فصل 17

CHAPTER 17

BREAD AND CIRCUSES

When Gibbon wrote the saga of Rome’s decline and fall, he relied on the written word, on memoir, epic, and history, for his source material. But the scholars of the collapse of the Soviet empire will go not to the library so much as the videotape. And in this video revolution, Anatoly Kashpirovsky played the role of Rasputin, the crazy wisdom man.

In a thousand years of Russian history, there have always been healers, mystics, and “holy fools.” Usually they came to prominence in periods of rapid change, disaster, and disorientation. The sixth-century historian Agathias recalled “charlatans and self-appointed prophets roaming the streets” after an earthquake in Byzantium. “Society,” he wrote, “never fails to throw up a bewildering variety of such persons in times of misfortune.” In the last years of the czarist regime, Rasputin, an illiterate Siberian, convinced the Romanovs of his magical powers. The royal family was sure Rasputin was curing the heir to the throne of his hemophilia.

But while Rasputin’s mesmerizing influence was limited to the czar’s family and high society, Kashpirovsky was a man of the global village and the world tour. His healing “séances” captured television audiences of 300 million in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and filled huge concert halls and football stadiums. Kashpirovsky’s medicine show had been kicking around for years, but it was at the end of 1989, when the economy was plummeting and people began talking about a new “Time of Troubles,” that the Communist Party officials who ran state television decided it was time for a grand diversion, a video healer.

I saw the first of Kashpirovsky’s broadcasts, and, like everybody else, I was hooked from the opening credits: A logo announced the “tele-séance.” Kashpirovsky came on the screen dressed all in black. He had the hyped-up glare, the scissors-and-a-bowl haircut of Brando in Julius Caesar. He started talking about his method of reaching the “bio-computer” inside his “patients,” how he had healed “hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions” of people of their tumors, hernias, and heart pains. His voice was 16 rpm, low and even, like a threat. He claimed medical successes never known in “human history,” successful cures of impotence, frigidity, blindness, baldness, emphysema, ovarian cysts, kidney stones, psoriasis, eczema, varicose veins, scars, tuberculosis, asthma, diabetes, allergies, stuttering, astigmatism, and, in four “documented” cases, the AIDS virus. He was at once God and Ponce de León: amputated limbs and extracted teeth regenerated at his mere suggestion; gray hair turned glossy and dark. Thanks to him, a woman of seventy began menstruating again and Mikhail Gorbachev’s mother got over her arthritis. And then there was the Kashpirovsky Diet: one of his patients dropped 350 pounds, “and without the skin hanging off or anything.” Or so the doctor said … so he said.

The soundtrack picked up now, a great wash of synthesizer music, switched-on baroque.

“Rid your mind of everything,” Kashpirovsky purred. “Get rid of all those goals and ambitions. Everyone, close your eyes. No matter what emotional reactions you have, don’t suppress them. And you will have different kinds of emotional reactions. Our silence is like a pause, a pause without words. Words don’t matter. There’s no work involved in this. It’s hard to understand, because all their lives people have been taught to try and understand.… Forget everything.… Listen to the music.… Don’t be afraid of the process that’s starting within you.… If something is moving, pay no attention.” The man seemed never to blink. He glistened, and for long periods he said nothing, just stared and smirked a little, the way a tyrant dinner guest does when he is half soused and certain you should be fascinated by everything he says.

“… Some of you are seeing forests, mountains. One … two … three.… Others are having very sad memories. Five … six.… Others are making plans for tomorrow, weighing, weighing everything. Seven.…” By “ten” Kashpirovsky was gone.

“The séance,” he said, “is over.”

We were healed.

Since his first televised séances, Kashpirovsky’s popularity—his cult of personality—went unmatched. Everyone knew his name and thought him either a genius or a confidence man. He told me once that he had an archive of more than a million telegrams and letters mainly from grateful viewer-patients. Schoolgirls and pensioners wrote in hinting they would do anything to be near him, learn from him, sleep with him. Older women wrote saying they had redecorated their krasny ugol—“red corner”—by taking down the traditional portrait of Lenin and replacing it with his. In the provinces, street vendors sold picture postcards of Czar Nicholas II, John Lennon, Jesus Christ, and Anatoly Kashpirovsky. He may have been the only man in the city of Kiev with three cars in his garage and a bank account to match. Newspapers that debunked his legend did so at their peril. After the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta printed an article calling Kashpirovsky a dangerous charlatan, the protest mail grew into such an avalanche that the editor canceled a second article.

There were those who thought of Kashpirovsky as a healer not only of stretch marks and wens, but of nations as well, and he was loath to dismiss the claim. “If I were president, people would kiss my footprints after I died because I would go out among the people and work for their interests,” he told me. His constituency was uncertain, but, he insisted, it was vast. “Ukraine is too small for me.” Kashpirovsky first appeared on the scene with a series of six nationally televised séances in the last few months of 1989. With the rise of independence movements and a workers’ revolt, perestroika was spinning out of Gorbachev’s control. The health care system was a shambles, with officials saying that only 30 percent of all basic medicines were available; even aspirin and penicillin were impossible to find. There were constant reports of hospitals without running water, doctors operating by candlelight. Kashpirovsky’s rise came precisely at the start of this extreme uncertainty, confusion, spiritual search. And, as happened so often in Russian history, disruption gave rise to an increased interest in black magic, prophecy, and wizardry. Bogoiskatelstvo, the search for God, in Russia led not only to the church, mosque, and synagogue, but to such frauds as Rasputin and Kashpirovsky.

Always, even during the purges, there were village healers and mystics in Russia. In his dotage, Leonid Brezhnev secretly invited the healer Dzhuna Davitashvili to the Kremlin to work her magic. But now there were no taboos, no hiding. During the Gorbachev era, old women sold copper bracelets in city parks swearing they would work as a vaccine against AIDS; horoscopes ran in Communist Party newspapers; the official news agency Tass announced that “humanlike” giants and a midget robot flying in a “banana-shaped object” had landed in the city of Voronezh. Witnesses described the craft in question as a “large shining ball” and the “one, two, or three” creatures as being “three or four meters high but with very small heads.” In Moscow, a healer named Alan Chumak opened shop on the program 120 Minutes, the Soviet version of the Today show. Waving his hands as if he were petting an invisible cat, Chumak “charged” glasses of water and tubes of cold cream that people put in front of their television sets with “healing energy.” “I am in touch with another world,” Chumak told me. He dug his hand into a garbage bag and pulled out one of his “countless” telegrams: SINCERELY GRATEFUL STOP HAD CHRONIC TACHYCARDIA AND GASTRITIS STOP DOCTORS COULDN’T CURE ME STOP NOW THANKS TO YOU I LIVE WITHOUT MEDICINE STOP THANKS SERGEI OF NOVOCHERKASSK I followed Chumak as he rode the elevator downstairs and stepped out into his building’s parking lot to heal a crowd of a few hundred people. This was a biweekly event, weather depending. A big crowd had gathered. Some of the people held up pictures of their sick children or parents, in hopes that the healer could radiate his energy through the photographic medium. Chumak stood on the steps and invited all to gather around and feel his aura. He had only one warning: he could not cure any former functionaries of the Communist Party.

“Their souls are already too hardened,” he said.

Kashpirovsky, of course, regarded Chumak as “a quack” and himself as above all this common magic. He was the über doctor, a secular priest of mind and body. “I’ve outgrown the title of ‘doctor,’ ” he said one night backstage before a séance. “That’s child’s play. It’s not healing. I have a Great Idea. But I’m not pushing religion. What good does it do if Jesus walked on water two thousand years ago? What does it do for these people?” He rubbed his chin and wondered where his marvelous gift came from. “The spiritual power that drove Jesus Christ very possibly exists within me,” he said, “and, in fifty years, I think I will be remembered as a saint.” Kashpirovsky trained as a psychologist in Vinnitsa, a provincial city in Ukraine, and worked in a hospital there for twenty-eight years. He earned a tiny salary, and to earn 100 rubles a month extra, he worked at night loading trucks with cement and lumber. For a while he was a fanatical weight lifter and boxer, and even now, in his early fifties, he was physically vain, claiming, “I can beat any champion of the world.” But in 1975, Kashpirovsky said, he had severe pancreatic disorders and nearly died. He spent a year in a hospital in Ukraine and then decided to go to Sakhalin, where he wandered the island, like Saint John the Baptist, eating one cookie a day. “Thanks to my hunger,” he said, “I was cured.” It was only in 1988 that Kashpirovsky began his public experiments in hypnosis and mass healing. He held five tele-séances in Kiev and, he claimed, cured thousands of children of bedwetting. His technique was as obscure then as now, a talking cure in which the healer somehow sets right the organic balance of the body. “Happiness and sadness have some sort of material basis, biochemical substances behind them. When I am afraid, I have a lot of adrenaline. When I’m depressed, I have more,” he said, beginning a lecture of sorts. “The gates open up inside of you and you accept information. You don’t know how those gates open—that’s my method—the information comes in, but because you don’t know how it comes in, it can’t get out. I reach beyond the mind, into the innermost being, to heal the body. The mark is left.” In 1988, the head of Soviet television was Mikhail Nenashev, a doltish apparatchik who told his aides that the primary aim of television was to soothe and reassure the troubled masses. In Kashpirovsky, who had strong support from people high up in the Ukrainian Communist Party organization, Nenashev found his soothing and reassuring voice. He signed him up for séances that were broadcast in 1989 not only in the Soviet Union, but in Bulgaria, Poland, Israel, Czechoslovakia, and Scandinavia. “In a country where you can’t even find aspirin, you begin hoping for a miracle,” said Yelena Chekalova, a television critic for Moscow News. “Then along comes this man and he offers you an easy way out, a miracle. It’s a phenomenon inherent in a poor and miserable country.” Leonid Parfyonov, a well-known broadcaster, said, “Kashpirovsky’s role has been similar to Gorbachev’s role in ‘85 and ‘86. They even have common gestures. They both come up with tremendous patches of meaninglessness in their speeches, and yet they were mesmerizing and inspired confidence.” Kashpirovsky’s most theatrical bit of psychic trickery came in a “tele-bridge” between Kiev and the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. A woman named Lesya Yershova needed a major abdominal operation at a Tbilisi hospital. Rejecting ordinary anesthesia, she allowed Kashpirovsky to hypnotize her, via television from Kiev. The resulting tape, a split-screen extravangnza, was grotesque.

“Just close your eyes and sing ‘The Poplar Tree,’ ” Kashpirovsky tells the poor woman. The poor woman actually squeezes out a few wobbly notes. “Close your eyes! You’re floating!” Kashpirovsky says. “You have no pain from your stomach to your spine! Close those eyes!… Yes, yes, you do feel the surgical instruments in your body, but you feel normal. Soon everything will be all right! People will ask me later if you are asleep. Are you?” “No,” she says meekly. “I feel someone doing something to my body.” Indeed they are. The operation requires a forty-centimeter incision.

When it is over, Kashpirovsky tells the audience, “Now all of you who have watched me can go to the dentist and get a tooth pulled. There will be no pain at all. I assure you.” Kashpirovsky claimed he had made medical—“no, spiritual!”—history with that performance. But then the patient rebelled. Lesya Yershova told reporters that, in fact, she had been in “monstrous pain” during the operation and had cooperated only because she “didn’t want to let Kashpirovsky down.” Yuri Savenko, the president of the Independent Psychiatric Association, said the Ministry of Health’s cooperation in Kashpirovsky’s broadcasts was an outrage and part of a broader bread-and-circuses conspiracy engineered by the Communist Party. He was far from alone in believing that the Party was using the broadcasts to divert the attentions and sorrows of the people. “With the Russian people,” he said, “Christianity is superficial. They are largely pagan. They observe rituals without understanding the essence. Under the political situation today, mysticism increases, and with such a low cultural level it acquires outrageous forms.” Savenko said that one of his colleagues had “firm data” proving that Kashpirovsky’s séances had not only done nothing to heal people of their ills, they also caused some Russians to have psychotic episodes. But there was no investigation. Journalists and doctors alike had a difficult time attacking a figure so popular that he won Man of the Year honors in various newspapers in 1990 and had a following no politician or movie star could match. Savenko said that some of his psychologist and psychiatrist “friends” were reduced to pranks: “I know some people made fun of Kashpirovsky by sending him cables saying things like ‘Thanks to you, my amputated stump has grown five centimeters longer.’ Then they waited for him to read them out in public as a testimonial.” On tour, Kashpirovsky packed concert halls, factory courtyards, and even soccer stadiums. His videocassettes were passed hand to hand the way Solzhenitsyn’s manuscripts once were. In the provinces, where very few people had VCRs, video salons and movie theaters organized Kashpirovsky Nights and showed the great man’s tapes. As a businessman, he was not altogether happy with this underground trafficking. At the beginning of one tape put together in the United States, the usual FBI warning that it is a crime to copy the tape dissolved into Kashpirovsky’s own message: “Warning! Duplicating this tape will result in losing its medical properties!” I saw Kashpirovsky in Moscow and on his world tour in the West. It was always the same scene, a mix of spooky New Age and Beatlemania. One night in New York, at a school in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx, Kashpirovsky hid in a corner, trying to avoid the stares of the bulky, perfumed émigré babushkas as they filed into the auditorium. The healer was in an awful mood. A few nights before in Queens he had had a good time of it. The adulation level was just right. “I believe in you like a god,” one woman told him. “Someone should blow up your enemies. Thank God that you were delivered to us. You are a god on earth.” Another man threw away his cane and started limping joyously around the apron of the stage, yelping his thanks in Russian. Kashpirovsky accepted all this as his due. He feigned boredom. Sure there was a “cult of Kashpirovsky,” Kashpirovsky allowed, but it wasn’t “as if I’m going to tell them to blow up a nuclear power station.… You shouldn’t be afraid of a repeat of Stalin or something.” But now, Kashpirovsky wore the collapsed look of the doomed. He was sure everything would go wrong. His manager, Mikhail Zimmerman, darted around like a wasp, frantic to know why the microphone crackled with static, why his star was so riddled with gloom. “Anatoly Mikhailovich is like a great instrument,” Zimmerman said. “Sometimes he is just not in tune.” Kashpirovsky was feeling the despair of all self-declared prophets. The world, the very universe, was not prepared for his wonderfulness. “Humankind is not ready yet to be saved,” he said. “There is not yet the technique. Imagine that everyone is healthy, no one is dying, and people keep reproducing. Where will they go? The other planets aren’t inhabitable yet. It’s some kind of law.” Once he was on stage, Kashpirovsky gave it a valiant try but never caught the groove. Never mind the inadequate universe; hell, as Robert Frost said, is a half-filled auditorium. He was angry at the middling ticket sales. He was used to 300 million on TV and 25,000 live, and now he had three hundred, if he was lucky. He recited his accomplishments and theories with all the tricked-up enthusiasm of a guy selling toupees on late-night television. Then the testimonials began. A woman’s neck no longer had its crick. Hallelujah. Another woman’s rheumatism was gone, her gray hair had darkened. “I feel like thirty, not sixty,” she said. She looked seventy. Kashpirovsky hardly acknowledged the miracles he had wrought. He had his eye on the clock on the back wall, and, after a decent interval, he declared it time for the real séance, the synthesizer music and the purring into the microphone, the healing. But even this, his centerpiece, wilted.

As he strolled up and down the aisle, Kashpirovsky spotted people who had not closed their eyes, others who fidgeted in their seats.

“Don’t look at me!” he shouted at one woman. “You’re irritating me! Turn away from me!” As he turned away, the music swelled, and Kashpirovsky reddened: “Where did you get that music?!” he barked at his assistant at the mixing board. “This is not human music! This is the sort of music they play at the May Day parade! Quieter! Turn it down!” When it was over, Kashpirovsky waited at the lip of the stage as grandmothers and mothers and children all rushed at him in a frantic grab for the star’s handshake and his healing glance. A few tried to corner him and describe their cancers, their migraines and tumors. “Look, I’m not an ordinary doctor,” he answered in a huff. “Don’t address me with your concrete illnesses.” Sometimes when the ailing and the weak approached him with their ills, their pains, Kashpirovsky was even more specific.

“Take a couple of pills,” he said.