# Valery Yemelyanov

Valery Nikolayevich Yemelyanov (Russian: Валерий Николаевич Емельянов; 24 May 1929 – 9 May 1999) was a Soviet-Russian Arabist and public figure, teacher of Arabic and Hebrew, and candidate of economic sciences.
Yemelyanov was a member of the so-called "anti-Zionist circle [ru]", which was part of the Russian nationalist movement in the USSR, which became known as the "Russian party [ru]". He was one of the founders of Russian neo-paganism, a representative of the "first wave" of the Russian neo-pagan movement, the creator of a pseudo-historical concept of the ancient civilization of the "Aryo-Veneti", and an author of antisemitic ideas. He was the founder and chairman of World Anti-Zionist and Anti-Masonic Front (VASAMF) "Pamyat" (the neo-pagan wing of the far-right Pamyat society) and author of the books Dezionization and Jewish Nazism and the Asiatic Mode of Production. He was one of the most notable "anti-Zionists" in the Soviet Union.

## Life

Yemelyanov graduated from the Moscow State University Institute of Oriental Languages. He worked as an assistant to Nikita Khrushchev on Middle Eastern affairs.
In 1963, Yemelyanov was put on trial for plagiarism in his PhD dissertation. After Khrushchev's resignation in 1967, he defended his dissertation at the Higher Party School under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, after which he taught political economy, Arabic, and Hebrew at the Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages, the Higher Party School, and other universities, and worked as a translator.
A good knowledge of Arabic and the peculiarities of his service allowed Yemelyanov to gain extensive connections in the Arab world, including among the highest-ranking officials. From these sources, he drew his understanding of "Zionism". As a lecturer at the Moscow City Party Committee in the early 1970s, Yemelyanov called for the "exposure" of the "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy."
I. Milovanov and Yu. S. Ivanov, members of the “anti-Zionist circle” and participants in the Russian nationalist movement known as the “Russian party,” consulted with Yemelyanov and were friends with him. During the 1970s, Yemelyanov closely communicated with other authors developing the neo-pagan “Aryan” idea, Valery Skurlatov [ru] and A. Ivanov (Skuratov). Yemelyanov managed to combine the activities of an official publicist and a samizdat author for a long time; in this capacity, he was a unique example in the Russian nationalist movement. His official publications were in line with the general trend of “anti-Zionist” Soviet propaganda.
Yemelyanov was the author of one of the first manifestos of Russian neo-paganism, the anonymous letter Critical Notes of a Russian Man on the Patriotic Magazine Veche, published in 1973. After the notes were published, the journal was liquidated in 1974, and its editor, V. Osipov, was arrested. This letter marked Yemelyanov's first appearance in samizdat.
In the 1970s, Yemelyanov wrote the book Dezionization, first published in 1979 in Arabic in Syria in the Al-Baʽath newspaper on the orders of Syrian President Hafez al-Assad. At the same time, photocopies of this book, allegedly published by the Palestine Liberation Organization in Paris, was distributed in Moscow. Among the illustrations for this book were reproductions of paintings by Konstantin Vasilyev on the theme of the struggle of Russian heroes with evil forces and, above all, the painting "Ilya Muromets defeats the Christian plague," which has since become popular with neo-pagans.
A voluminous and eclectic work, the main idea of Dezionization is that the "true" history of humanity is a struggle between pagans and degenerate Jewish "Zionists", hidden from the eyes of the average person. It also briefly recountes the contents of the Book of Veles and the foundations of neo-paganism. The book presents a version of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory. According to Yemelyanov, the conspiracy of "Zionists" and "Masons" was created by Solomon in order to seize power over the entire world by the year 2000; Solomon's Temple allegedly worshiped the devil and offered human sacrifices. The book was translated and published in Israel and several European countries as an example of modern Soviet antisemitism.
In addition to the description of the "history", structure, and methods of the functioning of the "Ziono-Masonic concern", Dezionization contained the charter of the "World Anti-Zionist and Anti-Masonic Front" (Russian: Всемирный антисионистский и антимасонский фронт, romanized: Vsemirny antisionistsky i antimasonsky front, VASAMF). The section "Principles and tasks of the front" envisaged its formation as a "world organization for the defense against Jewish Nazism-Zionism" and the liberation of all the peoples of the world, and most importantly the Slavs, from "occupation."
According to A. Ivanov (Skuratov), Yevgeny Yevseyev [ru] acted as an expert on Dezionization. Despite the fact that he was one of the intellectual leaders of Russian nationalists, he assessed the book as anti-Soviet and anti-Semitic. Later on, the theoretical differences between these two main ideologues of anti-Zionism had begun to worsen, reflected in a series of samizdat publications written by themselves and their associates.
A recording of Yemelyanov's lecture at the All-Union Knowledge Society [ru] lecture hall, distributed in samizdat, contained the idea of Jews as a professional tribe of criminals, as well as a number of oral mythologemes circulating among Russian nationalists, including criticism of Lilya Brik's “Jewish influence” on Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Andrei Tarkovsky film Andrei Rublev. Yemelyanov's creative activity was combined with his specific actions against the “Zionists.”
The dissemination of the ideas described by Yemelyanov in Dezionization and in lectures at the Knowledge Society in the early 1970s caused an international protest, declared by the American Senator Jacob Javits to the Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin in 1973, after which Yemelyanov's lectures were stopped.
Semyon Reznik wrote that in 1975, Yemelyanov managed to eliminate Masonic symbols from an exhibition dedicated to the Decembrists. Sergei Semanov, a member of the "Russian party," noted in his diary that in 1977, Yemelyanov sent a letter to the CPSU Central Committee protesting the presence of Masonic symbols on the commemorative ruble put into circulation, which consisted of three intersecting satellite orbits. Yemelyanov had a conversation with the Secretary for Ideology Mikhail Zimyanin, as a result of which, by decision of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the coins were withdrawn from circulation and sent for remelting.
In 1977, Yemelyanov sent a report to the Central Committee of the CPSU, in which he claimed that all Soviet Jews were "Zionist agents." In connection with this, he demanded the introduction of a mandatory course in "scientific anti-Zionism and anti-Masonry" in schools, universities, and the army, the creation of a scientific institute for the study of "Zionism" and "Masonry" under the Central Committee of the CPSU, and more. In the report, he "exposed" the "international Judeo-Masonic pyramid." He proposed creating a "World Anti-Zionist and Anti-Masonic Front" similar to the anti-fascist popular front of the 1930s and 1940s, since, in his opinion, all goyim of the world are threatened by the danger of worldwide Zionist domination, which he predicted would come by the year 2000.
In 1977–1978, Yemelyanov participated in the activities of the "anti-Zionist circle," on the basis of which its participants planned to create the Pamyat World Anti-Zionist and Anti-Masonic Front. The circle was led by Yevgeny Yevseyev, nephew of the Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Boris Ponomarev. Later, in 1979–1980, following the example of the circle, a Society of Book Lovers was created under the Ministry of Aviation Industry, which in 1982 became the Pamyat Society.
Semyon Reznik believes that Yemelyanov was the author of an anti-Semitic article in the Moskva magazine, published in 1979 under the pseudonym I. Bestuzhev. In this article, it was claimed that Judaism preaches hatred of non-Jews and teaches to kill the best of them.
Yemelyanov began to accuse a wide range of people of "Zionism", including the ruling elite headed by the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Leonid Brezhnev. In early 1980, he tried to distribute copies of Dezionization among members of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee its secretariat. Following an investigation by the Party Control Commission, Yemelyanov was expelled from the CPSU and suspended from work, with the formal reason given being a violation of party discipline by publishing a book abroad. On 26 March 1980, he refused to name the people who helped him print the book at a Party Control Commission meeting. The Shorter Jewish Encyclopedia connects the expulsion with the fact that Yemelyanov called Leonid Brezhnev a "Zionist". Exclusion from the party meant the collapse of his political and public career.
On 10 April 1980, Yemelyanov was arrested on charges of murdering and dismembering his wife with an axe, tried, found insane, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and placed in the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital for six years. According to a later statement by an observer present at the trial, Yemelyanov's motive for chopping up his wife's body with an axe and burning it at a construction site was suspicions of her collaboration with the Zionists. Aleksandr Dugin was a witness in this case. Yemelyanov was released in 1986.
After leaving the psychiatric hospital in 1986, Yemelyanov joined Dmitri Vasilyev's Pamyat Society and was briefly considered one of its leaders. The most influential literature in the society were Yemelyanov's Dezionization and A. M. Ivanov's (Skuratov's) Christian Plague. Yemelyanov parted ways with Vasilyev on ideological grounds: Vasilyev believed that the "Zionists" were destroying Christianity in Russia, while Yemelyanov believed that Christianity was imposed on Russia by the "Zionists".
At the end of 1987, Yemelyanov founded the Pamyat World Anti-Zionist and Anti-Masonic Front.
In late 1989, Yemelyanov became an open adherent of neo-paganism. At that time, together with Alexander Belov's Gorits Fighting Club, he created the Moscow Pagan Community [ru], the first neo-pagan community in Moscow, and adopted the neo-pagan name Velemir. In 1990, Belov expelled Yemelyanov and his supporters, including Alexey Dobrovolsky (Dobroslav), from the community for political radicalism.
In 1991, Yemelyanov became one of the founders of the "Slavic Council". In 1992, he declared himself "Chairman of the World Russian Government," but in the early 1990s, his organization only had a few dozen members who had their own military-sports club in Moscow. It is assumed that their activities were financed from Arab countries.
In the second half of the 1990s, Yemelyanov advocated the restoration of the monarchy in Russia led by the "Stalin dynasty" and proposed Stalin's grandson, retired colonel Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, as ruler. In the 1990s, Yemelyanov taught at the Academy of Armored Forces.
Towards the end of his life, Yemelyanov retired as a political figure. In 1997, together with a small number of followers, he joined the small Russian National Liberation Movement of A. M. Aratov and became the editor-in-chief of the Russkaya Pravda newspaper.

## Views and thought

In the 1970s, a significant part of the activities of anti-Zionists and participants in the Russian nationalist movement known as the "Russian Party" of Valery Yemelyanov, Dmitry Zhukov, Valery Skurlatov, and A. Ivanov (Skuratov) was the propaganda of a neo-pagan and racist worldview. These authors arrived at neo-paganism through the following theoretical construct: since everything that comes from Jews is by definition negative, therefore Christianity was also created by Jews to enslave other peoples. As a counterweight to Christianity, the authors proposed a return to the "original" religion of the ancient Slavs or Proto-Slavs, whom they considered part of the "ancient Aryans". Yemelyanov combined the "Aryan" ideas of the Book of Veles, the anti-Christian pathos of A. Ivanov (Skuratov), and the visual works of Konstantin Vasilyev into a generalized theory.
In his letter Critical Notes of a Russian on the Patriotic Magazine Veche (1973), Yemelyanov accused the magazine of giving in to "international Zionism," which was "worse than the fascist plague." He described the magazine as a “Zionist anteroom.” In his opinion, for this publication to be “truly” Russian, it should “publish materials about the worthlessness of the scientific works of Zionist pseudoscientists… ask the prosecutor's office questions about the money Zionists use to buy dachas and cars.” He called Christianity and Islam "subsidiaries of Judaism," created to subjugate humanity to the Jews. He claimed that "Christianity in general and Orthodoxy in particular… were created precisely to erase everything original and national, to turn everyone who profess them into rootless cosmopolitans." He called on Russians to return to the ancient faith in Slavic pagan gods and "to put an end to Orthodoxy as the anteroom of Jewish slavery." He declared the Bolsheviks to be the only force capable of saving the world from the "Zionist conspiracy."
In Dezionization (1970s), Yemelyanov wrote about the great Russian pre-Christian civilization that allegedly created a rich written language and culture. Like other neo-pagan authors, Valery Skurlatov and Vladimir Shcherbakov [ru], he extensively referenced the Book of Veles, which supposedly preserved the remnants of the true Russian worldview, which constituted the "soul of the people." He referred to the ancient Aryans who came to India as "Aryo-Veneti," who brought to Hindustan "our ideology, preserved at the foundations of Hinduism and yoga." The "Aryo-Veneti" dominated the Eastern Mediterranean for some time; according to Yemleyanov, the name Palestine originates from them, which means "Scorched Camp" (Russian: Опалённый стан, romanized: Opalyonny stan). In an effort to portray the "Aryo-Veneti," and not the Semites, as the creators of the alphabet, he also claimed that the Phoenicians were members of the "Aryo-Veneti."
According to Yemelyanov, the "Slavo-Russes," also of the "Aryo-Veneti," inhabited all of continental Europe and Scandinavia right up to the lands of the Germans. "The only autochthons of Europe are the Veneti and the Baltic Aryans," while the Celts and Germans allegedly came from the depths of Asia. The "Veneti" constituted "the backbone of the Aryan language substrate" and were the main guardians of the "common Aryan" ideology. The purity of language and ideology was preserved only "in the vast expanses from Novgorod to the Black Sea," where the idea of "the trinity of three triune trinities" was preserved the longest: Prav-Yav-Nav, Svarog-Perun-Svetovid, Dusha-Plot-Mosh. A golden age reigned on this land, when "there was no concept of evil," and the Rusichi lived in harmony with nature — they did not know blind obedience to God and had neither sanctuaries nor priests. The bearers of "occult power" were female yogis, which is supposedly generally characteristic of the "Aryans."
Yemelyanov portrayed the Jews as savages who migrated to "Aryan" Palestine and appropriated the "Aryan" cultural heritage. The Jewish language itself allegedly developed under strong "Aryan" influence. The "wild Jews" managed to conquer the lands of the "glorious Aryans" not by military force and valor, but thanks to the criminal actions of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian priests who feared the "great people of Ros or Rus" who lived in Asia Minor and Palestine:
   To destroy this threat, the priests of antiquity have long been cultivating and nurturing a stable criminal genotype of a hybrid nature, created over many, many centuries on the basis of crossing ancient professional dynasties of the criminal world of the black, yellow, and white races.
Later, by 1994, this idea of Yemelyanov resulted in the formulation: "Jews are professional ancient criminals who have formed a certain race." According to Yemelyanov, the world is doomed to an eternal struggle between two almost cosmic forces – patriotic nationalists and "Talmudic Zionists."
According to Yemelyanov, since the emergence of the Jews, the core of world history has been the deadly struggle of the "Zionists" (Jews) and "Masons" with the rest of humanity, led by the "Aryans," in the struggle for world domination. The plan for this struggle was allegedly developed by the Jewish king Solomon. The idea of the sinister role of Solomon goes back to the pamphlet of the Russian mystic Sergei Nilus, one of the first publishers of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Yemelyanov claimed that Judaism required human sacrifice. His goal was to expose the plans of the "Zionist-Masonic concern", which allegedly planned to create a world state by the year 2000. Christianity, according to him, was created by the Jews specifically for the purpose of enslaving other peoples and serves as a powerful weapon in the hands of "Zionism." To Yemelyanov, Jesus was both an "ordinary Jewish racist" and a "Mason", while Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich was endowed with Jewish blood. Only the "Aryan" world, led by Russia, could repulse "Zionism."
The Pamyat VASAMF headed by Yemelyanov declared that it spoke on behalf of "the majority of the indigenous population of each country in the world" and set its main goal as the struggle against the threat of the domination by "Jewish Nazism (Zionism)". The Front's ultimate goal was to establish in all countries of the world an "anti-Zionist and anti-Masonic dictatorship" that would not encroach on the features of the existing state systems. The Front declared the beginning of a "racial struggle," presenting it as a struggle for democracy, designed to save the world from the horrors "already experienced by the peoples of Russia and Palestine." The Front showed special sympathy towards the Palestinians, calling them brothers in suffering from "genocide by Jewish Nazis" and declaring its support for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He declared Islam his faithful ally in this struggle.

## Legacy

Yemelyanov is held in high esteem by a number of Russian neo-pagans, who consider him a "founding father." Many of his ideas have become widespread in Slavic neo-paganism and the far-right environment; the most prominent of these are the theft of great "Aryan" wisdom by Jews, the folk etymology of the word "Palestine", and Jews as hybrids of criminals of different races. The latter was adopted by such authors as Alexander Barkashov, Yuri Petukhov, Yu. M. Ivanov, and Vladimir Istarkhov [ru]. A number of his ideas from Dezionization were directly borrowed by the writer Yuri Sergeyev [ru]. The 1973 letter contained the main components of the ideology of the politicized wing of Russian neo-paganism: antisemitism, the idea of a "Zionist conspiracy", the rejection of Christianity as a "Jewish religion", and a call to revive the worldview of Slavo-Russian paganism.
Under the influence of Yemelyanov, a number of marker terms entered into fantastic and parascientific literature about the ancient Slavs, the mention of which indicates to those in the know that they are talking about a specific ideology, but allows them to avoid accusations of antisemitism or racism: "Scorched Camp" (Palestine), "Siyan Mountain" (Zion), "Rusa-Salem" (Jerusalem), steppe ancestors who traveled throughout Eurasia in ancient times, and Khazaria as a parasitic state (Khazar myth [ru]).
Yemelyanov is the author of one of the main Russian neo-pagan myths about the Judeo-Khazar origin of Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich, because of which he introduced Christianity, an instrument for the enslavement of the "Aryans" by Jews, which is described in Dezionization. Historian and religious scholar Roman Shizhensky characterizes this idea as one of the most "odious" neo-pagan historical myths. Shizhensky wrote that Yemelyanov's myth about Prince Vladimir's origin is based solely on an attempt to correlate and identify the names "Malk," "Malka," and "Dobrynya" with concepts (not even anthroponyms) that Yemelyanov derives from the Hebrew language: "dabran" - a good speaker, talker; "malik" - king, ruler. Shizhensky notes that the neo-pagan myth about Vladimir contradicts scientific works on this issue and the totality of historical sources, in particular those testifying to the widespread distribution in Rus' and the Slavic origin of the anthroponym Malk.
Based on the decision of the Meshchansky District Court of Moscow dated 3 December 2008, Dezionization was included in the Russian Federal List of Extremist Materials under number 970.