5.2. Agvan Dorzhiev in his Buddhist Kalachakra temple in St. Petersburg

109

5.3. Buryat pilgrims en route from Siberia to Mongolia 112

5.4. “Mad Baron” Roman von Ungern-Sternberg 118

5.5. Ragtag members of Ungern’s Asian Cavarly Division 119

5.6. h e eighth Bogdo-gegen, leader of Mongol Tibetan Buddhists 121

6.1. Sergei Borisov, head of the Mongol-Tibetan Section of Comintern 128

6.2. Sukhe-Bator, a prominent Bolshevik fellow traveler in Mongolia 132

6.3. Commissar for Foreign Af airs Georgy Chicherin 134

6.4. “Red lama” commissar of new Mongolia with his scribe 137

6.5. Remains of Ja-Lama’s fortress in Gobi Desert 138

7.1. Nicholas Roerich’s inner circle

164

7.2. Nicholas Roerich with Buddhist monks 177

7.3. Nicholas Roerich, wearing his Dalai Lama robe 178

8.1. Nicholas Roerich holding tanka depicting Maitreya 197

8.2. Onward to Lhasa under the Stars and Stripes and the sacred Maitreya banner

198

8.3. Nicholas Roerich with his Shambhala seekers 199

8.4. h e Roerich expedition at the Mongolian border 200

8.5. English spy F. M. Bailey hosts his unsuspecting opponent Nicholas Roerich

203

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8.6. Nicholas Roerich’s Master Building 205

8.7. Nicholas Roerich’s image of himself as St. Serguis the Builder 211

8.8. Nicholas and George Roerich during their “botanical expedition” to China

213

E.1. Boris and Nicholas Roerich, Urga, Mongolia, April 1927

219

E.2. Lev Belsky, Bolshevik secret police investigator 228

x

Preface

h e idea to write Red Shambhala developed gradually as a natural of -

shoot of my other projects. h e i rst spark came ten years ago when I was doing research for my book h e Beauty of the Primitive, a cultural history of shamanism. By chance, I found out that in a secret laboratory in the 1920s Gleb Bokii—the chief Bolshevik cryptographer, master of codes, ciphers, electronic surveillance—and his friend Alexander Barchenko, an occult writer from St. Petersburg, explored Kabala, Sui wisdom, Kalachakra, shamanism, and other esoteric traditions, simultaneously preparing an expedition to Tibet to search for the legendary Shambhala.

A natural question arose: what could the Bolshevik commissar have to do with all this? h e story of the life and death of the Bolshevik secret police oi cer Bokii and his friend intrigued me.

Meanwhile, I learned that during the same years, on the other side of the ocean in New York City, the Russian émigré painter Nicholas Roerich and his wife, Helena, were planning a venture into Inner Asia, hoping to use the Shambhala prophecy to build a spiritual kingdom in Asia that would provide humankind with a blueprint of an ideal social commonwealth. To promote his spiritual scheme, he toyed with an idea to blend Tibetan Buddhism and Communism. h en I stumbled upon the German-Armenian historian Emanuel Sarkisyanz’s Russland and der Messianismus des Orients, which mentioned that the same Shambhala legend was used by Bolshevik fellow travelers in Red Mongolia to anchor Communism among nomads in the early 1920s. 1

I came across this information when I was working on a paper dealing with the Oirot/Amursana prophecy that sprang up among Altaian nomads of southern Siberia at the turn of the twentieth century. h is prophecy, also widespread in neighboring western Mongolia, dealt with the legendary hero some named Oirot and others called Amursana. h e xi

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resurrected hero was expected to redeem suf ering people from alien intrusions and lead them into a golden age of spiritual bliss and prosperity. h is legend sounded strikingly similar to the Shambhala prophecy that stirred the minds of Tibetans and the nomads of eastern Mongolia.

In my research I also found that the Bolsheviks used the Oirot/Amursana prophecy in the 1920s to anchor themselves in Inner Asia. I began to have a feeling that all the individuals and events mentioned above might have somehow been linked.

First of all, I need to outline at least briel y what Shambhala means.

It was a prophecy that emerged in the world of Tibetan Buddhism between the nine and eleven hundreds ce, centered on a legend about a pure and happy kingdom located somewhere in the north; the Tibetan word Shambhala means “source of happiness.” 2 h e legend said that in this mystical land people enjoyed spiritual bliss, security, and prosperity.

Having mastered special techniques, they turned themselves into god-like beings and exercised full control over forces of nature. h ey were blessed with long lives, never argued, and lived in harmony as brothers and sisters. At one point, as the story went, alien intruders would corrupt and undermine the faith of Buddha. h at was when Rudra Chakrin (Rudra with a Wheel), the last king of Shambhala, would step in and in a great battle would crush the forces of evil. At er this, the true faith, Tibetan Buddhism, would prevail and spread all over the world. Scholars argue that the paradisal image of Shambhala and the motif of the i nal battle between good and evil, elements missing in original Buddhism, most likely were borrowed from neighboring religious traditions, particularly from Manichaeism and Islam, which was making violent advances on Buddhism in the early Middle Ages.

In the course of time, indigenous lamas and later Western spiritual seekers muted the “crusade” notions of the prophecy, and Shambhala became the peaceable kingdom that could be reached through spiritual enlightenment and perfection. h e famous founder of h eosophy Helena Blavatsky was the i rst to introduce this cleansed version of the legend into Western esoteric lore in the 1880s. At the same time, she xii

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draped Shambhala in the mantle of evolutionary theory and progress, ideas widely popular among her contemporaries. Blavatsky’s Shambhala was the abode of the Great White Brotherhood hidden in the Himalayas. h e mahatmas from this brotherhood worked to engineer the so-called sixth race of spiritually enlightened and perfect human beings, who possessed superior knowledge and would eventually take over the world. At er 1945, when this kind of talk naturally went out of fashion, the legend was refurbished to i t new spiritual needs. Today in Tibetan Buddhism and spiritual literature, in both the East and the West, Shambhala is presented as an ideal spiritual state seekers should aspire to reach by practicing compassion, meditation, and high spirituality. In this most recent interpretation of the legend, the old “holy war” feature is not simply set aside but recast into an inner war against internal demons that block a seeker’s movement toward perfection. 3

Recently it has become fashionable, especially among scholars, to debunk Western spiritual seekers who feed on Oriental wisdom.

Anthropologists, cultural-studies scholars, and historians of religion deconstruct this spiritual trend that has been very visible since the 1960s as a naïve “New Age myth” and point out how incorrect it is and how this spiritual romanticism has nothing to do with the “authentic”

and “traditional” Tibetan Buddhism of Inner Asia. 4 I want to stress at the outset that my book is not another academic exposure of the Shambhala myth as a Western invention. The reason I am not going to do this is very simple: I am convinced that in matters of religion and spirituality it is pointless to argue what is authentic and genuine and what is not. Incidentally, I adopted the same approach in my previous book The Beauty of the Primitive. So my premise is that in the field of spirituality everything is authentic, genuine, and traditional, including Eastern and Western versions of Tibetan Buddhism along with its Shambhala myth in old and new forms. At the same time, Red Shambhala is not a spiritual treatise that calls you to partake of this myth by virtually traveling to the Shambhala land to reach some sort of spiritual enlightenment. Other authors, spiritual seekers, have xiii