CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010073-5

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Declassified and Approved For Release 2014/01/09 : CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010073-5
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Soviet notebook
Crackdown on
parapsychology
Moscow parapsychologist Eduard K. Nau-
mov, sentenced to two years hard labour
last March, was reportedly beaten in
prison in December. Two weeks ago, it
was reported that parapsychologist Lar-
issa Vilenskaya, who had previously been
permitted to visit Naumov in jail, had
herself been arrested.
Naumov's trial and the dismissal from
their posts of others who had been active
in parapsychology in Russia in the 1960s
marks the end of a phase during which
free and indeed spirited discussion of
parapsychological topics was permitted
throughout the Soviet Union, and during
which a fair amount of informal and
unofficial East-West contact was at least
tolerated.
Naumov was apparently convicted of
taking fees for his lectures without the
permission of the appropriate authorities.
According to reports . from Russia, the
fees seem to have been collected in the
normal way by the club's director and his
assistant. However, both were subse-
quently declared psychologically unfit to
testify, certified schizophrenic, and re-
ferred for some unspecified form of
involuntary treatment at the Serbsky
Institute of Forensic Psychological Ex-
pertise. This institute's director, Dr
Andrej Snezhnevsky, is widely known for
his psychiatric zeal on behalf of ideo -.
logical orthodoxy and for his opposition
to parapsychology.
:
---
At the trial Snezhnevsky himself gave
evidence to the effect that parapsychol-
ogy was a pseudo-science based on ideal-
ism and mysticism. Although 40 witnesses
said they had bought their tickets from
the club's director or his representative,
Naumov was found guilty and sentenced
to two years in a camp.
According to Lev Regelson, a Moscow
physicist, Naumov's offence was twofold:
first, despite reiterated warnings from
the KGB he had "maintained free, per-
sonal, human contacts with foreign
scholars. . . " and made use of the mater-
ial he received for disseminating infor-
mation on parapsychology in the USSR.
Naumov's second fault is ideological. Up
to most recent times parapsychology has
been looked on in the Soviet Union as
"mysticism" and "pseudo-science," shar-
ing the fate of the theory of relativity,
quantum mechanics, cybernetics, genetics
etc.
The official Soviet attitude towards
psychical research has fluctuated exten-
sively. In 1924, A. V. Lunakharsky, Com-
missar for Education, took the initiative
in forming a Soviet Committee for Psy-
chical Research. Extensive work was
financed at the University of Leningrad
at the Institute for Brain Research, as a
result of Academician V. M. Bekhtercv's
enthusiasm for the subject. L. L. Vasiliev,
a former student of Bekhterev's demon-
strated to his own satisfaction that tele-
pathic influence at a distance may indeed
occur.
The research was then discontinued,
and the official Soviet attitude hardened
against parapsychology. Telepathy was
treated as a mystical and anti-social
superstition and nothing further was
heard of parapsychology in Russia until
the lale 1950s. Then, as a result of French
newspaper articles, rumours began to
circulate that American researchers had
disproved the "brain-radio" theory as a
result of ship-to-shore telepathy experi-
ments involving the US atomic submarine
Nautilus.
The Nautilus "experiments" probably
were mythical. But the claims had one
tangible consequence: the Soviet author-
ities permitted Vasilev, then professor
of physiology and holder of the Order
of Lenin, to publish his own earlier work
which decades previously had ostensibly
demonstrated that whatever mediates
telepathic influencing, radio-type brain
waves apparently do not. Vasilev was
also allowed to open a unit for the study
of parapsychology at the Institute for
Brain Research.
Vasiliev's work first reached the West
with an English translation of his mono-
graph Experiments in Mental Suggestion
in 1963. The result was instant inter-
national interest. Numerous Western
researchers travelled to Russia and found
a fair amount of activity and interest
in the paranormal, although the focus
was frequently different from that in
the West. Russian workers tended to be
far more preoccupied with physical and
biological effects than with the so-called
"mental" phenomena of telepathy and
clairvoyance, on which Western re-
searchers have concentrated in recent
times. Russians, for example, pioneered
Kirlian photography (see New Scientist,
vol 62, p 160).
ESP
Dr J. G. Pratt was among the first
parapsychologists to visit the Soviet
Union after the publication of Vasiliev's
work. He described the differences in
atmosphere pervading two conferences
in 1963 and 1968, both organised and
chaired by Naumov. During the first,
free and cordial exchange of views was
possible; the second was overshadowed
by an article in Pravda attacking para-
psychology
which, in Pratt's words,
"largely wrecked the formal plans for
the programme". Most of the Russians
declined to speak, Western visitors were
pressed to deliver impromptu lectures,
and the House of Friendship withdrew its
invitation to hold further meetings or
allow films to be shown there.
From this time onwards, with certain
fluctuations, official hostility towards
parapsychology increased in the Soviet
Union. Russian authorities took the
strongest possible exception to Schroeder
and Ostrander's best seller Psychic Dis-
coveries behind the Iron Curtain, based
on the author's visit to the USSR in 1968.
Naumov is cited throughout as the two
398
journalists' guide and mentor. Unfortun-
ately, the Voice of America beamed a
radio programme into Russia discussing
the Schroeder and Ostrander book, a
broadcast that was construed as a poli-
tically motivated attack using para-
psychology as a weapon.
Apart from this episode, it is not en-
tirely clear why Soviet officialdom should
have taken such fierce exception to a
frankly popular, sensational, and rather
chaotic book, which is not likely to be
taken seriously by Western scientists.
The most plausible interpretation seems
that the Russians are worried that they
might be believed by the world's scien-
tific community to be self-proclaimed
champions and leaders of parapsychology,
as expounded by Schroeder and Ostran-
der. In fact, Soviet scientists are just as
divided among themselves concerning
parapsychology as scientists elsewhere.
In October 1973 a long and detailedy
paper entitled Parapsychology: fiction
or reality? was published in Questions of
Philosophy, an official publication of the
Soviet Academy of Pedogogical Sciences,
by four eminent members of the Moscow
Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. They
explicitly set out "to express the view-
point of the USSR Society of Psycholo-
gists towards parapsychology." "Ob-
viously" they write,
"some so-called
parapsychological phenomena do happen;
however, the main obstacle to the accep-
tance of their existence is ignorance of
the basis of their operation."
It is not clear from this paper just
which
parapsychological phenomena
"obviously do happen"; the only ones
which the authors unambiguously support
as authentic, such as Kirlian photog-
raphy and Rosa Kuleshova's "dermal-
optical vision"-the alleged ability
to "see" colours by touching them-are
explicitly stated not to be parapsycho-
logical.
A large portion of the paper is in
fact devoted to a denunciation of
"militant parapsychologists," popular :
credulity, fraudulent practices, physi-
cists who ' quite unnecessarily change.
.their jobs . to investigate paranormal ..
phenomena, sensationalistic journalists,5
and institutions such " as the Institute
for Technical Parapsychology (which is
cited by name).
It seems plain that the authors are
anxious to discredit as a myth any idea
of a "parapsychological movement" in
Russia, and to ensure that no such profes-
sion as that of parapsychologist should
emerge: "there is no need for parapsy-
chology to exist as a separate discipline."
Anita Gregory
New Scientist 13 February 1975
Declassified and Approved For Release 2014/01/09 : CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010073-5
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