h e last one of these Shambhala seekers to be shot was Barchenko, chief of the “spy ring,” who fought for his life to the very end. h e failed 230
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Red Merlin eagerly cooperated with the investigation and played to the changing scenarios of his investigators, implicating himself and others in all kinds of crimes and adding more details from his life as early as 1917. Already condemned to death, he still struggled to extend his days, resorting to familiar “scientii c” tools. On December 24, 1937, he wrote directly to Ezhov. In this last pathetic appeal he masochistically plead-ed, “I was informed that my case has been completed. I fully disarmed myself with no loophole for retreat and revealed to the investigation all details, events, and names from my past. I clearly understand that I am responsible for what I did and do not ask you to sot en my fate. Yet, let me draw your attention to the fact that I discovered a physical phenom-enon unknown to modern science.” h e rest of his long letter was designed to awe the chief of Stalin’s secret police with another miraculous scientii c story. Now it was a legend about the secret of energy regula-tion used by bacteria—a discovery that promised to arm Red Russia with an “extraordinary powerful weapon” to i ght epidemic diseases and protect the country from bacteriological attacks. 15 h e message was obvious: please, save me, I still can be useful.
Yet nothing helped, and on April 25, 1938, with a bullet in the back of his head, the Red Merlin followed his brethren from the Shambhala-Dunkhor order. Who was Barchenko? A sincere, naïve spiritual seeker who became the prisoner of his compulsive dream or a talented scientist, as his Russian biographer Alexandre Andreev hinted. 16 Probably the former. A dropout medical student and an occult-i ction writer, he never had a systematic knowledge of biology, physics, or other sciences. Contrary to his claims, neither was he an expert on Tibetan Buddhism. Even in the i eld of esotericism, Barchenko unfortunately did not create anything new, simply adjusting Alexandre d’Alveydre’s “subterranean blues” to the Communist utopia. What he dei nitely excelled in was trumpeting his ancient science, a smorgasbord of Kalachakra, d’Alveydre’s Agartha, and Eliphas Levi’s books. Clearly a charismatic spiritual adventurer, Barchenko convinced himself and several dozen people around him that he knew how to scientii cally engineer a society 231
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free of social ills, and in this capacity he kept of ering himself to the Bolshevik elite.
Red Pilgrims to Ashes: Shumatsky, Borisov, and Others No less tragic was the fate of those romantic Bolsheviks who in the 1920s rushed into Mongolia, Western China, and farther to Tibet to build the Red Shambhala paradise by stirring indigenous prophecies and instigating lamas to revolution. By 1930, at er nationalist movements in China, India, and other Eastern countries failed to mutate into a Communist revolution, the Bolsheviks realized that the project of world Communism was going no farther than Mongolia. Soviet fortunes were at low ebb, and Stalin ordered all outreach ventures to be halted, concentrating on his domestic agenda. 17 It was clear that Communism could not win over nationalism, which showed no indication of exhausting itself as the Bolsheviks expected. In a decisive move, the dictator cracked down on the Communist indigenous elites that had expanded their inl uence in the 1920s. He also slowed down ai rmative-action programs for indigenous ethnic groups and stopped l irting with religions. h e brief romance with Tibetan Buddhism was over.
Red Russia was quickly turning into an isolated Communist fortress, shutting down contacts with the outside world. Comintern, an organization specially created to sponsor worldwide revolution, became an unnecessary appendix. Crippled by arrests of its agents, it was eventually shut down. Commissar for Foreign Af airs Georgy Chicherin, a Russian noble turned Bolshevik diplomat, was quickly losing his power. At i rst, he retreated to Germany to relax from the suf ocating police-state environment Stalin was creating. h en, not wishing to betray the cause, Chicherin returned and quietly retired in 1929, then conveniently died in 1936 on the eve of Stalin’s Great Terror, which mowed down all of Chicherin’s team.
Sergei Borisov was one of the i rst to go down. h is Oirot Bolshevik, who helped to foment revolution in Mongolia and then as a “lama”
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led an expedition to Tibet, made a good career in the foreign af airs commissariat, serving as deputy chair of the Eastern Department. On September 10, 1937, Borisov was tried and shot along with hundreds of other early Bolsheviks working in the Soviet Foreign Service. Elbek-Dorji Rinchino, the Buryat intellectual and i rst Red dictator of Mongolia who dreamed about the vast pan-Mongol Communist empire, was executed a year later. At least, unlike Borisov, who was simply shot for no reason as a Japanese spy, Rinchino was disposed of with a good of-i cial excuse as an unreformed proponent of pan-Mongolism. Agvan Dorzhiev, another player in the great Bolshevik game in Inner Asia, ended his Shambhala quest in a secret police prison morgue. By the 1930s, futile compromises with the Bolshevik regime morally broke down this former Dalai Lama ambassador to Russia. In 1937, with the advent of Stalin’s Great Terror, secret police shut down his Kalachakra temple in Leningrad as a “counterrevolutionary cell,” and Dorzhiev decided to return to his home in Siberia, hoping to spend his last years in peace and prayer. Yet once there the feeble eighty-four-year-old Buryat lama was immediately arrested as a Japanese spy. h e Shambhala seeker did not even live to see his execution, dying from a heart attack at er his i rst and only interrogation.
Boris Shumatsky, the polyglot Bolshevik organizer equally at home with his Yiddish-speaking kin, Russian workers, and Buryat or Mongol nomads, followed his former comrades-in-arms. h is revolutionary who wanted to bring Communism to all of northern Eurasia constantly clashed with Stalin when trying to secure more self-government for indigenous people in Siberia. As early as the 1920s, Shumatsky was already out of favor with the budding dictator, who did not like this assertive Jew from Siberia. At er a brief stint as president of the university that trained Comintern agents, Shumatsky was made the chief Bolshevik censor supervising the emerging Soviet cinema. In 1938, he was sentenced to execution for the crime that perfectly i t his latest position: Shumatsky found out he was planning to assassinate Comrade Stalin during a movie screening for the dictator.
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Of all the Bolsheviks and their fellow travelers who conjured Red Shambhala in Inner Asia, the most prominent one to survive Stalin’s slaughterhouse was the chubby Mongolian Choibalsan, former member of Comintern’s Mongol-Tibetan Department. In 1937, this short and shy former junior lama was elevated by Stalin to the position of Mongolia’s dictator. His predecessor had lost his life for wondering aloud how it was possible to eliminate one hundred thousand lamas—a goal the Russian dictator set for his Mongol comrades. Choibalsan, who preferred listening and doing to asking questions, took this assignment seriously.
He cracked down on his former brothers, wiping out those who resisted and sending those who were mute and submissive into his army to serve as soldiers or to concentration camps to perform hard labor.
By 1940, the Mongol Buddhist clergy was decimated. 18 When rounded up to be sent to Siberian camps, many lamas could not comprehend the magnitude of the whole event, believing they were being shipped to northern Shambhala, the cherished land of spiritual bliss. h us came
true the dream of the lama bandit Ja-Lama, who in his small totalitarian paradise in the Gobi Desert dreamed about making “lazy” lamas perform productive labor.
In the summer of 2009, I was returning to the United States from Moscow, where I had completed gathering archival material for this book.
Having a ten-hour wait before my l ight, I decided to go to downtown Moscow to i nd sites linked to major characters in this book. h e place
where in the 1920s Bokii and Barchenko conjured their Shambhala project was not dii cult to i nd. h e four-l oor structure at 21 Kuznetsky Bridge then belonged to the Commissariat for Foreign Af airs. h e two upper l oors, which to Chicherin’s chagrin accommodated Bokii’s Special Section, are now apartments. In an adjacent building around the corner on Lubyanka Square, Chicherin, Shumatsky, and Borisov worked out their Mongol and Tibetan schemes.
I came to enjoy my small tour of Red Shambhala sites, and upon landing in New York I decided to continue it. Now my destination was 234
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310 Riverside Drive, Nicholas Roerich’s skyscraper. h e Master Building is still there, solid and sound. In fact, now it is a historic landmark.
Somewhere down below in the foundation is a treasure chest containing Tibetan coins and a letter with the prophecy of a new golden age. A young intelligent-looking fellow wearing earphones came out from the building. He explained that the building was now completely occupied by apartments and that he had heard some weird Russian painter once owned the skyscraper. He looked surprised (if he actually understood what I was talking about) when I said that the weird painter designed this magnii cent tower-like structure to become the Master Building, beacon of knowledge and highest spirituality for all humankind.
I was about to add a couple of words about Roerich and his wife, but the man was already walking away. I smiled to myself: Busy people, both in Moscow and New York, are deeply immersed in their twenty-i rst-century hectic lifestyles. Why should they care about forgotten ideological alchemists who tried to engineer noble human beings and build a perfect society in which all problems would be solved once and for all—a quest that took them, along with millions of their contemporaries, on a path of self-destruction?
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Notes
Abbreviation
RASPH: Rossiiskii Arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoii istorii, [Russian Archive of Social and Political History], Moscow
Preface
1. Emanuel Sarkisyanz, Russland and der Messianismus des Orients-Sendungs-bewusstsein und politischer Chiliasmus des Ostens [Russia and Oriental Messianism: Sense of Mission and Political Chiliasm in the East] (Tübin-gen: J. C. P. Mohr, 1955); Emanuel Sarkisyantz, “Communism and Lamaist Utopianism in Central Asia,” Review of Politics 20, no. 4 (1958): 623–33.
2. “Shambhala,” in h e Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, ed. John Bowker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 885.
3. Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala: h e Sacred Path of the Warrior (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1984).
4. An example of this type of criticism is Donald S. Lopez, Prisoners of Shan-gri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). In contrast, two recent books have provided an unbiased account of the cultural history of Buddhism in the West: Lawrence Sutin, All is Change: h
e Two-h
ousand-Year Journey of Buddhism to the West (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2006); Jef ery Paine, Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).
5. See, for example, Christopher Hale, Himmler’s Crusade: h e Nazi Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race (New York: Wiley, 2003).
6. Gary Lachman, Politics and the Occult: h e Let , the Right, and the Radically Unseen (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2008), xv.
