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CRITICAL
FORUM KALACHAKRA
Buddhists, Occultists and
Secret Societies in Early Bolshevik Russia: an interview with
Andrei Znamenski
Andrei Znamenski is the author of Red Shambhala:
Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia, published by Quest
Books. Shambhala, a mythical, heaven-type land in
Tibetan Buddhism, was created during a period of conflict between Buddhists
and Muslims in Asia, and appears to have
been partly modeled on Islamic doctrine. As Znamenski
himself points out, the Buddhists had no conception of a paradise before
this. Shambhala, which originally had both
spiritual and martial qualities, may also have been modeled on the Islamic
idea of the inner and outer Jihad. With Shambhala,
though, the martial side eventually disappeared, and the myth entered the
Western imagination with a number of later nineteenth and early twentieth
century occult and mystical movements. In 1933, British author James Hilton
popularized the notion of Shambhala, which he
renamed Shangri-La. In Red Shambhala – the first
and only authoritative book on the subject – Znamenski
explores the origins of the Shambhala myth, as
well its appropriation by Western occult movements, spiritualists,
Bolsheviks, and the “bloody baron” Roman von Ungern-Sternberg.
AZ: Let
me first give you a few ideas about how Red Shambhala
came about. When I was writing my previous book, The Beauty of the
Primitive, about shamanism and the Western imagination, I stumbled upon
some interesting information that in the Soviet Union of the 1920s there
was a secret lab where Soviet secret police was conducting experiments with
Buddhist lamas, shamans, hypnotists, and all kinds of spiritual experts.
The goal was to use this knowledge to spearhead the cause of communism.
Then I found
information that this lab was part of so-called Special Section of the
Soviet secret police. The head of the Special Section was Gleb Bokii. This
hereditary aristocrat, whose ancestor had been granted nobility by the Ivan
the Terrible, was an interesting man. First of all, Bokii
was one of the spearheads of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and afterwards
became one of the leaders of the secret police in Red Russia. An active
member of the Marxist underground, he spent much of his life before 1917 in
czarist prisons and exile. At the same time, he dabbled in occult knowledge
and mysticism. In the early 1920s, he stumbled upon a writer and
occultist named Alexander Barchenko and became
close friends with him. Eventually, Bokii put Barchenko in charge of that secret lab.
Barchenko was
very much interested in the Agartha legend – a
Western occult myth about a legendary country that exists underground and
preserves high knowledge. French occult writer Alexandre
Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, who popularized this
legend and whom Barchenko held in a high esteem,
argued that this mystic country was located somewhere in Inner Asia.
Later, when in 1918 Barchenko learned from Mongol
and Tibetan visitors to Bolshevik Russia about the Shambhala
legend – a story about the Tibetan-Buddhist spiritual paradise and abode of
high wisdom – he came to conclusion that the legendary underground land and
the mythological country from the Tibetan-Buddhist tradition, is the same
thing. In fact, in his talks he frequently used expression Shambhala-Agartha. Bokii with
whom Barchenko shared this knowledge became very
much excited and together they began planning an expedition to Tibet to
access this country and to use its “ancient science” to help the cause of
Communism. This emphasis on science was not an accidental
remark. Both Barchenko and Bokii thought about their occult quest as an attempt to
locate some hard scientific knowledge (mind-bending techniques, mental
waves, the sound effect of mantras and so on) that was hidden in the heart
of Asia and needed to be unlocked.
PoS: You mentioned Shambhala.
This is a Tibetan Buddhist legend, but it entered into Western culture with
Theosophy and other New Age and esoteric movements. Can you tell me a bit
about it?
AZ: To make a long
story short, Shambhala was a Buddhist prophecy
that had emerged in the Early Middle Ages. When Muslims had advanced into Afghanistan and Northern
India, they dislodged the Buddhists from these areas, and they
had to find a safe haven somewhere. So they came up with a spiritual
resistance prophecy that was identified with a land, a utopian land, a kind
of a Buddhist paradise, where the members of this faith would be free to
live and worship without been harassed by the “barbarians” whom Sanskrit
sources called “Mlecca people” or, in other
words, the people of Mecca. The legend claimed that somewhere in the North
there was a mysterious country, a land of plenty where people lived 900
years, where they were rich and had houses where roofs were clad in gold,
and where nobody suffered, and of course, where the Buddhist religion
existed in its pure form and so forth.
In original
Buddhism there was no concept of Paradise.
This concept emerged as a result of encounters with the Muslim world. The
prophecy also claimed that when the true faith (read Buddhism) would be in
danger, the king of Shambhala named Rudra Chakrin would come with
a huge army and crash the enemies of the faith. So, it is a concept of a
holy war, pure and simple. Many people are not aware that such concept
existed in Tibetan Buddhism. The Shambhala
prophecy lingered on, and in modern time was sometimes engaged, when the
Mongol-Tibetan world felt threatened by outsiders. At the same time, Shambhala was also understood as an internal war
against one’s own inner demons. It was an aspiration for a spiritual
perfection. In the course of time, the former, the holy war part, gradually
disappeared and the latter one became more relevant.
Let’s go back to Bokii and Barchenko. The
1920s in Soviet Russia was a very interesting time, when some Bolsheviks
and their fellow-travelers were involved in a lot of social and cultural
experiments. The Red dictatorship hadn’t established itself firmly yet, so
there still remained some outlets where people could express themselves
artistically and culturally: Avant-garde art, nudism, naturism, feminism,
some spirituality practices and communes. Barchenko
himself set up a society called the United Labor Brotherhood, modeled after
George Gurdjieff’s brotherhood. The goal was to
use sacred knowledge to promote communal lifestyle based on high moral
standards and spirituality and eventually make people nobler.
Bokii
and Collegium
When I was learning
all this information, I completed my first book. Then I decided to dig in
further to find out what it was all about. Eventually I discovered that
some other Russian writers had written about it. One St. Petersburg writer, Alexandre Andreyev, had written about the Bolshevik
quest for Shambhala. So I read his book,
and I also went to the archives in Moscow.
I also found some interesting documents in the Moscow Archive of
Socio-Political History about how some Buddhist communities in the early
Soviet Union, in the 1920s, tried to find a common language with the
Bolsheviks, and how the Bolsheviks had tried to use the Buddhists to
spearhead the communist cause in Mongolia,
Tibet, and Western China.
Incidentally, the
Communist International (or Comintern), which was
an organization created by the Bolsheviks to promote the gospel of
Communism all over the earth, established a special Mongol-Tibetan Section
that was assigned to channel the Marxist secular prophecy to the masses of
Inner Asia by using indigenous prophecies and traditional culture.
One of the
interesting figures here was Agvan Dorzhiev, a tutor for the thirteenth Dalai Lama – the
predecessor of the present day Dalai Lama. Dorzhiev
became a Tibetan ambassador in Soviet Russia. He tried to build bridges
between Red Russia and Tibet.
The assumption was that Soviet Russia would be able to guarantee the
independence of Tibet.
And the theological justification for this was the Shambhala
legend, which said that in a time of trouble salvation would come from the
north.
Then I found
information about this crazy, bloody White baron, who tried to hijack Mongolia in
1920 – Roman von Ungern-Sternberg. There are some
interesting documents, showing that he also wanted to use the Shambhala prophesy to spearhead his own cause. For
example, when the Bolsheviks seized the papers of his Asian Cavalry
Division, they found a detailed translation of the Shambhala
prophecy into Russian. Obviously, the baron might have been toying somehow
with as an idea that he could act as that Rudra Chakrin, the legendary king of Shambhala,
who was coming to save the Buddhist world from infidels.
And of course I
found out that Russian painter and émigré in the USA Nicholas Roerich was
also attracted to this legend, in the same way. In fact, Roerich, who was
well familiar with Dorzhiev and Ungern activities, was afraid to come too late to use
this potent prophecy. Hence, he rushed to Inner Asia in 1923.
Mongol commissars with
Lenin sacred scroll
PoS: Why do you think so many people were
interested in this legend at that time? Was there something that had
sparked this internationally?
AZ: The more I
think about it the more I realize that it was about the time itself – the
1920s and the 1930s. Remember that German word zeitgeist, the spirit of the
times. That is what it was all about. At first, there was such horrible
disaster as the First World War. Then the Great Depression came. People had
this feeling that the whole world was coming to an end. In such times, both
the populace and the elites naturally rush to entrust their fate to various
ideological and political saviors (for example, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler,
and Roosevelt), who promise welfare and
security for everybody. That is why we have all those dictatorships
growing all over the world at that time. If you look at a map of the world
from the 1920s to the 1940s, you may count on your fingers those few
countries that remained more or less democratic: England,
Sweden, and the United States.
By the way, even the United
States under FDR clearly moved toward
centralized state. If it had not been for those checks and balances in the
US Government, FDR, a power-hungry Machiavellian, would have taken
advantage of the crisis situation and with all his prices and wages
regulations and back-to-land philosophy would have produced something
resembling Italian fascism.
So I think longing
for the “great father” was a way to resolve the crisis. Among the people of
that time there was an expectation that a savior should come – a
Stalin-type figure, or a Hitler-like prophet, or FDR-type person –
benevolent and wise enlightened master. The people wanted to find a sort of
master key – the ultimate solution to resolve all the problems in the
world. So these dominant sentiments certainly affected the fringe figures
we are talking about here: Roerich, Dorzhiev, Bokii and Barchenko, and Ungern. Prophesies from the world of Tibetan Buddhism
responded to their spiritual and ideological expectations. After all, they
were people of their time.
PoS: I thought that after the October
Revolution that the Bolsheviks pretty much had their way, but it was a lot
freer and they weren’t able to regulate people as much, then?
AZ: Yes and no.
See, some writers and scholars who peddled the 1920s as some sort of humane
period in the history of Bolshevism were to some extent driven by the idea
to save the idea of Socialism that was crumbling in the 1970s and the
1980s. Some of these writers even hinted that the 1920s was a lost
alternative – a trajectory that, if followed, could have led to “socialism
with a human face” and all that stuff. But the real reason why
there was a temporary liberalization was because the Bolsheviks at first
had tried to impose so-called “war communism” – they had tried a cavalier
attack by canceling money, destroying the banking system, trade, and
putting the entire society in barracks. And it ruined the entire economy.
So Lenin made it clear to his comrades: we might lose the entire country.
He literally begged his comrades to temporarily make a strategic
retreat. So the Bolsheviks willy-nilly stopped confiscating grain
from peasants and restored some market at least for peasants to work freely
on their homesteads, which eventually helped to feed the starving country.
They also opened limited outlets to private enterprise. But when you
release some of these forces of course it brings up certain cultural
liberalization.
So that is why
there was some limited cultural liberalization. And there were also
some independent groups. Of course the secret police controlled all of
them. Their members informed on each other. By the way, that is when this
practice was introduced on a nationwide basis in Soviet Russia. The
Bolsheviks knew that they had to allow partial liberalization, but they
were afraid they might lose the country ideologically, so they started to
encourage people to inform on each other.
From documents that
I read I have this hint that Barchenko was
actually recruited as an informer, to inform on the other people who were
in the occult, New Age-type spirituality. He delivered reports about other
people. He wasn’t actually trusted by many spiritual seekers in the St. Petersburg
esoteric circles, because they suspected him of being a secret police
snitch. But he was not the only one. A lot of people were encouraged to do
this. It was part of the game.
PoS: So the Bolsheviks as a whole didn’t look
very favorably on this New Age spiritual movement.
AZ: No, no. In fact
in 1929 they started to crack down on this. It was allowed during the 1920s
because the dictatorship did not have yet a total grip on the country and
because there were still some pre-1917 cosmopolitan Bolshevik types like Bokii, who played with this or tolerated it. There was
another person, Anatoly Lunacharski, the
commissar of Enlightenment – it’s like the Secretary of Education. He
promoted the idea that Communism should be treated as a new religion.
He and those who agreed with him called themselves “God-builders.” And if
you look closely, Communism is indeed a secular prophesy. Lenin, Stalin and
the rest of the gang never wanted people to think this way. For them
Communism was high science through and through – the science that harnessed
the laws of history. But Lunacharski
actually wanted to promote this idea that Communism was a new religion of
the oppressed masses and to tell the populace that instead of God we have
Karl Marx, and instead of the Ten Commandments we have certain communist
commandments. There were some others who wanted to link Communism to
spirituality. But Stalin shut all this down in 1929.
PoS: So what happened to the spiritual
practitioners? Were they just told to not do it? Or were they sent to the
gulags? Or?
AZ: Well many of
them were sent to concentration camps. It’s clear from documents I am
familiar with that in the late 1920s, they were informing on each other.
Doing these esoteric things, the occult, but informing on each other at the
same time. In 1929 they were sent to labor camps for three or five years.
Many of them were released in the early 1930s. But during the period of the
Great Terror, 1937-1938, they were thrown into prison again. And many of
them were either executed or died in labor camps from hunger, disease, and
hard labor.
Dorzhiev, the builder of Buddhist
Theocracy in Asia
But the secret
police – who were issued quotas about how many people they should arrest –
they even tried to manufacturer some occult groups, so that they could
report to their bosses that they had uncovered an occult, anti-Soviet
group. Because if one didn’t catch enough anti-Soviet elements, he could
not be promoted or, worse, one could become a victim himself. A large set
of declassified secret police documents that I recently read – it is about
so-called Asian Brothers, the last (1940-1941) Freemason police case in Red
Russia – is a pathetic and surreal story. In the 1920s and the early 1930s,
manufacturing their cases, Soviet secret police at least dealt with real
practicing occultists and intellectuals interested in mysticism. This
particular case under the name of “Obscurantists”
was manufactured out of a thin air from the beginning to the end and
involved four persons who completely stopped toying with occult at the end
of the 1920s, and three of whom, on top of this, were paid secret police
informers.
I guess by that
time the regime ran out of occultists to be arrested. Officers wrote
the scripts of testimonies for the four accused persons and tried to force
them to endorse these documents. Interestingly, one of them, certain
Eugene Tager, a former anarchist who toyed with
Freemasonry in the 1920s, was delivered from a Kolyma
labor camp where he was doing his time for his esoteric “sins” to play a
role in this new case. Yet the man firmly stood his ground. He was
repeatedly beaten by his investigator but never testified against himself
or other people and completely refused to cooperate. Moreover, the guy had
a nerve to file a complaint against his investigators. So they gave up on
him and sent him back to Siberia to finish
his sentence.
The other two,
Boris Astromov and Sergei Polisadov,
very active Freemasons in the 1920s and simultaneously seasoned police
informers who earlier gave to the police a lot of “human material” to work
with, now realized that their turn had come and refused to cooperate
too. Essentially, the entire case was based on testimonies of Vsevolod Belustin, a former
head of the Rosicrucian order in Russia and also a police
informer, the only one who cracked and agreed to testify against himself and others. The investigators contemplated to
construct a case about a secret anti-Soviet Freemason organization “Asian
Brothers” that spied for England
and that involved those four along with a dozen of Orientalists
from Soviet Academy of Sciences. Although Belustin
cooperated, coauthoring his testimonies with his investigators, to his
credit, many of the names of “Freemasons” he mentioned belonged to
long-deceased people, including Sergei Oldenburg, a famous Russian student
of Hinduism and Buddhism. Although the three former Freemasons/informers
were sentenced to several years of labor camps, secret police fiction
writers could not produce a sound case and had to archive the file.
Nicholas Roerich. May,
1934. Shanghai, China
In fact, Bokii, who was arrested and executed in 1937, became a
victim of a similar case that was totally made up by his former colleagues
who sought to destroy him on the orders from Stalin. Bokii’s interest in occult and mysticism and
participation in Barchenko’s United Labor
Brotherhood in the 1920s were used as a jump start to invent a more
sinister plot. The plot involved a tale about the anti-Soviet secret
society called Shambhala, with branches allegedly
all over the world. This society planned to murder comrade Stalin. It was
totally bizarre. Stalin hated Bokii anyway. As
one of the bosses of the secret police, Bokii
supervised phone wiretappings and radio surveillance and had files on all
Bolshevik elite. Stalin knew he had all this information and wanted to
eliminate the chief of the Special Section. So the occult games that Bokii had played during the 1920s were used against him
in 1937. It was just an excuse to eliminate him.
Barchenko was the
last one to be shot. There was a whole group of them, who were supposedly
part of this secret society of Shambhala. And Barchenko was the only one who was fighting for his
life to the end. He tried to intrigue his investigators by presenting
himself as a valuable scientist – an asset that could very useful to the
Bolshevik state. When the “investigation” was nearing its end, Barchenko suddenly started claiming to have discovered
a mysterious biological weapon. This delayed the execution, but eventually
he couldn’t avoid it. He was executed too. Of course, Hitler did the
similar things in Germany
with former occultists. When he was still maturing, during the 1920s, he
dabbled a bit into these esoteric groups. But when he came to power,
he outlawed all of them. Because in a totalitarian dictatorship there can
be only one master, only one cult.
PoS: Do you think communism and these
spiritual interests were compatible?
AZ: Well, Bokii’s interest in the Shambhala
myth was coming partly from the fact that his communist idealism had begun
to crack. He was an idealist. He expected that when in 1917 the
Bolsheviks came to power, a golden age would arrive. People would be
all brothers and sisters. They would stop stealing. They would love each
other. The beasts and their prey would embrace each other. But it didn’t
happen. Then in 1921, when the Red sailors at Leningrad – who had been the backbone of
the Revolution – revolted against the Bolshevik regime, and the revolt was
suppressed, he had a nervous breakdown. He might have started saying to
himself: “my goodness, we killed so many people in the civil war; half of
the nation was destroyed to build a new society.” And it was justified on
the basis that you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs, but now
there was no omelet. I assume that this is when he became interested in Barchenko.
People are
sometimes surprised that Bokii, a die-hard
Bolshevik, suddenly turned toward the occult. But part of the reason is
because he thought maybe if they go to Tibet they might uncover some
secret knowledge, some techniques that could show Bolsheviks how to sway
the minds of the people toward Communism and make people better. In
case of Bokii and Barchenko
it is all about the mind-bending. The Bolsheviks had taken power and they
were building socialism. This was all right. But the two friends were
disturbed by the fact that the minds of the people were still infested with
old prejudices. So they were posing a question for themselves, “How can we
transform the minds of the populace?” That is how they eventually became interested
in the Shambhala legend. In their view, it could
contain some high knowledge that they can bring back to Red Russia and use
to spearhead Communism. In other words, unlike people like Ungern or Bolshevik fellow-travelers in Mongolia,
who were more interested in using martial sides of the Shambhala
prophecy, Bokii and Barchenko
were eager to use the inner spiritual aspects of that legend. Barchenko claimed to have known Tibet, and
so they tried to organize an expedition. Readers can find out what happened
later by reading my book.
Source: People of Shambhala
– in: http://peopleofshambhala.com/buddhists-occultists-and-secret-societies-in-early-bolshevik-russia-an-interview-with-andrei-znamenski/
See also from Andrei Znamenski
Red_Shambhala – Magic, Prophecy, and
Geopolitics in the heart of Asia
Totalitarian Temptation – Andrei Znamenski
talks about his latest book Red Shambhala
New Opium for
Intellectuals: Tibetan Buddhist Chic in the West
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