In early August 1998, I flew to Crimea, where several business meetings awaited me. The visit dragged on for several days, and one morning, when I woke up, I felt vaguely uneasy. Something was wrong, I had a feeling that the money house was collapsing. At that time, I was the President of the Republic of Kalmykia, and the first thing I did was to call Elista and demand that the government squeeze all reserves dry, so it could immediately pay people everything that we owed them at the moment: public sector wages, child benefits, pensions - whatever was possible. About a week later, the Central Bank of Russia announced the suspension of payments on government short-term bonds. The country has defaulted.
The dollar, which only yesterday cost six roubles, soared almost instantly to twenty and this was only at the official rate. Salaries have depreciated while goods, on the contrary, have risen in price. Of course, what was happening caused discontent among people and fuelled social tension. Kalmykia, on the other hand, has become almost the only region whose residents, thanks to payments outside the schedule, were at least somehow ready for a financial catastrophe. Some managed to exchange roubles for dollars, some stocked up on the necessary products.
But my colleagues from other republics and regions were offended: "How is it, Kirsan, that you knew what was going to happen in advance, but did not warn us?" Nobody believed that I didn’t know anything, but simply felt that something was wrong, despite all the statements of Kiriyenko and Lifshitz. They still could not believe it.
There have been enough such insights in my lifetime. It is difficult to say what caused these premonitions. For example, for the case I described above, there is a simple and completely scientific explanation. The fact is that some people - scientists, executives, chess players (I belong to the last two categories) - tend to constantly collect and analyse information. This habit works even when you are oblivious to a problem.
The subconscious mind continually snatches pieces of news, bits of statistical data, vague echoes of expert comments from the flow of information, and constantly processes all this mess to come to a certain conclusion. However, it does not provide our mind with a resume printed on A4 paper with graphs and diagrams. We get more or less vague guesses or even disturbing images only.
As you know, the subconscious mind does not stop working even in a dream. Maybe that’s why I, without really knowing or understanding anything, came to that decision on one morning of August 1998? If the default had not happened then, the government and I would probably have to explain why we committed a malicious violation of budget discipline. But I'm used to trusting my intuition.
Of course, it is rather doubtful that the control authorities would have accepted the fact that Ilyumzhinov had a prophetic dream as an excuse. Nevertheless, many serious scientists and executives would consider such a presentiment sufficient reason for action. And they would stubbornly defend their position, even if they could not back it up with figures and facts precisely because the mechanism of intuition has been sufficiently studied and recognized.
But not everything can be explained by the work of the subconscious mind. I had predictions that could not be explained in this way. Of course, from time to time, I still managed to foresee things. But I have a lot of friends and acquaintances from among those who are called seers.
And the strongest of them was, of course, Vangelia Gushterova - the famous Baba Vanga. When we met, she was already over eighty. I was barely thirty, but by that time I had long and actively been interested in extrasensory perception, clairvoyance and other inexplicable phenomena and, I must say, I had seen many. Therefore, I was able to see who is really worth something, who deliberately deceives people, and who is honestly mistaken. Vanga struck me from our first meeting and continued to amaze me until the last one.
Vanga's predictions have much in common with intuitive foresight (such as mine). My premonitions appear as a vague image but Vanga rarely predicted something in a similar way.
This happened when we were drinking tea with her in her garden. We talked about this and that, and suddenly Vanga said to me: "You are so thin, small, but you sit on two chairs!" Although I did not say so, I could not understand her: what chairs, we were sitting on a bench! And six months later, I, who at that time was the head of Kalmykia, was suddenly elected president at the FIDE Assembly in Paris! How could she have known about it, if my nomination came as a surprise not only to me, but also to Anatoly Karpov and Bashar Kouatly? Actually, they approached her only when it became clear that the elections had reached a dead end, and my candidacy, for various reasons, could suit everyone, that is, during the Assembly.
At the same time, Vanga did not always speak in riddles. Knowing about our relationship with her, many of my acquaintances asked to provide them with patronage: to take them to my Bulgarian magician friend. Sometimes, even before our departure, she used to call me: “Kirsan, you want to bring someone here. He does not need to go, to waste money and time. Let him do this and that first”.
In another case, she did not even begin to talk to the guest I had brought, but asked us to tell his relative, who was waiting in her yard, that he immediately should quit smoking: his lungs were not in order. Then she gave instructions on how to get his sick father out of bed. We were pretty surprised: the young guy did not look consumptive at all, and his father felt great when we flew out of Russia. Needless to say, everything Vanga said was confirmed, and her advice really helped a suddenly ill person.
Let me remind you that Vanga was born into a poor peasant family. At the age of 12, she became blind, hitting a hurricane, and remained illiterate forever. Of course, she did not have her own intelligence service, which could collect information for her about certain people and prepare analytics. But how did she make her predictions?
I asked her about it. If we translate her explanations into modern language, it would turn out that Vanga considered herself to be something like a conductor. For some reason, she got access to a single information field containing events of the past, present and future. Why not? Our academician Vladimir Vernadsky, French philosophers Edouard Leroy and Teilhard de Chardin spoke about the possibility of such a field.
Most scientists are still condescending to this hypothesis. Perhaps, it is because long ago Christian theologians said something similar about the higher worlds. The Big Bang hypothesis was at one time accepted with hostility by the scientific community for the same reason. Today it is generally accepted. Nobody denies the existence of electromagnetic and gravitational fields. So why there cannot be the informational one?
I am not a scientist, not a philosopher or a theologian, so I will neither insist on this hypothesis, nor try to prove it. But my personal experience confirms: along with intuition, which can be explained by the constant work of our own quantum computer - the brain, there is also a certain informational space like the Internet that we can enter and "download" the necessary information.
I cannot say that everyone has access to the informational field, but, obviously, many do. And, apparently, there are more such people in Kalmykia than anywhere else. At least twenty years ago, in one of the Kalmyk newspapers, it was even necessary to create a special section called "The Bureau of Prophetic Dreams", where people reported their predictions.
Seriously speaking, I am convinced: whatever the true nature of foresight, it was given to us for a reason. Not so that we have a reason for idle conversations, and even more so not to be frightened in advance and give up before the future events. On the contrary, forewarned is forearmed. This means that foresight is an invitation to action, a reason to change yourself and the world around you.
