Lev Gumilev and the European New Right

Abstract

The striking affinities that have developed between radical-conservative movements in Western Europe and Russia since the end of the Cold War have been widely noted. This essay considers these affinities through the example of the Soviet historian and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912–1992). It argues that Gumilev and the European New Right developed perspectives that were highly comparable, founded on similar principles, and articulated through similar images and allusions. Yet despite the powerful resonances in terms of basic concepts and theoretical orientation, there were nonetheless deep differences in terms of the conclusions regarding the practical implications for their respective societies that Gumilev and the Europeans deduced from these principles.

Keywords:

• Lev Gumilev
• New Right
• ethnos
• ethno-territoriality
• race
• Eurasianism

Notes

1. Long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Alexander Yanov (1978) inadvertently called attention to this European–Russian juxtaposition by referring to the then-emergent Russian nationalist movement as the “Russian New Right.”

2. For Alain de Benoist's appreciation of “mon ami” Dugin, see de Benoist (2012, 119, 244), also see O'Meara (2013b, 238, 243, 256n), and Tudor (2014, 84, 98n, 108–111).

3. The growing political synergies between the Putin regime and radical conservatism in the West is an important subject which merits a separate examination; see Shekhovtsov (2014), Orenstein (2014), Polyakova (2014), Servettaz (2014), and Harding (2014).

4. For earlier studies, see Kochanek (1998), Kochanek (1999, 216–222), Lariuel' (2006), Shnirelman (2007, 358), and Shekhovtsov (2009, 703–704).

5. For de Benoist's attempt to qualify his use of the ethnos concept, see de Benoist (2014, 159–161). Indeed, even the German term Volk, which would also seem to provide an alternative to “nation” unencumbered by any nation-state associations, does not always convey the full organic sense of the more exotic ethnos, as can be seen in the demand of one New Right ideologue in Germany for the “Weiterentwicklung des deutschen Volkes als Ethnos” rather than a nation-Gesellschaft (Böttger 2014, 10, emph. original); also see Krebs (1994).

6. For comprehensive considerations of Gumilev's thinking, see Bassin (forthcoming), Beliakov (2012), Lavrov (2000), and Pavochka (2011).

7. On the history of the sliianie concept, see Simon (1991).

8. On the resonances between essentialist conceptions of nationality in Stalinist Russia and pre-war Germany, see Tishkov (1996, 27), Slezkine (1996, 853), and Shnirelman (2005, 105).

9. In fact, there were many similarities between Bromlei's and Gumilev's conceptions of ethnos; see Bassin (forthcoming), and Ivanov (1985).

10. In the 1930s, Ilse Schwidetzky was the assistant to Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, one of the leading racial theorists in Nazi Germany. After the war, she worked in the Department of Anthropology at Mainz University, where she continued to publish actively on issues of Rassenkunde. Schwidetzky's work is widely cited in the literature of the New Right (Benthall 2002; Krebs 2012, 21, 85). For critical studies, see Billig (1981), and Moreau (1983).

11. A Nobel prize-winning scientist, Konrad Lorenz was a member of the Nazi Party from 1938 to 1945. In the 1960s, he belonged to the editorial board of the French New Right journal Nouvelle École (Lindholm and Zúquete 2010, 61, 192n).

12. Strikingly, this author characterizes this attachment using the expression le Sang et le Sol – that is, Blood and Soil (Krebs 2013).

13. Although these comments were made in the early 1980s, Gumilev had expressed himself in a similar spirit half-a-century earlier, in the 1930s; see Gerstein (2004, 230).

14. Lobashev maintained that while behavioral patterns themselves were not genetically inscribed or inherited in animal populations, and had to be taught afresh to each new generation, a certain predisposition to learning them – what he called signal'naia nasledstvennost’ – did indeed form a part of an organism's genetic inheritance (1961, 1967). Lobashev's ideas were fundamental for Gumilev, who explained the cross-generational transfer of the ethnic “behavioral stereotype” as an example of signal'naia nasledstvennost’. It is extremely interesting to note that Alain de Benoist made the same argument at roughly the same time as Gumilev: “L'homme ne nait pas avec une culture (l'idée d'une culture surgissant tout armée des chromosomes est un fantasme raciste), mais avec la faculté d'assimiler une culture” (de Benoist 1979, 93–94, emph. added, cited in Davis and Godneff 1981, 534). While Gumilev did not refer to Konrad Lorenz in his writings and was not necessarily aware of his work, the strong resonances between them are noted in Onoprienko (2013) and Dugin (2002).

15. For a somewhat different geographical arrangement of the same ethnic groups, see Gumilev (2001, 292).

16. During the Nazi period, the Schicksalsgemeinschaft concept was used primarily in reference to an individual ethnos. See Jackson (2006, 464) and Wolin (2004, 140–141).

17. The author of this particular project is Guillaume Faye (Bar-On 2013b, 187–200; O'Meara 2013a, 61 (quote), 2013b, 235–244).

18. See the charts in Gumilev (2001, 33, 35).

19. Gumilev referred frequently to Spengler (his widow remarked that he had even fancied himself a sort of “Russian Spengler” (2003,18)), but in fact he had more in common with the Russian tradition of civilizational discourse, in particular as developed by Nikolai Danilevskii, Konstantin Leont'ev, and especially Nikolai Trubetskoi (Gumilev 1989b, 28, 69, 121, 131,147,149, 244, 358n, 1989c, 30, 1990a; Beliakov 2012, 144–146ff; Shitikhin 2012). Gumilev wrote an introductory essay to a major post-Soviet collection of Trubetskoi's writings (1995).

20. Also see the article on Gumilev at the Metapedia website: Gumilev (n.d.). Metapedia is the New-Right version of Wikipedia.

21. All of the quotations in this paragraph are from Andersen (2010).

22. On the revolutionary dimension of the New Right, see Lindholm and Zúquete (2010, 52).

23. He was not consistent on the point, however, and elsewhere dismissed the idea of reservations in the Soviet Union (Gumilev 1989a; Gumilev and Okladnikov 1982).

24. Gumilev's divergent views on Europe are noted by at least some New Right ideologues: see the discussion in Steuckers (2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (Stockholm) as part of the project “The Vision of Eurasia.”