From Communist to ‘Messiah-: The bizarre story of how one woman led hundreds to Kiev to meet the apocalypse

From Communist to ‘Messiah-: The bizarre story of how one woman led hundreds to Kiev to meet the apocalypse

How a former Soviet Communist reinvented herself as a living god and led the White Brotherhood toward a fiery end of the world
All the residents of the post-Soviet space are familiar with the ‘90s phenomenon’. After the collapse of the USSR, the lives of hundreds of millions of people changed suddenly and irrevocably. Everyone faced adversity, which came in all shapes and forms. Among other things, those turbulent times were marked by a mad wave of sectarianism. 
From Komsomol member to sect leaderThe above is a message from Marina Mamonova, the leader of the YUSMALOS White Brotherhood sect. She was born in Donetsk in 1960, graduated from the Kiev Polytechnic Institute as a journalist, worked for the Komsomol district committee, then was employed in a local newspaper and on the radio station of a Donetsk enterprise. Marina joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Union of Journalists. She got married, took her husband’s last name – Tsvigun – and gave birth to her first and only child, a boy named Vitaly.
Her life as a socially-active Soviet citizen abruptly changed in 1990. Tsvigun had many abortions and, according to various accounts, during her seventh or tenth abortion experienced clinical death.  According to Tsvigun’s own account, her soul left her body, ascended to heaven and took on a ‘divine soul’.
As Marina herself told the story, After three and a half hours, the Soul of the Mother of the World Returned to the lifeless body. Her first words were: I am the Messiah! Soon, Marina became the leader of one of the most famous sects of the post-Soviet space, the White Brotherhood. 
Marina Tsvigun ©  elohov.ru The creation of the White Brotherhood and its further activities are closely tied to another person, Yuri Krivonogov. He was older than Marina; he was born on May 15, 1945 in Voronezh Region. As an adult, Krivonogov moved to Ukraine and received a Ph.D. in technology in Kharkov.
Alexander Dvorkin – the renowned Russian researcher who studied sectarianism, that Krivonogov worked at the Kiev Institute of Neurology and Psychiatry, but eventually decided to become a preacher and missionary. According to some reports, he had cooperated with the KGB for a long time. In the 1980s, the democratization process, known as perestroika, began in the USSR.
Krivonogov ceased his scientific activities and became associated with the Krishnaites. Then, he broke ties with them and founded the Atma Soul Institute. We know little about the activities of this institute, but it had its own publishing house. Judging by the titles of the published literature, it specialized in the Vedas, human bioenergetic capabilities, advanced yoga, and messages from outer space. The founder of the institute traveled across Ukraine giving lectures. At one of those lectures, he met Marina Tsvigun. 
Tsvigun handed the lecturer a note in which she told him that she had experienced reincarnation and had become living God. This is how their partnership started. Soon, they got married. Marina left her husband and son, and became the central figure in the White Brotherhood sect, calling herself Maria Devi Khristos. Yuri Krivonogov chose the name John Swami. Later, they were joined by a third leader, Vitaly Kovalchuk, who also took on a new name – John Peter II.
The great mother Maat is the mother of light, truth, the primordial structure of the universe, impeccable balance, the highest standard of order. And man is ideally her small universe. All [human] ‘shells’ holographically contain complete information about the universe.  This is how Marina Tsvigun described Maria Devi Khristos. 
The White Brotherhood rapidly gained popularity in post-Soviet countries. People who had lived their whole lives in an anti-religious society thirsted for religion and became easy bait for sects and pseudo-religious movements, which sprang up like mu