The higher mountains will always remain a refuge for mystics, hermits, the nomadic, the mad, the trickster and the outlaw. They are content to contemplate the unreachable or dwell in their secret mazy ways.
* Idries Shah, ‘Delights of a visit to Hell’ in Reflections
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Those Crazy Russians
Tomorrow there will be apricots.
Proverb common in the Himalayas
The advantage of a mountain to map-makers is that it is high – you can see it from far away. So the peaks are the first to be labelled and lose their mystery. But what of the remaining hidden high places? Like most explorers drawn to the Himalayas, Sven Hedin wanted to find a hidden kingdom; it is one of the most enduring myths of the region.
The idea of a hidden kingdom, where life is perfect, where men live to be hundreds of years old, where wisdom has been sought and found – this idea is a very ancient one and yet it has, in the last 150 years or so, become both more prominent and more powerful. Now, when we suspect the world is all explored, the Shangri-La or Shambhala myth lives on in the form of exiled Himalayan peoples – the Tibetans, the Afghans, the Nagas – who, if only they could return to their homeland would restore its most ancient and magical properties.
In the early twentieth century, dreamers from the West went looking for Shangri-La. Those from Europe and America may have been spiritual tourists, harmless cranks or simply over curious. Those from the newly formed USSR had more sinister plans afoot.
It is a fact that tends to get overlooked but early Soviet Russia was a decidedly esoteric and nutty place. Ideas of the strangest sort – if they promised any sort of advantage for the promised land of the proletariat – were pursued with gusto. It was a place where nonsensical ideas about agriculture promulgated by a complete fraud – Lysenko – had the backing of the entire ruling establishment. Is it any surprise, then, that a department of OGPU – the forerunner of the KGB – was devoted to investigating the occult and using it to spread communism?
Gleb Bokii characterised this fascinating mix of the weird with the prosaic. In addition to being an efficient secret policeman – he was head of the ultra-secret OGPU department of codes and cryptography – Gleb had a collection of mummified penises. Why, you might ask. The answer isn’t easy to find . . . He was a small and delicate man, remembered for his politeness and excellent manners, his interest in the occult, his womanising and his belief in the existence of a secret kingdom, a ‘powerhouse’ of spirituality somewhere in the Himalayas. The idea wasn’t new. Notions of Shambhala and Agartha had been promoted since the nineteenth century, ancient myths propounded as real places by early scholars like Sándor Csoma Kőrösi and mystical writers such as Helena Blavatsky.
In the early twentieth century a new mystic appeared who was rather different to Madame Blavatsky. He was born in the Russian Empire, in the Caucasus, of Greek and Armenian ancestry and his name was G. I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff would embellish the myth of the ‘powerhouse monasteries’ of the Himalayas and fire up communists like Bokii and others to go searching for them.
I first came across Gurdjieff when I bought a desk he’d owned during his last days in Paris. It’s a good desk but I can’t say that it has given me any supernatural powers. But after reading about the man I could see why he was so influential in the early and mid twentieth century. Unlike Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff had a method. Through books written by his most prominent disciple, Peter Ouspensky (a writer who sadly curtailed novel writing when he became interested in becoming a teacher like Gurdjieff – his single novel, Strange Life of Ivan , is remarkably promising), Russians and later Europeans became aware of this bald-headed superman who hailed, like Stalin, from somewhere in the Caucasus.
Gurdjieff first popped up in Moscow in 1912, offering instruction in many mysteries including strange dancing and music that he claimed would ultimately lead to enlightenment. This was all of Central Asian Sufi origin, but Gurdjieff, learning from Blavatsky, sought to be obscure about where he got his material. He borrowed from the Sufis the idea of group work, pursuing a limited but nonsensical objective to build focus, the notion of the ‘observing self’ that watches and notes the ordinary workings of the mind and the emotions, but removed the Islamic context. He had travelled widely and had a powerful personality. He had mastered all the skills of the man of mystery: he could hypnotise, he was very persuasive, he was deeply intuitive and highly energetic. But plenty of people have all of the above and fail to attract one disciple of merit (it’s rather easier to attract nutters, as Charles Manson proved). But Gurdjieff did attract people of quality – such as the writers Katherine Mansfield and Peter Ouspensky – because he didn’t just talk, he actually appeared to be master of any situation he found himself in. Ouspensky was highly sceptical at first, and went along to meet Gurdjieff prepared to scoff. But the more he saw him interact with others, the more impressed he was. Most gurus Ouspensky had seen, and this included seers like Rasputin, were incompetent human beings. Gurdjieff appeared to be super competent.
It is this quality – and the fact that a reputable journalist and writer is telling you, rather than Gurdjieff himself (after Ouspensky and Gurdjieff had the inevitable falling out, Gurdjieff penned his own books some almost unreadable, others, such as Meetings with Remarkable Men, both instructive and enjoyable) that makes Gurdjieff’s claims – that there are ‘powerhouses’ of knowledge in the Himalayas – so compelling. In Gurdjieff’s version, there is a secret Sarmoung Monastery somewhere in the mountains – maybe Afghanistan or Tibet or Bhutan or Mustang; this monastery, and others connected to it, are pumping out vibrations that are literally controlling the planet on some deep level. Gurdjieff claimed that the Pyramids in Egypt were an attempt to pursue, through a kind of doctrine of signatures, a similarly powerful effect by building a micro-Himalaya in a fairly flat country. Be that as it may, the reports of Gurdjieff’s groups, the fact that he had Westerners progressing in these arcane areas rather than simply hanging around Tibetan Buddhists and copying them – all this was tremendously exciting to certain revolutionaries, since it also chimed in with the communist ideals of the time: communal living, group work, pursuit of the idea of a ‘new man’, a kind of superman, living in harmony, breaking with the past and, above all, though sympathetic to the core of all religions, rejecting the authority of any one creed over another. What the Russians took from Gurdjieff was a kind of Westernised mysticism in which personal development outshone almost everything else.
It was powerful stuff because, in short, it works; as Sufis have shown throughout the centuries in the countries where they have lived, from Morocco to India to Indonesia. Small dedicated groups of wisely chosen people who can set aside ego and pettiness can achieve great things; it is widely accepted that the Arab renaissance in science, which kickstarted the European interest in science, was due to Sufi activity.
But because Bokii and his colleagues were greedy, they forgot that the basic tenet of Sufism is service, not power. They focused on the crazy stuff: the tall tales, the mind reading and mind bending, and mythological materials whose function was certainly not intended to start a world crusade to Tibet looking for a lost paradise.
There is a comforting irony in communism – a religion which abhorred the supernatural – being so easily enticed into partnership with the most supernatural and spooky elements of mystical Islam and Buddhism. But Stalin himself sanctioned the search for Shambhala, believing, like Napoleon, that religion was a political tool that could be exploited.
A drop-out medical student called Barchenko was recruited by the penis gatherer, Bokii, to go in search of Shambhala, or the remains of its power. Bokii, like many idealistic revolutionary types, was drawn to both knowledge – which he characterised as ultimate truth – and power. It is the kind of mix that makes most seekers after truth blighted almost before they have started: they want to use the knowledge they find to achieve power. Being idealists, it is not power over others so much as power to ‘do good
’ and establish a perfect society, the kind of society that was dreamt of by the Russian revolutionary comrades of Lenin and Trotsky. Bokii had been appointed by Lenin because of these idealistic credentials. Yet the bloodshed and horror of the red terror led him to seek for truth elsewhere. His vague interest in the East and the occult took a practical turn when he met Barchenko.
Barchenko was another power seeker – for good, of course; he believed that occult powers such as telepathy, telekinesis and remote viewing would all be explained by scientific theories; it was just that we lacked the right theory. Meanwhile, one should do what any good scientist would do and experiment. Barchenko wired up people’s heads with metal helmets connected to each other via long copper wires. The idea was that one person thought of a word and wrote it down. The ‘receiver’ then tried to get the message. The results were problematic, but Barchenko claimed that when he switched to transmitting images it worked quite well. He also made an early study of ‘arctic madness’ – a kind of group hysteria found in Finland and Lapland, where sufferers have fits and see visions. (A real phenomenon, it has obvious links to the more controlled use of visions by shamans in Siberia.)
Fuelled by the lectures of Gurdjieff and meetings with Agvan Dorjiev (more of him later) Barchenko became obsessed with finding secret powers that could put communism back on track.
But though both Bokii and Barchenko enjoyed a brief period of popularity with Stalin and his gang, the powers they sought never really materialised, certainly not enough to save them. Bokii was sentenced to death on 15 November 1937 and shot the same day. Barchenko was executed the following year. But another Russian was a little luckier; his name was Nicholas Roerich.
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St Nick the Guru
Do not base your beliefs on what you overhear.
Naga proverb
Nicholas Roerich – a painter and would-be guru – enjoys today quite a reputation as a cultural explorer of Tibet and Mongolia. Unlike Blavatsky and Gurdjieff, he kept his nuttier ideas halfhidden. Born in Petrograd in 1874 and active in pre-revolutionary Russia, Roerich read Blavatsky and was influenced by Gurdjieff and the enigmatic Dorjiev.
Dorjiev emerges as a key figure in the whole Soviet intrigue in the Himalayas. Agvan Dorjiev, as you’ll recall, was the thorn in Curzon’s side, the ‘Russian lama’ who had been a teacher of the thirteenth Dalai Lama and encouraged Tibet to draw closer to Russia. Shortly after the Younghusband expedition, Dorjiev, confirming Curzon’s suspicions, took up residence in Petrograd to further his ambitions to obtain Russian backing for a vast Buddhist empire in the east. He had considerable luck with Czar Nicholas II; more so than with his father Alexander III, who wrote, ‘All of this is so new, so unusual and fantastic, that it is difficult to believe in its success.’
Nicholas II was convinced. He gave the go-ahead to build a Buddhist temple and dormitory in the capital. It drew support from many places. Nicholas Roerich, as an artist, was able to design and install its stained-glass windows.
In 1919 the Bolsheviks – who had persecuted Orthodox Christianity mercilessly – sponsored an exhibition of Buddhist art. Tibetan Buddhism was treated as a religion of a formerly oppressed people; by reaching out to it, the communists hoped to spread the Buryat rebellion further south. The Buryats were Russian Buddhists who had rebelled against their Mongolian lords to establish a soviet-like state. Dorjiev, as a Buryat lama, was riding high again.
Meanwhile, Roerich was pursuing his own path that had taken him away from the Buddhist temple in Petrograd via a short stay in Finland to Paris and then London. He followed clues from his wife, who was able to channel a spirit entity into talking through her either directly or with automatic writing. At first, Roerich relied solely on his wife’s connection (which had miraculously cured her of congenital headaches) but he found that with some concentration he could put himself into a trance state and then write without knowing what he was writing. The entity was the spirit of the fifth reincarnation of the Buddha. Judging by the diaries of Helena Roerich, they relied on this spirit for pretty much every decision – nothing was too trivial for the Buddhist deity to advise upon, be it food, friends or the big mission, which was to establish a new order of enlightened beings on earth starting in . . . well, not London. In London there were too many big wheels, esoterically speaking – Ouspensky (whom the spirit had bade them both to re-read) was in town, and people were popping across the Channel to see Gurdjieff all the time. Roerich was second eleven at best. It is strange that he didn’t try to join those whose work inspired him – but when you want to be a guru, other gurus are there mainly as sources of material you can steal rather than for instruction, which would be a little humiliating, especially if any disciples were around. One wonders what happened to the Sufi teacher’s dictate – ‘You show me your wisdom, and if you want, I will show you my wisdom.’
So London was out. Which left New York – a great place for folk looking to make friends and influence people. Which the Roeriches did. Coming up with a remarkably similar stratagem to Dale Carnegie, Nicholas Roerich followed the simple formula of making himself agreeable to useful and influential people, and then listening to them talk. When they ran out of things to say he would, bit by bit, draw them into the Shambhala fold. There was an inner circle, who all received special rings (strangely, Freud did the same thing with his inner circle of students) and Tibetan names and then a slightly larger circle who received less freaky names – inspired by Arthurian legend. Then there were simply well-wishers, who were there to buy the paintings. The Roeriches were nothing if not mercenary. People were there to be used and to be useful to the great cause.
The Roeriches managed to make several journeys to Tibet and Mongolia. The first was sponsored by American money, but the later ones received their backing from the Soviet Union. Nicholas Roerich was not the first person to think he could use Bolshevism to further his own plans. But he was not a completely willing participant in Red espionage. His brother Boris had been unable to escape the Soviet Union after the Revolution. As a former White officer, he was at some risk. In 1929 his apartment was searched for signs of espionage. In an abrupt turn, he was recruited into OGPU, forerunner of the KGB. Two years later, perhaps having over-extended his brief, he was arrested for smuggling artefacts to the West. Yet after only two months in prison, he was given a deal involving a generous form of house arrest. Trained as an architect, he was eventually given the task of helping design a building for the Leningrad branch of the secret police and a dacha for Stalin himself, entitled ‘The Big House’. He then began working on the enormous VIEM project building – the Stalinist successor to Gleb Bokii’s secret unit dedicated to looking at strange and unexplained phenomena. He was obviously in favour, as in 1937, just when so many people were disappearing to the gulags, he moved to an upmarket neighbourhood in Moscow where he lived until his death in 1945.
By some bizarre coincidence, Nicholas had also been involved in a massive building project with esoteric overtones. ‘The Master Building’ was the name of the twenty-nine-storey skyscraper that he had persuaded a multimillionaire currency dealer called Horch to build on strictly esoteric Buddhist principles. It’s still there, at 310 Riverside Drive, New York. Now a historic landmark and exclusive residence full of fancy apartments, few know that buried in its foundations lies a treasure chest containing Tibetan coins and a letter with a prophecy of a new golden age. Ask the doorman about it and he’ll simply tell you the place was ‘once owned by some weird Russian painter’.
Shambhala becomes Shangri-La in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon – this novel was the source of revived interest in the idea. Our Zen monk explorer, Kawaguchi, suggested the Russian Czar wanted to lead a Buddhist empire based on the Shambhala myth, and it was visions of this that so scared Curzon and Younghusband.
Another valley, another bridge to cross
Of Shambhala, the current Dalai Lama has rather beautifully commented that it is a real place but only visible to those with purified e
yes. The idea is certainly powerful. It was mainly propagated in the West, as we have seen, by Nicholas Roerich. He had great influence in the United States, especially on Henry Wallace – Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary for Agriculture. And FDR was hugely influenced by Wallace, who exuded a kind of ‘being there’ simplicity that impressed Roosevelt. It was Wallace who fell for Stalin’s lies, and no doubt this encouraged the naïve view that Roosevelt had of that tyrant. Such naïvety would dearly cost the people of Eastern Europe for the next forty years . . . Roosevelt had a country retreat built in the Maryland hills and called it Shangri-La; we know it now as Camp David.
Epilogue: Roerich’s paintings continue to rise in price long after his death. The Miracle of Madonna Laboris sold in June 2013 for £7.9 million at Bonhams, the highest price to date in a Russian art auction.
Madonna Laboris’s inspiration is an apocryphal gospel. It shows the gates of heaven guarded by St Peter. Peter is perturbed and says to the Lord: ‘All day long I watch the gates of Paradise; I do not let anyone in, yet in the morning there are newcomers in Paradise.’
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The First Interrogation of Agvan Dorjiev: Siberia, 1938
White Mountain Page 25