Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Fuhrmann, Joseph T. (1981). Tsar Alexis, His Reign and His Russia. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.

  JARMO T. KOTILAINE

  CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

  Corporal punishment, a form of criminal punishment usually involving public torture of convicts, began in ancient times and existed in Russia until 1904. It was known in Kievan Rus, but limited to certain groups. From the late thirteenth century onward, corporal punishment was applied more widely and used against individuals of any social group without exclusion. It is believed that this broader application arose under the influence of the Tartar and Mongolian conquerors, who freely practiced corporal punishment. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as a consequence of the total enslavement of the population to the state, corporal punishment came into extensive use and peaked in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. All known methods of corporal punishment were employed and applied in full view of the public. For speaking disrespectfully of the tsar or speaking in an obscene manner in a church, the convicted offender’s tongue was cut out; for attempting to kill one’s master, a hand was cut off; for forgery and thievery, fingers were cut off; for brigandage, rebellion, and perjury, the nose or ears were cut off. Criminals were branded so that they could be easily identified. During the reign of Peter I, the

  CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

  more dangerous criminals had their nostrils slit; less dangerous criminals had their foreheads branded with the letter “V,” for vor (criminal). In addition to sentences involving the mutilation of limbs, other painful punishments were meted out: flogging with the knout for the most serious crimes; beating with sticks or the lash for less serious crimes; or, in the case of soldiers, forcing the offender to run the gauntlet. Minors and adults found guilty of less serious offenses were beaten with birch rods. The number of blows began at 500 or more and sometimes extended to infinity- which for all practical purposes meant beating a person to death.

  Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, corporal punishment was applied to all classes within the population equally. But in the eighteenth century, the privileged estates successfully sought the repeal of corporal punishment against them. Motivating their opposition was the growing opinion that corporal punishment was a disgrace for those on whom it was imposed. For instance, a soldier who had undergone corporal punishment was unable to become an officer. As a result of this opposition from privileged groups, members of the nobility, distinguished citizens (pochetnye grazhdane), and merchants of the first and second guilds were exempted from corporal punishment in the imperial charters of 1785. The clergy was granted the same privilege in 1803, as later were members of other social estates-provided they had an education. However, beating with birch rods remained common until the 1860s as a form of punishment for students in elementary and secondary schools, even though children from the privileged social estates predominated in the latter.

  Over time, the severity of sentences was eased, and some forms of punishment were even abolished. For instance, the use of the knout ended in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The knout was the most deadly means of corporal punishment; an experienced executioner could kill a person with three blows. The 1845 Code of Punishments established the upper limit for sentences using the lash and birch rods to 100 blows. Exceptions for the sick and the elderly were under way, as were additional measures to protect the health of individuals undergoing punishment as much as possible. For instance, sentences would not be carried out in extremely cold and windy conditions. Beginning in 1851, a physician was present at the scene of corporal punishment. From 1863 on, corporal punishment was greatly curtailed. Women were entirely exempted. Men were subject to it in only five cases stipulated by law: (1) District courts (volostnye sudy) were permitted to sentence peasants to up to twenty blows of the lash, a sentence that earlier had been considered appropriate only for children. (2) With the permission of the governor of the province, prisoners were allowed to be punished with up to 100 blows of the birch rod for various violations of the established order. (3) Those serving sentences of hard labor in exile and those in exile as penal settlers could receive between 100 and 300 blows of the birch rod for various violations. (4) Those serving sentences of hard labor in exile who committed an additional crime could receive up to 100 blows of the lash. (5) Those serving on vessels at sea could be punished with up to five blows of the whip, and apprentices could be given between five and ten blows of the birch rod.

  Not until 1903 were all forms of corporal punishment abolished for those serving sentences of exile at hard labor or sentences of exile as penal settlers. The following year, corporal punishment was officially abolished for all peasants, soldiers, sailors, and other categories of the population. See also: LEGAL SYSTEMS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Adams, Bruce F. (1996). The Politics of Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia, 1863-1917. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Kucherov, Samuel. (1953). Courts, Lawyers, and Trials under the Last Three Tsars. New York: Praeger. Schrader, Abby M. (1997). “Containing the Spectacle of Punishment: The Russian Autocracy and the Abolition of the Knout, 1817-1845.” Slavic Review 56(4): 613-644. Shrader, O. (1922). “Crimes and Punishments, Teutonic and Slavic.” In Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings. New York: Scribners. Vernadsky, George, tr. (1947). Medieval Russian Laws. New York: Columbia University Press.

  BORIS N. MIRONOV

  CORPORATION, RUSSIAN

  The Russian government chartered the first company, a whaling and fishing enterprise, in 1704.

  COSMOPOLITANISM

  Although Peter I encouraged the formation of trading companies based on the European model, early Russian companies engaged primarily in fishing, textile production, or mining. The Russian-American Company, formed in 1799, expired in 1868, a year after the United States purchased Alaska.

  Limited liability, crucial to corporate enterprise, received legislative sanction in 1805 and 1807. A law promulgated on December 6, 1836, defined the general characteristics and functions of corporations. Each corporate charter (ustav) took the form of a law published in the Complete Collection of Laws or its supplement from 1863 onward, the Collection of Statutes and Decrees of the Government. The government occasionally considered replacing the concessionary system with one permitting incorporation by registration, but it never implemented this reform.

  Bureaucratic regimentation and tutelage kept the number of corporations relatively low: 68 in 1847, 186 in 1869, 433 in 1874, 614 in 1892, 1,354 in 1905, and 2,167, plus 262 foreign companies, in 1914 (Owen). Another 1,239 companies were founded between 1914 and 1916. In November 1917, 2,727 Russian and 232 foreign corporations were in operation. Banks, railroads, steamship lines, mines, and machine plants generally maintained their corporate headquarters in major cities, so that, despite the introduction of modern technology by large corporations in the half-century before World War I, most of the population of the Russian Empire considered the corporation an alien form of economic enterprise. See also: CAPITALISM; GUILDS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Owen, Thomas C. (1995). Russian Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika. New York: Oxford University Press.

  THOMAS C. OWEN

  COSMOPOLITANISM

  Although in English “cosmopolitan” means a citizen of the world or a person who has no permanent home, “cosmopolitanism” in the Soviet Union meant a rejection of Russian and Soviet values. However, after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, “cosmopolitanism” became a code word for “Jewish” and marked a period of lethal state anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union designed to eliminate Yiddish culture, Jewish intellectuals, “nationalists,” and Zionists. After permitting greater freedoms during the war, the Soviet regime in 1945 tried to reimpose control in face of a new Cold War. “Cosmopolitanism” became a “reactionary bourgeois ideology” more akin to capitalism than communism. Artists and intellectuals came under attack for subservience t
o the West and for not expressing adequate Soviet/Russian patriotism.

  During the 1920s “cosmopolitanism” had been synonymous with “internationalism,” one of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism. However, in the 1930s the regime turned toward Russian nationalism, and cosmopolitanism became more closely associated with capitalism-the antithesis of communism. Before 1948, culture chief Andrei Zhdanov led condemnation of many intellectuals for favorable portrayals of Western culture without mentioning the grand achievements of the Soviet experiment. In literature, architecture, biology, philosophy, and many other disciplines, the regime singled out people for “kowtowing” to the West and not showing adequate patriotism. In biology, for example, this led to the rejection of modern genetics, and reaction in many other disciplines was likewise destructive. Apart from enforcing intellectual conformity, “cosmopolitanism” engulfed internationalists and Jews charged with bourgeois nationalism, such as members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), who raised money, awareness, and support abroad during World War II.

  In early 1949, a Pravda article railed against an “unpatriotic group of theater critics,” signaling the first attempt to assign collective, rather than individual, guilt for not sufficiently glorifying the Soviet system. Because most of the critics named were Jewish, this is often noted as the beginning of the anti-Semitic stage of the anticosmopolitan campaign. Articles soon followed about “rootless cosmopolitans” and “passportless wanderers,” which clearly referred to the Jewish diaspora outside the new state of Israel. Jews and other cosmopolitans, according to these press attacks, were isolated and/or hostile to Russian and Soviet culture and traditions. The unspoken assumption was that cosmopolitans, because they were allegedly unpatriotic, would not be loyal when the Cold War turned into an armed conflict.

  The anticosmopolitan campaign destroyed the careers and lives of many of the Soviet Union’s intellectual elites and separated Soviet culture and

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  COSSACKS

  learning from much of the rest of the world. When combined with the campaign against “bourgeois nationalists,” both assimilated Jewish intellectuals and Yiddish culture suffered irreparable harm. For example, when the JAC collected information on wartime atrocities against the Jews, it led to charges of nationalism. Moreover, contact with Jewish groups abroad and calls for a Jewish homeland in Crimea and contact with foreigners were “unpatriotic” and brought charges of treason. In short, doing the regime’s bidding in World War II led to the imprisonment, execution, and silencing of many of the Soviet Union’s leading Jewish artists and intellectuals between 1949 and 1953 after the JAC was closed in 1948. Moreover, many JAC members were executed in August 1952 in what has been called the Night of the Murdered Poets. The investigation into the activities of these JAC members seems to have been the prelude to the Doctor’s Plot, which aimed at the execution of many Jews and physicians in 1953. The trials and executions were aborted after Josef Stalin’s death in March 1953. See also: SLAVOPHILES; WESTERNIZERS; ZHDANOV, ANDREI ALEXANDROVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Dunmore, Timothy. (1984). Soviet Politics, 1945-1953. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hahn, Werner. (1982). Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation, 1946-1953. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pinkus, Benjamin, and Frankel, Jonathan. (1984). The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948-1967: A Documented Study. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rubenstein, Joshua, and Naumov, V. P., eds. (2001). Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, tr. Laura E. Wolfson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Vaksberg, Arkadii. (1994). Stalin Against the Jews. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

  KARL D. QUALLS

  COSSACKS

  The word Cossack (Russian kazak) is probably Turkic in origin, and the term dates to medieval times, when it was used to denote wanderers or freebooters of varying Slavic and non-Slavic origins who lived off raids on the Eurasian steppe and jealously guarded their independence. By the fifteenth century, the term was increasingly applied to a mixture of freemen and fugitives who had fled the serfdom of Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy to live in the seams between encroaching Slavic settlement and receding remnants of the Golden Horde. From these beginnings two distinct traditions gradually emerged to figure in the evolution of the various Cossack groupings in later Russian and Ukrainian history. One tradition witnessed the transformation of these frontiersmen into military servitors, who, in exchange for compensation and various rights and privileges, agreed to discharge mounted military service, usually on the fringes of advancing Slavic colonization. These servitors came to be called “town Cossacks,” and their duties included mounted reconnaissance and defense against nomadic and Tatar incursion.

  During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Cossacks of this type in what is now Ukraine appeared often in Polish military service. They also fought stubbornly to retain their autonomy and status as freemen, for which reason in 1654 they sought protection from the Muscovite tsar. However, their autonomous status and sometimes even their existence proved ephemeral, as Muscovite and Imperial Russian rulers gradually either absorbed, abolished, or transplanted various service-obligated Cossack groupings, including the Ukrainians.

  A second and related tradition produced the more famous “free Cossack” communities. Like their service brethren, the roots of the free Cossacks lay largely with various wayward Russian and Ukrainian peasants (and town Cossacks) who combined with other migrants of mixed ethnic origins to settle in the open steppe beyond any recognizable state frontiers. They formed what the historian Robert H. McNeill has called “interstitial polities,” autonomous military societies that occupied the great river valleys of the Pontic steppe. Free Cossack communities began to appear in the fifteenth century, and by the mid-sixteenth century, they numbered six distinct groupings, including most prominently the Cossacks of the Don Host (voisko) and the Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Sich. Living by their wits and warrior skills off the land and its adjoining waters, these free Cossacks plundered traditional Islamic enemies and Orthodox allies alike. However, like their service-obligated brethren, the free Cossacks gradually came to serve as Muscovite allies, fielding light cavalry for tsarist campaigns, pressing Slavic colonization farther into the Pontic steppe, then into the Caucasus and Siberia. Although the free Cossacks formed bulCOSSACKS

  Cossacks on the march, 1914. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS warks against invasion from the south and east, they were also sensitive to infringements of their rights and privileges as free men. From the time of Stepan Razin’s revolt in 1670-1671 until the rising of Yemelian Pugachev in 1772-1775, they periodically reacted explosively to encroachments against their status and freebooting lifestyle.

  The service and free Cossack traditions gradually merged during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the former free Cossack groupings were either abolished (e.g., the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775) or brought under the complete control (e.g., the Don Host also in 1775) of imperial St. Petersburg. A series of imperial military administrators from Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin through Alexander Ivanovich Chernyshev imposed measures that regularized Cossack military service, subordinated local governing institutions to imperial control and supervision, and integrated local elites into the ranks of the Russian nobility. Regardless of origin, by the time of the Crimean War in 1854-1856, all Cossacks had been transformed into a closed military estate (sosloviye) subject to mandatory mounted military service in exchange for collective title to their lands and superficial reaffirmation of traditional rights and privileges. During the Great Reform Era, War Minister Dmitry Alexeyevich Milyutin toyed briefly with the idea of abolishing the Cossacks, then imposed measures to further regularize their governance and military service. The blunt fact was that the Russian army needed cavalry, and the Cossack population base of 2.5 million enabled them to satisfy approximately 50 percent of the empire’s cavalry requirements. Consequently, the Cossacks became an anachronis
m in an age of smokeless powder weaponry and mass cadre and conscript armies.

  Reforms notwithstanding, by the beginning of the twentieth century, many traditional Cossack groupings hovered on the verge of crisis, thanks to a heavy burden of military service, overcrowding in communal holdings, alienation of land by the Cossack nobility, and an influx of non-Cossack population. The revolutions of 1917 and the ensuing Russian Civil War seriously divided the Cossacks,

  COUNCIL FOR MUTUAL ECONOMIC

  ASSISTANCE

  with a majority supporting the White movement, while a stubborn minority espoused revolutionary causes. Following Bolshevik victory, many Cossacks fled abroad, while those who stayed were persecuted, gradually disappearing during collectivization as an identifiable group. During World War II, the Red Army resurrected Cossack formations, while the Wehrmacht, operating under the fiction that Cossacks were non-Slavic peoples, recruited its own Cossack formations from prisoners of war and dissidents of various stripes. Neither variety had much in common with their earlier namesakes, save perhaps either remote parentage or territorial affinity. The same assertion held true for various Cossacklike groupings that sprang up in trouble spots around the periphery of the Russian Federation following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. See also: CAUCASUS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Barrett, Thomas M. (1999). At the Edge of Empire: The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier, 1700-1860. Boulder: Westview Press. Khodarkovsky, Michael. (2002). Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press. McNeal, Robert H. (1987). Tsar and Cossack, 1855-1914. London: The Macmillan Press. McNeill, William H. (1964). Europe’s Steppe Frontier 1500-1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Menning, Bruce W. (2003). “G. A. Potemkin and A. I. Chernyshev: Two Dimensions of Reform and Russia’s Military Frontier.” In Reforming the Tsar’s Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution, eds. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Bruce W. Menning. New York: Cambridge University Press. Subtelny, Orest. (2000). Ukraine: A History, 3rd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.