Primetime hypnotic tele-healing with Anatoly Kashpirovsky

In 1988, Anatoly Kashpirovsky (1939-), a trained psychiatrist who had spent twenty years working in Soviet mental hospitals, reinvented himself as a guru capable of healing large numbers of patients through the power of hypnosis. Starting in October 1989, after a series of successful sessions in concert halls and on Ukrainian state television, Kashpirovsky conducted six séances on Soviet Central Television for the benefit of “two hundred million viewers,” as he asserts in the episode from which this excerpt is taken. Each session took place every two weeks at 10 PM immediately after the USSR’s flagship nightly newscast, Vremia (Time). Although his fame would wane only a few years later, at this time Kashpirovsky became a household name throughout the USSR, along with another tele-psychic, Allan Chumak (1935-2017), who preferred to work in the mornings.

At first glance, Kashpirovsky’s tele-healing psychic sessions seem like an odd match for Soviet state TV, overseen as it was by a Party ostensibly committed to atheism and the scientific method. Yet a look at this excerpt resolves this apparent contradiction. Each episode of Kashpirovsky’s show would open with thirty minutes of written and oral testimonials from audience members who claimed his televised interventions had cured their cancer, multiple sclerosis, heart conditions, speech disorders, scars, etc. As the guru explained, these testimonials were an important part of the session, but the centerpiece was the concluding segment, a guided meditation with elements of hypnosis. During this meditation, as elsewhere, Kashpirovsky repeatedly noted that his activities should be studied, that they enact real medical change, and that his televised “psychotherapy” made it possible to “influence” people with no access to a live psychotherapist.

The present excerpt concludes the first of Kahspirovsky’s six sessions on Soviet Central Television. In it, he remarks on the far-reaching effects of his power, concluding with the claim that “all of this is just the beginning; soon this will be a part of our everyday life, it will help our people [narod] become healthy and revive itself spiritually.” This statement is the key to understanding how Soviet psychics could possibly fit in with perestroika-era television. Gurus like Kashpirovsky presented their work as only vaguely spiritual, avoiding coming into conflict with the USSR’s state atheism. As a matter of “cosmic reason,” their alleged powers were an empirical fact worthy of further study and mainstreaming within a scientific framework. Kashpirovsky presents his tele-hypnosis as yet another kind of “new thinking” made possible by perestroika. By late 1989, when this episode aired, the USSR was in a crisis with economic, spiritual, and health dimensions, as the guru’s audience attests. The whole country was seemingly in need of salvation by any possible means, and through all forms of increasingly uncensored speech. Against this background, televised psychic sessions for the masses may have been exactly what the doctor ordered.