by James Millar
Russians also used calendars to select names for their children. The Russian Orthodox Church assigned each saint its own specific feast day, and calendars were routinely printed with that information, along with other appropriate names. During the imperial era, parents would often choose their child’s name based on the saints designated for the birth date.
Russia continued to use the Julian calendar until 1918, when the Bolshevik government made the switch to the Gregorian system. The Russian Orthodox Church, however, continued to use the Julian system, making Russian Christmas fall on January 7. The Bolsheviks eliminated some confusion by making New Year’s Day, January 1, a major secular holiday, complete with Christmas-like traditions such as decorated evergreen trees and a kindly Grandfather Frost who gives presents to
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children. Christmas was again celebrated in the post-communist era, in both December and January, but New Year’s remained a popular holiday. See also: OLD STYLE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hughes, Lindsey. (1998). Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
ANN E. ROBERTSON
CANTONISTS
The cantonist system in the Russian Empire evolved from bureaucratic attempts to combine a solution to two unrelated problems: welfare provision for the families of common soldiers and sailors, and the dearth of trained personnel to meet the multifarious needs of the modernizing imperial state. The evolution of this category was part of the development of social estates (sosloviia) in Russia, where membership was tied to service obligations.
The recruitment of peasant men into the Russian armed forces frequently plunged their wives (the soldatka) and children into destitution. The state sought to remedy this situation by creating the category of “soldiers’ children” (soldatskie deti) in 1719. These children were removed from the status of serfs, and assigned to the “military domain,” with the expectation that they would eventually serve in the military. Before beginning active service, they were assigned to schools and training institutions attached to military garrisons in order to receive an education of use to the armed forces. The training was provided for children between the ages of seven and fifteen, with an additional three years of advanced training for pupils who proved to be especially talented. They were educated in basic literacy before being given specialized artisan training, musical, or medical instruction, or the numerous other skills required by the military. The most able were given advanced training in fields such as engineering and architecture. Some children resided with their parents while receiving schooling, others were dispatched to training courses far away from home. Upon completion of their education, the soldiers’ children were assigned to the military or other branches of state service. Upon completion of their term of service, which ranged from fifteen to twenty-five years, they were given the status of state peasants, or were allowed to choose an appropriate branch of state service. The garrison schools were permitted to admit, as a welfare measure, the children of other groups, such as impoverished gentry. In 1798 the schools were renamed the “Military Orphanage” (Voenno-Sirotskie Otdelenya), with 16,400 students. In 1805, the students were renamed “cantonists” (kanton-isty), and reorganized into battalions. In 1824, the schools were placed under the supervision of the Department of Military Colonies, then headed by Count Alexei Arakcheyev. The cantonist system continued to grow, and to admit diverse social elements under Nicholas I. In 1856, Alexander II freed cantonists from the military domain, and the schools were gradually phased out.
The cantonist system never fulfilled its objectives. Its welfare obligations overwhelmed resources, and it never found training space for more than a tenth of the eligible children. The cantonist battalions themselves became notorious as “stick academies,” marked by brutality and child abuse, high mortality rates, and ineffective educational methods. The bureaucracy failed to adequately oversee the category of soldiers’ children, who were often hidden in other social estates.
In 1827, the legislation obliging Jews in the Pale of Settlement to provide military recruits permitted communities to provide children for the can-tonist battalions in lieu of adult recruits. The fate of these Jewish cantonists was especially harsh. Children were immediately removed from their parents, and often were subjected to brutal measures designed to convert them to Russian Orthodoxy. The provision of child recruits by the Jewish leadership did much to fatally undermine their authority within the community. See also: EDUCATION; JEWS; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Stanislawski, Michael. (1983). Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825-1855. Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America.
JOHN D. KLIER
CAPITALISM
Max Weber offered a value-free definition of modern capitalism: an economic system based on rational accounting for business, separate from the
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personal finances of an individual or family; a free market open to persons of any social status; the application of advanced technology, especially in large enterprises that required significant amounts of invested capital; a legal system providing equal treatment under the law, without arbitrary exceptions, and ensuring protection of the right of private property; a flexible labor market free of impediments to social mobility, such as slavery and serfdom, and of legal and institutional restrictions, such as minimum-wage laws and labor unions; and the public sale of shares to amass significant amounts of investment capital. Although no economy in world history has ever attained perfection in any of these six dimensions, social science can determine the extent to which economic institutions in a given geographical and historical situation approached this abstract “ideal type.”
The institutions of modern capitalism- corporations, exchanges, and trade associations- evolved in Europe from the High Middle Ages (1000-1300) onward. Corporations eventually appeared in the Russian Empire in the reign of Peter I, and by the late nineteenth century the tsarist government had permitted the establishment of exchanges and trade associations. However, the vast size of the country, its location on the eastern periphery of Europe, the low level of urbanization, the persistence of serfdom until 1861, and the late introduction of railroads and steamship lines slowed the diffusion of capitalist institutions throughout the country.
The autocratic government, which had survived for centuries by wringing service obligations from every stratum of society, viewed capitalist enterprise with ambivalence. Although it recognized the military benefits of large-scale industrial activity and welcomed the new source of taxation represented by capitalist enterprise, it refused to establish legal norms, such as the protection of property rights and equality before the law, that would have legitimized the free play of market forces and encouraged long-term, rational calculation. As Finance Minister Yegor F. Kankrin wrote in March 1836: “It is better to reject ten companies that fall short of perfection than to allow one to bring harm to the public and the enterprise itself.” Every emperor from Peter I onward regarded the principle of a state based on the rule of law (Rechtsstaat; in Russian, pravovoye gosudarstvo) as a fatal threat to autocratic power and to the integrity of the unity of the multinational Russian Empire. The relatively weak development of capitalist institutions in Russia, their geographical concentration in the largest cities of the empire, and the prominence of foreigners and members of minority ethnic groups (Germans, Poles, Armenians, and Jews, in that order) in corporate enterprises led many tsarist bureaucrats, peasants, workers, and members of the intelligentsia to resent capitalism as an alien force. Accordingly, much of the anticapitalist rhetoric of radical parties in the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 reflected traditional Russian xenophobia as much as the socialist ideology. See also: GUILDS; MERCHANTS; NATIONALISM IN THE TSARIST EMPIRE; RUSSIA COMPANY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gatrell, Peter. (1994). Government, Industry, and Rea
rmament in Russia, 1900-1914: The Last Argument of Tsarism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Owen, Thomas C. (1991). The Corporation under Russian Law, 1800-1917: A Study in Tsarist Economic Policy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Roosa, Ruth A. (1997). Russian Industrialists in an Era of Revolution: The Association of Industry and Trade, 1906-1917, ed. Thomas C. Owen. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Weber, Max. (1927). General Economic History, tr. Frank H. Knight. New York: Greenberg.
THOMAS C. OWEN
CARPATHO-RUSYNS
Carpatho-Rusyns (also known as Ruthenians or by the regional names Lemkos and Rusnaks) come from an area in the geographical center of the European continent. Their homeland, Carpathian Rus (Ruthenia), is located on the southern and northern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains where the borders of Ukraine, Slovakia, and Poland meet. From the sixth and seventh centuries onward, Carpatho-Rusyns lived as a stateless people: first in the kingdoms of Hungary and Poland; then from the late eighteenth century to 1918 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; from 1919 to 1939 in Czechoslovakia and Poland; during World War II in Hungary, Slovakia, and Nazi Germany; and from 1945 to 1989 in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Since the Revolution of 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union, most resided in Ukraine, Slovakia, and Poland, with smaller numbers in neigh198
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boring Romania, Hungary, and the Czech Republic; in the Vojvodina region of Yugoslavia; and in nearby eastern Croatia.
As a stateless people, Carpatho-Rusyns had to struggle to be recognized as a distinct group and to be accorded rights such as education in their own East Slavic language and preservation of their culture. As of the early twenty-first century, and in contrast to all other countries where Carpatho-Rusyns live, Ukraine did not recognize Carpatho-Rusyns as a distinct group but rather simply as a branch of Ukrainians, and their language a dialect of Ukrainian.
It was only during the Soviet period (1945-1991) that the majority of Carpatho-Rusyns, that is, those in Ukraine’s Transcarpathian oblast, found themselves within the same state as Russians. It was also during this period that Russians from other parts of the Soviet Union emigrated to Tran-scarpathia where by the end of the Soviet era they numbered 49,500 (1989).
Reciprocal relations between Rusyns and Russians date from at least the early seventeenth century, when Church Slavonic religious books printed in Moscow and other cities under Russian imperial rule were sought by churches in Carpathian Rus. From the last decade of the eighteenth century several Carpatho-Rusyns were invited to the Russian Empire, including Mikhail Baludyansky, the first rector of St. Petersburg University; Ivan Orlai, chief physician to the tsarist court; and Yuri Venelin, Slavist and founder of Bulgarian studies in Russia. In the nineteenth century Russian panslavists showed increasing interest in the plight of “Russians beyond our borders,” that is, the Rusyns of Galicia and northeastern Hungary. Russian scholars and publicists (Nikolai Nadezhdin, Mikhail Pogodin, Vladimir Lamansky, Ivan Filevich, Alexei L. Petrov, Fyodor F. Aristov, among others) either traveled to Carpathian Rus or wrote about its culture, history, and plight under “foreign” Austro-Hungarian rule. On the eve of World War I, a Galician Russian Benevolent Society was created in St. Petersburg, and a Carpatho-Russian Liberation Society in Kiev, with the goal to assist the cultural and religious needs of the Carpatho-Rusyn population, as well as to keep the tsarist government informed about local conditions should the Russian Empire in the future be able to extend its borders up to and beyond the Carpathian Mountains.
The Carpatho-Rusyn secular and clerical intelligentsia was particularly supportive of contacts with tsarist Russia. From the outset of the national awakening that began in full force after 1848, many Rusyn leaders actually believed that their people formed a branch of the Russian nationality, that their East Slavic speech represented dialects of Russian, and that literary Russian should be taught in Rusyn schools and used in publications intended for the group. The pro-Russian, or Russophile, trend in Carpatho-Rusyn national life was to continue at least until the 1950s. During the century after 1848, several Carpatho-Rusyn writers published their poetry and prose in Russian, all the while claiming they were a branch of the Russian nationality. Belorusian ?migr?s, including the “grandmother of the Russian Revolution” Yekate-rina Breshko-Breshkovskaya and several Orthodox priests and hierarchs, settled in Carpatho-Rus during the 1920s and 1930s and helped to strengthen the local Russophile orientation. In turn, Carpatho-Rusyns who were sympathetic to Orthodoxy looked to tsarist Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church for assistance. Beginning in the 1890s a “return to Orthodoxy” movement had begun among Carpatho-Rusyn Greek Catholics/Uniates, and the new converts welcomed funds from the Russian Empire and training in tsarist seminaries before the Revolution and in Russian ?migr? religious institutions in central Europe after World War I.
Despite the decline of the Russophile national orientation among Carpatho-Rusyns during the second half of the twentieth century, some activists in the post-1989 Rusyn national movement, especially among Orthodox adherents, continued to look toward Russia as a source of moral support. This was reciprocated in part through organizations like the Society of Friends of Carpathian Rus established in Moscow in 1999. See also: NATION AND NATIONALITY; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; PANSLAVISM; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; SLAVOPHILES; UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bonk?l?, Alexander. (1990). The Rusyns. New York: Columbia University Press. Dyrud, Keith. (1992). The Quest for the Rusyn Soul: The Politics of Religion and Culture in Eastern Europe and America, 1890-World War I. Philadelphia: Associated University Presses for the Balch Institute. Himka, John-Paul. (1999). Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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Magocsi, Paul Robert. (1978). The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus’, 1848-1948. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
PAUL ROBERT MAGOCSI
CATHEDRAL OF CHRIST THE SAVIOR
The Church of Christ the Savior has a three-phase history: construction, demolition, and reconstruction. In 1812, after the defeat of Napoleon’s invading armies in the Fatherland War, Tsar Alexander I decreed that a church in the name of Christ the Savior be built in Moscow as a symbol of gratitude to God for the salvation of Russia from its foes. Early plans called for a church to be built on Sparrow Hills, but due to unsteady ground at the original location, Nicholas I designated a new site near the Kremlin in 1827. Construction of the church was completed under Alexander II, and the cathedral was consecrated in 1883, during the reign of Alexander III. Some of Russia’s most prominent nineteenth-century artists and architects worked to bring the project to fruition.
Josef Stalin’s Politburo decided to destroy the cathedral and replace it with an enormous Palace of Soviets, topped with a statue of Vladimir Lenin that would dwarf the United States’ Statue of Liberty. In December 1931, the Church of Christ the Savior was lined with explosives and demolished; however, plans for the construction of a Palace of Soviets were never realized. The foundation became a huge, green swimming pool. The destruction of the Church of Christ the Savior followed in the spirit of the revolutionary iconoclasm of the late 1910s and early 1920s, when the Bolsheviks toppled symbols of old Russia. But the demolition of the cathedral was also part of an unprecedented alteration of Moscow’s landscape, which included the destruction of other churches and the building of the Moscow Metro, overseen by First Secretary of the Moscow Party Committee Lazar Kaganovich.
The process of resurrecting the demolished cathedral began in 1990 with an appeal from the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church to the Russian government, requesting that permission be granted to rebuild the church on its original site. This project, headed by Patriarch Alexei II and Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, was completed in 1996, and the Church of Christ the Savior was consecrated in 2000. See also: ALEXEI II, PATRIARCH; KAGANOVICH, LAZAR MOYSEYEVI
CH; LUZHOV, YURI MIKHAILOVICH; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bohlen, Celestine. “A Cathedral Razed by Stalin Rises Again.” New York Times. September 13, 1998: E11.
NICHOLAS GANSON
CATHEDRAL OF ST. BASIL
Located on Red Square, Moscow, the Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat (the official name of the cathedral) was built for Tsar Ivan IV (1532- 1584) between 1555 and 1561 to commemorate his capture of the Tatar stronghold of Kazan, which capitulated after a long siege on October 1 (O.S.) 1552, the feast of the Intercession or Protective Veil (Pok-rov) of the Mother of God, the protector of the Russian land. The original red brick structure incorThe colorful onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral dominate Red Square. © CHARLES O’REAR/CORBIS
CATHEDRAL OF ST. SOPHIA, KIEV
porated nine churches, mainly dedicated to feast days associated with the Kazan campaign. Construction began in 1555, but little else is known about the building process as few contemporary documents survive. Not until 1896 were the names of architects Barma and Posnik (also known as Barma and Posnik Yakovlev) discovered. The story that Tsar Ivan had them blinded after they completed their work-to prevent them from building something better for his enemies-is a legend. The church acquired its popular name after the addition in 1588 of a tenth chapel at the eastern end to house the relics of the holy fool St. Basil (Vasily) the Blessed.
The cathedral comprises the central “tent” church of the Intercession, which is surrounded by four octagonal pillar chapels dedicated to the Entry into Jerusalem (west), Saints Kiprian and Ustinia (north), the Holy Trinity (east), and St. Nicholas Velikoretsky (south). There are also four smaller rectangular chapels: St. Gregory of Armenia (northwest), St. Barlaam Khutynsky (southwest), St. Alexander Svirsky (southeast), and the Three Patriarchs (northeast). The remarkable regularity of the ground plan had led to the theory that it was based upon precise architectural drawings, rare in Muscovy, while the irregularly shaped towers were constructed by rule of thumb. They look even more varied when viewed from the outside, as a result of cupolas of different shapes and colors. The building as a whole is unique, though certain elements can be found in earlier Moscow churches (for example, the Ascension at Kolomenskoye [1532] and John the Baptist at Dyakovo [1547]).