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ENCYCLOPEDIA: ALEXANDER NEVSKY

(1220?–63), Russian national hero and saint. The son of Yaroslav Vsevolodovich (1191?–1246), grand prince of the medieval Russian state of Vladimir, Alexander was elected prince of the state of Novgorod in 1236. In 1240 he won a victory over the Swedes on the Neva River near present Saint Petersburg, thus acquiring his surname, Nevsky (“of the Neva”). The following year, he led the army of Novgorod against the Teutonic Knights, driving them from Russian soil and defeating them in a battle at Lake Peipus, Estonia, in April 1242. Later generations viewed this victory as having saved Russia from Western domination. When the Mongols invaded Russia from the east, Alexander collaborated with them, acting as mediator between his people and the Mongol Golden Horde. In 1246 the Mongols made him grand prince of Kiev, and in 1251 they installed him as prince of Vladimir, replacing his brother Andrei (d. 1264). As ruler of Vladimir, Kiev, and Novgorod, he did much to unify the principalities of northern Russia. Alexander is recognized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox church; his feast day is September 12.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: IVAN III VASILYEVICH,

called The Great (1440–1505), grand duke of Moscow (1462–1505). He was born in Moscow on Jan. 22, 1440, the son of Basil II (1415–62), whom he succeeded. Ivan strengthened the hegemony of Moscow over the other Russian principalities, and he described himself as Sovereign of All Russia. In 1470 he launched a war against Novgorod, which he conquered and annexed in 1478, thereby acquiring all of northern Russia from Lapland to the Ural Mountains. In 1480, by refusing to make the customary payment of tribute to the Tatar khan, Ivan ended the formal subservience of the Muscovite rulers to the Tatars. Subsequently, he further increased his domain by conquest, by purchases of territory, and by exacting allegiance from weaker princes. Ivan invaded Lithuania in 1492 and again in 1500 and forced Alexander I (1461–1506), the ruler of that country and king of Poland, to cede (1503) a score of towns to him. By his marriage in 1472 to Zo‘ (Sophia; fl. 1467–98), niece of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologus, Ivan also made creditable his claim to be the protector of the Orthodox church. After his marriage Ivan added the two-headed eagle of the Byzantine escutcheon to his own coat of arms and, modeling his regime on that of the autocratic Byzantine rulers, curtailed the powers and privileges of the Russian princes and the Russian aristocracy. He also issued the first Muscovite legal code in 1497. He died on Oct. 27, 1505.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: IVAN IV VASILYEVICH,

called The Terrible (1530–84), grand duke of Moscow (1533–47) and czar of Russia (1547–84), one of the creators of the Russian state.

Ivan was born in Moscow on Aug. 25, 1530, the grandson of Ivan III and the son of Basil III (1479–1533), whom he succeeded at the age of three. He was the first Russian ruler to be formally crowned as czar. The first 13 years of Ivan's reign constitute one of the greatest periods of internal reform, external expansion, and centralization of state power in the history of Russia. In 1549 Ivan convoked the Zemsky Sobor, the first national representative assembly ever summoned by a Russian ruler. In the same year he initiated a comprehensive revision and modernization of the Russian law code. He conquered and annexed the Tatar khanates of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556), bringing the entire Volga River within the borders of Russia and ending the threat of these Tatar areas to Russia. The Livonian War (1558–83), an attempt to gain a foothold on the Baltic coast, was, however, unsuccessful.

Ivan's reign after 1560 is remarkable more for the czar's repeated displays of erratic behavior and wanton brutality than for his statesmanship. He surrounded himself with a select group of noblemen, whom he allowed to exercise despotic power over his entire domain. In 1570 he ravaged the town of Novgorod and ordered the slaying of thousands of its inhabitants because they had been reported, on dubious authority, to be conspiring against him. In 1581, Ivan brought personal tragedy upon himself when, in a fit of anger, he killed his eldest and favorite son. In his later years, Ivan began the acquisition of Siberia after most of the Ob River Basin had been brought under Russian control (1581–83) by the cossack leader Yermak Timofeyevich (fl. 1579–85). Ivan died on March 18, 1584.

 

 

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: GODUNOV, Boris Fyodorovich

(1551?–1605), czar of Russia (1598–1605), who increased the power of the Russian monarchy and church and imposed serfdom on the peasants.

A descendant of an old Tatar family, Boris became a favorite of Czar Ivan IV (the Terrible), and his influence on the imperial court was further strengthened by his sister's marriage to Fyodor Ivanovich (1557–98), the mentally weak son of Ivan. In 1584, on his deathbed, Ivan appointed Boris and Nikita Romanovich Yuriev (d. 1584) joint guardians and regents for Fyodor, who became nominal czar as Fyodor I Ivanovich. Soon sole regent on the death of Nikita, Boris became the most powerful man in Russia, recognized as head of the state. He recolonized Siberia and gave the Church of Russia a status equal to that of other Eastern churches by making Moscow a patriarchate. Extremely autocratic, he was the first Russian ruler to use Siberia as a place of banishment for political exiles; moreover, he legalized serfdom in the grimmest form by an edict of 1587, which forbade the transfer of serfs from one landowner to another and thus bound them to the land. He may also have brought about the death of Dmitri (1581–91), Ivan's youngest son, in whose name many nobles had unsuccessfully revolted in 1584.

On Czar Fyodor's death in 1598, the Zemsky Sobor (National Assembly) elected Boris as his successor. The new czar banished the Romanovs, his chief rivals, and proceeded to further policies he had already begun, such as strengthening Russian commerce, introducing various aspects of Western civilization, and struggling against the privileged nobility. Despite his power, Boris was exceedingly suspicious and felt himself insecure; informers kept him constantly advised of all political activities, and increasing numbers of Russians became the victims of his persecutions. In 1604 a pretender to the throne, who claimed to be the murdered Dmitri, appeared in Poland; the pretender gained thousands of supporters and led a revolt against Boris. The czar, however, died suddenly in the midst of the civil war on April 23, 1605.

The story of Boris Godunov became the basis of the tragedy Boris Godunov by the Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin. It was later made into an opera of the same title by the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: ALEXIS I

(1629–76), second Russian czar (1645–76) of the house of Romanov, and father of Peter the Great. He succeeded his father Michael (1596–1645). As a result of two campaigns by Alexis against the Poles (1654–56 and 1660–67), Russia gained Smolensk, Kiev, and the lands east of the Dnepr River. The war with Sweden (1656–58) was not as successful; Alexis was forced to withdraw from the lands he had taken. The reign of Czar Alexis was also marked by internal revolt, a schism in the Russian Orthodox church, and the formulation of a legal code that extended the serfdom of the Russian peasants.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: PETER THE GREAT
orPETER I

(1672–1725), czar of Russia (1682–1725), whose military campaigns and modernization efforts transformed Russia into an empire to be reckoned with in European affairs.

Peter was born in Moscow on June 9, 1672, the son of Czar Alexis I Mikhailovich. In early childhood he was taught by private tutors; later, with the aid of palace masters and various foreigners living in Moscow, he taught himself technical and mechanical arts, especially in relation to military and naval science. From 1682 to 1689, under the regency of his half sister Sophia Alekseyevna (1657–1704), Peter shared the throne with his older half brother Ivan V (1666–96), but in 1689 Peter's partisans at court overthrew Sophia and installed him as sole authority (formally, Ivan continued to reign until his death).

During Peter's reign Russia emerged as a great European power, in part because of his introduction of many Western European scientific, technological, cultural, and political conceptions and practices. In 1696, after creating a river fleet, the first Russian navy, Peter captured from the Turks the important fortress of Azov, which commanded the Sea of Azov and gave Russia access to the Black Sea. The following year, in an effort to secure allies among the European powers against the Turks and the Swedes and in order to acquaint himself with Western technology, Peter accompanied a diplomatic mission to the principal capitals of Western Europe. During his travels he induced about 900 artisans, craftsmen, technical advisers, and other experts to emigrate to Russia. Later he sent many young Russians abroad to learn Western crafts and trades.

On his return to Moscow in 1698 Peter, determined to gain control of the eastern part of the Baltic Sea, began military preparations for an attack on Sweden. Although the Great Northern War (1700–21) that ensued began inauspiciously for him, with a devastating setback at Narva (1700), he went on to win one of the greatest military victories in Russian history at the Battle of Poltava in 1709. By the terms of the Treaty of Nystadt (1721) that concluded the war, Russia gained control of a considerable area of the Baltic littoral, later called the Baltic Provinces. In 1703, during the war, Peter founded Saint Petersburg as a “window to Europe” and made it his capital.

Peter was proclaimed emperor in 1721 and thus established the Russian Empire. He introduced such internal reforms as reduction of the power of the boyars, or the old nobility, and the subordination of those nobles and of the church to the throne; the encouragement of industry, trade, and education; and the reorganization of the administrative apparatus of the state to make it more modern and efficient. During Peter's reign the Russian alphabet was simplified, Arabic numerals were introduced, the first newspaper in the Russian language was published, schools were founded, and an Academy of Sciences was established.

Under Peter, Russia became a regimented state. His police-state philosophy was based on the conviction that, just as he spent his life unceasingly in service for the state, so his subjects, whose welfare was his object, should discharge their obligation to the state. Both his reforms and his swift, often cruel, reprisals for infractions of his regulations made indelible impressions upon Russian life. He died in St. Petersburg on Feb. 8, 1725.

For further information on this person, see the section Peter the Great.

 

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: CATHERINE I,

real name Marta Skavronskaya (1682?–1727), empress of Russia (1725–27). Of peasant origin, she was born in Jakobstadt (now Jfkabpils, Latvia) but was orphaned early in life and reared by a pastor in Marienburg (now Malbork, Poland). When the Russians captured Marienburg in 1702, she was taken prisoner by the Russian commander, who sold her to Prince Aleksandr Menshikov (1673–1729), a close adviser of Peter the Great. She soon became Peter's mistress and most influential counselor. Peter, who had divorced his first wife in 1699, married Catherine in 1712. After his son Alexis (1690–1718) died, Peter issued an ukaz (“imperial order”) declaring his right to name his own successor; he died in 1725 without doing so. Catherine, however, had been crowned empress-consort in 1724, and on Peter's death she was proclaimed his successor; the claims of Alexis's son (later Peter III) were bypassed. Shrewd and courageous, Catherine defended Peter's advisers against his rages, and in her own reign she established, and concentrated power in, the supreme privy council. Two of her eight children by Peter survived, Anna (mother of Peter III) and Elizabeth Petrovna (empress 1741–62).

 

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: ALEXANDER I

(1777–1825), emperor of Russia (1801–25), son of Emperor Paul I (1754–1801). He abolished many barbarous and cruel punishments then practiced and in 1802 introduced a more orderly administration of government by the creation of eight ministries. He improved the condition of the serfs and promoted education, doubling the number of Russian universities by establishing those at Saint Petersburg, Kharkov, and Kazan. Alexander was for a time the ally of Prussia against Napoleon of France. In 1807, however, after the battles of Eylau and Friedland, Alexander allied himself with the French. He broke the alliance in 1812, and later that year Napoleon invaded Russia, only to lose his army in a disastrous retreat from Moscow. Alexander was prominent thereafter in the European coalition that led to Napoleon's fall. In 1815 Alexander instituted the Holy Alliance of Austria, Russia, and Prussia. The purpose of the alliance, as it was conceived, was to achieve the realization of high Christian ideals among the nations of Europe, but it soon ceased to have any real importance. The last years of Alexander's life and reign were reactionary and despotic. He was succeeded by his brother Nicholas I.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: SUVOROV, Aleksandr Vasilyevich

(1729–1800), Russian military leader, born either in Moscow or in Finland. He entered the Russian army as a boy, was made a colonel in 1762 during the Seven Years’ War, and became a major general in 1768. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74 Suvorov fought in the campaign of 1773–74 and he was commander of the allied Russian and Austrian armies in the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–92. For his decisive victory over the Ottoman Turks at the Rimnik (now Rîmnicul) River in 1789 he received the surname Rimniksky and was made a count.

In 1799, during the War of the Second Coalition against revolutionary France, Suvorov commanded the Allied forces in northern Italy. Under his direction they won three successive victories, at Cassano d’Adda, the Trebbia River, and Novi Ligure. Suvorov then led his armies across the Alps to join the Russian forces fighting the French in Switzerland, but he was forced by the French to retreat. He returned to Russia the following year in disgrace and was dismissed from his post by Emperor Paul I (1754–1801). Suvorov died shortly afterward.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: BARCLAY DE TOLLY, Mikhail, Prince

(1761–1818), Russian field marshal, born in Livonia, and descended from an old Scottish family settled there. Having entered a Russian regiment, he fought in the Turkish War of 1788–89, in the campaign against Sweden in 1790, and in those against Poland in 1792 and 1794. Although the Russian national party disliked Barclay as a foreigner, Alexander I appointed him minister of war in 1810. Two years later, during the war against Napoleon, Barclay was made commander in chief of the Army of the West. His tactics of continual retreat into the depths of Russia aroused still more vehement opposition by the Russian national party. When the French captured Smolensk on August 17, he yielded his command to Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov (1745–1813), who continued Barclay's strategy with success. After Kutuzov's death Barclay was commander in chief in the German and French campaigns, and his tactics finally defeated Napoleon. Barclay took part in the 1814 invasion of France and was made a field marshal. At the end of the war he was created a prince.

 

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: ALEXANDER II

(1818–81), emperor of Russia (1855–81), son of Emperor Nicholas I and nephew of Alexander I. He ascended the throne during the Crimean War and in 1856 signed the Treaty of Paris, which brought the hostilities to an end. After establishing committees to study the need for reform, Alexander II abolished serfdom throughout Russia in 1861. He also abolished corporal punishment, established local self-government, initiated judicial reform, revised the educational system, and developed a system of universal military service. Under his rule the administration of the police was greatly improved, and military operations in Central Asia and in a war with Turkey (1877–78) were highly successful. The Russian possessions in North America, now constituting the state of Alaska, were sold to the U.S. in 1867. Alexander was assassinated by a bomb thrown into his carriage by a member of a revolutionary group, the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will).

ENCYCLOPEDIA: PUSHKIN, Aleksandr Sergeyevich

(1799–1837), Russian poet and author, who founded the literature of his language with epic and lyric poems, plays, novels, and short stories.

Pushkin was born June 6, 1799, in Moscow, into a noble family. He took particular pride in his great-grandfather Hannibal, a black general who served Peter the Great. Educated at the Imperial Lyceum at Tsarkoye Selo, Pushkin demonstrated an early poetic gift. In 1817 Pushkin was taken into the ministry of foreign affairs in Saint Petersburg; there he mingled in the social life of the capital and belonged to an underground revolutionary group. In 1820 his “Ode to Liberty” came to the attention of the authorities, and the young poet was exiled to the Caucasus; nonetheless, Pushkin continued to hold official posts.

That same year Pushkin published his Ruslan and Ludmila, a long romantic poem based on folklore, which earned him a reputation as one of Russia's most promising poetic talents. The influence of Lord Byron shows itself, along with Pushkin's own love of liberty, in his next major poems, The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1822), and The Gypsies (1823–24). He began his most famous work, Eugene Onegin, in 1823; a Byronic love story with a realistic contemporary setting that has been described as the first of the great Russian novels (although in verse), it was not completed until 1831. Transferred to Odessa in 1823, he incurred the stern disapproval of a superior. He was dismissed from government service in 1824 and banished to his mother's estate near Pskov. There he wrote (1824–25) Boris Godunov, a Russian historical tragedy in the Shakespearean tradition, published six years later. In 1826 Czar Nicholas I, recognizing his enormous popularity, pardoned him. Pushkin continued to draw upon Russian history in two long poems, Poltava (1828) and The Bronze Horseman (1833), and in his novel of the Pugachev rebellion, The Captain's Daughter (1836). He also wrote short stories, the best known of which is “The Queen of Spades.” Pushkin died Feb. 10, 1837, from wounds that he suffered in a duel which he had fought in St. Petersburg.

Pushkin provided a literary heritage for Russians, whose native language had hitherto been considered unfit for literature. He was also a versatile writer of great vigor and optimism who understood the many facets of the Russian character. His lyric poetry—said to be delightful to the Russian ear but untranslatable—and his simple, vivid prose were invaluable models for the writers who followed him.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: GOGOL, Nikolay Vasilyevich

(1809–52), Russian writer, whose plays, short stories, and novels rank among the great masterpieces of 19th-century Russian realist literature.

Gogol was born March 31, 1809, in Mirgorod, Poltava Province, of cossack parents. In 1820 he went to Saint Petersburg, where he eventually secured employment in the civil service and became known in literary circles. Enthusiastic praise greeted his volume of short stories of Ukrainian life, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831). Then followed another collection, Mirgorod (1835), containing “Taras Bulba,” which was expanded in 1842 into a full-length novel; this work, dealing with 16th-century cossack life, revealed the writer's great ability for accurate and sympathetic character portrayal and his sparkling humor.

In 1836 Gogol's play The Inspector General appeared. A rollicking satire on the cupidity and stupidity of bureaucratic officials, it is a comedy of errors regarded by many critics as one of the most significant plays in Russian literature. It concerns the local officials of a small town who mistake a young traveler for an expected government inspector and offer him propitiatory bribes to induce him to overlook their misconduct in office.

From 1826 to 1848 Gogol lived mostly in Rome, where he worked on a novel that is considered his greatest creative effort and one of the finest novels in world literature, Dead Souls (1842). It has also been published in English under the alternative title Chichikov's Journey. In structure, Dead Souls is akin to Don Quixote by the Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Its extraordinary humor, however, is derived from a unique and sardonic conception: Collegiate Councilor Pável Ivanovich Chichikov, an ambitious, shrewd, and unscrupulous adventurer, goes from place to place, buying, stealing, and wheedling from their owners the titles to serfs whose names appeared on the preceding census lists but who had since died and were, accordingly, called “dead souls.” With this “property” as security he plans to raise loans with which to buy an estate with “live souls.”

Chichikov's travels provide the occasion for profound reflections on the degrading and stultifying influence of serfdom on both owner and serf. The work also contains a large number of brilliantly depicted Russian provincial types. Dead Souls exerted an enormous influence on succeeding generations of Russian writers. Many of the witty sayings expressed in its pages have become Russian maxims.

As published, Dead Souls was intended to constitute the first part of a larger work; Gogol began the sequel but in a fit of hypochondriacal melancholy burned the manuscript. In 1842 Gogol published another famous work, “The Overcoat,” a short story about an overworked clerk who falls victim to Russian social injustice. In the following year Gogol made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and on his return a priest persuaded him that his fictional work was sinful. Gogol thereupon destroyed a number of his unpublished manuscripts. He died March 4, 1852, in Moscow. Gogol is ranked with such literary giants as the novelists Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the poet Aleksandr Pushkin.        M.Sl., MARC SLONIM, Ph.D.

See also RUSSIAN LITERATURE,.

 

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: TURGENEV, Ivan Sergeyevich

(1818–83), Russian author, considered the foremost stylist in Russian literature; his novels, poems, and plays are characterized by elegant craftsmanship, lucidity, and a liberal, balanced point of view.

Turgenev was born Nov. 9, 1818, in Orël in central Russia and educated at the universities of Saint Petersburg and Berlin. On his family estates, while still a child, he first witnessed the mistreatment and suffering of the serf class; such abuse, widespread in the Russian economic system, eventually became a recurrent theme in his writings. Before turning to a literary career, Turgenev worked for a short time as a minor civil servant in St. Petersburg. His first published work, the long poem Parasha (1843), was well received by literary critics. Through the next few years the publication of several of his short stories established Turgenev as a significant Russian writer. He became involved in the ideological controversy between two groups of intellectuals known as the Westernizers and the Slavophiles. The Westernizers urged Russians to better their lives by incorporating into them the best aspects of European culture. The Slavophiles, rigidly Orthodox, championed native Russian customs and believed that they should remain untainted by foreign influences. Turgenev sided with the Westernizers. Later, he spent long periods of time outside Russia, often mainly to be near the celebrated opera singer Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821–1910), whom he loved. After 1871 he remained in Paris. He died near there, at Bougival, Sept. 3, 1883.

Turgenev wrote plays, stories, novels, and nonfiction sketches. He had published several poems and prose sketches before the appearance of his first book, A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), a collection of stories of Russian peasant life. Of the many plays he wrote early in his career, the finest is probably A Month in the Country (1850), a gentle but penetrating study of aristocratic life still frequently performed. Of his stories or short novels, First Love (1860) and Torrents of Spring (1872) are notable as lyric, beautifully realized evocations of love. His longer novels include On the Eve (1860) and Smoke (1867), both portraits of passionate young girls and their stormy love affairs. In his masterpiece, Fathers and Sons (1862), Turgenev names, defines, and analyzes the philosophy of nihilism; Bazarov, the hero of the novel, is an idealistic young radical, a commoner and a university student, dedicated to universal freedom and destined for tragedy in his own life. Turgenev believed in the goals of his hero, but he also believed that they could be achieved only through a long period of gradual change rather than by revolution. Turgenev's complete works have been translated into English.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: TOLSTOY, Leo

(1828–1910), Russian novelist, a profound social and moral thinker, and one of the greatest writers of realistic fiction of all time.

Tolstoy, the son of a nobleman landowner, was born on Sept. 9, 1828, at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate south of Moscow. He was orphaned at the age of nine and educated by French and German tutors. At the age of 16, Tolstoy enrolled at Kazan University, first studying Oriental languages and then law; influenced by the writings of the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, he became dissatisfied with formal study and in 1847 left without a degree. After a brief, futile attempt to improve the condition of the serfs on his estate, he plunged into the dissipations of Moscow's high society, which he candidly recorded in his diary with vows to reform.

In 1851 Tolstoy joined his brother's regiment in the Caucasus, where he came into contact with cossacks. Later, in one of his best shorter novels, The Cossacks (1863), he compared the effeteness of a sophisticated young Muscovite with the vigorous and natural cossack life, portrayed with sympathy and profound poetic realism. Between battles with the hill tribes, Tolstoy completed an autobiographical novel, Childhood (1852), followed by two others, Boyhood (1854) and Youth (1856), which without rhetoric or sentimentality draw on the psychologically significant memories common to all growing boys. These works received instant acclaim, as did Sevastopol Stories (1855–56), based on Tolstoy's participation in the Crimean War. It is a sobering exposure of the pretentious heroics of the military command as opposed to the uncomplaining bravery of common soldiers and war's grim reality.

Back in Saint Petersburg, Tolstoy became interested in the education of peasants. While on trips abroad (1857 and 1861), he visited French and German elementary schools, and at Yasnaya Polyana he started a village school that, in its teaching methods, foreshadowed the tenets of modern progressive education. In 1862 the novelist married 18-year-old Sofya Andreyevna Bers (1844–1919), a member of a cultured Moscow family. In the next 15 years he raised a large family (they ultimately had 19 children), successfully managed his estate, and wrote his two greatest novels, War and Peace (1865–69) and Anna Karenina (1875–77).

War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

War and Peace, considered one of the greatest novels ever written, is an epic of Russian society between 1805 and 1815, just before and after the Napoleonic invasion. It contains 559 characters, commemorates important military battles, and portrays famous historical personalities, but its main theme is the chronicle of the lives of five aristocratic families. The work is a masterpiece of realism. The characters are brilliantly realized by the descriptions of significant physical details, and by Tolstoy's penetrating psychological analysis that illumines their inner worlds, showing how they seem to themselves and to others at different moments of their lives. Spontaneous, unaffected Natasha Rostova, one of the most famous heroines in Russian literature, who matures from an exuberant adolescent into a solid matron, embodies Tolstoy's ideal of womanhood. Natasha remains abundantly herself, engrossed in private concerns of love, marriage, and children in the midst of the national holocaust. She confirms Tolstoy's iconoclastic views, expounded in separate philosophical chapters in the novel, of the historical process; history, for him, was the result of anonymous motivations and personal happenings rather than great public events instigated by national leaders. A profoundly optimistic philosophy emanates from the vast novel. Despite the revelations of the horrors of war and acknowledgment of human failings, the general message of War and Peace, inspired by Tolstoy's personal happiness during these creative years, is a zestful love of life in all its manifestations.

Tolstoy's shorter masterpiece, Anna Karenina, is one of the greatest modern psychological novels. The same creative methods convey reality, but the novel has more artistic unity than the earlier work, and exuberance gives way to pessimistic overtones; the inner conflicts of the main protagonists remain unresolved. Anna's adulterous passion for the young officer Vronsky, set against a background of St. Petersburg society life in the 1860s, is effectively contrasted with the lawful union of Kitty and Constantin Levin and their life on a country estate. Tolstoy shows deep compassion for his beautiful, erring heroine, but ultimately she is condemned to suffering and suicide for her transgression of moral and social laws. The principal hero, Levin, is an autobiographical character. He echoes the author's disapproval of intellectuality and urban sophistication, and he becomes tormented by the same doubts about the meaning of life and the relation of human beings to the infinite that assailed Tolstoy when he was completing Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy's Moral Philosophy.

In the uniquely candid, powerful Confession (1882), Tolstoy described his growing spiritual turmoil, castigated himself and his class for leading a selfish, empty existence, and started his long quest for moral and social certitudes. He found them in two principles of the Christian Gospels: love for all human beings and nonresistance to the forces of evil. He expanded upon and illustrated his new radical faith in eloquent essays and tracts. From within autocratic Russia, Tolstoy fearlessly attacked social inequality and coercive forms of government and church authority, urging freedom from hatreds and a purer life dictated by one's own moral conscience. In What Is Art? (1896), an indictment of almost all classical and modern art—including his own masterpieces, which he claimed were produced for the cultured elite—he advocated a morally inspired art, accessible to everyone. His didactic essays, translated into numerous languages, won adherents in many countries and from all walks of life. Many of them visited Yasnaya Polyana seeking instruction and advice.

Last Works.

Returning to imaginative fiction, Tolstoy wrote a number of brief, edifying tales (Stories for the People, 1884–85) with peasant settings; they are models of economy in construction. Other works, intended for the educated reader, are also morally purposeful in subject matter but give fuller rein to his immense creative powers. The best known of these are the short stories “The Death of Ivan Ilych” (1886) and “Master and Man” (1895), both depicting the spiritual conversion of a man facing death; The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), a dramatic novel of a loveless marriage; the play The Power of Darkness (1889), a naturalistic peasant tragedy of cupidity and lust leading to violence; and the novel Resurrection (1899–1900), the story of the moral regeneration of a conscience-stricken nobleman.

At the age of 82, increasingly tormented by the disparity between his teachings and his wealth, and by quarrels with his wife, who resisted his attempts to renounce their material possessions, Tolstoy left his home one night. He fell ill three days later and died on Nov. 20, 1910, at a remote railroad station. At his death he was hailed as a uniquely powerful moral force throughout the world. That force and his timeless and universal art continue to provide inspiration today.        T.S.L., THAÏS S. LINDSTROM, M.A., Ph.D.

For further information on this person, see the section Tolstoy, Leo.

 

 

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: ALEXANDER III

(1845–94), emperor of Russia (1881–94), son of Alexander II. In reaction to the assassination of his father, he restored much of the absolutism of the reign of Nicholas I and sternly repressed all revolutionary agitation. Alexander tried to impose the Russian language on all of his subjects, persecuted the Jews, and restricted education. His foreign policy was marked by a close union with France in opposition to the Triple Alliance. He was succeeded by his son, Nicholas II.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: FABERGÉ, Peter Carl

(1846–1920), Russian goldsmith and jeweler, whose designs were so imaginatively conceived and opulently executed that his work elevated jewelry to a decorative art level unequaled since the Renaissance.

A descendant of Huguenot immigrants, Fabergé was born in Saint Petersburg. Educated in Western Europe, Fabergé took control of the family jewelry business in 1870. He rapidly gained a reputation as a designer, working with precious and semiprecious stones and metals and drawing on many styles, including Old Russian, Greek, Renaissance, baroque, Art Nouveau, naturalism, and caricature. His creations, displayed at the Pan-Russian Exhibition in Moscow (1882), won him a gold medal; further honors followed. He was appointed goldsmith and jeweler to the Russian imperial court and also to many other crowned heads of Europe. At its peak his firm had branches in Moscow, Odessa, Kiev, London, and Saint Petersburg and employed some 700 people to produce its jeweled flower baskets, gold-and-enamel Easter eggs, miniature animals, chalices, bonbonnières, and numerous other lavish objects. The Russian Revolution ended Fabergé's business in 1918.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: NICHOLAS II

(1868–1918), emperor of Russia (1894–1917); one of the major European leaders of the pre–World War I era, the last czar of the Russian Empire.

The eldest son of Emperor Alexander III, Nicholas was born at Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin) on May 18, 1868. Educated privately, he was married in 1894 to Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt (1872–1918), a German princess who took the name Alexandra when she converted to Russian Orthodoxy. In the same year his father died, and he succeeded to the throne. Believing firmly in his duty to preserve absolute power in the Russian monarchy, he opposed any concessions to those favoring more democracy in government, but had little talent for leadership himself. He tended to rely for advice on his wife, to whom he was devoted and who bore him four daughters and a son, and was influenced by her mystical beliefs. Nicholas’s interest in Russian expansion in the Far East was one of the contributory causes of the disastrous Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), which in turn helped touch off the Russian Revolution of 1905. Forced by the revolution to assent to constitutional monarchy, he nevertheless continued to believe he was responsible only to God.

An advocate of peace and international cooperation, Nicholas sponsored the HAGUE CONFERENCES, (q.v.), which created the Permanent Court of Arbitration and formulated rules for the humane conduct of war, but failed to check Europe’s growing arms race. Despite his personally friendly relations with his cousin, William II of Germany, their two countries were on opposite sides when World War I broke out in 1914.

Russia’s defeats and the suffering caused by the war among the people were blamed on Nicholas, especially after he assumed personal command of the army in 1915. Forced to abdicate in March 1917, Nicholas was held captive by the Bolsheviks until executed, along with his family, at Yekaterinburg on the night of July 16–17, 1918. Eighty years later, the remains of Nicholas, the Empress Alexandra, three of their daughters, and four members of their household staff were buried in a state ceremony in the Cathedral of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Saint Petersburg.

For further information on this person, see the Bibliography, sections 972. Russian history, 975. Russian Revolution.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: RASPUTIN, Grigory Yefimovich

(1872–1916), Russian mystic and court figure, whose pervasive influence over the imperial family was a scandal in prerevolutionary Russia. He was born in Pokrovskoye, Siberia. Rasputin was uneducated and lived as a peasant until about 1901, when he left his family to become a wandering holy man. He soon acquired a wide reputation for both his faith healing and his debauched behavior. In 1905, during a visit to Saint Petersburg, then the site of the national capital, Rasputin was presented at court and made a deep impression on Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna (1872–1918). Because he was able to relieve the suffering of her hemophiliac son and heir to the Russian throne, Alexis Nikolayevich (1904–18), Rasputin became the most influential person in the czarina's entourage. After 1911 many high government offices were filled by his appointees, most of whom were incompetent. After the start of World War I, when Emperor Nicholas II went to the front to take command of the army, Rasputin became the decisive influence in the government. His famous orgies scandalized the people of Russia, and rumors circulated that he was conspiring with Germany. Called the Mad Monk, he became an object of hatred, and on Dec. 29–30, 1916, a group of aristocrats assassinated him during a midnight tea party to which they invited him. Rasputin was in large part responsible for the rising tide of discontent that led to the revolution in 1917 and the downfall of the monarchy.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: PAVLOV, Ivan Petrovich

(1849–1936), Russian physiologist and Nobel laureate, best known for his studies of reflex behavior. He was born in Ryazan, and educated at the University of Saint Petersburg and at the Military Medical Academy, St. Petersburg; from 1884 to 1886 he studied in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) and Leipzig, Germany. Before the Russian Revolution he served as director of the department of physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine (part of the present Academy of Medical Sciences), St. Petersburg, and professor of medicine at the Military Medical Academy. In spite of his opposition to Communism, Pavlov was allowed to continue his research in a laboratory built by the Soviet government in 1935. Pavlov is noted for his pioneer work in the PHYSIOLOGY, (q.v.) of the heart, nervous system, and digestive system. His most famous experiments, begun in 1889, demonstrated the conditioned and unconditioned reflexes (see REFLEX,) in dogs, and they had an influence on the development of physiologically oriented behaviorist theories of psychology during the early years of the 20th century (see PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL,). His work on the physiology of the digestive glands won him the 1904 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. His major work is Conditioned Reflexes (1926; trans. 1927).

ENCYCLOPEDIA: TCHAIKOVSKY, Peter Ilich

(1840–93), Russian composer, the foremost of the 19th century.

Tchaikovsky was born May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, in the western Ural area of the country. He studied law in Saint Petersburg and took music classes at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. There his teachers included the Russian composer and pianist Anton Rubinstein, from whom Tchaikovsky subsequently took advanced instruction in orchestration. In 1866 the composer-pianist Nicholas Rubinstein (1835–81), Anton's brother, obtained for Tchaikovsky the post of teacher of harmony at the Moscow Conservatory. There the young composer met the dramatist Aleksandr Nikolayevich Ostrovsky (1823–86), who wrote the libretto for Tchaikovsky's first opera, The Voyevoda (1868). From this period also date his operas Undine (1869) and The Oprichnik (1872); the Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat Minor (1875); the symphonies no. 1 (called “Winter Dreams,” 1868), no. 2 (1873; subsequently revised and titled “Little Russian”), and no. 3 (1875); and the overture Romeo and Juliet (1870; revised in 1870 and 1880). The B-flat piano concerto was dedicated originally to Nicholas Rubinstein, who pronounced it unplayable. Deeply injured, Tchaikovsky made extensive alterations in the work and reinscribed it to the German pianist Hans Guido von Bülow, who rewarded the courtesy by performing the concerto on the occasion of his first concert tour of the U.S. (1875–76). Rubinstein later acknowledged the merit of the revised composition and made it a part of his own repertoire. Well known for its dramatic first movement and skillful use of folklike melodies, it subsequently became one of the most frequently played of all piano concertos.

Period of Productivity.

In 1876 Tchaikovsky became acquainted with Nadejda von Meck (1831–94), a wealthy widow, whose enthusiasm for the composer's music led her to give him an annual allowance of 600 pounds. Fourteen years later, however, Madame von Meck, believing herself financially ruined, abruptly terminated the subsidy. Although Tchaikovsky's other sources of income were by then adequate to sustain him, he was wounded by the sudden defection of his patron without apparent cause, and he never forgave her. The period of his connection with Madame von Meck was one of rich productivity for Tchaikovsky. To this time belong the operas Eugene Onegin (1878), The Maid of Orleans (1879), Mazeppa (1883), and The Sorceress (1887); the ballets Swan Lake (1876) and The Sleeping Beauty (1889); the Rococo Variations for Cello and Orchestra (1876) and the Violin Concerto in D Major (1878); the orchestral works Marche Slave (1876), Francesca da Rimini (1876), Symphony no. 4 in F Minor (1877), the overture The Year 1812 (1880), Capriccio Italien (1880), Serenade for string orchestra (1880), Manfred symphony (1885), Symphony no. 5 in E Minor (1888), the fantasy overture Hamlet (1885); and numerous songs. Meanwhile, in 1877, Tchaikovsky, hoping to still the conflicts he felt about his homosexuality, had married Antonina Milyukova, a music student at the Moscow Conservatory who had written to the composer declaring her love for him. The marriage was unhappy from the outset, and the couple soon separated.

From 1887 to 1891 Tchaikovsky made several highly successful concert tours, conducting his own works before large, enthusiastic audiences in the major cities of Europe and the U.S. He composed one of his finest operas, The Queen of Spades, in 1890. Early in 1893 the composer began work on his Symphony no. 6 in B Minor, subsequently titled Pathétique by his brother Modeste. The first performance of the work, given at St. Petersburg on Oct. 28, 1893, under the composer's direction, was indifferently received. Nine days later, November 6, Tchaikovsky died—of cholera, according to official records. Modern scholarship, however, is inclined to credit the story that he committed suicide on the orders of a group of former law school classmates, who feared scandal because an aristocrat had complained to the czar about Tchaikovsky's homosexuality.

Evaluation.

Many Tchaikovsky compositions—among them The Nutcracker (ballet and suite, 1891–92), the Piano Concerto no. 2 in G Major (1880), the String Quartet no. 3 in E-flat Minor (1876), and the Trio in A Minor for Violin, Cello, and Piano (1882)—have remained popular with concertgoers. His most popular works are characterized by richly melodic passages in which sections suggestive of profound melancholy frequently alternate with dancelike movements derived from folk music. Like his contemporary, the Russian composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky was an exceptionally gifted orchestrator; his ballet scores in particular contain many striking effects of orchestral coloration. His symphonic works, popular for their melodic content, are also strong (and often unappreciated) in their abstract thematic development. In his best operas, such as Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, he used highly suggestive melodic passages to depict a dramatic situation concisely and with poignant effect. His ballets, notably Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, have never been surpassed for their melodic intensity and instrumental brilliance. Composed in close collaboration with the choreographer Marius Petipa, they represent virtually the first use of serious dramatic music for the dance since the operatic ballet of the German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck. Tchaikovsky also extended the range of the symphonic poem, and his works in this genre, including Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, are notable for their richly melodic evocation of the moods of the literary works on which they are based.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: PAVLOVA, Anna Pavlovna

(1882?–1931), Russian ballerina, the most famous classical ballerina of her era. Born in Saint Petersburg, she was trained at the school of the Imperial Ballet, made her debut as soloist in 1899, and became prima ballerina of the company in 1906. Pavlova toured Europe in 1907, appeared briefly with the Ballets Russes of the Russian impresario Sergey Diaghilev, and, in 1910 she made her American debut with the Russian dancer Mikhail Mordkin (1881–1944) at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. She founded her own company in 1911, and until 1925, when she retired, she danced extensively in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, often bringing ballet for the first time to remote areas. Conservative in her aesthetics, she was an outstanding representative of classical Russian ballet, admired for the poetic quality of her movement. She was also interested in ethnic dances and in the dance techniques of India and Japan. Her most famous classical roles were in Giselle, Swan Lake, Les Sylphides, Don Quixote, Coppélia, and in the solo dance The Dying Swan, created for her in 1905 by the Russian choreographer Michel Fokine.

For further information on this person, see the section Pavlova, Anna Pavlovna.

 

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: KANDINSKY, Wassily

(1866–1944), Russian painter, whose exploration of the possibilities of abstraction make him one of the most important innovators in modern art. Both as an artist and as a theorist he played a pivotal role in the development of abstract art (see ABSTRACT ART,).

Born in Moscow, Dec. 4, 1866, Kandinsky studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany (1896–1900). His early paintings were executed in a naturalistic style, but in 1909, after a trip to Paris during which he was highly impressed by the works of the Fauvists and postimpressionists, his paintings became more highly colored and loosely organized. In 1910 he executed what is considered the first totally abstract work in modern art, a watercolor entitled Composition I or Abstraction, an arrangement in blue, red, and green that makes no reference to objects of the physical world and derives its inspiration and title from music.

In 1911, along with Franz Marc and other German expressionists, Kandinsky formed Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider group, so called for Kandinsky’s love of blue and Marc’s love of horses). He produced both abstract and figurative works during this period, all of which were characterized by brilliant colors and complex patterns.    See BLAUE REITER, Der.

Kandinsky’s influence on the course of 20th-century art was further increased by his activities as a theorist and teacher. In 1912 he published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the first theoretical treatise on abstraction, which spread his ideas through Europe. He also taught at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts (1918–21) and at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany (1922–33). In 1933 Kandinsky moved to Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life.

After World War I, Kandinsky’s abstractions became increasingly geometric in form, as he abandoned his earlier fluid style in favor of sharply etched outlines and clear patterns. Composition VIII No. 260 (1923, Guggenheim Museum, New York City), for instance, is composed solely of lines, circles, arcs, and other simple geometric forms. In very late works such as Circle and Square (1943, private collection), he refines this style into a more elegant, complex mode that resulted in beautifully balanced, jewellike pictures. Kandinsky died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, on Dec. 13, 1944.

He was one of the most influential artists of his generation. As one of the first explorers of the principles of nonrepresentational or “pure” abstraction, Kandinsky can be considered the father of abstract expressionism, the dominant school of painting since World War II.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: BUNIN, Ivan Alekseyevich

(1870–1953), Russian poet, novelist, and Nobel laureate, born in Voronezh, and educated at the University of Moscow. In 1903 he received the Pushkin Prize of the Russian Academy for his translations of the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the English poets Lord Byron and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Bunin’s literary reputation rests mainly on his realistic tales, short stories, and novels, in which his principal theme is the bleakness of life in provincial Russia. Bunin was considerably influenced by the works of the Russian writers Anton Chekhov and Ivan Turgenev. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Bunin made his home in Paris. In 1933 he became the first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. His works include The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories (1916) and the novels The Village (1910) and Mitya’s Love (1925).

 

 

 

 

 

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: LENIN, Vladimir Ilich

(1870–1924), Russian revolutionary and political theoretician, who was the creator of the Soviet Union and headed its first government.

Lenin, originally named Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, was born in Simbirsk on April 22, 1870, the son of a successful government official. The first breach in Lenin’s comfortable childhood came in 1887, when the police arrested and hanged his elder brother for plotting to assassinate Czar Alexander III. Later that year Lenin enrolled in the University of Kazan, but he was quickly expelled as a radical troublemaker and exiled to his grandfather’s estate in the village of Kokushkino.

During this first exile (1887–88) Lenin became acquainted with the classics of European revolutionary thought, notably Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, and he soon considered himself a Marxist. Finally granted the necessary permission, he passed his law examinations in 1891, was admitted to the bar, and worked as a lawyer for the poor in the Volga town of Samara before moving to Saint Petersburg in 1893.

Organizer.

In St. Petersburg, Lenin joined the growing Marxist circle, and in 1895 he helped create the St. Petersburg Union for the Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. Police soon arrested the leaders of this organization. After 15 months in jail, along with another union member, Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869–1939)—soon to become his wife—Lenin went into Siberian exile until 1900. At the end of his first period in Siberia Lenin went abroad, where he joined Georgy Plekhanov (1857–1918), L. Martov (1873–1923), and other Marxists in creating a newspaper, Iskra (The Spark). The paper proved to be an effective device in uniting the existing Social-Democrats and inspiring new recruits. In exile Lenin wrote his masterpiece of organizational theory, What Is to Be Done? (1902). His plans for revolution centered on a highly disciplined party of professional revolutionaries, who would serve as the “vanguard of the proletariat” and lead the working masses to an inevitable victory over czarist absolutism.

Lenin’s insistence on the centrality of professional revolutionaries caused a split within the Russian Social Democratic Labor party; at its second congress (1903) it broke apart. Lenin’s faction emerged with a small majority of the congress, hence the name Bolsheviks (from the Russian word for majority); the opposition became known as Mensheviks (from the Russian word for minority). Quarrels between the two factions dominated party politics until World War I. See BOLSHEVISM,.

Exile.

Lenin spent most of the years until 1917 in exile in Europe. He returned to Russia after the peak of the 1905 Revolution, but the reaction that descended on the country in 1907 again forced him to flee abroad.

As he wandered through Europe, Lenin lived a hard, bitter existence. He exchanged recriminations with the Mensheviks about the Revolution’s failure, and many of his most talented disciples deserted him. At this time he wrote his major philosophical tract, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909). Three years later, at a party conference in Prague, the break between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks became final.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Lenin opposed it on the grounds that workers were fighting each other for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. Instead, he urged socialists “to transform the imperialist war into a civil war.” He expounded and systematized Marxist views of the war in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), arguing that only a revolution that destroyed capitalism could bring lasting peace.

Revolutionary Leader.

The Revolution of March 1917 that overthrew the czarist regime caught Lenin by surprise, but he managed to secure passage through Germany in a sealed train. His dramatic arrival in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg had been renamed) occurred one month after rebellious workers and soldiers had toppled the czar. The Petrograd Bolsheviks, including Joseph Stalin, had agreed with the deference the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies showed the bourgeois provisional government. Lenin immediately repudiated this line of policy. In his “April Theses” he argued that only the Soviet could respond to the hopes, aspirations, and needs of Russia’s workers and peasants. Under the slogan “All Power to the Soviets,” the Bolshevik party conference accepted Lenin’s program.

After an abortive workers’ uprising in July, Lenin spent August and September 1917 in Finland, hiding from the provisional government. There, he formulated his concepts of a socialist government in a famous pamphlet, State and Revolution, his most important contribution to Marxist political theory. He also bombarded the party’s Central Committee with demands for an armed uprising in the capital. His plan was finally accepted; it was put into effect on November 7.

Premises.

A few days after the November Revolution, Lenin was elected chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, that is, head of government. He acted pragmatically to consolidate the power of the new Soviet state. At his urging, private enterprise, except for such institutions as banks, was not nationalized. He charted a slow course toward socialism and avoided the opprobrium attached to one-party rule by including the Left-Socialist Revolutionary party in his government. His overriding concern was the preservation of the Revolution and Soviet power against enemies both foreign and domestic. In line with these practical considerations Lenin accepted the onerous German terms for the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty. His tenacious struggle to maintain power, however, cost the young Soviet regime dearly in the 1918–21 civil war. Together with Leon Trotsky, the genius behind the Red Army, he set the course that brought the Soviet Union victoriously through the civil war.

After the war Lenin issued the New Economic Policy, returning the Soviet Union to the market economy and pluralistic society of early Soviet rule. At the same time, however, he called for a ban on factionalism and insisted on the principle of one-party rule.

The first of three strokes incapacitated Lenin in May 1922. He recovered somewhat, but never again assumed an active role in the government or the party. After a partial recovery in late 1922, he suffered a second stroke in March 1923, which robbed him of speech and effectively ended his political career. Lenin died in Nizhny Novgorod on Jan. 21, 1924.

Evaluation.

Although not an extraordinary philosopher, Lenin was a brilliant revolutionary thinker and strategist, whose clear-sighted realism guided the Bolsheviks to seize and maintain power. He did not formulate any one solution to the dilemma of how to build a workers’ state in a peasant society. His interpreters and critics differ. Some see a continuity between Lenin’s early ideas and those of Stalin, while others stress the pluralistic New Economic Policy that he advocated in the last years of his life. Most observers agree, however, that Lenin was the foremost revolutionary figure of 20th-century Europe.        J.E.Sa., JONATHAN E. SANDERS, M.A., Ph.D.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: TROTSKY, Leon

(1879–1940), Russian Marxist theorist and revolutionary, who was one of the principal leaders of the Soviet government until ousted and exiled by his archrival, Joseph Stalin.

Originally named Lev Davidovich Bronstein, he was born on Nov. 7, 1879, in Kherson Province in Ukraine, the son of Russified Jews. He was educated in Odessa and in Nikolayev and was a star pupil with enormous capabilities.

Early Political Life.

Trotsky's political involvement began in 1896 in a circle of Nikolayev Populists, but he soon converted to Marxism. After a brief stay at Odessa University, he returned to Nikolayev in 1897 to organize the Southern Russian Workers Union. For this he was arrested, jailed, and exiled.

He escaped from Siberian exile in 1902, fleeing to Europe and adopting the pseudonym Trotsky. He joined Lenin, L. Martov (1873–1923), Georgy Plekhanov (1857–1918), and other Russian Social-Democrats, who were publishing Iskra (The Spark). With his flair for polemic writing and oratorical brilliance, he quickly rose in the party.

At the party's Second Congress in 1903 he opposed Lenin and the Bolsheviks, siding with the Mensheviks. His characteristic independence, however, kept him from cementing any ties. Alone of the major party leaders, he rushed back to Russia to be an active participant in the 1905 Revolution, where he gained practical experience as chairman of the Saint Petersburg Soviet of Workers Deputies. Jailed in December 1905 and later exiled to Siberia, he used his time to reconsider the paradoxes of revolution in backward Russia. He synthesized his thoughts in two books, 1905 and Results and Prospects.

Revolutionary Leadership.

Escaping from Siberia in 1907, Trotsky spent the next decade defending his ideas and engaging in émigré squabbling. The March Revolution of 1917 caught him by surprise in New York City, where he wrote for a Russian newspaper. Trotsky reached Russia in May, quickly assumed leadership of the independent left Social-Democratic Interdistrict Group, and joined the Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed) Soviet. Within weeks, he had gained enormous popularity as the most eloquent agitator of the Soviet left. In July, after being courted by Lenin, he joined the Bolshevik party and was elected to its Central Committee.

As a Bolshevik, he was elected chairman of the Soviet in September. He sided with Lenin on the need to overthrow the provisional government and devoted his energies to marshaling support for the armed uprising of the Bolsheviks. With Lenin in hiding, Trotsky was the general in charge, and he successfully directed the masses of workers and soldiers in the November revolution.

In the ensuing Soviet government Trotsky first became commissar of foreign affairs, negotiating a separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk. Later, as a ruthlessly practical commissar of war, he is credited with creating, inspiring, and directing the Red Army that gained a great victory in the civil war and saved the Revolution.

Exile.

Trotsky was second only to Lenin in the Politburo, and Lenin viewed him as exceptionally able. He backed Lenin's major policy innovations, but had his own plans for industrializing Russia. When a stroke removed Lenin from active politics in May 1922, Trotsky was not in a position to take over. Never adept at party politics, he failed to outmaneuver the troika of Grigory Zinovyev (1883–1936), Lev Kamenev (1883–1936), and Stalin that took power. Although he put himself at the head of a loosely knit left opposition, Trotsky's polemic salvos were no match for Stalin's bureaucratic party machine. In 1925 his adversaries removed him from the Commissariat of War; in 1926 they expelled him from the Politburo; and in 1928 Stalin exiled him to Central Asia and in 1929 expelled him from the USSR.

Trotsky spent the rest of his life seeking a safe place to compose his savage critiques of Stalinist Russia. In Turkey, France, Norway, and finally Mexico he produced many publications, including an autobiography, My Life (1930; trans. 1930); an unmatched History of the Russian Revolution (3 vol., 1931–33; trans. 1932–33); an insightful The Revolution Betrayed (1937); and searing articles on the major issues of his day (Stalinism, Nazism, fascism, the Spanish civil war). A Stalinist agent fatally wounded him on Aug. 20, 1940, in Coyoacán, Mexico. He died the following day.

Evaluation.

Trotsky's brilliant polemical and oratorical talents were perfectly suited to a period of revolution, and his energies helped to create and, above all, to save the Soviet Union during the civil war. Lacking the skills of a political infighter, however, he lost out to Stalin. Soviet scholars still held to the Stalinist line that Trotsky was a traitor, who attempted to undermine the Soviet Union.        J.E.Sa., JONATHAN E. SANDERS, M.A., Ph.D.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: KOLCHAK, Aleksandr Vasiliyevich

(1874–1920), Russian admiral and counterrevolutionist, born in Saint Petersburg, and educated at the Russian naval academy. Kolchak entered the Russian navy in 1888, served with distinction in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, and was appointed rear admiral in command of the Baltic fleet during World War I. In 1917 he was promoted to the rank of vice admiral and placed in command of the Black Sea fleet. After the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, he organized a counterrevolutionary army in Siberia and assumed the title of Supreme Ruler of Russia, establishing his capital at Omsk. During 1918 and early 1919 he scored a number of successes against the Soviet armies, but in November 1919 he lost Omsk to the Soviets. Kolchak moved his government farther east to Irkutsk, but the citizens of that city refused to accept his rule and set up a socialist government instead. Compelled to resign, he transferred the command of his armies to the anti-Bolshevik general Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872–1947). Shortly afterward Kolchak was captured and executed by the Soviet forces.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: STALIN, Joseph

(1879–1953), Soviet Communist leader, the longtime ruler who more than any other individual molded the features that characterized the Soviet regime and shaped the direction of post-World War II Europe; in this regard, Stalin is considered by many to be the most powerful person to live during the 20th century.

Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, as he was originally named—he adopted the pseudonym Stalin, meaning “a man of steel,” only about 1910—was born on Dec. 21, 1879, in Gori, now in the Republic of Georgia. Both his parents were Georgian peasants. Neither of them spoke Russian, but Stalin was forced to learn it, as the language of instruction, when he attended the Gori church school in 1888–94. The best pupil in the school, Soso (his schoolboy nickname) earned a full scholarship to the Tbilisi Theological Seminary.

The Revolutionary.

While studying for the priesthood, Stalin read forbidden literature, including Karl Marx's Das Kapital, and soon converted to a new orthodoxy: Russian Marxism. Before graduation he quit the seminary to become a full-time revolutionary.

Stalin began his career in the Social-Democratic party in 1899 as a propagandist among Tbilisi railroad workers. The police caught up with him in 1902. Arrested in Batum, he spent more than a year in prison before being exiled to Siberia, from which he escaped in 1904. This became a familiar pattern. Between 1902 and 1913 Stalin was arrested eight times; he was exiled seven times and escaped six times. The government contained him only once; his last exile in 1913 lasted until 1917.

On his return from Siberia in 1904 Stalin married. His first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze, died in 1910. A second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva (1902–32), whom he married in 1919, committed suicide in 1932.

In the last years of czarist Russia (1905–17) Stalin was more of an up-and-coming follower than a leader. He always supported the Bolshevik faction of the party, but his contribution was practical, not theoretical. Thus, in 1907 he helped organize a bank holdup in Tbilisi “to expropriate” funds. Lenin raised him into the upper reaches of the party in 1912 by co-opting him into the Bolsheviks' Central Committee. The next year he briefly edited the new party newspaper, Pravda (Truth), and at Lenin's urging wrote his first major work, Marxism and the Nationality Question. Before this treatise appeared (1914), however, Stalin was sent to Siberia.

After the Revolution of March 1917, Stalin returned to Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), where he resumed the editorship of Pravda. Together with Lev Kamenev (1883–1936), Stalin dominated party decisions in the capital before Lenin arrived in April. The two advocated a policy of moderation and cooperation with the provisional government. Although he played a not insignificant role in the armed uprising that followed in November, Stalin was not remembered as a revolutionary hero. In the words of one memoirist, he produced the impression of a “grey blur.”

The Administrator.

As the Bolsheviks' expert on nationalism, Stalin was Lenin's choice to head the Commissariat for Nationality Affairs. Together with Yakov Sverdlov (1885–1919) and Leon Trotsky, he helped Lenin decide all emergency issues in the difficult first period of the civil war. Stalin participated in that war as a commander on several fronts. Within the party Stalin strengthened his position by dogged organizational work and devotion to administrative tasks. He was commissar for state control in 1919–23, and—more important—in 1922 he became secretary-general of the party. As Stalin converted this organizational base into a source of political power, he came into conflict with Lenin on several minor but ultimately telling issues.

Before his death, Lenin came to regard the flaws in Stalin's personality and conduct as political liabilities. In his political “testament” Lenin doubted whether the party's general secretary would use his great power with sufficient caution. He also attacked Stalin as being “too rude” and called for his removal. Luck and adroit maneuvering enabled Stalin to suppress Lenin's testament.

The Despot.

After Lenin's death Stalin joined in a troika with Grigory Zinovyev (1883–1936) and Kamenev to lead the country. With these temporary allies, Stalin acted against his archrival Trotsky, the foremost candidate for Lenin's mantle. Once the threat of Trotsky was eliminated, however, Stalin reversed course, aligning himself with Nikolay Bukharin and Aleksey Rykov (1881–1938) against his former partners. Trotsky, Zinovyev, and Kamenev in turn challenged Stalin as the “left opposition.” By skillful manipulation and clever sloganeering, but especially by interpreting Lenin's precepts to a new generation coming of age in the 1920s, Stalin bested all his rivals. By his 50th birthday (1929), Stalin had cemented his position as Lenin's recognized successor and entrenched his power as sole leader of the Soviet Union.

Stalin reacted to lagging agricultural production in the late '20s by a ruthless, personally supervised expropriation of grain from peasants in Siberia. When other crises threatened in late 1929, he expanded what had been a moderate collectivization program into a nationwide offensive against the peasantry. Millions were displaced, and unknown thousands died in the massive collectivization. The industrialization campaigns over which Stalin presided in the 1930s were much more successful; these raised the backward USSR to the rank of the industrial powers.

In the mid-1930s Stalin launched a major campaign of political terror. The purges, arrests, and deportations to labor camps (see CONCENTRATION CAMP,) touched virtually every family. Former rivals Zinovyev, Kamenev, and Bukharin admitted to crimes against the state in show trials and were sentenced to death. Untold numbers of party, industry, and military leaders disappeared during the “Great Terror,” making way for a rising generation that included such leaders as Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Fear instilled by a political secret police formed an essential part of the system called Stalinism. See KGB,.

The War Leader.

In part because the purges stripped the military of its leadership, the Soviet Union suffered greatly in World War II. Stalin personally directed the war against Nazi Germany. By rallying the people, and by his willingness to make great human sacrifices, he turned the tide against the Germans, notably at the Battle of Stalingrad.

Stalin participated in the Allies' meetings at Tehran (1943), Yalta (1945), and Potsdam (1945), where he obtained recognition of a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, and after the war he extended Communist domination over most of the countries liberated by the Soviet armies. His single-minded determination to prevent yet another devastating assault on the USSR from the West had much to do with the growth of the cold war. In his last years, increasingly paranoid and physically weak, Stalin apparently was about to start another purge. In January 1953 he ordered the arrest of many Moscow doctors, mostly Jews, charging them with medical assassinations. The so-called Doctors' Plot seemed to herald a return to the 1930s, but Stalin's sudden death on March 5, 1953, in Moscow forestalled another bloodbath.

Evaluation.

Although the ironfisted ruler of a mighty nation, Stalin has remained an enigmatic figure and his role in history a controversial one. Soviet historians assess his regime as a great one, although marred by some errors, but Western scholars assail the bloody terror of his rule. The question is whether or not the Soviet Union would have made the same progress under less despotic leadership. Three years after his death, the 20th Party Congress denounced Stalin and much that he represented.        J.E.Sa., JONATHAN E. SANDERS, M.A., Ph.D.

For further information on this person, see the section Stalin, Joseph.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: KHRUSHCHEV, Nikita S(ergeyevich)

(1894–1971), Soviet Communist leader, who was first secretary of the Soviet Communist party (1953–64) and premier of the USSR (1958–64).

Born on April 17, 1894, in Kalinovka, the son of a miner, Khrushchev worked in his early years as a shepherd and locksmith. After serving in the czarist army in World War I and participating in the Bolshevik Revolution, he joined the Communist party and the Red Army in 1918 and fought in the civil war. He attended a Communist party high school in 1921 and was active as a party organizer until 1929. For the next two years he attended the Industrial Academy in Moscow. Khrushchev advanced rapidly in the party, becoming a member of the Central Committee in 1934; first secretary of the Moscow Regional Committee (1935–37), directing the industrialization program of the second 5-year plan; first secretary of the Ukrainian party organization (1938); a provisional member (1938) and a full member (1939) of the party Politburo; and a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (1939).

During World War II he headed the political department of the Red Army on the southern front. In 1944, after the Germans were driven from the Ukraine, he was entrusted with restoring agricultural production, establishing order, and punishing traitors. Returning to Moscow in 1949, he was appointed a member of the Secretariat of the party’s Central Committee. After Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, he became first secretary of the Central Committee. Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, and in 1957 he demoted many of Stalin’s former close associates. He became premier of the Soviet Union on the resignation of Nikolay Bulganin in 1958. Khrushchev boasted of Soviet destructive might but advocated peaceful methods to overcome capitalism. He was deposed as premier and party head on Oct. 14–15, 1964. He was then accused of political “errors,” including fomenting the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, establishing a “cult of personality,” and disorganizing the economy. By the end of the year he held no government office. In 1966 he was dropped from the party’s Central Committee. Khrushchev died in Moscow on Sept. 11, 1971.

Khrushchev Remembers (1970) was published in English; Khrushchev denied, however, that he had authorized the book. A second printing of the memoirs, subtitled The Last Testament, and Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes, a new volume, were published in 1974 and 1990, respectively.

In 1999, his son, Serghei (1935–    ), a rocket engineer, became a U.S. citizen. He has written three books about his father.

For further information on this person, see the section Khrushchev, Nikita S(ergeyevich).

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: DUNCAN, Isadora,

professional name of Dora Angela Duncan (1878–1927), American dancer, whose creation of an expressive dance style, based on her vision of the dances of the ancient Greeks, laid the groundwork for the modern dance movement of the 20th century.

Born on May 27, 1878, in San Francisco, Duncan made her professional debut in Chicago in 1899. She subsequently toured Europe and the U.S. in dance recitals and established schools near Berlin in 1904, in Paris in 1914, and in Moscow in 1921. Her personal life was tragic. An advocate of free love, she had a daughter by the British stage designer Edward Gordon Craig and a son by Paris Singer (1892?–1953), American heir to a sewing-machine fortune. Both children were killed in an automobile accident in 1913. She married the Russian poet Sergey Yesenin (1895–1925) in 1922, but they separated shortly thereafter. Duncan lived in poverty for many years, making one final dramatic appearance in Paris before her own death in an automobile accident in Nice, France, on Sept. 14, 1927.

Duncan’s dancing was characterized by free, flowing movements expressive of inner emotion and inspired by waves, winds, birds, and insects. She usually appeared in a diaphanous tunic, her feet, arms, and legs bare and her long hair unbound. When she first introduced her style of dancing in America, Duncan met with strong opposition, especially from adherents of ballet, with its traditional conventions and techniques. Eventually her ideas came into wide favor. Through her impact on the Russian-born choreographer Michel Fokine, she greatly influenced 20th-century ballet. Her beliefs about her art also gave rise to a new type of dance known as interpretive dancing. Among the choreographers she influenced were the Americans Agnes De Mille, Martha Graham, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn and the Russian-American George Balanchine. Because of her antipathy for formalized techniques, Duncan’s dancing was highly improvisatory. Unfortunately, the specifics of her dance style have been lost, for she left behind no codified technique.

Duncan’s autobiography, My Life, was published in 1927. A motion picture based on her life was released in 1968. She is also the subject of a biography, The Real Isadora (1971), by the Russian-born American writer and musician Victor Serov (1902–79).

 

 

 

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: NABOKOV, Vladimir Vladimirovich

(1899–1977), Russian-American novelist, poet, and critic, whose brilliant and challenging novels and stories earned him the highest critical acclaim as a major international literary figure.

Nabokov was born April 23, 1899, in Saint Petersburg, into a prominent and wealthy aristocratic family. They fled to the West in 1919 in the wake of the Russian Revolution; Nabokov graduated (1922) from the University of Cambridge with highest honors. Under the pseudonym of Vladimir Sirin, he began writing for the Russian émigré press in Berlin, where he lived from 1923 to 1937. During the next three years he lived in France and there began to write in English. In 1940 Nabokov moved to the U.S. and five years later became an American citizen. His first novel in English, Bend Sinister, appeared in 1947. He had a minor literary reputation until the publication in Paris of Lolita (1955) made him a major literary figure. The astonishing novel recounts the intense and obsessive involvement of a middle-aged man with a sexually precocious young girl, whom Nabokov termed a “nymphet.” Having caused a sensation in Europe, the book was published in the U.S. in 1958 and received a similar reception.

During the 1960s some of Nabokov’s early work in Russian, such as Invitation to a Beheading, was translated into English and other languages. Pale Fire (1962), his first published novel after Lolita, was also widely acclaimed. His translation, with commentaries, of the Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin (4 vol.) appeared in 1964. Speak, Memory (1966) is a highly evocative account of his childhood in imperial Russia and his later life up to 1940; the memoirs were originally published in 1951 in a shorter form as Conclusive Evidence. King, Queen, Knave, which was written in Berlin and appeared in Russian and German editions in 1928, was published in an English translation in 1968. Ada appeared in 1969, and the English translation of Mary, first published in 1926, appeared in 1970. Glory, first published in 1932, appeared in an English translation in 1972. In 1973 he published two books: A Russian Beauty and Other Stories and Strong Opinions, nonfiction pieces. In 1959 Nabokov had moved to Switzerland, where, despite his eminence, he led a reclusive life until his death on July 2, 1977, at Montreux.

Nabokov’s unique province is the complex tragicomedy, with time and space telescoped or expanded and metaphors and similes juggled. As he has said, “While I keep everything on the very brink of parody, there must be, on the other hand, an abyss of seriousness . . . .”

ENCYCLOPEDIA: MAYAKOVSKY, Vladimir Vladimirovich

(1893–1930), Russian poet and propagandist. His early political activity during the czarist period led to his imprisonment; he then began writing poetry. Mayakovsky became a leading spokesperson for the Russian Revolution. He employed techniques geared to mass appeal, including the use of vernacular, even vulgar, language and new poetic forms. Poems such as “Oda revolutsi” (Ode to Revolution, 1918) were as popular as his passionate and lyrical love poems, such as “Lyublyu” (I Love, 1922). During the 1920s Mayakovsky provided propaganda for the Soviet government in a variety of forms such as poems, posters, plays, screenplays, and satiric travel sketches. In his play The Bedbug (1929; trans. 1960), he satirized the philistinism of the times. Disappointed in love and disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, Mayakovsky took his own life in 1930.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: ALEKHINE, Alexander

(1892–1946), Russian chess grand master and world champion, born in Moscow, and educated at the universities of Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) and Paris. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 he immigrated to France and became a French citizen. He won the rank of chess master at the age of 16 and the rank of grand master at 21. Alekhine won the chess world championship in 1927 from the Cuban chess player José Rául Capablanca and lost it to the Dutch chess player Max Euwe in 1935. Alekhine regained it from Euwe in 1937 and maintained it until his death.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: BULGAKOV, Mikhail

(1891–1940), Russian novelist and playwright, born in Kiev, Ukraine. Educated to be a physician, Bulgakov gave up medicine for writing. His early works are satirical stories, The Diaboliad (1925; trans. 1972), and comedies, Zoe’s Apartment (1926). The long novel The White Guard (1925; trans. 1971) is set in Kiev during the Revolution and it was dramatized as the Days of the Turbines (1926; trans. 1934). His famous novel, The Master and Margarita (trans. 1967), was written between 1929 and his death in 1940.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: CHEKHOV, Anton Pavlovich

(1860–1904), Russian dramatist and short-story writer, who is one of the foremost figures in Russian literature.

The son of a merchant, Chekhov was born on Jan. 29, 1860, in Taganrog, Ukraine, and educated in medicine at the University of Moscow. While still at the university he published humorous magazine stories and sketches. He rarely practiced medicine because of his success as a writer and because he had tuberculosis, at that time an incurable illness. The first collection of his humorous writings, Motley Stories, appeared in 1886, and his first play, Ivanov, was produced in Moscow the next year. In 1890 Chekhov visited Sakhalin Island off the coast of Siberia and later wrote Island Sakhalin (1891–94), an account of his visit. Chekhov's frail health caused him to move in 1897 from his small country estate near Moscow to the warmer climate of the Crimea. He also made frequent trips to health resorts in Western Europe. Near the end of the century he met the actor and producer Konstantin Stanislavski, director of the Moscow Art Theater, which in 1898 produced Chekhov's famous play The Sea Gull (1896; trans. 1923). This association of playwright and director, which continued until Chekhov's death, led to the production of several of his one-act dramas and his other well-known plays, Uncle Vanya (1899; trans. 1923), The Three Sisters (1901; trans. 1923), and The Cherry Orchard (1904; trans. 1923). He died at a German spa on July 14/15, 1904.

Modern critics consider Chekhov one of the masters of the short-story form. He was largely responsible for the modern type of short story that depends for effect on mood and symbolism rather than on plot. His narratives, rather than having a climax and resolution, are a thematic arrangement of impressions and ideas. Using themes relating to the everyday life of the landed gentry and professional middle class, Chekhov portrayed the pathos of life in Russia before the 1905 revolution: the futile, boring, and lonely lives of people unable to communicate with one another. Some of Chekhov's best known stories are included in the posthumously published Darling and Other Stories (1910; trans. 1916–22).

In the Russian theater Chekhov is preeminently a representation of modern naturalism. His plays, like his stories, are studies of the spiritual failure of characters in an aristocratic society that is disintegrating. To portray these themes Chekhov developed a new dramatic technique, which he called “indirect action.” He concentrated on subtleties of characterization and interaction between characters rather than on plot and direct action. In a Chekhov play important dramatic events take place offstage. Some of his plays were originally rejected in Moscow, but his technique has become accepted by modern playwrights and audiences, and his plays appear frequently in theatrical repertories.

For further information on this person, see the section Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, and the Bibliography, section 854. Russian literature.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: STANISLAVSKI, Konstantin,

professional name of Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseyev (1863–1938), Russian actor, director, and author; proponent of a technique for preparing a role that has had vast influence on contemporary acting.

Stanislavski was born in Moscow on Jan. 17, 1863, and began his acting career with an amateur group at the age of 15. In 1898 Stanislavski and the dramatist Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko (1859–1943) founded the Moscow Art Theater, with which Stanislavski worked for the rest of his life. He acted, directed, and taught his system of acting, which had its greatest success with the plays of Maksim Gorki and Anton Chekhov. Stanislavski described his theory in the autobiographical work My Life in Art (1924) and in An Actor Prepares (1935). His complete works in Russian, all published after his death, fill eight volumes.

In 1922–24 the Moscow Art Theater toured for the first time. Audiences in Europe and the U.S. were exposed to the results of Stanislavski's teaching, which sought to convey a new emotional reality within conventional theatrical forms. During the 1930s and '40s what came to be known as “the Method” became the most prevalent theory of acting, as teachers and directors adopted and adapted Stanislavski's principles. This was particularly true in the U.S., where first the Group Theater and later the Actors Studio led in promoting a kind of theater in which individual performances were submerged in the ensemble. Employing such techniques as the mental recall of past experiences, actors using “the Method” try to re-create at every performance the sequence of truthful emotions required to convey the playwright's intent to the audience. Stanislavski died in Moscow, Aug. 7, 1938.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: KASPAROV, Garry Kimovich

(1963–    ), Russian chess champion, born Gary Weinstein in Baku, Azerbaijan (then in the USSR). While at the height of his powers, he was celebrated for making bold, unconventional moves and risky flourishes that threw his opponents off their games.

Kasparov became an international grand master in 1980. In 1984 he mounted his first challenge to the world champion, Russian grand master Anatoly Karpov, losing in a controversial match that was canceled by the president of the International Chess Federation (FIDE) after 48 games when it appeared Karpov was about to lose. Kasparov defeated Karpov for the title in a 24-game rematch the following year, becoming the youngest world champion ever at age 22. He successfully defended his title against Karpov in 1986, 1987, and 1990. In February 1993 he split with FIDE to found the Professional Chess Federation (PCA) with Nigel Short (1965–    ) of Great Britain. FIDE stripped him of his title, but he won the PCA championship later that year and again in 1995. The PCA collapsed later in 1995. Financing for a planned title match against Alexei Shirov (1972–    ) of Spain fell through in 1998. Two years later, in a match conducted by Braingames Network, an Internet enterprise, Kasparov was dethroned by his former protégé Vladimir Kramnik (1975–    ).

Prior to the first multigame regulation match between a world chess champion and a computer in 1996, Kasparov participated in and won “man versus machine” matches held in Germany in 1985, 1989, 1992, and 1994. In the 1996 match he took on Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), and he won the match, with a final tally of three wins, one loss, and two draws; however, in a six-game rematch against an improved version of Deep Blue in 1997, the computer shocked both Kasparov and the chess world with two wins, one loss, and three draws.

In 2003 Kasparov played in the first official world championship match between a human and a computer. Sponsored by FIDE and the International Computer Game Association, the six-game match pitted him against “Deep Junior,” an Israeli-made chess computer and the reigning Computer World Champion, and ended in a draw, with one win each and four draws.

Kasparov is the author of several books on chess, and a newspaper, television and Internet contributor on a variety of subjects ranging from chess education and computer technology to Russian and world politics.

In March 2005, after winning a tournament in Linares, Spain, Kasparov announced his retirement from professional play.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: GORBACHEV, Mikhail Sergeyevich

(1931–    ), Soviet leader and Nobel laureate. The youngest man to hold supreme power in the USSR since Joseph Stalin, Gorbachev was born in Privolnoye, Russia, in the Stavropol region. Trained as a lawyer at Moscow State University, he joined the Communist party in 1952. Back in Stavropol, he rose in the regional party hierarchy until summoned to Moscow in 1978. There he became a protégé of Yuri Andropov, whose influence secured for Gorbachev full membership in the Politburo in 1980.

When Andropov succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as Soviet leader in 1982, Gorbachev became his second in command. After Andropov died in 1984, Gorbachev served as chief lieutenant to Konstantin U. Chernenko. Upon Chernenko's death in 1985, Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist party. In 1988, after Andrei A. Gromyko retired as president of the USSR, Gorbachev also assumed that title.

Between 1985 and 1990, he sought to reform Soviet society by introducing perestroika (Rus. “restructuring”) of the economy and glasnost (Rus. “openness”) in political and cultural affairs. He augmented the authority of the Soviet presidency and transferred power from the Communist party to popularly elected legislatures in the union republics. In international affairs, he withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan, normalized relations with China, signed a series of arms control agreements with U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and cooperated with the U.S.-led effort to oust Iraq—a long-time Soviet ally—from Kuwait (see PERSIAN GULF WARS,). For helping to end the cold war and allowing former Soviet-bloc countries in Eastern Europe to oust their Communist regimes, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1990.

In 1991, as the Soviet economy deteriorated, Gorbachev faced competing pressures from hard-line Communists, from free-market reformers, and from nationalists and secessionists seeking independence for their republics. The hard-liners, who included many top government officials, staged a coup in August, placing Gorbachev under house arrest, but within three days the reformers had restored Gorbachev to power. He immediately resigned as Communist party general secretary, suspended party activities, and placed reformers in charge of the military and KGB. After allowing Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to go free, he unsuccessfully sought to reformulate the relationship between the central government and the remaining republics. With the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, Gorbachev retired to private life. Reentering politics in 1996, he won less than 1 percent of the vote in the Russian presidential election. His writings include Memoirs (1996).

For further information on this person, see the section Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeyevich and the Bibliography, sections 977. Modern Russian history–979. Soviet history.

An article from Funk & Wagnalls® New Encyclopedia. © 2005 World Almanac Education Group

ENCYCLOPEDIA: GAGARIN, Yury Alekseyevich

(1934–68), Soviet astronaut, born near Smolensk. After graduating from technical and vocational schools, he enrolled at the Soviet air force cadet training center at Orenburg, graduating as a pilot in 1957. On April 12, 1961, Gagarin, then a major in the air force, became the first man to travel in space when he rode aboard the earth satellite Vostok (later referred to as Vostok 1) on a 27,400 km/hr (17,000 mph) single orbit of the earth. The flight lasted 1 hr 48 min, on an elliptical course having an apogee of 327 km (203 mi) and a perigee of 180 km (112 mi). He was killed in the crash of a test airplane.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: TERESHKOVA, Valentina Vladimirovna Nikolayeva

(1937–    ), Russian cosmonaut and the first woman in space. Tereshkova was a textile worker and amateur parachutist when recruited into the Soviet cosmonaut training program in 1961. She orbited the earth 48 times in her successful Vostok 6 flight on June 16–19, 1963, worked thereafter as a goodwill ambassador, and later entered politics. Her marriage to cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev (1929–    ) in 1963 aroused interest because their child, born in 1964, became the first offspring of parents who had been exposed to the space environment.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: YELTSIN, Boris Nikolayevich

(1931–    ), Russian political leader, president of the Russian Federation (1991–99), and chairman of the Council of Heads of States of the COMMONWEALTH OF NATIONS, (q.v.; CIS).

Rise to Power.

Born in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) and trained as a construction engineer, he became a full-time Communist party worker in 1968 and first secretary of the Sverdlovsk region in 1976. Yeltsin was brought to Moscow by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose political and economic reforms he embraced, and was installed as first secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee in 1985. He quickly alienated party reactionaries and, with Gorbachev’s acquiescence, was stripped of his post in 1987. In the March 1989 elections for the Congress of People’s Deputies, however, he won overwhelmingly in the Moscow constituency. The following year he was elected to the congress of the Russian SFSR, which designated him chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR. Under his leadership, the congress declared Russia to be a sovereign republic in June 1990. Yeltsin quit the Communist party the following month.

Critical both of the party and of Gorbachev’s delay in implementing reforms for democratization and a free market economy, Yeltsin gained a wide following and in June 1991 became the first popularly elected president of Russia. When reactionaries moved to depose Gorbachev as president of the USSR in August, Yeltsin led the fight to suppress the coup. Emerging as the dominant figure in Moscow, he asserted control over all Soviet Union institutions, and led the effort that replaced the USSR with the more loosely constituted CIS.

Russian Federation President.

Yeltsin presided over Russia’s treaty of federation, in March 1992, and achieved an international victory in January 1993 when he and U.S. President George Bush signed the START II Treaty, calling for the elimination of most of the nuclear warheads held by both powers. Legislative opposition to reforms culminated in late September when he dissolved parliament and parliament deposed him as president. The standoff, punctuated by violence, ended on October 4, when Yeltsin, with the army’s support, had opposition leaders arrested. In elections in December, voters simultaneously approved a constitution that expanded his presidential powers and elected a parliament in which his opponents held increased strength.

Yeltsin’s decision in late 1994 to use Russian troops to crush a rebellion in CHECHNYA, (q.v.) strained relations with the West, and his inability to bring the war to a quick conclusion eroded his popularity among Russian voters. His supporters in parliament fared poorly in the December 1995 election, in which the Communists won a plurality.

Despite weak poll ratings and questionable health, he declared his candidacy in February 1996 for a second presidential term. He led his rivals with about 35 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential balloting in June, and defeated a Communist challenger, Gennady Zyuganov (1944–    ), in a runoff election in July. In subsequent months, as his health worsened, he surrendered most of his responsibilities to his cabinet ministers. He reclaimed his powers in November after undergoing multiple-bypass heart surgery.

In March 1997 Yeltsin traveled to Helsinki, Finland, for a summit meeting with U.S. President Bill Clinton. In May, Yeltsin signed a formal peace treaty with Chechnya and treaties of friendship and cooperation with Belarus and Ukraine; dropping his objections to the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), he signed a NATO “Founding Act” at a summit conference in Paris in the same month. A month later, Yeltsin was welcomed at the Group of Seven (G-7) convention in Denver, Colo., at which the leaders of the seven leading industrial democracies formalized the group’s expansion to include Russia. In September, Yeltsin pledged that he would not run again when his presidential term expired in the year 2000.

Russia in Crisis.

During 1998, as the value of the ruble sank, Yeltsin’s behavior became increasingly erratic, and calls for his resignation increased. He astonished the nation in March by dismissing his entire cabinet, as well as Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin (1938–    ); in a subsequent confrontation with parliament, he succeeded in winning confirmation of his choice for prime minister, Sergey Kiriyenko (1962–    ), who had little previous government experience. In August, Yeltsin attempted to bring back Chernomyrdin, provoking another standoff with parliament; this time, however, it was the weakened Yeltsin who backed down. Unable to win the support of the parliament, Chernomyrdin withdrew his candidacy, and Yeltsin was forced to nominate a compromise choice, Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov (1929–    ), who quickly won the parliament’s confirmation. Meanwhile, a Moscow summit meeting with Clinton in early September produced no significant agreements and no evident solution for Russia’s deepening economic crisis. NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia (March–June 1999) and the subsequent entry of a NATO-led security force into Kosovo further strained relations between the two leaders.

An attempt by parliament to impeach Yeltsin for breaking up the Soviet Union, starting the war in Chechnya, and weakening the armed forces, among other allegations, failed in mid-May 1999. During the same month, Yeltsin dismissed Primakov and named First Vice-Prime Minister Sergey V. Stepashin (1952–    ) to succeed him; the nomination was approved by parliament shortly after impeachment proceedings ended. Yeltsin met little resistance from the legislature in August when he shook up his cabinet for the fourth time in 17 months, firing Stepashin and appointing Vladimir Putin, director of the Federal Security Service (formerly the KGB), as prime minister. The cabinet changes accompanied an escalation of Russian military operations against Muslim separatists in the Caucasus, first against Dagestan and then against neighboring Chechnya, where Russian forces launched a full-scale offensive.

Citing Russia’s need for new leadership in the new millennium, Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned on December 31 and named Putin, his chosen successor, as acting president. Putin then signed a decree providing for Yeltsin’s physical and financial security and immunizing him from any future criminal prosecution. A Communist-led effort to revoke the immunity deal was defeated in parliament in late March 2000, after Putin had won election to a full presidential term.

For further information on this person, see the Bibliography, section 971. General Russia, 977. Modern Russian history.

 

ENCYCLOPEDIA: PUTIN, Vladimir Vladimirovich

(1952–    ), Russian political leader, prime minister (August–December 1999) and president (1999–    ) of the Russian Federation.

Road to Power.

Putin was born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) on Oct. 7, 1952. After graduating (1975) from Leningrad State University, where he studied law, he went to work for the Soviet secret police, or KGB. Although much about his KGB service remains unclear, it is known that he was trained as a counterintelligence agent and that he worked in Dresden, in what was then East Germany, from 1985 to 1990. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, Putin returned to his home city. With the Soviet Union facing collapse, he retired from the KGB with the rank of lieutenant colonel and launched a political career, serving as an aide to Anatoly Sobchak (1937–2000), his former law professor; while Sobchak was mayor of St. Petersburg, Putin was first deputy mayor (1994–96).

Sobchak lost his reelection bid in 1996 and went into voluntary exile in France in November 1997, after being accused of corruption in office. In the interim, Putin moved to Moscow and began his rapid ascent through the Kremlin's upper echelons. In March 1997 he was named to head the department that oversees Russia's regions, and a year later he became first deputy chief of staff. By mid-1999 he was serving simultaneously as head of the KGB's main successor agency, the Federal Security Service, and as secretary of the Security Council, which coordinates the activities of the armed forces, security agencies, and police.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin elevated him to the office of prime minister on Aug. 9, 1999, and he was confirmed by parliament a week later. As head of government, Putin was in charge of the war against Islamic separatists in Chechnya. Although the Communists won the single largest bloc of seats in the December parliamentary elections, a coalition of parties loyal to Putin showed significant strength.

Putin as President.

When Yeltsin unexpectedly stepped down on Dec. 31, 1999, he named Putin as his interim successor. Favorable reports from the Chechnya battlefront, including the capture of Groznyy by Russian forces in February 2000, boosted Putin's domestic support, and in a presidential election on March 26 he won 53 percent of the vote against ten opponents. Operating from a position of strength, he secured legislative approval in April for two long-delayed arms control agreements, the START II Treaty (see Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (see Arms Control, International).

After he was sworn in for a full 4-year term on May 7, 2000, Putin named a former finance minister, Mikhail Kasyanov (1957–    ), as prime minister and introduced sweeping proposals to curb the powers of Russia's regions and return authority to Moscow. In August, when the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk sank in the Barents Sea, killing all 118 crew members, Putin was criticized for remaining on vacation while military leaders mishandled the situation.

In October 2002, while Russian troops continued to meet lethal resistance in Chechnya, Putin faced an unprecedented terrorist threat on his home turf, when some 50 armed Chechen guerrillas seized more than 800 hostages in a Moscow theater. Nearly all the terrorists and 129 of the hostages were killed during an assault by Russian forces that began when an aerosol anesthetic was pumped through ventilation ducts into the theater in order to immobilize the terrorists before special forces stormed the building; Putin came under heavy criticism after it was revealed that most of the hostages died from the gas used.

Although Putin appeared to enjoy a cordial personal relationship with U.S. President George W. Bush, their two nations disagreed on major policy matters. Putin was unable to halt the continued expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but eventually worked out an agreement (May 2002) with NATO on the establishment of the NATO-Russian Council, giving Russia an equal role in decision-making on policy to counter terrorism. He was not able to dissuade the Bush administration from pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), as a result of which Russia abandoned START II. After the terrorist attacks against the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001 (see Terrorism), Putin supported the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, and the U.S., for its part, moderated its criticism of Russian tactics against the Chechnya separatists; however, Putin opposed U.S. military intervention in Iraq in early 2003, and worked together with French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to prevent the United Nations Security Council from giving prior authorization to a U.S.-led war against the regime of Saddam Hussein. In March 2003 Putin hailed the favorable vote Chechens gave to a referendum on a controversial new constitution that bound the republic to Russia, but it remained unclear as to how that would stop the rebels, who showed no signs of ending the hostilities.

In May 2003 the lower house of the Russian Parliament ratified the Russia-U.S. agreement on strategic nuclear weapons reduction signed a year earlier, and that same month Putin welcomed more than 40 world leaders, including Bush, to St. Petersburg, which was celebrating its 300th anniversary. His state visit to Great Britain in June, the first by a Russian leader since Czar Alexander II in 1874, brought the two countries closer economically and politically.