Woe from illusions, the Soviet Breakup

I just explained the Ethnogenesis theory in the "Fan-Boy" post. Now let Gumilev explain his own theory during the Soviet Breakup.

Two authors: L.N. Gumilev, V. Y. Ermolaev

Ah, if we are born to adopt everything, At least we could borrow a few from the Chinese. The wisdom they have is the Ignorance of foreigners.

A.S. Griboyedov

(5,247 words)

When they talk about the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union which happened before our eyes, the most frequently used of all explanations becomes socio-political. "There is a natural disintegration of the last of the colonial empires of the past. Russia, if it wants to join the community of civilized nations, must necessarily be divided into a number of independent states." The popularity of such an explanation is equal to its internal inconsistency.

Firstly, and this has already been written about many times. Russia has never been an empire in the Western European sense. IF the peripheral republics of the Baltic States, Central Asia, Kazakhstan, the Caucasus, etc. are considered colonies, then the place of the metropolis remains only in Russia proper. But if so, then Russia would have to resemble England of the XVIII-XIX centuries in comparison with India: to have an increased welfare of the population formed by the third estate, actively develop social infrastructure at the expense of colonial investments. But, for pity's sake, there is nothing like this in Russia. In terms of the well-being of the inhabitants, the Caucasus is much more like a metropolis than Moscow or St. Petersburg are. By the formation of the third estate, Central Asia has gone much further. As for colonial investments, gas and oil from Siberia continue to flow to the Baltic States at prices below world prices, and they have separated from the Union, whereas in the historical center of Russia, called for some reason Non-Chernozem, and you cannot drive to all villages and towns because of the lack of roads.

Secondly, why is the disintegration of a huge power considered as a condition for entering the family of civilized nations? If "his anger dominates the day" and the modern European management practice in the form of the European Economic Community stands before the eyes of fascinated Russians, then this is all the more erroneous. The EEC and the European Parliament with their slogan "Europe is our common home" really represent a natural outcome of the development of individual civilized countries with established traditions of a market economy in the XX century. But if we take the European experience, it is worth considering it as a whole, and not in separate fragments. For European states, disintegration has always been a way of existence, but Western Europe has not become civilized today. According to M. Weber, the process of transformation of the Christian world into a Civilized world took place already in the XVI – XVIII centuries. Thus, the formation of the "family of civilized nations" does not coincide at all with the collapse of empires, but, on the contrary, with their creation! as a result of European colonial expansion into Africa, India, and the New World.

But you cannot stop at the level of the whole of Western Europe and consistently consider individual European countries from this point of view. Modern France within its political borders, according to the outstanding French historian O. Thierry, is the result of the military conquest of very different lands and peoples by the kings of Paris. Celtic Brittany was finally annexed only under Napoleon, Burgundy – in the XV century, the conquest of the South – Provence and Languedoc – required a continuous war from the central government, stretching from the first Albigensian war in the XIII century. before the suppression of the Kamisar uprising at the turn of the XVIII century.

It's the same in England. Wales resisted the English until the XIII century, Scotland – almost until the XVIII century, and Northern Ireland still has not completely reconciled with the power of London. Italy has similarly united in itself completely ethnologically different Piedmont and Naples. Is it worth mentioning Corsica, Navarre or the Lusatian Serbs still living in Germany? But it is unlikely that Western Europeans themselves will support a politician who will demand the political separation of Brittany, Burgundy, Provence, Corsica, Piedmont or Navarre, so that France, England, Spain and Italy become even MORE civilized.

The inconsistency of the social point of view encourages us to look for explanations that lie in a different plane, and we will try to find the answer in the ethnic history and ethnogenesis of the peoples of our country. However, here we immediately encounter a very significant difficulty. Today we do not have a generally accepted, i.e. shared by the majority of society, view of the history of the Fatherland. What is, for example, more than 70 years of Soviet power for the hard-core Bolsheviks? "A new era in the development of mankind." And a democrat will quite correctly describe these 70-odd years to you as "the time of the rule of the totalitarian regime that suppressed freedom, democracy and human rights proclaimed by the February Revolution." However, the patriot-pochvennik will reasonably object: "It was the February Revolution, directed by the hands of foreigners, that destroyed the traditional Russian statehood and initiated the Great Terror." It is easy to multiply the number of statements, but being within the socio-political coordinate system, it is almost impossible to eliminate the influence of "party preferences". And such a situation is quite natural – in the struggle for power, every political group seeks to win the sympathy of society, and therefore the transformation of truth is easy and somehow unnoticeable.

Let's try to put the question differently. Is there an alternative not to separate Marxists, democrats, soil scientists, anarchists (there are no number of them), but to the social interpretation of history as such? After all, in fact, politicians, with all the mosaic of political views, have a deep inner conviction in common: history is made by people and this process is amenable to conscious regulation. No wonder the key moment in the activity of any politician is the moment of the so–called decision-making. However, not only a politician, but also any layman is able to give a lot of examples of how, at first glance, correct and balanced political decisions led to completely different consequences than those for which they were calculated.

For example, wanting to improve the shattered well-being with the help of military successes, some medieval duke, having reasonably assessed his strength, "decided" to start recruiting mercenaries for himself. Soon the duke's majordomo was already giving some scoundrel a gold coin and saying, "My dear, take this, go and explain to all your friends that our duke is a good duke." And so, the seekers of paid adventures began to arrive at the Duke's possession in discordant crowds. As a result, even before the outbreak of the war, the seigneur's well-being was falling, because after the landsknechts (mercenaries), there were poached fields, empty barrels and torn women's skirts. Of course, our contemporary in hindsight will easily explain what happened by the Duke's short-sightedness, and the low level of education in the Middle Ages. "The ruler should have foreseen the consequences of inviting greedy condottieri to the service, and in general it would have been much more correct for him to free the peasants from serfdom, enlighten them by teaching them the basics of political economy and military affairs, and, relying on the peasant mass in alliance with artisans, to make a bourgeois revolution." This example is deliberately exaggerated, but we note that such a program would hardly be approved by the duke's vassals, and a quarrel with the entourage even then, reduced the chances of the leader living to a happy old age.

But the most paradoxical conclusion from the above example is that the methodology of social policy today remains the same as it was several hundred years ago. Call the Duke president, the mercenaries party democrats, the peasants civilized businessmen, and the bourgeois revolution democratic, and you will get an exact copy of the statements of yesterday's newspaper about the discussions in parliament.

As we can see, the choice of conscious decisions for a politician is always limited by the influence of the behavior of the environment and the adequacy of the politician's own ideas about this environment. Therefore, for a correct assessment of what is happening, it is extremely important to imagine the mechanisms of behavior of human collectives. But even more important is the correctness of the politician's ideas about the nature of the objects with which he has to deal volens nolens, (willing or unwilling, or willy-nilly). This, in our opinion, is where the roots of interethnic problems are hidden.

European education and the European mentality, among many other illusions, gave rise to the illusion of the social nature of ethnic groups (peoples). We should be more critical of this well-established and widespread misconception.

One can, of course, continue to believe that history is determined by socio-economic interests and conscious decisions. But let's think about the obvious things. There is nothing more unstable in human life than social status and social relations. One of the authors himself happened to experience the transformation from a disenfranchised state slave, into a scientist who enjoys some public attention. The reverse transition is even easier: both the head of the political police and the speaker of the newborn parliament can turn into a convict – the sad examples of V.A. Kryuchkov and A.I. Lukyanova is in front of our eyes.

But by no effort and desires can a person change his ethnicity – everyone belongs to some ethnic group, and only to that one. Does this not suggest that it is in the depths of the diverse ethnic element of humanity that the global and objective laws of historical processes are hidden? Until quite recently, there were no grounds for such assumptions. Within the framework of social doctrine (whether it was Stalin's Marxism or Levi-Strauss' structuralism), the differences between one ethnic group and another were associated with some set of social characteristics, and that was the end of the matter. In the works of the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences, such a view was carefully cultivated until very recently.

The emergence of an alternative approach turned out to be associated with the application of natural science methods to historical material. The alternative was embodied in the form of a passionate theory of ethnogenesis, proposed by one of the authors of these lines in the nineteen seventies. Within the framework of this theory, the differences between one ethnic group and another are not determined by the "mode of production", "culture" or "level of education". Ethnic groups objectively differ from each other in the way of behavior of their members (behavioral stereotypes). A person learns these stereotypes in the first years of life from parents and peers, and then uses them all his life, most often not realizing the stereotypical nature of his behavior. In an ethnic group, unlike society, it is not conscious decisions that work, but feelings and conditioned reflexes.

Roughly speaking, the behavior of each person and each ethnic group is just a way of adapting to their geographical and ethnic environment. But in order to adapt to your environment in a new way, i.e. to create a new ethnic group, you need strength, you need some kind of potential energy. This is the core of the novelty of the passionate theory of ethnogenesis. For the first time, it is connected the existence of ethnic groups as collectives of people with the ability of people as organisms to "absorb" the biochemical energy of the living matter of the biosphere, discovered by V.I. Vernadsky. Behavioral practice shows that the abilities of different people to absorb the biochemical energy of living matter are different. The easiest way is to classify all people on this basis into three types.

✓ The largest number of people have this energy in an amount sufficient to satisfy the needs dictated by the instinct of self-preservation. These people (they are called harmonious) work to live – they have no other needs. ✓ But a certain number of people with "extreme energy" are also noticeable in history. Excess energy of living matter was called passionarity by L.N. Gumilev. If there is more passionarity than is required for a quiet life, a passionate person lives to work for his ideal goal. However, another option is also possible. ✓ When a person's passionarity is noticeably less than is necessary even for a philistine life, an individual called a sub-passionary, lives in order not to work, and focuses on consumption at the expense of other people.

The ratio of people of different types in each ethnic group changes over time, and this process determines passionarity no longer at the individual, but at the population level.

Let's say a population reproduces biochemical energy at the normal level (and the biological norm of an organism is considered to be adaptation for the sake of reproduction of offspring). Then we see non-aggressive ethnic groups, quite happy with life. Such are, for example, modern Icelanders, Bedouins of Saudi Arabia or Mansi. But if a certain number of passionaries suddenly appear in such a population, then the picture of the behavior of the ethnic group changes. Since there is an excess of energy, people inevitably have to spend this excess on something. This is where a new ethnogenesis begins, various social ideals, that is, illusions, appear – comfort, knowledge, justice, victory, etc.

Striving for their ideal, passionate people often sacrifice their lives for the sake of other people, but most importantly, they simultaneously, in order to achieve their practical goals, rebuild the ethnic system itself, change its behavior patterns and development goals. And when all the initiative figures and their energetic descendants are killed in wars and skirmishes, everything returns to normal, and we again see a hardworking, calm, quite happy people. But let's remember: the same Icelanders are descendants of the formidable "captors of the seas", Vikings; The ancestors of the Bedouins of Saudi Arabia once created a mighty Arab caliphate. And even the harmless modern Mansi descend from the ferocious warriors of Attila, who destroyed the Roman Empire.

All other things being equal, about 1200-1500 years pass from the moment of the passion push (the appearance of the first passionaries in a calm population) to the return to a new state of equilibrium – homeostasis. For such a long time, the passionate content of the ethnic group does not remain stable. In the beginning, passionarity is steadily growing – this is a phase of passionary ascent, when the structure of the ethnic system is constantly becoming more complicated, a single new ethnos emerges from disparate subethnoses (estates). Then passionarity reaches its maximum values, and the Akmatic phase of ethnogenesis begins. It is in this phase that a single ethnic world is created – a superethnos consisting of separate ethnic groups that are close to each other in behavior and culture. The whole subsequent ethnic history is connected with the reverse process – the destruction of the created superethnos due to the decline of passionarity. A sharp decline in passionarity (the fracture phase) comes after the "overheating" of the acmatic phase and does not bring anything good.

Energetic passionate people are becoming fewer and fewer with each generation, but alas, the social system created by people does not keep up with these changes. It is always much more inertial and less plastic than the natural environment. And if the ancestors once created a state and an economy based on a lot of passionaries of the akmatic phase, now everything has to be constantly rebuilt in the fracture, adapting to deteriorating conditions. As soon as this process ends successfully, the ethnos has a chance to live up to the next phase of ethnogenesis – inertial. In it, passionarity decreases slowly and smoothly, and people live "without problems", but they enjoy the benefits of material and culture. However, when passionarity falls even lower, a destructive phase of obscuration comes, deceptive well–being perishes at the hands of its own subpassionaries, the ethnos disappears, and individual people are either incorporated into new ethnic groups, or remain in the form of ethnic relics – fragments of once raging passions.

But the most difficult moments in the life of an ethnos (and, therefore, in the lives of the people who make up it) are the changes in the phases of ethnogenesis, the so–called phase transitions. A phase transition is always a deep crisis caused not only by abrupt changes in the level of passionarity, but also by the need for psychological breaking of behavior stereotypes in order to adapt to a new phase.

The listed phases of ethnogenesis and phase transitions are passed by any ethnic group, although in different ways. In addition, any process of ethnogenesis can be forcibly interrupted from the outside – as a result of the mass death of people during the aggression of foreigners or an epidemic like the plague or like AIDS.

Changes in passionarity in the course of ethnogenesis create historical events. Thus, history does not take place in general, but in specific ethnic groups and superethnoses, each of which has its own reserve of passionarity, its own stereotype of behavior, its own system of values – an ethnic dominant. And therefore, it makes no sense to talk about the history of all mankind. The so-called universal history is only a mechanical collection of knowledge about the history of various superethnoses, since from an ethnic point of view historical humanity does not represent any phenomenological community.

Therefore, all the talk about the "priority of universal values" is naive, but not harmless. In reality, for the triumph of universal values, it is necessary to merge all of humanity into a single hyperethnos. However, as long as there are differences in the levels of passionate tension in the already existing superethnoses, as long as there are different landscapes of the Earth that require specific adaptation in each individual case, such a merger is unlikely and the triumph of universal values, fortunately, will be just another utopian dream. But even if we imagine the hypothetical merging of humanity into one hyperethnos as a fait accompli, then it is not "universal values" that will prevail, but the ethnic dominant of a particular leading superethnos.

The reason here is simple. Superethnic value systems are, as a rule, mutually exclusive and, in any case, poorly compatible with each other. Such incompatibility is quite justified and corresponds to the functional role of superethnic dominants. After all, they serve as indicators of the belonging of an individual and an ethnic group to "their" superethnos. Dominants, as it were, block the fusion of superethnoses among themselves. For example, you can find a lot in common in the theology of Christianity, Islam and even Buddhism. This commonality has been found enough before. However, historical practice shows that all previous attempts to artificially create on the basis of this common, not just a universal, but simply an inter-ethnic system of values invariably ended in collapse and led only to additional bloodshed. In other words, although the Muslims of Azerbaijan consider the Gospel along with the Koran to be a holy book (Injil), and Jesus Christ to be the prophet Isa, but this does not and cannot lead to reconciliation with Christian Armenians in principle.

Thus, the union of two superethnoses as such is impossible, but it remains possible to separate ethnic groups and join them to another superethnos. Russia's entry into the "family of civilized peoples of Europe" is just one of the options being played today for the country's accession to the new superethnic system. (written about 1990-91) But it would be the greatest mistake to think that the result of the construction of a "pan-European house" will be a mutual triumph of universal values.

Joining a foreign superethnos always involves abandoning one's own ethnic dominant and replacing it with the dominant value system of a new superethnos. It is unlikely that in our case it will happen otherwise. The price of entering civilization will be for us the dominance of Western European norms of behavior and psychology. And will it be easier because this superethnic system of values is wrongfully called "universal"? With the same degree of validity, an Orthodox Christian, Islamic or Confucian system of views and assessments could appear as universal.

But what, the dissatisfied reader will ask, it turns out that nothing depends on us at all? Let us hasten to reassure the reader. It is not at all about the fact of human influence on history. It would be ridiculous to deny that human designs and human handiwork affect history, and sometimes very much, creating unforeseen violations – zigzags – in the course of historical processes. But the measure of human influence on history is not at all as great as it is commonly thought, because at the population level, history is regulated not by social impulses of consciousness, but by biospheric impulses of passionarity.

Figuratively speaking, we can, just like frolicking stupid children, turn the hands on the clock of history, but we are deprived of the opportunity to wind up this clock. In our country, the role of arrogant children is played by politicians. They, on their own initiative, switch the hands from 3 p.m. to 12 a.m., and then they are terribly surprised: "Why has the night not come and why do the workers not go to bed?" For an answer to the last question, they turn to the very academicians who scientifically justified the need to switch the arrows. Thus, those who make decisions do not take into account the natural nature of the processes going on in the ethnic sphere at all. And, knowing the passionate theory of ethnogenesis, you are not surprised that "everything is bad" in the country. You're surprised that we still exist.

In order for the author's pessimism not to look like an unfounded statement, it is enough to make a simple calculation. The passionate push of our superethnos, which used to be called the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union, and now, apparently, will be called the Union of Sovereign States, occurred at the turn of the XIII century. Therefore, now our age is about 800 years old. The general model of ethnogenesis indicates that one of the most difficult moments in the life of a superethnos falls at this age – the phase transition from fracture to inertia. So, the crisis we are experiencing is quite natural and the events taking place in general do not contradict this interpretation. The fracture in the Russian superethnos was first identified after the Patriotic War of 1812. Since the total duration of the fracture phase is about 200 years, it becomes clear that the so-called Soviet period of our history is the most difficult, final part of the fracture phase, in which the former unity of the superethnos disappears and is replaced by the bloody excesses of the civil war. Consequently, Gorbachev's perestroika actually represents an attempt to transition to a new phase of development – inertial. Perestroika is often called the last chance, but in an ethnic context it would be more correct to call it the only chance for further life, because historical experience shows that superethnoses that did not survive this phase transition simply ceased to exist as systems whose elements disintegrated and became part of other superethnic systems.

Taking into account the retrospective of ethnic history, there is nothing unique in our situation. Of course, if we compare ourselves with modern Western Europeans or Americans, then the comparison is not in our favor: we are upset, and quite unnecessarily. Comparison makes sense only for equal ages of an ethnic group. Europeans are 500 years older than us, and what we are experiencing today, Western Europe experienced at the end of the XV – beginning of the XVI century.

For some reason, we easily forget that welfare, civil peace, respect for the rights of our neighbor, characteristic of modern Europe, are the result of a very long and no less painful historical development than ours. Quiet and calm France under Mitterrand, for which a terrorist act is an event, in the XV century, just like Russia in the XX, was burning in the flames of a civil war, only it was not the whites and reds who fought in it, but the supporters of the Duke of Orleans and the Duke of Burgundy. People hanging from trees were then regarded by the French as a familiar element of the native landscape.

And therefore, no matter how much we strive to copy Europe today, we will not be able to achieve their welfare and their morals, because our level of passionarity, our imperatives suggest a completely different behavior. But even taking into account the marked age difference of superethnoses, it would be wrong to say that the collapse of the country is only and exclusively a consequence of the fracture phase. Yes, the fall of passionarity in the phase of fracture and even in the inertial phase, in principle, always increases the desire of provinces for independence, and this is quite natural. After all, the sign of passionarity in the course of ethnogenesis seems to drift across the country from the center to the outskirts. As a result, by the final phases of ethnogenesis, the passionarity of the outskirts of the ethnic area is always higher than the passionarity of the historical center. The scheme of the process is very simple: energetic people, seeking to get rid of the close attention of their superiors and find more room for activity, leave the capitals and go to explore new lands. And then the reverse process begins – their children and grandchildren, having made a career "locally", go to Moscow or St. Petersburg to grab fortune by the hair. Thus, in the center, power is in the hands of the same provincials. Are there many native Muscovites or Petersburgers among the political leaders of recent years? N.I. Ryzhkov and B.N. Yeltsin are Uralians, A.A. Sobchak and E.K. Ligachev are Siberians, M.S. Gorbachev and E.K. Polozkov are natives of the North Caucasus, etc. We deliberately mention politicians with diametrically opposite programs, because the point is not in slogans.

Of course, if the provinces feel their strength, they are not inclined to listen to the central government. So, in ancient Rome at the turn of the I century A.D., the provincials also became the only real support of the throne. The province filled the legions, giving the empire protection, the province paid taxes, ensuring the prosperity of Rome, which mainly consumed. But Emperor Augustus, unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, understood that since the provinces had become the backbone of his power, it was necessary to expand the rights of the provincials, but it should not be done to the detriment of the integrity of the state. Augustus consistently defended the provinces from the arbitrariness of his own central bureaucracy, in fact considered the opinion of the local authorities, in every possible way sought to compensate for the large taxes collected by establishing legality and maintaining a firm economic and legal order. It was in this way that he ensured prosperity for the empire and a 44–year rule for himself. Of course, separatist excesses also happened during August, but they were local in nature and, as a rule, whether it was easy or hard, they were settled.

Our center, from the time of Lenin until very recently, was guided not by the national interests of the country, but by the misanthropic (hatred and mistrust), communist ideology. Red Moscow was reshaping, in accordance with the directives of the Central Committee, the way of life of all peoples without exception, adjusting it to the fictitious social scheme by the leaders. Realizing political utopias, the authorities forcibly moved Ingush and Balts to Siberia, and Koreans and Kalmyks to Kazakhstan. Realizing economic utopias, the same Bolshevik government moved Russians and Ukrainians to the Baltic States through an organ set.

Yes, taxes from the provinces were collected firmly – both the Ministry of Finance and the State Planning Committee monitored this, but the Kremlin elders most often left it to the "territories, regions, autonomous and union republics" to solve local problems. Is it any wonder that the suburbs, as soon as the opportunity arose, wanted to get rid of such guardianship of the center? But back in 1986-1989, even the most radical Lithuanians limited their demands to granting greater economic and political independence. In other words, they were not averse to staying in Gorbachev's rebuilt Union if they were allowed to arrange their lives the way they liked. And if the opportunity to be ourselves, to live in our own way, had been given to everyone - Lithuanians and Chechens, Russians and Uzbeks, Azerbaijanis and Armenians, Gagauzians and Moldovans – just then, then there would certainly not be a dozen sovereign states today, there would not be a direct civil war in the Caucasus, there would not be a civil confrontation in Baltic States and Moldova. But the central government continued the irresponsible international "policy of socialist choice" and as a result not only failed to hold the suburbs, but also lost Moscow completely.

Thus, the "parade of sovereignties" was not programmed during ethnogenesis. It could well have been avoided if not for the "party line" pursued by the Communist government. They quite deliberately ignored the very fact of the existence of different ethnic groups in the country with their own traditions and stereotypes of behavior and thereby provoked these peoples to secession.

Today, the process of disintegration, apparently, has become irreversible, and what has been done cannot be returned. Unfortunately, on the outskirts of the disintegration began to be aggravated by another circumstance. Local national movements perceive the policy of communists as Russian national policy. Such an aberration gives rise to the greatest delusion, because since October 1917, Russians have been deprived of the opportunity to pursue their national policy in the same way as all other peoples. But even in a theoretical sense, identifying Russians with communists is illegitimate. Communists initially represented a specific marginal subethnos, staffed by people from a variety of ethnic groups. It was not their origin that made them all related, but the negative, life-denying attitude of people who deliberately broke all ties with their people. (Such structures have been known in ethnic history since antiquity, they are commonly called anti-systems.) Let us recall the famous definition of L.D. Trotsky – "nomads of the revolution" and the quite sincere statement of the ideological informer and murderer L.Z. Mehlis: "I'm not a Jew, I'm a communist." There are hardly any emotional, much less scientific reasons to consider V.I. Lenin a Russian, F.E. Dzerzhinsky a Pole, and K.U. Chernenko a Tofalar. Russian Russians seem equally ineligible to be held responsible for Lenin's national policy, and Latvians are equally ineligible to be held responsible for the terror of the "red shooters" against the families of Russian officers.

Unfortunately, the substitution of "communists – Russians" that has taken place is dangerous primarily because it greatly narrows the already small possibilities of Russia's alliance with sovereign states. But one thing is for sure "one hundred percent": if Russia's national policy is again communist party policy, if this policy once again aims to build another utopia, the collapse of the Union will be followed by the collapse of Russia, and Boris Yeltsin will be able to turn into the president of only the Moscow region. Let's hope that the Russian government will be able to see the obvious and will be able to reckon with reality. And everything else is God's will.

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