Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  Theodosius’s successors undertook a major building campaign that continued with some minor setbacks until the invasion of the Mongols, who sacked Kiev and destroyed the monastery under Batu Khan in 1240. The monastery began to flourish once again in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries under Lithuanian rule. By the sixteenth century the Caves had become quite wealthy, although as a citadel of Orthodoxy it still faced some major challenges. After the Treaty of Lublin, which combined Poland and Lithuania, and the Treaty of Brest, which created the Eastern Rite Catholic Uni-ate Church (1596), there was pressure to subject the monastery to the Uniate metropolitan of Kiev. Only strong resistance by the Caves monks reversed this process. With the acquisition of Kiev by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, the monastery and the see of Kiev were placed under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Moscow. The Caves was the first (1598), and one of only four monasteries in Russia to be given the special designation lavra, which signified a particularly large and influential monastery. The monastery was an important center of Orthodox spirituality until 1926, when it was made a museum by the Soviet government. It was restored to the Orthodox Church in 1988. See also: KIEVEN CAVES PATERICON; KIEVEN RUS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Fedotov, George P. (1965). The Russian Religious Mind. New York: Harper Torchbooks. The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery. (1989). Translated and with an introduction by Muriel Heppell. Cambridge, MA: Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. (1953). Ed. and tr. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd. P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America.

  DAVID K. PRESTEL

  CAVIAR

  Of the twenty-six species of sturgeon found in the world, those most valued are the four that dwell in the Caspian Sea, including, from largest to smallest in size, the beluga (Huso huso), the osetra or Russian sturgeon (Acipenser gueldenstaedti), the sevruga or stellate (Acipenser stellatus), and the sterlet (Acipenser ruthenus). Each is appreciated for the quality and flavor of its roe (fish eggs), otherwise known as caviar (ikra,). Although they vary in the intensity of their saltiness and flavor, all Caspian caviars have a subtle, buttery taste. Because of the damage induced by the Volga River’s cascade of hydroelectric dams, which originally were built without fish ladders for anadromous fish such as the Caspian sturgeons, and subsequent overfishing in the sea itself, the populations of the Caspian sturgeons have plummeted since 1960. Thus connoisseurs have recommended that caviar lovers redirect their palates to the roe of more abundant fish species, such as the cheaper, but tasty American sturgeon, until the Caspian stocks can rebound. With the major decline of their numbers in the Caspian Sea, sevruga and osetra are being farm-raised in ponds in Europe.

  Belugas, which produce the best and most expensive caviar, are the largest freshwater fish in the world, typically weighing more than one ton, measuring 27 feet (9 meters) long, and living for 150 years. The largest on record weighed 4,350 pounds (1,973 kilograms). Beluga eggs are large, bluish gray, and slightly sweet. The caviar is best when it is fresh.

  Osetra sturgeon measure up to 9 feet (3 meters) in length and weigh up to 90 pounds (200 kilograms). Osetra caviar is brown in color and stronger in flavor than beluga caviar.

  The sevruga sturgeon is smaller still, and yields the smallest eggs. Sevruga caviar possesses the strongest flavor of all the caviars. Because of this, it is cheaper than beluga or osetra, but still quite good.

  215

  CENSORSHIP

  The exceedingly rare sterlet is the smallest of the Caspian sturgeons, measuring a little under 50 inches (2 meters) long, weighing 7 pounds (16 kilograms), and living on average to the age of 22 years. Sterlet, or imperial, caviar was once the most prized fish roe of all. The eggs are small-grained and golden in color. Valued also as a food species, the sterlet has been fished almost to extinction. See also: FOOD

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Alden, Laurie. (1996-2001). “Caviar and Roe.” The Cook’s Thesaurus Internet site. «http://www.foodsubs. com». Saffron, Inga. (2002). Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy. New York: Broadway Books.

  VICTOR L. MOTE

  CENSORSHIP

  Censorship informally began in Russia when the regime acquired the realm’s first printing press about 1560, a century after the invention of movable type. From then until the late 1600s successive tsars confined the use of that press, and the few more imported, to the Russian Orthodox Church.

  Peter I (r. 1682-1725) expanded his government’s monopoly to include secular publishing when, in 1702, he founded Russia’s first newspaper The St. Petersburg Bulletin to promote himself and his programs. In 1720, having added the Senate and Academy of Sciences as official publishers, he required the ecclesiastical college to approve in advance every book printed in Russia, a censorship role that he passed the next year to the newly-created Holy Synod. Synod authority over secular publishing ended in 1750 when Empress Elizabeth (r. 1741-1762) gave the Academy of Sciences the right to censor its publications, as she did Moscow University at its founding in 1755.

  When Catherine II (r. 1762-1796) finally made private ownership and use of printing presses legal in 1783, her decree governing “free publishing” banned published words against “the laws of God and the state” or of a “clearly-seditious” nature. The police would henceforth supervise “free” presses and serve as preliminary censors. Alarmed by the French Revolution, Catherine ended her reign by closing private presses and by opening new censorship offices in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Still, Catherine’s reign marked a stage in widening limits on the publishing of periodicals and books in Russia.

  Sharing Catherine II’s early belief in private publishing, Alexander I (r. 1801-1825) reinstated private presses, along with a preliminary censorship system. He set its rules in 1804 in Russia’s first, brief censorship statute, a major reform designed to make the exercise of state power more predictable and rational. Napoleon’s invasion in 1812, however, caused Alexander I to tighten censorship and to embrace the intense religiosity that spread during the war. Because the tsar resumed peacetime rule as a religious mystic, his choice to head his new Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Education in 1817 was the president of the Russian Bible Society, A. N. Golitsyn, a zealot who used his role as chief censor to promote his religious views and to disseminate Bibles. Repeated complaints from high officials of the Russian Orthodox Church persuaded the Emperor to dismiss Golitsyn in 1824, the year before Alexander I died.

  At the very outset of his reign, Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855) had to put down the Decembrist revolt led by gentry liberals. Blaming alien Western beliefs for discontent, the new tsar resolved to permeate society with Russian ideals and to prove, through paternalistic rule and controlled publishing that autocracy itself was inherently right for Russia.

  Nicholas I in June 1826 issued his secular censorship law of June 1826 as a means to “direct public opinion into agreeing with present political circumstances and the views of the government.” No less than 230 articles (five times the forty-six in the 1804 law) detailed procedures and made the author, not the censor, responsible should a duly censored text prove unacceptable once published (reversing the 1804 law).

  Bowing to criticism among his officials, Nicholas named a new drafting committee and signed a substantially more liberal, but still sweeping, law of April 1828 to govern all works of “Literature, Science, and Art” (under it, responsibility again fell on the approving censor). A Foreign Censorship Committee had to publish monthly a list of the foreign works it had banned. Issued at the same time was a new ecclesiastical censorship statute that confirmed the Holy Synod’s right-through censors

  216

  CENSORSHIP

  chosen from ecclesiastical academies-to ban any book, work of art, ceremony, musical composition, or performance contrary to precepts of the Orthodox Church.

  Nicholas also made censors of his new political police, the Third Section. To counter cland
estine printing of illegal works and lax censorship of legal ones, he secretly ordered his special police to look for and report anything “inclined to the spread of atheism or which reflects in the artist or writer violations of the obligations of loyal subjects.” One year after the French and Belgian Revolutions of 1830, Nicholas I put down the Polish rebellion. Building on popular support, the tsar in 1833 prescribed a system of ideas-so-called “Official Na-tionality”-to guide his subjects and his officials, including censors.

  With respect to the state’s granting licenses for private periodicals, the tsar himself approved or rejected applications, with the result that the mere forty-two private periodicals that circulated in 1825 had, by 1841, modestly increased to sixty. (Small readerships also forced a number of licensed periodicals to close for lack of profits.) As for books, limited statistics that begin with 1837 show that secular censors in that year approved more titles (838) than in 1845 (804) and 1846 (810), such numbers being minuscule compared to book production in Europe.

  Although limits on publishing under Nicholas I from 1825 to 1855 were the most invasive in Imperial history, brilliant writers such as Ivan Tur-genev, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy won censors’ approval under Nicholas I.

  Assuming power in the last stages of the humiliating Crimean War, Alexander II (r. 1855-1881) blamed that debacle on Russia’s backwardness and the archaic enserfment of 40 million peasants. To promote their liberation, in 1857 he lifted the de facto ban on publishing proposals for liberation.

  On the heels of decreeing Emancipation in February 1861, Alexander II committed to reform of censorship and thirteen months later in March, 1862, ended preliminary censorship for all scientific, academic, and official publications. Then followed, five months after the 1864 judicial reform, the decree of April 6, 1865 to give “relief and convenience to the national press.” Included as transitional for uncensored publications was a system of warnings that could lead to suspensions and closures for any showing a “dangerous orientation.” Freed from censorship-but only in St. Petersburg and Moscow-were all periodicals, translated books of 320 pages or more, and original books of 160 pages or more. (Short books were not freed, given their greater potential to do harm.) A big change was the statute’s subjecting to judicial prosecution anyone responsible for criminal content in a freed publication.

  In December 1866, the State Council declared that full freedom to publish would “take shape under the influence of a series of judicial decisions.” During the next decade, as mounting terrorism made the tsar wary of public opinion, the government all but abandoned press-related trials. New measures against the press included profit-cutting limits on street sales and commercial advertisements. Whereas officials used the warning system from 1865 through 1869 to suspend merely ten freed periodicals, they suspended twenty-seven from 1875 through 1879. On the other hand, the number of active journals rose from twelve in 1865 to twenty in 1879; of newspapers, from forty-one in 1865 to sixty-two in 1879.

  That trend reversed after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, because Alexander III (r. 1881-1894) repressed publishing. As one means, he created a Supreme Commission on Press Affairs in 1882 to silence not just “dangerous” periodicals but also, through temporary banishment from journalism, their editors and publishers. The Commission imposed closure, its harshest penalty, seven times from 1881 to 1889-a period when the overall number of journals and newspapers declined just over 22 and 11 percentage points, respectively.

  Given the seeming containment of terrorism by 1890, an easing of restrictions let the number of journals and newspapers rise; and the total stood once more at the 1881 level when Nicholas II (r. 1894-1917) acceded to the throne. Ten years later, during the 1905 Revolution, civil disobedience in printing plants effectively ended state controls that included censorship. In October, following a government decree that no printing plant could operate if it bypassed press regulations, the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workmen’s Deputies ordered members of the Printers’ Union to refuse to work for plant owners who complied.

  Not only did Nicholas II issue his Manifesto of October 17, 1905 to promise imminent freedom of expression and other reforms, but he also ordered his new prime minister, Sergei I. Witte, to draft

  217

  CENTRAL ASIA

  legislation to effect such changes. New rules for periodicals resulted on November 24, 1905. In issuing them, the tsar claimed to have shifted wholly to judicial controls and thereby to have granted “one of the fundamental freedoms.” Promised new rules on book publishing took effect on April 26, 1906, and they allowed most books simultaneously to reach the public and the governing Committee on Press Affairs. Excepted were works of fewer than seventeen pages (censors had to approve them at least two days before publication), and those from seventeen to eighty pages (censors had to screen them a week in advance). The new rules let officials close an indicted publication pending what could be protracted adjudication.

  Book-related trials in the remainder of 1906 mounted to an all-time high of 223, with 175 convictions. Those persons found criminally responsible for circulating or attempting to circulate a work ruled illegal mainly suffered fines, not imprisonment; for the main aim of the government was judicially to identify criminal content and to keep it from the public. Because the publishing industry became so large in the next decade, the tsarist regime found it almost impossible to limit printed opinion. By 1914, Russian citizens enjoyed freedom of expression very nearly equal to Western levels.

  War with the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires in 1914 caused the tsar to impose military censorship on private publishing. Then followed the heightening domestic turmoil that culminated in the 1917 revolution, ending Imperial Russia and a relatively free press; for Lenin and his Bolsheviks, who seized power in November, so well knew the power of the printed word that they eliminated privately-controlled publishing companies. Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-American novelist and memoirist, provides a measure of the change in this summation: “Under the Tsars (despite the inept and barbarous character of their rule) a freedom-loving Russian had incomparably more possibility and means of expressing himself than at any time during Vladimir Lenin’s and Josef Stalin’s regime. He was protected by law. There were fearless and independent judges in Russia.” Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin bested all rivals to emerge as the leader of the Party by the next year. Under him in1936, the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics made clear that publishing was to achieve the objectives of the socialist order as determined by the Communist Party. Harsh penalties awaited violators of laws against “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” Enforcing limits on the printed word-and all cultural and artistic expression-was maintained by means of a vast censorship apparatus known as Glavlit (the Chief Administration for the Protection of State Secrets) and only official institutions published newspapers (e.g., the Communist Party published Pravda). Each publishing house answered to the State Committee for Publishing, Printing, and the Book Trade. Party authorities approved all editors and publishers of newspapers, magazines, and journals.

  After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev began his eight-year dominance (1956-1964) as first secretary, and his effort to “de-Stalinize” the USSR brought his famous but short-lived “thaw” in censorship, especially with respect to literary and scholarly journals and the newspaper Izvestiia. Direct criticisms of the founding principles of the state or of system of government remained illegal, however, until 1986 when Mikhail S. Gorbachev, as general secretary, liberalized publishing practices under the term glasnost. See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; GLASNOST; GLAVLIT; GO-SIZDAT; INTELLIGENTSIA; JOURNALISM; NEWSPAPERS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Balmuth, Daniel. (1979). Censorship in Russia, 1865-1905. Washington, DC: University Press of America. Choldin, Marianna Tax, and Friedberg, Maurice, eds. (1989). The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars and Censors in the USSR, tr. Maurice Friedberg and Barbara Dash. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Foote, I. P
. (1994). “Counter-Censorship: Authors v. Censors in 19th Century Russia,” Oxford Slavonic Papers 27 62-105. Foote, I. P. (1994). “In the Belly of the Whale: Russian Writers and the Censorship in the Nineteenth Century,” Slavonic and East European Review 98 (1990), 294-298. Papmehl, K. A. (1971). Freedom of Expression in Eighteenth Century Russia. The Hague, Netherlands: Nijhoff. Ruud, Charles A. (1982). Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804-1906. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

  CHARLES A. RUUD

  CENTRAL ASIA

  The notion of “Central Asia” for Russia was the result of a gradual, often haphazard advance south218

  CENTRAL ASIA

  ward during the country’s history. The region has been called different terms in the past and it was not until the twentieth century that one saw the term “Central Asia and Kazakhstan” noted. Politically, it still is often restricted to the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. However, from a cultural perspective, “Central Asia” often encompasses a broader territorial range, that includes Afghanistan, Xinjiang (China), and the Northwest Territories of Pakistan.

  Historically, Central Asia has often been called the last colonial holding of the Russian Empire, a possession acquired during the famed “Great Game” struggle with the British Empire. The region of what is today Kazakhstan was incorporated into the Russian empire as early as the eighteenth century, when the Tsarist government signed treaties with the various nomadic hordes that controlled the vast swaths of steppe territory. The purpose of these agreements was to allow Russian agricultural settlements to develop and, more important, to permit a secure trade route to the Russian holdings in eastern Siberia and the Far East. Indeed, the cities that currently exist in southern Russia and northern Kazakhstan-Orenburg, Omsk, Tomsk, Semi-palatinsk, Pavlodar-were initially developed as “fortress towns” to protect the fur trade to and from the Far East.