Lev seems actually to have been able to acquire two books, which he would use as his main sources to write his first book Xiongnu. One was by the nineteenth-century scholar-monk Iakinf (Bichurin), who headed a Russian spiritual mission to China. He had translated medieval Chinese manuscripts and other historical documents into Russian.34 The other was a Soviet anthology of translated ancient Chinese documents.
Then, one snowy day in March 1953, something occurred that would change their lives – and the lives of everyone in the USSR. According to Georgy Von Zigern Korn, a fellow prisoner of Lev’s, the day began oddly. The camp commandant was nowhere to be seen, and other officers were hiding as well. The camp supervisors who were present ‘looked subdued, lost, and suddenly were polite and gentle as willow tree buds’.35 Later in the day they received the stunning news as it spread through the camp, whispered from prisoner to prisoner: Stalin had died.
It would be years before the changes brought about by the death of Stalin finally worked their way through the Soviet system, and it would take Lev three years to get a pardon. But the regime in the camps was finally relaxed enough to allow convicts to have books and to write.
The most precious thing for Lev, however, was free time – and, if he could get them, writing materials. ‘I even started visiting a hospital barrack more often’, he wrote. ‘And the doctors finally took pity on me and assigned me a physical disability. Now, I was appointed to rather easy work… So there appeared free time to think. Now I had to do the most difficult thing, to receive permission to write.’36
Lev and Von Korn worked together in the boot-drying shop of the prison camp. According to Von Korn, Lev had a heart ailment and was generally in frail health, so the lighter work probably saved his life. And it gave Lev what he needed most: free time.
Feeling that he was ready to write his masterpiece, and sensing that the camp authorities had grown more flexible, Lev went to one of the prison officers to request permission to write his book.
‘What does this mean, to write?’ The officer of the criminal investigation department knitted his brow.
‘To translate poems, to write a book about Huns.’37
‘Why do you need this?’ the officer asked.
‘To avoid being engaged in various gossip, to feel calm, to fill my time and to give trouble neither to myself nor to you.’
The officer looked at Lev suspiciously and said, ‘I’ll think about it.’ In a few days, Lev had his answer: ‘Huns are permitted, but not the poems.’38
Other prisoners helped him obtain writing paper in the form of food sacks shipped to the prison, and he was finally able to begin his first book: an account of the history of the Xiongnu, an obscure tribe of Eurasian steppe nomads first mentioned in Chinese sources in the third century bc.
The importance of the Xiongnu could not have been less obvious. But it was with them that Lev chose to start his long-delayed intellectual mission to record the history of the Eurasian steppe peoples. The only connection of the Xiongnu to the thread of greater world history was that they were the reason Emperor Qin Shi Huang began construction of what is today called the Great Wall of China to defend against nomad incursions. It was first mentioned in the third century bc by Chinese sources, which told of a tribe of northern nomads raiding Chinese settlements. They were the only tribe to stay out of the control of the Qin dynasty, the first imperial dynasty to unify the Chinese mainland.
Lev drew on a series of historical sources to argue that the reason that the Chinese never conquered the Xiongnu, or vice versa, was more fundamental than simply the vagaries of history, the outcome of battles and migrations. He cited the works of Sima Qian. According to Gumilev, the importance of Sima’s work was that:
he posed the question: why were the victorious arms of the Chinese unable to vanquish these nomadic barbarians? For this he gave an answer very intelligent for his times: the geographical situation, climate, and terrain of China and Central Asia are different enough that Chinese could not live on the steppes, and the nomads could not live in China, and the conquering of another landscape and people, possessing a different way of life, is impractical.39
While Lev sought to establish a permanent and natural separation between the Xiongnu and the Chinese, he tried to tease out a lineage between them and the Huns, the more illustrious tribe, who under Attila invaded the Roman Empire. By establishing chronological ancestry between two great steppe tribes, he apparently sought to prove that all steppe tribes had something in common, which simultaneously set them apart from other civilizations on the Eurasian periphery, whether it was the Chinese or Europeans.
The complicated part of Lev’s argument was in the timing. Maenchen-Helfen, an Austrian historian who had recently argued that the Huns and Xiongnu were separate and distinct, had made the point that the last time anyone saw the Xiongnu – the northern branch, which allegedly become the Huns – was in 155 ad in Tarbatai, in what is today Kazakhstan, when they were defeated by the khan of the Xianbei nomads, Tanshihuai, while the first mention of the Huns was five years later, in 160 ad in eastern Europe, by the ancient Greek geographer Dionysius Periegeta.
The two sightings by fairly reliable historical sources imply that, for the Huns and the Xiongnu to be the same people, the Xiongnu would have had to travel 2,600km in about five years. This would seem unlikely. But Gumilev never wasted an opportunity to add drama to the narrative, often forsaking good scholarly sense to do so. History for him was about passion and drive, after all.
Gumilev proposed that the Xiongnu had accomplished their mammoth trek across Eurasia probably by abandoning their women and children and fleeing from the victorious Chinese forces. Then he suggested that they encountered a group of Scythian women and took up with them to form a new chapter in their peoples’ history. He even fished out an actual account of such an event, and found a contemporary source which recorded that the Huns had been formed from the meeting of Scythian widows, exiled by King Filimer of the Goths, and a group of ‘unclean spirits’, which Gumilev asserted could easily have meant desert nomads:
To put it another way, the Huns were of the same relation to Xiongnu as Americans are to the British, or perhaps more appropriately, the Mexicans – a Creole Indian people – were to the Spaniards. The fact of such a migration is undoubtable, and moreover, it explains these deep differences which formed between the Asian-cultured Huns, and their degraded European branch, and so there is no place for the doubts expressed by Maenchen-Helfen.40
Fearing that the work might be confiscated, or that he might not live long enough to see its publication, Lev wrote to the prison authorities in 1954:
I have written the History of the Huns for my own pleasure and the soul’s consolation. There is nothing anti-Soviet in it. It is written in the same way as one would write a book for the Stalin Prize, only in a more lively style and, I hope, with more talent than would have been the case with my colleagues the historians. That is why, in the case of my demise, I request that the manuscript should not be destroyed but forwarded to the Manuscripts Department of the Oriental Institute at the Academy of Science in Leningrad.