Eighteen years later Bokii admitted, “h e Kronstadt events produced an indelible impression on me. I could not reconcile myself to the idea that the very sailors who took part in the October revolution revolted against our party and power.” 9 h e second blow to his faith was the death of Lenin, the charismatic chief of the Bolsheviks, in 1924. Bokii, totally devastated, treated the death of his revolutionary guru as the decline of Communism. Leon Trotsky, an outstanding Bolshevik intellectual and head of the Red Army, crossed swords with Joseph Stalin in a i ght for leadership. Stalin was a unique combination of a street thug, an intellectual, and a master of bureaucratic games. When Trotsky tried to outsmart him by talking ideas and ideology, Stalin, for whom ideology was secondary, turned to his favorite Byzantine techniques: backstabbing, surveillance, and smearing his opponents with dirt. h is 74
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vicious struggle for succession, which resulted in Stalin’s enthronement, depressed Bokii. He could not stomach Stalin as the chief of the party.
Eventually, this attitude cost Bokii and other old Bolsheviks their lives.
In 1937–38, Stalin mowed down all of Lenin’s comrades and brought his own people to power.
Sometime in the mid-1920s, Bokii detached himself from active political life and began to avoid Bolshevik party cell meetings, which appalled his romantic soul with their drudgery and boredom. Instead, he retreated into his immediate intelligence work. In 1921 the top Bolshevik elite appointed him chief cryptographer responsible for diplomatic and spy codes and electronic surveillance in Red Russia. At the same time, Bokii began to pose disturbing questions for himself. Is it possible to construct the perfect society devoid of social and economic problems and make people sell ess and noble? What is absolute truth? What represents an absolute evil and an absolute good? h ese questions gradually led him to a dif erent realm. Bokii summarized his quest thusly: “I did not see any prospects for our revolution and became involved in mysticism.” 10
Contemporary accounts stress that this originally die-hard Marxist revolutionary, one of the top spy chiefs of the early Soviet Union, stuck out among his secret police colleagues. In his memoirs, celebrity singer Fyodor Chaliapin, who later emigrated to the West, remembered that Bokii was the only Bolshevik leader who produced a pleasant impression on him. h e singer met him in 1918 during the time of the Red Terror:
Once I found in my dressing room a basket i lled with wine and fruit.
h en the one who sent me this kind git appeared himself. I saw in front of me a dark-haired skinny man with a sunken chest, dressed in a black blouse. h e color of his face was something between dark, pale, and earthly green. His olive-shaped eyes were clearly inl amed. I realized right away that my visitor suf ered from tuberculosis. h e man spoke in a pleasant and sot voice. All his gestures and body movements manifested 75
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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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