3.Phatic Evolution: Race and Geopolitics

PHATIC EVOLUTION

Claims to rational skepticism. Claims to critical thinking. Claims to genius. Claims that mental skills are inherent, inborn. Claims to superpowers. Such claims underwrite the tactics of both psychic and skeptical practices on the psychic stage. They both draw and dissolve lines dividing species (consider speculation about the psychic abilities of dolphins as “more evolved than we are”) and peoples, figuring even in ideological struggles to define geopolitical relations.

Anthropologist David Samuels (2005, 104) notes that telepathy—the ultimate clear channel—is frequently figured as characteristic of highly evolved beings (as in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land). In the 1960s world of Star Trek, where contact with aliens such as Vulcans has ended warfare on Earth, half-breed Spock can achieve the Vulcan mind meld, while the human crew on the Enterprise makes do with language and mechanical translators.

Samuels notes that telepathy is also depicted conversely as a lost sense that once linked humanity with all of nature, as in William Golding’s The Inheritors (1964), in which telepathic Neanderthals are replaced by Homo sapiens.1 The film Avatar (2009) does similar work: humanoid and other fauna communicate telepathically by joining pony tails and upload memories through the fibers of the World Tree. The power to make mental contact marks opposing ends along scales of both evolutionary progress and regression. A late Soviet comic film playing off them by negating them both is Kin-dza-dza! (1986), in which inhabitants of the desert planet Pljuk immediately understand earthling Russian via telepathy, while the spoken Pljukan lexicon is coarse and sparse (about ten words), and Pljukans themselves practice trickery and crooked trade.

In person, even in a single conversation people are quite able to switch up evolutionary values. In 2009 in Moscow, a celebrity psychic expounded to me in her office: “Nowadays we all have cell phones, we call each other and what do we say? We say: ‘Where are you?’ Compare that to the days of Atlantis, back then people were more advanced, because they had to feel each other.” By that logic, Soviet people untrained to the prosthetic cell phone channel, who stood in line at the post office to make calls, might have better commanded telepathic contact. Still, some minutes later the psychic spoke proudly about having appeared on a television program the year before devoted to the discovery of “meta” powers in specially evolved humans.

In Anglophone and Russophone worlds alike, writers and filmmakers have crafted characters who stand above and apart, especially when the superpower is mental. Such heroes may protect the dull masses (like the unfortunate Muggles in the Harry Potter universe) or work to improve the lumpen idiot classes (see Kukulin 2011; Lipovetsky 2013).2 In the United States, science fiction often lionizes a chosen one, usually a man, endowed with extrasensory capacities, fighting for freedom (“Use the force, Luke”). The genius raised above the rest strides through Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, both on the recommended reading list for the U.S. Marine Corps: “The few, the proud!” If American Ender is sadly alone in his brilliant awareness, so, too, is the Soviet hero whose mental powers outstrip those around him. In the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Hard to Be a God (1964), the protagonist is forbidden to reveal his advanced thinking or tools to inhabitants of a planet lower down the rungs of social evolution than his own; he is not to interfere in their progress (much as Star Trek fleets accept the prime directive, to make contact but not to interfere). Literary scholar Lipovetsky argues that the Strugatsky brothers called on readers—Soviet intellectuals—to fancy themselves as like the hero, as champions of liberty and of higher level thought, evolved over “the social/cultural/ethnic Other: ‘uneducated scum,’ immigrant workers from Central Asia, people from the Caucasus, etc.” (2013, 129). Science fiction in the United States closer to the Left, on the other hand, fears for the safety of the isolated, telepathic mutant—Octavia Butler’s Mind of My Mind treats genetic inheritance of telepathic ability as an allegory for postslavery systems of labor and kinship that re-create structures for exploitation. In the X-Men comics and films, psychic outcasts stand among other avatars for people who struggle for disability rights. Telepathic superheroes and outcasts starred in stories read on the Kansas plains and in the Urals hills.³

The evolutionary scales applied to telepathy parallel those apparent in evocations of phatic expertise. About twenty years ago a Moscow friend of mine, a designer, asked me for my thoughts on a book by political scientist Francis Fukuyama, a 1996 tract on trust, especially among strangers in markets. The thesis contrasted Russia to other countries as “less trustful,” aligning this deficiency with “lower levels of civilization,” as measured by GDP, election statistics, and infrastructure. The book projected something like phatic evolution by linking national cultures’ degrees and kinds of social trust to economic growth and electoral practices. Many in Russia during the late 1990s saw Soviet-raised persons as lacking both tools for accountability and skills for communication in the new markets and saw opportunity when Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) bustled to introduce these skills.4 At that time Fukuyama, like other political scientists, seemed to offer traction for changes my friend and others wanted to see. In decades to come, however, weary of foreign condescension, and as Western training failed to work magic, such assessments shifted.

MAGICAL ORIENTALISM AND IDEOLOGIES OF CONTACT

What can disturb phatic evolutionary scales? In 2012 an American who goes by the name Veet Mano (born in 1956 in Michigan) competed on Battle of the Psychics.⁵ A large man with white hair down to his shoulders and a short beard, who favors shimmery tunics over his teddy-bear frame, Veet was well liked by Russian viewers for his words of encouragement and warm hugs—exotically “American” styles of communication and contact. The show’s panel of phatic experts, however, described him over and again as no mage, reading the words and hugs as signs that he was merely an empathic, spiritually minded person and “a very good psychologist.” The summer before the season aired, one of the producers told me that everywhere they were filming, Veet was greeted with skepticism: “What kind of magic,” villagers near the small city of Tver’ had remarked to the crew, “can a Westerner do?”

By contrast, friends in Moscow asked each other (and me, as “our expert on Gypsies”), “Why do so many Eastern or Southern peoples win that show?”⁶ The orientalism conditioning these questions would sound familiar to scholars of European imperial and colonial expansion, who have argued that in order to claim rationalism, “Colonialism required native magic as its foil and ground” (Wiener 2003, 140; see also Latour 1993; Chakrabarty 1995; Khan 2008; Meyer and Pels 2003; Palmié 2011),⁷ while at the same time spiritualist, occult, magical, and paranormal performers and thinkers mined the East, the South, and the Primitive as sources for “human potentialities unknown to the West” (Jones 2009, 89). Not surprisingly, the show’s Moscow editors frequently reminded viewers that Veet had learned to channel energies in the East, not in America, through apprenticeship in Osho meditation with Indian mystic and guru Chandra Mohan Jain (aka Acharya Rajneesh in the 1960s, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh during the 1970s–1980s, and Osho from 1989).

The producers of Battle of the Psychics also draw from Soviet magical orientalism, which was itself never fully freed of imperial versions. Over the seasons, the show’s producers and editors have foregrounded contestants’ national, ethnic, and racialized identities by drawing from the images that once advertised Soviet internationalist and affirmative action policies, known by the shorthand Druzhba Narodov (Friendship of the Peoples). That project, even in its earlier, Leninist articulations, appropriated Russian imperial categories of nationality and race ostensibly to subvert them; raising the status of national minorities ultimately was supposed to undermine the pull of nationalism, rendering national distinctions merely decorative while building solidarity across classes. By late Soviet times, Druzhba Narodov had extended as an ideal beyond the USSR, promising, through socialist technical progress shared with all, to extend the reach of humanity—all of us—to explore the Arctic, the oceans, and outer space.

Since the inception of Battle of the Psychics in 2007, producers and editors of the show have arranged signs of regional and national identity to reflect the demographics not only of the current Russian state, but also of the former USSR, featuring psychics hailing not only from distant Russian cities but also from former Soviet Republics. The parade of Asian energies, Siberian shamanisms, folk magics, and paranormal sciences performed on Bitva stretches across the formerly multinational empire. Viewers easily draw parallels with Soviet-era slogans and imagery, fluently pointing out and making use of the very national categories and signs of identity solidified and even created during Soviet times,8 as evidenced by passionate participation in Internet conversation threads about the show and its contestants.

On screen, the supposedly exceptional magical skill of easterners and southerners does not go unremarked. Producers and editors of Battle of the Psychics script commentary to stress “national color/variation.” Narrative voice-over names certain contestants by nationality, claiming them: “Our Daghestanka.” Melodies and instruments made familiarly ethnic in Soviet film and radio play for Burjat, Kazakh, and Romani contestants. Russian-identified psychics are labeled not by nation or place, but by specialty or mast’ (“suit”), as “self-taught psychic and former lawyer” or “witch by heredity.” The editors also highlight unscripted comments made on camera. In an episode from season 12, two of the magician-experts sit with witnesses at closed circuit video monitors. They register various shades of anxiety about the movements of a tsyganka (“Gypsy”) psychic. They watch the master of ceremonies announce that each contestant will take a turn standing inside a ring of fire; as flames slip closer, they must divine which of several fire trucks parked outside the circle is actually loaded with water. When the “Gypsy psychic” takes her turn, she asks the magician handling test conditions to give her his hand. His brothers watching mutter, “Oh! She will snatch his wedding ring.” Later in the same episode, contestants are escorted into a room where a baby lies in a crib in front of six seated men; their task is to name the father. When the “Gypsy psychic” leans closer to see the baby, the mother, watching on closed circuit television, takes fright, asking to stop the trial.

FIGURES 3.1 AND 3.2.    Publicity photo for Battle of the Psychics taken early in a season. For comparison, a photo taken in the 1960s to document a celebration of Soviet-era Friendship of Peoples.

Over the years people in the United States, Russia, and European countries have warned me to take precautions against the “hypnotic gaze” of Gypsy women, said to manipulate with gesture, gaze, and even flashes of color—with inborn, magically dramatic flair, as if combining native performing skill and sleight of hand with real sorcery.9 Russian and Soviet books, poems, and films have long linked Gypsy magic to visions of imperial extension and Russian soul (Lemon 2000a). These links, like those made on Battle, reveal less about Roma and more about social ideologies of contact and avoiding contact: Beware her eyes! Don’t let her touch you!

While Battle mobilizes imagery from Soviet anti-imperial and antiracist policies, some viewers and contestants deploy Friendship of the Peoples to criticize the show. Challenging the show’s contestants on the Internet—their credentials and abilities—provides its own entertainment. On one website devoted to Battle and its stars, the blogger (a previous contestant) describes one season as it winds down by speculating about the pregnancy of contestant Tydyv, a clairvoyant from Central Asia. Below the text, he inserts a screen shot of the show’s main expert on psychic powers, Professor Mikhail Vinogradov. Over the image, the blogger has superimposed a white frame and a caption that reads: “Return of Budulaj. Who fathered Tydyv’s child—the secret will be revealed.” The joke assumes the reader remembers late Soviet media: Budulaj was the protagonist of a 1970s film and television series, both based on a 1960s novel titled Gypsy. Budulaj, a World War II veteran whose wife was felled by a Nazi tank, now travels the Russian countryside seeking army comrades and kin, fighting prejudice and enlightening Gypsy nomads along the way. The well-known story both incorporates progressive images of “New Soviet Gypsies” and typecasts the Gypsy as natural performer, with magical musicality pulsing under the skin; in the television series Return of Budulaj, Budulaj loses his memory until he plays a harmonica and recalls his true Gypsy self. It turns out that Budulaj has a son, a fact concealed because the adoptive mother has claimed that a Tatar grandfather gave him a “swarthy face.” The boy betrays his blood when he learns to dance from visiting Gypsy youths, picking up the steps immediately. The secret—who the father is—is revealed to be Budulaj.

The blogger’s montage layers Battle of the Psychics with Soviet televisual intertext: Tydyv’s unborn child is equated to Budulaj’s son. But why is this mixed up with Vinogradov, who recruits psychics from all over the formerly Soviet world to work in his investigation group? Are we to imagine that a former researcher for the Soviet military is the secret father? Or will he detect the secret? Is this a jab at the show, at phatic expertise? Are the targets Soviet nationalities policies, the absurdity of Soviet utopian dreams in the present? Does the joke play off propaganda about the birth rates of “non-Europeans” in Russia?

Veet, even representing a rival state, arouses less controversy, perhaps because the show mobilizes local political contexts more than it does the Cold War axis in much telepathy science fiction. In any case, the West lacks magic. All the same, the American Veet won several episodes and made it to the season finale. The Romani contestant was likewise judged against type and was eliminated for allegedly using ordinary senses and logic rather than extrasensory channels. Formulae that map Gypsy and American to extreme ends of magical evolutionary scales could not have predicted these outcomes—and these are not exceptions to prove a rule. Interactions—even mass-mediated ones structured by reality shows—always riddle racial logic with apparent contradictions. Racism remains active not because it is consistent with practice, but because its logic finds circular proof in material encounters that have, in fact, already been structured by legislative and social processes.

RACE, MATTER, AND INFRASTRUCTURE

Infrastructures seem to exist for anyone, but they do not. Contact with them is regulated, and infrastructures themselves regulate contact. In this we see the everyday workings of racism and also can begin to ask: What else, besides racism, does racialization activate? In this way we see how racializing forces affect domains not usually considered racialized, people not usually treated as raced. How does racialization affect everybody? Institutions that racialize—industries that divide labor, city streets that outline neighborhoods—also modify the ways any contacts come about, the ways any channels for communication work—or fail—and for whom.

FIGURE 3.3.    An early scene from Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). A world conference decides the fate of the space mission. Americans watching this scene have been puzzled—“But aren’t Russians white?”—not recognizing that in the Soviet future of cosmic exploration, as in some American versions, to be the world has transcended nation states.

Such successes and failures afforded the superpowers competing ways to claim “freedom of speech” versus “equality.” Americans were able to claim freedom by erasing the making and maintenance of channels that segregate—even while describing Soviet censorship. As meanwhile the Soviets targeted American inequalities.

After World War II, European empires disintegrated. Both the United States and the Soviet Union courted former colonies, competing to promise both infrastructural development and racial equality.10 They painted similar futures for peoples across the world: mechanized irrigation, moving sidewalks, talking computers, and rapid space travel would one day lift all humanity equally from conflict and toil.¹¹ In the 1950s mainstream Soviet and U.S. science fictions alike peopled this cosmopolitan future with international interstellar crews, as if competing to depict diversity in space. On board the SS Tantra of Ivan Efremov’s novel Andromeda Nebula (1959) we meet the African man Mven Mass; on board the USS Enterprise we find Uhura and Sulu.¹² While scholars have detailed the corresponding promises for modernity across the United States and the USSR, journalistic writers and political speakers still prefer to erase similarities and connections; in the early twenty-first century, it remains expedient to forget how Soviet and American public relations shared goals, methods, and styles. It was not only Coca-Cola who wanted to “teach the world to sing in perfect harmony”.¹³

With decolonization, racism became a key term in Cold War ideological battles. Each superpower asserted its rival’s violence and repression—white racism here, anti-Semitism there, each side calling out the other’s proxy war moves, denying its own. On the level of diplomatic competition, both deployed artists, musicians, ballet troupes, and chess players, each claiming its own system better sparks creativity and freedom.14 Such a measure of civilizational advance preceded the Cold War, having already crystallized in G.W.F. Hegel;¹⁵ the USSR and the United States both drew from movements of emancipation and suffrage begun in the eighteenth century, inheriting moral and political philosophies written by men whose governments touted freedom for some through institutions that restricted others—through land-tenure and literacy laws after serfdom and slavery (Buck-Morss 2000a; Trouillot 1995).

Processes that cross periods, institutions, and territories amplify the force and appeal of racism. Becoming “white” or “European” has depended on transregional manufacture of race: circuits of Atlantic and Ottoman slave trade fed North American versions, and the networks and institutions that racialized there did not terminate, but unfolded across still other borders. More recently, both Moscow skinhedy and Chicago skinheads align with white supremacists farther away, be they West or East, downloading graphics and strategies from the Internet.

One way to track how racism moves and settles in is to concentrate on infrastructures,¹⁶ divisions of space and access to material objects, such as tools that configure ways people experience limitations of action and interaction—who handles the keys, who holds the steering wheel, and who immerses their hands in hot dish water?¹⁷ How do these handlings interface with social relations?

Cold War era racializations involved organizing human relations to material objects, tools and infrastructures, commodities and dwellings. In Moscow as in Detroit, not everyone encountered public transit or water supplies in the same ways. American Jim Crow shared similarities with the rules of Russian imperial pales of settlement, echoed in Soviet propiska (residence permit) rules, systems that concatenated with institutions (educational committees, medical clinics, editorial boards, voting places) and materials that anchored them (buildings, furniture, tools, decorations, identification papers). Similar as they were, systems also diverged. Both black automakers in Detroit and Romani metro builders in Moscow encountered their cities differently than did people marked “white” or “European”—and yet differently again from each other. Well-worn debates about which economic system produced better material goods, who crafted pavement, tea, or blankets of higher quality, are only partly at issue. What matters more is attention to who handles what.

To make useful contrasts and comparisons has been difficult because scholars of and in the region long declined to recognize racial categories in Soviet or imperial practice.18 Soviet policy treated race as a construct belonging to capitalism; the government barred racial categories in policy language. Despite the intentions of the state, Soviet people, like those anywhere, signaled racializing thinking without racial terms or even corporeal signs (such as complexion), deriving signs of race from objects (gold teeth, dollar bills) and practices (dancing, hunting).¹⁹ We live race through spatial practices that join and separate activities, material things, and bodies—and that channel communications. To return to the comparative task: the intersections of matter and race in each state differed for historical reasons, and those differences have generated still other effects. These effects are especially apparent when things break down.

Both states promised to erase segregation and discrimination not by enlightenment alone, but also by achieving automation. Through better infrastructures. On the starship Enterprise, a machine delivers meals on command; one supposes that the toilets clean themselves (I assume the same for the teenage starship crew searching for alien contact in MosFil’m’s 1973 Moscow-Cassiopia).²⁰ Eventually, however, both socialist and capitalist realities faced a similar problem: neither actually achieved computer-delivered meals or self-cleaning latrines; neither reached “full development” or “world communism.” The things that each system built—the dams, reactors, bridges—started to fall apart, contradicting modernist dreams in both the first and second worlds. In Gary, Indiana, and in Sverdlovsk, the Urals, flights crashed and roofs collapsed, housing towers crumbled, and nuclear reactors leaked or imploded. During the same decades, broken public telephones dotted Chicago and Perm’. Similar material crises posed similar doubts about the promises of either economic system to deliver smooth, clean infrastructures—and about the capacity of infrastructures to deliver social equality, justice, and freedom.²¹

Things break down everywhere. In the Urals and in Arkansas alike I have seen people improvise engine belts with string; in Detroit and in Moscow, entire cars are held together by duct tape. Similar material ruptures, however, have not had the same political and social effects. Nor has knowledge of such effects been distributed in the same ways. Elites in each place encountered ruptures differently than did nonelites, but those differences themselves differed markedly. First of all, we need to acknowledge the obvious point that being elite in the United States could involve much larger accumulations of individual and family property in land (along with things like multiple cars and access to quality education) than did being elite in the USSR. Being elite in the USSR involved living in the centers of large cities, shopping occasionally in special stores, or knowing the people who ran factories, hospitals or other institutions. Or being approved to travel abroad. Even among the Soviet-era elite, there were those who did not, for example, own a car, but who might attend tomorrow’s ballet by making a phone call (and there were also nonelites who might manage both to own a car and acquire ballet tickets). The following discussion clarifies differences between the elites by contrasting the separations in each society between elites and others.

During the late Cold War U.S. elites could easily separate their experiences from those of people living close to broken factory gates and ruptured pipes. In the USSR they could not. In the 1980s Chicago dwellers of means could organize daily trajectories to circumvent housing projects, to see their dark windows only from the IC train. Late Soviet nomenklatura lived well, more often in the sturdy, central buildings, but they were not cloistered in neighborhoods cut off from public transit or in cul de sacs (this began only in the late 1990s). Dwelling in a majestic Moscow Stalinist building did not shelter a person from using other structures, never ruled out visits to school friends living in communal apartments. Soviet elites sometimes frequented special stores and clinics, but not always, and they too encountered infrastructures falling apart. Even decades later, city powers have not yet banished nonelites from the center, and penniless friends still socialize with schoolmates who have moved up.

By contrast, in the United States, perhaps more so during the Cold War, prolonged exposure to infrastructural breakdown was a matter of segregation, by race and class. Soviet nationalities policies and practices enacted and defined ethnic, national, and racial identities (see Hirsch 2005; Martin 2001; Slezkine 1996; Weitz 2002) and forms of labor discrimination, but they did not segregate entire neighborhoods. While the American interstates and other infrastructures cut off such neighborhoods, the Soviet train did not channel elites away from points where Soviet modernity fell apart.

To be sure, discrimination shaped many lives in Soviet and imperial Russian urban capitals, through pales of settlement and permits denying residence within one hundred kilometers of the city to ex-convicts or people labeled “Gypsies.” People living in Romani settlements faced violence and structural exclusion, as did Muslims in Kazakh and Tatar towns along the Volga, in the Urals, and in Crimea. All the same, experience of shortages and breakdowns impinged upon everyone, not just these people or the poorest, and in ways that gave everyone reason to complain. That is, Soviet forms of segregation articulated with Soviet infrastructures and access to material resources differently than did those of the United States.

PHATIC INFRASTRUCTURE AND DOUBLE VISION

Material infrastructures can act as phatic infrastructures that make it possible for people to communicate—or can merge with social forces that separate people. The latter sort especially affect which people learn or do not learn about material breakdowns and about their social extent. Here the superpower states diverge: the Soviet Union could not channel information about material failures away from the elite and along racialized lines at once, while the United States could. A full, book-length discussion of these processes would need to go further to compare each state’s elites—what it meant to be elite, how elite was elite—but for the purposes of this argument, the distinction holds. For example, an elite Moscow student in the 1980s might have had little cash but free tickets to the symphony every week. Having lived among the poorest and wealthiest in both states, I could give many and numerous further examples of who is aware or not of how others live. The divergence in the very possibilities for perceiving and reflecting upon troubled infrastructure was itself productive, insofar as it also distorted the ways people opposed the capitalist to socialist worlds.

If anything can work smoothly across the United States, it is the interstates, moving cars through standardized systems of truck plazas and rest stops. My Russian visitors always marvel at the uniformity and the boredom of the interstates. The interstates, by the way, do not advertise which of their exits lead to sundown towns, places where one is afraid to be caught while black after dark. These towns are easy to miss from I-80, making it easy to imagine that racism does not exist across the wholesome Midwest. Many who drive through Nebraska believe it is completely flat. It is not; the interstate follows a river valley and has been graded, and beyond it the land undulates in waves that produce, from the top of some, a dizzying vertigo. Passers-through may think that everyone in the state is white, not tuning into Lakota or Winnebago broadcasts that belie claims of disappearance.

To be sure, plenty of white people know America from behind plastic bags stretched across window frames. Plenty of black and brown people live in homes of suburban comfort. Near army bases, old factories, and prisons, white and black and brown worlds alike are scruffy, peeling, drafty, and in need of repair. Yet wealthy white families rarely live in underserved neighborhoods, while due to a legacy of racist real estate discrimination, wealthy black families sometimes do. Thus, poverty and infrastructural inequality remain difficult for American white elites to see, or even to hear about, as classmates and neighbors do not move in those spaces either.

Journalists in the United States do publish stories about poverty, documenting struggles with tenement owners, sometimes titillating with glimpses of meth moms and cat hoarders. But here is another key difference: among the white wealthy in these journalists’ audiences, print or video sources do not layer with additional channels for knowledge, such as daily sensory knowledge or face-to-face talk. The mere state of being in proximity can make people, too, into phatic infrastructures.22 Children in elementary schools know full well that bodily proximity opens opportunities to whisper, to pass notes; this is why middle school teachers separate talkative friends. And this is one reason that property laws regulate where people can assemble. Unless U.S. elites become very curious or otherwise motivated, they do not learn how many poor there are, how they live. They are rarely forced to triangulate media accounts that would trouble what they see and hear, or work against their haptic awareness of comfort, to offer other knowledge through the body, the cold wind on the walk to school, the smell of a leaky gas line. They are cut off from social channels where knowledge of troubles passes through family talk, along circuits of neighborhood hospitality. They do not know breakdown through combinations of multiple bodily sensations, contact channels, and media, combinations that afford what W.E.B. DuBois recognized as “double consciousness” (1903) the ability, often thrust upon one, to perceive more than one social ontology at a time—and to perceive how others perceive the self, usually through a distorted lens, such as that of racism.

American elites might read about material conditions in prison, but few do time. It is a truism that to read an exposé of prisons is not the same as to live in one. This is not what I am trying to say. Rather, some U.S. citizens learn breakdown or poverty through multiple channels: a press report triangulates against an uncle’s stories, one’s own sensations, or the fact of the absence of a brother. Others learn only through a single source of mediation, such as a good documentary. During the height of the Cold War, U.S. elites lacked occasion to layer and contrast mediations, even to try to contrast footage of a fire across town to haptic knowledge of flimsy walls and the smell of leaky gas lines.

Within the respective superpowers, channels by which such knowledge might move crossed social fields differently. In the USSR, knowledge of ruptures in the promise of modern comfort, or knowledge of incarceration conditions, was not channeled by racial segregation. Soviet labor camps, harsh as they were, did not imprison Roma or Ingush or Estonians at rates higher than Russians. Both states saw comparable rates of incarceration and forced labor,23 but it was in the Unites States that prison became a continuation of racialized slave labor. Moreover, while U.S. elites famously managed to avoid incarceration, Soviet elites were just as famously incarcerated, as during imperial times. Soviet elites and intellectuals ate prison food and breathed in bad prison factory ventilation. Prison also brought them into contact and conversation with people from other demographics. Many prisoners received amnesty in the 1950s and 1960s, and many (including Sergei Dovlatov, Yevgenija Ginzburg, Varlam Shalamov, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn) published prison memoirs and exposés. Even the best placed urban people had relatives or friends who had done time or lived in exile.

That is, people knew of troubles on the highway projects, in the factories, in the new settlements, and in the prisons well before people like Solzhenitsyn published about them. Contradictions to Soviet modernist fantasy could not be contained, as they could be in the United States, within “bad neighborhoods.” Intellectuals, scientists, and cultural elites lived in communal apartments with engineers and street cleaners. Some won spots in special buildings, say, for writers, but still did not undertake daily errands, work, or school untouched by late socialist-era shortage or decay. Moscow streets could seem utopian compared to muddy village roads and rusting busses farther out, yet people did venture farther out, and often, to cultivate gardens or visit family in Ukraine or Siberia, for weeks or a month at a time; city people did not live only in the city. Naïveté about material lack, shortages, or breakdown simply was not possible. Urban registration permits only buffered communication; they prevented many Roma from living in the cities, for example, but did not sever all talk across most categories. There was no equivalent to the wealthy Americans who never ride the subway, who fly but never take the Greyhound bus, versus those who never fly. Soviet soft-class train cabins (two beds at ground level) sometimes separated nomenklatura from people riding in ordinary cabins (four sleeping bunks, behind a sliding door) or in platzkart (a dozen or more bunks across an open car), but the station latrines were for everyone. The USSR, investing in trains rather than highways, made Soviet long-distance train cars into another phatic infrastructure, bringing strangers into prolonged proximal contact, all the more so as passengers on Soviet trains expected to share talk and provisions—to do otherwise was impractical and not much fun.

To counter exceptional thinking about these matters, we have moved back and forth across the superpowers not merely to compare and contrast. Our next task is to situate, in relation to these, more loudly proclaimed comparisons and their effects.

CHANNELS TO FREEDOM

In the Cold War–era United States, pockets of material lack, decay, and violent rupture that poked holes in American modernist dreams were disproportionately distributed across racialized spaces, infrastructures, and social networks that, even when they extended beyond one space to another, did not connect everyone in the same way. Roads, for example, offered mobility (to some) while also cutting vision: road grading and concrete walls channeled the perception of those who passed, windows up, through drive-by lands or fly-over country. In the Cold War United States, muckraking reportage did not reproduce layers combining sensory and mediated knowledges; such layers piled up for some, while others only saw the film or read the book.24 These relatively local divisions of the known allowed elites to invest in flawed claims to American exceptionalism and to do so in ways that still disrupt diplomatic process and justify geopolitical aggression.

Moreover, segregation in the United States could impede knowledge without particular agents, such as censors, and without needing to actively block broadcast or print channels. Consider the uprisings in Detroit in the summer of 1967, which some called race riots and others named urban revolt, action for social justice. In the decades after the events in Detroit, no one had to actively censor accounts of them in schoolbooks, because those who continued to live there had little access to any of the presses that manufactured high school texts—or to mainstream broadcast media.²⁵ Elite white Americans noticed nothing missing; it still takes most a leap of effort to attend to such histories. White high school students during the 1980s did not ask why Angela Davis was not mentioned in social studies. If American kids did not already know about Detroit or Angela Davis from friends and relatives, they might not learn until decades later, if ever.

What need was there to censor black, brown, or “white trash” voices when segregating spaces and limiting access to media technologies prefilters them?²⁶ For all America’s vaunted spatial mobility, to move North to work did not mean freedom to join the golf club and there to chat, face to face, about the need for regional public transit. In towns where black people could not (de facto, if not de jure) swim in white pools, what need was there to monitor communications among the kids? In our town, one could count on teenagers to beat girls and boys who stood in their swimsuits at the fence, talking through the links. Infrastructures—and rules for their engagement—could cut channels before any necessity to censor content. In the United States, those who did not experience the world as broken hardly spoke to those who did.

By contrast, in the USSR such things were passed along—in visceral, haptic terms, along social links, even through media subject to censorship. Again, Soviets who served time and knew prison conditions were not marked as descendants of racialized slave labor (even if their grandparents had been serfs)—everyone knew of these things, they simply did not speak of them in most settings (Platt 2016). Their number included many with higher education, people who worked in central bureaucracies, whose kin worked in publishing offices. They knew where to borrow typewriters, how to strategize manuscript circulation. Their words were censored in the mainstream press, but still such people had recourse to parallel networks leading to printing houses outside the country, such as Ardis Press in Ann Arbor, or to journals in Paris. They spread the very complaint of censorship far and wide. Solzhenitsyn, even after serving time, was vastly better connected than most people in the United States who have been jailed or imprisoned.27 In the United States, reports of abuse of authority, corruption, bad prison conditions, military malfunctions, misappropriations of highway funds, and so forth did come out in leaks. The elites, when they read about them, could digest it all separately from their own experience.

These different intersections enabled Americans to figure the United States as a haven for freedom of speech compared to the USSR. We could even occasionally acknowledge racism while simultaneously erasing the means by which we limited perception of racist conditions. We could lionize the muckracking journalism that occasionally brought topics above ground—even while rationalizing structures that made overt censorship unnecessary. People in gated neighborhoods could look at the USSR as if that place over there were the source of all that is zoned, walled, and censored.²⁸ This is how many Americans could believe that we all had freedom of speech. Segregation obviated direct censorship. Privileged Americans could imagine themselves luckier than those poor, brainwashed, Soviet robots.

Conversely, the USSR could pretend to racial equality, but meanwhile (and perhaps as a result) left acts of censorship visible. Soviets could believe that they lived without racism, while abandoning any illusion of living without censorship. The two countries generated mirrored contradictions, as neither consistently championed either freedom or equality. In denying this, we have been trapped in competitive, Hegelian distortions, unable to sort out how our own repressions have fed others’. Sharing a genealogy, our blind spots overlap: twentieth-century Americans invested in believing “we are free” while calling out (in limited ways) racism; Soviets could believe “we are equal” while calling out censorship.

These blinders are still effective. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, I led several groups of American students to Russia. One year, our group finally included two students of color. They were shocked by comments about race that they encountered in Moscow and equally puzzled that such talk seemed to contradict genuine signs of goodwill. We encountered more trouble, however, when in a meeting with Russian students, the group was asked, “In the US, do you fear your own police?” The white students replied, “Of course not, we are free.” One of the students of color interjected, “Are you KIDDING! Maybe that is how it is in YOUR family!” I made the same error when, while driving Moscow friends through South Dakota, a state patrolman pulled me over for speeding and let me go with a gentle warning. They asked me the same question, and I answered with the same forgetful, “No, we are not afraid, not in this state.” Americans in the twenty-first century are becoming more aware of police surveillance and violence that profiles black and brown, of the destruction of water supplies on reservations and in industrial towns like Flint, but those who have not lived in such places have to work harder to see and then not to unsee them.

MATTER THAT CHANNELS

European modernists have been projecting unfreedom elsewhere for a long time, all the while relying on institutions of slavery and incarceration to build democracy and liberty—for some but not for all (Trouillot 1995; Buck-Morss 2000b). Cold War media institutions reinforced this tendency, adding new institutions that augmented the ways segregation obviated censorship in the United States—while increasing the visibility of censorship in the USSR. To proceed more attentively means to doubt whether only Western institutions allow open exchange of ideas and that socialist societies always mire communication in bureaucratic “wooden language” (Thom 1989; Seriot 2002), barring people from “living in Truth” (Havel 1987; for a critique, see Gal 1995, 2005).

After World War II the United States expended enormous resources to broadcast information to compete with local media in the socialist world, establishing Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 1949 in Munich. RFE/RL, or just “The Radios,” names an organization of two services, the first aimed at Eastern European and the second at Soviet territories. Its stated mission was to serve as a surrogate free press in places where the press was “banned, censored, or incompletely established.” The Soviet state, in response, spent nearly as much to block these broadcasts. Such jamming, along with restrictions on travel and on currency trade, embodied those obstacles that together some call the “Iron Curtain.” Once again, it is crucial not only to compare and contrast but also to acknowledge connections across borders—including chains of events and discourse founded in comparison itself.

For decades, radio stations funded by U.S. and British agencies (including the CIA), edged close to Soviet bloc territories. Occupying German and Japanese soil, the U.S. State Department was well positioned to beam waves from Munich and Tokyo. Moscow, by contrast, commanded fewer geographic broadcast points that could reach the Western Hemisphere farther than Alaska (my stepfather served there during the Korean War, listening in with his army Russian on military shortwave). Buffered by Mexico and Canada, the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, the United States had little occasion to worry about its people tuning in to Radio Moscow, all the more as U.S. citizens were educated with comparatively little attention to languages besides English. American citizens were insulated by oceans, continents, and language barriers—and also by a market that barely produced shortwave radios.

Short waves reach farther than FM or AM medium and long waves; they bounce off the globe’s surface into the ionosphere (particles in the atmosphere) and then back down again, thus zigzagging across the globe rather than flying straight into the horizon (see Yurchak 2015b, 341–54). Radios sold in the Soviet market reached across all the wave lengths, especially shortwave. It was a gigantic space to broadcast over. As one historian of the Radio Free Europe project described this: “[I]n one of the most bizarre examples of incompetence in the history of the Soviet Union, despite the billions of dollars spent on jamming, the Soviet State itself saw to it that its citizens had cheap short-wave radios, which they used to listen to Western propaganda through the jamming” (Nelson 1997, xv); while “the salt in the wound was that in the United States, England, West Germany, and other countries, mass production of short wave radios, on which Soviet programs could be heard, had stopped” (ibid, 93). That is, Moscow broadcasts might have reached Americans (and perhaps then called for obvious jamming)—except that less than 0.1 percent of radio sets sold in the United States could receive shortwave. If the United States had produced shortwave receivers in surplus, would we have celebrated listening to stations from around the world? Would we have doubled down on lack of support for foreign language learning with domestic jamming? If not, would we have called that a chaos of freedom or “bizarre … incompetence”? The Soviet Ministry of Communications did propose to end mass production of shortwave radios in 1954, but it did not, although after 1958 some waves were trimmed from the dials.

Readers not raised in the Soviet Union may not realize that jamming was irregular, focusing on certain foreign programs and letting many others through. The state in fact encouraged listening to foreign broadcasts (Yurchak 2015b), encouraged learning languages and listening to global news (the Radios distinguished themselves by broadcasting versions of local news). No Soviet-era government, neither in the USSR nor in the socialist bloc, ever made listening to foreign broadcasts illegal; many did believe that it was, and testified to arrests for charges on other grounds, like black marketeering or holding foreign currency (Nelson 1997). The stakes of listening were sometimes high—but sometimes not. The point for contrast is that Soviet citizens were constantly confronted with radio waves, audible, offering themselves to be alternately tuned into and lost again to jamming or static. Americans were not. Radios waves were prefiltered by material supply; the channels were simply not available to most, and there was no material infrastructure, machine or waves, to tinker with. We could imagine ourselves free to listen because we did not encounter jamming to signal a channel underneath.

America broadcast messages to the Soviet world that were designed to heighten residents’ perception of interference with information channels. Early on, the U.S. Congress tasked the Radios to “refute Soviet misstatements and lies more quickly” in order to encourage resistance (ibid, 36). Another of the Radios’ mandates was to help exiles of those countries to broadcast back;29 the CIA contacted Soviet émigrés specifically to amplify their perspectives on Soviet policies and to influence events and opinions back home (Kind-Kovacs, 2013). Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty hired émigré native speakers to speak on the air, while American-born scholars and journalists joined them off air to structure broadcasts. A geopolitically inflected division of communicative labor took hold.

Broadcasts were designed to point out discrepancies, to maximally contrast with information given by local media, and thus to shape a sense of censorship. This style of information combat became familiar in many places (during the 2016 U.S. elections, many who accused news services like Russia Today of similar tactics clearly seem not to know the history of American broadcasting overseas). The Radios worked in two stages each day: first, the research department monitored local broadcasts, both for event news to pass up to the State Department and for points to refute. Second, broadcast groups crafted refutations for recognizably native voices to read alongside other programming. Sources that detail this work are few; I can provide a firsthand account, having worked at RFE/RL for a full year just after it moved from Munich to Prague, in the research department in 1995–1996 as it was being transferred to the Soros foundation,30 renamed the Open Media Research Institute. Still partly under the jurisdiction of the U.S. State Department, we labored for two bosses at once. I was a new hire (the Soros Foundation, not the State Department, had requested an analyst aware of Romani issues, able to read Romani); my colleagues had worked at the Radios for years, surviving a culling in Munich. Our job, every morning, was to sift through international and local newswires from Prague to Bishkek, across a dozen languages. We were to paraphrase those texts for the English-language digest sent to the U.S. State Department and other elite subscribers. The digest allotted each country two or three separate items, a small paragraph each; as one might expect, only certain topics passed through the editorial filter. Romani news, rather than having its own dedicated space, was counted into the quota for the relevant state, and thus was often cut to make room for news about visits of ministers without portfolio, and so forth. While we might not call this censorship, these institutional practices channeled media via national and racial logics.

From 8:00 to 10:30 every morning, analysts raced the clock to read the wires, then sputtered through last-minute struggles with editorial staff over which chunks of text would make it into distribution by 11:00 A.M. Each morning our department would send a person to attend the meeting with the Radios’ liaison for the U.S. State Department, held at the broadcasting headquarters in central Prague (our offices were further out in the city). State Department staff would have read the previous daily digest, and at this meeting the liaison would brief the RFE/RL broadcasters about which local stories they ought to respond to on air. In Munich, I was told, relations had been tighter among State Department, analytic department, and radio broadcasters, everyone united under one roof, one authority. Before 1990s restructuring, the process proceeded more efficiently, analysts monitoring and digesting local media, State Department staff vetting it up lines of command, passing guidance back down for broadcasters to shape. A lot of specialization is involved in crafting communications to stress flaws in enemy channels, painstaking work to find inaccuracies or misrepresentations, to counter even small details with alternative information. Many described this as a necessary antidote against mendacious Soviet media, and depicted Soviets who tuned in to RFE/RL as demonstrating the will of the people, the will to listen themselves to freedom, from which an objective view of the repressive forces of socialist censorship would become clear.

The Soviet state was not positioned to make similar assaults on U.S. media (there were as yet no proliferations of warring Internet sources spinning the same video in seven directions, no Russia Today television network). Very few Americans encountered any foreign media, much less foreign media that purposefully echoed back to them the inconsistencies and omissions of local media day after day, over decades. There was, in corollary, no need for the audible, obvious noises of jamming.

In contrasting political conditions for media, phatic infrastructures, and the divisions of labor that maintain them, I am not proposing that the Soviets did not censor. Nor would I deny that people living near U.S. military bases or nuclear test sites could sense that something was being blocked (see Brown 2001; Masco 2004; Lepselter 2005). The point is that the Soviet state could never render censorship practices invisible, while the United States did not need to; it could rely on naturalized conditions—from racial segregation to the absence of shortwave radios—to limit media from elsewhere, without having to exercise overt censorship. And so it is not really so ironic that, a decade after the USSR had dissolved, it was the International Monetary Fund that subsidized consolidation of post-Soviet Russian media into oligarchs’ hands.

STATIC AND THE TELEPATHIC BODY

Claims about censorship under socialism arose not only as channels were blocked, but also as channels multiplied. Varied experiences of different overlays of channels and obstacles created diverging anxieties about and hopes for communication, about contacts desired and dangerous. For a teenager at the radio dial in Surgut, both to succeed and to fail to tune in made distant barriers into closer and more tangible things-to-be-overcome. Citizens of socialist states were made all the more aware of foreign broadcasts, waves sometimes palpable when jammed by competing broadcasts. Excess radio noise demanded to be interpreted. Television crackles did not generate the same interpretants for people in Paris or Moscow or Omaha or Kungur. The noises of failed or blocked transmission might evoke similar hopes and fears, but not the same ones in the same combinations for the same sets of people. People in the USSR and in the United States expected different engagements and effects even from similar media.31 For some, static signaled fears of siege or infiltration, while others hoped for jazz trivia, and still others for alien messages.

The topic of telepathy opens a fresh vantage point onto the making of media expectations in the USSR, both because it manifested through transnational communications and because it was itself subject to censorship. In the USSR, telepathy was among the topics subject to restriction, along with nationalism, man-made disasters, violence, sexuality, and religion. While in 1923 Bernard Kazhinskij had published a book arguing that telepathy rides electromagnetic waves, Thought Transfer (printed alongside early Soviet-era fiction on mind control like Alexander Belyaev’s 1926 Lord of the World), from the late 1930s until the 1960s the topic almost never surfaced in the papers or television, only in live performances. Then, in 1985, when Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the reforms known as glasnost’, these were the very topics that bubbled into print and broadcast. Starting that year, media producers were encouraged to allow more debate and to produce investigative journalism. The state loosened procedures governing access to media, including face-to-face channels for embodied mediation, lifting rules regulating numbers of people who could assemble in outdoor spaces (which have since been reinstated).

During glasnost’, hypnotists such as Anatoly Kashpirovskii and healers such as Evgenia Davitashvili (aka Dzhuna) made their radio and television debuts. They had achieved fame through other media—posters, local papers, stage appearances, chatter—although even in the early 1970s the Soviet press had reported on visits to Bulgarian clairvoyant Vanga (Vangelia Dmitrova, speculated to have been close to Zhivkov’s government) by Soviet celebrities; Brezhnev was a rumored client. Throughout Soviet times and across the Soviet Union, paranormal demonstrations in variety show entertainments (estrada), such as those staged by Wolf Messing, played to full houses, advertised by local concert posters and word of mouth. As Soviet-born, Swedish-trained anthropologist Galina Lindquist also reminds us, Soviet people sought healers and shamans long before glasnost’.

And yet the period amplified occult and paranormal performances, broadcasting them through more media, allowing psychics and shamans to buy print advertising (subject again to regulation in 2012). Mass healing sessions moved from provincial stages and factory cultural clubs onto television screens and into hockey stadiums (Lindquist 2006, 36–37). But glasnost’ did not spark these practices, nor did it initiate Soviet curiosity about them, and older people now well recollect the 1960s and 1970s films, the print debates about telepathy tests.

Still, in the 1980s many did attribute the intense interest in the paranormal to glasnost’ and asserted, “We couldn’t talk about this before” (see Platz 1996; Lindquist 2006). The narrative that repression was being followed by new freedoms dominated (even while other topics became more difficult to air in public). Consider one of the famous televisual psychics of that period, Allan Chumak. One morning in 1989, Chumak appeared on television performing a silent gestural mime, offering healing vibrations to cross the screens. He continued for many mornings afterward, beginning always with a brief statement on the day’s focus: “Today’s energy is directed towards the digestive system … but anyone can benefit.” Viewers took up the broadcasts in differing ways: some called the station with effusive thanks, while others ferociously accused Chumak and all the others of charlatanry. Some saw in these psychics harbingers of freedom, in broadcasts amplifying the potential of glasnost’: “I welcome the television spots of Djuna, Raikov, Chumak, Kashpirovsky. And not because they might heal one and all, or charge us up with bioenergy and so on. Still, if it helps even one person, then such séances are necessary. In their mere appearance on the television screen, I see a gratifying instance of the real democratization of central television.—V. Zhukov, Novosibirsk” (letter to editor, Izvestija, 1989). Interestingly enough, U.S. journalists at the time read Chumak’s work on the screen in opposite ways. If for Mr. Zhukov from Novosibirsk, the television psychics manifested democratization of media, the American journalist reads Chumak’s gestures as miming the mental state of a drowsy public, perhaps no longer robots, but still caught in the amber of Orwellian stasis:

Early every morning across the Soviet Union, thousands of people rub the sleep from their eyes and sit in front of the television set, waiting to be healed. About 7:15 am, Allan Chumak appears on 120 Minutes, the Soviet equivalent of the Today Show. Sitting behind a desk, the owlish, middle-aged man with a mane of white hair stares at the camera and flings his hands about, as if he were petting an irritable cat…. Glasnost, miserable medical care, and a certain naive belief in extrasensory powers have led to [his] remarkable success in the Soviet Union. (Remnick 1989)

In thinking about these appearances, to avoid tacking between willful freedom and weak-minded hypnosis, I want to focus less on Chumak’s healing message and more on his phatic work, his silent and spoken references to contact (with viewers) and to channel (the televisual waves imagined between camera and screen). Chumak’s verbal silences amplified other sounds; during those stretches when he requested viewers to shut their eyes, as anthropologist Tomas Matza puts it, it was as if he asked viewers to “reshuffle the sensorium” from privileging vision to attend instead to other senses, to the “smell and crackle” of the TV itself (freq.uenci.es, January 6, 2012).32 Can you feel the medium itself, and the static that envelops it? Static, sounds layered by jamming, noise from rough electrical connections—the energy generated by Chumak’s silent gestures promised to reach along even the worst connections, flow over decayed wires, ride even static.

But as we have seen, static is no generic haunting by a universal media ghost, uniformly distributing equally points for contact to falter. What are the potential interpretants of static? Does it point to alien contact, government interference, bad weather?33 Does it sound like voices of the dead, competing channels, mental projections? In the 1980s, static in the USSR signified something different than it did in the United States; moreover, its significations shifted across the USSR and over time.

In the Soviet 1980s, good telephone lines were not yet taken for granted. For instance, out-of-town calls were ordered in advance, connected by an operator. Many could not place such an order from home and went to the postal and telegraph offices to order out-of-town calls. When lines were crossed, every one standing in line heard bursts of words (“Platform 7! Noon!”) belted out before the connection was lost. The frustrations of static were rarely confined to just two parties at each end of a single line; such channel complaints were audible, accessible for others to interpret as signs about the world. If Chumak had told 1980s U.S. audiences to imagine trying to “hear over a bad telephone connection” he would have been evoking different experiences.

Differences and changes in media technology evoke comparisons—but comparisons become ideologically bound when marshaled for abstractions like “freedom of speech” or modern “comfort and ease” (Sherouse 2014). In late 1980s Soviet imagination, Americans no longer dealt with mediate indignities; it was not known in Moscow that many Americans could not yet afford cable, tussled with static in television reception, rarely made what were at that time still quite expensive long-distance calls, and used broken pay phones. Bootleg Hollywood videotapes inspired such comparisons, and people like Chumak spun them into visions of a better future. Evoking the telephone while gesturing as if through the television screen, he layered phatic troubles with all the Soviet media still implicated as signs of backwardness, to transcend them all at once, staking a claim to communion through multiple mediations by machine and body.

Down the page from Zhukov’s 1989 letter to the editor hailing television psychics such as Chumak as heralds of openness, the head of the Moscow City Telephone administration announced in an interview that new directories would include the telephone numbers of foreign embassies (a few years later, I would copyedit the English versions). More and better communications to come! Chumak signaled new relations to media, however, that could not be read as openness alone. His wordless broadcasts amplified not just the machine crackle of static, the aural quality of bare broadcast channel, but also the sounds of his every intake of breath, swallow, quiet grunt of effort, and moist lip smack. These sounds exuded from, pointed back to, indexed a specific physical existence: a particular body, the body of a male, middle-aged, former athlete and sportscaster. The sounds emanated from a corporeal position, from a body taking a place in televisual divisions of labor, as beyond, behind, and around the television cameras, other persons labor as camera operators, sound managers, and scriptwriters. The dozen or so extremely popular late Soviet films set in television studies or on film sets that dramatize such divisions of labor (e.g., Moscow Does not Believe in Tears, 1980) situate those biographical accounts that highlight Chumak’s occupational journey from performance to paranormal.

Chumak had delivered sports news but got his start as a bioenergetic healer in 1977 while conducting research for a program debunking faith healers. His subjects convinced him that he himself possessed an unusually strong aura, or biopole.34 When glasnost’ began, he and others who executed new TV programming (or new telephone directories, etc.) were not new personnel; they had held their positions for years, and some would not retire for a long time. Chumak was a media veteran at a central television studio that decided programming content and broadcast times. So, while some read his silent blessings to reverse the optics of centralized media, or at least to bend its frames, it was long-term, Soviet-era social placement in the division of communicative labor that placed him to make phatic claims that his energetic channels rode televisual media.³⁵

LOVE, LONELINESS, AND THE COLD WAR TELEPATH

In the twenty-first century, contrasts among new and old communications media no longer work to the disadvantage of Moscow; cell phones work there more consistently than in most of Manhattan. After the Soviet state dissolved, telecommunications were among the fastest of infrastructures to transform (mechanical upgrades to public transit, for example, took longer).³⁶ By 1993 international calls had gone to direct dial, intercity connections had improved, and detailed local telephone books were published. Urban expertise and everyday experience with wireless electronic media had leapfrogged that in much of the United States.

And yet the imperative to compete to develop communications technology could never quite override impulses to appropriate media for less competitive communicative ends, carving channels, real and figurative, alongside or over new media and communication structures. Efforts to remove wires, papers, speakers, all materials, from communications across greater distances could not erase the bodily labors to connect or to separate, not just in the making of messages, but in the dialing, the waiting for a reply. Cold War competition, aiming to detect and defeat enemy propaganda, to block mental manipulation, to develop means to influence, to win hearts and minds, informed state-sponsored research in telepathy and other paranormal powers, infusing them with the mood of paranoia.37 Threat, however, did not exhaust all motivations, did not tamp out dreams for connection across troubled borders. Even government scientists and soldiers fantasized contact, even with the enemy others and especially with the unknown, as a good in itself.

Such sentiments color science fiction, such as when Soviet author Efremov’s ship, the Tantra of Andromeda Nebula (1955), encounters an entire planet gone silent; the tragedy of missed connection hits the multinational crew hard. We can find examples also in the writings of those who participated in Pentagon research on telepathy and clairvoyance, former military men like David Morehouse, Ed Dames, Joseph McMoneagle, and Mel Riley, who produced dozens of popular publications and documentaries on secret remote viewing programs.

These authors insistently quote the canonical set of Department of Defense declassified documents on Soviet paranormal science—and each other.³⁸ Veteran officer Morehouse, for example, does so in Psychic Warrior: Inside the CIA’s Stargate Program: The True Story of a Soldier’s Espionage and Awakening (note the excess of colons, poetically mimicking the way the text itself enfolds earlier accounts). Morehouse (1996) was in fact criticized for quoting so much from other authors to make his own autobiography more cinematically vivid (Mandelbaum 2002, 168; Schnabel 1997), but his practice was not unusual. As they compete for best prior stories, and as each new author reinterviews the last tellers of the tale, an aggressive, competitive mood knits across the corpus of books and documentaries.

And yet other structures of feeling poke through that aggression. In a 1993 interview for PSI Spies: The True Story of America’s Psychic Warfare Program, Morehouse, detailing the vantage of a psychic cold warrior with snatches of 1970s pop radio—and glimpses of the enemy as ordinary people who communicate via ordinary media—told Marrs:

I went to one of the remote viewing rooms and listened to the Eagles’ “Desperado” through headphones for my cool down session. Then I was read the mission coordinates, closed my eyes, and within seconds, I landed crouched on a rooftop. It was freezing cold with snow covering everything as far as I could see. I was on top of a three-story building which was part of a compound somewhere deep inside Russia…. I willed myself through the building’s wall and was instantly relieved by the warmth of the interior…. I saw people working at their desks. Some talked on the telephone, some simply were doing paperwork, and still others were conferring with each other. The office seemed to be for administration, not remote viewing…. I began experiencing trouble bending my legs and moving my head. The sensation became stronger as I drew closer to a small, flat, box-like device mounted high up on a wall…. I felt all my cells tingling…. [Mel Riley] too had seen the box, as had the other [remote viewers]…. It turned out to be some type of energy shield or screen, which the Soviets had been working on for years. This device recognized all forms of energy—extra low frequency, radio, television and the like…. The Soviets had mounted these shields in rooms where high-sensitive meetings took place or where their extrasensory [agents] were operating. (2007, 167–69)

Militarized tropes of energy and penetration pepper the account, the focus on internal sensation; “my cells tingling” draws attention to the enemy source of jamming energy, a static-making device that blocks channels to see and hear. But the actual people present all remain innocent—they chat, write, telephone, “simply doing paperwork,” paying no heed to the invisible machine-channel of state buried in the walls: both Morehouse and the Soviet state are aggressive intruders on people just doing their jobs.

Morehouse’s opening cool-down hints at hopes for human contact across paranoid barriers. The Eagle’s song “Desperado” gestures to the Wild West, the free but lonely cowboy. Morehouse probably expected readers to be Americans who would recall the line urging the wanderer to let someone love him: “Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses, come down from your fences, ‘n open the gate.” Morehouse voices a familiar character here, one branded by those American institutions that have militarized entire families, a masculine shadow who narrates war and love together, joining them through tropes of fences (albeit several steps removed from the way androgynous David Bowie sang about lovers at the Berlin Wall).

Along the very walls that we fortified, Cold War fantasies of contact germinated. American science fiction writers filled tales with Soviet characters who ignored lines of enmity to share discoveries—especially on topics like telepathy. Soviet science fiction writers projected an internationalized future, sowing stories with footnotes to foreign publications, their scientist heroes always off to international conferences.39 Post–World War II fascination with telepathy cannot be reduced to warm and cozy motives, of course—still, even from governing perspectives, the competition was not waged in the terms of violent conquest. The state that could light the path to perfect peace would claim the high road to hegemony: to develop perfect media was a means to this end.⁴⁰ What better way to broadcast a worthy state than to compete to achieve the most evolved means to communicate with a worthy rival, one that also claims impressive modern advances along the scale of phatic evolution?

“WHY CAN’T THEY READ ME BACK?”

For the U.S. Department of Defense, while Soviet paranormal experiments hinted at modern advances, the figure of endemic mysticism demonstrated the failed reach of Soviet-style modernity. The appearance of the topic in the press indexed alternative channels, resistant communications outside “channels controlled by the government”: “The ancient traditions and belief in the occult are passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation, outside the formal communications channels controlled by the government…. By channeling potentially dangerous, idealistic and spiritual popular beliefs into officially sanctioned channels, the government can in some measure defuse those beliefs” (Air Force Systems Command 1978, 39).

And yet for all that “beliefs” in alternative powers and channels are associated with informal channels, with the people plural, across their informal networks, the figure of the psychic stands alone. Science fiction of telepathy across the continents worries that reading others’ minds makes social life painful, impossible, lonely.41 One Moscow celebrity remarks publicly how difficult it can be for psychics to become intimate with anyone, especially other psychics. For her, “It worked out well that my husband is not an ekstrasens,” for two psychics cannot make a good marriage. One might develop her own talent while the other lags, becoming mere “ballast,” competition and resentment killing love. Her husband, luckily, was “a stable, ordinary, former KGB” bureaucrat “who grounds me” for her own flights. This contradiction of the lonely telepath bothers a good number of former Soviets: “How do you get along with other psychics?” “Can psychics marry each other?” were questions my friends suggested posing, and the topics always came up in meetings with psychics, without my asking.

This was the case when I visited the sister center to Vinogradov’s Center, Enchanted Forces, which focused on healing. In a building tucked behind a line of trees alongside a metro station far from the center of Moscow, inside the back courtyard, up on the second floor, the office was secured by a brown, padded leather security door. Next to the bell, a long placard hung bearing the logos of MasterCard, Visa, and American Express. Inside, a corridor opened into the clinic, offices branching off it. All was tidy, attractive RussoSoviet décor—many, many lush, green houseplants, rubber plants, geraniums, jade, large and small, in every corner and every window, evening rays brushing leaves, well-watered, green. The psychic greeted me with a handshake and a steady gaze and led me into a Spartan room where a desk and two chairs buttressed a window, and a clinical exam table and sink lined the other walls. The only talismans were a pack of yellow wax church candles and a small brass holder for them on the desk. She gestured to the more comfortable chair, glanced at my business card, nodded as I explained my hope to begin a documentary film or project. Then she launched into her biography, hardly taking breath between sentences. She may have prepared some phrases for her ongoing auditions for Battle (she has since become a celebrity on the spin-off show, Psychics Investigate). I asked no questions. She started right off with marital status: “We are both from the area near Saratov, and moved here for his police work.” Her husband fully “supports and believes in my talents—he comes home sometimes and asks for help with suspects.” Nevertheless, she stressed, it is very difficult for him to live with her, and she with him: “I get impatient because I think that I have sent him my thoughts, so why doesn’t he understand?! Always that feeling that others are not as smart…. I read them, so why don’t they read me?”

Another celebrity psychic complained to me the next week that the people who phone her now, all day long, occupy her social life, that she has neither time nor inclination to find a partner or start a family. Her own parents had married in the Crimea the fifth day after meeting (he had been in the navy; all the men in her family had been navy). She described them to me as “an ideal pair. He never drank, never cheated,” and fast-forwarded to her current romantic life: “This is what you have to give up in this profession. Sure I date, I might spend time with someone, but to be an ekstrasens makes womanly happiness impossible. That is what you have to give up. Also, I could not live under a man’s rule. I am no feminist, but I could not do it” (written notes, 2009).

She went on to lament that it is also difficult to make friends with other psychics—not because they read each other (that is the fun part), but because they compete. “To show off greater powers?” I asked. No, no, this was competition for attention, over who got a press article, who a television spot. “We made a big mistake making all this public.” She suffered from her fame; people were always grabbing her sleeves on the street, asking her to divine their future. One can find clips of her being stalked on YouTube and RuTube, posted by celebrity hunters. (Moscow is, after all, a city dense with celebrities.) Nonpsychic friends disappeared when they did not need help: “One is left with those who only want to talk to you because you are psychic.”

Celebrity psychics complain of having trouble making contacts last, trouble reaching friends and spouses when channels run one way. One means to situate and understand the ways these ideologies of contact burden love and friendship is to contrast them with other kinds of “one-way” encounters, especially those that work against intimacy. The next chapter takes up the dynamics of contact in bureaucracies and at checkpoints, places for the flashing of credentials, in spaces where some people are read but are not supposed to read back—except for the psychic, whose acts of reading themselves serve as credentials.