Ab Imperio, 1/2013

Martin BEISSWENGER

WAS LEV GUMILEV A “EURASIANIST?”

A NEW LOOK AT HIS POSTWAR CONTACTS WITH
PETR SAVITSKII*

Within the context of post-Soviet nationalist and neoimperialist ide-

ologies, the question of whether the Soviet historian, geographer, and
ethnologist Lev Gumilev (1912–1992) was a “Eurasianist” has acquired
considerable political signiicance. As Mark Bassin has recently pointed
out, the term “Eurasianism” “has emerged as one of the most popular key-
words available in the volatile ideological arsenal of post-Soviet politics.”
Lack of a sharp deinition and the fact that so-called “classical” émigré
Eurasianism of the 1920s and 1930s was “itself a profoundly heterogeneous
and ideologically fragmented movement,” made it “simply impossible to
reduce Eurasianism in any meaningful way to a common set of doctrinal
denominators.” Only two elements appear to be common to all versions of
Eurasianism: “a unique synthesis of European and Asian principles” and,
with respect to present-day variations, the claim to be “the legitimate heir
of the ‘classical’ legacy.”1
*
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of Ab Imperio, Sergey Glebov, and
Ludmila Novikova for their helpful comments on my article.
1
Mark Bassin. Eurasianism “Classical” and “Neo” // Tetsuo Mochizuki (Ed.). Beyond
the Empire: Images of Russia in the Eurasian Cultural Context. Sapporo, 2008. Pp. 279
and 281.
85
Martin Beisswenger, Was Lev Gumilev a “Eurasianist?”
The claims of some post-Soviet Eurasianists to be legitimate heirs of the
“classical” Eurasianist tradition are relatively easy to challenge. For instance,
the ideas of Aleksandr Dugin, who alongside Lev Gumilev was the most
prominent Russian neo-Eurasianist, differ in essential aspects from those
of the interwar Eurasianists. As several scholars have pointed out, Dugin’s
ideas initially emerged within the context and under the inluence of Western
European and in particular French neofascist thought of the nouvelle droite
and only later, after Eurasianist ideas in post-Soviet Russia became popular,
were labeled “Eurasianist.”2
With the ideas of Lev Gumilev, however, the issue appears more
complicated and controversial. In fact, there have been quite a number of
conlicting opinions. Gumilev himself has expressed his ideas not without
a certain ambiguity. On the one hand, he proudly accepted the title of the
“last Eurasianist” and emphasized his personal contacts with two “classi-
cal” Eurasianists:
People call me a Eurasianist – and I don’t reject this. […] I care-
fully studied the works of these people. And I did more than just study
them. For instance, when I was in Prague I met and talked to [P.N.]
Savitskii, I corresponded with G. Vernadskii. I do agree with their basic
historical-methodological conclusions.3
Moreover, in the 1990s, Gumilev supported the reeditions of two classical
“Eurasianist” works. He introduced a collection of N. S. Trubetskoi’s essays
on Russian and Eurasian culture.4 And he also wrote a preface (coauthored
with his student V. Ermolaev) to E. D. Khara-Davan’s Genghis Khan and
His Heritage.5 Gumilev thus explicitly associated himself with two of the
2
Ibid. P. 283; Stefan Wiederkehr. Die Eurasische Bewegung. Wissenschaft und Politik
in der russischen Emigration der Zwischenkriegszeit und im postsowjetischen Russ-
land. Cologne, 2007; Andreas Umland. Formirovanie fashistskogo “neoevraziiskogo”
intellektual’nogo dvizheniia v Rossii. Put’ Aleksandra Dugina ot marginal’nogo eks-
tremista do vdokhnovitelia postsovetskoi akademicheskoi i politicheskoi elity // Ab
imperio. 2003. No. 3. Pp. 289-304; Marlène Laruelle. Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology
of Empire. Washington, DC, 2008. Pp. 107-144.
3
Lev Gumilev. “Menia nazyvaiut evraziitsem…” // Nash sovremennik. 1991. No. 1. P. 132.
4
L. N. Gumilev. Istoriko-ilosofskie sochineniia kniazia N. S. Trubetskogo (zametki
poslednego evraziitsa) // N. S. Trubetskoi. Istoriia. Kul’tura. Iazyk / ed. by V. M. Zhivov.
Moscow, 1995. Pp. 31-54.
5
Lev Gumilev and Viacheslav Ermolaev. O knige d-ra Erenzhen Khara-Davana “Chingiz-
Khan kak polkovodets i ego nasledie” // E. D. Khara-Davan. Chingiz-khan kak polko-
vodets i ego nasledie. Kul’turno-istoricheskii ocherk Mongol’skoi imperii XII-XIV vv.
Alma-Ata, 1992. Pp. 5-16.
86
 Ab Imperio, 1/2013
ive “most prominent members” of the Eurasianist “historical-political
school” among whom he also counted P. N. Savitskii, G. V. Vernadskii and
N. P. Toll’.6
One the other hand, Gumilev also acknowledged important differences
between his views and those of the “classical” Eurasianists. He admitted
that despite his general methodological agreement with the “classical”
Eurasianists, their method was incomplete: “They did not know the main
element of ethnogenesis – the concept of passionarity.” The Eurasianist
historian Georgii Vernadskii, Gumilev argued, could have considerably
beneited from incorporating the ideas of his father, Vladimir Ivanovich
Vernadskii, into his own scholarly work.7 Although he intensively cor-
responded with the “classical” Eurasianist Petr Savitskii and was familiar
with many “classical” Eurasianist writings, in his own works Gumilev very
rarely cited classical Eurasianist works. In his Ethnogenesis and Biosphere
of the Earth, Gumilev’s magnum opus, there are only two references to
Savitskii, and even these merely mention Savitskii’s term “topogenesis”
(mestorazvitie) as a possible way of denoting the relationship between
landscape and its inhabitants.8 Whereas the lack of similar quotations in
earlier works may have been due to censorship, this hardly appears to have
been the case in the late 1980s.9
Gumilev’s ambiguity vis-à-vis Eurasianism (together with the fact that
he died soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus before he could
comment on his newly emerged “neo-Eurasianist” popularity) has allowed
for different assessments of his relationship with “classical” Eurasianism.
Some of his adherents insist that Gumilev was not only a legitimate heir
to “classical” Eurasianism, but, moreover, improved and completed its
work. Gumilev’s recent biographer Valerii Demin, for instance, claimed
that Gumilev’s work “crowns” the studies conducted earlier by the émigré
Eurasianists.10 Less explicitly, the continuity thesis has been promoted by
Sergei Lavrov, another biographer and editor of some of Gumilev’s works.11
6
Ibid. P. 6-7.
7
Gumilev. “Menia nazyvaiut evraziitsem…”. P. 132.
8
Idem. Etnogenez i biosfera zemli. 3rd ed. Leningrad, 1990.
9
Gumilev’s monograph Geograiia etnosa v istoricheskii period (Leningrad, 1990),
published without editorial interference “v avtorskoi redaktsii” does not mention Sav-
itskii at all.
10
Valerii Demin. Lev Gumilev. Moscow, 2008. P. 216.
11
Referring to Savitskii and other émigré Eurasianists, Lavrov devoted an entire chapter
to “Eurasianism’s birth and irst life”: S. B. Lavrov. Lev Gumilev: Sud’ba i idei. 3rd ed.
Moscow, 2008. Pp. 142-185.
87
Martin Beisswenger, Was Lev Gumilev a “Eurasianist?”
He characterized Gumilev’s early letters to Savitskii as those of a “shy
student to his teacher” and explained that although Gumilev initially knew
only very few Eurasianist works, he “intuitively embarked on exactly the
historical super task that the fathers of Eurasianism had formulated in the
1920s and 1930s.”12 Interestingly, the Polish scholar Ryszard Paradowski,
while critical of both the “classical” Eurasianists and their late- and post-
Soviet adherents, basically agreed with the continuity thesis.13
Other scholars have been more skeptical about Gumilev’s connection with
“classical” Eurasianism. Hildegard Kochanek pointed out that the emergence
of Gumilev’s central idea of “passionarity” coincided with the propagation
of similar ideas by the French “new right” in the early 1970s.14 Her as-
sessment has been supported by Stefan Wiederkehr, who considered such
inluence plausible, despite the lack of clear documental evidence. Overall,
Wiederkehr treats the ideas of Gumilev and of “classical” Eurasianism as
separate entities, although he found both to be characterized by a “histori-
cist structure,” that is, both claimed to have grasped the “regularities of the
course of world history” that would enable them to predict the future.15 The
most comprehensive and convincing critique of Gumilev’s claims to be the
“last Eurasianist” has been provided by Marlène Laruelle. In her examina-
tion of the contacts between Savitskii and Gumilev, she called the latter’s
“Eurasianism” an “intellectual usurpation” for several reasons. First of all,
the two scholars became acquainted only after Savitskii’s return to Prague
from Soviet captivity in 1956. By then both had already independently
developed their principal ideas and were not really familiar with each oth-
ers’ works. Second, despite a common interest in the history of Eurasia’s
nomads, there were considerable conceptual differences between the ideas
of Savitskii and those of Gumilev. Whereas Gumilev’s ideas focused heavily
on natural sciences, Laruelle argued, interwar Eurasianism was irst of all a
humanistic philosophy. Furthermore, Gumilev’s racist theory of ethnogen-
esis, which built upon a biological rather than geographical determinism,
had no equivalent among the ideas of “classical” Eurasianism. In essence,
thus, Laruelle concluded, rather than being the “last Eurasianist” Gumilev
was one of the founders of “Neo-Eurasianism,” a post-Soviet phenomenon

12
Ibid. Pp. 143 and 188.
13
Ryszard Paradowski. The Eurasian Idea and Leo Gumilëv’s Scientiic Ideology //
Canadian Slavonic Papers. 1999. Vol. 41. No. 1. P. 25.
14
Hildegard Kochanek. Die russisch-nationale Rechte von 1968 bis zum Ende der Sow-
jetunion: Eine Diskursanalyse. Stuttgart, 2001. Pp. 216-222.
15
Wiederkehr. Die Eurasische Bewegung. P. 202.
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 Ab Imperio, 1/2013
sui generis, markedly distinct from the émigré Eurasianism of the interwar
years.16
Finally, some of Gumilev’s followers and pupils have taken an inter-
mediate position. V. A. Michurin, for example, argued that Gumilev was a
“Eurasianist” primarily in a cultural and spiritual sense. Michurin explained
that by calling himself the “last Eurasianist” Gumilev did not imply “that
he considered the Eurasianist theory accomplished and without need of
continuers! On the contrary he passionately dreamed about its further de-
velopment and the appearance of new followers.” Still, Michurin claimed,
Gumilev “was indeed ‘the last Eurasianist’ – as a member of a particular
spiritual brotherhood, or perhaps party, formed among the Russian émigré
milieu. […] L. N. Gumilev was the only Soviet scholar whom the founding-
fathers of the Eurasianist ideology accepted as ‘one of their own.’”17 In a
similar vein, Aleksandr Titov and Viacheslav Ermolaev argued that Gumilev
could legitimately call himself the heir of Eurasianism’s scientiic tradition,
despite important intellectual differences between his ideas and those of the
émigré Eurasianists.18
This article will reexamine the personal and intellectual contacts between
Savitskii and Gumilev that are a central aspect for almost every scholar
examining Gumilev’s “Eurasianist” claims. These contacts will be placed
within the context of Savitskii’s dynamic intellectual biography. I will try to
ind the reasons for Savitskii’s interest in Gumilev and his scholarly work,
rather than addressing the question from Gumilev’s perspective, as has often
been done before. I will argue that at least since the late 1930s Savitskii’s
“classical” Eurasianist historiosophical and political ideas developed into
a new, explicitly anti-Western and pro-Soviet, yet still anticommunist con-
ceptual framework, a framework that can be called “trans-Eurasianism.”19

16
Marlène Laruelle. Histoire d’une usurpation intellectuelle: L.N. Gumilev, “le dernier
des eurasistes”? Analyse des oppositiones entre L. N. Gumilev at P. N. Savitskii // Revue
des études slaves. 2001. No. 73. Pp. 449-459.
17
[V. A. Michurin] // Michurin (Ed.). L. N. Gumilev. Ritmy Evrazii: Epokhi i tsivilizatsii.
Moscow, 1993. P. 33, fn. 1.
18
Viacheslav Ermolaev and Aleksandr Titov. Istoriia neskol’kikh zabluzhdenii // Revue
des études slaves. 2005. No. 76. Pp. 499-510. See also Laruelle’s rejoinder: Laruelle.
L. N. Gumilev, une œuvre contestée. Réponse aux critiques de V. Ermolaev et A. Titov //
Ibid. Pp. 511-518.
19
Despite its persistent anticommunist tendency, Savitskii’s “trans-Eurasianism” as a
Soviet-Eurasian nationalism paralleled in many ways Stalinist “National Bolshevism.” On
this ideology, see David Brandenberger. National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and
the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956. Cambridge, Mass., 2002.
89
Martin Beisswenger, Was Lev Gumilev a “Eurasianist?”
After World War II, when his contacts with Gumilev took place, Savitskii
himself had abandoned central ideas of classical Eurasianism and, thus,
strictly speaking, ceased to be a Eurasianist. By adding this transitional stage
we can better explain both continuities and differences between “classical”
and Neo-Eurasianism.
Furthermore, as this article will demonstrate, Savitskii’s “trans-Eur-
asianist” contacts with Gumilev were part and parcel of Savitskii’s larger
strategy to foster Eurasianist-Soviet and anti-Western sentiments among
Soviet scholars and intellectuals. Thus, ultimately, Gumilev was only one of
Savitskii’s many postwar Soviet correspondents, none of whom, however,
would or could legitimately claim to be a “classical” Eurasianist.
Overall, my examination will demonstrate that although Gumilev shared
many of Savitskii’s ideas, these were no longer those of interwar Eurasian-
ism, but rather views Savitskii had developed immediately before, during,
and after World War II. By allowing for a dynamic development of Eurasian-
ist ideas and by placing them in their historical context, it seems to me, we
can reach a better explanation of the discontinuities and continuities between
interwar and post-Soviet Eurasianisms.

Savitskii’s Eurasianism: Emergence and Evolution

Eurasianism is commonly regarded as a more or less static and coher-
ent system of ideas that over time underwent little or no change, except the
procommunist “deviation” of the Paris Eurasianist group that in early 1929
led to the split of the movement and its alleged decline.20 These interpreta-
tions were advanced by the Eurasianists themselves. Savitskii, for instance,
claimed that his ideas remained basically unchanged throughout his entire
life. In 1959, he told his former fellow-Eurasianist, the law scholar Nikolai
Alekseev: “Compared to you I am absolutely elementary. As if carved out
of one boulder. Essentially, I hold the same opinions that I had 55 years ago.
The only thing that changed is that I took into consideration the historical
reality and reoriented my old patriotism toward the new Russia.”21

20
This interpretation can be traced back to the very irst scholarly examinations of Eur-
asianism in the 1960s: Otto Böss. Die Lehre der Eurasier. Ein Beitrag zur russischen
Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Wiesbaden, 1961 and Nicolas V. Riasanovsky.
The Emergence of Eurasianism // California Slavic Studies. 1967. No. 4. Pp. 39-72.
21
Hoover Institution Archives. Gleb Struve Papers. Box 134. Folder 5. Savitskii to Alek-
seev. 30 September 1959 quoted from: Iu. Melikh. Staryi patriotizm “pereorientirovannyi
na novuiu Rossiiu”: Evraziistvo P. N. Savitskogo // Rossiia XXI. 2010. No. 2. P. 125.
90
 Ab Imperio, 1/2013
In fact, however, Savitskii was not born a Eurasianist. On the contrary,
his earliest interests in Ukrainian art and culture, in particular, those of his
hometown Chernigov, betray not only an appreciation of European art and
culture but also a distinct local patriotism. Savitskii’s early examinations of
architecture and popular art relected the ideas of Mykhailo Drahomanov
and many liberal Ukrainian patriots, who were striving to preserve and de-
velop local customs and traditions, while seeing Ukraine’s future within a
federalized Russian Empire.22 On the examples of local art and architecture
he discovered Ukraine’s character as a synthetic phenomenon, creatively
combining external inluences with an original historical tradition. Whereas
Ukrainian church architecture experienced inluences from Western Europe
and Russia, local embroidery combined a native Ukrainian tradition with
motifs from its immediate neighbors and from Asia Minor.23 This deinition
of a particular Ukrainian culture is one of the most explicit anticipations of
Savitskii’s later deinition of Eurasian culture as a similarly “complex” and
“synthetic” entity, the result of comparable inluences of “East” and “West,”
“Europe” and “Asia.”
Savitskii’s Ukrainian patriotism did not last long. In 1913 he moved
to St. Petersburg, where he studied under the mentorship of P. B. Struve
at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute and soon fell under the spell of
his teacher’s neoimperialist ideas. In an essay “Struggle for the Empire,”
published 1915, Savitskii echoed the ideas of his mentor Struve’s “Great
Russia,” an analysis of the Russian Empire as an “imperial nation.” Follow-
ing closely Struve’s concept, Savitskii described imperialism as a positive
phenomenon. In particular, he regarded Russia’s economic and national
consolidation in Siberia and in the Russian Far East as the basis of the
country’s future success.24
Russian imperialism, in Savitskii’s account, appeared as the almost per-
fect embodiment of a “continental and political” type. The Russian Empire
was initially created by the merger of Great Russians and Ukrainians; they
22
On Drahomanov and his ideas see: Orest Subtelny. Ukraine: A History. 3rd ed. Toronto,
2000. Pp. 284-286.
23
S. P. [Savitskii]. Ob ukrainskoi vyshivke XVIII veka i sovremennom ee vozrozhdenii //
Chernigovskaia zemskaia nedelia. 1914. 13 June. Pp. 1-5; Ibid. 1914. 20 June. Pp. 1-5;
V. L. Modzalevskii and P. N. Savitskii. Ocherki iskusstva Staroi Ukrainy [1919] // O. B.
Kovalenko (Ed.). Chernigivs’ka starodavyna. Zbirnyk naukovykh prats’, prysviachenyi
1300-richchiu Chernigova. Chernigiv, 1992.
24
P. N. Savitskii. Bor’ba za imperiiu. Imperializm v politike i ekonomike // Russkaia
mysl’. 1915. Vol. 36. No. 1 [section: II]. Pp. 51-77 and Ibid. 1915. No. 2. [section II].
Pp. 56-77.
91
Martin Beisswenger, Was Lev Gumilev a “Eurasianist?”
had constituted its “demographic core.” In a move that betrays Savitskii’s
continued Ukrainian patriotism, he now stressed his homeland’s crucial
contribution to the emergence of the Russian Empire. In a sense, it might
be said, Ukraine had given up its political and cultural independence for a
worthy cause: the creation of the Russian Empire. Savitskii called on the
Russian Empire to continue its imperial mission in the East.25
Savitskii’s imperialist dreams under the lag of a secular, social-economic
and political “Great Russia” did not survive the Revolution and Civil War.
In all likelihood, soon after his evacuation from the Crimean peninsula
together with General Wrangel’s White Army in November 1920, he un-
derwent a religious revival. In any case, he was irmly under the spell of
religious visions, when in August 1921, together with N. S. Trubetskoi,
P. P. Suvchinskii, G. V. Florovskii, and A. A. Liven, he published the irst
Eurasianist manifesto Exodus to the East. Throughout the irst half of the
1920s, Savitskii elaborated a more or less coherent Weltanschauung − the
irst, “utopian” version of his Eurasianism.
This ideology was not entirely new. It had gradually emerged from his
earlier ideas about Ukraine as a cultural melting pot, from his ideas about
Russian imperialism, and his philosophical and political writings during
the Civil War. In these writings, Savitskii had spoken of an imminent Rus-
sian mission for the spiritual beneit of the whole world. His experience
of the Russian Civil War, the exceptionality of what he encountered, the
bravery of both White and Bolshevik soldiers, the unprecedented violence
and chaos, the inability of Russia’s Europeanized anti-Bolshevik politicians
to govern the country properly, the ignorance and arrogance of Russia’s
Western allies − all produced a profound impression on Savitskii. He was
convinced he had witnessed in the civil war divine intervention in Rus-
sian history.26
In his Eurasianist publications of the early 1920s, Savitskii regarded
the Bolshevik Revolution as a grand religious revival and he interpreted
the events of the Civil War in religious terms. It seemed to him that Rus-
sia was different from the rest of the world: the country was destined to
lead the world into a new era, an era in which Russia, in conjunction with
the equally religious East, was destined to save the world from European
secularism. He deined Russia as Eurasia, a society combining European
knowledge with Asian spirituality, a society different from Europe and
25
Ibid. No. 2. Pp. 67-71.
26
See, for example, P. N. Savitskii. Ocherki mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii. Ekaterinodar,
1919.
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 Ab Imperio, 1/2013
Asia yet destined to reawaken the East and lead the world into a new era,
the “era of faith.”27
A place of considerable signiicance in Savitskii’s “utopian” Eurasianism
was occupied by the image of “the East.” More than in Savitskii’s earlier
writings, “the East” was now assigned special characteristics: a romantic
past, economic backwardness, and genuine religiosity. In this respect, Sav-
itskii’s ideas were part of a pan-European Orientalism that since the late
eighteenth century created an image of the East. Savitskii’s ideas echoed
the Russian version of this Orientalism that stressed a particular afinity of
Russia to Asia.28
In his writings of the early 1920s, Savitskii expressed his ultimate
historical goals in vivid but vague language. He interpreted the events of
the revolution and civil war from a “metaphysical” point of view − that is,
from the perspective of Orthodoxy. In contrast to Savitskii’s later writings,
where he would attempt to demonstrate that his spontaneous feelings and
forebodings could indeed be “empirically” conirmed, this irst phase of his
thinking and writing, in my opinion, can best be described as “utopian.” The
general characteristics of Savitskii’s “utopian Eurasianism” involve his use
of the language of “feelings,” emotionality, anticipation; an identiication in
Russia of “Eastern” and “Eurasian” particularities vis-à-vis “Europe,” these
particularities being otherwise unrelated geographic, economic, cultural,
psychological, and historical factors; lack of a “system” or “structure” to
his thought; his preference for bold a priori statements; and his usage of
powerful religious images and Church Slavonic language.
In the second half of the 1920s Savitskii’s Eurasianist ideas underwent
a signiicant evolution. Since 1925 he had tried “scientiically” to prove
his earlier visions and declarations. For this task Savitskii assembled and
analyzed enormous amounts of empirical data from the ield of Russian
economics, geography, and history. By the early 1930s he claimed to have
“proven” that Russia as Eurasia was indeed different from both Europe
and Asia, that it constituted an organic and indivisible entity, harmoniously
structured and regularly patterned. The previously empirically undeined
“Russia” had turned into a uniquely structured whole, a system of multiple
27
The most comprehensive account of Savitskii’s “utopian” Eurasianism can be found in
P. N. Savitskii. K obosnovaniiu evraziistva. Part I // Rul’. 1922. 10 January. Pp. 2-3 and
Idem. K obosnovaniiu evraziistva. Part II // Rul’. 1922. 11 January. Pp. 2-3.
28
On the tradition of a Russian “Orientalism,” see David Schimmelpenninck van der
Oye. Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigra-
tion. New Haven, 2010.
93
Martin Beisswenger, Was Lev Gumilev a “Eurasianist?”
parallelisms and symmetries, of numerous correspondences, correlations,
and interrelations – “Eurasia.”
Savitskii’s “scientiic” Eurasianism emerged directly from his religious
convictions. In late 1923, he argued that science could uncover the divine
organization of the world: “From a religious point of view, empirical sci-
ence is the revelation of the picture of God’s world. And in proportion to
the achievements of knowledge, this picture is becoming more and more
perfect and complete, more and more clearly revealing the Wisdom of the
Creator.”29 From this perspective, Savitskii’s Eurasianism was a way to
approach God by means of correlating the various empirical sciences into
a coherent system.30
The central piece of evidence for Savitskii’s bold assumption that human
science could indeed reach out toward the divine foundation of the universe
was his discovery that the entire universe was rhythmically structured.
He claimed that, if properly studied, the most diverse spheres of life and
nature − the economy, history, geography, anthropology, language, and
archaeology − exhibit harmonious organization. There were multiple and
unexpected coincidences between apparently unconnected phenomena, sym-
metries, and rhythmicities. Savitskii claimed that it was impossible to divide
the world into separate spheres, to juxtapose the material and empirical to
the religious or spiritual. All these “spheres” indivisibly formed a holistic
entity. Science, he argued, was discovering through experimental methods
“predetermination and meanings”:
From the physical and mathematical point of view, the ordered
status of the world is the least probable one. And yet, the most distant
celestial worlds, the solar system, lora and fauna and human society
we equally ind to be [rationally] ordered. Organization is the least
probable condition. And yet organization is the supreme law, to which
all being is subordinated.31
In this apparent paradox Savitskii found proof of the truth of religion.
“Here reveals itself the religious pivot of contemporary science. The Uni-
verse cannot be explained without the assumption of a Universal Being,
owing to which the improbable becomes the accomplished.” And this world
order, in the strictest sense of the word, is not partial or incomplete. On the
29
Savitskii. Evraziistvo. P. 20.
30
Letter Savitskii to unknown, 23 May 1926 // Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi
Federatsii (henceforth: GARF). F. 5783. Op. 1. Ed. khr. 337. Ll. 39-40.
31
Petr Savitskii. Edinstvo mirozdaniia (1929) // P. N. Savitskii. Izbrannoe. Moscow,
2010. P. 341.
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 Ab Imperio, 1/2013
contrary, it reveals itself as in the form of a grand “system,” of a develop-
ment on the basis of regularities. The organization of the empirical sphere,
of the natural environment, was thus Savitskii’s and Eurasianism’s “basic
scientiic concept.” He called this state of the empirical world’s regular
organization “the spirit, inherent in matter.”32
Throughout the 1930s Savitskii attempted to “prove” not only the em-
pirical reality of “Eurasia” but also the existence within the Soviet Union of
“Eurasianist” tendencies and forces that would ultimately assert themselves.
They would ultimately overthrow the alien “internationalist” Marxist ideol-
ogy and return Russia−Eurasia toward its divinely “predetermined” path of
development.
By the end of the 1930s, Savitskii was irmly convinced that the days of
communism in Russia−Eurasia were counted. In an unprecedented return to
the emotionality of his “utopian” Eurasianism of the early 1920s Savitskii
again became prophetic. He was irmly convinced that Russia could ultimately
emerge victorious from the imminent armed struggle. Just as Russians had
defeated the Mongols in the Kulikovo battle in the fourteenth century, Soviet
Russia would triumph over its attackers. At the same time, he predicted,
through military victory Russia will liberate herself from communism. This
victory will mark a new era of world history: “the beginning of the Eurasian
era of world history,” whereas Europe would inevitably fall into decline.33
The German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, marked the
ultimate end of Eurasianism as movement. Under the conditions of total war,
it was technically impossible to maintain the movement’s organizational
structure or even to continue regular correspondence between its various
European centers. But also ideologically the movement had reached its
fulillment. Essentially, interwar Eurasianism was an explicitly postrevolu-
tionary movement with an anticommunist agenda and aspirations to inherit
political power in the Soviet Union.34 Thus, by 1940, “classical” Eurasianism
had already come to its logical conclusion. One the one hand, in Savitskii’s
and other Eurasianists’ opinions, many central Eurasianist principles, such
as the “national” character of the Soviet government, a “Eurasian” industri-

32
Ibid.
33
Letter Savitskii (copy) to Alekseev, 25 July 1938 // Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian
and East European History and Culture, Columbia University, New York (henceforth:
BAR). George Vernadsky papers. Box 8. Folder “Savitskii, 1938”.
34
See, for example, Evraziistvo. Deklaratsiia, formulirovka, tezisy. [Prague], 1932;
Tezisy, vyrabotannye na Prazhskom Soveshchanii predstavitelei EA organizatsii, 15-27
Oktiabria 1935 g. [Prague], 1935.
95
Martin Beisswenger, Was Lev Gumilev a “Eurasianist?”
alization and foreign policy had become evident. On the other hand, some
Baltic Eurasianists, such as V. A. Peil’ (1907–1947) or V. E. Gushchik
(1892–1947) had taken positions in the local Soviet administration, not
without Savitskii’s authorization.35 Although for the time being only on a
limited scope, in the opinion of its members Eurasianism had achieved one
of its main goals: it had gained positions of power in the Soviet Union. Its
mission could thus be seen as accomplished.
With Russia−Eurasia in mortal danger, Savitskii acknowledged the
Soviet leadership and Stalin as the Soviet Union’s legitimate authority and
refrained from openly criticizing their policy, in order not to undermine
the patriotic effort. Throughout the war, Savitskii ardently believed in the
national revival of Russia−Eurasia, indications of which he had detected
in Soviet politics and society throughout the 1930s. His patriotic feelings
materialized in dozens of poems, most of which were devoted to the anticipa-
tion and celebration of the victorious Red Army that he praised as powerful
defender of Russia–Eurasia against foreign intervention. He considered the
Red Army to be the heir of the glorious Mongol armies of Genghis Khan.36
Savitskii’s newly emerged Soviet–Russian patriotism, in fact a sharp
break from his prewar anti-Soviet Eurasianist patriotism, was not chal-
lenged by the fact that in May 1945 he was arrested by the Soviet organs in
Prague, taken to Moscow, and sentenced to ten years of forced labor for his
Eurasianist activities. In fact, his experience in the camp in Mordovia only
reinforced his Russian–Soviet–Eurasianist patriotism. After his liberation
and return to Prague in 1956, he actively corresponded with surviving former
Eurasianists and newly acquired friends from the Soviet camps.
In these letters, Savitskii developed a new version of his Eurasianism that
can aptly be called “trans-Eurasianism.” This new ideology acquired most
of its stridency from the radically changed intellectual climate that arose
in the aftermath of National Socialist crimes and the cold-war ideological
competition between the Soviet Union and the West. Loosely based on the
cultural and spiritual opposition between “Europe” and “Eurasia,” charac-
teristic of Savitskii’s prewar Eurasianism, his postwar ideology transcended
the scope of his earlier ideas both geographically and intellectually. Echoing
oficial Soviet propaganda slogans, Savitskii now divided the entire world
into two camps − a “progressive humanity” and “reaction.”
35
On Gushchik and Peil, see A. G. Nosova. Gushchik Vladimir Eimovich // Ezhegodnik
Rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma na 2001 god. St. Petersburg, 2006. Pp. 392-395
and Sergei Isakov. Evraziitsy v Estonii // Raduga. 1995. No. 5-6. Pp. 73-81.
36
P. N. Savitskii. Neozhidannye stikhi / Ed. Stanislava Savitskaia. Prague, 2005. P. 19.
96
 Ab Imperio, 1/2013
One key element of Savitskii’s “trans-Eurasianism” was a bitter critique
of “the West” that now also included the United States. The West, Savitskii
was convinced, was the embodiment of the three main principles of evil:
capitalism, colonialism, and snobbism. “All three of them,” he explained,
“condense into the most inhuman essence: racism.”37
Savitskii’s ierce rejection of the West was essentially motivated by his
irm conviction that Nazi racism persisted not only in postwar West Germany
but also in other parts of Western Europe and the United States. “Hitlerism,”
Savitskii claimed, was not limited to the now defeated National Socialist
regime, but was “irmly entrenched in Germanism in general.” Furthermore,
it was not exclusively tied to Germany, but was “one of the most loathsome,
or maybe even the most loathsome spawn of the Western bourgeois spirit.”38
From Savitskii’s perspective, German racism was merely the most recent
manifestation of the Western tradition. “The madness and vileness of the
West,” he explained, were essentially the result of the “heretical damage of
Latinism [i.e., Roman Catholicism – MB] already between the eighth and
eleventh centuries. Already then Latin arrogance and stubbornness emerged.”
From these foundations later grew Western colonialism and capitalism. “And
now from there rise up the brainless obstinacy and vile plans of ‘the West.’”39

Savitskii and Gumilev: Common Ground

It is only on the basis of Savitskii’s postwar “trans-Eurasianism” that
his contacts with Lev Gumilev and other Soviet scholars and public igures
can be adequately understood. His “trans-Eurasianist” patriotism had indeed
much in common with Gumilev’s “Soviet-Eurasian” patriotism. There is no
doubt that if “trans-Eurasianist” Savitskii had lived long enough to experi-
ence the collapse of the Soviet Union, Marlène Laruelle’s characterization of
Gumilev as a Soviet-Eurasian patriot would have been equally applicable to
him: “While he was neither a communist in politics nor a Marxist in science,
he was very clearly pro-Soviet, a stance shared by many in contemporary
Russia, who consider that the ideological disappearance of the regime should
not have led to the demise of the country.” In fact Savitskii as well as Gumi-
lev shared a particular variety of Russian nationalism that was at the same
37
Letter Savitskii to unknown “drug na zapade,” (N. N. Alekseev?) March 1959 //
Slovanská knihovna, Prague [henceforth: SKP]. Savitskii papers. Box 5. Folder 108.
38
Letter Savitskii to Suvchinskii, [2 May 1957] // Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Département de la Musique. Pierre Souvtchinski papers, uncatalogued correspondence.
39
Savitskii to bishop Afanasii (Sakharov), [December 1958] // SKP. Savitskii papers.
Box 5. Folder 112.
97
Martin Beisswenger, Was Lev Gumilev a “Eurasianist?”
time imperial, Soviet, and Eurasian. They cherished Russia’s imperial past,
were proud of the Soviet Union’s achievements, and regarded the country’s
expansion into “Eurasia” as both natural and essential.40
There is no doubt that among Savitskii’s numerous postwar Soviet cor-
respondents Lev Gumilev occupied the most prominent position − in one
of his letters Savitskii called his young colleague “the closest person for me
in the whole world.”41 Their intellectual relationship and friendship began
in late 1956 − through the mediation of M. A. Gukovskii, one of Savitskii’s
former fellow camp inmates and now one of Gumilev’s colleagues at the
Hermitage in Leningrad. By then Gumilev, the son of the famous Russian
poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, was only supericially familiar
with Savitskii’s ideas. According to his own testimony, in the early 1930s he
had read Savitskii’s “Tasks of Nomadology,” a passionate but overall rather
eclectic essay on the signiicance of nomad studies for Russian history.42
Until Savitskii’s death in 1968, the two exchanged hundreds of letters and
in August 1966 met for a few days in Prague, where Gumilev participated
in an archaeological congress.
This unusual friendship, no doubt, contained an important component
of personal afinity. Both Savitskii and Gumilev were essentially outsid-
ers within academia, exhibited an antiestablishment and nonconformist
habitus, both were former Gulag prisoners, both wrote poetry (of different
quality to be sure) and cultivated their allegedly Tatar heritage. In one of
his letters to Gumilev, Savitskii explained this biographical component of
his veneration for Genghis Khan as “our severe father”:
For many Russian noble families, as is well known, this designa-
tion […] has a literal meaning. So do I, […], come, as you know, from
the Tatar murzy, through my great-grandmother [Soiia Moiseevna]
Akhmatova.43
Already in the 1930s Savitskii had demonstrated his pride of “Eastern”
extraction, when he chose “Petr Akhmatov” as one of his numerous pen
40
Laruelle. Russian Eurasianism. P. 79.
41
Savitskii to Gumilev [3 January 1959] // Memorial’nyi muzei-kvartira L. N. Gumileva.
St. Petersburg [henceforth: MKG SPb]. Folder KPVKh-18928.
42
Gumilev to Savitskii, 18 November 1956 // SKP. Savitskii papers. Box 2. Folder 22.
The essay was published as: P. N. Savitskii. O zadachakh kochevnikoveden’ia. (Pochemu
skify i gunny dolzhny byt’ interesny dlia russkogo?) // N. P. Toll’. Skify i gunny: Iz istorii
kochevogo mira. Prague, 1928. Pp. 83-106.
43
Savitskii to Gumilev, 29 November 1965 // MKG SPb. Folder KPVKh-18928. On
P. N. Savitskii’s great-grandmother, see P. N. Savitskii (Ed.). Savitskie: rodoslovnaia
rospis’. Kiev, 1913. P. 14.
98
 Ab Imperio, 1/2013
names, alongside “T. Chodot” or “Stepan Lubenskii,” which relected his
Ukrainian ancestors.44
Personal affection, of course, was not enough to sustain more than a
decade of intensive epistolary exchange. In a sense, Gumilev fulilled a
scholarly task Savitskii had set for himself two decades earlier as part of
his effort to build Eurasianism as a scientiic system but had been unable to
accomplish. “I have to confess,” Savitskii explained in 1958 to the former
Eurasianist Nikolai Alekseev,
the image of L. N. [Gumilev] as it appears from his letters, almost
ideally corresponds to the image of the Russian nomadologist as I had
imagined it in 1928, when I wrote “Tasks of Nomadology.” – Now I
am delighted by the fact that L. N. “learned to read Old Turkic” and
by his discoveries in this sphere. At that time I should have learned
Old Turkic myself, but I didn’t ind the time due to all of my historio-
sophical, geographic, economic, and historical and other occupations.
The greater is my delight that now L. N. knows this language. So now
may he accomplish in this ield all that can be accomplished! No one,
perhaps, in history has ever been so well prepared scholarly to solve
the tasks of nomadology as is currently L. N.45
Hence, Savitskii saw in Gumilev an exceptionally talented and promising
student of the history of the nomad people. In a sense, Gumilev was con-
tinuing Savitskii’s most fundamental and challenging project of the second
half of the 1930s: the establishment of a rhythmic alternation of “ups” and
“downs” within Russian history from the earliest times.46 During the years
spent in Soviet camps, Savitskii continued to work on that project and by
the late 1950s his research had reached the year 1632.47 Gumilev’s similar
research in the ield of Russia’s “Eastern” nomadic neighbors was thus
crucial for Savitskii, since it allowed him to synchronize the rhythmicity of
ancient Russian history with the history of other ethnic groups on Eurasian
territory, a task he had already formulated in 1937.48

44
See, for example, Petr Achmatov [Savitskii]. Borodinské jubileum // Program (De-
mokratický střed). 1937. Vol. 13. No. 38. P. 6.
45
Savitskii to Alekseev, [1958] // SKP. Savitskii papers. Box 5. Folder 80.
46
P. N. Savitskii. “Pod’em” i “depressiia” v drevne-russkoi istorii // Evraziiskaia khronika.
1935. No. 11. Pp. 65-100; Idem. Ritmy mongol’skogo veka // Evraziiskaia khronika.
1937. No. 12. Pp. 104-155.
47
See Letters Savitskii to Vernadskii, 9 May 1957 and 7 August 1957 // BAR. Vernadskii
papers. Box 8. Folder “Savitskii 1956−1957”.
48
P. N. Savitskii. Ritmy mongol’skogo veka // Evraziiskaia khronika. 1937. No. 12. P. 149.
99
Martin Beisswenger, Was Lev Gumilev a “Eurasianist?”
Besides enjoying personal sympathy and scholarly afinity, Savitskii and
Gumilev shared many ideological principles. As we have seen, Savitskii’s
“trans-Eurasianism” contained a considerable anti-Western and Russian−
Soviet nationalist component. Savitskii did not hide this from his Leningrad
correspondent. In one of his letters to Gumilev, Savitskii explicitly hailed the
contemporary political signiicance of nomad studies: “Ancient nomads are
a great model for us how one needs to ight and defeat […], how one needs
to stand up for one’s own, to defend one’s way of life, one’s system (uklad),
one’s originality.” This activity, fully in accordance with Savitskii’s “trans-
Eurasianism” was directed against the “West.” As he explained to Gumilev:
“The task of our time is to break to its very root the horn of Western pride
[rog zapadnoi gordyni] in all spheres and in all respects. Russian nomadol-
ogy, too, can and must serve this task (while preserving full objectivity in
the study of nomads).” In a letter he wrote in January 1959, on the very day
the second Soviet rocket was launched into outer space, Savitskii fell into
the wildest prophecies of Russia−Eurasia’s imminent national greatness:
“And who else should take over the great heritage of the nomads – if not
we, Russians − in order to wander [kochevat’] already not only through the
steppes but through the universe.” Savitskii was consumed by the enormous
universal tasks lying ahead: “The Russian era in world history is on the
threshold. […] If only Russia lived and rose up [shla vverkh]!”49
Quite obviously Gumilev shared his correspondent’s enthusiasm about
the latest Soviet-Eurasianist achievements in outer space and his sharply
anti-Western attitude. Replying to Savitskii’s prophecies, Gumilev not only
fully agreed with his colleague’s call for anti-Western efforts, but even de-
manded their intensiication: “You are right: the horn of Western pride needs
to be broken. But this horn is very tough and weak blows won’t harm it.”50
The fact that Savitskii and Gumilev shared many important ideas and
attitudes does not mean, however, that there were no essential conceptual
differences between Savitskii’s “trans-Eurasianist” ideas and Gumilev’s
teachings. First of all, Savitskii’s “trans-Eurasianism” (as “classical” Eur-
asianism had been before) was based on and developed from a fundamentally
religious – that is, Russian Orthodox – point of view. Central to this approach
was the concept of the human person, understood as a divine creation “in
the image and likeness of God.” This concern was a direct consequence of
the Eurasianist movement’s profound religiosity and its effort to create a

49
Savitskii to Gumilev, [3 January 1959] // MKG SPb. Folder KPVKh-18928.
50
Gumilev to Savitskii, 25 January 1959 // SKP. Savitskii papers. Box 2. Folder 22.
100
 Ab Imperio, 1/2013
new Russian ideology on the basis of Orthodoxy. In this respect “classical”
Eurasianists embraced the spirituality of the prewar Russian religious renais-
sance, stimulated by the catastrophic Zeitgeist of the Great War, Russian
Revolution, and Civil War.51
Savitskii’s understanding of historical development and the regularities
it allegedly exhibited was rooted in “Divine Providence.” For Gumilev, on
the contrary, historical development was ultimately the result of “cosmic”
impulses. While Savitskii saw God’s ordering hand behind natural phe-
nomena and historical events, Gumilev explained them as necessitated by
the “force of things” (sila veshchei).52 Whereas Savitskii’s ideas thus stood
in the tradition of the Russian religious renaissance, Gumilev’s concept
of “passionarity” and strong individuals with a powerful will may in fact
have been inspired by his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche. According to one
of his biographers, at least in 1935, he was familiar with Nietzsche’s Thus
spoke Zarathustra.53
Both Gumilev and Savitskii were well aware that their views were based
on essentially different philosophical foundations. Already in his second letter
to Savitskii in early December 1956 these important intellectual differences
came to light. Having read some of the articles and booklets sent by Savitskii
to Leningrad, Gumilev identiied Savitskii as an idealist par excellence and
declared: “Let me begin with the question of ideas. For you they appear in
an Aquinian sense […]. But I am a convinced nominalist. It seems to me that
ideas have power only as a relex of the second signal system [i.e., according
to I. P. Pavlov, of speech – MB] […].” Gumilev did not fully accept Savitskii’s
ideas that he interpreted as being inluenced by Hegel. He confessed that he
had been unable to detect “Hegel’s development of the spirit.” Instead, he
explained, “ruptures between cultures preclude synthesis.”54
The basic philosophical differences between Savitskii and Gumilev
manifest themselves more concretely in the different importance each of
51
On Eurasianism’s concern for the human person, see Martin Beisswenger. Eurasianism:
Afirming the Person in the “Era of Faith” // Gary M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole
(Eds.). A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830–1930: Faith, Reason and the Defense of
Human Dignity. Cambridge, 2010. Pp. 363-380.
52
L. N. Gumilev and A. I. Kurkchi. Chernaia legenda (istoriko-psikhologicheskii etiud)
// L. N. Gumilev. Chernaia legenda: Druz’ia i nedrugi velikoi stepi / Ed. V. A. Michurin.
Moscow, 1994. Pp. 103-105.
53
Valerii Demin. Lev Gumilev. Pp. 157-158. On the extraordinary impact of Nietzschean
ideas in reolutionary and Soviet Russia, see Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal. New Myth, New
World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism. University Park, 2002.
54
Gumilev to Savitskii, 3 December 1956 // SKP. Savitskii papers. Box 2. Folder 22.
101
Martin Beisswenger, Was Lev Gumilev a “Eurasianist?”
them ascribed to the geographical environment and its historical signiicance
for the emergence of ethnic groups. To be sure, in their profound interest in
the interactions between geographical landscapes and human populations,
both Savitskii and Gumilev irmly stood within the same scientiic tradition
of a particularly Russian “environmentalism.” Both scholars in one way or
another were inluenced by the ideas of V. V. Dokuchaev and his concept of
“natural-historical zones” and L. S. Berg’s anti-Darwinist theory of “nomo-
genesis,” that is, of evolution according to natural laws (zakonomernost’)
rather than chance (sluchainost’).55
Yet at the same time, Savitskii and Gumilev reached entirely different
conclusions about how and why these interactions occurred. In general, as
the above-mentioned disagreement suggests, Savitskii’s views were more
“idealist” whereas those of Gumilev were more “materialist.” Thus, Gumi-
lev ascribed crucial signiicance to the presence of two or more different
landscapes before any territory could inspire the emergence of a particular
ethnic group, that is, before it could become, in Savitskii’s terminology,
a “topogenesis” (mestorazvitie).56 To be sure, Savitskii conceded that the
presence of multiple landscapes provided the most powerful impulse for the
emergence of ethnic groups, yet he continued to insist that ethnic develop-
ment could in principle, albeit with lesser force, take place on any territory
even with only one type of landscape present.57
These conceptual disagreements were no coincidence and in fact were
rooted in sharply opposing views about the interrelationship of landscape
and population. Despite his profound sympathy and support for his younger
colleague, Savitskii did not avoid well-meaning criticisms. This included,
among other issues, the question of “geographical materialism,” that is,
the danger to ascribe absolute and decisive value to geographic condi-
tions. Savitskii cautioned his colleague: “When you write your book on
‘Ethnogenesis and the geographical factor’ (this title is, of course, very
tentative!), try to avoid formulations that could provide a pretext to accuse
you of ‘geographical materialism.’” Savitskii’s own views were entirely
the opposite:

55
On Russian environmentalism, see Douglas Weiner. Models of Nature: Ecology, Con-
servation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia. Bloomington, 1988. The impact of
this tradition on Gumilev has been demonstrated by Mark Bassin. Nurture Is Nature: Lev
Gumilev and the Ecology of Ethnicity // Slavic Review. 2009. Vol. 68. No. 4. Pp. 872-897.
56
Gumilev to Savitskii 19 December 1956 // SKP. Savitskii papers. Box 2. Folder 22.
57
Savitskii (copy) to Gumilev, 1-3 January 1957 // BAR. George Vernadsky Papers. Box
8. Folder “Savitskii 1956−1957”.
102
 Ab Imperio, 1/2013
To tell you the entire truth, I really think that peoples chose and
choose their place of development for their development and transfor-
mation (as the Russians “chose” the Great taiga “from lake Onega to
the Sea of Okhotsk” for their “transformation” into the greatest people
in the world), rather than having been created and being created by it.58
In this respect Savitskii’s own position in 1957 was even more “idealist,”
as it had been in the late 1920s. In his Geographic Peculiarities of Russia,
he had ultimately refrained from inal statements about the mutual inlu-
ences of landscape and inhabitants. It had been crucial for him to establish
the existence of such a mutual connection in principle, while the question
of the “direction and nature of the causal dependencies… is not essential.”
Essentially, in Savitskii’s opinion the concept of topogenesis was valid if
one assumed that the environment inluenced the “social-historical milieu”
or if one claimed the opposite. Yet ultimately Savitskii always saw both
processes at work at the same time and only this view he accepted as truly
“scientiic.”59
Savitskii’s religious idealism was evident in his views about the period-
icity of history as well. He irmly believed in an almost endless temporal
rhythmicity in history that “corresponded” to the rhythmicity of Eurasian
geography, a rhythmicity of alternating “ups” and “downs.” This stood in
sharp contrast to Gumilev’s strictly biological model of birth, maturity, and
ultimate death of every ethnos or nation. Savitskii’s more recent examina-
tion of ancient Russian history since the end of the irst millennium from
the point of view of alternating rhythmicity had prompted him to reevalu-
ate the pre-Mongol period of Kievan Rus’. He rejected Gumilev’s view
of the fourteenth century as the beginning of Rus’, a view he himself had
propagated in the mid-1920s. “Now I attach more signiicance than before,
to our Kievan−Novgorodian−Suzdalian prehistory of the ninth to thirteenth
centuries, in particular in the cultural sphere.” Our “Russian Moist Mother
Earth,” Savitskii explained, “provides us with our youth and intellectual
potential.” He considered the vastness of Russian earth responsible for
Russia’s continuous regeneration and rejuvenation. “We don’t have to fear
anything,” he concluded, “neither centuries, nor millennia.” In other words,
in Savitskii’s opinion, Russia was virtually beyond any biological circle of
life.60
58
Savitskii to Gumilev, 1-3 January 1957 // MKG SPb. Folder KPVKh-18928.
59
P. N. Savitskii. Geograicheskie osobennosti Rossii. Vol. 1. Rastitel’nost’ i pochvy.
Prague, 1927. P. 31.
60
Savitskii to Gumilev, 12 January 1958 // MKG SPb. Folder KPVKh-18928.
103
Martin Beisswenger, Was Lev Gumilev a “Eurasianist?”
Beyond Gumilev: Savitskii’s Soviet Scholarly Connections
Lev Gumilev may indeed be the best known of Savitskii’s postwar So-
viet correspondents. However, he was hardly the only Soviet scholar with
whom Savitskii was in epistolary contact over many years and with whom
he shared his “trans-Eurasianist” views. In late July 1963, Savitskii was con-
tacted by Andrei Nikolaevich Zelinskii (b. 1933), son of the famous Russian
and Soviet chemist Nikolai Zelinskii (1861–1953). Andrei Zelinskii, who
introduced himself as the student of Iu. N. Rerikh and L. N. Gumilev, had
graduated from Moscow State University’s Department of Archaeology in
1960 and was now writing a dissertation on the historical geography of the
Pamir region from the time of the Kushans – that is, from the irst century
AD to the Arab conquest. He regarded the Pamir area primarily as “a con-
nector [provodnik] rather than barrier of political, cultural, and trade rela-
tions between the oasis civilizations of Tarim, Buddhist culture of Northern
India, Eastern Iran, and Central Asia.”61 Savitskii responded immediately. He
warmly embraced Zelinskii as a new friend, strongly appraised his younger
colleague’s thesis about the connecting function of the Pamir and offered
his enthusiastic support for further research. Savitskii provided Zelinskii
with a copy of his “Tasks of Nomadology,” which the latter soon utilized for
his research.62 In later years Zelinskii extended his scholarly research into
other ields that in one way or another echoed Savitskii’s postwar “trans-
Eurasianist” ideas. In an article on the rhythmicity and temporal recurrence
in Asian and ancient Russian calendars, he developed Savitskii’s ideas about
the regular structuredness of time and history.63
Although Zelinskii’s contacts with Savitskii demand further research, it
is quite probable that both shared a more general understanding of history
and politics, including the rejection of “western” civilization and politics.
61
Zelinskii (copy) to Savitskii, 21 July 1963 // BAR. Vernadsky papers. Box 9. Folder
“Savitskii 1963”.
62
Savitskii (copy) to Zelinskii, 27-29 July 1963 and Zelinskii (copy) to Savitskii, 10
August 1963 // Ibid. In one of his articles Zelinskii used Savitskii’s Zadachi kochevniko-
vedeniia as evidence for his thesis about the connecting function of the Pamir: A. N.
Zelinskii. Drevnie puti Pamira // Strany i narody Vostoka. Geograiia, etnograiia, istoriia.
Vol. 3. Moscow, 1964. P. 115, fn. 122: “Already P. N. Savitskii remarked that ‘in the
world of nomads watersheds were trafic junctions.’”
63
See, for example, A. N. Zelinskii. “Koleso Vremeni” v tsiklicheskoi khronologii
Azii // Narody Azii i Afriki. 1975. No. 2. Pp. 104-117; Idem. Konstruktivnye printsipy
drevnerusskogo kalendaria // Kontekst. Literaturno-teoretichskie issledovaniia. Mos-
cow, 1978. Pp. 62-135; Idem. Liturgicheskoe vremia khristianskoi kul’tury // Russkoe
vozrozhdenie. 1991. No. 54. Pp. 32-49.
104
 Ab Imperio, 1/2013
In his present-day capacity as director of the Academician N. D. Zelinskii
Center for Noospheric Defense (Tsentr noosfernoi zashchity im. Akademika
Nikolaia Dmitrievicha Zelinskogo), A. N. Zelinskii calls for the “neces-
sity of a moral foundation” that can only be found in religion. He sees
our current age on the way toward an era of technization (Technozoi) that
due to its “merging of human being and machine condemns humanity to
its destruction.” Zelinskii’s views have a strong alarmist and apocalyptic
ring and clearly echo Savitskii’s “trans-Eurasianist” antiwesternism, and
anticapitalism.64 Characteristically, Zelinskii interprets the salvation of
humanity and Creation as the perfect incarnation of the “Russian Idea.” In
a recent newspaper article he passionately demanded “the creation in Russia
of a civil movement for the defense of the human being and Creation. This
Orthodox Christian idea could become the core of Russia’s national idea.”65
Savitskii’s contacts with Soviet scholars went beyond the ield of history
or archaeology and included several distinguished literary scholars as well.
From 1957, for instance, and until his death in 1968, Savitskii exchanged
numerous letters with V. I. Malyshev, prominent researcher and archivist at
the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskii dom) in Leningrad. Malyshev
and Savitskii shared a passion for the writings, ideas, and biography of the
seventeenth-century Russian Old Believer priest and writer Avvakum.66
Unsurprisingly, Savitskii’s letters included clear evidence of his “trans-
Eurasianist” concern for Russian–Eurasianist culture and its defense against
infringements from abroad. Avvakum, Savitskii argued, was a genuinely
national “ideocrat” – he conducted his actions in full accordance with his
ideas and beliefs. He defended his independence and originality by using
“national language for ideocratic purposes,” that is, “the defense of the Old
Belief and the ancient Russian way of life.”67
Moreover, in 1958 Savitskii met in Prague the Soviet literary historian
A. M. Panchenko, who was preparing his dissertation on the history of
Russian–Czech literary contacts. Just as enthusiastically as he supported
Gumilev’s interest in the history of the Eurasian nomads, Savitskii encour-

64
See http://kultury.ru/ (last accessed August 15, 2010).
65
A. N. Zelinskii. Zashchita tvoreniia. K 90-letiiu protivogaza Zelinskogo // Russkii
vestnik. 2005. No. 19 (673). 16 September. P. 14.
66
P. N. Savitskii. “Zhitie” protopopa Avvakuma, kak geograicheskii pervoistochnik //
Nauchnye trudy Russkogo narodnogo universiteta v Prage. 1929. No. 2. Pp. 218-231.
67
Savitskii to Malyshev, 17 September 1958 // Rukopisnyi otdel Instituta Russkoi Liter-
atury (Pushkinskii Dom) [henceforth: RO IRL]. St. Petersburg. F. 494 [V. I. Malyshev].
Op. 2. Ed. kr. 1540. L. 17.
105
Martin Beisswenger, Was Lev Gumilev a “Eurasianist?”
aged Panchenko’s research into early modern Russian literature. Panchenko,
Savitskii declared soon after their meeting, possesses “a deep understanding
of Russian life and Russian spirit – the pledge that also in the study of Rus-
sian literature he will give the right interpretations.”68 Panchenko, who in
the 1980s would become one of Gumilev’s closest friends, did not consider
himself a Eurasianist, although his contacts with Savitskii and the latter’s
appraisal of his work might have given him at least some justiication in this
respect. Nevertheless, Panchenko, who appears to have been quite impressed
by Savitskii’s personality at the time, later regarded “classical” Eurasianism
critically, but not without a certain respect and sympathy.69

Conclusion
So was Lev Gumilev a “Eurasianist?” The answer to this question is
clearly “no” if we compare his views and ideas to those of the members of
the “classical” Eurasianist movement that emerged among Russian émigrés
in 1921 and came to its logical conclusion by the very end of the 1930s,
when most of its members acknowledged the Soviet Union as the legitimate
promoter of Eurasianist principles and even joined Soviet institutions. From
this perspective, being a “Eurasianist” can only be tied to membership in this
movement, and thus, Gumilev could not have been the “last Eurasianist.”
He did not participate in this movement, regardless of whether we call it a
“brotherhood” or a “party,” he lacked the experience of interwar Europe’s
intellectual life, of which “classical” Eurasianism was an essential part.
Furthermore, the “last Eurasianist,” that is, the last surviving member of the
“classical” Eurasianist movement was not Gumilev, who died in 1992, but
the German-American literary scholar Heinrich Stammler (1912–2006).70
Stammler joined the Eurasianists in the early 1930s and published several
essays in Eurasianist periodicals.71 Although he did not propagate Eur-
asianism during or after World War II, Stammler remained interested in
68
Savitskii to Malyshev, 11 September 1958 // RO IRL. F. 494. Op. 2. Ed. kr. 1540. L.7.
69
Aleksandr Panchenko. Evraziistvo – sovremennaia problema // Obshchaia gazeta.
1994. No. 17/42. 29 April – 5 May. P. 9. On Panchenko’s contacts with Savitskii, see,
A. Iu. Ar’ev. Izuchaia protekshee, vechnoe (Ob Aleksandre Mikhailoviche Panchenko)
// A. M. Panchenko i russkaia kul’tura: Issledovaniia i materialy. St. Petersburg, 2008.
P. 393.
70
Edith W. Clowes. Heinrich A. Stammler, 1912–2006 // Slavic Review. 2007. Vol. 66.
No. 1. Pp. 600-602.
71
See for example: Nikolai Blagov [Stammler]. Kolomenskoe (Ocherk) // Evraziiskaia
khronika. 1937. No. 12. Pp. 62-67.
106
 Ab Imperio, 1/2013
the movement’s ideas and in 1962 published a sympathetic essay on its
contemporary signiicance.72
If we compare Gumilev’s ideas to those of Savitskii’s postwar “trans-
Eurasianism,” however, the answer is less unambiguous. Despite consider-
able conceptual differences, in particular Gumilev’s “materialist” rejection
of Savitskii’s profoundly religious and “idealist” worldview, the two scholars
shared a broad range of common ideas. Both were deeply interested in the
study of Russian history’s “eastern” connections, which both regarded as
an essential precondition for a proper understanding of the country’s past.
They shared a sharp rejection of and outright hostility toward the “west,”
both as a historical entity and a contemporary political force that, in contrast
to interwar Eurasianism, included Western Europe and the United States.
Most important, however, both were enthusiastic supporters of an anticom-
munist, yet at the same time unambiguously pro-Soviet-Russian-Eurasian
and neoimperialist nationalism. From this perspective, one might even argue
that “trans-Eurasianist” Savitskii had more in common with contemporary
neo-Eurasianism (including that of Aleksandr Dugin’s brand) than Gumilev
had with “classical” Eurasianism of the interwar years.

SUMMARY

This article reexamines the personal and intellectual contacts between

P. N. Savitskii and L. N. Gumilev during the 1950s and 1960s in order to
assess the validity of Gumilev’s claims to be “the last Eurasianist.” These
contacts are placed within the context of Savitskii’s dynamic intellectual
biography. It is argued that after World War II, when his contacts with
Gumilev took place, Savitskii himself had already abandoned the central
ideas of “classical” Eurasianism and, thus, strictly speaking ceased to be a
Eurasianist. At least since the late 1930s Savitskii’s “classical” Eurasianist
historiosophical and political ideas developed into a new, explicitly anti-
Western and pro-Soviet, yet still anticommunist conceptual framework that
can be called “trans-Eurasianism.” It was Savitskii’s “trans-Eurasianism” that
brought him intellectually close to Gumilev. By adding this transitional stage
to Savitskii’s intellectual odyssey we can better explain both continuities
and discontinuities between “classical” and neo-Eurasianism.

72
Heinrich Stammler. Europa−Rußland−Asien. Der “Eurasische” Deutungsversuch der
russischen Geschichte // Osteuropa. 1962. No. 12. Pp. 521-528.
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Martin Beisswenger, Was Lev Gumilev a “Eurasianist?”
РезЮме

Мартин Бейсвенгер по-новому анализирует личные и интеллекту-

альные контакты между П. Н. Савицким и Л. Н. Гумилевым в 1950-е
и 1960-е гг., пытаясь оценить обоснованность утверждений Гумилева
о себе как о “последнем евразийце”. Эти контакты рассмотрены в кон-
тексте динамично изменяющейся интеллектуальной биографии Савиц-
кого. В статье утверждается, что после Второй мировой войны, когда
завязались контакты между Савицким и Гумилевым, сам Савицкий уже
отошел от основных идейных положений “классического” евразийства
и, в точном понимании этого слова, уже перестал быть евразийцем. По
крайней мере, с конца 1930-х гг. историософские и политические идеи
Савицкого периода “классического” евразийства постепенно сменились
новыми концептуальными представлениями, которые можно обозна-
чить термином “трансевразийство”. Эти представления были открыто
антизападническими и просоветскими, но в то же время по-прежнему
оставались антикоммунистическими. Именно “трансевразийство”
Савицкого интеллектуально сблизило его с Гумилевым. Выделив эту
новую, переходную стадию в интеллектуальной одиссее Савицкого,
можно лучше объяснить преемственность и различия между “класси-
ческим” евразийством и неоевразийством.

108