How Soviet TV Audiences Fell Under the Spell of Mass Hypnosis Artist Anatoly Kashpirovskiy — SkimNews
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- Anatoly Kashpirovskiy became a cult phenomenon after Soviet state television began carrying his appearances; the broadcasts reached 300 million people and made him an early example of what the director calls “television medicine.”
- Kashpirovskiy. Under the Spell was screened in Ji.hlava’s Testimonies section, with festival audiences seeing Konopa’s documentary about the performer’s role in Soviet popular culture.
- Lukasz Konopa tracked down hundreds of hours of archival material with researchers in Ukraine, Poland, Georgia and the Czech Republic; he compared working with old Soviet archives to detective work because holdings and ownership were often uncertain.
- Ukraine yielded the film’s most compelling archival material, including 35mm footage from 1971 of Kashpirovskiy in a doctor’s uniform, riding a bicycle, performing tricks and hypnotizing a kolkhoz audience more than 15 years before fame.
- HBO joined the production in 2025 with essential completion funding, allowing the team to continue filming and collecting archival material without interruption while Konopa still had access to Kashpirovskiy.
- Anatoly Kashpirovskiy performed operations on women without anesthesia and persuaded Chechen leader Shamil Basayev to release 1,500 prisoners; Konopa calls them among the “stunts” that captivated millions amid the impending collapse of perestroika and glasnost.
- Lukasz Konopa believes Kashpirovskiy could really put people into trance or make them not feel pain, but says the more important story was the carefully planned persona and enchantment television created around him.
Why it matters: HBO’s 2025 completion funding let Konopa continue searching archives and filming with Kashpirovskiy, preserving hundreds of hours of archival material from a phenomenon that reached 300 million people. The result is a visual record of a performer whose television image—not proof that hypnosis was genuine—became the central subject of the new documentary.
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