This feels like the heart of it: "Then the Romanov dynasty takes power and with the help of the Vatican and the Holy Roman Empire and the Protestant Reformatio

This feels like the heart of it: "Then the Romanov dynasty takes power and with the help of the Vatican and the Holy Roman Empire and the Protestant Reformation (??) writes a series of fake histories in the 17th and 18th centuries to hide the true magnificence of the Horde so that Russians don’t realize the magnificence of their past and remained alienated from their Central Asian cousins. In Fomenko’s history, Peter the Great‘s western reforms of the 18th century aren’t an attempt to leverage a backwards Russia to the status of a world power but rather the treacherous efforts a usurper dynasty to stamp out the legacy of their predecessors and subordinate Russia to Western interests." For 500 years, Russians have been arguing with themselves about whether they belong in the West or whether they belong in Asia. And this seems like a very roundabout, and yet powerful, way of saying "Asia." Sometimes lunatics have their hands on something very true, and I suspect that this lunatic history is in fact the best expression imaginable of that part of Russia that rejects the West. After all, you could use all of the techniques of modern science to build an accurate history, but then you'd just be playing the West's game. You could use all of the protocols and formalisms that Western historians have developed over the last few centuries, but that would be akin to letting the enemy win. It's better to engage in mysticism and pseudo-science and pseudo-math: that is the proper way to reject the West.