Fantastic Ivan Efremov under the gun of the KGB

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the biography of science fiction writer and professor of paleontology Ivan Efremov, one secret has not yet been revealed. He died on October 5, 1972, and a month later, on November 4, the KGB carried out a thorough search for many hours in his apartment. What did you want to find? It is still unknown. But there are versions according to which the writer appears first as an English spy, then as an agent … of another civilization.

“According to the writer's wife Taisiya Efremova, the search began in the morning and ended after midnight, carried out by eleven employees of the Moscow KGB Directorate,” says Nikita Petrov, a historian, Ph. D., deputy chairman of the Council of the Scientific Information and Educational Center of the Memorial Society. - According to the protocol, they were looking for "ideologically harmful literature." However, something completely different was taken out of the apartment.

The seized list includes old photographs of Efremov and his friends, his letters to his wife and readers, receipts, an "orange tube with foreign words", samples of minerals, a collapsible cane, "a metal club made of non-ferrous metal", a book about Africa, "various chemical preparations in vials and jars”, which turned out to be homeopathic medicines. In total - 41 subjects.

“The strangest thing is that, in search of something, the KGB officers probed all the walls, ceilings, floors with a metal detector,” Nikita Vasilyevich continues. - To Taisiiya's direct question about what the writer is accused of, they answered: "Nothing, he is already a dead man."

However, the search had tragic consequences. The publication of the five-volume collected works of the writer was suspended - Efremov was not published until the mid-1970s. They did not even cite him in special works on paleontology, although Ivan Antonovich was the founder of a whole scientific direction.

Ivan Efremov and his wife Taya.

In the 8 years that have passed since the death of the writer, the specialists of the Second Service (counterintelligence) of the Moscow KGB Directorate have concocted 40 volumes (!) Of the case of operational development against a science fiction writer. What crime did the operatives trace?

VERSION 1: ENGLISH SCORER

- Is it true that there were rumors that Efremov was a spy?

- The KGB believed that Ivan Antonovich, at least, is not the person he claims to be, - says Dr. Petrov. - Allegedly, he is an Englishman, for whom the real Efremov was replaced during an expedition to Mongolia. Or even earlier - in his youth.

The spy version is, of course, flawed. Imagine: a dummy, carefully conspiratorial resident - he is also expensive. Must work at a very high level. And Efremov was "introduced" into an ordinary, not secret Institute of Paleontology. Although, before the war, he worked in geology, an industry that could be of interest to foreign exploration. In the late 1940s, when the USSR was busy creating the atomic bomb and geologists were looking for uranium ore, our "British resident" was investigating vertebrate fossils in the Gobi Desert. No, something is not right.

The emergence of the espionage version can only be explained by one thing: in the late 1960s, raising the prestige of the KGB, its new chairman, Yuri Andropov, engendered espionophobia, and they looked everywhere for illegal foreign agents. So Efremov was “found”.

VERSION 2: VICTIM OF POISONING

- I myself heard once that Efremov was killed …

- There was also such a suspicion. The fact is that during his lifetime, operatives were following Ivan Antonovich. And one of them reported to his superiors: the death of the writer came at the moment when the "object" opened a letter allegedly received by him from some foreign embassy. On the basis of this certificate, the following conclusion was made: British intelligence, having established that the KGB ring around its resident had closed, removed it by sending a letter to Efremov, processed with a potent poison.

But only, according to the testimony of Efremov's wife, he died at night in bed from another heart attack. And in 1989, in an official written response from the Investigative Department of the Moscow Directorate of the KGB, they confirmed that "the suspicions that arose about the possibility of his violent death were not confirmed."

VERSION 3: ARGENT ANTI-ADVISOR

- In the novel "Hour of the Bull" the writer denigrates the communist way of life - our bright future. Maybe he was a secret anti-Soviet?

- In 1970, Efremov was indeed suspected of trying to allegorically criticize Soviet reality. Even the chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, on September 28, 1970, in a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU directly writes that Efremov in his novel The Hour of the Bull "under the guise of criticizing the social system on the fantastic planet Torman, slanders Soviet reality." The secretary of the Central Committee Pyotr Demichev, who was then responsible for ideology and culture, invited the writer for a conversation. I asked to make some edits to the text. And Efremov agreed. The novel ended up from afar. And they began to withdraw from the libraries after the mysterious search.

So it was not about Hour of the Bull. And the writer did not participate in the dissident movement.

- Obviously, all three versions look dubious. What, then, is the reason for the strange search? Did you find any evidence that would clarify the mystery?

Historian Nikita Petrov.

- Yes, I studied the documents on the Efremov case, instituted in the Department for the supervision of the investigation in the state security agencies of the USSR Prosecutor's Office. But they, surprisingly, do not clarify the secret in any way. On January 22, 1973 - almost 4 months after the writer died, the investigative department of the Moscow KGB opened a criminal case into the death of Efremov "due to the unclear cause of death and to verify his identity." The investigation was extended several times, and finally terminated on March 7, 1974 "for the absence of a crime event."

If the writer was seriously suspected of collaborating with foreign intelligence services, then the case would have had a direct indication of this. Other motives were also stated there, including “identity verification”. As if Efremov really was "not who he pretended to be."

Among the thousands of supervisory cases of the Prosecutor's Office of the USSR, the case of Efremov is the only one from which it is not clear what it was started on.

WRITER'S OPINION

Chairman of the prose section of the Writers' Union of St. Petersburg, writer Andrei Izmailov:

"THE BODIES READ: ALL FANTASTS ARE SOMEONE'S AGENTS"

- I heard this version from the late Arkady Strugatsky. According to him, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, two US organizations - counterintelligence and the army - created institutions that seriously dealt with "flying saucers" and the possibility of alien infiltration into Earth.

Here is what Arkady Natanovich told me about this at one time: “Ours could have a similar idea,” he assumed. - And then the fans of science fiction came up with a fix idea: they say, the leading science fiction writers are agents of extraterrestrial civilizations. My brother and I received more than one letter about alien spies. One can imagine that the newly created department of competent authorities was headed by an extremely romantic-minded officer who believed in the absurdity of "science fiction writers are agents." And so they began to watch over Efremov. During life they were afraid to touch: God knows what to expect from an alien. And having learned about death, they came in the hope of finding something.

I put myself in the place of a hypothetical romantic officer, and I reason sensibly: if Efremov is an agent of an extraterrestrial civilization, then there must be some kind of communication means. But what does a means of communication look like for a civilization that has outstripped us by three or four hundred years, and even well disguised this means ?! Therefore, they took the first thing that came across. Then, satisfied that what was taken was not what was sought, they returned everything."

And in fact, everything fits together: the posthumous search, the metal detector, the seizure of chemicals. They even tried to open the urn with the writer's ashes, which at that time was kept at home. And during interrogations, everyone asked his wife why an autopsy was not carried out? Why was cremation, contrary to custom, followed on the second day after death? How long has she known her husband anyway? As if looking for alien artifacts and anatomical differences of a disguised alien.

By the way, if we adhere to the extraterrestrial version, then some facts of the usual, in general, biography of the writer can be interpreted accordingly. For example, his geological surveys and excavations of vertebrate remains look quite suspicious. Or craving for "dinosaur skulls." Efremov had a story about how paleontologists found the skull of an alien in the burial ground of lizards.

Among fans of science fiction, Efremov's authority was great, the fame of a man who anticipated some scientific discoveries was firmly entrenched in him. In this connection, they recalled, for example, holography. All of this in the aggregate mystified the employees of the authorities, who, even behind rather innocent events, saw some "secret springs", "outside influence." With this approach, the writer could become a suspicious or convenient figure for working out theories.

The developers of the "Efremov-Alien" version could not even tell their direct management directly about "extraterrestrial suspicions". And they did not dare to entrust the paper. From this, perhaps, there is no direct evidence of the connection of the writer with aliens. They cannot be.

OPINION OF SON EFREMOV

MAYBE WAS A DONOS

At the international symposium “Ivan Efremov - scientist, thinker, writer. A look into the 3rd millennium. Predictions and Forecasts ", held at the Biocenter of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the son of the writer, geologist Allan Efremov, to the question" was there a denunciation before the search? ", Answered:

- Undoubtedly. But who exactly wrote it, we do not know. Yes, we have certain suspicions, but until they are confirmed, I think we have no right to speak.

However, the senior investigator for especially important cases of the investigative department of the KGB under the USSR Council of Ministers in Moscow and the Moscow region, Lieutenant Colonel Rishat Khabibullin, who conducted the search, assured in an interview with journalists that there was no denunciation.

OPINION OF ANOTHER SPECIALIST

Physicist, researcher of pseudo-scientific mythology Pavel Poluyan:

"ASTRAL" SPYING WAS MORE PRODUCTIVE than REAL"

- Ivan Efremov was not just a writer, but a paleontologist-geologist, professor, winner of the Stalin Prize. In addition to excavating dinosaurs in the Gobi Desert, he participated in the search for ores, including uranium - he knew a lot. Once he published a story describing a diamond deposit in Yakutia - that is, he revealed a state secret. Efremov had to prove “in the organs” that he gave the description on a whim - even before the first diamond was found there. Not a leak of information, but a scientific prediction that came true. And this is not his only insight.

Is this the reason? Perhaps the secret services of the Soviet Union were concerned not with espionage, but with an obvious riddle: how does a writer obtain prophetic information? For example, the story "The Hellenic Secret" tells of strange dreams. The hero sees himself in ancient Greece and learns the recipe for a substance that softens ivory, which allows him to create products of amazing sophistication. Explanation: gene memory - the knowledge of ancestors is passed on to descendants, recorded in DNA.

Later, Efremov's gene memory turned into a "noosphere". This is how the geochemist Vernadsky called the sphere of activity of the mind. But the science fiction writer identified the "noosphere" with what in Indian mythology is called "Heavenly Akashic Chronicles."These are no longer genes, but a kind of geophysical structure that records and stores information about what is happening on planet Earth. Perhaps the writer came into contact with such a "data bank" - he received from the "noosphere" pictures of the times of the Egyptian pharaohs, Alexander the Great and Thais of Athens.

But where does the information about the future, about alien worlds and advanced super-science come from? The writer answers this question in the novel "The Andromeda Nebula". It says about the "Great Ring": space is filled with visual information that is sent from distant stars by our brothers in mind. In the novel, these radio signals are picked up by satellites. But a hint is made to other contacts: during the experiment, the hero of the book is visited by a vision of an alien, she utters: "Offa alli kor!" As if Efremov is talking about his own experience of supersensible perception.

The mysterious words "offa alli core" still sound like a spell, and lovers of Efremov's books recognize them as a secret password. But no one guessed what these words mean. Maybe we will find out when the meeting of two space civilizations will actually take place?

But many accused Efremov of excessive mysticism. Ivan Antonovich even had to answer such attacks in an article in Komsomolskaya Pravda on January 28, 1968: "In the second half of our century, it is no longer possible to draw an equal sign between mysticism and parapsychological phenomena." In 1962, Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences Leonid Vasiliev published the book "Experimental Studies of Mental Suggestion", and just then Stanislav Grof became famous in Czechoslovakia, who created transpersonal psychology with out-of-body travel.

It is clear that the special services could not but be interested in such "extrasensory perception": what if "astral" espionage turns out to be more productive than the real one? Probably, this explains the keen interest of the Soviet intelligence agencies in the personality of the writer Efremov …

The secret of the science fiction writer has become ashes, which is buried under a strange stone polyhedron at the Komarovskoye cemetery.

FROM THE DOSSIER "KP"

What "predictions" of Efremov came true?

In 1944, in the story "Diamond Pipe", the writer told about the discovery of a diamond deposit in Yakutia. And in 1954, just 300 km south of the places described in the story, the first Yakut diamond deposit, the Mir pipe, was discovered.

The discovery of a large deposit of mercury ores in the Southern Altai - in the story "The Lake of Mountain Spirits" (1943).

Holography - in the story "Shadow of the Past" (1945).

The peculiarity of the behavior of liquid crystals is in the story "Fakaofo Atoll" (1944).

In the novel Andromeda Nebula (1955): three-dimensional television with a parabolic concave screen, a geostationary satellite that is always above one point on the earth's surface, and an exosuit ("jumping skeleton") that allows people to overcome the increased gravitational pull.

EDITORIAL

We are sending a request to the FSB Directorate for Moscow and the Moscow Region in order to understand the true reasons for the search and the criminal case opened after the death of Ivan Efremov.