Other scholars have brilliantly described Russian and Soviet sorcery, orthodox miracles, shamanism, folk healing, the occult, and the paranormal in local and regional terms, demonstrating complex relations and connections to economic patterns, regime change, and local scientific history.7 Such works address literary and scientific struggles around the occult before and during Soviet times, the needs of late Soviet and post-Soviet clients seeking alternative treatment or spiritual counseling, the controversies surrounding UFO sightings, the legality of licensing nonmedically trained healers, and other topics.
Likewise, other scholars have explored theatrical movements across Russia and the Soviet Union, linking avant-garde, realist, and documentary work to political formations and social changes8 and situating theatrical agents and projects in fascinating ways, while giving them their due as creative aesthetic projects—for example, exploring Soviet amateur theaters (Mally 2000) or twenty-first-century ventures such as teatr.doc in Moscow, whose participants draft scripts verbatim from interviews with homeless people, migrants, and prisoners (Weygandt 2015). Many have argued that aesthetic struggles regarding performance in Russia, and performances themselves, have shaped events and social patterns, as Russian artists hoped they would do, vesting lines of poetry and stage props with revolutionary—and even occult—agency.9 Regimes both deify and destroy poets and directors, journalists and scientists, because they, too, worry about the effects of communication, even in play and fantasy,10 in changing the world.
A U.S. Department of Defense report on telepathy science cites Pravda as describing the “showmanship aspects of some psychic subjects” (Air Force Systems Command 1978), a comment pointing to actual overlaps of expertise among personnel in the Soviet experiments. In the 1960s, when telepathy, telekinesis, and dermo-optics emerged as topics for public debate in the USSR, the newspapers prominently reported the results of tests with people like actor-director Boris Ermolaev and actor Karl Nikolaev (né Nikolaj Gurvich). Ermolaev had started life following in his father’s footsteps, studying psychiatry with Leonid Vasiljev, a researcher of psychic phenomena and hypnotism since the 1930s (Vasiljev 2002). Encouraged by a neighbor, famous Soviet stage director Georgii Tovstonogov, he switched to the film institute in Moscow, following a childhood dream nurtured in Alma Ata, where his family had rubbed elbows with wartime evacuees such as Sergei Eisenstein. Ermolaev’s networks spliced together theatrical and paranormal work.
Nikolaev’s interest in psychic work was sparked more accidentally, at a working intersection of stage and magic. During World War II, while on leave in Hungary, Nikolaev attended a performance by hypnotist and telepath Orlando. Once he had returned to Moscow, he read everything he could find on psychic phenomena, seeking out Wolf Messing, the Soviet Union’s most famous magician. Messing, born in 1899 in a Jewish village in Poland under imperial Russian rule, toured European stages until he moved to the USSR in the late 1930s. He worked onstage as an illjuzionist (magician) for Goskontsert (state concerts) from the 1940s until his death in 1974, with a specialty in exhibitions of mind reading and hypnosis. By the time Maria Knebel’ spoke of the theatrical work of intuiting contact through analogy to telepathy, connections among the paranormal and the theatrical were not just metaphorical, but historically linked professional specializations.
In 1968 American writers Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder made a pilgrimage to the USSR to meet a number of these psychics, doing research for Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain (1970) Nikolaev is the second person they introduce to readers in the book (after their host, the organizer of an international Moscow conference on extrasensory perception [ESP], rogue biologist and parapsychologist Edward Naumov). They report Nikolaev as saying that his extrasensory powers “made me a better actor. I find it easier now to get into the lives of people I play. I tune in better to other actors and am more sensitive to the audiences,” and that “anyone can learn to develop it.” Nikolaev recounts how he taught himself, with help from his friends (fellow actors, quite possibly, as he describes tasks that recall theatrical academy drills): “They’d think: ‘Light a cigarette.’ … ‘Ok, change your mind and crush it out.’ ” Nikolaev was keen to draw historical threads between his acting and his work with scientists, linking them through a common lineage, stressing that both psychic and theatrical labor relies on practices from yoga to relax mind and body: “Did you know that Stanislavsky developed his famous acting methods through the study of yoga? He believed an actor must eliminate all muscular tensions before going onstage. Stanislavsky thought that tensions or ‘clamps’ on the nerves block real freedom of motion and expression” (Ostrander and Schroeder 1970, 23–25).
One of the resident experts on early seasons of Battle of the Psychics, psychologist and criminologist Mikhail Vinogradov, by his own account has lived across all these professional intersections. Over the years I had several opportunities to meet experts like Vinogradov, who repeats much of what he says on air in biographical publications.11 In the 1960s and 1970s he worked in government labs running experiments on thought transmission, hypnosis, and modes of extrasensory perception such as tactile vision (feeling color as heat) and other claims to synesthesia. He appears now on twenty-first-century television shows that repurpose the Soviet-era experiments, embedding in television performance both the experiments’ conventions and recollections of the personalities who undertook them. Vinogradov developed his specialty in detecting psychic channels when, as an intern in medical school, he was called upon to evaluate self-proclaimed hypnotists who showed up at the lab. He later discovered his own talent for clairvoyance and worked on a team of psychologists screening people who asserted that they could see U.S. submarines. His age, smooth gestures, measured tones, and credentials add gravity to the seasons in which he appeared, administering trials to hopeful contestants and sounding out final judgments. (“She is a strong ekstrasens”; “No extra-sensation was involved in this contact.”) He sometimes spoke against the other experts on the show, setting them straight about how probability works or about the physics of brain waves. Editors would intercut his face and words after tests to stress the historical connection to Soviet-era research: “We used to see this all the time in the lab.” After a few seasons on air, Vinogradov expanded to collaborate more with law enforcement, opening the Vinogradov Center, where past winners of the show work as associates, devoted to finding missing persons. At its sister center, Volshebnaja Sila (Enchanted Forces), other protégés focus on healing.
THE PHATIC FUNCTION
It is common for Americans to describe the Soviet Union in terms of failed contacts: diplomatic snafus, postal failures, radio interference, and media censorship. Less common is to attend to ways the Iron Curtain generated excess communications, contacts, and channels, even beyond the little openings created by official exchanges, shows of contact among heads of state.12
To work in a more robust way, we need the concept of the phatic. The Greek phatos simply means “spoken” or “that which is spoken.” English and other languages carry the root in words like aphasia (loss of speech) or apophasis (the device of feigning not to speak about a subject while doing so: “I hope no one brings up what happened last time.”). Scholars have used the term phatic to address conditions for communication, the channels, media, and practices that open contact or cut it off.
Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used the phrase “phatic communion” narrowly, to describe language that affirms or establishes social relations, “a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words” (1923, 315), such as weather talk and greetings and questions such as “What’s new?,” which are best answered not with information but with acknowledgment: “Nothing much. You?” (Those of us struggling with literal mindedness stutter, trying to recall what is truly new; others are smoother with phatic niceties.) Similar difficulties are matters not only of personal inclination, but also of rank or social distance, as they affect expectations about phaticity in specific contexts.
Russophone-Anglophone-polyglot13 linguist