Hypnotist Who Held 300 Million Soviet Viewers in His Spell Gets His Doc

A Soviet television audience of 300 million people watched Anatoly Kashpirovskiy's televised hypnosis sessions — and Polish director Lukasz Konopa has now turned that story into a documentary, "Kashpirovskiy. Under the Spell," screening this week in the Testimonies section of the Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival.

Kashpirovskiy, a trained medical doctor, said he first became fascinated by hypnosis to deal with medical students sleeping through his lectures. Once state television channels began carrying his appearances, he became a cult phenomenon of epic proportions — a man variously called a hypnotist, healer, magician and conjurer.

His stunts included operating on women without anaesthetics and persuading the Chechen leader Shamil Basayev to release 1,500 prisoners. Konopa calls these "just some of the stunts that captivated millions of citizens hungry for miracles amidst the wasteland of the impending collapse of perestroika and glasnost."

Why a Polish director revisited him now

For Konopa, the story is personal. "Kaspirovskiy is part of my childhood memories," he says. "When I first saw him on television, I was seven years old and I lived in a small village in gray, communist Poland. On the screen was a strange-looking man with black hair, speaking a language I didn't understand. Meanwhile, the light bulbs in our apartment were mysteriously flickering."

The flickering had a mechanical explanation, as Konopa later discovered: the electricity grid was under enormous strain because everyone was watching Kashpirovskiy at the same time on bulky television sets.

Konopa studied film in the United Kingdom and built a cinematography career, forgetting the experience, he says, "until it came back to me during the first lockdown in 2020." He became curious about what happened to the hypnotist. "He was a very important part of the transition: The fall of communism and the early days of capitalism — a shift that changed everything in this part of the world."

He decided the story was worth telling "especially at a time of another political and social change that we are living through right now."

What did the archival digging turn up?

The richest material came from Ukraine, where Kashpirovskiy began his career. One item dates to 1971, more than 15 years before he became famous: Kashpirovskiy in a doctor's uniform, riding a bike, performing tricks and hypnotizing a kolkhoz (Soviet cooperative farm) audience — "mesmerizing, beautifully crafted and shot on 35mm," as Konopa describes it.

"Working with old Soviet archives is a bit like detective work," the director admits. "You never know exactly what exists, where to find it, and who owns it. Sometimes, one discovery leads you to another, and suddenly you find something extraordinary."

A team of researchers in Ukraine, Poland, Georgia and the Czech Republic tracked down hundreds of hours of material. HBO joined the production in 2025 with essential completion funding — money that mattered, because Kashpirovskiy "was already old and I felt that we needed to act quickly," Konopa says. "We could continue filming and collecting archival material without interruption, while I still had access to Kashpirovskiy."

Was it a con?

Konopa's verdict: his subject was "a master of stage hypnosis and psychological suggestions," a craft Kashpirovskiy perfected for more than 25 years through seances in factories, villages and kolkhozes.

"He was really good at it," the director says. "The way he looked and sounded on stage, the music he played, the script of his shows — all these were carefully planned and executed. So I believe that he could really put many people in a state of trance or make them not feel pain. His powers got even stronger when he got the most powerful platform at that time — television."

The question of trickery, Konopa says, "wasn't the most important question for me. I was much more interested in the persona he created and the image that television built around him. I wanted the audience to be seduced by him and to experience him in the same way people did back then. This sense of enchantment is the real story."

Konopa also heard an unexpected echo of the present in the seances. "When I started watching Kashpirovskiy's seances, I was surprised how modern he sounded. He reminded me of a contemporary life coach," he says. "Sometimes, he literally says: 'I will hold your hands and walk you through this.'"

Whether today's audiences fall under the same spell is the experiment Ji.hlava's crowds are now running.