Wolf Grigorevich Messing (1899-1974) - Soviet Telepath?
By Adrian Chan-Wyles PhD
“It’s not mind-reading, it’s, like the “reading of muscles” … When a human thinks hard about something, the brain cells transmit impulses to all muscles of the body. Their movements, invisible to the eye, I can easily feel. … Often I’m performing mental tasks without direct contact with the inductor. The pointer to me here is the breathing frequency of the inductor, the beating of his heart, voice timbre, his walking nature etc”.[i]
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was an avid supporter of Wolf Messing in an era before the Soviet scientific community took psychic ability seriously. It was because of his association with Stalin that Messing was able to keep such a high public profile within the USSR and even to rise to a senior position within the KGB, responsible for the education of Soviet intelligence officers. Messing was born in a part of Poland that was then part of the Russian Empire. In his biography he stated that he was both telepathic and psychic since an early age, and that he had developed these powers as he got older. As a citizen of the Soviet Union, Messing became famous for his abilities and in 1937 was placed on the ‘hit-list’ of the Gestapo – the Secret State Police – of the Nazi German regime. This action was taken because Messing made a public statement that should the military forces of Nazi Germany ever attack eastward – that is toward the USSR – the death of Adolf Hitler would be assured. This development led to the Jewish Messing being arrested and imprisoned in Warsaw (which was under the influence of Nazi Germany at the time) but using his powers, Messing managed to persuade law enforcement officers into his cell – where he convinced them to let him go whilst they stayed behind. Messing then fled and made it to the safety of the Soviet Union.
In 1883, Friedrich Engels’ book entitled the ‘Dialectics of Nature’ - although unfinished - had taken its substantive shape. The majority of this book’s content was compiled over a ten year period (i.e. 1873-1883) and it is known that Karl Marx was either directly or indirectly involved in much of its writing. After the death of his friend in 1883, Engels shouldered much of the work previously undertaken by Marx, and although Engels continued to edit his text and work on its notes until around 1886 (signifying a thirteen year effort), he no longer had the time to substantially add to its theoretical content. The bulk of this book remained unpublished in its entirety until its first edition in 1925 in the Soviet Union (although two chapters had been previously published in the late 1800’s), and yet despite its late appearance, it is considered one of the most important Marxian texts produced during the 19th century.[ii] What is of particular interest in assessing the development of the scientific study of psychic ability in the USSR in the post-WW II era, is Chapter Three of the Dialectics of Nature entitled ‘Natural Science in the Spirit World’. This is an assessment by Engels of how dialectical materialism (which had always been the bedrock of progressive science in the 19th century and before) was being misused by certain individuals as a means to justify the belief in the ‘spiritual’, ‘telepathic’ and ‘religious’ realms. Dialectical materialism is the ability of the progressive human mind to correctly assess the causes and effects of history as embodied in both the world of nature and of man-made environments. It is the use of pristine logic in the understanding of how things exist in the present due to clearly observable causes firmly rooted in the past, and how the causes in the present are likely to produce certain effects in the future. Once material cause and effect is understood within the Marxian sense, reality is defined as the product of class antagonisms. As Marx wrote, the bourgeois – or ruling middle class – premises its domination of the working class entirely upon the inverted mind-set that has historically generated religion. Whereas dialectical materialism deals with concrete facts, it’s opposite – i.e. dialectical idealism (the premise of all religious teaching) – is the notion that reality is concocted out of thin air by thoughts of gods and spirits in the mind, justifying this belief with the further mistaken notion that this ‘subjectivity’ somehow represents an ‘objective’ reality. Idealism mistakes thoughts generated within the brain for material objects existing in the environment. This is inverted logic because the physical organ of the brain is created materially before any thoughts are created through it. Thoughts that are created within it are not concrete objects independently existing within the physical environment. It is a special arrangement of physical matter that creates the organ of the brain, and it is this ‘specialness’ that gives rise to the ability to ‘think’. Religious thinking is ‘inverted’ because thoughts in the head (that are synonymous with ‘gods’ and ‘spirits’) are falsely believed to independently exist outside of the brain that has generated them, and to have created the physical world – hence the ‘idealism’ that underlies theistic ‘creationism’. In such a back to front analysis of reality, theology replaces common sense and logic, and in such a situation there cannot be the development of a progressive and rational science.
Even before the advent of the Soviet Union, Czarist Russia had a vibrant tradition of science fiction, and in May 1875 the Physical Society of St Petersburg University established the Commission for the Investigation of Spiritualist Phenomena. Engels mentions in his book that Spiritualism arrived in the UK from America, and was spreading all over Europe and into Russia. The Commission finished its investigation in March 1876 and concluded that ‘spiritualist phenomena arise from unconscious movements or deliberate deception,’ and that ‘the spiritualist doctrine is superstition.’[iii] It is interesting to note that even within the modern feudal State of Czarist Russia – which was substantially colonised by religiosity and peasant superstitions, its academia, presumably through correctly applying a materialist critique of phenomena, possessed the clarity of thought not to fall into the trap of confirming the imaginations of inverted thinking. In the Dialectics of Nature, the chapter dealing with natural science and spiritualism is an attempt by Engels to demonstrate how certain scientists in the West (who had otherwise added to the logical and rational development of human understanding), nevertheless used exactly the same dialectical analysis to try and justify the acceptance of spiritualism (and other superstitious beliefs) as being the product of sound science.[iv] Engels gives a number of examples of how Spiritualists claiming to ‘communicate’ with the dead had been exposed time and again as frauds, and how many people still continued to believe in their efficacy.
It is clear that Marx and Engels – the founders of Scientific Socialism – opposed the use of the human mind that created religious teachings out of the imagination, but extolled the use of the human mind that did not confuse thoughts in the head with objects of concrete reality in the environment. This being the case it is obvious that neither Marx nor Engels denied the existence of the mind (on the contrary, reality within Scientific Socialism is defined as an integration of conscious awareness with material reality), but insisted that it be used in a correct manner that optimises its progressive and creative output. This is an important observation as it demonstrates that the use of the imagination may be used to formulate new and better ways of observing and interpreting physical matter. Therefore the technique of dialectical materialism, although critical of a religious thinking that turns the observation of reality upside down, does not suggest that the thinking process ‘stops’, but rather that it is lifted out of an out-dated and out-moded way of interpreting existence, and into a completely new way of seeing that benefits humanity as a whole. Obviously superstition and fanatic religiosity have no place in this modern Marxian perspective – just as they are excluded from mainstream bourgeois academia. The difference with the Marxian view is that rather than excluding superstition only from an academia that privileges the middle class, ignorance and religiosity are excluded from the entirety of society and social planning (becoming only private matters of choice for individuals that do not interfere with politics or the cultural milieu). This is the reality that the Russian Revolution created in 1917 and consolidated under the guidance of both Lenin and Stalin. This being the case, how did Wolf Messing gain such notoriety, and how did Soviet Science move from a critical to an accepting view of psychic phenomena?
Within Western paranormal literature (which uncritically accepts the unfounded notions of the existence of UFO’s, government conspiracies, telepathic ability and ghosts, etc) also blindly follows the bourgeois establishment’s habit of painting the great Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as a ‘tyrant’. In the reporting of the case of Wolf Messing, however, this caricature is difficult to justify or maintain – as it is directly because of his personal association with Joseph Stalin that Messing became famous not only in the USSR, but also throughout the world. Being steeped in the rationality and scientific thought of Marx (mediated though Lenin), Stalin (as well as the Soviet scientific establishment) was correctly dubious about any claims that appeared to be religious in nature, and that masqueraded as ‘science’. The destabilisation (and over-throw) of the entire Soviet system could be initiated by the infiltration of the rational State by the irrationality of religiosity. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin declared the following of religious teaching to be a purely private affair (religion was not ‘banned’ in the USSR), but that religions will no longer be able or encouraged to seek political power. As a consequence, all religious groups were stripped of State-funding, and had to be become self-sustaining. This was the Soviet achievement of the so-called separation of ‘Church from State’ (exactly the same legal situation that exists within the USA). Messing was renowned for his ability to manipulate the thought and behaviour of others, and Stalin decided to test the extent of these claims by setting Messing a challenge. Stalin stated that if Messing’s abilities were true, then why doesn’t he do something to prove it by, for instance, carrying-out a bank robbery? In his early days as a Bolshevik revolutionary, Stalin was well-known for carrying-out similar activities for the revolutionary cause, and understood all the risks and dangers involved in such an activity. In other words, the robbing of a bank was not an easy task even if it was well planned and everything went well. The received narrative is that Stalin ordered Messing to steal 100,000 rubles from Moscow’s Gosbank using only ‘psychic’ means. Messing achieved this feat by handing a cashier a blank piece of paper, and in so doing, persuaded him to hand over the required money. On another occasion, Messing managed to penetrate the private office of Stalin despite the fact that it was heavily guarded. Messing apparently convinced the special guards that he was Beria – the head of the secret police – and let him through.[v]
Stalin was so impressed by Messing’s abilities that he granted him a good apartment in Moscow and protected him from the scepticism of the Soviet scientific and politic system – allowing him to tour and demonstrate his abilities. This did not prevent Beria of the secret police to once order that Messing be kept confined within the confines of the Kremlin. Again, with no documentation whatsoever, Messing is reported as having walked out of the heavily guarded building. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev invited Messing to speak at the 12th Congress of the Communist Party, and state that he had seen in a vision that Lenin and Stalin had demanded that their bodies be removed from public display in the Red Square mausoleum, and buried. However, Messing refused this deception, stating that he did not believe in spiritualism and does not communicate with the dead. Messing predicted the date and time of his wife’s death (from cancer) on August 2, 1960 at seven o’clock, and after this descended into a deep depression. He was lifted from this negative state by being awarded the title of ‘Honoured Artist’ by the Soviet State in the 1960’s. After this Messing gave many public demonstrations of his psychic ability and this continued until his death in 1974.[vi]
It is clear that Wolf Messing, as he himself admitted, was using the power of suggestion (albeit to extraordinary length), coupled with an innate and profound understanding of body language. This assessment was confirmed by D.A. Biryukov, the Head of the Medical School of the Academy of Medical Sciences following one of Messing’s demonstrations, and yet Messing demonstrated that he could also read the thoughts of others (even at great distances), predict the future, and guess a person’s fate just from looking at a photograph. He is also reported as continuously suggesting to his audiences that various paranormal powers exist despite his denial of a belief in spiritualism or communicating with the dead. If Messing’s abilities were truly ‘scientific’ and not the imaginations of religious thinking, then a scientific explanation must be sought. It might well be the case that a mind freed of inverted thinking can, either through genetic predisposition, or appropriate training, develop the ability to be hyper aware of its surroundings, and understand (and therefore be able to ‘predict’) patterns of behaviour, and the cycles of manifestation and decline of natural or man-made processes, etc. In this interpretation many attributes usually ascribed to superstitious beliefs and religious teaching, are shifted into the realm of rational science and away from the domain of the inverted mind. This would mean that the abilities of Wolf Messing – far from being the ‘telepathy’ of deluded bourgeois origination – were in fact the products of a ‘new’ science of the mind identified as existing within a Communist regime, and manifesting within the mind of a staunch supporter of Marxist thinking.
©opyright: Adrian Chan-Wyles (ShiDaDao) 2016.
[i]Telepathist Wolf Messing - Interview with P. Oreshkin http://allrus.me/telepathist-wolf-messing/ Accessed 25.1.2016
[ii] Engels, Friedrich, Dialectics of Nature, Progress Publishers, Moscow, (1974), Preface, Pages 5 – Page 15 for a detailed assessment of the chronology of the construction of this text. This Preface was written by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism – the Central Committee of the CPSU and states that most of the Dialectics of Nature was not known to Lenin because it was first published in its entirety a year after his death in 1925.
[iii] Ibid – Page 58. Engels states that he does not think very much came of this investigation.
[iv] Examples of otherwise ‘rational’ scientists who attempted to use dialectical logic to justify illogical beliefs include Sir Isaac Newton, Alfred Russel Wallace, and William Crookes, etc.
[v] The X Factor: Cover-ups, Paranormal, Mysteries & UFOs, Issue 95, Mind Games, Page 2662. This is a bias account of the Soviet experimentation with telepathy, but present the basics facts of the matter.
[vi] Telepathist Wolf Messing http://allrus.me/telepathist-wolf-messing/ Accessed 27.1.2016 – a very good English language article compiled from Russian historical source material about Wolf Messing.
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was an avid supporter of Wolf Messing in an era before the Soviet scientific community took psychic ability seriously. It was because of his association with Stalin that Messing was able to keep such a high public profile within the USSR and even to rise to a senior position within the KGB, responsible for the education of Soviet intelligence officers. Messing was born in a part of Poland that was then part of the Russian Empire. In his biography he stated that he was both telepathic and psychic since an early age, and that he had developed these powers as he got older. As a citizen of the Soviet Union, Messing became famous for his abilities and in 1937 was placed on the ‘hit-list’ of the Gestapo – the Secret State Police – of the Nazi German regime. This action was taken because Messing made a public statement that should the military forces of Nazi Germany ever attack eastward – that is toward the USSR – the death of Adolf Hitler would be assured. This development led to the Jewish Messing being arrested and imprisoned in Warsaw (which was under the influence of Nazi Germany at the time) but using his powers, Messing managed to persuade law enforcement officers into his cell – where he convinced them to let him go whilst they stayed behind. Messing then fled and made it to the safety of the Soviet Union.
In 1883, Friedrich Engels’ book entitled the ‘Dialectics of Nature’ - although unfinished - had taken its substantive shape. The majority of this book’s content was compiled over a ten year period (i.e. 1873-1883) and it is known that Karl Marx was either directly or indirectly involved in much of its writing. After the death of his friend in 1883, Engels shouldered much of the work previously undertaken by Marx, and although Engels continued to edit his text and work on its notes until around 1886 (signifying a thirteen year effort), he no longer had the time to substantially add to its theoretical content. The bulk of this book remained unpublished in its entirety until its first edition in 1925 in the Soviet Union (although two chapters had been previously published in the late 1800’s), and yet despite its late appearance, it is considered one of the most important Marxian texts produced during the 19th century.[ii] What is of particular interest in assessing the development of the scientific study of psychic ability in the USSR in the post-WW II era, is Chapter Three of the Dialectics of Nature entitled ‘Natural Science in the Spirit World’. This is an assessment by Engels of how dialectical materialism (which had always been the bedrock of progressive science in the 19th century and before) was being misused by certain individuals as a means to justify the belief in the ‘spiritual’, ‘telepathic’ and ‘religious’ realms. Dialectical materialism is the ability of the progressive human mind to correctly assess the causes and effects of history as embodied in both the world of nature and of man-made environments. It is the use of pristine logic in the understanding of how things exist in the present due to clearly observable causes firmly rooted in the past, and how the causes in the present are likely to produce certain effects in the future. Once material cause and effect is understood within the Marxian sense, reality is defined as the product of class antagonisms. As Marx wrote, the bourgeois – or ruling middle class – premises its domination of the working class entirely upon the inverted mind-set that has historically generated religion. Whereas dialectical materialism deals with concrete facts, it’s opposite – i.e. dialectical idealism (the premise of all religious teaching) – is the notion that reality is concocted out of thin air by thoughts of gods and spirits in the mind, justifying this belief with the further mistaken notion that this ‘subjectivity’ somehow represents an ‘objective’ reality. Idealism mistakes thoughts generated within the brain for material objects existing in the environment. This is inverted logic because the physical organ of the brain is created materially before any thoughts are created through it. Thoughts that are created within it are not concrete objects independently existing within the physical environment. It is a special arrangement of physical matter that creates the organ of the brain, and it is this ‘specialness’ that gives rise to the ability to ‘think’. Religious thinking is ‘inverted’ because thoughts in the head (that are synonymous with ‘gods’ and ‘spirits’) are falsely believed to independently exist outside of the brain that has generated them, and to have created the physical world – hence the ‘idealism’ that underlies theistic ‘creationism’. In such a back to front analysis of reality, theology replaces common sense and logic, and in such a situation there cannot be the development of a progressive and rational science.
Even before the advent of the Soviet Union, Czarist Russia had a vibrant tradition of science fiction, and in May 1875 the Physical Society of St Petersburg University established the Commission for the Investigation of Spiritualist Phenomena. Engels mentions in his book that Spiritualism arrived in the UK from America, and was spreading all over Europe and into Russia. The Commission finished its investigation in March 1876 and concluded that ‘spiritualist phenomena arise from unconscious movements or deliberate deception,’ and that ‘the spiritualist doctrine is superstition.’[iii] It is interesting to note that even within the modern feudal State of Czarist Russia – which was substantially colonised by religiosity and peasant superstitions, its academia, presumably through correctly applying a materialist critique of phenomena, possessed the clarity of thought not to fall into the trap of confirming the imaginations of inverted thinking. In the Dialectics of Nature, the chapter dealing with natural science and spiritualism is an attempt by Engels to demonstrate how certain scientists in the West (who had otherwise added to the logical and rational development of human understanding), nevertheless used exactly the same dialectical analysis to try and justify the acceptance of spiritualism (and other superstitious beliefs) as being the product of sound science.[iv] Engels gives a number of examples of how Spiritualists claiming to ‘communicate’ with the dead had been exposed time and again as frauds, and how many people still continued to believe in their efficacy.
It is clear that Marx and Engels – the founders of Scientific Socialism – opposed the use of the human mind that created religious teachings out of the imagination, but extolled the use of the human mind that did not confuse thoughts in the head with objects of concrete reality in the environment. This being the case it is obvious that neither Marx nor Engels denied the existence of the mind (on the contrary, reality within Scientific Socialism is defined as an integration of conscious awareness with material reality), but insisted that it be used in a correct manner that optimises its progressive and creative output. This is an important observation as it demonstrates that the use of the imagination may be used to formulate new and better ways of observing and interpreting physical matter. Therefore the technique of dialectical materialism, although critical of a religious thinking that turns the observation of reality upside down, does not suggest that the thinking process ‘stops’, but rather that it is lifted out of an out-dated and out-moded way of interpreting existence, and into a completely new way of seeing that benefits humanity as a whole. Obviously superstition and fanatic religiosity have no place in this modern Marxian perspective – just as they are excluded from mainstream bourgeois academia. The difference with the Marxian view is that rather than excluding superstition only from an academia that privileges the middle class, ignorance and religiosity are excluded from the entirety of society and social planning (becoming only private matters of choice for individuals that do not interfere with politics or the cultural milieu). This is the reality that the Russian Revolution created in 1917 and consolidated under the guidance of both Lenin and Stalin. This being the case, how did Wolf Messing gain such notoriety, and how did Soviet Science move from a critical to an accepting view of psychic phenomena?
Within Western paranormal literature (which uncritically accepts the unfounded notions of the existence of UFO’s, government conspiracies, telepathic ability and ghosts, etc) also blindly follows the bourgeois establishment’s habit of painting the great Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as a ‘tyrant’. In the reporting of the case of Wolf Messing, however, this caricature is difficult to justify or maintain – as it is directly because of his personal association with Joseph Stalin that Messing became famous not only in the USSR, but also throughout the world. Being steeped in the rationality and scientific thought of Marx (mediated though Lenin), Stalin (as well as the Soviet scientific establishment) was correctly dubious about any claims that appeared to be religious in nature, and that masqueraded as ‘science’. The destabilisation (and over-throw) of the entire Soviet system could be initiated by the infiltration of the rational State by the irrationality of religiosity. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin declared the following of religious teaching to be a purely private affair (religion was not ‘banned’ in the USSR), but that religions will no longer be able or encouraged to seek political power. As a consequence, all religious groups were stripped of State-funding, and had to be become self-sustaining. This was the Soviet achievement of the so-called separation of ‘Church from State’ (exactly the same legal situation that exists within the USA). Messing was renowned for his ability to manipulate the thought and behaviour of others, and Stalin decided to test the extent of these claims by setting Messing a challenge. Stalin stated that if Messing’s abilities were true, then why doesn’t he do something to prove it by, for instance, carrying-out a bank robbery? In his early days as a Bolshevik revolutionary, Stalin was well-known for carrying-out similar activities for the revolutionary cause, and understood all the risks and dangers involved in such an activity. In other words, the robbing of a bank was not an easy task even if it was well planned and everything went well. The received narrative is that Stalin ordered Messing to steal 100,000 rubles from Moscow’s Gosbank using only ‘psychic’ means. Messing achieved this feat by handing a cashier a blank piece of paper, and in so doing, persuaded him to hand over the required money. On another occasion, Messing managed to penetrate the private office of Stalin despite the fact that it was heavily guarded. Messing apparently convinced the special guards that he was Beria – the head of the secret police – and let him through.[v]
Stalin was so impressed by Messing’s abilities that he granted him a good apartment in Moscow and protected him from the scepticism of the Soviet scientific and politic system – allowing him to tour and demonstrate his abilities. This did not prevent Beria of the secret police to once order that Messing be kept confined within the confines of the Kremlin. Again, with no documentation whatsoever, Messing is reported as having walked out of the heavily guarded building. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev invited Messing to speak at the 12th Congress of the Communist Party, and state that he had seen in a vision that Lenin and Stalin had demanded that their bodies be removed from public display in the Red Square mausoleum, and buried. However, Messing refused this deception, stating that he did not believe in spiritualism and does not communicate with the dead. Messing predicted the date and time of his wife’s death (from cancer) on August 2, 1960 at seven o’clock, and after this descended into a deep depression. He was lifted from this negative state by being awarded the title of ‘Honoured Artist’ by the Soviet State in the 1960’s. After this Messing gave many public demonstrations of his psychic ability and this continued until his death in 1974.[vi]
It is clear that Wolf Messing, as he himself admitted, was using the power of suggestion (albeit to extraordinary length), coupled with an innate and profound understanding of body language. This assessment was confirmed by D.A. Biryukov, the Head of the Medical School of the Academy of Medical Sciences following one of Messing’s demonstrations, and yet Messing demonstrated that he could also read the thoughts of others (even at great distances), predict the future, and guess a person’s fate just from looking at a photograph. He is also reported as continuously suggesting to his audiences that various paranormal powers exist despite his denial of a belief in spiritualism or communicating with the dead. If Messing’s abilities were truly ‘scientific’ and not the imaginations of religious thinking, then a scientific explanation must be sought. It might well be the case that a mind freed of inverted thinking can, either through genetic predisposition, or appropriate training, develop the ability to be hyper aware of its surroundings, and understand (and therefore be able to ‘predict’) patterns of behaviour, and the cycles of manifestation and decline of natural or man-made processes, etc. In this interpretation many attributes usually ascribed to superstitious beliefs and religious teaching, are shifted into the realm of rational science and away from the domain of the inverted mind. This would mean that the abilities of Wolf Messing – far from being the ‘telepathy’ of deluded bourgeois origination – were in fact the products of a ‘new’ science of the mind identified as existing within a Communist regime, and manifesting within the mind of a staunch supporter of Marxist thinking.
©opyright: Adrian Chan-Wyles (ShiDaDao) 2016.
[i]Telepathist Wolf Messing - Interview with P. Oreshkin http://allrus.me/telepathist-wolf-messing/ Accessed 25.1.2016
[ii] Engels, Friedrich, Dialectics of Nature, Progress Publishers, Moscow, (1974), Preface, Pages 5 – Page 15 for a detailed assessment of the chronology of the construction of this text. This Preface was written by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism – the Central Committee of the CPSU and states that most of the Dialectics of Nature was not known to Lenin because it was first published in its entirety a year after his death in 1925.
[iii] Ibid – Page 58. Engels states that he does not think very much came of this investigation.
[iv] Examples of otherwise ‘rational’ scientists who attempted to use dialectical logic to justify illogical beliefs include Sir Isaac Newton, Alfred Russel Wallace, and William Crookes, etc.
[v] The X Factor: Cover-ups, Paranormal, Mysteries & UFOs, Issue 95, Mind Games, Page 2662. This is a bias account of the Soviet experimentation with telepathy, but present the basics facts of the matter.
[vi] Telepathist Wolf Messing http://allrus.me/telepathist-wolf-messing/ Accessed 27.1.2016 – a very good English language article compiled from Russian historical source material about Wolf Messing.