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A Journey Into The Heart Of The Russian Occult

Russia is in the news a lot, but one thing that very rarely makes the headlines is the country's incredible passion for the occult. Join me for a journey into the weird...

Everyone knows about Grigory Rasputin, the mysterious monk whose malign influence over Tsar Nicholas II led indirectly to the Bolshevik Revolution. But the wild-eyed former peasant was not only - as Boney M put it -"Russia's greatest love machine," he was also rumoured to have links to the Khlysty sect, a bunch of self-flagellating nutters who tried to whip themselves closer to God.
That kind of thing was actually pretty par for the course in Rasputin's Russia, which boasted hundreds of other bizarre cults (special shout out to castration freaks the Skoptsy) and more faith healers than doctors.

Still, upon my arrival in Russia in 1997, I was startled to find that over seven decades of communist rule had failed to dampen this occult fervour. Rasputin not only had heirs - they were thriving. Although it's obviously hard to get exact figures, there are an estimated 400,000 plus professional occultists in Russia, with the business worth, according to some reports, up to $2 billion a year. That's a lot of spells and a lot of cash floating around, whichever way you look at it.

Over a beer, my new friends would tell me of love spells cast on acquaintances, while in more formal settings businesspeople would confess that they made use of clairvoyants or psychics to aid them in decision-making. On top of all this, there were the Kremlin-backed psychic healers whose shows had drawn audiences of millions, the dozens of sects scattered across the country's vast wilderness, and the media savvy shamans who never seemed to be out of the news. Not to mention, if the police were to be believed, a rapidly growing Satanic underground.

Walking home at night through forests of concrete tower blocks, I would picture the occupants of the flats carrying out magical rituals in their bedrooms or casting spells in their living rooms. Flickering shadows behind curtains invariably took on sinister qualities as my imagination, fuelled by my longtime love of horror films, ran wild. Were the old women I saw on the metro with plastic bags full of market produce on their way home to knock up potions in their tiny kitchens? Was that old guy with the beard and the intense eyes a master of the dark arts? After all, if the statistics were right, some of the people I saw every day had to be witches or wizards. Or, at the very least, psychics.

Obviously, though, I tried hard not to stare too much.
How did Russia transform in the twinkling of a red star into a land mad for magic? Was its sudden public enthusiasm for the occult simply a reaction to the often-bleak reality of post-Soviet life? An attempt to replace Marxism-Leninism with another set of belief systems? Or does the explanation lie deeper in the national character and traditions?
As Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's twin polices of openness and reform took hold in the late 1980s, every day brought new shocks (Stalin was a nasty piece of work!) and startling revelations (the Soviet way of life wasn't the envy of the world!) to the people of the world's first socialist state. At times, it seemed like Gorbachev had gone too far, that his perestroika and glasnost had driven the entire nation out of its collective mind. The country was gripped by a frenzy of visions and hallucinations, alien sightings and mystic revelations.

In late 1989, the official state news agency Tass, once notorious for its unreadable reports on the routine work of Kremlin officials, ran a piece on how Soviet scientists had "confirmed the landing of an alien spacecraft in the old Russian city of Voronezh."

"The aliens were three or even four meters tall, but with very small heads," the news agency reported.
''It was not an optical illusion,'' Lieutenant Sergei A. Matveyev of the Voronezh district police station was quoted as saying. "I rubbed my eyes and it didn't go away. Then, I figured, in this day and age, anything is possible.''
The lieutenant was right. Strange days indeed had come to the Soviet Union. Besides the dramatic increase in alien sightings, belief in magic and mysticism was rocketing. Town halls that had once hosted Communist Party meetings now saw sorcerers armed with ouija boards attempting to conjure up Lenin's spirit. Old women openly sold magical charms against AIDS in city markets. State journalists transformed overnight into wild-eyed psychic healers. Pravda ran horoscopes. Two decades on, this willingness to seek out new beliefs is as strong as ever. I have spent the last year or so investigating this occult scene, meeting with just a few of Russia's countless witches, wizards, and, as well as their clients.