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Approved For Release 2004/08/02 3 GIA:RDP96-00792R000600350001-3 DST-18108-387-75 September 1975 for disseminating information 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 “pseudoscience," sharing the fate of the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, cyber- netics, genetics, etc. (U) Naumov's trial and the dismissal from their posts of others who had been active in parapsychology in the Soviet Union in the 1960's may mark 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 gt informal and unofficial East-West contact was at least tolerated. , (U) Despite apparent shifts in the official attitude toward the science, 49 out of the 91 papers presented in 1973 at the First International Con- ference on Psychotronic Research in Prague, Czechoslovakia, were authored by Soviet or ECC researchers. In addition, the Moscow publication "Thurnalist," published a lengthy editorial” in 1974, in which readers were assured that "all energy fields existing in nature are not known to contemporary physics" and "that because various phenomena cannot as yet be explained does not mean that they do not exist." The name of the science may be changed in the future, but the research will continue. (U) During the past decade parapsychology has undergone many changes in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. In a sense, this is a question of changing generations. The elder generation of researchers, who actively investigated the problems of psychotronics, regarded it predominantly as philosophy and psychology. To a certain extent, this concept determined their approach to the problems: in most cases they concluded that very complex psychic processes were involved, processes that were difficult to control and hence were not always reproducible. This older generation of researchers had as their primary objective the proof of psychic proc- esses and the defense of their theories. They confined themselves to their own specifics and problems. In terms of the quantity of accumu- lated facts and performed experiments their work was considerable and often awe-inspiring. (U) Researchers of the younger generation in the USSR and Czechoslovakia are beginning to regard this concept as one-sided, a straitjacket. They are not satisfied with the constant proving and description of the phe- nomena. They also want to model, amplify, formulate and compute. A desire to conclusively master the problems has compelled them to abandon the previous concept and to define parapsychology for the time being, as a borderline interdisciplinary science. To the unipolar philosophical- psychological concept there is now added another pole, the technical- physical concept. Between these two poles there is sufficient room for parapsychology to comprehend all the phenomena that it investigates, in their complexity. 7 Approved For Release 2004/08/02 fA-RBP96-00792R000600350001-3