Jesus alive in Siberia.

Torop, 48, is the spiritual leader of at least 5,000 devoted followers, among them intellectuals, artists and professionals who flock to worship him in the small isolated village of Petropavlovka - more than 2000 miles from Moscow.

Torop was ‘reborn’ as ‘Vissarion’ in 1991 just as Russia was facing a crisis of confidence following the collapse of the iron curtain.

He is just the latest example of Russia’s reoccurring fondness with the cult of the personality in a national obsession that leads back all the way to Rasputin.

Both Lenin and Stalin tapped into the Russian people’s eagerness to embrace powerful figures and actively fostered the almost religious fervour with which they were worshipped.

After time spent in the Army, Torop had been working as a traffic policeman on the night shift in the small Siberia town of Minusinsk until he was made unemployed.

Suddenly something ‘awoke’ inside him, he says, and he instantly knew that he was the second coming of Christ - 2,000 years after he was first crucified.

He says he realised that God had sent him to Earth to teach mankind about the evils of war and the havoc we were wreaking on the environment.

With Christmas abolished his followers mark the day of his first sermon on August 18 as their special feast day.

Time in the community is measured by Vissarion’s life and so as he is 48 years old his Church is now living in year 49.

His followers, who have given up their lives to follow him, are strict vegans and are banned from smoking and drinking or handling money.

Around 300 of them live in wooden huts in the village that has grown up around his church and which does not appear on any maps.

Many thousands more have made their homes in the small villages that surround Petropavlovka and survive the vicious Siberian winters so that they can be close to their Messiah.