A regular colour newspaper uncovering the world of the strange and the esoteric still lining the shelves of the kiosks of Russia NOW.
`Why do you bother with lame stuff like that?` asked a Russian friend on being asked to translate something. Another acquaintance, a yeti hunter, was just as unimpressed.
`If there’s any news of the Russian yeti in there it is lost in all the other nonsense.` he opined.
Nevertheless there was an occasion, when I was squinting at one edition on the metro, and I was the subject of long and respectful looks from a nearby woman. It was ANOMALNI NOVOSTI that did it.
Beacon for the fringe.
ANOMALNI NOVOSTI – `Anomalous News` – constitutes one of the progenies of the Russia of the Nineties.
In the atmosphere of glasnost, when the Marxist-Leninist framework that had held good for a generation was being phased out, a subculture centred round interest in the paranormal was one of the forbidden fruits that the new press freedoms gave the green light to. The flabbergasting accounts that issued from the city of Voronezh in the winter of 1989 were one early manifestation of this.
ANOMALNI NOVOSTI began circulation in 1997. In an age when internet use was much less common than it is now, its readership must have felt like members of a special club. Perhaps it still does: ANOMALNI NOVOSTI remains an ink and paper product (much in the same way as Private Eye is in the U.K).
S.Media churns out this full colour illustrated 36 page newspaper twice a month in St Petersburg. It is then sold in kiosks, train stations, post offices and some supermarkets or delivered by subscription. The format of the paper with its fairground graphics and subtitled articles and – now- with a glossy A4 design – belongs to the `yellow press` (the Russian term for tabloid).
Within its pages you can find original articles about the latest UFO sightings or hauntings or kooky science developments. As their website puts it:
`Aliens and UFOs, poltergeists and teleportation, the world of spirits and ghosts, time travel and the most incredible scientific discoveries. All of the most mysterious and fantastic.`
Dom Ankor, the publishers, are also responsible for other reading matter with similar sensational slants. Some of their other titles include: Stars and Law, Forbidden History and Historical Truth of the USSR.
A Denis Lobkov works as one of the main staff writers. He is the author of such works as `The Magic and Power of Trees` (2013) and the headlines of his pieces are along the lines of `My husband was taken from a forest to another planet`.
Dmitry Sokholov is the paper’s resident UFO expert though, boasting his own page called `All the Secrets of UFOs`. (`Black UFO Attacks the Moon`, `South America: Portal for UFOs`) Such stories do tend to take the front page, but wider interests are catered for within.
Some running features include a section called Paranormal Chronicles, a page on Runes and one on Magical Amulets and Talismans (Sylvester Stallone, we learn, wears one of a dolphin’s flippers). The paper does involve a dash of humour now and then – as shown in a piece on the Ig-Nobel prize, for example.
Each issue carries a celebrity interview in whiuch a Russian star confesses to some experience hinting at paranormal revelation or a belief in some such thing. Thus Basta – a rapper and co-owner of the music label Gazgolder – tells us that : `I believe in karma and life after death`.
Then we have the photography competition in which readers send in their snapshots of unaccountable things in the sky, in windows or the woodlands. This week Yulia Fovlova from Vladivostok has captured an image of a spectral human-like thing lurking in a copse.
There is an advice column too – the confidante being a self-styled `Witch` called Irina. Last but not least, of course, there is in all of this a horoscope (a fact which they have, of late, taken to advertising on the masthead).
With its sensationalism ANOMALNI NOVOSTI does have some things in common with something like The Old Moore’s Almanac (they did sell amulets through the post at one time) and The Sunday Sport (except their stories do check out and are not just fabrications) on the one hand and, with its mix of free enquiry and mysticism, with more reputable publications like The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time and Fortean Times on the other.
They do not indulge such obvious anti-scientific silliness such as belief in a flat earth nor do they pander to the darker kind of conspiracy theories with their antisemitic overtones. In fact, we could call many of their column inches educational. The latest issue, for instance devotes a two page spread devoted to the lives of otters.
Some of the lower key stories are quite fresh and are intriguing enough to prove that the paper does have some value. One such story is worth relating at length:
The Ghost of Elzie Lurks in a Castle.
It begins in the early Twentieth Century in Southern Russia when a young couple – the Gusakovs – bought a dream home in Emmanuel Park in Pyatigorsk (a tourist destination known for its health giving waters). The husband was the successful owner of a coffee shop and confectioner and together with his wife seemed to live a charmed life.
Then, however, they were told by a doctor that Elzie (the wife) would never be able to bear a child. Her husband reacted by abandoning her for another woman – but not before allowing her to keep and stay in the charming old building.
Later, following the revolution, Elzie disappeared. It was rumoured that she had been killed by Bolsheviks and her body entombed somewhere in the building itself.
The building, now turned into a state run hostel, came to be inhabited by the sculptress Irina Shahovskaya and it is she who claimed to have made contact with the ghost of Elzie.
To this day passers-by still see the phantom of Elzie at the window, as visible from the nearby Lermontov street….
The Punters.
Strange to say, I have never yet caught anyone in the act of reading ANOMALNI NOVOSTI – not on the metro or waiting for trains or anywhere. Yet it boasts a circulation of 180, 000. So somebody is laying down their thirty of forty roubles for it and clasping it to their breasts. A website aimed at potential advertisers called Fenix Media.com sheds some statistical light on who these people might be.
Just a few more women – at 53 per cent – are consumers, as compared to 47 per cent men. The majority of these are either between 35 and 44 years of age (at 36 per cent) or 45 to 54 at the same percentage. In term of profession, the clearest constituency is divided into those working whilst studying (35 per cent) and people with a higher education and at work at the same percentage. There are no great surprises here.
Companion.
For the last ten years or so, whenever I have stumbled on a kiosk that happens to sell ANOMALNI NOVOSTI, I have made a point of returning there for their wares. This green, blue and red companion has given me something to look forward to each month. The first Russian article that I managed to read and understand was one of theirs.
Arthur C.Clarke – no stranger to a spot of zany speculation himself – once said of such journalism that it should carry an Intellectual Health Warning on it to parallel the kind that appears about the contents of comestbles on food packages.
Perhaps so, and perhaps ANOMALNI NOVOSTI is just a purveyor of what Russians call `pink dreams`. Even so, what it does not purvey is the kind of salaciousness, consumerism and mass media trivia that you get so much of elsewhere. Also, in a world where there seems to have been a mass exodus into cyberspace, ANOMALNI NOVOSTI hangs on in there as an ink and paper artefact. As such, it is able to offer paid publishing opportunities to new writers.
