Soon he was caught up in another scandal, which again tinged him with anti-Semitism. Gumilev’s arguments were used by philosopher Yury Boroday, who wrote in Priroda that Western civilization was the heir to the tradition of Jewish Manichaeism.105 It was a twisted, racist use of claims that Gumilev had made, and indeed this particular point does not seem to have been present in Gumilev’s work; however, Gumilev never publicly repudiated Boroday’s article. Following the essay’s publication in Priroda, the USSR Academy of Sciences convened a special session to condemn it and, by extension, Gumilev’s theories. The editorial board of Priroda was purged and several articles by Gumilev were rejected without explanation by scientific journals. Thus Gumilev became increasingly controversial – not only among nationalists, for whom he was too much of an internationalist, but also among liberals, who saw him as an anti-Semite and nationalist. Each camp saw him with one foot in the other.
Gumilev’s histories were not generally chauvinistic; indeed he devoted most of his talent to raising the profile and histories of the USSR’s minority nationalities; but they did smack of imperialism, emphasizing the ‘unity’ of the Soviet peoples under a benevolent Russian hand. The anti-Western slant of his histories was also very likely considered politically useful.106 And it is probably no accident that he was given considerable latitude to publish during the Kulikovo anniversary, against the backdrop of Soviet confrontation with the West over Afghanistan and Poland.
Interest in Gumilev and his theories in the upper reaches of the party seems to have grown in direct proportion to the waning appeal of communism. By the mid-1980s, senior officials had no doubt noticed that the official metaphysics was exhausted and Leninist dogma was a joke even in top party circles. The Politburo was a ‘gerontocracy’ that was expiring at a furious rate – Brezhnev’s death was closely followed by that of his two successors as general secretary, Yury Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. Russia’s economy was crumbling and needed reform; its dogmas needed rejuvenation; its politics needed fresh faces.
Fresh faces
Chernenko was followed by a relatively sprightly 54-year-old, Mikhail Gorbachev, who would shortly implement the political thaw known as glasnost, and economic reforms known as perestroika, which liberalized private property and paved the way for the end of communism.
Glasnost, the relaxation of censorship, was first implemented in 1988, and it rescued Lev’s fate as a scholar. By 1987 he was being sought out for interviews in major publications and on television. In 1988 he was even invited to deliver a series of lectures on nationalism at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to Alexander Zotov, later Russia’s ambassador to Syria, who helped organize them. Lev’s scholarship was, however, still under censorship. In 1987 he wrote to the central committee:
Owing to some unclear circumstances, the publication of my works for the past ten years has been blocked. I can only explain this as the reflection of troubles which pursued me in the first half of my life. All accusations against me were revoked in 1956. Between 1959 and 1975 my work was printed, and since 1976 it has stopped, with a few exceptions.107
Unlike in the 1960s, it was not Lev’s gulag past that was his primary difficulty in publishing. Instead, it was his colleagues in academia, who (somewhat justifiably) continued to criticize his work as science fiction. The Academy of Sciences went on blocking publication of his ‘Ethnogenesis’, yet eventually Lev’s powerful friend Lukyanov, by then chairman of the Supreme Soviet, intervened to get the book published. That happened in 1989 – the same year that Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was finally serialized, despite a counter-attack by hardliners:
I know that the Academy of Sciences blocked the publication – this was the main book, the subject of most of the confrontations. They appealed to the Leningrad party organs, who interfered in the publication. I had to tell the party organs myself in very tough language ‘Let’s help get this book published.’108
Lev was summoned that year to the Moscow provincial committee of the Communist Party to hear its verdict on the book. In a panic, he called Anatoly Chistobaev, director of the Geography Institute at LGU. Chistobaev recalls him saying: ‘Something has happened. I have been asked to appear before the obkom [provincial committee] of the party. I don’t know whether to bring a spoon and a plate.’109 Gumilev thought he was going to be arrested again – he would need the utensils in prison. ‘His voice was full of fear’, recalls Chistobaev. Instead, he was told the book would be published. It was a sensation. Its first print run of 50,000 copies sold out almost immediately.
Exhibit A
In the final two or three years of his life, Lev Gumilev gave over a hundred press interviews in top national newspapers, and a series of his lectures was broadcast on local television in Leningrad.
Gumilev had lived to see his books published, but he was already in very poor health. In 1990 he had his first stroke, after which one of his hands was left paralysed. He became increasingly bitter about what he saw as the incompetence of the Soviet authorities and their inability to stop the break-up of the USSR, as economic catastrophe worsened. In a May 1990 interview published in Moskovskaya Pravda, he went so far as to hold Bromley responsible for the apparent failure of the USSR nationalities policy:
It was he who advanced the thesis that ethnos is a social phenomenon, that is, belonged to the realm of class. And as a result, there are no ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, because we have no class distinctions, right? It is completely absurd, but he still exercises harmful influence on the theoretical side of our ethnographic sciences… If the inhabitants of Pompeii had known in advance about the eruption of Vesuvius, they would not have simply waited for death, but fled.110
The attack, according to Bromley’s biographer, S.I. Vainshtein, ‘worsened the condition of the already seriously ill scientist’, who was in hospital. A week later, Bromley died. Lev’s two-decade feud had come to a particularly inauspicious end.111
In fact, the coming demise of the Soviet Union would vindicate not only ‘primordialist’ theories of nationalism, like Gumilev’s, which saw nationalism as immanent, natural and essential, a fundamental, unchanging and practically genetic identity; the constructivists – those who believed that nationalism was a ‘construct’ created for social reasons or out of political expediency – also proclaimed victory, and with some justification: the Soviet Union fell apart not along true national lines, but along those of largely artificial nations identified by Soviet ethnographers and cartographers in the 1920s.112