AHC/WI: Soviet Pseudo-Archaeology and Occultism Wank

Deleted member 97083

What if the Soviets had a significant obsession with ideologically motivated pseudo-archaeology, much like the Anatoly Femenko's "New Chronology", the Nazi Ahnenerbe and Thule cult, or Olof Ohmans "Kensington Runestone"?

As for the POD, maybe Stalin is just obsessed with pseudo-archaeology and occultism and through him, a cult is created. Producing "evidence" for pseudo-historical ideas that the Soviet bureaucracy finds useful or just really want to believe.

Soviet Pseudo-Archaeology and Occultism could be focused on finding (manufacturing hoaxes, or modifying existing artifacts to produce a hoax) evidence and artifacts that "prove" the existence of an Atlantis civilization in Ukraine or the Caucasus, that key historical figures were proto-communists, that the medieval Slavic lands were hyper-advanced for the time or the Russian Empire was the first civilization, that Slavs created the Roman Empire, that Scythians, ancient China, or Mongols had been Slavs, that the Vikings or Kievan Rus were an egalitarian communist society destroyed by Bourgeois Crusaders, that Greco-Roman gods were derived from pagan Slavic gods, that human species evolved on the Volga, or finding "prophecies" of world revolution from ancient times.
 
Occultism isn't really in keeping with communist ideology, religion is the opium of the people and all that so I can't see them going to any particular lengths to prove some relationship between Slavic religions and Christianity or Greco-Roman deities ect. Also the idea of the Russian empire being the first civilisation is A clearly not true and B they weren't a fan of the Russian empire.

What I can definitely seeing them do is trying to the prove that the Indus valley civilisation was proto-communist, and to be honest you can make a pretty good case for it. The Indus valley cities have a surprising amount of central planning with a distinct grid layout for their cities and a uniformity and standardisation in many goods like bricks and pottery. Additionally unlike most early civilisations the Indus valley seems to lack the huge palace complexes you find in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. There's also some evidence of public services with what might be the first known public baths and a basic sewer system. Many people also believe that this they were a fairly peaceful civilisation due to the rarity of weapons found in their cities and the fact that their cities generally weren't as fortified as others of the classical world which would have been embraced by communists who were often pacifists. It also helps that we know very little about them leaving plenty of room for slotting the ideas you like into the gaps in our knowledge.
 

samcster94

Banned
Occultism isn't really in keeping with communist ideology, religion is the opium of the people and all that so I can't see them going to any particular lengths to prove some relationship between Slavic religions and Christianity or Greco-Roman deities ect. Also the idea of the Russian empire being the first civilisation is A clearly not true and B they weren't a fan of the Russian empire.

What I can definitely seeing them do is trying to the prove that the Indus valley civilisation was proto-communist, and to be honest you can make a pretty good case for it. The Indus valley cities have a surprising amount of central planning with a distinct grid layout for their cities and a uniformity and standardisation in many goods like bricks and pottery. Additionally unlike most early civilisations the Indus valley seems to lack the huge palace complexes you find in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. There's also some evidence of public services with what might be the first known public baths and a basic sewer system. Many people also believe that this they were a fairly peaceful civilisation due to the rarity of weapons found in their cities and the fact that their cities generally weren't as fortified as others of the classical world which would have been embraced by communists who were often pacifists. It also helps that we know very little about them leaving plenty of room for slotting the ideas you like into the gaps in our knowledge.
The whole Indus River stuff would be good at discrediting their political enemy, the British.
 
State encouragement of such an adventure was not, and can not be - there were tendencies to schematization and simplification, but no one has ever falsified archaeological finds. However .... unofficially there were many all sorts of trends. For example, in the 70s there were many people who claimed that the Russians were descended from the Etruscans.
 
As others have said occultism doesn't really mix with Marxism-Leninism. That said the Soviets had an obsession with proving that Communism was "natural" (this is the reason Lysenkoism became popular). I could see them doing pseudo-archeology to prove that pre-civilization man lived under a micro-scale form of Communism and show that feudalism/capitalism only emerged with the advent of farming. They might also try to use pseudo-archeology to show that early Russians (IE from Kievan Rus or earlier) lived under Communism, so as to make Communism seem like something that's natural to Russia (the end goal being to persuade the Russian people to support Communism).
 
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