In a word, Gumilev’s whole conception was basically poetry. Maybe he inherited this talent from his father, but it was very effective. The simpler and more elegant, the easier it is for people, dilettantes in this case, to grasp. Gumilev was very popular among the technical intelligentsia, the creative intelligentsia. Bromley was boring to read, very boring, as with any normal scholarly book. Gumilev was fun. It was utter, unprovable nonsense, but it was good to read. Like a novel.99
The khan’s steel sabre
In 1980, the 600th anniversary of the battle of Kulikovo Field, turned into a year-long celebration of Russian arms and valour. It was to be a milestone in Lev Gumilev’s academic career. All censorship of Russia’s nationalist intellectuals was suspended for the duration. In 1980 alone, Soviet publishing houses printed roughly 150 titles that directly or indirectly referenced the battle.100
The Kulikovo anniversary celebration seems to have been designed by the Communist Party central committee to whip up nationalist spirit and mobilize the public. This may have been inspired by two increasingly difficult challenges it faced abroad: the Polish Solidarity movement and the deepening war in Afghanistan.101 Just as in the late 1960s, when the last upsurge in Russian nationalism coincided with a border war with China and the Prague Spring, the Kulikovo celebrations seem to have had a political purpose as well. Nationalism was allowed to flourish within carefully prescribed limits. But celebration of the origins of the Russian nation let the nationalist genie out of the bottle for good, and it would now be impossible to put back. For the rest of the decade, nationalism would provide a centre of gravity in the politics of the USSR – both the Russian and the non-Russian parts – with fateful consequences.
While Gumilev’s books stayed safely in the All Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, he was given an exceptional opportunity to step into the limelight, publishing a number of articles (including one in the popular national magazine Ogonek). ‘Russian ethnos was born on Kulikovo Field’, wrote Lev in one article.102 Of course, if this were true (and it surely isn’t), his hypothesis that the average ethnos had a 1,200-year lifespan was convenient, because being 600 years old would place Russia at the summit of its historical existence.
His interpretation of the battle was controversial, and also convenient for his theory that Russia and the steppe peoples formed an unconscious super ethnos, a natural empire or civilization. He argued that the battle was not actually between Russians and Mongols, but was a civil war between two branches of the Mongol Empire, with the Russians fighting on one side. Mamay, leader of the Mongol forces at Kulikovo, was warring with Tokhtamysh, a rival. Russian forces led by Dmitry Donskoy at Kulikovo were allied to Tokhtamysh, while Mamay was in the pay of Catholic Europe, a clique of shadowy Genoan princes. The battle of Kulikovo Field was ‘not with the Golden Horde at all’, wrote Gumilev, but with the horde of Mamay, ‘which was absolutely different from the former’. He pointed out that there is a record of Dmitry sending joyful news about the victory at Kulikovo Field to Tokhtamysh Khan.103 Thus, the battle of Kulikovo was in fact, in the imagination of Gumilev, a fight not against Mongol invaders, but against the representatives of an international evil cartel in the pay of the West. The argument turned Russian history on its head. Traditionally the ‘ungrateful Europe’ argument had held sway in Russian historiography since the time of the Romanovs: it argues that Europe owes Russia a debt of gratitude for stopping the Golden Horde from sweeping further westward. Gumilev instead reverses this, saying that thanks to the Mongols, Russia was saved from falling under the sway of Europeans who ‘wanted to turn Russia into a Genoan trading colony’.
As far as serious historians are concerned, this was based on non-existent evidence and was almost certainly the product of Lev’s vivid imagination.104 It is generally agreed by scholars that Mamay, who was not a Chingizid, was warring with Tokhtamysh, who was. Dmitry Donskoy was allied to Tokhtamysh, and after the battle of Kulikovo, in which Donskoy defeated Mamay, he continued to pay tribute to Tokhtamysh. Gumilev’s assertion that Mamay was backed by Genoan princes is not substantiated by any research. But his histories were popular – more popular than other, more properly sourced history. ‘It was basically like reading a novel. Unlike most history books, you read until the last page’, according to contemporary author Dmitry Bykov.
Lev’s friends in high places continued to support him. And even if they could not get his more controversial works (like ‘Biosphere’) published, there did seem to be a consensus that Eurasianist historiography pioneered by Lev was in vogue among a narrow but steadily widening section of the elite.
The deaths of both Brezhnev and Suslov in 1982 were a blow to the nationalists, and brought an end to official support for the ‘Russian Party’ from the Soviet Politburo. Whether Suslov had indeed been a closet nationalist, or had simply been using the nationalists as a counterweight to the liberals, is still hotly debated. But the balance which had favoured the nationalists under Brezhnev and Suslov began to be righted under Andropov and Chernenko, both orthodox internationalists. Neither had any interest in antagonizing the West, and realized that Russian chauvinism would strengthen the minority nationalist movements that threatened the USSR.
The Kremlin was increasingly preoccupied with nationalist tensions roiling underneath the seemingly placid surface of the USSR. In 1982, according to Cheshko, Bromley spoke at the presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and said, for the first time, that dangerous ethnic and separatist problems existed in the USSR. ‘It sounds silly, but this was stunning to hear at the time’, recalls Cheshko. ‘There was no discussion, everyone was in shock. It was the first time anyone had heard this.’ A special ethnographic commission was created in the academy.
It became clear that neither dogmatic Stalinism nor Bromley’s groundbreaking ‘ethnosocial’ theory was able to cope with the reality of national self-determination movements within the Soviet Union. Bromley had recognized the importance of ethnos as a field of study; but, like everything in Soviet academia, any use of his insights was stifled by the suffocating climate of orthodoxy. The fundamental problem in the field, as elsewhere in Soviet academia, was a hermetic, conservative, helpless elite governed by ‘the requirement that everyone subscribe to a single universal or eternal methodology’, which ‘doesn’t change except with the death of its principal exponent’, according to Valery Tishkov, Bromley’s successor as chairman of the Institute of Ethnography. However, it is doubtful whether Gumilev’s theory would have saved the day, either – in fact, his valorization of the steppe tribes and micro-ethnicities of the Caspian and Caucasus region, his reverence for Cossack hetmans and Kievan princes gave evidence and inspiration to nationalist authors and self-determination movements throughout the USSR. Gumilev seems to have done more than anyone to inspire non-Russian nationalism in Central Asia and the Caucasus, with fateful consequences.
Authors like Olzhas Suleymenov and Chingiz Aytmatov, Kazakh and Kyrgyz respectively, read Gumilev for his stubborn defence of the forgotten and often maligned minority peoples. ‘I was introduced to Turkology by reading Gumilev’, admits Suleymenov. Gumilev’s contribution to Kazakhstan’s independence is so revered, for example, that the country’s post-independence president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, named a university after him. His publications raised his profile to a national level for the first time. Letters poured in from all over the USSR. But this exposed him to criticism: patriotic Russian historians saw his defence of the Mongols and the way he equated Russia with steppe nomads as heresy. He was labelled a ‘Russophobe’ in the august bastion of nationalism, Molodaya Gvardiya. The attacks worsened Gumilev’s already severe paranoia, and it remains somewhat tragic that he sank deeper into anti-Semitism as a result. According to his biographer Belyakov, he believed Jews to be behind the attacks on him – odd, given that the list of academics who were gunning for him was entirely composed of ethnic Russians (with the exception of Bromley, who was ethnically English).