Gumilev Eurasian National University (Евразийский Национальный университет имени Л. Н. Гумилёва, founded in 1996) to be erected just opposite his own palace on the central square of the new Kazakh capital, Astana. Ideas Gumilev attempted to explain the waves of nomadic migration that rocked the great steppe of Eurasia for centuries by geographical factors such as annual variations in solar radiation, which determine the area of grasslands that could be used for grazing livestock. According to this idea, when the steppe areas shrank drastically, the nomads of Central Asia began moving to the fertile pastures of Europe or China. To describe the genesis and evolution of ethnic groups, Gumilev introduced the concept of "passionarity" (пассионарность), meaning the level of activity to expand typical for an ethnic group, and especially for their leaders, at a given moment in time. He argued that every ethnic group passes through the same stages of birth, development, climas, inertia, convolution and memorial. It is during the "acmatic" phases, when the national passionarity reaches its maximum heat, that the great conquests are made. Gumilev described the current state of Europe as deep inertia, or "introduction to obscuration", to use his own words. The passionarity of the Arabic world, in contrast, is still high, according to him. Drawing inspiration from the works of Konstantin Leontyev and Nikolay Danilevsky, Gumilev regarded Russians as a "super-ethnos" kindred to Turkic-Mongol peoples of the Eurasian steppe. The periods in which Russia has been said to conflict with the steppe peoples were reinterpreted by Gumilev as the periods of consolidation of Russian power with that of steppe to oppose destructive influences from Catholic Europe, that posed a potential threat to integrity of Russian. In accordance with his pan-Asiatic theories, he supported the national movements of Tatars, Kazakhs and other Turkic peoples, in addition to those of the Mongols and other East Asians. Unsurprisingly, Gumilev's teachings have enjoyed immense popularity in Central Asian countries. In Kazan, for example, a monument to him was erected in August 2005. The historian Mark Bassin stated that Gumilev's theories are scientifically unproven and problematic but that they have a significant impact in a range of Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. Several researchers, such as Vadim Rossman, John Klier, Victor Yasmann, Victor Schnirelmann and Mikhail Tripolsky describe Gumilev's views as anti-Semitic. According to those authors, Gumilev did not extend this ethnological ecumenism to the medieval Jews, whom he regarded