Wolf Messing: The True Story of Russia`s Greatest Psychic

By Tatiana Lungin

In this, the first biography and personal memoir of WOLF MESSING to appear in the West, Tatiana Lungin limns a revealing portrait of one of the greatest psychic performers of the twentieth century.

Born a Polish Jew near Warsaw, Messing ran away from home at the age of eleven and soon discovered his psychic gifts. Supporting himself by performing mind-reading acts in Berlin theaters, at fourteen Messing was sold by his unscrupulous manager to the famous Busch Circus. In no time Wolf gained an international reputation as the world’s greatest telepath as he toured the capitals of Europe. In Vienna Messing met Albert Einstein who brought him to the apartment of another admirer of his abilities, Sigmund Freud. His touring days ended abruptly in 1937 when, after Messing publicly predicted the downfall of the Third Reich, the Nazis placed a sizable bounty on his head. Summoning all his hypnotic powers, he escaped capture by the Gestapo and fled to Russia.

In the USSR Messing’s displays of telepathy, uncannily accurate predictions, and psychic crime solving gained him a rare celebrity status. While most parapsychologists were forced to conduct psychic research in secrecy, Messing thrilled audiences in packed theaters across the country. His fame was all the more amazing coming as it did in the Marxist society dominated by Joseph Stalin, the man who had officially abolished ESP. Even Stalin himself was intrigued by Wolf’s ability to influence thoughts at a distance, and devised a number of unusual tests of Messing’s powers. The stories of how Messing successfully took on Stalin’s challenges to hypnotically elude his personal security force, and even commit psychic bank robbery, are colorfully related.

As Messing’s longtime friend and confidante, Lungin draws from personal notes, conversations with Wolf, and reports of other eyewitnesses of his performances to chronicle Messing’s incredible life and career. At the same time, she provides an inside look at parapsychology and psychic research behind the Iron Curtain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glagoslav
• Release date: May 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781782670988

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Wolf Messing

The True Story of Russia`s Greatest Psychic

by Tatiana Lungin

Glagoslav Publications

Copyright

Wolf Messing

The True Story of Russia`s Greatest Psychic

by Tatiana Lungin

© Tatiana Lungin, 1989

© 2014, Glagoslav Publications, United Kingdom

Glagoslav Publications Ltd

88-90 Hatton Garden

EC1N 8PN London

United Kingdom

www.glagoslav.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tatiana Lungin: translated from the Russian by Cynthia Rosenberger and John Glad : translation edited by D. Scott Rogo

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-78267-096-4

1. Messing, Vol`f, 1899-1974. 2. Psychics – Soviet Union –

Biography. I. Rogo, D. Scott. II. Title.

BF1027.M47L8613 1989

133.8`092`4– dc19

[B]

89-3154

CIP

This book is in copyright. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Foreword

Super psychic tested by Freud, Einstein, Gandhi and Stalin! That’s the stuff of tabloid headlines bedecking the check-out counter. That’s 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 friend’s 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 Wolf’s path just days before her world and everyone else’s was irretrievably shattered by Hitler’s 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 didn’t 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 dictator’s 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 government’s 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. It’s 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 there’s 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 Messing’s autobiography, About Myself, an outrageous story by anyone’s standards. Here were tales of using the power to cloud men’s 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 don’t exist in the USSR.

Ludmila Svinka-Zielinski — a seasoned Kremlin watcher and contributor to Atlas, the Western foreign correspondents’ magazine­ — wrote about Messing’s 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.

What about Wolf Messing? Scientists from all over the Soviet Union and the bloc countries answered favourably: he’s genuine. He may not use ESP in every performance, but he has great talent and can do even more than his autobiography claims. He is serious — a high compliment in scientific circles. Things got blurry fast, however, when we asked the researchers how they knew. They hedged: he had promised to come to their labs, but he was old and so busy performing… It never came down to hard evidence; they told us Messing’s ability was simply a known fact, and we should accept it. A few bloc scientists said they had run informal experiments with Messing, all successful, and confided the obvious: he had friends in high places.

The head of an Intourist office in Moscow talked to us about Messing’s talent as if she were discussing the violin playing of Oistrakh or the dancing of Nureyev. I’ve heard about Wolf Messing since I was a little girl, she said. She must have gone to see him a number of times then? Well no. "It’s because I know he’s so good that I haven’t. I don’t like the idea of someone looking into my thoughts," she admitted.

The magic of Messing’s name worked with everyday Soviets, too, people of all sorts who liked to practice English with foreigners, particularly among the endless walking throngs that fill the city’s streets and parks. Just about everyone knew of him. He was famous-a holy man, a hero, a legend. Occasionally, we heard fifth­ hand stories about his kindness, for example, how he helped locate a missing relative after the war; these are the sorts of stories Tatiana Lungin relates firsthand in her memoir.

Telephone books were under lock and key the USSR, unavailable to locals or foreigners, so we wangled Messing’s number before arrival. Yes, this is the home of Wolf Messing, agreed the woman on the other end of the line. We’d written about an interview, could he spare us a few moments? We very much wanted to tell Americans about his wonderful performances. She said she’d ask. After some time, she returned to say Messing had received our letter and sends his compliments. Unfortunately, he was somewhat ill from the rigors of his performances and couldn’t see us at this time. He thanked us for our interest in his abilities.

According to Tatiana Lungin’s account, Messing was probably under the weather. However, on that sweltering June day, it didn’t take a psychic to know it might be less than politic to entertain two wandering North American writers involved in the parapsychology conference the authorities had just stopped dead in the middle — particularly as we had joined a greatly reduced number of Soviets to continue the conference under the friendly auspices of the Czech Embassy, a dissident, rogue embassy in those days only a few weeks before Soviet tanks clattered into Prague.

Messing the genuine, Messing the great talent remained elusive. Now his friend Tatiana has literally fleshed out the mystery. Reading her accounts of Messing’s psychic feats, it’s interesting to note how closely his specific talents matched the contours of Soviet psychology and particularly parapsychology, a field that evolved quite differently in the ancient Russian culture than it did in American labs, which relied on statistical ESP card-guessing experiments.

For instance, upon his arrival in Russia, Messing was put to work performing amazing mental, not psychic, feats. This is squarely in line with a long, serious history of Russian interest in prodigies — people who calculate figures instantly, people who read pages at a glance, people with photographic memories, geniuses, and idiot savants of all sorts. The establishment, not the counterculture, spearheaded the pursuit of human potential in Soviet psychology. If one person can do such things, they said, maybe others can be trained to at least partially unlock such reserves of the human mind. And stage demonstrations taught the public that the human brain was indeed a marvel — marvel enough to make the supernatural unnecessary.

Then there was Messing’s cataleptic trance, his ability to put himself in a state of suspended animation. This quirky gift catapulted him from a street urchin’s life to fame and fortune in Europe and the Far East. Catalepsy was another standing interest of Soviet psychologists, leading them to the intermittent study of yogis and, of course, to demand a demonstration of Messing.

Ideomotor activity involves tiny, unconscious muscle movements brought on by one’s thoughts and imagination. By the time Messing tumbled over the border into Russia, Soviet scientists had piled up voluminous research on the topic. Such research fit the physical bent of their psychology and helped demystify some seeming wonders. No doubt, it was also seen as one more promising avenue in the ongoing exploration of the ways and means of mind and people control. Could a sensor on your throat pick up tiny traces of speech and reveal what you were thinking?

In 1950, the philosophy section of the Soviet Academy of Science was pressed to explain Messing. It was a bitter era; anything outside a very narrow norm could prove fatal. The ideomotor explanation must have seemed heaven-sent. The academicians declared that Messing was unusually sensitive to the micro muscle movements of audience participants who held his wrist as he moved about the hall performing. An official pronouncement, which Lungin has mercifully condensed in her book, was thenceforth read before each of Messing’s shows, instructing the audience on all things ideomotor.

That Messing might have relied on ideomotor action for some of his feats is a plausible explanation. It is a highly implausible one for the more complex and whimsical challenges dreamt up by his audiences. It is no explanation at all for his ability to clairvoyantly see someone’s besieged apartment a thousand miles away, or his ability to predict to the hour some indefinite future event that would occur.

Messing, in his autobiography, says flatly that the ideomotor tag was pinned on him by the cult of personality (i.e., Stalinism), and that it had no relation to his abilities.

The feat tying Messing most securely to the heart of Soviet psi research was his ability to influence the minds of others at a distance. Sometimes called telepathic hypnosis, this psychic spell is the Soviet psi experiment par excellence. While the tsars held sway, Russian scientists plunged into telepathic hypnosis, and Soviet scientists went right back to it as soon as the revolution ended. They showed off their success in a spectacular way at the 1924 All Russian Congress of Psychoneurologists at a Black Sea resort. A young woman waltzing in the arms of her partner, round and round an elegant ballroom, suddenly froze in midstep. A hidden psychologist had sent the telepathic command to halt — or so the scientific journals reported. Telepathic hypnosis, so foreign to American psi research, was the experiment endlessly repeated by Vasiliev and others in the late twenties and through thirties. They used it in part as a tool, a form of reliable psi, as they searched for the electromagnetic waves that carried psi. Ironically, they piled up the best evidence in the world that psi is not carried on electromagnetic waves. Telepathic hypnosis started up again in the labs of the sixties and continued in the seventies. Quite probably, it is still in some form being used today.

It’s hardly surprising this was the psychic feat Stalin commanded Messing to demonstrate on a grand scale, though surely not for theoretical purposes. His interest, no doubt, lay in the other aspect of telepathic hypnosis that had long fascinated Soviets: the ability to influence the mind and body of another person telepathically, usually without his knowledge.

A number of ESP abilities would certainly interest any dictator. Stalin may also have been intrigued by Messing’s prophetic gift. Yet, he didn’t appear to heed a prediction Messing made in a private Moscow club in 1940 that set the rest of the Communist elite abuzz. The Russo-German nonaggression pact was in full force. Messing, however, looking into the future proclaimed, Soviet tanks will roll into Berlin! The German Embassy quickly lodged a protest. After all, Hitler was still smarting from a 1937 Messing prediction of his ultimate defeat. The Soviet diplomatic corps huddled in confusion. At last they stated, We cannot be expected to answer for the prophecies of Wolf Messing.

Again in 1943, Messing ventured to go public with a prophecy, risky for any psychic, but compounded in a land where psychics were not safe. The Baltic, Byelorussia, the Ukraine, the Crimea: all were in Nazi hands. The end of the war was not in sight. Messing himself had been evacuated to safety in Siberia. In Novosibirsk, the famous science city, Messing spoke to a packed audience at the Opera Theater. The war, he predicted, would end in May, 1945, probably within the first week.

Messing talked of various encounters with Stalin. However, he strongly denied circulating rumors that he’d worked with the police and intelligence groups. The Messing that Lungin knew was spiritually evolved — something that, contrary to popular belief, does not always accompany great psychic talents. He believed his gift came with a moral imperative: act ethically, help others.

You will read of the many ways he did help others, even though it was sometimes forbidden. In his autobiography, Messing mentions how he tried to help in subtle ways. His ability to powerfully implant thought in others, he said, could be used in an upbeat way to inspire people who were dangerously depressed: ‘’I often succeed with forceful mental suggestion in giving courage, confidence, and strength to people who are ready to commit suicide."

Lungin remarks that Messing felt he would never be allowed to take a trip out of the Soviet Union. Dr. Vasiliev, the father of Soviet parapsychology, and other prominent researchers weren’t allowed to travel either, not even to the satellite states. Maybe this is a sign of how seriously the Soviets take psi. Maybe, as Lungin suggests, there’s more to it, and the secret remains locked away in the Kremlin. We still don’t really understand talents like Messing’s, nor the inner workings of the Kremlin elite, so, to borrow from Churchill’s famous phrase about Russia, Messing remains an enigma wrapped in an enigma.

Happily though, we now have something to ponder and wonder about, thanks to Tatiana Lungin’s memoir and her faithful record of Messing’s comments. She has performed a real service for anyone interested in extraordinary lives, for Messing’s story is full of the drama, improbabilities, and wild swings of fortune usually only found in Dickens. Anyone interested in human potential or, more particularly, in psychic phenomena will especially appreciate Lungin’s contribution. Messing was a giant and deserves to be remembered in the West as well as in the East.

A long time ago, Messing made a seemingly impossible prediction. He told his young friend Tatiana that one day she and her son would live in America. Perhaps Messing looked even more closely into the future than he admitted and, then and there, chose his biographer. If so, like many other of Messing’s actions, it was a wise and good choice.

Sheila Ostrander

Lynn Schroeder

Encounter With a Seer

The auditorium in Tbilisi, in the Soviet republic of Georgia, was packed to the brim with a well-dressed audience. The stage, starkly modest, lacked the traditional curtain. The decor consisted of two ordinary tables and several chairs. From time to time, the impatient audience clapped, anxious for the performance to begin. Finally, after the warning bell had sounded, a woman smartly dressed in black walked out onto the stage.

Wolf Messing! she announced unceremoniously. Psychological experiments!

The hall rang with applause, welcoming the man for whom they had been so impatiently waiting: Wolf Messing, a legend in his own time, a man shrouded in mystery. It was said he could read the thoughts of anyone to whom he spoke,