Demyan Belyaev
After the collapse of the communist system it was not only the established denominations (the Russian Orthodox Church and various Protestant churches) that experienced a boom in Russia, as people tried to fill the spiritual and ideological vacuum left behind by the previous system. In addition, numerous religious and spiritual movements, academically classified as occultism, esotericism, or alternative religions, have been offering ways of coping with life to a population that is looking for meaning.
Increasing Occult Popularity
As early as 1988 national newspapers ran the first articles on UFOs, yoga, and parapsychology that showed none of the aggressive and “unmasking” features previously characteristic of publications on these topics. The pioneer was the national newspaper Komsomol’skaia pravda, whose target audience was mostly the generation of 20-30-year-olds.
The first newspaper exclusively specializing in this subject area appeared in 1990 under the title Anomaliia, with print runs the first two years of 250,000 copies per issue. However, the highest number of copies (up to 550,000 per monthly issue) has been reached by other specialized esoteric newspapers and journals, including Oracle [Orakul], UFO [NLO], Secret Power [Tainaia vlast’], The Age of Aquarius [Era Vodoleia], and Paranormal News, [Anomal’nye novosti].
In Russia political liberalization was followed by a rapid growth in publications of all kinds related to occult knowledge. Books by Helena Blavatsky, Nikolai Roerich, George Gurdjieff, Daniil Andreev, and other Russian and Western esotericists of the past came out in huge print runs. The number of public healers, magicians, and astrologers grew exponentially. Healing with the help of magic techniques was especially popular. Moreover, other movements at the margins of the esoteric subculture, such as Slavic neo-paganism, extremist elements of Russian nationalism, and traditional shamanism in Siberia and certain other Russian regions, have also seen an upturn (Marjorie Balzer, Shamanic Worlds: Rituals and Lore of Siberia and Central Asia [Armonk, New York: North Castle Books, 1997]).
TV Healers
TV played a special role in the process of spreading esoteric knowledge and skills in the years of perestroika. The first popular subject was healing. On 31 March 1988 Ukrainian doctor Anatolii Kashpirovskii (b. 1939) performed a live operation on the show Vzgliad [Opinion], using hypnosis as an anesthetic. On 9 October 1989 the public channel Ostankino, which can be received all over Russia, began broadcasting Kashpirovskii’s healing séances. That same year Muscovite Alan Chumak (b. 1935), a trained sports coach and journalist, appeared with similar séances for the first time. On live TV he claimed to charge water, food, and other items with healing energy.
Astrology and Magic
The next vogue was astrology. In January1989 the astrologist Pavel Globa (b. 1953), a trained historian and archivist, and his wife Tamara made their first appearance on the Leningrad channel The Fifth Wheel (Piatoe koleso). Pavel Globa had been teaching astrology underground since the late 1970s, for which he was charged for anti-Soviet agitation and imprisoned. The Globas have made a significant contribution to the popularity of astrology among the broad masses of the Russian population, mostly by associating it with ancient esoteric knowledge with links to Zoroastrianism. A third very popular area of applied occultism was magic. In the late 1980s-early 1990s, also on TV, Ukrainian Iurii “Longo” Golovko (1956-2006) gained notoriety as a practitioner of white, practical magic. The phenomena demonstrated included levitation and even resurrection of the dead.
Although these individuals were national celebrities in the late 1980s, they no longer have the same influence on the population as they used to, but most remain active to the present day. Kashpirovskii, for example, has been on several short tours throughout Russia since 2005, even though his performances no longer draw large audiences, and there have been a number of protests against his “charlatanism.” Allan Chumak toured Germany for a month in 2005, giving séances in various towns. Pavel Globa still reads the horoscope every morning on one of the commercial TV channels and publishes articles in newspapers and journals. He also advises politicians and businessmen (www.Globa.ru).
The scene in contemporary Russia, however, is not limited to representatives of “applied esotericism.” In addition, we find those who specialize in the dissemination and/or teaching of different paranormal schools, training systems, and practices. This section of the esoteric subculture includes bioenergetics (often also called psychics), the development of psychic abilities, as well as several approaches from the field of practical psychology as long as they appeal to the existence of supernatural forces or laws.
Occult Best-Sellers
Another important way of communicating esoteric knowledge in contemporary Russia, both theoretical and practical, is through books. The pioneer in this field was Gennadii Malakhov (b. 1954), who published his first book on this topic, Cleansing of the Organism and Diet (Ochishchenie organizma i pitanie), in 1991 in the small southern town of Staryi Oskol. This book was followed by several others, and by 1995 Malakhov had sold more than four million copies of his highly esteemed four volumes. He still lives in his native town of Kamensk-Shakhtinskii in the Rostov area in southern Russia, and he regularly travels the country, meets his followers, publishes a newspaper, has his own TV show, and owns the publishing house Genesha.
Mirzakarim Norbekov (b. 1957) came to Moscow in 1993 and began to hold health promotion séances on various stages, as didAndrei Levshinov (b. 1957) in St. Petersburg. Later they both turned to writing books, trying to gain a bigger audience for their ideas and healing methods, in the same way as Malakhov. Each wrote bestsellers that made them famous throughout Russia (Andrei Levshinov, Taina upravleniia sud’boi [Moscow: “Olma-Press,” 2002]; and Mirzakarim Norbekov, Opyt duraka, ili kliuch’ k prozreniiu. Kak izbavit’sia ot ochkov [St. Petersburg: “VES,” 2003]). Norbekov organized a network of courses for the restitution of sight. Subsequently he began offering courses for the development of intuition, which he presents as a necessary prerequisite for founding one’s own company and improving one’s financial situation. Levshinov taught yoga and Qi Gong and held outdoor training sessions abroad, which he called “grand master classes.” Cases of Fraud Some clear cases of fraud have been exposed where people pretending to represent the esoteric subculture are looking only for financial gain. Notorious is the case of Grigorii Grabovoi from Kazakhstan in 2006, who offered to resurrect, for a fee, the school children killed during the attack by Chechen separatists in Beslan. He was subsequently given a prison sentence. However, such cases are for the most part exceptions.
Soviet-Era Precursors
On the whole, it is noteworthy that those who are now recognized as bearers and disseminators of esoteric knowledge began to engage with this subject matter well before the fall of the Soviet Union. Thus, it is very hard to accuse them of having chosen esotericism simply as a convenient way of making money in the financially difficult transitional period of the 1990s.
Andrei Levshinov told me that he has been interested in yoga, karate, and psychology since 1978. Gennadii Malakhov was the director of the Alertness (Bodrost’) Club for natural healing as early as 1984. These observations suggest that what intensified significantly after the collapse of the Soviet Union was not interest in esoteric knowledge as such, but merely the scope of this interest and the intense communication of this knowledge to broad groups of the general population. Varying Interpretations Different scientific approaches have been used to examine the recent developments in the religious panorama in Russia (among which esotericism and occultism are usually counted); they have led to a variety of conclusions. On the one hand, doubt is cast on the profundity of the beliefs of those Russians who today refer to themselves as believers. In view of the widespread belief in astrology and miracles, some people say it is an exaggeration to speak of a religious renaissance in Russia, since such a mixture of beliefs ought to be interpreted as a sign of rejection of all definite religious convictions (Kimmo Kääriänen, “Religiousness in Russia of the Collapse of Communism,” Social Compass No. 46 [Issue 1, 1999], 35-46).
Some scholars, however, say that religiosity in Russia was never very high and the Orthodox Church, it is suggested, never had a monopoly on religious belief even in the 18th and 19th centuries (Stefan Plaggenborg, “Säkularisierung und konversion in Russland und der Sowjetunion” in H. Lehmann, ed., Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung, im neuzeitlichen Europa [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997], 275- 92). Others insist that in Russia even communism was turned into a religion (Sam McFarland, “Communism as Religion,” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion No. 8 [Issue l, 1998], 33-48). According to these people the view that the country underwent a process of secularization in the Soviet era is erroneous, as is the view that a de-secularization took place during the 1990s. On the contrary, the dogmatic and quasi-religious atheistic system had nothing to do with secularization, and only today are we witnessing secularization. Russia’s spiritual evolution is like a pendulum moving between different kinds of religiosity, that is, from Orthodox Christianity to communism and atheism towards post-rational eclecticism (Dmitrii Furman, “Religion and Politics in Mass Consciousness in Contemporary Russia,” in Lehmann, ed., Säkularisierung, 291-303).
Diverse Religious Phenomena and Blurred Lines
In the early 1990s it was not only Marxist ideology that was in a very weak position. Orthodox Christianity had been compromised by decades of collaboration with Soviet authorities. As a result, the main rivals of Orthodox Christianity, traditionally the dominant religion in Russia, were those religious doctrines whose adherents “believed not in God but in supernatural forces” (Furman, “Religion and Politics”). The adherents in question can identify with Orthodox Christianity as well as with Christianity in general and even with atheism; typical for this group is an interest in Eastern religions, spiritism, and para-scientific and para-religious mythology.
Religion in Russia has turned into a folkloric belief system based on science, para-science, and theosophy. Magic, occultism, and elements of Eastern religions are combined with traditional Christian dogmas. Therefore, it is claimed, the “real” religion of Russia is “not Orthodoxy, and not paganism, shamanism, or atheism either,” but rather, “a popular religion combining many elements of different origin.” Only on the surface is there a Central Asia that is home to a “popular religion based on shamanism, Zoroastrianism, Islam and other sources” (David Lewis, After Atheism. Religion and Ethnicity in Russia and Central Asia [London: Curzon Press, 2000], 295).The public consciousness of Russia is “occultism-after-atheism,” while Orthodox Christianity no longer serves as a source of beliefs and values, but rather as the “public religion,” that is, a source of the national ideology and identity (Alexander Agadjanian, “Russian Religion in Media Discourse--Entropy Interlude in Ideocratic Tradition” in Matti Kotiranta, ed., Religious Transition in Russia [Helsinki: Kikimora Publications, 2000], 251-88).
Survey Findings
Could the present esoteric subculture in Russia turn into a rival of traditional (Christian) religiosity and even aspire to a dominant position in the religious consciousness of the population? This question motivated me to carry out my own opinion poll among the Russian population in 2006. For this poll I presented 1,600 persons from all over Russia with a questionnaire on belief in occult ideas and their experiences with occult practices. This poll has so far been the only scientifically founded quantitative investigation in Russia specifically designed to analyze the proliferation of occult worldviews in the Russian population (“‘Heterodoxe’ Religiosität auf dem Vormarsch in Russland? Zur empirischen Untersuchung des religiösen Synkrestismus im postsozialistichen Raum,” Zeitschrift fűr Religionswissenschaft No. 16 [2008], 177-202).
According to the results of the poll the majority of respondents agreed with esoteric worldviews, and even those ideas that were rejected by or viewed in a skeptical light by the majority were approved by a relatively large minority. In addition, respondents were asked about their practical experience with esotericism. Over 22 percent of Russians have had some contact with a spiritual healer, with a subjective success rate of almost 56 percent; almost 35 percent of Russians over 18 have read some kind of esoteric literature and around 50 percent believe they have profited from the advice in this literature. Around 15 percent of the population adheres to traditional religious beliefs. In comparison, around 20 percent of the population has a predominantly esoteric worldview. Another 27 percent are both traditionally religious as well as believers in esoteric ideas, and around 30 percent ostensibly have no consistent convictions in the field of religious or esoteric belief (Author’s poll, September 2006).
In Summary
In summary, 2006 polling results allow us to draw a number of conclusions. First, in contemporary Russia esoteric worldviews are more common than traditional forms of religiosity. Second, esoteric worldviews apply consistently to at least 45 percent of the population, compared to 40 percent who hold traditional Christian ideas, and 10 percent who adhere to scientific materialism.
We can point to a few specific conditions that may have encouraged the flourishing of esoteric beliefs. Above all, esoteric and occult doctrines have a long-standing tradition in Russia, in particular among the intellectual elite, both before the Bolshevik Revolution and after. Secondly, the fast rejection of Marxist doctrines in public consciousness in the early 1990s furthered the reception of everything new, including all kinds of occult and esoteric doctrines. Thirdly, one can say that perhaps Russian consciousness remains less influenced by the West European Enlightenment.
Edited excerpts reprinted with permission from Demyan Belyaev, “Occult and Esoteric Doctrines in Russia after the Collapse of Communism” in The New Age of Russia; Occult and Esoteric Dimensions, ed. by Birgit Menzel et al. (Munich: Otto Sagner, 2012).
Demyan Belyaev (Ph.D., University of Heidelberg, Germany) is a research fellow at the Lusophone University of Humanities and Technologies, Lisbon.