Culture and Society after Socialism

Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia

Mark Bassin

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501703386
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacy of the historian, ethnographer, and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912–1992) has attracted extraordinary interest in Russia and beyond. The son of two of modern Russia's greatest poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev spent thirteen years in Stalinist prison camps, and after his release in 1956 remained officially outcast and professionally shunned. Out of the tumult of perestroika, however, his writings began to attract attention and he himself became a well-known and popular figure. Despite his highly controversial (and often contradictory) views about the meaning of Russian history, the nature of ethnicity, and the dynamics of interethnic relations, Gumilev now enjoys a degree of admiration and adulation matched by few if any other public intellectual figures in the former Soviet Union. He is freely compared to Albert Einstein and Karl Marx, and his works today sell millions of copies and have been adopted as official textbooks in Russian high schools. Universities and mountain peaks alike are named in his honor, and a statue of him adorns a prominent thoroughfare in a major city. Leading politicians, President Vladimir Putin very much included, are unstinting in their deep appreciation for his legacy, and one of the most important foreign-policy projects of the Russian government today is clearly inspired by his particular vision of how the Eurasian peoples formed a historical community.

In The Gumilev Mystique, Mark Bassin presents an analysis of this remarkable phenomenon. He investigates the complex structure of Gumilev's theories, revealing how they reflected and helped shape a variety of academic as well as political and social discourses in the USSR, and he traces how his authority has grown yet greater across the former Soviet Union. The themes he highlights while untangling Gumilev's complicated web of influence are critical to understanding the political, intellectual, and ethno-national dynamics of Russian society from the age of Stalin to the present day.

Part 1

GUMILEV’S THEORY OF ETHNOS AND ETHNOGENESIS

1

THE NATURE OF ETHNICITY

What Is an Ethnos?

All of Gumilev’s theories rest on a highly essentialized understanding of the nature of ethnicity. The ethnic unit or ethnos (pl. ethnies) is conceived as one of the most fundamental and durable categories of human organization. Ethnic belonging is an existential mode of being that forms an intrinsic and immutable part of the very persona of all individuals. It is a feature of human nature, which can be neither transcended nor transformed.1 “No human being can live outside of an ethnos,” he affirmed, indeed any attempt to do so would be tantamount to “pulling oneself out of a swamp by one’s own hair.”2 Although all ethnies share a similar organizational structure and go through the same evolutionary life cycle—what he called etnogenez or ethnogenesis—each ethnos was nonetheless unique: a self-contained and self-sustaining entity. Gumilev placed great emphasis on ethnic individuality, maintaining that real-existing differences between groups were reflected in a subjective group awareness of an “us-them” juxtaposition that provided cohesion and solidarity.3 All ethnic groupings share “the particular quality of the species homo sapiens to group in such a way as to oppose oneself and one’s own (svoi) to the outside world. This [process of] distinction is characteristic for all ages and all countries.”4

As essentialized entities, Gumilev’s ethnies were primordial formations with ancient lineages. In its full scope, he reckoned that the ethnogenetic cycle of birth, blossoming, and eventual decline lasted around 1,500 years. In the course of its life cycle, the ethnos developed and evolved in certain ways, but its basic character remained constant (under normal circumstances, at least). This same cyclical pattern was characteristic across all of world history, moreover, which meant that the ethnic formations of the ancient world were structurally identical to those of the present day and shared the same institutions.5 On this basis, he tended to use examples drawn from history—frequently ancient history—in order to illustrate present-day processes. The inherent differences between ethnies did not necessarily result in antipathy or hostile relations, but ethnic individuality did mean that they could not be combined or merged without injuring their integrity. Ethnic separation was very much a part of the natural order of what he called the ethnosphere. “It is impossible to unite (ob′edinit′) ethnies, for the resulting union will always involve the principle of compulsion. Ethnies cannot simply be made to love each other.”6 Even long centuries of cohabitation of adjacent spaces and mutual interaction among different groups did not necessarily lead to the loss of a sense of ethnic individuality, regardless of how much convergence there may have been between them economically and socially.

What, for Gumilev, was the essential marker of ethnicity? He rejected commonly invoked attributes such as language, religion, material culture, genre de vie, or simple folkways and customs. Ethnicity was rather embodied most vitally in what he called a “behavioral stereotype” (stereotip povedeniia), shared by all members of a given ethnic group.7 The behavioral stereotype referred to an established pattern of interactions, a “strictly defined norm governing the relationships between the collective and the individual and between the individuals themselves.”8 All interactions among the member of an ethnos were shaped in a similar way by behavioral stereotypes, and because all ethnies possessed them, they served to establish the fundamental unity of the ethnosphere as a whole. At the same time, each stereotype was unique to the respective ethnic unit. Indeed, in the final analysis it was the very uniqueness of its behavioral stereotype that conditioned the singularity of the group noted above. The principle of ethnic exclusivity insured that members of one group would be incapable of assimilating the behavioral norms of any other, and were frequently unable even to understand them.

For the most part, the behavioral stereotype operated on a subconscious level of personal and group psychology, where it worked to shape personal interactions, tastes, and attitudes, giving them all a distinctive ethnic stamp.9 Gumilev illustrated how this worked with the following anecdote. Imagine four men on a Moscow tram, he proposed—a Russian, a Tatar, a German, and someone from the Caucasus. They all dressed alike, spoke Russian equally well, had a similar educational background and social values, and even enjoyed the same films. In short, you would think there was no difference between them. Yet when a drunken youth stumbles onto the tram and begins to harass a young woman, the differences in behavioral stereotype become immediately clear. “I know, and we all know, that the Russian will say to him, ‘hey you, kiriukha [an affectionate term for a drunk], you’re going to get caught. Look, get off at the next stop and take another tram.’ But not the German! He will stop the tram with the emergency brake, call the police, and demand that they ‘arrest this hooligan.’” The fellow from the Caucasus “will not call anyone but simply lose control and hit the offender in the face—and hit him hard. The Tatar, however, will observe the whole affair with disdain and turn away in silence.”10

Gumilev’s conceptual modeling of the ethnos was strongly influenced by systems theory and cybernetics, both of which were popular in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s.11 The biologist and geneticist Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Malinovskii (1909–1996), an important proponent of this perspective, was a personal friend of his.12 Each individual ethnos, Gumilev argued, represented a self-contained organism. More than a mere assemblage of ethnically similar individuals, an ethnos was a systemic entity, a “complex of elements” defined by the system of functional relationships and interconnections between them. It was these interconnections that provided the ethnos with its coherence as an integrated unit.13 The “elements” involved included not only human individuals but also various animate and nonanimate parts of the external environment with which the former interacted. The ethnos operated on different levels as a sort of ecological network, which like all systems was based on certain organizational principles and dynamics.14

As we will see, neither Gumilev’s notion of the behavioral stereotype nor his conceptualization of the ethnos as a system-organism defined by the functional interrelationships between its parts were particularly out of line with mainstream Soviet ideas about ethnicity.15 What set him apart were his radical ideas about where ethnies fit in the fundamental juxtaposition between the natural world and human society. Whatever distinctive characteristics an ethnos might possess, it was always understood in the USSR to be a social phenomenon. This point was very important for a number of reasons, not least because it meant that in the final analysis ethnic groupings always remained in some way a part of the matrix of social relations that Marx had described, and thus they remained subject to the same laws and imperatives that drove social development universally. Ethnies might not evolve at the same tempo or in the same manner as society’s material means of production, but like all other social phenomena they did evolve and did undergo transformation.

This was a perspective that Gumilev rejected, consistently and unequivocally. Throughout all of his work, he insisted that an ethnos was not a social but rather a natural formation. There were two separate categories or modes of human collective existence, he explained, which corresponded to the juxtaposition between the natural and the social. The obshchestvennyi or social category took the generic form of a sotsiuum or society. By contrast, the natural mode of collective existence took the form of ethnies and their variants: superethnies and subethnies.16 In developing his argument he appealed directly to the authority of Marx.

If we use the word “social” (sotsial′nyi) in our Marxist sense, we need to understand it as a form of collective existence connected with production, that is to say, “society” (obshchestvo). But are there human collectives that are not social? Collectives that are different and separate from (krome i pomimo) society? On this question, Marx expressed himself precisely and definitively. He referred to society using the German word Gesellschaft. [But] he distinguished society from primeval collectives, which he called Gemeinwesen…. These primeval collectives existed long before the emergence of the material production among humankind that Marx considered to be a necessary condition for the emergence of society. The first formations, the first collectives or groups of homo sapiens, indeed had no relation to a means of production that had not yet come into existence. They lived as collective groups simply because they could not exist individually.

These Gemeinwesen, he concluded, did not disappear with the emergence of society, “but on the contrary, gradually developed [into] those entities that we call ethnies...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 GUMILEV’S THEORY OF ETHNOS AND ETHNOGENESIS
• Part 2 THE SOVIET RECEPTION OF GUMILEV
• Part 3 GUMILEV AFTER COMMUNISM
• Conclusion: The Political Significance of Gumilev
• Bibliography
• Index