Chumak sends morning healing vibes to perestroika-era audiences

Like Kashpirovskii (see Artifact #00052), Allan Chumak came to all-Union fame in the Perestroika era for his capacity to heal people through the television screen. Another example of mainstreaming New Age “new thinking” in the heat of Gorbachevan glasnost’, Chumak was a household name and stayed around even on post-Soviet television, perhaps by virtue of 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-minute daily morning lineup on Central Television. Unlike Kashpirovskii, who was a trained psychiatrist and had a good understanding of guided meditation and hypnosis, Chumak had no medical background. Rather, he was a TV and newspaper sports journalist who realized that he possessed psychic healing powers as a result of a personal ‘road to Damascus’ moment at some point in the 1970s, while doing a Soviet official report on the charlatanism of faith healers. Upon meeting them, Chumak allegedly understood that they were honest people and that he too possessed their power. In the 2000s, he would claim that this power was taught to him by mystical voices he heard in his head, but back in the still-Soviet 1980s he neglected to mention this point publicly.
The given excerpt is an almost complete morning seance from Chumak. It begins with him outlining the specific ailments targeted by the day’s session (though it isn’t surprising that one of the listed ailments is general anxiety, which obviously casts a wide net). Then follows Chumak’s famous invitation to place one’s drinking water, creams and lotions before the TV screen, so that these items of daily use can also get charged with positive energy (lots of eyewitnesses, including myself, recall their families participating in this ritual). Then the seance begins, composed entirely of Chumak staring silently through the screen to the tune of riling melodramatic music. The close-up camera position, Chumak’s quiet facial expressions and the musical background evoke the catharsis of a sincere protagonist in a typical late Soviet melodrama film. In later seances, Chumak will discard the background music and add mystical healing “passes” with his hands, which he will continue to perform in dead silence.