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by several armed guards recruited from the ranks of Russian émigrés, the Roeriches then made a blitz visit to Manchurian Mongols right on the border with Red Mongolia, mingling with local princes and lamas.

From Manchuria, Roerich and his son drove to Inner Mongolia, where they met Teh Wang, leader of the Mongol national liberation movement against the Chinese, promising him American support—another reckless step that further raised the eyebrows of U.S. diplomats in China and Japan.

En route, George kept a detailed diary, which seems more of a military journal than travel notes. He carefully scanned the topography of places they visited, measured hills and distances between various sites and towns, noted major intersections, and provided detailed information about the Japanese military transportation system, the movement of Japanese troops, and the plan of Teh Wang’s headquarters. In short, this was a blueprint for developing future defensive and of ensive plans. 46

Figure 8.8 Nicholas and George Roerich during their “botanical expedition” to China with an occult spin. Manchuria–Inner Mongolia, 1934–35.

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Simultaneously, at a monastery press in Inner Mongolia, Roerich had his brief biography printed in Mongolian to be distributed among local lamas. Again, as during his abortive Tibetan venture, the goal was to build up his image as the divine messenger of a new era with links to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. h is silly text i lled with praises for the painter was written in 1926 by Tseveen Jamtsarano, a former cultural leader of Red Mongolia who befriended the Roeriches during their long stay in Urga in 1926. Jamtsarano, a Bolshevik fellow traveler, who, like Roerich, toyed with the idea of marrying Buddhism and Communism, endorsed the painter as a new Asian messiah: “Spreading all over the world, the name of the great Teacher Roerich, became the greatest in all countries. In future, if trouble happens somewhere, he will teach us and light our path.” 47

Besides this spiritual propaganda, the Roeriches explored Buddhist manuscripts in the monasteries they visited and collected samples of herbs used in Tibetan medicine. With such an intensive geopolitical, cultural, and medicinal agenda, there was hardly any time let for drought-resistant plants. During the sixteen months of their expedition, the Roeriches were able to produce specimens of only twenty plants, whereas the two botanists sent by the Department of Agriculture brought home more than two thousand plant samples, including 726

soil-conserving grasses. 48

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Red tide: a brownish-red discoloration of marine waters that is lethal to i sh.

—Random House Dictionary of English Language

Epilogue:

The End of Red Shambhala

Roerich’s careless steps and his megalomaniacal taste for adventure again backi red. First of all, he was noticed by the Japanese intelligence service and put on their close-watch list. Spies from the Land of the Rising Sun tried to i gure out whom the painter worked for.

Was he an American or Russian agent? In fact, the Japanese had been monitoring him on and of since the mid-1920s, reading his correspondence to his brother Vladimir, who had settled in Harbin in eastern China at er escaping from the Bolsheviks.

Despite Nicholas Roerich’s warm gestures to Tokyo supporting Mongol independence, the Japanese did not trust the painter. h ey became

alarmed when during his side trip to Harbin, a port city that accommodated thousands of White Russian refugees, Roerich suddenly began acting as the future leader of the entire Russian émigré community. h e Japanese were especially mad at the painter for speaking harshly against Konstantin Rodzaevsky, head of the Harbin-based Russian Fascist Party, whom Japanese intelligence was grooming as the chief of all Whites.

h inking the Americans had purposely planted Roerich to disrupt this plan, Japanese intelligence unleashed a smear campaign in the press against the painter. h

e intercepted letters that Nicholas wrote to Vladimir in 1926 on the eve of his Tibetan expedition were excavated from the intelligence archives and made public. 1 Although in a heavily dis-torted form, parts of his Great Plan were now exposed. h e press wrote that Roerich was a Mason, which was not true, and a messenger of the 217

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mysterious Great White Brotherhood that sought to establish a great Siberian state—which did contain elements of truth. Several newspapers drew attention to his brief romance with the Bolsheviks, wondering if it was still going on. Meanwhile, the American press raised hell, speculating about some hidden U.S. governmental agenda linked to the Roerich Manchurian expedition. So again the painter was caught in the crossi re of diplomatic, spy, and media games.

Still worse, the State Department informed his patron Wallace that the Soviets had sent a coni dential protest to the American government, complaining that the dangerous émigré Roerich was wandering along the borders of Red Mongolia. h e Bolsheviks were worried that “the armed party is now making their way toward the Soviet Union osten-sibly as a scientii c expedition but actually to rally former White elements and discontented Mongols.” 2 To the last moment, Wallace backed up Roerich and dismissed all insinuations against his “botanist.” Only when he realized that the painter had become a diplomatic embarrass-ment for the government and that his own career was now on the line did the Secretary of Agriculture call of the expedition, cut funding, and terminate all contact with his former guru. Eventually, along with Louis Horch, another sponsor who dropped Roerich, Wallace turned against the painter, initiating a tax-evasion lawsuit against him and seizing all his properties in the United States. FDR felt embarrassed about the whole situation and personally interfered, promising Horch and Wallace to call the judge who handled the case in order to guarantee the “correct” verdict. And sure enough, Roerich, who trusted Horch to do his i nances, was indicted. Betrayed and humiliated by his esoteric partners Logvan and Galahad, Roerich never came back to the United States, wisely choosing to settle in India.

Manchurian Candidate: The Conclusion of Roerich’s Odyssey What went unnoticed at the time was that in January 1933 in Leningrad, right on the eve of the Manchurian expedition, Boris Roerich, 218

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another brother of the painter who remained in Red Russia, was suddenly released by OGPU for good behavior before his sentence ex-pired; in May 1931, the Bolshevik secret police had set up and then arrested Boris for attempting to smuggle his own antique items to the West. Yet, there is an interesting detail here. Boris’s two-year sentence seems more a house arrest. An architect by profession, he was coni ned to work at the secret technical bureau, designing the Big House, which headquartered the Leningrad branch of the secret police and Stalin’s summer cottage! Here Nicholas Roerich’s brother worked under Nikolai Lansere, the Soviet architectural star who received a similar sentence. 3

Figure E.1. Let to right: Konstantin Riabinin, Boris Roerich, Sina Lichtmann-Fosdick, Nicholas Roerich. Urga, Mongolia, April 1927.

From Boris’s recently declassii ed secret police i le it is clear OGPU

was using him as a tool in some sophisticated game that most certainly involved Nicholas Roerich. As early as February 1929, the secret police searched Boris’s apartment, trying to i nd materials that 219

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might implicate him in espionage. Two months later he was recruited by OGPU and began working as its secret informer. h en two years

later OGPU suddenly framed and arrested him for smuggling, sentenc-ing him to three years in a concentration camp. Yet, hardly had two months passed before this draconian sentence was miraculously waived and replaced by benevolent coni nement in the golden cage of the secret technical bureau. 4

But this strange story does not end here. From 1936 to 1937, now in Moscow and again with Lansere, Boris Roerich worked on the monumental project of the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine (VIEM), the notorious “new age” Stalinist research center described in chapter 4. What followed was even more stunning. From 1937 to 1939, during the period of the Great Terror when hundreds of thousands of Soviet intellectuals, including Lansere, and numerous Bolshevik bureaucrats, were either shot or locked in concentration camps for a good deal less than being relatives of “enemies of the people,” Boris continued his career as if nothing was happening and even improved his material conditions by moving to an elite neighborhood in Moscow, where he quietly died a natural death in 1945. 5 It is notable that during the same time when the architect lived safely in Moscow, Dr. Konstantin Riabinin, who never fought or spoke against the Bolshevik regime, was rearrested and placed in a concentration camp for i t een more years simply for his association with the “English spy” Nicholas Roerich during the Tibetan expedition!

h e facts of Boris Roerich’s biography look shocking. Even without having such a “dangerous” brother, Boris, simply as a former White oi cer who fought against the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, was a prime candidate if not for execution then at least for a twenty-i ve-year sentence in a concentration camp. Still, by some providential force, the Bolsheviks’ vengeance never reached him. How to explain this miracle?

What was the magic shield that protected Boris Roerich? h e most obvious answer is that this magic guardian was his adventurous brother.

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victims and the loyalty of OGPU agents was standard practice for Stalin’s secret police, all pieces of the puzzle fall in place.

It is quite possible that Boris was a bargaining chip in some devious and sophisticated spy game that involved Nicholas Roerich. I will not repeat here the far-fetched argument made by Moscow writer Oleg Shishkin that at er 1919 or 1920 the painter was always a paid Bolshevik spy and that his Master School in New York City was a cover for a Soviet spy ring. 6 h ere is simply no credible evidence to support such a case. At the same time, one cannot totally exclude the possibility that at some point Roerich was simply blackmailed by the Soviet secret police and forced to perform occasional clandestine assignments, especially during his Manchurian venture. h ese assignments might not have necessarily contradicted his Great Plan. h

ey could include monitoring Japanese military activities near Red Mongolia’s border, the location of their troops and military hardware, the status of Manchuria as a puppet state, and the general geopolitical situation in the area, a major concern for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Bolshevik intelligence threw a tremendous amount of resources and manpower into the Far East, recruiting hundreds of unemployed White émigrés to spy on the Japanese. Besides, putting on a leash as a possible agent of inl uence the prominent Russian émigré who worked to unite White Russians and Mongols in a sacred crusade against Communism was not a bad idea. Viewed from this angle, the protest quietly delivered by the Soviets to the United States in 1935 regarding Roerich’s “armed and dangerous party” might have simply been a good smokescreen to smooth the mission of the reluctant agent.

As long as Boris remained in the hands of the Soviet secret police, the painter’s cooperation could be safely solicited anytime. h ere were signs that at er their failed Tibetan venture Nicholas and Helena Roerich wanted to drop the Bolsheviks and i nd another sponsor. h e couple probably thought their involvement of Moscow in their 1920s’ geopolitical scheme was a one-time thing. If they thought so, they made a fatal mistake. If Nicholas Roerich wanted to drop the Bolsheviks, most likely they did not want to drop him. At the least, we know that Boris 221

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Roerich, who in 1922 was ready to leave Russia to join his brother in New York, never got his chance.

At er his second attempt to launch the Sacred Union of the East from Manchuria failed and at er the Master Building was seized by Horch, Nicholas and Helena, along with their two sons, settled in northern India in the picturesque Kulu Valley. Right next door, beyond the Himalayan ranges, loomed the Tibet these “Shambhala warriors” failed to conquer. Immersing himself in painting local landscapes and entertaining occasional visitors, Roerich i nally had to lay to rest his grand dreams of becoming the spiritual redeemer for humankind. Here in Kulu, the painter peacefully died in 1947 from prostate cancer. His wife followed him eight years later.

Yet before he died, during the Second World War when Russia was attacked by Nazi Germany, Roerich suddenly again became openly pro-Soviet and patriotic. Moreover, at er the war ended, he approached the Soviet government, asking permission to return to Russia. Did the old man expect some special treatment from Stalin for occasional services he might have provided to the Bolshevik regime? Or was he simply an old, naïve idealist nostalgic for his motherland? Who knows? Fortunately for him, Red Russia refused to issue such permission. Roerich, who did not know anything about real life in the Bolshevik utopia, was certainly unaware how lucky he was. What could await him in Stalinist Russia in case he returned? h e atmosphere of total suspicion, suf ocating propaganda, and possibly a prison sentence.

In 1957, at er the death of Stalin, George Roerich, a linguist and Tibetan scholar who was always part of his parents’ Great Plan, followed his father’s footsteps; he asked for and did receive permission to im-migrate to the Soviet Union. h e Soviets not only let him in but also awarded him a prestigious job as a senior research fellow at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies. h ree years later he died from natural causes. h e younger son, Svetoslav, an architect, lived a long life and died in 1993 at his estate in Bangalore, India. None of them let any of spring. It surely looked as if some divine punishment was inl icted 222

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