The richest portrait is that of the true father of this ideology, Lev Gumilev. He was the disappointing son of Anna Akhmatova and Nikolay Gumilev, the two greatest poets of the Russian silver age. Akhmatova, the aristocratic, sorceress-like dissident, whose meeting with Isaiah Berlin he described as one of the highlights of his life, wrote perhaps the 20th century’s most beautiful poem in the Russian language, “Requiem”. It was about the terror, and Lev.

Told by his mother that he had no talent for poetry, too young when his father was executed by the Bolsheviks ever to  escape from hero-worshipping him, this wounded man would outsell and out-influence them both. He was to imagine the dominate nationalist ideology for 21st-century Russia.

Arrested for being one of Osip Mandelstam’s “listeners” as he read out his “Stalin Epigram”, a poem for which the Kremlin would send Mandelstam to die in Siberia, Lev followed the great poet to the Gulag. Digging the White Sea Canal, for which 25,000 died, watching starved inmates reduced to beasts, he began writing in his head something quite different: history.  He did not see tragedy in the hypothermia and demented eyes of the starving slaves digging the canal; Gumilev felt he was seeing something beautiful, the essence of history itself, the Christ-like secret of all nations’ greatness — passionarnost. This tricky-to-translate word denotes the mysterious inner energy for sacrifice that Gumilev believed all great nations possess. This Raskolnikov-like realisation devoured him and propelled him on the path to become the most influential writer on Rusian society and politics to come out of Stalin’s camps. Solzhenitsyn, for all his fame, comes nowhere close. Vladimir Putin refers to passionarnost in his speeches.

Gumilev’s tales, theories and scholarly epics, at first written on Gulag sackcloth, were both gripping and utter bunk, peppered with imaginary documents and fictitious discoveries. These tales of fleeing forefathers of the Huns and Christian Mongols rebuffed by the West at the gates of Palestine, read more like short stories by Jorge Luis Borges than history. “In his books,” writes Clover, “the Xiongnu, the Huns, the Turks, the Mongols — all subjects of Gumilev’s early histories — are isolated, perpetually maligned, backward societies, historically prone to tragic, dramatic, cycles of glory and ruin. In this, it appears, they serve mainly as metaphors for Gumilev’s native Russia.”

Gumilev did not stop at this genre, venturing into science fiction, all the time claiming, indeed believing, that he was an academic scholar. All human beings are part of a nation, he wrote, powered by radiation from outer space. This insight saw him leap to the conclusion that nations have a 1,200-year lifespan, and that Russia was only halfway through the cycle. And from its very birth, Gumilev asserted, a shadowy Western conspiracy had been trying to rip Russia apart. As the Soviet Union imploded, one would have expected Gumilev to have cheered the burial of the tyranny that murdered his father and forced him into hard labour. Instead, he was devastated. “How can you joke about this?” he scolded one friend. “It is our country. Our forebears fought for it, many generations of people fought so that Kazakhstan would be ours, so that Fergana would be ours, that we would live with the Kazakhs and Uzbeks in the same country. And now what will happen to that country?” It was gone. Gumilev saw the wrecking hands of the never-ending Anglo-Saxon conspiracy — a Protocols of the Elders of Zion without the Jews — everywhere.