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Exploiting Siberian witch doctors to support the Ukraine war
In mid-September, a very strange story appeared in leading German news-weekly Der Spiegel. Written by Mikhail Zygar, the founder of an anti-Kremlin TV channel who now lives in necessary exile in Berlin, it claimed insider knowledge of the true reasons for the visit of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to Mongolia that same month.
Officially, Putin was celebrating a shared military anniversary, but Zygar knew better: the President sought blessing from native shamans to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
More likely, Putin’s real reason for visiting was to discuss recent snags in oil and gas pipelines being routed to China via Mongolia, not to frequent witch doctors. However, this is Putin’s third visit to Mongolia in a decade, and he had stopped over beforehand in the southern Asiatic Russian Republic of Tuva, known for its strong shamanic traditions.
Zygar points out Tuva is also the birthplace of Sergei Shoigu, Putin’s former Defence Minister, with whom he often travelled to the area on summer camping-holidays, being photographed catching fish and swimming to look macho on-camera. Yet actually, says Zygar, Shoigu’s true purpose in leading Putin into Tuva’s forests was to convert him to shamanism, which sounds rather implausible.
But what was Zygar’s own true purpose in introducing such rather unlikely sounding tales into the international news-media?

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Vlad the Inhaler
Zygar’s Der Spiegel piece was soon recapitulated in the English-language Press with a raft of headlines like the following, from UK tabloid The Sun: “VLAD’S HORRORSCOPE: Barmy [i.e., ‘mad’] tyrant Putin met world’s most powerful mystical shamans to seek guidance for the Ukraine war”. There is a distinct possibility that Zygar’s story, based upon the testimony of conveniently anonymous “sources close to the Kremlin”, was simply either invented or fed to the dissident, in order to make “Mad Vlad”, as he is colloquially known, look even madder in the eyes of the wider world.
Soon, other rebels were joining in too. Traditionally, shamans often ingest hallucinogenic substances prior to enjoying their visions, and these media tale tellers seem to have been aiming at getting the general public to ask themselves just what Putin had been inhaling himself lately.
One social media account talked of how tame shamans had once performed a special rite for Putin, the spirits providing the prophecy that “a burning bird brings victory and death”, this “burning bird” apparently being a nuke. Allegedly, whilst in Tuva together, Putin and Shoigu had performed “the sacrifice of a black wolf in a rite” after which “A piece of white fabric was soaked with the wolf’s blood and burned” in a fire, causing a magical black raven to appear in the intoxicating smoke, which “circled for a long time”, a sure sign of spirit-world favour.
Putin’s former speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov, who fell foul of his old boss and now is also in exile, like Zygar, likewise took to the airwaves, warning of how all this proved Vlad was Bad as well as Mad. Gallyamov made dubious comparisons between Putin and Hitler, exploiting the fake old legend Adolf had similarly been obsessed with the occult: “Like Hitler, Putin sought a higher authority for his evil actions” by consulting shamans, he said. “It reminds me of Hitler with his … search for the Holy Grail.” It was actually Himmler who searched for the Sangraal, not Hitler, but never mind: the main aim was just to tarnish Putin’s name even further by association.
A real blood bath?
Gallyamov continued to explain that “nuclear weapons are the weapons of the gods … If a mere mortal wants to use the weapons of the gods, then he must undergo the appropriate rituals and receive the blessing of heaven.” But what if Putin was not a mere mortal?
Gallyamov thought Putin’s alleged meetings with shamans were organised by Mikhail Kovalchuk, a leading member of the Russian Academy of Sciences who has recently made headlines for his alleged efforts to create an immortality potion for his 70-plus-year-old boss, or at least some form of advanced life-extension method. Unfortunately, this January, one of Russia’s top researchers in this field, Vladimir Khavinson, died in St Petersburg aged only 77, perhaps suggesting this quest has not as yet been fully achieved.
Such gossip has also been linked back to persistent stories that Putin enjoys bathing in the blood of Siberian reindeers, drained from their severed antlers, believing it contains special ingredients that will make him live forever and boost his libido, like Countess Elizabeth Bathory in days of old.
Sergei Shoigu is supposed to have introduced the President to this ancient shamanic-style practice personally – but if so, it would just not make Putin into a full-blown occultist, just a fan of alternative medicine. Such fluid is a widely used remedy in Russia, with a whole industry devoted to making antler-blood pills, creams and vodkas. Even Russian Olympic athletes consume the stuff, to no apparent objection from IOC doping authorities. Britain’s King Charles III is famously into homeopathy. Does that make him a Satanist?
Ritual abuse
Are such wicked whispers Putin’s own fault? Shamanism is widely believed in across the Russian Federation, at least in the vast rural swathes of the nation which make up most of its huge landmass. Therefore, besides co-opting the Russian Orthodox Church as a compliant religious ally, the Kremlin has made moves to get shamans onside, too.
In 2022, Kara-ool Dopchun-ool, Russia’s Supreme Shaman – as artificial a position as “King of the Vampires” or “Top Imam”, newly created only in 2018 – held a prominent ceremony bringing together subordinate sorcerers from all over Russia to “ensure the protection of our land, our people, our Fatherland” by commanding the sacred spirits to “achieve victory over all enemies of the Great Bright Russia” on the battlefield in Ukraine. Such rituals definitely worked, Dopchun-ool assured watching cameras, as his own grandfather had been enlisted by Stalin to perform the very same ones to ensure Soviet victory over the Nazis in WWII – and the Soviets won, didn’t they?
Meanwhile, censors allow the publication of sensationalist fantasy novels like Viktor Pelevin’s 2004 bestseller The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, which portrayed FSB security agents performing strange shamanic rituals to ensure never-ending supplies of Siberian crude oil. To control shamans, and imply their powers are on your side, is an excellent way to manage public opinion in the countryside, where petrochemical prosperity during Russia’s economic boom years never fully reached.
Claiming asylum
Yet there is a danger in this tactic: what happens when a shaman appears who doesn’t support you? Beginning in 2018, a rebellious Yakut shaman named Alexander Gabyshev made repeated attempts to march on Moscow, hoping to gather an anti-Kremlin peasant-army, after God had told him Putin was quite literally a demon in human disguise who needed to be publicly exorcised from office, as he was destroying the nation and its people. Oddly enough, on this particular occasion the authorities did not prove so tolerant of the appointed messenger of Heaven, and threw Gabyshev into a mental asylum, where he lingers to this day.
In Russia, if you are a shaman who says you can speak to the right kind of spirits – those who support Putin – then you are not mad, just a holy prophet. If you say you can talk to the wrong kind of spooks, however – those who oppose Putin – then you are a total nutjob and must be locked away indefinitely for your own good.
As for Supreme Shaman Kara-ool Dopchun-ool’s opinion, he says Gabyshev is definitely insane. For him to do anything otherwise whilst Tsar Putin remains sitting on his throne would of course be sheer madness.
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Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest, “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science”, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, was released in 2023.
Image credit: The head shaman of Olkhon. Lake Baikal, Buryatia, Siberia
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