Parascience and life – Weekend – Kommersant

The publishing house of the Garage Museum has published a book by the historian of Soviet culture Alexei Konakov “The Declining World” – an extremely fascinating journey into the space of the “Soviet incredible” from the hunt for UFOs to the TV shows of Alan Chumak.

Alexei Konakov is one of the most original researchers of late Soviet culture. The main focus of his texts is that phenomena that look emphatically peripheral turn out to be not deviations from the main line of culture, but ways to highlight the mainstream, to capture the main tensions, passions and anxieties of the era. If the characters of the first Konakovo book, published five years ago in the collection The Second Outside the Find, were nevertheless quite respectable (it is dedicated to underground writers: Prigov, Aronzon, Ulitin and others), then the plots of The Declining World seem marginal to the limit.

There is a strange fact: Soviet reality, with its fetish of scientific and technological progress, was filled with excitement around the irrational. Newspapers and magazines published reports of UFO sightings, expeditions looked for traces of the yeti, scientific institutes held discussions about telepathy and telekinesis, intellectuals discussed the healing properties of the mysterious substance mummy, and so on. At first glance, these phenomena have little to do with each other, but in fact they are tightly intertwined. Enthusiasts easily switched from Atlantis to hunting for ball lightning, simultaneously practicing extreme hardening and treatment with passes, and also linked their searches in different areas: for example, according to one version, the Bigfoot turned out to be an alien, according to another, the healing mummy was the evaporated fat of the unfortunate yeti. Konakov gives the name “Soviet incredible” to this entire ramified network (based on the name of the famous TV show “Obvious – Incredible”).

A popular explanation for this passion of Soviet people for riddles is that the crisis of socialist ideology with its militant materialism that occurred in the era of stagnation created a spiritual vacuum and opened the way for religious searches, part of which were the popularity of yoga and the hunt for poltergeists. Konakov disagrees with this interpretation. The first point of divergence is that the “incredible” is not at all a product of the Brezhnev era. It originates in the 1930s, confidently formed in the late Stalin era, and truly flourished in the thaw. Its first receptacle is, of course, the cosmos, and the Soviet improbable is marked by the same ambiguity as the entire Soviet cosmic discourse; it is torn between mass utopian enthusiasm and Cold War paranoid anxieties. Neither one nor the other can be associated with the apathy of stagnation.

The second objection is that “incredible” has little to do with religion and much more to do with science. The main places of its development were all kinds of research institutes, scientific circles, ideologists – famous physicists and chemists, engineers, editors of scientific journals, lecturers of the Knowledge society. The official “big” science tried to keep this discourse in check, sometimes suppressing it, sometimes supporting it, but definitely did not feel it as something fundamentally alien. The search for life on Mars is closely intertwined with the space program, Soviet telepathy is related to cybernetics (telepaths presented their studies as research in the science of information and its transmission).

A well-known, but always fascinating paradox: what is obvious to us, descendants, the division into science and parascience, progress and mysticism, never works for contemporaries. Great scientific discoveries breed an enthusiasm for riddles, and this is always thrown into what until recently was the realm of superstition; as if becoming more understandable, the world always simultaneously becomes more incredible. In other words, if we flew into space, what would prevent someone from space from flying to us.

However, if Konakov had simply peered into these ambiguities, his book would not have been so innovative. Unraveling the transformations of the “incredible”, he writes the history of the entire post-war Soviet society. The main drift here is: outside – inside. From a vast expanse with aliens visiting the earth, Atlantis – the sunken ancestral home of all earthly civilization, antimatter and other amazing mysteries of the universe through telepathy that overcomes space and opens access to the secrets of ancient yoga to biofields and healing miracles of charged water. The “incredible” is gradually losing touch with academic science and, as it were, shrinking. As a result, its main receptacle turns out to be such a banal thing as health; it becomes one of the objects of consumption. From a seeker-enthusiast, a Soviet person becomes a private person, little interested in things outside his apartment and his own well-being – this is how the Soviet bourgeois is born.

Despite the melancholy ending, The Waning World is one of the most charming books about the late USSR. Largely because Konakov refrains from the two usual temptations in his work with esoteric subjects. He does not expose ignorance, does not bring his characters to light from the position of a truly enlightened person, but does not stick to the material, offering the reader to partake of the mystery. There is an obvious ironic distance here, but there is also a lot of sincere love for the “incredible”. The combination of both is the key to a truly interesting study.

Alexey Konakov. A waning world: a story of the “incredible” in the late USSR. Moscow: Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2022

---

Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram