Chumak sends morning healing vibes to perestroika-era audiences

Like fellow television psychic Anatoly Kashpirovsky (1939-), Allan Chumak (1935-2017) came to all-Union fame during the perestroika era for his ability to “heal” people via the television screen. As another instance of New-Age-style “new thinking” going mainstream at the height of Gorbachev’s glasnost, Chumak was a household name who persisted into the post-Soviet era. The longevity of his career may be attributed to the fact that, unlike his colleague, he conducted sessions that were only a few minutes long, did not involve a stage set, and could easily be incorporated into the 120 minutes of Central Television’s daily morning roundup.

Unlike Kashpirovsky, a trained psychiatrist with a solid understanding of guided meditation and hypnosis, Chumak had no medical background. Rather, he had been a sports journalist working in TV and newspapers who realized he possessed psychic healing powers during a “road to Damascus” moment in the 1970s, which occurred as he reported on the charlatanism of faith healers for official Soviet TV. Upon meeting these accused grifters, Chumak allegedly understood that they were, in fact, honest people and that he, too, possessed similar powers. In the 2000s, he would claim that this power was conveyed to him by mystical voices, but back in the still-Soviet 1980s, he avoided mentioning this point publicly.

The excerpt featured in this artifact is an almost complete morning session from Chumak. He begins by outlining the specific ailments targeted on that day’s session—one of which, tellingly, is generalized anxiety, which allows him to cast a wide net. What follows is Chumak’s famous invitation to place one’s drinking water, creams, and lotions before the TV screen, so that these mundane items may also become charged with positive energy (many eyewitnesses, including the author of this annotation, recall their families participating in this ritual). After these prefatory actions, the session can begin in earnest. It is composed entirely of Chumak staring silently at the viewer through the screen, accompanied by stirring, melodramatic music.

The close-up camera position, Chumak’s quiet facial expressions, and the music evoke the travails of the sincere protagonist of late-Soviet fiction—e.g. the heroic spy Stierlitz from the 1973 television miniseries Seventeen Moments of Spring. In later sessions, Chumak dispensed with the background music and added mystical healing “passes” with his hands, performed in dead silence. Chumak’s mystical performances reveal the extent to which even fully mainstream Soviet media outlets, including the morning news, were willing to platform fringe content in their search for meaning and relevance during perestroika.