Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  Born in 1923, Akhromeyev belonged to that cohort upon whom the burden of World War II fell most heavily. The war shaped both his career as a professional soldier and his understanding of the external threat to the Soviet regime. He enrolled in a naval school in Leningrad in 1940 and was in that city when the German invasion began. He served as an officer of naval infantry in 1942 at Stalingrad and fought with the Red Army from the Volga to Berlin. Akhromeyev advanced during the war to battalion command and joined the Communist Party in 1943.

  In the postwar years Akhromeyev rose to prominence in the Soviet Armed Forces and General Staff. In 1952 he graduated from the Military Academy of the Armor Forces. In 1967 he graduated from the Military Academy of the General Staff. Thereafter, he held senior staff positions and served as head of a main directorate of the General Staff from 1974 to 1977 and then as first deputy chief of the General Staff from 1979 to 1984. As Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov’s deputy, Akhromeyev sought to recast the Soviet Armed Forces to meet the challenge of the revolution in military affairs, which involved the application of automated troop control, electronic warfare, and precision strikes to modern combined arms combat. See also: AFGHANISTAN, RELATIONS WITH; ARMS CONTROL; AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; COLD WAR; MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Herspring, Dale. (1990). The Soviet High Command, 1964-1989: Politics and Personalities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kipp, Jacob W., Bruce W. Menning, David M. Glantz, and Graham H. Turbiville, Jr. “Marshal Akhromeev’s Post-INF World” Journal of Soviet Military Studies 1(2):167-187. Odom, William E. (1998). The Collapse of the Soviet Military. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press Zisk, Kimberly Marten. (1993). Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Military Innovation, 1955-1991. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  JACOB W. KIPP

  AKHUNDOV, MIRZA FATH ALI

  (1812-1878), celebrated Azerbaijani author, playwright, philosopher, and founder of modern literary criticism, who acquired fame primarily as the writer of European-inspired plays in the Azeri-Turkish language.

  Akhundov was born in Shaki (Nukha), Azerbaijan, and initially was tutored for the Islamic clergy by his uncle Haji Alaksar. However, as a young man he gained an appreciation for the arts, especially literature. An encounter with famed Azerbaijani lyricist and philosopher Mirza Shafi Vazeh in 1832 is said to have profoundly influenced his career as a writer. In 1834, he relocated to Tbilisi, Georgia, where he worked as a translator in the Chancellery of the Viceroy of the Caucasus. Here he was further influenced in his social and political views through his acquaintance with exiled Russian intellectuals, including Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky.

  Akhundov’s first published work was entitled “Oriental Poem” (1837), inspired by the death of famous Russian poet Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. However, his first significant literary activity emerged in the 1850s, through a series of comedies that satirized the flaws and absurdities of contemporary society, largely born of ignorance and superstition. These comedies were highly praised in international literary circles, and Akhun-dov was affectionately dubbed “The Tatar Moliere.” In 1859 Akhundov published his famous novel The Deceived Stars, thus laying the groundwork for realistic prose, providing models for a new genre in Azeri and Iranian literature.

  In his later work, such as Three Letters of the Indian Prince Kamal al Dovleh to His Friend, Iranian Prince Jalal al Dovleh, Akhundov’s writing evolved

  AKKERMAN, CONVENTION OF

  from benign satire to acerbic social commentary. At this stage, he demonstrated the typical leanings of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia toward the Enlightenment movement and its associated principles of education, political reform, and secularism. Akhundov’s secular views, a by-product of his agnostic beliefs, stemmed from disillusionment with his earlier studies in theology. He perceived Islam’s hold on all facets of society as an obstruction to learning. Although assaulting traditional institutions was seemingly his stock in trade, his biting satires were usually leavened with a message of optimism for the future. According to Tadeusz Swi-etochowski, noted scholar of Russian history, Akhundov believed that “the purpose of dramatic art was to improve peoples’ morals” and that the “theater was the appropriate vehicle for conveying the message to a largely illiterate public.” See also: AZERBAIJAN AND AZERIS; CAUCASUS; ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Azeri Literature. (2003). “Mirza Faith Ali Akhundov.” «http://literature.azner.org/literature/makhundov/ makhundov.en.htm». Swietockhowski, Tadeusz. (1995). Russia and Azerbaijan: A Borderland in Transition. New York: Columbia University Press. Swietockhowski, Tadeusz, and Collins, Brian. (1999). Historical Dictionary of Azerbaijan. New York: Scarecrow Press. agreed to negotiations beginning in July 1826 at Akkerman on the Dniester estuary.

  On October 7, 1826, the two sides agreed to the Akkerman Convention, the terms of which affirmed and extended the conditions of the earlier Bucharest Treaty. Accordingly, Turkey transferred to Russia several settlements on the Caucasus littoral of the Black Sea and agreed to Russian-approved boundaries on the Danube. Within eighteen months, Turkey was to settle claims against it by Russian subjects, permit Russian commercial vessels free use of Turkish territorial waters, and grant Russian merchants unhindered trade in Turkish territory. Within six months, Turkey was to reestablish autonomy within the Danubian principalities, with assurances that the rulers (hospodars) would come only from the local aristocracy and that their replacements would be subject to Russian approval. Strict limitations were imposed on Turkish police forces. Similarly, Serbia reverted to autonomous status within the Ottoman Empire. Alienated provinces were restored to Serbian administration, and all taxes on Serbians were to be combined into a single levy. In long-term perspective, the Akkerman Convention strengthened Russia’s hand in the Balkans, more strongly identified Russia as the protector of Balkan Slavs, and further contributed to Ottoman Turkish decline. See also: BUCHAREST, TREATY OF; SERBIA, RELATIONS WITH; TURKEY, RELATIONS WITH

  GREGORY TWYMAN

  AKKERMAN, CONVENTION OF

  By the mid-1820s, the Balkans and the Black Sea basin festered with unresolved problems and differences, including recurring cycles both of popular insurrection and Turkish repression and of various Russian claims and Turkish counterclaims. Most blatantly, in violation of the Treaty of Bucharest (1812), Turkish troops had occupied the Danubian principalities, and the Porte had encroached on Serbian territorial possessions and autonomy. On March 17, 1826, Tsar Nicholas I issued an ultimatum demanding Turkish adherence to the Bucharest agreement, withdrawal of Turkish troops from Wallachia and Moldavia, and entry via plenipotentiaries into substantive negotiations. An overextended and weakened Sultan Mahmud

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Jelavich, Barbara. (1974). St. Petersburg and Moscow: Tsarist and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1814-1974. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press. Seton-Watson, Hugh. (1967). The Russian Empire 1801-1917. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press.

  BRUCE W. MENNING

  AKSAKOV, IVAN SERGEYEVICH

  (1823-1886), Slavophile and Panslav ideologue and journalist.

  Son of the famous theater critic Sergei Timo-feyevich Aksakov, Ivan Aksakov received his early education at home in the religious, patriotic, and literary atmosphere of the Aksakov family in Moscow. He attended the Imperial School of JuAKSAKOV, KONSTANTIN SERGEYEVICH risprudence in St. Petersburg, graduating in 1842. After a nine-year career in government service, Ak-sakov resigned to devote himself to the study of Russian popular life and the propagation of his Slavophile view of it. Troubles with the censorship plagued his early journalistic ventures: Moskovsky sbornik (Moscow Miscellany) (1852, 1856) and Russkaya beseda (Russian Conversation); his newspaper, Parus (Sail), was shut down in 1859 because of Aksakov’s outspoken defense of free speech.

  In his newspapers Den (Day) and Moskva (Moscow), Aksakov largely supported the reforms of the 1860s and 1870s, but his nationalism became increasingly strident, as the histori
cal and critical publicism of the early Slavophiles gave way, in the freer atmosphere of the time, to simpler and more chauvinistic forms of nationalism, often directed at Poles, Germans, and Jews. In 1875 Aksakov became president of the Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee, in which capacity he pressed passionately for a more aggressive Russian policy in the Balkans and promoted the creation of Russian volunteer forces to fight with the Serbs. He was devastated when the European powers forced Russia to moderate its Balkan gains in 1878. “Today,” Aksakov told the Slavic Benevolent Committee, “ we are burying Russian glory, Russian honor, and Russian conscience.”

  In the 1880s Aksakov’s chauvinism became more virulent. In his final journal, Rus (Old Russia), he alleged that he had discovered a worldwide Jewish conspiracy with headquarters in Paris. Ak-sakov’s increasing xenophobia has embarrassed Russians (and foreigners) attracted to the more courageous and generous aspects of his work, but the enormous crowds at his funeral suggest that his name was still a potent force among significant segments of the Russian public at the time of his death. See also: AKSAKOV, KONSTANTIN SERGEYEVICH; JOURNALISM; NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE; PANSLAV-ISM; SLAVOPHILES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Lukashevich, Stephen. (1965). Ivan Aksakov (1823-1886): A Study in Russian Thought and Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Riasanovsky, Nicholas. (1952). Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles: A Study of Romantic Ideology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walicki, Andrzej. (1975). The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought. Oxford: Clarendon.

  ABBOTT GLEASON

  AKSAKOV, KONSTANTIN SERGEYEVICH

  (1817-1860), Slavophile ideologue and journalist.

  Konstantin Aksakov was a member of one of the most famous literary families in nineteenth-century Russia. His father was the well-known theater critic and memoirist Sergei Aksakov; his brother, Ivan Aksakov, was an important publicist in the 1860s and 1870s.

  During his university years in the early 1830s, Konstantin Aksakov was a member of the Stanke-vich Circle, along with Mikhail Bakunin and Vissarion Belinsky. He underwent a period of apprenticeship to Hegel, but, like several other Slavophiles, was most influenced by his immediate family circle, which was the source of the communal values he was to espouse and the dramatic division in his thought between private and public.

  Toward the end of the 1830s Aksakov drew close to Yury Samarin, and both of them fell under the direct influence of Alexei Khomyakov. Ak-sakov’s Hegelianism proved a passing phase; he evolved into the most determinedly utopian and ideologically minded of all the early Slavophiles. A passionate critic of statist historical interpretations, Aksakov viewed Russian history as marked by a unique relationship between the state and what he called “the land” (zemlya). At one level the division referred simply to the allegedly limited jurisdiction of state power in pre-Petrine Russia over Russian society. At another level “the land” signified the timeless religious and moral truth of Christianity, while the state, however necessary for the preservation of “the land,” was external, soulless, and coercive. The Russian peasant’s communal existence had to be protected from the contagion of politics. Behind Aksakov’s static “Christian people’s utopia” lay the romantic hatred of social and political rationalism, a passion that animated all the early Slavophiles. Aksakov died suddenly in the Ionian Islands in the midst of a rare European trip. See also: AKSAKOV, IVAN SERGEYEVICH; KHOMYAKOV, ALEXEI STEPANOVICH; SLAVOPHILES

  ALASH ORDA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Christoff, Peter. (1982). An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Russian Slavophilism, Vol. 3: K.S. Aksakov: A Study in Ideas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Riasanovsky, Nicholas. (1952). Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walicki, Andrzej. (1975). The Slavophile Controversy. Oxford: Clarendon.

  ABBOTT GLEASON

  ALASH ORDA

  Alash Orda is the autonomous Kazakh government established by the liberal-nationalist Alash party in December 1917. Alash was the mythical ancestor of the Kazakhs, and Alash Orda (Horde of Alash) long served as their traditional battle cry. His name was adopted by the Kazakh nationalist journal, Alash, that was published by secularist Kazakh intellectuals for twenty-two issues, from November 26, 1916, to May 25, 1917. Alash Orda then was taken as the name of a political party founded in March 1917 by a group of moderate, upper-class Kazakh nationalists. Among others, they included Ali Khan Bukeykhanov, Ahmed Baytursun, Mir Yakub Dulatov, Oldes Omerov, Magzhan Zhum-abayev, H. Dosmohammedov, Mohammedzhan Tynyshbayev, and Abdul Hamid Zhuzhdybayev. Initially, the party’s program resembled that of the Russian Constitutional-Democrats (Kadets), but with a strong admixture of Russian Menshevik (Social Democrat) and Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) ideas. Despite later Soviet charges, it was relatively progressive on social issues and demanded the creation of an autonomous Kazakh region. This program was propagated in the newspaper Qazaq (Kazakh), published in Orenburg. The paper had a circulation of about eight thousand until it was closed by the Communists in March 1918.

  After March 1917, Alash Orda’s leaders dominated Kazakh politics. They convened a Second All-Kirgiz (Kazakh) Congress in Orenburg from December 18 through December 26, 1917. On December 23, this congress proclaimed the autonomy of the Kazakh steppes under two Alash Orda governments. One, centered at the village of Zham-beitu and encompassing the western region, was headed by Dosmohammedov. The second, headed by Ali Khan Bukeykhanov, governed the eastern region from Semipalatinsk. Both began as strongly anti-Communist and supported the anti-Soviet forces that were rallying around the Russian Constituent Assembly (Komuch): the Orenburg Cossacks and the Bashkirs of Zeki Velidi Togan. In time, however, the harsh minority policies of Siberia’s White Russian leader, Admiral Alexander Vasilievich Kolchak, alienated the Kazakh leaders. Alash Orda’s leaders then sought to achieve their goals by an alignment with Moscow. Accepting Mikhail Vasilievich Frunze’s November 1919 promise of amnesty, most Kazakh leaders recognized Soviet power on December 10, 1919. After further negotiations, the Kirgiz Revolutionary Committee (Revkom) formally abolished Alash Orda’s institutional network in March 1920. Many Alash leaders then joined the Communist Party and worked for Soviet Kazakhstan, only to perish during Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. After 1990 the name “Alash” reappeared, but as the title of a small Kazakh pan-Turkic and Pan-Islamic party and its journal. See also: CENTRAL ASIA; KAZAKHSTAN AND KAZAKHS; NATIONALISM IN THE SOVIET UNION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Jackson, George, and Devlin, Robert, eds. (1989). Dictionary of the Russian Revolution. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Olcott, Martha Brill. (1995). The Kazakhs, 2nd ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wheeler, Geoffrey. (1964). The Modern History of Soviet Central Asia. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

  DAVID R. JONES

  ALASKA

  Alaska is the largest state in the United States, equal to one-fifth of the country’s continental land mass. Situated in the extreme northwestern region of North America, it is separated from Russian Asia by the Bering Strait (51 miles; 82 kilometers). Commonly nicknamed “The Last Frontier” or “Land of the Midnight Sun,” the state’s official name derives from an Aleut word meaning “great land” or “that which the sea breaks against.” Alaska is replete with high-walled fjords and majestic mountains, with slow-moving glaciers and still-active volcanoes. The state is also home to Eskimos and the Aleut and Athabaskan Indians, as well as about fourteen thousand Tlingit, Tshimshian, and Haida

  ALASKA

  Cartoon ridiculing the U.S. decision to purchase Alaska from Russia. © BETTMANN/CORBIS people-comprising about 16 percent of the Alaskan population. (The term Eskimo is used for Alaskan natives, while Inuit is used for Eskimos living in Canada.) Inupiat and Yupik are the two main Eskimo groups. While the Inupiat speak Inupiaq and reside in the north and northwest parts of Alaska, the Yupik speak Yupik and live in the south and southwest. Juneau is the sta
te’s capital, but Anchorage is the largest city.

  The first Russians to come to the Alaskan mainland and the Aleutian Islands were Alexei Chirikov (a Russian naval captain) and Vitus Bering (a Dane working for the Russians), who arrived in 1741. Tsar Peter the Great (1672-1725) encouraged the explorers, eager to gain the fur trade of Alaska and the markets of China. Hence, for half a century thereafter, intrepid frontiersmen and fur traders (promyshlenniki) ranged from the Kurile Islands to southeastern Alaska, often exploiting native seafaring skills to mine the rich supply of sea otter and seal pelts for the lucrative China trade. In 1784, one of these brave adventurers, Grigory Shelekhov (1747-1795), established the first colony in Alaska, encouraged by Tsarina Catherine II (the Great) (1729-1796). Missionaries soon followed the traders, beginning in 1794, aiming to convert souls to Christianity. The beneficial role of the Russian missions in Alaska is only beginning to be fully appreciated. Undoubtedly, some Russian imperialists used the missionary enterprise as an instrument in their own endeavors. However, as recently discovered documents in the U.S. Library of Congress show, the selfless work of some Russian Orthodox priests, such as Metropolitan Innokenty Veni-aminov (1797-1879), not only promoted harmonious relations between Russians and Alaskans, but preserved the culture and languages of the Native Alaskans.

  Diplomatic relations between Russia and the United States, which began in 1808, were relatively cordial in the early 1800s. They were unhampered by the Monroe Doctrine, which warned that the American continent was no territory for future European colonization. Tsar Alexander I admired the American republic, and agreed in April 1824 to restrict Russia’s claims on the America continent to Alaska. American statesmen had attempted several times between 1834 and 1867 to purchase Alaska from Russia. On March 23, 1867, the expansionALBANIANS, CAUCASIAN ist-minded Secretary of State William H. Seward met with Russian minister to Washington Baron Edouard de Stoeckl and agreed on a price of $7,200,000. This translated into about 2.5 cents per acre for 586,400 square miles of territory, twice the size of Texas. Overextended geographically, the Russians were happy at the time to release the burden. However, the discovery of gold in 1896 and of the largest oil field in North America (near Prud-hoe Bay) in 1968 may have caused second thoughts. See also: BERING, VITUS JONASSEN; DEZHNEV, SEMEN IVANOVICH; NORTHERN PEOPLES; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH