Alternate history turned into a rotten garbage dump

Prior to that, the Latvian deputy became famous for a tweet: “The Russian language arose as a dialect when the Mongol-Tatars tried to speak Ukrainian.” A video went viral on the Runet showing a fifteen-year-old girl suggesting to a grey-bearded Russian skeptic: “Your ruler Catherine told you” that Vladimir the Baptist and Yaroslav the Wise were not Ukrainians!

Not surprising. Even before the second Maidan, the British press ran the Polish version that almost from Svyatopolk Vladimirovich the Accursed, Poland and “Rus-Ukraine” constituted a “commonwealth”.

And on YouTube since 2019, hundreds of Russian-language videos with titles like “Lies of Historians” have been multiplying. Below them are thousands of comments like: “The conquest of the Rus by the Petersburg Empire!”, “The Romanovs carried out the genocide of the Slavs!” …

No, it’s not Svidomo Ukrainians who curse the victory of Russian weapons near Poltava, it’s not their Belarusian brothers-zmagars crying about the death of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This is written by the Russians. For example, about the war of 1812 – about the archetypal Russian feat, which, despite the bitterness of Moscow smoke, has become a symbol of Russian independence and triumph.

Let me explain: “alternative history” (AI) is usually called the genre of science fiction. Suppose the Indians fought off the conquistadors, captured cannons, horses and ships, and then reached the gates of Madrid. But more and more often the AI ​​name is given to versions that leave no stone unturned from the “official” (or “traditional”) history. True, they relate to science in the same way that the assertion that the moon is made in Hamburg is related to astronomy.

At first it was a whim of mathematicians. I read about Fomenko and Nosovsky, who deepened the historical revision of Morozov, a member of Narodnaya Volya, back in 1994. And in 1995, the invasion of the “new chronology” (NC) began on the book market and the shattered post-Soviet minds.

Toward the end of the decade, in December 1999, Moscow State University even held an alarming conference “Myths of the NC” with the participation of the greatest experts in Ancient Rus’, academicians – archaeologist Yanin and linguist Zaliznyak. The materials of “Myths of NX” and years later explain why the Morozovites and Fomenkovites toil with foolishness.

Nikolai Morozov assured that the history of the biblical kingdoms and the annals of ancient Rome are fantasy echoes of later events: in reality, they say, only Byzantium-Romea existed. And the history of Hellas and ancient culture is the work of the Renaissance. He also admitted that the Golden Horde is the Order of the Crusaders.

Geometer Anatoly Fomenko checked the calculations of the Narodnaya Volya, at first deducing that “Romea” is the Holy Roman Empire of those Middle Ages, when the Italians invented Ancient Greece.

The mathematician Gleb Nosovsky took up the work of his senior colleague – and the province went to write. Spain and China (with Egypt and both Indias) ended up in the same Russian-speaking Horde-Empire, aka Tartaria. The Genghis Khan capital was erected after the Battle of Kulishki (on Slavyanskaya Square, where the Kitai-Gorod metro station is). The empire was destroyed in the Ivano-Grozny era and finished off with the coming to power of the “Romanov dynasty connected with the West.”

To explain “this is all” to those who have not heard anything before is long and strange. However, in Russia the number of those who have heard about “that’s all” tends to be the number of those who are aware of “traditional”, that is, normal history.

At the beginning of the 2000s, the NX reached suicidal absurdity: the authors declared Razin, Pugachev and real Indians to be Horde Mohicans, assured that the remnants of Tartaria were conquered by the Romanovs and the United States already in the 19th century. Here Sigurd Ottovich Schmidt, a great historian, printed the new chronologists with the book “The Fomenko Phenomenon”.

The reasons for the brief over-success of the “mature” HX are obvious. The post-perestroika public was offered the fashionable word “empire”, parallels with the death of a superpower, experiments in naive etymology in the interpretation of old pictures. This easily boosted the self-esteem of the readers of the simpler. Readers, on the other hand, were more disillusioned with HX, as well as with the fashion sensations of the 70s and 80s: “Dear editor! Maybe it’s better about the reactor? .. “

Tartar history, it would seem, has stopped its course … But if foolishness disappears somewhere, non-trivial views will be added somewhere else. As soon as President Vladimir Putin noticed that the legendary Varangian Rurik could also be a Slav, media well-wishers were found who imagined it had begun! The “experts” got into trouble about the defendants of the NH – the insidious academicians Bayer, Miller and Schlozer, who imposed on the Russians the humiliating Norman theory, for disagreeing with which Lomonosov was allegedly sentenced to death.

In fact, the adjunct (that is, assistant professor) Lomonosov spent six months under arrest for a drunken scandal at the academy, threatening to count the teeth of completely different Germans. According to the fierce Peter’s law, such a debauchery could be punished, like a riot on a ship. But they were not zealous – otherwise, in the turbulent years of Peter and the post-Petrine region, they would have been left without civil servants. And here the meek Elizabeth reigned.

Lomonosov’s “History” is crude proto-romanticism, obsolete by the end of the eighteenth century, as was the judgment of the first Normanists that the Vikings (not at all Germans) allegedly started the “Ordnung” in Rus’.

The Norman theory, in today’s terms, is not a theory at all, but a hypothesis on a particular question, unprovable, irrefutable, changing nothing. Rurik could be a Scandinavian: the Viking Age! Or a Slav. Or he might not have been Igor’s father at all, having arisen from confusion in legends. From which it does not follow that the chronicle tradition is fake and there was no Horde yoke – and the difficult overcoming of the powerful Steppe by Russia.

However, the myth about the unproven Lomonosov and his manuscript stolen by the Millers, where “the whole truth”, has become, if not a good tone, then a commonplace.

Here the abysses of hell open up. Or just burning rotted garbage. In the bowels of it, short “chronologies” compiled by various enthusiasts rot, sticking together with the 7- and 40-thousand-year-old Vedas of the Rus, Slavs and other Hyperboreans.

The obsessive signs of “alternativeism” are the search on Google maps for “star fortresses” (ordinary bastions). References to “buried floors” (semi-basements). Conclusions that the “ancient” (from the word “Antes”) civilization (the same Tartaria) was destroyed by a nuclear strike – in 1700 (“the Germans Romanovs” changed the calendar for a reason!), In 1812, or during the Crimean War, someone with by someone. Otherwise, “where does so much clay come from?” – virtual archaeologists repeat: either it poured with an explosion, or it caused a flood! (They do not believe in the cultural layer, nor in the fact that the semi-basements are not antediluvian, but water supply and dolift.)

With the development of video blogging and trash journalism on monetized network resources, the “surprising side by side” with the claim to parascience is replaced by cheap cheating: it is enough to cut pictures from the Internet that are “inexplicable by official science.” Any large buildings “in the old style” – “antediluvian”! A tram is running, no wires are visible – these are “Vedic technologies”! Have you heard of the secret physicist Tesla?

Here you understand: other TV channels shamelessly played with content about the “unknown”; at school, for a long time “everything is wrong” with history (not only Soviet), as well as with the basics of world art; the abolition of architecture in our country has given rise to people to whom any non-panel building is “ancient”. Such people believe that Empire style and modernity are “ancient” and “antediluvian”, because they “cannot be repeated!”.

And the assertions that “scientists cannot explain” are usually based on ignorance of what and how science explains. Previously, alternative technical thought did not understand: why, having learned to “forge something iron”, did the locomotive not immediately work? The new alternatively gifted do not believe how it is possible to “make it beautiful” without a 3D printer, and the riddle of the egg and the chicken is solved through occultism and ufology: “We were erased from memory!”, “We were cloned and settled!”…

Of course, these are the intrigues of the “world government” and its servants – priests, Jews, scientists. The authors are scoffing – and commentators are already calling for storming the archives. It seems that historians and linguists (and there also physicists) are saved from meetings with the distraught “antiques” by the ignorance of the latter about the organization and personalities of our science.

In alternative history there is no place left for either Lomonosov, or Pushkin, or culture in general. Probably, the “new chronology” will end with the idea that Moscow was built under Soviet rule. It’s not funny anymore, since they dug up Petersburg!

Who fabricates irrepressible nonsense in Runet? There are sincere fans of alternativeism. There are also sincere fanatics. And businessmen (a careless coach will not refuse extra monetization). And something in between and even worse.

Here are the bots with the names of the sample “Matilda Sverdlova” slapping comments: “No one knows further than their great-grandfather anyway!”, “That’s why my grandmother called the old times antediluvian!”, “Mine lived 104 years, she said that clay fell from the sky!” … Similar “people without faces” agitated to rebel against covid vaccinations, and then against CBO.

I can’t guarantee that the notorious TsIPSO – the Center for Info-Psycho-Special Operations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine – is behind the entire alternative history. But it would be strange if the masters of disinformation and sect-building did not note a cheap way to make the extra thousands of Russians, if not crazy, then idiots in the national-civil sense. The one who came behind the millennia of the “Vedic past” remains with the “secret knowledge” that not only “ancient Petersburg”, but even the Moscow metro was “dug up”: “You have nothing! You’re hungry!”

An alternative story is akin to a call from scammers that frighten the victim: “There was an attempt to withdraw money from your account!” The victim believes – the money evaporates for real. The same here. They shout to the victim: “They stole your story! Lomonosov proved! And they leave the victim with no history at all, but with a new skull open. If people believe that Moscow and all of Tartaria were devastated in 1812, then what will they believe tomorrow? ..