Because I have read some Soviet school manuals, which were full of shameless lies about most historical events (not only in the history manuals, but in all manuals, regardless of subject, e.g. in physics manuals, biology manuals and so on, and even in the sports manuals, where e.g. sports like boxing and skiing had been invented and developed by Russians, before the English and the Norse), I find it easy to believe that someone who grew in the Soviet Union was convinced that all written history sources must contain only lies.
I opened Wikipedia and immediately found this as the second sentence: "The earliest archaeological examples of skis were found in Russia and date to 6000 BCE." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_skiing
They also mention China there.
Sure attributing it to modern Slavs is anachronistic, but was there really such attribution in those school manuals you read? Or did they simply mean it was the territory of USSR where the first examples were found?
It's modern skiing which was developed in Scandinavia.
I'd say it's often quite the opposite, Western historiography is largely Eurocentric and disregards a lot of what happened in Asia/Africa.
Moreover, the use of skis is not the same with organized skiing competitions and special training methods for them.
Also, it was not enough to claim that all kinds of ancient inventions were due to Russians, the claims were that they were due to Russian peasants, because of course nothing good could have originated in Russian "enemies of the people", e.g. aristocrats or bourgeoisie.
So it was the usual communist propaganda about social classes, but what you originally said sounded more like Russian nationalism.
I do wonder if his strange history is influenced by his mathematics. The idea of 'copies' of the same event but with different names seems quite mathematical.
Apart from that, he seems to explicitly ignore well-known and reasonable data like tree rings and c14, for reasons that he must surely explain elsewhere.
I find all of this very amusing, and maybe a bit tragic. But it does not make me angry in any way; and Fomenko is certainly a person worthy of the utmost respect. Newton also famously worked in stuff that we consider crackpotery today, like alternate chronologies (heh), alchemy, occultism, etc.
And he also completely ignores all non-narrative historical documents, like financial receipts, sales invoices, banking books, etc, which are numbered in millions and were certainly not produced by a sinister sect in 18th century which decided to falsify all history.
In Russian bookstores of the period there were very long bookshelves filled with his books.
More like decoding the Bible code. The method is so broad that it's always possible to find some parallel, no matter how fuzzy and distant. But this is not proof of anything, you can only start from the assumption that the replicas Fomenko talks about must exist.