Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  KIERAN WILLIAMS

  CZECHOSLOVAKIA, RELATIONS WITH

  Both the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia were born from the collapse of European empires at the

  CZECHOSLOVAKIA, RELATIONS WITH

  close of World War I. While the USSR rose directly from the rubble of the Russian Empire, the Paris Peace Conference crafted Czechoslovakia from Aus-tro-Hungarian lands. From the outset, the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia) and Slovakia had as many differences as similarities, and tensions between the two halves of the state would resurface throughout its lifetime and eventually contribute to its demise in 1992.

  Under the leadership of President Tomas G. Masaryk, Czechoslovakia was spared many of the problems of the interwar period. Its higher levels of industrialization helped it weather the financial crises of the 1920s better than its more agrarian neighbors. Czechoslovakia also remained a democracy, ruled by the “Petka”-the five leading political parties. Democracy ended only when Czechoslovakia was seized by Nazi Germany, first through the Munich Agreement of 1938, and later through direct occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in 1939. A separate Slovak state was established under Nazi protection in 1939. Ultimately, Soviet troops liberated Czechoslovakia in 1945.

  Following World War II, Stalin moved to first install satellite regimes throughout Eastern Europe and then mold them to emulate Soviet structures. Unlike other future members of the Warsaw Pact, however, Czechoslovakia’s communists were homegrown, not installed by Moscow. A Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCz) had been established in 1921 and had a much broader support base than the Soviet party. Communists served in the first post-war government of President Eduard Benes, taking a plurality (38 percent) of the vote in May 1946. They controlled key ministries, including the Interior, Education, Information, and Agriculture. They also acceded to Soviet pressure to not participate in the Marshall Plan reconstruction program. The CPCz seized power in February 1948, when non-Communist cabinet members resigned, hoping to force new elections. A handful of other parties competed in the May 1948 election, but the Communists were in charge. Benes resigned the presidency in June and was replaced by Communist Klement Gottwald.

  Gottwald and CPCz First Secretary Rudolf Slan-sky then began a program of restructuring Czechoslovakia in the Soviet image. Noncommunist organizations were banned, economic planning was introduced, agriculture was collectivized, and media and educational institutions were subjected to ideological controls. Again emulating Stalin, the Czechoslovak communists used terror and purges to consolidate their rule. Even Slansky succumbed to the purges; he was replaced by Antonin Novotny. Following Gottwald’s death in 1953, Antonin Za-potocky became president.

  The other major communist death of 1953, Stalin’s, had little effect on Czechoslovakia. Like hard-line communist leaders in East Germany, officials in Prague did not embrace Nikita Khrushchev’s efforts at liberalization and pluralism. They kept tight control over the Czechoslovak citizenry for the next fifteen years, using the secret police as necessary to enforce their rule. Public protest was minimal, in part due to the relative success-by communist standards-of Czechoslovakia’s economy.

  In January 1968 the CPCz removed Novotny and replaced him with Alexander Dubcek, who finally brought destalinization to Czechoslovakia. The CPCz now allowed broader political discussion, eased censorship, and tried to address Slovak complaints of discrimination. This new approach, called “socialism with a human face” led to a resurgence in the country’s social, political, and economic life-an era that came to be called the Prague Spring. Soon popular demands exceeded the Party’s willingness to reform. The CPCz’s “Action Plan” was countered by “2,000 Words,” an opposition list of grievances and demands.

  The Kremlin kept a close eye on all developments in Czechoslovakia. Khrushchev had dispatched tanks to Budapest in 1956 when Hungarian Communists took reform too far. His successor, Leonid Brezhnev, was even less inclined to allow for experimentation. By summer, Moscow worried that Dubcek had lost control. Moscow declared its right to intervene in its sphere of influence by promulgating the Brezhnev Doctrine. On August 21, 1968, Warsaw Pact troops invaded to restore order. Dubcek was summoned to Moscow but not immediately fired.

  In 1969 “socialism with a human face” was replaced with a new policy: normalization. Gustav Husak became the CPCz first secretary in April 1969, and Dubcek was dispatched to the forests of Slovakia to chop wood. Husak took orders from Moscow, turning Czechoslovakia into one of the Soviet Union’s staunchest allies. The Party purged itself of reformist elements, alternative organizations shut down, and censorship was reimposed. In October 1969, Moscow and Prague issued a joint statement, announcing that their economies would be coordinated for the next six years.

  CZECHOSLOVAKIA, RELATIONS WITH

  The populace fell in line, quietly accepting the reversal of the Prague Spring. The communist leaders tried to temper the political hard-line by maintaining a high standard of living and plentiful consumer goods. As the shock of the crackdown faded, however, a handful of opposition movements emerged trying to keep alive the spirit of 1968. The best-known of these groups was Charter 77, named for the January 1977 declaration signed by 250 dissidents, including playwright and future president Vaclav Havel.

  The rise of Gorbachev in 1985 alarmed the CPCz. The hard-line communist leaders of Czechoslovakia did not embrace Gorbachev’s brand of new thinking. They stubbornly held onto their austere rule, while the economy began to skid. They had come to power in 1969 to block reform; they could hardly shift and embrace it now. Gorbachev’s first official visit to Czechoslovakia, in 1987, raised hopes-and fears-that he would call for a resurrection of the 1968 reforms, but instead he made rather bland comments that relieved the Czech leaders. They believed they now had Moscow’s blessing to ignore perestroika. Husak retired as First Secretary-but not President-in late 1987, apparently for personal reasons rather than on Moscow’s order. His replacement, Milos Jakes, was another hard-line communist with no penchant for reform.

  Czechoslovakia was one of the last states to experience popular demonstrations and strikes in the cascading events of late 1989. The West German embassy in Prague was overrun by thousands of East Germans seeking to emigrate. When the other hard-line holdout, East Germany, collapsed in October, suddenly the end of communism in Czechoslovakia seemed possible. Unable to address popular demands, the Czechoslovak Politburo simply resigned en masse, after barely a week of demonstrations. Havel became president; Dubcek returned from internal exile to lead parliament.

  The Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991 and the Czech Republic and Slovakia divorced on December 31, 1992. Initially, the new Czech state tilted westward, whereas Slovakia leaned toward Moscow, in part because its economy was still oriented in that direction. As the 1990s unfolded, both countries maintained proper ties with Moscow, but also joined NATO: the Czech Republic in 1999, Slovakia in 2002. See also: CZECHOSLOVAKIA, INVASION OF; WARSAW TREATY ORGANIZATION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Brzezinski, Zbigniew K. (1967). The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gati, Charles. (1990). The Bloc That Failed: Soviet-East European Relations in Transition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Skilling, H. Gordon. (1976). Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wolchik, Sharon L. (1991). Czechoslovakia in Transition: Politics, Economics, and Society. London: Pinter.

  ANN E. ROBERTSON

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  DAGESTAN

  Dagestan, part of the ethnically diverse Caucasus region, is an especially rich area of ethnic and linguistic variety. An Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the RSFSR during the Soviet period, it has continued to be an autonomous republic of the Russian Federation since. There are twenty-six distinct languages in the Northeast Caucasian family. The majority of these languages’ speakers live in Dagestan. The largest of these are Avar, Dargin, and Lezgin. The total population of the Dagestan A.S.S.R. in 1989 wa
s 1.77 million. Many other nationalities, such as Russians, also live in Dagestan.

  The capital of Dagestan is Makhachkala, located on the Caspian Sea. The Terek River is the most important river in Dagestan, flowing from Chechnya and toward the Caspian Sea. There is a small coastal plain that gives rise quickly to the eastern portion of the main Caucasus range. The most intense ethno-linguistic diversity is found in the mountains as a result of the isolation that historically separated groups of people. The northern part of Dagestan connects with the Eurasian steppe.

  Many of the people of Dagestan are descendents of the residents of the ancient Caucasian Albanian Kingdom. This kingdom was known for its multiplicity of languages and was Christian for many centuries, having close relations with the Armenian people and their Christian culture.

  Dagestanis were traditionally Muslims peoples. Attempts in the post-Soviet period to incite Islam-based rebellion, however, have been generally unsuccessful. These rebellions have come from the direction of the troubled Republic of Chechnya, which is located west of Dagestan. The Islam of Dagestan was traditionally a Sufi-based Islam, one that is inimical to the sort of puritanical Sunni sectarianism that is exported from other parts of the Islamic world. Sufism in this part of the world is not without its militant expression; one of the most famous leaders, Shamil, was an Avar of Dagestan. His power base was mainly in the Central Caucasus among the Chechens.

  Unlike many of their other neighbors in the Caucasus, the Dagestanis, for the most part, did not experience the exile and deportation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This makes the narrative of their people much less filled with the anger and alienation that characterizes Chechen, Abkhazian, and other histories. The ethnic fragmentation of

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  DANIEL, METROPOLITAN

  Dagestan has also prevented a unified Dagestani national identity from being formed.

  The Russian Empire appeared in this area in two different forms: by the Cossacks who lived at the periphery of the empire in the semiautonomous communities; and by means of the imperial army’s movement down the Volga River and to the western shore of the Caspian. Peter the Great captured territory in this area, but Dagestan was not fully brought into the Russian Empire until the mid-nineteenth century.

  The Soviet period saw the creation of Cyrillic-based alphabets for the various languages of Dagestan. This strengthened the existence of the larger languages, and may have forestalled the extinction of some of the smallest of the languages. It also served to forestall the creation of a united Dages-tani national identity.

  In the post-Soviet period, in addition to Islamic agitation from the west, there has also been a certain amount of ethnic conflict. The conflict is generally over who will control the politics and patronage of certain enclaves, while the larger groups jockey for position in the republic’s government. Some of the conflicts result from the ethnic mixing that was encouraged and sometimes forced during the Soviet period. See also: AVARS; CAUCASUS; DARGINS; ISLAM; LEZGINS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Hill, Fiona. (1995). “Russia’s Tinderbox: Conflict in the North Caucasus and Its Implication for the Future of the Russian Federation.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project. Karny, Yo’av. (2000). Highlander: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  PAUL CREGO

  DANIEL, METROPOLITAN

  (d. 1547), Metropolitan of Moscow, 1522-1539; leading Josephite and “Possessor.”

  Daniel was a native of Ryazan with a powerful frame, an encyclopedic turn of mind, a preacher’s bent, and disciplined work habits. He was tonsured by Joseph of Volokolamsk (also known as Iosif or Joseph of Volotsk) around 1500 and designated to succeed him before his death in 1515, when he and his monastery were under virulent attack by Vass-ian Patrikeyev and out of favor at court.

  As abbot, Daniel demonstrably enforced the rule of communal property, and the cloister continued its remarkable growth as a landowner and center of learning, training future prelates, and writing. He oversaw the completion of the extended redactions of Joseph’s Enlightener and Monastic Rule and masterminded the creation of the Nikon Chronicle with its milestone grand narrative, sacral-izing Rus history and granting Moscow the contested succession to Kiev.

  Selected metropolitan by Basil III, Daniel issued a worthless writ of safe-conduct to a suspect appanage prince (1523) and permitted Basil’s controversial divorce and remarriage (1525), which resulted in the birth of the future Ivan IV (1530). In turn Daniel was able to organize synods against Maxim Greek (1525, 1531) and Vassian (1531), and canonize Joseph’s mentor Pafnuty of Borovsk. Daniel also placed an enterprising ally, Macarius, on the powerful, long vacant archepiscopal see of Novgorod (1526) and Iosifov trainees as bishops of Tver (1522), Kolomna (1525), and Smolensk (1536). Presiding over Basil III’s pre-death tonsure and the oaths to the three-year-old Ivan IV (1533), Daniel remained on his throne through the dowager Helen Glinsky’s regency (1533-1538), but could not exercise his designated supervisory role, prevent murderous infighting at top, or keep his post after she died.

  Using his office to bolster church authority, Daniel systematized canon law and the metropolitan’s chancery, built up its library, and tried to impose Iosifov practices on some other monasteries. He handled dissenting voices in a variety of ways. The 1531 synodal sentences ended Vassian Patrikeyev’s career with imprisonment in Iosifov, but permitted the less bellicose and eminently useful Maxim a milder house arrest in Tver. Foregrounding the Orthodox principle of patient endurance in public life, Daniel contested the diplomat Fyodor Karpov’s Aristotle-based insistence upon justice, but did not prosecute him. Daniel also utilized Basil III’s German Catholic physician Nicholas B?lew and commissioned Russia’s first translation of a Western medical work, but obliquely opposed by pen B?lew’s astrology and

  DANILEVSKY, NIKOLAI YAKOVLEVICH

  arguments favoring union of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.

  Daniel left two collections of original writings modeled on the encyclopedist Nikon of the Black Mountain and Joseph of Volokolamsk-one with sixteen discourses, the other with fourteen missives. They cover a variety of theological and ethical issues and evince both Nil Sorsky’s and Joseph’s influences. Daniel composed six other similar extant pieces and still others now lost. These collections, however, unlike the Nikon Chronicle and Daniel’s canonic compilation, never achieved the authoritativeness and popularity of Joseph’s En-lightener or Maxim’s works. See also: BASIL III; IVAN IV; JOSEPH OF VOLOTSK, ST.; MAXIM THE GREEK, ST.

  DAVID M. GOLDFRANK

  Abram Tertz). Both were put on trial in February 1966, accused by the prosecution of “pouring mud on whatever is most holy and most pure.” The authors were permitted to speak in their own defense, but the trial was conducted in Stalinist style, with its outcome determined in advance. Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years of hard labor, Daniel to five years. The Sinyavsky-Daniel trial served as the regime’s clear sign to the Soviet intelligentsia that Khrushchev’s liberalism was at an end.

  After serving his sentence, Daniel was forbidden to return to Moscow. He settled in Kaluga for a number of years, before finally being allowed to move back to the capital. See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; SINYAVSKY-DANIEL TRIAL

  DANIEL, YULI MARKOVICH

  (1925-1988), translator, author, show-trial defendant.

  A native of Moscow, Yuli Daniel fought in World War II, then studied at the Moscow Regional Teachers’ Institute. He began his literary career as a translator of poetry.

  During the cultural Thaw that followed Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in 1956, Daniel began to write short stories of his own. These include “This Is Moscow Speaking” (1962), “Hands” (1963), and “The Man from MINAP” (1963). Daniel’s stories were satirical and absurdist. For example, the protagonist of “The Man from MINAP” is able to choose the sex of any baby he fathers.
To create a boy, he thinks about Karl Marx at the point of conception; for a girl, he fantasizes about Klara Zetkin. In “This Is Moscow Speaking,” a summer day in 1960 is designated “National Murder Day,” an obvious-and bold-reference to Stalinist terror.

  Even under Khrushchev, Daniel published not in the USSR, but in the West, under the pseudonym Nikolai Arzhak. Nonetheless, for the time being, Daniel remained safe from actual persecution. However, the ouster of Khrushchev in 1964 and the rise of Leonid Brezhnev brought about a deep cultural retrenchment. Daniel was among the first of its victims.

  In 1965 Daniel was arrested, with fellow author Andrei Sinyavsky (who used the nom de plume

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Brown, Edward J. (1982). Russian Literature Since the Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Terras, Victor. (1994). A History of Russian Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  JOHN MCCANNON

  DANILEVSKY, NIKOLAI YAKOVLEVICH

  (1822-1885), social theorist and pan-Slavist.

  Nikolai Danilevsky, a pan-Slavist, introduced into Russian social thought of the early and mid-nineteenth century the utopian-socialist ideas of the French thinker, Charles Fran?ois Marie Fourier. Danilevsky’s major writing was his book Russia and Europe: An Inquiry into the Cultural and Political Relations of the Slavs to the Germano-Latin World, published in 1869.

  In his interpretation of socialism as applied to peasant Russia, Danilevsky developed the idea of the existing Russian peasant commune, or ob-shchina, as a unique, progressive, specifically Russian institution. It contained, he said, the seeds of cooperative socialism as found in Fourier’s “phalanstery,” or socialist cooperative.

  Into his socialist worldview Danilevsky had added the Russian ingredient of Slavophilism and pan-Russism. This nationalistic concept that influenced some segments of the Russian intelligentsia by the early nineteenth century was derived from German thinkers of Germanophilic persuasion,