academia from the old regime, Oldenburg became an inl uential Bolshevik fellow traveler. From 1904 to 1929, he occupied the powerful position of Secretary of the Russian/Soviet Academy of Sciences. h is status allowed him to exercise much control over the humanities and sciences in the country.

Oldenburg, the leading academic authority on Tibetan Buddhism, was one of the i rst with whom Barchenko shared his idea of the Shambhala-Agartha expedition. Yet this contact proved not only frustrating but also harmful for his project. h e skeptical Oldenburg made fun of the entire idea. Moreover, in his talks with colleagues the scholar-bureaucrat began openly to call Barchenko a charlatan. Even at er 1925, when the secret police formally took Barchenko under its wing, Oldenburg continued to assail the “ancient scientist” as a con artist. In all fairness, it was obvious that Barchenko, who had only a superi cial knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism, was a dwarf compared to Oldenburg who, as one of the deans in this i eld, was well versed in the Buddhist tradition and the languages of the area. In 1923, attacked by his powerful opponent, Barchenko dropped out of the research community and let Glavnauka.

His salvation came from the astronomer Alexander Kondiain and his wife, Eleanor Mesmacher, participants in his arctic expedition and fellow occultists, who sheltered Barchenko and his former and new wives in their large apartment on Red Dawn Street in downtown Petrograd.

Barchenko was also pleased to i nd out that this Russianized Greek was also ready to accept him as a spiritual teacher. Besides, the new friend was blessed with a phenomenal memory and could read several Eastern languages, including Sanskrit. For Barchenko, who was determined to penetrate the hub of ancient wisdom in Inner Asia but did not know the languages of the area, Kondiain became not only a savior but also a great asset.

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United Labor Brotherhood on Red Dawn Street In 1923, at er his troubles with Oldenburg and Glavnauka, Barchenko wanted to rejuvenate himself spiritually. He was inspired by a small Buddhist/Communist commune that he set up at Kondiaian’s apartment on Red Dawn Street. Women were mastering the art of sewing, and men were practicing carpentry. In the evening, together they read and discussed spiritual and occult literature. In the 1920s in Soviet Russia, before the totalitarian dictatorship spread its tentacles, people were involved in various social experiments. Alternative communes and informal clubs, usually with a progressive and avant-garde spin, populated the cultural landscape. While monitoring them, the secret police did not yet harass these groups too much, as long as they loosely i t socialism.

Besides Kondiain and Mesmacher, Barchenko’s commune included Natalia and Olga, his old and new wives, and children from both families. Mesmacher remembered: “We lived as one family in a commune.

We shared everything and took turns doing chores. At our meetings we frequently scrutinized the behavior of one member or another in the commune, pointing to his or her mistakes.” 19

Barchenko developed guidelines for his commune, which he named United Labor Brotherhood (ULB). His friends Otto, Ricks, Leismaier-Schwartz, and Vladimirov, the former Cheka/OGPU oi cers, or “checkers” as Mesmacher jokingly dubbed them, were also part of this project.

Although kicked out of the secret police, Vladimirov continued on his own to report diligently to his former service on all his friends. To his credit, in these secret updates, full of gossip, he never slandered Barchenko.

h e goal of ULB was to foster a community of people who, through studying mysticism and philosophy as well as working on traditional crat s as a team, would spiritually upgrade themselves. h e blueprint for ULB was G. I. Gurdjief ’s United Labor Commonwealth, which Barchenko learned of from his close friend Peter Shandarovsky, a former 60

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member of Gurdjief ’s circle who chose to remain in Russia. Barchenko’s brotherhood had two ranks: students and brothers. In order to the reach the brothers’ level one had to exercise rigorous spiritual discipline and reach the highest moral standards. h e i rst step in this direction was renouncing property, which was not a controversial issue—in Red Russia private property was scorned as evil anyway. Despite being a leader, Barchenko modestly stated that he was still a student. A good esoteric commune had to have its own symbols, and ULB was no exception. h e symbol of a brother was a red rose with a white lily petal and a cross, symbols of full harmony. h e rose and the cross were borrowed from the Rosicrucian tradition; the lily came from Musurgia Universalis by Athanasius Kircher (1602–80), a German Jesuit esoteric scholar. A black-and-white hexagon was the symbol of a student, meaning that students still had to work hard to tune their lives to universal rhythm and harmony. 20

Barchenko was well familiar with several major texts of the Western esoteric tradition. At the same time, for a person who craved to penetrate the hub of ancient knowledge in Inner Asia, he lacked any deep knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism. Barchenko simply felt inadequate in front of such giants as Oldenburg who were well read in this area, knew Tibetan and Sanskrit, and had hands-on experience with local cultures.

h e Shambhala-Agartha seeker was well aware that a question would always arise of how he, with no expertise in Tibetan Buddhism, could be qualii ed to lead an expedition to the area.

In an attempt to eliminate this drawback and to ground himself in Tibetan Buddhism, Barchenko moved for several months onto the premises of the Buddhist Kalachakra temple in Petrograd. In fact, he did so right at er his fatal conl ict with Oldenburg, before setting up his little commune on Red Dawn Street. h is unique Buddhist complex, which included a temple and a dormitory, was erected with the personal blessing of Emperor Nicholas II a year before the Bolshevik revolution. Its formal goal was to accommodate the spiritual needs of visiting Buddhists. h e project was initiated by Agvan Dorzhiev (1858–1938), 61

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a Buryat lama from Siberia who for many years served as a chief tutor of the thirteenth Dalai Lama and then, at er 1900, as Tibetan envoy to Russia. Dorzhiev nourished an ambitious idea: to bring all Tibetan Buddhists under the wing of the Russian emperor, whom he advertized to his brethren as the reincarnation of the legendary Shambhala king.

h e temple also served as a gathering place for spiritually charged elite and middle-class Russian bohemians who craved Oriental spirituality.

One of them was the painter Nicholas Roerich, who heavily contributed to the project by designing stained glass for the second l oor of the temple.

So in the summer of 1923, Barchenko moved into the Buddhist dormitory and was introduced to a variety of interesting characters, including Bolshevik fellow travelers from Tibetan Buddhist lands, some of whom came to Petrograd to establish contacts with the new regime and i nd out about its liberation prophecy. Barchenko engaged these people in conversations, trying to learn from them. First of all, he got in touch with Dorzhiev, whom the Bolsheviks inherited form the old regime.

At er 1917, this activist lama befriended the new masters and began to promote Red Russia as the new Shambhala. But most important for Barchenko were his talks with a Mongol, Khaian Khirva, and a Tibetan, Naga Naven. h e former was head of State Internal Protection (GVO), the secret police of revolutionary Mongolia, a sister spy structure sponsored and built up by Red Russia. Khirva was a shady character, and not much is known about him except that, before embracing Communism and becoming one of the top leaders of Red Mongolia, he was a young lama who preached poverty as a lifestyle. 21 Khirva was the i rst to reach out to Barchenko by knocking on the door of his apartment.

He was dei nitely Barchenko’s kindred spirit. h e lama-turned-secret-police-chief wanted to promote Communism in Inner Asia by explaining to his nomadic brethren that the ethics and teachings of Tibetan Buddhism and Communism were similar. Moreover, he nourished a desire to educate Communist leaders of Russia about the wisdom of 62

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Kalachakra tantra and Buddhism in general—the same idea that so captivated the mind of Barchenko.

Naga Naven was the governor of Western Tibet who quit on the Dalai Lama and threw his lot with the Panchen Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet, who in 1923 escaped to Mongolia and challenged the Lhasa ruler from there. Naven came to Soviet Russia to solicit Bolshevik support for the Panchen Lama, but in the early 1920s the Bolsheviks still gambled on the Dalai Lama and refused to listen to Naven. h e Tibetan introduced Barchenko to Kalachakra tantra and told him more about the Shambhala prophecy as it existed in its indigenous hub—Tibet.

At er his brief stay with the Tibetan Buddhists, Barchenko referred to his spiritual pursuits by the word Dunkhor, derived from Dus’khor, a Tibetan word for Kalachakra tantra. Yet, there was certainly no way for a European like Barchenko, who did not speak and read Tibetan, to learn in a few months the wisdom that Tibetan monks usually explored for four years at special monastery schools. It is obvious that Barchenko “mastered” Kalachakra through the prism of Western esotericism, mostly Synarchy and Hermetism. 22 As a result of the talks with Naven and Khirva, Barchenko’s desire to become the “Red Merlin” for the Bolshevik regime grew stronger. He recovered from his spiritual crisis and returned to the world. More than ever he became determined to enlighten the Soviet government by retrieving the Shambhala wisdom that would benei t and ennoble the Communist cause.

h e i rst and foremost goal was to inform the Bolshevik elite about the powerful scientii c knowledge that Barchenko was convinced was hidden in Shambhala-Agartha, waiting to be unlocked. h e crown jewel of this Eastern wisdom was Kalachakra tantra, which provided necessary spiritual tools. h e brightest and smartest of the Bolsheviks were to master psychological techniques that would help shape people’s minds in the right direction and allow them to control and determine the future.

Simultaneously, Barchenko would unfold for commissars his political plan that would stop social conl icts. Instead of pitting urban and 63

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village underclass people against the bourgeoisie and middle class, he wanted the Bolsheviks to cultivate professional associations that would help stop the vicious circle of class warfare between the haves and the have-nots. In order to build up a perfectly harmonious society, the new Red masters, like high priests in d’Alveydre’s Agartha, were to cultivate a commonwealth of professional guilds, consisting of productive and hardworking members. Strikingly similar projects captivated the minds of Barchenko’s contemporaries in Europe and beyond, and one of them, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, a former socialist, was already putting them into practice, setting up fascist professional corporations as the backbone of the new classless society. In 1927, in a letter to a native Buryat scholar, the exited Barchenko wrote, “Anyone, who is initiated into the mysteries of Dunkhor-Kalachakra, must admit that only the classes based on professional ai liations can mutually aid each other.

Only these types of classes will eventually become healthy living limbs of the state body and humankind in general. Only this type of social division will be capable of turning people on our planet into a healthy rel ection of Buddha, whose limbs serve and strengthen each other instead of i ghting one another and ruining the whole body, as happens nowadays in our society.” 23

Barchenko came to view the 1917 Communist Revolution as the beginning of the global cultural showdown between the rotten Western civilization, based on die-hard individualism, and the Orient, benevolent cradle of collectivism and high spiritual wisdom—a recurrent notion from the early nineteenth-century German Romantics to present-day avatars of multiculturalism. According to Barchenko, the i rst step for the Bolshevik elite was to strengthen their ties to Eastern countries and learn from Oriental wisdom. Barchenko might have begun to view himself as a social therapist or some sort of Red Merlin who would reveal high Buddhist wisdom to the Bolshevik leadership: “Af-ter deeply immersing myself in Dunkhor-Kalachakra, I began to aspire to introduce the most powerful and sell ess leaders of Russia into this 64

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mystery and to inform them about the correct view and the true value of the ancient and modern culture of the East.” 24

At the end of 1923, the budding prophet returned to his work at Glavnauka. Now coni dent of his knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism, Barchenko revived his idea of an expedition to Shambhala to retrieve the hidden wisdom. Yet again the same stumbling block stood in his way: scholar-administrator Oldenburg. Barchenko’s project was discussed at a closed session of Glavnauka, and Oldenburg immediately suggested that the whole scheme be thrown out. His objection sealed the fate of the project. But Barchenko was stubborn and did not want to give up. Cornered by the powerful scholarly opponent and desperate to i nd a way out of the situation, he turned to his “checker” comrades, Vladimirov, Otto, Ricks, and Leismaier-Schwartz, asking them to introduce him to somebody high up who might appreciate his grand plan.

A desire to retrieve the sacred Inner Asian wisdom and enlighten the Soviet elite about its power became an obsession: “Until Soviet Russia’s leaders realize what high positive values the East has secretly been harboring since ancient times, they are constantly doomed to repeat steps that are harmful and destructive both for the Orient and for Russia, even through these are driven by the best and purest aspirations.” Soon everybody in the esoteric circles of Moscow and Petrograd knew about his compulsive politico-spiritual utopia. Some seekers began to treat him with caution as a tool of the Soviet government. Others simply called him a kook. Barchenko brushed aside these slurs: “To be honest, if one approaches my idea as paranoia and ‘impractical fantasy,’ I have to admit that my ‘insanity’ is ‘incurable.’” 25

Although the “checkers” no longer worked for OGPU, they responded to Barchenko’s plea and activated old contacts. Remembering this episode, Barchenko stated, “h e comrades told me that my work is so important that I should report about it to the government, and especially to Dzerzhinsky, the head of the All Union Economic Council. On their advice, I wrote to Dzerzhinsky about my work.” 26 Reaching Felix 65

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Dzerzhinsky was not easy. h e only person of power accessible to them was their former boss Gleb Bokii, head of the Petrograd secret police in 1918. Vladimirov took the trouble to go to Moscow at the end of 1924

to deliver Barchenko’s letter about ancient science personally. h e letter

at i rst landed on the desk of Jacob Agranov, one of Bokii’s colleagues.

Agranov became intrigued and several days later went to Leningrad (the new name for Petrograd) to meet the “occult doctor” at an OGPU safe house. Barchenko remembered, “In this talk with Agranov, I informed him in detail of my theory about the existence of a hidden scientii c collective in central Asia and revealed my plan to establish contacts with the owners of its secrets. Agranov was very positive about my report.”

To speed up the process, Vladimirov convinced Barchenko to write another letter addressed directly to the OGPU collegium, the council of top oi cers who ran the Bolshevik secret police. Vladimirov, who always liked to be in the spotlight, again volunteered to deliver the letter. A few days later, he returned with happy news: the “powerful ones”

expected the Shambhala-Agartha seeker to come to Moscow and brief them about ancient science. Barchenko could not dream about having better luck. Now he and Vladimirov, along with Leismaier-Schwarz, who also joined the exciting venture, hurried to Moscow, where they again met Agranov: “During this meeting, Agranov told me that my report about a hidden ancient scientii c community was included in the OGPU collegium meeting agenda. He also added that my proposal about establishing contacts with the carriers of the Shambhala secrets in the East had a chance to be approved, and that in the future I should stay in touch with Bokii, a member of the collegium, about this.” 27

Soon Agranov stepped aside, and Barchenko had his fateful meeting with Bokii. h e chief Bolshevik cryptographer, sensing in the Shambhala-Agartha seeker a kindred spirit, took Barchenko under his wing and tuned his ear to Barchenko’s “scientii c prophecy.” Formal contacts quickly evolved into friendship.

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He’s the learned one, the bearer of great illusion, h

e fuli ller of aims with great illusion, h