Siegel was onto something: the belief that acting could influence through wordless, bodily technique—the way a hand turns a playing card, the way eyes meet before a kiss. Like theories of ideology on the left, from Adorno through Bourdieu, Cold War paranoia about mind control and influence sought the forces of inculcation right here, in what comes and goes without saying.
The Manchurian Candidate foregrounded anxiety that channels not usually suspected of mediation—playing cards, gestures—might bear suspect content. Theatrical and film genres themselves could stir more such worry than could even socialist pamphlets. Even while the latter directly challenged the system in words, they rarely attracted large groups in public to read them aloud. In the theater, by contrast, all those implicit hints about “how to walk, talk, smile, and court” reached large, flesh-and-blood audiences gathered together, a visceral crowd exposed not only to foreign ideas about society, but also to moves that might rearrange social means for making connections.7
Social restructuring was, after all, the aim of avant-garde and conceptualist art and performance; its makers believed that rearrangements of forms and media, from color to architecture, could bring people into contact not only as audiences, but also as interlocutors and as actors themselves. Of course one man’s fantasy of the people discovering their agency is to another the nightmare of the masses, especially when they are mesmerized by demagoguery. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács, Jacques Rancière—all have warned of and lauded the theatrical for its effects on thought and social action.8 Siegel suggests that McCarthy-era politicians mobilized similar logics to other ends: to rationalize blacklisting even actors, as avatars of mental penetration from Moscow.9 Meanwhile, politicians manipulated xenophobic anxiety around unwitting contact with the Soviet in ways that fed fears of “mixing” classes or races.
CIRCLES IN CIRCLES
Scholarship on nineteenth-century European or American interest in the occult and the paranormal typically reaches beyond state borders to ask how such fascinations articulated worries about and hopes for new infrastructures and media for travel, exchange, information, and communication: the trains, steamships, and telegraphs that conquered and connected colonies. Newly mechanized means of crossing great distances along rails and wires or over the air posed new problems and possibilities. If Dracula expressed paranoia about military intelligence and colonial governance from the perspective of one empire’s center, spiritualists and theosophists joined international movements, the struggles for abolition, suffrage, and colonial independence. Scientists and artists reforged eighteenth- and nineteenth-century formations of mesmerism and hypnosis in the crucible of industrial and colonial extractions of labor and shaped a “modern occult” of telepathy and clairvoyance just when the first European nation-states were carving their borders.
Despite scholarship recognizing movement, it is rare for discussion of the Russian paranormal to cross borders. Other Russian and Soviet topics, like film and theater, have long received transnational treatment. The traces are easier to discern: the products and their makers and performers traveled, and so left tracks, allowing scholars to follow editing techniques from Sergei Eisenstein to Alfred Hitchcock, to see where MGM producers studied the Soviet avant-garde (Eagle 1992). To be fair, transnational approaches to almost any other Soviet or Russian phenomena are rare.10
Anglophone media typically depict “Russian fascination” with the occult as homegrown. British journalist Marc Bennetts wonders “where Russia’s eternal passion for the paranormal and the occult will take it?” (2012, 8). Decades earlier, researchers for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) similarly summarized intelligence on Eastern bloc paranormal research. Even while allowing that “investigation of paranormal mental phenomena generally began during the latter part of the 1800s in various countries,” and even after crediting imperial scientific luminaries Dmitry Mendeleyev and Naum Kotik for studying “thought transmission” in order to “separate natural phenomena from mysticism,” the DoD researchers nevertheless fell back on asserting that “the Soviet public in general has always appeared open to mystical type phenomena, an openness that was somewhat officially acknowledged by Czar Nicholas II and his family’s association with the highly controversial Rasputin” (Air Force Systems Command 1978, 11).
Reference to Rasputin and the imperial family finds its way again and again into documentaries, articles, and books anchoring mysticism to the Russian soul and soil, imposing the myth of the nation-state over a world whose powers were constituted in imperial circuits. Consider the circular knots of imperial kinship, the aristocratic matches that linked European capitals while bringing rulers to rule in places far from where they were raised. The last tsar, Nicholas, was first cousin to Britain’s King George V and to three other European monarchs (Christian X of Denmark, Constantine I of Greece, and Haakon VII of Norway). The tsarina was born Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, in Darmstadt, then part of the German Empire. A granddaughter of Queen Victoria of Britain, she was already related to her husband as a second cousin (both were great-grandchildren of Princess Wilhelmina of Baden). Alix came to Russia at age twenty-two and was given the name Alexandra Feodorovna upon being received into the Russian Orthodox Church, but unlike Catherine the Great, she never learned much Russian. The last tsarina kept close company with the monk Rasputin, having brought interest in spiritualism with her.
American scholars and journalists may be adept at linking local American problems to distant causes (e.g., the loss of jobs to foreign industries, loss of votes to foreign meddling), but we are less motivated to see such links elsewhere, asking “Why are Russians given to mysticism?” without registering the extent to which “Russian mysticism” is also the product of diplomacy and conflict, and neglecting all the skeptics in Russia who have influenced our own skeptics. We will get further if we also ask: How did we learn to pose such questions in terms of inherent dispositions or national traits rather than historical entanglements? Who asks them, how, and to what ends?
Points of foreign connection are more apparent in Russian-language sources than in texts created by the DoD. Here is an example: in a Russian documentary titled Telepatija (Teorija Neverojatnosti, October 23, 2006; dir. Baxrusheva), a female engineer recounts her career path to becoming a leading paranormal expert during Soviet times. In the 1960s she had worked at the Institute for the Study of Information Transfer in Moscow, where she did not herself work in one of the telepathy labs, “but got a whiff of them in the kurilki.” The Soviet “smoking corner” nested divisions of public and private—stairwells near a fortuchka, balconies, little nooks for conversation which, like talk around the kitchen table, some treated as if outside the system even as the system built those spaces for contact in the first place (see also Humphrey 2005). In this case, the smoking corner for telepathy tales was tucked within an institution itself sustained in order to communicate about communication.
Many institutions like this one extend across borders, and for scholars to trace lines through them, instead of within state boundaries, loosens the hold of exceptional claims. This book juxtaposes and connects moments of encounter that cross specifically Russian (or Soviet) and U.S. borders. It attempts to do so concretely and symmetrically—without assuming either position as neutral or standard (Latour 1993; Chakrabarty 1995)—while also suggesting how a history of implicit comparisons has led us astray.
Rather than staging closed, site-based comparisons, the chapters juxtapose and connect among places, encounters, and texts through a filament running across their terrains, through problems of contact. This book thus aims to serve as an analysis of the historical grounds and categories for contact and failures of contact, whereby mediations, be they through words and gestures, broadcast and print, or even by telepathy ray, are recognized as more or less material, more or less subsumed into both contact and its obstacles.
BATTLE OF THE PSYCHICS
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