The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia.

• Author: Shlapentokh, Dmitry

The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia

By Mark Bassin

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016, 400 pages, $89.95, ISBN: 9780801445941

Professor Mark Bassin's book deals with Lev Gumilev, the seminal Russian historian, ethnographer and philosopher, who is quite popular in Russia. Gumilev's popularity was especially strong in the last years of the Soviet regime and the early post-Soviet era, as Bassin makes clear. Still, no books on Gumilev had been published in English until Bassin's work, and very few of Gumilev's works have been translated into English. Indeed, Gumilev has been practically ignored in the West. Why? Most Western historians and ethnographers would provide an easy answer, based on the materials presented in Bassin's work: Gumilev's views are beyond Western science. In fact, they are not scientific at all and could be seen at best as peculiar science fiction. Readers of Bassin's work can well substantiate this conclusion.

Gumilev regarded ethnicities and their larger conglomerate, the 'superethnos,' as, in a way, a biological entity. 'Ethnos' as a cohesive entity emerges when the people living in a particular territory receive the cosmic energy. At that point, they become charged with passionarnost, a concept which Gumilev regarded "as his most important theoretical discovery" (p. 44). The word can be roughly translated as passion, or energy. After its infusion of passionarnost, the new ethnos experiences growth and its leaders are driven to expansion. Later, the ethnos, similar to other biological creatures, matures and loses its youthful energy, although new stages may emerge through the creativity of the elite. Later, the ethnos dies, although Gumilev apparently made several exceptions to these rules. The other important aspect of Gumilev's theory--also well-represented in Bassin's work--is the idea of the "complimentariness" of ethnicities (p. 61). According to Gumilev, some ethnoses lived well in proximity to each other and, in a way, benefited each other economically and culturally. In some cases, they could be engaged in intermarriage, although Gumilev himself usually advocated endogamy, the notion that each ethnicity should marry only its own. At the same time, he clearly made exceptions for Slavs' relationships with Turkic peoples.

Elaborating on his theory of "complimentariness," Gumilev follows the path of the "Eurasianists," the group of Russian emigres who...