Alright, so here's the broad-strokes version of what I've come up with for the 'weird monks' idea. I've dropped the doomsday stuff in favor of a more hopeful outlook, but I'll come up with some suitably bizarre and painful rituals for them to do:

Eastern Siberia is a shitty place to be now that the empire's gone. It was never great to begin with, granted, but times are [u]especially[/u] tough now. When the empire still stood, many brave workers from western Russia came to seek their fortunes in the oil fields, mines and logging camps of the region. The export of the region's abundant natural resources funded the food imports needed to sustain this working population and the mining/logging towns that supported it. But, alas, most of the demand for Siberian resources vanished along with the empire, and famine soon followed.

Amidst the starvation, cossack raids and general hopelessness arose a new sect of Orthodox Christianity, promising that through the ministry of the church and the power of Christ, someday, the winters would be shortened, the sun would shine eternally on them, and they would never go hungry again. This group came to be known as Порядок рассвета, the Order of the Breaking Dawn, and came to dominate much of the spiritual life of the region. More practically, as they grew in influence, they more or less took on the role of a provisional government, distributing food where possible and trying to keep the peace between villages. This has mostly been successful, even in the face of the rising body count of the ongoing famine and the rumors of Asian incursions into formerly Russian territories to the south. Now, their main practical goals are to solidify their hold on the region and reignite foreign interest in Siberian natural resources, so they can start getting food for everyone again. Spiritually, they're trying to convert the few remaining holdouts in the area and start spreading to Buryatia, Novosibirsk and other, warmer regions.

Anybody got any suggestions for how this can be improved, or gripes with my read on local history?