We live, not sensing the country beneath us,
Our speeches at ten paces cannot be heard,
And where there is enough for a half-speaker, –
There they recall the Kremlin mountain-dweller …
And around him is a rabble of thin-necked bosses,
He plays with the services of half-people.
By the time Gumilev’s monograph, Khunnu: Central Asia in Ancient Times, was published in 1960, Gumilev had endured a third eight-year sentence in the camps, fought in the Battle of Berlin, and stopped speaking to his mother altogether, their relationship tortured to destruction by the mechanisms of the Great Terror.
Fabulous Scythian hordes to Herodotus and Pliny, barbarian aggressors beyond the Great Wall to the ancient Chinese, and an obscure adjunct to the name Attila in the mind of Europe, the nomad horsemen of Central Asia re-enter history in Gumilev’s work as cultivated inhabitants of a distinct geographical region – a ‘dry Mediterranean’ – to which their art, culture, religion, and political and economic systems were subtly adapted. The Huns become the foundational example of Gumilev’s ‘scientific’ theory of ethnogenesis, which explains the rise, flowering and vanishing of peoples as a ‘biological’ process. Landscape and climate, for Gumilev, are the determining elements in the formation of ethnicity; peoples are ‘anthropofauna’. For Gumilev, ethnic phenomena are material, objective facts. ‘There is not a single person on the planet without ethnicity,’ he declared. Though he was of mixed blood himself – Akhmatova was proud of her Tatar blood and Gumilev shared her Asiatic features – he despised exogamy, which he believed destroyed nature and culture.
In his major work, Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of the Earth, Gumilev accounts for the historical flourishing of human collectives with the concept of passionarnost’, ‘passionarity’ – a neologism for creative drive, the ‘anti-entropic impulse’, which bursts out during the creative period of an ‘ethnos’ and later ebbs. The approximate duration of an ethnos, which lies at the ‘boundary of the biosphere and the sociosphere’, is 1,200–1,500 years, which cover its creative period, the time of its actualisation and its inevitable decay. Passionarity is a biological attribute, ‘an inborn capacity of the organism to absorb external energy and give it out again in the form of work’. Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, Archpriest Avvakum and Napoleon were all great ‘passionaries’. Culture can be deceptive, Gumilev believed. What we call ‘flourishing’ should really be seen as ‘squandering’, when people use up the great heritage accumulated by their ancestors, which creates an impression of abundance. Comparisons that measure non-European peoples by European culture and talk of their backwardness or stagnation are meaningless, Gumilev argues, because each cultural region has its own path.
Since his death in 1992, Gumilev has become a cult figure. In bookshops all across Russia, his works occupy large sections of the history shelves. In 2005 a monument was erected to him in Kazakhstan, and a university has been named in his honour in Astana, the Kazakh capital. Gumilev’s work can easily be read to assert the great future for Russia–Eurasia which so many Russians believe they are owed by history. He suggests a geopolitical identity based on the heritage of the steppe. Arguing repeatedly against eurocentrism, Gumilev depicts both China and the West as predatory aggressors, insisting that Russia ‘may only be saved through Eurasianism’.
Ignoring the historical evidence of the ravages of Khan Baty, who destroyed thousands of Russian towns in the thirteenth century, Gumilev denied that the Mongol presence had been a ‘yoke’. (For scholars like Dmitri Likhachev, the arrival of the khans on horseback from across the steppe was a defining disaster for Russia, which had previously been among the most culturally and economically developed nations in Europe.) Gumilev talked instead about the fruitful saving character of Mongol rule – a symbiosis of Rus and the Golden Horde – which established the first pan-Eurasian state: a model for the Muscovite tsars. For Gumilev, the ‘Jewish–Khazarian’ yoke (a novel concept he developed) was far more deleterious than the Mongol invasion, for the Jewish ‘behaviour stereotype’ does not match with the behavioural stereotypes of the Eurasian ethnicities. For disciples of this mysticism of race, some of whom organised into a ‘political social movement’ in 2001 under the leadership of a clever demagogue in good standing with the Kremlin called Alexander Dugin, Eurasianism is a cultural antidote to ‘Atlanticism’. The Atlantic powers are sea powers, and Eurasia is a land power, built on the conquest of the dry routes, the rectangle of the steppe, which is the equivalent of the Mediterranean for the West. The geopolitical force of maritime civilisations has always stood in opposition to Eurasian civilisation. In the sphere of foreign policy, ‘Eurasia’ pledges to ‘support forces which act against the process of “American-style globalisation”,’ envisaging a Turkic–Slavic merger, and possible anti-Atlantic alliances with Islamic countries.
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Selenginsk, which lies eighty miles south of Ulan Ude, where Pushkin’s African great-grandfather General Gannibal once protected the imperial border, was once the most important stockade in the region. Later Udinsk was strengthened, and became Verkhneudinsk. In the nineteenth century, though, the most prominent town in this border region was Kyakhta-Troitskosavsk. Together, the Selenga river and the old post road to Kyakhta describe a long figure of eight, snaking southwards and crossing once at Selenginsk near Gusinoe Ozero. The geological and botanical features and shamanist lore of the ‘Goose Lake’ were carefully documented by the Decembrist Nikolai Bestuzhev in the latter years of his Siberian exile. After serving thirteen years’ hard labour, Bestuzhev and his brother Mikhail were allowed to settle in Selenginsk in the 1840s. Their house stands tall among the wooden huts on the main street of this ramshackle outpost, close to the terracotta plaster and white Doric columns of the local library, once home to the merchant who adopted the illegitimate children of Bestuzhev and his Buryat common-law wife. The stone ruins of the baroque church opposite hint at the glamour of Kyakhta, fifty miles on.
Nikolai Bestuzhev had noted the strata of brown coal around Gusinoe Ozero. A power station, constructed under Stalin, still churns beneath the railway line on the north shore, sending electricity to Mongolia. In The Decembrist Nikolai Bestuzhev, First Explorer of Siberia (1950), the writer Lydia Chukovskaya contrasts the dark industrial scene with the primordial tranquillity that Bestuzhev experienced as he studied the lakeshore a century earlier, suggesting that he would have delighted in a future measured out in Five-Year Plans. But then, Stalin was still alive when her innocuous monographs on the activities of the Decembrist exiles appeared under the imprint of the State Publisher of Geographical Literature. Quoting Lenin and praising collectivisation must have seemed a small price for the freedom to describe the civilising energy, the distinctly European passionarnost’, which sustained the Decembrists in this alien place. Still locked away in the future dissident’s desk drawer was Sofia Petrovna, the novel she had written in 1939 about a mother who loses her son to the Gulag, and secreted in her head were the lines of Requiem that she had memorised for her friend Akhmatova before the manuscript of the poem was burned. Decades later, when she was able to tell the story, Chukovskaya wrote: