File Photo: The Moscow Kremlin (Thinkstock Photo)
Dzhuna, a famed mystic healer and astrologer who is said to have treated Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and Russian celebrities, died today at 65, her close friend told AFP.
"Dzhuna died today morning," said Andrei Malakhov, the host of a prime-time chat show on Channel One state television, by telephone.
Dzhuna's death led the news broadcasts on state channels, reflecting her enormous fame in the chaotic years after the breakup of the USSR when psychics and astrologers enjoyed a wave of new-found popularity.
"Some called her a charlatan, some called her a saviour," said the state RIA Novosti news agency.
Dzhuna, whose real name was Yevgenia Davitashvili, "was the secret healer of the Kremlin, she was a female version of Rasputin in the 1980s," Igor Matviyenko, a top pop producer, told AFP, adding that he was married to her "for a month" in the late 1980s.
Davitashvili came from the small ethnic group of Assyrian Christians and played up her striking dark-haired looks, calling herself "the Assyrian princess".
She was born in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar to an Iranian father and Cossack mother. After training as a nurse, she began using hand movements to heal patients.
After coming to Moscow she worked at a state planning institution but began healing celebrities including singer Vladimir Vysotsky, RIA Novosti said.
Dzhuna gave consultations to Brezhnev, who died in 1982, and to Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet top diplomat between 1985 and 1991, Matviyenko said, adding that she "never divulged" what went on during the consultations.
Kremlin limos used to drive up to her Moscow apartment, which became a kind of fashionable salon where "Kremlin leaders and artists rubbed shoulders," said Matviyenko, who was a rock musician 11 years her junior.
"Almost all the Politburo came to our wedding in central Moscow," he said, adding that she once healed him "with one finger" when he had a knee injury from football.
The healer, who also wrote poetry and painted, founded an institution called the International Academy of Alternative Sciences in 1990.
She only became a widely known public figure after the fall of the Soviet Union, making frequent media appearances.
After her son died in a car accident in 2001, she became reclusive and rarely appeared in public.
She reportedly died after slipping into a coma following circulation problems.