e delighter with delight through great illusion, h
e conjuror of an Indra’s net of great illusion.
—Verse on the Great Mandala of the Vajra Sphere, Kalachakra Tantra
Four
Engineer of Human Souls:
Bolshevik Cryptographer Gleb Bokii
Gleb Bokii, chief cryptographer of the Soviet Union and Barchenko’s patron, was one of those idealists who took the liberation of the “wretched of the earth” close to their hearts. He came from a Ukrainian noble lineage that traced its roots to the time of Ivan the Terrible. His father was a professor of chemistry and the author of a textbook popular in Russian schools and universities. Raised as a well-rounded person on good literature and good music, young Bokii enrolled in the St. Petersburg Mining College. Quite possibly he would have followed the same career route as his father had it not been for one incident. In 1894, his brother Boris invited him to take part in a student demonstration against the authorities. h ere was a brief i ght with police, and both of them, along with other demonstrators, were arrested. On top of this, Bokii was beaten. Although the siblings were immediately released at er their father i led a petition (the tsarist regime was far more liberal than the totalitarian state Bokii and his comrades would later build in Russia), the incident upset their father, who soon died from a heart attack.
h e two brothers drew dif erent conclusions from this incident.
Blaming himself for the death of their father, Boris quit playing a revolutionary and devoted all his time to science. Gleb, on the contrary, blamed the regime and decided to i ght it to the very end, eventually 69
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becoming a professional revolutionary and joining the Marxist underground. Although he was still interested in science, the desire to change the world and the romantic lure of underground life overrode all other pursuits. At er four years of college, young Bokii eventually dropped out, devoting all his time to the cause. It is possible that his mother also inadvertently contributed to Gleb’s drit toward Marxism—the “religion” of science and reason. At er her i rst infant son contracted scarlet fever during communion and died, she denounced God, stopped going to church, and became militantly antireligious. 1
Like all contemporary Marxists, young Bokii and his comrades viewed themselves as the spearheads of history who had mastered the laws of human evolution and found the key to the liberation of humankind in the “scientii c” prophecy of Karl Marx. h e founding father of Marxism insisted on the coming revolutionary Armageddon, that would climax in the i ght of industrial workers (forces of goodness) against capitalists (forces of darkness), which would eventually lead to a communist paradise, a society in which people would live happily as brothers and sisters without money, private property, or greed. h e people who would lead the laboring masses into this i nal battle were to be a vanguard communist party, a small group of revolutionaries who knew what to do and would educate the populace, navigating it in the
“right” direction.
Young Bokii’s formal initiation into organized Marxism took place in 1900 when he joined Vladimir Lenin’s Union for the Liberation of Labor, a clandestine organization that, at er several splits and mutations, evolved into what became known as the Bolsheviks, proponents of a violent communist revolution. h
e next step was learning the under-
ground crat . At er he was given a secret password, the young man’s i rst assignment was to go to an apartment occupied by a certain Helena Stasova, famous for her knowledge of clandestine work, and help her.
Knocking on the door, Bokii uttered the code phrase, “I want to see the thief.” h e woman responded, “I am the thief.” 2 From that moment Bokii’s life dramatically changed. He had joined the revolutionary elect, 70
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a tightly controlled underground Marxist organization with numerous branches all over the Russian Empire.
To wake the lethargic masses for active rebellion against the regime, much work had to be done: printing l yers and newspapers, conducting secret inspirational talks with factory workers, and organizing strikes.
Young Bokii turned out to be a quick learner and soon excelled in this crat . During one of his arrests, police coni scated ordinary school blue books i lled with mathematical formulas. In reality, these were ciphered records of his revolutionary cell. h is particular cipher was a personal invention of Bokii, and he was the only one who knew the key. h e best cryptographers of the tsarist secret police wracked their brains trying to i gure out these formulas, but they could not crack this tough nut. An investigator kept pressing the young Marxist, “Admit this is some kind of a cipher.” Yet Bokii stubbornly replied, “If this is a cipher, go ahead and decipher it.” So the oi cer had to return the blue books. 3
Between 1900 and 1917, Bokii’s life was i lled with propaganda activities, arrests, and long prison sentences. Overall, the revolutionary enthusiast was arrested twelve times and twice was exiled to Siberia. In 1907–08, he spent almost a year in solitary coni nement. h e result of all
the time in prison and exile was tuberculosis. Although Bokii received treatment at er being released, he did not complete it, and the illness turned into a chronic ailment. Later, at er the Bolshevik revolution, when he was doing counterintelligence work in Central Asia against Moslem insurgents in 1920, Bokii had a recurrence. Hearing from someone that dog meat helped cure tuberculosis, he tried it, which certainly appalled the followers of Allah. His secret police colleagues, who disliked Bokii for his independent mind and aristocratic origin, made up a story, pictur-ing this skinny intellectual as some Russian equivalent of Dracula who got his power by drinking human blood and munching on dog meat. 4
In 1917, at er the demise of the tsarist regime, Bokii returned to Petrograd from exile and immediately joined the Military-Revolutionary Committee set up by the Bolsheviks to speed up a communist revolution. h is mob of mostly self-appointed radical intellectuals, workers, 71
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and soldiers headed by Lenin and his right-hand man, Leon Trotsky, was the group that scripted and executed the famous 1917 Bolshevik revolution. h eir immediate plan was to get rid of the so-called Provisional Government. h is impotent structure established by liberal bourgeoisie and moderate socialists was unpopular among the grass roots anyway: it did not pull the country out of the bloody Great War and talked such nonsense as democracy, elections, and republic, which sounded Greek to most of the populace. Bokii vigorously contributed to the demise of this government by organizing workers into paramilitary units and simultaneously overseeing Lenin’s bodyguards.
Agent of Red Terror
In October 1917, amid the anarchy and chaos caused by the collapse of the Russian Empire and the crumbling Provisional Government, Lenin and his comrades quickly gained power. h ey abolished money, out-lawed private property, and introduced an iron-i sted dictatorship. A grand experiment of building an ideal and perfect society was on the way. With his rich experience of clandestine work and interest in secret codes, ciphers, and symbols, Bokii was a natural choice to become one of the leaders of Cheka/OGPU—the revolutionary secret police created to combat crime and weed out opponents of the new regime. Although Bokii was not thrilled about this assignment, he accepted it in earnest: the revolution needed to defend itself. When the poet-terrorist Leonid Kanegisser killed his boss Moses Uritsky and someone made an attempt on Lenin’s life, an infuriated Bokii took over as the head of the Petrograd Cheka and was ready for revenge. He became one of the chief agents of the infamous Red Terror, trying to intimidate into submission all bourgeoisie and colleagues from friendly socialist parties.
In October 1918, Bokii proudly reported that under his guidance the secret police shot eight hundred counterrevolutionaries and imprisoned 6, 229. 5 Although many of those liquidated were innocent and did not work against the Bolshevik revolution, it hardly mattered; they belonged 72
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to the bourgeois class anyway. In the Marxist scheme of social evolution, this was a vanishing class of exploiters that would have no place in the future Communist society. At er all, a great cause demanded great sacrii ces, and if some people suf ered on the way to the bright future it was unavoidable collateral damage. h at was how many leading Bolsheviks rationalized their violence. In a snowball ef ect, the Red Terror unleashed by the Bolsheviks expanded from Petrograd and Moscow all over Russia and provoked an equally i erce and savage resistance from the supporters of the old regime. h e clashes quickly escalated into the bloody Civil War (1918–22) between the Bolshevik “Reds” and the
“Whites,” supporters of the old regime.
Although Bokii consecrated himself with blood, to some of his more militant comrades he appeared not sui ciently tough. Several Bolshevik chiefs wanted to escalate the revolutionary terror by lynching and executing all “enemies of revolution” on the spot without any arrest or even a slight investigation. Bokii had some doubts about this tactic and might have started asking himself uncomfortable questions. Eventually he began to argue that instead of executing actual and potential enemies, it would be better to round them up and ship them to concentration camps. h ere, through the miracles of redemptive labor, they would be hammered into good Communist citizens. h e Bolshevik government oi cially announced the creation of concentration camps for
“class enemies” on September 5, 1918. h is ad hoc project later gave rise to the notorious Gulag, a monstrous system of penal labor camps that was widened and perfected under Stalin. Although Bokii did not create this system, he dei nitely was one of its chief intellectual sparks. 6
Amid the Red Terror, this “liberalism” expressed by Bokii outraged Zinoviev, the Bolshevik dictator of Petrograd and himself the target of an unsuccessful murder attempt. In September 1918, Zinoviev ordered that the terror be escalated: “To subdue enemies, we need our own socialist militarism. From the population of one hundred million people we now have in Soviet Russia we must save for us ninety million. As for the rest, we have nothing to of er them. h ey should be exterminated.” 7
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Moreover, Zinoviev ordered Bokii to arm workers and give them the right to identify and execute all enemies of the revolution without any arrest. Asked how would they be able to spot the enemies, Zinoviev answered that “class instinct” of the workers would easily allow them to detect who were bourgeoisie and who were people of labor. When Bokii inquired if Zinoviev was sure that some zealous worker guided by class instinct would not shoot him by mistake, Zinoviev was furious and used all his inl uence to remove Bokii as head of the Petrograd secret police, a post Bokii had occupied for barely a month. Zinoviev was not the only one to express such a bloodthirsty attitude. In fact, during the Red Terror, it was the prevailing sentiment among Bolsheviks. In the same year, the Latvian Martin Latsis, one of the top secret police oi cers, stressed, “Cheka does not judge the enemy, it strikes him. It shows no mercy. We, like the children of Israel, have to build the kingdom of the future under constant fear of enemy attack.” 8
Bokii might have eventually been stunned with the magnitude of the terror and brutality he had helped unleash. It is known for sure that his revolutionary idealism cracked somewhat in 1921 when Red Baltic sailors in the Kronstadt fortress, the major spearheads of the 1917
Red takeover, revolted against the Bolshevik dictatorship and terror.
