…Lev Gumilev, who corresponded with Savitsky, developed Eurasianist ideas in imaginative and at times ridiculous ways. The son of two great poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev boasted a pedigree that commanded attention. In a country where literature enjoyed immense prestige, the persecution of his parents—his father was shot and his mother became the target of nationwide denunciation—only added to Gumilev’s inherited charisma, enhanced still more by two terms in the Gulag. (One “for papa” and one “for mama”, he liked to say.) Born in 1912, Gumilev became a specialist in the Mongols, Turks, and other peoples of Central Asia. His engagingly written books, some of which could be published only during glasnost, challenged traditional accounts of Russian history and developed his own form of ethnology, which he called a new hard science…His theories represent a fantastic excursion into pseudoscience, which thrives in Russia even among serious scholars and scientists.
…As Mark Bassin points out in his illuminating book The Gumilev Mystique, it would be hard to overstate Gumilev’s influence. He eventually enjoyed support at high levels of the Communist Party, the General Staff of the Armed Forces, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1995 the State Duma awarded one of his books on Russian history a prestigious prize. Approved by the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation as a high school textbook, it was reissued in a print run of 100,000. Gumilev’s celebration of Central Asian peoples also made him a hero of Kazakhstan’s former autocratic president Nursultan Nazarbaev. In the Kazakh capital, Astana, students attend Gumilev Eurasian National University. On the hundredth anniversary of Gumilev’s birth, Nazarbaev named a mountain for him (Gumilev Peak). In Russia, Gumilev’s ideas penetrate everywhere, and his central terms—“passionarity”, “complementary”, “chimaera”, and others—have entered common usage.
…In Gumilev’s view, an ethnic group, which he calls an “ethnos” (“ethnoi” in the plural), is not a social but a biological phenomenon, analogous to a herd or flock among animals. Developing according to biochemical laws, an ethnos constitutes “a biophysical reality…. Ethnic belonging, which manifests itself in the human consciousness, is not a product of…consciousness.”…Gumilev reasoned that ethnogenesis (the formation of ethnoi) requires enormous
work (in the physical sense)…. And to do that work, energy is needed, very ordinary energy measurable in kilogram-meters or calories…. Let me explain. The stone blocks at the top of a pyramid were not raised by [conscious] ethnic self-awareness but by the muscle power of Egyptian workers on the principle of heave-ho!
That energy must come from somewhere. It cannot come from the consciousness of individuals or their immediate surroundings; such a view, according to Gumilev, “infringes the law of the conservation of energy.” It followed for him that the energy must come from outer space. Otherwise, “entropy…would have smoothed out all ethnic differences and converted the diversity of the human race into a featureless anthroposphere.” The earth receives “more energy from outer space than is needed to maintain equilibrium of the biosphere”, and it is that surplus energy on which ethnogenesis draws.
The process works like this: during some periods of the solar cycle, “the defensive qualities of the ionosphere are reduced, allowing individual quants or bundles of energy to approach near to the earth’s surface.” This energy causes genetic mutations, giving rise to a few people endowed with great “passionarity.” People with passionarity display the ability to absorb large amounts of energy from their surroundings. As lemmings or swarms of locusts sometimes expend great energy in self-destruction, so “passionaries” overcome the survival instinct. They take risks to accomplish great deeds for no reason except to accomplish them. Why did Alexander the Great and his army march all the way to India when they could not hope to bring their booty home to Macedonia? They must have done so out of passionarity. Gumilev regarded passionarity as his greatest discovery, since it explains what no social theory ever could. Heroism, self-sacrifice, supreme devotion to an ideal regardless of the consequence to oneself, loved ones, or friends: these actions, which shape the world in lasting ways, cannot be explained by rational, social-scientific theories because they are not rational, and their origin is biological rather than social.
Using “induction”, passionaries attract others, who attract still others, until an ethnic group forms. Anyone, regardless of race, may be drawn to a passionary, and so ethnoi are rarely homogeneous in origin…Entropy, Gumilev claims, ensures that passionary energy diminishes at a mathematically calculable rate. That is why all ethnoi pass through a series of precisely defined stages until, after about 1,500 years, they become mere “relicts”, as happened to the ancient Khazars of Central Asia and the Yakuts of Siberia…Groups well adapted to each other enjoy “complementarity.” That, Gumilev says, is emphatically the case with Russians and other steppe peoples.
…If ethnoi are biological phenomena, then it is essential to maintain their gene pool, and so exogamy must be avoided. Sometimes crossbreeding creates a new ethnos, but usually it deforms or destroys an existing one. “But it never happens without a trace”, Gumilev writes. “That is why neglect of ethnology, be it on the scale of state or country, tribal union, or monogamous family, must be qualified as irresponsibility, criminal in regard to the offspring.”
…Whether Jewish or not, chimeric intruders typically reject the material world, as the various gnostic groups—including Manichaeans, Zoroastrian Mazdaists, and Albigensians—have done. Embracing “vampire concepts that embody a deep and diabolical sense of purpose”, they subscribe to a life-denying worldview detached from the soil, fetishize the written word, adopt lies on principle, and maintain a different morality for themselves than for outsiders.