Encyclopedia of Russian History
Page 54
The continuing Rus reception of Byzantine culture in the later Middle Ages is somewhat paradoxical: as the visual elements (e.g., styles of painting and building) became progressively diluted through local developments, so the non-visual elements (e.g., ideas, ideology) were more assiduously adopted into official culture. The Muscovite State of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was more Byzantine in its structures than any of the earlier Rus principalities, in that it was a relatively unitary empire headed by an autocrat supported by a growing administrative bureaucracy. Moreover, since the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, it was self-consciously the only surviving Orthodox empire and thus could be projected as Byzantium’s successor. Emblems of this new status were woven into the fabric of Muscovite self-presentation: in the formal adoption of the title of tsar for the ruler; in the establishment of a patriarchate in place of the old metropolitanate; in the construction of imperial genealogies linking the Muscovite dynasty with Imperial Rome; in tales of the transfer of imperial regalia from Byzantium to ancient Kiev; and in the articulation of the notion that Moscow was-in world-historical terms-the “third Rome.”
Ostensibly the reforms of Peter the Great brought about a decisive break. Peter’s new capital was a radical statement of non-Byzantinism in the physical environment, and Western Europe became the new model for prestigious cultural production, whether in architecture and painting or in writing, printing, performing, and philosophizing. The Church continued to produce icons and profess the
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ancient faith, but it no longer enjoyed its virtual monopoly of the high-status media. However, does this necessarily mean that the Byzantine component of Russian culture disappeared? Perhaps, and perhaps not. The question of the Byzantine legacy in post-Petrine Russia is periodically controversial. Some have regarded Russian Byzantinism as a feature only of the remote past, while others have seen it as pervasive even after Peter (whether in true Russian spirituality or, by contrast, in the long continuation of autocratic, authoritarian theocratic forms of government). Such, once more, are the two poles of a debate that can have no objective resolution, since the terms of reference are more ideological than historical. Yet through such debates Russia’s Byzantine heritage remains very much alive, at least as an issue for discussion, after more than a thousand years. See also: ARCHITECTURE; ORTHODOXY; PETER I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Franklin, Simon. (2002). Byzantium-Rus-Russia: Studies in the Translation of Christian Culture. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Meyendorff, John. (1981). Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: A Study of Byzantino-Russian Relations in the Fourteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Obolensky, Dimitri. (1971). The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500-1500. London: Weiden-feld and Nicolson. Obolensky, Dimitri. (1994). Byzantium and the Slavs. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Thomson, Francis J. (1999). The Reception of Byzantine Culture in Mediaeval Russia. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
SIMON FRANKLIN
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CABARET
Cabaret came late to Russia, but once the French, German, and Swiss culture spread eastward in the first decade of the twentieth century, a uniquely Russian form took root, later influencing European cabarets. While Russian theater is internationally renowned-as just the names Chekhov and Stanislavsky confirm-the theatrical presentations in cabarets are less so, despite the brilliance of the poets and performers involved.
The French word cabaret originally meant two things: a plebeian pub or wine-house, and a type of tray that held a variety of different foods or drinks. By its generic meaning a cabaret is an intimate night spot where audiences enjoy alcoholic drinks while listening to singers and stand-up comics. While sophisticates quibble over precise definitions, most will agree on the cabaret’s essential elements. A cabaret is performed usually in a small room where the audience sits around small tables, and where stars and tyros alike face no restrictions on the type of music or genre or combinations thereof, can experiment with avant-garde material never before performed, and can “personally” interact with the audience. The cabaret removes the “fourth wall” between artist and audience, thus heightening the synergy between the two. Ro-dolphe Salis-a failed artist turned tavern keeper- established the first cabaret artistique called Le Chat Noir (The Black Cat) in Paris, where writers, artists, and composers could entertain each other with their latest poems and songs in a Montmartre pub.
Cabarets soon mushroomed across Europe, its Swiss and Austrian varieties influencing Russian artists directly. Russian emigr?s performed, for example, in balalaika bands at the Caf? Voltaire, founded by Hugo Ball in 1916 in Z?rich, Switzerland. The influence of Vienna-based cabarets such as Die Fledermaus (The Bat) is reflected in the name of the first Russia cabaret: “Bat.”
This tiny theater was opened on February 29, 1908, by Nikita Baliev, an actor with the Moscow Art Theater (MKhAT) in tune with the prevailing mood in Russia. In the years following the revolution of 1905, Russian intellectual life shifted from the insulated world of the salon to the zesty world of the cabaret, the balagan (show), and the circus. New political and social concerns compelled the theater to bring art to the masses. Operating perhaps as the alter ego-or, in Freudian terms, the id-of MkhAT, the “Bat” served as a night spot for
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actors to unwind after performances, mocking the seriousness of Stanislavsky’s method. This cabaret originated from the traditional “cabbage parties” (kapustniki) preceding Lent (which in imperial Russia involved a period of forced abstinence both from theatrical diversion as well as voluntary abstinence from meat). Housed in a cellar near Red Square, the “Bat” had by 1915 become the focal point of Moscow night life and remained so until its closure in 1919.
While the format of the Russian cabaret-a confined stage in a small restaurant providing amusement through variety sequences-owed much to Western models, the uniqueness of the shows can be attributed to the individuality of Nikita Baliev and indigenous Russian folk culture. In one show entitled Life’s Metamorphoses, Baliev installed red lamps under the tables that blinked in time with the music. In another show, he asked everyone to sing “Akh, akh, ekh, im!”-to impersonate someone sneezing. As Teffi (pseudonym of Nadezhda Buchinskaya), a composer for the “Bat” recalled, “Everything was the invention of one man-Nikita Baliev. He asserted his individuality so totally that assistants would only hinder him. He was a real sorcerer.”
The Russian cabaret also flourished due to its links with the conventions of the indigenous folk theater-the balagan, the skomorokhi (traveling buffoons), and the narodnoye gulyanie (popular promenading). It incorporated the folk theater’s elements-clowning, quick repartee, the plyaska (Russian dance), and brisk sequence of numbers. Baliev employed key writers and producers, including Leonid Andreyev, Andrei Bely, Valery Bryusov, Sergei Gorodetsky, Alexei Tolstoy, Vasily Luzhsky, Vsevolod Meyerkhold, Ivan Moskvin, Boris Sadovskoi, and Tatiana Shchepkina-Kupernik. Famous artists performed at the “Bat,” including Fyodor Chalyapin, Leonid Sobinov, and Konstantin Stanislavsky. In 1916-1918 Kasian Goleizovsky, the great Constructivist balletmaster of the 1920s, directed performances.
Like most visionaries ahead of their time in the Soviet Union, however, Baliev was arrested. When released in 1919 after five days of confinement, he fled to Paris with the renamed Chauve-Souris (“bat” in French), which toured Europe and the United States extensively. In 1922 the Baliev Company moved to New York, where Baliev entertained enthusiastic audiences until his death in 1936. Baliev and the “Bat” inspired many imitations, most notably the “Blue Bird” (Der Blaue Vogel), founded in Berlin by the actor Yasha Yuzhny in 1920. See also: CIRCUS; FOLK MUSIC; STANISLAVSKY, KONSTAN-TIN; THEATER
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jelavich, Peter. (1993). Berlin Cabaret. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lareau, Alan. (1995). The Wild Stage: Literary Cabarets of the Weimar Republic. Rochester, NY: Camden
House. Russell, Robert, and Barratt, Andrew. (1990). Russian Theatre in the Age of Modernism. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Segel, Harold. (1987). Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret: Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Cracow, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Zurich. New York: Columbia University Press. Segel, Harold. (1993). The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 1890-1938. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Senelick, Lawrence. (1993). Cabaret Performance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
JOHANNA GRANVILLE
CABINET OF MINISTERS, IMPERIAL
Often called the Council of Ministers, this body was convened by Alexander II in 1857 to coordinate legislative proposals from individual ministers. It was chaired by the tsar himself and met irregularly thereafter to consider various of Alexander II’s “Great Reforms.” In 1881, he submitted to it Count Loris-Melikov’s plan for semiconstitutional government, but revolutionaries assassinated the tsar before action could be taken. His successor, Alexander III, determined to reestablish full autocratic rule, did not convene the council, and it played no significant role in the early years of Nicholas II’s reign.
Early in the Revolution of 1905 reformers persuaded Nicholas II to revive the Council of Ministers. From February to August 1905 it worked on various projects for administrative and constitutional change. On October 19, two days after publication of the October Manifesto, an imperial decree established a much revamped Council of Ministers, which was structured along lines recommended by Count Sergei Witte, principal architect of the manifesto and its accompanying reforms. The tsar retained the right to name ministers of war, the navy,
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foreign affairs, and the imperial court, but a new council chairman appointed, subject to the tsar’s approval, the remaining ministers and was empowered to coordinate and supervise the activities of all ministries. The reorganized council was to meet regularly and to review all legislative proposals before their submission to the proposed Duma. Although it resembled a Western-style cabinet in some respects, the new Council of Ministers was not responsible to the about-to-be-formed legislative body and remained heavily dependent on the tsar’s support.
Moreover, Count Witte, as council chairman or prime minister, was unable to implement fully the new structure. Several ministers continued to report directly to the tsar. Nevertheless, the council survived Witte’s dismissal by Nicholas II in spring 1906, and its power was soon broadened to include consideration of legislation when the Duma was not in session. The Council of Ministers remained the chief executive organ under the tsar until his overthrow in the February Revolution of 1917. See also: ALEXANDER II; ALEXANDER III; GREAT REFORMS; NICHOLAS II; WITTE, SERGEI YULIEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mehlinger, Howard, and Thompson, John M. (1972). Count Witte and the Tsarist Government in the 1905 Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Yaney, George L. (1973). The Systematization of Russian Government. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
JOHN M. THOMPSON
CABINET OF MINISTERS, SOVIET
The Cabinet of Ministers was the institutional successor to the Council of Ministers, the chief policy-making body of the Soviet government. It existed for only a brief period during the chaotic final year of Communist rule.
In the late Soviet period, the Council of Ministers had grown into an unwieldy executive body with well over one hundred members, who sat atop a bureaucratic phalanx of government agencies. Moreover, the Council of Ministers, having voted to reject the Five-Hundred Day Plan, had emerged as a political obstacle to Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the centrally planned economy. In October 1990, the revitalized Supreme Soviet granted President Mikhail Gorbachev extra legislative powers to undertake a transition to a market economy. In November 1990, as part of a larger package of political institutional reforms, the Council of Ministers was dissolved by order of the Supreme Soviet, and the Cabinet of Ministers was created in its place. The Cabinet of Ministers was smaller than its predecessor and more focused on economic policy. The body was directly subordinate to the president, who nominated its chairman and initiated legislation with the consent of the Supreme Soviet. The first and only chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers was Valentin Pavlov, a politically conservative former finance minister.
As events turned radical in 1991, the Cabinet of Ministers began to act independently from President Gorbachev in an effort to stabilize and secure the Soviet regime. In March, the cabinet issued a ban on public demonstrations in Moscow; this order was promptly defied by the Russian democratic movement. In the summer, the Cabinet of Ministers became entangled in a power struggle with President Gorbachev over control of the economic policy agenda. Finally, Prime Minister Pavlov and the cabinet allied with the ill-fated August coup. In response, Russian President Boris Yeltsin demanded the dismissal of the mutinous ministers. In September, Gorbachev was forced to comply and sacked his entire government. The Cabinet of Ministers was replaced by an interim body, the Inter-Republican Economic Committee, which itself ceased to exist following the Soviet collapse in December 1991. See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; COUNCIL OF MINISTERS, SOVIET; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; PAVLOV, VALENTIN SERGEYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Archie. (1996). The Gorbachev Factor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
GERALD M. EASTER
CADETS See CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY.
CADRES POLICY
The term cadres policy refers to the selection and training of key CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) personnel. Its importance is indicated by the famous phrase used by Stalin in 1935,
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“Cadres decide everything.” Generally speaking, cadres were selected in theory according to their degree of loyalty to the CPSU and their efficiency in performing the tasks assigned to them. The appointment of cadres at a senior level in the CPSU hierarchy was made or confirmed by the cadres department of the appropriate Party committee. Scholars have raised questions about the degree to which the cadres selected at any given time by the Soviet leadership were “representative” of the population as a whole or of the constituency that they represented. Other issues raised include the extent to which cadres were adequately trained or had the appropriate expertise. By the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the mid-1980s, accusations were being made that many key Party members, who constituted the leadership at all levels within the CPSU structure, had become corrupt during Leonid Brezhnev’s era of stagnation. Hence a new cadres policy was necessary in order to weed out the careerists and replace them with others worthy of acting as a genuine cadre to ensure that the interests of the Party, society, and the people coincided. This led to widespread anti-corruption campaigns against the Party from 1986 onward throughout the former USSR. Famous examples include the arrest of seven Uzbek regional first secretaries in March 1988 and the trial of Brezhnev’s son-in-law, Yuri Mikhailovich Churbanov, the former Interior Minister, in 1989. See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hill, Ronald J. (1980). Soviet Politics, Political Science, and Reform. Oxford: Martin Robertson/M. E. Sharpe. Hill, Ronald J., and Frank, Peter. (1981). The Soviet Communist Party. London: Allen amp; Unwin. White, Stephen. (1991). Gorbachev in Power. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS
CALENDAR
In Russia, the calendar has been used not only to mark the passage of time, but also to reinforce ideological and theological positions. Until January 31, 1918, Russia used the Julian calendar, while Europe used the Gregorian calendar. As a result, Russian dates lagged behind those associated with contemporary events. In the nineteenth century, Russia was twelve days behind, or later than, the West; in the twentieth century it was thirteen days behind. Because of the difference in calendars, the Revolution of October 25, 1917, was commemorated on November 7. To minimize confusion, Russian writers would indicate their dating system by adding the abbreviation “O.S.” (Old Style) or
“N.S.” (New Style) to their letters, documents, and diary entries.
The Julian Calendar has its origins with Julius Caesar and came into use in 45 B.C.E. The Julian Calendar, however, rounded the number of days in a year (365 days, 6 hours), an arithmetic convenience that eventually accumulated a significant discrepancy with astronomical readings (365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 46 seconds). To remedy this difference, Pope Gregory XIII introduced a more accurate system, the Gregorian Calendar, in 1582.
During these years Russia had used the Byzantine calendar, which numbered the years from the creation of the world, not the birth of Christ, and began each new year on September 1. (According to this system, the year 7208 began on September 1, 1699.) As part of his Westernization plan, Peter the Great studied alternative systems. Although the Gregorian Calendar was becoming predominant in Catholic Europe at the time, Peter chose to retain the Julian system of counting days and months, not wanting Orthodox Russia to be tainted by the “Catholic” Gregorian system. But he introduced the numbering of years from the birth of Christ. Russia’s new calendar started on January 1, 1700, not September 1. Opponents protested that Peter had changed “God’s Time” by beginning another new century, for Russians had celebrated the year 7000 eight years earlier.