“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 distinctions among nations:
[In] cold countries the nervous glands are less expanded: they sink deeper into their sheaths, or they are sheltered from the action of external objects; consequently they have not such lively sensations…. In cold countries they have very little sensibility for pleasure; in temperate countries, they have more; in warm countries, their sensibility is exquisite…. It is the same with regard to pain, which is excited by the laceration of some fibre of the body…. [N]ow it is evident that the large bodies and coarse fibres of the people of the north are less capable of laceration than the delicate fibres of the inhabitants of warm countries; consequently the soul is there less sensible of pain. You must flay a Muscovite alive to make him feel. (1748, bk. XIV)
Montesquieu’s text activated both early colonial hierarchies and imperial competitions, kicking off the long conversation about Russian capacity for feeling. Published in the years after Peter the Great’s Russian imperial expansion, the text made an impression in Russia.
Russian imperial rulers were well-read; French, German, Latin, and English posed few obstacles. Empress Catherine, hailing from Austria, barely spoke Russian when she first arrived but carried on extensive correspondence in several languages with continental philosophes. Russian elites were always aware of European perceptions of Russia (see Layton 1994),27 and as Soviets and now Russians continue to study other languages, they continue also to consider how Russia is viewed from elsewhere. It does not escape notice when foreign sources anchor policy to claims about Russian capacity to feel. It is noticed when depictions zigzag between extremes, northern stoics giving way to Dostoevskian maniacs or Hollywood depictions of cold-faced bureaucrats being eclipsed by Khrushchev removing his shoes at the United Nations to bang one on the table (some argue that those 1960s photos were faked).28 The world switches between Orwellian visions of a state stifling passions and romantic images of a culture of feisty philosophers and emotional ballerinas. Russians get caught in these compelling oscillations; they echo the shapes of historical accounts of survival between other imperial powers, East and West.
Anglophone Cold War writing on Soviet telepathy and extrasensory perception rarely mentions crisis and instead privileges capacities to feel. When Americans Ostrander and Schroeder published their paranormal travelogue of encounters with Soviet telepathy scientists and telepaths, they took care in the introductory pages to note that people, such as actor Karl Nikolaev, greeted them effusively, belying images of emotionless, brainwashed Soviets:
[A] major thrust of Soviet ESP work is to develop machines capable of monitoring, testing, and studying ESP. But the Soviets are also eager to study the human, people-to-people aspects of ESP. “We believe ESP is enmeshed with all of everyday life,” they told us, “We believe ESP affects any group situation.” And perhaps with people as warmhearted and volatile as the Slavs, ESP does flow more easily. Many Westerners seem to have the idea Soviet citizens are robot-like people, gray automatons in a well-run machine shop. An American we met in Leningrad confessed, “I thought the sun never shone in Russia and people never smiled—boy was I wrong!” (1970, 8)
They followed these words with examples of extravagant and spontaneous hospitality, descriptions of flowers and gifts of poetry, and accounts of sudden embraces from elevator operators.
Nevertheless, soon after their book came out, Ostrander and Schroeder appeared
