e perfect age will dawn anew, better than anything that has happened before.
—Shambhala Prophecy, early Middle Ages
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e cause has been launched and will not die. I know the roads this cause will travel. h
e tribes of Jenghiz Khan’s successors are awakened. Nobody shall extinguish the i re in the heart of the Mongols! In Asia there will be a great State from the Pacii c and Indian Oceans to the shore of the Volga.
h
e wise religion of Buddha shall run to the north and to the west. It will be the victory of the spirit.
—Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg (1921).
Five
Prophecies Draped in Red:
Blood and Soil in the Heart of Asia
In late 1920, in Kako-Nor at the Northern Chinese-Tibetan Border, a group of Russian oi cers led by Professor Ferdinand Ossendowski, former minister of i nances in the White Siberian government, were l eeing for their lives from the terror of Red Russians, who were quickly gaining control over northern Eurasia. His party planned to make a daring l ight southward through Tuva, Mongolia, and Tibet to the safety of British-owned India. Traveling mostly at night to avoid Bolshevik patrols and wandering bandits, the professor and his friends covered almost two thousand miles, crossing snowy plains, mountains, and deserts, subsisting primarily on raw frozen meet. Before entering Tibet, the party decided to rest at the place called Koko-Nor. Just as the exhausted Whites, thinking that they were i nally safe, decided to rest, they were suddenly showered with a spray of bullets from local nomadic brigands. Two oi cers dropped dead. Hoping to escape from the trap, the Whites tried to parley with the attackers. To arouse the sympathy of the bandits, Ossendowski coni ded that his party was escaping from the wrath of the Bolsheviks in Red Russia. To his amazement, one of the bandits informed him that they “knew the Bolsheviki and considered them the liberators of the people of Asia from the yoke of the white race.” 1 h e political “debate” continued in earnest the next day at er the
“progressive” bandits prepared one more trap, silently surrounding the 101
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camp of the “reactionaries” during the night and awakening them at dawn with another spray of bullets.
Ossendowski, armed with a Mauser pistol, and his oi cer friends were excellent marksmen and hardened i ghters, but now they realized that proceeding farther to India might be dangerous. Paranoid about the possibility of meeting another band of politically indoctrinated bandits, the Whites decided to ride back to Mongolia. At er losing six more men, the small party was i nally able to get rid of their pursuers.
h is meeting between indoctrinated Tibetan bandits and the Ossendowski party is both symbolic and revealing. It clearly shows that the anticolonial liberation gospel of the early Bolsheviks did reach distant corners of Asia and stirred ethnic, national, and even racial feelings of indigenous people.
h e professor’s story serves as a good parable to what I propose in this chapter: Shambhala and sister prophecies, on the rise in Inner Asia between the 1890s and 1930s, served nationalist and separatist causes by invoking “blood and soil” sentiments in the world of Tibetan Buddhism. I also want to show how the Bolsheviks tried to latch onto these prophecies. At er the collapse of the Russian and Chinese empires, the Mongols, Tibetans, Oirot, Tuvans, Buryat, and Kalmyk were suddenly on their own, getting a taste of independence. Like other nationalists the world over, their leaders turned to easily understandable indigenous tales, legends, and prophecies to bring the mostly illiterate people together as nationalities and nations. Better than anybody else the Bolsheviks understood the power of nationalism and set forth to ride indigenous lore and prophecies to win masses of Inner Asia to their side.
Communism as a Secular Prophecy
We let Bokii and Barchenko when their ambitious project of an expedition to Tibet had been successfully buried by the combined ef orts of Georgy Chicherin, Commissar for Foreign Af airs, and Meer Trilisser, chief of the OGPU foreign intelligence branch. Grounded in the world 102
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of real politics, Chicherin and Trilisser sensed that the plan to uncover in Inner Asia some ancient wisdom that would help control minds and engineer new types of human beings was l aky. h eir desire to see real action rather than listen to vague stories about powerful spiritual techniques hidden by Himalayan masters was the chief reason Barchenko and Bokii failed to win support for their Shambhala project.
At er the 1917 revolution, Chicherin, Trilliser, and other Bolsheviks quickly embraced anti-Western sentiments because, to their dismay, industrial workers in Europe and North America somehow did not rush to embrace the message of worldwide Communist revolution that the Bolsheviks so persistently sent out all over the globe. Corrupted and pampered by bourgeois perks was the Bolsheviks’ verdict regarding their Western brethren. Asian folk were a dif erent breed. h ese were truly the wretched of the earth; poor and hungry, they lived under the colonial oppression of the West. Unlike their spoiled counterparts in Europe and America, Asians were ready to go to the barricades. h e
Bolsheviks hoped they could reach out to these impoverished masses, stir them with their liberation gospel, and lead them in a revolt against their oppressors, especially England, the chief colonial culprit.
What eased the plans of the Bolsheviks was that their own prophecy, Marxism, contained a strong religious element that could be easily customized to i t the prophecies and needs of preliterate people facing the advance of modern Western society and looking for social and economic miracles to help them deal with this advance. Indeed, the philosophy of Marxism, and the communist movement it stirred, played the role of a surrogate religion. Like any religion, it claimed absolute truth and provided a universal explanation of the past and the future. Marxism also prophesized that all evil would eventually be phased out once and for all in the course of the coming worldwide revolutionary holocaust, which would sweep away capitalism and oppression. h is i nal battle for the liberation of human beings would open the gates to the new age of goodness when all people would live as brothers and sisters in total harmony and equality. 2 By replacing divine power with the secular 103
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prophecy, Marxism established a convenient link between the traditional religious expectations of people and emerging modern life. At er all, the communist movement sprang up as a Romantic answer to the ten-sions caused by the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century.
At er the 1917 revolution, Communism in Russia acquired features of a secular prophecy that resembled religious revitalization in tribal societies facing rapid modernization. h e anthropologist Anthony Wallace, who studied such prophetic movements, was among the i rst to note this striking similarity:
Communist movements are commonly asserted to have the quality of religious movements, despite their failure to appeal to a supernatural community, and such things as the development of a Marxist gospel with elaborate exegesis, the embalming of Lenin, and the concern with conversion, confession, and moral purity (as dei ned by the movement) have the earmarks of religion. h e Communist Revolution of 1917 in Russia was almost typical in structure of religious revitalization movements: there was a very sick society, prophets appealed to a revered authority (Marx), apocalyptic and Utopian fantasies were preached, and missionary fervor animated the leaders. 3
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us, the portraits of living and deceased Bolshevik leaders such as Lenin, Trotsky, and then Stalin replaced old Russian Orthodox Church icons, and new revolutionary monuments and palaces substituted for Christian churches. h e pyramid of power was headed by the Bolshevik (Communist) Party, which Stalin (a graduate of a Greek Orthodox theological seminary) once referred to as a sacred order.
At er they took power, Lenin, Trotsky, and their comrades expected that soon the tide of Communism would roll on all over the globe and other nations would follow Red Russia to form the world federation of Soviet republics. In 1919, in their zeal to speed up this second coming, the Bolsheviks launched Communist International (Comintern), a Moscow-based organization with branches in various countries.
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One aspect of Marxism gave the Bolsheviks many headaches. Karl Marx, the founding father of the prophecy, predicted that the communist revolution would triumph i rst of all in economically advanced states of Europe and North America rather than in such underdevel-oped countries as Russia, China, and Mongolia. He reasoned that only highly developed nations with an industrial working class were ripe for communism. Marx prophesized that without this class redemption, which was to be guided by a revolutionary party, there was no way to liberate humankind from the bondage of capitalism and make the leap into the golden age of communism. Yet, contrary to Marx’s prophecy, a communist revolution took place in the backward Russian Empire, a vast Eurasian country with a predominantly peasant population still living in a premodern age.
Red Russia Turns to the East
Sometime in late 1920, desperately trying to keep the revolutionary i re al ame, the Bolsheviks turned to the East, hoping to woo Moslem, Hindu, and Tibetan Buddhist societies wanting to rid themselves of national and colonial oppression. Lenin and his followers hoped that, under proper guidance, it would be easy to navigate the anticolonial sentiments toward Communism, so the immediate goal of Red Russia in Asia was to bond with the Eastern colonial periphery against the imperialist West. h e most enthusiastic Bolsheviks even came up with the heretical idea that all Oriental people were oppressed by the capitalist West and automatically qualii ed as a surrogate working class ripe for Communist revolution. 4
What might have also eased the Bolsheviks’ l irt with the East was the fact that at er the revolutionary holocaust of the Civil War (1918–22) Russia appeared more Asian than European. h e 1917 Communist Revolution, which took the form of a bloody crusade of peasants and the urban underclass against all things bourgeois, literally washed away the spirit of Western civilization along with its representatives—educated 105
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