Although it’s fairly obvious why someone would say hypnotist and mass “faith healer” Anatoly Kashpirovsky is Russia’s “new” Rasputin, calling him Russia’s Uri Geller or even Russia’s Benny Hinn, seems like a better fit. Kashpirovsky, a controversial—and very famous—television “remote healer” was all the rage when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, but the psychic left Russia 15 years ago to “treat” Russian ex-pats in the US (see what I mean about him being a Russian Benny Hinn?). Now he’s back on television in Russia and opinion is no less contentious. From a fascinating article in the Guardian by Moscow-based journalist Marc Bennetts:

Clad entirely in black, his piercing eyes staring into apartments across the vast territory of the USSR, Kashpirovsky “treated” millions, his voice both reassuring and oddly threatening.

“For those of you with high blood pressure, your blood pressure will lower… whoever has hip injuries, they will heal…” he droned, his litany of the suffering and the saved a potent lullaby that plunged the nation into a communal trance.

Who cared if the country was collapsing around them, if the shops were almost empty, and the threat of separatist violence in the Caucasus was moving ever closer? The USSR turned on, tuned in and switched off.

“The streets would empty whenever Kashpirovsky came on,” journalist Katya Murzina tells me. “I was just a kid, but I remember we all talked about his shows at school. Everyone was convinced he really could heal the nation.

“We had never seen anything like this on TV before,” she goes on. “You have to remember, there were basically no adverts on Soviet TV. Everything was taken at face value. So if state TV presented him as possessing these incredible powers, most people believed it.”

I suppose that would explain why anyone would be convinced of Kashpirovsky’s “talents: after watching something as silly as this:
 

 
Faith healer Anatoly Kashpirovsky: Russia’s new Rasputin (Guardian)

Thank you Chris Campion of Berlin, Germany!