Yuri Leonidovich Nesterenko

Biography

He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Engineering Physics with an Honors degree in 1995. He asked the USA for political asylum in 2010, which was granted to him in 2011.

Fiction

Nesterenko has written numerous books published by the leading publishing companies of Russia (Eksmo, AST, and others). Also he has contributed to many magazines, including Nauka i Zhizn, Khimiya i Zhizn – XXI Vek, Mir Fantastiki, Кругозор (Mental Outlook). Kroki w nieznane series (Poland) published a Polish translation of Nesterenko's story Despair in 2011.

Computer programming

Having a Master degree in computer science, Nesterenko has created several non-commercial computer games, including FIDO. This game was very popular in the nineties.

Views on human sexuality

While a proponent of antisexualism, he has become one of the founders of the International Antisexual Movement (IAM). The IAM is consciously and purposely orientated on liquidating the sexual relations throughout the world. It was Yuri Nesterenko who established the first Antisexual Society in Russia (1995) Since then, he has taken a leading role in the IAM. The main venue of the society is the "Anti-sexual Stronghold" website created by Nesterenko. The group accepts the minimum amount of sexual activity necessary to maintain population, but the founder hasn’t updated it in quite a while.

Nesterenko is an atheist and does not speak in the name of religious belief in the virtue of chastity. According to him, sexual drive is tantamount to drug addiction because a common addictive element is present in the two behaviours, the only difference being in the formation of psychoactive substances within an addict’s organism itself. Nesterenko calls upon every person to make use of his own reason and to see that it is necessary to reject sexual relations. Any sex other than that strictly for reproduction places animal passions over the development of the highest powers human possesses. That is why Nesterenko opposes it. He is not opposed to all emotions. There is nothing bad in feeling satisfaction by a well-done job, artwork, intellectual communication. But emotions that originate in primitive instincts and fog the mind really must not exist.

Yu. L. Nesterenko’s attitude to David Jay presents special interest. His own ideas had already been formed in the main when AVEN's website was launched in 2002. On the whole he highly appreciates Jay’s work, ascribing to him the credit of having set forth with the idea that sexual indifference is not in need of medical treatment. Later, however, there began to be serious disagreements. Nesterenko’s stance is, first of all, much more radical than Jay’s. When comparing the IAM and asexual people, Russian journalists give particular emphasis to the difference that the ideological position of the IAM’s leader is militantly anti-sexual. Nesterenko not only considers asexuality a normal state, but also condemns all the forms of hedonistic sexual activity. In contrast to a conciliatory character of AVEN’s attitude to the LGBT community, Nesterenko’s efforts as an anti-sexual ideologist are not directed to looking for a fourth way between the three sexual orientations, viz., heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. He stresses in every way possible that the IAM is not a new variety of sexual minorities just as anti-fascists do not constitute a particular stream in fascism. When asked the question "But you’re a minority, aren’t you?" Nesterenko said: "If we take a psychiatric hospital, we find that medical staff is a minority there, too."

In the middle of the 2000s, the moulding of the IAM attracted the attention of Russian and foreign mass media. Nesterenko was interviewed by journalists and bloggers, articles about his anti-sexual views appearing in central newspapers and magazines of Russia and the CIS. Also he was featured on Russian television shows including TV programmes of Channel One and NTV. Nesterenko himself is not very happy with these shows. He says that they give a superficial and tendentious survey of the IAM. In his opinion, these attempts at a description of asexual people’s ways of life (always with an obvious pro-sexual twist) are preconceived and not objective, with his real views being a bit distorted.

Views on race

Nesterenko is an open proponent of racism. He defends his stance in the article entitled "Racism is bad? Can you prove it"?, where he defines racism as a "concept, according to which (human) races are not equal by certain significant (biologically ground) properties which can be objectively assessed in 'better - worse' terms" (e.g., on average, blacks are better in some kinds of sports while whites are better in intellectual tasks). Nesterenko states that this definition is just "an acknowledgement of the fact" and does not automatically justify any hatred or aggression against the race with worse properties. Among other things, he claims racism can be scientifically proven to be rational because of the low IQ of blacks, higher black criminality and lack of great civilizations (equal to the ones created by white and yellow races) built by blacks. He names a racist booklet "Whites & Blacks. 100 FACTS (and one Lie)", which he has on his site, as one of his sources.

Main works