Gumilev in a discussion on the interaction, man and nature.

THE LENINGRAD THEOLOGICAL ACADEMY, (31 JANUARY - 5 FEBRUARY 1988), ON THE 1000TH ANNIVERSARY OF ORTHODOX BAPTISM OF RUS'

This is a short panel discussion with Gumilev, a historian, Florensky, a geologist, and Shutova, a journalist and moderator. There is also a 4th voice, called “Jester”, which must be an inserted counterpoint, kind of joking. (I didn’t find a graphic with a woman moderator, sorry.)

First a Gumilev narration on how RUS was baptized:

I will be very brief. Before our Holy Church came to Rus' and baptized our “sinful people”, there was a century of very sharp conflicts, when the government and the people hesitated in choosing one of the several faiths offered to them.

In the past century, the solution of these issues was reduced to the study of the "Tale of Bygone Years", (a longstanding synthetic history), where this is set out very concisely in one short story of the chronicler Nestor, But thanks to the works of A. A. Shakhmatov and D. S. Likhachev we can treat the "Tale of Bygone Years" with some disbelief. The critical works of D.S. Likhachev have prompted me to look for new ways to solve problems that remained undisputed, ways purely historical, which in Scripture are defined by one phrase - "by their works ye shall know them". The fact is that there are few surviving ninth-century sources and their information is not very reliable. Therefore, it is better to work not on the sources, but on the dissected chains of facts, which I did. And came to the following conclusions, which I believe reliable.

Allow us to do a little prologue first, first on Earth and then in Heaven. Both won't take us very long.

Eastern Europe, where the ancestors of the modern Russian people lived, has always been ethnographically motley. In addition to the Slavs, the Russians lived here. Both Slavs and Russians, as well as Lithuanians, Latvians, Prussians and other Baltic peoples were very negatively disposed toward Christianity. Khazars were in the power [363-364] of the Jewish government, which waged constant war with Byzantium. It would seem that there was no chance for the Christian religion to prevail in this land.

But the next prologue took place in Heaven. The fact is that there is in the hearts of people a love of freedom and independence, a respect for tradition, a demand that they be reckoned with, that they be understood. Neither the Jewish government of the Khazars, nor the cruel customs of pagan cults, particularly the cult of Perun, which required human sacrifice, nor the Tengri cult, coming from the Great Steppe, satisfied the hearts of the people and, moreover - the interests of the government. And in order to achieve their own salvation and to ensure this salvation for their neighbors, salvation both on Earth and in Heaven, it was necessary to make a choice of faith from among four options - they are described in the Tale of Bygone Years. One could have joined the "Muslim world," which was then in its heyday, at the culmination of its culture.

You could join Catholicism, which was on a great rise, and developing ...

You could join the new, emerging cult of Perun. Why do I say "new"? Because it appeared only in the IX century. This is not my idea, but the idea of Academician B. A. Rybakov, and he is right in this case. It was a new cult, associated with the Viking movement, which began in the IX century. Before the ninth century, although the name of Perun occurs, in particular in the work of Procopius of Caesarea, but in a completely different presentation. The cult of the homicidal god, the god who demands blood and human sacrifices, came to the East, and to Russia, together with the Vikings, during their campaigns. It made its way to the West as well, even reaching America. But we had to choose. The first Varangian princes, who bore the title Helgi, or Oleg (it is a title, it is not a proper name), fought quite actively with Byzantium. But found an ally, oddly enough, in Khazaria.

And this is where we come to the prologue in Heaven. The fact is that with the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, grace descended upon the Earth, which gave birth to monotheism - theism. But since there is theism, with a one sign, there must also be atheism, with the opposite sign, and there must also be something in between-the zero composition. And all of this exists and existed then in kind.

What we call paganism is essentially a great complex of superstitions, characteristic of different geographical zones, of different ethnicities, but leading not to the fact that [364-365] people believe in something, but that people try to protect themselves from something, to save themselves from something. For example, they try not to get lost in the woods, not to get into some deadly place where they can die. They try to foresee atmospheric influences, such as cyclones with rain, floods, etc. On the basis of personification there were images of fairies, watermen, the cult of the dead, mermaids. But to call this cult a religion or faith, in my opinion, is wrong.

Nowadays all of us, including atheists, believe that alpha-rays affect our health in a harmful way. None of us have seen alpha rays, but we all believe physicists who say they are harmful. Those who want to check, OK, but I am not one of them. I believe that alpha rays are harmful. And there used to be many such phenomena that people knew nothing about, but tried to get away from them. So, when we consider the choice of faith, we will move away from these beliefs that are purely ethnographic.

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Let us turn to Muslimism

The Muslim religion is essentially a variant of early, pre-Catholic Christianity, because Muhammad, being a man of illiteracy, heard what the caravaners from Palmyra, Antioch, and Jerusalem said around him. And what they were saying was a particular heresy-Sabellianism or the doctrine of Paul of Samosata: strict monotheism, a doctrine which claimed that Jesus was a man, a prophet, and modalism, that is, the manifestation of one God in different persons. This doctrine was rejected as early as the Council of Nicaea, but in Syria and Arabia it persisted even after the Council of Nicaea. That is, we can define theism as a single religion with a number of variations and variations. Atheism, too, can be defined as something whole. The difference is that while theism recognizes God as a being, atheism (Manichaeism, Gnosticism, apparently Talmudic Judaism) recognizes pleroma, or the element of light, and the element of darkness, the cult of the elements. To this same system of atheism belongs Mithraism, the cosmic cult of the Sun (the Sun is the eye of Mithra, and Mithra himself is the cosmos, the law-order). Everyone was free to choose theism or atheism, even in the most mystical form.  And what turned out to be: both in the West and in the East, atheistic church forms arose, which in France were called Albigensians, in the Balkans - Cathars, in the Middle East - Ishmaelites. There were many of them, but their meaning was the same. They rejected the material reality.

And here it was necessary to decide for Russia, the Russian people, who were in an exceptionally difficult situation from the constant blows from the Khazaria of the Rahdonites and without anyone's [365-366] help or support. It was necessary to decide where to go, what choice to make?

And the choice was made in the middle of the IX century, even before Vladimir. In 846 Patriarch Photii sent missionaries to Rus', and they founded the first Orthodox community in Kiev. And three years before that, St. Cyril (Constantine the philosopher) traveled to Khazaria and baptized a number of Khazars, who formed the beginning of the Don Cossacks. Christianity in the IX century, began to compete with the local cults. And here is the most interesting thing: the anti-Christian systems - Judaism and the homicidal cult of Perun - united in their actions.

There is no record of this. People were illiterate back then, and if they wrote in Greek, it was on birch bark, which, of course, has not survived. There were no texts, but there is a chain of events. And what turns out: the Vikings, who came from the Baltic, quickly agreed with the merchants Khazarin (with whom they traded) on allied actions. When Muslims cut the trade routes that led across the Caspian Sea, Khazaria had to fight. But it did not have its own army: the merchant top brass did not take the local population into the army and did not fight.

Khazar Khaganate power was based on the fact that the government of Khazaria hired belligerent mountaineers from the southern shore of the Caspian Sea - Deylemites. They fought for a very high fee, but with one condition: they would not fight against Muslims. They were used as a police force to suppress the non-Muslim tribes: the Slavs, the Bashkirs and other peoples. And to fight the Muslims they had to hire Russians.

The merchant rulers of Khazaria had a brutal, but very logical order: the troops that were defeated, when they came back they were punished by death. And it was natural for the merchants - they paid for the soldiers to win. Defeat was punishable by death. Russ which did not know it, three times went to Caspian Sea, three times suffered defeat, and three times were exterminated by Moslems and Christians, living on Volga, - a unique way from Caspian Sea to Russia. After that, of course, the attitude of the relatives of the dead was extremely negative to this reign. And the influence of Khazaria outside of its strongholds was lost.

But then one terrible event happened. In 939 Russian Prince Helgi went with an army to the Khazar town of Samkerz, and taking advantage of the fact that it’s commandant was not there - Rebbe Hashmonai, he  took the fortress. The regular [366-367] Khazar troops, commanded by the "venerable Pesach," were thrown against him. Helgi was defeated, and Pesach marched through the Crimea, where all the Christian population except Chersonesos was slaughtered, and then reached Kiev (in 939) and levied tribute on it. This was the culmination of the development of Khazaria, which, naturally, no one liked.

Princess Olga found a reasonable way out: she turned to Byzantium. It was the only country that was firmly Christian, without the negative sign, without the sectarians like the Albigensians, Zindians or Ishmaelites, and therefore it could be trusted. With Princess Olga, began the path that through victory over Khazaria led to the baptism of Russia. [367-368]

PANEL DISCUSSION, REMEMBER BABYLON1.

Our interlocutors are Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev, Doctor of Historical Sciences, and Pavel Vasilievich Florensky, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences. They are connected by the former Nikolayevskaya Road, which connected two Russian capitals and two senses of Russian statehood and nationality, a long friendship, love for Asia, and devotion to the ideas of V. I. Vernadsky.

1 Istoki Almanac, 1989, vol. 20, pp. 359-372.

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The Tower of Babel is the core of the conversation led by journalist Tatiana Shutova.

Shutova. Why did the tower of Babel collapse? According to tradition, the tower was built by the ancient inhabitants of the Acre, striving to be equal to God in their arrogance. But, unable to find common ground among themselves, they found themselves under the rubble of the collapsed edifice.

Florensky. It is not without reason that the grounds for the death of the ancient civilization of the East was that it could not find a common language with nature. Deforestation, overgrazing, and Irrigation, initially uplifting civilizations, and then the rise of groundwater, salinization, swamping of the land. Salty winds scattered states into ashes and sent nations out into the world.

Gumilev. In our time, the legend of the Tower of Babel is evolving from a symbol into a myth. Before the modern mankind, becoming a united earth civilization in the era of transition to noosphere, two questions arise with all urgency: to find a common language between the peoples and the states, and a common language with the nature. Failure to do so is death.  In the first case, referring to nuclear war, it is instantaneous. In the second, as a result of a total ecological catastrophe, it is slow and agonizing. Therefore, in order to ensure the political, economic [368-369] and environmental security of peoples, it is necessary, as Vernadsky wrote, to "to unite the efforts of all mankind" with the widest participation of all people in the creation of the noosphere - the sphere of reason. Humanity standing on a platform of planetary patriotism. The alternative to this is the path to the necrosphere - the sphere of death.

Shutova. Isn't this the vector along which we believe the development of civilizations, and indeed the entire Earth, is moving? "Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse" - "Everything passes, everything grows old, everything is destroyed" - this is how the French translate the famous statement of Ecclesiastes. What do a geologist and a historian think about the subject of their sciences?

Florensky. Originally the subject of geology was the Earth. But coming out of its cradle, humanity has rushed beyond the boundaries of the universe. And now, planetary geology is rapidly developing. As for the Earth, it had a beginning. It began billions of years ago. Its development can be likened to the life of a living organism, and then it turns out that the general nature of the stages of age are similar.

Astrophysicists believe that the solar system is in the middle of its development. A billion years of planetary life can be equated to ten years of human life. So, the Earth is a person at the age of 45 years.

Landscapes have their own "beginning and end”. According to Clements' succession theory, they are nascent, "growing," and formed into types. There comes a period of "kleimex", the apogee of this or that landscape. There is a painting "Alexander the Great's crossing of the Amu Darya" in the Museum of Local Lore in Dushanbe. The famous general's army is crossing the torrent on rafts. It is strange to see rafts made of logs 40 centimetres in diameter. The indestructible army was not dragging the trees for thousands of kilometers! 

Jester. Perhaps the trees are aboriginal? Although a turanga does not reach such a thickness. In addition, its trunk grows shriveled up in old age.

Florensky. Botanists suggested that it could be a plane tree or elm. But what kind of heavy log rafts? Paleobotanists, based on spore-pollen analysis, claim that broadleaf forests once grew there. So, the landscape has changed beyond recognition over the past two and a half thousand years. The Amu Darya can already be waded across...

Gumilev. ...it no longer flows into the Khazar Sea, as the Caspian Sea used to be called, but into the Aral Sea. However, it changed its course [369-370] many times in historical times. And in the time of the Macedonian, the Khazars were not a thing of the past…

Florensky. Now the Amu Darya flows not even into the Aral, which is breathing on its last breath, but into the Takhiatash, the last reservoir before the Arap. Its sister Syr Darya doesn't reach the Arap, but with its numerous water intakes it is disassembled into cotton plantations and wasted in the fields. The Aral shrinks like a shagreen leather, which is clearly seen when comparing several space images of the recent decades. A special type of landscape - tugai - thickets in the floodplains of the Asian rivers disappears under the influence of the anthropogenic activity. It is well preserved only at the confluence of the Vakhsh and Pyanj rivers, in the Palang Tugai - "Tiger Gully" Reserve. A reserve where the yolbars, the Turanian tiger, will never appear again.

Aral Sea

Gumilev. The historical landscape, too, has changed. There are no more Bactrians and Sogdians. The descendants of the latter, who lived in the Hissar spurs, soon after the war, were forcibly driven from the mountains and thrown into "cotton", on the plain, where the people ceased to exist. Other peoples who used this landscape disappeared. The empire of the Hellenes disintegrated, and even Alexander the Great's homeland is inhabited by other peoples.

Shutova. The geological face of the Earth is changing. Landscapes have their own youth, their own maturity, their own "in their old age". The historical map is changing. And what about man? After all, with the emergence of the Cro-Magnon Homo sapiens is finally formed and as a species is quite stable.

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Gumilev. The form of existence of the species is relatively constant. Man, like other living beings, exchanges substance and energy with the environment. But differs from them by the fact that he gets almost everything necessary for existence by labor. That is, he interacts with nature not only as a biological entity, but primarily as a social being. The social laws of human development do not supersede the biological laws. To become clearer the contours of the mechanism of interaction between man and nature need to be studied.

We must study them. In other words, to finally start the economic-ecological-demographic forecast of the earth civilization existence, as Vernadsky predicted. This is an element of the basis for new thinking, noospheric... 

Florensky. The great Vernadsky explained to us that humanity is also a geological factor. Like volcanoes, rivers, seas. People shovel as much earth as [370-371] all the volcanoes of the planet move it. Smokers all over the world "smoke" more cadmium into the atmosphere than all the volcanoes of the world in the last few years. Pretty ladies who use perfumes and refrigerators are thought to have done significant damage to the Earth's ozone cover. Economic formations have changed, technically humanity seems omnipotent. What was a curse in ancient times, "To make your rivers flow backwards!" - is now not only possible, but being done. We have the power. And intelligence? And wisdom? It is only in recent decades that man has been reshaping, if not destroying, the entire planet, creating an avalanche of ecological crises.

Shutova. I would like to distinguish long-term processes, landscape evolution, and results of anthropogenic activity. To know where are the long-term processes and where are the geologically instantaneous ones.

Florensky. From the point of view of geology, a volcanic eruption is an insignificant event. Time levels out all processes. But even drops in a million years do a lot.

Gumilev. The Sahara was made a desert by a warming climate and the giant herds of domesticated animals that had multiplied before. As now the desert in Kalmykia is also made a desert by excessive herds. Combined with the Volgo-Chograi.

Shutova. Perhaps the tragedy of the biosphere is inherent in social evolution? Is it accelerated by technological progress? Or is it the ill will of individuals?

Gumilev. If the processes of extermination of landscapes were not interrupted by regenerative periods, then already in the Neolithic Age the Earth would have become a desert. And this is not the case. The destruction of flora and fauna is equally observed in primitive society: the Maori exterminated the moa bird. In the feudal society: the Spaniards brought goats to Madeira and they ate all the vegetation on the island. The Chinese in the first millennium BC destroyed the forests of northern Shanxi and opened up access to the steppe winds carrying sand into Inner China. Primitive hunters exterminated mammoths and the ancient Persians exterminated lions in Iran. Man's devastation of vegetation is even more intense. In sedentary herding, the accumulation of livestock leads to the impoverishment of the phytocenosis. Goats helped the ancient Hellenes and Romans to destroy the Mediterranean forest of hard-leaved oak and pine, which were replaced by the evergreen shrub maquis.

Florensky. And yet humanity is not so omnipotent in its good and not so reckless in its evil manifestations. [371-372] The earth also has its own character. Everyone knows the Uzboy, the bed of the Amu Darya, which at Sultanuwais (Sultanuizdag) turned southwest, crossed the Karakum and flowed into the Caspian Sea, and then dried up. Who else could be blamed! And climate, and melting glaciers in the Tien Shan.

Gumilev. When Peter the Great led by Prince Bekovich-Cherkassky embassy arrived to Turkmens, Turkmens complained of Khorezmians, who allegedly dammed the Uzboy. The basis of the alliance concluded was the military assistance to the Turkmens against the Khivins, and water in the Uzboy. This part of the treaty was only fulfilled in our time by the Lenin Karakum Canal. It was created not by the efforts of the military, but by the joint efforts of the peoples of the country.

Shutova. And who "stole" the water of Uzboy?

Florensky. It turned out that a giant fault runs from Western Europe through Donbass, Astrakhan, Mangyshlak to Sultanuvais, and on to Bukhara. In addition, the zone of this fault is a storehouse of minerals. The blocks of the Earth's crust move along the fault, like the keys of a grand piano. So, there you go. Sultanuwais used to rise faster than it does now. And the Amu Darya could not break into the Aral Sea. And now this ascent has slowed down, and all the water has gone north unhindered. Perhaps, Genghis Khan's victories were victories because they coincided with the geologically favorable conditions for them.

Shutova. So much for the story of geography. Nature creates what we humans can't create: rivers, mountains, seas, animals. People can destroy them. But they can also build, create machines, paint pictures.

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Florensky. The elements of nature pass into each other. Nature lives by being filled with that energy that it receives from the Sun, the stars of the Galaxy, and the radiation decay in the depths of our planet. Earth's biosphere overcomes global entropy through biogenic migration of atoms.

Gumilev. Man-made objects can either be preserved or destroyed. Pyramids stand for a long time. The Eiffel Tower doesn't last that long. But neither are eternal.

Shutova. And where is the border between the biosphere and the technosphere, if man himself is part of nature? Obviously, the boundary between socio-techno-sphere and biosphere passes not only outside human bodies, but also inside them. So, somewhere here we can find the real moment of interaction between the social and the biological. At what level of its organization does man interact with nature?      [372-373]

Gumilev. From the historian's point of view, humanity cannot be viewed as a single unit. It is necessary to take a different unit - at the level of ethnos. Ethnoses are a phenomenon belonging to both the biosphere and the sociosphere. And ethnos should not be seen as a function of social progress, but as an independent phenomenon. Ethnoses are always linked to natural conditions, to landscapes. That is why they are as diverse as landscapes, because there is no place on Earth where no man has set foot. The landscape defines the possibilities of the ethnic group at its birth, and the newborn ethnos changes the landscape according to its needs. Then comes the habit to the created environment, which becomes close and dear to the descendants. The attachment to the landscape is unconsciously stored in people. The Russians, settling in Siberia, preferred to settle on the banks of forest rivers, Ukrainians preferred steppe landscapes.

Shutova. So, like every person, every collective is exposed to social and natural forms of matter movement, develops in time, which is history, and in space, which is geography.

Gumilev. And in the first perspective, we will see social organizations: tribal unions, states, political parties, philosophical schools. And in the second ethnoses: collectives of people arising and dissolving over a historically foreseeable time, but having in each case an original structure, a unique type of behavior and a peculiar rhythm of development.

Florensky. So, your ethnos is our landscape, as the in-laws used to say in the good old days. Biosphere is organized into landscapes, people into ethnoses. These two phenomena coexist and have that common denominator, which allows the naturalist and the humanist to talk to each other correctly, without introducing concepts of one science and alien to the other. For the geologist this is the transgression and regression of the Caspian Sea (fluctuations in the level of its waters), and for the historian this is the destruction of the Khazaria and its defeat by the Slavs and Turks. For our contemporaries, this is a swindle by the Ministry of Water Resources with the transfer of northern rivers into the Caspian Sea, the level of which is already rising. And let some people say "landscape" and others "ethnos", the scale, length in time, volume of substance and area of the planet are the same for a naturalist and for a humanist.

Thus, the history of anthropogenic landscapes is the history of the interaction of technology and nature through the mechanism of [373-374] ethnos. And people's relation to the environment changes depending on the phase of ethnogenesis. If ethnogenesis is a natural process, therefore, by itself, it should not create irreversible changes in the biosphere. And if they create them, then, there is still some factor involved. This applies, for example, to the historical vicissitudes of the Tigris-Euphrates interfluve. You seem to have another version: "Chercher la femme" - "Look for a woman."

Gumilev. Bab-eloi - "Gate of God" - Babylon was founded by the Amorites in the 19th century BC and conquered by the Assyrians in the 7th century BC. The Chaldeans defeated Assyria in 612 BC and became masters of Babylon, whose population reached a million. The economy of Babylonia was based on a system of irrigation between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, with excess water discharged into the sea across the Tigris. This was sensible because the rivers carry a lot of sediment in floods, and clogging the soil with gravel and sand is impractical.

But in 582 B.C. King Nebuchadnezzar sealed the peace with Egypt by marrying the princess Nitokris. Her retinue of educated Egyptians arrived in Babylon with her. Nitokris proposed to her husband, not without consultation with her cronies, to build a new canal and increase the irrigated area. The Chaldean king accepted the proposal of the Egyptian queen, and the Pallukat Canal, which began above Babylon and asked for large tracts of land beyond the river floodplains, was constructed.

Jester. And what came of it?

Gumilev. The Euphrates began to flow more slowly, alluvium was deposited in irrigation canals. This increased the labor cost of maintaining the irrigation system. Water from the Pallukat, which passed through dry areas, caused salinization of the soils. Farming was no longer profitable. Babylon was deserted and in 129 B.C. became a prey to the Parthians. By the beginning of the new era only a small settlement remained of it, but it soon disappeared as well.

Jester. Could a caprice of the queen have ruined a prosperous country? Perhaps her role was not decisive after all.

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Gumilev. If the tsar had been a local, he would have understood the disastrous consequences of ill-conceived land reclamation, or consulted his countrymen, and among them there would have been intelligent people. But the king was a Chaldean, the army was made up of Arabs, and the advisers were Jews. The Egyptian engineers, the first technocrats in history, transferred their reclamation techniques to the Euphrates mechanically. The Nile, on the other hand, carries in floods [374-375] fertile silt, and the sands of the Libyan desert prize any amount of water. So, there is no danger of soil salinization in Egypt.

Shutova. Were there any attempts to correct the "Babylonian reclamation"?   

Gumilev. In the seventh and ninth centuries, the Arabs tried to do this. They had huge sources of cheap labor, obtaining negro slaves from Zanzibar. They were forced to collect salt crystals around the ruins of Babylon, collect them in baskets and take them away. The idea of improving the soil in this way was not feasible, as the small crystals were invisible to the common eye. But the work was terrible! Under the scorching sun, with salt-encrusted hands, with no hope of rest. The desperate Negroes led a revolt that lasted almost a quarter of a century and eventually brought down the Baghdad Caliphate. Such was the price of the second attempt at reclamation, as ill-conceived as the first.

Jester. Apparently, it should not be assumed that any reclamation of soils is pernicious. It becomes so when the ecological consequences, as we shall now say, are not taken into account.

Gumilev. In ancient times this happened when newcomers took over the business. They had no time to study, they had to act. And here is the result! The most tragic was that the migrants were in a reciprocal relationship with the native aborigines. They taught them, made technical improvements suitable for the native landscapes of migrants, not for the places where they mechanically transferred them. And sometimes the destructive effects became irreversible. But when ethnos, which is part of the host landscape, takes up the task, it works in unison with natural processes and creates a stable biocoenosis, in which there are ecological niches for plants, animals, and people.

Shutova. Thank you, Lev Nikolaevich, for the "ethnological" aspect of the legend of the Tower of Babel. It does not contradict, but reveals its mythological and ecological interpretation. It is as important for us to know ethnological processes as it is for us to study droughts, floods and tsunamis. We cannot prevent them, but we can predict and account for them. I am reminded of an oriental parable about the inevitability of fate. The vizier sees the messenger of death Azrael in Baghdad and asks the shah for a horse to flee to Smyrna, and Azrael is surprised to see him - in a few hours he has a date with the vizier in Smyrna. [375-376]

Florensky. One should not fall into cosmic pessimism. As for our planet, it is in its prime, if we, mankind, the most powerful geological force, do not hasten its demise ourselves. They like to look for reasons for the disappearance of the dinosaurs in space. In the past, they used to refer to God. "God is God, but don't be bad yourself." Landscapes are self-destructive. Ethnoses are aging. Is that good or bad?

Gumilev. Personally, I like dinosaurs. But they were, after all, replaced by us. And we now have our own "dinosaurs" - technogenic stooges, walking excavators. And there are meaningless landscapes - "construction sites of the century" - that harm us too. Violence against nature and the ethnic environment causes irreparable damage to landscapes. In the period from 1927 to 1937 the logging on the Solovetsky Islands increased more than 50 times. And then Solovetsky camp became a branch of the White Sea-Baltic Canal. Created in the depths of the NKVD Giprovodkhoz, where to this day the director of the institute and the heads of departments are called chiefs, in those years the map of the country was strewn with gigantic hydro-constructions, which this patron generously provided with free labor, (Gumilev was held in the Gulags for a period of years by the Soviets). The area of the constructed plain water reservoirs was equal to ten Divans, and with the flooding they destroyed an area equal to the average European country. The Volga floodplain, which once fed one-third of the herds of European Russia, perished. Irreparable blow was dealt to the Russian village with its original institutions, the entire course of development preparing for socialization. The flywheel could not stop spinning. And the ministries - monopolists of the Ministry of Energy and Ministry of Water Resources, ignoring the real economic needs, continue to knit hydrosystems on the rivers and dig canals in the Volga and Central Asia. The lack of free labor is replaced by free budget money, which is buried in the ground, as people once were, making the land barren.

Shutova. Here comes another history lesson with geography. Although they say that the main lesson of history is that it teaches nothing.

Florensky. Alas, too often this joke sounds like truth. Is it so? History is one of the foundations of civilization. The main sanctuary of the people, the foundation of it - the past, the ancestors. Farmers graves of their ancestors are always near, in the pogost. And what about the nomads? Here it is possible to agree to what was said in XIX century: civilizations of nomads are more primitive than those of farmers. Though it is absolutely not so. Modern [376-377] Kazakhs have lists of ancestors. Every cultured Kazakh (and in terms of national culture means all Kazakhs) knows his ancestry all the way back to... Adam. Yes, yes. I have seen such genealogies on pieces of paper, on the cloths of yurts.

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Any Kazakh knows the history of his family and quickly finds the degree of kinship with another Kazakh. The names of ancestors are history. Pushkin perceived history through his ancestors. Isn't it culture!

Gumilev. Human culture is directly proportional to knowledge of the past. I wrote a monograph on the demise of ancient China, "The Xiongnu in China”. Then both died. I wrote about the death of the Golden Horde and ancient Russia, in place of which appeared the new Great Russia. History is a constant change of life across the threshold of death.

Shutova. Lev Nikolayevich, in what phase of ethnogenesis is the ethnos, to which we, the talk participants belong?

Gumilev. In the most optimistic! Look for yourself, remember the Kulikovo battle, the consolidation of ethnos around Moscow. History with geography is very useful.

Shutova. Thus, the theory of ethnogenesis rests on the watershed between history and geography. At the watershed of natural and humanities knowledge is the study of noosphere, the science of the future, where they are combined into a single worldview. Thank you to our interlocutors for lighting the road leading to the Temple of noosphere. [377-378]

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