Back in the Soviet union we used to have this popular TV program by Anatoly Kashpirovsky where he was hypnotizing the whole country through TV. You could see people falling into trance, sleepwalking, raising their hands when Kashpirowski told them to...

Kashpirovsky had this heavy gaze and used to count slowly and tell people that "everything is good", "your headache is gone", "you feel light and happy"... Imagine all this was happening at the end of 80s, when the Soviet union was collapsing and some people didn't have much to eat. The best of escapist TV ever!

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Central Asia might seem unstable these days, with the semi-regular occurrence of a revolution or the violent suppression of an uprising. But gone are the days when you could take a capital city with a ragtag army of soldiers and mercenaries. In 1921, however, Baron Roman Ungern von Sternberg, known as the Bloody Baron, did just that when he captured Ulan Bataar in one of the strangest incidents of the Russian Civil War.

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