h e well-guarded clandestine world of symbols, codes, and behind-the-scenes activities eventually became an intimate part of Bokii’s character.
His oi ce door had a peephole with a one-way glass through which he routinely examined his visitors. 25 Living in a bubble of secrecy, members of an intelligence community are usually susceptible to things esoteric and mysterious, and Bokii was no exception.
At the end of 1925, he encouraged Barchenko to begin classes about Kalachakra tantra and Western occult wisdom for members of the Special Section. However, to Bokii’s frustration, six colleagues who at i rst volunteered for these meetings soon became bored: “h e students were not prepared to absorb the mysteries of ancient science.” 26 As a result, the occultist and his secret police friend moved their classes to private apartments, inviting close friends who were interested in esotericism, Tibetan medicine, and the paranormal. h ey frequently met in downtown Moscow at a large apartment occupied by Ivan Moskvin, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party, and Soi a Doller, Bokii’s former wife. Moskvin was one of the driving forces behind the VIEM project. Among those who frequented Barchenko’s talks about Oriental wisdom were former college mates of Bokii, the engineers Mikhail Kostrikin and Alexander Mironov, as well as Bolshevik luminaries such as Boris Stomniakov and Semen Dimanshtein.
h e former worked at the Commissariat for Foreign Af airs as one of Chicherin’s deputies, while the latter was a member of the Communist Party Central Committee responsible for nationalities policies. Even the notorious Yagoda, who, at er Dzerzhinsky’s death in 1926, became the de facto head of the OGPU secret police, dropped by out of curiosity.
Barchenko was surely thrilled with all these visitors: his dream to enlighten the Soviet elite about the wisdom of Shambhala was gradually turning into a reality. A few more steps and he might reach people at the very top of the pyramid of power.
h e content of Barchenko’s classes was a smorgasbord of Western esotericism and bits and pieces of Tibetan Buddhism he had learned from his Mongol and Tibetan contacts while staying in the Leningrad 87
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Kalachakra temple. In 1937, when arrested and pressured by Stalin’s henchmen to give them the gist of these classes, Bokii remembered: According to Barchenko, in ancient times there existed a culturally advanced society that later perished as a result of a geological catastrophe.
h is was a communist society, and it existed in a more advanced social (communist) and materially technical form than ours. h e remnants of this society, as Barchenko told us, still exist in remote mountain areas at the intersection of India, Tibet, Kashgar, and Afghanistan. h is ancient science accumulated all scientii c and technical knowledge, representing a synthesis of all branches of science. h e existence of the ancient science and the survival of that society is a secret carefully guarded by its members. Barchenko called himself a follower of this ancient society, stressing that he was initiated into it by messengers of its religio-political center. 27
Tantra for the Commissar
It was not only at the Moskvin apartment where Bokii and his comrades conjured an ideal society and perfect human minds and bodies.
In deep secrecy, the chief Bolshevik cryptographer maintained another meeting place, a fenced summer cottage (dacha) in the Kuchino area of the Moscow suburbs. Here, away from curious eyes, he could temporarily forget his troubling thoughts about the fate of the revolution and allow his imagination to run wild and free. In this retreat, Bokii and a few trusted men and women from his Special Section indulged in naturism, wining, and dining. On weekends when weather allowed, Bokii and these selected few, naked or partially naked, worked in the garden of the summer cottage, raking and gathering fruits and vegetables. h e chief cryptographer added an esoteric spin to these retreats, calling them “the cult of unity with nature” and composing a special charter for his “summer cottage commune,” as it became known in his inner circle. h e charter prescribed nude sunbathing as well as collective 88
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bathing for men and women. h e collective work in nude was usually followed by communal meals, accompanied by generous drinking and group sex. 28
It is likely that in order to justify these group-sex practices the Bolshevik cryptographer might have resorted to Kalachakra tantra rituals, which he might have learned from either Barchenko or Badmaev, the doctor of Tibetan medicine, although there is no evidence that these two were part of the nature commune. Given the general social environment of Red Russia in the 1920s, these peculiar nature retreats did not look odd. In early Bolshevik Russia, very much like in Western countries in the 1960s, free love, contempt for so-called traditional family values, and various projects of collective living ran amok. In fact, several Let -leaning theoreticians elevated sexual promiscuity to the level of the new Bolshevik morality. From time to time, pedestri-ans on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad and passengers in trams bumped the naked bodies of nudists, who viewed their public exposure as a revolutionary act.
Although the existence of this commune is corroborated by documents, its particular details are obscure. Later, in 1937, Bokii’s former colleagues from the Special Section, arrested and pressured by secret police, portrayed the dacha commune as a chain of drinking sprees and sexual orgies. Although it is hard to accept all these testimonies at face value, there might be some truth in them. According to a certain N. Kli-menkov, who took part in these retreats, the “nature people” from his Special Section not only practiced collective gardening and sex, but also played crude pranks on each other. h e favorite ones were mock church services and religious funerals. Dressed in Russian Orthodox Church garb coni scated from clergy, some of the commune’s members acted as priests, while others played the role of corpses to be buried. Once an agent named Fillipov, while drunk, nearly suf ocated when buried in the ground during one mock service. Some mornings the “nature people” would awaken to i nd their vaginas and penises smeared with paint or mustard. To maintain these regular retreats, the participants set 89
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aside 10 percent of their monthly salaries. Eventually, with the advent of Stalin’s conservatism and puritanism in the early 1930s, rumors of the dacha commune reached the ears of OGPU leadership, and a Communist Party cell reprimanded Bokii, forcing the cryptographer to shut down his clandestine experiment in alternative living.
Besides the unity-with-nature fad, these retreats might have had something to do with Bokii’s sexual life. Besides his great concern about how to perfect the Communist cause and human nature, libido was an issue that clearly disturbed the frustrated commissar, now in his forties.
In 1920 he divorced his wife, and before remarrying he went on a quest for a new partner. To be on good terms with their boss, several women from his Special Section were ready to please him. To the rest, both married and unmarried, Bokii’s advances became a big headache for a while. Several female agents and secretaries tried to dress and look as ugly as possible at work. For some time, Bokii shared a bed with the wife of Maiorov, one of Special Section’s workers, and then with the wife of another colleague named Barinov. Unable to withstand such moral pressure, both men committed suicide. One jumped under the wheels of a train, and the other shot himself. Slowly but surely, Bokii was becoming like those secret police monsters who worked around him.
h e cryptographer was clearly seeking to increase his sexual potency, and this quest also took an esoteric turn. From somewhere he acquired a morbid collection of mummii ed penises, which he kept in his apartment. 29 It is known that in several branches of the Kalachakra tantra school, mummii ed limbs (hands, arms, penises, and skulls), especially those that belonged to deceased lamas, were used for empowerment.
Most likely, Bokii received this strange collection from Badmaev, who frequented the Moskvin apartment and at one point cured Bokii. h e
cryptographer might have viewed these dried organs as a healing aid from the arsenal of Tibetan medicine.
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The Abortive Shambhala Expedition
Besides nature retreats and empowering himself with mummii ed penises, the priority on Bokii’s agenda was organizing an expedition to Inner Asia to establish contact with Shambhala. Everything seemed to have gone smoothly in this direction. h e chief cryptographer was
ready to invest enormous funds in this project. Encouraged by the enthusiasm of his powerful patron, Barchenko widened his exploratory goals by adding Afghanistan to the Tibetan itinerary of the future expedition. h ere the Red Merlin hoped to uncover secrets of ancient Sui brotherhoods—clearly a result of his intensive reading of d’Alveydre, who placed this Central Asian country in the center of his subterranean Agartha kingdom.
To prepare themselves for the coming Asian mission, Barchenko and his close friends, including Vladimirov, immersed themselves in learning Mongol and Tibetan languages, reading anthropological literature, and mastering riding horses. Although the proposed expedition was dei ned as scientii c and was not classii ed, Bokii did not want to adver-tise it too much because of the involvement of his Special Section. But Vladimirov, as always boastful and l amboyant, spilled the beans, and word about the exotic Oriental venture spread in the esoteric circles of Leningrad. One of his acquaintances, a struggling Leningrad sculptor with occult interests, begged Vladimirov to take him and two of his girlfriends. Soon Barchenko found himself besieged by acquaintances and acquaintances of acquaintances asking to join the expedition. Eventually, Bokii kicked out Vladimirov, who ironically was to serve as political commissar for the expedition, an ideological watchdog to make sure its participants would not deviate from the Bolshevik line—an odd role for Vladimirov, who had to be watched himself.
Such a large enterprise involving travel to foreign countries needed approval from Georgy Chicherin, Commissar for Foreign Af airs, a close friend of Lenin and a career diplomat with prerevolutionary 91
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tenure. In July 1925, accompanied by two OGPU oi cers, Barchenko visited Chicherin. At i rst, the commissar sounded very supportive.
In fact, Chicherin was already working to orient Soviet foreign policy more toward Asia and away from the West, which he did not like anyway. Yet, the next day the chief Bolshevik diplomat completely changed his mind. It could be that the personality of the Red Merlin and his grand dreams aroused suspicion. For Chicherin, an experienced diplomat, it was relatively easy to i gure out such characters as Barchenko. A rivalry between OGPU and the Commissariat for Foreign Af airs surely played its role as well.
An aristocrat from an impoverished noble family, Chicherin had been raised as a well-rounded intellectual in a home bubble surrounded by his protective mother, aunt, and nanny. Like Bokii, he was a high-class revolutionary idealist who joined the Red cause far before 1917 in order to liberate the “wretched of the earth.” As a young adult, Chicherin studied history and law at St. Petersburg University, with a brief detour into the mists of German philosophy: Kant, Hegel, and the like. At one point he realized that all this knowledge was just intellectual masturba-tion. He craved a noble cause and real action that would change the world, and found it by bumping into Lenin and Trotsky, who gave the intellectual an activist agenda. h e new convert to Marxism quit his job as a minor diplomatic clerk and moved to Western Europe, where he frequented émigré salons while preparing for the revolution.
Now the commissar lived the life of a committed bachelor, enjoying playing Mozart at night in the company of his cat. He was seriously disturbed that some snooping folk from OGPU had passed around word he was a homosexual and hinted about his intimate relations with his chief of protocol. h ere was always bad blood between him and the secret police. h ose bastards, Chicherin complained to a junior colleague, not only gossiped behind his back but spied on all the top Bolsheviks, installing microphones everywhere, including his own oi ce—and Bokii was in charge of all those techs. 30 h at skinny cryptographer with penetrating eyes, enormous sexual drive, and equally enormous power 92
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thought he could do whatever he wanted. He even took several l oors of Chicherin’s commissariat building for his Special Section. Now, through this quack Barchenko, Bokii had the nerve to casually inform him that all passport paperwork for their Shambhala expedition was already going through rank-and-i le clerks in Chicherin’s own commissariat without his knowing about it! h
e Commissar for Foreign Af airs would
have none of it. Chicherin was ripe for a good intrigue and a small revenge.
So at er he sent out his original memo, in which he endorsed the Barchenko-Bokii project, the commissar decided to call OGPU bosses to check if the expedition had their approval. h e i rst person he called was Meer Trilisser, chief of the Foreign Espionage Department. Technically, Bokii, as the head of the autonomous Special Section, was not obligated to report about his plans to him or to any other OGPU boss.
