Putin’s passing mention of the late Russian historian Lev Gumilev and this odd word, passionarnost, meant very little to the uninitiated; but to those familiar with the conservative theories of nationalism that have made dramatic inroads into Russian politics since the end of the Cold War, it indicated a lot – a classic Kremlin signal, known in US politics as a ‘dog whistle’, used to communicate to certain groups a message which only they could hear. It was a way of announcing in deniable terms what Putin probably could not say outright – that certain circles within the state enjoyed his understanding and support.
The word passionarnost is resistant to easy translation (passionarity? passionism?), but the few who knew its provenance took immediate notice. It was seven months after Putin’s inauguration for a third term as Russia’s president, and he was sending a subtle signal to the elite that new ideas had swept to power along with him. Ideas that might, just a few years previously, have been considered both marginal and even barking mad were suddenly the anchor of his most important speech of the year. And these ideas would make themselves clearer 15 months later, when Russian soldiers quietly seized airports and transport chokepoints across Crimea, starting a domino effect that would lead to war in eastern Ukraine. Instead of the polite, non-ideological civic patriotism of the previous two decades, Putin was extolling chest-thumping nationalism, the martial virtues of sacrifice, discipline, loyalty and valour.
Putin’s definition of passionarity (from the Latin word passio) was a slightly sanitized one. ‘Moving forward and embracing change’ was one way of putting what Gumilev meant, though more accurate would be something akin to ‘capacity for suffering’. It was a word, with dramatic allusions to the New Testament, that had been dreamt up by Gumilev during his 14 years in Siberian prison camps. In 1939, while digging the White Sea canal and daily watching fellow inmates die of exhaustion and hypothermia, Gumilev invented his theory of passionarnost. It was a theory of the irrational in human history. The capacity of single individuals to make a sacrifice for the greater good, and therefore change history, he would later write, was the defining trait of great nations.
During the decades following his internment, Gumilev’s eminently spiritual vision became profoundly pessimistic, and his idea became the germ of a new idea of Russian nationalism. As a historian, working from the late 1950s to the end of his life in 1992, Gumilev became a renowned expert on the steppe tribes of inner Eurasia: the Scythians, the Xiongnu, the Huns, Turks, Khitai, Tanguts and Mongols. Such history did not record the progress of enlightenment and reason, but rather an endless cycle of migration, conquest and genocide, and death, repeating itself through eternity. Every few hundred years, primitive nomads would sweep out of the steppes, plunder the flourishing kingdoms of Europe, the Mideast or Asia, and then vanish into history’s fog just as quickly as they had come. The victors in such history were not the societies that led the world in technology, wealth and reason. Instead, they had passionarity. Gumilev’s work is echoed in the works of other scholars through the ages describing much the same phenomenon: Machiavelli used the term virtù to describe martial spirit, while the medieval Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun described the tribal solidarity of nomadic raiders and plunderers of civilized cities as asabiya.
Gumilev’s obsession with the steppe tribes may have been a reflection of his own life, of 14 years spent in the Siberian gulag, witnessing at close quarters the latest incarnation of a savage, millennium-old process of life-taking and ruin amid the icy continental vastness. Observing his fellow inmates stripped of all their civilization and forced to behave as beasts to survive taught him that man is not the master of nature, but is subject to it. The human virtues of society, friendship and brotherhood, he would later write, are not a mark of human advancement, but a biological natural impulse, the instinctual urge, common to all humans at all times, to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’.
A staunch anti-communist, Gumilev was nonetheless surprisingly embittered by the collapse of the USSR, which occurred six months before his own death in 1992. Like many of his fellow prisoners, he later became possessed by an odd patriotism – an inexplicable loyalty to the homeland (and even the regime) that had stolen his health, his years and his friends. It was a type of Stockholm syndrome which produced some singularly odd scholarship: paeans to Russia’s imperial greatness, the organic character of the Russian Empire (and later the Soviet Union) as a singular super-ethnos, or civilization, whose many nations willingly joined Russia not as conquests, but as voluntary subjects of the tsar’s imperial greatness. Gumilev even purported to be able to quantify the amount of physical passionarity remaining in Russia, a civilization which, he predicted, was in the middle of its 1,200 year lifespan.
His theories, which he called ‘Eurasianism’ were drawn from a literature which preceded him by several decades, having been invented by a group of White Russian exiles in Europe in the 1920s. The word, popularized by Gumilev, became a favoured slogan among ideologues of reaction – both dissident nationalists and Soviet hardliners, who were increasingly finding common cause. Amid the death throes of the USSR, Gumilev became an odd, flag-waving Soviet patriot and denigrator of democrats in several perestroika-era interviews which even his lifelong friend Emma Gerstein called ‘dreadful’.
Despite having suffered so much at its hands, no person of higher social standing glorified the Soviet empire more in its dying days of the late 1980s. He had spent his career studying the irrational bonds that tie nations and peoples together – the irony was that he himself, a former gulag prisoner who fought tooth and nail in his last days to save his beloved USSR, was exhibit A.
Such displaced anger is the hallmark of all the authors chronicled in this book who suffered mightily at the hands of Soviet power, and yet worked tirelessly to build a new ideology of imperial domination for its successor, a new authoritarian superstate.
Putin’s mention of passionarnost in 2012 was part of a pattern of lacing his speeches and writings with a new vocabulary. Following his announcement the previous year that he would run for a third term as president, Putin embarked on a new political trajectory – a strikingly consistent appeal to Orthodox Church values and Russian nationalism; strident criticism of liberalism and Western values; and projects for reintegration with former Soviet neighbours. In speeches, TV talk shows and newspaper articles, he began to use new terminology. Referring to the West, for example, he began to use the term ‘Atlantic’; and when he spoke of Russia’s broader identity he used the term ‘Eurasia’. When he refers to Russians, he increasingly frequently uses the term Russky (meaning ethnic Russians), rather than Rossiisky (referring to a more civic and inclusive definition of the Russian nation state).1 He also replaced the term ‘nation state’ (with its liberal connotations) with ‘civilization state’, as more appropriate to the historical sweep of the Russian people. Later, unmistakably militaristic words started to enter his lexicon – ‘national traitor’ and ‘fifth column’. When he spoke of patriotism he began to appeal to ‘passionarity’.