Valery Chudinov

Valery Alekseevich Chudinov (Russian: Вале́рий Алексе́евич Чуди́нов; born 30 June 1942) is a Russian pseudolinguist and historical revisionist. He cranked out hundreds of books, articles and blogposts on Slavic "runes" and on his version of ancient history. He is particularly infamous for claiming to find "ancient Slavic writing" on things like celestial objects and contemporary maps. He believes that the Russian language is the oldest in the world. Chudinov holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Moscow State University with a thesis on the philosophical problems of atomism in natural science. His BA was in physics, and he claims to have studied at the MSU Faculty of Philology for four years before dropping out. He is a member of the pseudoscientific Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and heads the Institute of Old Slavic and Old Eurasian Civilisation created on its basis.

"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".