A new breed of Russian nationalist is warping history in
disturbing ways
From 1920 to 1990, the Soviet Union was governed by
totalitarian communists whose regime was inspired and legitimized by the
writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and the numerous state-supported
commentators who followed them. These writers believed that "scientific
Marxism" (as they variously defined it) explained all aspects of human
history and culture, including the origin and development of religion, kinship,
ethnicity, nations and empires, as well as the dynamics of the economy, politics,
the arts and psychology.
They also believed that this system of thought contained the
laws of history and that these laws predicted the ultimate downfall of Western
capitalism, individualism and liberal democracy, and the international triumph
of communism based on an economy of central planning and collectivization. The
fact that Russia and Russian-speaking communists dominated the Soviet Union and
its Eastern European and Central Asian satellite states for 70 years was
justified at that time by the fact that the revolution had been started in
Russia by Russians -- they considered themselves "first among
equals."
Serious historians and political scientists have since
demonstrated the correlation between Marxist regimes and the systematic
violation of human rights, including the deportation of dissidents to death
camps and the Gulag. Russian and other Marxist regimes caused the deaths of
millions of their own innocent citizens.
With the rise of Perestroika and the subsequent collapse of
the Soviet Empire in the early '90s, almost all Russian politicians and
intellectuals rejected Marxism. One would think that the Russian and Turkic
peoples of Central Asia would have proceeded by attempting to rewrite their
history from an empirical, non-ideological point of view -- that they would have
translated the works of Western, non-Marxist historians and anthropologists in
an attempt to explain the strange and terrifying communist chapter of their
history. They didn't.
Instead, a whole new set of ideologically driven pseudo
sciences and bizarre theories of history have emerged in contemporary Russia.
They are promoted by scholars and ideologues who call themselves Eurasianists.
They have the endorsement of some of the highest Russian authorities, and they
are trying to work out a new, aggressive and expansionist imperial ideology for
21st-century Russia.
The Eurasianist debate goes back to the time of Catherine
the Great but crystallized in the 19th century. During that time, Imperial
Russia considered itself the heir of Byzantium, from which it received Orthodox
Christianity and the imperial impulse. The Russians built an empire by
conquering the Turkic peoples of Central Asia and settling Siberia. The elite
around the court of the czars did not consider themselves an Eastern European
and Orthodox version of that other great imperial power of the time, Great
Britain, but rather thought of themselves as something special.
That uniqueness was the Asian geographical spread of Russia
and its domination of Central Asia. According to Russian thinkers of the time,
and up until the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, this is what made Russia
different from Western Europe and special in a mystical, historical and
political way. It was Russia's destiny to dominate Asia and to consider itself
as Asian or Eurasian with regard to Europe and the rest of the world. They also
believed that this made them morally superior to the West.
The original Eurasianist thinkers included Vasily Tatishchev
(1686-1750), Nikolai Danilevsky (1822-85), Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) and
even the linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982). Since 1990 their work has been
interpreted and modified by Neo Eurasianist writers and political activists
such as Lev Gumilev (1912-1992), Aleksandr Pamarin (1924-2003) and Aleksandr
Dugin, who was born in 1962. Dugin gives us a flavour of the feel of the new
Eurasianism in this quote from a book he wrote in 1997:
"In principle, Eurasia and our space, the heartland
Russia, remain the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American
revolution ... The new Eurasian empire will be constructed on the fundamental
principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control
of the U. S. A. and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us. This
common civilizational impulse will be the basis of a political and strategic
union."
Dugin proposes a Slavic Turkic alliance against the West. He
is well known for his interest in occultism, his admiration of Reinhard
Heydrich -- one of the chief organizers of the Holocaust -- and he is reputed to
be close to the Russian Prime Minister and former president, Vladimir Putin.
During the recent Russian invasion of the newly independent Caucasian state of
Georgia, Dugin visited the secessionist Ossetians who had been supported
militarily by the invading Russian army. When the Russian Duma (parliament)
recognized the breakaway republic of South Ossetia, Dugin expressed this as one
aspect of the "long awaited renaissance of the Russian Empire."
Marlene Laruelle, a French writer on Eurasianism, highlights
the key features of contemporary Eurasian thinking:
"The different currents of Russian Neo Eurasianism that
emerged in the 1990s all share a set of convictions: an assertion of cultural
unity and common historical destiny of the Russians and the non-Russian peoples
of Russia, the former Soviet Union or parts of Asia; the idea that the central
geographical position of this space in the heart of the Old Continent
inevitably entails an imperial form of political organization; a belief in the
existence of cultural constants that explain the deeper meaning of contemporary
political events; a rhetorical cult of national diversity combined with a
dismissal of real autonomy for the minorities; and a rejection of Europe and/or
the
West and/or capitalism through criticism of 'Atlanticist'
domination, considered disastrous for the rest of mankind."
So much of the so-called scientific, anthropological and
historical justification for the Eurasian ideology ignores the basis of modern
scholarship, as we know it in the West. That is because a growing number of
Russian scholars reject Western empiricism and the epistemological assumptions
of our scholarship. Not surprisingly, Eurasian writers are sought out by larger
and larger segments of Russian society and the ruling elite. This is shown most
clearly in the exploding popularity of the writings of one of the pillars of
modern Eurasianism, Lev Gumilev.
Gumilev was born in St. Petersburg on Oct. 1, 1912. His
parents were members of the czarist Russian intelligentsia, both famous poets.
After the revolution, his father was executed because of his opposition to the
Bolsheviks. His mother was hounded and persecuted by the Bolshevik authorities
despite her fame as a poet. As Gumilev was thought of as "tainted" by
his parents' political sympathies, he was expelled from Leningrad University by
Stalin's henchmen and spent the years from 1938-56 as a slave labourer in the
Gulag.
Freed from detention after Stalin's death in 1956, he went
back to the university and defended two doctoral dissertations on the history
of the peoples of Central Asia. He wrote extensively, but was criticized by his
colleagues for his non-Marxist approach to the ethnology and history of Central
Asia. The academic authorities made it very difficult for anyone to obtain his
numerous articles and publications.
Given his background, one would assume that as a non-Marxist
he would have done everything possible to read Western sources on the history
of Russia and Central Asia, but this is not the case. Instead, he invented an
ethnology and history, which purports to explain the rise and fall of all
cultures and civilizations. Gumilev's writings have numerous contradictions and
would strike any North American university graduate as bizarre. Nevertheless,
here are some of the ideas that have made him famous in contemporary Russian
intellectual and political circles.
Gumilev believed that he had invented a new science of
ethnology and that his theories were unique. He rejected historiography and the
humanities as having any value in explaining the rise and fall of ethnic groups
and empires. He believed that only a biological explanation would suffice. He
claimed that he was a Darwinist, but few Darwinian anthropologists or
historians in the West would give his theories much credence.
Gumilev believed that the formation or
"ethnogenesis" of "ethnoi" or what we would call ethnic
groups (and later nations and empires) is the result of a burst of chemical
energy (probably from outer space). This energy gives a group of men a
mysterious force that explains their collective rise and fall. He calls this
principle "passionarity."
Each ethnos has a life cycle of 1,200 to 1,500 years. The
whole pro-cess takes 60 generations to complete. The first stage of the
"ascent" takes 300 years. The next stage, the fluorescence or
"acme," as he puts, takes another 300 years. Then comes the
"pivotal" or destructive stage of 150 years, then a 600 year stage of
inertia, followed by a stage of eclipse and then a stage of homeostasis which
implies a return to primitive savagery, which he compares to African Bushmen or
Australian Aboriginals.
Somehow out of all this he explains that contemporary Russia
and its empire have high "passionarity" while Europe and the West
have low "passionarity." His theory includes terms like ethnos,
superethnos, ethnosphere and ethnogenesis. Then there are his moral deductions
from his theory of ethnogenesis and history. He believes that members of
"ethnoi" should not mix -- they should marry among themselves. For
the ethnoi to survive, elders must be respected, as should religious
institutions and the state. Of course, the key elements here are that history
is determined, the individual is second to the group, Eurasia is rising and the
West is in decline.
You do not need a PhD in ethnology or anthropology to point
out the vagaries and absurdities of this theory. The deeper one goes into the
writings of Gumilev, the greater the contradictions. Ultimately Gumilev, like
most Eurasianist thinkers, is trying to find a way of justifying the Soviet
Marxist experience as a preparatory "stage" in some greater hidden
process, where ultimately Russia and its allies will dominate the West. Simply
recognizing Stalinism as a horrible failure and a moral catastrophe, and
admitting that Russia should become more democratic, is too humiliating for
Eurasianist thinkers like Gumilev, despite his personal experience of the
Gulag.
Since Gumilev's death in 1992 his books have become best
sellers in Russia. Hundreds of thousands of copies have been printed and sold.
His books are found on almost all university reading lists dealing with history
and the social sciences. The new Kazakh State University was named after him.
When Vladimir Putin visited Gumilev University he said that Lev Gumilev was
"the greatest Eurasianist of our times" and that "his scholarly
works are a brilliant contribution ... to thinking about history."
When Canadians read about the recent violation of Arctic
airspace by a Russian jet fighter, when we hear about a claim by Russia to oil
wealth that we believe to be in Canadian waters, when we hear that it has
planted a Russian flag under the ice of the North Pole, when we contemplate the
Russian invasion of Georgia and its support for Iran's nuclear ambitions, we
need to understand that these are not random events.
They are an expression of Eurasianism, the new ideology of
21st-century Russia. It is the latest version of Russian nationalism. It is
hierarchical, imperial, expansive, militaristic and nondemocratic. It
celebrates and endorses the authoritarian continuity between Soviet Russia and
the present regime. We ignore it at our peril.
