In memory of L. N. Gumilyov
L. N. Gumilyov
About one myth and the twilight time
In the series of articles dedicated to the Ulus of Jochi, which was started by the material The Golden Horde on the Path to Traditional Islam: From Batu to BerkeL. N. Gumilev was mentioned more than once.
His name is associated with the unconfirmed myth of the fraternization of Alexander Nevsky and Batu's son Sartak, which was analyzed during Leo Nikolayevich's lifetime, for example, by the outstanding medievalist V. A. Kuchkin in his work "Rus' under the yoke: how was it?"
Nevertheless, in the 1990s, the myth became firmly established in journalism, which is not surprising. It was a twilight time in the field of humanities knowledge, when stories Everyone and anyone began to write, and television and non-scientific publications with a large audience opened their doors to them.
Yes, I don't argue: sometimes criticism of dogmatic assessments, for example, of revolutionary events and the Civil War, was justified. Unfortunately, the researchers were too overwhelmed by the ideological cliches cemented in Marxist historical materialism.
However, if its founding fathers had read some of the works of Soviet historians or philosophers, I think they would not have been delighted.
As an example, I will cite the title of G. Z. Ioffe’s monograph “The Collapse of the Russian Monarchist Counter-Revolution,” dedicated to the defeat of A. V. Kolchak.
I remember reading it in the 1990s, as a student, and being struck by the title: the actual steps taken by the admiral in his position as Supreme Ruler were least of all correlated with the restoration of autocracy, as were, incidentally, those of Lieutenant Generals A. I. Denikin and Baron P. N. Wrangel.
All of them were Februaryists to varying degrees, but certainly not monarchists, especially the first two. Thus, A. V. Kolchak, upon arriving in revolutionary Petrograd, first paid a visit to the elder Russian Marxist, G. V. Plekhanov, of which Plekhanov left behind recollections not without a mixture of irony and respect for the admiral.
And this despite the fact that Genrikh Zinovievich was a highly skilled historian. But, I repeat, the ideological cliches that dominated researchers, especially those specializing in the modern period of Russia's past, did their job, giving rise to the scathing remark: "Historians lie."
Unfortunately, this cleared the way for all sorts of freaks who suddenly took up work in the field of history and began to “expose” the professionals.
However, amateurs did not limit themselves to the 20th century and delved into an earlier period, less susceptible to ideological taint.
Stunned by their influx on the pages of printed publications and television programs, scientists just clutched their heads. They responded.
But who read their books and articles, published in tiny print runs and often written in a dry, academic style, difficult for an unprepared audience to grasp, preferring to devour Fomenko and Nosovsky, Solonin and Rezun, Muldashev and Bushkov, Zadornov, and other pseudo-historical literature? Alas, they still do. I encounter them.
Should L. N. Gumilev be included in the aforementioned anti-scientific ranks of dilettantes who, especially Fomenko and Nosovsky, filled the shelves of prestigious bookstores with their output? In my view, no.
A man of complex and even tragic destiny, a superbly educated scholar, he was not a follower of folk history, although he certainly made some mistakes and, perhaps unwittingly, confused his readers. The myth of fraternization is a striking example.
But at the same time, L. N. Gumilyov invited us to take a fresh look at the format of Russian-Horde relations, to rethink them from a different angle.
In some ways, this was justified. For example, the term "yoke," introduced into historiography by N. M. Karamzin, was questioned not only by Lev Nikolayevich but continues to spark debate in the scholarly community.
True, the historian's interpretation of the relationship between Rus' and the Horde—primarily Batu and Alexander Nevsky—swung the pendulum in the other direction—not a yoke, but an alliance, which drew justified criticism from his colleagues.
But does this give reason to deny the scientific value of everything that came from Lev Nikolayevich's pen? In my opinion, no.
Emotional but outstanding
Thus, another Russian medievalist, I. Ya. Froyanov, criticizing L. N. Gumilev for a number of unfounded assessments and conclusions, nevertheless wrote:
There was an element of emotionality in the constructions of this undoubtedly outstanding scientist.
Let me note that Igor Yakovlevich himself was an outstanding scientist.
Although some scholars assessed Leo Tolstoy’s legacy from a negative perspective:
"Gumilyov," write researchers V. A. Shnirelman and S. A. Panarin, "became the prophet of amateurs and half-educated xenophobes, obsessed with the furious desire to bless humanity with new versions of world history. It's unlikely he himself aspired to this. But the fact remains: Gumilyov essentially paved the way for the burgeoning of various creators of pseudo-historical nonsense (like Anatoly Fomenko, Murad Adzhi, and their ilk) and the necessary audience for their products."
A harsh and, in some ways, cruel assessment: after all, it was not L. N. Gumilev who gave birth to the aforementioned pseudo-scientists, and calling him a “prophet of amateurs” is an exaggeration.
Moreover, criticism of Lev Nikolaevich, which for a time became mainstream in the scientific community, was sometimes biased and went beyond the scope of scientific discussions, as is well described in the work of A. V. Bondarev and A. S. Saraev, “Problems of Perception of the Scientific Heritage of L. N. Gumilyov: Critics and Skeptics.”
I won't rehash it—the material is publicly available. I'll just note that Lev Nikolayevich's contemporaries partly repeated the theses of their predecessors. And their criticism was motivated not only, and sometimes not so much, by scientific arguments as by the complex nature of L. N. Gumilyov's internal relationships with his colleagues.
The future historian with his parents: Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova
It seems to me that V. A. Shnirelman and S. A. Panarin are more correct when they write:
In modern Russian historiography, L. N. Gumilyov is perhaps the most popular and at the same time perhaps the most controversial figure.
It is precisely contradictory, and not unequivocally negative from the point of view of its contribution to the development of science.
My article is a tribute to Leo Tolstoy, not an analysis of his view of Medieval Rus' history. Therefore, I will allow myself to cite only a couple of examples that highlight the need for a reasoned, scholarly analysis of the historian's conclusions, rather than dismissing them outright.
For example, L. N. Gumilyov wrote the following about the events of December 1237:
Part of the army, led by Khan Batu (Batu), approached the borders of the Ryazan Principality. The Ryazan princes, like those of Suzdal and Vladimir, had not participated in the Battle of the Kalka River, and therefore Batu had no intention of fighting them. However, the army's further advance required a constant supply of horses and provisions. Batu sent envoys to Ryazan, seeking food and horses from the Ryazan princes. The Ryazan princes, without bothering to find out who they were dealing with, said, "Kill us, and everything will be yours." And so it happened.
With these arguments, Lev Nikolayevich raised an interesting question: did the princes understand who was in front of them, and did they all clearly think the same way as the Ryazan people, expressing their readiness to openly resist Batu's army?
The answer to this question is debatable.
Modern historians, writes medievalist A. V. Mayorov, are unanimous in their belief that the peace terms offered by the Tatar ambassadors to Prince Yuri Vsevolodich should have been the same as those they offered to the Ryazan people and, in general, to everyone they wanted to subjugate: tribute and submission. Prince Yuri's "gifts" to the Tatars ("The Tatars were sent away with gifts"), according to Prokhorov (a Soviet historian and specialist in chronicles – I.Kh.), were precisely the demanded tribute.
A. V. Mayorov explains the prince’s behavior as follows:
One way or another, the Vladimir-Suzdal prince seems to have done everything possible to avoid direct military clashes with the Tatars.
Or take the issue of Batu's army's size. To this day, the mainstream narrative is full of fantastic figures—100 and up. And it was L. N. Gumilev who first introduced a wider audience to the actual numbers of the Mongols who invaded Rus', a point rightly noted by A. V. Bondarev and A. S. Saraev, scholars of Leo Tolstoy's scholarly legacy:
According to his estimates, Batu's army consisted of no more than 30–40 thousand people, which is substantiated by objective demographic data.
For my part, I'd like to point out that this isn't even a matter of demographics: in the realities of the Middle Ages, no one could have commanded a larger army. The Russian Tsardom only surpassed the 100,000-man threshold during the campaigns of the 17th century.
In an earlier period, such an army would have become not so much a force as a problem for its command, associated with foraging, logistics, interaction on the battlefield, etc.
Moreover, the army size indicated by Leo Tolstoy was unlikely to have been assembled in a single location during the battles of the Western Campaign. This was, for example, noted by the Hungarian Dominican monk Julian:
Now, standing on the borders of Rus', we learned the true story: the entire army marching to the western lands was divided into four parts. One part, at the Etil River on the borders of Rus', approached Suzdal from the eastern edge. The other part, heading south, was already attacking the borders of Ryazan.
L.N. Gumilev also gave reason to rethink the format of Batu's relationship with Alexander Nevsky. Thus, A.V. Bondarev and A.S. Saraev cite the renowned historian of Russian foreign policy, A.N. Sakharov, as an example:
In a brief overview of the foreign policy of Rus' before the 15th century (A. N. Sakharov - I. Kh.) he casts a positive light on the meeting between Alexander Nevsky and Batu, saying that “both rulers apparently liked each other,” mutual understanding was established between them, and, as a result, both “derived only benefit from this union in the political realities of that time - both for the Russian lands and for the Horde.
Another important detail that the aforementioned researchers drew attention to:
Some opponents, without mentioning Gumilev by name, nonetheless express remarkably similar thoughts. For example, the contemporary Golden Horde scholar R. Yu. Pochekaev (incidentally, a highly respected scholar whom I have frequently cited; I recommend his remarkable book, "Batu: The Khan Who Was Not a Khan," to readers—I.Kh.), who is critical of Gumilev, effectively supports his periodization of the yoke: "I would most reasonably date the establishment of the yoke to the reign of Uzbek." It should be noted that Pochekaev's other conclusions are also largely consistent, although references to his works are absent.
And here's another thing I'd like to mention: while professionals were skeptical of this unconventional author's constructs, we, students at the Historical and Archival Institute, at least some of us, devoured his books in the 1990s. Lev Nikolayevich certainly knew how to instill a love of history.
I remember that a considerable number of us, at the first session, if my memory serves me right, chose “From Rus to Russia” as the monograph to defend.
I'm afraid I'm mistaken, but the teachers who administered the exam were not thrilled with our perhaps somewhat rebellious choice.
From the vantage point of my own life, I understand them well: numerous fundamental scholarly monographs have been devoted to the Russian Middle Ages since the Soviet era. But L. N. Gumilev was a brilliant writer, including in his style of presentation, and his concept of ethnogenesis, which attracted attention against the backdrop of the formational approach, which was in crisis, also sparked discussion. The term "passionarity," which had only recently become unfamiliar and suddenly entered common usage, fascinated, at least some students.
Back then, we considered the Marxist view of history as a class struggle outdated. The alternative, along with Gumilev's concept, was the phenomenological approach formulated by the philosopher E. Husserl, whose adherent the author of these lines would later become for a time.
However, phenomenology found greater resonance in the scientific community. Gumilev's concept gained popularity in wider public circles.
I remember one of the instructors, during lectures on the development of Muscovite Rus', mentioned Leo Tolstoy, agreeing with him on some points and disagreeing with him on others. But no one else was mentioned at the Historical Archives Department.
I can't help but mention that already in our senior years, our students' attention was captured by innovative, but more scholarly, works, such as A. L. Yurganov's "Categories of Russian Medieval Culture." At the same time, in the late 1990s, I. N. Danilevsky's controversial work, "Ancient Rus' through the Eyes of Contemporaries and Descendants: 9th–11th Centuries," was published.
And I think by the early 2000s, the popularity of L. N. Gumilev's ideas within humanities faculties and universities began to wane. After all, the emotionality of Lev Nikolayevich, mentioned by I. Ya. Froyanov, made his works popular in society, but did not add to their scholarly weight.
About "techies" and ideologists
It's noteworthy that Lev Nikolayevich retained his position longer among "techies," or, more broadly, among his fellow citizens with a mathematical mindset and an interest in history. Incidentally, some of them retrained as historians—high-class professionals. Such, for example, is the leading Russian specialist in the history of the Civil War in general and the White Movement in particular, A.S. Kruchinin, who graduated from MEPhI with an engineering degree.
Why did Lev Nikolayevich’s concept resonate with techies?
"Gumilyov," write V. A. Shnirelman and S. A. Panarin, "appealed not to quotations from the classics (although, when it was convenient and advantageous for him, he could easily cite Marx) or to some intangible 'social relations' or abstract 'productive forces,' but to the 'laws of nature.'" By this alone, he won the hearts of thousands of techies who were never inwardly satisfied with the dialectical casuistry of established Soviet philosophers and who involuntarily sought in history the same coherent, convincing cause-and-effect relationships they encountered in the world of things, technology, and natural processes.
Unfortunately, L. N. Gumilev's name was also used by ideologists, including those with dubious public reputations—A. G. Dugin, for example. This did not add weight to Gumilev's concept of ethnogenesis in the scientific community; quite the contrary, in fact.
Is Lev Nikolayevich himself to blame for this? In my view, no. I wrote above that K. Marx and F. Engels would hardly have been delighted with the interpretation of their teachings by their 20th-century followers. I think the same is true of L. N. Gumilev.
However, discussions in the scientific community and debates in student audiences were provoked not only by Gumilev’s innovative judgments regarding the relationship between Rus' and the Horde, but also by the book “In Search of an Imaginary Kingdom,” published in 1970, which found a second wind at the end of the last century.
Monument to L. N. Gumilyov in Kazan
Its pages were the first to inform a wider audience about the spread of Christianity in the Far East. Leo Tolstoy characterized it as steppe Byzantium.
The book prompted me to recall L. N. Gumilyov on the pages of the Military Review, as it became one of the foundations of my interest in the Mongol Empire and, above all, the Golden Horde.
This is the merit of this thinker, cultural scientist, historian, and publicist to science: he drew attention to a layer of culture that was little studied in the USSR, inspiring some of the then students of history departments to study Far Eastern Nestorianism.
And here I agree with A. V. Bondarev and A. S. Saraev:
L. N. Gumilev was one of the first to speak of the distinctiveness and high achievements of Turkic-Mongol culture. He made an undeniable contribution to refuting the so-called "black legend," which justified the biased negative view of the Eurasian steppe peoples as pathologically cruel, barbarian savages, obsessively seeking to destroy benevolent, highly developed civilizations. It was largely thanks to Gumilev's work that the "blank spots" in the history of Eurasian peoples over a period of nearly two millennia (primarily from the 3rd century BC to the 15th century) were filled.
As for the concept of passionarity developed by Lev Nikolaevich, it has the same right to exist as any speculative theory, such as the formational one.
To read or not to read?
Would I recommend his books? I'll answer this way: the once popular "From Rus' to Russia" and "Ancient Rus' and the Great Steppe" are now outdated in scholarly terms, although they retain their cultural significance, like the works of N. M. Karamzin, for example.
For my esteemed readers interested in the Russian Middle Ages, I recommend A. A. Gorsky, one of today's leading medievalists, who has been cited repeatedly in my articles, particularly his work "The Russian Middle Ages: Traditional Views and Source Data." Its pages present in popular form what the researcher previously wrote in monographs and scholarly articles.
Since our publication is primarily devoted to military topics, I also recommend one of A. A. Gorsky's early works, "The Old Russian Druzhina (On the History of the Genesis of Class Society and the State in Rus')," published in the USSR but still relevant. It is, if not the best, then one of the best written about the Russian military corporation of the pre-Mongol period.
And what about Lev Nikolaevich? I'm afraid of incurring the wrath of orientalists, but I'll risk recommending his "Hunnu," "In Search of an Imaginary Kingdom," and "Ancient Turks: The History of the Formation and Rise of the Great Turkic Khaganate (6th–8th Centuries AD)."
And, of course, I am grateful to Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov for his books, which gave me abundant food for thought during my student years and inspired me to follow the path I had once chosen as a historian.
References
Vakhit R. R., Rodionova A. E. Naturalistic conservatism of L. N. Gumilev. (Essays on conservative thought in the USSR) // Orthodoxy. - 2023. - No. 1. - P. 10 - 31
Gumilyov from Rus to Russia: Essays on Ethnic History / Lev Gumilyov. – Moscow: IRIS-press, 2016
Kuchkin V. A. Rus' under the yoke: how was it? / V. A. Kuchkin - M.: Panorama, 1991
Mayorov A. V. Mongol-Tatars and princes of North-Eastern Rus'
Froyanov I. Ya. On rewriting the history of relations between Rus' and the Horde // Bulletin of St. Petersburg University. History. 2018. Vol. 63. Issue 1. Pp. 196–222
Shnirelman V. A. Panarin S. A. Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov: founder of ethnology?
Bondarev A. V., Saraev A. S. Russian-Horde relations in the concept of L. N. Gumilyov and the interpretation of his critics // XIII Faizkhanov readings. The legacy of the Golden Horde in the statehood and cultural traditions of the peoples of Eurasia: materials of the international scientific and practical conference. St. Petersburg, May 4–6, 2016 / [editorial board: D. V. Mukhetdinov (chairman), V. V. Tishin (editor-in-chief), et al.]. – M.: OOO Izdatelsky Dom Medina, 2017/ C/ 66–90
Information