Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  BIBLOGRAPHY

  Lampert, E. (1965). Sons against Fathers. Studies in Russian Radicalism and Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon. Paperno, Irina. (1988). Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study of the Semiotic of Behavior. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. See also: NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; RUBLE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Goland, Yurii. (1994). “Currency Regulation in the NEP Period.” Europe-Asia Studies 46(8).

  CHESME, BATTLE OF

  Gregory, Paul R. (1994). Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First Five-Year Plan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  JULIET JOHNSON

  CHESME, BATTLE OF

  The battle of Chesme (“fountain” in Turkish) was fought on the night of July 5-6, 1770 between a Russian squadron under the command of Count Aleksei Grigoryievich Orlov and an Ottoman fleet under Hassan Bey at Chesme bay on the western Anatolian Mediterranean coast. Orlov had nine ships of the line, three frigates, a bomb ship, and a number of smaller vessels under his command. Ottoman forces numbered sixteen line ships, six frigates, six xebecs, thirteen galleys, and thirty-two galliots. Orlov’s plan was to send in vessels to attack the tightly clustered Ottoman squadron at anchor in the bay. On the evening of June 26, Orlov sent a detachment of four line ships, two frigates, a bomb ship, and four fire ships under the command of Captain S.K. Greig into the anchorage. A fire ship under the command of Lieutenant Il’in soon set an Ottoman 84-gun line ship alight, and the fire soon spread to other vessels. In total numbers the destruction was the greatest naval victory in the days of sail; the Ottomans lost fifteen line ships, six frigates and about fifty smaller vessels. About ten thousand Ottoman sailors died in the battle, and the Russians captured a number of Ottoman ships, including five galleys and the frigate Rodos-60. Empress Catherine the Great awarded Orlov the title of “Count Chesmensky” for his participation in the victory. The strategic result for Russia was command of the sea in the Aegean during the remainder of its war with the Ottoman Empire. When a peace treaty was signed at K???k Kaynarca in 1774, the Ottoman Empire recognized Russian claims to represent Christian interests in the empire. See also: CATHERINE II; ORLOV, GRIGORY GRIGORIEVICH; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Daly, Robert Welter. (1958). “Russia’s Maritime Past,” In The Soviet Navy, ed. Malcolm George Saunders. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

  JOHN C. K. DALY

  CHICHERIN, GEORGY VASILIEVICH

  (1872-1936), revolutionary and diplomat.

  Georgy Chicherin was born on November 12, 1872, in Karaul, Tambov Province, into an aristocratic family of declining fortunes. He studied in the history and philology faculty at St. Petersburg University. After graduation, he worked in the archives department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Disillusioned with the Romanov regime, Chi-cherin fled to Western Europe in 1904, spending the next fourteen years immersed in socialist ?migr? politics. He belonged to the Menshevik wing of Russian socialism, but his strong opposition to World War I aligned him with Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik faction.

  Returning to Russia in January 1918, Chicherin joined the Bolshevik Party and soon was appointed commissar of Foreign Affairs. He was uniquely qualified for the post, possessing a thorough knowledge of diplomatic history, experience in the tsarist Foreign Ministry, command of several foreign languages, familiarity with European conditions, and considerable negotiating experience from his days in the fractious ?migr? community. Block-daded by the Allies during the period of Civil War and foreign intervention in Russia, Chicherin used radio and the press to create a novel diplomacy of propaganda. Bolshevik appeals to the governments and peoples of the West for fair treatment of Soviet Russia were mixed with revolutionary calls to overthrow those same imperialist regimes.

  The failure of the Bolshevik Revolution to spread abroad convinced Chicherin that a new period of capitalist stabilization had begun. He led the diplomatic component of the USSR’s New Economic Policy (NEP), seeking peaceful relationships with the great powers as well as foreign trade, technology, loans, and investment. Chicherin coined the term “peaceful coexistence” to characterize this new era of temporary accommodation with the capitalist world.

  Chicherin’s major diplomatic successes were the 1921 Anglo-Soviet Trade Treaty and, with Germany, the 1922 Rapallo Treaty and 1925 Berlin Treaty. He saw strong political, economic, and even military ties with Germany as the key to preventing a European-wide anti-Soviet alliance of capitalist powers. He also fought tirelessly against the League of Nations because he saw it as the framework for an anti-Soviet coalition. In the 1920s the USSR received full diplomatic recognition from all the great powers, except

  CHINA, RELATIONS WITH

  the United States. These successes were offset by a number of failures. The USSR was unable to secure sufficient financial and technological assistance from the West. Britain and France continued to manifest undisguised hostility toward Moscow, causing Kremlin leaders to fear renewed armed intervention against Soviet Russia. Germany moved closer to the Anglo-French camp by signing the Locarno Accords in 1925 and joining the League of Nations.

  Chicherin saw opportunities in the national-liberation movements in Asia. Support for anti-colonial struggles, he hoped, would sap the strength of the imperialist powers.

  Chicherin was never a significant figure in Kremlin politics, though he was elected to the Party’s Central Committee in 1925. He played a significant role in foreign policy formulation because Lenin greatly valued his knowledge, experience, and abilities. After Lenin’s incapacitating stroke in 1922, Chicherin began to lose influence, and was eclipsed gradually by his deputy, Maxim Litvinov. A combination of Chicherin’s estrangement from the Stalinist elite and his increasingly poor health virtually eliminated his role in foreign affairs after 1928. He was replaced by Litvinov as foreign commissar in 1930 and lived on a pension until his death, of natural causes, in 1936. See also: CENTRAL COMMITTEE; LEAGUE OF NATIONS; LITVINOV, MAXIM MAXIMOVICH; RAPALLO, TREATY OF

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Jacobson, Jon. (1994). When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. O’Connor, Timothy E. (1988). Diplomacy and Revolution: G.V. Chicherin and Soviet Foreign Affairs, 1918-1930. Ames: Iowa State University Press.

  TEDDY J. ULDRICKS

  CHINA, RELATIONS WITH

  From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, one of the core problems in Russian foreign policy has been how to manage relations with China. A vast Eurasian land power, Russia adjoins China, its giant neighbor to the south, along the sparsely populated territories of eastern Siberia and the Maritime Province. Further to the west, the buffer states of Mongolia and Kazakhstan lie between Russia and China. For most of the past century and a half, Russia enjoyed a significant power advantage vis-?-vis China in military and economic terms. The world recognized Russia as one of the great powers. Meanwhile, China, weakened by domestic turmoil and foreign imperialism, experienced the successive traumas of dynastic collapse, civil wars, revolution, and radical communism. More recently, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the balance of power between the two countries has shifted in favor of China. In the short term, a diminished post-Communist Russia, shorn of its Central Asian territories as well as its western borderlands, has worked out an amicable relationship with China. In the longer term, however, Russian policymakers, like their tsarist and Soviet predecessors, will continue to confront the question of whether an increasingly powerful China is friend, foe, or changeling.

  FROM THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1917

  Russian-Chinese relations date from the seventeenth century. Russia’s eastward expansion at the time was driven by a spirit of adventure, the quest for profits in the fur trade, and the dream of state aggrandizement. Unruly bands of freebooting Cossacks led by Russian adventurers such as Yerofei Khabarov established initial contacts along the Amur River with tribal dependents of China’s ruling Qing dynasty. Conflic
ts that flared up within an as-yet-undefined frontier area came to the attention of Chinese officials, who viewed the Russians as the latest in a long series of armed aggressors from Central Asia. Meanwhile, early Russian diplomatic missions to Beijing, intended to promote commerce and to gauge the strength of the Chinese Empire, ran afoul of China’s elaborate court ritual that the Russians neither understood nor respected. The Russian exaction of tribute from tribal peoples whom the Qing considered their dependents, and the encroachment of armed Russian settlements along the Amur, led to military clashes between Russian and Chinese forces in the 1680s. In 1689, the Treaty of Nerchinsk, the first modern international treaty between China and a European country, began to define a boundary between the two empires and established rules for regulating commercial intercourse. The Treaty of Kiakhta in 1728 readjusted the commercial relationship, further defined the border, and granted Russia permission to build an Orthodox church in Beijing, which became the nucleus of Russian sinology. Thereafter, relations stabilized for the next century on the basis of equality, reciprocity, limited commerce, and peace along the border.

  CHINA, RELATIONS WITH

  In the mid-nineteenth century, Russia seized the opportunity afforded by the decline of the Qing dynasty to expand its eastern territories at China’s expense. Its ultimate objective was to bolster its status as a European great power by playing an imperial role in East Asia. Nikolai Muraviev, the governor-general of Eastern Siberia, was the most prominent of the new generation of empire builders who were determined to make Russia a Pacific power. Combining the threat of force with skillful diplomacy and blandishments, Muraviev and his peers imposed upon China the Treaties of Aigun (1858), Peking (1860), and Tarbagatai (1864), which added 665,000 square miles (1,722,342 square kilometers) to the Russian Empire in Central Asia, eastern Siberia, and the Maritime Province. In 1896 Russian officials bribed and bullied China to grant permission to build the Chinese Eastern Railway across Manchuria (Northeast China), to connect the Trans-Siberian Railway with Vladivostok, Russia’s major port on the Pacific Ocean. Russian occupation of Manchuria in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion, an antiforeign Chinese nativist movement, and growing tension with imperial rival Japan over Manchuria and Korea, led to the Russo-Japanese War and Russia’s humiliating defeat. With the Rising Sun ascendant, Russian influence in China was restricted to northern Manchuria and the Central Asian borderlands.

  SOVIET-CHINESE RELATIONS, 1917-1991

  The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had a profound and lasting impact upon Russian-Chinese relations. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912, China dissolved into civil war and chaos. A small but determined band of revolutionary Chinese intellectuals, disillusioned with Western liberal democracy, discovered in Russian Bolshevism a template for political action. Desiring to revive China and promote revolutionary social transformation, they responded to Bolshevik appeals by organizing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921 and joining the Communist International (Comintern), which ordered the fledgling CCP into alliance with the Chinese Nationalists led by Sun Yat-sen. Moscow dispatched veteran revolutionary Mikhail Borodin and hundreds of military and political advisers to China in the early 1920s to guide the Chinese revolutionary movement to victory. The Comintern dictated strategy and tactics to the CCP. In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen’s successor, severed his alliance with the CCP, slaughtered tens of thousands of communists, and expelled all the Soviet advisers. The revolutionary project lay in ruins.

  Meanwhile, playing a complicated game, Bolshevik Russia and, after 1924, the Soviet Union, successfully maneuvered to retain the imperial gains tsarist Russia had wrested from China in the preceding century. In other words, the Soviet Union simultaneously pursued both statist and revolutionary goals vis-?-vis China. Under its new leader, Mao Zedong, the CCP continued to look toward Moscow for ideological and political guidance while pursuing its own path to power.

  On July 7, 1937, Japan’s creeping aggression against China escalated into a full-scale war. To deflect the threat of Japanese attack against Siberia and the Maritime Province, the USSR provided Chiang Kai-shek substantial military and financial aid in his lonely war of resistance against Japan. Soviet military advisers were attached to Chiang’s armies, and Soviet pilots defended Chinese cities against Japanese attack. In 1941, however, Moscow signed a neutrality treaty with Tokyo, and Soviet aid to China dried up.

  The renewed civil war in China (1946-1949) that followed hard upon victory in World War II culminated in the victory of the Chinese Communist Party and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. Although suspicious of Mao Zedong, the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin quickly extended diplomatic recognition to the new communist government and, after intensive negotiations, signed a thirty-year Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance on February 14, 1950, with the PRC. Mao Zedong proclaimed that the Soviet Union provided a model of socialism for China to emulate. Thousands of Soviet civilian and military experts flooded into China while tens of thousands of Chinese students studied in the USSR and the East European satellite states.

  Within a few years, however, a combination of Soviet high-handedness, Chinese suspicion, and differences over international political strategy eroded the bonds of Sino-Soviet friendship. Beijing challenged Moscow’s leadership of international communism, claimed huge chunks of Russian territory, and condemned the USSR as a “social imperialist” state. In 1969, fighting broke out along the contested eastern and central Asian borders, and a large-scale war loomed but did not materialize. The Sino-Soviet Cold War gradually dissipated in the 1980s as new leaders came to power in Moscow

  CHINA, RELATIONS WITH

  Mao Zedong escorts Nikita Khrushchev to the airport, following celebrations marking the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China in 1959. © SOVFOTO/EASTFOTO and Beijing. During Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s summit in Beijing in May 1989, the two countries proclaimed a new era of amity.

  AFTER THE FALL

  Post-communist Russia suffered a sharp decline in economic and political power just as China was enjoying its greatest period of economic growth that translated into military power and international influence. Yet the two countries soon found common cause in their opposition to the exercise of unilateral American global power. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his Chinese counterpart Jiang Zemin in 1996 proclaimed a new Russian-Chinese strategic partnership that was largely rhetorical. By that time the border issue between the two countries had been basically settled, and stability restored to the relationship. However, Russians in eastern Siberia and the Maritime Province objected to an influx of Chinese illegal migrants and traders whose presence, they said, constituted a growing threat to Russia’s hold over territories acquired only in the mid-nineteenth century. Levels of Russian-Chinese trade remained quite modest, although Russia became a main supplier of advanced military technology to the newly affluent Chinese who could now afford to pay. Within Russia debate continued over the question of whether China could be trusted as a friendly neighbor or whether growing Chinese power would eventually turn north and seek to reassert dormant historical claims against a weakened Russian state.

  In cultural terms, Russian influence upon China peaked in the early to mid-twentieth century, but receded thereafter, leaving very little residue except among the older generation of Chinese who

  CHIRIKOV, ALEXZEI ILICH

  remember the brief era of Sino-Soviet friendship in the 1950s. Chinese influence upon Russian culture is also considerably less than it is in other Western countries, particularly the United States. Racist and condescending attitudes are present on both sides of the relationship along with genuine admiration and understanding of each society’s cultural achievements on the part of educated Russian and Chinese elites. See also: ALGUN TREATY OF; CENTRAL ASIA; COLD WAR; COLONIAL EXPANSION; COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL; FAR EASTERN REGION; JAPAN, RELATIONS WITH; KARAKHAN DECLARATION; NERCHINSK, TREATY OF; SIBERIA; PE
KING, TREATY OF

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Clubb, O. Edmund. (1971). China and Russia: The “Great Game.” New York: Columbia University Press. Mancall, Mark. (1971). Russia and China: Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Paine, S. C. M. (1997). Imperial Rivals: Russia, China, and Their Disputed Frontier. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Quested, Rosemary. (1984). Sino-Russian Relations: A Short History. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin. Tien-fong Cheng. 1957. A History of Sino-Russian Relations. Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press.

  STEVEN I. LEVINE

  In the summer of 1740, Bering’s ships, the St. Peter and St. Paul-captained by Bering and Chirikov, respectively-set sail for Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka. From there, the ships departed in June 1741. Shortly after, the ships separated and never reestablished contact. The crew of the St. Peter sighted Alaska in July, then wintered on the isle now called Bering Island. Bering himself perished; the survivors returned to Petropavlovsk in the fall of 1742.

  In July 1741, Chirikov and the crew of the St. Paul discovered Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago. Short of food and fresh water, the St. Paul returned to Kamchatka in October 1741, having lost eight sailors. The following May, Chirikov sailed east again, searching for Bering and his crew. Unfortunately, the St. Paul sailed past Bering Island. In June, after exploring the Aleutians, Chirikov turned back once more. In August 1742, Chirikov sailed into Petropavlovsk-only a few days before the survivors of the St. Peter voyage returned.