Russia today, despite the collapse of the USSR and its partial dismemberment, is still the largest and most powerful Eurasian state in the world, extending as it does over eight time zones from East Europe to the Pacific Ocean. The current government under President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin appears quite stable at the moment and as democratic as circumstances permit. At the extreme left of the political spectrum, the old Communists under Gennady Zyuganov still retain a substantial following; at the extreme right a militant group, which calls itself the “New Right”, has formed around Vladimir Borisovich Avdeyev and two comrades – Anatoli Ivanov and Pavel Tulayev.

Avdeyev describes himself as a proud Russian heathen, namely, one who does not acknowledge the God of the Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Not a trained specialist in racial anthropology, Avdeyev, a former Russian Air Force officer, has a degree in economics and is a member of the Russian Writer’s Association. His book, now in its second edition, is the most recent title in the Library of Racial Thought Series of which Avdeyev is chairman. Previous books in the series include: Political Anthropology (Social Darwinism) by Ludwig Woltmann; Female Racial Beauty by Karl Stratz; Metaphysical Anthropology by Avdeyev; Overcoming Idealism by Ernst Krieck (editor of the journal, Volk im Werden); and Selected Works on Race Science by Hans F. K. Günther. The Series obviously borrows heavily from German National Socialist thought, especially Rassenkunde, and applies it to the Russian scene.

Avdeyev has written a book on racial anthropology, sometimes characterized by the academic left as “scientific racism,” that gives a good idea of the type of Russia he hopes to create. He describes it as a synthesis of the Third Rome, the Third Reich, and the USSR — truly strong medicine for a dying race. Avdeyev and his comrades are deeply concerned about the gradual demise of the White Race everywhere and especially in Eastern Siberia. Will China or Muslim tribes rule Siberia as the power center of the modern world shifts to the East or will Russia be able to maintain control? Together, the three men have organized a Pan-European society of like-thinkers called “Athenaeum” and the journal Atheney to share ideas and to recruit new members. Without more Whites Aleksandr Dugin’s geopolitical Eurasia, based on Mackinder’s Heartland Theory and dreams of a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, will be unattainable. The priorities of the New Right are “blood before soil” and “biopolitics before geopolitics”.

Sadly, Avdeyev dismisses any chance of help from the United States:

Beautiful America — the dream of millions of European refugees and immigrants — that used to be free, White and proud, has transformed into an aggressive terrorist State, the corrupt policeman of the world, protecting … human degeneration, race-mixing and global Zionism.

Like National Socialism in Germany, the New Right in Russia has a special interest in the pre-Christian era, i.e., before Christianity, seen as a Jewish sect, distorted the natural course of Slavic racial history by imposing an alien value system on the Slavs. Like the Greeks, Romans, and Nordics, prehistoric Russians were polytheists fearing and worshipping many gods. The Athenaeum group has just recently published a handsomely illustrated book on the Slavic gods and what they represented. Likewise, Avdeyev and his group study and learn from ancient Slavic mythology, folk tales, and fairy tales, much as the Grimm brothers did in Germany.

Lest one thinks that biology has little or nothing to do with politics and government, recall Trofim Lysenko, who dominated Soviet biology and headed of the Institute of the Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences until 1965. His teaching that environmentally acquired characteristics may be inherited became national policy in that multiracial State.

A myriad of diverse peoples live on these Eurasian lands: Europeans in the West; Turkic, Iranic, and others of the Islamic world in the south; Finno-Ugrians and a multitude of Mongoloid tribes in Siberia all the way to the shores of the Pacific. According to the Russian anthropologists cited by the author, since antiquity Europeanoids have been the prime agents for introducing whatever cultural and organizational forms once existed or exist today. Even during the Communist era anthropologists supported this contention.

By re-introducing the importance of the racial capabilities and eugenics standards that existed for a hundred years before the outbreak of war in 1939, Avdeyev’s book, Rasologiya [Rasology; literally Race-ology, meaning “Race Science”] flies in the face of modern rampant internationalism, globalism, multiculturalism, and most of the other isms that have transformed the West since World War II.

Rasology, as Avdeyev defines it, is the study of the effect of race on human culture and history. Rasology attempts to evaluate the social, political, cultural, religious, sexual, and other behavior of different races through the study of their inherited group characteristics. Avdeyev estimates that roughly 80% of human behavior may be attributed to inherited characteristics and only about 20% to environment. Consequently, a specific population shares a distinctive gene pool. Any infusion of alien genes would disrupt the unity of the population and alter it.

Unlike ethnology, which is a sociological study, Rasology is an exclusively biological science dealing with humans as part of the animal world and consequently conforming to Darwinian principles of evolution. It is a qualitative rather than a quantitative evaluation of human behavior. The very term race, Avdeyev argues, derives from the Sanskrit and refers to the essence, elixir, or best part of something. It is therefore a value system. However, as in America, Russia too had strong advocates for quantitative measures and the belief that the environment is the dominant influence on behavior.

Avdeyev subscribes to the belief that in deep prehistoric times mankind consisted of three major races: Europeanoids, Mongoloids, Negroids. Subdivisions exist on all continents. In Europe, Avdeyev, like other Europeans before him, ranks Nordics as the most capable and valuable human category. Indeed, it was a Russian anthropologist, Joseph Deniker, who first introduced the concept of the “Nordic Race” to the world. The term ‘Nordic’ was soon adopted by Madison Grant, the popular American author, and by the German Hans F. K. Günther in the interwar period. Hitler, an admirer of the work of both gentlemen, soon took it up and it became part of the professional literature.

According to Avdeyev, in Russia, too, it was primarily Nordics who established the country, ruled it, set its mores and laws, and have its been its leaders in most governmental, scientific and military matters. In Tsarist times, German names shared some of these roles until they were replaced by Jewish names after the Communist Revolution.

Avdeyev rejects the use of the term “the West” or “Western” to refer to the Northern Nordic peoples of Europe. He especially faults the English, who in the past were powerful enough to assign place names to their colonies and other conquered territories; they were even able to set the prime meridian of the longitudinal system in Greenwich, England. Today, in economic and financial matters even Japan is included as part of the West. But, in the modern world Nordic England no longer exists. Avdeyev asserts that England has been Semiticized and White Nordic instincts put at the service of a Semitic value system. Indeed, throughout the Anglo-Saxon countries much of the leadership appears to have passed from Germanics to Judaics. Racially much of Europe is similar to Russia, but it has been racially infected with an alien ideology.

Investigations have shown that lack of gene flow between groups results in increased biological differences between the groups, which, in turn, will cause the cultural life to change over time. Avdeyev cites Eric-Rudolph Gensch, head of the German Psychological Society in the early 20th century: “Our present practical task now is to recover the basic national psychic type.” Here Avdeyev advocates research that would reveal the primordial European genetic type, unmixed with any subsequent contributions from other groups.

To disprove the argument of some that the Russians themselves as Eurasians are in no position to discuss the purity of races, V. E. Deryabin in a comparative anthropological study titled Contemporary East Slavic Peoples found that Russians occupy a central position among the Europeans with regard to anthropological criteria. Russians are in fact, Deryabin claims, the most typical of Europeans in that the pigmentation of their hair and eyes is even lighter than the average European type.[1]

As the English, German, and French anthropologists have done from the mid-19th Century to the mid-20th Century, Avdeyev considers the Nordic component to be the most valuable of the entire European stock. He writes:

The fundamental thesis of race theory proclaims that the racial basis of the Russian and other European peoples is unarguably the Nordic race. All Europe is indebted to the culture-creating ability of the Nordic race.[2]

The very name of the Slavic people who settled the land now called Russia derives, according to Avdeyev, either from the Indo-Aryan tribes resident there at the time, namely, ruksa, russa meaning fair or white or from the Iranic (Old Persian) rauka, ruk meaning light or white. It is undeniable that the Slavs, as a European people, had a Nordic component, as did the other European states going back to ancient Greece and perhaps earlier.

Among topics discussed by the author in Rasology are: the myth of the Melting Pot; the race problem in contemporary Russian science; anthropoaesthetics; the evolutionary stability of racial characteristics; the biological hierarchy of cultures. In the section on Soviet and Post-Soviet science in the service of race theory, Avdeyev gives many examples of how the Europeanoids, not the Mongoloids, produced whatever culture or civilization that has ever existed in Asiatic Russia. Some examples follow:

In 1972 V. V. Ginzburg and T. A. Trofimov in their work Paleoanthropology of Middle Asia reported:

In the Bronze Age the population of the Pamir was homogeneous and without a Mongoloid admixture. The Europeanoid race with only a slight Mongoloid admixture constituted the main anthropological type of the area of Tien Shan and Semirechye (Seven Rivers) in Russian Turkestan.[3]

Moreover, Ginzburg and Trofimov confirmed the basic postulate of race theory to the effect that it was the Europeanoid racial type in whom the Nordic element was the underlying factor that fulfilled the function of culture-builder throughout Eurasia (p. 105–106). Indeed, significant infusions of Mongoloid blood only entered European Russia at the time of the 13th-century Mongol-Tartar invasions. The French expression Grattez le Russe et vous Trouverez le Tartare (Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar), attributed to Napoleon, is obviously exaggerated.

At an international symposium on ethnic problems in Central Asia in antiquity (2000 BC) held in 1977 the Soviet delegate B. G. Gaforov reported:

Data from Indic and Iranic languages, similarities in religion, culture, social and political organization, attest to their origin from a single common Aryan source.[4]

Writing in 2000, anthropologist A. T. Yablonov in his study Anthropological and Ethnographic Findings on the People of Central Asia, noted that

in the very heart of Eurasia in the era when literacy, religion, culture, technology, which are the foundations of civilization and laws were developed in the first identifiable countries were formulated, Mongoloids, Negroids, and others were not even mentioned. It was the will, the rule, and the wisdom of the white man that was responsible for all these epochal developments.[5]

Clearly, many, if not most, anthropologists had accepted Joseph Deniker’s idealization of the Nordic Race during the Classical Age of Race Studies (1850–1950).

It has also become equally manifest that people of European heritage in both the Old and New Worlds are gradually abandoning their old value system as their nations change from monoracial states to multiracial.

Avdeyev concludes his book with a little story based on old Slavic fairy tale characters: “Deathless Kashcheys” of another race have for a long time been aggressively weakening the biological body of the Russian people, diminishing its ability to expand and diminishing its evolutionary prospects. A new scenario has begun. We have only to call to life “Johnny the Little Fool” of the Russian fairytale, no longer stupidly burdened with all of mankind’s humanistic ideals and therefore free to switch on the Kashcheys’ genetic self-destruction program, so that in an instant of agony these parasites are obliterated from our time once and for all.

In Slavic mythology the Kashcheys (Kashchei Bessmertnyye) are ugly evil persons whose souls are so well hidden that they may not even exist. Johnny the Little Fool (Ivanushka Durachok) is a beloved figure in Slavic mythology, somewhat akin to The Pure Fool (der reine Tor) in Germany, who looks out for the Slavs.

Avdeyev clearly sees the decline of the Russian people as being caused by racial outsiders. Although it is not stated, he is perhaps referring to Jews, given his comments on Jewish influence on England and the long history of conflict between Jews and Russians recounted in Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together.

Rasology is clearly an attempt to resurrect ideas that were prominent early in the 20th century but were more or less eradicated following World War II and the rise of a leftist political culture in the universities and among intellectuals generally that opposed the idea that racial differences were related to cultural accomplishment and even denied the reality of race. This intellectual culture has had devastating consequences on the cultural confidence of Europeans and the ability of Europeans to defend themselves against colonization by other peoples. The fact that Rasology is a bestseller in Russia bodes well for a resurgence of the Russian people and the West in general.

[1] Vladimir Avdeyev. Rasologiya (Race Science): Nauka o nasledstvennykh kachestvakh lyudey (Science of the Human Inherited Qualities). Belyye alvy Publisher, Moscow, 2005, p. 113.

[2] Ibid., p. 114

[3] Ibid., p. 106.

[4] Ibid., p. 110.

[5] Ibid., p. 115.