Britannica Guide to Russia

Yeltsin dismissed the entire cabinet, ostensibly for failing to implement reforms energetically enough, and installed a new leadership team to carry out ongoing economic reforms. Chernomyrdin himself had probably also offended Yeltsin by acting too independently and appearing to groom himself to succeed Yeltsin as president.

In the first two Dumas (elected in 1993 and 1995), the Communist Party of the Russian Federation was the single largest party, though it was never close to enjoying a majority. As it had inherited the infrastructure of the dissolved CPSU, it had the most effective nationwide organization. Other parties found it difficult to operate outside the major urban areas. Party loyalties were weak, and deputies jumped from one party to another in the hope of improving their electoral chances. Worrying to many was the success of the ultra- nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, which captured nearly a quarter of the vote in 1993 (though its share of the vote declined thereafter). Nevertheless, despite hostile and even inflammatory rhetoric directed to­wards Yeltsin and his foreign policy, Zhirinovsky's party generally backed the executive branch. Throughout the 1990s hundreds of parties were founded, but most were short-lived, as their appeal was based solely on the personal­ities of their founders. The liberal party of acting prime minister Yegor Gaidar, Russia's Choice, floundered once Gaidar was forced out of government at the end of 1992. Chernomyrdin's party, Our Home Is Russia, suffered a similar fate soon after Yeltsin dismissed Chernomyrdin as prime minister.

Despite the public hostility between the Duma and President Yeltsin, compromises were usually hammered out behind the scenes. Yeltsin used the threat of dissolution to secure the

Duma's support for his presidential bills, and deputies could never be confident of re-election in view of the voters' disgust with politicians. During Yeltsin's second term, some deputies tried to initiate impeachment proceedings against him, but they were defeated by the many legal obstacles to such a move.

Throughout the political turmoil of the 1990s, the weak­ened Russian state failed to fulfil its basic responsibilities. The legal system, suffering from a lack of resources and trained personnel and the absence of a legal code suitable for the new market economy, was near collapse. Low salaries led to a drain of experienced jurists to the private sector; there was also widespread corruption within law enforcement and the legal system, as judges and police officials took bribes to supplement their meagre incomes. The country's public services were also under severe strain. Because of a lack of resources, law- enforcement agencies proved unable to combat rising crime. As medical services collapsed, life expectancy declined and the population started to shrink.

Another consequence of the political and economic changes of the 1990s was the emergence of Russian orga­nized crime. This has taken various forms, including the drug trade and the black market. Armed robbery has been parti­cularly popular and easy because of the widespread avail­ability of arms supplied to nationalist movements by those seeking political destabilization of their own or other coun­tries. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, official Russian crime statistics had identified more than 5,000 organized-crime groups responsible for international money laundering, tax evasion, and assassinations of businessmen and politicians. Throughout most of the Yeltsin administra­tion, shoot-outs between rival groups and the assassinations of organized-crime or business figures filled the headlines of

Russian newspapers, and created further disillusionment among Russians over the course of economic and political reform. The explosive rise in crime shocked most Russians, who had had little direct experience of such incidents in the Soviet era. The assassinations of well-known and well-liked figures, such as human rights advocate Galina Starovoytova, served to underscore the Yeltsin regime's inability to combat crime. The open warfare between organized-crime groups had diminished by the end of the Yeltsin era, not because of effective state action but because of the consolidation of the remaining criminal groups that had emerged victorious from their bloody struggles.

Economic Reforms

The new Russia faced economic collapse. In 1991 alone, gross domestic product (GDP) fell by about one-sixth, and the budget deficit was approximately one-fourth of GDP. The government of Mikhail Gorbachev had printed huge amounts of money to finance both the budget and subsidies to factories and on food at a time when the tax system was collapsing. Moreover, the price controls on most goods had kept their supply well below the levels demanded. By 1991 few items essential for everyday life were available in traditional retail outlets. The entire system of goods distribution was on the verge of disintegration. Since the central-command economy had existed in Russia for more than 70 years, the transition to a market economy proved more difficult for Russia than for the other ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe. The reformists had to balance the necessities of economic reform with the vested interests that had become extremely powerful under communism.

Although Russia's manufacturing sector was one of the world's largest, it was also very inefficient and expensive to support. It was heavily geared toward defence and heavy industrial products. The industrial managers and workforce, though highly educated, lacked the skills needed by a market- based consumer-led economy, and would therefore have to be retrained.

In January 1992 the Yeltsin government removed price controls on most items - the first essential step towards a market-based economy. The immediate goal of getting goods into the stores was achieved, and the long queues typical of the Soviet era disappeared. However, inflation soared and became a daily concern for Russians, whose purchasing power de­clined as prices for even some of the most basic goods rose. The government was forced to print money to finance the budget and to keep failing factories afloat. By 1993 the budget deficit financed by the printing of money consumed one-fifth of GDP. Consequently, people lost faith in the value of the ruble and started to use US dollars instead. Inflationary pressures were exacerbated by the establishment of a "ruble zone" when the Soviet Union collapsed: many of the former republics contin­ued to issue and use rubies and receive credits from the Russian Central Bank, thereby further devaluing the ruble. In the summer of 1993 the Russian government pulled out of the ruble zone, effectively reducing Russian influence over many of the former Soviet republics.

During the Soviet era the factory had been not only a place of work but often also a source of social services, such as child care, holidays, and housing. If the government allowed many industries to collapse, it would have not only to provide relief for unemployed workers but also to guarantee a whole array of social services - a responsibility it was in no position to assume. Yet the inflation caused by keeping factories afloat undermined popular support for both Yeltsin and economic reform, as many Russians struggled to survive. Factories resorted to paying their workers and their creditors in kind, creating a barter economy. It was not uncommon for workers to go months without being paid or to be paid in, for example, rubber gloves or crockery, either because they made such things themselves or because their factory had received them as payments from its debtors. Meanwhile street markets sprang up where people tried to sell their personal possessions in a desperate effort to maintain their incomes.

In 1995 the government moved to resolve the crisis and end the misery. With loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the proceeds from the sale of oil and natural gas, it fixed the ruble's exchange rate at a level that the Russian Central Bank was committed to defend. Inflation fell and the economy started to stabilize. Yet the government continued to borrow money on domestic and foreign mar­kets while avoiding serious structural reforms of the econ­omy. It failed to establish an effective tax system, clear property rights, and a coherent bankruptcy law, but con­tinued to support failing industries. As a result the ruble exchange rate proved increasingly expensive to defend, and became the target of speculators. In 1998 the ruble col­lapsed, and the government defaulted on its debts amid a growing number of bankruptcies. The ruble eventually sta­bilized and inflation diminished, but living standards hardly improved for most Russians, though a small proportion of them became very wealthy. Moreover, any improvements were confined to Moscow, St Petersburg, and some other urban areas; elsewhere, vast tracts of Russia were gripped by economic depression.

Another element of economic reform was shifting Russian industry into private hands. The reformists hoped that the threat of a return to communism would dwindle once a Russian capitalist class had developed, and believed, like many western economists, that the economy could recover only if enterprises were privatized and then left to fight for survival. As well as allowing privately owned industrial and commercial ventures to start up (using both foreign and domestic sources of investment), the government moved to sell state-owned enterprises to private owners. Initially, the government issued to each citizen a voucher worth 10,000 rubles: Russians could invest their entire vouchers, sell them, or use them to bid for additional shares in specific enterprises. However, the average Russian did not benefit from this rather complicated scheme. By the end of 1992 some one-third of services and trade enterprises had been privatized.

In a second wave of privatization in 1994-5, much of Russian industry was sold at knock-down prices to the friends of "the Family", meaning Yeltsin and his daughter Tatyana Dyachenko and their allies in the government. Natural re­source companies were sold at prices well below those recom­mended by the IMF. From this process emerged the "oligarchs", individuals who, because of their political con­nections, controlled huge segments of the Russian economy. Many oligarchs bought factories for almost nothing, stripped our and sold their assets, and then closed them, creating huge job losses. By the time Yeltsin left office in 1999, most of the Russian economy had been privatized.

The stripping of the factories played a major role in the public's disenchantment with the development of capitalism in Russia, To many Russians, it seemed that bandit capitalism had emerged. Most people had suffered a fall in living standards, the social services had disintegrated, and the coun­try was engulfed by a wave of crime and corruption, Yeltsin's popularity plummeted.

Ethnic Relations and Russia's "Near-Abroad"

Post-Soviet Russia emerged with formidable ethnic problems. Many of the autonomous ethnic regions that had been part of the Russian empire since before the 1917 Revolution wanted to escape Russian hegemony, and ethnic Russians made up less than four-fifths of the population of the Russian Federation. The term rossiyanin was used to denote a citizen of the Russian Federation and was not given any ethnic Russian connotation. However, a committee set up to construct a Russian identity to rally people around the new Russian Federation eventually concluded that national identity could emerge only from the grass roots, and history had shown that attempts to impose an identity from above led to an authoritarian or totalitarian state. The Russian Orthodox Church re-established itself as a force in the moral guidance of reborn Russia, but many minority groups observed religions other than Christianity, notably Islam.

During the Yeltsin years, Russia's numerous administrative regions sought greater autonomy. For example, Tatarstan negotiated additional rights and privileges. The republic of Chechnya declared independence in 1991, but Russia refused to accept the declaration. Chechen nationalism was based on the struggle against Russian imperialism since the early nine­teenth century and the living memory of Stalin's massive deportations of the Chechen population in 1944 that had resulted in the deaths of a large segment of the population. In late 1994 Yeltsin sent the army into Chechnya in the aftermath of a botched Russian-orchestrated coup against the secessionist president, Dzhokhar Dudayev.

There were fears that if Chechnya succeeded in breaking away from the Russian Federation, other republics might follow suit. Moreover, Dudayev's Chechnya had become a source of drug dealing and arms peddling. In 1995 Russia gained control of the capital, Grozny, but in 1996 Russian forces were pushed out of the city. Yeltsin, faced with a forthcoming presidential election and great unpopularity be­cause of both the war and economic problems, had General Aleksandr Lebed sign a ceasefire agreement with the Che­chens. The Russians subsequently withdrew from the republic, postponing the question of Chechen independence.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Commonwealth of Independent States was established to serve as a forum for the former Soviet republics (which Moscow now called the "near- abroad"). The CIS had its origins on December 8, 1991, when the elected leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus signed an agreement forming a new association to replace the crumbling USSR. The three Slavic republics were subsequently joined by the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Taji­kistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, by the Transcaucasian republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and by Mol­dova. (The remaining former Soviet republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia declined to join the new organization.) The Commonwealth formally came into being on December 21, 1991, and began operations the following month with the city of Minsk in Belarus designated as its administrative centre.

Russia hoped to maintain its influence over most of these former republics; it considered the Caucasus and Central Asia special areas of interest, as was clear from its aid to ethnic Russian separatists in the Dniester region of Moldova and intervention in the Tajik civil war. In addition, the Russian government exerted economic pressure on Ukraine and sup­ported separatist groups in Georgia to attain its ends.

However, Moscow did more to undermine the CIS through its inconsistent policies, lack of organizational leadership, and tendency to work bilaterally with the governments of the newly independent republics. In 1996 Russia and Belarus began a process that, it was proclaimed, would eventually result in the unification of the two countries. However, by the early twenty-first century there was still no sign that unifica­tion would occur. Russia's severe economic difficulties limited its ability to provide financial and military assistance to its neighbours (at least until the surge in oil prices in the early twenty-first century) and hence to retain influence over its near-abroad. Russian officials were even wary of allowing in too many imports from the near-abroad for fear that they would further weaken Russian industry.

The collapse of the Soviet Union left some 30 million ethnic Russians outside the borders of the Russian Federation. The largest such populations were in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and the Baltic countries. These countries feared that Moscow could use the resident ethnic Russian populations to pressure them to adopt policies friendly to Moscow. However, during the 1990s Moscow refrained from following such an approach - some­times to the great criticism of the Russians living in these areas.

Foreign Affairs

For several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin placed a high priority on relations with the West, particularly with the United States. But the geopolitical goals of the two countries were not always compatible. Russia opposed the eastward expansion of NATO. Although eventually accepting the inevitability of some such expansion, it tried to thwart the entry of former Soviet republics and to construct a viable bilateral relationship with NATO so as to acquire some influence over it. Russia also attempted to strengthen its links with the European Union. But Washington and Moscow's disagreements over the Balkans - in particular, US support for NATO's armed intervention against the Yugoslav government of Slobodan Milosevic - soured their relations.

The Yeltsin government tried not only to come to terms with Russia's loss of empire and of its superpower status but also to create a foreign policy doctrine reflecting the new global geo­political reality. Its increasing concerns about US world hege­mony led Yevgeny Primakov, who became foreign minister in % 995, to promote a multipolar system of international relations to replace the US-dominated unipolar world. To balance US power, Russia strengthened its relations with China and India; Russia's good relations with Iran and differences in approaches to Iraq further increased tensions in Russian-US relations.

Overall, Russian foreign policy in the 1990s was aimless, contradictory, and confused. Despite Primakov's efforts to give it coherence, Yeltsin himself was erratic in foreign policy, and his divide-and-rule strategy allowed various bureaucratic bodies to fight for control over the direction of Russia's external relations.

Rewriting History

During the Soviet period, history had been written in light of the official ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which stressed the Soviet Union's leading role in the inevitable emergence of world communism. After 1991, aided by the opening of official archives, Russian historians debated whether the events of 1917 were inevitable, and many concluded that the Bolshevik Re­volution had thrown Russia off the evolutionary course tra­velled by other European countries. Tsarist leaders such as Peter I, Catherine II, and Alexander II became positive figures in Russian history. Nicholas IPs great love for his family and Russia was recognized. The reburial of the remains of the immediate imperial family (all of whom were executed together in 1918) in the Peter-Paul Fortress in St Petersburg in 1999 brought to a head the partial transformation of Nicholas IPs position in Russian history. The Stalinist period and the role of Lenin in the emergence of a totalitarian state after the revolution were re-evaluated; documentary evidence reflecting official thinking during and after the Second World War gave historians an opportunity to reassess the origins of the Cold War. Con­sequently, much of the conventional wisdom among western historians about Soviet intentions at the time was debunked.

The Putin Leadership, 1999-2008

Toward the end of Yeltsin's presidency, Vladimir Putin began playing a more important role. During the Soviet period, he joined the KGB and worked in East Germany for many years. Fluent in German and proficient in English, Putin worked for the liberal mayor of St Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, in the initial post-Soviet period, and ended up in Moscow when Sobchak failed to be re-elected mayor in 1996. In July 1998 Putin became director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), one of the successor organizations of the KGB, and in August 1999 Yeltsin plucked Putin out of relative obscurity for the post of prime minister.

VLADIMIR PUTIN (b. 1952) Russian president (1999-2002)

Putin served I 5 years with the KGB, including six years in Dresden, East Germany. In 1990 he retired from active KGB service and returned to Russia to become pro- rector of Leningrad State University, and by 1994 he had risen to the post of first deputy mayor of St Petersburg. In 1996 he moved to Moscow, where he joined the presidential staff as deputy to Pavel Borodin, the Kremlin's chief administrator. In July 1998 President Boris Yeltsin made Putin director of the Federal Security Service (the KGB's domestic successor). In 1999 Yeltsin appointed Putin prime minister, and on December 31 of that year Yeltsin stepped down as president in Putin's favour. Three months later Putin won a resounding electoral victory, partly the result of his success in the battle to keep Chechnya from seceding.

In his first term Putin asserted central control over Russia's 89 regions and republics, and moved to reduce the power of Russia's unpopular financiers and media tycoons. The period was also marked by frequent terrorist attacks by Chechen separatists. Putin easily won re-election in 2004. His chosen successor, Dmitry Medvedev, was elected president in March 2008.

Separatism

As prime minister, Putin blamed Chechen secessionists for the bombing of several apartment buildings that killed scores of Russian civilians, prompting the Moscow government to send

Russian forces into the republic once again. (Evidence never proved Chechen involvement in these bombings, leading some to believe that the Russian intelligence services played a role in them.) Grozny fell to the Russian forces, Putin's popularity soared, and Yeltsin, having chosen Putin as his successor, resigned the presidency on December 31, 1999. Putin became acting president, and his first official undertaking in this role was to grant Yeltsin a pardon for any offences he might have committed during his administration. In the presidential elec­tion of early 2000, Putin easily defeated Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov.

Although the Russian military was able to win control of Chechnya, Chechen fighters threatened Russian forces with a prolonged guerrilla war. After two years the fighting abated, and Putin felt confident enough to seek talks with the remaining Chechen leadership. Then in October 2002 Chechen separatists seized a Moscow theatre and threa­tened to kill all those inside; Putin responded by ordering special forces to raid the theatre, and during the operation some 130 hostages died - mostly as the result of inhaling gas released by the security forces in order to subdue the terrorists. In 2003 Chechen voters approved a new con­stitution that devolved greater powers to the Chechen government but kept the republic in the federation. The following year the Russian-backed Chechen president was killed in a bomb blast allegedly carried out by Chechen guerrillas.

Despite worries arising from his years working for the intelligence services, many Russians believed that Putin's cool­ness and decisiveness - which contrasted starkly with Yeltsin's unpredictable behaviour - would restore order and prestige to the country and deal with the Chechen problem. Indeed, Putin reasserted central control over the country's numerous regions by dividing Russia into seven administrative districts, each overseen by a presidential appointee charged with rooting out corruption, monitoring the local governors, and ensuring that Moscow's will and laws were enforced. Putin established the supremacy of Russian Federation law throughout the country, ending the often chaotic contradictions between Russian fed­eral law and that of the regions. Even independent-minded regions such as the republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan reluctantly aligned their constitutions in 2002 to that of the Russian Federation.

Foreign Affairs

Putin's foreign affairs priority was to strengthen Russia's security and economic relations with Europe. Nevertheless, after the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, on the United States, Putin was the first foreign leader to telephone US President George W. Bush to offer sympathy and help. Moreover, Russia established a council with NATO on which it sat as an equal alongside NATO's 19 members. Russia also reacted calmly when the United States officially abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and established tempor­ary military links with several former Soviet states in Central Asia and Georgia.

However, wary of US unilateralism, Putin strengthened Russian ties with China and India and maintained ties with Iran. In 2002—3 he opposed the US-led military intervention against Iraq, favouring a more stringent inspections regime of Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction programme.

Putin brought new life to the CHS by providing relatively active Russian leadership, and strengthened Russia's ties with tlie Central Asian republics. Under Yeltsin the Russian army had lost much of its effectiveness and technological edge, as revealed by its defeats in the first Chechen war, Putin hoped to increase funding for the armed forces through greater arms sales.

The Oligarchs

Putin also moved against the political and economic power of the infamous oligarchs. Although he could not destroy the business elite, he insisted on certain limits on its conduct. Those oligarchs who criticized Putin during the presidential campaign faced the Kremlin's wrath. In 2001 Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, two of Russia's richest men, were stripped of their electronic media hold­ings, and Berezovsky was removed from his position of influence at Russian Public Television. In 2003 Russia's richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the oil giant Yukos, was convicted of fraud and tax evasion. This campaign prompted doubts about Putin's commitment to free speech and a free press. Under Yeltsin the oligarchs had used their individual media outlets in their battles with each other and with political figures. Yet some tele­vision stations consistently contradicted the reports of government-controlled stations on issues such as corruption and the wars in Chechnya, thereby providing an alternative source to government news sources. Yeltsin never tried to reassert control over the mass media, but Putin moved to close television networks that criticized him, usually by charging their owners with non-payment of taxes and financial mismanagement.

THE KREMLIN

As throughout its history, the Kremlin remains the heart of Moscow. It was established in i 156, and served as the centre of Russian government until 1712 and again after 1918. It has been the symbol of both Russian and Soviet power and authority, as well as being the official residence of the president of the Russian Federation since 1991. Its crenellated brick walls and 20 towers were built in the fifteenth century by Italian architects. The palaces, cathedrals, and government buildings within the walls encompass a variety of styles, including Byzantine, Russian baroque, and classical.

Several capitals of principalities were built around old kremlins, or central fortresses, which generally contained cathedrals, palaces, governmental offices, and munitions stores. They were usually located at a strategic point along a river and separated from the surrounding parts of the city by a wall with ramparts, moat, towers, and battlements.

Political and Economic Reforms

Putin proved adept at constructing a stable relationship with the Duma. Where Yeltsin's automatic hostility to the Com­munist Party had hobbled his reform programme, Putin was better able to work with the parties, and he secured the passage of bills that reformed the tax, judicial, labour, and bankruptcy systems, provided property rights, adopted national symbols and the flag, and approved arms treaties. In addition, he avoided frequent changes in the cabinet or premiership, there­by promoting policy consistency and political stability that ordinary Russians appreciated. He also attempted to reduce the number of political parties - in particular, regional parties - in Russia by requiring them to have registered offices and at least 10,000 members in at least half of Russia's regions to be eligible to compete in national elections.

Putin believed that the Russian economy's long-term health required deep structural reforms that the Yeltsin administration had avoided, though implementing such re­forms proved difficult. He secured the creation of a new tax code that simplified and streamlined the tax system in order to encourage individuals and businesses to pay taxes. As a result the state's rate of tax collection dramatically increased, which, along with a surge in income from the increase in world oil prices, allowed the Russian government to enjoy a budget surplus and to repay some of its external debt. Putin was also keen to attract foreign investment in order to reduce Russia's dependence on western loans (which he believed threatened the country's national interests and long-term economic prospects) and to help finance the development of Russian industry. Russia also sought to increase its exports by promoting the sale of oil, natural gas, and arms. The reforms implemented by Putin - as well as his demeanour - produced political stability and econom­ic vitality not seen in the country during the 1990s. Never­theless, problems in the economy remained, and many people still lived in poverty.

Putin's presidency also witnessed a change in the way Russians viewed the Soviet past. Whereas under Yeltsin popular histories and general opinion were critical of the Soviet period and nostalgic for pre-revolutionary days, during Putin's tenure aspects of the Soviet age - for example, the victory in the Second World War, Russia's superpower status, and even the Stalinist era - were again glorified (Stalin was described in one teaching manual as "the most successful leader of the USSR"). Despite nostalgia among some communists for the Soviet period and uncertainty among many about the future, by the early twenty-first century Russia seemed poised to set out upon the long path of economic and political development.

Though accused of over-centralizing power in the presi­dency and curtailing freedoms won when the Soviet Union collapsed, Putin remained popular and was re-elected in 2004 in a landslide. During his second term his popularity contin­ued, and speculation arose that, constitutionally ineligible as he was to run for another term in office because of term limits, he might engineer a constitutional amendment to allow his re­election. Instead, in October 2007 Putin made the surprise announcement that he would head the list of the pro-Putin United Russia Party in parliamentary elections. In December 2007 United Russia won more than three-fifths of the vote and 315 of the Duma's 450 seats. Within days Putin anointed First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as his successor as president for the 2008 elections. In turn, Medvedev subse­quently announced that he would appoint Putin prime min­ister if his campaign succeeded, thus giving Putin a base to continue his dominance of Russian politics. In March 2008 Medvedev was easily elected president, winning 70 per cent of the vote. Although some outside observers criticized the con­test as unfair, most agreed that Medvedev's victory reflected the will of the majority of the Russian people. Medvedev took office on May 7, 2008; Putin was confirmed as prime minister the next day.

DMITRY MEDVEDEV (b. 1965) Russian president (from 2008)

Dmitry Medvedev was born into a middle-class family in suburban Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in 1965. He attended Leningrad State University, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1987 and a law degree in 1990. In 1991 Medvedev joined the legal team of St Petersburg's newly elected mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, who also had brought future president Vladimir Putin into his administration. Medvedev and Putin worked together in the mayor's office for the next five years.

When Sobchak's term ended, Medvedev returned to academic life, and Putin moved to a position at the Kremlin. After Putin became acting president of Russia in December 1999, he made Medvedev his protйgй. In 2000 Medvedev headed Putin's presidential election campaign, and following Putin's victory he was named first deputy chief of staff. Later that same year, Medvedev was appointed chairman of the state-owned natural-gas monopoly Gazprom. In 2003 he became Putin's chief of staff, and two years later he was appointed to the newly created post of first deputy prime minister.

Throughout his service under Putin, Medvedev distinguished himself as an able administrator with an eye towards reform. His admiration of western popular culture made some conservatives within the Kremlin uneasy, but much of this criticism was softened after Putin named Medvedev his heir apparent in December 2007. The central message of Medvedev's subsequent

presidential campaign was "Freedom is better than no freedom", a remark that hinted at an openness to the West that was uncharacteristic of the Putin years.

Just three months into his presidency, Medvedev was con­fronted with a growing military conflict between Russia's neigh­bour Georgia and South Ossetia, a separatist region of Georgia that borders the Russian republic of North Ossetia-Alania. As fighting between Georgian and Ossetian forces escalated in August 2008, Russia sent thousands of troops across the border with the goal of supporting rebels in not only South Ossetia but also Abkhazia, another separatist region within Georgia. Despite a French-brokered ceasefire, hostilities continued, and Russian troops remained in Georgia. The conflict heightened tensions between Russia and the West. In response to condemnation from NATO, which Georgia hopes to join, Russia suspended its cooperation with the Atlantic alliance. In September the Russian government agreed to withdraw its troops from Georgia; how­ever, it planned to maintain a military presence in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, whose independence it had recognized.

THE FSB (FEDERAL SECURITY SERVICE) AND ITS PREDECESSORS

Russian internal security and counterintelligence service

The FSB was created in 1994 as one of the successor agencies of the Soviet-era KGB (Committee for State Security). The KGB was the most durable of a series of security agencies starting with the Cheka (1917), which was charged with the preliminary investigation of counter-revolution and sabotage; it quickly assumed

responsibility for arresting, imprisoning, and executing "enemies of the state", including members of the former nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the clergy. Successors of the Cheka included the OGPU (Unified State Political Administration, 1923), whose duties included the administration of "corrective" labour camps and the surveillance of the population, and the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, 1934), which helped Stalin to consolidate his power by carrying out purges.

The KGB was created in 1954 to serve as the "sword and shield of the Communist Party". For the next 20 years the KGB became increasingly zealous in its pursuit of enemies, harassing, arresting, and sometimes exiling human rights advocates, Christian and Jewish activists, and intellectuals judged to be disloyal to the regime. Among the most famous of its victims were the Nobel laureates Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov.

During the late 1980s, as the Soviet government and economy were crumbling, the KGB survived better than most state institutions, suffering far fewer cuts in its personnel and budget. The agency was dismantled, however, after the attempted coup in August 1991 against Mikhail Gorbachev, in which some KGB units participated. In eariy 1992 the internal security functions of the KGB were reconstituted first as the Ministry of Security and less than two years later as the Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK), which was placed under the control of the president. In 1995 Boris Yeltsin renamed the service the Federal Security Service (FSB) and granted it additional powers, enabling it to enter private homes and to conduct intelligence activities in

Russia as well as abroad in cooperation with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).

Despite earl/ promises to reform the Russian intelligence community, the FSB and the services that collect foreign intelligence and signals intelligence - the SVR and the Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information (FAPSI) - remained largely unreformed and subject to little legislative or judicial scrutiny. Although some limits were placed on the FSB's domestic surveillance activities -for example, spying on religious institutions and charitable organizations was reduced - all the services continued to be controlled by KGB veterans schooled under the old regime. Moreover, few former KGB officers were removed following the agency's dissolution, and little effort was made to examine the KGB's operations or its use of informants.

After appointing Vladimir Putin as its director in 1998, Yeltsin ordered the FSB to expand its operations against labour unions in Siberia and to crack down on right-wing dissidents. As president, Putin increased the FSB's powers to include countering foreign intelligence operations, fighting organized crime, and suppressing Chechen separatists.

The FSB, the largest security service in Europe, is extremely effective at counterintelligence. Human rights activists, however, have claimed that it has been slow to shed its KGB heritage, and there have been allegations that it has manufactured cases against suspected dissidents and used threats to recruit agents. At the end of the 1990s, critics alleged that the FSB had attempted to frame Russian academics involved in joint research with western arms-control experts.

PART 3

CULTURE

5

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ARTS IN RUSSIA

Russia's unique and vibrant culture developed, as did the country itself, from a complicated interplay of native Slavic cultural material and borrowings from a wide variety of foreign cultures. This sometimes took place gradually, across several centuries - in the Kievan period, for example (c. tenth-thirteenth centuries), when the borrowings were pri­marily from Eastern Orthodox Byzantine culture. At other times external influences were consciously sought and im­ported: under Peter I (1682-1725), known as Peter the Great, the cultural heritage of western Europe was deliber­ately added to the Russian melting pot, and in the 1860s a deliberate programme of "Russification" was introduced, imposing Russian culture on minorities and outlying parts of the empire. Over and above this interplay between foreign and native elements, though not unrelated, was another creative tension, the relationship between high and folk art. Both these sets of relationships were closely linked with Russia's political development.

Several strands from Russia's medieval past stand out as being influential in the culture of modern Russia. One recur­ring thread was the influence of the Orthodox Church, and in particular church architecture. From the tenth century, when Russia was Christianized, Slavic culture in Kievan Rus was dominated by the church: artistic composition was undertaken almost exclusively by monks, and the early Slavic rulers, like their western European counterparts, expressed their religious piety and displayed their wealth through the construction of stone churches. The earliest of these were in Byzantine style and indeed built by craftsmen from Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium: perhaps the most famous example is the eleventh-century Cathedral of St Sophia, which still stands in Kiev, Ukraine.

The destruction of Kievan Rus by the Tatar (Mongol) invasions of the early thirteenth century led to new political focuses and, inevitably, new cultural influences. By the time Russian political and cultural life began to recover in the fourteenth century, a new centre had arisen, Muscovy (Mos­cow). In the next century the whole country united under the Grand Dukes of Moscow, and after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 Russian political ideology developed the slogan "Moscow, the third Rome": Russian art became the self- conscious successor to Byzantine art, and Moscow its artistic centre. Although Italian architects were called in to help build the Kremlin, Moscow's citadel, they had to compromise with traditional Russian elements: the Cathedral of the Assumption is very much a Russian church, with its typical bulbous domes and an interior that makes no concession to foreign tastes.

It was this period that saw the flourishing of an art that is truly Russian, no longer dependent on Byzantium, and not yet an integral part of European culture. Central to this was the influence, artistically and intellectually, of the Orthodox Church, which was a beacon of national life during the period of Tatar domination and which continued to play a central role in Russian culture into the seventeenth century. This meant that Russian cultural development in the Muscovite period was quite different from that of western Europe - which at this time was experiencing the secularization of society and the rediscovery of the classical cultural heritage that charac­terized the Renaissance. It also meant that the most significant cultural achievements of Muscovy were again in the visual arts and architecture, rather than in literature, and in ecclesiastical art in its many forms. The Moscow school of icon painting produced great masters, among them Dionisy and Andrey Rublyov (whose Old Testament Trinity, now in Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery, is among the most revered icons ever painted). Russian architects continued to design and build impressive churches, most famously the celebrated Cathedral of St Basil the Blessed on Moscow's Red Square. Built between 1554 and 1560 to commemorate the Russian capture of Kazar, the Tatar capital, St Basil's is a supreme example of the confluence of Byzantine and Asiatic cultural streams that characterizes Muscovite culture. It remains today an icon of Russian identity.

The late seventeenth century witnessed a pendulum swing of cultural awareness and development. The gradual turning of Russia towards western Europe and a weakening of the power of the Orthodox Church gave rise, under Peter I, to an almost total reorientation of Russian culture. Although Peter was not particularly interested in cultural questions, he was energetic and insistent in introducing western cultural and technological traditions to Russia. He personally visited western Europe as part of the so-called "Grand Embassy", comprising about 250

ANDREI RUBLYOV (c. 1360-1430) Russian painter

Rublyov (or Rublev) was trained wholly in the stylized tradition of Byzantine art, but to the more humanistic approach it had adopted by the fourteenth century he added a truiy Russian element, a complete unworldliness that distinguishes his work from that of his predecessors and successors. He assisted Theophanes the Greek in decorating the Cathedral of the Annunciation in Moscow. The greatest of medieval Russian icon painters, he is best known for The Old Testament Trinity (c. 1410). He became a monk fairly late in life,

people; one of the aims of the tour was to gather information on the economic and cultural life of Europe. The emperor travelled incognito under the name of Sergeant Pyotr Mikhay- lov, and though he spent much of his time studying shipbuild­ing - his passion - he also visited factories, arsenals, schools, and museums. The result of this visit was a rapid westerniza­tion of Russia that altered the daily life of the upper classes and high culture generally. Some of the reforms Peter introduced were brutal and superficial - he decreed that beards should be shorn off and western dress worn - while others were longer- lasting and more influential. He promoted the translation of books from western European languages; the first Russian newspaper, Vedomosti ("Records"), appeared in 1703; the Russian Academy of Sciences was instituted in 1724; women came out of seclusion; and from January 1, 1700, a European calendar was introduced, making the Russian calendar con­form to European usage with regard to the year, which in

Russia had hitherto been numbered "from the Creation of the World".

These changes were inevitably reflected in literature and the development of the Russian language. With the introduction of new subject matter into Russian literature and cultural life and the influx of foreign expressions, Church Slavonic - descended from Old Church Slavonic, the religious and lit­erary language of Orthodox Slavs throughout the Middle Ages - proved inadequate, and the resulting linguistic chaos re­quired the standardization of literary Russian. In 1758 the poet and scientist Mikhail Lomonosov published Preface on the Use of Church Books in the Russian Language, in which he classified Russian and Church Slavonic words, assigning their use to three styles, and correlated these styles with appropriate themes, genres, and tones. Thus the Russian literary language was to be established by a combination of Russian and Church Slavonic. Lomonosov was also instrumental, along with Vasily Trediakovsky, in carrying out far-reaching reforms in versifi­cation, developing a system of "classical" metre that prevails in Russian poetry to this day. The writings of the nineteenth- century poet Aleksandr Pushkin gave further impetus to the development of the language. By combining the colloquial and Church Slavonic styles, Pushkin put an end to the considerable controversy that had developed as to which style of the language was best for literary uses.

By the nineteenth century, the absorption of western culture had been so rapid and complete that the first language of the upper nobility was not Russian but French. The very foreign- ness that adhered to high culture was one reason why a tradition arose in which the sign of Russianness was the defiance of European generic norms. Justifying the self­consciously odd form of War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy observed

MIKHAIL V AS! LYE VIC H LOMONOSOV (1711-65)

Russian scientist, poet, and grammarian, considered the first great Russian linguistic reformer

Educated in Russia and Germany, Mikhail Lomonosov established what became the standards for Russian verse in the Letter Concerning the Rules of Russian Versification. In 1745 he joined the faculty at the St Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences, where he made substantial contributions to the physical sciences. He later wrote a Russian grammar and worked to systematize the Russian literary language, which had been an amalgam of Church Slavonic and Russian vernacular. He also reorganized the academy, founded Moscow State University (which now bears his name), and created the first coloured- glass mosaics in Russia.

that departure from European form is necessary for a Russian writer: "There is not a single work of Russian artistic prose, at all rising above mediocrity, that quite fits the form of a novel, a poem, or a story." This (admittedly exaggerated) view, which became a clichк, helps explain the enormous popularity in Russia of those western writers who parodied literary con­ventions, as well as the development of Russia's most influen­tial school of literary criticism, Formalism, which viewed formal self-consciousness as the defining quality of "literari­ness". The sense that culture, literature, and the forms of "civilized" life were a foreign product imported by the upper classes is also reflected in a tendency of Russian thinkers to regard all art as morally unjustifiable, and in a pattern of Russian writers renouncing their own works. While English

and French critics were arguing about the merits of different literary schools, Russian critics also debated whether literature itself had a right to exist - a question that reveals the peculiar ethos of Russian literary culture.

The spirit of nationalism that swept across Europe in the nineteenth century did not leave Russia untouched. In turning their backs on inherited western "traditions" nineteenth- century writers, musicians, and artists made a self-conscious return to what were perceived as typically Russian themes, often from folk culture - whether in song or verse - and to the Middle Ages, to source their particular Russian identity. Composers, writers, and dramatists all turned to the Russian Middle Ages for inspiration for Russian themes and charac­ters: Tolstoy's novella Father Sergius, Modest Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov, many of his songs, and his setting of some of Nikolay Gogol's Zhenitba ("The Marriage"), and Mikhail Glinka's operas Life of the Tsar and Kuslan and Lyudmila, as well as Rimsky-Korsakov's series of operas on Russian folk tales, to name only a few.

The political control of the arts became a marked feature of the culture of the Soviet era. Such control was not entirely new - censorship, for example, had flourished in tsarist Russia - but from the late 1920s and under Stalin's iron hand it reached new heights, with more brutally repressive measures for those who failed to conform. Though periods of strict suppression were followed by brief thaws, during the Soviet era most customs and traditions of Russia's imperial past were forbid­den expression, and life was strictly controlled and regulated by the state through its vast intelligence network. Stalin's policy of socialist realism, which came to dominate Soviet arts, dictated that individual creativity be subordinated to the political aims of the Communist Party and the state. In practice, it militated against the symbolic, the experimental, and the avant-garde in favour of a literal-minded "people's art" that glorified representative Soviet heroes and idealized Soviet experience. Its effects were felt in literature, film­making, the visual arts, and music.

This repressive policy was facilitated by control of sources of information: propaganda manifested itself quickly after the 1917 Revolution, and most independent publications were eliminated by the early 1920s. What remained were the ubiquitous daily duo of the newspapers Pravda ("Truth") and Izvestiya ("News"). Radio and television, from the time of their appearance in the Soviet Union, were similarly heavily dominated by the Communist Party apparatus and were seen as primary tools for propaganda. Until the mid-1980s most television programming consisted of either direct or indirect propaganda spiced with high art (such as filmed concerts and plays) and occasional B-movie thrillers. Interestingly, ground­breaking television programming was to play a part in creating the situation in which the Soviet state was destroyed, so that from the mid-1980s, with Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, the political and social restrictions on cultural activity that had predominated for much of the century were eased and com­mon traditions and folk customs, along with the open practice of religion, were actively encouraged.

6

LITERATURE

From the nineteenth century, literature in Russia enjoyed much greater prestige than in the West. Its achievements were some­times thought, as the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky once de­clared, to he the justification for the Russian people's very existence. The function, role, and compass of literature were broader than in the West: literature and criticism were ex­pected to offer philosophical, moral, and religious analysis, for example, and literary critics were typically the leaders of Russian intellectual life and political thought. Thus, in the nineteenth - and still more, the twentieth - century, politics and literature were intimately connected, and a writer or critic was often called upon to be a political prophet. (In the nine­teenth century, Aleksandr Pushkin emphasized the writer's civic responsibility and exhorted the poet-prophet to "fire the hearts of men with his words".) Inevitably this could lead to conflict with the authorities, whether tsarist or Soviet, and, not infrequently, to exile or emigration, imprisonment, and, in the twentieth century, execution. It also led to a self-consciousness

BOYARS

Mofe members of the upper class of medieval Russian society and state administration

In Kievan Rus (tenth—twelfth centuries) the boyars belonged to the prince's retinue, holding posts in the army and civil administration and advising the prince in matters of state through a boyar council, or duma. In the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries the boyars constituted a privileged class of rich landowners in north-eastern Russia. In the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries the boyars of Muscovy ruled the country along with the grand prince (later the tsar) and legislated through the boyar council. Their importance declined in the seventeenth century, and the title was abolished by Peter I in the eariy eighteenth century.

about literature's relation to the cultures of the West, and a strong tendency toward formal innovation and defiance of received generic norms. The combination of formal radicalism and preoccupation with abstract philosophical issues is one of the hallmarks of the Russian classics.

The Nineteenth Century

Pushkin is a natural starting point for any discussion of Russian literature, not only because of his acknowledged genius, the subjects he introduced, and the literary genres he opened up or foreshadowed, but also because of the way he shaped the Russian language itself. His personal literary trajectory can be seen as a microcosm of the various strands of

SERFS

Tenant farmers bound to a hereditary plot of land and to the will of their landlord

Serfs differed from slaves in that slaves could be bought and sold without reference to land, whereas serfs changed lords only when the land they worked changed hands. In western Europe the development of centralized political power, the labour shortage caused by the Black Death, and endemic peasant uprisings in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries led to the gradual emancipation of serfs. In eastern Europe serfdom became more entrenched during that period; the peasants of the A ustro-Hungarian empire were freed in the late 18th century. Russia's serfs were not freed until 1861, during the reign of Alexander II.

Defeat in the Crimean War, change in public opinion, and the increasing number and violence of peasant revolts had convinced Alexander of the need for reform. The final Edict of Emancipation was a compromise and fully satisfied no one, particularly the peasants. It immediately granted personal liberties to the serfs, but the process by which they were to acquire land was slow, complex, and expensive. Though it failed to create an economically viable class of peasant proprietors, its psychological impact was immense.

Russian literature, combining elements of high and low culture, and aristocratic and native folk traditions, and illustrating the political role of the writer and his or her dependent relationship with authority. Even the stories sur­rounding Pushkin's birth are emblematic: on his father's side

he came from an old boyar family; on his mother's he is said to have inherited an Abyssinian princely lineage - it is possible that his maternal grandfather was bought as a slave at Constantinople.

French culture and the French language had been adopted in Russia as a hallmark of culture, and so, like many aristocratic families in early nineteenth-century Russia, Pushkin and his siblings learned first to talk and to read in French. Yet he was also immersed in the much older tradition of the Russian folktale, which he heard mostly from his old nurse, Arina Rodionovna Yakovleva, a freed serf, but also during the summer months that he spent on his grandmother's estate near Moscow, where he talked to the peasants and spent hours alone, living in the dream world of a precocious, imaginative child.

Pushkin was one of the first writers to draw on such traditions in his literary output. Even his first completed major work, the romantic poem Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820), though largely written in the style of the narrative poems of Ludovico Ariosto and Voltaire, introduced an old Russian setting and made use of Russian folklore. Over time, the Russian features of his poetry became steadily more marked. His ballad "The Bridegroom" (1825), for instance, with its simple, swift-moving style, is based on motifs from Russian folklore. Others followed: in 1824 he published The Gypsies and in 1831 one of his major works, the historical tragedy Boris Godunov. His central masterpiece, however, was a novel in verse, Yevgeny Onegin (1833), in which he unfolds a panoramic picture of Russian life. The characters it depicts and immortalizes - Onegin, Lensky, Tatyana - are typically Russian and are shown in relationship to the social and environmental forces that mould them.

Fairly early on in his career Pushkin's outspokenness brought him face to face with political authority and repres­sion, In May 1820 he was banished from St Petersburg to a remote southern province. But the fact of exile did not deter him from tackling the burning themes of his day - the struggle of the masses against the ruling classes, headed by the tsar - or from following the "folk-principles" of Shakespeare's plays, writing for the people in the widest sense. Recalled from exile in the autumn of 1826, he was given a personal audience with the new tsar, Nicholas I. During their long conversation the tsar met the poet's complaints about censorship with a promise that in the future he himself would be Pushkin's censor. He also told the poet of his plans to introduce several pressing reforms from above and, in particular, to prepare the way for liberation of the serfs. Pushkin himself believed that the only possible way of achieving essential reforms was from above, "on the tsar's initiative"; these ideas are explored in the great historical poems Poltava (1829) and The Bronze Horseman (1837), the latter arguably one of the greatest poems in Russian literature.

After returning from exile, Pushkin found himself in an awkward and invidious position. Government censorship had been replaced by the personal censorship of the tsar, and his personal freedoms were curtailed. Yet it was during this period that his genius came to its fullest flowering. His art acquired new dimensions, and almost every one of the works written between 1829 and 1836 opened a new chapter in the history of Russian literature. During this time he wrote the four so-called "little tragedies" - The Covetous Knight (1836), Mozart and Salieri (1831), The Stone Guest (1839), and Feast in Time of the Plague (1832) - the short story "The Queen of Spades" (1834); "A Small House in Kolomna" (1833), a comic poem of everyday lower-class life; and many lyrics in widely differing styles, as well as several critical and polemical articles, rough drafts, and sketches.

Pushkin also exerted a profound influence on other aspects of Russian culture, notably opera, but perhaps his most enduring legacy was his reshaping of the Russian literary language. His writings, by combining the colloquial and Church Slavonic styles, put an end to the considerable con­troversy that had developed as to which style of the language was best for literary uses. The astonishing simplicity of his language formed the basis of the style of the novelists Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, and Leo Tolstoy. To the later classical writers of the nineteenth century, Pushkin, the creator of the Russian literary language, stood as the cornerstone of Russian literature: in Maksim Gorky's words, "the beginning of beginnings".

The first quarter of the nineteenth century had been domin­ated by Romantic poetry. Vasily Zhukovsky's 1802 transla­tion of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard" ushered in a vogue for the personal, elegiac mode that was soon amplified in the work of Konstantin Batyushkov, Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky, and the young Pushkin. Although there was a call for civic-oriented poetry in the late 1810s and early 1820s, most of the strongest poets followed Zhukovs­ky's lyrical path. In the 1820s the mature Pushkin went his own way, producing a series of masterpieces that laid the foundation for his eventual recognition as Russia's national poet.

But despite Pushkin's immense influence, during the 1830s poetry gradually gave way to prose-writing, a shift that coin­cided with a change in literary institutions. The aristocratic salon, which had been the seedbed for Russian literature, was gradually supplanted by the monthly "thick journals", the editors and critics of which became Russia's tastemakers. Also in the 1830s the first publications appeared by Nikolay Gogol, a comic writer of Ukrainian origin, whose grotesquely hilari­ous oeuvre includes the story "The Nose" and the play The Government Inspector (both 1836), and the epic novel Dead Souls (1842). Although Gogol was then known primarily as a satirist, he is now appreciated as one of the founders of the great nineteenth-century tradition of Russian realism and a verbal magician whose works seem akin to the absurdists of the twentieth century. One final burst of poetic energy ap­peared in the late 1830s in the verse of Mikhail Lermontov, who also wrote A Hero of Our Time (1840), the first Russian psychological novel.

In the 1840s the axis of Russian literature shifted decisively from the personal and Romantic to the civic and realistic, a shift presided over by the great Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, who believed that literature should be primarily concerned with current social problems. By the end of the 1840s, Belinsky's ideas had triumphed. Early works of Russian realism include Goncharov's anti-romantic novel A Common Story (1847) and Dostoyevsky's Poor Folk (1846).

From the 1840s until the turn of the twentieth century, the realist novel dominated Russian literature, and in turn was dominated by three literary giants, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. In the early period the favoured method was the "physiological sketch", which often depicted a typical member of the downtrodden classes. Turgenev's beautifully crafted stories in the collection A Sportsman's Sketches (1852) de­scribe the life of Russian serfs as seen through the eyes of a Turgenev-like narrator; in fact, his depiction was so powerful that he was credited with convincing Tsar Alexander II of the

NIKOLAY GOGOL (1809-52)

Ukrainian-born Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist

Gogol tried acting and worked at minor government jobs in St Petersburg before achieving literary success with Evenmgs on a Farm near Dikanka (1831-2). His pessimism emerged in such stories as "Taras Bulba" (1835) and "Diary of a Madman" (1835). His farcical drama T7ie Government inspector (1836) lampooned a corrupt government bureaucracy. From 1836 to н846 he lived in Italy. During this time he laid the foundations of nineteenth-century Russian realism with his masterpiece, the novel Dead Souls (1842), a satire about serfdom and bureaucratic inequities in which he hoped to castigate abuses and guide his compatriots through laughter, and his story "The Overcoat" (1842). His collected stories (1842) received great acclaim. Soon afterward he came under the influence of a fanatical priest who prompted him to burn the manuscript of the second volume of Defld Souis. He died a few days later at the age of 42, perhaps of intentional starvation, on the verge of madness.

need to emancipate the serfs. Turgenev followed Sketches with a series of novels, each of which was felt by contemporaries to have captured the essence of Russian society. In addition to his subtle descriptions of peasant life, further novels, such as Rudin (1856), On the Eve (1860), and Smoke (1867), focused on intelligentу (members of the intelligentsia) and ideology, and, in his most celebrated work, Fathers and Sons (1862), on generational and class differences in Russia. Though Turgenev was the first Russian writer to be widely celebrated in the

West, he was reviled in Russia by the radicals, as well as by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, for his dedicated westernism, bland liberalism, aesthetic elegance, and tendency to nostalgia and self-pity.

Dostoyevsky was the second nineteenth-century literary giant. In 1849, at the outset of his career, he was arrested and imprisoned in Siberia for his involvement in a socialist reading group, and he rejoined the literary scene only in the late 1850s. During his imprisonment he experienced a religious conversion, and his novels of the 1860s and 1870s are suffused with messianic Orthodox ideas. Many of his works delve into the psychology of men and women at the edge. In Notes from the Underground (1864) the hero argues, in a complex series of paradoxes, against determinism, utopianism, and historical laws. In Crime and Punishment (1866), a philosophical and psychological account of a murder, Dostoyevsky examines the tendency of members of the intelligentsia to regard themselves as superior to ordinary people and as beyond traditional morality. The Possessed (1872), a novel based on Russian terrorism, is famous as the work that most accurately predicted twentieth- century totalitarianism. In The Idiot (1868-9) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80) Dostoyevsky, who is generally regarded as one of the supreme psychologists in world literature, sought to demonstrate the compatibility of Christianity with the dee­pest truths of the psyche.

Probably even more than Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy has been praised as being the greatest novelist in world literature. The nineteenth-century English critic and poet Matthew Arnold famously expressed the commonest view in saying that a work by Tolstoy is not a piece of art but a piece of life: his novels read as if life were writing directly, without mediation. Tol­stoy's techniques reflect his belief that no theory is adequate to

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY (1821-81) Russian novelist

Dostoyevsky gave up an engineering career early in order to write. In 1849 he was arrested for belonging to a radical discussion group: he was sentenced to be shot, but was reprieved at the last moment and spent four years at hard labour in Siberia, where he developed epilepsy and experienced a deepening of his religious faith. Later he published and wrote for several periodicals while producing his best novels. His novels are concerned especially with faith, suffering, and the meaning of life; they are famous for their psychological depth and insight and their near-prophetic treatment of issues in philosophy and politics. His first, Poor Folk (1846), was followed the same year by The Double. The House of the Dead (1862) is based on his imprisonment and The Gambler (1866) on his own gambling addiction. Best-known are the novella Notes from the Underground (1864) and the great novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The idiot (1869), The Possessed (1872), and The Brothers Karamozov (1880), which focuses on the problem of evil, the nature of freedom, and the characters' craving for some kind of faith. By the end of his life, Dostoyevsky had been acclaimed one of his country's greatest writers, and his works had a profound influence on twentieth-century literature,

explain the world's complexity, which unfolds by "tiny, tiny alterations" fitting no pattern. He denied the existence of historical laws and insisted that ethics is a matter not of rules but of supreme sensitivity to the particular. "True life", he

contended, is lived not at moments of grand crisis but at countless ordinary and prosaic moments, which human beings usually do not notice. All these ideas are illustrated and explicitly expressed in War and Peace (1865-9), set in the time of the Napoleonic Wars, and in Anna Karenina (1 875-7), which applies this prosaic view of life to marriage, the family, and work. Anna Karenina also contrasts romantic love, which is based on intense moments of passion and may lead to adultery, with the prosaic love of the family, which is based above all on intimacy.

After completing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy underwent a religious crisis, which eventually led him to reject his two great novels, formulate a new religion that he thought of as true Christianity, and cultivate a different type of art. To outline his views, he wrote a number of tracts in the 1890s. His only long novel of this period, Resurrection (1899), is a tendentious failure. But he produced brilliant novellas, many of which were published posthumously, including Father Sergius (written in 1898), in which he seems to reflect on his own quest for sainthood, and Hadji-Murad (written in 1904). The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), which is often considered the greatest novella in Russian literature, conveys the existential horror of sickness and mortality, while describ­ing civilization as a web of lies designed to distract people from an awareness of death.

Apart from these literary giants, the mid-nineteenth century produced a number of other fine prose writers. Among them are Sergey Aksakov (The Family Chronicle, 1856, and Years of Childhood, 1858), Aleksandr Herzen (From the Other Shore, 1851, and My Past and Thoughts, 1861-7), Ivan Goncharov (Ohlomov, 1859), Nikolay Leskov ("Lady Mac­beth of the Mtsensk District", 1865), Mikhail Saltykov

LEO TOLSTOY (1828-1910)

Russian writer, one of the world's greatest novelists

The scion of prominent aristocrats, Tolstoy spent much of his life at his family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, After a somewhat dissolute youth, he served in the army and travelled in Europe before returning home and starting a school for peasant children. He was already known as a brilliant writer for the short stories in Sevastopol Sketches (I85S-6) and the novel The Cossacks (1863) when War and Peace (1865-9) established him as Russia's pre-eminent novelist. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, the novel examines the lives of a large group of characters, centring on the partly autobiographical figure of the spiritually questing Pierre. Its structure, with its flawless placement of complex characters in a turbulent historical setting, is regarded as one of the great technical achievements in the history of the western novel. His other great novel, Anna Karenina (1875-7), concerns an aristocratic woman who deserts her husband for a tover and the search for meaning by another autobiographical character, Levin.

After the publication of Anna Karenina Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis and turned to a form of Christian anarchism. Advocating simplicity and non­violence, he devoted himself to social reform. His later works include The Death of Ivan llyich (1886) and What Is Art? (1898), which condemns fashionable aestheticism and celebrates art's moral and religious functions. Tolstoy lived humbly on his great estate, practising a radical

asceticism and in constant conflict with his wife. In November 1910, unable to bear his situation any longer, he left his estate incognito. During his flight he contracted pneumonia, and he was dead within a few days.

{The Golovlyov Family, 1876}, and Vsevolod Garshin ("Ar­tists", 1879). But by the early 1880s the hold of the realist novel was waning. Russian poetry had not played a central role in the literary process since the 1830s, and drama, despite the able work of Aleksandr Ostrovsky (1823-1886), was a marginal literary activity for most writers.

The only major prose writer to emerge in the 1880s and 1890s was Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), one of the greatest short story writers in world literature. Chekhov reinterpreted the short story genre within his essentially bourgeois values, stressing the moral necessity of ordinary virtues such as daily kindness, cleanliness, politeness, work, sobriety, paying one's debts, and avoiding self-pity - a rejection of the intelligentsia's demand for political tendentiousness. In his hundreds of stories and novellas Chekhov - a practising doctor - adopts something of a clinical approach to ordinary life. Meticulous observation and broad sympathy for diverse points of view shape his fiction. In his stories, an overt plot subtly hints at other hidden stories, and so the experience of rereading his fiction often differs substantially from that produced by a first reading. In his greatest stories - including "The Man in a Case" (1898), "The Lady with a Lapdog" (1899), "The Darling" (1899), "In the Ravine" (1900), "The Bishop" (written 1902), and "The Betrothed" (written 1903) - Che­khov manages to attain all the power of his great predecessors

MAKSIM GORKY (1868-1936) Russian writer

Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov was born in Nizhny Novgorod. After a childhood of poverty and misery he became a wandering tramp. He assumed the name Gorky, meaning "bitter". His early works offered sympathetic portrayals of the social dregs of Russia: they include the outstanding stories "Chelkash" (1895) and "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" (1899), and the successful play The Lower Depths (1902). For his revolutionary activity, he spent the years 1906-13 abroad as a political exile. His works include the autobiographical trilogy My Childhood (1913­14), In the World (1915-16), and My Universities (1923).

Though initially an open critic of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, after 1919 Gorky cooperated with Lenin's government. He lived in Italy from 1921 to 1928. Upon his return to the USSR, he became the undisputed leader of Soviet writers. When the Union of Soviet Writers was established in 1934, he became its first president and helped establish socialist realism. He died suddenly while under medical treatment, possibly killed on the orders of Joseph Stalin.

in a remarkably compact form. Towards the end of his career, Chekhov also became known for his dramatic work, including Such pillars of the world theatrical repertoire as Uncle Vanya (1897) and The Cherry Orchard (first performed 1904). In these, his belief that life is lived at ordinary moments and that histrionics are a dangerous lie found expression in a major innovation, the undramatic drama - or, as it is sometimes called, the theatre of inaction.

IVAN BUNIN (1870-1953) Russian poet and novelist

Bunin worked as a journalist and clerk while writing and translating poetry, but he made his name as a short- story writer, with such masterpieces as the title story of The Gentleman from San Fronc/sco {1916). His other works include the novella Mityo's Love (1925), the collection Dark Avenues, and Other Stories (1943), fictional autobiography, memoirs, and books on Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. He was the first Russian awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature {1933) and is among the best stylists in the language.

Chekhov's heirs in the area of short fiction were Maksim Gorky (later the doyen of Soviet letters), who began his career by writing sympathetic portraits of various social outcasts, and the aristocrat Ivan Bunin, who emigrated after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933.

The Twentieth Century

The interplay between art and life, literature and politics, came once more to the fore, sometimes in dramatic and bloody fashion, in the twentieth century. By way of example, the poet Nikolay Gumilyov (first husband of the poet Anna Akhma­tova) was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921; Akhmatova's son Lev was twice imprisoned under Stalin; Osip Mandel- shtam, considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century, died in a Soviet prison camp; and among tlie millions whose lives were taken during the Stalinist purges (see Chapter 2), were the writers Isaak Babel, Daniil Kharms, and Boris Pilnyak, the peasant poet Nikolay Klyuyev, and the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Russian literary history in the twentieth century was char­acterized by major upheavals. The 1917 Revolution and the Bolshevik coup later in the same year created the first major divide between the imperial and post-revolutionary periods, eventually turning "official" Russian literature into political propaganda for the communist state. Mikhail Gorbachev's ascent to power in 1985 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 marked the second dramatic break, this time between the post- revolutionary and post-Soviet periods. These breaks were sudden rather than gradual and were the product of political forces external to literary history itself.

However, the cross-over period from the 1890s to 1917 was a time of revival, ushering in a new era of Russian poetry and drama, a "Silver Age" that rivalled, and in some respects surpassed, the Pushkinian "Golden Age". In literature gener­ally this was a time of intellectual ferment, in which mysticism, aestheticism, Neo-Kantianism, eroticism, Marxism, apocalyp­ticism, Nietzscheanism, and other movements combined with each other in improbable ways. The civic orientation that had dominated Russian literature since the 1840s was, for the moment, abandoned. The avant-garde's new cry was "art for art's sake", and the new idols were the French symbolists. The symbolists saw art as a way to approach a higher reality. The first wave of symbolists included Konstantin Balmont, who wrote verse that he left unrevised on principle (he believed in first inspiration); Valery Bryusov, who for years was the leader of the movement; Zinaida Gippius, who wrote decad­ent, erotic, and religious poetry; and Fyodor Sologub, author

Cathedra! of St Basil the Blessed in Red Square, Moscow, Constructed between 1554 and 1560 by Ivan the Terrible as a votive offering for his military victories over the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan.

Red Square, Moscow. Dating from the late fifteenth century, Red Square (Krasnaya Ploshchad) adjoins the Kremlin, Russia's centre of government. It has long been a focal point in the social and political history of Russia and the former Soviet Union. It has had several names, but the present name has been used consistently since the later seventeenth century, 'lhe Russian word krasnaya (now translated as "red") also means "beautiful".

Catherine the Great (1729-96). German- horn empress of Russia who reigned from 1762 and led her country into full participation in the political and cultural life of Europe, carrying on the work begun by Peter the Great. With her ministers she reorganized the administration and law of the Russian Empire and extended Russian territory.

Gallery in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great, the Hermitage adjoined the Winter Palace and served as a private gallery for the art amassed by the empress. It was opened to the public in 1852. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the imperial collections became public property.

Demonstrators gathering in front of the Winter Palace in Petrograd (St Petersburg) in January 1917, shortly before the Russian Revolution.

Monument to the Third International, 1920. The most famous work of Ukrainian artist Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), this was one of the first buildings conceived entirely in abstract terms and would have been the world's tallest structure at more than 1,300 feet (396 m) tall. The striking design consisted of a leaning spiral iron framework supporting a glass cylinder, a glass cone, and a glass cube, each of which could be rotated at different Speeds. It was never built.

Soviet leader Vladimir Iliych Lenin (1870-1924) addressing a crowd in 1920. Lenin was founder of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), leader of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), and the architect and first head (1917-24) of the Soviet state. Lenin was the posthumous source of "Leninism", the doctrine codified and conjoined with Karl Marx's works by Lenin's successors to form Marxism-Leninism, which became the communist wo rid view.

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953). Secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-53) and premier of the Soviet state (1941-53), Stalin dictatorially ruled the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century and transformed it into a major world power.

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799­1837). Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer, Pushkin has often been considered his country's greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. His masterpiece, the novel in verse Yevgeny Onegin (1833), is considered by many to be the first great Russian novel.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Russian author, a master of realistic fiction, and one of the world's greatest novelists, Tolstoy is best known for his two longest works, War and Peace (1865-9) and Anna Karenina (1875-7), which are commonly regarded as among the finest novels ever written.

Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) with companion Olga Iwinskaja and their daughter Irina in the late 1950s. Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 but aroused so much opposition in the Soviet Union that he declined the honour. An epic of wandering, spiritual isolation and love amid the harshness of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the novel became an international bestseller but circulated only in secrecy and translation in his own land.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918­2008). Russian novelist and historian who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 following the publication, in Paris, of The Gulag Archipelago, a literary-historical record of the vast system of prisons and labour camps that came into being shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power and that underwent an enormous expansion under Stalin.

Yury Gagarin (1934-68), Soviet cosmonaut who in 1961 became the first man to travel into space. His spaceflight brought him immediate worldwide fame; he was awarded the Order of Lenin and given the titles of Hero of the Soviet Union and Pilot Cosmonaut of the Soviet Union,

Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931) on a state visit to Poland. General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991 and president of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. His efforts to democratize his country's political system and decentralize its economy led to the downfall of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1990,

Vladimir Putin (b. 1952). Russian intelligence officer and politician who served as president of Russia (1999-2008) and was also the country's prime minister in 1999 and again from 2008.

of melancholic verse and of a novel about a sadistic, homicidal, paranoid schoolteacher. The second wave was dominated by Andrey Bely, whose novel St Petersburg (1913-22) is regarded as the masterpiece of symbolist fiction; Aleksandr Blok, whose best-known work is the poem The Twelve, which describes 12 brutal Red Guards who turn out to be unwittingly led by Jesus Christ; and the principal theoretician of the symbolist move­ment, Vyacheslav Ivanov, who wrote mythic poetry conveying a Neoplatonist philosophy.

The symbolists dominated the literary scene until 1910, when internal dissension led to the movement's collapse. Their beliefs and writings were challenged by two different poetic groupings, the Acmeists and Futurists. The Acmeist school of poetry rejected the mysticism and abstraction of Russian symbolism and demanded concrete representation and precise form and meaning, combined with a broad-ranging erudition (classical antiquity, European history and culture, including art and religion). The Acmeists, whose outstanding members included Nikolay Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelshtam, were associated with the new St Petersburg journal Apollon and the poets of the older generation who stood apart from the dominant symbolist poets of the day. The Futurists, on the other hand, wanted to throw all earlier and most contemporary poetry "from the steamship of modernity" and thus to free poetic discourse from the fetters of tradition. The two most important Futurist poets were Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladi­mir Mayakovsky. Khlebnikov hoped to find the laws of history through numerology and developed amazingly implausible theories about language and its origins; his verse is characterized by neologisms and "trans-sense" language. Mayakovsky epi­tomized the spirit of romantic bohemian radicalism. Humour, bravado, and self-pity characterize his inventive long poems.

VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY (1893-1930)

Leading poet of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the eariy Soviet period

From his youth repeatedly jailed for subversive activity, Mayakovsky began writing poetry during solitary confinement in 1909. On his release he became the spokesman for Futurism in Russia, and his poetry became conspicuously self-assertive and defiant. As a vigorous spokesman for the Communist Party he produced declamatory works saturated with politics and aimed at mass audiences, including "Ode to Revolution" (1918) and "Left March" (1919), and the drama Mystery fiouffe (performed 1921). Disappointed in love, increasingly alienated from Soviet reality, and denied a visa to travel abroad, he committed suicide at the age of 36.

In the years immediately after the 1917 Revolution a brief period of relative openness was enjoyed. Many writers turned to prose, particularly the short story and the novella. Some were inspired by the recent revolution and the sub­sequent Russian Civil War (1918-20): these included Pil- nyak (The Naked Year, 1922), Babel (Red Cavalry, 1926, a formally chiselled and morally complex cycle of linked stories about a Jewish commissar in a Cossack regiment), and Mikhail Sholokhov, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965. Others described life in the new Soviet Union with varying degrees of mordant sarcasm: the short stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko, the comic novels of llya XIf and Yevgeny Petrov, and the short novel Envy (1927) by Yury Olesha fall into this category. Boris

BORIS PASTERNAK (1890-1960) Russian poet and prose writer

Pasternak studied music and philosophy and after the Russian Revolution of 1917 worked in the library of the Soviet commissariat of education. His early poetry, though avant-garde, was successful, but in the 1930s a gap widened between his work and officially approved literary modes, and he supported himseif by doing translations. The novel Doctor Zhivago (I9S7; film, 1965), an epic of wandering, spiritual isolation, and love amid the harshness of the revolution and its aftermath, was a best-seller in the West but until 1987 circulated only in secrecy in the Soviet Union. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, but he was forced to decline it because of Soviet opposition to his work.

Pasternak, a Futurist poet before the revolution, published a cycle of poems, My Sister - Life (1922), and the story "Zhenya Luvers's Childhood" (1918).

The lull in the storm was short-lived, however, and it soon became clear that the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 would radically change Russian literature. From the mid- 19205, literature became a tool of state propaganda. Officially approved writing (the only kind that could be published) by and large sank to a sub-literary level. Censorship, imprison­ment in labour camps, and mass terror were only part of the problem. Writers were not only forbidden to create works that were dissident, formally complex, or objective (a term of reproach), but they were also expected to fulfil the dictates of the Communist Party to produce propaganda on specific, often rather narrow, themes of current interest to it. Writers

OS1P MANDELSHTAM (1891-19387) Russian poet and critic

Osip Mandelshtam was a major Russian poet and literary critic. He was born in Warsaw in 1891 and grew up in St Petersburg. His first poems appeared in the avant- garde journal Apollon in 1910. It was partly the apolitical stance of Mandelshtam's poetry, together with its heavy intellectual demands, that led to his estrangement from and eventual denunciation by the official Soviet literary establishment. In 1928 a volume of his collected poetry and a collection of literary criticism appeared: these were his last books published in the Soviet Union during his lifetime.

In May 1934 Mandelshtam was arrested for an epigram he had written on Joseph Stalin and was sent into exile. In 1938, the year after his return to Moscow, he was arrested again. In a letter to his wife, Nadezhda, that autumn, he reported that he was ill in a transit camp near Vladivostok. Nothing further was ever heard from him. The Soviet authorities officially gave his death date as 27 December 1938, although he was also reported by government sources to have died "at the beginning of 1939".

were called upon to be "engineers of human souls" helping to produce "the new Soviet man".

The decade beginning with Stalin's ascendancy in the late 1920s was one of unprecedented repression. Censorship be­came much stricter, and many of the best writers were silenced. In 1932 all independent literary groupings were dissolved and replaced by an institution that had no counterpart in the West,

ANNA AKHMATOVA (i889-1966) Russian poet

The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was recognized at her death as the greatest woman poet in Russian literature. Her brief, finely chiselled lyrics brought her fame at the outset of her career, but from the 1920s she was forced into years of silence, emerging again into public life only from the 1940s; publication of much of her work had to wait until the 1960s, and full recognition, at least on an international scale, until the 1980s.

Akhmatova was born in 1889 near Odessa, Ukraine. At 21 she joined the Acmeists, adding to the school her own stamp of elegant colloquialism and the psychological sophistication of a young cosmopolitan woman. During the Soviet period her former husband, Nikolay Gumilyov, was executed, and her son, Lev, and her third husband, Nikolay Punin, were arrested for political deviance in 1935. No volume of her poetry appeared in the Soviet Union until 1940. Her public life became limited to her studies of Pushkin.

In the years following Stalin's death Akhmatova was slowly, if ambivalently, rehabilitated. A slender volume of her poetry, including some of her translations, was published in 1958. What is perhaps her masterpiece, "Poem without a Hero", on which she worked from 1940 to 1962, was not published in the Soviet Union until 1976. She died, near Moscow, in 1966.

MARINA TSVETAYEVA (1892-1941) Russian poet

After spending most of her youth in Moscow, Tsvetayeva began studies at the Sorbonne in Paris at the age of 16. She published her first poetry collection in 1910. Her verses on the Russian Revolution glorify the anti-Bolshevik resistance, of which her husband was a part. She lived abroad from 1922 to 1939, mostly in Paris, writing varied works including poetry that increasingly reflected nostalgia for her homeland. Many of her best and most typical poetic qualities are displayed in the long verse fairy tale Tsor-dev/tsa (1922; "Tsar-Maiden"). Separated from her husband and daughter and isolated from friends after the evacuation of Moscow, she committed suicide. Though little-known outside Russia, she is considered one of the finest twentieth-century poets in Russian.

the Union of Soviet Writers, which became the state's instrument of control over literature; expulsion from it meant literary death. In 1934 socialist realism was proclaimed the only acceptable form of writing. Henceforth, literature was to he governed by a series of official directives regarding details of style and content in order to ensure that each work offered a "truthful" depiction "of reality in its revolutionary development". Literature had to be "party-minded" and "typical" (that is, avoiding unpleasant, hence "atypical", aspects of Soviet reality), while showing the triumph of fully "positive heroes". Only a few of the works produced in this style have retained some literary interest, notably Fyodor Gladkov's Cement (I925),Niko!ay Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered (1932—4), and Valentin Katayev's

MIKHAIL SHOLOKHOV {1905-54) Russian novelist

A native of the Don River region, Shotokhov served in the Red Army and joined the Communist Party in 1932. He is best known for the huge novel The Quiet Don, translated in two parts as And Quiet Flows the Don (1934) and T/ie Don Rows Home to the Sea (1940). A portrayal of the struggle between the Cossacks and Bolsheviks, it was heralded in the Soviet Union as a powerful example of socialist realism and became the most widely read novel in Russia. It became controversial when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others alleged that it was plagiarized from the Cossack writer Fyodor Kryukov {d. 1920). Sholokhov's later novels include Virgin Soil Upturned (1932-60). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965.

Time, Forivard! (1932). The moral nadir of Soviet literature was reached in a collaborative volume, Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea (1934). With Gorky as an editor and 34 contributors, the volume praised a project (and the secret police who directed it) that used convict labour and cost tens of thousands of lives.

In addition to official Soviet Russian literature, two kinds of unofficial literature existed. First, a tradition of emigre litera­ture, containing some of the best works of the century, continued until the fall of the Soviet Union. Writing in Russian flourished in communities of anti-communist exiles in Ger­many, France, Italy, and the United States, with writers as various as the novelists Vladimir Nabokov and Yevgeny

Zamyatin, and the theologian-philosophers Vladimir Niko- layevich Lossky, Sergey Bulgakov, and Nikolay Berdyayev, Second, unofficial literature written within the Soviet Union came to include works circulated illegally in typewritten copies [samizdat), works smuggled abroad for publication (tamiz- dat), and works written "for the drawer" or not published until decades after they were written ("delayed" literature). Isolation from the West and from its own literary past was another feature of Russian literature at this time. Whereas pre- revolutionary writers had been intensely aware of western trends, for much of the Soviet period access to western literary movements was severely restricted, as was foreign travel. Access to pre-revolutionary Russian writing was also inter­mittent. As a result, Russians periodically had to change their sense of the past, as did western scholars when "delayed" works became known.

From a literary point of view, unofficial literature clearly surpasses official literature. Of Russia's five winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature during the Soviet period, Bunin emigrated after the revolution, Pasternak had his novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) published abroad, Solzhenitsyn had most of his works published abroad and was expelled from the Soviet Union, and Joseph Brodsky published all his collections of verse abroad and was forced to emigrate in 1972. Only Mikhail Sholokhov was clearly an official Soviet writer. Emi­gres also included the poets Vladislav Khodasevich and Georgy Ivanov. Marina Tsvetayeva, regarded as one of the great poets of the twentieth century, eventually returned to Russia, where she committed suicide. Nabokov, who later wrote in English, published nine novels in Russian, including The Gift (published serially 1937-8) and Invitation to a Beheading (1938). And a modern literary genre, the dystopia,

MIKHAIL BULGAKOV (1891-1940)

Playwright, novelist, and short-story writer

Bulgakov was born in Kiev and trained as a doctor, but gave up medicine to write. His first major work was the novel The White Guard, serialized in 1925 but never published in book form. A realistic and sympathetic portrayal of the motives and behaviour of a group of anti-Boishevik White officers during the civil war, it was met by a storm of official criticism for its lack of a communist hero. Bulgakov wrote and staged many popular plays in the years 1925-9, including dramatizations of his own novels, but by 1930 his trenchant criticism of Soviet mores had caused him to be effectively prohibited from publishing. His works, known for their scathing humour, include the novella The Heart of a Dog (written 1925), a satire on pseudoscience that did not appear openly in the Soviet Union until 1987, and the dazzling fantasy The Master and Margarita, not published in unexpurgated form until 1973.

was invented by Zamyatin in his novel We (1924), published only abroad, which describes a future socialist society that has turned out to be not perfect but inhuman.

The work now generally regarded as the finest post- revolutionary novel, Mikhail Bulgakov's grotesquely funny The Master and Margarita, was written "for the drawer" (1928—40); it appeared (expurgated) in Russia only in 1966-7 and unexpurgated in 1973. It tells of the Devil and his retinue visiting Soviet Russia, where they play practical jokes of metaphysical and political significance. A novel within

tlie novel gives the "true" version of Christ's encounter with Pilate. The result is a joyful philosophical comedy of enormous profundity. Other masterpieces that did not fit the canons of socialist realism and were not published until many years later include the dark pictures of rural and semi-urban Russia by An drey Platonov (1899-1951), The Foundation Pit (1973) and Chevengur (1972).

The need to rally support in the Second World War brought a loosening of Communist Party control. The war itself created the opportunity for a large "second wave" of emigration, thus feeding emigre literature. However, the period from 1946 until the death of Stalin in 1953 was one of severe repression known as the Zhdanovshchina, or Zhdanovism, after Andrey Zhda­nov, a Politburo member and the director of Stalin's pro­gramme of cultural tyranny. During this campaign, attacks on "rootless cosmopolitans" involved anti-Semitism and the re­jection of all foreign influences on Russian literature. The Soviet practice of samokritika (public denunciation of one's own work) was frequent.

The years from the death of Stalin until the fall of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 saw several "thaws" separated by "freezes". In 1956 Khrushchev delivered a famous speech denouncing certain Stalinist crimes. From that time on, it was possible for Russians to perceive orthodox communists as people of the past and to regard dissidents not as holdovers from before the revolution but as progressives. New writers and trends appeared in the 1950s and early 1960s. Vibrant young poets such as Brodsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Andrey Voznesensky exerted a significant influence, and Alek- sandr Solzhenitsyn emerged from a Soviet prison camp (Gu­lag) and shocked the country and the world in 1962 with details of his brutal experiences in One Day in the Life of Ivan

Denisovich, "Youth" prose on the model of American writer J. D, Salinger appeared as well, particularly in the work of Vasily Aksyonov and Vladimir Voynovich,

By the late 1960s, however, most of these writers had again been silenced. The harsher years under Leonid Brezhnev following Khrushchev's fall opened with the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of two writers, Andrey Sinyavsky (whose pseudonym was Abram Terts) and Yuly Daniel (pseudonym Nikolay Arzhak), for publishing "anti-Soviet propaganda" abroad. In the years that followed, well-known writers were arrested or, in one way or another, expelled from the Soviet Union, thus generating the third wave of emigre literature. Among those who found themselves in the West were Brodsky, Sinyavsky, Solzhenitsyn, Aksyonov, and Voynovich.

That trend in Russian literature towards speaking the truth about moral and political issues was exemplified in the work and life of Solzhenitsyn. Arrested initially for writing a letter in which he criticized Joseph Stalin, Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in prisons and labour camps, followed by three more years in enforced exile. Rehabilitated in 1956, he was allowed to settle in Ryazan, in central Russia, where he became a mathematics teacher and began to write. Encouraged by the loosening of government restraints on cultural life, Solzhenit­syn submitted his short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) to the leading Soviet literary periodical, Novy Mir ("New World"). Based on Solzhenitsyn's own experiences, Ivan Denisovich describes a typical day in the life of an inmate of a forced-labour camp during the Stalin era. The impression made on the public by the book's simple, direct language and by the obvious authority with which it treated the daily struggles and material hardships of camp life was magnified by its being one of the first Soviet literary works of tlie post-Stalin era to directly describe such a life. The book produced a political sensation both abroad and in the Soviet Union, where it inspired a number of other writers to produce accounts of their imprisonment under Stalin's regime. Inter­estingly, Khrushchev personally saw to its publication as part of his de-Stalinization campaign.

Solzhenitsyn's period of official favour proved to be short­lived, however. Ideological strictures on cultural activity in the Soviet Union tightened with Khrushchev's fall from power in 1964, and Solzhenitsyn met first with increasing criticism and then with overt harassment from the authorities when he emerged as an eloquent opponent of repressive government policies. Denied the option of official publication, he resorted to samizdat literature and publication abroad - and it was this that secured his international literary reputation. Probably his most celebrated work was The Gulag Archipelago, published in Paris in 1973 after a copy of the manuscript had been seized in the Soviet Union by the KGB. Various sections of the work describe the arrest, interrogation, conviction, transportation, and imprisonment of the Gulag's victims as practised by the Soviet authorities over four decades. This work, arguably the greatest work of Soviet prose, narrates the history of the Soviet camp system with controlled fury and in an ironic mode reminiscent of the eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon. It is all the more remarkable in that much of the raw material for the book was committed to memory during Solzhenitsyn's imprisonment.

Inevitably, the Soviet press immediately attacked the work and, despite the intense interest in his fate that was shown in the West, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and charged with treason on February 12, 1974. On the following day he was exiled from the Soviet Union. In December he took possession of his

Nobel Prize and later settled in the United States; he returned to Russia from exile only in 1994,

Practically the only valuable writing published between the late 1960s and early 1980s came from the "village prose" writers, who treated the clash of rural traditions with modern life in a realistic idiom: the most notable members of this group are the novelist Valentin Rasputin and the short-story writer Vasily Shukshin. The morally complex fiction of Yury Trifo- nov, staged in the urban setting (The House on the Embank­ment, 1976), stands somewhat apart from the works of Rasputin and Shukshin that praise Russian rural simplicity. Nevertheless, as with the 1930s and 1940s, the most important literature of this period was first published outside the Soviet Union. Notable writers include Variam Shalamov, whose exquisitely artistic stories chronicled the horrors of the prison camps; Sinyavsky, whose complex novel Goodnight! appeared in Europe in 1984, long after he had been forced to leave the Soviet Union; and Venedikt Yerofeyev, whose grotesque latter- day picaresque Moscow-Petushki - published in a clandestine edition in 1968 - is a minor classic. Some of the best work published in the 1980s was in poetry, including the work of conceptualists such as Dmitry Prjgov and the meta-mctaphoric poetry of Aleksey Parshchikov, Olga Sedakova, Ilya Kutik, and others.

The effects on literature of the collapse of the Soviet Union were enormous. The period of glasnost under Gorbachev and the subsequent collapse of the USSR led first to a dramatic easing and then to the abolition of censorship. Citizenship was restored to emigre writers, and Solzhenitsyn returned to Rus­sia. Doctor Zhiuago and We were published in Russia, as were the works of Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, Voynovich, and many others. The divisions between Soviet and emigre and between official and unofficial literature came to an end. Private foundations began awarding annual literary prizes, such as the Russian Booker Prize and the Little Booker Prize, The so- called Anti-Booker Prize - its name, a protest against the British origins of the Booker Prize, was selected to emphasize that it was a Russian award for Russian writers - was first presented in 1995 by the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

In the 1990s Russians experienced the heady feeling that came with absorbing, at great speed, large parts of their literary tradition that had been suppressed, and with having free access to western literary movements. A Russian form of postmodernism, fascinated with a pastiche of citations, arose, along with various forms of radical experimentalism. During this period, readers and writers sought to understand the past, both literary and historical, and to comprehend the chaotic, threatening, and very different present.

7

MUSIC

The story of music in modern Russia is in certain recurrent aspects unique in the history of western music. These aspects can be summarized as: the geographical position of Russia, which means that the country's music is a product of both western and eastern root cultures and material; the absence of sophisticated home-grown music prior to the latter half of the nineteenth century, to be later sapped by the 1917 Revolution and a continuing pattern of emigration; the fact that the politics of the twentieth century swept away the upper middle classes and the aristocracy, and with them the pursuit of music as an amateur activity by composers of outstanding technical ability; the almost complete absence in Russia of the breaking down of traditional compositional methods and sounds that took place elsewhere during the twentieth century; the effects of the active state control of culture; the indirect political power ot popular music culture; the phenomenon of a Russian artist's creativity and musical personality being weakened when the artist leaves Russia as an emigre; an innate Russian conservatism and links with tradition that predisposed twentieth-century music to continue to incorporate many char­acteristics of nineteenth-century music; the effect of Orthodox Church music; the unconscious rapport between composers and the people of Russia, and the composers' natural ability to speak to the heart of the masses; and Russian mysticism.

The Nineteenth Century

To understand music in modern Russia, one has first to start with the nineteenth century. There was little sophisticated secular music on a western model, especially home grown, prior to the blossoming of musical nationalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the extraordinary outburst of creativity at the turn of the century. Although in the eighteenth century the imperial court and some aristocratic houses imported Italian opera troupes and foreign maestri di cappella ("choirmasters"), the first Russian composer to gain international renown was Mikhail Glinka, a leisured aristocrat who mastered his craft in Milan and Berlin. His patriotic A JJfe for the Tsar (1836) and his Pushkin-inspired Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842) are the oldest Russian operas that remain in the standard repertoire.

I.ike Glinka, many of Russia's early composers came from the upper middle classes or the aristocracy and were essentially self-taught musical amateurs. Modest Mussorgsky (1838­1881), for example, worked in the civil service; Aleksandr Borodin (1833-1887), son of a Georgian prince, was as famous in his day for his work as a chemist as for his music; and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) began his career in the navy. However, by the second half of the nineteenth

ALEKSANDR BORODIN (1833-87) Russian composer

From 1862 Borodin took lessons from Mily Balakirev; fired by nationalist sentiment, the two men became the core of the group of Russian composers known as The Five. A professor of chemistry for much of his life, he left a small compositional output, which includes the orchestral suite In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880), two string quartets, and three symphonies, the second of which has remained highly popular. His opera Prince Igor — which contains the often-heard "Polovtsian Dances" - was left unfinished after 18 years of intermittent work.

century an active and institutionalized musical life was in place, thanks mainly to the efforts of the composer and piano virtuoso Anton Rubinstein, who, with royal patronage, founded in St Petersburg Russia's first regular professional orchestra (in 1859)and conservatory of music (in 1862). Both became models that were quickly imitated in other urban centres.

One of the first graduates of the St Petersburg Conservatory, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-93), steered an unlikely path between Russian nationalist tendencies and the cosmopolitan stance encouraged by his conservatory training. He was both a Russian nationalist and a westernizer of polished technical skill. Through his style and artistic creed he establishes an immediate rapport with the audience. In the words of the twentieth-century composer Igor Stravinsky, "Tchaikovsky drew unconsciously from the true, popular sources of our race," thus demonstrating the ability of Russian composers to identify with the spirit of the peoples of Russia.

PYOTR TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-93) Russian composer

Sensitive and interested in music from his early childhood, Tchaikovsky turned to serious composition at the age of 14. In 1862 he began studying at the new St Petersburg Conservatory; from 1866 he taught at the Moscow Conservatory. His Piano Concerto No. I (1875) was premiered in Boston and became immensely popular. He wrote his first ballet, Swan Lake (first performed 1877), on commission from the Bolshoi Ballet. In 1877 he received a commission from the wealthy Nadezhda von Meek (1831-94), who became his patron and long-time correspondent. The opera Yevgeny Onegin (1878) soon followed.

Though homosexual, Tchaikovsky married briefly; after three disastrous months of marriage, he attempted suicide. His composition was overshadowed by his personal crisis for years. His second ballet, Sleeping Beauty (1889), was followed by the opera The Queen of Spades (1890) and the great ballet The Nutcracker (1892). The Pathйtнque Symphony (1893) premiered four days before his death from cholera; claims that he was forced to commit suicide by noblemen outraged by his sexual liaisons are unfounded. He revolutionized the ballet genre by transforming it from a grand decorative gesture into a staged musical drama. His music has always had great popular appeal because of its tuneful, poignant melodies, impressive harmonies, and colourful, picturesque orchestration.

Mussorgsky - like the writer Aleksandr Pushkin - learned about Russian fairy tales from his nurse. Significantly, in 1866 Mussorgsky achieved artistic maturity with a series of remark­able songs about ordinary people such as "Darling Savishna", "Hopak", and "The Seminarist", which, along with his later songs, many to his own texts, describe scenes of Russian life with great vividness and insight, and realistically reproduce the inflections of the spoken Russian language. Another work dating from this time is the symphonic poem Night on a Bare Mountain (1867). In 1868 Mussorgsky reached the height of his conceptual powers in composition with the first song of his incomparable cycle The Nursery and a setting of the first few scenes of Nikolay Gogol's The Marriage. In 1869 he began his great work, the opera Boris Godunov, which was based on the drama of Pushkin.

Mussorgsky was counted among The Five, a group of composers who adopted a deliberately nationalist flavour; his colleagues were Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mily Balakir- ev, and Cйsar Cui. The name arose after Rimsky-Korsakov's performance of Slavonic music conducted by Balakirev in St Petersburg on May 24, 1867. In reviewing the concert, the critic Vladimir Stasov proudly proclaimed that henceforth Russia, too, had its own "mighty little heap" of native com­posers. The name caught on quickly and found its way into music history books. The Five were united in their aim to assert the musical independence of Russia from the West.

Rimsky-Korsakov held a number of influential posts: from 1874 to 1881 he was director of the Free Music School in St Petersburg; he served as conductor of concerts at the court chapel from 1883 to 1894; and he was chief conductor of the Russian symphony concerts between 1886 and 1900. In 1889 he led concerts of Russian music at the Paris World

Exposition, and in the spring of 1907 he conducted in Paris two historic Russian concerts in connection with Sergey Diag- hilev's Ballets Russes. Rimsky-Korsakov can be described as nationalistic in several senses. First, he rendered an inestimable service to Russian music as the de facto editor and head of a unique publishing enterprise financed by the Russian indus­trialist M. P. Belyayev and dedicated exclusively to the pub­lication of music by Russian composers. Second, with two exceptions, the subjects of his operas are taken from Russian or other Slavic fairy tales, literature, and history. These include Snow Maiden (1882), Sadko, The Tsar's Bride (1899), The Tale of Tsar Saltan, The Legend of the Invisible City ofKitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya, and Le Coq d'or (1909). And finally, in his superbly descriptive and masterful orchestration and sensuous melodies evoking mood, colour, and place, he demonstrates that Russia, in character, is essentially an ori­ental county.

The Early Twentieth Century

The early years of the last century saw the emergence of three major Russian composers: Aleksandr Scriabin (1871-1915), Sergey Rachmaninov (1873-1943), and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). The music of all three reveals some enduring features of nineteenth-century Russian music, as well as some of the themes that were to become prominent later in the twentieth century.

Scriabin, the supreme exponent of Russian mysticism, en­tered the Moscow Conservatory in 1888, where he studied the piano and composition; he later taught at the conservatory but from 1903 devoted himself entirely to composition and in 1904 settled in Switzerland. After 1900 he was much pre­occupied with mystical philosophy, and his Symphony No. I, composed in that year, has a choral finale, to his own words, glorifying art as a form of religion. Ideas stemming from the theosophical movement, a blend of western occultism and eastern mysticism, similarly provided the basis of the orches­tral Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus (1911), which called for the projection of colours onto a screen during the performance. From 1906 to 1907 Scriabin toured the United States, where he gave concerts with V. L Safonov and the conductor Modest Altschuler, and in 1908 he frequented theosophical circles in Brussels. In 1909 he returned to Russia. By then he was no longer thinking in terms of music alone; he was looking forward to an all-embracing "Mystery". This work was planned to open with a "liturgical act" in which music, poetry, dancing, colours, and scents were to unite to induce in the worshippers a "supreme, final ecstasy". He wrote the poem of the "Preliminary Action" of the "Mystery", but left only sketches for the music.

Scriabin's reputation stems from his grandiose symphonies and his sensitive, exquisitely polished piano music. His piano works include ten sonatas, an early concerto, and many preludes and other short pieces. As his thought became more and more mystical, egocentric, and ingrown, his harmonic style became ever less generally intelligible. Meaningful ana­lysis of his work only began appearing in the 1960s, and yet his music had always attracted a devoted following among mod­ernists.

Rachmaninov's music, although written mostly in the twen­tieth century, remains firmly entrenched in the nineteenth- century musical idiom. He was, in effect, the final expression of the tradition embodied by Tchaikovsky, a melodist of

Romantic dimensions still writing in an era of explosive change and experimentation. At the time of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Rachmaninov was a conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre. Although more of an observer than someone politically involved in the revolution, he also emigrated, with his family, in November 1906, to live in Dresden. There he wrote three of his major scores: the Symphony No. 2 in E Minor (1907), the symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead (1909), and the Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor (1909). In 1909 he made his first concert tour of the United States, highlighting his much-acclaimed pianistic debut in November of that year with the New York Symphony. In Philadelphia and Chicago he appeared with equal success in the role of conductor, interpreting his own symphonic compositions. Of these, the Symphony No. 2 is the most significant: it is a work of deep emotion and haunting thematic material. While tour­ing, he was invited to become permanent conductor of the Boston Symphony, but he declined the offer and returned to Russia in February 1910.

The one notable composition of Rachmaninov's second period of residence in Moscow was his choral symphony The Bells (1913), based on Konstantin Balmont's Russian translation of the poem by F.dgar Allan Рое. This work dis­plays considerable ingenuity in the coupling of choral and orchestral resources to produce striking imitative and textural effects, a hallmark of many later Russian composers, stamped by the influence of the Orthodox Church's choral tradition.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Rachmaninov went into his second self-imposed exile, dividing his time between Switzerland and the United States. For the next 25 years he spent most of his time in an English-speaking country. But he missed Russia and the Russian people - the sounding board for his music, as he said. And this alienation had a devastating effect on his formerly prolific creative ability. He produced little of real originality but rewrote some of his earlier work. Indeed, he devoted himself almost entirely to giving concerts in the United States and Europe, a field in which he had few peers.

Stravinsky, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, was catapulted to early fame through his association with Diaghilev, for whose Ballets Russes (see Chapter 9) he composed a trio of sensa­tional works that had their premieres in Paris: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). The first performance of The Rite of Spring at the Theatre des Champs-Йlysйes on May 29, 1913, provoked one of the most famous first-night riots in the history of musical theatre. This highly original composition, with its shifting and audacious rhythms and its unresolved dissonances, was an early mod­ernist landmark. From this point on, Stravinsky was known as "the composer of The Rite of Spring" and the destructive modernist par excellence. But while Stravinsky may have felt daringly avant-garde to his contemporaries, in effect these works of his for Diaghilev had not lost touch with mainstream Russian tradition.

Stravinsky's success with the Ballet Russes uprooted him from St Petersburg. He first took his family to France, then spent most of the war in Switzerland, but it was the Russian Revolution of October 1917 that finally extinguished any hope he may have had of returning to his native land. (Having returned to France in 1920, he took French citizenship in 1934; in 1940 he settled in California, and in 1945 he became a US citizen.)

Immediately after the First World War he continued to explore Russian folk idioms, notably in The Wedding, a ballet cantata based on the texts of Russian village wedding songs, and the "farmyard burlesque" Renard (1916); but his volun­tary exile from Russia gradually prompted him to reconsider his aesthetic stance. The result was an important change in his music: he abandoned the Russian features of his early style and instead adopted a neoclassical idiom. His works of the next 30 years usually take some point of reference in past European music - a particular composer's work or the baroque or some other historical style - as a starting point for a highly personal and unorthodox treatment that nevertheless seems to depend for its full effect on the listener's experience of the historical model from which Stravinsky borrowed.

Having lost his property in Russia during the revolution, Stravinsky was compelled to earn his living as a performer, and many of the works he composed during the 1920s and 1930s were written for his own use as a concert pianist and conductor. His instrumental works of the early 1920s include the Octet for Wind Instruments (1923), Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (1924), Piano Sonata (1924), and the Serenade in A for piano (1925). These pieces combine a neoclassical approach to style with what seems a self- conscious severity of line and texture. Though the dry urbanity of this approach is softened in such later instrumental pieces as the Violin Concerto in D Major (1931), Concerto for Two Solo Pianos (1932-5), and the Concerto in E-flat (or Dum­barton Oaks concerto) for 16 wind instruments (1938), a certain cool detachment persists. Once Stravinsky left Russia and gained international recognition, he became a musical chameleon, indulging in the pluralism of styles so fashionable in the twentieth century outside Russia. It is not possible to decide how far Stravinsky led and created a number of musical fashions or how far he shrewdly anticipated fashions already in the making. But, again like several other Russian emigres, once having left Russia he seems to have largely lost his Russianness, This trait was reflected, but with even greater originality, in the latter half of the twentieth century by Alfred Schnittke (see below).

But, especially after his religious conversion in 1926, the mystical strain in Russian art can again be seen in Stravinsky's work. A religious theme can be detected in such major works as the operatic oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927), which uses a libretto in Latin, and the cantata Symphony of Psalms (1930), an overtly sacred work that is based on biblical texts. Religious feeling is also evident in the ballets Apollon musagиte (1928) and Persephone (1934), and the Russian element in Stravin­sky's music occasionally re-emerged during this period: the ballet The Fairy's Kiss (1928) is based on music by Tchai­kovsky, and the Symphony of Psalms has some of the antique austerity of Russian Orthodox chant, despite its Latin text.

The Mid-Twentieth Century: Tradition, Innovation, and Politics

The traditional aspect of Russian music was consciously fostered and promoted by the Soviet regime, beginning from the political clampdown on culture in the late 1920s and coming to a head during the following decade in Joseph Stalin's insistence on so-called socialist realism in musical style and content — that music should be understandable by and appeal directly to the so-called masses, that it should be upbeat and cheering in its effect, and that it should celebrate the wonders of modern Russia, This meant in practice that com­posers were afraid, except in closet composition, to pursue the new avenues opened up elsewhere in Europe and America, or to allow themselves to be part of the revolution in established musical methodology; but, at the same time, it made them pursue and use existing traditional elements, elements already in their blood.

The effects of political control were both good and bad. The demise of the aristocracy presented the socialist regime with the challenge of creating a new audience. This the politicians turned to their favour, and the development of orchestras, conservatories, local schools of music, ballet companies, and other aspects of the performing arts - as in sport - offered an outlet for and an encouragement of the creative spirit and energies that might otherwise have sought other outlets; they created a sense of pride, and at the same time offered a sort of bread and circuses syndrome, an alternative world for the governed to enter into as an escape from their surrounding realities.

Once the socialist state had been structured and established, it is significant that, unlike so many western governments, the country's leaders realized the importance of the arts as a method of channelling the creativity of the governed classes, of creating social cohesion, and as a tool of cultural imperi­alism. One positive feature of state control was that perfor­mers were encouraged to follow the strictest disciplinary regimes and were offered the highest quality of technical teaching in the conservatories. Once established, the best artists could be assured of a high level of material security provided by the state. Among the great twentieth-century performers to emerge from this training were David Oistrakh, the world-renowned Soviet violin virtuoso acclaimed for his exceptional technique and tone production; Mstislav Rostro- povich, conductor, pianist, and one of the greatest cellists of tlie twentieth century; Vladimir Horowitz, Russian-born American virtuoso pianist in the Romantic tradition, cele­brated for his flawless technique and an almost orchestral quality of tone; violinist Gidon Kremer; pianists Svyatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels; and singer Galina Vishnevskaya.

On the other hand, the individuality of artistic creation was sapped by the developing political agenda. Composers in particular were not free to express themselves or their response to life around them, and in the earlier part of the century, not a few emigrated, while there was still a chance to get out. Even later, some performers made a break to the West, both in search of wider opportunities and acknowledging their re­sponsibility as iconic figures to protest against the political regime. Among these was Rostropovich - who announced his decision not to return to Russia from a tour overseas in 1975 and was deprived of citizenship in 1978, a ruling reversed in 1990 — and Dmitry Shostakovich's son, Maxim. From the mid- 1980s, w^rhen Mikhail Gorbachev's reform policies eased re­strictions on Soviet artists, many of Russia's emigres, such as Rostropovich and Horowitz, made triumphant returns.

Sergey Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Aram Khachaturian each reacted in differing ways to socialist strictures, but all three composers chose to remain in the Soviet Union.

The life and work of Prokofiev (1891-1953) nicely illustrate some of the themes already touched on - the stimulus and freedom of exile abroad combined with an almost mystical longing for the home country; the balance of traditional Russian and cosmopolitan musical elements; and an intimate relationship with the politics of his day.

Prokofiev initially welcomed the 1917 Revolution as a harbinger of social and national renewal, and his output in that year was prolific: he composed two sonatas, the Violin

Concerto No. 1 in D Major, the Classical Symphony, and the choral work Seven, They Are Seven; he began the magnificent Piano Concerto No. 3 in С Major; and he planned a new opera, The Love for Three Oranges. Stranded in the Caucasus by the civil war, he eventually decided to leave Russia and spent the next decade touring Japan, the United States, and western Europe, performing and writing. While living abroad Prokofiev was a modernist like Stravinsky, avidly seeking musical innovation.

But although Prokofiev enjoyed material well-being, success with the public, and contact with outstanding figures of western culture, in 1932 he returned to Russia for good. As the 1930s developed he gradually adapted to the new condi­tions and became one of the leading figures of Soviet culture, adopting a more conservative, accessible idiom in conformity with Soviet expectations. The outbreak of the Second World War sharpened Prokofiev's national and patriotic feelings. Regardless of the difficulties of the war years, he composed with remarkable assiduity, even when the evacuation of Mos­cow in 1941 made it necessary for him to move from one place to another until he was able to return in 1944. The crowning works of his Soviet period were the ballet Romeo and Juliet (1935-6), the cantata Aleksandr Nevsky (1939; adapted from the music that he had written for Sergey Eisenstein's film of the same name), and the operatic interpretation (1942) of Tol­stoy's classic novel War and Peace. The realistic and epical traits of his art became more clearly defined at this time, and the synthesis of traditional tonal and melodic means with the stylistic innovations of twentieth-century music was more fully realized.

But Prokofiev's relationship with the authorities was not always easy, despite his organizational work for the

Composers' Union: in 1948, along with other Soviet compo­sers, he was censured by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party for "formalism". After his death in 1953, however, his popularity rose once again, and in 1957 he was posthumously awarded the Soviet Union's highest honour, the Lenin Prize, for his Symphony No, 7.

Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975) is renowned for his 15 symphonies, numerous chamber works, and concerti, many of them written under the pressures of government-imposed standards of Soviet art. Some uphold the Soviet view of the composer as a sincere communist; others view him as a closet dissident. As in literature and the other arts, the cultural climate in the mid-1920s in the Soviet Union was remarkably free, and so Shostakovich was able to write compositions such as Symphony No. 1, of which the stylistic roots and influences were numerous. He continued to openly experi­ment with avant-garde trends until the late 1920s, when Joseph Stalin fastened an iron hand on Soviet culture. In music a direct and popular style was demanded. Avant-garde music and jazz were officially banned in 1932, and for a while even the stylistically unproblematic Tchaikovsky was out of favour, owing to his quasi-official status in tsarist Russia. Shostakovich did not experience immediate official displeasure, but when it came it was devastating. It has been said that Stalin's anger at what he heard when he attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936 precipitated the official condemnation of the opera and of its creator. The opera was not performed again until the cultural thaw in the 1960s.

Shostakovich was bitterly attacked in the official press, and both the opera and the still unperformed Symphony No. 4 (1935-6) were withdrawn. The composer's next major work was his Symphony No. 5 (1937), which was described in the press as "a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism", A trivial, dutifully "optimistic" work might have been expected: what emerged was compounded largely of serious, even sombre and elegiac music, presented with a compelling directness that scored an immediate success with both the public and the authorities.

With his Symphony No. 5 Shostakovich forged the style that he used in his subsequent compositions. Whereas the earlier symphony had been a sprawling work, founded upon a free proliferation of melodic ideas, the first movement of Sym­phony No. 5 was marked by melodic concentration and classical form. This single-mindedness is reflected elsewhere in Shostakovich's work in his liking for the monolithic bar­oque structures of the fugue and chaconne, each of which grows from, or is founded upon, the constant repetition of a single melodic idea.

While Shostakovich's works written during the mid-1940s contain some of his best music - especially the Symphony No. 8 (1943), the Piano Trio (1944), and the Violin Con­certo No. 1 (1947-8) - the prevailing seriousness, even grimness, of these works led to his second fall from official grace. Like many other Russian artists, he suffered repression when, at the beginning of the Cold War, the Soviet author­ities attempted to exert greater control over art. In Moscow in 1948, at a now notorious conference presided over by the Soviet theoretician Andrey Zhdanov, the leading figures of Soviet music, including Shostakovich, were attacked and disgraced. As a result, the quality of Soviet composition slumped in the next few years.

From the time of Stalin's death in 1953 Shostakovich was mostly left to pursue his creative career unhampered by official interference. The composer had visited the United States in 1949, and in 1958 he made an extended tour of western Europe, including Italy (where he had already been elected an honorary member of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome) and Great Britain, where he received an honorary doctorate of music at the University of Oxford. In 1966 he was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal.

Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) was a professor at both the Gnesin State Musical and Pedagogical Institute in Moscow and at the Moscow Conservatory. As a young composer, he was influenced by contemporary western music, though in his later works this influence was supplanted by a growing ap­preciation of folk traditions, not only those of his Armenian forebears, but also those of Georgia, Russia, Turkey, and Azerbaijan.

In 1948, along with Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Khacha­turian was accused by the Central Committee of the Commu­nist Party of bourgeois tendencies in his music. He admitted his guilt and was restored to prominence, writing a highly tuneful song in praise of Stalin, After Stalin's death in 1953, however, Khachaturian publicly condemned the Central Committee's accusation, which was formally rescinded in 1958. He was named People's Artist of the Soviet Union in 1954 and was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1959.

Khachaturian wrote music that appealed to the masses, music that glitters with all the traditional Russian expertise in orchestration, orientalism, rhythm, and tunefulness. He is best known for his Piano Concerto (1936) and his ballets Gayane (1942), which includes the popular, stirring "Sabre Dance", and Spartacus (1954).

The Late- and Post-Soviet Period

The best-known composers of the late- and post-Soviet period include Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Alfred Schnittke. In the early 1990s Gubaidulina and Schnittke moved to Germany, where they joined other Russian emigres.

Of these, Schnittke (1934-1998) achieved the most popu­larity and fame in the West. Virtually unknown outside the Soviet bloc until the mid-1980s, Schnittke rather suddenly acquired a large western following through the efforts of a number of prominent Russian musicians, including Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Gidon Kremer, Yury Bashmet, and Mstislav Rostropovich. A postmodernist Russian composer, he created serious, dark-toned musical works characterized by abrupt juxtapositions of radically different, often contradictory, styles, an approach that came to be known as "polystylism". Like Shostakovich, Schnittke intermingled disjointed elements within a single work, but his combinations were far more jarring — an offhand Beethoven quotation, a distorted folk song, fragments of a medieval chant, and passages of fero­ciously dense, dissonant serialism might appear within the space of a few minutes.

In the Soviet period Schnittke was required to produce many works in easily digestible socialist realist style, particularly film scores, of which he wrote more than 60 between 1961 and 1984. His more demanding experimental works were viewed with official disfavour. Schnittke's works embraced a wide range of genres and include seven symphonies, numerous string concerti, a piano concerto, the oratorio Nagasaki (1958), six ballets, much choral and vocal music, and arrange­ments of works by Shostakovich, Alban Berg, and Scott Joplin. His best-known works include the Concerto Grosso No. I (1977) and the Violin Concerto No. 4 (1984), for which the violinist was instructed to mime the cadenza rather than actually play it.

Schnittke's work is ingenious in the extreme, but has some­thing of the feeling of an objective commentary on twentieth- century disintegration of musical tradition. He emigrated to Germany after spending the most difficult years of his creative life in Russia. He alone of all the Russian composers men­tioned in this chapter does not appear to illustrate any of the characteristic qualities of Russian music. But though in prac­tice he can be said to be a Russian composer, his ancestry is Latvian and German.

Folk and Pop

In the nineteenth century the Orthodox Church forbade the presence of musical instruments, including organs, in churches and frowned on their use elsewhere. Yet traditional folk music continued to exist, and in the second half of the twentieth ccntury the socialist regime encouraged the creation of tradi­tional folk groups. These musicians used the many and varied instruments that one would expect to find in a crossroads culture. Folk instruments across the world are usually found to be specific examples of generic types. Russia is no exception. In addition to the ubiquitous balalaika and button accordion, among these instruments are the lira (hurdy-gurdy), gudok (bowed instrument), gusli (plucked instrument), rozhok (reed trumpet or horn), kalyuka (flute), dudka (flute), kugikli (pan­pipes), domra (lute), volynka (bagpipes), and various percus­sion instruments. Folk instrument manufacture flourishes in Russia today. Folk song always has been an integral part of

Russian daily life, and Russia's folk choirs, in a tradition dating back to the later nineteenth century, are justly famous. Folk music, botb instrumental and vocal, was officially sup­ported by the state from the time of the revolution as being valuably proletarian. In the 1960s it was used in an attempt to oppose the spread of western-style pop and rock, suppressed under Stalin.

Nevertheless, pop and rock music continued to exist. Parti­cularly notable were two balladeers. The raspy-voiced actor and musician Vladimir Vysotsky, whose songs circulated on thousands of bootleg cassettes throughout the 1960s and 1970s, was perhaps the best-known performer in the Soviet Union until his death in 1980. Georgian Bulat Okudzhava had an almost equally loyal following. Jazz flourished openly with the sanction of the Soviet authorities, and evolved into one of the country's most popular musical forms. The Ganelin Trio, perhaps Russia's most famous jazz ensemble, toured western countries throughout the 1980s. The pop singer Alia Puga- cheva also drew large audiences in the 1970s. As the rigidity of the regime relaxed in fits and starts in the 1960s and 1970s, such groups made a name for themselves outside Russia thanks to their appearances at festivals, including those orga­nized by WOMAD (World of Music Arts and Dance).

From the end of the Stalin era up to the 1970s, rock musicians in Russia were content to reproduce not only the styles but the songs of British and American models; however, by the early 1980s there emerged a very strong culture of dissidence and counterculture, which expressed itself through western pop and rock. Russian rock found its native voice in the band Akvarium ("Aquarium"), led by charismatic song­writer and vocalist Boris Grebenshikov. The band's "con­certs", played in living rooms and dormitories, were often broken up by the police, and, like Vysotsky, the band circu­lated its illegal music on bootleg cassettes, becoming the legendary catalyst of an underground counterculture and an inspiration to other notable bands, such as Kino.

After the fall of communism, the loss of Soviet funding and support undermined the creation of new music in Russia as well as in the former satellite states. Nevertheless, rock and pop music continued to flourish.

8

THE VISUAL ARTS AND FILM

The Visual Arts

Like music, the visual arts in Russia were slower to develop along European lines than was literature. With the exception of the portraitist Dmitry Levitsky, no great Russian painters emerged in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the 1830s the Russian Academy of Arts (which had been founded in 1757) began sending Russian painters abroad for training. Among the most gifted of these were Aleksandr Ivanov and Karl Bryullov, both of whom were known for Romantic historical canvases. A truly national tradition of painting did not begin, however, until the 1870s with the appearance of the "Itinerants". Although their work is not well known outside Russia, the serene landscapes of Isaak Levitan, the expressive portraits of Ivan Kramskoy and Uya Repin, and the socially oriented genre paintings of Vladimir Makovsky, Va- sily Perov, and Repin arguably deserve an international re­putation.

As with literature, there was a burst of creativity in the visual arts in the early twentieth century, with Russian painters playing a major role in the European art scene. Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910) was the first powerful personality to emerge in the figurative arts in Russia since the Muscovite period. Above all he was a brilliant draughtsman; his work pointed the way to cubism and Futurism, and in this way prepared the merging of Russian art into the mainstream of the European move­ments before its flowering in suprematism and constructivism, when for the first time Russians emerged as leaders of the European avant-garde.

The early twentieth century was marked by a turning away from academic realism to primitivism, symbolism, and abstract painting. Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova looked for a new style that could combine the new aesthetic achievements of the West with inspiration from native Russian folk art. Their strip-like and often abstract formulations, to which they gave the name of Rayonism, date from 1911. Both Larionov and Goncharova were members of the Jack of Diamonds group of artists, who advocated the most advanced European avant-garde trends in their own painting and exhibited works by European artists such as Albert Gleizes and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) created his highly influential lyrical abstractions during this period, while Kasimir Mal- evich (1878-1935) began to explore the rigid, geometric abstraction of suprematism.

Suprematism, originated by Malevich in about 1913, was the first movement to advocate pure geometrical abstraction in painting. He constantly strove to produce pure, cerebral compositions, repudiating all sensuality and representation in art. Malevich explained that "the appropriate means of

NATALYA GONCHAROVA (1881-1962)

Russian painter, sculptor, and stage designer

The daughter of an aristocratic family, Goncharova studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Moscow. After an early preoccupation with sculpture, in 1904 she began seriously to paint, experimenting with the cubist and Futurist styles during the next few years. It was as a synthesis of these movements that Goncharova and Larionov (see below), whom she later married, conceived of Rayonism (founded c. 1910), which sought to portray in two dimensions the spatial qualities of reflected light. Both Goncharova and Larionov participated in the first jack of Diamonds exhibition of avant-garde Russian art in Moscow in 1910, In 1912 Goncharova took part in Roger Fry's post- Impressionist exhibition in London and in the second exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich.

Goncharova earned a high reputation in Moscow for her scenery and costume designs for the Kamerny Theatre. When she and Larionov moved to Paris in 1914 she became a designer for Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, her vibrant, Byzantine-inspired designs for the ballet i_e Coq d'or being especially notable.

representation is always the one which gives fullest possible expression to feeling as such and which ignores the familiar appearance of objects". In his first suprematist works, which consisted of simple geometrical forms such as squares, circles, and crosses, he limited his palette to black, white, red, green, and blue. By 1916-17 he was presenting more complex shapes (fragments of circles, tiny triangles); extending his colour range to include brown, pink, and mauve; increasing the complexity

MIKHAIL FYODOROVICH LARIONOV (1881-1964)

Russian-born French painter and stage designer

Larionov was a pioneer of pure abstraction in painting, most notably through his founding, with Goncharova, of the Rayonist movement. His early work was influenced by Impressionism and symbolism, but with the painting Qoss (1909) he introduced a non-representational style conceived as a synthesis of cubism. Futurism, and Orphism. In the Rayonist manifesto of 1913 he asserted the principle of the reduction of form in figure and landscape compositions into rays of reflected light. Larionov also achieved renown as a designer for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

of spatial relationships; and introducing the illusion of the three-dimensional into his painting. His experiments culmin­ated in the White on White paintings of 1917-18, in which colour was eliminated, and the faintly outlined square barely emerged from its background. Finally, at a one-man exhibition of his work in 1919, Malevich announced the end of the suprematist movement. His own artistic career was doomed when Soviet politicians imposed socialist realism. He died in poverty and oblivion.

Suprematism had a few adherents among lesser-known artists, such as Ivan Klyun, Ivan Puni, and Olga Rozanova. While not affiliated with the movement, Kandinsky showed the influence of suprematism in the geometrization of his forms after 1920. This geometrical style, together with other abstract trends in Russian art, was transmitted by way of Kandinsky and the Russian artist El Lissitzky to Germany, particularly to tlie Bauhaus school of architecture and applied art, in the early 1920s.

Other Russian artists of the early twentieth century sub­scribed to constructivism. Based on earlier experiments by Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), constructivism favoured strict geometric forms and crisp graphic design. The name of the movement derives from the Realist Manifesto jointly written by the expatriate Russian artists Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo; one of the directives of the manifesto was "to construct" art. Because of their admiration for machines and technology, functionalism, and modern industrial ma­terials such as plastic, steel, and glass, members of the movement were also called artist-engineers. Many constructivists became actively involved in the task of creat­ing living spaces and forms of daily life; they designed furniture, ceramics, and clothing, and they worked in gra­phic design and architecture.

One of the most prominent constructivists was Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891—1956), who favoured a completely ab­stract, highly geometric style using a ruler and compass. His earlier geometric paintings were made in response to the famous White on White painting of his rival, Malevich, but in 1919 Rodchenko began to make three-dimensional con­structions out of wood, metal, and other materials, again using geometric shapes in dynamic compositions; some of these hanging sculptures w^rere, in effect, mobiles. In the 1920s he abandoned painting altogether, since he wanted to forge closer ties between the arts and industry and to produce works that constructivists considered more appropriate in the daily lives of worker-consumers. He thus took up such art forms as photography; poster, book, and typographic design; furniture design; and stage and motion-picture set design. He held various government offices concerned with art-related pro­jects, helped to establish art museums, and taught art.

The second major influence in the constructivist movement was El Lissitzky (1890-1941). In 1919 Lissitzky began to work on a series of abstract geometric paintings that he named Proun, an acronym for the Russian words translated as "Projects for the Affirmation of the New". In 1921 he became professor at the state art school in Moscow, but he left his country at the end of that year when the Soviet government turned against modern art. Based in Hannover between 1925 and 1928, Lissitzky co-founded a number of periodicals propagating the most progressive artistic tendencies of the 1920s. In the winter of 1928-9 he returned to Moscow, where he continued to be an innovative force. His experiments in spatial construction led him to devise new techniques in exhibiting, printing, photomontage, and architecture, which have had much influence in western Europe.

By the end of the 1920s the same pressures that con­fronted experimental writing were brought to bear on the visual arts. With the imposition of socialist realism, the great painters of the early 1920s found themselves increasingly isolated. Eventually, their works were removed from mu­seums, and in many cases the artists themselves were almost completely forgotten and a good number went into exile. Countless pictures of Vladimir Lenin were produced - for example, Isaak Brodsky's Lenin at the Smolny (1930) - as were a seemingly unending string of rose-tinted socialist realist depictions of everyday life bearing titles such as The Tractor Drivers' Supper (1951). During this period, a number of Russia's leading twentieth-century artists, parti­cularly Marc Chagall (1887-1985) and Kandinsky, pro­duced major works outside the country.

Marc Chagall's poetic, whimsical paintings were based on his own personal mythology; his work defies classification within any one group or trend. Born in 1887 in Vitebsk (now in Belarus), Chagall in 1907 went to St Petersburg, where he studied intermittently for three years, at one point under the stage designer I.йon Bakst. Characteristic works by Chagall from this period of early maturity are the nightmarish The Dead Man (1908), which depicts a roof violinist (a favourite motif), and My Fiancйe with Black Gloves (1909), in which a portrait becomes an occasion for the artist to experiment with arranging black and white.

In 1910 Chagall left Russia for Paris, where over four years he came into contact with avant-garde poets and a number of young painters destined to become famous, including the expressionist Chaim Soutine, the abstract colourist Robert Delaunay, and the cubists Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Lйger, and Andrй Lhote. In such company he was encouraged to experiment and take risks, and he responded to the stimulus by rapidly developing the poetic and seemingly irrational tendencies he had begun to display in Russia. At the same time, he gave up the sombre palette he had employed at home. This period is often considered Chagall's best phase. Representative works are Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers (1912), I and the Village (1911), Hommage а Apollinaire (1911-12), Calvary (1912), The Fiddler (1912), and Paris Through the Window (1913). In these pictures Chagall was already essentially the artist he would continue to be for the next 60 years. His colours, although occasionally thin, were beginning to show the characteristic complexity and resonance he would eventually achieve. The often whimsical figurative elements, frequently upside down, are distributed on the canvas in an arbitrary fashion, producing an effect that

LЙON BAKST (1866-1924)

Russian artist who revolutionized theatrical design both in scenery and in costume

Bakst attended the Imperial Academy of Arts at St Petersburg but was expelled after painting a too- realistic "Pietа". He returned to Russia after completing his studies in Paris and became a court painter. He was a co-founder with Sergey Diaghilev of the journal Mir /skusstra ("World of Art") in 1899. Bakst began to design scenery in 1900, first at the Hermitage court theatre and then at the imperial theatres.

in 1906 Bakst went to Paris, where he began designing stage sets and costumes for Diaghilev's newly formed ballet company, the Ballets Russes. The first Diaghilev ballet for which he designed decor was Oйopвtre (1909), and he was chief set designer thereafter, working on the ballets Scheherazade and Carnaval (both 1910), Le Spectre de la rose and N arasse (both 191 I), L'Apres-midi d'un faune and Dof>hn/s et Ch/oй (both 1912), and Les Papillons (1914). Bakst achieved international fame with his sets and costumes, in which he combined bold designs and sumptuous colours with minutely refined details to convey an atmosphere of picturesque, exotic orientalism. In 1919 he settled permanently in Paris. His designs for a London production of Pyotr liyich Tchaikovsky's Sfeeping Beauty in 1921 are regarded as his greatest work.

sometimes resembles a film montage and suggests the inner space of a reverie. The general atmosphere of these works can imply a Yiddish joke, a Russian fairy tale, or a vaudeville turn. Often the principal character is the romantically handsome,

curly-haired young painter himself. Memories of childhood and of Vitebsk were major sources of imagery for Chagall during this period.

Initially enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution of Oc­tober 1917, Chagall returned briefly to his native Vitebsk, where he launched ambitious projects for a local art academy and museum; but after two and a half years, marked by increasingly bitter aesthetic and political quarrels with the faculty of the art academy, he gave up and moved to Moscow. There he turned his attention for a while to the stage, produ­cing sets and costumes. In 1922, however, he left Russia for good. Until the outbreak of the Second World War he travelled extensively, working in Brittany in 1924, in southern France in 1926, in Palestine in 1931 (as preparation for his Bible etch­ings), and, between 1932 and 1937, in the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, and Italy. His reputation as a modern master was confirmed by a large retrospective exhibition in 1933 at the Kunsthalle in Basel, Switzerland. The outbreak of war, and the Nazi menace for European Jewry, forced Chagall to move yet again, this time, in July 1941, with his family to the United States. Adolf Hitler's rise to power had changed his painterly visions, as reflected in the powerful White Crucifixion (1938), in which Jewish and Christian symbols are conflated in a depiction of German Jews terrorized by a Nazi mob; the crucified Christ at the centre of the composition is wrapped in a tallith, a Jewish prayer shawl.

Chagall was prolific for the last 30 years of his life, con­tinuing to paint on canvas while also designing theatre sets - he completed a number of projects for the Paris Opera and the New York Metropolitan Opera, including his highly regarded set and costume designs for the 1967 production of Mozart's The Magic Flute- and in the late 1950s mastering the difficult art of stained glass. He designed a number of windows at international locations such as the Cathedral of Metz in France (1958-60), the synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem (1960-1), the United Nations building in New York (1964), and the Art Institute of Chicago (1977), His stained-glass windows are often considered to be some of the strongest work of his late career; the medium's capacity for brilliant colour was perfectly suited to his magical imagery,

Chagall's repertory of images, including massive bouquets, melancholy clowns, flying lovers, fantastic animals, biblical prophets, and fiddlers on roofs, helped to make him one of the most popular major innovators of the twentieth-century School of Paris. He presented dreamlike subject matter in rich colours and in a fluent, painterly style that, while reflecting an awareness of artistic movements such as expressionism, cub­ism, and even abstraction, remained invariably personal. Although critics sometimes complained of facile sentiments, uneven quality, and an excessive repetition of motifs in the artist's large total output, there is agreement that at its best it reached a level of visual metaphor seldom attempted in mod­ern art.

Perhaps the most influential of all Russian painters to work primarily outside Russia was Vasily Kandinsky. Having tra­velled widely in his youth, when he decided in his late twenties that, rather than take up a professorship in jurisprudence, he would become a painter, nothing seemed more natural to him than to pack his bags and take a train to Germany, a seedbed of artistic activity and learning.

It took many further years of study and familiarization with various artistic traditions and trends before the emergence of Kandinsky's strikingly personal style. His instincts had always been to abstraction in art, however: he later recalled that, as an adolescent, he had a strong conviction that each colour had a mysterious life of its own. Gradually, the many influences he had undergone coalesced. His impulse to eliminate subject matter altogether stemmed from his desire for a kind of painting in which colours, lines, and shapes, freed from the distracting business of depicting recognizable objects, might evolve into a visual "language" capable - as was, for him, the abstract "language" of music-of expressing general ideas and evoking deep emotions.

The vision was not, of course, entirely new, and in these years just before the First World War Kandinsky was by no means alone in his attack on figurative art. Between 1910 and 1914 the list of pioneer abstract artists included many fine painters, working under the umbrella of a variety of move­ments. But if Kandinsky does not quite deserve to be called, as he often is, the "founder" of non-figurative painting, he remains a pioneer of the first importance.

In his Blue Mountain (1908) the evolution toward non- representation was already clearly under way: the forms are schematic, the colours non-naturalistic, and the general effect that of a dream landscape. By 1910 his Improvisation X/V was already, as its somewhat musical title suggests, practically abstract; with the 1911 Encircled, he had definitely developed a kind of painting that, though not just decoration, has no discernible point of departure in the depiction of recognizable objects. After that came such major works as With the Black Arch, Black Lines, and Autumn-, in such pictures, done between 1912 and 1914 in a slashing, splashing, dramatic style that anticipates the New York abstract expressionism of the 1950s, most art historians see the peak of the artist's achievement.

On the outbreak of the First World War Kandinsky returned to Russia, where, in 1917, he married a Moscow woman, Nina Andreyevskaya, and hoped to reintegrate himself into Russian life. His intention was encouraged by the new Soviet govern­ment, which at first showed itself anxious to win the favour and services of avant-garde artists. In 1918 he became a professor at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts, and further official appointments followed. But by the early 1920s, when it became clear that the Soviet government was veering away from avant-garde art towards socialist realism, he and his wife left Moscow for Berlin.

Invited to teach at the Bauhaus school of architecture and applied art, Kandinsky evolved in the general direction of geometric abstraction, but with a dynamism and a taste for detail-crowded pictorial space that recall his earlier sweeping- gesture technique. That Kandinsky was keenly interested in theory during these years is evident from his publication in 1926 of his second important treatise, Point and Line to Plane. In his first treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), he had emphasized in particular the supposed expressiveness of colours, comparing yellow, for example, to the aggressive, allegedly earthly sound of a trumpet and comparing blue to the allegedly heavenly sound of the pipe organ. Now, in the same spirit, he analysed the supposed effects of the abstract elements of drawing, interpreting a horizontal line, for example, as cold and a vertical line as hot.

His persona] trajectory continued to be directed in part by political developments. Although he had been a German citizen since 1928, when the Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close in 1933 he emigrated to Paris. During this final period his painting, which he began to prefer to call "concrete" rather than "abstract", became to some extent a synthesis of the organic manner of the pre-First World War Munich period and the geometric manner of the Bauhaus period. The visual language that he had been aiming at since at least 1910 turned into collections of signs that look like almost-decipherable messages written in pictographs and hieroglyphs; many of the signs resemble aquatic larvae, and now and then there is a figurative hand or a lunar human face. Typical works are Violet Dominant, Dominant Curve, Fifteen, Moderation and Tempered Elan. The production of such works was accom­panied by the writing of essays in which the artist stressed the alleged failure of modern scientific positivism and the need to perceive what he termed "the symbolic character of physical substances". Kandinsky died in 1944. His influence on twentieth-century art, often filtered through the work of more accessible painters, was profound.

The visual arts took longer to recover from the Stalinist years than did literature. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that a new group of artists, all of whom worked "under­ground", appeared. Major artists included Ernst Neizvestny, Ilya Kabakov, Mikhail Shemyakin, and Erik Bulatov. They employed techniques as varied as primitivism, hyperrealism, grotesque, and abstraction, but they shared a common distaste for the canons of socialist realism.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, and thanks to the liberalization policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, artistic experimentation began a resurgence within Russia, and many Russian painters en­joyed successful exhibitions both at home and abroad. In the late 1980s the greatest works of Russian art of the early twentieth century were again made available to the public. But by this time a large number of Russian artists had emigrated, and many became well known on the world art scene. Particularly notable was the team of Vitaly Komar and

Alex Melamid, who became internationally recognized in the 1990s for a project in which they systematically - and ironic­ally - documented what people throughout the world said they valued most in a painting. The early years of the twenty-first century saw the extensive re-emergence of contemporary Russian artists on the world art market scene, often fetching very high prices for figurative art, perhaps in part thanks to the emergence of an industrial and commercial nouveau riche in Russia.

Film

A glance at the development of Russia's film industry draws into focus some of the recurring issues in Russian culture, such as the relationship between art and politics, the advantages and disadvantages of state-sponsored artistic activity, and the native Russian vs. imported western debate.

Before the October 1917 Revolution, Russia for all practical purposes had no native film industry. In the industrialized nations of the West, motion pictures had first been accepted as a form of cheap recreation and leisure for the working class, but in pre-revolutionary Russia the working class was com­posed largely of former serfs too poor to support a native industry, and so the small movie business that did develop was dominated by foreign interests and foreign films. The first native Russian company was not founded until 1908, and by the time of the revolution there were perhaps 20 more; but even these were small, importing all their technical equipment and film stock from Germany and France.

From Russia's entry into the First World War in August 1914, its film industry came under government control. Since foreign films could no longer be imported, the tsarist govern­ment established the Skobelev Committee to stimulate domes­tic production and produce propaganda in support of the regime; when the tsar fell in March 1917 the Provisional Government reorganized it to produce anti-tsarist propagan­da. When the Bolsheviks inherited the committee eight months later, they transformed it into the Cinema Committee of the People's Commissariat of Education.

The potential of film to communicate quickly and effectively was quickly seized upon by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the first political leader of the twentieth century to recognize the importance of film as propaganda and control. More speci­fically, Lenin saw the potential of film to unite the huge, disparate nation over which the Bolsheviks, then a minority party of some 200,000 members, had assumed leadership. He declared: "The cinema is for us the most important of the arts." His government gave top priority to the rapid develop­ment of the Soviet film industry, which was nationalized in August 1919 and put under the direct authority of Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.

With little to build upon (most of the pre-revolutionary producers had fled to Europe, taking their equipment and film stock with them), one of the first acts of the Cinema Commit­tee was to found a professional film school in Moscow to train directors, technicians, and actors for the cinema. The Ali- Union State Institute of Cinematography was the first such school in the world and is still among the most respected. Initially it trained people in the production of agitki, existing newsreels re-edited for the purpose of agitation and propa­ganda (agitprop). The agitki were transported on specially equipped agit-trains and agit-steamers to the provinces, where they were exhibited to generate support for the revolution.

During the Russian Civil War (t 918-20) nearly all Soviet films were agitki of some sort, and most of the great directors of the Soviet silent cinema were trained in that form.

An outstanding teacher at the school was Lev Kuleshov, who formulated the groundbreaking editing process called montage, which he conceived of as an expressive process whereby dissimilar images could be linked together to create non-literal or symbolic meaning. As a teacher and theorist Kuleshov deeply influenced an entire generation of Soviet directors.

Two of Kuleshov's most brilliant students were Sergey Eisenstein and Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin. Eisenstein, one of the great pioneering geniuses of the modern cinema, approached his art from an intellectual angle, formulating a modernist theory of editing based on the psychology of per­ception and Marxist dialectic. His first theoretical manifesto, "The Montage of Attractions", was published in the radical journal Lef: the article advocated assaulting an audience with calculated emotional shocks for the purpose of agitation.

In 1924 Eisenstein produced his first film, Strike, a semi- documentary representation of the brutal suppression of a strike by tsarist factory owners and police. This was the first revolutionary mass-film of the new Soviet state. Conceived as an extended montage of shock stimuli, the film concludes with the now famous sequence in which the massacre of the strikers and their families is intercut with shots of cattle being slaugh­tered in an abattoir. The film was an immediate success, and Eisenstein was next commissioned to direct a film celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the failed 1905 Revolution against tsarism. Originally intended to provide a panorama of the entire event, the project eventually came to focus on a single representative episode - the mutiny of the battleship

Potemkin and the massacre of the citizens of the port of Odessa by tsarist troops. Battleship Potemkin (1925) emerged as one of the most important and influential films ever made, especially in Eisenstein's use of montage. Although agitational to the core, Battleship Potemkin is a work of extraordinary pictorial beauty and great elegance of form. With the addition of a stirring revolutionary score by the German Marxist composer Edmund Meisel, the appeal of Battleship Potemkin became nearly irresistible, and, when exported in early 1926, it made Eisenstein world-famous.

Although more state commissions followed in the late 1920s and early 1930s, increasingly Eisenstein's work drew critical disapproval. Stalin himself despised Eisenstein because he was an intellectual and a Jew: only the director's international stature prevented him from being publicly purged. Instead, Stalin used the Soviet state-subsidy apparatus to foil Eisen­stein's projects and attack his principles at every turn, a situation that resulted in the director's failure to complete another film until Alexander Nevsky was commissioned in 1938. With a score by Sergey Prokofiev, the film became a classic. Eisenstein's later films included the operatically sty­lized Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II (1944-6), a veiled critique of Stalin's autocracy.

Pudovkin developed a new theory of montage, but one based on cognitive linkage rather than dialectical collision. He maintained that "the film is not shot, but built, built up from the separate strips of celluloid that are its raw material". His films are more personal than Eisenstein's: the epic drama that is the focus of Eisenstein's films exists in Pudovkin's films merely to provide a backdrop for the interplay of human emotions. Pudovkin's major work is Mother (1926), a tale of strike-breaking and terrorism in which a woman loses first her husband and then her son to the opposing sides of the 1905 Revolution, The film was internationally acclaimed for the innovative intensity of its montage, as well as for its emotion and lyricism, Pudovkin's later films included The End of St Petersburg (1927) and The Heir to Genghis Khan (or Storm over Asia; 1928). Although Pudovkin was never persecuted as severely by the Stalinists as Eisenstein, he, too, was publicly charged with formalism for his experimental sound film A Simple Case (1932), which he was forced to release without its sound track. Pudovkin made several more sound films but remains best-known for his silent work.

Two other seminal figures of the Soviet silent era were Aleksandr Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov, whose kino-glaz ("film-eye") theory - that the camera, like the human eye, is best used to explore real life - had a huge impact on the development of documentary film-making and cinema realism in the 1920s. But with the restraints imposed on Soviet film­makers by Stalin's insistence on socialist realism from 1929 onwards, it became impossible for the great film-makers of the post-revolutionary era to produce creative or innovative work.

Soviet cinema went into rapid decline after the Second World War: film production fell from 19 features in 1945 to 5 in 1952. Although Stalin died the following year, the situation did not improve until the late 1950s, when such films as Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying {1957) and Grigory Chukh- rai's Ballad of a Soldier (1959) emerged to take prizes at international film festivals. Some impressive literary adapta­tions were produced during the 1960s (Grigory Kozintsev's Hamlet, 1964; Sergey Bondarchuk's War and Peace, 1965-7), but the most important phenomenon of the decade was the graduation of a whole new generation of Soviet directors from the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, many of them from the non-Russian republics. By far the most brilliant of the new directors were Sergey Paradzhanov and Andrey Tarkovs- ky, who both were later persecuted for the unconventionally of tlieir work, Paradzhanov's greatest film was Shadows of For­gotten Ancestors (1964), a hallucinatory retelling of a Ukrai­nian folk legend of ravishing formal beauty, Tarkovsky created a body of work whose seriousness and symbolic resonance bad a major impact on world cinema - Andrey Rublyov (1966), Solaris (1971), Mirror (1974), Stalker (1979), Nostalgia (1983) - even though it was frequently tampered with by Soviet censors. During the 1970s the policy of socialist realism was again put into practice, so that only two types of films could safely be made - literary adaptations and bytovye, or films of everyday life, such as Vladimir Menshov's Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1980).

Although under the glasnost policy introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev Russian film-makers were free from the diktat of the communist authorities, the industry suffered from drastically reduced state subsidies. The state-controlled film- distribution system also collapsed, and this led to the domin­ance of western films in Russia's theatres. Private investment did not quickly take the place of subsidies, and many in Russia complained that the industry often produced elitist films primarily for foreign film festivals while the public was fed a steady diet of second-rate movies.

Nonetheless, Russian cinema continued to receive interna­tional recognition. Two films - Menshov's Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears and Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun - received the Academy Awards for best foreign-language film, in 1980 and 1994, respectively. The work of Andrey Konch- alovsky, who has plied his craft in Russia as well as in Europe and the United States with features such as Runaway Train (1985) and House of Fools (2002), is also highly regarded. In the late 1990s Aleksandr Sokurov emerged as a director of exceptional talents, gaining international acclaim for Mother and Son (1997) and Russian Ark (2002), the first feature film ever to be shot in a single take.

9

THEATRE AND BALLET

Theatre

Russian drama in the nineteenth century got off to a slow start because of strict government censorship, particularly after 1825. This atmosphere was conducive to the flowering of Romanticism, especially as manifest in patriotic spectacles. Melodrama, Shakespeare, and musical plays were the back­bone of Russian repertory until the 1830s. The best-known plays of the new realistic school were those of Aleksandr Ostrovsky, Nikolay Gogol, and Ivan Turgenev. Until 1883 the imperial theatres, under strict government controls, had a monopoly on productions in Russia's two major cities, Mos­cow and St Petersburg. It was not until the monopolies were rescinded that public theatre was able to expand, although the state troupes, such as the Bolshoi in Moscow, continued to offer the most professional productions.

Theatrical life in Russia was dominated in the first decades of the twentieth century by the directors Konstantin

Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhoid. Just as Russian writers regarded literature as an art of social significance, so Stani­slavsky believed that theatre was a powerful influence on people and that actors should serve as the people's educators. These convictions led in 1898 to the foundation, with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, of a people's theatre, the Moscow Art Theatre (later called the Moscow Academic Art Theatre), which became the arena for his reforms. Nemirovich- Danchenko undertook responsibility for literary and admin­istrative matters, while Stanislavsky was responsible for sta­ging and production.

Disappointed with the initial performances, Stanislavsky reflected that it should be felt there were living characters on stage, the mere external behaviour of the actors being insufficient to create a character's unique inner world. Fighting against the artificial and highly stylized theatrical conventions of the late nineteenth century, Stanislavsky sought instead the reproduction of authentic emotions at every performance. To seek knowledge about human behaviour, he turned to science and began experimenting in developing the first elements of what became known as the Stanislavsky method, his most lasting contribution to the theatre. He turned sharply from the purely external approach to the purely psychological. A play was discussed around the table for months. He became strict and uncompromising in educating actors. He insisted on the integrity and authenticity of performance on stage, repeating for hours during rehearsal his dreaded criticism, "I do not believe you."

A turning point in Russian theatre came with Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko's restaging in 1898 of Anton Che­khov's The Seagull. This new production was a triumph, heralding the birth of the Moscow Art Theatre as a new force in world theatre. In staging the play, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko had discovered a new manner of per­forming which emphasized the ensemble. Stanislavsky felt that, though actors had to have a common training and be capable of an intense inner identification with the characters that they played, they should still remain independent of the role in order to subordinate it to the needs of the play as a whole. The new production of The Seagull was also pivotal for Chekhov. After the failure of the original production in St Petersburg in 1896 Chekhov had resolved never to write another play, but, follow­ing the acclaim he received for Stanislavsky's production, Che­khov went on to write, specially for the Moscow Art Theatre, The Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1903), plays which are still performed across the world today.

Commanding respect from followers and adversaries alike, Stanislavsky became a dominant influence on Russian intel­lectuals of the time. In 1912 he formed the First Studio, where his innovations were adopted by many young actors. In 1918 he undertook the guidance of the Bolshoi Opera Studio, which was later named after him. There in 1922 he staged Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onegin, which was acclaimed as a major reform in opera direction. From 1922 to 1924 the Moscow Art Theatre toured Europe and the United States with Stanislavsky as its administrator, director, and leading actor.

The Stanislavsky method, or system, developed over 40 years. He tried various experiments, focusing much of the time on what he considered the most important attribute of an actor's work - bringing an actor's own past emotions into play in a role. But he was frequently disappointed and dissatisfied with the results of his experiments. He continued nonetheless his search for "conscious means to the subconscious" - that is, the search for the actor's emotions. In 1935 he was taken by tlie modern scientific conception of the interaction of brain and body, and started developing a final technique that he called the "method of physical actions". It taught emotional creativity; it encouraged actors to feel physically and psycho­logically the emotions of the characters that they portrayed at any given moment. The method also aimed at influencing the playwright's construction of plays.

Meyerhold was initially one of Stanislavsky's actors, but he soon broke with his master's insistence on realism and began to formulate his own avant-garde theories of symbolic, or "conditional", theatre. In 1906 he became chief producer at the theatre of Vera Komissarzhevskaya, a distinguished actress of the time, and staged a number of symbolist plays that employed his radical ideas of non-representational theatre. Meyerhold directed his actors to behave in puppet-like, me­chanistic ways, thus introducing into Russia a style of acting that became known as biomechanics.

Meyerhold's unorthodox approach to the theatre led him to break with Komissarzhevskaya in 1908. Thereafter, drawing upon the conventions of commedia dell'arte and oriental theatre, he went on to stage productions in St Petersburg and elsewhere, putting his talent and energy into creating a new theatre for the new state. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, he staged brilliant, inventive productions, both of contemporary drama and of the classics; his greatest artistic success as a director began with Fernand Crommelynck's The Magnificent Cuckold (1920) and ended with his controversial production in 1935 of Aleksandr Pushkin's story "The Queen of Spades".

Although Meyerhold had welcomed the 1917 Revolution, his fiercely individualistic temperament and artistic eccentri­city brought reproach and condemnation from Soviet critics.

In the 1930s he was accused of mysticism and neglect of socialist realism. Refusing to submit to the constraints of artistic uniformity and defending the artist's right to experi­ment, in 1939 he was arrested and imprisoned. Weeks later, his actress wife, Zinaida Raikh, was found brutally murdered in their apartment. Nothing more was heard of him in the West until 1958, when his death in 1942 was announced in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia-, in a later edition the date was changed to 1940.

After Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, the heavy restrictions on Soviet theatre began to relax, signalling a slow, cautious, and intermittent return to experimentation. The scale of the Soviet theatre was gigantic: companies played in more than 50 languages; there were vast numbers of theatres, many with huge and superbly equipped stages; companies of 100 actors or more were not unusual, and they maintained extensive repertoires. Yet the security derived from enormous state subsidies, combined with the vast output of work, tended to give rise to mediocre standards.

So large was the Soviet theatregoing public that the profes­sional theatre could not satisfy the demand for dramatic entertainment, and every encouragement was given to the amateur movement. Most professional theatrical companies accepted responsibility for at least one amateur group, the members of the company giving much time to advising and training it. Amateur companies of outstanding merit were given the title "people's theatre".

In the 1960s the Soviet theatre gradually began to free itself from ideology, placing more emphasis on entertainment value. By the late 1970s one or two of the experimental companies could once more take their place alongside the best in Europe. The Rustaveli Company from Georgia was acclaimed during its visits to Britain in 1979 and 1980. Yury Lyubimov, director of the prestigious Taganka Theatre in Moscow, successfully reproduced his adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel С rime and Punishment in London in 1983 with British actors. In search of even more artistic freedom, he defected to the West the following year.

Theatre companies were afforded creative independence in the late 1980s. Until then, state policy had dictated that at least 50 per cent of a theatre's repertoire had to consist of con­temporary Soviet plays, and at least 25 per cent of Russian classics and plays from the various Soviet states. This period was marked by the establishment of several experimental theatrical groups, as well as by an increase in commercial backing for productions. Works by foreign playwrights that had previously been banned began to be performed, and the government monopoly on theatre effectively came to an end. Labour unions were formed within the industry, and the National Union of Theatrical Leaders was established as an umbrella organization for all unions. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the former Soviet republics sought to establish individual identities in theatre.

Puppet theatre has been another extremely successful area of theatrical performance in modern Russia. The central figure in this genre in the twentieth century was Sergey Obraztsov, a puppet master who effectively established puppetry as an art form in the Soviet Union. In 1931 Obraztsov was chosen by the Soviet government as the first director of the State Central Puppet Theatre, Moscow. His performances displayed marked technical excellence and stylistic discipline. In dozens of tours outside the Soviet Union, notably the 1953 tour of Great Britain and the 1963 tour of the United States, his shows enchanted audiences with classic figures, such as the dancing couple whose tango movements require the skill of seven puppeteers, and the female gypsy who sings bass.

A number of rod-puppet theatres were founded as a result of Obraztsov's tours. The Obraztsov Puppet Theatre (formerly the State Central Puppet Theatre) continues in the twenty-first century to give delightful performances for audiences of all ages. The same can be said for the spectacular presentations of the Moscow State Circus, which has performed throughout the world to great acclaim. Using since 1971 a larger building and renamed the Great Moscow State Circus, it excelled even in the darkest of the Cold "War years.

Ballet

Classical ballet remains in the twenty-first century one of the primary expressions of Russian culture. Ballet was first introduced into Russia in the early eighteenth century, devel­oped to maturity in the following century, and, unlike many other art forms, continued to flourish under Soviet rule. Some of the world's greatest performers, choreographers, theatre designers, and composers of ballet scores have been Russian, and many are still household names, having ac­quired international reputations through defection, emigra­tion, or, in the case of the Ballets Russes, as part of a travelling troupe.

The country's first dedicated ballet school was formed in 1734. Throughout the nineteenth century dancers and cho­reographers, even those of non-Russian origin, worked for the Russian Imperial Theatres and were effectively govern­ment employees. The French-born dancer and choreogra­pher Marius Petipa worked for more than 60 years at

St Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre, and had a profound influence on modern classical Russian ballet. He directed many of the greatest artists in Russian ballet and developed ballets that retain an important position in Russian dance repertoire, including Tchaikovsky's ballets Swan I.ake and The Sleeping Beauty. As in music and the visual arts, it was only towards the middle of the nineteenth century, however, that Russians infused the predominantly western European (particularly French and Italian) dance styles with Russia's own folk traditions.

The Ballets Russes

While from an international perspective Russian dancers had been considered supreme since the 1820s, the Russian ballet was spectacularly brought to the attention of the West by Sergey Diaghilev, who in 1909 founded the Ballets Russes. The opening season took place at the Thйвtre du Chвtelet in Paris, with dancers Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Michel Fokine. The performances set all Paris ablaze, and over the next 20 years the Ballets Russes, though never performing in Russia itself, boasted some of the best dancers from the imperial theatres in St Petersburg and Moscow, and became the foremost ballet company in the West. Diaghilev toured with his ballet uninterruptedly from 1909 to 1929, throughout Europe, in the United States, and in South America. During his later seasons he introduced the works of forward-looking composers and painters from France, Italy, Great Britain, and the United States. Among the composers represented in his repertory were Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Sergey Prokofiev.

ANNA PAVLOVA (1881-1931) Russian ballet dancer

Pavlova studied at the Imperial Ballet School from 1891 and joined the Mariinsky Theatre company in 1899, and became prima ballerina in 1906. In 1913 she left Russia to tour with her own company, which showcased her outstanding performances in classical ballets such as G/sel/e; the most famous numbers were a succession of short solos such as "The Dying Swan", choreographed for her by Michel Fokine. Her tours took ballet to audiences in many countries for the first time and did much to popularize ballet worldwide.

Diaghilev had a flair for bringing the right people together and a determination to create a novel form of spectacle based on a synthesis of the arts - dance, music, libretto, costume, and stage design - a "total work of art" in which no one element dominated the others. The company premiered some of the most significant ballets of the early twentieth century and popularized a distinctly Russian style, characterized by sensu- ousness, drama, exoticism, and primitive dynamism.

Diaghilev's art reached its height in the three ballet mas­terpieces of the young Russian composer Igor Stravinsky: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). In Petrushka, perhaps the greatest of the Diaghilev ballets, Stravinsky, at Diaghilev's insistence, transformed a conventionally conceived piano concerto (on which he had been working) into a mimed ballet, bringing into real life the fantasy dramas of puppets ata showman's fair. The incident is indicative of the extraordinary psychological influence Diag­hilev was able to exert over his collaborators. In The Rite of

Spring Stravinsky produced one of the most explosive orches­tral scores of the twentieth century, and the production created an uproar in the Paris theatre at its first performance. The scandalous dissonances and rhythmic brutality of the music provoked among the fashionable audience such protestations that the dancers were unable to hear the orchestra in the nearby pit. They carried on, nevertheless, encouraged by the choreographer Nijinsky, who stood on a chair in the wings, shouting out and miming the rhythm.

One of the many enduring features of the Ballet Russes was its innovative approach to ballet as theatre. Performances were characterized by their bold use of colour - Natalya Gonchar- ova's design for Le Coq d'or in 1914 was unprecedented in its use of vivid colours, chiefly shades of red, yellow, and orange, with other colours for discordant emphasis - and innovations in stage design. Lйon Bakst, whose designs for Clйopвtre (1909) were his first commission for Diaghilev, produced stage sets and costumes with brilliant palettes and well-coordinated decors. In later seasons Diaghilev engaged as designers Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault, Henri Matisse, and Andrй Derain.

Of course Diaghilev worked closely with and depended on an exceptionally talented array of dancers and choreogra­phers. Tamara Karsavina had been prima ballerina at the Mariinsky Theatre. Her repertoire included Giselle and Od- ette/Odile in Swan Lake, but she is best known as the leading ballerina of the Ballets Russes from its beginning in 1909 until 1922. Between 1909 and 1914 (paired with Nijinsky until 1913) she created most of the famous roles in Fokine's neo- romantic repertoire. Fokine was the first choreographer to put Diaghilev's ideas into practice. He worked with Stravinsky and Ravel, and his major scenic artists were Alexandre Benois and Bakst, whose contributions to theatrical design had influences beyond the sphere of ballet. Firebird and Petrushka are among his most famous creations.