The presence in Lev’s life of a clique of high-ranking Communist Party officials was an intriguing puzzle given Lev’s politically chequered past. Indeed, he was still seen as politically unreliable in many corners of the party: he ignored communist holidays, but celebrated Christmas and Easter. Unlike other academics with whom he worked, he appears to have been forbidden to travel to capitalist countries, though he was permitted trips to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, his writings were gaining converts at high levels of the state, despite being blocked by his academic peers.
I sought out Lukyanov in 2009. Over tea and cakes in Moscow at the downtown Pushkin restaurant, he reminisced about his friendship with Gumilev and the paradox that this appeared to present. In the 1970s, Lukyanov was an up-and-coming Soviet bureaucrat, whose progressively hardline views would eventually see him play a major role in the 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, which destroyed his political career and sent him to jail. But he was a complex man. Though a hardline Marxist, he idolized Akhmatova – for many a symbol of private revolt against totalitarianism – and called her poetry ‘the most beautiful thing in the modern Russian language’. He even made an audio recording of Lev reciting her ‘Requiem’, of all things.
In addition to the connection to Akhmatova, Lukyanov seems to have seen something to like in Lev’s theories:
I could always call the Leningrad officials who were putting the clamps on [Gumilev’s work] and they listened to me… It wasn’t some great feat on my part; it was just that I had an understanding of Lev Gumilev’s importance and his work.87
For the next two decades, Lukyanov became Lev’s protector – his fights with the academic establishment were sometimes solved by a phone call from the presidium of the Supreme Soviet or the central committee. Such political interference in academic life was routine: many a dissertation or journal article was published with the help of party connections. But the case of Lukyanov’s interventions on Gumilev’s behalf were curious – not a case of the party intervening to protect some reigning orthodoxy, but instead to support an insurgency against the carefully crafted establishment consensus.
For Lukyanov, Lev’s theories represented something utterly originaclass="underline" not nationalism, not Marxism, but rather a third way – a synthesis of nationalism and internationalism, a way out of the brutal and total culture wars which were leading to a dangerous calamity. His histories, while profoundly un-Marxist, emphasized the unconscious sympathy of the people of the Soviet Union, the millennia-old unity of inner Eurasia, and a lurking distrust of the West. Party conservatives may not even have realized the propaganda value of Lev’s theories, if used in the right way; but he nonetheless may have appeared useful. ‘If one were to describe him in party terms’, said Lukyanov, ‘Gumilev was an internationalist. He considered that all the influences on the Russian people – from the Polovtsians, the Chinese and the Mongols – only enriched us… Among real communists, the ones who knew Marxism at first hand, Lev Gumilev did not have enemies.’88
Lukyanov also, perhaps inadvertently, explained the source of Lev’s progressively anti-Western and reactionary views. Following his mother’s death, he said, the ugly court fight over her estate, the feuding between Lev and some members of Akhmatova’s entourage reached a crescendo of public acrimony:
As [Gumilev] told me, in Anna Andreevna Akhmatova’s circle there was [Viktor] Ardov, [Ilya] Zilbershtein, several other such people. As he said: ‘Not a single one is Russian.’ That’s what he said… Akhmatova’s circle were always pro-Western. Akhmatova herself was not that at all. She always blessed the Russian language, the Russian nation and so on. Why she went with such people I don’t know… maybe it was connected to the difficulty of her existence.89
Lukyanov’s view must be taken with a pinch of salt. The fight over Akhmatova pitted her ex-husband Punin’s family against the rest of Akhmatova’s entourage. Most of her Jewish friends sided with Lev, including Nadezhda Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, Emma Gerstein and Viktor Ardov. However, it is quite likely that Lukyanov’s comments may well have reflected Lev’s own descent into anti-Semitism. His biographer Sergey Belyakov reports the same observation that Lukyanov made: ‘By the 1980s, Gumilev would forget about the help Akhmatova’s Jewish friends had given him. Instead, he blamed them for his conflicts with his mother.’
Lev would need Lukyanov’s help soon enough, when he pushed his luck and tried for a second doctorate. Given the reception of his first round of articles, and the increasing politicization of the debate about Russian history, Lev would need all the highly placed friends he could find. He was teaching at the Institute of Economic Geography, and – quite sensibly – felt that he should gain the credentials in that discipline in addition to his history doctorate. He presented his dissertation for a doctorate in geography – ‘Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of Earth’ – to the geographical board.
‘Ethnogenesis’ was a lengthier version of his 1970 article – a detailed joust at official Marxism, espousing exactly the historical theories that Yakovlev had panned the previous November, and a lengthier attack on Bromley’s more nuanced take on the concept of ethnos. In it, Gumilev tackled the question of why certain peoples become ‘great’. Eurasia was a place uniquely suited to examining this idea: over two millennia, the expanses of the steppe had been dominated by tribes that had grown rapidly from nothing and had conquered vast regions of inner Eurasia, starting with the Huns under Attila, the Mongols under Genghis Khan, the Turks under Tamerlane, and finally the Russians under a succession of tsars. Part of his explanation for why such small groups of nomads became so dominant in such a short time was, of course, superior military technology and fighting spirit; but that could not explain the whole phenomenon. The peoples of Eurasia, he asserted, shared a cultural affinity, which made the spread of language and culture much more rapid than mere conquest could explain, and cemented political cohesion.
Perhaps, he theorized, it was not so much the characteristics of the peoples that created this unique cohesion, as the characteristics of the geography of Inner Asia, its network of rivers and steppe and forests and arable black soil, which favoured travel and economic integration. ‘Eurasia’, he suggested, formed a unique geographical zone in which all inhabitants are naturally subject to the same ‘rhythms’, as he called them, and display a tendency to converge on one another, to grow more similar with time, and to diverge from those outside this zone.