Meet the Russian ‘guru’ whose followers work grueling hours at his Moscow restaurants for free — and then go into debt attending his retreats
Artur Sita is a self-proclaimed “enlightened man” who has hundreds of thousands of social media followers — and thousands of acolytes in real life. The 48-year-old organizes expensive “retreats” in Russia and Thailand, “teaches” people how to enter a state of thoughtless bliss, and even claims he can treat depression and other ailments. But Sita isn’t just another influencer or mindfulness expert; he also has a chain of vegan restaurants and barbershops in Moscow where nearly all the staff work long hours for no salary. Like the volunteers who help put on his retreats and other “spiritual” projects, many of these unpaid workers are subjected to controlling and demeaning treatment from Sita and their coworkers — especially if they dare to criticize the “guru” himself. Meduza explains how Sita’s movement works, what he teaches his followers, and why so many people have given up their previous lives to serve him.
‘I’m simply waking people up’
Artur Sita’s video titled “Two hours that will completely change you” begins with him making some light jokes and adjusting his lapel mic with a smile. The camera pans over the exuberant faces of the people — mostly women — who have come to see him speak. One of the few men in the audience talks about how Sita changed his life and taught him to immerse himself in a state of “thoughtlessness.” “You emit the state,” the man tells Sita, “and I take hold of it.”
“Thoughtlessness” and “the state” are terms from the “philosophy” Artur Sita teaches his followers. The crux of his teachings is that a person can get rid of all of their personal problems by meditating and concentrating on specific objects; beyond that, he doesn’t give specific instructions. At the same time, he rejects psychotherapy, claiming that the peaceful “state” he talks about can only come from him specifically. In one video, he tells his followers:
I’m simply waking people up. For the first time in our planet’s history, numerous people are becoming enlightened. A few years from now, there will be enlightened people everywhere you look in Russia.
Sita’s YouTube channel has more than 1,000 videos. In them, he not only talks about “the state” but also gives advice on topics ranging from how to run a business, how to stop your boyfriend from leaving you for another woman, and how to cure depression instantly. He also promotes his “alternative views” on history and evolution, such as that humans were “raised here [on Earth] like rabbits [by] the guys who mythology refers to as gods.”
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Sita rejects the theory of evolution and argues that “all of world history was made up”; for this reason, he says, “studying history just wastes time and fills one’s head with nonsense.” He also opposes vaccinations and claims to have the “solution” to Russia’s war in Ukraine: he argues that Ukraine “shouldn’t have resisted” being invaded and that if NATO simply “accepts Russia,” the conflict will end.
Artur Sita’s YouTube channel has more than 360,000 subscribers, and his videos usually garner between several thousand and 1.2 million views each. Many of the videos serve as ads for Sita’s “retreats,” and his other YouTube channel contains more than 600 videos of attendees raving about these events. “This is what makes life worth living,” one reviewer says. “Artur is the solution to any problem,” says another.
‘Artur is the revelation and the knowledge’
It’s difficult to find details about Artur Sita’s biography. According to his website, he first experienced “the state” when he was 14 years old. He claims that he ran a successful business in the 1990s, though Meduza was unable to find information about it in open sources. When he was 23, after he began feeling “unfulfilled” by his business career, his “state of presence” suddenly returned, and he began holding consultations and group meditations, he says. The first online mentions of him as an “enlightened master” appeared as early as 2011.
Alisa (name changed), a former follower who first met Sita in 2017, tells Meduza that he began charging a fixed price for his events in 2018. It was during this period, she says, that Sita began excessively “admiring himself.” Over time, according to Alisa, Sita expanded his practices to include not just teaching his followers meditation and mindfulness but also “healing” them from physical ailments.
Sita’s followers include several minor Russian celebrities. Actress Irina Bezrukova, for example, began following him in 2021. Last year, she said that he “opened the door [for her] to a magical space,” and that “Artur doesn’t convey knowledge from anyone else — he is the revelation and the knowledge.”
In January 2024, Russian media personality and one-time presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak read an ad for Artur Sita’s YouTube channel on her own channel. Shortly after, when she ran a poll on her Telegram channel asking who her subscribers wanted her to interview for her next video, nearly a quarter of the 4,500 respondents named Sita (though he had asked his own subscribers to write in). Sobchak ended up choosing someone else.
In general, Sita aggressively promotes himself online: he has pages on all major social media platforms, and he posts Instagram Reels every day.
‘Everything else loses meaning’
Visitors’ accounts of Artur Sita’s retreats and “satsangs” — personal audiences with the “guru” — vary. Some maintain that their meetings with Sita were beneficial, even if their later experiences with his community turned traumatic. Maria (name changed), for example, says that her retreat with Sita was the “most important event of her life”:
On the third day, I entered a very clear state — as if I was becoming myself for the first time in my life, with no thoughts, only a feeling of very clear love and authenticity. It hit me on the way home, and I started crying, because it was as if I’d simply been absent for the previous 30 years. I’d been living but somehow not living at the same time.
Alisa, who attended her first “satsang” with Sita in 2017, recounts a similar experience. “All of the thoughts disappeared from my head, and I felt love and joy,” she tells Meduza.
But many other people were left with negative impressions after visiting Sita’s retreats. Yelena (name changed) says that while she did feel the sense of inner peace that Sita claims to be able to teach, she also felt that he deprived her of her ability to think critically:
[Artur] has certain capabilities — people can sense this and are attracted to him. And at some point, they start seeing him almost as a Jesus-like figure. Everything else loses meaning for them, and they get pulled into the system: all that matters to them is what Artur deems to be right.
Anastasia, a former follower who attended Sita’s retreats and “satsangs” from 2016 to 2022, speaks in even harsher terms about her time with him. According to her, with his talk about the “liberating power” of “thoughtlessness,” Sita is actually “denying the mind, thinking, and education”:
[He tells his followers that] life is meaningless, and that nothing will bring [them] satisfaction or happiness — not relationships, not money. The only way to become free is to go beyond the mind and wake up. And only the enlightened can do that. Only I, [Sita says], can immerse you in love and in the present.
In Anastasia’s view, Sita infantilizes his followers, makes them dependent on him, and leads them to “devalue” their own wills as well as those of their friends and family. “They sometimes cry just from seeing him,” she says. “They have photos of Artur as their [social media] avatars and phone backgrounds. They attend his satsangs, and they watch his videos during the breaks.”
Working free of charge
For a long time, Sita held events for his followers in cities all through Russia, but in recent years, he’s only had them in Moscow, Dubai, and Thailand, where he has a “retreat center” on the island of Koh Samui.
The cost of his services has also gone up: while tickets to a live event with Sita cost about 500 rubles (around $5) in 2018, he now charges up to hundreds of dollars to see him speak. Meanwhile, his multi-day retreats, which typically include three group meetings with him, cost thousands of dollars. And for 10 million rubles ($108,300), one can have a personal consultation with Sita, though it’s unclear if anybody has taken advantage of this option.
But consultations, retreats, and speaking appearances aren’t Sita’s only income streams: He also owns a network of vegan cafes in Moscow with names like CoffeePita, GoodFoodBowl, and PitaBurrito, as well as a vegan food delivery service in Dubai. Additionally, he has a small chain of Moscow barbershops called Master Leo.
All of these establishments are staffed by Sita’s fans — and according to Meduza’s sources, almost all of them work for free. It’s not just a side activity they fit into their spare time: workdays at Sita’s businesses can last as long as 18 hours, and the “volunteers” generally work seven days a week. Though they’re not given a salary, they are provided with food and, if necessary, a bed in a shared apartment. The most valuable form of compensation for most of them, however, is access to Sita himself. “Employees” frequently write to the guru about topics both related and unrelated to work, and he actively responds with feedback and advice.
Sita has openly said that he only hires people to work in his cafes who have attended his retreats and “satsangs,” claiming this is the only way for him to “instill [his] values” in them.
‘They’re all in debt’
Karina (name changed) says she spent 10 years dreaming of working at Dobraw, one of Sita’s cafes in Moscow, but was too busy with work and, later, taking care of her newborn daughter. Eventually, however, she managed to get a part-time role delivering food for the restaurant. While she confirmed that most employees at Dobraw received no salary at all, she says an exception was made since she was a new parent: she was paid 200–300 rubles ($2.15–$3.25) for each delivery.
Karina says she was struck by her former coworkers’ work ethic and dedication. “Some people who try to join the team don’t even last a single day,” she tells Meduza. “You really have to love Artur to get integrated and stay in the structure.”
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One of the employees who didn’t “last” at the cafe was Maria, the former Sita acolyte who said meeting him was the “most important event in her life.” She quit her job at Dobraw, she says, because she “quickly realized what was going on.” After five days of work, Maria didn’t show up for her next shift because she was too exhausted.
I hadn’t had any time to sleep. I said, guys, this is impossible. Have you lost your minds? The same day that I didn’t show up, [one of my coworkers] called an ambulance because her back was hurting so much. Those kinds of people really want to be “good.” I was the same way: I started at Dobraw because I wanted to be “good” for Artur.
Maria proceeded to make an Instagram post about the working conditions at Dobraw. In response, Sita accused her of using him for attention. According to Maria, he posted screenshots of her post in a group chat and asked her whether she thought what she wrote was “okay and reasonable.” After that, Sita went silent, while the group’s other 50 participants began to “attack” Maria:
For about four hours, they wrote about how disgusted they were by my post, how they didn’t know how to work with me or trust me moving forward. He just writes a few words, and suddenly 50 people are tearing you apart. I read all of those messages and told myself that I couldn’t work with these people anymore — I couldn’t go back there.
Yelena says she also witnessed Sita’s followers engaging in harsh public denunciations. “Everything is built on the idea that you should endure, that you should overcome,” she explains. “People complain that their back hurts or their feet hurt, and then your ‘family’ starts wearing you down: ‘We endured it, so you need to, too. We’re not complaining, so you shouldn’t either.’”
Because almost all of the workers at Sita’s businesses are unpaid, many of them take out informal loans from him in order to continue attending his retreats. According to Yelena, hundreds of Sita’s followers currently owe him money. Alisa confirms: “People who have worked for Artur for years, they’re all in debt. And that’s what’s keeping many of them there.”
Alisa began working at Dobraw after she started dating a man who was “deep into the cult” already; he’d even helped physically build the restaurant. It wasn’t until the couple moved in together that Alisa realized her boyfriend wasn’t getting a salary. “He had to borrow money for rent from his mother,” she recalls. “Sometimes we literally had nothing to eat, and we would collect apples in the nature reserve near our house.”
According to Alisa, she started working enough at her regular job to support both of them, but she also worked part-time at Dobraw. She managed to negotiate a salary there of 25,000 rubles ($270) per month, though the cafe deducted money for the food she ate. Still, her salary was considered “luxurious,” she says: “Many people work seven days a week and get nothing.”
Nonetheless, she found the work extremely difficult, with shifts that could last up to 14 hours. According to Alisa, she worked there as long as she did out of “love for Artur.”
‘People are hooked on this stuff like heroin’
Alisa ultimately quit working at Dobraw twice. The first time was after her father died and she became too depressed to show up for her shifts. The second was “after the end of a long, abusive relationship,” when she “didn’t have the strength to do anything.” That time, she wrote to Sita that she wanted to leave the job because she was “weak.” In response, he told her that she “isn’t weak” and that she’d “just gotten used to whining” — and if she “toughened up,” she could expect rapid career growth. This failed to convince her to stay.
Alisa believes she was able to “get out of the cult” thanks to her close relationships with her friends and her mother — and because she “never fully fell into it.” “A lot of people simply have nowhere else to go,” she tells Meduza. “They have nothing left, not a penny to their name, and they’re stuck in a new city. Ninety-five percent of people there aren’t from Moscow or St. Petersburg.”
Despite her negative experiences at the cafe, Alisa still attended one of Sita’s “satsangs” after she stopped working for him. “Sita himself changes, his policies and his words change, but his effect on people remains the same. That’s why so many people are hooked on this stuff like it’s heroin,” she says.
These days, Alisa doesn’t go to Sita’s events or even watch his videos. She says it’s still hard to talk about her experiences with him. “I recently broke down in tears while talking about Artur because he felt like a second father to me,” she says.
Anastasia, another one of Sita’s former followers, tells Meduza that she would occasionally “wake up from the hypnosis” and realize she’d been caught in a trap — only to get sucked back in later. She was admitted to a psychiatric hospital twice, but in both cases, she proceeded to apologize to Sita for calling him a “cult leader” and blame herself for her behavior.
She finally managed to quit her job at Dobraw and leave Sita’s orbit after she was “demoted in the hierarchy” one too many times. According to Anastasia, she was suffering from depression, and when she complained about Sita and her other superiors punishing her for this, they told her it was her own fault. “I realized that if I stayed, I would just die. But it was a very hard decision to make,” she says.
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All of the former Sita followers who spoke to Meduza managed to return to their previous jobs and mend their relationships with their families and friends after leaving his “community.” Many of them said they benefited from therapy.
While working on this story, Meduza’s correspondent reached out to more than 20 people who participated in Artur Sita’s “retreats” and worked in his businesses. Some declined to comment because they didn’t want to “speak ill of someone who has done a lot of good.” Others declined “because he’s like a god, like something sacred that shouldn’t be challenged.” One source retracted a detailed comment; it later emerged that he had begun “volunteering” for Sita again.
Maria says that she believes fear likely played a major role in people’s decisions not to speak to the press. “People decline to talk because Artur has a really, really big presence. And when you’re in his sphere, you know he can reach you,” she says. “The fallout might not even come from Artur, but from life itself.”
Story by Ksenia Morozova. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.