Stephan Orth - Behind Putin's Curtain - Friendships and Misadventures Inside Russia [aka Couchsurfing in Russia]

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.”

On the way here I discovered a similarly trivial passage in The Last Testament . To the question of whether it was a good or a bad sign when you attract mosquitoes, whether they prefer to bite the chaste or sinners, Vissarion answers: “Put yourself in the place of the mosquito. Would you make a dive for something if its consumption disgusted you?” [13] Mühling, Jens. A Journey into Russia . London: Haus, 2015.

Inwardly I rework my list of questions. It now consists of only one question: How do you open a box of Cornflakes without wrecking the top flaps?

ON A LITTLEwalk Minna shows me around the village, which lies between an impenetrable forest and the Kazyr River. One hundred fifty people live here and roughly 70 percent are Vissarion followers. Some of the wooden houses are well maintained, others are in need of repairs, and a few are not yet habitable. Some of the houses have unusually steep roofs so that in winter not much snow can gather there. It must be a paradise for children; there is a treetop walkway, a playground with Masha and the Bear figures, and an elaborate wrought-iron gate, above which stands the word radost —“joy.” Opposite is the teremok , the communal building where discussions and choir practices take place, and there is a banya. For many people it’s the best place to wash due to the lack of water pipes.

About two hundred yards outside the village there is a cemetery. On one of the gravestones, engraved in German, are the words Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe (“faith, hope, love”) next to an image of two praying hands. A fresh wreath of roses and pine branches are draped around a simple wooden cross. Minna explains that Alex’s wife died a month ago. At sixty, she was seventeen years older than him. A tick bite was her downfall; she got encephalitis and fell into a coma. “No one here gets vaccinated,” says Minna. “They believe God is taking care of them and if not then there’s a reason behind it. But in summer the forest is full of ticks.”

As far as illnesses are concerned, Vissarion is less than Jesus-like. “You are not allowed to heal an unbeliever; a believer doesn’t need healing,” he once said. He considers every form of suffering to be an indication of a punishment from God. If someone dies, mourning is not particularly excessive as the next reincarnation is bound to happen soon. Maybe I shouldn’t ask him the Cornflakes question, but rather why am I suffering from backaches today.

On returning to the house I’m greeted in German by Tanya, a forty-seven-year-old linguist with laugh lines and a voice like a glockenspiel. She has been with the community for twenty-three years and has recently moved from Zharovsk to another village because she has just married. “I was brought here by heavenly powers—toward the Truth. So that I could translate the words,” she says. “We followers of Vissarion are all predestined; I feel that in a previous life I was also a translator.” Now she is translating The Last Testament into German; at the moment she is working on Chapter 10. “Vissarion has many German followers since a very good article about him appeared in GEO magazine in 2009,” she says. She speaks without a hint of slang, never swallowing syllables, and formulates some sentences in a more complicated way than necessary, as only a keen language learner who hadn’t lived in the corresponding country for long would do. “When were you born?” she asks. I tell her. “Libra is a good star sign. Like all the others. Can I do a few calculations?”

At that moment Alex returns. He says that the first frost could come that night and he has to pick the vegetables in the garden. I offer to help. “But only if you’re not too tired!” A short while later we’re hauling top-quality pumpkins to a wheelbarrow, in sizes ranging from soccer ball to airbag.

In the meantime Tanya picks tomatoes and analyzes my birth data. “You have got two sevens in your matrix; that means: you have a predestination,” she announces. What are the names of your parents?” I tell her. She finds one of the names “beautiful” and the other “very beautiful” and reveals that I’m kind and determined and that I’m a sensitive sort of person. Almost as an aside she says that Minnichka, her nickname for Minna, “needs a good man who will stand by her for a long time.” Then she returns to picking vegetables.

The next morning my alarm clock rings at five to four. I climb down the ladder to the kitchen and pack bread, fruit, raisins, and water in my backpack while Minna puts on the kettle. Half an hour later we set off; our headlamps are the only lights in the village. There is only one street, two possible directions: to the “world” or to the holy mountain where the Messiah lives, ten miles away. The service begins at eight. We can hope that one of the other followers will pick us up by car, but actually we both enjoy walking and the crisp morning air is refreshing. “It’s like a pilgrimage,” Minna remarks. “The hill where the service is taking place is at the easternmost point of all the settlements. After that there is four hundred miles of forest all the way to Lake Baikal.”

The sun gradually rises; shafts of light break through the morning mist between the trees at the roadside, illuminating the fluffy seed hairs of cottonwood. I ask Minna whether she believes that Vissarion is the reincarnation of Jesus.

With a print run of 200,000, this calendar contains two different facial expressions and the following images: Putin with candles. Putin with child. Putin with cat. Putin in a tree. Putin with veterans. Putin behind the wheel of something. Putin with amphora. Putin on a harvester. Putin in a delta wing plane beside a Eurasian crane. Putin on a horse. Putin as a fighter pilot. Putin with a wristwatch. Beneath the last picture there is a quotation: “Russia is a peace-loving, self-sufficient country. We do not need other people’s territory or other people’s resources. But if we are threatened we are prepared to use weapons to guarantee our security.”