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24. In 1929 Berlin was appointed the oi cial controller of Boris Roerich (one of Nicholas’s brothers), who remained in Red Russia and was blackmailed by the Bolshevik secret police into becoming a secret informant.

25. Fosdick, Moi uchitelia, 275-276 (see chap. 7, n. 4); Vladimir Rosov, “Arkhitekhtor B. K. Rerikh: Rassekrechennoe arkhivnoe delo N. 2538 [Architectural Designer B. K. Roerich: Declassii ed File No. 2538],” Vestnik Ariavarty

[Messenger of Aryavarta] 10 (2008): 46. Moscow investigative reporter Oleg Shishkin came up with an unlikely argument that, dressed as a lama, Bliumkin actually joined the Roerichs and accompanied them to Tibet (Oleg Shishkin, Bitva za Gimalaii, 128–29 [see preface, n. 10). h ere was no way for Bliumkin, an urbanite Jew from Odessa, to pose as a lama and be unnoticed. Even the indigenous Bolshevik “lama pilgrims” with Asiatic facial features, like Sergei Borisov (Oirot) and Arashi Chapchaev (Kalmyk), sent by the Soviets to Lhasa did not make it undetected. h e Tibetans and Lt.

Colonel Bailey quickly cracked the identity of all these “pilgrims.” So, as attractive as it may sound, the story of Bliumkin posing as a lama should be put to rest.

26. h e radiogram was intercepted by local White émigrés (Andreev, Gimalaiskoe bratstvo, 330 (see chap. 7, n. 3).

27. Nicholas Roerich, Shambhala, 295 (see chap. 7, n. 10).

28. Nicholas Roerich, Altai-Himalaya, 107 (see chap. 7, n. 13).

29. Kordashevsky, Tibetskie stranstviia, 90 (see chap. 7, n. 15).

30. Helena Roerich, Vysokii put’, vol. 1, 512, 513, 519 (see preface, n. 7).

31. Ibid., 528.

32. Pavel Portniagin, “Sovremennyi Tibet: missia Nikolaia Rerikha [Modern Tibet: Nicholas Roerich’s Mission],” Ariavarta 2 (1998): 53, http://ay-fo-rum.net/1/Ariavarta_2/2_11.pdf (accessed April 10, 2010).

33. Kordashevsky, Tibetskie stranstviia, 282 (see chap. 7, n. 15).

34. Meyer and Brysac, Tournament of Shadows, 472 (see chap. 5, n. 9).

35. Kordashevsky, Tibetskie stranstviia, 301 (see chap. 7, n. 15).

36. Konstantin Riabinin, Razvenchannyi Tibet [Tibet Debunked] (Samara: Agni, 1996), 672. h e couple severed ties with their former travel companions, whom they no longer found useful. h e fate of Dr. Riabinin was tragic. Caught into the sophisticated blackmail game the Bolshevik secret police also played with Nicholas Roerich and his brother Boris, he was arrested twice and pressured by Stalin’s secret police to admit their Tibetan party was a spy ring headed by the “English agent” Nicholas Roerich.

Despite various physical and mental tortures, the doctor demonstrated 254

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incredible courage, refusing to slander his former friend. Riabinin miraculously survived nineteen years of Stalin’s concentration camps and was released in 1949. Before his death in 1953, he worked as a pediatric physician. h e young h eosophist Portniagin settled at Harbin in China, graduated from a Catholic college, and became a Catholic missionary. Af-ter World War II, he was also arrested by the Soviet secret police and was coni ned from 1948 to 1956 in a concentration camp for “anti-Soviet activities.” At er his release, Portniagin settled in Samarkand, Soviet Central Asia, where he worked as an English translator. He died in 1977.

Like Portniagin, Colonel Kordashevsky, found his spiritual niche, turning to Christianity and becoming a Catholic monk. He died an impoverished man in Jerusalem in 1948; his novel about Joan of Arc remained uni nished.

37. Nicholas Roerich, Altai-Himalaya, 29 (see chap. 7, n. 13).

38. Nicholas Roerich, Shambhala, 164 (see chap. 7, n. 10).

39. For more on the Roeriches’ contacts with Wallace and FDR, see Meyer and Brysac, Tournament of Shadows, 474–91 (see chap. 5, n. 9); Williams, Russian Art and American Money, 136–43 (see chap. 7, n. 2); John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: h e Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (New York: Norton, 2000), 130–46.

40. Helena Roerich, Pis’ma [Letters], vol. 3 (Moscow; MTR, 2001), 351 (my reverse translation of text that was translated from English into Russian).

41. Fosdick, Moi uchitelia, 609 (see chap. 7, n. 4).

42. C. R. Bowden, Modern History of Mongolia (New York: Praeger, 1968), 205.

43. Samdin, “O Banchen-lame [1934]” RASPH, f. 532, op. 4, d. 335, p. 102–102

back.

44. Fosdick, Moi uchitelia, 659 (see chap. 7, n. 4).

45. Ibid., 623.

46. Rosov, Nikolai Rerikh vestnik Zvenigoroda, vol. 2, 79–80 (see preface, n. 9).

47. Rosov, Nikolai Rerikh vestnik Zvenigoroda, vol. 1, 59–61 (see preface, n. 9).

48. Culver and Hyde, American Dreamer, 143.

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Epilog

1. Dubaev, Kharbinskaia taina Rerikha, 230–31 (see chap. 7, n. 23; Rosov, Nikolai Rerikh vestnik Zvenigoroda, vol. 2, 169 (see preface, n. 9).

2. Meyer and Brysac, Tournament of Shadows, 488 (see chap. 5, n. 9).

3. Rosov, “Arkhitekhtor B. K. Rerikh,” 43 (see chap. 8, n. 25).

4. Ibid., 46.

5. Andrei Yudin, Tainy Bol’shogo doma [Secrets of the Big House] (Moscow: Astrel, 2007), 15.

6. Shishkin, Bitva za Gimalaii, 27–40, 51–63, 72–75, 105–125 (see preface, n. 10).

7. Andreev, Vremya Shambaly, 176 (see preface, n. 8).

8. Oleg Shishkin, “Nachalo okkultnogo i paranormalnogo proekta OGPU [h e Beginning of the OGPU Occult and Paranormal Project]” (2006), http://

www.harrimaninstitute.org/MEDIA/00787.pdf (accessed April 29, 2010).

9. His real name was Abraham Levin (1889–1941). Before joining the Cheka/

OGPU in 1918, he was an activist in the Jewish Socialist Bund Union.

10.“Iz protokola doprosa G.I. Bokia,” in Andreev, Vremya Shambaly, 218 (see preface, n. 8).

11. Ibid., 216–17, 219–20.

12. h e girl did not survive anyway. As a relative of an “enemy of the people,”