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Nowadays, many publications raise the topic of Freemasonry in the pre-revolutionary and modern - “perestroika” - history of Russia.

However, the Soviet period, especially the 20s and 30s, until recently remained a kind of blank spot for researchers of Freemasonry. It was believed that in the USSR Masonic lodges were prohibited and it was as if they did not exist at all.

Now that access to many previously secret archives has been opened, very interesting and very unexpected facts are being discovered that shed light on the unusually extensive network of Masonic and near-Masonic organizations that literally filled the intelligentsia environment of large Russian cities.

From the article below by the St. Petersburg researcher of this dangerous topic, Viktor Brachev, the reader will learn about the methods of creating, recruiting and conspiracy of “brothers” and “sisters” of “order” lodges, about the ideology and ultimate goals of the activities of various “religious and philosophical circles” and “occult societies” , like a magnet that attracted cosmopolitan-minded “cultural” intelligentsia, students, scientists and often members of the government

And here we unexpectedly learn about the involvement of widely known people, who, as they said, were unfairly persecuted and suffered from “Stalinist repressions.” Among them are the famous Russian philosophers G. P. Fedotov, I. O. Lossky, writer D. S. Merezhkovsky, literary critic M. M. Bakhtin, famous actors Mikhail Chekhov, Yuri Zavadsky, among them the recently deceased academician D. S. Likhachev.

This article, perhaps for the first time, reveals the facts of the artificial creation of Masonic lodges by the OGPU and NKVD for the purpose of “exposing” and tracking the actions of, as stated in the investigative documents, “enemies of Soviet power.”

On the other hand, from the statements of the leaders of Masonic lodges we learn that “the aspirations of communism coincide in general terms with the aspirations of Russian Freemasonry.” This eloquent recognition is another stroke in revealing the mechanisms of governing the world by a single secret government.

JV Stalin patiently, gradually undermined this most insidious behind-the-scenes system until, having accumulated strength, he attacked it with all his punishing might.

Only now it becomes clear that the numerous trials of the thirties against all kinds of “Trotskyists”, “rootless cosmopolitans”, “Western agents” and “anti-Soviet organizations” were a crushing blow to Freemasonry in the USSR. This is precisely what Western and Russian Zion democracy still cannot forgive Stalin. Without a doubt, Freemasonry in the USSR was not completely eliminated.

Having gone deep underground, it survived, survived, and in our “perestroika” times, it dropped its masks, achieved open power, reaping its destructive fruits. Its priests are in full view, have world fame, wealth, honor, they do not leave television screens, from the pages of magazines and newspapers, books are written about them. They, as before, teach the laymen a “new” life...

This article only lifts the veil over the hitherto hidden truth. The main discoveries and conclusions are yet to come. From the Editors It is most appropriate to start a conversation about Freemasons and secret Masonic lodges in the USSR with the so-called “Kremlin Lodge”.

A lot of different kinds of conjectures and assumptions have accumulated here. Characteristic in this regard is the dialogue that took place in December 1982 between the Moscow writer Felix Chuev and the former Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR Vyacheslav Molotov.

“Nowadays there is a lot of talk about Freemasonry. They say that we also have Freemasons in our country,” Chuev starts the conversation. “Probably there is. Underground. “It can’t help but be,” Molotov replies.

“And they say about you that you are also a Mason.”

- “A Mason for a long time. Since 1906,” smiles Molotov, referring to the time of his entry into the RSDLP.

“There is an opinion that there are Masons among the communists,” Chuev continues.

“There may be,” Molotov admits.

“And they say that in the Politburo Molotov was the main Mason.”

“The main one,” Molotov responds. - Yes, it was I who remained a communist in the meantime, and meanwhile managed to be a Freemason. Where do you dig such truths!”

(One hundred and forty conversations with Molotov. From the diary of F. Chuev. - M., “Terra”, 1991, p. 267).

The debate about the Masonic nature of Bolshevism and its connection with international Jewry has been going on for a long time. Even some professional historians, such as Academician Nikolai Likhachev, were inclined to explain the victory of Bolshevism in 1917 by the machinations of international Jewry.

The close connection between Bolshevism and Freemasonry is also noted by the Orthodox Church.

“Under the banner of the Masonic star,” wrote Metropolitan Anthony, chairman of the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, in 1932, “all the dark forces are working, destroying national Christian states.

The Masonic hand also took part in the destruction of Russia. All the principles, all the methods that the Bolsheviks use to destroy Russia are very close to Masonic ones. Many years of observing the destruction of our Motherland showed the whole world how students imitate their teachers and how the enslavers of the Russian people are faithful to the program of the Masonic lodges.”

As for Jewry, Judaism, in his opinion, “is historically connected with Freemasonry by the closest ties in its fierce struggle with Christianity and in Masonic aspirations for world dominion” (Nikolaevsky V.I. Russian Freemasons and Revolution. - M., “ Terra”, 1990, p. 174).

A valuable contribution to the development of this issue was made by Russian emigrant historians N. Svitkov (F. Stepanov) and V.F. Ivanov, who used confidential sources of information received from circles close to French political Freemasonry.

“In 1918,” wrote V.F. Ivanov in his book “From Peter I to the Present Day” (Harbin, 1934, p. 497), “a five-pointed star, the emblem of world Freemasonry, rose over Russia. Power passed to the most evil and destructive Freemasonry - Red Freemasonry, led by Masons of high dedication - Trotsky and his henchmen - Freemasons of lower dedication: Rosenfeld, Zinoviev, Parvus, Radek, Litvinov...

The program of struggle of the “builders” comes down to the destruction of the Orthodox faith, the eradication of nationalism, mainly Great Russian chauvinism, the destruction of everyday life, the Russian Orthodox family and the great spiritual heritage of our ancestors.”

“For the triumph of Masonic ideals,” he noted, “it was necessary to kill the soul of the Russian people, snatch God from them, depersonalize them nationally, trample their great past into the mud, corrupt the younger generation and raise a new breed of people without God and Fatherland, two-legged animals who , trained by the tamer, will obediently sit in a Masonic cage.”

According to the observations of V.F. Ivanov, already at the beginning of the 1930s, Russia was turning into “the purest and most consistent Masonic state, which implements Masonic principles in all their completeness and consistency.”

International Freemasonry and socialism, in his opinion, are “children of the same dark force. The goal of Freemasonry and socialism is the same. They only temporarily diverged in their methods of action.” (Ivanov V.F., “Secret diplomacy.” - Harbin, 1937, p. 128).

In essence, it would be possible not to attach much importance to these statements if the conviction in the common goals of the Masons and the Bolsheviks was not shared by the “brothers” themselves.

While working on the materials of the “Masonic case” initiated in January 1926 by the OGPU against the Leningrad “brothers”, the author of these lines discovered a very interesting document addressed to the government of the USSR. It is dated August 1925 and was written by the General Secretary of “Autonomous Russian Freemasonry” (an organization that arose in 1922) Boris Astromov (initiated in 1909, lodge “Avzonia” - “Great East of Italy”).

And it said the following: the path and goal of free masons and communists are the same - “the conversion of humanity into a single fraternal family... Pursuing the same goals, recognizing the same views as fair and subject to implementation, communism and Russian Freemasonry They shouldn’t look at each other suspiciously at all; on the contrary, their paths are parallel and lead to the same goal.”

The difference, according to B.V. Astromov, is only in the “methods of action”, because, in contrast to the revolutionary path followed by the Bolsheviks, “the path of Russian Freemasonry is the path of slow intellectual work, the path of slyness.”

And the enemies of the Bolsheviks and Freemasons, noted B.V. Astromov, are the same - national and religious prejudices, class egoism, private property.

The essence of the deal that he proposed to the Bolsheviks was that in exchange for the “secret legalization” of Masonic lodges in the country, the “brothers” would undertake to contribute to the “reversal of magnetization” of the Russian intelligentsia to the side of the Soviet government, because “The aspirations of communism coincide in general terms with the aspirations of Russian Freemasonry.”

Let us now compare these reasonings of the Freemason Astromov, who can hardly be suspected of being a “Black Hundred”, with statements on this topic by the opponents of Freemasonry - Vasily Ivanov and Metropolitan Anthony. The coincidence of views, as we see, is striking.

Now is the time to return to Felix Chuev’s conversation with Molotov. It arose for a reason, since Vyacheslav Mikhailovich has long been “under suspicion” among researchers.

As for the Freemasonry of two other Bolsheviks, I.I. Skvortsov-Stepanov and S.P. Sereda (worked in the Ryazan lodge), then it is considered indisputable (Startsev V. Masons. - “Rodina”, 1989, No. 9, p. 75).

The fact that Leon Trotsky belonged to Freemasonry was confirmed by the late writer Nina Berberova, who worked with Masonic archives for many years and established the names of 666 Russian Freemasons of the early 20th century. In response to the direct question asked to her during a visit to the USSR in September 1989: “Was Trotsky a Freemason?” - she answered: “I was, 6 months at 18 years old” (“Komsomolskaya Pravda”, 1989, September 12, p. 4).

For his part, the author of these lines managed to find in the archives of the former KGB of the USSR evidence of A. V. Lunacharsky’s belonging to the “Grand Orient of France”. Karl Radek and Nikolai Bukharin are “under suspicion”. Finally, one cannot fail to mention the Masonic lodge “Ar e Travai”, in which supposedly included Lenin, Zinoviev and other Bolsheviks” (Vinogradov A. Retouching on white spots. - “Young Guard”, 1991, No. 8, p. 267).

And although this information has not yet been documented didn't receive, there were no fundamental obstacles to the entry of the Bolsheviks (at least until 1917) into foreign Masonic lodges. After all, like their Menshevik colleagues, they were all Social Democrats, members of the same party - the RSDLP, although they belonged to different factions.

The active participation in the work of the Masonic lodges of the Mensheviks, as well as socialists in Europe and America in general, was never in doubt.

As for the so-called “Kremlin Lodge,” practically nothing is known about it, although in intellectual circles in the mid-1920s. and they said that in Moscow there were two Masonic Satanic lodges - in the Kremlin and in the Kropotkin Museum.

As for the latter (Alexey Solonovich's box), we will talk about it ahead. Another thing is the “Kremlin box”. It is possible, as Andrei Nikitin believes, that the mention of it contains “hints of real circumstances” (Nikitin A. Templars in Moscow. - “Science and Religion”, 1992, No. 12, p. 12).

The emigre historian Vasily Ivanov is more definite on this issue, who not only answered affirmatively to the question regarding the existence of the “Kremlin Lodge,” but also confidently named its Grand Master: according to his information, he was Karl Radek. He also cites an excerpt from a letter from K. B. Radek to the Grand Master of the “Grand Orient of France” in the early 1930s. with a request to influence the government of President Roosevelt through the American Freemasons, prompting him to speedily diplomatic recognition of the USSR (Ivanov V.F. Secret diplomacy. - Harbin, 1937, p. 210).

The fact that M. N. Tukhachevsky visited in the early 1930s also deserves attention. one of the Masonic lodges in Rome, as reported on the basis of Masonic sources by the Yugoslav historian Z. Nenezić in his book “Masons in Yugoslavia” (1984).

However, the closest thing to the secret of the “Kremlin Lodge” is the biography of a prominent Soviet security officer - the head of the 9th Directorate of the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD, Gleb Ivanovich Bokiy. It turns out that back in 1919, when he was chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, Gleb Ivanovich was initiated into the Masonic lodge “United Labor Brotherhood”, headed by a disciple of the freemason-satanist Zh. I. Gurdjieff, Dr. A. V. Barchenko.

We will meet Alexander Vasilyevich Barchenko on the pages of this essay. As for G.I. Bokiy, translated in the early 1920s. to Moscow, to the apparatus of the OGPU, from that time on he became the leading specialist on the “Masonic issue” in this department. Since then, not a single Masonic case promoted through the OGPU has passed him by.

He is also an indispensable participant in the OGPU boards that passed verdicts in Masonic cases. Bokiy was “removed” in 1937, accusing him of organizing, oddly enough, a Masonic lodge, which included more than 20 people, including such representatives of the party-Soviet elite as member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks I.M. Moskvin, Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR V. Stomoniakov and others.

The most curious thing is that an inspection of this case in 1956 confirmed: G.I. Bokiy was indeed engaged in the OGPU “studying the structure and ideological currents of Freemasonry,” thus making it indirectly clear that there was a “lodge” (Vaksberg A. Mason , son-in-law of a mason. - “Literary Newspaper”, 1990, December 26).

Of course, this is not yet that mysterious “Kremlin box,” but the solution to the mystery is obviously here. After all, it was not out of idle curiosity that Bokiy began studying the “structure and ideological currents of Freemasonry.” Most likely, his “owner” needed it. If he was J.V. Stalin, then we will have to admit that the “Kremlin Lodge” ceased its work in 1937.

It is noteworthy that in the lists of prominent Bolshevik Masons appearing in historical literature Stalin's surname is missing. And this is not accidental, because... the repressions that occurred in the middle of the second half of the 1930s against the Jewish environment of V.I. Lenin, were regarded in the right-wing circles of the Russian emigration as J.V. Stalin’s struggle against Freemasonry, his desire to get out from under their tutelage.

“Stalin,” noted V.F. in this regard. Ivanov, “acts as the Scourge of God against world Freemasonry, which created the satanic Tower of Babel called the USSR.” Having destroyed prominent communist masons, I.V. Stalin, in his opinion, “is cutting down pillars, and the time is not far off when the fences themselves will fall down” (Ivanov V.F. Secret diplomacy. - Harbin. 1937, pp. 313-314).

Masonic ideology at the beginning of the 20th century took such deep roots among the Russian intelligentsia that even the famous Bolshevik terror of the 1920s. was unable to immediately destroy its rapidly growing shoots.

To date, at least eleven secret Masonic or semi-Masonic organizations are known that operated in the 1920s in the USSR: “United Labor Brotherhood”, “Martinist Order”, “Order of the Holy Grail”, “Russian Autonomous Freemasonry”, “ Sunday”, “Hilfernac”, “Cosmic Academy of Sciences”, “Brotherhood of True Service”, “Order of Light”, “Order of the Spirit”, “Order of the Templars and Rosicrucians”. The first eight of them were located in Leningrad. The “Order of Light” united Moscow “brothers and sisters” in its ranks.

Closely associated with the Moscow “Order of Light”, the “Order of the Spirit” and the “Order of the Templars and Rosicrucians” were located in Nizhny Novgorod and Sochi, respectively. The daughter lodges of “Russian Autonomous Freemasonry” were the “Harmony” lodge in Moscow and the “Knights of the Flaming Dove” in Tbilisi.

This essay is mainly devoted to them, in the preparation of which the author used “Masonic files” from the archives of the Ministry of Security of the Russian Federation. The oldest underground Masonic organization of the 1920s. in Leningrad there was the “Martinist Order,” which was a branch of the French Order of the same name.

The first Martinist lodge was organized here back in 1899 by Count Valerian Muravyov-Amursky. The friction that arose between him and the head of the “Martinist Order” in Paris, the famous occultist Papus, led to the fact that around 1905 V. V. Muravyov-Amursky was dismissed from his post as a delegate of the Order in Russia.

In 1910, the Pole Count C.I. was appointed to his place. Chinsky, with whose name the creation of the Russian branch of the “Martinist Order” is actually associated. In 1912, a split occurred among them, and the St. Petersburg part of the Order, led by Grigory Mebes, declared its autonomy or, more simply put, independence from Paris.

The Moscow brothers, led by P.M. and D.P. The Treasurers, on the contrary, remained faithful to him and continued their activities under the leadership of their Parisian superiors until 1920. The St. Petersburg Martinists formed in 1913 a special autonomous chain with Templar overtones, which existed until its defeat in 1926 by the OGPU.

The teachings of the Martinists are based on occultism - a special direction of religious and philosophical thought that strives to understand the deity in an intuitive way, through mental experiences associated with penetration into the other world and communication with its essences.

Unlike its “brothers” from the “Great Orients” of France, Italy and the “Great Orient of the Peoples of Russia” (A.F. Kerensky and Co.), who pursued purely political goals, Martinism orients its members towards internal spiritual work on themselves, their own moral and intellectual improvement. This allows us to classify the Martinists as a special group, the so-called. spiritual or esoteric branch of the World Brotherhood.

The distinctive sign of the Russian Martinists was a circle with a six-pointed star inside, the main colors: white (ribbons) and red (cloaks and masks). Initiations were carried out according to the Masonic example with a somewhat simplified ritual. In 1918 -1921. lectures on the Zohar (part of Kabbalah) were given by G.O. Mebes, according to the history of religion, with a pronounced anti-Christian bias, his wife Maria Nesterova. Boris Astromov introduced listeners to the history of Freemasonry.

In addition to purely theoretical studies, the “school” also carried out practical work to develop in its members a chain of abilities for telepathy and psychometry.

In total, we know the names of 43 people who went through the “school” of G.O. Mebes in 1918-1925, including the famous military historian G.S. Gabaev and poet Vladimir Piast.

However, in general, the composition of the Order was quite ordinary: lawyers, accountants, students, housewives, failed artists and journalists - in a word, ordinary Russian intelligentsia, disillusioned with life and turned into mysticism (St. Petersburg Martinists 1919-1925 - “Domestic History”, 1993, no. 3, pp. 180-182).

An unsightly role in the fate of the Leningrad Martinists was played by Boris Viktorovich Astromov (real name Kirichenko), who was already discussed at the beginning of the essay. Coming from an impoverished noble family, he left for Italy in 1905, where he entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Turin. Here he becomes a student of the famous criminologist Freemason Cesare Lombroso.

In 1909, he was initiated into the Brotherhood (the Ausonia lodge, belonging to the “Grand Orient of Italy”). In 1910, B.V. Astromov returned to Russia, but, according to him, did not take part in the work of Russian Masonic lodges.

His initiation into the “Martinist Order” took place only in 1918 after meeting G.O. Mebes. In 1919 G.O. Mebes appoints B.V. Astromov as the General Secretary of the Order. The friction that arose between them led to the fact that in 1921 B.V. Astromov was forced to leave the Order. It would seem that the paths of the unlucky Secretary General and the Martinists diverged forever.

However, it turned out that this is far from the case. In May 1925 B.V. Astromov unexpectedly appears at the OGPU reception in Moscow and offers his services to cover Freemasonry in the country in exchange for permission to leave the USSR.

B.V. Astromov did not receive permission to emigrate, but his proposal to cover Freemasonry in the USSR interested the security officers, especially since, as it turned out, they had been following him since 1922. After interrogations and conversations with “specialists,” B.V. Astromov arrived in Leningrad at the beginning of June 1925, where he began to “work” under the control of the OGPU.

The increased interest of this institution in B.V. Astromov understands it, since he “laid down” not only the Martinists, but also his own underground organization “Russian Autonomous Freemasonry,” of which he introduced himself to the security officers as the general secretary.

It began back in 1921 with the establishment of B.V. Astromov from dissatisfied G.O. The furniture of the Martinists of their own, independent of him, Masonic lodge “Three Northern Stars”.

Its members were: engineer-architect P.D. Kozyrev, travel engineer M.M. Petrov, former attorney at law V.P. Osten-Driesen, artist N.G. Sverchkov, film artist S.D. Vasiliev, former adjutant to the commander of the Leningrad Military District D.I. Avrova, ARA employee in Leningrad R.A. Kühn, film director G.V. Alexandrov, former conservatory inspector G.Yu. Bruni, ballet dancer E.G. Kyaksht. B.V. Astromov managed to organize four dissident Martinist lodges - “Flaming Lion” (chair master B.P. Osten-Driesen), “Dolphin” (chair master M.M. Petrov, vice-master A.N. Volsky), “Golden Ear” (local masters N.A. Bashmakova and O.E. Nagornova).

In August 1922, representatives of these lodges established the so-called. mother lodge “Grand Lodge of Astraea” and announced the creation of a new organization, independent from the Martinists, “Russian Autonomous Freemasonry”. B.V. became the General Secretary of the “Grand Lodge of Astrea”. Astromov.

As for the position of Grand Master, which was announced to the former director of the imperial theaters V. A. Telyakovsky (1861-1924), it, apparently, remained vacant, since during the investigation Astromov was forced to admit the fact of the “brothers” being a hoax in this question and forging Telyakovsky’s signature on official documents of the lodge.

Based on patents issued by B.V. Astromov, two lodges were opened outside Leningrad: “Harmony” in Moscow, led by former Martinist Sergei Polisadov, and “Knights of the Flaming Dove” in Tiflis, led by B.V. Astromov’s brother Lev Kirichenko -Martov. The ceremony of initiation into the junior degrees of the Order was as follows.

Kneeling before the altar, the neophyte read out a passage from the initiatory notebook corresponding to his degree, after which the presiding officer in the white robes of a magician gave him a brief instruction. The ceremony ended with the neophyte taking an oath, sealed with his signature with blood from a punctured finger.

According to M.N. Sevastyanov, whom B.V. Astromov was initiated into the 30th degree; during this sacrament he had to not only put an imprint of his index finger in blood on his signature under the text of the oath with a vow of silence, but also kiss the hilt of the ritual sword and the six-pointed star on B.V.’s chest. Astromov.

In addition, in accordance with the occult tradition, Astromov also painted an image of a sacred pentagram, i.e., a five-pointed star, on his forehead. Among the Leningrad occultists, the “school” of B.V. Astromov was considered magical, since, according to the general opinion, it allowed those who passed through it to “subjugate” the environment, although, unlike black magic, they did not resort to the services of dark, satanic forces.

This was, in general terms, the organization of B.V. Astromov, whose members found themselves drawn into a major political game by their leader.

Some idea of ​​it is given by a special report prepared by B.V. Astromov and his colleague in the Order M.M. Sevastyanov on August 15, 1925 at the request of the OGPU (it was already mentioned at the beginning of our essay), entirely devoted to possible cooperation between the Bolsheviks and Freemasons . With the help of the OGPU, the report was retyped and sent in two copies to Moscow, and a copy of it was presented in Leningrad to the local branch of the OGPU.

Report by B.V. Astromov was not his personal improvisation on a “Masonic” theme. This was a Masonic answer to specific questions that interested the “specialists” of the OGPU. First of all, the discussion was, naturally, about the possibility of using the Masonic organization in the interests of building communism in the USSR.

Developing this idea, B.V. Astromov emphasized in his report that “of course, Freemasons do not claim open legalization, because it will be more harmful than beneficial to the work.” And then, he noted, they will be able to accuse him of “chekism” or “reptilism,” which will certainly push the Russian intelligentsia away from Freemasonry.

The role of Freemasonry should have been mainly to convince the better part of it of “the regularity of the events being experienced, and therefore their inevitability.”

Here, according to B.V. Astromov, the “real work” of “Autonomous Russian Freemasonry” could be expressed primarily “in strengthening the ideas of internationalism and communism in the legal consciousness of the Russian intelligentsia, as well as in the fight against clericalism.”

Ultimately, B.V. Astromov proposed the following “modus vivendi” to the Soviet government: the Soviet government tolerates the existence of Masonic lodges and cells included in the union of the “General Lodge of Astrea”, without persecuting its members, and the “General Lodge of Astrea”, in turn , undertakes the obligation “not to have any secrets from the government of the USSR and not to be in connection or in an alliance with any foreign Masonic Order.”

The document is, needless to say, remarkable. But what or who is behind it? Did B.V. Astromov himself really come up with the idea of ​​Freemasonization with the tacit support of the government, if not the whole country, then at least of the Russian intelligentsia, or was this idea suggested to him during conversations with “specialists” of the OGPU, one of whom was G.I. . Bokiya - do we already know?

It is not easy to answer this question. The fact is that, declaring during the investigation that he did not pursue any other goals in creating his organization other than “self-improvement and self-discipline” of its members, B.V. Astromov was not entirely sincere.

In any case, B.V. Astromov’s attempts to contact the English Freemason Lombart Derit, a former pastor of the Anglican Church in St. Petersburg, as well as the rector of the University of Turin, the Freemason Gorrini, suggest that his plans went somewhat further than the work “on themselves” of the members communities. This is also evidenced by the persistent efforts of B.V. Astromov, undertaken by him since 1923, to obtain a foreign visa.

As we see, B.V. Astromov had no intention of staying too long on the banks of the Neva. And yet, the very idea of ​​​​possible cooperation between the Masons and the Soviet government does not belong, apparently, to B.V. Astromov. Here, most likely, as it seems to the author of these lines, other forces were involved.

Some light is shed on them by the testimony of the freemason N. N. Beklemishev, who testified that already at the end of 1925 B. V. Astromov told him about his desire to set up a “lodge in Moscow with the knowledge of the Political Directorate in order to work together for rapprochement with the Western powers "

“I remember,” he showed on March 3, 1926 to investigators of the Leningrad OGPU, “that at first Astromov attributed this idea to a certain Barchenko, and then he began to speak on his own behalf and, it seems, traveled to Moscow on this issue.”

Thus, it turns out that the idea of ​​​​using Masonic channels to bring Soviet Russia closer to the Western powers was planted on B.V. Astromov by A.V. Barchenko, who, as we already know, involved G.I. in the Masonic lodge in 1919. Bokiya (it could, however, have been the other way around) was undoubtedly connected with the OGPU.

B.V. Astromov’s right hand was the local master of the Moscow lodge “Harmony” Sergei Palisadov, with the help of whom he managed to “get in touch” with his colleague from the “Grand Orient of France” V.I. Zabrezhnev, who worked in the mid-1920s. in the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR.

Encouraged by this, B.V. Astromov gives S.V. Polisadov the task of contacting A.V. Lunacharsky and the editor of Izvestia, Yu. S. Steklov (Nakhamkis), through the insignia of the order. Astromov himself also did not sit idly by and managed to interest in Freemasonry the head of the department of international settlements in Leningrad, member of the All-Russian Commissariat of Shchb) A.R. Ricks, and persistently sought meetings with the former investigator of the Petrograd Gubchek K.K. Vladimirov.

This inherently provocative activity of B.V. Astromov continued for seven months, until, finally, the security officers working with him realized that their ward was clearly not a figure with whom they could have serious business. A disabled person of the second group (a consequence of a shell shock he received during the Russo-Japanese War), B.V. Astromov enjoyed among the Masons the unenviable reputation of not only an unbalanced, but also a deceitful, morally unclean person. There could be no question of any respect for him on the part of his students.

The entire authority of B.V. Astromov among the “brothers” rested on his inherent power of hypnotic influence on his interlocutor. In connection with this, a belief even spread among some of the brothers that all of Astromov’s magical power lies in seven long hairs on his bald skull under his academic cap, the direction of the ends of which allegedly changes regularly with the change in the direction of astral influence.

Especially a lot of criticism was caused by B.V. Astromov’s practice of forcing his female students to have sexual intercourse with him in perverted forms - the so-called “three-plane initiation”, allegedly widespread in some esoteric lodges in Western Europe.

The “brothers” did not approve of B.V. Astromov’s contacts with the security officers, rightly suspecting him of being a provocateur. The turmoil that arose in connection with this in the “brotherly” environment ultimately ended with the fact that on November 16, 1925, the Astromov lodge of the “Cubic Stone” was closed by the “brothers,” which meant his actual exclusion from the organization he had created. On November 22, B.V. Astromov was presented with an ultimatum to resign from the title of general secretary of the community, which he was forced to accept under the circumstances.

On December 12, 1925, after much delay, B.V. Astromov announced the official removal of the “title” of member of the “General Lodge of Astrea” and General Secretary. This was the end of B.V. Astromov, because as a private individual, there could no longer be any talk of any cooperation with him by the OGPU. Now he could only be of interest to the security officers as a person under investigation.

And indeed, on January 30, 1926, B.V. Astromov was arrested. Already in the House of Pre-trial Detention, on February 11, 1926, he wrote a letter to I.V. Stalin, where we develop the idea of ​​​​using “Red Freemasonry” not only as an association of communist-minded intellectuals, but also as “a form and disguise that could take Comintern".

The unlucky general secretary of “Autonomous Russian Freemasonry” saw himself “as an advisor-consultant” under I.V. Stalin (Leningrad Freemasons and OGPU. - “Russian Past”, 1991, book 1, pp. 275-276). Life, however, had other plans. Immediately after the arrest of B.V. Astromov, the same fate befell the members of the “Russian Autonomous Freemasonry” and the “Martinist Order” led by Mr. O. Mebes in February-March 1926.

On June 18, 1926, by resolution of a special meeting at the board of the OGPG, B.V. Astromov, G.O. Mebes, M.A. Nestyarova, V.F. Gredinger, A.V. Klimenko, S.D. Larionov and other “brothers” and “sisters” - 21 people in total - were convicted, and the unusually lenient sentence against the leaders of these organizations, B.V. Astromov and G.O., is striking. Mebes - only three years of exile. As for the very idea of ​​using the “Masonic card” and “Masonic channels” to establish unofficial contacts with the true masters of Western democracies, this idea, as the already mentioned letter from K. B. Radek to the master of the “Grand Orient of France” shows, has not died.

Among the Masonic occult lodges named by B.V. Astromov during the investigation was the “Order of the Knights of the Holy Grail”, headed by Alexander Gabrielovich Gaucheron-Delyafos, who worked as a controller of the financial control department of Gubfo.

The oldest members of the Order were Delyafos’s close friends: Nikolai Tsukanov and Mikhail Bityutko, who together with him formed the leadership “triangle” of the organization. Among other “brothers” and “sisters”; artist M. A. Poiret-Purgold, theater artist A. I. Vogt, Leningrad State University student Natalya Tarnovskaya, musician A. A. Kinel, archaeologist G. V. Mikhnovsky, composer and musicologist Yu. A. Singer.

In fact, the Order arose no earlier than 1916, although the first initiations into it were made by A.G. Delafos back in 1914 (poet Dmitry Kokovtsev and Nikolai Tsukanov). The fact is that by this time Delafos had returned from a trip to France, where he was apparently initiated, although during the investigation he denied this fact.

The officially declared goal of the Order - “improving the mental and moral abilities” of the knights of the Holy Grail as they move up the ladder of degrees (there were seven in total) - was not original and was akin to the goals declared by other Masonic communities of all times.

The legend of the Grail - the cup into which the blood of the crucified Christ supposedly flowed after the Roman centurion Longinus pierced his chest with a spear - is as revered among Freemasons as the myth of Adoniram, the builder of Solomon's Temple. A. G. Delafos himself told his students about the existence of a certain ideal center of the Holy Grail in a dilapidated knight's castle in Brittany in France.

The mystical-religious philosophy preached by Delafos has its roots in medieval sectarianism known in literature as Manichaeism, a doctrine professed by the heretical movements of the Cathars, Waldensians and Albigensians.

In addition to the cup, the symbolism of the Order also included a cross and a luminous pentagram. On May 15, 1927, A.G. Delafos and 9 other knight brothers were arrested. The investigation against them did not last long, and on July 8 of the same year they were convicted. The leaders of the Order suffered the most severe punishment: A.G. Gaucheron-Delafosse - ten years in the camps, and five - M.M. Bityutko and N.I. Tsukanov.

In addition to the cup, the symbolism of the Order also included a cross and a luminous pentagram. On May 15, 1927, A.G. Delafos and 9 other knight brothers were arrested. The investigation against them did not last long, and on July 8 of the same year they were convicted.

The leaders of the Order suffered the most severe punishment: A.G. Gaucheron-Delafosse - ten years in the camps, and five - M.M. Bityutko and N.I. Tsukanov.

The position of the OGPU regarding the occultists had already been determined by this time, which immediately affected the fate of other Masonic groups operating in Leningrad in the 1920s. One of them was the “Brotherhood of True Service”, known, however, under another name - “Esoteric Lodge”.

This organization was led by the former nobleman Georgy Anatolyevich Tyufyaev. It began back in 1922 with the founding of a small occult circle by G. A. Tyufyaev and his friend V. G. Labazin. In 1925, when the size of the circle reached several dozen people, it was transformed into the “Brotherhood of True Service,” which set as its goal the theoretical and practical study of esoteric phenomena.

At this time, the unemployed drama artist V. N. Ochnev-Lefevre, who headed one of its three lodges, began to play a prominent role in the Brotherhood. Members of the “Brotherhood” explained the misfortunes that befell Russia with the establishment in 1917 of the rule of the Antichrist in our country, dragging the Russian people into the abyss of the “Black Triangle.”

The main occupation of its members, in addition to reading prayers and traditional “free love” for mystics in order to harmonize relations between “brothers” and “sisters” (usually young people), was spiritualism. During regularly held spiritualistic sessions, the leaders of the lodges (G. A. Tyufyaev, V. N. Ochnev-Lefevre and V. G. Labazin) conveyed orders and prophecies of the archangels Raphael and Gabriel and even summoned the souls of the dead, including Nicholas II and a number of other political figures who predicted the imminent death of Soviet power.

Members of the “Brotherhood” were not recommended to work in Soviet institutions and take part in the activities of public organizations, so as not to contribute in this way to strengthening the power of the Antichrist, by which they meant Bolshevism.

In May 1927, almost all members of the Brotherhood (33 people in total) were arrested. The investigation lasted for more than a year, until finally, by the resolution of the Special Meeting at the OGPU Collegium on August 21, 1928, their fate was determined: G.A. Tyufyaev, as the leader of the community, received 10 years in concentration camps, V.N. Ochnev-Lefevre and V.G. Labazin - five each.

Ordinary members of the Brotherhood were given more lenient punishments. Along with occult communities of an openly Masonic nature, religious and philosophical circles and groups became widespread among the intelligentsia in the 1920s, the pro-Masonic essence of whose activities, although beyond doubt, is far from being so obvious to the uninitiated.

The largest of this kind of underground organizations of the Leningrad intelligentsia in those years was “Resurrection”. It began in December 1917 with a meeting of the initiative group of Public Library employees at the apartment of the philosopher G. P. Fedotov. In addition to G.P. Fedotov himself, his colleagues, also library employees, were present here: N.P. Antsiferov and A.A. Meyer with their wives, and L.V. Preobrazhenskaya. “We read the prayer “Our Father,” recalled A. A. Meyer’s wife, Ksenia Polovtseva, in this connection, “we finished with tea and refreshments. We decided to continue to gather in the same way.”

The fact that the circle was started by employees of the Public Library was, of course, not an accident, since already during the war years, through the efforts of famous Freemasons Alexander Meyer and Alexander Braudo (Russian Political Freemasonry 1906-1918 - “History of the USSR”, 1990, no. 1, p. 142) it was turned into one of the strongholds of “vocal masonry” in St. Petersburg. As Ksenia Polovtseva testified during interrogations at the OGPU, it was G.P. Fedotov who stood at the origins of “Resurrection”; he also developed, in her words, the “detailed theses” that formed the basis for the work of the circle.

Nevertheless, very soon the Freemason A. A. Meyer and K. A. Polovtseva herself emerged as leaders next to him, which, as we will see, had far-reaching consequences for the organization. In ideological terms, the circle of G. P. Fedotov - A. A. Meyer was a continuator of the traditions of the left wing of the Religious and Philosophical Society, represented by such names as 3.N. Gippius, D.S. Merezhkovsky, A.V. Kartashev, V.P. Sventsitsky, E.P. Ivanov, A.A. Meyer and others. The St. Petersburg branch of the Society has always been to the left of the Moscow one.

Its most prominent members are the Masons 3.N. Gippius and D.S. Merezhkovsky - at one time sharply condemned “Vekhi” and called on the people for revolution. Members of the Society expelled V.V. Rozanov for recognizing his articles on the “Beilis case” and the Jewish question in Russia as “anti-Semitic”, and Z.N. Gippius fiercely protested against “Russian chauvinism” during the First World War and, in particular, against the renaming of St. Petersburg to Petrograd.

Unlike their Moscow colleagues, the St. Petersburg members of the RFO consciously sought to more closely link their activities with the contemporary social movement, placing at the center of their attention such important problems for Russian reality at the beginning of the century as bridging the gap between the intelligentsia and the people, between religion and social revolution.

The core of the circle in the first years of its existence consisted of: G.P. Fedotov, A.A. Meyer, K.A. Polovtseva, M.V. Pigulevskaya, P.F. Smotritsky, N.P. Antsiferov. The historian I.M. also took an active part in it. Grevs, philosopher S.A. Alekseev-Askoldov, relative of S.M. Kirova (his wife’s sister) old Bolshevik S.L. Marcus, N.I. Konrad, A.A. Ghisetti, N.A. Kryzhanovskaya, literary critic M.M. Bakhtin, his brother V.V. Bakhtin, D.D. Mikhailov, anthroposophist N.V. Mokridin, bibliographer L.F. Shidlovsky, pianist M.V. Yudina, naval officer S.A. Tilichev. “This circle,” noted E.P. Fedotov, - could not in any way be called not only church, but even Orthodox.

Three Protestants, two Catholics who converted from Orthodoxy, several unbaptized Jews and the majority of Orthodox, but Orthodox by birth and attitude, and for now standing outside the Sacrament” (Fedotov G.P. Face of Russia. - Paris. 1988, p. 37).

The circle, apparently, did not have any strictly defined political orientation. Among its members there were 2 communists, 1 monarchist, but the majority hoped for the evolution of Soviet power. The path that the “circle members” decided to follow was the path of widespread propaganda by them of the idea of ​​​​religious revival, which alone, in their opinion, could save Russia.

At the end of 1919, at one of the meetings of the organization, which by this time had grown to 25-30 people, it received the name “Resurrection” as a symbol of the resurrection and revival of Russia. By 1919, the core of the circle (about 11 people) became the Brotherhood of Christ and Freedom.

Unlike the rest, who continued to meet on Tuesdays (“secondaries”), members of the Brotherhood began to meet in a narrow group on Sundays. This continued until 1923, when a break occurred between the circle members.

The formal reason for it was the report of G.P. Fedotov “On the Sacrifice,” read by him on March 6, 1923, after which some of the “secondary” students stated that these questions were “too alien to them, that they were afraid and probably would not come again.” After that, “Tuesdays” soon stopped. As for the “resurrections,” they continued until December 1928.

The main task that the circle participants set for themselves was to prevent the Bolsheviks from “destroying Christian culture.”

According to N.L. Antsiferova, members of the circle, sharing the economic and social program of the Bolsheviks, at the same time considered it clearly insufficient for “renewing humanity and building communism,” since it ignored religion. In other words, they wanted to connect the incompatible, hoping that the time would come “when May 1 meets Easter Sunday.”

“My main position on the issue of religion and revolution boils down to the following: religion is not a private or national matter,” noted A.A. Meyer. - Religion cannot be indifferent to the historical paths of mankind. The Christian religion, in principle, affirms the overcoming of individualism, and this is the main way of connecting Christianity with the social revolution.”

Members of the circle, especially in the first period of its activity, had a negative attitude towards Orthodoxy and the Orthodox Church, believing that within its framework the free development of Christian ideas was impossible. The reports read at the meetings of the circle in 1921-1922 also corresponded to this: about asceticism, about church affairs, about Jewry, about communism, about property, about Basil the Great, etc.

“For me, Tuesdays,” noted K.A. Polovtsev, “this is the laboratory where the ideology of the modern intelligentsia will be prepared, which will take into account both religiosity and communism.” In 1920-1921 the majority of the intelligentsia thought so. Soviet reality soon forced them, if not to change their beliefs, then at least to make serious adjustments to them.

“In my time,” N.V. wrote in this regard. Pigulevskaya on November 7, 1922, professed the following conviction: communism is building a building, and it is building without a cross, but when it is completed to the end, we will make domes, put up a cross, and everything will be fine. That's what I thought. It's different now. I know they don't make churches out of town halls. Now a synagogue of Satan is being built, from which, no matter how many bells you hang, nothing can be done.”

In the spring of 1920, the process of returning the “secondaries” to the fold of the Orthodox Church began. The initiators of the circle still remained outside the Sacrament, but the Jews were baptized and came under the influence of their Orthodox priests, who denounced A.A. Meyer in “Merezhkov Heresies”.

This eventually forced A.A. himself. Meyer also return to the fold of the Orthodox Church. With the closure in 1923 of the “Free Philosophical Association” (Wolfila), which was used as a meeting place for members of the circle and the selection of suitable candidates for its replenishment, and the deportation of its most active members abroad (L.P. Karsavin, I.I. Lapshin, N.O. Lossky and others) the possibilities of legal activities of “Resurrection” were sharply reduced.

In order not to attract the attention of the OGPU, at the beginning of 1924 it was decided not to all gather at once, but one by one, in small groups, at the apartments of K.A. Polovtseva, G.P. Fedotova, P.F. Smotritsky, P.D. Vasilyeva, G.V. and N.V. Pigulevskikh. In 1925 G.P. Fedotov leaves abroad, and the leadership of “Resurrection” completely passes into the hands of A.A. Major and K.A. Polovtseva.

On her initiative, already in 1925, a decision was made to develop a whole network of circles among school youth to teach them according to the Law of God, among which can be noted the circle of teacher E.M. Vakhrusheva in the first-level school (b. Stoyunina), in which children 12-13 years old studied. “Resurrection” was neither a purely religious, nor even an Orthodox organization, since among its members there were people of various faiths.

At the same time, it was not a harmless association of circles of intelligent people connected by a common cultural interest - we can, of course, only talk about a Masonic structure. A.A. himself hinted at this. Meyer back in 1922, who called on his colleagues “not to seize power... not to build parties, but to create b. m. Orders that would awaken an idea in their lives, which would then have an effect outside.”

The pro-Masonic character of “Resurrection” is reflected in the symbolism of this organization: “Luminous triangle with the All-Seeing Eye of Providence.”

On the initiative of A.A. Meyer and K.A. Polovtsian circle meetings opened with a prayer (there were two in total), into which words about freedom of spirit were inserted. As for the conversations in a circle, they began with a mutual shake of hands by all those gathered - the famous Masonic chain. “Meyer and Polovtseva,” emphasized N.P. Antsiferov, “tried in every possible way to give the circle meetings the character of a ritual.”

The clear desire of A.A. Meyer’s transformation of the organization into a Masonic lodge led at the end of 1928 to the fact that some of the members of “Resurrection” were forced to break with him. This event was preceded by an attempt by the organization's leaders to first identify the people closest to them in spirit.

For this purpose, K.A. Polovtsev with the help of T.N. Arnson developed the following theses:

1) we are all church people;

2) Christ and freedom;

3) the intersection of religious and social issues;

4) about the culture of church people.

On December 2, 1928, the theses were read out by T.N. Arnson at a circle meeting in K.A.’s apartment. Polovtseva. Present; A.A. Meyer, P.F. Smotritsky, K.A. Polovtseva, E.P. Ivanov and others - only 10 people. During the discussion of the issue, some of those present (V.V. Bakhtin, E.P. Ivanov, M.V. Yudina) expressed their disagreement with the theses and left the meeting.

There was a split among the members of Resurrection. This was, as subsequent events showed, the beginning of his end. By this time A.A. Meyer and his colleagues were already under the surveillance of the OGPU. On December 8, 1928, V.V. was arrested. Bakhtin, December 11 A.A. Meyer, and after them other members of the organization.

The interrogations began. The investigation into the “Resurrection” case continued until May 1929, and in early August the verdict was announced. By resolution of the OGPU board, most of the accused were sentenced to various terms in concentration camps and exile to remote areas of the country.

K.A. received seven years in concentration camps. Polovtseva, five - A.P. Alyavdin and N.V. Pigulevskaya, three years - N.V. Izmailov. The most severe punishment - ten years in concentration camps - was determined by A.A. Meyer and captain of the second rank, naval officer B.M. Nazarov.

However, initially A.A. Meyer was sentenced to death and only thanks to the intervention of his old friend A.S. Enukidze it was replaced by a concentration camp. Organization A.A. Meyer was a kind of ideological and organizational center that coordinated and directed the activities of smaller intellectual circles and groups.

One of these branches of Meyer’s “Resurrection” was the circle of the philosopher Ivan Mikhailovich Andrievsky, better known as “Hilfernak”, which stands for Artistic-Literary-Philosophical-Religious-Scientific Academy. It began in 1921.

As in the A.A. Meyer, in the center of attention of the members of the circle (employee of the Phonetic Institute I.E. Anichkov, former chairman of the “All-Russian Union of Christian Youth” A.P. Obnovlensky, teacher of the Pedagogical Institute P.P. Meshkov, students A.A. Mikhailov, E.K. Smirnova, E.K. Rosenberg, D.S. Likhachev, etc.) there were questions of a religious and philosophical nature.

Lectures were given to members of the circle by: S.A. Alekseev (Askoldov), V.L. Komarovich, A.P. Alyavdin and a number of other philosophers and philologists of Leningrad, famous at that time, who developed the ideas of the spiritual revival of the Russian people and the “renewal” of the Orthodox Church. Both visitors to “Resurrection” and visitors to “Hilfernak”, as evidenced by D.S., a participant in these meetings. Likhachev, there were, “in general, the same” people (Likhachev D.S. Letter to the editor. - “Petersburg Panorama”, 1992, No. 6, p. 6.)

On August 1, 1927, “Hilfernak” was transformed into the “Brotherhood of Seraphim of Sarov.” Already at the first meeting of the circle, which took place in I.M.’s apartment. Andrievsky, the provocateur Sergei Ionkin appeared.

The fate of the circle was predetermined: at the beginning of 1928 the first arrests followed, and it ceased to exist.

The same fate befell the Space Academy of Sciences (CAS), a kind of branch of the Brotherhood formed in the spring of 1926. Among the members of the “Space Academy” were P.P. Meshkov, A.V. Selivanov, V.T. Rakov, A.S. Terekhovko, N.E. Speransky, A.M. Mihankov, 3.K. Rosenberg and still living academician D.S. Likhachev.

The peculiarity of the circle was that from the outside everything in it was like in a real Academy of Sciences: its own president, permanent secretary, academicians, and even the traditional large and small conference rooms. In ideological terms, the “Space Academy of Sciences” is close to the organization of A.A. Meyer.

On February 8, 1928, its members were arrested. In total, 40 people were involved in the case of the Brotherhood of Seraphim of Sarov and the Space Academy, of whom thirty were convicted. The most severe punishment - 5 years in concentration camps - was suffered by the leaders and most active members of these organizations - I.M. Andrievsky, 3.K. Rosenberg, D.S. Likhachev, I.E. Anichkov and others - only 9 people.

Others were sent to remote areas of the country for a period of three years. Thus, it was apparently over with Masonic or at least Masonic circles in Leningrad. Another thing is Moscow, where back in the early 1920s a large Masonic organization of the Templar-Rosicrucian persuasion, known as the “Order of Light” or the A.A. Lodge, built its nest. Solonovich.

At the origins of this organization was Apollo Andreevich Karelin (1863-1926), better known in his circle under the esoteric name as Knight Santey. A popular writer on topics from Russian communal life, he began as a populist, later moved to the Social Revolutionaries, and by 1905 he had finally emerged as an anarchist. Having emigrated abroad, he lectured at the Higher School of Social Sciences in Paris, organized by Russian Freemasons, where he was apparently initiated into “free masonry.”

Karelin returned to Russia in the fall of 1917 with a reputation as a theorist of anarcho-communism. Here he was immediately introduced to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and began vigorous activity: the All-Russian Federation of Anarchists and Anarcho-Communists was established, the Black Cross (an organization that provided assistance to anarchists) and the famous anarchist club in Leontyevsky Lane were created.

Back in 1919, Karelin expressed the idea of ​​​​the desirability of carrying out anarchist work “through some Order,” and already in 1920, the archbishop of the “Order of the Spirit”, Moscow professor Boris Mikhailovich Zubakin (1894-1938), initiated the first adherents into it: director Sergei Eisenstein, artist L. A. Nikitin, actor of the first studio of the Moscow Art Theater Mikhail Chekhov, poet P. A. Arensky, student Valentin Smyshlyaev. In 1921, Moscow Art Theater actor Yuri Zavadsky and his wife became knights of the Order of the Spirit. In the spring of 1924, the circle was reorganized into the “Order of Light,” whose leader (commander) was A.S. Paul is a teacher at the Economic Institute named after. Plekhanov.

The brothers who had previously been initiated into the “Order of the Spirit” automatically moved to the rank of its senior knights of the highest degrees. There were seven of them in total, and each of them corresponded to a specific order legend; about the Atlanteans, whose descendants allegedly lived in underground labyrinths in Ancient Egypt, about the Aeons, who took on the role of intermediaries between the world of Spirits and people, about the Holy Grail - the sacred cup with the blood of Christ, etc.

The rite of initiation into the Order was simple: after familiarizing the initiate with the corresponding order legend, the leader of the circle lightly struck his shoulder with his hand, thus imitating a blow with the flat of a sword during the initiation of a medieval knight, and at this point the ceremony was considered completed.

The symbol of the order was an eight-pointed blue star - the personification of the superstellar world of eight dimensions. The distinctive sign of the knights of the second and subsequent degrees was a white rose - personifying the sublimity and purity of the thoughts of the “brothers”.

The Order’s subsidiary organization in Moscow was the “Temple of Arts” lodge, where the artistic and artistic circles of the Freemasonry Moscow intelligentsia were grouped.

Branches of the Moscow organization - the “Order of the Spirit” and the “Order of the Templars and Rosicrucians” - operated in Nizhny Novgorod and Sochi. The main source of replenishment of the Order’s personnel, whose members during these years were N.K. Bogomolov, D.A. Bem, L.I. Deykun, G.I. Ivakinskaya, A.E. Smolentseva, N.A. Lodyzhensky, N.I. Preferences, I.V. Pokrovskaya, V.I. Sno, A.V. Uyttenhoven, his wife I.N. Uyttenhoven-Ilovaiskaya and others, the Moscow creative intelligentsia still remained: artists, musicians, writers.

However, there were also dropout students - Ilya Rytavtsev and even former naval officer Evgeny Smirnov. The role of the headquarters of the “Order of Light” was played by the Kropotkin Museum in Moscow, opened on December 9, 1928.

The “brother knights” themselves viewed their organization as a continuation of the work of the medieval Templars - a spiritual monastic order founded in 1118 in Jerusalem by nine French knights led by Hugh de Payen and Geoffroy de Saint-Auterre.

However, in fact, the ideological principles and ethical standards underlying the “Order of Light” make its “brother knights” related not so much to the medieval Templars, but to the “free masons” of modern and contemporary times.

Hostility towards Orthodoxy and traditional Russian national values, the search for some new philosophy designed to synthesize the anarchist worldview with the worldview of early Christianity, widespread propaganda of the need to organize communes, artels and unions of an anarchist persuasion leave no doubt about the Masonic nature of the “Order of Light”.

This is exactly how his contemporaries perceived him. The testimony of the Bolshoi Theater violinist 3.M deserves attention. Mazel about his visit together with M.A. Chekhov to “meetings of the Masonic lodge in Moscow.” The head of the “Brotherhood of Seraphim of Sarov” in Leningrad, Ivan Andrievsky, spoke about Solonovich’s Masonic lodge, to which he was invited in 1924 by the Moscow “brothers”, during interrogations at the OGPU.

In this regard, the clumsy attempts of the Moscow journalist Andrei Nikitin to obscure the Masonic character of this organization should be recognized as inappropriate and without proper justification (Science and Religion, 1993, No. 6, p. 55). Their criticism of Bolshevism was clearly carried out from a Masonic position, since in the revolution they saw not the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” but “the spiritual and social transformation of man, the revelation of all his potential strengths and abilities, the victory of Light over Darkness, Good over Evil.”

The discouraging realities of Soviet reality not only put them in opposition to the Bolshevik regime, but also showed the fallacy of previous ideas about the quick and, most importantly, easy implementation of the Masonic ideal. “Man,” wrote A. A. Solonovich, “is the “Holy Sepulcher,” which can only be liberated by new crusades of the Spirit, for which new knightly orders are needed - a new intelligentsia, if you like, which will base its irresistible will to real freedom, equality and brotherhood of all in humanity.”

By this time, Alexey Aleksandrovich Solonovich was a teacher at the Moscow Higher Technical School. Bauman - was the most famous theorist of mystical anarchism in his circle. His lectures at the Kropotkin Museum, where he headed the anarchist section, or at home, were a great success among listeners.

After the death of A.A. Karelina March 20, 1926 A.A. Solonovich becomes the spiritual leader not only of the Order, but of the entire movement. The largest theoretical work of A.A. Solonovich is a three-volume study “Bakunin and the cult of Yaldobaoth” (one of the incarnations of Satan), which circulated in typewritten form from hand to hand among members of the community. A.A. Solonovich was disappointed with the results of the October Revolution of 1917.

The Bolsheviks, he argues in his book, trampled on the ideals of October, “betrayed”, “strangled” the revolution, the last outbreaks of which he considered the Kronstadt rebellion and the peasant uprisings of 1921-1922.

“In the footsteps of Yoaldobaoth,” warned A. A. Solonovich, “larvae are crawling, and demonic dirt is dirtying the souls of people and their lives.”

Like any Freemason, he had a nihilistic attitude towards the Russian Orthodox Church, which, in his opinion, needed not only cleansing from the dogmatism supposedly inherent in it, but also radical reform. The OGPU definitely had its own informant among the order. On the night of September 11–12, 1930, most of the Order members were arrested.

The accusation was quite in the spirit of the times: anti-Soviet activity. Three years of exile - such was the fate of the majority of those arrested, which the OGPU board determined for them by its resolution of January 13, 1931. A number of people, such as high-ranking knights Yuri Zavadsky and Sergei Eisenstein, were completely exempted from punishment.

However, the leaders of the order (A.A. Solonovich, A.A. Nikitin, N.I. Preferences, V.I. Sno) were treated strictly. They all received five years in camps. It is noteworthy that one of the members of the board that condemned the Moscow knights was Gleb Bokiy, an expert in Masonic affairs already known to us. There is no doubt that the OGPU closely monitored the processes taking place among the intelligentsia and promptly suppressed attempts at organized spiritual resistance.

However, the main reason for the failure of such resistance is not so much the omnipotence, often imaginary, of the OGPU, but rather the false, Masonic in its essence, spiritual guidelines of the intelligentsia itself, taking her further and further away from the Russian national soil, the Russian national ideal. The results of this evolution of our intellectual and creative elite are evident today.

Victor Brachev

On the Internet you can read different versions of the origin of the name “Yandex”. Thus, the most logical, but not entirely correct, is the opinion that the name of the Internet company “Yandex” was originally derived from the phrase “language index”. This version seems quite plausible in the light that the future founders of Yandex became the first programmers to write competitive software for searching documents in the language. By the way, the developments of CompTek (the progenitor of Yandex) are still used by leading Russian companies to this day.

The history of the creation of the name "Yandex"

The name “Yandex” itself originated within the walls of the CompTek company, where the first search algorithms were written, which served as the basis for the launch of the No. 1 search engine in Russia. The name “Yandex” was coined by the company’s founders Ilya Segalovich and Arkady Volozh. In an attempt to find the most sonorous, memorable and concise name, parts of words from the English phrase yet another indexer were selected, which literally means “another indexer”. In search technologies, an indexer is a program that “roams” the Internet and reads text information from website pages. Processed arrays of information are placed in an index - a database of pages already viewed and saved by the indexer program. With the help of search ranking algorithms, the user is given a link to the information he is interested in, based on the search query that he entered on the main page of the search engine or in the omnibox of his browser.

Initial use of the name "Yandex"

At the very beginning, the name “Yandex” was used for a software product that allows you to find information of interest on your computer’s hard drive. The technology was approximately the same as what a user sees when entering a query into the Windows search bar or when using various types of professional reference books purchased on disk. The ease of perception of the word “Yandex” by ear, its sonority and originality influenced the fact that on September 23, 1997, a new Internet search engine “Yandex” was announced under this name; by the way, it was not the only one in Russia at that time. In memory of the first developments in the field of search and the very birth of the search engine, the Yandex company annually holds the Yet Another Conference, the name of which is an allusion to the decoding of the company's name.

Yandex, Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, Mail.ru are the largest resources on the Runet. But in practice, the “National Search System” and “Russian” social networks are controlled by owners who are not of Russian nationality.

Who owns VKontakte?

VKontakte LLC was created on January 19, 2007. According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, the founders were son and father Vyacheslav and Mikhail Mirilashvili (60% and 10% of the authorized capital, respectively), Lev Leviev (10%) and Pavel Durov (20%).

Reference. The first profile registered in the Vkontakte.ru system was Durov, the third was his former classmate Vyacheslav (Itzhak) Mirilashvili, who then moved to Israel due to threats and graduated from Tufts University, USA in 2006.

Lev Leviev - born in Volgograd in 1984, studied at the same school with Mirilashvili in Tel Aviv.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Mirilashvili (Misha Kutaissky) - born in 1960 in Georgia. He has lived in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) since 1978. A pediatrician by training. Married, two children. Religion: Judaism. This “authoritative entrepreneur” ran the gambling business in Moscow and St. Petersburg, was the president of the Russian Video company, sponsored the elections of Starovoytova, and replaced the president of the Russian Jewish Society, Vladimir Gusinsky (Mirilashvili has dual citizenship of Russia and Israel). Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Petromir holding (pharmaceuticals, chemistry, medicine, furniture production, construction, real estate, new technologies, restaurant and hotel business); President of CONTI Corporation (entertainment, gambling and club business); co-owner of the St. Petersburg Open tennis tournament (ATP-Tour series, the largest in the world). He was a member of the management of LUKoil-North-West Oil Products.

In 2001, Mirilashvili was accused of kidnapping two people who kidnapped his father. The murder charge was later dropped, and the prison term was reduced from 12 to 8 years. In his first interview given after his release, he stated that he had become “even more Jewish than before.”

In 2013, together with M. Freeman, G. Khan and other Jewish oligarchs, he went on a journey along the “road of Moses”. Member of the board of the Russian Jewish Congress.

News 2013: The caravan of Russian billionaires will pass the roads of Moses

A dozen famous Russian and foreign businessmen, many of whom are worth billions of dollars, will make a walking pilgrimage through the desert with a final stop in Jerusalem. It will symbolize the exodus of the Jewish people from the land of Egypt under the leadership of Moses, the press service of the Russian Jewish Congress reports.

Among the pilgrims will be co-owner of Alfa Group Mikhail Fridman, executive director of TNK-VRGerman Khan, co-owner of the social network VKontakte Mikhail Mirilashvili and many others.

To simulate the passage of Jews through the desert, businessmen will be deprived of mobile communications and other benefits of civilization. At the same time, they will be wearing the clothes of the ancient Jews - tunics and sandals.

Participants in the pilgrimage will carry a supply of food and water on camels, and prepare kosher matzo along the way.

Financial indicators

VKontakte is Russia's largest social network, with a monthly audience of 31.5 million, according to TNS estimates. The company's revenue in 2012 amounted to 4.8 billion rubles.

Leviev and Mirilashvili separately enriched themselves by creating the Selectel company in 2007 and opening a data center to meet VKontakte’s needs for data processing and storage. The social network completely switched to it by 2009 and, until the launch of its own data center in 2012, depended on a single service provider. This allowed Selectel to become a large company with 11% of the data center market by number of server racks by the end of 2011.

In 2010, Leviev and Vyacheslav Mirilashvili created the Vaizra Capital venture fund with representative offices in New York, Israel and St. Petersburg to invest in technology companies at any stage of development, investing in a number of other people’s projects: video hosting Coub, hotel booking service Ostrovok.ru, publishing house "Committee" (includes the publication about the IT industry "Zuckerberg Will Call", social media TJournal and startup community Spark), online consultant for websites Livetex, community for extreme sports enthusiasts Riders. At the end of 2014, the general fund portfolio included about 30 projects. In August 2014, Leviev announced a personal investment of €500 thousand in a startup jointly with Boaz Behar - an API platform for Bitcoin developers BlockTrail.

Leviev and Mirilashvili are investors in Yuri Milner's funds DST Global II and DST Global IV

Property transfers

As of February 1, 2008, 100% of Vkontakte was transferred to the offshore Doraview Limited, registered in the British Virgin Islands.

The first external investor was the Digital Sky Technologies fund of Yu. Milner (son of Boris/Benzion Milner, who ruined the world's first computer network developed in the USSR by the remarkable Russian academician Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov), which bought a quarter of the social network in 2007 and later transferred it to the balance sheet of Mail.Ru Group. Gradually, Mail.ru Group began to buy back shares of the VKontakte network. By purchasing another 7.5% of shares. So both Mirilashvili sold Mail.ru - 30%, Leviev - 4%, and Durov - 8% of the company's shares.

In 2011, Mail.ru Group increased its share in the VKontakte social network from 32.49% to 39.99%. The company exercised an option to buy out 7.44% from the founders of the network at a price of $111.7 million. By the end of the year, Mail.ru Group already owned 39.99% of the social network, and the remaining 60% was divided between Durov (12%), Leviev (8 %) and the Mirilashvili family (40%). The transaction was carried out through JPMorgan, which describes the shareholder structure.

In April 2013, Mirilashvili’s share was purchased by the United Capital Partners fund, which is headed by Ilya Sherbovich, who is on the boards of directors of such large companies as Rosneft, Transneft, and Federal Grid Company. Forbes devoted a special article to how he circumvented legal restrictions and sold Gazprom shares to foreign companies. At the same time, it is shown that Shcherbovich is a long-time partner of the Russian government, while engaging in raiding and money laundering through offshore companies.

On January 25, 2014, Durov announced that he sold all his remaining shares (12%) to his friend Ivan Tavrin, director of Megafon.

In September 2014, the VKontakte company sold the remaining 48.01% stake in the social network Mail.ru Group for $1.47 billion.

Thus, Mail.ru Group became the owner of 100% of the shares of the VKontakte social network, since both Megafon and Mail.ru, in turn, belong to the oligarch Alisher Usmanov, who was convicted of extortion and rape in 1980.

The son of the Tashkent city prosecutor, Usmanov, was sentenced in August 1980 by the Military Tribunal of the Turkestan Military District to eight years in a forced labor camp. And in 1986, Usmanov was released on parole, and subsequently, through the family of President Islam Karimov, he cleared his criminal record. In 2000, the billionaire was officially rehabilitated by the Supreme Court of Uzbekistan, and at the same time, the Uzbek archives stopped storing documents compromising Usmanov.

As a result, Usmanov's past has changed over the years. Earlier in Uzbekistan, according to the British Ambassador to Tashkent Craig Murray, most of his Uzbek interlocutors were well aware that Alisher Usmanov was convicted under several episodes and several articles of the Criminal Code, including for gang rape that occurred during an alcoholic party of the children of senior republican officials.

According to data that was constantly published in the press before the purge of Usmanov’s past, the second episode had military specifics - the future businessman, together with his friend, the son of the deputy chairman of the KGB of the Uzbek SSR, the detective of the special departments of the KGB Bakhadyr Nasymov, extorted 30 thousand rubles from army officer Andrei Mayorov.

The arrest of the son ended in the collapse of the career of the father of one of the convicts, KGB Major General, Deputy Chairman of the KGB of Uzbekistan Muhammad-Amin Nasymov. Another close friend of the current billionaire, with whom they spent their lives together in Tashkent, was the son of the future first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan and chairman of the Council of Nationalities of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR Rafik Nishanov, Sobir Nishanov. Now he is employed by Usmanov on the board of directors of OJSC Telecominvest, through which the oligarch controls the mobile operator Megafon.

Alisher Usmanov now claims that he was convicted only of “fraud and theft.” The convict promised to publish a copy of the court verdict, even in its newest version, but he never dared to do so. In addition, the oligarch says that he became a victim of political repression in the totalitarian USSR, since his father, being the prosecutor of Tashkent, fell under the “wheel of checks of Gdlyan and Ivanov.”

Usmanov’s wife, born into a family of Samarkand Jews, Irina Viner-Usmanova, who was in charge of the Russian gymnastics team, brought V. Putin together with A. Kabaeva. After which Usmanov actively began buying up all media resources of any importance. It got to the point that even Habrahabr was under his control for some time.

Oppenheimers are the biggest owners of Yandex

A company registered in Russia as Yandex LLC, but 100% of the authorized capital of which is owned by the joint stock company Yandex N.V. registered in the Netherlands.

Ownership structure of the company "Yandex N.V." as of March 31, 2013 (as a percentage of total shares) is shown as follows:

The company's two halakhic founders:

Arkady Volozh (10.5%);

Ilya Segalovich (2.5% - passed to the heirs after his death in 2013).

In addition to them, the remaining shares are owned by:

- “Baring Vostok” - 9.9% (Dutch bank ING Group, part of the Inter-Alpha group, Rothschild);

Other directors - 2.1%;

Other employees - 4.7%;

Other “Pre-IPO” shareholders - 3.3%;

- “public investors” - 67%.

On the website of the American exchange Nasdaq.com, it is not difficult to find information about who these “public investors” are - or rather, the main owners of the Yandex search engine, which many perceive as a “Russian” search engine:

The Openheimer Foundation - the foundation of the old clan of moneylenders and stone dealers, in which Amschel Moses "Bauer" (who later took the pseudonym "Rothschild") learned the "basics of business" - from Jacob Oppenheimer; whose uncle Joseph ben Isaac Suess Oppenheimer (1698-1738), who became a “court Jew” under the Duke of Wüttemberg Karl Alexander, having dragged his accomplices into the “elite”, printed inferior coins, sold privileges and stole to such an extent that he was hanged and exhibited in in an iron cage until the birds ate him.

Total: 56.51%. Those. controlling stake. How did global bankers end up with them?

According to the official version, in April 2000, the ru-Net Holdings fund (Leonid Boguslavsky-Kagan associates) acquired 35.72% of Yandex shares.

In 2009, the then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev initiated the purchase by Sberbank of a “golden share” of Yandex “in order to avoid an enterprise of national importance falling into the hands of foreigners.”

However, already in 2011, Yandex entered the American NASDAQ exchange and sold about 16.25% of shares.

In May 2012, a bill “on amendments to the law on foreign investment” appeared in the State Duma. It envisioned expanding the list of strategic enterprises through Internet companies that provide socially significant services and are recognized as national transmitters of information.

The criterion was at least 20 million users per month for six months, and “socially significant” services meant: searching for information on the Internet, e-mail, services for downloading, storing and viewing audio and video, reference services, file sharing services and “other communication services”. services on the Internet. Therefore, when dealing with shares of large Internet companies, a special procedure was provided for the purchase of more than 10% of voting shares by a foreign investor and should be possible only with the permission of the government commission on foreign investment and the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS).

However, the law was never adopted...

In April 2014, at the ONF media forum V.V. Putin publicly scolded Yandex for selling shares to foreigners. Meanwhile, the silent purchase of Yandex shares by the Oppenheimer fund took place in the 1st quarter of 2014.

Hello friends. This is our everything - search engines. Just twenty years ago, the phrases “Google”, “Google can help you” or “search in Yandex” could puzzle any person, but now even small children understand them. Here is the story of the creation of Yandex and Google, the most popular search engines that make our lives easier every day and bring billions to their creators.

The history of Google

Google first appeared in America, namely on the territory of Stanford University, where its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met. Their meeting was completely accidental. Larry, along with other students, simply came on an excursion to Stanford University, and his guide turned out to be Sergey Brin. They both had Jewish roots, but unlike Larry, who was Native American, Sergei was from Russia. He moved to America when he was still a schoolboy. Later, a chance meeting and the ensuing conversation grew into a strong friendship.

The idea of ​​creating a good search system came to the guys about a year after they met, when two young graduate students decided to surprise their teachers. They created a search engine called "PageRank". People quickly fell in love with it, surprising them with its quality of information search. It became much easier to find it; in other search engines, the first links to appear were those that contained more keywords, that is, the search for information was carried out by the number of similar words in the text, but the meaning was very poor. When creating his search engine, Larry took the works of scientists as a model. The scheme was as follows - the better the robot was, the more people referred to this scientist. The search engine worked the same way: the better the information, the higher it rose among the links.

Why is Google Google?

In order for the system to work, all that remains is to choose a name. It had to be short and interesting. The creators considered more than fifty names, but after careful selection, Brin and Page finally settled on the term “googol,” which means one to the hundredth power. Thus, already in 1997, students and teachers at Stanford University were able to evaluate all the advantages and disadvantages of the new creation.

Design

Many users fell in love with the search engine precisely because of the simplicity of its design. As it turned out, colored letters on a white background were not the original idea of ​​brilliant programmers. That was all Larry and Sergey had enough money for, let alone hiring designers. They, as they say, did everything “simple and tastefully.”

Heyday

1998 was a turning point in the development of Google. It was then that Google Inc was registered, the first office was rented (in fact, it was an ordinary garage), the first employees were hired and the first check was received from investor - millionaire Andy Bechtolstein for 100 thousand dollars. And then Google moves from office to office, signs a contract with another major American corporation, conquers Sydney and South America and acquires the Blogger publishing service in the USA. The second most important year was 2004, when the stock market saw shares of a successful company for the first time, and its founders became billionaires.

Development

Every year, Google is actively developing and coming up with new services and developments. So, the most popular today are Google+ is a social network that was created not so long ago in 2011 so that people could communicate via the Internet.

• Google Docs is a service in which you can store text documents, various presentations and tables.
• Google Drive is a service for storing private information. Each person can store up to 15GB of information and access it from anywhere in the world.
• Gmail – email.
• Maps – geographical maps. They are convenient because you can calculate the route based on mileage and time.
• Play is a gaming application store.
• Picasa is a service for working with applications.
• News – a collection of news from around the world. They are formed from publication titles and are displayed depending on the user's preferences.
• Google also created its personal browser, Google Chrome, which today is one of the most convenient and frequently used browsers in the world.

History of the creation of Yandex

Do you want to learn how to write articles and make money online? Right now I am recruiting for free training using the author’s methodology. MAKE AN APPOINTMENT WITH PAVL YAMBU

Arkady Volozh - founder of Yandex

Yandex appeared in Russia on September 23, 1997. One of its founders was Russian programmer Arkady Volozh. He wanted to create a system that would be able to find information in large volumes, and, importantly, would take into account the morphology of the language. But this was still a long way off, and Volozh, together with his English teacher, in 1989 created the company CompTek, which sold computers. In the same year, Arkady persistently continued to achieve his goal, therefore, together with another friend Arkady Borkovsky, he created the Arcadia company for the development of search and information systems. In 1993 the two companies merged. At the same time, a program was created to search on a computer’s hard drive.

The mystery of the name

The program needed to be called something, but a suitable name could not be found. We also considered the option of the name “Search”, but since we wanted to show that the system was developed in Russia, it was necessary to introduce an element of the Russian language, and the word search was not understandable to Russian people. The word “Yandex” was suggested by Volozh’s school friend Ilya Segalovich, who later became director of technology. He thought that the word “index” was more in harmony with the Russian language, but since the system was not the first in Russia, the phrase “yet another index” (another indexer) came to his mind. As a result, “Yandex” appeared, and it was decided to replace the first “Ya” with the Russian “Ya”.

Development

In the same year, 1993, the first search dictionary was created, which, as Volozh wanted, took into account the morphology of the Russian language. And the very next year the “Bible Computer Reference Book” was created.

In 1995, they decided to launch the search system on the Internet, but initially it worked only with selected resources, and later with all Russian-speaking resources. The turning point and official birthday of Yandex is considered to be September 23, 1997, when the search engine was first exhibited at the Softool exhibition.

At the time when Yandex appeared on the Internet, it was not the only search engine. Many preferred the same Rambler or Altavista, which was the most popular search engine in Russia at that time. But Yandex was rapidly gaining momentum, and by mid-1999, Yandex brought the owners about 72 thousand dollars. In 2000, the RuNetHolding company invested good money in Yandex, but still had to sell some of the shares. It was then that Yandex became a separate company, with its own structure, budget and management. Arkady Volozh became the CEO of Yandex.

In the same year, Yandex expanded its capabilities: Yandex bookmarks, Yandex.mail, and Postcards appeared. The company's staff has also increased. Another significant advance was the emergence of Yandex Bar - specialized software.

All this influenced the fact that already next year Yandex became number one in terms of traffic on the RuNet. Yandex continued to develop. Yandex Pictures and Yandex Money appeared. With each subsequent year, Yandex only actively developed and expanded its staff.

Design

Initially, Yandex's design was as simple as Google's. On the main page the name of the search engine was written, as well as examples of queries and a couple of hot news. The design was finalized in several stages. So the second stage was in 1999. Then the design of the Yandex home page had already become close and even similar to the real one. The categories were improved, and windows with mail, advertising, forums, etc. appeared. In 2001, the Yandex main page was improved and was already approaching today's version. The final version of the changes to the main page was the 2003 version, after which the design did not change radically, but was only refined in places.

Thus, Google and Yandex have gone through a short, but very actively developing path of formation. None of the search engines today stands still and every day they develop more and more new services to make life easier. These are the world's leading search engines, processing millions of queries every day. Many people can no longer imagine their lives without these lifesavers - they have become such commonplace things.

Which search engine do you prefer? What do you usually do - Google or type into Yandex? Pavel Yamb was with you, see you soon

Yandex is a Russian IT company, which owns the Internet search system and Internet portal of the same name. The Yandex search engine is 5th among search sites in the world in terms of the number of processed search queries. As of October 16, 2012, according to Alexa.com rankings, In terms of popularity, the website yandex.ru ranks 20th in the world and 1st in Russia.

The search engine Yandex.ru was officially announced on September 23, 1997, and at first developed within the framework of CompTek International. Yandex was formed as a separate company in 2000. In May 2011, Yandex held an initial public offering, earning more from it than any Internet company since the IPO of the search engine Google in 2004.

The main and priority direction of the company is the development of a search engine, but over the years, Yandex has become a multi-portal. In 2011, Yandex provides more than 30 services. The most popular are: Yandex.Pictures, Yandex.Mail, Yandex.Maps, Yandex.News, Yandex.Weather and others.

However, the concept of Yandex as a connection between an Internet search engine and all other things that greatly facilitate the everyday life of an Internet user was not born immediately, and neither was the search technology itself. As befits every ambitious project, it was preceded by a long and winding path, the history of which began back in the days when the global network in Russia was only talked about in the bowels of scientific research institutes.

Yandex video stories on Russia 24 channel in the Technopark program

Background: voluntary-obligatory cooperative

The year was 1988. At that time, mathematician and programmer Arkady Volozh, who had just completed his studies, worked at the Institute of Management Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he researched the possibility of processing large amounts of data, and the leadership of the Soviet Union tried to put the country on the feet of a market economy. They began to implement the adopted Law on Cooperation on a scale characteristic of Soviet leaders, and the head of the department where Volozh worked, without further hesitation, appointed him co-founder of the newly formed cooperative.

Since enterprises at that time lacked automated jobs, and the experience of the institute’s workers could solve this problem, it was decided to import Austrian personal computers, exchanging them (it was a wonderful time!) for seeds. However, Arkady was not directly involved in selling computers, but only performed technical work.

At that time, he met an American student, Robert Stubblebine, who had come on guard, from whom he took English lessons. But the common interests of the two young people were not limited only to foreign languages, and already in 1989 they jointly founded the company CompTek, which sold computer equipment. So the company could have specialized only in hardware if not for Volozh’s old connections.

Teach the computer to understand Russian

Having become deeply involved in commerce, Arkady Volozh did not give up his main place of work. At the institute, he continued to work on a program focused on searching for information in large volumes of text data. Then Arkady came to the idea that it was necessary to somehow take into account the rich inflection inherent in the Russian language. And at that moment a person was found who was able to help cope with this difficult task. It was Arkady Borkovsky, who studied problems of computer linguistics at the Academy of Sciences. At the same time, the first important task appeared, where it was possible to successfully apply existing developments: the Institute of Patent Information needed a searchable classifier of inventions.

So two Arkady, Borkovsky and Volozh, created a company called Arcadia. They were joined by several programmers, among whom was Ilya Segalovich, Volozh’s friend since school. So, after much effort, the distribution kit of the “International Classifier of Inventions” was ready. It was also decided to sell it as a product for organizations working with patents.

At first, everything worked out well: the product was sold for about three years, and there was enough money to pay employees and advertise in newspapers. Then the “Classifier of Goods and Services” was developed. But the economy in the country dictated its own conditions in the early nineties, and buying such software products became much worse. On the other hand, Volozh's second company, CompTek, was gaining momentum by supplying computers and deploying networks to financial institutions. At that moment, a bold step was taken to preserve existing promising developments in the absence of demand: in 1993, it was decided to transform the small staff of Arcadia into the CompTek programming department.

Meanwhile, work continued on improving the search engine code. A team of specialists in the field of structural linguistics, led by Yuri Apresyan, provided a high-quality dictionary, and Ilya Segalovich and a group of programmers began to integrate it into the existing technology, which made the search capabilities even wider. The new CompTek department then took on more complex tasks. In 1994, it was decided to create a system for working with the Synodal Translation of the Bible, and in 1995, an academic publication of Pushkin and Griboyedov for the Institute of World Literature.

Origin of the word "Yandex"

When in 1993 it became clear that work on a new technology for searching Russian-language texts would continue, it was decided to come up with a simple and catchy name for it. Ilya began to write down words on a piece of paper that were related to technology. However, no original solutions came to mind. Then he went a different way. At that time, many new programs for UNIX-like systems, due to the lack of desire to come up with an original name, were simply called by adding the combination “yet another” to any word, meaning “one more.” This is how “yet another indexer” appeared - “yet another indexer” or Yandex. I liked this name, especially since it can be deciphered as Language Index. Arkady suggested replacing the combination “ya” with the Russian “ya” to emphasize the focus on the Russian language. This is how Yandex appeared.

Then Artemy Lebedev offered an interesting interpretation: “I” in the word “Index” is translated into Russian as “I”. It turned out to be a kind of “index” in Russian. Already during the operation of the site, users came up with a new decoding with the division of the Internet in the spirit of Eastern philosophy into INDEX and YANDEX. But these two interpretations appeared much later, after Yandex went online. For now, there was only technology that was tied to specific software products.

New Yandex for the new Internet

Even while working on the academic edition of the classics, an algorithm for constructing hypotheses was created. This algorithm made it possible to avoid being strictly tied to the dictionary that was available in the program. And he worked as follows. If during the search process an unfamiliar word comes across, the algorithm analyzes it and predicts the inflection paradigm using an existing dictionary, just as native speakers, having once heard a new term, can use it in various forms.

Then, in 1996, the developers realized that the new technology could be developed and sold independently, without being tied to specific texts. This idea was a very timely solution, since many companies needed similar search systems, and the Internet was gaining momentum in the country. In the fall of the same year, the opportunity arose to show the results of this work.

CompTek took part in the Netcom"96 exhibition, where it presented two new products: Yandex.Dict, which was a layer between a search engine that does not understand Russian morphology and the user, and Yandex.Site, a search engine designed for installation on Internet sites. Over time, the first solution became not very popular, and Yandex.Site, which turned into Yandex.Server, continues to be used today on many resources. A little more time passed, and the Yandex line was supplemented with two new products. This was Yandex.CD, which helps to find. the required document on CD, and Yandex.Lib - a package for developers who need search capabilities for their products.

And on November 25, 1996, Yandex took its first timid step onto the Internet. Anyone has the opportunity to perform a convenient search for Russian-language text using the popular search engine AltaVista. For this, the already mentioned query generation mechanism Yandex.Dict was used. Then it became clear that to create your own search engine, only a small step was needed - indexing Russian-language resources with your own bot. This was a relatively simple task: once the robot was launched, it indexed all available resources, of which there were 5 thousand, which amounted to 4 GB of texts.

At the next exhibition there was an opportunity to show in a favorable light the Yandex-Web solution from CompTek, which is capable of finding everything that is on the network. The yandex.ru resource was opened on September 23, and its presentation took place 2 days later, on September 25, 1997, at the Softool "97 exhibition. The first version of the site with an original “slanted” design was created by Artemy Lebedev (his studio is still working on the external the appearance of Yandex services).

Work for the people

Then it turned out that the new service had outgrown the scope of a simple demonstration of the capabilities of Yandex technology. Regular users began to use it, and the number of requests began to increase rapidly. That is why, after two months, the developers taught the search engine natural Russian. Yandex began to understand not only queries made using logical operators, but also ordinary sequences made up of several words. In addition to this, the new search engine was able to recognize the uniqueness of a document, showing only one copy in the results, and had its own relevance assessment algorithm, which made it possible to obtain among the first links the resources most relevant to the search query.

Already on September 30, i.e. a week after the opening of Yandex-Web, the first “Yandex fairy tale” appeared, a study of the contents of the Russian Internet with some philosophical overtones, and in December it became known that a link to Yandex would appear in the Russian version of Internet Explorer 4.0.

During 1998 the number of indexed texts doubled. To maintain performance, the developers partially changed the search engine algorithms. This year the design has been updated and convenient additions have been added. It is now possible to search among the results, as well as see what other users are looking for at the moment. Academic Search, now called Advanced, has two new features: sorting by date and searching for documents within a specific time range. The introduced “find similar documents” option deserves special attention. Users were able to clarify the request simply by clicking on the appropriate link.

1999 can be called the year of Internet development. Then the amount of information and users increased by an order of magnitude, and meanwhile Yandex came in fourth or fifth place in popularity. To better index the sharply increased volume of data, a new robot has been launched. It was created with the aim of effectively filtering spam, and also indexed image captions, descriptions and took into account links much better, which made it possible to introduce search functions for one site and links to a specified resource.

To the already existing regularly published “fairy tales”, reflecting with a slight degree of irony the contents of network resources, was added the Index of Inconstancy of Interests of the Internet Population, abbreviated as NINI-index. From January 1, 1999 to January 1, 2005, weekly summaries were posted reflecting trends in search queries. They represented two five words, the interest in which over the week most sharply changed towards an increase (“finds”) or a decrease (“losses”). Yandex began to communicate more closely with users: a forum about the search engine appeared and the ability to subscribe to changes in search results for the desired query was added. The new mechanism, called the “citation index,” now ordered resources by importance and popularity, and search in categories made it possible to find information only among sites on a certain topic. A "Family Search" was also introduced to prevent pages with obscene or erotic content from appearing in results.

On December 15, 1999, Yandex and netBridge opened the online auction Molotok.Ru. This was followed by the joint project Narod.Ru, which started on February 15, 2000. Launched under the motto “Build your website in 60 seconds!”, it provided anyone with the opportunity to create a personal page. Soon the companies divided their areas of interest, and Molotok.Ru came under the full control of netBridge, and Narod.Ru became the property of Yandex. The changes that occurred in 1999 finally secured Yandex’s status as a social service and predetermined its further development. In just over two years, Yandex gained recognition and earned consistently high traffic, which became the reason for the changes that took place the following year.

Yandex promotion

The success of the new project predetermined the further history of its development, which required additional resources and assumed a management model that was completely different from that used at CompTek. Since 1999, Arkady Volozh, having chosen the promotion of Yandex as his main occupation, began choosing from many potential partners. It was necessary to find people experienced in corporate construction who would not require a complete transfer of management and would be willing to invest a sufficient amount of funds.

And in the spring of 2000, an extremely important event occurred: an investment agreement was concluded with the company ru-Net Holdings, under which it received a little more than a third of the search engine. Yandex began to exist independently, separating from CompTek, and Arkady Volozh became the general director of the new company. It was not the company’s style to receive money and do nothing, so an expansion of staff and a grandiose development of the resource immediately followed.

The design changed for the fifth time, and an “ascetic” version of ya.ru appeared. On the other hand, new services have become available, such as Yandex.Bookmarks, Yandex.News, Yandex.Products, Yandex.Guru and Yandex.Mail. The culmination of innovations was the week of launches of new services that took place in June 2000, which ended with the Yandex holiday. In the fall, the Yandex.Bar toolbar was released. Also, 2000 was the year of the start of a large-scale advertising campaign, for which the slogan “Everything will be found!” was invented, which is still used today. The second advertising campaign, which started at the end of the year, was held under the slogan “All questions to Yandex.”

New Year 2001 Yandex celebrated with the event “New Year’s Appeal of the People of Russia to the President,” in which everyone could take part. All received “letters” were summarized into a single text of the appeal. In mid-February, Yandex settled at a new address, where it acquired its own server room, since new services and an increasing flow of users required an expansion of the hardware base. By the summer, Yandex was able to top the list of the most visited Russian-language resources for the first time in its history.

In 2001, the Open Russian Cup for Internet Search, also called the Yandex Cup, was established. In the first year there were 2 cups, and until 2009 there were 9 cups and a competition between the winners, the so-called Cup Winners' Cup. Like the previous year, Yandex greeted 2002 with a memorable campaign. This time it was dedicated to the introduction of the euro into circulation.

Meanwhile, Runet was developing, and already in the spring the volume of data indexed by Yandex exceeded the landmark threshold of 1 TB. Users now have the opportunity to search for images using Yandex.Images, and in the summer, together with the PayCash group of companies, the electronic payment system Yandex.Money was launched. This was a significant step towards expanding the scope of services provided by Yandex, and had a noticeable impact on the Russian Internet as a whole.

Certain improvements related to filtering unwanted correspondence have affected Yandex.Mail. At the end of 2002, three independent services, Podpiri, Guru and Products, were combined into Yandex.Market, a project that continues to be popular today. This year, the company's management set an ambitious goal - to achieve self-sufficiency. It was decided to build a commercial model on contextual advertising, which made it possible not only to complete the task, but also to do it even before all the expected deadlines. The next stage in the development of Yandex has been completed.

Focus on creativity

In 2003 Much attention was paid to the postal service, which underwent further changes that made it more convenient. These changes continued the following year: Yandex.Mail users received an unlimited mailbox size and a new “Spam Defense” spam filter. Also in 2003, a transition was made to the eighth version of the design. This time, anyone could take part in a two-week test of the new look of the main page and make constructive suggestions. It was slightly modified a year later, and in this form the page existed until 2007.

The Yandex.News service was significantly redesigned, which became an organized collection of the most important news messages, grouped by topic. Photos and videos appeared in the news. The Internet search itself has also undergone changes: RTF, PDF and DOC documents now appear in the results, which has made it easier to find, for example, the necessary documentation, and XML output has been implemented for webmasters. A year later, support for PPT and XLS formats was added, as well as indexing of sites made in Flash.

In addition to the yandex.ru resource, other company products were also developed. So in 2003, the Yandex search engine started working on the presidential website, and in the fall a new line was presented, which included three solutions: Yandex.Server, which grew out of Yandex.Site, Yandex.Publisher, including Yandex.CD, and Yandex.SDK, which became continuation of Yandex.Lib. On June 3, 2003, the board of directors decided to pay the first dividends in the history of Russian Internet companies, amounting to $100,000, which was a completely logical step for a self-sustaining company. Yandex received two thirds of its revenue from contextual advertising. The following year, advertising profits tripled, and 2004 showed fantastic growth rates in the profitability of the business model created by Yandex.
Yandex and Google

Meanwhile, international players appeared on the Russian search engine market. They had an equally developed technological base and were serious competitors to Yandex. Runet was becoming closer to the West, which required not only maintaining the quality of the services provided, but radically changing everything for the entire company. This affected not only search: all services required a new look. Yandex managers, accustomed to changes, coped with this task: they managed to expand the staff from 200 to 2,000 people, without turning into a dry corporation, but maintaining the developed creative style that users loved.

During this time, many new projects were launched, and existing ones received many improvements. Yandex.Maps was opened for users, which was subsequently closely connected with many other services and became one of the priority areas. Yandex.WiFi launched, Yandex.Afisha and other projects were released, many of which were distinguished by their focus on the needs of Russian users. It has become a tradition to hold regional seminars. This approach was correct: the Russian company had undeniable advantages over international competitors, which ensured Yandex’s victory in the Russian market.

At the same time, with timid steps, the company began to expand its geography, so in 2005 a Ukrainian representative office opened.

Time to expand your horizons

Now Yandex is working on two fronts: the company is trying to improve local services and cover the foreign Internet space. In 2007, the Ukrainian version of the yandex.ua search was opened, and 2008 was the year the Yandex Labs division, located in California, was opened. In the same year, Yandex carried out significant work aimed at supporting international Internet standards such as Sitemap, and the GZIP, FOAF and MediaRSS protocols. This made it possible to work more efficiently with indexing not only Russian, but also foreign resources.

In the meantime, there was a noticeable change in the Yandex logo: all the letters became Russian and lost their serifs, gaining a technological look.

In 2009, the Snezhinsk program started, providing users with search results that are most relevant to a specific city when required. On the other hand, in the same year, Yandex became deeply involved in foreign content: it began testing a service that provides translation of found foreign sites, which was released in 2011 under the name Yandex.Translation. In May 2010, users were able to search only among foreign sites by enabling the appropriate option or using the yandex.com domain. Then a search for images and videos was added to yandex.com. Yandex.by and the Tatar version of search started working.

At the same time, the number of local services for Ukraine grew and a regional search appeared, called “Poltava”. It was based on Matrixnet technology, used a year earlier in the Snezhinsk program. The Yandex.Maps service, which has grown significantly over several years, has acquired its own mapping company, GIS Technologies. This is how Yandex came to be in 2011, which became another milestone in the development of the company.

At the very beginning of the year, advertisers were offered a new service - geo-advertising, which offered highlighting organizations on maps and displaying search queries. The Yandex.Fabrika startup investment program was launched, in which not only Russian but also foreign projects were able to take part.

In May 2011, Yandex made an initial public offering on the high-tech NASDAQ exchange, which turned out to be even more successful than expected. They were placed 14% higher than forecast and rose in value by another 42% on the first day of trading. In terms of the volume of funds raised ($1.3 billion) as a result of the initial offering, Yandex took an honorable second place in the list of Internet companies, not beating only Google, which earned $1.67 billion in 2004. From this moment begins a new page in the history of Yandex, which has grown from an ambitious project into a huge company, while successfully preserving the unique style loved by millions of users.