First of all, a lot of people went to the lectures simply to look at Lev Nikolaevich. He was a unique figure, the son of two famous poets, even more so because his father’s poetry was forbidden. Secondly, he allowed himself the liberty to criticize the official positions which the historical sciences at the time had stuck to. He stuck pins in it, and people liked that.61
The storm in a teacup over Lev’s book Xiongnu was just one of a number of similar episodes in the wide-ranging debate over the history and direction of the USSR – often expressed in oblique metaphorical terms in the pages of the official ‘thick journals’. These came to dominate the life of the intelligentsia, and figured prominently in lectures and debates in which Gumilev enthusiastically took part.
‘Politics by culture’
Khrushchev’s effervescent thaw was short-lived. In the early 1960s, even before he was ousted from power, life began to freeze over again. When Brezhnev succeeded him in a ‘soft coup’ in 1964 he immediately began to reverse Khrushchev’s policy of tolerance, and in 1966, the trials of Yury Daniel and Andrey Sinyavsky, two Russian writers whose satires of the Soviet system were published abroad, became the targets of the first high-profile repression of literary figures since Stalin’s day. It was a signal that the rest of the intelligentsia did not fail to register.
But while democracy and reform-minded members of the elite were put back in their boxes by a series of show trials and firings, the nationalists were not. The attitude towards nationalism that emerged under Brezhnev was of grudging acceptance of the lesser of two evils. With the nationalist intelligentsia increasingly in conflict with the liberals, the Communist Party came down in favour of the former, who were given greater latitude than the liberals to publish unorthodox views and faced less severe punishment for transgressions. It was the beginning of a new era in the Soviet Union, the introduction of nationalism into the mainstream – an era described by historian Yitzhak Brudny as ‘politics by culture’.
The first concession of the regime to the nationalists came in 1965 when a number of prominent nationalists petitioned the Kremlin to allow them to create a new organization, the All Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical Monuments and Culture (the clunky VOOPIK in Russian). It was tightly controlled by the Communist Party, and ostensibly devoted only to the preservation and restoration of historical monuments, mainly Orthodox churches. But VOOPIK quickly grew into a quasi-political organization, a bauble awarded to nationalists by the central committee. It gave them a legal forum in which to meet every month, in the Vysokopetroskii monastery in central Moscow. This was the first in a series of signals that the Communist Party, which throughout its existence had claimed to have broken with Russia’s past, would now embrace it.
Brezhnev was a simple man. He was not a good speaker and had a stammer due to wartime concussion. ‘He was not polished, but he was a wise man in a simple way’, according to Sergey Semanov, a radical nationalist intellectual who was an active combatant in the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s between conservative nationalists and liberal reformists within the elite. ‘He knew what had to be done, and it had to be done very carefully.’ VOOPIK became the centre of a growing movement both inside and outside the Communist Party – known today as the ‘Russian Party’ – which united nationalist-minded intellectuals, party apparatchiks and even dissidents in a mutual web of influence, promoting Russian nationalism.
One regular attendee at VOOPIK sessions in the monastery was Gumilev, though, according to Semanov, he was not formally a member. Semanov remembered Lev’s temper and argumentative nature:
He was a real enfant terrible… We knew him quite well, we all loved him, but he was a bit of a hooligan, arguing all the time and picking fights… He unconditionally influenced the formation of Russian patriotism… but not in the sense that we all agreed with him. It was the arguments – they inspired us, gave us new ideas, challenged us to new formulations… In intellectual life it is more important if there is a living idea, something with some passion in it… Gumilev smashed up everything. He said two times two equals five. And it was true. Two times two equals four was simply boring.62
Lev’s writings on Central Asian nomads were controversial among the Russian nationalists, most of whom could not accept a history which argued that Russia and the steppe nomads shared a common heritage. The Mongols had been the historical bugbears of Russian nationalists for three centuries, and the liberation from the Mongol ‘yoke’ at the battle of Kulikovo in 1380 was seen as the beginning of the independent Russian nation by Nikolay Karamzin, the nineteenth-century father of modern Russian historiography, who wrote in his twelve-volume History of the Russian State: ‘The Russians went to the Kulikovo Field as citizens of various principalities and returned as a united Russian nation.’ But despite these important differences, Lev fitted in among the dissident nationalists at VOOPIK; in broad historiographical terms, they agreed that Russia was a profoundly unique civilization and a natural empire.
Lev’s histories were often fanciful and, strictly speaking, not very scholarly; he invented people, he invented documents, or transported things magically through time so that they would fit his narrative. ‘His attitude was like Hegel, who said if the facts do not fit my theory, then so much for the facts’, wrote a close acquaintance, the right-wing literary critic Vadim Kozhinov.
Following Xiongnu, Lev had published two further works on the steppe nomads – Ancient Turks and Searches for the Imaginary Kingdom, about the Mongols. Ancient Turks was devoted to a series of Turkic kings and warlords who unified the chunks of steppe land between Korea and Byzantium in the second half of the first millennium. It covered four centuries of history, until the demise of the Uighur khanate in the ninth century. This is a period about which historians know virtually nothing, and this gave Gumilev a kind of unlimited licence. As we have already seen from his first book, Xiongnu, he was always one to prefer the dramatic and the colourful explanation, even when a more sensible interpretation would fit the available evidence; but when the available evidence was virtually nil, it was easier to be creative. ‘I love the Turks the most because in the sixth to the eighth centuries I can represent persons and events in a much livelier way’, he wrote to Savitsky in 1961.
In Ancient Turks, Gumilev pioneered a historical methodology that would make him famous: ‘historical reconstruction’, which was applicable when there was little actual history to choose from. With very little in the way of supporting evidence, for example, he portrayed the demise of the Uighur khanate as a kind of Shakespearean tragedy: the degeneration of the Uighur aristocracy and the collapse of family values caused by their adoption of Manichaeism as a religion. ‘Here, reconstruction appears to have been replaced by author fantasy’, says even Gumilev’s largely sympathetic biographer, Sergey Belyakov.63
Lev’s imagination was a product of the prison camps. Ancient Turks had started out as Gumilev’s candidate’s dissertation at Leningrad University and had stayed with him through nearly seven years of felling trees and near-starvation. The theoretical musings on the fate of the anonymous khans and kings of ancient history appear to have been largely a coping mechanism – stories he told and retold himself and his fellow inmates to keep himself sane. In letters to friends he often spoke of the subject matter of his histories in vaguely paternal terms. As he wrote to Natalya Varbanets: ‘Out of the contours and shadows, the Xiongnu, Uighurs, the Kara Kipchaks transform themselves into figures, sometimes filled with flesh and blood. I look upon them almost as my children – I have summoned them from oblivion.’64