In Search of Tartaria

Part One: A History of Conspiracy

This post is part 1 of 3 detailing my research into the fascinating if ultimately frustrating theory of Tartaria. The link to the next article in the series is provided at the bottom of the articles.

Tartaria. A marvelous empire, glorious and beautiful, an empire that spanned the globe with outposts on every continent. Far more advanced than any other civilization, they were capable of feats of engineering that to this day remain a mystery, somehow creating inspiring architecture that seemed to reach into the heavens at a time when the populace used no more than a horse and carriage. Not only this, but Tartaria managed to conceive and utilize a network of free energy that they incorporated into all of their towns and even their structures. They were a vast empire, its people literally giants and beautiful, the true Aryan ideal if you will, but an empire that wanted nothing more than the enlightenment of mankind. An empire now not only hidden from history but erased from our books entirely. Its very name is the subject of a vast global conspiracy involving the fabrication of countless documents and maps, histories invented wholesale for every nation, and the dismissal of the idea of free technology, giants, or indeed, even anything wondrous and fantastical.

Tartaria. It’s all nothing but completely schizophrenic rubbish.

I first heard of Tartaria about a year ago in conjunction with another wonderfully strange theory known as Flat Earth. I was curious as to what evidence people actually argued to prove the existence of a flat Earth, so some helpful internet denizens pointed me down some rabbit holes. Flat Earth in of itself could be its own strange and unique rabbit hole to go down, but I’ll instead focus on the Tartaria and its mother theory: The Theory of Missing Time. This often correlates with another similar theory, that of Hidden History. Now, Hidden History itself isn’t exactly a conspiracy theory. There are a plethora of theories and ideas that there were whole swathes of civilizations that rose and were lost to time and are now hidden from us because scientists and archeologists don’t want to rock the boat too much. Or these civilizations are well and truly lost thanks to the ravages of time, thus they remain “hidden” in a sense. Many of these hypothetical civilizations predate even our ancient history, with ancient writers leaving tantalizing clues to a past beyond theirs full of the fantastical and terrible. But here I learned about a new type of hidden history, a hidden history that dealt with missing time, or more accurately, an invented non-existent time.

Fomenko

To talk about the modern theory of Tartaria today, we must first go back to one Anatoly Fomenko. Born in 1945, Fomenko was a Soviet mathematician and apparently quite a brilliant one. He was also a science fiction author and an artist, painting eerie Soviet-styled pictures of mathematical concepts. Seriously go look up Fomenko’s paintings, they’re bizarre. His mathematical theses involved such exciting names as “Classification of totally geodesic manifolds realizing nontrivial cycles in Riemannian homogeneous spaces” and “The decision of the multidimensional Plateau problems on Riemannian manifolds”. He was recognized by Russia at the time for his excellence in mathematics. Using mathematics, Fomenko then seized on the idea that history was largely falsified.

This idea of false history wasn’t even new to Fomenko. His inspiration came from another Soviet fellow named Nikolai Morozov, a Russian revolutionary born in 1854. He was a member of a secret society known as People’s Will and, after unsuccessfully trying to blow up a train carrying Tsar Alexander II, he regularly wrote propagandist pamphlets from the security of London alongside his fellow terrorist, Karl Marx. After the Revolution was successful, Morozov found new life in Russia as a professor, teaching chemistry and astronomy. It was through attempting to apply astronomical observations to St. John’s apocalyptic visions in Revelations that Morozov deduced that the Revelations could actually be dated astronomically. In 1907 he published The Revelation in Storm and Thunder, giving the visions a precise date, the date of September 20^th, 395. With this later date than the accepted norm, he reasoned it was none other than St. John of Chrysostom that wrote the Revelations. This was of course, absolutely nonsensical and mostly dismissed by everyone around him. Even the most ardent believer in literalistic interpretations of the Bible would hesitate to apply astronomical observances of the Zodiac to passages such as Revelations 4:6-7, Revelations 12:1 or Revelations 17:3-4. Still, Morozov went on to speculate that if this little bit was wrong, then more of ancient history must have been falsified by the evil West and began trying to establish a new chronology. This was a work that Fomenko would go on to pick up in earnest in the 1980s.

Fomenko’s ideas on what he would dub his New Chronology was mostly rejected even by his Soviet colleagues, so he set about publishing his findings and writing books. His New Chronology, published throughout the 80s and 90s, is a staggering 20-volume work purporting to lay out the truth behind the complete fabrication of history from ancient to medieval to recent. Tartaria is only briefly mentioned as just one small facet of his larger theory -- that most of history only goes back to about AD 800 and nearly ALL events mentioned throughout history were fabrications pieced together from real events. An example would be that one king from one dynasty in England would in fact be the same emperor mentioned in Chinese annuls that existed four hundred years later, but medieval historians obfuscated the “real” person for nefarious reasons. This so-called discovery was mostly done by Fomenko’s use of mathematics, applying statistical correlation methods between rulers, events, dynasties and years.

It cannot be overstated just how completely absurd it is to attempt to use statistics to prove such a theory. The most egregious example I find is his claim that Jesus was a figure that existed in the 1100s, if he existed at all. Fomenko claims that Jesus was a composite created from other figures such as Pope Gregory VII, Li Yuanhao, Bacchus, and Elisha from the Old Testament. Every other figure in Western history is subjected to the same bizarre composite dismissals and is relegated to mere fantasy, concocted by monks in the 12^th-15^th centuries.

The real purpose behind his theory of falsified time was to promote the idea that in reality, a Russian Horde dominated most of Eurasian history and the evil West wanted to stamp out such knowledge. His version of Tartaria, Tartary, is just one name for the peoples that once controlled Eurasia. His idea is a product of his world and his time, that of Soviet dominance always and forever, extending forwards as well as backwards. In his chronology, there was never an invasion of Russia by Mongols or Turks in the past. China never even existed as an empire. It was a complete and total rewrite of history. Russia was always the best and biggest empire around and played a large role in establishing what we would call Western Civilization but all of the great Rus’ contributions were erased by evil Westerners.

It’s a bit strange, because there really was a Tartary and I think most of us here even in the West have a vague knowledge of Tatars. Tatars were more or less Turkic in ethnic background and at one time or another ruled a large portion of Central Asia and even up into Northern Asia. Now, they are completely different in appearance from the Nord/Slav mixture Rus and lived entirely different lifestyles. They were also majority Muslim and had close ties with the Ottoman Empire. And that’s not even getting into the Golden Horde, the Khanate that arose from the fragmentation of the Mongol empire. Largely Mongol from the start, it gradually grew more fragmented and eventually broke up into several smaller Tatar khanates before being swept away by the rising strength of their previous vassal state of Muscovy. This is a very, very generalized overview of Russian history but also a fairly well-established one. And one that was completely false according to Fomenko. I don’t know how he so easily hand waves away years and centuries of Muslim rule and Mongol rule, but he does. To Fomenko, the Tatary that existed was as Russian as he was. No matter the time, whatever great Empire that ruled Central Asia, the great steppes and the Siberian north was always Mother Russia. Even if it was once called Tartary.

In a twisted way it almost makes sense when viewed through Fomenko’s lens. He frequently worked for the Soviet government to examine biases in then-current Western media and research anti-Soviet sentiment. Thus he was exposed to anti-Soviet biases daily and told that all those biases were false, he was the best, his country was the best, viva la Stalin forever. If Fomenko was exposed to that on a daily basis, why wouldn’t he assume that the history written by Westerners was false as well? Even we here in the US can see that certain parts of our history are false or at least falsified. Numerous questions can be raised about even the most recent of events like the assassination of JFK and attempts have been made for decades now to erase or ignore the true reasons behind the American Civil War. Fomenko merely takes this mistrust of historical information all the way to its most brazen and illogical conclusion – that everything written historically is false.

Nationalists

So there is where Fomenko leaves his Tartaria. And it is where the public picks it up. Not in the English speaking world however, where the New Chronology is still practically unknown. But as the internet grew in Russia, so did conspiracy forums and blogs much like our own here in the US and Europe. Sadly, the internet of today is hardly the vanguard of information we would like to think it to be and much of the information on the early internet is lost. The earliest information I could find of Tartaria on Russian websites was back to about 2013 on livejournals. There is almost certainly older information but most search engines only go back so far and Google knowingly deletes old entries and websites the company labels as “misinformation”. My use of Cyrillic can only be called amateur at best as well, which hampers my findings.

From what I have been able to find, the theory did grow some legs under Russian research. Not necessarily the entire New Chronology all-time-is-fake part, but the idea of a Russian Horde in the past that ruled much of Eurasia was intriguing. Russians liked this idea, especially post-Soviet Russians who were watching their country picked apart like carrion by the Western-sponsored oligarchs and money men. They began to question whether or not there was a “real” history of Russia aside from the common Western history. An idea of a past Tartaria was formed, a Tartaria that was destroyed under Peter the Great and Catherine the Great and the rest of the Muscovite royal dynasty that took over Russia. The capitol was moved at the time from Moscow to St. Petersburg and much of the country was realigned according to Western government and ideals. So the theory goes that people like Catherine the Great must have destroyed everything related to old Tartaria to keep sway over the whole of the Russian people. This is the first mention I see of the star forts which will come up later under even wilder ideas. Here in 2013 Russian livejournals, the star forts are merely the enemy Tartarian forts that were razed by the newly established Russian Empire. The theory goes that all true Tartarian history was destroyed by the victors and only tantalizing bits and pieces remain, lost but not entirely forgotten.

This is not exactly a wild conspiracy. There are undoubtedly some aspects of the old ways of life that were swallowed up by the Russian Empire. I’m an American so Russian history is almost completely unknown to me, but at the very least I do understand that Russia was and still is made up of a great many sub-peoples. The Russian Empire has always been vast, enormously vast (in of itself, there could said to be a Western Russia and an Eastern Russia, with divides going back to before the days of Christendom), and the idea of a particular group of people once being fairly great before being conquered isn’t exactly crazy. Many descendants of the Indians in the US know there were cities and towns, or if you’re an Indian from South America, whole empires that rose and fell before the Europeans came. The fantastic will creep in, so we get ideas propagated that those empires and cities were utopic or used some sort of lost technology that is now lost thanks to the evil conquering European man. So Russia does with its theories of “true” Russians and Tartaria.

The fantastic does begin to creep in even on Russian forums in the past. Already, there are some talks on how Tartarians had some sort of unknown free energy devices and that fireplaces weren’t actually fireplaces but electrical pathways of some sort. “Who needs a fireplace that big?” they ask, “And how could it heat a whole house? Clearly a magical electrical device.” It gets even better when it hits US shores, just wait.

A large part of the Tartaria theory at this point also stems from the idea of Moscow being a Third Rome. Third Rome is actually a very old and non-fantastical idea, one as old as the fall of Constantinople itself. If Rome is the first Rome and Constantinople is the second Rome that took over the mantle of the Church and the Roman Empire, then Moscow stood to be the Third Rome. Everyone considered themselves to be heirs to the Roman Empire at the time. The Carolingian Empire famously was the “true” Roman Empire in the West and had nothing to do with the Byzantines to the East. The Holy Roman Empire was of course, not holy, Roman or an empire. Even Mehmed II, the sultan who conquered Constantinople in 1453 called himself Emperor of the Romans by right of conquest. Moscow perhaps has a better claim to the title as monks fleeing the fall of Constantinople called Ivan the Great, “The new Tsar Constantine”. Ivan himself married Sophia Paleologue, a Byzantine princess whose marriage allowed Ivan to lay claim to the Byzantine throne if he wished. And what is a Tsar if not a transferring of Caesar from one language to the other?

The Russian Orthodox Church held enormous sway in the growth of the Russian Empire and of the image the Russian people had of themselves. They were not merely Russian or Orthodox, but part of Holy Rus, an eternal Tsardom granted to them by the Lord. The ROC has acted as an autocephalous (governing itself) branch of the Eastern Orthodox Church since even before the fall of Constantinople. With such a well-established church presence, many in Russia naturally saw themselves as the successors to Christ’s earthly kingdom and set about to continue the work of the Church. This lasted for hundreds of years through reforms, wars, famines, right up to the atheistic Soviet takeover. Famously, the Soviets did everything in their power to stop the Russian Orthodox Church from even existing. Churches were seized and destroyed, bishops and priests were executed or incarcerated and worship was highly discouraged. Yet the Church persisted and, after the Soviets were thrown out of power, blossomed into what we in the States would call a full-blown revival.

I digress on all of this because this is part of the Russian Nationalist outlook. There are those who view themselves as having inherited the Kingdom of God, the Empire of Rome and the title of Third Rome itself. Their church is the true church, handed to them to safeguard while the West tears itself apart on strange political ambitions and anti-religious sentiments. To make the leap from Third Rome to secret Tartarian Empire wiped out by Satanic Westerners is perhaps not so big a jump in logic for them after all. I make no criticisms of whatever they believe and honestly, if they believe themselves to be the new Christian empire on the block, God bless them for it. There isn’t a single Western nation or empire that could back up such a claim with their actions, let alone even make such a claim.

Modern Tartaria

Somewhere along the way, Russians began talking about the Tartaria theory in English. The oldest I can find is in 2016 with some very dry Youtube videos. There may be older videos now deleted by the Almighty Google, but that’s what I can find. The YT videos I found were by one Philipp Druzhinin and contained most if not all of the elements of the now current Tartaria theory, a theory that is a bewildering behemoth that rivals Fomenko’s New Chronology. This Youtuber’s theories start with the infamous Mud Floods and giants before drifting around to Star Forts (interestingly, Atlantean in origin at first before transitioning to Tartarian) and the Tartarian Empire and their influence on Old World architecture.

Either Google the All-Powerful has destroyed most of the evidence or it simply didn’t pick up much steam for a couple years. But the internet seems mostly devoid of Tartarian interest between Philipp’s 2016 videos and late 2018. There are a few scattered mentions, mostly by weird New Agey occult sites that talk how you can open your third eye and gain knowledge of Tartaria, that sort of thing. Somehow though in late 2018, Tartaria blows up everywhere. And yes, the theory’s popularity does seem to be that new. While the rough edges of the theory have been around at least since Fomenko, it was only a couple years ago that the internet really began to embrace it, at least here in the US and Europe. Multiple reddits to the subject were opened in late 2018 to early 2019, multiple Youtube channels, multiple social media accounts everywhere. It exploded.

If you were to research Tartaria through mainstream media, the whole idea is often lumped into a sort of quasi-propaganda tool that the Russians are somehow responsible for promoting for some sort of nefarious reasons. I don’t quite buy it. While the theory does originate in Russia, I don’t see the Russian intelligence actively promoting the idea as I can’t think of a use for doing so. Maybe I’m too smoothbrain, but most Russians seem to find the theory as outlandish as we do stateside. And most articles I see on Tartaria are extremely dismissive of the whole idea without ever examining the root cause behind the reason people would even believe such a theory other than a vague, “people are stupid and think things were better back in the past also they’re stupid”. One article linked Tartaria to the 17^th letter of the alphabet Anon conspiracy, vaguely insinuating they were related somehow. Such is the state of our modern journalism, where anything bad can be tied back to Orange Man.

Now, if I were a conspiratorial individual – and I am – then I would instead posit the idea that the whole Tartaria theory was itself promoted by mainstream media as a silly nonsense idea to make people look foolish. The origins of the theory with Morozov, Fomenko and Russians seem largely organic, at least to me on this side of the ocean. That’s a people denied their own heritage for a couple generations and struggling to reclaim their birthright. The wild and outlandish is bound to slip in there with the real stuff. However, the sudden and inexplicable growth of the theory amongst the English-speaking world all in the span of a couple months seems odd to me. Perhaps I am reading too much into it. Perhaps the appearance of many Youtubers espousing the same ideas using the same video style and the appearance of several reddits promoting the same people is natural and not paid agitprop. I could very well just be misreading the exponential viral growth of a new memetic conspiracy. Tartaria-styled theories do undoubtedly tap into a memetic line of consciousness where we do recognize there was a better past and our ancestors accomplished great things, but again I digress.

Read on to Part 2: photographs, mud floods, and orphan trains…