Russian History Lexicon

After Austria threatened to join the allies, Russia accepted preliminary peace terms on Feb. 1, 1856. The Congress of Paris worked out the final settlement from February 25 to March 30. The resulting Treaty of Paris (Paris, Treaty of), signed on March 30, 1856, guaranteed the integrity of Ottoman Turkey and obliged Russia to surrender southern Bessarabia, at the mouth of the Danube. The Black Sea was neutralized, and the Danube River was opened to the shipping of all nations. The Crimean War was managed and commanded very poorly on both sides. Disease accounted for a disproportionate number of the approximately 250,000 men lost by each side.

The war did not settle the relations of the powers in eastern Europe. It did awaken the new Russian emperor Alexander II (who succeeded Nicholas I in March 1855) to the need to overcome Russia's backwardness in order to compete successfully with the other European powers. A further result of the war was that Austria, having sided with Great Britain and France, lost the support of Russia in central European affairs. Austria became dependent on Britain and France, which failed to support that country, leading to the Austrian defeats in 1859 and 1866 that, in turn, led to the unification of Italy and Germany.

Emancipation Manifesto

▪ Russia [1861]

(March 3 [Feb. 19, Old Style], 1861), manifesto issued by the Russian emperor Alexander II that accompanied 17 legislative acts that freed the serfs of the Russian Empire. (The acts were collectively called Statutes Concerning Peasants Leaving Serf Dependence, or Polozheniya o Krestyanakh Vykhodyashchikh iz Krepostnoy Zavisimosty.)

Defeat in the Crimean War, a perceptible change in public opinion, and the increasing number and violence of peasant revolts had shown Alexander, who became tsar during the war, that only a thorough reform of Russia's antiquated social structure would put the nation on an equal footing with the Western powers. The abolition of serfdom, he decided, was the first priority. In April 1856, in a speech to a group of noblemen, he revealed his intention. The following January he appointed a secret committee to investigate the problems. When the committee, composed primarily of conservative landowners, failed to draw pertinent conclusions, Alexander publicly authorized the formation of provincial committees of noblemen to formulate plans for emancipating the serfs (December 1857).

By the end of 1859 the committees had sent their proposals to the “editorial commissions,” which evaluated them and drafted the preliminary statutes for emancipation (October 1860). These were revised by the Chief Committee (formerly the secret committee) and by the State Council (January 1861) and were signed by the tsar on Feb. 19, 1861, and published on March 5. The final edict, or ukase, was a compromise between the plans of the liberals, the conservatives, the government bureaucrats, and the landed nobility. It fully satisfied no one, particularly the group directly involved: the peasants.

According to the act, the serfs were immediately granted personal liberties and promised land. But the process by which they were to acquire the land was slow, complex, and expensive. They were required to serve their landlords while inventories of all the land were taken, land allotments calculated, and payment calculated, since, legally, the land belonged to the landlord. Peasants, with the government loans, had to “redeem” their land allotments from the landlords and make “redemption payments” to the government for the next 49 years.

By 1881 about 85 percent of the peasants had received their land; redemption was then made compulsory. The land allotments were adequate to support the families living on them and to yield enough for them to meet their redemption payments. But the large population growth that occurred in Russia between emancipation and the Revolution of 1905 made it increasingly difficult for the former serfs to get by economically.

Emancipation had been intended to cure Russia's most basic social weakness, the backwardness and want into which serfdom cast the nation's peasantry. In fact, though an important class of well-to-do peasants did emerge in time, most remained poor and land-hungry, crushed by huge redemption payments. It was not until the revolutionary year of 1905 that the government terminated these payments. By then, the peasant loyalty that the emancipation was intended to create could no longer be achieved.

zemstvo

▪ Russian government

organ of rural self-government in the Russian Empire and Ukraine; established in 1864 to provide social and economic services, it became a significant liberal influence within imperial Russia. Zemstvos existed on two levels, the uyezd (canton) and the province; the uyezd assemblies, composed of delegates representing the individual landed proprietors and the peasant village communes, elected the provincial assemblies. Each assembly appointed an executive board and hired professional experts to carry out its functions.

Generally dominated by the nobility, the zemstvos suffered after 1890 from legislation that restricted their authority, from insufficient revenue, and from administrative controls of a hostile bureaucracy. Nevertheless, they expanded the network of elementary schools, constructed roads, provided health care, and instructed the peasantry in agricultural techniques. From the late 1890s onward they also agitated for constitutional reform and, through a union organized by the zemstvos and their professional employees, stimulated revolutionary activity in 1904–05 and 1917. Reorganized on a democratic basis in 1917, the zemstvos were abolished after the Bolshevik party came to power later that year.

The term zemstvo also referred to a 16th-century institution for tax collection.

Milyutin, Dmitry Alekseyevich, Count

▪ Russian war minister

born June 28 [July 10, New Style], 1816, Moscow, Russia

died Jan. 25 [Feb. 7], 1912, Simeiz, near Yalta, Crimea, Russian Empire

Russian military officer and statesman who, as minister of war (1861–81), was responsible for the introduction of important military reforms in Russia.

Graduated from the Nicholas Military Academy in 1836, Milyutin served in the Caucasus (1838–45) and then became a professor at the academy. In 1856 Milyutin returned to active duty. In 1860 he entered the Ministry of War as deputy minister and became minister of war the following year. Milyutin reorganized the system of military education for both officers and regular troops; among other innovations, he made elementary education available to all draftees. In 1874 he introduced universal compulsory military service into Russia, compelling all Russian males at 20 years of age, except those who qualified for specific exemptions, to serve in the army; he also reduced the term of active service from 25 years to 6. In addition, Milyutin introduced the reserve system.

Despite the success of his reforms, which was demonstrated by Russia's victory over the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War (Russo-Turkish wars) of 1877–78, Milyutin acquired many powerful enemies, especially among those who resented his reduction of the nobles' privileges within the military establishment. He chose to retire (May 1881) soon after Alexander III ascended the Russian throne.

Shuvalov, Pyotr Andreyevich, Count

▪ Russian diplomat

(Graf)

born June 15 [June 27, New Style], 1827, St. Petersburg, Russia

died March 10 [March 22], 1889, St. Petersburg

diplomat and political-police director who became one of Alexander II's (Alexander II) advisers and used his extensive power to oppose the enactment of liberal reforms in Russia.

Having entered the Russian army in 1845, Shuvalov served in the Crimean War (1853–56) and began his diplomatic career as a member of the Russian delegation to the Paris peace conference of 1856. The following year he was put in charge of the St. Petersburg police. His success there brought him the post of director of political police in the Ministry of the Interior (1860–61). There he became known as an opponent of the emancipation of the serfs. In 1866 he became chief of staff of the gendarmerie corps and head of the political police, or “3rd section” of the imperial chancery. While serving in this capacity he became a close adviser to Alexander II and used his influence to retard the carrying out of existing reforms and to appoint persons of reactionary views to important positions. Sent to London on a special diplomatic mission in 1873, Shuvalov was appointed ambassador to London in 1874 and served there effectively until 1879, when, because of his involvement in Russia's diplomatic failure following the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78), he was recalled and forced to retire.

Pan-Slavism

19th-century movement that recognized a common ethnic background among the various Slav peoples of eastern and east central Europe and sought to unite those peoples for the achievement of common cultural and political goals. The Pan-Slav movement originally was formed in the first half of the 19th century by West and South Slav intellectuals, scholars, and poets, whose peoples were at that time also developing their sense of national identity. The Pan-Slavists engaged in studying folk songs, folklore, and peasant vernaculars of the Slav peoples, in demonstrating the similarities among them, and in trying to stimulate a sense of Slav unity. As such activities were conducted mainly in Prague, that city became the first Pan-Slav centre for studying Slav antiquities and philology.

The Pan-Slavism movement soon took on political overtones, and in June 1848, while the Austrian Empire was weakened by revolution, the Czech historian František Palacký (Palacký, František) convened a Slav congress in Prague. Consisting of representatives of all Slav nationalities ruled by the Austrians, the congress was intended to organize cooperative efforts among them for the purpose of compelling the Emperor to transform his monarchy into a federation of equal peoples under a democratic Habsburg rule.

Although the congress had little practical effect, the movement remained active, and by the 1860s it became particularly popular in Russia, to which many Pan-Slavs looked for leadership as well as for protection from Austro-Hungarian and Turkish rule. Russian Pan-Slavists, however, altered the theoretical bases of the movement. Adopting the Slavophile notion that western Europe was spiritually and culturally bankrupt and that it was Russia's historic mission to rejuvenate Europe by gaining political dominance over it, the Pan-Slavists added the concept that Russia's mission could not be fulfilled without the support of other Slav peoples, who must be liberated from their Austrian and Turkish masters and united into a Russian-dominated Slav confederation.

Although the Russian government did not officially support this view, some important members of its foreign department, including its representatives at Constantinople and Belgrade, were ardent Pan-Slavists and succeeded in drawing both Serbia and Russia into wars against the Ottoman Empire in 1876–77.

When efforts were made in the early 20th century to call new Pan-Slav congresses and revive the movement, the nationalistic rivalries among the various Slav peoples prevented their effective collaboration.

Loris-Melikov, Mikhail Tariyelovich, Graf

▪ Russian statesman

(Count)

born Jan. 1, 1826, [Dec. 20, 1825, old style], Tiflis, Russia

died Dec. 24 [Dec. 12, O.S.], 1888, Nice, Fr.

military officer and statesman who, as minister of the interior at the end of the reign of the emperor Alexander II (ruled 1855–81), formulated reforms designed to liberalize the Russian autocracy.

Loris-Melikov was the son of an Armenian merchant. He attended the Lazarev School of Oriental Languages and the Guards' Cadet Institute in St. Petersburg before he joined a hussar regiment in 1843. Assigned to the Caucasus in 1847, he served as governor of the Terek region (1863–75) and, while commanding an army corps in Turkey during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, scored notable military victories. For his heroism, he was made a count.

After serving briefly as governor-general of the plague-ridden lower Volga region (1879), Loris-Melikov was transferred to the provinces of central Russia, where he recommended to the emperor a modest scheme of administrative and economic reforms, aimed at alleviating the causes of social discontent and, thereby, combating revolutionary terrorism. Impressed by his suggestions, Alexander appointed him chairman of a special commission that was given authority to use the entire government apparatus to suppress the revolutionary movement and also to prepare a reform program for the country. Six months later Alexander abolished the commission and named Loris-Melikov the new minister of the interior (November 1880).

In this position Loris-Melikov devised a program of moderate reforms that included provisions for locally elected representatives to give the government advice on certain current problems. Although the project was approved in principle by Alexander, the emperor was assassinated (March 13 [March 1, O.S.], 1881) before it was formally enacted. When his successor, Alexander III, rejected the reform program and firmly committed himself to the preservation of the autocracy, Loris-Melikov resigned (May 19 [May 7], 1881), retiring to Nice.

emperor of Russia

Russian in full Aleksandr Aleksandrovich

born March 10 [Feb. 26, old style], 1845, St. Petersburg, Russia

died Nov. 1 [Oct. 20, O.S.], 1894, Livadiya, Crimea

emperor of Russia from 1881 to 1894, opponent of representative government, and supporter of Russian nationalism. He adopted programs, based on the concepts of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and narodnost (a belief in the Russian people), that included the Russification of national minorities in the Russian Empire as well as persecution of the non-Orthodox religious groups.

The future Alexander (Alexander II) III was the second son of Alexander II and of Maria Aleksandrovna (Marie of Hesse-Darmstadt). In disposition he bore little resemblance to his softhearted, impressionable father and still less to his refined, chivalrous, yet complex granduncle, Alexander I. He gloried in the idea of being of the same rough texture as the great majority of his subjects. His straightforward manner savoured sometimes of gruffness, while his unadorned method of expressing himself harmonized well with his roughhewn, immobile features. During the first 20 years of his life, Alexander had no prospect of succeeding to the throne. He received only the perfunctory training given to grand dukes of that period, which did not go much beyond primary and secondary instruction, acquaintance with French, English, and German, and military drill. When he became heir apparent on the death of his elder brother Nikolay in 1865, he began to study the principles of law and administration under the jurist and political philosopher K.P. Pobedonostsev (Pobedonostsev, Konstantin Petrovich), who influenced the character of his reign by instilling into his mind hatred for representative government and the belief that zeal for Orthodoxy ought to be cultivated by every tsar.

The tsesarevich Nikolay, on his deathbed, had expressed a wish that his fiancée, Princess Dagmar of Denmark, thenceforward known as Maria Fyodorovna, should marry his successor. The marriage proved a most happy one. During his years as heir apparent—from 1865 to 1881—Alexander let it be known that certain of his ideas did not coincide with the principles of the existing government. He deprecated undue foreign influence in general and German influence in particular. His father, however, occasionally ridiculed the exaggerations of the Slavophiles and based his foreign policy on the Prussian alliance. The antagonism between father and son first appeared publicly during the Franco-German War, when the Tsar sympathized with Prussia and the tsarevich Alexander with the French. It reappeared in an intermittent fashion during the years 1875–79, when the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire posed serious problems for Europe. At first the Tsarevich was more Slavophile than the government, but he was disabused of his illusions during the Russo-Turkish War (Russo-Turkish wars) of 1877–78, when he commanded the left wing of the invading army. He was a conscientious commander, but he was mortified when most of what Russia had obtained by the Treaty of San Stefano was taken away at the Congress of Berlin under the chairmanship of the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck (Bismarck, Otto von). To this disappointment, moreover, Bismarck shortly afterward added the German alliance with Austria for the express purpose of counteracting Russian designs in eastern Europe. Although the existence of the Austro-German alliance was not disclosed to the Russians until 1887, the Tsarevich reached the conclusion that for Russia the best thing to do was to prepare for future contingencies by a radical scheme of military and naval reorganization.

On March 13 (March 1, O.S.), 1881, Alexander II was assassinated, and the following day autocratic power passed to his son. In the last years of his reign, Alexander II had been much disturbed by the spread of nihilist conspiracies. On the very day of his death he signed an ukaz creating a number of consultative commissions that might have been transformed eventually into a representative assembly. Alexander III cancelled the ukaz before it was published and in the manifesto announcing his accession stated that he had no intention of limiting the autocratic power he had inherited. All the internal reforms that he initiated were intended to correct what he considered the too liberal tendencies of the previous reign. In his opinion, Russia was to be saved from anarchical disorders and revolutionary agitation not by the parliamentary institutions and so-called liberalism of western Europe but by the three principles of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and narodnost.

Alexander's political ideal was a nation containing only one nationality, one language, one religion, and one form of administration; and he did his utmost to prepare for the realization of this ideal by imposing the Russian language and Russian schools on his German, Polish, and Finnish subjects, by fostering Orthodoxy at the expense of other confessions, by persecuting the Jews, and by destroying the remnants of German, Polish, and Swedish institutions in the outlying provinces. In the other provinces he clipped the feeble wings of the zemstvo (an elective local administration resembling the county and parish councils in England) and placed the autonomous administration of the peasant communes under the supervision of landed proprietors appointed by the government. At the same time, he sought to strengthen and centralize the imperial administration and to bring it more under his personal control. In foreign affairs he was emphatically a man of peace but not a partisan of the doctrine of peace at any price. Though indignant at the conduct of Bismarck toward Russia, he avoided an open rupture with Germany and even revived for a time the Alliance of the Three Emperors between the rulers of Germany, Russia, and Austria. It was only in the last years of his reign, especially after the accession of William II as German emperor in 1888, that Alexander adopted a more hostile attitude toward Germany. The termination of the Russo-German alliance in 1890 drove Alexander reluctantly into an alliance with France, a country that he strongly disliked as the breeding place of revolutions. In Central Asian affairs he followed the traditional policy of gradually extending Russian domination without provoking a conflict with Great Britain, and he never allowed bellicose partisans to get out of hand.

As a whole, Alexander's reign cannot be regarded as one of the eventful periods of Russian history; but it is arguable that under his hard, unsympathetic rule the country made some progress.

Michael T. Florinsky

Additional Reading

Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917 (1967), massive information clearly organized and objectively presented; The Decline of Imperial Russia, 1855–1914 (1952), good factual record with little attention to personalities; M.T. Florinsky, Russia: A History and an Interpretation, vol. 2 (1955), a compact, detailed account, factual and analytical.

Pobedonostsev, Konstantin Petrovich

▪ Russian statesman

born May 21, 1827, Moscow, Russia

died March 23, 1907, St. Petersburg

Russian civil servant and conservative political philosopher, who served as tutor and adviser to the emperors Alexander III and Nicholas II. Nicknamed the “Grand Inquisitor,” he came to be the symbol of Russian monarchal absolutism.

The youngest son of a Russian Orthodox priest who was also professor of Russian literature at Moscow University, Pobedonostsev was educated at home and at the Oldenburg School of Law in St. Petersburg, from 1841 to 1846. His adult life was devoted to service at the centre of the Russian state bureaucracy, beginning in the Moscow office of the senate. The publications he produced in his spare time there on the history of Russian civil law and institutions led to his being invited in 1859 also to lecture on civil law in Moscow University. His courses were so distinguished in organization, learning, and clarity that in 1861 Alexander II asked him to serve also as a tutor to his sons during the time they spent in Moscow each year. At the same time, he was an important contributor to the 1864 reform of the Russian judicial system. In 1865 he accepted the tsar's invitation to leave Moscow University and the senate to serve as a tutor to the tsar's sons and their families in St. Petersburg. Gradually he turned against all the reforms of Alexander II, particularly that of the courts. His service as one of the tutors and closest advisers of Alexander III helped make the latter a most reactionary ruler. Pobedonostsev was appointed to the senate in 1868, to the council of state (a high advisory body) in 1872, and in 1880 to the director generalship, or chief administrative position, of the Most Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox church, a position he held until the fall of 1905. This post gave him immense power over domestic policy, particularly in matters affecting religion, education, and censorship.

Pobedonostsev considered man to be by nature “weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious.” He denounced the 18th-century Enlightenment view of the perfectibility of man and of society and therefore strongly supported paternalistic and authoritarian government. He looked upon each nation as being based on the land, the family, and the national church, and he regarded the maintenance of stability as the principal purpose of government. He sought, therefore, to defend Russia and the Russian Orthodox church against all rival religious groups, such as the Old Believers, Baptists, Catholics, and Jews. He also defended Russian rule over the various minority groups and supported their Russification. As lay head of the church, he promoted the rapid expansion of primary education in parish schools because he saw it, with its emphasis upon religion, as a strong bulwark of the autocracy. He sought to keep each person in that station in life into which he had been born and to restrict higher education to the upper classes and exceptionally talented. He tried also to prohibit and to banish all foreign influences, especially western European ideas concerning constitutional and democratic government. He was thus largely responsible for the government's repressive policies toward religious and ethnic minorities and toward Western-oriented liberal intellectuals.

Pobedonostsev had great influence in 1881, immediately after the assassination of Alexander II, when he persuaded Alexander III to reject the so-called Loris-Melikov constitution that was designed to bridge the gap between the government and the leading elements of society. He influenced the government's reactionary domestic policies throughout the rest of the 1880s but exercised little authority during the last 15 years of his life. His role, however, was exaggerated during his lifetime by critics of the regime and since then by historians, largely because his personality, appearance, and known views superbly qualified him as the symbol of a system of government deeply unpopular among many educated Russians and among all liberals and radicals.

Pobedonostsev was a dry, reserved, and deeply pessimistic ascetic with almost no close friends, except for the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who died in 1881. At the same time, he was a man of immense learning and scholarship who was widely respected among foreign diplomats. He read and spoke most European languages and was deeply familiar with the great body of European and American literature and philosophy—although he strongly supported censorship and tight controls for other Russians. Especially after 1890 he was convinced the regime would be overthrown by revolution. His hatred and fear of constitutional and democratic government, freedom of the press, religious freedom, trial by jury, and free secular education was best expressed in a collection of essays, Moskovskyy sbornik, published in 1896.

Narodnaya Volya

▪ Russian revolutionary organization

English People's Will , or People's Freedom

19th-century Russian revolutionary organization that regarded terrorist activities as the best means of forcing political reform and overthrowing the tsarist autocracy.

Narodnaya Volya was organized in 1879 by members of the revolutionary Populist party, Zemlya i Volya (“Land and Freedom”), who were disillusioned by the failure of their efforts to promote social revolution by agitating among peasants. The new group, emphasizing the need for an organized political struggle against the state structure, used terror to force political reform as well as to undermine the state. Led by Andrey I. Zhelyabov and Sofya L. Perovskaya, it elected an executive committee that planned the assassination of government officials, and even of the emperor Alexander II, who was killed by its members on March 1 (March 13, New Style), 1881. The assassins were arrested and hanged. The murder of the emperor stimulated antiterrorist sentiment in Russia, and Narodnaya Volya, its ranks already decimated by mass arrests, collapsed in the following year.

Zemlya i Volya

▪ political party, Russia

English Land and Freedom

first Russian political party to openly advocate a policy of revolution; it had been preceded only by conspiratorial groups. Founded in 1876, the party two years later took its name from an earlier (1861–64) secret society. A product of the Narodnik (Populist) movement, the party maintained that the peasantry would be the source of social revolution. Its members, especially doctors and teachers, settled among the peasants and encouraged them to improve their condition by changing the social system. The party also had groups operating among the intelligentsia and urban workers and had administrative and “disorganizing” sections; all its activities were coordinated by a central “basic circle.”

By 1878–79 many of those working among the peasantry had become frustrated by police repression, which convinced them of the need for political as well as social reform. They favoured emphasis on the party's “disorganizing” activities (i.e., terrorism) to bring about reforms that would in the end result in revolution. The reforms first would provide the political freedom to conduct agitation leading to the undermining of the state structure, and thus publicly exposing the state's vulnerability and encouraging revolution. Disagreeing over tactics, the members of Zemlya i Volya split into two groups in 1879. Those favouring terror formed the Narodnaya Volya (“People's Will”), which was effectively crushed by the police after it assassinated Alexander II (1881). The others, preferring to emphasize direct agitation among the people, became the Chorny Peredel (“Black Repartition”), which operated until several of its leaders left it (1883) to form a Social-Democratic organization abroad.

The early period

Foundation and medieval growth

The first documentary reference to Moscow is found in the early monastic chronicles under the year 1147, when on April 4 Yury Vladimirovich Dolgoruky (see Dolgoruky family) (Dolgoruky family), prince of Suzdal, was host at a “great banquet” for his ally the prince of Novgorod-Seversky “in Moscow.” This is the traditional date of Moscow's founding, although archaeological evidence shows that a settlement had existed on the site since Neolithic times. Archaeological work has also revealed the remains of corduroy roads and evidence of iron and leather working dating from the 11th century. Defense was essential to protect the growing settlement, and in 1156 Prince Dolgoruky built the first fortifications: earthen ramparts topped by a wooden wall with blockhouses. This was the kremlin. The origin of the word kremlin is disputed; some authorities suggest Greek words for “citadel” or “steepness,” others the early Russian word krem, meaning a conifer providing timber suitable for building. The Kremlin was sited on the relatively high spit of land between the Moscow River (Moskva River) and a small tributary, the Neglinnaya. The triangular piece of land between the rivers was protected on the eastern side by a moat joining them. The Neglinnaya now flows through an underground conduit, but part of its course is traced by a street of the same name.

Moscow soon developed as one of the more important towns of the principality of Vladimir-Suzdal. A trading settlement, or posad, grew up to the east of the Kremlin, along the Moscow River in the area known as Zaryadye. Like most other Russian towns, Moscow was captured and burned by the Tatars (Tatar) (Mongols) in their great invasion of 1236–40, and its princes had to accept Mongol suzerainty. It soon recovered, though the Tatars sacked it once again in 1293. Three years later the Kremlin was strengthened with a new earthen wall and oak palisade. Thereafter Moscow grew in importance, in trading and artisan activity, and in size, overtaking the older and previously more important centres of Suzdal and Vladimir. The town was fairly centrally placed in the system of rivers and portages that formed the trade routes across European Russia. The area east of Moscow between the Oka (Oka River) and Volga (Volga River) rivers had better soils than most of northern Russia and comprised a region of prosperous towns. Moscow's authority was greatly enhanced when in 1326 the metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox church transferred his seat from Vladimir to Moscow. Thereafter the town was to remain the centre of Russian Orthodoxy, and after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks (1453) it claimed the title of the Third Rome. Under Ivan I the principality of Vladimir was incorporated into that of Moscow. Gradually the princes of Moscow extended their rule over the other surrounding Russian princedoms, and the town became the leader in the long struggle against Mongol hegemony.

The struggle at first fluctuated. In 1378 a Muscovite army repulsed a Mongol attack on the Vozha River south of the town, and in 1380 Prince Dmitry (Dmitry (II) Donskoy) of Moscow inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mongols under the great khan Mamai in the Battle of Kulikovo (Kulikovo, Battle of) on the Don River, for which he was thereafter known as Dmitry Donskoy (“of the Don”). The Kremlin had been enlarged and given walls and towers of white limestone in 1367, but the new fortifications were unable to withstand the renewed Mongol attack in 1382: despite a heroic defense, Khan Tokhtamysh captured and plundered Moscow. However, another attack, in 1408 under Khan Yedigei, was beaten off. Moscow grew steadily in size and importance as it continued to absorb the surrounding princedoms. Within the Kremlin the first stone cathedral, of the Assumption, was built in 1326. Palaces for the prince and leading boyars (boyar), monasteries, and churches were erected. Outside the Kremlin walls, the trading and artisan quarter to the east grew in size and became known as the Kitay-gorod; this name, which originated in the 16th century, probably derives from the word kita (a binding of poles used in the fortifications before stone walls were built) and does not mean “Chinese town,” as it is sometimes translated.

The rise of Moscow as capital

By the second half of the 15th century, especially after the annexation of Novgorod in 1478, Moscow had become the undisputed centre of a unified Russian state. During the reign of the grand prince of Moscow Ivan III (the Great), the Kremlin was again enlarged and given brick walls more than a mile in length and in some places up to 60 feet (18 metres) high. From this period also date the rebuilt Cathedral of the Assumption and the equally beautiful Annunciation and (also rebuilt) Archangel cathedrals, the Palace of Facets, and the bell tower of Ivan III. In 1534–38 the Kitay-gorod, previously protected only by earth banks and palisades, was also surrounded by a brick wall, with 12 towers. The town continued to grow and spread outside the walls to form what became known as the Bely Gorod (“White City”) in a semicircle around the Kremlin and Kitay-gorod.

Despite its new fortifications, Moscow remained subject to disaster and attack. In 1547 two fires destroyed much of the town. In the mid-16th century Ivan IV (the Terrible) conquered the Mongol khanates of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556), but in 1571 the Crimean Tatars captured Moscow, burning everything but the Kremlin. The annals record that only 30,000 of 200,000 inhabitants survived. A further attack was launched by the Crimean Tatars in 1591, but they failed to overcome Moscow's stubborn resistance. The defense was helped by the new walls, some 5 miles (8 km) long, built of stone between 1584 and 1591 to protect the Bely Gorod. The walls' lines are marked today by the strip of parkland and tree-lined streets of the Boulevard Ring. In 1592 an outer earth rampart with 50 towers was erected around the city, including an area on the right bank of the Moscow River. This encompassed a further extension of Moscow that had grown up beyond the Bely Gorod; known at first as Skorodom, this outer sector came to be called the Zemlyanoy Gorod, or “Earthen City.” The Garden Ring traces the line of its fortifications. As an outermost line of defense, a chain of strongly fortified monasteries was established beyond the ramparts to the south and east, principally the Novodevichy Convent and Donskoy (Don), Danilovsky, Simonov, Novospassky, and Andronikov monasteries, most of which now house museums.

With much-improved security, the products of artisans flourished. Distinct quarters were occupied by particular trades—for example, the suburbs of Bronnaya by armour makers, Kuznetskaya by blacksmiths, and Kotelniki by kettle makers. Across the Moscow River was the weavers' suburb. These artisan sectors are commonly commemorated today by street or quarter names. State workshops cast cannon and made weapons and gunpowder. The tsar's court and its attendant nobility provided patronage for luxury crafts. Increasingly the boyars took over the Kitay-gorod, with artisans and traders moving to the outer parts; the Kremlin became solely the seat of temporal and ecclesiastical authority. The centre of commercial activity was the market in Red Square between the Kremlin and the Kitay-gorod, where there were rows of stalls, each handling a specific variety of goods. The Russian word for “red” (krasnaya), which also meant “beautiful” in Old Russian—the common East Slavic language used until the late 13th century—was the original name for the square. Trade with western Europe (especially England and Holland), as well as with Central Asia, Transcaucasia, Persia, and the Black Sea coast, was brisk, furs forming a major staple in this international commerce. Foreign merchants lived in the Nemetskaya Sloboda (a German quarter), and a flourishing cultural life was marked by the growth of the book trade and the founding in 1553 of the first printing house.

At the turn of the 17th century, Moscow, like the rest of Russia, suffered severely during the Time of Troubles (Troubles, Time of). In the reign of Boris Godunov (Godunov, Boris) there were severe famines from 1601 to 1603. After Boris's death in 1605, the first False Dmitry (Dmitry, False) seized Moscow with Polish help, and, though he was killed in 1606 and the Poles were driven out, they reoccupied Moscow with a second False Dmitry in 1608–10. In May 1611 the Muscovites attacked the Poles, and the invaders retreated into the Kremlin. Under the energetic leadership of a boyar, Prince Dmitry Mikhaylovich Pozharsky, and a merchant, Kuzma Minin, the Russians forced the Poles to surrender in October 1612.

With the establishment in 1613 of the Romanov Dynasty under Michael, relative peace returned to Moscow and with it further economic advance. Nevertheless, the conditions of the poor of the town often led to riots and uprisings; similar events had also occurred in 1382, 1445, and 1547. In 1648, as a result of an increase in the salt tax, and again in 1662 (the year of the so-called Copper Riots) there were disturbances by artisans, labourers, and tradesmen. The great revolt of Stenka Razin (Razin, Stenka) in southern Russia (1667–71) was echoed by unrest in the capital, and in 1671 Razin was executed in Moscow as a warning to the city's inhabitants. The revolts were put down by the streltsy (hereditary militia), who in 1698, early in the reign of Peter I (the Great), themselves revolted and were suppressed only by great slaughter. Despite the frequent upheavals, however, culture flourished. Russia's first higher educational institution, the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy attached to the Zaikonospassky Monastery in the Kitay-gorod, dates from 1687. In 1701 Peter founded a School of Mathematics and Navigation. The first newspaper in Russia began publication in Moscow in 1703.

Evolution of the modern city

The 18th and 19th centuries

In 1703 Peter I began constructing St. Petersburg (Saint Petersburg) on the Gulf of Finland (Finland, Gulf of), and in 1712 he transferred the capital to his new, “Westernized,” and outward-looking city. Members of the nobility were compelled to move to St. Petersburg; many merchants and artisans also moved. Both population growth and new building in Moscow languished for a time, but even during Peter's reign the city began to recover from the loss of capital status. Peter himself stimulated economic growth by establishing new industries, and private entrepreneurs followed suit. By 1725 there were some 32 new factories employing 5,500 workers; more than 20 of the factories were textile mills, including a crown enterprise making sailcloth. At the same period there were about 8,500 craft workers.

During the 18th century Moscow retained its major role in the cultural life of Russia. In 1755, on the initiative of the great man of letters and science Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (Lomonosov, Mikhail Vasilyevich), Moscow University (now formally M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University (Moscow State University)) was founded, the first university in Russia; a medical and surgical college was opened in 1786. Although serious fires did much damage in 1737, 1748, and 1752, many splendid new buildings appeared, designed by such architects as Giacomo Quarenghi, Vasily Bazhenov, Matvei Kazakov, and Vasily Stasov. In 1741 Moscow was surrounded by a barricade 25 miles (40 km) long, the Kamer-Kollezhsky barrier, at whose 16 gates customs tolls were collected; its line is traced today by a number of streets called val (“rampart”) and by place-names such as Kaluga Zastava (Customs Gate). Industry flourished, and by the end of the 18th century there were about 300 factories in Moscow, more than half of them textile mills. The population had grown to 275,000 by 1811.

In 1812 Napoleon I invaded Russia; after a bitter 15-hour battle on August 26 (September 7, New Style) at Borodino (Borodino, Battle of) on the approaches to Moscow, the Russian commander in chief, Gen. M.I. Kutuzov (Kutuzov, Mikhail Illarionovich, Prince), evacuated troops and civilians from the city, which was occupied by the French a week later. A fire broke out and spread rapidly, eventually destroying more than two-thirds of all the buildings. Looting was rife. The lack of supplies and shelter and the continual harassment by Russian skirmishing forces made it impossible for Napoleon to winter in Moscow, however, and on October 7 (October 19, New Style) the French troops began their catastrophic retreat.

In 1813 a Commission for the Construction of the City of Moscow was established. It launched a great program of rebuilding, which included a partial replanning of the city centre. Among many buildings constructed or reconstructed at this time were the Great Kremlin and Armoury palaces, the university, the Manezh (Riding School), and the Bolshoi Theatre. Industry also recovered rapidly and continued to develop through the 19th century. In 1837 the Moscow stock exchange was established. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the beginning of the railway era with the opening of the line to St. Petersburg in 1851 greatly increased labour mobility, and large numbers of peasants from the villages began moving into Moscow. The population, which had reached 336,000 in 1835, had almost doubled, to 602,000, in 1871 and by 1897 had reached 978,000. Moscow became the hub of Russia's railways, with trunk lines to all parts of European Russia. A ring of main line termini was built, mostly on or near the Kamer-Kollezhsky barrier at the limits of the built-up area. Outside the barrier many new factories, particularly those concerned with textiles, began operation. In the 1890s heavy engineering and metalworking industries also developed. Between 1897 and 1915 Moscow yet again doubled in size, to a population of 1,983,700.

The later 19th century was a period of ostentatious building by public bodies and wealthy private persons, in various imitative “Old Russian” styles and the so-called modern style. From this period date the Town Hall (meeting place of the Gorodskaya Duma, former site of the Central Lenin Museum), the State Historical Museum, and the Upper Trading Rows (now GUM).

The growth of an industrial proletariat in Moscow, together with the generally low living standards of the workers, brought unrest and strikes. Various revolutionary groups were active. In the Revolution of 1905 (Russian Revolution of 1905) a small-scale insurrection took place in Moscow, and an attempt was made to seize the Nikolayev (now St. Petersburg) station; the revolt was ruthlessly crushed. In 1917, although a Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies was set up in Moscow, the city remained relatively quiet until after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) on October 25 (November 7, New Style), which was immediately followed by fighting in Moscow. Military cadets held out for a time in the Kremlin, but by November 3 (November 16, New Style) they were overcome and Bolshevik power was firmly established.

Nicholas II

▪ pope

original name Gerard of Burgundy , French Gérard de Bourgogne

born Burgundy

died August 27, 1061, Florence [Italy]

pope from 1059 to 1061, a major figure in the Gregorian Reform.

Born in a region near Cluny, Gerard was most likely exposed to the reformist zeal of the monastery there. As bishop of Florence from 1045, he imposed the canonical life on the priests of his diocese. His efforts at reform were first steps toward the more dramatic legislation he would implement as pope.

His election as pope was a complicated affair that revealed the challenges facing the papacy. When Pope Stephen IX (Stephen IX (or X)) (or X; 1057–58) fell ill, he requested that no election of a successor be held until his legate Hildebrand (later Pope Gregory VII (Gregory VII, Saint)) returned from Germany. At Stephen's death, however, the powerful Tusculani family orchestrated the election of John Mincius, bishop of Velletri, as Benedict X (Benedict (X)), though only two cardinals participated in the voting; the other cardinals, including Peter Damian (Peter Damian, Saint), had left Rome for Florence. Damian's departure was most damaging to Benedict's succession because, as bishop of Ostia, Damian was responsible for consecrating the new pope. In Siena the cardinals, under the influence of Hildebrand, elected Gerard pope in December 1058. The king in Germany, Henry IV, and Duke Godfrey of Lorraine, the leading power in northern Italy and brother of Stephen IX, were notified of the election, and Gerard gained their support as a result. He was escorted to Rome by Godfrey and the German chancellor for Italy, Wibert of Ravenna (later antipope Clement [III]). On the way to Rome, Gerard convened a council at Sutri that declared Benedict deposed; Benedict fled Rome, and Gerard assumed the papal throne as Nicholas II on January 24, 1059.

Nicholas faced a number of problems, including issues raised by the irregularity of his own election. At his first council, held in the Lateran at Easter in 1059, Nicholas issued a decree on papal elections, which was intended to prevent interference by the nobility and to regularize the succession. He assigned a leading role to the seven cardinal bishops, who were to choose a suitable candidate and then summon the other cardinals. The remaining clergy and the people of Rome were to acclaim the choice; the right of the emperor to confirm the election was recognized, though it was not accepted as hereditary and had to be confirmed by the pope when the new emperor took the throne. Although the decree caused tension between Rome and the German court, which circulated its own version, Nicholas's reform was an important step toward establishing the independence of the church.

At the Lateran synod Nicholas also promoted the reform agenda initiated by Leo IX (Leo IX, Saint) in 1049. The council prohibited simony and lay investiture, declaring that no priest or cleric could accept a church from a layman. Nicholas and the council also forbade clerical marriage and concubinage; masses celebrated by priests with wives or mistresses were to be boycotted, and married priests were not to perform the mass or hold church benefices. Supporting the goals of the Gregorian Reform movement, the synod also extended papal protection to the persons and property of pilgrims and gave papal sanction to the Peace of God (God, Peace of) and Truce of God (God, Truce of) movements, which promoted religious reform and sought to restrict warfare and protect clerics and other noncombatants in times of war. It was also at the council that Berengar Of Tours was forced to renounce his teachings on the Eucharist.

The Lateran council was only one of Nicholas's achievements as pope. He sent legates to resolve the crisis in Milan brought about by the Patarine movement, which had challenged the established social order, clerical corruption, and the practice of clerical marriage. Of even greater consequence was his revolutionary decision to forge an alliance with the Normans in southern Italy. At the council of Melfi in August 1059, Nicholas invested Robert Guiscard (Robert) as duke of Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily and Richard of Aversa as prince of Capua, making them vassals of Rome. Both princes swore an oath of fealty to the pope and promised aid. Robert also swore to help Nicholas regain control of papal territories, to preserve Nicholas in office, and to aid the cardinals in future papal elections. Nicholas derived great benefit from the alliance; the Normans even captured Benedict and presented him to the pope in 1060.

The alliance with the Normans led to tensions with the German ruler, whose claims to Italian territory and traditional right to protect the pope were undermined. Shortly before the pope's death in 1061, the German bishops declared all Nicholas's decrees void and broke off relations with Rome. The break may have been precipitated by the Norman alliance, by Nicholas's restatement of the prohibitions against simony and clerical marriage, or by conflict with the archbishop of Cologne; the exact cause remains uncertain, but the cooling of relations would have serious consequences. Nicholas's short but eventful reign left a profound mark on the medieval church and papacy.

Michael Frassetto

▪ tsar of Russia

Introduction

Russian in full Nikolay Aleksandrovich

born May 6 [May 18, New Style], 1868, Tsarskoye Selo [now Pushkin], near St. Petersburg, Russia

died July 16/17, 1918, Yekaterinburg

the last Russian emperor (1894–1917), who, with his wife, Alexandra, and their children, was killed by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution.

Early life and reign

Nikolay Aleksandrovich was the eldest son and heir apparent (tsesarevich) of the tsarevich Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (emperor as Alexander III from 1881) and his consort Maria Fyodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark). Succeeding his father on November 1, 1894, he was crowned tsar in Moscow on May 26, 1896.

Neither by upbringing nor by temperament was Nicholas fitted for the complex tasks that awaited him as autocratic ruler of a vast empire. He had received a military education from his tutor, and his tastes and interests were those of the average young Russian officers of his day. He had few intellectual pretensions but delighted in physical exercise and the trappings of army life: uniforms, insignia, parades. Yet on formal occasions he felt ill at ease. Though he possessed great personal charm, he was by nature timid; he shunned close contact with his subjects, preferring the privacy of his family circle. His domestic life was serene. To his wife, Alexandra, whom he had married on November 26, 1894, Nicholas was passionately devoted. She had the strength of character that he lacked, and he fell completely under her sway. Under her influence he sought the advice of spiritualists and faith healers, most notably Rasputin (Rasputin, Grigory Yefimovich), who eventually acquired great power over the imperial couple.

Nicholas also had other irresponsible favourites, often men of dubious probity who provided him with a distorted picture of Russian life, but one that he found more comforting than that contained in official reports. He distrusted his ministers, mainly because he felt them to be intellectually superior to himself and feared they sought to usurp his sovereign prerogatives. His view of his role as autocrat (absolutism) was childishly simple: he derived his authority from God, to whom alone he was responsible, and it was his sacred duty to preserve his absolute power intact. He lacked, however, the strength of will necessary in one who had such an exalted conception of his task. In pursuing the path of duty, Nicholas had to wage a continual struggle against himself, suppressing his natural indecisiveness and assuming a mask of self-confident resolution. His dedication to the dogma of autocracy was an inadequate substitute for a constructive policy, which alone could have prolonged the imperial regime.

Soon after his accession Nicholas proclaimed his uncompromising views in an address to liberal deputies from the zemstvos, the self-governing local assemblies, in which he dismissed as “senseless dreams” their aspirations to share in the work of government. He met the rising groundswell of popular unrest with intensified police repression. In foreign policy, his naïveté and lighthearted attitude toward international obligations sometimes embarrassed his professional diplomats; for example, he concluded an alliance with the German emperor William II during their meeting at Björkö in July 1905, although Russia was already allied with France, Germany's traditional enemy.

Nicholas was the first Russian sovereign to show personal interest in Asia, visiting in 1891, while still tsesarevich, India, China, and Japan; later he nominally supervised the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway (Trans-Siberian Railroad). His attempt to maintain and strengthen Russian influence in Korea, where Japan also had a foothold, was partly responsible for the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05). Russia's defeat not only frustrated Nicholas's grandiose dreams of making Russia a great Eurasian power, with China, Tibet, and Persia under its control, but also presented him with serious problems at home, where discontent grew into the revolutionary movement of 1905.

Nicholas considered all who opposed him, regardless of their views, as malicious conspirators. Disregarding the advice of his future prime minister Sergey Yulyevich Witte (Witte, Sergey Yulyevich, Graf), he refused to make concessions to the constitutionalists until events forced him to yield more than might have been necessary had he been more flexible. On March 3, 1905, he reluctantly agreed to create a national representative assembly, or Duma, with consultative powers, and by the manifesto of October 30 he promised a constitutional regime under which no law was to take effect without the Duma's consent, as well as a democratic franchise and civil liberties. Nicholas, however, cared little for keeping promises extracted from him under duress. He strove to regain his former powers and ensured that in the new Fundamental Laws (May 1906) he was still designated an autocrat. He furthermore patronized an extremist right-wing organization, the Union of the Russian People, which sanctioned terrorist methods and disseminated anti-Semitic propaganda. Witte, whom he blamed for the October Manifesto, was soon dismissed, and the first two Dumas were prematurely dissolved as “insubordinate.”

Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin (Stolypin, Pyotr Arkadyevich), who replaced Witte and carried out the coup of June 16, 1907, dissolving the second Duma, was loyal to the dynasty and a capable statesman. But the emperor distrusted him and allowed his position to be undermined by intrigue. Stolypin was one of those who dared to speak out about Rasputin's influence and thereby incurred the displeasure of the empress. In such cases Nicholas generally hesitated but ultimately yielded to Alexandra's pressure. To prevent exposure of the scandalous hold Rasputin had on the imperial family, Nicholas interfered arbitrarily in matters properly within the competence of the Holy Synod, backing reactionary elements against those concerned about the Orthodox church's prestige.

World War I

After its ambitions in the Far East were checked by Japan, Russia turned its attention to the Balkans. Nicholas sympathized with the national aspirations of the Slavs and was anxious to win control of the Turkish straits but tempered his expansionist inclinations with a sincere desire to preserve peace among the Great Powers. After the assassination of the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo, he tried hard to avert the impending war by diplomatic action and resisted, until July 30, 1914, the pressure of the military for general, rather than partial, mobilization.

The outbreak of World War I temporarily strengthened the monarchy, but Nicholas did little to maintain his people's confidence. The Duma was slighted, and voluntary patriotic organizations were hampered in their efforts; the gulf between the ruling group and public opinion grew steadily wider. Alexandra turned Nicholas's mind against the popular commander in chief, his father's cousin the grand duke Nicholas, and on September 5, 1915, the emperor dismissed him, assuming supreme command himself. Since the emperor had no experience of war, almost all his ministers protested against this step as likely to impair the army's morale. They were overruled, however, and soon dismissed.

Nicholas II did not, in fact, interfere unduly in operational decisions, but his departure for headquarters had serious political consequences. In his absence, supreme power in effect passed, with his approval and encouragement, to the empress. A grotesque situation resulted: in the midst of a desperate struggle for national survival, competent ministers and officials were dismissed and replaced by worthless nominees of Rasputin. The court was widely suspected of treachery, and antidynastic feeling grew apace. Conservatives plotted Nicholas's deposition in the hope of saving the monarchy. Even the murder of Rasputin failed to dispel Nicholas's illusions: he blindly disregarded this ominous warning, as he did those by other highly placed personages, including members of his own family. His isolation was virtually complete.

Abdication and death

When riots broke out in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) on March 8, 1917 (Russian Revolution of 1917), Nicholas instructed the city commandant to take firm measures and sent troops to restore order. It was too late. The government resigned, and the Duma, supported by the army, called on the emperor to abdicate. At Pskov on March 15, with fatalistic composure, Nicholas renounced the throne—not, as he had originally intended, in favour of his son, Alexis, but in favour of his brother Michael, who refused the crown.

Nicholas was detained at Tsarskoye Selo by Prince Lvov's provisional government. It was planned that he and his family would be sent to England; but instead, mainly because of the opposition of the Petrograd Soviet, the revolutionary Workers' and Soldiers' Council, they were removed to Tobolsk in Western Siberia. This step sealed their doom. In April 1918 they were taken to Yekaterinburg in the Urals.

When anti-Bolshevik “White” Russian forces approached the area, the local authorities were ordered to prevent a rescue, and on the night of July 16/17 the prisoners were all slaughtered in the cellar of the house where they had been confined. The bodies were burned, cast into an abandoned mine shaft, and then hastily buried elsewhere. A team of Russian scientists located the remains in 1976 but kept the discovery secret until after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By 1994 genetic analyses had positively identified the remains as those of Nicholas, Alexandra, three of their daughters ( Anastasia, Tatiana, and Olga), and four servants. The remains were given a state funeral on July 17, 1998, and reburied in St. Petersburg in the crypt of the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul. The remains of Alexis and of another daughter (Maria) were not found until 2007, and the following year DNA testing confirmed their identity.

On August 20, 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church canonized the emperor and his family, designating them “passion bearers” (the lowest rank of sainthood) because of the piety they had shown during their final days. On October 1, 2008, Russia's Supreme Court ruled that the executions were acts of “unfounded repression” and granted the family full rehabilitation.

John L.H. Keep

Additional Reading

Dominic Lieven, Nicholas II: Emperor of All the Russias (1993; reissued 1996), is a sympathetic, detailed biography. Also of interest is Marc Ferro, Nicholas II: The Last of the Tsars (1991, reissued 1994; originally published in French, 1990). Andrew M. Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (1990), is an authoritative study of his early reign. More popular is Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra (1967, reissued 2000). The fullest study of the Romanov family's fate, based on 160 documents drawn from Russian archives, is Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalëv, The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (1995). Also useful are Edvard Radzinsky, The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II, trans. from Russian (1992); and Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, Nicholas II: The Interrupted Transition (2000; originally published in French, 1996).

Rasputin, Grigory Yefimovich

▪ Russian mystic

original name Grigory Yefimovich Novykh

born 1872?, Pokrovskoye, near Tyumen, Siberia, Russian Empire

died December 30 [December 17, Old Style], 1916, Petrograd [St. Petersburg]

Siberian peasant and mystic whose ability to improve the condition of Aleksey Nikolayevich (Alexis), the hemophiliac heir to the Russian throne, made him an influential favourite at the court of Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra.

Although he attended school, the peasant Grigory Yefimovich Novykh remained illiterate, and his reputation for licentiousness earned him the surname Rasputin, Russian for “debauched one.” He evidently underwent a religious conversion at age 18, and eventually he went to the monastery at Verkhoture, where he was introduced to the Khlysty (Flagellants) sect. Rasputin perverted Khlysty beliefs into the doctrine that one was nearest God when feeling “holy passionlessness” and that the best way to reach such a state was through the sexual exhaustion that came after prolonged debauchery. Rasputin did not become a monk, returned to Pokrovskoye, and at age 19 married Proskovia Fyodorovna, who later bore him four children. Marriage did not settle Rasputin; he left home and wandered to Mount Athos, Greece, and Jerusalem, living off the peasants' donations and gaining a reputation as a starets (self-proclaimed holy man) with the ability to heal the sick and predict the future.

Rasputin's wanderings took him to St. Petersburg (1903), where he was welcomed by Theophan, inspector of the religious Academy of St. Petersburg, and Hermogen, bishop of Saratov. The court circles of St. Petersburg at that time were entertaining themselves by delving into mysticism and the occult, so Rasputin—a filthy, unkempt wanderer with brilliant eyes and allegedly extraordinary healing talents—was warmly welcomed. In 1905 Rasputin was introduced to the royal family, and in 1908 he was summoned to the palace of Nicholas and Alexandra during one of their hemophiliac son's bleeding episodes. Rasputin succeeded in easing the boy's suffering (probably by his hypnotic powers) and, upon leaving the palace, warned the parents that the destiny of both the child and the dynasty were irrevocably linked to him, thereby setting in motion a decade of Rasputin's powerful influence on the imperial family and affairs of state.

In the presence of the royal family, Rasputin consistently maintained the posture of a humble and holy peasant. Outside court, however, he soon fell into his former licentious habits. Preaching that physical contact with his own person had a purifying and healing effect, he acquired mistresses and attempted to seduce many other women. When accounts of Rasputin's conduct reached the ears of Nicholas, the tsar refused to believe that he was anything other than a holy man, and Rasputin's accusers found themselves transferred to remote regions of the empire or entirely removed from their positions of influence.

By 1911 Rasputin's behaviour had become a general scandal. The prime minister, P.A. Stolypin, sent the tsar a report on Rasputin's misdeeds. As a result, the tsar expelled Rasputin, but Alexandra had him returned within a matter of months. Nicholas, anxious not to displease his wife or endanger his son, upon whom Rasputin had an obviously beneficial effect, chose to ignore further allegations of wrongdoing.

Rasputin reached the pinnacle of his power at the Russian court after 1915. During World War I, Nicholas II took personal command of his forces (September 1915) and went to the troops on the front, leaving Alexandra in charge of Russia's internal affairs, while Rasputin served as her personal advisor. Rasputin's influence ranged from the appointment of church officials to the selection of cabinet ministers (often incompetent opportunists), and he occasionally intervened in military matters to Russia's detriment. Though supporting no particular political group, Rasputin was a strong opponent of anyone opposing the autocracy or himself.

Several attempts were made to take the life of Rasputin and save Russia from further calamity, but none were successful until 1916. Then a group of extreme conservatives, including Prince Feliks Yusupov (husband of the tsar's niece), Vladimir Mitrofanovich Purishkevich (Purishkevich, Vladimir Mitrofanovich) (a member of the Duma), and Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich (the tsar's cousin), formed a conspiracy to eliminate Rasputin and save the monarchy from further scandal. On the night of December 29–30 (December 16–17, Old Style), Rasputin was invited to visit Yusupov's home and, once there, was given poisoned wine and tea cakes. When he did not die, the frantic Yusupov shot him. Rasputin collapsed but was able to run out into the courtyard, where Purishkevich shot him again. The conspirators then bound him and threw him through a hole in the ice into the Neva River, where he finally died by drowning.

The murder merely strengthened Alexandra's resolve to uphold the principle of autocracy, but a few weeks later the whole imperial regime was swept away by revolution.

Purishkevich, Vladimir Mitrofanovich

▪ Russian politician

born Aug. 24 [Aug. 12, old style], 1870, Kishinyov, Russia

died February 1920, Novorossiysk

Russian politican and right-wing extremist who in 1905 was one of the founders of the Union of the Russian People (URP), a reactionary group active before the Russian Revolution and noted for its violent attacks against Jews and leftists.

A landowner and onetime government official, Purishkevich also served as a deputy to the second through fourth state Dumas (parliaments), in which he made anti-Semitic speeches. Purishkevich quickly established himself as a leader of the extreme reactionaries in the Duma, claiming at one point, “To the right of me there is only the wall.” He combined unswerving loyalty to the monarchy with a firm commitment to ethnic Russian domination of the Empire's minority nationalities, and he had an unyielding hatred for liberals, socialists, and Jews.

In 1908, after a personality clash with other URP leaders, Purishkevich formed a splinter group known as the Union of the Archangel Michael. A vigourous supporter of the Russian war effort during World War I, Purishkevich was one of the conspirators in the murder of Grigory Rasputin in December 1916.

After the abdication of the Tsar in February 1917, Purishkevich planned the escape of the imperial family from the provisional government. During the revolution in November (October, O.S.) he led a counterrevolutionary conspiracy in Petrograd. Imprisoned by a Soviet court, he was amnestied in May 1918 and moved to southern Russia, where he worked with White forces and published an anti-Soviet newspaper. He died of typhus.

empress consort of Russia

Russian in full Aleksandra Fyodorovna, original name Alix, Princess (prinzessin) von Hesse-Darmstadt

born June 6, 1872, Darmstadt, Ger.

died July 16/17, 1918, Yekaterinburg, Russia

consort of the Russian emperor Nicholas II. Her misrule while the emperor was commanding the Russian forces during World War I precipitated the collapse of the imperial government in March 1917.

A granddaughter of Queen Victoria and daughter of Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, Alexandra (German name Alix) married Nicholas in 1894 and came to dominate him. She proved to be unpopular at court and turned to mysticism for solace. Through her near-fanatical acceptance of Orthodoxy and her belief in autocratic rule, she felt it her sacred duty to help reassert Nicholas' absolute power, which had been limited by reforms in 1905. In 1904 the tsarevich Alexis was born; she had previously given birth to four daughters. The tsarevich suffered from hemophilia, and Alexandra's overwhelming concern for his life led her to seek the aid of a debauched “holy man” who possessed hypnotic powers, Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin (Rasputin, Grigory Yefimovich) (q.v.). She came to venerate Rasputin as a saint sent by God to save the throne and as a voice of the common people, who, she believed, remained loyal to the emperor. Rasputin's influence was a public scandal, but Alexandra silenced all criticism. After Nicholas left for the front in August 1915, she arbitrarily dismissed capable ministers and replaced them with nonentities or dishonest careerists favoured by Rasputin. As a result, the administration became paralyzed and the regime discredited, and Alexandra came to be widely but erroneously believed to be a German agent. Yet she disregarded all warnings of coming changes, even the murder of Rasputin. After the October Revolution (1917), she, Nicholas, and their children were imprisoned by the Bolsheviks and were later shot to death.

Trans-Siberian Railroad

▪ railway, Russia

Russian Transsibirskaya Zheleznodorozhnaya Magistral

(“Trans-Siberian Main Railroad”), the longest single rail system in Russia, stretching from Moscow 5,778 miles (9,198 km) east to Vladivostok or (beyond Vladivostok) 5,867 miles (9,441 km) to the port station of Nakhodka. It had great importance in the economic, military, and imperial history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

Conceived by Tsar Alexander III, the construction of the railroad began in 1891 and proceeded simultaneously in several sections—from the west (Moscow) and from the east (Vladivostok) and across intermediate reaches by way of the Mid-Siberian Railway, the Transbaikal Railway, and other lines. Originally, in the east, the Russians secured Chinese permission to build a line directly across Manchuria (the Chinese Eastern Railway) from the Transbaikal region to Vladivostok; this trans-Manchurian line was completed in 1901. After the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, however, Russia feared Japan's possible takeover of Manchuria and proceeded to build a longer and more difficult alternative route, the Amur Railway, through to Vladivostok; this line was completed in 1916. The Trans-Siberian Railroad thus had two completion dates: in 1904 all the sections from Moscow to Vladivostok were linked and completed running through Manchuria; in 1916 there was finally a Trans-Siberian Railroad wholly within Russian territory. The completion of the railroad marked the turning point in the history of Siberia, opening up vast areas to exploitation, settlement, and industrialization.

The trans-Manchurian line came under full Chinese control only after World War II; it was renamed the Chinese Ch'ang-ch'un Railway. In the Soviet Union, over the years, a number of spur lines have been built radiating from the main trans-Siberian line. From 1974 to 1989 construction was completed on a large alternative route, the Baikal-Amur Mainline; its route across areas of taiga, permafrost, and swamps, however, has made upkeep difficult.

The full rail trip on the passenger train Rossiya from Moscow to Nakhodka (including a compulsory overnight stay in Khabarovsk) now takes about eight days.

Russo-Japanese War

▪ Russo-Japanese history

(1904–05), military conflict in which a victorious Japan forced Russia to abandon its expansionist policy in the Far East, becoming the first Asian power in modern times to defeat a European power.

The Russo-Japanese War developed out of the rivalry between Russia and Japan for dominance in Korea and Manchuria. In 1898 Russia had pressured China into granting it a lease for the strategically important port of Port Arthur (now Lü-shun (Lüshun)), at the tip of the Liaotung Peninsula, in southern Manchuria. Russia thereby entered into occupation of the peninsula, even though, in concert with other European powers, it had forced Japan to relinquish just such a right after the latter's decisive victory over China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. Moreover, in 1896 Russia had concluded an alliance with China against Japan and, in the process, had won rights to extend the Trans-Siberian Railroad across Chinese-held Manchuria to the Russian seaport of Vladivostok, thus gaining control of an important strip of Manchurian territory.

However, though Russia had built the Trans-Siberian Railroad (1891–1904), it still lacked the transportation facilities necessary to reinforce its limited armed forces in Manchuria with sufficient men and supplies. Japan, by contrast, had steadily expanded its army since its war with China in 1894 and by 1904 had gained a marked superiority over Russia in the number of ground troops in the Far East. After Russia reneged in 1903 on an agreement to withdraw its troops from Manchuria, Japan decided it was time to attack.

The war began on Feb. 8, 1904, when the main Japanese fleet launched a surprise attack and siege on the Russian naval squadron at Port Arthur. In March the Japanese landed an army in Korea that quickly overran that country. In May another Japanese army landed on the Liaotung Peninsula, and on May 26 it cut off the Port Arthur garrison from the main body of Russian forces in Manchuria. The Japanese then pushed northward, and the Russian army fell back to Mukden (now Shen-yang) after losing battles at Fu-hsien (June 14) and Liao-yang (August 25), south of Mukden. In October the Russians went back on the offensive with the help of reinforcements received via the Trans-Siberian Railroad, but their attacks proved indecisive owing to poor military leadership.

The Japanese had also settled down to a long siege of Port Arthur after several very costly general assaults on it had failed. The garrison's military leadership proved divided, however, and on Jan. 2, 1905, in a gross act of incompetence and corruption, Port Arthur's Russian commander surrendered the port to the Japanese without consulting his officers and with three months' provisions and adequate supplies of ammunition still in the fortress.

The final battle of the land war was fought at Mukden in late February and early March 1905, between Russian forces totaling 330,000 men and Japanese totaling 270,000. After long and stubborn fighting and heavy casualties on both sides, the Russian commander, General A.N. Kuropatkin, broke off the fighting and withdrew his forces northward from Mukden, which fell into the hands of the Japanese. Losses in this battle were exceptionally heavy, with approximately 89,000 Russian and 71,000 Japanese casualties.

The naval Battle of Tsushima (Tsushima, Battle of) finally gave the Japanese the upper hand in the conflict. The Japanese had been unable to secure the complete command of the sea on which their land campaign depended, and the Russian squadrons at Port Arthur and Vladivostok had remained moderately active. But on May 27–29, 1905, in a battle in the Tsushima Strait, Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō's (Tōgō Heihachirō) main Japanese fleet destroyed the Russian Baltic Fleet, which, commanded by Admiral Z.P. Rozhestvensky, had sailed in October 1904 all the way from the Baltic port of Liepāja to relieve the forces at Port Arthur and at the time of the battle was trying to reach Vladivostok. (See Tsushima, Battle of.) Japan was by this time financially exhausted, but its decisive naval victory at Tsushima, together with increasing internal political unrest throughout Russia, where the war had never been popular, brought the Russian government to the peace table.

President Theodore Roosevelt (Roosevelt, Theodore) of the United States served as mediator at the peace conference, which was held at Portsmouth, N.H., U.S. (Aug. 9–Sept. 5, 1905). In the resulting Treaty of Portsmouth (Portsmouth, Treaty of), Japan gained control of the Liaotung Peninsula (and Port Arthur) and the South Manchurian railroad (which led to Port Arthur), as well as half of Sakhalin Island. Russia agreed to evacuate southern Manchuria, which was restored to China, and Japan's control of Korea was recognized. Within two months of the treaty's signing, a revolution compelled the Russian tsar Nicholas II to issue the October Manifesto, which was the equivalent of a constitutional charter.

Witte, Sergey Yulyevich, Graf

▪ prime minister of Russia

Introduction

(Count)

born June 29 [June 17, old style], 1849, Tiflis, Georgia, Russian Empire

died March 13 [Feb. 28, O.S.], 1915, Petrograd

Russian minister of finance (1892–1903) and first constitutional prime minister of the Russian Empire (1905–06), who sought to wed firm authoritarian rule to modernization along Western lines.

Life.

Witte's father, of Dutch ancestry, directed the agricultural department in the office of the governor general of the Caucasus. His mother came from a high-ranking family of the Russian nobility engaged in state service. Witte's childhood in the Caucasus was a happy one. Following his successful career as a student of mathematics at the Novorossiysky University (now Odessa State University) at Odessa, Witte thought of entering on an academic career. But he followed the advice of a family friend, the minister of communications, and entered the railway administration. It was the beginning of a career that brought Witte to the heart of imperial politics and finance. After a period in the chancellery of the governor general of Odessa and Bessarabia (1871–74), Witte studied railway administration in the Odessa Railway at the Odessa office of the Ministry of Communications. He led a disciplined, orderly life, imposed partly by family poverty and partly by an urge to succeed. By the time of the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78) he had already risen to a position in which he controlled all the traffic passing to the front along the lines of the Odessa Railway. At one critical point he devised a novel system of double-shift working to overcome delays on the line.

Witte showed his freedom from bureaucratic prejudice by appointing men of all nationalities—Jews, Poles, Ukrainians—as his subordinates and by cultivating favourable press relations. His economic acumen was shown in his collection and use of railway statistics and in the implementation of an effective freight tariff whereby he lowered freight rates and increased revenue.

In 1889 Witte was invited to establish a railway department in the Ministry of Finance. He advanced rapidly and became in quick succession minister of communications (February 1892) and minister of finance (August 1892). Far-reaching plans for the economic development of the Russian Empire formed the kernel of Witte's policy. He aimed at “removing the unfavourable conditions which hamper the economic development of the country and at kindling a healthy spirit of enterprise” (Witte's first budget to the Emperor, 1893). Using the full power of the state, Witte unfolded a vast range of activity: a remodelled State Bank made ready capital available to industry; Russian steamship companies and nautical and engineering schools were established; savings banks were encouraged; company law was reformed; and the ruble was made convertible. Witte was also instrumental in raising large loans from investors in France, Britain, Belgium, and Germany to finance Russian industrialization.

He deployed his greatest energy in stimulating railway building, particularly the Trans-Siberian line (actually begun in 1891). He saw it not only as a means to bring urban progress to the countryside but also as an economic stimulus in itself, as a link between European and Asiatic Russia, and as a way of making Russia the chief intermediary between western Europe and the Far East. For almost a decade the “Witte system” enjoyed considerable success, but at the turn of the century international uncertainty (the South African [Boer] War, the Spanish–American War, and the Boxer Rebellion in China) reduced the flow of foreign loans to Russia, and strikes and peasant unrest in Russia revealed that the mass of the population would no longer tolerate the reduced living standards that Witte's policy entailed. Moreover, influential agricultural interests, always hostile to Witte's all-out support for industrialization, made their opposition manifest at court. His relationship with Emperor Nicholas II, who feared this dynamic man, was also unhappy. In August 1903 Witte was removed from the Ministry of Finance and appointed to the largely decorative position of chairman of the Committee of Ministers.

He had to look on in impotence as the government blundered into war with Japan. But he was to render highly important services to the empire in 1905 and 1906. In July 1905 he was appointed chief Russian plenipotentiary to conduct peace negotiations with Japan. He obtained unexpectedly favourable terms for Russia, but his achievement did not make him any more popular.

At a political level, Witte, though he detested constitutionalism in any form, used his influence to persuade the Tsar to issue the “October Manifesto” of 1905, which promised to grant a measure of representative government. No less important was Witte's role as prime minister in the new system of government, in organizing the repression of all the forces of disruption in the autumn and winter of 1905–06—e.g., the St. Petersburg Soviet, or workers' council, the troop mutinies in the Far East, strikes in South Russia, and peasant uprisings in the Baltic provinces.

Witte was also instrumental in concluding arrangements in 1906 with a group of European bankers for a series of loans that restored Russian finances, which were in a state of virtual collapse through the effects of defeat in the Far East and the widespread revolts of 1905.

This was Witte's last opportunity to serve the state. He was forced to resign the premiership in April 1906, having lost what little confidence the Tsar had in him. Witte never returned to office, and his efforts to influence policy were ineffectual. Thus, in the summer and winter of 1914–15 he vainly opposed Russian entry into World War I and was sympathetic to peace feelers put out by the German government through Witte's own German banker. He died embittered and dispirited, foreseeing disaster for the tsarist empire.

Assessment.

Witte's reputation was at first eclipsed through the collapse of tsarism, but he is now appreciated as a successor to Peter I the Great in the drive to modernize a backward empire and as a forerunner of the Communists in the policy of implementing an industrial revolution from above. The “Witte period” of 1892–1903 may well be compared to the period of the First Five-Year Plan. But Witte worked in an unsympathetic political context that was perhaps incompatible with industrialization and by which he was ultimately defeated.

Lionel Kochan

Additional Reading

Theodore von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (1963), is the only study of Witte's career that is commensurate with the importance of the subject, ending with Witte's final fall from power in 1906 (includes a useful bibliography). The Memoirs of Count Witte, trans. and ed. by Abraham Yarmolinsky (1921), remains indispensable, though the emphasis is on Witte's career in 1905–06. The Memoirs

Duma

▪ Russian assembly

Russian in full Gosudarstvennaya Duma (“State Assembly”),

elected legislative body that, along with the State Council, constituted the imperial Russian legislature from 1906 until its dissolution at the time of the March 1917 Revolution. The Duma constituted the lower house of the Russian parliament, and the State Council was the upper house. As a traditional institution, the Duma (meaning “deliberation”) had precedents in certain deliberative and advisory councils of pre-Soviet Russia, notably in the boyar dumas (existing from the 10th to the 17th century) and the city dumas (1785–1917). The Gosudarstvennaya Duma, or state duma, however, constituted the first genuine attempt toward parliamentary government in Russia.

Initiated as a result of the 1905 revolution, the Duma was established by Tsar Nicholas II in his October Manifesto (Oct. 30, 1905), which promised that it would be a representative assembly and that its approval would be necessary for the enactment of legislation. But the Fundamental Laws, issued in April 1906, before the First Duma met (May 1906), deprived it of control over state ministers and portions of the state budget and limited its ability to initiate legislation effectively.

Four Dumas met (May 10–July 21, 1906; March 5–June 16, 1907; Nov. 14, 1907–June 22, 1912; and Nov. 28, 1912–March 11, 1917). They rarely enjoyed the confidence or the cooperation of the ministers or the emperor, who retained the right to rule by decree when the Duma was not in session. The first two Dumas were elected indirectly (except in five large cities) by a system that gave undue representation to the peasantry, which the government expected to be conservative. The Dumas were, nevertheless, dominated by liberal and socialist opposition groups that demanded extensive reforms. Both Dumas were quickly dissolved by the tsar.

In 1907, by a virtual coup d'état, Prime Minister Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin restricted the franchise to reduce the representation of radical and national minority groups. The Third Duma, elected on that basis, was conservative. It generally supported the government's agrarian reforms and military reorganization; and, although it criticized bureaucratic abuses and government advisers, it survived its full five-year term.

The Fourth Duma was also conservative. But as World War I progressed, it became increasingly dissatisfied with the government's incompetence and negligence, especially in supplying the army. By the spring of 1915 the Duma had become a focal point of opposition to the imperial regime. At the outset of the March Revolution of 1917, it established the Provisional Committee of the Duma, which formed the first Provisional Government and accepted the abdication of Nicholas II.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Federation in 1993 replaced its old Soviet-era constitution with a new document that revived the name “State Duma” for the lower house of the newly created Federal Assembly, or Russian national parliament. (The Federation Council comprised the upper house.) The revived Duma consisted of 450 members elected by universal suffrage to a four-year term. Half of the Duma's members were elected by proportional representation, and the other half by single-member constituencies. The revived Duma was the chief legislative chamber and passed legislation by majority vote. The Federal Assembly could override a presidential veto of such legislation by a two-thirds majority vote. The Duma also had the right to approve the prime minister and other high government officials nominated by the president.

October Manifesto

▪ Russia [1905]

Russian Oktyabrsky Manifest

(Oct. 30 [Oct. 17, Old Style], 1905), in Russian history, document issued by the emperor Nicholas II that in effect marked the end of unlimited autocracy in Russia and ushered in an era of constitutional monarchy. Threatened by the events of the Russian Revolution of 1905 (q.v.), Nicholas faced the choice of establishing a military dictatorship or granting a constitution. On the advice of Sergey Yulevich Witte, he issued the October Manifesto, which promised to guarantee civil liberties (e.g., freedom of speech, press, and assembly), to establish a broad franchise, and to create a legislative body (the Duma [q.v.]) whose members would be popularly elected and whose approval would be necessary before the enactment of any legislation.

The manifesto satisfied enough of the moderate participants in the revolution to weaken the forces against the government and allow the revolution to be crushed. Only then did the government formally fulfill the promises of the manifesto. On April 23, 1906, the Fundamental Laws, which were to serve as a constitution, were promulgated. The Duma that was created had two houses rather than one, however, and members of only one of them were to be popularly elected. Further, the Duma had only limited control over the budget and none at all over the executive branch of the government. In addition, the civil rights and suffrage rights granted by the Fundamental Laws were far more limited than those promised by the manifesto.

Russian Revolution of 1905

uprising that was instrumental in convincing Tsar Nicholas II to attempt the transformation of the Russian government from an autocracy into a constitutional monarchy. For several years before 1905 and especially after the humiliating Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), diverse social groups demonstrated their discontent with the Russian social and political system. Their protests ranged from liberal rhetoric to strikes and included student riots and terrorist assassinations. These efforts, coordinated by the Union of Liberation, culminated in the massacre of peaceful demonstrators in the square before the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, on Bloody Sunday (January 9 [January 22, New Style], 1905).

In St. Petersburg and other major industrial centres, general strikes followed. Nicholas responded in February by announcing his intention to establish an elected assembly to advise the government. But his proposal did not satisfy the striking workers, the peasants (whose uprisings were spreading), or even the liberals of the zemstvos (local government organs) and of the professions, who by April were demanding that a constituent assembly be convened.

The revolt spread to non-Russian parts of the empire, particularly to Poland, Finland, the Baltic provinces, and Georgia, where it was reinforced by nationalist movements. In some areas the rebellion was met by violent opposition from the antirevolutionary Black Hundreds, who attacked the socialists and staged pogroms against the Jews. But the armed forces joined in on the side of the revolt as well: army units situated along the Trans-Siberian Railroad line rioted, and in June the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied in the harbour at Odessa.

The government decree on August 6 (August 19) announcing election procedures for the advisory assembly stimulated even more protest, which increased through September. The rebellion reached its peak in October-November. A railroad strike, begun on October 7 (October 20), swiftly developed into a general strike in most of the large cities.

The first workers' council, or soviet, acting as a strike committee, was formed at Ivanovo-Vosnesensk; another, the St. Petersburg soviet, was formed on October 13 (October 26). It initially directed the general strike; but, as social democrats, especially Mensheviks, joined, it assumed the character of a revolutionary government. Similar soviets were organized in Moscow, Odessa, and other cities.

The magnitude of the strike finally convinced Nicholas to act. On the advice of Sergey Yulyevich Witte (Witte, Sergey Yulyevich, Graf), he issued the October Manifesto (October 17 [October 30], 1905), which promised a constitution and the establishment of an elected legislature ( Duma). He also made Witte president of the new Council of Ministers (i.e., prime minister).

These concessions did not meet the radical opposition's demands for an assembly or a republic. The revolutionaries refused to yield; even the liberals declined to participate in Witte's government. But some moderates were satisfied, and many workers, interpreting the October Manifesto as a victory, returned to their jobs. This was enough to break the opposition's coalition and to weaken the St. Petersburg soviet.

At the end of November the government arrested the soviet's chairman, the Menshevik G.S. Khrustalev-Nosar, and on December 3 (December 16) occupied its building and arrested Leon Trotsky (Trotsky, Leon) and others. But in Moscow a new general strike was called; barricades were erected, and there was fighting in the streets before the revolution was put down. In Finland order was restored by removing some unpopular legislation, but special military expeditions were sent to Poland, the Baltic provinces, and Georgia, where the suppression of the rebellions was particularly bloody. By the beginning of 1906 the government had regained control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad and of the army, and the revolution was essentially over.

The uprising failed to replace the tsarist autocracy with a democratic republic or even to convoke a constituent assembly, and most of the revolutionary leaders were placed under arrest. It did, however, force the imperial regime to institute extensive reforms, the most important of which were the Fundamental Laws (1906), which functioned as a constitution, and the creation of the Duma, which fostered the development of legal political activity and parties.

▪ Russia [1905]

Russian Krovavoye Voskresenye

(January 9 [January 22, New Style], 1905), massacre in St. Petersburg, Russia, of peaceful demonstrators marking the beginning of the violent phase of the Russian Revolution of 1905. At the end of the 19th century, industrial workers in Russia had begun to organize; police agents, eager to prevent the Labour Movement from being dominated by revolutionary influences, formed legal labour unions and encouraged the workers to concentrate their energies on making economic gains and to disregard broader social and political problems.

In January 1905 a wave of strikes, partly planned by one of the legal organizations of workers—the Assembly of Russian Workingmen—broke out in St. Petersburg. The leader of the assembly, the priest Georgy Gapon, hoping to present the workers' request for reforms directly to Emperor Nicholas II, arranged a mass demonstration. Having told the authorities of his plan, he led the workers—who were peacefully carrying religious icons, pictures of Nicholas, and petitions citing their grievances and desired reforms—toward the square before the Winter Palace.

Nicholas was not in the city. The chief of the security police—Nicholas's uncle, Grand Duke Vladimir—tried to stop the march and then ordered his police to fire upon the demonstrators. More than 100 marchers were killed, and several hundred were wounded. The massacre was followed by a series of strikes in other cities, peasant uprisings in the country, and mutinies in the armed forces, which seriously threatened the tsarist regime and became known as the Revolution of 1905.

Black Hundreds

▪ Russian history

Russian Chernosotentsy,

reactionary, antirevolutionary, and anti-Semitic groups formed in Russia during and after the Russian Revolution of 1905. The most important of these groups were the League of the Russian People (Soyuz Russkogo Naroda), League of the Archangel Michael (Soyuz Mikhaila Arkhangela), and Council of United Nobility (Soviet Obedinennogo Dvoryanstva). The Black Hundreds were composed primarily of landowners, rich peasants, bureaucrats, merchants, police officials, and clergymen, who supported the principles of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and Russian nationalism. Particularly active from 1906 until 1914, they conducted raids (with the unofficial approval of the government) against various revolutionary groups and pogroms against the Jews.

Stolypin, Pyotr Arkadyevich

▪ Russian statesman

born April 14 [April 2, old style], 1862, Dresden, Saxony

died Sept. 18 [Sept. 5, O.S.], 1911, Kiev

conservative statesman who, after the Russian Revolution of 1905, initiated far-reaching agrarian reforms to improve the legal and economic status of the peasantry as well as the general economy and political stability of imperial Russia.

Appointed governor of the provinces of Grodno (1902) and Saratov (1903), Stolypin demonstrated his concern for improving the welfare of the peasants as well as his firmness and efficiency in subduing their rebellions. Consequently, he gained the favour of Emperor Nicholas II and was appointed minister of the interior in May 1906. In July he was also named president of the Council of Ministers (i.e., prime minister).

Dismissing the first Duma (the elected legislative body created after the 1905 Revolution) on July 22 (July 9, O.S.), 1906, because it demanded a determining voice in the formulation of an agrarian reform program, Stolypin, by executive decree, introduced his own reforms. These gave the peasantry greater freedom in the selection of their representatives to the zemstvo (local government) councils, removed restrictions that had excluded the peasantry from participating in normal judicial procedures, and, most importantly, provided them with an opportunity to leave their communes, acquire private ownership of consolidated plots of land, and transform themselves, according to Stolypin's wish, into a prosperous, stable, and loyally conservative class of farmers (October and November 1906).

Stolypin, however, also instituted a network of courts-martial, which were authorized to try accused rebels and terrorists; within the few months of their existence they used “Stolypin's necktie” (the noose) to execute several thousand defendants; the prime minister gained the enmity of the left wing and much of the centre. He also provoked the opposition of the moderate left when he swiftly dismissed the second Duma (which met from March to June 1907) because it refused to endorse his agrarian reform proposals and when, on the day of its dissolution (June 16 [June 3, O.S.], 1907), he issued—in complete disregard for the recently adopted constitution—a new electoral law reflecting his personal conservatism and Russian nationalism and restricting the franchise of the peasant and worker electorate as well as that of the national minorities.

Although he had earlier also alienated the extreme right by partially accepting the constitutional framework, Stolypin did obtain the cooperation of the party of the moderate right (the Octobrists), which dominated the third Duma (convened November 1907). With the Octobrists' aid he passed legislation confirming and elaborating his 1906 agrarian reforms (June 1910 and June 1911). He was also able to reimpose harsh Russification policies on Finland. When he convinced the Emperor to temporarily suspend both the Duma and the upper legislative house (the State Council) in order to bypass them and enact legislation on the extension of the zemstvo system into the Polish regions of the empire (March 1911), he also alienated the moderate right, which condemned him for once again abusing the constitutional system of government.

It is probable that Nicholas was considering his dismissal when Stolypin, while attending an operatic performance with the Emperor, was fatally shot (Sept. 14 [Sept. 1, O.S.], 1911) by Dmitry Bogrov, a revolutionary who had used his police connections to gain admittance to the theatre.

Russian Revolution of 1917

two revolutions, the first of which, in February (March, New Style), overthrew the imperial government and the second of which, in October (October Revolution) (November), placed the Bolsheviks (Bolshevik) in power.

By 1917 the bond between the tsar and most of the Russian people had been broken. Governmental corruption and inefficiency were rampant. The tsar's reactionary policies, including the occasional dissolution of the Duma, or Russian parliament, the chief fruit of the 1905 revolution, had spread dissatisfaction even to moderate elements. The Russian Empire's many ethnic minorities grew increasingly restive under Russian domination.

But it was the government's inefficient prosecution of World War I that finally provided the challenge the old regime could not meet. Ill-equipped and poorly led, Russian armies suffered catastrophic losses in campaign after campaign against German armies. The war made revolution inevitable in two ways: it showed Russia was no longer a military match for the nations of central and western Europe, and it hopelessly disrupted the economy.

Riots over the scarcity of food broke out in the capital, Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg), on February 24 (March 8), and, when most of the Petrograd garrison joined the revolt, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate March 2 (March 15). When his brother, Grand Duke Michael, refused the throne, more than 300 years of rule by the Romanov dynasty came to an end.

A committee of the Duma appointed a Provisional Government to succeed the autocracy, but it faced a rival in the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. The 2,500 delegates to this soviet were chosen from factories and military units in and around Petrograd.

The Soviet soon proved that it had greater authority than the Provisional Government, which sought to continue Russia's participation in the European war. On March 1 (March 14) the Soviet issued its famous Order No. 1, which directed the military to obey only the orders of the Soviet and not those of the Provisional Government. The Provisional Government was unable to countermand the order. All that now prevented the Petrograd Soviet from openly declaring itself the real government of Russia was fear of provoking a conservative coup.

Between March and October the Provisional Government was reorganized four times. The first government was composed entirely of liberal ministers, with the exception of the Socialist Revolutionary Aleksandr F. Kerensky (Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich). The subsequent governments were coalitions. None of them, however, was able to cope adequately with the major problems afflicting the country: peasant land seizures, nationalist independence movements in non-Russian areas, and the collapse of army morale at the front.

Meanwhile, soviets on the Petrograd model, in far closer contact with the sentiments of the people than the Provisional Government was, had been organized in cities and major towns and in the army. In these soviets, “defeatist” sentiment, favouring Russian withdrawal from the war on almost any terms, was growing. One reason was that radical socialists increasingly dominated the soviet movement. At the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, convened on June 3 (June 16), the Socialist Revolutionaries were the largest single bloc, followed by the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.

Kerensky became head of the Provisional Government in July and put down a coup attempted by army commander in chief Lavr Georgiyevich Kornilov (Kornilov, Lavr Georgiyevich), but he was increasingly unable to halt Russia's slide into political, economic, and military chaos, and his party suffered a major split as the left wing broke from the Socialist Revolutionary Party. But while the Provisional Government's power waned, that of the soviets was increasing, as was the Bolsheviks' influence within them. By September the Bolsheviks and their allies, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, had overtaken the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks and held majorities in both the Petrograd and Moscow soviets.

By autumn the Bolshevik program of “peace, land, and bread” had won the party considerable support among the hungry urban workers and the soldiers, who were already deserting from the ranks in large numbers. Although a previous coup attempt (the July Days; q.v.) had failed, the time now seemed ripe. On October 24–25 (November 6–7) the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries staged a nearly bloodless coup, occupying government buildings, telegraph stations, and other strategic points. Kerensky's attempt to organize resistance proved futile, and he fled the country. The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which convened in Petrograd simultaneously with the coup, approved the formation of a new government composed mainly of Bolshevik commissars.

Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich

▪ prime minister of Russia

born April 22 [May 2, New Style], 1881, Simbirsk [now Ulyanovsk], Russia

died June 11, 1970, New York, N.Y., U.S.

moderate socialist revolutionary who served as head of the Russian provisional government from July to October 1917 (Old Style).

While studying law at the University of St. Petersburg, Kerensky was attracted to the Narodniki (or populist) revolutionary movement. After graduating (1904), he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party (c. 1905) and became a prominent lawyer, frequently defending revolutionaries accused of political offenses. In 1912 he was elected to the fourth Duma as a Trudoviki (Labour Group) delegate from Volsk (in Saratov province), and in the next several years he gained a reputation as an eloquent, dynamic politician of the moderate left.

Unlike some of the more radical socialists, he supported Russia's participation in World War I. He became increasingly disappointed with the tsarist regime's conduct of the war effort, however, and, when the February Revolution (Russian Revolution of 1917) broke out (1917), he urged the dissolution of the monarchy. He enthusiastically accepted the posts of vice chairman of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies and of minister of justice in the provisional government, formed by the Duma. The only person to hold positions in both governing bodies, he assumed the role of liaison between them. He instituted basic civil liberties—e.g., the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and religion; universal suffrage; and equal rights for women—throughout Russia and became one of the most widely known and popular figures among the revolutionary leadership.

In May, when a public uproar over the announcement of Russia's war aims (which Kerensky had approved) forced several ministers to resign, Kerensky was transferred to the posts of minister of war and of the navy and became the dominant personality in the new government. He subsequently planned a new offensive and toured the front, using his inspiring rhetoric to instill in the demoralized troops a desire to renew their efforts and defend the revolution. His eloquence, however, proved inadequate compensation for war weariness and lack of military discipline. Kerensky's June Offensive was an unmitigated failure.

When the provisional government was again compelled to reorganize in July, Kerensky, who adhered to no rigid political dogma and whose dramatic oratorical style appeared to win him broad popular support, became prime minister. Despite his efforts to unite all political factions, he soon alienated the moderates and the officers' corps by summarily dismissing his commander in chief, General Lavr G. Kornilov (Kornilov, Lavr Georgiyevich), and personally replacing him (September); he also lost the confidence of the left wing by refusing to implement their radical social and economic programs and by apparently planning to assume dictatorial powers.

Consequently, when the Bolsheviks seized power (October Revolution, 1917), Kerensky, who escaped to the front, was unable to gather forces to defend his government. He remained in hiding until May 1918, when he emigrated to western Europe and devoted himself to writing books on the revolution and editing émigré newspapers and journals. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he lectured at universities and continued to write books on his revolutionary experiences.

Kornilov, Lavr Georgiyevich

▪ Russian general

born August 30 [August 18, Old Style], 1870, Karkaralinsk, Western Siberia, Russian Empire [now Qargaraly, Kazakhstan]

died April 13, 1918, near Ekaterinodar [now Krasnodar], Russia

Imperial Russian general, who was accused of attempting to overthrow the provisional government established in Russia after the February Revolution of 1917 and to replace it with a military dictatorship.

An intelligence officer for the Imperial Russian Army during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) and a military attaché in Beijing (1907–11), Kornilov became a divisional commander during World War I. Captured by the Austrians at Przemysl (March 1915), he escaped in 1916 and was placed in command of an army corps.

After the February Revolution Kornilov was put in charge of the vital military district of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) by the provisional government. His determination to restore discipline and efficiency in the disintegrating Russian Army, however, made him unpopular in revolutionary Petrograd. He soon resigned, returned to the front, and participated in the abortive Russian offensive in June against the Germans in Galicia. On August 1 (July 18, Old Style) Prime Minister Aleksandr Kerensky (Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich) appointed him commander in chief, but conflicts developed between Kornilov and Kerensky, owing to their opposing views on politics and on the role and nature of the Army. At the end of August, Kornilov sent troops toward Petrograd; Kerensky, interpreting this as an attempted military coup d'état, dismissed Kornilov and ordered him to come to Petrograd (August 27). Kornilov refused, and railroad workers prevented his troops from reaching their destination; on September 1 he surrendered and was imprisoned at Bykhov.

Kornilov later escaped, and, after the Bolsheviks seized power (October 1917), he assumed military command of the anti-Bolshevik (“White”) volunteer army in the Don region. Several months later he was killed during a battle for Ekaterinodar.

July Days

▪ Russian history

(July 16–20 [July 3–7, old style], 1917), a period in the Russian Revolution (Russian Revolution of 1917) during which workers and soldiers of Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) staged armed demonstrations against the Provisional Government that resulted in a temporary decline of Bolshevik influence and in the formation of a new Provisional Government, headed by Aleksandr Kerensky (Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich). In June dissatisfied Petrograd workers and soldiers, using Bolshevik slogans, staged a demonstration and adopted resolutions against the government. On July 3 protestors, motivated in part by the resignation of the government's Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) ministers, marched through Petrograd to the Tauride Palace to demand that the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies assume formal power. The Bolsheviks, initially reluctant, attempted to prevent the demonstration but subsequently decided to support it.

On July 4 the Bolsheviks planned a peaceful demonstration; but confused armed clashes broke out, injuring about 400 persons. Neither the Provisional Government nor the Soviet could control the situation. But the Soviet refused to take power, and the Bolshevik Party refrained from actually staging an insurrection. Thus, the demonstration was deprived of its political goal, and by nightfall the crowds had dispersed.

To undermine Bolshevik popularity and reduce the threat of a coup d'etat, the government produced evidence that the Bolshevik leader Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich) had close political and financial ties with the German government. A public reaction set in against the Bolsheviks; they were beaten and arrested, their property destroyed, their leaders persecuted. Lenin fled to Finland; but others, including Trotsky, were jailed. The Provisional Government was reorganized, with Kerensky as prime minister. The new government, though largely Socialistic, proved to be only a short-lived concession to the demonstrators' demands for a revolutionary Soviet government. It was subsequently overthrown during the October (November) Revolution.

Socialist Revolutionary Party

▪ political party, Russia

Russian Sotsialisty Revolyutsionery (SR, or ESERY)

Russian political party that represented the principal alternative to the Social-Democratic Workers' Party during the last years of Romanov rule. Ideological heir to the Narodniki (Populists) of the 19th century, the party was founded in 1901 as a rallying point for agrarian socialists, whose appeal was principally to the peasantry. The party program called for the socialization of the land and a federal governmental structure. The SR Party carried out hundreds of political assassinations and never completely abandoned terrorist tactics (V.I. Lenin was wounded by an SR member in 1918).

In 1917 it was the largest socialist group in Russia. Between February and October 1917 its members held powerful political posts (e.g., Aleksandr Kerensky was minister of justice and later prime minister; Viktor Chernov was minister of agriculture) and exercised considerable influence over the provisional governments. The party won 410 seats (compared to the Bolsheviks' 175) in the election for the Constituent Assembly (November 1917) but had divided over the Bolshevik Revolution (October 1917). Its radical wing (Left Socialist Revolutionaries) formed a splinter group that participated in the Bolshevik government until its representatives were expelled in July 1918 at the fifth Congress of the Soviets. The SR was suppressed by Lenin after the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War.

Bolshevik

▪ Russian political faction

Russian“One of the Majority”, plural Bolsheviks, or Bolsheviki,

member of a wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party, which, led by Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich), seized control of the government in Russia (October 1917) and became the dominant political power. The group originated at the party's second congress (1903) when Lenin's followers, insisting that party membership be restricted to professional revolutionaries, won a temporary majority on the party's central committee and on the editorial board of its newspaper Iskra. They assumed the name Bolsheviks and dubbed their opponents the Mensheviks (Menshevik) (“Those of the Minority”).

Although both factions participated together in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and went through periods of apparent reconciliation (about 1906 and 1910), their differences increased. The Bolsheviks continued to insist upon a highly centralized, disciplined, professional party. They boycotted the elections to the First State Duma (Russian parliament) in 1906 and refused to cooperate with the government and other political parties in subsequent Dumas. Furthermore, their methods of obtaining revenue (including robbery) were disapproved of by the Mensheviks and non-Russian Social Democrats.

In 1912 Lenin, leading a very small minority, formed a distinct Bolshevik organization, decisively (although not formally) splitting the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party. His determination to keep his own faction strictly organized, however, had also alienated many of his Bolshevik colleagues, who had wished to undertake nonrevolutionary activities or who had disagreed with Lenin on political tactics and on the infallibility of orthodox Marxism. No outstanding Russian Social Democrats joined Lenin in 1912.

Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks became increasingly popular among urban workers and soldiers in Russia after the February Revolution (Russian Revolution of 1917) (1917), particularly after April, when Lenin returned to the country, demanding immediate peace and that the workers' councils, or Soviets, assume power. By October the Bolsheviks had majorities in the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and Moscow Soviets; and when they overthrew the Provisional Government, the second Congress of Soviets (devoid of peasant deputies) approved the action and formally took control of the government.

Immediately after the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks refused to share power with other revolutionary groups, with the exception of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries; eventually they suppressed all rival political organizations. They changed their name to Russian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) in March 1918; to All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) in December 1925; and to Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Menshevik

▪ political party, Russia

(Russian: One of the Minority),plural Mensheviks, or Mensheviki,

member of the non-Leninist wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party, which evolved into a separate organization. It originated when a dispute over party membership requirements arose at the 1903 congress of the Social-Democratic Party. One group, led by L. Martov, opposed Lenin's (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich) plan for a party restricted to professional revolutionaries and called for a mass party modelled after western European social-democratic parties.

When Lenin's followers obtained a temporary majority on the central committee and on the editorial board of the newspaper Iskra, they appropriated for themselves the name Bolshevik (Those of the Majority); Martov and his followers became the Mensheviks. After the 1903 congress the differences between the two factions grew. In addition to disapproving of Lenin's emphasis on the dictatorial role of a highly centralized party, the Mensheviks maintained that the proletariat could not (nor should it) dominate a bourgeois revolution; therefore, unlike the Bolsheviks, they were willing to work with the bourgeois left to establish a liberal, capitalist regime, which they considered to be a necessary precursor to a Socialist society. They played active roles in the 1905 revolution, particularly in the St. Petersburg soviet, but afterward, like the Bolsheviks, they participated in the Dumas (parliaments), believing their success to be a step toward the creation of a democratic government. In 1912 the Social-Democratic Party was definitively split by Lenin; in 1914 the Mensheviks themselves became divided in their attitudes toward World War I.

Although they assumed leading roles in the soviets and provisional governments, created after the February Revolution (1917), and formally set up their own party in August, they were not sufficiently united to maintain a dominant position in the political developments of 1917. After the Bolshevik Revolution (October), they attempted to form a legal opposition but in 1922 were permanently suppressed; many Mensheviks went into exile.

Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party

▪ political party, Russia

Russian Rossiyskaya Sotsial-demokraticheskaya Rabochaya Partiya,

Marxist revolutionary party ancestral to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Founded in 1898 in Minsk, the Social-Democratic Party held that Russia could achieve socialism only after developing a bourgeois society with an urban proletariat. It rejected the populist idea that the peasant commune, or mir, could be the basis of a socialist society that could bypass the capitalist stage.

Most of the leaders elected at the founding congress were soon arrested. The second congress, in Brussels and London in July–August 1903, was dominated by the argument between the Bolshevik wing of the party, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the Menshevik wing, led by L. Martov, over Lenin's proposals for a party composed of disciplined professional revolutionaries. Georgy Plekhanov, one of the founders of Russian Marxism, took a generally middle position. This argument dominated the internal life of the party. Party members played a major role in the unsuccessful Russian Revolution of 1905, in which one Social-Democratic leader, Leon Trotsky, was elected president of the St. Petersburg Soviet. In the turmoil of 1917 the Bolsheviks broke definitively with their Menshevik rivals and, after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, changed their name to the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). Their rivals, the Mensheviks, were finally suppressed after the end of the Russian Civil War.

Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich

▪ Russian anarchist

Introduction

born May 30 [May 18, Old Style], 1814, Premukhino, Russia

died July 1 [June 19], 1876, Bern, Switzerland

chief propagator of 19th-century anarchism, a prominent Russian revolutionary agitator, and a prolific political writer. His quarrel with Karl Marx (Marx, Karl) split the anarchist and Marxist wings of the revolutionary socialist movement for many years after their deaths.

Early life

Bakunin was the eldest son of a small landowner in the province of Tver. His lifetime of revolt began when he was sent to the Artillery School in St. Petersburg and later was posted to a military unit on the Polish frontier. In 1835 he absented himself without leave and resigned his commission, an action for which he narrowly escaped arrest for desertion. During the next five years he divided his time between Premukhino, where he plunged into the study of the German philosophers Johann Fichte (Fichte, Johann Gottlieb) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich), and Moscow, where he moved in the literary circles of the critic Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky (Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich), the novelist Ivan Turgenev (Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich), and the publicist Aleksandr Herzen (Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich). In 1840, with his opinions still in a fluid and turbulent state, he journeyed to Berlin to complete his education. There he fell under the spell of the Young Hegelians, the radical followers of Hegel. After moving to Dresden, Bakunin published his first revolutionary credo in a radical journal in 1842, ending with a now-famous aphorism: “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.” This brought him a peremptory order to return to Russia and, on his refusal, the loss of his passport. After brief periods in Switzerland and Belgium, Bakunin settled in Paris, where he consorted with French and German Socialists, including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph) and Karl Marx (Marx, Karl), and numerous Polish émigrés who inspired him to combine the cause of the national liberation of the Slav peoples with that of social revolution. The February Revolution of 1848 (1848, Revolutions of) in Paris gave him his first taste of street fighting, and after a few days of eager participation he traveled eastward in the hope of fanning the flames of revolution in Germany and Poland. In Prague in June 1848, he attended the Slav (Pan-Slavism) congress, which ended when Austrian troops bombarded the city. Later that year, in the secure retreat of Anhalt-Köthen in Germany, he wrote his first major manifesto, An Appeal to the Slavs, in which he denounced the bourgeoisie as a spent counterrevolutionary force, called for the overthrow of the Habsburg (Habsburg, House of) Empire and the creation in central Europe of a free federation of Slav peoples, and counted on the peasant—especially the Russian peasant—with his tradition of violent revolt, as the agent of the coming revolution.

Tired of inaction, Bakunin once more plunged into revolutionary intrigues and, engaging in the Dresden insurrection of May 1849, was arrested. The Saxon authorities turned him over to Austria, where he was incarcerated and then transferred to Russia. There, in May 1851, he was back on Russian soil in the Peter-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. At the invitation of the chief of police he wrote an enigmatic Confession, which was not published until 1921. It consisted of expressions of repentance for misdeeds and abject appeals for mercy but also included some gestures of defiance, playing heavily on Bakunin's devotion to the Slavs and hatred of the Germans—sentiments that were noted with interest and approval by the tsar. Nevertheless, the work did not win Bakunin's release, and he remained in the Peter-Paul Fortress for three years and in another fortress, the Schlisselburg, for three additional years, during which time his health deteriorated rapidly. In 1857 he was released to live in Siberia, where he contracted a marriage, which was not consummated, with the daughter of a Polish merchant. The governor of Eastern Siberia was a cousin of Bakunin's mother, and it was probably through this connection that he obtained permission in 1861 to travel down the Amur, ostensibly on commercial business. Having reached the coast in a Russian ship, he transferred to an American vessel bound for Japan and traveled via the United States to Great Britain.

London and Marx

Bakunin's arrival in London at the end of 1861 reunited him with Herzen, whom he had last seen in Paris in 1847 and who now occupied a preeminent position among Russian émigrés as editor of Kolokol (“The Bell”). Bakunin's 14-month stay in London led to an irreparable rift with Herzen, who had shed some of the revolutionary ardour of his youth and had already crossed swords with the critic and novelist Nikolay Chernyshevsky (Chernyshevsky, N.G.) and other extreme radicals of the rising Russian generation. Herzen now found Bakunin's financial and political irresponsibility difficult to bear. When the Polish insurrection broke out early in 1863, Bakunin eagerly embarked with a shipload of Polish volunteers for the Baltic, though he got only as far as Sweden. At the beginning of 1864 he established himself in Italy, which became his residence for four years. While in Italy he framed the main outlines of the anarchist creed that he preached with unsystematic but unremitting vigour for the rest of his life. It was there, too, that he began to weave a complex network—part real, part fictitious—of interlocking secret revolutionary societies that absorbed his energies and bewildered the followers whom he enrolled in them.

The most famous episode of Bakunin's later years was his quarrel with Marx. While living in Geneva in 1868, he joined the First International (International, First), a federation of working-class parties aimed at transforming the capitalist societies into socialist commonwealths and eventually unifying them in a world federation. At the same time, however, he enrolled his followers in a semisecret Social Democratic Alliance, which he conceived as a revolutionary avant-garde within the International. The First International was unable to contain both of the two powerful and incompatible personalities, and at a congress in 1872 at The Hague, Marx, by an intrigue that had little relation to the causes of the quarrel, secured the expulsion of Bakunin and his followers from the International. The resulting split in the revolutionary movement in Europe and the United States persisted for many years.

Two of Bakunin's major writings, L'Empire knouto-germanique et la révolution sociale (1871; “The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution”) and Statism and Anarchy (1873), directly reflected his conflict with Marx. Bakunin was as uncompromising a revolutionary as Marx and never ceased to preach the overthrow of the existing order by violent means, but he rejected political control, centralization, and subordination to authority (while making an unconscious exception of his own authority within the movement). He denounced what he regarded as characteristically Germanic ways of thought and organization and championed instead the untutored spirit of revolt that he found embodied in the Russian peasant. Bakunin's anarchism took final shape as the antithesis of Marx's communism. Both personally and theoretically, Bakunin threatened all Marxists. His belief that the first act of a revolutionary movement must be the abolition of the state appealed to rank-and-file revolutionaries, and his criticism of Marx's readiness to maintain the state until socialism was achieved—until the state led to a bureaucratic tyranny that in turn would spur revolutionary change—proved all too prescient.

During his last years, which he spent in penury in Switzerland, Bakunin reverted to his preoccupation with central and eastern Europe. He was compromised by a short-lived enthusiasm for Sergey Gennadiyevich Nechayev (Nechayev, Sergey Gennadiyevich), a young Russian nihilist who paraded his contempt for conventional morality and who achieved notoriety by murdering a fellow conspirator whom he suspected of intending to betray or desert the cause, a crime for which Nechayev was eventually extradited to Russia by the Swiss authorities. Bakunin consorted with Russian, Polish, Serb, and Romanian émigrés—among whom he found eager disciples—drafted proclamations, and planned revolutionary organizations. His health grew worse, and his financial embarrassments became ever more acute, and he was forced to depend on the bounty of a few Italian and Swiss friends.

Assessment

Proudhon and Bakunin rank as the founders of 19th-century anarchism. Bakunin formulated no coherent body of doctrine, and his voluminous and vigorous writings were often left incomplete. However, his fame and personality inspired a large and widely dispersed following. Small anarchist groups existed in Great Britain, Switzerland, and Germany, though the powerful anarcho-syndicalist wing of the French trade unions owed more to Proudhon than to Bakunin. Anarchist movements owing allegiance to Bakunin continued to flourish in Italy and especially in Spain, where as late as 1936 the anarchists were the strongest revolutionary party.

Edward H. Carr Alan Ryan Ed.

Additional Reading

The first collection of Bakunin's writings was published in six volumes in French between 1895 and 1913; a complete Russian edition of writings and letters was planned, but only the first four volumes up to 1861 were published (1934–36). A complete edition of the later writings, edited by Arthur Lehning, began publication in 1961 by the Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam. Selected works in English translation were published in G.P. Maximoff (ed.), Political Philosophy of Bakunin (1953); Sam Dolgoff (ed.), Bakunin on Anarchy (1972); and S. Cox and O. Stevens (eds.), Selected Writings (1974, from the Lehning edition). Biographies of Bakunin include Max Nettlau, Michael Bakunin, 3 vol. (1896–1900, reissued in 2 vol., 1971), based on a large mass of documents; E.H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (1937, reissued with minor alterations, 1975); and Aileen Kelly, Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism (1982, reprinted 1987).

Nechayev, Sergey Gennadiyevich

▪ Russian revolutionary

Nechayev also spelled Nechaev

born Sept. 20 [Oct. 2, New Style], 1847, Ivanovo, Russia

died Nov. 21 [Dec. 3], 1882, St. Petersburg

Russian revolutionary known for his organizational scheme for a professional revolutionary party and for his ruthless murder of one of the members of his organization.

During 1868–69 Nechayev participated in the student revolutionary movement in St. Petersburg and composed his “Catechism of a Revolutionary,” which embodied his militant philosophy and a morality under which any means was justified that served the revolutionary end. In March 1869 he went to Geneva, where he met the exiled Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich). A close collaboration between the two developed.

In September 1869 Nechayev returned to Moscow, where he founded a small secret revolutionary group, the People's Retribution (Russian: Narodnaya Rasprava), also called the Society of the Axe, based on the principles of the Catechism and requiring its members to submit unquestioningly to the will of the leader. When I.I. Ivanov, a student member of the group, protested Nechayev's methods, Nechayev organized his execution. The murder, committed in November 1869, was Nechayev's work, although other members of the group were present. When the crime was discovered, Nechayev escaped to Switzerland, but 67 members of his organization were brought to trial. Nechayev resumed contact with Bakunin and participated in revolutionary intrigues until his unprincipled behaviour discredited him in the eyes of Bakunin and other Russian émigrés. At the request of the Russian government, Nechayev was arrested by the Swiss police in 1872 and extradited to Russia. He was tried and sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment in the Peter-Paul Fortress, where he died of undetermined causes. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor) used Nechayev as a model for the character Pyotr Verkhovensky in The Possessed.

pogrom

▪ mob attack

(Russian: “devastation,” or “riot”), a mob attack, either approved or condoned by authorities, against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national minority. The term is usually applied to attacks on Jews (Jew) in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The first extensive pogroms followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Although the assassin was not a Jew, and only one Jew was associated with him, false rumours aroused Russian mobs in more than 200 cities and towns to attack Jews and destroy their property. In the two decades following, pogroms gradually became less prevalent; but from 1903 to 1906 they were common throughout the country. Thereafter, to the end of the Russian monarchy, mob action against the Jews was intermittent and less widespread.

The pogrom in Kishinev (now Chisinau) in Russian-ruled Moldavia in April 1903, although more severe than most, was typical in many respects. For two days mobs, inspired by local leaders acting with official support, killed, looted, and destroyed without hindrance from police or soldiers. When troops were finally called out and the mob dispersed, 45 Jews had been killed, nearly 600 had been wounded, and 1,500 Jewish homes had been pillaged. Those responsible for inciting the outrages were not punished.

The Russian central government did not organize pogroms, as was widely believed; but the anti-Semitic policy that it carried out from 1881 to 1917 made them possible. Official persecution and harassment of Jews led the numerous anti-Semites to believe that their violence was legitimate, and their belief was strengthened by the active participation of a few high and many minor officials in fomenting attacks and by the reluctance of the government either to stop pogroms or to punish those responsible for them.

Pogroms have also occurred in other countries, notably in Poland and in Germany during the Hitler regime. See also anti-Semitism; Kristallnacht.

Kadet

▪ Russian political party

member of the Constitutional Democratic Party , also called Party of People's Freedom , Russian Konstitutsionno-Demokraticheskaya Partiya , or Partiya Narodnoy Svobody

a Russian political party advocating a radical change in Russian government toward a constitutional monarchy like Great Britain's. It was founded in October 1905 by the Union of Liberation and other liberals associated with the zemstvos, local councils that often were centres of liberal opinion and agitation.

The Kadets dominated the first Duma in 1906, but the tradition of despotic rule, the dislocations caused by World War I (1914–18), and the growth of revolutionary fervour and agitation during the war caused other groups to claim the nation's attention. Succeeding Dumas saw a weakening of Kadet strength. Four of the members of the Provisional Government's first cabinet were Kadets, but the Bolsheviks (Bolshevik), seizing power, declared the Kadet organization illegal late in 1917, and the party's activities ceased within Russia.

Stolypin land reform

▪ Russian agricultural history

(1906–17), measures undertaken by the Russian government to allow peasants to own land individually. Its aim was to encourage industrious peasants to acquire their own land, and ultimately to create a class of prosperous, conservative, small farmers that would be a stabilizing influence in the countryside and would support the autocracy. After the government emancipated the serfs in 1861 it allotted land to each peasant household, but the land was collectively owned by the village communes. The communes traditionally divided the land into strips, which were distributed among the households for cultivation.

The lack of economic success in agriculture following emancipation, as well as the violent peasant uprisings that occurred during the Revolution of 1905 (Russian Revolution of 1905), suggested the need to abandon communal land tenure and to replace it with individual land ownership. On Nov. 22 (Nov. 9, old style), 1906, while the Duma (the formal legislative body) was not in session, the prime minister Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin issued a decree that enabled each peasant household to claim individual ownership of its land allotment and to withdraw from the commune. The household could also demand that the commune provide it with a consolidated plot equivalent to the scattered strips it had been cultivating. Furthermore, the decree abolished joint household ownership and made the head of each household the sole property owner. In 1910 the decree was finally confirmed by the Duma, which passed laws expanding it in 1910 and 1911.

The reform was only a moderate success. By the end of 1916 no more than 20 percent of the peasant households had title to their land, although fewer (some 10 percent) had received consolidated plots. The reform did not transform the peasantry into the bulwark of support that the autocracy needed; and during 1917 peasants everywhere participated in the revolutions, seizing properties belonging to the Stolypin farmers.

Octobrist

▪ political party, Russia

Russian Oktyabrist , also called Union of October 17

member of a conservative-liberal Russian political party whose program of moderate constitutionalism called for the fulfillment of the emperor Nicholas II's October Manifesto. Founded in November 1905, the party was led by the industrialist Aleksandr Ivanovich Guchkov and drew support from liberal gentry, businessmen, and some bureaucrats. As the majority party in the third and fourth Dumas (1907–17), the Octobrists favoured a legislature with real power but insisted that the executive be responsible to the emperor only. The Octobrists, increasingly alienated from the government, finally joined the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) in the Progressive Bloc of 1915, which called for more representative leadership and new reforms

mir

▪ Russian community

in Russian history, a self-governing community of peasant households that elected its own officials and controlled local forests, fisheries, hunting grounds, and vacant lands. To make taxes imposed on its members more equitable, the mir assumed communal control of the community's arable land and periodically redistributed it among the households, according to their sizes (from 1720).

After serfdom was abolished (1861), the mir was retained as a system of communal land tenure and an organ of local administration. It was economically inefficient; but the central government, having made members of the commune collectively responsible for the payment of state taxes and the fulfillment of local obligations, favoured it. The system was also favoured by Slavophiles and political conservatives, who regarded it as a guardian of old national values, as well as by revolutionary Narodniki (“Populists”), who viewed the mir as the germ of a future socialist society. Despite the efforts of Prime Minister Pyotr A. Stolypin (Stolypin, Pyotr Arkadyevich), who initiated a series of agricultural reforms encouraging peasants to assume private ownership, the peasantry universally reverted to communal landholding after the 1917 Revolution.

Siberia

▪ region, Asia

Russian Sibir

vast region of Russia and northern Kazakhstan, constituting all of northern Asia. Siberia extends from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east and southward from the Arctic Ocean to the hills of north-central Kazakhstan and the borders of Mongolia and China.

All but the extreme southwestern area of Siberia lies in Russia. In Russian usage the administrative areas on the eastern flank of the Urals, along the Pacific seaboard, and within Kazakhstan are excluded from Siberia. The total area of Siberia in the wider sense is about 5,207,900 square miles (13,488,500 square km); in the narrower Russian definition the area is 2,529,000 square miles (6,550,000 square km), consisting of two economic planning regions, Eastern and Western Siberia. Siberia also contains the (Russian) republics of Sakha (Yakutia), Buryatia, and Tuva (Tyva).

Siberia falls into four major geographic regions, all of great extent. In the west, abutting the Ural Mountains, is the huge West Siberian Plain, drained by the Ob and Yenisey rivers (Yenisey River), varying little in relief, and containing wide tracts of swampland. East of the Yenisey River is central Siberia, a vast area that consists mainly of plains and the Central Siberian Plateau. Farther east the basin of the Lena River separates central Siberia from the complex series of mountain ranges, upland massifs, and intervening basins that make up northeastern Siberia (i.e., the Russian Far East). The smallest of the four regions is the Baikal area, which is centred on Lake Baikal in the south-central part of Siberia.

Siberia, its name derived from the Tatar term for “sleeping land,” is notorious for the length and severity of its almost snowless winters: in Sakha, minimum temperatures of −90 °F (−68 °C) have been recorded. The climate becomes increasingly harsh eastward, while precipitation also diminishes. Major vegetation zones extend east-west across the whole area—tundra in the north; swampy forest, or taiga, over most of Siberia; and forest-steppe and steppe in southwestern Siberia and in the intermontane basins of the south.

The mineral resources of Siberia are enormous; particularly notable are its deposits of coal, petroleum, natural gas, diamonds, iron ore, and gold. Both mining and manufacturing underwent rapid development in Siberia in the second half of the 20th century, and steel, aluminum, and machinery are now among the chief products. Agriculture is confined to the more southerly portions of Siberia and produces wheat, rye, oats, and sunflowers.

It is still uncertain whether humans first came to Siberia from Europe or from central and eastern Asia. Evidence of Paleolithic settlement is abundant in southern Siberia, which, after participating in the Bronze Age, came under Chinese (from 1000 BC) and then under Turkic-Mongol (3rd century BC) influence. Southern Siberia was part of the Mongols' khanate of the Golden Horde from the 10th to the mid-15th century.

Before Russian colonization began in the late 16th century, Siberia was inhabited by a large number of small ethnic groups whose members subsisted either as hunter-gatherers or as pastoral nomads relying on domestic reindeer. The largest of these groups, however, the Sakha (Yakut), raised cattle and horses. The various groups belonged to different linguistic stocks: Turkic (Turkic peoples) (Sakha, Siberian Tatars), Manchu-Tungus ( Evenk [Evenki], Even), Finno-Ugric (Khanty, Mansi), and Mongolic ( Buryat), among others.

The Russian occupation began in 1581 with a Cossack expedition that overthrew the small khanate of Sibir (from which is derived the name of the entire area). During the late 16th and 17th centuries, Russian trappers and fur traders and Cossack explorers penetrated throughout Siberia to the Bering Sea. They built fortified towns in strategic locations, among them Tyumen (1585), Tomsk (1604), Krasnoyarsk (1628), and Irkutsk (1652). Most of Siberia thus gradually came under the rule of Russia between the early 17th century and the mid-18th century, although the Treaty of Nerchinsk (Nerchinsk, Treaty of) (1689) with China halted the Russian advance into the Amur River basin until the 1860s. The impact of Russian expansion upon the indigenous peoples was twofold; the smaller and more primitive tribes succumbed to exploitation and imported diseases, while larger groups such as the Sakha and Buryat adjusted better and began to profit from the material benefits of colonization. The Russians generally did not interfere with their internal institutions and way of life, and most of the native inhabitants eventually became nominal Christians.

At first the area's Russian rulers collected tribute, which was paid by the native inhabitants in furs as it had been paid to the Mongols. Later Russian agricultural colonists arrived to feed the local Russian administrative personnel. With the decline of the fur trade, the mining of silver and other metals became the main economic activity in Siberia in the 18th century.

Although Siberia was used as a place of exile for criminals and political prisoners, Russian settlement (by state peasants and runaway serfs) remained insignificant until the building of the Trans-Siberian Railroad (1891–1905), after which large-scale in-migration occurred. Modern farming methods were introduced into southern Siberia to grow cereal grains and produce dairy products, and coal mining was also started in several locations. During the Russian Civil War (1917–20) an anti-Bolshevik government headed by Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak (Kolchak, Aleksandr Vasilyevich) held much of Siberia until 1920; virtually all of Siberia was reincorporated into the new Soviet state by 1922, however.

From the first Soviet Five-Year Plan (1928–32), industrial growth was considerable, with coal-mining and iron-and-steel complexes begun in the Kuznetsk Coal Basin and along the line of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, partly through the use of forced labour. Forced-labour camps spread throughout Siberia during the 1930s, the most important being the camp complexes in the extreme northeast and along the lower Yenisey River, whose inmates were used mostly in mining operations. During World War II, owing to the evacuation of many factories from the western portions of the Soviet Union, Siberia (together with the Urals) became the industrial backbone of the Soviet war effort for a few years. Agriculture, by contrast, suffered greatly from collectivization in 1930–33 and was neglected until the Virgin Lands Campaign of 1954–56, when southwestern Siberia (including northern Kazakhstan) was the principal area to be opened to cultivation.

The late 1950s and '60s saw major industrial development take place, notably the opening up of large oil and natural gas fields in western Siberia and the construction of giant hydroelectric stations at locations along the Angara, Yenisey, and Ob rivers. A network of oil and gas pipelines was built between the new fields and the Urals, and new industries were also established, such as aluminum refining and cellulose pulp making. The construction of the BAM (Baikal-Amur Magistral) railroad between Ust-Kut, on the Lena River, and Komsomolsk-na-Amure, on the Amur, a distance of 2,000 miles (3,200 km), was completed in 1980.

Despite industrialization, migration out of Siberia was considerable in the late 20th century, and population growth was slow, in part because of the unmitigatedly harsh climate. The population of Siberia remains sparse, is chiefly concentrated in the west and south, is more than half urban, and is overwhelmingly Russian in ethnic character. The largest cities are Novosibirsk, Omsk, and Krasnoyarsk.

Progressive Bloc

▪ Russian political coalition

Russian Progressivnyi Blok,

coalition of moderate conservatives and liberals in the fourth Russian Duma (elected legislative body) that tried to pressure the imperial government into adopting a series of reforms aimed at inspiring public confidence in the government and at improving the management of Russia's effort in World War I. The bloc was formed in August 1915 under the leadership of Pavel N. Milyukov (Milyukov, Pavel Nikolayevich). On September 7 its members issued a program that called upon Emperor Nicholas II to appoint ministers who enjoyed the nation's confidence and who would cooperate with the legislature. It urged that the government curtail its practices that discriminated against national and religious minority groups and that it cooperate with private organizations that had formed to promote the war effort.

The bloc, which included about half of the Duma membership, received support from several political factions in the State Council (the upper house of the legislature) as well as from some ministers and organizations representing local governments. But the emperor responded on Sept. 16, 1915, by suspending the session of the Duma (which had begun on August 1).

Throughout 1916 the bloc became increasingly dissatisfied with the administration; in November 1916 Milyukov delivered a scathing criticism of it to the Duma. When the February Revolution broke out, members of the bloc (with two left-wing Duma members) formed the Provisional Committee of the Duma (March 12, 1917), which appointed the first Provisional Government, which in turn assumed official power in Russia on March 15, 1917.

Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich

▪ Russian writer

Introduction

Herzen also spelled Hertzen, or Gertsen

born April 6 [March 25, Old Style], 1812, Moscow, Russia

died Jan. 21 [Jan. 9], 1870, Paris, France

political thinker, activist, and writer who originated the theory of a unique Russian path to socialism known as peasant populism. Herzen chronicled his career in My Past and Thoughts (1861–67), which is considered to be one of the greatest works of Russian prose.

Early life.

Herzen was the illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman, Ivan Alekseyevich Yakovlev, and a German woman of humble origins. Reared in his father's house, he received an elite and far-ranging education from French, German, and Russian tutors. Still, the “taint” of his birth, as he regarded it, made him resentful of authority and, ultimately, of the autocratic, serf-based Russian social order. This resentment also bred in him an ardent commitment to the cause of the Decembrists (Decembrist), a revolutionary group that staged an unsuccessful uprising against the emperor Nicholas I in 1825. Herzen and his friend Nikolay Ogaryov, who, like Herzen, was influenced by the heroic libertarianism of the German playwright Friedrich Schiller, took a solemn oath to devote their lives to continuing the Decembrists' struggle for freedom in Russia.

Attending the University of Moscow between 1829 and 1833, Herzen evolved from “romanticism for the heart to idealism for the head” and became an adept of the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling's Naturphilosophie.

Eventually Herzen and Ogaryov and their circle fused the pantheistic idealism of Schelling with the utopian socialism of the French social philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon (Saint-Simon, Henri de) to produce a philosophy of history in which the “World Spirit” evolved ineluctably toward the realization of freedom and justice.

This metaphysical politics was sufficient, however, to lead to the arrest of the entire circle in 1834. Herzen was sent into exile for six years to work in the provincial bureaucracy in Vyatka (now Kirov) and Vladimir; then, for an indiscreet remark about the police, he spent two more years in Novgorod. The misery of this period was relieved by an extravagantly romantic courtship and an initially happy marriage with his cousin, Natalya Zakharina, in 1838.

Herzen's eight-year experience with injustice and the acquaintance it afforded with the workings of Russian government gave firmer contours to his radicalism. He abandoned the nebulous idealism of Schelling for the thought of two other contemporary German philosophers—first the “realistic logic” of G.W.F. Hegel and then the materialism of L.A. Feuerbach (Feuerbach, Ludwig). Herzen thus became a “Left-Hegelian,” holding that the dialectic (development through the reconciliation of conflicting ideas) was the “algebra of revolution” and that the disembodied truths of “science” (i.e., German idealism) must culminate in the “philosophy of the deed,” or the struggle for justice as proclaimed by French socialism. In later life Herzen explained that this metaphysical approach to politics was inevitable for his generation, since the despotism of Nicholas I made action impossible and thus left pure thought as the only free realm of expression.

Armed with these philosophical weapons, Herzen returned to Moscow in 1842 and immediately joined the camp of the Westernizers (Westernizer), who held that Russia must progress by assimilating European rationalism and civic freedom, in their dispute with the Slavophiles (Slavophile), who argued that Russian development must be founded on the Orthodox religion and a fraternal peasant commune. Herzen contributed to this polemic two able and successful popularizations of Left-Hegelianism, Diletantizm v nauke (“Dilettantism in Science”) and Pisma ob izuchenii prirody (“Letters on the Study of Nature”), and a novel of social criticism, Kto vinovat? (“Who Is to Blame?”), in the new “naturalistic” manner of Russian fiction.

Soon, however, Herzen fell out with the other Westernizers because the majority of the group were reformist liberals, whereas Herzen had by now embraced the anarchist socialism of the French social theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. At this point, in 1846, Herzen's father died, leaving him a considerable fortune; and the following year Herzen left Russia for western Europe—as it turned out, for good.

Life in exile.

Herzen went immediately to the capital of European radicalism, Paris, hoping for the imminent triumph of social revolution. The revolutionary upheavals of 1848 that he witnessed in Paris and Italy soon disabused him: he became convinced that the Western “matadors of rhetoric” were too imbued with the values of the past to level the existing social order, that Europe's role as a progressive historical force was finished, and that Western institutions were in fact “dead.” He concluded further that, contrary to the teachings of the Hegelians, there was no “rational” inevitability in history and that society's fate was decided instead by chance and human will. He developed these themes in two brilliant but rather confused works, Pisma iz Frantsii i Italii (“Letters from France and Italy”) and S togo berega (From the Other Shore). His disillusionment was vastly increased by his wife's infidelity with the radical German poet Georg Herwegh and by her death in 1852.

Loss of faith in the West, however, provoked a spiritual return to Russia: though “old” Europe, “fettered by the richness of her past,” had proved incapable of realizing the ideal of socialism, “young” Russia, precisely because its past offered nothing worth conserving, now seemed to Herzen to possess the resources for a radical new departure. And Herzen (borrowing an idea from his old foes, the Slavophiles) found these resources above all in a collectivist peasant commune, which he viewed as the basis for a future socialist order. This new faith in Russia's revolutionary potential was expressed in Letters to the French historian Jules Michelet and the Italian revolutionist Giuseppe Mazzini in 1850 and 1851.

In 1852 Herzen moved to London, and the following year, with the aid of Polish exiles, he founded the “Free Russian Press in London,” the first uncensored printing enterprise in Russian history. In 1855 Nicholas I died, and soon thereafter Alexander II proclaimed his intention of emancipating the serfs. Responding to this unprecedented “thaw,” Herzen rapidly launched a series of periodicals that were designed to be smuggled back to Russia: “The Polar Star” in 1855, “Voices from Russia” in 1856, and a newspaper, Kolokol (The Bell), created in 1857 with the aid of his old friend Ogaryov, now also an émigré. Herzen's aim was to influence both the government and the public toward emancipation of the peasants, with generous allotments of land and the liberalization of Russian society. To this end, he moderated his political pronouncements, speaking less of socialist revolution and more of the concrete issues involved in Alexander's reforms. For a time he even believed in enlightened autocracy, hailing Alexander II in 1856 (in words that echoed the famous dying tribute of Julian the Apostate to Christ) with: “you have conquered, oh Galilean!” Kolokol soon became a major force in public life, read by the tsar's ministers and the radical opposition.

Soon, however, the ambiguity of Herzen's position between reform and revolution began to cost him support. After 1858 moderate liberals, such as the writer Ivan Turgenev, attacked Herzen for his utopian recklessness; and after 1859 he quarreled with the political writer N.G. Chernyshevsky (Chernyshevsky, N.G.) and the younger generation of radicals, whose intransigent manner appeared to him as “very dangerous” to reform. He also lost faith in the government; when the Emancipation Act (Emancipation Manifesto) was finally enacted in 1861, he denounced it as a betrayal of the peasants.

He therefore veered again to the left and called on the student youth to “go to the people” directly with the message of Russian socialism. Furthermore, on the urging of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich), he threw the support of Kolokol behind the unsuccessful Polish revolt of 1863. He immediately regretted this rashness, for it cost him the support of all moderate elements in Russia without restoring his credit among the revolutionaries. Kolokol's influence declined sharply. In 1865 Herzen moved his headquarters to Geneva to be near the young generation of Russian exiles, but in 1867 public indifference forced Kolokol to cease publication.

Amidst these political reverses, Herzen turned his energies increasingly to his memoirs, My Past and Thoughts, which were designed to enshrine both his own legend and that of Russian radicalism. A loosely constructed personal narrative, interspersed with sharp vignettes of both Russian and Western political figures and with philosophical and historical digressions, it provides a masterful fresco of contemporary European radicalism. At times witty, irreverent, and playful in style, and at other times lyrical, passionate, and rhapsodical, it is one of the most original and powerful examples of Russian prose. My Past and Thoughts was published principally between 1861 and 1867, and its scope and quality have placed it alongside the great Russian novels of the 19th century in artistic stature.

In 1869 Herzen wrote letters K staromu tovarishchy (“To an Old Comrade”; Bakunin), in which he expressed new reservations about the cost of revolution. Still, he was unable to accept liberal reformism completely, and he expressed interest in the new force of the First International, Karl Marx's federation of working-class organizations. This wavering position between socialism and liberalism, which characterized so much of his career, proved to be his political testament. The ambiguities of his position have made it possible ever since for both Russian liberals and socialists to claim his legacy with equal plausibility.

Martin E. Malia

Additional Reading

Works on Herzen include Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–1855 (1961), exploring his ideology and politics; Edward Hallett Carr, The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth-Century Portrait Gallery (1933, reissued 1981), treating his personal life; Edward Acton, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary (1979); and N.M. Pirumova, Aleksandr Gertsen: Revoliutsioner, Myslitel', Chelovek (1988). Collected editions of his works are Polnoe sobranie sochineniĭ i pisem, ed. by M.K. Lemke, 21 vol. in 22 (1919–23); and Sobranie sochineniĭ, 30 vol. in 35 (1954–66), published by the Soviet Academy of Sciences

Milyukov, Pavel Nikolayevich

▪ Russian historian and statesman

Introduction

Milyukov also spelled Miliukov

born January 27 [January 15, Old Style], 1859, Moscow, Russian Empire

died March 3, 1943, Aix-les-Bains, France

Russian statesman and historian who played an important role in the events leading to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and served as foreign minister (March–May 1917) in Prince Lvov's provisional government. He remains one of the greatest of Russia's liberal historians.

Early career

Milyukov entered Moscow University in 1877 and soon attained academic distinction as a specialist in Russian history. His three-volume Ocherk po istorii russkoy kultury (1896–1903; Outlines of Russian Culture) brought him nationwide renown. He was, however, to become even better known as a spokesman for imperial Russia's nascent liberal movement.

Milyukov's concern with contemporary political issues led in 1895 to the loss of his teaching post, whereupon he went abroad, traveling widely and developing a deep admiration for the political values of more advanced democratic countries. On two occasions, in 1903 and 1904–05, he visited the United States, where he gave public lectures on Russian history and politics. As a convinced “Westernizer,” Milyukov saw tsarist absolutism as the main obstacle to Russia's progress. He strove to make Russian liberalism a more broadly based movement committed to a radical (but not socialist) transformation of the empire's political and social structure. In particular, he stood for the rule of law, parliamentary government, universal suffrage, a broad range of civil freedoms, the expansion of popular education, and land reform. He was perhaps a better judge of abstract ideas than of human nature and was too inflexible to succeed in practical politics.

Political journalism

As a contributor to a clandestinely circulated journal, Osvobozhdeniye (“Liberation”), founded in 1902, Milyukov did much to swing the moderate members of the zemstvos (local government bodies) to the left. During the revolutionary year 1905 (Russian Revolution of 1905), he was active in forming the Union of Unions, a broad alliance of professional associations, and subsequently the Constitutional Democratic, or Kadet, Party. As editor of the Kadet daily newspaper, Rech (“Speech”), and a member of the party's Central Committee, he directed its tactics in Russia's first nationwide election, which brought the Kadets success at the polls. The gulf between the newly created Duma, or national assembly, and the government could not be bridged, however, and in July 1906 the assembly was prematurely dissolved. Milyukov helped to draft the Vyborg Manifesto, appealing for a campaign of passive resistance to the government; this, technically speaking, was an illegal act. Many moderates thought that his tactics, which involved a measure of cooperation with the revolutionary Socialists, were too radical.

Subsequently Milyukov moved to the right. In the third and fourth Dumas (1907–17), he led the Kadets' depleted parliamentary faction in condemning bureaucratic abuses and championing progressive causes. After the outbreak of World War I, Milyukov adopted a patriotic “defensist” policy, which in 1915 led him to criticize the imperial regime for its inefficiency in organizing Russia's resources for the war effort. He helped to form a Progressive Bloc of moderate Duma leaders, who sought by gentle pressure from public opinion to secure a ministry enjoying the nation's confidence. When these overcautious tactics proved unavailing, Milyukov swung sharply to the left and, on November 14, 1916, delivered a powerful speech in the chamber implying that the government was guilty of treason. His charges had no real substance, but they greatly stimulated revolutionary sentiment, which soon exceeded the bounds that Milyukov had expected or desired.

Foreign minister

When Tsar Nicholas II abdicated under this pressure on March 15, 1917 (Russian Revolution of 1917), Milyukov wanted to preserve the monarchy as a stabilizing force but found little support. The revolutionary tide was now running strongly against him. In the liberal provisional government under Prince Georgy Lvov (Lvov, Georgy Yevgenyevich, Prince), which Milyukov helped to constitute, he towered intellectually over his colleagues but was soon outmaneuvered by the Socialist leader Aleksandr Kerensky (Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich), who favoured a policy of concessions to popular demands, notably on the question of taking immediate steps toward a negotiated peace. As foreign minister, Milyukov clung to Russia's wartime alliances. He resisted heavy pressure from inside and outside the government to send a note to the Allies redefining his country's war aims, and when he yielded on May 1 the note was phrased ambiguously. Disturbances broke out in the streets of Petrograd (St. Petersburg), and Milyukov was obliged to resign (May 15).

Last years

Thereafter Milyukov endeavoured to counter the new coalition government's leftward swing by rallying the moderates, but with little success. The Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 forced him to leave Petrograd for southern Russia, where he became political counselor to the leaders of the White Volunteer Army. Subsequently he emigrated to Paris. Milyukov held fast to his liberal principles and remained active in politics and scholarship until his death.

John L.H. Keep Ed.

Additional Reading

Thomas Riha, A Russian European: Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics (1969), is a thorough study that emphasizes the period 1905–17. A more recent work is Melissa Kirschke Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880–1918 (1996).

Lvov, Georgy Yevgenyevich, Prince

▪ Russian statesman

(Knyaz)

born Oct. 21 [Nov. 2, New Style], 1861, Popovka, near Tula, Russia

died March 7, 1925, Paris, France

Russian social reformer and statesman who was the first head of the Russian provisional government established during the February Revolution (1917).

An aristocrat who held a degree in law from the University of Moscow, Lvov worked in the civil service until 1893, when he resigned. He became a member of the Tula zemstvo (local government council), and during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) he organized voluntary relief work in the Orient. In 1905 he joined the newly founded liberal Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party, was elected to the first Duma (Russian parliament; convened May 1906), and in 1906 was informally nominated for a ministerial post.

During World War I Lvov became chairman of the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos (1914) and a leader of Zemgor (the Union of Zemstvos and Towns; 1915), which provided relief for the sick and wounded and procured supplies for the army. Although his activities were often obstructed by bureaucratic officials who objected to voluntary organizations that encroached upon their areas of responsibility, Lvov's groups made significant contributions to the war effort, and he won the respect of many political liberals and army commanders. When the imperial government fell, he became the prime minister (with Tsar Nicholas II's subsequent approval) of the provisional government (March 2 [March 15], 1917).

Lvov also served as minister of the interior, but his government, composed initially of liberals and, after May 5 (May 18), of moderate socialists as well, was unable to satisfy the increasingly radical demands of the general population. In July, after a major left-wing demonstration threatened to overthrow the provisional government, Lvov resigned his posts (July 7 [July 20]), allowing Aleksandr Kerensky to succeed him as prime minister. When the Bolsheviks seized power in October, Lvov was arrested, but he escaped and eventually settled in Paris.

▪ Russian government

Russian Uchreditelnoye Sobraniye,

popularly elected body that convened in 1918 in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) to write a constitution and form a government for postrevolutionary Russia. The assembly was dissolved by the Bolshevik government.

The election of the Constituent Assembly was held on Nov. 25, 1917 (November 12, Old Style). The Socialist Revolutionary Party, though only receiving a plurality of the vote (40 percent), won a majority of the seats. The Bolsheviks received a little less than 25 percent of the vote. Other parties won only a small number of delegates.

The Bolsheviks and their allies, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, argued that this mandate was not valid and that the Soviets (where they were in control) more accurately reflected the public will.

When the Constituent Assembly convened on Jan. 18, 1918 (January 5, Old Style), it rejected the Bolsheviks' demand that it recognize the authority of the Soviet government. The Bolshevik delegates (and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries as well) walked out. The next day, troops loyal to the Soviet government dispersed representatives of the non-Bolshevik parties, and the government officially dissolved the Assembly.

Brusilov, Aleksey Alekseyevich

▪ Russian general

born Aug. 31 [Aug. 19, Old Style], 1853, Tiflis, Russia

died March 17, 1926, Moscow

Russian general distinguished for the “Brusilov breakthrough” on the Eastern Front against Austria-Hungary (June–August 1916), which aided Russia's Western allies at a crucial time during World War I.

Brusilov was educated in the Imperial Corps of Pages, and he began his military career as a cavalry officer in the Caucasus. He distinguished himself in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 and was promoted to the rank of general in 1906. Upon the outbreak of World War I, Brusilov was given command of the Russian 8th Army, and he played a brilliant part in the Russian campaign in Galicia (autumn 1914).

In the spring of 1916 Brusilov succeeded the elderly and irresolute general N.Y. Ivanov as commander of the four Russian armies on the southwest sector of the Eastern Front. From June 4, 1916, Brusilov led these armies, who were billeted south of the Pripet Marshes, in a massive attack against the Austro-Hungarian forces. Though they suffered heavy losses, Brusilov's forces by August had taken 375,000 Austrian prisoners (200,000 in the first three days of the offensive) and had overrun all of Bukovina and part of eastern Galicia. Largely because of this offensive, Germany was forced to divert troops that might have sufficed to secure a final victory against the French in the Battle of Verdun. The offensive had other beneficial effects for the Allies. Romania decided to enter the war on their side, and Austria had to abandon its assault in northern Italy. Brusilov's offensive produced no decisive results on the Eastern Front itself, however.

Brusilov served briefly as commander-in-chief of the Russian armies from May 22 to July 19 (O.S. [June 4 to Aug. 1, N.S.]), 1917. Under the Bolshevik government he served as a military consultant and an inspector of cavalry from 1920 to 1924, after which he retired. His memoirs of World War I were translated in 1930 as A Soldier's Note-Book, 1914–1918.

Goremykin, Ivan Logginovich

▪ Russian official

born Oct. 27 [Nov. 8, New Style], 1839, Novgorod province, Russian Empire

died Dec. 11 [Dec. 24], 1917, Caucasus

Russian official and government minister whom many view as a symbol of the unresponsiveness of the tsarist regime to the social unrest preceding the Russian Revolution (Russian Revolution of 1917).

Goremykin spent most of his life as a government bureaucrat, attaining successively more responsible positions until his appointment in 1895 as minister of the interior. Chiefly concerned with his own advancement, he showed little initiative in any of his posts, preferring inaction or delay on most policy matters. Forced out of office in 1899, he returned to power briefly in April 1906, when Nicholas II appointed him chairman of the Council of Ministers. The tsar viewed Goremykin as a loyal functionary who would support the throne in dealings with the newly created state Duma, or parliament. Having served his purpose, Goremykin was dismissed in July 1906.

In 1914, when Goremykin was 74 and generally thought to be senile, Nicholas reappointed him chairman of the Council of Ministers, in which he obediently followed the orders of the tsar, then under the influence of Rasputin. Dismissed as chairman in 1916, he fled during the Revolution to the Caucasus, where he died.

Kolchak, Aleksandr Vasilyevich

▪ Russian naval officer

born Nov. 4 [Nov. 16, New Style], 1874, St. Petersburg, Russia

died Feb. 7, 1920, Irkutsk, Siberia

Arctic explorer and naval officer, who was recognized in 1919–20 by the “Whites” as supreme ruler of Russia; after his overthrow he was put to death by the Bolsheviks (Bolshevik).

At the outbreak of World War I, Kolchak was flag captain of the Baltic fleet. By August 1916, as a vice admiral, he was commanding the fleet in the Black Sea. In June 1917, after the February revolution, he resigned under pressure and went to the United States. Next he tried, unsuccessfully, to coordinate White Russian forces in Manchuria. In October 1918 he went to Omsk, where he became war minister in the non-Bolshevik government. On Nov. 18, 1918, a military coup d'état at Omsk brought him absolute power there.

His armies, though at first successful, eventually were routed. When Omsk fell to the Red Army on Nov. 14, 1919, Kolchak transferred his headquarters to Irkutsk, but on Jan. 4, 1920, he was forced to resign when a Socialist Revolutionary–Menshevik group seized power in that city. He placed himself under Allied protection, but the Czechs handed him over to the Irkutsk authorities, from whom he was taken by the Bolsheviks. He was summarily executed and his body thrown into the Angara River.

soviet

▪ Soviet government unit

council that was the primary unit of government in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and that officially performed both legislative and executive functions at the all-union, republic, province, city, district, and village levels.

The soviet first appeared during the St. Petersburg disorders of 1905, when representatives of striking workers acting under socialist leadership formed the Soviet of Workers' Deputies to coordinate revolutionary activities. It was suppressed by the government. Shortly before the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March 1917 and the creation of a Provisional Government, socialist leaders established the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, composed of one deputy for every 1,000 workers and one for each military company. A majority of the 2,500 deputies were Socialist Revolutionary Party members, claiming to represent peasant interests. This Petrograd Soviet stood as a “second government” opposite the Provisional Government and often challenged the latter's authority. Soviets sprang up in cities and towns across the Russian Empire. Much of their authority and legitimacy in the public eye came from the soviets' role as accurate reflectors of popular will: delegates had no set terms of office, and frequent by-elections gave ample opportunity for quick exertion of influence by the voters.

In June 1917 the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets, composed of delegations from local soviets, convened in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). It elected a central executive committee to be in permanent session, with this committee's presidium at the head of the congress. The second congress met right after the radical Bolshevik faction of the Petrograd Soviet, having gained a majority in this body, had engineered the overthrow of the Provisional Government by the Red Guards and some supporting troops. In protest of this coup (the Russian Revolution of October 1917), most of the non-Bolshevik members of the congress walked out, leaving the Bolsheviks in control; an all-Bolshevik Council of People's Commissars was established as Russia's new government. Soviets across the empire assumed local power, though it took some time for the Bolsheviks to achieve a dominant position in every soviet.

At the fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, in 1918, a constitution was drawn up that established the soviet as the formal unit of local and regional government and affirmed the All-Russian Congress of Soviets as the highest body of the state. Later, the 1936 constitution provided for the direct election of a two-chamber Supreme Soviet—the Soviet of the Union, in which membership was based on population, and the Soviet of Nationalities, in which members were elected on a regional basis. Nominally, the deputies and presiding officers of the soviets at all levels were elected by the citizenry, but there was only one candidate for any office in these elections, and the selection of candidates was controlled by the Communist Party.

Anastasia

▪ Russian duchess

Russian in full Anastasiya Nikolayevna

born June 18 [June 5, Old Style], 1901, Peterhof [now Petrodvorets], near St. Petersburg, Russia

died July 16/17, 1918, Yekaterinburg

grand duchess of Russia and the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, last emperor of Russia.

Anastasia was killed with the other members of her immediate family in a cellar where they had been confined by the Bolsheviks following the October Revolution. But after the executions several women outside Russia claimed her identity, making her the subject of periodic popular conjecture and publicity. Each claimed to have survived the execution and managed to escape from Russia, and some claimed to be heir to the Romanov fortune held in Swiss banks. Perhaps the most famous of these claimants was a woman who called herself Anna Anderson (and whom critics alleged to be one Franziska Schanzkowska, a Pole), who married an American history professor, J.E. Manahan, in 1968 and lived her final years in Virginia, U.S., dying in 1984. In the years up to 1970 she sought to be established as the legal heir to the Romanov fortune; but, in that year, West German courts finally rejected her suit and awarded a remaining portion of the imperial fortune to the duchess of Mecklenberg. In the 1990s, genetic tests undertaken on tissues from Anderson and on the exhumed remains of the royal family established no connection between her and the Romanovs and instead supported her identification with Schanzkowska.

The story of a surviving Anastasia provided the germ of a French play, Anastasia, written by Marcelle-Maurette (1909–72) and first produced in 1954. An American film version appeared in 1956, with Ingrid Bergman winning an Academy Award for her title role.

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