Lev Gumilyov as a Mirror of a Moral Turning-Point

The article focuses on attempting to explain the reasons for popularity of the teachings on passionarity of L. N. Gumilyov in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The author claims that Gumilyov's popularity is weakly associated with his scientific achievements, many of which, with the passage of time, look dubious. In any case, the roots of Gumilyov's popularity clearly lie more in the field of ideology and social psychology than in science itself. The novelty of the proposed solution is in paying main attention to previously nearly unexamined reason for the popularity of Gumilyov's views, while it possibly is of the utmost importance. This is the moral content of the defining element of his philosophical and historical views, namely, his concept of passionarity. The moral content of Gumilyov's theory surprisingly accurately resonated with the moral shifts of the late Soviet era, turned out to be (in terms of Gumilyov himself) complementary. Perhaps without realizing it, L. Gumilyov turned out to be the most successful spokesman for the essence of, if not ethnogenetic, then moral breakdown and turn-around of the 1980-1990s. When this breakdown in its most acute form ceased to be relevant, the popularity of the concept of ethnogenesis also came to naught. The popularity of the teachings on passionarity of Lev Gumilyov is due to its relevance in the conditions of catastrophic transformation of the structure of Soviet ethics. When there was nothing left but the ethics of virtue, it discovered its relativism and omnivorousness, which caused moral discomfort for many people. Under these conditions, the doctrine of the positive historical role of passionarity, as a philosophy of history, partly replaced the lost tier of universal values - with that it at least gave a world-historical meaning to what was happening in Russia.