Mutual suspicion, however, and the wreck of his plans in Tibet ended Roerich's first rapprochement with the USSR; by late 1927, he had drifted back into the anti-Soviet orbit. Over the next half decade, Roerich relied on his US followers to build his skyscraper-museum in New York, to acquire property for him in India, and to gain access to as many American tycoons, celebrities, and politicians as possible. Roerich did not fare well with the Hoover administration, but the election of Franklin Roosevelt as president in 1932 brought him a windfall in the person of Henry Wallace, a mystically minded agronomist who had already spent several years under Agni Yoga's spell, and was now raised up to a post in FDR's first cabinet. Wallace persuaded
Roosevelt to sponsor Roerich's treaty effort (against the advice of the State Department) and, under the pretext of hiring him as a Department of Agriculture expert to search for drought-resistant grasses in Asia, arranged Roerich's expedition to Manchuria and China in 1934-1935. In the process, Wallace left behind one of the most bizarre bodies of correspondence in US history: the "Dear Guru" letters, which played a role in the presidential elections of 1940, 1944, and, most sensationally, 1948. Simultaneously, Helena Roerich, writing from India, entered into a strange nine-letter exchange with FDR himself, an interaction that has perplexed historians for years.
What Roosevelt did not know in 1934 and 1935 was that the Roerichs were hedging their geopolitical bets with a pro-Japanese hole card. The United States granted diplomatic recognition to the USSR in the fall of 1933, and Roerich now doubted whether he could depend on America to stand firmly against communism. So, once in China, the artist—technically an employee of the US government—broke free and launched a renegade campaign to exhort Japanese forces and White Russian emigres in Asia to band together against the Stalinist menace. Here, Roerich overreached himself. Years of zigzagging had made it impossible for anyone to trust him, and far from answering his call, both the Whites and the Japanese accused him of espionage, as did the Chinese and Soviets. Worse, Roerich's gamble forfeited the political and material capital he had accumulated in the United States.
In the summer of 1935, Wallace, desperate to stave off political ruin, severed all connection with the Roerichs. The New York circle split, and the faction led by Roerich's chief financial supporter renounced him. This group, with help from Wallace, turned the New York courts and the Internal Revenue Service against the Roerichs. The family fled and never again set foot on US soil.
Roerich lived the rest of his days in northwestern India, nursing grievances against America (a land of "thieves" and "gangsters") and Britain ("tyrannical oppressor" of his newly adopted home).9 His political sympathies lay with the Indian Congress and its quest for independence, and he inclined once more toward the Soviet Union, even though he was regarded there as a "re- ligio-mystical reactionary," an American or Japanese agent, and a "Buddhist-Masonic conspirator."i° Admiration for the USSR's struggle against Nazi aggression confirmed Roerich as a Soviet patriot, and he spent the wartime years painting heroic images from Russian myth and folklore. Afterward, he tried to hammer out a repatriation agreement with Moscow, but to no avail. He lived to see India freed from British rule, but never returned to his beloved motherland— which did not love him back until the late 1950s, when the Khrushchev regime restored
him to his place in Russia's artistic canon.
what need is there for another book about them? The fact is that little of the work on Roerich, despite its volume, manages to portray him both convincingly and thoroughly. There is an excellent literature dealing with his art, and research into his expeditions and political activities has improved over time." By contrast, comprehensive studies are mostly unreliable or incomplete. In many cases, they willfully sidestep any issue that might cast their subject in a less than favorable light.12
Why such a state? Several difficulties have skewed biographers' attempts to perceive Roerich in his totality. The most straightforward has to do with time: before the 1990s, important collections of Ro- erich-related documents remained hidden or unavailable, and anything written before their reemergence is sorely lacking." The wide dispersal of Roerich's papers poses a second problem. The biggest archival holdings are located not just in Russia, but in Washington, DC, New York, London, and Naggar, India, with smaller repositories strewn throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Late in his life, Roerich, wondering "where and in what condition are my archives?" bemoaned the scattering of his records and effects to the far ends of the earth—a personal tragedy for the artist and a hardship for any would-be chronicler of his career.14
National perspectives have also distorted work on Roerich. The bulk of Russian writing about him has been shaped by Soviet-era ideological constraints and post-Soviet patriotism. During the Cold War, researchers were forbidden to touch on political controversies or speak frankly about Roerich's mysticism. Instead, they built him up as a painter of brilliance, a philosopher of "cosmic" and "universal" insight, and an explorer who contributed invaluably to the field of Asian studies. (This last assertion was so successfully propagated that even in the West, more than a few reference works, including the Times Atlas of World Exploration, refer—more confidently than they should—to Roerich as providing the "bedrock" for anthropological understanding of Central Asia.15) In the post-Soviet era, Russians have been free to think of Roerich what they will, and some have put aside the old, blandly idealized image. However, nationalistic pride has kept that image largely intact, and the growing appeal of new age movements has added to it. In the West, popular writing about Roerich is dominated by admirers of his art or his spirituality, but scholarship has been far more critical than in Russia. He receives due credit as an artist of importance, but many art historians find his style not to their taste, and his mysticism and political skulduggery have called forth skepticism and scorn.
Polarization of opinion has similarly confused the biographical record. Both in Russia and abroad, Roerich is commonly viewed in two dimensions rather than three, as a saint limned on an icon or as a cartoon villain. His admirers, whether they venerate him as a guru or merely enjoy his art, typically cling to hagiographic understandings of him as a benign sage: politically blameless, esoteric in a philosophical rather than a cultish sense, and imbued with the compassion and social conscience of an Albert Schweitzer or a Gandhi. Some see Roerich this way because they know no better; others more consciously refuse to face unflattering facts about him. For example, one scholar at a major US university angrily dismissed as "fantasy" the research of a peer for daring to suggest that Roerich conducted himself less than spotlessly.16 Moscow's International Center of the Roerichs, which touted itself from the 1990s through the 2010s as the "defender" of the family's spiritual and cultural legacy, declared it a "sin" and "abomination" to speak of the Roerichs as one would "mere historical figures."17