The True Story of Psychics in Russia

Alexander Torin

Copyright (C) 1997 Alexander Taratorin. All rights reserved.

Any alteration of this text, as well as its reproduction for commercial purposes, may be undertaken only with the authors consent.

E-mail: amtar@pacbell.net

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Because all sorts of rumors and conjectures have been circulating around my recently published novella The Psychic, I decided to turn on my computer and describe the real story on which it was basedto take up my electronic pen, so to speak.

To a reader, the novella may seem like one long farce inspired by The Fatal Eggs or Heart of a Dog, transposed to Moscow in the 1980s. Unfortunately, Mikhail Bulgakovs brilliant imagination became reality during the general crisis of socialism. The novella is based to a considerable extent on events that actually took place.

It may be simplest to list what really was invented. The rejuvenation of the body beneath a radar reflector was invented, and consequently so were the irradiation sessions for the upper ranks of the Politburo. Also invented was the appearance of Mikhail Gorbachevs famous birthmark as a result of one such session; that mark undoubtedly existed long before the period described in the book. Somewhere I have a photograph of the future General Secretary taken in the early 1970s, and the dark mark was already present on his forehead. Well, that is probably all. My imagination, then, is rather limited: it simply pales beside the real atmosphere of public lunacy that preceded the collapse of the USSR.

Now let us begin at the beginning. Since the Khrushchev Thawroughly from the mid-1960s onwardthere had been a strange laboratory in Moscow supposedly devoted to studying and training psychics. It was established under the A. S. Popov Society, the Russian analogue of the respected American Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the IEEE. I know very little about that laboratory. Hardly any serious research was conducted there; they dealt with telepathy and healing by telephone and ran some semilegal courses for training psychics. Once I came across a monograph by I. B. Kogan, a well-known specialist in methods of transmitting information, in which he tried to create a theory of transmitting thoughts over a distance. I no longer remember the details, but I was left with the impression that the theory could not withstand criticism. In short, no one took the laboratory seriously. Enthusiasts of telepathy and the occult coexisted peacefully with official science, bothered no one, and published none of their findings in any serious journal.

By the beginning of the 1980s, the situation had changed

If I were a historian, I would certainly wonder how an unhealthy interest in occult phenomena arises within a social order, and why it usually precedes major upheavals. History offers many such examples. At the beginning of the twentieth century, sances flourished, summoning the spirits of the dead for conversation. Occultism and mysticism may have played a tragic role in Russian history: who knows how events might have unfolded if Grigori Rasputin had not been admitted into the imperial familys circle? Rumor has it that high-ranking psychics and sorcerers inevitably appeared at the throne of every ruler, whether at the court of Brezhnev, Mao Zedong, or Kim Il Sung. In Russia, such magicians included Dzhuna, and later, near the twilight of the collapse, Chumak and Kashpirovsky, whose sessions were broadcast on television. The crowning achievement of this mystical mood was the appearance of issues of Evening Moscow charged by Chumak, their entire press runs instantly snapped up at Soyuzpechat newsstands.

In short, at the beginning of the 1980s, during the era of the end of stable stagnation, numerous rotting bubbles of the supernatural began to form in the social dough. Healers appeared here and there who claimed to cure fatal illnesses with a single movement of the hand and to revive people in comas. And then, as always, a historical circumstance played into their hands: Comrade Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, could barely walk and had even greater difficulty moving his tongue. Many other Politburo members were in almost equally pitiable condition. The bodies of these old mensurvivors of Stalins dictatorship who had seen many executions in their timewere on the verge of wearing out. And then, at a highly opportune moment, Dzhuna Davitashvili appeared on the horizon

I should add a qualification: I am not prepared to claim that Dzhuna and many other healers had no effect whatsoever on their patients. At the mere mention of psychics, many eminent scientists became so irritated that they refused even to discuss the possibility of any effect on the human body. I am convinced that a whole range of effects described by ordinary physics and physiology can exist, and that some may have therapeutic value. I have also seen things I cannot explain. But more about that later.

At the beginning of her career, Dzhuna worked as a nurse in Georgia. Then she discovered that she could heal by laying on her hands, cured one patient and then another, and soon moved higher up. Someone in the Georgian leadership recommended her to Comrade Baibakov, then Chairman of the USSR State Planning Committee. I no longer remember his first name and patronymic; I believe he was Nikolai Konstantinovich.

Another qualification is necessary here. Dzhuna looked highly exotic: burning eyes, black hair, long, slender fingers. The sight of her alone might have been enough to jolt an organism into action. In short, the Chairman of Gosplan felt much better, as did his wife and entourage. As a Politburo member and a highly influential man at the time, he introduced Dzhuna to Brezhnev. This happened around the end of 1981.

I do not know exactly what happened then. Leonid Ilyich was already in very poor shape, as anyone could see on television. Dzhuna was unlikely to have treated him for any particular disease; the sessions were probably more like restorative physiotherapy. The fact remains that Brezhnev was pleased and apparently even felt better.

Then came that famous telephone call from the Central Committee. More precisely, the call was only the beginning; afterward there was a meeting at the Central Committee. For simplicitys sake, let us regard the existence of the call as firmly established. It rang in the office of Academician Vladimir Alexandrovich Kotelnikov, Vice President of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Any reader who has studied signal theory or information transmission knows that, in Soviet science, Kotelnikov was something like Claude Shannon, the father of information theory. The famous sampling theorem is still called Kotelnikovs theorem in Russian textbooks, although Americans prefer Nyquists interpolation formula. At the time, Vladimir Alexandrovich was director of the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronicsthe IREof the USSR Academy of Sciences.

It was a good institute, divided between Moscow and Fryazino. The Moscow section, formerly at 18 Marx Prospekt, stood just behind the Hotel National, in the courtyard of Moscow Universitys old building. It had once housed the universitys physics faculty. On the third floor there was a small plaque saying that this was where Lebedev had discovered light pressure. The institute also had a secret section in the town of Fryazino, employing more than a thousand people. Its work included electronics, semiconductor physics, radar observations of planets in the Solar System, remote mapping of the surface of Venus, and other research both useful and useless to Soviet society.

At this point, our story divides into two streams. Why was Kotelnikov assigned to investigate Dzhuna and the other psychics, rather than, say, Chazov, the Minister of Health and an Academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences?

The second stream began in St. PetersburgLeningrad at the time. An astonishing woman named Nelli Sergeyevna Kulagina lived there. She moved objects with her hands. After her sessions she became exhausted, her face reddened, and her blood pressure rose. She was filmed; people tried to discover how she did it, but in vain.

Academician Yuri Borisovich Kobzarev worked at the IRE. He was a founder of Soviet radar, a Lenin Prize laureate, a Hero of Socialist Labor, and so on and so forth. He was a very pleasant, cultivated man, a surviving fragment of the old school, nearly seventy years old. Through acquaintances he heard about Kulagina and became interested. He decided to conduct experiments, brought an oscilloscope with an electrode to Leningradand the instrument unexpectedly registered a strong electric field around Kulaginas hands. Physicists, you know, are like that: they get carried away.

At the time, the IREs deputy director was Yuri Vasilyevich Gulyayev, a Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. For reference, he is now an Academician and director of the same institute. A graduate of the Moscow Institute of Physics and TechnologyPhysTechGulyayev was one of the youngest Corresponding Members of his day. He had already received a European Physical Society prize and had practically founded an entire scientific field, acoustoelectronics. The filters used in color television sets were based on a discovery he made at Cambridge in the late 1960s. When Yuri Vasilyevich heard about these wonders, he snorted and went with Kobzarev to expose the sorceress. That was when he had to bite his tongue.

Kulagina scattered a laser beam with her hands. A strong electric field surrounded them. She really could move small objects such as a sugar cube or a matchbox. A sensitive microphone placed near her hands also registered short ultrasonic pulses, and the amplifiers input stage burned out during the experiments. Then, within a few seconds, Kulagina produced a burn on the hand of the skeptical Gulyayev, who until then had insisted that all talk of burns was the result of suggestion and hypnosisto which he was immune.

Although Kulagina had never practiced healing, rumors of the Leningrad experiments began to circulate and made their way upward: Scientists at the IRE have already begun working with psychics.

In short, Kotelnikov was allocated foreign-currency funds and staff positions to establish a special laboratory. It was to study Dzhuna, determine the nature of her healing effect on the human organismread: organisms of special state importanceand submit a report to the forthcoming Congress of the Communist Party. No, I am not being sarcastic. That was the Politburos assignment, word for word. Gulyayev was appointed to head the new scientific program.

Anyone who remembers those days will know that foreign-currency funding in the Academy was extremely rare. Staff positions were rarer still. I do not remember the exact amount, but it was around half a million dollars. A trifle on the scale of a country, of course, but in our particular corner of history it was very substantial indeed.

Let us return for a moment to real life. The call from the Central Committee had come. The institute had been ordered to report to the Party Congress. Enormous funds and staff positions had been allocated. Kotelnikov, Vice President of the USSR Academy of Sciences and director of the IRE, was a busy man carrying an impossible burden. Deputy Director Gulyayev was equally mired in administration: he simultaneously headed several programssemiconductors, acoustoelectronics, thin filmsand taught at PhysTech. In short, they needed an energetic leader willing to devote himself to this strange occupation.

They found him in Room Fourteen in the IRE basement: Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Eduard Emmanuilovich Godik, an old friend of Gulyayevs. Godik and his graduate students studied semiconductor physics. For twenty years, day and night, he had taken measurements and, day after day, picked out ever more effects in the behavior of holes and electrons. He had once invented the worlds first semiconductor infrared detectors; they were immediately classified and installed on military satellites. In short, Eduard EmmanuilovichEdikwas an ordinary research scientist, not even a senior researcher, I believe. Gulyayev proposed that he head the laboratory for psychic research. Godik resisted; he hated to abandon semiconductors. Then he gradually became intrigued by the idea and decided to exploit the situation according to the classic scientific principle: Satisfy your curiosity at the states expense. It was the end of 1981 or the very beginning of 1982.

The proposed research program rested on one central idea: all observed effectsif, of course, they existed, and Gulyayev, remembering his burn and the destroyed amplifier, was convinced that they didwere based on physical phenomena. Effects at a distance could be explained only by physical fields found in nature: electromagnetic, acoustic, or chemical. The research would therefore begin with the construction of instruments capable of detecting the human bodys own fields and emissions across every possible range: optical, infrared, microwave, static electric potential, magnetic fields, acoustic radiation, and so forth.

Several capable PhysTech graduates worked for Godik. They enthusiastically seized this opportunity and even brought in their friends. Computers and whatever instruments were available were purchased with the allotted funds. Work began to boil. That was also when I joined the laboratory, in the first weeks of its existencelargely by happy accident. I came to Godik to work on my diploma, then became a trainee and began analyzing and processing the results of all sorts of experiments. By the time my IRE career ended in 1990, I had defended my dissertation and become a leading research scientist and group leader.

At the time, the laboratory occupied two little rooms in the basement of the Anokhin Institute of Normal Physiology, formerly the medical faculty of Moscow University. It was a small, two-story building about ten meters from the red-brick IRE. Was this perhaps the very building Bulgakov had in mind when he described Professor Persikovs nocturnal vigils, his inflamed red eyes fixed upon the mysterious red ray of life?

The first years in that basement were the laboratorys best. Godik gathered around him a team that was in many respects unique. It divided into groups: one studied the bodys infrared radiation, another its optical radiation, a third its microwave emissions, a fourth the magnetic fields of the heart and brain, and a fifth the electrical potentials of the skin. These groups usually consisted of one person, at most two, and all of those young researchers later became heads of laboratories working on the same subjects. I had to move among nearly all the groups, transferring data into the computer and processing it; later I began conducting experiments myself.

By the standards of the day, the generous injection of foreign currency into our basement by the countrys ailing leaders allowed us to acquire unique equipment. Our computerfamous in its daywas made by the Norwegian firm Norsk Data. Just as described in the novella, it was red and hummed. The extraordinary breed of cockroaches, supposedly crossed with Amazonian ones, was not invented either. They scurried around the basement and disabled the computer several times. Once, one of those beasts crawled into a disk drive and was smeared across the magnetic disk. Ah, magnetic disks. I am becoming lyrical again.

A lyrical digression. Those good old days: enormous Control Data disks, five megabytes apiece. If only I had known that, many years later, I would be working on ultra-dense, ultra-fast magnetic recording in sun-drenched California, recalling those quivering cabinets, their lights blinking, ten megabytes to a cabinet, ruined by an exotic cockroachwhile holding in my hands the latest IBM prototype, forty gigabytes in capacity and weighing perhaps five hundred grams. If only I had known that I would write several books explaining the fundamentals of that very magnetic recording. The irony of fate.

To return to the laboratory: prototypes of the new instruments were built fairly quickly. Naturally, we tested them on ourselves. I sat for long periods beneath the infrared cameras lens, holding my breath and trying to observe the reaction of the blood vessels in my hands. I still remember that time with pleasure. Wherever one looked, it seemed, one discovered some new and astonishing phenomenon. It turned out that the temperature of the hands oscillates synchronously; that heat waves travel across an animals brain; that an electric potential exists around a person, modulated by breathing and heartbeat. More interesting still, close observation of the human body revealed strange reactions in individual areas of skin connected with internal organsthe dermatomes.

We could not forget, however, that the Party was awaiting its report. Those at the top were nervous and demanded that the institute conduct experiments as quickly as possible. As soon as the first prototype instruments were ready, therefore, Dzhuna began to be brought to us. I believe I conveyed the general impression created by her visits quite accurately in the book. Naturally, no mafia was hunting her, but strange characters were always swirling around her; telephones rang endlessly; deals were being arranged. It was entirely natural that she neither understood nor could understand the methods of scientific research. She often became angry because the results were not shown to herthough in general there was nothing to show. Sometimes Dzhuna made a scene, demanding that all those physicists switch on their instruments and leave; she was perfectly capable of measuring everything herself. Entirely in keeping with the spirit of the times, Dzhuna was appointed, in the strictest secrecy, a senior research scientist at the IRE. The comrades in the Politburo had originally favored making her a professor, but an infuriated Kotelnikov insisted that the rank be lowered.

I think Dzhuna sincerely believed in her abilities and was ready to treat anyone. Once I had a sore throat, and she offered me a healing session. I agreed; I was curious to see how it would end. I felt nothing at all, and two days later developed a severe case of tonsillitis.

We tried to detect zero-order effects by pointing various sensors at Dzhunas hands and her patients bodies. Alas, the instruments registered no obvious physical anomalies. But we did notice something else. Some time after Dzhuna made passes with her hands while speaking of cosmic energy and a divine gift, the blood in a patients skin would often redistribute itself, sometimes quite locally. This chance observation became the basis for a series of studies of skin receptors sensitivity to heat flux and ultimately led to a fairly elegant hypothesis explaining the effects of psychics.

Human skin can sense extremely small heat flows; the signal from a hand is an order of magnitude greater than the threshold of sensitivity. A psychics movements can therefore be compared to a massage without physical contact. Moreover, individual areas of skin are connected through the spinal cord with internal organs. If blood circulation increases in such an area, the internal organ will receive additional innervation; more blood will flow to it, and immune processes will intensify. In some cases, this may produce a beneficial therapeutic effect. We even managed to measure reactions in internal organsthe kidney and liverduring treatment by psychics.

We then established that the skin reaction was exclusively thermal. It persisted when the hand was separated from the skin by a material transparent to infrared radiation, and disappeared when the hand was separated from the body by an infrared filter. This effect, illustrated by numerous images and graphs, was included in a classified report of which I was a coauthor. The report went upstairs, and for a while the institutes management breathed a sigh of relief.

The mystery of N. S. Kulagina remained unresolved. At last, we managed to invite her for experiments. Every attempt to move an object cost her great effort. Her blood pressure rose sharply, her face reddened, and afterward she had to rest for a long time. Following nearly a week of work, we established that histamine was being expelled from her palm in tiny droplets, possibly through the sweat glands. Once expelled, it formed a charged aerosol that explained all the observed effects. The droplets caused clicks in a microphone; they altered the dielectric constant of the medium and scattered a laser beam; they irritated the skin, producing the famous burn; and finally they settled on an object and charged it. All the physical estimatescharge, concentration, and so onagreed with the observed effects. We never understood the physiological mechanism behind this expulsion; it was a genuine physiological phenomenon. To everyones great regret, Kulagina died soon afterward, taking her secret with her. All these demonstrations had cost her dearly.

Before long, an order came down from above to intensify our work with Dzhuna, which no one in the department wanted to do. Preparing for these essentially pointless experiments consumed a great deal of time, and the results produced practically nothing new. I formed the impression that the scientific report had disappointed the people who had commissioned it. No miracle had occurred; the magician was apparently no magician at all. The bastards had cheated them. We gave them foreign currency and staff positions, and all they did was measure some obscure things and confuse the bosses.

Then a new problem arose. Rumors of the laboratory had spread through the upper ranks and the Academy of Sciences. Anyone and everyone began descending into our basement. There was Comrade Baibakov himself, Chairman of Gosplan; Academy President Anatoly Petrovich Alexandrov; the next president, Gury Ivanovich Marchuk; political advisers to the General SecretaryI no longer remember which one, perhaps Brezhnev or perhaps Andropov; hordes of comrades from the Central Committee; first secretaries of district Party committees; Moscow City Council department heads; the KGB; every imaginable academician and institute director; cosmonauts; and artists.

We showed all of them color pictures on the computer screen: Dzhuna moving her hand above a patient while his back grew redder and redder. We showed them hands before and after. Naturally, I exaggerated about the alcohol in the novella. No, the reaction was perfectly visiblethe blood vessels did dilatebut we never tried to distinguish cognac from vodka or port.

As I recall, it became practically impossible to work. I personally handled many of the visits and demonstrations, and even wrote a small automatic program that cycled through the color images on the screen in the correct sequence. Once I looked at the usage statistics for one of the files and discovered that I had displayed it 1,130 times in the preceding few months. Then the press descended on us as well: Evening Moscow, Ogonyok, Science and Life, the television news program Vremya. What nonsense they wrote about us. Some publications were respectable, to be sure, but others In short, see the novella. It is time to investigate the horny membranes, the laboratory director said. I do owe an apology, however, to Lev Yefimovich Kolodny, a well-known Moscow journalist of the time; he wrote quite well about all this devilry.

The effects we had discovered required serious and meticulous investigation in collaboration with physiologists. Godik tried to establish cooperation with various institutes. Some things worked, but slowly. Then Brezhnev died and those at the top fell quiet for a while as Andropov, the former head of the KGB, began restoring order. Dzhuna still appeared in the basement, but mostly talked about her songs, paintings, and poems. It seemed that we might finally be able to do normal science.

At approximately this time, the military became active. The story, as I know it, is rather comical and apparently very close to what I described in the novella.

Once upon a time in California, at the prestigious Stanford Research Institute, there lived a Mr. Russell Targ and a Mr. Edwin May. I hope I have not mangled their names. Oh, nolong live the mighty Internet. Here are the books from the U.S. Library of Congress; I have just downloaded the catalog entries:

Mind at Large / Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers symposia on the nature of extrasensory perception; edited by Charles T. Tart, Harold E. Puthoff, Russell Targ.

Targ, Russell. Title: Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability / by Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff; introd. by Margaret Mead; foreword by Richard Bach. Published: London: Cape, 1977. LC Call No.: BF1029 .T37 1977b.

Author: Targ, Russell. Title: The Mind Race: Understanding and Using Psychic Abilities / Russell Targ & Keith Harary; foreword by Willis Harman; epilogue by Larissa Vilenskaya. Published: New York: Villard Books, 1984. LC Call No.: BF1031.T285 1984.

Yes, that last book is extremely instructive. My story is about that one.

In short, the scientists conducted various dubious experiments in telepathyyes, yes, they transmitted thoughts from one submarine to another. Then they studied the effects of various fields on human beings. The military funded them; how could it have been otherwise? After that, I never quite understood what happened. It appears that the warriors interest in parapsychology began to wane. And what must one do in such a case to survive in the terrible, cruel world of capitalist science? Precisely, dear reader: create an enemy and wave the red menace. The Reds are conducting extensive research, gentlemen generals, and we shall fall terribly, terribly far behind unless

In about 1983, then, the gentlemen came to Russia on a scientific visit. Rumors had reached them about Gulyayevs work, apparently the earlier Leningrad experiments with Kulagina. They appeared at our institute, and the First Departmentthe security officewent into a frenzy. I do not know the details, but naturally they were not admitted to our laboratory. Gulyayev and Godik flooded their brains with discussion of the complex pattern of physical fields existing around every biological object. In other words, they brought the conversation down to a purely scientific level and even showed the visitors a couple of unclassified papers we had prepared for Proceedings of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

The visitors wandered around, sniffed the air, visited a few other crackpotspeople who supposedly attracted irons to their stomachsand returned to California, where they wrote a book in 1984. They honestly described their travels and hinted that Russia contained many secret, closed laboratories that In short, the Russians already had all of it. I am certain that this was their way of shaking loose some money. In any case, a year or two later rumors began circulating that the U.S. Department of Defense was accelerating research in parapsychology, had created a special institute, and so on.

By another irony of fate, when I reached America I settled a five-minute walk from that very SRIthe Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. While researching magnetic disks and pining for science, I contacted Godik, who by then was also in the United States, though on the opposite coast. He still had Targs business card. No matter how often I called the number, an answering machine responded in a pleasant female voice. It informed me that I had reached a laboratoryoh Lord, help my memory, what was it called? Something like the Laboratory for Neuromagnetic Research. I carefully explained that I had worked with Gulyayev and Godik in Moscow and now lived and worked here; that I would be glad to meet and had brought some papers and new scientific materials with me. I never received a reply. I wrote several letters and, naturally, received no answer to those either. Since I was clearly not looking for a job, and explicitly said so, I am almost convinced that the laboratory remains closed to outside eyes even now.

And now for our own Soviet-Russian comrades with stars on their shoulder boards. Military men are the same all over the worldno offense intended. Oh, that phrase reminds me of something. I feel another little lyrical digression coming on.

A little lyrical digression. In 1984, an engineer named David came from England to assemble a shielded chamber purchased for another series of experiments. The chamber was supposed to block external microwave radiation. It was difficult to assemble, so the manufacturer sent him. I remember David for several reasons. First, he was a hopeless alcoholic, which he explained by the unbearable suffering caused by attacks of tropical fever. He had supposedly contracted it somewhere in the Third World while assembling shielded chambers. Second, on his second day he picked up some girl in a bar. Those were the times: an ordinary young woman could not simply walk into a hard-currency bar. He never stopped marveling at the cultural sophistication of Russian girlshis chosen companion spoke four languages fluently. When we learned this, we bit our tongues and stopped telling him jokes.

Thirdand this is the real reason for my lyrical digressionwiring had to be installed inside the chamber. For this, the institute electrician Gena was summoned, the same Gena who found his way into the pages of my book, grabbing a bourgeois visitor by the sleeve outside the Hotel National. Gena was a unique character. He really had completed several years at PhysTech, but had been forced to abandon his studies because his mother was bedridden. On this occasion, Gena was thoroughly drunk and swearing as he laid black cable inside the chamber. An equally drunk David watched him admiringly, grabbed us by the arm, and repeated: Believe me, all electricians all over the world are absolutely the same!

Yes, military men all over the world bear the same elusive resemblance to one another, just like electricians. It is not difficult to guess what happened in Moscow. Suddenly, uniformed men wearing generals and admirals stars began frequenting our basement. Negotiations with them usually took place behind closed doors; ordinary staff could only guess what was being discussed. From fragmentary rumors, I can conclude that a very large program of paranormal research was being launched under the General Staff.

So much was happening that, after all these years, the stories have blended together in my mind. Take the radar story, for example. No, dear readers, I did not invent it. I invented only the rejuvenation. What did you thinksoldiers were not irradiated in front of an antenna aperture? Did you think a report entitled The Effect of Radiation on Suppressing the Morale of an Enemy Army was nonsense? No, dear readers, that is how it really was. I still remember it. A lieutenant colonel or colonel arrived, an imposing man, and showed us graphs. He irradiated fish, cats, and dogs. Then he irradiated soldiers. The soldiers grew tired and fell asleep. He wanted to irradiate an enemy army, although he never got the chance.

Or consider the tortoiseshell story. That was real as well. A man came in and said that shell accumulated energyultraviolet radiationand then re-emitted it. Alcoholism vanished as if wiped away by hand; potency became astounding; tumors dissolved just like that. Beside him stood a professor from Kyiv, a theoretical physicist, who had given the whole thing a scientific foundation: where the muons flew, where the gluons were, and why elementary particles accumulated in the shell.

Here is something that did not make it into the book. As a curiosity, we demonstrated how an infrared camera could show breath emerging from the nostrils. The KGB comrades immediately caught on. Lets watch the General Secretarys face remotely, they said. If he takes a turn for the worse, his breathing will become irregular; well be right there with a resuscitation team, and well stop the television broadcast to avoid embarrassment before the mass media. I think they had already begun purchasing installations for Brezhnev at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, but they did not make it in time. The poor fellow died.

And the military listened to all these stories, spellbound. One almost wanted to become sentimental, embrace them, and kiss them with all ones heart. My dears, my lovely boys.

In short, the military decided, the hostile imperialists already have everything, while wethe hope of all progressive humanityare falling behind! And they sprang into action. Naturally, they first went cautiously to the scientists and asked, So, what exactly have you discovered over there? Then they created a comprehensive classified program on such a scale that, if anything came of it, the entire worlds eyes would pop from their sockets.

As I remember, both Godik and Gulyayev tried with all their might to keep their distance from the General Staff. They served as consultants, demonstrated their work, and explained what had been done in the laboratory. At the very highest level, a struggle went on to leave the Academy laboratory alone and not classify it: the laboratory was no rival to the military; it did not conduct classified research and would not do so; and an exchange of information, scientific contacts, and the like would be useful to the military.

I came into direct contact with the uniformed comrades only once, and saw the business with my own eyes. I was summoned as a consultant to a hypnosis session. An admiral of the fleet was in charge, while uniformed colonels and captains scurried around him. From a distance, the hypnotist gave commands to patients, who obeyed them. The military took notes. Then came questions about precisely how the hypnotist had transmitted the orders. For some reason, the military was particularly interested in the magnetic field. They refused to believe that it was millions of times weaker than the Earths. Second in importance were radio waves emitted by the hypnotists brain. I vaguely recall that the proposed wavelength was approximately ten kilometers. The comrades with shoulder boards carefully wrote down the recommended list of equipment for measuring magnetic fieldsa superconducting quantum interference device, gradient coils, and a data-processing systemasked about the design of chambers that shield magnetic fields, and disappeared. They took the transmission of mental commands very seriously.

What follows is based on actual facts. Before long, one of the young men working in the laboratory was being lured into a top-secret mailboxa research institution known only by a post-office-box number. As it later emerged, this mailbox was merely one of several similar institutes employing thousands of people. What astonishing scale has always come so naturally to Russia. It must somehow be inspired by the boundless expanses of our motherland.

One evening we had been drinking, and this young man, his head in his hands, told me that the mailbox had built a thought amplifier. See the novella. I mean that literally: one officer transmitted thoughts, while another sat at the opposite end of Moscow and wrote them down. Imagine implanting the thoughts of a Party organizer into enemy troops. And why stop at troops? One might influence the actions of a government official in a hostile country, or determine the outcome of a presidential election. In short, the possibilities were endless.

They never hired him. He failed the security check. Probably talked too much.

At the same time, another mailbox was constructing enormous underground chambers for shielding fields. I invented nothing here either. They built the chambers from riveted armor plate, with the result that they shielded no fields at all. I learned of this because only one specialist in such chambers existed in Moscow, and after their failure the comrades were forced to seek his help. In the purest Soviet tradition, hundreds of soldiers from construction battalions had been thrown into building the chamber. We already know the result.

According to rumor, the military parapsychology program expanded on a truly massive scale. It would be interesting to know how it all ended. I never heard anything more, which is strange, since nowadays everyone talks about everything. Apparently, nothing came of itwhich is hardly surprising.

Well, my story is nearing its end. A little more of the laboratorys history. It moved to 8 Starosadsky Lane, where its remnants remain to this day. We discovered all kinds of physical and biological effects of extraordinary beauty. Some work was published in Russia in Biophysics and Proceedings of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Unfortunately, nearly all the results were lost in the course of the historical process.

Godik made desperate attempts to introduce the methods we had developed into medicine. For a time, the department occupied one floor of the USSR Academy of Sciences clinic on Leninsky Prospekt. Then the doctors revolted and expelled the scientistsespecially since the scientists were of little use and the physicians did not have enough disposable syringes.

The department slowly began to fall apart even as it accumulated people and titles. Science ceased to exist as a class; comprehensive programs called The Health of Moscow and the Moscow Region appeared instead. Alcoholics Incidentally, the story of the drug-and-alcohol treatment clinic out on the steppe is entirely true; that is exactly how it happened. Then the merry times began, when it became utterly impossible to live on ones salary and people wanted to earn money. First the computers were stolen, then everyone split into factions, and finally they all quarreled. The laboratory broke into several small companies that began making and selling little devices in order to survive. By then, I had already left.

More than half the former laboratorys staff now live in the United States, mostly in Californias Silicon Valley. They work for various companies, writing software and designing things, every one of them having forgotten the old research. Behold the law of the capitalist jungle. It is curious how we all suddenly ended up together.

The former head of the magnetic group, however, recently quit his company and fled to a famous laboratory in New Mexico to pursue his biomagnetic research. Perhaps he will succeed. Another former colleague is now at a university in New York, advancing superconductivity. Yet another is somewhere in England. He doggedly pursued science, but now has to develop methods for extracting information from oil wells. Godik is also in America, trying to introduce optical methods for the early diagnosis of breast cancer. He has been trying for several years, and recently things finally began to move.

One of the founding fathers, who once conducted pioneering research into the electrical properties of skin, abandoned science and became a New Russian. He controlled factories and, rumor has it, has now gone bankrupt. What do they call such people nowSupernova Russians? I have not heard anything about him for a long time. Another founder of the laboratory, a former graduate student of Godiks who in some ways resembles Sasha in the novella, suffered a terrible tragedy. His wife was attacked one evening in the stairwell. Her skull was fractured and her fur hat stolen. Afterward, she was afraid to go out alone and had difficulty walking. One evening, a car struck and killed her. They say he drank himself into ruin.

Recently, a friend of mine went to Moscow and visited the former laboratory on Starosadsky Lane. He returned gloomy. The building now contains the offices of small companies. Everyone is buying and selling; someone sits huddled in a corner, cobbling something together on his knees; people scarcely speak to one another. The situation in the institute is rotten and chaotic. People come to work once a week. The salaryfor those who receive oneis thirty dollars a month. One of the best scientists was struck and killed by a car in a crosswalk. Another sells bananas on the side and uses the proceeds to obtain liquid helium for his experiments.

The institute is being evicted from its building in central Moscow, which is slated for demolition. In the future, there will be a garden with fountains for prosperous, rosy-cheeked Intourist guests who have come to see St. Basils Cathedral with their own eyes. If this happens, the institute will probably come to an end.

And the electrician Gena was killed by the police several years ago. He came to the institute drunk one night and pounded on the door. The guard refused to let him in and called the police. They took Gena away, and he disappeared. His ailing mother raised the alarm. Several days later, he was found in a cemetery for unidentified bodies.

But why am I dwelling on sad things? Let us turn instead to what I cannot explain. I saw such things only a couple of times. We were conducting experiments with a patient whose leg had almost completely lost its blood supply. The vessels were blocked, and the leg was on the verge of amputation. Nothing helped, not even injections. We summoned Yuri Sergeyevich Kharitonov; this was in 1988 or 1989. Kharitonov was well known in Moscow. He was himself a physicist, a PhysTech graduate, I believe, and was completing his doctoral dissertation. In his spare time, he treated acquaintances.

In short, he passed his hands along the leg, and it suddenly flared on the thermal-imaging screen. Blood began to flow as though the vessels had opened instantaneously. We were all stunned. By then, I had seen many such experiments. When a reaction occurred at all, it was weak and slow, with a time constant of fifteen to twenty minutes. Here the leg returned to normal within a minute.

The second inexplicable experiment also involved Kharitonov. He decided to play a trick by producing a reaction from another room without telling the patient anything. The experiment was blind: none of us knew what he would do or when, least of all the patient. The beginning of the reaction coincided to the very second with Kharitonovs action.

This reminds me of a story told by my friendthe one who recently returned so gloomy from Moscow. His grandfather had been a famous professor and psychologist who worked extensively with hypnosis and treatment under hypnosis. At a congress of psychiatrists in Moscow during the 1920s, he demonstrated the following experiment. Patients were hypnotized. The doctor left the room and mentally commanded them to wake. The patients awakened, with astonishing agreement in timing. According to the grandfather, he observed this repeatedly. The congress responded, however, as though I had made an indecent noise and they had pretended not to notice.

Or here is another story, one that did make it into the novella. Academician Glushkov, founder of the famous Institute of Cybernetics, lay dying in Kyiv. He was in intensive care, in a coma. The doctors were preparing to switch off life support. They summoned an old woman healer. She sat beside him and moved her hands. He regained consciousness, spoke, and lived for two more days. Believe it or not, as you please. In short, see the epigraph.

Deep down, I hope that science will someday return to research like the work begun in Moscow fifteen years ago. Who the devil knowsperhaps my novella will help a little. I also deeply hope that the Russian and American secret services will not begin pursuing me. So many years have passed, after all, and the entire affair turned into a farce.

Well, all that remains is to tell you about myself. I defended my dissertation in physics in 1986 and wrote two scientific books in Russia. I left Russia in 1990 and was stripped of my citizenship in the process. For three years I worked in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion in Israel, mapping the mechanics of the heart and teaching. Then we bought an infrared camera and even began conducting a few experiments, but the devil led me astray and I left to work in America.

I landed in a crazy company and had to take up magnetic recording: how to cram more and faster changes in magnetization into a unit of space. Oh, how organically I detest those words. I made a career, wrote several books in America, and brought several old friends over here. I lecture at Stanford University, where I am also listed as a very junior consulting professor. I began writing various literary and semi-literary works. I now work at the IBM Research Center. It is almost like the Academy of Sciences, only much worse.

Alexander Taratorin
Santa Clara, California
November 1997