About midway between Moscow’s center and the suburbs, at the Elektrozavod metro station, Shkola Obraz rents space in the building that houses a school for the Moscow Metro Builders (MetroStroj). Around 2007 it expanded from one to four rooms: three small ones nested together on the ground floor and a larger room for acting and movement on the third, next to Metrostroij’s classrooms for mass transit accounting. A far cry from the grandeur of GITIS, with its grassy courtyard, curved wooden benches, iron gates, imperial heralds, and marble staircases, at Shkola Obraz’s space people practice on gray carpet under acoustic tiles or listen while sitting in office chairs. The downstairs rooms are within view of the building concierge and turnstile where one shows a passport. A small bulletin board announces a low-budget session with a photographer to compile headshots to send to Mosfil’m or the new casting agencies. The innermost room serves as an office, with room for a desk, a shelf displaying several books on acting and psychology, and about six chairs. The middle room is for meditation training, with chairs around the edges. Shkola Obraz advertises a free introductory lesson every Thursday evening in either psychology or acting. Both lectures are available on tape and on the website.
I visited the school several times, attending the introductory lecture on acting in September 2005. Also in attendance were two teenage boys in jeans and a slender girl in stiletto heels with waist-length blond cornrows. They were just as beautiful as any beginning student at GITIS, but they kept so still and quiet that they hardly emitted any signs at all beyond their attire. I imagined that the course might do them some good; however, while Shkola Obraz is itself successful, its graduates have yet to penetrate far into professional filmmaking or theatrical work. During the lecture we learned that the cost for each three-month cycle of study was 7,000 rubles (about U.S. $230 at the time, about one-quarter of the average monthly salary in the city) and that one could attend either Monday and Saturday or Thursdays for a few hours a week: “No one in America studies acting at a five-year institute as we do here! They just take a few night classes…. Anybody can work in the theater after a few weeks training, just like driving a bus.” The schedule and fees, the lecturer said, were signs of democracy.
By contrast, Leonid Heifetz, director and master instructor at GITIS, in his autobiography justifies closing the ranks to provide free education and training single-mindedly from 9:00 A.M. to 11:00 P.M., seven days a week. He addresses aspiring applicants by contrasting the theatrical to other professions: “One cannot simply select theater as a workplace. Theater is a calling. Say you are unemployed, but there are openings in a theater: ‘I’ll just go work as an actor.’ Not an option. You will not make a single step onto the stage if you have no calling…. You need not only innate characteristics, but also a specific school, a set of abilities and masterly skills without which work in the professional theater is impossible” (2001, 5–6).
Our lecturer, Shkola Obraz’s founder, laid out a different reasoning. He swiveled on his chair and spoke as if extempore, often reciting from the school’s website word for word: “Let me tell you about my friend who was upset: ‘WHY did I buy this thing that I don’t need?!’ I told him, and I’ll tell you: ‘Because somebody needed to lean on you to buy it, because somebody else was leaning on him to buy something else.’ And so it goes, the whole world in a circle, … [P]eople won’t tell you this, they won’t admit it, but I will.” He promised to teach us to prevent others from controlling us. Through meditation and play, we would learn technologies for intuition dedicated not only to contact, but also to jamming channels, to liberate ourselves from forces that make us puppets or robots, that nas zombiruyut (zombify us).
CRISIS?
At this point some readers will be intrigued, ready to ponder both how theatrical and telepathic projects intersect and how psychics and actors diverge. Others, before continuing to the specific cases, will want to learn about the kinds of explanations that have been given for surges of interest in or suspicion about theatrical skill and telepathy, as well as about the interests that hold stakes in those explanations. For now, let me identify some of the stakeholders. The first, which I address in this section, finds cause in crises, especially those during which unknown actors seem to draw curtains to hide their machinations from the rest of us. The other stakeholders I address in the following sections, to sketch the arc of a long game among world powers to demonstrate their own capacities for intelligence and intuition, attributing such capacities to enemy political systems, for instance by claiming that socialism or capitalism forces theatricality and represses authentic intuition.
One line of argument for crisis sees occult surges when seismic politico-economic shifts challenge familiar technologies for intuition, as when economic crises intersect crises of representation, or when distributions of resources change directions by seemingly opaque mechanisms or mysterious actors. This anthropological thinking runs from Max Gluckman through Jean and John Comaroff, from E.E. Evans-Prichard to Nancy Munn. For example, when South African apartheid ended in 1994, an oil boom rewarded certain people in such unexpected ways that others tried to account for it in terms of “occult economies.” Drawing inspiration from Gluckman’s 1959 essay “The Magic of Despair” (in which he cited Evans-Pritchard: “New situations demand new magic”), the Comaroffs assert that people imagine “arcane forces are intervening in the production of value, diverting its flow [and sparking an] effort to eradicate people held to enrich themselves by those very means” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999, 284).22
Other scholars have convincingly linked the occult with political and economic crises (Taussig 1980; Geschiere 1997, 2013; Ashforth 2005; Morris 2000; Sanders 2008; Kivelson 2013). Many who specialize in Russian studies claim that the paranormal filled a spiritual vacuum created by the sudden collapse of state ideology.23 Others have described the popularity of hypnosis during the 1980s (the period known for perestroika and glasnost’) as a symptom of “an unstable time of apocalyptic expectations” (Etkind 1997, 119). Others assert that, “[t]he occultism that has flourished in Russia has been a response to acute societal stress, like pain or fever” (Rosenthal 1997, 418), or ask whether such phenomena “suggest a terminally ill body politic, both in the physical and in the spiritual sense … [an] illness that is steadily eroding its grip on reality, this body politic searches for a way out—a portal into another dimension” (Geltzer 2011).
Across formerly Soviet spaces, changes in markets and market policy affected how people experienced and imagined social connections. Soviet-era networks for mutual aid did more than fulfill favors (Ledeneva 1998); people knit bonds of concern that extended the pleasures of consuming cookies, tea, or vodka together (Pesmen 2000; see also Farquhar 2002). Even the most practical such ties came to seem, retrospectively, both warmer and more comprehensible than the 1990s manipulations of brend and imedzh.24 A lens of crisis illuminates that period. However, what about increases in interest in the occult during periods of stability, when paranormal surges do not correlate with acute crisis, such as in the USSR from 1961 to 1972 or in Russia from 2000 to 2007?25 Even during the so-called stagnant, economically calm 1960s and 1970s, Soviets populated films and fictions with mesmerists, magicians, fairies, and sorcerers.26
CAPACITY TO FEEL: EMPIRE AND INTUITION
After crisis, another line of explanation puts the stakes in citizenship or belonging in imperial or nation states. Claims about European cognitive capacities and sensibilities have frequently justified rule; comparisons of national or racial capacities to think and to feel shaped logics of imperial ambition long before the Cold War. In the eighteenth century Montesquieu famously exposed a tongue to air at various temperatures, noting the constriction and expansion of its external fibers to extrapolate