Wednesday, June 11, 2025
In The Spirit of Socialism, Joseph Kellner shares a cultural history of the Soviet collapse. His book examines the millions of Soviet people who, during the cascading crises of the collapse and the post-Soviet transition, embarked on a spirited and highly visible search for new meaning. Amid profound disorientation, these seekers found direction in their horoscopes, or behind gurus in saffron robes or apocalyptic preachers, or by turning from the most basic premises of official science and history to orient themselves anew. The beliefs they seized on and, even more, the questions that guided their search reveal the essence of late-Soviet culture and its legacy in post-Soviet Russia. In this edition of the Sage House blog, Kellner explores how revisiting history can unearth larger questions of where true knowledge originates.
In the 1990s, Russians numbering in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, came to doubt that there had ever been a Mongol invasion. The reality of the Mongols’ conquest of northern Eurasia, previously taken to be a defining event of the Middle Ages in the region, was cast into doubt not by a historian but by the renowned Soviet-Russian mathematician Anatolii Fomenko. I elaborate Fomenko’s methodology at length in my new book; but in short, he came to his conclusions based on an apparent aberration in the long-term trajectory of the moon.
With the help of Soviet supercomputers, Fomenko processed astronomical observations and other data from a wide and eclectic selection of historical manuscripts and determined that the numbers, and thus the history, did not add up. Fomenko’s “New Chronology” theory, published in dozens of blockbuster volumes throughout the 1990s, put the manuscripts in their proper order, and found no space for the Mongols. Instead, they revealed a forgotten, continent-spanning Slavic-Turkic “Great Empire” that ruled most of Eurasia from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, and ruled well at that, such that today’s Russians should take pride. The Great Empire was marked by peaceful development and ethnic and religious tolerance. As for the Mongols, the “invasion” was invented via a conspiracy between the upstart Romanovs and their German accomplices to legitimize themselves, by sullying the empire whose throne they usurped. Mongols were really part and parcel of the pre-Romanov formation, rather than an external enemy or even a clearly-defined ethnic group.
[T]he “invasion” was invented via a conspiracy between the upstart Romanovs and their German accomplices to legitimize themselves, by sullying the empire whose throne they usurped.
The bindings of the earliest volumes bore the imprint of Moscow State University, the premier university of the Soviet Union and then Russia. This was the early 1990s, when the university, like everything else, was in the grips of crisis. It was a financial crisis on the scale of the Great Depression, but also a cultural crisis, provoked by the rapid erosion of all Soviet reference points and expectations. Fomenko’s theory, like a wide range of new and radical worldviews that all drew extraordinary public interest, succeeded by addressing the deepest questions that racked the culture at this time.
They were questions that the Russian Revolution and subsequent Soviet order had raised but ultimately had not answered: Where does true knowledge originate? Where do we stand among the world’s peoples and civilizations? And underlaying these, and most fundamental to the entire Soviet worldview: Where is history going? The Soviet answer was straightforward—scientific-rational investigation along Western lines, once decoupled from the profit motive, is the engine of progress, driving history ever-upward. In a word, the Soviet Union was an heir of the Enlightenment. But by the 1990s, nobody could believe these premises anymore. Fomenko’s status as a world-class mathematician gave him intellectual credibility, and to the questions of identity and history’s direction, he offered a lost national golden age, obscured by a conspiracy of outsiders, but towards which society might reorient itself. His were just some among many answers to these same urgent questions.
Where does true knowledge originate? Where do we stand among the world’s peoples and civilizations? And underlaying these, and most fundamental to the entire Soviet worldview: Where is history going?
It is no coincidence that the questions that racked Russian society at the Soviet collapse are today racking ours. Conspiracy theory is now a primary mode of discourse, alongside a breakdown of any shared intellectual authority. Anxiety about identity has bred various reactionary nostalgias all over the West. Vanishingly few of us look to the future with hope. The end of Enlightenment was a major story of the twentieth century, with the world wars and nuclear weapons playing major but, remarkably, not decisive roles. Both ideological blocs preserved something of that grand vision to the end. The imagined arc of history ultimately frayed at the end of the Cold War—first on their side, then on ours.
Joseph Kellner is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union at the University of Georgia.