Slavic-Aryan myth as a distortion of the history of Russia

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The Russian population of the former Soviet territories has been undergoing rapid political, economic and social changes over the past twenty years.

For the sake of the future of the nation, you can even return to those origins that have never been

It is not surprising that they are accompanied by a search or, more correctly, the creation of a new national mythology. It is also not surprising that the main source of this new mythology is sought in religion. And if the role of Orthodoxy in this process is well known and understood, the strengthening of Aryan ideas among Russians remains little studied and even little understood. But anyone who observes Russian political or intellectual life could not help but notice that the further, the more often the "Slavic paganism" and "Aryan roots" of Russians are mentioned in the public statements of some politicians and intellectuals. And by no means the least noticeable in the life of the country.

For the sake of the future of the nation, you can even return to those origins that have never been

The Behistun inscription was carved by order of the Persian king Darius I in 523-521 BC. e. Above the cuneiform text is a bas-relief of Ahura Mazda, one of the central deities of Zoroastrianism. Photo (Creative Commons license): dynamosquito

Even recognizing the impossibility of attributing to a new trend at least some massive character, we see that it fully fits into the global phenomenon of our time, the most important component of which is to invent traditions for oneself, and in this quality it needs to be studied and comprehended. The return to reflections on the Aryan theme takes many forms. Religiously, we are witnessing a rapid swelling of the mass of movements aimed at recreating the revised ancient Slavic paganism, for example, in the guise of "Russian National Socialism" invented by Alexei Alexandrovich Dobrovolsky (Dobroslav); historiographically, we see the emergence of an obvious inclination to demonstrate the "glorious Aryan past of the Rus"; Politically, attention is drawn to the very gradual import of Aryan allusions from the arsenal of ultra-right extremist nationalist parties into the political tools of more moderate groups, such as the Party of Spiritual Vedic Socialism of Vladimir Danilov. At the same time, the general public either cannot or does not want to discern behind the Aryan myth its ideological background and historical ties with Nazism.

References to the Aryan past are not new to Russia. In the 19th century, the idea of a special Aryan origin of some European peoples was borrowed by Russian Slavophiles from Western European thinkers, especially from German ones. The ideological father of the Slavophiles Alexei Stepanovich Khomyakov (1804-1860), like many of his students - including Alexander Fedorovich Gilferding (1831-1872), Dmitry Ivanovich Ilovaisky (1832-1920) and Ivan Yegorovich Zabelin (1820-1908) - argued that the Russians are the descendants of one of the main branches of the family of the Aryan peoples, and the least distant from the line of direct kinship. And yet, at that time, neo-paganism did not loom in the background of the Russian Aryan myth, and Russian Orthodoxy remained a fundamental religious context for these nationalist intellectuals. Moreover, they hoped to combine their Orthodox religiosity with the desire to acquire an Aryan identity, arguing that Byzantium came to Christianity directly under the influence of the Aryan peoples, whose Asian cradle, in their opinion, was located in Central Asia or Iran.

This view of biblical history allowed them to cleanse the Aryan idea of anti-Semitism: unlike their German counterparts, from claims of Aryan origin for the Russians, they did not move to condemn the Jewish world and did not question the ties that unite Christianity and Judaism. In the Soviet period, some intellectuals, both those close to the Communist Party (Boris Rybakov and Apollo Kuzmin) and dissidents (the Pamyat society and Vladimir Chivilikhin), again started talking about “Aryan roots” among some intellectuals, but the Aryan myth never surfaced.

With the end of the Soviet period in Russian history, the Aryan myth took on a completely open public life. Numerous series of collections of works by popularizers of the Aryan idea - such as "Secrets of the Russian Land" or "The True History of the Russian People" - lie on the shelves of Russian bookstores, on the trays of Orthodox churches, on the shelves of municipal and university libraries. This wave has become part of a much broader alternative history movement that denies the exclusive rights of academic historians to interpret data from archeology and ancient history and demonstrates what this data turns into when in the hands of lay people.

These texts can by no means be considered marginal: their circulation reaches tens of thousands of copies (or even millions, if we recall, for example, the books of Alexander Asov), and their content currently forms the ideological basis of a wide segment of the population regarding ancient history. New doctrinaire nationalists developing the Aryan theme often end up working in geopolitical institutions or members of new academies that proliferated in the 1990s. Very rarely they have a special historical education, most of them were trained in the field of exact (physical and mathematical) or technical sciences.

In the books of these authors, the Slavs are systematically represented as the first civilized people of the human race, existing for millennia, if not tens of thousands of years. It was the Slavs, in their opinion, who taught the ancient Greeks to philosophize, the Indians - to cultivate the land, the Europeans - to write, the Semites - to believe in a single God, etc. tried to hide the significance of the Slavic civilization and hid the Slavs under various names: Sumerians, Hittites, Etruscans, Egyptians … Russians, according to them, have always played a central role, still unrecognized, in every heyday of this or that ancient civilization of the Mediterranean region. The engine of the revival of the Aryan myth is Veles's Book, a falsified manuscript created by two Russian emigrants in the United States and containing an eclectic set of fairy tales, legends and folk songs. It allows any author who believes in its authenticity to reconstruct the "primary pantheon" of the Aryan gods.

The modern defenders of the Russian version of the Aryan myth, like its German and European supporters, have a fundamental question dividing them into two camps. While some consider the steppes of southern Russia to be the cradle of the Aryan civilization (for example, Elena Galkina), others prefer to look for this cradle closer to the Arctic Circle (like Valery Demin). The southern theory for the most part reproduces the reasoning of the Slavophiles of the 19th century: the first Aryans, who are also the future Russians, created powerful civilizations in the steppe zone stretching from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea or even to central Siberia. The association with the Scythians seen here forms the central element of this retroactive identification.

The northern theory is directly inspired by the German model and was practically absent from the Slavophiles. According to this version, the cradle of the Aryans was ancient Atlantis, a northern country that disappeared during a catastrophic flood. But its population managed to escape and migrated to the territory of the future Russia. The mysterious Hyperborea, which was never found by the Germanic enthusiasts of the Aryan myth, was thus located in the north of Russia - this thesis makes it possible to give special value to the rich folklore of these places. Theorists who have taken this position differ from their opponents by radical racism: the Arctic myth is inextricably linked with the idea of the superiority of the primordial white race, of which the Russians are the purest representatives. And therefore, it is Russia that faces the task of building the Fourth Reich, a new Aryan empire on a global scale.

Aryan fashion cannot be seen simply as a parallel historiography developed outside the university walls and outside academia. On the contrary, some prominent personalities of post-Soviet science play an important role in the dissemination of these ideas. Some well-known Indologists, for example, are looking for examples of similar manifestations of the spiritual life of the ancient Indians and the ancient Slavs in order to substantiate the Aryan origin of the Russians with their help, supporting the “Arctic party” as a whole. One of the most notable points of such a meeting of scientific discourse and nationalist mythology was formed in connection with the discovery of Arkaim.

In 1987, a group of archaeologists discovered a fortified settlement near Chelyabinsk dating from the 17th – 16th centuries BC. e. Similar fortifications were known for a long time in Central Asia, but for the first time such an extensive building was discovered on the territory of Russia proper. She had to go under water during the construction of a new reservoir, and the local scientific community hoped to save the historical monument, insisting on its absolute uniqueness. Very quickly, the initiative was intercepted by nationalists who presented Arkaim as the capital of the ancient Russian-Aryan civilization; some of them even found traces of Zarathustra in Arkaim. This nationalistic instrumentalization of a scientific discovery was, to a certain extent, approved by a part of the scientific community, and the process of its vulgarization reached unprecedented proportions without encountering any opposition. Some of the local scholars, as well as some representatives of the local political authorities, even played an ambiguous role in promoting this myth.

However, Russia is now not the only country where the Aryan movement is becoming more active. There are also activists in the West, immersed in their Celtic past, who advocate a return to the "druid religions" of pre-Christian Europe. The neo-pagan political anchors of the far-right nationalist ideology are not specific to Russian inventions: this is a technique often used by their Western counterparts. For the most part, both French and German "new rightists" stand on a common platform of common European unity based on Aryan identity and a desire to part with Christianity, which they accuse of two millennia of "wandering in darkness." The result is always the same - more or less openly recognized anti-Semitism. Indeed, the search for the lost "harmony" between man and nature, or the lost spirit of collectivism, quickly leads to the construction of xenophobic theories, if only this harmony implies the exclusion of certain categories of people or their groups.

Demonstration of the "Aryan Guard" in the Canadian city of Calgary in October 2007. This relatively small neo-Nazi group has existed since 2006 and calls to "shut up the mouth that bites the hand that feeds it." On their official website, they announce that they undertake to cleanse Canada of "third world immigrants." Apparently, they consider themselves to be more direct descendants of the common Aryan ancestors of all people. Photo (Creative Commons license): Robert Thivierge

In Russia, the fashion for the Aryan revival is nourished, first of all, from the most universal source: you need to know your national past - hardly anyone would argue with this thesis. As well as the need to study regional folklore. As a result, the embodiment of folklore renewal in radical nationalist theories meets with all-round support - as a manifestation of interest of the general public in the history of the ancient Slavs, and in the diverse manifestations of local folklore, and in the reviving ancient rituals and peasant superstitions associated with the cult of the land-breadwinner and mixed in "Double faith" Christian and pagan practices (many examples of which are contained in ethnographic sources). Apologists of the Aryan myth successfully play on the need for a life-giving national idea, which would confirm the factor of historical continuity in the long-term (ideally, from prehistoric times) existence of the people and the state, would finally make it possible to survive the disappearance of the Soviet Union and would designate the cultural and religious invariants of the state " Russianness ".

Marlene Laruelle