Novel Faiths Find Followers Among Russia's Disillusioned

Then they gathered beneath the community basketball hoop and divvied up chores for the day: Work crews were dispatched to create roads and paths, to re-channel mountain streams into plastic tubes for household water supply, to run workshops on woodcarving and embroidery.

Despite harsh winters when temperatures can dip to 50 below, more than 250 people live in the growing village, which doesn't appear on any map. They have named it the Abode of Dawn. Between 4,000 and 5,000 more followers live in about 40 other villages scattered along old logging roads within a few hours' drive.

Framed photos of Torop, wearing purple robes, hang in hundreds of small wooden homes. Here they measure time by the life of Vissarion. Because he turned 46 in January, the followers are now living in Year 47.

By Torop's order, alcohol, drugs and smoking are strongly discouraged, and everyone maintains a strict vegetarian diet. The villagers try to eat only what they grow, supplemented by big sacks of basics such as sugar, grain, salt, flour -- and the occasional box of Earl Grey tea.

The emphasis on environmental awareness is part of Torop's voluminous teachings, contained in a nine-volume "Last Testament" and 61 commandments. He preaches kindness to all, non-aggression and peace. His commandments include "Be pure in your thoughts," "Do good deeds beyond all measure" and "Destroy nothing without reason."

Galina Oshepkova, 54, said that 18 months ago she was a divorced mother of two sons, searching for meaning in her life in her native Belarus. Then a friend showed her a videotape of Torop. To her, she recalled, he looked so much like the classic images of Jesus, with his long brown hair and beard. In his sermon, he said he had come back to Earth because people had forgotten his teachings about peace from 2,000 years earlier.

"That was the end of my search," Oshepkova said, boiling porridge over a propane stove in her dirt-floor kitchen. "I felt my heart beating really fast, and I knew, 'This is the truth. This is Him.' He is the second incarnation of Jesus Christ."

Oshepkova gave her apartment and all her possessions to her sons and moved to Siberia. She said she arrived with two suitcases and no money, and was invited to move in with other followers. She is now married to Nikolai Oshepkov, an engineer who also walked away from his old life in Belarus. Now he designs the village's network of solar panels and generators, and its rudimentary networks of piped water.

"We are building heaven on Earth," Oshepkov said. "The conditions here are severe. Life is physically hard. But we have found what we were waiting for."

Hype or Hope

Alexander Dvorkin, a Moscow academic and one of Russia's leading specialists on new religions, called Torop a cult leader who is exploiting vulnerable followers. "To have this kind of control over people is bad," Dvorkin said. He estimated that as many as 800,000 Russians are members of religious sects.

Torop's followers, he said, are idealists who have had difficulty adjusting to the freewheeling new world of Russian capitalism. "They think, 'I am more important than you because I am with Jesus. The end of the world will come, and where will you be with your money and big car?' "

Many followers interviewed said they were happy to give their money to a community they found so rewarding, but Dvorkin said it amounts to Torop fleecing them. Assets turned over by followers are the main income of the group; it also earns money from sales of handicrafts, such as woodcarvings, knitting, pottery and oil pressed from cedar nuts.