“In the past itself lies the roots of our current national controversy. Tracing their historical development, it is possible to find painless ways to solve them” © Lev Gumilev

A biography of a brilliant Russian historian Lev Gumilev is a part of Russian history itself. Lev (means lion in Russian) Gumilev was born in a family of Russian poets in 1912. After the Soviet revolution in 1917 his father was arrested and killed by NKVD (predecessor of KGB) on charges of “counter-revolutionary conspiracy”. After that his mother Anna Akhmatova became humiliated and despised in print, ceased to publish and print her poems.

In 1935 Lev Gumilev was arrested too. Like many others thousands of political prisoners in Stalin’s rule his only guilt was his intelligent origin. In his article “Autonekrolog” Lev Gumilev wrote that all charges against him were always fabricated and had no witnesses and once he even got an honest answer from his interrogator that “he is too literal” that is why he is caught. The second time Lev Gumilev was arrested in 1938 and sentenced to five years in the camps. In general he was captured over 10 years of his life. But despite all hardships and difficulties of his destiny he studied and has been graduated from Lenigrad (former Saint-Petersburg) State University historical faculty and later on became a Doctor of Historical and Geographical Sciences. He never stopped to study history and was devoted to his passion all this life.

Lev Gumilev is famous for his Theory of Ethnogenesis and his concept of Passionarity. “Never before a History as a science has been taken as a synthesis of the natural sciences and humanities with the study supervision and verifiable ways as in phisics, biology, geography and other sciences.” – wrote Lev Gumilev in his “Autonekrolog”.

In his introduction to his book “From Rus to Russia” he says: “The basic idea (of the theory) is as follows: ethnicity differs from society and social structure in that it exists in parallel society , regardless of those formations which it is experiencing and only correlated with them, interact in certain cases .

Cause of the formation of ethnic group, I think the special biochemical energy fluctuation of living matter, open by Vernadsky (Vladimir Vernadsky Russian academician known for his teachings on the Earth's biosphere and noosphere), and further entropy process, i.e the process of damping shock from the environment . Each thrust must sooner or later die out .….. This energy of the living matter of the biosphere is known to all, seen by all, although I noted its importance first , and I did it, meditating in prison on the problems of history. I found that some people have a greater or lesser extent, there is a craving for sacrifice, craving for fidelity to their ideals (under ideal I understand far forecast). These people are to a greater or lesser extent, are working towards more important values than personal happiness and personal life. I called these people passionaries and the quality is what I called passionarity.”

To explain the genesis and evolution of new ethnic groups Lev Gumilev used the concept of “passionarity”, meaning the level of activity to expand typical for an ethnic group, and especially for their leaders, at the given moment of time. According to him every ethnic group passes through the same stages of birth, development, climax, inertia, convolution, and memorial. It is during the “acmatic” phases, when the national passionarity reaches its maximum heat, that the great conquests are made.

“Thus the historical process seems to me not as a straight line, but in the form of a bundle of colored threads interwoven . They interact with each other in various ways . Sometimes they are are complimentary , i.e sympathetic to each other , sometimes , on the contrary , this sympathy is excluded, sometimes it goes neutral.”

Gumilev regarded Russians as a “super-ethnos” which is kindred to the native tribes and nations of the Eurasian steppe. Those periods when Russia has been said to conflict with the steppe peoples of Turkic origin, 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. Unsurprisingly, Gumilev's teachings have enjoyed immense popularity in Russia and Central Asian countries but were rarely translated into English or other European languages.

“The fact that I added to this (Theory of Ethnogenesis) a geographical point - a hard link with the landscape of the human collective, i.e. notion of “Homeland”, and over time, a notion of “Fatherland”. It's like two parameters that crossing over, give the desired point, the focus, characterizing ethnicity. As for our present (he was writing this article in 1988), I would say that, in my conception, the advantage of passionate tension on the side of the Soviet Union and its member fraternal peoples who created a system with respect to Western Europe is young, and therefore have more opportunities to stand in that struggle from time to time from the XIII century occurred and apparently will continue to arise…

Beyond that it was written by me is the sequel of my readers want, which consists of two parts: “Millennium around the Caspian Sea”, which explains the origins of the unity and friendship of the peoples of ancient, now inhabiting the territory of the Soviet Union, and “Ancient Rus and the Great Steppe”, which shows the that in ancient times the territory of the Soviet Union (i.e. Homeland) and traditions that then existed (i.e. homeland) have the same meaning as now, and represented a single integrity...” wrote Lev Gumilev in his article "Autonecrolog" in 1988.

Translated and adapted from http://levgumilev.spbu.ru/biotory