Sergey Torop, a Russian religious cult leader who claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, was recently convicted to 12 years in prison for causing physical and psychological harm to his followers.

A former traffic cop, Torop gained a huge religious following in the early 1991, taking advantage of the void caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union. He called himself Vissarion and claimed to be Jesus reincarnated. We first wrote about the Siberian Jesus in 2009, when he started making news headlines outside of Russia for claiming to be a reincarnation of the Son of God and traveling to other countries to convert people. Even back then, he faced accusations of fraud, but denied any wrongdoing, claiming that his church made no money whatsoever. In 2020, Vissarion was finally arrested and charged with using psychological manipulation to control and exploit his followers for labor and money. He was recently sentenced to 12 years in prison.

“It’s all very complicated. But to keep things simple, yes, I am Jesus Christ,” Torop famously told The Guardian in a 2002 interview.

The Russian cult leader founded the Church of the Last Testament in 1991, soon after being laid off as a traffic cop, and managed to attract thousands of members to remote settlements in Siberia, including a group of about 300 fervent followers who lived atop a hillside in a complex known as the Abode of Dawn.

 

Controversy always surrounded Vissarion and his cult, but in 2020, Russian authorities finally decided to do something about it. Torop and two of his associates were arrested and charged with harming at least 16 followers’ health and financial affairs. They had been in custody ever since, and last week, a Court sentenced the former traffic policemen to 12 years in a maximum security prison.

Styling himself to closely resemble the depiction of Jesus, Sergey Torop asked his followers, who routinely honored him in their prayers, to refrain from eating meat, smoking, and drinking alcohol, and forbade them to use money. He himself had no problem using fiat currency if the police investigation is to be believed.