Grappling With Russians’ Paranormal Obsessions

When I first moved to Russia in 1997, despite only initially knowing about 10 words of the language, I would buy a couple of papers every morning and attempt to decipher them with the help of my brand-new, Russian-English dictionary. The broadsheets, I figured, would most likely prove too tough to decode, and so I plumped instead for the tabloids. There’s nothing quite like the gutter press for getting to the heart of a nation’s passions and obsessions, and Russia is no exception.

After I got bored with the sports and celebrity news, I would check out the classified ads. Among the usual dentists, plumbers, and cockroach exterminators, I was surprised to see page after page of advertisements for witches, wizards and psychics, all of them offering to solve my everyday problems for a reasonable sum.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that the Russians were utterly obsessed with magic and the paranormal. Although it’s obviously hard to get exact figures, there are an estimated 100,000-plus professional occultists in Russia, with the business worth, according to some reports, up to $30 billion a year. That’s a lot of spells and a lot of cash floating around, whichever way you look at it.

Source: The Moscow Times