As Anatoly Anokhin recalls:
The official ideology was oriented towards the achievement of social homogeneity – a single Soviet society according to Marxist Leninist ideals formed by the ideological department of the central committee. These differences were supposed to melt away over time. But they didn’t. And this became one of the main reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union.73
The very use of the term ethnos – by both Bromley and Gumilev – took the field of ethnography a step back from socialist orthodoxy. Instead of the terms ‘class’ and ‘nation’, which were solidly based in the official metaphysics, ethnos implied the need for a new vocabulary and was an admission that the subject at hand – the study of ethnic differences – was something that had not been adequately addressed by orthodox Marxism. Ethnos was something old, but also something new.
Ethnography under Bromley became the study not of the ethnic features of society, but of societies conceived as ethnoi – a subtle but distinct shift indicating more permanence than Marxist theory had originally credited them with. However, Bromley never pushed his theory to its logical conclusion: he stressed the importance of ethnic groups, but he never addressed the possibility that there might be problems with nationalism in the USSR. Quite the opposite, in fact. In 1982 he wrote in a characteristic (and with hindsight, rather unfortunate) passage:
As the experience of the multinational Soviet Union and other countries joining the socialist confederation shows: socialism, liquidating the socio-class basis for the exploitation of one nation by another, avoids the bases for inter-ethnic antagonisms, and stimulates the narrowing of national differences.74
While Bromley argued that nations are more permanent than socialist theory had predicted, he took a middle position, arguing that ethnoi were ‘ethnosocial units’, as he termed them.75 They could change, and be assimilated away over time, with the disappearance of class antagonisms that nurture ethnic hatreds. But it would not happen as quickly as Stalinist dogma had first taught.
Gumilev, meanwhile, took the maximal position, arguing that ethnoi were real bounded wholes, akin to organisms with their own independent existence and life cycles. It was completely counter to orthodox Marxism, and the fact that Gumilev was permitted to teach at all is evidence of a certain degree of pluralism in the Soviet establishment.
Gumilev was not arguing that nations are permanent: the historical record was full of cases of nations being born and dying; but the death of a nation was not a case of national bonds withering away under social progress and steady enlightenment, as was the view of Marxist orthodoxy. Gumilev believed that the creation and extinction of ethnoi were part and parcel of the life cycle of peoples, the instinct to thrive, spread, wither and die.
Drawing on his labour camp-era theories, Gumilev argued that the existence of ethnoi was not a social phenomenon, but rather the result of a biological instinct – involuntary, unconscious and irreducible, which could be cured or which melted away. He believed that this universal tendency to distinguish ethnicity was associated with a biological capacity in human beings to acquire a ‘stereotype of behaviour’ early in life. ‘There is not a single person on Earth outside of an ethnos’, he was fond of saying. ‘Everybody will answer the question “What are you?” with “Russian”, “French”, “Persian”, “Maasai”, etc. without a moment’s hesitation.’76
However, he was coming close to saying that nationality was biologically determined or hereditary – a red rag to a bull in the USSR (and everywhere else, for that matter) on account of its association with Nazism. This criticism was unfair: he argued that the predisposition to distinguish one’s ethnic identity was indeed a biological endowment, but the identity itself was in fact learned through interaction with the environment, mainly the parents, at a very early age. Elsewhere in the social sciences, the cognitive revolution was making many of the same arguments that Gumilev was starting in the 1970s – that human behaviour is more innate, more unconscious, less rational and less free than had been previously thought.
While Gumilev was not a highly ranked academic at the time, his social standing within intelligentsia circles gave his work wide visibility. The academic establishment of the USSR could not let such dissent go unanswered. The Institute of Ethnography took notice of Gumilev’s revolt, and Bromley wrote a rebuttal in the next issue of Priroda. He criticized Lev’s concept of stereotypes, arguing that these were not as ingrained as Lev believed. Culture was a product of the environment, and could change: ‘Stable mental stereotypes are not an immanent product of the human brain, they are a product of certain external conditions, first of all socio-historical. Ethnos is not nuclear. It is made up of social as well as natural factors.’77
Sergey Cheshko, an ethnographer and colleague of Bromley in the former Soviet Academy of Sciences, summed up both approaches when I sought him out at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow: ‘According to Bromley, ethnos was a collection of characteristics. It was not an essence. The characteristics may change… Gumilev believed that humanity is made up of a number of “species” and this gives each ethnos its own particular essence.’ Lev was soon subjected to a number of scholarly attacks and was forbidden from publishing in major academic journals as a result of the run-in with Bromley.
There was another, darker reason for Lev’s ostracism by mainstream academia, however. His association with the dissident nationalists of VOOPIK brought him into contact with a lively community of intellectuals, but also nurtured the wraiths of anti-Semitism and racism that had haunted Russia since the time of the pogroms. In addition to debating the finer points of historiography, the nationalist milieu became an echo chamber for all manner of conspiracy theories and racial demagoguery, and these became the glue which held together a rather disparate movement of iconoclasts.
The ‘Russian Party’ within the Soviet elite was getting stronger and bolder. VOOPIK had begun to attract not just intellectuals, but also high-ranking party sympathizers on the one hand, and serious dissidents on the other. Nationalists were being given high-ranking posts in the media and propaganda realm; in 1969 radical nationalist writer Valery Ganichev was appointed to head the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house, and he appointed Semanov to run their most prestigious book series.78 The nationalists were united in a loose-knit and ideologically driven group that came to be increasingly in conflict with Western-oriented reform-minded liberals within the intelligentsia and the regime. The nationalists played on traditional prejudices to demonize their opponents in culture wars that had become brutal and total.
Lev, battle-scarred after his academic conflicts, found an odd association with the serious anti-Semitic fringe of the nationalist movement. His antipathy towards Jews appears to have grown over time; while he had always been known to make the odd anti-Semitic remark, many of his childhood friends, such as Gerstein and the Mandelstams, were Jewish and had found it (mostly) harmless. It seems likely that, driven by the trauma of the camps (which nurtured his already horrible temper), his conflict with his mother’s entourage, and his regular association with voluble anti-Semites, Lev’s prejudices grew. In her memoirs, Gerstein calls the older Gumilev an ‘anti-Semite’. Many also regarded a book he published in 1965 on the Khazars (a tribe living in the Caspian region between the seventh and the tenth centuries that had converted to Judaism) as a thinly veiled piece of anti-Jewish propaganda: Khazars were described in the work as a ‘chimera’ or a parasitic ethnos. Meanwhile, the reputation of his associates rubbed off on him, colouring his reputation in scholarly circles.