For the couple, paradise is this remote area that was unearthed three years ago. Located on the border with Hungary, it would be the ideal place to start a community inspired by the novels of Vladimir Megre.
Between 1996 and 2010, the Russian entrepreneur published ten volumes in which he recounts his encounter in the Siberian taiga with Anastasia, a mysterious woman with long blond hair endowed with supernatural powers. He wrote there the advice she gave him to leave the industrial society which, through its contempt for nature, would leave the field open to “dark forces” who would steer them toward world catastrophe.
Vladimir Megre becomes his prophet and offers every family the opportunity to rediscover the purity of their origins by starting a permaculture farm aimed at food self-sufficiency.
infatuation
Norman Kosin, 36 like his wife, is igniting what he calls his “Room of Love,” which will likely bring together “a hundred families.” “Imagine a doctor, midwife, craftsman and woodcutter evolving side by side” in harmony, he says, touching his cedarwood locket, which he says “feels absorbing the positive energy.”
A way of life widespread in Russia, where in 2019, according to Vladimir Megre, there were 400 settlement initiatives. In Germany, Switzerland and Austria, Norman Kosin, a figure in the movement also known online as Felix von Elysion – named after the community he hopes to see – has between 3,000 and 4,000 followers.
If those numbers can’t be independently verified, a recent Austrian report worries about a new frenzy. “The Covid-19 pandemic has given Anastasia a significant boost in German-speaking countries,” where she encounters a far-right Antivax movement, wrote the Documentation Fund on religiously motivated political extremism in November.
Beyond the Germanic world, there are active members in other European countries, from Portugal to Bulgaria. In France, the interministerial mission (Miviludes) responsible for combating these phenomena has also noted a “significant increase” in sectarian aberrations in the context of the health crisis.
antivax
Former tourist accommodation manager Norman Kosin, long gray hair and full beard, confirms anti-Covid restrictions have reinforced his beliefs. Against the vaccination, there was no question for his wife and him submitting their daughters to the school’s mandatory nose tests and “indoctrination.”
The youngest, aged 4, goes to crèche, but the two oldest, aged 10 and 14, have dropped out of school. “Children’s souls are so innocent,” and such measures “destroy them,” protests the father, drawing a parallel to what is currently happening with the war in Ukraine. “We’re building an image, anti-Russian propaganda that ‘marks for life’, he says, convinced that the ‘system’ that has ‘degenerated’ man will collapse.
conspiracy and anti-Semitism
In addition to a channel dedicated to Anastasia, he participates in the animation of conspiratorial channels on Telegram with almost 250,000 subscribers, where he notably denounces the “lies” of the media. With the pandemic, conspiracy theories have “experienced a massive boom,” confirms Ulrike Schiesser, head of the Federal Office for Cult Affairs.
She sees the Anastasia movement as an esoteric concept that seemingly “contains all sorts of harmless ideas for a better life.” But “it poses a problem,” she believes, because “it positions itself against democracy, the state, or science,” presenting itself as the way forward for an “elite” that adheres to the truth and called to separate ordinary ignorant mortals.