Chronicles of Exile: Esoteric Movements during the First Decades of Soviet Power

Whereas the politically engaged artists of the radical avant-garde began working on “a new art for a new world” immediately after the Russian Revolution, for those creative people involved in anything considered mystical, religious or esoteric the dictatorship of the proletariat meant the threat of imminent arrest and possible execution. In 1922, the Anti- Religion Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party was founded. Most esoteric groups and philosophical and religious associations were now defined as sects and considered anti-Soviet organizations. As Ilya Udovenko writes in his article for this booklet, in 1929, “the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars issued the decree ‘On Religious Associations,’ which remained in force (with certain alterations) until October 1, 1990. Article 17 of the decree banned any non- liturgical activities by religious organizations. These included all education and economic activities, as well as running groups or societies. Members of such groups were usually accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and imprisoned.” By the mid-1920s, the anarcho-mystical community had fallen victim to violent persecution, many anthroposophists were arrested as class enemies, the constant fear of the “arrival of the crow” (as the black cars of the repressive state were referred to) pushed the members of the Anthroposophical Society to destroy any evidence of their involvement in Steiner’s teaching (one display in the exhibition covers the founder of the State Darwin Museum and devout anthroposophist Alexander Kohts). “Secret knowledge” came to mean more than esoteric teachings accessible to a few initiates. Now it really had to be kept secret for the safety of those who possessed it. This “double secrecy” would later present a major obstacle to those searching for information and artifacts that might shed light on the intense spiritual life of the first half of the twentieth century. However, one of the exhibition’s most curious narratives unfolds around the mechanics of the transfer of “secret knowledge:” the crystal that Alexander Kohts kept on his desk; the indirect evidence of Andrei Bely’s friends having been converted to anthroposophy by the poet (Steiner said that Bely “would bring many followers”); a cabinet with spiritual texts copied by hand into standard Soviet notebooks and preserved by the family of the Soviet sculptor and theosophist Ariadna Arendt. Arendt’s husband, sculptor Anatoly Grigoriev was arrested and exiled in 1948 as the result of a fabricated case against the “anti-Soviet theosophist underground.”

Working in the archives of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the research team was able to reconstruct the tragic trajectories of several artists (including Rimma Nikolaeva), writers, and intellectuals involved in mystical societies. The exhibition includes copies of criminal records of a number of people tried by troikas (commissions of three people that handed down sentences without a public trial, created as an instrument of political repression). One of the most striking of these documents is the record of Boris Zubakin, who at the age of 18 created a Masonic lodge he titled Light of Stars. Later it merged with another lodge called Astrea. Zubakin was an important figure on the Russian intellectual and philosophical scene. He amassed an outstanding library of religious and philosophical literature. Anastasia, the sister of the famous poet Marina Tsvetaeva, briefly worked as Zubakin’s secretary. He was arrested in 1922 and again in 1929 as an ex-officer, “a member and organizer of mystical groups, a Kabbalist, and a practitioner of black magic.” In 1937, he was among those accused in the group case against “the members of the counter-revolutionary fascist organization the Rosicrucian Order.” On January 26, 1938, Zubakin was sentenced to death and on February 3 he was shot at the Butovo Polygon.