Lev Gumilyov

The portrait of Lev Gumilyov

**Lev Gumilyov** (born 1 October 1912) is the leader of the Passionarity (Passionariyy) Organization, a political theorist and potential leader of Komi, which is renamed to Ust-Sysolsk, when he takes power. He is known to be an eccentric philosopher, but a well-spoken, cunning, and charismatic ideologue.

## Contents

* Biography
	+ Early-life
	+ Passionarity thought
	+ Political career
* Trivia

## Biography

### Early-life

Lev Nikolayevich Gumilyov was born to famous poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolay Gumiylov, who had divorced when Gumilyov was age 7, with his father being executed when Gumilyov was only 9 years old. As a child, Lev Gumilyov spent most of his life being persecuted by the Soviets for his unorthodox views and unreliable ancestry.

## Ideas

Gumilyov attempted to explain the waves of nomadic migration that rocked the great steppe of Eurasia for centuries by geographical factors such as annual vacillations in solar radiation, which determine the area of grasslands that could be used for grazing livestock. According to this idea, when the steppe areas shrank drastically, the nomads of Central Asia began moving to the fertile pastures of Europe or China.

To describe the genesis and evolution of ethnic groups, Gumilyov introduced the concept of "passionarity", meaning the level of activity to expand typical for an ethnic group, and especially for their leaders, at the given moment of time. He argued that every ethnic group passes through the same stages of birth, development, climax, inertia, convolution, and memorial. It is during the "acmatic" phases, when the national passionarity reaches its maximum heat, that the great conquests are made. Gumilyov described the current state of Europe as deep inertia, or "introduction to obscuration", to use his own words. The passionarity of the Arabic world, on the other hand, is still high, according to him.

Drawing inspiration from the works of Konstantin Leontyev and Nikolay Danilevsky, Gumilyov regarded Russians as a "super-ethnos" which is kindred to Turkic-Mongol peoples of the Eurasian steppe. Those periods when Russia has been said to conflict with the steppe peoples, Gumilyov reinterpreted as the periods of consolidation of Russian power with that of steppe in order to oppose destructive influences from Catholic Europe, that posed a potential threat to integrity of the Russian ethnic group.[*citation needed*]

In accordance with his pan-Asiatic theories, he supported the national movements of Tatars, Kazakhs, and other Turkic peoples, in addition to those of the Mongolians and other East Asians. Unsurprisingly, Gumilyov's teachings have enjoyed immense popularity in Central Asian countries. In Kazan, for example, a monument to him was opened in August 2005.

Historian Mark Bassin writes that Gumilyov was "not a credible theoretician... [and] his hypotheses are filled with inconsistencies, misunderstandings, and misapplications of the concepts he borrowed"

but that while his social theory is thoroughly problematic and lacks any sort of scientific or intellectual authority, his ideas are important to understand in that his theories of ethnos, ethnogenesis, and passionarity (among other concepts) have been massively influential and have had significant impact in a range of Soviet and post-Soviet contexts.

### Political career

Failing to apply his theories as Russian warlords ignored and rejected him, Gumilyov eventually found supporters in Komi, who felt betrayed by communists and democrats. He founded a combination of a social club, secret society, and political group named the Passionariyy Organization. The coalition is composed up of Eurasianists, "compassionate conservatives", monarchists, and other smaller movements. As a result, he has created the most wide-ranging coalition in Komi. Gumilyov is ruthless and will resort to any means to take charge of Komi and create his Eurasianist vision.

## Trivia

Amusingly, Lev's mother, Anna Akhmatova in the game as a leader for Market Liberalism in Tomsk (only accessible through changing Tomsk's ideology with console commands). Presumably, if she was meant to be used but ended up cut, she (or whoever succeeded her, if she stepped down like Dmitri Shostakovich), she would've had interactions with Gumilyov.