Lev Gumilev

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Monument to Lev Gumilev and his parents in Bezhetsk.

Lev Nikolayevich Gumilyov (Russian: Лев Никола́евич Гумилёв) (October 1, 1912, St. Petersburg–June 15, 1992, St. Petersburg), better known in the West as Lev Gumilev, was one of the most controversial and popular Russian historians of the 20th century. His unorthodox ideas on the birth and death of ethnoses (ethnic groups) have given rise to the political and cultural movement known as "Neo-Eurasianism".

1 Life
2 Ideas
3 Accusations of anti-Semitism
4 Works
5 References
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Life

His parents were two prominent poets Nikolay Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova. They divorced when Lev was a baby, and his father was executed when he was just 9. During his mother's persecution in the 1930s, he was expelled from the Leningrad University and deported to gulags, where he would spend most of his youth, from 1938 until 1956. During a brief stint at large, he joined the Red Army and took part in the Battle of Berlin. In order to secure his release, Akhmatova was constrained to publish dithyrambs to Stalin, but this didn't help. Their relations remained strained, as Lev blamed his mother for the misfortunes that had dogged his youth.

Young Lev with his parents in 1913.

After Stalin's death, Gumilev joined the Hermitage Museum, whose director, Mikhail Artamonov, he would come to appreciate as his mentor. Under Artamonov's guidance, he became interested in Khazar studies and steppe peoples in general. In 1960 he started delivering lectures at the Leningrad University. Two years later, he defended his doctor's thesis on ancient Turks. Since 1960s, he worked in the Geography Institute, where he would defend another doctor's thesis, this time in geography.

Although his ideas were rejected by the official Soviet doctrine and most of his monographs banned from publication, Gumilev came to attract much publicity, especially in the Perestroika years. As an indication of his popularity, the Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev ordered the Lev Gumilev Eurasian University to be erected just opposite his own palace on the central square of new Kazakh capital, Astana.

[edit] Ideas

Gumilev attempted to explain the waves of nomadic migration that rocked the great steppe of Eurasia for centuries by geographical factors such as annual vacillations in solar radiation, which determine the area of grasslands that could be used for grazing livestock. According to this idea, when the steppe areas shrank drastically, the nomads of Central Asia began moving to the fertile pastures of Europe or China.

To describe his ideas on the genesis and evolution of ethnoses, Gumilev introduced the concept of "passionarity", which may be explained as the level of vital energy and power characteristic of any given ethnic group. Gumilev argued that they pass through stages of rise, development, climax, inertial, convolution, and memorial. It is during the "acmatic" phases, when the national passionarity reaches its maximum heat, that the great conquests are made. The current state of Europe he described as deep inertia, or "introduction to obscuration", to use his own term. The passionarity of the Arabic world, on the other hand, is still high.

Drawing inspiration from the works of Konstantin Leontyev and Nikolay Danilevsky, Gumilev regarded Russians as a "super-ethnos" which is kindred to Turkic peoples of the Eurasian steppe. Those periods when Russia has been said to conflict with the steppe peoples, Gumilev reinterpreted as the periods of consolidation of Russian power with that of steppe in order to oppose destructive influences from Catholic Europe, that posed a potential threat to integrity of the Russian ethnic group.

In accordance with his pan-Asiatic theories, he supported the national movements of Tatars, Kazakhs, and other Turkic peoples, in addition to those of the Mongolians and other East Asians. Unsurprisingly, Gumilev's teachings have enjoyed immense popularity in Central Asian countries. In Kazan, for example, a monument to him was opened in August 2005.

[edit] Accusations of anti-Semitism

Gumilev did not extend this ethnological ecumenism, however, to the medieval Jews, who he regarded as a parasitic, international urban class that had dominated the Khazars who in turn had subjected the early East Slavs to the "Khazar Yoke". This last phrase he adapted from the traditional term "Tatar Yoke" for the Mongol domination of medieval Russia, a term Gumilev rejected for he did not regard the Mongol conquest as a necessarily negative event. In particular, and with virtually no support from primary sources, he asserted that the Radhanites had been instrumental in the exploitation of East Slavic people and had exerted undue influence on the sociopolitical and economic landscape of the early Middle Ages. Gumilev maintained that the Jewish culture was by nature mercantile and existed outside and in opposition to its environment.[1][2][3]. These ideas, which bears parallels to both classic anti-Semitism and elements of Nazi geopolitical theory, have led many scholars to label Gumilev antisemitic.^[1]^[2]

[edit] Works

The Hsiung-nu (1960) — on the Xiongnu
Ancient Turks (1964)
Searching for an Imaginary Kingdom : The Legend of the Kingdom of Prester John (1970)
The Hsiung-nu in China (1974)
Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of Earth (1978)
Ancient Rus and the Great Steppe (1989)
An End and a New Beginning (1989)
From the Rus to Russia (1992)

[edit] References

^ Gumilev's anti-semitism has been noted by a number of commentors and scholars. E.g., Rossman, Vadim, et al. Russian Intellectual Antisemitism in the Post Communist Era (Studies in Antisemitism Series). Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2005; Malakhov, Vladimir. "Racism and Migrants". (Trans. Mischa Gabowitsch.) Neprikosnovennij Zapas, 2003; Klier, John. " The Myth of the Khazars and Intellectual Antisemitism in Russia, 1970s–1990s". The Slavonic and East European Review, Volume 83, Number 4, 1 October 2005, pp. 779-781(3). See also, e.g., FSU Moniter Russia Regional Report 2001; Yasmann, Victor. "The Rise of the Eurasians". The Eurasian Politician
Issue 4 (August 2001) Radio Free Europe, 1992.
^ "[..] Gumilev shows his colors both as a crude and sophisticated anti-Semite. He labels the Jews as a parasite ethnos, which has ceased to exist as a separate ethnos. In fact, according to this view, the Jews are not a nation at all, but a specific way of thinking by a certain group of people having Jewish genetic heritage and/or sharing the moral norms of Judaism. In Gumilev's view, every time a parasite ethnos dominated an indigenous ethnos, revolution, civil war, and the creation of what he calls a "chimera" statehood, followed. So it happened with French rationalists, who unleashed the Great French Revolution, and with British Puritans, who created a "chimera" state—the United States. He labels the U.S. a "parasite" state, established by dissidents and "drop outs" from the dying Anglo-Saxonian ethnos. In his view, this state can exist only by the exploitation of foreign mental, biological, and energy resources. Gumilev links the French and American states to Jews, with the explicit statement that both of their intellectual and spiritual foundations come from the Old Testament.
Yasmann, Victor. "Red Religion:An Ideology of Neo-Messianic Russian Fundamentalism." Demoktratizat: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization. Volume 1, No. 2. p. 26.