Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Russian Security Council and one of the most senior officials in the country, has given an interesting interview to Kommersant.

Oleg Kashin in Moscow

Among other things, he said that America is jealous of Russia’s great natural resources, and believes that “we control them illegally and undeservedly because, in their view, we do not use them as they ought to be used”. He substantiated this by saying: “you surely remember ex-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s claim that neither the Far East nor Siberia belong to Russia”.

This phrase, “you surely remember”, is misleading and you cannot blame the interviewer for not interrupting Patrushev and asking him for a source. It is one of those claims we have heard somewhere before. Upon hearing it again, we are liable to nod absent-mindedly and think “yes, yes, I remember”. But therein lies the trap.

A number of pithy foreign quotes circulate in the Russian political language as common currency. But turn to the original language and no one can find them. There is the Dulles Doctrine (a supposed plan by the CIA to destroy the Soviet Union) and Churchill’s apparent claim that “Stalin came to power when Russia had only a wooden plow, and left it in possession of atomic weapons”. There’s Margaret Thatcher allegedly saying that the Russian population could happily be cut in three, and there is Albright’s quote about Siberia and the Far East not lawfully belonging to Russia.

When these quotes are wheeled out by Russian “patriots”, they attract the attention only of uncritical acolytes. Patrushev, on the other hand, is an important figure and his words were picked up on by journalists who all rushed to discover the origin of the Albright quote. They found it.



He said his boss had penetrated Albright’s subconscious, where he discovered thoughts about Siberia and the Far East

In 2006, the government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta published a lengthy interview with a retired Russian general, Boris Ratnikov, about the security service’s occult and parapsychological activities.

A lot had already being written about this in the 1990s. Alexander Korzhakov, a former KGB general who served as head of the presidential security service from 1993 to 1996, had a deputy, Georgy Rogozin, who dealt specifically with these matters. He raised the souls of the dead, penetrated people’s subconscious through photographs and made up horoscopes for Boris Yeltsin. That was the sort of time it was.

Rogozin’s contemporaries made fun of him, of course, but time is a great leveller. Reading the interview with Ratnikov, who served under Rogozin, everything looks quite respectable. Who knows what the security services get up to?

Ratnikov said his boss Rogozin had used a photograph to penetrated Madeleine Albright’s subconscious, where he discovered thoughts about the need to strip Russia of Siberia and the Far East.

After the recent interview with Patrushev, the BBC Russian service tracked down Ratnikov, who repeated the claim that Rogozin would lie down and fall into a hypnotic state through which he could communicate with Albright.

What are we to make of this? Not much. The world is full of unscientific tosh and not short of people to believe in it. Rogozin was a believer, Korzhakov believed Rogozin and Yeltsin believed Korzhakov. But this was all long ago and there is nothing to do but to laugh about it.

Boris Yeltsin’s former chief bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov. Photograph: AP

Or rather you could laugh if it were not for Patrushev, who now, in 2015, apparently credits the words uttered many years ago by a Kremlin parapsychologist in a hypnotic state, and attributed to Albright.

Think about it. Patrushev is a very important and influential politician, a person crucial to the system. He has been with Putin from the very beginning, since his rise to power in 1999. Patrushev is now secretary of the Security Council, meaning that his purview extends to the most serious matters of state, including war and peace. Any mistake on his part risks catastrophe.

This is the man who repeats the words attributed to Albright as if they were self explanatory, when in fact they were pronounced by an eccentric Russian general 20 years ago. On the basis of these words, Patrushev draws conclusions, conceives notions and pens doctrines. Perhaps Russia is preparing for war with the US because it says in some secret file of his that Albright planned to take Siberia away.

It turns out that the hallucinations of a long-dead Kremlin psychic could result in a real war or, at the least, a real crisis in foreign policy. Imagine that Patrushev’s file comes to the attention of Putin and that when he meets his American counterpart he thinks about how the Americans want to seize our natural resources.

This state of affairs is unhealthy and abnormal and one would be justified in calling for Patrushev’s immediate resignation. Here, after all, is a man who confuses lies for truth, is incapable of properly weighing up existing threats and has proved unable to critically assess the reliability of sources.

We Russians have a real problem on our hands here – which goes well beyond the story with Albright. Our authorities are unchanging and isolated. We can only judge what is going on in their heads from their chance blunders, as in the case of Patrushev. Within their circle they speak a language all their own, their folklore and humour are unknown to us. They believe in things of which we have not the slightest inkling. Their superstitions, horoscopes, saints, fears, hopes, their good, their bad – all these have existed for a long time and mutate in ways foreign to us, the ordinary Russian people.

For decades, people on the other side of the power divide have lived outside the world of you and me. It stands to reason that a new, distinct culture has grown up in which only they can live, in which the voice of Madeleine Albright in the head of a Kremlin psychic is by no means the most surprising thing one might find.

One day, we will find out everything about them. On that day, we will be in for a big surprise.

A version of this article first appeared in Russian on Free Press. Translation by Cameron Johnston