Documents of the OGPU and NKVD as a source of information about the culture of occult organizations

Among the sources on the activities of occult organizations, interrogations, confrontations, and indictments in criminal and intelligence cases of the 1920s and 1930s are of particular importance. The OGPU and NKVD solved their specific tasks, but in their documents we find important details concerning occultists that are absent from other sources. Evaluating these materials from the point of view of various criteria, we can admit that the documents of the early and mid-1920s more objectively represent reality, although individual significant circumstances were revealed only in 1940. In general, the documents of the OGPU and NKVD allow us to create an idea of the reasons for the emergence of occult societies in Soviet Russia at that time.