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A Yogi Meeting Point in the Tajikistan Mountains

By Vladimir Wiedemann

The Yogi commune in the upper reaches of the Siëma River (near Dushanbe, Tajikistan). The employees of the hydrometeorological station, together with guests from Estonia. Summer 1982. Unknown Photographer. Vladimir Wiedemann’s private archive.

In the mid-1970s, a small community of young people interested in yoga and other mystical practices sprang up on the upper reaches of the Siëma River[1] on the site of a hydro-meteorological station.[2] The community’s initiator was Leonid Bobrov, who studied Indian languages at one of the Soviet universities and had gained practical experience in India in the early 1970s. There, Leonid met some Indian yogis and visited a few ashrams, including the center of Swami Sivananda (1887–1963) in Rishikesh. I have heard that for several months of his Indian trip, Leonid actively studied Hatha yoga and other yogic meditation methods, using the services of professional teachers. He returned to the USSR with a library of books on yoga and Indian philosophy. But his career as an orientalist did not work out, and Leonid got a job as the head of a Siëma River hydro-meteorological station about fifty kilometers from Dushanbe. He recruited several friends as staff interested in yoga, Indian mysticism, and culture.

The hydro-meteorological station was located on the way to various passes in Siëma Gorge, famous for organizing tourist and alpinist routes. To get there, one had to take a hitchhiker (poputka) from Dushanbe northwards to the village of Gushar(i) (Hushyori) and then walk uphill for about two hours from the bridge through the Varzob Valley. Many people came there and stayed overnight. When expeditions were organi-zed, up to thirty tents often camped at the station. By the early 1980s, this place became well-known among Dushanbe yogis and mystics of various directions from all over the USSR, including “Bigfoot hunters.”

Initiated by Anatoliĭ Ignat’evich Merzliakov, a legendary figure of the local bohemian scene in Dushanbe, a circle of yoga lovers was formed at the end of the 1970s. There were at least fifty yogis clustered around him. Merzliakov was a veteran of the Second World War who got rid of a disability received during the war by intensively practicing Hatha yoga. He was also a friend of the famous Soviet physician and Sanskrit scholar Boris Leonidovich Smirnov (1891–1967), an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Turkmen USSR, who translated the Indian epic Mahabharata, analyzing it from a medical point of view, Hatha yoga and Indian contemplative practices. Later, Merzliakov, or “Ignat’ich,” became a popular figure among lovers of yoga and mysticism from different cities of the Soviet Union and even gained some fame in Yugoslavia, where one of his students lived. His community in Dushanbe existed until the very end of the USSR.[3]

In general, the Dushanbe mystical milieu, this ‘paradise’ of alternative people and esotericists in the Soviet Union, was quite diverse in different orientations: besides yogis, [4] there were Buddhists, Sufis, mystics, and snezhniki (“Snow people,” i. e. Bigfoot hunters). I still have vivid memories of the early 1980s, when the Siëm station was also a center of attraction for the later categories of Soviet adventurers. This was initiated through articles in the daily newspaper Komsomolskaia Pravda by a longstanding enthusiast, Igor’ Burtsev.[5] In the summer, up to two dozen tents were pitched around the station, from where expeditions set off to the nearby mountains. According to enthusiasts, the “Bigfoot” was an alien from Orion, and his skin was simply a ‘biosuit’ of a highly developed humanoid creature.

The photo against the backdrop of the Pamir Mountains captures us: two guests (in the middle) who came to the yogi retreat in the Tajik mountains and the station staff (on the edges). Both visitors, Nina Raeva-Kasatkina and me, Vladimir Wiedemann, were the first Estonian hippies from Tallinn. Then, I saw myself as an activist of the New Age movement, a founder of the first Hatha and Raja Yoga circle, and the first Tai Chi Chuan group in Estonia (1980). On the left is Ravil, a guy from Tashkent who was a specialist in martial arts. After working for several years as an employee of this hydro-meteorological station, in the 1990s, he emigrated to Canada. The second, a long-term station employee, was Fëdor Fëdorovich, a practicing yogi originally from Dushanbe. He was trained by the Buddhist (‘underground elder’) Lama Gotavon, who was one of the mentors of the Buddhist and philosopher Bidiia Dandaron (1914–1974), who died in Soviet camps as a dissident.


[1] I have used the Russian word for that – Siama.

[2] See Vladimir V. Videmann. Zapreshchennyĭ Soiuz – 2. Poslednee desiatiletie glazami misticheskoĭ bogemy (The Forbidden Union. The Last Decade Through the Eyes of the Mystical Bohemia). Moskva; Sankt-Peterburg: RIPOL Klassik; Pal’mira, 2020, 23ff. I have heard that the station at Siëma exists to this day, and until recently, Leonid Bobrov was still its director.

[3] See ibidem, 273f.

[4] See ibidem, 36ff.

[5] Igor’ Burtsev (b. 1940) has sought after snezhnyĭ chelovek (literally ‘Snow man,’ i. e. Bigfoot) since 1965 and has participated in and led many Bigfoot expeditions: http://iair-f.ru/members/burtcev.htm. In 2021, he became a protagonist in the documentary Moĭ drug Ĭeti (My Friend Yeti) by Director Vladimir Krivov (Russia, documentary, 60 min).


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
vlwiedemann (January 6, 2025). A Yogi Meeting Point in the Tajikistan Mountains. New Age in Eurasia. Retrieved July 9, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/1311a


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