I familiarized myself with the works of A. T. Fomenko comparatively recently, and they impressed me greatly. What part of them struck me as the most stunning? First and foremost, it was the intellectual capacity observable behind them. The authors reveal a way of cogitating that manages to fuse austere logic with dialectic flexibility; this is truly a rare occurrence in the field of social studies. Reading the œuvres of A. T. Fomenko and his co-author G. V Nosovskiy – occasionally several times over – was a veritable intellectual delight for yours truly. They flabbergasted me with their sheer disquisitive might as well as the research results which, in my opinion, can by rights be called the greatest discovery in contemporary historical science – what A. T. Fomenko and his colleagues had learnt over the course of their research was the fact that the entire history of humanity up until the XVII century is a forgery of global proportions (“old history” in their terminology) – a falsification as deliberate as it is universal. I shall be referring to this falsification as the first one. My sociological research of the great evolutionary breakpoint demonstrated that a new, blatant, global and premeditated falsification was already in full swing. Prior to becoming familiar with the writings of Fomenko, I had already known that the falsification of the past was a rather common phenomenon inherent in human existence. However, I was neither aware of the scale of this fraud as described by Fomenko and his fellow scholars, nor of its social type. My assumption had been that the blatant falsification of history on a planetary scale that I discovered was the first one in what concerned the proportions and the ulterior motivation, as well as its historical role. Let us call it the second falsification of the same variety. It differs from the first in terms of pertaining to a different epoch. Its main subject is modern history and whatever historical period can be claimed as relevant to, and seen as fitting for, the purposes of this falsification. The second falsification also differs from the first one in its primary means and methods, which shall be described below.
One has to differentiate between the two kinds of falsification, the first one being the involuntary routine falsification of minor details that results from the mechanisms of gnosis and those of the actual description of historical events, or the entropy inherent in the framework of humanity’s historical memory. The second is the extraordinary, premeditated and complex falsification that has distinct social causes.
Let us consider the former kind first. We shall disregard the period preceding the epoch of literacy and symbolic systems. The mnemonic means available back then were less than meagre, which automatically diminished the arsenal of the hypothetical falsifiers. We shall turn to the era of literacy instead. It is common knowledge that historical events become immanetized in human language – and a statement uttered is a lie, as the old saying goes. We cannot fathom the unfathomable. What we end up doing is raking the vastness of history for tiny morsels of information and adding some of our own narrative in order to produce wholesome and coherent textual material.
The modern information technology does not affect the principles that the status quo relies upon. Let us introduce the concept of historical “atoms”, or particles that aren’t subject to further division. One may well calculate that the verbal description of a single year of real history the way it really happened, including all manner of events, no matter how minute, would require the processing power of all the computers on the planet, with all people made computer operators. De facto, this technology serves as a powerful instrument of historical falsification. It allows for the possibility of drowning a scientific approach to historical events in an ocean of meaningless facts.
Furthermore, the description of actual historical events is done by humans, and not perfect divine entities. People are brought up and educated in a certain way and have a certain social standing, as well as egotistical goals and aims of their very own. All of this affects the way the information is processed. Over the course of time, the overwhelming majority of events are wiped away into oblivion without leaving the merest trace. They are frequently not even realized as events. The people’s attitude to the past begins to alter as past events gradually drift into an altogether different observational and interpretational context.
Evolutionary process discerns between two kinds of events – preliminal and superliminal. The former kind does not affect the general character of evolution; the latter one does. However, humans, including specialists, fail to recognize the difference between the two. Everyone knows perfectly well how much attention is poured over rather insignificant individuals, such as kings and presidents, whereas the really important events often don’t even get so much as a passing reference. This affects the relations between historical events so much that all sense of measure is often lost. Even if we are to suppose that all those who partake in the creation of historical records see veracity as their mission, the result of their collective efforts is often the rendition of their own subjective views on history as opposed to what happened in reality. As centuries pass by, the stream of disinformation is fed by various sources and tributaries, which, in their multitude, produce the effect of impartial falsification of historical events. This stream also feeds on murky rivulets of countless liars and swindlers.
The false model of history serves its function for a certain while. However, humanity eventually enters a period when this distorted representation loses efficacy and stops serving its ends. This is where people are supposed to start searching for explanations and set out on their quest for a “truth”. However, there is the abstract scientific kind of truth, and the actual historical variety – that is to say, something that people regard, or will at some point start regarding as truth. The very word “truth” is confusing here. We shall be on safer ground if we are to consider the adequacy of having certain concepts of the past for the new needs that have manifested as a result of the historical process. These concepts stop being valid for satisfying these needs. One becomes aware of the necessity to update our view of the past in accordance with whatever the present stipulates. This awareness is the kind of craving that can only be satisfied by a “bona fide rectification” of history, which has to occur as a grandiose paradigm shift – moreover, it has to be a large-scale organized operation; one that shall result in an epochal falsification of the entire history of humankind. The issue at hand is by no means the falsification of individual observations of historical events, but rather the revision of the entirety of historical records describing the events which cannot be observed as a principle since they belong to the past. What we are talking about is not a mere change in the perception and interpretation of the same old existential phenomena – it is the adaptation of the charactery, which naturally used to refer to certain commonplace realities at some point, to the exigencies of people who have to live in an altogether different environment. Trained specialists are a sine qua non for this – people whose activity shall have to be organized in such a manner that their collective output will result in the creation of a coordinated historical Gestalt. What they really have to do is create exactly the kind of past that is needed for the present, making use of whatever available material presents itself.
The first global falsification of history as discovered and brilliantly related by Fomenko was based on an erroneous temporal and spatial coordinate system of chronological events (the chronological system and the localizations of events wedded thereto). The more recent and ongoing second global falsification of history is based on a system of erroneous pseudoscientific sociological concepts stemming from ideology and aided greatly by the modern information manipulation technology. This is why I call the second falsification conceptual and informational, or merely “conceptual” for brevity’s sake. Fomenko’s works describe the technology of building a false model of human history which uses the art of manipulating the temporal and spatial coordinates of events. Many thousands of specialists in false historical models are already working on this second falsification – their forte is the ability to misrepresent historical events while giving correct temporal and spatial coordinates and representing individual facts veraciously and in full detail. The actual falsification is achieved via the selection of facts, their combination and interpretation, as well as the context of ideological conceptions, propagandist texts that they are immersed into, etc. In order to describe the technology behind the second falsification with any degree of clarity at all, exhaustively and convincingly, one needs a well-developed scientific system of logistics and methodology, as well as sociological theory. I call such a system logical sociology; however, it is a thing of the future, which means that the second falsification of history shall continue in its present manner, with as much ease and impunity as the first. Tens and hundreds of years hence, a number of solitary researchers shall “excavate” the so-called “modern history” in very much the same manner as Fomenko (and his predecessors, including N. A. Morozov) have treated “old history”.
I would like to conclude with an observation concerning the exceptional scientific scrupulousness of the works of A. Fomenko and G. Nosovskiy. I have examined them from exactly this position many a time, and I have neither found a single ipse dixit statement, nor any categorical pontificating of any kind. The general narrative scheme they employ is as follows: the authors relate the consensual ( school textbook) historical concepts and then cite historical facts which either fail to concur to said concepts, or contradict them explicitly. Other authors who have noticed these inconsistencies are quoted. Then Fomenko and Nosovskiy put forth hypotheses which allow to find logically correct solutions for the problems under study. They keep on emphasizing and reiterating that the issue at hand is all about hypotheses and not categorical statements presented as the truth absolute. The readers are invited to take part in the solution of problems that arise as a consequence of the consensual chronological concept of history. I am amazed by the horrendous injustice of the numerous critics of Fomenko and Nosovskiy, who obviously distort their ideas, either failing to understand them completely or being altogether unfamiliar with their content. It is also quite astounding that whenever a publication occurs that voices ideas that bear semblance to those of Fomenko and Nosovskiy, but are a lot more tame and local, providing a lot less factual information, this publication is usually accepted with a great deal more benevolence. I understand the psychological groundwork beneath this – Fomenko and Nosovskiy have performed a great scientific feat of epochal significance, one that affects the sentiments and interests of too many people. Acknowledging this feat as such, or at the very least the mere fact of its creative relevance, obligates one to actions that are apparently beyond these people due to their incapability and immaturity. The trouble with Fomenko and Nosovskiy is that they have reached out too far and dealt the dominating historical discourse too heavy a blow.
Alexander Zinoviev.
10 October 1999,
19 April 2001.
Alexander Zinoviev, Professor of the Moscow State University, logician, sociologist, writer, member of the Finnish, Bavarian and Italian Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Polite Letters and several others. Laureate of the 1982 Alexis Tocqueville prize for sociology and the “Best Sociology Essay of 1979” prize, as well as a large number of European and international prizes for literature. Honorary citizen of several French and Italian towns and cities. The works of A. A. Zinoviev are published in more than 20 languages and considered international bestsellers. He reads lectures on sociology in many European and American universities.
