Russians – members of this zone for centuries – have become Eurasians, Gumilev suggested, descended not from European culture but from the ancient steppe tribes. The thrust of the dissertation was to explain how ethnoi are born. The quibble with the reigning orthodoxy he highlighted was similar to one commonly aired with reference to biological evolution, which is good at explaining the gradual change (i.e. evolution) of species, but runs into difficulty over how new species come into being relatively suddenly. So, too, with modern ethnography, which focuses on the ‘social’ aspects of culture: it is good at explaining how existing cultures change, but its weakness lies in providing a theoretical basis for the birth of completely new ethnoi.
Lev believed this to be the weakest point of his opponents’ theory, and he hammered away at it. He believed that the strength of his theory lay in explaining ‘ethnogenesis’, the creation of new cultures.
For Gumilev, the birth and death of ethnoi are an exercise in human creativity – the result of ‘passionarity’ – the instinct to self-sacrifice and self-abnegation. What distinguishes an ethnos from a jumble of languages, religions and common historical experiences is a common purpose or goal, and the willingness of members to sacrifice themselves for it. Ethnoi, he theorized, always start with the actions of a small group of ‘passionaries’, and the birth of new ethnoi is always associated with a high intensity of passionarity, which then begins to dissipate over the lifespan of a nation.90 It was a theory that was evocative of the romantic theories of Herder or Fichte, seeing an ethnos as akin to an organism.
And it was already getting a bit weird. But then Gumilev took the organism metaphor further, arguing that passionarity has predictable ‘phases’, with a typical lifespan of 1,200 years. And then he descended from a confidently argued theory into the realms of science fiction, when he tested the waters for the theory that he had bounced off Nikolay Timofeev-Resovsky at the Institute of Radiation in Obninsk a few years before: he argued that passionarity was generated by cosmic radiation from outer space.
‘The biogenic migration of atoms of chemical elements in the biosphere always tends to its maximum manifestation’, wrote Gumilev in chapter six of the dissertation, giving his critics their main justification for marginalizing him.
Because the development of free energy capable of doing work is created by the action of living matter. Consequently our planet received more energy from outer space than is needed to maintain equilibrium of the biosphere, which leads to excesses that give rise to phenomena among animals like those described above, and among people impulses of drive or explosions of ethnogenesis.91
In hindsight, it is amazing that the doctoral project went as well as it did. Even adherents of Lev’s views looked askance at the theory of bioenergy – the notion that human actions are explicable by cosmic rays: ‘It’s an interesting concept,’ said Kozhinov in an interview published long after Gumilev’s death, ‘but I don’t think it has any objective significance. He thinks that it’s all about cosmic rays or something. This looks a bit comic even.’92
It says something about Lev’s credentials as a feared debater and public figure with powerful friends that he was even allowed to present the thesis in the first place, let alone get it past the dissertation committee with only one abstention and one ‘no’ vote out of 23. Much of this was due to interference by Lukyanov on his behalf. ‘[Lukyanov] asked the Leningrad and Moscow leadership of different ranks to present no obstacles to Gumilev in his scientific and pedagogical activity, in his presentation of his doctoral thesis’, wrote Voznesensky in a memoir.93
Gumilev’s dissertation defence was a public event; hundreds of people went to the Smolny Institute to hear it, including Western journalists. But the major obstacle lay in Moscow: all dissertations had to go through the Higher Attestation Commission (VAK) which vetted all advanced degrees. The dissertation came back with a huge number of remarks from a ‘black opponent’, who, according to the Soviet degree system, had the right to challenge anonymously and eventually to veto candidacies. Lev had to defend the dissertation again, but this time in a less friendly environment in Moscow. He went, promising his boss Lavrov that he would keep his temper and be deferential, and would not pick any fights that the institute would have to settle. ‘Our fears came true – he lost his temper!’ recalled Lavrov. ‘Our protégé said too many unnecessary things and was failed. He returned to Leningrad confused and a bit guilty; not so much because of the sad result, but because of the fact that he failed to keep the promise to “stay within limits”.’94
Months of fraught negotiations followed, but Gumilev was ultimately denied his dream of another doctorate, which was put on hold indefinitely. Nevertheless, in 1979 the dissertation was finally placed on file at the All Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information in Moscow, an institute affiliated to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In this way, many books which did not meet with the approval of the official censors could eventually see the light of day. It just had to be ordered and printed on request. Word got around, and Ethnogenesis and the Human Biosphere became one of the most requested monographs of all time in the USSR. ‘They had so many orders that the paper ran out several times’, said Yamshchikov.
In December 1974 came another blow. The eminent ethnographer Viktor Kozlov wrote a blistering attack on Gumilev’s work in the top-flight Soviet journal Voprosy Istorii (Historical Issues): ‘On the Biological–Geographical Conception of Ethnic History’.95 Accusing Gumilev of being a racist, Kozlov spent 13 pages citing Gumilev’s work and charging him with ‘biologism’, ‘geographical determinism’ and a host of other errors, and essentially saying that what he wrote was unprovable rubbish. The only reason no one had bothered to debunk it before, he said, was that ‘his conceptions have largely bypassed the attention of the majority of historians and philosophers, and thereby avoided criticism’. Marina Kozyreva – the niece of Nikolay Kozyrev – remembers that the article stung: ‘It was to all intents and purposes a denunciation.’96 From that point on, until the mid-1980s, Lev was virtually unable to publish anything, and he was only permitted to teach thanks to Lukyanov’s interventions.
Lavrov, Lev’s boss at the Institute of Economic Geography, said that he frequently received instructions to suspend Gumilev’s lectures:
Everybody understood that it was nonsense… But every so often I had to ask L.N.: ‘Have a rest for a couple of weeks; let Kostya lecture these times.’ L.N. understood everything, he wasn’t even sour with me when we met, and three or four weeks later everything was forgotten ‘at the top’ as well, and L.N. appeared in front of students again.97
At one point, the Communist Party’s inspector for sciences came for a visit. Anokhin remembers the man was told by Lavrov: ‘Do you want to make another dissident out of Gumilev? We can prohibit him from lecturing, and then the next day you’ll be hearing it on the BBC.’
Gumilev’s personal popularity and his relationship with the Communist Party were not to be underestimated, and his opponents found him intimidating. Bromley considered Lev’s theories to be prominent enough for him to debunk them straightaway in his 1982 ethnology textbook Theoretical Sketches.98 ‘Recently there has appeared in our literature an opinion that ethnoi represent a biological unit – a population or a system arising as a result of some sort of mutation’, wrote Bromley, footnoting Gumilev (which suggests that, despite being forbidden from publishing, Lev’s concepts were very much part of mainstream thought among the intelligentsia). Cheshko remembered the 20-year Gumilev–Bromley polemic: