A thought occurred to me on the motivation for human action in history. Why did Alexander the Great go all the way to India and Central Asia, even though he… could not return the spoils from these countries all the way to Macedonia? Suddenly, it occurred to me that something had pushed him, something inside himself.
According to him, he jumped out of his cot and, bad leg or no, ran around shouting ‘Eureka!’ – ‘It was revealed to me that the human has a special impulse, called passionarity.’ What Gumilev was seeking, as he described it, was ‘the powerful impulse which pulls the human towards obtaining some sort of unnecessary benefit, in particular, posthumous honour. Because Alexander the Great could not have counted on anything else but that.’9
Gumilev’s studies of history at Leningrad University had focused on the Middle East and the steppe tribes of Inner Asia – the Huns, the Xiongnu, the Turks, the Mongols – who every few hundred years rose from nowhere, conquered the known world and then vanished. The subject matter provided a rich vein to mine for his historical theories. The tribes, societies and nations which flourished were not the most rational, enlightened or advanced, he theorized, but rather those that contained the highest proportion of ‘passionaries’, who were defined by their desire to sacrifice themselves, and the highest level of ‘complementarity’, a sense of attraction of its members for each other. Society was held together not by a civilizing humanism, historical progress and cumulative reason, but by natural, unconscious instincts which had changed very little over the last few millennia.
Lev’s university studies may have played a role in his meditations on passionarity and complementarity as forces in history – in his study of Middle Eastern history he very likely came across the Arab medieval historian Ibn Khaldun, who in the fourteenth century described the ceaseless cycle of conquest, rise and decline in world history. In his classic work, the Muqaddimah, he sought to explain why, despite their refinements, superior technology and wealth, the cities of the medieval world did not survive intact for very long. Every few generations in Ibn Khaldun’s time, civilized towns got swept away by tribal barbarians riding over the steppe and desert. Their greater civilization did not win them battles. But the conquering barbarians, after a few generations of growing lazy and complacent on their new thrones, would themselves be routed by new barbarians. While civilization has technology and wealth, he said, the nomads have what he called asabiya, akin to social solidarity or spirit. This peculiar, intangible quality offers a rather pessimistic view of history, which consists not of progress or linear advancement towards a peak of civilization, but of a cycle – the natural rhythms of migration, conquest and genocide – endlessly repeating itself through eternity. Giambattista Vico and Niccolò Machiavelli also describe something akin to tribal solidarity or spirit, as a decisive force in the history of peoples – Machiavelli called this virtù.
The convicts were not the only ones to be scarred by the experience of prison. Akhmatova, like the spouses and relations of thousands of Leningraders sent to the camps, began the awful and tedious process of making the rounds of the various police offices and prisons, trying desperately to lobby the ‘organs’ – or the Kremlin in Moscow – to intervene. Like thousands of other Leningraders, she spent days and nights with her loved ones on her conscience, feeling the dreaded urgency that if only she could make one more plea, find the right official and deliver proof of innocence, or pay the right bribe to the right person, she could free her loved one from almost certain death. The truth is that the terror was not, as many believed, a miscarriage of the Soviet justice system which could be rectified by correcting a mistake. It was a preposterous human phenomenon beyond all comprehension: the combination of a mutated strain of cruelty and perversion of impersonal bureaucracy on a monstrous scale, paralleled only by the Holocaust. As Gumilev wrote:
Mama, the innocent soul, like many other pure-hearted people, thought that the sentence passed on me was the result of the court’s mistake, an accidental oversight. She could not at first imagine how far the court system had fallen.10
Lev would probably have finished his days clearing the canal bed in a forest near Medvezhegorsk, but for the miraculous deus ex machina which saved his life. The judge who had sentenced him and his friends was himself hanged – an all too frequent occurrence during the terror – and the cases that he had decided were reviewed. At the end of January, Shumovsky and Lev were summoned back to St Petersburg for a case review. It came none too soon for Lev, with his leg injury. As a result of the reinvestigation, they were given reduced sentences of five years apiece. This reversal was attributed to the abrupt arrest and removal of Nikolay Ezhov as chief of the NKVD in 1939. He confessed to a range of anti-Soviet activity and was executed in 1940. His successor was the ‘kindly, just’ Lavrenty Beria. Now, however, the three friends were sent to different camps – Lev to Norilsk, a huge ore mining complex in northern Siberia.11
He reached the port of Dudinka in the autumn of 1939 on a barge full of zeks. This was the starting point for the most northerly railway in the world, which ran eastwards along the seventieth parallel to the town of Norilsk. At the time, this ‘town’ consisted of four houses made of quarry stone, a small metal works with an enrichment plant (the silhouette of which looked like a medieval palace against the horizon) and two clusters of barracks, which contained about 24,000 prisoners. Located north of the Arctic Circle, in the Kolyma region, Norilsk was founded in 1935 on top of the largest known nickel deposit in the world. Prisoners dug nickel from the permafrost, built the processing plant, power stations, and finally a city for the NKVD guards to live in. It was one of the harshest camps to be sent to, alongside Vorkuta and Kolyma.12 As Lev would recall, in Norilsk ‘in autumn the tundra was wrapped in snow mist, in winter in deep blue polar night’.13
There was a mathematical equation which governed the fate of prisoners in the far north. To keep one prisoner healthy for a year, 800kg of supplies needed to be transported 2,000km across harsh terrain by rail and river. A new prisoner, however, weighed less than 100kg. It was more efficient, therefore, to starve the existing prisoners to death and bring in new replacements. Zeks were kept on meagre rations and died in their droves, to be replenished by new loads of prisoners. But Lev’s education made him valuable: he passed himself off as a geologist and thus was entitled to extra rations.
The social life in Norilsk (such as it was) revolved around two groups: the geologists and the metallurgists. Lev was put in the geologists’ barracks. According to an acquaintance of his, S. A. Snegov, the geologists were ‘intellectual and priggish’, and so Lev chose to spend most of his time in the ‘more democratic’ metallurgist barracks.14 Snegov was the first, but not the last, to note Lev’s temper and impatience, and his tendency to alienate his friends – a character trait that seems to have begun to manifest itself around this time, quite likely due to the stress of the camps. His friends from the pre-camp days hardly ever mentioned an intemperate side, but after the camps, many acquaintances were abruptly terminated by a quarrel.
The friendship between Lev and Snegov was one such case. The inmates of Norilsk had arranged to have a poetry contest, in which Lev came second to Snegov. As the son of two of Russia’s greatest poets, Lev’s pride was seriously damaged. So angry was he that he actually challenged Snegov to a duel. This was avoided only because they were unable to find pistols (which of course, were not ordinarily given to prisoners) and because Snegov insisted that he was ‘not a butcher’ and so they could not use knives. A week later, having determined that there was no realistic chance of fighting a duel, they decided to postpone it ‘until better times’.