#soviet wizards

[iljowicz]

Black brothers bby!

I want to draw jegulus and my marauders au but this is all I can show you right now ;n;

[super-ion]

Aug-UST Day 17 - From rival factions

Some original fiction of character ideas that have been rattling around in my brain for a while now, based on a prompt from @thepromptfoundry

---

I heave against the barn door and in a horrible cacophony, it grinds closed. It's still cold as hell, but at least we're out of the wind and snow.

I should probably place wards on the doors... and windows... and...

I glance up at the roof of the barn where wind whistles through more than a few holes that need patching. Yeah, no amount of warding is going to make this place defensible. Honestly, it's probably better not to use any magic at all, lest we give away our position.

That and I'm completely exhausted, I very much doubt I have any effort to spare for a half decent ward.

Getting eaten by zombies on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain was not how I imagined myself going out.

A hiss of a match brings my attention back to the here and now. Katerina is stooped over a glass lantern that shortly casts a sickly yellow light over the room. For a moment, I get that same brief impression of too many shadows around her. Spending a week with her has done little at temper the strangeness of her magic to my senses, that blend of traditional Eastern European craft and whatever the hell the Soviets have been dreaming up.

She straightens, bearing the lantern aloft and peering around the room as she carelessly brushes the curtain of her dark hair behind her ear. The flickering lamplight casts her bony features in sharp relief, and it really isn't that hard to imagine her as some witch living in a hut in the woods that walks around on chicken legs. There's something hard yet beautiful about her. She's...

"Elizabeth, you are bleeding," she says cutting through my thoughts.

I raise a hand to the wet spot on my temple.

"It's just a scratch," I reply. "It looks worse than it is."

She frowns and strides towards me.

"Let me see," she demands.

"It's nothing," I insist, probably sounding petulant, which is not at all my intent.

"It is not nothing if those beasts hunt by smell."

Damn, she's got me there.

She sets the lantern on the ground and takes my head in her hands. Her touch is surprisingly gentle as she makes her examination.

My heart speeds up at the touch.

Get it together Liz, I tell myself. She's the enemy.

Is she though?

Only a few months ago, our two nations were bearing down on one another in the waters between Cuba and Florida. Even the mundane world understood how close everything had come to all going to hell.

Right now though? Here in this barn in the East German countryside? We are just two witches, just two women united against a common enemy.

She murmurs something in a language I don't recognize and a blessed warmth flows through me, centering on the cut on my scalp.

Her eyes meet mine, those dark pools of intensity captivating me. The gaze lingers. The gentle touch of her fingers against my cheek linger. Her eyes flicker to my lips briefly, erasing any doubt that she hasn't felt the exact same feelings that had been haunting me.

Unbidden, my breath hitches. We are so close, it would be the easiest thing in the world to close that distance between us.

This is...

This is a terrible idea. At the end of the day, common enemy or no, we are still agents of rival governments.

I watch as the exact same thought plays out in her head. Something in her expression closes off and she jerks her hands away.

"We should get some rest," she mutters. "We will both need all our strength in the morning."

"Yeah..." I agree reluctantly.

[andmaybegayer]

a TV. would be nice for the Thicket so that I can have people over for movies. But for the cost of a TV one can purchase many soviet era microscopy equipment.

[motherlicker]

Headcanons: magic in the Soviet Union

I started thinking about this and then unsurprisingly had a lot more thoughts. ('Pureblood', what's that? Sounds dangerously bourgeois and decadent to me, komrade.)

Only the tip of this autistic iceberg.

PRAXES

Most common were folk or pagan magics, persistent enough to survive the targeted purges of political enemies (including magical folk) and became part of 'general superstition', sometimes reinforced or rediscovered via trial and error. The early NRU in particular, had very little continuity of magical education or formal programme for training their agents, and thus relied on word-of-mouth practices; in contrast, the OGNU always enjoyed special privilege and more covert status, and did set up centralised training systems, even later breeding ('family planning') for special abilities and bloodlines (e.g. seers, metamorphmagi, etc.).

Main forms of magic

Verbal magic: Pagan prayers and incantations that had assimilated by taking on forms resembling Eastern Orthodoxy prayers or canon, usually centred on protection / concealment / blessing (zagovory), or healing / binding / transfiguration (nagovory). Quite hermetic and ritualistic, requiring a prescriptive incantation but also symbolic instruments and components.

Alchemy: The whole nine yards of herbal remedies--potions, poultices, witches' brews--these probably work the best / have the most enduring tradition out of all the surviving Soviet magic.

Talismans: Amulets worn by superstitious soldiers are eventually also studied and their basic runic or charmed principles are 'distilled' and standardised by the state. Wands, chalices, other spellcasting focii are included in this category; all of these are later commodified into NRU-issued 'wands' that are more like magical stun batons than anything. The OGNU go wild making talismanic fetishes: aegis-on-a-dogtag, garrote-in-a-box, you name it.

Divination: Tarot, astrology, and numerology (oh THIS for sure is tied to the church calendar, associated calendrical effects/strength, etc.) but also scrying. The latter is usually elemental a la staring into a pool of water or fire or etc; can be looking for visions of the future or visions of remote/secret places. None of this is accurate or a known science and it's the best way to drum up some sketchy charges as an excuse to execute political enemies.

GLOSSARY

Euphemistic terms for magical vs non-magical people

Govorchik (говорчик, 'talker'): Fairly neutral euphemism for a wizard, originally referring to verbal magic practitioners (obviously) but broadened in usage. Both derived from, and then subsequently gave rise to (in pejorative use) zagovorchik (заговорчик, 'conspirator') and nagovorchik (наговорчик, 'slanderer') as NRU and OGNU terms to refer to the other, respectively.

Chuzhak (чужак, 'alien / outsider'): Pejorative euphemism for a wizard, 'defined' by the state around the same time they coined kulak as part of a series of labels for class or political enemies. Carries xenophobic insinuation, i.e. wizards are Beings, not fully human, and certainly the more magical ancestry the more suspect. (Actual Beings like veela, giants, so on, are of course true chuzhak.)

Bezvolshy (безвольшы, 'weak-willed'): Pejorative used by Soviet wizards to refer to their unmagical counterparts. Never really popularised, using this term in front of the wrong person could lead to you being labelled chuzhak.

Myagiy (мягкий, 'soft'): Pejorative used by Soviet military to refer to their wizarding counterparts. Only used by high-ranking OGNU or NRU muggles since most state/military were not aware of the existence of wizards.

State-sanctioned actors

NRU: Extraordinary Intelligence Directorate (Необыкновенное разведывательное управление / Neobyknovennoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye) Magical counterpart to the foreign military intelligence agency (GRU). Although nascent as early as 1918 (as a spetsnaz), the NRU was formally given its special directive in 1920. For much of the interwar period it was a running joke to refer to the NRU as the 'Fourth and Half Department'. Like the GRU, the NRU is under the Ministry of Defense. Like the GRU as well, its focus was gathering magical intelligence (collection, generation, and interpretation of prophecies), human intelligence (torture) and reconnaissance (scrying, divination). Given its Red Army origin, the NRU was mostly wizards (very few witches), who were always regarded with suspicion and received less cooperation from Red Army proper. Recruitment was usually ad hoc, after teenage or adult soldiers displayed signs of magic; the GRU would discreetly flag those individuals to the NRU, who would test for aptitude and compatibility. The vast majority of recruits were muggleborns, and anyone with any magical parentage was liable to come under suspicion of greed, decadence, and being a chuzhak. The NRU remained a rival to the OGNU (and its various later forms), somewhat like the FBI and CIA, but far more hostile; both agencies constantly attempted to paint the other as political enemies and execute them.

OGNU: Joint State Extraordinary Directorate (Oбъединенное государственное необыкновенная управление / Ob"yedinennoye Gosudarstvennoye Neobyknovennaya Upravleniye) Magical counterpart to the secret police (OGPU). Like the OGPU, the OGNU's remit was 'domestic security', i.e. political repression (targeting political dissenters) and counterintelligence (maintaining a pervasive surveillance network). Their cloak-and-dagger nature lent itself to much higher tolerance and interest in magical ('extraordinary') abilities. They were much more advanced in their development of wands and enchanted talismans, and generally trained their agents to fight magical creatures using magic. The OGNU kept tabs on young children who manifested early signs of magic, and would often 'recruit' (kidnap) them to be trained and brought up as its loyal agents.

NKRD: People's Commissariat of Infrequent Affairs (Народный комиссариат редких дел / Narodnyy Komissariat Redkikh Del) Succeeded the OGNU and formed in 1934, ~a year earlier than its NKVD counterpart. By this time, the state was relatively stable and power was centralised, and the NKRD began to turn its attention to the 'domestic threat' posed by Beings. Policing its borders as far as Finland and Japan, the NKRD had quite a lot of interaction (of the hostile, exterminating kind) with veela colonies, tribes of giants, dragons, other extraordinary threats. The commissariat also began to cultivate valuable bloodlines and abilities in records of geneologies correlated against astrological charts. It also permitted its agents to form families and have (likely magical) children.

MBCh: Ministry of Internal Emergency (Министерство внутренних чрезвычайная / Ministerstvo vnutrennikh chrezvychaynaya) While the NKVD underwent various consolidations, the NKRD remained relatively stable until 1946, when Stalin reached the full flower of his power and unleashed the MGB to formalise his hold over the Soviet Union. It's widely believed that Stalin was aware of magic by this point, and more or less obliquely sanctioned the activiites of the magical MBCh counterpart. MGB head Abakumov was certainly and unhappily aware of his magical counterpart. The tension between the MGB and MBCh persisted until the two were combined into the KGB in 1954. Beria was the first and only state Minister with any magical ancestry; following his execution, enemies were quick to smear his perverted reputation as a result of magic (tying him back to folklore about Rasputin and the like), and no such situation was allowed again.

[moss-in-hiding]

(i’m making basically translation of my previous post that’s fully in Russian) 

today I watched an old Soviet two episode show called Ordinary Miracle, which I haven’t seen since I was a kid. however, while I was watching it, I realize that two of the characters the Wizard and his wife are basically just Howl and Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle.

because the wizard is on one hand trying to live normally, but also turned a bear into a human just for his own amusement? (but also it’s heavily implied he did it because he wanted the bear to feel love and get to be human) and his wife, who is ginger by the way, just like book Sophie, is basically his conscience telling him that it’s inhumane to force the bear to be human if he doesn’t want to be.

oh, and also the movie starts off with the line my wife who I’ve been in love with since I was a boy- which is literally Howl.

but yeah, it’s on YouTube if you’re into subbed surreal soviet musicals from the 70s!

[lidasilivonchic]

"I'm Prospero, their wicked STEP-UNCLE!"

[a-pint-of-j-and-b]

Бойся, враг, девятого сына (The Horseherd's Ninth Son/Beware of the Ninth Son) | Viktor Chuguno and Viktor Pusurmanov | 1984 | The Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic

Based on Kazakh folk tales. The youngest son of the herdsman Yerzhan, the kind and brave Yerkenzhe, goes in search of his father and eight brothers, who were turned into stone idols by the evil wizard Tasbol.

[chinesecentury]

America is in decline because the CIA slashed funding for telepaths, wizards, psychics and such. The Soviets kept America on their toes because they knew they couldn't let a psychic gap develop.

[sovietpostcards]

I'm trying to learn Russian language. Can you suggest some good movies (with subtitles that I can find on Netflix, prime or youtube) and some of your favourite russian songs?

Can't say much for Netflix (don't have it), but you can check my Soviet Cinema tag for movie ideas! I'd start with something from the most popular list, like Ivan Vasilyevich Changes Profession, The Office Romance, Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears, 3+2.

Or try these holiday-themed movies: The Carnival Night, Irony of Fate, Wizards, Morozko

[txttletale]

You've helped expose me to a lot of theory that I hadn't read before, and I'm realizing i need to read more theory for real, like. Actually. That being said; The more I start to lean into communist thoughts and not just anti capitalist, I find myself becoming warped and joyless. How does it not take a tole on you? The constant reminder of the endless suffering of the oppressed? How do I enjoy art when I am forced to see all of it as a coerced product, suffering for my entertainment? The constant guilt of life is something I dont think I can stomach at all times. Am i supposed too? (BTW; I mean this more so as an ask of how you do it, not to argue that because suffering is hard to look at we should actually just go back to the status quo and ignore it. I'm just like. Not sure how to deal with it, I guess.)

i don't really feel guilty about anything so i don't know how much i can help. i guess i just think that using communism as like a lense to judge your own individual morality as many people like to do is bound to make you miserable to no real avail. that's not the purpose of communist theory, the point of communist theory is to analyze society and history and guide mass-scale poltical action, not tell you if you're evil for watching the new star wars or whatevsies.

i guess i also personally find that reading socialist history and the more practical, grounded-in-praxis types of theory is liberatory and fills me with optimisim--reading about, e.g., social systems in cuba or people's democracy in the early soviet union is helpful in dispelling the 'oh, everything's going to be horrible forever, socialism is just a utopian pipe dream' insinct that i think liberal hegemony instills in most people, by showing how people took actual sensible pragmatic steps to introduce things like workplace democracy, universal healthcare, women's equality, mass literacy, etc. post-revolution. it helps you understand that communism is not a magic wizard who will come and save us all but yknow something that is doable and achievable by human beings.

[taylor-titmouse]

Re: Cadogan teleportation mechanics, there's an old Russian children's book series about a wizard whose old wizard master leaves him a magical piece of chalk. If you draw a door with the chalk on any surface, it becomes a functional door that will teleport you (in the story's case, to The Land of Fantasy, because the wizard lives in a regular Soviet Russian city.)

ah yes of course, the beloved russian story chalkzone

[otter-popa]

Some old art from beginning of the year.

The first art is a drawing of my character as he was in the Soviet puppet film The Wizard of Emerald City, based on the books by Volkov, which were a Soviet interpretation of the fairy tale The Wizard of Oz.

Second art is drawing of Urfin Juce from book by Volkov Urfin Juce and his wooden soldiers.

Third is just Severus. Nothing more.

Link leads to song from puppet film that I associate with my oc Boris Bobinski (sun dude).

[r0bin-d00dles]

Yea so earlier this week I learned there's a soviet oz movie n I made this

[designs n movie link below, no English subtitles srry]

Movie Link: The Wizard of the Emerald City

Designs:

[motherlicker]

Headcanons: magic in the USSR (Part 2)

Bолшебство это bыработка. Проявление это порядок. Власть служит народу--или умирает. Magic is production. Manifestation is order. Power serves the People--or it dies.

Why the USSR? a) why not, and b) I am interested in systems where magic survives a populist revolution, is reframed ideologically, and comes under intense bureaucratic control; idk these constraints make it interesting! I might also do the CCP one day.

Interwar period -- magic in the 1920s-1940s

Kollkrug (коллкруг, 'call circle'): From the contraction of kollektívnoye krug (коллективное круг, 'collective circle') and inspired by Stalinist collective farming, this was an early NRU campaign to suppress solitary magic. The NRU rounded up peasant witches and warlocks and forced them to perform group rituals for agricultural production (e.g. fertility rites, raincalling, pestilence banishment). Whether the rituals worked or not was irrelevant; failure was often used as an excuse to bring charges of sabotage or counter-revolutionary sorcery against 'undesirables'.

Plague magic: Alchemy under the OGNU took a darker turn in wartime. By the late 30s, certain factions within the OGNU became obsessed with the development of magical 'diseases'. Some were rooted in folklore (e.g. 'Wolfmother Fever', a lycanthropy-like mutation that could be triggered), while others rose out of experimentation with using magic in mass delusion, manipulation, or incapacitation. It was rumoured but never confirmed that their 'experiments' were tested in the gulags.

Surveillance magic: The NKRD created the 'whisperglass' charm (шепотстекло / shepotsteklo) which could be applied to any glass surface--windowpanes, mirrors, lamps, ink bottles--to provide one-way audio/visual for a wizard who held the key rune. They also developed their own arsenal of detectors which were deployed to capture and record ambient spells/magic.

Cold War -- magic after the 1950s

Black sites

Facility R-17 ('The Knuckle'): A black site buried somewhere deep beneath the Siberian taiga, R-17 was designed for the containment and experimentation of high-threat magical prisoners. The facility's layout was enchanted to change every week, supposedly to confuse prisoners, although some staff believe that this function was never planned, merely discovered. The walls were lined with magic-dampening 'nullstone' (нетокаменный / netokamennyy) mined from a meteorite.

The Sanitarium: Housed in an old Orthodox monastery near the Romanian border, this ward was used to rehabilitate (magically) important or useful prisoners. They were made to drink potions that forced them to relieve propagandised versions of their own memories on repeat. Initially meant to be used as an interrogation method, the NKRD realised the true potential of this technique when some prisoners emerged changed--some suffering irreversible ego fragmentation, others gifted with terrifying precognition or new abilities.

смертyобет (smertyobet, 'death vows' or 'death bets'): Given that pureblood, halfblood, and otherwise 'unrecognised' wizards were political enemies, gulags and 'remote collectives' (i.e., exile in Siberia) gave rise to underground magical traditions and practices. Smertyobet, magical favours bound by word and will, became a distinctive currency--and eventually mark of fraternity--within these communities. These were effectively 'IOUs' scratched into small tokens or on paper slips that could be exchanged and sold. If betrayed in some way, the vow would backfire catastrophically to the debtor. OGNU agents tracked these to root out rogue wizarding networks, though many agents themselves quietly relied on the black market to carry out certain unpleasant services.

Orgburo for the Study of Secrets (OBIT) (Организационное бюро изучению тайн / Organizatsionnoye Byuro Izucheniyu Tayn)

By the 1960s, the Orgburo for the Study of Secrets (OBIT) (Организационное бюро изучению тайн / Organizatsionnoye Byuro Izucheniyu Tayn) was formed as a tentative collaboration between an NRU spetznaz and a few MBCh subdepartments not fully aligned to the KGB. The OBIT became the Soviet answer to their Western counterparts such as the British Department of Mysteries. However, given its close ties to both the NRU and KGB, the OBIT had a broader mandate to weaponise its research and was permitted/encouraged to use political enemies in its experiments.

Memory and mind research: During the escalation and height of the Cold War, espionage via memory extraction became a wide-ranging concern. Seers were tortured and sacrificed in rituals to protect the Lubyanka against foreign scrying. The OBIT developed sophisticated conditional memory magics and mutually binding oaths to guarantee secure negotiations/diplomacy. Eventually they found a way to use minds (witting or willing or otherwise) as vaults for state secrets, or otherwise hide magical embassies in the memory-palaces of certain diplomats.

Time and space research: Soviet interests in time and space travel resulted in wizards trapped in time loops, pocket dimensions, and mirror realities. Some agents were turned into хранители (khranyteli, 'keepers'), permanent surveillance ghosts protecting the KGB archives. Another key area of research was 'historical revision'--magic not for time-travel, but to realign history as perceived by individuals or groups. The Soviet state never fully admitted to these efforts, but enough defectors independently spoke of dreamlike, barely-remembered massive group rituals with red banners and stroboscopic fireworks and mnemonic chanting to 'overwrite' traumatic events (e.g. the Great Purge).

Prophecy and eugenics research: Post-WWII, the MBCh quietly formed the Commission for Future Potential (KBP) (Комиссия Будущего Потенциала / Komissiya Budushchego Potentsiala), a subdepartment responsible for monitoring and even predicting magical children based on genealogical and astrological criteria. These children were enrolled in state-run orphanages where magic was 'cultivated' via psychological conditioning, sensory deprivation, and talismanic bonding. Some grew into magical prodigies. Others vanished. Over the decades, the OBIT tried multiple programmes to create 'ultimate Lenins' by implanting magically talented children with false memories of Soviet heroes.

Magical-Industrial Commission (MPK) (Магико-промышленная комиссия / Magiko-Promyshlennaya Komissiya)

By the 1960s, the Soviet state had bureaucratised magical practices. Magical tools were heavily regulated and standardized, subject to enchantment audits, and personal or unauthorised use was forbidden.

The K8 Manual was a 12-volume procedural manual issued to train NKRD officers, used in K8 ('Class 8'), a special programme within the NKVD's Special Purpose School (SHON). The manual contained forms for spells, required authorisations, and reportable side effects. As a Soviet joke went, magic only worked if the right requisitions were filed.

Spell-reactive alloys were of great interest to the state--regardless of whether they amplified, channelled, or dampened magic. A primary mining operation and forge was located in the Urals to refine meteorites for wands, enchanted armor, and shock-sticks.

[maxdibert]

As a German I genuinely wonder what muggleborns were doing during ww2, like not even the adult wizards I mean the kids going to school and seeing the Jewish muggleborns and stuff?? Like???

As a Spaniard, I can’t help but wonder what the hell happened to Muggle-borns during our Civil War? Did they go to the French school alongside the children of people from the opposing side? And what about the 40 years of dictatorship? Could the son of a high-ranking regime official go to school with the child of someone who had been executed or imprisoned for political reasons?

Like, wtf, Rowling? This is basic 20th-century European history. How do you not consider this? The woman lived in Portugal, and Portugal had its own dictatorship until 1974. Germany was split in two after WWII. Half of Europe was under Soviet rule. Maybe it’s just that I studied politics and think about these things more, but seriously aren’t these topics you literally study in high school???