Both Gumilev and Savitsky seem to have suffered from a kind of Stockholm syndrome following their gulag experiences. Given Lev’s own suffering at the hands of Stalin’s Russia, it is also interesting that he identified as positive the elements of Russia’s past that were the most faithful antecedents to a brutal, arbitrary and cruel dictatorship, while rejecting as pernicious all European influences. Indeed, given his scholarly interest in the irrational, personalistic elements which guide history, it is certainly odd that the word ‘Stalin’ never appears in any of his writings, and in only two of over a hundred interviews – and then only when he is directly asked about the dictator. This cannot have been solely due to fear of censorship, for this blank spot in Lev’s work continued through perestroika, glasnost and the end of the USSR.
Damaged but undaunted, the two men began a correspondence that lasted until 1961, when Savitsky was arrested for a second time. This time it was at the Czech government’s behest: he had published the poetry he had written in the gulag with a Paris publisher. Savitsky was sentenced to 30 months in prison (shortened to a year after an international letter-writing campaign organized by friends abroad). He fell ill soon after his return, however, and never fully recovered. In 1966, Gumilev visited Savitsky in Prague, his first and only trip outside the USSR, two years before Savitsky died of cirrhosis of the liver, in April 1968.
Lev’s later works owed much to the Eurasianist conception of history which poured forth in Savitsky’s letters. Through Savitsky, Lev was also able to write to Vernadsky in the USA; writing direct to America was too dangerous, but writing to Czechoslovakia did not raise eyebrows. His letters to Vernadsky were enclosed in letters to Savitsky, who posted them on to New Haven and sent Vernadsky’s replies back to Lev.
Vernadsky, who had built his academic career on rehabilitating the Mongols and reinterpreting their relationship with Russia, taught Lev a great deal. His patronage was also invaluable. In 1960, when Xiongnu finally appeared, Vernadsky helped to raise its profile by praising it as ‘penetrative and well-organized’ in the respected journal American Historical Review.54
Gumilev was flattered. But thaw or no thaw, one still had to be very carefuclass="underline" history as taught in the Soviet Union was very much hostage to the prevailing ideological winds. This time, Lev had pursued an even more un-Marxist approach, arguing that history was driven not by classes, but by peoples, tribes and nations, whose complex interrelationship with the natural environment shaped their unique cultural identity. Instead of economic forces and the evolution of the means of production, the glue that held history together, so Lev argued, was the unconscious ‘complementarity’ of peoples (a word which camp life had inspired him to invent) and geographical and environmental factors.
Lev had already had a taste of the politics of Soviet history when, defending his candidate’s thesis in the presence of his nemesis Bernstam, the latter had accused him of anti-Marxism – a charge which Lev felt had contributed to his arrest later that year.
Academic disputes in Russia are notoriously prone to getting out of control. Scholars have always been very passionate about their subject and take disagreements very personally, tending to emotional and no-holds-barred polemics. Colleagues tend to pursue each other not just in the pages of specialist journals and in conference papers: before duelling was outlawed, many a scientific disagreement was settled at the ten-pace barrier with a pistol shot; and in the Soviet period, disagreements between academics could still be a matter of life and death. Most famously, in 1940, Trofim Lysenko, a prominent geneticist who had the ear of Stalin, denounced his scholarly rival Nikolay Vavilov after the two disagreed over theories of genetics. Vavilov was sent to a labour camp where he starved to death in 1943.
No topic – the Huns, the Turkic khanate or the Mongols – was too esoteric or obscure to attract unwelcome attention and accusations of ideological waywardness. For instance, it just so happened that the last person to publish a major book on the steppe tribes (in this case, the Huns) had been Bernstam himself. His book History of the Xiongnu (1951) had been savaged: a year after publication a review was published charging the unfortunate Bernstam with ‘following in the footsteps of bourgeois historiography’ for suggesting that the Huns had played a progressive role in history.55 Bernstam was condemned by the board of the Institute of the History of Material Culture, which at the time oversaw academic work. It offered him the chance to write a self-criticism with analysis and the reasons for his mistakes.56
When Lev learned of Bernstam’s fate, feelings of schadenfreude and vengeance evidently overcame empathy and a feeling of shared injustice: ‘I am glad that the bastard got his comeuppance’, he wrote to his mother. But Bernstam’s fate showed just how precarious an existence Soviet scholars led, no matter their subject. Like Bernstam, Gumilev would be subjected to withering criticism from his colleagues in history departments. The arguments Lev was making were rather radical and most unorthodox (and quite possibly wrong), and a few months after Xiongnu was published in 1961, a devastating review appeared in the academic journal Bulletin of Ancient History by one K. Vasilyev, accusing Lev of ‘ignorance of original versions of the sources used, ignorance of modern research literature in Chinese and Japanese, noncritical perception of some outdated concepts representing the past of the Oriental science’.57 Then Lev’s book provoked a row with the Mongolian Communist Party, which was anxious to toe the line of Soviet historiography even at the expense of their ancestors’ reputation. The third plenum of the central committee of the Mongol People’s Revolutionary Party ‘strongly criticized pseudoscientific theories about the progressiveness of the Tatar–Mongol conquests of the countries of Asia and Europe’.58
For a short while it appeared that Lev had seriously overestimated the change in the political climate, gone too far out on a limb, and would be forced into an embarrassing retraction or self-criticism (or worse). But perhaps even more surprising than the strident criticism he received was the praise he got from unexpected quarters. The director of the Hermitage museum, Professor M. I. Artamonov, defended him, saying that ‘Certainly, Gumilev had the right to work with such translations, the more so that he was creating a summarizing work, and not a specific research establishing a certain fact or amendment to its interpretation.’59 Far from finishing his career, the controversy surrounding Xiongnu confirmed Lev’s academic reputation. After publication, the rector of Leningrad University offered him a post as senior researcher at the university’s Geographical Economic Institute, and the same year he started lecturing in the historical department of Leningrad State University as a freelance lecturer, and presented open lectures at the USSR Geographical Society. His works gained a steady following. Sergey Lavrov, Lev’s biographer and boss at the institute, said that his lectures became so popular that not everyone could be accommodated in the hall (which could only hold 100 people). ‘A whole team of young scientists formed around Gumilev.’60
Anatoly Anokhin was one such scientist. He joined the geography department in the 1960s and still teaches there. I found him in his office one day and asked him about Gumilev: