History as Therapy: Alternative History and Nationalist Imaginings in Russia, 1991–2014 by Konstantin Sheiko and Stephen Brown (review)

“Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market,” Eric Hobsbawm observed in “Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today,” Anthropology Today, Vol. 8, No. 1 (February 1992), p. 3. Well, since that time, in Russia at any rate, large numbers of people evidently think that academic historians have not been producing sufficiently strong stuff. History as Therapy takes on a fascinating subject: the vastly popular “alternative histories” that have become, for an alarming number of Russians, their main source of information about history. Books, blogs, films, and television series devoted to sensational imaginaries claim to set the record straight about Russia’s glorious past, which has previously been suppressed by, among others, the “German” Romanovs beginning in the eighteenth century. The extraordinary popularity of such works, which sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies, is far more significant than the details of the historical narratives themselves, many of which resemble astonishing kaleidoscopic designs made up of personages and events chopped up and swirled out of recognition. The phenomenon can be compared, perhaps, with the dispensationalist evangelical Left Behind book series, the sales of which in the United States have exceeded 65 million in the past fifteen years.

The major protagonist of the story told by Konstantin Sheiko and Stephen Brown is Anatolii Fomenko, a mathematician who, together with the physicist Gleb Nosovskii, began to publish a series of books in the 1990s, beginning with the exposition of a “new chronology” that introduced a radically altered historical dating system. They churned out volumes at a frantic pace, with well over 100 publications to date, plus numerous television and Internet productions. The reader has only to take a look at their website, http://www.chronologia.org/, for a head-spinning array of titles, most of them in series such as the 2010–2012 revised editions of the 7-volume Istoriia: Vymysl ili nauka (History: Fiction or Science) also out in 24 slick videos—and the current series Kak bylo na samom dele (How It Was in Reality), the latest volume of which appeared in February 2015. These books and films in turn have inspired numerous other “para-academic” narratives, authored mostly by men trained in the hard sciences.

According to Fomenko’s “New Chronology,” known historical events date no earlier than the eleventh century CE, and conventional geographical identifications have been confounded: the Biblical Temple of King Solomon was, in fact, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and Solomon himself was Suleiman the Magnificent; Caesar Augustus lived in Rome in the late twelfth century CE; the Battle of Jericho was actually the 1453 Turkish conquest of Constantinople; the Old Testament was written after the New Testament; the description of the building of the Temple in Jerusalem in the book of Nehemiah was actually an account of the building of the Moscow Kremlin; the Book of Revelation was written in 1486 CE; Christopher Columbus was most likely a Cossack sent by the great—and heretofore unacknowledged—“Russian Horde,” a mighty Slav-Turkic empire that dominated the vast Eurasian space for centuries on end. No Mongol invasion took place, but a civil war occurred within the Russian Horde, whose princes “occasionally hired Tatar thugs much as their predecessors hired Vikings for raiding parties” (p. 162). Moreover, Batu Khan, who is thought to have led that invasion, was, in fact, Aleksandr Nevskii. (Predictably, Fomenko and other authors of alternate histories are strongly anti-Normanist, asserting that Slavs and not Vikings founded and governed the Kievan Empire.) According to Fomenko, four tsars actually ruled Russia in the years that “conventional historians” attribute to the reign of Ivan the Terrible. The Russian Horde was the most extensive and advanced civilization in the world, whose real history and stunning achievements were heretofore hidden as part of a Western plot to rob Russia of...