In March 2019, Alexander Gabyshev, a 51-year-old Yakut man, announced that he was going to march through more than 8000 kilometers on foot and reach Moscow. Gabyshev called himself a shaman — that is, a person who, according to beliefs still widespread in Yakutia and other Siberian regions, can communicate with the spirit world. While usually shamans refrain from getting involved in politics, Gabyshev's project was openly protest: the purpose of his march was to “exorcise” the “demon” — that is, Vladimir Putin — from the Kremlin.
For Russia, where, by that time, opposition politics was almost totally suppressed, Gabyshev's march was an event so extraordinary that the federal media soon began to cover it, as if the threat to the president was real. In the meantime, the shaman was gaining supporters. Soon he was walking along the road with a whole team of people ranging from former criminals and factory workers to hippies and curious bloggers: together they formed a kind of group portrait of the Russian popular protest. Along the way, they met rural old men and truckers, cops and lunatics, priests and other shamans, argued about the fate of Russia, and kept going to the west, until the authorities stopped them. Gabyshev was forcibly sent back to Yakutsk, where he continued his standoff?
Why did Gabyshev's march attract such attention? Did he really have some special powers?> What traditions did this project grow out of, and how does it relate to the role that shamanism plays in the lives of contemporary Yakuts? How does the shaman's march fit into the traditions of Yakut resistance to Moscow and into the context of Russian grassroots protest? In his book, historian Mikhail Bashkirov, who in 2019 spent several months alongside the shaman and his team, closely observing what was happening, tells Gabyshev's remarkable story, and through it, examines the larger Russia beyond Moscow, the people in it, and the methods by which the modern Russian state suppresses those who try to oppose it.
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A social anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, Mikhail Bashkirov has spent many years studying the native culture of Siberian people and writing papers about their traditions. In 2019, after learning about Alexander Gabyshev, Bashkirov and his wife, filmmaker Beata Bubenets, began shooting a documentary about him. They were able to get inside the shaman's expedition, got to know Gabyshev and his companions personally, and witnessed many of the events that he describes in the book. Even now, Bashkirov maintains contact with the shaman, who was sent by the court for compulsory treatment in one of the Far Eastern state clinics. However, Bashkirov himself left Russia after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He currently continues his studies in France.