I first came across his ideas in the 70s, through a book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1970), by two American authors, Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder.

Reflecting somewhat the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, the authors were exploring psychic matters and occultism, and for that purpose they visited Soviet Russia, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968. As described in the back cover, “they reveal astonishing breakthroughs and key personalities spearheading exploration of man’s unknown powers” in laboratories from Prague to Moscow.

One place they stopped was the Pulkovo Observatory near St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), “the principal observatory of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the timekeeping Greenwich of Russia” (today The Central Astronomical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences) to meet Dr. Kozyrev. They were going there to discuss “an amazing theory of time” developed by Kozyrev, whom the authors described as “one of the Soviet Union’s most renowned astrophysicists” (p. 157).

Kozyrev does deserve this praise, as he was only 17 when he published his first scientific paper. When he graduated in physics and mathematics from the University of Leningrad, he was only twenty. And by the age of twenty-eight, he had already won distinction as an astronomer and had taught at several colleges (p. 158).

He was brimming with new ideas and life was as good as he could possibly have wished it to be. Then the ax fell. In 1936 he was arrested in the Stalinists repressions and in 1937 he began eleven crushing years in a prison camp. … When he was at last rehabilitated and could return to astronomy, Kozyrev made a series of brilliant predictions about the Moon, Venus, and Mars. Much later, Soviet space probes proved him right. (p. 158)

Like many other geniuses throughout world history, his announcements were received with skepticism in the beginning. In 1958, for instance, he announced volcanic activity on the moon, which meant that there were vast natural resources to exploit. Scientists “classified him as an eccentric hunting for gas on the moon. They knew this was not possible.” But he was proven right when Dr. Harold Urey, a U.S. Nobel Prize winner, talked with him and NASA started the enormous “Moon Blink” project. Eventually, gas emissions were found on the moon.

Kozyrev was proposing a new theory when he said, “Time is a form of energy. It is to time’s properties that we should look in order to find the source that maintains the phenomenon of life in the world.” With all credit to his other findings, this theory on time may sound completely irrelevant and without basis to scientists today; but as mentioned in the beginning, the purpose of this review is not to confirm his theory, but to open up a long forgotten gateway for researchers studying time and ether.

Although approached with suspicion today, parapsychology studies peaked in the eastern bloc in the 1960s, which was the main reason the two American authors felt the need to travel overseas and spend three years researching their 450-page book. “Parapsychology, nonexistent just a decade before, was suddenly flourishing all over the USSR,” they wrote. When the authors looked beyond Iron Curtain politics, “behind the lace curtains of everyday Russia,” they began to come across “some very unusual material about life.”

“Soviet scientists were asking publicly, ‘What is man?’ Do we have unused, undreamed of potentials? Can parapsychology melt the barriers and create the supernormal human being? These were heady questions to read in Soviet publications.”

In 1966, the authors noted, the influential journal Science and Religion put out a special issue, No. 3, on current Russian telepathy research. Outstanding Soviets, including such notables as Dr. Nikolai Semyonov, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry and Vice President of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, called for further scientific investigations of telepathy. It was in this time and context when Kozyrev’s research intensified and his speculative theory came into a form.

The authors noted that, according to some Soviet scientists (p. 159), ESP (extrasensory perception) “may involve an unknown form of energy,” which Kozyrev called “time,” in the telepathic transfer of “thought” instantly from one person to another.

“Time is the most important and most enigmatic property of nature. Time is not propagated like light waves; it appears immediately everywhere. The altered properties of a certain second of time will appear instantly everywhere at once, just as time is everywhere. Time links us all and all things in the universe,” Dr. Kozyrev told the authors in his high-ceilinged office at Pulkovo. The authors noted the following from their interview with Kozyrev:

Kozyrev’s “time” has a number of properties which he says can be studied in the scientist’s lab. He has found, for instance, that this “X” energy, or “time,” is denser near the receiver of an action and thinner near the sender. He showed us some of the instruments he has devised to chart this unusual effect. The basic equipment includes precision gyroscopes, asymmetrical pendulums, and torsion balances. The instruments, when set up in a complex arrangement, react showing a change in time density near a mechanical action (like stretching elastic) or a chemical action (like burning sugar).

This is the gist of what happens in one of the more simple experiments: a long elastic is stretched by a machine. You can think of this elastic as having two poles. The “pull” or cause end and the “stretch” or effect end. When the elastic is stretched, the registering equipment, consisting mainly of an asymmetrical pendulum made with a gyroscope, arcs toward the effect pole of the elastic. This deflection is imperceptible to the eye, but easily registered on the sensitive instruments. It is a highly important effect. It shows there has been an increase in the intensity of time, according to Dr. Kozyrev. “This has nothing to do with force fields. We shielded and calculated out any possible influence of electrostatic or any other force.” Considering Kozyrev’s rarified caliber as a scientist, he probably knows what he is talking about.

Kozyrev’s instruments also showed a thinning of time near the “cause” end of the elastic, and this was possible even when the “cause-effect” equipment was shielded by a wall one yard thick: “It reacts even through iron tubes.” Chemical cause-effect, like burning sugar, also showed the change in time density. “We postulate,” Dr. Kozyrev said, “that time is thin around the cause and dense around the effect.”

According to the authors, “what Dr. Kozyrev has found in these tests can be called PK (psychokinesis),” for the chemical events acted on the gyroscope pendulum at a distance and without the use of any known force. Dr. Kozyrev would say that “time density” brought on this startling action at a distance. PK is usually considered not as matter affecting matter from a distance, but as a mind affecting matter. The authors asked Kozyrev whether thought might have any effect on this time density. “Yes,” Dr. Kozyrev replied. “Thought definitely affects the reaction. When I purposefully think of poetry or something emotional during the test, the equipment registers more of a change than when I think of mathematical calculations. Our thoughts may change the density of time.”

“Would the density of time, then, have something to do with telepathy?” asked the authors.

“Telepathy always depends on the density of time. Time would be thin near the sender of the thought and denser around the receiver. We’ve already done tests in our lab to try to artificially change the density of time. When we can make time dense at will, we can make telepathy happen when we want it,” Dr. Kozyrev feels.

What else affects the density of time? Thunderstorms, the weather, the change of season, the activity of growing things, gravity, and density of matter have an effect on time density, which lingers longer in some substances than in others. “It remains twice as long in aluminum as in lead and five times longer in wood than in lead” (p. 162).

Another characteristic of the energy Kozyrev called “time” is that it has a flow pattern, according to his findings:

Dr. Kozyrev thought about all living organisms-animals, plants, people. Our right and left sides are not mirror images. More of the heart is on the left than the right side. Microbes produce colonies of a spiral structure. Protoplasm, the basic building block of life, is not symmetrical either. Asymmetry is a basic property of life. This can’t be a chance thing, Dr. Kozyrev thought. … Perhaps the energy of “time” flows in this pattern. If so, Dr. Kozyrev figured, he could see it and measure it in a rotating body like a gyroscope. Altering the time pattern in a rotating system should add or subtract energy.

After years of careful experiments, Dr. Kozyrev and his colleagues found that in a left-hand rotating system the time flow is positive-it adds energy. In a right-hand system the time flow is negative. … In Dr. Kozyrev’s view our world is a left-hand system and it has a positive time flow that adds energy to our universe.

Time not only has a pattern of flow, says Dr. Kozyrev, but also a rate of flow. He calls “the rate of flow” the difference between cause and effect. “As the rate of the time flow through a substance changes, weight is lost,” Dr. Kozyrev told us. “It means that ‘levitation’ is a perfectly practical possibility.” (p. 163)

Time or ether?

Time is not matter. According to Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, “time is like an aspect or a ‘ribbon’ of motion” (The Thirty-First Word, p. 591). That is, time is not possible without motion. I argue that what Kozyrev thought he discovered was not time, but perhaps had to with what is called ether, an element which is assumed by some cosmologists to be the essence of all existence, but which is also disregarded by many scientists today. Bediuzzaman is one of those scholars who referenced ether in his work. In his partial Qur’anic exegesis, The Sign of Miraculousness (Isharat al-I’jaz first published in 1914), Bediuzzaman explained the verse (Hud 11:7) as follows:

… the verse “the heavens and the earth were at first one piece, and then We parted them as separate entities”(21:30) indicates that the earth and the solar system were a sort of dough kneaded by the hand of power out of a simple substance; I mean ether, which compared with beings is a fluid substance that passes through and among them. The verse “His Supreme Throne was upon the water”(11:7) alludes to this matter, which resembles water. After its creation, the ether received the Maker’s first manifestation giving existence; that is, He created the ether, then He made it into the subatomic particles (jawâhir farda) … (Isharat al-I’jaz, pp. 254)

For Bediuzzaman, ether was something like an interface upon which all acts of God were displayed:

… being an extremely subtle, fine, obedient and subjugated page for the All-Majestic Maker’s acts, being a means for the transmission of His commands, being an extremely delicate veil for the execution of His decrees, being refined ink for His writing, being a finest raiment to clothe His acts of creation, being a fundamental component in His artifacts and a field in which to sow His seeds, ether acts as a mirror for the manifestations of the Lordship of God. (The Thirtieth Gleam, p. 477)

Bediuzzaman also referred to “ether” when he said “refined matter” in the following quote: “Such subtle and refined matters as light, electricity, and heat point to the existence of a more subtle and refined matter that fills space” (The ThirtyFirst Word, p. 589).

The observations and findings of Kozyrev, though in desperate need of endorsement by objective scientific criteria, sound, from how the American authors revealed in their interview, as if referring to this mysterious subtle matter called “ether” rather than “time.”

Conclusion

The authors of this once popular book wrote in the Prologue that they “would have to be megalomaniacs to think that scores of highly reputable scientists from centers across the Soviet Union and the satellite countries all conspired to publish data for a decade and to bluff through interviews” to impress them when they happened to meet them. The authors further noted that “whether communist observations and theories about psychic happenings are right or not, can only be determined by further investigations East and West.”

Let us conclude with the following quote from the Prologue: “As Vladimir Mutshall wrote of current Soviet telepathy research in the American Foreign Science bulletin, Vol. 4, No. 8, ‘If the Russian reports are even partly true, and if mind-to-mind thought transference can be used for such things as interplanetary communications or the guiding of interplanetary spacecraft, the reports will obviously have overwhelming significance.'”

The main reason I have extensively quoted from this book is not to confirm any of the findings, but to encourage scientists to conduct further research into the essence of matter without completely disregarding phenomena like ether.

As religion cannot be the source of happiness and misery at the same time, we examine these two perspectives. Among the examples typically cited to support the misery argument are Islam’s expansion (seventh to sixteenth centuries), the Crusades, and Europe’s ‘religious’ wars. While seemingly plausible at first glance, further analysis reveals that this argument overlooks key historical information and misrepresents others. In the following article, we examine this argument from a theological and historical perspective.

The Holy Scriptures

First we look at the religious sources: the holy Scriptures. The Qur’an condones war only in self-defense and preventing injustice and aggression, and equates killing one person unjustly with killing humanity (5:32). Examining early Islam’s so-called ‘religious wars’ reveals that each one was fought in self-defense or to prevent injustice. The total number of people killed in any battle of Prophet Muhammad never exceeded several hundred.(1)

The phrase holy war, the common translation for jihad, is a misnomer. Jihad essentially means struggling in God’s cause, of which war is only one form and allowed only under clearly defined circumstances. The New Testament tells victims to embrace aggressors with love or restore justice in the most appropriate manner (Matthew 5; Luke 17:1-5), while the Old Testament says: ‘Thou shalt not kill’ (Exodus 20:13, Deuteronomy 5:17) and ‘He that kills any man shall surely be put to death (Leviticus 21:17).

Any aggression not conducted for self-defense or preventing injustice is not based on true religion. A good treatment of this in the context of Islam can be found in Prophet Muhammad as Commander.(2)

The Twentieth Century

The claim that religion is responsible for much of the bloodshed and death from a historical and statistical perspective is incorrect. The majority of deaths throughout history occurred during the twentieth century, and the majority of those happened during wars stemming from nonreligious motives.(3) World War II tops this list: 15 million soldiers and 25.5 million civilians. World War I is a close second: 9 million soldiers and 9.7 million civilians. Other examples include the Russian civil and the Russo-Polish wars (1917-21: 2 million soldiers, 7 million civilians), the Korean War (1950-53: 2 million soldiers and .9 million civilians), the Franco-Vietnam and US-Vietnam wars (1945-73: 1.3 million soldiers and 1.4 million civilians), the Sino-Japanese War (1937-41: 1 million soldiers and 1.2 million civilians), and the Soviet-Afghanistan War (1979-89: 500,000 soldiers and 1 million civilians).(4) These wars, which are responsible for the great majority of human loss through history, cannot be attributed to religious zeal.

The Soviet Union

While the motives of certain wars and other acts of aggression can be debated, certain self-proclaimed atheist, fascist, or otherwise nonreligious regimes, such as pre-World War II Germany and the Soviet Union, committed unprecedented crimes against their neighbors and citizens. According to Laqueur: ‘One of the cardinal features of the totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century was internal terror, the huge number of ‘enemies”and potential enemies’interned and executed. A striking example of this phenomenon is the era of Lenin and Stalin in Soviet Union. The atrocities committed during the time of Stalin are well documented.'(5)

According to the most conservative figures, allegedly based on secret KGB archives, between 510,307 and 1,727,970 Soviets were in labor camps between 1934 and 1950. A further 457,000 to 1,145,000 people were sentenced to labor colonies during roughly the same period. According to numbers released by Major General Anatoli Krayushkin, head of the Ministry of State Security’s archives, 3,853,000 arrests and 827,995 death sentences were made between 1917 and 1990. According to official KGB sources, 681,692 persons were killed between 1937 and 1938. In addition, 1,053,829 persons died in the Gulag between 1934 and 1953. To these numbers, one should add such figures as the Polish officers killed in 1940 in Katyn and other camps (15,000 to 20,000), and the Kazakhs who disappeared during the 1930s (1.5 to 2 million).

These are conservative estimates, given their source. Some researchers put the total number of deaths under the Soviets at between 10 and 20 million. According to Alec Nove, there were some 11 million ‘excess’ deaths between 1927 and 1937. Steven Wheatcroft, another Soviet-era researcher, says between 4 and 5 million people died.(6)

While Stalin remains notorious for internal terror, Lenin has been viewed differently’as a visionary whose ideals were betrayed by his followers. Is this correct? Recently declassified Soviet documents tell a different story. The following is a letter from Lenin to his comrades in which, appallingly, he mentions a specific number of people to be hanged: ‘Comrades! The uprising of the five kulak districts should be mercilessly suppressed… Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks.'(7)

In 1922, Moscow sought to confiscate all valuables of the Russian Orthodox Church and its monasteries to secure badly needed assets and to break the Church’s power over the peasants. Lenin hoped that the terrible famine sweeping Soviet Russia and Ukraine in 1921-22 would turn the peasantry against the Church. In the industrial city of Shuia, soldiers fired and killed several civilians (devout Christians) trying to protect their church. This event prompted the Politburo to delay further confiscation. When Lenin learned of this, he urged Politburo members to continue the campaign ‘mercilessly,’ as the time was ripe for such an action:

It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy… to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles.

One wise writer on matters of statecraft (8) rightly said that if it is necessary to resort to certain brutalities for the sake of realizing a certain political goal, they must be carried out in the most energetic fashion and in the briefest possible time because the masses will not tolerate prolonged application brutality…. the struggle against us will be made more difficult if right at this moment, precisely in connection with the famine, we suppress the reactionary clergy with maximal speed and ruthlessness.

Therefore I come to the categorical conclusion that precisely at this moment we must give battle to the Black Hundred clergy in the most decisive and merciless manner and crush its resistance with such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come.(9)

In another letter, Lenin openly instructs his comrades to terrorize the state’s enemies:

To Comrade Krestinsky:

I propose to form a commission immediately (initially this can be done secretly) to work out emergency measures (in the spirit of Larin: Larin is right). Let us say you+Larin+Vladimirsky (or Dzerzhinsky)+Rykov? Or Miliutin.

It is necessary secretly’and urgently’to prepare the terror. And on Tuesday we will decide whether it will be through SNK (the Council of People Commissars) or otherwise.(10)

These letters demonstrate that Stalin’s internal ‘cleansing’ campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s only continued Lenin’s policy and practice, and were not, as some claim, a betrayal of his high ideals.

While love and respect for fellow human beings is an essential principal of all major religions, in practice this has not always been the case. Aggression in the name of religion has long been exploited to show that religion brings tyranny and misery. Certain individuals, organizations, states, and regimes have used religion to justify the suffering they have caused, but this does not prove that religion by itself is to blame. As a matter of fact, nationalism, ideological extremism, or simple greed for power and material gain have caused incomparably larger suffering, as shown by documented statistics of wars and internal terror.

Conclusion

We looked briefly at the former Soviet Union, an atheist regime that committed some of the worst crimes against its own people in the name of communist ideology.

The twentieth century saw unprecedented advances in science and technology and, unfortunately, unprecedented human misery and suffering. Most crimes against humanity, as documented by statistics and recently revealed secret archives, were committed by totalitarian regimes during the twentieth century. Thus it is to claim that religion is responsible for most of history’s bloodshed and death. This responsibility lies with modern racist, atheist, or simply greedy regimes and not with religion, which was revealed to guide people to true happiness in this world and in the next through their own will.

Footnotes

1. Ali Unal, ‘Killing for Religion?’ The Fountain, no. 2 (Apr.’June 1996), 14.
2. M. Fethullah Gulen, Prophet Muhammad as a Comman der (Truestar: 1998).
3. Richard F. Mollica, ‘Invisible Wounds,’ Scientific American (June 2000).
4. Ibid.
5. Walter Laqueur, The Dream That Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union (Oxford University Press: 1994).
6. Ibid.
7. Letter to V. V. Kuraev, Ye. B. Bosh and A. E. Minkin, August 1918. Located in Richard Pipes, The Unknown Lenin (Yale University Press: 1996).
8. Editor Note: Lenin is referring to Machiavelli (1469-1527), an Italian political philosopher and statesman synonymous with placing politics above everthing else.
9. Ibid., Letter to the Politburo, March 1922.
10. Ibid., Memorandum to N. N. Krestinsky, Sept. 1918.