8.5. English spy F. M. Bailey hosts his unsuspecting opponent Nicholas Roerich
203
ix
I L L U S T R AT I O N C R E D I T S
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
P R E FA C E
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
P R E FA C E
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
P R E FA C E
already done this, the best example being Edwin Bernbaum’s The Way to Shambhala.
h e purpose of my book is dif erent. I want to explore how the Shambhala myth and related prophecies were used in Inner Asia and beyond between the 1890s and 1930s. I draw attention to the fact that the original Shambhala myth with its two sides (the spiritual paradise and the crusade against ini dels) and its later versions served dif erent purposes, depending on circumstances and the people dealing with the legend. Some individuals proi led in this book became more attracted to the image of Shambhala as a country of spiritual bliss and the container of superior knowledge. Others turned to Shambhala as a vehicle to bring about a grand Buddhist theocracy in Inner Asia. At the same time, several people were drawn to the old avenging side of the legend and used it as a tool of spiritual resistance. So the story I am going to tell deals with both the peaceful and avenging sides of the Shambhala myth.
As the account unfolds, I will show why Shambhala suddenly became relevant for a number of groups and individuals inside and outside Asia between the1890s and the 1930s. Prophecies usually stay dormant in times of peace and prosperity. Under normal circumstances, few people believe in utopias, share doomsday dreams of the total renewal of the world, or follow political messiahs. Yet in a time of severe crisis or natural calamity, when the established routine of life falls apart and people feel insecure, prophecies, along with messiahs, multiply and come to the forefront. h at is when people invoke old myths and legends and cling to various utopias promising ultimate salvation. h e period between the 1890s and 1930s was rich in social and political calamities, not only in Asia but all over the world. World War I and the collapse of four large empires (Chinese, Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian) followed by bloody revolutions created a fertile environment for various religious and secular prophecies.
Red Shambhala is the i rst book in English that recounts the story of political and spiritual seekers, from the West and the East who used Tibetan Buddhist prophecies to promote their spiritual, social, and xiv
P R E FA C E
geopolitical agendas and schemes. h ese were people of dif erent persuasions and backgrounds: lamas (Ja-Lama and Agvan Dorzhiev), a painter-h eosophist (Nicholas Roerich), a Bolshevik secret police cryptographer (Gleb Bokii), an occult writer with let ist leanings (Alexander Barchenko), Bolshevik diplomats and revolutionaries (Georgy Chicherin, Boris Shumatsky) along with their indigenous fellow- travelers (Elbek-Dorji Rinchino, Sergei Borisov, and Choibalsan), and the right-wing fanatic “Bloody White Baron” Roman von Ungern-Sternberg. Despite their dif erent backgrounds and loyalties, they shared the same totalitarian temptation—the faith in ultimate solutions. h ey were on the quest for what one of them (Bokii) dei ned as the search for the source of absolute good and absolute evil. All of them were true believers, idealists who dreamed about engineering a perfect free-of-social-vice society based on collective living and controlled by enlightened spiritual or ideological masters (an emperor, the Bolshevik Party, the Great White Brotherhood, a reincarnated deity) who would guide people on the “correct” path. Healthy skepticism and moderation, rare commodities at that time anyway, never visited the minds of the individuals I proi le in this book. In this sense, they were true children of their time—an age of extremes that gave birth to totalitarian society.
Much has been written about the appropriation of Tibet and Shambhala by conservative and right-wing “cultural workers.” For example, we already know a great deal about Nazi ventures to the Himalayan Forbidden Kingdom that Himmler and his associates envisioned as the motherland of the Aryans. 5 In Politics and the Occult, Gary Lachman has pointed out that popular imagination tends to link the occult to the Right, which is not exactly correct. 6 Red Shambhala proves yet again that people on the Let were no strangers to the occult, and they were equally mesmerized by the light from the East. In fact, it is more so in our day.
Geographically I focus on Inner Asia, which roughly includes areas populated by people who either belonged to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition (Tibetans, Mongols, Tuvans, Buryat, and Kalmyk) or stood on its fringes (such as Altaians, sometimes called the Oirot people). For the xv
P R E FA C E
