Tatiana Lungin - Wolf Messing - The True Story of Russia`s Greatest Psychic

Super psychic tested by Freud, Einstein, Gandhi and Stalin! Thats the stuff of tabloid headlines bedecking the check-out counter. Thats also part of the story of a remarkable human being, Wolf Messing, one of the four or five major psychics of the twentieth century, until now a man almost unknown in the United States.

Tatiana Lungin has side-stepped the sensational to create a warm, personal memoir of her long-time friend Wolf. Russians have a special talent for friendship, old-fashioned friendship woven together by little gifts of flowers, exchanges of keepsakes and hour-long walks to a friends house for tea and talk.

Even by Russian standards, this friendship was an unlikely one. A teenager brimming with anticipation at the brink of her career, Tatiana first crossed Wolfs path just days before her world and everyone elses was irretrievably shattered by Hitlers Panzer divisions thundering into Russia. Messing and Lungin are survivors, and their paths crossed again after the war. This time friendship grew between the young woman and the mysterious, older celebrity who never lost the heavy accent of his youthful German. Eventually, she became his confidant. Now living in America, Tatiana has the freedom and the insight to show us both Wolf, the chain-smoking Polish refugee concerned about his family and friends, and Messing, as even he referred to himself when his great psychic gift was coursing through him.

Messing was as famous across the vastness of the Soviet Union as rock stars are in the United States. Unlike rock stars, however, he was one of a kind. And his world was very different from ours. Just how remarkable his story is may become more apparent to an American reader by shading in the background against which Messing and Lungin lived and worked.

In the early sixties, the Soviet Encyclopaedia continued to inform readers that ESP and all things psychic were bourgeoise, capitalist fictions. Anyone who promoted such fictions was accused of mysticism, something the state was pledged to eradicate. During the Stalin years, psychics were hunted down, imprisoned in labor camps or shot. At the same time Joseph Stalin, the man who had officially abolished ESP, was concocting his own ESP tests for a strange Polish Jew who had fled Hitler: Wolf Messing. Stalin didnt challenge Wolf with clean-cut lab tests. Instead he asked him to try a psychic bank robbery, or cast a psychic spell to breech the dictators personal security forces. Even more paradoxical, while the few psychics and folk healers remaining lived deep underground, Messing wowed packed audiences with his mental and, to many observers, psychic powers.

With Nikita Khrushchev, a thaw finally came to Soviet life. In 1962 appeared a thin volume written by Dr. Leonid L. Vasiliev, an internationally known physiologist and holder of the Lenin Prize. Experimental Research of Mental Suggestion was an explosive book. Vasiliev revealed how he and others, at the governments direction, secretly carried on extensive parapsychological experiments during the thirties under Stalin. War disrupted the work, but now Vasiliev put out a clear, loud call for psi research to resume. The discovery of the energy associated with psychic events, Vasiliev said, will be as important if not more important than the discovery of atomic energy. Its a big statement. But apparently official ears were listening. Communist scientists physicists, engineers, and biologists swung into psi research.

The Soviet press, all official and all censored, began carrying reports of ESP; that made us sit up and take notice. We followed the Soviet media, tracking the increasing use of humor used to subtly criticize the government. Here, however, was evidence of a much bigger change. Even Pravda carried a from-page story about ESP experiments at the Newark College of Engineering in New Jersey. Funded by Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography, this ground-breaking work involved telepathic communication that could be recorded on monitoring machines. The researchers, Drs. John Mihalasky and Douglas Dean, were friends of ours. Probably only about four or five hundred people in America knew much about these experiments, not because they were secret, but because, at the time, scientific psi commanded little interest. We read the Pravda headline in faraway Russia and realized somebody was interested.

We began corresponding with Communist psi researchers, trading articles and books and always tacking on a question or two, like, Who are the best psychics in the USSR? They answered, This one in that lab, that one here, then added, almost as an afterthought, and theres Messing of course. Messing, of course The bits of articles sent us about Messing seemed to talk about a mentalist, a crowd-pleasing stage psychic. Why did the physicists and engineers accept him so matter-of-factly?

The mystery grew more tantalizing. Science and Religion the party journal devoted to eradicating mysticism and insuring the growth of an atheistic, materialist philosophy surprised its readers by publishing the first chapters of Wolf Messings autobiography, About Myself, an outrageous story by anyones standards. Here were tales of using the power to cloud mens minds to knock out captors and make daring escapes, stories of psi missions for Stalin, and accounts of how private citizen Messing had amassed enough money to buy and outfit two fighter planes, which he presented to the Red Air Force. In the United States wild tales in print are ubiquitous; but, especially regarding certain topics, they just dont exist in the USSR.

Ludmila Svinka-Zielinski a seasoned Kremlin watcher and contributor to Atlas, the Western foreign correspondents magazine wrote about Messings autobiography: It is important to remember that under the conditions prevailing in the USSR anything done or written by such a controversial personality as Messing had to be scrutinized, criticized, and subjected to constant censorship, so that he could not get away with fraud or anything that even approached a vain boast. In fact, we can be convinced that to survive and to exist in the environment on such a level, Wolf Messing must be thoroughly authentic.

We awaited the promised continuation of About Myself, but it never appeared. Messing remained a prominent question in our minds when, in the spring of 1968, we set sail for the First Annual International Parapsychology Conference in Moscow. It was the first and, so far, last such conference.