People like Vladimir Megré

Vladimir Megre (Russian: Влади́мир Никола́евич Мегре́; né Puzakov; Russian: Пузако́в; born 23 July 1950) is a Russian entrepreneur and writer best known as the author of the Ringing Cedars of Russia (also known as Anastasia) series of books, which since the 1990s has given rise to a homonymous socio-religious movement.

Megre was born in Chernigov Oblast, USSR, in present-day Ukraine, and grew up in the village of Kuznichi. He spent most of his childhood with his grandmother, whom he describes as a village healer. As a teenager in the 1960s, Megre occasionally visited a monk called Father Feodorit at the Trinity-Sergiev Monastery, in Sergiev Posad, north-east of Moscow.

Megre left home at age 16 and moved to Novosibirsk, where he worked as a photographer, camera operator and film director in several commercial co-operatives. He married and had a daughter, Polina. As many other newly capitalistic Russians, he took advantage of Perestroika and the subsequent collapse of the communist system to launch his entrepreneurial career. By the late 1980s had become the president of the Inter-Regional Association of Siberian Entrepreneurs.