A Psychic Revolution

Telepathic commands and even world domination through mind control.' who would have dreamt that psychical experimentation in the USSR was originally inspired by nothing more innocent than circus stunts? `Human intelligence has discovered much in nature that was hidden,' wrote Lenin, `and it will discover much more, thus strengthening its domination over her.' Although, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, he did his best to stamp out ancient superstitions, before his death in 1924 the young Soviet Union had become the first country to provide official support for research into nature's most baffling area - later to be called parapsychology.

Half-a-century later, it was clear that Soviet scientists had learned a good deal about this supposedly hidden branch of knowledge, and were ready to put their discoveries to good use. But there is a very sinister ring to some of their terminology - 'distant influence', `mental suggestion' and `transfer of motor impulses', for instance - indicating a desire to make people act and think according to instructions of which they are not consciously aware. Indeed, the theme of domination, as forecast by Lenin, runs through much Soviet work in parapsychology, and little imagination is needed to speculate on the uses to which such practices, were possibly put.

Soviet interest in psychic matters was not initially inspired by Lenin, nor even by a scientist, but by a circus performer, Vladimir Durov, one of the most skilful animal trainers of all time. His animals, especially his dogs, delighted audiences with their well-rehearsed tricks. Although these were produced not by telepathy but by means of thorough training and the use of signals from an ultrasonic whistle, Durov was convinced that he could make direct mind-to-mind contact with his performers and persuade them to carry out complex tasks.

`Suppose', he said, `we have the following task: to suggest that the dog go to a table and fetch a book lying upon it.-.., I take his head between my hands, as if I am symbolically inculcating in him the thought that he is entirely in my power... I fix my eyes upon his... ' Durov would then visualise the exact nature of the task to be performed, adding: `I fix into his brain what I just before fixed in my own. I mentally put before him the part of the floor leading to the table, then the leg of the table, then the tablecloth, and finally the book.' Then, on the mental command, the dog would rush off like an automaton, leap on to the table and seize the book in its teeth.

After watching Durov and his dogs perform at a circus, one of the country's leading neuropathologists, Academician Vladimir Bekhterev (1857-1927), a colleague of the world-renowned physiologist Ivan Pavlov, decided to put his claims to the test in his laboratory. After several demonstrations, which involved a variety of different dogs, Bekhterev became satisfied that animal behaviour could indeed be influenced by thought suggestion, even when dog and trainer were out of sight of each other. Some of the tests, carried out in Durov's absence, involved tasks known only to Bekhterev himself, however; and he only achieved limited success with his own dog.

Inconclusive as it was, this work with Durov encouraged Bekhterev to take telepathy seriously. On becoming head of the Brain Research Institute at Leningrad University, he founded a Commission for the Study of Mental Suggestion in 1922 and now set to work - not with dogs, but with humans as subjects. In one series of experiments, successful attempts were made to send visual images to a subject who was told to write or draw whatever came into her mind. An extract from the sender's notes reads:

`Transmitted: triangle with a circle inside it. The subject completes the task [draws the target] at once. Transmitted: a simple pencil drawing of an engine. The percipient carries out the task precisely, and goes over the contour of the engine several times.' Members of the Commission then tried concentrating on objects instead of drawings, and found that, while subjects rarely identified the object itself, they often picked up particular features of it, and even the sender's mental associations with it. A subject whose target was a block of cut glass, for instance, reported `reflections in water - sugar loaf - snowy summit - iceberg, ice floes in the north illuminated by the sun - rays are broken up.' In another experiment, the sender stared at a framed portrait of a woman and noticed a reflection on its glass surface from a light bulb in the shape of the letter N. `Napoleon - the letter N flashed by,' he said to his assistant. A minute later, the subject, who was out of earshot, announced: `I see either Napoleon or Vespasian.' Altogether, the Commission ran 269 experiments in transmission of objects or images, and reported that no less than 134 were wholly or partly successful.

At the 1924 Congress of Psychoneurology, delegates were to be given a spontaneous demonstration of telepathic control in action. On his way to the meeting, Professor K. I. Platonov happened to meet one of his patients, whom he asked to come along without telling her why. In full view of the audience, Platonov put the girl to sleep in a matter of seconds by mental suggestion from behind a blackboard, and then woke her by the same method. Afterwards, the girl asked him: `Why did you invite me to the Congress? I don't understand. What happened to me? I slept, but I don't know why....' Platonov later revealed that this subject was so suggestible that he could send her to sleep even while she was dancing a waltz.

His experiment was repeated independently, and at almost the same time, by a group of researchers at the University of Kharkov, where psychologist Dr K. D. Kotkov reported that a series of about 30 experiments, held over a two-month period and designed to influence the behaviour of a girl student, were all successful. He described exactly how he did it. He would sit quietly and mentally murmur the words of suggestion to his subject. Then he would visualise her doing what he wished, and finally he would strongly wish her to do so. (This last stage was, he felt, the most important.) In this way, he could not only send the girl to sleep and wake her up, but even summon her to the laboratory. When asked why she had turned up, the bewildered girl replied: `I don't know. I just did. I wanted to come.' The most alarming aspect of this early example of behaviour control was that at no time was the girl aware of what was happening. `When are the experiments about which you warned me going to start?' she kept asking - even after they had been carried out.

In addition to its own research, Bekhterev's Commission studied reports of spontaneous telepathy, which the Revolution had not managed to suppress totally from members of the public. One well-documented case concerned a student who had seen a bright light on his bedroom wall `transforming itself into the clear head of a young lady.' He recognised her as his friend Nadezhda. After smiling at me,' he reported, `she spoke a sentence of which I only managed to catch the last word - "decay". Then the girl's image seemed to melt into the wall and disappear.' The student wrote out an account of his experience on the same day, and six days later he learned that Nadezhda had died within minutes of his vision. Moreover, her mother testified that the girl's last words, addressed specifically to the boy, had been: `There is neither dust nor decay.'

Impressed by the mounting evidence for telepathic phenomena, the 1924 Congress resolved that an investigation on strictly scientific lines was called for. The man who was to devote his life to doing this was one of Bekhterev's students, Leonid I. Vasiliev (1891-1966). He began his career knowing that telepathy existed because he had experienced it himself. When he was 12, he had nearly drowned after falling into a river. He begged his guardians not to tell his parents, who were 800 miles (1,300 kilometres) away; but as soon as his mother came home, she retold the whole story, right down to the detail of his new white cap being swept away by the current. She had dreamed the whole episode at the time.

Despite this personal experience, Vasiliev embarked objectively on his research into telepathy. He assumed there must be some physical explanation for it; and although he never found one, he did discover a number of practical ways in which telepathy can be made to work. In 1926, he carried out a series of experiments in a Leningrad hospital. These were designed to convey mental suggestions to a hypnotised subject, and comprised trivial actions such as raising a certain arm or leg, or scratching the nose. He was wholly or partly successful 16 times out of 19. Later, after repeating the experiment, he declared that both conscious and unconscious movements of a human body could be caused by mental suggestion alone.

Remote control

Vasiliev also found that it was possible to send somebody to sleep or wake them up by a kind of mental remote control, even at distances of up to 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres). Moreover, he found that screening the sender inside a Faraday cage (through which almost no form of electromagnetic radiation can pass) had no appreciable effect on his success rate. But Vasiliev failed in his main aim, to establish a physical basis for telepathy. His greatest achievement was to provide continuity between the pioneer days of the 1920s and the sudden renaissance of Soviet psi research that began after Khrushchev's historic denunciation of Stalinism in 1956. Little is known about Vasiliev's research over the latter part of his life, although in 1940, a few months before the siege of Leningrad, he was carrying out experiments in his laboratory that showed how the muscles of an insect's intestines respond to electrical impulses emitted from contracting human muscles. Such work might not seem a vital part of the Russian war effort, yet it appears that Vasiliev was still determined to find physiological evidence for `brain power' transference.

1940 also saw none other than Joseph Stalin himself acting as psychical researcher for a short while, after showing an interest in one of the country's most popular stage performers, telepathist Wolf Messing. According to Messing's story, as published in the Soviet press (and never officially denied), Stalin put the telepathist's power of mind control to the test by having him persuade a bank clerk that a blank piece of paper was a cheque for 100,000 roubles. He then walked unchallenged through the dictator's own security guards after hypnotising them into thinking that he was secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria. If his report is true, Messing, who died in the early 1970s, could have been the greatest spy of all time.

However, despite Messing's undoubted popularity, and Stalin's private views on the subject, telepathy was defined in the 1956 Great Soviet Encyclopedia as `an anti-social, idealist fiction about man's supernatural power to perceive phenomena which, considering the time and place, cannot be perceived.' Vasiliev's whole life had apparently been spent in vain, at least as far as public recognition was concerned. Yet, after a typically sudden policy reversal by the Soviet authorities, Vasiliev was allowed to re-enter the field of parapsychology, with the full backing of the government, in 1960. The specific task of his so-called Laboratory of Aero-ions and Electromagnetic Waves at Leningrad University (where he had by then become head of the physiology department) was `to study the phenomena of telepathy.' He must have felt his life had come full circle after 40 years.

Czech parapsychologist Milan Ryzl claimed that Vasiliev was almost certainly engaged in secret work, and it seems plausible that it was the prospect of discovering the mechanism of telepathy that kept research funds flowing in. If indeed they had discovered it, the Soviet authorities would have had in their power a means of domination of which even Lenin probably never dreamed.