Magic specialists call themselves by various names, of which the commonest are koldun (sorcerer) which emphasises links (often spurious) with folk tradition and mag (magus) which emphasises western tradition.

The other area which has attracted a good deal of attention is the revival of elite occultism in Russia, largely excluding reference to its popular and commercial manifestations (Rosenthal, 1997 Rosenthal, B. G. 1997. “‘Political implications of the early twentieth-century occult revival’”. In The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, Edited by: Rosenthal, B. G. 379–418. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.  [Google Scholar]; deNio Stephens, 1997 Denio Stephens, H. 1997. “‘The occult in Russia today’”. In The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, Edited by: Rosenthal, B. G. 357–76. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.  [Google Scholar]; Brougher, 1997 Brougher, V. G. 1997. ‘The occult in Russian literature of the 1990s’. Russian Review, 56(1): 110–24.  [Google Scholar]). More recently, in 2007, a conference was held in Berlin in 2007 devoted to ‘The Occult in Twentieth-Century Russia’. The organiser Professor Birgit Menzel is the author of the most recent and thoughtful discussion of the occult revival and its impact on Russian literature today (Menzel, 2007).

This argument does not appear in Lindquist's 2006 Lindquist, G. 2006. Conjuring Hope: Healing and Magic in Contemporary Russia, New York: Berghahn.  [Google Scholar] book and she may have changed her mind.

For comparative purposes the same article quotes the results of a similar survey of school leavers of various kinds from the Altai region. Results are analogous; if anything, the Altai children were slightly more superstitious than those in Krasnoyarsk (Nemirovsky and Manuil'sky, 1987 Nemirovsky, V. G. and Manuil'sky, M. A. 1987. ‘Fantasticheskiye predstavleniya kak element massovogo soznaniya’. Sotsiologicheskiye issledovaniya, 4: 70–75.  [Google Scholar], p. 73).

For example, in a poll conducted for The Times by Ben Schott and Ipsos Mori in early October 2007, the percentage of ‘don't knows’ in reply to questions about fortune-telling was mainly very low (1–3 per cent), while for belief in ghosts, fate or premonitions figures were around 6 per cent (Schott, 2007 Schott, B. 2007. ‘Schott's almanac of belief’. The Times, 30 October [Google Scholar]).

In the earlier surveys, active churchgoers were also very superstitious, but this appears to be changing as the demographic shifts towards a younger and better educated congregation.

The debate about magico-religious practices within the Church is beyond the scope of this article.

Names of informants have been changed to preserve anonymity.

Kurayev has written on many subjects, and should not be seen simply as a conservative. In the 1990s he was not afraid of alienating Church fundamentalists by attacking the popular notions about witchcraft, prediction and the evil eye found in widely available booklets about locally venerated holy figures (Kurayev, 1999 Kurayev, A. 1999. Okkul'tizm v pravoslavii, Moscow: Blagovest.  [Google Scholar], pp. 174–310). As a result he is hated by some conservatives in the Church.

As public interest in psychic distance healing declined, the centre changed its name to Dushepopechitel'sky Tsentr imeni svyatogo pravednogo Ioanna Kronshtadtskogo and its focus onto drug addicts and alcoholics.

The group that runs the site is connected to other sites devoted to suicide, love and marriage, death of a loved one and the pain of parting.