The Hunt for Passionarians: How Lev Gumilev’s Ideas Apply to Russia’s Actions in Ukraine
Lev Gumilev (1912–1992), a Soviet-era historian and philosopher, is rarely mentioned as an influence on modern Russian ideology, if only because he wasn’t much of a political thinker. However, as a self-styled “last Eurasianist”, he constitutes a not-to-be-overlooked link between the original movement from the early 20th century that advocated Russia’s domination over the Eurasian continent and neo-Eurasianism of Aleksandr Dugin, viewed as the “esoteric” philosophical background of the Kremlin’s politics of the last couple of decades.
Indeed, Vladimir Putin undoubtedly holds Gumilev in high regard. He mentioned him and his concept of passionarity on several occasions, saying he “believes” in it.
Moreover, this term, as well as its derivatives passionary or passionarian as an adjective and a noun (I’ll stick with passionarian for both), went far beyond its original use in an obscure theory and took a foothold in popular consciousness in Russia — as well as in Ukraine, so much so that the modern Ukrainian writer Andriy Kokotiukha put the word passionarian in a character’s mouth in a retro detective novel set in the early 20th century, without realizing that this concept did not exist at the time and was developed by Gumilev during the 1960s and the 1970s and became a buzzword among laypeople only after the collapse of the USSR.
Originally used to explain the birth, evolution and death of ethnic groups and described in most detail in Gumilev’s Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, which is available in English translation, the concept of passionarity has a number of practical implications for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, which are worth considering. But first let’s briefly elucidate the meaning of passionarity and passionarians.
Passionarity and Passionarians
Passionarity (from the Latin word for passion; Gumilev himself suggested “drive” as an English equivalent, which is used by some translators), is an organism’s innate — that is, genetically predetermined — capacity to absorb energy from the environment and then give it back in the form of work or activity that exceeds basic self-preservation needs and immediate response to external stimuli.
Or, as Gumilev also puts it, passionarity is the capacity and aspiration to intentionally apply extraordinary effort in order to change one’s environment.
Someone with a high level of this capacity is called a passionarian. Such a person has excess vital energy that needs to be directed somewhere, which can take the form of both creative and destructive actions.
Rather than Bergsonian élan vital, Gumilev describes this energy as “biochemical energy of the living matter” along the lines of Volodymyr Vernadsky’s biosphere theory, thus trying to keep it within the field of natural science, which didn’t guard him against accusations in the unscientific character of his ideas.
There are times in history when the level of passionarity in a population suddenly explodes, as if some external force “whips” the Earth’s surface at certain spots. Gumilev, possibly inspired by Alexander Chizhevsky’s theories, tentatively suggests that this external force may be related to solar activity, which was another reason for skepticism and criticism he encountered.
These “explosions”, when passionarian individuals are especially active and are prone to unite around common ideas and instigate others, are conducive to the formation of new ethnic groups or can provide a new impulse to existing ones. On the other hand, when the level of passionarity in an ethnic group is low, it stagnates, deteriorates, and may eventually cease to exist.
From the psychological point of view, a passionarian is an ambitious, passionate individual who readily leaves their comfort zone and commits actions that break the inertia of tradition. These are adventurers who embark upon exploring and conquering new lands, warriors ready to die for their homeland, activists risking their life and freedom for abstract ideas, artists, and everyone else who does things that seemingly go against the logic of a normal living being.
Practical Implications
There are four major ways how the concept of passionarity can be applied in the context of Russia’s current actions against Ukraine.
1. Gumilev himself mentions that passionarians can be used to form storm troops or, alternatively, can be “dispersed” and “planted” in various army divisions to inspire others and infect them with their ardor. This way one can motivate thousands of soldiers to risk their life for illusive ideas.
2. The concept of passionarity, in its vulgarized psychological interpretation, is very popular in various Russian activist groups, including Dugin’s Eurasian Youth Union, where it is used to explain what kind of people they need to recruit. Passionarians also make the best collaborators on occupied territories as well as spies and turncoats. It was reported that Russians tried to recruit prisoners from the Azov, which is not surprising: converting soldiers who volunteered to fight is more valuable than recruiting someone who wasn’t much motivated and used the first opportunity to surrender, because the former have more passionarian energy that can be directed into destructive or disruptive activities.
3. Passionarians are also the first who Russians hunt for on occupied territories. When investigators from the Mobile Justice Team say that, in the first place, Russians try to neutralize people labeled as “leaders”, who could resist the occupation physically or culturally, it is obvious that, in Russian terms, the word “passionarians” would be more fitting, since these people are not necessarily leaders in the literal sense: they don’t always lead, but rather “push”, as Gumilev puts it. And since Putinists deny the existence of the Ukrainian nation, eliminating passionarians perfectly accords with Gumilev’s theory of ethnogenesis: it reduces the Ukrainians’ push to differentiate and makes it easier to destroy their identity and absorb them into the bosom of Mother Russia.
4. Gumilev also describes material culture, including works of art, as “crystallized passionarity”. Destroying objects that emphasize Ukrainian uniqueness and don’t suit the “one nation” narrative, as well as appropriating the other ones, is also part of the strategy to erase Ukrainian identity.
Know Your Enemy
Of course, all this can be explained using Western psychology, social science, and game theory. The above is just an attempt to interpret the situation from the point of view of those who, like Putin, “believe in passionarity”. Our opponents don’t always view things the same way we do, and being familiar with their theoretical background helps make sense of their behavior and design adequate responses.