September 03, 2019 by Nathaniel Lloyd
In this edition, we will transition from discussing the nationalist myths of Nazis and the conspiracy theories attempting to negate their history, and we will look at… nationalist myths of Russians and conspiracy theories attempting to rewrite history in their favor. But this subject is more than just a comparison of strains in contemporary Russian culture with the German culture preceding the rise of Nazism, and it will comprise more than one installment, for the topic branches to other theorists who have made challenges to accepted history and science, and not all of them with clear nationalist agendas. In the post-truth era, when facts can be disproven in the eyes of many simply by shouting that they are lies, when journalism can be discredited merely by calling it fake, and when history may be negated through hard-headed denial, perhaps it should come as no surprise that there are some who theorize that the entire timeline of history as it is accepted by academics everywhere is completely wrong. And perhaps it is even easier to believe that there are many who take them seriously. To be clear, I am not talking about alternate interpretations of certain historical events or even theories suggesting that those events have been exaggerated or misrepresented. I am speaking of fundamental doubts about entire swathes of history, raising objections about the number of years between historical events, about whether some separate episodes in history were actually the same events, and even about whether entire eras and epochs ever occurred! More than the claims of Holocaust deniers, who purport to practice the techniques of historians and whose false assertions still indicate a respect for the notion of legitimate historiography, the theories I’ll be discussing in this series represent a direct and serious challenge to all historians and to the very idea of historiology. Like other denialist ideas, these rely implicitly on conspiracy theory, giving the impression or even directly making the accusation that the academic community, in consistently promulgating the consensus view of history, is involved in what would have to be considered the most massive cover-up of all time.
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As we are exploring ideas that scramble time and throw our understanding of the sequence of historical events into disarray, I will be following suit by not discussing chronological revisionist theories in a chronological order. Instead, I’ll start with the most recent influential writer on the topic, Anatoly Fomenko, but before I delve into his New Chronology, I feel it necessary to examine the genre of alternate history in Russian culture from which Fomenko’s work seems to have evolved. This will serve as something of a transition from my series on the occult origins of Nazism, as well, for many of the same veins that throbbed in German society in the early 20th century seem to throb also in modern Russia. For example, many of the New Age occult ideas and societies swirling among the literati in Austria and Germany that I spoke about, such as theosophy, anthroposophy, astrology, etc., have found a strong foothold in Russian culture as well, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this has led to some prominent theories in alternate history. For example, as it did in Germany, this New Age movement has led to some curious historical mythmaking tying Russian prehistory to lost civilizations, such as Atlantis. Inspired by great Russian poets who had long used Atlantis as metaphor, some have made the serious assertion that the mythical continent was located in Russia. Also like Germany, there has been a resurgence of neo-paganism. Some more nationalist Russians, recoiling from transnational Christianity, have looked to their ancient, pre-Christian roots for inspiration. From their view, the beginning of the Russian people’s downfall came when Prince Vladimir Christianized them in 988. Indeed, just as the Germans looked to that hoax the Oera-Linda Book to confirm the superiority of ancient Germanic peoples, so Russians have their own forgery, the Book of Vles, a hoax that presented itself as an authentic manuscript written on wood planks describing the greatness of a pre-Christian Slavic civilization. The neopagans who hold this book sacred may not be so great in number as the neopagans of interbellum Germany, and may be no great worry to the dominant Orthodox Church, but they do exist, and they push to normalize their alternate view of history, as can be seen by the fact that the Book of Vles can be found in the history section of many Russian bookstores.
Likewise, just as German neopagans tied their notions of a pre-Christian golden age to notions of racial superiority, so in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union we have seen an apparent rise in belief in the myth of the Aryans and with it, unsurprisingly, renewed anti-Semitism, which as I’ve discussed in the past, has a long history in Russia. There has always been something of a controversy over whether the original Russians were Scandinavians or Slavs. Unlike the Germans, however, Aryanists in Russia have chosen to argue that Slavic peoples, rather than Nordic peoples, were the superior root race of humanity, crafting various alternate narratives of history in which the Slavs introduced all the great advancements of humanity to different cultures, teaching Greeks how to philosophize, Indians how to farm, and Europeans how to write. As Ariosophist Germans believed every great ancient civilizations must have been founded by Aryans, so these Russians will claim that Sumerians, Hittites, Egyptians, and Etruscans were all really Slavic. And just as Ariosophy was racist and specifically anti-Semitic to its core, so these Russian Aryanists recast history as a struggle between the superior and noble Slavic Russians and a villainous conspiracy of “world Jewry” bent on weakening and subjugating Russia. Much of the alternate Russian history pushed by anti-Semites focuses on Khazaria, a polyethnic kingdom on the Caspian Sea that flourished as a kind of buffer state and crossroads during the second half the Common Era’s first millennium. The anti-Semitism surrounding it stems from medieval sources indicating some of the state’s elite converted to Judaism. This has led to theories of Khazaria being a predominately Jewish homeland whose Jews survived its destruction as the Ashkenazi Jews, a diasporic population that made a home in the Holy Roman Empire. Anti-Semites see in this version of Khazarian history a cautionary tale against the supposed danger of Jewish immigrants who scheme to undermine Christian nations, as many Russians believed they did in the form of Bolshevism. More brazen purveyors of anti-Semitic alternate Russian history will even go so far as to suggest, without a shred of proof or even valid reasons to suspect it, that the entire historical record has been falsified by Jews, that rather than being subjected to the rule of Mongol invaders from the 13th to the 15th centuries, Russia was actually conquered by Khazar Jews, but, as the conspiracy theory goes, “world Jewry” would rather the Russians forget who their true enemy has always been and thus altered the historical record somehow.
It has been suggested, for example in one of my principal sources, “Conspiracy and Alternate History in Russia,” written by Marlène Laruelle for The Russian Review, that the modern Russian phenomenon of radical historical revisionism or even the reimagining of history, especially through the lens of conspiracism, can only be understood as an effect of the Soviet Union’s collapse, and in a broader sense as a reaction to its politics. Firstly, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, artists, academics, and lay researchers suddenly enjoyed a greater freedom of speech, and along with it the possibility of publishing work that previously would have been squelched by the state, or by publishers beholden to the state, for failing to conform to official discourse. Add to this a newly privatized publishing market searching for material that will sell well, and you have the makings of a possible renaissance in new Russian historiography. The fact that this “genre” of alternate history has proven to be so popular among those now writing and buying books on history can be contextualized by considering the fact that in Communist Russia, the people knew no such thing as established, unassailable consensus history. They regularly saw their history rewritten by those in power. From the nationalist revision of history prevalent in Stalinist propaganda to the disingenuous rehabilitation of Stalin by his more modern apologists, they have seen history as not a scientific pursuit but as a malleable tool of politics. And rather than declining in the new era since the Soviet Union’s collapse, they have seen former Communist states engaging in “memory wars,” protesting the historical representation of the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, the Soviet victory in World War II, and the incorporation of Baltic states, culminating in 2009 when Russian President Dmitri Medvedev established a “Commission for Countering Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests.”
When I speak about alternate history as a genre of literature in Russia, I don’t mean alternate history as we tend to think of it in America, as a style of speculative fiction that imagines a world in which history took a different path. Certainly works such as those are popular in Russia as well, but I refer more specifically to a strain of academic and pseudo-academic historiography that does something quite similar but for scholarly purposes. The first such works came in the mid-1980s from a mathematician named Ivan Koval’chenko, who suggested that math and history were more closely related than is often thought, and that historians should study their subject like scientists—a suggestion with which many of the theorists and researchers we will review would heartily agree. Koval’chenko originated a brand of historiography that explores hypotheticals in detail, academic historiological studies of “what if” scenarios: what if Prince Vladimir had not Christianized, what if Ivan the Terrible had instituted democracy, what if the Bolshevik Revolution had been avoided, what if Lenin had lived longer? And these books are common and popular. It seems that the longtime distortion and corruption of history in Russia and the yearning to take history back from establishment authorities who use it as a tool of repression has created such an appetite among Russians for non-traditional and non-conformist historical narratives, especially when they favor Russia’s importance in world history, that it has created a bastardized field of history, one that peddles fiction as history with no qualms about making sweeping changes to prove a point. Now the alternate history of Koval’chenko and those who came after him may admit to being hypothetical, but there are others who make revisions just as sweeping and assert that their changes are accurate.
In the early 1970s, a young and promising mathematician and geometer named Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko had taken an interest in astronomy, or more specifically, in celestial mechanics, the study of the motion of objects in space. What had captured his interest was a problem with the orbit of the moon having to do with its elongation, the angle separating it from the sun, whose acceleration should be relatively constant when charted through history according to records we have of eclipses. The issue with this is that, when taking into account data on eclipses from the Early Middle Ages, about 500 to 900 C.E., it isn’t constant at all, with its acceleration showing a massive, unexplained drop in graphs. One of the foremost authorities on this problem in the late 1970s was Robert R. Newton, who dealt with such problems first by accusing Claudius Ptolemy, author of the most important record of ancient astronomy, the Almagest, of falsifying observations to make his data agree with his theories, and then by suggesting that any remaining variations in the acceleration of the Moon’s elongation must be attributable to unknown forces. Anatoly Fomenko, however, had a different idea. He had attended a lecture on a little known Russian autodidact named Nicolai Aleksandrovich Morosov who between 1907 and 1932 had published numerous works challenging the chronology accepted by historians. Over the course of his interesting lifetime, Morosov had gone from being an imprisoned revolutionary to a respected polymath and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but his works on chronology were not well-received. They asserted that much of ancient history had been expanded, or made longer than it actually was, because the same events were mistakenly repeated and attributed to different eras, errors that were thereafter cemented as historical fact and never challenged. For proof, Morosov relied on linguistic evidence, data about constellation positions taken from ancient horoscopes, and statistical analysis of records that he argued proved an overlap existed between the reigns of certain sovereigns who had previously been thought to rule successively. Perhaps it was this application of mathematics to history that so inspired Anatoly Fomenko in the 1970s, or perhaps it was the fact that challenging accepted chronology made for a simple solution to the problem of the Moon’s motion, since it suggested the eclipses of the Early Middle Ages may not have actually happened in those years. By shifting the problematic period of time, Fomenko was actually able to get the graph depicting the acceleration of the Moon’s elongation to flatten out into something resembling a constant variation. For the mathematician Fomenko, this constituted absolute, unimpeachable proof that history was wrong, and ever since, he has followed in Morosov’s footsteps and relied on many of his methods, but has taken his conclusions even further, suggesting that world history may be as much as a thousand years shorter than we have always been taught.
Certainly Fomenko brought a greater and more modern understanding of mathematics to bear in his arguments than had Morosov before him. Moreover, modern astronomy can determine with a far greater degree of accuracy when certain planetary configurations such as lunar and solar eclipses did or did not occur. Because of that, Fomenko could be far more certain in his conclusions regarding whether a historical record of a celestial event could or could not have occurred in the year historians accept that it occurred. He looked first to the Peloponnesian War, during which, according to the contemporary Greek historian Thucydides who chronicled it, there occurred three eclipses, two solar and one lunar, within about 18 years. Based on Thucydides’ descriptions of the eclipses, the first of which seems to have been a total eclipse because of the fact that, during it, Thucydides says, “stars became visible,” Fomenko identified a series of eclipses visible in Greece starting in 1039 C.E. that better match the description, thereby shifting the beginning of the Peloponnesian War forward in time some 600 years. Likewise, he and his associates found alternative eclipses for those described by Livy and Plutarch, as well as one recorded in the New Testament Gospels as having occurred during Christ’s crucifixion. There was indeed an eclipse that occurred in 33 C.E. and was visible in Jerusalem, but it would have been of short duration, while both Mark 15 and Luke 23 tell us the event lasted three hours. So, looking for a better alternative, Fomenko argues this event was one and the same as an eclipse that occurred in 1075 C.E., more than a millennium after historians agree Christ was crucified. Likewise, his team challenged the date of the Council of Nicaea based on lunar cycles and the rules set out by the council for establishing the dates on which Easter would be celebrated, rules which, if the council had been held in 345 as tradition tells us, were not all followed until almost 500 years later.
Fomenko’s efforts to use astronomy to establish an alternate chronology represent his most scientific and most irreproachable work… but there are nevertheless big problems with the conclusions he reaches. Not the least of these is the fact that he treats throwaway lines in ancient manuscripts as though they are unimpeachable and exact astronomical observations. He accepts Ptolemy’s work in the Almagest as reliable when it has been found dubious time and time again, and not just because it doesn’t line up with traditional chronology. As for Thucydides, Fomenko insists that the eclipse traditionally identified as that which took place at the start of the Peloponnesian War could not be the one described because of the detail of stars being visible, when it’s perfectly plausible that Thucydides exaggerated the totality of the eclipse or mentioned the twinkling of stars during the eclipse for purely aesthetic reasons. While his calculations may be sound, they are based on the questionable premise that historical reports of eclipses were rendered with pinpoint accuracy. But even if we accept this, there is the muddled mess that he makes of history in reordering it. For example, by his team’s best calculations, the Council of Nicaea, at which was debated the nature of Christ and his importance in relation to God the Father, took place in 876 or 877 C.E., while Christ himself was crucified, at 33 years old, in 1075 C.E. So in his garbled chronology, the council debated the nature of Christ more than 150 years before Christ would even be born.
Likewise his other approaches to analyzing and proposing changes to settled chronology rely on sound mathematics but rest on unstable foundational assumptions. For example, like Morosov before them, Fomenko and his assistant researchers looked at a number of Egyptian artifacts with horoscope representations carved on them, such as the Denderah stones and other bas-reliefs and paintings in a variety of tombs. After analyzing the sky configuration represented by these zodiacs, Morosov had determined that they depicted the night sky as it appeared not in the 1st century B.C.E. but rather the 6th century C.E.. As usual, Fomenko and his team go further, asserting that actually, a more accurate placement would be the 12th century, making of the Egyptians a medieval culture. But as before, their exact and scientific calculations stand on infirm ground. These zodiacs were illustrations with figures like people and animals representing planetary bodies, and as such, each figure and the significance of its placement was open to interpretation. To illustrate the uncertainty involved, one point of debate was whether a man holding a stick was or was not meant to represent a planet, a dispute that came to depend on whether his stick had or did not have a handle, because if it were a walking stick, then he was being depicted as a traveler and could thus be interpreted as a planet. Clearly this is not an exact science, and issues of interpretation like this abound and are not always treated consistently by Fomenko and his team. For example, in interpreting the Denderah zodiac, he asserts that a star over the head of a planetary figure means that it was visible, but in interpreting bas-reliefs at Esna, he says just the opposite, claiming the standard artistic representation had changed. And sometimes, when they had no interpretations for certain figures, they came up with novel solutions, such as that smaller figures represented partial horoscopes, depicting some of the same planets already on the zodiac but in different context. But the suggestion made by many Egyptologists that these weren’t necessarily accurate astronomical diagrams but rather works of art, they dismiss out of hand.
Taking another cue from Morosov, Fomenko deals in the same way with the principal objection to his New Chronology, that it simply doesn’t gel with the known sequence of events, usually counted according to the reigns of different rulers, such as pharaohs in Egypt and sovereign dynasties elsewhere, or even popes in Rome. There is a wealth of records for nearly every era and in nearly every region showing us who took power, how long they held it , and who succeeded them. As did Morosov before him, Fomenko argues that some of these reigns must have overlapped, that some of these rulers must have been the same person called by different names, thus collapsing the timeline to suit his shortened version of history. Unlike Morosov, however, Fomenko takes pains to support his assertions with math, or more specifically, statistics. He takes the intervals of how long a king reigned, in conjunction with those who reigned afterward, and attempts to match them with the lengths of other reigns. To explain further, he doesn’t say, These two kings both reigned ten years, so they must be the same. Rather, he argues, Here we have a reign of ten years, followed by a reign of five years, another of 20 years, and then one of 7 years, and these match well with the lengths of another series of four consecutive reigns thought to be different. His argument is that such similarities, which he claims to have found numerous examples of, are mathematically improbable, suggesting the rulers may have been the same, recorded under different names by different scribes and thereafter assumed to be different people. He even goes so far as to create painstaking statistical analyses of ancient records, recording the number of words used to describe events in a period or the frequency of names mentioned over a period, and in comparing these finds corresponding patterns that he also argues prove the records are talking about the same time and the same people. This latter method is hard to comprehend as useful unless one is a statistician, and so Fomenko cows many critics with a proof by intimidation, a sort of logical fallacy that, like proof by verbosity, relies on the assumption that all this mathematical jargon that’s so difficult to follow must represent a valid and ironclad argument. However, we can look closely at Fomenko’s method in determining supposedly identical monarchs to see how much water it really holds. It appears Fomenko omits certain kings from his sequencing when they reigned for a statistically insignificant length of time, suggesting that any issues this omission creates fall well within an acceptable margin of error. But this shows that the sequences he is comparing don’t actually match, that one era or dynasty he’s saying is the same as another actually records a different number of rulers than its supposed doppelganger. Also, he takes it for granted that these figures are simply numbers on a page, when in fact, in many cases, each has extensive biographical information that doesn’t line up with the other, fighting different wars with different enemies for different lengths of time, marrying different numbers of spouses and fathering different numbers of children, and finally, being laid to rest in different burial places, some of which can still be visited today.
Perhaps out of an inflated self-assurance, which my principal source, The Lost Millennium by mathematician Florin Diacu, suggests may have been cultivated by the prominence and prestige accorded to mathematicians in Russia, Fomenko focuses not only on mathematical proofs of his theories, venturing also into fields of which he is no expert. In 1996, Fomenko and his associates published a book on the ancient history of Rome, England, and Russia, and in it, they rely mostly on linguistic arguments to assert that English history is far shorter than tradition claims, and that much of its history actually occurred in the Byzantine Empire. As we have seen in, for example, our examination of The Two Babylons, etymology is a shaky ground on which to build a vast conspiracy theory or alternate history, especially when one is only an amateur etymologist. In fact, true etymologists have taken some joy in absolutely destroying Fomenko’s work here, such as A. A. Zalyzniak, who belittled it as “mountains of amateurish nonsense and phantasmagoric fabrications” which he suggested “bears the same relation to a scientific investigation as a report on the authors’ dreams” (qtd. in Diacu 206-208). What specific errors were made? Well, he reduced most words to consonants only, which while valid in the analysis of some ancient languages is not suitable for English, Russian, and Latin—the pertinent languages in this case. So we see Fomenko making false assertions, such as that “Turk” reduces to the root TRK, and Trojan to TRN, so because of a superficial similarity of consonants, the Trojans must have been the Turks. And the Russian city of Samara, read backwards in some languages could be “Aramas,” and as it shares the R and M of Rome, then Rome was in Russia. It is absolutely flabbergasting that an otherwise brilliant man would make such patently false claims with such weak proof. Unless he had some ulterior motive…
Fomenko has been roundly criticized by much of academia, but based on his scientific credentials and approaches, he is also defended and often given the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, even when scholars disagree with his conclusions, they will suggest that he has raised valid points about certain weaknesses in our chronology that should be further explored. In dealing with those who seek to refute or debunk his theories, Fomenko retains a position of logical advantage, for almost anything a historian might bring up to counter his claims, Fomenko can cast doubt on as being itself part of a flawed chronology. So, for example, there are records linking Christ to the time of Tiberius, a Roman emperor from 14 to 37 C.E., but Fomenko can easily point out that Tiberius’s reign may have also been misplaced on the timeline, or that he may have never existed at all, for as with many challengers of tradition, Fomenko also relies on conspiracy theory, suggesting that many records have been falsified to support traditional chronology. But as much as Fomenko may argue that traditionalists have a bias toward accepted chronology and cherry pick evidence that supports their view, he is guilty of the same. For example, the eclipse he settled on as taking place when Christ was crucified actually had as short of a duration as that which took place in 33 C.E., making it just as problematic as the one the traditionalists cite, but Fomenko likes it better because it fits his timeline. And when his techniques return impossible dates, such as when his analysis of one Egyptian zodiac indicated it represented a 19th century sky configuration, he simply discards it. As for his agenda, as with the less influential and less notorious writers of Russian alternate history, it has been argued that he seeks to rewrite history in order to place Russia in a more prominent position, or in order to reclaim the historical significance that has been supposedly taken from her by her enemies who falsify the past to minimize Russia’s contributions. While Fomenko never breaks from his scientist character to indicate this agenda, it does seem apparent in the 1996 work I mentioned. His argument that English history is really Byzantine history equates to an argument that Russia should be given credit for England’s historical accomplishments, for because of its shared Orthodox faith, Russia has long been seen by Russians as a successor to the Byzantine Empire, its tsars a continuation of the empire’s Caesars. This agenda is hard to discern in much of Fomenko’s other chronological work, but it does provide some clear motivation for why he would take his career in such a strange and controversial direction, and why his books sell so well in Russia, where his devotees have dedicated internet forums to disseminating and furthering his theories. But Fomenko was not the only Russian figure to set off a movement to revise chronology and challenge traditional scholarship, as we shall see in our next installment.
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Further Reading
Diacu, Florin. The Lost Millennium: History’s Timetables Under Siege. Knopf, 2005.
Laruelle, Marlène. “Conspiracy and Alternate History in Russia: A Nationalist Equation for Success?” Russian Review, vol. 71, no. 4, 2012, pp. 565–580., www.jstor.org/stable/23263930.
