Jesus of Siberia: The traffic cop turned cult leader who claimed to be the son of god — and will now spend 12 years in jail
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Deep in a remote corner of Siberia, a group of masked men swarmed the City of the Sun, a deeply religious settlement in the Krasnoyarsk region.
The Russian security forces had arrived in September 2020 to arrest the so-called Jesus of Siberia, a former traffic policeman known as ‘cult’ who some viewed as the reincarnation of Christ. The religious leader, whose real name is Sergei Torop, was accused of extorting money and causing physical and psychological harm to his many of followers, some 10,000 worldwide.
On Monday, nearly five years later, Torop’s stint as a cult leader came to an end when he was convicted in a Siberian court and sentenced to 12 years in a maximum-security prison camp, along with two other sect leaders, Vladimir Vedernikov and Vadim Redkin.
The 64-year-old bearded and long-haired mystic, who led the Church of the Last Testament, claimed that he had been “reborn” to convey god’s word to the world. Many of his devotees flocked to the settlement known as ‘Abode of Dawn’ or ‘Sun City’, soaking in Torop’s teachings of reincarnation, veganism, and harmonious human relations.
“It’s all very complicated,” he explained to a reporter for The Guardian in 2002. “But to keep things simple, yes, I am Jesus Christ. I am not god. And it is a mistake to see Jesus as god. But I am the living word of God the Father. Everything that god wants to say, he says through me.”
Torop told his followers not to eat meat, smoke, drink alcohol or swear – and to stop using money. They would often hold prayers in his honour, looking up to his large hilltop residence in the City of the Sun.
But it was a darker, hidden side to life in Vissarion’s commune that led to his arrest.
His apparent re-birth was followed by decades of psychological manipulation of his followers, exploiting them for labour and money from 1991 to 2020. Torop exerted control over his followers, prosecutors said, inflicting “moral harm” on 16 people, leaving six with “serious health problems”.
“There were these ridiculous situations when adults and children died because they didn’t receive medical assistance,” Elena Melnikova, one of at least eight people who testified against Vissarion and his lieutenants in the year after his arrest, told the BBC.
Content retrieved from: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/jesus-of-siberia-russia-cult-leader-jailed-12-years-b2782624.html.
