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Approved For Release 2004/08/02 : CIA-RDP96-00792R000600350001-3 UNCLASSIFIED DST-1810S- 387-75 September 1975 (U) Current Soviet and Czech parapsychological terms and objectives have evolved in a climate of fluctuating political pressure. Scientists in pre-revolutionary Russia studied parapsychology as did later such Soviet scientists as V.M. Bekhterev, A.G. Ivanov-Smolensky, and B.B. Kazhinsky in the twenties and thirties. In 1924, A.V. Lunakharsky, Commissar for Education, took the initiative in forming a Soviet Committee for Psychical Research. As a result of Academician V.M. Bekhterev's enthusiasm for the subject, extensive work was financed at the University of Leningrad Insti- tute for Brain Research. L.L. Vasilev, a former student of Bekhterev's demonstrated to his own satisfaction that telepathic influence at a dis- tance may indeed occur. Work flourished throughout the thirties with research being reported in the literature in 1934, 1936, and 1937. After 1937 further experiments in the field of parapsychology were forbidden. During Stalin's time, the study of paranormal phenomena was interpreted as a deliberate attempt to undermine the doctrines of materialism. Tele- pathy was treated as a mystical and antisocial superstition and nothing further was heard of parapsychology in. the Soviet Union until the late 1950s. Then, as a result of French newspaper articles, rumors began to circulate that American researchers had disproved the "brain-radio" theory as a result of ship-to-shore telepathy experiments involving the US atomic submarine Nautilus. The Nautilus "experiments" probably were mythical, but the claims had one tangible consequence: the Soviet authorities per- mitted Vasilev, then Professor of Physiology and holder of the Order of Lenin, to publish his own earlier work in which decades previously he ',had proven to his own satisfaction that radio-type brain waves did not mediate telepathy. Vasilev was also allowed to open a unit for the study of parapsychology at the Institute for Brain Research. His work first reached the West with an English translation of his monograph "Experiments in Mental Suggestion" in 1963. The result was instant international interest. Numerous Western researchers traveled to the Soviet Union and found a fair amount of activity and interest in the paranormal, although the research approaches were frequently different from those in the West. Soviet workers tended to be far more preoccupied with whole-body physical and biological effects rather than with the "mental" phenomena with which Western researchers had long been preoccupied. | (U) Some of the first parapsychologists to visit the Soviet Union after the publication of Vasilev's work described the differences in atmosphere pervading two conferences in 1963 and 1968. During the first, free and cordial exchange of views was possible; the second was overshadowed by an article in Pravda attacking parapsychology which largely wrecked the formal plans for the program. Most of the Soviets declined to speak, Western visitors were pressed to deliver impromptu lectures, and the House of Friendship in Moscow withdrew its invitation to hold further meetings or allow films to be shown there. From this time onwards, with certain UNCLASSIFIED Approved For Release 2004/08/02 : CIA-RDP96-00792R000600350001-3