Syed Fattahul Alim
Superstition, bigotry, mysticism and cultism are not things of the past. Even in 21st century, people can be so bigoted that they believe that the world will come to an end on a particular date announced by their cult guru. A group of people are hiding in a cave in the Penza region of central Russia to survive the doomsday their spiritual leader said would come in May 2008. They have refused to listen to the appeals made by the police to come out of the cave and have even threatened to commit mass suicide if they are pressured to leave the shelter. As there are also children among the followers of the cult now hiding in the cave, police have decided not to go into action to rescue them, at least for the time being.
It has been learnt that the group behaving in such a crazy manner belongs to a mainstream faith. And their scripture does not certainly prophesy that the doomsday will occur on the said date of 2008. If those are modern people, and certainly they are, how could they blindly accept what their cult guru instructed them to believe? And it is also not for the first time that followers of such spiritual guru demonstrated such bizarre behaviour including self-immolation on a mass scale.
Guardian's Luke Harding from Moscow on November 15 provided the following report on the developments of the Russian doomsday cult members:
"To locals in the Russian village of Nikolskoye they were simply a group of eccentric Christian believers. And when 29 members of the sect abruptly vanished last month, villagers assumed they had packed up and gone.
In fact, the religious doomsday cult had taken up residence in a remote underground cave. They had decided to barricade themselves inside until May 2008 - the date when their spiritual leader told them the world was going to end.
Today, authorities were attempting to talk to cult members by bellowing through a ventilation shaft cut into the cave's roof. So far, however, the members - who include 25 adults and four children, one of them a 16-month-old baby - have refused to emerge.
"They have covered the entrance and refuse to come out and are threatening to blow themselves up. They threaten to detonate a gas tank," an official in the local prosecutor's office said. "They say they are fine. They tell us to go away," another added.
The sect members are hiding out in a snow-covered hillside in the Penza region of central Russia, about 60 miles from the town of Penza.
The chief prosecutor of the region's Bekovsky district, Alvetina Volchkova, said they moved in at the end of October.
"I talked to them last Thursday," she told the Guardian today. "The temperature outside was freezing. They told me they were fine and that the temperature inside the cave was plus 17C. They've lit candles and paraffin lamps. I asked if I could come in and have a look around but they wouldn't let me in.
"They don't have a name as such. They don't regard themselves as a sect but refer to themselves as 'the chosen ones'. They also say that they are representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church."
The police had sealed off the area and were trying to negotiate, she added.
"No-one wants to take on the responsibility of provoking them ... because our information is that there are children among them,' a police spokeswoman told Reuters.
The cave is two miles from the modest tin-roofed prayer hall where sect members used to gather to sing songs. Elders began secretly preparing the cave last month - bringing in supplies of gas and kerosene, as well as half a tonne of honey and a lot of jam, locals said.
The sect's leader is Pyotr Kuznetsov - a divorced 43-year-old architect from Belarus. Kutnetsov travelled across Belarus and Russia, spreading his message of apocalyptic doom, before settling in the village 18 months ago, locals said.
Several dozen believers followed him. They moved into abandoned houses, refusing to use electricity. "They are simple Christians," a local priest, Father Georgy, told NTV television. "They say: 'The church is doing a bad job, the end of the world is coming soon and we are all saving ourselves.'"
After decades of state suppression, the Russian Orthodox Church is now enjoying a revival. But many Russians and ex-Soviet nationals have also fallen under the sway of local and foreign sects. Some even refuse passports and taxpayers' numbers, claiming the figures conceal "satanic" meanings.
However, the tradition of religious dissent in Russia and defiance of secular authority goes back much further. In the seventeenth century, one group, the Old Believers, founded their own church in protest at reforms to orthodox rituals. To escape persecution, many settled in extremely lonely communities.
The cave in Penza was discovered after the daughter of one of the missing cult members complained to the local prosecutor, Russian media said. Police then arrested Kuznetsov - who led investigators to the entrance. When they tried to approach together with another priest gunshots were fired in the air, NTV reported.
"Kuznetsov is their spiritual leader. He told them that the world would end in May and that the only way for them to save themselves was to go underground," Pavel Shishkin, a reporter with Komsomolskaya Pravda in Penza told the Guardian today. "They believed him. They've gone to sit it out."
Izvestiya newspaper yesterday reported that Kuznetsov suffered from schizophrenia and that in the last few months he had been sleeping in a coffin.
"He said his followers should not be disturbed, that they are the chosen ones, and that no one else is allowed to get in the cave," a law enforcement officer told the paper.
Police and ambulances have sealed off the approach to the cave, which is scarcely visible from the outside and hidden by a sloping ravine. Relatives of cult members are expected to arrive at the scene shortly from Belarus and Ukraine to try and persuade their loved ones to give up. This may be tricky; however, as cult members have apparently taken a vow of silence.
Asked whether Russian special forces would storm the cave, Volchkova said: "For the moment the police are making sure that the situation is OK and under control."
Prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation under article 235 of Russia's criminal code, against illegal religious societies, she added.
The BBC reported in July 18, 1999 of a similar doomsday cultist group that vanished with its 60 members into the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern Colombia. They were due for an alleged rendezvous with a spaceship, and nothing was been heard of them since the weekend, despite a continuing police search.
The members of the Stella Maris Gnostic church were hoping to be carried off by extraterrestrial beings before what they believe would be the imminent end of the world at the turn of the Millennium.
Police checked the sect's half-finished temple in the Caribbean city of Cartagena, but found no clue as to where the cult had gone or what their intentions were.
The head of the sect had assured the followers that the Sierra Nevada - a sacred territory to indigenous Indians - was where they could contact a spaceship.
According to their interpretation of the Bible, the sect believed that extraterrestrials would take 140,000 people from the earth before the end of the world - a sort of second Noah's Ark.
The doomsday, destructive and apocalyptic cults are religiously based, very high intensity, controlling groups that have caused or are liable to cause loss of life among their membership or the general public.
It is important to realize that out of the tens of thousands of new religious groups worldwide, only a very few meet these criteria.
They do not include terrorist groups in the above definition, because their goals are primarily political, not religious. However, groups like Al Quaeda (The Source) do have some points of similarities with destructive religious cults.
What is behind the death of members of destructive cults?
No consensus exists concerning the motivation for the loss of life within this handful of cults: Some in the Anti-Cult Movement claim that much of this loss of life among cult members was the result of mass suicides ordered by the group leadership. That opinion fits well with their now-discredited belief that cult memberships have been the victims of mind control techniques. Having little self-will, they have been willing to follow any order from the leadership -- even one leading to self destruction.
The loss of life by the Heaven's Gate membership was definitely a suicide. The members were convinced that they would be transported, at death, to a space ship where they would evolve to a higher level of existence. There is overwhelming hard evidence that all of the deaths within the Ugandan Movement for the Restoration..., and many of the Solar Temple deaths were actually murders to cover financial fraud by the leadership. This may have been the motivation for the Jeffrey Lundgren murders as well. All of the Branch Davidian victims appear to have been murdered by their leaders -- either by being shot or as a result of the arson-set fire. Many, perhaps most, of the People's Temple victims were also murdered. Details are sketchy because of the advanced state of decomposition of the bodies when investigators arrived.
White supremacist groups:
These do not fit the mould of the destructive cults listed above. However, they do preach hatred of gays, lesbians, African-Americans, communists and other minorities. Even though the group may preach non-violence, their message of hate appears to inspire some of their members to commit murders and serious terrorist acts:
Doomsday cultists of modern era
FE Team | Published: November 17, 2007 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00
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