Putin’s Great Patriotic Pseudoscience
Russia has a proud history of scientific inquiry and advancement. Now the Kremlin is investing in academic kooks and conspiracies. ...
Science is under assault in the land that has produced some 17 Nobel Prize winners in the sciences. It’s not just that funding has been slashed (though it has) or that the field struggles with corruption and brain drain (though it does). Members of the scientific community say one of the biggest issues they face is the recent embrace of pseudoscientists like Yermakova by the Russian state. The Kremlin has elevated and institutionalized their ideas, often mixing them with a healthy dose of anti-Western rhetoric for good measure. ...
Meanwhile, the growing link between nationalism and pseudoscience has allowed pseudoscientists to accuse their critics of being unpatriotic Russophobes. Anatole Klyosov, a Russian biochemist who worked in the United States before veering off into genetics, last year opened a Moscow-based “academy” for DNA genealogy, a field he claims to have discovered and upholds as a “patriotic science.” In the 10 books he has published since 2010, Klyosov has advanced outlandish claims, including the idea that the human species originated in the Russian North and that the view that humans derived from Africa is an expression of Western political correctness.
In 2015, a group of scientists from various fields wrote an open letter saying Klyosov’s writing could fuel hatred by “attracting readers whose nationalist and political ambitions are not satisfied with the world’s scientific body of knowledge.” Klyosov responded in his latest book, which he called Lies, Insinuations, and Russophobia in Modern Russian Science, dismissing his critics as members of a “fifth column.” ...