A CONDENSED GUIDE TO THE REVELATION OF VISSARION CHRIST
Long ago, the first God created the universe and everything in it. After that he withdrew to monitor the processes essential for its continuing existence. But he does not intervene in human affairs: he is absolutely indifferent to whether we live or die. The Vissarionites do not worship him.
The second God was created by the collision of energy waves of earth and space. After coming into being he gained consciousness, and his consciousness was even higher than that of the first God. This God has no name, but his nature is pure love. The Vissarionites call him God the Father, even though he is a young God, younger than the human race, in fact. His essence is like light, brilliant as the sun, but it is a light that doesn’t burn, which is cold and white and tender and gentle.
Even at this early stage humanity, emotionally immature and prone to violence, was in a sorry state. God the Father wanted to help us, but as he is not physical, he cannot influence the physical universe. Fortunately mankind is a suitable vessel for souls, so he created souls from his energy and placed them in mankind, to try and influence us through that.
The soul is eternal. If you kill the body, the soul will live on, and will be born again in another body.
The soul is connected only to our feelings. It has nothing to do with the mind. If someone claims God is speaking to him, he is lying, because God doesn’t speak directly to our reason. He works through our feelings.
To get to the next level of consciousness, we have to learn how to control our feelings. But there is a problem: when souls were placed within mankind, our feelings had priority over our intellect. Man was like a child, and unable to control his emotions and so the negative ones predominated. This has been the situation for millennia. That is why this is such a difficult period for humanity.
The soul is supposed to improve through each incarnation. For example, if I kill in one life, I will learn that this is wrong, the lesson will be inscribed on the record of my soul, and the next time I am born I won’t be able to do evil in this way. So each time we live, we should accumulate experience and knowledge, and the soul should grow, until it returns to God the Father and is then passed to another human being. Over time, the soul should develop immunity to evil. When it reaches this perfect state, it goes into a sort of ‘soul storage’ – what is commonly referred to in other traditions as ‘heaven’.
But there is a problem: the common soul has grown hard, and so it no longer receives the vibrations of our Heavenly Father as it was intended to. We receive them, but as if through a wall, with difficulty and without clarity. In this imperfect state, the soul can deteriorate. Even if it wants to be better, circumstances might make the soul worse. For example, if it is born into such bad circumstances, if it is surrounded by killing, and evil, and there are no positive examples for it to learn from, then the soul will not develop, but rather will sink and sink through its incarnations, until it enters the storage of broken souls – what is referred to in other traditions as ‘hell’.
The situation is not without hope, however. Though the soul is eternal, hell is not. The record can be erased, the soul released, and the cycle will start again.
Satan is real, but he is created by us. He is the sum total of the confluence of human evil. For there are ‘channels’ through which our negative and evil thoughts pour out: they don’t stay locked in our skulls. And these negative thoughts, when they meet, mingle and create Lucifer. He is primitive: his nature is pure evil, and he exists only to cause pain. He knows the thoughts of all men, and can return to us by the same channels through which our thoughts pour out.
Damned souls are located close to the Devil. The Devil will die when the record of their sins has been wiped clean, when there is no person left who can provide him with a source of negative energy. So far that hasn’t happened; but Lucifer knows that it will and that he will die and so lives like a prisoner due to be shot tomorrow – instead of repenting, he inflicts pain on his cellmate out of pure malice. He lusts for maximum violence, rape and so on. And the closer to the end, and we are very close to the end, then the more violent he will become. Violence, pain, misery are pure pleasure for him.
Lucifer would like to kill us but he cannot because like God, he is immaterial. So he sits at the centre of the channels of negative thoughts, listening to our thoughts, and whispering to us, and that is how he manipulates us, forcing us to pour out our negative energy and make him stronger …
‘ … like in The Matrix,’ said Sergei. ‘Have you seen it?’
‘Er, no,’ I said. So far we had stayed close to Gnosticism, Hinduism, New Age talk of ‘energy’, and there was also an appealing smattering of Dostoevsky in the description of the condemned man’s psychology: nothing too startling. The pop-culture reference was jarring. I looked for a twinkle of irony in Sergei’s eye, a sign of an appreciation of the absurdity. It wasn’t there.
‘Well you should watch it,’ he said, solemnly. ‘Because that’s how Lucifer works.’
There are also alien civilisations. Like God the Father, they were created by energy waves clashing in space. Now they live on alien planets.
There are two types of alien civilisations: good ones and bad ones. The good ones try to help us. They come to earth as the gods and gurus of religions – Krishna, or the Buddha, for example. They try to help us by working through our reason. The problem is that they do not know the rules of the soul perfectly. And so even though their intent is good, and their words may contain truth, yet they become distorted. Humans build temples and organisations, and by the time the message has reached the common mass of people, it has all gone wrong. And so these religions do not succeed in solving our problems.
The second group of aliens are ruled by Lucifer, and like him, they want to wipe us out. They whisper to us, giving us aggressive feelings, alcoholism, and providing us with dark knowledge – of how to produce weapons, for example. But we’re the ones who actually make them.
Their most powerful weapon, their most diabolical invention, however, is money. For money divides people. The rich are an intermediary between these dark forces and mankind. They have been given special knowledge by the dark forces about how to use money and how to control people through it. They chose the Jewish people in particular, isolated them, trained them in mastery of money and then dispersed them all over world, so they would rule our societies, and spread the doctrine of money everywhere.
‘Wait, wait – the rich are intermediaries between the evil aliens and us?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the Jews have received special training from them in the mastery of money?’
‘Yes.’ Sergei looked irritated. He didn’t like being interrupted, and didn’t like being challenged.
I decided to let the sinister alien-Jewish conspiracy slide; for the moment, at least.
And so, the current state of mankind is abysmal. So much hate and greed and violence and egoism: if we don’t destroy ourselves, then the planet herself will wipe us out.
For the ancient pagans were right when they said that the planet has a life force; their prayers were not in vain. Though she is not sentient, the earth feels, and can respond, if you are in harmony with her. And therein lies the problem – for we can compare the earth’s situation today to that of a man tied to a tree in the taiga. Every bad thought we have is to our globe like a bite from an insect to this man. She will kill us to survive: it’s a natural instinct. The earthquakes and tsunamis we have been experiencing recently are efforts by the earth to remove the sources of the negative energy that so afflict her.
But that is only the start of our problems. For the soul is immortal, and so if the earth destroys us, and all human bodies die, then the souls will whirl around in space for ever, never being reincarnated. And that will be a real disaster …
So with this situation looming, we need to find a solution rapidly. And that’s where Vissarion fits in. In fact, if the Teacher hadn’t come, then we’d already be gone. But he brought hope, and for as long as there’s hope, then the earth postpones Armageddon. It will surely come, but now, thanks to the Teacher, not everyone need be eradicated. The only question is: how much flesh will be left?
We need to develop a field of positive energy if the world is to survive, and if there are to be bodies left for souls to reincarnate into. That is why we need more and more people here in Siberia, so we can build a critical mass of goodness to ensure the human race’s survival.
All religions say that you will sin; that it is inevitable. But Vissarion turns this on its head. No, he says. It is not inevitable. We must try to live without sin, if we are to survive. We must be completely non-aggressive. We cannot even think ill of other people. It is not easy, of course. It is a fight within man’s soul, as fierce as Armageddon itself. And if you want to fight, you must learn how to fight, methodically.
But it can be done.
For example, here in the village we have lots of people from different walks of life, different jobs, different positions, and yet still they managed to find the true belief, and to come here. And even though everything is bad in the world, some souls have reached perfection, or have come close enough.
And the Christ, the Living Word of God too has come. So there is hope.
Vissarion’s body and his soul were specially prepared for his mission. Until the age of 30, however, the nature of his soul was concealed even to him. He had to live among men first. He had lots of jobs. He was in the army, then he was an electrician, then he was a traffic policeman. But he was always interested in people’s behaviour, and throughout this time he was watching people and studying them.
His awakening took place when he was working as an artist and he received a commission to paint icons for a church in Minussinsk. He had never painted icons before; he was not even religious. So he started reading books, researching the commission so he would know what to paint. While he was doing this, Vissarion felt a new feeling being born inside him. He didn’t understand it at first. But although icons are painted according to strict rules, the Teacher started painting according to his own vision, and depicted St Nicholas and the Virgin Mary walking on the clouds.
The priest saw the difference, but he accepted the icon, and paid the Teacher for his work. Later there was a meeting, and some other priests complained that the Icon was non-canonical. They told the priest to tell him to paint it again, or take the money back. The priest asked the Teacher: can you repaint it? But Vissarion had painted what he had felt, so he said no, and returned the money. The next day he had a sense of illumination. It took him six months to get used to this new state of consciousness. He preached for the first time on 15 August 1991.
The first Christ came two thousand years ago. He came to stop the Jews’ destructive programme of money, and was thus born in Israel …
‘Wait, wait – did you say he came to stop the Jews’ destructive programme of money?’
‘Yes.’
I had been enjoying the unfolding doom that faced our planet: I was almost looking forward to it. In particular I appreciated the twist that Vissarion had come to preserve flesh, and the way it flowed logically from his cosmogony. It was a weird inversion of Jesus’ mission, which had been to save souls.
But there was the stuff about Jews again. After all the talk about living in harmony with nature, and avoiding aggression, it bothered me. It seemed out of place, an intrusion from an older way of seeing the world into Vissarion’s New Age talk of environmentalism and ‘energy waves’.
Sergei continued.
… but this Christ was killed, and His gospel was corrupted. Now the second Christ is here.
The characteristics of the second Christ are as follows: like all men, he has a soul, but whereas man has freedom of choice Christ does not. His soul has been specially prepared and is pre-programmed. He cannot act against God’s will. For he has been sent to us in a dark time as the direct voice of God – whereas ordinary souls are hard and resistant to God’s vibrations, his soul is different. It is fluid; he can hear God.
Christ’s second feature is that in an emergency he can access the super-consciousness of the Father. That way he can get any information he needs about the laws of the universe, or about human behaviour. And thus the Last Testament reveals to us exactly what we should do in every situation. It is the book of foundations for the sixty-one basic situations we face in life, according to the sixty-one rules of the soul.
The first volume of the Last Testament gives the basic rules; the following volumes apply them to all sorts of situations. Before Vissarion came, no one knew the sixty-one rules, so we don’t even have words to describe the new feelings we have.
‘Why sixty-one rules?’ I asked.
Sergei was irritated by my interruption.
‘Because there are rules and there are sixty-one of them,’ he snapped.
Our bodies have one billion sensors through which we can feel the world, its emanations and its energy. Vissarion, however, has ten thousand times that number. He feels what the whole of mankind feels. If you have a question you can go to him and ask, but before you ask, he feels your problem, your attitude to it. It helps him to resolve the problem properly.
Vissarion’s goal is to change man’s inner nature. You can compare this work on the soul to changing the stars in the sky. The Teacher is changing the constellation, one by one. In the future, the picture of the sky will be completely different.
For now we see the world through the prism of egoism. We need to see it through the crystal of Living Spirit. Vissarion is here not just to show us, but step by step to live with us and guide us by example. He went through all the steps of life – he was an ordinary man; he had troubles in marriage; he has children. He does not perform miracles, or at least, not in the sense that outsiders would understand. For us, though, there are miraculous events. He leads not just by example but by feeling. In his reactions he communicates his internal state to people.
In the past, when the community was small, if you had a question you could ask the Teacher directly. Now, however, there are many of us, spread out through a hundred villages, and the process has changed. The people living on the mountain have weekly meetings with the Teacher, but we have to learn to be self-sufficient. Fortunately, everything we need to know is written in the Last Testament.
The Last Testament is not just a set of general principles. It deals with specific situations. It is based on the questions people ask at meetings with the Teacher. Everything is recorded on a dictaphone, edited and then written down.
It is the School of Life: read it, and do what it says. Whatever your problem is, there is probably already an explanation in the book.
‘Can you give me an example?’
‘It is difficult to pick just one. It is about everything, I mean, even very tiny questions. For example,’ he said, laughing a little, ‘there is one question: If my wife forces me to clean my boots before I enter the house but sometimes I forget and leave traces of dirt in the house, what should I do? Ask her to forgive me, or ignore it?’
‘It’s that precise?’
‘Yes.’
This sounded less like Christianity and more like Islam, where the Koran (the direct word of God revealed to Mohammed) and the collections of Hadith (reported sayings and deeds of the prophet), combine eschatology with exceedingly thorough legislature on moral, social, commercial and personal matters. The Hadith, for example, contains not only descriptions of the Day of Judgement but also instructions on the correct way to dispose of a date stone. Centuries of Islamic thinking have been dedicated to annotating both the Koran and the traditions, producing untold millions of pages of instruction for every aspect of life. By the time of the Iranian revolution in 1979 the Ayatollah Khomenei himself had written eighteen volumes on Islamic jurisprudence and philosophy, and yet with all that learning seemed unable to decide whether God approved of chess or not. At first it was banned in the new Islamic republic; ten years later he lifted the prohibition.
But then Sergei seemed to reconsider. He didn’t want to focus on Vissarion’s remarkable attention to detail; that was a dangerous angle. ‘Well … perhaps that is a bad example. There are only a few basic laws, but they are applied to lots of different situations. But ultimately the Teacher reveals that at root, egoism is hidden in all these situations. He helps us to overcome this, to triumph over the ego.’
‘I see.’
‘You see, whenever we do the wrong thing it leaves a negative imprint on the soul. To erase it … you have to warm up your feelings, and then do the right thing. That will make a good print on the soul, instead of a bad one. Yes, in our life man tries to do the right thing, but he is always thinking of doing bad. He wants to do good, but he can’t. It is extremely difficult. But it is possible. I know. In the last ten years, I have seen so many changes in the internal world. We can do it. We make mistakes, but step by step, we are changing the arrangement of the stars in the sky, we are reordering the constellation …’
His voice trailed off. I had asked too many questions, disrupting the flow of precisely memorised perfect knowledge. When Sergei had to respond off the cuff he became anxious; he wanted to return to precision, to recitation, revelation. Vissarion’s teachings were ultimate and finished. That being the case they were difficult to explain, as ‘close enough’ was not permitted. That, after all, was one of the main problems with all the world’s other religions, why they were not to be trusted. They were all flailing around in the dark, right about some things, wrong about others. Vissarion had come to do away with vagueness, to administer life perfectly and absolutely, to shine a light into every dark corner and issue an instruction that had to be followed, for God (the second one, that is) cares how we wipe our shoes.
Sergei took us to see the church. The Keeper of the Church, a bearded man in a mediaeval gown, was waiting for us at the gate; he opened it and let us in, smiling a blissful, gentle, slightly vacant smile. He loved his job.
The exterior owed a lot to the traditions of Russian wooden architecture; there was nothing original about it. But the atmosphere inside was very different from the murky gloom of most Orthodox churches, with their images of glowering Christs, solemn saints and the likes of St Theodora being tormented by hundreds of black demons. In fact, it was very feminine: pink and powder-blue banners and streamers hung from the ceiling, and baskets of flowers were positioned next to circular windows. Sergei explained with a slightly sheepish smile that the village’s women had done the decorating.
There was a small Vissarion by the altar, the same image I had seen on the walls of the cultural centre. Candles were burning under him, as if the photograph were a sacred icon. Sergei pre-empted my question:
‘We do not pray to Vissarion, of course. He is not God. But he is close to God, and so he is close to the holy altar.’
The church ultimately was not very spectacular. We stood there for a minute or two, mainly because it would have been rude to leave too quickly. Sergei thought of something to say. ‘Anyone can pray here, according to their own ritual. Hindus, Muslims, followers of Krishna …’
‘But do they come?’ I asked.
‘Everyone comes,’ he said. ‘Except the Orthodox.’
I was sure Sergei was telling the truth, but even so I found it difficult to accept that anyone who took his religion seriously could pray in Vissarion’s temple. To do that would be to ascribe spiritual authority to Vissarion and thus (to some degree at least) validate his claims. But most religions don’t have room to accommodate other beliefs claiming to supplant them. And this is not unique to religions, but is a feature of almost any ideology which is deeply held: Evolutionists and Creationists never attend each other’s conferences except to bark at each other; Communists don’t go to Nazi rallies, and vice versa.
As for the Orthodox, their hostility was understandable: there could be little more blasphemous to any Christian than Vissarion’s claim he was the Second Coming. But according to Sergei, the Orthodox Church’s reasons for not reconciling with the new belief were far more worldly – ‘They will not recognise our message, because to do so they would have to give up their big hats, and their power. They have their system, their hierarchy, power and influence in society. A lot of money is attached to it, and so they resist the truth. Not only that, they try to obstruct our work. We don’t blame them, though – we are not angry. Once an archbishop came here for round-table talks with Vissarion. It led to nothing, of course. It’s a question of belief: there can’t be any compromise. But the Orthodox do steal from Vissarion’s teachings. We know that they study the Last Testament and use it in their sermons. Unofficially, of course …’
Vissarion: close to the altar because he’s close to God
I had an idea. Two years earlier I had met a pagan priest, an encounter described in my first book, Lost Cosmonaut. His beliefs required him to kill animals for God: chickens, rabbits, and every five years, a horse. Would the Vissarionites have allowed him to kill a rabbit in the temple, I wondered?
But I was falling into the same trap that had opened up in front of me when I had overheard the arguments in Tatiana’s house. It was a trick question, designed to provoke, and not to illuminate. I knew the answer would be no, and that there would be a rationale for it, so why bother asking? To watch him squirm?
We left the cathedral and walked over to the Minussinsky Dom. Sergei stopped at the gate to shake my hand ‘How long will you be here?’ he asked.
‘A few days,’ I said.
‘That is not enough,’ said Sergei. ‘You will need to stay longer to feel what we are doing here … feeling is the most important thing. That is where true understanding comes from.’
Back at the house, the little girls in the cultural centre looked different. They were the first generation to receive these ideas as facts, to not have to unlearn old ways of thinking, who had not ‘chosen’ but were born into it, who knew this world before they knew any other. Whose bodies had their souls inhabited before? What was Satan whispering to them? Around them, energy waves were flowing in and out, my negative ones going to form Satan. God the Father was trying to whisper to their hard and unresponsive souls. On the mountain, the unseen mountain that I found hard to picture, Vissarion was amassing his good flesh to stave off total annihilation of the species. I was in the midst of a heroic struggle of cosmic proportions.
Hungry and light-headed, I tried to process everything Sergei had told me. There were definitely some things I liked about Vissarion’s belief system: the fusion of science fiction elements with traditional religious concepts for example, the depiction of the Devil, and especially the all-pervasive apocalyptic tone. The necessity of building up a ‘critical mass’ of ‘good flesh’ was raw, wild poetry to me. But there was other material that was harder to digest. For example:
1. In spite of what Sergei had said, there were obvious contradictions, or at least inconsistencies in his explanations of Vissarion’s beliefs. If Vissarion had direct access to the mind of God and knew everything already, then why couldn’t he speak to me in English? If they were seeking to return to eighteenth-century conditions, then why were they not just using modern technology as a temporary stopgap, but actually increasing their dependence on it (a radio antenna was under construction so that all the believers would soon have mobile phone coverage, and as Ali had said, even on the mountain, close to Vissarion, there were TVs, powered by solar panels). But I hadn’t pursued this angle. I knew there would be a rationalisation and I would simply irritate him and make him defensive.
2. Vissarion’s numbers – from an aesthetic point of view, they were very disappointing: sixty-one rules of the soul; two Gods; fourteen points on the astral street plan. They were numbers without beauty or significance, asymmetrical, obsessive, clumsy, and deeply banal when compared with such timeless classics as the Ten Commandments, the Holy Trinity; the Ninety-nine Names of God and the Number of the Beast. On the other hand, their inelegance was good evidence that Vissarion was absolutely sincere. Anyone cynically constructing a religion would surely have chosen better ones. I would have, anyway.
3. A return to the eighteenth century did not seem very attractive, especially if we were talking about Russia, which at the time was a pre-industrial society where the vast majority of the population lived in serfdom. It was also the beginning of the large-scale environmental despoliation of Siberia as the Russian Empire expanded eastward in search of fur, establishing prison colonies and attempting to convert the indigenous nationalities to Orthodoxy along the way. Meanwhile the intellectual and scientific revolutions that Sergei opposed were already under way: Russia’s greatest scientist, Mikhail Lomonosov, walked from the village of Kholmogory on the White Sea to Moscow, enrolling at the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy there in 1731. The good news: there were printing presses, so it would still be possible to produce the Last Testament in sufficient quantities.
4. And then, of course, there was the collusion between Jews and evil aliens. It hadn’t shocked me in Ukraine: over there, Yid-bashing is a venerable tradition. But I had hoped for better from the Son of God.
But I was succumbing to the old temptation again. Critiquing Vissarion’s ideas was a dead end; it could only propel me out of this reality he had created. I had to stay close to the believers, to see through their eyes if I were to travel deeper into their world and understand not only what had brought so many people to such inhospitable conditions, but what had kept them there.
It wasn’t the environmentalism, even though this is a movement with deep religious underpinnings. Because whatever the science says, its emotional drive is derived from Christian eschatology: the sins may be committed against the planet instead of God, but the end times are still nigh and the pending apocalyptic catastrophe remains in place. We live wrongfully, we shall reap what we sow and be punished for our wickedness. Only sincere repentance and atonement can prevent this calamity from taking place.
In environmentalism, however, ‘sincere repentance’ usually amounts to wallowing in guilt and ‘atonement’ to recycling the odd bit of rubbish. Any changes that would entail a real cost for the individual are usually avoided. The Vissarionites on the other hand required the believer to embrace a life of backbreaking toil, of relentless self-criticism, and of striving in some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet.
Maybe, then, it was something deeper, perhaps something in the dark side of Vissarion’s teachings, that held them there. Once you got past the strangeness of the imagery, all the talk of Lucifer and bad energy and evil aliens orchestrating cosmic conspiracies amounted to a thoroughgoing expression of a profound despair, a certainty that man, childlike, seduced and manipulated by unseen forces, whether Jews or aliens or Satan, was unable to avoid evil. Consequently he had to be destroyed.
But as Sergei had said, the intellect was not enough – feeling was the key. So it wasn’t enough to think this. The believer had to feel this deeply. And perhaps then, once you really did feel it, the only sensible option really would be to flee the world, and escape to another one, where you could build another, better life. Then all that backbreaking toil and suffering would make sense, and as an extra benefit, you’d be living as close to God as was possible.
Tatiana and Sergei had both said that Vissarion’s soul had been prepared for years, millennia even. His was not the only one: his followers’ souls had also been prepared, by an individual and national experience, to accept his beliefs. Russian history seemed designed to make it easier to adopt them: the country had already experienced several apocalypses in the twentieth century, so it was perhaps less difficult to believe in another, final one just round the corner. The proximity of Siberia was also key: Vissarion’s belief required a vast, epic landscape to disappear into, and construct something new. If it hadn’t been there, what would he have done? (Similarly in the nineteenth century another vast and largely unsettled area, the USA, contained multiple utopian communities comprising those who had withdrawn from the mainstream in pursuit of perfection, and even now the tradition continues in desert cults.) His rejection of the intellect half-echoed a poem known to all Russian schoolchildren that declared their country impossible to understand with the mind, and insisted that it could only be ‘believed in’ (though Vissarion, of course, talked about feeling instead of faith, and applied it to his God and not the country; but the dismissal of rationalism was still there). And finally, his followers needed to be prepared to accept severe hardship. Russians are masters at this, and have a high tolerance for suffering.
Vissarion seemed more and more like an exclusively Russian Messiah; it was hard to understand how his message could ever become universal. And later I was told that the Germans, coming from the materialistic and individualistic West, were hampered in their spiritual growth by their inability to speak Russian. They were too analytical, too systematic. They tried to grasp the revelation through thought rather than feelings. It was necessary to understand Russian to truly grasp Vissarion’s ideas; once you could think in Russian then you could start to think and feel like a Russian, more accustomed to collective living, to sacrifice and toiling towards a greater aim. And thus, though unhappiness is universal, Vissarion was a thoroughly Russian Messiah, and redemption could only be found here, on Russian soil …
So behind all the smiles and openness lay a great shadow: the certainty of doom and death and colossal bloodshed almost built into the DNA of a people. It was a grim business contemplating all these souls so despairing of hope that they would come here, where in the past only prisoners and outcasts could be settled by force …
Or at least that’s how it seemed sitting in the cultural centre at that particular moment. But almost immediately I had another experience that seemed to undermine these ominous musings, pointing out clearly how varied individuals’ reasons can be for believing what they believe.
Natasha, our cook, offered to show me the workshops where the Vissarionites were developing the crafts that would eventually see them become independent of the world, and with the dominating Tatiana gone, she suddenly opened up, giggling and chatting away.
She was from St Petersburg; she had had a nice flat there, and run a business that was ‘more or less successful’, but none of it fulfilled her. Then a friend gave her some videos to watch: ‘It looked so beautiful, like something out of a storybook! I didn’t know such places could exist in reality! Ever since I was a little girl I had wanted to live in a village like that!’
Then the Teacher came to St Petersburg. Natasha listened to him talk in a palace of culture; at the end he spoke to her personally. And immediately she knew that she had to move to Siberia. And that was that; Natasha’s motivations were shockingly naïve, even touchingly so. She became more and more childlike as she spoke about her new life, and I became less sure about my doomy speculations. Natasha seemed to have come to the village in pursuit of innocence. Motivations began to seem enigmatic again, and what lay behind the phenomena once more started to slip away from me.
‘It’s wonderful here,’ she continued. ‘You know, you can wear any clothes you like and nobody will judge you. What matters is the spirit, what’s inside … Yes, it’s magical here. It’s a pity you came in the winter. In the summer I always dress in eighteenth-century costume! You know, last summer a couple came here to get married: he was English and she was Australian. A Dutch company came to film them. And the TV people, well, they filmed me, because of my dress … they liked it. They thought it was beautiful. Some of our girls wear mediaeval gowns. It’s so creative, so free here: there’s no snobbery, not like in St Petersburg. And you know, the Teacher says that we should have nothing in our houses that is not useful …’
But Natasha was not without sadness. Suddenly her story took a darker turn.
‘Yes,’ she continued. ‘I left everything to come here. My business, my flat and … my son.’
And how that final sentence hung in the air: like a sudden insertion of real, adult darkness into a fairytale, shattering the carefully crafted illusion.
‘Why did you leave your son?’ I asked.
‘He didn’t want to come, and I couldn’t make him. So I left him with his father. He’s fifteen.’
‘Do you ever see him?’
‘Oh yes. The Teacher is very strict on this. We can’t just throw away our families when we join the community. We must return to the world, and visit those we leave behind. So every year I return to see him.’
At the thought of these compulsory reunions, Natasha’s eyes grew darkly reflective. Did that separation weigh on her like a sin, I wondered, or was she so in love with her new life that the necessity of going back to the old one was a burden she resented?
Suddenly Camouflage Boy appeared, stomping past us, driven by a wild energy. He looked as though he was continuing the same hopeless walk he had been on earlier in the day.
‘We’re moving! We’re moving!’ he said, giggling nervously as he passed us.
‘Him!’ Natasha snarled under her breath. ‘Let me tell you about him! You know, his parents accepted the faith and came to the village. He did not, but they brought him with them anyway …’
The boy was from Yaroslavl: hardly St Petersburg, but still Paris in comparison to Petropavlovka. Stuck out here, unable to get drunk or fight or chase girls, surrounded by lentil-eating lovers of God, he had to be one of the loneliest and angriest boys in the world. Now I understood his mad walk: he was trying to kill time, and not only that, but to kill his youth and energy. I thought of Natasha’s son, growing up in St Petersburg, abandoned by his mother for life in the storybook village governed by the Son of God. That could have been Natasha’s son, if she had forced him to come with her. But there was no sympathy for the boy in her soul:
‘He is an idiot. He has nothing in his head.’
Natasha showed us knives, baskets, wooden eggs and clay pots. The basketweaver looked bored and resentful that she had the most tedious craft, the wooden-egg girl was keen to sell me an egg with a unicorn on it; the clay-pot guy was enthusiastic, but barking mad. He was convinced that the Teuton in Lederhosen standing on two crossed bars of a fence on his mug was symbolic of a German desire to subjugate Christianity. As for the knife-maker, he was dead. The only stuff I liked was the furniture.
The furniture-maker was a dark, bearded giant with a voice deep and resonant enough to liquefy the internal organs of Humboldt squids darting around in the depths of the ocean. He explained that he tried to capture the natural feeling of the wood and follow the forms that the pieces themselves suggested to him. And it did look as though the roots and branches had grown into these shapes of their own accord, as though his furniture wanted to be sat on or slept in. It was beautiful stuff, and popular: all of it was sold in the markets in Krasnoyarsk and he received a lot of private commissions. It wasn’t a very efficient economic model. A single chair took three men a day and a half to make; a bed, two weeks. To meet demand he worked from dawn until eleven every night, like a Stakhanovite, one of the famous shock workers of Stalin’s day, working inhuman hours for the sake of the leader, for the sake of the future, for the nobility of labour itself. Like everyone else in the village he had never practised his craft before; like Ali he was not worried by the absence of objects and distractions in his world. This was not a problem as he had so much work.
He was relaxed and affable and communicated warmth. I had a weird, inexplicable sense that I had met him before; in fact I had, sort of – I later realised that he was the narrator of the Vissarionite recruitment video. We could have stayed; I think he wanted us to. But there was nothing left to talk about, not unless we were going to get into the thing that was underlying everything, the thing that was strange, and awkward, and that after talking to Sergei, I understood a little too well. My growing familiarity with the new belief, ironically, was placing a distance between me and the people I met, even as they became more open towards me.
Because it was Vissarion who had brought all this to pass, it was Vissarion who had summoned this beauty out of the void; it was Vissarion who was necessary for this world. Vissarion was inside them, and they were inside his reality. Wherever I looked, whoever I spoke to, Vissarion was staring back at me, with his weak smile, greasy hair and that strange, unidentifiable glint in his eyes.