Valery Yemelyanov

Valery Nikolayevich Yemelyanov (Валерий Николаевич Емельянов, 1929–1999) was a Soviet-Russian Arabist and public figure, teacher of Arabic and Hebrew, and candidate of economic sciences. 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 "Aryans-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. 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, he was sued for plagiarism in his Ph.D. thesis. After Khrushchev's resignation in 1967, he defended his dissertation at the Higher Party School under the Central Committee of the CPSU, 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 the Arabic language and the peculiarities of the service allowed Yemelyanov to get extensive contacts in the Arab world, including the most senior 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 "exposing" of the "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy." Yemelyanov was the author of one of the first manifestos of Russian neo-paganism - an anonymous letter titled "Critical notes of a Russian person on the patriotic magazine Veche", published in 1973. After the appearance of the notes, the journal was liquidated in 1974, and its editor, V. Osipov, was arrested. In the 1970s, Yemelyanov wrote the book Dezionization, first published in 1979 in Arabic in Syria in the Al-Baʽath newspaper at the behest of Syrian President Hafez al-Assad.