‘Jesus of Siberia’ jailed after exploiting followers for cash

Alex Croft looks at how Sergei Torop, a former traffic police officer turned cult leader, came to receive a 12-year sentence

- Alex Croft

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 “Jesus of Siberia”, a former traffic police officer known as “Vissarion” 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 followers, some 10,000 worldwide.

Last 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.”