Intro: for the "End and the Beginning Again", full version

SOME AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY and questions and answers.

Facts of my biography lately began to cause interest in the reading public. However, I have been avoiding such stories, because it is impossible for me to remember anything pleasant, for lack of it, and I do not want to remember unpleasant things, because this would only upset me. But now I can tell you briefly how I felt in the vocation of being a scholar of history and geography (I stress that: a scholar of history and geography, not just a historian) and how it evolved throughout my life.

I was quite late in my development, and I remember myself from about 7 or 8 years old, when I lived with my grandmother in the town of Bezhetsk, 15 versts from which our village was.  I went to school in Bezhetsk. I must say that I quickly developed an extremely negative attitude toward school, because I was forced to learn absolutely not what I was capable of, and things that I would never use later in life.

The situation in our ancient town of Bezhetsk, once the Piatnya of Novgorod and then the appanage of the Moscow principality, was disgusting, because there were almost no intelligent, cultured and thinking people in this generally small but ancient town, except for one family who had arrived from starving Petrograd and settled in Bezhetsk. It was with them - their surname was Pereslegin - that I became friends.

The only useful thing I learned in Bezhetsk was the library, which was quite good. I read a lot and started comparing various large ethnic and territorial groups among themselves. For example, the World of Islam and the World of Christianity, the war of the Hungarians with the Austrians and the Poles (this I read at one time by G. Sienkiewicz). Then, at the age of 14, I got interested in wars, like the Thirty Years' War between Protestants and Catholics. Schiller was there, so you could read about the history of the Thirty Years' War.

Then antiquity... There were books on the history of late Italy, on the history of the Roman Republic, the conquest of Ostgotian Italy by Byzantium - Velisarius and Narses.

I memorized it all. And what I had, the most important thing: my mother sent me an atlas of history, though in German. But nothing - I mastered these very names. And all the time I was comparing where it happened.

And then I stumbled on the limit: the history of Europe and the Middle East still existed somewhat within Bezhetsk, but the history of China, India, Central Asia and pre-Columbian America was completely absent. There were no such books then, except for Prescott, whom I had read in my time.

Even then I had an anti-Eurocentric attitude (on a purely childlike level): I liked much more the Indians, who were defending themselves against the attacks of the squatters, the Aztecs and Incas, who were fighting the Conquistadores. Like most modern writers, I was on the side of some and not others. I think it's an age level, from about 12 to 15 years old. After the age of fifteen, a scholar should be getting smarter. But now I come across the level I know from my adolescence.

I finished the last grade in Leningrad, and I had enough knowledge not to study much, but to read "History of the Ancient East" by B.A. Turaev. That was my main occupation. In addition, when I was in the ninth grade, my social studies and literature teacher, Alexander Mikhailovich Pereslegin, gave me a course in philosophy, which was enough material for me to pass my PhD.

Since I failed to go to university, I got into the Geological Committee as a worker-collector. This gave me the opportunity to travel on various expeditions. I was in South Pribaikalye, in Slyudanka and in the Khamar-Daban Mountains. I was in southern Tajikistan and learned to speak Tajik there. It also helped me a lot because the Tajik language is the Persian language. So, when I had to take a candidate's minimum in Persian at university, I took it. Then I went to excavations in the Crimea, the Don and other places. It was very useful.

At one time my mother taught me French. But I must say, my mother had great aptitude for literature but some negative aptitude for pedagogy. I learned very little from her, but it helped me later when I was at the university. There was a language courses at the Public Library: you had to pay two and a half pennies and you could go there for a month. I learned to speak and read French there. I didn't have to speak but I had to read.

Did I have to read?

Question: You didn't gain admission to the University just because of your French origins.

Л. G.: Yes, because of my origins. I am a nobleman.

Question: You went as a collector on a geological expedition. Was it difficult for you to imagine that someday you will still go to university, i.e. did you think about your future?

Л. G.: I was dreaming. In those days, in the era of the cult of personality, thinking about the future and making predictions was a useless exercise. I lived through the day, and thank God! Dreaming was not forbidden yet. So, I dreamed. I dreamed that I would go to school and study history. And it finally happened in '34.

In 1935 I was arrested for the first time, but I was released soon enough. I must say that the prison was overcrowded. There were 160 people in cells designed for 20. And when I was in solitary, it was certainly very boring, but not as hard. And then - there was nothing to do - and I started thinking, why are all the historical phenomena happening? Because of what? It occurred to me: if there was a class struggle, why were some feudal lords fighting against others, each with the help of their peasants? It doesn't make sense. The Hundred Years' War was not a class war. 

It's true that they didn't teach us that in school; I learned that there were such wars as the Hundred Years' War, the Thirty Years' War, the Guelphs, and the Ghibellines. We were only taught little episodes: for example, that there was Jacqueria. But after all, it was a small rebellion that was at once suppressed and had no significance at all. What was the point, I began to think. And while I was sitting in solitary, I managed to raise the question. And the posing of the question implicitly contains the solution.

But in '38, I was arrested again. When I was in my fourth year of university, I was sent to the Taimyr Peninsula, to Norilsk, a glorious city with only four ramshackle houses and a number of barracks. But first there was the Belomorkanal, fortunately not for long. I would have died there at the lumberyard: it was such hard work. Luckily the procurator cancelled my 10-year sentence "due to softness", and they took me from Belomorkanal back to Leningrad.

Well, in "Kresty" I took a little break. And it turned out that Yezhov was no longer there - (Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was the chief of the Soviet security police (NKVD) from 1936 to 1938. It was he that made all the purge arrests.) He had been shot; and the prosecutor, who had demanded that I be shot, had also been shot. And then they started asking me: why was I in prison? Because I couldn't say anything, they gave me only 5 years and sent me to a camp in Norilsk.

But in prison I had time to think again. It was forbidden to lie in the cell, you had to hide under the bench. I lay under the bench and thought: why did Alexander the Great go first to Persia and then to India and Central Asia? What did he want there? - Nothing! And suddenly it dawned on me that all these great wars are not because anyone needs them, least of all their participants, but because there is such a thing as passion, which I called passionarity, from the Latin word for passion.

Passionarity is the desire to act without any visible goal, or with only an illusory goal. Sometimes this illusory goal turns out to be useful, more often it is useless, but a passionarian cannot help acting. This applies not just to one person, but to a group of people.

This was the first stage of my work.

Notice this. They say that monks, all kinds of Brahmins and Chinese teachers kept themselves on a very strict regime: they ate little, slept little, and in the end, something was revealed to them. Well, they discovered religious problems because they were thinking about them. And I thought about scientific problems, and they also opened up to me.

Passionarity turned out to be, generally speaking, a very real motive for human behavior. I tried to generalize this human behavior and realized that Alexander the Great was not alone. But there was Cornelius Sulla in Rome, for example. Or Hernando Cortes went to America at the risk of his life. He was lucky: he was able to return to Spain, while most did not. Napoleon, for example, did not seek material prosperity, but unlimited power over the world, which he understood as Europe. And so on.

In general, if there was anything that was taken out of brackets in all these cases (such an arithmetic term, sorry), it was the big "P" - passionarity. And it is absolutely present in all historical processes. If it is absent, the processes do not take place. Then people live quietly and quietly don't hurt anyone, and if they are attacked, they defend themselves to the best of their ability.

Of course, I couldn't explain this to anyone because when I came to Norilsk, there were no humanitarians - people who knew history - around me. And geologists had little interest in such things. They even thought it was detrimental to their cause. And it was harmful indeed, because I used to dream, compose poems on historical themes and write them on the back of geological drawings, which I used to make. That's why I basically got kicked out of the geological expedition. But it even did me good, because they took me to the chemical laboratory and I was engaged in the archive of samples, as a librarian. And it was already warm there, and that's how I ended up still alive.

In general, the place at Nizhnyaya Tunguska was very harsh. Taiga is a green prison. In summer there is this horror: mosquitoes, gnats; in September it starts raining, and since October - snowdrifts. It's terribly hard to live there. And to relieve myself, I volunteered at the front. I was a soldier at the front, and it was much easier there than in the geophysical expedition from the Norilsk Combine. I was better fed and I could get food. So, I made a very wise move to volunteer for the army.

I took part in the capture of Berlin, came back from the front, came to Leningrad and, already in overcoat with epaulettes, went to the university, where at that time the dean of the history department was my good friend V. V. Mavrodin. And he suggested to me: how do you want to finish the university - full-time, part-time or externship? Well, I decided that there was no need to “yawn”, and I said: "Externship". And I passed all my exams and credits in a year and a half. I found my old article, which I had never finished, and then I rewrote it and submitted it for my dissertation. It was printed - it was a good article. Then I quickly finished my Candidate's degree and, in the process, passed the state exam.

It was such a good time after the war! But all that ended with Zhdanov's decree on Zvezda and Leningrad. Then I was transformed from the good and pleasant Lyovushka into my dialectical opposite, and I was kicked out of everything and no longer bowed to on Nevsky. And then I got into a madhouse as a librarian. In order to apply for the defense of my dissertation at the university (since the Academy of Sciences did not accept my papers), I needed a certificate from my last job. And I managed to get a job as a librarian in a neuropsychiatric hospital: there I gave books to crazy people in a white coat. Then finally I got a certificate and handed in all the papers to the university. And we had the rector (God rest his soul!) N.A. Voznesensky. Then they took him upstairs, as a minister, and killed him. I felt sorry for him: he was a bright man. Well, of course, I went to defend my dissertation, although I was all very dragged, they did not want to write reviews. But back then the scientists had at least a grain of conscience and wrote the necessary reviews. And the thesis was defended.

Then the honored worker of Kirghiz science, Doctor of Historical Sciences, "great" archeologist Bernshtam showed up, started speaking against me as an unofficial opponent, and said: "Certainly Lev Nikolayevich knows something, but he does not know oriental languages, and besides that he has some mistakes". Sixteen objections in all. I began to answer. First, I addressed him in Persian, but he didn't know it. Then I switched to Turkic, but he didn't know it either. So, I ended up with 15 white and one black balloon out of 16 members of the Academic Council. I don't know who planted it on me, but it didn't matter.

And after that I could join the Museum of Ethnography as a researcher, but I didn't stay there long: I joined in March, and in October they took me to Lefortovo prison. And they started to exert pressure on me: you had to tell them yourself what you were guilty of, what you could be sentenced for. And so, 11 months of this kind of time, but fortunately they rarely called me in. And then I started thinking: what is passionarity? Where does it come from?

Sitting in my cell I saw a ray of light falling from the window onto the cement floor. That's when I realized that passionarity is energy, like the energy that plants absorb. It was a distant association. So, I took the next step in developing my theory.

Then there was a break of ten years: they took me to Karaganda, and there I found myself in a camp. I was already an experienced convict and said that I would not chisel away at the permafrost - let them kill me instead. There were a lot of easy jobs in the camp, as a librarian, for example. But because I didn't betray anyone, I had a special note in my papers: only hard work. So, they took me outside the camp, and no one cared how I was doing there. And I ended up being discharged as an invalid. At first, they put me in the hospital, but then they left me in the camp on the disabled team, and I started helping out in the library. Then I got a chance to study and write a book called Hunnu.

Then I was transferred to Omsk, and there I was hospitalized again, and I wrote the book "The Ancient Turks". So, I came back from my imprisonment with two works. The first one - "The Hunnu" - was accepted by the newly formed publishing house "Vostokizdat". God, what began after its publication! They pounced on me "like a tiger on a cabbage. All this pressure on the book was intended to prevent me from defending my doctoral dissertation. But here I used a clever evasive maneuver. They concentrated on the first book, while I quietly prepared another work - "Ancient Turks" - and defended it.

After a while, my acquaintances brought me the book by Vernadsky "The Chemical Structure of the Earth's Biosphere and its Environment". And in it I found what I needed. It turns out that in order to solve questions of historical development, one must approach them not inductively - from minor fact to generalization - but deductively. So Vernadsky took all living organisms on Earth and declared them the biosphere.

And among the other animals on the planet there are Homo sapiens, the "two-legged without feathers," which interests us first and foremost, since we ourselves belong to this species of living beings”. The representatives of this species have a very curious peculiarity, namely, they are widely distributed over the whole territory of the Earth due to their increased adaptive abilities. They feed on plants and animals, they can breathe cool air, and warm, and hot, and dry and wet. But of course, these adaptive abilities make them different from each other. That is, the anthroposphere is a mosaic. The mosaic consists of ethnic groups that over the centuries and millennia have become accustomed to certain conditions. But not only that, they create their own particular forms of existence and forms of living together, because they have the capacity for technology, as well as for art. The ability to transmit spiritual culture - folklore, epic, religious beliefs - to the next generations is very important.

Every person, if asked who he is, will say: Russian, French, Armenian, English, Maasai, Iroquois, without hesitation. Not for a minute will he think about it. And what is it and how to define it scientifically? This element of the mosaic anthroposphere - who is he? So, the answer is this:

Ethnos is a system. It is, firstly, a closed system, and secondly, corpuscular. And thirdly, it is a system that begins and ends. It arises and it disappears. In order to repeat this process, you need energy. What kind of energy does ethnogenesis work on? On the energy of the living matter of the biosphere discovered by our great naturalist Vernadsky, which drives all living things: ants, lemmings, people who went with and after Columbus to the Americas. The Arabs who suddenly moved from the depths of their peninsula and seized lands from the Loire to the Indus and the Pamirs, a colossal territory with a large population. Everyone was conquered! Where did this come from? It is the very energy that gives the effect we see - passionarity. Passionarity is the effect in which it manifests itself in us humans. How it manifests in animals is something to ask zoologists.

So, we accept the statement that events occur due to the energy of the living matter of the biosphere. And indeed, how can we do without it? Every process requires some form of energy - electromagnetic, thermal, mechanical, whatever. But why isn't this energy evenly distributed throughout the surface of this human inhabited planet, the Oikumene? In some cases, there is an incredible amount of it, as if there are outbreaks, followed by a decrease in activity and, finally, disappearance.

In fact, the passionary impulse is the appearance of a certain number of passionaries in a certain region, that is, people who are trying to do more than it takes to sustain their own and their offspring's lives. And they do not care whether it will be beneficial or detrimental. They want to act, that is, they have a surplus of energy.

What kind of people are these? Biologists will simply say that they are mutants. The mutation is very weak, very small, it doesn't disturb the soma of the person, it only affects his behavior, i.e. the hormonal and nervous system.

Passionary shocks are not haphazardly located on Earth, not in dots or spots, but in long chains, lines that are completely unconnected to each other. These are very long strips on which suddenly these mutants, which we call Passionaries, appear, and they take over about half of the globe, without going to the other, opposite side.  What could this be from? The Earth experiences, as is known, a number of cosmic influences. Solar activity is not applicable here: it would not produce such bands that reach the length of half the globe, concentrating in some specific places. So, the hypothesis of the origin of passionarity from solar activity is not suitable. Maybe, offer an explanation from geologists, it is the decay of uranium ores? But the ores are also found in certain places, and passionaries do not appear there.

That leaves the third possibility: this is energy, which comes to Earth from outer space. In this regard, I heard from everyone that I say that, I bring in the Lord God, but the Lord God is engaged in much more serious things than mutagenesis. So, such conclusions were completely out of place and unfair.

The Earth is not in a vacuum, but simply in rarefied matter, which is pervaded by streams of cosmic particles. People feel their influence, but the Earth is protected from their excessive influence by the ionosphere.

These particles pierce the ionosphere and eleven other spheres surrounding the Earth, reach the Earth's surface and affect the biosphere. But this influence is very weak (if it affects plants - then on seeds, in animals - on embryos), and it creates mutations, i.e. excitation of energy of living matter of biosphere on certain parts of the Earth's surface. Subsequently, there is an expansion of excitation bands and the capture of quite significant regions. Further, the Arabs acted by spreading their passionarity, their way of life and their worldview.

But since it is energy, like all energy, it has its own energy field. And indeed, we know the electromagnetic field, the thermal field. Why should the above-named energy be denied the right to have a field, especially when we see such an interesting thing: a person, thrown out of his ethnic group by the will of fate, whose systematic connections are cut, who finds himself in a foreign country, nevertheless he keeps his stereotype of behavior, his ideals, and his worldview.

And this does not hinder him.

The state of dispersion, or diaspora in Greek, is characteristic of so many peoples. The Roma, (Gypsies) for example, came out of India in the eighth century and are still Roma today. There is something that distinguishes them very clearly from all the peoples among whom they live. They do not blend in with those peoples.

Jews are scattered all over the oikoumene and they remain Jews, they are a super-ethnos, made up of different ethnic groups: Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Fallachian, Georgian Jews, and so on. That is, there is a certain phenomenon that I call the ethnic field, which has all the properties of a field and explains such phenomena as nostalgia, as friendship or enmity between peoples. No one wants enmity for enmity’s sake or for gain.

The same Tolstoy wrote a remarkable story, "The Cossacks," about Chechens sneaking around the village of Grebenskaya and engaging in skirmishes with Terek Cossacks. I have been there and seen those places. For example, I wouldn't risk crossing the Terek River, because the current there is terrible. Although I'm a very good swimmer and I'm not afraid of water in any way, but there I was even afraid to step knee-deep into the Terek, lest I be swept away by the water and carried into the Caspian Sea. And they crossed to the other bank on snags, and for what? To shoot at some Cossack. And the Cossacks, in turn, would make raids on the southern bank of the Terek, kill these Chechens there, and come back, embellishing themselves with laurels and getting the love of their Cossack girls. What was the matter? Why didn't they love each other, to such a horrible extent?

Here comes into play a phenomenon that biologists call complimentarity. It is sympathy or antipathy, It is an unconscious feeling of liking or disliking. That is, complementarity can be positive or negative. On a personal level it is very weak and can be overcome even by conscious motives: calculation, profit, desire to get rid of trouble. But the larger the ethnic group, the ethnic ethnolone, the stronger and more irresistible it is. In some cases, it even goes to extremes. For example, the Chinese hated the nomads so much that they refused even to drink milk, because milk is the food of nomads. They had a negative complimentarity. The Russians and Tatars, on the other hand, were easy to mix and mingle. Although one was considered a Muslim and the other a Christian, this did not interfere with their friendship. What was the problem? It is a phenomenon that requires special study and that explains many of the unfortunate forms of ethnic contacts and the bloody events that followed.

And note that ethnicities are complimentary to some seemingly foreign peoples and uncomplimentary to others. Look at America. The Catholics who came there - the French, the Spanish, they very quickly married Indian women and formed mixed ethnic groups. They got along great with each other. And where there were Protestants, there was a scalp hunt, sending Indians to reservations, murdering 95% of them. But in Tahiti the Polynesians willingly accepted Protestantism and were friends with the English. The same in New Zealand.

And with the French, as they say, they did not succeed. That is; we see here a quite natural effect, which cannot be explained by the fact that someone is good and someone is bad at all. "Good" and "bad," "good" and "evil" are concepts exclusively on a personal level. Above the personal level and above personal morality it doesn't go beyond that, because there are natural phenomena at work there. And the natural phenomena as an example a typhoon or an earthquake. The practical significance of ethnology is as great as that of climatology and seismology. We cannot prevent tsunamis, floods or droughts, but we can predict them and take action.

"The End and the Beginning Again”: Dialogue Instead of an Introduction

Editor: Your book is so full of historical material and you handle it so easily and freely that the reader, going into the most interesting facts, sometimes loses the logic of your scientific thought. Maybe it makes sense to formulate it separately and briefly?

Author: This book is devoted to the description of the general scheme of the process, which is equally inherent in the course of any ethnogenesis in the biosphere of the Earth. It is known that humanity as a species is one, and in this aspect, represents the anthroposphere of our planet. However, the intra-species ethnic diversity allows us to consider the mosaic anthroposphere as an ethnosphere - part of the Earth's biosphere.

Ethnic diversity can be easily explained by the adaptation of groups of people in different landscapes: different ethnic groups and different cultural traditions are formed in different climatic conditions of geographical environment. This is how ethnic diversity manifests itself in geographical conditions. But what determines the unity of diverse ethnogenesis?

It turns out that they are based on only one model of ethnogenesis, which manifests itself in a sequence of phases. This model illustrates a special case of the second principle of thermodynamics (the law of entropy) manifestation - primary energy impulse received by a system and then subsequent dissipation of this energy to overcome the environmental resistance, until the energy potentials are equalized.

Let's translate these words into the language of an everyday example. A fire from a match, flares up at one edge. At first the draft increases and the flame flares up, then combustion slows down because of the lack of oxygen inside the fire, and the fire continues to rage around the edges. Finally, all the fuel is burned, the embers die down and turn into cooling ashes. This model is familiar to cyberneticists, but is being used to explain ethnic history for the first time. Establishing the existence of a natural law has clarified the nature of humanity's relationship with the natural environment. We humans are part of nature, and nothing natural is alien to us. In nature, everything ages: animals and plants, people and ethnic groups, cultures, ideas and monuments. And everything is transformed and reborn; thanks to this dialectical law, our foremother, the biosphere, evolves.

Editor: Granted, nature is subject to its own laws and cannot change them. So, you think humans as a natural phenomenon also have no autonomy over issues that directly affect them?

Author: Yes, exactly.

Editor: Then does your theory make practical sense?

Author: There is, and a huge one! Humans are surrounded by a variety of natural systems, among which the controllable ones are rare. But many uncontrollable phenomena are predictable, such as cyclones, earthquakes, and tsunamis. They bring disasters that cannot be completely prevented, but can be avoided. This is why we need meteorology, seismography, geology and hydrology. Ethnology is like these sciences. It cannot change the laws of ethnogenesis, but it can warn people who don't know what they are doing. But as always, fundamental science, the search for truth and the disinterested accumulation of knowledge, precedes practical conclusions. But when science becomes practice, the latter compensates all the work, talent and energy of life. Just as a building cannot stand without a foundation going into the ground, so the practical application of a scientific theory or hypothesis is impossible without first examining the subject. The discoverer's thought is vague and obscure for a long time. Only the contact between the author's idea and the reader's perception allows it to develop into a scientific concept.

Editor: How do you explain your, not quite usual for a scientific academic publication method of presenting historical material - large dialogues with a limited number of references to the sources, the emotionality, which is not typical for the texts of scientific works?

Author: There are two ways of presenting a new thought. One is considered "academic”. It means that it is necessary to saturate the text with special terms and references, so much so that not any expert will be able to understand it without a dictionary. I will not condemn this method, although it seems to me not so much "scientific" as "scholarly". It is very useful for writing dissertations, but the dissertation is read by three opponents and two reviewers.

The second way is the "funny Russian syllable," that is, simple colloquial language. There is no scientific idea which could not be presented clearly and briefly to a person with average education, but of course, you have to use literary tricks: metaphors, hyperbolas, epithets, and even fictitious dialogues. Yet Herodotus resorted to the latter, but he was well read and copied, so that his history has survived, while the work of the stultifying scholars has been long forgotten.

Editor: I see you favor the second way, but you run the risk of falling victim to critics. They don't like what they're not used to.

Author: I'm thinking more about the readers. I need them to understand the content of the work and not to abandon the book without finishing it. Let's agree to think of my style as experimental. What difference does style and language make if the content is adequately conveyed? I also tried not to overload the book with footnotes, because a monograph is not an article. The theses of any monograph must no longer rely on primary material from unverified sources, but on the verified conclusions of one's own and others' work.

But even a monographic study is only a necessary foundation for a "philosophical generalization" or a statement of a scientific idea developed through the synthesis of many scientific disciplines. Such are the works of V.I. Vernadsky (including "Biosphere", "Chemical Structure of the Earth Biosphere and its Environment"), L.S. Berg ("Climate and Life", "Nomogenesis"), N.I. Konrad ("West and East"), A. Toynbee, O. Spengler and others. Here the authors appeal to the educated reader, who knows the facts to such an extent that there is no need to make footnotes.

My work lies between the monograph and the philosophical. It is the "empirical generalization" of thirty articles and four monographs, and of four treatises expressing the essence of the dialectic of natural processes in the anthroposphere. In short, it is figuratively speaking, a kind of caryatide, (an ornate column, usually a female figure, holding up the roof of a building). But the plot of this book is based on the ages of ethnicity, the description of the characteristics, the nature of the phases of ethnogenesis, the pattern of the ups and downs of ethnoses, the cyclicality that I have called "The End and the Beginning Again". Why?

History is a way to study the properties and events of time, while historical geography is a combination of time and space. If one considers that history has neither beginning nor end, then studying it would be impossible, because studying it is comparing proportional phenomena and revealing their interrelations. If the phenomenon is one, it is incomparable. That is why the phrase "The end and the beginning again" is a statement of discrete historical time.

This difficulty was noticed and formulated by the great historian of ancient China Sima Qian, and proposed as a conditional division of the known history into periods. Moreover, he discovered in these periods the real essence of historical time, which is similar neither to the cyclic calendar, nor to physical linear time. Historical time is, in his opinion, a chain of events connected by causality. They are finite: beginning with some fact, sometimes even imperceptible, events flow like an avalanche until inertia runs out and the rest of the "material" involved settles down at rest. Then, according to Sima Qian, new processes will begin, unique in detail but similar in general features. The development of science over 2,000 years has clarified the Chinese thinker's opinion. "Pushes" generating ethnic processes arise in different regions of the Earth, randomly alternating. The idea of quantized time is preserved, but it has become more complicated. For the sake of presenting it on the global material of three millennia, using the dialectical method, this book was written. So, let us move on to a detailed presentation of the theory of the age of ethnic groups. But first, about ethnos itself...

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