before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Soviet on November 15, 1937, and sentenced to death. He was shot that same day. Tantric studies Inspired by Theosophical lore and several visiting Mongol lamas, Bokii along with his writer friend Alexander Barchenko, embarked on a quest for Shambhala, in an attempt to merge Kalachakra-tantra and ideas of Communism in the 1920s. Among other things, in a secret laboratory affiliated with the secret police, Bokii and Barchenko experimented with Buddhist spiritual techniques to try to find a key for engineering perfect communist human beings. They contemplated a special expedition to Inner Asia to retrieve the wisdom of Shambhala – the project fell through as a result of intrigues within the Soviet intelligence service, as well as rival efforts of the Soviet Foreign Commissariat that sent its own expedition to Tibet in 1924. Bokii also held group sex orgies in his dacha under the pretext of tantric studies. Posthumous rehabilitation and legacy Bokii's fellow bureaucratic NKVD foes had conjured up fictions of his being as a sort of Dracula-like human blood drinker. On June 27, 1956, as part of the Thaw sponsored by new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Gleb Bokii's case was reviewed by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Soviet and he was posthumously rehabilitated, enabling his family members to receive social benefits which had been previously denied to them by the state. Footnotes 1879 births 1937 deaths Cheka officers Politicians from Tbilisi Old Bolsheviks Soviet politicians Commissars 3rd Class of State Security Recipients of the Order of the Red Banner Great Purge victims from Ukraine Ukrainian people executed by the Soviet Union Members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union executed by the Soviet Union Soviet rehabilitations Executed Ukrainian people