The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Gumilev's central idea was the concept of ethnogenesis, a process by which, according to his theory, different ethnic groups came into being and acquired distinct characteristics that were passed on from generation to generation. An ethnic group, or an ethnos, as Gumilev called it, was shaped by two major forces: the geographic conditions in which they lived, and radiation from outer space. In his works on ethnogenesis, Gumilev detailed his ideas on radiation and the resulting genetic mutations, while in his works on history he pursued the geographic-determinist line and drew on the ideas of Eurasianists, a school of thought—born around the time of, and apparently in reaction to, the Bolshevik Revolution—that held that Russia's unique course was set by its predicament of straddling the two continents.²¹

Gumilev was barely tolerated by the Soviet academic establishment after he was released and his name was cleared, and his ideas were largely shunned. But he enjoyed a year or two of popularity and even celebrity before his death in 1992: he recorded a series of lectures that millions saw on television, and later the press runs of his books, originally written for an academic audience, beat all conceivable records. He was the perfect post-Soviet intellectual hero, a victim of the regime whose mind seemed to have triumphed over unconscionable adversity. His famous mother's best-known work, a heartbreaking cycle of poems called Requiem, which circulated underground in the Soviet Union, told the story of his imprisonment.

They took you away at dawn, As though at a wake, I followed, In the dark room weeping children, Among icons, the candle guttered. On your lips, the chill of a cross, On your brow a deathly pall. I'll be, like a woman to be shot,

Dragged to the Kremlin wall.²²

Gumilev's intellectual quest could be seen as the essence—or as a caricature—of the fate of the social sciences in the Soviet Union: decades spent working in a hostile environment, isolated from the ideas of others, struggling to invent the wheel in the dark. Working on his own, Gumilev had had to create his own theory of the universe, complete with radiation from outer space. The totality of his theory and its scientific sheen had to appeal to post-Soviet minds, which had just lost another totalizing explanation of the world. Ethnos entered everyday Russian speech, as did other concepts of Gumilev's coinage, such as passionarnost', a measure of the degree to which an ethnos was initially receptive to radiation and eventually possessed of ethnos-specific powers.

Other schools of thought that offered totality and scientific language were also gaining a foothold in Russia. Scientology, for example, was particularly popular among small-business men and bureaucrats in smaller cities. But two attributes made Gumilev's ideas perfect for the historical moment. His insistence on the essential nature of ethnic groups helped explain the agony of the empire. His geographic determinism fit well with the idea of Russia's unique destiny, which the Levada survey had shown to be so important for Russians.

Masha's grandmother was taken with Gumilev's theories. Masha's mother objected. She chose a different all-encompassing revisionist theory, one invented by Anatoli Fomenko, a mathematician who claimed that his calculations recast all of world history. In his story, history was shorter and more accessible: in the Middle Ages, the world was a giant empire with Russia at its center; before that, there was hardly anything. Conventional history was fiction, concocted by the Russians-who-ruled-the-world for their own entertainment. Fomenko was a classic conspiracy theorist: he proved his assertions by way of relentlessly logical constructions based on random mathematical assumptions, and he dismissed all contrary evidence as falsification by his enemies. Fomenko was particularly popular with the exact-sciences crowd, including the chess champion Garry Kasparov, who for a time became a vocal adherent.²³ The head of