by James Millar
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in 1380 over the Mongol Tatars. Yet, despite the spiritual optimism of both works, their lyrical heights coincide with expressions of despair.
Blok supported the 1917 Revolution, perceiving it as a spiritual event, a step toward a transformed Christian world. Yet his twelve-part poem Dvenadtsat (The twelve, 1918) suggests deep ambivalence. Among the most complex and controversial of Blok’s works, it mixes voices and idioms (slogans, war cries, laments, wry remarks) without resolving the discord. The shifts of rhythm and diction, the mimicry of sounds, and the punctuation of the verse with diverse exclamations overwhelm the Christian motif.
Blok’s disillusionment with the Soviet bureaucracy and censorship is suggested in his fierce and eloquent essay “On the Poet’s Calling” (1921), at one level a short treatise on Alexander Pushkin, at another level, a discussion of the conflict between the poet (“son of harmony”) and the “mob” (chern). The poet’s calling, according to Blok, is to create form (cosmos) out of raw sound (chaos); this goal is opposed by the mob-the officials and bureaucrats, those committed to everyday vanities.
Blok died in 1921 from a mysterious (possibly venereal) disease, in a state of malnutrition, despair, heavy drinking, and mental illness. His work continued to be published in the Soviet Union after his death, with a marked discrepancy between official and unofficial interpretations. See also: PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH; SILVER AGE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berberova, Nina. (1996). Aleksandr Blok: A Life, tr. Robyn Marsack. New York: George Braziller. Blok, Alexander. (1974). Selected Poems [of] Alexander Blok, tr. John Stallworthy and Peter France. Ham-mondsworth, UK: Penguin. Chukovsky, Kornei. (1982). Alexander Blok as Man and Poet, tr. and ed. Diana Burgin and Katherine O’Connor. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.
DIANA SENECHAL
BLOODY SUNDAY
On January 22, 1905, a peaceful demonstration of workers in St. Petersburg was dispersed by troops with considerable loss of life. The event triggered the 1905 Revolution. The demonstration was organized by the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of St. Petersburg, a labor organization patronized initially by police authorities and led by an Orthodox priest, Father Georgy Gapon. When four members of the Assembly were fired from the giant Putilov Works just before Christmas, the Assembly felt its very existence threatened and decided to resort to the desperate means of an illegal strike. The Putilov Works was struck on the January 16, but by January 20 the entire city of St. Petersburg was paralyzed by the strike. All eleven branches of the Assembly became perpetual meeting places for the strikers. There was much discussion about the workers presenting a petition to Nicholas II, outlining their grievances. At a meeting with some of his lieutenants, Gapon asked if they should not take their petition directly to the tsar himself. The idea was enthusiastically supported and spread like wildfire. When the petition was finished, copies of “The Most Humble and Loyal Address” were sent to important ministers and the tsar. The address was to be delivered at 2 P.M. on Sunday at the Winter Palace Square.
Before the fateful day, the branches of the Assembly held continuous meetings; the petition was read, and workers cried, fell on their knees, and swore to die for their cause. Wound up by the oratory, they were determined to reach the Palace Square. The Minister of the Interior, not realizing the seriousness of the situation, assured Nicholas II that matters were under control and that he was completely confident a show of force would be sufficient to stop the demonstration.
Each branch made its own arrangement to arrive at the Square by 2 P.M. Members of the farthest branch departed in the early morning hours. The largest procession came from the main branch at the Putilov Works, and was led by Gapon. Efforts were made to give it a religious appearance: Religious paraphernalia, icons, and portraits of tsars were carried at the head of the procession. Shortly after eleven o’clock the immense crowd began to move, singing prayers and the national anthem just as church bells were announcing the end of services. The crowd moved along the main thoroughfare toward the Narva Triumphal Arch, where the road across the river was blocked by troops. The commander tried to disperse the crowd with cavalry; then the bugle sounded a warning, followed by a warning volley over the crowd. This seemed only to encourage workers; they closed ranks and, singing louder, began to run at the
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troops. Soldiers lowered their rifles and began shooting at the crowd. Most of the casualties that day occurred during this procession. Similar events unfolded in several other locations. In some areas the crowds were dispersed without the use of firearms; in others, workers were allowed to pass on their own. On one bridge the officer said he could not let them cross but did not stop workers from crossing on the ice below the bridge.
Despite the shootings, many workers reached the Square, where the Guards barred their way. In the crowd were many survivors of earlier shootings; many were wounded, but all anxiously awaited the appointed hour. The hour came and nothing happened. As the demonstrators were becoming unruly, the commander of the Guards decided to disperse them. A volley was fired near Alexander Garden. The crowd was pushed onto Nevsky Prospect, where some officials in uniforms and policemen were attacked. Troops tried to clear the area, and more shots were fired.
In Russia and abroad, there was universal revulsion at the shooting of peaceful demonstrators. The authorities themselves were shocked; nobody had wanted what happened. The press reported thousands killed, but the official count eventually listed 130 killed, including a policeman. Bloody Sunday, as it became known, began the Revolution of 1905. See also: GAPON, GEORGY APOLLONOVICH; REVOLUTION OF 1905
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ascher, Abraham. (1988). “Gapon and Bloody Sunday.” In his Revolution of 1905, vol. 1. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sablinsky, Walter. (1976). The Road to Bloody Sunday: Father Gapon and the St. Petersburg Massacre of 1905. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
WALTER SABLINSKY
brikov, chief of staff of the St. Petersburg military district, was appointed governor general of the Grand Duchy of Finland in August 1898 to bring about closer integration of the separate Finnish army with the Russian armed forces. The new Conscription Act, drafted by the Russian General Staff, not only aroused strong protests in Finland but even failed to receive the sanction of the Russian State Council in 1901. Bobrikov then appealed directly to Nicholas II who ordered, according to Bobrikov’s wishes, the total abolition of the Finnish army. Immediately after assuming his duties, the strongly nationalist Bobrikov also changed some Finnish symbols and procedural matters that in his view boosted the “false idea of the separateness of the borderland.” In the same vein, Bobrikov made the Finnish Senate and the central administration adopt the Russian language. He also initiated both the abolition of the Finnish tariff and monetary institutions and the governmental supervision of the university. Furthermore, he envisioned but did not accomplish the spreading of the Russian language to local administration, the thorough inspection of the textbooks used in Finnish schools, and the introduction of the autocratic system in Finland. Bobrikov faced opposition in Finland in the form of demonstration and strikes, but he largely succeeded in splitting the opposition by skillfully manipulating it, imposing strict censorship, and strongly curtailing the right of free speech and assembly. To combat emerging activist groups, Bobrikov sought and achieved dictatorial rights in 1903. By that time his original supporters, Minister of War Alexei Kuropatkin and the Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav Plehve, had already shown some weariness of the harsh methods Bobrikov invariably used when dealing with the Finns. Finnish activists had made plans to assassinate Bobrikov but were preempted by an individual malcontent on June 16,1904. See also: FINLAND; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; RUSSIFICATION
BOBRIKOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH
(1839-1904) governor general of the Grand Duchy of Finland and Russian nationalist.
Nikolai Ivanovich
Bobrikov has left a lasting imprint on the collective memory of the Finns as the personification of the oppressive Russification policies toward national minorities. Originally BoBIBLIOGRAPHY Polvinen, Tuomo. (1995). Imperial Borderland: Bobrikov and the Attempted Russification of Finland, 1898-1904. London: Hurst amp; Company.
TUOMO POLVINEN
BOGOLYUBSKY, ANDREI YAROSLAVICH
See ANDREI YAROSLAVICH.
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BOLOTNIKOV, IVAN ISAYEVICH
(c. 1565-1608), outstanding rebel military leader during Russia’s Time of Troubles.
Ivan Bolotnikov led the so-called Bolotnikov rebellion (1606-1607) against Tsar Vasily Shuisky. That rebellion was the largest and most powerful uprising in Russian history prior to the twentieth century and has often been compared to the rebellions led by Stepan Razin and Emelian Pugachev. For several generations, scholars erroneously claimed that the Bolotnikov rebellion was a social revolution against serfdom led by a radical former slave, Ivan Bolotnikov. In fact, the rebellion was not a social revolution; serfs did not actively participate in it, and rebel goals never included the abolition of serfdom. Instead, Bolotnikov led rebel forces loyal to Tsar Dmitry against the usurper Tsar Vasily Shuisky. Wrongly believing that Dmitry had escaped Shuisky’s assassins, the rebels essentially renewed the civil war that had brought Tsar Dmitry to power. Bolotnikov’s forces came from all social classes, and the uprising against Shuisky quickly spread from southwestern Russia to cover half the country.
Little is known about Bolotnikov. In the late sixteenth century, he apparently served the tsar as a cavalryman but fell on hard times and indentured himself to a rich aristocrat as an elite military slave. He later fled to the southern frontier and joined the Volga or Don cossacks. Bolotnikov was eventually captured by Crimean Tatars and sold into slavery; he spent several years working on a Turkish ship before Germans liberated him. On his way back to Russia, he passed through Poland, where he heard about Shuisky’s coup d’?tat. Bolotnikov made his way to Sambor (home of Marina Mniszech), where a man claiming to be Tsar Dmitry interviewed him. “Tsar Dmitry” (Mikhail Molchanov) appointed Bolotnikov commander-in-chief of all rebel forces struggling against Shuisky.
Sometime during the summer of 1606, Bolot-nikov arrived in Putivl (headquarters of the rebellion in Tsar Dmitry’s name), took command of a rebel army, and began marching toward Moscow. He defeated Shuisky’s rapidly retreating forces, and town after town welcomed Bolotnikov as a hero. During the siege of Moscow (late fall 1606), however, rivalry between Bolotnikov and another rebel commander, Istoma Pashkov, led to Pashkov’s betrayal of the rebels during a decisive battle on December 2, 1606. Forced to break off the siege, Bolotnikov retreated in good order to Kaluga, where his skillful defense of the fortress frustrated all efforts by Shuisky’s commanders to capture the town. After breaking up the siege of Kaluga, Bolot-nikov led his men to stone-walled Tula to link up with other rebel forces. Soon Tula came under siege, but once again Bolotnikov’s skill and energy frustrated his enemies. Eventually, Tsar Vasily’s army built a dam below Tula and flooded the town, forcing the rebels to surrender on October 10, 1607.
Bolotnikov managed to negotiate good terms for the rebels. He gave himself up, but his men (with their weapons) were allowed to go free. Many of them immediately rejoined the civil war against Shuisky by entering the service of the second False Dmitry. Bolotnikov was taken in chains to Moscow as a trophy of Tsar Vasily’s victory over the rebels. He was then transferred to Kar-gopol in north Russia, where he was blinded and drowned in early 1608. So great was his reputation that even some of Shuisky’s supporters privately criticized the tsar for executing the brilliant rebel leader. See also: DMITRY, FALSE; MNISZECH, MARINA; PUGACHEV, EMELIAN IVANOVICH; SERFDOM; SHUISKY, VASILY IVANOVICH; SLAVERY; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Avrich, Paul. (1972). Russian Rebels, 1600-1800. New York: Schocken Books. Bussow, Conrad. (1994). The Disturbed State of the Russian Realm, tr. G. Edward Orchard. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s. Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Skrynnikov, Ruslan. (1988). The Time of Troubles: Russia in Crisis, 1604-1618, tr. Hugh Graham. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.
CHESTER DUNNING
BOLSHEVISM
Bolshevism was a dissenting movement within Russian Marxism before World War I that became the founding political party of the Soviet Union. The Russian word bolshevik means literally a person in the majority, as opposed to menshevik, a person in the minority. These words originated at
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the second party congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP) that convened in 1903 in Brussels, then London. The dominant figure in the Bolshevik faction of the RSDWP was Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (1872-1924), more commonly known by his revolutionary name, Lenin.
Marxism was a radical ideology that predicted a revolution by the working classes that would seize power from the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 indeed precipitated a revolution, but the Romanov autocracy of Tsar Nicholas II survived by a combination of reform and repression. The RSDWP originally focused its efforts on the urban working classes in Russia, but Lenin and the Bolsheviks ultimately triumphed because they recognized the need to appeal to the poor peasantry as well.
Bolsheviks were divided between educated intellectuals and factory workers. Some became professional revolutionaries. Others became leaders of the labor movement and strikers in industrial workplaces. The professional revolutionaries favored an illegal conspiracy to seize power, tracing their roots to the Jacobins of the French Revolution and the Populist terrorists of the 1870s in Russia. The working-class Social Democrats favored a revolution that would benefit workers and their families, not intellectuals seeking power.
Russian Social Democrats were inspired by the spontaneous unrest that occurred in Russia in 1905-strikes, peasant violence, and demands for a constitution and a parliament. Neither Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks played a leading role that year. The October Manifesto issued by the tsar promised a constitutional system with an elected parliament, or Duma. After these concessions, the government combined peasant land reform with bloody police repression to quiet the countryside.
After 1905, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks faced new choices. Should they participate in a bourgeois parliament such as the Duma? Or should they boycott its elections and recall their deputies? Should they focus on legal means of achieving power through the system? Or should they engage in illegal actions such as terror, bank robberies, and strikes? Should they limit themselves to the working classes in the towns? Or should they look for support in the peasantry as well?
The Bolsheviks were particularly attentive to the orthodox Marxism of Karl Kautsky in Germany and the radical syndicalism of Georges Sorel and others in France and Italy. Orthodox Marxists feared any revision of Karl Marx’s ideas in favor of reform rather than revolution. The syndicalists believed in forming trade unions and convincing workers to believe in a future general strike. After 1905, the Bolsheviks were deeply divided between those who, like Lenin, claimed to be following Marxist scientific orthodoxy, and those who, like Alexander Bogdanov, believed Marxism was not a set of truths, but a set of useful myths that workers might be convinced to believe. Lenin, in his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909), attacked Bogdanov’s relativism.
The Bolsheviks fought over who should control the party faction’s money and RSDWP schools for workers and revolutionaries in Paris, Bologna, and Capri. Lenin’s followers in European exile argued with Bogdanov’s followers inside Russia. Although the Bolshevik journal was called Pravda (Truth), the Bolsheviks by 1914 were a shrinking group of alienated intellectuals who could agree on little except for their old feud with the Mensheviks, who maintained better ties with factory workers.
When World War I broke
out in 1914, there was no great general strike. Russian socialists were divided among defensists who patriotically supported their government at war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, and pacifists who wanted to end the war. Lenin wanted the war transformed into a revolution and civil war, then a workers’ revolution. But most Russian socialists, exiled either in Europe or Siberia, hardly affected the war effort.
In 1917 the February Revolution surprised both the government and the revolutionaries. Nicholas II abdicated. A liberal Provisional Government shared power with radical workers’ councils, known as soviets, that sprang up in the factories, farms, and army units. Returning from exile, Lenin and the Bolsheviks proclaimed war against the Provisional Government. As the unpopular great war dragged on, the Bolshevik program of workers’ revolution and land reform gained them majorities in the soviets. By October, the Bolshevik-dominated soviets easily took power in the major cities from the weakened Provisional Government.
The Bolshevik Revolution did not end the dispute between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks. Bog-danov led a proletarian culture movement popular among the masses for a few years. Leon Trotsky became a popular and independent leader of the new Red Army. And Josef Stalin quietly worked to cre160
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ate a single-party dictatorship that exiled or killed its enemies. By 1924 the Bolsheviks had become a party in their own right, first the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1918, and then the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1924. Ultimately the Bolsheviks led a massive and violent program of industrialization, collectivization of agriculture, and purges that made the Soviet Union as autocratic and unpopular as its imperial predecessor. Sochor, Zenovia. (1988). Revolution and Culture: The Bog-danov-Lenin Controversy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ulam, Adam. (1965). The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia. New York: Macmillan. Williams, Robert C. (1986). The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and his Critics, 1904-1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.