A Long Weekend with the Son of God

Filmmaker George Carey went a long way from home looking for the son of God. Siberian outpost of Minusinsk is the town where the new messiah came from. As Lenin's dream was blown away in Berlin a new religion was starting in Siberia led by a young man who'd once been a cop. He said he was Christ reborn and people believed him.

George is heading for his remote hideaway in Siberia to find out just who this man is and why thousands of people have given up everything to follow him. It was the idea that Christ was a cop that first intrigued him. Anyway, one bright August day he found himself waiting at a railway station in Siberia for someone to show him the way.

He drove on through a poor land, increasingly depopulated now that the old collective farms have disappeared. George's guide was Pavel, a fairly new recruit to Vissarion's creed. At first sight the coming of the Lord hadn't done anything for the new Promised Land... an empty land, getting emptier by the mile. But Pavel told George to be patient... Vissarion village wasn't very far away.

It was an astonishing sight. It wasn't just the appearance of the buildings, it was the almost surreal disconnect between the Siberia George traveled through and the fairyland he ended. At one end of the village he came to a house where he'd been told that the village baker lived. That sounded down to earth enough, but nothing is down to earth in Petropavlovka. The baker was an artist from Lithuania who'd been guided there by a Bulgarian clairvoyant.

Walking back from the baker George heard singing. Not exactly local country folk. In fact the one leading the singing had once been an officer in a top secret Soviet missile program. The reason they were practicing so hard was that the next day was the biggest day in their calendar, when their Lord will come down from his mountain to bless them.