At the end of August, much was heard about Alexandr Dugin. This was basically because of the death of his daughter. Daria Dugin was assassinated near Moscow when the car in which she was travelling was blown up on the highway. Neither perpetrators and masterminds have yet to be found and the matter remains the source of much speculation.

She was a commentator in the Russian media and she was an activist in the cause of the Russian war against Ukraine. Her father is better known as the chief propagandist of the Putin regime.

Alexandr Dugin is a theorist of Neo-Eurasianism a concept according to which Russia is not only by western standards a separate country but a separate civilisation- Eurasia. It’s not an original idea as the ‘neo’ prefix stresses. Dugin can be regarded as a poor imitator of a movement that arose in the twenties of the twentieth century.

The son of Akhmatova and the Mongols

It was in the White Russian émigré circles that an educated group formulated a critical attitude to the Soviet Union and crystalised their Eurasian programme. They concluded that the Soviet Union was nothing else but a latter-day iteration of the Russian empire, being in their opinion the heir of the Golden Horde, descendants of the Mongol invaders. They were convinced that Russian identity is resistant to all that comes from the West. They predicted that the USSR would gradually get rid of all European doctrines that originated there notably communism. By the same token, they would evolve towards a native political culture of Eurasia (which in some part has actually come about).     SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE 
  We could say that Dugin would not have existed without these people. But also for this accolade there is Lev Gumilyov, who advocated despite his difficulties, the ideology of Eurasianism, even in the USSR itself. Gumilyov was a historian and on October 14 celebrated the 110th anniversary of his birth. He was a remarkable character.

We can’t forget who his parents were. His father Nikolai Gumilyov was a poet, condemned in 1921 by the Bolsheviks on the basis of doctored evidence, od anti-Soviet conspiracy. He was sentenced to the firing squad. Hi mother was the famous poet Anna Akhmatova. She was the champion of the lyric form and was dubbed the Sappho of Russian literature.

Lev Gumilyov had a rocky early life. In his youth he had already been arrested four times. Twice he was imprisoned in the Gulag, accused of anti-Soviet activities. He was also the son of a designated enemy of the people, which made things even worse.

His dramatic travels ended together with that of Stalinism. He was freed in 1956 and fully rehabilitated only on 1975. He died after the fall of the USSR in 1992.

From the second half of the 1950s, he corresponded with fellow eurasianists outside the USSR, including the geographer Piotr Sawicki, and the historian George Vernadsky. In their wide field of interests they encompassed the history of the nomadic, steppe peoples of Central Asia.

In his research, (published in Polish by the Polish PIW the National Publishing Institute) he wanted to prove that the Mongols in the 13th century after conquering Ruthenian lands, were definitely not wild and backward barbarians, the trope that dominated in Russian historiography. He argued that they reached the same level of development, ‘ethnogenesis’, at the time that the devastating and rapacious Germanic tribes found themselves in Europe in the second half of the first millennium.

In this version the Golden Horde is portrayed as the ally of the Ruthenian princedoms, that were threatened by the encroachment of Catholic states. Gumilyov respected Alexander Nevsky for this reason. The prince of Novgorod saw the West as a greater threat than the one posed by the Mongols. He allied with them (thus becoming dependent on them as a result) to strengthen his position against the Germans from Livonia (against the Livonian order) and the Swedes.

On their conquered lands , the Mongols demanded political subordination and nothing else. They were not interested in theological affairs and allowed a measure of religious pluralism. In opposition to Catholic countries, they did not lead any missionary activities. For Alexander, who wanted to preserve orthodoxy on Ruthenian lands, this was equally as important.

Gumilyov did not maintain that Genghis Khan’s descendants were doves of peace by comparison. He thought that the relationship for the Ruthenian princes with the Golden Horde was complex. Periods of co-operation coupled with those of conflict. But according to him, the balance convinced the Russians that they should condescend to the Mongols. It was with them, as with other ethnic groups of the Great Steppe, rather than with the Europeans that they shared a common civilisation. It was not by accident that Gumilyov became the patron of the Eurasian National University established in 1996 in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan.

But there are elements in the historian’s work that are at best questionable. Gumilyov ascertains that ‘biospheric energy’ influences world history. He advocated a specific kind of geographic determinism. He coined the term ‘passionarism’, as the driving force behind remarkable individuals such as Alexander the Great, Jan Hus or Napoleon Bonaparte. These could shape world events, which could threaten and indeed which threatened those individuals and the very societies they commanded.

Colonial superiority complex

Is Alexandr Dugin Lev Gumilyov’s intellectual heir? He also reached for these esoteric philosophical undercurrents. Well, only superficially.

Gumilyov, as opposed to Dugin did not involve himself in politics, it must be stressed. He was oppressed by the system to boot. Soviet officials started to think about an alternative to the moribund communist ideology in the 1980s. Neo-Eurasianism thus appeared and perhaps it was a project dreamt of in the Lubyanka office itself. Dugin is realising this work. He praises Josef Stalin as a politician who placed the interests of Russia above realising a communist utopia.

Gumilyov underlined the antagonism civilisational, that divided the Mongols from the Chinese. Dugin is a supporter of an alliance between Russia and the Chinese People’s Republic. It is possible to multiply the differences.

But let’s move on to another question. If the peoples of the Great Steppe and Russia are indeed connected by historical experience and civilisational examples (we can agree) does this mean that a symbiosis will result?

Not really. This is borne out by the fact that Gumilyov disagreed with the Russian Eurocentric superiority complex regarding the ethnic groups of the Central Asia.

We are confronted with a paradox, relevant to this day. This is that the Russians who belong to the other peoples of the Great Steppe (at least under some circumstances) belong to a civilisation that exhibits a colonial mentality towards them.

This is best illustrated by the Russian feature film from 2010 The Stoker directed by Aleksei Balabanov. It is set in contemporary Russia. The hero Is Ivan Skryabin, an Afghan war veteran and a Yakut. He works as a stoker in a boiler house. His former comrades, Russians, are paid killers who bring corpses of their victims to him so that he can cover their tracks in the furnace. They are very patronising of Skryabin. But they do not show respect. They are even ready to eliminate his daughter.

The current sign of Russian colonialism is the ethnic composition of the soldiers sent against Ukraine. Their cannon fodder consist of Buryats, Kalmyks and Tuvans. This has provoked a reaction from the president of Mongolia, Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj who called in solidarity for others not to shoot at Ukrainians (Wojciech Stanisławski wrote about this in Tygodnik TVP.)

It is evident that today the heritage of the Golden Horde is supporting centrifugal forces in Russia. Any talk about a Eurasian community cannot overcome this fact. There is just one more question; just how would Lev Gumilyov comment?

–Filip Memches

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists

  –Translated by Jan Darasz