Lost and Found in Russia by Susan Richards

Author:Susan Richards
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781590513699
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2010-12-07T05:00:00+00:00

TICKET TO THE END OF THE EARTH

This morning I finally heard from Vera. As soon as I reached Novosibirsk, I sent her a telegram. I had not rated my chances of being invited highly, as Vissarion’s community was notoriously secretive. But a week later I received a message, via Natasha’s sister, that I was welcome.

Igor was working quietly at his computer. Natasha was visiting a friend in hospital. I took out a map of southern Siberia and considered the journey. First, I would fly to Abakan, a town on the River Yenisei south of Krasnoyarsk. Kuragino, where Vera was living, was the very last place marked on the map east of Abakan. I would have to travel on by a combination of bus and train. Beyond Kuragino the map showed no towns or roads, nothing but the wilderness of the Sayan Mountains.

Natasha had been begging me not to go. It was dangerous, she said. At first, I took her warnings seriously. After all, she was born and bred in Siberia. But when I pressed her, I could get nothing sensible out of her. “It’s just—it’s the end of the earth. Daddy says that there’ll be nothing but tractors out there! Stay here instead,” she wheedled. In Marx she had been a proud woman and guarded. Now she was clinging and slightly pathetic. The last thing I needed was Natasha’s anxiety.

Another friend had just shown me an article about Vissarion’s community in a national newspaper. It was an interview with a Petersburg woman who murdered her husband to escape from the community. She said her husband had fallen under Vissarion’s spell after losing his job; that her only hope of keeping the family together lay in following him. Things had gone wrong from the start. The woman’s teenage son had taken one look at the community and gone back home. She had not been able to stand the hard labor and the brainwashing. Why she had not just left was unclear. Instead, with money from the sale of their Petersburg flat, she hired two local men to kill her husband. There was a photograph of the murderer, looking young and vulnerable. I did not know whether to trust the story. It might be a pack of lies, but it was unsettling.

When I first met Vera in Saratov, the newspapers were sympathetic to Vissarion. But latterly, the coverage had turned nasty. The idea that Russians should be free to choose their form of belief was deeply alien. Until the Revolution, Russian nationality and Orthodoxy were considered synonymous. Now the Church was trying to reclaim that monopoly. Press reports usually bracketed Vissarion’s cult together with one called the Great White Brotherhood. In the early nineties, the Brotherhood’s undernourished, white-clad teenage converts were a common sight on the streets of Russia’s cities, importuning passersby. Its fate was comical and tragic. Its “living god,” an ex–Komsomol girl who called herself Maria Devi Christos, was rash enough to predict that the world was going to end on November 24, 1993.

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