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
One fascinating site for seeing these issues brought into explicit discussion is the Russian-language Bitva Ekstrasensov, or Battle of the Psychics, a reality show first developed in Sweden and the United Kingdom, then picked up in Israel, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Mongolia, the United States, and other places.11 An entire book could compare the variants. The formula adapts the form’s magic shows and demonstrations of occult debunking going back a long time. In the 1970s The Amazing Kreskin! was broadcast from Canada, inviting guests to discuss the paranormal or demonstrate their skills. In 1972 Kreskin invited the authors of Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain to discuss famous Soviet telepaths such as Wolf Messing and footage they had brought back demonstrating telekinesis, and to banter about how they had been “banned in Russia”—because sections of the book were read on the air by Radio Liberty, the American organization broadcasting to the Soviet bloc since World War II.
The U.S. version of Battle, America’s Psychic Challenge, lasted only half a season in 2007 (the Russian was past its seventeenth season by 2017). We cannot credit its cancellation to American sophistication regarding the occult; U.S. media are saturated with supernatural plots, talk shows with mediums, and ghost-seeking reality shows (Bastien 2010). On the contrary, cheery confidence in magical forces suffused America’s Psychic Challenge: the game host, the voice-over, and even the musical sound track all introduced each scene with breathy, hushed expectation. By contrast, the Russian Battle of the Psychics, ranked number one for several years running, poses tests of extrasensory detection and telepathic contact after which experts debate, evaluate performances, and eliminate losers. Dramatic conflict sets wishful psychics against each other and their skeptics. In the American version, neither the host, the narrators, nor any formal elements indicate the slightest note of skeptical challenge. As Lamont (2013, 228) notes, psychics commonly blame their failures on interference from a hostile or skeptical audience, and the American show’s producers made sure nothing like this disrupted the action. Bright, optimistic affect ruled tone and tempo, even when the host had to tell a contestant that she had earned only 12 of 25 points. In America’s Psychic Challenge, all participants were perfectly groomed and styled, always smiling, never tired, never worn out. And there was no discussion of how or why contestants failed, no accusations of faking or psychic weakness; points alone were added to calculate success, without additional review.
The Russian version, in contrast, frames each scene with questioning rigor. A few times per episode, a narrating voice stresses that “this is just an experiment,” that viewers are free to judge—“decide yourselves”—whether the phenomena on display are real. Multiple frames jostle, cuing the viewer to recognize frames within frames, as layers of experts talk about how the psychics make telepathic contact or communicate with another dimension. This editing strategy attracts engagement—as comments testify on fan websites devoted to judging how the judges do their judging. Viewers watch skeptics and experts set up double-blinds and controls, watch the crew position multiple cameras. In one episode, before the psychics search for a plastic bomb hidden in an empty stadium, the crew times a search dog and a platoon of soldiers—the dog finds it quickly, and the platoon needs a bit more time, but only one of the psychics comes close.
We watch people whom the producers have hired to be observed while observing: a psychologist who claims to have worked in military ESP labs in the 1960s and three young magicians, brothers “who sniff out any tricks,” because their very “profession it is to fool the public.” All of these differently skeptical experts trail behind each psychic, checking procedures, adjusting boxes and blindfolds, asking questions, and setting limits as the host reminds viewers that the tests are modeled after laboratory science, to follow protocols for randomization and double-blind. These experts also monitor video screens (sometimes alongside participating civilians), commenting throughout: “She is feeling the rails, she’s just using deduction”; “He’s studying her eyes for a reaction.” In this way, even apparent successes become failures as the experts deconstruct how the deeds are done: “too much talk,” “using too many senses.”
The expert panel format is familiar to the genre everywhere, as well as to telepathy shows on variety stages in the Soviet and Russian imperial eras. We might compare them to U.S. shows like Project Runway, for its public shaming, or MythBusters for its debunkings (see also Hanks 2016). This makes the American version something of an outlier, as it does not even attempt to stage controls—the contrast also undermines any claims that Americans are less prone than Russians to magical thinking. Although back in the 1970s Johnny Carson brought professional magician James Randi onstage to unmask Uri Geller, and magicians like Penn and Teller make entertainment of debunking others on stage, in the twenty-first century such skeptical shows are at least equaled in America by shows that amplify the mystical without question. They achieve this amplification by technical means and collective efforts to focus perception of contacts and communication. Mentalist John Edwards, for example, performs for audiences who do not see the panorama of facial expressions from which Edwards, observing from the stage, can choose (and for broadcast, the cameras avoid capturing this view). His viewers lack access to a range of minute details that performers from the stage can see to select among (better to choose more mobile
