Encyclopedia of Russian history

E N C Y C L O P E D I A O F RUSSIAN HISTORY EDITOR IN CHIEF James R. Millar George Washington University SENIOR AS...

Author: James R. Millar

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E N C Y C L O P E D I A

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RUSSIAN HISTORY

EDITOR IN CHIEF

James R. Millar George Washington University SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR

E D I TO R I A L B OA R D

Ann E. Robertson George Washington University ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Daniel H. Kaiser Grinnell College Louise McReynolds University of Hawaii Donald J. Raleigh University of North Carolina Nicholas V. Riasanovsky University of California, Berkeley Ronald Grigor Suny University of Chicago ADVISORY BOARD

Marianna Tax Choldin University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Gregory L. Freeze Brandeis University Paul R. Gregory University of Houston Lindsey Hughes University College London Paul R. Josephson Colby College Janet L. B. Martin University of Miami Bruce W. Menning U.S. Army Command and Staff College Boris N. Mironov Russian Academy of Science Reginald E. Zelnik University of California, Berkeley


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RUSSIAN HISTORY VOLUME 2: E-L JAMES R. MILLAR, EDITOR IN CHIEF

Encyclopedia of Russian History James R. Millar

© 2004 by Macmillan Reference USA. Macmillan Reference USA is an imprint of The Gale Group, Inc., a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Macmillan Reference USA™ and Thomson Learning™ are trademarks used herein under license. For more information, contact Macmillan Reference USA 300 Park Avenue South, 9th Floor New York, NY 10010 Or you can visit our Internet site at http://www.gale.com

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Encyclopedia of Russian history / James R. Millar, editor in chief. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-02-865693-8 (set hardcover) — ISBN 0-02-865694-6 (v. 1) — ISBN 0-02-865695-4 (v. 2) — ISBN 0-02-865696-2 (v. 3) — ISBN 0-02-865697-0 (v. 4) 1. Russia—History—Encyclopedias. 2. Soviet Union—History—Encyclopedias. 3. Russia (Federation)—History—Encyclopedias. I. Millar, James R., 1936DK14.E53 2003 947’.003—dc21

2003014389

This title is also available as an e-book. ISBN 0-02-865907-4 (set) Contact your Gale sales representative for ordering information. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

EARLY RUSSIA See

KIEVAN RUS; MUSCOVY; NOV-

GOROD THE GREAT.

ECONOMIC GROWTH, EXTENSIVE In the quantitative analysis of aggregate economic development, modern economists commonly distinguish extensive from intensive growth. Extensive economic growth comes from the expansion of ordinary inputs of labor, reproducible capital (i.e., machines and livestock) and natural resources. Intensive growth, by contrast, involves increased effectiveness, quality, or efficiency of these inputs— usually measured as a growth of total factor productivity. The early development of the USSR was primarily of the extensive sort. Increased application of labor inputs came from reduced unemployment, use of women previously engaged within the household, diminished leisure (e.g., communist sabbaticals or subotniki), and forced or prison labor. Increased capital investments were a result of forced savings of the population, taxes and compulsory loans, deferred consumption, and a small and varying amount of foreign investment in the country. Natural resources were expanded by new mines and arable acreage, most notably the “virgin lands” opened up in semiarid zones of Kazakhstan during the 1950s. But shifting resources from the backward peasant sector to modern industry, as well as to borrowed technology, also accounted for some intensive growth.

E

During the 1950s total growth of gross domestic product (GDP) was an impressive 5.7 percent annually, adjusted for inflation, of which approximately 3.3 percent came from increased inputs and only about 2.4 percent from increased productivity. Growth rates declined to 5.1 percent during the 1960s, 3.2 percent during the 1970s, and a mere 1.9 percent during the 1980s. Less than 1 percent of these growth rates came from intensive sources. The increased share of extensive sources meant that growth could not be sustained for several reasons. Population growth was slowing in Russia. Most of the increased labor supplies came from the less educated populations of Soviet Central Asia, where industrial productivity was considerably lower than in the traditional heartland of Russia and Ukraine. These Muslim populations did not move readily to, or were not welcome in, the most productive areas of the USSR,

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such as the Baltic states. Some economists, including Martin Weitzman and Stanley Fischer, attributed the slowdown to the difficulty of substituting new investments for labor, as well. Depletion of oil and ore fields also played a role in reduced growth. For systemic reasons, the Soviet command economy could not develop the new goods, higher quality, and innovative processes that increasingly characterized the economies of the developed West. Nor could it keep up with the newly industrializing economies of southeast Asia, which by the 1980s displayed higher growth rates, predominantly from intensive sources.

See also:

ECONOMIC GROWTH, IMPERIAL; ECONOMIC

GROWTH, INTENSIVE; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (1986). Soviet Economic Structure and Performance, 3rd rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row. Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (1999). Comparative Economics Systems, 6th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. MARTIN C. SPECHLER

ECONOMIC GROWTH, IMPERIAL The economic development of the Russian Empire can be traced back to the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725), who was determined to industrialize Russia by borrowing contemporary technology from Western Europe and attracting foreign specialists. While military considerations played an important role in this drive, they combined with vast natural resources and large labor pool to develop an increasingly modern industrial sector by eighteenth-century standards. The less progressive policies of Peter’s successors lead to a growing gap between Russia and its industrializing European competitors that became evident in the nineteenth century. Peter’s most significant policy was his entrenchment of serfdom in the village, which was abolished in 1861. After the Crimean War (1854–1856), especially during the tenure of the Minister of Finance Count Sergei Witte (1892–1903), recognition of the dangers of the economic gap bolstered the accelerated industrialization of the Russian Empire. Large government investments in the rail network development expanded the transportation network from 2,000

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kilometers in 1861 to more than 70,000 kilometers in 1913. This development helped to open up the iron and coal resources of the Southern regions (Ukraine) and facilitated the marketing of wheat, the major export commodity of the Russian empire. A vibrant textile industry grew in Moscow, and metalworking blossomed in St. Petersburg. Government policy favored the influx of foreign capital, primarily from England, France, and Belgium, which were attracted by Russia’s vast economic potential. The stabilized ruble exchange rate allowed Russia to join the international gold standard in 1897. The expansion of domestic heavy industries was promoted by government protectionist policies such as high tariffs, profit guarantees, tax reductions and exemptions, and government orders at high prices to insure domestic demand. The ministry of finance was the major agent in this strategy. Bureaucratic intervention into economic matters and bribery were among the numerous limitations on the development of a modern entrepreneurial class in Russia. More recent data suggest that the state was not as pervasive in Russian economic life as was originally thought. Budgetary subsidies were modest, and tariffs and indirect taxes were levied strictly for revenue purposes and played little role in the industrial policy. Russia had active commodity markets and was active in world markets. The state did not engage in economic planning, and both product and factor prices were set by markets. The creation of industrial trusts and syndicates in the early years of the twentieth century implied the existence of some monopolies in Russia. The success of Russian industrialization before 1917 was evident, but agricultural progress was more modest (agriculture continued to account for more than half the national product). During the industrialization era, the share of agriculture fell from 58 percent in 1885 to 51 percent in 1913. Russian agriculture was characterized by feudal elements and serfdom that provided few incentives for investment, productivity improvements, or better management. Russian serfs had to work the landlords’ land (called barshchina) or make in–kind or monetary payments from their crops (obrok). Peasant land prior to 1861 was held communally and was periodically redistributed. Agricultural reforms were modest or too late to prevent what many contemporary observers feel was a deepening agrarian crisis. The Emancipation Act of 1861 provided the peasants with juridical freedom and transferred to them about half the landholdings of the landed aristocracy. However, peasants had to


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“redeem” (buy) their allotted plots of land. The size of land allotments was very small, and backward, unproductive communal agriculture remained the main organizational form in villages. While the production and marketing of grain increased substantially after the Emancipation Act of 1861, the primary objective of the Russian emancipation was not to create a modern agriculture, but to prevent revolts, preserve the aristocracy, and retain state control of agriculture. Many observers feel that the agrarian crisis was one of the causes of the Revolution of 1905, which necessitated further reforms by the tsarist government. The reforms introduced in 1906 and 1910 by Peter Stolypin allowed the peasants to own land and cultivate it in consolidated plots rather than in small, frequently separated strips. The Stolypin reforms weakened communal agriculture and created the base for a class of small peasant proprietors. These reforms were considered long overdue, and they had a positive effect on the development of agriculture. In spite of persistent regional differences, peasant living standards rose, and productivity and per capita output increased. Overall, agricultural growth during the post–emancipation period was much like that of Western Europe. In spite of the late removal of serfdom, there is evidence of significant peasant mobility, and the completion of an extensive rail network greatly facilitated the marketing of grain. Regional price dispersion fell as transportation costs were lowered, and agricultural marketing and land rents were, in fact, dictated by normal market principles. Despite scholarly controversy concerning the consequences of active government intervention in economy, the late tsarist era after 1880 is characterized by the significant acceleration of the output growth rate. Between the 1860s and 1880s the average annual rate of growth of net national product was 1.8 percent, while for the period thereafter, up to the 1909–1913 period, the rate of economic growth was 3.3 percent. At the same time, Russia experienced significant population growth, which put the Russian empire in the group of poorer West European countries in per capita terms. Russian economic growth was largely the consequence of the relatively rapid rate of growth of population (1.6% from 1885 to 1913) and labor force (1.7% from 1885 to 1913), pointing to the extensive character of the growth. Less reliable data on the tsarist capital stock suggests that roughly two–thirds of the growth of Russian output was accounted for by the growth of conventional labor and capital in-


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puts. With respect to structural change, the decline in the shares of agriculture (from 58% in 1885 to 51% in 1913) and expansion of industry, construction, and transportation (from 23% in 1885 to 32% in 1913) suggests that the Russian economy had indeed embarked on a path of modern economic growth. Russia’s economic power was concentrated in agriculture. In 1861 Russia produced more grain than any other country and was surpassed only by the United States in 1913 (123,000 versus 146,000 metric tons). On a per capita basis, however, Russia ranked well behind major grain producers (the United States and Germany) and was close to the level of such countries as France and Austria–Hungary. Russia’s industrial base was even weaker. In 1861 the country was a minor producer of essential industrial commodities such as coal, iron, and steel, and still lagged behind the major industrial powers in 1913. Russia began its modern era with a per capita output that was 50 percent that of France and Germany and 15 percent that of England and the United States. On per capita basis, in 1913 Russia was a poor European country ranking well below Spain, Italy, and Austria–Hungary. The relative backwardness of the Russian empire is explained by rapid population growth and slow output growth in the years before the 1880s. Russia’s output growth figures do not paint a picture of a collapsing economy, but rather of an economy that was either catching up or holding its own with the most industrialized countries of the era. Data on human capital development (in particular, literacy data) suggest that Russia was still a socially backward nation at the turn of the century. In 1897 the illiteracy rate was 72 percent; in 1913 it was still as high as 60 percent, with urban literacy almost three times that of rural literacy. By contrast, in 1900 the illiteracy rate in the United States was 11 percent. Despite this fact, after 1880 investment in primary education rose, and primary school enrollment increased considerably. While Russia’s birth and death rates began to decline after 1889, birth rates were still at premodern levels at the time of the 1917 revolution. Foreign investment played a substantial role in the industrialization of Russia, since the domestic production of capital equipment was limited. In addition to importing technology and equipment, the Russian economy was also aided by the receipt of foreign savings to finance Russian capital formation along with domestic savings. Russia was a

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large debtor country during the period from 1880 to 1913, receiving significant capital influx from France, England, and Belgium. It accounted for 15 percent of world international debt by 1913. Foreign capital accounted for nearly 40 percent of Russian industrial investment, 15 to 20 percent of total investment, and about 2 percent of Russian output at the end of tsarist era. The Russian empire was more dependent upon foreign capital in both magnitude and duration than either the United States or Japan during their periods of dependence. The large foreign investments in Russia were a sign of confidence in its potential and responded to traditional signals such as profits sufficient to offset risk.

See also:

See also:

ECONOMIC GROWTH, EXTENSIVE; ECONOMIC

GROWTH, SOVIET

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abramowitz, M. (1986). “Catching Up, Forging Ahead, and Falling Behind.” Journal of Economic History 46: 385–406. Domar, Evsei. (1957). Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth. New York: Oxford University Press. Krugman, P. (1994). “The Myth of Asia’s Miracle.” Foreign Affairs 73:62-78. Solow, R. (1957). “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function.” Review of Economics and Statistics 39(3):312-320.

AGRICULTURE; BARSHCHINA; INDUSTRIALIZA-

STEVEN ROSEFIELDE

TION; OBROK; PEASANT ECONOMY; PETER I; SERFDOM BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gatrell, Peter. (1986). The Tsarist Economy, 1850–1917. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Gregory, Paul R. (1994). Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First Five Year Plan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. PAUL R. GREGORY

ECONOMIC GROWTH, INTENSIVE Increases in aggregate economic activity, or growth, may be generated by adding more labor and capital or by improving skills and technology. Development economists call the latter “intensive growth” because labor and capital work harder. Growth is driven by enhanced productivity (higher output per unit of input) rather than augmented factor supplies. Theory predicts that all growth in a steady-state, long-run equilibrium will be attributable to technological progress (intensive growth). Developing nations may initially grow faster than this “golden mean” rate, benefiting both from rapid capital accumulation (capital deepening) and technological catch-up, but must converge to the golden mean thereafter. During the 1970s many Marxist economists hypothesized that socialist economies were not bound by these neoclassical principles. They forecasted that extensive growth (increased factor supply) would be replaced by socialist–intensive methods ensuring superior performance, but they were mistaken: Growth fell below zero in 1989, heralding the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later.

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ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET During the first decade of Soviet rule and up to 1929, the Soviet economy struggled to recover from the damages of World War I, the Revolution, and the civil war, and then to find its way through policy zigzags of the young and inexperienced Soviet leadership. It is commonly accepted that during this decade of the 1920s the Soviet economy more or less managed to regain the level of national product of 1913, the last prewar year. In 1929 the Soviet Union embarked upon a strategy of rapid economic growth focused mainly on industrialization. The main institutional instrument used in order to implement growth was the Five-Year Plan, the key economic tool of the centrally planned system. The record of Soviet growth since 1928 and the main factors that contributed to it are presented in Table 1. The data reflect mostly Western estimates, based partly on Soviet official data following adjustments to conform to Western definitions and methodology as well as to accuracy. One major methodological difference related to the national product was that, following Marxist teaching, the concept of Net National Product (NNP), the main Soviet aggregate measure for national income, did not include the value of most services, considered nonproductive. One of the main goals of Soviet communist leadership was rapid economic growth that would equal and eventually surpass the West. The pri-


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mary aim was to demonstrate the superiority of the communist economic system and growth strategy, based on the teachings of Marx and Lenin, over capitalism. The goal was needed also in order to build a sufficient military power base to avert the perceived military threat of the capitalist world in general, initially that of Nazi Germany. Indeed the rates of growth of Soviet GNP were initially, during the 1930s and the first Five-Year Plans, exceptionally high by international comparisons for that period; this made the Soviet model a showcase for imitation to many developing countries that became independent in the aftermath of World War II. While the Soviet growth rates were still high during the 1950s and 1960s, they were already matched or exceeded at that time by countries such as Germany and Japan, as well as a number of developing countries. The decade of the 1940s, with the devastation of World War II, witnessed stagnation at first and slow growth during the reconstruction efforts later. Growth somewhat accelerated in the aftermath of the death of Josef Stalin, but from the 1960s onward the rates of economic growth began to fall, declining continuously throughout the rest of the Soviet period down to near zero just before the dissolution of the USSR at the end of 1991. Various efforts at economic reform in order to reverse this trend largely failed. As a result, the entire postwar growth record declined further by international comparisons to below that of most groups of developed as well as

G R O W T H ,

S O V I E T

developing countries, especially a number of East Asian and Latin American countries. While many developed market economies suffered from business cycles and oscillations in growth rates, they experienced sustained economic growth in the long run. Per contra the fall in Soviet growth rates proved to be terminal. Thus, although during the early decades the Soviet economy grew fast enough in order to catch up and narrow the gap with the developed countries, during its last decades it fell behind and the gap widened. The growth record with respect to GNP per capita, followed a similar trend of high rates of growth initially, but declined in later decades (Table 1). While in 1928 the Soviet level of GDP per capita stood around 20 percent of that of the United States, it reached about 30 percent in 1990, probably the best record in terms of comparisons with other Western economies. Throughout the period, the share of private consumption in GNP was lower than in most other nonsocialist countries. Consumption levels did go up significantly from very low levels during the two decades or so following Stalin’s death. Also, throughout most of the period, there were relatively high public expenditures of education and health services, which helped to raise the comparative level of welfare and the quality of life. The failure of the communist regime to achieve sustained economic growth on a converging path with developed countries is no doubt the most important reason for the fall of the economy.

Table 1.

Growth, Productivity and Consumption 1928–1990 (AVERAGE ANNUAL GROWTH RATES)

1928–1990

1928–1940

1940–1950

1950–1960

1960–1970

1970–1980

1980–1985

1986–1990

GNP Population

Period/Category

3.2 1.2

5.8 2.1

2.2 -0.8

5.2 1.8

4.9 1.3

2.5 0.9

1.8 0.9

1.3 0.9

GNP per Capita Employment

2.0 1.4

3.6 3.9

3.0 0.3

3.3 1.6

3.6 1.8

1.6 1.4

0.9 0.7

0.4 0.1

Capital Total Factor Productivity (TFP)

5.7* 0.5*

9.0 1.7

0.4 2

9.5 0.4

8.0 0.5

7.4 -1.2

6.2 -1.0

.. ..

Consumption Consumption per Capita

3.2 2.1

3.5 1.4

3.3 2.5

5.2 3.3

5.2 3.9

3.4 2.5

1.9 1.0

2.2 1.3

*1928–1985. SOURCE: Ofer, 1987; Laurie Kurtzweg, “Trends in Soviet Gross National Product” in United States Congress, Joint Economic Committee. Gorbachev’s Economic Plans, Vol. 1, Washington D.C., pp. 126–165; James Noren and Laurie Kurtzweg, “The Soviet Economy Unravels: 1985–91” in United States Congress, Joint Economic Committee. The Former Soviet Union in Transition, Vol. 1, Washington D.C. pp. 8–33, 1993; Angus Maddison. Monitoring the World Economy 1820–1992, OECD, Paris, 1995; Angus Maddison, The World Economy : A Millennial Perspective, OECD, Paris, 2000.


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The growth record of the Soviet Union—its initial success and eventual failure—is a joint outcome of the selected growth strategy and the system of central planning, including almost full state ownership of the means of production. The centrally planned system was more effective at the start in mobilizing all needed resources, and directing them to the goals of industrialization and growth. The system is also characterized by using commands instead of incentives and decentralized initiatives: emphasis on fulfillment of quantitative production targets rather than on improvements in quality, technology, and efficiency, routine expansion instead of creativity, and rigidity and “more of the same” instead of flexibility—a very high cost for any change. Some of the above characteristics, while advantageous at the start, turned out to be obstacles when the economy developed and became more complex. Other features, such as difficulties in creating indigenous technological innovations, were less harmful initially, when technology could be transferred from abroad, but more of a hindrance later when more domestic efforts were needed. The Soviet communist growth strategy, following Marxian doctrine, was based on high rates of investment and a rapid buildup of capital stock. High rates of investment come at the expense of lower shares of consumption, sacrificed at the beginning in exchange for hopes of abundance in the future. Central planning, state ownership, and the dictatorship of the proletariat were the necessary tools needed to impose such sacrifices. Next the regime mobilized the maximum possible number of able-bodied men and women to the labor force. A model of growth based mostly on maximum mobilization of capital and labor is called “extensive.” The increase in output is achieved mainly through the increase in the amounts of inputs. Under an alternative “intensive” model, most of the increase in output is achieved through improvements in the utilization of a given amount of inputs. These include technological changes and improvements in management, organization, and networks, termed total factor productivity (TFP). The mobilization of capital in the Soviet growth model assumed that the newly installed equipment would embody also the most advanced technology. While this was the case to some extent during the first decade, with heavy borrowing of technology from abroad, the failure to generate indigenous civilian technology, as well as the mounting inefficiencies of central planning, diminished, eliminated, and turned neg-

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ative the intensive contribution (TFP) to Soviet growth. Only during the 1930s TFP was significant and accounted for about 30 percent of total growth. Soviet leaders and economists were aware of the efficiency failure and tried to reverse it through many reforms but to no avail. The problem with extensive growth is that the ability to mobilize more labor and capital is being exhausted over time; furthermore, in both cases early efforts to mobilize more resources backfire by reducing their availability in the future. Labor was mobilized from the start, by moving millions of people from farms to the cities, by obliging all ablebodied, especially women, to join the active labor force, and by limiting the number of people employed in services, forcing families to self-supply services during after-work hours. Very low wages compelled all adult members of the family to seek work. Table 1 illustrates that until the 1980s employment grew by a higher rate than the population, indicating a growing rate of labor force participation, achieving at the time one of the highest rates, especially for women, in the world. However, the table also shows that over time the rate of growth of employment declined, from nearly 4 percent per year from 1928 to 1940 to almost zero during the late 1980s. In the Soviet Union, birthrates declined far beyond the normal rates accompanying modernization everywhere. This was due to the heavy pressure on women to work outside the household, provide services in off-work hours, and raise children in small, densely inhabited, and poorly equipped apartments. In this way larger labor inputs early on resulted in fewer additions to the labor force in later years, thereby contributing to declining growth. During the 1980s employment increased at even a slower rate than the population. A similar process affected capital accumulation. Because a labor force grows naturally by modest rates, the main vehicle of growth is capital (equipment and construction). This is especially true if the rate of efficiency growth is modest or near zero, as was the case most of the time in the USSR. It follows that the share of investment out of the national product must increase over time in order to assure a steady growth rate of the capital stock. An increased share of investment leaves less for improvements in consumption, in the supply of social services, and for defense. Indeed the share of (gross) investment increased in the Soviet Union to more than 30 percent of GNP, and this kept down the rate of growth of the capital stock and thus of


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output. Furthermore, with the earlier drying up of increments of labor, Soviet growth was driven for a time, still extensively, by capital alone. This in turn forced the system to always substitute capital for labor, a difficult task by itself, more so when no new technology is offered. The outcome was further decline in productivity of capital and of growth. The early mobilization of labor and capital inputs at the cost of their future decline is part of a general policy of haste by the Soviet leadership, which was frustrated by declining growth, the inability to provide for defense and other needs, and the failure of partial reforms. In addition to the above, there were also overuses of natural resources, over-pumping of oil at the expense of future output, neglect of maintenance of infrastructure and of the capital stock, and imposition of taut plans that forced producers to cut corners and neglect longer-term considerations. Initally this policy of haste produced some incremental growth but at a cost of lower growth later. The results of the policy of haste spilled over to the transition period in the form of major obstacles for renewed economic growth. The heavy military burden was another significant factor adversely affecting Soviet growth. Early on the Soviet Union was threatened and then attacked by Germany, and following World War II engaged in the Cold War. Throughout the entire period it had to match the military capabilities of larger and more advanced economies, hence to set aside a higher share of its output for defense. During the Soviet system’s last decades this share grew to around 15 percent of GNP. This amount was unprecedented in peacetime. The real defense burden was even heavier than shown by the figures because the defense effort forced the leaders to give priority to defense, in both routine production and in technological efforts, thereby disrupting civilian production and depriving it of significant technological innovation. Additional causes of declining growth over time were the deterioration of work motivation and discipline, increasing corruption and illegal activities, declining improvements in the standard of living, and weakening legitimization of the regime. Collective agriculture, the cornerstone of the communist system, became the millstone around its neck.

See also:

ECONOMIC GROWTH, EXTENSIVE; ECONOMIC

GROWTH, INTENSIVE; FIVE-YEAR PLANS; INDUSTRIALIZATION, RAPID; MARXISM; NET MATERIAL PRODUCT


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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bergson, Abram. (1961). The Real National Income of Soviet Russia since 1928. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Domar, Evsey. (1957). “A Soviet Model of Growth.” In Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth. New York: Oxford University Press. Easterly, William, and Fischer, Stanley. (1995). “The Soviet Economic Decline: Historical and Republican Data.” World Bank Economic Review 9(3):341–371. Maddison, Angus. (2001). The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. Paris: Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Nove, Alec. (1993). Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1991, rev. ed. New York: Penguin. Ofer, Gur. (1987). “Soviet Economic Growth, 1928–1985.” Journal of Economic Literature 25(4):1767–1833. Ofer, Gur. (1996). “Decelerating Economic Growth under Socialism: The Soviet Case.” In The Wealth of Nations in the Twentieth Century: The Policies and Institutional Determinants of Economic Development, ed. Ramon Myers. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. GUR OFER

ECONOMIC REFORM COMMISSION The State Commission on Economic Reform, chaired by economist and vice premier Leonid Abalkin, was created in July 1989. The first fruit of its work was a background report written for a conference on radical economic reform held October 30– November 1, 1989, in Moscow. This document was very radical by soviet standards. It argued, “We are not talking about improving the existing economic mechanism, nor about merely replacing its outdated parts. One internally consistent system must be dismantled and replaced by another one, also internally consistent and thus incompatible with the previous one.” In April 1990 Abalkin and Yuri Maslyukov (chairman of Gosplan) presented to the Presidential Council a program for a rapid transition to the market. This program drew attention to the costs involved in economic reform (e.g., open inflation, decline in production, closing of inefficient enterprises, fall in living standards, increased inequality). Most likely the program was rejected because of its honesty in discussing the costs of rapid marketization. The program officially adopted in May was substantially more conservative.

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From May to August of 1990 two teams were working on economic reform programs, one headed by Abalkin and one headed by Stanislav Shatalin. The latter produced the Five-HundredDay Plan. Mikhail Gorbachev did not commit himself to either. He asked Abel Aganbegyan to merge the two documents. This compromise was adopted at the Congress of People’s Deputies in December 1990. Abalkin was dissatisfied by these events and resigned effective February 1991.

See also:

GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ellman, Michael, and Kontorovich, Vladimir, eds. (1998). The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insiders’ History. Armonk, NY: M. E.Sharpe. Hough, Jerry. (1997). Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. MICHAEL ELLMAN

ECONOMISM The label applied to a group of moderate Russian Social Democrats at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. An offshoot of the legal Marxists, the economist group emphasized the role of practical activity among industrial workers. According to their theories, activism at the rank-and-file level would lead to social change: Agitation for a ten–hour day, limitation on fines for petty infractions, better sanitation in the workplace, and so forth would ignite conflict with tsarist officialdom. Class conflict would provoke revolutionary political demands and eventually lead to a bourgeois–liberal revolution, which all Russian Marxists of the time thought necessary before the advent of socialism. For the time being, though, these economist Marxists were willing to follow worker demands rather than impose an explicitly socialist agenda on the laboring class. Workers involved themselves in strikes, mutual aid societies, and consumer and educational societies to raise their class consciousness. Thus this faction criticized the leading role assigned to the revolutionary intelligentsia by scientific Marxists such as Georgy Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod.

Rabochaia Mysl from 1897 to 1902 in St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Warsaw. While mostly concerned with worker grievances and local conditions, this newspaper (at first produced by St. Petersburg workers) did bring out a “Separate Supplement” in issue 7, written by Konstantin Takhtarev, that was critical of the more radical Marxists. The economists also sponsored the journal with a more political and theoretical character: Rabochee Delo, published from 1899 to 1902 in Switzerland. Economism is sometimes linked to the leading German revisionist Marxist Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932). In 1899 one of the economists, Yekaterina Kuskova, wrote a “Credo,” which came to the attention of Vladimir Ilich Lenin, who penned a protest the same year. That group’s practical and local emphasis continued to be attacked, somewhat unfairly, by Lenin and his supporters in Iskra (Spark) and later in “What Is to Be Done?” (1902). Lenin argued that the opportunist notions of economism, as opposed to his revolutionary activism, justified a split in Russian Social Democracy the following year. Several of the leading economists, for example, Sergei Prokopovich, later became liberals, like the more famous legal Marxist Peter Struve. Both Prokopovich and Kuskova became anticommunists and participated in an emergency relief committee during the 1920–1921 famine. Soon afterward they were arrested in the general crackdown on Lenin’s opponents.

See also:

LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; MARXISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harding, Neil. (1977). Lenin’s Political Thought, vol. 1. London: Macmillan. Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. (1978). Collected Works, vol. 4. Moscow: Progress Publishers. MARTIN C. SPECHLER

ECONOMY, POST-SOVIET

Organized as the Union of Social Democrats Abroad, the economists published the newspaper

Establishing a market economy and achieving strong economic growth remained Russia’s primary concerns for more than a decade after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. By the middle of the decade, Russia had made considerable progress toward creating the institutions of a mar-

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ket economy. Although the process of privatization was flawed, a vast shift of property rights away from the state toward individuals and the corporate sector occurred. The main success of economic reforms were macroeconomic stabilization (gaining control over the inflation, relative reduction of government deficit, and so forth) as well as initial steps toward creating a modern financial system for allocating funds according to market criteria. The banking system was privatized, and both debt and equity markets emerged. There was an effort to use primarily domestic markets to finance the government debt. In contrast to other ex-Soviet countries in Central Europe, Russia could not quickly overcome the initial output decline at the beginning of market reforms. Russia’s economy contracted for five years as the reformers appointed by President Boris Yeltsin hesitated over the implementation of the basic foundations of a market economy. Russia achieved a slight recovery in 1997 (GDP growth of 1%), but stubborn budget deficits and the country’s poor business climate made it vulnerable when the global financial crisis began in 1997. The August 1998 financial crisis signaled the fragility of the Russian market economy and the difficulties policymakers encountered under imperfect market conditions. The crisis sent the entire banking system into chaos. Many banks became insolvent and shut down. Others were taken over by the government and heavily subsidized. The crisis culminated in August 1998 with depreciation of the ruble, a debt default by the government, and a sharp deterioration in living standards for most of the population. For the year 1998, GDP experienced a 5 percent decline. The economy rebounded in 1999 and 2000 (GDP grew by 5.4% in 1999 and 8.3% in 2000), primarily due to the weak ruble and a surging trade surplus fueled by rising world oil prices. This recovery, along with renewed government effort in 2000 to advance lagging structural reforms, raised business and investor confidence concerning Russia’s future prospects. GDP is expected to grow by over 5.5 percent in 2001 and average 3–4 percent (depending on world oil prices) from 2002 through 2005. In 2003 Russia remained heavily dependent on exports of commodities, particularly oil, natural gas, metals, and timber, which accounted for over 80 percent of its exports, leaving the country vulnerable to swings in world prices. Macroeconomic stability and the improved business climate can easily deteriorate with changes in export com-


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modity prices and excessive ruble appreciation. Additionally, inflation remained high according to international standards: From 1992 to 2000, Russia’s average annual rate of inflation was 38 percent. Russia’s agricultural sector remained beset by uncertainty over land ownership rights, which discouraged needed investment and restructuring. The industrial base was increasingly dilapidated and needed to be replaced or modernized if the country was to achieve sustainable economic growth. Three basic factors caused Russia’s transition difficulties, including the absence of broad-based political support for reform, inability to close the gap between available public resources and government spending, and inability to push forward systematically with structural reforms. Russia’s second president, Vladimir Putin, elected in March 2000, advocated a strong state and market economy, but the success of his agenda was challenged by his reliance on security forces and ex-KGB associates, the lack of progress on legal reform, widespread corruption, and the ongoing war in Chechnya. Despite tax reform, the black market continued to account for a substantial share of GDP. In addition, Putin presented balanced budgets, enacted a flat 13 percent personal income tax, replaced the head of the giant Gazprom natural gas monopoly with a personally loyal executive, and pushed through a reform plan for the natural electricity monopoly. The fiscal burden improved. The cabinet enacted a new program for economic reform in July 2000, but progress was undermined by the lack of banking reform and the large state presence in the economy. After the 1998 crisis, banking services once again became concentrated in the state-owned banks, which lend mainly to the business sector. In 2000 state banks strengthened their dominant role in the sector, benefiting from special privileges such as preferential funding sources, capital injections, and implicit state guarantees. Cumulative foreign direct investment since 1991 amounted to $17.6 billion by July 2001, compared with over $350 billion in China during the same period. A new law on foreign investments enacted in July 1999 granted national treatment to foreign investors except in sectors involving national security. Foreigners were allowed to establish wholly owned companies (although the registration process can be cumbersome) and take part in the privatization process. An ongoing concern of foreign investors was property rights protection: Government intervention increased in scope as the enforcement agencies and officials in the attorney general’s office attempted to re-examine pri-

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vatization outcomes. The most significant barriers to foreign investment and sustainable economic growth continued to be the weak rule of law, poor infrastructure, legal uncertainty, widespread corruption and crime, capital flight, and brain drain (skilled professionals emigrating from Russia).

See also: BLACK MARKET; FOREIGN DEBT; PUTIN, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH; RUSSIAN FEDERATION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure. Boston, MA: Addison Wesley. Gustafson, Thane. (1999). Capitalism Russian-style. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. PAUL R. GREGORY

ECONOMY, TSARIST The economy of the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century was a complicated hybrid of traditional peasant agriculture and modern industry. The empire’s rapidly growing population (126 million in 1897, nearly 170 million by 1914) was overwhelmingly rural. Only about 15 percent of the population lived in towns, and fewer than 10 percent worked in industry. Agriculture, the largest sector of the economy, provided the livelihood for 80 percent of the population and was dominated by peasants, whose traditional household economies were extremely inefficient compared to agriculture in Western Europe or the United States. But small islands of modern industrial capitalism, brought into being by state policy, coexisted with the primitive rural economy. Spurts of rapid industrialization in the 1890s and in the years before World War I created high rates of economic growth and increased national wealth but also set in motion destabilizing social changes. Despite its islands of modernity, the Russian Empire lagged far behind advanced capitalist countries like Great Britain and Germany, and was unable to bear the economic strains of World War I.

communes. In most places the commune continued to control the amount of land allotted to each household. Land allotments were divided into scattered strips and subject to periodic redistribution based on the number of workers in each household; and it was very difficult for individual peasants to leave the commune entirely and move into another area of the economy, although increasing numbers worked as seasonal labor outside their villages (otkhodniki). Rapid population growth only worsened the situation, for as the number of peasants increased, the size of land allotments diminished, creating a sense of land hunger. Most peasants lived as their ancestors had, at or near the margin of subsistence. Agricultural productivity was constrained by the peasantry’s lack of capital and knowledge or inclination to use modern technology and equipment; most still sowed, harvested, and threshed by hand, and half used a primitive wooden plow. In 1901 a third of peasant households did not have a horse. Poverty was widespread in the countryside. Items such as meat and vegetable oil were rarely seen on the table of a typical peasant household. After the 1905 revolution the government of Peter Stolypin (minister of the interior, later premier) enacted a series of laws designed to reform agriculture by decreasing the power of the village communes: Individual peasant heads of households were permitted to withdraw from the commune and claim private ownership of their allotment land; compulsory repartitioning of the land was abolished and peasants could petition for consolidation of their scattered strips of land into a single holding. However, bureaucratic processes moved slowly. When World War I began, only about onequarter of the peasants had secured individual ownership of their allotment land and only 10 percent had consolidated their strips. While these changes allowed some peasants (the so-called kulaks) to adopt modern practices and become prosperous, Russian agriculture remained backward and underemployment in the countryside remained the rule. In increasing numbers peasants took out passports for seasonal work, many performing unskilled jobs in industry.

The country’s agricultural backwardness was rooted in the economic and cultural consequences of serfdom, and it was reinforced by the government’s conservative policies before the Revolution of 1905. The Emancipation Act of 1861, while nominally freeing the peasantry from bondage, sought to limit change by shoring up the village

Industrialization accelerated in the 1890s, pushed forward by extensive state intervention under the guidance of Finance Minister Sergei Witte. He used subsidies and direct investment to stimulate expansion of heavy industry, imposed high taxes and tariffs, and put Russia on the gold standard in order to win large-scale foreign investment.

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Although the process slowed from 1900 through the 1905 revolution, it soon picked up again and was very strong from 1910 to the outbreak of the war. The rate of growth in the 1890s is estimated to have been an impressive 8 percent a year. While the growth rate after 1910 was slightly lower (about 6%), the process of economic development was broader and the government’s role diminished.

worker. In 1913 horsepower per industrial worker in Russia was about 60 percent of that per worker in England and one-third the level per an American worker. In addition, many industrial workers were still connected to their villages and spent part of their time farming. Because of these factors the costs of production were considerably higher in Russian industry than in Western Europe.

Railroad construction, so critical to economic development, increased greatly toward the end of the nineteenth century with the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad and then rose another 20 percent from 1903 to 1914. Although the number of miles of track per square mile and per capita was the lowest in Europe, the railroad-building boom stimulated great expansion in the related industries of iron and steel, coal, and machine building.

Russian workers faced wretched working conditions and long hours with little social protection. Wages were so low that virtually the entire income of a household went to pay for basic necessities. Living space was meager and miserable, and there were few if any educational opportunities. In the face of these circumstances, some turned to selfhelp, and the cooperative movement made rapid advances. Many workers began to organize despite the restrictions on trade unions even after the Revolution of 1905. The labor movement renewed its efforts in the years before the war, combining political and economic demands. From 1912 strikes rose dramatically until in the first half of 1914 almost 1.5 million workers went on strike.

Industrial production came to be concentrated in large plants constructed during the period of rapid industrialization. In 1914, 56 percent of the employees in manufacturing worked in enterprises that employed five hundred or more workers, and 40 percent in plants employing one thousand or more workers. Such large-scale production frequently incorporated the most up-to-date technology. In a number of key industries production was concentrated in a few large oligopolies. Starting in the later 1890s foreign investment became an important factor in the economy. In 1914 it amounted to one-third of total capital investment in Russian industry, most of it in mining, metallurgy, banking, and textiles. France, England, and Germany were the primary sources of foreign capital. Foreign trade policy was dominated by protectionism. Tariffs just before the war averaged an astonishing 30 to 38 percent of the aggregate value of imports, two to six times higher than in the world’s most developed economies. Predictably, this led to higher prices. Russia was highly dependent on Western imports of manufactured goods, largely from Germany. Raw materials, such as cotton, wool, silk, and nonferrous metals, comprised about 50 percent of all imports. Exports were dominated by grains and other foodstuffs (55% of the total). Russia was the world’s largest grain exporter, supplying Western Europe with about one-third of its wheat imports and about 50 percent of its other grains.

The tsarist economy collapsed under the strain of World War I, inhibited by political as well as economic limitations from meeting the demands of total economic mobilization and undermined by bad fiscal policy that led to destructive inflation. But part of the collapse must be traced to prewar roots. Chief among these was the still unresolved legacy of the old serf system: an agricultural system that was inefficient and inflexible, lacking in capital and technology, heavily taxed, and, as a result, unable to provide a reasonable standard of living for a rapidly growing population. Of near equal importance were the consequences of the rapid industrialization in the two decades before the war. Industrialization created the possibility of escaping the limits of the agricultural system, but the way it was carried out imposed most of the costs on the common people and uprooted peasants from the old society before the institutions and policies of a new society had been created.

See also:

AGRICULTURE; GRAIN TRADE; KULAKS; INDUS-

TRIALIZATION, RAPID; PEASANTRY; STOLYPIN, PETER ARKADIEVICH;

TRADE

UNIONS;

WITTE,

SERGEI

YULIEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The productivity of labor was extremely low because of the deficient capital endowment per


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Dobb, Maurice H. (1948). Soviet Economic Development since 1917. New York: International Publishers.

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Gerschenkron, Alexander. (1962). Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gregory, Paul R. (1994). Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First FiveYear Plan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mosse, Werner E. (1996). An Economic History of Russia, 1856–1914. London: Tauris. CAROL GAYLE WILLIAM MOSKOFF

EDINONACHALIE The one-person management principle used in the Soviet economy to assign responsibility for the operation and performance of economic units, from industrial enterprises and R&D institutes to ministries and state committees. Under edinonachalie, the head (rukovoditel or edinonachalnik) of each administrative unit issued all directives and took full responsibility for the results the organization achieved. Edinonachalie was a key feature of the Soviet management system from the beginning of central planning in the early 1930s. It did not literally mean, however, that one person made every decision. In industrial ministries, major manufacturing plants, and other large organizations, deputies or other subordinates who specialized in one or another sphere of operations were authorized to make decisions in their designated areas of expertise on behalf of the head of the organization. Moreover, although fully responsible for the organization’s performance, the edinonachalnik was obliged to work with a consultative group of deputies, department heads, workers, and other technical personnel. This group could make decisions and give advice, but their decisions could only be implemented by the edinonachalnik, who, in both principle and practice, was free to ignore their advice. Edinonachalie made enterprise managers responsible for the collective of workers and the outcome of the production process because it gave them the authority to direct the capital, material, and labor resources of the firm within the constraints of the targets and norms in the annual enterprise plan (techpromfinplan). Since the plan was law in the Soviet economy, this identified the manager as the person to punish if the plan was not fulfilled.

the administrative unit was based upon a strict hierarchical order. Subordinates to the edinonachalnik could not deal directly with higher authorities, although they could report to higher authorities that their superior was violating laws or rules.

See also:

ENTERPRISE, SOVIET; TECHPROMFINPLAN

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kuromiya, Hiroaki. (1984). “Edinonchalie and the Soviet Industrial Manager, 1928–1937.” Soviet Studies 36:185–204. Kushnirsky, Fyodor. (1982). Soviet Economic Planning, 1965–1980. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Malle, Silvana. (1985). The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–1921. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. SUSAN J. LINZ

EDUCATION Education and literacy were highly politicized issues in both Imperial and Soviet Russia, tied closely to issues of modernization and the social order. The development of an industrialized society and modern state bureaucracy required large numbers of literate and educated citizens. During the Imperial period, state officials faced what one scholar has dubbed “the dilemma of education”: how to utilize education without undermining Russia’s autocratic government. During the early Soviet period, on the other hand, the Bolsheviks attempted to use the education system as a tool of social engineering, as they attempted to invert the old social hierarchy. In both cases, the questions of which citizens should be educated and what type of education they should receive were as important as the actual material they were to be taught. THE EDUCATION SYSTEM IN IMPERIAL RUSSIA, 1700–1917

The concentration of decision-making authority and responsibility in the hands of the head of

Before 1700, Russia had no secular educational system. Literacy, defined here as the ability to comprehend unfamiliar texts, was generally taught in the home. Although there was a considerable spike upwards in literacy in seventeenth-century Muscovy, the overall percentage of literate Russians remained low. In 1700 no more than 13 percent of the urban male population could read—for male peasants, the rate was between 2 and 4 percent.

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The Communist Party brought free education and mass literacy to the Soviet people. © DAVID TURNLEY/CORBIS

This was well below Western European literacy rates, which exceeded 50 percent among urban men. The hostility of many Orthodox officials towards education and the absence of a substantial urban class of burghers and artisans were two factors that contributed to Russia’s comparatively low literacy rates. Like many aspects of Russian society, the educational system was introduced and developed by the state. Peter I opened the first secular schools— institutes for training specialists, such as navigators and doctors—as part of his plan to turn Russia into a modern state. A number of important institutions, such as Moscow University (1755), were created in the next decades, but it was not until 1786 that a ruler (Catherine II) attempted to create a regular system of primary and secondary schools. This was only the first of many such plans initiated by successive tsars. The frequent reorganization of the school system was disruptive, and since new types of schools were opened in addition


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to, rather than in place of, existing schools, the situation became quite chaotic over time. This confusion was compounded by the fact that many schools lay outside the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, which was created in 1802. Other state ministries regularly opened their own schools, ranging from technical institutes to primary schools, and the Holy Synod sponsored extensive networks of parochial schools. As a result, there were sixty-seven different types of primary schools in Russia in 1914. Most schools fell into one of three categories: primary, secondary, or higher education. Primary schools were intended to provide students with basic literacy, numeracy, and a smattering of general knowledge. As late as 1911, less than 20 percent of primary school students went on to further study. Many secondary schools were also terminal, often with a vocational emphasis. Other secondary schools, such as gymnasia, prepared students for higher education. Higher education encompassed a variety of institutions, including universities and professional institutes.

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From Peter I onward, the Russian state devoted a disproportionate amount of its educational spending on higher education. This was partly due to the pressing need for specialists, and partly because these institutions catered to social and economic elites. Ambitious plans notwithstanding, Russia developed a top-heavy educational system, which produced a relatively small number of welleducated individuals, but which failed to offer any educational opportunities to most Russians until the end of the nineteenth century. The number of primary school students in Russia grew from 450,000 in 1856 to 1 million in 1878 to 6.6 million in 1911; even then, there were still not enough spaces for all who wanted to enroll. Access to education was, as a rule, better in cities and large towns than in rural areas, though it was still limited in even the largest cities until the 1870s. In 1911, 67 percent of urban youth aged eight to eleven were enrolled in primary schools (75% of boys, 59% of girls). In the countryside, the school system developed more slowly. Many rural schools opened before the 1870s were short-lived, and it was only in the 1890s that a concerted effort began to establish an extensive network of permanent rural schools. In 1911, 41 percent of rural children aged eight to eleven were enrolled in primary school (58% of boys, 24% of girls). Peasants in different areas had different attitudes about education, and there has been some dispute about how useful literacy was considered by rural populations. The better access to education in urban areas is reflected in literacy statistics. The literacy rate among the urban population (over age nine) was roughly 21 percent in 1797 (29% of men, 12% of women); 40 percent in 1847 (50% of men, 28% of women); 58 percent in 1897; and 70 percent in 1917 (80% of men, 61% of women). In rural areas, the literacy rate was 6 percent in 1797 (6% of men, 5% of women); 12 percent in 1847 (16% of men, 9% of women); 26 percent in 1897; and 38 percent in 1917 (53% of men, 23% of women).

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ASPECTS OF IMPERIAL EDUCATION POLICIES

tional policy’s impact on Russia’s political system and social hierarchy, both of which they wanted to preserve. This was evident in the higher educational system, which was shaped to a degree by the tsars’ desire to maintain social order and the nobility’s support. Special institutes, such as the Corp of Cadets (1731), were created exclusively for the sons of hereditary nobles. While non-nobles were not barred from higher education (with a few exceptions), the very nature of the Russian school system made it difficult for such students to qualify for advanced institutions. Escalating student fees at gymnasia and universities in the nineteenth century provided an additional barrier. Just as the nobility’s position had to be defended, the lower classes had to be protected from “too much knowledge.” Nicholas I and his Education Minister Sergei Uvarov (1831–1849) believed that excessive education would only create dissatisfaction among the peasantry. Accordingly, they placed strict limits on the curriculum and duration of rural primary schools. But they also increased the number of such schools, since they understood that basic literacy was of social and economic value. Uvarov, like many other Russian pedagogues, saw education as an opportunity to instill in young Russians loyalty to the tsar and proper moral values. A centrally controlled school inspectorate was created to ensure that teachers were imparting the right values to their students. All textbooks also required state approval. Schools were used in other ways to maintain or modify the social order. A separate school system was created for Russia’s Jews, and strict limits were placed on the number of Jewish students admitted into higher educational institutions. In the annexed Western provinces, schools were used as a weapon in the aggressive Russification campaign of the 1890s. And while most primary and secondary schools were coeducational, higher educational institutions were not. Separate women’s institutes were only opened in 1876, and Russia’s first coed university, the private Shaniavsky University, was established in 1908.

While military and economic needs forced the Russian state to create an educational system, social and political considerations also played a role in shaping it. Tsars and their advisers carefully considered who should be educated, how long they should study, and what they should be taught. Above all, they were concerned about the educa-

In order to prevent the circulation of subversive ideas, the state placed strict limits on private and philanthropic educational endeavors. In the 1830s all private educational institutions and tutors were placed under state supervision. The activities of volunteer movements trying to provide adult education, such as the Sunday School Move-

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Moscow State University—the Soviet Harvard—rises above the Lenin Hills. © PAUL ALMASY/CORBIS

ment (1859–1862), were severely constrained, though zemstvos (local governmental bodies) were later allowed more leeway in this area. Alarm over the proliferation of unofficial (and illegal) peasant schools helped motivate the state’s expansion of its rural education system in the 1890s. Ironically, it was the educated elite the state had created that ultimately challenged the tsar’s authority. Discontent became widespread in the 1840s,


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as large segments of educated society came to see state policies as retrograde and harmful to the peasantry. Frustrated by the conservative bureaucracy’s disregard of their ideas, many educated Russians began to question the legitimacy of the autocratic form of government, with a small number of them becoming revolutionaries. This was one reason why the tsarist government found itself with little support among educated Russians in February 1917.

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Even as educated society was becoming estranged from the autocracy, its members were growing distant from the masses they wished to help. As educated Russians adopted Western values and ideas, a vast cultural and social divide developed between them and the mostly uneducated peasantry, which largely retained traditional beliefs and culture. The growth of the education system in the last decades before 1917 was starting to bridge this gap, but the inability of these groups to understand one another contributed to the violence and chaos of 1917. Scholars debate whether a more rapid introduction of mass education into late Imperial Russia would have stabilized or further destabilized the existing order.

ety did not support the communists. Bolshevik leaders responded by creating a “red intelligentsia” to replace them. The children of “socially alien” groups were largely excluded from higher education, their places taken by young, poorly educated workers and peasants, known as vydvizhentsy. The number of technical institutes was expanded to accommodate the rapid growth of industry. A network of communist higher educational institutions was also opened. The influx of vydvizhentsy into higher education, and the persecution of “socially alien” teachers and students at all levels, climaxed during the cultural revolution (1928–1932). It has been argued that the vydvizhentsy, many of whom rose to prominent positions, provided an important base of support for Stalin’s regime.

EDUCATION IN THE SOVIET UNION

After 1932, experimental approaches were abandoned in favor of more practical teaching methods. Primary schools were returned to a more traditional curriculum, class-based preferences ended, and the separate communist educational system eliminated. The minimum duration of schooling was raised from four to seven years. Schools were now open to all students, though children whose parents were arrested faced serious discrimination until Stalin’s death in 1953. Most of Narkompros’ functions were transferred to the new Ministry of Education in 1946.

While the Bolsheviks shared their tsarist predecessors’ belief in education’s potential social and political power, they had a different agenda: swift industrialization, social change, and the dissemination of socialist values. Although they lacked an educational policy upon seizing power, the Bolsheviks pledged to make education accessible to all, coeducational at all levels, and to achieve full literacy. The Russian Republic’s educational system was placed under the control of the Russian Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narodnyi kommisariat prosveshcheniia, or Narkompros), a republic-level institution created in October 1917. Its first leader was Anatoly Lunacharsky (r. 1917–1929). Like all Soviet institutions, Narkompros was controlled by the Communist Party. Before 1920, however, it had little authority. Many instructors had supported the Provisional Government’s moderate reform program, and they refused to cooperate with the Bolsheviks. During the civil war (1918–1921), education was under the control of local authorities. After 1920, Narkompros’ officials tried to implement the ideas of progressive pedagogues, such as John Dewey, in primary and secondary schools. Their attempts were largely unsuccessful, hampered by a lack of funds and teacher opposition. Narkompros also faced challenges from the economic commissariats, which eventually took control of vocational education. This was the first round in a decades-long debate over the roles of general and vocational education. Teachers were frequently harassed by members of the Leninist Youth League (Komsomol).

By the late 1950s, all children had access to a free education. Social mobility was possible on the basis of merit, although inequalities still existed. Children of the emerging Soviet elites often had access to superior secondary schools, which prepared them for higher education. Members of some nonRussian ethnic minorities had spaces reserved for them at prestigious higher educational institutions, as part of the Soviet Union’s unique affirmative action program. After the 1950s, however, unofficial quotas again limited Jewish students’ access to higher education. There were also numerous adult education programs in the Soviet Union. These ranged from utopian attempts to train artists during the civil war to ongoing literacy campaigns. Literacy rates continued their steady rise after 1917 (88% in 1939, and 98% in 1959). Adult education programs were run by many groups, including the trade unions and the Red Army.

Bolshevik higher educational policies were even more ambitious. Most members of educated soci-

Soviet schools were expected to teach students loyalty to the state and instill them with socialist values; teachers who did otherwise were liable to arrest or dismissal. Political material was a con-

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stant part of Soviet curricula. In some periods, it was restricted mainly to the social sciences and obligatory study of Marxism-Leninism. During Stalin’s rule, however, almost every subject was politicized. Rote memorization was common and student creativity discouraged.

Matthews, Mervyn. (1982). Education in the Soviet Union: Policies and Education Since Stalin. London: Allen & Unwin.

Despite its flaws, the Soviet educational system achieved some impressive successes. The heavily subsidized system produced millions of welltrained professionals and scientists in its last decades. After 1984 the state began to loosen its grip on education, allowing teachers some flexibility. These tentative steps were quickly overtaken by events, however. Since 1991 the Russian school system has faced serious funding problems and declining facilities. Control of education has been transferred to regional authorities.

Mironov, Boris N. (1991). “The Development of Literacy in Russia and the USSR from the Tenth to the Twentieth Centuries.” History of Education Quarterly 31(2): 229–251.

See also:

ACADEMY OF ARTS; ACADEMY OF SCIENCE;

McClelland, James C. (1979). Autocrats and Academics: Education, Culture, and Society in Tsarist Russia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sinel, Allen. (1973). The Classroom and the Chancellery: State Educational Reform in Russia under Count Dmitry Tolstoi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Webber, Stephen L. (2000). School, Reform, and Society in the New Russia. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Whittaker, Cynthia H. (1984). The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. BRIAN KASSOF

HIGHER PARTY SCHOOL; LANGUAGE LAWS; LUNARCHSKY, ANATOLY VASILIEVICH; NATIONAL LIBRARY OF RUSSIA; RUSSIAN STATE LIBRARY

EHRENBURG, ILYA GRIGOROVICH BIBLIOGRAPHY

Black, J. L. (1979). Citizens for the Fatherland: Education, Educators, and Pedagogical Ideals in Eighteenth Century Russia. Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly. Brooks, Jeffrey. (1985). When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Culture, 1861–1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. David-Fox, Michael. (1997). Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning Among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Dunstan, John, ed. (1992). Soviet Education under Perestroika. London: Routledge. Eklof, Ben. (1986). Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1979). Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hans, Nicholas. (1964). History of Russian Educational Policy, 1701–1917. New York: Russell & Russell, Inc. Holmes, Larry E. (1991). The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse: Reforming Education in Soviet Russia, 1917–1931. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kassow, Samuel D. (1989). Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marker, Gary. (1990). “Literacy and Literacy Texts in Muscovy: A Reconsideration.” Slavic Review 49(1): 74–84.


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(1891–1967), poet, journalist, novelist. Ilya Grigorovich Ehrenburg was an enigma. Essentially Western in taste, he was at times the spokesman for the Soviet Union, the great antiWestern power of his age. He involved himself with Bolsheviks beginning in 1907, writing pamphlets and doing some organizational work, and then, after his arrest, fled to Paris, where he would spend most of the next thirty years. In the introduction to his first major work, and probably his life’s best work, the satirical novel Julio Jurentino (1922), his good friend Nikolai Bukharin described Ehrenburg’s liminal existence, saying that he was not a Bolshevik, but “a man of broad vision, with a deep insight into the Western European way of life, a sharp eye, and an acid tongue” (Goldberg, 1984, p. 5). These characteristics probably kept him alive during the Josef Stalin years, along with his service to the USSR as a war correspondent and spokesman in the anticosmopolitan campaign. Arguably, his most important service to the USSR came in the period after Stalin’s death, when his novel The Thaw (1956) deviated from the norms of Socialist Realism. His activities in Writer’s Union politics consistently pushed a kind of socialist literature (and life) “with a human face,” and his memoirs, printed serially during the early 1960s, were culled by thaw–generation youth for inspiration. When Stalin was alive, Ehrenburg may well

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have proven a coward. After his death, he proved much more courageous than most.

See also:

BUKHARIN, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH; JEWS; WORLD WAR II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Goldberg, Anatol. (1984). Ilya Ehrenburg: Writing, Politics, and the Art of Survival. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Johnson, Priscilla. (1965). Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–1964. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. JOHN PATRICK FARRELL

EISENSTEIN, SERGEI MIKHAILOVICH (1898–1948), film director, film theorist, teacher, arts administrator, and producer. Sergei Eisenstein, born in Riga, was the most accomplished of Russia’s first generation of Soviet filmmakers. Eisenstein both benefited from the communist system of state patronage and suffered

the frustrations and dangers all artists faced in functioning under state control. The October Revolution and the civil war allowed Eisenstein to embark on a career in theater and film. His first moving picture was Glumov’s Diary, a short piece for a theatrical adaptation of an Alexander Ostrovsky comedy. Between 1924 and 1929 he made four feature-length films on revolutionary themes and with revolutionary cinematic techniques: The Strike (1924), The Battleship Potemkin (1926), October (1928), and The General Line (also known as The Old and the New, 1929). In Potemkin Eisenstein developed the rapid editing and dynamic shot composition known as montage. Potemkin made Eisenstein world-famous, but at the same time he became embroiled in polemics with others in the Soviet film community over the purpose of cinema in “the building of socialism.” Eisenstein believed that film should educate rather than just entertain, but he also believed that avant-garde methods could be educational in socialist society. This support for avant-garde experimentation would be used against him during the far more dangerous cultural politics of the 1930s. His last two films of the 1920s, The General Line and October, were influenced by the increasing interference of powerful political leaders. All of Eisenstein’s Russian films were state commissions, but Eisenstein never joined the Communist Party, and he continued to experiment even as he began to accommodate himself to political reality. From 1929 to 1932 Eisenstein traveled abroad and had a stint in Hollywood. None of his three projects for Paramount Pictures, however, was put into production. The wealthy socialist writer Upton Sinclair rescued him from the impasse by offering to fund a film about Mexico, Qué Viva México! Eisenstein thrived in Mexico, but Sinclair became disgruntled when filming ran months over schedule and rumors of sexual escapades reached him. When Stalin threatened to banish Eisenstein permanently if he did not return to the Soviet Union, Sinclair seized the opportunity to pull the plug on Qué Viva México! Eisenstein never recovered the year’s worth of footage and he was haunted by the loss for the rest of his life.

Acclaimed film director Sergei Eisenstein. ARCHIVE PHOTOS, INC. REPRODUCED

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The Moscow that Eisenstein found on his return in May 1932 was more constricted and impoverished than the city he had left. His polemics of the 1920s were not forgotten, and Eisenstein was criticized by party hacks and old friends alike for being out of step and a formalist, which is to say he cared more about experiments with cinematic


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form than with making films “accessible to the masses.” Political attacks on the director culminated in 1937, at the height of the Great Terror, as Eisenstein was nearing completion of Bezhin Meadow, his first film since returning from abroad. Boris Shumyatsky, chief of the Soviet film industry, had the production halted; he proceeded to denounce Eisenstein to the Central Committee and then directly to Stalin, inviting a death sentence on the filmmaker. After barely surviving this attack, and after ten years of blocked film projects, Eisenstein wrote the required self-criticism and was given the opportunity to make a historical film. Alexander Nevsky, a medieval military encounter between Russians and Germans, would become his most popular film; however, Eisenstein was ashamed of it, and except for its “battle on the ice,” it is generally considered to be his least interesting in technical and intellectual terms. The success of Alexander Nevsky catapulted him to the highest of inner circles; he won both the Order of Lenin and, in 1941, the newly created Stalin Prize. Then, in a restructuring of the film industry, Eisenstein was made Artistic Director of Mosfilm, a prestigious and powerful position. In 1941, just months before World War II began in Russia, Eisenstein accepted a state commission to make a film about the sixteenth-century tsar, Ivan the Terrible. He worked on Ivan the Terrible for the next six years, eventually completing only two parts of the planned trilogy. Eisenstein’s masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible is a complex film containing a number of coordinated and conflicting narratives and networks of imagery that portray Ivan as a great leader, historically destined to found the Russian state but personally doomed by the murderous means he had used. Part I (1945) received a Stalin Prize, Part II (1946, released 1958) did not please Stalin and was banned. Eisenstein was one of few practicing film directors to develop an important body of theoretical writing about cinema. In the 1920s he wrote about the psychological effect of montage on the viewer; the technique was intended to both startle the viewer into an awareness of the constructed nature of the work and to shape the viewing experience. During the 1930s, when he was barred from filmmaking, Eisenstein wrote and taught. A gifted teacher, he relied on his wide reading and sense of humor to draw students into the creative process. Work on Ivan the Terrible in the 1940s stimulated his most productive period of writing. He produced several volumes of theoretical works in Method and


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Nonindifferent Nature, as well as a large volume of memoirs. This work developed his earlier concept of montage by broadening its scope to include sound and color as well as imagery within the shot. By nature Eisenstein was a private and cautious man. He could be charming and charismatic as well as serious and demanding, but these were public masks; he guarded his private life. It seems clear that he had sexual relationships with both men and women but also that these affairs were rare and short-lived; he consulted with psychoanalysts on several occasions about his bisexuality in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1934, just after a law was passed making male homosexuality illegal in the Soviet Union, Eisenstein married his good friend and assistant, Pera Atasheva. It is fair to say that Eisenstein’s sexuality was a source of some dissatisfaction for him and that his private life in general brought him considerable pain. He suffered from periodic bouts of serious depression and from the 1930s onward his health was also threatened by heart disease and influenza. Eisenstein suffered a serious heart attack just hours after finishing Part II of Ivan the Terrible. He never recovered the strength to return to film production, but he wrote extensively until the night of February 11, 1948, when he suffered a fatal heart attack.

See also:

CENSORSHIP; MOTION PICTURES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bordwell, David. (1994). The Cinema of Eisenstein. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bulgakowa, Oksana. (2001). Sergei Eisenstein: A Biography. San Francisco: PotemkinPress. Neuberger, Joan. (2003). Ivan the Terrible: The Film Companion. London: I. B. Tauris. Taylor, Richard. (2002). The Battleship Potemkin: The Film Companion. London: I. B. Tauris. Taylor, Richard. (2002). October. London: British Film Institute. JOAN NEUBERGER

ELECTORAL COMMISSION Electoral commissions play a large role in the organization and holding of elections under Russia’s so-called guided democracy. They exist at four fundamental levels: precincts (approximately 95,000),

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territorial (TIK, 2,700), regional (RIK), and central (TsIK). There are also municipal commissions in some of the large cities, and there are district commissions for elections to the State Duma (around 190 to 225 districts according to Duma elections, minus those falling on a region’s borders). The central, regional, and territorial commissions are permanent bodies with four-year terms. The district and precinct commissions are organized one to three months before elections, and curtail their activity ten days after the publication of results. The electoral commissions have from three to fifteen voting members, at least half of whom are appointed based on nominations by electoral associations with fractions in the Duma and by the regional legislatures. Half of the members of the regional electoral commissions are appointed by the regional executive, the other half by the legislative assembly. This means that for all practical matters the electoral commissions are under the control of the executive power. Parties, blocs, and candidates participating in elections may appoint one member of the electoral commission with consultative rights in the commission at their level and the levels below them. The precinct and territorial commissions are organized by the regional commissions with the participation of local government. A new form of central electoral commission arose in 1993, when it was necessary to hold parliamentary elections and vote on a constitution in a short time. Officials considered the election deadlines unrealistic. At that time the president named all members of the commission and its chair. The central electoral commission has fifteen members and is organized on an equal footing by the Duma, the Federation Council, and the president. The central commission is essentially a Soviet institution, with the actual power, including control over the numerous apparatuses, concentrated in the hands of the chair. Between 2001 and 2003, an electoral vertical was established whereby the central commission can directly influence the lower-level commissions. The central commission names at least two members of the regional commission and nominates candidates for its head. Moreover, in the future the regional electoral commissions may be disbanded in favor of central commission representation (this mechanism was tested in 2003 with the Krasnoyarsk Krai electoral commission). The role of the central commission, and also of the Kremlin, in regional and local elections has grown significantly. The central commission’s authority to interpret am-

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biguous legal clauses enables it to punish and pardon candidates, parties, electoral associations, and mass media organizations. As a bureaucratic structure, the central electoral commission has turned into a highly influential election ministry with an enormous budget and powerful leverage in relation to other federal and regional power structures and the entire political life of the country.

See also:

DUMA; PRESIDENCY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergi. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. McFaul, Michael; Petrov, Nikolai; and Ryabov, Andrei, eds. (1999). Primer on Russia’s 1999 Duma Elections. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press. NIKOLAI PETROV

ELECTRICITY GRID In 1920, Lenin famously said, “Communism equals Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.” He created the State Commission for Electrification of Russia (GOELRO) to achieve this, and the expansion of electricity generation and transmission became a core element in Soviet modernization. Total output rose from 8.4 billion kilowatt hours in 1930, to 49 billion in 1940 and 290 billion in 1960. After World War II the Soviet Union became the second largest electricity generator in the world, with the United States occupying first place. The soviets built the world’s largest hydroelectric plant, in Krasnoyarsk in 1954, and the world’s first nuclear power reactor, in Obninsk. Electrification had reached 80 percent of all villages by the 1960s, and half of the rail track was electrified. Power stations also provided steam heating for neighboring districts, accounting for onethird of the nation’s heating. This may have been efficient from the power-generation point of view, but there was no effort to meter customers or


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conserve energy. By 1960 the Soviet Union had 167,000 kilometers of high transmission lines (35 kilovolts and higher). This grew to 600,000 kilometers by 1975. Initially, there were ten regional grids, which by the 1970s were gradually combined into a unified national grid that handled 75 percent of total electricity output. In 1976 the Soviet grid was connected to that of East Europe (the members of Comecon). The Soviet power supply continued to expand steadily, even as economic growth slowed. Output increased from 741 billion kilowatt hours in 1970 to 1,728 billion in 1990, with the USSR accounting for 17 percent of global electricity output. Still, capacity failed to keep pace with the gargantuan appetites of Soviet industry, and regional coverage was uneven, since most of the fossil fuels were located in the north and east, whereas the major population centers and industry were in the west. Twenty percent of the energy was consumed in transporting the coal, gas, and fuel-oil to thermal power stations located near industrial zones. In the early 1970s, when nuclear plants accounted for just two percent of total electricity output, the government launched an ambitious program to expand nuclear power. This plan was halted for more than a decade by the 1986 Chernobyl accident. In 1990 the Russia Federation generated 1,082 billion kilowatt hours, a figure that had fallen to 835 billion by 2000. Of that total, 15 percent was from nuclear plants and 18 percent from hydro stations, the rest was from thermal plants using half coal and half natural gas for fuel. In 1992 the electricity system was turned into a joint stock company, the Unified Energy Systems of Russia (RAO EES). Blocks of shares in RAO EES were sold to its workers and the public for vouchers in 1994, and subsequently were sold to domestic and foreign investors, but the government held onto a controlling 53 percent stake in EES. Some regional producers were separated from EES, but the latter still accounted for 73 percent of Russian generating capacity and 85 percent of electricity distribution in 2000. Electricity prices were held down by the government in order to subsidize industrial and domestic consumers. This meant most of the regional energy companies that made up EES ran at a loss, and could not invest in new capacity or energy conservation. By 1999, the situation was critical: EES was losing $1 billion on annual revenues of $7 billion. Former privatization chief Anatoly Chubais was appointed head of EES, and he proposed pri-


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vatizing some of EES’s more lucrative regional producers to the highest bidder. The remaining operations would be restructured into five to seven generation companies, which would be spun off as independent companies. A wholesale market in electricity would be introduced, and retail prices would be allowed to rise by 100 percent by 2005. The grid and dispatcher service would be returned to state ownership. Amid objections from consumers, who objected to higher prices, and from foreign investors in EES, who feared their shares would be diluted, the plan was adopted in 2002.

See also:

CHERNOBYL; CHUBAIS, ANATOLY BORISOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ebel, Robert. (1994). Energy Choices in Russia. Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies. EES web site: . PETER RUTLAND

ELIZABETH (1709–1762), empress of Russia, 1741–1762, one of the “Russian matriarchate” or “Amazon autocratrixes,” that is, women rulers from Catherine I through Catherine II, 1725–1796. Daughter of Peter I and Catherine I, grand princess and crown princess from 1709 to 1741, Elizabeth (Elizaveta Petrovna) was the second of ten offspring to reach maturity. She was born in the Moscow suburb of Kolomenskoye on December 29, 1709, the same day a Moscow parade celebrated the Poltava victory. Elizabeth grew up carefree with her sister Anna (1708–1728). Doted on by both parents, the girls received training in European languages, social skills, and Russian traditions of singing, religious instruction, and dancing. Anna married Duke Karl Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp in 1727 and died in Holstein giving birth to Karl Peter Ulrich (the future Peter III). Elizabeth never married officially or traveled abroad, her illegitimate birth obstructing royal matches. Because she wrote little and left no diary, her inner thoughts are not well-known. Hints of a political role came after her mother’s short reign when Elizabeth was named to the joint regency for young Peter II, whose favor she briefly enjoyed. But when he died childless in 1730 she

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regencies, the last headed by his mother, Anna Leopoldovna (1718–1746). This Anna represented the Miloslavsky/Brunswick branch, whereas Elizabeth personified the Naryshkin/Petrine branch. Elizabeth naturally worried the inept regency regime, which she led her partisans in the guards to overthrow on December 5–6, 1741, with aid from the French and Swedish ambassadors (Sweden had declared war on Russia in July 1741 ostensibly in support of Elizabeth). The bloodless coup was deftly accomplished, the regent and her family arrested and banished, and Elizabeth’s claims explicated on the basis of legitimacy and blood kinship. Though Elizabeth’s accession unleashed public condemnation of both Annas as agents of foreign domination, it also reaffirmed the primacy of Petrine traditions and conquests, promising to restore Petrine glory and to counter Swedish invasion, which brought Russian gains in Finland by the Peace of Åbo in August 1743.

Portrait of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna by Pierre Duflos. © STAPLETON COLLECTION/CORBIS

was overlooked in the surprise selection of Anna Ivanovna. Under Anna she was kept under surveillance, her yearly allowance cut to 30,000 rubles, and only Biron’s influence prevented commitment to a convent. At Aleksandrovka near Moscow she indulged in amorous relationships with Alexander Buturlin, Alexei Shubin, and the Ukrainian chorister Alexei Razumovsky. During Elizabeth’s reign male favoritism flourished; some of her preferred men assumed broad cultural and artistic functions—for instance, Ivan Shuvalov (1717–1797), a well-read Francophile who cofounded Moscow University and the Imperial Russian Academy of Fine Arts in the 1750s.

Elizabeth was crowned in Moscow in spring 1742 amid huge celebrations spanning several months; she demonstratively crowned herself. With Petrine, classical feminine, and “restorationist” rhetoric, Elizabeth’s regime resembled Anna Ivanovna’s in that it pursued an active foreign policy, witnessed complicated court rivalries and further attempts to resolve the succession issue, and made the imperial court a center of European cultural activities. In 1742 the empress, lacking offspring, brought her nephew from Holstein to be converted to Orthodoxy, renamed, and designated crown prince Peter Fyodorovich. In 1744 she found him a German bride, Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, the future Catherine II. The teenage consorts married in August 1745, and hopes for a male heir came true only in 1754. Elizabeth took charge of Grand Prince Pavel Petrovich. Nevertheless, the “Young Court” rivaled Elizabeth’s in competition over dynastic and succession concerns.

Anna Ivanovna was succeeded in October 1740 by infant Ivan VI of the Brunswick branch of Romanovs who reigned under several fragile

While retaining ultimate authority, Elizabeth restored the primacy of the Senate in policymaking, exercised a consultative style of administration, and assembled a government comprising veteran statesmen, such as cosmopolitan Chancellor Alexei Bestuzhev-Ryumin and newly elevated aristocrats like the brothers Petr and Alexander Shuvalov (and their younger cousin Ivan Shuvalov), Mikhail and Roman Vorontsov, Alexei and Kirill Razumovsky, and court surgeon Armand Lestocq. Her reign generally avoided political repression, but she took revenge on the Lopukhin family, descendents of Peter I’s first wife, by hav-

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ing them tortured and exiled in 1743 for loose talk about the Brunswick family and its superior rights. Later she abolished the death penalty in practice. Lestocq and Bestuzhev-Ryumin, who was succeeded as chancellor by Mikhail Vorontsov, fell into disgrace for alleged intrigues, although Catherine II later pardoned both. In cultural policy Elizabeth patronized many, including Mikhail Lomonosov, Alexander Sumarokov, Vasily Tredyakovsky, and the Volkov brothers, all active in literature and the arts. Foreign architects, composers, and literary figures such as Bartolomeo Rastrelli, Francesco Araja, and Jakob von Stählin also enjoyed Elizabeth’s support. Her love of pageantry resulted in Petersburg’s first professional public theater in 1756. Indeed, the empress set a personal example by frequently attending the theater, and her court became famous for elaborate festivities amid luxurious settings, such as Rastrelli’s new Winter Palace and the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo. Elizabeth loved fancy dress and followed European fashion, although she was criticized by Grand Princess Catherine for quixotic transvestite balls and crudely dictating other ladies’style and attire. Other covert critics such as Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov accused Elizabeth of accelerating the “corruption of manners” by pandering to a culture of corrupt excess, an inevitable accusation from disgruntled aristocrats amid the costly ongoing Europeanization of a cosmopolitan high society. The Shuvalov brothers introduced significant innovations in financial policy that fueled economic and fiscal growth and reinstituted recodification of law. Elizabeth followed Petrine precedent in foreign policy, a field she took special interest in, although critics alleged her geographical ignorance and laziness. Without firing a shot, Russia helped conclude the war of the Austrian succession (1740–1748), but during this conflict Elizabeth and Chancellor Bestuzhev-Ryumin became convinced that Prussian aggression threatened Russia’s security. Hence alliance with Austria became the fulcrum of Elizabethan foreign policy, inevitably entangling Russia in the reversal of alliances in 1756 that exploded in the worldwide Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). This complex conflict pitted Russia, Austria, and France against Prussia and Britain, but Russia did not fight longtime trading partner Britain. Russia held its own against Prussia, conquered East Prussia, and even briefly occupied Berlin in 1760. The war was directed by a new institution, the Conference at the Imperial Court, for Elizabeth’s declining health lim-


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ited her personal attention to state affairs. The war dragged on too long, and the belligerents began looking for a way out when Elizabeth’s sudden death on Christmas Day (December 25, 1761) brought her nephew Peter III to power. He was determined to break ranks and to ally with Prussia, despite Elizabeth’s antagonism to King Frederick II. So just as Elizabeth’s reign started with a perversely declared war, so it ended abruptly with Russia’s early withdrawal from a European-wide conflict and Peter III’s declaration of war on longtime ally Denmark. Elizabeth personified Russia’s postPetrine eminence and further emergence as a European power with aspirations for cultural achievement.

See also:

ANNA IVANOVNA; BESTUZHEV-RYUMIN, ALEXEI

PETROVICH; PETER I; SEVEN YEARS’ WAR

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, John T. (1989). Catherine the Great: Life and Legend. New York: Oxford University Press. Anisimov, Evgeny. (1995). Empress Elizabeth: Her Reign and Her Russia, ed. and tr. John T. Alexander. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International. Hughes, Lindsey. (2002). Peter the Great: A Biography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Naumov, Viktor Petrovich. (1996). “Empress Elizabeth I, 1741–1762.” In The Emperors and Empresses of Russia: Rediscovering the Romanovs, ed. and comp. Donald J. Raleigh and A. A. Iskenderov. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Shcherbatov, M. M. (1969). On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, ed. and tr. Anthony Lentin. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wortman, Richard. (1995). Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. JOHN T. ALEXANDER

EMANCIPATION ACT The Emancipation Act was issued by the Russian Emperor Alexander II on March 3, 1861. By this act all peasants, or serfs, were set free from personal dependence on their landlords, acquired civil rights, and were granted participation in social and economic activities as free citizens.

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The importance of emancipation cannot be overestimated. However, emancipation can be understood only by taking into consideration the history of serfdom in Russia. If in early modern Europe different institutions successfully emerged to represent the interests of different classes (e.g., universities, guilds, and corporations) against the state’s absolutist tendencies, in Russia the state won over its competitors and took the form of autocracy. Despite the absolutist state’s takeover in early modern Europe, it never encroached on the individual rights of its subjects to the extent that the Russian autocracy did. Indeed, autocracy presupposed that no right existed until it was granted and thus all subjects were slaves until the tsar decided otherwise. As the process of state centralization proceeded in Russia, external sources of income (for instance, wars and territorial growth) were more or less exhausted by the seventeenth century, and the state switched its attention to its internal resources. Hence the continuous attempts to immobilize peasants and make them easily accessible as taxpayers. The Law Code of 1649 completed the process of immobilization declaring “eternal and hereditary attachment” of peasants to the land. Thus the Russian term for “serf” goes back to this attachment to the land more than to personal dependence on the master. Later in the eighteenth century it became possible to sell serfs without the land. Afterwards the only difference between the serf and the slave was that the serf had a household on the land of his master. At the time of emancipation, serfdom constituted the core of Russian economic and social life. Its abolition undermined the basis of the autocratic state in the eyes of the vast majority of nobles as well as peasants. Those few in favor of the reform were not numerous: landlords running modernized enterprises and hindered by the absence of a free labor force and competition, together with liberal and radical thinkers (often landless). For peasants, the interpretation of emancipation ranged from a call for total anarchy, arbitrary redistribution of land, and revenge on their masters, to disbelief and disregard of the emancipation as impossible.

the nobility and the peasantry based on the “benevolence of the noblemen” and “affectionate submission on the part of the peasants” had become degraded. Under these circumstances, acting as a promoter of the good of all his subjects, Alexander II made an effort to introduce a “new organization of peasant life.” To pay homage to the class of his main supporters, in the document Alexander stresses the devotion and goodwill of his nobility, their readiness “to make sacrifices for the welfare of the country,” and his hope for their future cooperation. In return he promises to help them in the form of loans and transfer of debts. On the other hand, serfs should be warned and reminded of their obligations toward those in power. “Some were concerned about the freedom and unconcerned about obligations” reads the document. The Emperor cites the Bible that “every individual is subject to a higher authority” and concludes that “what legally belongs to nobles cannot be taken from them without adequate compensation,” or punishment will surely follow. The state initiative for emancipation indicates that the state planned to be the first to benefit from it. Though several of Alexander’s predecessors touched upon the question of peasant reform, none of them was in such a desperate situation domestically or internationally as to pursue unprecedented measures and push the reform ahead. The Crimean War (1853–1856) became the point of revelation because Russia faced the threat not only of financial collapse but of losing its position as a great power among European countries. The reform should have become a source of economic and military mobilization and thus kept the state equal among equals in Europe as well as eliminate the remnants of postwar chaos in its social life. However, the emancipation changed the structure of society in a way that demanded its total reconstruction. A series of liberal reforms followed, and the question of whether the Emperor ever planned to go that far remains open for historians.

Thus Alexander II had to strike a balance between contradictory interests of different groups of nobility and the threat of peasant riots. The text of the act makes this balancing visible. The emperor openly acknowledged the inequality among his subjects and said that traditional relations between

The emancipation meant that all peasants became “free rural inhabitants” with full rights. The nobles retained their property rights on land while granting the peasants “perpetual use of their domicile in return of specified obligations,” that is, peasants should work for their landlords as they used to work before. These temporal arrangements would last for two years, during which redemption fees for land would be paid and the peasant

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would become an owner of his plot. In general the Emancipation Act was followed by Regulations on Peasants Set Free in seventeen articles that explained the procedure of land redistribution and new organization of peasant life in detail. Because peasants became free citizens, emancipation had far-reaching economic consequences. The organization of rural life changed when the peasant community—not the landlord—was responsible for taxation and administrative and police order. The community became a self-governing entity when rural property-holders were able to elect their representatives for participation in administrative bodies at the higher level as well as for the local court. To resolve conflicts arising between the nobles and the peasants, community justices were introduced locally, and special officials mediated these conflicts. Emancipation destroyed class boundaries and opened the way for further development of capitalist relations and a market economy. Those who were not able to pay the redemption fee and buy their land entered the market as a free labor force promoting further industrialization. Moreover, it had a great psychological impact on the general public, because, in principle at least, there remained no underprivileged classes, and formal civil equality was established. A new generation was to follow—not slaves but citizens.

See also:

ALEXANDER II; LAW CODE OF 1649; PEASANTRY;

SERFDOM; SLAVERY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“The Emancipation Manifesto, March 3 1861.” (2003). Emmons, Terrence. (1968). The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.. Emmons Terrence, ed. (1970). Emancipation of the Russian Serfs. New York: International Thomson Publishing. Field, Daniel. (1976). The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855–1861. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hellie, Richard. (1982). Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Seton-Watson, Hugh. (1967). The Russian Empire, 1801–1917. Oxford: Oxford University Press. JULIA ULYANNIKOVA


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EMPIRE, USSR AS The understanding of the concept of empire depends on time and space. During the nineteenth century the terms empire and imperialism were associated with the spread of progress by countries claiming to represent civilized forms of existence. By the end of World War II the emergent superpowers, the United States and the USSR, adhered to an antiimperialist, anti-empire ideology and thereby ended the colonial empires of countries such as Britain and France. According to Leninist thought, empire and imperialism represented the highest and last stages of capitalist development after which socialism would emerge. Therefore the Soviet leadership never considered the multinational USSR, the leader of socialist revolution, to be an empire. This Leninist ideological definition of empire, while providing a framework for comprehending the Soviet leadership’s approach to governing, fails to describe the dynamics of the USSR as an empire. As shown by Dominic Lieven (2000), a country must fulfill several criteria to be considered an empire. It must be continental in scale, governing a range of different peoples, represent a great culture or ideology with more than local hegemony, exercise great economic and military might on more than a regional level, and arguably govern without the consent of the people. According to these criteria the USSR was indeed an empire, however not without certain characteristics distinguishing it from other empires, such as the British, Ottoman, or Hapsburg. The USSR was the world’s largest country, extending from Europe in the west to China and the Pacific in the east, its southern borders touching the boundaries of the Middle East. Given this geographic position, Moscow was a player in three of the world’s most important regions. The Soviet Union’s population consisted of hundreds of different peoples speaking a myriad of languages and practicing different religions, including Judaism, Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Sunni and Shia Islam. Such diversity was reminiscent of the great British and French maritime empires. Josef Stalin’s brutal industrialization policies and victory in World War II paved the way for the Soviet Union’s emergence as a superpower with global reach and influence. The Soviet economy was the second largest in the world despite its many deficiencies and supported a huge military industrial complex, which by the 1960s had enabled the

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USSR to attain nuclear parity with the United States while maintaining the largest armed forces in the world. Ideological power accompanied this military and economic might. The Cold War between the USSR and the United States was rooted in alternative visions of modernity. Whereas the United States held that liberal democracy and capitalism ultimately represented the end of history, the Soviet Union believed that an additional stage, that of communism, represented the true end of history. Many across the globe found Soviet communism’s claims of representing a truly egalitarian and therefore more humane society attractive. In other words, the ideological and cultural power of the USSR exercised global influence. In the midst of war and revolution many areas of the former tsarist empire became independent. With the exception of Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and parts of Poland, the Bolsheviks, through the effective and brutal use of force and coercion and under the banner of progressive Soviet communism, resurrected the empire they once called “Prison of the Peoples.” In 1940 Stalin invaded and occupied the Baltic States, which subsequently, according to Soviet propaganda, voluntarily became part of the USSR. Until the late 1980s during the reform process of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leadership governed without the direct consent of the people. LAND-BASED EMPIRE

The Soviet Union was a land-based empire encompassing all the territories of its tsarist predecessor— except Poland and Finland—while adding other areas such as western Ukraine and Bessarabia. The dynamics of a land-based empire differ greatly from those of maritime empires, such as the British and French. Before embarking on maritime empire building, countries such as Britain, France, and Spain already had a relatively solidified national identity. In tsarist Russia, empire and nation building commenced at roughly the same time, thereby blurring empire and nation. To determine where Russia the nation ended and where the empire began was difficult. This theme would continue in the Soviet era.

peoples under a single supranational ideology or symbol never arose. The metropolitan British identity was neither created nor adjusted to include the peoples of the vast empire ruled by London. In tsarist Russia the emperor and the crown represented the supranational entity to which the various peoples of the empire were to pledge their loyalty. Here, terminology is important. Two words for the English equivalent of “Russian” exist. When discussing anything related to Russian ethnicity, such as a person or the language, the word russky is used. However the empire, its institutions and the dynasty, were called rossysky, which carried a civil meaning designed to include everyone from Baltic German to Tatar. The emperor himself was known not as the “russky” tsar, but vserossysky (All-Russian). The Soviet leadership faced the same problems of governing and assimilation associated with a multiethnic land empire. While Soviet nationality policy, in other words how Soviet leaders approached governing this large and diverse empire, varied over time, its goals never did. They were (a) to maintain the country’s territorial integrity and domestic security; (b) to support the monopolistic hold on power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU); and (c) create a supranational Soviet identity, reminiscent of the civil rossysky. On one hand the Soviet leadership in line with Marxist–Leninist thought believed that nationalism, the death knell for any multinational empire, was a phenomenon inherent to capitalism and the bourgeois classes. Therefore, with the advent of socialism, broadly defined working class interests would triumph over national loyalties. In short, socialism makes nationalism redundant. On the other hand, the reality of governing a multiethnic empire required the Soviet leadership to pursue several policies reminiscent of a traditional imperial polity, such as deportations of whole peoples, playing one ethnic group against another, and drawing boundaries designed to maintain the supremacy of the central power.

Given the geographical distance between the metropole and its maritime empire, a clear division remained between colonized, most of whom were of different races and cultures, and colonizer, and therefore the question of assimilation of different

Unlike previous empires, the USSR was a federation that had fifteen republics at the time of its dissolution in 1991. Confident in the relatively speedy victory of socialism and communism over capitalism, in the 1920s the Soviet leadership followed a very accommodating policy in regard to nationalities. Along with the creation of a federation that institutionalized national identities, the new Soviet authorities supported the spread and strengthening of non-Russian cultures, languages,

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and identities. In areas where a national identity already existed, such as Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia, great ethnic cultural autonomy was allowed. In areas where no national identity yet existed, as in Central Asia, Soviet ethnographers worked to create peoples and national borders, based on cultural and economic considerations. The Soviet drawing of borders is comparable to the creation of states by European imperial powers in Africa and the Middle East. Each created republic had identical state, bureaucratic, and educational structures, an Academy of Sciences, and other institutions whose responsibility was the maintenance and strengthening of the national identity as well as propagation of Marxist–Leninist teachings. Therefore the Soviet Union supported and gave birth to national identities, whereas other landbased empires, such as the Ottoman and Habsburg, fought against them. At the same time the central Soviet authorities recruited indigenous people in the non-Russian republics to serve in local, republican, and even all-union institutions.


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Alongside nation building went social and economic modernization, and a requirement for the emergence of socialism, which would bring an end to strong national feelings. Unlike French and British colonial rule, the Soviets made dramatic changes of the societies and peoples of the USSR— one of the main thrusts of their nationality policy. While Central Asia and the Caucasus were the most economically and socially “backward,” through rapid industrialization and collectivization of peasant land all societies of the USSR endured dramatic change, surpassing the extent to which France and Britain had affected their colonial possessions. Importantly, the Soviets strove to modernize Russia, which many regarded to be the imperial power. There is no such analogy in regard to the maritime European empires, whose metropole was considered to be at the forefront of modernization and civilization. The rule of Josef Stalin brought changes to this policy. Regarding cultural autonomy a threat to the

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integrity of the Soviet state, Stalin imposed very strong central control over the constituent republics and appointed Russians to many of the high posts in the non-Russian republics. The biggest change, however, was in regard to the position of the Russian people within Soviet ideology. The Russians were now portrayed as the elder brother of the Soviet peoples whose culture and language provided the means for achieving communist modernity. Appreciation and love of Russian culture and language was no longer regarded as a threat to Soviet identity, but rather a reflection of loyalty to it. From Stalin’s death to the collapse of the USSR, Soviet nationality policy was an amalgamation of the policies followed during the first thirty-five years of Soviet power. The peoples of the non-Russian republics again filled positions in republican institutions. Through access to higher education, privilege, and the opportunity to exercise power within their republican or local domain, the central leadership created a sizeable and reliable body of non-Russian cadres who, with their knowledge of the local languages and cultures, ruled the non-Russian parts of the empire under the umbrella of the CPSU. However, Great Russians, meaning Russians, Ukrainians, or Belarusians, usually occupied military and intelligence service positions. The Soviet command economy centered in Moscow limited the power of the local and republican authorities. Through allocation of economic resources, goods, and infrastructure, the central Soviet authorities wielded a great degree of real power throughout the USSR. Moreover, in traditional imperial style, Moscow exploited the natural resources of all republics, such as Russian oil and natural gas and Uzbek cotton, to fulfill all-union policies even to the detriment of the individual republic.

Nevertheless the existence of national feelings continued to worry the Soviet leadership. During the late 1950s it adopted a new language policy, at the heart of which was expansion of Russian language teaching. The hope was that acquisition of Russian language and therefore culture would bring with it the spread and strengthening of a Soviet identity. The issue of language is always sensitive in the imperial framework. Attempts by a land-based empire to impose a single language frequently results in enflaming national feelings among the people whose native tongue is not the imperial one. Yet every land-based empire, especially one the size of the USSR, needs a lingua franca in order to govern and ease the challenges of administration. RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET EMPIRE

One of the more contentious issues concerns the extent to which the Soviet Union was a Russian empire. The USSR did exist in the space of the former tsarist empire. The Russian language was the lingua franca. From Stalin onwards the Russians and their high culture were portrayed as progressive and therefore the starting point on the path toward the modern Soviet identity. Great Russians held the vast majority of powerful positions in the center, as well as sensitive posts in the nonRussian republics. Many people in the non-Russian republics regarded the USSR and Soviet identity to be only a different form of Russian imperialism dating from the tsarist period.

The problem of assimilation of varied peoples and the creation of a supranational identity remained. After the death of Stalin, the Soviet leadership realized that ethnic national feelings in the USSR were not dissipating and in some cases were strengthening. The Soviet leadership’s response was essentially the promotion of a two-tiered identity. On one level it spoke of the flourishing of national identities and cultures. The leadership stressed, however, that this flourishing took place within a Soviet framework in which the people’s primary loyalty was to the Soviet identity and homeland. In other words, enjoyment of one’s national culture and language was not a barrier to having supreme loyalty to the progressive supranational Soviet identity.

On the other hand the Soviets destroyed two symbols of Russian identity—the tsar and the peasantry—while emasculating the other, the Russian Orthodox Church. During the 1920s Lenin and other Bolsheviks, seeing Russian nationalism as the biggest internal threat to the Soviet state, worked to contain it. The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, by far the largest of the republics of the USSR whose population equaled all of the others combined, had no separate Communist Party and appropriate institutions in contrast to all of the other republics. The Soviet regime used Russian high culture and symbols, but in a sanitized form designed to construct and strengthen a Soviet identity. The Russian people suffered just as much as the other peoples from the crimes of the Soviet regime, especially under Stalin. Already by the 1950s Russian nationalism was on the rise. The Soviet regime was blamed for destroying Russian culture and Russia itself through its reckless exploitation of land and natural resources in pursuit

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of Soviet goals. In the closing years of the USSR the symbols of Russian identity, the tsarist tricolor flag and the double-headed eagle, were commonly seen, while cities and streets regained their prerevolutionary Russian names. For many Russians, a distinction existed between Russian and Soviet identity.

F R I E D R I C H

leading to the collapse of one of the world’s great land-based empires.

See also:

COLONIAL EXPANSION; COLONIALISM; NATION-

ALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS

BIBLIOGRAPHY COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE

Debate continues over the causes of the collapse of the USSR and specifically the extent to which Soviet handling of its multiethnic empire was responsible for it. The Soviet federal structure, although leaving real power in Moscow, nevertheless institutionalized and therefore strengthened national identities, which are lethal to any multinational empire. Yet the goal of nationality policy was the creation of a supranational Soviet identity. Despite this contradiction, Soviet nationality policy when compared to that of other imperial polities enjoyed a relative degree of success. By encouraging dependence on the state and protecting the educational and occupational interests of the local political elite and educated middle class, the central Soviet leadership blunted aspirations to independent nationhood and integrated groups within the Soviet infrastructure. While the use of local elites to govern the periphery is a traditional imperial practice, providing a degree of legitimacy to the imperial power, Soviet non-Russian elites achieved powerful positions within their respective republics, wielding power unattainable by the colonized local populations in the French and British empires. Ideological power is as strong as its ability to deliver what it promises. Disillusionment with the unfulfilled economic promises of the Soviet ideology weakened loyalty to the Soviet identity. Gorbachev’s economic policies only worsened the economic situation. At the same time, Gorbachev ended the CPSU’s monopoly on power. Faced with growing popular dissatisfaction with the economic situation and loss of guarantee of power through the CPSU, regional and local political figures became nationalists when the national platform seemed to be the only way for them to retain power as the imperial center, the CPSU, weakened. Russia itself led the charge against the Soviet center, thereby creating a unique situation. The country that many people inside and outside the USSR considered to be the imperial power, revolted against what it regarded to be the imperial power, the CPSU and central Soviet control over Russia,


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Barkey, Karen, and Von Hagen, Mark, eds. (1997). After Empire. London: Westview Press. Dawisha, Karen, and Parrott, Bruce, eds. (1997). The End of Empire? The Transformation of the USSR in Comparative Perspective. London: M. E. Sharpe. Lieven, Dominic. (2000). Empire. London: John Murray. Nahaylo, Bohdan, and Swoboda, Victor. (1990). Soviet Disunion. London: Penguin. Pipes, Richard. (1964). The Formation of the Soviet Union. London: Harvard University Press. Rezun, Miron, ed. (1992). Nationalism and the Breakup of an Empire: Russia and Its Periphery. Westport, CT: Praeger. Rudolph, Richard, and Good, David, eds. (1992). Nationalism and Empire: The Habsburg Empire and the Soviet Union. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Suny, Ronald. (1993). The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Szporluk, Roman. (2000). Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. ZHAND P. SHAKIBI

ENGELS, FRIEDRICH (1820–1895), German socialist theoretician; close collaborator of Karl Marx. Friedrich Engels is remembered primarily as the close friend and intellectual collaborator of Karl Marx, who was the most important socialist thinker and arguably the most important social theorist of the nineteenth century. Engels must be regarded as a significant intellectual figure in his own right. Engels’s writings exerted a strong influence on Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology. Engels was born in Barmen in 1820, two and a half years after Marx. Ironically, Friedrich Engels worked for decades as the manager of enterprises in his family’s firm of Ermen and Engels; this necessitated his move to Manchester in 1850. Engels contributed substantially to the financial support of Marx and

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his family. He survived Marx by twelve years, during an important period in the growth of the socialist movement when Engels served as the most respected spokesman for Marxist theory. In recent decades there has been a lively debate over the degree of divergence between Marx’s thought and that of Engels, and therefore over whether the general scheme of interpretation known as “historical materialism” or “dialectical materialism” was primarily constructed by Engels or accorded with the main thrust of Marx’s intellectual efforts. George Lichtheim and Shlomo Avineri, distinguished scholars who have written about Marx, see Engels as having given a rigid cast to Marxist theory in order to make it seem more scientific, thus implicitly denying the creative role of human imagination and labor that had been emphasized by Marx. On the other hand, some works, such as those by J. D. Hunley and Manfred Steger, emphasize the fundamental points of agreement between Marx and Engels. The controversy remains unresolved and facts point to both convergence and divergence: Marx and Engels coauthored some major essays, including The Communist Manifesto, and Engels made an explicit effort to give Marxism the character of a set of scientific laws of purportedly general validity. The well-known laws of the dialectic, which became the touchstones of philosophical orthodoxy in Soviet Marxism-Leninism, were drawn directly from Engels’s writings.

See also:

authority, and opposed by the retrograde antiEnlightenment. Originated with the French philosophes, especially Charles de Secondant Montesquieu (1689–1755), Denis Diderot (1713–1784), François Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1684–1778), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), the Enlightenment quickly spread through Europe and the American colonies. It reached Russia in the mid–eighteenth century, peaking during the reign of Catherine II (1762–1796) and becoming one of the most important components of the country’s Westernization and modernization. The impact of the Enlightenment in Russia is generally described in terms of its reception and accommodation of the ideas of the philosophes. These ideas spurred new scientific and secular approaches to culture and government that laid the foundation of Russia’s modern intellectual and political culture. In addition to greater intellectual exchange with Europe, the Enlightenment brought Russia institutions of science and scholarship, arts and theater, the print revolution, and new forms of sociability, such as learned and charitable societies, clubs, and Masonic lodges. The Enlightenment created a new generation of Russian scientists, scholars, and men of letters (i.e., Mikhail Lomonosov, Nikolai Novikov, Alexander Radishchev, and Nikolai Karamzin). The Enlightenment also brought about an intense secularization that significantly diminished the role of religion and theology and transformed the monarchy into an enlightened absolutism.

DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM; MARXISM

The Enlightenment is traditionally defined as an intellectual movement characterized by religious skepticism, secularism, and liberal values, rooted in a belief in the power of human reason liberated from the constraints of blind faith and arbitrary

The actual impact of the Enlightenment in Russia was limited and inconsistent, however. While the writings of the philosophes were widely translated and read, Russian audiences were more interested in their novels than in their philosophical or political treatises. Policy makers preferred German cameralism and political science. Catherine’s selfproclaimed adherence to the principles of the philosophes was rather patchy, which prompted widespread accusations that she had created the image of philosopher on the throne to dupe the European public. The progress of science, education, and literature as well as the formation of the public sphere owed more to government tutelage than independent initiative. Most Russian champions of Enlightenment were profoundly religious. Thus, criticism of the Orthodox Church was virtually nonexistent; anticlerical statements were directed primarily against Catholicism, the old foe of Russian Orthodoxy. Some of the new forms of sociability, such as Masonic lodges, served as venues not only for liberal discussion, but also for the exer-

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carver, Terrell. (1989). Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought. London: Macmillan. Hunley, J. D. (1991). The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels: A Reinterpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Steger, Manfred B., and Carver, Terrell, eds. (1999). Engels after Marx. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ALFRED B. EVANS JR.

ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF

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cises in occultism, alchemy, and criticism of the philosophes. The Enlightenment in Russia was preoccupied with superficial cultural forms rather than content. The traditional picture outlined above needs to be revised in light of new studies of the European Enlightenment since the 1970s. Enlightenment is no longer identified as a uniform school of thought dominated by the philosophes. Instead it is understood as a complex phenomenon, a series of debates at the core of which lay the process of discovery and proactive and critical involvement of the individual in both private and public life. This concept softens the binary divides between the secular and the religious, the realms of private initiative and established public authority, and, in many cases, the conventional antithesis between Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment. One may interpret the Enlightenment in Russia more comprehensively and less exclusively as a process of discovering contemporary European culture and adapting it to Russian realities that produced a uniquely Russian national Enlightenment. An analysis of enlightened despotism need not be preoccupied with the balance between Enlightenment and despotism and can focus instead on the reformer’s own understanding of the best interests of the nation. For example, it was political, demographic, and economic considerations rather than an anticlerical ideology that drove Catherine’s policy of secularization. There is no need to limit discussions of the public debate to evaluations of whether or not it conformed to the standards of religious skepticism. Contemporary discussions of the difference between true and false Enlightenment demonstrate that religious education and faith, along with patriotism, were viewed as the key elements of true Enlightenment, while religious toleration was touted as a traditional Orthodox value. Instead of emphasizing the dichotomy between adoption of cultural institutions and reception of ideas, twenty-first century scholarship looks at institutions as the infrastructure of Enlightenment that created economic, social, and political mechanisms crucial for the spread of ideas.

See also:

CATHERINE II; FREEMASONRY; ORTHODOXY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Madariaga, Isabel. (1999). Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Collected Essays. New York: Longman.


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Dixon, Simon. (1999). The Modernisation of Russia, 16761825. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gross, Anthony Glenn, ed. (1983). Russia and the West in the Eighteenth Century. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners. Smith, Douglas. (1999). Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling. (2003). The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. OLGA TSAPINA

ENSERFMENT Enserfment refers to the broad historical process that made the free Russian peasantry into serfs, abasing them further into near-slaves, then emancipating them from their slavelike status and finally freeing them so that they could move and conduct their lives with the same rights as other free men in the Russian Empire. This process took place over the course of nearly five hundred years, between the 1450s and 1906. Almost certainly enserfment would not have occurred had not 10 percent of the population been slaves. Also, it could not have reached the depths of human abasement had not the service state been present to legislate and enforce it. The homeland of the Great Russians, the land between the Volga and the Oka (the so-called VolgaOka mesopotamia), is a very poor place. There are almost no natural resources of any kind (gold, silver, copper, iron, building stone, coal), the threeinch-thick podzol soil is not hospitable to agriculture, as is the climate (excessive precipitation and a short growing season). Until the Slavs moved into the area in the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, the indigenous Finns and Balts were sparsely settled and lived neolithic lives hunting and fishing. This area could not support a dense population, and any prolonged catastrophe reduced the population further, creating the perception of a labor shortage. The protracted civil war over the Moscow throne between 1425 and 1453 created a labor shortage perception. At the time the population was free (with the exception of the slaves), with everyone able to move about as they wished. Because population

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densities were so low and agriculture was extensive (peasants cleared land by the slash-and-burn process, farmed it for three years, exhausted its fertility, and moved on to another plot), land ownership was not prized. Government officials and military personnel made their livings by collecting taxes and fees (which can be levied from a semisedentary population) and looting in warfare, not by trying to collect rent from lands tilled by settled farmers. Monasteries were different: In about 1350 they had moved out of towns (because of the Black Death, inter alia) into the countryside and entered the land ownership business, raising and selling grain. They recruited peasants to work for them by offering lower tax rates than peasants could get by living on their own lands. The civil war disrupted this process, and some monasteries, which had granted some peasants small loans as part of the recruitment package, found that they had difficulty collecting those loans. Consequently a few individual monasteries petitioned the government to forbid indebted peasants from moving at any time other than around St. George’s Day (November 26). St. George’s Day was the time of the preChristian, pagan end of the agricultural year, akin to the U.S. holiday, Thanksgiving. The monasteries believed that they could collect the debts owed to them at that time before the peasants moved somewhere else. This small beginning—involving a handful of monasteries and only their indebted peasants—initiated the enserfment process. It is possible that the government rationalized its action because not paying a debt was a crime (a tort, in those times); thus, forbidding peasant debtors from moving was a crime-prevention measure. Also note that this was the normal time for peasants to move: The agricultural year was over, and the ground was probably frozen (the average temperature was -4 degrees Celsius), so that transportation was more convenient than at any other time of year, when there might be deep snow, floods, mud, drought, and so on. For unknown reasons this fundamentally trivial measure was extended to all peasants in the Law Code (Sudebnik) of 1497. Similar limitations on peasant mobility were present in neighboring political jurisdictions, and there may have been a contagion effect. It also may have been viewed as a general convenience, for that is when peasants tended to move anyway. As far as is known, there were no contemporary protests against the introduction of St. George’s Day, and in the nineteenth

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century the peasants had sayings stating that a reintroduction of St. George’s Day would be tantamount to emancipation. The 1497 language was repeated in the Sudebnik of 1550, with the addition of verbiage reflecting the introduction of the threefield system of agriculture: Peasants who had sown an autumn field and then moved on St. George’s Day had the right to return to harvest the grain when it was ripe. Chaos with its inherent disruption of labor supplies caused the next major advance in the enserfment process: the introduction of the “forbidden years.” Ivan IV’s mad oprichnina (1565–1572) caused up to 85 percent depopulation of certain areas of old Muscovy. Recent state expansion and annexations encouraged peasants disconcerted by oprichnina chaos to flee for the first time to areas north of the Volga, to the newly annexed Kazan and Astrakhan khanates, and to areas south of the Oka in the steppe that the government was beginning to secure. In addition to the chaos caused by oprichnina military actions, Ivan had given lords control over their peasants, allowing them “to collect as much rent in one year as formerly they had collected in ten.” His statement ordering peasants “to obey their lords in everything” also began the abasement of the serfs by making them subject to landlord control. Yet other elements entered the picture. The service state had converted most of the land fund in the Volga-Oka mesopotamia and in the Novgorod region into service landholdings (pomestie) to support its provincial cavalry, the middle service class. These servicemen could not render service without peasants on their pomestie lands to pay them regular rent. Finding their landholdings being depopulated, a handful of cavalrymen petitioned that the right of peasants to move on St. George’s Day be annulled. The government granted these few requests, and called the times when peasants could not move “forbidden years.” Like St. George’s Day, the forbidden years initially applied to only a few situations, but in 1592 (again for precisely unknown reasons) they were applied temporarily to all peasants. That should have completed the enserfment process. However, there were two reservations. First, it was explicitly stated that the forbidden years were temporary (although they did not actually end until 1906). Second, the government imposed a five-year statute of limitations on the enforcement of the forbidden years. Historians assume that this was done to benefit large, privileged landowners who could conceal peasants for five


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years on various estates so that their legal possessors (typically middle-service-class cavalrymen) could not find them and file suit for their return. Moreover, there was the issue of colonial expansion: The government wanted the areas north of the Volga, south of the Oka in the steppe, and along the Middle and South Volga eastward into the Urals and Siberia settled. It even had its own agents to recruit peasants into these areas, typically with the promise of half-taxation. Those running the expansion of the Muscovite state did not want their sparse frontier populations diminished by the forcible return of fugitive peasants to Volga-Oka mesopotamia. Thus they also supported the fiveyear statute of limitations on the filing of suits for the recovery of fugitive serfs. The Time of Troubles provided a breathing spell in the enserfment process. Events occurred relevant to enserfment, but they had no long-term impact— with the possible exception of Vasily Shuisky’s near-equation of serfs with slaves in 1607. After the country had recovered from the Troubles and from the Smolensk War (1632–1634), the middleservice class sensed that the new Romanov dynasty was weak and thus susceptible to pressure. In 1637 the cavalrymen began a remarkable petition campaign for the repeal of the statute of limitations on the filing of suits for the recovery of fugitive peasants. This in some respects was modeled after a campaign by townsmen to compel the binding of their fellows to their places of residence because of the collective nature of the tax system: When one family moved away, those remaining had to bear the burden imposed by the collective tax system until the next census was taken. For the townsmen the reference point typically was 1613, the end of the Time of Troubles. For the cavalrymen petitioners, the reference points were two: the statute of limitations and the documents (censuses, pomestie land allotments) proving where peasants lived. The middle-service-class petitioners pointed out that the powerful (i.e., contumacious) people were recruiting their peasants, concealing them for five years, and then using the fugitives to recruit others to flee. The petitioners, who had 5.6 peasant households apiece, alleged that the solution to their diminishing ability to render military service because of their ongoing losses of labor would be to repeal the statute of limitations. The government’s response was to extend the statute of limitations from five to nine years. Another petition in 1641 extended it from nine to fifteen years. A petition of 1645 elicited the promise that the statute of limi-


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tations would be repealed once a census was taken to show where the peasants were living. The census was taken in 1646 and 1647 but no action was taken. The government was being run by Boris Morozov, whose extensive estate records reveal that he was recruiting others lords’ peasants in these years. Morozov and his corrupt accomplices got their comeuppance after riots in Moscow, which spread to a dozen other towns, led to their overthrow and to demands by the urban mob for a codification of the law. Tsar Alexis appointed the Odoyevsky Commission, which drafted the Law Code of 1649 (ulozhenie). It was debated and approved with significant amendments by the Assembly of the Land of 1648–1649. Part of the amendments involved the enserfment, especially the repeal of the forbidden years. Henceforth all peasants were subject to return to wherever they or their forbears were registered. This measure applied to all peasants, both those on the lands of private lords and the church (seignorial peasants) and those on lands belonging to the tsar, the state, and the peasants themselves (later known as state peasants). The land cadastre of 1626, the census of 1646–1647, and pomestie allotment documents were mentioned, but almost any other official documents would do as well. Aside from the issue of documentation, the other major enserfment issue was what to do with runaways, especially males and females who belonged to different lords and got married. The solutions were simple and logical: The Orthodox Church did not permit the breaking up of marriages, so the Law Code of 1649 decreed that the lord who had received a fugitive lost the couple to the lord from whom the fugitive had fled. If they wed as fugitives on “neutral ground,” then the lord-claimants cast lots; the winner got the couple and paid the loser for his lost serf. The Law Code did not resolve the issue of fugitives, because of the intense shortage of labor in Muscovy. After 1649 the government began to penalize recipients of fugitives by confiscating an additional serf in addition to the fugitive received. This had no impact, so it was raised to two. This in turn had no impact, so it was raised to four. At this point would-be recipients of fugitive serfs began to turn them away. Peter I took this one step further by proclaiming the death penalty for those who received the fugitive serfs, but it is not known whether anyone was actually executed. The Law Code of 1649 opened the door to the next stage of enserfment. Lords wanted the peasants converted into slaves who could be disposed of as

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they wished (willed, sold, given away, moved). This contradicted the idea that serfs existed to support the provincial cavalry. The Law Code permitted landowners to move their serfs around, whereas landholders had to leave them where they were so that the next cavalry serviceman would have rent payers when the pomestie was assigned to him. The extent to which (or even whether) serfs were sold like slaves before 1700 is still being debated. The issue was resolved during the reign of Peter I by two measures. First, in 1714 the service landholding and hereditary estate (votchina) were made equal under the law. Second, the introduction of the soul tax in 1719 made the lord responsible for his serfs’ taxes and gave him much greater control over his subjects, especially after the collection of the soul tax commenced in 1724. In the same year, peasants were required to have a pass from their owners to travel. This was strengthened in 1722, and again in 1724. That serfs were becoming marketable was reflected in the April 15, 1721, ban on the sale of individual serfs. Whether the ban was ever enforced is unknown. The fact that it probably was not was reflected in a law of 1771 forbidding the public sale of serfs (the private sale of serfs was permitted) and a 1792 decree forbidding an auctioneer to use a gavel in serf auctions, indicating that the 1771 law was not observed either. After 1725 the descent of seignorial serfs into slavery accelerated. In 1601 Godunov had required owners to feed their slaves, and in 1734 Anna extended this to serfs. In 1760 lords were allowed to banish serfs to Siberia. This was undoubtedly done to try to ensure calm in the villages. That this primarily concerned younger serfs (who could have been sent into the army) is reflected in the fact that owners received military recruit credit for such exiles.

Paul tried to undo everything his mother Catherine had done. This extended to serfdom. In 1797 he forbade lords to force their peasants to work on Sunday, suggested that peasants could only be compelled to work three days per week, and that they should have the other three days to work for themselves. Paul was assassinated before he could do more. His son Alexander I wanted to do something about serfdom, but became preoccupied with Napoleon and then went insane. He was informed by Nikolai Karamzin in 1811 that the Russian Empire rested on two pillars, autocracy and serfdom. Emancipation increasingly became the topic of public discussion. After suppressing the libertarian Decembrists in 1725, Nicholas I wanted to do something about serfdom and appointed ten committees to study the issue. His successor, Alexander II, took the loss of the Crimean War to mean that Russia, including the institution of serfdom, needed reforming. His philosophy was “better from above than below.” Using Nicholas I’s “enlightened bureaucrats,” who had studied serfdom for years, Alexander II proclaimed the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, but this only freed the serfs from their slavelike dependence on their masters. They were then bound to their communes. State serfs were freed separately, in 1863. The seignorial serfs had to pay for their freedom, that is, the state was unwilling to expropriate the serfowners and simultaneously feared the consequences of a landless emancipation. The serfs were finally freed in 1906, when they were released from control by their communes, the redemption dues were cancelled, and corporal punishment for serfs was abolished. Thus, all peasants were free for the first time since 1450.

See also:

EMANCIPATION ACT; LAW CODE OF 1649; PEAS-

ANTRY; PODZOL; POMESTIE; SUDEBANK OF 1497; SUDEBANK OF 1550; SERFDOM; SLAVERY

A tragic date in Russian history was February 18, 1762, when Peter III abolished all service requirements for estate owners. This permitted serfowners to supervise (and abuse) their serfs personally. Thus it is probably not accidental that five years later, in 1767, Catherine II forbade serfs to petition against their owners. Catherine, supposedly enlightened, opposed to serfdom, and in favor of free labor, gave away 800,000 serfs to private owners during her reign. The year 1796 was the zenith of serfdom.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Blum, Jerome. (1961). Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hellie, Richard. (1967, 1970). Muscovite Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago College Syllabus Division. Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hellie, Richard, tr. and ed. (1988). The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649. Irvine, CA: Charles Schlacks, Publisher.

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Kolchin, Peter. (1987). Unfree Labor. American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Robinson, Geroid Tanquery. (1932). Rural Russia under the Old Regime. New York: Longmans. Zaionchkovsky, P. A. (1978). The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. RICHARD HELLIE

ENTERPRISE, SOVIET Soviet industrial enterprises (predpryatie), occupying the lowest level of the economic bureaucracy, were responsible for producing the goods desired by planners, as specified in the techpromfinplan (technical-industrial financial plan) received by the enterprise each year. Owned by the state, headed by a director, and governed by the principle of oneperson management (edinonachalie), each Soviet enterprise was subordinate to an industrial ministry. For example, enterprises producing shoes and clothing were subordinate to the Ministry of Light Industry; enterprises producing bricks and mortar, to the Ministry of Construction Materials; enterprises producing tractors, to the Ministry of Tractor and Agricultural Machine Building. Enterprises producing military goods were subordinate to the Ministry of Defense Industry. In some cases, enterprises subordinate to the Ministry of Defense Industry also produced civilian goods—for example, all products using electronic components were produced in military production enterprises. Many enterprises producing civilian goods and subordinate to a civilian industrial ministry had a special department, Department No. 1, responsible for military-related production (e.g., chemical producers making paint for military equipment or buildings, clothing producers making uniforms and other military wear, shoe producers making military footwear). While the enterprise was subordinate to the civilian industrial ministry, Department No. 1 reported to the appropriate purchasing department in the Ministry of Defense. During the 1970s industrial enterprises were grouped into production associations (obedinenya) to facilitate planning. The creation of industrial or production associations was intended to improve the economic coordination between planners and producers. By establishing horizontal or vertical mergers of enterprises working in related activities, planning officials could focus on long-term or ag-


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gregate planning tasks, leaving the management of the obedinenya to resolve problems related to routine operations of individual firms. In effect the obedinenya simply added a management layer to the economic bureaucracy because the industrial enterprise remained the basic unit of production in the Soviet economy. Soviet industrial enterprises were involved in formulating and implementing the annual plan. During plan formulation, enterprises provided information about the material and technical supplies needed to fulfill a targeted level and assortment of production, and updated accounts of productive capacity. Because planning policy favored taut plans (i.e., plans with output targets high relative to input allocations and the firm’s productivity capacity), output targets based on previous plan fulfillment (i.e., the “ratchet effect” or “planning from the achieved level”), and large monetary bonuses for managers if output targets were fulfilled, Soviet enterprise managers were motivated to establish a safety factor by over-ordering inputs and under-reporting productive capacity during the plan formulation process. Similarly, during plan implementation, they were motivated to sacrifice quality in order to meet quantity targets or to falsify plan fulfillment documents if quantity targets were not met. In some instances managers would petition for a correction in the plan targets that would reduce the output requirements for a particular plan period (month, quarter, or year). In such instances they apparently expected that their future plan targets would be revised upward. In the current period, if plan targets were lowered for one firm, planning officials redistributed the output to other firms in the form of higher output targets, so that the annual plan targets would be met for the industrial ministry. Unlike enterprises in market economies, Soviet enterprises were not concerned with costs of production. The prices firms paid for materials and labor were fixed by central authorities, as were the prices they received for the goods they produced. Based on average cost rather than marginal cost of production, and not including capital charges, the centrally determined prices did not reflect scarcity, and were not adjusted to capture changes in supply or demand. Because prices were fixed, and cost considerations were less important than fulfilling quantity targets in the reward structure, Soviet enterprises were not concerned about profits. Profits and profitability norms were specified in the annual enterprise plan, but did not signal the same

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information about the successful operation and performance of the firm that they do in a market economy. Typically, failure to earn profits was an accounting outcome rather than a performance outcome, and resulted in the planning authorities providing subsidies to the firm. The operation and performance of Soviet enterprises was monitored by planning authorities using the financial plan component of the annual techpromfinplan. The financial plan corresponded to the input and output plans, documenting the flow of materials and goods between firms, as well as wage payments, planned cost reductions, and the like. Financial accounts for the sending and receiving firms in any transaction were adjusted by the state bank (Gosbank) to match the flow of materials or goods. Furniture manufacturers, for example, were given output targets for each item in their assortment of production—tables, chairs, benches, cabinets, bookshelves. The plan further specified the input allocations associated with each item. Gosbank debited the accounts of the furniture manufacturer when the designated inputs were received and credited the accounts of the supplying firms. Planned transactions did not involve the exchange of cash between firms. Gosbank provided cash to the enterprise each month to pay wages; the maximum amount that an enterprise could withdraw from Gosbank was based on the planned number of employees and the centrally determined wages. Cash disbursements for wage payments were strictly controlled to preclude enterprise directors from acting independently from planners’ preferences. Financial control was further exercised by planners in that Gosbank only provided short-term credit if specified in the annual enterprise plan. This system of financial supervision was called ruble control (kontrol rublem).

See also: EDINONACHALIE; GOSBANK; MONETARY SYSTEM,

ENVIRONMENTALISM Environmental protection in Russia traces its roots to seventeenth-century hunting preserves and Peter the Great’s efforts to protect some of the country’s forests and rivers. But environmentalism, in the sense of an intellectual or popular movement in support of conservation or environmental protection, began during the second half of the nineteenth century and scored some important victories during the late tsarist and early soviet periods. The movement lost most of its momentum during the Stalin years but revived during the 1960s and 1970s, peaking during the era of perestroika. After a decline during the early 1990s, environmentalism showed a resurgence later in the decade.

EARLY HISTORY

Sergei Aksakov’s extremely popular fishing and hunting guides (1847 and 1851) awakened the reading public to the extent and importance of central Russia’s natural areas and helped popularize outdoor pursuits. As the membership in hunting societies grew in subsequent decades, so did awareness of the precipitous decline in populations of game species. Articles in hunting journals and the more widely circulated “thick” journals sounded the alarm about this issue. Provincial observers also began to note the rapid loss of forest resources. Noble landowners, facing straitened financial circumstances after the abolition of serfdom, were selling timber to earn ready cash. Anton Chekhov, among others, lamented the loss of wildlife habitats and the damage to rivers that resulted from widespread deforestation. By the late 1880s the outcry led to the enactment of the Forest Code (1888) and hunting regulations (1892). These laws had little effect, but their existence testifies to the emergence of a Russian conservation movement.

SOVIET; RUBLE CONTROL; TECHPROMFINPLAN BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berliner, Joseph S. (1957). Factory and Manager in the USSR. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freris, Andrew. (1984). The Soviet Industrial Enterprise. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Granick, David. (1954). Management of the Industrial Firm in the USSR. New York: Columbia University Press. Linz, Susan J., and Martin, Robert E. (1982). “Soviet Enterprise Behavior under Uncertainty.” Journal of Comparative Economics 6:24–36. SUSAN J. LINZ

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In contrast to the environmentalism around the same time in the United States and England, the main impetus for the movement in Russia came from scientists rather than amateur naturalists, poets, or politicians. Russian scientists were pioneers in the fledgling field of ecology, particularly the study of plant communities and ecosystems. While they shared with western environmentalists an aesthetic appreciation for natural beauty, they were especially keen about the need to preserve whole landscapes and ecosystems. During the early twentieth century when the Russian conservation movement began to press for the creation of na-


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Half of the livestock in Muslumovo have leukemia, but their meat and milk are still consumed. © GYORI ANTOINE/CORBIS SYGMA

ture preserves, it did not adopt the U.S. model of national parks designed to preserve places of extraordinary beauty for recreational purposes. Instead, Russian scientists sought to preserve large tracts of representative landscapes and keep them off limits except to scientists who would use them as laboratories for ecological observation. They called these tracts zapovedniks, a word derived from the religious term for “commandments” and connoting something forbidden or inviolate. The Permanent Commission on Nature Preservation, organized in 1912 under the auspices of the Russian Geographical Society, proposed the creation of a network of zapovedniks in 1917, shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution. Its primary author was the geologist Venyamin Semenov-Tian-Shansky (1870–1942). His brother, Andrei (1866–1942), a renowned entomologist, was an important proponent of the project, along with the botanist Ivan Borodin (1847–1930), head of the Permanent Commission, and the zoologist Grigory Kozhevnikov (1866–1933), who had first articulated the need for inviolate nature preserves.


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These scientists also sought to popularize a conservation ethic among the populace, especially among young people. Despite their many educational efforts, however, they were unable to build a mass conservation movement. This was at least partly because their insistence on keeping the nature preserves off limits to the public prevented them from capitalizing on the direct experience and visceral affection that U.S. national parks inspire in so many visitors. SOVIET PERIOD

The early Bolshevik regime enacted a number of conservation measures, including one to establish zapovedniks in 1921. The politicization of all aspects of scientific and public activity during the 1920s, together with war, economic crisis, and local anarchy, threatened conservation efforts and made it difficult to protect nature preserves from exploitation. In 1924 conservation scientists established the All-Russian Society for Conservation (VOOP) in order to build a broad-based environ-

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mental movement. VOOP organized popular events such as Arbor Day and Bird Day, which attracted 45,000 young naturalists in 1927, and began publishing the magazine Conservation (Okhrana prirody) in 1928, with a circulation of 3,000. An All-Russian Congress for Conservation was convened in 1929, and an All-Soviet Congress in 1933. By this time conservationists had lost their optimism, overwhelmed by the Stalinist emphasis on conquering nature in the name of rapid industrial development. The government whittled away at the idea of inviolate zapovedniks over the ensuing decades, turning some into game reserves, others into breeding grounds for selected species, and opening still others to mining, logging, and agriculture. In 1950 the government proposed to turn over more than 85 percent of the protected territories to the agriculture and timber ministries. Environmentalism of a grassroots and broadbased variety finally began to develop after Stalin’s death. VOOP had expanded to some nineteen million members, but it existed primarily to funnel extorted dues into dubious land-reclamation schemes. The real impetus for environmentalism came during the early 1960s in response to a plan to build a large pulp and paper combine on Lake Baikal. Scientists once again spearheaded the outcry against the plan, which soon included journalists, famous authors, and others who could reach a broad national and international audience. The combine opened in 1967, but environmentalists gained a symbolic victory when the government promised to take extraordinary measures to protect the lake. Similar grassroots movements arose during the 1970s and early 1980s to protest pollution in the Volga River, the drying up of the Aral Sea, riverdiversion projects, and other threats to environmental health. Under Leonid Brezhnev, environmentalists were able to air some of their grievances in the press, especially in letters to the editors of mass-circulation newspapers. As long as they did not attack the idea of economic growth or other underpinnings of soviet ideology, they were fairly free to voice their opinions. By and large, the environmentalists called for improvements in the central planning system and more Communist Party attention to environmental problems, not systemic changes. Their arguments took the form of cheerleading for beloved places rather than condemnations of the exploitation of natural resources, and it became difficult to distinguish environmentalism from local chauvinism. In contrast to its counterpart in the West, en-

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vironmentalism in the Soviet Union was often closely aligned with right-wing nationalist politics. Furthermore, environmental activism had little impact on economic planners. Although, as official propagandists boasted, the country had many progressive environmental laws, few of them were enforced. Activists were further hampered by official secrecy about the extent of environmental problems. In 1978 a manuscript entitled “The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union” by Boris Komarov (pseudonym of Ze’ev Wolfson, a specialist in environmental policy ) was smuggled out and published abroad. Environmentalism left the margins of soviet society and took center stage in the period of glasnost. After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, everyone became aware of the threat soviet industry posed for the environment and public health, and also of the need for full disclosure of relevant information. Environmental issues galvanized local movements against the central government, and nationalist overtones in the environmental rhetoric fanned the flames. In Estonia, protests in 1987 against a phosphorite mine grew into a full–blown independence movement. Environmental issues also helped initiate general political opposition in Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere. Environmentalists began to win real victories, closing or halting production on some fifty nuclear plants and many large construction projects. There were thousands of grassroots environmental groups in the country by 1991, and the Greens were second only to religious groups in the degree of public trust they enjoyed. POST-SOVIET ACTIVISM

After 1991 the influence of Russian environmental organizations declined. As the central government consolidated its power, public attention turned to pressing economic matters, and pollution problems decreased as a result of the closing of many factories in the post-Soviet depression. Later in the decade the government became openly hostile to environmental activism. It arrested two whistleblowers, Alexander Nikitin and Grigory Pasko, who revealed information about radioactive pollution from nuclear submarines. President Vladimir Putin dissolved the State Committee on the Environment in 2000 and gave its portfolio to the Natural Resources Ministry. Environmental organizations survived by becoming professionalized nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) on the Western model, seeking


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funding from foreign foundations and appealing to world opinion rather than cultivating local memberships. Among the most influential of these are the Center for Russian Environmental Policy under the direction of Alexei Yablokov (former environmental adviser to Boris Yeltsin), the St. Petersburg Clean Baltic Coalition, the Baikal Environmental Wave, the Russian branch of the Worldwide Fund for Wildlife (WWF), and Green Cross International, of which Mikhail Gorbachev became president in 1993. A few radical environmental groups emerged during the early 1990s, notably the Rainbow Keepers and Eco-Defense, which promote more fundamental societal change. Beginning during the late 1990s, there was a revival of grassroots activism on local issues of air and water quality, animal welfare, nature education, and protection of sacred lands. Such efforts rely on local members and on the resources of preexisting (i.e., Soviet-era) institutions and networks, and they tend to cultivate local bureaucrats and political leaders.

EPARKHYA See

See also:

Eastern Orthodoxy is widely believed to have been introduced in Kievan Rus in 988 C.E. At first the Russian church was governed by metropolitans appointed by the patriarchate of Constantinople from the Greek clergy active in the Rus lands. When the Russian church gained its independence from Constantinople in 1448, Metropolitan Jonas, resident in the outpost of Moscow, was given the title of metropolitan of Moscow and All Russia. Metropolitan Job of Moscow became the first Russian patriarch in 1589, thereby establishing the Russian church’s independence from Greek Orthodoxy.

CHERNOBYL; RUSSIAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY;

THICK JOURNALS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Goldman, Marshall I. (1972). Environmental Pollution in the Soviet Union: The Spoils of Progress. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Henry, Laura. (2002). “Two Paths to a Greener Future: Environmentalism and Civil Society Development in Russia.” Demokratizatsiya 10(2):184–206. Komarov, Boris (Ze’ev Wolfson). (1978). The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union. London: Pluto Press. Pryde, Philip R. (1991). Environmental Management in the Soviet Union. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, John Massey, ed. (1992). The Soviet Environment: Problems, Policies and Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Weiner, Douglas R. (1988). Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Weiner, Douglas R. (1999). A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yanitsky, Oleg. (1999). “The Environmental Movement in a Hostile Context: The Case of Russia.” International Sociology 14(2):157–172.

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EPISCOPATE The episcopate of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) encompasses the whole body of bishops who govern dioceses and supervise clergy, as well as perform and administer church sacraments. The episcopate is drawn exclusively from the ranks of the celibate “black” clergy, although widowers who take monastic vows may also be recruited. The patriarch of Moscow and All Russia and the ecclesiastical ranks below him—metropolitans, archbishops, bishops, and hegumens— comprise the leadership of the church. The patriarch and metropolitans hold power over the church hierarchy and carry on the debates that produce (or resist) change within the church.

The close link between ecclesiastical and temporal authorities in Russia reflected Byzantine cultural influence. The alliance between church and state ended with the reign of Peter the Great (16821725). Seeing the Russian Orthodox Church as a conservative body frustrating his attempts to modernize the empire, he did not appoint a successor when Patriarch Adrian died in 1700 and in his place appointed a bishop more open to Westernization. In 1721 Peter abolished the patriarchate and appointed a collegial board of bishops, the Holy Synod, to replace it. This body was subject to civil authority and similar in both structure and status to other departments of the state.

RACHEL MAY

The reigns of Peter III (1762-1763) and Catherine II (1762-1796) brought Peter the Great’s reforms to their logical conclusion, confiscating the church’s properties and subjecting it administratively to the state. A (lay) over-procurator was

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Ziegler, Charles E. (1987). Environmental Policy in the USSR. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.


DIOCESE.

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empowered to supervise the church, appointing important officials and directing the activities of the Holy Synod. The full extent of the over–procurator’s control was realized under the conservative Konstantin Pobedonostsev (1880–1905), who kept the episcopate in submission. The calls for reform during Tsar Nicholas II’s reign (1894–1917) included demands for an end to state control of the church. By and large the bishops were dissatisfied with the Holy Synod and the role played by the over-procurator. Nicholas II responded by granting the church greater independence in 1905 and agreeing to allow a council that church officials anticipated would result in the liberalization of the church. In 1917, when the council was finally convened, it called for the restoration of the patriarchate and church sovereignty, and decentralization of church administration. The October Revolution brought a radical change in the status of the episcopate. The Bolsheviks implemented a policy of unequivocal hostility toward Orthodoxy, fueled by the atheism of Marxist– Leninist doctrine and also by the church’s legacy as defender of the imperial government. Bishops were a special target and, along with priests, monks, nuns, and laypersons, were persecuted on any pretext. Nearly the entire episcopate was executed or died in labor camps. In 1939 only four bishops remained free. Throughout the Soviet period, the number of bishops rose and fell according to the whims of the communist regime’s religious policy. While initially the episcopate was hostile to the Bolsheviks, the sustained persecution of believers made it apparent that if the church wished to survive as an institution it would have to change its position. In 1927 Patriarch Sergei, speaking for the church, issued a “Declaration of Loyalty” to the Soviet Motherland, “whose joys and successes are our joys and successes, and whose setbacks are our setbacks” This capitulation began one of the most controversial chapters in the episcopate’s history. The Soviet authorities appointed all of the church’s important officials and unseated any who challenged their rule. The regime and the church leadership worked together to root out schismatic groups and sects. Meanwhile, prelates assured the international community that accusations of religious persecution were merely anti-Soviet propaganda.

ist regime. The Orthodox Church figured prominently in discussions about the renewal and regeneration of Soviet society. In post-communist Russia, the patriarch and other Orthodox dignitaries became high-profile public figures. The episcopate has influenced political debate, most notably the deliberations on new religious legislation during the mid- and late 1990s. The end of communism also produced new challenges for the episcopate. Schismatic movements, competition from other faiths, and reformist priests have created divisions and threatened the Orthodox Church’s preeminence.

See also:

CHRISTIANIZATION; JOB, PATRIARCH; KIEVAN

RUS; ORTHODOXY; PATRIARCHATE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ellis, Jane. (1986). The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History. London: Routledge. Gudziak, Borys A. (1998). Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hosking, Geoffrey. (1998). Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Knox, Zoe. (2003). “The Symphonic Ideal: The Moscow Patriarchate’s Post-Soviet Leadership.” Europe–Asia Studies 55:575–596. ZOE KNOX

ESTATE See

SOSLOVIE.

ESTONIA AND ESTONIANS

The reinstitutionalization of the Orthodox Church during the perestroika years marked the end of the episcopate’s subordination to the athe-

Estonia covers the area from 57.40° to 59.40° N and 21.50° to 28.12° E, bordered on the north by the Gulf of Finland, on the east by Russia, on the south by Latvia, and on the west by the Baltic Sea. Its area is 17,462 square miles (45,222 square kilometers), and its capital is Tallinn (population 400,378 in 2000). The estimated population of Estonia in 2003 was 1,356,000, including 351,178 ethnic Russians. Outside the country there are

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approximately 160,000 Estonians, among them 46,390 in the Russian Federation.

The Estonian constitution, adopted in 1992, vests political supremacy in a unicameral parliament, the Riigikogu, with 101 members elected by proportional representation for four-year terms. The Riigikogu makes all major political decisions, such as enacting legislation, electing the president and prime minister, during the longevity of governments, preparing the state budget, and making treaties with foreign countries. The head of state and supreme commander of the armed forces is the president, who is elected to not more than two consecutive five-year terms. The president is elected by a two-thirds majority of the Riigikogu. If no candidate receives two-thirds, the process moves to the Electoral College, made up of the members of Riigikogu and representatives of local government. The Estonian economy is mainly industrial. The dominant branches are the food, timber, textile, and clothing industries, but transportation, wholesaling, retailing, and real estate are also significant. The importance of agriculture is diminishing, but historically it was the most important branch of Estonian economy. The main fields of agriculture are cattle and pig keeping and raising of crops and potatoes. In 2001 there were 85,300 agricultural households in Estonia. The earliest settlements in Estonia date to the Mesolithic Age (9000 B.C.E.). Its Neolithic Age continued from 4900 B.C.E. to 1800 B.C.E., its Bronze Age until 500 B.C.E., and the Iron Age until the beginning of the thirteenth century. After a struggle for independence between 1208 and 1227, Estonia was conquered by the Danes and Germans. It territory was divided between Denmark (Tallinn and northern Estonia), the Teutonic Knights (southwestern Estonia), and the bishoprics of Saare-Lääne


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The Estonian language belongs to the BalticFinnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages of the Uralic language family. The first book in Estonian was printed in 1525. According to the 2000 census, 99.1 percent of Estonians considered Estonian their mother tongue.

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The Estonian constitution separates church and state. According to the census of 2000, there were 152,237 Lutherans (of whom 145,718 were Estonians), 143,557 Orthodox Chrsistians (104,698 of them Russians), 6,009 Baptists, and 5,745 Roman Catholics. Non-Christian religions included Islam (1,387 Muslims), Estonian native religion (1,058), Buddhism (622), and Judaism (257).

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(western Estonia and the islands) and Tartu (southeastern Estonia). In 1346 the Danish crown sold northern Estonia to the Teutonic Order. During the Livonian Wars (1558–1583), Ivan the Terrible invaded Old Livonia (now Estonia and Latvia). The largest of the Estonian islands, Saaremaa, became the property of the Danish king, northern Estonia capitulated to Sweden, and the southern part of present-day Estonia to Poland. By the Truce of Altmark (1629) Poland surrendered southern Estonia to Sweden. In 1645 Sweden obtained Saaremaa from Denmark. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Peter the Great of Russia defeated Charles XII of Sweden in the Great Northern War, and, by the Peace of Nystad (1721), obtained Estonia, which he had occupied in 1710. Between 1816 and 1819, serfdom was abolished in Estonia. This led to an improved economic situation and the cultural development of the Estonian people, who constituted most of the class of peasants by that time. Between 1860 and 1880 there was an Estonian national awakening, the beginning of a modern Estonian nation. Estonians began to publish national newspapers, organized all-Estonian song festivals, and developed literature, education, and the arts. In the late nineteenth century, a wave of Russification,

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initiated by the tsarist government, reached Estonia. Estonian politicians demanded radical political changes during the revolution of 1905, but the Russian authorities responded with repressions. After the February Revolution in Russia, the Provisional Government allowed Estonia’s territorial unification as one province (until then it had been divided into the Estonia and Livonia guberniyas).

Taagepera, Rein. (1993). Estonia: Return to Independence. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

On February 24, 1918, Estonia declared its independence. Its War of Independence (1918–1920) concluded with Soviet Russia recognizing its independence in the Tartu Peace Treaty signed on February 2, 1920. In 1939 the Nazi-Soviet Pact (also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) assigned Estonia to the Soviet sphere of influence. Soviet troops occupied the Estonian Republic in June 1940 and incorporated it into the USSR. During the first year of the Soviet regime, 2,000 Estonian citizens were executed and 19,000 deported, more than half of them in June 1941. During the period 1941–1944, Estonia was occupied by Germany.

ETHIOPIAN CIVIL WAR

At the end of World War II there were nearly 100,000 Estonian refugees in the West. An antiSoviet guerilla movement was active from 1944 through the mid-1950s. In March 1949, during the collectivization campaign, more than 20,000 Estonians were deported to Siberia. Throughout the Soviet period, a directed migration of population from Russia was conducted, mainly into Tallinn and the industrial region of northeastern Estonia. The 1970s and the first half of the 1980s comprised the most intense period of Russification. At the end of the 1980s, a new wave of national awakening began in Estonia, accompanied by political struggle to regain independence. On August 20, 1991, Estonia proclaimed its independence from the Soviet Union, and in September 1991 it was admitted to the United Nations.

See also: GREAT NORTHERN WAR; LATVIA AND LATVIANS; LIVONIAN WAR; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; WORLD WAR II

ART LEETE

The Ethiopian civil war, between the Ethiopian government and nationalists from Eritrea (an Ethiopian province along the Red Sea), has raged off and on and has been tightly interconnected with Ethiopia’s internal political problems and conflict with neighboring Somalia. In the 1880s Italy captured Eritrea. By 1952 Ethiopia regained control, but eight years later, in 1961, Eritrean nationalists demanded independence from Ethiopia. When the Ethiopian government rejected this demand, civil war erupted. The civil war was a symptom of profound changes within Ethiopia, involving a confrontation between traditional and modern forces that changed the nature of the Ethiopian state. The last fourteen years of Haile Selassie’s reign (1960–1974) witnessed growing opposition to his regime. Ethiopians demanded better living conditions for the poor and an end to government corruption. In 1972 and 1973, severe drought led to famine in the northeastern part of Ethiopia. Haile Selassie’s critics claimed that the government ignored victims of the famine. In 1974 Ethiopian military leaders under Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile-Mariam seized the government and removed Haile Selassie from power. The Ogaden region of southeastern Ethiopia also became a trouble spot, beginning in the 1960s. The government of neighboring Somalia claimed the region, which the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik had conquered in the 1890s. Many Somali people had always lived there, and they revolted against Ethiopian rule. In the 1970s fighting broke out between Ethiopia and Somalia over the Ogaden region.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Raun, Toivo U. (2001). Estonia and the Estonians. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

Until then, Ethiopia had enjoyed U.S. support, while the Soviet Union had sided with its rival, Somalia. In fact, in the space of just four years (1974–1978), the USSR concluded a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with Somalia, Ethiopia experienced a revolution in 1974, and the Soviet Union dramatically shifted massive support from Somalia to Ethiopia and then played a key part in

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Clemens, Walter C., Jr. (1991). Baltic Independence and Russian Empire. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Pettai, Vello A. (1996). “Estonia.” In Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania: Country Studies, ed. Walter R. Iwaskiw. Washington, DC: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress.

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the military defeat of its former ally in the Ogaden conflict of 1977–1978. During the conflict, about fifty Soviet ships passed through the Suez Canal to the port of Assab to unload fighter aircraft, tanks, artillery, and munitions—an estimated 60,000 tons of hardware—for delivery to Mengistu’s regime. After the 1974 revolution, the new military government under Mengistu adopted socialist policies and established close relations with the Soviet Union. The government began large-scale land reform, breaking up huge estates of the former nobility. The government claimed ownership of this land and turned it into farmland. But the military leaders also killed many of their Ethiopian opponents, further alienating former U.S. supporters who opposed the human rights abuses. Eritrean rebels stepped up their separatist efforts after the 1974 revolution. Mengistu’s regime invaded rebel-held Eritrea several times, but failed to regain control. Ethiopia’s conflict with Eritrea also had a strong East-West dimension. The Soviet Union, along with some Arab states, advocated complete independence for Eritrea. In a speech to the United Nations, the Soviet delegate rejected the federalist compromise solution advocated by the United States, claiming that the Eritrean people had not given their consent. Soviet scholars also backed Ethiopia’s claim to Eritrea on both historical and economic grounds. They noted that the Soviet Union had favored Ethiopian access to the Eritrean port of Assab as early as 1946. Despite an influx of Soviet military aid after 1977, Mengistu’s counterinsurgency effort in Eritrea progressed slowly. Talks between the two sides continued well into the 1980s. The war ended in 1991 with Eritrea’s independence; however, conflict between the two countries persisted for more than a decade. In June 2000, the two countries signed a cessation of hostilities agreement, and a United Nations peacekeeping force of more than 4,300 military personnel was dispatched later that year. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Albright, David E. (1980). Communism in Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Feuchtwanger, E. J., and Nailor, Peter. (1981). The Soviet Union and the Third World. New York: St. Martin’sPress. Human Rights Watch Organization. (2003). Eritrea and Ethiopia: The Horn of Africa War: Mass Expulsions and the Nationality Issue, June 1998–April 2002. New York: Human Rights Watch.


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Korn, David A. (1986). Ethiopia, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. JOHANNA GRANVILLE

ETHNOGRAPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET Russian ethnography took shape as a distinct field of scholarship in the mid-nineteenth century, but the creation of ethnographic knowledge in Russia dates back at least to Kievan Rus. The Russian Primary Chronicle abounds with information about Slavic tribes and neighboring peoples, while later medieval and early modern Russian writings provide accounts of the peoples of Siberia and the Far North. It was only in the period following the reforms of Peter the Great (d. 1725), however, that the population of the empire was studied using explicitly scientific methods. In the 1730s Vasily Tatishchev disseminated Russia’s first ethnographic survey, thereby legitimizing the notion of peoples and their cultures as objects of systematic scientific inquiry. From the 1730s to the 1770s the Russian Academy of Sciences sponsored two major expeditions dedicated to the study of the empire. Led by Gerhard Friedrich Miller and Peter Pallas, the academic expeditions covered a vast expanse from Siberia to the Caucasus to the Far North and, drawing on the talents of numerous dedicated scholars, amassed an enormous amount of ethnographic information and physical artifacts. But for all their achievements as ethnographers, eighteenth-century scholars viewed the study of cultural diversity as merely one component of a broadly defined natural science. FOLKLORE AND THE SEARCH FOR NATIONAL IDENTITY

During the last decades of the eighteenth century Russian scholars began to turn their attention to folklore. Publishers of folk songs in the 1790s, such as Mikhail Popov and Nikolai Lvov, claimed that their collections were of value not only for entertainment but also as relics of ancient times and as sources of insight into the national spirit. By 1820 several significant folklore collections had appeared, including the Kirsha Danilov collection of folk epics, and the first efforts to collect folklore among the common people had begun under the patronage of Count Nikolai Rumiantsev. As Russian intellectuals struggled in the 1820s to define narodnost, the

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The Caucasus region is one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the former Russian empire. © MAPS.COM/CORBIS

national spirit, they turned increasingly to folklore for inspiration. Peter Kireyevsky assembled the largest folk song collection, drawing on an extensive network of contributors, including Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and other prominent writers. While Kireyevsky’s songs were not published during his lifetime, other folklorists in the 1830s and 1840s, such as Ivan Snegarev, Ivan Sakharov, Vladimir Dal, and Alexander Tereshchenko, put out collections that enjoyed considerable success with the reading public despite their often dubious authenticity.

ETHNOGRAPHY AS A DISCIPLINE

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Geographic exploration and folklore, the two main branches of ethnographic research up to this point, came together in the Ethnographic Division of the Russian Geographical Society, the founding of which in 1845 marks the emergence of ethnography as a distinct academic field. In its first years the society considered two well-developed conceptions of ethnography as a scholarly discipline. The eminent scientist Karl Ernst von Baer proposed that the Ethnographic Division study primarily the smaller and less-developed populations of the em-

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pire, paying particular attention to the role of environment and heredity. In contrast, Nikolai Nadezhdin, a well-known editor, literary critic, and historian, advocated a science of nationality dedicated to describing the full range of cultural, intellectual, and physical features that make up national identity. First priority, he felt, should go to the study of the Russian people. After replacing Baer as chair of the Ethnographic Division in 1847, Nadezhdin launched a major survey of the Russian provinces based on a specially designed questionnaire. The materials generated were published by the Ethnographic Division in its journal Ethnographic Anthology (Etnografichesky sbornik), the first periodical in Russian specifically devoted to ethnography, and were used for several major collections of Russian folklore. In the 1860s a second major center of ethnographic study arose in Moscow with the founding of the Society of Friends of Natural History, Anthropology, and Ethnography (known by its Russian initials, OLEAE). Dedicated explicitly to the popularization of science, the society inaugurated its ethnographic endeavors in 1867 with a major exhibition representing most of the peoples of the Russian Empire as well as neighboring Slavic nationalities. During the 1860s and 1870s ethnographic studies in Russia flourished and diversified. The Russian Geographical Society in St. Petersburg and OLEAE in Moscow sponsored expeditions, subsidized the work of provincial scholars, and published major ethnographic works. At the same time regional schools began to take root, particularly in Siberia and Ukraine. Landmark collections appeared in folklore studies, such as Alexander Afanasev’s folktales, Vladimir Dal’s proverbs and dictionary, Kireevsky’s folksongs, and Pavel Rybnikov’s folk epics (byliny). As new texts accumulated, scholars such as Fedor Buslaev, Alexander Veselovsky, Vsevolod Miller, and Alexander Pypin developed sophisticated methods of analysis that drew on European comparative philology, setting in place a distinctive tradition of Russian folklore studies. The abolition of serfdom in 1861 sparked an upsurge of interest in peasant life and customary law. Nikolai Kalachov, Peter Efimenko, Alexandra Efimenko, and S.V. Pakhman undertook major studies of customary law among Russian and nonRussian peasants, while the Russian Geographical Society formed a special commission on the topic in the 1870s and generated data through the dissemination of a large survey. The vast literature on


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customary law was cataloged and summarized by Yevgeny Iakushkin in a three-volume bibliography. Alongside the study of customary law, ethnographers probed peasant social organization, with emphasis on the redistributional land commune. THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF ETHNOGRAPHY

While ethnographers in the 1860s through the 1880s produced an enormous quantity of important work, the boundaries and methods of ethnography as a discipline remained fluid and ill-defined. Not only did ethnography overlap with a number of other pursuits, such as philology, history, legal studies, and belle-lettres, but the field itself was distinctly under-theorized—descriptive studies were pursued as an end in themselves, with little attempt to integrate the data generated into broader theoretical schemes. During the 1880s and 1890s, however, ethnography began to establish itself on a more solid academic footing. New journals appeared, most notably the Ethnographic Review (Etnograficheskoe obozrenie) distributed by OLEAE and the Russian Geographical Society’s Living Antiquity (Zhivaia starina). Instruction in ethnography, albeit rather haphazard, began to appear at the major universities. Museum ethnography also moved forward with the transformation, under the direction of Vasily Radlov, of the old Kunstkamara in St. Petersburg into a Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, and the founding around the turn of the twentieth century of the Ethnographic Division of the Russian Museum. By the 1890s theoretical influences from Western Europe, particularly anthropological evolutionism, had begun to exert a stronger influence on Russian scholars. Nikolai Kharuzin, a prominent young Moscow ethnographer, made evolutionist theory the centerpiece of his textbook on ethnography, the first of its kind in Russia. In the field, Lev Shternberg, a political exile turned ethnographer, claimed to find among the Giliak people (Nivkhi) of Sakhalin Island confirmation of the practice of group marriage as postulated by the evolutionist theorist Henry Lewis Morgan and Friedrich Engels. With the growing theoretical influence of Western anthropology came increased contacts. Shternberg and his fellow exiles Vladimir Bogoraz-Tan and Vladimir Iokhelson participated in the Jessup North Pacific Expedition sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History in New York under the direction of Franz Boas. Upon his return from exile, Shternberg was hired by Radlov

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of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in St. Petersburg, and made use of his friendship with Boas to cultivate a fruitful collaboration with the museum in New York. SOVIET PERIOD

The Russian Revolution presented both opportunities and dangers for the field of ethnography. On the eve of the February Revolution of 1917 a Commission for the Study of the Ethnic Composition of the Borderlands (KIPS) was established under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences. While initially established to aid the Russian effort in World War I, KIPS found a niche under the Bolshevik regime, which welcomed the collaboration of ethnographers in coping with the immense ethnic diversity of the Soviet state. During the 1920s KIPS ethnographers played a major role in defining the ethnic composition of the Soviet Union. The 1920s also saw the emergence of the first comprehensive programs of professional training in ethnography at Leningrad and Moscow universities. In the late 1920s, however, “bourgeois” ethnography became a target of attack by radical Marxist activists. After a dramatic confrontation in April 1929, key ethnographic institutions were disbanded and ethnography itself was reclassified as a subfield of history devoted exclusively to the study of prehistoric peoples. Nevertheless ethnographers such as Sergei Tokarev and Nina Gagin-Torn continued to produce substantive scholarly works during the 1930s, while others collaborated with state institutions in conducting censuses and resolving practical issues of nationality policy. Soviet ethnographers and anthropologists were also called upon to repudiate Nazi racial ideology. Like many other fields, ethnography was badly shaken by the trials and purges of the 1930s. By the end of the decade many leading ethnographers had been executed or imprisoned in the gulag. After World War II Soviet ethnography revived. Sergei Tolstov of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow was instrumental in drawing together a cadre of talented scholars, revitalizing professional training, and regaining for the field the autonomous status it had previously enjoyed. By the 1960s Soviet ethnography was a thriving profession whose central and local institutions produced a wealth of publications, sponsored numerous expeditions, and trained large numbers of talented students. Ideological constraints persisted, however, as ethnographers were often called upon to document a priori the successes of soviet nationality policy. As a rule

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ethnographers were expected to show a stark contrast between a dark past and a present tarnished in places by lingering survivals but well on the way toward the bright communist future. Rather than confront the exigencies of the present day, however, many ethnographers chose to linger in the past. Much of the most substantive work produced in the 1950s and 1960s was historical in nature, with the topic of ethnogenesis, or the origins of peoples, enjoying particular popularity. The 1970s, however, brought a renewed emphasis on contemporary ethnic processes. Yuly Bromlei, director of the Institute of Ethnography in Moscow, put forth his theory of ethnos, which attempted to show how ethnicity continued to be a vital force even as the peoples of the Soviet Union drew together (sblizhenie) in a process that would ultimately lead to their merging (slyanie) into a new form of human collectivity—the Soviet nation. Bromlei’s theory remained the guiding doctrine of the field through the 1980s as social processes, such as intermarriage, geographical mobility, and bilingualism seemed to support the model of the merging of the peoples. However, much of the practical work of ethnographers, particularly on the local level, had the effect of solidifying and reinforcing the symbolic attributes of ethnic consciousness. The flowering of ethnic nationalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s took place on ground well prepared by the work of Soviet ethnographers.

See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; BYLINA; FOLKLORE; FOLK MUSIC; PRIMARY CHRONICLE; NATION AND NATIONALITY; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES

POLICIES,

TSARIST;

RUSSIAN

GEOGRAPHICAL

SOCIETY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grant, Bruce. (1995). In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hirsch, Francine. (1997). “The Soviet Union as a Workin-Progress: Ethnographers and the Category ‘Nationality’ in the 1926, 1937 and 1939 Censuses.” Slavic Review 52(2):251–278. Knight, Nathaniel. (1998). “Science, Empire and Nationality: Ethnography in the Russian Geographical Society, 1845–1855.” In Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, ed. Jane Burbank and David Ransel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Knight, Nathaniel. (1999). “Ethnicity, Nationality and the Masses: Narodnost and Modernity in Imperial Russia.” In Russian Modernity, ed. David Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis. New York: Macmillan/St. Martin’s.


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Slezkine, Yuri. (1994). Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. NATHANIEL KNIGHT

EVENKI The Evenki are the most geographically wideranging native people of Russia, occupying a territory from west of the Yenisey River to the Pacific Ocean, and from near the Arctic Ocean to northern China. One of Russia’s northern peoples, they number about thirty thousand. Traditionally many Evenki pursued hunting, using small herds of domesticated reindeer mainly for transport and milk. Some groups focused more on fishing, whereas in northerly areas larger-scale reindeer husbandry was pursued. Largely nomadic, Evenki lived in groups of a few households, gathering annually in larger groups to trade news and goods, arrange marriages, and so forth. The Evenki language is part of the ManchuTungus language group. Its four dialects differ substantially, a fact ignored by the soviets when they introduced Evenki textbooks based on the central dialect, which were barely intelligible to those in the East. Evenki cosmology includes a number of worlds; and their shamans negotiate between these worlds. Indeed, the word shaman derives from the Evenki samanil, their name for such spiritual leaders. Shamans were severely repressed during the Soviet period; the possibility of revitalizing shamanism proved a common trope for cultural revival among Evenki in early post-Soviet years. Russian traders began to penetrate Evenki homelands in the mid-seventeenth century. Prior to this, southern Evenki had carried on trade relations with the Chinese. Russians subjected Evenki to a fur tax (yasak), and held hostages to ensure its payment. The Soviet government brought new forms of con-


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trol, organizing Evenki into collective farms, arresting rich herders, and settling nomads to the extent possible. Families were often sundered, as adults remained with the reindeer herds while children attended compulsory school. Children were not taught their own language or how to pursue traditional activities. Inadequate schooling, racism, and apathy have hindered their ability to pursue nontraditional activities. In some areas, mining and smelting have removed substantial pastures and hunting grounds through environmental degradation. Hydropower projects have also challenged traditional activities by appropriating portions of Evenki territory. Since the demise of the Soviet Union, Evenki reindeer herds have suffered serious decline. At the same time substantial numbers of families took the opportunity provided by new laws to leave stateowned farms and establish small, family based hunting and herding operations. However, lack of government support has made the survival of these enterprises almost impossible. Evenki are battling this predicament through the establishment of quasipolitical organizations, mainly at the regional level, to pursue their rights.

See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; NORTHERN PEOPLES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, David. (2000). “The Evenkis of Central Siberia.” In Endangered Peoples of the Arctic. Struggles to Survive and Thrive, ed. Milton M. Freeman. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Anderson, David. (2000). Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia. The Number One Reindeer Brigade. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fondahl, Gail. (1998). Gaining Ground? Evenkis, Land, and Reform in Southeastern Siberia. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. GAIL A. FONDAHL

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FABERGÉ, PETER CARL (1846–1920), jeweler to the Russian imperial court; creator of the stunning Easter eggs, holiday gifts to Nicholas II and his family. Peter Carl Fabergé was born in 1846 in St. Petersburg, the son of a master goldsmith. The French surname of the future jeweler derives from his family’s Huguenot background; they left France during the seventeenth century, moving eastward from Germany to the Baltic before settling in Russia. Peter Carl, also called Carl Gustavovich in keeping with the Russian patronymic tradition, was educated in the local German-language school and later attended commercial courses at the Dresden Handelsschule. The combination of his astonishing craftsmanship and cosmopolitanism gave him entry to all European royal houses. In 1861 young Carl set out on his requisite Grand Tour of the continent. He developed an abiding interest in renaissance and baroque designs and was especially influenced by the French rococo of the eighteenth century. His mastery of fine detail and ability to work in a variety of precious metals and jewels, including hardstone carving, contributed to his unique style Fabergé. In addition to his legendary eggs, whose matching of the delicacy of fine jewelry with technological innovations was epitomized by the miniature Trans-Siberian train that chugged through one of them, his oeuvre ranged from carved animals to icons to cigarette cases. His clients, primarily from the pan-European aristocracy, knew that he could be trusted not to repeat the specific designs they requested.

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Fabergé matched his exquisite style with a finely honed business acumen. From his renowned establishment in St. Petersburg on Bolshaya Morskaya Street, he published catalogs of his objets d’art. Employing the finest craftsmen, he expanded his enterprise to Moscow, drawing the attention of serious art collectors from Bangkok to Boston; special exhibitions held around the world continue to attract by the thousands. He left Russia in 1918 and died in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1920. Fabergé lies buried alongside his wife in Cannes.

See also:

FRENCH INFLUENCE IN RUSSIA; ST. PETERSBURG

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Von Habsburg, Géza. (2000). Fabergé: Imperial Craftsman and his World, with contributions by Alexander Von

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Solodkoff and Robert Bianchi. London: Booth-Clibborn Editions.

See also:

FAMILY CODE ON MARRIAGE, THE FAMILY, AND

GUARDIANSHIP; FAMILY EDICT OF 1944; FAMILY LAWS OF 1936; MARRIAGE AND FAMILY LIFE

LOUISE MCREYNOLDS BIBLIOGRAPHY

FAMILY CODE OF 1926 In 1926 the Soviet government affirmed a new Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship to replace the 1918 version. Adopted after extensive and often heated nationwide debate, the new Code addressed several social issues: the lack of protection for women after divorce; the large number of homeless orphans (besprizorniki); the incompatibility of divorce and common property within the peasant household; and the mutual obligations of cohabiting, unmarried partners. The new Code promoted both individual freedom and greater protection for the vulnerable. It simplified the divorce procedure in the 1918 version even further by transferring contested divorces from the courts to local statistical bureaus. Either spouse could register a divorce without the partner’s consent or even knowledge. This provision removed the law’s last vestige of authority over the dissolution of marriage, circumscribing both the power of law and the marital tie. The Code recognized de facto marriage (cohabitation) as the juridical equal of civil (registered) marriage, thus undercutting the need to marry “legally.” It provided a definition of de facto “marriage” based on cohabitation, a joint household, mutual upbringing of children, and third party recognition. It established joint property between spouses, thus providing housewives material protection after divorce. It abolished the controversial practice of “collective” paternity featured in the 1918 Family Code. If a woman had sexual relations with several men and could not identify the father of her child, a judge would assign paternity (and future child support payments) to one man only. The Code incorporated an April 1926 decree that reversed the prohibition on adoption and encouraged peasant families to adopt homeless orphans, who were to be fully integrated into the peasant household and entitled to land. It set a time limit on alimony to one year for the disabled and provided six months of alimony for the needy or unemployed. It also created a wider circle of family obligations by expanding the base of alimony recipients to include children, parents, siblings, and grandparents.

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Farnsworth, Beatrice. (1978). “Bolshevik Alternatives and the Soviet Family: The 1926 Marriage Law Debate.” In Women in Russia, eds. Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin, Gail Warshovsky Lapidus. Sussex, UK: Harvester Press. Goldman, Wendy. (1984). “Freedom and Its Consequences: The Debate on the Soviet Family Code of 1926.” Russian History 11(4):362–388. Goldman, Wendy. (1991). “Working-Class Women and the ‘Withering-Away’ of the Family: Popular Responses to Family Policy.” In Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, eds. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, Richard Stites. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lapidus, Gail Warshovsky. (1978). Women in Soviet Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Quigley, John. (1979). “The 1926 Soviet Family Code: Retreat from Free Love.” Soviet Union 6(2):166–74. WENDY GOLDMAN

FAMILY CODE ON MARRIAGE, THE FAMILY, AND GUARDIANSHIP The Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets ratified the Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship in October 1918, one year after the Bolsheviks took power. Alexander Goikhbarg, the young author of the Code, expected that family law would soon be outmoded and “the fetters of husband and wife” unnecessary. Goikhbarg and other revolutionary jurists believed children, the elderly, and the disabled would be supported under socialism by the state; housework would be socialized and waged; and women would no longer be economically dependent on men. The family, stripped of its social functions, would “wither away,” replaced by “free unions” based on mutual love and respect. The Code aimed to provide a transitional legal framework for that short period in which legal duties and protections were still necessary. Prerevolutionary jurists had attempted throughout the late nineteenth century to reform Russia’s strict laws on marriage and divorce, but achieved little success. Up to 1917, Russian law recognized


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the right of religious authorities to control marriage and divorce. Women were accorded few rights by either church or state. According to state law, a wife owed her husband complete obedience. She was compelled to live with him, take his name, and assume his social status. Up to 1914, a woman was unable to take a job, get an education, or execute a bill of exchange without her husband’s consent. A father held almost unconditional power over his children. Only children from a legally recognized marriage were considered legitimate, and illegitimate children had no legal rights or recourse. Up to 1902, when the state enacted limited reforms, a father could recognize an illegitimate child only by special imperial consent. The Russian Orthodox Church considered marriage a holy sacrament, and divorce was almost impossible. It was permissible only in cases of adultery (witnessed by two people), impotence, exile, or unexplained and prolonged absence. In cases of adultery or impotence, the responsible party was permanently forbidden to remarry. The 1918 Code swept away centuries of patriarchal and ecclesiastical power and established a new vision based on individual rights and gender equality. It was predated by two brief decrees enacted in December 1917 that substituted civil for religious marriage and established divorce at the request of either spouse. The 1918 Code incorporated and elaborated on these two decrees. It abolished the inferior legal status of women and created equality under the law. It eliminated the validity of religious marriage and gave legal status to civil marriage only, creating a network of local statistical bureaus (ZAGS) for the registration of marriage, divorce, birth, and death. The Code established no-grounds divorce at the request of either spouse. It abolished the juridical concept of “illegitimacy” and entitled all children to parental support. If a woman could not identify the father of her child, a judge assigned paternal obligations to all the men she had sexual relations with, thus creating a “collective of fathers.” It forbade adoption of orphans by individual families in favor of state guardianship: jurists feared adoption, in a largely agrarian society, would allow peasants to exploit children as unpaid labor. The Code also sharply restricted the duties and obligations of the marital bond. Marriage did not create community of property between spouses: a woman retained full control of her earnings after marriage, and neither spouse had any claim on the property of the other. Although the Code provided an unlimited term of alimony for either gender, support was


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limited to the disabled poor. The Code presumed that both spouses, married or divorced, would support themselves. The 1918 Code was very advanced for its time. Comparable legislation on equal rights and divorce would not be passed in Europe or the United States until the end of the twentieth century. Yet many Soviet jurists believed that the Code was not “socialist” but “transitional” legislation. Goikhbarg, like many revolutionary jurists, expected that law, like marriage, the family, and the state, would soon “wither away.” The Code had a significant effect on the population, both rural and urban. By 1925, Soviet citizens had widely adopted civil marriage and divorce. The USSR displayed a higher divorce rate than any European country, with fifteen divorces for every one hundred marriages. The divorce rate was higher in the cities than in the rural areas, and highest in Moscow and Leningrad. In Moscow, there was one divorce for every two marriages. Soviet workers, women in particular, suffered high unemployment during the 1920s, and divorce proved a special hardship for women who were unable to find work. Peasant families found it difficult to reconcile customary law with the autonomous property provisions of the Code. After extensive debate, Soviet jurists enacted a new Family Code in 1926 to redress these and other problems.

See also:

FAMILY CODE OF 1926; FAMILY EDICT OF 1944,

FAMILY LAWS OF 1936; MARRIAGE AND FAMILY LIFE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berman, Harold. (1963). Justice in the USSR: An Interpretation of Soviet Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goldman, Wendy. (1993). Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy, 1917–1936. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hazard, John. (1969). Communists and Their Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stites, Richard. (1978). The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism, 1860–1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wood, Elizabeth. (1997). The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. WENDY GOLDMAN

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FAMILY EDICT OF 1944 This decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet claimed to “protect motherhood and childhood.” Amid deep concern for wartime manpower losses and social dislocation, the decree sought to increase natality and reinforce marriage. The law’s best–known provisions rewarded prolific mothers and made divorce more difficult to obtain; its pro–natalism and support for marriage reinforced prewar trends apparent in the Family Laws of 1936. Pro–natalist measures included family allowances paid to mothers regardless of marital status, extended maternity leave, protective labor legislation for pregnant and nursing women, and an ambitious plan to expand the network of childcare services and consumer products for children. Bearers of ten or more living children were honored as “Mother–heroines.” Other provisions tightened marital bonds by making divorce more onerous. Proceedings now took place in open court, with both parties present and the court obligated to attempt reconciliation. The intent to divorce was published in the newspaper, and fines increased substantially. Reversing the 1926 Family Code, only registered (not common–law) marriages were now officially recognized. The state also reestablished the notion of illegitimacy: only children of registered marriages could take their father’s name and receive paternal child support. The legislation had no significant lasting effect on birth or divorce rates. Despite its ambitious goals, promises of augmented childcare services and consumer goods went unfulfilled, given postwar economic devastation and prioritization of defense and heavy industries. The law’s greatest significance was perhaps as a manifestation of the ongoing Soviet effort to imbue private life with public priorities.

See also:

FAMILY CODE OF 1926; FAMILY CODE ON MARRIAGE, THE FAMILY, AND GUARDIANSHIP; FAMILY LAWS OF 1936

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bucher, Greta. (2000). “Struggling to Survive: Soviet Women in the Postwar Years.” Journal of Women’s History 12(1):137–159. Field, Deborah. (1998). “Irreconcilable Differences: Divorce and Conceptions of Private Life in the Khrushchev Era.” Russian Review 57(4):599–613. REBECCA BALMAS NEARY

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FAMILY LAWS OF 1936 In 1936, the Soviet state enacted several laws that sharply departed from previous legislation. The Soviet Union had been the first country in the world to legalize abortion in 1920, offering women free abortion services in certified hospitals. In 1936, however, the Central Executive Committee outlawed abortion. Anyone who performed the operation was liable to a minimum of two years in prison, and a woman who received an abortion was subject to high fines after the first offense. The new law offered monetary incentives for childbearing, providing stipends for new mothers, progressive bonuses for women with many children, and longer maternity leave for white-collar workers. The criminalization of abortion reflected growing anxiety among health workers, managers, and state officials over the rising number of abortions, the falling birth rate, the shortage of labor, and the possibility of war. The law also made divorce more difficult and stiffened criminal penalties for men who refused to pay alimony or child support. It required both spouses to appear to register a divorce and increased costs for the first divorce to fifty rubles, 150 rubles for the second, and three hundred rubles for the third. It set minimum levels for child support at one–third of a defendant’s salary for one child, fifty percent for two children, and sixty percent for three or more, increasing the penalty for nonpayment to two years in prison. The law was part of a longer and larger public campaign to promote “family responsibility” and to reverse almost two decades of revolutionary juridical thinking. In April 1935, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) granted the courts sweeping new powers to try and sentence children aged twelve and older as adults; this resulted in mass arrests and imprisonment of teenagers, mostly for petty theft. In May 1935 the local Commissions on the Affairs of Minors were abolished, and responsibility for all juvenile crime was shifted to the courts. Punishment replaced an earlier commitment to pedagogical correction. The 1936 laws also marked a turn in attitudes toward law and family. Jurists condemned as “legal nihilism” earlier notions that the law and the family would “wither away.” Many legal theorists of the


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1920s, including Yevgeny Pashukanis and Nikolai Krylenko, were arrested and shot.

See also:

FAMILY CODE OF 1926; FAMILY CODE ON MAR-

RIAGE, THE FAMILY, AND GUARDIANSHIP; FAMILY EDICT OF 1944

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Goldman, Wendy. (1991). “Women, Abortion, and the State, 1917–1936.” In Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, eds. Barbara Clements, Barbara Engel, Christine Worobec. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goldman, Wendy. (1993). Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sharlet, Robert. (1984). “Pashukanis and the WitheringAway of Law in the USSR.” In Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–31, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Korolenko and others—rushed into the countryside on their own initiative, setting up a large network of private soup kitchens and medical aid stations. The relief campaign was remarkably successful. More than 12 million people received aid, and starvation was largely averted. Mortality for 1892 rose in the sixteen famine provinces—about 400,000 deaths above normal—much of it due to a simultaneous cholera epidemic. But compared to contemporary Indian and later Soviet famines, this loss of life was minimal. Still, the famine aroused public opinion. Many blamed the government’s economic policies for causing the disaster, and its relief efforts were often unfairly criticized. Consequently, the famine proved to be an important turning point in Russian history, beginning a new wave of opposition to the tsarist regime.

See also:

FAMINE OF 1921–1922; FAMINE OF 1932–1933;

FAMINE OF 1946

WENDY GOLDMAN BIBLIOGRAPHY

Robbins, Richard G., Jr. (1975). Famine in Russia, 1891–1892: The Imperial Government Responds to a Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press.

FAMINE OF 1891–1892 The famine of 1891–1892 was one of the most severe agricultural crises to strike Russia during the nineteenth century. In the spring of 1891 a serious drought caused crops to fail along the Volga and in many other grain-producing provinces. The disaster came on the heels of a series of poor harvests, its impact worsened by endemic peasant poverty and low productivity. The population of the affected areas had few reserves of food and faced the prospect of mass starvation. Beginning in the summer of 1891, the imperial Russian government organized an extensive relief campaign. It disbursed almost 150 million rubles to the stricken provinces, working closely with the zemstvos, institutions of local selfgovernment responsible for aiding victims of food shortages. The ministry of internal affairs established food supply conferences to coordinate government and zemstvo efforts to find and distribute available grain supplies. When massive backlogs of grain shipments snarled the railroads and threatened the timely delivery of food, the government dispatched a special agent to remedy the situation. The heir to the throne, the future Nicholas II, chaired a committee designed to encourage and focus charitable efforts. Many public-spirited Russians—Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir


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Simms, James Y., Jr. (1977). “The Crisis of Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Different View.” Slavic Review 36:377–398. Wheatcroft, S.G. (1992). “The 1891–92 Famine in Russia: Toward a More Detailed Analysis of its Scale and Demographic Significance.” In Economy and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1860–1930: Essays for Olga Crisp, eds. Linda Edmondson and Peter Waldron. New York: St. Martin’s Press. RICHARD G. ROBBINS JR.

FAMINE OF 1921–1922 This devastating famine, comparable only to that of 1932 and 1933, most seriously affected the Volga provinces, Ukraine, and the Urals, and to a lesser extent several other regions, from late 1920 to mid-1923. At its peak in the summer of 1922, some thirty million people were starving (statistics from this period are uncertain), in towns as well as villages. One of the largest relief efforts in history, including foreign and Soviet agencies, reached most of these people despite enormous logistical and ideological obstacles. Severe droughts in 1920 and especially 1921, as well as locusts and other natural disasters, most

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directly caused the famine. One-fourth of the crops failed overall, and many other areas had low yields. Agrarian developments during World War I and the Civil War also contributed to the crisis. The peasants’ subdivision of landlord estates, the collapse of industrial production, and massive inflation led increasing numbers of peasants to orient production toward subsistence. From 1918 to 1920, many peasants sold or bartered food to townspeople despite Bolshevik efforts against private trade, but these sales declined because of requisitions by tsarist and provisional governments, the German-Austrian occupation in Ukraine, and the White armies and Bolsheviks, which depleted peasants’ grain reserves. With insufficient seed, draft forces, and deteriorating equipment, peasants in 1921 succeeded in planting only two-thirds to three-fourths of the cropland farmed prior to the wars and much less in some regions. Yet even this would not have caused the disaster that occurred without the droughts of 1920 and 1921. The Bolshevik government responded to the 1920 drought by ceasing requisitions from the central provinces and, in February 1921, by forming a commission for aiding agriculture in the affected regions, distributing food relief and seed, and importing grain. By late May 1921 it was clear that the country was in the midst of a second drought even more severe than that of 1920. Peasants resorted to eating weeds and other food surrogates, and cannibalism, trying to save their seed for the fall planting. Thousands of peasants fled from famine districts to Ukraine and other regions, often with government assistance, which sometimes spread famine conditions. During the summer of 1921, the Bolshevik government distributed limited seed and food relief to famine regions, often by curtailing rationed supplies to towns, and appealed for food relief at home and abroad. Many groups responded. The International Red Cross set up an International Committee for Russian Relief, under the leadership of Fridtjof Nansen. Other agencies offering help included the International Committee of Workers’ Aid, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

gress to allocate $20 million for food supplies; these were shipped and distributed in a “corn campaign,” conducted from January to August of 1922, which had to overcome the catastrophic disrepair of the railroads and the incompetence and ideologically motivated resistance of some local and central government officials. By the summer of 1921, some eleven million people received food from foreign relief agencies. The ARA also organized medical aid and international food remittances, many sent to Ukraine. In October ARA personnel went to Ukraine and found famine conditions that the Moscow Bolsheviks had not mentioned, as well as a Ukrainian government that refused to accept the Riga agreement. Only after negotiations in December was Ukraine brought into the relief effort. The ARA and other groups also provided medical aid that reached more people than the food relief. By the summer of 1922, Soviet government food relief had reached some five million people in the Volga, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Many ordinary Soviet citizens also contributed to famine relief. Soviet and foreign seed aid supported a 1922 harvest. Although grown on an area about 20 percent smaller than that of 1921, the 1922 harvest was much larger than that of the previous year because normal rainfall had returned. Still, famine conditions continued in many regions and especially among abandoned children (besprizorniki). The ARA continued relief into mid-1923 against intrusive Soviet efforts to limit its operations. A few small relief programs continued, but the 1923 harvest basically ended the famine. Estimates of famine mortality vary, with the most widely accepted being five million deaths, most resulting from typhus and other epidemics spread by refugees. So vast was the famine that the combined relief efforts at their peak in the summer of 1922 encompassed at most two-thirds of famine victims, despite substantial imports. The ARA imported some 740,000 tons of food; the Bolshevik government supplied more than one million tons of grain.

By far most aid came from the American Relief Administration (ARA), headed by Herbert Hoover. In the Riga agreement of August 1921, the Bolsheviks allowed the ARA to distribute its own relief. Investigation of the Volga region led the ARA to attempt to aid as many people as possible until the 1922 harvest. Hoover persuaded the U.S. Con-

The famine weakened armed resistance to the Bolshevik regime, and some argue that this was intentionally manipulated. It also, however, delayed national economic recovery for at least two years. The fact that Vladimir Lenin and other Soviet leaders agreed (however ambivalently) to foreign relief indicated a fundamental shift in their attitude toward the peasants and their orientation toward pri-

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vate production. This shift was reflected in the New Economic Policy of 1921, which legalized free trade and abolished the requisition policies of the Civil War and in the regime’s food imports during famines in 1924 and 1928. The 1921 famine also convinced Soviet leaders that Soviet agriculture needed significant modernization, which underlay the decision to collectivize agriculture nine years later.

See also:

AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION; FAMINE OF

1891–1892; FAMINE OF 1932–1933; FAMINE OF 1946

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Edmondson, Charles M. (1977). “The Politics of Hunger: The Soviet Response to Famine, 1921.” Soviet Studies XXIX (4):506–518. Patenaude, Bertrand M. (2002). The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. MARK B. TAUGER

FAMINE OF 1932–1933 The famine began in the winter of 1931 and 1932, peaked between the fall of 1932 and the summer of 1933, and subsided with the 1933 harvest. Mortality was highest in rural areas of Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the central and southern Volga Basin, but increased in most rural and even urban areas. The famine affected all of Soviet society. Not only peasants, but also industrial workers and other townspeople desperately sought to supplement their inadequate food rations. Officials and managers responsible for production, transport, and distribution faced disastrous labor conditions from the subsistence crisis. The OGPU (Soviet security police), grain procurement agencies, and Soviet leaders, in their efforts to obtain grain and other supplies from the villages at all costs, minimized or ignored the pleas and starving conditions of the peasants. The causes of the famine are disputed. The conventional view, that it was a human-made famine imposed by Joseph Stalin on Ukraine and certain other regions to suppress nationalist opposition, has been challenged. Conclusive new evidence shows that the harvests of 1931 and especially


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1932 were much smaller than claimed by the Soviet government or later memoir and eyewitness accounts, that they were reduced by natural disasters, and that famine mortality was not limited to specific national regions or even to rural areas. New sources also show that the regime had inadequate reserves yet provided peasants limited famine relief, including relief from imported sources, in addition to supplying more than forty million people in towns, the army, and others on the rationing system in 1932-1933. The famine developed in the wake of collectivization campaigns in 1930 and 1931 that reorganized most villages into collective or state farms. By this means the regime sought to increase food production and procurement to feed towns and industrial sites, which were growing rapidly because of the First Five-Year Plan and were dependent on government rationing systems, and to export in order to earn hard currency for purchases of producer goods. Collectivization allowed procurement agencies to obtain substantially more grain from the villages than during the 1920s, even considering what the peasants would have sold voluntarily. This left many peasants short of food as early as 1930. A drought in 1931 in the Volga region, Ukraine, the Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere reduced the harvest drastically. Yet the authorities procured more from this harvest than from that of 1930 (22.8 million tons vs. 22.1 million tons), often taking the last reserves from many farms. Peasants were left in desperate circumstances, and their mortality increased. Hundreds of thousands fled the drought regions seeking food. Soviet leaders acknowledged the drought and returned grain to farms for food and seed. They introduced new labor organization rules in the collective farms to reduce evasion of responsibility for farm work. Laws in May 1932 legalized private trade in food products in an effort to increase production and improve urban food supplies. Unfortunately, 1932 was worse than 1931. Weakened by starvation and often resentful of procurements and collectivization, some peasants worked poorly or not at all. The new labor system encountered confusion and resistance and often had little effect. Crops were planted later than in previous years and with less seed. A complex of natural disasters— drought, heavy rains, infestations, soil exhaustion— drastically reduced the harvest. Yet agricultural and statistical authorities minimized or overlooked these problems and projected output matching or even exceeding that of 1931.

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The harvest shortfall became evident early: July procurements were only 470,000 tons compared to 950,000 tons in July 1931. Statistical and OGPU reports convinced Stalin and other Soviet leaders that the 1932 harvest was normal and that procurements collapsed because peasants withheld grain from procurements to sell on the free market at astronomical prices and because local officials mismanaged procurements. The leadership changed its approach from incentives to extreme coercion in procurements and distribution. One part of this shift was the decree of August 7 that imposed harsh penalties for “theft of socialist property.” In the following year, in the Russian republic alone, more than 200,000 people were arrested and more than 8,000 executed under this law. Simultaneously, the authorities conducted an intensive procurement campaign that lasted into the spring of 1933 in some regions. Procurement agents came from towns almost as famished as the villages, and their desperation led them to irrational actions they found difficult to explain in memoirs written later. They dug up peasants’ yards to find concealed hoards, though the amounts they found were miniscule; they took prepared meals away from peasants. Starving peasants (and to a lesser extent townspeople) tried to survive on surrogates, and some resorted to cannibalism. The authorities repeatedly reduced procurement quotas, ultimately obtaining fifteen percent less grain from the 1932 harvest (18.5 million tons) than from the 1931 harvest, but at a much greater cost in life and disruption. Even with reduced procurements, the small harvest left practically nothing to be sold on the market. By January 1933, most of the USSR was in a state of famine, and millions of peasants and townspeople fled their homes seeking subsistence. The Politburo attempted to control this situation by establishing an internal passport system, by directives to prevent starving peasants from fleeing the main agricultural regions and return to their farms those who had fled, and by establishing political departments in the state farms and machine-tractor stations to remove opposition officials and improve work organization.

working. Moreover, the regime exported more than 300,000 tons of grain during the first half of 1933 to meet contractual commitments and cover loan payments. Purchasing countries received diplomatic reports about the famine but did not raise the issue and continued imports at dumping-level prices. Soviet officials at all levels denied the famine publicly, refused aid from foreign organizations, and tried to concealed the famine from foreign visitors. Improved agricultural conditions and desperate work by all concerned led to a substantially greater harvest in 1933 that ended the famine in most areas by the fall of 1933. Estimates of mortality range from five million to eight million lives, mostly peasants but also townspeople and others, yet government aid in supplies, equipment, and organizational measures helped agriculture to recover and produce large harvests soon after the famine. This tragedy could have been substantially mitigated had Soviet leaders been less distrustful of and hostile toward the peasants, more skeptical of their own personnel and knowledge, and more open to outside aid.

See also:

AGRICULTURE; FAMINE OF 1891–1892; FAMINE

OF 1921–1922

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Conquest, Robert. (1986). Harvest of Sorrow. New York: Oxford University Press. Osokina, Elena. (2000). Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Tauger, Mark. (2001). “Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931–1933.” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1506. Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh. MARK B. TAUGER

FAMINE OF 1946

The regime allocated much more food for relief and seed from the 1932 harvest, 5.7 million tons, than it had from the 1931 harvest, with rations doled out to peasants in return for their work. Still, farm work in the spring and summer of 1933 proceeded under desperate conditions, and many peasants died of starvation or related diseases while

In 1946, the devastation of World War II and a severe drought that engulfed most of the major grain producing areas of the country, including Ukraine, Moldavia, the lower and middle Volga, Rostov oblast, and the central black earth zone, resulted in a poor harvest in the Soviet Union. Shortage of workforce, machinery, and livestock exacerbated

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the situation. Despite food shortages and malnutrition in the countryside in the spring of 1946, the Soviet government enforced unrealistic procurement quotas while exporting grain to Eastern Europe and France. Toward the end of 1946, the government lowered procurement plans in drought areas but raised quotas in other parts of the country in order to compensate for the shortfall. The authorities provided grain loans to collective farms and opened kitchens and children’s houses, but the relief was administered inconsistently and belatedly. As a result, approximately two million people died from famine and related diseases in 1946 and 1947. The mortality rate peaked in the summer of 1947. The famine contributed to mass flight from the countryside to the cities and was followed by the arbitrary purging of peasants labeled “kulaks” from the countryside. Despite its major political and social implications, this famine had not been studied until the 1990s, largely because the Soviet government ignored its existence. Even in confidential government documents, officials avoided mention of hunger or starvation, employing euphemisms suggesting difficulties with provisions. The central authorities advanced the image of a heroic postwar rebuilding process and a smooth transition to peacetime.

See also:

FAMINE OF 1891–1892; FAMINE OF 1921–1922;

FAMINE OF 1932–1933

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ellman, Michael. (2000). “The 1947 Soviet Famine and the Entitlement Approach to Famines.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 24:603–630. Volkov, Ivan Mefodievich. (1992). “The Drought and Famine of 1946–47.” Russian Studies in History 31:31–60. NICHOLAS GANSON

FAR EASTERN REGION The easternmost extremity of the Russian Federation is a vast territory with a sparse and declining population. It comprises 6.2 million square kilometers (2,394,000 square miles), or more than 36 percent of the country, but holds barely seven million residents, or less than 5 percent of the population. Given the inclement climate and poor


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transportation infrastructure in the north, residents are concentrated near the southern border with China, many living along the Amur River and the Pacific coast. Russians reached the coast during the seventeenth century; only in 1861 did they establish the city of Vladivostok after securing control over the southeastern maritime zone through a treaty with China. Construction of the TransSiberian railroad from the 1890s onward brought increased settlement. The Soviet state continued to rely on prison labor and exiles as well as military garrisons to develop the region, although at times it succeeded in drawing young settlers and workers with material incentives. During the 1990s incentives were ended, and many began to leave the region. The Russian Far East is rich in natural resources, but fear of neighboring countries has affected their development and use. After accepting migrants and welcoming trade during the 1930s and 1940s, the Kremlin, led by Josef Stalin, expelled the Chinese and deported the Koreans to Central Asia. At great cost, the Far East sent marine products to European Russia in return for industrial goods. A brief rise in Sino-Soviet trade during the 1950s was followed by a massive military buildup that forced Moscow to spend much more on the area. Plans for exporting vast quantities of coal and lumber to Japan in return for investment in infrastructure were only partly realized before bilateral relations deteriorated at the end of the 1970s. Huge cost overruns meant that during the early 1980s, when authorities announced the completion of the Baikal-Amur Mainline railroad to extend development northward, even funds for maintenance could not be found. During the 1990s local elites diverted marine and lumber products to exports without paying taxes to Moscow. None of these approaches to the use of natural resources proved efficient for sustained development. During the early twentyfirst century, Russians hoped that oil and gas projects, especially offshore by Sakhalin Island, would fuel the region’s prosperity, yet fear of foreign control continued to leave investors uncertain of their prospects. The Russian Far East has the potential to become part of the emerging Northeast Asian region, drawing together China, Japan, South Korea, and eventually North Korea. First, it would need to resolve tensions between the ten regional administrations, which pressed local agendas during the 1990s, and Moscow, which made efforts at recentralization. While there was a brief fear of the local

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governments banding together to restore the Far Eastern Republic of the early 1920s and gain substantial autonomy, the pendulum tilted toward Moscow; a presidential representative resided in Khabarovsk. Second, territorial disputes with China and Japan must be further resolved, stabilizing tensions over the border. Third, Russia must become confident of the balance of power in the region, overcoming fear that China or another country will dominate. Finally, plans for economic development need firm backing in Moscow, which must recognize that only by opening its eastern border to the outside world can it secure its future as a country facing both the developed European Union and the dynamic Asia-Pacific.

See also: BAIKAL-AMUR MAGISTRAL RAILWAY; CHINA, RELATIONS WITH; GEOGRAPHY; TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bradshaw, Michael J., ed. (2001). The Russian Far East and Pacific Asia: Unfulfilled Potential. Richmond, UK: Curzon. Minakir, Pavel A., and Freeze, Gregory L., eds. (1994). The Russian Far East: An Economic Handbook. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Stephan, John J. (1994). The Russian Far East: A History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. GILBERT ROZMAN

FATHERLAND-ALL RUSSIA “Fatherland-All Russia” (Otechestvo–Vsya Rossiya, or OVR) was an alternative “ruling party,” a bloc formed in the summer of 1999 in order to seize power from the weakening Kremlin. The first step towards organization was the formation of the bloc called Fatherland, a political structure created by Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who had presidential ambitions. Established and registered on December 19, 1998, a full year before Duma elections, Fatherland brought together a number of organizations that appealed to patriotism or paternalism. These included the Congress of Russian Communities (which later left it) and the “Power” movement, as well as the political wing of the reformist trade unions (profsoyuzy), “Union of Labor” and Women of Russia. It also included a handful of influential heads of Luzhkov-oriented regions:

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Karelia, Komi, Mordvinia, Udmurtia, and the Arkhangelsk, Moscow, Murmansk, Nizhegorod, Novosibirsk, and Yaroslavl oblasts. Prospective politicians, often the mayors of centers, headed the ubiquitous regional branches. This often led to conflict, when two or three local organizations simultaneously claimed to be the area’s regional branch. The material base of “Fatherland” was provided by a powerful consortium of of financial and industrial groups known as the “Moscow clan.” Established three months later, the “All Russia” bloc became an alternative gubernatorial political project. The bloc included another dozen influential regional heads, including the leaders of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Petersburg, Irkutsk oblast, among others, as well as a few regional speakers. The mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Yakovlev, became chair of the bloc. Four and a half months before the elections, despite the opposition of the Kremlin, the two powerful gubernatorial blocs were able to unite, advancing the recently retired prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, as their leader. Soon after their formation, they were joined by a large contingent of the Agrarian Party of Russia, which did not see a future in continuing its association with Zyuganov’s Communist Party. Fatherland–All Russia, united not so much by ideology as by a foretaste of full assumption of power, announced an eclectic program. Its main slogan, “Trust only deeds,” drew the voter’s attention to powerful politicians united under the bloc’s banners and to authoritarian governors. The overall agenda of the bloc, including the continuity of ruling power, social peace, and rejection of revolutionary shocks, were combined with concrete programmatic elaborations concerning key questions of economy, politics, and social development. These elaborations went through a series of discussions and were summarized in the form “Notices for the president.” At the core of OVR’s propaganda campaign was the juxtaposition of its candidates with the ruling Kremlin command, along with criticism of Yeltsin and his entourage, an identification of the “family” as the locus of corruption, and allegations of the government’s secrecy and incompetence. A crucial moment in the campaign, and the beginning of the end of OVR as a “party of future power,” was a series of explosions in residential areas of Moscow and other cities, and the beginning of a new war in the northern Caucasus. People no longer wanted the economic and social improve-


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ments promised by OVR; instead, they wanted the safety and protection provided by a strong government. Although the complex and clumsy propaganda machine of OVR continued to attack Yeltsin, a social question based on new principles took hold and was answered in large part by the new prime minister, Vladimir Putin. The extremely strong public relations campaign of the Kremlin against OVR played its part as well. In the end, OVR received 13.3 percent of the votes (third place), losing by nearly half to the KPRF and to the Unity Party that had been created shortly before the elections and had campaigned as a party of regional power. Moreover, nearly half the OVR votes came from four regions whose elites remained loyal to the bloc: Moscow, Moscow oblast, Tatarstan, and Bashkiria. In these regions, the bloc brought forth most of its candidates in districts where they already enjoyed a distinct majority. In the Duma, OVR formed the OVR faction (which delegates from Fatherland joined) and the delegate group called “Regions of Russia,” which opposed the Kremlin for a while. In the absence of ideology and the disagreements associated with it, this factionalism could not continue for long. Beginning in mid-2000, a long process of unification took place, and in December 2000, Unity, Fatherland, and All Russia officially merged into the party “Unity and Fatherland” (“United Russia”) with three co-chairs: Sergei Shoygu, Yuri Luzhkov, and Mintimir Shaymiev. Two weeks later, the new party was registered with the Ministry of Justice.

See also:

LUZHKOV, YURI MIKHAILOVICH; PRIMAKOV,

YEVGENY MAXIMOVICH; UNITY (MEDVED PARTY); WOMEN OF RUSSIA BLOC

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

FEAST BOOKS Special paraliturgical books that register the annual commemorative meals in a monastic community throughout the calendar year. Formally the Feast books are similar to Western late medieval anniversary books in parishes and brotherhoods. The Russian term for “feast book” is kormovye kniga, literally “feeding book.” Kormy, “feedings,” in memory of the deceased, correspond functionally and genetically to anniversary meals in Byzantine monasteries as well as in Western communities. The Russian term reflects the idea that by means of the donation, on the basis of which the meal is established, the monks become guests of the donor. “Feeding” the monks equals alms to the poor, in return for which the monks offer their liturgical services. Kormy were the most representative and most expensive form of commemoration in Muscovite Russia. Regular kormy usually took place on the anniversary of death or on the name day of the deceased. In earlier times, the dates of kormy were registered within the Ustav, the liturgical Rule. Probably as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, monasteries began to register the dates separately in special Feast Books, but the preserved manuscripts derive only from the last third of that century and from the seventeenth century. The entries range from brief notation of date and name of the commemorated person to elaborate detail concerning donor and donation, the food to be served, and the burial place within the monastery. Some Feast Books additionally specify the menu throughout the year and contain instructions concerning discipline of the brethren, services, distribution of alms, and related matters.

See also:

DONATION BOOKS; SOROKOUST

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Steindorff, Ludwig. (1995). “Commemoration and Administrative Techniques in Muscovite Monasteries.” Russian History/Histoire Russe 22:433–454. LUDWIG STEINDORFF

McFaul, Michael; Petrov, Nikolai; and Ryabov, Andrei, eds. (1999). Primer on Russia’s 1999 Duma Elections. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press. NIKOLAI PETROV


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FEBRUARY REVOLUTION The February Revolution (which, according to New Style dates, actually took place in March) developed out of a wave of industrial strikes in Petrograd from

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January to March 1917. It gathered force when workers at Russia’s largest factory were locked out on March 7 and when women workers at a few factories, angered by the food shortages, marched out from their factories on March 8 demanding bread. Men at nearby factories joined them, and over the next two days antigovernment demonstrations grew to include most of the industrial work force. By March 10 they were joined by students and broad sections of the urban lower and middle classes. Soldiers who were called out to help break up demonstrations acted with reluctance. The government’s ordering of troops to fire into the crowds on March 11 broke the fragile bonds of discipline among the soldiers, who were mostly recent draftees with the same grievances as the demonstrators. A revolt by one detachment of the Volynsky Guard Regiment the morning of March 12 (February 27 O.S.) quickly spread to other regiments. By midday the government lost control of the means of armed coercion and collapsed. To this point the revolution had been mainly a popular revolt, with little leadership. What there was came from socialist activists at the factory level and from individuals who emerged as organizers of factory demonstrations and leaders in attacks on police stations and other symbols of authority. The revolutionary parties, whose main leaders were in exile, played few leadership roles before March 12. But leadership was necessary to consolidate the revolution that had taken place in the streets. Two groups stepped forward on March 12. One was a group of Duma leaders who had watched the events of the preceding days, concerned about their implications for the war effort but also realizing that this might offer the long-sought opportunity to force Tsar Nicholas II to reform the government. That evening they formed a “Temporary Committee of the State Duma,” which would take governmental responsibility in Petrograd. They opened negotiations with the army high command to secure its support in forcing Nicholas to make concessions. The involvement of these respected public figures proved vital in the following days.

gan to cooperate to consolidate the February Revolution and to form a new government. On March 15 they announced formation of a Provisional Government that would govern Russia until a new governmental system could be created by a Constituent Assembly, which was to be elected by universal franchise. The same day Nicholas II gave way to the reality of events and the pressures from his army commanders, and abdicated. News of the revolution in Petrograd sparked mostly peaceful revolutions in the cities and towns of Russia. New city governments, drawn primarily from liberal circles of educated society, replaced the old government authorities, while alongside them local soviets of workers and soldiers deputies sprang up. The new government was drawn primarily from the liberal political leadership of the country. Its head, the minister-president, was Prince G. E. Lvov, a well-known liberal. The socialist Petrograd Soviet leaders promised to support the new government insofar as it pursued policies of which they approved. This political situation, however, was very unstable. The existence of the Petrograd Soviet alongside the Provisional Government robbed the latter of much of its actual authority, giving rise to what quickly was dubbed “dual-authority” (dvoyevlastie). The government had the generally recognized official authority and responsibility but not the effective power, while the Soviet had the actual power but not responsibility for governing. This situation emerged because the Soviet commanded the primary loyalty of the industrial workers and garrison soldiers, the main bases of power in Petrograd, and could call on this support in a conflict with the government.

At the same time, a multiparty group of socialist intellectuals met at the Duma building and led workers and soldiers in the formation of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. This was a more avowedly revolutionary body, committed to making the street revolt into a sweeping social and economic as well as political revolution. The Duma Committee and the Petrograd Soviet leaders immediately, if warily, be-

The February Revolution resulted not merely in the overthrow of the monarchy and creation of a new government, but in an unleashing of popular self-assertion and the formation of thousands of organizations dedicated to expressing popular aspirations. Factory committees, soldiers’ committees, trade and professional unions, cultural clubs, minority nationalist organizations, feminist groups, householders’ associations, and other organizations were created to safeguard and advance the interests and hopes of the population in its varied identities. These became a major force in the later unfolding of the revolution as they asserted themselves and as political parties and leaders struggled to articulate their demands and win their allegiance. Gaining control over popular activism became one of the key tasks of the political elites and would-be leaders of the revolution.

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As the new political system was unstable, it took some time for the main contours of power to become clear. While political parties remained important, three broad political blocs quickly emerged: liberals, moderate socialists, and radical left socialists. The liberals, represented especially by the Cadet Party (Constitutional Democrats), dominated the first Provisional Government and then shared it in coalition with the moderate socialists from May to October. The moderate socialists—the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) predominantly—were the main force in the Petrograd and most other soviets around the country. The radical left—Bolsheviks, left-wing Mensheviks, and SRs, anarchists—were at first a small minority voice, but soon grew as the alternative to the “coalition” of liberals and moderate socialists when the Provisional Government failed to satisfy popular aspirations. Socialism was the overwhelming political position in 1917, and therefore the conflict between the moderate and radical socialists determined the main course of politics in 1917. The moderate socialists, primarily Mensheviks and SRs, took form first. A key development here was the return of a group of socialist exiles from Siberia in March. Under the leadership of Irakli Tsereteli, a Georgian Menshevik, they established the policy of Revolutionary Defensism as the basic policy of the Petrograd Soviet (and, in fact, for most soviets in the country). Revolutionary Defensism spoke to the desire of the populace for an end to the war by calling for a general negotiated peace based on the principle of self-determination of nations and without annexations or indemnities. At the same time it addressed still strong patriotism by calling for continued defense of the country until this peace could be achieved. The Revolutionary Defensists also were willing to cooperate with the liberals in the Provisional Government, and beginning in May some of their leaders entered the government in what was called “coalition” governments—that is, ones with liberals and socialists, after massive antiwar demonstrations underscored the weakness of the government and strength of the Soviet. A radical left opposition to these policies existed from the beginning, but received a major reinforcement by the return of political exiles from Western Europe. The most important of these proved to be Vladimir Lenin, who electrified politics on his return in April by denouncing not only the government, but also the policy of the dominant Revolutionary Defensists. This made the Bol-


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sheviks relatively impotent in the optimistic mood of the spring of 1917, but positioned them to receive the support of the dissatisfied sections of the population in the summer and fall as the policies of the Revolutionary Defensists and the Provisional Government failed to find a way out of the war or to solve domestic problems. The Provisional Government initiated important and far-reaching reforms, especially in areas of civil rights and individual and group freedoms. However, the new leadership faced almost unsolvable problems. The desire for peace was immense, and failure to make progress on ending the war undermined both the Provisional Government and the Revolutionary Defensist leaders of the Petrograd Soviet. This problem was compounded by an enormously unpopular, and unsuccessful, military offensive in the summer, which drove the soldiers and many others leftward politically. The government also failed to move swiftly to meet the peasantry’s expectations for land reform. During the summer and early fall the economy deteriorated rapidly, food and other goods became ever scarcer, crime rose, and other social and economic problems multiplied, along with rising social tensions. Demands for autonomy or even separatism grew among some of the national minorities. The cumulative problems gave rise by June to a call for “All Power to the Soviets,” a call for a more radical, soviet-based, government that would act more vigorously to end the war and solve the many problems. This resulted in massive street demonstrations in favor of soviet power in July (the “July Days”). This in turn was followed by an attack on the government from the right on September 9–13, the unsuccessful putsch by General Lavr Kornilov. Meanwhile, the Provisional Government was unstable, undergoing fundamental restructuring (accompanied by violence and major crises) in May, July, and September. During one of these Alexander Kerensky, a moderate socialist, became head of the government on July 21. By September the radicals were winning reelections to the leadership of soviets, workers’ and soldiers’ committees, and other popular institutions. The Kornilov Affair gave an enormous boost of support for the Bolsheviks and radical left. Bolshevik-led coalitions took the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet—the most important political institution in the country—and soviets in Moscow and elsewhere. This, in addition to the increasing social problems and tensions, prepared the ground for the October Revolution.

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See also:

A S S E M B L Y

APRIL THESES; BOLSHEVISM; KORNILOV AFFAIR;

LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; MENSHEVIKS; NICHOLAS II;

FEDERAL ASSEMBLY

OCTOBER REVOLUTION; REVOLUTION OF 1905

For most of the Soviet period, Russia’s legislature was a ceremonial, rubber stamp body called the Supreme Soviet. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, however, Russia’s legislative structures underwent dramatic reform, becoming an arena for competitive elections and debates on major policy issues.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acton, Edward; Cherniaev, Vladimir I.; Rosenberg, William G., eds. (1997). Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Browder, Robert Paul, and Kerensky, Alexander F., eds. (1961). The Russian Provisional Government, 1917: Documents. 3 vols. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Frankel, Edith Rogovin; Frankel, Jonathan; and Knei-Paz, Baruch, eds. (1992). Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi. (1981). The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Koenker, Diane, and Rosenberg, William G. (1989). Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lieven, Dominic. (1994). Nicholas II: Twilight of the Empire. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Rabinowitch, Alexander. (1968). Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rabinowitch, Alexander. (1976). The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd. New York: Norton. Rosenberg, William G. (1974). Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Service, Robert, ed. (1992). Society and Politics in the Russian Revolution. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. Smith, S.A. (1983). Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–18. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1972). The Baku Commune, 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wade, Rex A. (2000). The Russian Revolution: 1917. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wildman, Allan K. (1980, 1987). The End of the Russian Imperial Army, Vol I: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March–April 1917); Vol II: The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Road to Soviet Power and Peace. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. REX A. WADE

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From May 1990 until September 1993, the Russian legislature consisted of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) Congress of People’s Deputies and a smaller body called the Supreme Soviet, which was the full-time working parliament. On September 21, 1993, President Boris Yeltsin dissolved the RSFSR Congress and Supreme Soviet after a protracted political confrontation with its members over constitutional and policy issues. He further decreed that elections to a new bicameral parliament called the Federal Assembly would be held in December 1993. This parliamentary structure was to be given constitutional status through a national referendum on a new constitution to be held simultaneously with the parliamentary elections. The elections and referendum took place on December 12, 1993, and on January 11, 1994, the newly elected deputies convened in Moscow for the opening of the new Federal Assembly. The 1993 constitution provides for a mixed presidential-parliamentary system with a directly elected president and a prime minister approved by parliament. The lower chamber of the bicameral Federal Assembly is called the State Duma, and the upper chamber is the Federation Council. The president appoints the prime minister, and the Duma votes whether to confirm the appointment. The president has wide legislative powers, including the powers of veto and decree. Decrees (ukazy) carry the force of law, but may not violate existing law. A decree remains in effect until the parliament enacts legislation that supersedes it. The Federal Assembly may override a presidential veto by a two-thirds vote of each chamber. The Duma may deny the government its confidence. Upon the first vote of no confidence in the government, the president may ignore the parliament’s action. But the president must either dismiss the government or dissolve the Duma if the Duma votes no confidence a second time within three months. The prime minister may submit a motion of confidence to the Duma, which, if de-


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feated by the Duma, leads the president to decide whether to dismiss the government or dissolve the Duma. The president may not dissolve the Duma within one year of its election, nor during a state of emergency or national state of martial law, nor within six months of a presidential election. Parliament does have the right to remove the president by impeachment, but the constitution requires that both chambers, the Supreme Court, and the Constitutional Court concur with the charges. Legislation originates in the Duma and, if passed, is sent to the Federation Council. If the Federation Council approves the legislation or fails to examine it within fourteen days, the legislation is sent to the president to be signed. If the Federation Council rejects the legislation, the two houses may form a commission to resolve differences. However, the Duma may override a Federation Council veto by a two-thirds vote. Following final action by the Federal Assembly, legislation is sent to the president, who must sign or veto the legislation. ELECTIONS

The electoral system used in the December 1993 Duma elections was put into effect by presidential decree, but its essential features have been preserved under subsequent legislation. Duma elections employ a mixed system of proportional representation and single-member districts. Half of the Duma’s 450 seats are allocated proportionately to registered parties that receive at least five percent of the vote in a single nationwide electoral district. The other 225 deputies are elected in single-round plurality elections in single-member districts. Unlike the Duma, the Federation Council has changed significantly in the manner in which its members are chosen. The Constitution provides that two individuals from each of Russia’s eightynine constituent territorial subjects, representing the legislative and executive branches of each region, are to be chosen as members of the Federation Council. The membership of the 1994–1995 chamber was chosen by popular election. A 1995 law provided, however, that thereafter the two members would be the head of the executive branch and the head of the legislature in each territorial subject. Therefore the members of the Federation Council were part-time members of the chamber and full-time officials in their home regions. Typically they traveled to Moscow for a few days every month for brief parliamentary sessions.


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During the summer of 2000, President Vladimir Putin again changed the method for selecting Federation Chamber members. Under the new law he sponsored, all members were to be full-time delegates chosen by the chief executive officers and the legislative assemblies of the eighty-nine territorial subjects. The members chosen do not need to reside in the region sending them, allowing regions to send prominent businesspeople, retired military officers, and influential politicians as their representatives. The changeover was complete by the end of 2001. Most observers believe that the system for selecting members of the Federation Council is likely to evolve further. Many advocate holding direct elections of senators, as in the United States. One difficulty with this is the constitutional provision stipulating that the two senators from each region represent the executive and legislative branches. LEGISLATIVE-EXECUTIVE RELATIONS

Over the 1994–1995 and 1996–1999 terms of the State Duma, no party or coalition held a clear majority. However, in both Dumas, deputies opposed to President Yeltsin held a majority. Vetoes were frequent, and in 1999 the Duma came within fourteen votes of passing a motion to remove Yeltsin through impeachment. Nonetheless, behind-thescenes bargaining over legislation was the norm. The chairman of the Duma in 1994 and 1995, Ivan Rybkin, was a communist but took a cooperative approach to his dealings with the executive branch, as did his successor as chairman, Gennady Seleznev, also a communist. On some highly contentious issues, such as the privatization of land, the branches were deadlocked. On many other issues, however, president and parliament were able to reach agreement. Overall, the president eventually signed about three-quarters of the laws passed by the Duma between 1994 and 1999. The December 1999 parliamentary election and President Yeltsin’s subsequent resignation resulted in a substantial change in legislative-executive relations. The Duma that convened in January 2000 was far friendlier to the president, and President Putin proved to be skillful in managing his relations with the Duma. By mid-2001 a coalition of four pro-Kremlin political factions had come to dominate the chamber, and the president was successful in passing an ambitious reform agenda. Much legislation that had been stalled under Yeltsin, including land privatization, cleared both chambers. So did many other laws, including a new

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Labor Code, pension reform, simplified rules for business licensing and regulation, and ratification of the START-II treaty. INTERNAL ORGANIZATION

In the Duma, political factions exercise substantial collective power over agenda-setting, organization, and procedures. The chamber’s steering body is the Council of the Duma, which is made up of the leaders of each of the party factions (i.e., each party clearing the five percent threshold in the party list vote) as well as the heads of each organized deputy group possessing at least thirty-five members. The Council of the Duma forges the political compromises needed to reach agreement on important legislation. In addition, the leaders of the factions decide among themselves on the distribution of chairpersonships of the standing committees. Committee chairpersonships are distributed in rough proportion to factional strength, although under Putin, pro-presidential factions control the most influential committees. The Duma is not divided into “majority” and “minority” coalitions, although some evolution in that direction began in 2001. The Federation Council lacks a system of political factions and is organized around its chairman and standing committees. The 2000 reform has led to significant changes in the way the chamber operates. A pro-Putin caucus, called “Federation,” with approximately one hundred members, came to dominate the legislative proceedings in 2001. One of its members, a Putin ally named Sergei Mironov, was elected chairman of the chamber in December 2001. President Putin’s legislative reforms began to sail through the chamber with almost no opposition. “Federation” was dissolved in January 2002, but the chamber remained strongly supportive of President Putin’s program. THE FEDERAL ASSEMBLY IN PERSPECTIVE

ernment vis-à-vis the regions and laws intended to improve the climate for investors and entrepreneurs. However, each chamber has developed a capacity for deliberation and decision making that may make parliament a more effective counterweight to future presidents. Therefore it is likely that the role of the Federal Assembly in the political system will continue to evolve.

See also:

CONGRESS OF PEOPLE’S DEPUTIES; DUMA; GOR-

BACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; PUTIN, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH; SUPREME SOVIET; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chaisty, Paul. (2001). “Legislative Politics in Russia.” In Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader, ed. Archie Brown. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Remington, Thomas F. (2001). The Russian Parliament: Institutional Evolution in a Transitional Regime, 1989–1999. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Smith, Steven, and Remington, Thomas F. (2001) The Politics of Institutional Choice: Formation of the Russian State Duma. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. THOMAS F. REMINGTON

FEDERALISM The Russian Federation, as its name implies, is a federated political entity. However, this concept continues to evolve and is periodically challenged by a variety of political forces. Even if using one of the simpler definitions of federalism—that of “self rule plus shared rule” within a country—the Russian case defies easy classification.

The 1993 constitution gives the president preponderant power in the political system. However, the electoral system that uses party-list voting for half the seats in the Duma, combined with the president’s interest in seeking legislative legitimacy for his policy agenda, has allowed the parliament to exercise greater influence than President Yeltsin had originally anticipated. During his first two years, President Putin succeeded in marginalizing political opposition in both chambers and securing parliament’s support for his legislative program, which included measures strengthening the central gov-

According to the Russian constitution, there are eighty-nine distinct territorial entities within the Russian Federation, with some based on ethnic groups and others on territorial foundations. How these entities fit together in the Russian political system is a result of more than a decade of negotiation and practice. After all, the initial challenge was that while the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic (RSFSR) was called a federation during the Soviet period, it was a unitary system in practice. Thus, at the time of independence in 1991, each of these political units had to renegotiate its

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standing within the new state, which eventually developed a system referred to as “assymetrical federalism.” A number of the ethnic–based republics, for example, sought greater autonomy, or outright independence. The Federation Treaty of March 1992 was the first step in formally resolving the question of powers and rights within the federated system. By the end of that year, all but Chechnya and Tatarstan signed the agreement, and the abstention of these two republics raised questions of a possible splintering of the Russian Federation. With the adoption of the new Russian constitution in December 1993, however, the Federation Treaty was enshrined in the main legal basis of the country. Beginning in 1994, the government in Moscow worked out an agreement with Tatarstan, as well as treaties with the other republics of the Russian Federation, leaving the Chechen Republic as the sole holdout. Indeed, that part of the Russian Federation remains contested and in the early twenty-first century is mired in a bloody conflict. There are several key issues that continue to confront the federal structure in Russia. First, there are questions concerning basic budgetary and taxation rights. Are the regions able to create their own financial bases from which to fund specific projects? From education policies to economic development plans, problems exist as to what the republics can do. Second, there remains a problem of resource management on the national level. This is particularly important in the energy and strategic mineral fields. For example, control over energy deposits in the Yamalo–Nenets okrug was contested by that entity, the Tiumen oblast within which it is located, and the government in Moscow. Third, there are questions about the actual political power of regional governors. During the late–Yeltsin era, there was a tendency for the federal government to appoint regional officials in order to better control them from the center. Since that time, however, these officials are elected, and a few of these have begun to exercise real authority in their specific regions. In addition, the Federal Council, the upper chamber of the Russian legislature (similar to the U.S. Senate), is designed to represent the interests of these various subnational entities. Given the vast territorial expanse of the Russian Federation, as well as the ethnic diversity of the regions, political leaders in Russia at least support the idea of a federated political system. However, the history of unitary control, both during tsarist and Soviet times, has yielded a legacy within


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the bureaucracy and administration that is difficult to change. In addition, the specific conditions and needs of each region undoubtedly dictate the specific level of authority that may be attained throughout the country. Most analysts and experts suggest that “federalism” in the Russian Federation will remain a multi–level system that will continue to see variations from region to region.

See also:

FEDERATION TREATIES; NATIONALITIES POLICIES,

SOVIET; PEOPLE’S COMMISSARIAT OF NATIONALITIES; RUSSIAN SOVIET FEDERATED SOCIALIST REPUBLIC

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kahn, Jeffrey. (2002). Federalism, Democratization, and the Rule of Law in Russia. New York: Oxford University Press. Kempton, Daniel R., and Clark, Terry D., eds. (2002). Unity of Separation: Center–Periphery Relations in the Former Soviet Union. Westport, CT: Praeger. Ross, Cameron. (2003). Federalism and Democratization in Post–Communist Russia. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Stoner–Weiss, Kathryn. (2002). “Soviet Solutions to Post–Soviet Problems: Has Vladimir Putin Really Strengthened the Federal Center?” PONARS [Program on New Approaches to Russian Security] Policy Memo No. 283, October. Walker, Edward W. (1995). “Designing Center–Region Relations in the New Russia.” East European Constitutional Review 4(1): 54-60. ROGER KANGAS

FEDERAL PROPERTY FUND The State Property Committee agency charged with receiving and overseeing privatization of state enterprises designated for privatization began operations in October 1992 (under Anatoly Chubais) in what became a large–scale sale of state enterprises. The first stage was voucher privatization. Vouchers were sent to every man, woman, and child in Russia. These voucher checks could be used to purchase shares in what had previously been state enterprises. Or they could be invested in managed mutual funds or sold on the secondary market. Enterprises slated for privatization were transferred to the Federal Property Fund. The initial stage of privatization excluded enterprises of national significance, such and oil and electric generation

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and those of military or strategic significance. Large scale, non-military enterprises were transferred subsequently in 1994–1995 and many were auctioned off under what was called the “loans for shares” program. When enterprises were transferred to the Federal Property Fund they were required to be converted into open joint stock companies before privatization. The Federal Property Fund was to oversee this transformation and supervise the privatization process. In the end the Federal Property Fund participated in the largest privatization program in economic history, one that was replete with insider advantages, corruption, bribery, and scandalous underpayment by the ultimate owners. Privatization was also incomplete because the government maintained either a majority ownership or “golden shares” that allowed a veto over management decisions.

See also:

PRIVATIZATION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 7th ed. New York: Addison Wesley. Hedlund, Stefan. (1999). Russia’s “Market” Economy: A Bad Case of Predatory Capitalism. London: UCL Press. JAMES R. MILLAR

FEDERATION TREATIES On March 13, 1992, representatives of eighteen of Russia’s twenty ethnic republics initialed a treaty of federation with the Russian federal government. Two republics—Chechnya and Tatarstan—refused to sign. A separate agreement was initialed by representatives of Russia’s oblasts and kraya (administrative divisions) that same week, followed several days later by a third agreement with the country’s autonomous okruga (territorial divisions) and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. On March 31, 1992, the three treaties, which would be collectively referred to as the “Federation Treaty,” were formally signed into law. After the formal separation of the Chechen and Ingush Republics was ratified by the Sixth Congress of Peoples’ Deputies in April 1992, the number of republics under Russian constitutional law rose to twenty-one. While Ingushetia signed the Treaty

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upon its establishment, Chechnya refused to do so, asserting that it had declared formal independence in November 1991. The April 1992 Treaty provided for a complicated and vague division of powers between the federal government and Russia’s eighty-nine “subjects of the federation.” It also required as many as one hundred enabling laws, most of which were never adopted. Symbolically, the most important provision was the Treaty’s designation of the ethnic republics, but not the Russian Federation’s other constituent units (oblasts, kraya, and autonomous okruga), as “sovereign,” although it was not clear what legal rights, if any, “sovereign” status entailed. Some advocates of the republics argued that it implied a right to refuse to join the federation as well as a right of unilateral secession. Unlike the USSR constitution in effect at the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, however, Russia’s Federation Treaty of 1992 made no reference to a right of secession for the republics. Nor did federal authorities agree that the republics had a right to refuse to join the federation. The Treaty also stipulated that the constitutions of the republics had to conform to the federal constitution. The intent of the drafters of the April 1992 had been to include the Treaty’s provisions in a new constitution for the Russian Federation. However, the text of the Treaty was left out of the Russian Constitution of December 12, 1993, although Article 11.3 stated that the distribution of federal and regional powers is governed by “this Constitution, the Federation Treaty, and other treaties (dogovory) that delineate objects of jurisdiction and powers.” Article 1, Part 2, of the constitution added that “should the provisions of the Federation Treaty . . . contravene those of the Constitution of the Federation, the provisions of the Constitution of the Russian Federation shall apply.” In effect, the terms of the Federation Treaty were superseded by the federation provisions in the new constitution, which did not identify the republics as sovereign and was unequivocal in denying the subjects of the federation a unilateral right of secession. While the Treaty had limited legal significance, its signing in early 1992 helped ameliorate some of the tension between the Russian federal government and the republics in the wake of the dissolution of the USSR. It also provided President Boris Yeltsin with an important political victory. But it left many critical issues unresolved, particularly the legal status of Chechnya and Tatarstan. In Febru-


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ary 1994, Tatarstan agreed to become a constituent unit of the Russian Federation pursuant to the terms of a bilateral treaty. Chechnya would continue to refuse to join the federation, however, a position that led to war between the Russian federal government and supporters of Chechen independence later that year.

See also:

CONSTITUTION OF 1993; FEDERALISM; RUSSIAN

SOVIET FEDERATED SOCIALIST REPUBLIC

had to be devoted to the producers’ goods sector. Net investment would have to be proportional to the existing allocation of capital. The greater the capacity to produce capital goods, the faster the economy could grow, according to the model. Capital-output ratios in the two sectors could be minimized by working several shifts. This early growth model, however, ignored likely scarcities of food, foreign exchange, and skilled labor that would result when growth accelerated.

See also:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; GOSPLAN

Ahdieh, Robert B. (1997). Russia’s Constitutional Revolution: Legal Consciousness and the Transition to Democracy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lapidus, Gail W., and Walker, Edward W. (1995). “Nationalism, Regionalism, and Federalism: CenterPeriphery Relations in Post-Communist Russia.” In The New Russia: Troubled Transformation, ed. Gail W. Lapidus. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Ellman, Michael. (1990). “Grigorii Alexandrovic Fel’dman.” In Problems of the Planned Economy, eds. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman. New York: Norton.

Domar, Evsey D. (1957). Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth. New York: Oxford University Press.

MARTIN C. SPECHLER EDWARD W. WALKER

FELDSHER FELDMAN, GRIGORY ALEXANDROVICH (1884–1958), a pioneer in the mathematical study of economic growth. Grigory Alexandrovich Feldman, an electrical engineer by profession, worked in Gosplan from 1923 until 1931. His report to the committee for long-term planning of Gosplan, entitled “On the Theory of the Rates of Growth of the National Income,” was published in 1928 and became the basis for the committee’s preliminary draft of a long-term plan. However, Feldman soon came under attack for his ideas on the politically sensitive subject of socialist industrialization and use of mathematics in the heroic atmosphere of those times. His numerical targets, though supported by the head of the committee, proved too optimistic and could not be realized. After some tendentious criticism, Feldman’s career never recovered. Even his later work on growth in the United States, an early interest of his, could not be published. He apparently spent several years in labor camps before being released, quite sick, in 1953. Feldman’s two-sector growth model was based on the macroeconomic concepts of Karl Marx. Feldman first demonstrated that the higher the aggregate growth of an economy, the more capital


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Medical assistant. Feldshers first appeared in Russia during the eighteenth century, when they served as medical assistants in urban hospitals or as army corpspeople. During the nineteenth century they played a major role in rural medical systems. The law restricted them to practice under a physician’s direct supervision; many were nevertheless assigned to run remote clinics on their own because of the dearth of physicians in the countryside. Forced by circumstances to tolerate such independent feldsher practice, known as “feldsherism,” leading physicians adamantly opposed granting it legal sanction. “Feldsherism” remained a contentious issue as well as a widespread practice well into the 1920s. During the 1870s, many provincial zemstvos established feldsher schools in order to raise feldshers’ overall qualifications. Opening feldsher practice to women in 1871 brought growing numbers of urban women with gymnasium training into these schools. By the twentieth century, the qualifications of these newer feldshers and feldsher-midwives had improved dramatically. As of 1914 there were more than 20,000 civilian feldshers in Russia. Most served in rural areas, but one-third worked for urban hospitals, railroads, schools, and factories.

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The publication in 1891 of the newspaper Feldsher sparked the appearance of a feldsher professional movement. In 1906, local feldsher societies formed a national Union of Societies of Physicians’ Assistants, which published the newspaper Feldshersky vestnik (Feldsher Herald) and lobbied on feldshers’ behalf. During the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, most feldshers identified with moderate socialist parties. In 1918 the Union was dissolved; its members entered the industrial medical union Vsemediksantrud. The Soviet regime ceased training feldshers altogether in 1924, focusing instead on midwives and nurses. Feldsher training was resumed in 1937, and feldshers continue to serve as auxiliary medical personnel in Russia.

See also: HEALTH CARE SERVICES, IMPERIAL; HEALTH CARE SERVICES, SOVIET

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ramer, Samuel C. (1976). “Who Was the Russian Feldsher?” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 50:213–225. Ramer, Samuel C. (1996). “Professionalism and Politics: The Russian Feldsher Movement, 1891–1918.” In Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History, ed. Harley D. Balzer. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. SAMUEL C. RAMER

FELLOW TRAVELERS Intellectuals sympathetic to the Bolshevik cause and later to the Soviet Union as a socialist state. The term fellow traveler (poputchiki) was used by Vladimir Lenin and other Bolsheviks to describe those who agreed with the principles of socialism but did not accept the entire Bolshevik program. Lenin attacked these “petty-bourgeois fellow travelers” for their weak understanding of theory and tactics, and for leading workers away from revolution. Leon Trotsky, in 1918, described the Left Socialist Revolutionaries in similar terms because of their vacillation on the October Revolution. The pejorative sense of the term gave way in 1924, when Trotsky argued that fellow travelers in literature could be useful for the young Soviet state. He used the term to describe non-party writers who could serve the cause of revolution even though they were not proletarians. In Literature and

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Revolution, Trotsky argued that non-party intellectuals were no longer a serious threat and could be guided toward a proletarian view of the world. This was followed by a Central Committee resolution in 1925 refusing to prefer one faction or theory of literature over any other. The groups and individuals defined as fellow travelers during the 1920s constituted a flourishing artistic and literary culture that produced the best Soviet literature of the decade. The most famous group was the Serapion Brotherhood, whose membership included Konstantin Fedin, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Vsevolod V. Ivanov. These authors believed that literature should be free from outside control, but were generally sympathetic to the goals of the revolution. Others, perhaps less favorably inclined toward the Bolsheviks but nonetheless counted as fellow travelers, were Boris Pilnyak, Isaac Babel, and Mikhail Bulgakov. By the late 1920s, fellow travelers were coming under increasing pressure from groups claiming to represent the proletariat, such as the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP). In 1932, all independent organizations for writers and artists disappeared and the Writers’ Union was created. Fellow travelers were required to either join the union and follow its rules or stop publishing. By the end of 1920s, the term “fellow traveler” had been taken up in other countries as a designation for people sympathetic to the Soviet Union and especially for intellectuals who publicly expressed support for Stalin. Romain Rolland and George Bernard Shaw, for instance, praised the Soviet Union and saw it as a real alternative to western political systems. In the post–World War II era, “fellow traveler” became a term of derision, applied by conservatives to people who were communists in all but party affiliation. Albert Einstein, for example, was called a “dupe and a fellow traveler” by Time magazine in 1949 for his outspoken belief in socialism.

See also:

CULTURAL REVOLUTION; RUSSIAN ASSOCIATION

OF PROLETARIAN WRITERS; SERAPION BROTHERS; UNION OF SOVIET WRITERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Canute, David. (1988). The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Maguire, Robert. (1987). Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. KARL E. LOEWENSTEIN


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meaningful legislative change until the last years of tsarist rule.

Feminism in Russia first developed during the 1850s, following the disastrous Crimean War and the accession of Alexander II. At a time of political ferment over the nation’s future, an intense debate arose within educated society over the dependent status of women and inherited assumptions about their capacities and their roles. The idea of women’s emancipation was readily linked to peasant emancipation, plans for which were being publicly debated during these years. If one section of the population—enserfed peasants—could be liberated, why not women too, half the human race? Many activists in the women’s movement over the next half–century pinpointed the 1850s and 1860s as the moment when women first challenged their own subordinate legal status, inferior education, exclusion from all but menial paid employment, and vulnerability to sexual exploitation, as well as the complex web of convention and sanction that restricted their everyday lives. A number of women writers—and some radical male writers—had already addressed these themes a generation earlier, but always as individuals. It was only during the 1850s that a women’s movement, dedicated to change, could coalesce.

Feminist ideas in Russia were inspired not only by social and political change at home, but equally by the emerging women’s movement in the West (particularly North America, Britain, and France) in this period. Russian feminists established lasting contacts with their western counterparts and read western literature on the “woman question.” Most considered themselves “westernizers” rather than “slavophiles” in the contemporary political–cultural controversy over Russia and its future. The word “feminism” itself was rarely used in Russia or elsewhere, and even when it gained wider currency toward the end of the century, it most often had a pejorative connotation, both for conservative and radical opponents of reformist women’s movements, and for feminists too. Before 1905 they called themselves “activists in the women’s movement” (deyatelnitsy zhenskogo dvizheniya). During the 1905 Revolution, when the movement was politicized, the most uncompromising became “equal–righters” (ravnopravki), emphasizing the struggle for social equality overall, not just for women. After 1917 feminist activists either emigrated or were silenced, and for the entire Soviet period feminism was branded a “bourgeois deviation.”

Unlike women in many western countries, Russian upper– and middle–class women kept their property upon marriage and were not forced into financial dependence on their husbands. However, even propertied women were disadvantaged by inferior inheritance rights; despite their financial autonomy, the law required that they obey their husbands and live in the marital home unless given formal permission to leave. In an abusive marriage a woman could apply to the courts for legal separation, but this was a tortuous process and available only to the relatively well–to–do. The vast majority of Russian women in this period were peasants; before 1861 many were serfs. Even after peasant emancipation their status in the family was subordinate, particularly as young women. They were valued in the village for their ability to work— in the fields and in the household—and to produce and raise children. Few had time to think about the possibilities of an alternative life or about their own lack of rights or status. It was feminists and female radicals who first set out to improve women’s personal rights and establish their legal and actual autonomy, though the prevailing social conservatism on gender issues and the extreme limitations on political campaigning impeded any


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RADICAL ALTERNATIVES TO FEMINISM

Like feminists, revolutionary women and men espoused sexual equality. But they fiercely rejected feminism, insisting that women’s liberation must be part of a wider social revolution. Feminists, they claimed, based their appeal to women by driving a wedge between men and women of the oppressed classes struggling for their rights. Feminists denied the radical claim that they were motivated only by their own “selfish” ends, and saw themselves working for Russia’s “renewal” and “regeneration,” for the betterment of the whole population. Although a socialist women’s movement developed in Russia (as elsewhere) around 1900, both populist and Marxist revolutionary groups were antagonistic to separate work among women, and only well after 1900 was it possible for Bolshevik women (such as Alexandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand, and Nadezhdaya Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife) to address women’s issues specifically within their party organization. Though dubbed a “Bolshevik feminist” by later western historians, Kollontai herself was one of the most outspoken critics of reformist feminism—and the very concept of feminism—before and after 1917.

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women had moved into illegal populist groups whose aim was the liberation of the “Russian people,” the narod. In their own estimation, by the early 1870s the radicals had left the “woman question” behind. FEMINIST CAMPAIGNING

The reformers were dedicated to working within the system. They raised petitions, lobbied ministers, and exploited personal connections to reach influential figures, many of them already sympathetic to feminist ideas. Of necessity, they focused on philanthropy and higher education. Philanthropy was the one form of public activity then open to women, an acknowledged extension of their “caring” role within the family. It aimed both to encourage self-sufficiency in the beneficiaries and to give their organizers practical experience of public administration. Feminist philanthropists ran their enterprises, as far as was possible, democratically and with minimal regulation. Most successful was a Society to Provide Cheap Lodgings (founded in 1861 and by 1880 a major charity) in St. Petersburg. Another society provided refuges for poor women. A major feminist preoccupation, particularly important in a rapidly urbanizing society, was to provide poorer women with alternatives to prostitution. Soviet communism declared gender equality, as celebrated in this 1961 postcard, reading “Glory to Soviet Women!” © RYKOFF COLLECTION/CORBIS

Disagreements between feminist reformers and radicals were present from the beginning. At first these conflicts were more over lifestyle than politics. Reformers observed existing social codes (dress, comportment, family obligations, respectability). Many, though not all, came from well-to-do gentry backgrounds and had no need to earn a living. Radicals, often of gentry origin too, were in conscious revolt against family and social propriety. They wore cropped hair and simple, unadorned clothing, smoked in public, and called themselves “nihilists” (nigilistki). Whether in financial need or not (many were), nihilists joined urban “communes,” or set up their own. For a few years there was some contact (including individual friendships) between nihilists and feminists, focusing on attempts to set up an employment bureau for women and cooperative workshops providing employment and essential skills for themselves and other women. This collaboration foundered during the mid-1860s; within a few years many nihilist

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Campaigns for higher education were a new departure, but still within a familiar realm— woman as educator of her children—a role that became increasingly important in Russia’s drive to “modernize.” Feminists received support from individual professors and even university administrations. Persistent lobbying of government led to permission for public lectures for women (1869), then preparatory courses and finally university– level courses (1872 in Moscow), all existing on public goodwill, organization, and funding. Medical courses (for “learned midwives”) were opened to women in St Petersburg (1872), extended to full medical courses in 1876. In 1878 the first Higher Courses for Women opened in St. Petersburg, followed by Moscow, Kiev, and Kazan. Though outside the university system, with no rights to state service and rank as given to men, these courses were effectively women’s universities. Feminist campaigners also provided financial resources to students needing assistance, setting up a charity to raise money for the Higher Courses in 1878. The campaign for higher education and specialist training was critically important for radical women too. Radicals’ increasing identification with


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“the people” inspired them to train for professions that could be of direct use, principally teaching and medicine. During the early 1870s dozens of radical women (along with nonpolitical women in search of professional education not then available in Russia) went abroad to study, especially to Zurich, where the university was willing to admit them. Some radicals completed their training; others were drawn into Russian émigré political circles, abandoned their studies, and soon returned to Russia as active revolutionaries. Feminism—like all reform movements in Russia during the 1870s—suffered in the increasingly repressive political environment. All independent initiatives, legal or illegal, came under suspicion: these included a feminist publishing cooperative founded during the mid-1860s, fundraising activities, proposals to form women’s groups, and so forth. Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 brought further misfortune. Several of the terrorist leaders were women, former nigilistki, and in the wholesale assault on liberalism following the murder, feminists were tarred with the same brush. The reaction after 1881 proved almost fatal. Expansion of higher education was halted; some courses were closed. Feminists ceased campaigning, and all avenues for action were barred. Only during the mid-1890s could feminists begin to regroup, but under strict supervision, and always limited by law to education and philanthropy. POLITICAL ACTION

Before 1900 Russian feminism had no overt political agenda. For some activists this was a matter of choice, for many others a frustrating restriction. In several, though not all, western countries women’s suffrage had been a focal point of feminist aspirations since the 1850s and 1860s. When rural zemstvos and municipal dumas were set up in Russia in the 1860s, propertied women received limited proxy rights to vote for the assemblies’ representatives, but legal political activity—by either gender—was not permitted. Indeed, no national legislature existed before 1906, when the tsar was forced by revolutionary upheaval to create the State Duma. It was during the build up of this opposition movement, from the early 1900s, that Russian feminism began to address political issues, not only women’s suffrage, but calls for civil rights and equality before the law for all citizens. After Bloody Sunday (January 9, 1905), feminist activists began to organize, linking their cause


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with that of the liberal and moderate socialist Liberation Movement. Besides existing women’s societies, such as the Russian Women’s Mutual Philanthropic Society (Russkoye zhenskoye vzaimno– blagotvoritelnoye obshchestvo, established in 1895), new organizations sprang up. Most directly political was the All-Russian Union of Equal Rights for Women (Vserossysky soyuz ravnopraviya zhenshchin), dedicated to a wide program of social and political reform, including universal suffrage without distinction of gender, religion, or nationality. It quickly affiliated itself with the Union of Unions (Soyuz soyuzov). Feminist support for the Liberation Movement was unmatched by the movement’s support for women’s political rights, and much of the union’s propaganda during 1905 was directed as much at the liberal opposition as at the government. Unlike the latter, however, many liberals were gradually persuaded by the feminist claim, and support increased significantly in the years of reaction that followed. The government refused to consider women’s suffrage at any point. The women’s union—though itself overwhelmingly middle-class and professional—was greatly encouraged by women’s participation in workers’ strikes during the mid-1890s and, particularly, women’s involvement in working-class action in 1904 and 1905. After 1905, however, feminists were increasingly challenged by revolutionary socialists in a competition to “win” working–class women to their cause. Prominent Bolsheviks such as Kollontai had finally convinced their party leaders of working–class women’s revolutionary potential. During the last years of tsarist rule, when the labor movement overall was becoming increasingly active, Kollontai and her comrades benefited from the feminists’ failure to make any headway in the mass organization of women, a failure exacerbated after the outbreak of World War I by the feminists’ stalwart support for the war effort. It was the Bolsheviks, not the feminists, who capitalized on the war’s catastrophic impact on the lives of working–class women and men. With the outbreak of the February Revolution of 1917, the feminist campaign resumed, and initial opposition from the Provisional Government was easily overcome. In the electoral law for the Constituent Assembly, women were fully enfranchised. Before it was swept away by the Bolsheviks, the Provisional Government initiated several projects to give women equal opportunities and pay in public services, and full rights to practice as lawyers. It also proposed to transform the higher

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courses into women’s universities; in the event, the courses were fully incorporated into existing universities by the Bolsheviks in 1918. During the 1920s, with “bourgeois feminism” silenced, women’s liberation was sponsored by the Bolsheviks, under a special Women’s Department of the Communist Party (Zhenotdel). In 1930 the Zhenotdel was abruptly dismantled and the “woman question” prematurely declared “solved.”

See also:

KOLLONTAI, ALEXANDRA MIKHAILOVNA; KRUP-

SKAYA, NADEZHDA KONSTANTINOVNA; MARRIAGE AND FAMILY LIFE; ZHENOTDEL

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Atkinson, Dorothy; Dallin, Alexander; and Warshofsky, Lapidus, eds. (1977). Women in Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Clements, Barbara Evans. (1979). Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clements, Barbara Evans; Engel, Barbara Alpern; and Worobec, Christine, D., eds. (1991). Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Edmondson, Linda. (1984). Feminism in Russia, 19001917. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Edmondson, Linda, ed. (1992). Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Engel, Barbara Alpern. (1983). Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth–Century Russia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Farnsworth, Beatrice, and Viola, Lynne, eds. (1992). Russian Peasant Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glickman, Rose L. (1984). Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880-1914. Berkeley: University of California Press. Noonan, Norma Corigliano, and Nechemias, Carol, eds. (2001). Encyclopedia of Russian Women’s Movements. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Norton, Barbara T., and Gheith, Jehanne, M., eds. (2001). An Improper Profession: Women, Gender, and Journalism in Late Imperial Russia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stites, Richard. (1978). The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 18601930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. LINDA EDMONDSON

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FERGHANA VALLEY A triangular basin with rich soil and abundant water resources from the Syr Darya River, modern canals, and the Kayrakkum Reservoir; the Ferghana Valley (Russian: Ferganskaia dolina; Uzbek: Fargona ravnina) is situated primarily in Uzbekistan and partly in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and is formed below the Tien Shan Mountains to the north and the Gissar Alay Mountains to the south. This has been the agricultural center of Central Asia for the last several thousand years. The basin is a major producer of cotton, fruits, and raw silk. It is one of the most densely populated regions of Central Asia, including the cities of Khujand, Kokand, Ferghana, Margilan, Namangan, Andijan, Osh, and Jalalabad. Throughout its history, material and cultural wealth have made the valley a frequent target of conquest. Khujand, at the western edge of the valley, was once called “Alexandria the Far” as an outpost of Alexander the Great’s army. From the third century the valley emerged as a Persian–Sogdian nexus and major stop along the Silk Road under the suzerainty of the Sassanids. The Chinese Tang Dynasty briefly exerted influence in the valley during the seventh and eighth centuries, followed by Arab conquest and Islamic conversions during the eighth and ninth centuries and Persian Samanid dominion during the tenth century. The rise of the Karakhanids brought lasting Turkicization of the Ferghana Valley during the eleventh century. The Chaghatay Ulus of the Mongol Empire during the thirteenth century and the Turkic Timur (Tamerlane) and his grandson Ulugh Bek during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries introduced a period of burgeoning literature and Islamic erudition, followed by centuries of shifting local powers and instability under the various Turkic groups. Kokand khans ruled from the late eighteenth century until the Russian Empire annexed the valley as the Ferghana oblast to the Turkestan governor–generalship in 1876. During the establishment of Soviet power in Central Asia (1920s and 1930s), the valley provided a fertile area for the Basmachi movement. In 1924, it was divided between the Uzbek SSR, the Tajik ASSR, and the Kirgiz ASSR. As a result, the valley inherited several cross border enclaves in a traditionally interwoven ethnic region. Despite a tradition of multiethnic cooperation, late–Soviet unrest and ethnic clashes erupted there in 1989 between


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Uzbeks and Meshkhetian Turks, and in 1990 between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Osh. The famous Ferghana Canal was an early Soviet engineering project celebrated in prose, poetry, and film.

See also:

BASMACHIS; CENTRAL ASIA; UZBEKISTAN AND

UZBEKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manz, Beatrice Forbes. (1987). “Central Asian Uprisings in the Nineteenth Century: Ferghana Under the Russians.” Russian Review 46 (3):267–281. Tabyshalieva, Anara. (1999). The Challenge of Regional Cooperation in Central Asia: Preventing Ethnic Conflict in the Ferghana Valley. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace. MICHAEL ROULAND

FEUDALISM According to the nearly unanimous consensus of Western scholars, pre–Soviet Russian scholars, and most Soviet scholars until the mid– to late–1930s, feudalism never appeared in Russia. By the end of the 1930s, however, it became the entrenched dogma in the Soviet Union that Russia had experienced a feudal period. Post–Soviet Russian historians have been unable to rid themselves of this erroneous interpretation of their own history, in spite of Western arguments to the contrary that have been advanced since 1991. The fundamental issue is whether the term “feudalism” has any meaning other than “agrarian regime,” that is, that most of the population lives in the countryside and makes its living from farming and that most of the gross domestic product is derived from agriculture. If that is all it means, then Russia was feudal until after World War II. Most definitions of feudalism, however, involve other criteria as well, which, as defined by George Vernadsky and others, typically encompass: (1) a fusion of public and private law; (2) a dismemberment of political authority and a parcellization of sovereignty; (3) an interdependence of political and economic administration; (4) the predominance of a natural, i.e., nonmarket, economy; (5) the presence of serfdom. Presumably all of these criteria, not just one or two, should be present for there to be feudalism in a locality. The first historian to posit the existence of feudalism in Russia was Nikolai Pavlov–Silvansky


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(1869-1908), who based his theory primarily on the political fragmentation of Russia from the collapse of the Kievan Russian state in 1132 to the consolidation of Russia by Moscow by the early sixteenth century. The basic problem with that thesis is that there was no serfdom until the 1450s. Moreover, there were no fiefs. In 1912 Lenin defined feudalism as “land ownership and the privileges of lords over serfs.” Mikhail Pokrovsky (1868-1932) worked out a “Soviet Marxist” understanding of Russian feudalism and traced its origin and major cause (large landownership) to the thirteenth century. “Feudalism” was necessary to legitimize the October Revolution and Soviet power. According to Marx, human history went through the stages of (1) primordial/primitive communism; (2) slave–owning; (3) feudalism; (4) capitalism; (5) imperialism; (6) socialism; (7) communism. The fact that Russia in reality never experienced “stages” two through five made it difficult to claim that the October Revolution was historically inevitable and therefore legitimate. Inventing “stages” three through five was therefore politically necessary. A major problem for the Soviets was that Russia never knew a slave–owning stage (as in Greece and Rome). This “problem” was worked out in the early 1930s by a Menshevik historian, M. M. Tsvibak (who was liquidated a few years later in the Great Purges), with the claim that Russia had bypassed the slave–owning period entirely, that feudalism arose about the same time as the Kievan Russian state during the ninth century, or even earlier. Boris Grekov, the “dean” of Soviet historians between 1930 and 1953 (he allegedly had no use for Stalin), earlier had alleged that Russia had passed through a slave–owning stage, but he took the Tsvibak position in the later 1930s, and that remained the official dogma to the end of the Soviet regime. As a result, nearly all of Russian and Ukrainian history was deemed feudal and succeeded by “capitalism” with the freeing of the serfs from seignorial control in 1861.

See also:

MARXISM; PEASANTRY; SLAVERY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vernadsky, George. (1939). “Feudalism in Russia.” Speculum 14:302-323. RICHARD HELLIE

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FILARET DROZDOV, METROPOLITAN (1782–1867), Metropolitan of Moscow, theologian, and churchman. Throughout his long career, Filaret (Vasily Mikhailovich Drozdov) played a central role in important matters of church, state, and society: as a moving force behind the Russian translation of the Bible, as a teacher of the Orthodox faith through his famous catechism, sermons, and textbooks, and as a reformer of the church, particularly its monasteries. His widespread reputation as a man of profound faith and great integrity made him the government’s natural choice to compose the emancipation manifesto ending serfdom in 1861. When he died in 1867, the country went into mourning. As Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the future overprocurator of the Holy Synod, wrote on the day of the metropolitan’s funeral: “The present moment is very important for the people. The entire people consider the burial of the metro[politan] a national affair.” Filaret’s early career focused on reform of religious education, which he shifted from the Latin scholastic curriculum of the eighteenth century to a Russian and Bible-centered one during the early nineteenth century. He wrote two Russian textbooks in 1816 inaugurating a new Orthodox Biblical theology: An Outline of Church-Biblical History (Nachertanie tserkovno-bibleiskoi istorii) and Notes on the Book of Genesis (Zapiski na knigu Bytiya). By this time he was also heavily engaged in a contemporary Russian translation of the Bible that would carry the Christian message to the Russian people more effectively than the Slavonic Bible published during the previous century. He personally translated the Gospel of John. In 1823 he wrote a new Orthodox catechism with all of its Biblical citations in Russian. His abilities and work quickly advanced his career. He became a member of the Holy Synod in 1819 and archbishop of Moscow in 1821 (metropolitan in 1826).

While he never departed from his belief that the church must communicate its teachings in a language people could understand (he finally won publication of a Russian translation of the Bible during the more liberal reign of Alexander II), Filaret now gave his ideas a more explicitly patristic underpinning, as evidenced in the dogmatic theology he eloquently and poetically expressed in his sermons. Moreover, he sponsored publication of the Writings of the Holy Fathers in Russian Translation (1843–1893). One eminent Russian theologian identifies the new work as the crucial moment in the “awakening of Orthodoxy” in modern times, the moment when Russian theology began to recover the teachings of the Eastern church fathers and to define itself with respect to both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. While many aspects of Filaret’s activity as a leader of the Russian church for more than forty years bear mentioning, his efforts to reform and strengthen monasticism stand out. He promoted contemplative asceticism (hesychasm) on the territory of the Holy Trinity–St. Sergius monastery and elsewhere. Fully reformed monasteries, he believed, might inspire the return of the Old Ritualist and reconvert Byzantine Rite Catholics (Uniates) of Poland. He encouraged informal women’s communities to become monasteries, and during the 1860s devised badly needed guidelines for all monasteries, stressing wherever possible that they follow the rule of St. Basil with its obligation for a common table, community property, work, and prayer. Filaret was canonized as a saint in 1992.

See also:

METROPOLITAN; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH;

SAINTS BIBLIOGRAPHY

Florovsky, Georges. (1979–1985). Ways of Russian Theology, vol. 1, chap. 5. Belmont, MA: Nordland. Nichols, Robert L. (1990). “Filaret of Moscow as an Ascetic.” In The Legacy of St. Vladimir: Byzantium, Russia, America, eds. J. Breck, J. Meyendorff, and E. Silk. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Filaret’s new Bible and catechetical initiatives provoked opposition in church and governing circles, who saw them as signs of Orthodoxy’s deepening dependence on Protestantism. The critics soon stopped the Bible translation, burned its completed portions, and redirected church education on what Filaret called the “reverse course to scholasticism.” His catechism was reissued in 1827 in revised form and in Slavonic. Under these circumstances, Filaret had to rethink his own position and ideas.

FILARET ROMANOV, PATRIARCH

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(c. 1550–1633), Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus (1619–1633). Born Fedor Nikitich Romanov, the future Patriarch Filaret came from an old boyar clan, known

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variously from the fourteenth century as the Koshkins, the Zakharins, the Iurevs, and finally as the Romanovs. The clan reached the height of power and privilege after 1547, when Tsar Ivan IV (“the Terrible”) married Anastasia Iureva, Fedor Nikitich’s aunt (Fedor was probably born after the wedding). During the reign of Ivan the Terrible’s son and heir, Tsar Fedor Ivanovich (1584–1598), Fedor Nikitich Romanov succeeded his father, Nikita Romanovich Iurev, on a regency council that ruled along with Tsar Fedor. Fedor Nikitich had been a boyar since 1587. He was regional governor (namestnik) of Nizhnii Novgorod (1586) and later of Pskov (1590) and served in numerous ceremonial functions at court. On the death of Tsar Fedor in 1598, Fedor Nikitich continued to hold important posts and retained his seniority among the boyars under the new tsar, Boris Godunov. In 1601, however, as part of a general attack by Boris on real and potential rivals to his power, Fedor was forcibly tonsured (made a monk) and exiled to the remote AntonievSiisky Monastery, near Kholmogory. His wife, Ksenia Ivanovna Shestova (whom he married around 1585), was similarly forced to take the monastic habit in 1601. She took the religious name Marfa and was sent in exile to the remote Tolvuisky Hermitage. Other Romanov relatives— Fedor’s brothers and sisters and their spouses— similarly fell into disgrace under Boris Godunov, with only one of Fedor’s brothers (Ivan) surviving his confinement. That Fedor should be considered a rival to Boris was natural enough. He was the last tsar’s first cousin, whereas Boris was merely a brother-inlaw. There was also the more or less general belief, known even to foreign travelers in Russia at the time, that just before his death, Tsar Fedor had bequeathed the throne to his cousin Fedor, and that Boris Godunov had been elected to the throne only after the Romanovs had first refused it. While there is enough contemporary evidence to suggest that the Romanovs were genuinely thought of as candidates for the throne in 1598, many of the stories about Tsar Fedor’s nomination of one of the Romanovs as his heir date from only after the Romanov ascension to the throne (in 1613) and therefore must be regarded with some suspicion. Whatever the case, Fedor Nikitich, having taken the monastic name of Filaret, received some relief from his circumstances in 1605, when Boris Godunov died and was replaced by the First False Dmitry, who freed him (and his former wife, the


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nun Marfa) from his confinement and elevated him to the rank of Metropolitan of Rostov. After the fall of the First False Dmitry, Filaret took charge of the translation of the relics of Tsarevich Dmitry from Uglich to Moscow’s Archangel Cathedral in the Kremlin. This was where Dmitry was interred and, shortly thereafter, where he was glorified as a saint. With the election of (St.) Germogen as patriarch, Filaret was sent back to Rostov; but when the Second False Dmitry captured the city in 1608, Filaret soon became one of his supporters in a struggle with Tsar Vasily Shuisky (r. 1606–1610), establishing himself in Dmitry’s camp at Tushino, near Moscow. It was the Second False Dmitry, in fact, who elevated Filaret to be patriarch after (St.) Germogen was murdered by the Poles, who had intervened in Russian internal affairs. Filaret briefly fell into Polish hands when Dmitry was defeated and put to flight, but he quickly made his way back to Moscow under the protection of Tsar Vasily Shuisky. However, military defeats brought Shuisky’s regime down in 1610, and Shuisky was forcibly tonsured a monk. Political power rested then in a council of seven boyars who dispatched Filaret to Poland to invite Prince Wladislaw, son of Poland’s King Sigismund III, to be tsar in Muscovy. During these negotiations, Filaret insisted that the young prince convert to Orthodoxy and to do so by rebaptism, a stipulation to which the Polish king was unwilling to concede. With the breakdown of these talks, Filaret was placed under house arrest, where he remained until after the Treaty of Deulino in 1618, which finally provided an end to Polish interests in the Russian throne. In June 1619, Filaret returned to a Moscow and to a Russia ruled now by his son, Mikhail, who had been elected tsar by the Assembly of the Land (Zemsky Sobor) in February 1613. Within days, Filaret was consecrated patriarch and within days after that, he was proclaimed “Great Sovereign”—a title usually reserved for the ruler—signaling Filaret’s unique position at the court. Filaret took the reins of government in his own hands, directing church and foreign policy with evidently little input from his son. In church matters, Filaret continued his previous position with regard to the non-Orthodox, insisting on the rebaptism of all converts and, in general, further hardening confessional lines with Muscovy’s non-Orthodox neighbors and minorities. He also advocated for the Polish war that started in 1632, which turned against Muscovy with the failure of the siege of

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Smolensk and the routing of the Russian army. Filaret died on October 1, 1633, amid the unfolding disasters of that war.

See also:

ASSEMBLY OF THE LAND; CATHEDRAL OF THE

ARCHANGEL; DMITRY, FALSE; GODUNOV, BORIS FYODOROVICH;

IVAN

IV;

KREMLIN;

METROPOLITAN;

ROMANOV DYNASTY; ROMANOV, MIKHAIL FYODOROVICH;

RUSSIAN

ORTHODOX

CHURCH;

SHUISKY,

VASILY IVANOVICH; TIME OF TROUBLES BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dunning, Chester S.L. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Keep, J.L.H. (1960). “The Regime of Filaret, 1619–1633.” The Slavonic and Easter European Review 38:334–360. Klyuchevsky, Vasily Osipovich. (1970). The Rise of the Romanovs tr. Liliana Archibald. London: Macmillan St. Martin’s. Platonov, Sergei Fyodorovich (1985). The Time of Troubles, tr. John T. Alexander. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. RUSSELL E. MARTIN

FINLAND Finland, a country of approximately five million people, located in northeastern Europe, was part of the Russian Empire from 1809 to 1917. It gained its independence in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and had a complex, close, and occasionally troubled relationship with the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the USSR, Finland began to turn more toward the West, joining the European Union in 1995. Finns are not Slavs. They speak a Finno-Ugric language, closely related to Estonian and more distantly to Hungarian. The territory of modern-day Finland was inhabited as early as 7000 B.C.E., but there is no written record of the earliest historical period. During the ninth century C.E., Finns accompanied the Varangians on expeditions that led to the founding of Kievan Rus. The Finnish peoples maintained close trading ties with several early Russian cities, especially Novgorod, while from the west they were influenced by the nascent Swedish state.

of a crusade led by King Erik in 1155 that established Christianity in Finland. The Swedes and Novgorod fought several conflicts in and around Finland during this time. The Peace of Noteborg in 1323 established a rough boundary between Swedish and Russian lands, with some Finns (Karelians) living on the eastern side of the border and adopting the Orthodox faith. Although the Swedes were Catholic at the time of the conquest, they broke with Rome under Gustavus Vasa (1523–1560), and Lutheranism was established as the official religion of Sweden and Finland in 1593. The Finnish lands enjoyed some local autonomy under the Swedes, and the Finnish nobility had certain political rights. Swedish was the language of the upper classes and remains an official language in Finland in the early twenty-first century. During the mid-sixteenth century, Sweden became embroiled in several wars of religion and state expansion with Denmark, Poland, and Russia. Russia and Sweden fought over territory along the Arctic Ocean, and Sweden intervened during Russia’s Time of Troubles (1598–1613). Later, under Gustavus Adolphus (1611–1632), the Treaty of Stolbova (1617) gave substantial territory on both sides of the Gulf of Finland to Sweden, thereby enabling it to control trade routes from the Baltic to Russia. Under Charles XII (1697–1718) and Peter I (1682–1725), Sweden and Russia fought a major war for control of the Baltic. In 1714, Russia occupied Finland after the Battle of Storkro. However, in 1721, in the Treaty of Nystad (Uusikaupunki), the Russians withdrew from most of Finland (keeping the region of Karelia in the east) in return for control over Estonia and Livonia. More than 500,000 Finns, roughly half the population, died during this long conflict, and the national economy was ruined. Another war between Russia and Sweden from 1741 to1743 again resulted in the Russian occupation of Finland. However, in accordance with the Peace of Turku (1743), Russia withdrew from most of Finland, although it did annex some additional lands in the eastern part of the country. There were no further border changes after the third war between the two states from 1788 to 1790. UNDER RUSSIAN RULE

Starting in the twelfth century, most of Finland was absorbed by the Swedish kingdom. Legend tells

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Finland’s democracy survived, but a more serious threat was posed by Soviet military action. After the Germans and Soviets carved up Poland and the Baltic states during the fall of 1939, Finland found itself the target of territorial demands of Joseph Stalin. The Soviets demanded border changes around Leningrad and in the far north, islands in the Gulf of Finland, and a naval base in southern Finland. Diplomatic efforts to find a peaceful solution failed, and Soviet forces invaded Finland on November 30, 1939. Finland received assistance from Western countries, and its forces fought ferociously against the Soviets, who according to some accounts suffered 100,000 dead.

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Before and during the fateful events of 1917, many Russian revolutionaries, including Vladimir Lenin, took refuge in Finland, where there were active socialist and communist parties. After the Bolsheviks seized power, the Finns, taking advantage of the breakdown in central authority, declared independence on December 6, 1917. Later that month, Lenin recognized Finnish independence. Nonetheless, there was fighting in Finland during the Russian Civil War between Reds, backed by Moscow, and anti-communist Whites, backed by Sweden and Germany. The Whites prevailed, exacting vengeance on those Reds who did not flee to Russia. Finland made peace with Russia in 1920 with the Treaty of Tartu and adopted a constitution creating a democratic republic that continues to remain in effect. During the 1920s and 1930s Finnish democracy came under assault by both left-wing and right-wing groups, the former allied with the communists in the USSR and the latter attracted to Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini.


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becoming its first grand duke. Under this arrangement, the Finns were to enjoy religious freedom, and Finland, in Alexander’s words, would “take its place in the rank of nations, governed by its own laws.” Russia returned land to the Finns, and most of them accepted Russian rule. During the nineteenth century Finland experienced a national awakening, spurred by developments in the arts, language, and culture, and political parties began to organize around national issues. By the end of the century, when Alexander III and Nicholas II tried to assert Russia’s authority in Finland, there was resentment and resistance, culminating in the assassination of the Russian governor general in 1904.

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Nonetheless, the Finns were outnumbered and outgunned. In March 1940 they agreed to the Soviet territorial demands, and more than 400,000 Finns left their homes rather than become citizens of the Soviet state. Continuing economic and military demands by the USSR eventually made Finland turn to Germany for assistance. Finnish troops advanced with the Germans in June 1941 when Germany attacked the USSR, precipitating, in effect, another war with the Soviets. In 1943 and 1944, as the tide of the war turned against Germany, Finland made

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Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov signs the Soviet-Finnish Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. Standing behind him are Andrei Zhdanov, Klimenty Voroshilov, Josef Stalin, and Otto Kuusinen. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS

Although Finland was subjected to Russian influence during the war, the Finns avoided the fate of the East European states, which became communist satellites of the Soviet Union. Instead, in 1948, Finland signed an Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance with the USSR that allowed it to keep its democratic constitution but prohibited it from joining in any anti-Soviet alliance. This agreement is sometimes derided as “Finlandization”: Finland retained its constitutional

freedoms but gave the USSR an effective veto over its foreign policy (e.g., it had close trade links with the USSR but did not join NATO or the European Community) and, on some questions, its domestic politics (e.g., anti-Soviet writers could not be published in Finland; Finnish politicians had to publicly affirm their confidence in Soviet policy). This was especially the case under President Urho Kekkonen (1956–1981), who had close ties with Moscow. Nonetheless, Finland was generally regarded as a nonaligned, neutral state. This culminated with the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe of 1975, which led, among other things, to the Helsinki Accords, an important human rights agreement that would later be used against the communist rulers of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. During the postwar period,

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peace with the USSR and turned on the Germans, but it had to make additional territorial concessions to Moscow, most of which were incorporated into the USSR’s Autonomous Republic of Karelia. Thus Finland enjoyed the dubious distinction of fighting both the Soviets and the Germans, and the country was devastated by years of war.

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Finland, like the other Scandinavian states, developed a social-democratic welfare state, and Finns enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Finland and Russia signed a new treaty in 1992, which ended the “special relationship” between the two states. Trade ties have suffered because of Russia’s economic collapse, and Finns increasingly have looked to the West for economic relationships. Finland joined the European Union in 1995, and enjoys close ties with the Baltic states, particularly Estonia.

See also:

ESTONIA AND ESTONIANS; FINNS AND KARE-

LIANS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; NYSTADT, TREATY OF; SOVIET-FINNISH WAR

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allison, Roy. (1985). Finland’s Relations with the Soviet Union, 1944–1984. London: Macmillan. Kirby, David G., ed. (1975). Finland and Russia, 1808–1920: From Independence to Autonomy. London: Macmillan. Kirby, David G. (1979). Finland in the Twentieth Century. London: Hurst. Singleton, Fred, and Upton, Anthony F. (1998). A Short History of Finland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tanner, Vaino. (1957). The Winter War: Finland Against Russia, 1939–1940. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. PAUL J. KUBICEK

FINNS AND KARELIANS Finns, Karelians (in Karelian Republic and eastern Finland), Izhorians (Ingrians) and Ingrian Finns (around St. Petersburg), Vepsians (southeast of St. Petersburg), near-extinct Votians (southwest of St. Petersburg), and Estonians speak mutually semiintelligible Finnic languages. Novgorod absorbed many of them during the thirteenth century, without formal treaties. After defeating the Swedes and taking territory that included the present St. Petersburg, tsarist Russia subjugated all these peoples. Finns, Ingrian Finns, and most Estonians were Lutheran, while Karelians, Vepsians, Izhorians, and Votians were Greek Orthodox. Livelihood has ex-


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tended from traditional forest agriculture to urban endeavors. Finland and Estonia emerged as independent countries by 1920, while Karelia became an autonomous oblast (1920) and soon an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1923). Deportations, immigration, and other means of russification have almost obliterated the Izhorians, while reducing the Karelians, Finns, and Vepsians to 13 percent of Karelia’s population (103,000 out of 791,000, in 1989). Altogether, the Soviet 1989 census recorded 131,000 Karelians (23,000 in Tver oblast), 18,000 Finns, and 6,000 Vepsians (straddling Karelia and the Leningrad and Vologda oblasts). Karelia occupies a strategic location on the railroad to Russia’s ice-free port of Murmansk on the Arctic Ocean. Much of the crucial American aid to the Soviet Union during World War II used this route. The Karelian Isthmus, seized by Moscow from Finland during that war, is not part of the Karelian republic, which briefly (1940 to 1956) was upgraded to a Karelo-Finnish union republic so as to put pressure on Finland. The earliest surviving written document in any Finnic language is a Karelian thunder spell written on birch bark with Cyrillic characters. Karelia contributed decisively to the world-famous Finnish epic Kalevala. Finnish dialects gradually mutate to northern and western Karelian, to Aunus and Ludic in southern Karelia, and on to Vepsian. Given such a continuum, a common Karelian literary language has not taken root, and standard Latin-script Finnish is used by the newspaper Karjalan Sanomat (Karelian News) and the monthly Karjala (Karelia). A Vepsian periodical, Kodima (Homeland), uses both Vepsian (with Latin script) and Russian. Only 40,000 Karelians in Karelia and 22,000 elsewhere in the former Soviet Union consider Karelian or Finnish their main language. Among the young, russification prevails. Karelia is an “urbanized forest republic” where agriculture is limited and industry ranges from lumber and paper to iron ore and aluminum. The capital, Petrozavodsk (Petroskoi in Karelian), includes 34 percent of Karelia’s entire population. Ethnic Karelians have little say in political and economic management. Hardly any of the republic government leaders or parliament members speak Karelian or Finnish. The cultural interests of the indigenous minority are voiced by Karjalan Rahvahan Liitto (Union of the Karelian People), the

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Vepsian Cultural Society, and the Ingrian Union for Finns in Karelia.

two ballets also helped spread awareness of Russia’s rich folk culture beyond its borders.

Economic and cultural interactions with Finland, blocked under the Soviet rule, have revived. Karelia’s future success depends largely on how far a symbiosis with this more developed neighboring country can reach.

See also:

See also:

FINLAND; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NA-

TIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; NORTHERN PEOPLES

BALLET, FOLKLORE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Guterman, Norbert, tr. (1973). Russian Fairy Tales, 2d ed. New York: Pantheon Books. Taruskin, Richard. (1996). Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press. NORMAN W. INGHAM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eskelinen, Heikki; Oksa, Jukka; and Austin, Daniel. (1994). Russian Karelia in Search of a New Role. Joensuu, Finland: Karelian Institute. Kurs, Ott. (1994). “Indigenous Finnic Population of North-west Russia.” GeoJournal 34(4):443–456.

FIRST SECRETARY, CPSU See GENERAL SECRETARY.

Taagepera, Rein. (1999). The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State. London: Hurst. REIN TAAGEPERA

FIREBIRD The Firebird (Zhar–ptitsa) is one of the most colorful legendary animal figures of Russian magical tales (fairy tales). With golden feathers and eyes like crystals, she is a powerful source of light, and even one of her feathers can illuminate a whole room. Sometimes she functions as little more than a magical helper who flies the hero out of danger; in other tales her feather and she herself are highly desired prizes to be captured. “Prince Ivan, the Firebird, and the Gray Wolf” depicts her coming at night to steal golden apples from a king’s garden and becoming one object of a heroic quest by the youngest prince, Ivan. Helped by a gray wolf, he ends up with the Firebird as well as a noble steed with golden mane and golden bridle and Princess Yelena the Fair. The tales became the narrative source for the first of two famous folklore ballets composed by Igor Stravinsky under commission from Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. L’Oiseau de feu, with choreography by the noted Russian Michel Fokine, premiered at the Paris Opera on June 25, 1910, with great success and quickly secured the young Stravinsky’s international reputation. Like his Petrushka that followed it, The Firebird impressed audiences with the colorfulness of both story and music and with its bold harmonic innovations. The

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FIVE-HUNDRED-DAY PLAN Proposals for reform of the Soviet economic system began to emerge during the 1960s, and some concrete reforms were introduced. All of these efforts, such as Alexei Kosygin’s reforms in 1965, the new law on state enterprises in 1987, and the encouragement of cooperatives in 1988, basically involved tinkering with details. They did not touch the main pillars of the Soviet economy: hierarchical command structures controlling enterprise activity, detailed central decision-making about resource allocation and production activity, and fixed prices set by the government. The need for reform became ever more obvious in the “years of stagnation” under Leonid Brezhnev. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, reform proposals became more radical, culminating in the formulation of the Five-Hundred-Day Plan, put together at the request of Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin by a group of able and progressive reform economists headed by Academician Stanislav Shatalin and presented to the government in September 1990. The plan fully accepted the idea of a shift to a market economy, as indicated by its subtitle “transition to the market,” and laid out a timetable of institutional and policy changes to achieve the transition. It described and forthrightly accepted the institutions of private property, market pricing, enterprise independence, competition as regulator, transformation of the banking system, macroeconomic stabilization, and the need to open the economy to the world market. It specified a timetable


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of steps to be taken and provided draft legislation to undergird the changes. One of its more radical elements was its acceptance of the desire of the republics for devolution of central power, and it endorsed their right to economic independence. This feature of the plan was fatal upon its acceptance, as Gorbachev was not ready to accept a diminution of central power. Parallel with the Five-Hundred-Day Plan, a group in the government worked up an alternative, much less ambitious, proposal. Gorbachev asked the economist Abel Aganbegyan to meld the two into a compromise plan. Aganbegyan’s plan accepted most of the features of the Five-HundredDay Plan, but without timetables. By then, however, it was too late. Yeltsin had been elected president of the Russian republic and had already started to move the RSFSR along the path of reform envisioned in the Shatalin plan. This was followed in August 1991 by the abortive coup to remove Gorbachev, and in December 1991 by the breakup of the Union, ending the relevance of the Five-Hundred-Day Plan to a unified USSR. But its spirit and much of its content were taken as the basis for the reform in the Russian republic, and many of the reformers involved in its formulation became officials in the new Russian government. The other republics went their own way and, except for the Baltic republics, generally rejected radical reform.

See also:

P L A N S

tention focused on several centers in south Russia and eastern Ukraine, which were to be rapidly enlarged. Electric power was the glamorous new industry, and both Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin stressed it as a symbol of progress. By 1927 the planners had prepared a huge three-volume Five-Year Plan, consisting of some seventeen hundred pages of description and optimistic projection. By 1928 Stalin had won control of the Communist Party from Leon Trotsky and other rivals, enabling him to launch Russia on a fateful new path. The First Five-Year Plan (FYP) laid out hundreds of projects for construction, but the Party concentrated on heavy industry and national defense. In Germany Adolf Hitler was already calling for more “living room.” In a famous 1931 speech Stalin warned that the USSR only had ten years in which to prepare against invasion (and he was right).

AGANBEGYAN, ABEL GEZEVICH; COMMAND

ADMINISTRATIVE

ECONOMY;

KOSYGIN

REFORMS;

SHATALIN, STANISLAV SERGEYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aslund, Anders. (1995). How Russia Became a Market Economy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Yavlinsky, G. (1991). 500 Days: Transition to the Market. Trans. David Kushner. New York: St. Martin’s Press. ROBERT W. CAMPBELL

FIVE-YEAR PLANS Russian economic planning had its roots in the late nineteenth century when tsarist explorers and engineers systematically found and evaluated the rich resources scattered all around the empire. Major deposits of iron and coal, as well as other minerals, were well documented when the Bolsheviks turned their attention to economic development. Initial at-


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The First Five-Year Plan was cut short as planning gave way to confusion. A Second Five-Year Plan was issued in one volume in 1934, already behind schedule. The planners were learning that oneyear plans were more effective for managing the economy, leaving the five-year plans to serve as propaganda documents, especially effective abroad where the Great Depression seemed to signal the collapse of capitalism. The Third Five-Year Plan had limited circulation, and the Fourth was only a pamphlet, issued as a special edition of the party newspaper, Pravda. The Nazi invasion, starting June 22, 1941, required hasty improvisation, using previously prepared central and eastern bases to replace those quickly overrun by well-equipped German forces. The Nazis almost captured Moscow in December 1941. After Soviet forces rallied, wartime planners organized hasty output increases, drawing on newly trained survivors of Stalin’s drastic purges. Russian planners worked uneasily with U.S. and British officials as the long-delayed second front was opened, and abundant Lend-Lease supplies arrived. After the war, improvisation gave way to Stalin’s grim 1946 Five-Year Plan, which held the Soviet people to semi-starvation rations while he rebuilt heavy industry and challenged the United States in building an atomic bomb.

Other Russians contributed greatly by creating new tools for economic management, especially Leonid Kontorovich, who invented linear programming; Wassily Leontief, who invented inputoutput analysis; and Tigran Khachaturov, who provided skillful political protection for several hundred talented economists as they improved Russian economics. These men rose above the barriers of the Russian planning system and thus deserve worldwide respect.

See also:

ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; INDUSTRIALIZA-

TION, SOVIET

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bergson, Abram. (1964). The Economics of Soviet Planning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (1990). Soviet Economic Structure and Performance, 4th ed. New York: Harper & Row. Hunter, Holland, and Szyrmer, Janusz M. (1992). Faulty Foundations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. HOLLAND HUNTER

FLORENCE, COUNCIL OF

This brilliant leader’s successors were a dull lot. The planners returned to previous five-year plan procedures, which mainly cranked up previous targets by applying a range of percentage increases. Growth rates steadily declined.

In 1438 Pope Eugenius IV called a church council to consider reunion of the eastern and western churches. The Latin and Greek churches had been drifting apart for centuries and from the year 1054 onward had rarely been in communion with each other. The sack of the Byzantine capital of Constantinople by the western crusaders made it clear that they no longer considered the Greeks their coreligionists and proved to the Greeks of Byzantium that the Latins were not their brothers in faith. But by the fifteenth century, with the Ottoman Turks already in control of most of the territory of the Byzantine Empire and moving on its capital of Constantinople, reunion of the churches seemed to be a necessity if the Christian world were to respond with a united front to the Muslim threat to Europe.

In 1985 the energetic Mikhail Gorbachev looked for help from Soviet planners, but the planners were outweighed by the great bureaucracies running the system. In a final spasm, the last FiveYear Plan set overambitious targets like those of the first such endeavor.

The council convened in 1439 in the Italian city of Ferrara and then moved to Florence. Present were not only the Pope, the cardinals, and many western bishops and theologians, but also the Byzantine Emperor John VIII, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Joseph II, the foremost cleric of the eastern

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Fortunately for the Soviet people and the world, Stalin died in March 1953, and by 1957 Nikita Khrushchev was able to give Soviet planners a more humane agenda. The next Five-Year Plan was actually a seven-year plan with ambitious targets for higher living standards. Soviet welfare did improve markedly. However, Khrushchev was diverted by his efforts to control Berlin and by his ill-fated Cuban missile adventure. The Party leadership was furious, but instead of having him executed, they allowed him to retire.

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Christian world, and a number of leading officials and clergy of the Byzantine world (including a Russian delegation). The main points of dispute between the two churches were the legitimacy of a western addition to the creed (the “filioque”) and the nature of the church: whether it should be ruled by the Pope or by all the bishops jointly. After much discussion and debate, the delegates of the eastern church, under political pressure, accepted the western positions on the “filioque” and Papal supremacy, and reunion of the churches was solemnly proclaimed. When the Greek representatives returned home, however, their decision was greeted with derision. Church union was never accepted by the masses of the Eastern Christian faithful. In any case, it became a dead letter with the 1453 Turkish conquest of Constantinople, renamed Istanbul by the Turks. When the Greek Isidore, Metropolitan of Kiev and presiding bishop of the Russian church, returned to Moscow where he normally resided and proclaimed the Pope as the head of the church, he was arrested on the orders of Grand Prince Basil II (“The Dark”) and then diplomatically allowed to escape to Poland. In 1448 he was replaced as metropolitan by a Russian bishop, Jonah, without the consent of the mother church in Constantinople, which was deemed to have given up its faith by submitting to the Pope. From now on, the church of Russia would be an independent (autocephalous) Orthodox church. The ramifications of the Council of Florence were significant. The rejection of its decisions in the East made it clear that the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches were to be separate institutions, as they are today. Yet the concept of incorporating eastern ritual into Catholicism in certain places, a compromise that evolved at the council, became the model for the so-called uniate church created in Polish-governed Ukraine and Belarus in 1596, whereby the Orthodox church in those lands became part of the Catholic church while retaining its traditional eastern rites.

See also:

BASIL II; METROPOLITAN; UNIATE CHURCH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cherniavsky, Michael M. (1955). “The Reception of the Council of Florence in Moscow.” Church History 24:347–359. Gill, Joseph. (1961). The Council of Florence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. GEORGE P. MAJESKA


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FOLKLORE Folklore has played a vital role in the lives of the Russian people and has exerted a considerable influence on the literature, music, dance, and other arts of Russia, including such major nineteenthand twentieth-century writers and composers as Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Peter Tchaikovsky, and Igor Stravinsky. A folklore tradition has existed and flourished in Russia for many centuries, has been collected and studied for well more than two hundred years, and is represented by a variety of large and small genres, including oral epic songs, folktales, laments, ritual and lyric songs, incantations, riddles, and proverbs. A simple explanation for the survival of folklore over such a long period of time is difficult to find. Some possible reasons can be found in the fact that the population was predominately rural and unable to read and write prior to the Soviet era; that the secular, nonspiritual literature of the folklore tradition was for the most part a primary source of entertainment for Russians from all classes and levels of society; or that the Orthodox Church was unsuccessful in its efforts to repress the Russian peasant’s pagan, pre-Christian folk beliefs and rituals, which over time had absorbed many Christian elements, a phenomenon commonly referred to as “double belief.” The fact that the Russian peasant was both geographically and culturally far removed from urban centers and events that influenced the country’s development and direction also played a role in folklore’s survival. And Russia’s geographical location itself was a significant factor, making possible close contact with the rich folklore traditions of neighboring peoples, including the Finns, the nomadic Turkic tribes, and the non-Russian peoples of the vast Siberian region. Evidence of a folklore tradition appeared in Russian medieval religious and secular works of the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries, and conflicting attitudes toward its existence prior to the eighteenth century are well documented. The church considered it as evil, as the work of the devil. But memoirs and historical literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries indicate that folklore, folktales in particular, was quite favorably regarded by many. Ivan the Terrible (1533–1584), for example, hired blind men to tell stories at his bedside until he fell asleep. Less than one hundred

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Ural region, made during the middle of the eighteenth century and published early during the nineteenth century. At about the same time a real foundation was laid for folklore research and scholarship in Russia, due largely to the influence of Western romanticism and widespread increase in national self-awareness. This movement, represented in particular by German romantic philosophers and folklorists such as Johann Herder (1744–1803) and the brothers Grimm (Jacob, 1785–1863; Wilhelm, 1786–1859), was mirrored in Russia during the early years of the nineteenth century among the Slavophiles, a group of Russian intellectuals of the 1830s, who believed in Russia’s spiritual greatness and who showed an intense interest in Russia’s folklore, folk customs, and the role of the folk in the development of Russian culture. Folklore now began to be seriously collected, and among the significant works published were large collections of Russian proverbs by V. I. Dal (1801-1872) and Russian folktales by A. N. Afanasev (1826-1871).

Prince Ivan and the Grey Wolf, nineteenth-century engraving after a watercolor by Boris Zvorykin. THE ART ARCHIVE/BIBLIOTHÈQUE

DES

ARTS DÉCORATIFS PARIS/DAGLI ORTI

But the latter part of the nineteenth century signaled the most significant event in Russian folklore scholarship, when P.N. Rybnikov (1831–1885) and A.F. Hilferding (Gilferding, 1831–1872) uncovered a treasury of folklore in the Lake Onega region of northwestern Russia during the 1860s and 1870s, including a flourishing tradition of oral epic songs, which up to that time was believed to be almost extinct as a living folklore form. This discovery led to a systematic search for folklore that is still being conducted during the early twentyfirst century.

The first important collection of Russian folklore by Russians was that of folksongs from the

During the Soviet period folklore was criticized for depicting the reality of the past and was even considered harmful to the people. Until the death of Stalin in 1953 folklore scholarship was under constant Party supervision and limited in scope, focusing on social problems and ideological matters. But folklore itself was recognized as a powerful means to promote patriotism and advance Communist ideas and ideals, and it became a potent instrument in the formation of Socialist culture. New Soviet versions of folklore were created and made public through a variety of media—concert hall, radio, film, television, and tapes and phonograph records. These new works included contemporary subject matter: for example, an airplane instead of the wooden eagle on whose back the hero often traveled, a rifle for slaying a modern dragon in military uniform, or marriage to the daughter of a factory manager rather than a princess.

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years later, however, Tsar Alexis (1645–1676), son of Peter the Great (1696–1725), ordered the massacre of practitioners of this and other secular arts. Royal edict notwithstanding, tellers of tales continued to bring pleasure to people, and on the rural estates of noblemen and in high social circles of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Moscow, skillful narrators were well rewarded. The earliest collection of Russian folklore, consisting of some songs and tales, was made during the seventeenth century by two Oxford-educated Englishmen: Richard James, chaplain to an English diplomatic mission in Moscow (1619–1620), and Samuel Collins, physician to Tsar Alexei (during the 1660s).

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Since the 1970s, Russian folklore has become free from government control, and the sphere of study has expanded. During the early twenty-first century, folklore of the far-flung regions of the former Soviet Union is being collected in the field. Many of the older, classic collections of Russian folklore are being republished, old cylinder recordings restored, and bibliographies published, mainly under the direction of the Folklore Committee of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in St. Petersburg and the Folklore Section of the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow. Among the most important narrative folklore genres are Russian oral epic songs and folktales, which provide a rich diversity of thematic and story material. The oral epic songs are the major genre in verse. Many of them concern the adventures of heroes associated with Prince Vladimir’s court in Kiev in southern Russia; the action in a second group of epic songs occurs on the “open plain,” where Russians fight the Tatar invaders; and the events of a third group of songs take place near the medieval city of Novgorod in northern Russia. The stories are made up of themes of feasting, journeys, and combats; acts of insubordination and punishment; trials of skill in arms, sports, and horsemanship; and themes of courtship, marriage, infidelity, and reconciliation. Some popular songs are about the giant Svyatogor, the Old Cossack Ilya Muromets, the dragon-slayer Dobrynya Nikitich, Alyosha Popovich the priest’s son, and the rich merchant Sadko. The leading genre in prose, one that is well known beyond Russia, is the folktale, which includes tales of various kinds, such as animal and moral tales, as well as magic or so-called fairy tales, similar to the Western European fairy tales. Russian magic or fairy tales often tell a story about a hero who leaves home for some reason, must carry out one or several different tasks, encounters many obstacles along the way, accomplishes all of the tasks, and gains wealth or a fair maiden in the end. Among the popular heroes and villains of Russian folktales are Ivan the King’s son, the witch Baba Yaga, Ivan the fool, the immortal Kashchey, Grandfather Frost, and the Firebird.

See also:

FIREBIRD; FOLK MUSIC; PUSHKIN HOUSE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Afanasev, Alexander. (1975). Russian Fairy Tales. New York: Random House.


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Bailey, James, and Ivanova, Tatyana. (1998). Russian Folk Epics. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Ivanits, Linda J. (1989). Russian Folk Beliefs. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Miller, Frank J. (1990). Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Oinas, Felix J. (1985). Essays on Russian Folklore and Mythology. Columbus, OH: Slavica. Oinas, Felix J., and Soudakoff, Stephen, eds. (1975). The Study of Russian Folklore. The Hague: Mouton. Sokolov, Y.M. (1971). Russian Folklore, tr. Catherine Ruth Smith. Detroit, MI: Folklore Associates. PATRICIA ARANT

FOLK MUSIC Russian folk music is the indigenous vocal (accompanied and unaccompanied) and instrumental music of the Russian peasantry, consisting of songs and dances for work, entertainment, and religious and ritual occasions. Its origins lie in customary practice; until the industrial era it was an oral tradition, performed and learned without written notation. Common instruments include the domra (three- or four-stringed round-bodied lute), balalaika (three-stringed triangular-bodied lute), gusli (psaltery), bayan (accordion), svirel (pennywhistle), and zhaleyka (hornpipe). Russian folk music includes songs marking seasonal and ritual events, and music for figure or circle dances (korovody) and the faster chastye or plyasovye dances. A related form, chastushki (bright tunes accompanying humorous or satirical four-line verses), gained rural and urban popularity during the late nineteenth century. The sung epic bylina declined during the nineteenth century, but protyazhnye—protracted lyric songs, slow in tempo and frequently sorrowful in content and tone—remain popular. Significant stylistic and repertoire differences exist among various regions of Russia. Russian educated society’s interest in folk music began during the late eighteenth century. Numerous collections of Russian folk songs were published over the next two centuries (notably N. L. Lvov and J. B. Prác, Collection of Russian Folk Songs with Their Tunes, St. Petersburg, 1790). From the nineteenth century onward, Russian composers used these as an important source of musical ma-

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native folk music in the face of increasing urbanization. In 1896 Vasily Andreyev (1861–1918) organized an orchestra of folk instruments, and in 1911 Mitrofan Piatnitsky (1864–1927) founded a Russian folk choir. Originally consisting of peasant and amateur performers, both became well-known professional ensembles, providing folk music as entertainment for urban audiences.

Russian peasants playing folk music, early-twentieth-century postcard. THE ART ARCHIVE/BIBLIOTHÈQUE DES ARTS DÉCORATIFS

During the Soviet era folk music had important symbolic importance as a form genuinely “of the people.” During the 1930s, state support for socialist realism encouraged study and performance of folk music. Composers and amateur performers developed a new “Soviet folk song” that wedded traditional forms and styles with lyrics praising socialism and the Soviet state. Official support was demonstrated in the establishment of the Pyatnitsky choir and the Russian folk orchestra directed by Nikolai Osipov (1901–1945) as State ensembles. Russian folk music became a state-sanctioned performance genre characterized by organized amateur activities, notated music, academic study, and large professional performing ensembles that toured internationally. During the 1970s, Dmitry Pokrovsky (d. 1996) began a new effort to collect and perform Russian folk songs and tunes in authentic peasant village style, with local variations. This revival of Russian folk music received international attention as part of the world music movement.

PARIS/DAGLI ORTI

See also: BALALAIKA; FOLKLORE; GLINKA, MIKHAIL; MUSIC; RIMSKY-KORSAKOV, NIKOLAI ANDREYEVICH

terial. During the nineteenth century, German philosopher Johann Herder’s ideas of romantic nationalism and the importance of the folk in determining national culture inspired interest in and appreciation of native Russian musical sources, especially as they reflected notions of national pride. Mikhail Glinka, for his purposeful use of Russian folk themes in his 1836 opera A Life for the Tsar, is considered the founder of the “national” school of Russian music composition, most famously embraced by Mili Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolai RimskyKorsakov. This designation had more political than musical significance, as composers not associated with the national school, such as Peter Tchaikovsky and Igor Stravinsky, also made use of folk music in their compositions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Malcolm Hamrick. (1983). “Native Song and National Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music.” In Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. Theofanis George Stavrou. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Miller, Frank J. (1990). Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore in the Stalin Era. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Rothstein, Robert A. (1994). “Death of the Folk Song?” In Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Taruskin, Richard. (1997). Defining Russia Musically. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Russian ethnographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made efforts to record

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FONDODERZHATELI Literal translation: “fund holders.” In the Soviet economy, various organizations were holders and managers of inputs (fondoderzhateli). The principal fund holders were ministries and regional and local governments. In some instances, the state executive committees that directed construction organizations and local industry had fund-holding authority as well. Only fund holders were legally entitled to allocate funded resources, the most important of which were allocated by the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) and the State Committee for Material Technical Supply (Gossnab). Fund holders had to estimate input needs and their distribution among subordinate enterprises. They were obliged to allocate funds among direct consumers, such as enterprises, plants, and construction organizations within their jurisdiction. Fund holders also monitored the use of allocated funds. Funding (fondirovanie) was the typical form of centralized distribution of resources for important and highly “deficit” products. Such centrally allocated materials were called “funded” (fondiruyumye) commodities and were typically distributed among the enterprises by ministries. Enterprises were not allowed to exchange funded inputs legally. Material balances and distribution plans among fund holders were developed by Gosplan and then approved by the Council of Ministries. The ministries had their own supply departments that worked with central supply organizations. The enterprises related input requirements to their superiors through orders (zayavki), which were aggregated by the fund holder. At each stage of economic planning, requested inputs were compared to estimated input needs, and imbalances were corrected administratively without the use of prices. The process of allocating funded resources was characterized by constant bargaining between fund holders and consumers, where the latter were required to “defend” their needs.

See also:

FUNDED COMMODITIES

PAUL R. GREGORY

FONVIZIN, DENIS IVANOVICH (1744–1792), dramatist. Denis Fonvizin, the first truly original Russian dramatist in the eighteenth century, is best known


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for two satirical plays written in prose: The BrigadierGeneral (Brigadir) and The Minor (Nedorosl). Brigadir, written in 1766, was not published until 1786. Nedorosl was first staged in 1783 and published the following year. Both are considered masterpieces combining Russian and French comedy. Like all writers at the time, Fonvizin was born into a well-to-do family. His father, a strict disciplinarian, trained him to become a real “gentleman,” and became the model for one of the characters— the father of Mr. Oldwise (Starodum)—in Fonvizin’s play The Minor. Although thoroughly Russianized, the family’s ancestor was a German or Swedish prisoner captured in the Livonian campaigns of Ivan the Terrible. At Moscow University Fonvizin participated actively in theatrical productions. Upon graduation in 1762 (when Catherine II became empress), Fonvizin entered the civil service. In St. Petersburg, he befriended Ivan Dmitrievsky, a prominent actor, and began to translate and adapt foreign plays for him. He wrote minor works, such as Alzire, or the Americans (1762) and Korion (1764), but tasted his first real success when Catherine summoned him to the Hermitage to read his comedy The Brigadier to her. In 1769 she then appointed him secretary to Vice-Chancellor Nikita Panin, Catherine’s top diplomatic advisor. Although faithful to the French genre in writing The Brigadier, Fonvizin was less inspired by Molière than by the Danish playwright Barin Ludvig Holberg, from whose play Jean de France Fonvizin’s play was derived. A salon comedy, The Brigadier attacks the nobility’s corruption and ignorance. After reading the play, Panin wrote to Fonvizin: “I see that you know our customs well, because the wife of your general is completely familiar to us. No one among us can deny having a grandmother or an aunt of the sort. You have written our first comedy of manners.” The play also mocks the Russian gentry’s “gallomania”; without French rules for behavior “we wouldn’t know how to dance, how to enter a room, how to bow, how to perfume ourselves, how to put a hat on, and, when excited, how to express our passions and the state of our heart.” In 1782 Fonvizin finished The Minor. Since it was unthinkable that these lines could be read aloud to Catherine, he arranged a performance at Kniper’s Theater in St. Petersburg with Dmitrievsky as the character, Mr. Oldwise. The audience, recognizing the play as original and uniquely Russian, signaled its appreciation by flinging purses onto the stage. The play condemns domestic tyranny and false

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education, while touching also on larger social questions, such as serfdom. The play concerns the stupid son in a noble family, the Prostakovs (a play on the word prostoi or “simple”), who refuses to study properly but still expects to receive privileges. The lad’s name—Mitrofan (or Mitrofanushka in the diminutive)—is now a synonym in Russia for a dolt or fool. The composition of the family is telling. The mother, a bully, is obsessed with her son (that he get enough to eat and marry an heiress). Her brother resembles a pig more than a man (as his name, Skotina, suggests). Her husband acts sheepishly; the nurse spoils the boy; and the boy—wildly selfish and stupid—beats her. The play’s basic action revolves around the conflict between the Prostakovs on the one hand and Starodum and his associates on the other. The formers’ “coarse bestiality” (as Gogol termed it) contrasts sharply with the lofty morality that Starodum and his friends exhibit. In 1782 Fonvizin’s boss, Count Panin, had a stroke and summoned Fonvizin to write his Political Testament. He instructed the dramatist to deliver the testament, containing a blunt denunciation of absolute power, to Catherine after Panin’s death. However, when Panin died the next year, Catherine impounded all his papers (not to be released from archives until 1905) and dismissed Fonvizin. Pushkin later wrote that Catherine probably feared him. The playwright’s health declined after a seizure in 1785, and he died in 1792.

See also:

THEATER

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fonvizin, Denis Ivanovich, and Gleason, Walter J. (1985). The Political and Legal Writings of Denis Fonvizin. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. Levitt, Marcus C. (1995). Early Modern Russian Writers: Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Detroit: Gale Research. Moser, Charles A. (1979). Denis Fonvizin. Boston: Twayne. Raeff, Marc, ed. (1966). Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

many fermented and preserved foods necessitated by the short growing season of the Russian North. Foraged foods, especially mushrooms, are important to Russian diet and culture. The Russians excel in the preparation of a wide range of fresh and cultured dairy products; honey is the traditional sweetener. Russian cuisine is known for its extensive repertoire of soups and pies. The national soup (shchi) is made from cabbage, either salted or fresh. Soup is traditionally served at the midday meal, accompanied by an assortment of small pies, croutons, or dumplings. The pies are filled with myriad combinations of meat, fish, or vegetables, and are prepared in all shapes and sizes. The Russian diet tends to be high in carbohydrates, with a vast array of breads, notably dark sour rye, and grains, especially buckwheat. Many of Russia’s most typical dishes reflect the properties of the traditional Russian masonry stove, which blazes hot after firing and then gradually diminishes in the intensity of its heat. Breads and pies were traditionally baked when the oven was still very hot. Once the temperature began to fall, porridges could cook in the diminishing heat. As the oven’s heat continued to subside, the stove was ideal for the braised vegetables and slowcooked dishes that represent the best of Russian cooking. The Orthodox Church had a profound influence on the Russian diet, dividing the year into feast days and fast days. The latter accounted for approximately 180 days of the year. Most Russians took fasting seriously, strictly following the proscriptions against meat and dairy products. From the earliest times the Russians enjoyed alcoholic beverages, especially mead, a fermented honey wine flavored with berries and herbs, and kvas, a mildly alcoholic beverage made from fermented bread or grain. Distilled spirits, in the form of vodka, appeared only during the fifteenth century, introduced from Poland and the Baltic region.

Russian food is typically hearty in taste, with mustard, horseradish, and dill among the predominant condiments. The cuisine is distinguished by the

The reforms carried out by Peter I greatly affected Russian cuisine. The most significant development was the introduction of the Dutch range, which relied on a cooktop more than oven chambers and resulted in more labor-intensive cooking methods. The vocabulary introduced into Russian over the course of the eighteenth century reveals influences from the Dutch, German, English, and ultimately French cuisines. By the close of the eighteenth century, Russia’s most affluent families em-

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ployed French chefs. With so much foreign influence, Russian cuisine lost its simple national character. The eighteenth-century refinements broadened Russian cuisine, ushering in an era of extravagant dining among the wealthy. The sophistication of the table was lost during the Soviet period, when much of the populace subsisted on a monotonous diet low in fresh fruits and vegetables. Shopping during the Soviet era was especially difficult, with long lines even for basic foodstuffs. Hospitality remained culturally important, however, and the Soviet-era kitchen table was the site of the most important social exchanges. The collapse of the Soviet state brought numerous Western fast-food chains, such as McDonald’s, to Russia. With the appearance of self-service grocery stores, shopping was simplified, and food lines disappeared. However, food in post-Soviet Russia, while plentiful and widely available, was expensive during the early twenty-first century.

See also:

AGRICULTURE; CAVIAR; PETER I; RUSSIAN OR-

THODOX CHURCH; VODKA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Glants, Musya, and Toomre, Joyce, eds. (1997). Food in Russian History and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Goldstein, Darra. (1999). A Taste of Russia: A Cookbook of Russian Hospitality, 2d ed. Montpelier, VT: Russian Life Books. Herlihy, Patricia. (2002). The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia. New York: Oxford University Press. Molokhovets, Elena. (1992). Classic Russian Cooking: Elena Molokhovets’ A Gift to Young Housewives, tr. Joyce Toomre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. DARRA GOLDSTEIN

FOREIGN DEBT The first stage in Russia’s involvement with international capital markets was associated with the great drive for industrialization that marked the final decades of the nineteenth century. The backwardness of the country’s largely rural economy implied substantial needs for imports, which in turn meant foreign borrowing. The epic railway construction projects in particular would not have been possible without such financing.


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With growing volumes of Russian debt floating abroad, the country became increasingly vulnerable to speculative attacks, which could have proven highly damaging. The skillful policies of finance ministers Ivan Vyshnegradsky and Sergei Witte averted such dangers. By imposing harsh taxes on the rural economy, they also managed to promote exports from that sector, which made for a healthy trade surplus. As a result of the latter, by the end of the century the currency qualified for conversion to the gold standard. Russia thus entered the twentieth century with a stable currency and in good standing on foreign capital markets. The Bolsheviks put an end to that. By deciding to default on all foreign debt of Imperial Russia, Vladimir Lenin effectively deprived the Soviet Union of all further access to foreign credit. Since the economy remained backward, all subsequent ambitions of achieving industrialization thus would have to be undertaken with domestic resources, or with the goodwill of foreign governments offering loan guarantees. An early illustration of problems resulting from the latter scenario was provided during World War II, when the Soviet Union received substantial military assistance from its western allies, shipped via the famed Murmansk convoys. Known as “Lend-Lease,” the program was not originally intended as a free gift, but during the subsequent Cold War the Soviet Union refused to make repayments. In 1972 the United States followed a previous British example in forgiving ninety percent of the debt. When Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, about $600 million of the remainder was still outstanding—and more had been added. Toward the end of the Soviet era, much-needed modernization of the economy produced growing demands for imports of foreign technology, which in turn required foreign credits. Eager to have good relations with Mikhail Gorbachev, many Western governments gladly offered guarantees for such loans. By the end of 1991, with the Soviet Union in full collapse, those loans went into effective default. The total of all outstanding Soviet foreign debt came to almost $100 billion. The first decade of Russia’s post-Soviet existence was heavily marked by problems surrounding the handling of that debt. While foreign creditor governments remained insistent that it be repaid, they were also willing to offer substantial new credits in support of Russia’s economic transition. The Russian government responded by evolving a

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strategy for debt management that rested on aggressively threatening default on old debt in order to obtain forgiveness, rescheduling, and fresh credits. Much of the subsequent political wrangling would revolve around Russia’s increasingly controversial relations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). An initial credit of $1 billion was granted in July 1992, when Russia became a member of the Fund. In 1993, a further $1.5 billion was paid out, under a special “Systemic Transformation Facility” (STF). As Moscow failed to live up even to the soft rules of the STF, the IMF withheld disbursement of an agreed second $1.5 billion tranche. Following severe criticism for having failed to offer proper support, in April 1994 the Fund decided to release the second tranche of the STF. The essentially political nature of the relation was now becoming evident. Despite Russia’s continued problems in honoring its commitments, in April 1995 the IMF granted Russia a $6.5 billion twelve-month credit, and in March 1996 it agreed to a three-year $10.1 billion “Extended Fund Facility.” The latter was the second-largest commitment ever made by the Fund, and there was little effort made to hide its essentially political purpose. The objective was to secure the reelection of Boris Yeltsin to a second term as president, and the IMF was not alone in offering support. On a parallel track, France and Germany offered bilateral credits of $2.4 billion, and the “Paris Club” of foreign creditor governments agreed to a rescheduling of $38 billion in Soviet-era debt. The latter was of particular importance, in that it opened the doors for Russia to the market for Eurobonds. Receiving its first sovereign credit rating in October 1996, in November the Russian government placed a first issue of $1 billion, which was to be followed, in March and June of the following year, by two further issues of DM2 billion and $2 billion, respectively. Up until the crash in August 1998, Russia succeeded in issuing a total of $16 billion in Eurobonds. As the Russian government was gaining credibility as a debtor in good standing, other Russian actors, ranging from city governments to private enterprises, also began to venture into the market. Russian commercial banks in particular began securing substantial loans from their partners in the West.

ket with ruble-denominated government securities, known as GKO and OFZ. While these instruments technically represented domestic debt, they became highly popular among foreign investors and therefore essential to the issue of foreign debt. The final stage of Russia’s financial bubble was heralded with the onset of the financial crisis in Asia, during the summer of 1997. At first believed to be immune to contagion by this “Asian flu,” in the spring of 1998 Russia was becoming seriously ill. In May, the Moscow markets were in free fall, and by June the IMF was under substantial political pressure to take action. Some even warned of pending civil war in a country with nuclear capacities. Following protracted negotiations, on July 13 the Fund announced a bailout package of $22.6 billion through December 1999, which was supported both by the World Bank and by Japan. A first disbursement of $4.8 billion was made on July 20, and the financial markets began to recover confidence. On August 17, however, the Russian government decided to devalue the ruble anyway and to declare a ninety-day moratorium on short-term debt service. The potential losses were massive. The volume of GKO debt alone was worth about $40 billion. To this could be added $26 billion owed to multilateral creditors, and the $16 billion in Eurobonds. There also were additional billions in commercial bank credits, including about $6 billion in ruble futures contracts. And there still remained $95 billion in Soviet-era debt, some of which had been recently rescheduled. In the spring of 1999, few believed that Russia would be able to stage a comeback within the foreseeable future. One foreign banker even stated that he would rather eat nuclear waste than lend any more money to Russia. The situation was aggravated by suspicions that the Russian Central Bank was clandestinely bailing out well-connected domestic actors, at the expense of foreign investors. It was also hard for many to accept the Russian government’s unilateral decision to ignore its Soviet-era debt and to honor only purely “Russian” debt.

Compounding the exposure, the Russian government was simultaneously saturating the mar-

A year later, fuelled by the ruble devaluation and by rapidly rising oil prices, the Russian economy was making a spectacular recovery. In 2000, the first year of the Putin presidency, GDP grew by nine percent. The federal budget was finally in the

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black, with a good margin, and foreign trade generated a massive surplus of $61 billion. Despite this drastic improvement in economic performance, the Russian government nevertheless appeared bent on continuing its policy of threatening default in order to secure further restructuring and forgiveness of its old debts. For the German government in particular, this finally proved to be too much. When the Russian prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov hinted that Russia might not be able to meet its full obligations in 2001, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder informed Moscow that in case of any further trouble with Russian debt service, he would personally do all he could to isolate Russia. The effect was immediate and positive. From 2001 onward Russia has been current on all sovereign foreign debt (excluding the defaulted GKOs). In support of its decision to fully honor its credit obligations, the Russian government made prudent use of its budget surplus. By accelerating repayments of debt to the IMF, it drew down the principal, and by introducing a strategic budget reserve to act as a cushion against future debt problems, it strengthened its credibility. The reward has been a series of upgrades in Russia’s sovereign credit rating, and a calming of previous fears about further rounds of default. While this has been positive indeed for Russia’s international standing, it has not come without a price. Every billion that is paid out in foreign debt service effectively means one billion less in desperately needed domestic investment. In that sense, it will be a long time indeed before the Russian economy has finally overcome the damage that was done by foreign debt mismanagement during the Yeltsin years.

See also:

BANKING SYSTEM, SOVIET; BANKING SYSTEM,

TSARIST; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; ECONOMY, CURRENT; INDUSTRIALIZATION; LEND LEASE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hedlund, Stefan. (1999). Russia’s “Market” Economy: A Bad Case of Predatory Capitalism. London: UCL Press. Mosse, W.E. (1992). Perestroika under the Tsars. London: I.B. Taurus. Stone, Randall W. (2002). Lending Credibility: The International Monetary Fund and the Post-Communist Transition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. STEFAN HEDLUND


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FOREIGN TRADE Owing to its geographic size and diversity, Russia’s foreign trade has always been relatively small, as compared to countries of Western Europe with whom it traded. Nevertheless, foreign trade has provided contacts with western technologies, ideas, and practices that have had considerable impact on the Russian economy, even during periods when foreign trade was particularly reduced. From earliest times Russia has typically traded the products of its forests, fields, and mines for the sophisticated consumer goods and advanced capital goods of Western Europe and elsewhere. Trade with Persia, China, and the Middle East, as well as more remote areas, has also been significant in certain times. The first recorded Russian foreign trade contact was a treaty concluded in 911 by Prince Oleg of Kiev with the Byzantine emperor. During the medieval period most of the trade was conducted by gostiny dvor (merchant colonies), such as the Hanseatic League, resident in Moscow or at fairs at Novgorod or elsewhere. This practice was quite typical of the European Middle Ages because of the expense of travel and communication and the need to assure honest exchanges and payment. During the early modern period Russian iron ore was very attractive to the British, but until the coking coal of Ukraine became available during the nineteenth century, Russia had to import much of its smelted iron and steel. Up to about 1891, when Finance Minister Ivan Vyshnegradsky raised the tariff, exports of grain and textiles did not suffice to cover imports, interest on previous loans, and the expenses of Russians abroad. Hence Russia had to depend on more foreign capital. Although Russia was known in this period as the “granary of Europe,” prices were falling because of new supplies from North America. Nonetheless, Vyshnegradsky insisted, “Let them eat less, and export!” One aspect of the state-promoted industrialization of 1880–1913 was an effort by the state bureaucracy to increase exports in support of the gold-backed ruble, introduced in 1897. To develop outlets for Russian manufactures, the next minister of finances, Count Sergei Witte, encouraged Russians consular officials to cultivate markets in China, Persia, and Turkey, where prior trade had been mostly in high-value goods such as furs. Witte’s new railways, built for military purposes, made exchange of bulkier items economical for the first time. Subsidized sugar and cotton textiles

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would be sent to Persia and the East, with foreign competition foreclosed by prohibition on transit routes. Nonetheless, in 1913 fully sixty percent of Russian exports were foodstuffs and animals, another third lumber, petroleum, and other materials. Scarcely six percent were textiles, much of it from tsarist Poland. Russian imports were luxury consumer goods (including coffee and tea), equipment, and cotton fiber. Spurred by railroads, industrialization, and a convertible currency, foreign trade during the tsarist period reached a peak just before World War I with a turnover of $1.5 billion in prices of the time. This total was not matched after the Communist Revolution until the wartime imports of 1943, paid for largely by loans. Exports were approximately one-tenth of gross domestic product in 1913, a proportion hardly approached since. They were only four percent of GDP in 1977, for example. Under the Bolsheviks, Russia conducted an offand-on policy of self-sufficiency or autarky. According to Michael Kaser’s figures, export volumes rose steadily from five percent of the 1913 level in 1922 to sixty-one percent by 1931. When Britain signed a trade agreement in 1922 and others followed, the Soviet government began to buy consumer goods to provide incentives for the workers. They also bought locomotives, farm machinery, and other equipment to replace those lost in the long war years. Exports also rose smartly. With the beginnings of planning at the end of the 1920s, however, trade fell off throughout the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s, reflecting extreme trade aversion and suspicions of western intentions on Josef Stalin’s part, as well as the general world depression, which adversely affected Russia’s terms of trade. Russia wanted to be as self-sufficient as possible in case war cut off its supplies, as indeed occurred from 1939 to 1945. Imports of consumer goods fell precipitously, but so did some important industrial materials that were now produced domestically. Since 1928, Russian exports have averaged only about one to two percent of its national income, as compared with six to seven percent of that of the United States in a comparable period. Imports showed a similarly mixed pattern, with imports much exceeding exports during the long war years.

of output. The statistical breakdown of Soviet trade was often censored. Its deficits on merchandise trade account and invisibles were financed in unknown part by sales of gold and by borrowings in hard currency. The latter resulted in a growing hard-currency debt to western creditors from 1970 onward, amounting to an estimated $11.2 billion by 1978. Neglect of comparative advantage and international specialization has probably been negative for economic growth and consumer welfare. During the post–World War II period, most Soviet merchandise imports and exports were traded with the other Communist countries in bilateral deals concluded under the auspices of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). Even though trade with the developed capitalist countries of the West and with less developed countries increased throughout this era, USSR trade with other “socialist” states still exceeded fifty percent of the total in 1979, while the share of the West was about one-third. Trade with COMECON members was nearly balanced year by year, but when it was not, the difference was credited in “transferable rubles,” a book entry that hardly committed either side to future shipments. Franklyn Holzman termed this feature of Soviet trade “commodity inconvertibility,” as distinct from currency inconvertibility, which also characterized intra-bloc trade and finance. Trade with the developed western capitalist countries was always impeded by the deficient quality of Soviet manufactured goods, including poor merchandising and after-sales service. Furthermore, western countries also discriminated against Soviet exports by their tariff and strategic goods policies. Even so, some Russian-produced articles, like watches produced in military factories and tractors, entered a few markets. More significantly, the USSR was able to export tremendous quantities of oil, gas, timber, and nonferrous metals such as platinum and manganese, as well as some heavy chemicals. Notable imports included whole plants for the production of automobiles, tropical foodstuffs, and grain during periods of harvest failure.

After World War II, Russia no longer pursued such an extreme policy of autarky. Export volumes rose every year, reaching 4.6 times the 1913 level by 1967. But they were still less than four percent

Foreign trade was always a state monopoly in the USSR, even during the New Economic Policy (NEP). Under the control of the Minister of Foreign Trade, foreign-trade “corporations” conducted the buying and selling, though industrial ministries and even republic authorities could be involved in the negotiations. Barter deals at the frontiers and

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tourist traffic provide trivial exceptions to the rule. The object of the monopoly was to fit imports and exports into the overall plan regardless of changes in world prices and availabilities. Foreign trade corporations are not responsible for profits or losses caused by the difference between the prices they negotiate and the corresponding ruble price, given the arbitrary exchange rate. Exports must be planned to cover the cost of necessary imports—notably petroleum, timber, and natural gas during the last decades in exchange for materials, equipment, and foodstuffs during poor harvest years. Hence enterprise managers were told what to produce for export and what may be available from foreign sources. Thus, they had little or no knowledge of foreign conditions, nor interest in adjusting their activities to suit the international situation of the USSR. With internal prices unrelated to international scarcities, the planning agencies could not allow ministries or chief administration, still less enterprises, to decide on their own what to buy or sell abroad. Tariffs were strictly for revenue purposes. For instance, when the world market price of oil quadrupled in 1973–1974, the internal Soviet price did not change for nearly a decade. But trade with the outside world is conducted in convertible currencies, their volumes then translated into valyuta rubles at an arbitrary, overvalued rate for the statistics. Prices charged to or by COMECON partners were determined in many different ways, all subject to negotiation and dispute. Some effort was made during the 1970s to calculate a more efficient pattern of foreign trade for investment purposes, but in practice these calculations were little applied. Given the shortage of foreign currency and underdeveloped trading facilities, Soviet trade corporations often engaged in “counterpart-trade,” a kind of barter, where would-be western sellers were asked to take Soviet goods in return for possible resale. For instance, the sale of large-diameter gas pipes for West European customers would be repaid in gas over time. Obviously, these practices were awkward, and Soviet leaders tried a number of organizational measures to interest producers in increased exports, with little success. One of the changes instituted under Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership was permission for Soviet enterprises to deal directly with foreign suppliers and customers. Given the short time perestroika had to work, it is impossible to tell whether these direct ties alone would have improved Soviet penetration of choosy markets in the developed world.


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After all, Soviet manufactures suffered from poor design, unreliability, and insufficient incentives, as well as substandard distribution and service. During the years immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian ruble became convertible for trade and tourist purposes, but exporters were required to rebate part of their earnings to the state for repayment of foreign debts. Further handicapping Russian exporters was the appreciating real rate of exchange, owing to continued inflation. The IMF also supported the overvalued ruble. By 1996 the ruble became fully convertible. All this made dollars cheap for Russians to accumulate and stimulated capital flight estimated at around $20 billion per year throughout the 1990s. It also made imports of food and luxuries unusually inexpensive, while making Russian exports uncompetitive. What is more, the former East European CMEA partner countries and most Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) members now preferred to trade with the advanced western countries, rather than Russia. When in mid-1998 the government could no longer defend the overvalued ruble, it accepted a sixty percent depreciation to eliminate the large current account deficit in the balance of payments. This stimulated a recovery of Russian industry, particularly those firms producing import substitutes. Russian exports of oil and gas (which furnish about one-third of tax revenues) also recovered during the late 1990s. Rising energy prices likewise allowed the government to accumulate foreign exchange reserves, pay off much of its foreign debt, and finance still quite extensive central government operations. However, absent private investment, prospects for diversifying Russian exports beyond raw materials and arms were still unclear in the early twenty-first century.

See also:

COUNCIL FOR MUTUAL ECONOMIC ASSISTANCE;

ECONOMIC GROWTH, IMPERIAL; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET;

FOREIGN

DEBT;

TRADE

ROUTES;

TRADE

STATUTES OF 1653 AND 1667 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Erickson, P.G., and Miller, R.S. (1979). “Soviet Foreign Economic Behavior: A Balance of Payments Perspective.” In Soviet Economy in a Time of Change: A Compendium of Papers, U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, 3 vols. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. 2:208-243. Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert. (1999). Comparative Economic Systems, 6th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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Holzman, Franklyn D. (1974). Foreign Trade under Central Planning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kaser, Michael. (1969). “A Volume Index of Soviet Foreign Trade.” Soviet Studies 20(4):523–526. Nove, Alec. (1986). The Soviet Economic System, 3d ed. Boston: Allen & Unwin. Wiles, Peter. (1968). Communist International Economics. Oxford: Blackwell. MARTIN C. SPECHLER

FRANCE, RELATIONS WITH If the first official contact between France and Russia was established in 1049, when the daughter of Yaroslav, prince of Kiev, married Henri, King of France, bilateral relations were established with the treaty of friendship signed in 1613 by King Louis XIII and Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich. Since then, cultural exchanges regularly expanded, most notably during the reigns of Peter the Great and Elizabeth. However, on political and economic grounds, the exchanges remained thus: England retained primacy in Russian foreign trade throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and on the diplomatic scene, despite common geopolitical interests, France and Russia were quite often the victims of mutual hostile stereotypes. In 1793, embittered by France’s radical revolution, Catherine II broke all diplomatic relations with the revolutionary state; and in 1804, despite the treaty of nonaggression concluded in 1801 with Napoleon, Alexander I joined the Third Coalition to defeat the “usurper,” his political ambitions, and his expansionism. The war against Napoleon (1805–1813) was a national disaster, marked by several cruel defeats and by the fire of Moscow in 1812, but Alexander’s victory, marked by his entrance into Paris in March 1814, gave him a decisive role during the Congress of Vienna. The second half of the nineteenth century brought a major change in Russian-French relations. If France took part in the humiliating Crimean War in 1854–1856, during the late 1860s reconciliation began to take place and, in 1867 and 1868, the Russian Empire participated in the universal exhibitions organized in Paris. Political and military concerns motivated a decisive rapprochement during the last third of the century: France, traumatized by the loss of the provinces of Alsace and

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Lorraine, desperately needed an ally against Bismarck’s Prussia, while for Alexander III’s Russia, the goal was to gain an ally against the AustroHungarian Empire, which opposed the Russian pan-Slavic ambitions in the Balkans. In December 1888, the first Russian loan was raised in Paris and three years later, in August 1891, the two countries concluded a political alliance, followed by a military convention in December 1893. To sanctify the rapprochement, Tsar Nicholas II visited France three times, in October 1896, September 1901, and July 1909; and in July 1914, President Poincaré visited Russia to reinforce the alliance on the eve of World War I. The October 1917 Revolution killed these privileged links. The Bolsheviks opted for a peace with no annexing and no indemnity—and refused to recognize the tsarist loans. As a result, the French state felt deceived, and in December 1917, it broke relations with Russia and engaged instead in a struggle against it. In the spring of 1918, France organized the unloading of forces to support the White Guard and took part in the Polish war against Russia (May–October 1920). However, these interventions failed to overthrow the Soviet regime and, by the end of 1919, French diplomacy opted for a policy of containment against the expansion of communism. By that time, FrenchSoviet contacts were reduced: the French presence in the USSR was limited to the settlement of a small group of radical intellectuals and to the visits of French Communists; similarly, there was no official Soviet presence in France, although communist intellectuals and artists continued actively promoting Soviet interests and values. In 1924 Edouard Herriot, chief of the French government, decided to recognize the USSR. While he had no illusion about the authoritarian nature of the Soviet regime, he thought that France could no longer afford to ignore such an important country politically and that the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 could be dangerous. Therefore, for geopolitical reasons, he chose to reestablish diplomatic relations. This decision gave rise to a rapid growth of economic, commercial, and cultural exchanges. In particular, Soviet artists became increasingly present in France: Maxim Gorky and Ilya Ehrenburg, for example, became brilliant spokesmen for the Socialist literature. However, this improvement was a fragile one and remained subject to diplomatic turbulences, due to Fascism and Nazism. Foreign


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French president Jacques Chirac shakes hands with Russian president Vladimir Putin as they meet in April 2003 to discuss the situation in Iraq. © AFP/CORBIS

Commissar Maxim Litvinov tried to bring the USSR closer to France and England, but French hesitation, demonstrated by the ambivalent French-Soviet treaty concluded in May 1935 and the lack of strong reaction to the Spanish Civil War, led Josef Stalin to conclude an alliance with Adolf Hitler instead. And on August 23, 1939, the conclusion of the Soviet-German Pact sanctified the collapse of the Soviet-French entente. Bilateral relations were reestablished during World War II. In September 1941, three months after the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin decided to recognize General Charles de Gaulle officially as the “Chief of Free France”; in December 1944 in Moscow, de Gaulle and Stalin signed a treaty of alliance and mutual assistance. However, the Cold War, which began to spread over Europe in 1946, had deep conse-


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quences for Soviet-French relations, and in 1955 the Soviet state denounced the treaty of 1944. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev’s proclaimed deStalinization was favorably received by French diplomacy, and in the same year the head of the French government, Guy Mollet, made a trip to the USSR. This trip reestablished contacts and led to a protocol on cultural exchanges. But from 1958 on, de Gaulle’s return to power brought a new dynamic to relations with Moscow. De Gaulle wished to encourage “détente.” In his view, this would restore France’s international significance. In June 1966, he signed several important bilateral agreements with the USSR. Two committees were designed to improve economic cooperation; cooperation was also planned for space, civil nuclear, and television programs; and an original form of cooperation took place in the movie industry.

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These agreements conferred a distinct flavor on bilateral relations: in contrast to the American-Soviet dialogue, which remained limited to strategic issues, the French-Soviet détente was in essence more global and covered a wide variety of areas of mutual interest. Political cooperation, economic and scientific exchanges, cultural exhibits, performers’ tours, and movie festivals all contributed to build a bridge between the two countries. Perestroika brought a new impulse to these relations. When Mikhail Gorbachev introduced drastic changes in March 1985, François Mitterrand’s diplomacy first hesitated but, after a few months, provided strong support for the new leader; and in October 1990, a bilateral treaty of friendship—the first since 1944—was signed. The collapse of the USSR imposed another yet another series of geopolitical and cultural changes on the new leaders. But these changes had little impact on the long-lasting structural bonds forged with France through the centuries.

See also:

FRENCH INFLUENCE IN RUSSIA; FRENCH WAR OF

1812; NAPOLEON I; POLISH-SOVIET WAR; TILSIT, TREATY OF; WORLD WAR I; WORLD WAR II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Shlapentokh, Dmitry. (1996). The French Revolution in Russian Intellectual Life, 1865–1905. Westport, CT: Prager. MARIE-PIERRE REY

FREE ECONOMIC SOCIETY The Free Economic Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture and Husbandry, established in 1765 to consider ways to improve the rural economy of the Russian Empire, became a center of scientific research and practical activities designed to improve agriculture and, after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the life of the peasantry. “Free” in the sense that it was not subordinated to any government department or the Academy of Sciences, the society served as a bridge between science, agriculture, and reform until shut down during World War I. It sponsored a wide variety of research in the natural and social sciences as well as essay competitions, publishing reports and essays in Transactions of the Free Economic Society (comprising 280 volumes by 1915), and nine other periodicals.

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Founded under the sponsorship of Catherine the Great, who provided funds for a building and library, as well as a reformist agenda influenced by physiocratic ideas, the society brought together noble landowners, government officials, and scholars to study and disseminate information on advanced methods of agriculture and estate management, particularly as practiced abroad. Papers were presented on rural economic activities, new technologies, and economic ideas that could be applied to Russia. Young men were sent abroad to study agronomy. At the initiative of Catherine, the society’s first essay competition examined the utility of serfdom for the commonweal, but the winning essay, which opposed serfdom, was ignored. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the society’s membership came to include more scientists, professionals, and officials, and fewer landowners. Its work focused on discussion of advanced ideas in agronomy, medicine, and the developing sciences of chemistry and biology. After 1830 the society concentrated on practical applications of technology to agriculture. Among its most important projects were research on the best varieties of plants to grow on Russian soil, efforts to improve crop yields and sanitary measures, and the introduction of smallpox vaccination into rural areas. After the accession of Alexander II in 1855, the society threw itself into reform efforts and greatly expanded its activities. It offered popular lectures on physics, chemistry, and forestry. It entered the fight against illiteracy and in 1861 established a committee to study popular education. It supported research on soil science, agricultural economics, demography, and rural sociology, and carried out systematic geographic studies. To educate the newly freed peasantry, the society initiated a wide range of activities, mounting agricultural exhibits, establishing experimental farms, encouraging the use of chemical fertilizer and industrial crops, promoting scientific animal husbandry and beekeeping, and expanding its efforts to vaccinate the peasantry against smallpox. As part of its educational mission, the society published popular works on agriculture and distributed millions of pamphlets and books free of charge. Increasingly, as the society became a forum for progressive economic thought critical of government policy toward the peasantry, its work took on political dimensions. The government revoked its charter in 1899, ordering it to confine its activities to agricultural research. Nonetheless, in 1905 the society supported the election of a constitu-


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tional assembly and after 1907 published surveys of peasant opinion on the land reforms proposed by Interior Minister Peter Stolypin that were implicitly critical of government policy. During World War I the tsarist government closed down the society because of its oppositional stance, and the new Soviet government formally abolished it in 1919.

See also:

AGRARIAN REFORMS; AGRICULTURE; MOSCOW

AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY; STOLYPIN, PETER ARKADIEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pratt, Joan Klobe. (1983). “The Russian Free Economic Society, 1765–1915.” Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri. Pratt, Joan Klobe. (2002). “The Free Economic Society and the Battle Against Smallpox: A ‘Public Sphere’ in Action.” Russian Review 61:560–578. Vucinich, Alexander. (1963). Science in Russian Culture. Vol. 1: A History to 1860. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Vucinich, Alexander. (1970). Science in Russian Culture. Vol. 2: 1861–1970. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. CAROL GAYLE WILLIAM MOSKOFF

FREEMASONRY Freemasonry came to Russia as part of the eighteenth–century expansion that made the craft a global phenomenon. Although at first it was one of several social institutions, including salons, societies, and clubs, that made their way to Russia in the course of Westernization, Freemasonry soon acquired considerable importance, evolving into a widespread, variegated, and much vilified social movement. Despite the legends that attributed the origins of Russian Freemasonry to Peter the Great (who purportedly received his degree from Christopher Wren), the first reliable evidence places the beginnings of the craft in Russia in the 1730s and early 1740s. The movement expanded in the latter half of the eighteenth century, especially between 1770 and 1790, when more than a hundred lodges were created in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the provinces. Freemasonry was an important element of the Russian Enlightenment and played a central role in the evolution of Russia’s public sphere and civil society. The lodges were self-governed and open


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to free men (but not women) of almost every nationality, rank, and walk of life, with the notable exception of serfs. While many lodges were nothing but glorified social clubs, there were numerous brethren who saw themselves as on a mission to reform humankind and battle Russia’s perceived “barbarity” by means of charity and selfimprovement. They regarded the lodges as havens of righteousness and nurseries of virtue in a depraved world. The history of Russian Freemasonry followed a tortuous path. Most of the lodges, especially in the provinces, were short–lived, and Russian Freemasonry was very fragmented. Some lodges were subordinated to the Grand Lodge of England; others belonged to the Swedish Rite, the Strict Observance, or some other jurisdiction. Contemporaries made a distinction between Freemasonry proper and Martinism, a mystical strand in the movement that claimed the famous mystic Claude Saint–Martin as its founder. A group of Moscow Rosicrucians headed by Johann–Georg Schwarz and Nikolai Ivanovich Novikov were the most important Martinists. Often referred to as “Novikov’s circle,” they enjoyed close ties with the university, the government, and even the local diocese and initiated numerous educational and charitable initiatives, such as the Friendly Learned Society, the Typographical Company, and the Philological Seminary. Novikov’s circle was an important episode in the history of the Russian Enlightenment. Its activities, however, came to an end in 1792, when Novikov was arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to life in prison. Many aspects of the so-called Novikov affair are still unclear. The government of Catherine II may have had political motives for arresting Novikov, given the Rosicrucians’ ties to foreign powers as well as to the future Emperor Paul I and his entourage. The affair may also, in large part, have been caused by the fear of occult secret societies and anti–Masonic sentiment that was spreading through Europe. Anti–Masonry later became an important political factor in imperial and postSoviet Russia. Russian Freemasonry enjoyed a brief period of relatively unhampered existence in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The craft counted among its members practically every politician, military leader, and intellectual of note, including Mikhail Kutuzov and Alexander Pushkin; many of the Decembrists belonged to the Astrea lodge in St. Petersburg. After 1822, when Alexander I imposed

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a ban on all secret societies, the situation changed. The ban, confirmed by Nicholas I in 1826, signified the official end of Freemasonry, although some clandestine lodges continued to operate, particularly during a brief revival on the eve of World War I. Freemasonry was again outlawed in Soviet Russia in the early 1920s. The ban ended in the 1990s, when the French National Grand Lodge established lodges in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Voronezh, and chapters of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite were also organized.

See also:

CATHERINE II; ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF;

NOVIKOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH; PAUL I

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Smith, Douglas. (1999). Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. OLGA TSAPINA

FRENCH INFLUENCE IN RUSSIA The first real manifestations of the influence of France in Russia date from Russia’s first political opening toward Europe, undertaken by Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) and further advanced by Catherine II (r. 1762–1796). In the first instance, this influence was cultural. The adoption of the French language as the language of conversation and correspondence by the nobility encouraged access to French literature. The nobility’s preference for French governesses and tutors contributed to the spread of French culture and educational methods among the aristocracy. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Russian nobility still preferred French to Russian for everyday use, and were familiar with French authors such as Jean de la Fontaine, George Sand, Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, and Honoré de Balzac. The influence of France was equally strong in the area of social and political ideas. Catherine II’s interest in the writings of the philosophers of the Enlightenment—Baron Montesquieu, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Voltaire, and Denis Diderot— contributed to the spread of their ideas in Russia during the eighteenth century. The empress conducted regular correspondence with Voltaire, and received Diderot at her court. Convinced that it was her duty to civilize Russia, she encouraged the growth of a critical outlook and, as an extension

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of this, of thought regarding Russian society and a repudiation of serfdom, which had consequences following her own reign. The support of Catherine II for the spirit of the Enlightenment was nonetheless shaken by the French Revolution of 1789. It ceased entirely with the execution of King Louis XVI (January 1793). The empress was unable to accept such a radical challenge to the very foundations of autocratic rule. From the close of her reign onward, restrictions on foreign travel increased, and contacts were severely curtailed. Despite this change, however, liberal ideas that had spread during the eighteenth century continued to circulate throughout Russia during the nineteenth, and the French Revolution continued to have a persistent influence on the political ideas of Russians. When travel resumed under Alexander I (ruled 1801–1825), Russians once again began to travel abroad for pleasure or study. This stimulated liberal ideas that pervaded progressive and radical political thought in Russia during the nineteenth century. The welcome that France extended to political exiles strengthened its image as a land of liberty and of revolution. During the nineteenth century, travel in France was considered a form of cultural and intellectual apprenticeship. Study travel abroad by Russians, as well as trips to Russia by the French, shared a common cultural space, encouraging exchanges most notably in the areas of fine arts, sciences, and teaching. Because they shared geopolitical interests vis à vis Germany and Austria-Hungary, France and Russia were drawn together diplomatically and economically after 1887. This resulted, in December 1893, in the ratification of a defensive alliance, the French-Russian military pact. At the same time, French investment capital helped finance the modernization of the Russian economy. Between 1890 and 1914, numerous French industrial and banking houses established themselves in Russia. French and Belgian capital supplied the larger part of the flow of investment funds, the largest share of which went into mining, metallurgy, chemicals, and especially railroads. The largest French banks, notably the Crédit Lyonnais, made loans to or invested in Russian companies. Public borrowing by the Russian state, totaling between eleven and twelve billion gold francs, was six times greater than direct investment on the part of the French. On the eve of 1914, there were twelve thousand French nationals in Russia. Forty consuls were in the country looking out for French interests. French newspapers had permanent correspondents


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in St. Petersburg. In 1911, l’Institut Français (a French institute) was created there to help spread French culture in Russia. In fact, from the 1890s onward, France’s cultural presence in Russia was consistently viewed as an adjunct to its policy of industrial and commercial implantation.

outside of Russia strengthened this image by supporting the cause of Soviet dissidents. It is again in the name of human rights that France has attempted, since 1994, to soften the position of the Russian government with regard to Chechnya.

Following the close of the nineteenth century, the role of France as a land that welcomed political exiles and refugees had a reciprocal influence on the countries from which they came. When they returned to Russia, some of these individuals brought back ideas as well as social, pedagogical, and political experiences. For example, the experience acquired by Maxim Kovalevsky (1851–1916), professor of law and sociology, as the head of the Ecole supérieure russe des sciences sociales de Paris (the Russian Advanced School for Social Sciences in Paris), founded in 1901, served to organize the Université populaire Shanyavsky in Moscow (the Shanyavsky People’s University), founded in 1908.

See also:

After the October Revolution of 1917, Paris, along with Berlin and Prague, was one of the three principal cities of Russian emigration in Europe. A hub of intellectual activity from the 1920s onward, the French capital was among the leading centers abroad for publishing Russian newspapers and books, of which a portion subsequently made its way into Russia, thereby helping to bind the emigrant population with Soviet Russians back home. The suspension of scientific and cultural relations between the USSR and the rest of the world, starting in the mid-1930s, put an end to this exchange. The cultural influence of France did not disappear, however. Beginning in 1954, new attempts were made to bring France and the USSR closer together, beginning with cultural exchanges. During that year the Comédie française made a triumphant tour of the Soviet Union. Later, the trip by General Charles de Gaulle, in June of 1966, marked the beginning of a time of privileged relations between the two countries. A joint commission was created to foster exchange, and numerous cultural agreements were signed, some of which remained in effect during the early twenty-first century. French teaching assistants were appointed in Soviet universities, the teaching of French was expanded at the secondary school level, and agreements were signed for the distribution of French films in the USSR. In the end, in the perception of the Russian people, France has remained the country of the Revolution of 1789 and the homeland of the Rights of Man. From the 1960s onward, French intellectuals


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CATHERINE II; ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF;

FRANCE, RELATIONS WITH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Madariaga, Isabel. (1998). Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia. London: Longman. Kaufman, Peter H. (1994). The Solidarity of a Philosophe: Diderot, Russia, and the Soviet Union. New York: P. Lang. Raeff, Marc. (1994). Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Riasanovsky, Nicholas. (1999). A History of Russia, 6th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shlapentokh, Dmitry. (1996). The French Revolution in Russian Intellectual Life, 1865–1905. Westport, CT: Praeger. Voltaire. (1974). Voltaire and Catherine the Great: Selected Correspondence. Cambridge, MA: Oriental Research Partners. Wesling, Molly W. (2001). Napoleon in Russian Cultural Mythology. New York: P. Lang. MARTINE MESPOULET

FRENCH WAR OF 1812 The French war of 1812 was one of the most decisive conflicts of modern times. Napoleon crossed the Russian frontier on June 24, 1812, with more than 650,000 troops, and just a few months later recrossed the frontier, defeated, with less than onetenth of that number. Although winter played a role in the deaths of tens of thousands of French soldiers during the retreat, Russia won the campaign through a skillful withdrawal and the careful selection of battlefields. Napoleon contributed to his own disaster by failing to provide adequately for an extended campaign in terms both of supplies and of reinforcements. Originally Russia had contemplated an invasion of French-held Poland, but the Russian commander, Mikhail B. Barclay de Tolly, quickly changed the plan. When Napoleon crossed the frontier, Barclay de Tolly intended to have his First Army withdraw to a fortified camp at Drissa, luring

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Napoleon’s main body behind it. While Napoleon attacked the camp, Peter I. Bagration’s Second Army was to fall on the French rear, destroying the invading army. The plan was abandoned and the retreat began when the Russians realized that Napoleon’s force was more than twice as large as they had believed. The Russian armies had been drawn up with a considerable gap between them, and Napoleon drove right through it, intending to keep them separated. Barclay de Tolly and Bagration naturally wished to link up before they accepted battle, but were unable to do so before reaching Smolensk in mid-August. Facing ever-increasing pressure from Tsar Alexander to fight, Barclay de Tolly prepared to accept battle supported by Smolensk’s impressive walls. Napoleon, however, attempted to envelop the Russian position rather than attack head-on. As Barclay de Tolly became aware of this movement, he decided once again that discretion was the better part of valor and withdrew from Smolensk rather than risk losing his army. Frustrated by this continued retreating and also by the bickering between Barclay de Tolly and Bagration, neither of whom was prepared to take orders from the other, Alexander appointed Mikhail I. Kutuzov as overall commander of what was now effectively an army group comprising two armies marching together. Despite Alexander’s continued prodding, Kutuzov continued the retreat. As he neared Moscow, he recognized that he would have to give battle before abandoning Russia’s ancient capital, and so he selected the field near Borodino, which he prepared with field fortifications. Napoleon, chastened by his experience at Smolensk and desperate for a decisive battle, refused the advice of his subordinates to envelop the Russian position at Borodino and on September 7 launched a bloody frontal assault instead. The Russian army held, and Kutuzov mustered it to continue its retreat that night. Barely pausing in Moscow, Kutuzov withdrew to the south in order to prevent Napoleon from marching into the rich fields of Ukraine to replenish his supplies, and also to protect Russian reinforcements coming from those regions. Napoleon occupied Moscow on September 14 and remained in the city for more than a month before abandoning it on October 18. During the French occupation, the city was destroyed almost completely in an enormous fire, although the exact cause of the blaze remains unclear and controversial to this day.

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Having decided to leave Moscow when Alexander refused to make any move toward peace, Napoleon tried to march southward but found Kutuzov’s army arrayed against him at Maloyaroslavets. The bloody battle there on October 24–25 forced Napoleon back to the WarsawMoscow highway along which he had originally invaded, and he began the long retreat by the way he had come. Napoleon’s retreating forces suffered horribly. They had eaten most of the supplies along the road on their inward march, and the Russians had deliberately pursued a scorched-earth policy to destroy the remaining supplies. The burning of Moscow had also deprived Napoleon of valuable supplies, and when Kutuzov cut him off from Ukraine, the fate of the Grande Armée was sealed. All the way back to the Russian border, peasants, Cossacks, and Russian regular troops harried the French, who died in droves. The Russians attempted to cut off the French retreat altogether at the Battle of the Berezina on November 27–28. Although Napoleon managed to batter his way through, his casualties were staggering. When the remnants of the French army struggled across the Russian frontier, one of the most powerful armies ever assembled to that point in history had been virtually wiped out. It is customary to credit the Russian winter with the destruction of the French army, but this notion is greatly exaggerated. The most critical events in the campaign—Napoleon’s initial operations, the maneuver at Smolensk, the Battle of Borodino, the seizure of Moscow, and even the Battle of Maloyaroslavets—were fought before hard cold and snow set in. The Russian army was forced to confront the vast French force on its own without climatological aids for four months, and literally hundreds of thousands of French soldiers perished in that time. The hard winter that followed merely added to the misery and completed the destruction of a French force that had already been defeated by Russian arms. The invasion of Russia set the stage for the collapse of Napoleon’s hegemony in Europe. In the wake of Napoleon’s flight, the Prussian auxiliary corps he had forced to advance into the Baltic States made peace with the Russia on its own accord and committed Prussia to fight against France. As Russian forces crossed their own frontier and marched westward, Austria, Britain, and Sweden were persuaded to join the now-victorious Russian army,


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and the final coalition against Napoleon was born. By catalyzing this last great and victorious coalition, the War of 1812 marked a profound turning point in European history and also in Russian history. Pursuing the French back to France, Russian troops found themselves in Paris itself. Alexander committed himself absolutely to a prominent role in the affairs of the entire European continent. Russian soldiers who had the unique chance to see the French capital, on the other hand, would ultimately become so frustrated with Alexander’s conservative regime as to stage the Decembrist Rebellion in 1825. The costs of this greatest of Russian victories were, in every respect, staggering.

See also: BORODINO, BATTLE OF; DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION; FRANCE, RELATIONS WITH; HOLY ALLIANCE;

KUTUZOV,

MIKHAIL

ILARIONOVICH;

QUADRUPLE ALLIANCE AND QUINTUPLE ALLIANCE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Duffy, Christopher. (1973). Borodino and the War of 1812. New York: Scribner. Tarle, Evgeny Viktorovich. (1942). Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia, 1812. New York: Oxford University Press. FREDERICK W. KAGAN

M I K H A I L

V A S I L I E V I C H

station several thousand troops along the Bank Line (Bereg), an especially vulnerable 250-kilometer (155.3-mile) stretch of the Oka between Kolomna and Kaluga, every spring and summer. By century’s end the Abatis Line (Zasechnaya cherta), an additional network of forest abatis and fortifications almost 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) in span, had arisen another 100 kilometers (62 miles) farther south; the field army was restationed along it, providing central Muscovy with greater defense in depth and also encouraging military colonization of the forest-steppe zone. From 1637 to 1658 a new Belgorod Line was built along most of the southern edge of the forest-steppe, from Akhtyrka in northeastern Ukraine to Chelnavsk; it consisted of earthen fortifications built in the new Dutch manner, as well as abatis, and linked twenty-five garrison towns. From 1646 it became the new line of deployment for the corps of the southern field army as well as a place d’armes for aggressive operations down the Don (against the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman fortress of Azov) and in Ukraine (against the Commonwealth during the Thirteen Years War). In 1679–1680 most of the steppe along the Northern Donets and Oskol rivers was enclosed behind yet another new line, the Izyuma Line, another 160 kilometers (99.42 miles) southeast of the Belgorod Line.

See also:

CRIMEAN TATARS; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA;

MUSCOVY; THIRTEEN YEARS’ WAR

FRONTIER FORTIFICATIONS Fortified lines played a major role in Muscovy’s southern frontier defense strategy. The great scale of these fortifications projects testified to the Muscovite state’s considerable powers of resource mobilization. The defense of Muscovy’s southern frontier relied heavily upon long fortified lines linking garrison towns and serving as stations for the corps of the southern frontier field army. These lines were never intended to be impermeable walls keeping out the Tatars, but rather a supporting infrastructure for reconnaissance patrols, signaling, and corps movements beyond or behind the defense line. The gradual extension of these defense lines deeper into the steppe over the course of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reflected the Muscovite state’s successes in the military colonization of its southern frontier and in its command and control of much larger field armies. To stop the Crimean Tatars from invading central Muscovy, it had become necessary by 1512 to


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FRUNZE, MIKHAIL VASILIEVICH (1885–1925), military leader and theoretician. Mikhail Vasilievich Frunze was a native of Semirchesk oblast, the son of an orderly, and a student in the Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, from which he failed to graduate. He joined the social democratic movement (1904) and led strikes in Ivanovo (May 1905). Arrested and twice sentenced to death, he was exiled instead and managed to escape. He did party work in Belorussia (1917), was head of the militia in Minsk, and was a member of the Party committee of the West Front. Frunze was head of the Party Soviet in Shuia (September 1917). Opposed to the Treaty of BrestLitovsk, he joined the “Left-Communists.” Frunze

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was military commissar of Yaroslavl Military District. From February 1919, he was at the front as commander of the Fourth and Turkestan Armies, then he was commander of the south wing of the East Front, fighting against Kolchak. From July 1919, Frunze was commander of the East Front deployed in the Urals, and from September 1919, he commanded the Turkestan Front. From September 1920, Frunze served as commander of the South Front deployed in Crimea and accepted the surrender of Pyotr Wrangel’s remaining forces in the Crimea, who were later massacred by the Party and Cheka operatives, despite his disapproval. From December 1920, he headed the Revolutionary Military Soviet (RVS) and commanded the Crimea and Ukraine forces, which embarked on various punitive operations. He was elected to the Party Central Committee (1921), appointed as Deputy People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs (March 1924), and later (April 1924) served as the Chief of Staff of the Red Army. Frunze was a candidate member of the Politburo (1924). He authored a number of studies, including a guide on reorganizing the Red Army (1921), on military doctrine (1921, 1924), and on Vladimir Lenin and the Red Army (1925). He led the military reforms in 1924–1925. Frunze’s ideas, formed in bruising battles with Leon Trotsky, involved a “unified doctrine” and setting up of a bureaucratically structured Red Army high command to meet wartime as well as peacetime needs. The necessity for an industrial defense base, as well as machinery for rapid mobilization, was also emphasized. These views were opposed by those who favored a militia-type Red Army. On March 11, 1924, Frunze was appointed as Trotsky’s deputy, and on January 1, 1925, Joseph Stalin named him Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs, replacing Trotsky. Frunze’s death, as a result of an operation recommended by Stalin, has given rise to a number of claims that his demise was no accident and that it gave Stalin the opportunity to replace him with Kliment Voroshilov, about whose loyalty there was little doubt. Frunze is buried on Red Square. His son, fighter pilot Timur Frunze, was killed during the Battle of Stalingrad.

Von Hagen, Mark (1990). Soldiers in a Proletarian Leadership: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. MICHAEL PARRISH

FULL ECONOMIC ACCOUNTING In the Soviet economy, industrial enterprises were treated as independent units from a financial management and economic accountability perspective. Under the system of full economic accounting (polny khozrachet) introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev, each enterprise was to be self-financing in the long run, meeting wage payments and other production costs from sales revenues. Investment requirements identified in the techpromfinplan were to be met from enterprise profits. Full economic accounting was a cornerstone of perestroika, regarded as an important measure to improve enterprise operations. The khozrachet system used by Soviet enterprises during the 1980s was not new, but the attention paid to enterprise autonomy and accountability during the period of perestroika appeared more serious. Under the system of full economic accounting, unprofitable or “negativevalue-added” firms were to go out of business either through a bankruptcy proceeding or by another enterprise taking over the loss-making firm’s assets. Prior to perestroika, the khozrachet system gave lip service to self-financing and economic accountability, but in practice, loss-making firms routinely received subsidies from central authorities or industrial ministries redistributing profits from “winners” to “losers.”

Gareev, M.A. (1987). M.V. Frunze, Military Theorist. Washington, DC: Pergamon-Brassey’s.

Gorbachev’s full economic accounting system was supposed to end the automatic subsidies provided to loss-makers. It appeared to be the Soviet answer to the question of how to eliminate the “soft budget constraint” described by Janos Kornai as the primary contributing source of scarcity in a planned economy. However, centrally determined prices for inputs received by the firm and output sold by the firm made calculations of cost, revenue, and profit somewhat meaningless from an efficiency or economic accountability perspective. Centrally determined prices did not reflect scarcity, nor did they signal accurate information about the operation or performance of the Soviet industrial enterprise. Consequently, basing the full economic accounting system on these prices, in an environ-

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ment of persistent and pervasive shortages, provided little opportunity to maneuver Soviet enterprises away from the production of shoddy goods and toward the production of goods that adequately captured the specifications or preferences of customers. Moreover, as planners maintained the bonus system that linked substantial monetary payments to the fulfillment of output targets rather than cost reductions, enterprise managers continued to over-order inputs and hoard labor in order to achieve the planned output targets. As planners continued to set output plan targets high relative to the firm’s productive capacity, enterprise managers continued to disregard cost in efforts to fulfill planned output targets. In short, policies pursued by planners sustained the outcome that the extension to full economic accounting was to replace. The absence of bankruptcy law and established bankruptcy proceedings, plus the lack of a mechanism for one firm to acquire the assets of a second firm, also undermined the effectiveness of full economic accounting in improving enterprise operations.

See also:

KORNAI, JANOS; PERESTROIKA; TECHPROMFIN-

PLAN BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1987). Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. New York: Harper & Row. Gregory, Paul R. (1990). Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Count Sergei Witte, one of the initiators of the October Manifesto and of the introduction of national representatives into Russian politics, warned that if the revision was issued before the election, the Duma would become the Constitutional Assembly, and this would lead to violence and the end of the new order. There were three drafts of the Fundamental Laws: one liberal, one conservative, and one “moderate” (in fact closer to liberal). The latter, created at the State Chancellery by the deputy state secretary, Peter Kharitonov, was adopted as basis for the future document. The Japanese, Prussian, and Austro-Hungarian constitutions were studied in the process of creating and compiling the laws, as was a draft prepared by the Union of Liberation and published abroad. The draft prepared by the State Chancellery was discussed at five meetings of the Council of Ministers in March of 1906 under the chairmanship of Witte and was completed in a spirit of fortifying conservative principles. Such articles as “the restriction to punish in ways other than the court’s ruling” and “the respected secrecy of private correspondence” were removed, and the tsar’s prerogatives were strengthened. The project and its revisions were discussed at meetings on April 1906 in Tsarskoye Selo under the chairmanship of Tsar Nicholas II. After he approved the new edition of the Fundamental Laws, it was published on May 10 (April 27 O.S.), 1906, the day the State Duma opened. The new edition, containing 223 articles, transformed Russia into a constitutional monarchy.

SUSAN J. LINZ

FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF 1906 The Fundamental Laws, a 203-article compilation of existing laws on supreme rule, were first published in the Set of Laws of the Russian Empire (Svod zakonov Rossyskoi impery) in 1832. Unchanged since the edition published in 1892, they had to be revised in order to carry out the principles set forth in the October Manifesto of 1905. The revision was based on the principles established by the Manifesto of 1906, which made the State Council a second legislative chamber with the right to veto acts by the State Duma, thereby establishing that the Duma did not have the right to change the Fundamental Laws. The new revision of the Fundamental Laws was hurriedly accepted before the upcoming election of the Duma.


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Whereas the first article of the earlier version of the Fundamental Laws stated that “The Russian emperor is an autocratic monarch with unlimited power,” article 4 now gave the tsar supreme autocratic power. The term “unlimited” was removed, and “autocratic” (samoderzhavnyi) was defined as declaring the independence of the country and the monarch. A special note by the historian Sergei Knazkov proved that the word “autocracy” had been used in this sense during the seventeenth century and had only assumed the meaning of unlimited power during the eighteenth. The new article proclaimed the unity and indivisibility of the Russian Empire. It noted that Finland was an “inseparable part” of Russia, but “was governed by special institutions on the basis of being a special legislative authority.” Russian was declared the official language of the empire, and its use was required in the army, navy, and all state and civil institutions.

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From then on, no law could be passed without the approval of the State Council and the State Duma. Members of the Duma were elected for five years. The State Council and the Duma could legislate on matters not covered by the Fundamental Laws. The chief innovation was the inclusion into the Fundamental Laws of articles that guaranteed identity rights and civil freedoms, specifically the protection of identity and residence, freedom of residence, activity, movement, protection of possessions, freedom of speech, press, unions, assembly, and religion. The declared rights and freedoms did not include Jews, for whom residential restrictions (the Jewish Pale of Settlement) and restrictions on civil service positions still existed. These concessions notwithstanding, the tsar retained an enormous amount of power. He had the right of the legislative initiative, including the exclusive right to initiate revisions of the Fundamental Laws. Without his approval, laws approved by the legislative chambers could not be passed. Moreover, in emergency situations the tsar could promulgate laws when the Duma was not in session (article 87). These would be nullified, however, unless ratified by the Duma within two months. The tsar had supreme control of the country, including control over foreign policy, the power to declare war and peace, supreme command of the armed forces, the right to mint coins, the appointment and dissolution of the government, and the unlimited right to declare a state of war or emergency. The tsar had power over the Council of Ministers and could hold them accountable. The State Council and the Duma were to be convened annually. The tsar determined the time span of their yearly activities and the duration of the “holidays” for legislative institutions. He appointed half of the members of the State Council and had the right to dissolve the Duma before the five-year mark. If he did so, he had to announce a date for new elections to the Duma. Nicholas II used this right twice, dissolving the first and second Dumas. In the second case, on June 3 (16), 1907, the electoral law was changed. This was a violation of the Fundamental Laws, because the new electoral law was not presented to the legislative institutions. Under the second revision of the Fundamental Laws, Russia became a dualistic monarchy (Duma monarchy).

See also:

Ascher, Abraham. (1992). The Revolution of 1905: Authority Restored. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Harcave, Sidney, tr. and ed. (1990). The Memoirs of Count Witte. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Mehlinger, Howard D., and Tompson, John M. (1972). Count Witte and the Tsarist Government in the 1905 Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Szeftel, Marc. (1976). The Russian Constitution of April 23, 1906: Political Institutions of the Duma Monarchy. Brussels: Editions de la Librarie encyclopédique. OLEG BUDNITSKII

FUNDED COMMODITIES Funded commodities were a category of commodities considered so critical to the success of the annual plan that allocation was tightly controlled by Gosplan and the USSR Council of Ministers. Soviet central planning aspired to comprehensive coverage of the supply and demand of all commodities and services in the economy. As there were millions of transactions in an economy the size of the USSR, this was not a realistic ambition. The system of materials balances was designed to replace market forces of supply and demand in attaining equilibrium in each market. This enormous task was subdivided by category in order to decentralize the burden of achieving balances to various administrative and territorial planning units. Funded commodities represented a restricted list of critical commodities that were under the direct control and allocation of the Gosplan and required explicit approval by the USSR Council of Ministers. The number of commodities in this category varied considerably over time, reflecting various reorganizations of planning procedures, changes in priorities, and attempts to reform the process. According to Paul Gregory and Robert Stuart, the number of funded commodities varied from 277 in the beginning in 1928 to as many as 2,390. During the 1980s, the number was approximately 2,000. About 75,000 other commodities were also specifically planned and controlled either by Gosplan in conjunction with various centralized supply organizations, or by the ministries without explicit central oversight.

DUMA; NICHOLAS II; OCTOBER MANIFESTO;

STATE COUNCIL; WITTE, SERGEI YULIEVICH

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FONDODERZHATELI; GOSPLAN


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Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, C. Robert. (1990). Soviet Economic Structure and Performance. New York: HarperCollins. Nove, Alec. (1965). The Soviet Economy, An Introduction, rev. ed. New York: Praeger.

A L E X E Y E V I C H

nacharsky, the Soviet commissar of education, and obtained important cultural posts. But by 1930 they had lost influence within the government and within most of the literary community.

See also:

LUNACHARSKY, ANATOLY VASILIEVICH; MAYA-

KOVSKY, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH; OCTOBER REVO-

JAMES R. MILLAR

LUTION BIBLIOGRAPHY

Janecek, Gerald. (1996). Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism. San Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press.

FUTURISM A term coined by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), Futurism emphasized discarding the static and irrelevant art of the past. It celebrated change, originality, and innovation in culture and society and glorified the new technology of the twentieth century, with emphasis on dynamism, speed, energy, and power. Russian Futurism, founded by Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922), a poet and a mystic, and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), the leading poet of Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the early Soviet period, went beyond its Italian model with a focus on a revolutionary social and political outlook. In 1912 the Russian Futurists issued the manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” that advocated the ideas of Italian futurism and attacked Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. With the Revolution of 1917, the Russian Futurists attempted to dominate postrevolutionary culture in hopes of creating a new art integrating all aspects of daily life within a vision of total world transformation; artists would respond to a call to transcend and remake reality through a revolutionized aesthetic, to break down the barriers that had heretofore alienated the old art and the old reality. Russian Futurism argued that art, by eliciting predetermined emotions, could organize the will of the masses for action toward desired goals. In 1923 Mayakovsky cofounded with Osip Brik the Dadaistic journal LEF. Soviet avant-garde architects led by Nikolai Ladovsky were also highly influenced by Futurism and the theory that humanity’s “world understanding” becomes a driving force determining human action only when it is fused with world-perception, defined as “the sum of man’s emotional values . . . created by sympathy or revulsion, friendship or animosity, joy or sorrow, fear or courage.” Only by sensing the world through the “feeling of matter” could one understand, and thus be driven to change, the world. The Futurists were initially favored by Anatoly Lu-


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Markov, Vladimir. (1968). Russian Futurism: A History. Berkeley: University of California Press. HUGH D. HUDSON JR.

FYODOR ALEXEYEVICH (1661–1682), tsar of Russia, February 9, 1676 to May 7, 1682. Fyodor was the ninth child of Tsar Alexis and his first wife, Maria Miloslavskaya. He became heir to the throne following the death of an elder brother in 1670. Fyodor is said to have studied Latin and Polish with the Belarusian court poet Simeon Polotsky, but sources indicate that his education was predominantly traditional, with some modern elements. Just fourteen on his accession in 1676, Fyodor ruled without a regent, but was supported by a number of advisors and personal favorites, notably his chamberlain Ivan Yazykov and the brothers Alexei and Mikhail Likhachev. Less intimate with the tsar, but highly influential, was Prince Vasily Golitsyn. Members of Fyodor’s mother’s family, the Miloslavskys, were less prominent, although they succeeded early in the reign in securing the banishment of Artamon Matveyev and several members of the rival Naryshkin clan. There were power struggles throughout the reign. There were also rumors that Fyodor’s ambitious sister Sophia Alekseyevna regularly attended his sickbed. In fact, Fyodor, although delicate, was by no means the hopeless invalid depicted by some historians. Records show that he regularly participated in ceremonies and presided over councils. He married twice. His first wife Agafia Grushetskaya (of partPolish extraction) and her newborn son died in July 1681. In February 1682 he married the noblewoman Marfa Apraksina.

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The central event of Fyodor’s reign was war with Turkey (1676–1681), precipitated by Turkish and Tatar incursions into Ukraine, compelling Russia to abandon the fort of Chigirin on the Dnieper. The treaty of Bakhchisarai (1681) established a twenty-year truce. War determined economic policy. In 1678 a major land survey was conducted in order to reassess the population’s tax obligations, providing the only reliable, if partial, population figures for the whole century. In 1679 the household rather than land became the basis for taxation. Provincial reforms included abolition of some elected posts and wider powers for military governors. Fyodor’s major reform was the abolition of the Code of Precedence (mestnichestvo) in 1682. An associated scheme to separate civil and military offices and create permanent posts was shelved, allegedly after the patriarch warned that such officials might accumulate independent power. In 1681 and 1682 a major church council sought to raise the caliber of priests and intensified the persecution of Old Believers. Fyodor had his portrait painted, encouraged the introduction of part-singing from Kiev, and approved a charter for an academy modeled on the Kiev Academy (implemented only in the late 1680s). Polish fashions and poetry became popular with courtiers, but traditionalists regarded “Latin” novelties with suspicion. Tsar Alexis’s theatre was closed down, and foreign fashions were banned. Historians remain undecided whether Fyodor was a sickly young nonentity manipulated by unscrupulous favorites or whether he showed promise of becoming a strong ruler. His reign is best viewed as a continuation of Russia’s involvement in international affairs and of mildly Westernizing trends, especially via Ukraine and Poland.

See also:

ALEXEI MIKHAILOVICH; GOLITSYN, VASILY

VASILIEVICH; PETER I; SOPHIA

FYODOR II (1589–1605), Tsar of Russia and son of Boris Godunov. Fyodor Borisovich Godunov was born in 1589 and eventually became tsar. His father, Boris Godunov, was the regent of the mentally retarded Tsar Fyodor I. Fyodor Godunov’s mother, Maria, was the daughter of Tsar Ivan IV’s favorite, Malyuta Skuratov (the notorious boss of the oprichnina, the tsar’s hand-picked military and administrative elite). Upon the death of the childless Tsar Fyodor I in 1598, Boris Godunov became tsar, and Fyodor Borisovich became heir to the throne. Contemporaries described young Fyodor as handsome, athletic, and kind. Like his older sister Ksenya, Fyodor was well educated and learned from his father the art of government as he grew up. Fyodor was also an avid student of cartography, and he is credited with drawing a small map of Moscow, included on a well-known Dutch map of Russia published in 1614. In April 1605 Tsar Boris died, and Fyodor was proclaimed Tsar Fyodor II. Although well prepared to rule, the sixteen-year-old tsar was soon overwhelmed by the civil war his father had been fighting against supporters of someone claiming to be Dmitry of Uglich (the youngest son of Tsar Ivan IV). Several of Fyodor’s courtiers immediately began plotting to overthrow him, but it was the rebellion of the tsar’s army on May 7, 1605, that sealed the fate of the Godunov dynasty. Tsar Fyodor II was toppled in a bloodless popular uprising in Moscow on June 1, 1605. Several days later he and his mother were strangled to death, and it was falsely reported that they had committed suicide. Almost no one mourned the death of Fyodor II; Moscow was too busy celebrating the arrival of Tsar Dmitry.

See also:

DMITRY OF UGLICH; FYODOR ALEXEYEVICH; GO-

DUNOV, BORIS FYODOROVICH; IVAN IV; OPRICHNINA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bushkovitch, Paul. (2001). Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671–1725. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Soloviev, Sergei. (1989). History of Russia: Vol. 25, Rebellion and Reform: Fedor and Sophia, 1682–1689, ed. and tr. Lindsey Hughes. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dunning, Chester (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Skrynnikov, Ruslan (1985). “The Rebellion in Moscow and the Fall of the Godunov Dynasty.” Soviet Studies in History 24:137–54.

LINDSEY HUGHES

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(1557–1598), Tsar of Russia reigned 1584–1598. Fyodor Ivanovich was the second son of Ivan IV (“The Terrible” or Ivan Grozny). Ascending the throne in 1584, three years after his father killed his older brother Ivan in a fit of rage, Fyodor Ivanovich was nevertheless too mentally deficient to govern. His brother-in-law, Boris Godunov (the brother of his wife Irene), ruled instead as regent. Fyodor did not have children and thus was the last descendant of Rurik to occupy the Russian throne. Fyodor’s father Ivan IV had the longest reign in Russian history, from 1533 to 1584, and the first half of his reign was marked by constructive achievements in both foreign and domestic policy. His defeat of the Tartars of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556) opened the way southward and eastward to Russian expansion. He also welcomed the British explorer Richard Chancellor in 1553–1554 and established commercial relations with England. By 1560 Ivan IV had established the power and legitimacy of the tsar. He authorized reforms in the army and even established a consultative body known as the zemsky sobor to debate issues and provide advice (although only when he solicited it). After the death in 1560 of his first wife Anastasia—whom he suspected had been poisoned— Ivan IV became moody and violent. Withdrawing from the boyars and the church, he insisted on personal control, exercised through the establishment of the oprichnina—the private police force he could order to kill his personal enemies. In 1591, just seven years after he killed his oldest son, Ivan’s youngest son Dmitry died under mysterious circumstances, possibly by the hand of Boris Godunov, a member of the lesser nobility who had become Ivan’s protegé. In 1584 when Ivan’s second son Fyodor Ivanovich became tsar, Godunov shrewdly exploited Fyodor’s feeble-mindedness to assume de facto power as regent. When Fyodor died in 1598, the zemsky sobor elected Godunov as tsar. Godunov was an effective regent and tsar. Although he did nothing to ease the burden on the peasants (issuing a decree in 1601 limiting their rights to move from one estate to another), Godunov made strides in economic development and colonization of Siberia. He also established the patriarchate in 1589. Before then the Russian church recognized the patriarch of Constantinople (now Istanbul). Under Godunov’s tutelage, Russia waged

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successful wars against the Tatars (1591) and Sweden (1595).

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Plots, intrigues, and natural disasters soon undermined Godunov’s power, however. A stranger appeared, claiming to be Ivan’s youngest son, Dmitry (the first of three “False Dmitrys”). A famine from 1601 to 1603 stimulated rural unrest and opposition to Godunov’s rule. Godunov was killed in 1605 while suppressing a revolt during the advance on Moscow of one of the False Dmitrys. His death ushered in a “Time of Troubles” (Smutnoye vremya), which lasted until the establishment of the Romanov dynasty in 1613.

See also:

DMITRY, FALSE; GODUNOV, BORIS FYODOR-

OVICH; IVAN IV; TIME OF TROUBLES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bobrick, Benson. (1987). Fearful Majesty: The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible. New York: Putnam. Grey, Ian. (1973). Boris Godunov: The Tragic Tsar. New York: Scribner. Lamb, Harold. (1948). The March of Muscovy: Ivan the Terrible and the Growth of the Russian Empire, 1400–1648. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Yanov, Alexander. (1981). The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History. Berkeley: University of California Press. JOHANNA GRANVILLE

FYODOROV, BORIS GRIGORIEVICH (b. 1958), economist, deputy prime minister (1992–1993), finance minister (1990, 1993), advocate of liberal economic reform. Boris Fyodorov, an ambitious young economist who served briefly as deputy prime minister, found a business career more fruitful than politics. Fyodorov graduated from the Moscow Institute of Finance and went on to earn candidate and doctor’s degrees at Moscow State University (1985) and the USA/Canada Institute (1990). From 1980 to 1987 he worked at Gosbank, and then at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations. He was part of the team led by Grigory Yavlinsky that prepared the Five-Hundred-Day Plan in 1990. In July 1990 he became finance minister in the Russian Federation government, but resigned in December. From April 1991 to October 1992 he worked for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development,

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and then spent two months as Russian director at the World Bank. In December 1992 he became deputy prime minister in Boris Yeltsin’s cabinet, taking on the job of finance minister in March 1993. In December 1993 he was elected to the State Duma from a Moscow constituency as a member of Yegor Gaidar’s Russia’s Choice party. Fyodorov fell out with Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin in January 1994, citing frustration with weak monetary and fiscal discipline. He then formed a liberal parliamentary fraction, Union of December 12, and in 1995 created his own party, Forward Russia, which mixed advocacy of market reform with patriotic slogans, including support for the war in Chechnya. He was reelected to the Duma in December 1995, famously publishing a book of blank pages entitled “The Economic Achievements of the Chernomyrdin Government.” From May to September 1998 he headed the State Tax Administration, but his political career did not progress. In subsequent years he remained a prominent advocate of further liberal reforms and a defender of minority shareholder interests. In 2000 he was elected a member of the board of Gazprom and Unified Energy Systems, the two largest companies in Russia.

See also:

important role in the promotion of literacy and Eastern Orthodox confessional unity, and he introduced a high level of content, design, and craftsmanship into a critically needed profession. Born sometime around 1510 in Muscovy, he studied at Krakow University, where he probably received training in Greek and Latin, and from which he graduated in 1532. Subsequently, he worked as deacon in the St. Nikola Gostunsky church in the Moscow Kremlin, serving from some time after 1533 until 1565. He was selected by Tzar Ivan IV “Grozny” to initiate an official printing press in Moscow where, together with his partner Petr Mstislavets, he printed books that were needed for an expanding Russian Orthodox Church. These included the first dated Russian imprint, the Apostol of 1563–1564, and two editions of the Chasovnik (Horologion, 1565). Several anonymous Moscow editions from the immediately preceding period (c. 1553–1563) are also generally ascribed to Ivan. His Moscow activity was cut short by what he de-

CHERNOMYRDIN, VIKTOR STEPANOVICH; FIVE-

HUNDRED-DAY PLAN; GAIDAR, YEGOR TIMUROVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kranz, Patricia Kranz. (1998). “No Tax Man Ever Had It Tougher.” Business Week 3585:51. PETER RUTLAND

FYODOROV, IVAN (c. 1510–1583), the most celebrated among printers in old Rus. Ivan Fyoderov (also called Ivan Fyodorovich, Fyodorov syn, Moskvitin, and drukar Moskvitin) was the initiator of printing in Muscovy and Ukraine, and was a printer also in Belarus. He produced the first printed Church Slavonic Bible (the “Ostroh Bible” of 1580–1581), the first Russian (or other East Slavic) textbook (Bukvar, 1574), and the first printed Russian alphabetical subject index, calendar, and poem. He was an accomplished craftsman in numerous trades, and a man of broad vision and great persistence. Altogether, Ivan played an

Ivan Fyodorov, the first Russian printer. Painting by Alexander Moravov. © TASS/SOVFOTO

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scribes in one of his later editions as the antagonism of narrow-minded people, and he moved to Zabludovo in Belarus together with his son (also named Ivan) and Petr Mstislavets. Here he opened a new print shop under the sponsorship of Hetman G. A. Khodkevich and produced several more editions, including the Evangelie uchitelnoe (1569, Instructive Evangelary) and a psalter (1570). Advised by his aging sponsor to retire to farming on land provided him, he declined, saying he was suited to sowing not seeds but the printed word. Instead, he moved to the city of Lviv (now in Ukraine), where with his son he printed more editions, including a reprint of his Moscow Apostol (1573–1574), and the Bukvar (1574, Primer). Federov subsequently established one more print shop, on the estate of Prince Kostiantyn (Constantine) of Ostroh, participating in the latter’s defense of Eastern Orthodoxy against increasing pressure from Western denominations. The major publication among the several issued there was the famous Ostroh Bible, which remains of prime historical, textual, and confessional importance. The first complete printed Church Slavonic Bible, it was issued in a large print-run and widely distributed


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among East Slavic lands and abroad, surviving in the early twenty-first century in some 300 copies. In 1581 Ivan left Ostroh to return to Lviv, where he died on December 15, 1583. He was buried in the Onufriev Monastery; his gravestone read, in part, “printer of books not seen before.” The literature devoted to Ivan Fyodorov is vast, well exceeding two thousand titles, mostly in Russian and other Slavic languages.

See also:

EDUCATION; IVAN IV

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Ivan Fedorov’s Primer of 1574: Facsimile Edition,” with commentary by Roman Jakobson; appendix by William A. Jackson. (1955). Harvard Library Bulletin IX-1:1–44. Mathiesen, Robert. (1981). “The Making of the Ostrih Bible.” Harvard Library Bulletin 29(1): 71–110. Thomas, Christine. (1984). “Two East Slavonic primers: Lvov 1574 and Moscow 1637.” British Library Journal 10(1): 60–67. HUGH M. OLMSTED

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GAGARIN, YURI ALEXEYEVICH (1934–1968), cosmonaut; first human to orbit Earth in a spacecraft. The son of a carpenter on a collective farm, Yury Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino, Smolensk Province. During World War II, facing the German invasion, his family evacuated to Gziatsk (now called Gagarin City). Gagarin briefly attended a trade school to learn foundry work, then entered a technical school. He joined the Saratov Flying Club in 1955 and learned to fly the Yak-18. Later that year, he was drafted and sent to the Orenburg Flying School, where he trained in the MIG jet. Gagarin graduated November 7, 1957, four days after Sputnik 2 was launched. He married Valentina Goryacheva, a nursing student, the day he graduated. Gagarin flew for two years as a fighter pilot above the Arctic Circle. In 1958 space officials recruited air force pilots to train as cosmonauts. Gagarin applied and was selected to train in the first group of sixty men. Only twelve men were taken for further training at Zvezdograd (Star City), a training field outside Moscow. The men trained for nine months in space navigation, physiology, and astronomy, and practiced in a mockup of the spacecraft Vostok. Space officials closely observed the trainees, subjecting them to varied physical and mental stress tests. They finally selected Gagarin for the first spaceflight. Capable, strong, and eventempered, Gagarin represented the ideal Soviet man, a peasant farmer who became a highly trained cosmonaut in a few short years. Sergei Korolev, the chief designer of spacecraft, may have consulted with Nikita Khrushchev, Russia’s premier, to make the final selection.

G

Gagarin was launched in Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome near Tyuratam, Kazakhstan. The Vostok spacecraft included a small spherical module on top of an instrument module containing the engine system, with a threestage rocket underneath. Gagarin was strapped into an ejection seat. He did not control the spacecraft, due to uncertainty about how spaceflight would affect his physical and mental reactions. He orbited the earth a single time at an altitude of 188 miles, flying for one hour and forty-eight minutes. He then ejected from the spacecraft at an altitude of seven kilometers, parachuting into a field near Saratov. His mission proved that humans could survive in space and return safely to earth.

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Gagarin received a state funeral and was buried in the Kremlin Wall. American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin left one of Gagarin’s medals on the moon as a tribute. The cosmonaut training center where he had first trained was named after him. A crater on the moon bears his name, as does Gagarin Square in Moscow with its soaring monument, along with a number of monuments and streets in cities throughout Russia. At Baikonur, a reproduction of his training room is traditionally visited by space crews before a launch. Russians celebrate Cosmonaut Day on April 12 every year in honor of Gagarin’s historic flight.

See also:

SPACE PROGRAM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gagarin, Yuri. (1962). Road to the Stars, told to Nikolay Denisov and Serhy Borzenko, ed. N. Kamanin, tr. G. Hanna and D. Myshnei. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Gurney, Clare, and Gurney, Gene. (1972). Cosmonauts in Orbit: The Story of the Soviet Manned Space Program. New York: Franklin Watts.

Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin prepares to be the first man to orbit the Earth. © BETTMANN/CORBIS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

Johnson, Nicholas L. (1980). Handbook of Soviet Manned Space Flight. San Diego, CA: Univelt. Riabchikov, Evgeny. (1971). Russians in Space, tr. Guy Daniels. New York: Doubleday. Shelton, William. (1969). Soviet Space Exploration: The First Decade, intro. by Gherman Titov. London: Barker.

Gagarin was sent on a world tour to represent the strength of Soviet technology. A member of the Communist Party since 1960, he was appointed a deputy of the Supreme Soviet and named a Hero of the Soviet Union. He became the commander of the cosmonaut corps and began coursework at the Zhukovsky Institute of Aeronautical Engineering. An active young man, Gagarin often felt frustrated in his new life as an essentially ceremonial figure. There were many reports of Gagarin’s resulting depression and hard drinking. In 1967, however, he decided to train as a backup cosmonaut in anticipation of a lunar landing. On March 27, 1968, Gagarin conducted a test flight with a senior flight instructor near Moscow. The plane crashed, killing both men instantly. Gagarin’s tragic death shocked the public in the USSR and abroad. A special investigation was conducted amid rumors that Gagarin’s drinking caused the crash. Since then, investigators have indicated other possible causes, such as poor organization and faulty equipment at ground level.

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GAGAUZ More than ten hypotheses exist about the origins of the Gagauz, although none of them has been proven decisively. In Bulgarian and Greek scholarship, the Gagauz are considered, respectively, to be Bulgarians or Greeks who adopted the Turkish language. The Seljuk theory is popular in Turkey. It argues that the Gagauz are the heirs of the Seljuk Turks who in the thirteenth century resettled in Dobrudja under the leadership of Sultan Izeddina Keikavus, and together with the Turkish-speaking Polovetsians of the southern Russian steppes (Kipchaks in Arabic, Kumans in European historiography) established the Oghuz state (Uzieialet). In Russia scholars believe that the base of the Gagauz was laid by Turkish-speaking nomads


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(Oghuz, Pechenegs, and Polovetsians) who settled in the Balkan Peninsula from Russia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and there turned from nomadism into a settled population and adopted Christianity. During the Russian-Turkish wars at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the Gagauz resettled in the Bujak Steppe of southern Bessarabia, which had been emptied of the Nogai and annexed by the Russian Empire. From 1861 to 1862 a group of Gagauz settled in the Tauride province, a region that is today part of Ukraine. During the Stolypin agrarian reforms of 1906 to 1911, some of the Gagauz resettled in Kazakhstan, and in the 1930s, in protest against the collectivization imposed by Josef Stalin, they moved to Uzbekistan. There they stayed until the end of the 1980s under the name of Bulgars. At the end of the 1920s a few dozen families, in order to save themselves from the discriminatory policies of rumanization, migrated to Brazil and Canada. The short-lived migration of some families to southern Moldavia, at the time of the Khrushchev Thaw at the end of the 1950s, was unsuccessful. According to the census of 1989, there were 198,000 Gagauz in the former Soviet Union, of whom 153,000 lived in Moldavia, 32,000 in Ukraine, and 10,000 in the Russian Federation. One-third of the Gagauz lived in cities. Those Gagauz who are religious are Orthodox. The Gagauz language belongs to the southwestern (Oghuz) subgroup of the Turkish group of the Altaic language family. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, folklore texts were published in the Gagauz language, using the Cyrillic alphabet. In 1957 a literary language was established on the basis of the Russian alphabet. On January 26, 1996, by order of the People’s Assembly of Gagauzia, writing switched to the Latin alphabet. The official languages in Gagauzia are Moldavian, Gagauz, and Russian. The majority of the Gagauz are bilingual. In 1959, 94.3 percent of Gagauz spoke the language of their nationality; in 1989, 87.4 percent. The Gagauz speak fluent Russian. In 2000 the Gagauz language was taught in forty-nine schools, in Komrat State University, and in teachers’ colleges and high schools. The contemporary culture of the Gagauz is represented by the State Dramatic Theater (in the city of Chadyr-Lunga), the Kadynzha Ensemble, and musical and folklore groups.


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On January 24, 1994, the parliament of the Republic of Moldova passed the law On the Special Legal Status of Gagauzia (Gagauz Eri), which established the autonomous region of Gagauzia. This new form of self-determination for the Gagauz was based on the two principles of ethnicity and territory and won great approval in Europe. At the turn of the twentieth century cattleraising and livestock husbandry dominated, this has been replaced by agriculture, viniculture, tobacco farming, and industrial production.

See also:

MOLDOVA AND MOLDOVANS; NATIONALITIES

POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

MIKHAIL GUBOGLO

GAIDAR, YEGOR TIMUROVICH (b. 1956), economist, prime minister. The public face of shock therapy, Yegor Timurovich Gaidar was a soft-spoken economist who, at the age of thirty-six, became prime minister in the turbulent first year of Boris Yeltsin’s administration. He came from a prominent family: his father was Pravda’s military correspondent, and his grandfather a war hero and author beloved by generations of Soviet children. Gaidar graduated from Moscow State University in 1980 with a thesis on the price mechanism, supervised by reform economist Stanislav Shatalin. He then worked as a researcher at the Academy of Sciences Institute of Systems Analysis. In 1983 he joined a commission on economic reform that advised General Secretary Yuri Andropov. In 1986, he formed an informal group, Economists for Reform, and from 1987 to 1990 he was an editor at the Communist Party journal Kommunism, under the reformist editor Otto Latsis. In 1990, he became a department head at Pravda and headed a new Institute of Economic Policy. Gaidar walked into the White House during the August coup and offered his services to Yeltsin aide Gennady Burbulis. With the support of the young democratic activists, Gaidar became a key player in Yeltsin’s team, drafting his economic program and even the Belovezh accords, which broke up the Soviet Union. He later described himself as on a kamikaze mission to turn Russia into a market economy. As deputy prime minister (with Yeltsin serving as prime minister) and minister of finance and economics from November 1991, Gaidar oversaw the introduction of price liberal-

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and pursued business and academic interests. He was again elected to the Duma in December 1999 as head of the Union of Right Forces, an umbrella group uniting most of the fractured liberal leaders. The bloc went on to offer conditional support to President Vladimir Putin.

See also:

GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; PERE-

STROIKA; PRIME MINISTER; PRIVATIZATION; SHOCK THERAPY; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gaidar, Yegor. (2000). Days of Defeat and Victory. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. PETER RUTLAND

Yegor Gaidar directed Russia’s 1992 shock-therapy program. © KEERLE GEORGES DE/CORBIS SYGMA

ization in January 1992. Russia experienced a burst of hyper-inflation, but formerly empty store shelves filled with goods. Communist and nationalist opposition leaders unfairly blamed the collapsing economy on Yeltsin’s policies and Gaidar’s ideas. Gaidar was appointed acting prime minister in June 1992, but the Congress of People’s Deputies refused to approve his appointment in December. He left the government, returning as economics minister and first deputy prime minister in September 1993, in the midst of Yeltsin’s confrontation with the parliament. At one point in the crisis Gaidar appealed to people over television to take to the streets to defend the government. Gaidar took part in the creation of a liberal, progovernment electoral bloc, Russia’s Choice, but it lost to redbrown forces in the December 1993 parliamentary elections, winning just 15.5 percent of the party list vote. Gaidar left the government in January 1994, although he stayed on as leader of Russia’s Choice in Parliament. At the same time, Gaidar became head of his own think tank, the Institute of Transition Economies. In the December 1995 elections he led the renamed Russia’s Democratic Choice, which failed to clear the five percent threshold. He spoke out against the war in Chechnya, but supported Yeltsin in the 1996 election. During the later 1990s Gaidar served more as an author and commentator than as a front-rank politician. He defended his record, advocated more liberal reform,

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GAMSAKHURDIA, ZVIAD (1931–1999), human rights activist and writer. Born the son of Konstantin Gamsakhurdia, a famous Georgian writer and patriot, Zviad Gamsakhurdia became a leading Georgian dissident and human rights activist in the Soviet Union. In 1974, along with a number of fellow Georgian dissidents, he formed the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights and in 1976, the Georgian Helsinki Group (later renamed the Helsinki Union). Active in the Georgian Orthodox church, during the 1970s he wrote and published a number of illegal samizdat (self-published) journals. The best-known were The Golden Fleece (Okros sats’misi) and The Georgian Messenger (Sakartvelos moambe). Arrested in 1977 for the second time (he was first imprisoned in 1957), after a public confession he was released in 1979 and resumed his dissident activities. After the arrival of perestroika, he participated in the founding of one of the first Georgian informal organizations in 1988, the Ilya Chavchavadze the Righteous Society. An active leader in major demonstrations and protests in 1988–1989, he became the most popular anticommunist national figure in Georgia and swept to power in October 1990 as leader of a coalition of nationalist parties called the Round Table-Free Georgia Bloc. Elected Chairman of the Georgian Supreme Soviet, after amendments to the constitution, he was elected the first president of the Georgian Republic in May 1991. His period in office was brief and unsuccessful. Unable to make the transition from dissident activist to political mediator and statesman, his in-


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creasing authoritarianism alienated almost every interest group in Georgian society. A coalition of paramilitary groups, his own government’s National Guard, intellectuals, and students joined to overthrow him in a fierce battle in the city center in January 1992. He made his base in neighboring Chechnya and in 1993 attempted to reestablish his power in Georgia, leading the country into civil war. Quickly defeated after his forces captured a number of major towns in west Georgia, he was killed, or committed suicide in December 1993 in the Zugdidi region, Georgia.

Portraits of the tsars hung on the wall. Ostensibly there were no reasons for the authorities to be concerned about the Assembly, as the organization was named, but beneath the surface, Gapon’s ambitious plans began to unfold. Gathering a small group of the more active workers, he unveiled to them his “secret program,” which advocated the winning of labor concessions through the strength of organized labor. His advocacy of trade unionism met with the enthusiastic support of the conferees, and he gained loyal supporters who would provide the leadership of the Assembly.

See also: GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS; NATIONALISM IN THE

During the turbulent year of 1904, the Assembly grew rapidly. By the end of the year it had opened eleven branches. However, its rapid growth was causing concern among the factory owners, who feared the growing militancy of the workers and resented police interference on their behalf. Shortly before Christmas, four workers, all active members of the Assembly, were fired at the giant Putilov Works. Rumors spread that all members of the Assembly would be fired. When Gapon and police authorities tried to intercede, they were told that labor organizations were illegal and that the Assembly had no right to speak for its members. Faced with a question of survival, Gapon called a large meeting of his followers, at which it was decided to strike the Putilov Works—a desperate measure, since strikes were illegal.

SOVIET UNION; PERESTROIKA

STEPHEN JONES

GAPON, GEORGY APOLLONOVICH (1870–1906), Russian Orthodox priest led a peaceful demonstration of workers to the Winter Palace on Bloody Sunday, 1905; the event began the 1905 revolution. Father Georgy Apollonovich Gapon was a Ukrainian priest who became involved with missionary activity among the homeless in St. Petersburg, where he was a student at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy. His work attracted the attention of police authorities, and when Sergei Zubatov began organizing workers in police-sponsored labor groups, Gapon was brought to his attention. Zubatov’s efforts in Moscow ran into the opposition of industrialists who objected to police interference in business matters. In St. Petersburg Zubatov tried to tone down police involvement by recruiting clergy to provide direction to his workers. Gapon was reluctant to become involved, sensing opposition to Zubatov among the officials and the distrust of workers, but he began attending meetings and established contacts with the more influential workers. He also argued with Zubatov that workers should be allowed to decide for themselves what was good for them. During the summer of 1903, Zubatov was dismissed and given twenty-four hours to leave the city. In this manner Gapon inherited an organization created and patronized by the police. On the surface Gapon seemed to justify the trust of the authorities. A clubroom was opened where meetings began with prayers and the national anthem.


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The strike began on January 16, and by January 17 the entire working force in the capital had joined the strike. Branches turned into perpetual gatherings and rallies of workers. At one of the meetings, Gapon threw out an idea of a peaceful mass demonstration to present a workers’ petition to the tsar himself. The idea caught on like fire. Gapon began preparing the petition. It essentially contained the more specific demands of his secret program and a vague compilation of the most popular demands of the opposition groups. Copies of the petition, “Most Humble and Loyal Address to be presented to the Tsar at 2 P.M. on the Winter Palace Square,” were sent to various officials. Meanwhile the march was prohibited, and reinforcements were brought to St. Petersburg. Police tried to arrest Gapon, but he could not be found. By then the workers were too agitated to abandon their hope to see the tsar; moreover, they did not think soldiers would fire on a peaceful procession that in some places was presented as a religious procession. But the soldiers opened fire in several locations, resulting in more than 130 casualties.

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These events, known as Bloody Sunday, began the revolution of 1905. Gapon called for a revolution, then escaped abroad. Becoming disillusioned with the revolutionary parties, he attempted to reconcile with the post-1905 regime of Sergei Witte. Upon his return to St. Petersburg, he tried to revive his organization but was killed by a terrorist squad acting on the orders of the notorious double agent, Evno Azef. To explain Gapon’s murder, the perpetrators concocted a story of a workers’ trial and execution.

See also:

BLOODY SUNDAY; REVOLUTION OF 1905;

RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; ZUBATOV, SERGEI VASILIEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ascher, Abraham. (1988). “Gapon and Bloody Sunday.” Revolution of 1905, vol. 1. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gapon, Georgy A. (1905). The Story of My Life. London: Chapman & Hall. Sablinsky, Walter. (1976). The Road to Bloody Sunday: Father Gapon and the St. Petersburg Massacre of 1905. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. WALTER SABLINSKY

GASPIRALI, ISMAIL BEY (1851–1914), Crimean Tatar intellectual, social reformer, publisher, and key figure in the emergence of the modernist, or jadid, movement among Russian Turkic peoples. Ismail Bey Gaspirali was born March 8, 1851, in the Crimean village of Avci, but he spent most of his first decade in Bakhchisarai, the nearby town to which his family had moved during the Crimean War (1853–1856). Reared in the Islamic faith, his education began with tutoring in Arabic recitation by a local Muslim teacher (hoca), but then continued in the Russian-administered Simferopol gymnasium and Russian military academies in Voronezh and Moscow. In 1872 he embarked on a foreign tour that took him through Austria and Germany to France, where he remained for two years. A year followed in Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire, before Gaspirali returned home during the winter of 1875. His observations abroad became the basis for one of his earliest and most important essays, A Critical Look at European Civilization

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(Avrupa Medeniyetine bir Nazar-i Muvazene, 1885), and inspired the urban improvement projects during the four years (1878–1882) that he served as mayor of Bakhchisarai. By then, the importance of education and the modern press had become for Gaspirali the keys to improving the quality of life for Crimean Tatars and other Turkic peoples, who were mostly adherents of Islam. Nineteenth-century European military might, economic development, scientific advances, increased social mobility, political experimentation, and global expansion impressed upon him the need for reconsideration of Turkic cultural norms, perspectives, and aspirations. The narrow focus of education, inspired by centuries of Islamic pedagogy whose purpose was the provision of sufficient literacy in Arabic for reading and reciting the Qur’an, struck Gaspirali as unsuited for the challenges of modern life as defined by European experience. A new teaching method (usul-i jadid), emphasizing literacy in the child’s native language, and a reformed curriculum that included study of mathematics, natural sciences, geography, history, and the Russian language, should be instituted in new-style primary schools where children would be educated in preparation for enrolling in more advanced, modern, and Russian-supported institutions. The survival of non-European societies such as his own, many already the victims of European hegemony and their own adherence to timehonored practices, depended upon a willingness to accept change and new information, open up public opportunities for women, mobilize resources and talents, and become involved with worldly affairs. The medium by which Gaspirali propagandized his new method, both as pedagogue and social transformer, was the modern press. Beginning in April 1883, he published a dual-language newspaper in both Turkic and Russian entitled The Interpreter (Tercüman in Turkic, Perevodchik in Russian). It appeared without interruption until early 1918, becoming the longest surviving and most influential Turkic periodical within the Russian Empire. In later years, Gaspirali published other newspapers— The World of Women (Alem-i Nisvan), The World of Children (Alem-i Sibyan), and Ha, Ha, Ha! (Kha, Kha, Kha!), a satirical review—and numerous essays and didactic manuals on subjects ranging from Turkic relations with Russia to pedagogy, geography, hygiene, history, and literature. Gaspirali’s espousal of substantive social change raised opposition from both Russian and Turkic


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sources, but his moderate and reasoned tone won him important allies within local and national official circles, allowing him to continue his work with little interference. The intensification of ethnic controversy by the early twentieth century, however, increasingly marginalized him in relation to advocates of more strident nationalist sentiments and the politicization of Russian-Turkic relations. He died September 11, 1914 after a long illness.

See also:

CRIMEAN TATARS; ISLAM; JADIDISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fisher, Alan W. (1988). “Ismail Gaspirali, Model Leader for Asia.” In Tatars of the Crimea: Their Struggle for Survival, ed. Edward Allworth. Durham: Duke University Press. Kuttner, Thomas. (1975). “Russian Jadidism and the Islamic World: Ismail Gasprinskii in Cairo—1908. A Call to the Arabs for the Rejuvenation of the Islamic World.” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 16:383–424. Lazzerini, Edward J. (1988). “Ismail Bey Gasprinskii, the Discourse of Modernism, and the Russians.” In Tatars of the Crimea: Their Struggle for Survival, ed. by Edward Allworth. Durham: Duke University Press. Lazzerini, Edward J. (1992). “Ismail Bey Gasprinskii’s Perevodchik/Tercüman: A Clarion of Modernism.” In Central Asian Monuments, ed. by H.B. Paksoy. Istanbul: Isis Press. EDWARD J. LAZZERINI

GATCHINA One of the great imperial country palaces to the south of St. Petersburg, Gatchina was located near the site of a village known since 1499 as Khotchino. In 1708 Peter I granted the land to his beloved sister Natalia Alexeyevna, after whose death in 1717 the property belonged to a series of favored court servitors. In 1765 Catherine II purchased the estate from the family of Prince Alexander Kurakin and presented it to Grigory Orlov. She commissioned the Italian architect Antonio Rinaldi to design for Orlov a lavish palace-castle in a severe and monumental neoclassical style. Rinaldi, who had worked with the Neapolitan court architect Luigi Vanvitelli, created not only a grandiose palace ensemble but also a refined park. The palace, begun in 1766 but not completed until 1781, was conceived as a three-story block


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with square, one-story service wings—designated the Kitchen and Stables—attached to either side of the main structure by curved colonnades. In order to project the appearance of a fortified castle, Rinaldi departed from the usual practice of stuccoed brick and surfaced the building in a type of limestone found along the banks of the nearby Pudost River. The flanking towers of the main palace and its restrained architectural detail further convey the appearance of a forbidding structure. On the interior, however, the palace contained a display of luxurious furnishings and decorative details, including lavish plaster work and superb parquetry designed by Rinaldi. Rinaldi also contributed to the development of the Gatchina park with an obelisk celebrating the victory of the Russian fleet at Chesme. The exact date of the obelisk is unknown, but presumably it was commissioned by Orlov no later than the mid1770s in honor of his brother Alexei Orlov, general commander of the Russian forces at Chesme. Following the death of Orlov in 1783, Catherine bought the estate and presented it to her son and heir to the throne, Paul. He in turn commissioned another Italian architect, Vincenzo Brenna, to expand the flanking wings of the palace. Brenna, with the participation of the brilliant young Russian architect Adrian Zakharov, added another floor to the service wings and enclosed the second level of a colonnade that connected them to the main palace. Unfortunately, these changes lessened the magisterial Roman quality of the main palace structure. Brenna also modified and redecorated a number of the main rooms, although he continued the stylistic patterns created by Rinaldi. Grand Duke Paul was particularly fond of the Gatchina estate, whose castle allowed him to indulge his zeal for a military order based, so he thought, on Prussian traditions. The palace became notorious for military drills on the parade grounds in front of its grand facade. With the accession of Paul to the throne after the death of Catherine (November 1796), the Gatchina regime extended throughout much of Russia, with tragic results not only for the emperor’s victims but also for Paul himself. After his assassination, in 1801, the palace reverted to the crown. Among the many pavilions of the Gatchina park, the most distinctive is the Priory, the product of another of emperor Paul’s fantasies. After their expulsion from the island of Malta, Paul extended to the Maltese Order protection and refuge, including the design of a small pseudo-medieval palace known as the Priory, intended for the prior

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of this monastic military order. In his construction of the Priory, the architect Nikolai Lvov made innovative use of pressed earth panels, a technique that Paul had observed during a trip to France. The relatively isolated location of the Priory made it a place of refuge in 1881–1883 for the new emperor, Alexander III, concerned about security in the wake of his father’s assassination. For most of the nineteenth century the palace drifted into obscurity, although it was renovated from 1845 to 1852 by Roman Kuzmin. After the building of a railway through Gatchina in 1853, the town, like nearby Pavlovsk, witnessed the development of dacha communities. Gatchina briefly returned to prominence following the Bolshevik coup on November 7, 1917. The deposed head of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, attempted to stage a return from Gatchina, but by November 14 these efforts had been thwarted. In the fall of 1919 the army of General Nikolai Yudenich also occupied Gatchina for a few weeks before the collapse of his offensive on Petrograd. After the Civil War, the palace was nationalized as a museum, and in 1923 the town’s name was changed to Trotsk. Following Trotsky’s fall from power, the name was changed again, in 1929, to Krasnogvardeysk. With the liberation of the town from German occupation in January 1944, the imperial name was restored. Notwithstanding the efforts of museum workers to evacuate artistic treasures, the palace ensemble and park suffered catastrophic damage between September 1941 and 1944. Major restoration work did not begin until the 1970s, and in 1985 the first rooms of the palace museum were reopened.

See also:

ARCHITECTURE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brumfield, William Craft. (1993). A History of Russian Architecture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Orloff, Alexander, and Shvidovsky, Dmitri. (1996). St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars. New York: Abbeville Press.

Elena Stasova. After the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, Lenin gave the position of secretary in the ruling Communist Party of Russia to Yakov Sverdlov, a man with a phenomenal memory. After Sverdlov’s death in 1919, three people shared the position of secretary. In 1922, in recognition of the expanding party organization and the complexity of the newly formed USSR, a general secretary was appointed. Josef Stalin, who had several other administrative assignments, became general secretary, and used it to build a power base within the party. Lenin, before his death, realized Stalin had become too powerful and issued a warning in his Last Testament that Stalin be removed. However, skillful use of the patronage powers of the general secretary solidified Stalin’s position. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the position was renamed first secretary of the Communist Party (CPSU) in an attempt to reduce its significance. Nonetheless, Nikita S. Khrushchev (1953–1964) succeeded in using the position of first secretary to become the single most powerful leader in the USSR. Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid I. Brezhnev (1964–1982) restored the title of general secretary and emerged as the most important political figure in the postKhrushchev era. Mikhail S. Gorbachev, working as unofficial second secretary under general secretaries Yuri V. Andropov (1982–84) and Konstantin U. Chernenko (1984–85), solidified his position as their successor in 1985. Gorbachev subsequently reorganized the presidency in 1988–89, and transferred his attention to that post. After the 1991 coup, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary, one of several steps signaling the end of the CPSU. The position of general secretary was the most influential role in leadership for most of the Soviet period. Its role was closely associated with the rise of Stalin and the end of the position was also a signal of the end of the Soviet system.

See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; SUCCESSION OF LEADERSHIP, SOVIET

WILLIAM CRAFT BRUMFIELD BIBLIOGRAPHY

GENERAL SECRETARY Top position in the Communist Party

Hough, Jerry F. and Fainsod, Merle. (1979). How the Soviet Union Is Governed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, Gordon B. (1988). Soviet Politics: Continuity and Contradiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Prior to the revolution, Vladimir I. Lenin, the head of the Bolshevik faction, had a secretary,

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GENETICISTS Adherents of a prescriptive theoretical model for economic development planning in a controversy of the 1920s. The geneticists participated in an important theoretical controversy with the teleologists over the nature and potential limits to economic planning. The issue was fundamental and cut to the heart of the very possibility of central planning. Would a central planning agency be constrained by economic laws, such as supply and demand, or by other fixed economic regularities, such as sector proportions, or could planners operate to shape the economic future according to their own preferences? The geneticists argued that it was necessary to base economic plans on careful study of economic laws and historical determinants of economic activity. The past and certain general laws constrained any plan outcome. In this view, planning was essentially a form of forecasting. The teleologists argued on the contrary that planners should set their objectives independently of such constraints, that planning could seek to override market forces to achieve maximum results focused on decisive development variables, such as investment. Proponents of the geneticist view included Nikolai Kondratiev and Vladimir Groman and were well disposed to the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s. The teleologists included Stanislav Strumilin and Pavel Feldman who were less well disposed toward the NEP and believed it would be possible to force economic development through binding industrial and enterprising targets. The argument became quite heated and oversimplified. The degree of freedom of action that the geneticists allowed planners was miniscule, and it appeared that planning would involve little more than filling in plan output cells based almost entirely on historical carryover variables. The teleologists claimed a degree of latitude to planners that was almost total. In the end the geneticists lost, and Soviet planning followed the teleologists’ approach: it consisted of a set of comprehensive targets designed to force both the pace and the character of development. Soviet experience over the long run, however, suggests that the geneticists were closer to the mark concerning constraints on development.

See also:

ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; KONDRATIEV,

NIKOLAI DMITRIEVICH; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; TELEOLOGICAL PLANNING


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Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (1990). Soviet Economic Structure and Performance, 4th ed. New York: HarperCollins. Millar, James R. (1981). The ABCs of Soviet Socialism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. JAMES R. MILLAR

GENEVA SUMMIT OF 1985 A summit meeting of U.S. president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev took place in Geneva, Switzerland, on November 19–20, 1985. It was the first summit meeting of the two men, and indeed of any American and Soviet leaders in six years. Relations between the two countries had become much more tense after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan at the end of 1979, and the election a year later of an American president critical of the previous era of détente and disposed to mount a sharp challenge, even a crusade, against the leaders of an evil empire. However, by 1985 President Reagan was ready to meet with a new Soviet leader and test the possibility of relaxing tensions. Although the Geneva Summit did not lead to any formal agreements, it represented a successful engagement of the two leaders in a renewed dialogue, and marked the first step toward several later summit meetings and a gradual significant change in the relationship of the two countries. Both Reagan and Gorbachev placed a high premium on direct personal encounter and evaluation, and they developed a mutual confidence that helped steer national policies. Gorbachev argued strongly at Geneva for a reconsideration of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or Star Wars), but to no avail. He did, however, obtain agreement to a joint statement that the two countries would “not seek to achieve military superiority” (as well as reaffirmation that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”). This joint statement was given some prominence in Soviet evaluations of the summit, and was used by Gorbachev in his redefinition of Soviet security requirements. Although disappointed at Reagan’s unyielding stance on SDI, Gorbachev had come to realize that it represented a personal moral commitment by Reagan and was not simply a scheme of the American military-industrial complex.

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The Geneva summit not only established a personal bond between Reagan and Gorbachev, but for the first time involved Reagan fully in the execution of a strategy for diplomatic reengagement with the Soviet Union, a strategy that Secretary of State George Schultz had been advocating since 1983 despite the opposition of a number of members of the administration. For Gorbachev, the summit signified recognition by the leader of the other superpower. Although it was too early to predict the consequences, in retrospect it became clear that the renewed dialogue at the highest level would in time lead to extraordinary changes, ultimately contributing to the end of the Cold War.

See also:

COLD WAR; STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE;

UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

side pressed for the broadest possible repayment of Russian obligations, but offered little in loans and trade credits. The Soviets pushed for as much Western financed trade and technological assistance as possible, but conditioned limited debt repayment on the recovery of the Soviet economy. Moreover, Foreign Commissar Georgy Chicherin angered the Western representatives by calling for comprehensive disarmament and representation for the colonial peoples in the British and French empires. The impasse between Russia and the West, combined with a similar stalemate between the Anglo-French side and Germany, caused Berlin and Moscow to conclude a political and economic pact, the Rapallo Treaty. Thus, the Genoa Conference ended in failure, though the USSR succeeded in gaining recognition as an integral part of European diplomacy and in bolstering its relationship with Germany.

See also:

WORLD WAR I

Garthoff, Raymond L. (1994). The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Shultz, George P. (1993). Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Fink, Carole. (1984). The Genoa Conference: European Diplomacy, 1921–1922. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

RAYMOND L. GARTHOFF

White, Stephen. (1985). The Origins of Detente: The Genoa Conference and Soviet-Western Relations, 1921–1922. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. TEDDY J. ULDRICKS

GENOA CONFERENCE The Genoa Conference, convened in April and May 1922, was an international diplomatic meeting of twenty-nine states, including Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Japan, but not the United States. It was summoned to resolve several problems in the postwar restructuring of Europe, including the desire to reintegrate Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany into the political and economic life of Europe on terms favorable to the dominant Anglo-French alliance. The Allies wanted Moscow to repay foreign debts incurred by previous Russian governments, compensate foreign owners of property nationalized by the Bolsheviks, and guarantee that revolutionary propaganda would cease throughout their empires.

GENOCIDE

The invitation for Soviet participation in the conference facilitated Moscow’s drive for peaceful coexistence with the West and for the substantial foreign trade, technology, loans, and investment required by the New Economic Policy. Both sides failed to achieve their objectives. The Anglo-French

Genocide is a word coined after World War II to designate a phenomenon that was not new—the extermination, usually by a government, of a group of people for their ethnic, religious, racial, or political belonging. The term implies both a deliberate intent as well as a systematic approach in its implementation. Until international law came to terms with the Holocaust of the Jewish people in Europe, the extermination of such groups was considered as a crime against humanity or as a war crime, since wars tended to provide governments the opportunity to execute their designs. In a resolution adopted in 1946, the U.N. General Assembly declared genocide a crime under international law—its perpetrators to be held accountable for their actions. Two years later, with the full support of the USSR, the same body approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that went into effect soon after.

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Article II of the Convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: a) killing members of the group; b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another.” Article III of the Convention stipulated that those who commit such acts as well as those who support or incite them are to be punished. The Convention provided for an International Court of Justice to try cases of genocide. The Tribunal was established only in 2002. Meanwhile, the genocide of Ibos in Nigeria during the 1970s was not considered by any court; those responsible for the Cambodian genocide during the 1980s were tried by a domestic court some years later; the genocide during the mid 1990s of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda was finally considered by an international court in Tanzania, while an international tribunal in The Hague undertook a review of charges of genocide against Serb, Croat, and other leaders responsible for crimes during the Balkan crisis following the collapse of Yugoslavia during the early 1990s. Two well-known cases of genocide have affected Russia and the Soviet Union. The Young Turk Government of the Ottoman Empire implemented a deliberate and systematic deportation and extermination of its Armenian population during World War I in the Western part of historic Armenia under its domination. Eastern Armenia had been integrated into the Russian Empire by 1828. Russia, along with other European powers, had pressed Ottoman governments to introduce reforms in Ottoman Armenia and Russian Armenians were involved in the efforts to produce change. Close to one million Armenians perished as a result. The Russian army, already at war with the Ottomans, was instrumental in saving the population of some cities near its border, assisted by a Russian Armenian Volunteer Corps. Many of the survivors of the Genocide ended up in Russian Armenia and southern Russia. Others emigrated after 1920 to Soviet Armenia, mainly from the Middle East during the years following World War II. A few of the Young Turk leaders responsible for the Armenian genocide were tried by a Turkish court following their defeat in the war and condemned, largely in absentia, but the trials were halted due to changes in the domestic and international environment.


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During World War II Nazi advances into Soviet territory provided an opportunity to German forces to extend the policy of extermination of Jews into those territories. Nazi leaders responsible for the Holocaust were tried and condemned to various sentences at Nuremberg, Germany, following the war. Russian and Soviet governments have tolerated or implemented policies that, while not necessarily qualified as genocides, raise questions relevant to the subject. Pogroms against Russian Jews during the last decades of the Romanov Empire and the deportation of the Tatars from Crimea, Chechens and other peoples from their Autonomous Republics within Russia, and Mtskhetan Turks from Georgia during and immediately following World War II on suspicion of collaboration with the Germans reflect a propensity on the part of Russia and Soviet governments to resolve perceived political problems through punishment of whole groups. Equally important, the politically motivated purges engineered by Josef Stalin and his collaborators of the Communist Party and Soviet government officials and their families and various punitive actions against whole populations claimed the lives of millions of citizens between 1929 and 1939. In one case, Soviet policy has been designated as genocidal by some specialists. As a result of the forced collectivization of farms during the early 1930s, Ukraine suffered a famine, exacerbated by a severe drought, which claimed as many as five million lives. The Soviet government’s refusal to recognize the scope of the disaster and provide relief is seen as a deliberate policy of extermination.

See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; WORLD WAR II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Courtois, Stéphane. (1999). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, tr. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fein, Helen. (1979). Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust. New York: The Free Press. Walliman, Isidor, and Dobkowski, Michael N., eds. (1987). Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death. New York: Greenwood Press. Weiner, Amir. (2000). Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. GERARD J. LIBARIDIAN

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GEOGRAPHY Russia is the world’s largest country, 1.7 times larger than second-place Canada, ten times larger than Alaska, and twenty-five times larger than Texas. It stretches from 19° E Longitude in the west to 169° W Longitude in the east, spanning 5,700 miles (9,180 kilometers) and eleven time zones. If Russia were superimposed on North America with St. Petersburg in Anchorage, Alaska, the Chukchi Peninsula would touch Oslo, Norway, halfway around the globe. Thus, when Russians are eating supper on any given day in St. Petersburg, the Chukchi are breakfasting on the next. From its southernmost point (42° N) to its northernmost islands (82° N), the width of Russia exceeds the length of the contiguous United States. Russia’s size guarantees a generous endowment of natural features and raw materials. The country contains the world’s broadest lowlands, swamps, grasslands, and forests. In the Greater Caucasus Mountains towers Europe’s highest mountain, Mt. Elbrus. Flowing out of the Valday Hills northwest of Moscow and into the world’s largest lake, the Caspian Sea, is Europe’s longest river, the “Mother Volga.” Almost three thousand miles to the east, in Eastern Siberia, is Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake. The Russian raw material base is easily the world’s most extensive. The country ranks first or second in the annual production of many of the world’s strategic minerals. Historically, Russia’s size has ensured defense in depth. Napoleon and Hitler learned this the hard way in 1812 and in the 1940s, respectively.

the northwest to Novosibirsk in Western Siberia and back to the North Caucasus. A thin exclave of settlement continues along the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Vladivostok in the Russian Far East. Except for random mining and logging, major economic activities are carried out in the settled area. Russia’s size evidences great distances between and among geographic phenomena. Accordingly, it suffers the tyranny of geography. Many of its raw materials are not accessible, meaning they are not resources at all. The friction of distance—long rail and truck hauls—accounts for high transportation costs. Although in its entirety Russia displays great beauty and diversity of landforms, climate, and vegetation, close up it can be very dull because of the space and time required between topographical changes. Variety spread thinly over a massive land can be monotonous. Three-fourths of the country, for example, is a vast plain of less than 1,500 feet (450 meters) in elevation. The typical Russian landscape is flat-to-rolling countryside, the mountains relegated to the southern borders and the area east of the Yenisey River. The Ural Mountains, which divide Europe from Asia, are no higher than 6,200 feet (1,890 meters) and form a mere inconvenience to passing air masses and human interaction. Russia’s average elevation is barely more than 1,000 feet (333 meters).

Because Russia is such a northerly country, however, much of the land is unsuitable for human habitation. Ninety percent of Russia is north of the 50th parallel, which means that Russian farmers can harvest only one crop per field per year. Three-fourths of Russia is more than 250 miles (400 km) away from the sea. Climates are continental rather than maritime. Great temperature ranges and low annual precipitation plague most of the country. Therefore, only 8 percent of Russia’s enormous landmass is suitable for farming. The quest for food is a persistent theme in Russian history. Before 1950, famines were harsh realities.

Russia is a fusion of two geologic platforms: the European and the Asiatic. When these massive plates collided 250 million years ago, they raised a mighty mountain range, the low vestiges of which are the Urals. West of the Urals is the North European Plain, a rolling lowland occasioned by hills left by Pleistocene glaciers. One set of hills stretches between Moscow and Warsaw: The SmolenskMoscow Ridge is the only high ground between the Russian capital and Eastern Europe and was the route used by Napoleon’s and Hitler’s doomed armies. Further north between Moscow and St. Petersburg are the Valday Hills, which represent the source of Russia’s major river systems: Volga, Dnieper, Western Dvina, and so forth. Where it has not been cleared for agriculture, the plain nurtures a temperate forest of broadleaf trees, which dominate in the south, and conifers, which prevail in the north. The slightly leached gray and brown soils of this region were first cultivated by the early eastern Slavs.

The Russian people thus chose to settle in the temperate forests and steppes, avoiding the mountains, coniferous forests, and tundras. The primary zone of settlement stretches from St. Petersburg in

In the south, the North European Lowland merges with the Stavropol Upland of the North Caucasus Foreland between the Black and Caspian seas. Here the forests disappear, leaving only grass-

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land, or steppe, the soils of which are Russia’s fertile chernozems. Along the western and northern shores of the Caspian Sea, desert replaces the grasslands. Farther south, North Caucasia merges with the Greater Caucasus Mountains, the highest peak of which is Mt. Elbrus (18,481 feet [5,633 meters]). The northern part of the European Lowland supports a northern coniferous forest, known as taiga. The largest continuous stand of conifers in the world, the taiga stretches from the Finnish border across Siberia and the Russian Far East to the Pacific Ocean. Even farther north, flanking the Arctic Ocean is the Russian tundra. Permafrost plagues both the taiga and tundra, limiting their use for anything other than logging and mineral development. Soils are highly infertile podzols. Virtually all of Siberia and the Russian Far East consist of either taiga or tundra, except in the extreme southeast, where temperate forest appears again.

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East of the Urals is the West Siberian Lowland, the world’s largest plain. The slow-moving Ob and Irtysh rivers drain the lowland from south to north. This orientation means that the lower courses of the rivers are still frozen as the upper portions thaw. The ice dam causes annual floods that create the world’s largest swamp, the Vasyugan. The Ob region contains Russia’s largest oil and gas reservoirs. In southeastern Western Siberia is Russia’s greatest coal field, the Kuzbas. South of the Kuzbas are the mineral-rich Altai Mountains, which together with the Sayan, and the Yablonovy ranges, form the border between Russia, China, and Mongolia. East of the Yenisey River is the forested Central Siberian Plateau, a broad, sparsely populated tableland that merges farther east with the mountain ranges of the Russian Far East. In the southeastern corner of the plateau is a great rift valley in which

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lies Lake Baikal, “Russia’s Grand Canyon.” Equal to Belgium in size, the world’s deepest lake gets deeper with every earthquake.

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CLIMATE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lydolph, Paul E. (1990). Geography of the USSR. Elkhart Lake, WI: Misty Valley Publishing. Mote, Victor L. (1994). An Industrial Atlas of the Soviet Successor States. Houston, TX: Industrial Information Resources. Mote, Victor L. (1998). Siberia Worlds Apart. Boulder, CO: Westview. Shaw, Denis J. B. (1999). Russia in the Modern World: A New Geography. Malden, MA: Blackwell. VICTOR L. MOTE

GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS Georgia [Sak’art’velo] is among the “Newly Independent States” to emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its territory covers 69,700 square kilometers, bordered by the North Caucasus republics of the Russian Federation on the north, Azerbaijan to the west, Armenia and Turkey to the south and southwest, and the Black Sea to the east. It includes three autonomous regions: Adjaria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. The latter two have maintained a quasi-independent status for most of the post-Soviet period, and have been the scenes of violence and civil war. The capital city of Tiflis, located on the Mtkvari (or Kura) River in the heart of Georgia, has a population of 1.2 million, approximately 22 percent of the republic’s 5.4 million. Georgia’s head of state is a president. A unicameral parliament is Georgia’s legislative body.

5.7 percent, Ossetian 3 percent, Abkhaz 1.8 percent, and other groups comprising 5 percent. Georgian principalities and kingdoms began to appear in the last few centuries of the first millennium B.C.E, and existed alongside a well-traveled east-west route on the peripheries of both Persian and Greco-Roman civilizations. These influences were mediated through their Armenian neighbors who, with the Georgians, also maintained contacts with Semitic cultures. Ancient Georgian culture was split into two major areas: east and west, divided by the Likhi mountains. The eastern portion, known as Kartli, or Iberia, had its center at Mtskheta, at the confluence of the Aragvi and Mtkvari Rivers. When not directly controlled by a Persian state, it still maintained ties with the Iranian political and cultural spheres. This connection lasted well into the Christian period, when the local version of Zoroastrianism vied with Christianity. Western Georgia was known by different names, depending upon the historical source: Colchis, Egrisi, Lazica. It had more direct ties with Greek civilizations, as several Greek colonies had existed along the Black Sea coast from as early as the sixth century B.C.E. Western Georgia was eventually more directly under the control of the Roman Empire, in its successive incarnations. The conversion of the Kartli to Christianity occurred in the fourth century as the Roman Empire was beginning its own transition to Christianity. As with other aspects of cultural life, Armenian and Semitic sources were important. Mirian and his royal family, after being converted by St. Nino, a Cappadocian woman, made Christianity the official religion. Dates in the 320s and 330s are argued for this event. The conversion of the west Georgians land owes itself more directly to Greek Christianity.

The Georgians are historically Orthodox Christians, with some conversions to Islam during times of Muslim rule. Their language, with its own alphabet (thirty-three letters in the modern form), is a member of the Kartvelian family, a group distinct from neighboring Indo-European or Semitic languages. Speakers of Mingrelian and Svanetian, two of the other Kartvelian languages, also consider themselves Georgian. Laz, closely related to Mingrelian, is spoken in Turkey. Georgia has an ethnically diverse population: Georgian 70.1 percent, Armenian 8.1 percent, Russian 6.3 percent, Azeri

The conversion of the Georgians was accompanied by the invention of an alphabet in the early fifth century. Scripture, liturgy, and theological works were translated into Georgian. This association of the written language with the sacred is a vital aspect of Georgian culture.

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The Georgian capital was transferred from Mtskheta to Tiflis in the fifth century, a process begun during the reign of King Vakhtang, called Gorgasali, and completed under his son Dachi. Vakhtang is portrayed in Georgian sources, in an

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exaggerated fashion, as one of the important figures in transferring Kartli from an Iranian orientation to a Byzantine one. This was a complex time of struggle in the South Caucasus, not only between Byzantine and Persian Empires, but also among various Armenian, Caucasian Albanian, and Georgian states vying for power. These currents of conflict were drastically altered in the seventh century when Islam asserted its military and political power. Tiflis was captured by an Arab army in 645, a mere thirteen years after the death of Muhammad, and would remain under Arab control until the time of David II/IV (the numbering of the Bagratid rulers differs according to one’s perspective) in the eleventh century. While Christianity was tolerated in Eastern Georgia, the political center shifted westward, where


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the Kingdom of Abkhazia grew to preeminence in the eighth century. This realm was one of mixed ethnic composition, including the Kartvelians of West Georgia (i.e. the ancestors of today’s Mingrelians and Svanetians) and, toward the northwest, the ancestors of the Abkhazian people. Meanwhile, a branch of the Bagratid family, which had ruled parts of Armenia, and who were clients of the Byzantine Empire, became prominent in the Tao-Klarjeti region of southwest Georgia. Because of Bagrat III (d. 1014), they became inheritors of the Kingdom of Abkhazia. From their capital Kutaisi they contemplated the re-conquest of Tiflis and the unification of Georgian lands. This was accomplished in 1122 by David II/IV, called the Builder, who reigned from 1089 to 1125. For nearly two centuries, through the reign of Tamar (1184–1212), the Georgians enjoyed a golden age,

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when they controlled a multiethnic territory from the Black to the Caspian Seas and from the Caucasus Mountains in the north, toward the Armenian plateau in the south. It was also a time of great learning, with theological academies at Gelati, near Kutaisi, and in the east at Iqalto on the Kakhetian plain. The literary output of this time reached it zenith with Shota Rustaveli’s epic tale of heroism and chivalry, Knight in the Panther Skin, written in the last quarter of twelfth century.

Safavid court. The Bagratid dynasty continued to reign locally over a collection of smaller states that warred against one another. West European travelers who ventured through Georgia in these centuries give sad reports about the quality of life.

In the thirteenth century a succession of invasions by Turks and Mongols brought chaos and destruction upon the Georgians. These culminated in the devastating raids of Timur in the early fifteenth century. From these depredations Georgian society was very slow to recover, and for much of the next four centuries it remained under the sway of the Savafid Persian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Georgians at this time were active at the

In the eighteenth century the Russian Empire’s steady expansion brought it to the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains and along the Caspian Sea to the east of Georgia. Russians and Georgians had been in contact through earlier exchanges of embassies. Persian invasions in that century had been especially harsh, and the Georgians looked to their northern Orthodox neighbor for assistance. This assistance culminated first in the 1783 Treaty of Georgievsk, by which Irakle II’s realm of KartliKakheti became a protectorate of the Russian Empire. Then, in 1801, soon after his accession to the throne, Alexander I signed a manifesto proclaiming Kartli-Kakheti to be fully incorporated into Rus-

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sia. Other parts of Georgia followed within the next decade, although not always willingly. Despite Russification efforts during the nineteenth century, the Georgian language and culture underwent a renaissance that would undergird Georgian national aspirations in the twentieth century. The Society for the Spread of Literacy among the Georgians, founded by Iakob Gogebashvili, was important for fostering language acquisition, especially among children. Ilia Chavchavadze, Akaki Tsereteli, and Vazha Pshavela dominated the literary scene into the twentieth century. Georgians joined with comrades throughout the Russian Empire in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. When the Russian state began to shed its periphery in 1918, the Georgians briefly entered the Transcaucasian Republic. This political entity lasted from February until May 1918, but then split into its constituent parts. Georgia proclaimed its independence on May 26, 1918. The Democratic Republic of Georgia, beset by internal and external enemies, lasted less than three years, and on February 26, 1921, the Bolsheviks established Soviet power in Tiflis. Independent Georgia had been governed mainly by Mensheviks, an offshoot of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. They were reluctant nationalists, led by Noe Zhordania, who served as president. These Mensheviks became the demonic foil for any number of aspects of Soviet historiography and remained so for the Abkhazians when they would press for greater autonomy. The Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia entered the USSR through the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1922 and remained a member of it until its dissolution in 1936. Afterward the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic became one of the USSR’s constituent republics. Three autonomous regions were created within Georgia, part of what some describe as a manifestation of the “divide and conquer” regime of ethnic pseudosovereignties. The South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast was established across the border from North Ossetia, and the Adjar A.S.S.R. was an enclave of historically Muslim Georgians in the southwest. The third, and most troubled, part of Georgia was Abkhazia. This region in the northwest along the Black Sea coast had been in an ambiguous federative, treaty status with Georgia, but was finally, in 1931, incorporated as an A.S.S.R. Georgia fared generally no better or worse for having its “favorite son,” Iosep Jugashvili (a.k.a.


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Josef Stalin), as the dictator of the Soviet Union. With other parts of the U.S.S.R., it suffered the depredations of party purges and the destruction of its national intelligentsia in the 1930s. In the latter decades of the Soviet period, Georgia was held up as a sort of paradise within the Soviet system. Agriculture, with tea and citrus in the subtropical zone in the west, prospered, and the Black Sea coast was a favorite spot for vacationers from the cold north. The hospitality of the Georgians, seemingly uncooled by Soviet power, and always warmed by the quality of Georgia’s famous wines, wooed Soviet and foreign guests alike. The Georgians developed a vigorous dissident movement in the 1970s, with Zviad Gamsakhurdia and Merab Kostava playing leading roles. Tens of thousands came out into the streets of Tiflis in 1978 to protest the exclusion of the Georgian language from the new proposed Constitution of the Georgian S.S.R. As Gorbachev’s glasnost worked its effects, the Georgian independence movement gave rise to competing movements in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In reaction to a communiqué issued by Abkhazian intellectuals in March 1989, the main streets of Tiflis again overflowed with protesters. On the morning of April 9, 1989, troops moved against the demonstration, killing at least twenty and injuring scores of others. This outburst of violence marked the beginning of the rapid devolution of Soviet power in Georgia. Georgia voted for its independence on April 9, 1991, and elected its first president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, in May. His rule was harsh, and his presidency barely survived the final collapse of the USSR by a few months into 1992. Eduard Shevardnadze, who had held power in Georgia under Communist rule, and who became Gorbachev’s foreign minister, returned to Georgia, eventually to be elected twice to the presidency. His presidency was plagued by warfare and continuing conflict in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, both of which claimed independence. The ethnic conflict compounded the economic dislocations, although the proposed Baku-Tiflis-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the beginning of an east-west energy corridor, has brought the promise of some future prosperity.

See also:

CAUCASUS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET;

NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; SHEVARDNADZE, EDUARD AMVROSIEVICH

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Allen, W. E. D. (1971). A History of the Georgian People: From the Beginning down to the Russian Conquest in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Barnes & Noble. Aronson, Howard. (1990). Georgian: A Reading Grammar, 2nd ed. Columbus, OH: Slavica.. Braund, David. (1994). Georgia in Antiquity: A History of Colchis and Transcaucasian Iberia, 550 BC–AD 562. Oxford: Clarendon. Lang, David Marshall. (1962). A Modern History of Soviet Georgia. New York: Grove. Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. (1997). “Imagining History at the Crossroads: Persia, Byzantium, and the Architects of the Written Georgian Past.” Ph.D. diss, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. Suny, Ronald G. (1994). The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Toumanoff, Cyril. (1982). History of Christian Caucasia. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. PAUL CREGO

GEORGIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH The Orthodox Church of Georgia, an autocephalous church of the Byzantine rite Eastern Churches, is an ancient community. It dates from the fourth century, and stories of the evangelization of Kartli center around St. Nino, called Equal to the Apostles, who was born in Cappadocia, studied in Jerusalem, and made her way through Armenia to preach, heal, baptize, and convert the Georgian people. Later traditions add apostolic visits from St. Andrew and St. Simeon the Canaanite that reflect evangelization of western Georgia. Christians in Kartli continued to have a strong relationship with the Armenians until the seventh century, when these Christian people opted for different Christologies. The autocephaly of the Orthodox Church is claimed from the fifth century, when the Archbishop of Mtskheta was given the title of Catholicos. There was later also a Catholicos in western Georgia, coinciding with the Kingdom of Abkhazia.

The Georgians, for much of their history, have lived under the rule of Muslim states. Arab Muslims conquered Tiflis in 645, and it continued under Muslim rule until 1122. After a brief golden age the Georgians again came under Muslim control, alternating between Savifid Persians and Ottoman Turks. The church endured this period of time with difficulty and looked for assistance from their Orthodox neighbors in Russia toward the end of the eighteenth century. The identification of the Georgian nation with its Orthodox identity was strengthened in this period, as the church was often the guarantor of linguistic and national identity and the legal authority for the nation. Soon after the Russians annexed Georgia (1801), the autocephaly of the Georgian Church was rescinded (1811) and it became a part of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Georgian Church became one of the institutions in Georgia through which the imperial government attempted its program of Russification. The Georgian Church reclaimed its autocephaly in 1918, as Georgia was proclaiming its independence. This short period of breathing space was quickly constricted with the imposition of Soviet power, and nearly seven decades of atheist education and oppression took a devastating toll on the Georgian Church. As in the rest of the USSR, church buildings were closed, confiscated for other purposes, left to ruin, or destroyed. The role of the clergy was restricted, and many came under suspicion as possible KGB agents. The reign of Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II from December 1977 marked a new beginning in the life of the Georgian Church. Slowly, Ilia began to restore episcopal sees and reopen churches. In October 1988, the Tiflis Theological Academy was opened. With the changes of perestroika and glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Georgian Church continued a dramatic revival. By the end of the 1990s dozens of churches had been rebuilt and many new ones built.

Western Georgia was evangelized more directly by Greeks, and, after the split from the Armenians, the entire Georgian Church strengthened its ties with the church in Constantinople. Of the family of Orthodox Churches that derive their liturgies from the Byzantine tradition, the liturgical language remains an archaic Georgian, not entirely intelligible to modern speakers.

During the first decade of Georgia’s new independence the church struggled to find its place in society and in relation to the state. Georgian politicians, especially the first president Zviad Gamsakhurdia, have used and misused their ties to the church. The new Georgian Constitution not only guarantees freedom of religion and conscience but gives the church a place of historical honor. This place of honor was given further definition and practical meaning by a Concordat signed by the government and the church on October 14, 2002.

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The Georgian Church was encouraged to join the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1961, and Ilia II has served as its president. Internal pressures from conservatives helped to further the decision of the Georgians to leave the WCC and other ecumenical bodies during the spring of 1997. There has also been considerable persecution of non-Orthodox religious communities, including Baptists, Pentecostals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, in the post-Soviet period, some of it violent. The Orthodox responsible for this persecution are generally persons excommunicated by the Georgian Church. Some within the church, however, have participated either by direct violence or by an elevation of rhetoric against the non-Orthodox.

See also: BYZANTIUM, INFLUENCE OF; GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS; ORTHODOXY; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; RUSSIFICATION.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Babian, Gorun. (2001). The Relations Between the Armenian and Georgian Church: According to the Armenian Sources, 300–610. Antelias, Lebanon: Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia. Mgaloblishvili, Tamila, ed. (1998). Ancient Christianity in the Caucasus. Surrey, England: Curzon. PAUL CREGO

GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC One of the unintended and initially unforeseen consequences of World War II was the division of Germany. At the end of the war, Western forces controlled and occupied Western Germany, while Soviet forces occupied Eastern Germany and Eastern Europe. The Allied powers, including Russia, agreed to divide Germany and Berlin into occupation zones. The tensions resulting from the joint administration of Germany, as well as the emergence of the Cold War, led in 1949 to the formal division of Germany into two separate states. In 1949 occupied West Germany was transformed into the Federal Republic of Germany, a democratic state with close ties to the Western powers. In East Germany, the German Democratic Republic was founded. The Soviets had allowed political parties to form in their section of Germany as early as 1945, but had used pressure and coer-


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cive measures to achieve a merger between the socialist and communist parties during April of 1946. The result was the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) or SED, which came to exercise near-complete control in East Germany. The GDR, like other communist governments established in Eastern Europe, had a central committee, and power came from the party leadership, which also assumed key roles in the state bureaucracy. The government used repressive measures such as censorship and arrest, and began to require communist ideology to be taught in schools. Walter Ulbricht, the head of the German Democratic Republic, had been part of the German Communist Party from 1919, the year it was founded, and had served as a communist deputy in the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic. Ulbricht was flown from the Soviet Union to Germany after the Soviet army had invaded Germany. Ulbricht, a hard-line Stalinist, stated in 1952 that East Germany could pursue the construction of full socialism, further restricting workers and reducing the availability of consumer goods. Although the Soviet Union had been exerting considerable pressure upon Ulbricht to reform and alter his repressive policies, the Soviets used force to suppress the rebellion his policies provoked in 1953. Since the Soviet occupation of East Germany had begun, hundreds of thousands of Germans had fled to the West. The desire to escape Sovietoccupied territory intensified during Ulbricht’s tenure, a fact illustrated by the 400,000 Germans who left East Germany in 1953. The Soviet Union was able to lessen this massive emigration by patrolling the border between the two German states and making it impassable, but until 1961, Germans could take public transportation from East Berlin to West Berlin and then declare themselves to authorities. In 1961, the Soviets officially sealed off East Berlin, as well as the last breach in East Germany, by building the Berlin Wall. The erection of the Berlin Wall led to a stabilization of the situation in East Berlin and the end to the constant drain on the population. Ulbricht introduced the New Economic System in 1963. The New Economic System did not succeed in substantially altering the centralized structure of the East Germany economy, but it allowed for a relaxation of the rigid economic policies and for some independent decisions. As a result of these changes, the East German economy became the strongest of all of those countries within the Soviet sphere of occupation, while still far below the economies of

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Western Europe. Ulbricht appeared to be at the height of his power in 1968, but many of his policies were unpopular. In 1971 Soviet authorities forced Ulbricht to step down. Ulbricht died in 1973, and his death paved the way for improved relations between East and West Germany. The East German minister, Willie Stoph, negotiated and signed several treaties with the German Federal Republic. Stoph briefly served as the effective head of state but was replaced by Erich Honecker in 1976. In 1989 the changes and reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and the reluctance of the Soviet leader to use force to suppress rebellions elsewhere led to uprisings in Eastern Europe. In East Germany the Berlin Wall symbolized not just the repressive Soviet-style government that had been in place since 1949 but also the single largest cause of resentment among Germans. The Soviet control of East Berlin and East Germany necessitated the forced separation of family and friends who were unable to secure travel permits or permission to emigrate from the notoriously inefficient and reactionary bureaucracy in the East. The uprisings in Eastern Europe and the discontent in Germany led the SED to replace Honecker and to pass a new law regarding travel and emigration. It was too little too late, however, and crowds swarmed the crossing point arguing that restrictions had been relaxed. When Soviet guards, unsure of the situation, opened the gate and allowed them to pass, Germans began to dismantle the Wall, and it was not long until the communist government in East Germany collapsed. The noncommunist leadership of the German Democratic Republic immediately arranged to meet with authorities from the German Federal Republic. The initial focus of these talks was on the financial situation and the request for a loan to East Germany, but the question of German reunification also hung in the air. These developments led to the “Two plus Four” talks, encompassing the two German states and the four powers that had occupied Germany. The Two plus Four Treaty, concluded on September 12, 1990, dealt with all international issues regarding affairs in Germany, to the satisfaction of the major powers. The support of the president of the United States, George H.W. Bush, was instrumental in securing the approval of the French, who had grave concerns about the renewal of Germany. At 12:01 A.M. on October 3, 1990, the GDR ceased to exist, and the German Federal Republic became the sole authority for a reunified Germany. Reunification has greatly impacted all Germans socially, economically, and politically as

the complicated process of reintegrating East and West Germany has taken place within both a national and an international context.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Detwiler, Donald S. (1999). Germany: A Short History, 3rd edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Turner, Henry Ashby, Jr. (1992). Germany from Partition to Reunification. Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press. MELISSA R. JORDINE

GERMAN SETTLERS German traders and missionaries began settling on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea during the thirteenth century and eventually became the exclusive nobility in the region. The Germans ruled over the native Estonian and Latvian peasants and converted them first to Catholicism and then, after the Protestant Reformation, to Lutheranism. They were responsible for establishing merchant and artisan guilds in urban areas and feudal manors in rural areas. The Baltic Germans retained their privileged status even after Sweden decisively conquered the region during the 1620s. In 1721 the Russian Empire acquired the territories of Estland and Livland (equivalent to modern-day Estonia and northern Latvia) from Sweden. Germans became influential and loyal members of the Russian government and army, with some serving as generals, administrators, and diplomats. Baltic Germans fought simultaneously against the Bolsheviks and the Latvian nationalists during the late 1910s but did not succeed in establishing a permanent German-ruled state in the Baltics. The number of Germans living in the Baltics steadily decreased. Following a pact signed between the foreign ministers of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin in August 1939, almost all of the remaining Baltic Germans moved to German-ruled Poland over the next two years. Germans arrived in the Russian Empire in several additional waves of immigration between 1763 and 1862. The areas in which these Germans initially settled included the Middle Volga Area, southern Ukraine, the Crimean peninsula, Bessarabia, Volhynia, and the Caucasus. Their religions included Lutheranism, Catholicism, and Mennonitism.

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On July 22, 1763, the Russian Tsar Catherine the Great issued a manifesto that offered foreigners the opportunity to settle in Russia. The newcomers were promised land, self-governance, religious freedom, exemptions from taxes and military service, and other privileges. The manifesto particularly appealed to Germans, who had suffered during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), a time of rampant famine and forced military conscription. From 1763 until 1767, approximately 25,000–27,000 Germans resettled in the Middle Volga river valley in 104 colonies in the provinces of Saratov and Samara, which later developed into 192 towns and villages. Most of the Volga Germans engaged in agriculture, harvesting such crops as rye, sunflowers, potatoes, and sugar beets, but some worked as tanners, sausage makers, millers, and craftspeople. Tsar Alexander II began drafting them into the Russian army in 1874. During the following decades, some Volga German families moved to Siberia, while others immigrated to the United States, Canada, and other countries. Volga Germans were afflicted by severe famines in 1891–1892, 1921–1922, and 1932–1933, the last one caused by Stalin’s forced collectivization of farms. While the Volga Germans had been granted their own autonomous republic in 1924, it was abolished by Stalin on August 28, 1941, in the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, and the Volga Germans were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia and forced into slave labor. Between 1783 and 1812, the Russian Empire annexed former Ottoman and Crimean Tatar territories on the northern Black Sea coast. In 1787 Germans began to settle in New Russia, which later became the provinces of Kherson, Yekaterinoslav, and Tauride. In 1813 Tsar Alexander I invited Germans to Bessarabia and offered them many privileges. The first German settlement in Bessarabia was founded in 1814, and in the following years, until 1842, many more Germans arrived and formed numerous other colonies. Many of the Bessarabian and Ukrainian Germans specialized in farming and grape growing, but others worked in trades like weaving, blacksmithing, shoemaking, and carpentry. Germans also founded factories and mills. Bessarabia became part of Romania in 1918, and its Germans departed in 1940. The Russian Germans were very conscious of their identity, operating their own schools and churches and teaching their children the German language. Tsar Alexander III’s Russification policies in the 1880s and 1890s made Russian the language


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of all schools and abolished the Germans’ right to self-government. During World War I, with Germany an enemy of Russia, German organizations and newspapers were shut down by the Russian government, preaching in German was outlawed, and Germans from Volhynia were exiled to Siberia (1915). During the Soviet years, increasing numbers of young Germans became fluent in Russian rather than in German. Whereas from the 1950s to the1970s few Soviet Germans were allowed to immigrate to Germany, during the late 1980s and 1990s a much larger number of Germans did so following the gradual easing of restrictions beginning in 1987. As of the 1989 census there were at least two million Germans living in the Soviet Union, but the majority of them left within a decade.

See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brandes, Detlef. (1991). “A Success Story: The German Colonists in New Russia and Bessarabia: 1787–1914.” Acta Slavica Iaponica 9:32–46. Giesinger, Adam. (1981). From Catherine to Khrushchev: The Story of Russia’s Germans. Lincoln, NE: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia. Kern, Albert. (1998). Homeland Book of the Bessarabian Germans. Fargo, ND: Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University Libraries. Koch, Fred C. (1977). The Volga Germans: In Russia and the Americas, from 1763 to the Present. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Long, James W. (1988). From Privileged to Dispossessed: The Volga Germans, 1860–1917. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Pleve, Igor R. (2001). The German Colonies on the Volga: The Second Half of the Eighteenth Century, tr. Richard R. Rye. Lincoln, NE: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia. KEVIN ALAN BROOK

GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH The reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725) marked Russia’s official entry into European diplomatic affairs. Around 1740 this was followed by the entry of another power, Prussia, transformed under Frederick the Great. Significant Russian-Prussian relations began during the reign of Catherine the Great

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(1762–1796), a former German princess. Catherine’s husband, Peter III, a great admirer of Frederick II, the king of Prussia, had withdrawn from the Seven Years’ War, a decision that left Russia with no gains from a costly conflict that it had been waging successfully. After the coup removing Peter from the throne, Catherine repudiated his treaty with Prussia in order to demonstrate Russia’s power and independence. By 1772, however, relations with Prussia had been reestablished, in part in connection with the negotiations leading to the partition of Poland by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon posed a direct threat to Prussia and Russia, and they both participated in the coalitions formed in opposition to the French emperor. The defeat of Napoleon led to the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The three most conservative of the attending powers (Russia, Austria, and Prussia) were determined to preserve a balance of power through the Concert of Europe and to preserve the old order by exercising the right to intervene militarily in order to preserve legitimate governments.

new alliances. Russia, no longer tied to Germany or Austria-Hungary, and afraid of being diplomatically isolated and without allies, negotiated a treaty with France. Wilhelm II alienated the British, who maintained friendly relations with the French, and Germany found itself allied with only Italy and Austria-Hungary.

The next significant period in German-Russian relations occurred just prior to and during the unification of Germany under the leadership of King Wilhelm I of Prussia, and his iron chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck was able to unite Germany in part by securing Russian nonintervention. Although Russia has been criticized for enabling the rise of Germany, there were practical considerations for its support of Bismarck, such as the possibility of increasing its influence in certain areas as a consequence of the Austro-Prussian War. Furthermore, the possible consequences of German unification under Prussia were not fully understood. During the immediate aftermath of the unification, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Germany formed the Three Emperors’ League (1872–1873), a defensive military alliance that attempted to revive and maintain the old order upheld at the Congress of Vienna. Difficulties and disagreements arising from the situation in the Crimea and in the Balkans brought about the league’s collapse. It was revived and then allowed to lapse permanently in 1887 because of the impossibility of reconciling the differences between Austria-Hungary and Russia. Bismarck maintained relations with Austria and negotiated the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, which guaranteed the neutrality of the signatories in case of war, except if Germany attacked France or Russia attacked Austria-Hungary. Wilhelm II’s dismissal of Bismarck and refusal to renew the Reinsurance Treaty in 1890 led to the formation of

The refusal of the Allied powers to recognize the communist government and the diplomatic isolation of the Soviet Union were factors in GermanSoviet relations during the interwar years. Even after the rise of Adolf Hitler and the violent suppression of the Communist Party in Germany, Josef Stalin continued to maintain relations with Germany. Although Hitler and Stalin gave considerable aid and support to different factions during the Spanish Civil War, no breach of their relationship occurred and negotiations for a nonaggression treaty were initiated. Stalin’s primary reason for signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 is still uncertain. The Nazi-Soviet Pact included a nonaggression clause and a secret protocol calling for the division of Poland between the two countries. Whether Stalin believed a genuine alliance could be formed with Germany against the Allied powers or was merely attempting to gain time to further industrialize and prepare for war, it is clear that he did not expect the massive German invasion of the Soviet Union that was launched on June 22, 1941.

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During the conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia that triggered World War I, Germany was compelled to support Austria-Hungary and Russia was similarly committed to support the Serbians. The resulting war led to a major conflict between Russia and Germany on the Eastern Front. Russia’s poor performance in the war combined with the policies of Tsar Nicholas II led to defeat and revolution. The Bolshevik regime that replaced the Provisional Government ended Russia’s participation in the war by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1917 which was bitterly resented by many Russian. The Versailles Treaty, signed by a defeated Germany, in 1919, overturned the earlier RussianGerman agreement.

The defeat of Hitler and Germany by the Allied powers led to the occupation of Eastern Germany and East Berlin by the Soviet Union. Although divided and occupied, Germany played a role in the Cold War; the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was allied with the Soviet Union, while the German Federal Republic (West Germany) was allied with the United States and the Western pow-

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ers. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union paved the way for the reunification of Germany in 1990. The republics of the former Soviet Union have established economic and diplomatic relations with unified Germany, which has become the Russian Federation’s most important trading and financial partner in the postcommunist era.

See also:

GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC; GERMAN

SETTLERS; NAZI-SOVIET PACT OF 1939; SOVIET-GERMAN TRADE AGREEMENT OF 1939; THREE EMPERORS’ LEAGUE; WORLD WAR I; WORLD WAR II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jelavich, Barbara A. (1964). A Century of Russian Foreign Policy, 1814–1914. New York. Smyser, W. R. (1999). From Yalta to Berlin: The Cold War Struggle over Germany. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Sodaro, Michael J. (1990). Moscow, Germany, and the West from Khrushchev to Gorbachev. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stent, Angela. (1999). Russia and Germany Reborn: Unification, the Soviet Collapse, and the New Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. MELISSA R. JORDINE

GIGANTOMANIA Gigantomania is the creation of abnormally large works. Gigantomania dominated different areas of political and cultural life in the Soviet Union and was a feature of other totalitarian societies (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, communist states of Eastern Europe, and modern China). According to the Marxist theory, socialism must triumph historically over capitalism. Soviet rulers attempted to prove the superiority of the socialist system by the creation of gigantic industrial complexes, huge farms, colossal buildings, and enormous statues. Enormous new cities and industrial centers were erected in the Soviet Union from the end of the 1920s through the 1930s. Historian Nicolas V. Riasanovsky wrote, “Gigantic industrial complexes, exemplified by Magnitostroi in the Urals and Kuznetsstroi in western Siberia, began to take shape. Entire cities arose in the wilderness. Magnitogorsk, for instance, acquired in a few years a population of a quarter of a million.”


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However, the execution of the Five-Year Plans, industrialization, and the forced collectivization of agriculture were accompanied by a huge number of human victims. Gulag prisoners working in terrible conditions built many of the huge projects. Gigantism and monumental classicism became the typical features of Soviet architecture starting in the 1930s. All other architecture styles were suppressed in the Soviet Union. Historian Geoffrey Hosking points out that in the Soviet architecture “. . . neoclassical forms gradually became distorted, more extended in size . . ..” As the result of this distortion, many large buildings were erected, as exemplified by the tasteless “wedding cake” style skyscrapers built in Moscow after World War II. The same standard was used in Soviet sculpture and art. Huge monuments of Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin were erected in every sizable city. Many Soviet artists created paintings showing gigantic images of the communist leaders with tiny figures of the common people in the background. Gigantomania began in Stalin’s time, but continued after his death. During the 1960s to the 1980s two huge sculptures depicting the warrior “Motherland-Mother” were erected by sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich near Kiev and Volgograd. According to Soviet doctrine, art should show the super-human accomplishments of the new socialist man, who was depicted as a huge muscular and overpowering human being. Even women were sculpted as enormous figures with rugged masculine physiques. These works are now generally thought to be the vulgar creations of dilettante artists; showing the exceedingly poor taste of the all-powerful Soviet leaders who commanded their creation.

See also:

ARCHITECTURE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bown, Matthew Cullerne, and Taylor, Brandon, eds. (1993). Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in a One-party State, 1917–1992. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Groys, Boris. (1992). The Total Art of Stalinism. AvantGarde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, tr. Charles Rougle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hosking, Geoffrey. (2001). Russia and the Russians. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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London, Kurt. (1938). The Seven Soviet Arts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Riasanovsky, Nicolas V. (2000). A History of Russia, 6th ed. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ryabushin, Alexander and Smolina, Nadia. (1992). Landmarks of Soviet Architecture 1917–1991. New York: Rizzoli. VICTORIA KHITERER

GINZBURG, EVGENIA SEMENOVNA (1904–1977), Stalin-era memoirist. Evgenia Semenovna Ginzburg was one of the most well-known and respected memoirists of Josef Stalin’s purges and life in the Soviet Gulag. She was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Moscow. She became a teacher and party activist in Kazan. She married Pavel Aksenov, a high-ranking party official in Kazan, and the couple had two sons. The eldest, Alyosha, would die during the Siege of Leningrad; the younger, Vasily, became a noted writer in his own right. In 1937 both Ginzburg and her husband were arrested. Ginzburg spent the next two years in solitary confinement before being sent to a labor camp in Kolyma. While in the camps, she undertook a variety of work, including nursing, and she met Anton Walter, a fellow prisoner who worked as a doctor. He became her second husband. In 1947 Ginzburg was released from captivity but chose to stay in the Magadan area to wait for Walter to finish his allotted prison sentence. She began teaching Russian language and literature. Ironically many of her students at the time worked for the security services. Ginzburg was rearrested in 1949. In 1955 she was released again. This time Ginzburg was allowed to return to Moscow and was officially rehabilitated. She began to write pieces for such Soviet periodicals as Youth (Yunost), the Teacher’s Newspaper (Uchitelskaya gazeta), and the News (Izvestiya). Despite her rehabilitation, Ginzburg’s background still made her a bit suspect in the eyes of the authorities, so she never joined the Soviet Writers’ Union. In 1967 the first volume of her memoirs, Journey into the Whirlwind, was published in Italy. The book covers the 1934–1939 period of her life. In it, she describes how her mentality as a devoted party member changed once she realized the extent of the Purges, and she notes the kinds of things people had to do to survive their imprisonment. In Ginzburg’s case, for instance, she took great solace from her vast

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knowledge of Russian poetry, and she would recite it at length for her fellow prisoners. The second volume of her memoirs, Within the Whirlwind, was published abroad in 1979 and describes her remaining years in prison as well as her life in Magadan and her eventual return to Moscow. There is a distinct difference in tone between the two volumes, with the second book being much harsher and honest in its criticisms. Many scholars have speculated that Ginzburg knew by then that her memoirs would not legally be published in the Soviet Union during her lifetime and that she chose not to temper her language in the hopes of publication. Both volumes of memoirs have been translated into an array of languages, and they remain among the best, most widely read accounts of Soviet prison life. In the Soviet Union, the books circulated widely in samizdat form among the dissident community and, finally, in 1989 they were published officially.

See also:

DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; GULAG; PURGES, THE

GREAT

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Heldt, Barbara. (1987). Terrible Perfection. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kelly, Catriona. (1994). A History of Russian Women’s Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kolchevska, Natasha. (1998). “A Difficult Journey: Evgeniia Ginzburg and Women’s Writing of Camp Memoirs.” In Women and Russia: Projections and SelfPerceptions, ed. Rosalind Marsh. New York: Berghahn Books. Kolchevska, Natasha. (2003). “The Art of Memory: Cultural Reverence as Political Critique in Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Writing of the Gulag.” In The Russian Memoir: History and Literature, ed. Beth Holmgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ALISON ROWLEY

GKOS GKOs, Gosudarstvennye Kratkosrochnye Obyazatelstva, are short-term ruble-denominated treasury bills issued since 1993. They played a major role in Russia’s August 1998 economic crisis. In the 1990s Russia was unable to balance its budget. The general government budget deficit


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varied from 5 to as much as 25 percent of GDP without any declining trend. First the deficit was covered by money emission, which contributed to very high and variable inflation. The Russian government started in May 1993 to issue short-term zerocoupon bonds known as GKOs. This was meant as a non-inflationary method of financing the deficit. The GKO maturity is less than a year. Sometimes the average maturity has been as short as half a year. There are also ruble-denominated mediumterm federal bonds known as OFZs (since 1995). Other government debt instruments were also issued, but GKOs remained the most important ones. Russian inflation came down after 1995. The root problem, the budget deficit, was not addressed. It was believed that deficits could be financed by increasing debt. The government debt market was the fastest-growing market in 1996 and 1997. Domestic ruble-denominated debt remained very small until 1996 but rose to 13 percent of GDP in January 1997. This is still not an internationally high figure. But the high yields, short maturities, and large foreign ownership shares of GKOs made the situation explosive. The GKO real interest rates were first highly negative due to unexpectedly high inflation. As inflation subsided but GKO nominal yields remained high—due to high inflation expectations, political uncertainty or other reasons—real interest rates shot up. They were 30–60 percent in 1996–1997. Later they decreased, only to reach new highs in early 1998, as the danger of default became evident. Interest payments rose to 27.6 percent of federal government revenue in 1995 and more than half in early 1998. Most GKOs were consequently issued to service earlier debt. By 1997 the GKO contribution to financing the deficit was actually negative. On the other hand, they had become the main revenue source for the larger Russian banks. Access for foreigners to the GKO market was quite restricted until 1996. Due to the small size of the market relative to international capital flows and very high real interest rates, access was only liberalized gradually. Measures were used to keep the non-residents’ earnings within limits. Still, by the end of 1997 their share in GKO stock was at least a third, perhaps more. The rest was basically owned by the Central Bank and the state-owned Sberbank. The risk of sudden exit of nonresident GKO holders was real. Nonresident behavior soon became a major source of the GKO market crisis in the spring of 1998.


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After the crisis of August 1998, the government chose to restructure the GKOs and OFZs, which were to a large part frozen. Afterward, Russian government debt market has remained quite illiquid. With budget surpluses, the government has not needed new debt. Investors remain wary. GKO stock is less than 1 percent of GDP. However, debt instruments would be useful for liquidity control and protection from inflation.

See also:

ECONOMY, POST-SOVIET; SBERBANK

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gobbin, Niko, and Merleverde, Bruno. (2000). “The Russian Crisis: A Debt Perspective.” Post-Communist Economies 12(2):141–163. Malleret, Thierry, Orlova, Natalia, and Romanov, Vladimir. (1999). “What Loaded and Triggered the Russian Crisis?” Post-Soviet Affairs 15(2):107–129. Willer, Dirk. (2001). “Financial Markets.” In Russia’s Post-Communist Economy, eds. Brigitte Granville and Peter Oppenheimer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. PEKKA SUTELA

GLASNOST Glasnost is a Russian word that proved fateful for the Soviet communist empire in its last years of existence. Variously translated as “openness,” “transparency,” or “publicity,” its root sense is public voice or speech. Freedom of speech is a close Western equivalent. Upon his rise to power in 1985 as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost as one of a troika of slogans in his campaign to reform a faltering Soviet system. He called for glasnost (openness) in public discussion, perestroika (restructuring) in the economy and political system, and novoye mneniya (new thinking) in foreign policy. All three slogans broke away from the ideology-laden sloganeering of past Soviet leaders and suggested movement away from dictatorship to a more open and democratic Soviet future. While Gorbachev made perestroika the troika’s centerpiece, glasnost was the most potent in bringing new political forces and formerly silenced voices onto the political stage. The notion of a public voice distinct from the ruling power and the idea of open

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public debate ran hard against the Soviet ideological system. Before Gorbachev, the regime recognized no public voice beyond the voice of the nomenklatura, the Communist Party hierarchy, speaking to its subjects through state-controlled media. All nonpolitical, literary, academic, and scientific publication was subject to the strictures of the party line and censorship. Glasnost made its initial and unofficial appearance during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, Gorbachev’s predecessor. A small but vocal dissident movement (also known as the Democratic Movement) broke through the regime’s facade of ideological conformity. It produced an underground press, samizdat (lit. self-publishing), which gave voice to a wide range of opinion and criticism at odds with the official line. A notable moment in samizdat came when Andrei Sakharov, the famed Soviet nuclear physicist and advocate of civil and democratic rights, published an unauthorized essay in 1968. He appealed to the top leaders to move toward glasnost and democracy as the path toward overcoming the country’s urgent problems. Entitled Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, the essay, written in typescript, circulated widely inside the USSR and was smuggled to the West. Sakharov’s outspokenness led the Brezhnev regime to exile him in 1980 to the closed city Gorky, far from Moscow and Western media sources. In a symbolic gesture of his glasnost policy, Gorbachev freed Sakharov from exile six years later and allowed him to return to Moscow.

“two-edged sword” that could turn against its user. Yegor Ligachev, a fellow member of the Politburo, aimed a barb at Gorbachev that it was not wise to enter a room if you do not know the way out. And, in fact, the explosion of the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine, severely tested Gorbachev’s commitment to glasnost. Gorbachev’s glasnost policy was a major factor precipitating and informing the political struggle developing in the leadership in the latter half of the 1980’s and culminating in the coup of August 1991. The struggle began in earnest in the fall of 1987 with a split inside the ruling Politburo. Yegor Ligachev, former ally of Gorbachev, became his adversary on the right. Boris Yeltsin became his rival in the cause of reform on the left. Second in command in the Politburo, Ligachev defended the interests of the nomenklatura against Gorbachev’s reforms. Yeltsin, who entered the Politburo under Gorbachev’s patronage from provincial Sverdlovsk, pressed for a faster pace of reform than Gorbachev was then ready to promote. At a Central Committee meeting in October 1987, Yeltsin attacked Ligachev for sabotaging his reform efforts as Moscow party chief and accused Gorbachev of foot-dragging on perestroika. The upshot was Yeltsin’s ouster from the Politburo and then as Moscow party secretary. His fall was a blessing in disguise for Yeltsin and freed him subsequently to rise as a popular leader untainted by association with the ruling group.

Though Sakharov’s essay may well have influenced Gorbachev, Gorbachev’s version of glasnost was limited and aimed at a controlled change and liberalizing reform of the Soviet system without destroying its foundations. Yet, despite his effort to keep glasnost within manageable limits, it opened the door ever wider to an intensifying and searching public debate challenging the Soviet order itself. Newspapers, journals, once-banned books, and revelations from archives appeared and found appreciative audiences. Glasnost as transparency brought to light what the regime had hidden. Revelation upon revelation of its record of mass repressions, abuses, lies, and corruption were publicized, deepening its disrepute among the public at large. Glasnost also gave voice to long-suppressed national independence movements within the empire, which contributed to its disintegration. Defenders of the old order warned Gorbachev that glasnost was a

Despite his effort to control glasnost, Gorbachev soon found himself driven to more radical measures by the dynamic of the new political world that glasnost was bringing into play. First he proposed at a party plenum in January 1987 that party leaders be elected from below instead of by cooptation from above. He ran into a wall of resistance from local and regional party secretaries who feared losing power. He then turned to shifting his own base of power from the party to a new parliamentary body with constitutional powers beyond the reach of party control. In March 1989 he realized his project. A Congress of Peoples Deputies was instituted with two-thirds of its deputies popularly elected and a third selected from party and other official organizations. The Congress became a platform of open public debate televised to the whole country. Andrei Sakharov led the democratic grouping (Interregional Group) in opposition to the party nomenklatura. Sakharov lent his great prestige and the fire of his moral passion to the sharp and open debate in the body (often to Gor-

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bachev’s irritation as the presider) and galvanized public opinion against Communist Party abuses. Though conservative party elements held a large majority in the Congress, they found themselves on the defensive in the face of withering criticism from the Sakharov-led opposition. Glasnost was winning the day, but Gorbachev’s grip on public debate and democratic reform began to slip. The introduction of popular elections was reversing the political thrust in the heart of the Soviet system. Power from above was increasingly challenged by power coming from below.

committee’s orders to crush the opposition. The Russian democratic and national revolution under Boris Yeltsin’s lead dissolved the emergency committee, arresting its members and the coup participants. The Russian Federation assumed full authority in its territories, abolished the Soviet Communist Party, and ushered the Soviet Union out of existence at the end of the year. The principal nations that had been subjected to the Soviet empire gained their independence. Gorbachev became a private citizen, and his rival, Yeltsin, went on to lead the resurrected Russian republic.

Yeltsin lost no time in using the electoral process Gorbachev brought into being. In Moscow he won a seat in the Congress by landslide, and after Sakharov’s death in December, he assumed Sakharov’s place as leader of the democratic faction. He also won a seat in the parliament of the Russian Federation, the body that elected Yeltsin its president in May 1990. At his initiative the Russian presidency was made into a national elective office, and in June 1991 he handily won that office in a national election, becoming the first Russian leader so chosen. Yeltsin became a powerful challenger to Gorbachev and to the Soviet system itself. Glasnost and democratic reform were no longer Gorbachev’s preserve. What formerly had been a mere facade of Russian self-government now became a second center of authority in the land.

Before his death in December 1989, Sakharov, in a private encounter with Gorbachev, forewarned him that if he continued to seek unlimited power without standing for election, he would one day find himself without public support in a leadership crisis. Gorbachev was unwilling or unable to act on the clear implication that glasnost posed for his leadership, namely, that democratic legitimacy could only be secured through a process of public debate and popular election.

As rivalry between Gorbachev and Yeltsin unfolded, conservative elements inside the party were marshaling their forces to challenge Gorbachev and suppress glasnost and the democratic movement. Gorbachev now walked a tightrope between rightwing forces and the Yeltsin-led forces on the left. Gorbachev’s effort to shore up his presidential powers and build his base in the Congress of Peoples Deputies and its Supreme Soviet was ineffectual. His popularity plummeted as Yeltsin’s soared. Leaders of the party’s old guard finally struck in August 1991. They sought to employ all the Soviet agencies of repression against the developing democratic and national revolution. They organized an emergency committee, seized power in its name, declared martial law, sent an armada of tanks into Moscow, and put Gorbachev under house arrest in his vacation dacha in the Crimea. Yeltsin defied the perpetrators of the coup from atop a tank in front of the White House (the Russian parliament building), drawing a mass of supporters around him. The standoff ended when the military and special forces refused the emergency


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Though this was not his intention, Gorbachev paved the way for Russia’s historical return as a nation-state and in the form of a democratic republic. His taking up of the cause of glasnost led to a renaissance of Russian intellectual and political life. Despite instability and a perilous transition from Soviet despotism to a fledgling republic, glasnost continued to be the rule in the new Russia’s first decade, in the provisions of its new constitution, the existence of free public debate, and a series of orderly and reasonably fair parliamentary and presidential elections. Whether the spirit of glasnost prevails or wanes in the post-Yeltsin era was yet to be determined as the reborn Russia entered the twenty-first century. One thing was clear: glasnost would go down in the annals of Russian history as the potent word that brought down an empire.

See also:

AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL

SERGEYEVICH; LIGACHEV, YEGOR KUZMICH; PERESTROIKA; SAKHAROV, ANDREI DMITRIEVICH; SAMIZDAT; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gorbachev, Mikhail S. (1995). Memoirs: Mikhail Gorbachev. New York: Doubleday. Gwertzman, B., and Kaufman, Michael T., eds. (1990, 1991). The Collapse of Communism. New York: Times Books.

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Kaiser, Robert G. (1991). Why Gorbachev Happened. New York: Simon and Shuster. Linden, Carl. (1997). “Gorbachev and the Fall of the Marxian Prince in Europe and Russia.” In Russia and China on the Eve of a New Millennium, eds. Carl Linden and Jan S. Prybyla. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Tarasulo, Isaac J., ed. (1989). Gorbachev and Glasnost: Viewpoints from the Soviet Press. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc. Walker, Rachael. (1993) Six Years that Shook the World: Perestroika, the Impossible Project. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. CARL A. LINDEN

GLAVKI Plural, short for glavnoye upravlenie, or chief administration. Glavki are subordinate administrative units or departments of Soviet state planning and existed in economic, military, and cultural ministries, such as tourism. In the economy these subdivisions of central or local industrial ministries dealt with specific industrial branches in formulating and administering the annual and perspective plans. These departments appeared originally as parts of the Supreme Council of National Economy (VSNKh or Vesenkha) controlling particular sectors, such as the match, soap, oil, and timber industries (Glavspichki, Tsentromylo, Glavneft, Glovles, and so forth). They replaced the corresponding People’s Commissariats by early 1918. During the civil war period, the glavki controlled distribution of scarce materials and ordered new production of items for war, subject to interference from the Party’s Politburo and without a national plan, wages, or bookkeeping. By 1921 this had become a bureaucratic chaos (called glavkism). Nevertheless, these units survived reorganizations during the New Economic Policy of the 1920s and thereafter, emerging once again in 1931. Now under the commissariats (called ministries after 1946) and Gosplan in the Stalinist planning period, they acquired direct power over their subordinate enterprises until Nikita Khrushchev’s reorganization in 1957.

construction branches alone reached thirty-three in 1946 and 1947, but about a year later the number was again reduced by unification. For instance, the Ministry of Textiles sometimes reverted to a chief administration within the Ministry of Light Industry, or the reverse. These continual organizational changes had questionable practical effect. Some of these glavki—such as those for finance or labor—were responsible for functional administration, and some were specialized subdivisions, such as the glavki for woolens in the Ministry of Textiles. Enterprises received their plans from the chief administration, usually in Moscow, and submitted their requirements to it. So-called funded inputs, which were especially scarce, were allocated to enterprises by the glavki, which set up their own supply arrangements to make sure their firms met the planned targets. They set up workshops to produce spare parts on an inefficiently small scale, a practice that also led to duplication. The chiefs of these chief administrations, usually called Deputy Ministers, became nonpolitical technical specialists, like most of the ministers over them, subject only to occasional intervention from party officials in the Kremlin. Their incentives were linked informally to the success of the enterprises under them, but not necessarily their profit or productivity. Accordingly, they could be relied on to support enterprises’ requests for more investments and supplies and easier plans, even when they knew higher productivity would be possible. Sometimes they reallocated profits among their subordinated enterprises to allow all of them to meet their financial obligations. Even during the regional reorganization instituted by Khrushchev, the more important allocation decisions were made in the republican or sectoral glavki of the all-Union Gossnab (supply agency) in Moscow. This was necessary to prevent “localism,” a preference for enterprises within one’s region over the needs of enterprises elsewhere.

See also:

GOSPLAN; INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bergson, Abram. (1964). The Economics of Soviet Planning. New Haven: Yale University Press. Carr, Edward Hallett, and Davies, R. W. (1969–[1978]). Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929. 3 vols. London: Macmillan. Nove, Alec. (1961). The Soviet Economy. New York: Praeger.

As a result of subdivisions, some glavki became new ministries, whose number in the industrial and

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GLAVLIT The Main Directorate for Literary and Publishing Affairs (Glavnoe Upravlenie po Delam Literatury i Izdatelstv), known as Glavlit, was the state agency responsible for the censorship of printed materials in the Soviet Union. Although print was its main focus, it sometimes supervised the censorship of other media, including radio, television, theater, and film. Glavlit was created in 1922 to replace a network of uncoordinated military and civilian censorship agencies set up after the Bolshevik seizure of power. Although freedom of the press nominally existed in the Soviet Union, the government reserved the right to prevent the publication of certain materials. Glavlit was charged with preventing the publication of economic or military information believed to pose a threat to Soviet security; this included subjects as diverse as grain harvests, inflation, incidence of disease, and the location of military industries. Party and military leaders compiled a list of facts and categories deemed secret. Glavlit was also charged with suppressing any printed materials deemed hostile to the Soviet state or the Communist Party. This ran the gamut from pornography to religious texts to anything that could be construed as critical of the party or state, whether implicitly or explicitly. Individual censors had a fair amount of discretion in this area, and often showed considerable creativity and paranoia in their work. The severity of censorship varied with the political climate. Glavlit was particularly strict in its supervision of the private publishers allowed to operate between 1921 and 1929. Although some state publishing houses were initially exempted from Glavlit’s supervision, by 1930 all printing and publishing in the Soviet Union was subject to pre-publication censorship. Everything from newspapers to books to ephemera, such as posters, note pads, and theater tickets, required the approval of a Glavlit official before it could be published; violation of this rule was a serious criminal offense. Glavlit had several secondary functions, including the censorship of foreign literature imported to the Soviet Union. It also took part in purging materials associated with “enemies of the people” from libraries, bookstores, and museums. Glavlit was part of the Russian Republic’s Commissariat of Enlightenment until 1946, when it was placed under the direct authority of the All-Union


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Council of Ministers. Its official name changed several times after this point, usually to a variant of Main Directorate for the Protection of Military and State Secrets. Despite these changes, the acronym Glavlit continued to be used in official and unofficial sources. Technically a state institution, Glavlit answered directly to the Communist Party’s Central Committee, which oversaw its work and appointed its leadership. Each Soviet Republic had its own Glavlit, with the Russian Republic’s Glavlit setting the overall tone for Soviet censorship. While most Soviet writers and editors learned to practice a degree of self-censorship to avoid problems, Glavlit served as a deterrent for those willing to question orthodox views. Its standards were relaxed in late 1988 as part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign. Glavlit was dissolved by presidential decree in 1991, essentially ending prepublication censorship in Russia, but other forms of state pressure on media outlets remained in effect.

See also:

CENSORSHIP; GLASNOST; JOURNALISM; NEWS-

PAPERS; SAMIZDAT; TELEVISION AND RADIO; THEATER

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fox, Michael S. (1992). “Glavlit, Censorship, and the Problem of Party Policy in Cultural Affairs, 1922– 1928.” Soviet Studies 44(6):1045–1068. Plamper, Jan. (2001). “Abolishing Ambiguity: Soviet Censorship Practices in the 1930s.” Russian Review 60(4):526–544. Tax Choldin, Marianna, and Friedberg, Maurice, eds. (1989). The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars and Censors in the USSR. Boston: Unwin-Hyman. BRIAN KASSOF

GLINKA, MIKHAIL IVANOVICH (1804–1857), composer, regarded as founder of Russian art music, especially as creator of Russian national opera. Mikhail Glinka, the musically gifted son of a landowner, gained much of his musical education during a journey to Europe (1830–1834). In Italy he became acquainted with the opera composers Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti, and in Berlin he studied music theory. After his return, Glinka channeled the spiritual effects of the trip into the composition of a work that went down in history as the first Russian national opera, “A Life for

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the Tsar” (1836). Three aspects of this opera were formative to operatic style in Russia: the national subject (here taken from the seventeenth century), the libretto in Russian, and the musical language, which combined the European basic techniques with Russian melodic patterns. The patriotic character of the subject fit extremely well into the conservative national attitudes of the 1830s under Tsar Nicholas I. In spite of Glinka’s stylistic borrowings from European tradition, the Russian features of the music made way for a national art music apart form the dominant foreign models. Overnight, Glinka became famous and soon was admired as the father of Russian music. Whereas the “Life for the Tsar” marked the beginning of the historical opera in Russia, “Ruslan and Lyudmila” (1842) established the genre of the Russian fairy-tale opera. Thus, Glinka embodied the two strands of Russian opera that would flourish in the nineteenth century. Stylistically Glinka’s Russian and Oriental elements exerted greatest influence on the following generations. Glinka became not only a creative point of reference for many Russian composers but also a national and cultural role model, and later a figure of cult worship with the reestablishment of Soviet patriotism under Josef Stalin.

See also:

MUSIC; OPERA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, David. (1974). Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical and Critical Study. London: Oxford University Press. Orlova, Aleksandra A. (1988). Glinka’s Life in Music: A Chronicle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press. MATTHIAS STADELMANN

GLINSKAYA, YELENA VASILIEVNA (d. 1538), the second wife of Grand Prince Basil III and regent for her son Ivan IV from 1533 to 1538. Yelena Vasilievna Glinskaya was the daughter of Prince Vasily Lvovich Glinsky and his wife Anna, daughter of the Serbian military governor, Stefan Yakshich. After Basil III forced his first wife, Solomonia Saburova, to take the veil in 1525 because of her inability to produce offspring, he entered into a second marriage with Glinskaya in the following year. They bore two sons, the future Ivan IV and his younger brother Yury Vasilyevich.

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Because Ivan IV was only three years old at the time of Basil III’s death in 1533, Glinskaya became a regent of the Russian state during his minority. Although Basil III had entrusted the care of his widow and sons to relatives of Glinskaya and apparently had not made specific provisions for her regency, the royal mother used her pivotal dynastic position to defend her son’s interests against those of rival boyar factions at court. Aided by her presumed lover, Prince Ivan Ovchina-TelepnevObolensky, and Metropolitan Daniel, Glinskaya headed up a government marked by efficient policies, both abroad and at home. Her government successfully fended off the efforts of Lithuania, the Crimean khan, and Kazan to encroach on Russian territories. At Glinskaya’s death in 1538, Russia was at peace with its neighbors. Domestically, Glinskaya moved to eliminate the power of the remaining appanage princes, who presented a dynastic challenge to the Grand Prince. She initiated the creation and fortification of towns throughout the Russian realm, increasing the protection of the population and that of the realm substantially. In 1535 the regency government introduced a currency reform, adopting a single monetary system, which significantly improved economic conditions in Russia. Glinskaya’s government also worked toward the institution of a system of local judicial officials, which was eventually realized in Ivan IV’s reign. While Glinskaya managed to keep in check the various aristocratic factions, which sought to increase their influence vis-à-vis the young heir to the throne, the situation quickly reversed after her death. Without the protecting hand of his mother, the young Ivan IV was exposed to the political intrigues of the boyars until his ascendance to the throne in 1547. As a royal wife, Glinskaya shared the problems of all Muscovite royal women, especially their concern about the production of children and their health. Glinskaya joined her husband on arduous pilgrimages to pray for offspring. Like her predecessor, Saburova, she seems to have believed that her womb could be divinely blessed. Five letters to Glinskaya attributed to Basil III portray the Grand Princess as a devoted mother who struggled to maintain her children’s physical and emotional well-being. Glinskaya’s legitimacy and effectiveness as a regent have been the subject of scholarly debate. While earlier studies have treated the grand princess as a figurehead and her regency as a period of transition, recent work on the early sixteenth century


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stresses Glinskaya’s political achievements in her own right. During the reign of her son, the Grand Princess’s political and social status was enhanced in the chronicles produced at the royal court, and Glinskaya became a model for future tsars’ wives.

See also:

BASIL III; IVAN IV

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Ladoga and Riurikovo gorodishche. Gnezdovo’s most intense period of settlement dates to the period from 920 to the 960s, when its settlements had reached their maximum size and when many of the largest burial mounds were raised. Gnezdovo was abandoned in the early eleventh century, when a new center, Smolensk, assumed Gnezdovo’s role in international and regional trade.

See also:

KIEVAN RUS; ROUTE TO THE GREEKS; VIKINGS

Miller, David. (1993). “The Cult of Saint Sergius of Radonezh and Its Political Uses.” Slavic Review 52(4): 680–699.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pushkareva, Natalia. (1997). Women in Russian History from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, tr. and ed. Eve Levin. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Avdusin D.A. (1969). “Smolensk and the Varangians according to Archaeological Data.” Norwegian Archaeological Review 2:52-62.

Thyrêt, Isolde. (2001). Between God and Tsar: Religious Symbolism and the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press.

HEIDI M. SHERMAN

ISOLDE THYRÊT

GODUNOV, BORIS FYODOROVICH (1552–1605), Tsar of Russia (1598–1605).

Located in the Upper Dnepr River, thirteen kilometers west of Smolensk, Gnezdovo was a key portage and transshipment point along the “Route to the Greeks” in the late ninth through the early eleventh centuries. The area provided easy access to the upper reaches of the Western Dvina, Dnepr, and Volga rivers. The archaeological complex consists of several pagan and early Christian cemeteries (17 hectares), one fortified settlement (1 hectare), and several unfortified settlements. More than 1,200 of the estimated 3,500 to 4,000 burial mounds have been excavated. While Balt and Slav burials are found in great number, the mounds with Scandinavian ethnocultural traits (cremations in boats and rich inhumations and chamber graves) receive the most attention. However, no more than fifty mounds can be positively identified as Scandinavian. Gnezdovo’s burials are among the richest for European Russia in the tenth century and include glass beads, swords, horse riding equipment, silver and bronze jewelry, and Islamic, Byzantine, and western European coins.

Tsar Boris Godunov, one of the most famous (or infamous) rulers of early modern Russia, has been the subject of many biographies, plays, and even an opera by Mussorgsky. Boris’s father was only a provincial cavalryman, but Boris’s uncle, Dmitry Godunov (a powerful aristocrat), was able to advance the young man’s career. Dmitry Godunov brought Boris and his sister, Irina, to the court of Tsar Ivan IV, and Boris enrolled in Ivan’s dreaded Oprichnina (a state within the state ruled directly by the tsar). Boris soon attracted the attention of Tsar Ivan, who allowed him to marry Maria, the daughter of his favorite, Malyuta Skuratov (the notorious boss of the Oprichnina). Boris and Maria had two children: a daughter named Ksenya and a son named Fyodor. Both children received excellent educations, which was unusual in early modern Russia. Boris’s sister Irina was the childhood playmate of Ivan IV’s mentally retarded son, Fyodor, and eventually married him. When Tsar Ivan died in 1584, he named Boris as one of Tsar Fyodor I’s regents. By 1588, Boris triumphed over his rivals to become Fyodor’s sole regent and the effective ruler of Russia.

Although much of Gnezdovo’s settlement layers have perished, recent excavations reveal house foundations and pits containing the remains of iron smithing and the working of nonferrous metals into ornaments, not unlike production of the contemporaneous and better–preserved sites of Staraia

Boris Godunov has been called one of Russia’s greatest rulers. Handsome, eloquent, energetic, and extremely bright, he brought greater skill to the tasks of governing than any of his predecessors and was an excellent administrator. Boris was respected in international diplomacy and managed to make

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Russia’s southern frontier and harness them to state service. Those drastic measures failed to alleviate the state’s severe crisis, but they did make many Russians hate him.

Tsar Boris Godunov posed with the Russian regalia of state, to underscore his dubious claim to the throne. ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS. REPRODUCED

BY PERMISSION.

peace with Russia’s neighbors. At home he was a zealous protector of the Russian Orthodox Church, a great builder and beautifier of Russian towns, and generous to the needy. As regent, Boris was responsible for the elevation of his friend, Metropolitan Job (head of the Russian Orthodox Church), to the rank of Patriarch in 1589; and Boris’s generosity to the Church was rewarded by the strong loyalty of the clergy. Boris continued Ivan IV’s policy of rapidly expanding the state to the south and east; but, due to a severe social and economic crisis that had been developing since the 1570s, he faced a declining tax base and a shrinking gentry cavalry force. In order to shore up state finances and the gentry so that he could continue Russia’s imperial expansion, Boris enserfed the Russian peasants in the 1590s, tied townspeople to their taxpaying districts, and converted short-term slavery to permanent slavery. Boris also tried to tame the cossacks (bandits and mercenary soldiers) on

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Boris was accused by his enemies of coveting the throne and murdering his rivals. When it was reported that Tsar Ivan IV’s youngest son, Dmitry of Uglich (born in 1582), had died by accidentally slitting his throat in 1591, many people believed Boris had secretly ordered the boy’s death in order to clear a path to the throne for himself. (Several historians have credited that accusation, but there is no significant evidence linking Boris to the Uglich tragedy.) When the childless Tsar Fyodor I died in 1598, Boris was forced to fight for the throne. His rivals, including Fyodor Romanov (the future Patriarch Filaret, father of Michael Romanov), were unable to stop him from becoming tsar, but they did manage to slow him down. At one point, an exasperated Boris proclaimed that he no longer wanted to become tsar and retired to a monastery. Patriarch Job hastily convened an assembly of clergy, lords, bureaucrats, and townspeople to go to the monastery to beg Boris to take the throne. (This ad hoc assembly was later falsely represented as a full-fledged Assembly of the Land [or Zemsky Sobor] duly convened for the task of choosing a tsar.) In fact, Boris had enormous advantages over his rivals; he had been the ruler of Russia for a decade and had many supporters at court, in the Church, in the bureaucracy, and among the gentry cavalrymen. By clever maneuvering, Boris was soon accepted by the aristocracy as tsar, and he was crowned on September 1, 1598. For most Russians, the reign of Tsar Boris was an unhappy time. Indeed, it marked the beginning of Russia’s horrific Time of Troubles (1598–1613). By the end of the sixteenth century, Russia’s developing state crisis reached its deepest stage, and a sharp political struggle within the ruling elite undermined Tsar Boris’s legitimacy in the eyes of many of his subjects and set the stage for civil war. In his coronation oath, Tsar Boris had promised not to harass his political enemies, but he ended up persecuting several aristocratic families, including the Romanovs. That prompted some of his opponents to begin working secretly against the Godunov dynasty. Contemporaries described the fearful atmosphere that developed in Moscow and the gradual drift of Tsar Boris’s regime into increasingly harsh reprisals against opponents and more frequent use of spies, denunciations, torture, and executions.


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Early in Tsar Boris’s reign catastrophe struck Russia. In the period 1601–1603, many of Russia’s crops failed due to bad weather. The result was the worst famine in all of Russian history; up to onethird of Tsar Boris’s subjects perished. In spite of Boris’s sincere efforts to help his suffering people, many of them concluded that God was punishing Russia for the sins of its ruler. Therefore, when a man appeared in Poland-Lithuania in 1603 claiming to be Dmitry of Uglich, miraculously saved from Boris Godunov’s alleged assassins back in 1591, many Russians were willing to believe that God had saved Ivan the Terrible’s youngest son in order to topple the evil usurper Boris Godunov. When False Dmitry invaded Russia in 1604, many cossacks and soldiers joined his ranks, and many towns of southwestern Russia rebelled against Tsar Boris. Even after False Dmitry’s army was decisively defeated in the battle of Dobrynichi (January 1605), enthusiasm for the true tsar spread like wildfire throughout most of southern Russia. Support for False Dmitry even began to appear in the tsar’s army and in Moscow itself. A very unhappy Tsar Boris, who had been ill for some time, withdrew from public sight. Despised and feared by many of his subjects, Boris died on April 13, 1605. It was rumored that he took his own life, but he probably died of natural causes. Boris’s son took the throne as Tsar Fyodor II, but within six weeks the short-lived Godunov dynasty was overthrown in favor of Tsar Dmitry.

See also:

ASSEMBLY OF THE LAND; COSSACKS; DMITRY,

FALSE; DMITRY OF UGLICH; FILARET ROMANOV, PATRIARCH; FYODOR IVANOVICH; IVAN IV; JOB, PATRIARCH; OPRICHNINA; ROMANOV, MIKHAIL FYODOROVICH; SLAVERY; TIME OF TROUBLES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barbour, Philip. (1966). Dimitry Called the Pretender: Tsar and Great Prince of All Russia, 1605–1606. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Crummey, Robert O. (1987). The Formation of Muscovy, 1304–1613. London: Longman. Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Margeret, Jacques. (1983). The Russian Empire and Grand Duchy of Muscovy: A Seventeenth-Century French Account, tr. and ed. Chester Dunning. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press. Perrie, Maureen. (1995). Pretenders and Popular Monarchism in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars of the


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Time of Troubles. Cambridge, UK.: Cambridge University Press. Platonov, S. F. (1973). Boris Godunov, Tsar of Russia, tr. L. Rex Piles. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Skrynnikov, Ruslan. (1982). Boris Godunov, tr. Hugh Graham. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Vernadsky, George. (1954). “The Death of Tsarevich Dimitry: A Reconsideration of the Case.” Oxford Slavonic Papers 5:1–19. CHESTER DUNNING

GOGOL, NIKOLAI VASILIEVICH (1809–1852), short-story writer, novelist, playwright, essayist. Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, whose bizarre characters, absurd plots, and idiosyncratic narrators have both entranced and confounded readers worldwide and influenced authors from Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Franz Kafka to Flannery O’Connor, led a life as cryptic and circuitous as his fiction. He was born in 1809 in Sorochintsy, Ukraine. His father was a playwright; his mother, a highly devout and imaginative woman and one of Gogol’s key influences. By no stretch a stellar student, Gogol showed theatrical talent, parodying his teachers and peers and performing in plays. In 1828 Gogol moved to Petersburg with hopes of launching a literary career, His long poem Hans Kuechelgarten (1829), a derivative, slightly eccentric idyll, received only a brief and critical mention in the Moscow Telegraph. Dismayed, Gogol burned all the copies he could find and left for Lübeck, Germany, only to return several weeks later. In 1831 he met the poet Alexander Pushkin. His first collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831–1832), folk and ghost tales set in Ukraine and narrated by beekeeper Rudy Panko, reaped praise for its relative freshness and hilarity, and Gogol became a household name in Petersburg literary circles. Gogol followed the Dikanka stories with two 1835 collections, Arabesques and Mirgorod. From Mirgorod, the “Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich” (nicknamed “The Two Ivans”), blends comedy with tragedy, prose with poetry, satire with gratuitous play. Describing the two Ivans through bizarre juxtapositions, the narrator explains how the fatal utterance of the

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word gander (gusak) severed their friendship for good. Gogol’s Petersburg tales, some included in Arabesques, some published separately, contain some of Gogol’s best-known work, including “The Nose” (1835), about a nose on the run in full uniform; “Diary of a Madman” (1835), about a civil servant who discovers that he is the king of Spain; and “The Overcoat” (1842), about a copyist who becomes obsessed with the purchase of a new overcoat. In all these stories, as in the “Two Ivans,” plot is secondary to narration, and the tension between meaning and meaninglessness remains unresolved. In 1836 a poor staging and mixed reception of Gogol’s play The Inspector General precipitated his second trip to Europe, where he stayed five years except for brief visits to Russia. While in Rome he wrote the novel Dead Souls (1842), whose main character, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, travels from estate to estate with the goal of purchasing deceased serfs (souls) to use as collateral for a state loan. Chichikov’s travels can be considered a tour of Gogol’s narrative prowess. With each visit, Chichikov encounters new eccentricities of setting, behavior, and speech. In 1841 Gogol returned to Russia. There he began a sequel to Dead Souls chronicling Chichikov’s fall and redemption. This marked the beginning of Gogol’s decline: his struggle to establish a spiritual message in his work. His puzzling and dogmatic Selections from Correspondence with Friends (1847), in which he offers advice on spiritual and practical matters, dismayed his friends and supporters. Various travels, including a pilgrimage in 1848 to the Holy Land, failed to bring him the strength and inspiration he sought. Following the advice of his spiritual adviser and confessor, the fanatical Father Matthew, who told him to renounce literature, he burned Dead Souls shortly before dying of selfstarvation in 1852.

See also: DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE; PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH

Senechal, Diana. (1999). “Diabolical Structures in the Poetics of Nikolai Gogol.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, New Haven, CT. DIANA SENECHAL

GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE The Golden Age of Russian Literature is notably not a term often employed in literary criticism. It does not refer to any particular school or movement (e.g., Classicism, Romanticism, Realism); rather, it encompasses several of them. As such, it immediately falls prey to all the shortcomings of such literary categorizations, not the least of which is imprecision. The term furthermore demands, eo ipso, a pair of ungilded ages at either end, and might lead one to an easy and unstudied dismissal of works outside its tenure. Finally, those who wrote during its span were not particularly aware of living in an aureate age, and they certainly never consciously identified themselves as belonging to a unified or coherent faction—any similarity is adduced from the outside and puts in jeopardy the authors’ particular geniuses. That said, the phrase “golden age of Russian literature” has gained currency and therefore, if for no other reason, deserves to be defined as carefully and intelligently as possible. When they indulge in a yen for periodization, literary specialists tend to distinguish two contiguous (or perhaps slightly overlapping) golden ages: the first, a golden age of Russian poetry, which lasted (roughly) from the publication of Gavrila Derzhavin’s Ossianic-inspired “The Waterfall” in 1794, until Aleksandr Pushkin’s “turn to prose” around 1831 (or as late as Mikhail Lermontov’s death in 1841); and the second, a Golden Age of Russian prose, which began with the nearly simultaneous publication of Nikolai Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm near the Dikanka and Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin (1831), and which petered out sometime during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Nabokov, Vladimir. (1961). Nikolai Gogol. New York: New Directions.

It is historians, with their professional inclination to divide time into discrete and digestible pieces, who most often make use of the term under discussion. Nicholas Riasanovsky, in A History of Russia, offers the following span: The golden age of Russian literature has been dated roughly from 1820 to 1880, from Pushkin’s first major poems [his stylized, Voltairean folk-epic Ruslan and Liudmila] to Dostoevsky’s last major novel [Brothers

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Karlinsky, Simon. (1976). The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maguire, Robert. (1994). Exploring Gogol. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Karamazov]. Riasanovsky’s dates are notably narrower than those mentioned above. His span omits the first two decades of the century, and with them the late pseudo-classicism of Derzhavin, as well as the Sentimentalism and Ossianic Romanticism of Nikolai Karamzin and Vasily Zhukovsky—schools that constituted Pushkin’s and Gogol’s frame of reference and laid the verbal foundation for the later glorious literary output of Russia. On the far end, it disbars the final two decades of the nineteenth century, Anton Chekhov and Maksim Gorky notwithstanding. Ending the golden age in 1880 furthermore neatly excludes the second half of Tolstoy’s remarkable sixty-year career. 1830S AND 1840S: ROMANTICISM

If one is to follow the historians in disregarding the first decades of the nineteenth century—to discount, so to say, the first blush and to wait until the flower has fully bloomed—then arguably a better date to initiate the golden age of literature would be 1831, which witnessed the debut of two uncontested masterpieces of Russian literature. In January, for the first time in its final form, Woe from Wit, Alexander Griboyedov’s droll drama in verse (free iambs), was performed. A few months later, Pushkin put the final touches on Eugene Onegin, his unequaled novel in verse, which he had begun in 1823. The works are both widely recognized by Russians as the hallmarks of Russian literature, but they receive short shrift outside of their native land, a fate perhaps ineluctable for works of subtle and inventive poetry. The year 1831 also witnessed Gogol’s successful entry into literary fame with his folksy Evenings on a Farm near the Dikanka. Gogol and Pushkin had struck up an acquaintance in that year, and Gogol claimed that Pushkin had given him the kernel of the ideas for his two greatest works: Dead Souls (1842), perhaps the comic novel par excellence; and the uproarious Inspector General (1836), generally recognized as the greatest Russian play and one that certainly ranks as one of the world’s most stageable. Pushkin also served as the springboard for another literato of the golden age, Lermontov, who responded to Pushkin’s death (in a duel) in 1837 with his impassioned “Death of a Poet,” a poem which launched Lermontov’s brief literary career (he was killed four years later in a duel). Although his corpus is smallish—he had written little serious verse before 1837—and much of it was left unpublished until after his death (mostly for censorial


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reasons), Lermontov is generally considered Russia’s second-greatest poet. He also penned a prose masterpiece, A Hero of Our Time, a cycle of short stories united by its jaded and cruel protagonist, Pechorin, who became a stock type in Russian literature. In 1847 Gogol published his Selected Passages from My Correspondence with Friends, a pastiche of religious, conservative, and monarchical sermonettes— he endorses serfdom—that was met by an overwhelmingly negative reaction by critics who had long assumed that Gogol shared their progressive mindset. Vissarion Belinsky, perhaps the most influential critic ever in Russia, wrote a lashing rebuke that was banned by the censor, in part because it claimed that the Russian people were naturally atheists. The uproar surrounding Selected Passages effectively ended Gogol’s career five years before the author’s death in 1852. REALISM

In 1849, the young writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky— who had created a sensation in 1845 with his parodic sentimentalist epistolary novel Poor Folk, but whose subsequent works had been coolly received— injudiciously read the abovementioned rebuke of Gogol and allowed his copy to be reproduced, for which he spent ten years in Siberia. When he returned to St. Petersburg, he published Notes from the House of the Dead, an engrossing fictionalized memoir of the years he had spent in penal servitude. The work was his first critical success since Poor Folk, and he followed it, during the 1860s and 1870s, with a series of novels that were both critical and popular successes, including Notes from Underground (1864) and Crime and Punishment (1866) —both, in part, rejoinders to the positivistic and utilitarian Geist of the time. His masterpiece Brothers Karamazov (1880) won him the preeminent position in Russian letters shortly before his death in 1881. Gogol’s death in 1852 moved Ivan Turgenev to write an innocuous commemorative essay, for which he was arrested, jailed for a month, and then banished to his estate. That year, his Sportsman’s Sketches was first published in book form, and popular response to the vivid sketches of life in the countryside has been long identified as galvanizing support for the Emancipation. (Its upper-class readers were apparently jarred by the realization that peasants were heterogeneous and distinct individuals). Turgenev’s prose works are united by their careful and subtle psychological depictions of

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highly self-conscious characters whose search for truth and a vocation reflects Russia’s own vacillations during the decades of the 1860s and 1870s. His greatest work, Fathers and Sons (1862), depicted the nihilist and utilitarian milieu of Russia at the inception of Age of the Great Reforms. The clamor surrounding Fathers and Sons—it was condemned by conservatives as too liberal, but liberals as too conservative—pricked Turgenev’s amour propre, and he spent the much of his remaining two decades abroad in France and Germany. It was also in 1852 that Tolstoy’s first published work, Childhood, appeared in The Contemporary (a journal Pushkin founded), under the byline L. N. (the initials of Tolstoy’s Christian and patronymic names). The piece made Tolstoy an instant success: Turgenev wrote the journal’s editor to praise the work and encourage the anonymous author, and Dostoyevsky wrote to a friend from faraway Siberia to learn the identity L. N., whose story had so engaged him. Along with Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy’s prose dominated the Russian literary and intellectual spheres during the1860s and 1870s. War and Peace (1869), his magnum opus, describes the Russian victory over Napoleon’s army. Anna Karenina (1878), a Russian version of a family novel, was published serially in The Russian Messenger (the same journal that soon thereafter published Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov) and is generally considered one of the finest novels ever written. THE END OF THE GOLDEN AGE

Although none of Tolstoy’s works (before 1884) treated politics and social conflict in the direct manner of Dostoyevsky or Turgenev, they were nonetheless socially engaged, treating obliquely historical or philosophical questions present in contemporary debates. This circumspectness ended in the early 1880s after Tolstoy’s self-described “spiritual restructuring,” after which he penned a series of highly controversial, mostly banned works beginning with A Confession, (1884). Marking the end of golden age at the threshold of the 1880s—with Tolstoy’s crisis and the deaths of Dostoyevsky (1881) and Turgenev (1883)—relies on the convenient myth of Tolstoy’s rejection of literature in 1881, despite works such as Death of Ivan Ilich, Resurrection, Kreutzer Sonata, Hadji Murad, several excellent and innovative plays, and dozens of short stories—in brief, an output of belletristic literature that, even without War and Peace and Anna Karenina, would have qualified Tolstoy as a world-class

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writer. It also excludes Anton Chekhov, whose short stories and plays in many ways defined the genres for the twentieth century. Chekhov’s first serious stories began to appear in the mid-1880s, and by the 1890s he was one of the most popular writers in Russia. Ending the golden age in the early 1880s likewise leaves out Maxim Gorky (pseudonym of Alexei Peshkov), whose half-century career writing wildly popular, provocative and muchimitated stories and plays depicting the social dregs of Russia began with the publication of “Chelkash” in 1895. A better date to end the golden age, therefore, might well be 1899, a year that bore witness to the publication of Sergei Diagilev’s and Alexander Benois’s The World of Art, that herald of the silver age of Russian literature, with its bold, syncretic program of music, theater, painting, and sculpture, idealistic metaphysics, and religion. The same year Tolstoy published (abroad) his influential What Is Art?, an invective raging equally against the Realist, socially-engaged literature of the previous century and the esthete, l’art pour l’art school that then dominated the literary scene. In their stead, it promulgated an emotive art that would unify all of humankind into a mystical brotherhood—a program not at all irreconcilable with the silver age aesthetics, proving the lozenge that les extrêmes se touchent. OVERVIEW

Although the golden age should in no way be seen as an internally, self-consciously united movement, several features marry the individual authors and their works. Russian literature of this period thrived independently of politics. Its prodigious growth was unchecked, perhaps encouraged, by autocracy (some flowers bloom best in poor soil): It set its roots during the stifling reign of Nicholas I, continued to grow during the Era of Great Reforms begun under the Tsar-Liberator Alexander II, blossomed profusely during the reactionarily conservative final years of his rule, and continued to bloom in fits under Alexander III. The literature of the period engaged and influenced the social debates of the era. It remained, however, above the fray, characteristically criticizing, as overly simplistic, the autocratic and conservative government and the utilitarian ideas of progressive critics alike, for which it was frequently condemned by all sides. It was also, in many important ways, sui generis. One constant characteristic of all the works


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cited above is their distinctive Russian-ness. All of the authors were fluent in the conventions and heritage of Western European literature, but they frequently and consciously rejected and parodied its traditions. (This tendency explains why many early Western European readers and popularizers of Russian literature (e.g., Vogüé) considered Russians to be brilliant but unschooled savages.) What exactly constitutes the quiddity of this Russian-ness is a thorny issue, though one might safely hazard that one defining characteristic of Russian literature is its concern with elaborating the Russian idea.

Terras, Victor, ed. (1985). Handbook of Russian Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Finally, the limited amount of Russian literature cannot be exaggerated. In the brief overview of the period given above, one might be surprised by the tightly interdigitated fates of Russian authors during the golden age. However, the world of Russian letters was remarkably small. As late as 1897, according to the census conducted that year, only 21.1 percent of the population was literate, and only 1 percent of the 125 million residents had middle or higher education. The Russian novelist and critic Vladimir Nabokov once noted that the entirety of the Russian canon, the generally acknowledged best of poetry and prose, would span 23,000 pages of ordinary print, practically all of it written during the nineteenth century—a very compact library indeed, when one figures that a handful of the works included in this anthological daydream are nearly a thousand pages each. Despite its slenderness, youth, and narrow base, in influence and artistic worth Russian literature rivals that of any national tradition.

An anachronistic and misleading term for an area more appropriately called the Ulus of Jochi or Khanate of Qipchaq (although Arabic sources at times refer to it as the Ulus of Batu or Ulus of Berke).

See also:

CHEKHOV, ANTON PAVLOVICH; DOSTOYEVSKY,

FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; GOGOL, NIKOLAI VASILIEVICH; LERMONTOV, MIKHAIL YURIEVICH; PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH; TOLSTOY, LEO NIKOLAYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Billington, James H. (1966). The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. New York: Vintage Books. Brown, W.E. (1986). A History of Russian Literature of the Romantic Period. 4 vols. Ann Arbor: MI: Ardis. Mirsky, D.P. (1958). A History of Russian Literature from Its Beginnings to 1900, ed. Francis Whitfield. New York: Vintage Books. Proffer, Carl R., comp. (1989). Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature in English: A Bibliography of Criticism and Translations. Ann Arbor: MI: Ardis. Terras, Victor. (1991). A History of Russian Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.


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Todd, William Mills, III, ed. (1978). Literature and Society in Imperial Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. MICHAEL A. DENNER

GOLDEN HORDE

In Russian sources contemporary to the existence of the Golden Horde, the term Orda alone was used to apply to the camp or palace, and later to the capital city, where the khan resided. The term Zolotaya Orda, which has been translated as “Golden Horde,” first appears in Russian sources of the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries, many decades after the end of the Qipchaq Khanate. In a travel account of 1624 concerning a journey he took to Persia, the merchant Fedot Afanasievich Kotov describes coming to the lower Volga River: “Here by the river Akhtuba [i.e., the eastern effluent of the Volga] stands the Zolotaya Orda. The khan’s court, palaces, and [other] courts, and mosques are all made of stone. But now all these buildings are being dismantled and the stone is being taken to Astrakhan.” Zolotaya Orda can be understood here to mean the capital city of the Qipchaq Khanate. Of the two capitals of that khanate—Old Sarai or New Sarai (referred to in the historiography as Sarai Batu and Sarai Berke, respectively)—Kotov’s description most likely refers to New Sarai at the present-day Tsarev archaeological site. In the History of the Kazan Khanate (Kazanskaya istoriya), which some scholars date to the second half of the sixteenth century and others to the early seventeenth century, the term Zolotaya Orda (or Zlataya Orda) appears at least fifteen times. Most of these references seem to be to the capital city— that is, where the khan’s court was—but some can by extension be understood to apply to the entire area ruled by the khan. The problem with accepting the reliability of this work is its genre, which seems to be historical fiction. Given the popularity of the History of the Kazan Khanate (the text is extant in more than two hundred manuscript copies),

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one can understand how the term Golden Horde became a popular term of reference. It is more difficult to understand why.

Qipchaq Khanate the Golden Horde than an apparent mistake in a late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century Muscovite work of fiction.

Neither Kotov nor the author of the History of the Kazan’ Khanate explains why he is using the term Golden Horde. It does not conform to the steppe color-direction system, such that black equals north, blue equals east, red equals south, white equals west, and yellow (or gold) equals center. The Qipchaq Khanate was not at the center of the Mongol Empire but at its western extremity, so one should expect the term White Horde, which does occur, although rarely, in sources contemporary to its existence. Even then the term seems to apply only to the khanate’s western half, while the term Blue Horde identifies its eastern half. One could refer to the palace or the camp of any khan as “golden” in the sense that it was at the “center” of the khanate, but in no other case is it used to refer to a khanate as a whole.

The Khanate of Qipchaq was set up by Batu (d. 1255) in the 1240s after the return of the Mongol force that invaded central Europe. Batu thus became the first khan of a khanate that was a multiethnic conglomeration consisting of Qipchaqs (Polovtsi), Kangli, Alans, Circassians, Rus, Armenians, Greeks, Volga Bulgars, Khwarezmians, and others, including no more than 4000 Mongols who ruled over them. Economically, it was made up of nomadic pastoralists, sedentary agriculturalists, and urban dwellers, including merchants, artisans, and craftsmen. The territory of the khanate at its greatest expanse reached from Galicia and Lithuania in the west to present-day Mongolia and China in the east, and from Transcaucasia and Khwarezm in the south into the forest zone of the Rus principalities and western Siberia in the north. Some scholars dispute whether the Rus principalities were ever officially part of the Qipchaq Khanate or merely vassal states. These scholars cite the account of the fourteenth-century Arabic historian alUmari to the effect that the Khanate consisted of four parts: Sarai, the Crimea, Khwarezm, and the Desht-i Qipchaq (the western Eurasian steppe). Since most Rus principalities were not in the steppe but in the forest zone north of the steppe, they would seem to be excluded. Other scholars argue that not too fine a point should be put on what al-Umari understood as the northern limit of the Desht-i Qipchaq, for, according to Juvaini, Jochi, the son of Chinghis Khan and father of Batu, was granted all lands to the west of the Irtysh River “as far in that direction as the hooves of Tatar horses trod,” which would seem to include the Rus principalities conquered in campaigns between 1237 and 1240. In addition, a number of Rus sources refer to the Rus principalities as ulus of the khan.

In the eighteenth century, Princess Yekaterina Dashkova suggested that the term Golden Horde was applied to the Qipchaq Khanate “because it possessed great quantities of gold and the weapons of its people were decorated with it.” But this conjecture seems to fall into the realm of folk etymology. Others have suggested that the term refers to the golden pavilion of the khan, or at least a tent covered with golden tiles (as the fourteenthcentury traveler Ibn Battuta described the domicile of Khan (Özbek). Yet khans in other khanates had similar tents or pavilions at the time, so there was nothing that would make this a distinguishing trait of the Qipchaq khan or of his khanate, let alone a reason to call the khanate “golden.” George Vernadsky proposed that Golden Horde may have been applied to the Khanate of Qipchaq (or Great Horde) only after the separation of the Crimean Khanate and Kazan Khanate from it in the midfifteenth century. It would have occupied, accordingly, a central or “golden” position between the two. Yet, neither of the other khanates, in the evidence available, was designated white or blue (or red or black) as would then be expected. This leaves three intractable considerations: (1) there is no evidence that the Qipchaq Khanate was ever referred to as “Golden Horde” during the time of its existence; (2) the earliest appearance of the term in a nonfictional work is one written more than a hundred years after the khanate’s demise and refers specifically to the capital city where the khan resided, not to the khanate as a whole; and (3) no better reason offers itself for calling the

The governmental structure of the Qipchaq Khanate was most likely the same as that of other steppe khanates and was led by a ruler called a “khan” who could trace his genealogical lineage back to Chinghis Khan. A divan of qarachi beys (called ulus beys in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), made up of four emirs, each of whom headed one of the major chiefdoms, constituted a council of state that regularly advised the khan. The divan’s consent was required for all significant enterprises on the part of the government. All important documents concerning internal matters had to be countersigned (usually by means of a

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seal) by the qarachi beys for them to go into effect. Their witnessing was also required for all agreements with foreign powers to become official. The khan was not allowed to meet with foreign ambassadors without the presence of the qarachi beys, as representatives of the major chiefdoms. At times an assembly called a quriltai advised the khan but could also be called to choose a new khan or depose the reigning khan. Notable men from the ruling class made up the quriltai, and this included the khan’s relatives and retinue, religious leaders, and other members of the nobility from the ruling class’s lower ranks. The government was set up on a dual-administrative basis with a vizier in charge of civilian administration, including record-keeping and the treasury. The beklaribek (head of the qarachi beys) presided over military administration. The clan of each qarachi bey held the highest social and political status within its chiefdom, with people of every social status in descending order down to slaves beneath.

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moil and endured another devastating civil war, this time between Khan Tokhtamish and the Emir Mamai. In 1395 Tamerlane swept through the khanate, defeated the army of Tokhtamish, and razed the capital cities. In the middle of the fifteenth century the Qipchaq Khanate began to split up, with the Crimean Khanate and Kazan Khanate separating off. Finally in 1502, the Crimean Khan Mengli Girey defeated the last khan of the Qipchaq Khanate, absorbed the western part of the khanate into his domains, and allowed the organization of the Khanate of Astrakhan to govern the rest. The Qipchaq Khanate, nonetheless, had lasted far longer as an independent political entity than any of the other ulus granted by Chinghis Khan to his sons.

See also: ASTRAKHAN, KHANATE OF; BATU; CENTRAL ASIA; CRIMEAN KHANATE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Six of the early khans of the Qipchaq Khanate were sky worshipers, the traditional religion of the Mongols. One of these khans, Sartaq (r. 1256–1257), may have been a Nestorian Christian and another, Berke (r. 1257–1267), was Muslim. But all the early khans followed policies of religious toleration. In the early fourteenth century, Khan Özbek (r. 1313–1341) converted to Islam, which from then on became the official religion of the elite of the Khanate and spread to most of the rest of the population. The Rus principalities, however, remained Christian, since the Rus Church enjoyed the protection of the khans as long as the Rus clergy prayed for the well-being of the khan and his family.

Fedorov-Davydov, G. A. (1984). The Culture of the Golden Horde Cities, tr. H. Bartlett Wells. Oxford: B.A.R.

The Qipchaq Khanate had extensive diplomatic dealings with foreign powers, both as part of the Mongol Empire and independently. It maintained agreements with the Byzantine Empire and Mamluk Egypt. It fought incessantly with the Ilkhanate and maintained alternating periods of agreement and conflict with the Grand Dukes of Lithuania. It maintained extensive commercial dealings with Byzantium, Egypt, Genoa, Pisa, and Venice to the west, as well as with the other Mongol khanates and China to the east. During the fourteenth century, a high Islamic Turkic culture emerged in the Qipchaq Khanate.

Vernadsky, George. (1953). The Mongols and Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

At the end of the thirteenth century, the Qipchaq Khanate survived a devastating civil war between Khan Tokhta and the Prince Nogai. After the assassination of Khan Berdibek in 1359, the khanate went through more than 20 years of tur-


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Fedorov-Davydov, G. A. (2001). The Silk Road and the Cities of the Golden Horde. Berkeley, CA: Zinat Press. Halperin, Charles J. (1985). Russia and the Golden Horde: Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Schamiloglu, Uli. (1986). “Tribal Politics and Social Organization in the Golden Horde.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, New York. Schamiloglu, Uli. (2002). “The Golden Horde.” In The Turks, 6 vols., ed. Hasan Celâl Güzel, C. Cem Oguz, and Osman Karatay, 2:819–835. Ankara: Yeni Türkiye.

DONALD OSTROWSKI

GOLD STANDARD A gold standard is a monetary system in which a country backs its currency with gold reserves and allows the conversion of its currency into gold. Tsarist Russia introduced the gold standard in January 1897 and maintained it until 1914. The policy was adopted both as a means of attracting foreign capital for the ambitious industrialization efforts of the late tsarist era, and to earn international respectability for the regime at a time when the world’s leading economies had themselves

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adopted gold standards. Preparation for this move began under Russian Finance Minister Ivan Vyshnegradsky (1887–1892), who actively built up Russia’s gold supply while restricting the supply of paper money. After a brief setback, the next finance minister, Sergei Witte (1892–1903), continued to amass gold reserves and restrict monetary growth through foreign borrowing and taxation. By 1896, Russian gold reserves had reached levels commensurate (in relative terms) with other major European nations on the gold standard. The gold standard proved so controversial in Russia that it had to be introduced directly by imperial decree, over the objections of the State Council (Duma). This decree was promulgated on January 2, 1897, authorizing the emission of new five- and tenruble gold coins. At this point the state bank (Gosbank) became the official bank of issue, and Russia pegged the new ruble to a fixed quantity of gold with full convertibility. This meant that the ruble could be exchanged at a stable, fixed rate with the other major gold-backed currencies of the time, which facilitated trade by eliminating foreign exchange risk. Private foreign capital inflows increased considerably after the introduction of the gold standard, and currency stability increased as well. By World War I, Russia had been transformed from a state set somewhat apart from the international financial system to the world’s largest international debtor. Proponents argue that the gold standard accelerated Russian industrialization and integration with the world economy by preventing inflation and attracting private capital (substituting for the low rate of domestic savings). They also point out that the Russian economy might not have recovered so quickly after the Russo-Japanese war and civil unrest in 1904 and 1905 without the promise of stability engendered by the gold standard. Critics, however, charge that the gold standard required excessively high foreign borrowing and tax, tariff, and interest rates to introduce. They further charge that once in place, the gold standard was deflationary, inflexible, and too preferential to foreign investment. Economist Paul Gregory argues that the entire debate may be moot, inasmuch as Russia had no choice but to adopt the gold standard in an international environment that practically required it for countries wishing to take advantage of the era’s large-scale cross-border trade and investment opportunities. Russia abandoned the gold standard in 1914 under the financial pressure of World War I.

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FOREIGN TRADE; INDUSTRIALIZATION; VYSHNE-

GRADSKY, IVAN ALEXEYEVICH; WITTE, SERGEI YULIEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Drummond, Ian. (1976). “The Russian Gold Standard, 1897–1914.” Journal of Economic History 36(4): 633–688. Gerschenkron, Alexander. (1962). Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Gregory, Paul. (1994). Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First Five-Year Plan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Von Laue, Theodore. (1963). Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia. New York: Columbia University Press. JULIET JOHNSON

GOLITSYN, VASILY VASILIEVICH (1643–1714), chief minister and army commander during the regency of Sophia Alekseyevna. Prince Vasily Golitsyn was the eldest son of Prince Vasily Andreyevich Golitsyn and Tatiana Streshneva. Both his parents were from aristocratic clans with strong connections, which brought young Vasily the honorific posts of cup-bearer to Tsar Alexis in 1658 and coach attendant in 1666. In 1663 he married Avdotia Streshneva, who bore him six children. In 1675 he was posted to Ukraine, where he served intermittently during the RussoTurkish war of 1676–1681, leading an auxiliary force, organizing fortification works and provisioning, and taking a major role in negotiations with Cossack leaders. He was appointed commander in chief of the southern army just before the truce of 1681. During visits to court, Golitsyn won the favor of Tsar Fedor (r. 1676–1682), who promoted him to the rank of boyar in 1676. He also held posts as director of the Artillery Chancellery and the Vladimir High Court. In 1681 he returned to Moscow to chair a commission on army reform, with special reference to regimental structure and the appointment of officers. The commission’s proposals led to the abolition in January 1682 of the Code of Precedence, although its scheme for provincial vice-regencies was rejected. Following Tsar Fedor’s death in May 1682, Golitsyn rose further thanks to the patronage of


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Tsarevna Sophia Alekseyevna, who became regent to the joint tsars Ivan V (r. 1682–1696) and Peter I (r. 1682–1725). Their relationship is said to have begun when Sophia was caring for the ailing Fedor, to whose bedchamber Golitsyn often reported, but contemporary Russian sources do not record any such meetings. The claim that the couple became lovers rests on hearsay and some coded letters dating from the later 1680s. Golitsyn was not closely involved in the intrigues with the Moscow militia (musketeers) that brought Sophia to power following a bloody revolt, but he remained close to the tsars during the so-called Khovanshchina and was appointed director of the important Foreign Office, and later accumulated the directorships of the Foreign Mercenaries, Cavalry, Little Russian (Ukrainian), Smolensk, Novgorod, Ustyug, and Galich chancelleries, which afforded him a substantial power base. In 1683 Sophia dubbed him “Guardian of the Tsar’s Great Seal and the State’s Great Ambassadorial Affairs.” Golitsyn’s main talent was for foreign affairs. He was unusual among Russian boyars in knowing Latin and Greek and became known as a friend of foreigners. He was instrumental in negotiating the renewal of the 1661 Treaty of Kardis with Sweden (1684), trade treaties with Prussia (1689), and the important treaty of permanent peace with Poland (1686), by which Russia broke its truce with the Ottomans and Tatars and entered the Holy League against the infidels. In fulfillment of Russia’s obligations to the League, Golitsyn twice led vast Russian armies to Crimea, in 1687 and 1689, on both occasions returning empty-handed, having suffered heavy losses as a result of shortages of food and water. Golitsyn’s enemies blamed him personally for the defeats, but Sophia greeted him as a victor, thereby antagonizing the party of the second tsar Peter I, who objected to “undeserved rewards and honors.” Following a stand-off between the two sides in August–September 1689, Golitsyn was arrested for aiding and abetting Sophia, bypassing the tsars, and causing “losses to the sovereigns and ruin to the state” as a result of the Crimean campaigns. He and his family were exiled to the far north, first to Kargopol, then to Archangel province, where he died in 1714. Historians have characterized Golitsyn as a “Westernizer,” one of a select band of educated and open-minded Muscovite boyars. His modern views were reflected not only in his encouragement of contacts with foreigners, but also in his library of books in foreign languages and his Moscow man-


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sion in the fashionable “Moscow Baroque” style, which was equipped with foreign furniture, clocks, mirrors, and a portrait gallery, which included Golitsyn’s own portrait. The French traveler Foy de la Neuville (the only source) even credited Golitsyn with a scheme for limiting, if not abolishing, serfdom, which is not, however, reflected in the legislation of the regency. Golitsyn’s downfall was brought about by a mixture of bad luck and poor judgement in court politics. Peter I never forgave him for his association with Sophia and thereby forfeited the skills of one of the most able men of his generation.

See also:

FYODOR ALEXEYEVICH; SOPHIA ALEXEYEVNA

(TSAREVNA); WESTERNIZERS.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hughes, Lindsey. (1982). “A Seventeenth-century Westerniser: Prince V.V. Golitsyn (1643–1714).” Irish Slavonic Studies 3:47–58. Hughes, Lindsey. (1984). Russia and the West: The Life of a Seventeenth-Century Westernizer, Prince Vasily Vasil’evich Golitsyn (1643–1714). Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners. Smith, Abby. (1995). “The Brilliant Career of Prince Golitsyn.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19:639–645. LINDSEY HUGHES

GONCHAROVA, NATALIA SERGEYEVNA (1881–1962), artist, book illustrator, set and costume designer. Natalia Sergeyevna Goncharova was born on June 21, 1881, in the village of Nagaevo in the Tula province; she died on October 17, 1962, in Paris. She lived in Moscow from 1892 and enrolled at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in 1901 to study sculpture. She met Mikhail Larionov in 1900–1901 who encouraged her to paint and became her lifelong companion. They were married in 1957. In 1906 she contributed to the Russian Section at the Salon d’Automne, Paris. In 1908–1910 she contributed to the three exhibitions organized by Nikolai Riabushinsky, editor of the journal Zolotoe runo (The Golden Fleece) in Moscow. In 1910 she founded with Larionov and others the Jack of Diamonds group and participated in their first exhibition. In 1911 the group split and from 1911–1914 she participated in a series of rival exhibitions organized

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by Larionov: the “Donkey’s Tail” (1912), the “Target “(1913), and the “No. 4” (1914). Throughout this period she worked in several styles— Primitivist, Cubist, and, in 1912–1913, Futurist and Rayist. Her work immediately became a lightning rod for debate over the legitimacy and cultural identity of new Russian painting. In 1910 a oneday exhibition of Goncharova’s work was held at the Society for Free Esthetics. The nude life studies she displayed on this occasion led to her trial for pornography in Moscow’s civil court (she was acquitted). Major retrospective exhibitions of Goncharova’s work were organized in Moscow (1913) and St. Petersburg (1914). Paintings of religious subject matter were censored, and in the last exhibition temporarily banned as blasphemous by the Spiritual-Censorship Committee of the Holy Synod.

Moscow (1999, 2000). The first retrospective of her Russian oeuvre since 1914 was held at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg in 2002.

See also:

DIAGILEV, SERGEI PAVLOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Artcyclopedia Web site. (2003) <www.artcyclopedia .com/artists/goncharova_natalia.html>. Chamot, Mary. (1972). Gontcharova Paris: La Bibliotheque des Arts. Lukanova, Alla and Avtonomova, Natalia, eds. (2000). Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova. Exhibition Catalogue. Moscow: State Tretiakov Gallery. Petrova, Evgeniia, ed. (2002). Natalia Goncharova: the Russian Years. Exhibition Catalogue. St. Petersburg: The State Russian Museum and Palace Editions.

On April 29, 1914 Goncharova left with Larionov for Paris to mount Sergei Diagilev’s production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’Or (a collaboration between herself and choreographer Mikhail Fokine). Also in 1914, the Galerie Paul Guillaume in Paris held her first commercial exhibition. During the 1920s and 1930s she and Larionov collaborated on numerous designs for Diagilev and other impresarios. Returning briefly to Moscow in 1915, she designed Alexander Tairov’s production of Carlo Goldoni’s Il Ventaglio at the Chamber Theater, Moscow. After traveling with Diagilev’s company to Spain and Italy, she settled in Paris with Larionov in 1917. In 1920–1921 she contributed to the “Exposition internationale d’art moderne” in Geneva and in 1922 exhibited at the Kingore Gallery, New York. From the 1920s onward she continued to paint, teach, illustrate books, and design theater and ballet productions. After 1930, except for occasional contributions to exhibitions, Larionov and Goncharova lived unrecognized and impoverished. Through the efforts of Mary Chamot, author of Goncharova’s first major biography, a number of their works entered museum collections, including the Tate Gallery, London, the National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and the National Art Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand. In 1954 their names were resurrected at Richard Buckle’s “The Diagilev Exhibition” in Edinburgh and London. In 1961 Art Council of Great Britain organized a major retrospective of Goncharova’s and Larionov’s works, and numerous smaller exhibitions were held throughout Europe during the 1970s. In 1995 the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris organized a large exhibition of their work in Europe. Exhibitions were also held at the State Tretyakov Gallery,

Goncharov is known primarily for three novels— A Common Story (1847), Oblomov (1859), and The Precipice (1869)—as well as a travel memoir of a government expedition to Japan, The Frigate Pallas (1855–1857). By far his best-known work is Oblomov, whose hero, an indolent and dreamy Russian nobleman, became emblematic of a Russian social type, the superfluous man. The figure of Oblomov made such a deep impression on readers that the radical critic Nikolai Dobrolyubov pop-

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GONCHAROV, IVAN ALEXANDROVICH (1812–1891), writer. Born in Simbirsk to a family of wealthy merchants, Ivan Goncharov moved to Moscow for his schooling in 1822 and then moved to St. Petersburg in 1835 where, with a few breaks, he remained until his death. He worked from 1855 to 1867 as government censor, a post that earned the criticism and mistrust of many of his contemporaries. Although his politics as a censor were clearly conservative when it came to reviewing Russian journals, he also used his position to allow many important and liberal works of literature into print, including works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Alexander Herzen. Goncharov’s unfounded accusation of plagiarism against the novelist Ivan Turgenev in 1860 caused a scandal in the literary world; Goncharov suffered from bouts of neurosis and paranoia and lived most of his life in sedentary seclusion.

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ularized the term oblomovshchina (oblomovitis) to describe the ineptitude of the Russian intelligentsia. Goncharov’s novels rank him among the best Russian realist writers, yet his university years in Moscow at the height of the Russian romantic movement and his consequent attraction to its ideals places him within the era of the Golden Age of Russian literature.

See also:

GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ehre, Milton. (1974). Oblomov and His Creator; the Life and Art of Ivan Goncharov. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lyngstad, Alexandra, and Lyngstad, Sverre. (1971). Ivan Goncharov. New York: Twayne Publishers. Setchkarev, Vsevolod. (1974). Ivan Goncharov: His Life and Works. Wurzburg: Jal-Verlag.

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policies in a semi-market economy, and most important, the nature of peasant responses to market forces when facing the imperatives of an industrialization drive.

See also: AGRICULTURE; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; PEASANT ECONOMY; SCISSORS CRISIS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gregory, Paul R. (1994). Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First Five Year Plan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zaleski, Eugene. (1971). Planning for Economic Growth in the Soviet Union, 1918–1932. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ROBERT C. STUART

CATHERINE O’NEIL


GOODS FAMINE The concept of the goods famine refers to excess demand (at prevailing prices) for industrial goods in the Soviet Union during the latter half of the 1920s. The importance of this excess demand can only be understood within the context of the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s and the underlying forces leading to excess demand. Specifically, the goods famine was an outgrowth of the Scissors Crisis and state policies relating to this episode. Specifically, in the middle and late 1920s, the quicker recovery of agricultural production relative to industrial production meant that increases in the demand for industrial goods could not be met, an outcome characterized as the goods famine. State policy was ultimately successful in forcing a reduction of the prices of industrial goods. The concern was that a goods famine might drive rural producers, unable to purchase industrial goods, to reduce their grain marketings. This was viewed as a critical factor limiting the possible pace of industrialization. The goods famine is important to the understanding of the changes implemented by Stalin in the late 1920s. Moreover, these events relate to economic issues such as the nature and organization of the industrial sector (e.g., monopoly power), state


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(b. 1931), Soviet political leader, general editor of the CPSU (1985–1991), president of the Soviet Union (1990–1991), Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1990). Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union during a period of sweeping domestic and international change that saw the dismantling of communist systems throughout Europe and ended with the disintegration of the USSR itself, was born in the southern Russian village of Privolnoye in Stavropol province. His parents were peasants and his mother was barely literate. Mikhail Gorbachev did not have an easy childhood. Born on March 2, 1931, he was just old enough to remember when, during the 1930s, both of his grandfathers were caught in the purges and arrested. Although they were released after prison, having been tortured in one case and internally exiled and used as forced labor in the other, young Misha Gorbachev knew what it was like to live in the home of an enemy of the people. The war and early postwar years provided the family with the opportunity to recover from the stigma of false charges laid against the older generation, although the wartime experience itself was harsh. Gorbachev’s father was in the army, saw action on several fronts, and was twice wounded. Remaining in the Russian countryside, Gorbachev and his mother had to engage in back-breaking

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work in the fields. For two years Gorbachev received no schooling, and for a period of four and one-half months the Stavropol territory, including Privolnoye, was occupied by the German army. In Josef Stalin’s time, those who had experienced even short-lived foreign rule tended to be treated with grave suspicion. Nevertheless, the Gorbachevs engaged as wholeheartedly in the postwar reconstruction of their locality as they had in the war effort. Exceptionally, when he was still a teenager, Gorbachev was awarded the Order of Red Banner of Labor for heroic feats of work. He had assisted his father, a combine operator (who was given the Order of Lenin) in bringing in a record harvest in 1948. The odds against a village boy gaining entry to Moscow State University in 1950 were high, but the fact that Gorbachev had been honored as an exemplary worker, and had an excellent school record and recommendation from the Komsomol, made him one of the exceptions. While still at high school during the first half of 1950, Gorbachev became a candidate member of the Communist Party. He was admitted to full membership in the party in 1952. Although the Law Faculty of Moscow University, where Gorbachev studied for the next five years, hardly offered a liberal education, there were some scholars of genuine erudition who opened his eyes to a wider intellectual world. Prominent among them was Stepan Fyodorovich Kechekyan, who taught the history of legal and political thought. Gorbachev took Marxism seriously and not simply as Marxist-Leninist formula to be learned by rote. Talking, forty years later, about his years as a law student, Gorbachev observed: “Before the university I was trapped in my belief system in the sense that I accepted a great deal as given, assumptions not to be questioned. At the university I began to think and reflect and to look at things differently. But of course that was only the beginning of a long process.”

of 67 in 1999 as his “hardest blow ever.” They had one daughter, Irina, and two granddaughters. After graduating with distinction, Gorbachev returned to his native Stavropol and began a rapid rise through the Komsomol and party organization. By 1966 he was party first secretary for Stavropol city, and in 1970 he became kraikom first secretary, that is, party boss of the whole Stavropol territory, which brought with it a year later membership in the Central Committee of the CPSU. Gorbachev displayed a talent for winning the good opinion of very diverse people. These included not only men of somewhat different outlooks within the Soviet Communist Party. Later they were also to embrace Western conservatives—most notably U.S. president Ronald Reagan and U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher—as well as European social democrats such as the former West German chancellor Willy Brandt and Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez. However, Gorbachev’s early success in winning friends and influencing people depended not only on his ability and charm. He had an advantage in his location. Stavropol was spa territory, and leading members of the Politburo came there on holiday. The local party secretary had to meet them, and this gave Gorbachev the chance to make a good impression on figures such as Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov. Both of them later supported his promotion to the secretaryship of the Central Committee, with responsibility for agriculture, when one of Gorbachev’s mentors, Fyodor Kulakov, a previous first secretary of Stavropol territory, who held the agricultural portfolio within the Central Committee Secretariat (along with membership in the Politburo), died in 1978.

Two events of decisive importance for Gorbachev occurred while he was at Moscow University. One was the death of Stalin in 1953. After that the atmosphere within the university lightened, and freer discussion began to take place among the students. The other was his meeting Raisa Maximovna Titarenko, a student in the philosophy faculty, in 1951. They were married in 1953 and remained utterly devoted to each other. In an interview on the eve of his seventieth birthday, Gorbachev described Raisa’s death at the age

From that time, Gorbachev was based in Moscow. As the youngest member of an increasingly geriatric political leadership, he was given rapid promotion through the highest echelons of the Communist Party, adding to his secretaryship candidate membership of the Politburo in 1979 and full membership in 1980. When Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982, Gorbachev’s duties in the Party leadership team were extended by Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov, who thought highly of the younger man. When Andropov was too ill to carry on chairing meetings, he wrote an addendum to a speech to a session of the Central Committee in December 1983, which he was too ill to attend in person. In it he proposed that the Politburo and Secretariat be led in his absence by Gor-

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bachev. This was a clear attempt to elevate Gorbachev above Konstantin Chernenko, a much older man who had been exceptionally close to Brezhnev and a senior secretary of the Central Committee for longer than Gorbachev. However, Andropov’s additions to his speech were omitted from the text presented to Central Committee members. Chernenko had consulted other members of the old guard, and they were united in wishing to prevent power from moving to a new generation represented by Gorbachev. The delay in his elevation to the general secretaryship of the Communist Party did Gorbachev no harm. Chernenko duly succeeded Andropov on the latter’s death in February 1984, but was so infirm during his time at the helm that Gorbachev frequently found himself chairing meetings of the Politburo at short notice when Chernenko was too ill to attend. More importantly, the sight of a third infirm leader in a row (for Brezhnev in his last years had also been incapable of working a full day) meant that even the normally docile Central Committee might have objected if the Politburo had proposed another septuagenarian to succeed Chernenko. By the time of Chernenko’s death, just thirteen months after he succeeded Andropov, Gorbachev was, moreover, in a position to get his way. As the senior surviving secretary, it was he who called the Politburo together on the very evening that Chernenko died. The next day (March 11, 1985) he was unanimously elected Soviet leader by the Central Committee, following a unanimous vote in the Politburo.

General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev waves to the crowd at Orly Airport in Paris. REUTERS/BETTMANN. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

Those who chose him had little or no idea that they were electing a serious reformer. Indeed, Gorbachev himself did not know how fast and how radically his views would evolve. From the outset of his leadership he was convinced of the need for change, involving economic reform, political liberalization, ending the war in Afghanistan, and improving East-West relations. He did not yet believe that this required a fundamental transformation of the system. On the contrary, he thought it could be improved. By 1988, as Gorbachev encountered increasing resistance from conservative elements within the Communist Party, the ministries, the army, and the KGB, he had reached the conclusion that systemic change was required.

of his earliest appointments that took most observers by surprise was the replacement of the longserving Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, by the Georgian Party first secretary, Eduard Shevardnadze, a man who had not previously set foot in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Yet Shevardnadze became an imaginative and capable executor of a foreign policy aimed at ending the Cold War. At least as important a promotion was that given to Alexander Yakovlev, who was not even a candidate member of the Central Committee at the time when Gorbachev became party leader, but who by the summer of 1987 was both a secretary of the Central Committee and a full member of the Politburo. Yakovlev owed this extraordinarily speedy promotion entirely to the backing of Gorbachev. He, in turn, was to be an influential figure on the reformist wing of the Politburo during the second half of the 1980s.

Initially, Gorbachev had made a series of personnel changes that he hoped would make a difference. Some of these appointments were bold and innovative, others turned out to be misjudged. One

Other appointments were less successful. Yegor Ligachev, a secretary of the Central Committee who had backed Gorbachev strongly for the leadership, was rapidly elevated to full membership in the


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Politburo and for a time was de facto second secretary within the leadership. But as early as 1986 it was clear that his reformism was within very strict limits. Already he was objecting to intellectuals reexamining the Soviet past and taking advantage of the new policy of glasnost (openness or transparency) that Gorbachev had enunciated. Successive heads of the KGB and of the Ministry of Defense were still more conservative than Ligachev, and the technocrat, Nikolai Ryzhkov, as chairman of the Council of Ministers, was reluctant to abandon the economic planning system in which, as a factory manager and, subsequently, state official, he had made his career. Gorbachev embraced the concept of demokratizatsiya (democratization) from the beginning of his General Secretaryship, although the term he used most often was perestroika (reconstruction). Initially, the first of these terms was not intended to be an endorsement of pluralist democracy, but signified rather a liberalization of the system, while perestroika was a useful synonym for reform, since the very term reform had been taboo in Soviet politics for many years. Between 1985 and 1988, however, the scope of these concepts broadened. democratization began to be linked to contested elections. Some local elections with more than one candidate had already taken place before Gorbachev persuaded the Nineteenth Party Conference of the Communist Party during the summer of 1988 to accept competitive elections for a new legislature, the Congress of People’s Deputies, to be set up the following year. That decision, which filled many of the regional party officials with well-founded foreboding, was to make the Soviet system different. Even though the elections were not multiparty (the first multiparty elections were in 1993), the electoral campaigns were in many regions and cities keenly contested. It became plain just how wide a spectrum of political views lay behind the monolithic facade the Communist Party had traditionally projected to the outside world and to Soviet citizens.

great deal of socioeconomic change during the decades that separated Stalin’s death from Gorbachev’s coming to power, there was one important institutional continuity that, paradoxically, facilitated reforms that went beyond the wildest dreams of Soviet dissidents and surpassed the worst nightmares of the KGB. That was the power and authority of the general secretaryship of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, the post Gorbachev held from March 1985 until the dissolution of the CPSU in August 1991 and which—in particular, for the first four of his six and one-half years at the top of the Soviet political system—made him the principal policy maker within the country. Perestroika, which had originally meant economic restructuring and limited reform, came to stand for transformative change of the Soviet system. Both the ambiguity of the concept and traditional party norms kept many officials from revolting openly against perestroika until it was too late to close the floodgates of change. A major impetus to Gorbachev’s initial reforms had been the long-term decline in the rate of economic growth. Indeed, the closest thing to a consensus in the Soviet Union in 1985–1986 was the need to get the country moving again economically. A number of economic reforms introduced by Gorbachev and Ryzhkov succeeded in breaking down the excessive centralization that had been a problem of the unreformed Soviet economic system. For example, the Law on the State Enterprise of 1987 strengthened the authority of factory managers at the expense of economic ministries, but it did nothing to raise the quantity or quality of production. The Enterprise Law fostered inflation, promoted inter-enterprise debt, and facilitated failure to pay taxes to the central budget.

While glasnost had brought into the open a constituency favorably disposed to such reforms, no such radical departure from Soviet democratic centralism could have occurred without the strong backing of Gorbachev. Up until the last two years of the existence of the Soviet Union the hierarchical nature of the system worked to Gorbachev’s advantage, even when he was pursuing policies that were undermining the party hierarchy and, in that sense, his own power base. While there had been a

The central budget also suffered severely from one of the earliest policy initiatives supported by Gorbachev and urged upon him by Ligachev. This was the anti-alcohol campaign, which went beyond exhortation and involved concrete measures to limit the production, sale, and distribution of alcohol. By 1988 this policy was being relaxed. In the meantime, it had some measure of success in cutting down the consumption of alcohol. Alcohol-related accidents declined, and some health problems were alleviated. Economically, however, the policy was extremely damaging. The huge profits on which the state had relied from the sale of alcohol, on which it had a monopoly, were cut drastically not only because of a fall in consumption but also because,

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under conditions of semi-prohibition, moonshine took the place of state-manufactured vodka. Since the launch of perestroika had also coincided with a drop in the world oil price, this was a loss of revenue the state and its political leadership could not afford. Gorbachev had, early in his general secretaryship, been ready to contemplate market elements within the Soviet economy. By 1989–1990 he had increasingly come to believe that market forces should be the main engine of growth. Nevertheless, he favored what he first called a “socialist market economy” and later a “regulated market.” He was criticized by market fundamentalists for using the latter term, which they saw as an oxymoron. Although by 1993 Yegor Gaidar, a firm supporter of the market, was observing that “throughout the world the market is regulated.” Gorbachev initially endorsed, and then retreated from, a radical but (as its proponents were later to admit) unrealistic policy of moving the Soviet Union to a market economy within five hundred days. The Five-HundredDay Plan was drawn up by a group of economists, chosen in equal numbers by Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin (the latter by this time a major player in Soviet and Russian politics), during the summer of 1990. In setting up the working group, in consultation with Yeltsin, Gorbachev completely bypassed the Communist Party. He had been elected president of the Soviet Union by the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR in March 1990 and was increasingly relying on his authority in that role. However, the presidency did not have the institutional underpinning that the party apparatus had provided for a General Secretary—until Gorbachev consciously loosened the rungs of the ladder on which he had climbed to the top. Ultimately, in the face of strong opposition from state and party authorities attempting to move to the market in a giant leap, Gorbachev sought a compromise between the views of the market enthusiasts, led by Stanislav Shatalin and Grigory Yavlinsky, and those of the chairman of the Council of Ministers and his principal economic adviser, Leonid Abalkin. Because radical democrats tended also to be in favor of speedy marketization, Gorbachev’s hesitation meant that he lost support in that constituency. People who had seen Gorbachev as the embodiment and driving force of change in and of the Soviet system increasingly in 1990–1991 transferred their support to Yeltsin, who in June 1991 was elected president of Russia in a convincing firstround victory. Since he had been directly elected,


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and Gorbachev indirectly, this gave Yeltsin a greater democratic legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of citizens, even though the very fact that contested elections had been introduced into the Soviet system was Gorbachev’s doing. If Gorbachev had taken the risk of calling a general election for the presidency of the Soviet Union a year earlier, rather than taking the safer route of election by the existing legislature, he might have enhanced his popular legitimacy, extended his own period in office, and extended the life of the Soviet Union (although, to the extent that it was democratic, it would have been a smaller union, with the Baltic states as the prime candidates for early exit). In March 1990, the point at which he became Soviet president, Gorbachev was still ahead of Yeltsin in the opinion polls of the most reliable of survey research institutes, the All-Union (subsequently All-Russian) Center for the Study of Public Opinion. It was during the early summer of that year that Yeltsin moved ahead of him. By positing the interests of Russia against those of the Union, Yeltsin played a major role in making the continuation of a smaller Soviet Union an impossibility. By first liberalizing and then democratizing, Gorbachev had taken the lid off the nationalities problem. Almost every nation in the country had a long list of grievances and, when East European countries achieved full independence during the course of 1989, this emboldened a number of the Soviet nationalities to demand no less. Gorbachev, by this time, was committed to turning the Soviet system into something different— indeed, he was well advanced in the task of dismantling the traditional Soviet edifice—but he strove to keep together a multinational union by attempting to turn a pseudo-federal system into a genuine federation or, as a last resort, a looser confederation. Gorbachev’s major failures were unable to prevent disintegration of the union and not improving economic performance. However, since everything was interconnected in the Soviet Union, it was impossible to introduce political change without raising national consciousness and, in some cases, separatist aspirations. If the disintegration of the Soviet Union is compared with the breakup of Yugoslavia, what is remarkable is the extent to which the Soviet state gave way to fifteen successor states with very little bloodshed. It was also impossible to move smoothly from an economic system based over many decades on one set of principles (a centralized, command economy)

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to a system based on another set of principles (market relations) without going through a period of disruption in which things were liable to get worse before they got better. Gorbachev’s failures were more than counterbalanced by his achievements. He changed Soviet foreign policy dramatically, reaching important arms control agreements with U.S. president Reagan and establishing good relations with all the Soviet Union’s neighbors. Defense policy was subordinated to political objectives, and the underlying philosophy of kto kogo (who will defeat whom) gave way to a belief in interdependence and mutual security. These achievements were widely recognized internationally—most notably with the award to Gorbachev in 1990 of the Nobel Peace Prize. If Gorbachev is faulted in Russia today, it is for being overly idealistic in the conduct of foreign relations, to an extent not fully reciprocated by his Western interlocutors. The Cold War had begun with the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe. It ended when one East and Central European country after another became independent in 1989 and when Gorbachev accepted the loss of Eastern Europe, something all his predecessors had regarded as nonnegotiable. Gorbachev’s answer to the charge from domestic hard-liners that he had “surrendered” Eastern Europe was to say: “What did I surrender, and to whom? Poland to the Poles, the Czech lands to the Czechs, Hungary to the Hungarians....” After the failed coup against Gorbachev of August 1991, when he was held under house arrest on the Crimean coast while Yeltsin became the focal point of resistance to the putschists, his political position was greatly weakened. With the hard-liners discredited, disaffected nationalities pressed for full independence, and Yeltsin became increasingly intransigent in pressing Russian interests at the expense of any kind of federal union. In December 1991 the leaders of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian republics got together to announce that the Soviet Union was ceasing to exist. Gorbachev bowed to the inevitable and on December 25 resigned from the presidency of a state, the USSR, which then disappeared from the map. During the post-Soviet period Gorbachev held no position of power, but he continued to be politically active. His relations with Yeltsin were so bad that at one point Yeltsin attempted to prevent him from travelling abroad, but abandoned that policy following protests from Western leaders. Throughout the Yeltsin years, Gorbachev was never invited to the Kremlin, although he was con-

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sulted on a number of occasions by Vladimir Putin when he succeeded Yeltsin. Gorbachev’s main activities were centered on the foundation he headed, an independent think-tank of social-democratic leanings, which promoted research, seminars, and conferences on developments within the former Soviet Union and on major international issues. Gorbachev became the author of several books, most notably two volumes of memoirs published in Russian in 1995 and, in somewhat abbreviated form, in English and other languages in 1996. Other significant works included a book of political reflections, based on tape-recorded conversationswith his Czech friend from university days, Zdenek Mlynár, which appeared in 2002. He became active also on environmental matters as president of the Green Cross International. Domestically, Gorbachev lent his name and energy to an attempt to launch a Social Democratic Party, but with little success. He continued to be admired abroad and gave speeches in many different countries. Indeed, the Gorbachev Foundation depended almost entirely on its income from its president’s lecture fees and book royalties. Gorbachev will, however, be remembered above all for his contribution to six years that changed the world, during which he was the last leader of the USSR. Notwithstanding numerous unintended consequences of perestroika, of which the most regrettable in Gorbachev’s eyes, was the breakup of the Union, the long-term changes for the better introduced in the Gorbachev era—and to a significant degree instigated by him—greatly outweigh the failures. Ultimately, Gorbachev’s place in history is likely to rest upon his playing the most decisive role in ending the Cold War and on his massive contribution to the blossoming of freedom, in Eastern Europe and Russia itself.

See also:

AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; DEMOCRATIZATION;

GLASNOST; GORBACHEV, RAISA MAXIMOVNA; NEW POLITICAL THINKING; PERESTROIKA; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Braithwaite, Rodric. (2002). Across the Moscow River: The World Turned Upside Down. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Breslauer, George. (2002). Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders. New York: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Archie. (1996). The Gorbachev Factor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


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Brown, Archie, and Shevtsova, Lilia, eds. (2001). Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin: Political Leadership in Russia’s Transition. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Chernyaev, Anatoly. (2000). My Six Years with Gorbachev. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1996). Memoirs. New York: Doubleday. Gorbachev, Mikhail, and Mlynár, Zdenek. (2001). Conversations with Gorbachev. New York: Columbia University Press. Hough, Jerry F. (1997). Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Ligachev, Yegor. (1993). Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin. New York: Pantheon Books. McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Matlock, Jack F., Jr. (1995). Autopsy of an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union. New York: Random House. Palazchenko, Pavel. (1997). My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze: The Memoir of a Soviet Interpreter. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ARCHIE BROWN

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thing with his wife, including high-level politics and the affairs of state. Raisa, as she became universally known, was intellectually well equipped for the role she played. Though she had to attend many different schools as her father, a railway worker, moved from place to place, she gained a gold medal for maximum grades in all subjects and entered the philosophy department at Moscow State University in 1949. Later she did pioneering sociological research, gained the Russian equivalent of a Ph.D., and published a book in 1969 on the way of life of the peasantry in the Stavropol region (where her husband was the First Secretary of the Communist Party). Whereas many Soviet officials had books produced for them by hired hands, Raisa Gorbachev did her own field research and writing. As a very visible “First Lady” in the Soviet Union between 1985 and 1991, she aroused envy and resentment at home (for her glamour and smart clothes) as well as admiration, but she was much more universally liked and respected abroad. She played a significant part in projecting both the new image and new reality of Soviet politics following the accession of her husband to the highest post in the Kremlin.

See also:


BIBLIOGRAPHY

GORBACHEV, RAISA MAXIMOVNA

Brown, Archie. (1996). The Gorbachev Factor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(1932–1999), “first lady” of the Soviet Union, spouse of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1996). Memoirs. London: Transworld.

Raisa Maximovna Titarenko was born on January 5, 1932, in Siberia and died at the age of 67 on September 21, 1999. She married Mikhail Gorbachev, a fellow student at Moscow State University in 1953 and achieved fame as the first spouse of a Soviet leader to accompany him on all his travels. This made a substantial contribution to the favorable impact the Gorbachevs had on their many foreign interlocutors.

Gorbachev, Raisa. (1991). I Hope: Reminiscences and Reflections. New York: HarperCollins.

Raisa Gorbachev became one of the best-known women in the world, partly because her attractive appearance, vivacity, and self-assurance were so much at odds with the image the wives of highranking Soviet politicians had projected hitherto. Her partnership with her husband was exceptionally close. It caused a sensation when Gorbachev revealed, in answer to a question from an American television interviewer, that he discussed every-


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GORCHAKOV, ALEXANDER MIKHAILOVICH (1798–1883), Chancellor and Foreign Minister of the Russian Empire, 1856–1881. A descendant of an illustrious Russian aristocratic family, Alexander Gorchakov was educated at the lyceum in Tsarskoye Selo that is best known for his classmate, Alexander Pushkin. He excelled as a classical scholar and gained more than the usual fluency in Latin and French. He chose a

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diplomatic career, entering the foreign ministry under the tutelage of Count Karl Nesselrode, serving as minister to Stuttgart and Württemberg during the 1830s and 1840s and to the German Confederation, where he first met Otto von Bismarck. His promotion to Austrian ambassador during the Crimean War was a more serious test of his diplomatic ability and won his recognition as a worthy successor to Nesselrode. He was, nevertheless, a sharp critic, not only of the blunders that led to the war, but also of the peace terms that resulted. He consistently counseled caution on Russian involvement in the Balkans, a policy unheeded by his predecessors and successors, to Russia’s and the world’s misfortune. As a true Russian following a German master, he rose to the occasion of the Russian defeat in the Crimean War to be Foreign Minister and Chancellor under Tsar Alexander II. In a period of vulnerability and weakness during the reforms of the tsar, he maintained a conservative-cautious front in European diplomacy, while gradually managing to nullify most of the ignominious restrictions of the Treaty of Paris (1856), such as the restrictions on warships in the Black Sea. His major subsequent accomplishments were to shield successfully the substantial Russian expansion in Central Asia (Turkistan) and the Far East (the acquisition of the Maritime Provinces) from European interference and to dispose of a costly and vulnerable territory in North America (Alaska) to the United States in 1867. His greatest accomplishment was the achievement of a dominant position for Russia in the Balkans through the treaty negotiations at San Stefano that concluded the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 and at the Congress of Berlin that followed. His over-commitment to pan-Slavic and nationalist Russian goals, however, moved Russia into the center of Great Power rivalries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sowing the seeds for the debacle of World War I.

Russian chancellor clearly resented the appearance of a German domination of Russian policy. While Bismarck suffered dismissal by his own government in 1879, Gorchakov overstayed his tenure, becoming a senile embarrassment by 1881. Unfortunately for both major European powers, none would follow with equal skill, international outlook, prestige, and ability to compromise and maintain peace. It is perhaps no surprise that Vladimir Putin’s “new Russia” recognizes Gorchakov as a statesman who successfully promoted Russian interests in international relations and, in his honor, awarded the annual “Gorchakov peace prize,” in 2002 to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.

See also:

ALEXANDER II; NESSELRODE, KARL ROBERT;

PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jelavich, Barbara.(1964). A Century of Russian Foreign Policy, 1814–1914. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Kennan, George F.(1979). The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. NORMAN E. SAUL

GORDON, PATRICK LEOPOLD (1635–1699), born in Cronden, Aberdeen, Scotland, died in Moscow.

Much of Gorchakov’s success in advancing Russia’s European interests, however, could also be credited to Bismarck, who promoted GermanRussian collaboration, supported Gorchakov’s initiatives, and whose paramount role in European diplomacy overshadowed Gorchakov’s. In response, Gorchakov willingly supported German aggression in Holstein and in the Franco-Prussian War, thus promoting Bismarck’s creation of the German Empire. They were partners in both waging limited wars for expansionist gains and in preserving general peace through aggressive diplomacy, but the

Patrick Leopold Gordon, known in Russia as Petr Ivanovich Gordon, was a descendant of a Scottish Catholic aristocratic family and studied at Braunberg College in Danzig (Gdan ´ sk) where he graduated in 1655. Gordon served in the Swedish and Polish armies, and then entered Russian service in 1661 with the rank of major, given the task of training New Formation regiments. Gordon was dispatched as an unofficial Russian envoy to England in 1666–1667 where he met with James II and played an important role in reviving Anglo-Russian relations, including trade which had been of marginal significance since the expulsion of the English from the Russian interior in 1649. He advised the English government and the Muscovy Company on strategies to adopt for negotiations with Russia. He also was an active participant in the Chyhyryn (Chigirin) campaign in 1677–1678

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and the Crimean expeditions of 1687 and 1689. Gordon headed the Butyrskii Regiment, was promoted to general-major in 1678, and general-lieutenant in 1683. Having supported the regime of Sof’ia Alekseevna, in 1689 he switched sides back to Peter I (the Great) who deposed his half-sister. Gordon became one of Peter’s close associates and played a crucial role in the creation of a regular Russian army. He headed the Kozhukhov campaign of 1694 and obtained Peter’s permission for the presence in Russia of a Roman Catholic clergy, and in 1694 founded a Catholic church in Moscow. Gordon was a leader of the Azov campaigns of 1695–1696, and was in charge of the seizure of the fortress in 1696. Gordon subdued the Strel’tsy (Musketeer) Uprising of 1698. He authored an extensive diary describing his experiences in Sweden, Poland, and Russia, 1655–1699, and also produced a large number of surviving letters pertaining to Anglo-Russian political and commercial relations, and late Muscovite political history.

See also:

PETER I

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gordon, Patrick.(1859). Passages from the Diary of General Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries, AD. 1635-AD. 1699. Aberdeen: Printed for the Spalding Club. Konovalov, Sergei. (1963). “England and Russia: Two Missions, 1666–8,” Oxford Slavonic Papers 10:47–58. Konovalov, Sergei. (1964). “Patrick Gordon’s Dispatches from Russia, 1667.” Oxford Slavonic Papers 11:8–16. Konovalov, Sergei. (1967). “Sixteen Further Letters of Patrick Gordon,” Oxford Slavonic Papers 13:72–95. Poe, Marshall T. (2000). “A People Born to Slavery: Russia.” In Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476— 1748. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. JARMO T. KOTILAINE

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Born of a noble family, Goremykin spent his long life almost entirely in public service. During the 1860s, while an official in Russian Poland, he took a special interest in peasant affairs, and later he was involved in many studies of rural issues. Characteristic of his record, however, he never proposed any solutions. After various posts in the Senate, the Ministry of Justice, and the Ministry of Interior, Goremykin was appointed minister of Interior in October 1895 by the new tsar, Nicholas II, who valued him as a “safe” bureaucrat and a staunch supporter of the autocracy. Goremykin assured Nicholas that Russian society was basically stable and only some “completion and repair” was required to fix minor problems. Goremykin proposed extending the zemstvo system into the empire’s western provinces plus a few borderlands, but Nicholas, fearing the spread of liberal ideas, decided in October 1899 to replace Goremykin. After the tsar became disillusioned with Sergei Witte’s reform efforts in 1905 and 1906, he fired Witte as prime minister in April 1906 and brought in Goremykin, then sixty-seven years old. Goremykin discarded the program Witte had intended to submit to the First Duma and stonewalled the Duma’s demands. Having decided to dismiss the Duma and seeking a stronger leader, the tsar sent Goremykin into retirement in July 1906, replacing him with Peter Stolypin. But in January 1914 Goremykin, at the age of seventy-four, again became prime minister. Because of his frailty and lack of initiative and because he rebuffed public attempts to improve the government’s war effort, Goremykin came to symbolize the regime’s incompetence and callousness. Despite public pressure, Nicholas II stuck by his decrepit prime minister until January 1916, when Goremykin was finally replaced.

See also:

NICHOLAS II; STOLYPIN, PETER AKRADIEVICH;

WITTE, SERGEI YULIEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GOREMYKIN, IVAN LONGINOVICH (1839–1917), minister of interior and twice prime minister under Nicholas II. Ivan Loginovich Goremykin was the prototypical bureaucrat and conservative leader of late tsarist times, and became, especially during World War I, a symbol of the old regime’s outdatedness and resistance to change.


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Hosking, Geoffrey. (1973). The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907–1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kokovtsov, V. N. (1935). Out of My Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1986). Passage through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914–1918. New York: Simon and Schuster. JOHN M. THOMPSON

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GORKY, MAXIM (1868–1936), renowned writer and playwright. Maxim Gorky (Maxim the Bitter) was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in Nizhny Novgorod during the reign of Tsar Alexander II and died in the Stalinist Soviet Union. Gorky was orphaned at an early age, and his formal education ended when he was ten because his impoverished grandparents could not support him. He was self-taught in many areas, including literature, philosophy, and history, both Russian and Western. Gorky rose to prominence early in life and made his mark as a writer, playwright, publicist, and publisher in Russia and abroad. His literary career began in 1892 with the publication of the story “Makar Chudra.” His articles and stories were soon appearing in provincial newspapers and journals. His ideas of the writer’s involvement in the social, political, and economic problems facing Russia were close to those of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir G. Korolenko, who became his mentor and friend. Some of his literary works had important political sig-

nificance, such as the poem Burevestnik (The Stormy Petrel), which in 1901 prophesied the oncoming storm of revolution. While visiting the United States in 1906 on a mission to win friends for the revolution and raise funds for the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP), he wrote the novel Mat (Mother). Gorky’s revolutionary ideology lay in his insistence on the inevitability of radical change in Russian society. Disillusioned with the passivity and ignorance of the peasant, Gorky gradually abandoned narodnik (populist) ideology in favor of social democracy. He financed Vladimir Lenin’s Iskra (The Spark). At the same time he supported other parties, such as the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Liberals. The events of Bloody Sunday and the Revolution of 1905 induced Gorky to become involved, for the only time in his life, in revolutionary work. He wrote articles for the first legal Bolshevik newspaper, Novaia zhizn (New Life), gave financial assistance, and criticized the tsar’s October Manifesto for its conservatism. Warned of his imminent arrest, Gorky left Russia for the Italian island of Capri and did not return until 1913. Alienated by the Lenin and the RSDWP, Gorky joined a group led by Alexander A. Bogdanov, who shared his belief in mass education. With Bogdanov and Anatoly V. Lunacharsky, he organized a school for underground party workers. This was also the time of the emergence of a new religion called Bogostroitelstvo (God-building), best defined as a theory of the divinity of the masses. Gorky’s Ispoved (Confession), written in 1908, served as an exposition of this belief and led to a break with Lenin. On his return to Russia in 1913, Gorky devoted his time, ability, and resources to advancing Russian education and culture, projects brought to an end by World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Gorky was enthusiastic about the February Revolution, hoping that Russia would become a liberal democratic state. Soon after Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917, Gorky, writing in Novaia zhizn (New Life), criticized the Bolshevik propaganda for a socialist revolution. These views appeared in articles called Nesvoevremennye mysli (Untimely Thoughts). Russia, wrote Gorky, was not ready for the socialist revolution envisioned by the Bolsheviks.

Writer Maxim Gorky established the Socialist Realism genre. ARCHIVE PHOTOS, INC./HERBERT. REPRODUCED

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Under Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Gorky saw it as his task to save Russia’s cultural treasures and intellectual elite. In 1921, horrified by the cruelty and bloodshed of the civil war, he decided to leave Soviet Russia but not before he succeeded in ob-


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taining American aid for the country’s famine victims. His second exile was spent mostly in Sorrento, Italy. Among his political writings of this period is the essay O russkom krestianstve (On the Russian Peasantry), which appeared in 1922 in Berlin and during the 1980s in the Soviet Union. A bitter indictment of the Russian peasantry, it was resented by both the Russian émigré community and Soviet leaders. In 1928, under pressure from Josef Stalin, Gorky returned to the Soviet Union. The years from 1928 to1936 were trying for him, for he could see but not speak of the realities of Stalinist Russia. He became an icon and cooperated with the regime, apparently believing that socialism would modernize Russia. The cause of Gorky’s death in 1936 is still debated, some maintaining that he died of natural causes, others that he was a victim of a Stalinist purge. Similarly, opinion in today’s Russia is divided on the question of Gorky as a political activist. Gorky was a great political activist and writer of short stories, plays, memoirs, and novels such as Foma Gordeev, The Artamonovs, the trilogy My Childhood, In the World, and My Universities, and The Life of Klim Samgin.

See also:

KOROLENKO, VLADIMIR GALAKTIONOVICH; SO-

CIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY; SOCIALIST REALISM; TOLSTOY, LEO NIKOLAYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Scherr, Barry P. (1988). Maxim Gorky. Boston: Twayne. Weil, Irwin. (1966). Gorky: His Literary Development and Influence on Soviet Intellectual Life. New York: Random House. Yedlin, Tovah. (1999). Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography. Westport, CT: Praeger. TOVAH YEDLIN

GOSBANK Gosbank (the State Bank of the USSR) was the Soviet Union’s monobank. Characteristic of command economies, monobanks combine central and commercial banking functions into a single stateowned institution. Gosbank’s primary tasks were to issue cash and credit according to government directives, and to operate the payments and clearing system. The Soviet government created Gos-


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bank in October 1921 as the State Bank of the Russian Federation and changed its name to the State Bank of the USSR (Gosbank) in July 1923. The Soviet government permitted communal and cooperative banks to exist separately during the New Economic Policy period of the 1920s, but a series of banking reforms from 1930 to 1932 ended these last vestiges of commercial activity. Several organizational changes ensued in the following years, and by the mid-1960s Gosbank’s structure had crystallized. The USSR Council of Ministers directly controlled Gosbank. Gosbank’s director sat on the Council of Ministers, and the Council nominated the members of Gosbank’s board. Besides its main branches in each of the fifteen union republics and sub-branches in autonomous republics, territories, and regions, Gosbank controlled three subordinate banks: Stroibank USSR (the AllUnion Bank for Investment Financing), Sberbank USSR (the Savings Bank), and Vneshtorgbank (the Foreign Trade Bank). In addition, Gosbank and Vneshtorgbank controlled foreign subsidiary banks in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Luxembourg, and Vienna. The oldest and most prominent were Moscow Narodny Bank, founded in London in 1919, and Eurobank, founded in Paris in 1925. As a part of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring) program, the Soviet government dismantled the monobank in January 1988 and created a two-tiered banking system. Gosbank became a central bank, and retained only its major offices in the republics, large cities, and oblasts. The state foreign trade bank (now renamed Vneshekonombank) and Sberbank remained under Gosbank’s direct control. The rest of Gosbank split off into three specialized banks. Agroprombank (the Agro-Industrial Bank) and Zhilsotsbank (the Housing and Social Development Bank) emerged from Gosbank proper, while Stroibank became Promstroibank (the IndustrialConstruction Bank). In 1990 the Russian government transformed a Moscow branch of Gosbank into the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) during the battle for sovereignty between the Soviet and Russian governments. The CBR and Gosbank operated in parallel until after the failed coup attempt against Gorbachev in August 1991, when the Soviet governing bodies lost their hold on power. On August 23, Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered the USSR Council of Ministers to complete the transfer of Union-level organizations on Russian territory to the custody

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of the Russian state by the end of the year. On November 15, Yeltsin took over, by decree, the USSR Ministry of Finance and the USSR Chief Administration for the Production of State Bank Notes, Coins, and Medals. The Presidium of the Russian Supreme Soviet then unilaterally passed a resolution dissolving Gosbank and transferring its “facilities, documents, and specialists” to the CBR. On January 1, 1992, the CBR officially took over the rest of Gosbank’s resources in Russia, and Gosbank ceased to exist.

See also:

BANKING SYSTEM, SOVIET; CENTRAL BANK OF

RUSSIA; SBERBANK; STROIBANK

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Garvy, George. (1977). Money, Financial Flows, and Credit in the Soviet Union. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. Hellman, Joel. (1993). Breaking the Bank: The Political Economy of Banking Reform in the Soviet Union. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York. Kuschpèta, Olga. (1978). The Banking and Credit System of the USSR. Leiden, Netherlands: Nijhoff Social Sciences Division. Zwass, Adam. (1979). Money, Banking, and Credit in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe. JULIET JOHNSON

GOSIZDAT State publishing house of the Russian Republic. Gosizdat was the most important publishing house in Soviet Russia between 1919 and 1930, and played an important role in the creation of the Soviet publishing system. After coming to power, the Bolsheviks nationalized most private book publishers and printers, transferring their assets to local party and state organizations, which used them to set up their own publishing operations. When the new publishing system proved too disorganized and chaotic, Gosizdat was founded in May 1919 to provide a centralized alternative. Gosizdat started as a contract-printer, receiving most of its editorial content from other Soviet institutions, though it did produce some titles independently. It also acted as a regulatory body overseeing the work of remaining local publishing houses, controlling their

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access to raw materials and enforcing political censorship. Gosizdat’s production during this period consisted primarily of short agitational and military titles, though it also published some longer scientific works. These books and pamphlets were state-funded and distributed at no charge. Gosizdat’s output was almost entirely in the Russian language. With the onset of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, the Soviet publishing industry and Gosizdat underwent dramatic changes. Publishing was decentralized, as Soviet institutions were permitted to open their own publishing operations, and books became priced commodities. Gosizdat lost its regulatory functions and focused on producing its own books, though it continued to do some contract printing. Unlike most Russian-language publishing houses, whose production was specialized (at least in theory), Gosizdat remained a universal publishing house, issuing works on a wide variety of subjects, including fiction, children’s literature, scientific texts, propaganda, and works on Marxism and Leninism. It had monopolies on the publication of Russian literary classics and textbooks. Gosizdat issued between 25 and 40 percent of Soviet Russian-language book production (measured by pages) each year in the 1920s. Gosizdat also published a number of important periodicals. During the 1920s, Gosizdat absorbed a number of prominent Soviet publishing houses, including Krasnaya nov, Priboy, and Zemlya i fabrika. Gosizdat was techically part of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, though in practice it answered directly to the Communist Party’s Central Committee, which appointed its board of directors, reviewed editorial appointments, and monitored its work. Gosizdat acted as the Central Committee’s main book publisher and was afforded special privileges, including large state subsidies and freedom from external ideological censorship. In August 1930, Gosizdat provided the foundation for a new, centralized publishing conglomerate, the Association of State Publishing Houses (OGIZ), into which most existing Soviet publishing houses were merged. Even after this time, it was not uncommon for Soviet sources to use the term gosizdat to describe the Russian Republic’s main publishing operation, whatever its official name. Variants of the term were also used to describe the main publishing house serving some republics or languages: The Tatar State Publishing House, for instance, was known as Tatizdat or Tatgiz. Spe-


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cialized Russian-language publishing houses were also popularly known by similar acronyms; for example, the State Technical Publishing House was Gostekhizdat.

See also:

CENSORSHIP; CENTRAL COMMITTEE; SAMIZDAT

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Friedberg, Maurice. (1962). Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets. New York: Columbia University Press. Kassof, Brian Evan. (2000). “The Knowledge Front: Politics, Ideology, and Economics in the Soviet Book Publishing Industry, 1925–1935.” Ph. D. diss., University of California, Berkeley. Kenez, Peter. (1985). The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. BRIAN KASSOF

GOSKOMSTAT The term Goskomstat is the abbreviation used to designate the State Committee for Statistics (Gosudarstvennyi Komitet Statistiki, or Goskomstat), which, in July 1997, replaced the Central Statistical Agency (TsSU). Founded in 1918, the Soviet office for statistics went through various institutional transformations starting in January 1930, when central planning was established. The office lost its institutional independence that year and was subsumed under Gosplan, the State Planning Administration. Its missions were redefined. From then on its main task would be to supply Gosplan with the numbers it needed to create the indicators necessary to the planned management of the Soviet economy and society. Conflicts erupted as early as the end of the 1920s between TsSU statisticians and the political leadership on a number of issues, particularly on the measurement of crop levels and the analysis of social differences in the countryside. During the 1930s, disagreements on population numbers led to the purges that touched most of the officials in charge of the census of 1937. In 1948, TsSU once again became independent from Gosplan, but its activity remained essentially focused on the production of numbers for the planning and improvement of indicators. Following the launching of perestroika policies, in 1985, a decree dated July 17, 1987, stated the necessity to “rebuild the foundations for statistical


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activity in the country.” Nevertheless, planned management of the economy was not abandoned right away. The year 1991 marked a breaking off in this respect with Goskomstat entering a period of reforms clearly oriented toward the abandonment of planning and the transition to a market economy. First, the disappearance of the Soviet state caused the breakup of USSR’s Goskomstat followed by the transfer of its various services to each new state born out of the former USSR: each created its own statistics committee or department. After the founding of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), on December 30, 1991, a statistics committee was created to coordinate the activities of statistics committees of CIS member states. Adjustment to the new constraints imposed upon the production of statistical data resulting from the transition to a market economy brought about a number of different programs affecting Goskomstat starting in 1992. The recasting of economic indicators, the elaboration of new monitoring tools—notably for trade and financial activities—and methods for gathering economic data from a growing number of companies outside the state sector, as well as the construction of a new national accounting system, were all accomplished thanks to the support of experience from statistical administrations of Western countries. Concern for the ability to compare Russian statistical data with those released by other countries explains the attention that was given to the elaboration of principles for the calculation of GNP and such indicators as price, population, labor, foreign trade, and financial activity statistics that match the practices adopted by Western nations in this domain.

See also: CENTRAL STATISTICAL AGENCY; ECONOMY, CURRENT; GOSPLAN

MARTINE MESPOULET

GOSPLAN Gosplan SSSR (Gosudarstvenny planovy komitet SSSR—the State Planning Committee of the USSR), the core state committee of the Soviet economic bureaucracy, was created in 1921. During the first Five-Year Plan (1928–1932) Valerian Kuybyshev headed Gosplan. Gosplan was responsible for executing the directives of the Council of Ministries,

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translating general directives into operational plans for the ministries, and advising the Council of Ministries on a wide range of issues. Gosplan planned for the ministries, not for enterprises, although some large enterprises were planned directly by Gosplan. Gosplan communicated extensively with the ministries in the process of drafting the plan. It was subdivided into industrial departments, such as coal, ferrous metals, and machine building, and also had summary departments, such as finance, to deal with functions that crossed functional bodies. The early recognition of Gosplan’s importance came in 1925 and 1926, when it began to prepare the annual preliminary plan targets, or so-called control figures. During the 1930s the principle of guidance of economic policy on an annual basis was established, although much publicity was devoted to nonoperational five-year plans. Annual plans, including production and financial targets, so-called promfinplany, were drawn up sector by sector. By 1926 and 1927, promfinplany that were originated by ministries became dependent on the control figures. Formally, the plan era began in 1928 with the First Five-Year Plan for intensive economic growth. The Five-Year Plan was a comprehensive plan that set the major economic goals for a five-year period. The five-year goals were not put into operation in the shorter-term operational plans. Once the Soviet regime stipulated the plan figures, all levels of the economy from individual enterprises to the national level were theoretically obliged to meet those goals (“The plan is the law”). During the period from 1928 to 1932, the basic principles of Soviet planning were established. Gosplan was to be the central coordinating body to which all other planning bodies were to submit their proposals. The control figures would provide the general direction for the economy. The actual detailed operational plans for enterprises (promfinplany) were to conform to the control figures. Materials were to be allocated through a system of balances, which would elaborate the sources and uses of basic industrial materials. The long-term planning horizon was set at five years, the average period required for the completion of investment projects. Operational plans were prepared in cooperation with the planning departments of ministries, the most important of which were the all-union ministries. In day-to-day operations, inter-ministry cooperation was limited in such matters as equipment delivery and construction planning. Soviet law gave Gosplan substantial responsibilities concerning supply planning. Gosplan was charged with preparing and confirming plans

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for the distribution of production among ministries. It was Gosplan who prepared general material limits (limityu) for the ministries. Later these material limits would be broken down into product profiles by the State Committee for Material Technical Supply, Gossnab, which was formed in 1947 to assist in supply planning. Gosplan remained the primary planning body of the Soviet Union until its collapse in December 1991.

See also:

ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; FIVE-YEAR PLANS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure. Boston, MA: Addison Wesley. Hewett, Edward A. (1988). Reforming the Soviet Economy: Equality Versus Efficiency. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. PAUL R. GREGORY

GOSTI The gosti (singular: gost) were great merchants who enjoyed high social status. They are encountered in the Kievan and later Mongol period, but are best known as a corporate group that emerged in the sixteenth century and figured prominently in the economic, political, administrative, and court life of seventeenth-century Russia. In the last half of the sixteenth century, the leading merchants of Muscovy were organized into three privileged corporations: the gosti, the gostinnaya sotnya, and the sukonnaya sotnya. They were obliged to render services to the government and were compensated with certain privileges. The gosti, whose number averaged around thirty throughout the seventeenth century, stood at the top of the merchant hierarchy. The rank was not hereditary, so the government periodically designated replacements for those who had died or became incapable of rendering service. They were obliged, among other burdensome duties, to serve as the tsar’s factors, to collect customs at the port of Archangel and at Moscow, to oversee the state liquor monopoly, and to participate in ceremonial functions at the court. In return for the exercise of these duties, the gosti were freed of the obligation to quarter troops, and permitted to brew and keep stocks of liquor. They were not


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required to pay taxes imposed on other townsmen, and they were the only Russian merchants permitted to travel abroad on business. Representatives of the gosti participated in the land assemblies (zemskie sobory) and advised the rulers on questions of war and peace. They were leaders of a long-running campaign to abolish privileges granted to foreign merchants and to secure uncontested control of the domestic market. Peter the Great, dissatisfied with their perceived want of dynamism, phased them out in the first quarter of the eighteenth century.

See also:

GOSTINAYA SOTNYA; MERCHANTS; SUKKON-

NAYA SOTNYA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baron, Samuel H. (1980). “The Fate of the Gosti in the Reign of Peter the Great.” In Muscovite Russia: Collected Essays, ed. Samuel H. Baron. London: Variorum. Baron, Samuel H. (1980). “Who Were the Gosti?” In Muscovite Russia: Collected Essays, ed. Samuel H. Baron. London: Variorum. SAMUEL H. BARON

The name Gostinaya sotnya derives from the word gost (guest), which was used to refer to prosperous merchants in medieval Russia. The Gostinaya sotnya was the second most important corporation of elite merchants after the gosti (pl. of gost). Members of the Gostinaya sotnya tended to be relatives of gosti, former members of the Sukonnaya sotnya (a lower corporation of merchants), prominent local merchants, and prosperous peasant-traders. Three categories of Gostinaya sotnya members were defined in terms of wealth. Members of the Gostinaya sotnya performed official duties for the government, usually once every six years for half a year at a time. They typically served as heads or officials of local customs and taverns. They assisted gosti in large cities and conducted similar functions independently in smaller towns. They sold treasury goods at fairs

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A 1613 charter issued to members of the Gostinaya sotnya closely resembled the charter of the gosti; however, it did not authorize travel abroad. Foreign travel was subsequently permitted through government-issued passes. The Gostinaya sotnya typically sent two representatives to Assemblies of the Land (zemskie sobory). The Gostinaya sotnya had 345 members in 1601 and 1602; membership fell to 185 in 1630 and 158 in 1649. A total of 2,100 individuals joined the Gostinaya sotnya during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with a particular marked growth in the 1680s. With the introduction of the poll tax in the 1720s, members of the Gostinaya sotnya, along with townsmen, joined the stratum of merchants. GOSTI; FOREIGN TRADE; MERCHANTS; SUKON-

NAIA SOTNYA;TAXES

Literally “Guest Hundred,” a privileged corporation of Russian merchants between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries.


and abroad. In return, Gostinaya sotnya members were exempted from direct taxes, minor customs duties, and the responsibility to quarter soldiers. They were excluded from the jurisdiction of local authorities and granted other privileges, including the right to distill liquor for personal consumption. Elevated fines of ten to twenty rubles were assessed in cases of dishonor committed against Gostinaya sotnya members. Unlike the status of a gost, membership in the Gostinaya sotnya was hereditary and typically shared with other family members engaged in a joint enterprise.

See also:

GOSTINAYA SOTNYA

D V O R

R U S S I A N

H I S T O R Y

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hellie, Richard. “The Stratification of Muscovite Society: The Townsmen.” Russian History 5(2):119–175. Hittle, J. Michael. (1979). The Service City: State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. JARMO T. KOTILAINE

GOSUDARYEV DVOR Literally, “sovereign’s court,” a hierarchical institution made up of the ruler’s elite servitors during the late twelfth through seventeenth centuries. Courts of east Slavic princes usually included close members of the retinue, service cavalrymen, and household officials. Members of boyar families with established ties to the prince of Moscow

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formed the basis of the Muscovite court during the fourteenth century. The growing political power of the Muscovite ruler attracted numerous distinguished newcomers, including members of the Lithuanian and Tatar ruling families, to his court in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Muscovite rulers also incorporated the princes of territories annexed by Moscow into their court, although some of them, known as service princes, retained some organizational autonomy within the court until the end of the sixteenth century. As a result of the reforms of the 1550s, the sovereign’s court functioned on the basis of a mixture of hierarchical and territorial principles. During the second half of the sixteenth century, the court acquired a clear hierarchy of ranks: boyars, okolnichie, counselor cavalrymen, counselor secretaries, the household ranks and chancellery secretaries, the ruler’s personal guard (stolniki, stryapchie, zhiltsy), service princes, and the lowest ranks (dvorovye deti boyarskie, later vybornye dvoryane). Service relations between courtiers were subject to rules of precedence (mestnichestvo), a complex system that defined the status of a courtier on the basis of the prominence and service appointments of his ancestors and relatives. Territoriality was crucial to the court’s lowest strata, which included members of collateral branches of boyar families, people who had advanced through faithful service, and newcomers of lower status. The people who held the lowest court ranks were leading members of local cavalrymen communities and were listed by the town where they had service lands. They served in Moscow on a rotating basis. Secretaries entered the court thanks to their literacy and the patronage of the ruler or influential courtiers. A servitor’s career at court thus dependent on his pedigree, his position in the local cavalrymen community, his personal skills and merits, and the favor of his patrons. The princes of Moscow used a variety of means to secure the integrity of their court. Members of the court swore an oath of allegiance and received land grants on condition that they served the prince. Muscovite rulers secured the loyalty of distinguished newcomers by granting them superior status over the boyars, manipulating their land possessions, encouraging marriages with members of the royal family and the local elite, and subjecting the disloyal to disgrace and executions. Ivan IV’s reign saw the climax of repressions against members of the court, which was divided in two parts during the Oprichnina. The social and genealogical composition of the court, however, re-

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mained stable until the middle of the seventeenth century, when people of lower origin began entering the court’s upper strata. At the same time, the leaders of local cavalrymen communities were excluded from the court. Peter I stopped making appointments to the upper court ranks during the early 1690s. The sovereign’s court included the most combatworthy Muscovite troops and provided cadres for administrative and diplomatic tasks. An efficient military and administrative institution, the sovereign’s court was vital to the victory of the princes of Moscow over their opponents and to the functioning of the Russian state during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

See also:

BOYAR; CHANCELLERY SYSTEM; IVAN III; IVAN

IV; OPRICHNINA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alef, Gustave. (1986). The Origins of Muscovite Autocracy: The Age of Ivan III. Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte, vol. 39. Berlin: Osteuropa-Institut; Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Poe, Marshall T. (2003). The Russian Elite in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. Helsinki: The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. SERGEI BOGATYREV

GOVERNING SENATE The Governing Senate was founded in 1711. Its initial primary responsibility was to govern the empire when the emperor was on military campaigns. The establishment of the Senate was also part of a government re-organization undertaken by Peter I (1689–1725) who wished to make the government structure more responsive to his wishes and more effective at tapping society’s resources for military purposes. In 1722 it was transformed from a higher governing organ to a higher supervisory one responsible for resolving legal and administrative disputes. Catherine II (1763–1796) further systemized the Senate by dividing it into six departments with relatively clear institutional responsibilities related to administrative oversight. The governmental reforms undertaken by Alexander I (1801–1825) fundamentally changed the role of the Senate. According to his decrees of 1801 and 1802 the Senate had the right to judicial


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review and supervision of the highest governmental organs, including the newly established ministries. No legislative bill could become law without the Senate’s approval. However, one year later a new decree stripped the Senate of these powers. The founding of the ministerial system and the State Council (1810) fatally weakened the Senate’s role in practice. For the remainder of the nineteenth century it played the role of a High Court of Review and along with other institutions exercised limited administrative supervision. Until 1905 the Senate, whose forty or fifty members were chosen by the tsar, rarely met, except on ceremonial occasions. Six departments that dealt with a myriad of judicial, social, and political issues continued to work under the supervision of the Senate. After the Revolution of 1905 the role of the Senate changed once again. It became the High Criminal Court dealing with corruption in the bureaucracy. Its first department played a role in the preparations for the formation of the First Duma, while its Second Department became the supreme appellate court for land-related issues.

See also:

ALEXANDER I; CATHERINE II; PETER I

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Seton-Watson, Hugh. (1991). The Russian Empire 1801–1917. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yaney, George. (1973). The Systemization of Russian Government. London: University of Illinois Press. ZHAND P. SHAKIBI

GRAIN CRISIS OF 1928 The Grain Crisis of 1928 was economic and political in nature and was a turning point in the Soviet regime’s policy toward the peasantry, a preview of Josef Stalin’s harsh methods of collectivization. Ten years after the Revolution, agriculture was still based on individual farming, with peasants cultivating more than ninety-seven percent of the land and selling their product to the state at set procurement prices in order to meet their tax obligations. The most important product was grain, and the system of state procurement supplied grain to feed the cities and the military, and for export. Under the New Economic Policy (NEP), the existence of a free market for agricultural products helped keep procurement prices competitive. Most peasants were at or near the


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subsistence level. A small number of richer peasants (the so-called kulaks) supplied most of the grain sold on the free market. Prices for industrial products produced by the state sector were kept relatively high in order to accumulate capital. In December 1927, the Fifteenth Party Congress of the Communist Party endorsed the idea of planned economic development, requiring the state to accumulate even more capital from domestic sources, principally the peasantry, while maintaining exports. Grain procurement prices were lowered in order to keep state expenditures down. A war scare in 1927 led people to hoard food. Within this context, the grain crisis began to take shape toward the end of 1927. Although it was an average harvest, grain procurements fell precipitously at the end of the year; in November and December of 1927, procurements were about half of what they had been during the same months of the previous year. The problem was especially acute in Siberia, the Volga, and the Urals, even though the harvest had been good in these areas. Richer peasants withheld grain from the market, waiting for prices to rise. Peasants also switched from producing grain to other agricultural commodities. For example, in the Urals, while peasant grain sales to the state declined by a third, the sale of meat rose by fifty percent, egg sales doubled, and bacon sales went up four times. Stalin insisted that the kulaks were withholding grain from the market to sabotage the regime, creating as much a political problem as an economic problem. He argued that the class struggle was intensifying. In January 1928 he visited the Urals and West Siberia and called for a series of emergency measures to extract grain from the recalcitrant peasantry. In direct opposition to the views of Nikolai Bukharin and other moderates in the Politburo, quotas for compulsory grain deliveries were imposed on kulaks and also on middle peasants. Peasants responded by decreasing grain production during 1928, but this simply intensified the crisis. For the year October 1927–October 1928, grain procurements fell by fourteen percent relative to the same period a year earlier, although the harvest was down by only seven to eight percent. The grain crisis of 1928 was a critical turning point in Soviet economic and political history. Applying compulsion to the peasants rather than using economic incentives meant that NEP was dead. Most significantly, the events of 1928 showed that Stalin saw the peasantry as the enemy and established the context of a warlike crisis that would

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justify violence. The outlines of the harsh collectivization drive were already visible.

See also:

COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; KULAKS;

NEW ECONOMIC POLICY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nove, Alec. (1969). An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. London: Allen Lane. Tucker, Robert. (1990). Stalin in Power. New York: Norton. CAROL GAYLE WILLIAM MOSKOFF

GRAIN TRADE In Russia the dynamics of the grain trade depended on demand in the domestic and foreign markets. Before 1762 the export of grain was conducted under government supervision and depended on the domestic price level. If local prices exceeded an established level, export of grain was prohibited because of fears of further price rises. But even in the years of low prices, permission for the export of grain was required. The government considered grain a strategic commodity and gave this permission reluctantly. As a result, before 1762 grain trade was limited mainly to the empire’s frontiers. Only after the declaration of freedom of grain trade in 1762 did a systematic growth of grain exports begin. Before the 1780s the export of grain was prohibited only in case of a substantial price rise, and by the 1790s export became virtually free. Domestic demand for grain came from the urban population, the army, industry (mainly distillation), and the rural population of provinces that experienced a grain deficit. The demand for marketable grain was comparatively small because nearly 75 percent of the population, even as late as 1897, was engaged in agriculture and able to satisfy its need for grain with its own production. The urban population was not large (in 1914 only 15.3% of the population lived in towns, and a portion of the townspeople engaged in agriculture). The regular army was comparatively small (in 1719, 2.9% of the country’s total population; in 1795, 2.5%; in 1850, 1.5%; in 1913, 0.8%). The consumption of vodka was limited physiologically (in 1913 in Russia the consumption of vodka converted to spirit was only

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3.1 liters per capita) and the technology of distillation was improving. A constant demand for grain was felt only in the vicinity of big cities, industrial centers, and where arable land was scarce or soil poor. According to rough estimates, during the 1800s the urban population consumed 4.7 percent of all grain produced; in 1851–1860, 5.6 percent; and in 1912–1913, 9.1 percent; with industry consuming 4.1, 3.5, and 0.5 percent correspondingly; the army, 2.1, 2.1, and 1.2 percent; and exports 1.0, 3.8, and 15.7 percent. During the 1800s the share of marketable grain was nearly 12 percent of the gross yield of grain; during the 1850s, 15 percent; and in 1892–1913, 26.4 percent. The grain trade began to grow markedly after the abolition of serfdom. Domestic and, even more, foreign demand increased, both of which were stimulated by extension of the railway network. Of three most important factors stimulating the demand for grain, export was in the first place, industrialization the second, and urbanization the third. The export of marketable grain constituted 7 percent of the total grain trade during the early 1800s, 26 percent during the 1850s, and 60 percent in 1892–1893; in terms of weight the average annual export of grain amounted to 0.2 million tons, 1.1 million tons, and 10.7 million tons correspondingly. The export of grain acquired vital importance for Russia. The main export cereals were wheat, rye, barley, and oats. In the mass of exported grain in 1762–1802 the share of wheat was 48 percent; rye, 45 percent; barley, 3.9 percent; oats, 2.8 percent; other cereals, 0.3 percent; in 1841–1850, 66, 17, 4, 6, and 7 percent correspondingly; in 1912–1913, 37, 8, 41, 11, and 3 percent. Russian grain was mainly exported to Western European countries. Germany, Holland, Switzerland, and Italy imported mainly Russian grain, while England, Belgium, and France imported U.S. grain. Russia and the United States competed mainly in exports of red cereals: wheat and some barley. Grey cereals, rye and oats, were chiefly delivered from Russia and did not encounter U.S. competition. During the post-reform period considerable success was achieved in the organization of the grain trade: A whole army of trade agents appeared; credit for marketable grain was created; great amounts of capital were mobilized; means of communication, ports, and the merchant navy were improved; a tariff system was designed; a fairly dense network of elevators and granaries was formed; a corporative organization of grain tradesmen emerged; grain ex-


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Laborers in Odessa walk among the cattle-driven wagons laden with sacks of wheat, 1878. © CORBIS

changes were founded in major centers of grain trade (St. Petersburg, Moscow, Voronezh, Elizavetgrad, Borisoglebsk); information on crops, grain exports, stocks, prices, and freights became widely available. Western European commercial ethics and trade customs were gradually adopted. Despite indisputable progress, the organization of Russian grain trade did not attain the high level of development that it did in the United States, Russia’s main competitor in the world grain market. Elevators and granaries served merely as storehouses in Russia;


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classification of grains was not practiced there. Railways were not equipped with proper warehouses, rolling stock, and double track sections. Consequently, in good years, grain piled up at railway junctions, waiting for loading in the open, sometimes for up to two months. The quality of grain deteriorated, making it difficult for tradesmen to meet the conditions of contracts. The state of the roads along which grain was delivered to railway stations was unsatisfactory. Macadamized roads were few. In European Russia in 1912, there were

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6 kilometers (3.7 miles) of them per 1,000 square kilometers (386.1 square miles); in the United States, 53 kilometers (33 miles); in Germany, 516 kilometers (320.6 miles); in Great Britain, 819 kilometers (508.9 miles); and in France, 1,073 kilometers (666.7 miles). Grain was brought to the stations not when it was profitable to sell it but when roads permitted. In ports there was a lack of warehouses for grain storage as well as a lack of facilities for grain reloading. All this raised overhead expenses and prices, and reduced the competitive capacity of Russian grain. In Russia, foreign grain trade was in the hands of Western European tradesmen, and domestic trade remained in the hands of native tradesmen, mainly Jews, who purchased grain in the country and delivered it to ports for foreign exporters who gave credits and therefore dictated the conditions. The buyers-up were interested only in expanding and accelerating their turnovers. They did not attach much importance to the price level, since they made money on the difference between purchase and sale price. The sellers were peasants overburdened with various payments and landowners with big debts. They were short of liquid capital and, because of transportation conditions, not free to choose the moment of sale. Russian grain producers could neither wait for a favorable situation in the market nor exert influence upon prices, the level of which depended on crops and market competition of the sellers themselves. Inadequate organization of the grain trade resulted in the sale of Russian grain on world markets at less of a profit than U.S. grain. U.S. producers and sellers were to some extent able to regulate grain supplies to the world market, restraining the fall in prices in case of surplus grain supplies and maintaining high prices in a profitable market situation.

index of prices for domestic goods rose 6.6 times (five times during the eighteenth century). By contrast, in European countries, despite cyclic fluctuations, grain prices and the general price index had a tendency to decline in this period. In eighteenthcentury Russia, a phenomenal rise in grain prices (and generally in all prices) occurred. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Russia had stood apart from the price revolution in Europe, but during the eighteenth century Russia entered world trade, and a belated price revolution took place. The Russian price revolution resulted in a leveling of Russian and world prices. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Russian prices were about nine to ten times lower than world prices, and at the turn of the twentieth century only 20 to 30 percent lower.

On account of great export (during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grain played the same role as did oil and gasoline during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries) the level of prices was of great significance for Russia. Incomes and solvency of peasants and landlords, the country’s trade balance, and earnings from customs duties depended on the price level. From the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, the situation in the world grain markets was for the most part advantageous to Russia. Russian local grain prices, expressed in grams of gold, rose 10.2 times from 1,707 grams (60.2 ounces) to 1,914 grams (67.5 ounces) (5.7 times during the eighteenth century), while the general

The leveling of Russian and world prices occurred under the influence of the market economy laws, which required, first of all, that prices for Russian goods correspond not only with national but also with world production costs, and, second, that they be determined by the relations between demand and supply both in the Russian and world markets. As Russia was joining the world market, local grain prices were becoming less dependent on local crops and local demand, and more dependent on the situation in the world market. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the dynamics of Russian grain prices were largely determined by the world market situation, and red grain prices were fully dependent on it. All of this attests that from the beginning of the eighteenth century Russia joined the international division of labor and gradually turned into a full member of the world economy and world market, and that the principles of the market economy penetrated the Russian national economy as early as the eighteenth century, long before the reforms of the 1860s. Hence, from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century the general line of Russia’s socioeconomic evolution remained unchanged and consisted in commercialization of the economy and enhancement of the role of the market as a production regulator. Serfdom hampered and slowed down but did not prevent the development of capitalism in Russia, just as prior to 1865 slavery did not stop the development of capitalism in the United States. Grain prices exerted substantial influence upon numerous aspects of the economic, social, and political life of the country. They played an important part in the modernization of the national economy, development of social stratification of the peasantry, destruction of the peasant

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commune, and urbanization and industrialization of the country.

See also:

AGRICULTURE; ECONOMY, TSARIST; FOREIGN

TRADE; PEASANT ECONOMY.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Herlihy, Patricia. (1986). Odessa: A History, 1794–1914. Cambridge, MA: Distributed by Harvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Mironov, Boris N. (1992). “Consequences of the Price Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Russia.” Economic History Review 45(3):457–478. BORIS N. MIRONOV

GRAND ALLIANCE Officially termed the Anti-Hitlerite Coalition by the Soviet Union, the Grand Alliance (1941–1945) was a military and political coalition of countries fighting against the Axis (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan), and their satellites. The alliance evolved during World War II through common understandings and specific formal and informal agreements negotiated between the Big Three (United States, Soviet Union, and Great Britain) at wartime conferences, ministerial meetings, and periodic summits between the respective heads of state. In addition to the Big Three, the alliance included China, members of the British Commonwealth, France, and many other countries. While some formal agreements and modest liaison and coordinating bodies existed within the context of these agreements, particularly between the United States and Great Britain, the alliance as a whole formed few formal official policy organs. Evolving step by step after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the alliance was a virtual marriage of necessity between the two Western democracies and Stalin’s communist government, impelled by the reality of war and a common threat to all three powers, as well as the necessity of joining military and political forces to achieve victory in the war. The motives and attitudes of alliance members varied over time according to the military situation and the member states’ political aims. To varying degrees, the Big Three shared certain wartime goals in addition to victory: for instance, mutual military assistance, formulation of a common unified wartime military strategy, es-


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tablishment of a postwar international security organization, and elimination of any future threats from Germany and Japan. The decisive stage in the formation of the Grand Alliance occurred after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, when, prompted by fear that Germany might win the war, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared their support for the Soviet Union as “true allies in the name of the peoples of Europe and America.” Great Britain and the Soviet Union signed a mutual aid treaty in July 1941, and Stalin endorsed the peace aims of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s Atlantic Charter in September. In November the United States solidified the alliance by extending lend-lease assistance to the Soviet Union. Thereafter, a steady stream of agreements and periodic meetings between unofficial representatives, ministers, and heads of state of the three countries formalized the alliance. The most important ministerial meetings took place in London (September–October 1941) and Moscow (October 1941 and October 1943) and at the Big Three summits at Tehran (November 1943–January 1944), Yalta (Crimea) (February 1945), and Potsdam (July–August 1945). During wartime, tensions emerged within the alliance over such vital issues as the adequacy of lend-lease aid, military coordination among Allied armies, the opening of a second front on mainland Europe, the postwar boundaries of the Soviet Union, the political structure of liberated European countries, Soviet participation in the war against Japan, European reconstruction, and the shape and nature of postwar peace.

See also:

CHINA, RELATIONS WITH; FRANCE, RELATIONS

WITH; GREAT BRITAIN, RELATIONS WITH; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH; WORLD WAR II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Churchill, Winston S. (1950). The Grand Alliance. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Feis, Herbert. (1957). Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kimball, Warren F. (1997). Forged in War: Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill and the Second World War. New York: Morrow. Stoler, Mark A. (2000). Allies and Adversaries: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Grand Alliance, and U.S. Strategy in World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. DAVID M. GLANTZ

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GRAND PRINCE The title of “grand prince” designated the senior prince of the Rurikid dynasty in Rus principalities from the era of Kievan Rus until 1721. In scholarly literature on Kievan Rus the term grand prince is conventionally used to refer to the prince of Kiev. Succession to the position of grand prince was determined by principles associated with the rota system, according to which the position passed laterally from the eldest member of the senior generation of the dynasty to his younger brothers and cousins. When all members of that generation died, those members of the next generation whose fathers had actually held the position of grand prince of Kiev became eligible to inherit the position in order of seniority. Despite common usage of the term in scholarly literature, the absence of the title “grand prince” and even the title “prince” in contemporary sources, including chronicles, treaties, charters, diplomatic documents, seals, and coins, suggests that they were rarely used during the Kievan era. The title “grand prince” in tenth-century treaties concluded between the Rus and the Byzantines has been interpreted as a translation from Greek formulas rather than a reflection of official Rus usage. The title also occurs in chronicle accounts of the deaths of Yaroslav the Wise (1054), his son Vsevolod (1093), and Vsevolod’s son Vladimir Monomakh (1125), but this usage is regarded as honorific, borrowed from Byzantine models, and possibly added by later editors.

above the other grand princes. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as they absorbed the other Rus principalities into Muscovy and subordinated their princes, they not only monopolized the title “grand prince,” but also began to use other titles conveying the meaning of sovereign (gosudar or gospodar). From 1547, when Ivan IV “the Terrible” was coronated, until 1721, when Peter I “the Great” adopted the title “emperor,” the rulers of Muscovy used “grand prince and tsar” as their official titles.

See also:

KIEVAN RUS; ROTA SYSTEM; RURIKID DYNASTY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Poppe, Andrzej. (1989). “Words That Serve the Authority: On the Title of ‘Grand Prince’ in Kievan Rus.” Acta Poloniae Historica 60:159–184. JANET MARTIN

GREAT BRITAIN, RELATIONS WITH

The title “grand prince” came into more common and consistent use during the fourteenth century. In addition to its use by the prince of Vladimir, it was also adopted by the princes of Tver, Riazan, and Nizhny Novgorod by the second half of the century. The princes of Moscow, who acquired an exclusive claim to the position of grand prince of Vladimir during this period, joined the title to the phrase “of all Rus” to elevate themselves

Russia’s relations with Great Britain have been marked by chronic tension. During the nineteenth century, the British were keenly aware of tsarist Russia’s expansion into Central Asia and of the menace it might hold for lands in the British Commonwealth, particularly India. Twice during that century the British invaded Afghanistan to forestall what they perceived as a Russian threat to occupy the country and use it as a staging area for an attack on India. Prophetic of George Kennan’s “X” telegram of 1946 and the U.S. policy of containment, the British foreign minister Lord Palmerston said in 1853: “The policy and practice of the Russian government has always been to push forward its encroachments as fast and as far as the apathy or want of firmness of other governments would allow it to go, but always to stop and retire when it was met with decided resistance and then to wait for the next favorable opportunity.” That same year the British decided to resist the effort by Tsar Nicholas I (1796–1855) to enhance Russian power and influence over the Black Sea region and the Ottoman Empire. War broke out between Russia and Turkey in October 1853 over a dispute about religious rights in the Holy Land. Great Britain and France joined forces with Turkey and laid siege to Sevastopol, Russia’s naval base in the Crimea, and in September 1855 the Russians were forced to accept defeat. The Treaty of Paris (March 30, 1856),

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“Grand prince” was first used as an official title not for a prince of Kiev, but for Vsevolod “the Big Nest” of Vladimir-Suzdal (ruled 1176–1212). Within their principality it was applied to his sons Konstantin and Yuri as well. Outside of VladimirSuzdal, however, recognition of Vsevolod as grand prince, despite his dynastic seniority, was inconsistent, and during the very late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the title was occasionally attributed to rulers of Kiev.

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ending the war, was a serious diplomatic setback for Russia, because it guaranteed the integrity of Ottoman Turkey and obliged Russia to surrender southern Bessarabia, at the mouth of the Danube. The Crimean War failed to settle the Russian-British rivalry, but it impressed upon Nicholas’s successor, Alexander II, the need to overcome Russia’s backwardness in order to compete successfully with Britain and the other European powers. As a further result of the Crimean War, Austria, which had sided with Great Britain and France, lost Russia’s support in Central European affairs. Russia joined the Triple Entente with Britain and France in 1907, more as a result of the widened gap between it and the two Germanic powers and improved relations with Britain’s ally, Japan, than out of any fondness for Britain and France. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated (June 28, 1914), Russia was not prepared to see AustriaHungary defeat Serbia, a Slavic country, and the mobilization systems and interlocking alliances of the great powers undermined all attempts to avert a general war. The general disruption caused by World War I contributed to the revolutions in February and October 1917. The Bolshevik Revolution enraged the British. Vladimir Lenin and other communists called on the workers in all countries to overthrow their capitalist oppressors and characterized the war as caused by rivalries between capitalist and imperialist countries like Britain. Lenin withdrew Russia from the war and signed a separate peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk in 1918. In the aftermath, Soviet support for national liberation movements in the empire, and of anti-British sentiment and activity in the Middle East, was a special source of annoyance to Britain. To avenge the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and alarmed that the Germans might transfer troops to the Western Front, the British, French, and Japanese intervened in Russia’s Civil War, deploying troops to Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, and Vladisvostok, and later funneling material and money to the White armies opposing the Red Army. Winston Churchill (minister of munitions in 1917) made no secret of his antipathy toward Bolshevism, aiming to “strangle the infant in its crib.” Soviet policy toward Britain during the 1920s and 1930s was marked by contradictions. On the one hand, Josef Stalin tried to expand his diplomatic and commercial contacts with this archetypical imperialist power, as part of an effort to win recognition as a legitimate regime. On the other hand, he and his colleagues in the Kremlin remained


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wary of an anti-Soviet capitalist alliance and worked for the eventual demise of the capitalist system. Then, with the League of Nations weakened by the withdrawal of Japan and Germany, the Versailles Peace Treaty openly flaunted by Adolf Hitler’s rearming of Germany, and the world economy crashing in the Great Depression, Stalin began thinking of an alliance with Britain as protection against Germany. When Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain capitulated to Hitler at Munich in 1938, Stalin decided to make a pact with the Nazis and did so the following year. But on June 22, 1941, Hitler renounced the nonaggression treaty and invaded the Soviet Union, thus precipitating the Grand Alliance between Britain, the Soviet Union, and United States. Churchill’s cynical words reveal his true feelings about Stalin and the Slavic country to the east: “If Hitler had invaded Hell, I would find something nice to say about the Devil in the House of Commons.” The USSR lost twenty million lives and suffered incalculable destruction during World War II. The conflict ended in the total defeat of the Axis powers, with the Red Army occupying Albania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. Relations between Britain and the Soviet Union chilled rapidly. Churchill warned of the hazards of growing Soviet domination of Europe (a descending “iron curtain”) in a historic March 5, 1946, speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. The formation of two military alliances, NATO (1949) and the Warsaw Pact (1955). solidified the Cold War, which lasted until 1989. In the postwar era, the Soviet Union perceived Britain as an imperialist power in decline, especially after it relinquished most of its colonies. Nevertheless, Britain remained an important power in Soviet eyes because of its nuclear forces, its leadership of the British Commonwealth, and its close ties with the United States. In general, however, Soviet relations with Britain took a back seat to Soviet relations with France (especially during the presidency of Charles de Gaulle) and West Germany (especially during the administration of Willy Brandt). This may have been because Britain, unlike West Germany, was a united country and thus not susceptible to Soviet political pressure exerted through the instrument of a divided people, and because the British Communist Party, because of its small size, had less influence in electoral politics than the French Communist Party. Given its close trade ties with the United States, Britain was less dependent economically than other West European states on

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Soviet and East European trade and energy resources. Britain also fulfilled its obligations as a NATO member, whereas France withdrew in 1966 from the military side of the alliance. Even after the collapse of communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the Soviet-era division of Europe continued to influence Russia’s foreign policy toward Britain and other West European countries. Although the Warsaw Pact was disbanded, NATO extended its reach, admitting three former Soviet allies (Hungary, Poland, and the Czech republic) in 1999. Some Russian hardliners feared that NATO would embrace all of Russia’s former allies and deprive it of its traditional European buffer zone. Nevertheless, the al Qaeda terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 fostered closer ties between Russian president Vladimir Putin and other Western leaders, including British prime minister Tony Blair. New security threats that transcend state borders, such as global networks of suicidal terrorists, chemical and biological warfare, international organized crime, cyberwar, and human trafficking, all underscore the need for greater cooperation among sovereign states.

See also:

CRIMEAN WAR; GRAND ALLIANCE; NORTH AT-

LANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION; WORLD WAR II

Ullman, Richard. (1961–1972). Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1917–1921, 3 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. JOHANNA GRANVILLE

GREAT NORTHERN WAR The Great Northern War (1700–1721) was the main military conflict of Peter the Great’s reign, ending in a Russian victory over Sweden that made Russia an important European power and expanded Russia’s borders to the Baltic Sea, including the site of St. Petersburg. The war began in the effort of Denmark and Poland-Saxony to wrest control of territories lost to Sweden during the seventeenth century, the period of Swedish military hegemony in northern Europe. When the rulers of those countries offered alliances to Peter in 1698 and 1699, he saw an opportunity to recover Ingria, the small territory at the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland that Russia had lost to Sweden in 1618. Possession of Ingria would once again give Russia access to the Baltic Sea, which seems to have been Peter’s principal aim. To achieve this aim Peter built a European-style army and a navy based in the Baltic. The war also served as a major stimulus to Peter’s reforms.

Ulam, Adam B. (1968). Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–67. New York: Praeger.

The initial phase of the war (1700–1709) was marked by Swedish successes. Peter’s attempt to capture the port of Narva in Swedish-held Estonia ended in catastrophic defeat on November 30, 1700, at the hands of Charles XII, king of Sweden. The defeat meant the destruction of most of Peter’s new army, which he then had to rebuild. Fortunately, Charles chose to move south into Poland, hoping to unseat August II from the throne of Poland and expand Swedish influence. In 1706 Charles succeeded in forcing August II to surrender and leave the war and to recognize Stanislaw Leszczynski, a Swedish puppet, as king of Poland. In 1707 Charles moved east through Poland toward Russia, apparently hoping to both defeat and overthrow Peter and replace him with a more compliant tsar from among the Russian boyars. Charles also managed to convince Ivan Mazepa, the Hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks, to join him against Peter, but in Russia itself there was no move in favor of Charles. Instead, the Russian army retreated before the Swedes, acquiring experience and mounting ever more effective resistance. Charles was forced south into Ukraine during the fall of

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Adams, Ralph James Q. (1993). British Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of Appeasement, 1935–39. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Blackwell, Michael. (1993). Clinging to Grandeur: British Attitudes and Foreign Policy in the Aftermath of the Second World War. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Eudin, Xenia Joukoff, and Slusser, Robert. (1967). Soviet Foreign Policy, 1928–1934; Documents and Materials. University Park: Penn State University Press. Keeble, Curtis. (1990). Britain and the Soviet Union, 1917–1989. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kennan, George F. (1960). Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1941. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand. Pravda, Alex, and Duncan, Peter J. S., eds. (1990). Soviet-British Relations since the 1970s. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ross, Graham. (1984). The Foreign Office and the Kremlin: British Documents on Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1941–45. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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The Battle of Poltava in 1709 marked the turning point in the Great Northern War. © BETTMANN/CORBIS

1708, and Peter’s defeat of the Swedish relief column at Lesnaya (October 9, 1708) left him without additional food and equipment. The battle of Poltava (July 8, 1709) proved the turning point of the war. The Swedish army suffered heavy casualties and fled the field southwest toward the Dnieper River. When they reached the banks with the Russians in hot pursuit, they found too few boats to carry them across and had to surrender. Only Charles, his staff, and some of his personal guard escaped into Ottoman territory. Thus the way was clear for Peter to occupy the Baltic provinces and southeast Finland, then a Swedish possession, in 1710. By the end of 1710 Peter had achieved his principal war aims, for these conquests secured the approaches to St. Petersburg. In 1711 the outbreak of war with the Turks provided an unwelcome distraction, and he was able to turn his attention to the Northern War only in 1712. His allies now included the restored August II of Poland-Saxony, as well as Denmark and Prussia. Russian troops moved


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into northern Germany to support these allies, and Sweden’s German possessions, Bremen, Stralsund, and Stettin, fell by 1714. In 1713 Peter managed to occupy all of Finland, which he hoped to use as a bargaining chip in the inevitable peace negotiations. Charles XII, who returned to Sweden from Turkey in 1714, would not give up. Ignoring Sweden’s rapidly deteriorating economic situation, he refused to acknowledge defeat. Peter’s small but decisive naval victory over the Swedish fleet at Hangö peninsula on the Finnish coast in 1714 preserved Russian control over Finland and allowed Peter to harass the Swedish coast. A joint Russo-Danish project to invade Sweden in 1716 came to nothing, and the war continued until 1721 with a series of Russian raids along the Swedish coast. The death of Charles XII in 1718 even prolonged the war, for Great Britain, worried over Russian influence in the Baltic region and northern Germany, began to support Sweden, but it was too late. In 1721 the treaty of Nystad put an end to the war, allowing Russia to keep southeast Finland (the town of Viborg), Ingria, Estonia, and the province of Livonia (today

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southern Estonia and Latvia north of the Dvina river). Peter’s victory in the Great Northern War radically altered the balance of power in northern and eastern Europe. The defeat of Sweden and the loss of most of its overseas territories other than Finland and Stralsund, as well as the collapse of Swedish absolutism after 1718, rendered Sweden a minor power once again. The events of the war revealed for the first time decisively the political and military weakness of Poland. Russia, by contrast, had defeated the formerly hegemonic power of the region, recovered Ingria, acquired the Baltic provinces and part of Finland, and founded St. Petersburg as a new city and new capital. These acquisitions gave Russia a series of seaports to support both trade and a naval presence in the Baltic Sea, as well as a shorter route to Western Europe. Victory in the war justified Peter’s military, administrative, and economic reforms and the Westernization of Russian culture. It also enormously reinforced his personal prestige and power.

See also:

LESNAYA, BATTLE OF; PETER I; NARVA, BATTLES

OF; POLTAVA, BATTLE OF; SWEDEN, RELATIONS WITH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bushkovitch, Paul. (2001). Peter the Great. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Hatton, Ragnhild. (1968). Charles the Twelfth. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Frost, Robert I. (2000). The Northern Wars: War, State, and Society in Northeastern Europe. Harlow, UK: Longman. PAUL A. BUSHKOVITCH

GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR See

WORLD WAR II.

GREAT REFORMS At the accession of Alexander II in 1855, some twenty-two million Russian peasants were serfs; their status was like slavery. “State peasants” were similarly constrained. In 1861, serfdom was abolished. Other reforms followed. Together they are called the “great reforms.” How did they emerge from a conservative regime? How did they relate one to another? What was their impact on Russia’s development?

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The explanations most often given for the abolition of serfdom do not work. Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War left the regime discredited and impoverished, ill positioned to challenge the serfholding elite. The regime believed that peasant rebellions were more likely a result of reform. It expected economic growth if serfdom were abolished, but dreaded economic disruption. It understood that serfdom was outmoded, but it seemed to work. When, in August 1857, a secret committee pronounced that “not only the peasants but even the Government itself is not prepared for a general emancipation” of the serfs, Alexander expressed satisfaction. Three months later, the government began to reform serfdom. The turnabout occurred because serfdom was weak. The serfholders were dependent upon the state, to which they had mortgaged twothirds of their serfs and on which they relied to keep the serfs subordinate. They had no political experience. Most of them shared a culture oriented to western Europe, where serfdom had disappeared. No articulate voice in Russia could praise serfdom. Thanks to censorship, nothing critical or supportive of serfdom, appeared in print. Russia had no Garrison, but also no Calhoun; serfdom had no ideology. The breakthrough took the form of directives to the governor-general of three northwestern provinces. These incoherent documents were the by-product of an abandoned initiative, but their publication committed the government to the reform of serfdom. And they contained the germ of a resolution to the key problem. The government believed that a noble’s land was inalienable private property; peasants believed the land was theirs because they tilled it. Freedom without land would, from a peasant perspective, be a monstrous injustice. To give privately-owned land to the peasants would, from an elite perspective, be no less monstrous. The directives reaffirmed the serfholders’ property rights, but provided peasant households with the use of allotments of land. Ostensibly, the nobility of each province was to participate in drafting the reform. The government learned that there was no flim-flam the nobility would not tolerate. It made a series of promises to the nobility and withdrew or ignored each one. The nobles barely responded, confident because most top positions in government were held by men as hostile to reform as they were. The abolition legislation was not created by these dignitaries, but by a group of zealous reformers


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assembled in an Editorial Commission. They had enormous energy and guile. They managed to convince Alexander that their critics were actually challenging his autocratic prerogatives. The legislative process was epitomized when the commission’s draft came before the Council of State in early 1861. The council was composed of Alexander’s friends and confidants. It voted down each section of the draft by large margins. The members were counting on the emperor’s sympathy and his distrust of reformers. These dignitaries could not, however, come up with a coherent alternative. Furthermore, the council was not a legislature. With each section of the draft, the emperor used his prerogative to endorse the minority position, and the Editorial Commission’s version became law without significant change. The result was a cautious reform that was nonetheless much more radical than anyone in authority had contemplated. The terms of the legislation promulgated on February 19, 1861, varied from province to province. The reformers wanted to accommodate the nobility. Hence, in the North the allotments of land assigned to the ex-serfs were relatively large but costly; since the land was of little value, the squires would rather have cash. To the south, where land was valuable, the allotments were smaller but not so costly. The complexity of the legislation is compounded by special cases, some involving millions of peasants. The commune was unknown in Ukraine and was not imposed there. State peasants would be more generously treated than serfs when the reform was extended to them in 1866; the regime was more willing to sacrifice its interests than those of serfholders. If one focuses on a majority of Great Russian serfs, one can grasp the reform by comparing it to the system of serfdom. (1) Authority: The essence of serfdom was the subjection of the serfs to the arbitrary power of their master or mistress. Serfholders could buy and sell serfs and subject them to physical or sexual abuse. The laws limiting the squires’ powers were vague and rarely enforced. This arbitrary power of the serfholding noble was utterly abolished by the legislation of 1861. The ex-serfs found themselves subject in a new way, however, to the nobles as a class, because they dominated local administration. And most ex-serfs were dependent, as renters, wage-laborers, or sharecroppers, on a squire in the neighborhood.


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(2) Ascription: A second element of serfdom was ascription, or fastening. The reform left peasants ascribed, but transferred the power to regulate their comings and goings from the squire to the village commune, which now issued the passports that enabled peasants to go in search of wage work. The government retained ascription as a security measure. (3) Economics: It was the economic elements of the reform that most severely restricted the freedom of ex-serfs. Most peasants received (through the commune) an allotment of land and had to meet the obligations that went with the allotment. It was almost impossible to dispose of the allotment. Few peasants who wanted to pull up stakes and start afresh could do so. Servile agriculture was linked to the repartitional commune. Plowland was held by the commune and subject to periodic repartition among households. The objective of repartition was to match landholding to the labor-power of each household, since the commune allocated and reallocated burdens, such as taxes, as well as plowland. The reform, like the serfholders before, imposed a system of mutual responsibility. If one household did not meet its obligations, the others had to make up the difference. It was in the interests of the commune that each household have plowland proportional to its labor power. Also characteristic of the servile economy was “extraeconomic compulsion.” Under serfdom, it was not the market but the serfholders’s arbitrary authority that determined the size of the serfs’ allotments and the dues they had to render. After the reform, these were determined not by the market, but by law. These characteristics of the servile economy broke down slowly because, to minimize disruption, the reformers took the elements of serfdom as their point of departure. The size of the allotments set by statute derived from the size under serfdom. In the interests of security, the reformers retained the commune, although it impeded agricultural progress. The statutes sought to minimize the economic dependence of ex-serfs on their former masters. They provided that peasants could redeem their allotments over a forty-nine-year period. Redemption entailed an agreement between the squire and his ex-serfs, which was hard to achieve. Until the redemption process began in a village, the ex-serfs were in a state of “temporary obligation,” subject to yesterday’s serfholder. Within limits set by

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statute, they had to render dues in cash or in labor in return for their allotments. The abolition of serfdom regulated more than it changed, but regulation represented an enormous change: The arbitrary power of the serfholder had been the essence of serfdom. The reform could not provide an immediate stimulus to economic development. The regime set a higher value on stability, on the prosperity of the nobility, and on the welfare of the peasantry, than on development. It feared chaos more than it wanted progress. So it imposed stability and opened the way for a slow passage out of the structures of serfdom. It is argued that the other great reforms followed from the abolition of serfdom, but the peasant reform reordered the Russian village, while the other reforms addressed the opposite end of the social spectrum. For example, the education reform (1863) restored autonomy to Russia’s universities, permitting the rector and faculty to run them; the minister of education, however, had broad authority to interfere. It also provided for technical secondary schools. However, only graduates of the traditional, classical schools could enter the universities; the regime supposed that Greek and Latin had a sobering effect on the young. The reform also gave new authority, but little money, to local agencies to establish primary schools. Finally, it allowed some education to women, provided that they would get an education “appropriate for the future wife and mother.” The censorship was reformed in 1865. Under the old system, a censor went over every word of a book or magazine, deleting or changing anything subversive. This system had been supportive of serfdom, but useful publications had been impeded, and pre-censorship had not prevented the dissemination of radical ideas. The emperor wanted knowledge to flourish, but he was suspicious of intellectuals. He observed, “There are tendencies which do not accord with the views of the government; they must be stopped.” The censorship reform did that. It eliminated the prepublication censorship of books and most journals. Editors and publishers were responsible for everything they printed, however, and subject to heavy fines, criminal penalties, and the closing of periodicals. The regime appreciated that publishers dreaded financial loss. The result was self-censorship, more exacting than precensorship.

were not usually subject to the new courts. Under the old system, justice had been a purely bureaucratic activity. There were no juries, no public trials, and no legal profession. Corruption and delay were notorious. Commercial loans were available only on short terms and at high interest because the courts could not protect the interests of creditors. The new system provided for independent judges with life tenure; trial by jury in criminal cases; oral and public trials; and an organized bar of lawyers to staff this adversary system. Peasants were formally eligible to serve on juries, but property qualifications for jury service excluded all but a few peasants. Here, as elsewhere, distinctions linked to the system of estates of the realm (sosloviya) were retained by other means. The reform of the courts had long been under discussion. Officials who shared the emperor’s suspicion of lawyers and juries were unable to produce any workable alternative to the chaos they knew. Hence the task of drafting the new system passed to a group of younger men with advanced legal training. With the task came powers of decision making. The reformers acted in the spirit of the cosmopolitan legal ethos they had acquired with their training. They, alone of the drafters of reform statutes, avowedly followed western models and produced the most thorough-going of the reforms. The zemstvo, or local government, reform (1864) provided for elective assemblies at the district and provincial levels; the electorate was divided into three curias: landowners (mostly nobles), peasant communities, and towns. Voting power was proportional to the value of real estate held by each curia, but no curia could have more than half the members.

The Judicial Reform (1864) was not closely related to the abolition of serfdom, since peasants

The zemstvo’s jurisdiction included the upkeep of roads, fire insurance, education, and public health. Squires and their ex-serfs sat together in the assemblies, if not in proportion to their share of the population. Public-spirited squires found a sphere of activity in the boards elected by the assemblies. These boards, in turn, hired health workers, teachers, and other professionals. The zemstvo provided an arena of public service apart from the state bureaucracy, where liberal landowners and dissidents interacted. The accomplishments of the zemstvo were remarkable, given their limited resources and the government control over them. The provincial governor could suspend any decision taken by a zemstvo. The zemstvo had only a lim-

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ited power to tax, and as much as half the total it collected went to functions performed for the state. Why didn’t the government do more? It cherished autocracy and realized that genuine constitutional change would favor the rich and the educated, not the peasants; many nobles sought a national zemstvo as compensation for their supposed losses. Most important, to let authority pass to judges, juries, editors, and others not under direct bureaucratic discipline required a trust in which the regime was deficient. Many bureaucrats feared that the reforms would come back to haunt the regime. They were right. The bar did become a rallying point for dissidents, the economic and social position of the nobility did decline, and the zemstvo eventually protested. Cautious officials can be good prophets, even if the solutions they offer are ineffective.

See also: ALEXANDER II; EMANCIPATION ACT; PEASANTRY; SERFDOM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bushnell, John; Eklof, Ben; and Zakharova, Larisa, eds. (1994). Russia’s Great Reforms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Field, Daniel. (1976). The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855–1861. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mironov, Boris. (1999). A Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700–1917, 2 vols., ed. Ben Eklof. Boulder, CO: Westview. Wortman, Richard. (1976). The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DANIEL FIELD

GREECE, RELATIONS WITH Ideas originating in Greece, a country in southeastern Europe that occupies the southernmost part of the Balkan Peninsula and is bordered by the Aegean, Mediterranean, and Ionian seas, first influenced Russian culture as early as the tenth century, during the golden age of Kievan Rus. Prince Vladimir (978–1015) adopted Eastern Orthodoxy, which reflected his close personal ties with Constantinople, a city that dominated both the Black Sea and the Dnieper River, Kiev’s busiest commercial route. Adherence to the Eastern Orthodox


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Church had long-range political, cultural, and religious consequences for Russia. The church liturgy was written in Cyrillic, and a corpus of translations from the Greeks had been produced for the South Slavs. The existence of this literature facilitated the East Slavs’ conversion to Christianity and introduced them to rudimentary Greek philosophy, science, and historiography without the necessity of learning Greek. Russians began to look to the Greeks for religious inspiration and came to regard the Catholics of Central Europe as schismatics. This tendency laid the foundation for Russia’s isolation from the mainstream of Western civilization. Seeking warm-water ports, Russian explorers were attracted to Greece. No part of mainland Greece is more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) from water, and islands constitute about one-fifth of the country’s land area. By the nineteenth century, as the Russian Empire expanded to the southwest, its population grew more diverse and began to include Greek Orthodox peoples. After Russia’s defeat by Japan in 1905, the government began to take a more active interest in the Balkans and the Near East. The decline of the Ottoman Empire (“the sick man of Europe”) encouraged nationalist movements in Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria. In 1912 the Balkan League, which included Greece, defeated the Ottoman Empire in the First Balkan War. A year later, the alliance split, and the Greeks, Serbs, and Romanians defeated Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War. Russia tried to extend its influence over the new nations. Greco-Russian relations became strained when Russia sided with Serbia in the conflict between Serbia and Greece for control of Albania. Greece fought on the side of the Western allies and Russia in World War I, and similarly on the side of the Allies, including the Soviet Union, in World War II. In the immediate aftermath of the war, tensions arose between the legitimate Greek government and the Soviet Union. The Greek resistance movement during World War II, the National Liberation Front (EAM) and its army (ELAS), were dominated by the Communist Party. When the Greek government-in-exile returned to Athens in late 1944 shortly after the liberation, the communists tried to overthrow it, and in the ensuring civil war they were supported by Josef Stalin’s USSR and (more enthusiastically) Tito’s Yugoslavia. Britain funded the non-communists, but when the economic commitment exceeded its postwar capabilities, the United States took on the burden with

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the Truman Doctrine. Thanks to massive military and economic aid from the United States, which came just in time, the communists, who had established a provisional government in the northern mountains, were ultimately defeated. Relations between Greece and the USSR cooled with the former’s admission to NATO in 1952. Beginning in the mid-1950s, NATO’s southeastern flank experienced periodic cycles of international tension. The problem in Cyprus, where the population is split between Greek-Cypriots (approximately 78%) and Turkish-Cypriots (18%) led eventually to a Turkish invasion of the island on July 20, 1974, to protect the Turkish-Cypriot minority. Nevertheless, Greek-Soviet ties established during the 1980s not only survived the political upheaval that ended the Soviet Union, they even improved. In 1994 Greece signed new protocols with Russia for delivery of natural gas from a pipeline to run from Bulgaria to Greece. In 2002, during its fourth presidency of the European Union (EU), Greece repeatedly called for improved relations with Russia. At the Russia-EU summit in Brussels on November 11, 2002, Prime Minister Costas Simitis emphasized the importance of implementing the Brussels agreement on the Kaliningrad region, an enclave on the Baltic Sea that would be cut off from the rest of Russia by the Schengen zone when Poland and Lithuania joined the EU. Greece also prepared a new strategy for greater cooperation between Russia and the EU, which is Russia’s largest trading partner.

See also:

BALKAN WARS; KIEVAN RUS; ORTHODOXY;

ROUTE TO GREEKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gerolymatos, André. (2003). The Balkan Wars: Conquest, Revolution, and Retribution from the Ottoman Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond. New York: Basic Books. Gvosdev, Nicholas. (2001). An Examination of ChurchState Relations in the Byzantine and Russian Empires with an Emphasis on Ideology and Models of Interaction. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Joseph, Joseph S. (1999). Cyprus Ethnic Conflict and International Politics: From Independence to the Threshold of the European Union. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Prousis, Theophilus. (1994). Russian Society and the Greek Revolution. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. JOHANNA GRANVILLE

GREEKS As early as 1000 B.C.E., pre-Hellenic Greeks, in search of iron and gold, explored the southeast shores of the Black Sea. Beginning in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C.E., Greeks established fishing villages at the mouths of the Danube, Dnieper, Dniester, and Bug Rivers. They founded the colony of Olbia between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C.E. near the South Bug River and carried on trade in metals, slaves, furs, and later grain. Greek jewelry, coins, and wall paintings attest to the presence of Greek colonies during the Scythian, Sarmatian, and Roman domination of the area. During the late tenth century C.E., Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rus accepted the Orthodox Christian religion after marrying Anna, sister of Greek Byzantine Emperor Basil II. With the conversion came the influence of Greek Byzantine culture including the alphabet, Greek religious literature, architecture, icon painting, music, and crafts. The East Slavs carried on a vigorous trade with Byzantium following the famous route “from the Varangians to the Greeks”—from the Baltic to the Black Sea. With the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, many Greeks, fleeing onerous taxes, emigrated to Russia. Ivan III (1462–1505) married Sophia, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, giving rise to the Muscovite claim that Moscow was the “Third Rome.” Ivan, like many future Russian rulers, employed Greeks as architects, painters, diplomats, and administrators. The opening of the Black Sea grain trade with Western Europe and the Near East during the early nineteenth century gave impetus to a large Greek immigration to the Black Sea coast. Greek merchant families prospered in Odessa, which was the headquarters of the Philiki Etaireia Society, advocating the liberation of Greece from Turkey (1821–1829).

Koliopoulos, John S. (1999). Plundered Loyalties: World War II and Civil War in Greek West Macedonia. New York: New York University Press.

In 1924 some 70,000 Greeks left the Soviet Union for Greece. Of the estimated 450,000 Greeks at the time of Stalin, 50,000 Greeks perished during the collectivization drive and Purges of the

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1930s. Greeks, especially from the Krasnodar Region, were sent to the Solovki Gulag and to Siberia. In 1938 all Greek schools, theaters, newspapers, magazines, and churches were closed down. In 1944 Crimean and Kuban Greeks were exiled to Kazakhstan. Between 1954 and 1956 Greek exiles were released, but they could not return to the Crimea until 1989. The last major immigration of Greeks to the Soviet Union began in 1950 with the arrival of about 10,000 communist supporters of the Greek Civil War of 1949. The Soviet census for 1970 showed 57,800 persons of Greek origin. The Soviet census for 1989 had 98,500 Greeks in Ukraine and 91,700 Greeks in Russia. The 2001 census for Ukraine reported 92,500 Greeks.

See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; ORTHODOXY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Herlihy, Patricia. (1979–1980). “Greek Merchants in Odessa in the Nineteenth Century.” Eucharisterion: Essays Presented to Omeljan Pritsak on His Sixtieth Birthday by his Colleagues and Students. Harvard Ukrainian Studies 3–4(1):399–420. Herlihy, Patricia. (1989). “The Greek Community in Odessa, 1861–1917.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 7:235–252. Prousis, Theophilus C. (1994). Russian Society and the Greek Revolution. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Rostovtzeff, Michael I. (1922). Iranians and Greeks in South Russia. Oxford: Clarendon Press. PATRICIA HERLIHY

GREEN MOVEMENT Green Movement is the term used to describe peasant resistance to the Bolshevik government during the Russian Civil War. The first rebellions against the Bolshevik government began in 1918 and increased with frequency and intensity through the civil war period. In 1918 and 1919 peasant rebellions were poorly organized and localized affairs, easily suppressed by small punitive expeditions. In 1920, however, after the defeat of the White armies, the Bolsheviks faced large, well-organized peasant insurgent movements in Tambov, the Volga and Urals regions, Ukraine, and Siberia.


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The causes of the rebellions were similar. After the failure of Committees of the Rural Poor to bring a reliable government to the countryside, the Bolshevik regime relied on armed detachments to procure grain and recruits, and to stop the black market in food and consumer goods. The depredations of these detachments, the only representatives of the Soviet government that most peasants saw, became increasingly severe as war communism ground down the Russian economy. By 1920, many peasants had little grain left, even as communist food supply organizations made greater demands on them. Large numbers of young men—deserters and draft-dodgers from the Red Army—hid in villages and the surrounding countryside from armed detachments sent to gather them. The Soviet-Polish war, beginning in August 1920, increased the demands on peasants for food and recruits, and stripped the provinces of trained, motivated troops. This allowed peasant uprisings that were initially limited to a small area to grow, with armed bands finding willing recruits from the mass of deserters and draft-dodgers. By early 1921 much of the countryside was unsafe even for large Red Army detachments. The Green Movement of 1920 and 1921 was qualitatively different from the peasant rebellions the communist government had faced in 1918 or 1919. While many peasant insurgents fought in small independent bands, Alexander Antonov’s Insurgent Army in Tambov and Nestor Makhno’s forces in Ukraine were organized militias whose members had military training. Enjoying strong support from political organizations (often made up of local SRs [Socialist Revolutionists], Anarchists, or even former Bolsheviks), they established an underground government that provided food, horses, and excellent intelligence to the insurgents, and terrorized local communists and their supporters. They were much harder to defeat. By February 1921 the communist government suspended grain procurements in much of Russia and Ukraine, and in March, at the Tenth Party Congress, private trade in grain was legalized. The end of the Soviet-Polish war in March also freed elite armed forces to turn against the insurgents. In the summer of 1921 hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers, backed by airplanes, armored cars, and artillery, attacked the insurgent forces. In their wake followed the Cheka, who eliminated support for the insurgents by holding family members

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hostage, making villages collectively responsible for guerilla attacks, shooting suspected supporters of the insurgents, and sending thousands more to concentration camps. Facing drought and terror, and with the abolition of forced grain procurement and military conscription, support for the Green Movement collapsed by September 1921. A few leaders, such as Makhno, slipped across the border, but most were hunted down and killed, such as Antonov, who died in a shootout in June 1922.

See also:

CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; COMMITTEES OF THE

VILLAGE POOR; SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; WAR COMMUNISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brovkin, Vladimir, ed. (1997). The Bolsheviks in Russian Society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Figes, Orlando. (1989). Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malet, Michael. (1982). Nestor Makhno in the Russian Civil War. London: Macmillan. Radkey, Oliver. (1976). The Unknown Civil War in Soviet Russia. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. A. DELANO DUGARM

GRIBOEDOV, ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH (1795–1829), dramatist and diplomat. Alexander Griboedov is best known as the author of Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma). The first Russian comedy of manners, the play was written in 1823, but not published until 1833 because of censorship.

mastered (French, German, Italian, and English). In 1821 he transferred to service in the Caucasus, but took a leave of absence in St. Petersburg and Moscow from February 1823 to May 1825 to write Woe from Wit. Although Griboedov was back in the Caucasus by December of 1825, he was nevertheless summoned under arrest for his alleged involvement in the abortive Decembrist uprising of that time. After extensive interrogations, however, he was cleared of suspicion and returned to his diplomatic post. Griboedov negotiated the peace treaty of 1828 that ended the Russo-Persian War. As a reward for his wits, he was appointed Russian minister in Tehran in 1828, where—in ironic mockery of his own play’s title—he was murdered in January 1829 by religious fanatics who attacked the Russian embassy. The twentieth-century novelist Yuri Tynianov wrote about Griboedov’s death in Death and Diplomacy in Persia (1938). Woe from Wit, composed in rhymed verse, is a seminal work in Russian culture. Many lines from the play have entered everyday Russian speech as quotations or aphorisms. Its hero, Chatsky, is the prototype of the so-called superfluous man, who criticizes social and political conditions in his country but does nothing to bring about a change. In addition to the gap between generations, the concept of service is a key theme. In a monolithic country with minimal private enterprise, a man’s career choices were either civil or military. Griboedov mocks as shallow and morally irresponsible the character Famusov, who says in the play: “For me, whether it is business matters or not, my custom is, once it’s signed, the burden is off my shoulders.” As for military service, the hero Chatsky prefers to serve the cause and not specific personalities. He says to Famusov: “I should be pleased to serve, but worming oneself into one’s favor is sickening” (Sluzhit’ by rad, prisluzhivat’sia toshno). Famusov rejects such serious loyalty to a higher cause, reminiscing fondly of his uncle who stumbled and hurt himself while in court. When Catherine the Great showed amusement, the uncle deliberately fell again as a way to please her. Here Griboedov appears to counter the poet Gavryl Romanovich Derzhavin’s ode to Catherine (“Felitsa”), written in 1789, in which Catherine is praised as someone who treats subordinates respectfully. The play contains an extensive gallery of satirical portraits that continue to hold relevance to contemporary audiences in Russia and around the world.

Born in Moscow as the son of a military officer, Griboedov showed talent at an early age in a number of areas. He was admitted to Moscow University at the age of eleven. By the age of sixteen he had graduated in literature, law, mathematics, and natural sciences. He also had a gift for music. The Napoleonic invasion prevented him from pursuing a doctorate. He served in the military from 1812 to 1816. After the war he entered the civil service in the ministry of foreign affairs. In 1818 he was sent to Persia (Iran) as secretary to the Russian mission. There Griboedov added Arabic and Persian to the long list of foreign languages he had

See also:

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Tynianov, Iurii Nikolaevich. (1975). Death and Diplomacy in Persia, 2nd ed. Westport, CT: Hyperion.

Reddaway, Peter. (1972). Uncensored Russia: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union. New York: American Heritage Press.

JOHANNA GRANVILLE

JONATHAN WEILER

GRIGORENKO, PETER GRIGORIEVICH

GRISHIN, VIKTOR DMITRIEVICH

(1907–1987), leading Soviet human rights activist.

(1914–1992), member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Born in Ukraine, Peter Grigorenko was a decorated war hero during World War II. He rose to the rank of Major General in 1959. In 1964 Grigorenko was arrested for participation in the Society for the Restoration of Leninist Principles, which warned of the reemergence of a Stalinist cult of personality. For fifteen months he was in psychiatric hospitals and prisons before being released in 1965. Stripped of a military pension, denied professional work, Grigorenko, at age 58, emerged as a tireless campaigner for human rights. He became a mythic figure among Crimean Tatars for aiding their fight for national rights. He organized demonstrations at dissident trials in the late 1960s and wrote and signed petitions on behalf of dissidents. He attacked the use of psychiatric confinement as a method of punishing political prisoners. For his troubles, he was arrested again, in Tashkent on May 7, 1969, and held in psychiatric confinement until 1974. He subsequently became one of the founding members of the Moscow Helsinki Group, established after the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975. On November 30, 1977, Grigorenko flew to New York with his wife and a son for emergency surgery. While there, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship. Peter Reddaway, writing in 1972 about the Soviet human rights movement, said “if one person had to be singled out as having inspired the different groups within the Democratic movement more than anyone else, then it would surely be [Grigorenko]. Indeed he became, while free, in an informal way the movement’s leader.” Grigorenko died in New York City in 1987.

Twice decorated Hero of Socialist Labor (1974, 1984), Viktor Grishin was one of the highestranking members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on the eve of Michael S. Gorbachev’s selection as party leader. Born in Moscow, he received his degree in geodesy in 1932. From 1938 to 1940 he served in the Red Army, during which time he became a member of the CPSU. Following his discharge from the army in 1941, he was assigned to duties in the Moscow Party organization. Grishin entered the upper echelons of the party when he was made a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1952. He took on additional responsibilities as the head of Soviet professional unions in 1956, a position he held until 1967. In 1961 he was made a candidate of the Politburo, and in 1967 he became First Secretary of the Moscow Party organization, one of the most powerful posts in the CPSU. By 1971, he was a full member of the Politburo. Grishin was one of Gorbachev’s rivals for the post of General Secretary in 1985. In order to ensure the loyalty of the Moscow Party organization, Gorbachev had Grishin removed from both the Politburo and the Moscow Party organization in 1986. He was replaced in both posts by Boris Yeltsin. Grishin was retired from the CPSU and lived on a party pension until his death in 1992.

See also:

CENTRAL COMMITTEE; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL

SERGEYEVICH; MOSCOW; POLITBURO

See also:

DISSIDENT MOVEMENT BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexeyeva, Lyudmila. (1985). Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human Rights. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Grigorenko, Petr. (1982). Memoirs. New York: Norton.


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Mawdsley, Evan, and White, Stephen. (2000). The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Central Committee and Its Members, 1917–1991. Oxford: Oxford University Press. TERRY D. CLARK

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GROMOV, BORIS VSEVOLODOVICH

A Russian monetary and weight unit used from the ninth or tenth century to the eighteenth century.

(b. 1943), Commander of Fortieth Army in Afghanistan, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Deputy Minister of Defense, Member of the State Duma, and Governor of Moscow Oblast (District).

Initially the grivna was a unit of account (twenty-five dirhams or Islamic silver coins) and a unit of weight (c. 68 grams, or 2.4 ounces), used interchangeably for denominating imported coined silver. Since foreign coins fluctuated in weight and fineness and diminished in import frequency, by the late tenth century the grivna weighed around 51.2 grams (1.8 ounces) and equaled fifty cut dirhams. By the eleventh century, the ratio of coins to weight of a grivna was further altered with the appearance of a rodlike, or Novgorodian type, silver ingot in northern Rus, weighing around 200 grams (7 ounces). This unit, called mark in German, like the silver itself, was imported from western and central Europe to northern Russia via the Baltic. Consequently, in Novgorod there developed a 1:4 relationship between the silver ingot, called grivna of silver, and the old grivna, or grivna of kunas. Both units diffused outside of Novgorod to other parts of Russia, including the Golden Horde, but the relationship of the grivna of kunas to the grivna of silver fluctuated throughout the lands until the fifteenth century, when the ingots were replaced by Russian coins. However, the term grivna (grivenka) and the 200 grams (7 ounces) it represented remained in Russian metrology until the eighteenth century. The southern Rus lands also manufactured and used silver grivna ingots, but they were hexagonal in shape and, following the weight of the Byzantine litra, weighed around 160 grams (5.6 ounces). These Kievan-type ingots were known in southern Rus from the early eleventh century until the Mongol conquest.

See also:

ALTYN; DENGA; KOPECK; RUBLE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Noonan, Thomas S. (1987). “The Monetary History of Kiev in the pre-Mongol Period.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 11:384–443. Pritsak, Omeljan. (1998). The Origins of the Old Rus’ Weights and Monetary Systems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Spassky, Ivan Georgievich. (1967). The Russian Monetary System: A Historico-Numismatic Survey, tr. Z. I. Gorishina and rev. L. S. Forrer. Amsterdam: Jacques Schulman. ROMAN K. KOVALEV

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Boris Gromov had a distinguished career as a professional soldier in the Soviet Ground Forces. In 1962 he graduated from the Suvorov Military School in Kalinin. From there he attended the Higher Combined Arms Command School in Leningrad and was commissioned in the Soviet Army in 1965. From 1965 Gromov held command and staff assignments. In 1974 he graduated from the Frunze Military Academy. From 1980 to 1982 he commanded a motorized rifle division in Afghanistan; on his return to the Soviet Union, he attended the Voroshilov Military Academy of the General Staff, graduating in 1984. In 1987 Gromov returned to Afghanistan as Commander of the Fortieth Army and led the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, which was completed in February 1989. His next assignment was that of Commander of the Kiev Military District, a post he held until November 1990, when, in an unexpected move, he was named First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs and Commander of Internal Troops. He held that post until August 1991. In the aftermath of the unsuccessful coup against Gorbachev, Gromov was appointed First Deputy Commander of Soviet (later Commonwealth of Independent States) Conventional Forces. In May 1992 he was appointed Deputy Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation. In 1994 Gromov joined a group of senior Russian officers who broke with Minister of Defense Pavel Grachev and publicly warned against military intervention in Chechnya when Russian forces were unprepared. In the aftermath of that act, Gromov was moved to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1995 he stood for election to the State Duma on the My Fatherland Party ticket and won. In January 2000 he was elected Governor of the Moscow Oblast. Gromov received the Hero of the Soviet Union award for his service as army commander in Afghanistan.

See also: AFGHANISTAN, RELATIONS WITH; MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baev, Pavel K. (1996). The Russian Army in a Time of Troubles. London: Sage Publications.


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Gromov, Boris. (2001). “Wounds of a Bitter War.” New York Times, No. 2767 (October 01, 2001), Op-Ed. JACOB W. KIPP

GROMYKO, ANDREI ANDREYEVICH (1909–1989), Soviet foreign minister and president. Andrei Gromyko was born into a peasant family in the village of Starye Gromyki in Belorussia. He joined the Communist Party in 1931. He completed study at the Minsk Agricultural Institute in 1932 and gained a Candidate of Economics degree from the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Agronomy in 1936. From 1936 to 1939 he was a senior researcher in the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences and the executive editorial secretary of the journal Problemy ekonomiki; he later gained a doctorate of Economics in 1956. In 1939 Gromyko switched to diplomatic work and became section head for the Americas in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. Later that year he became counselor in the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Between 1943 and 1946 he was Soviet ambassador to the United States and Cuba. During this time, he was involved in the Dumbarton Oaks Conference (1944) called to produce the UN Charter and the 1945 San Francisco conference establishing the United Nations. He also played an organizational role in the Big Three wartime conferences. From 1946 to 1948 he was the permanent representative in the UN Security Council as well as deputy (from 1949 First Deputy) minister of foreign affairs. Except for the period 1952–1953 when he was ambassador to Great Britain, he held the First Deputy post until he was promoted to foreign minister following the anti-party group affair of 1957. Gromyko remained foreign minister until July 1985, when he became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, effectively Soviet president. Throughout his career, Gromyko was neither highly ambitious nor a major political actor on the domestic scene. Although a full member of the Central Committee from 1956, he did not become a full member of the Politburo until 1973. He developed his diplomatic skills and became the public face of Soviet foreign policy, gaining a reputation as a tough negotiator who never showed his hand. He was influential in the shaping of foreign policy, in particular détente, but he was never unchallenged as the source of that policy; successive lead-


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Soviet foreign ministry Andrei Gromyko, nicknamed “Mr. Nyet” by his Western counterparts, addresses the U.N. General Assembly. UNITED NATIONS

ers Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev both sought to place their personal stamp upon foreign policy, while there was always competition from the International Department of the Party Central Committee and the KGB. Gromyko formally nominated Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary in March 1985, and three months later was moved from the Foreign Ministry to the presidency. The foreign policy for which he was spokesperson during the Brezhnev period now came under attack as Gorbachev and his Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze embarked on a new course. Gromyko’s most important task while he was president was to chair a commission that recommended the removal of restrictions on the ability of Crimean Tatars to return to Crimea. Gromyko was forced to step down from the Politburo in September 1988, and from the presidency in October 1988, and was retired from the Central Committee in April 1989. He was the author of many speeches and articles on foreign affairs.

See also: BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH

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Edmonds, Robin. (1983). Soviet Foreign Policy: The Brezhnev Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gromyko, Andrei. (1989). Memories, tr. Harold Shukman. London: Arrow Books. The Tauris Soviet Directory. The Elite of the USSR Today. (1989). London: I. B. Tauris. GRAEME GILL

GROSSMAN, VASILY SEMENOVICH (1905–1964), one of the most important Russian novelists of the twentieth century who became increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system. Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 in the town of Berdichev in Ukraine. He spent the years from 1910 to 1914 in Switzerland with his mother and attended high school in Kiev. He received a degree in chemical engineering from Moscow University in 1929 and worked in various engineering jobs until becoming a full-time writer in 1934. He published his first news article in 1928 and his first short story in 1934 and became a prolific writer of fiction during the 1930s. He published a long novel about the civil war entitled Stepan Kolchugin between 1937 and 1940. In 1938, his wife was arrested, but Grossman wrote to Nikolai Yezhov and achieved her release. During World War II, Grossman served as a correspondent for Red Star (Krasnaya Zvezda) and spent the entire war at the front. His writing during the war years was immensely popular, and his words are inscribed on the war memorial at Stalingrad (now Volgograd). He also began writing short stories, which were collected in titles such as The People are Immortal. However, from that perspective, he also began to doubt the abilities of the systems that organized the war effort. Grossman’s postwar projects were often challenging to the Soviet system, and several were not published until long after their completion. Beginning in 1943, Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg began to collect personal accounts of the Holocaust on the territories of the Soviet Union, entitled the Black Book of Russian Jewry. Grossman became the editor of the collection in 1945 and continued to prepare it for publication. The printing plates were actually completed, but in 1946, as anti-Semitism began to increase and Josef Stalin turned against the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, they were removed from

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the printing plant. The book would not be published in any part of the former USSR until 1994. His postwar fiction about the war generated intense criticism from Soviet officials. His novel For a Just Cause (Za pravoye delo), published in 1952, led to attacks for its lack of proper ideological focus. His most contemplative piece about the war, Life and Fate (Zhizn i sudba) was arrested by the KGB in 1961. Although they seized Grossman’s copy of the manuscript, another had already been hidden elsewhere and preserved. Often compared to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the novel bitterly attacks Stalin and the Soviet system for failures. He focuses on the suffering of one family at the hands of large forces outside of their control. In it he touches upon the Gulags, the Holocaust, and the repressions that accompanied the heroism of ordinary Soviets. After twenty years, it was smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm and published in the West. His last novel, Everything is in Flux (Vse techet), is an angry indictment of Soviet society and was distributed only in Samizdat. On his death from cancer in 1964, Grossman disappeared from public Soviet literary discussions, only reappearing under Mikhail Gorbachev. In retrospect, Grossman’s writing has been acknowledged as some of the most significant Russian literature of the twentieth century.

See also:

CENSORSHIP; JEWS; SAMIZDAT; STALIN, JOSEF

VISSARIONOVICH; WORLD WAR II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ehrenburg, Ilya, and Grossman, Vasily. (2002). The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, tr. David Patterson. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Garrard, John, and Garrard, Carol. (1996). The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman. New York: Simon and Schuster. Grossman, Vasily. (1985). Life and Fate, tr. Robert Chandler. New York: Harper & Row KARL E. LOEWENSTEIN

GUARDS, REGIMENTS OF The Russian Imperial Guards regiments originated in the two so-called play regiments that the young Tsar Peter I created during the 1680s. They took their names, Preobrazhensky and Semonovsky, from the villages in which they had originally taken


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form. Peter used those regiments to seize power from Sophia Alexeyevna, then ruling as regent, and establish himself in sole rule. Unlike the streltsy musketeer units that had been the elite element in the Russian army to that point, the guards were trained and equipped in the style of Western European armies, and drilled by Western officers. Their original complements were entirely noble, including the enlisted ranks, and the guards regiments served as the principal training ground for officers for the line units. The guards, especially the Preobrazhensky regiment, often provided escorts for the tsar, even accompanying him on his tour of Europe. They also fought in his wars, playing an important role at the Battle of Narva in 1700 and throughout the Northern War. The guards served a political function under Peter as well, participating in the arrests of nobles and other governmental activities. With Peter’s death, the guards regiments increased in political significance. A demonstration by both regiments played a role in bringing Peter’s wife, Catherine I, to power peacefully. They also brought Anna and Elizabeth to power through forceful coup d’état, and participated in Catherine II’s seizure of the throne and murder of her husband, Peter III. Although they continued to participate in the smaller wars of the eighteenth century against Poland, Sweden, and Turkey, they did not play an important role in the Seven Years’ War. Their numbers were nevertheless expanded, including the formation of the Izmailovsky Regiment by Anna and the Cavalier-Guard Cavalry Regiment, as well as the Guard Horse Regiment, among others. The political significance of the guards regiments fell between Catherine the Great’s reign and the end of the Napoleonic wars, while the guards’ combat role increased. They accompanied Alexander I to battle in the war of 1805 and played an important role on the Austerlitz battlefield. They also participated in the 1812 campaign, including a prominent role in the Battle of Borodino, and they fought throughout the following two years of conflict against France. The Napoleonic Wars saw a significant reorganization of the guards similar to that which occurred throughout the Russian army at that time. In 1806 a guards division was formed of the three guards infantry regiments. In 1811 an Independent Guards Corps was formed, which persisted in various forms until the end of the empire. The years after Napoleon’s defeat saw a resurgence in the guards’ political importance. In 1820


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the Semenovsky Guards Regiment mutinied, and the rebellion had to be suppressed by other, loyal, troops. And in 1825, during the interregnum following the death of Alexander I, guards troops participated in the abortive Decembrist Rebellion, likewise suppressed by troops loyal to Nicholas I, the new tsar. Although the individuals who participated in the rebellions were punished, the guards as a whole were not. Indeed, the number of guards units mushroomed through the nineteenth century, so that in 1914 there were seventeen infantry and fourteen cavalry regiments with four artillery brigades, in addition to smaller detachments. The guards also spread into the navy in the form of individual units and ships. Guards units participated in the Russo-Turkish Wars of 1828–1829 and 1877–1878, and individual guards officers participated as volunteers in the Russo-Japanese War. The guards units were used to help put down the Revolution of 1905. The guards regiments then played a prominent role in all of the major campaigns of World War I. Their ranks were decimated by the casualties they incurred, however, and by 1917 most guards units were filled with simple conscripts. Their political reliability, therefore, was no greater than that of any other army units. As a result, guards regiments garrisoned in Petrograd participated in the February Revolution against the government and helped bring down the tsarist regime. Guards units also helped the Bolsheviks to power in October. Throughout the imperial period, members of the guards units received a number of significant privileges. In particular, guards officers were granted an additional one or two steps on the Table of Ranks, depending upon which units they belonged to (this benefit was reduced by one step toward the end of the nineteenth century). The tsars and tsaritsas and their favorites frequently served as the colonels of the guards regiments, and appointments in those regiments were keenly sought as a step toward political, social, and, of course, military advancement. On the whole, guards regiments did not perform better in combat than most good, well-trained regiments of the regular army. With the advent of communist rule the guards regiments were disbanded. In 1941, however, Josef Stalin reestablished the concept of “guards” in a new form. Following the Battle of Smolensk, five rifle divisions were redesignated the First through the Fifth Guards Infantry Divisions for extraordinary valor as units in combat. Thereafter other units, including divisions, corps, and armies,

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received the designation “guards” as a reward for valor in battle.

See also:

MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; PETER I

FREDERICK W. KAGAN

GUBA ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM The guba system made communities partially responsible for their own policing and entrusted the investigation and partial adjudication of felony cases to local elected officials. In the early sixteenth century the local administration of criminal justice was in the hands of vicegerents (namestniki) appointed by the grand prince and remunerated with the right to collect their own feeding maintenance (kormlenie). An increasing number of community complaints that the vicegerents were corrupt or unable to deal decisively with banditry led the government of Grand Prince Ivan IV to begin issuing in 1538 and 1539 ordinance charters permitting petitioning communities to remove criminal justice affairs from their vicegerents’ jurisdiction and entrust them to criminal justice chiefs (gubnye golovy) elected from the local middle service class and criminal justice elders (gubnye starosty) elected from the more prosperous local peasants and taxpaying townsmen. A guba was the territorial jurisdiction of an elected criminal justice chief or elder, be it an urban posad commune or a rural canton. The elected guba executives and their deputies (tselovalniki) were made responsible for hunting down and arresting bandits and other felons, investigating and trying felony cases, and carrying out the sentences upon them. This guba reform appears to have been motivated less by the need to respond to sharpening class conflict than by Moscow’s interest in achieving greater specialization in and central control over provincial criminal justice matters than had been possible with the vicegerents. The degree of genuine administrative autonomy it conceded to the recipient communities was limited in that the communities, once given the privilege of electing guba officials, were under collective responsibility for their performance, and their guba officials were required to submit reports and accounts to a supervising commission of boyars at Moscow. By 1555 this supervising commission had evolved into the Robbery Chancellery (Razboyny prikaz). It is unclear whether guba officials themselves ever had the au-

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thority to pronounce death sentences upon felons, or whether the right of verdict in capital cases had to be reserved for the Robbery Chancellery. Some see in the 1550 Sudebnik law code Moscow’s intent of universalizing the guba system, but there is no evidence this was accomplished. The development of norms for guba policing, investigations, and hearings is reflected in a series of sources: the first guba community charters of the 1530s through the 1550 Sudebnik code; the 1555 Ordinance Book of the Robbery Chancellery; the revisions of this Ordinance book produced between 1617 and 1631; Chapter Twenty-One of the 1649 Ulozhenie law code; and the 1669 New Decree Statutes on Theft, Robbery, and Murder Cases. Some elements of traditional diadic justice remained to the end: for example, continued partial reliance on community hue and cry to apprehend criminals, and some continued reliance on community polling (povalny obysk) to establish guilt on the basis of reputation in the community’s eyes. But in these successive ordinances, the shift to a more triadic criminal justice system became more apparent, especially from 1617 on, as seen in increasing emphasis placed on proactive struggle against brigandage and greater use of torture to produce confessions and name accomplices. In the 1669 New Decree Statutes, the guba organs are instructed in how to cooperate with special inquistors sent from Moscow to conduct mass dragnets. The tendency after the Time of Troubles was also to subordinate most guba offices to the offices of the chancelleryappointed town governors (voyevodas). In 1679 the guba offices were abolished and the town governors given full authority over felony cases. The purpose was apparently to simplify the financing of local government and reduce the number of elective offices in which men might take refuge from military duty. But it had the effect of increasing the workload of the town governors and providing more opportunities to corrupt them, so the guba system was restored in 1684.

See also: COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY; IVAN IV; LAW CODE OF 1649; SUDEBNIK OF 1550; TIME OF TROUBLES

BRIAN DAVIES

GUBERNIYA The highest unit of administrative-territorial division in prerevolutionary Russia.


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In 1708 Peter I decreed the organization of Russian territory into eight large administrative regions (Petersburg, Moscow, Arkhangelsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Kazan, Azov, and Siberia), each under the jurisdiction of a centrally appointed governor. Between 1713 and 1719, each government was subdivided into provintsii (provinces) and uezdy (districts). By the time of Catherine II’s accession in 1762, Russian territory had been reorganized into twenty governments. During the first decade of her reign, Catherine resolved to rationalize the territorial division and administration of imperial territory. Her “Constitution for the Administration of Governments” of 1775 established forty guberny, each with a male population of between 300,000–400,000 (by the end of her reign the number of governments had increased to fifty-one). Each government was subdivided into several okrugy or uezdy of between twenty and thirty thousand male inhabitants. This system was retained in European Russia throughout the nineteenth century, but the new territories of the imperial periphery were organized into general-governorships and, later, oblast (regions). The 1864 zemstvo reform established assemblies in many provinces, elected on a narrow, indirect franchise, which were responsible for nominating an executive board with responsibility for regional economic administration. Judicial and policing matters remained the responsibility of the governor, who also ratified the appointment of the president of the executive board. After the February Revolution of 1917, the Provisional Government replaced governors with commissars and after the Bolshevik Revolution authority passed to the executive committee of the regional soviet. Between 1924 and 1929 the new regime dissolved governments and replaced them with oblast and kraya.

merchants, doctors, pharmacists, ship captains, painters, and the like; a second guild, comprising retail traders and artisans; and all others, called the “common people.” Although the word guild was borrowed from medieval European practice, guilds in Russia had purely administrative functions: to categorize merchants according to the extent of their economic activities and to collect fees from them. Merchants also bore heavy responsibilities of unpaid state service, such as tax collection and service on municipal boards, law courts, and other local institutions. A decree issued on January 19, 1742, specified three merchant guilds. In a decree of March 17, 1775, Catherine II freed merchants from the soul tax and set 500 rubles of declared capital as the minimum requirement for enrollment in the merchant estate, subject to the payment of 1 percent of declared capital each year. A law issued on May 25, 1775, set specific minimum amounts: 10,000 rubles for the first guild, 1,000 rubles for the second, and 500 rubles for the third. In her Charter to the Cities, promulgated on April 21, 1785, Catherine II increased the minimum capital requirements to 5,000 rubles for the second guild and 1,000 rubles for the third. By abolishing the merchants’ former monopoly on trade and industry, Catherine allowed the gentry and serfs to engage in ruinous competition with the merchants, free of the annual guild payment. Many enterprising merchants fled this precarious situation by rising into the gentry. The merchant estate therefore remained small and weak.

GUILDS

In 1839 a first-guild certificate, costing 600 rubles, entitled a merchant with at least 15,000 rubles in assets to own ships and factories, to offer banking services, and to trade in Russia and abroad. Second-guild certificates, sold for 264 rubles, entitled merchants whose stated wealth surpassed 6,000 rubles to manage factories and engage in wholesale or retail trade in Russia. Members of the third guild were permitted to conduct retail trade in the city or district where they resided, provided they owned assets worth 2,400–6,000 rubles and purchased certificates costing 1.25 percent of the declared amount.

Organizations of merchants in groups called a “hundred” (sto or sotnya) existed in medieval Novgorod and in Muscovy. The first organization of merchants in guilds (gildy; singular gildia) occurred in December 1724, when Peter I divided the urban population into a first guild, composed of wealthy

The third guild was abolished in 1863 and a new fee structure established, but the link between largescale economic activity and membership in the merchant estate was already dissolving. Laws issued in 1807, 1863, and 1865 allowed non-merchants engaged in manufacturing and wholesale commerce

See also:

COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; LO-

CAL GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION; UEZD; ZEMSTVO

NICK BARON


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to enroll in a merchant guild while maintaining their membership in another social estate as well. From 1863 onward, anyone, regardless of social status or even citizenship, could create and manage a corporation. Still, many industrialists and traders enrolled in merchant guilds, as their fathers and grandfathers had done, to demonstrate their commitment to a group identity separate from the gentry.

See also:

CAPITALISM; CHARTER OF THE CITIES; MER-

CHANTS; RUSSIA COMPANY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baron, Samuel H. (1980). Muscovite Russia: Collected Essays. London: Variorum. Bushkovitch, Paul. (1980). The Merchants of Moscow, 1580–1650. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hittle, J. Michael. (1979). The Service City: State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. THOMAS C. OWEN

GULAG Stalinist labor camps. The prison camp system of the Stalin era, whose acronym in Russian (GULag—hereafter Gulag) stood for Glavnoye upravlenie lagerei, or Main Camp Administration, grew into an enormous network of camps lasting into the mid-1950s. Other penal institutions, including prisons, labor colonies, and special settlements, supplemented the labor camps to form a vast number of sites available to the Soviet government for the incarceration and exile of its enemies. While much larger than both its tsarist and Soviet antecedents in size and scope, Stalin’s prison empire evolved along lines clearly established over centuries of Russian rule. But the gulag far outpaced all predecessor systems and became an infamous symbol of state repression in the twentieth century. Although unprecedented in reach, the labyrinth of Stalinist camps had its roots in both the tsarist and early Soviet periods. The secret police under the tsars, ranging from the oprichniki at the time of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century to the Third Section and Okhranka of later years, established the broad historical outlines for Stalinist institutions. Imprisonment, involuntary servitude, and exile to Siberia formed a long and well-known

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experience meted out by these prerevolutionary organs of state security. Soon after the October Revolution, however, the new government under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin also issued key resolutions on incarceration, forced labor, and internal exile that explicitly set the stage for the gulag. The Temporary Instructions on Deprivation of Freedom (July 1918) and the Decree on Red Terror (September 1918) took aim at class enemies of the new regime to be sent to prison for various offenses. Other Bolshevik decrees from as early as January 1918 stipulated arrest and hard labor for political opponents of the new state as well as workers who had violated the labor code. The initial Soviet secret police agency, the Cheka (acronym for the Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counterrevolution and Sabotage), controlled many but not all of the camps, which would in time be reintegrated with other prison structures and grow to an immense scale. Other than proportion, one of the critical differences between this embryonic camp system under Lenin and its successor under Stalin concerned the problem of jurisdiction. In Lenin’s time, the Soviet government lacked a centralized administration for its prison organizations. The Cheka, People’s Commissariat of the Interior, and People’s Commissariat of Justice all oversaw various offshoots of the penal camp complex. In 1922 and 1923, the GPU (State Political Administration) and then the OGPU (Unified State Political Administration) replaced the Cheka as the main secret police organization and assumed command over many of the labor camps. The first and largest cluster of prison camps under its authority, the primary ones of which existed on the Solovetski Islands in the White Sea to the north of Petrograd (renamed Leningrad in 1924), became known at this time as SLON (Northern Camps of Special Designation). While Lenin left no blueprint for a future camp leviathan under Stalin, the infamous archipelago of Gulag sites that lasted until the time of Nikita Khrushchev clearly grew out of these early variants. In 1930, the gulag was officially established just as the parameters of the labor camp network began to expand greatly after Stalin’s consolidation of power. The tremendous growth in inmate numbers throughout the 1930s proved a defining feature of Stalinism, and certainly one that sets it apart from previous eras. Whereas prisoner counts of the Stalin era would rise into the millions, neither the tsars nor Soviet leaders before 1929 incarcerated


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Perm-35, the last Soviet gulag. © P.PERRIN/CORBIS SYGMA

more than a few hundred thousand inmates. The collectivization of agriculture and the dekulakization campaign in the early 1930s began new trends in the Soviet Union, ushering in much higher rates of imprisonment. The Great Purges later in the decade again increased these statistics, particularly in the number of political prisoners sentenced to the Gulag. Other events, such as signing of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in August 1939, led to further waves of inmates, including Polish and Baltic citizens who joined their Soviet counterparts in remote camp zones across the USSR. By the 1940s, the Stalinist labor camps contained a multinational assortment of prisoners. The troika, or three-person extrajudicial panel that could both try and sentence the accused even in absentia, became infamous in the late 1930s as a common mechanism for dispatching enemies of the state to widespread gulag regions. Comprising fourteen sections, Article 58 of the well-worn Soviet Criminal Code found extensive and arbitrary


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application throughout the Stalin era as the labor camps began to stretch to all corners of the nation. The organs of state security became preoccupied with the shipment of prisoners to penal sites across the country. One of the most legendary in the early 1930s involved construction of the Baltic–White Sea Canal. Other inmates labored under similarly hostile conditions on the Solovetski Islands, or at gulag sites in and around Vorkuta, Magadan, Pechora, and Karaganda. Throughout its history, the gulag served both a punitive and economic function. From its very origins, Soviet prisons and camps had been repositories for enemies of the regime. Useful both for isolating and punishing real and imagined opponents, the labor camps in particular became a tool of repressive state policy. But while inefficient and substandard in many respects, the gulag fulfilled a vital economic role as well. Russia had long wrestled with the question of adequate labor in remote parts of the empire, which only compounded the

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intractable problems of a cash-poor economy nationwide. Although the roots of serfdom can in part be found in such conditions, Peter the Great in later years addressed numerous shortcomings with everincreasing levels of coercion that expanded the realm of forced labor to include large prisoner contingents and peasants ascribed to factories. Political exile and hard labor became synonymous with Siberia in particular, and provided a blueprint for the Stalin era. Although going far beyond Petrine goals, Stalin employed similar methods in the twentieth century. Inmates offered a bottomless pool of workers to be sent to areas historically poor in labor supply. The most famous and important gulag zones, focused upon the procurement of lumber and minerals, were located in remote northern and eastern regions of the USSR far from population centers. Leaving aside the question of productivity and efficiency, both of which registered at exceedingly low levels in the camps, the Soviet state sought a fulfillment of industrialization targets in such areas through the widespread application of prison contingents. But the labor camps soon grew beyond this scope, and began to fill economic functions within a larger national framework. Some gulag sites in time even appeared in and around major cities and industries. The Soviet government expanded the use of inmates in numerous largescale construction projects, particularly involving railroad, canal, and highway plans. Eventually, the secret police concentrated inmate scientists in special prison laboratories known as sharashkas, where vital technical research proceeded under the punitive eye of the state. While circumstances proved much better in such special design bureaus, most inmates throughout the gulag system both lived and worked under grueling conditions. Aside from enervating physical labor in extreme winter climates, prisoners suffered as well from poor living arrangements and minimal food rations. Hard labor in the mines and forests of Siberia was backbreaking and required a stamina that few inmates could maintain over long periods. Turning Marxism on its head, inmates also received caloric norms based upon a sliding scale of labor output that penalized low production levels even from the least healthy. Moreover, prisoners were subject to the whims of an unpredictable camp hierarchy that meted out harsh punishments for offenses, however minor. The threat of the isolator or lengthier terms of incarceration hung over every inmate

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and made the camp population dread the seemingly wanton authority of the camp bosses. As a rule, conditions within the camps worsened over time up through the end of the 1930s and early 1940s. The brunt of this fell on the politicals, who as a result of the Great Purges had begun to arrive in the gulag in significant numbers by this time. Constituting the most dangerous element in the view of the Soviet government, political prisoners occupied the lowest rung in the camps. Moreover, prison bosses favored actual criminals convicted for far lesser economic crimes, and placed them in positions of authority within the informal camp structure. The result was an inverted universe in which normal societal mores were suspended and the rules of the criminal world came to the fore. For many inmates, such moral corrosion proved even more onerous than the physical hardships of camp life. The gulag incarcerated several million inmates over the length of its existence. Archival records reveal that the numbers were not as high as those posited by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others in previous years, although exact counts remain elusive for several reasons. In terms of the gulag proper, the highest camp figures for any one time were to be found in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Even then, there were not much more than two million prisoners on average within the camps at any given moment. Additional totals from internal exile, special settlement, and labor colonies augmented this number. But statistics convey only a narrow viewpoint on the reality of the gulag, which proved to be one of the most repressive mechanisms in the history of the Soviet Union.

See also:

BERIA, LAVRENTI PAVLOVICH; PRISONS; PURGES,

THE GREAT; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF; YEZHOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Applebaum, Anne. (2003). Gulag: A History. New York: Broadway Books. Ginzburg, Evgeniia. (1967). Journey into the Whirlwind, tr. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World. Ivanovna, Galina Mikhailovna. (2000). Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, ed. Donald J. Raleigh, tr. Carol Flath. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Khlevniuk, Oleg. (2003). History of the Gulag. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. (1974–1978). The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investi-


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G U M I L E V ,

gation, 3 vols. tr. Thomas P. Whitney and H. Willetts. New York: Harper and Row. DAVID J. NORDLANDER

GUM The acronym GUM stands for Main Department Store (Glavnyi universal’nyi magazin), and indeed, from the time it opened in 1953, GUM was the Soviet Union’s largest and busiest retail establishment. Located on the northeast corner of Red Square, GUM occupies the historic premises of Moscow’s Upper Trading Rows. This enormous glass-roofed complex, completed in 1893, might be considered an early shopping mall; in the late imperial period, it housed between three hundred and one thousand shops at a time. The Upper Trading Rows were nationalized along with other commercial businesses in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, and were almost immediately converted into office space for the new Soviet bureaucracy. The New Economic Policy of the 1920s brought a brief revival of trade in the building when the municipal government established a five-and-dime emporium there, but it soon reverted to administrative use. When the premises were refurbished for retailing during the early 1950s, the emphasis was no longer on discounted sales. GUM became the Soviet capital’s most prestigious store, with specialized departments for such luxuries as Central Asian rugs, televisions, crystal stemware, and fur coats. Another department, Section 200, sold luxury wares exclusively to the Soviet elite; entry into this department was by permit only. In 1992 GUM was reorganized as a joint-stock company. According to a 1991 formula, onequarter of the shares went to the Moscow city government and one-quarter to employees, while the balance was sold to private investors.

See also:

N I K O L A I

S T E P A N O V I C H

Lev Gumilev belonged to the old Russian intelligentsia. His father, Nikolai Gumilev, was a prominent poet of the Silver Age and a victim of Bolshevik terror. His mother, Anna Akhmatova, was one of the greatest Russian women poets. Lev Gumilev’s ties with the old intelligentsia led to frequent imprisonments from the 1920s to the 1950s in Josef Stalin’s Gulag (prison camp system). Gumilev joined a punishment battalion in 1944 and fought in the Battle of Berlin. In spite of this, he became a major intellectual figure in Leningrad and developed an international reputation for his studies of the ancient Turkic and Mongol peoples. He combined historical and archeological research with historical geography to develop a new discipline, ethnography (narodovedenie) in the Department of Oriental Studies of Leningrad State University. Soviet scholar circles found thought anti-Marxist in his research and publications. He was accused of ignoring the role of the class struggle in history. Gumilev was particularly concerned with the relationship between culture and nation and the impact of biological energy and morals upon the development of ethnic groups. He advanced a theory of ethnogenesis to explain the rise and decline of particular ethnic groups in terms of biological and not social factors. He stressed the absence or presence of drive (passionarnost) in a particular people as manifest in the personalities of leaders to explain the people’s role in the unfolding of the nation’s history. These ideas have had a profound influence on Russian nationalist thought and the development of Eurasianism in contemporary Russia.

See also:

DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; NATIONALISM IN THE

SOVIET UNION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Shnirelman, Viktor, and Panarin, Sergei. (2001). “Lev Gumilev: His Pretensions as a Founder of Ethnology and his Eurasian Theories.” Inner Asia 3:1–18 JACOB W. KIPP

RED SQUARE

JULIE HESSLER

GUMILEV, NIKOLAI STEPANOVICH (1886–1921), poet executed by the Bolsheviks.

GUMILEV, LEV NIKOLAYEVICH (1912–1992), dissident historian, geographer, and ethnographer in the Soviet Union.


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Born in Kronstadt and educated at the Tsarskoye Selo Gymnasium, Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev was a major Silver Age poet and a victim of

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Bolshevik repression. Gumilev, his first wife, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam were the foremost representatives of acmeism, a movement emphasizing concrete personal experience that arose in response to the dominant symbolist school of poetry during the 1910s. Gumilev also played a central role in the St. Petersburg–based Guild of Poets, a literary organization intermittently active between 1910 and 1921. As a monarchist and self-styled “poet-warrior,” Gumilev volunteered to serve in the Russian army in August 1914. In 1918 he returned to Petrograd, where he worked as an editor and translator for the World Literature series. Gumilev was arrested by the Bolsheviks in August 1921 for his alleged part in an anti-Soviet plot. Although the charges were almost certainly fabricated, Gumilev and sixty others were executed within weeks, over the protest of many writers. His execution was part of a sustained campaign against intellectuals by the Bolsheviks, who hoped to stifle potential dissent while loosening economic and social controls during the New Economic Policy. Gumilev’s execution is frequently cited as evidence that the systematic use of state terror was an integral part of communist rule, not an aberration associated with Stalinism. Many contemporaries viewed the deaths of Gumilev and the poet Alexander Blok, just twelve days apart, as symbolic of the destruction of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia. Gumilev’s work was banned in the Soviet Union from 1923 until 1986. His poetry has become very popular in Russia since that time, with more than forty editions of his works appearing. Major collections included Romantic Flowers (1908), Alien Sky (1912), Quiver (1916), and The Pillar of Fire (1921). Gumilev also wrote several plays.

See also:

AKHMATOVA, ANNA ANDREYEVNA; BLOK,

ALEXANDER ALEXANDROVICH; MANDELSHTAM, OSIP EMILIEVICH; SILVER AGE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gumilev, Nikolai. (1999). The Pillar of Fire and Other Poems, trans. Richard McKane, intro. by Michael Basker. London: Anvil Poetry Press. Sampson, Earl D. (1970). “Nikolay Gumilev: Towards a Reevaluation.” Russian Review 29(3):301–311. BRIAN KASSOF

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GYPSY Gypsies (tsygane in Russian, while Roma is the name preferred by this group) have been one of the most visible and yet least powerful of ethnic groups in Russia. The population is considerably larger than the 153,000 in the Russian Federation who were listed as Gypsies in the 1989 census. This is due to underreporting, a high birth rate, and immigration from former Soviet republics. Roma leaders claim a population of at least one million. As is true of Roma populations all over Europe, little is known of their ethnic origins and history as a people, though it is theorized that Gypsies originated in India. Many migrated to Russia by way of Germany and Poland during the eighteenth century after suffering persecution there. Romani, the language spoken by most gypsies, has Indo-European roots with some links to ancient Sanskrit. Gypsies are widely dispersed across Russia, with communities in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Samara, Komi Republic, Sverdlovsk, Vologda, Volgograd, Voronezh, Yaroslavl, and elsewhere. Following long-standing cultural traditions, Roma have resisted assimilation and exist on the margins of society. Geographic dispersal and social marginalization meant that the Roma did not enjoy the state support that often characterized Soviet nationality policy. Gypsies had no territorial entity of their own, no schools offering instruction in their own language, and no newspapers. The first Roma newspaper in Russia began publication in Samara only in 2001. Even under Josef Stalin, however, the cultural role of gypsies in Soviet society was recognized. In 1931 the Romen Theater opened in Moscow. It was the first theater in the world to showcase gypsy culture, and gypsy actors and musicians performed and were trained there. The theater continues to be active in post-Soviet Russia. Gypsy themes have been prominent in Russian culture, particularly through the popular film Tabor Goes to Heaven (Tabor ukhodit v nebo) which was released in 1976. In Russia as in the rest of Eastern Europe, gypsies have been the object of public scorn and official repression. Many have traditionally engaged in illegal or semilegal occupations such as black marketeering, petty theft, fencing stolen goods, and organized begging. This is both a cause and effect of the lack of acceptance of gypsies in Russian society. During the Soviet period, gypsies often engaged in black-market selling of alcohol and


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perfume, as well as fortune-telling and other occult arts. State repression of the gypsies reached a new height during the Nikita Khrushchev period. New regulations issued in 1957 attempted to restrict their movements outside of places where they were registered. This attempt to prevent the movement of gypsies has continued in post-Soviet Russia, with the police sometimes tearing down illegal gypsy settlements and forcing residents to return to their home region. With the expansion of private enterprise in post-Soviet Russia, the Roma reportedly have been squeezed out of their traditional commercial occupations, with even fortune-telling taken over by non-gypsy entrepreneurs who had an easier time dealing with the authorities. There has been an increasing incidence of gypsies involved in more serious crimes, such as the drug trade, a tendency bemoaned by leaders of the Roma community. In 2000 the Russian government officially recognized the need for gypsies to have a political voice, and it authorized the creation of a council that would defend gypsy interests. Its leaders have campaigned against frequent stereotyping of gypsies in the media and have condemned police harassment based solely on ethnic identity.

See also:

GYPSYMANIA; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET;

NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crowe, David M. (1994). A History of Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia. New York: St. Martin’s Press. European Roma Rights Center (2003). “Written Comments of the European Roma Rights Center Concerning the Russian Federation for Consideration by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination at its Sixty-second Session, March 3–21, 2003.” DARRELL SLIDER

GYPSYMANIA Gypsymania took both literary and musical forms during the early nineteenth century. The gypsy theme—imagined scenes from their life and customs—captivated Russian poets. Alexander Pushkin’s contributions gained popularity


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and immediately entered the literary canon. Gypsymania in music (tsyganshchina) outlasted the literary genres. Its sources—choirs comprising free, serf, and state peasant ethnic gypsies (Roma) and Russian composers who adapted gypsy motifs to popular romances—were blended by star performers such as Stesha (Stepanida Sidorovna Soldatova, 1784–1822) and her successors. Tsyganshchina’s attraction rested on lyrics, music, and performance style. Song lyrics represented gypsies as hot-blooded, wild in love, cruel in hatred, and enamored of freedom and the open road. The music was marked by sharp contrasts and sudden changes of tempo. The critic Apollon Grigorev wrote in 1847: “If you seek sounds, if you seek expression for those undefined, incomprehensible, sorrowful ‘blues’ (khandra), you make off to the Gypsies, immerse yourself in the hurricane of these wild, passionate, oppressively passionate songs.” An English visitor to a Moscow cafe during the 1850s described the performance of a gypsy choir wearing expensive and gaudy garments. They sat or lay on the floor; the soloist was joined by the company who drank and smoked as they strolled from table to table, stamping their feet. As cafes, restaurants, and phonograph records proliferated during the early twentieth century, gypsymania launched the careers of a half dozen superstars of the era who often emulated in life the emotional turbulence of their songs. Most Russians found them irresistible. Critics accepted both the traditional music of the Roma, because it bore a folkish spirit, and the stylizations of composers at play like Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms. The middle range, by far the most popular, invited rancor: the local vernacular adorned with gypsy devices of rhythm, sonority, instrumentation, and phrasing. In Russia, songs composed in the gypsy manner, such as “Two Guitars” and “Dark Eyes,” evoked repugnance among some critics. Ironically, genuine gypsies when playing Roma music also borrowed from local styles, and this habit accounts for the huge variety among the various authentic gypsy styles from Spain to Finland. Under Bolshevism, hostility to tsyganshchina took on a political edge. During the 1920s, classical musicians lamented its vulgarity, and proletarian composers charged the music with inciting decadence, bourgeois values, and miscreant sexuality. The gypsy genre disappeared during the Cultural Revolution (1928– 1931), and a form of gypsy music was partially

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revived, in a sanitized form, with the founding of the Teatr Romen in 1931 where something like genuine Roma performances were mounted. Recordings by other Soviet singers of selected gypsy songs were released under the watchful eye of the censors. With the coming of glasnost under Mikhail Gorbachev, every kind of previously taboo gypsy songs resurfaced, only to be drowned out soon by Western rock and hip-hop.

See also:

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FOLK MUSIC; GYPSY; PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stites, Richard. (1992). Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. RICHARD STITES

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HAGIOGRAPHY Various types of narratives with documentary and commemorative functions for the Orthodox Church are also regarded as important literary works in the medieval Russian canon. Sacred biographies (vitae) were written about persons who had followed Christ’s example in life and shown evidence of powers after death to intercede for believers, attributes that qualified them for sainthood. A short summary of the saint’s life was read initially at the ceremonial inauguration of the feast day and thereafter to honor the saint’s memory. Longer vitae circulated in religious anthologies of devotional readings. Eulogistic biographies of rulers, initially written for the funeral service, were recorded in chronicles, then revised for hagiographical anthologies. Tales from the Patericon record episodes from the lives of holy monks, their teachings, or the history of a monastic community. The vitae also include extended accounts of miracles worked by icons, some of which are viewed as local or national symbols, as well as tales of individual miracles. When the Kievans converted to Christianity during the reign of Vladimir I (d. 1015), they received Greek Orthodox protocols for the recognition and veneration of saints, as well as a corpus of hagiographical texts. Beginning in the eleventh century, Kievan monks produced their own records of native saints. Veneration for the appanage princes Boris and Gleb, murdered in the internecine struggles following the death of their father Vladimir, inspired three extended lives that are regarded as literary classics. Also influential was the life of Theodosius (d. 1074), who became a monk and helped to found the renowned Kiev Cave Monastery. His biography, together with stories of the monastery’s miraculous founding and of its monks, was anthologized in the Kiev Cave Monastery Patericon. The earliest hagiographical works from the city-state of Novgorod, surviving in thirteenth-century copies, focus on the bishops and abbots of important cloisters. Lives of Suzdalian saints, such as the Rostov bishops Leontius, Isaiah, and Ignatius, and the holy monk Abraham, preserve collective memories of clerics who converted the people of the area to Christianity.

H

In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Russian monks fled the cities, moving into wilderness areas to live as hermits, then founded monasteries to house their disciples. The writings produced in these monastery scriptoria promoted

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asceticism as the highest model to which a Christian could aspire. Biographies of saints were supplemented with long prefaces, prayers, laments, and digressive praises employing the poetic imagery and complex syntactic structures characteristic of hymnography. An introductory commonplace, declaring the writer’s wish to write an account that will be a fitting crown or garland of praise for the saint, has inspired some scholars to group these lives into a hagiographical school whose trademark is “word-weaving” (pletenie sloves). The most prominent writers of this school include Metropolitan Cyprian (c. 1330–1406), identified by some as a Bulgarian and others as a Serb, who wrote a revised life of the holy Metropolitan Peter in 1381; Epiphanius the Wise (second half of the fourteenth century to the first quarter of the fifteenth century), author of the first life of St. Sergius of Radonezh and St. Stephen of Perm (1390s); and Pachomius the Logothete, an Athonian monk sometimes identified as a Serb, who was commissioned to rewrite the lives of widely venerated holy men from Novgorod, Moscow, and leading monasteries between 1429 and 1484. Sixteenth-century Muscovite hagiographers composed expansive narratives celebrating saints and icons viewed as protectors of the Russian tsardom. The most influential promoter of the Muscovite school was Macarius. While serving as archbishop of Novgorod (1537–1542), Macarius ordered the collection of saints’ lives and icon legends, as well as other translated and original religious texts, for a twelve-volume anthology known as the Great Menology (Velikie Minei Chetii). The first “Sophia” version was donated to the Novgorod Cathedral of Holy Wisdom in 1541. During his tenure as metropolitan of Moscow (1542–1563), Macarius commissioned additional lives of saints who were recognized as national patrons at the Church Councils of 1547 and 1549, for a second expanded version of this anthology, which he donated to the Kremlin Cathedral of the Dormition in 1552. A third fair copy was prepared between 1550 and 1554 for presentation to Tsar Ivan the Terrible. Between 1556 and 1563, expanded sacred biographies of Kievan rulers Olga and Vladimir I, appanage princes and princesses and four Moscow metropolitans, as well as an ornate narrative about the miracles of the nationally venerated icon Our Lady of Vladimir, were composed for Macarius’s Book of Degrees. These lives stressed the unity of the Russian metropolitan see and the theme that the line of Moscow princes had prospered because they followed the guidance of the Church.

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In the seventeenth century, two twelve-volume hagiographical anthologies were produced by clerics affiliated with the Trinity-Sergius Monastery: the Trinity monk German Tulupov and the priest Ioann Milyutin. Their still unpublished menologies preserve lives of native Russian saints and legends of local wonder-working icons not included in earlier collections. In 1684 the Kiev Cave Monastery monk Dmitry (Daniel Savvich Tuptalo), who would be consecrated metropolitan of Rostov and Yaroslavl in 1702, began to research Muscovite, Western, and Greek hagiographical sources. Dmitry’s goal was to retell the lives of saints and legends of wonder-working icons in a form accessible to a broad audience of Orthodox readers. The first version of his reading menology was printed in 1705 at the Kiev Cave Monastery. In 1759, a corrected edition printed in Moscow became the authorized collection of hagiography for the Russian Orthodox Church. Also noteworthy as sources on the spirituality of the seventeenth century are the lives of Old Believer martyrs (Archpriest Avvakum, burned as a heretic on April 1, 1682, and Lady Theodosia Morozova who died in prison on November 2, 1675) and the life of the charitable laywoman Yulianya Osorina, written by her son Kallistrat, district elder (gubnaya starosta) of Murom between 1610 and 1640.

See also: KIEVAN CAVES PATERICON; ORTHODOXY; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; SAINTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bosley, Richard. (1997). “The Changing Profile of the Liturgical Calendar in Muscovy’s Formative Years.” In Culture and Identity in Muscovy: 1359–1584, eds. A. M. Kleimola and G. D. Lenhoff. Moscow: ITZGarant. Ebbinghaus, Andreas. (1997). “Reception and Ideology in the Literature of Muscovite Rus.” In Culture and Identity in Muscovy: 1359–1584, eds. A. M. Kleimola and G. D. Lenhoff. Moscow: ITZ-Garant. Fennell, John. (1995). A History of the Russian Church to 1448. New York: Longman. Hollingsworth, Paul, tr. and ed. (1992). The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lenhoff, Gail D. (1997). Early Russian Hagiography: The Lives of Prince Fedor the Black (Slavistiche Veröffentlichungen 82). Berlin-Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Prestel, David K. (1992). “Biblical Typology in the Kievan Caves Patericon.” The Modern Encyclopedia of Religions


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in Russia and the Soviet Union 4:97-102. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. GAIL LENHOFF

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Clemens, Walter C., Jr. “Nicholas II to SALT II: Change and Continuity in East-West Diplomacy.” International Affairs 3 (July 1973):385-401. Rosenne, Shabtai, comp. (2001). The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 and International Arbitration: Reports and Documents. The Hague: T.M.C. Asser.

HAGUE PEACE CONFERENCES Tsar Nicholas II summoned peace conferences at The Hague in the Netherlands in 1899 and 1907. His gestures appealed to pacifist sentiments in the West, but his primary motives were quite pragmatic. He hoped the 1899 conference would ban the rapid-fire artillery being developed by AustriaHungary, Russia’s rival in the Balkans. Russia could neither develop nor purchase such weapons except at great expense. Finance Minister Serge Witte urged that such money be spent instead on modernizing Russia’s economy. Having called the conference, the Imperial government found itself tied in knots. Its war minister warned that Russia would need more and better arms to achieve its goals in the Far East against Japan and in the Black Sea region against Ottoman Turkey. Russia’s major ally, France, objected to any limitations because it sought new arms to cope with Germany. Before the conference even opened, St. Petersburg assured Paris that no disarmament measures would be adopted. The 1899 Hague Conference did not limit arms, but it did refine the laws of war, including the rights of neutrals. It also established an international panel of arbiters available to hear cases put before it by disputing nations. A second Hague conference was planned five years after the first, but did not convene then because Russia was fighting Japan. Nicholas did summon the meeting in 1907, after Russia began to recover from its defeat by Japan and from its own 1905 revolution. It was during the 1905 upheaval that Vladimir Ilich Lenin first articulated his view on disarmament. The revolutionary task, he said, is not to talk about disarmament (razoruzhenie) but to disarm (obezoruzhit’) the ruling classes. The Russian delegation in 1907 proposed less sweeping limits on armaments than in 1899. However, when some governments proposed a five-year ban on dirigibles, Russia called for a permanent ban. Nothing came of these proposals, and the second Hague conference managed only to add to refinements to the laws of war.

See also:

LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; NICHOLAS II


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Van den Dungen, Peter. (1983) The Making of Peace: Jean de Bloch and the First Hague Peace Conference. Los Angeles: Center for the Study of Armament and Disarmament, California State University. WALTER C. CLEMENS, JR.

HANSEATIC LEAGUE The Hanseatic League was an association of north European towns that dominated trade from London in the west to Flanders, Scandinavia, Germanic Baltic towns, and Novgorod in the east. There is no precise date for the beginning of the Hansa, but during the twelfth century German merchants established a commercial center at Visby on the island of Gotland, and by the early thirteenth century founded Riga, Reval (Tallinn), Danzig (Gdansk), and Dorpat (Tartu). German and Scandinavian merchants established the Gothic Yard (Gotsky dvor) and the Church of St. Olaf on Novgorod’s Trading Side. Toward the end of the twelfth century, Lübeck built the German Yard (Nemestsky dvor, or Peterhof for the Church of St. Peter) near the Gothic Yard. At the same time Novgorodian merchants frequented Visby, Sweden, Denmark, and Lübeck. During the thirteenth century Lübeck gradually replaced Visby as the commercial center of the League, and during the fourteenth century the Gothic Yard became attached to Peterhof. In 1265 the north German towns accepted the “law of Lübeck” and agreed for the common defense of the towns. The League’s primary concern was to ensure open sea-lanes and the safety of its ships from piracy. In addition to Novgorod, the League founded counters or factories in Bruges, London, and Bergen. At its height between the 1350s and 1370s, the League consisted of seventy or more towns; perhaps thirty additional towns were loosely associated with the Hansa. The cities met irregularly in a diet (or Hansetage) but never developed a central political body or common navy. The League could threaten to exclude recalcitrant towns from its trade.

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A Novgorod-Hansa agreement of 1269 laid the basic structure of commercial relations. German and Scandinavian merchants from Lübeck, Reval, Riga, and Dorpat traveled twice per year, in summer and winter, to Novgorod. German merchants were under their own jurisdiction within Peterhof, but disputes involving Novgorodians fell to a joint court that included the mayor and chiliarch (military commander). During the thirteenth century the German Yard elected its own aldermen, but during the fourteenth century Lübeck and Visby chose the aldermen. During the fifteenth century the Livonian towns selected a permanent official who resided in Novgorod. Novgorod supplied the Hansa with furs, wax, and honey, and received silver ingots (the source of much of medieval Rus’s silver), as well as Flemish cloth, salt, herring, other manufactured goods, and occasionally grain. In 1369 the League imposed duties on its silver exports to Novgorod; in 1373 it halted silver exports for two years, and in 1388 for four years. Novgorod turned to the Teutonic Order for silver, but exports stopped after 1427. During the 1440s war broke out between Novgorod and the Teutonic Order and the League, closing the German Yard from 1443 to 1448. Novgorod’s fur trade declined in the second half of the fifteenth century. After conquering Novgorod in 1478, Moscow closed the German Yard in 1494. The Yard reopened in 1514, but Moscow developed alternative trading routes through Ivangorod, Pskov, Narva, Dorpat, and Smolensk. During the sixteenth century Dutch and English traders further undermined the League’s commercial monopolies. In 1555 the English obtained duty-free privileges to trade manufactured goods for Russian furs.

See also:

FOREIGN TRADE; GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH;

NOVGOROD THE GREAT

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dollinger, Philippe. (1970). The German Hansa, tr. D. S. Ault. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. LAWRENCE N. LANGER

HARD BUDGET CONSTRAINTS In market economies, firms face hard budget constraints. This means that they must cover their costs of production using revenues generated either from

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the sales of their product or from other financial sources. In the short term, firms facing hard budget constraints may borrow to cover their operating costs. In the long term, however, if firms cannot cover their costs from their revenues, they fail, which means they must declare that the company is bankrupt or they must sell their assets to another firm. Hard budget constraints coincide with a situation where government authorities do not bail out or subsidize poorly performing or loss-making firms. Soviet industrial enterprises did not face hard budget constraints. Unlike their counterparts in market economies, Soviet firms’ primary objective was to produce output, not to make a profit. In many respects, planners controlled the financial performance of firms, because planners set the prices of labor, energy, and other material inputs used by the firm and also set the prices on products sold by the firm. Centrally determined prices in the Soviet economy did not facilitate an accurate calculation of costs, because they were not based on considerations of scarcity or efficient resource utilization. Nor did prices reflect demand conditions. Consequently, Soviet firms were not able to accurately calculate their financial condition in terms that would be appropriate in a market economy. More importantly, however, Soviet planners rewarded the fulfillment of output targets with large monetary bonuses and continually pressured Soviet industrial enterprises to produce more. With quantity targets given highest priority, managers of Soviet firms were not concerned with costs, nor were they faced with bankruptcy if they engaged in ongoing loss-making activities. Without the constraint to minimize or reduce costs, and given the emphasis on fulfilling or expanding output targets, Soviet firms were encouraged to continually demand additional resources in order to increase their production. In contrast to hard budget constraints faced by profit-maximizing firms in market economies, Soviet industrial enterprises faced soft budget constraints.

See also:

NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; VALUE SUBTRACTION;

VIRTUAL ECONOMY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kornai, Janos. (1986). Contradictions and Dilemmas: Studies on the Socialist Economy and Society, tr. Ilona Lukacs, et al. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kornai, Janos. (1992). The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. SUSAN J. LINZ


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HAYEK, FRIEDRICH (1899–1992), leading proponent of markets as an evolutionary solution to complex social coordination problems. One of the leaders of the Austrian school of economics in the twentieth century, Friedrich Hayek received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1974. Born to a distinguished family of Viennese intellectuals, he attended the University of Vienna, earning doctorates in law and economics in 1921 and 1923. He became a participant in Ludwig von Mises’s private economics seminar and was greatly influenced by von Mises’s treatise on socialism and his argument about the impossibility of economic rationality under socialism due to the absence of private property and markets in the means of production. Hayek developed a theory of credit-driven business cycles, discussed in his books Prices and Production (1931) and Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933). As a result he was offered a lectureship, and then the Tooke Chair in Economics and Statistics at the London School of Economics and Politics (LSE) in 1931. There he worked on developing an alternative analysis to the nascent Keynesian economic system, which he published in The Pure Theory of Capital in 1941, by which point the Keynesian macro model had already become the accepted and dominant paradigm of economic analysis. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hayek made his major contribution to the analysis of economic systems, pointing out the role of markets and the price system in distilling, aggregating, and disseminating usable specific knowledge among participants in the economy. The role of markets as an efficient discovery procedure, generating a spontaneous order in the flux of changing and unknowable specific circumstances and preferences, was emphasized in his “Economics and Knowledge” (1937), “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945), and Individualism and Economic Order (1948). These arguments provided a fundamental critique of the possibility of efficient economic planning and an efficient socialist system, refining and redirecting the earlier Austrian critique of von Mises. They have also provided the basis for a substantial theoretical literature on the role of prices as a conveyor of information, and for the revival of non-socialist economic thought in the final days of the Soviet Union. Hayek worked at LSE until 1950 when he moved to Chicago, joining the Committee of Social


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Thought at the University of Chicago. There Hayek moved beyond economic to largely social and philosophic-historical analysis. His major works in these areas include his most famous defense of private property and decentralized markets, The Road to Serfdom (1944), New Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1978), and the compilation The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988). These works, more than his economic studies, provided much of the intellectual inspiration and substance behind the anti-Communist and economic liberal movements in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1962 Hayek left Chicago for the University of Freiburg in Germany, and subsequently for Salzburg, where he spent the rest of his life. The Nobel Prize in 1974 significantly raised interest in his work and in Austrian economics.

See also:

LIBERALISM; SOCIALISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bergson, Abram. (1948). “Socialist Economics.” In A Survey of Contemporary Economics, ed. H. S. Ellis. Homewood, IL: Irwin. Blaug, Mark. (1993). “Hayek Revisited.” Critical Review 7(1):51–60. Caldwell, Bruce. (1997). “Hayek and Socialism.” Journal of Economic Literature, 35(4):1856–1890. Foss, Nicolai J. (1994). The Austrian School and Modern Economics: A Reassessment. Copenhagen, Denmark: Handelshojskolens Forlag. Lavoie, Don. (1985). Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Machlup, Fritz. (1976). “Hayek’s Contributions to Economics.” In Buckley, William F., et al., Essays on Hayek, ed. Fritz Machlup. Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College Press. O’Driscoll, Gerald P. (1977). Economics as a Coordination Problem: The Contribution of Friedrich A. Hayek. Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews and McMeel. RICHARD E. ERICSON

HEALTH CARE SERVICES, IMPERIAL Prior to the reign of Peter the Great there were virtually no modern physicians or medical programs in Russia. The handful of foreign physicians employed by the Aptekarskyi prikaz (Apothecary bu-

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reau) cared almost exclusively for the ruling family and the court. Peter himself took a serious interest in medicine, including techniques of surgery and dentistry. His expansion of medical services and medical practitioners focused on the armed forces, but his reformist vision embodied an explicit concern for the broader public health. As of 1800 there were still only about five hundred physicians in the empire, almost all of them foreigners who had trained abroad. During the eighteenth century schools in Russian hospitals provided a growing number of Russians with limited training as surgeons or surgeons’ assistants. The serious training of physicians in Russia itself began in the 1790s at the medical faculty of Moscow University and in medical-surgical academies in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Later these were joined by medical faculties at universities in St. Petersburg, Dorpat, Kazan, and elsewhere. The early medical corps in Russia also included auxiliary medical personnel such as feldshers (physicians’ assistants), midwives, barbers, bonesetters, and vaccinators. Much of the population relied upon traditional healers and midwives well into the twentieth century. Catherine the Great made highly visible efforts to improve public health. In 1763 she created a medical college to oversee medical affairs. She had herself and her children inoculated against smallpox in 1768 and sponsored broader vaccination programs. She established foundling homes, an obstetric institute in St. Petersburg, and several large hospitals in the capitals. Her provincial reform of 1775 created Boards of Public Welfare, which built provincial hospitals, insane asylums, and almshouses. In 1797, under Paul I, provincial medical boards assumed control of medicine at the provincial level, and municipal authorities took over Catherine’s Boards of Public Welfare. With the establishment of ministries in 1803, the Medical College was folded into the Ministry of Internal Affairs and its Medical Department. The paucity of medical personnel made it difficult to provide modern medical care for a widely dispersed peasantry that constituted over eighty percent of the population. During the 1840s the Ministry of State Domains and the Office of Crown Properties initiated rural medical programs for the state and crown peasants. The most impressive advances in rural medicine were accomplished by zemstvos, or self-government institutions, during the fifty years following their creation in 1864. District and provincial zemstvos, working with the

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physicians they employed, developed a model of rural health-care delivery that was financed through the zemstvo budget rather than through payments for service. By 1914 zemstvos had crafted an impressive network of rural clinics, hospitals, sanitary initiatives, and schools for training auxiliary medical personnel. The scope and quality of zemstvo medicine varied widely, however, depending upon the wealth and political will of individual districts. The conferences that physicians and zemstvo officials held at the district and provincial level were a vital dimension of Russia’s emerging public sphere, as was a lively medical press and the activities of professional associations such as the Pirogov Society of Russian Physicians. By 1912 there were 22,772 physicians in the empire, of whom 2,088 were women. They were joined by 28,500 feldshers, 14,000 midwives, 4,113 dentists, and 13,357 pharmacists. The fragmentation of medical administration among a host of institutions made it difficult to coordinate efforts to combat cholera and other epidemic diseases. Many tsarist officials and physicians saw the need to create a national ministry of public health, and a medical commission headed by Dr. Georgy Ermolayevich Rein drafted plans for such a ministry. Leading zemstvo physicians, who prized the zemstvo’s autonomy and were hostile to any expansion of central government control, opposed the creation of such a ministry. The revolutions of 1917 occurred before the Rein Commission’s plans could be implemented.

See also:

FELDSHER; HEALTH CARE SERVICES, SOVIET

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, John T. (1980). Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia: Public Health and Urban Disaster. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Conroy, Mary Schaeffer. (1994). In Health and in Sickness: Pharmacy, Pharmacists, and the Pharmaceutical Industry in Late Imperial, Early Soviet Russia. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs. Frieden, Nancy. (1981). Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 1856–1905. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hutchinson John F. (1990). Politics and Public Health in Revolutionary Russia, 1890–1918. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. McGrew, Roderick E. (1965). Russia and the Cholera, 1823–1832. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ramer, Samuel C. (1982). “The Zemstvo and Public Health.” In The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in


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Local Self-Government, ed. Terence Emmons and Wayne S. Vucinich. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Solomon, Susan, and Hutchinson, John F., eds. (1990). Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. SAMUEL C. RAMER

HEALTH CARE SERVICES, SOVIET Soviet socialized medicine consisted of a complex of measures designed to provide free medical care to the entire population, at the time of service, at the expense of society. The Soviet Union was the first country in the world to grant every citizen a constitutional right to medical care. This commitment was one of the few brighter (and redeeming) aspects of an otherwise bleak totalitarian system and often held as an example to emulate by other nations. The promise of universal, free (though not necessarily equal) care was held as the fulfillment of an age-long dream of providing care to those who needed it regardless of their station in life and ability to pay. It thus promised to eliminate the commercial aspects of the medical encounter that, in the eyes of many, had turned the physician into a businessman concerned primarily with his income and his willingness to treat only those who were affluent. In the first decade of the Soviet regime, the official ideology held that illness and premature mortality were the products of a faulty socioeconomic system (i.e., capitalism) and that the establishment of a socialist society (eventually to become communist) would gradually eliminate most of the social causes of disease and early deaths by creating improved conditions (better nutrition, decent standard of living, good working conditions, housing, and prevention). This approach was set aside when Stalin took power at the end of the 1920s. He launched a program of forced draft industrialization and militarization at the expense of the standard of living, with an emphasis on medical and clinical or remedial approach, rather than prevention, to maintain and repair the working and fighting capacity of the population. The number of health personnel and hospital beds increased substantially, though their quality was relatively poor, except for the elites. Soviet socialized medicine was essentially a public and state enterprise. It was the state that


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provided the care. It was not an insurance system, nor a mix of public and private activities, nor was it a charitable or religious enterprise. The state assumed complete control of the financing of medical care. Soviet socialized medicine became highly centralized and bureaucratized, with the Health Ministry USSR standing at the apex of the medical pyramid. Physicians and other health personnel became state salaried employees. The state also financed and managed medical education, all health facilities from clinics to hospitals to rest homes, medical research, the production of pharmaceuticals, and medical technology. The system thus depended entirely on budgetary allocations as line items in the budget. More often than not, the health care system suffered from low priority and was financed on what came to be known as the residual principle. After all other needs had been met, whatever was left would go to health care. Most physicians (the majority of whom were women) were poorly paid compared to other occupations, and many medical facilities were short of funds to purchase equipment and supplies or to maintain them. Access to care was stratified according to occupation, rank, and location. Nevertheless the population, by and large, looked upon the principle of socialized medicine as one of the more positive achievements of the Soviet regime and welfare system, and held to the belief that everyone was entitled to free care. Their major complaint was with the implementation of that principle. Soviet socialized medicine could be characterized as having a noble purpose, but with inadequate resources, flawed execution, and ending in mixed results.

See also:

FELDSHER; HEALTHCARE SERVICES, IMPERIAL

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Field, Mark G. (1957). Doctor and Patient in Soviet Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Field, Mark G. (1967). Soviet Socialized Medicine: An Introduction. New York: The Free Press. Field, Mark G., and Twigg, Judyth L., eds. (2000). Russia’s Torn Safety Nets: Health and Social Welfare During the Transition. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Ryan, Michael. (1981). Doctors and the State in the Soviet Union. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Sigerist, Henry E. (1947). Medicine and Health in the Soviet Union. New York: Citadel Press. Solomon, Susan Gross, and Hutchinson, John F., eds. (1990). Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. MARK G. FIELD

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HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH (1770–1831), leading nineteenth-century philosopher. Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel was one of the most influential idealist philosophers of the nineteenth century. In German philosophical thought, Hegel was rivaled in his own times perhaps only by Immanuel Kant. Hegel developed a sweeping spectrum of thought embracing metaphysics, epistemology, logic, historiography, science, art, politics, and society. One branch of his philosophy after his death was reworked and fashioned into an “algebra of revolution,” as developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Russian Marxists and socialists, and later by Vladimir I. Lenin, the founder of Bolshevism. For Hegel, reality, which progresses dynamically through a process, or phases, of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—his triadic concept of logic, inspired

by the philosophy of Heraclitus—is essentially spiritual. Ultimate, determinant reality, according to Hegel, is the absolute World Spirit (Weltgeist). This spirit acts in triadic, dialectical fashion universally throughout world history. For Hegel, the state was the principal embodiment, or bearer, of this process. Because of its occasional obscurity and complexity, Hegelianism as a social and political philosophy soon split into various, contrasting branches. The primary ones were the extremes widely known as Right and Left Hegelianism. There was also a middle, or moderate, form of Hegelianism that in some ways influenced English, Italian, American, and other branches of late-nineteenthcentury idealism and pragmatism. Right (or Old) Hegelianism regarded reality more or less passively, as indubitably rational. Whatever is real is rational, as seen in the status quo. Spirit, it alleged, develops on a grand, world scale via the inexorable, dialectical processes of history. Wherever this process leads must be logical since spirit is absolute and triadically law-bound. In the milieu of contrasting European politics of the nineteenth century, Right Hegelianism translated into reactionary endorsement of restorationism (restoring the old order following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars) or support for monarchist legitimacy. By contrast, however, Left (or Young) Hegelianism, which influenced a number of thinkers, including Marx and Engels together with Russian Marxists and socialists, stressed the idea of grasping and understanding, even wielding, this lawbound process. It sought thereby to manipulate reality, above all, via society, politics, and the state. For revolutionaries, the revolutionary movement became such a handle, or weapon.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel influenced the writings of Karl Marx. © BETTMANN/CORBIS

Hegel had taught that there was an ultimate reality and that it was spiritual. However, when the young, materialist-minded Marx, under the influence of such philosophers as Feuerbach, absorbed Hegel, he “turned Hegel upside down,” to use his collaborator Friedrich Engels’s apt phrase. While retaining Hegelian logic and the historical process of the triadic dialectic, Marx, later Engels, and still later Lenin, saw the process in purely nonspiritual, materialistic, historical, and socioeconomic terms. This became the ideology, or science, of historical materialism and dialectical materialism as embraced by the Russian Marxist George Plekhanov and, thence, by Lenin—but in an interpretation of the ideology different from Plekhanov’s.

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In the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin interpretation of Left Hegelianism, historical change, the motor of history as determined by the forces and processes within the given social and economic system, is law-bound and strictly predictable. As presented in historical materialism, the history of societies develops universally by stages—namely, from slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism, and finally to socialism, whose final stage is full-fledged communism. Each stage, except the merged last two (socialism/communism), contains the seeds of its own destruction (or “contradictions”) as the dialectical process of socioeconomic development spirals upward to the next historical stage. For instance, capitalism’s antithesis is seen in the seeds of its own destruction together with the anticipation of the new synthesis of socialism/communism. Such seeds, said the Marxists, are capitalism’s impoverishment of a majority of the exploited population, overproduction, unemployment, class struggle, economic collapse, and, inevitably, revolution. Progressive elements of the former, capitalist order are then continued in new form in the final, socialist/communist phase. This assumes the form of industrialization, mass production, a just sociopolitical order (under a workers’ dictatorship of the proletariat). In this formulation the Marxists developed the theory of base and superstructure. The base is the economic system; the superstructure are such facets of society as government, laws, religion, literature, and the arts. The superstructure both reflects and rationalizes the base.

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The leaders of the impending proletarian revolution, Lenin says in his 1903 work, What Is to Be Done?, become a select circle of intellectuals whose philosophy (derived from Marx and Hegel) equips them to assume exclusive Communist Party leadership of the given country. Lenin could imagine that such knowledge might allow a nation’s (namely, Russia’s) socioeconomic development to skip intermediate socioeconomic phases, or at least shorten them. In this way, the Russian Bolsheviks could lead the masses to the socialist/communist stage of development all but directly. This could be accomplished by reducing or suppressing the phase of bourgeois capitalism. (This Leninist interepretation of the dialectic has been criticized by other Marxists as running counter to Hegel’s, and Marx’s, own explanations of the dialectic.) Thus, in Lenin’s interpretation of Hegel and Marx, the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes the leader and teacher of society, the single indoctrinator whose absolute power (based on the people) saves the masses from the abuses of the contradictions of capitalist society, whether in rural or urban society, while guiding society to the final, communist phase.

See also:

DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM; ENGELS, FRIEDRICH;

LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; MARXISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gregor, A. James. (1995). “A Survey of Marxism.” In The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ultimately, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, state power, as described in the Marxist Critique of the Gotha Program, gradually withers away. The society is thence led into the final epoch of communism. In this final stage, a virtual millennium, there are no classes, no socioeconomic inequality, no oppression, no state, no law, no division of labor, but instead pure equality, communality, and universal happiness. Ironically, in contrast to Marx’s formulation, the ultimate phase in Hegel’s own interpretation of the dialectic in history was the Prussian state.

Hegel, Georg Wilhem Friedrich. (1967). The Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Clarendon.

In Lenin’s construction of Marxism, Hegelianism was given an extreme left interpretation. This is seen, among other places, in Lenin’s “Philosophical Notebooks.” In this work Lenin gives his own interpretation of Hegel. He indicates here and in other writings that absolute knowledge of the inevitable historical process is attainable—at least by those equipped to find it scientifically.

ALBERT L. WEEKS


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Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. (1962). Selected Works. 2 vols. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House. Possony, Stefan T. (1966). Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary. London: Allen & Unwin. Tucker, Robert C. (1972). Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Weeks, Albert L. (1968). The First Bolshevik: A Political Biography of Peter Tkachev. New York: New York University Press.

HELSINKI ACCORDS Signed at the Finnish capital of Helsinki on August 1, 1975, the Helsinki Accords were accepted by

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thirty-five participating nations at the first Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The conference included all of the nations of Europe (excluding Albania), as well as the Soviet Union, the United States, and Canada. The Helsinki Accords had two noteworthy features. First, Article I formally recognized the post-World War II borders of Europe, which included an unwritten acknowledgement of the Soviet Union’s control over the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which the USSR had annexed in 1940. Second, Article VII stated that “the participating States recognize the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” This passage, in theory, held the Soviet Union responsible for the maintenance and protection of basic human rights within its borders. Although the Soviet government was never serious about conforming to the human rights parameters defined by the Helsinki Accords, the national leadership under General Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev believed that its signing of the document would improve the Soviet Union’s diplomatic position with the United States and other Western countries. Specifically, the state wished to foster the perception that it was as an equal player in the policy of détente, in which both superpowers sought to relax Cold War tensions. What the regime did not anticipate, however, was that those outside the Soviet Union, as well as many of the USSR’s own citizens, would take the Accords seriously. Soon after the Soviet delegation returned from Finland, a number of human rights watchdog groups emerged to monitor the USSR’s compliance with the Accords. Among those organizations that arose after the signing of the accords was Helsinki Watch, founded in 1978 by a collection of Soviet dissidents including the notable physicist Andrei D. Sakharov and other human rights activists living outside the USSR. Helsinki Watch quickly became the bestknown and most outspoken critic of Soviet human rights policies. This collection of activists and intellectuals later merged with similar organizations to form an association known as Human Rights Watch. Many members of both Helsinki Watch and Human Rights Watch who were Soviet citizens endured state persecution, including trial, arrest, and internal exile (e.g., Sakharov was exiled to the city of Gorky) from 1977 to 1980. Until the emergence of Mikhail S. Gorbachev as Soviet general secretary in 1985, independent monitoring of Soviet compliance with the accords from within the USSR re-

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mained difficult, although the dissidents of Helsinki Watch were never completely silenced. After the introduction of openness (glasnost) and restructuring (perestroika) under Gorbachev in the late 1980s, however, these individuals’ efforts received much acclaim at home and abroad. The efforts of Helsinki Watch and its successor organizations served notice in an era of strict social control that the Soviet Union was accountable for its human rights obligations as specified by the Helsinki Accords.

See also:

BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; DÉTENTE; DISSIDENT

MOVEMENT; HUMAN RIGHTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Civnet: A Website of Civitas International. (2003). “The Helsinki Accords.” Luxmoore, Jonathan. (1990). Helsinki Agreement: Dialogue or Discussion? New York: State Mutual Book and Periodical Service. Nogee, Joseph and Donaldson, Robert, eds. (1992) Soviet Foreign Policy since World War II, 4th ed. New York: Macmillan. Sakharov, Andrei D. (1978). Alarm and Hope. New York: Knopf. CHRISTOPHER J. WARD

HERZEN, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH (1812–1870), dissident political thinker and writer, founder of Russian populism. Alexander Ivanovich Herzen was born in Moscow, the illegitimate son of a Russian aristocrat and his German-born mistress. His family name, derived from the German herz (“heart”), was given to him by his father. In 1825 Herzen was deeply affected by the Decembrist revolt that fueled his rejection of the Russian status quo. His early commitments were developed in the companionship he formed with a young relative, Nikolai Ogarev. In 1828 on the Vorobyevy Hills, they took a solemn oath of personal and political loyalty to each other. While a student at Moscow University, Herzen became the center of gravity for a circle of critically-minded youth opposed to the existing social and moral order; in 1834 both Herzen and Ogarev were arrested for expressing their opinions in private. Herzen was exiled to Perm and later to Vyatka, where he worked as a clerk in the governor’s


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office. A surprise encounter with the future tsar Alexander Nikolayevich (later Alexander II) led to his transfer to the city of Vladimir. There he found work as a journalist, and later received permission to reside in St. Petersburg. This, however, was soon followed by another period of exile that lasted until 1842. Meanwhile, Herzen’s study and propagation of Hegelian philosophy became the cornerstone of his debates and intellectual alliances with radical Westernizers such as Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky, moderates such as Timofey Nikolayevich Granovsky, and the early Slavophiles. He established himself as a prolific writer on issues such as the perils of excess specialization of knowledge, the promises and defaults of utopian socialism exemplified by Robert Owen (1771–1858) and Charles Fourier (1772–1837), the libertarian anarchism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), and, most of all, the purportedly socialist promise of the Russian peasant commune. This latter subject became the centerpiece of his thought and worldview; as set forth in his key work, From the Other Shore (1847–1848, coinciding with the appearance of Marx’s Communist Manifesto), Herzen laid out the key arguments of Russian populism, arguing that the primordial collective morality of the commune must be preserved against the inroads of capitalism, and extolling Russia’s opportunity to overtake the West on the path of social progress toward a just and equitable organization of society, without having to pass through the capitalist stage. Populism, as envisioned by Herzen, was to become one of the two main currents of Russia’s revolutionary thought, alongside with Marxism. Each of these philosophical strains cross-fertilized and competed with the other. In 1847, urged by Ogarev from abroad to escape the dictatorial regime of Nicholas I, Herzen managed to overcome political obstacles to his emigration and leave Russia, as it later turned out, forever. He traveled across continental Europe, witnessed the failure of the French Revolution of 1848, and invested in a radical newspaper edited by Proudhon that was soon to be shut down. He developed a bitter critique of European capitalism, which he denounced for its Philistine depravity and wickedness. In his view, even the promise of socialism was hardly a cure for corruption of what one would call today the consumer society. This new outlook reinforced the Russo-centric element of his populism (although never reconciling him with Russian domestic oppression), and was reflected in his major writings of the period, including Letters from France and Italy, published over the


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period from 1847 to 1854; On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia, published in 1851; and Russian People and Socialism, published in 1851. In 1852 Herzen moved from Nice to London, which became his home until the end of his life. He set up the first publishing house devoted to Russian political dissent, printing revolutionary leaflets, his journal Polyarnaya zvezda (Polar Star), and, finally, his pivotal periodical, Kolokol (The Bell), which he published between 1857 and 1867. This brought Herzen great fame in Russia, where the liberal atmosphere of Alexander II’s Great Reforms allowed Herzen’s works to be distributed, albeit illicitly, across the country. Kolokol’s initial agenda advocated the emancipation of the serfs and played a major role in shaping social attitudes such that emancipation became inevitable. Although living in London, Herzen often spoke out publicly on key issues of the day, addressing his remarks directly to Tsar Alexander II, at times positioning himself as a mediator between the authorities and the liberal and radical elements of Russian society, but identifying firmly with the latter. After 1861, however, his émigré politics were rapidly overtaken by growing radicalism within Russia, and he was increasingly treated with condescension by the younger activists as being out of touch with the new realities. The crackdown on the Polish rebellion by tsarist troops in 1863 and the ensuing conservative tilt in Russia marked the twilight of Herzen’s public career. He died in Paris in 1870, and was buried in Nice. Over time he became a symbolic founding figure of Russia’s democratic movement, broadly conceived to include its different and often widely divergent ideological and political traditions. In this, his reputation is similar to Pushkin’s standing within Russian literature. He is best remembered for his ability to synthesize a variety of anti-authoritarian currents, from liberal and libertarian to revolutionary-socialist and Russophile populist, whose mutual contradictions were not as clearly evident in his time as they became in later years. Among his many literary works, which range from fiction to philosophy and politics, the central place is occupied by My Past and Thoughts, which was written between 1852 and 1866. This is a personal, political, and intellectual autobiography, into which he injected a wide-ranging discussion and analysis of the major developments of his time in Russia and Europe.

See also:

DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; POPULISM; SOCIALIST

REVOLUTIONARIES; WESTERNIZERS

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Herzen, Alexander. (1979). The Russian People and Socialism, tr. Richard Wollheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herzen, Alexander. (1989). From the Other Shore, tr. Moura Budberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herzen, Alexander. (1999). My Past and Thoughts, tr. Constance Garnett. Berkeley: University of California Press. Herzen, Alexander, and Zimmerman, Judith E. (1996). Letters from France and Italy, 1847-1851. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies, No 25. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Malia, Martin. (1961). Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–1855. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Venturi Franco. (2001). Roots of Revolution, revised ed., tr. Francis Haskell. London: Phoenix Press. Walicki, Andrzej. (1969). The Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists. Oxford: Clarendon Press. DMITRI GLINSKI

HIGHER PARTY SCHOOL The Higher Party School was created in 1939 under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was tasked with training future leaders (known in Soviet parlance as “cadres”) for Party and state positions. The purpose was to prepare them for propaganda work with the masses and for supervising managers and state officials, while ensuring their political loyalty or partynost (Party-mindedness). In 1978 it was merged with the Academy of Social Sciences, which provided more advanced training. A similar Higher School was created for the Young Communist League (Komsomol) in 1969. Party officials under the age of forty were selected by the Communist Party and came to the main school in Moscow from across the Soviet Union for a two-year training program that was long on Marx, Lenin, and the latest Party edicts and short on practical skills. For leaders from the non-Russian republics, attendance provided important exposure to life in the Soviet capital. With the general erosion of ideology in the Brezhnev era, the Party became increasingly concerned about the efficacy of its ideological training, so funding for Party education was increased.

higher Party nomenklatura. Living conditions at the school were comfortable, and it provided an opportunity to meet senior Party officials and to network with one’s peers, connections that could be useful in one’s future career. The Moscow school had about 120 faculty and 300 students per year; it also had 22 regional branches that ran shorter seminars and correspondence courses for Communist leaders at every level in the Party hierarchy, including the heads of regional and city councils (soviets). Some of these schools provided remedial education for Party cadres who had missed out on higher education. In the 1980s one in three of the regional (obkom) party secretaries had passed through the Higher Party School; its graduates included General Secretary Yuri Andropov. Ironically Vyacheslav Shostakovsky, the school’s rector, was one of the leaders of the Democratic Platform movement that in 1990 called for the Communist Party to relinquish its monopoly of power. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the network of Party schools turned themselves into colleges of management and public administration. The premises of the Higher Party School itself are now occupied by the Russian State Humanities University.

See also:

CADRES POLICY; COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SO-

VIET UNION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rutland, Peter. (1992). The Politics of Economic Stagnation in the Soviet Union. New York: Cambridge University Press. PETER RUTLAND

HILARION, METROPOLITAN (Eleventh century; exact dates unknown), first native of Rus to be metropolitan of Kiev, author of the Sermon on Law and Grace.

Selection for the school was an important step in the career ladder for would-be members of the

Very little biographical information is known about Hilarion. In the Russian Primary Chronicle under 1051 it is reported that Prince Yaroslav of Kiev assembled the bishops in St. Sophia Cathedral and appointed Hilarion, a Carpatho-Rusyn (native of Rus), as metropolitan bishop. He is described as a devout man, learned in the Scriptures, and an ascetic, who served as one of Yaroslav’s priests in the church of the Holy Apostles at Berestovo, a favorite princely residence located just south of Kiev.

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While a priest, Hilarion selected a spot on a hill above the Dnieper not far from Berestovo where he dug a small cave in which to chant the hours and pray to God in solitude. This cave was later occupied by Anthony of the Caves and served as the foundation for the Caves Monastery of Kiev. Hilarion was the first native of Rus to be metropolitan. The only other Carpatho-Rusyn to serve as metropolitan in Kievan Rus was Klim Smolyatich in the twelfth century. Scholars have long debated Yaroslav’s motives for appointing Hilarion, and many maintain that the decision reflects an antiByzantine bias. There is no condemnation of the appointment in Byzantine sources, however, and Yaroslav’s purpose remains unclear. There is much speculation but no concrete information for Hilarion’s biography after his appointment. All that is known is that the First Novgorod Chronicle mentions a new metropolitan by 1055. Whether Hilarion’s tenure survived his patron Yaroslav (d. 1054) is not known. Hilarion’s most significant contribution to Kievan culture is his Sermon on Law and Grace. A master of rhetoric and the oratorical tradition, Hilarion expressed the pride of his newly converted nation as it joined the Christian community, and celebrated its past achievements. Utilizing the familiar Biblical contrast between law and grace, Hilarion began by emphasizing the gift of grace through Christ, which ended humankind’s subservience to the law and through which Rus was converted. In the second part of the sermon, Hilarion turned his attention to the apostle of Rus, Vladimir I, as well as to the works of his son, Yaroslav. Scholars have often seen an anti-Jewish bias or evidence of a struggle with Byzantium in the sermon. There is little evidence of either, however, and it is best read as a sophisticated and effective attempt to establish the place of Rus in sacred history by moving from theological doctrine to the specific pious actions of the Kievan princes. Although a number of works have been attributed to Hilarion, only the sermon and a confession of faith followed by a postscript can with any certainty be ascribed to his pen.

See also: CAVES MONASTERY;

YAROSLAV VLADIMIROVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Franklin, Simon. (1991). Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University.


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The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. (1953). Edited and translated by Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd. P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America. DAVID K. PRESTEL

HIS MAJESTY’S OWN CHANCERY His Majesty’s Own Chancery was formally founded by Paul I (r. 1796–1801) in 1796. Centralizing power further, Nicholas I (r. 1825–1855) greatly expanded the Chancery’s power and role in government, placing it above the regular bureaucracy and under his direct control. As the Russian bureaucracy grew during the nineteenth century, the emperors struggled to maintain personal control over it and to have it carry out the imperial will. The Chancery was one solution to this problem. It provided a mechanism for greater monarchical control over government and society, and it gave the emperor the opportunity to bypass bureaucratic inertia. In 1826 two departments were added to the Chancery. The First Section prepared documents and papers for the emperor’s review and supervised the bureaucracy’s personnel. The Second Section worked on the codification of the empire’s laws, resulting in the publication in 1832 of The Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire. After the death of Empress Maria Fedorovna in 1828, a Fourth Section was established to handle her sizeable charitable endowments. In 1836, a Fifth Section studied the conditions under which the state peasants lived, and implemented reforms designed to improve them. In contrast to serfs, who were owned by the nobility, state peasants belonged to the emperor, which gave the government greater flexibility in regard to reform. More importantly, its research became the basis for the emancipation of the serfs legislation that was passed by Alexander II in 1861. In 1842, a Sixth Section was charged with the establishment of Russian administrative control in the Caucasus. These last two sections had a relatively short existence, and were closed when the tasks assigned to them were completed. The Third Section, founded in 1826, became the most famous—or infamous—part of the Chancery, because of its police and supervisory functions that were equivalent to an internal intelligence service. It was a relatively effective state organ for the collection and analysis of information and for the implementation of the emperor’s will. Five subsections

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handled wide ranging duties. The first of these was the most secret, and probably the most important from the government’s point of view. It conducted investigations into political crimes, and maintained surveillance of society, and it kept watch on groups and individuals that were deemed politically unreliable. After the revolutions of 1848 in several European countries, its activities intensified, reflecting the government’s, and Nicholas’s, growing fear of penetration of radical revolutionary ideas into Russia. A second subsection handled corruption and crime within the state apparatus. The third kept an eye on foreigners living in Russia. The fourth managed and controlled relations between peasants and landowners. Censorship and control over printed matter was assigned to the fifth subsection. The Third Section also had an executive body known as the Gendarme Corps, who were personal representatives of the emperor. Members of the corps were assigned to individual governorships and large cities, where they played the role of arbiter between society and local governments while supervising both. The corps provided the emperor with reliable information on the condition of his empire. Nicholas could not completely control the bureaucratic machine that was his Chancery, however. For example, the Third Section maintained surveillance on the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, illegally and without his or the emperor’s knowledge. In the 1880s, the Chancery underwent serious reorganization. Many of its functions were transferred to the ministries and the central bureaucracy. The Ministry of the Interior took over many of the responsibilities of the Third Section. The Gendarme Corps remained in existence until 1917 as an elite police force, but its central position did not survive after the death of Nicholas I. By the reign of Nicholas II, His Majesty’s Own Chancery handled only questions related to promotions and pensions of bureaucrats.

See also:

NICHOLAS I

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1978). Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias. London: Indiana University Press.

Yaney, George. (1973). The Systemization of Russian Government. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ZHAND P. SHAKIBI

HISTORICAL SONGS Folklorists apply this term to certain Russian oral epic songs tracing to a later period than the type of the bylina and dealing with known historical persons and events. Although Soviet specialists attempted to find earlier examples, the historical song as people know it most probably arose in Muscovy in the sixteenth century; the first clear examples have to do with the reign of Tsar Ivan IV but appear to have been composed somewhat after it. Historical songs are typically shorter than the bylina but continue many features of oral epic composition, including prosody. In place of the larger-thanlife bogatyr, the hero of a historical song is often a common soldier or cossack. In this folklore genre from a relatively late period observers have one of their best opportunities to see how historical events became adapted and transformed in the minds of simple Russian people. What they produced were imaginative, poetic treatments of problems, persons, and happenings. Two outstanding songs concerning Ivan the Terrible and known in many collected variants are those called “The Conquest of Kazan” and “The Wrath of Ivan the Terrible against His Son.” Both stress the dangerous anger of the tsar, which may explode suddenly like the gunpowder that breached the wall of Kazan during the Russian siege of 1552. In the second instance it is turned against his own son, a tsarevich whom he suspects of treason. The offending parties have to be saved by a third person who risks his own life by speaking up to the tsar and is the real hero of the song. Historians have tried to associate “The Wrath of Ivan the Terrible against His Son” with the sack of Novgorod in 1570, but the imperfect fit with history brings out the fact that songs often embodied only a popular conception of the spirit of events. Ivan IV emerges as both a fearful and a respected ruler.

Seton-Watson, Hugh. (1991). The Russian Empire 1801– 1917. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Seventeenth-century historical songs include themes associated with the Time of Troubles: the supposed murder of Tsarevich Dmitry, a lament of Ksenia Godunova, the rise of pretender Grishka Otrepiev, the assassination of Mikhailo SkopinShuisky. Stenka Razin’s reputation naturally inspired a number of songs later in the century. From

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Saunders, David. (1992). Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform. London: Routledge.

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the eighteenth century, there is a cycle about Peter the Great that depicts him as a people’s tsar who mingled with the common folk. A development from the historical songs were the so-called cossack songs and soldier songs, usually still shorter and sung rather than chanted. Although examples of historical songs are claimed even from the midnineteenth century, the genre was clearly dying out.

See also:

BYLINA; FOLKLORE; FOLK MUSIC; MUSIC

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chadwick, N. Kershaw. (1964). Russian Heroic Poetry, reprint ed. New York: Russell & Russell. Stief, Carl. (1953). Studies in the Russian Historical Song. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger. NORMAN W. INGHAM

HISTORIOGRAPHY Historiography is the writing of history, the aggregation of historical compositions. The establishment of history as a modern scholarly discipline in Russia dates back to the end of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. At the order of Peter the Great, the accumulation of historical sources began with the translation of works of Western European historians such as Samuel Pufendorf. Compositions that justified the tsar’s activity and, in particular, the reasons behind the Northern War were recounted by Peter’s companions, including Feofan Prokopovich and Petr Shafirov. The eminent Russian statesman and Historian of the first half of the eighteenth century, Vassily Tatischev, was influenced by rationalism. He understood history as a political history of the country. In Istoriia Rossiiskaia (Russian History, published after his death), he provided, for the first time, the classification of the periods of Russian history. German historians were invited to work at the Academy of Sciences in the 1730s and 1740s, and they had a great impact on Russian historiography. Three of these Germans were particularly important: Gerhard Friedrich Müller and Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer, who formulated what is known as Norman theory, and August Ludwig Schlözer, who tried to reconstruct the original text of the earliest Russian chronicle, Povest Vremennykh Let (The Primary Russian Chronicle), in his work titled Nestor.


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Also important were the works of Major General Ivan Boltin, written in the 1780s and 1790s. Boltin proposed the idea of a comparative method of studying history, an approach that would take into account the cause-and-effect connection between historical events. A great impact on social conscience was made by Nikolai Karamzin’s Istoriia Gosudarstva Rossiiskogo (The history of the Russian state), published in twelve volumes between 1816 and 1829. This work was sold in enormous quantities, according to the time’s standards. While working on the History, Karamzin developed the modern Russian language. According to Alexander Pushkin, Russia was discovered by Karamzin, like America was discovered by Columbus. Methodologically, however, the belles-lettres style of Karamzin’s work did not suit the standards of historical science of the time. Karamzin proved that autocracy was vital for Russia, having proposed the thesis that the history of the people belongs to the tsar. As a counterweight to Karamzin’s history of the state, publisher and journalist Nikolai Polevoi tried to create Istoriia Russkogo Naroda (A History of the Russian People), but he could not cope with the task. Instead of the history of society, his six-volume work, published between 1829 and 1833, was yet another version of the history of state power. He was unable to break away from the convention of organizing the material by ruling periods. In the nineteenth century, historiography became professional, and a majority of historical works were now created by scholars at universities. The development of Russian historiography was greatly affected by the philosophy of Georg Hegel and the works of German historians, especially the representatives of the German historical law school. From 1840 through the 1860s, in the works of Konstantin Kavelin, Sergei Soloviev, and Boris Chicherin, the Russian state (judicial) school of historiography was formed. According to the views of the historians of the Russian state school, Russia differed markedly from the West, where social development came from the bottom. In Russia, according to this view, the organizer of society, classes, and the relations between classes was the state. The society was typically weak, unorganized, and movable, which was supported by the geographical distribution of Russian people on the Western European plain, a circumstance that provided for no natural borders. For Kavelin, the state acted as a creator of history. The theoretical views of historians of the state school were most fully embodied in the Istoriia

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Rossii S Drevneishikh Vremen (History of Russia from Ancient Times), published in twenty-nine volumes between 1851 and 1879. This work was written by the greatest Russian historian, Sergei Mikhailovich Soloviev. His conception was characterized by the perception of the inner organic pattern of the historical process, defined by objective, primarily geographical, factors and of the state, as the supreme embodiment of the history of the people. He believed the most important factor of Russian history to be its colonization, and he saw the breakthrough in Russian history to be the reign of Peter the Great, who put Russia on the path to Europeanization. As a counterweight to the members of the state school, referred to as Westernizers, who believed that Russia was developing the same way as Western Europe, Slavophiles (among them Ivan and Konstantin Aksakov and Ivan and Petr Kireyevsky) believed that Russia’s development was independent and self-directed, and that Peter the Great’s reforms were artificial. They believed that it was necessary to return to the policies of the seventeenth century, when the tsar had the power of rule and the people had the power of opinion. They were influenced by German Romanticism, especially as expressed in Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy. Slavophiles did not create any significant historical works other than Ivan Belyaev’s Krestiane na Rusi (Peasants in Russia), published in 1860. In the second half of the nineteenth century, more and more works of Russian historians concerned the socioeconomic problems, the history of peasants and serfdom, and peasant communes. The eminent historian of this time period was Vasily Osipovich Klyuchevsky, who replaced his teacher, Soloviev, in the Department of Russian History at the Moscow University. Klyuchevsky believed that Russian history developed under the influence of various factors, geographical, economic, social, and political. Klyuchevsky’s great influence is partly explained by the brilliant style of his works, especially his lectures Kurs Russkoii Istorii (A Course of Russian History), first printed in 1880 as lithographs, appearing in five bound volumes between 1904 and 1921. He was known for his deeply psychological approach, and his portraits of Russian historical figures are still unmatched. Klyuchevsky was skeptical of Peter the Great’s reforms, believing them to be chaotically organized and prompted by the needs of the Northern War. Klyuchevsky’s school became the leading school in Russian historiography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The members of this

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school included Paul Milyukov, Alexander Kizevetter, Mikhail Lubavsky, Mikhail Bogoslovsky, and others. Methodological searches were typical for Russian historians of that time: they were affected by ideas of neopositivism (Miliukov), neokantianism (Alexander Lappo-Danilevsky), and Marxism (Mikhail Tugan-Baranovksy, Petr Struve). The more popular general work on the history of Russia published in this period was Milyukov’s Ocherki Po Istorii Russkoii Kultury (Essays on the History of Russian Culture), which came out in several parts from 1896 to 1903. Milyukov formed a thesis about the simplicity and slowness of Russia’s historical process, and of the structure of Russian history as having been built from the top down. Standing apart from the supporters of Russia’s independent historical process, Nikolai Pavlov-Silvansky tried to prove its similarity to the Western European experience, postulating the presence of feudalism in medieval Russia in his Feodalizm v Drevnei Rusi (Feudalism in Old Russia) published in 1907. For the Moscow school generalizations were typical, but the historians of the St. Petersburg school (Konstantin Bestuzhev-Riumin, Sergei Platonov, Lappo-Danilevsky, and others) paid special attention to publication and the analysis of earlier historical sources. In general, Russian historiography of the early twentieth century blossomed early, but this ended abruptly with the October Revolution of 1917. After the Bolsheviks prohibited the teaching of history in schools and dismantled the historical departments in universities, the last citadel of nonMarxist historiography was the Academy of Sciences, but after the so-called Academic Affair and mass repressions against historians from 1929 to 1931, the Marxist-Leninist school of historiography became supreme in the USSR.

See also:

KARAMZIN, NIKOLAI MIKHAILOVICH KLYUCHEV-

SKY, VASILY OSIPOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Byrnes, Robert F. (1995). V. O. Kliuchevsky: Historian of Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mazour, Anatole. (1975). Modern Russian Historiography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Sanders, Tomas, ed. (1999). Historiography of Imperial Russia. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharp. Vernadsky, George. (1978). Russian Historiography: A History. Belmont, MA: Nordland. OLEG BUDNITSKII


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HOLY ALLIANCE The Holy Alliance is the name given to the treaty signed on September 26, 1815, in Paris by the monarchs of Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Its maker and prime mover was Tsar Alexander I. In 1815 after the downfall of Napoleon, Alexander was at the height of his powers. A romantic, an idealist, indeed something of an evangelical who had experienced a religious conversion in 1812, Alexander had fallen under the influence of a spiritualist, Baroness Julie von Krüdener, the wife of one of his diplomats, and the alliance was the product of nightly prayer meetings between the two. The alliance called upon the three powers to deal with one other and with their peoples on the basis of the Christian Gospel so there could emerge a fraternal union of rulers and peoples that would forever rid the earth of the scourge of war. At the insistence of the Austrian chancellor, Klemens von Metternich, Alexander’s ally in the war against Napoleon, “fraternal” was struck out and changed to “a paternal alliance of monarchs over their peoples,” lest the former clause be interpreted by Russia in a manner that would conflict with the language of other treaties under negotiation at this time. Two common criticisms of the Holy Alliance are that its members (which in time included most the sovereigns of Europe) forged it into an instrument of oppression against their subjects, and, more important, that Alexander used it as a base to attain hegemony in Europe. Neither criticism is persuasive. The first can be challenged on factual grounds. The aspirations of the overwhelming majority of Europeans in the aftermath of the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars ran to one thing and one thing only: peace. National rights, national liberties, and the like were at this time simply not matters of priority. Moreover, the Holy Alliance powers exercised considerable restraint after 1815, as demonstrated by the extent to which they allowed multiple revolutionary fuses to be lit before they stepped in—in a real sense they allowed revolutions to explode (the Spanish and Italian revolutions of 1820–1821; the revolutions in France, Belgium, the Papal States, and Poland in 1830–1831; those in France, Germany, Austria, and Italy in 1848). Similarly, the argument that Alexander was bent on expansion in Europe overlooks the many things he did that pulled the opposite way. With a combination of threats and persuasion, he forced Prussia from the path of aggrandizement in Poland and onto that of cooperation with Austria. He re-


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sisted repeated appeals from the smaller German states for an anti-Austrian alliance—a move that he believed would be inimical to the interests of the general peace. Finally, he continually urged Russians to respect Turkish interests in the Balkans and especially in Greece. The fact is that Alexander was a committed moderate statesman who happened to believe what he said, and what he said illustrates a point often forgotten by historians and political scientists—that there is a place in the international system for principles and moral values.

See also:

NAPOLEON I; VIENNA, CONGRESS OF

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Knapton, Ernest John. (1939). The Lady of the Holy Alliance: The Life of Julie de Krüdener. New York: Columbia University Press. Nicolson, Harold. (1946). The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity, 1812–1822. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Schroeder, Paul. (1994). The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DAVID WETZEL

HOLY SYNOD The governing body of the Russian Orthodox Church from 1721 to 1917. On January 25, 1721, Peter the Great formally established an Ecclesiastical College to rule and reform the Russian Orthodox Church. This new governing body was renamed the Most Holy Governing Synod at its first session in February and replaced the former office of Patriarch, which had been in abeyance since the death of the last incumbent, Adrian, in 1700. The creation of the Synod, modeled after the state-controlled synods of the Lutheran church, was an integral part of Peter’s wider program for the reform of Russia’s secular administrative and military machine, a program aimed at improving efficiency, eradicating abuses, and, above all, increasing the Sovereign’s control of revenue. The Synod was entrusted with the administration of all church affairs. A governing statute called the Ecclesiastical Regulation was written by Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich, with amendments by Peter. According to the statute, the Synod was to

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have twelve clerical members appointed by the tsar, although in practice there were always fewer. Despite the powers granted by the statute, ecclesiastical authority was effectively reduced in 1722 when Peter created the office of over-procurator to oversee the Synod. The over-procurator was to be a lay official whose chief duty was to be the Sovereign’s “eye,” to “ensure that the Synod does its duty.” In theory the Synod was meant to be equal to its secular counterpart, the Senate, but in reality ecclesiastical government had very little autonomy and was firmly subordinate to the tsar. Collegial administration guaranteed the Sovereign firmer control over the church than patriarchal administration had allowed, and removed the challenge to the tsar’s authority that a patriarch had represented. Despite the formal recognition of the Synod in 1723 by four Eastern patriarchs, Russian clergy resented the abolition of Russia’s patriarchate, the domination of the Synod by Peter’s handpicked foreign clergy, and the interference in church affairs by the over-procurator. Nonetheless, attempts to restore the patriarchate after Peter’s death in 1725 failed. Instead, the office of over-procurator (in abeyance from 1726) was restored in 1741, gaining exclusive access to the tsar in 1803. From 1824 the over-procurator exercised effective authority over all aspects of church administration and held ministerial rank. The best-known incumbent, Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev (1880–1905), was able to wield far-reaching influence during his procuratorship. After the election of the First Imperial Duma in 1905, deputies began to voice concern over the Synod’s subservience to the procurator and tsar, but only after Nicholas II’s abdication could steps be taken to restore the autonomy of the church. In July 1917 the Provisional Government abolished the post of over-procurator and invited the Synod to call elections to a council to decide the future of church administration. In November 1917 a council of 564 delegates reestablished the patriarchate and elected Metropolitan Tikhon of Moscow as Patriarch of All Russia, thus bringing to an end Peter the Great’s system of Synodal governance.

See also:

ORTHODOXY; PETER I; POBEDONOSTSEV, KON-

STANTIN

Freeze, Gregory. (1983). The Parish Clergy in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hughes, Lindsey. (1998). Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. DEBRA A. COULTER

HOMELESS CHILDREN Homeless children, or besprizorniki, constituted one of the most vexing social problems facing the new Soviet state, caused by cumulative effects of World War I (1914–1917), the Russian Revolution and Civil War (1918–1921), and cold, hunger, and disease, which claimed the lives of millions of parents. The catastrophic famine of 1921 and 1922 produced millions of additional orphaned and abandoned children. Divorce, single motherhood, unemployment, and economic dislocation pushed surviving children out on the streets. By 1922, historian Alan Ball estimates, there were seven million homeless children in Russia. These homeless children represented a profound crisis for the Bolshevik government. They roamed the country alone and in groups, often following rail arteries to Moscow, Rostov-on-the-Don, Samara, Saratov, Tashkent, and other cities. Seemingly omnipresent waifs begged for food in train stations and other public places. Most resorted to stealing, petty crimes, and prostitution. The state sent children to special homes (detdoma), long-term boarding institutions run by the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros). Initially intended to offer programs capable of instilling in the waifs an instinct for the collective and preparing them to join the ranks of the proletariat, these children’s homes were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of homeless children. Many children’s homes lacked food and heat and were rife with dysentery, scurvy, and syphilis. Countless children escaped from these institutions, preferring to take their chances on the streets. Labor communes, most notably the secret police’s Dzerzhinsky Labor Commune run by Anton Makarenko, sought to rehabilitate young delinquents and met with mixed success.

Cracraft, James. (1971). The Church Reform of Peter the Great. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Convinced that socialized child rearing was an impossible ideal, the state, beginning in 1925, shifted its focus back to the family as the basic unit for social structure. The 1926 Family Code emphasized the family as a unit for effecting social

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change rather than the state; thousands of besprizorniki left state-funded children’s homes and were adopted. By 1927 besprizorniki were considered less a pedagogical than a social problem stemming from the breakdown of the Soviet family. Increasingly, the state relied on punishment rather than pedagogy to clear the streets of besprizorniki, ordering militia sweeps of the children in the 1930s. The problem of homeless children did not go away; collectivization and the famine of 1932 and 1933 produced another wave of homeless children. Most of these besprizorniki were placed in children’s homes and special schools for young delinquents. The number of homeless children continued to increase during times of severe social strain, notably World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union, though not on the scale that the country witnessed in the 1920s.

See also:

FAMILY CODE OF 1926

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ball, Alan M. (1994). And Now My Soul Is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918–1930. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goldman, Wendy. (1993). Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Stevens, Jennie. (1982). “Children of the Revolution: Soviet Russia’s Homeless Children (Besprizorniki) in the 1920s.” Russian History 9(2-3):242–264. Stolee, Margaret Kay. (1988). “Homeless Children in the USSR, 1917–1957.” Soviet Studies 40:64–83. JACQUELINE M. OLICH

HONOR AND DISHONOR See

BESCHESTIE.

M I K H A I L


founded new scholarly journals, and established his school of Ukrainian history. After the 1905 Revolution Hrushevsky lived in St. Petersburg and Kiev, where he became increasingly involved in liberal politics. In Kiev he founded the Ukrainian Scientific Society (1907), as well as a cluster of journals and newspapers. Arrested and exiled to eastern Russia during World War I, Hrushevsky emerged after the February Revolution as a recognized leader of moderate Ukrainian nationalists. In March 1917 he was elected president of the Central Rada (Council), which eventually developed into a Ukrainian parliament. During the Revolution Hrushevsky moved to the left and joined the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, which had a majority in the Rada. On the last day of its existence, April 29, 1918, the Rada elected Hrushevsky president of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Hrushevsky lived abroad after 1919, but returned to Soviet Ukraine in 1924 and soon resumed his role as the dean of Ukrainian historians. But the authorities increasingly criticized his scholarship as nationalistic and in 1931 transferred him to Moscow. By the time of his death in 1934, his school in Soviet Ukraine was destroyed by arrests and condemnations. Hrushevsky’s main scholarly achievement is his monumental History of UkraineRus’ (10 vols., 1898-1937) covering the period until 1658. He also authored several short surveys of Ukrainian history and a five-volume History of Ukrainian Literature. Rejecting the history of state formations in favor of the history of the people, Hrushevsky criticized traditional Russian historical models and was influential in claiming Kievan Rus as a part of Ukrainian history. In contrast to Hrushevsky’s denigration by the Soviet ideologues as a bourgeois nationalist, in post-Soviet Ukraine Hrushevsky is lauded as the nation’s greatest historian and statesman.

See also:

UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS

HRUSHEVSKY, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH (1866–1934), prominent Ukrainian historian and statesman. In 1890 Mikhail Hrushevsky graduated from Kiev University, where he studied under Volodymyr Antonovych. In 1894 he was appointed to the newly created chair of Ukrainian history at Lviv University (at the time, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire). While in Lviv, Hrushevsky reorganized the Shevchenko Scientific Society (est. 1873) into an equivalent of a Ukrainian Academy of Sciences,


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Hrushevs’kyi, Mykhailo. (1993–). History of UkraineRus’, vols. 1, 7, 8. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. Hrushevs’kyi, Mykhailo (1941). A History of Ukraine. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Prymak, Thomas M. (1987). Mykhailo Hrushevsky: The Politics of National Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. SERHY YEKELCHYK

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HUMAN RIGHTS Human rights are the rights individuals are said to have as human beings. They are claims on society— its members and government (Henkin, 1996). They are spelled out in international law, drawing on the norms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) (Steiner and Alston, 2000). Russia has a long history of authoritarian rule and human rights abuses. Nikolai Berdyayev went so far as to connect the depth and longevity of Russian communism, a system inimical to human rights, to this persistent culture of despotism (1960). In the vivid phrasing of Alexander Radishchev, an eighteenth-century dissident, in his Journey from Saint Petersburg to Moscow (which landed him in Siberia), the rigid censorship under Catherine the Great resembled a restrictive nursemaid who stunts children’s growth toward self-reliant maturity. Human rights improved somewhat thanks to the liberating effects of Russia’s rapid industrialization after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the judicial and local government reforms in 1864. In Tsarist Russia by 1914, a liberal and democratic socialist professional class of educators, lawyers, judges, social workers, women’s rights advocates, and rapidly growing and mainly nonBolshevik political parties increasingly demanded the protection of individual rights and a lawgoverned state. That meant broadening the selective westernization, launched two hundred years earlier by Peter the Great and aimed at strengthening Russia, to include the rights and freedoms he and his successors generally sought to exclude. Following the abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917, the Provisional Government of March– November 1917 produced what the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin himself called the freest country in Europe, before he and his minority party of Bolsheviks forcibly ended that freedom by sharply curbing human rights. The Bolsheviks socially cleansed Russia’s reformed courts, democratic professionals, and growing autonomous civil society. They held Russia to the constitutional principles that rights must serve the cause of socialism as interpreted by the Communist Party. Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924 opened the way to the consolidation of total power by Josef Stalin, his forced collectivization of the peasants, his five-year plans for heavy industrialization, and his purges of alleged enemies of the people.

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The cultural thaw after Stalin’s death in March 1953 ended with the ousting of Party leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1964. Ensuing trials of social satirists and critics sparked a courageous dissident movement in Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Its members, who were promptly imprisoned or exiled, included Andrei Sakharov, proponent of EastWest convergence; Yuri Orlov and the Moscow Helsinki Group; and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, chronicler of Soviet labor camps. Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet leader from March 1985 to December 1991, introduced glasnost— openness or free expression—and soon after, perestroika—attempts at economic and political reform. Gorbachev freed political prisoners and exiles between 1986 and 1989. His UN speech of December 7, 1988, praised the once spurned Universal Declaration of Human Rights and revised the 1977 Constitution accordingly. But he reformed too little too late. Four months after his near-overthrow in the August 1991 coup by his own reactionary appointees, the Soviet Union split into three onceagain independent Baltic republics and twelve newly independent states, including the Russian Federation. Boris Yeltsin, Russian president from 1991 until his resignation in 1999, forced on Russia the 1993 Constitution increasing presidential power but also containing Article 2: “The individual and his rights and freedom are the highest value. The recognition, observance and defense of the human rights and freedoms of the individual and the citizen are the obligation of the state.” The Constitution proclaims a broad range of civil, political, social, and economic rights. Contrasting realities under overbearing and corrupt state administrations infringed on freedom of expression, religion, fair and humane justice, freedom of movement, and freedom from racial, ethnic, and homophobic bigotry, and hate crimes. Moreover, during the wars to retain Chechnya just about every human right was violated. Inequality, poverty, and homelessness haunted the land while the new rich lived high. Women experienced inequality and exploitation in employment, widespread divorce, abandonment, and domestic violence, and trafficking into prostitution. Life expectancy fell to third-world levels, especially among men, owing to stress, accidents, alcoholism, and the pervasive inadequacy of health care (Juviler, 2000; Human Rights Watch). Such political and social human rights violations prompted the formation of numerous free but under-funded human rights advocacy groups—


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nongovernmental organizations. They ranged from Russian Soldiers’ Mothers, who were against the wide abuses of military recruits, to the antiStalinist and pro-rights Memorial Society, to Muslim cultural and aid societies. Seventy years of Communist social and legal cleansing are not overcome in a decade or two. In Ken Jowitt’s words, “We must think of a ‘long march’ rather than a simple transition to democracy” (Jowitt, 1992, 189), with all sorts of human rights to redeem.

See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; GULAG; SAKHAROV, ANDREI

DMITRIEVICH;

SOLZHENITSYN,

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ISAYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berdiaev, Nicolas. (1960). The Origin of Russian Communism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Henkin, Louis. (1996). The Age of Rights, 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Human Rights Watch World Report. (2003). . Jowitt, Ken. (1992). New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Juviler, Peter. (1998). Freedoms Ordeal: The Struggle for Human Rights and Democracy in Post-Soviet States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Juviler, Peter. (2000). “Political Community and Human Rights in Post-Communist Russia.” In Human Rights: New Perspectives, New Realities, ed. Adamantia Pollis and Peter Schwab. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner.

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the Hungarian revolution symbolizes perhaps the first major “domino” to fall in a process that ultimately resulted in the Soviet Union’s loss of hegemony over Eastern Europe in 1989. When Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, delivered his Secret Speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, he not only exposed Stalin’s crimes, but also presented himself as a proponent of different paths to socialism, a claim that would later prove hard to fulfill. All over Eastern Europe, hardline Stalinist leaders wondered fearfully how far destalinization would go. Meanwhile, their opponents, who criticized Stalinist policies, suddenly gained in popularity. In Hungary, Nagy was one such critic and reformer. He had served as Hungary’s prime minister from July 4, 1953, to April 18, 1955. In the spring of 1955, however, Nagy was dislodged by a hard-line Stalinist leader, Mátyás Rákosi, who had been forced to cede that post to Nagy in mid-1953. Social pressures continued to build in Hungary under the leadership of Rákosi, called Stalin’s “best disciple” by some. He had conducted the antiYugoslav campaign in 1948 and 1949 more zealously than other East European party leaders. Hundreds of thousands of Hungarian communists had been executed or imprisoned after 1949. By late October 1956 the popular unrest in Hungary eluded the control of both the Hungarian government led by Rákosi’s successor, Ernõ Gerõ, and the USSR.

HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION

On October 23, 1956, several hundred thousand people demonstrated in Budapest, hoping to publicize their sixteen-point resolution and to show solidarity with Poland where, in June, an industrial strike originating in Poznan turned into a national revolt. The Budapest protesters demanded that Nagy replace Gerõ, the Hungarian Communist Party’s first secretary from July 18 to October 25, 1956. Fighting broke out in Budapest and other Hungarian cities and continued throughout the night.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was the first major anti-Soviet uprising in Eastern Europe and the first shooting war to occur between socialist states. In contrast to earlier uprisings after the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in March 1953, such as the workers’ revolt in East Berlin (1953) and the Polish workers’ rebellion in Poznan, Poland (October 1956), the incumbent Hungarian leader, Imre Nagy, did not summon Soviet military troops to squelch the revolution. Instead, he attempted to withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw Pact. Hence,

It is now known that Soviet leaders decided on October 23 to intervene militarily. Soviet troops executed Plan Volna (“Wave”) at 11:00 P.M. that same day. The next morning a radio broadcast announced that Nagy had replaced András Hegedüs as prime minister. On October 25, János Kádár, a younger, centrist official, replaced Gerõ as first secretary. However, this first Soviet intervention did not solve the original political problem in the country. New documents have revealed that the Kremlin initially decided on October 28 against a

Steiner, Henry, and Alston, Philip. (2000). International Human Rights in Context: Law, Politics, Morals, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. PETER JUVILER


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Russian tanks and armored vehicles surround the Hungarian parliament building in Budapest. © HULTON ARCHIVE

second military intervention. But on October 31, they reversed course and launched a more massive intervention (Operation Vikhr, or “Whirlwind”). During the night of November 3, sixteen Soviet divisions entered Hungary. Fighting continued until mid-November, when Soviet forces suppressed the resistance and installed a pro-Soviet government under Kádár.

See also:

Györkei, Jenõ, and Horváth, Miklós. (1999). The Soviet Military Intervention in Hungary, 1956. Budapest: Central European University Press. Litván, György, and Bak, János M. (1996). The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Reform, Revolt and Repression, 1953–1963. New York: Longman. JOHANNA GRANVILLE

HUNGARY, RELATIONS WITH; KHRUSHCHEV,

NIKITA SERGEYEVICH;

HUNGARY, RELATIONS WITH

Granville, Johanna. (2003). The First Domino: International Decision Making in the Hungarian Crisis of 1956. College Station: Texas A & M University Press.

Russian and Soviet relations with Hungary, in contrast to those with other east central European countries, have been especially tense due to factors such as Hungary’s monarchical past, historical rivalry with the Russians over the Balkans, Russia’s invasion of Hungary in 1848, Hungary’s alliances in both world wars against Russia or the USSR, the belated influence of communism in the interwar period, the Soviet invasion in 1956 to crush the nationalist revolution, and Hungary’s vastly different language and culture in general.

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Békés, Csaba; Rainer, János M.; and Byre, Malcolm. (2003). The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents. Budapest: Central European University Press. Cox, Terry, ed. (1997). Hungary 1956—Forty Years On. London: Frank Cass.

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No part of Hungary had ever been under direct Russian rule. Instead, Hungary formed part of the Habsburg Empire, extending over more than 675,000 square kilometers in central Europe. Both empires—the tsarist and Habsburg—fought for hegemony over Balkan territories. The Habsburg empire included what is now Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, as well as parts of present-day Poland, Romania, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In July 1848 the Hungarians, led by Lajos Kossuth, fought for liberation from Austria. However, upon the Austrians’ request in 1849, Tsar Nicholas I sent Russian troops to crush the rebellion. Nevertheless, Kossuth’s initiative paved the way for the compromise in March 1867 (known in German as the Ausgleich), which granted both the Austrian and Hungarian kingdoms separate parliaments with which to govern their respective internal affairs. It also established a dual monarchy, whereby a single emperor (Francis Joseph I) conducted the financial, foreign, and military affairs of the two kingdoms. By the late 1800s and early 1900s, ethnic groups within the empire clamored for self-rule. On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a member of a secret nationalist movement, Mlada Bosna (“Young Bosnia”), shot Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, thus precipitating World War I. Austro-Hungary fought with Germany against Great Britain, France, and Russia. Throughout the fall of 1918 the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed as its armies retreated before enemy forces. On March 21, 1919, Béla Kun established a communist regime in Hungary that lasted four months. Given their monarchical past, Hungarians resented communists, who seized their farms and factories and sought to form a stateless society. After a brief transition, Admiral Miklós Horthy became Regent of Hungary, heading a new monarchy that lasted twenty-five years. Defeated in World War I, Hungary lost more than two-thirds of its territory in the 1920 peace settlement (“Treaty of Trianon”). In 1914 Hungary had 21 million inhabitants; Trianon Hungary had less than 8 million. German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was able to coax Hungary to fight on the Axis side in World War II by promising the return of some of the territory Hungary lost in 1920. Despite its gradual alliance with Germany and Italy against the Soviet Union in the war, the German army


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(Wehrmacht) occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. Hitler put Ferenc Szálasi (leader of the fascist Arrow Cross Party) in charge as prime minister. By mid-April 1945, however, the Soviet Red Army expelled the Germans from Hungary. The Soviet troops remained in Hungary until 1990. Another element of Hungary’s particularly anti-Soviet history is the belated influence of communism in the interwar period. While most other East European countries turned authoritarian after 1935, Hungary remained relatively liberal until 1944. After a short democratic period, the Communist Party took over in 1948. The Hungarian Communist Party never did win an election, but gained control due to the presence of Soviet troops and their hold over government posts. Its first secretary was Matyás Rákosi, a key figure in the international communist movement who had returned with other Hungarian communists from exile in the Soviet Union. These include Imre Nagy (later prime minister during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956) and József Révai who became the key ideologist in the 1950s. Other communists remained in Hungary and organized the Communist Party illegally during the war, such as János Kádár (who became general secretary after 1956) and László Rajk (the first key victim of the purges in 1949). The Soviet Union also established its hegemony over Eastern Europe in commercial and military spheres. In 1949 Stalin had established the Council for Mutual Economic Cooperation (CMEA or Comecon) to counter President Truman’s Marshall Plan, which Stalin prevented Hungary and other East European countries from joining. In Comecon the member states were expected to specialize in particular industries; for example, Hungary focused on bus and truck production. The East European satellites were expected to copy the Stalinist model favoring heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods. In doing so, Rákosi’s economic plans contradicted Hungary’s genuine interests, as they required the use of obsolete Soviet machinery and old-fashioned methods. Unrealizable targets resulted in a flagrant waste of resources and the demoralization of workers. Meanwhile, fearing a World War III against its former ally, the United States, the Soviet leadership encouraged the Hungarian army to expand. Having failed to prevent West Germany’s admission into NATO, the USSR on May 14, 1955, established

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the Warsaw Pact, which subordinated the satellites’ armies to a common military command. Austria was granted neutrality in the same year. In 1956 the first major anti-Soviet uprising in Eastern Europe—the Hungarian Revolution—took place. It is not surprising that Hungary, given its history, culture, and language (a non-Slavic tongue, Magyar), was the first satellite to challenge Moscow directly by declaring neutrality and withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact. Despite the restlessness of the population after the crushed revolution and the repression of 19571958, Kádár’s regime after normalization differed sharply from Rákosi’s style of governance. Kádár’s brand of lenient (“goulash”) communism earned grudging respect from the Hungarian people. Kádár never trumpeted his moderate New Economic Mechanism (NEM) of 1968 as a socioeconomic model for other satellites, lest he irritate Moscow. Hungary’s overthrow of its Communist regime in 1989-1990 and independence today prove that the nationalist spirit of the revolution was never extinguished. The Soviet collapse in 1991 led to the demise of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon. In March 1999 NATO admitted Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic as members.

See also:

HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Békés, Csaba; Rainer, János M.; and Byrne, Malcolm. (2003). The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents. Budapest: Central European University Press. Deák, István. (2001). Phoenix: Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–1849. London: Phoenix Press. Felkay, Andrew. (1989). Hungary and the USSR, 1956–1988: Kadar’s Political Leadership. New York: Greenwood Press. Fenyo, Mario. (1972). Hitler, Horthy, and Hungary: GermanHungarian Relations, 1941–1944. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Kann, Robert A. (1980). History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918. Berkeley: University of California Press. Litván, György, and Bak, János M. (1996). The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Reform, Revolt, and Repression, 1953–1963. New York: Longman. O’Neill, Patrick H. (1998). Revolution from Within: The Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party and the Collapse of Communism. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. JOHANNA GRANVILLE

HUNS The Huns (the word means “people” in Altaic) were a confederation of steppe nomadic tribes, some of whom may have been the descendants of the Hsiung-nu, rulers of an empire by the same name in Mongolia. After the collapse of the Hsiung-nu state in the late first century C.E., the Huns migrated westward to Central Asia and in the process mixed with various Siberian, Ugric, Turkic, and Iranian ethnic elements. Around 350, the Huns migrated further west and entered the Ponto-Caspian steppe, from where they launched raids into Transcaucasia and the Near East in the 360s and 370s. Around 375, they crossed the Volga River and entered the western North Pontic region, where they destroyed the Cherniakhova culture and absorbed much of its Germanic (Gothic), Slavic, and Iranian (Sarmatian) ethnic elements. Hun movement westward initiated a massive chain reaction, touching off the migration of peoples in western Eurasia, mainly the Goths west and the Slavs west and north-northeast. Some of the Goths who escaped the Huns’ invasion crossed the Danube and entered Roman territories in 376. In the process of their migrations, the Huns also altered the linguistic makeup of the Inner Eurasian steppe, transforming it from being largely Indo-European-speaking (mainly Iranian) to Turkic.

Györkei, Jeno , and Horváth, Miklos. (1999). The Soviet Military Intervention in Hungary, 1956. Budapest: Central European University Press.

From 395 to 396, from the North Pontic the Huns staged massive raids through Transcaucasia into Roman and Sasanian territories in Anatolia, Syria, and Cappadocia. By around 400, Pannonia (Hungary) and areas north of the lower Danube became the Huns’ staging grounds for attacks on the East and West Roman territories. In the 430s and 440s, they launched campaigns on the East Roman Balkans and against Germanic tribes in central Europe, reaching as far west as southern France.

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Gerö, András. (1997). The Hungarian Parliament (1867–1918): A Mirage of Power, tr. James Patterson. New York: Columbia University Press. Granville, Johanna. (2003). The First Domino: International Decision Making in the Hungarian Crisis of 1956. College Station: Texas A & M University Press.

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The Huns’ attacks on territories beyond the North Pontic steppe and Pannonia were raids for booty, campaigns to extract tribute, and mercenary fighting for their clients, not conquests of their wealthy sedentary agricultural neighbors and their lands. Being pastoralists, they wielded great military powers, but only for as long as they remained in the steppe region of Inner Eurasia, which provided them with the open terrain necessary for their mobility and grasslands for their horses. Consequently, Hun attacks west of Pannonia were minor, unorganized, and not led by strong leaders until Attila, who ruled from about 444 or 445 to 453. However, even he continued the earlier Hun practice of viewing the Roman Empire primarily as a source of booty and tribute. Immediately after Attila’s sudden death in 453, the diverse and loosely-knit Hun tribal confederation disintegrated, and their Germanic allies revolted and killed his eldest son, Ellac (d. 454). In the aftermath, most of the Huns were driven from Pannonia east to the North Pontic region, where they merged with other pastoral peoples. The collapse of Hun power can be attributed to their inability to consolidate a true state. The Huns were always and increasingly in the minority among the peoples they ruled, and they relied on complex tribal alliances but lacked a regular and permanent state structure. Pannonia simply could not provide


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sufficient grasslands for a larger nomadic population. However, the Hun legacy persisted in later centuries. Because of their fierce military reputation, the term “Hun” came to be applied to many other Eurasian nomads by writers of medieval sedentary societies of Outer Eurasia, while some pastoralists adopted Hun heritage and lineage to distinguish themselves politically.

See also:

CAUCASUS; CENTRAL ASIA; UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Christian, David. (1998). A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, Vol. 1: Inner Asia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire. Oxford: Blackwell. Golden, Peter B. (1992). An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag. Maenchen-Helfen, O. J. (1973). The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sinor, Denis. (1990). “The Hun Period.” In The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, ed. Denis Sinor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ROMAN K. KOVALEV

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ICONS Icons are representations, usually on wood, of sacred figures—Christ and the Virgin Mary, the apostles, saints, and miraculous events. The Greek term eikon (Russian, obraz) denotes “semblance,” indicating that the icon does not incarnate but only represents sacred objects. As such it serves to facilitate spiritual communion with the sacred; the distinctive two-dimensional flatness symbolizes an immateriality and hence proximity to the otherworldly. In rare cases this mediating role reaches miraculous proportions when the faithful believe that a “miracle-working” (chudotvornaya) icon has interceded to save them from harm, such as the depredations of war and disease. The evolution of icons in Russia paralleled the development of Eastern Orthodoxy itself. Initially, after Grand Prince Vladimir embraced Eastern Orthodoxy in 988, icons were produced by Greek masters in Byzantium; few in number, they were restricted to the urban elites that actually practiced the new faith. The most venerated icon in Russia, the “Vladimir Mother of God,” was actually a twelfth-century Greek icon imported from Constantinople. Revered for its representation of the Virgin’s tender relationship to Christ, it became the model of the umilenie (tenderness) style that dominated Marian representation in most Russian iconography.

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The Crusades from the West and the Mongol invasion from the East suddenly disrupted the Byzantine predominance in the mid-thirteenth century. The new indigenous icons showed a marked tendency toward not only simplification but also regionalization. As Kiev Rus dissolved into separate principalities under Mongol suzerainty, icon-painting acquired distinctive styles in Vladimir-Suzdal, Novgorod, Pskov, Yaroslavl-Rostov, Tver, and Moscow. Some icons also bore a distinctive local theme, such as the “Battle between the Novgorodians and Suzdalians,” a mid-fifteenth century icon with unmistakable overtones for Novgorod’s lifeand-death struggle with Moscow. The evolution of icon painting also derived from external influences. One phase began with the resumption of ties to Byzantium in the midfourteenth century and culminated in the icons and frescoes of Theophanes the Greek (c. 1340–after 1405). His indigenous co-workers included the most venerated Russian icon-painter, Andrei Rublev (c. 1360–1430), whose extant creations include the

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celebrated “Trinity” icon. A second phase came in the late fifteenth century, when Italian masters— imported to construct an awe-inspiring Kremlin— helped introduce some Western features (for example, the clothing and gestures of the Virgin). That was but a foreshadowing of the far greater Western influence in the seventeenth century, when the official icon-painting studios in the Kremlin Armory (under Simon Ushakov, 1626–1686) used Western paints and techniques to produce more naturalistic, monumental icons. Such innovations elicited sharp criticism from traditionalists such as Archpriest Avvakum, but they heralded tendencies ever more pronounced in Imperial Russia. Even as Moscow developed an official style, the production of icons for popular consumption became much more widespread. The Church Council of 1551 complained about the inferior quality of such images and admonished painters not to “follow their own fancy” but to emulate the ancient icons of “the Greek icon-painters, Andrei Rublev, and other famous painters.” That appeal did nothing to stem the brisk production of popular icons, with some small towns (e.g., Palekh, Kholuy, Shuya, and Mstera) gaining particular renown. Popular icons were not only simpler (indulging fewer details and fewer colors), but also incorporated folkish elements alien to both traditional Byzantine and newer official styles. Although authorities sought to suppress such icons (e.g., a 1668 edict restricting the craft to certified icon-painters), such decrees had scant effect. Indeed, both popular and elite icon-painting continued to coexist in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Popular icons flourished and proliferated; while some centers (such as the specialized producers in Vladimir province) exhibited artistic professionalization, the expanding production of amateur icons aroused the concern of both Church and state. But attempts to regulate the craft (e.g., decrees of 1707 and 1759) did little to restrict production or to dampen demand. A far greater threat eventually came from commercialization—the manufacture of brightly colored, cheap lithographs that pushed artisanal icons from the marketplace in the late nineteenth century. Seeking to protect popular icon painting, Nicholas II established a Committee for the Stewardship of Russian Icon Painting in 1901, which proposed a broad set of measures, such as the establishment of iconpainting schools to train craftsmen and to promote their work through special exhibitions.

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Icon production for elites took a quite different path. After Peter the Great closed the icon-painting studio of the Armory in 1711, its masters scattered to cities throughout the realm to ply their trade. By the late eighteenth century, however, the Academy of Arts became the main source of icons for the major cathedrals and elites. By the midnineteenth century the Academy had not only developed a distinct style (increasingly naturalistic and realistic) but also significantly expanded its formal instruction in icon painting, including the establishment of a separate icon-painting class in 1856. At the same time, believers and art connoisseurs showed a growing taste for ancient icons. By mid-century this interest began to inspire forgeries as well as orders for icons in the old style. The meaning of that old style underwent a revolutionary change in the early twentieth century: As art restorers peeled away the layers of paint and varnish applied in later times, they were astonished to discover that the ancient icons were not dark and somber, but bright and clear. The AllRussian Congress of Artists in 1911 held the first exhibition of restored icons; the new Soviet regime would devote much attention to the process of restoration. While placing a high priority on icon restoration, the Soviet regime repressed production of new icons: It closed traditional ecclesiastical producers (above all, monasteries), and redirected popular centers of icon production such as Palekh to specialize in secular folk art. Although Church workshops continued to produce icons (by the early 1980s more than three million per year—an important source of revenue), not until 1982 did the Church establish an elite patriarchal icon-painting studio. The subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union not only generated a sharp surge in demand (from believers and reopened churches), but enabled the Church to establish a network of icon-painting schools specifically devoted to the revival of traditional iconography.

See also: ACADEMY OF ARTS; BYZANTIUM, INFLUENCE OF; DIONISY; ORTHODOXY; PALEKH PAINTING; RUBLEV, ANDREI; THEOPHANES THE GREEK; USHAKOV, SIMON FEDOROVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Onasch, Konrad, and Schneiper, Annemarie. (1995). Icons: The Fascination and the Reality. New York: Riverside Book Company.


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Ouspensky, Leonid, and Lossky, Vladimir. (1982). The Meaning of Icons, 2nd. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. GREGORY L. FREEZE

IDEALISM The debates regarding Russia’s national identity and historical destiny were always vital to the work of the prominent Russian thinkers, who were also preoccupied with moral issues and closely involved with literature. Due to its location between Europe and Asia, Russia belongs to both cultural worlds, having inherited different and often contradictory value standards that played a significant role in the course of its history. This marginal cultural situation of the country resulted in two competing approaches to its role in world history: national isolationism and openness to Europe, both trends still present in the national consciousness. During the Kievan Rus period, affiliation with Europe was a strong feature of culture. The Tatar invasion and the development of the Moscow Kingdom generated a strong tide of alienation from the West. After the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Moscow Kingdom was the proclaimed “the third Rome” (by monk Filotius)—the vanguard force in world history inheriting the grandeur of the Roman Empire and at the sam