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In the Russia scientific community a new scandal erupted - acting IAAS MSU director, member of Expert Council of the Higher Attestation Commission Professor I. I. Abylgaziev was accused of plagiarism. It turned out that the basis of his doctoral thesis served several pieces of foreign dissertations and other sources.

In response to accusations in plagiarism, Abylgazieva called an assembly of IAAS academic council and asked to vote on a confidence towards him. "At first they discussed the importance of studying the problems of Soviet internationalism and solidarity, in which the director is engaged, also that there are similar ideas in different theses, that it does not matter how good scientist the director is, if he is a good administrator instead, and also that the "media campaign" is a scheming against V.A. Sadovnichego and is not worth paying attention. It was also suggested that some certain fragments of the not yet published dissertation of professor Abylgaziev were stolen and hastily published by his enemies or protected by them before he had time to complete his research. That was the statement of the former director of IAAC scientist in Turkish studies M.S. Meyer and scientist in Vietnam studies D.V. Deopik which was somewhat unexpected: they both have a reputation of decent people," notes the member of RAS, historian Askold Ivanchik in his blog on "Echo of Moscow."

As the author notes, the issue of trust was put to a secret voting.

Results: 21 board members trust the director, 10 have no trust towards him, 7 invalid ballots.

“Well, the Russian orientalists chose the option of the disgrace quite consciously. None of them could say that he didn’t know for whom he or she is voting. Moreover, as it was a secret vote, it can be stated that the academic council of IAAS chose its director freely; no one can claim that he is imposed from the top. This means that the IAAS professors themselves, quite well realizing what they are doing decided that the retired official with its compiled dissertation (but real colonel) deserves the place of the director of one of the Russian main centers, where future orientalists are being prepared,” Ivanchik writes.

It is not accidental that when talking about the corporate reputation of RSU the author in connection with the scandal mentions Meyer, expert of Turkish studies. Meyer was also a participant of another sensational scandal in academic community.

Note that the head of the Institute of Asian and African countries at RSU named after Lomonosov, member of Russian-Turkish Commission of historians Mikhail Meyer made a speech on a channel “Kultura”, in a series of “Turkish March” of a program “Power of fact.” When commenting on the historical facts concerning the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire, he made cynical statements.

In particular, he stated that there was “slaughter on both sides”, “a certain number of Armenians” managed to survive and “it is not genocide and one million and a half Armenians were not killed.”

In fact, Meyer’s statements denying the Armenian Genocide, coincided with the Turkey’s new arguments, where the fact of planed destruction of the ethnic groups is replaced by the arguments, completely not related to the Armenians, about the parallel suffering of Muslims in the breakaway colonies of the Empire and during the First World War.

After, the representatives of Armenian Diaspora, Armenian organizations of Russia, the representatives of the Russian intelligentsia and the mass media harshly criticized Meyer’s statements, the host of the “Power of fact” program on the “Kultura” channel in a written form apologized for the statements of Meyer.

It’s also noteworthy that Meyer as well participated in a scandalous presentation of Oleg Kuznetsov’s book “Truth about the “myths” of Nagorno Karabakh Conflict” held at the press center “AIF.”

Note, that the presentation of the book revealed that from the very first page it is full of historical inaccuracies, misinformation and in some cases there are even obvious falsification of the facts about the history of Armenian people.

The video record of dispute between Vadim Gomoz, the editor of “Wikipedia” and Oleg Kuznetsov was distributed on the Internet. It clearly shows that the author of the book admits his pro- Azerbaijani bias, thus depreciating the academic value of his book.