Valery Chudinov

Valery Alekseevich Chudinov (Russian: Вале́рий Алексе́евич Чуди́нов; 30 June 1942 – 6 February 2023) was a Russian pseudolinguist and historical revisionist. He cranked out hundreds of books, articles and blogposts on Slavic "runes" and his views on ancient history. Chudinov was particularly infamous for claiming to discover Cyrillic writing on things like landscape and celestial objects. He believed that the Russian language is verifiably the oldest language in the world. Valery Chudinov was a member of the pseudoscientific Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and headed the Institute of Old Slavic and Old Eurasian Civilisation that was created on its basis.

Background
Chudinov obtained from the Moscow State University with a thesis titled "Philosophical problems in scientific atomism" (Филосо́фские пробле́мы естественнонау́чной атоми́стики; Filosofskiye problemy yestestvennonauchnoy atomistiki). His bachelor's degree was in physics. More relevantly to his later activity, Chudinov reported to have studied at the MSU Faculty of Philology for four out of five years, before dropping out without a degree.

He actively participated in Russian academic life, teaching philosophy in several universities and serving on various review boards. As he became more and more notorious, Chudinov lost some of the more respectable-looking positions that he acquired through legitimate academic credentials and connections. By 2010 he lost whatever positions he held at the Russian Academy of Sciences, while the Polytechnic Museum excluded his "blatantly pseudoscientific" lectures from its programme.

"Russian runes"
One of Chudinov’s primary claims is the existence of the so-called "Russian runes", a Pre-Christian Slavic writing system. More specifically, he claims that three ancient runic systems existed: "runes of Makosh", "runes of Rod" and "runes of Mara". According to his terminology, "a 'rune' is a character from any writing system that has magical properties". He proposes that "both in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, the Slavs and the Germanic peoples called all characters 'runes', regardless of whether they were alphabetic or syllabic". Therefore, these "runes" were used primarily for magical or ritual purposes, up until the Middle Ages, when, according to Chudinov, they started being used for regular communication.

Runes of Makosh
The "runes of Makosh" were, according to Chudinov, a syllabic writing system and "possibly the oldest writing system on Earth".