Tartaria: A Russian Psyop For People Who Hate Drywall

About this episode

The episode explores the Tartaria conspiracy theory and its implications on history and architecture.

Have you ever looked at a beautiful old train station and felt something had been lost? Good news: the something is "labour protections." Bad news: a Russian topologist from the 1980s has a different theory, and it's currently eating TikTok. This week, Tristan is joined by Mia Mulder , who happens to have made the definitive YouTube video on this exact topic two years ago and then forgot she'd been on the podcast before. Together, they take on Tartaria, also known as the mud flood theory, also known as (per Bloomberg) the QAnon of architecture. We trace it from Anatoly Fomenko's "new chronology" through Nikolai Levashov's Aryan space-giants, into Putin-adjacent nationalist rhetoric, then watch it break containment around 2016 and metastasize on western social media into a modular conspiracy that bolts onto Q, the great reset, and great replacement theory. Plus: Chicago raised its entire street level by four to six feet using 6,000 screw jacks and one guy with a whistle; the 1893 World's Fair was held in a city made of fancy papier-mache; and a horse and buggy is actually a sophisticated piece of equipment that you, specifically, could not build. The bigger argument is a double…

People in this episode

Hosts: Tristan Johnson, Scott Niswander

Guest: Mia Mulder

Topics covered

• Tartaria
• conspiracy theories
• architecture
• history
• social media
• politics

Keywords

• Tartaria
• mud flood theory
• conspiracy
• architecture
• social media
• capitalism
• history

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Bloomberg

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