4. Georges Agabekov, OGPU: h e Russian Secret Terror (New York: Brentano’s, 1931), 264.

5. Christopher Andrew and Vasilii Mitrokhin, h e Sword and the Shield: h e Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 26; I. S. Rat’kovskii, Krasnii terror i deiatel’nost’ VChK v 1918

g. [Red Terror and Cheka Activities in 1918] (St. Petersburg: iz-vo St. Petersburgskogo universiteta, 2006), 185.

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6. Particularly, Bokii suggested that a concentration camp be set up for class enemies on the Solovki islands in the northernmost part of Russia. It is symbolic that the steamboat that sailed between these islands and the mainland carried his name. It is also notable that the camp was established on premises coni scated from a Russian Orthodox monastery. In a switch to the secular religion of Communism, Christian icons on the monastery walls were replaced with portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, and quotes from the Bible with slogans of the Communist Party. Letters from Russian Prisons, ed. Alexander Berkman (Westport, CT: Hyperion, 1977), 189.

7. Baberowski, Der Rote Terror, 38 (see chapter 3, n. 4).

8. McCauley, Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, 56 (see chap. 3, n. 4).

9. “Iz protokola doprosa G. I. Bokia, May 17–18, 1937,” in Andreev, Vremya Shambaly, 209 (see preface, n. 8).

10. Ibid., 210.

11. Fyodor Chaliapin, Maska i dusha [Mask and Soul] (Paris: Sovremennyie zapiski, 1932), 281–82.

12. Bokii and his i rst wife, Soi a Doller, formally divorced in 1920. Doller, of mixed French-Russian Jewish origin, married Ivan Moskvin, a close college friend of Bokii. Moskvin similarly belonged to the elite of the Bolshevik party. h e former spouses maintained warm relations, and Bokii frequented Moskvin’s apartment, where the chief cryptographer, Barchenko, and their friends conducted much of their esoteric talks about paranormal phenomena, Shambhala, and Tibetan medicine. h e writer Lev Razgon, Bokii’s son-in-law, who lived in this apartment for a few years, remembered constantly bumping into “doctors” who strove to locate “a certain something,” such as i nding a key to overcoming all illnesses and old age (Lev Razgon, True Stories, transl. John Crowfoot [Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1997], 44).

13. Ibid., 51.

14. Ibid., 281.

15. Andrew and Mitrokhin, h e Sword and the Shield, 53. Bokii’s section not only developed codes, intercepted radio signals, and listened to phone conversations of foreign ambassadors and the Bolshevik elite, but also forged ID documents and monitored how well various Soviet departments handled classii ed materials inside and outside the country.

16. David Kahn, h e Codebreakers: h e Story of Secret Writing (New York: Scribner, 1996), 642.

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17. Grigory Bessedovsky, Revelations of a Soviet Diplomat (1931, reprint Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1977), 196. Bokii went very far in trying to keep his experts content and happy. In 1921, to Chicherin’s chagrin, the chief cryptographer received special permission to procure regularly gourmet and delicatessen foods for his unit, as well as cognacs and wines from European countries, using hard currency and diplomatic channels of the Commissariat for Foreign Af airs. “Protokol zasedaniia prezidiuma VChK, July 8, 1921,” in Arkhiv VChK: sbornik dokumentov [Archives of Cheka: Documents], ed. V. Vinogradov, A. Litvin, and V. Khristoforov (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2007), 458. It is notable that the Special Section was showered with these outlandish perks amid the horrii c mass famine that took the lives of more than a million Russians.

18. Grekova, Tibetskii lekar’ kremlevskikh vozhdei, 188–89.

19. Shishkin, Bitva za Gimalaii, 133–34 (see preface, n. 10); Razgon, True Stories, 51.

20. Berkman, Letters from Russian Prisons, 192, 208, 210; Ann Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Anchor, 2004), 38.

21. “Iz protokola doprosa G.I. Bokia, May 17-18, 1937,” in Andreev, Vremya Shambaly, 210 (see preface, n. 8).

22. Shishkin, Bitva za Gimalaii, 130 (see preface, n. 10).

23. Razgon, who was personally familiar with several oi cials who initiated this project, writes: “In an extraordinary short period of time an enormous institute with a vast staf and unheard-of privileges came into being”

(Razgon, True Stories, 45).

24. “Protokol doprosa A. V. Barchenko,” 365–67 (see chap. 3, n. 8).

25. Kahn, h e Codebreakers, 640.

26. “Iz protokola doprosa G.I. Bokia, May 17-18, 1937,” in Andreev, Vremya Shambaly, 212 (see preface, n. 8).

27. Ibid., 210–11.

28. Svetlana Epifanova, “Maloizvestnie istochniki Mastera i Margarity,” [Little-Known Sources of Master and Margarita] http://www.lebed.com/2000/

art2076.htm (accessed April 14, 2010); A. G. Tepliakov, Mashina terrora: OGPU-NKVD v Sibiri, 1929–1941 [Machine of Terror: OGPU-NKVD in Siberia, 1929-1941] (Moscow: Novyi Khronograf, 2008), 555–56.

29. Grekova, Tibetskii lekar’ kremlevskikh vozhdei, 224.

30. Igor Simbirtsev, VChK v Leninskoi Rossii, 1917–1923 [Cheka in Lenin’s Russia, 1917–1923] (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2008), 337.

31. Agabekov, OGPU, 256.

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32. Andreev, Vremya Shambaly, 151–52 (see preface, n. 8).

33. Alexander Barchenko to Gombojab Tsibikov, May 24, 1927, and “Protokol doprosa A. V. Barchenko” (see chap. 3, n. 8).

34. Joseph Schneersohn, h e Heroic Struggle: h e Arrest and Liberation of Rabbi Yosef Y. Schneersohn of Lubavitch in Soviet Russia (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot, 1999), 135–36.

35. Ibid., 279.

36. Evgenii Moroz, “Kommunizm i evreiskaia magia; epizod istorii dvadtsa-tykh godov” [Communism and Jewish Magic: An Episode from the 1920s], Neva 6 (2005).

37. “Protokol doprosa A. V. Barchenko,” in Shishkin, Bitva za Gimalaii, 375

(see preface, n. 10).

Chapter Five

1. Ossendowski, Beasts, Men and Gods, 92 (see chap. 2, n. 12).

2. About Communism as a surrogate secular religion, see David G. Rowley, Millenarian Bolshevism, 1900 to 1920 (New York: Garland, 1987), and Igal Hali n, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).

3. Anthony Wallace, “Revitalization Movements,” American Anthropologist 58, no. 2 (1956): 277.

4. Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, L'Empire d'Eurasie: Une histoire de l'Empire russe de 1552 à nos jours [Eurasian Empire: History of the Russian Empire from 1552 to the Present] (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 259.

5. Baberowski, Der Rote Terror, 28, 64–66 (see chapter 3, n. 4).