WeeklyWorker

05.01.2023

Mongols versus Vikings

Daniel Lazare examines the dangerous stew of ethno-nationalisms that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union

In early 2021, Vladimir Putin gave a speech invoking some of the key concepts of the famous Soviet eurasianist, Lev Gumilev. “I believe in passionarity, in the theory of passionarity,” Putin said. “… Russia has not reached its peak. We are on the march, on the march of development … We have an infinite genetic code. It is based on the mixing of blood.”

Nearly two years later, the Azov battalion staged a torchlight ceremony in honour of Ukraine’s war dead that ended with the burning of a Viking ship. In a scene worthy of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the will, Azov members held aloft images of the swastika-like ‘wolfsangel’ as they intoned, “In the flames, our fallen are symbolically sent in a drakkar [longboat] to another world, Valhalla or Vyrii” [a Slavic folk paradise].1

It’s a case of duelling national mythologies in which Norsemen supposedly sow the seeds of a mighty Viking-Slavic kingdom while, farther to the east, Russians, Turks and other groups come together to form a higher unity in a process that Gumilev describes as “ethnogenesis”. It’s tempting to dismiss both as the sort of racial hooey that has disappeared elsewhere in the world but is still holding on in certain backward regions. But that would be a mistake. One reason is that nationalism is no longer confined to the backwoods, but is madly on the upswing throughout the globe, due to the capitalist economic crisis. Another is that the Ukrainian conflict is turning the region in particular into a hotspot as it sends geysers of nationalist ideology shooting upwards and causes them to spread as well.

But there’s a third reason: the two nationalisms are converging in a way that’s increasingly explosive. One holds that Ukraine is destined to lead to something called the “intermarium”, an alliance extending from the Black Sea to the Baltic that just happens to overlap with the empire that Viking adventurers established in the 9th century. Its mission is to roll back Russian power. The other maintains that Ukraine is part of the Russo-Turkic “super-ethnos” that Nato is now trying to destroy. The ideologies are complementary because one says that Balts, Poles, and Ukrainians should unite to keep Russia out of Europe, while the other says that Russia should stay out because its heart is in central Asia. But they’re competitive because they’re at odds over contested territory in between.

The interplay is invisible to pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian partisans who are too busy pointing the finger at one side or the other to notice what they have in common. But it’s perfectly obvious - from a revolutionary-defeatist perspective that holds that the war is capitalist through and through - that both sides are reactionary, and that the conflict is pushing them equally to the right the longer it goes on. Instead of siding with Ukrainian ‘democracy’ against Russian ‘autocracy,’ to use Joe Biden’s self-serving terminology, the duty of the working class is to side with neither while earnestly hoping for the defeat of both - although, in keeping with international proletarian solidarity, the defeat of our ‘own’ side first and foremost.

Although little known in the west, the leading far-right ideologist in Ukraine is a doctoral student of philosophy named Olena Semenyaka who started out as a pro-Russia eurasianist but switched after the 2014 Euromaidan uprising and joined forces with the National Corps, a political movement set up by Azov founder Andriy Biletsky. As its international secretary, Semenyaka’s job is to meet with German revolutionary nationalists, Polish traditionalists, Finnish neo-pagans, and American white supremacists in a search for common ground. In late 2019, she began working on an Intermarium Support Group in the hope of enlisting western ultra-rightists in a grand anti-Russia crusade that she sees as an essential part of the Ukrainian national mission.

Stepan Bandera

According to Adrien Nonjon, a scholar at Paris’s Inalco - Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales - Semenyaka’s aim is to move Azov from the single-minded worship of Stepan Bandera, the Nazi collaborator who emerged as a national hero in 2014, and “to internationalise the Ukrainian cause at a time when the European far right did not hide its support for the Russian perspective.” This means integrating the Azov movement into a broader tradition of western ultra-conservatism extending from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Charles Maurras to such modern figures as: Dominique Venner, the OAS veteran who committed suicide inside the Notre Dame cathedral in 2013; the French new right thinker, Alain de Benoist; the religious traditionalist, René Guénon; and the Italian author, Julius Evola.2 The aim is to Europeanise Ukrainian nationalism while “Ukrainifying” the larger ultra-right. According to Nonjon:

Her argument is founded on the ancient colonisation of the Black Sea coast by the Greeks, who introduced the basis of western civilisation, and particularly its democratic foundations, from the south. The north, meanwhile, is considered to be very much tied to the migration of the Germanic peoples from northern Europe - the Goths - to the region in the 3rd century CE. This north-south polarisation was also the axis chosen by the princes of the Kievan Rus’, a Europeanising force, to expand toward the ‘barbarian’ north as far as Novgorod. Ukraine is perfectly situated because it is oriented in all directions at once. As Semenyaka puts it: “… the difference between the ‘old’ and ‘young’ (or belated) nations explains why the intermarium union plays a role of the platform for the paneuropean reconquista, or the laboratory of the all-European revival.”

Ukraine is a new nation overflowing with nationalist energy whose job is to create a north-south alliance against the east while fostering far-right revolution in the west.

What Nato sees as a limited war aimed at taking back territory that Ukraine lost in 2014 is therefore fast turning into an unlimited war aimed at conquering both Europe and Russia. It is a textbook example of liberals seeking to use the ultra-right to advance their own agenda only to discover that the ultra-right is using them instead. The results are a surprise only for those who never heard of the Catholic Zentrum’s push to elevate Hitler to the German chancellorship in 1933 on the grounds that he was a pliant instrument that conservative politicians could easily control.

Gumilev’s eurasianism is somewhat more exotic from a western point of view. The son of two of modern Russia’s most famous poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, he was arrested by Stalin in 1938, joined the Red Army upon his release in 1943, took part in the Battle of Berlin, and was then re-arrested in 1949. But he was able to join the staff of the Hermitage museum following Stalin’s death in 1953, immersing himself in the study of the people of the steppe and successfully defending not one doctoral dissertation but two, one in ethnology and the other in geography.

Ironically for someone who is now a nationalist hero, Gumilev initially ran into a wave of nationalist wrath. The reason is that where Russian nationalists celebrate the overthrow of the ‘Tartar yoke’ imposed by the Mongol conquests in the 13th century, he countered that Mongol suzerainty was relatively benign and that modern Russia emerged out of the healthy interaction among a variety of “ethnies” in or around the Golden Horde. It is as if a Mexican historian had argued that US domination had provided a much-needed jolt of energy. As Gumilev writes:

These ethnies occupied the different landscape regions that corresponded to their cultural-economic patterns, and they did not disturb other ethnies but rather helped them. The Yakuts settled in the broad floodplains of the Lena river, the Evenks in the watersheds of the Taiga uplands, and the Russians along the river valleys. The expanses of the steppe were left to the Kazakhs and Kalmyks and the forests to the Ugrian peoples.3

Instead of conquering one another, they interacted in order to form a higher common identity. Their “infinite genetic code,” as Putin calls it, was collective rather than individual. Blood-mixing occurred among groups that remained otherwise separate.

Ideas like these were impossible under Stalin, who viewed Russia not as a partner, but as a teacher, cultural leader, and “elder brother” of the other Soviet peoples, as he put it in a famous victory speech in 1945. They were equally doomed under Khrushchev, who heralded the rise of a new Soviet man who would transcend such petty ethnic distinctions.

But they were much in demand beginning in 1992 when post-Soviet republics found themselves cast adrift and thus desperate to establish a new basis for regional cohesion and unity. The concept of many smaller nations growing together organically to form a large whole was just what the doctor ordered.

Gumilev’s quackery

Gumilev, who died at age 79 just a few months after the Soviet break-up, became the man of the hour. Freely compared to Herodotus, Marx, Oswald Spengler and Albert Einstein, his books sold in the millions while streets were re-named in his honour and entire institutes devoted themselves to his legacy. In Kazakhstan, a major university in the capital city of Astana proudly bears his name, while the Kazakh government named a peak in the Altai mountain range after him on the centenary of his birth in 2012. Leading politicians quote him, including Putin, who has praised his “extraordinary talents” and “unique impact”.4

Gumilev’s theory of side-by-side development may sound nice, cosy and progressive, but, in fact, it is just a higher form of quackery. In order to give his bio-geographical theories a firm universalist footing, for example, he concluded that a burst of cosmic rays was needed to ignite the passionarost that would get the ethnogenetic process going. Since ethnicity is natural and biological, he argued in favour of an “optimal variant of ethnic contact” that would enable different groups to live “next to each other but separately, cultivating peaceful relations and not interfering in the other’s affairs”.5 It is a theory of separate but equal development, with obvious appeal to European new rightists who believe in France for the French, Africa for the Africans, and Turkey for the Turks; and that everyone should go back to where they came from.

Gumilev also believes that certain anti-ethnic groups have succeeded in detaching themselves from their natural environments so as to prey on others. Or, rather, he believes in one such anti-ethnicity: the Jews. It’s an obsession that, according to one writer, “runs like a red thread through the entirety of his work”.6 Much of his focus is on the Khazars, a Turkic group that established a major commercial empire in the early medieval period, only to be taken over by Jewish merchants in the mid-8th century, who subjugated the Khazars rather than converting them, selling their children into slavery and growing rich off the caravan trade. It’s a portrait of Jewish parasitism that is as bogus as all the rest. The fact that it is wildly popular in Russia and central Asia should set off alarm bells, to say the least.

Ironically, Semenyaka also believes in Gumilev-style ethnogenesis, but in the intermarium rather than the steppe. Nonjon describes the results as “an ‘ethno-futurism’ in which existing national divisions of the Baltic-Black Sea space will be overcome by wider ethno-regional synergies”. The concept derives not only from Gumilev but also from a French new right thinker named Guillaume Faye, whose 1998 book Archeofuturism asserts, according to Nonjon, “that the fate of European civilization must pass through a return of societies to archaic values without demonising technology, and that it must coincide with the formation of a large pan-European independent state bloc called ‘Euro-Siberia’.

This is also quackery, but quackery of an especially dangerous sort since it is a programme for ethno-ideological conquest from one end of Eurasia to the other. As Semenyaka’s all-too-familiar slogan declares: “Today Ukraine, tomorrow Rus’ and the whole of Europe!”

So which side will prevail - Azov or Gumilev? It does not much matter since elements from both sides are busily competing and combining to form a higher synthesis. It took years for Nazism to emerge out of the welter of ultra-right German groups that existed in the immediate post-World War I period, and it will take time for the new upsurge to clarify itself too. But while no-one knows what will emerge out of the Russo-Ukrainian far-right ideological stew, one thing is certain: mutual nationalist radicalisation will lead to more war rather than less.

  1. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11576251/Thousands-Ukraines-Azov-soldiers-burn-Viking-longboat-honour-comrades.html.↩︎

  2. www.illiberalism.org/olena-semenyaka-the-first-lady-of-ukrainian-nationalism.↩︎

  3. Mark Bassin The Gumilev mystique Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2016, p41.↩︎

  4. Ibid, pp2-3.↩︎

  5. Mark Bassin ‘Lev Gumilev and the European New Right’ Nationalities Papers No 46, July 2015, p10.↩︎

  6. Mark Bassin The Gumilev mystique, p75.↩︎