Lehal Library

To the early American analysts, then, nothing of all this made any sense -- and some in their wisdom advised that the whole of it was just a smoke screen designed to confuse American and British intelligence communities. And there the matter rested until about 1969. As was later, much later, discovered, the great Western mistake was in comparing the Soviet work to Western psychical research and parapsychology. In other words, Lenin did not approve of so-called "Soviet parapsychology." Indeed, he approved of something else almost entirely different. And, indeed again, the distinctions between Western parapsychology and what he did approve of must have been made clear to him -- or he would not have approved. After all, Lenin was not stupid. And neither was Josef Stalin who succeeded him. Lenin unexpectedly suffered two strokes, the first in 1922 and the other in 1923 from which he died in 1924. The formidable and deadly Josef Stalin succeeded him as the all-powerful dictator of the growing Soviet Empire. Not long after Stalin's accession to power, the work of Kazhinski, the Bekhterevs and Vasiliev more or less began disappearing from open view. Few Westerners, of course, had any knowledge that the work had even begun. But among those who were weakly aware of those early events it was assumed that it had been done away with.