Encyclopedia of Russian History
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Pratzen Heights, where Kutuzov and Alexander himself urged their troops to resist, and then surrounded the remnants of the allied army, inflicting approximately 30 percent casualties on the Russian and Austrian troops.
The victory was so one-sided that Alexander withdrew his army from the campaign altogether, retreating rapidly back to Russian Poland. His departure compelled Emperor Franz to sue for peace, resulting in the lopsided Treaty of Pressburg (1806), that formally ended the war and dissolved the coalition. Although little studied by Russians and Austrians (for reasons of national pride), Austerlitz elsewhere became the paradigm of decisive battles in the nineteenth century, and generals across the continent and even in the United States sought to emulate Napoleon’s accomplishment. See also: ALEXANDER I; KUTUZOV, MIKHAIL ILARIONOVICH; NAPOLEON I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bowden, Scott. (1997). Napoleon and Austerlitz : An Un-precedentedly Detailed Combat Study of Napoleon’s Epic Ulm-Austerlitz campaigns of 1805. Chicago: Emperor’s Press. Duffy, Christopher. (1999). Austerlitz, 1805. London: Cassell.
FREDERICK W. KAGAN
AUSTRIA, RELATIONS WITH
As they gained control of the Russian lands during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the princes of Moscow became a factor in international relations. An Austrian nobleman, Sigismund von Herber-stein, twice led embassies from the Habsburg Holy Roman emperor to Basil III (1505-1533) in Moscow. Herberstein’s Rerum moscoviticarum com-mentarii (Notes on Muscovite Affairs, 1549) helped shape European attitudes to Russia for generations. More sustained relations between Austria and Russia began during the reign of Peter the Great (1689-1725), who made the Russian Empire a permanent force in the European balance of power.
Austria maintained an alliance with Russia for most of the eighteenth century, because its rival, France, was seeking aid from Russia’s neighbors Poland and Turkey. Austria and Russia prevented Stanislaw Leszczynski, a French-supported candidate to the Polish throne, from unseating the Saxon dynasty in the War of the Polish Succession (1733-1735). Russia supported Maria Theresa’s claim to the inheritance of her father, Emperor Charles VI, in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Year’s War (1756-1763).
Austria and Russia joined with Prussia in the First Partition of Poland (1772), a cynical but effective attempt to preserve regional equilibrium by compensating the three powers at Poland’s expense. Austria then supported Empress Catherine II’s ambitions in the Balkans, but, concerned by the threat of the French Revolution, withdrew from the war with Turkey in 1791. While Austria was preoccupied with France, Russia and Prussia cooperated in the Second Partition of Poland (1793), but Austria joined them in the Third Partition following Kosciuszko’s revolt (1795).
During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Russia and Austria were allies in the War of the Second Coalition (1798-1801, Russia withdrew in 1799) and the War of the Third Coalition (1805-1807). French victories forced Austria to make an alliance with Napoleon, sending troops to join his invasion of Russia in 1812. When the invasion failed, however, Austria joined Russia, Prussia, and Great Britain in the final coalition that defeated Napoleon in 1814 and occupied Paris.
Following the Congress of Vienna (1815), Austria signed Alexander I’s Holy Alliance, and the two states generally cooperated to support the conservative order and prevent revolution. Nicholas I (1825-1855) sent a Russian army to help Austria defeat the Hungarian bid for independence in 1849. This was poorly repaid by Austria’s malevolent neutrality during the Crimean War (1853-1856).
After the unification of Italy and Germany, Austria turned its ambitions exclusively to the Balkans, where it clashed with Russia. The Balkan crises in 1875 to 1878 and in 1885 destroyed Otto von Bismarck’s Three Emperors’ League. Subsequent Austro-Russian success at keeping the Balkans “on ice” ended after Russia’s disastrous war with Japan in 1904 to 1905. As Russia turned from the Far East to a more active Balkan policy, Austria in 1908 annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina (occupied since the Congress of Berlin in 1878), leaving Serbia bitter and Russia humiliated. Russia responded by encouraging Balkan cooperation to thwart further Austrian penetration, but instead the Balkan League turned on Turkey in two wars in 1912 and 1913. At the peace conference in Lon100
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don in 1913, Austria blocked Serbian access to the Adriatic, again to Russia’s chagrin.
This accumulation of tension set the stage for the assassination of the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, touching off World War I. Austria was determined to punish Serbia for the assassination. Russia’s support for Serbia drew in Germany, Austria’s ally. The German war plan called for an attack on France, Russia’s ally since the 1890s, before Russia could mobilize. The attack, through neutral Belgium, provoked Great Britain’s entry. During the war, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires both collapsed.
The empire’s diminished successor, the Republic of Austria, and the Soviet Union did not enjoy significant relations between the wars. Absorbed into Hitler’s Germany in 1938, Austria regained its independence after World War II because the Allies had decided in 1943 to treat it as liberated, not enemy, territory. Nevertheless, Austria was occupied in four zones, with Vienna, also divided, located in the Soviet zone. On the fault line of the developing Cold War, Austria emerged united, neutral, and free of Soviet domination when the State Treaty was signed in 1955. Vienna was often a site for international meetings, such as the summit between Nikita S. Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy in 1961, prior to the Berlin and Cuban crises. Austria’s entry into the European Union ended its neutrality and placed its relations with Russia on a new footing as part of Russia’s relationship with the EU. See also: BALKAN WARS; COLD WAR; CRIMEAN WAR; POLAND; SEVEN YEARS’ WAR; THREE EMPERORS’ LEAGUE; VIENNA, CONGRESS OF; WORLD WAR I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allard, Sven. (1970). Russia and the Austrian State Treaty: A Case Study of Soviet Policy in Europe. University Park: Pennsylvania State University. Bridge, F. R. (1990). The Habsburg Monarchy Among the Great Powers, 1815-1918. New York: Berg. Jelavich, Barbara. (1974). St. Petersburg and Moscow: Tsarist and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1814-1974. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press. Jelavich, Barbara. (1991). Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, 1806-1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Poe, Marshall. (2000). A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476-1748. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rossos, Andrew. (1981). Russia and the Balkans: Inter-Balkan Rivalries and Russian Foreign Policy, 1908-1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
HUGH LECAINE AGNEW
AUTOCRACY
Autocracy was the form of government in Russia until 1905 when, in theory, a constitutional monarchy was established. The Russian autocratic order can date its origins to the rise of Moscow during the Mongol occupation. The official conception of the autocracy stressed that all political power and legitimacy emanated from the autocrat, who claimed to be God’s representative on earth. According to Russia’s Fundamental Laws of 1832, “The All-Russian Emperor is an autocratic and unlimited monarch.” He had the ability to overcome society more easily than most of his counterparts to the west of Russia simply because the tenets of autocratic thought did not accept the notion that the monarch should consult social groups or other forms of organized societal elements, and institutional constraints on monarchical power did not exist.
One of the justifications for autocracy was its perceived position as being above all classes. It was portrayed as the ideal arbiter between the various self-interested groups in society, ensuring that exploitation did not take place between them and implementing supreme truth and justice. In addition, autocracy was stressed as Russia’s prime and unique historical force, pushing the country towards greatness and providing for national unity in a multi-ethnic empire and internal stability. The emergence of Russia as an empire and a great European power symbolized for many the autocracy’s achievements.
> At the base of autocratic ideology was the idea of a strong union between the people and the autocratic tsar, whose paternalistic image was stressed. While carrying the title of autocrat, he was also known as the “little father” who protected his people from the bureaucracy and worked for their ultimate benefit. There is considerable debate over the extent to which the Soviet political system, and specifically Stalinism, was rooted in this heritage of autocracy.
The autocracy was dependent on the character and modus operandi of the autocrat. As the coordinating pivot of the entire system, he determined
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the autocracy’s actions and reactions. If the autocrat failed to ensure a degree of harmony and unity among the highest servants of the state, or could not fulfil this role and refused to support a minister to act as the coordinating point of the government, he contributed greatly to disorder and paralysis within the autocracy. This scenario was played out during the reign of the last emperor, Nicholas II.
The educated upper classes did not believe that the autocracy was without some constraints. These, however, were not legal, but moral, and based on history, culture, religion, and tradition. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, debate over the future of autocracy increased. The Decembrist Revolt of 1825 was the first sign of open dissatisfaction with autocracy. Forced to embark on a policy of modernization in the middle of the nineteenth century, the autocracy struggled to deal with its consequences. By the end of the nineteenth century, the autocracy was seem more as an obstacle than a positive force. After the Revolution of 1905, the tsar was still called autocratic, but a parliamentary system now existed. Autocracy’s ultimate failure to incorporate to any sufficient degree the greatly enlarged educated and working classes, a step which would have in theory put an end to autocracy, became of the major causes of the collapse of the monarchy. See also: DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION; LIBERALISM; REVOLUTION OF 1905; TOTALITARIANISM; TSAR, TSARINA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dukes, Paul. (1982). The Making of Russian Absolutism 1613-1801. London: Routledge. McDaniel, Tim. (1988). Autocracy, Capitalism, and Revolution in Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rogger, Hans. (1992). Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, 1881-1917. London: Routledge. Verner, Andrew. (1990). The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
ZHAND P. SHAKIBI
AVARS
The Avars are one of the many people of the Dagestan Republic of the Russian Federation. Numbering 496,077 within Dagestan at the 1989 Soviet census, they formed 28 percent of this republic’s population. This made them the largest ethnic group in Dagestan (the Dargins were second, with 15.8 percent), but still far from a majority. There were a total of 600,989 Avars in the Soviet Union in 1989. Of this total, 97 percent spoke Avar as their first language. Nearly 61 percent, a significant number of the adults, claimed fluency in Russian as a second language.
The Avar language is a member of the Avaro-Andi-Dido group of the Northeast Caucasian family of languages. In Soviet times this would have made the them a part of the larger Ibero-Caucasian family, a classification now seen as a remnant of Soviet druzhba narodov politics. It is written in a modified Cyrillic alphabet that was introduced in 1937. A Latin alphabet had been used previously, from 1928 to 1937. Before that an Arabic script was used. A modest number of books have been published in Avar. From 1984 to 1985, fifty-eight titles were published. Being without their own eponymous ethnic jurisdiction, the Avars were less privileged in this category than the Abkhaz, for example, whose jurisdiction was the Abkhazian Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR). With only one-sixth of the population of the Avars, the Abkhazians nonetheless published some 149 books in their language in the same period.
The most prominent leader of Caucasian resistance against the encroachment of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century was an Avar man named Shamil. Curiously, his power base was centered not among his own people, but among the Chechens immediately to the west.
In the delicate multiethnic balance of Dagestani politics, the Avars have occupied a preeminent, if not a dominant, status, especially in the post-Soviet period. The Avar language is often spoken by members of other ethnic groups within the Dagestan Republic as a means of gaining access to power structures. One of the disputes in Dagestan involves the Chechens. Part of the Chechen Republic’s territory that had been absorbed by Dagestan after the Chechen deportation in 1944 was never returned. Avars occupied some of this territory, and the return of Chechens seeking their land has resulted in ongoing conflict.
The ethnogenesis of the Avars is often linked to the people of the same name who appeared with the Hunnic invasions of late antiquity. These Avars original from East Central Asia with other Turkic102
AVIATION
speaking peoples, and so the connection with a people speaking a vastly different language is difficult to make. See also: CAUCASUS; DAGESTAN DARGINS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ethnologue «www.ethnologue.com» Hill, Fiona. (1995). Russia’s Tinderbox: Conflict in the North Caucasus and its Implication for the Future of the Russian Federation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Karny, Yoav. (2000). Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
PAUL CREGO
AVIATION
Defined as the science and practice of powered, heavier-than-air flight, aviation made its first great strides in the early twentieth century, after decades of flights in lighter-than-air gliders and balloons had been achieved in several countries. As acknowledged in reference books worldwide, including those of Soviet Russia, the first successful flight of an airplane was performed one hundred years ago by Orville and Wilbur Wright on December 17, 1903. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, designers and engineers in many countries were working on plans for powered human flight.
In Russia, Sergi Alexeyevich Chaplygin (1869-1942) and Nikolai Yegorovich Zhukovsky (1847-1921) made major contributions in their study of aerodynamics, founding a world-famous school in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1881, Alexander Fyodorovich Mozhaisky (1823-1890) received a patent for a propeller-driven, table-shaped airplane powered by a steam engine, which crashed on takeoff in 1885. From 1909 to 1914, however, Russia made significant strides in airplane design. Progress included several successful test flights of innovative aircraft. For instance, the Russian aircraft designer Yakov M. Gakkel (1874-1945) achieved worldwide attention among aviation experts for developing a single-seat, motor-powered biplane that attracted world attention among aviation experts. In 1910, Boris N. Yuriev (1889-1957) designed one of the world’s first helicopters, which were known in aviation’s earlier days as autogyros. A major breakthrough in world aviation occurred in 1913, with the development of the four-motored heavy Russian aircraft, the Ilya Muromets. This huge airplane far outstripped all other planes of its time for its size, range, and load-carrying capability. Russian ice- and hydroplane development was also outstanding in the years 1915 and 1916. One of the world famous Russian aircraft designers of this period, and the one who built the Muromets, was Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky (1889-1972), who emigrated to the United States in 1919 and established a well-known aircraft factory there in 1923.
Before and during World War I, Russian military aircraft technical schools and aviation clubs blossomed. In the war, the Russians deployed thirty-nine air squadrons totaling 263 aircraft, all bearing a distinctive circular white, blue, and red insignia on their wings. With the coming to power of the Communists in late 1917, Lenin and Stalin, who stressed the importance of military production and an offensive strategy, strongly supported the development of the Red Air Force. Civilian planes, too, were built, for what became the world’s largest airline, Aeroflot.
By the time of World War II, the Soviets had made significant strides in the development of all types of military aircraft, including fighte
rs and bombers, gliders and transport planes, for both the Red Army and Red Navy. By the time of the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, various types of Soviet aircraft possessed equal or superior specifications compared to the planes available to their Nazi German counterparts. This achievement was possible not only because of the long, pre-revolutionary Russian and postrevolutionary Soviet experience in designing and building aircraft and participating in international air shows. Progress in this field also stemmed from Soviet strategic planning, which called for offensive air-ground support in land battle.
During World War II, such aircraft as the Shturmoviks, Ilyushins, and Polikarpovs became world famous in the war, as did a number of male and female Soviet war aces. With the coming of jet-powered and supersonic aircraft in the 1950s and beyond, the Soviets continued their quest for air supremacy, and again showed their prowess in aviation. See also: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY; WORLD WAR I; WORLD WAR II
ALBERT L. WEEKS
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AVVAKUM PETROVICH
(1620-1682), one of the founders of what came to be called Old Belief.
Avvakum was a leading figure in the opposition to Patriarch Nikon and the program of church reform he directed. Nikon’s removal from his post did not placate Avvakum. He continued to agitate against the program of church reform and its supporters until his execution.
Avvakum was born on November 20, 1620, to a priest and his wife in the village of Grigorovo in the Nizhny Novgorod district. In 1638 he married Anastasia Markovna, the daughter of a local blacksmith. She was a devoted wife and true companion to Avvakum until his death. Following in the footsteps of his father, Avvakum entered the secular clergy. In 1642 he was made a deacon at a village church in the Nizhny Novgorod district. Two years later he was ordained a priest.