Premium Episode 155: New Chronology & Fomenkoism w/ Sean KB (Sample)
The Romans and Greek never existed. History starts with the "Russian Horde Empire". Chronology as we know it is a conspiracy to cover up Russian greatness. Guest writer Sean KB from the Antifada Podcast leads us down the rabbithole of "New Chronology", a belief system created by respected scientist and professor at the University of Moscow Anatoly Fomenko in the 70s that became hugely popular in the 90s, after the collapse of the USSR.
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Episode written by Sean KB: https://twitter.com/as_a_worker / https://fans.fm/theantifada
More New Chronology madness: https://chronologia.org
Music by Lake Radio. Editing by Corey Klotz.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 155 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the new chronology episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Sean KB, Liv Agar, Julian Field, and Travis View.
This week, our guest writer is Sean KB, the co-host of the Antifada Podcast and a union carpenter.
They should unionize this podcast.
I'm gonna say it here and now.
I know a guy.
Yeah?
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, I'll put you in touch.
Yeah, maybe start passing around some pamphlets and stuff.
He's brought us the story of a fantastic conspiracy theory that emerged in Russia during the 1990s after the fall of the USSR.
At its center, Anatoly Fomenko, a professor and scientist at the University of Moscow who wrote a series of books promoting what he called New Chronology, Which is an incredibly elaborate, alternate history that places Russia at the center of basically everything.
Despite how wild it is, the theory is apparently believed by a decent portion of the Russian population, and was even embraced by Garry Kasparov, the chess champion.
This is particularly interesting to me because I've been recently exploring on my stream the 1993 Yeltsin coup, which kind of was like, you know, the real final death knell for the Soviet structure and ushered in a wave of privatization that saw life expectancy in Russia drop by a decade in a very short period of time.
So yeah, thanks for bringing us a story from one of, like, by far the most brain-melting parts of history, Sean.
Yeah, great to be with you guys.
This was certainly a deep dive into maybe the most insane shit I've ever read in my entire life, but I fucking love it.
Yeah, and I think, you know, it's our attempt to chronicle amazing conspiracy theories that have gripped huge parts of places that are not just the Western world.
Because we all know Australia's pilled.
We all know the UK's gone.
We all know...
America is doing great.
But it's true that, like, I don't think we've ever looked at a purely Russian conspiracy theory believed by a huge part of the population that is on its face insane and ridiculous and ahistorical, but also promoted by a fucking professor and scientist.
Like, that rocks.
That it's just straight from the top.
University of Moscow.
It's not some random guy.
And what I love about it, too, is it's almost like a prehistory of of pilling, right? Because this arises in the 1970s and
only really heats up in the 1990s before even the internet. I love it. So it's a bit of a prehistory
maybe of some of the things we've seen over the last 20 years or so. Fantastic. Let's jump
right into it. Genealogy of New Chronology. With tensions between the United States and
Russia heating up yet again, it's a good time to have a look at what kinds of ideas and
movements have been animating the great Russian bear since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and, as
Julian just mentioned, the Yeltsin coup of 1993.
As we'll see, Russia in a time of world historical change has given rise to its own great conspiracy theory.
Perhaps as Byzantine as QAnon and certainly more extensive to explain its own place in history in a rapidly changing world.
Today we'll explore the grand pseudo-historical theories of Anatoly Fomenko, a once respected Soviet mathematician and now the crank intellectual leader of so-called New Chronology, a conspiracy that some surveys suggest is accepted by up to 30% of Russians and whose chief proponent has been chess champion and international celebrity Gary Kasparov.
He beat the computer.
He's like, actually my brain with the help of these books could beat pretty much anything.
It is important to note with like chess champions though is that they're like incredibly stupid in everything except for chess.
Like they're really good at a board game and that's about it.
But they're considered, like, these general intellect geniuses.
Famously, Bobby Fischer is now, like, a virulent crank anti-Semite as well.
Incredible.
It does feel good when you win at chess, though, I gotta say.
It feels good.
You feel smart when you beat the computer.
That's so true.
Uh, I used to play that- that 3D version of chess where it was like- Battle Chess.
Frickin' knights and shit, and they would chop each other up.
Oh, that was the best.
I thought I was sick.
To teach a boy chess, that's the ultimate- you're like, ah, no, it's- it's a barbarian, not a pawn.
You know what I played the other night?
Uh...
Oculus Rift has a chess game that you use your hands to move, like you don't need the controllers anymore, like the front of the headset captures your hands, so you actually pick up the pieces and move them.
I was playing in bed, completely sealed off from the real world, and I won!
And then I became an anti-semitic crank.
Can you flip the board, though, or, like, throw the pieces at the head of the other player, you know?
You know, I didn't try doing the, like, doing the angry swipe where you, you know, you erase all the pieces from the board.
I was too preoccupied with getting my pawns to the other side so I could have, like, four queens, which I didn't know was a rule, but I was very happy to see that it was.
As you were playing the audiobook for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the background, So, but I feel like I've seen Garry Kasparov post, like, basically, like, rad lib stuff on Twitter?
I mean, is he just all over the place?
He's like a resistance guy, sort of, because he's, like, anti-Putin lib stuff.
He used to, like, he used to be a part of, like, the coalition against Putin, essentially.
Right.
Okay, right.
That makes sense.
Wow.
So, okay.
He's a political actor.
He contains many, then, if he also believes in new chronology.
That's insane.
Yeah, oh man, so he's basically like, yeah, like Putin, you know, illegitimate successor to the Russian hordes.
Well, I'm not gonna get too into it, but Kasparov is merely a skeptic, right?
So he believes that basically all of human civilization fell apart, more so than we even believed during the Dark Ages.
And he appreciates new chronology, not for the reconstruction, which we'll get into, which is the real galaxy brain shit, but for the questioning of standard historiography and chronology.
So he's not like fully pilled on this shit, but he's written extensively about how important this project is of revising chronology.
He just thinks that Q is making great rhetorical questions and is helping people think critically.
He doesn't believe the adrenochrome stuff.
Just asking questions.
I have more than a passing interest in history and historiography.
I'm a failed graduate student in historical studies who has parlayed my meager training into podcasting about historical materialism and political economy.
As such, I'm obviously deeply invested in the historically specific ways in which human beings reproduce themselves and society itself.
But at the same time, I'm obsessed by cranks and crank theory.
Whether it's bizarre conspiracies like QAnon and Flat Earth, Or modern religious sects like Scientology and Mormonism, or pseudo-histories like Ancient Astronaut Theory.
At stake is always a social group's understanding of themselves and their world.
These ideologies come to take on a semi-independent existence, but not, of course, under conditions of the ideologue's own choosing.
As we'll see, the New Chronology epic is more than just the story of a Russian mathematician who became famous by jumping off the deep end of historiography.
It likewise helps us to get at how Russians themselves were and are navigating a huge world historical change.
The rise of Fomenko and his insane reconstruction of history are inseparable from the dissolution of the USSR and the vast social, economic, and political changes that have proceeded over the last 30 years or so.
It's also interesting to think about pseudo-histories in general.
How their proponents come up with implausible ideas like ancient astronaut theory, the Holy Grail myth, and more darkly, things like Holocaust denial, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Lost Cause Myth of the Confederate South, and so on.
And what the persistence of these ideologies means for the rest of us out here living in normal-ass boring historical times.
Now, everyone from a young age knows that the ancient Western world was centered around Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean.
That starting around 3100 BC, the ancient Egyptian civilization arose.
That it was followed by Ancient Greece that was followed by Ancient Rome.
That the collapse of the Roman Empire led to a series of feudal successor states in the West and the Byzantine Empire in the East.
That we ourselves are a product of at least 10,000 years of human civilization in all of its dizzying diversity and slow accretion of knowledge and human experience.
Even the most based and pilled QAnon devotee in the US or Europe would agree that, say, the Old Testament was written before the New Testament, right?
The standard chronology of Western history is school kid shit, that every resource tells us is emphatically true and verifiable.
But what Anatoly Fomenko's new chronology and all its weirdness and grandiosity proposes is, maybe it isn't.
Maybe this entire narrative is an epic mistake on top of an epic fraud.
Maybe the Holy Roman Empire, the Vatican, and the Germanophile Romanov dynasty perpetuated this 5,000-year-old fake-ass history to deny the uncomfortable truth that Egypt, Greece, and Rome were fake as hell.
That when ancient sources talk about the Kingdom of Jerusalem, fake.
They are talking about Byzantium or Moscow.
That the historical Jesus?
Fake.
Is in fact a composite figure based primarily on Andronicus I Commendus, Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire from 1152 to 1185, alongside Pope Gregory VI.
That the history of the Egyptians?
Fake.
Greeks?
Fake.
Romans?
Definitely fake.
We're all just phantom copies of the true history of Western civilization, which consists of a great empire based, conveniently, in Moscow, called the Russian Horde, which dominated the Eurasian steppes, where all the action that was supposed to be happening in the West really happened, but that dumb and jealous Europeans half-faked and half-mistook for the history of Western civilization.
