The 1950's saw Soviet investigation of Karotechia Vril research hindered by serious Soviet scientists sceptical of Nazi occult gibberish involving the Black Sun and AZATHOTH.

However, the effects of the Vril Generator could not be denied. They placed Semyon Kirlian , the Armenian Electrician who discovered Kirlian Photography, in charge of the Vril Research. Kirlian was unwilling to sacrifice human pawns to the device, and this slowed development.

The KGB, however, did not suffer from such reluctance. They manipulated prisoners from the gulags into volunteering for the project with promises of freedom. In 1961, after a disappointing string of cerebral hemorrhages and nightmarish interdimensional accidents, the Soviets had their first success. His name was Yuri Kasavin.

Kasavin was a small-time Moscow hood who had been detained for desertion and looting during the Hungarian revolution of 1956. He was sent to spend the rest of his days incarcerated in the gulag system, where he quickly made enemies with a pack of ruthless gangsters in a temporary Novosibirsk Gulag. To escape certain death, he jumped at the chance to be exposed to the acoustically focused radiation of the Nazi Vril Generator.

Yuri quickly gained the ability to see beyond, witnessing the horrible creatures that existed in the spaces between our own. This slightly unhinged Yuri's mind, but such visions were nothing compared to the supernatural abilities he developed. During months of ever increasing exposure to the machine Yuri gained the ability to render himself invisible, intangible, to produce a visible aura, to charge objects with T-Radiation and move those objects with the powers of his mind, to partly project himself into N-Space and the Astral plane, to temporarily stop the passage of time, and to set things ablaze by partially charging them with T-Radiation, allowing interdimensional friction to ignite them.

The scientists and their KGB handlers were greatly impressed with Yuri's phenomenal powers. They were even more impressed when, in the middle of a supposedly harmless demonstration of those powers, he was devoured from the inside out by some sort of invisible creature, showering visiting party officials (including a KGB General) with an bloody explosion of gore and viscera.

This established the pattern of Soviet Psychic research for the two decades to follow: dramatic results followed by equally dramatic disaster. The KGB quickly came to regard the manufacture of psychics as a suicidal prospect with an enormous cost in human life and sanity. They resolved themselves to pay that terrible price. For the Rodina, the motherland, and for Communism -- they sold their souls to meet the butcher's bill.

GRU-SV8 became aware of the KGB's catastrophic activity in 1968 at the First Moscow International Conference on Parapsychology. By this time, the KGB had greatly refined their psychic manufacturing techniques, and had managed to recruit a few actual talents. Among their refinements was a device designed by Semyon Kirlian that used an electrically generated acoustic field to purge a subject of T-Radiation. The KGB had constructed a secret "Science City" in the Ural mountains to continue their psychic research. Unknown to the KGB, their experimentation had saturated the entire area with T-Radiation, and the poisoned land became a magnet for all sorts of paranormal interdimensional phenomenon.

Credits: the Man in Black