Yet, during this phone conversation, Trilisser was angry or acted angry.
He told Chicherin that Bokii had never informed him about the project, adding that Bokii’s initiative was l awed and that there were other ways to penetrate Inner Asia.
Soon, the intrigue against Bokii sparked by Chicherin involved the powerful Genrikh Yagoda, second in command in the Soviet secret police. h is “brutal, uncultivated, and gross individual” and “past-master of intrigue,” as a former coworker described him, 31 also played ignorant and spoke against Bokii’s project. Although both Trilisser and Yagoda were members of the OGPU collegium that had heard Barchenko’s report and agreed to assign Bokii to work out practical recommendations, now, a few months later, they played against it. Both men resented Bokii’s privileged status within OGPU and would not miss a chance to make life harder for the arrogant aristocrat. So the intrigue against Bokii within OGPU gave Chicherin an excellent chance to kill a project from the rival commissariat that he despised anyway.
h e next day, in his follow-up memo, Chicherin did not denounce outright the whole project but cast strong doubt on selected routes and especially on the person in charge of the expedition: 93
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For nineteen years, a certain Barchenko has been searching for the remnants of some prehistoric culture. He has a theory that in prehistoric time humankind had developed an extremely advanced civilization that far surpassed the present historical period. He also believes that in Central Asian centers of spiritual culture, particularly in Lhasa and in some secret brotherhoods in Afghanistan, one can i nd surviving scientii c knowledge let by this advanced prehistoric civilization. Comrade Barchenko approached Comrade Bokii, who became extremely interested in his theory and decided to use the manpower and resources of his Special Section to locate the remnants of this prehistoric culture. h e OGPU
collegium that heard Barchenko’s report similarly became interested in this project and decided to use some funds they probably have at their disposal. Two comrades from OGPU and Barchenko have visited me to secure my support.
I told them that they should exclude Afghanistan from their agenda outright. Not only will Afghan authorities not let our chekists [secret police oi cers] search for any secret brotherhoods, but also the very fact of their presence in that country will produce repercussions in English mass media, which will not miss an opportunity to portray this expedition in a totally dif erent light. As a result, we will create trouble for ourselves. I repeat again that our chekists will not be allowed to contact any secret brotherhoods. However, my attitude to the trip to Lhasa was totally dif erent. If the sponsors who support Barchenko have enough money to organize the expedition to Lhasa, I would welcome this as another step to establish links with Tibet. Yet there is one condition. First of all, we need to gather more dei nitive information about the personality of Barchenko. Second, he needs to be accompanied by experienced controllers from the ranks of serious Communist Party comrades. h ird, he needs to promise not to talk politics in Tibet and especially to avoid talking about relations between Tibet and other Eastern countries. h is expedition demands large funds, which our commissariat does not have.
Finally, I am totally convinced that there had been no advanced civilization in prehistoric times in this area. Yet, I assume that an extra trip to 94
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Lhasa will not harm but help strengthen the connections we are now establishing with Tibet. 32
Chicherin’s ambiguous memo and the intrigues of Bokii’s colleagues eventually buried the Shambhala project. In all fairness, it would have been hard for Bokii and Barchenko to succeed anyway. h e whole idea of searching for remnants of an ancient civilization using OGPU money sounded naive. Even under the most favorable circumstances, the secret police would hardly have rushed to approve the “scientii c” expedition in search of a mythological Shambhala. Chicherin and Bokii’s rivals within OGPU had better and more reliable plans or, as Trilisser put it, other ways to penetrate Inner Asia. Besides his personal dislike of OGPU, Chicherin’s reason for not endorsing the secret police venture might have been simply that he did not want it to interfere with his own Tibetan scheme, already underway.
h e expedition organized by Chicherin was headed by a seasoned revolutionary, Sergei Borisov, an educated indigenous Oirot from the Altai, who worked as a consultant in his Eastern Department. Borisov, who helped win over Mongolia for Red Russia, was a trusted man. As a native, he was expected to mingle well with Inner Asians. When Bokii and Barchenko approached Chicherin in 1925, Borisov was already on his way to Lhasa with a group of Bolshevik fellow travelers disguised as lama pilgrims. Borisov was not interested in retrieving ancient Shambhala wisdom. His goal was to probe anticolonial and anti-English sentiments in Tibet and to use, if possible, ancient prophecies to stir revolts in the Forbidden Kingdom.
During the same year Chicherin was pleasantly surprised to discover two other Tibet experts. In December 1924, the Russian émigré painter Nicholas Roerich, then living in New York and also striving to reach Shambhala, contacted the Soviet embassy in Berlin. Roerich had already made several trips to the Tibetan-Indian border. In exchange for Soviet support of his new expedition, the painter of-fered to monitor British activities in the area and to trumpet the 95
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Bolshevik agenda by highlighting similarities between Buddhism and Communism.
Last but not least, Chicherin already had at his disposal one more Tibet expert, Agvan Dorzhiev, the former Dalai Lama tutor, now a Bolshevik fellow traveler. Cast against Borisov, Dorzhiev, and Roerich, Barchenko and Bokii appeared as naive amateurs and dreamers. For Chicherin, Comintern (the Communist International), OGPU, Shambhala, and similar prophecies were the realm of geopolitics rather than inward psycho-techniques that could perfect human minds. Clearly Chicherin dismissed as gibberish Barchenko and Bokii’s plan to go to Inner Asia and retrieve ancient wisdom that that might benei t the Communist cause.
White Water Land, Rabbi Schneersohn, and Beyond Having failed to penetrate Inner Asia, the core of legendary Shambhala and Agartha, the chief cryptographer and his friend did not give up.
Changing the geography of their quests, the seekers of high wisdom had to focus on domestic manifestations of that legend. Using Special Section funds, Bokii, on his own, began i nancing Barchenko’s trips to various corners of the Soviet Union to gather information on esoteric teachings and groups: Tibetan Buddhists, shamanists, Sui s, Russian Orthodox sectarians, Hasids, and others. All these activities made perfect sense because Barchenko and his patron believed that all contemporary esoteric teachings were surviving splinters of the universal ancient science
Barchenko made trips to southern Russia to contact Sui s in the Crimean peninsula. Later, he brought their leader, Saidi-Eddini-Dzhi-bavi to Moscow and introduced him to Bokii. In 1925, he also made a long trip to the Altai, a mountain area in southern Siberia on the Mongolian, Russian, Kazakhstan, and Chinese borders, to explore, among other things, shamanic drumming. He tried to i nd out why and how the sound of drumming plunged people into altered states. Using his status 96
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as an elite scholar, Barchenko coni scated several shaman drums from a local museum and brought them to Moscow for his experiments.
In the Altai and also during another trip to Kostroma in central Russia, he met so-called Old Believers, Russian Orthodox sectarians who resisted attempts to modernize the Orthodox Church and subject it to state control. One of the Old Believers’ tenets was hiding from the world in the wilderness and seeking a utopian dreamland called Belovodie (White Water). To the seekers, this folk utopia, which Barchenko certainly treated as a Russian version of Agartha and Shambhala, was a safe place with fertile ground and abundant crops, and especially a safe haven where people could worship freely and experience spiritual bliss.
In the Altai, Barchenko also investigated the legend about “subterranean folk” called the Chud—a possible link to Agartha. In some unde-i ned ancient times, as the legend goes, the mysterious Chud, who faced constant oppression and harassment from authorities in this world, hid away underground by cutting wooden beams to support the roofs of their subterranean dwellings. From then on, the Chud lived an invisible life, resurfacing only when the world faced a calamity.
Generously funded by Bokii, the Red Merlin traveled all over the Soviet Union, shopping around for esoteric wisdom. h e goal of his ventures was not only to collect splinters of the universal ancient science: Barchenko and his patron nourished an ambitious idea to con-vene sometime in 1927–28 in Moscow a congress of all esoteric groups and use them to advance the Communist agenda. 33 In hindsight, this plan perfectly i t the religious reform movement sponsored in the 1920s by the Soviet government and its secret police. h e goal of the Bolsheviks was to identify and bring together religious leaders who were ready to work closely with them to promote Communism, and to weed out those who insisted the government should keep its hands of religion and spirituality.
Not much is known about the work of Barchenko for the Special Section between 1925 and the early 1930s. However, there is intriguing ancillary evidence from an independent source that shows how he 97
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contacted people from esoteric and religious groups. h is source is Rabbi Joseph Schneersohn (1880–1950), the head of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic movement. h is prominent leader of traditional Jews, who resided in Leningrad in the early 1920s, dei ed the religious reform movement and stubbornly refused to put his community under the control of the Bolshevik secret police. Schneersohn remembered how on October 1, 1925, Barchenko asked him to provide all available information about Kabala and the Star of David. h e Red Merlin was convinced that
“mastery of this knowledge could be a source of great power.” 34 Barchenko most likely viewed Kabala as a manifestation of the universal ancient science. As a jack-of-all-spiritual-trades, he was not aware that he had picked the wrong man and the wrong tradition, unless the Kabala business was just an excuse on the part of his secret police patron to get access to the stubborn rabbi. It is clear that traditional and conservative Hasidic teaching, which was alien to any universalism, could not provide any feedback to Barchenko’s “mystical international.”
Trying to win Schneersohn’s trust, Barchenko l ashed reference letters from several Moscow scholars and coni ded to the rabbi that he
“dealt with the occult (which was also based on mathematics) to reveal mysteries and predict the future.” He also disclosed that “he had already organized a group in Moscow to pursue this study, for which they received a governmental permit. h ey were joined with keen interest by many leading scholars.” 35 Barchenko claimed that he wanted to learn from the rabbi the “great truth” that would help create and destroy social worlds—a spiritual technique for social engineering. Having been repeatedly harassed by Bolsheviks, the rabbi was very cautious, assum-ing that Barchenko was either insane or a secret police provocateur. h e
latter assumption was not totally unfounded.
Barchenko’s exciting tales about prospects of inl uencing and engineering the future through ancient science sounded to the rabbi like pure heresy. However Schneersohn did not want to antagonize a person with high connections, so he acted as if he was interested in working together and even assigned his young assistant Menachem Mendel to 98
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translate excerpts from Hasidic literature to educate Barchenko about Kabala. As a gesture of gratitude, the Red Merlin sent Schneersohn several hundred golden rubles, a large amount of money. 36 But the wise rabbi returned the money, saying that the translation work was free—a smart decision. In 1927, when the rabbi was arrested by OGPU, interrogators tried to incriminate him for receiving payments for illegal religious activities.
Barchenko’s persistent ef orts to engage the rabbi in occult work and his no-less-persistent attempts to convince him to accept money make one wonder if the Red Merlin was driven only by spiritual curiosity.
Could it also be that Barchenko was simultaneously acting as an OGPU
agent provocateur, trying to set up a rabbi who refused to place himself under the “protection” of the secret police? Barchenko never tried to hide his links to the government. Of course, he never mentioned OG-PU—the name scared people away. However, directly and indirectly, he always stressed that he enjoyed oi cial support. And all his ventures required a lot of money. Overall, from 1925 to the early 1930s, Barchenko received about 100,000 rubles from Bokii38—a huge amount of money, roughly the equivalent of $200,000 at that time!
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