Encyclopedia of Russian History
Page 65
In 1999 and 2000 Chernomyrdin chaired the Gazprom Council of Directors, and from 1999 to 2001 he was a parliamentary deputy for the pro-Kremlin party Unity. In 2001 President Putin made him ambassador to Ukraine. Here he supervised a creeping Russian takeover of the Ukrainian gas industry that stemmed from Ukraine’s inability to finance its massive gas imports from Russia. See also: ECONOMY, POST-SOVIET; OCTOBER 1993 EVENTS; OUR HOME IS RUSSIA PARTY; PRIVATIZATION; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press. Shevtsova, Lilia. (1999). Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
PETER REDDAWAY
CHERNOV, VIKTOR MIKHAILOVICH
(1873-1952), pseudonyms: ‘Ia. Vechev’, ‘Gardenin’, ‘V. Lenuar’; leading theorist and activist of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
Viktor Chernov was born into a noble family in Samara province. He studied at the Saratov gymnasium, but was transferred to the Derpt gymnasium in Estonia as a result of his revolutionary activity. In 1892 Chernov joined the law faculty at Moscow University, where he was active in the radical student movement. He was first arrested in April 1894 and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress for six months. Chernov was exiled to Kamyshin in 1895, but was transferred to Saratov and then to Tambov because of poor health. He married Anastasia Nikolaevna Sletova in 1898. In the same year, he organized the influential “Brotherhood for the Defense of People’s Rights” in Tambov, a revolutionary peasants’ organisation.
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CHERNUKHA
In 1899 Chernov left Russia, and for the next six years he worked for the revolutionary cause in exile. He joined the newly formed Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1901, and from 1903 he was a central committee member. His role in the party was predominantly as a political theorist and writer. He formulated the party’s philosophy around a blending of Marxist and Populist ideas, propounding that Russia’s communal system offered a “third way” to the development of socialism. He reluctantly supported the use of terror as a means of advancing the revolutionary cause.
Chernov returned to St. Petersburg in October 1905, and proposed that the party follow a moderate line, suspending terrorist activity and opposing further strike action. In July 1906 he again left Russia, this time for Finland. He continued his revolutionary work abroad, not returning to Russia until April 1917. Chernov joined the first coalition Provisional Government as Minister for Agriculture in May 1917, despite misgivings about socialist participation in the Provisional Government. His three months in government raised popular expectations about an imminent land settlement, but his tenure as minister was marked by impotency. The Provisional Government refused to sanction his radical proposals for reform of land use.
Chernov struggled to hold the fractured Socialist Revolutionary Party together, and stepped down from the Central Committee in September 1917. He was made president of the Constituent Assembly, and after the Constituent Assembly’s dissolution, was a key figure in leftist anti-Bolshevik organizations, including the Komuch. He believed that the Socialist Revolutionary Party needed to form a “third front” in the civil war period, fighting for democracy against both the Bolsheviks and the Whites. He left Russia in 1920, and was a passionate contributor to the emigr? anti-Bolshevik movement until his death in 1952 in New York. Chernov was a gifted intellectual and theorist who ultimately lacked the ruthless single-mindedness required of a revolutionary political leader. See also: SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burbank, Jane. (1985). “Waiting for the People’s Revolution: Martov and Chernov in Revolutionary Russia, 1917-1923.” Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique 26(3-4):375-394. Chernov, Victor Mikhailovich. (1936). The Great Russian Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Melancon, Michael. (1997). “Chernov.” In Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914-1921, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Chernaiev, and William G. Rosenberg. London: Arnold.
SARAH BADCOCK
CHERNUKHA
Pessimistic neo-naturalism and muckraking during and after glasnost.
Chernukha is a slang term popularized in the late 1980s, used to describe a tendency toward unrelenting negativity and pessimism both in the arts and in the mass media. Derived from the Russian word for “black” (cherny), chernukha began as a perestroika phenomenon, a rejection of the enforced optimism of official Soviet culture. It arose simultaneously in three particular areas: “serious” fiction (published in “thick” journals such as Novy mir), film, and investigative reporting. One of the hallmarks of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost was the open discussion of the misery and violence that was a part of everyday Soviet life, transforming the form and content of the nation’s news coverage. In journalism, chernukha was most clearly incarnated in Alexander Nevzorov’s evening television program “600 Seconds,” which exposed the Soviet viewing audience to some of its first glimpses into the lives of prostitutes and gangsters, never shying away from images of graphic violence.
In literature and film, chernukha refers to the naturalistic depiction of and obsession with bodily functions, sexuality, and often sadistic violence, usually at the expense of more traditional Russian themes, such as emotion and compassion. The most famous examples of artistic chernukha include Sergei Kaledin’s 1987 novel The Humble Cemetery, which tells a story about gravediggers in Moscow, and Vasilii Pichul’s 1988 Little Vera, a film about a dysfunctional family, complete with alcoholics, knife fights, arrests, and virtually nonstop shouting. Also emblematic was Stanislav Govorukhin’s 1990 documentary This Is No Way to Live, whose very title sums up the general critical thrust of chernukha in the glasnost era.
Often condemned by critics across the ideological spectrum as “immoral,” chernukha actually played an important part in the shift in values and in the ideological struggles concerning the country’s legacy and future course. Intentionally or not,
CHERNYSHEV, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH
artists, writers, and journalists responded to Gorbachev’s call for “openness” with works that exposed the long-repressed underside of Soviet life: the misery of the communal apartment, the daily lives of homeless alcoholics, and the hypocrisy of established authority figures. One of the most prominent themes in the chernukha of the 1980s was Soviet youth, particularly in film and on stage: the new generation was repeatedly depicted as mercantile, hedonistic, and bereft of any moral compass. Yet even if these young people were presented in a fashion calculated to provoke the audience’s outrage, blame was almost always attributed to the older generations: to the parents who failed to provide a model worth emulating, and to the system itself, which reduced all human relations to a question of survival and dominance.
Though chernukha was initially a breath of fresh air after decades of sanitized news and entertainment, by the post-Soviet era the majority of the purveyors of “highbrow” culture began to reject it in favor of postmodern playfulness or a return to sentimentality. By contrast, variations on cher-nukha are still a crucial part of Russian popular culture, from the daily news magazines devoted to violent crime and horrible accidents, to the action films and novels where sadistic violence and rape are taken for granted. Though these forms of entertainment are distant from the ideological struggles that helped spawn the phenomenon in the 1980s, they show that the aesthetic of chernukha is still very much a part of the post-Soviet landscape. See also: GLASNOST; MOTION PICTURES; PERESTROIKA; TELEVISION AND RADIOS; THICK JOURNALS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Genis, Alexander. (1999). “Perestroika as a Shift in Literary Paradigm.” In Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, eds. Mikhail Epstein, Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover. New York: Berghan.
ELIOT BORENSTEIN
the age of fifteen, and advanced rapidly through the ranks, participating in all of Russia’s campaign
s against Napoleon. During the Tilsit Period (1807-1812) Alexander I sent Chernyshev to Napoleon to serve as a channel of communications. Napoleon took a liking to Chernyshev and undertook to lecture him in the finer points of war, information that Chernyshev duly brought back to Alexander before the outbreak of hostilities. In November 1812, Chernyshev became an adjutant-general, and commanded various Cossack detachments in the campaigns of 1812 to 1815. In 1819, Chernyshev became a member of the committee Alexander established to reform the organization and legal structures of the Don Cossack host.
Nicholas I promoted Chernyshev to the rank of general-of-cavalry and appointed him minister of war in 1826. From that position, Chernyshev played the leading role in devising and implementing a major reform of the Russian military administration between 1831 and 1836. This reform abolished the position of chief of the main staff and unified control over the entire military administration in the person of the war minister. Chernyshev also presided over the first successful codification of Russian military law, completed in 1838 with the assistance of Mikhail Mikhailovich Speransky. In 1841, Chernyshev was created a prince.
The bases of the enormous mobilization that supported Russia’s efforts in the Crimean War, as well as the support of those troops, were largely established by Chernyshev’s reforms. The fundamental military structure developed by those reforms, furthermore, especially the predominance of the War Ministry as opposed to a General Staff, remained the basic organization of the Russian Imperial Army down to the collapse of the empire, and continues to serve as the basic structure of the Russian Federation’s armed forces. Chernyshev died on June 20, 1857. See also: ALEXANDER I; COSSACKS; MILITARY REFORMS; NICHOLAS I
CHERNYSHEV, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH
(1786-1857), minister of war for Nicholas I, 1826-1852.
Alexander Ivanovich Chernyshev was born on January 10, 1786, entered the Russian army at
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kagan, Frederick W. (1999). The Military Reforms of Nicholas I: The Origins of the Modern Russian Army. New York: St. Martin’s. Menning, Bruce. (1988). “A.I. Chernyshev: A Russian Ly-curgus.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 30(2):192-219.
FREDERICK W. KAGAN
CHERNYSHEVSKY, NIKOLAI GAVRILOVICH
CHERNYSHEVSKY, NIKOLAI GAVRILOVICH
(1828-1889), Russian radical journalist, writer, literary critic, and thinker.
Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was the son of an Orthodox priest. From 1842 to 1845 he attended the theological seminary in Saratov, and in 1850 he graduated from the Department of History and Philology of the University of St. Petersburg. Chernyshevsky was a polyglot; he knew eight foreign languages. As a student Chernyshev-sky impressed his professors with his distinguished knowledge in literature and linguistics, and they predicted that he would have a bright academic career.
After two years of teaching in Saratov from 1851 to 1853, Chernyshevsky returned to St. Petersburg. There Chernyshevsky began to write for the popular journals Otechestvennye Zapiski (Annals of the Fatherland) and Sovremennik (Contemporary). In 1859 he became editor in chief of Sovremennik. There he published his Ocherki gogolevskogo perioda russkoi literatury (Essays on the Gogolian Period in Russian Literature), “his first and most important contribution to literary criticism” according to Eugene Lampert (1965, p. 110). Soon Chernyshevsky became very popular among radical youth and was called a “prophet of the young generation” (Irina Paperno, 1988).
However, Chernyshevsky was not satisfied with only doing journalist work; he attempted to continue his academic career and prepared his dissertation, “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality” (1855). This dissertation presented a doctrine about the superiority of reality over art. He believed that nothing could be more beautiful than that which exists in reality; as he wrote, “Beauty is life.” According to Chernyshevsky, art should be a “textbook of life.” He rejected “art for art’s sake.” However, the Academic Board of the University of St. Petersburg did not share Chernyshevsky’s views on art and did not approve his dissertation. According to T. Pecherskaya, Chernyshevsky said that his dissertation was his interpretation of the ideas of the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, but the conservative Academic Board could not understand him.
After his unsuccessful attempt to pursue an academic career, Chernyshevsky continued his journalistic work and published many essays on art, literature, philosophy, and radical socialist thought. He was a materialist and followed the ideas of German philosophers of the early and mid-nineteenth century. Chernyshevsky propounded radical ideas in his essays and criticized the emancipation of serfs by the government from the radical point of view. He believed that the liberation of the serfs without land was inadequate and mockingly cruel to the peasants. Francis B. Randall (N. G. Chernyshevskii, 1967, preface) wrote that Chernyshevsky called himself a “socialist” but took his doctrine “not from Marx but from the French radicals of the decades before the revolution of 1848.” Chernyshevsky believed in the peasant commune as the germ of the future socialist society and called for a peasant revolution in his publications. Fearing Chernyshevsky’s growing influence, the government closed Contemporary in 1861 and put its editor under secret police surveillance. In July 1862 Chernyshevsky was arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. During his two years of imprisonment from 1862 to 1864, when Chernyshevsky waited for his sentence, he wrote his most famous novel What Is to Be Done? and several other works of fiction. In the novel What Is to Be Done? Cherny-shevsky described the life of a new type of people, who lived by their own labor and led a new kind of family life, where the enlightened woman was a man’s lifelong companion. The novel popularized the ideas of women’s equality and “cooperative socialism”; it depicted the future society as a society of equality and happiness for all. This novel was a synthesis of Chernyshevsky’s sociopolitical, philosophical, and ethical views. The novel became very popular among the radical youth. Aside from the ideas it contained, this work was not a great literary achievement. Lampert (op. cit., p. 224) states that Chernyshevsky “wrote his novel on a fairly low imaginative plane.” All his heroes speak with the same voice, men and women alike. Cherny-shevsky himself did not have any delusions about his literary talent. He wrote his wife from Siberia: “I have not a trace of artistic talent . . . and all [the novel’s] merit consists merely in its truthfulness” (Lampert, op. cit., p. 223).
In spite of the lack of direct evidence of Cherny-shevsky’s participation as a member in the revolutionary organizations, he was condemned to fourteen (later reduced to seven) years of forced labor, followed by lifelong exile in Siberia. According to Lampert, “the government had come to realize the extent of Chernyshevsky’s influence on the younger generation; it knew what his views were, and it had taken fright.” The government considCHERVONETS ered Chernyshevsky’s ideas a danger to the existing order.
On May 19, 1864, the ceremony of “civil execution” was performed on Chernyshevsky in the center of St. Petersburg in Mytninskaya Square. “After sentence has been read out he was forced to kneel, a sword was broken over his head and he was then set in a pillory by a chain,” wrote Alexei Suvorin (Lampert, op. cit., p. 130). However, instead the reaction of condemnation anticipated by the authorities, the big crowd stood silent. Then somebody from the crowd threw a bunch of flowers at Chernyshevsky’s feet.
Chernyshevsky spent more than twenty-five years in prison, forced labor, and exile. During this time he continued to write fiction, essays, and philosophical works (the most famous of his philosophical works was The Nature of Human Knowledge). The last years of his life he devoted to the translation of Georg Weber’s Universal History. Chernyshevsky refused to ask the authorities for “imperial mercy” even when they encouraged him to do so. Chernyshevsky believed that he was innocent and thus did not need be forgiven by the government. Chernyshevsky’s fortitude brought him respect even from among his opponents. The respect for Chernyshevsky and deep sympathy for his misfortune was expressed by the Russian wr
iter Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Chernyshevsky received permission from the authorities to return to his native city of Saratov only four months before his death. Government persecution fueled the image of Chernyshevsky as a “revolutionary saint.” His works were denied publication in Russia until the first Russian revolution in 1905. However, the novels and essays of Cherny-shevsky were spread around the country illegally, often in handwritten copies. His novel What Is to Be Done? became a table book of several generations of Russian radical youth. This novel was considered a classic of Russian literature in Soviet times. After the collapse of the socialist system, people lost interest in the pro-socialist ideas and works of Chernyshevsky. He died on October 29, 1989. See also: DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; JOURNALISM; SOCIALISM; WHAT IS TO BE DONE Randall, Francis B. (1967). N. G. Chernyshevskii. New York: Twayne. Tompkins, Stuart Ramsay. (1957). The Russian Intelligentsia: Makers of the Revolutionary State. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
VICTORIA KHITERER
CHERVONETS
A gold-backed currency introduced by the Soviet government in 1922 as part of the New Economic Policy (NEP).
The Soviet Union did not possess a stable currency at the end of the civil war, and the government realized that it could not achieve its ambitious economic development plans without first solving this pressing monetary problem. Accordingly, a Sovnarkom decree of October 11, 1922, authorized the Soviet state bank to issue the chervonets bank note as the equivalent of the prerevolutionary ten-ruble gold coin (7.74232 grams of pure gold). This legislation required at least 25 percent of chervontsy (plural) to be backed by precious metals and hard currency. The first paper chervontsy appeared in December 1922, and in 1923 the state bank (Gos-bank) also began issuing gold chervonets coins (primarily for use in foreign trade). The chervonets circulated alongside the rapidly depreciating sovz-nak (“Soviet note”) ruble until February 1924, when the state bank began to withdraw the sovz-nak ruble from circulation and established the cher-vonets as the country’s sole legal tender, equal to ten “new” rubles. Through the 1920s, the cher-vonets was officially quoted on foreign exchanges. However, this attempt to maintain a “hard” Soviet currency was controversial almost from its inception and quickly ended along with the NEP itself. On June 9, 1926, the government passed a resolution forbidding the export of Soviet currency abroad, and in February 1930 Soviet currency was withdrawn from foreign exchanges, and private exchanges of foreign currency for chervontsy were banned.