Andrey Vedyaev
Half a century ago, on November 8, 1974, Wolf Messing passed away, a unique Soviet psychic and seer who made a significant contribution to the Victory of the Soviet people over the fascism of Europe.
When I am asked what this contribution consists of, I suggest that we first think about the contribution to the Victory made by Yuri Levitan, an announcer of the All-Union Radio, People’s Artist of the USSR, who during the Great Patriotic War read out all the reports of the Soviet Information Bureau and the orders of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, who heard his voice on the radio at night in 1934, when he was preparing a report for the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and from then on trusted only Levitan to voice his speeches.
However, their first personal meeting took place much later, before Stalin’s speech on the radio on July 3, 1941.
Wolf Messing played the same role in mobilizing the spiritual forces of the Soviet people to fight the hated enemy. He performed psychological experiments in reading thoughts, first as part of propaganda teams, and then with individual programs through the State Concert. The very fact that a prophet appeared in the USSR on the eve of the war says a lot. As Yunna Moritz wrote about this:
He still has a prophetic talent,
He fled from fascist Europe to the Land of Soviets, —
And when Europe calls my country an occupier,
Messing’s flight from Europe is the only answer!
On a dark November night in 1939, an elderly, poorly dressed man of unremarkable appearance stood on the Polish shore. In front of him, the cold waves of the Western Bug dimly gleamed. This man challenged Adolf Hitler himself, the Fuhrer of the German nation. His name was Wolf Messing.
“I knew that I could not remain in the territory occupied by the Germans,” Messing wrote in his memoirs. “My head was valued at 200,000 marks. This was due to the fact that back in 1937, speaking in one of the Warsaw theaters in the presence of thousands of people, I predicted the death of Hitler if he turned to the East.” Having hired a boatman, Messing reached Brest.
“Where to go?” he continues. “The next day I was advised: I went to the arts department of the city committee. I was greeted politely, but reservedly. In the Soviet Union, fighting against superstitions in the minds of people, they did not favor fortune tellers, magicians, or palmists. Telepathy was also considered one of the same uninvited activities. …I had to prove that there was no trick, deception, or fraud in this.
And finally a person was found who believed. It was the head of the arts department, Pyotr Andreevich Abrasimov. At his own risk, he included me in the team of artists serving the Brest region. Life began to improve.”
And although the authenticity of Messing’s memoirs is now disputed — allegedly they were written by the head of the science department of Komsomolskaya Pravda, Mikhail Khvastunov — nevertheless, this was done from Messing’s words, especially since this did not require personal contact.
A significant meeting for Messing was the meeting at the May Day demonstration of 1940 with the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (bolsheviks) of Belarus, Panteleimon Kondratievich Ponomarenko. Writer Vadim Erlikhman, author of the book “Wolf Messing. Stalin’s Psychic”, believes that Ponomarenko decided to distract workers from the increasingly alarming situation on the border with Messing’s speeches.
During a performance in Gomel, two men in cornflower-blue caps approached Messing and, apologizing for the interrupted performance, the Chekists took him to Moscow.
We learn about what happened next from the magician’s memoirs: “A man with a moustache comes in. He says hello. I recognized him and immediately answered: ‘Hello. And I carried you in my arms.’ ‘What do you mean, in my arms?’ Stalin was surprised. ‘Your portrait. On May 1st, at a demonstration…'”
Wolf Messing first discovered that he had the gift of suggestion at the age of eleven. He boarded a train to Berlin, and when the conductor asked him for a ticket, he handed him the first piece of paper he found on the floor, hands shaking with fear. Mentally, he seemed to be trying to convince the conductor that this was the ticket. To the boy’s surprise, that was exactly how he responded. Moreover, the conductor advised the young man to take a more comfortable seat and get some sleep.
The most interesting thing is that Messing’s messages sent in this way somewhere into the infosphere are so powerful that they are still effective today. For example, I think that many of the amazing achievements of the head of East German intelligence, Markus Wolf, are connected to his mental closeness to Wolf Messing. I myself have had to be convinced of this more than once.
Once, while in Germany, in the mining town of Bochum, I received a message late in the evening that I urgently needed to arrive at Dusseldorf airport in the morning.
The distance there is about 50 km, the train covers it in half an hour. When I boarded the train at the Bochum Hbf station, it was very early, about six in the morning. Having taken a seat in the carriage and dozing off, I suddenly saw out of the corner of my eye the inspector walking along the carriage and realized with horror that I had forgotten to punch a ticket on the platform.
This threatened me not so much with a fine as with unnecessary showdowns – and I didn’t want to attract attention to myself at all. When the conductor was already nearby, I concentrated internally, and somewhere in my subconscious the faces of Wolf and Messing surfaced – and the former was alive and well at that moment. The conductor checked everyone’s tickets, but didn’t even look at me. At the appointed time, I was at the airport.
In Berlin, Messing faced poverty and hunger. One day, he lost consciousness on the street and ended up in a hospital. There, the boy caught the eye of a prominent neurologist, Professor Abel. Noticing the child’s ability to control his body and voluntarily fall into a trance, the doctor became interested and began to conduct experiments with him. The results exceeded all expectations: young Wolf not only had the ability to hypnotize, but could also read minds!
Abel helped the 12-year-old psychic find an impresario, and soon Wolf became a variety artist. After several years of performing, people started talking about him as a famous touring performer, able to guess the thoughts of the audience, find hidden objects and look into both the future and the past of viewers. His performances were modestly called “Psychological Experiments.”
During these experiments, the psychic easily carried out the orders that the audience mentally gave him, told him the biographies of people he didn’t know in detail, and had the ability to stop his heartbeat. There were rumors that Messing could lie in a cataleptic stupor in a crystal coffin for three days.
Why did Stalin become interested in Messing? The fact is that Stalin, like Hitler, had superpowers, and the events of the Great Patriotic War largely consisted of the personal mental confrontation of the two leaders. But one in the field, even a paranormal one, is not a warrior – professional assistants are needed.
The story of the famous psychic and clairvoyant Eric Jan Hanussen, whose real name was Hermann Steinschneider, is well known. He was born in 1889 in Vienna to a poor Jewish family. Initially performing in the circus as a rider and acrobat, he gradually gained fame in the circles of hypnotists and telepaths.
Having revealed some of his secrets in his book Meine Lebenslinie (My Life Line) in 1930, he moves on to clairvoyance, improving on the classic act of reading notes. He tries to open his own “school of the occult” and makes loud predictions in the press. Hanussen’s colorful weekly quickly becomes one of the best-selling publications in the German capital. The “astrological advice to stockbrokers” he published had a real impact on stock prices.
And here, the seemingly unthinkable happened: the Jew Hanussen tries in every way to get closer to the Nazis and helps Hitler rise to the top with his astrological predictions. He visits Hitler at the Kaiserhof Hotel and becomes his advisor. And Hanussen’s predictions work! He predicted the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, which played an important role in the Nazi seizure of power.
But soon after, Hanussen’s mutilated corpse was discovered in a forest south of Berlin. According to documents found later, he was shot on the night of March 24 by a detachment of stormtroopers under the command of Wilhelm Ost. It is unlikely that this could have happened without Hitler’s sanction, according to whom Hanussen had fulfilled the role of Judas prepared for him and should have died.
But Messing made the right choice, trusting his inner voice. But, as they say, “trust, but verify” — after asking him about Poland and his tour, Stalin suggested that he leave the Kremlin building without a pass, stand under a tree, and then return.
When Stalin saw Messing walking from the window with amazement, he was bewildered, and when he returned, he began to ask him how he managed to do it. To which the fortune teller replied that he had simply suggested to the guards: “A general is coming, salute and let him through.” And, seeing Stalin’s skeptical reaction, he added: “I know your thoughts, do not consider me an enemy.”
During the war, Messing constantly spoke to packed halls in Siberia and the Far East and transferred hundreds of thousands of rubles to the Defense Fund. And asked for them to build airplanes. Stalin sent telegrams of gratitude to everyone who transferred large sums for tanks and airplanes. “Stalin personally sent me telegrams. I have several of them,” Messing testified.
Even before the start of World War II, Messing predicted a clash between the USSR and Germany, emphasizing that he saw tanks with red stars in Berlin. “During a speech during the war, he was asked about the Battle of Stalingrad,” notes historian Alexander Mosyakin. “He said that it would end with the defeat of Hitler’s troops, that he ‘sees’ a captured field marshal, and named the date — the beginning of February 1943.
He was asked when the war would end. He said that victory would be in 1945, and named the date — the signing of the Act of Surrender of Germany: May 8. Here are two absolutely accurate predictions by Messing, made in the presence of many people.” Stalin was finally able to verify the abilities of a psychic and clairvoyant when Messing saved his son Vasily from death by telling him to change his flight to a train. The plane carrying the Air Force hockey team, which Vasily never boarded, actually crashed on Saturday, January 7, 1950, near Koltsovo Airport in the outskirts of Sverdlovsk.
A huge number of people attended Messing’s performances. They wrote him assignments, which were handed to judges selected from the audience on stage in a sealed envelope. After which he practically ran around the hall, dragging the author of the note along with him, asking him to think about what he was looking for. They tried to deceive him, depriving him of a mental hint, some deliberately, some out of excitement.
But Messing always emerged victorious from the duel. He found any objects hidden in the most unexpected places. He could go to the farthest row, where in a briefcase among the books he found the necessary page in Webster’s English explanatory dictionary and pointed to one hidden word on it.
“He took many secrets to the grave,” writes Kolodny, “because the Honored Artist of the RSFSR could not demonstrate everything on stage. He was invited as a consultant to a group filming a movie about Grigory Rasputin, an indisputable psychic who treated the unfortunate Tsarevich. Messing surprised not only with his gift of knowing other people’s thoughts. He treated without having the right to do so, without being a doctor.
At the risk of being known as a charlatan, he healed wounded soldiers in hospitals, saved them from blood poisoning. The head doctor of the Oncology Center in Moscow told me that during the war she lived in Novosibirsk and worked in a military hospital. The wounded died of gangrene. The doctors knew about antibiotics, but did not have this medicine.
After a concert in the hospital, Messing remained in the wards and irradiated the wounds with his hands, surprisingly quickly healing them after operations.” After Stalin’s death, which Messing, by the way, also predicted, albeit allegorically, with reference to a Jewish holiday, Khrushchev, who came to power, decided to use Messing’s authority for personal gain: to force the psychic to “predict” the need to remove the body of Joseph Vissarionovich from the Mausoleum.
Messing refused such a profanation, after which he fell out of favor with Nikita and no longer had the right to tour large cities. Then the telepath was banned from traveling to villages.
The most terrible thing about the gift of clairvoyance is being privy to your personal situation, which no one can avoid. But it is one thing to believe and hope, and another thing to know for sure. Wolf Messing knew the exact date of his death and tried to think about it rarely. But when the time came, he still did not give up the fight for life. He believed in the power of doctors and God.
Going to the operation, he turned to his house and whispered: “Well, that’s it, Wolf, you will not come back here anymore.” And although the operation was generally successful, the predictor’s kidneys suddenly failed, and on November 8, 1974, he was gone. Wolf Messing was buried at the Vostryakovskoye Cemetery, next to his wife.
Yuri Chekalin
Sergey Stankevich
