Russian authorities to take harder line against magicians, ESPs.

MOSCOW, July 4 (By Itar-Tass World Service writer Lyudmila
Alexandrova) -- To believe in matters supernatural is human. Those
professing traditional monotheistic religions have faith in God. But also there are many who sincerely believe in magic, extra-sensorial persons, the UFOs and other paranormal and esoteric phenomena.
While some believe, others make a pretty penny on their faith. This is true not only of all sorts of medicine women, knowing how to make a love potion or cure the bewitched of a wasting disease, but also all sorts of pseudo-scientists, salaried and working for government agencies.

The State Duma is now taking a harder line against the wonderworkers, magicians, astrologists, ESPs and other paranormal business enthusiasts.

The first blow will be dealt on advertising. All adds of occultist and mystical services will soon be banned, alongside the advertising of tobacco and alcohol.

The Moscow city legislature has for several months now been working on amendments to the federal law on the protection of the health of the nation. If adopted, they will outlaw the provision of occult services in Russian territory altogether.

The weekly Argumenty I Fakty says the legislators were stirred into activity by an unambiguous hint from Vladimir Putin. In a recent address at the assembly of the Russian Academy of Sciences the prime minister clamped down on what he described as flourishing obscurantism and pseudo-sciences. He even likened these to extremism.

According to the weekly, back at the very beginning of his first
presidency Putin purged the Kremlin of a whole flock of 'prophets' and
'fortune-tellers'. By 2000 quite a few of such types had gathered there.

Major-General Georgy Rogozin was a real 'star' in this sense. His position was that of a deputy chief of the presidential security and bodyguard service. In reality, he was the Kremlin's chief astrologist.

Once in a while he went much father than just making horoscopes for the presidential entourage. One day, with reference to Nostradamus, he predicted a nuclear war would begin no later than August 1999. That forecast spelled the end of his civil service career.

Many other key members of his team had to leave high-ranking
positions, too.

Fortune-tellers at the Emergency Situations Ministry demonstrated no less remarkable results. The Emergency Situations Ministry for several years had a special unit staffed by tens of government-salaried astrologists. They were asked to leave for good only after a major row.

A Tu-154 passenger jet crashed in the Far East several years ago. A total of 127 ESPs were involved in the search, but even ten days after the disaster none of them could see anything. Conventional specialists were the ones who eventually found the wreck.

On some occasions some details of colossal hoaxes and frauds leak to the public at large. Here is one such case, as narrated by Argumenty I Fakty. In 1999 the then President Yeltsin was giving a grand VIP reception in the Kremlin. Russian Academy of Sciences Member Eduard Kruglyakov was one of the invited scientists. This is how he remembers it. At a certain point the president approached him for a chat.

"Will you tell me, please, is it possible to extract low-price energy out of stones?" curious Yeltsin asked. The dumbfounded scientist explained it was hardly possible, to say the least. As it turned, out a top secret program for deriving energy from stones had existed since 1991.

Tens of millions of rubles were spent on it - naturally without any sign of success.

The greatest dividends, though, a pseudo scientist has ever managed to milk out of the state were those the Defense Ministry paid to one Anatoly Akimov.

His name tops the Russian Academy of Sciences list of the country's eleven most notorious psuedo-scientists. In 1985, Russian military created in Moscow what they called the classified Center of Non-Traditional Technologies (CNT). Under Akimov's guidance the center was commissioned to conduct research into torsion fields.

Scientifically, there may be nothing wrong about the existence of such a term as such. The problem is not a single laboratory in the whole world has so far managed to discover anything like that. In the meantime, the CNT director dared to declare he had identified the torsion fields (if confirmed, this discovery alone would instantly earn him a Nobel Award).

Moreover, he promised to create on their basis some kind of 'psychotronic weapon' boasting fabulous capabilities. Both the military and secret services were paying through the nose.

"When the scientific community got word about the Akimov affair, the general physics unit of the Russian Academy of Sciences angrily rose in revolt against the state's support for the charlatan," RAS member Kruglyakov recalls.

"The fraudulent scheme burst like a soap bubble, but only not before the state had squandered 500 million rubles - the firm old Soviet rubles. The USSR is no more, but it looks like Akimov may be
planning a comeback. According to some sources, he is on the payroll of the Defense Ministry again. This time he is promising torsion field-based communication lines."

Rimily Avramenko, an engineer at the Research Institute of Radio
Instruments Engineering and an UFOlogist in his spare time has had a huge piece of the budget pie, too. At a certain point he declared he was working on the creation of the world's most powerful system of
anti-ballistic missile defense. Inter-continental delivery vehicles, he said, will be easily downed with what he described as "autonomous
plasmoids."

Avramenko said he would need 50 million dollars of budget
money. And he got it! Today the country does not have the money, the
promised plasmoids or even someone to blame. Avramenko passed away just recently, and his followers have gone elsewhere:

An outfit calling itself International Academy of Energy Information Sciences has held a rather peculiar exhibition at the State Duma. As follows from a television report, the event's greatest hit was an extra-sensorial sofa, advertised as a remedy from no end of health problems, including frigidity and impotence.

Pretty bored with swindlers, the Moscow City Duma has got down to
work, and it may soon produce amendments to the federal law that would
outlaw all occult services in the country's territory.

The chief of the Moscow City Duma's health protection commission,
Lyudmila Stebenkova, said "the point at issue is not a ban on traditional medicine and healing practices, but a ban on such peculiar types of activity as banishing 'the evil eye', removing 'the wreath of celibacy', blending a love potion and other occult, mystical and religious services," Kommersant quotes Stebenkova as saying.

Russia has about 2,000 officially registered traditional healers with licenses. According to unofficial estimates, though, unlicensed magicians and fortune-tellers number 100,000.

The Serbsky Institute for Social and Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow has said over 100 patients, who have developed serious problems as a result of occult rituals, undergo treatment at its facilities every year.

In the meantime, 32 percent of Russians believe that magic can affect a human being's fate, 58 percent do not believe in magic, and 10 percent remain undecided, as a Public Opinion Fund poll found last September.

Women tend to recognize the possibility of magic effects on a person's life more often - over 40 percent of the polled believe in this, and 50 percent do not exclude such a possibility, while only 23 percent of men recognize the existence and strength of magic forces.