In Imiss, like in many other villages where believers following Vissarion live, there is a United Family. The United Family is a commonwealth of people who decided to live and to work together helping each other. They solve all of their problems together, working to earn enough to buy agricultural instruments, seeds, food, things and everything that members of the United Family need. Usually some natural families or single people are members of a United Family. They cultivate the land and get the main part of foodstuff from their vegetable gardens. All of them are vegetarians, but some of them have cows or goats and get milk for children from them. Siberia has a sharp continental climate with cold snowy winters and hot summers, in which not only cucumbers and tomatoes grow ripe, but also melons and watermelons. And in hotbeds, they cultivate different exotic and heat-loving plants.
By the way, people doing it will happily take any of your help: seeds, young plants or clever advice in cultivating plants.

Living on Mother-Earth and using its gifts, the believers treat with solicitude our Mother-Nature, they try to use ecologically safe technologies for all areas of their lives. They gather different materials to make necessary, vital things using age-old "grandfather's" techniques. There are people who make excellent medicines: cedar oil, fir oil, fir balsam, abissip, collections of herbs -- which help them to get well from many illnesses.

There are good craftsmen and craftswomen making furniture, fabric, adornments, household things. There are musicians composing music, songs; there are artists painting wonderful pictures. During the last few years, trade exhibitions of craftsmen following Vissarion were held in Krasnoyarsk. People like to buy their hand-made things which breathe joy and were made with love in heart. The exhibitions were held with the music, songs and dances of the inhabitants of the Land of New Promise.

I told already about Vladimir Kapunkin, the priest, «singing apostle». Besides him there are many other singers and groups: Svetlana Vladimirskaya, the group «Harmony», Vadim Redkin, Alexey Rags , Vladisvar Nadishana, Yaroslav Sokolov and many others. I met many of those people and talked with them.

	Alexey Rags		Vadim Redkin

When I lived in Imiss, I took part in the life of the United Family there. Members of it have mastered production of knitted wool from the beginning. They keep goats and sheep, shear them, then spin and knit different things. Only few words were written, but so much work of careful hands was put into a knitted costume or into a little cap with mittens. When I was there, it was time to shear sheep and then turn them out into a summer pasture. I, a city-dweller, not only saw rams and sheep not in the Zoo for the first time, but also helped in shearing. Everybody who comes there tries to help and not only come for an excursion like a tourist. Because people living there build a new life, new society, new relations. They have no rich sponsors, our government doesn’t support them. Everything they lovingly create they do with their own hands, using the tiny amounts of money which they work very hard to earn. Most of them came there from big cities and, like me, they never built anything before, didn’t cultivate land, didn’t create anything with their hands. Working together and teaching each other, they learn everything about craftsmanship, cultivating land and other things during their life.
And I appeal again to those who are interested and want to help. Any craftsmen who know long-forgotten methods for making many different essential goods, using age-old technologies that are ecologically safe and that don"t need a large outlay of money, can write me an e-mail: t-russkaya@yandex.ru or post-mail to Siberia: Pavel Shtempelev, 662 920 Krasnoyarsk region, Kuragino, P.O. box 1, e-mail: vissarion@krasmail.ru.

	Vladisvar Nadishana		Nadishana and Youll

Road to the Mountain

But let’s come back to my trip. I set as a goal for myself to see as much as I could, to visit many places and to take part in different matters -- in other words, to live the common life of believers and to feel their cares and problems. Many of my friends left Moscow and came there to live.

On the instructions of my friend, I went to Artyomovsk. It's a former town of gold diggers and now just one of many villages. I was absolutely charmed with the nature of the road to the small town and its location. Our bus drove through mountains covered by beautiful forest (taiga). I never saw such forest before - can you imagine huge trees many centuries old? Rivers were running through the forest, and on one side of the road were mountains and on the other side was deep forest below. Such a pity I forgot my camera in Imiss, so I don't have even one picture of Artyomovsk. Because I'm neither a professional photographer (with my cheap "soap box" nobody could take nice pictures) nor a journalist, I wasn't going to write any stories about my trip. My friends put this idea into my head when I came back to Moscow. I was so tired of retelling my trip a hundred times by phone and in online conversations. In the absence of a picture of Artyomovsk, here is the river Kazir again.

When I came back to Imiss, I decided at last to visit the town of my dreams on Suhaya Mountain and to see everything with my own eyes. At my request, the United Family of Imiss recommended me for a week's work to help the inhabitants of the Abode of Dawn.

A lorry to the Mountain usually goes from Petropavlovka village on Sundays at noon after the liturgy. The liturgy at the Petropavlovka temple begins at 11 a.m. A man with a wonderful, soft, kind smile, Sergey Chevalkov, ex-officer and now the priest of the Last Testament Church, holds the liturgy devoutly, emanating reverence. His eyes look at you with warmth and love, and you see that he can help you with any of your troubles and understand you and forgive all of your sins.

		The day when I was there, young parents came into the temple. After the liturgy, they asked the priest to bless their newborn child for life. Everybody who was at the temple took part in the solemn rite conducted by the priest. Then he asked all of us to dream and to create in our minds beautiful images, to endow this little person, who had just begun his life, with wonderful kind and light wishes. I looked at the bright spiritual faces of people -- and it was like a miracle. Together we created a brilliant future for this child. But it is already noon. The lorry to the Mountain is waiting for us. In our rucksacks there are things which are necessary for life and work on the Mountain: sleeping-bags, some clothes, rubber boots in case of rain, food for a week (cereals, vegetables, vegetable oil, salt), candles and matches – there is no electricity there.

We climb into the open basket of the lorry in which some benches are placed. It was a wonderful, sunny and warm day. I banished the thought that people probably go there in the same lorry in cold and bad weather. We travelled about 3 hours, coming into every village: Cheremshanka, Gulyaevka, Jarovsk. We took people who were going to the Mountain, too. In the last village, there was already no electricity. Finally, we came to the last stop. From here, the lorry will take people who came down from the Mountain to go back to Petropavlovka. More rains washed the road away, so we had to walk till the little khutor. After the khutor, there is no road for a car at all, only a footpath.

I heard the argument of some lads, which path is better for walking: upper or lower. They said that the lower path is only 9 kilometers and the upper one is 3 kilometers longer, but the lower path may be covered with water because of bogs. I prayed God we could go by the lower path. Still I didn’t feel the weight of my rucksack, I packed food into a bag. We began our journey, it seemed on the lower path. (Thank God!). It was easy to walk in running shoes. My new friend Vera (meaning Faith) walked ahead of me. I joked: "I follow my Faith!" She’s a woman of my age, but she came to live in Siberia few years ago from Riga, the capital of Latvia. Many thanks to her! She supported me the whole week – on the road there and back and on the Mountain. Also people around me helped me. They saw that I was unsuitable for life in the taiga.

Everyone began to help me and one of the brothers took my bag with food at the beginning of the road. He promised to put it near the registration house at the Abode of Dawn. But notwithstanding it, the road up to the Mountain still was very difficult for me. Oh! If I only knew that it will be SO hard for me!.. I’d… go there in any case! But at last we reached the town! But where is the Abode of Dawn itself? – Look, here it is! Ah, no, it’s just a khutor just shy of the town.

We walk a little further. Near the house where they register everybody who comes to the town, I see my bag. Thank you, Gennadiy! It means we have reached our end. It seems, me too… There is only one phrase in my head: "They shoot horses, don’t they?"

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