intelligence or military ends, strategic and paranoid motivations. Such motives are clearly part of the story. All the same, to focus only on such ends and motives can distract us not only from other motives, but also from the myriad and unintended outcomes of those experiments and discourses about them. To understand decades later how people deployed the techniques and the media spun around Cold War era events and institutions (and even rumors) requires that we cast our gaze more broadly, and farther back.
Cold War paranoia appears to some to have begun only after World War II. However, the outlines of that anxious discourse, and in particular the appeal to tropes of mind control, go back to the nineteenth century, to British suspicions of sabotaged imperial communication and enemy intelligence. Literary historian Jill Galvan reads Bram Stoker’s Dracula as its contemporaneous readers might have, through the filters of reports of British conflicts in India and with Russia in Asia during the so-called Great Game. Regarding Britain’s Indian holdings, “The most sensational rumor to this effect was that the Indians had sent messages to each other by way of native telepathic abilities, sometimes known as the ‘Hindu Secret Mail,’ ” an occult channel for spreading mutiny (Galvan 2015, 446). Galvan argues that Stoker played on fears about Britain’s imperial conflicts, from stories of both Indian rebel communications and Russian military intelligence: Dracula, exerting mesmeric power across great distances, collects intelligence on his prey better than any military spies. British Russophobia, Galvan notes, had already intensified after the Crimean War (1853–1856), increasing throughout the competing empires’ struggles to control pieces of Central Asia. Reports of events there built “collective memory of a vigorous conflict between Eastern and Western realms of information” and “extreme investment in information and in depicting warring orders of information” (Galvan 2015, 449).
In Dracula, the narrative of British victory over the Orient is vexed in still another way, as the book emphasizes the Occident’s practical informational weaknesses relative to the mysterious other, weaknesses improbable and unnerving for a nation aspiring to champion modernity (Galvan 2015, 458). Dracula, written during the decade after Frederic W.H. Myers coined the term telepathy in 1882,2 parallels efforts of the Society for Psychical Research in England to catalog “native systems of communication that outpaced Western devices,” perhaps, as Luckhurst notes, as “a mechanism of projection where anxieties about the fragility of colonial rule and scanty communication conjured occult doubles that mysteriously exceed European structures” (2002, 157–58). The British Society for Psychical Research involved itself with reports from all over the empire and beyond; one of its first acts, in 1884, was to send a member to India to investigate some of Elena Blavatsky’s psychic claims.
By the time of the Russian Revolution, the ground was well prepared for continuing accounts of Soviet Russia that obsessed about deciphering the Russian mind: The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia (Fülöp-Miller, Flint, and Tait 1929); New Minds, New Men? The Emergence of the Soviet Citizen (Woody 1932); Mind and Spirit in the Land of Soviets (Lyons 1947); The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism (Berlin and Hardy [1949] [2004]); The Country of the Blind: The Soviet System of Mind Control (Counts and Perlmutter 1949); The Mind of Modern Russia; Historical and Political Thought of Russia’s Great Age (Kohn 1955); The Revolt of the Mind: A Case History of Intellectual Resistance behind the Iron Curtain (Aczél and Méray 1959); The Russian Mind (Hingley 1978); and The Russian Mind since Stalin’s Death (Glazov 1985).
These titles do not describe brain activity so much as they signal a need to figure out the aims of the state, a need for intelligence, often by triangulating the words of intellectuals and artists for their relation to the state. The reference to the Russian mind signals worries about what might befall those who fail to read it. On October 1, 1939, Winston Churchill famously remarked over radio: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Churchill’s words still ring like an incantation, even though he went on, in fact, to predict what the USSR would soon do (perceive German expansion as aggressive). The cliché that Russia poses special and inscrutable puzzles lives on.
During the Cold War American scholars approached the hermeneutic puzzle allegedly posed by Russians by projecting it inward, into Soviet and Russian national character. Right after World War II, the Rand Corporation commissioned anthropologist Margaret Mead and others to conduct a study that led to a collection of essays, Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority (1951). The authors interviewed Soviets who had immigrated during and just after the war and argued that Soviet social life was shaped by the ways Soviet people were uniquely paranoid about deceptive enemies within, paranoid that “every individual maintains the capacity for complete betrayal of all those values to which he has hitherto shown devoted allegiance” (197).3
Mead and her colleagues named fear of internal enemies as alien to “the Western mind” (an odd claim, given that they had just lived through McCarthy’s purges). While they acknowledged that the refugees entered interview situations conducted by officials and scholars representing the state that was granting asylum after a devastating war, they did not reflect on how such conditions primed identification of paranoia. Anthropological thinking about interview methods and contexts prompts me to consider how such research conditions resembled discursive genres such as interrogation, thus priming themes like betrayal.4 This is not to deny the existence of discourses of betrayal in the USSR; as discussed previously, historians have amply illuminated forms of Soviet unmasking and samokritika (“self-criticism”) in show trials, at work, in schools, and in diaries. What I do deny is the radical alterity of a “Soviet mind.” I mistrust claims of a specifically Soviet “culture of dissimulation” (Shlapentokh 1984; Sinyavsky 1991) and ask whether such claims are not themselves products of circuits for suspicion, channels charged by their functions and closures during imperial and then Cold War conflicts, because those functions and closures, their points of contact, extended beyond the borders of either state.
Paranoia and attention to others’ paranoia are both precipitates of conditions such as diplomacy and war (but see also Ngai 2005). Conditions shape demands for particular kinds of truth as useful intelligence; interview situations in service to aims of diplomacy or war strictly manage the channels for contact and structures for communicating.5 In 1998 the head of the Russian Academy for Theatrical Arts declared, in an official pamphlet describing the departments and admissions, that theater aims to make holes in the “defensive structures” of the audience (GITIS 1998); perhaps such aggressive metaphors for theatrical communication reverberate with previous painful encounters across political rifts.
GEOPOLITICAL PARANOIA AND INTUITION
During the years when Knebel’ ran telepathy drills for Soviet acting students, Americans were firing up related enchantments with intuition. The nineteenth-century movements of spiritualism and theosophy, the allied genres of gothic and science fiction, had moved into the mainstream by the 1960s. Themes of mind reading and mental control proliferated in American and British television series and films (The Prisoner, Doctor Who, Star Trek), as through New Age philosophy and popular publications on ESP experiments. Skeptics, too, redoubled public demonstrations to debunk ESP; belief in telepathy became a symptom of mental illness, as in the figure of the schizophrenic who receives FBI broadcasts by brain wave or claims psychic contact with aliens.6
In 1972 a report prepared for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency by the Army Medical Intelligence and Information Agency enumerated the practical military applications of extrasensory powers in ways that echoed Knebel’s words on developing sensitivity and attention within technologies for intuition: “In view of [animals’] perceptive processes, it has been difficult to differentiate between those sensory processes which are merely sharpened or highly honed, and those that are extra or super-normal. Certain military advantages would come from the application and control of these perceptive processes. For example, such application and control could be used in the detection and identification of animate objects or humans through brainwave interactions, mass
