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trust and good nature. He held by hand a small girl, his daughter. h e man

introduced himself. h is was Bokii, the famous chief of the Petrograd Cheka, whose appearance and manners totally contradicted what I had heard about him. I have to state honestly—Bokii produced the best impression on me. I was especially touched by his fatherly kindness to his daughter. 11

Apparently, the revolution appeared to Bokii in his idealistic dreams as a noble enterprise that would establish a commonwealth of well-rounded people who would live in harmony, perfecting their minds and bodies.

Reality turned out to be brutal and ugly. Instead of a peaceable kingdom he saw a nightmare—the rivers of blood he himself helped to spill.

Bokii might have felt that against his will the tide of events had carried him away from the noble goals of the project, and that there was no way to stop it. He was especially perturbed that the Communist revolution did not better the minds of people as he and his idealistic comrades expected. h e Bolshevik elite did not think twice about taking advantage of material perks that came along with their new position as the ruling class. Better than anybody, the chief Bolshevik cryptographer saw the greed and corruption of many of those who should have been role Figure 4.1. Gleb Bokii, master of codes and chief cryptographer of the Bolshevik regime. Moscow, 1922.

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models of the i rst working-class state where wealth was expected to be spread around evenly. Still, like some of his Bolshevik brethren, he never blamed the “noble cause” he served. It was always “bad people”

who grossly spoiled it.

Bokii was one of those idealistic Bolsheviks who hated to use the special privileges the Communist elite promptly reserved for itself at er seizing power. He lived with his second wife and one of the daughters from his i rst marriage in a small apartment. 12 His relatives and friends never dared to use his oi cial Packard convertible for personal needs—a practice widespread among other Bolshevik bosses. In winter and summer, he wore the same raincoat and crumpled military cap. Bokii also had an odd habit—he never shook hands with anybody, a practice perhaps acceptable in Western countries but impossible to imagine in Russia. So this aristocrat-turned-revolutionary was a strange man, a “white crow” among his secret police comrades, who instinctively felt he was not one of them. His habit of issuing categorical judgments about other people did not help either, and soon he antagonized many of his colleagues. At the same time, Bokii was far from an ascetic. He was a passionate womanizer and also liked to sit with a glass of good wine in the company of friends, sharing intellectual conversation, but he never dominated a talk. 13

The Special Section: Code-Making and Wonders of Science In hindsight, it was clear that, like his idealistic comrades of the same caliber, Bokii was doomed. What shielded him for a long time was the nature of his work and the peculiar status he and his Special Section enjoyed within the OGPU secret police. Although Bokii was one of the heads of OGPU, his section was not subordinated to but only ai liated with the secret police. h e Special Section was created on January 21, 1921, by a special decision of the Soviet government as the crypto-graphic service reporting directly to the top leadership of the Bolshevik Party. As the head of this autonomous unit, Bokii provided information 77

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directly to Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and other top communist bosses, bypassing the OGPU leadership.

Besides regular secret police funding, the section had an independent source of income from manufacturing and selling safe boxes to various Soviet departments inside and outside the country. Bokii could personally dispose of these funds. Treated as the most secret unit of Soviet intelligence, the Special Section resembled the American National Security Agency. Lev Razgon, who worked for this unit for two years and later became Bokii’s son-in-law, remembered, “In the entire complex and vast Soviet intelligence and police apparatus, this department and its director were, perhaps, the most inaccessible of all.” 14 People who worked for the section were even forbidden to reveal not only the location but the very existence of the place to their relatives.

Figure 4.2. Former building of the Commissariat for Foreign Af airs. h e two upper l oors were occupied by Gleb Bokii’s Special Section, which specialized in cryptography and occult experiments.

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h e greater part of the section’s services was housed not at the OGPU

major premises on Lubyanka Street but on two upper l oors of the Commissariat for Foreign Af airs building on the corner of the Kuznetsky Street Bridge and Lubyanka Square. Unlike the rest of the secret police, Bokii’s unit did not arrest and interrogate anybody. Its chief tasks were deciphering foreign cables and codes, developing reliable ciphers for Soviet embassies and spies, and conducting electronic surveillance, an emerging hot spy crat that promised wide opportunities. Bokii and his people were able to decipher and read all British, Austrian, German, and Italian diplomatic trai c and to partially access Japanese, American and French cables. His codebreakers were far more successful than those of any similar services in the West. 15 h e chief Bolshevik cryptographer gradually expanded the range of his work, adding to his formal duties the exploration of paranormal and esoteric phenomena that might be useful in intelligence work. By the end of the 1920s, the activities and research projects of the Special Section ranged from perfecting electronic spy devices and developing remotely controlled explosives to exploring things mysterious and anomalous. From time to time, Bokii’s researchers brought in shamans, mediums, and hypnotists, who were scrutinized to detect the source of their extraordinary abilities.

Because of the nature of their work, people hired for the Special Section usually were highly educated and intelligent folk: cryptographers, linguists, translators, and scientists. Many, like the graphologist Konstantin Vladimirov, possessed unique expertise in exotic i elds. h ere were also academic scholars and scientists like Professor Pavel Shun-gsky, a student of Japanese culture and language and later a military intelligence oi cer, or the young chemist Evgenii Gopius, who experimented with remotely controlled explosives. Several experts employed by the section were individuals with “politically incorrect” backgrounds: barons and counts inherited from the old regime. 16 Georgy Chicherin, Commissar for Foreign Af airs, who clashed with OGPU from time to time, once coni ded to a colleague: “h e experts who decode foreign 79

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dispatches are absolutely unrivalled. Bokii, the head of this section, has enlisted some old professionals from the time of the tsars. He pays them highly, and gives them apartments more sumptuous than the ones they occupied before the revolution. h ey work for i t een or sixteen hours a day.” 17

Like many other Bolsheviks, the head of the Special Section believed in the wondrous powers of science and sought to explain everything from a materialistic viewpoint, including paranormal phenomena.

Bokii was very interested in thought transfer—the scientii c fad that captivated popular imagination both in Russia and in the West in the beginning of the twentieth century. He assumed that, like radio signals, thoughts could be sent back and forth. Nikolai Badmaev, a Siberian native and expert in Tibetan medicine who cured several of the Soviet elite, remembered that during one of their meetings Bokii wondered how Tibetan doctors applied hypnosis and why mantras should be recited only in Sanskrit. Shrewdly tuning his curative philosophy to politically correct materialist and scientii c sentiments, Badmaev suggested that, once uttered, the words of a mantra produced sound waves that had a healing ef ect on human minds and bodies. Bokii, who was convinced that the surrounding world represented an interconnected information system, was pleased to hear such an explanation. 18 As an intelligence oi cer, he certainly contemplated the wide opportunities that might arise from using mantras and reading the thoughts of an opponent at a distance.

It was natural that his secret police colleagues were jealous of the autonomous status of Bokii and his Special Section. Indeed, it was unfair.

h e chief cryptographer knew everything that was going on in OGPU, while OGPU leaders did not know what he was up to in his elite unit.

h e fact that members of the section were frequently cited for emu-lation did not help either. Unfortunately, Bokii himself added to this animosity. Proud of his clan of experts, he scorned other OGPU departments as “loafers” and did not miss a chance to play l amboyant pranks on his colleagues within and outside of the secret police.

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One of his wireless stations that monitored all suspicious radio communications once intercepted a transmission ciphered in an unfamiliar code. Bokii’s people quickly deciphered the message, which was sent from a moving object and said, “Send me one case of vodka.” h e message came from Genrikh Yagoda, the future head of OGPU, who was having fun on a motorboat in the company of two girls. Bokii decided to play a practical joke and sent the information about the “suspicious object” to Yagoda’s own unit. Soon, Yagoda’s people were trying to break into the OGPU food supply base that was preparing to deliver vodka to the motorboat, narrowly avoiding a shoot-out. In another case, Bokii bet Maxim Litvinov, Chicherin’s deputy, a bottle of French cognac that his people could steal classii ed documents from the safe in Litvinov’s guarded oi ce. Special Section people somehow managed to sneak into the oi ce and steal the papers, which Bokii then returned to Litvinov.

h e top bureaucrat was so upset that instead of keeping his end of the deal, he complained directly to Lenin about Bokii’s mischief. 19

In the fall of 1924, two months before Barchenko came to Moscow to report to the OGPU bosses about his ancient science, Bokii returned from a depressing inspection trip to the Solovki concentration camp, his pet project to hammer alien classes into good Soviet citizens. On December 19, 1923, i ve political prisoners in that camp had been shot for violating curfew. Somehow the news leaked to the West, and Bokii was included in a commission to investigate the incident. 20 Although each time during his ceremonial visits to the camp he was treated as a high dignitary who was to see a Potemkin village, he could not help noticing that the place looked like a real hell: prisoners lived in cramped barracks, hungry, cold, and subject to various abuses. It is dii cult to say if Bokii continued to believe in the redemptive nature of this labor-camp project. Yet it would be natural for a person capable of pondering questions of absolute evil and absolute good to have at least some doubt on seeing his own idea turned into such a brutal material force.

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Soviet Secret Police Master Ancient Wisdom Amid his frustrations and doubts, the chief Bolshevik cryptographer met Barchenko and learned about his ancient science: “I became acquainted with Barchenko through Leismaier-Schwartz and Vladimirov, former oi cers of the Leningrad Cheka. h ey came to visit me at the OGPU Special Section accompanied by Barchenko and recommended him to me as a talented researcher who had made a discovery of extraordinary political signii cance. h ey also asked me to get him in touch with OGPU leadership in order to put his idea into practice.” 21

At er several meetings with Barchenko, Bokii i nally invited him to report on Kalachakra and Shambhala to the collegium of OGPU top bosses in Moscow on the evening of December 31, 1924. Records of the meeting are not available, yet one can suggest that Barchenko expanded on the applied nature of his ancient science. He most certainly tried to convince them there were people in the East who for hundreds of years had read people’s thoughts and by the power of their minds could receive and send information over long distances. Barchenko certainly would not fail to stress that he and others had already “scientii cally”

proven the actuality of thought transfer. At er a brief deliberation, the collegium, headed by OGPU chief Felix Dzerzhinsky, entrusted Bokii to look into this matter and take practical steps if needed. Barchenko remembered, “h

e meeting of the collegium took place late at night.

Everybody was tired and they listened to me inattentively. h ey hurried to be done with this and other issues. Yet, with the support of Bokii and Agranov, we were able to secure a favorable decision. Bokii was assigned to familiarize himself with the details of my project, and if it could be useful, to fuli ll it.” 22

In the beginning of 1925, at Bokii’s suggestion, Barchenko moved to Moscow, where the chief of the Special Section secured an apartment for him and employed him as a consultant. h e circumstances

of the occultist miraculously changed. Despite his earlier contempt for material possessions, Barchenko was now happy not only to improve 82

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Figure 4.3. Twelve chiefs of the Bolshevik secret police cluster around their boss, Felix Dzerzhinsky, in the middle. Gleb Bokii, seated, with his head leaning on his hand, is second to Dzerzhinsky’s let . Moscow, 1921.

his living conditions, but also to receive the abundant funds Bokii began providing to him. It appeared that i nally Barchenko was nearing his dream of becoming the Red Merlin for the Bolshevik government.

In a secret neuropsychology lab created by Bokii, he could also perfect his ideas about thought transfer, psychology, and parapsychology, experimenting with various mediums, hypnotizers, and shamans. Earlier in Glavnauka, Barchenko’s ancient science had always been open to the academic scrutiny of such qualii ed peers as Oldenburg. Now, surrounded by an aura of secrecy, the Red Merlin was guaranteed that nobody would interfere with his research. Later, in 1934, the lab moved to the newly created All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine (Vse-soiuznii intitut eksperimental’noi meditsiny, VIEM) and was renamed as a neuroenergy laboratory. VIEM was a research institute established by Soviet authorities in 1932 to conduct applied studies on the human brain, hypnosis, toxic poisons, and drugs. 23

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