"The end and the beginning again", condensed

© Gumilev L. N., 1980-1989, © FTHM, 1980-1989 © AST, 1980-1989, ISBN 978-5-17-107353-4, UDC 93 BBC 63.5

The end and the beginning again / L. N. Gumilev - (Exclusive: The Russian classics) 12,800 word free fragment translated from the Russian by me. This is a fantastic essay on the philosophy of man’s coalescence into groups, of which it’s the condition every human being.

The book is based on the lectures given by L. N. Gumilev to different audiences in Moscow and Leningrad in the 1980s. The concepts of the author's original theory of passionarity, explaining the laws of emergence and development of ethnic groups, the destruction and collapse of the great empires, presented in a fascinating form and illustrated by examples from the lives of many peoples of ancient and medieval Europe, the Middle East, China, India and America and the activities of their outstanding representatives (passionarii), who left their vivid marks on history.

Contents

(page numbers from the Russian, no pages cited here.)

Biography of scientific theory 6

"The end and again the beginning": 13

Chapter one 16

Man in biosphere 16

Mosaic anthroposphere 20

Ethnos - not society 22

Ethnos - not race 23

Ethnos - not population 26

Reality and logic 27

End of introductory excerpt. 29

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 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 atmosphere in our ancient town of Bezhetsk, once a piatina of Novgorod and then a fiefdom 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 came 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 there. 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 American 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 Ph.

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've been to South Pribaikalye, to Slyudanka and to 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 and some negative aptitude for pedagogy. I learned very little from her, but it helped me later when I was at university. At the Public Library there was a linguistic society: 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 with the help of their peasants, and those others with the help of their peasants? It doesn't make sense.

The Hundred Years' War was not a class war. True, they didn't teach us that in school; I learned that there were wars like 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 whatsoever. 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 in the Taimyr, in the glorious city of Norilsk, which at that time had only four row 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 so hard. 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 - he had been shot; 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 apparent goal, or with an illusory goal. Sometimes this illusory goal turns out to be useful, but 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.

Now, please pay attention: 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 anything was taken out of the bracket in all these cases (such, excuse me, an arithmetic term), it is this 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 they 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 the 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 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.

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 as my graduation work. 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.

That was such a good time after the war! But all that ended with Zhdanov's decree on "Zvezda" and "Leningrad". Then, from a good and nice Lyovushka, I turned into my dialectical opposite, and I was kicked out of everything, no longer bowed with me on Nevsky Prospekt. And then I got into a madhouse as 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 since 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 bothered to find out how.  They put me in the hospital first, and then 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 the book "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 a minor fact to a 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 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 and religious beliefs - to the next generations is very important.

Every man, if asked who he is, will say, without hesitation: Russian, French, Armenian, English, Maasai, Iroquois. 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 us 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 were 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. That's what I was doing there, and I ended up being discharged as an invalid.  Solar activity is not applicable here: it would not give 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, it offers an explanation to geologists, is it 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, I bring 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. Thus, the Arabs, for example, arose as a result of an outbreak that occurred - Then 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, his worldview. And this does not bother him.

The state of dispersion, or diaspora in Greek, is characteristic of very many peoples. The Roma, 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 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 to enmity for enmity 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 I have seen those places. For example, I wouldn't risk crossing the Terek, because the current there is terrible. Although I'm a very good swimmer and I'm not afraid of water, I was even afraid to step knee-deep into the Terek, lest I be swept away by it and carried into the Caspian Sea. And they crossed to the other bank on snags, and for what? To shoot 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 an extent?

Here comes into play a phenomenon that biologists call complementarity. 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 complementarity. 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 (South America) - 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, (North America) there was scalp hunting, sending Indians to reservations.

But in Tahiti the Polynesians willingly accepted Protestantism and made 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 at all by the fact that someone is good and someone is bad. "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. 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 particular case of the second principle of thermodynamics (the law of entropy) manifestation - the primary energy impulse received by a system, and then subsequent dissipation of this energy for overcoming the environment 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 devices: 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, (column holding up 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 ethnicity, the cyclicality 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 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 remnants of the "material" involved settle down to 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 has been 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...

 Chapter One

Ethnos. Its properties and peculiarities;  Man in the biosphere.

Let's put the question this way: why is this problem interesting for us? After all, simply collecting information never gets into a person's head or arouses interest. And if we do learn something and spend effort on it, we need to know why? The answer is simple. Mankind, existing on Earth a very little, 30-50 thousand years, nevertheless, on its surface has made coups, which V. Vernadsky equated to geological upheavals of small scale. And that is a lot.

How did one species of mammal manage to change to such an extent, and not for the better, the Earth on which he lives?  It is a problem of our generation, and it will become even more relevant for our descendants, because if we don't get to the bottom of what is happening all over the Earth, and what every thinking part of humanity considers the number one problem, then there is no reason to get married, to have children, because the biosphere will die, and all children will die. But in order to understand this issue, we need to investigate its history.

Man as a biological being belongs to the genus Homo. For this genus, when it appeared on Earth, it was characterized by quite a great diversity. This also applies to those Homo species which, strictly speaking, we do not have the right to consider as humans, namely Pithecantropus and Neanderthals (Pithecantropus and Homo primigenius in Latin, but I will call them by common Russian words). These two species differ from modern man as much as a donkey from a horse or a dog from a fox.   But we and they had something in common that makes us very, very similar: these original human species were also very aggressive, had technology and fire, and were also cannibalistic: they ate their own kind, which is not common to other animals. Where did they come from and why did they disappear? I cannot say. There are many hypotheses about it, but they are completely unfounded and unsupported.

Neanderthals differed from modern humans, first of all, by their height; they were bark-like - 155-160 cm (such big, pot-bellied carapaces) - and very strong. Their legs were short, they ran worse than our ancestors, but their cranium was larger, so they had more space for brain matter. So they were smarter. Stone technology was very advanced. There was also bone technology, which was denied until the 1930s, but I myself have dug up a bone needle in a Neanderthal site. So they knew how to sew.

Apparently, they had a very highly developed technique made of unstable materials, because they could even kill cave bears. They liked to collect things. They collected the skulls of these cave bears and put them in their caves. Whether they lived in these caves permanently or used them as museums is hard to say. I am inclined to think that they lived mostly in the open air, and sometimes in caves when they needed to. But nevertheless huge clusters of cave bear skulls - up to 1000! - are found in Neanderthal caves.

I must say that the cave bear was four times larger than our bear; accordingly it had better psychophysical qualities - it was more agile, faster, stronger, in general much scarier than our modern bear, which only the most daring hunters went out with a slingshot. It would have been useless to go out with a slingshot on a cave bear. Even the weaker modern grizzly bear of the Americas is so fearsome that Indians considered grizzly hunting equal to war with a neighboring tribe and killing a grizzly a feat equal to killing the leader of a neighboring tribe, not just a warrior. It is now illegal to hunt grizzlies in the United States on the grounds that the only way to safely kill a grizzly is with a sniper rifle, but that's not hunting, it's a firing squad. If you use an ordinary rifle and shoot at a rather short distance, but you don't hit him right in the heart and don't kill him right away, he will catch up with you. And he runs at the speed of a horse. That is practically a grizzly, which is weaker than a cave bear, and now with all our technology is not an object for hunting.

How did Neanderthals exterminate the cave bear so that it did not remain at all? Obviously, they had the means to do so. Which ones? We don't know. But it is better not to know and to confess than to make some lightweight hypotheses that explain everything and disintegrate when first confronted with practice. I think that's not the best way to go about it. Let's leave the question open.

Did Neanderthals encounter modern humans? Yes! In Palestine in the caves - Schul, Karmel, Kafzeh - burials of strange people have been found, which I. Я. Roginsky defined as mestizo Neanderthal and modern man. How could such strange mestizos appear, given the fact that Neanderthals were cannibals, I do not know. But the fact is that mestizos appeared, obviously not viable and left no trace.

The last data of excavations in the Crimea (they have not been published yet, a Ukrainian archaeologist told me about them) are very interesting: there were found Neanderthal-Cromagnon (Cro-Magnon is us) layers, where, let`s say, Cro-Magnon layer, then Neanderthal layer, and in the Neanderthal layer the bones of Cro-Magnon he ate, then again Cro-Magnon layer, then Neanderthal again. That is, in the Crimea there was some kind of terrible struggle between Hominides species, some of which (Neanderthals) disappeared without a trace, while others multiplied and populated the Earth.

The situation was somewhat different in the Far East, where there was a Sinanthrope. Its remains were found near Beijing. It is closer to modern man, a Mongoloid with a flattened face, but also a cannibal and also quite large. It should be noted, however, that both the former and the latter knew fire.

Ancient Hominides species did not survive the Ice Age, and this is very strange. The glacier did not take over the entire landmass of the Earth, and living near a glacier was very good. It is usually said that living near a glacier is cold, hungry. Nowadays, there are also glaciers: in Switzerland - Davos, in the Caucasus - Teberda, in Central Asia - Tien-Shan. These are all resort places. People go there to rest and pay very dearly for it, which is quite reasonable. A glacier is a huge accumulation of ice, which exists only because there is a column of pure air with high pressure, i.e. anticyclone.  A huge mass of clean, clear air captures a much larger space than the glacier itself. So, next to the glacier, next to the block of ice, which rises a kilometer, sometimes 2-3 kilometers, there will be a perfectly clear sky, and therefore a huge insolation. The temperature is low, but the sun shines and heats the earth. Grass grows on the ground. The sun warms the bodies of animals and people, they are not cold. There is almost never any wind.

It has been suggested that the blizzards around the glacier brought huge drifts of snow. This is geographical illiteracy peculiar to humanitarians. If it was blowing snow, that would mean there was a warm moist wind, and that would melt the glacier. Nothing of the sort! Very little snow or rain fell. The heated soil created convection currents of air, and occasionally a small amount of air would break through from neighboring latitudes, where there were cyclonic conditions.

The end and the beginning again, small moist air masses which fell as rain or a very light snow cover. This was enough to spread out behind the glacier in the anticyclone zone a magnificent dry steppe with little snow, which did not prevent herbivorous animals from getting dry grass from under the snow in winter, very caloric, soaked in the sun.

On the other hand, the glacier also melted under the sunlight, i.e. streams and rivulets of pure fresh water flowed down from it and formed lakes along the rim of the glacier. And where there are lakes, there are fish and waterfowl that carry eggs on their claws. And where there is moisture, lush vegetation will grow, forests will grow there. There, when there is a big thaw, water will begin to flow out in the form of rivers, and they will flow wherever the topography tells them to. These rivers will create the necessary watering places for animals in the dry steppe, bordering the glacier from the south. Dry steppe like the Mongolian steppe, where very little snow falls, is a free range for ungulates that can tear the snow with their hooves and get food in winter. And where there are ungulates, there are predators, and among the predators, there is man. A melting glacier is an optimal environment for human development.

It was different when it got warmer there. The glacier was moving all the time. From the Taimyr, it kept growing, going to Fennoscandia and melting in the Atlantic. Cyclones brought rain, fogs, wet snow, which fell on the glacier and increased it. And on the eastern edge, the glacier was melting, so the best conditions were here. The best conditions during the ice age were in Siberia!

And so it was until the glacier went under the Gulf Stream and melted there. The Gulf Stream broke through and carried the humid Atlantic air all the way to Yenisei and Yakutia where the Pacific monsoons came in, and instead of the steppe the taiga grew. Then things got bad. Huge snow drifts deprived animals of plant food. Mammoths, rhinos, and aurochs died; deer, hares, and mosquitoes that grew in the taiga survived. It became almost impossible for people to live. The population sharply declined. But people survived and, moreover, expanded their range!

Why did Homo sapiens spread over the whole of the Earth's land masses and turn it into its own Ocean, the place where it lives? What made it possible for man to spread everywhere? After all, all animals live in certain conditions for each species. For example, the wolf is a steppe animal. He lives in the steppe or in the woods, where he hides, but there is no wolf in the deep taiga; the bear is a forest animal, he has nothing to do in the steppe, and he lives in the forest. And what about the polar bear, which lives in the ice? It is another species belonging to the genus of bears. It is so distant from its ancestor that it refers to the modern brown forest bear in the same way a horse refers to a donkey and a man to the Neanderthal, that is, they are different species. The polar bear has adapted to living on the Arctic ice, eating seals and catching fish. But in addition, there is the Himalayan bear, which is so adapted to eating fruit that it lives only in trees.

So, we state that all animals, in order to occupy other habitats, to live in different landscape conditions, evolved outside the species. Humans have remained within the same species. All humans now living on Earth belong to the same species, but nevertheless they have spread from the Arctic to the tropics. They live in the dry areas, in the highlands, in the humid forests of the North, and in the tropical jungles-anywhere, adapting to the landscape.

How did it happen that all the animals lived in their usual conditions, while man spread across the entire landmass of the Earth, capturing in some cases even the gulfs of the sea? And it was not only through technology that man was able to achieve victory. During the Paleolithic period, technology was not yet abundant. And yet man was able to settle in both tropical regions and polar regions, in humid and dry regions, in mountainous and steppe regions. We must admit that man has some ability, not only social but also natural, which also distinguishes him from animals.  We can characterize this ability as increased adaptability, and even the ability to re-adapt, and re-adapt again. Why such mobility?

Mosaic Anthroposphere.

Let us pay attention to one circumstance. The anthroposphere is divided into communities, which we simply call peoples, scientifically - nations, scientifically - ethnoses. "People" is an uncomfortable term, too polysemantic. The term "nation" is used only in the conditions of the capitalist and socialist formations, and before that, it is believed, there were no nations. Let's not argue about the term. But the term "ethnos" is very suitable for referring to the communities into which all of humanity is divided. There is a mosaicism of the anthroposphere, and it is more correct to call it the ethnosphere.

When we are faced with this problem, it seems that there is no mystery, everything is very simple - there are Germans and French, Englishmen and Italians. What is the difference between them? There is some difference. When the question arises as to what exactly the difference is, it turns out that the answer is very difficult to find.

Of course, this is why the Institute of Ethnography exists, and it appeared when the complexity of the problem was not yet evident; it was clear to everyone that there are different peoples and they must be studied. But the science is developing. Much that was previously clear now needs to be explained. Therefore, the easiest solution was chosen. As we know, man is a social animal. No one is going to dispute this. And therefore, said by some ethnographers, all relations between people are only social relations, that is, social. And since people are divided into ethnic groups, this, too, is a social phenomenon.

At first glance, this sounds convincing and logical. But what do we mean by social relations? Historical materialism teaches us that man develops in accordance with the development of his productive forces; first he lived in the primitive communal formation, then came the slave-owning, feudal, capitalist formation. With such a formation division, is there any room for ethnic divisions? A feudal could be a Frenchman, an Englishman, a Seljuk, a Chinese, a Mongolian, or a Russian. (Bromley joined this point of view).

Similarly with serfs, slaves, wage laborers. In short, the socio-economic characteristic of man ignores the ethnic characteristic. But does this mean that there are no French, Chinese, or Persians, that the difference between them is illusory; there are only feudal lords and serfs, bourgeois and wage laborers - all the rest is irrelevant? If so, why the need for the Institute of Ethnography? Or even ethnography itself? And yet it turns out that ethnography is needed and cannot be thrown out.

So, what is ethnos? What are the transitions from one ethnos to another? What is the difference between ethnoses? Some say that there is no difference. They say that what is written in the passport is fine. You can write anything you want in the passport. For example, anyone can be written down as Malay. But this does not make him Malay.

There is another definition - linguistic and social. "All people speak some kind of language, and so," A. A. Freiman, a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, told me, "the French are those who speak French, the English are those who speak English, the Persians are those who speak Persian, etc.

"Fine," I said to him, "but my own native mother spoke French till she was six years old, and learned to speak Russian later, when she went to school and began to play with the girls in the streets of Tsarskoye Selo. True, after that she became a Russian poet, not a French poet. So was she French before she was six years old?"

"That's an individual case," the academic scholar quickly found.

"Okay," I tell him, "the Irish spoke English for 200 years, forgetting their language, but then they rebelled, separated from England, and spared no blood for that separation - Neither their own nor anyone else's. In your way of judging, have they been true Englishmen for 200 years?"

"I knew you'd give me that example, but what else?"

I gave him a dozen examples and posed the question: "You yourself have been to Central Asia, you know perfectly well that the people of Bukhara and Samarkand speak three languages - Tajik, Uzbek and Russian - with equal ease”. Russian is needed for school, and they speak Russian like you and me. Tajik and Uzbek are the languages of bazaars. And yet they do not confuse in the slightest who is an Uzbek and who is a Tajik, even though they can write in their passports as Tajiks when they are Uzbeks and vice versa. Even one of my acquaintances, who, as a Tajik from Samarkand, registered himself as an Uzbek, was described by other Tajiks as "Mil Lat Furush", who sold out his people or was a traitor to his people.  And they signed up this way because Uzbek nationalists started a rumor that anyone who signed up as a Tajik would be evicted from the cities into the mountains. And everyone signed up as Uzbeks. Although in principle, what difference does it make how to sign up? After all, my acquaintance didn't become an Uzbek.

So everyone knows that there are different ethnic groups. Ethnoses are the French, Germans, Papuans, Masai, Hellenes, and Persians. But to the question, "What are they?" - there was no sensible answer. And I can't give it right away. If I could do it right away, I would limit myself to a short article, rather than offering a book to the reader's attention.

Let us pose another question: does the problem of ethnicity have a practical meaning? In everyday cases we are not confused. If, say, an English scientist comes to us, we immediately see that he is a different person than we are: although he speaks Russian, but not ours, and he wears a suit differently. But when these outward differences are obscured, the meaning of ethnicity is questioned.

For example, four people - equally dressed, equally well Russian-speaking, etc. - enter the streetcar. Suppose one of them is Russian, and the others are Caucasian, Tatar, and Latvian from the Baltics. Is there a difference between them or not? It would seem to be clear to everyone that there is. However, one of my opponents said that unless there is some silly, far-fetched national conflict between them, no one will ever know there is a difference between them or that there really isn't one. "No," I replied, "there might not be any national conflict. Any event will cause these people to have different reactions. For example, a violent drunk gets on the same streetcar and starts hooliganizing. What will happen? Of course, a Russian will sympathize with them, saying, "You, kerch, get out before they take you away. The Caucasian will not bear it, and will kick him in the teeth. The Tatar will step aside and will not get involved. A Westerner will immediately call out a policeman. These are four completely different stereotypes of behavior!

So, it is the stereotypes of behavior that are always more or less different in different ethnic groups, but these differences in close living conditions are often hidden.

We have a large number of Finnish tribes living near Leningrad: Karelians, Vepsians closer to Onega, Chukhns (white-eyed chuds), as if they do not differ from Russians in appearance and speak Russian correctly. And when he walks along Liteynoye Street, you do not recognize him. But as soon as you get to their home villages, the ethnic differences become apparent.

What does it look like? Let's put the question: what color is the air? You can't see the color of the air in the room because there is relatively little of it, but in the window, the blue sky is the color of the air. So it is here: the ethnic characteristic is better perceived and grasped in large masses than in isolated cases. But as we saw from the first example, the ethnic stereotype is sometimes revealed in single cases as well. If so, is this a phenomenon of what - human social life or human nature? We need to agree on terms.

Ethnos is not a society.

What is social? The Latin word "socium," translated as "society," is used in this sense in all Western European languages to refer to forms of both animal and human organization. In Soviet science, the characteristic "social" is used to refer only to human society. The term "community", a combination of several animal and plant species interconnected by a "food chain," is used to refer to animal collectives. Such a division seems justified because the social form of development is peculiar only to humans. This development is spontaneous and progressive, spiraling and connected to the development of technology and attitudes to labor. Neither technology nor labor exists in animals, so what animals and humans have in common cannot be social. So is ethnos a phenomenon in common with animals or not?

This is what I argued with my Moscow opponents about: they claim that ethnos is a social phenomenon. I say: how so? Does ethnicity develop spontaneously and spirally and is it uniquely linked to the development of modes of production? Has any ethnos existed from the very beginning of human development from the pithecanthropus? Is there such a map showing ethnicities at least from the beginning of the historical period? There are none! There were Sarmatians, in their place there is nothing, in the place of Sarmatians were Polovtsians (Kumans), and there are none.

Speaking about ethnic groups, we are saying "was" all the time. There is no spiral development of ethnos-soviets. If we use the word "social" in our, Marxist sense, we should understand it as a form of collective being connected with production - "society". Do human beings have collectives that are not social? Collectives other than and apart from society? Marx expressed himself rather precisely and definitely on this point, although in his early works.  He called society by the German word "Gesellschaft," and in addition to society he singled out primary collectives. He called them "Gemeinwesen. Gemein is "common," and Wesen is "essence," "essence of the matter," "being," "foundation. There is no such word in Russian, but the meaning is clear. Marx believed that these primordial collectives, which existed before the appearance of material production in man, were a precondition of the appearance of society.

The primitive formations, the original collectives, individuals of the species Homo sapiens had really nothing to do with productive forces that did not yet exist; people simply lived as collectives-groups, because no fool would live alone. And this group division naturally did not disappear with the emergence of society; on the contrary, gradually evolving, it created those wholes that we call ethnoses.

Ethnos is not a race.

Ethnos in humans is the same as prides in lions, packs in wolves, herds in ungulates, etc. It is a form of existence of the species Homo sapiens and its individuals, which differs both from social formations and from purely biological ones, such as races. The races, according to V. P. Alekseev, are five or six. Both in appearance and psychophysical features, the representatives of different races differ greatly from each other. Race is a relatively stable biological characteristic of the human species, but it is important for us to emphasize here that it is in no way a form of their coexistence, a way of living together. Races are differentiated by purely external features that can be defined anatomically. Apparently, they play some role in the biological process of speciation, but they do not matter in terms of how people live and get along, how they work, how they prosper, or how they die. The thesis seems, at first sight, rather strange, for there is a habit of thinking as if Negroes were the poor, who are abused; all Indians are noble, who are exterminated; there are also civilized whites, numerous yellows, etc. Let us see, however, how these races are distributed on the surface of the earth and what implications this has for the fate of the biosphere.

According to anthropological evidence, the most ancient members of the so-called white race, the Caucasoids, originated in Europe and spread from Europe to Central Asia, Central Asia, Northern Tibet and finally, after crossing the Hindu Kush, they entered India and occupied its northern part. They also inhabited northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula for a long time.

In our own time members of this race have crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and have occupied most of North America and large parts of South America, Australia, and South Africa. These are all the results of resettlement.

Negros, strangely enough, always seem to be inhabitants of the tropics, because it is thought that the melanin that gives their skin its black color prevents burns from the scorching tropical sun. It does prevent burns, that's true, but when it's hot in summer, what kind of dress do we wear, white or black? It's absolutely clear that even if we don't have skin burns, in the scorching heat to have black skin is completely disadvantageous, especially in high insolation, because black reflects the sun's rays poorly. Consequently, we have to assume that blacks appeared in conditions where it was relatively cloudy.

Indeed, the most ancient finds of the so-called Grimaldi race, a Negro race of the Upper Paleolithic, were found in the Grimaldi Cave in the South of France, in Nice, and then it turned out that all this territory was inhabited in the Upper Paleolithic by Negroes - people with black skin, with woolly hair that allowed them to go around without a hat, with large lips. They were slender, tall, long-legged hunters of large herbivores. And how did they come to Africa? Yes, as a result of the same migrations that brought Europeans to the Americas. South Africa was settled by Negros, the Bantu Negros, the classical ones that we know, in a very late period; Bantu expansion started in the 1st century BC - 1st century AD; so the first Negroid forest-dwellers were contemporaries of Julius Caesar! Athens had long ago faded, the age of Pericles was forgotten, Egypt had become a colony, but they had only just begun to conquer the forests of the Congo, the savannahs of East Africa, to go south to the great Zambezi River and to the muddy, muddy Limpopo River.

Who were they pushing out of there? After all, there was a population before them. This is the third race, also belonging to the Southern races, and indeed, apparently, the Southern race, which is called conventionally "Koisan". ("Koisan" is also a special group of languages.) The Koisan race includes the Hottentots and the Bushmen. And they differ from the Negroes, first, in that they are not black, but brown; they have Mongoloid features, strongly developed eyelids, they have a completely different pharynx - they do not speak as we do, not on the exhale, but on the inhale, that is, they differ sharply from both Negroes and Europeans, and from Mongoloids. They are considered a remnant of some ancient race of the southern hemisphere, but in an ethnic sense they do not represent anything whole, even though there are very few of them left.

The Bushmen are quiet and timid hunters, pushed out into the Kalahari Desert by the Bechuan Negroes. They are out there living their lives, forgetting their ancient culture, very rich and fascinating; they have myths and art, but in a rudimentary state because life is so difficult, they don't think about art, they think about where to get something to eat.

And the Gottentots (that's the Dutch name for these tribes), who lived in the Cape Province, became famous as incredible brigands, guides for merchants, and cattle enthusiasts. They considered bulls the best thing to have. And when a missionary who converted the Hottentot to Christianity asked: "Do you know what evil is?" - he replied, "I do, if the Zulu take my oxen." - "And what is good?" - "It is if I steal my bulls from the Zulus." That's the principle on which they existed before the Dutch came.

They got on well with the Dutch pretty quickly, became their guides, interpreters, workers on their farms. When the English took over the Cape Colony and drove out the Dutch, the Hottentots mingled beautifully with the English, and now they are the most boisterous elements there. Nothing like the Bushmen. It's as if they were the same race, racial traits are the same in both. But they resemble each other as little as, for example, the Spaniards resemble the Finns in behavior.

The fourth race, also very ancient, is the Australoids, or Australians. It is not known how they got there, to Australia, but they got there a long time ago. The pre-European population of Australia consisted of a great number of small tribes with different languages and very different customs and rituals. And they did not like each other, they tried to live as far away from each other as possible, because they did not expect anything but unpleasant from their neighbors.

They lived very primitively but they did not die out, because Australia has exceptionally healthy climate; any big wound there heals faster than ours. Now, Australoids, or just Australians, are a special race that looks nothing like Negroes, or Caucasoids, or Mongoloids - nothing at all. They look like themselves. They have huge beards, wavy hair, broad shoulders, exceptionally fast reactions, despite their black skin color. I've heard stories I haven't checked but I trust them: they show Australian movies twice as fast as we do, because at our speed they see gaps between the shots. With all that said, they have a specificity that hasn't given them the opportunity to develop. What are those specifics? We will find that out at the end of the book.

The fact remains that a single race, inhabiting a single isolated continent, which got there under some conditions obviously by sea and apparently from India, because their closest relatives live on the Deccan Plateau (in southern India), makes up a huge number of the most diverse ethnic groupings.

The fifth race, the most numerous, is the Mongoloids, who are divided into a number of races of the second order: there are Siberian Mongoloids, there are North Chinese, South Chinese, Malay, Tibetan (they were, now they no longer exist), that is a great variety of different subraces, and none of them constitutes an independent ethnos.

To refer back to all this, we note that every ethnos, as it develops, creates its own culture, and expands its capacities, consists of two or more racial types. I know of no monoracial ethnoses. If even now they constitute some majority.

Finally, the last race, the sixth, which we will not talk about, is the Americanoids. They inhabit all of America, from the tundra to Tierra del Fuego (Eskimos are a new people). There are a huge number of languages, so it is even impossible to classify them. Many dead languages are preserved now because the tribes whose languages were recorded are extinct. Americanoids, in general, are quite different in character, in their cultural makeup, and in their way of life, even though they all belong to the same race.  In other words, the races into which the species Homo sapiens is divided are conventional biological designations that may have some significance for our theme, but only a subsidiary one, like any classification that in no way reflects the specificity of the ethnic phenomenon.

And with that another important observation. These races, as I said at the beginning, are static in relation to the species. We know that Homo sapiens, Cro-Magnon man - and you and I, Cro-Magnon men - have been on the European continent for 15,000 years, during which time the races have swapped places, but no new ones have appeared and no old ones have disappeared.

You may ask why I left out the Pygmies. They are simply negroes, except that they live in very bad conditions in the rainforest, where they are stunted by malnutrition.

This would seem to be the end of the matter, if race were an instrument of interaction between society and nature and development of ethnicities, there would be no history, just a pre-determined image.

Ethnos is not a population.

Just as ethnos is not the same as race, it is not the same as another biological grouping of individuals, a population. A population is, to quote a textbook, "the sum of individuals living in the same habitat and interbreeding randomly. For example, two swarms of flies come into the same room. They immediately form a single population and do not compete with each other.

Do ethnic groups exist in this way? First of all, fighting between ethnic groups is quite common, though not obligatory. There can be no struggle between populations; once they scatter into one area like mice, or swarm like flies, they will merge into one population at once. They do not have restrictions on interbreeding, hence geneticists derive their laws, which are true for animals.

There are always mating restrictions in an ethnos. Two ethnic groups can coexist on the same territory for centuries and millennia. They can mutually destroy each other, or one can destroy the other. This means that ethnos is not a biological phenomenon, nor is it a social one.  I propose to think of the ethnos as a geographic phenomenon that is always connected with the surrounding landscape that feeds the adapted ethnos. And since the landscapes of the Earth are diverse, so are many ethnoses.

Reality and logic

Thus, in the study of ethnicity we consider a phenomenon of nature, which, obviously, should be studied as such. Otherwise we would come to such a number of contradictions, logical and factual, in the study of reality, that ethnology itself would be meaningless and unreasonable to study.  It would almost cease to have any meaning or reason to study it. The tools of science are methods and ways of study. How can one define what ethnicity is and understand its meaning and significance? Only by applying a modern system of notions, a modern system of views.

The ancient Egyptians had no need at all to define what ethnicity was; they did it through color. They painted blacks as black, Semites as white, Libyans as brown and red, and themselves as yellow. And it was clear to everyone who was in the picture. But for us the color is useless because we know not four peoples but many more, there are not enough colours on the palette and on the other hand it is clear that color does not say much.

The Greeks put the question much more simply: there are Hellenes, "us", and there are "barbarians", everyone else; "us" and "not us", our own and others. But when Herodotus tried to write a history in nine books, dedicated to the nine Muses, he was confronted with the insufficiency of this classification. For example, he was describing the Greco-Persian wars. The Persians, of course, were barbarians, but his countrymen, the Athenians, Spartans, Thebans, and others, were Hellenes. But where do the Scythians fit in? They are neither Persians nor Greeks. And where do you put the Ethiopians, or the Hadhramantes, a tribe of Tibbu, still living in the southern part of Tripolitania? Neither are they Persians or Greeks. Barbarians, of course. But this classification became clearly insufficient.

Later, when the Romans conquered the whole world, that is, what they considered the whole world, they internalized this same understanding of the term. It was simple and easy for them. Romans were Roman citizens, everyone else was either provincial, conquered barbarians, or not yet conquered barbarians; though perhaps not always savage, they were not Romans. Everything was simple.

When the Roman Empire fell at the time of the Great Transmigration of the peoples, it turned out that the system did not work. All the peoples were different, very different from one another. And that's when the idea of a socio-cultural definition of people was first born. (This is a medieval concept.) 

It was decided that all people are the same, but there are believers in the true God and non-believers, that is, professing the true religion and non-believers. The true religion in Europe was considered Catholicism (not Orthodoxy), in Byzantium and Russia Orthodoxy (not Catholicism), in the Middle East Islam (not Christianity), etc. For the rest, people were considered to be divided according to known social gradations. And so the Turkic emirs were considered by the Crusaders as barons and earls, only Turkish, and the Turks considered the Crusaders as emirs or beks, only infidels, that is, French. If these Emirs had occasion to read the works of a philosopher like Plato, they regarded Plato as a mere sorcerer. They had their own magicians. It worked very well. The professional division (also social) suited them.

And more than that. When the Spaniards came to America and encountered the socially highly organized nations of the Aztecs, Incas and Muiscos, they enrolled all the chiefs of their tribes as hidalgoes, gave them the title of "dawn" if they were baptized, exempted them from taxes, compelled them to serve with the sword, and sent them to Salamanca to study. And they were quite happy about it. The Indians thought it suited them just fine. Although the Incas and Aztecs did not, in fact, become Spaniards, the Spaniards turned a blind eye. They married Indian beauties because they had few women of their own, produced a great many mestizos, and believed that the Spanish language, the Catholic faith, a common culture, a common social community ensured the unity of an empire in which the sun did not set.

Anaguac is New Spain, Chibcha is New Grenada, etc. But they paid for this speculative delusion in the early nineteenth century with such a massacre, in comparison with which all the Napoleonic wars pale into insignificance. Instead of seeing natural processes and phenomena, which should be studied, the Spaniards substituted their own ideas, which made perfect sense according to their point of view, but which were not adapted to reality.

Thus, we consider the popular notion that ethnicities are reduced to certain social phenomena to be an unproven hypothesis, although we will return to this hypothesis several times as we go along. The fact is that we are obliged to study social phenomena when posing our problem, because when we study our subject, only then we see them. But this does not mean that they exhaust the problem.

Let me explain my point. It is quite complicated, although it seemed perfectly simple to me until I confronted my opponents. Here, for example, is electric lighting. The phenomenon would seem to be socio-technical: the wiring was made in a factory, and the installer, a union member, installed it, and it serves, say, university employees. And that's all important to consider when looking at this phenomenon. But, you see, there would be no light here if there were no physical phenomenon- electric current. There is no way we can classify electricity as a social phenomenon. It is a combination of a natural phenomenon and those socially conditioned, artificial conditions under which we can observe, study, and use this natural phenomenon.

End of essay on the philosophy of man’s coalescence into groups. this 32 pages was extracted from a longer book of 244 pages.