The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Leonid Vasiliev.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	born	died	location	updated	relations
Leonid L. Vasilev L. L. Vasilev L. L. Vasil'yev	Scientists & Researchers	Person Researcher Parapsychology	Leningrad physiologist who led the Soviet Union's telepathy research from the 1930s and, after 1960, the state laboratory whose work American intelligence tracked for decades.	1891-04-12	1966-02-08	Leningrad, Soviet Union	2026-10-08	type with start role fn participant_in The Nautilus (Telepathy Project) 1960 cited the accounts in a 1960 lecture and, per I. V. Tsykunov, in a March 1960 report to the Soviet defense minister 5

Leonid Vasiliev was a Soviet Union parapsychologist and chairman of the physiology department at the University of Leningrad, a past winner of the Lenin Prize (as Ostrander and Schroeder and Schnabel give it; the 1975 DIA study gives the Order of Lenin) and a key figure in the resurgence of Soviet Parapsychology research following the publication of The Nautilus (Telepathy Project) article in 1960. He argued that "the discovery of the energy underlying ESP will be equivalent to the discovery of atomic energy."¹

He stated in April 1960 that Soviet scientists had conducted extensive, unreported investigations into telepathy under the Stalin regime, predating American efforts, and that they had successfully performed telepathy tests over a quarter-century before the alleged U.S. Nautilus tests. He held that the publication of articles like Jacques Bergier's "Thought Transfer, Weapon of War" and "The Secret of the Nautilus" in French journals stimulated Soviet research, and used them to advocate for increased Soviet investment in the field: "Today the American Navy is testing telepathy on their atomic submarines. Soviet scientists conducted a great many successful telepathy tests over a quarter of a century ago. It's urgent that we throw off our prejudices. We must plunge into the exploration of this vital field."¹²

Ostrander and Schroeder date that address to April 1960, at a gathering to commemorate the discovery of radio; I. V. Tsykunov suggests May, when Soviet Radio Day fell, and the translated Znanie-Sila report of Gleb Anfilov places a Vasiliev lecture at the Leningrad Scientists Club on June 15, 1960 in which he mentioned the American attempts at telepathic communication with the Nautilus.³⁴⁵

Tsykunov reports a seven-page memorandum of March 21, 1960 drawn up by Vasiliev, P. I. Gulyaev and Igor Poletaev, attached to a report that Poletaev sent to Defense Minister Malinovsky on March 26, 1960. As Tsykunov quotes it, the report says Vasiliev had told Poletaev in March 1960 that the American armed forces had adopted telepathy for communication with submarines, that two French magazines had published brief reports, and that a test with the Nautilus submerged under polar ice about 2,000 kilometers from its base had produced 70 percent correct symbols; it says that without discussing the reliability of the reports the danger of a new psychological weapon was too great to leave them without attention, and it proposes that Vasiliev and Gulyaev continue telepathy research.⁴

Raphael L. Khérumian of the Institut Métapsychique International sent Vasiliev clippings of the Science et Vie and Constellation articles in late 1959 and early 1960. In his 1962 book Vasiliev acknowledged receiving them and, in a footnote, said such reports must be treated with caution, having been denied in Washington and by other American sources; Martin Ebon quotes the book as calling the experiment a "totally unexpected foreign confirmation" of tests Vasiliev had conducted twenty-five years earlier.⁶⁷

By the early 1960s Vasiliev was heading a well-funded parapsychology laboratory, and his work soon concentrated on "remote-influencing" experiments, such as attempting to telepathically induce sleep in a distant receiver. In a 1963 Kremlin edict, the Soviet minister of defense, Rodion Malinovsky, declared Telepathy to be science- and technology-based, leading to the creation of the Special Laboratory for Biocommunications Phenomena at the University of Leningrad, with Vasiliev in charge; its goals included establishing "scientific proof of telepathic communications" and identifying the nature of the brain energy that produces it. His efforts, along with those of other Soviet researchers like I. M. Kogan, contributed to the establishment of numerous other psi research centers in the Soviet Union, and to the Soviet nomenclature around ESP being rewritten to sound technical, severing ties with its occult past: mental telepathy became "long-distance biological signal transmission," and Psychokinesis "non-ionizing, in particular electromagnetic, emissions from humans."¹²

Tsykunov writes that the laboratory was created at the physiology institute of Leningrad University in 1960 and that a "biotelecommunication" group in Vasiliev's laboratory of electromagnetic fields and aeroions included P. I. Gulyaev, V. K. Pavlenko, A. I. Pudovkin, V. P. Leutin, V. A. Doroshenko and A. S. Efremov.⁴

A Defense Intelligence Agency briefing on "Soviet Activities in Psychoenergetics," given to the Air Force in July 1987, opened its timeline with Vladimir Bekhterev and "L. L. Vasil'yev (1919-)," under the headings "hypnosis," "automatic responses" and "long distance (1700 km)," and dated his "open publications" and "new lab, Leningrad Univ." to 1959-1965, with Genady Sergeyev working in "Vasil'yev's lab" from 1965 to 1970.⁸

Footnotes

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1. Schnabel, Jim. Remote Viewers. Dell, 1997. ↩︎

2. Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. ↩︎

3. Ostrander, Sheila, and Lynn Schroeder. Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. Prentice-Hall, 1970, pp. 6-7. ↩︎

4. Tsykunov, I. V. "От фантазии к реальности: как история «Наутилуса» открыла гонку сверхъестественных вооружений между СССР и США" [From fantasy to reality: how the story of the Nautilus opened the race for supernatural weapons between the USSR and the USA]. Aliter, no. 20 (2023), pp. 34-55. https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/ot-fantazii-k-realnosti-kak-istoriya-nautilusa-otkryla-gonku-sverhestestvennyh-vooruzheniy-mezhdu-sssr-i-ssha. Quoting Vinokurov and Gurtovoy, Психотронная война, pp. 147-149. ↩︎

5. Anfilov, Gleb. "Is Telepathy Possible?" The Soviet Review, vol. 2, no. 6 (June 1961), pp. 3-7, translated from Znanie-Sila, 1960, no. 12. https://archive.org/details/sim_russian-social-science-review_1961-06_2_6 ↩︎

6. Newsletter of the Parapsychology Foundation, "Nautilus Hoax Exposed," vol. 10, no. 6, November-December 1963, citing This Week, September 8, 1963. NSA-RDP96X00790R000100040002-2, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/nsa-rdp96x00790r000100040002-2. ↩︎

7. Ebon, Martin. Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion? McGraw-Hill, 1983, chapter 3, pp. 26-27. ↩︎

8. Henry E. Shinol, Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff, Studies and Analyses, Headquarters USAF, to the Defense Intelligence Agency, "Soviet Parapsychology Research Briefing," June 12, 1987, and cover note of July 14, 1987, with paper briefing slides "Soviet Activities in Psychoenergetics," CIA-RDP96-00789R002600320001-8 to -004-5. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎