11. Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, Gumilev
Part Six, 1st section, PASSIONARITY IN ETHNOGENESIS, DEVOTED TO THE DESCRIPTION OF THE ATTRIBUTE WITHOUT WHICH, THE PROCESSES OF ETHNOGENESIS DOES NOT START.
XXII. Ethnogenic trait or "factor X"
HERE IT IS, THE "X FACTOR".
And now I ask the reader to accept my apologies for wandering together with him through "thickets and deserts" of geographical, biological, ethnographic subjects for so long, without telling directly what the secret is. After all, the reader simply would not have believed me! He would have said, "But it is quite clear. Ethnos is defined by language, race, geographical environment, social relations, identity, the process of evolution, or a combination of all of them, or several of the factors listed; which can be chosen to taste." And this is the opinion not only of dilettantes, but also of many professionals, although it proves to be untenable at every attempt to apply it to the practice of ethnogenesis analysis.
My task was to show that not only any of the factors listed, but also any combination of them does not allow to construct a hypothesis, i.e. a consistent explanation of all the facts of ethnogenesis known at present, although the number of strictly fixed facts is by no means infinite.
It follows that the proposed solutions were imperfect.
Hence, there arises the right to search for a new solution, i.e. to construct the right to search for a new solution, i.e. to construct an original hypothesis. Any hypothesis, in order to be accepted, must explain all known facts. However, the transformation of a hypothesis into a theory is a very complicated process, so no scientist has the right to establish the moment of this qualitative transition. His task is different: to present his point of view and present his justification for it to the judgment of his contemporaries and descendants.
Psychology at the organismal level is currently understood as the physiology of higher nervous activity, taking into account hormonal influences, which manifests itself in human behavior.
Individual psychology is often integrated into higher-order systems: social and ethnic psychology, but in our formulation of the question, the size of the system does not change the matter. Therefore, for our analysis, the motivations of individual people's actions are not indifferent, for ethnic stereotypes of behavior are composed of them.
Unlike psychology, ethnopsychology studies the motives of behavior of systems at the population level, i.e. above the organismal level, which is also a system, and a rather complex one. In direct observation, ethnopsychology is inaccessible to us, but its function is that ethnic behavior is easily perceived and felt.
As K. Marx and F. Engels wrote: "No one can do anything without doing it for any of his needs and for the organ of that need."[1] Human needs lend themselves to classification, for which many levels of fractionality have been proposed, which we do not need[2]. For the purposes of our analysis, it is expedient to limit ourselves to dividing into two groups with different signs. The first is a set of needs, ensuring the self-preservation of the individual and the species - "needs of need"; the second is motives of another kind, due to which there is intellectual mastering of the unknown and complication of the internal organization - "needs of growth"[3], what F.M. Dostoevsky described in The Brothers Karamazov as "the need to know", because "the mystery of human existence is not just to live, but what to live for", and at the same time "to settle in necessarily worldwide", because man needs the community of ideals - what we would call ethnic dominance. But the latter does not appear by itself, but appears and changes together with the phases of ethnogenesis, i.e. it is a function of the sought "factor X". Now we are almost at the goal.
The conditions in which the processes of ethnogenesis begin are quite variant. But at the same time there is always more or less uniformity of their further course, sometimes disturbed by external influences. If, however we, seeking to uncover a global pattern, use a constant phase scheme of the process and neglect external points as random disturbances, we will inevitably come to the conclusion that there is a single cause of the origin of all the ethnic groups on the globe. This will be the same "factor X", which should be taken out of the brackets as the sought invariant.
In order to make sure that we have discovered exactly that value, which is the impulse of ethnogenesis, we must show that when taking it into account, the three above mentioned classifications fit into one scheme: a) ethnological, taking into account the division into "anti-egoists" and "egoists"; b) geographical, describing the attitude to the landscape and c) historical, describing the natural dying of an ethnic community, which has passed through phases of rise and decline. The coincidence of the three lines corrects the accuracy of the proposed concept and the disclosure of the "X factor.
Let us take the path of "empirical generalization". Let's see what moment is present in all the beginnings of ethnogenesis, no matter how diverse they may be. As we have seen, the formation of a new ethnos is always associated with the presence in some individuals of an irresistible inner desire for purposeful activity, always connected with a change in the environment, social or natural, with the achievement of the intended goal, often illusory or destructive to the subject himself, appearing to him more valuable than even his own life[4]. Such an undoubtedly rare phenomenon is a deviation from the species norm of behavior, because the described impulse is in opposition to the instinct of self-preservation and, consequently, has the opposite sign. It can be associated with both heightened abilities (talent) and average abilities, and this shows its independence among other impulses of behavior described in psychology. This sign has never been described or analyzed anywhere until now. However, it is the basis of an anti-egoistic ethic, where the interests of the collective, even if misunderstood, prevail over the lust for life and concern for one's own offspring. Individuals possessing this trait, under favorable conditions for themselves, commit (and cannot help committing) acts that, when summed up, break the inertia of tradition and initiate new ethnoses.
The peculiarity generated by this genetic trait has long been seen; moreover, this effect is even known as passion, but in everyday usage it has come to refer to any strong desire, and ironically simply to any, even weak, attraction. Therefore, for the purposes of scientific analysis, we will propose a new term-passionarity [5] (from Latin Passio, ionis, f.), excluding from its content animal instincts stimulating egoistic ethics and caprices, which are symptoms of a disordered psyche, as well as mental diseases, because although passionarity is certainly a deviation from the species norm, it is by no means pathological. Later we will clarify the content of the term "passionarity" by pointing out its physical basis.
F. ENGELS ON THE ROLE OF HUMAN PASSIONS
Engels vividly describes the power of human passions and their role in history: "...civilization has done such things, to which the ancient clan society has not even remotely reached. But it has done them by setting in motion the basest impulses and passions of men and by developing them to the detriment of all their other predispositions. Low greed has been the driving force of civilization from its first to the present day; wealth, again wealth, and three times wealth, the wealth not of society, but of this one miserable individual, has been its only defining goal. If, at the same time, in the depths of this society, science developed more and more, and periods of superior art flourished, it was only because without it all the achievements of our time in the accumulation of wealth would be impossible.
This thought pervades the fabric of Engels' work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. He points out that it was the "greedy desire for wealth" that led to the emergence of antagonistic classes. Speaking about the fall of the tribal system in society (in that society where the functioning ethnoses are, in our opinion, in the phase of homeostasis), Engels wrote: "The power of this primitive community must be broken - and it was broken. But it has been broken under such influences as directly appear to us to be a decadence, a sinful fall in comparison with the high moral level of the old clan society. The lowest motives - vulgar greed, crude passion for pleasures, filthy avarice, selfish desire to plunder the common property - are the recipients of the new civilized class society; the vilest means - theft, violence, guile, treachery - undermine the old classless clan society and lead it to ruin.
This was Engels' view of humanity's progressive development. Greed, on the other hand, is an emotion rooted in the subconscious, a function of higher nervous activity, lying on the edge of psychology and physiology. Equivalent emotions are greed, passion for pleasure, avarice, self-interest, mentioned by Engels, as well as ambition, ambition, envy, and vanity. From the philosophic point of view, these are "bad feelings", but from the philosophic point of view, only the motives of deeds can be "bad" or "good", and conscious and freely chosen, while emotions can be only "pleasant" or "unpleasant", and that depends on what kind of deeds they provoke.
And there may be various actions, including those that are objectively useful for the collective. For example, vanity forces an artist to seek the approval of the audience and thereby improve their talent. Ambition stimulates the activity of politicians, sometimes necessary for government decisions. Greed leads to the accumulation of material values, etc. After all, all these feelings are moduses of passionarity, peculiar to almost all people, but in extremely different doses. Passionarity can manifest itself in a variety of character traits, giving rise to exploits and crimes, creation, good and evil with equal ease, but leaving no room for inaction and calm indifference.
A similarly categorical statement was made by Hegel in his lectures on the philosophy of history: "We maintain that nothing has ever been realized without the interest of those who participated in its activity, and since we call interest a passion, since the individual, pushing aside all other interests and goals that this individual also has and may have, gives himself entirely to the object, focuses all his forces and needs on this object, we must say generally that nothing great in the world is accomplished without passion."[9]
In the cited description of the socio-psychological mechanism, despite all its colorfulness, there is an important defect. Hegel, by the use of this word in the 19th century, the "interest" was understood as the urge to acquire material goods, which rules out the possibility of self-sacrifice in advance. And it is no accident that some followers of Hegel began to exclude sincerity and selfless sacrifice for the object of their passion from the motives of behavior of historical figures. Such vulgarization, unfortunately, which has become a common misconception, stems from the vagueness of the German philosopher's wording. But the classics of Marxism overcame this boundary. In response to the militant banality of the philistines, who saw in all human actions only wingless egoism, they put forward the concept of mediated determinism, which leaves room for the diversity of manifestations of the human psyche.
Let us recall again what F. Engels wrote in a letter to I. Bloch of September 21-22, 1890: "According to the materialist understanding of history, the determining moment in the historical process is ultimately the production and reproduction of real life. Neither I nor Marx ever claimed more. If anyone distorts this position in the sense that the economic moment is the only determining moment, he turns this statement into a meaningless, abstract, phrase. Yes, ideas are lights in the night, beckoning to new achievements, not chains that restrain movement and creativity. Respect for predecessors lies in continuing their exploits, not in forgetting what they did and what they did it for.
XXII. Images of Passionaries
NAPOLEON
Napoleon Bonaparte, an artillery lieutenant in his youth, was poor and dreamed of a career. This is banal, and therefore understandable. Through personal connections with Augustin Robespierre he was promoted to captain, after which he took Toulon and, becoming a general as a result, suppressed the royalist rebellion in Paris in October 1795. His career was made, but it did not bring him wealth, nor did his marriage to the beautiful Josephine Beauharnais. However, already the Italian campaign had made Bonaparte a rich man. So he could have lived the rest of his life without toiling. But something pulled him to Egypt and then pushed him to take the swift risk of the 18th Brumaire. What? Power, nothing else! And when he became emperor of the French, did he calm down? No, he took on an exorbitant burden of wars, diplomacy, legislative work, and even enterprises which were by no means dictated by the true interests of the French bourgeoisie, like the Spanish war and the campaign against Moscow.
Of course, Napoleon each time differently explained the motives for his actions, but their real source was an irrepressible thirst for activity, which did not leave him even in St. Helena, where he wrote his memoirs just because he could not be without work. For contemporaries, the impetus behind Napoleon's activities remained a mystery. And it is not without reason that the Parisian bourgeoisie greeted the Russian army as it entered Paris in 1814 with the cry: "We do not want war, we want to trade.
Indeed, the bourgeois King Louis Philippe, fulfilling the social order of growing French capitalism, stopped what had become a tradition of war with England and moved the activities of his belligerent subjects to Algeria, for it was more profitable, safer, and did not affect the majority of the French, who wanted peace and quiet. But why did Napoleon not do the same after the Peace of Amiens? Since he was no Louis Philippe, the Parisian shopkeepers could not order him to do anything. They only wondered why the emperor was perpetually anxious to go to war.
Similarly Alexander the Great was not understood even by his "friends", as they called the closest associates of the conquering king.
ALEXANDER OF MACEDONIA
Alexander the Great had by right of birth everything that a man needed: food, a house, entertainments and even conversations with Aristotle. And yet he rushed on Boeotia, Illyria and Thrace only because they did not want to help him in the war with Persia, while he supposedly wanted to avenge the destruction caused by the Persians during the Greco-Persian wars, which the Greeks themselves had managed to forget[11]. And then, after defeating the Persians, he attacked Central Asia and India, with the senselessness of the latter war angered the Macedonians themselves. After the brilliant victory over Porus, "those who were more humble only mourned their fate, but others firmly declared that they would not follow Alexander..." (Arrsch. V. 26).
Finally, Ken, son of Polemocrates, mustered his courage and said: "You see for yourself how many Macedonians and Hellenes have gone with you and how many remain. The Hellenes who settled in the cities you founded, even those did not stay quite voluntarily... Some were killed in battle, others... scattered elsewhere in Asia. Even more died of disease; not many remained, and they do not have their former strength, and in spirit they are even more tired. All who still have parents are pining for them; pining for their wives and children, pining for their native land, and pining for it is forgivable to them: they left as poor men and now, raised by you, they yearn to see it, becoming prominent and wealthy men. Do not lead the soldiers against their will" (Arrian. V. 27).
This is the point of view of an intelligent and businesslike man who considered and expressed the sentiments of the troops. One cannot but admit that for all the considerations of realpolitik Ken was right, but it was not his reason, but the irrationality of Alexander's behavior that played an important role in giving rise to that phenomenon which we call "Hellenism" [12] and whose role in the ethnogenesis of the Middle East is beyond doubt.
In this connection the speech of the king himself is curious for us, the arguments with which he enticed the soldiers to continue the campaign. Listing his conquests, Alexander stated: "To men who endure toil and danger for a great cause, it is sweet to live in valor and to die, leaving behind immortal glory... What great and beautiful things would we have accomplished if we had sat in Macedonia and thought that we had had enough of living in peace: to preserve our land and only to drive away from it our neighbors ... who are hostile to us?" (Arrian. V. 26-27).
This is the program of a man who puts glory above his own well-being and the interests of his country. But "he himself despised his own pleasures, and was very stingy with money for his own pleasures, but showered his favors with a generous hand" (Arrian. VII. 28). And he feasted, according to Aristobulus, a witness, for his friends, but drank little himself (Arrian. VII. 29). But they did not go to war for pleasure! And his soldiers did not want to go to war with the Indians, especially since the looted goods with those means of transport were impossible to deliver home. But they did fight, and how they fought!
It is unlikely that the reason for the Macedonian king's campaign was to gain markets for the trading cities or to destroy Phoenician competition. Athens and Corinth, which had just been conquered by force of arms, continued to be the enemies of Macedonia, and to sacrifice oneself for the sake of an enemy makes no sense at all. So the motives for Alexander's behavior have to be sought in his own character. Two qualities, taken to an extreme, are noted in Alexander by both Arrian and Plutarch: ambition and pride, i.e. manifestations of the passionarity described by us. This excess of energy was enough not only to win, but also to force his subjects to fight a war they did not need.
Of course, many of Alexander's comrades-in-arms - Perdiccas, Clitus, Seleucus, Ptomey and others - also possessed passionarity and were genuinely involved in their king's cause, thanks to which they managed to entice the ordinary Macedonians and Greeks to march. Not just one person, but an entire group of passionate people in the Macedonian army was able to break the Persian monarchy and create in its place several Macedonian kingdoms and even a new ethnic group - Syrian. The Macedonians and Persians themselves were transformed in the new conditions beyond recognition, becoming prey to the Romans and Parthians.
But could it be the idea of combining Hellas with the East that pushed Alexander to his exploits? No, he learned philosophy from Aristotle, and the latter did not teach him such things. And chronologically this idea arose not before but after the conquest of Persia, otherwise the palace at Persepolis would not have been burned. No compromise is sought by destroying the masterpieces of art of the conquered people.
So, passionarity is the ability and desire to change the environment, or, in the language of physics, to break the inertia of the aggregate state of the environment. Impulse of passionarity can be so strong that the carriers of this attribute - passionarians can not make themselves calculate the consequences of their actions. This is a very important circumstance indicating that passionarity - is not an attribute of consciousness, but subconsciousness, an important feature, expressed in the specifics of the constitution of nervous activity. The degrees of passionarity are different, but in order for it to have visible and fixable by history, there must be many passionaries, i.e. it is not only an individual trait, but also a population one.
LUCIUS CORNELIUS SULLA
Let us check the correctness of the description of the discovered trait on several other individuals. Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a Roman patrician, had and nobility, had a house in Rome, villas in its vicinity, and many slaves and clients. Like Alexander, he had no shortage of food or entertainment. What was it that impelled him to join the army of Marius, whom he despised and hated? And yet he did not confine himself to the service of a staff officer, he took part in battles and, risking his life, captured Jugurtha to bring him to Rome and condemn him to a starving death in the prison of Mamertina. For all these exploits he had only one reward: staggering around the forum and chatting with his buddies, he could call Marius a talentless chump and himself a hero. Many believed this, but not all; then Sulla got into a fight again, endured a duel with a barbarian leader who had invaded Italy, killed him, and he boasted even more. But even this was not enough for him. He had surpassed Marius, to be sure, but there was still the memory of Alexander. Sulla decided to conquer the East and make himself more famous than the Macedonian king. Then he was told, "Enough! Let others work too!"
It would seem that Sulla should have been satisfied: his services to the Roman Republic are recognized, the house - a full bowl, all around respect and admire live and enjoy it! But Sulla did something different: he stirred up the legions, stormed his hometown, and marched on the barricades without a helmet, to inspire his companions, and made sure he was sent to another difficult war. What drove him? Obviously, there was no desire for gain. But, from our point of view, the internal pressure of passionarity was stronger than the instinct of self-preservation, and respect for the laws, brought up in him by culture and custom. Further is simply a development of the logic of events, something that in the time of A. С. Pushkin called "the power of things" (a good forgotten term). This already belongs to historical science, which reinforces ethnology. Marius in 87 B.C. opposed Sulla with an army of veterans and slaves who were promised freedom. He was supported by the consul Cinna, who drew the Populares-Italics, i.e., the oppressed ethnic groups, to his side. Taking Rome, Marius ordered the most humane of his generals to slaughter the slave soldiers, for his reliance on them compromised him. And four thousand men were slaughtered while they slept by their battle companions. This massacre showed that the Populares, for all their democratic proclamation, differed little from their opponents, the Optimists.
But still the difference was: Sulla had also mobilized his army of 10 thousand slaves, but after victory awarded them plots of land and Roman citizenship. The difference between Marius and Sulla was defined more by personal qualities than by party programs. Yet, unlike Alexander, Sulla was not ambitious and proud, for he himself gave up power as soon as he felt satisfied. He was extremely vain and envious, but these qualities - are only manifestations of passionarity. Again, let us emphasize that Sulla's success depended not only on his personal qualities, but also on contact with his surroundings. His officers - Pompey, Lucullus, Crassus and even some of the legionaries were also passionate, feeling and acting in unison with the leader. Otherwise Sulla would not have become dictator of Rome.
JAN GUS, JOAN D'ARC AND PROTOPOPUS AVVAKUM
It also happens that a passionarius does not sacrifice his loved ones to his own passions, but sacrifices himself for their salvation or for the sake of an idea. An example of such sincere service was shown by Jan Hus, professor at the University of Prague, who declared, "I have said and say that the Czechs in the Kingdom of Bohemia by law... and by the demand of nature should be first in office, just as the French in France and the Germans in their lands..." But Huss's sacrifice in Constance would have been fruitless if not for Žižka and the Prokopy brothers, students of the University of Prague, citizens and knights, peasants and Czech priests, who threw the burgomaster and German advisers of the talentless King Wenceslas IV of the Luxemburg dynasty out the window of the New Town (Prague district) town hall. They were consumed with anger and took revenge for the unjust sentence of their rector, who was betrayed and burned by the Germans.
If in the above examples of Napoleon, Alexander the Great and Lucius Cornelius Sulla it is tempting to see "heroes leading the crowd" with great stretch, then here, with similar combinations of events, it is obviously not about personal "heroism", but about creating ethnic dominance, which organizes the passionarity of the system and directs it toward the intended goal. After all, there are many cases where a heroic and patriotic leader could not encourage his fellow citizens to take up arms in order to protect themselves and their families from a cruel enemy. Suffice it to recall Alexei Murzufl, who fought on the walls of Constantinople against the crusaders in 1204. Around Alexei was only a Viking retinue and a few hundred volunteers; they were all killed. And the 400-thousand population of Constantinople allowed the crusaders to burn and pillage their city. Here is the difference between the role of the leader and the capacity of the ethnic group, determined by the level of passionarity.
Even more revealing are the events that took place in Rome in 41. The regime established by Augustus turned all the republican laws into a fiction, a pompous decoration that covered the arbitrariness of the princeps. Under Tiberius and especially under Caligula, brutal reprisals against the wealthy, whose property filled the imperial coffers, became fashionable. In addition, Caligula suffered from fits of paranoia, during which he ordered the slow murder of anyone he saw or remembered by chance. No one could have imagined such a thing during the Republic, but the civil wars had claimed so many passions that senators and horsemen only shuddered and waited to die. But two brave men were found, Cassius Heraea and Cornelius Sabinus, who killed the villain. The senate could take the power that belonged to it by law: but most of the senators scattered to their homes, the people crowded into the square, and then dispersed; the emperor's bodyguards, the Germans, seeing him dead, left; and the coup did not take place.
Some soldier found Caligula's frightened uncle, Claudius, brought him to his comrades, and they declared him emperor for the payment of 15 thousand sesterces for each legionary. And there was "discord" in the Senate,[13] until all the cohorts joined Claudius. The Republican conspirators were executed, and despotic power was restored.
Here the leaders were "heroes" and the "crowd" was numerous, but the system of the Roman ethnos was deprived of that energetic filling with passionarity which made the Roman people the victor of all neighbors, and the city of Rome the capital of the half-world. The legionaries did not even have to win, for they met no resistance.
But back to the Czechs who lost the rector of the University of Prague. The Czechs were not like the Romans of the time of the Principate, but like the Romans of the time of Marius and Sulla. Of course, Gus was a good professor and popular with Czech students, but his influence on all segments of the Czech ethnos grew enormously after his martyrdom. Not the "hero," but his shadow, which became a symbol of ethnic self-assertion, lifted up the Czechs and threw them against the Germans, so much so that the German and Hungarian militias fled in panic before the Czech partisan detachments. And it cannot be said that the Czechs were inspired by the ideas of the Prague professor. Gus defended the teachings of the English priest Wycliffe, and his followers. Some demanded communion from the chalice - i.e. a return to Orthodoxy; others demanded a national church without a break with the papacy; some denied the need for a hierarchy; others declared themselves "Adamites," ran around naked, and denied everything (these madmen were exterminated by the Czechs themselves).
Not a positive program, but a negative ethnic dominant - "beat the Germans" and for being Catholics, for being noblemen, for being peasants without protection, for being rich burghers at whose expense one can make a profit... in short, for anything - gave the Czechs a victory in the twenty-year war (1415-1436).
But at what cost? The Czechs lost most of their population; Saxony, Bavaria and Austria lost about half; Hungary, Pomerania and Brandenburg lost considerably less, but also quite a bit.
Bohemia defended its freedom and culture, but only through internecine warfare. At Lipany the Utraquist-Chaschists defeated the Protestant Taborists and dealt with them mercilessly. After that the possibility of making peace with the Germans arose. A policy of toleration based on fatigue was implemented by King George Podebrad (1458-1471).
Although this brief overview shows that passionarity is a spontaneous phenomenon, it can nevertheless be orchestrated by one ethnic dominant or another. (We call ethnic dominance a phenomenon or set of phenomena - religious, ideological, military, domestic - that determines the transition of the initial ethnocultural diversity for the process of ethnogenesis into a purposeful uniformity.) But it can also spill over without merging into a single stream; this is exactly what happened in Bohemia in the 15th century.
Similar, but not quite, was the liberation of France in those same years from the power of King Henry VI of England and his Burgundian allies, who sought to break away from France, even though their dukes bore the name of Valois. Joan of Arc, a Lorraine girl who spoke French with a German accent, would never have saved Orléans, the king, or her homeland had she been surrounded only by the shrews - the courtiers of the dauphin and his minion Agnes Sorel - and there would have been no Dunois and La Guire, no Marshal Bussac, no captain Poiton de Santrail, no desperate lathiers and skillful crossbowmen who needed only two words: "Beautiful France," a formulation of ethnic dominance, to understand what was worth fighting for until victory, although even before that those who did not want to "become Englishmen" had fought for the Dauphin.[14] And Avvakum was not alone; the fiery pages of his autobiography were read and re-read by people willing to self-immolate for the sake of what they revered.
Again, the strength of "Old Believerism" in Russia was not in the arguments of reason; they never got down to a calm dispute with the Nikonians. And Avvakum was not defending the ancient Orthodoxy, but the habitual Orthodoxy, which is not at all the same thing. Nikon had sent from Venice the best editions of Greek texts on patristics, published by the Aldon brothers, for verification and as samples. Avvakum, on the other hand, demanded a correction of the liturgical books from the Russian translations of the 13th and 14th centuries. These translations were very beautiful, but less exact than the original of the 4th and 5th centuries. The Old Believers' objection to bright colors on icons is based on their habit of faces darkened by time. Andrei Rublev and Theophanes the Greek painted in bright colors, which had been forgotten by the 17th century.
In short, the subjects of the dispute were random, but the dispute itself was logical, because it expressed the splitting of the Great Russian ethnos, with the subsequent allocation of a sub-ethnos "Old Believers", in which there was not even a shadow of dogmatic unity, as there were currents of "Polovtsy" and "Besopovtsy", and then numerous "talkies". But the ethnos did not disintegrate. During the Swedish invasion of Byelorussia, emigrant Old Believers created partisan detachments and 'quite helped Menshikov in his victory at Lesnaya.
So it is not individual passionaries who do great things, but the overall mood, which can be called the level of passionarial tension. The mechanism of this phenomenon was brilliantly described by Oposten Thierry in his analysis of Hugo Capet's victory over the Carolingians, which resulted in the formation of the core of the French ethnos. "The masses of the people, when they come into motion, are not aware of the force that pushes them. They go, driven by instinct, and advance toward the goal without trying to define it precisely. If one were to judge superficially, one would think that they were following blindly the private interests of a leader, whose name only remains in history. But these names are known only because they serve as a center of attraction for a large number of people who, in saying them, know what they are supposed to signify and do not feel the need to express themselves more precisely at a given moment. Yes, but this means that all the events we have considered have at their core, or rather in depth, an ethnic content. Both Alexander, Sulla, Jan Hus, and Avvakum must be seen as participants in different ethnogenesis in different phases and regions. Thus, through the isolation of individual psychological abstractions, we have come to ethnopsychology as a sphere of manifestation of behavioral impulses.
The enormous material accumulated by ethnography urgently requires generalization. Many Soviet ethnographers have been searching for a principle on which to comprehend all global material[16]. It is clear that the principle must be new, otherwise it would have been applied long ago, and universal. These requirements are met by the real phenomenon of passionarity as an effect of nature's influence on the behavior of ethnic communities. But this contradicts the usual concept of ethnos as a "social state"[17].
Adherence to outdated and incorrect views entails the well-known logical error of the inductive method - metaphorical deformation. In encountering new thoughts, impressions, etc., the brain seeks rest in a buffering process of analogization that creates a bridge between the perceived known and the new unknown, which is clothed in the garb of the familiar. This is the pathway that attracts us. We want to take the next step. But first, let us briefly formulate the conclusions already drawn, for they now turn into starting points.
HOARDING OR WASTING?
Recall that the discovery of the biochemical energy of living matter was made by Vernadsky, when he compared the accumulation of locusts with the mass of ore in the deposit. There were more kgs of locusts, and they flew towards death. So what was pushing it? In search of an answer, the theory of the biosphere, a shell of the Earth with anti-entropic properties, was created. But humans are also part of the biosphere. Consequently, the energy of living matter penetrates the bodies of ours, our ancestors and will penetrate the bodies of our descendants, stimulating a variety of ethnogenesis. And now our task is to show whether the phenomenon we have discovered and described can solve the questions of ethnogenesis and ethnic history posed above.
The above-described scheme of ethnogenesis as a discrete process assumes a sudden emergence of a group of passionate ethnoses within a region, their subsequent spread beyond its borders, the loss of complexity of the ethnic system and either the dispersal of the individuals that made it up or their transformation into a relic. Since this scheme, despite its many local variations, can be traced everywhere, there is a need for its interpretation, if only by comparison.
Imagine a ball received a sudden jolt. The energy of the push is spent first on overcoming the inertia of rest, and then on the motion of the ball, which will slowly decay due to the resistance of the environment until the ball stops; the path of this ball will depend on whether it rolls on a level place, or runs into obstacles, or falls into a pit, etc., but no matter how many times we repeat this operation, the principle of motion is the same - the inertia of the push, i.e. the waste of energy of the received impulse.
In the biosphere, phenomena of this order are called successions. Succession is quite diverse in its duration, character and consequences, but all of them have a marked similarity - inertia, which in humans is manifested as a waste of passionate impulse. This relates mankind to other phenomena of the biosphere, while the social and cultural structures peculiar only to man have a different character of movement. The phenomenon of the ethnos is on the verge of two forms of movement.
XXIV. Passionary Tension
THE BIOCHEMICAL ASPECT OF PASSIONARITY
There is no doubt that each individual and each group of people is a part of the biosphere and a constituent element of society, but the nature of interaction between these forms of matter movement requires clarification. In order to achieve this goal and to solve the problem of the relationship between man as a carrier of civilization and the natural environment, the concept of "ethnos" was introduced to designate it as a stable collective of individuals, opposing itself to all other similar collectives, having an internal structure, in each case distinctive, and a dynamic stereotype of behavior. It is through ethnic collectives that specific variants of humanity's connection with the natural environment are carried out. However, this raises the question of the boundary and the relationship between the natural and the social. The fact that nature dominates outside the technosphere is obvious, but it is also found in people's bodies. Physiology (including pathophysiology) is closely connected with psychology as a product of the nervous and hormonal activity of the body. Lack of iodine causes cretinism; adrenaline release creates fear and anger; glandular hormones stimulate love lyrics and sentimental romance; chemical compounds as doping affect not only the physical but also the mental state of athletes; drugs lead to the degeneration of entire nations, etc. The regularity of the social form of the movement of matter in man is so intertwined with the biological, biochemical, and biophysical that the need for a clear distinction between them is obvious.
But if it is extremely difficult to do this, taking one person as an object of study, it is much easier to take the ethnos as a unit system of a higher order, where the inevitable errors of analysis are mutually compensated. Of course, it is difficult to describe, let alone calculate the passionarity of the people of eras past. But there is a reverse course of thought. The work performed by an ethnic collective is directly proportional to the level of passionariness[18]. Consequently, counting the number of events in the history of an ethnos, even with a large tolerance, we get the result of energy expenditure, on the basis of which we can judge the initial charge of energy, i.e. the level of passionarity.
Actions dictated by passionarity are easily distinguishable from ordinary actions performed due to the presence of the universal instinct of self-preservation, personal and species. They are no less different from reactive actions triggered by external stimuli, such as the invasion of foreign tribesmen. Reactions, as a rule, are short-lived and therefore ineffective. Passionaries, on the other hand, are characterized by devotion to a particular goal, sometimes pursued throughout a lifetime. This makes it possible to characterize this or that era in the aspect of passionarity.
Having characterized in this aspect different phases of ethnogenesis of the studied ethnos, we will obtain data for constructing the curve of passionaric tension with an admissible approximation, and with a number of similar calculations for different ethnoses and better super-ethnoses we will catch the general pattern of ethnogenesis. So, in order to grasp this regularity, it is necessary to know well the history of events, because history as a science of social relations reflects not this but quite another regularity - spontaneous development inherent in the social form of matter movement.
There may be doubts about the legitimacy of contrasting the idea of the self-development of the social form of matter movement - the concept with inertial movement, gradually fading, which is inherent in ethnogenesis as a variation within the species Homo sapiens. It would seem that human biological changes can take place without the fluctuating energy of the living matter of the biosphere, without the effect of passional tension. However, in this case the optimal degree of adaptation to these or those conditions would have been a dead end for any type of development, the outcome of which in this case was only the complete destruction of of the population. After all, in order to reorganize physiologically and ecologically, a species (or an ethnos) must give up its developed organs (or skills), i.e. step back from a dead end in order to find a new path. Conversely, the emergence of mutation without reference to environmental conditions, in other words, excesses affect the population forcibly, forcing its altered part to seek ways to achieve the lost paradise - homeostasis, which Ovid represented as a "golden age".
THE MULTI-VECTOR NATURE OF THE ETHNIC SYSTEM IN THE SCHEME
Since there is not and cannot be ethnogenesis without passionate tension, we can consider passionarity as an obligatory element of ethnogenesis, which, figuratively speaking, can be taken out of the brackets, within which there are local features of certain ethnoses. It is this feature, common to all processes, that is important for identifying the pattern.
However, no one has ever seen Passionarity as a phenomenon itself and never will. Consequently, we can characterize it only by its manifestations. But the most difficult thing is not even this, but how to take into account and understand the multidirectional dominants generated by the ethnos' passionarity.
Let's explain by examples. In the 8th-5th centuries B.C., Hellas was boiling with passionarity. The Three Rhemes furrowed the Mediterranean and Black Seas, the Hellenic colonies stretched from the Caucasus to Spain, and Ionia and Greater Greece (in Italy) became more populous than the metropolis. The Hellenic polities, however, could not coordinate their forces, for each valued its independence more than its life, and subjugation amounted to slavery. Even under the deadly threat of Xerxes' campaign, the Thessalians and Boeotians fought for the Persians, not at all forgetting that they were Hellenes. For this they suffered severely, for the Athenians and Spartans after the battle of Plataea executed the captive Persian Greeks, while the Persians were spared.
But once the Peloponnesian and Thebanian wars had emaciated Hellas, coordination of forces and Alexander's march on Persia were possible. The area of Hellenism was much wider than that of Hellenism, but these successes were achieved at the expense of the general decline in the passionate level of Hellas, when the most culturally and economically undeveloped areas, Aetolia and Achaea, began to claim the first role along with Macedonia. Not only they became stronger, but Athens, Thebes and Sparta became weaker. In other words, the overall strength of Hellas as a system diminished. That’s why it became easy prey to Rome. And although the inertia of the Hellenes' former potential power was enough to make the Roman nobility aware of their culture, the weakening continued until the remnant of the Hellenes turned into a core of Byzantine Greeks, completely transformed by the passionate push of the first century AD. But this is another process.
So, simple observations without corrections will overwhelmingly lead to false conclusions. The decline of the passionaric thrust will be recognized as a rise, because in both cases there are a large number of accomplishments; and the small number of "great deeds" is equally characteristic of low and relatively high levels of passionarity, because in the second case, the balancing of differently directed forces and temporal stabilization is possible. It is necessary to study not the individual moments of the life of the ethnos, but the entire process. Then it will be clear whether passionarity increases or decreases.
What cannot be distinguished in the most careful study of an individual because of the multifactoriality of the moments determining behavior is revealed in the statistical study of the activities of large collectives, manifested in the history of mankind. First, irrelevant factors are mutually compensated; second, historical processes are fixed in absolute time, while biological or geological processes are fixed in relative time.
Therefore, only history can give the natural sciences an absolute chronology, receiving from them in return ways of empirical generalization, after which ethnology appears - a science processing humanitarian materials by methods of natural sciences.
We do not undertake to judge: whether a single gene or a combination of genes, whether this trait is recessive or dominant, whether it is connected with nervous or hormonal activity of the organism lies in the basis of passionarity? Let representatives of other sciences answer these questions. Our task, ethnological, has been completed. We have discovered along with the social biogeographical development of the anthroposphere and what has caused it. The essence of the phenomenon of passionarity and its connections with other elements of the biosphere will be discussed below.
PASSIONARITY INDUCTION
Passionarity has an important property: it is contagious. This means that people who are harmonious (and to an even greater extent, impulsive), being in close proximity to the passionaries, begin to behave as if they were passionarous. But as soon as enough distance separates them from the passionaries, they regain their natural psycho-ethnic behavior. This circumstance, without special comprehension, is known quite widely and is taken into account mainly in the military. There they either select passionaries, recognizing them intuitively, and form selective, shock troops from them, or deliberately disperse them in the mass of mobilized to raise "military spirit". In the second case, it is believed that two or three passionaries can increase the combat effectiveness of an entire company. And this is indeed the case.
Ф. Engels in his article "Cavalry" writes that the counter combat of two cavalry units is extremely rare. Usually some turn the rear before the fight, i.e., "the moral factor, bravery, here turns into a material force," the decisive moment being the impulse (dash),[19] in which the soldier values victory (the ideal goal) more than his own life.
It goes without saying that the cavalrymen in the regiment are quite different from each other in their mental qualities, but nevertheless in combat the regiment behaves as a unified whole, more or less passionate. The regiment's passionarity lies in valuing victory over life, and the paradox is that a less passionate military unit dies, for the cavalry will easily cut down the runners. Keep in mind that it is only possible to "electrify" a few hundred people equally by induction, i.e., by exposing each individual to the passionarity charge of another individual. A logical continuation of the analogy would be the hypothesis of a passionarial field (similar to an electromatic field), which has quite different properties of affecting the psychology of populations compared to the individual psychologies of the same people taken separately.
In contrast with the theory of "the hero and the crowd" the point is not that the hero leads a military unit, but that due to the presence of several passionate, unremarkable individuals among the soldiers in the unit itself acquires what Engels calls the marked impulse, which sometimes helps even an untalented military leader. For example, no one has tried to compare the talents of Benigsen, Wittgenstein, and Blucher with those of Napoleon, but the impulse of the Russian, British, and Prussian troops in 1813-1814 was stronger than that of the French recruits, almost children.
The most important thing, perhaps, is that in such critical cases it is usually useless to influence people's consciousness, i.e., reason. And no arguments help. Let us recall the tragedy of Hannibal, who suffocated in an unequal war on the threshold of victory. After the battle of Cannes he needed a small reinforcement, a detachment of infantry, to take Rome and thus save Carthage. The arguments used in the Carthaginian council of elders by Hannibal's ambassadors and supporters of the Varca family were impeccable.
But he who wishes not to hear will not hear, he who strives not to understand will not understand. The elders of Carthage sent a reply to the commander: "You are winning, so why do you need more troops?", thus condemning their grandchildren to death.
And it cannot be said that the Carthaginian rulers were stupid or cowardly.
But the influence of the absentee did not extend to them. And when the defeated Hannibal returned to his hometown, it turned out that his popularity is so great that the mighty rivals were forced to bow to him, and only an ultimatum from the Roman Senate forced Hannibal to leave his homeland. Hannibal himself decided to sacrifice himself, for he understood that attempted resistance was doomed.
And one more example, this time from literary history. On July 8, 1880. F. M. Dostoevsky, at a meeting of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, made a speech about Pushkin. The success was, according to recollections of eyewitnesses, grandiose. However, the reading of this speech does not make a special impression. It does not go along with chapters from The Brothers Karamazov. Apparently, Dostoevsky's personal presence played no small role in enhancing the impact of his speech on the audience.
Passionate induction manifests itself everywhere. This is especially evident nowadays, when music or theater lovers besiege the entrances of the Conservatory or the Moscow Art Theater. After all, they know perfectly well that the impression of the same plays broadcast on radio or television is unequal to the one they get in the theater. This example may be microscopic compared to the phenomena of ethnogenesis, but the pattern here and there is the same.
A striking example of passionate induction is the battle on the Arkol Bridge in 1796. The Austrian and French armies were separated by a shallow but viscous river, over which the bridge was thrown. Three times the French attacked, but were repulsed by Austrian buckshot. Finally, when the soldiers seemed impossible to raise for a new rush, General Napoleon Bonaparte grabbed the banner and rushed forward, and behind him, like a magnet attracting iron filings, flowed to the bridge the entire column of grenadiers. The first ranks were again mangled by buckshot, but the next ones managed to run up to the Austrian guns and break the gunners, after which the French army crossed in one piece and the battle was won. Napoleon himself survived only because he was pushed off the bridge into the river during the dash.
Let us analyze this example from the perspective we have adopted. The army sent to Italy was the worst of all the French armies operating at the time on the fronts. It was manned by mobilized peasants from the bleeding and trampled Parisians of the South of France,[20] poorly trained and even worse equipped. They were inert men, without professional military skills. The intendants in this army were scoundrels, and a considerable part of them were shot by Bonaparte for embezzlement even before the campaign began.
Consequently, the percentage of passionate individuals was negligible, and the best regiments of the Habsburg monarchy were moved against them. And yet, in the four great battles (Lodi, Castiglione, Arcola, Rivoli) the French gained the upper hand because Napoleon was able to inhale (or rather introduce, i.e. induce) passionarity at the crucial moment, something his rival, General Albinzi, could not do. And some time later the induced passionarity disappeared, and Suvorov with three battles (at Adda, Trebbia and Novi in 1799) negated the success of the French in Italy. In this case you can not blame the French generals - Jourdain, Macdonald and especially Moreau. They knew their job well, but they made efforts, not over-exertion. But Suvorov, like Bonaparte, could transfer his excessive passionarity not only to Russian, but even to foreign soldiers. However Suvorov could not influence gofkriegsrat, because it sat in Vienna, and for the passionary induction requires a certain proximity; a hundred kilometers away it is not felt.
When Suvorov, after the lost Swiss campaign and albeit a heroic retreat, came to Vienna and, entering the theater, blessed those present, no one found this to be ridiculous or inappropriate. On the contrary, Suvorov was given imperial honors, although it would have been much more useful not to embarrass his actions six months ago.
We have dwelt so much on these examples in order not to mention the mass of similar cases, but in essence the entire military and political history of developing ethnic groups consists of these or those variants of passionary induction, by which the harmonious individuals are set in motion in crowds.
However, these variants are also varied, with the degree of ethnic proximity being decisive. Suvorov could raise the spirits of the Russian troops through the modus patriotism to a greater extent than the Hungarian, Tyrolean, Croatian, or Czech soldiers also under his command.
Napoleon had a much stronger effect on the French than on the Westphalians, Saxons, Dutch and Neapolitans, as the campaign of 1812-1813 showed. We can say that the resonance of passionary excitability is smaller the further apart the ethnoses of the passionary and the harmonious individual are, of course, other conditions being equal. This circumstance again brings the problem of passionarity as a trait closer to the problem of the essence of ethnic monolithism. But resonance, like induction, is an energetic concept. How applicable are they to the ethnos?
As we have seen above, any process of ethnogenesis is initiated by heroic, sometimes sacrificial deeds of small groups of people (consortia), which are joined by the surrounding masses, and quite sincerely. Of course, this or that person may have skeptical or simply selfish attitudes, but once he has entered the system that is emerging before his eyes, his attitudes are of little importance. This well-known phenomenon is explained by the passionary induction and resonance we have noted. And they allow us to understand the importance of organic passionaries, who are "seed" for those whom passionarity has infected. Without the former, the latter fall apart as soon as the generator of passionary induction has disappeared and the inertia of resonance has dried up. And this usually happens very quickly.
WAYS OF LOSS OF PASSIONARITY
So, any ethnogenesis is a more or less intensive loss of passionarity by the system, in other words, the death of passionaries and their genes; this is especially evident during heavy wars, because passionate warriors mostly die young, not having used their full capacity to transmit their qualities to their offspring.
But the most interesting thing is that it is not only during wars that the passionate tension decreases. It would be easily explained by the deaths of individuals who too actively sacrifice their lives for the triumph of their collective. But passionarity falls just as steadily during times of deep peace, and even faster than during violent times. And the worst thing for an ethnos is the transition from quiet existence to defense before the onslaught of another ethnos; then the inevitable, if not the death, of a breakdown that never goes away painlessly. It is impossible to explain the phenomenon by social reasons or factors, but if we consider increased passionarity as an inherited trait - everything is clear.
During wars, women appreciate heroes who go into battle, so that before they perish, they manage to leave offspring, not always in a legal marriage. Children grow up and continue to do what their constitution dictates, even without knowing their fathers. Conversely, during quieter periods, the moderate and neat family man becomes the ideal, while the passionarians find no place in life. This situation is illustrated in I.A. Goncharov's The Precipice, where the girl prefers both the revolutionary and the artist to the rich landowner.
The same pattern we observe where the family is polygamous and the woman seems to be powerless. The rapid reproduction of the Arabs during the Caliphate and the Ottoman Turks was due to polygamy. But concubines for harems were obtained in battle, maintained at the expense of spoils of war or revenues from conquered countries. Even marrying a compatriot was very expensive, since a bride price was supposed to provide for the family in case of widowhood. The poor nomadic Bedouins were therefore content with one wife, who had the right to divorce, for marriage was not a sacrament, as in Christian Europe, but a civil condition. So, Muslim law - Shariah did not prevent a woman from choosing a husband according to her taste, and the taste corresponded to the fashion either for brave men who brought booty or for diligent masters who ensured prosperity in the home.
In either case, both in the West and in the East, the passionaries who were not needed, and sometimes society throwing them away, died without legitimate offspring. Their disappearance from the population went unnoticed until external shocks shook the ethnos, and when this happened, it turned out that the loss was irreplaceable. And then came the phase of obscuration, i.e. agony. So we have the right to assert that ethnic processes are not a kind of social processes, but constantly interact with them, which forms the diversity of historical geography, where the focus of both co-exist.
So, passionarity is not just "bad tendencies," but an important hereditary trait that brings to life new combinations of ethnic substrates, transforming them into new super-ethnic systems. Now we know where to look for its cause: ecology and the conscious activity of individuals fall away. What remains is a wide area of subconsciousness, but not individual, but collective, and the duration of the inertia of the passionarial impulse is counted in centuries. Consequently, passionarity is a biological trait, and the initial push, which breaks the inertia of rest, it is the emergence of a generation, including a number of passionate individuals. By the very fact of their existence, they disrupt the usual environment, because they cannot live their everyday life without a purpose that fascinates them. The need to resist the environment forces them to unite and act accordingly; this is how the primary consortium emerges, quickly acquiring these or those social forms prompted by the level of social development of the era.
The activity generated by passionary tension, given a favorable set of circumstances, puts this consortium in the most favorable position, while the scattered passionaries not only in ancient times "were either expelled from the tribes or simply killed"[21]. This is roughly the same in a class society. Pushkin noted this when he wrote: "...mediocrity alone is not strange to us..." (Eugene Onegin, Chapter Eight, IX).
Quite right! Passionaries are doomed. But if they always died before they had time to do anything, we would still be sacrificing babies, killing old people, devouring the bodies of our murdered enemies, trying to kill our friends and relatives by witchcraft. There would be no pyramids, no Pantheon, no "discovery" of America, no formulation of the law of gravitation, and no flights into space. However, all this is there, and began to accumulate back in the Paleolithic. And it would not be the modern French, English, Russians, etc., who live on Earth today, but the Sumerians, Picts, and others, whose names have long been forgotten.
Passionaries die most tragically in the final phases of ethnogenesis, when they become scarce and the understanding between them and the masses of commoners is lost. So it was in 1203 in Byzantium. A small band of crusaders, only 20,000 men, appeared under the walls of Constantinople to put the deposed emperor's son on the throne. The Greeks could field 70,000 warriors, but they did not resist, leaving the Viking army and those brave men who marched to the walls unaided. The city was taken twice: on June 18, 1203 and April 12, 1204. The last time it was terribly destroyed and looted. The crusaders lost... one knight! Well, the Passionaries were killed in battle and the others killed in their torched homes. Cowardice does not save. And yet there were forces of resistance. It was possible not only to survive, but also to win. And when the province entered the war, the victory was won and Constantinople was liberated, only to fall again in 1453 under the same circumstances. And again there were many people left, quietly letting themselves be slaughtered by the victors. So what kind of people were these?
NOTES
[1] Marx K., Engels F. Opus, 2nd ed. Vol. 3, p. 245.
[2] For more details, see: Higher Nervous Activity of Man. Motivational and Emotional Aspects. М., 1975. С. 27-29
[3] Ibid.
[4] For more details see: Gumilev L.N. 1) Ethnogenesis and ethnosphere // Nature. 1970. - 1, P. 46-56 - 2, P. 43-50; 2) Ethnogenesis - a natural process / / Ibid. 1971. - 2. P. 80-82; 3) On the relationship between nature and society, according to historical geography and ethnology / / / Vestnik LFU. 1970. - 24. С. 39-49.
[5] The English equivalent of the term drive (see: Soviet Geography. 1973. Vol.XIV. - 5. P. 322).
[6] Marx K., Engels F. Op. 21, p. 176.
[7] Ibid. С. 165.
[8] Ibid. С. 99.
[9] Hegel F. Opus; In 14 vols. Т. 8. M., 1935, P. 23.
[10] Marx K., Engels F. Opus. Vol. 37. С. 394
[11] Arrian. Alexander's campaign /Translated by M.E. Sergienko. M.; L., 1962. II. 14.4; III. 18.12 - Hereinafter the footnotes to this edition are given in the text.
[12] Hellenism is usually defined as cultures developed in the wake of Alexander's campaigns, where Hellenistic elements were mixed with Eastern elements.
[13] Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus. Life of the twelve Caesars, Moscow, 1964. С. 132,135
[14] Raitses V. I. Process of Joan of Arc. M., L., 1954. С. 12. See also: Raitses V. I. Joan of Arc. Л., 1982.
[15] Thierry O. Izbr. op. M., 1937. С. 255.
[16] See for example: Bromley Yu. В. 1) To the Question of the Essence of Ethnos // Nature. 1970. - 2. P. 51-55, 2) Ethnos and ethnography. М., 1973.
[17] Kozlov V. I. Dynamics of the number of peoples. М., 1969. С. 56.
[18] The passionary tension of an ethnos is the amount of passionarity available in the ethnic system, divided by the number of persons constituting the ethnos.
[19] See: Marx K. Engels F. Op. 14, p. 318.
[20] In the thirteenth century. - During the Albigoy War; in the 16th century ~ the Huguenot wars and in the 17th century. - because of the Camisar rebellion.
[21] Kozlov V. I. What is ethnos // Nature. 1971. - 2. С. 72.
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