E N G I N E E R O F H U M A N S O U L S
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.
81
C H A P T E R F O U R
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
E N G I N E E R O F H U M A N S O U L S
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
83
C H A P T E R F O U R
Figure 4.4. Projected main building of the Institute for Experimental Medicine (VIEM). h is clandestine “new age” Stalinist research center, which was involved in engineering a new type of human being, prolonging life, and simultaneously perfecting lethal substances, was launched in 1934 but never completed because of the war.
In the 1920s, when the Bolshevik utopia i rmly entrenched itself in power, there was no shortage of quacks who besieged the Soviet government and the secret police, advertising their miraculous remedies and technologies designated to advance the country toward a bright future. It was little wonder that early Bolshevism saw a variety of grand social and cultural projects promoted by various eccentric individuals.
h e entire political and cultural climate during this decade encouraged people like Barchenko to come out of the closet. h e sudden collapse
of the Russian Empire and the drastic changes in the life of the country created an impression that everything was possible. Many of those who came to associate themselves with the new regime were ready to “storm the skies.”
Many of these adventurous characters insisted that what they were doing was hard science based on experiments. Scientii c knowledge was a sacred cow in the eyes of the Bolsheviks. h ey believed science could work miracles and linked it to the Marxist theory of progress. Like his comrades, Bokii was convinced that scientists were capable of reshaping 84
E N G I N E E R O F H U M A N S O U L S
nature, society, and the minds of people in the “right direction.” Many Bolsheviks hoped that social and physical knowledge would help them engineer a harmonious social order free from any vestiges of the old world and social dissent. A new Communist landscape appeared to them as a perfect, symmetrically designed garden populated by people liberated from outdated spiritual and cultural values. h e prospect of retrieving scientii c knowledge that, according to Barchenko, was hidden in the caves of Shambhala and could be used to advance the Communist cause might have looked appealing to the chief cryptographer.
Bokii might have originally become captivated with Barchenko’s ideas promising awesome practical results for intelligence work: thought transfer and reading people’s minds at a distance, using altered states, Oriental psychological techniques, solar energy, and so forth. Consciously or unconsciously, Barchenko plugged well into the Bolsheviks’
scientii c faith.
Bokii might gradually have become interested not only in Barchenko’s “science” but also in his “ancient science.” At er all, the Bolshevik cryptographer was already posing bigger philosophical questions by the time he met the budding Red Merlin. Eventually, Barchenko exposed his secret police patron to various esoteric theories, and Bokii silently let Barchenko enter his life. When the chief of the Special Section began pondering on the fate of the Bolshevik revolution and on what constituted absolute good and absolute evil, Barchenko already had an answer:
As the revolution was moving forward, all human values were demolished and many people were brutally exterminated. I asked myself the following questions: why and how had the oppressed toilers turned into a herd of roaring animals who on a mass scale exterminated intellectuals, the spearheads of human ideals? I also wondered what should be done to change the sharp animosity between the populace and people of thought. How can one resolve this contradiction? Recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat did not i t my worldview. Gradually, I became 85
C H A P T E R F O U R
convinced that all bloody sacrii ces to the altar of the revolution were in vain and that the future might bring new revolutions and more blood, which would further degenerate humankind. h e key to the solution of the problems was in Shambhala-Agartha, the oasis of secret Eastern wisdom, which maintains the remnants of ancient knowledge and stands higher in its social and economic development than modern humankind. h is means that one needs to i nd a path to Shambhala and establish connections with this country. h
is task is not for everyone but only
for the people of a high moral caliber. h ese seekers should be sell ess, free of material possessions and property, and have no aspirations for personal enrichment. We also need to develop a middle ground among people of dif erent worldviews who are capable of raising themselves above temporary social rivalries in order to understand and resolve more pressing issues. 24
At some point, Barchenko might have shared with Bokii his vision of the future, which did not exactly coincide with the Soviet project focused on uncompromising class warfare. It is possible that Bokii, exposed to the Bolshevik dirty linen and plagued by frustrations, tuned his ear to the “doctor’s” prophecy and thought seriously that scientii c knowledge of Shambhala could help the Communist cause. h at Bokii totally bought Barchenko’s stories about the Himalayan country possessing some high spiritual wisdom seems unlikely. Yet it is quite probable that the chief of the Special Section came to share a scientii c belief that in Inner Asia there were spiritual practitioners of Tibetan Buddhist and Sui origin who had mastered superior psychological techniques that could ennoble and empower the Communist project. Listening to Barchenko’s talk, Bokii might have assumed that these practitioners kept their secrets well guarded. Such reasoning perfectly i t the mindset of the cryptographer, who had spent the i rst half of his life in a revolutionary underground i lled with clandestine activities. h e second
part of his life, at er the 1917 revolution, was covered with a similar aura of secrecy: electronic surveillance, codemaking and codebreaking.
86
E N G I N E E R O F H U M A N S O U L S
