In 1990, a year after losing his job as a traffic policeman, a Russian man named Sergey Anatolyevitch Torop experienced a mystical revelation. He believed that he had been reborn as Vissarion, the returned Jesus Christ, and soon afterward he founded a religious movement, the Church of the Last Testament. Thirteen years later, he has nearly five thousand followers, known as Vissarionites, who live in a community based in the rural Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia. The Church of the Last Testament combines elements of the Russian Orthodox Church with Buddhist themes of reincarnation, as well as preparations for the impending apocalypse; members are vegan and are restricted from drinking alcohol, smoking, and using money.
A VISIT WITH THE VISSARIONITES
POSTED BY MARIA LOKKE
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2013/01/davide-monteleones-photographs-of-the-vissarionites.html#slide_ss_0=1
The photographer Davide Monteleone (who recently documented the journey of an ice-class bulk carrier through the through the Arctic seas) heard about the Vissarion community during his first trip to Russia, in 2000. Years later, he returned to spend a week with them in Siberia, in mid-December. “I’ve always been intrigued by utopian communities,” he told me. “Particularly in Russia, many of them appeared after the fall of Soviet Union, sort of looking for a new belief when an entire system falls to pieces.” Over the past ten years, Russia has seen a rise in domestic cults; the Russian Orthodox church estimates that over four thousand religious movements currently exist across the country. Here’s a selection of Monteleone’s photographs from his time with the Vissarionites.