Lev Gumilev’s Naturalistic Conservatism. (Essays on the Conservative Thought in the USSR)

Abstract

The paper examines the views of the ethnologist, historian and philosopher Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev (1912–1992), the creator of the theory of ethnogenesis and the theory of passionarity. The scientist’s dramatic life journey, his political opinions and scientific concepts are discussed here. The paper also reconstructs Lev Gumilev’s political views based on biographers’ studies, memoirs about Lev Gumilev and his poems that were unpublished during his life. This entire process shows that from his very youth to the last days the scientist was a secret anti-Soviet, anti-communist, monarchist and Orthodox Christian, anti-Westerner and antidemocrat. The paper reveals how these views of his are connected with the theories of ethnogenesis and passionarity. The perception of the history of mankind as the development of ethnic groups excludes progressism and liberalism, since under this concept the history of mankind would cease to be perceived as a universal process involving traditional and modernist stages. At the same time, the doctrine of “fostering landscapes” created by Lev Gumilev suggests that every nation has its own system of values and standards of behavior, and their mechanical borrowing is impossible. It was from this point that Lev Gumilev drew his conclusions of anti-Western and Slavophile/Eurasian nature: Russia should not imitate Europe. It should follow its own way. However, the doctrine of the Slavic-Turkic symbiosis as the foundation of Russian civilization turned out to be a distinction between him and the Slavophiles. In addition, the liberal democracy of the Western type was seen by Lev Gumilev not as a universal value, but as a set of behavioral patterns and stereotypes in views typical only of the peoples of Western civilization. Finally, the scientist repeatedly emphasized the most important role of Orthodoxy in forming the Russian ethnicity. So, Lev Gumilev was a conservative thinker. His conservatism, however, was a kind of naturalistic, cosmic conservatism, akin to the teachings of Plato, Konstantin Leontiev and Oswald Spengler.