According to a document of the Russian Federal Guard Service, the agency is prepared to defend Vladimir Putin including with the help of hypnotists and priests. The existence of a parapsychological defence plan may seem bizarre, but a penchant for mysticism and the paranormal is not uncommon in Russia. Over time, the elites and even the state have turned to unconventional helpers, such as Rasputin, KGB parapsychologists or the FSB general who said he can read minds.
Yogis versus KGB parapsychologists in the Soviet-era chess wars
Imagine a large hall with a podium and hundreds of seats for spectators. On the podium, two people bent over a table, deep in thought, pressing their hands against their temples. One of them wears black glasses. A spectator in the front row stares at him. In turn, the spectator is also flanked and stared at by two other men, dressed in the traditional Indian kurta. In the zigzag of looks around the hall and at the table, the tension hovers almost palpably.
You have just watched - mentally, of course - a typical day at the World Chess Championship match in Baguio City, Philippines in 1978. The match lasted three months. One of the two chess players on the podium is Viktor Korchnoi, the challenger. His opponent is Anatoli Karpov, the world champion. The man in the front row is parapsychologist Vladimir Zukhar, and his watchers are two yogis from the Indian spiritual movement Ananda Marga.
And now the explanation: Zukhar is part of Anatoli Karpov's team of one hundred people. Korchnoi says he is disturbed by the insistent gaze of Zukhar who, he suspects, was commissioned by the KGB to hypnotize him. Though the Soviets denied it, Korchnoi brought his own “shield”: two yogis who are part of his team of ten. The yogis in turn have the mission to hypnotize the hypnotist during the game. And to be more on the safe side, Korchnoi is wearing a pair of black glasses.
There was no need for Korchnoi's memoirs, from which I have extracted this scene, to demonstrate the involvement of the Moscow authorities in the preparation and running of major sporting events in which representatives of the USSR participated. In Karpov's team of trainers there were also KGB members, but they were a regular presence in all the trips that the Soviet players took abroad, and especially to the West. And this was a common practice not only for chess, but also for other sports. The KGB men had the role of protecting, guarding and spying on the Soviet sportsmen away from home and to help them win, using “specific means”. One of the recommended methods in this regard was to parapsychologically influence the opponent, a method all the more indicated since chess is a “sport of the mind”.
There is another reason why Korchnoi’s accusation makes sense. He knew the Soviets too well. In fact, until 1976, when he fled the country, the chess player from Leningrad was a Soviet player himself. We can assume that he was intimately familiar with the KGB's methods of paranormally influencing sports performance. Furthermore, he too believed in the effectiveness of such an approach; otherwise he would not have brought the two Ananda Marga yogis to his aid.
The FSB took over the KGB's preoccupation with the paranormal. The general who claimed to have read Madeleine Albright's mind
After the fall of the USSR, the KGB became the FSK and then the FSB, but the preoccupation with the paranormal was preserved regardless of the name. Therefore, in 1996 the service had a specialized department, led by Gheorghi Rogozin, in charge of controlling occult phenomena. In a 2006 interview for Rossiyskaya Gazeta, General Boris Ratnikov, a subordinate of Rogozin’s, recounted what his boss was up to. He claimed, for example, that he could summon the spirits of the dead or enter people's subconscious using their photographs.
Another task was to write the daily horoscope for the Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Ratnikov gave as an example of Rogozin's performance the episode about Madeleine Albright's subconscious. Using a photograph of Ms. Albright, Rogozin allegedly penetrated her subconscious, where he discovered how she believed that Siberia and the Far East didn’t rightfully belong to Russia and therefore Moscow should’ve been dispossessed of them.
At the time, many took Ratnikov's words as a joke, but a later incident showed that Rogozin's work was actually taken seriously at the Kremlin. Almost ten years later, in 2015, in an interview carried by the Kommersant, Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russia's Security Council and former head of the FSB, said in passing, “you surely remember ex-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s claim that neither the Far East nor Siberia belong to us”. What initially was a photographic penetration of Ms. Albright's mind, the British daily The Guardian wrote , later turned into a diplomatic “truth” with which Russian officials would publicly operate.
Against this background, a recent document of the Russian Federal Guard Service (FSO) , which contains the psychological and parapsychological defence plan in case of war, did not take me by surprise. Between the moment of 1978, those of 1996 and 2015, and today’s approach there is an obvious continuity. The memo from the Guard Service today speaks specifically to the risks of its employees being hypnotized by hostile Western forces or being subjected to external paranormal, mystical influences that are trying to alter their decisions and actions.
These attacks have, in official terminology, a name: they are called “psychological contamination of the employed personnel”. They would not be limited, therefore, to the pursuit of an ideological “infection”, but would also seek to psychologically influence the subjects. The higher authorities, the note also shows, have the duty to intervene and prevent such incursions of a psychic nature. Officers as well as soldiers involved in combat must be protected by cutting-edge training and education, all updated to today's wartime conditions.
Western media that commented on the “memo” of the Russian guard service say that without widespread empathy at the highest levels of decision-making in the Kremlin, the hypothesis of paranormal influence on the minds of Russian soldiers and agents would not have been so directly mentioned. “Pseudoscience and mysticism are at home among the Moscow elite”, Foreign Policy wrote . At the same time, the average Russian also seems willing to accept the possibility of the existence of this confrontation on a psychic level. According to a survey cited by Foreign Policy, one out of five Russians has seen a medium or a healer (probably of the type that also appeared in post-December Romania), and three out of five Russians believe in one form or another of magic.
The Guardian noted as early as 2015 that Nikolai Patrushev is one of the most influential people in the Kremlin thanks to his closeness to Vladimir Putin. Almost ten years ago, the paper drew attention to how dangerous it would be for Putin and Russia to make decisions based on the imaginings of a “medium” like Rogozin, according to which the US and the West want to seize two-thirds of Russia's territory, along with all the natural richness of these regions. Now, however, after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, such accusations are made openly. Nikolai Patrushev, a supporter of the war in Ukraine, publicly declares that “America is the devil” who wants to see Russia get harmed.
From Dostoevsky’s mysticism to the cosmic rays that feed the Russians’ vital elan
The theme of the West's alleged hostility to Russia is not only fueled by the “paranormal source” uncovered by Moscow's intelligence services. It has a considerable age and usually accompanies the justification of Russia's expansionist attitude, which permanently claims a territorial protection zone around it. Stalin's interwar isolationist policy, as well as the establishment of satellites of “friendly regimes” in Eastern Europe after the war, was shaped on the basis of the threatened state. There is plenty of Russian literature justifying Russian imperialism, and the concept intersects with the work of important Russian writers such as Pushkin, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. The tone is often mystical, with politics and territorial ambitions tied to terms like 'destiny'.
Nineteenth-century mysticism was supplemented (by no means replaced) in the twentieth century by a belief in the paranormal that is sometimes found in the arguments advanced by Russian intellectuals. In a book published in 2018 (translated in Romanian in 2021), under the title “The Road to Unfreedom. Russia, Europe, America”), historian Timothy Snyder mentions the “ethnos theory” of Lev Gumiliov (1912 - 1992). He invented a concept (and a word, at the same time), “passionarnost”, to name the vital elan of nations that other theorists had also talked about. In Gumiliov’s theory, this elan is extracted from cosmic rays; in the case of the West, the cosmic sap has dried up, which, however, does not happen in the case of Russia, which would still have the energy and vocation to establish a Slavic-Turkish empire on the Eurasian continent.
Gumiliov's cosmic rays remind me of another episode in the post-Soviet world of chess. The International Chess Federation was headed for twenty years, starting in 1995, by a rather picturesque character named Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. Between 1993 and 2010, he was also president of the Republic of Kalmykia, a member of the Russian Federation, whose capital was Elista. He stated that during election campaigns, the country was covered by a kind of psychic dome, which protected the inhabitants from harmful foreign influences. This explains, Ilyumzhinov said at the time, why he wins the elections with 99 percent of the votes.
In the book mentioned earlier, Timothy Snyder claims that Lev Gumiliov, together with Ivan Ilyin (1882 - 1954), who argued that for Russia the most suitable form of government was that represented by an absolute monarch, above laws and constitutions, are two of the Russian intellectuals who have significantly influenced Vladimir Putin’s views and decisions.
Parapsychology and the war in Ukraine
The Kremlin’s decision-making mechanism, which also includes the possibility of accepting data obtained “through occult means”, can be deciphered somewhat better today, after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. Caught up in the rhetoric of war, Russian officials are now speaking publicly about the “evil West” attacking Russia including on a psychological level.
The story is not new. The influence of a purported medium and healer like Rasputin at the court of Tsar Nicholas II is known, as is the affinity of the “mujics” for the occult. I remember that, immediately after 1990, in Romania, and especially in the area of Moldova, many “Russian” healers and parapsychologists came, bringing with them the belief in the manipulation of energies, in the possibility of directing them for evil or beneficial purposes - which, for the Romanian mentality back then, was something new.
The problem noticed by The Guardian, however, as early as ten years ago, is the trust that Russian officials can still enjoy even if they prove to be adherents of occult theories. The dominant Muscovite conception at present is, as The Economist wrote , “an obscurantist anti-Western mixture of Orthodox dogma, nationalism, conspiracy theory and security-state Stalinism”. Added to all this is the belief in the paranormal, taken seriously at the highest level. And we are not talking about just any state here, but about the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, which, on top of that, is caught in a war described more than once in apocalyptic terms by propaganda and the pro-Kremlin press.
If such a powerful figure as Patrushev really believes that Madeline Albright's mind was read, what would the Russian leadership do if a secret service “parapsychologist” said he got into Joe Biden's head and saw that he’s preparing to start a nuclear war?
