There are scattered reports of unusual behavior
from across Russia’s nine time zones.
Inmates in a women’s prison near the
Chinese border are said to have experienced a “collective
mass psychosis” so intense that their wardens
summoned a priest to calm them. In a factory
town east of Moscow, panicked citizens stripped
shelves of matches, kerosene, sugar and candles.
A huge Mayan-style archway is being built — out
of ice — on Karl Marx Street in Chelyabinsk
in the south.
For those not schooled in New Age prophecy,
there are rumors the world will end on Dec. 21,
2012, when a 5,125-year cycle known as the Long
Count in the Mayan calendar supposedly comes
to a close. Russia, a nation with a penchant
for mystical thinking, has taken notice.
Last week, Russia’s government decided
to put an end to the doomsday talk. Its minister
of emergency situations said Friday that he had
access to “methods of monitoring what is
occurring on the planet Earth,” and that
he could say with confidence that the world was
not going to end in December. He acknowledged,
however, that Russians were still vulnerable
to “blizzards, ice storms, tornadoes, floods,
trouble with transportation and food supply,
breakdowns in heat, electricity and water supply.”
Similar assurances have been issued in recent
days by Russia’s chief sanitary doctor,
a top official of the Russian Orthodox Church,
lawmakers from the State Duma and a former disc
jockey from Siberia who recently placed first
in the television show “Battle of the Psychics.” One
official proposed prosecuting Russians who spread
the rumor — starting on Dec. 22.
“You cannot endlessly speak about the
end of the world, and I say this as a doctor,” said
Leonid Ogul, a member of Parliament’s environment
committee. “Everyone has a different nervous
system, and this kind of information affects
them differently. Information acts subconsciously.
Some people are provoked to laughter, some to
heart attacks, and some — to some negative
actions.”
Russia is not the only country to face this
problem.
In France, the authorities plan to bar access
to Bugarach mountain in the south to keep out
a flood of visitors who believe it is a sacred
place that will protect a lucky few from the
end of the world. The patriarch of Ukraine’s
Orthodox Church recently issued a statement assuring
the faithful that “doomsday is sure to
come,” but that it will be provoked by
the moral decline of mankind, not the “so-called
parade of planets or the end of the Mayan calendar.”
In Yucatán State in Mexico, which has
a large Mayan population, most place little stock
in end-of-days talk. Officials are planning a
Mayan cultural festival on Dec. 21 and, to show
that all will be well after that, a follow-up
in 2013.
Russians, however, can be powerfully transported
by emotions, as the Rev. Tikhon Irshenko witnessed
during his visit to Prison Colony No. 10 in the
village of Gornoye. In an interview with the
Data news service, Father Tikhon said he was
summoned to the prison in November. The wardens
told him that anxiety over the Mayan prophecy
had been building for two months, and some inmates
had broken out of the facility “because
of their disturbing thoughts.” Some of
the women were sick, or having seizures, he said.
“Once, when the prisoners were standing
in formation, one of them imagined that the earth
yawned, and they were all stricken by fear and
ran in all directions,” the priest said.
He lectured the inmates about the signs of the
apocalypse according to the New Testament, he
said, and after that “the populist statements
about the end of the world were dispelled and
the tension eased.”
More common are reports about panicky buying.
In Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Buryatiya region,
citizens have reportedly been hoarding food and
candles to survive a period without light, following
instructions from a Tibetan monk called the Oracle
of Shambhala, who has been described on some
Russian television broadcasts. A similar account
appeared in a local newspaper in the factory
town of Omutninsk, about 700 miles east of Moscow.
Viktoria Ushakova, the editor in chief of
the newspaper, told the Interfax news agency
that she ran the article as entertainment on
the last page of her newspaper, in a section
entitled “Relax” that also includes
crossword puzzles. The ensuing panic, accompanied
by a barrage of calls from distraught readers,
lasted for a week and a half and then spread
to nearby villages.
“I checked myself today,” she
said. “There are no candles in all of
Omutninsk.”
Last week, lawmakers in Moscow took up the
matter, addressing a letter to Russia’s
three main television stations asking them
to stop airing material about the prophecy.
“You get the sense that the end of the
world is a commercial project,” Mikhail
Degtyaryov told the newspaper Izvestiya. “Just
look at how many swindlers are trying to make
money on this affair, starting from the pseudo-magicians,
ending with people selling groceries and other
rations.”
Though news outlets are likely to pay a price
for this episode, Maria Eismont, a columnist
for the newspaper Vedomosti, argued that the
government’s recent embrace of archaic
religious conservatism set the stage for apocalyptic
thinking. At the blasphemy trial against the
punk protest band Pussy Riot last summer, she
noted, the young band members were sentenced
in part on the basis of writings by Orthodox
clerics from the seventh and fourth centuries.
“It would be unfair to consider Omutninsk
a unique site of flourishing mysticism,” she
wrote. “If Cossacks in operatic costumes
march in downtown Moscow, and the State Duma
is quite seriously considering introducing
punishment for the violation of believers’ feelings,
then why shouldn’t people living in a
depressed town a thousand kilometers from Moscow
not buy matches out of a fear of cosmic flares?”
As the first three weeks of December melt
away, Russians will approach the deadline with
their characteristic mordant humor. An entrepreneur
in the Siberian city of Tomsk, for example,
has sold several thousand gag emergency kits,
a cleverly packaged $29 parcel including sprats,
vodka, buckwheat, matches, candles, a string
and a piece of soap.
The motto on the package offers a classic
Russian commentary on the end of the world: “It
can’t be worse.”
