Djuna Davitashvili

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The former Soviet Union's best-known healer, Djuna Davitashvili, began her career as a qualified medical researcher before developing her 'information-energy interaction with living organisms', coupled with 'contact and non-contact' massage. Possessed of penetrating and hypnotic eyes, her amazing success rate has allowed her to build up her own busy clinic in Moscow.

At the time of the inception of this book, President Boris Yeltsin was reported to be consulting Davitashvili, who chanced to be the selfsame faith healer used by one of his predecessors, Leonid Brezhnev. The illness of Yeltsin now dictates that foreign observers adopt a wait and see approach rather than give willing assistance to reform.

Yeltsin's use of the powers of Djuna Davitashvili was rich with irony, as Yeltsin was part of the team of Gorbachev supporters that mocked, for political ends, Brezhnev's use of faith healing.

Davitashvili calls herself a 'chaneller of bioenergy'. Davitashvili is Assyrian and a Russian monarchist-her love of nobility has lead her to emulate them, as she is known to be fond of giving out 'titles' to believers in her mystical powers. Djuna Davitashvili claims to be a regular visitor to the Soviet leader, boosting his 'bioenergy' and alleviating the weight of office with her technique of 'contactless massage'.

Djuna Davitashvili is also famed for her powers of diagnosis. She participated in tests for the Washington Research Centre, which established that she could diagnose the various complaints of a group of forty-three subjects with a 97 per cent accuracy. She even went so far as to diagnose hitherto undetected complaints in the study group that were later substantiated by examination.

Perhaps we should not be so shocked at the use of healers by the Soviet premier as both Yeltsin and Brezhnev spent their formative years in an atmosphere of profound superstition and belief in folk medicine. It was the old Russia that retained its belief in faith cure and folk medicine long after the dominance of such practices weakened in Europe.

It was only just over a century ago that every Russian village had a wizard, almost as a matter of course, and witches were hardly less prevalent. And of course one of the most famous faith healers of all time, and a creature of this very culture, Rasputin, died within living memory.