"Misha's Living Room" from the series "Remains", by Russian-born photographer Sasha Rudensky

This article is a preview from the Spring 2015 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here.

I’d arranged to meet the sorceress at 4pm, but I was running late. Hurrying past central Moscow’s upmarket shops and restaurants, I entered one of the Russian capital’s many sprawling courtyards. Once I’d located the correct entranceway, I was buzzed in. I walked into the gloom of what appeared to be a cavernous, renovated kommunalka – a Soviet-era communal apartment. A large artificial candle supplied the only light in the lobby, while the incongruous sound of Russian pop music blasted from tinny speakers. After a wait of a few minutes, a young woman came to greet me and wordlessly ushered me through a set of double doors.

The sorceress sat smoking and drinking tea behind a large wooden desk filled with candles and other, more arcane objects. She had long jet-black hair and bright-red lipstick, and was wearing a lot of gold jewellery. The walls were decorated with magical symbols. A small human-shaped effigy hung near a wall, a needle stuck into its side. A sickly-sweet, pungent scent made my head spin. On the desk: a sad-looking mouse in a tiny glass jar. “Ask anything,” said the sorceress, and took a long drag of her thin cigarette.

The sorceress’s name was Valeriya Karat, and her slick, professional-looking website claimed she possessed hereditary magical powers. Among the rites she offered to carry out were spells to bring back wayward husbands, remove curses and attract money for her customers. “I can also heal illnesses,” she told me. “But I can’t use my magic to benefit myself.” I’d interviewed many of Russia’s self-proclaimed sorcerers, wizards and psychics as part of my ongoing research into the country’s enthusiasm for the occult and the paranormal, but this was the first time I’d met someone who appeared to practise voodoo. “There is no such thing as black magic,” Karat told me, perhaps sensing my discomfort. “Magic is colourless.” A scrabbling sound came from behind me. In a murky corner of the room, a black rabbit sat in a small cage. “This is part of a magical rite to get a husband to return to his wife,” Karat said, matter-of-factly. “The husband was born in the Chinese year of the rabbit. When he returns, I’ll free the rabbit.”

Karat is far from Russia’s only internet-savvy sorceress. From St Petersburg to Vladivostok, there are thousands of online advertisements for “magical services.” Not all of Russia’s occultists are to be found online, however. In 2010, a psychologist with the Russian Academy of Sciences cited World Health Organisation data that indicated there were more occult/faith healers (800,000) in Russia than professional doctors (640,000). And Russians are putting their money where their faith is. In 2013, the country’s leading cardiologist complained that his fellow citizens spend almost £20 billion every year on magical and paranormal services. This, the astonished surgeon pointed out, is almost twice the amount Russians spend on foreign medical care. Another statistic is perhaps even more revealing: Russia’s Academy of Sciences estimates that 67 per cent of all Russian women have at some time sought help from a “psychic or sorcerer”. The figure for Russian men is one in four.

Welcome, then, to the strange and unsettling world that lies behind the façade of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. A country where faith healers and psychics enjoy as much, if not more, respect and trust as doctors and psychoanalysts. A country where a high-profile, Kremlin-linked ideologue is as well-versed in the writings of early 20th century British occultists as he is in modern political theory. A country where belief in magic is still very much alive.

What are the reasons for the startling popularity of psychics, witches and other purveyors of occult or paranormal services in modern-day Russia? In part, it’s down to the failure of the authorities to provide adequate medical care, especially in the often brutal provinces. Why risk a dangerous botched operation, when you can go to a psychic healer first instead? But health issues aren’t the only reason Russians use these occult services in such numbers; the instability of recent decades has had an effect, too. “The average Russian is completely confused and disorientated by modern life,” Nikolai Naritsyn, a Moscow-based psychoanalyst who has written on the subject, told me. “Where do financial crises come from, what do the laws they pass in parliament mean, why has my salary been halved? To find his solutions, his truth, he heads to witches and wizards. Maybe they know what is going on and can help him?” Naritsyn also believes the Soviet past – when “we were taught not to take responsibility for ourselves, but to allow the state to do so” – has shaped the modern Russian psyche: “We became used to other people solving our problems for us.”

Russia’s obsession with the occult has deeper historical roots, too. In his seminal study of Russian folk culture, Ivan the Fool, Soviet-era dissident Andrei Sinyavsky detailed a pervasive Tsarist-era belief in superstition, magic and pagan gods, as well as the widespread popularity of sorcerers and faith healers. “In Old Russia, almost everyone resorted to elementary magic help,” wrote Sinyavsky. “Magic was used on a daily basis.”

Although these beliefs went underground for much of the Soviet era, manifestations of Russia’s occult mania were not uncommon. In 1920, three years after the Bolsheviks had seized power, the Cheka state security organisation (the forerunners of the KGB) was tipped off about a gathering of occultists on the outskirts of Petrograd (now St Petersburg). According to biophysicist Alexander Chizhevsky, who witnessed the Cheka raid, officers burst into the building and arrested the occultists in the middle of an attempt to place curses on Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky by concentrating their thoughts on photos of the Soviet leaders. The would-be psychic assassins were shot out of hand.

But it wasn’t only the Kremlin’s enemies who attempted to use occult powers in the early years of Soviet rule. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Bolsheviks skilfully adapted the rural occult practices and symbols familiar to newly urbanised peasants. Propaganda posters and slogans referred to “unclean forces” and “purging” ceremonies. Lenin was even more direct, denouncing his adversaries as “vampires”. As author Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal has noted in her pioneering book The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, the Bolsheviks may not have believed in the world of magic – indeed, they frequently denounced it – but they “incorporated occult and quasi-occult ideas” into the mythologies they constructed around Lenin and Stalin. Superhuman powers of wisdom were attributed to both men, often taking on – particularly in Stalin’s case – a near-mystical quality. Although there is no concrete evidence that Stalin himself believed in the occult, there have been rumours for years that the Soviet dictator employed the services of one Natalya Lvova, “a third-generation witch”. Shake-ups in the Communist Party, which usually meant a trip to the Gulag for the unfortunate official, were whispered to be the result of Stalin and Lvova’s black magic Kremlin sessions.

This belief in the occult and the paranormal reemerged into the mainstream in the late 1980s, as Soviet society entered a chaotic period of ideological and economic disintegration. Confused, frightened and desperate for ideas to replace the certainties of Marxism-Leninism, Russians turned in their millions to the paranormal and the occult. All over Russia, urban witches and wizards set up shop to offer magical services. State television replaced tractor-production reports with “psychic healing” sessions. In the twinkling of a red star, Russia went mad for magic. “When there is no belief in anything, then mysticism flourishes,” said Mikhail Vinogradov, a high-profile Russian psychiatrist-criminologist. “Our economy was extremely unstable, and people hoped for a miracle: they sought out, expected, and called forth that miracle, including in the form of psychic healers.”

The most famous of the Soviet Union’s state-sanctioned psychic healers was Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a former weightlifter and qualified psychiatrist. Dressed all in black, Kashpirovsky “treated” millions every week during his televised show. At the height of his popularity, the streets of towns and cities across Russia would empty as people hurried home to catch his programme. “For those of you with high blood pressure, your blood pressure will lower ... whoever has hip injuries, they will heal,” he intoned. Such was Kashpirovksy’s fame that he regularly topped polls as the most popular public figure, easily beating the still sober Boris Yeltsin into second place. His live appearances, as I experienced for myself when he made a brief comeback in 2010, were a combination of mass hypnosis and cult-type hysteria: both men and women fainted in his presence, while others danced or sobbed at his command.

This interest in the supernatural and the paranormal continued unabated after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with President Yeltsin giving the green light to a number of bizarre projects, including one that saw state funds pumped into a scheme to “extract energy from stones”.

But it was in the shape of Grigory Grabovoi, a mysterious, self-proclaimed messiah, that the newly independent Russia’s passion for the paranormal took on its most poignant and tragic form. In 2004, Grabovoi, an apparently uncharismatic middle-aged man from Kazakhstan, made headlines across Russia with an offer to physically resurrect the dozens of children killed during the bloody conclusion to the Beslan siege, when Russian security forces used flamethrowers and tanks to attack militants who had seized a North Caucasus school. But miracles rarely come for free: Grabovoi was asking for $1,500 a “resurrection”.

Out of their minds with despair, many of the bereaved mothers turned to Grabovoi, attending his lectures and “resurrection sessions” in Moscow. With public opinion outraged, Grabovoi was arrested in 2006 and sentenced to eleven years in jail – cut to eight on appeal. And that was where this already barely credible story got even stranger. After Grabovoi had been jailed, investigative journalists, some at the respected Moscow-based Novaya Gazeta newspaper, alleged that he was a Kremlin agent. His real aim, they said, was to discredit the Mothers of Beslan pressure group, which sought to bring to justice those officials responsible for the heavy-handed tactics employed to end the siege. Grabovoi was released from prison in 2010, having served just half his sentence. He has not been seen or heard from since, although reports suggest he may have moved into the South-East Asian market, where his name has been used to advertise the “psychically assisted growth” of new vital organs and teeth.

Back in Moscow, Valeriya Karat, the sorcerer I had hurried to keep my appointment with, was telling me about her secret visits from government officials. “They come in the middle of the night,” she confided. “So that no one will see them. I can’t name names, of course, but Russian government officials always consult sorcerers before taking major decisions.”

Oddly, she wasn’t the first mystic to “reveal” to me the importance of the occult and the paranormal in Russian political life. “Whenever there are big international talks going on, Russia always brings a psychic or witch along to influence things,” Marina, a psychic sorceress based in southeast Moscow, told me when I visited her busy magical centre. “Look at Rasputin: he was the greatest magician we have ever seen. Russian leaders have always employed occultists. This is our country’s great secret.”

Given that a sorcerer’s stock-in-trade is making things up, we should be sceptical about these claims. Obviously, short of hiding out near a sorcerer’s office late at night, there is no way I can prove or disprove them. But there is at least one Kremlin-linked ideologue with an established interest in the occult, a man whose international profile has risen to unprecedented heights since the beginning of the Russian-backed insurgency in east Ukraine in April 2014.

Alexander Dugin, a 53-year-old bearded Moscow-born philosopher and political analyst dubbed “Putin’s Brain” by the US-based journal Foreign Affairs, predicted with eerie precision the events in Crimea and east Ukraine years before the 2014 Maidan uprising in Kyiv. Dugin – until very recently a professor at the prestigious Moscow State University, and a staple on state-run television – has also called for the mass slaughter of Ukrainians and the “destruction” of the United States. He has expressed his admiration for elements of the ideology of fascism.

Although these days he refuses to speak publicly about such matters, Dugin has a long and documented involvement in the occult. In the 1980s, he is reported to have been a member of the Moscow-based “Black Order of the SS”, a group of intellectuals fascinated with both mysticism and Nazism, as well as – according to former members of the circle – experiments with drugs and sex magic. Later, Dugin took his interest in the occult to a new level. In the early 1990s, he became editor of the Eurasian magazine Elementy. The front cover of the magazine’s second issue featured a portrait of Baphomet, the goat god who is also the symbol of the US-based Church of Satan. Dugin frequently wrote about the occult within the pages of Elementy, as well as praising the “spiritual and transcendental side of fascism”.

In 1995, during an unsuccessful attempt to get elected to parliament, Dugin took part in a pre-election concert – described as a “black mass” by participants – in memory of the British occultist Aleister Crowley, notorious for his sex “magick”. During the performance, Dugin’s supporters read aloud from Crowley’s Book of the Law (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”). Dugin is also reported to have met with figures from the Ordo Templi Orientis, a worldwide occult organisation that once boasted Crowley among its ranks.

Dugin’s press secretary declined to forward my request for an interview with her boss on the theme of the occult when I contacted her. “He is a devout Orthodox Christian,” she told me, who had only become interested in the occult out of “intellectual curiosity”. This may well be so – after all, Dugin also has a well-known interest in Chaos Magic, the post-modern, technology-friendly magical tradition that inspired writers such as William S Burroughs and musicians such as Genesis P-Orridge of the British band Psychic TV. Nevertheless, it appears Dugin’s occult studies continue to have an influence on his apocalyptic thinking: just two years ago, this hardline Russian nationalist thinker lectured in Moscow on the necessity of curtailing the “illusion” that is the planet Earth by bringing about the “end of the world”.

It’s impossible to determine if Dugin’s occult interest has had any impact on Kremlin policy. But if the occultists aim to alter perceptions of reality through mantras and magical techniques, then Russian state-run television has sought to do the same through swift and bewildering video montages, half-truths, and appeals to conscious and subconscious fears. The results – a rise in anti-Western sentiments and fervent support for Putin – have been startling. Russia is awash with occultists, but the Kremlin’s propagandists may well turn out to be the most skilful sorcerers of them all.