In other words, according to political scientists such as Rogers Brubaker, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and other republics sought independence from the USSR not due to some strong primordial ethnic unity, but rather due to the simple fact that they had been given artificial statehood. In the right circumstances (wide-ranging economic crisis, combined with a real fear of the rise of Russian nationalism) this was simple to translate into real statehood. Not a single ethnic group that was not given national status by Soviet ethnographers bothered to revolt against authority in 1991 (though later, Chechnya would).
Rather than vindicating Gumilev’s theory that nations had been buried alive by the USSR, the break-up of the Soviet Union may just as well have vindicated the view of nationalism as a social force that was capable of being manipulated. The Soviet Union’s nationalities policy, in other words, manipulated nations into existence instead of recognizing existing ones. However, in the mind of the reading public, Gumilev’s reputation as a scholar was assured by the demise of the Soviet Union. That convincingly proved his theories of nationalism as an immanent and primordial force that could not be erased.
The combination of Gumilev’s personal charisma, the mystique of his parents, and his suffering at the hands of the regime all combined to make him one of the heroes of perestroika. That aura brought his works on Eurasianism massive popularity at a time when there was a hunger for dissident literature, and when any suppressed works automatically gained a reputation for authenticity and truth. He became a formidable opponent of the liberal reformers, an ally of nationalist groups and communist hardliners.
With the withering away of the Communist Party as a moral force in Soviet society, Russians looked for anything that could take its place and offer them a solid foundation in the new agoraphobic universe, shorn of its official metaphysics, in which they lived. That was especially true of the elite, who found in Gumilev’s theories a synthesis of nationalism and internationalism which could justify, in theoretical terms, the continued existence of the multinational USSR as a singular political unit, even as it was about to be torn apart by elemental nationalism.
Lukyanov’s numerous interventions on Gumilev’s behalf were motivated by an instinct to preserve the union, he said. In Lev’s Eurasianism he saw the continuation of the USSR. In a 2009 interview, this is what he said:
You know, it coincides with my beliefs. The fact is that Eurasianism, Eurasia and the Soviet Union are a completely different world. With all due respect, the West does not understand it… This is a huge territory, people settled here along the rivers, and created a conglomerate of nations and nationalities, who had to live together. The climate is very severe, so the individual, the Western individualist, would find it impossible to live here. So there was a collectivism – a special relationship.113
Gumilev’s political beliefs legitimized, in theoretical terms, the nationalism (in all its forms and permutations) that would burst out of the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, creating the scientific (or pseudo-scientific) basis for many nationalist writers. His vocabulary of ‘passionarity’, ‘complementarity’, ‘super ethnos’ and so on has been absorbed into the political mainstream, and his theories stand today at the nexus of scholarship and power. He has been championed both by Russian hardliners such as Lukyanov and by breakaway nationalists such as Kazakhstan’s President Nazarbaev. Georgian, Kyrgyz and Azeri nationalists have all claimed his inheritance.
As Sergey Cheshko put it to me: ‘Marxism is gone, was thrown out, there was only an empty space left, so what took its place was either nationalism, or this supra-nationalism – Eurasianism.’ The fashion for Gumilev’s ideas grew out of ‘firstly, mysticism, secondly, xenophobia, and thirdly, the search for some kind of universal idea to take the place of the previous one.’114
In 1990, Gumilev befriended Leningrad’s upstart TV star Alexander Nevzorov, a young, charismatic but rather mysterious man who hosted the city’s most popular television talk show of the day, 600 Seconds. Nevzorov had begun his television career tackling corruption in high places in the Leningrad city administration, earning plaudits from reformers; but he gradually showed himself to be a nationalist zealot who was militantly in favour of preserving the Soviet Union. When nearby Lithuania declared independence from the USSR in March 1990, Nevzorov appeared in a special broadcast holding a rifle during the storming of the TV tower in Vilnius by Special Forces soldiers sent to crush the protest. Nevzorov formed a youth brigade, Nashi (literally ‘Ours’), which had a strong presence on the streets of Leningrad. Its shoulder patches showed an outline of the USSR with the word ‘Nashi’ stencilled across it.
The friendship stunned many of Gumilev’s acquaintances, who saw Nevzorov as nothing better than a demagogue. ‘How often he was criticized in his last months for this turn towards “Nashi” ’, recalled Lavrov. Rather implausibly, he went on: ‘I think L.N. understood the word “Nashi” much more broadly than any political movement, group, bloc; everyone who supported the united country and opposed its further break-up was “Nashi” to him.’
Gumilev’s friends were dumbfounded when with incredible energy he plunged into the existential debates that accompanied the collapse of the USSR, defending the union with a zealotry that left many of them scratching their heads. He actively campaigned to save the USSR in a flood of broadcast and print interviews, which Emma Gerstein, one of Lev’s closest friends, described in her memoirs as ‘dreadful’.115
In 1990 he recorded an interview with Nevzorov at the latter’s country house. Asked by the TV presenter if he supported democracy, he become furious:
Not at all!… How could I be a democrat. I am an old soldier. My father was a soldier, and my grandfather was a soldier, and thus back to the fourteenth century. My ancestors died on the Kulikovo battlefield. We were soldiers, but we were educated people, at least starting with my grandfather. We studied….
He then took a jab at the nascent pro-democracy movement spreading through the streets of the USSR: ‘These so-called intelligentsia are not living up to their name. The intelligentsia just talk…’ ‘Democracy’, he wrote in one characteristic criticism, ‘unfortunately dictates not choosing the best, but rather the promotion of the similar. Access to the control bridge, to the steering wheel, is given to casual people.’116
In 1991, in advance of the March referendum on the continued existence of the Soviet Union, Gumilev authored a piece entitled ‘Unite, or You Will Disappear’.117 In another interview, he ventured a prediction: ‘If Russia is saved, it will only be as a Eurasian state.’
In August 1991, at the end of his life, Gumilev was given a chance offered to few people who have suffered at the hands of a cruel dictatorship: the opportunity to see his tormentors flung down in humiliation and despair. A few days after the failure of a coup d’état by hardline generals in Moscow, and the ascendancy of Boris Yeltsin, the end of the USSR was all but inevitable. The totalitarian state that had destroyed Lev’s family and made his life a misery was to be expunged from the face of the earth.