KOZENKI, Russia - Acrid clouds of smoke drift through the sky from stubborn peat fires smoldering here northwest of Moscow. But standing in a stubbled field next to the New Riga Highway, Alexander Golod claims that the air is healthier than anywhere else in the region.
It's because, he says, of the 144-foot pyramid towering behind him. The 53-year-old former guitar-string manufacturer says his pyramids - which can be ordered from a Canadian firm - don't just purify the air by somehow concentrating the "energy" of the space around them. They can cure cancer, detoxify chemical weapons, prevent terrorism, and even reduce the power of tornadoes and earthquakes.
To at least one visitor, the air smells just as smoky as elsewhere. But Golod, who sells jewelry and crystals stored in his 55-ton Fiberglas edifice, says it has sweeping powers. "Visiting the pyramid, it's like going under a shower," he says. "It takes all the diseases away, like grease washing off your body."
Russians find such ideas, which stray into the fringes of science and beyond, irresistible. After the fall of the Soviet Union, interest in the supernatural flourished like weeds in a vacant lot - perhaps because, with the collapse of communism, so many of the society's basic beliefs were mowed down.
To some, Golod's claims might seem too fantastic to take seriously. Not here. The lanky "pyramidologist" counts influential bureaucrats, top-ranking military officers and even some scientists among his friends and supporters.
Russia's mammoth state-owned gas monopoly, Gazprom, confirms that it built one of Golod's 144-foot pyramids - which, according to news accounts can cost $1 million - in an oil field near the Caspian Sea. Other agencies have gone beyond pyramids.
A staff of 60 specialists in extrasensory perception works for the Ministry of Emergency Situations, predicting natural and man-made disasters, the weekly magazine Kommersant Vlast reported in January. (Their record for forecasting was dismal, the magazine noted.)
Russia's Defense Ministry established a State Center for Extreme Medicine at Moscow State University, Russia's most prestigious institution of higher learning. The center's director told the reporters he would test "auras," energy fields that supposedly envelop the body, and "charged water," which New Age theorists say can purge illness.
Golod claims that a cosmonaut carried crystals grown in one of his pyramids to the International Space Station last year - although Russian space officials say that, if that happened, they weren't told about it.
Disturbed by the rise of belief in paranormal phenomena, the Russian Academy of Sciences, founded by Czar Peter the Great, has launched a campaign against pseudo-science, denouncing quack cures in interviews, articles and lobbying sessions with top politicians.
Increasingly, they say, people seem willing to listen. "The ice has started to move," said Eduard Kruglyakov, a prize-winning physicist and chairman of the academy's Commission Against Pseudo-Science and the Falsification of Scientific Studies, in a telephone interview from his office in Siberia.
Kruglyakov, the chief of one of the most prestigious scientific institutes in Russia, is soft-spoken but blunt about his view of paranormal claims. They consist, he says, of "swindles" and "frauds." He calls their promoters "crooks."
Many people in Western countries, of course, believe in the power of pyramids, crystals and astrology. But in Russia, these views are often treated respectfully by the media, academic institutions and government bureaucrats.
"I call this phenomenon 'corruption,'" Kruglyakov says.
What other explanation is there, he asks, when - as happened two years ago - Russia's deputy chief of public health claims in newspaper ads that a boxlike device, called "Vita," could prevent injury from electromagnetic radiation?
The product, Kruglyakov says, defied all scientific logic. It doesn't work and uses misleading technical information and advertising, he wrote in Skeptical Inquirer, an American magazine dedicated to debunking paranormal claims.
Russia's health care system lies in ruins, and people here on average die 10 years earlier than other Europeans. Yet Russians squander $1 billion each year on questionable medical devices, Kruglyakov estimates, encouraged by testimonials by scientists. "It is incomprehensible why the Academy of Medical Sciences keeps silent about such fraud," he recently wrote.
Valentina Deradze, a spokesman for the medical academy, said the group doesn't investigate fake medical claims, and referred questions to the Ministry of Public Health, which told a reporter to ask the medical academy.
Dr. Yuri Lopukhin, a cellular biologist and chief of the ethics commission of the medical academy, says he has done his best to fight pseudo-science within his field. One medical researcher claimed to cure several diseases by injecting bits of fruit into his patients, supposedly boosting the immune system - a preposterous assertion. "I was furious," Lopukhin says.
He attacked the procedure in a book he wrote on immune therapy, appeared on television and wrote an article for Moscow's Komsomolets newspaper. He was determined, he said, "to block the road for charlatans."
But, he says, there is simply too much bogus medicine in Russia, and too little time to fight it. "We cannot examine everything and everybody," he says. "That's why there is so much of this delirium."
The Communists were not immune to the allure of pseudo-science. A Soviet physicist, Anatoly E. Akimov, told military officials he could harness the untapped energy potential of the vacuum to create a weapon powerful enough to scatter an army "like a flock of sheep," Kruglyakov says. Akimov's secret weapons program received $500 million from the Kremlin during the 1980s, a time when the Soviet economy was in its death spiral.
When the existence of the research became public in March 1991, the U.S.S.R.'s leading physicists were dumbfounded. Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev ordered a halt to it.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, occult beliefs and dubious science flourished - even in the highest levels of government. President Boris N. Yeltsin's circle of advisers included an astrologer who claimed to be able to use the stars to predict the fate of ships, submarines, tanks - and the president's aircraft.
Kruglyakov took his case against pseudo-science to the top last year, during a visit by President Vladimir V. Putin to the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk, where Kruglyakov is deputy director. If no effort was made to curb crackpot science, the physicist warned Putin, "in a few years, we will have a country of wild people."
Putin, the physicist says, pledged his support. Gone are the presidential astrologers and mystics. But, Kruglyakov says, many practitioners of the paranormal remain embedded in the Russian bureaucracy.
"It seems to me that the group surrounding the president is much better now," Kruglyakov says. "Nevertheless there are many crooks in the vicinity of government."
Kruglyakov says he is considering writing a separate article on Golod's growing pyramid empire. "This is a swindle," the physicist said bluntly. "There is no kind of phenomenon inside a pyramid."
Meanwhile, a steady stream of visitors find their way to Golod's property. A battered white bus filled with pensioners from the Moscow Society for the Disabled arrived in front of the pyramid one recent morning. About 20 heart-disease and cancer patients shuffled inside, where the sun filtered through the lightweight panels, filling the structure with honey-colored light.
The slender, tranquil Golod offered the disabled free sips from a plastic jug of water stored in the structure. "It helps any disease, even cancer," he assured them. The security guard's desk doubled as a souvenir shop, where visitors could buy a $4 jug of the water, a $3.18 bracelet or a $143 miniature marble pyramid.
Golod lives in a sprawling, brand-new country home a quarter-mile from his Moscow-area pyramid. In his back yard, he is building a new barn-sized building to house an indoor swimming pool, in-law apartments and squash court.
He says he earns his living by running a company that produces maps for the military. His pyramids are, he says, a philanthropic "hobby" that has cost him $2 million.
Critics scoff at this. "He's building these pyramids only to get a lot of money," says Dr. Lopukhin of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
Many of the hundreds of visitors who stream into the pyramid every day, meanwhile, seem eager to believe Golod's claims.
"Maybe it will help me," says Svetlana Shulyakutskaya, a 64-year-old member of the Moscow Society for the Disabled, who was considering buying a jug of water.
She has high blood pressure and recently suffered a heart attack. "I would like to try it," she said. "I'm an optimist, and I hope it would help. At least, I would like it very much if it helped."