The priests of the Perm diocese are trying to help children who have suffered from the sect. About 50 people, including children, are hiding in an abandoned village near Perm awaiting the second coming of Mikhail Romanov.
Cold weather is approaching, in the village there is a high risk of freezing to death. At the head of the sect is a former Orthodox priest who recruited adherents in churches, talking about the dangers of INN, passports and "juvenile fascism."
Passports, pension certificates, birth certificates of children - they burned all their documents. So ordered their guru - a bearded old man in a cassock, who calls himself "Hieromonk Eustratius." “The documents,” he urged, “are from the evil one. They hide microchips to keep an eye on you. Medicine, doctors, school - from the evil one. " And finally, people who call themselves social workers: "They want to take your children away."
Evstratiy and brought them to this forest - to the abandoned village of Cherepanovo, 350 kilometers from Perm. Only here, he said, neither the police nor the authorities, no one else can get to you.
And now they fled from this forest back to the "Antichrists", as Eustratius called it, the world. They were afraid. How will they be greeted? Is it true that the children will be taken away? Will they be locked up in a mental hospital? "Hieromonk" often and for a long time told what would be done to them in the "big" world. But living in the forest further - with five children, the youngest of whom is only two years old - was unbearable.
It was getting colder. The huts left by the last villagers many years ago were damp. Day and night they chopped wood. But to make a decent supply for the winter, there were not enough hands. And then they decided. Until the forest is completely wet, until it disappears under the snowdrifts, we must run.
The children were assigned to the back seat of the car. The car, the UAZ, was their last possession. We set off carefully. We left behind the huts and bundles of firewood. They left behind the portraits of the tsar - the "monk" Eustratius urged people to pray in front of them with special force. And only when we drove onto the track, when we saw that there was no chase, we were able to exhale: "We are gone."
This story took place in mid-October. A large family fled from a sectarian settlement near Perm. The sectarians, led by a former cleric of the Russian Orthodox Church, settled in a deep forest. Along with the adults, about a dozen children remain in the settlement. Their fate worries everyone today - from ministers to ordinary employees of the district center for social assistance. Can the kids survive the winter? Is it possible to persuade people to leave the forest? Our correspondent understood the situation.
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Waiting for winter
The weather forecast for Nyrob, a settlement near the village of Cherepanovo, is as follows. On Sunday, November 10, the temperature will be plus three degrees. In a week, on November 17, it will drop to minus four degrees. In another three days it will be minus twelve.
It is not yet known what the coming winter will be like. But it seems that a lot depends on temperature fluctuations in Nyrob today. In the forest, in the community of sectarians, eight children stay for the winter - aged from fifteen to one year. Their parents came here together with a bearded man in a cassock - "priest" Evstratii, and hope to witness the coming of the boyar Mikhail, the uncle of the first tsar from the Romanov family.
“This Eustratius zobbed them all. People walk and look into his mouth. He took their documents. He scares them that they will come to them, put everyone in jail, and take away their children, "- Irina Dashkova knows" Hieromonk "Evstratii firsthand. Last year, he first tried to gather his flock into a settlement. It was near Kostroma - in the Sharya region, where Dashkova works in the administration. As in Perm today, then sectarians occupied empty houses in one of the villages.
“We found out that the children were with them, and came to see what conditions they live in,” Dashkova recalls. - It was terrible! No bedding. There are no washbasins. No hygiene. There are no medicines, should anything happen”.
The average age of children in the community, according to Dashkova, was 10-13 years. Their parents greeted the delegation from the region with hostility: “They refused to let doctors see the children. We asked: how do children learn? We were told: they are on external studies at a school in the city of Novomoskovsk near Tula. Then we contacted the school and found out - some children are really attached to it. But they never showed up to take the exams."
Divorced women, Dashkova says, made up the majority of the community at the time. In total, about two or three dozen people settled near Kostroma. “We started looking for the relatives of those children who were brought to the village by their mothers. They were looking for fathers, grandmothers, called, told how they live. Then the court got involved. He declared the living conditions of the children in the village unacceptable and decided to transfer some of them to their relatives.
Irina Dashkova recalls the story of two boys, 11 and 13 years old. They were brought to the community by their mother, Svetlana, telling everyone else that she was going to work in another city. The district authorities managed to find the boys' grandmother and mother's sister. The children were taken away all together, in the presence of the police. After that, Eustratius gathered his adepts and took them even further away from the world. To the village of Cherepanovo, near Nyrob.
Nyrob is a strange, if not abnormal, place. Boyarin Mikhail, whose coming is expected in the community of Eustratius, was martyred here in 1602. Boris Godunov sent him to the Permian forests. For a year the boyar lived in an earthen hole, in shackles. Then he was strangled by the guards.
Today excursions to the Dyatlov pass are carried through Nyrob and Cherepanovo. A group of tourists led by Igor Dyatlov died on this pass in the winter of 1959. The cause of their death is still not clear and gives rise to a variety of, at times, mystical versions: aliens, an animal unknown to science, special services.
In spring and autumn, the forests near Nyrob become impassable. The helicopter remains the only means. Sergey Bolshakov, Deputy Minister of Social Development of the Perm Territory, flew to the sectarian settlement at the end of October. “We realized that it would be impossible to persuade them to leave the forest. And then we collected a humanitarian cargo for them,”he says.
The villagers were delivered over a ton of food products, warm clothes, and medicines. They met the delegation with caution, but they accepted the cargo. “The huts in the village are intact, not decayed. Villagers heat the stoves. They have an electric generator, gasoline. There is even one satellite phone,”Bolshakov describes the life of the community.
We learned about the settlers from local residents. Since September, men with beards and women wearing long skirts and scarves have been noticed in the surrounding villages. They said that they lived in Cherepanovo, a village that the last residents left several years ago. The settlers bought food from the village shops and left. Then it became known that the community was headed by Eustratius - the same one who made a splash in Kostroma a year earlier. Then it turned out that children were living with the sectarians.
Caution is the word used by the Perm authorities in dealing with settlers. “We will continue to inspect the community. Snow will fall, we will ride all-terrain vehicles,”says Bolshakov. According to him, there is no talk of taking the children out of the community now. Any careless action, according to him, can lead to the fact that Eustratius will go even further - to a place where even all-terrain vehicles will not be able to pass.
Perhaps this is a better tactic than the one used in Kostroma. Because there the settlers saw that what Eustratius had warned them about is coming true. The "antichrist" people came and began to take away the children. All this, ultimately, further raised the authority of the pseudo-monk in the community.
However, Irina Dashkova does not agree with the actions of the Permians. She continues to follow the movements of the sectarians from Kostroma: “The children feel bad. Winter is coming. I do not believe that something has changed for the better in the community, as the authorities of the region claim."
Shelter
Priest Boris Kitsko from the Perm town of Vereshchagino does not divide children into friends and foes. For him, they are all his own. Since 1995, Father Boris has been the head of an orphanage, where more than 150 children, abandoned by their parents or orphaned, live, work and study.
When an UAZ truck pulled up at the door of his house in October, Father Boris was not surprised. In the back seat were five children sitting in a row - there was a family that had escaped from the "forest" sect of Eustratius. Father gave shelter to them too: he settled in a skete at a local monastery. Then another family came to him: a mother with a 13-year-old son. And again, father Boris could not refuse - he settled, put the child in school.
"The head of the first family, breaking free from them, said: 'Finally, I can breathe calmly, not being afraid," - says Father Boris. - This Evstratiy put a lot of pressure on them. He took the documents from whom he made them burn. he forbade doing: he scared that there was mercury in them, that they would poison them.”Interestingly, the priest notes, the Internet sectarians do not consider the Internet to be evil:“How is it, I ask, are you afraid of passports, but there is no Internet? !"
Today "refugees" work at the monastery. Their "UAZ" was also useful - the head of the family works as a driver, delivers people and parcels. Originally from Krasnodar, they are in no hurry to return there. Perhaps, Father Boris believes, the family will settle in the Perm Territory for good.
The eldest son, who is now about 13 years old, was settled with his peers in a shelter. After school he goes into horse riding: “The boy adapts well, gets along with everyone. He just says: "I won't get my passport anyway!"
From priests to gurus
Until 2008, "Hieromonk Eustratius" served in the Tula diocese. He was the rector of the church in the village of Novogurovsky, and was known as Veniamin Filippov. Since the mid-2000s, the priest began to criticize the hierarchy - first orally, then through video messages that he posted on the Internet. When he was defrocked, he called himself a monk, took a new name and continued services - in the apartments of the parishioners.
“People followed him, because for many he was the first priest, the person who opened the Church for them,” Father Igor Kirov, the current rector of the Novogurovsky parish, explains the phenomenon of Eustratius. - Father Benjamin served in the Tula diocese since the late nineties. Muscovite by registration, a doctor by training, he left the profession and became a priest. He helped to restore the temple in the neighboring village of Spas-Konino. And up to a certain time he led a really bright and useful activity”.
Another Tula priest, on condition of anonymity, explains why yesterday's priest turned into a man who is today called "a likeness of an Eastern guru": “Father Benjamin had a great tragedy. A father of three, he lost his mother in a car accident. Apparently, this was the reason for all the changes."
Deprived of his dignity, Benjamin joined the group of schismatics so-called. Bishop Diomedes. But he soon moved away from them. In November 2012, he wrote an appeal calling on believers to start an exodus from the world. Then the sectarians had already settled near Kostroma and, as it was stated in the letter, "experienced the threat of the actions of the security forces." In the letter, Eustratius also outlined a new course: he and his group advocate the revival of the Orthodox monarchy. A year later, this resulted in the expectation of the second coming of the boyar from the Romanov family.
“The hypertrophied veneration of kings in pseudo-Orthodox sects is a frequent occurrence. People are looking for a panacea for their fears and create new idols for themselves,”says Vitaly Pitanov, head of the Stavros center. Since 2010, with the blessing of Metropolitan Vladimir of St. Petersburg and Ladoga, the center has been engaged in missionary work and studies the activities of sects.
“To people like Evstratiy,” the expert continues. - There are people who are looking for miracles, looking for elders, they want to avoid responsibility for their lives and shift it to another self-proclaimed "miracle worker."
“Father Benjamin was given many chances to recover. Metropolitan Alexy literally coddled him, forgave him a lot,”recalls priest Igor Kirov.