In the late 1980s, the doctrine of Porfiry Ivanov, an old man who was not afraid of the cold and urged everyone to pour over the ice water, spread in the USSR

Why did he become so popular? Fragment of the book "Decreasing World"

The Garage publishing house is published by a book by the researcher of late Soviet culture and literature Alexei Konakov “ The Decreasing World: the History of“ Incredible ”in the Late USSR .” The author talks about how people in the Soviet Union were fond of anti -scientific ideas - about psychics, extraterrestrial civilizations, a snowy man, the Tunguska meteorite and so on (and that these interests spoke about the company of that time). With the permission of the Medusa publishing house, he publishes a fragment of a book about Porfiry Ivanov, which developed the movement of dousing with cold water.

A specific combination of the interest of a late Soviet society in “incredible health”, the healing forces of nature and a bucolic lifestyle caused the huge popularity of Porfiry Ivanov, who came up with a “system of natural healing”.

A native of Luhansk region Porfiry Ivanov in the thirties comes to the idea of ​​gaining health through unity with nature. For decades, he is doused with ice water, in any weather he walks barefoot and with a naked torso, practices starvation and self -hypnosis; A similar lifestyle several times leads him to an imprisonment in psychiatric hospitals and, as a result, to the status of a spiritual teacher, quickly growing by students. On the farm, the upper Kondryuchny students have been building a “health home”, where since 1976 Ivanov has been living and accepting visitors.

In the late seventies, Alexei Katkov will begin to explore the experience of Porfiry Ivanov; The example of Ivanov as a person who reveals the internal reserves of the body will be extremely interested in Joseph Goldin ; Ivanov will discuss the issues of healing starvation with Yuri Nikolaev , and he will inspire Leonid Krasov to harden with ice water.

The writer Vladimir Cherkasov, who depicted Ivanov in the 1980 novel, “Create Good” and actively promoting Ivanovo methods of healing, will also be one of the main followers of Ivanov. In 1982, the journalist “Ogka” Sergei Vlasov, whose enthusiastic article “Experiment of half a century”, will make Ivanov to be famous for the entire Soviet Union (it is significant that in the same year, Vlasov will write about the ophthalmologist Svyatoslav Fedorov - laser microsurgery of the eye and the treatment of ice water seemed incredible).

Vlasov describes Ivanov with reverence, who “has so accustomed himself to the cold that it can for hours in shorts - and barefoot! - To be in the winter on the street. He was 85 years old, in half a century that he was friends with frost, never caught a cold, he was not sick with either a sore throat or influenza. And earlier he was ill, like everyone else ... ” - and in the USSR, a general fashion for dousing with cold water begins.

Vlasov himself admits that after his pursuit he had a cold, Katkov publishes another article about Ivanovo in the newspaper “Week”, and “the famous enthusiast and propagandist of a healthy lifestyle Vladimir Georgievich Cherkasov claims that he [Cherkasov] runs barefoot in the snow, experiencing a sense of“ high joy ”, and not suffering at all.”

The audience buys the books “Healing Cold of Water” and “The Secret of the Russian Tax”, the number of “walruses” is increasing many times, family hardening clubs appear: “In 1981, engineer V.N. in Leningrad. Luzhbin creates the first large family club “Neva Morgeut”. <...> In 1983 in Moscow, first in the Perovsky district, then in the Central Bank of the Central Executive Committee. Gorky, the efforts of engineer A.S. Gurevich, physics A.B. Solovyov and Economist A. 3. Cyrkina was born the Club “Healthy Family”, which became part of the capital's dodgy and winter swimming federation. <...> Now the same clubs exist in Dnepropetrovsk, Tallinn and other cities. ”

For some citizens, the white -bearded elder Porfiry Ivanov becomes an object of religious worship, but most of the population perceives bathing in ice water as another effective health practice (“a cold“ walruses ”are 6-8 times less often, and other diseases 2-3 times”), and Ivanova - as evidence that people really have huge internal reserves.

However, the very idea of ​​internal reserves begins to sound completely different in the second half of the eighties-designed to once inspire on the exploits of socialist construction, now it works to educate extreme individualism, on faith in self-sufficiency and autonomy of a person, to approve the independence of the subject from the state and society.

The erosion of Soviet collectivism has been going on for a long time, but the general hobby for a healthy way of life significantly accelerates the process. Independence is the keyword of the late Soviet healthy lifestyle, whose apologists are increasingly encouraging people not to trust official medicine, but rely on their own forces: “Doctors, actively using medicines, underestimate the role of such a factor as the independence of living cells, when a person will be able to create appropriate environmental conditions for their healing, development and restructuring,” Mikulin points out; “Fear to be captured by doctors! <...> To be healthy, you need your own efforts, constant and significant, ” Amosov calls.

The problem is that a healthy Soviet person brought up in this way is no longer ready to spend his health and his internal reserves for the benefit of the country and society; It has long been attracted by either space, nor ocean, nor taiga, nor virginity. If earlier the “Soviet incredible” was practically homeless and easy to climb, easily traveling with a backpack to the observatory for observing Mars, with a tent to the mountains in search of Yeti, now it is comfortably located in a two -room apartment, is compressed to the size of the kitchen and the bedroom, adapts to the needs of a purely urban person.

No wonder Porfiry Ivanov in his text “Baby” (written in response to the questions of the readers of “Light” in 1982, a year before his death) advises walking barefoot on the ground precisely “at 12 o’clock in the afternoon of Sunday” - that is, on a weekend, when the city dweller is convenient to get out of nature. No wonder Nikolai Amosov notes that for a healing run, "you need to get up too early until there are few people and cars have spoiled air." It is not for nothing that Lazarus of Lazar Sukharebsky “live not old” has a subtitle “Tips for the Employed Man”, and the book of Viktor Vereshchagin about Yoga considers Asana primarily as a means of combating hypokinesia .

The dream of “incredible health” blooms mainly in the heads of educated citizens, whose ideology has finally become crypto -bourgeois and the attitude of which is increasingly reminiscent of the Tatcherovskoye “there is no society, but only individual men and women” (living in separate convenient apartments). The entire once wide world of Soviet man is now reduced to the perimeter of such an apartment: instead of India, two or three yogis poses, instead of space-the wonderful Eleutherococcus extract (and hypodynamia), instead of forests and fields-collection of chamomile and St. John's wort, instead of lakes-dousing with cold water in the shower. You can’t even run in a coward - after all, Mikulin invented vibrationymnastics, and on the TV there is a program “Rhythmic gymnastics” (conveniently engaged right in front of the screen!).

Herbal therapy and hardening are combined in a new fashion for a Russian bath - but for the sake of it it is not at all necessary to leave the house: “Who is not able to visit the Russian bath or sauna, you can recommend making a homemade boarding chamber that may well fit in a backpack. Such a bathhouse in a backpack consists of a steam chamber made of plastic film. <...> A domestic pressure cooker serves as a steam -former, into which infusions of healing or aromatic herbs can be poured, ”one author advises; “I am arranging a steam room in the kitchen. I supply hot air with a vacuum cleaner from the oven of the gas stove. <...> I sewed a peculiar “spacesuit” from thick polyethylene, leaving only holes for the head and hose, ”the other suggests a decision; The Voroshilov Grades Grigory Fakhrutdinov invents the bathhouse in the closet, the Leningradets Alexander Massarsky, the portable bathhouse in the suitcase.

Having caught in a plastic bath-or drinking herbal tea-or by eating a mummy (which was once smoked with a snowy man, and now becoming another metonymic health)-or having drew up the tops of the lungs-or having jumped on the heels-or laying down in Shavasan , the Soviet cryptobourzuis sits in front of the television, transmitting films about achieving force and Longevity: “Mummy - legends and reality” (1986), “Friends and enemies of Dr. Buteyko ” (1988), “Pyramid” (about Valentina Dikula, 1985), “I bow low and ask you, people” (about Porfiria Ivanov, 1987), “This paradoxical gymnastics” (about Strelnikov , 1986). The world of this person is self -sufficient and self -propelled, comfortable inside and tightly closed outside - all its aspirations and ideals are now placed on several dozen square meters.

This is the maximum, surprisingly, incredibly narrowed world.