We Either Learn To Suffer Like Russians, Or We Are Lost — Guest Post by Ianto Watt

I’d sworn not to write again until Eastern events proved themselves out. But I’m comfortable with the progression. Or better yet, the regression. Of the West, that is. Daniel’s statue has shifted its weight from one leg to the other. The East is now ascendant. The Empire has turned.

Something happened to make me break my silence. Not that it has happened in a visible way, or in a ‘newsworthy’ way. No, it is something that happened to me. Something once obscure has now been revealed, at least to me.

That is, I have come across the cheap (cost-wise) translation of Lev Gumilev’s work, Ethnos and the Biosphere (get it at Amazon or free at The Librarian). Another brilliant Russian mind. Crazy, true enough, but brilliant. Much like Fedorov and The Cosmist Cosmist idea. (As an aside, remember that transhumanism is not a new idea. Almost every crazy idea begins in Russia!)

Someone recently sent me an article from the Financial Times from 2016, wherein the article’s subject, one Vladimir Putin, in his annual speech from 2012, cited Gumilev’s central concept Passionarnost.

I think I have found something that Western minds need to know, if they want to have an iceberg’s chance in Hell of understanding Russia. I have tried to elucidate it before in my discussion of Sobornost, the Russian concept of total solidarity. The concept of Russian ‘Us-ness’. The Us-ness that can accept the idea that a condemned murderer in Russia can still be a true Russian, and therefore should not be executed. Why? Because every Russian is invaluable.

Want proof? Look at all the Russian prisoners that have been released to fight in the Ukrainian War. On behalf of the Russian motherland. If they live, they become heroes. If not, they are still heroes. They died for the Motherland.

That is to say that Russians see themselves, all of them, as being apart from the rest of the world. They see this with good reason. But with bad results. For us, that is. But for them too, in their long and painful history. And therein lies the point. Which is this; how has Russia survived for a millennium?

And that is precisely Gumilev’s question. To understand how this could have happened, he has to explain how any people (an ethnos as he calls it) can survive and even become a super-ethnos that allows it to surmount all that is thrown at it, over a long period of time. And to even become the ruler of a large portion of the entire earth, and all the people within it. And maybe, all of the earth, in their mind. And all of them, willingly.

There are two parts to this equation, in Gumilev’s mind. The first part is the particular portion of mankind in question – the ethnos, that is. The second is that portion’s environment, or biosphere as he says it. These two parts, and their interaction, tell us whether a given tribe/clan/people/nation can survive and even thrive in the face of constant hostility. The dual surroundings of hostile enemies, and the enveloping hostility of their own physical environment. Russia is not suburbia, you understand?

Let’s not pussyfoot around Gumilev’s elephantine point. That is, the very hostility of both of these two factors will determine the fate of any people. That’s what he is saying. Which is to say, if you never have any opposition in your life, you will do splendidly. Until hard times come, that is. That’s when you find out who’s in this for the long haul. Think of portages.

You know. Those spots where you have to disembark from the easy life of drifting downstream and then you have to drag your boat across some rugged terrain to intercept another river where you can resume the trek. It’s the portages that define your chance of survival. Can you do it? Can you drag your cargo and carcass across that rocky ground? More importantly, can you do it in the face of unrelenting forces arrayed along the banks of the river you traverse?

Gumilev says this is the defining point of being a Russian (or any ethnos, actually). Can you survive hostility when it arrives? What’s in your wallet? Got guts? Here’s his point. Do you have the genetic disposition to surmount the hardship of both your hostile neighbors (other ethnoses) and your brutal physical environment (biosphere)? Do you embrace suffering, or strive to avoid it? Gumilev says there must be a passion in the genetic bloodstream of a people if they are to survive, let alone thrive. This gives rise to his concept of passionarity.

Passionarity, to Gumilev, is akin to genetics, as we think of it. Does a given ethnos have the inborn guts to tough it out? He says every ethnos has it at some early point in their existence. But do you still have it when things go south? He goes into great detail to describe all of the multiple sub-elements of the ethnos’ that we see today as a singular Russia. He breaks down, in exhaustive detail all of the intermixings of those peoples that have given rise to the current Slavic race over the past millennium. He sees a much wider mix of peoples and their interactions that have finally melded together into a super-ethnos. A melded people that gives singular allegiance to a central ideal, the ideal of Russia. The result of seemingly eternal and internal duress, emerging as the Eurasian colossus that we know as Russia today.

Gumilev is one of the fathers of Eurasianism. That term describes the belief that our Western concept of ‘continents’ is misguided in the true understanding of ‘world history’. Gumilev is the root of Alexander Dugin’s ‘nationalistic’ style of thought. Gumilev’s idea of passionarity is what Vlad specifically referred to in his annual speech in 2012. And that is important if we want to know what to expect from Vlad in particular, but more importantly, from Russia, as a whole. Remember, Russia has survived over a thousand years, from Vladimir the Great until now, with Vladimir the Greater. Don’t think that regime change will change Russia. There will be a Vladimir the Greatest in the end.

Let’s stop for a minute and revisit the idea of Sobornost. The idea that the people of Russia are the result of this concept of one-ness. This idea that We are Us. Us, as in one people, regardless of confession, clime, class or clan. If you are loyal to the State, you are Russian. It’s that simple. And the State is here to protect you from Them. That is, all who surround us. And seek our destruction and enslavement. In the Russian mind, neighbors is a synonym for enemies. And so, the unspoken part of Sobornost is not just Us. It’s Us against Them.

In the Russian mind, even in the pre-Russian minds of those parts of the melded super-ethnos we know today as Russia, history has shown this to be true. It truly is Us vs Them. No reading of world history can deny this fact. Russia has been the target of more invasions and assaults than any nation I can think of. Every Hegemon has sought to subdue and dismantle her, both East and West. And there is a reason for this. That reason is that Russia, as we know it today, sits on approximately two-thirds of all mineral wealth on this earth. Envy is the simple answer to the question of why Russia is the target.

Now we are back to the question of how has Russia survived this long. She evidently has had the genetic passion, as Gumilev would say, to survive hostile neighbors. And yes, she has the hostile physical climate that keeps her genetic ‘immune system’ exercised and healthy. But other peoples have had this as well, and yet they have faded from history. Why so? Simple, my friend. When their time of suffering arrived, they had lost their Sobornost. Thus, there was no unified Passiarnost. They couldn’t suffer together, because they were not together.

My point is the intermixing of the passionarity of the Russian ethnos with the communal nature of the Russian people(s) as expressed in the word ‘Sobornost’ that has allowed Russia the Nation to survive. It’s the Us-ness, the One-ness of Russia, combined with the toughness of its multi-ethnic paternity in a hostile physical environment that gives rise to the key ingredient of passionarity. Russians know how to be One. And Russians know how to Suffer. Put those two thoughts together and you have the answer to the question.

Passionarity and Sobornost. Russia has lasted over a thousand years because they know how to suffer.How? By suffering together. That’s how they became one. They emphasize the whole of Russia over the oneness of any singular Russian. The community over the individual. In the West, we used to know this, too. We called it self-sacrifice. Christendom was built upon it.

Here’s where the Western (Imperial) Empire made its mistake. It couldn’t wait for Russia to fall apart. Its greed over-ruled its reason. Make no mistake, Russia was severely weakened in the period between 1990 and 2008. Until the time when Vlad emerged, unmasked. If the West had just waited a little longer, young Russians would have lost their Passionarity. Their will to survive as Russians (versus ‘westerners’). And they would have succumbed. Like we have. Slaves to the Empire. Instead, we did them a favor, by waking them up before it was too late to preserve their past. And now, we must pay the price. Because they have regained their will to live. To live as Slavs. And not slaves.

The question before us today, Komrades, is not whether Russia will survive, as Russians. They’ve done it for a thousand years, and they will do it again by doing what they have always done. By suffering, together. They know how to do it.

The real question today, my friends, is this; Do we know how to do it?

That’s what we’re going to find out. And soon.

We’d better learn, because it’s our turn soon. So, all you people of the West, all you radical individualists, all you atomized free radicals, you’d better start learning to work together. And praying together. Only then can you learn how to suffer together. That’s the only way we can weather the coming storm.

Oremus.

Subscribe or donate to support this site and its wholly independent host using credit card click here. Or use the paid subscription at Substack. Cash App: $WilliamMBriggs. For Zelle, use my email: matt@wmbriggs.com, and please include yours so I know who to thank.