--- aliases: - Dzhuna Davitashvili - Dzhuna - Juna - Juna Davitashvili - Djuna - Dzhuna Davitashvili (Juna) - Eugenia Davitashvili - Evgenia Davitashvili - Evgeniya Davitashvili - Evgenia Yuvashevna Davitashvili - Eugenia Sardis - Comrade D born: 1949 category: Psychics & Remote Viewers created: 2026-10-05 died: 2015 location: Moscow, Soviet Union relations: - end: 1985 fn: 5 role: enrolled without publicity as a senior researcher without a dissertation, at 180 rubles a month, according to the journalist Lev Kolodny; the physicist Alexander Taratorin wrote that the Politburo had favored a professorship and Vladimir Kotelnikov insisted on a lower rank start: 1982 type: employed_by with: '[[Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics]]' - end: 1985 fn: 4 role: the principal biological subject of the laboratory of physical fields of biological objects, which Godik led under Yuri Gulyaev start: 1982 type: subject_of with: '[[Eduard Godik]]' - fn: 10 role: a DIA report of 1982 stated that healers such as Davitashvili had been studied in the laboratory of the Society's Bioelectronics Section start: 1978 type: subject_of with: '[[Popov Society]]' - fn: 3 role: married a Tbilisi official described by Kolodny as on the staff of Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze; son Vakhtang born 1975 type: spouse_of with: '[[Viktor Davitashvili]]' summary: Healer brought from Tbilisi to Moscow in 1980 by the Gosplan chairman, enrolled in 1982 as a senior researcher at the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, and principal subject of its laboratory. tags: - Person - Healer - Biofield - SovietUnion - Psychoenergetics - Gosplan - Brezhnev updated: 2026-10-05 --- Evgenia Yuvashevna Davitashvili, known as Dzhuna, was born Evgenia Sardis in 1949 in the village of Urmia in Krasnodar Krai, founded in the 1920s by Assyrians; a biographical account gives the date in her documents as June 22, 1949, and notes that she told varying stories of her childhood and training.[^1] She was of the Assyrian Christian minority of the [Soviet Union](/places/soviet-union/).[^2] She left home at fourteen, worked as a cinema projectionist and waitress, and then as a masseuse for hospital patients, who reported relief of arthritis, neuralgia and sciatica; she became a local figure in Tbilisi, and she told the researcher Larissa Vilenskaya that she treated as many as one hundred patients a day. Der Spiegel reported on September 22, 1980 that she held certificates from a people's high school and an institute of clinical psychology in Tbilisi.[^2] ### Move to Moscow, 1980 The journalist Lev Kolodny wrote that Dzhuna had lived in Tbilisi for many years, married Viktor Davitashvili, whom he described as on the staff of Eduard Shevardnadze's administration, and raised a son. When the wife of the Gosplan chairman Nikolai Baibakov had been ill for five years, the chairman of the Georgian Council of Ministers recommended Dzhuna; Baibakov's son Sergei flew to Tbilisi for her in April 1980, and she arrived in [Moscow](/places/moscow/) with her five-year-old son Vakhtang and was lodged in the Hotel Moskva. Kolodny quoted Baibakov's memoir Forty Years in the Government that treatment of Klavdia Andreevna began after he invited Dzhuna to his home, that she felt considerably better after the first sessions, and that the chairman made Dzhuna an expert at a departmental polyclinic.[^3] Foreign correspondents were the first to report the guest of the Hotel Moskva, and spread the rumor that she had come to treat the ailing [Leonid Brezhnev](/people/leonid-brezhnev/); Kolodny named an American journalist, Henry Gris, as inventing the details "Comrade D," six bodyguards and a fee of 250 rubles a session.[^3] Martin Ebon wrote in 1983 that the Soviet health minister Boris Petrovsky and Baibakov were among those reported to have benefited, that the magazine Ogonyok quoted her in April 1981 saying that "there is a biological field around all living organisms" which she felt as prickling or warmth in her hands, and that the Ogonyok round table of that issue, chaired by Sergey Vlasov, noted two hundred such persons in the Moscow area.[^2] Vilenskaya, then editing a Western bulletin on Soviet parapsychology, recalled meeting her in the Hotel Druzhba in April 1979.[^2] The actor Arkady Raikin and his wife Ruf Ioffe were treated, according to Baibakov's memoir as cited in a 2019 profile.[^1] ### Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, 1981 to 1985 Kolodny wrote that physicist Yevgeny Velikhov stated in 1990 that he had "put a hand to organizing the study of the 'Dzhuna effect' in serious scientific laboratories" at Brezhnev's demand, and quoted Yuri Gulyaev that Guriy Marchuk told him and Velikhov that Brezhnev had asked them to find out whether she was "treating or maiming" him.[^3] A [Central Intelligence Agency](/organizations/central-intelligence-agency/) news abstract of Kolodny's Moskovskaya Pravda article of October 10, 1990 states that Baibakov persuaded Brezhnev the research was worthwhile and that Davitashvili thereby received permission to reside in Moscow; its sponsors were Baibakov, Marchuk, Anatoly Aleksandrov and [Vladimir Kotelnikov](/people/vladimir-kotelnikov/), the director of the [Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics](/organizations/institute-of-radio-engineering-and-electronics/), and the project's two groups were led by Eduard Godik at the institute and Rakhimov at Moscow State University.[^4] Kolodny wrote that she was enrolled without publicity as senior researcher, without a dissertation, at 180 rubles a month. Taratorin, who worked in the laboratory, wrote that she was enrolled in secret as a senior researcher, that the Politburo's first idea of a professorship was reduced at Kotelnikov's insistence, that she was brought to the laboratory as soon as the first instrument prototypes were ready, that strange persons and endless telephone calls surrounded her, that she sometimes demanded the physicists switch on their instruments and leave so she could measure herself, and that she offered Taratorin a treatment for a sore throat after which he developed a severe angina.[^5][^6] The laboratory's findings, as Taratorin wrote, were that the instruments registered no obvious physical anomalies at her hands or the patients' bodies, but that after her passes patients' skin showed a redistribution of blood, sometimes localized, which led to work on the sensitivity of skin receptors to thermal flows; the skin senses very small heat flows, so the heat from a hand lies an order of magnitude above threshold, and the passes resemble contactless massage.[^6] Godik, asked about the healer whose example was Dzhuna, said he concluded that the effect rests on the body's ability to notice and respond to weak signals below the threshold of awareness, and that no unknown physical fields or "mystical biofields" stand behind it.[^7] The newspaper Izvestiya stated on July 3, 1986 that she "willingly cooperated with a group of physicists at the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics headed by Yu. V. Gulyayev and readily demonstrated her abilities," and that a laboratory under E. E. Godik compared the physical fields of a control group of laboratory workers with those of "extrasenses, primarily Ye. Yu. Davitashvili": in the "working regime" the fields near her wrists showed changed infrared radiation, increased very weak optical luminescence, an increased magnetic field and low-frequency electric oscillations, and the hand warmed by several degrees, a warming of the patient's skin that did not occur when a glass wall opaque to infrared separated healer and patient.[^8] Kolodny quoted Godik's book Zagadka ekstrasensov on a patient with endarteritis whose circulation was "practically restored" after her passes, and Gulyaev in 2016 that she was "a phenomenon to some extent," humans sensing temperature differences half as well as she.[^3][^9] The published results omitted her name; Kolodny wrote that the editor of the Vestnik Akademii Nauk SSSR asked the authors to cut a paragraph explaining the phenomena for fear readers would conclude "science had confirmed them."[^9] A [Defense Intelligence Agency](/organizations/defense-intelligence-agency/) (DIA) report of March 22, 1982 stated that "healers, such as Davitashvili, have been studied" in the laboratory of the Bioelectronics Section of the Popov Society, that research with healers took place at the institute, and that popular press articles "have on several occasions described Party Chairman Brezhnev's affiliation with a healer, Dzhuna Davitashvili"; it listed "healers" among subjects expected to perform well in psychoenergetics tasks with military implications.[^10] Taratorin wrote that after Baibakov introduced Dzhuna to Brezhnev at about the end of 1981, with Brezhnev satisfied and "it seems even feeling better," a call from the Central Committee came to the institute, and that a stream of visitors followed to the laboratory's basement: Baibakov, the Academy presidents Aleksandrov and Marchuk, political advisers to the General Secretary, Central Committee staff, [KGB](/organizations/kgb/) officers, academicians, cosmonauts and artists, who were shown colored computer images of her hand passes over a patient's reddening back; he recalled that one file was shown 1,130 times in a few months.[^6] At a joint session of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences the physicist Yakov Zeldovich criticized the philosopher Alexander Spirkin, who had publicly acknowledged the phenomena, with the remark Kolodny attributed to him that scientists "should not succumb to hypnosis even on the part of healers"; Aleksandrov added that "it is impermissible for members of the Academy of Sciences to support pseudoscientific directions."[^3] According to the news abstract the group's work was interrupted in April 1985.[^4] ### After 1985 Kolodny wrote that his first article on her, in Komsomolskaya Pravda, drew a sharp reaction from the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences, published his account as Fenomen "D" i drugie (Politizdat, 1991, 200,000 copies), and in 2016 disputed the statement attributed to Gulyaev that no Dzhuna phenomenon had existed.[^3][^9] Godik emigrated to the United States in 1993.[^3] A biographical account states that she died in Moscow in 2015 of a stroke after years of seclusion following the death of her son, was given the funeral rites of the Assyrian Church of the East and was buried in the Vagankovo cemetery.[^1] [^1]: "Dzhuna: biografiya pervogo ofitsialnogo ekstrasensa SSSR," lady.mail.ru. https://lady.mail.ru/article/558046-dzhuna-davitashvili/ (the text gives June 22, 1949 as the date in her documents and states both June 8 and July 8, 2015 as the date of death). [^2]: Martin Ebon, *Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion?* (McGraw-Hill, 1983), chapter 13, "Dzhuna the Healer," citing Ogonyok (April 1981), Der Spiegel (September 22, 1980) and *Parapsychology in the USSR*, ed. Larissa Vilenskaya (Washington Research Center, San Francisco). https://archive.org/details/psychic-warfare-threat-or-illusion-ebon-martin [^3]: Lev Kolodny, preface to *Dzhuna. Tayna velikoy tselitelnitsy* (first published as *Fenomen "D" i drugie*, Politizdat, 1991). https://mybook.ru/author/lev-kolodnyj/dzhuna-tajna-velikoj-celitelnicy/read/ Kolodny was a journalist who campaigned for Dzhuna and for the laboratory. [^4]: Lev Kolodny, "Biofield Researchers' Equipment, Support from Country's Leaders Noted," *Moskovskaya Pravda*, October 10, 1990, no. 232, p. 3, as abstracted in the Daily SNAP (item SNAP 901023), CIA-RDP96-00792R000500470003-9. https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP96-00792R000500470003-9 [^5]: Kolodny (note 3). [^6]: Alexander Taratorin, "Nevydumannaya istoriya ekstrasensov v Rossii" (1997), lib.ru. http://lib.ru/ZHURNAL/istoria.txt_with-big-pictures.html Sole source for the passages so cited, written by a member of the laboratory. [^7]: "A chto nauka? Smogli li uchenye razgadat zagadku ekstrasensov," *Argumenty i Fakty*, no. 42, October 14, 2014 (interview with Eduard Godik). https://aif.by/social/a_chto_nauka_smogli_li_uchenye_razgadat_zagadku_ekstrasensov [^8]: B. Konovalov, "Extrasense Through the Eyes of Physics," *Izvestiya*, July 3, 1986, p. 6, as translated in JPRS-UBB-86-022, *USSR Report: Life Sciences, Biomedical and Behavioral Sciences*, December 5, 1986, pp. 105-108. https://archive.org/details/jprs-report_jprs-ubb-86-022 [^9]: Lev Kolodny, "Mify i pravda o Dzhune," *Moskovsky Komsomolets*, October 14, 2016. https://www.mk.ru/social/2016/10/14/mify-i-pravda-o-dzhune-esli-ne-izvinitsya-to-zadumatsya.html [^10]: Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense Technical Intelligence Report DST-1810D-948-82-RPT-4, "The Soviet Psychoenergetics Research Program (U)," March 22, 1982, sections II.D and III, NSA-RDP96X00790R000100020003-3. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-nsa-rdp96x00790r000100020003-3 --- *The Info Web has an MCP server for agents at https://theinfoweb.org/mcp (streamable HTTP, no auth): search by meaning, exact text, source or date, and follow typed, footnoted connections. 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