It is probably worth starting with the bitter truth. The death in Moscow of pensioner Chumak A. V. is not a reason to talk about the secrets of miraculous healings. And this is not a reason to talk about whether or not there are secret healing energies that can charge Vaseline in a tube and a jar of water. And it’s not at all worth talking about the life of the deceased.
Seeing off the 82-year-old sports journalist, who has become one of the brightest, most memorable and - for all his harmlessness - one of the most shameful symbols of his rather shameful era, it is worth talking about a completely different riddle.
But first - a brief note (after all, the kids who were born in the first year of perestroika are now over thirty, they themselves have schoolchildren). Allan Vladimirovich Chumak - this was a man in glasses who appeared on Soviet Central Television in 1989 - was introduced to millions of viewers as a psychic and for several sessions made passes with his hands for several minutes, explaining that he was now treating the pancreas of viewers, but now he will switch to the cardiovascular system.
Allan Vladimirovich gained enormous popularity and provided himself, presumably, with fantastic means - like some of his colleagues (many remember such names as Yuri Longo and Dzhuna Davitashvili). But the flourishing of the class of TV stars-healers and their transition to billionaire titles was prevented by the order of the Ministry of Health, which had come to its senses by the mid-90s, which covered up the so-called non-traditional methods of treatment and drove psychics into a relative underground. That is, they were not forbidden to publish books and conduct mass sessions, but they were no longer allowed to direct magic at the viewer.
What happened to Allan Vladimirovich then, between the 90s and his death at a venerable age - in general, is of no interest.
… And so. The riddle that is really worth speculating about can be formulated as follows.
How is it that in the most educated country of the USSR, which was naturally proud of its universal literacy, its scientists, its technical achievements and breakthroughs in the field of fundamental sciences, and even at such a difficult historical moment (recall that 1989 is the year of the actual beginning of the "parade of sovereignty", furious queues and wild shortages, the rise of organized crime, a year of miners' strikes and interethnic conflicts, smoothly turning in places into the massacre of the hottest Soviet peoples of their foreign neighbors) - how at such a time and in such a country could appear on state television, still completely non-commercial, so anti-scientific brainwashing delirium?
Promotional video:
Who let him go there?
Did the late pioneer of extrasensory perception leaked into the morning broadcast of the 1st channel of the Central Television Channel "120 Minutes" in the same way as the German air amateur Matthias Rust did on Red Square - simply because they missed it and did not notice? Of course not.
He was invited there by the television bosses - moreover, the party bosses, educated and ideologically savvy by position. He invited and sat in front of the camera wearing glasses to make passes, the explanation of the effect of which ignored all the laws of physics.
Thus, the ideological, with party ranks, the leadership at once simply took and canceled the strictly scientific approach, which, according to the logic, should have guided the Communist Party in its entertainment and educational work with the population.
And this speaks rather eloquently about who was actually the main initiator and engine of perestroika. And most importantly - who was the main carrier of the crisis that led to the collapse of the Soviet system and the Soviet state itself.
Ordinary citizens, of course, had many complaints about the government. Late Soviet life, of course, carried a lot of inconveniences - from those very queues for a shortage to banal boredom, since the official assortment of entertainment was, frankly, small and rather dull.
However, it was not the simple working class, but the privileged strata - the creative and scientific intelligentsia, the party and ideological elite - that experienced the deprivation in the cage of Soviet life much more strongly and sharply. Of those that had personal dachas or parents with personal dachas, and Volga with or without curtains, or access to something imported and exclusive, or checks to the Berezka store, or traveling abroad.
There was no paradox here. It was precisely the privileged strata, feeling themselves towering above the gray mass, at the same time feeling especially deprived of that set of various pleasures that their class brothers in capitalist countries had. And therefore, both in the “proto-perestroika” of the early 1980s, and in the actual perestroika, all their reflection focused on the question “how to get more freedom, how to throw off the shackles of these hypocritical ideological roles that the system forces us to play”.
In this sense, typical was the case of filming in the Georgian USSR in 1983, two years before the official start of perestroika, the film "Repentance" that was exposing and anti-Soviet in all its main features. One of the leading actors, the youngest and also from a privileged family, got so carried away that he became a terrorist and participated in a bloody attempt to hijack an airplane to Turkey with the shooting of flight attendants and passengers. This, however, did not prevent in 1987 with a roar and with the support of the entire party press to roll the film on the big screens of the USSR, followed by discussion in the central television studios.
Let us repeat: the themes of revising Soviet history (up to outright curses against it) and Soviet ideals (up to open mockery of them) were, first of all, not a “request from below”. They were promoted from above - those same late Soviet elitists, starving for opportunities, who had completely reliably lost their idealism and were eager to cash out their elite in the same way “as in the whole normal world”.
And therefore, together with perestroika, as older readers will remember, publicity was immediately announced. Which, in turn, resulted not simply in the abolition of censorship, but in the disappearance of restrictions in general.
And Allan Vladimirovich Chumak (together with his antagonist Anatoly Mikhailovich Kashpirovsky, who at least has a medical diploma and who did not pass off his methods of suggestion as Subtle Energies) turned out to be a characteristic, but not the most radical version of the "dam break".
After all, the banal common sense of the elite stratum thirsting for Freedom seemed then another kind of censorship. And banal decency too.
And the very next year after Chumak's debut, I, a twelve-year-old schoolboy, walking in my hometown in the west of the USSR along the station square in broad daylight, passed stalls with Black Hundred and, on the contrary, Russophobic newspapers; pornographic and "about UFOs"; Along with the finally allowed Stephen King, there was a license for the company "Mein Kampf", and the first recruiters of sects, later recognized as totalitarian, were guarding the minibuses.
… Well, then - very slowly, very gradually - the country came to its senses. After several local, but bloody wars, as well as several psychic epidemics (and there were such: remember the storming of Kiev by the sect of the "White Brotherhood", in fact, the first to run something like the Maidan, or the psychic Grabovoi, who made money on the "resurrection" of Beslan children), the country gradually healed from the "frenzy of freedom." And it developed antibodies - although yes, still clumsy, constantly misfiring and sometimes attacking generally innocent phenomena.
And those parts of the former united country that did not develop antibodies continue to suffer from this “frenzy of freedom” from time to time to this day. Let's not point a finger, but we must not forget that ecstatic races in the squares and belief in the magical amulets of embroidered shirts are the direct legitimate heirs of the creams that were once charged in front of the TV by ordinary Soviet people.
Victor Marakhovsky