In Russian on Batenka by Pyotr Manyakhin
Photos: Vladislav Nekrasov. Published on October 17, 2017
Translated by Google Translate.
Ecology in big cities is lame, and the desire to protect yourself from all this disgrace and live on the shore of a clean brook is understandable. In Russia, the philosophy of eco-conditions takes on bizarre forms, mixing with neopaganism, cheers and patriotism and traditional family values. A special correspondent of the samizdat, Pyotr Manyakhin, studied who builds tribal estates and why... How much does the head of the movement earn and how freedom from the city turns into dependence on the idea.
Sideways! Sideways! Turn! "- commanded by a bearded gray-haired man in tarpaulin boots.
Boys and girls from seven to seventy dance in a dance near the scene of the Novosibirsk Central Park, on which hangs the stretch "Ancestral manors - the national idea of Russia!"
- Come to us! - says a woman in a red skirt in the floor, scarf and with indistinct speech.
- Yes, we came to see.
- We do not need spectators. Come on, dance! - she commands and drags her hand into the dance.
The dance is simple: two steps forward, two - back, three times elegantly swap places with the partner - but the legs of the surprise are braided [tangled legs]. It is advisable to look into each other's eyes to see there something that will make you marry and create your own family estate. During the time that music is playing, the waists of all the girls should be in the hands of the guy. A young lady in a doublet and a fluffy shawl, a seven-year-old girl and many elderly ladies in skirts on the floor, painted like Zhostovo trays.
- Faster! Sizzles an elderly woman in a leather jacket and pushes into the center of the circle.
- We reached those with whom we started, the dance ends! Was it growing warmer? - asks a gray-haired man with a microphone and offers to learn a new dance. - These are all popular dances of our ancestors and ancestors. Guys get up in the inner circle counter-clockwise, and the young ladies - in the outer, hands in the lock, take the girl by the hip!
- Is there a holiday today or a rally? - the elderly woman, walking on arm with the girlfriend on the Central park, on an input in which there are trading tents with jam, honey, vegetables, clothes from flax and brochures against abortions is perplexed.
- The love of the creator-creator, the love of the creator-creator, the love of the creator-creator and your kind! - the mantra responds to the speakers from the stage.
Evenings (pre-revolutionary inscriptions), fairs and other "originally Russian scenery - an integral part of the movement" Ringing Cedars of Russia ", the creators of patrimonial estates.
They are also called Anastasians, because the heroine of the books of spiritual leader Vladimir Megre was called Anastasia.
In 1994, the former president of the Interregional Association of Entrepreneurs of Siberia, Vladimir Megre, who organized excursions on river ships, went on a commercial expedition "Merchant Caravan" along the Ob River. The ships stopped in a "small village, tens of kilometers away from large settlements," Megre writes in the third book, "The Space of Love." Two old men, one hundred and nineteen and ninety-three years old, turned to him there and asked him to help cut down the "ringing pine", which for five hundred years had recruited some miraculous power from the earth. Megre drove off, but decided to find this ringing pine.
A year later he organized another expedition and in the same village met twenty-six-year-old Anastasia, who has the gift of clairvoyance, the ability to teleport and knowledge about the arrangement of UFOs. The girl was very beautiful, but did not wear clothes, so Megre predictably engaged in sex with her, as a result of which they had a son, Volodya.
NOVORUSSIAN FIELDS
An inspired and contented Megre in 1995 brought to Novosibirsk from the expedition the idea that one should live on earth, bear children and continue the family, and began to write books. Now they are already twelve, including the ninth volume broken into two parts and a collection of parables. His followers in 2001 in the Kaluga region founded the first settlement of the patrimonial estates "The Ark". Since then, their number, according to the fund "Anastasia" Vladimir Megre, has grown to three hundred and seventy-one in Russia and one hundred and twenty in other countries.
Among the organizers of the first patrimonial estates were scammers. In 2001, the Molchanov family started buying up lands in the Vladimir region for summer residents at a price of no more than 2,000 rubles per hectare, and some of them were obtained for free, writes Irina Fedotova, an associate professor of the Vladimir Institute of the Federal Penitentiary Service, in the "Vestnik VYUI FSIN", who studied Anastasia from a legal point of view . Those who wanted to move to eco-settlement, the spouses offered to buy land at 35,000 rubles per hectare. At the same time, no contracts were concluded, and the Molchanovs retained their ownership. Also, the head of the family, Anatoly, buried his mother-in-law and his mother on the plot near his house, than shocked local residents and violated the federal law on burials. For all this he did not bear punishment.
THE GIRL WAS VERY BEAUTIFUL, BUT I WAS NOT WEARING CLOTHES, SO MEGRE PREDICTED BETWEEN THEM SEX
One of the first landowners in the Megre movement was Viktor Kuptsov. For the first time that he needed to become a part of nature, he thought about it in 1978. Then his wife's colleagues from Sibgiproshakht went to the Inyu River on a tent camp once a week and rested with a guitar in the open air.
- I thought, why does a person work a week, a month, then to relax in nature? - says Victor. - Is it not better to live in nature, and in some cases to come to the city. Then such an idea struck me, and she led me into the malicious supporters of the Megre. With a thought you can not joke.
Now Viktor, along with his neighbor Sergei, stands near the trees of the Medunitsa settlement. He has a gray beard, long hair and a birch bark braided band around his forehead - a necklace. It is necessary to defend itself against the electromagnetic impulses of the city.
In the nineties Victor left Novosibirsk for Moscow because he quarreled with his superiors and his wife. He fell into an existential crisis, he was even visited by suicidal thoughts.
- There is I - all this is, there is no me - still all this is. Well, what's the difference, then? - says Victor.
At that time, Kuptsov was looking for himself: he went to the Seventh-day Adventists, Baptists, Muslims, sat in the memorial apartment of Nicholas Roerich with his adopted daughter Iraida Bogdanova at the same table and as a result fell into Tolstoy - the Christian teaching of the writer Leo Tolstoy, whose essence in community and pacifism.
"Tolstoy's philosophy is still to my heart, to my liking," says Kuptsov. - No, it does not border on the philosophy of ancestral estates. Tolstoy is a little bit different. Yes, work, natural labor, but still he has a Christian philosophy. And Megre does not.
Gradually, life was normal: he [Kuptsov] settled into the economic department of the Presidential Administration and began to live with a woman who had a son. At six years old the child went to school, where the teachers said that he should study the alphabet in three months. Victor was indignant:
- I came, I say, you guys, six years. But we have a program - we do not care, even six, at least nine years old. I ask them: "You deal with whom?" With kids! And you, a pancake, under instructions of your children drive!"
Well I did not swear, but just said sharply. And the wife of my friend, also a teacher, was offended by the blood - they say, my colleague was insulted.
After some time the same friend's wife came to Victor in the evening on a visit and brought a book.
"Read this, this is for you, it's yours," she said.
This turned out to be "Anastasia" by Vladimir Megre. Victor closed the book only in the morning and ran to his friend's wife:
"Where did you get it?"
- The school brought a psychologist to school, he has books.
Anatoly Karasev, the same psychologist, became Kuptsov's mentor in the knowledge of Megre's ideas. He sent a letter with the verses of the daughter of Megre, and in the third book the spiritual leader of the Anastasis thanked him for his address.
To Karasev letters were poured, and Kuptsov began to help them rake, answering dozens a day.
Private traders of the Novosibirsk festival of patrimonial estates begin to represent their settlements in turn:
"We do not need overseas warm regions, the Siberian land has chosen us!" - reads a rolling young guy from the stage with a rolling voice. - Come and get acquainted with us and with the land, this will be your most important choice!
On the screen above the scene appear footage from the settlement "Fairy Tale". A playful female voice reports that it was founded in 2009 and is designed for about one hundred estates.
- We have a better lake than any jacuzzi. While we go by cars, we plan to change seats for horses. They do not produce exhaust, at least, harmful to the environment, - says voice-over voice enthusiastically.
One of the shopping tents is approached by an elderly man and starts a conversation with a young girl in a sarafan:
- Do you have any honey?
- Yes, but the bees scattered because a lot of queens were planted, but we did not transplant! - giggles the laughing girl.
- Are there many queens ?! Never heard of this! - the man is surprised.
The girl's name is Alena, she lives in the Novosibirsk Academgorodok. Now her family is building a family estate in the village of Skazka.
- What to do in the city? To work for somebody. And on the ground you work for yourself, - says Alyona. - The daughter comes to town - she does not know what to do. She is interested, sometimes you do not know where they went: to the forest, to the lake. And here comes - like a friend of the same, but the interests are different: she does not need a TV, no dolls. Here we have a visit, there are guest houses, with a stove. Pogostit-try it on.
Almost all participants of the festival invite to themselves. But after the local branch of the State TV and Radio Company published a story where an Orthodox priest calls the movement of the Anastasis a sect, they began to be more cautious about the journalists in the patrimonial estates.
The confrontation between the Anastasians and the ROC has been going on for a long time, back in 2005, the protodeacon Andrei Kuraev with the students of the St. Tikhon Orthodox Institute picketed the tour of the "Ringing Cedars" Theater "Meeting" in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. In 2012, the Kuzbass Metropolitanate held several conferences, whose participants condemned the movement of the Megre. The main claim of the Orthodox is that this movement is a totalitarian sect, and Anastasia replaces Jesus Christ.
As Irina Fedotova, an associate professor of the Vladimir Institute of the Federal Penitentiary Service, wrote in the "Vestnik VYUI FISIN", studying the activities of the Megre followers from a legal point of view, in 2000 in the city of Kovrov, Vladimir region, Anastasia group tried to register the organization "Association - Space of Love" as a religious organization. The local council on religious associations considered the application and refused registration because, according to experts, "the dogma that is the basis of this association is not independent, but is a mixture of images borrowed from other religions, in particular , Christianity and paganism."
"There is no such thing that we come as a sect," Alyona says. "It's an idea to live on earth." Someone came from Orthodoxy, someone else from something. Yes, and these dresses we only on holidays wear, - she points to a sarafan and a woven ochelie. - We do not even have a spiritual leader as such.
However, to deny that Vladimir Megre is a real messiah is stupid. Victor Kuptsov quotes Megre from memory in general, like the Bible - "in the eighth book, and this is in the third." This is not surprising, because he actually experienced a mystical experience - in 1999 he saw Megre in the basement at the cedar table.
- He, as a tape recorder, from memory, I gave out a book that was still in the publishing house, - recalls Kuptsov.
Practically all participants have a story: read the Megre and decided to build a family estate.
- While waiting for documents for the apartment, read the book Megre "Ringing Cedars", infected, - says Alena. - We traveled through the settlements and realized that there was no better "Fairy Tales" for us. It is formalized as a farm cooperative, we have a chairman, an accountant, but we are one and we all decide on democratic principles. We try to teach children, we try to preside. The Earth needs from a hectare or more.
Hectare is the cornerstone of the Anastasian movement.
"Through a piece of such land, man rules the world," writes the spiritual leader of the creators of the patrimonial estates Vladimir Megre in his book The New Civilization. Anastasians believe that a hectare for one family provides the greatest productivity. "One hectare requires thirty times less labor than six hundred square meters," the agitational clip of "Ringing Cedars" says.
"You live in a room." You wake up at night, you will tell in which locker socks, on which shelf the book. Gektar is the same, - explains the festival participant Victor Kuptsov. "The person's psyche overlooks the whole hectare, you know where every blade of grass is." Here is the second hectare - not so.
According to the old Soviet norms, if you have a plot of less than twenty-five hectares, you must build septic tanks. If more - septic tanks are not needed, nature processes everything. When I come to the city, I become the enemy of nature. I increase the pollution by my presence.
Another fundamental concept is cedar, and it is desirable that it "ring", that is, possess miraculous power. Creators of ancestral estates wear pieces of this wood on the chest. After the action of the whole Earth, festival participants plant cedars.
"Because the air cleans," the woman answers with a confused question why the festival participants plant the cedars.
"It's a store of energy in the cosmos," her long-haired young man confidently interrupts in an ocheloon. - King Solomon ordered a temple of cedar. People could not stand there because of the cloud, but in the clouds there was a god.
In everything at the festival you need to participate. To plant a cedar is simple: in the prepared pit you put the seedling with long needles to the north, you squeeze the earth to remove the emptiness around the roots, and load up with positive thoughts.
"Take another acorn, plant it in a family estate," the woman says. "Yes, I do not have an estate."
- And how without an estate? Be sure to create.
MILLIONS ON CEDARS
In that Anastasia is a fiction, Megre himself confessed in court, wrote on May 18, 2011 the newspaper "Smena". In 1999, he filed a claim for copyright protection against the writer and esoteric Olga Stukova. She tried to prove that Anastasia really exists, and her ideas are a continuation of the teachings of Nicholas Roerich and Elena Blavatsky, and she published the book The Way of Anastasia and Other Masters of Humanity.
To prove the fact of copyright infringement, Megre said that Anastasia is "an image-symbol, that is, an independent artistic image that has an emotionally paranetic meaning", and "Megre's books are literary and artistic texts that can be attributed to science fiction." Olga Stukovoy was arrested.
For outstanding literary achievements Megre in 2011 was awarded the Philippine Guzi Prize - "Eastern analogue" of the Nobel Prize.
However, the fact that "Anastasia" - not non-fiction, and quite a worse, does not interfere with earning money on this. According to the database "Kartiteka.ru", the Megre family owns several commercial firms that use the brands of "Ringing Cedars" in their activities.
OOO Megre, owned by Polina and Sergei Megre, the daughter and son-in-law of the leader of the Anastasians (Sergei, like his father-in-law, took his wife's surname) - for 2016 earned almost 7,500,000 rubles for the sale of oils, nuts, sprouts and other natural products. Spouses own companies "Ringing Cedars" (2,731,000 rubles for 2016) and "Natural Pharmacy" (1,332,000 rubles). In addition, Sergey is a co-founder of the Lunnaya Reka LLC (475,000 rubles), which leases out real estate, mainly in garden cooperatives, and the summer non-profit partnership "Small Glades".
Polina owns the publishing house "Ringing Cedars" (249,000 rubles), which publishes Megre books and the same newspaper, which publish manuals on the organization of patrimonial estates, advertise the products of the "Natural Pharmacy" and expose unscrupulous, from the point of view of "Ringing Cedars," sellers of cedar oil. The director of the publishing house is the grand daughter, Nina Megre. In 2016 she defended her diploma at the Department of Management of the Economics Faculty of the Novosibirsk State University on the topic "Creation and promotion of a new product (on the example of the company "Ringing Cedars"). There she proposes, in conditions of a decrease in demand, to produce a new product - cedar-honey bars, which will make production waste-free.
YOU LIVE IN ROOM. YOU WILL KNOW AT YOUR NIGHT, YOU'LL SAY, IN WHICH SHOCK OF THE SOCKS, ON WHICH BOOK OF THE BOOK. HECTAR IS THE SAME
Vladimir Megre himself owns LLC "RINGING CEDARS" (like his daughter, only in large letters), which in 2016 earned 2,621,000 rubles, and the fund "Anastasia". Thus, last year the Megre family earned at least about 15,000,000 rubles. All this syndicate could not exist if in 1996 Vladimir did not invent Anastasia.
"Organizers <...> are trying to entice hundreds of people into motion under the ecologically attractive slogan (somewhat Orthodox, neo-pagan in fact), invented by a talented businessman who published many books about wandering somewhere in Russia almost barefoot (even in winter!) a certain girl Nastya, incessantly prays, is friends with wolves-chanterelles. In general, for children to be as healthy as possible, "carry your money to the field of miracles," wrote Alexander Yarkov, head of the ethnoconfessional relations research department of the Institute for Humanitarian Studies of the Tyumen State University in 2008 in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, calling the "Ringing Cedars of Russia" project , invented to enrich its creators.
Followers of Megre also earn their estates, but much more modestly. Basically - due to the sale of agricultural products.
"The creator of the patrimonial estate is not a farmer, but a peasant," explains the landowner Viktor Kuptsov. - He does not chase profit, does not exploit the land, but sells surplus.
At the Novosibirsk festival of clan estates, Alyona from the village of Skazka together with her daughter sell a turnip, which the girl has partially raised.
- And what to do with it? - One of the customers is interested.
- You can sour it with a peel, and can without a peel, Watching as you will eat it, - answers Алёна, adding in a word "is" the common "й" in the beginning.
"I'll be without peel." And here it is necessary to cut it? Asks the customer, pointing to the greenery part of the root. "It's not harmful, is there no salad in the potato?"
- No, of course, you can eat everything.
- And what are tastier, round or flat? - the customer is already addressing Alena's daughter.
The girl looks at the turnips, then at her mother, and, gathering her strength, she says:
- They are flat.
"Then choose one more for me."
Slightly wider assortment in the tent of the estate Tolstoukhov, located in the village of Kazantsev, Altai Territory. Here are sold honey, jam, wicker.
"We've been living in the estate for six years," says the owner of Tolstoukhov's estate. - We read the book "Anastasia", then they rented the land in Morozov, they lived there for four years. We went to the villages and found the village Kazantsevo, the land is free. Now we have five families. Recently, young people came with a girl, the second was born. Come, we will be happy. They come, they look, they do not come off. From the city to come off hard.
The land under the Tolstoukhov estate was leased for forty-nine years, and even then not a hectare, but "only seventy-five acres."
According to the Anastasians, the fact that it is impossible to formalize even abandoned land is the main problem of Russian legislation. Therefore, in addition to business, Vladimir Megre is engaged in political activities. He co-founded the "Motherland Party" created in 2013, whose main task is to achieve adoption of the federal law on patrimonial estates.
According to it, each family should be provided a sacred hectare of land for free, and the products produced on it should not be taxed. Members of the "Motherland Party" constantly write bills and discuss them on their website, participate in elections of different levels, but nowhere in large did not win. On a single voting day on September 10, even trained observers in the Vedic Veteran School, which takes place in the form of an online conference in RaidCall (and at the same time discussed how to celebrate the Nut Savage). Then the candidate Marina Kopenkina participated in the elections to the Saratov Regional Duma.
Despite the fact that such a law fell into the State Duma, but was rejected, some initiatives of the "Motherland Party" are being implemented. The most "long-running" Russian governor Yevgeny Savchenko (forbade hunting hamsters, going to the woods and not listening to rock), as the newspaper "Ringing Cedars of Russia" writes, studied the books of Vladimir Megre, as a result of which, with the assistance of the "Motherland Party" in 2010 Belgorod Oblduma adopted the law "On patrimonial estates in the Belgorod region". He became the first such legislative act in the country.
In their newspaper the Anastasii praise Savchenko and propose to accept such a project at the federal level, citing the results of the International Scientific and Practical Conference "Scientific Foundations and Practical Implementation of the Idea of Ancestral Manors in Russia and the World", which was held at Moscow State University with the support of Governor Savchenko.
The philosopher-eurasian Alexander Dugin said that Savchenko realizes the "Belgorod ideology", aimed at the development of traditional values and the institution of the family. The governor himself said that he forms a society of creators in opposition to the consumption society imposed by the West.
Another idea, realized by the authorities, consonant with Megre is the "Far Eastern hectare". Megre, however, stated in the Vedorsk school on December 28, 2016 that the Far Eastern hectare "works only with the image of Anastasia." But still the adoption of this law, the Anastasians believe, puts Russia on the right path.
A FELLOW, BORN BIRTHDAY"
Creating a family estate does not make any sense without family and children, because without it there will be no sort. Virtually everything in the Megre teaching is subordinated to the reproductive function. He even recommends having sex only with his spouse (he himself, we recall, entered into an accidental connection with the forest beauty Anastasia, which he wrote in his own book) and only for conception.
There are even special sites for online dating Anastasia. The largest public on the VKontakte network is called "LOOKING FOR A HALF TO ESTABLISH A GENEROUS COLLEGE", there are almost seven and a half thousand subscribers in it. Men are called Creators there, and women are called Goddesses. In the group poems love poems, Megre and native land and tell the success stories of those who met and created a family estate. The database is always relevant - administrators delete the questionnaires of creators and goddesses if "there are signs of improving the marital status on the page".
- GET INSIDE THE POTENTIAL ENERGY OF THE POULTRY (SEX), REALIZED HER ABSOLUTELY AND DISAPPEARED OF ITS OWNS! NOW ONLY THE CONCEPT OF THE DIVINE CHILD FOR THE RIGHT I SEE THE MEANING OF INTIMATE APPROACH WITH MY HALF
- writes the creator Rodaslav Mirny who is looking for Vudrus (Slav).
But even if you still manage to find a worthy couple and conceive a child, it is not very clear whether it will be possible to give birth to it. Usually followers of Megre are supporters of home births and rarely turn to midwives. Anastasia believes that the main thing is a positive attitude. A friend of the landlord Viktor Kuptsov, an artist who knew nothing about medicine, twice took births from his wife.
- It's all about being benevolent. In the city, the pregnant woman is not looked at very positively, she comes to the polyclinic - there it is impossible, it is impossible. She is constantly stressed, says Kuptsov.
- And then she lives in the estate - no fuss. Neighbors greeted: "Oh, what a fine fellow you have in a cabaret!", "Oh, and this one is twins, and she's tiny! It's unclear how she feeds them even."
With medicine in the patrimonial estates in general, everything is complicated. Often settlements are far from large settlements with hospitals, so those who live permanently in estates rarely go to the doctor, hoping that natural products will save from all diseases.
"We have all vegetarians or raw food, so there is no food or health problems," says Alena from the village of Skazka.
Some believe that the main thing is not to think about the diseases and their possible outcomes.
- In Soviet times, because of chondrosis, I was given fifty injections and quartz on my back every year. Now I'm sixty-three years old, in 2008 I passed a medical examination for the rights. There are no special complaints from doctors. I do not go there any more and do not think about it," Viktor Kuptsov says, adding that the ambulance is sometimes called to the estates.
He is echoed by his neighbor in Sergei Medunitsa. He comes to the estate only for the weekend, but since 2003 he also did not go to doctors and feels great.
"When I come from the estate to the city, my throat starts to poke," says Sergei.
How to give children compulsory school education, everyone decides for himself. In the village of "Solnechnaya Polyana", located in the Tomsk region, some of the children are at home school, some attend schools in neighboring villages; There is also a special house where the residents are holding lessons for children, its residents tell from the stage of the festival. In the Primorye Territory there is a school "Svetozar" for children from ancestral estates, which sets itself the task of "educating the image and personality."
- Daughter on family training. She has an art school only because I can not give such an education, "says Alena from the Novosibirsk Fairy Tale.
Anastasians are sure that children in such conditions turn out to be special, not like the city ones.
- To see the children who were born in the settlement - for this it is worthwhile to go through everything, - says Victor Kuptsov from "Medunitsa".
- See the living eyes, talk to them, watch them. The aura is read clearly. Think about where to be born to your children!
The Megre teaching is a sample of syncretism, in which not only Orthodoxy and neo-paganism were found, but also the Buddhist idea of the rebirth of souls.
"If you go deeper, then when you look into your grandson's eyes, you see the eyes of your future grandfather," Kuptsov adds.
Participants in the festival of clan estates conduct some kind of ceremony - they throw up and lower their hands. Through the circle, consisting of people, a little girl is riding a bicycle:
"Oh, let's listen to what our sun will say!" - interrupts the rite of one of the women.
- No! Says the girl.
- Our sun said: "No!"