Mikhail Morosov

Mikhail Fyodorovich Morozov (born 1955)^[1] is the director of Durakovo's “Russian/American Center for Treatment of Alcoholics and Drug Addicts”,^[2] established using his own funds.

Morozov is an alcoholic. He was marked at the age of 24 by the trauma from witnessing the death of his uncle, who drowned in the Moscow River while swimming drunk.^[3]

Once visiting a friend in early recovery in 1993, Mr. Morozov drove through the fields of Durakovo and found an Orthodox shrine, its cupola smashed and filled with a stork’s nest. He took it as a sign from God, built a small cottage, and launched a business in a nearby town, building a factory to mass-produce Russian Orthodox icons. As he brought friends and acquaintances with alcohol problems to the cottage for increasingly longer visits, he transformed the place into an informal treatment center. Rumors spread, he says. That’s how people learned about us.^[4]

Documentary

In 2008, Nino Kirtadze made a documentary film entitled For God, Tsar and the Fatherland (alternative title: Durakovo: Village of Fools), regarding the rehabilitation centre in Đurakovo. Mr. Morozov was a central figure of the film, being suggested his authoritarian views of power, his sympathy towards president Vladimir Putin, his anti-democracy conceptions and profound mistrust towards the West.^[5]

References