Allan Chumak, a self-styled "distance healer" whose televised sessions drew in millions of viewers seeking a cure for their ills in the years before the Soviet collapse, has died in Moscow at the age of 82, his wife said on October 10.
Chumak was extremely popular in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, when faith in the crumbling communist system was flagging.
Viewers across the country would put jars with water, toothpaste, ointments, and creams in front of their TV sets ahead of Chumak's morning broadcasts, hoping the powers he claimed to possess would give them the capacity to cure.
Chumak, a Moscow native, was a TV journalist for decades before claiming he had "extrasensory" powers.
He wrote several books about self-healing.