Black magic on Red Square | New Humanist

A fascinating read,,,

The sorceress’s name was Valeriya Karat, and her slick, professional-looking website claimed she possessed hereditary magical powers. Among the rites she offered to carry out were spells to bring back wayward husbands, remove curses and attract money for her customers. “I can also heal illnesses,” she told me. “But I can’t use my magic to benefit myself.” I’d interviewed many of Russia’s self-proclaimed sorcerers, wizards and psychics as part of my ongoing research into the country’s enthusiasm for the occult and the paranormal, but this was the first time I’d met someone who appeared to practise voodoo. “There is no such thing as black magic,” Karat told me, perhaps sensing my discomfort. “Magic is colourless.” A scrabbling sound came from behind me. In a murky corner of the room, a black rabbit sat in a small cage. “This is part of a magical rite to get a husband to return to his wife,” Karat said, matter-of-factly. “The husband was born in the Chinese year of the rabbit. When he returns, I’ll free the rabbit.”

Karat is far from Russia’s only internet-savvy sorceress. From St Petersburg to Vladivostok, there are thousands of online advertisements for “magical services.” Not all of Russia’s occultists are to be found online, however. In 2010, a psychologist with the Russian Academy of Sciences cited World Health Organisation data that indicated there were more occult/faith healers (800,000) in Russia than professional doctors (640,000). And Russians are putting their money where their faith is. In 2013, the country’s leading cardiologist complained that his fellow citizens spend almost £20 billion every year on magical and paranormal services. This, the astonished surgeon pointed out, is almost twice the amount Russians spend on foreign medical care. Another statistic is perhaps even more revealing: Russia’s Academy of Sciences estimates that 67 per cent of all Russian women have at some time sought help from a “psychic or sorcerer”. The figure for Russian men is one in four.

Welcome, then, to the strange and unsettling world that lies behind the façade of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. A country where faith healers and psychics enjoy as much, if not more, respect and trust as doctors and psychoanalysts. A country where a high-profile, Kremlin-linked ideologue is as well-versed in the writings of early 20th century British occultists as he is in modern political theory. A country where belief in magic is still very much alive.

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Russia’s obsession with the occult has deeper historical roots, too. In his seminal study of Russian folk culture, Ivan the Fool, Soviet-era dissident Andrei Sinyavsky detailed a pervasive Tsarist-era belief in superstition, magic and pagan gods, as well as the widespread popularity of sorcerers and faith healers. “In Old Russia, almost everyone resorted to elementary magic help,” wrote Sinyavsky. “Magic was used on a daily basis.”

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But it wasn’t only the Kremlin’s enemies who attempted to use occult powers in the early years of Soviet rule. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Bolsheviks skilfully adapted the rural occult practices and symbols familiar to newly urbanised peasants. Propaganda posters and slogans referred to “unclean forces” and “purging” ceremonies. Lenin was even more direct, denouncing his adversaries as “vampires”. As author Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal has noted in her pioneering book The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, the Bolsheviks may not have believed in the world of magic – indeed, they frequently denounced it – but they “incorporated occult and quasi-occult ideas” into the mythologies they constructed around Lenin and Stalin. Superhuman powers of wisdom were attributed to both men, often taking on – particularly in Stalin’s case – a near-mystical quality. Although there is no concrete evidence that Stalin himself believed in the occult, there have been rumours for years that the Soviet dictator employed the services of one Natalya Lvova, “a third-generation witch”. Shake-ups in the Communist Party, which usually meant a trip to the Gulag for the unfortunate official, were whispered to be the result of Stalin and Lvova’s black magic Kremlin sessions.

Black magic on Red Square | New Humanist