He was sent to the Gulag for his ideas

Alexander Chizhevsky was one of the most unconventional thinkers of the 20th century. He believed, and demonstrated through research, that the Sun's solar cycles influenced the psychology of people and shaped history. Stalin put him in the Gulag for his ideas. Read more👇

Chizhevsky fought in the first World War, and earned a "Cross of Saint George" for valor. In the war he observed that "battles tended to wax and wane with the strength of solar flares and geomagnetic storms." This birthed a lifelong obsession with the Sun.

A fateful collaboration. Svante Arrhenius, a Nobel Prize winner, invited Chizhevsky to work with him. Chizhevsky showed that positive and negative ions in the air physically affected living beings: Negative ions made animals "excitable" and positive ions made them "lethargic."

By now a professor, Chizhevsky collected extensive historical records, and Sun cycles, over centuries. Juxtaposing the two, he found that "geomagnetic storms from solar flares" didn't just fry up electrical circuits, but made political revolutions more likely!

When the atmosphere becomes negatively ionized, there is a significant uptick in "human mass excitability." This is when wars and revolutions break out. The underlying grievances transform into violent political action during the "solar cycle maximum."

Chizhevsky showed that 13 of 17 socialist revolutions happened just when his theory would predict: during solar maximums. He went through war records of 2000+ years, and found that cultures across history faced violent revolutions and wars during solar maximums.

What's a solar cycle? Solar cycles last for 11 years; after 11 years the Sun's magnetic field flips completely. In the first five years of solar minimum, passivity slowly turns into political awareness. Then revolutions break out; you get 3 years of maximum excitability.

Chizhevsky was disrupting the official Soviet theory of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and Stalin didn't like that. For this Chizhevsky was sent off to a "forced labor Gulag" for eight years. He spent his sentence in the distant Ural mountains.

Results got replicated. Chizhevsky's research has been replicated by A. Putilov, an Animal and Human Physiology researcher, and Suitbert Ertel, a psychologist. They both found a "substantial relationship between solar activity and revolutionary behavior."

Chizhevsky was an intellectual renegade who was unafraid of bold ideas. His ideas on Heliobiology, while interesting, aren't favored by mainstream science. Chizhevsky's gravestone is engraved with a "carving representing the Sun." Also check out: The Sun Worship of DH Lawrence.