Marian Revelations in

the Russian Context

The Cosmopolitics of Blessed John

J. Eugene Clay

ABSTRACT: Modern Marian apparitions have often responded to vari-

ous incarnations of rational Enlightenment political thought, from the
1830 French revolution to Soviet socialism and the international
Communist movement. Through her apparitions, the Virgin and her
devotees have engaged in ‘‘cosmopolitics’’ by offering an alternative to
a purely secular political order. Denying a mechanistic universe, Mary
testifies to the existence of a compassionate, personal, miracle-working
God. Although primarily a Roman Catholic phenomenon, Marian appa-
ritions are also part of the Orthodox tradition, and the Virgin’s appear-
ances in Russia and Ukraine after 1917 served to critique the new Marxist
order. In 1984, the Mother of God continued her venture into cosmopo-
litics when she first spoke to Soviet citizen and spiritual seeker Veniamin
Bereslavsky (‘‘Blessed John’’). Over the following decades, as the
Communist world collapsed, Bereslavsky built an ecclesiastical organiza-
tion and an international movement on the charismatic authority of these
continuing revelations, which gradually have led him away from tradi-
tional Christianity to gnostic dualism. With thousands of followers, meet-
ing in congregations from Ulan-Ude in eastern Russia to Glastonbury,
England, Bereslavsky, who now lives in Spain, preaches ecumenical
esotericism as a cosmopolitical alternative to Western secularism.

KEYWORDS: cosmopolitics, Orthodox Church of the Sovereign Mother

of God, Blessed John Bereslavsky, Mother-of-God Center, New Cathar
Church, Veniamin Iakovlevich Bereslavskii, Transfiguring Theotokos

Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Volume 21, Issue 2, pages
26–42. ISSN 1092-6690 (print), 1541-8480. (electronic). © 2017 by The Regents of the
University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to
photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s
Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2017.21.2.26.

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 Clay: Marian Revelations in the Russian Context

M
arian apparitions engage in ‘‘cosmopolitics,’’ the term that
Belgian philosopher and chemist Isabelle Stengers uses to
describe practices through which interested persons are able
to voice their concerns in shaping the social and political order.1
Stengers’ analysis derives from her critique of the role and authority
of science in contemporary society; with its claims to objectivity, ratio-
nality, and truth, science (and scientists who speak for it) appears to
have unique power to render authoritative answers to difficult social
questions. Democratic societies, she contends, need to recognize the
power of science, but also to understand its limits; through the practice
of ‘‘cosmopolitics,’’ the voice of every citizen, not only those that con-
form to a scientific worldview, can be heard. According to Stengers,
Marian apparitions and the pilgrimages they inspire are not so different,
sociologically speaking, from the practices that bind together the scien-
tific community engaged in exploring subatomic particles.2 By linking
cosmos to politics, Stengers highlights the political consequences of
particular worldviews and invites an understanding of apparition
movements as part of a larger conversation about the social order.
The brutality of some Enlightenment utopias (particularly Stalinist
civilization, which claimed to be based on a scientific understanding of
history) underscores the moral dangers of silencing ‘‘all humans, both
individuals and populations, who do know that Gods, jinns, or the Virgin
Mary matter.’’3 Deprived of their voices, many such individuals and
populations in the USSR found themselves discarded in the human ‘‘sew-
age disposal system,’’ as Alexander Solzhenitsyn aptly termed the Soviet
Gulag.4 The terrible cost of this form of secular Enlightenment political
thought is not fully known, but its scope can be partially measured: for
example, in just five years, from 1937 to 1941, the Soviet secret police
arrested approximately 175,800 Orthodox clergy, of whom 110,700 were
executed.5 Marian apparitions—whether understood as a ‘‘weapon of the
weak’’ emerging from believers’ creative imaginations, or as the divine
actions of a supernatural being—engage in a form of cosmopolitics that
resists the dominant Enlightenment worldview and its secular political
order. Asserting a theistic understanding of the cosmos, the Virgin Mary,
through these apparitions, also asserts the possibility of a different polit-
ical order that takes believers’ deepest concerns into account. The
Marian movement of Blessed John (Veniamin Bereslavsky, b. 1946) that
arose in the late Soviet period to encompass thousands of followers in
Russia, Ukraine, Croatia, and Western Europe, represents one aspect of
the Virgin’s modern rebellion against the secular.
Since the early nineteenth century, the Virgin Mary’s most famous
appearances have directly challenged the Enlightenment vision of a
secular society based on reason. In Paris in 1830, on the eve of a pro-
found crisis for the conservative, post-Napoleonic European order—the
liberal July revolution that overthrew the restored Bourbon dynasty in

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Nova Religio

France—the Virgin showed herself to the young visionary Catherine

Labouré (1806–1876) and mournfully predicted that the streets would
soon be awash in blood. Significantly, the German Marian devotee
Johannes Maria Höcht (1901–1966) identified this apparition as the
beginning of the ‘‘Marian Age.’’6 At Lourdes in 1858, the Virgin identi-
fied herself as the ‘‘Immaculate Conception,’’ the controversial dogma
that Mary was conceived without sin which Pope Pius IX had promul-
gated four years earlier. With this declaration, the Queen of Heaven
clearly sided with the socially conservative ultramontanist (pro-papal)
party in the Roman Catholic Church.7 The famous apparitions in 1917 at
Fátima, Portugal, responded in part to that country’s secular revolution
of 1910, which had established a republic that nationalized Church
property, closed churches and seminaries, ended official observance
of many Catholic holy days, and even martyred members of the clergy.
Likewise, Mary’s appearance in Medjugorje in 1981 challenged the
Marxist worldview of the rulers of Yugoslavia.8
In these apparitions, the Virgin Mary has been offering to the world
her own vision of the cosmos as an alternative to the rational, secular,
modern, naturalistic, political order of Enlightenment thinkers and
their heirs. Rather than an atheistic natural order, amoral and indiffer-
ent to suffering, Mary testifies for a compassionate, personal God who
regularly and miraculously intervenes in human affairs. Like contempo-
rary science, Marian revelations (often addressed to the whole world)
make broad, transcendent claims to objective truth, but unlike science
or the technocratic politics that flow from it, Mary claims that truth is
also personal and moral. Combining in her person the universal and
the particular—her mythological destiny as Birth-giver of God and her
biography as first-century Jewish woman—Mary provides a transcendent
view of the historical moment in which she chooses to appear. Acts of
personal piety (prayer, repentance, devotions) take on universal signif-
icance as they become part of an eschatological narrative in which the
Virgin’s revelations are divine acts of grace before the final judgment.
Although originating in a Catholic context, the genre of Marian appari-
tions as critiques of Enlightenment utopias have proven powerful
enough to cross denominational boundaries. In the 1980s, Mary specif-
ically challenged the scientific Marxism undergirding the socialist Soviet
Union in revelations given to Russian Orthodox Christians who
launched their own religious movements.9

MARIAN REVELATIONS IN THE TRADITION

OF THE ORTHODOX CHURCH

Marian apparitions have been a largely Catholic, rather than an

Orthodox, phenomenon, although Mary has certainly made dramatic

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 Clay: Marian Revelations in the Russian Context

appearances to Orthodox believers. In the fourth century, the Orthodox

Church father Gregory of Nyssa claimed that Mary had appeared to St.
Gregory the Wonderworker (213–270), who evangelized the region of
Cappadocia in central Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), to affirm the
Wonderworker’s understanding of a serious (but unspecified) doctrinal
question.10 Like the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church
honors Mary as both perpetually virgin and Mother (or Birth-Giver)
of God (Theotokos in Greek, Bogoroditsa in Slavonic), a title affirmed at
the Third Ecumenical Council in Ephesus in 431. Orthodox Christians
tend to prefer the title Birth-giver of God, which emphasizes Mary’s
maternal nature rather than her sexual purity. In keeping with this
emphasis on motherhood, Orthodox iconography rarely portrays
Mary without her son.
When Mary intervenes in history, she usually does so through the
many miracle-working icons that bear her image. For example, while
praying before an icon of the Virgin at St. Mary of Blachernae church in
Constantinople, St. Andrew the Fool had a vision of Mary covering the
city of Constantinople with her protective veil.11 In the thirteenth cen-
tury, the Mother of God saved the citizens of Smolensk, who earnestly
prayed before her holy image in the town cathedral for protection from
the Mongol invaders. Through this icon, Mary instructed a young
warrior named Merkurii to do battle against the Mongols and earn
a martyr’s crown.12 Several decades later, Mary appeared to St. Sergius
of Radonezh (1314–1392), founder of Holy Trinity Monastery, after he
had venerated her icon; she assured him that his monastery (today the
most important in all of Russia) would be a success.13 Later, Mary led
Sergius’ disciple, Avraamii of Gorodets, to discover her icon in a tree
atop a hill where he was to found a monastery.14 Russians credit miracle-
working icons of the Theotokos for victories over the Polish invaders of
1612, the Swedish invaders of 1709, and the French invaders of 1812.15

MARY’S RESPONSES TO THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS

In the sacred history of the Russian Orthodox Church, Mary has

more often acted as protector than revelator. Typically, when she
appears in the lives of the saints, she offers no new teaching (although
she may reassure the struggling doubter, as she did St. Gregory) but
instead consoles the sorrowful, encourages the pious, and frightens away
the enemy. In the twentieth century, however, as socialist revolutions
swept away Russia’s ancien regime, Mary’s appearances naturally became
an expression of opposition to a secular, atheistic political order. As early
as the tumultuous February Revolution of 1917, the Virgin Mary led
a peasant woman through dreams to search for the miracle-working
‘‘Sovereign’’ icon of the Mother of God. With the help of her priest, the

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woman discovered the icon in the basement of a village church near

Moscow on 15 March 1917,16 the very day that Tsar Nicholas II abdi-
cated. For many Orthodox Christians, the appearance of this icon—
showing Mary holding a scepter in her right hand and an orb in her
left—provided evidence that the Mother of God herself had accepted
the burden of Russian sovereignty surrendered by the emperor.17 Nine
years later, on 30 July 1926, Christ himself appeared to two shepherd
boys in Demidov (Demydiv) village near Kiev to warn them of imminent
persecution by the Communists. Sometime later, several villagers saw the
Mother of God as well. Soviet authorities repressed the cult, destroyed
a memorial cross marking the apparition site, and sentenced one of
the seers to a long prison term.18 When the Communist Party forced
peasants to join collective farms in a mass campaign beginning in 1929,
the Virgin circulated letters urging resistance to this innovation. In the
region of Astrakhan, for example, a rumor spread of such a heavenly
letter that predicted the imminent destruction of the collective farms.19

MARY’S APPEARANCE TO BLESSED JOHN

(VENIAMIN BERESLAVSKY)

In November 1984, just a few years before the dissolution of the

Soviet Union and the Communist bloc, the Queen of Heaven again
challenged Soviet socialism, just as she had challenged the July revolu-
tion 134 years earlier. She revealed herself to an unemployed teacher,
musician, and spiritual seeker, Veniamin Bereslavsky. Like many Marian
seers, he had experienced a deep personal crisis. Born in Moscow just
after just after the Great Patriotic War (as many Russians call World War
II), the young Bereslavsky initially enjoyed the promise of a bright future
as a member of the Soviet intelligentsia. Graduating from the respected
Ippolitov-Ivanov Academy of Music in 1966 and the Maurice Thorez
Foreign Language Institute four years later, Bereslavsky briefly taught
English at Moscow State University (Russia’s most important institution
of higher education), married in 1973, and fathered two daughters. As
he entered middle age, however, Bereslavsky found himself facing
increasing spiritual and material challenges. For some reason—perhaps
his curiosity about religion in the officially atheist Soviet Union—he lost
his prestigious job at Moscow University. In the 1970s, he engaged
in a series of fruitless and disappointing spiritual explorations into
Tibetan Buddhism, Judaism, Kabbalah, and other mystical practices, but
he remained dissatisfied with all of them. According to hostile sources,
he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic in February 1971 and
suffered two psychiatric hospitalizations; Bereslavsky’s enemies claim
that because of his poor mental health he was officially classified as an
invalid for several years.20 (In the USSR, psychiatrists often used this

30
 Clay: Marian Revelations in the Russian Context

diagnosis to persecute dissidents, and Bereslavsky’s religious preoccupa-

tions may have caused him to become a target for state repression.)
Whatever the truth about his mental condition, Bereslavsky has freely
admitted that many of his friends and family regarded his spiritual quest
as a symptom of insanity. ‘‘My relatives considered me a failure and
treated me as though I were already dead. It was understandable: I had
not made a career, but instead had believed in God and used my faith
to hide my failure at work. Every day they stabbed me in the back:
‘He’s schizophrenic, a maniac, a parasite, a sanctimonious jerk.’’’21
Bereslavsky’s experience of the Mother of God initially followed
Orthodox, rather than Roman Catholic, precedents. His spiritual search
led him in 1980 to be baptized in the small Russian Orthodox church of
St. Elijah the Prophet near the town of Mozhaisk, about 70 miles from
Moscow, and when his marriage subsequently fell apart, he began pre-
paring to take monastic vows.22 Gathering a small group of followers who
joined him in pilgrimages to sacred places, he began writing a series of
works, Penitential Fire, which drew on his readings of Christian mystical
and ascetic literature. In the antireligious atmosphere of the USSR,
these works could not be published officially, so they were circulated
in manuscript form, a type of self-publication known as samizdat. Not
satisfied with his experience of Orthodox liturgy, he continued making
pilgrimages to holy sites such as the Pochaev Dormition Monastery
in Ukraine, whose thirteenth-century founders had witnessed the
Virgin appear as a column of flame.23 While visiting the monastery,
he discovered the stern ascetic Evfrosiniya Nikiforova (1916–1993) living
in a catacomb hermitage nearby. Although she was not formally a nun,
Nikiforova became Bereslavsky’s spiritual director in the tradition of the
Orthodox elder (starets), an ascetic with a divine gift to discern and
resolve moral and spiritual problems. After her death, Bereslavsky’s own
church canonized her, and he has vigorously promoted her cult.24
Bereslavsky continued to seek out the charismatic gifts available in
the Orthodox tradition. In November 1984, he and a friend visited the
Smolensk Dormition Cathedral, which houses a sixteenth- or
seventeenth-century copy of the miracle-working Smolensk icon of the
Mother of God. In this very town, Mary had spoken through her icon to
St. Merkurii and inspired him to sacrifice his life in battle against the
Mongols. While climbing the small iron staircase leading to the famous
icon, Bereslavsky also felt the Virgin Mary’s presence: ‘‘She looked at me
vivaciously, with such trembling and such tenderness, and spoke some-
thing directly to my heart. I closed my eyes and listened, heeding Her.’’
Returning to his companion, Bereslavsky suddenly said, ‘‘Ask questions.
The Mother of God is going to speak now.’’ The two men exited the
cathedral and walked slowly along the streets of Smolensk recording
Mary’s message as the snow fell softly. Bereslavsky’s friend continued
to transcribe the divine words until his hands were nearly frostbitten.25

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Nova Religio

In this initial revelation, Mary offered a new cosmopolitics that

challenged the Enlightenment utopia of Soviet socialism: ‘‘Go out and
tell the whole world that the TIME HAS COME and IF ALL WILL NOT
PRAY AND FAST, THEY WILL PERISH.’’26 At the time, few imagined
that within a decade the Soviet Union would no longer exist. As the
leading country of the socialist bloc, the USSR seemed to be an ‘‘inde-
structible union,’’ as its anthem proudly proclaimed. Moreover, the
antireligious nature of the regime also showed no signs of change.
The Soviet dictator, Konstantin Chernenko (1911–1985), a septuage-
narian who held the title of General Secretary of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union, did little to reform the course laid out by his
predecessors, Yuri Andropov (1914–1984) and Leonid Brezhnev
(1906–1982). Despite its inefficiencies, the Soviet economy could
boast of full employment and a 100 percent literacy rate. The greatest
military threat to the USSR lay in the combined might of the United
States and its NATO allies, which had begun deploying a new genera-
tion of missiles a year earlier.
Mary spoke at a time when the Russian Orthodox Church was insti-
tutionally weak. Nearly seven decades of antireligious persecution had
taken its toll. In 1914, the Church had over 50,000 parishes; seventy
years later, fewer than 7,000 were left. The USSR provided only limited
legal recognition to a small number of official religious institutions. The
leaders of these organizations, who traveled abroad to promote Soviet
diplomatic initiatives, quietly accepted state prohibitions of religious
propaganda, social welfare programs and charity work while also acqui-
escing to tight restrictions on religious activity of any kind. Large
sections of the country, such as the Kamchatka peninsula, had no offi-
cial religious representation at all. Moreover, the Council of Religious
Affairs, the government body responsible for overseeing religion, was
especially hostile to the Russian Orthodox Church, the greatest poten-
tial rival to the Communist Party. In 1984, several prominent Orthodox
priests were suffering long prison terms for their outspoken promotion
of their faith.27
Because of this severe persecution, religion in the USSR was often
highly personalized, secret, and hidden. For the most part, the questions
that Bereslavsky and his companion asked on that November day
reflected their personal spiritual quest. To Mary’s demand for fasting,
prayer, and humility, the men responded, ‘‘How is one to learn to fast?
How is one to pray? How is one to profess humility now?’’ The Virgin’s
answers prescribed a highly ascetic, internalized religious practice: ‘‘The
Spirit teaches prayer. Maintain your heart as a temple with icons and
relics. Let no stranger into this holy temple, day or night. . . . Enter the
temple of the heart, shut the door, fall to your knees, close your eyes, and
pray.’’ Mary emphasized the internal struggle of self-discipline, sleep
deprivation, celibacy, and fasting. At the same time, she warned about

32
 Clay: Marian Revelations in the Russian Context

the dangers of external religiosity and the institutional Russian

Orthodox Church. She condemned the ‘‘Pharisees,’’ hypocritical priests
who had ‘‘blackened the Church and desecrated the Lord’s wounds.’’
‘‘The priesthood has fallen,’’ she declared, but she also offered the
promise of renewal: ‘‘You (the truly zealous Orthodox Christians) are
the Church of the future.’’28
Mary’s revelations emphasized the charismatic spiritual traditions
within the Orthodox faith. At a time when an atheist state tightly con-
trolled religious institutions and hierarchies, Bereslavsky and his friends
could turn to the temples of their own hearts, seek out charismatic
elders who had received their authority from God alone, listen to the
messages given to them directly from the Queen of Heaven, and practice
the ascetic discipline she demanded. Within a few months after his first
revelation, Bereslavsky sought out a secret and illegal underground
monastery in the Caucasus Mountains, where he took monastic vows
and the new name of John. Returning to the capital, he and his compa-
nions formed a religious community of their own.29
At the same time, Mary’s revelation pointed forward to a future
apocalyptic judgment and outward to an international network of
seers. Marian internationalism, which offered a global vision of
a united humanity tied together by devotion to the Virgin Mother,
directly challenged the Marxist foundations of the USSR, which called
for class unity among the workers of the whole world. Her messages
came at an opportune moment; in 1985, the new General Secretary of
the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931), began a series of
reforms allowing greater freedom of expression and of religion.
Bereslavsky took advantage of these new liberties to emerge from
the underground, publish his ongoing revelations, legalize his church,
and assume its leadership as presiding bishop. In April 1991, he regis-
tered his ‘‘Mother-of-God Center’’ (bogorodichnyi tsentr) with the
Russian Ministry of Justice as a charity, and two months later he held
the First Mother-of-God Council in Moscow.30 During this tumultuous
period, Bereslavsky and his adherents frantically proselytized in
anticipation of Mary’s final battle against evil. In July, Mary called
for a million Russians to ensure the Antichrist’s defeat by signing
her ‘‘white charter,’’ a pledge to ‘‘confess the Mother of God as one’s
new spiritual Mother, the Czarina of Russia, the Queen of Heaven, and
the one crowned on the throne of Holy Rus.’’ 31 The signatories
formally admitted their spiritual sickness and bondage to Satan and
completely surrendered themselves to Mary. One month later, when
Communist hard-liners failed in a coup attempt to remove Gorbachev
and reverse his democratic reforms, Bereslavsky credited the Mother
of God for her triumph over the Communist ‘‘red dragon,’’ whose
destruction had been prophesied by the Apostle John (Revelation
12:7–9; 20:7–10).32

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Nova Religio

In the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Bereslavsky

developed international ties with other Marian seers. In a 1995 effort to
unite the visionaries in a single universal church, he convened
a Universal Marian Council of Orthodox and Catholic Churches in
Moscow. He found allies in this venture across the globe, especially
among leaders of small schismatic movements from the Roman
Catholic Church. The American Jacque Alwin Daniel Jones (b. 1922),
bishop and founder of the Tridentine Old Roman Community Catholic
Church (created in 1976), and his disciple, the Minnesotan seer
Andrew C. Wingate (known as the Trumpeter for his eschatological
prophecies), attended, as did Patriarch Athanasius Konstantinos
(Harry Armstrong) of the Autocephalous Traditional Orthodox
Catholic Church. Also participating were two Asian visionaries associ-
ated with controversial Australian Catholic seer William Kamm, the
Little Pebble (b. 1950): Christina Lee, the ‘‘White Rose’’ of
Singapore, and former female wrestler Taemi (Mimi) Hagiwara of
Japan (b. 1956). For Bereslavsky, Mary’s continuing revelations through
all of her true visionaries constituted a third testament, the new ‘‘white
gospel’’ that would be the final divine message before the end of the
world. In the 1990s, Bereslavsky and his followers expressed the hope
that Mary’s new gospel would heal the schism between the Catholic and
Orthodox Churches.33
Mary’s revelations to Bereslavsky sacralized local places distinct
to Russia. In 1997, Bereslavsky’s church officially took the name ‘‘The
Orthodox Church of the Sovereign Mother of God’’ (OCSMG), iden-
tifying itself with the famous ‘‘Sovereign’’ icon miraculously discov-
ered on the very day of Nicholas II’s abdication. The church
especially venerated the Solovetsky monastery—a fortified cloister in
the White Sea that the Soviets had converted into a large prison
camp—as the site of holy martyrdom of those truly faithful the
Mother of God.34
In the relatively liberal climate of the 1990s, the OCSMG grew
rapidly. In 1991, Bereslavsky’s church joined a liberal North American
Protestant denomination, the International Council of Community
Churches, and on that basis claimed membership in the World
Council of Churches. From 1991 to 2004, it held twenty-four
All-Russian councils, usually in the 5000-seat Dynamo sports palace in
Moscow, with crowds ranging from 300 to 4,000. Resembling Protestant
revival meetings more than traditional Orthodox councils, these assem-
blies were open to all. Featuring lively music and preaching, they often
included free meals for participants. In the provinces, the OCSMG
organized local councils that followed the same model. At its height in
2002, the OCSMG had 30 legally registered congregations in the Russian
Federation (Table 1) as well as many unregistered groups throughout
the former USSR. These congregations covered Russia’s vast expanse,

34
 Clay: Marian Revelations in the Russian Context

Photo 1. Entrance to the Moscow headquarters of the Orthodox Church of the Sovereign
Mother of God, 2014. Credit: J. Eugene Clay.

from Ulan-Ude in the east to St. Petersburg in the west, and from
Krasnodar in the south to Severodvinsk in the north. In 1999, the
church’s academy, named for the great Orthodox mystic St. Simeon
the New Theologian (949–1022), had more than 100 students enrolled
in its classroom and correspondence courses. At its Empress Alexandra
College in a Moscow suburb, the OCSMG applied educational methods
supposedly used by Nicholas II and his family, and in its ‘‘Eternal
Spring’’ school, students studied the ‘‘white gospel’’ of the Virgin
Mary’s various revelations. By 2005 the OCSMG had about ten bishops
and 100 clergy; in addition, nuns in the hermitages near Moscow pro-
duced the many vestments, altar cloths, and other liturgical furnishings
that the church required. Outside Russia, the OCSMG established
nine congregations in neighboring Ukraine and two in Croatia. As
presiding archbishop of his church, Bereslavsky attended a Marian
council in Japan in 1994 and three years later helped officiate at
‘‘Blessing 97,’’ a mass marriage ceremony conducted by Reverend
Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church in Washington, D.C. In
the early 2000s, as part of his ecumenical mission, Bereslavsky made
several missionary trips to the United States, Western Europe, Turkey,
and Japan, where he visited prominent Marian shrines and conferred
with other seers.35

35
 table 1 . Registered Religious Organizations of the Orthodox Church of the Sovereign Mother of God in the Russian

36
Federation, 1994–2016

35

30

25

20

15

10

0
1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
Registered Religious Organizations of the Orthodox Church of the Sovereign Mother of God in the Russian Federation, 1994-2016

Source: Rossiia v tsifrakh: kratkii statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow: Goskomstat, 1995-2004, Federal’naia sluzhba gosudarstvennoi statistiki, 2005–2016)
 Clay: Marian Revelations in the Russian Context

THE GNOSTIC TRANSFORMATION OF BERESLAVSKY’S

MARIAN COSMOPOLITICS

Ultimately, Bereslavsky was unable to sustain his international network

of idiosyncratic Marian seers, whose movements and theologies often
ended up as rivals to the OCSMG. The Universal Marian Church, uniting
East and West, did not last much longer than the 1995 council that
created it. Likewise, in the cosmopolitical marketplace of post-Soviet
Russia, Bereslavsky discovered that his community was unable to com-
pete with an increasingly powerful Russian Orthodox Church, which
exerted more and more control over sacred places such as the
Solovetsky monastery. In 1997, a new freedom-of-conscience law sought
to favor Russia’s ‘‘traditional’’ religions, particularly the Moscow
Patriarchate, and to discourage new religious movements such as the
OCSMG. Facing greater government scrutiny and a hostile political elite
in the 2000s, Bereslavsky’s church often was classified as a ‘‘destructive
cult’’ that threatened Russia’s ‘‘spiritual security.’’36 By 2005, the church
had closed its spiritual academy for lack of funds. Within the OCSMG,
dissenters criticized Bereslavsky for his authoritarian manner and love of
luxury. Former members accuse the OCSMG of promoting harmful
ascetic practices and of exploiting its monks, nuns, and laity, who built
the church’s hermitages and sometimes gave their entire lifesavings to
advance the Virgin’s cause.37
Under these pressures, Bereslavsky resigned from the administrative
leadership of the OCSMG in 2009 and moved to Spain, where he began
receiving new revelations from Cathars, medieval dualists violently
repressed in southern France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centu-
ries.38 Drawing on charismatic sources, Bereslavsky has developed a new
theology in his new home on the Mediterranean. Instead of bringing
Orthodox and Catholic Christians together under Mary’s aegis,
Bereslavsky now rejects traditional organized Christianity altogether.
The God of the Old Testament is none other than a minor deity,
Yaldabaoth, the evil demiurge. Jesus Christ was an emissary of the true
God, the heavenly father of love, but the treacherous apostle Peter,
founder of the Roman Catholic Church, distorted his message.
Heavenly Mother appears not only as Mary but also as the Gnostic
emanation Pistis-Sophia and as the Buddhist bodhisattva Guanyin.
Incorporating his original revelations into this new theological frame-
work, Bereslavsky contends that he is the heir of true Christianity,
preserved by Joseph of Arimathea, the Bogomils of Bosnia and
Bulgaria, and the Cathars, whose ruined castles serve as sacred places
for the enlightened.39 He retains a loyal following in Russia, where the
OCSMG still has nineteen legally registered religious communities that
collect millions of rubles in contributions.40 In addition, he has found
new followers in Western Europe: the Cathar Temple in Glastonbury,

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Nova Religio

Photo 2. Blessed John of the Holy Grail kneeling before an altar, 25 May 2008. Credit:
John of the Holy Grail Photostream, accessed 18 March 2017, https://www.flickr.com/
photos/54283490@N06/5749592915/in/photostream/. Licensed for noncommercial reuse.

England, and the Bogomil Center in Zagreb, Croatia, enthusiastically

promote the teachings of this Russian prophet.41 With three decades of
revelations published in hundreds of books, Bereslavsky continues to
offer an ecumenical vision, but one that unites Western and Eastern
esotericism rather than the Western and Eastern churches. Guided not
only by the Virgin Mary but also by the ascended Cathars, Bereslavky
continues to offer a cosmopolitical alternative to Western secularism,
just as he first challenged Marxist socialism thirty years ago.

ENDNOTES
1
Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010–2011); Isabelle Stengers, Power and

38
 Clay: Marian Revelations in the Russian Context

Invention: Situating Science, trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1997).
2
Isabelle Stengers, La Vierge et le neutrino: les scientifiques dans la tourmente
[The Virgin and the Neutrino: Scientists in the Storm] (Paris: Empecheurs de penser
en rond, 2006).
3
Isabelle Stengers, ‘‘Including Nonhumans in Political Theory: Opening
Pandora’s Box?’’ in Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life, ed.
Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2010), 3–33, here 4. On Stalinism as part of the Enlightenment, see
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997).
4
Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956:
An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York:
Harper & Row, 1974), 1: 24–98.
5
Alexander N. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, trans. Anthony
Austin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 165. St. Tikhon’s
University in Moscow maintains a valuable database on victims of persecution
against the Orthodox Church: ‘‘Novomucheniki, ispovedniki, za Khrista postra-
davshie v gody gonenii na Russkuiu pravoslavnuiu tserkov’ v XX v’’ [‘‘New
Martyrs, confessors for Christ who suffered in the years of persecution against
the Russian Orthodox Church’’], http://kuz3.pstbi.ru/bin/code.exe/
frames/m/ind_oem.html/ans; accessed 1 August 2017.
6
Johannes Maria Höcht, Fatima und Pius XII: Der Kampf um den Weltfrieden: Die
überraschende Kriegswende (1942/1943) und der kommende Triumph Mariens [Fatima
and Pius XII: The Struggle for World Peace: The Surprising Turn of the War (1942/1943)
and Mary’s Coming Triumph] (Wiesbaden: Credo Verlag, 1950), 67.
7
Christopher John Maunder, ‘‘Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Modern
European Roman Catholicism (from 1830),’’ PhD diss., Vol. 1, Leeds, UK:
University of Leeds, 1991, 26.
8
David G. Bromley and Rachel S. Bobbitt, ‘‘Visions of the Virgin Mary: The
Organizational Development of Marian Apparitional Movements,’’ Nova Religio
14, no. 3 (2011): 5–41.
9
Eugene Clay, ‘‘The Church of the Transfiguring Mother of God and Its Role in
Russian Nationalist Discourse, 1984–99,’’ Nova Religio 3, no. 2 (2000): 320–49;
Yana Afanasenko and Matvei Pismanik, ‘‘Tserkov’ – Sem’ya Detei Bozhiikh: An
Indigenous Russian Neoreligious Phenomenon,’’ Religion, State and Society 30, no.
3 (2002): 277–89; J. Eugene Clay, ‘‘The Orthodox Church of the Sovereign
Mother of God/The New Cathar Church,’’ in Revisionism and Diversification in
New Religious Movements, ed. Eileen Barker (London: Ashgate, 2013), 93–109;
J. Eugene Clay, ‘‘The Orthodox Church of the Sovereign Mother of God
(OCSMG),’’ World Religions and Spiritualities Project, ed. David G. Bromley, 3
September 2014, http://www.wrldrels.org/profiles/OCMSG.htm, accessed 5
August 2017.
10
Gregory of Nyssa, ‘‘Life of Gregory the Wonderworker,’’ St. Gregory
Thaumaturgus: Life and Works, trans. Michael Slusser (Washington, D.C.:
Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 53–54.

39
Nova Religio
11
Nikephoros, ‘‘Vita S. Andreae Sali,’’ Patrologia Graeca 111, cols. 621–888, here
848C-849A; Nikephoros, The Life of St. Andrew the Fool, ed. and trans. Lennart
Rydén, Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia, 4:1–2 (Uppsala: L. Rydén, 1995), 254.
12
P. P. Mindalev, Povest’ o Merkurii Smolenskom i bylevoi epos [The Tale of Merkurii of
Smolensk and the Historical Epic] (Kazan’: Lito-Tipografiia I.N. Kharitonova, 1913).
13
Epifanii, ‘‘Zhitie Sergiia Radonezhskogo’’ [‘‘The Life of Sergius of
Radonezh’’], in Biblioteka literatury Drevnei Rusi (Library of the Literature of Old
Rus), vol. 6: XIV—seredina XV veka (fourteenth to mid-fifteenth century), ed. D. S.
Likhachev, L. A. Dmitriev, A. A. Alekseev, N. V. Ponyrko (St. Petersburg:
Nauka, 1999), 254–411; here 380–81.
14
K. V. Dorofeeva, ‘‘Zhitie prepodobnogo Avraamiia Galichskogo’’ [‘‘The Life
of St. Avraamii of Galich’’], Vestnik tserkovnoi istorii [Herald of Church History], no.
3–4 (2011): 5–55.
15
Aleksei Nikolaevich Ipatov, Pravoslavie i russkaia kul’tura [Orthodoxy and
Russian Culture] (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1985), 54.
16
2 March in the Julian calendar, which Russia used at the time.
17
L. A. Shchennikov, Gurii (Fedorov), E. P. I., ‘‘Derzhavnaia ikona Bozhiei
Materi’’ [‘‘The Sovereign Icon of the Mother of God’’], Pravoslavnaia entsiklope-
diia [Orthodox Encyclopedia] (Moscow: Tserkovno-nauchnyii tsentr ‘‘Pravoslavnaia
entsiklopediia,’’ 2010), 14:436–37; A. N., Kazakevich, ed. ‘‘ ‘ . . . V podvale khrama
poiavilas’ ikona Bogomateri’, Dokumenty Tsentral’nogo istoricheskogo arkhiva
Moskvy o Derzhavnoi ikone Bozhiei Materi [‘ . . . An Icon of the Mother of God
Appeared in the Church Basement’: Documents of the Central Historical
Archive of Moscow about the Sovereign Icon of the Mother of God’’],
Otechestvennye arkhivy: nauchno-prakticheskii zhurnal (Archives of the Fatherland:
A Scientific-Practical Journal), no. 1 (2004): 102–08.
18
Ioann (V. Ia. Bereslavskii), Demidovo: Iavlenie Gospoda na Ukraine letom 1926 g.
[Demidov: The Lord’s Appearance in the Summer of 1926 in Ukraine] (Moscow: Novaia
Sviataia Rus’, 1998).
19
Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant
Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 63.
20
In December 1994, a commission from the notorious Serbskii Forensic
Psychiatric Institute headed by Professor Tamara Pechernikova (1927–2007),
who in the Soviet period forced dissidents to undergo painful psychiatric drug
treatments, claimed that Bereslavsky was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia
in February 1971 and had to be hospitalized twice. T. P. Pechernikova, F. V.
Kondrat’ev, T. M. Orseniuk, F. S. Safunov, G. I. Kopeiko, and G. V. Vasil’evskii,
‘‘Zakliuchenie instituta sudebnoi psikhiatrii o deiatel’nosti organizatsii ‘Fond
Novoi Sviatoi Rusi’ (Bogorodichnyi tsentr)’’ [‘‘Conclusion of the Forensic
Psychiatric Institute on the Activities of the ‘New Holy Rus Foundation’
(the Mother-of-God Center)’’], http://www.sektoved.ru/enciclopedia.php?
art_id¼22, accessed 5 August 2017. On Pechernikova, see Anna Politkovskaya,
Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy (New York: Owl Books, 2007), 67–68.
21
Ioann (V. Ia. Bereslavskii), IPTs vremen gonenii, (1917–1996 gg.) [The True
Orthodox Church in the Time of Persecution (1917–1996)] (Moscow: Novaia
Sviataia Rus’, 1997), 37.

40
 Clay: Marian Revelations in the Russian Context
22
Anatolii Leshchinskii, Osobennosti bogorodichnogo dvizheniia v Rossii (iz opyta
sotial’nogo filosofskogo analiza) [Special Characteristics of the Mother-of-God
Movement in Russia: An Experiment in Socio-philosophical Analysis] (Moscow:
ROIR, 2005), 48–53; Blazhennyi Ioann (V. Ia. Bereslavskii), Ikonostas moi vnu-
trennii [My Inner Iconostasis] (Moscow: Obshchina pravoslavnoi tserkvi Bozhiei
Materi Derzhanvnaia, 2011), 135.
23
Pompei Nikolaevich Batiushkov, Volyn’: istoricheskie sud’by iugozapadnogo kraia
[Volhynia: Historical Destinies of the Southwest Region] (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia
Tovarishchestva ‘‘Obshchestvennaia Pol’za,’’ 1888), 84.
24
Blazhennyi Ioann, Ikonostas moi vnutrennii, 136; Leshchinskii, Osobennosti bo-
gorodichnogo dvizheniia v Rossii, 48–53; Irina Paert, Spiritual Elders: Charisma and
Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press,
2010); Blazhennyi Ioann (V. Ia. Bereslavskii), ‘‘Matushka Evfrosiniia—velikaia
staritsa Sviatogo Dukah’’ [‘‘Mother Evfrosiniya—the Great Elder of the Holy
Spirit’’], http://ioan.ru/efros.html, accessed 1 August 2017.
25
Ioann, IPTs vremen gonenii, 35; Leshchinskii, Osobennosti bogorodichnogo dvizhe-
niia v Rossii, 55.
26
Petr (Sergei Iur’evich Bol’shakov), ed., Otkrovenie Bozhiei Materi v Rossii
(1984–1991) proroku episkopu Ioannu Odigitriia-Putevoditel’nitsa [The Revelation of
the Mother of God in Russia (1984–1991) to the Prophet Bishop John, the Hodegetria Who
Shows the Way] (Moscow: Bogorodichnyi tsentr, 1991), 5.
27
Nathaniel Davis, A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian
Orthodoxy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003).
28
Petr, Otkrovenie Bozhiei Materi v Rossii, 5, 7–8; English translation available
on the OCSMG web site at https://avemaria.ru/news-eng.htm, accessed 8
August 2017.
29
Ioann, IPTs vremen gonenii, 39–48. Critics question this account and suggest
that Bereslavsky took monastic vows only in 1988. A. L. Dvorkin, ‘‘Bogorodichnyi
tsentr [The Mother-of-God Center],’’ Pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia (Moscow:
Pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia, 2000), 5: 512–13. Il’ia (Mikhail N. Popov),
‘‘Presledovaniia: fakty i dokumenty: fal’shivki’’ [‘‘Persecution: Facts and
Documents: Forgeries’’], http://www.avemaria.ru/bc_presled.htm, accessed 1
August 2017.
30
Leshchinskii, Osobennosti bogorodichnogo dvizheniia v Rossii, 58–59; G. Iu.
Baklanova, Pravoslavnaia tserkov’ Bozhiei Materi Derzhavnaia (sotsial’no-filosofskii
ocherk) [The Orthodox Church of the Sovereign Mother of God (a Socio-philosophical
Essay)] (Moscow: Agent, 1999), 20.
31
Belaia gramota [White Charter] (Moscow: IPTK ‘‘Logos’’ VOS, 1991).
32
Baklanova, Pravoslavnaia tserkov’ Bozhiei Materi Derzhavnaia, 34–35.
33
Baklanova, Pravoslavnaia tserkov’ Bozhiei Materi Derzhavnaia, 21–22; Leshchinskii,
Osobennosti bogorodichnogo dvizheniia v Rossii, 130–31; William A. Reck, Dear Marian
Movement: Let God Be God (Milford, OH: Riehle Foundation, 1996), 62; J. Gordon
Melton, Encyclopedia of American Religions (Detroit, MI: Gale, 1999), 241, 272–73;
Charles Mercieca, Marian Spirituality: Key to Eternal Happiness (New Delhi: Sanbun
Publishers, 2010), 67–70; Joseph Laycock, The Seer of Bayside: Veronica Lueken and
the Struggle to Define Catholicism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015),

41
Nova Religio

163–65; Ioann (V. Ia. Bereslavskii), Beloe evangelie [The White Gospel] (Moscow:
Novaia Sviataia Rus’, 1995).
34
Ioann (V. Ia. Bereslavskii), Solovetskaia siiaiuschchaia vetv’: Solovki v istorii v
Rossii [The Shining Branch of Solovetsky: Solovetsky in History in Russia] (Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo Pravoslavnoi tserkvi Bozhiei Materi ‘‘Derzhavnaia,’’ 2001);
Blazhennyi Ioann (V. Ia. Bereslavskii), Solovki—vtoraia Golgofa [Solovetsky:
A Second Golgotha] (Moscow: Mestnaia religioznaia organizatsiia Obshchina
Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi Bozhiei Materi Derzhavanaia, 2011).
35
Baklanova, Pravoslavnaia tserkov’ Bozhiei Materi Derzhavnaia, 18–32, 109; Clay,
‘‘Church of the Transfiguring Mother of God,’’ 339–40; Leshchinskii, 132–39.
36
Aleksandr Leonidovich Dvorkin, Sektovedenie: Totalitarnye sekty: Opyt sistemati-
cheskogo issledovaniia [Heresiology: Totalitarian Cults: An Essay of Systematic Research]
(Nizhnii Novgorod, Russia: Izd-vo Bratstva vo imia Sv. Kniazia A. Nevskogo,
2002); Aleksandr Leonidovich Dvorkin, ‘‘Bogorodichnyi tsentr,’’ Pravoslavnaia
entsiklopediia [‘‘The Mother-of-God Center,’’ Orthodox Encyclopedia] (Moscow:
Tserkovno-nauchnyi tsentr ‘Pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia’, 2009), 5: 512–13.
37
Leshchinskii, Osobennosti bogorodichnogo dvizheniia v Rossii, 112; ‘‘Rasskazy o
lichnom opyte prebyvaniia v BTs (iz rasskazov posledovatelei)’’ [‘‘Personal
Experiences in the Mother-of-God Center: Stories of Followers’’], https://vk.
com/topic-134926097_36541732, accessed 1 August 2017.
38
Clay, ‘‘Orthodox Church of the Sovereign Mother of God,’’ 93–109.
39
Ioann (V. Ia. Bereslavskii), Oblichenie Ialdavaofa [The Unmasking of Yaldabaoth]
(Moscow: Mestnaia religioznaia organizatsiia Obshchina Pravoslavnoi tserkvi
Bozhiei Materi Derzhavnaia, 2012); John of the Holy Grail (V. Ia.
Bereslavskii), The Immortals ([Spain?]: World of Sophia, 2010); Blazhennyi
Ioann, Ikonostas moi vnutrennii, 138–40.
40
According to its filing for 2016 with the Russian Ministry of Justice, the
OCSMG Moscow parish alone had a budget of 7,179,000 rubles—roughly
$120,000. Mestnaia religioznaia organizatsiia Obshchina pravoslavanoi Tserkvi
Bozhiei Materi Derzhavnaia Moskvy, ‘‘Otchet o deiatel’nosti religioznoi organi-
zatsii za 2016 [Report on the Activity of a Religious Organization for 2016],’’
http://unro.minjust.ru/Reports/41043101.pdf, accessed 14 August 2017.
41
‘‘The Cathar Temple,’’ https://www.facebook.com/cathartemple, ‘‘Cathar
Prophet John Bogomil,’’ http://cathartemple.org/index.php?option¼com_
content&view¼article&id¼81&Itemid¼110, and ‘‘Balkanski bogumili,’’ http://
bogumili.com, all accessed 1 August 2017.

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