The Russian Presswatch/Prophet Sharing

...CI...

...Other supporters of the ban care little for the distinction between bad, foreign preachers and their domestic counterparts: in the following issue of Megapolis Express, one Alexander Nechayev (himself a clairvoyant, which isn't very Orthodox) opined that all Protestant churches were in league with the devil...

...Billy Graham's ability to fill a stadium in Moscow...

...Shortly afterwards, Russia's highest arbitration court ruled in favor of RTV Press, or rather of the State Property Committee...

...But if we stand together, we can create a small island of resistance...

...resistance and persecution of the independent press in Russia aren't what they used to be...

...Considering that Yakovlev, who also publishes the weekly Obshchaya Gazeta [The Common Paper], has been critical of Yeltsin, this had the look of state-orchestrated harassment . Yet the rally organized by the Journalists' Union in solidarity with Yakovlev drew numerous Yeltsinites in and out of official posts, and other VIPs...

...The West can be bad either because it subverts traditional social values or because it imposes social conformism—as long as it's bad...

...Other declared candidates include economist Grigory Yavlinsky, presidential adviser Sergei Shakhrai, irrepressible Mussolini wannabe Vladimir Zhirinovsky (see TAS, February 1992), and a newcomer to Russian politics though not to Russian TV: healer Anatoly Kashpirovsky...

...Under a plan to partially privatize the Ostankino State Broadcasting Company, the Committee on State Property allowed RTV Press television, headed by former Moscow News editor Yegor Yakovlev, to purchase some of Ostankino's facilities and equipment...

...M ore seriously, the press and some deputies have questioned the financing of the veep's new country home, with a four-car garage, a swimming pool, a sauna, and other non-populist amenities...

...According to the July 4 edition of Moscow News, the bank where Rutskoi expects to get a home-building loan is controlled by a fund for which he had obtained regulatory and licensing breaks...

...This, from the man who, as late as 1991, was still warning the West of the Soviets' relentless drive for a global takeover...

...hence they are oppressors of all that is good...

...It gets curiouser and curiouser, as Orwell is jeered for pandering to the public perception of "Stalin as a new Hitler" and "mobilizing the masses to repel the new Hitler's (imagined) assault on the West...

...This event will be preceded by a massacre of the White Brothers...

...Of course, fascination with the supernatural and the extrasensory has been a growing craze in post-Communist Russia, weirdly coexisting—often in the same people—with renewed interest in traditional religion...

...Not quite...

...Mother Mary Devi, a beauty in her early thirties, founded the group in the summer of 1990 in Kiev together with her husband, John the Swami/Elijah the Prophet, or, in his secular incarnation, Yuri Krivonosov, holder of a graduate degree in the technical sciences...

...Not that life in Moscow doesn't have its rewards: Limonov's novel It's Me, Eddie, chronicling the author's bisexual adventures in New York, has sold over a million copies in Russia, and Limonov claims that he now deliberately tries to dress down to avoid crazed fans (young men and "huge numbers of middle-aged women...

...The measure is rumored to have been prompted by a complaint from Patriarch Alexei II, reportedly upset by the Rev...

...Yakovlev, lavishly praised as a pioneer of glasnost, summed up the conflict thus: "Most of the media that brought the current regime to power have become the loyal press of this regime and cannot stand up to it...

...The bizarre axe murders of three monks in Optina Pustyn near Moscow by a monastery worker fired for drunkenness, who had carved "666" into the axe handle, prompted further talk about possibly Satanic exotic cults...

...In an essay in the June Ogonyok, "Hitler and Freud: The, Conflict of Cultures" (which seems to suggest that Hitler's hatred for Jews was really the fault of Freud, who sullied the most sacred provincial middle-class values such as childhood and motherhood with sexual associations), Navrozov analyzes the Islamic world's fight for "purity" against the "filth" spread by the "formerly Christian" West on an unmistakably sympathetic note...

...To Orwell, on the other hand, "tyranny deprives about 99 percent of the population of pleasures . . . which 99 percent of the Western population legitimately enjoy in 1949 [and] does not allow the population to believe what [most] regard as truth and reality, i.e., that 2 x 2 = 4." (Has Navrozov actually read Orwell...

...Vice President wantonly abused by liberal media .. . where have we heard that before...

...Father Dmitry Dudko, a priest persecuted by the KGB in the late 1970s who hasmore recently concluded that Communism was actually good for religion because it kept away consumerist seductions, wrote in the ultranationalist weekly Den (Day), "Democracy means the refusal to combat evil, therefore democrats give equal freedom to all sects, even Satanic ones...

...In a remarkable essay in the January 3, 1993 issue of Moscow News, Navrozov compares George Orwell's 1984 to the earlier dystopian novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, classifying the former as mass-market trash...

...While Rutskoi's post may be abolished by Russia's proposed new constitution, he has already announced his intention to run for president...

...In the late 1980s, Kashpirovsky claimed to be able to put patients in so beatific a state that they could undergo surgery without anesthesia and not feel pain...

...We, says Navrozov, is about the individual's rebellion against the conformist rationality of his technologically advanced society, about the freedom to proclaim that two times two does not equal four...

...He also says he really hates Moscow, which is "too complacent" and too infested with "rotten people and profiteers" from all over the ex-USSR: "Moscow isn't a Russian city anymore...

...In this view of the West, Limonov may find a near-ally in Lev Navrozov,another ex-Soviet citizen previously discussed in this space (October 1992...

...a young woman preacher handing out leaflets with Mother Mary's picture (in white robes, wearing a cross and holding something like an Egyptian magic staff) outside a Moscow movie house resolutely told Moscow News reporter Svetlana Kolosovskaya, "She'll be crucified by late November...

...A recent poll showed that 82 percent of Russians celebrated Easter this year while only half celebrated May Day...

...all the converted are to sever their worldly ties and go out to urge others to repent, since on Judgment Day all those who have not repented and believed in Mary Devi will be destroyed...

...So far, however, they have not even had any legal trouble, despite sending their preachers to proselytize in some small-town high schools...

...According to a report in the Independent Gazette (June 17), "The demonstrators noted that this was not just an isolated incident but part of a disturbing trend...

...Actually, 12,000 White Brothers were supposed to have been slaughtered by this summer, according to one of their earlier pamphlets...

...This did not sit well with state broadcasting chief Viktor Bragin, who had his own privatization plan all worked out...

...M oscow News writes about an interesting group calling itself the White Brotherhood, which mixes elements of traditional Russian Orthodoxy, apocalyptic Christianity, Krishna worship, and yoga...

...maybe he plans something similar for the economy...

...Modern Western society, Eddie says, is "like a mental ward where the patients are treated rather well but shot full of various tranquilizers...

...Still, Yakovlev has a point...

...The messiah is female—her full title is Mother of the World Mary Devi Christ, Messiah and Savior—and it seems that until the collapse of Communism, she herself either did not know of her divine nature or kept it carefully closeted, in her capacity as Komsomol functionary Marina Tsvigun...

...It ought to be shut down and sprayed with DDT for a long time...

...However, Moscow News discloses that while the Russian Orthodox Church pushed for the restrictive law, the initial request came (in an April 20 meeting of heads of religious denominations with President Yeltsin) from the leader of the Russian Baptist community, Viktor Longvinenko...

...In the meantime, the Russian Supreme Soviet has passed a law, yet to be signed by Yeltsin, cracking down on a far more dangerous influence: foreign missionaries and preachers, who will be required to have an invitation from a Russian-based organization or "accreditation" by the state before they can engage in any activities in Russia...

...T hose on the side of the good include the notorious émigré writer Eduard Limonov (see TAS, September 1992), who now lives mostly in Moscow but admits to Komsomolskaya Pravda (June 23) that he still makes most of his money in Paris...

...In an uncanny parallel, the journalists are especially fond of picking on Rutskoi's infelicitous way with words, e.g., "I'm from the Kursk region myself, and everyone knows that isn't some kind of Zulu country," or the complaint that Russia's criminal laws "look like they've been written either by gynecologists or by vegetable growers...

...Alexander Rutskoi, fighter-pilot-turnedpopulist politician, one detects an unpleasant whiff of toadyism in the way Yeltsin's insubordinate veep is being whacked by the press...

...Is he, then, taking up the defense of the common man against the cultural elite...

...Forinstance, little as one may like Gen...

...Winston Smith is not made to say that two times two is not four, but that the four fingers his torturer holds up are five...

...Who says Russians lacic the initiative to carve out new careers in the dog-eat-dog world of the market...

...Still, the alternately boorish andclownish Kashpirovsky has his faithful, including former skeptics who tell of warts or sores miraculously gone after they dozed off in front of the TV while the great man held a seance...

...an arbitration court ruled in favor of the state broadcasting company, and police were dispatched to seal off the studio's premises...

...Perhaps the former chairman of the Committee for the Salvation of Western Democracies is wondering in retrospect whether the democracies were worth saving after all...

...The theory is that in preparation for Judgment Day, a new messiah has descended on earth in the company of a "white brotherhood" of 144,000 saints who live among men and women, sometimes not even knowing that they are saints...

...Thus, to Orwell, "freedom means the conformism of the happy 99 percent of the population...

...According to the White Brothers, the world will end on November 24...