In fact, neither she nor her Russian “interpreter” Sidorov did, but what they really said is an even more interesting story.
by Massimo Introvigne
Putin will become the “Lord of the World” while Europe will become a “wasteland.” “All will thaw, as if ice, only one remain untouched—Vladimir’s glory, the glory of Russia.” “Nobody can stop Russia.”
After Russia invaded Ukraine, these alleged prophecies for the year 2022 attributed to Bulgarian blind seer Baba Vanga (1911–1996) went viral on social media, and were mentioned by mainline international media as well. Reportedly, they came from Russian poet and academic Valentin Mitrofanovich Sidorov (1932–1999), who interviewed Baba Vanga and devoted a book to her, whose most popular edition, heavily edited after his death, was published in 2009.
Both Baba Vanga and Sidorov are interesting characters. However, the prophecies about 2022 and Putin defeating Europe are apocryphal. Sidorov’s writings about Baba Vanga and other visionaries do include references to the glory and victories of Russia, but there are no special mentions of Putin’s activities in 2022.
Sidorov is an important, if usually neglected abroad, figure in the history of Russian esotericism. He authored several books on Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947), the Russian artist and Theosophist who founded with his wife Helena (1879–1955) Agni Yoga as a splinter group from the Theosophical Society, received revelations from mysterious Masters, and promoted the utopia of a future millenarian kingdom in the Himalayas. Sidorov tried to make Roerich palatable to the Soviet establishment, and was put in charge of a Soviet commission charged with displaying Roerich’s art and publishing his writings in ways acceptable to the regime.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Sidorov continued to promote his version of Roerich, increasingly within a broader vision of the messianic mission of Russia. Sidorov insisted on the fact that both main prophets of a coming New Age, Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, and Roerich, were Russian.
Sidorov’s ideas may be summarized in three points. First, several authentic prophecies indicate that a “New Revelation” will be born in Russia. It will be the third Russian revelation after Blavatsky’s and Roerich’s, and create a new universal religion merging both spirituality and science and Western and Eastern religions. Second, this new religion will create a bridge—or rather complete its construction, which Blavatsky and Roerich had started—between our world and the higher invisible dimension of Cosmo-Humanity, ruled by the White Brotherhood.
Third, the coming of what Theosophists call the World Teacher, and Buddhists the Buddha Maitreya, will happen in Russia and coincide with the descent of what Christians call the Holy Spirit or the Paraclete. A mighty battle will follow between Russia, the “Standard Bearer of the Paraclete,” and the “Dark Forces,” which will be fought both in the visible and the invisible world.
Sidorov tried to collect many different prophecies, both ancient and contemporary, confirming his vision of Russia. He claimed that when she visited Baba Vanga in Bulgaria, she also confirmed his views.
This may well be possible, but the point is that Baba Vanga was both blind and semi-literate, and never wrote anything. There are hundreds of book about her alleged predictions, but what she really said is difficult to confirm.
Or perhaps not. There is a mine of documents about Vanga in Bulgaria, but it has been exploited only by a handful of Bulgarian scholars, mostly by social anthropologist Galia Valtchinova, who currently teaches at University of Toulouse 2 in France.
These are documents collected by the Institute of Suggestology, established in 1966. Suggestology was a discipline created in Communist Bulgaria as something in the middle between parapsychology and psychosomatic medicine, and the Institute in 1967 was asked to “manage” the “Baba Vanga phenomenon.” It collected inter alia 7,000 to 8,000 cards with predictions coming from individual consultations Baba Vanga gave between 1967 and 1974. They were kept under lock and key until Valtchinova was allowed to study them in the 2000s.
But we should go back and explain what the “Baba Vanga phenomenon” was all about. Many regard Evangelia (“Vanga”) Pandeva Gushterova, later known as Baba Vanga, as quintessentially Bulgarian, but she was born in 1911 in the Ottoman Empire and in a town, Strumica, which is now part of North Macedonia. Reportedly, her father Pando Surchev (1873–1940) was a pro-Bulgarian Macedonian and was opposed to Macedonia’s incorporation into Serbia, for which he was persecuted.
It is commonly reported that in her teens Vanga was struck by a lightning, became blind as a result, and started “seeing” the deceased and the future with an internal spiritual eye. There is no evidence, however, that she started a career as a seer until April 6, 1941, when she started pronouncing in an altered state of conscience, claiming she was receiving revelations from a “shining horse rider” later identified as St. George, the names of those in her area who will survive or die in World War II, attracting large crowds.
One who consulted her in 1942 was Dimitar Gushterov (d. 1962), a soldier of the Bulgarian’s occupation army. Eventually, they got married and moved to Dimitri’s hometown, Petrić, in Bulgaria’s Blagoevgrad Province, where she continued her activity as a seer and again attracted crowds.
The Bulgarian Communist government tried to repress Vanga’s activities, but visitors continued to come. The situation changed in the mid-1960s, which were marked by the growing influence on her father of Lyudmila Zhivkova (1942–1981), the young and brilliant daughter of Bulgarian Communist Party leader Todor Zhivkov (1911–1998). Zhivkova, who was promoted to several key political positions in the 1970s, was interested in esotericism, Theosophy, and parapsychology. She was also an admirer and collector of the works of Roerich.
The Bulgarian Communist state decided to embrace, rather than fight, the Baba Vanga phenomenon. Vanga became a state employee, with a regular salary. She was provided with a new home in the village of Rupite, a secretary, and a driver. In exchange, the authorities organized her consultations and kept the money paid by Vanga’s clients. In the words of Valtchinova, she became a “state-socialist enterprise,” a unique case of state-managed clairvoyance.
The Zhivkov regime also promoted Vanga in other Socialist countries as a unique Bulgarian treasure, and she was consulted by the powerful and the famous, including senior KGB officers and (reportedly) Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) himself. Vanga’s affiliation with the Institute of Suggestology guaranteed that her activities were presented as science rather than religion. In her later years, she was so busy consulting for the rich and the famous that it was virtually impossible for ordinary people to access her.
Valtchinova’s studies may disappoint many Vanga fans, as they demonstrate that most of those seeking predictions from the seer did not consult her on world politics or events of the future but on their health and personal problems. They wanted predictions for the next few months, not for a faraway future. Vanga did humor them, but also recommended they visit the leading Bulgarian medical doctors who befriended her.
It is of course not impossible that Baba Vanga was also consulted by some about world events, but most of the predictions she allegedly made were included in books published after her death, and many were post factum. After 9/11, the election of Barack Obama and of Donald Trump, and the COVID-19 pandemic, some claimed Vanga had predicted these events, but “after” is the operative word here.
Several scholars and research centers have noted the use of alleged predictions by Baba Vanga in Russian propaganda and infiltration into New Age and “spiritual” milieus. For instance, in 2018, Bulgarian academic Albena Hranova noted how Baba Vanga had been mobilized in anti-democratic and anti-European narratives spread in Bulgaria, which also used the Western theme of the Reptilians.
They are believed to be malevolent aliens who possess the bodies of world leaders, including Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, whose alleged evil activities are at the center of many conspiracy theories. As Hranova writes, in this propaganda “Putin is the only true bulwark of the world against the sly dragon Soros and, generally, against the reptilians; but then, he might be a reptilian himself, which only makes him mightier.”
One can find all of this laughable. However, millions are interested in New-Age-style spirituality and prophecies, and it is not surprising that this huge international constituency has also become a target of the propaganda war.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
