Photo Gallery Praying for Putin
A small Russian sect believes God sent Vladimir Putin to prepare Russia for the coming of Jesus Christ. Here, members work in the fields in Bolshaya Yelnya.
Sect headquarters in Bolshaya Yelnya, near the city of Nizhny Novgorod. Its members worship Vladimir Putin as the reincarnation of the apostle Paul.
Svetlana Frolova, the founder of the sect, believes that Putin carries the "spirit of the czar" within him. "Every day we've prayed for him to return to the Kremlin," she says.
Frolova now calls herself Mother Fotina. In the 1990s she sat for 21 months in jail for embezzling money as a civil servant. After that, she opened a "Center for Cosmo-Energetic Medicine."
Her Chapel of the Resurrection of Russia, which found itself in competition with a local Orthodox church. After a run-in with the law, according to a neighbor, Mother Fotina began to deify Putin.
