Since his experience in the White Sea Canal prison camp in 1939, his epiphany about ‘passionarity’ had never left him. For decades, he had never tired of telling people about his breakthrough, the biological impulse that drives men to irrational deeds; or about the feature of complementarity which he had hit upon, meaning the compulsion of prisoners to band together in tight groups. Teaching in Leningrad in the 1960s he pursued this idea, inspired by the 1908 account of a Russian biologist who documented a curious episode: a massive swarm of locusts which flew across the Red Sea, from Abyssinia towards the Arabian Peninsula, and drowned entirely. Gumilev believed this mass locust suicide was analogous to Alexander’s death march: ‘Who could have lifted up this mass of locusts and transferred it across the sea. And not according to Darwin’s rules, not for the continuation of the species, not for multiplication, but to meet death.’
His theories were at best unorthodox, and at worst quite eccentric. ‘Passionarity’ in Gumilev’s work is a quantifiable measure of the mental and ideological energy at the disposal of a given nation at a given time. He believed one could actually calculate it with impressive equations and plot it on graphs. He even assigned it a symbol as a mathematical variable: Pik.
In 1965, he read the Chemical Composition of the Earth’s Biosphere by the great Russian biologist Vladimir Vernadsky (father of Georgy), who described for the first time in 1908 his theory of ‘bioenergy’. Energy from the sun that makes plants grow and causes photosynthesis is transferred to human beings via the digestive system. Vernadsky believed that energy from the cosmos is decisive in the behaviour of animals, as well as plants; and it even affects human beings. Gumilev, in the maximalist tradition of Russian nineteenth-century philosophy, began to try to prove Vernadsky’s thesis: that episodes of intense human activity are in some way connected to solar and cosmic radiation. He became so fascinated with the idea that during the summers of 1967 and 1968 he went every Saturday to the Institute of Radiation in Obninsk to meet Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky, one of the USSR’s most celebrated geneticists. The two men were in discussion about a joint article on passionarity.
Predictably, the potential collaboration ended when Timofeev-Resovsky learned of the truly ambitious and not entirely scientific arguments that Lev planned to make. According to Gumilev’s wife Natalya: ‘In the opinion of the geneticist, nation should be defined according to social relations, and Timofeev-Resovsky could not in the end agree with the conception of passionarity and the characterization of this phenomenon as natural.’70 The two men fell out, with the elder geneticist calling Lev a ‘crazy paranoiac’.
Lev published the article on his own, in 1970, in the journal Priroda (Nature), in which he laid out the idea of the ‘ethnos’ – something similar to a nation or ethnic group – which he described as the most basic element of world history, the national or ethnic self-identification that is ‘a phenomenon so universal as to indicate its deep underlying foundation’. All homo sapiens, as he put it, are members of an ethnos, ‘so that it is possible to distinguish those close to us from the rest of the world’.71 With that, Lev launched a meme that was to define the rest of his career: the theory of ‘Ethnogenesis’.
The term ‘ethnos’ had entered Soviet ethnography sometime in the late 1960s, with many claims and counterclaims as to who (re-)introduced it. It was a Greek term rediscovered by Russian émigré anthropologist Sergey Shirokogorov in the early twentieth century; but it did not penetrate the orthodox Marxist academy of his native Russia until 1966, when it was popularized by Yulian Bromley, who that year had taken over the chair of the Soviet Academy of Sciences Institute of Ethnography.
Gumilev would later accuse Bromley of plagiarizing his theory. Certainly, he had used the term ‘Ethnos’ before Bromley – there are 117 mentions of it in Gumilev’s Discovery of Khazaria, published in 1965, a year before Bromley began to popularize the term. Bromley’s first major theoretical take on the theory was published after Lev’s article in Priroda, as a criticism of Lev’s work.72
Bromley’s appointment as head of the Institute of Ethnography would mark the beginning of a two-decade-long scholarly feud that would define Gumilev’s further academic career. It was an argument about the nature of ethnicity and nationalism which tracked the steadily rising tide of the USSR’s ethnic problems, which a quarter of a century later would tear the Union apart. In retrospect, neither man could convincingly lay claim to have correctly predicted the calamity or to have offered a solution to avert it. However, Lev’s theories, focusing on nationalism as something primordial and permanent, are widely judged today to have been closer to the mark than those of Bromley, who reflected the orthodox Soviet view that nationalism was a ‘socio-economic’ phenomenon and would eventually melt away with progress. It didn’t.
Bromley was appointed head of the Institute of Ethnography in 1966 as a relative outsider. Like most academics he had to justify his promotion by throwing out old dogmas and ushering in something new and proprietary. The theory of Ethnos fit the bill, and the term symbolized the new seriousness with which ethnic and national identity was being taken by the USSR’s academic establishment – a recognition of the fact that, 50 years after class differences were officially abolished (which in theory would erase national contradictions), nations had stubbornly failed to disappear.
While the original Bolsheviks were profoundly conscious of the ethnic diversity of the Soviet Union, cataloguing and recognizing more than 200 languages of native Soviet peoples, they nevertheless remained confident that ethnicity and nationalism constituted just a stage in the progression of mankind through history; it was a fossil of tribal and feudal development, and an expression of class distinction and economic relationships. The recognition of nations and ethnic groups by the Soviets was actually meant to hasten the wheel of history; the sooner the nation was brought forth, the sooner it could be dispensed with in the inexorable rise of humanity towards true socialism. Under Stalin’s constitution of 1936, ethnic groups had been classified according to their perceived level of historical consciousness, their numbers, language and territory. The first stage was the tribe, the second was the narod or people, while the third stage was the nation. The fifteen titular peoples of the USSR that had given their names to the Soviet republics – such as the Uzbeks, Kazakhs and Ukrainians – were given the status of nations, with a formal right of independence; while those that had autonomous status within a republic – like the Tatars, the Chechens and the Ingush – were given the lesser status of narod, and the eventual promise of nationhood.
It was a singularly odd policy, aimed at artificially hastening and buttressing the very thing they were trying to overcome, and the collapse of the Soviet Union would show just how badly Stalin had miscalculated. Already in the 1960s the Soviet social sciences for the first time were confronting the frustrating fact that nations were not fading away. The culture wars within the Soviet intelligentsia between nationalists and liberals were but one symptom of this wider problem.