On May 19, the Commission on Combating Pseudoscience of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) issued a statement urging the exclusion of homeopathic drugs from mandatory clinical guidelines. It seemed like a routine step in the defense of scientific integrity, yet a document drafted in February waited three and a half months for publication. The reason lies in a fierce struggle within the RAS and beyond, where the homeopathic industry, backed by influential figures in the State Duma (Russia’s lower house of parliament) and top officials within the RAS, is mounting an offensive. From censorship to political insinuations about “NATO conspiracies,” T-invariant uncovers how pseudoscience is encroaching on science in Russia.
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To begin, a few words about the content of the statement published on May 19, 2025. The Commission points out that several mandatory clinical guidelines currently in effect in Russia prescribe the use of homeopathic or other drugs “containing no molecules of active substances.” The Commission references its 2017 memorandum on the “Homeopathy as Pseudoscience,” where a group of experts it assembled thoroughly substantiated the pseudoscientific and ineffective nature of homeopathic treatments. Therefore, the Commission demands these demonstrably ineffective drugs be removed from mandatory clinical guidelines. The statement is accompanied by an expert report. Letters sent to Russian healthcare authorities are also included with the publication.
This might appear to be a routine step in the Commission’s work. However, what is surprising is not the statement’s content but its date: February 5, 2025, though its publication was only approved on May 14. What caused this three and a half months delay? Surprisingly, this issue and the circumstances surrounding the statement’s publication lead to profound insights into the state of contemporary Russian science. To understand this, we need to examine some background.
In Homeopathic Doses
The Commission on Combating Pseudoscience was established under the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1998 at the initiative of Nobel laureate and Academician Vitaly L. Ginzburg. Since then, Commission members have regularly appeared in the media, responded to official inquiries, published the bulletin “In Defense of Science”, and proactively critiqued demonstrably unscientific or misleading concepts and projects. Many such pseudoscientific ventures concealed fraudulent schemes aimed at deceiving ordinary citizens or misappropriating public funds.
One of the most high-profile cases in the Commission’s history was its opposition to pseudoinventor Viktor Petrik, who, with the backing of State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, attempted in 2009–2010 to secure funding for a massive water purification project using his filters, whose effectiveness was not supported by testing. Petrik also enjoyed support within the Academy, including from RAS Vice-President, Academician S.M. Aldoshin. Nevertheless, with public support, the Commission succeeded in halting RAS collaboration with Petrik. Speaking at the RAS General Assembly in December last year, Commission Chairman аcademician Eugene Alexandrov stated (from the 6:20:52 mark — Ed.) that, by his estimate, “over these 26 years, we have saved Russia’s budget approximately one trillion dollars in total.”
In 2017, the Commission took on a far more formidable adversary than Petrik: homeopathy. This is an entire sector of medicine and the pharmaceutical industry built on the imitation of therapeutic activity. At its core lie medieval notions of sympathetic magic (treating like with like), though more recently they’ve been increasingly dressed up as modern scientific advancements.
During the Soviet era, homeopathy saw little development, though it was permitted in very limited forms, typically in private practice for non-critical medical conditions. Its principles fundamentally contradict the naturalistic worldview generally upheld by official Soviet ideology. However, almost immediately after the USSR’s collapse, proponents of this form of magical thinking began strengthening its position within the healthcare system. More details can be found in the historical overview attached to the memorandum (in Russian).
The memorandum meticulously demonstrated that homeopathy is ineffective in practice (unsupported by clinical studies) and cannot work in principle (contradicting firmly established scientific facts). Thanks to the memorandum, homeopathy became the go-to example of pseudoscience in Russian popular science discourse.
However, because the homeopathic industry involves substantial money and careers, the Commission gained influential enemies. The memorandum and subsequent popular science articles sparked several lawsuits against the Academy and individual Commission members, including its chairman. Meanwhile, the RAS effectively distanced itself from defending its Commission. While not objecting to the facts presented in the memorandum, RAS management and legal representatives shied away from defending scientific truth in court.
The RAS’s formal legal argument in court was that the Presidium had not directly tasked the Commission with addressing homeopathy, and thus, regardless of its scientific merit, the memorandum reflected only the personal views of the experts, not the Academy’s official stance.
This was a disingenuous position. According to the then-operative Charter of the Commission on Combating Pseudoscience and Falsification of Scientific Research (its full title at the time), the Commission required no specific directives or permissions from the RAS Presidium to operate or publish. The very establishment of the Commission and the approval of its membership, led by its chairman, granted it the authority to make official statements on pseudoscience matters. For the first 20 years of its existence, the Commission’s activities and public statements were consistently supported by RAS officials, endorsed at General Assemblies, and approved at Presidium meetings.
A Shot of Pseudoscience
It’s worth noting that, as part of a reform beginning in 2013, the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) was merged with the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences (RAMS). The latter was incorporated into the RAS as a department. The overall scientific rigor at RAMS had always been significantly lower than at the main Academy (formerly the USSR Academy of Sciences). After the Soviet Union’s collapse, it was within RAMS that opportunities arose for promoting numerous dubious and pseudoscientific projects. Following the merger, this pseudoscience was integrated into the RAS along with the entire RAMS structure.
Indeed, at the time of publication of the memorandum “Homeopathy as Pseudoscience,” even the Commission on Combating Pseudoscience included one medical academician who supported homeopathy. However, this member was only nominally part of the Commission, never actively participating in its work. After the memorandum’s release, this individual publicly claimed that the document had not been discussed or adopted by the Commission in accordance with established procedures. This, of course, is untrue. The Commission has always operated in a distributed manner, with its members engaging in discussions, sometimes quite heated. The memorandum’s text was first drafted by a specially convened expert group and then submitted for discussion by the Commission. All members who wished to participate in the discussion of the memorandum and propose changes ultimately supported its final text. More than half of the Commission’s listed members endorsed it, with no one voting against it.
Despite the rigorously scientific text of the memorandum and the proper procedure for its approval, it was met with hostility by some members of the Medical Sciences Department of RAS, representatives of the homeopathic industry, and their supporters in state institutions, including the Ministry of Health and the State Duma Committee on Health Protection. Amid a disruptive reform of the Academy, the RAS hesitated to confront the internal and external patrons of pseudoscience. It proved easier to suppress the Commission’s voice.
In 2018, the RAS Presidium decided to reorganize the Commission, splitting it into three separate entities: one for combating pseudoscience, one for countering falsification of scientific research, and one for science popularization. This was formally accompanied by the adoption of new Charters governing the commissions’ activities. The key change for the Commission on Combating Pseudoscience was the effective removal of its right to make independent official public statements. Originally, the Commission was an arm of the RAS Presidium, empowered to speak on pseudoscience and research falsification at any time, now found itself needing Presidium approval for every official public statement, with no clear procedure for getting it.
In effect, this meant that the leaders of the Academy could arbitrarily censor the Commission’s statements. When approval was granted, it was typically communicated to the Commission’s chairman informally—verbally or via personal email. The Commission was generally advised to minimize public statements and, whenever possible, to operate through formal correspondence with state authorities.
Censorship significantly impacted the Commission’s work. For instance, in 2019–2020, discussions took place about preparing a new memorandum. Topics under consideration included pseudoscientific ideas and approaches hindering the fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic and misconceptions about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) leading to flawed regulatory approaches. However, it quickly became clear that these topics were entirely untenable.
By that time, genetically modified organisms had been used for years to frighten schoolchildren and the public through television broadcasts. Mikhail Kovalchuk, head of the Kurchatov Institute (a major Russian research center), warned members of the Federation Council (Russia’s upper house of parliament) about genetically modified “utility humans” supposedly being fed GMOs in the West. As for HIV, addressing this issue would have required a competent discussion of at-risk groups, including the LGBTQ community, teenage sexual activity, and migrants often excluded from the healthcare system. Amid the growing political emphasis on “traditional values” and rising anti-migrant sentiments, such a discussion had no chance of passing censorship.
Rebranding Homeopathy
In 2019, another scandal arose from the work of the Commission on Countering Falsification of Scientific Research. In line with its mandate, this commission prepared a report for the RAS elections, analyzing violations of academic ethics by candidates for academician and corresponding member status. Much of the data came from Dissernet, a project that tracks not only plagiarism in dissertations but also the involvement of academic advisors and official reviewers in defending such flawed works.
Another incident involved a response to a press statement by Academician Sergey Glazyev. In his article, Glazyev unexpectedly endorsed the pseudoscientific “New Chronology” of Academician Fomenko (claiming all historical dates as radically falsified) and advocated for an unconstitutional idea of developing a state ideology for Russia, and, moreover, for subordinating all scientific research to it. Discussion of the long-debunked “New Chronology” provoked a sharp reaction from the RAS Historical Sciences Department. The RAS Presidium approached the Commission, requesting a statement on the matter. The statement was promptly drafted, voted on by the Commission, and subjected to minor editorial revisions by the Presidium to soften certain phrases, with publication approval expected to follow. However, approval never came. A couple of weeks later, as the issue’s relevance waned, an informal order to “stand down” was issued. So, the document, prepared and agreed at the Presidium’s request, was banned from publication for purely political reasons.
Thus, even in a censored format, the commissions continued to create discomfort for the Academy’s leadership, which decided to further diminish their role and status. In 2022, a resolution was adopted to “transfer the functions” of the commissions from the Presidium to the RAS Expert Council. The procedure for this transfer was not specified, allowing detractors—primarily from the homeopathic community—to claim that the commissions had been dissolved and that the Expert Council would now handle pseudoscience and falsification issues (which, certainly, it had no capacity to do). As this decision sparked media discussions, RAS Vice-President Academician S.N. Kalmykov issued a public clarification three months later, assuring that the commissions would continue to work, with only their reporting structure being altered.
Alexandrov continued to receive documents and directives from the RAS officials that required the Commission on Combating Pseudoscience’s reaction. He also spoke as the Commission’s chairman at RAS General Assemblies. Notably, at the December 2024 General Assembly, Alexandrov presented a candidate to succeed him as the chairman of the Commission. The candidate had already been informally approved, with official appointment planned for February 2025. For reasons unknown, this did not occur.
By early February, the Commission had prepared its statement calling to exclude drugs lacking active substance molecules from mandatory clinical guidelines. Approval for publishing this document took three and a half months to obtain.
Here’s where things get particularly interesting. As soon as the document appeared online, representatives of the homeopathic industry within the State Duma’s Health Protection Committee mobilized, distributing to the media a pre-prepared set of documents discrediting the Commission on Combating Pseudoscience and its criticism of homeopathy.
Most of these documents were already known to the Commission and the press. They contain no substantive scientific rebuttals, as no coherent response to the memorandum’s arguments has emerged in the years since its release, despite attempts. For example, at a press conference responding to the memorandum, the Homeopathic Association used meaningless pseudosophisticated gibberish about “quantum field resonances,” resembling the parodies of Sergey Kuryokhin (a Russian musician known for satirical performances).
A more serious effort came from the pharmaceutical company Materia Medica, led by RAS Corresponding Member Oleg Epstein. To distance themselves from homeopathy’s magical terminology, they coined the concept of “release-activity.” Allegedly, substances used in homeopathic preparations “release” some emanation that transfers their therapeutic properties even when no molecules of the active substance remain in the drug. In his articles, Epstein claimed to have medically discovered a new physical reality and called on physicists to verify it. Rhetorically, this was a novel attempt to rebrand medieval homeopathy. It allowed the company to formally classify its products as “release-active” rather than homeopathic. Physicists found no evidence for this, and several of Epstein’s articles were later retracted from scientific journals. So, the company has abandoned this “brand” and now modestly refers to its products as “innovative drugs.”
Pseudoscience at the Helm
Lacking of substantive scientific rebuttals, modern homeopathy lobbyists resort to purely legal arguments. For instance, they cite a document from the Prosecutor General’s Office confirming that the Commission’s memorandum is not a regulatory act and imposes no obligations, while the law permits the use of homeopathy. However, no one disputed that homeopathy is currently legal in Russia. The Commission called for a review of this status, as homeopathic methods are ineffective. The current statement demands even less: not to ban homeopathy outright but merely to remove homeopathic drugs from mandatory clinical guidelines.
Another document, containing excerpts from a court protocol, is used to argue that the memorandum is not an official RAS document. This is a more complex issue. Indeed, neither the memorandum nor other Commission publications are legal documents of the RAS as a corporate entity, nor were they created as commissioned products of that entity. However, this does not diminish their official status as scientific-expert publications of the RAS: they were prepared within the Commission’s competencies, authority, and operational rules, as established by the Academy.
Another document in the set, dated 2017 and signed by V.A. Tutelian, Acting Academician-Secretary of the RAS Medical Sciences Department, states that the Department “rejects the ‘pseudoscientific’ characterization” of homeopathy. The seven-line letter provides no arguments. This indicates that, four years after RAMS’s integration into the RAS, the medical academy still viewed itself as an autonomous entity, ready to oppose the broader Academy. The Academician-Secretary is the elected head of a department in the RAS. In the case of the Medical Sciences Department, this position corresponds to the former role of RAMS president, meaning direct support for homeopathy comes from the very top of Russian academic medicine. This reveals that Russian medicine, up to its highest levels, is significantly influenced by pseudoscience—an important fact for all countries and international organizations collaborating with Russia in medicine and healthcare.
Until recently, however, the Russian Academy of Sciences itself has generally sought to counter pseudoscience. Academician Alexandrov, as head of the Commission on Combating Pseudoscience, received commendations from the RAS governing body. His speeches were often highlights of General Assemblies. Against this backdrop, a new document in the homeopathy proponents’ arsenal came as a complete surprise.
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This is a letter from the current RAS President, Academician Krasnikov, dated April 8, 2024, which effectively disavows the Commission on Combating Pseudoscience’s activities. According to Krasnikov’s letter, the Commission ceased to exist in 2022 when the decision was made to “transfer its functions” to the RAS Expert Council. This decision allegedly dissolved the Commission, though no one was informed, and its chairman continued to act in his official capacity at Academy assemblies. Notably, at the December 2024 General Assembly, Krasnikov himself gave Alexandrov the floor to report on the Commission’s work and present a successor candidate, informally agreed upon with the Expert Council. The minutes recorded that the appointment was to be formalized by February 2025, but the Academy declined to do so during the period between the preparation and approval of the Commission’s homeopathy statement.
Krasnikov’s letter also claims that the Commission’s website was neither created nor managed by the RAS. However, a simple check reveals that the domain knlran.ru is registered to the Russian Academy of Sciences. It was established in 2014 with the direct permission of then-RAS President Academician V.E. Fortov. The website was created and maintained by Commission members and is updated under the chairman’s oversight.
Taken together, these facts indicate an ongoing, behind-the-scenes battle within the Academy’s governing body between supporters and opponents of pseudoscience, with the current RAS President siding with pseudoscience by endorsing the homeopaths’ claim that the Commission was dissolved in 2022. This is another critical fact for consideration in any interactions with official Russian science. This does not mean that all Russian scientists have suddenly become pseudoscientists. However, we now know that the heads of Russia’s largest state scientific organizations—the RAS, its medical department (former RAMS), and the Kurchatov Institute—have personally either supported pseudoscience or opposed efforts to combat it.
The cherry on top of this set of documents is a letter from the State Duma, signed by Vladimir Egorov, Deputy Chairman of the Expert Council (on complementary medicine) of the Health Protection Committee and Deputy Chairman of the Coordination Council (on folk medicine) of the Russian Ministry of Health.
The letter reiterates Academician Krasnikov’s claim that the Commission’s website is not controlled by the RAS, adding a significant caveat that it is supported “from a NATO country” that is officially considered unfriendly. Thus, the Duma expert explicitly insinuates to journalists that the Commission’s activities against homeopathy are not driven by the pseudoscientific nature of the practice but by the machinations of political adversaries.
In his signature, Egorov also mentions his status as a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (RAEN), a public organization that, following the USSR’s collapse, began granting academician title to those not accepted by established academies. RAEN members include, for example, the aforementioned Viktor Petrik and Anatoly Akimov, creator of the pseudoscientific torsion field theory. The organization also named Ramzan Kadyrov (head of the Chechen Republic) an academician. It is no coincidence that a representative of this pseudoscientific academy is now defending homeopathy in the State Duma and the Ministry of Health. The letter’s wording suggests that pseudoscience, having infiltrated government bodies, is shifting from rhetorical tactics to using political motives to persecute its opponents—methods reminiscent of the history of Soviet pseudoscience.