Russian chimera

“The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia” by Mark Bassin is a scholarly summary of the life, ideas and contemporary influence of Lev Gumilyov (1912-1992). Or perhaps attempted summary since Gumilyov´s ideas were incredibly complex, eclectic and contradictory. So is his influence on the political discourse in the ex-Soviet Union. First, an admission: I never even heard of Gumilyov (whose name is spelled Gumilev in the book) until a few months ago, yet he has been a towering intellectual presence in Russia since the 1970´s. Bassin´s book popped up in a search engine when I was looking for material by Nikolai Trubetzkoy in English…

Lev Gumilyov was the son of two prominent Russian poets, Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova. Nikolai was executed by the Communist Cheka in 1921, while Lev spent a total of 15 years in Stalin´s labor camps. He enjoyed a kind of quasi-approval during the post-Stalin decades, but it wasn´t until the advent of the perestroika and the collapse of the Communist regime that Gumilyov´s ideas became more widely known. Gumilyov is regarded as a historian and ethnologist, but I think it´s more useful to see him as a philosopher in the broad Russian sense. Indeed, I get the impression that Gumilyov was a mercurial intellectual and “mad genius” with the usual persecution complex and delusions of grandeur. Somehow, I consider this particular type of person to be very Russian!

Gumilyov´s ideas are difficult to describe in a short review. They are a bewildering blend of vitalism, biologism, geographic determinism, anti-Semitism, anti-Communism, anti-modernism and Russian nationalism, but also Turkophilia and Mongolophilia. I agree with Bassin that the various strands don´t always combine very well. There are certain similarities to the ideas developed by Spengler and Toynbee, but the differences are more striking. Gumilyov had an essentialist view of ethnic groups, viewing them as more or less self-contained units of a biological and psychological character. In some writings, he described the origins of an ethnos in geographical and ecological terms. Each ethnos was molded by its natural living environment and could even be seen as part of nature itself (note the strong biologism). In other writings he claimed that the “ethnies” (plural of ethnos) were products of cosmic radiation (!). Somehow, this solar radiation gives rise to new ethnies by mutations affecting the psychological make-up of certain persons. These founding fathers are also given an energy impetus (which thus comes at least indirectly from the sun), giving rise to what Gumilyov called “passionarnost” – a central term in his writings. My interpretation is that passionarnost is really the élan vital and that its bearers roughly correspond to the “creative minority” in Toynbee´s writings. A new ethnos is *not* dependent on its living environment, to the contrary, it rebels against it, perhaps by moving out to new territories. Each ethnos follows a life cycle of roughly 1,500 years during which it rises, reaches maturity and then loses the energetic impetus due to entropy. Eventually the ethnos disappears or becomes a relict population. (Curiously, the Russians – uniquely – have experienced two ethnic cycles, rather than just one.) Gumilyov believed that his ideas were scientific in the strict sense of that term, but critics see them as sheer fantasy. Another central concept for Gumilyov is “chimera”. Apparently, there is one way in which an ethnos could artificially prolong its existence almost indefinitely: by turning into a parasite on other ethnies, sucking their solar energy. This kind of parasitical ethnos is what Gumilyov called a chimera. Unsurprisingly for a Russian nationalist, his prime example of such was the Jewish people…

More surprising are Gumilyov´s pro-Turkic and pro-Mongol positions. Bassin never really explains where they come from, except that some Russians romanticized the life and culture of the steppe nomads, both that of ancient peoples such as the Scythians and that of later Tatars and Mongols. Gumilyov´s parents were influenced by this romanticism in their poetry, and his mother´s last name Akhmatova is really a pseudonym – she claimed to be a literal descendant of Khan Ahmed (Akhmat) of the Golden Horde! Gumilyov claimed that the Tatar yoke never existed, calling it a “black legend”. Russians and Mongols/Tatars cooperated peacefully. The battle of Kulikovo in 1380, when Prince Dmitri of Moscow defeated the Horde, wasn´t a Russian liberation struggle against the evil Tatars, but rather a joint Russian-Tatar effort to repulse a dissident Tatar faction backed by Lithuania (a hostile “Western” nation). Today, Gumilyov´s legacy is cherished in Kazakhstan, Tatarstan and Sakha (Yakutia). A university in Kazakhstan´s capital Astana is named after Gumilyov and a monument in Tatarstan´s capital Kazan – the monument was dedicated in the presence of Vladimir Putin himself – shows a statue of the man.

One thing that immediately struck me when reading “The Gumilev Mystique” is the strongly anachronistic character of Gumilyov´s writings. Thus, he claims that Khazaria and the Vikings cooperated in a genocidal war against Kievan Rus. Translation: Jews and Nazis are equally dangerous to modern Russia. Another possible translation: Bolsheviks and Nazis! Gumilyov believed that some ethnies were closer than others. They could be grouped into “super-ethnies” based on “complementarity” (another essentialist psychological term). This is strikingly similar to the Soviet concept of “the brotherhood of nations”. Gumilyov also made a distinction between ethnos, which is natural, and society, which is a social construct by man. This notion also has an affinity with the Soviet idea that the Communist state, of course, transcends all ethnic identities. It may seem strange that a man who spent most of his youth in Soviet labor camps would nevertheless have certain similarities to the regime which put him away, but the relation between Russian nationalism and Communism is a complex issue in itself. Gumilyov was no liberal democrat, usually avoided the pro-Western dissidents, supported the Soviet Cold War confrontation with the West, and opposed Gorbachev´s perestroika. He enjoyed a certain amount of support in the party hierarchy from the Brezhnev years onwards.

Due to their highly eclectic nature, Gumilyov´s ideas have inspired a wide range of people, from more strictly scholarly types interested in sociobiology or geography to decidedly less scholarly people such as Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin, often cast in the role of Putin´s Rasputin (at least by the Western media). Russian ethno-nationalists, Russian imperial or state “nationalists”, Kazakh pro-Russian Eurasianists and Kazakh anti-Russian ethno-nationalists have all claimed Gumilyov´s legacy. Ziuganov, Zhirinovsky and Putin himself have name-dropped him on many occasions. The Green movement in the Soviet Union was inspired by Gumilyov, but also by Russian nationalism. At least two of his “scientific” terms have become virtual household words in Russia: passionarnost and chimera. The national question is just as vexing in Putin´s Russia as it was in Communist or Czarist ditto. Should loyalty primarily be to the state or to the Russian ethnos? And should the state be seen as multi-ethnic, non-ethnic or specifically Russian? Similar problems exist in Kazakhstan, where Russians form a substantial minority and the total number of nationalities is about 150. Should Kazakhstan be “Kazakh” or “Kazakhstani”? One possible interpretation of Gumilyov´s ideas is that Russians shouldn´t be “primus inter pares” in Russia or the Russosphere, rather this role should belong to a coalition of Russians and various Central Asian peoples! Bassin also mentions that some admirers of Gumilyov, including outright neo-Nazis, have drawn the conclusion that Jews could form a natural ethnos by moving to Israel, since the Israeli nation isn´t a chimera. Is this where the bizarre blend of neo-Nazism and Zionism of the National Bolshevik Party comes from?

My overall impression after reading “The Gumilev Mystique” is that Gumilyov, in his own kind of way, actually was right. A discourse of his type is surely impossible in Western nations, or even in “Eastern” Europe. What other European nation has spawned an intelligentsia seriously debating whether or not their historical legacy is somehow identical to or intertwined with that of Genghis Khan? Maybe the Russian ethnos really is fundamentally different. If that´s a good thing, is perhaps an entirely different question.