Wearing a long white scarf, military khaki pants and holding a drum and stick, Vladimir Putin smiles as he watches a shaman – a combination of a psychic and spiritual healer – play an acoustic guitar for a traditional ritual. It is 2007 and the Russian president, his close friend Sergei Shoigu, now head of Russia’s national security council, and the shaman are sitting by a fire in Tuva, a remote area of Siberia on the border with Mongolia.
Known as ‘a place of power’ where shamanic traditions are strong, this region is home to Shoigu, a native Siberian Asiatic, who in his former role as defence minister played a crucial role in the brutal invasion of Ukraine. He grew up surrounded by such mystics who believe in the supernatural and the ability to interact with the spiritual world through trance-like altered states of consciousness. Since the invasion two years ago, Russia’s shamans have turned their attention to supporting Russia’s war effort. The so-called head shaman Kara-ool Dopchun-ool has performed rituals and given his blessing to the war, reportedly asking ‘the sun, the stars and the moon’ to protect the Kremlin’s troops and denounced President Zelensky as ‘an enemy’.
In normal times, the hallucinations of a dead KGB psychic would not be taken seriously
Last month, Putin returned to Mongolia and Siberia where he reportedly consulted these shamans about the state of the war. ‘My source close to the Kremlin says Putin consulted extensively with mystics before the invasion began and all of them assured him of a military victory,’ said Mikhail Zygar, the Russian author and leading opposition activist. The former Kremlin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov who now opposes Putin confirmed this account. ‘In addition to receiving a blessing to use nuclear weapons (God’s weapons), Putin was interested in his own longevity and reincarnation,’ he wrote on Telegram. ‘He was very pleased with the meetings and the rituals performed.’
Putin’s participation in such rituals provides an insight into his motivation for the war in Ukraine. ‘He believes in these psychics, the shamans and their rituals and devotes some time to it’, said Dr Denys Bohush, whose grandfather oversaw a special group that studied the paranormal in Russia for twelve years during and after the Second World War.
Putin’s fatalistic world view is rooted in a suspicion of western culture, science, technology, humanism and logic. He is heavily influenced by Alexander Dugin, who once published the works of the British black magic and satanist Alastair Crowley. Known as ‘Putin’s Rasputin’, Dugin believes the West is in a state of terminal decline and Russia should embrace ‘Eurasia’ – in essence to revive its empire.
‘Dugin believes Russians have what he calls “an empire-building will” and the only way Russia can preserve its sovereignty in the face of US hegemony will be through a recovery of its status as an empire’, said the philosopher Mark Jenkins, who is writing a book based on his visits to ancient centres of learning across Russia. ‘Putin’s speeches are littered with references to Eurasia. According to Dugin, Eurasia is home to a civilisation rooted in beliefs and customs very different from the west: a preference for the collective over the individual and a family of nations under a supreme ruler. Since 2009, Dugin has been speaking of what he sees as the threat to Russia’s imperial ambitions posed by the continued existence of Ukraine as an independent state.’
The roots of Putin’s fascination with the supernatural world can be traced back to his time in the KGB in the 1980s, when secret laboratories supervised research into mindreading. As a young KGB officer, he watched ‘healing sessions’ by Kremlin-approved psychics on Soviet state television. ‘The intelligence services have always had a fascination with the paranormal,’ said Aran Dharmeratnam, who encountered healers and mystics in Moscow while researching close quarter and personal safety tactics. ‘The word “occult” means practices that are hidden and so that cements the connection with the covert world. During the Cold War there was a genuine interest in enhancing psychic capabilities, particularly for special units.’
In the mid-1990s, experiments into using telepathy, clairvoyance, hypnosis and astrology to infiltrate the west were conducted by General Georgy Rogozin, a former senior KGB officer who became deputy chief of President Yeltsin’s security service in the 1990s. While based in the Kremlin, the general compiled personal astrological charts for Yeltsin, dealt in the occult, raised the souls of the dead and believed he could penetrate people’s subconscious using photographs. His technique was to lie down and fall into a hypnotic state through which he claimed to be able to communicate with a target, reading their mind, infiltrating their soul and discovering secret agendas.
Based on this method, Rogozin claimed he had managed to penetrate the mind of Madeline Albright, then US Secretary of State, according to his deputy general, Boris Ratnikov. ‘In Albright’s thoughts, we found pathological hatred of the Slavs,’ he recalled. ‘Albright was outraged that Russia has the largest mineral reserves. In her opinion, in the future, Russia’s reserves should be managed not by one country but by all of humanity under the supervision of America.’
Ratnikov said his superior officer claimed to have discovered her secret thoughts about the priority of removing Siberia and the Far East from Russian territory. The US Secretary of State never advocated – privately or publicly – for such a thing. It was a fabrication, but her ‘secret thoughts’ have suited Putin’s narrative that the US was intent on global domination, destabilising Russia in the process and securing access to its valuable oil and gas reserves as a result.
In normal times, the hallucinations of a dead KGB psychic would not be taken seriously. In 1998, Edward Kruglyakov, head of a government inquiry into combating pseudoscience, lamented how Rogozin brought ‘psychics, occultists and charlatans into the security service’, creating an atmosphere of collective Rasputinism. His concern was the danger of excessive, secret power by mystics being exerted in the Kremlin – just as Rasputin manipulated the family of Tsar Nicholas II until his death in 1916.
But as recently as 2021 Putin took the Albright report and Rogozin’s supposed intelligence seriously. ‘Someone actually dared to say it is unfair that Russia allegedly owns the wealth of a region like Siberia – only one country’, said the Russian president.
Later, in 2021 the Russian armed forces adopted what they called ‘psychotronic techniques’. Bewildered soldiers attended conferences at which military ‘scientists’ conveyed conspiracy theories about the west based on what they called ‘extrasensory perception’ (mind reading). An obscure military unit in the Russian army – the expert and analytical department of the general staff – investigated ‘unusual human capabilities’. ‘Our task is to tune the brain to the information that is in space,’ said its commander Lieutenant General Alexei Savin. ‘We called ourselves special operators – people with advanced brain capabilities. The Americans have not even come close to our results.’ (During the Cold War, the CIA and Pentagon also investigated the potential use of the paranormal).
Putin’s fascination with the shamans is also consistent with his Orthodox religious beliefs. ‘There is no demarcation between the two,’ the scholar Mark Jenkins told me. ‘Christianity does not take off in a spiritual vacuum. Orthodoxy has been especially good at integrating pagan customs and beliefs into its practices.’ This is illustrated by the Russian president spending so much time with the ‘elders’ of the Valaam Monastery who were venerated by Orthodox mystics. These elders imitate the manners of past hermits, notably the habit of crossing one’s mouth at the mention of the devil. Putin has managed to pick up the habit: during a speech in 2009 he attempted to make a joke, accidentally mentioned the devil and instinctively crossed his mouth.
But just because the Russian president has increasingly rejected western values, inspired by those like Dugin, this is a direct endorsement on his part of the supernatural. ‘This world view is not an embracement of superstition but a perfectly valid rejection of European enlightenment,’ said Jenkins, who points to The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, published soon after the First World War, as the seminal text for understanding Russia’s view of the west. Like TS Eliot’s epic poem ‘Wasteland’, Spengler surveyed what he regarded as the chaos and decadence of a spiritually arid West – and he concluded it would be Russia which would eventually emerge as the dominant civilisation.
This doctrine of the ‘Russian world’ – Moscow’s perceived sphere of political, cultural and military influence – has been embraced by Putin with devastating consequences for the Ukrainian people. He believes the world is in perpetual conflict between the light (Russia) and the dark (West) and that the war is a spiritual and cultural confrontation as much as a military one. At the heart of Putin’s new order is the rejection – echoed by Dugin – of the west’s humanism, optimism, rational thought, science and materialism. It is frightening to think his world view is influenced – even in part – by the supernatural, the superstitious and the occult.
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