| http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=004808393757103&rtmo=QwOap3OR&atmo=rrrrrrrq&
pg=/et/01/4/19/warth19.html King Arthur was really a Russian, say Slavs By Marcus Warren in Moscow TO the alarm of Russian intellectuals, a new Slavocentric history of the world that suggests Britain was once part of a Russian empire is attracting growing numbers of converts. The history, known as "New Chronology", rejects orthodox dating and makes a welter of fantastic claims, including that King Arthur was a Russian prince and that the early King Henrys were known as Khan Rex. Its supporters go further and combine the classical and medieval periods into a catch-all grand theory of Byzantine and Russian cultural might. All accounts of events up to the Renaissance are forgeries hiding the truth and extending history artificially into the past, they argue. Far from being dismissed as nonsense, books on the theories are packing the shelves of the history sections of major book stores. The school has also secured the energetic support of Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster. After refusing for years to take it seriously, conventional historians are sounding the alarm at the phenomenon, denouncing New Chronology as the work of charlatans set on robbing Russia and the rest of the world of their past. Anatoly Fomenko and Gleb Nosovsky, the mathematicians from Moscow University who have developed the theory, are unimpressed by the efforts of historians, archaeologists, astronomers and linguists to prove them wrong. Mr Fomenko said: "Theirs are not arguments but ideology and hanging labels on us. There is nothing academically serious in anything our opponents have written about us, just emotions." Basing their findings on what they say are irrefutable astronomical and statistical data, the mathematicians have filled hundreds of pages with what they call "our reconstruction" of past centuries. Their concept of a mega-Russian empire occupying Eurasia and the British Isles until the 16th century and their belief in a total falsification of the past are increasingly fashionable. Kasparov, who is fronting a television series on the inconsistencies of traditional chronology, said: "I consider myself to be part of a team. It's quite a big group and it's expanding." In the provinces, Mr Fomenko's history is entering the mainstream, with some officials in charge of school curricula lobbying for the theories to be included in textbooks. Igor Danilevsky, a specialist in medieval history, said: "At this rate I would not be surprised if in five years school leavers come to me with their heads stuffed with all this." Historians' reputation as servants of the old regime and the haste with which they overturned old orthodoxies after the collapse of communism discredited the profession and helped the rise of the likes of Mr Fomenko, he said. Other academics are more aggressive. Valentin Yanin, head of Moscow University's archeology faculty, compared Prof Fomenko to the magician David Copperfield, and called Kasparov "his Rottweiler". Many of the mathematicians' linguistic arguments rely on intellectual sleights of hand akin to conjuring. The Highland county of Ross is posited as proof that the area was part of a Russian empire. The French word for "Scotland" (Ecosse) hints at the presence of Cossacks. References to England as "an island" are not to be taken at face value either. In fact it was an "Asia-land", revealing its origins in the East. The violence done to Russian history is just as brutal. Ivan the Terrible never existed and the version of Russia's past that has come down to us was invented by the Romanovs to justify their seizure of power. The mathematicians and Kasparov strongly deny any nationalist subtext to their history, despite its vision of a mammoth Russian empire stretching from the Atlantic to Japan. Their critics are unconvinced. |
