Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  Two financial state committees, the Ministry of Finance and the State Bank (Gosbank), worked directly with enterprises, unlike other economic ministries. The Ministry of Finance monitored the use of credit by enterprises (working with the ministries), and was responsible for collections of revenues for the budget. At the local level, Ministry of Finance officials were interested primarily in collecting profit taxes, fixed payments, and capital charges from enterprises. The ministry played an important role in limiting managerial staff positions in state bureaucratic organizations and monitored compliance. Its responsibility for the development and execution of the state budget authorized the Ministry of Finance to give an independent opinion on the correspondence of economic plans to party economic policy-a right that Gosplan did not have.

  Banking services were provided by Gosbank. This bank combined the services of a central bank and a commercial bank, but due to the absence of credit and capital markets Gosbank did not perform some traditional banking functions (open market operations, commercial paper transactions, and so forth). The major functions performed by Gosbank were to make short-term loans for working capital (supply of credits in accordance with credit requirements planned by the Ministry of Finance), to oversee enterprise plan fulfillment, to create money, and to monitor payments to the population as a center for all accounts. Therefore, Gosbank acted as the Finance Ministry’s agent by booking the payments of taxes and fees to the state budget through Gosbank accounts while monitoring the flow of wage payments and credit through the economy.

  The third group consisted of the State Committee on Prices (Goskomtsen), the State Committee

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  on Labor and Wages (Goskomtrud), the State Committee on Science and Technology (Goskomtekhnika), the State Committee on Construction (Gosstroy), and the State Committee on Standards (Goskom-standart). These committees worked primarily in setting rules and establishing norms to be observed by the ministries and their subordinate enterprises. For those goods whose prices were to be set centrally, the State Committee on Prices set the prices; for other goods, it established rules for price setting by individual ministries. The State Committee on Labor and Wages established staffing norms and spelled out the rules of compensation and pay. The State Committee on Science and Technology set norms for scientific work and collaborated with Gosplan on science policy. The State Committee on Construction set standards for documenting construction projects and assisted Gosplan in site and project selection. The State Committee on Standards established rules for judging quality standards.

  The main function of state committees was the generation of information useful to the Council of Ministries and Gosplan in making planning decisions. Their information on norms, technology, and quality standards gave Gosplan independent data useful for the evaluation of ministry requests. The rules developed by functional state committees helped the Council of Ministries and Gosplan to constrain the activities of the industrial ministries in order to limit their opportunistic behavior. See also: COMMAND ADMINISTRATIVE ECONOMY; GOS-BANK; GOSPLAN; MINISTRIES, ECONOMIC

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Gregory, Paul R. (1990). Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure. Boston: Addison Wesley.

  PAUL R. GREGORY

  BURYATS

  The Buryats, originally a nomadic herding people of Mongolian stock, live in the South-central region of Siberia, in the territory bordering Mongolia, with Lake Baikal on its western border and Yablonovy Ridge to the east. The Buryats are one of the nationality groups that was recognized by Soviet authorities and had an autonomous republic of its own, along with the Yakuts, the Ossetians, the Komi, Tuvinians, Kalmyks, and Karelians. Of the five republics located east of the Ural Mountains in Asian Russia, four-Buryatia, Gorno-Altay, Khakassia, and Tuva-extend along Russia’s southern border with Mongolia. After the changes of the immediate post-Soviet years, the Buryat Republic, or Buryatia (formerly the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, or ASSR), continues to exist in the Russian Federation and is recognized in the Russian constitution passed in 1993. Besides the republics, the constitution recognizes ten autonomous regions, whose status, like that of the republics, is based on the presence of one or two ethnic groups. One of these regions is Aga Buryat, in which Buryats make up 55 percent of the population; the rest are Russians.

  One of the largest ethnic groups in Siberia, the Buryats number well over one million in the early twenty-first century. In 1994 the population of the republic was about 1.1 million, of which more than one-third lived in the capital city, Ulan-Ude, which lies at the junction of the Uda and Selenga Rivers. Other cities in Buryatia include Babushkin, Kyakhta, and Zakamensk. All are situated by key rivers, including Barguzin, Upper Angara, and Vitim. Occupying 351,300 square kilometers (135,600 square miles), Buryatia has a continental climate and mountainous terrain, with nearly 70 percent of the region covered by forests.

  Contrary to popular belief, Buryatia, and Siberia in general, is not a frozen wasteland year-round. The Siberian winter extends from November to March. In fact, the Siberian flag contains the colors green and white in equal horizontal proportions, with the green representing the Siberian taiga (the largest forest in the world) and the white representing the snow of winter. This taiga shelters vast amounts of minerals, plants, and wildlife, some of which are quite rare and valuable. Along with huge hydroelectric reserves, Buryatia possesses rich stores of bauxite, coal, gold, iron ore, uranium, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, tungsten, lignite, graphite, shales, mercury, tin, and rare earth minerals. The main industries derive from coal extraction, timber harvesting, textiles, sugar refining (from beets), engineering (including locomotive building and boat repairs), and food processing (mostly wheat and vegetables, such as potatoes).

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  BUTASHEVICH-PETRASHEVSKY, MIKHAIL VASILIEVICH

  The peoples of Siberia fall into three major ethno-linguistic groups: Altaic, Uralic, and Paleo-Siberian. The Buryats are one of the Altaic peoples, speakers of Turkic languages widely distributed in the middle Volga, the southern Ural Mountains, the North Caucasus, and above the Arctic Circle. Buryatia is the center of Buddhism in Russia. In fact, it is a place where three religions coexist peacefully: shamanism, Buddhism, and Orthodoxy. The Siberian region even gave rise to the languages from which the term shaman is derived. Shamanism is a belief in unseen gods, demons, and ancestral spirits responsive only to priests (shamans) with magical and healing powers.

  The Buryats have not always been a part of Russia. From 1625 to 1627, the Russian Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich (first of the Romanov dynasty) sent an expedition to explore the Bratskaya land. This first boat expedition, underestimating the ferocity of the Angara River’s rapids, never completed the journey, but nevertheless word spread that Buryat farmers were eager to trade. Later that century, the Russians-in search of wealth, furs, and gold-annexed and colonized the area. Some Buryats, dissatisfied with the proposed tsarist rule, fled to Mongolia, only to return to their native country saying, “Mongolia’s Khan beheads culprits, but the Russian Tsar just flogs them. Let us become subjects of the Russian Tsar.” In 1923 the Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was founded, which consisted of the land on which Buryats lived. Fourteen years later, in 1937, Buryat was forced to split to into three parts: the Buryat-Mongol ASSR, and the Irkutsk and the Chita provinces. That population division remains in the post-Soviet era. During the 1970s Soviet authorities forbade Buryats from teaching the Buryat language in schools. In 1996 the Russian Parliament finally passed a bill concerning the nation-alalities policy of the Russian Federation, allowing the Buryatlanguage and native customs to be taught and preserved. See also: ALTAI; KALMYKS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; SIBERIA; TUVA AND TUVINIANS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam. (1997). Shamanic Wo
rlds: Rituals and Lore of Siberia and Central Asia. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Hudgins, Sharon. (2003). The Other Side Of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East. College Station: Texas A amp;M University Press. Preobrazhensky, Alexander. (1993). “The Beginning of Common Road,” International Affairs, May 1993. Tkacz, Virlana, Sayan Zhambalov, et al. (2002). Shanar: Dedication Ritual of a Buryat Shaman in Siberia. New York: Parabola Books.

  JOHANNA GRANVILLE

  BUTASHEVICH-PETRASHEVSKY, MIKHAIL VASILIEVICH

  (1821-1866), Russian revolutionary democrat and political organizer.

  A graduate of St. Petersburg University Law Department and a clerk at the Foreign Ministry, Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevsky founded (in 1844) and headed a clandestine society of educated youth, from moderate to radical, that were opposed to Tsarism and serfdom. The “Petrashevskians” (pe-trashevtsy) held gatherings at his home on Fridays; their members included Fyodor Dostoyevsky, then an upstart story writer, and a future nationalist thinker Nikolai Danilevsky. Petrashevskians engaged in the study of Western democratic and socialist thought, in particular, the works of Charles Fourier, French utopian socialist and advocate of reorganizing society into a federation of grassroots communes (falanst?res). Petrashevsky apparently organized a falanst?re in his own estate, although it was subsequently destroyed by peasants. Petra-shevskians authored and published two issues of The Pocket Dictionary of Foreign Words (1846, 1849) that included explanations for a number of terms from the “revolutionary” lexicon and was later used against them as incriminating evidence. They also disseminated the Letter of Belinsky to Gogol that was banned in Russia. Their circle is viewed as Russia’s closest reflection of the revolutionary movements of 1848 in Western and Central Europe. In 1849, with the onset of political repression in Russia after the revolutions in Europe had been crushed, Petrashevsky was arrested together with other members of his circle. Most of them, except himself, pleaded guilty of anti-government activities, and all were sentenced to death, but the sentence was revoked by Nicholas I; the announcement was made at the last moment at the scene of the execution. For Petrashevsky, death penalty was replaced by a lifetime sentence to forced labor in a penal colony in Eastern Siberia. In 1856 he declined the pardon offered by Alexander II to political prisoners as part of the general amnesty.

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  See also: DANILEVSKY, NIKOLAI YAKOVLEVICH; DOS-TOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; PETRASHEVTSY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Evans John L. (1974). The Petrasevskij Circle, 1845-1849. The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton.

  DMITRI GLINSKI

  BYLINA

  Oral epic song type.

  The term bylina is a nineteenth-century scholarly innovation, although it is found with a different meaning (“true happening”) in the Lay of Igor’s Campaign and Zadonshchina. Folksingers generally called any such songs starina or starinka (song of olden times). Known first from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the bylinas were mainly collected in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth. They had survived on the margins of the Russian state: in the north, the Urals, parts of Siberia, and among cossacks in the south. Since true epics are relatively scarce in world folklore, the Russian repertoire is significant. It is also notable for its relative brevity (typically a few hundred lines) and native subjects and heroes.

  Epic composition of some kind probably was practiced in early medieval times, as witness literary reflections in the Lay of Igor’s Campaign, Zadon-shchina, passages of the Destruction of Ryazan, and the tale of Kozhemyaka in the Primary Chronicle. The first two of these would seem to indicate that epic singing started in princely courts and was performed by professional bards. But the bylina known to researchers it was performed by peasant singers of tales, both men and women. Most of the surviving examples are set in Kievan Rus in the time of a Prince Vladimir (unclear which one), often with the heroes anachronistically fighting Tatar armies, and this suggests that the songs originated in later centuries when Kiev as capital was only a vague memory and circumstances could be confused with those of the Tatar Yoke. Attempts have been made to attach certain of the exploits to historical events, but this remains doubtful. Rather, it seems that bylinas are fictions reflecting wish fulfillment pervasive in Russian folklore; with superhuman strength and prowess, native heroes always win against the steppe enemies, turning history upside down. Being improvisational, performances differ according to the talents and tastes of performers. It is believed that early practitioners were professionals who chanted to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument, the gusli. In modern times the bylinas were often spoken or sung (the latter especially by cossacks). The bylina’s metrical principle is accentual: a fixed number of strong stresses (three or two) per line, usually with the last stress on the third from last syllable (marking the end of the line) and often with the first stress coming on the third syllable of the line. The number of weak syllables between stresses varies. Conventionally, extra syllables and words might be inserted in order to get the desired spacing of stresses.

  Approximately one hundred subjects of the bylina are known. Scholars categorize the epic songs either chronologically (old and new) or by region (Kievan and Novgorodian). The older heroes (Volkh, Svyatogor) are called that because they appear to be connected with ancient myths. Characteristic Kievan heroes (bogatyrs) are Ilya Muromets, Dobrynya Nikitich, and Alyosha Popovich, while Dyuk Stepanovich is an aristocratic dandy and Sukhman a rare tragic hero. The few bylinas from Novgorod (Sadko, Vasily Buslayev) reflect the commercial interests of that merchant republic of the North.

  Related to the bylinas as epic compositions are the so-called historical songs and spiritual songs. See also: FOLK MUSIC; FOLKLORE; HISTORICAL SONGS; LAY OF IGOR’S CAMPAIGN; MUSIC; SKAZ; ZADONSHCHINA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bailey, James, and Ivanova, Tatyana, tr., ed. (1999). An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Sokolov, Y. M. (1971). Russian Folklore, tr. Catherine Ruth Smith. Detroit: Folklore Associates.

  NORMAN W. INGHAM

  BYZANTIUM, INFLUENCE OF

  Toward the end of the tenth century-the conventional date is 988-Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich of Kiev made Christianity the official religion of his people, the Rus. In choosing his faith, he also had to choose between its two institutional structures- that of the Western (Latin) Church under the au190

  BYZANTIUM, INFLUENCE OF

  thority of the pope in Rome, and that of the Eastern (Greek) Church under the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople (Byzantium). Although the two churches were not formally in opposition at the time-the Great Schism occurred in 1054- nevertheless they had grown apart over the centuries, and each had developed its own distinctive features. Vladimir chose the Byzantine version, a decision with consequences at many levels. However, the nature and extent of Russia’s Byzantine heritage has been controversial. Some have argued that, since Christianity was imported into Rus from Byzantium, the culture that grew therefrom cannot be said to have been merely influenced by Byzantium: it simply was Byzantine, a local development from and within the broader Byzantine tradition. Others, by contrast, stress the active nature of cultural borrowing-namely, the adoption and adaptation of selected elements of Byzantine culture to serve local needs and hence to develop a native culture that, while indebted to Byzantium in superficial aspects of form, was indigenous in substance and essence. Such are the crude extremes. The more productive discussion lies in the nuances between the two.

  For seven hundred years from the official Conversion, high-status cultural expression among the East Slavs of Rus and then of Muscovy was almost entirely limited to the celebration, affirmation, and exposition of Christianity, and hence was almost entirely limited to the appropriate forms inher-ited-directly or indirectly-from Byzantium. In painting this was the age of the icon: not really art in the modern sense (as the product of an individual artist’s imaginative creativity), but a devotional image, a true and correct
likeness according to the approved prototypes. In architecture, public spaces were dominated by churches, whose basic design- most commonly a cross-in-square or domed cross layout-was Byzantine in origin. As for writing, 90 percent or more of all that was written, copied, and disseminated was ultimately derived from Church Slavonic texts translated from Greek. Over time, cultural production in all these media could of course acquire local features-in the development and composition of the full-height iconosta-sis, for example, or in the elaboration of roof-tiers, the onion-shaped dome, or in the robust styles of native chronicles-and local perceptions of such cultural production could vary widely. Overall, however, the Byzantine links were explicit, and Byzantium remained the acknowledged source of authoritative example and precedent. A Byzantine churchman visiting Rus would thus have found part of the surroundings familiar; but still he would not have felt entirely at home. Outside the explicitly ecclesiastical, the Rus reception of Byzantine culture was more patchy. For example, Byzantium itself maintained a tradition of classical Greek learning, but there is little or no sign of any Rus interest in this before the late seventeenth century. Byzantium possessed a large corpus of written law. Church law (canon law) was in principal accepted by Rus together with Christianity, but in practice could be assimilated only gradually and partially through accommodation to local custom, while Byzantine civil law (derived from Roman law) seems to have made not made an impact. The Rus did not, therefore, accept Byzantine culture as a complete package. The borrowing was partial, selective, and thus in a sense non-Byzantine.