RTFA: http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,221151…

…In fact, the religious doomsday cult had taken up residence in a remote underground cave. They had decided to barricade themselves inside until May 2008 – the date when their spiritual leader told them the world was going to end.

Today, authorities were attempting to talk to cult members by bellowing through a ventilation shaft cut into the cave’s roof. So far, however, the members – who include 25 adults and four children, one of them a 16-month-old baby – have refused to emerge.

“They have covered the entrance and refuse to come out and are threatening to blow themselves up. They threaten to detonate a gas tank,” an official in the local prosecutor’s office said. “They say they are fine. They tell us to go away,” another added…

Izvestiya newspaper yesterday reported that Kuznetsov suffered from schizophrenia and that in the last few months he had been sleeping in a coffin.