Vladimir Avdeyev: Race Scientist

Rasologia. Biblioteka Rasovoy Mysli, by Vladimir Avdeyev. Moscow, 2007. 665 pp.

Where in the world is it nowadays conceivable that a book about the inherent differences between the human races, which pays tribute to the racial theorists of the Third Reich and explicitly claims that all races are not equal, is not only openly sold in the bookstores but even becomes a bestseller? And where in the world is it possible that such a book is favorably reviewed by renowned scholars and provided with two introductions, one written by a member of parliament and the other one by a prominent representative of a liberal organization?

In Germany, Austria or France? Unthinkable! In these countries such a book would almost certainly be banned; its author would be put on trial for “racial discrimination” or “instigation of the populace”; any member of parliament who would have the audacity of endorsing its contents by writing an introduction would immediately be castigated as a “racist bigot” by the media and would have to relinquish his seat in parliament within days.

In the Anglo-Saxon world? Not impossible, but highly unlikely. It is quite true that the English-speaking countries enjoy much greater freedom of thought and speech than the German-speaking ones or France. In the USA, the First Amendment to the Constitution would certainly protect the author of such a book from legal persecution; in Britain or Canada, there are laws against “racism”, but the author of a scholarly work about race would hardly be prosecuted on the basis of these laws. On the other hand, the media would either ignore or angrily denounce his book without discussing his arguments, and he would risk social ostracism. This is exactly what happened in the United States to Arthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck, two serious scientists who had dared to challenge the dogma of racial equality. They were pilloried as “racists” and “haters” and harassed by left-wing fanatics for whom rational arguments did not count. The late biologist Glade Whitney became the victim of a tremendous smear campaign after writing an introduction to David Duke’s My Awakening. Only a handful of scholars or politicians will muster the courage to incur the wrath of the watchdogs of “political correctness”.

In Russia? Yes, in Russia all this is perfectly possibly. The proof is Vladimir Avdeyev’s books Rasologia, the second edition of which came out in late 2007 in Moscow. Vladimir Borisovich Avdeyev was born in 1962, After acquiring a university degree in Economics, he served in the Soviet Air Force where he was promoted to the rank of First Lieutenant. Since 1993, he has been a member of the Russian Writers’ Association; in 1991, he founded the journal Atenei together with his comrades-in-arms Anatoli Ivanov and Pavel Tulayev. Since 1999, V. Avdeyev has edited a series of books under the title “Biblioteka Rasovoy Mysli” (The Library of Racial Thought), and in 2005, the first edition of his Rasologia appeared. This book was highly successful, and already two years later its author was able to publish an improved and enlarged second edition. The two introductions were written by Andrey Savelev, a delegate of the Russian Duma {parliament) and close personal friend of Avdeyev, and by Valeri Solovei, a historian and member of the ultra-liberal Gorbachev Foundation, who aptly summarizes the book as follows:

“Humanity is entering a new epoch. The world that was shaped by the Enlightenment and Modernity using melodious words such as ‘democracy’, ‘equality’, ‘progress’ and ‘human rights’ is becoming part of a past that will never return. Together with this world, the scientific concepts and the intellectual ballast which belonged to it are doomed too. All this will be replaced by a world based on blood and soil, strength and hierarchy, which will need a new theory and new concepts.”

Avdeyev’s book is subdivided into eight chapters: 1) Racial Science and Anthropology: What are the differences? 2) The Fair Race: Historiography and Anthropology. 3) The Biological Foundation of the Northern Conception of the World. 4) Thoughts about Racial Prejudices. 5) A New Paradigm in Racial Science. 6) The Anti-Racial Myth of the “Melting Pot”. 7) Racial-ideological Neurology, and finally, the striking chapter 8, A Racial Theory of Time. The book contains a large number of excellent photographs and illustrations.

For me as a non-specialist, who only had a very general knowledge of the question, Avdeyev’s history of racial thought was particularly fascinating. I had erroneously taken it for granted that almost all racial theorists had been German and that the Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau (Essay on the Inequality of the Races, 1855) and the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, 1899) were exceptions. Thanks to Avdeyev, who has carefully studied the writings of all the important racial theorists, I learned I was wrong: the subject of race has been dealt with by numerous and illustrious French scholars, and the study of race flourished in Russia before 1917. Who would have guessed that the term “Nordic race” was not coined by a German, but by a Russian, Joseph Denniker (1852-1918)?

Being a Russian nationalist (nota bene, he is not a Russian chauvinist), Avdeyev objectively and impartially presents the works of all major racial theorists regardless of their countries of origin. He calls himself a “grateful student” of the “great theorists of race” to whom he dedicates his book. In my opinion, Avdeyev can best be characterized as a representative of “classical racial thought.” Although a large part of the book summarizes and discusses the theories of his predecessors, it also contains many of his original thoughts. This is especially true of the fascinating final chapter, “A Racial Theory of Time.”

The amount of solid information this book provides both to the specialist and to the interested layman is awesome — and it will force the reader to jettison many a cherished yet erroneous belief.

I will confine myself to two errors Avdeyev clears up: Since the Soviet Union officially professed the strictly egalitarian doctrine of Marxism, we are naturally inclined to think that the study of racial differences was taboo under Soviet rule. But as Avdeyev shows, this is an error: During the Soviet period, scientific anthropology, which gave due credit to racial differences, was not only not oppressed, but even encouraged.

Second example: As National Socialist Germany saw in Bolshevist Russia its arch-enemy, one might presume that in the Third Reich scientists were strictly forbidden to quote Soviet sources. As a matter of fact, one of the leading German racial theorists, Fritz Lenz, quoted no fewer than 34 works of Soviet scientists in his seminal study “Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre” [“A Theory of Human Heredity”], which he wrote in 1932. This fact did not prevent Lenz from becoming highly respected after Hitler’s assumption of power.

Some people may argue that a book such as Avdeyev’s has no practical value, and they may ask “what good does it do?” My answer to this objection is the following:

Firstly, true science enriches our knowledge, and knowledge is always valuable, regardless of whether it offers material advantages or not. When an ornithologist discovers a truly new kind of bird, this will be reported by the major media around the world, although this discovery does not benefit us materially. And if it is useful to add to our knowledge of birds, it is undoubtedly even more useful to increase our knowledge of man — of ourselves.

But there is more. A correct understanding of race and racial differences is of tremendous importance because we thereby recognize certain extremely grave errors Western society has committed, and this understanding equips us to remedy them. The fallacious doctrine of racial equality, which has been promoted for decades by the followers of Franz Boas, has caused pernicious political consequences. It has made possible the catastrophe of forced racial integration in the USA, which has done immeasurable harm to both the white and the black populations, and it has paved the way for massive third-world immigration into Europe, North America and Australia. What is happening before our eyes in France is the handwriting on the wall. Race does matter, whether or not some people want us this.

With his book, which is the fruit of many years of hard study, Vladimir Avdeyev has rendered to science, and to us all a grand service. His work deserves to be translated from Russian into English and into all the other major Western European languages.

Vladimir Avdeyev can be reached at avd999@yandex.ru

A review of:

Rasologia, by Vladimir Avdeyev. Moscow : Biblioteka Rasovoy Mysli. 2007, 2nd edition, 665 pp., $49.50. Translation by Patrick Cloutier. Foreword by Kevin MacDonald

Like it or not, Raciology is a book that illustrates how free speech about Galtonian topics has sunk in the West–and resurfaced in Moscow (where Communism had formerly banned scientific racism). In the West of the past fifteen years, only mail-order and vanity publishers would deliver the thoughts and evidence of academic race realists Art Jensen, Phil Rushton, Richard Lynn, Glayde Whitney, Helmuth Nyborg and myself to the Western public. In leading British universities, Geoffrey Sampson, Satoshi Kanazawa, Armand Leroi, Frank Ellis and David Coleman were all silenced by administrators when they talked of race; and I was sacked. By contrast, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, with its serious concern with ethnic (often Muslim) problems and the disruptive advance of Western ‘liberal interventionism’ and multicultural illusionism in ex-Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, the 46-year-old Vladimir Borisovich Avdeyev, an engineer and Soviet Army officer by origin, later a journalist, is allowed not only to edit the prestigious Athenaeum Magazine but to have a publisher for his thoroughgoing racial analysis of the world’s problems, combining lively (if traditional) ideas with scholarly detail and vivid illustrations (not disdaining the splendidly buttocked ‘Hottentot Venus’ who was displayed in Paris a century ago). Avdeyev has mastered the history of Western racial thought from the Enlightenment days of Immanuel Kant and David Hume to the twentieth century and provided an unparalleled summary. Only John Baker’s Race (1967, Oxford University Press–but withdrawn after Baker’s death) would hold a candle to Avdeyev’s magisterial effort.

Essentially, Avdeyev presents the Nordic peoples (including thereby the Slavs and Caucasoid Russians) as the racial group responsible for the bulk of culture, science and lawful governance in the world. He writes (p. 156): “In the very heart of Europe–at the time of the formation of the first states, the creation of literacy, religion, culture, technology and the bases of civilisation and jurisprudence–there was no mention of Mongols, Negroes, and cross-breeds. All the epic creation belonged entirely to the White man of pure race–to his will, genes, and far-sightedness.” (The term “Nordic race” was apparently not coined by a German or by the mighty William McDougall (of the universities of Cambridge, London, Oxford and Harvard), but by the French-parented but Russian-born Joseph Deniker (1852-1918). And, contrary to communist propaganda, Hitler apparently took a dim view only of Bolsheviks, not of East Europeans in general: “The Third Reich did not fight with Slavism, but with threat of bolshevism to the fundamentals of European civilisation . . . It was the Bolsheviks, such as Mehlis and open racists like Ilya Ehrenburg that those in Himmler’s department described as “Untermenschen” in an exceedingly anthropological sense of the word” (p.123).) In particular, Avdeyev rehearses the Nordics’ economic and psychometric achievements and provides physical measurements (including some of his own) which he takes to attest Nordic superiority–for Blacks, in particular, he finds to be distinguished by strength and physicality rather than by cranial development. In all this, Avdeyev is well in line with the modern London School and it is good to think that Russian scholars and students will be led by Raciology to join the great debate that Western politicians, publishers and university authorities have done their best to suppress.

It is true that Avdeyev will discompose Western race realists almost as much as Western anti-racists. He takes a Nazistic line about the Jews, reckoning them uncultured ‘nomads’ rather than recognizing (1) their having been beaten into the wilderness by Rome, (2) their high IQs, and (3) their ten-fold over-representation among Nobel prizewinners (compared to other Americans). Strangely, he does not especially want to criticize the Jewish elite for the manufacture of multiculturalism and PeeCee in the West (not in Israel, of course, where strict race realism rules) and its weird importation to the West, qua blessed ‘minorities’ which all should love, of millions of Jewry’s most deadly Muslim enemies. He is equally dismissive of the Chinese–verily Johnsonian in his assertion of White superiority, even thinking some of the higher Chinese (as also Egyptian) cultural attainments attributable to stray Caucasoid genes, and not admitting the onward march of modern China to make America its debtor. Avdeyev equally declines to follow modern Western ‘out of Africa’ thinking about evolution, preferring to believe that the main human races descended quite separately from different types of ape. (He backs this up with reasoning involving the proneness of different races to different diseases and tolerance to different kinds of food, smell/taste [as identified in cannibals].) He has a special line of his own in believing that the West, in its right-handedness and left-to-right script, is thus importantly distinguished from Muslims, Jews, Egyptians, homosexuals and the Chinese–not apparently recalling that Africans are both conspicuously more right-handed and less homosexual than Europeans. He also wants to derive significance from Blacks’ tendencies to squat and from alleged Asian proneness to melancholy. And he disdains Western convention in deploring ‘mixed marriages’–believing such unions to yield unhealthy and otherwise degenerate children (with large genetic ‘mongol stains’ on their bottoms, at least in Brazil and Ecuador). (“The propaganda of free love is of no satisfaction, since, in the long run, it destroys races. Any search for sensory-biological diversity is fraught with evolutionary irresponsibility”– p.265. What Avdeyev makes of the half-caste Tiger Woods, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice and Naomi Campbell is not recorded….) Still more problematic, Avdeyev’s system of referencing is non-Western, making it hard to follow up many of his mentions of the works of the scholars and medics of Europe’s past who did so much to identify the racial differences that had been strangely ignored by Ancient Greece, Rome and Christianity. And, though Avdeyev’s heart is surely in the right place about plucky Serbia, he doesn’t admit that 25% of the Russian Army is now Muslim and thus multicultural and incapable of deployment into Kosovo.

Nevertheless, Avdeyev’s thoughts and scholarship fully deserve discussion and development rather than the suppression which they would promptly receive if he attempted to publish in the West. Above all, Avdeyev makes the strong case that ‘race is everything: literature, science, art–in a word, civilization–depend on it,’ as Edinburgh University’s top anatomist Robert Knox explained in 1850. And Avdeyev is also properly agitated not so much about Negroes (among whom he lived for a while, studying their varied tastes in cannibalism–one sub-section, 4-pages long, is called “Racial smells and passions of cannibals”) as against Whites who betray their own race and science (for Darwin’s great book was called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life), wear dreadlocks or flip-flops, listen to heavily rhythmic music, shake or otherwise draw attention to their genitals while dancing and fail to appreciate Russia’s eugenic possibilities of breeding from the likes of Red Army sex symbol Dana Borisova (e.g. https://www.rususa.com/photo/gallery . . . .14-imageid-359). One only hopes his next work might concentrate–as the London School has done–more on intelligence and IQ than on features of less immediate relevance to explaining the human races’ different levels of cultural advance.