Fortune-tellers and Palm-Readers Play a Decisive Role in Russians’ Relationships
With annual psychic turnover this year estimated at $ 2 billion, mystic soothsayers are almost mainstream mediators in Russian relationships, taking on the role, albeit refracted through a crystal ball, of the American “Dear Abby,” or the British “Agony Aunt.” “As soon as I came in she said she knew why I had come,” said 24-year-old Galina Kostukaylo, who went to a dark-haired card-reading psychic in Stavropol for advice when her boyfriend proposed to her. “At first I thought it was just a trick to make me trust her, but then something interesting happened. Two days before I’d had a dream about my fiancee in which he was in a car accident. She then told me about my dream after reading cards, and said that it would happen in reality and that we were not meant to be together. She said that my friend would make him marry her, as she would get pregnant. It all came true,” said Kostukaylo, a Russian from Stavropol in the North Caucasus who has used psychics “countless” times since she was 17.
Kostukaylo has many stories, including one when an old lady invited her to drink water which she had “charged” by muttering over it from the Bible, eventually inducing Kostukaylo to faint, apparently thereby removing an “evil eye” that had been placed on her by some unsavory acquaintance. “In Stavropol it is very common to go and see these ladies. You would never meet a person who had never been to a fortune-teller. It’s particularly popular among girls who always go to find out about their love lives, while guys usually go about business,” said Kostukaylo.
Her whole family has mysterious tales from the world of clairvoyance. “Once my dad’s friend disappeared and no one could find him. My mom, as a true believer in psychics, made my dad go to this lady, who was blind. She asked him to bring her a picture of his friend. She took the picture, covered it with her palm and when she uncovered it, there was a hole in his head. She said that he was dead and that his body was hidden between two similar mountains near our region. And just like she’d said, his body was found there,” said Kostykaylo.
Kostykaylo said her brother consulted a fortune-teller after he had written off five cars in “serious car accidents” in just two months, but escaped injury “without even a scratch.” “He went to this lady and she made him come to a cemetery in the middle of the night and stand barefoot in a white shirt facing in a particular direction, I forget which, and read a prayer.”
Big bucks
These tales of the occult have the ring of the barmy and medieval to put it mildly, but the popularity of psychic consultancy in southern Russia appears to transmit precisely the opposite message. What’s more, the industry is far from limited to the southern provinces. In 2008 the Kommersant daily valued Moscow’s psychic industry at $ 15 million per year, while a United Russia report this year estimated hocus-pocus turnover at $ 2 billion. Practicing wizards, sorcerers, and psychic therapists number 100,000, while 300,000 Russians apparently turn to their services each year.
These nicely-rounded figures may have been plucked out of the air, but the market’s health has pricked up ears among foreign investors. Stan Beremski, a businessman from a leading Western television channel, came to Russia this summer to set up a phone-in psychic channel. He said there is “huge potential” in the Russian market, adding that he was only forced to pull out because of corruption and difficulties establishing trust with his Russian business partners. “There’s a section of society who are really into these sorts of services, and actually do believe in the power of psychics. You only have to look at that television show, ‘Battle of the Extrasensory.’ It’s really popular,” said Beremski.
Russia’s “Battle of the Extrasensory” is the viral cousin of “America’s Psychic Challenge,” itself modeled on “Britain’s Psychic Challenge,” a psychic spin-off of X-factor and American Idol. According to the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, the show’s viewing figures are regularly well into the millions. “It’s hard to say whether proportionally in Russia more people believe in these services. I would say that is the case, but having said that, it is all around the world. In every country there is always a section of society that believes,” said Beremski.
Marc Bennetts, a Moscow-based journalist who is writing a book on Russia’s “fascination” with the occult, said that psychic services are particularly popular in Russia. “Russia has always had a strong tradition of psychics and the chaos that ensued after the collapse of the Soviet Union merely allowed it to rise into the mainstream,” he said.
The tradition’s most memorable pre-Soviet champion of the occult was Grigory Rasputin, Russia’s “Mad Monk” who made his way into the inner circle of Tsar Nicholas II after he was lauded as a “genuine” mystic for appearing to cure Prince Alexei’s hemophilia. Rasputin obviously did not make it through the Bolshevik Revolution, but the mystic tradition survived the atheist and ideological Soviet Union.
In the late 1980s Anatoly Kashpirovsky and Allan Chumak led the frontline of the psychic surge into the mainstream. As a voodoo television quack, Kashpirovsky would appeal to viewers to place pots and pans full of water by their television sets during his show, so that their contents would be charged with healing properties by being exposed to his waves of telepathic energy. Kashpirovsky and Chumak imbued Russia with an alternative, fantastical reality during the death throes of the Soviet Union. Asked in 1990 whether they thought that Kashpirovsky-style “psychotherapy” can help cure illness, a staggering 52.3 of respondents said “yes,” a poll by the Levada Center found. Some suggested that Kashpirovsky could even rise up to politically challenge a still-sober Boris Yeltsin.
But to this day the unnatural health of the extrasensory industry riles many in the government. The United Russia ruling party this year produced a report deploring the situation, and in October signed off on a draft law outlawing the advertizing of wizardry, sorcery and psychic healing services that have long been plastered all over the classifieds.
Sorcery license
The aim of the law, presumably, is to weed out the likes of Grigory Grabovoi, the self-styled Jesus figure who once charged the bereaving mothers of the 2005 Beslan school siege for resurrecting their dead children. Grabovoi ended up behind bars, although he was inexplicably freed early, only to offer his “services” when explosions in the Raspadskaya mine killed almost a hundred miners. The bill could also halt Russia’s mushrooming alternative medicine sector.
But still the draft has glaring pitfalls, said Bennetts. It has so far only made it through the Lower House, but bizarrely the draft legislation only outlaws the advertizing of paranormal services offered by “unlicensed” wizards and sorcerers. Legions of “real” sorcerers and wizards will therefore be able to carry on practicing.
Mystic soothsayers are almost mainstream mediators in Russians’ relationships with each other.
One of these “real,” licensed clairvoyants is Russia’s Darya Mironova, one of the starlets of the “Battle of the Extrasensory” who drives a yellow Hummer with a special compartment for her owls, which she uses as props on the set. “Today she is the one ‘extrasense’ parapsychologist who has so much media-baggage and recognition. Darya began practicing when she was young and she has accumulated the largest amount of experience,” reads Darya’s biography.
But Darya’s profile is far from typical. Kostukaylo said that roughly 70 percent of the women she consulted in Stavropol were Armenians, that they were all between the ages of 35 and 70, used various mediums and props including cards, tarot cards, palm reading and dried beans. They usually live in decrepit, run-down houses, five of them near cemeteries. Many do not even charge fixed prices and leave it open to the client, she said. One Dagestani clairvoyant, offering sessions in her seventh-floor apartment, was so renowned for her services that the queue to her door would apparently spill out of the entrance to the apartment block on the first floor.
Officially, in order to become a licensed practitioner in Russia, an aspiring sorcerer must go to the Federal Scientific Clinical Center for Traditional Methods of Diagnostics and Healing, which has been issuing permits for practitioners of “traditional” medicine since 2008. But with a straightforward price tag of $ 500 for a license, it is fairly clear that the process of getting licensed is open to corruption.
Will the Duma’s bill have an impact on the situation? Probably not, say observers. “Either psychics will change the wording in their titles to sidestep the provisions in the bill, or the bill will send the sector underground, much as it was during the Soviet Union,” said Bennetts.
For over two years now, the word “magic” has been banned in titles of psychic healers and the titles they use now are misleading in the extreme. The organization that claims credit for masterminding the “Battle of the Extrasensory” is called “The Center for Psychology, Traditional Methods and Improvement of Applied Medicine.” Luckily, however, there are already some checks-and-balances within the psychic relationship-mediating industry, including, somewhat bewilderingly, a notion of ethics.
Ethics of enchantment
Firstly there is the notion that people who consult fortune-tellers but do not actually believe in the fortunes they are told will never actually come to live those fortunes, said Anya Zalota, a Russian in her 20s who said she would “never use such absurd services.”
The simple truth in this notion of course is that only believable—possibly even already self-diagnosed—fortunes are likely to happen, greatly increasing the chances of a crystal ball-gazing shaman getting it right. But this notion also informs some of the fortune-teller ethics. Kostukaylo said that a good fortune-teller will always ask a client at the beginning of the session whether they are going to believe everything they are told. If they reply in the affirmative then a good fortune-teller should refuse to continue with the session, she said. Someone who does not dogmatically believe everything they are shoveled can pick and choose whatever they want to hear.
“They’re very good psychologists. If they see that you get excited by a guy’s name, for example, then they’ll realize that you do actually like him and they’ll be nice about him to give you more hope,” said Kostukaylo. “It’s nice to have them around. If you don’t know what to do and your friends cannot help you out, at least you can go and ask. Or maybe you know already what you have to do, but you’re scared to make the first steps. They’re still good psychologists and they feel it, and they just tell you what you want to hear. If people want it, then there should be supply,” she said.
Certainly, this is a rather wild conclusion, but it is still hard to imagine this lucrative industry ever disappearing, even if it has to slip into the underground—hardly a leap of imagination if many “practitioners” are holed up in ramshackle abodes next to cemeteries, reading futures from dried-up beans.
