by James Millar
DARGINS
such as Herder and Ruckert. In Danilevsky’s construction, not Germany but Russia occupies a leading position in the world as the standard-bearer of socialism. At heart, his Slavophilism was not a religious conception but, in his view, a “scientific” one.
Danilevsky gave his cyclic theory of history a specifically Russian twist. In it he incorporated the historiography of Oswald Spengler as found in the latter’s Decline of the West. For Danilevsky, the West and in particular Germany were in the throes of decadence and demise. Russia, by contrast, was the wave of the future. In his book, he insisted that “even today [in the Balkans] the Slavs prefer the heavy yoke of Islam to the civilized domination of Austria.” Danilevsky came to the conclusion that Russia’s interests ran parallel to those of Prussia, which needed Russian collaboration more than the other way around. Yet Russia alone, he insisted, could make the best synthesis of all types of civilization worldwide.
Danilevsky’s views influenced such writers as Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881). Moreover, his Slavophilism and pan-Russism became a point of departure for rationalizing tsarist Russian foreign policy. This expansionist motivation allowed Slavs to become united as “brothers” around the Russian core. Polish Slavs, on the other hand, would be excluded in this brotherhood because Poland was said by some to be a collective “old traitor to Slavdom.”
Because of his socialist views and his affinity to the revolutionist Petrashevsky Circle of socialists in St. Petersburg, Danilevsky ran afoul of the tsarist police. As the reputed leading Russian expert on Fourierism, he, too, was put on trial and imprisoned along with the other Petrashevtsy, including Dostoyevsky.
Although Bolshevik and Soviet propaganda disavowed Danilevskian Pan-Slavism as a tsarist dogma, Leninism-Stalinism nevertheless reflected, in essence, a good deal of this thought. Lenin had described the Great Russian proletariat as the “vanguard” of world revolution. Stalin, in turn, echoed this idea in his tributes to the Great Russians, placing them above all other peoples in the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. Moreover, in its domestic imperial policy, Moscow described the Russians as the elder brother of all nations and national groups composing the USSR. See also: DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; OB-SHCHINA; PANSLAVISM; PETRASHEVTSY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kohn, Hans. (1953). Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame. Venturi, Franco. (1960). Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
ALBERT L. WEEKS
DARGINS
The Dargins (or Dargwa) are an ethnic group in the Republic of Dagestan in the Russian Federation. At the 1989 Soviet Census they numbered 280,431, or 15.8 percent of the republic. In the USSR as a whole there were 365,038 Dargins, of whom over 97 percent considered Dargin to be their native tongue. Of that same number 68 percent claimed fluency in Russian as a second language. This would include a significant majority of the adults. The Dargins are situated in the area of Kizlyar, where one of the branches of the Dagestani State University is found.
The Dargin language is a member of the Lak-Dargwa group of the Northeast Caucasian family of languages. In Soviet times it would also have been included in the larger category of Ibero-Cau-casian languages. This grouping owed as much to the politics of druzhba narodov (the Soviet policy of Friendship of the Peoples) as it did to the reality of linguistic relation in this diverse collection of languages found in the Caucasus region. Following the general pattern of many of the non-Slavic languages of the Soviet Union, Dargin has had a modified Cyrillic alphabet since 1937. A Latin alphabet was utilized from 1926 to 1937 and before that Dargin was written in an Arabic script.
A modest number of books was published in Dargin during the Soviet period. From 1984 to 1985, for example, a total of fifty-one titles appeared. This compares favorably with other ethnic groups of its size, but without an ethnic jurisdiction of its own. A people such as the Abkhaz, with less than a third of the population of the Dargins, had 149 titles published in the same two-year period.
The Dargins have competed with other local nationalities for position within the diverse Dagestan Republic as ethnic politics are manipulated along with religious identity. The Dargins have traditionally been Sunni Muslims, with the strong inDASHKOVA, YEKATERINA ROMANOVNA fluence of Sufism characteristic in the Caucasus region. See also: CAUCASUS; DAGESTAN; ISLAM; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Karny, Yo’av. (2000). Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
PAUL CREGO
DASHKOVA, YEKATERINA ROMANOVNA
(1743-1810), public figure, author, and memoirist.
As director of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and president of the Russian Academy, Princess Yekaterina Romanovna Dashkova (n?e Vorontsova) was one of the first women to hold public office in Europe. By any standard, Dashkova led a remarkable life: She was born in 1743 to a prominent Russian noble family, the Vorontsovs. After losing her mother at the age of two, Dashkova grew up in the household of her uncle, Count Mikhail Vorontsov, where she received the best instruction available for young women. Yet, as she points out in her Memoirs, Dashkova felt compelled to supplement her education with intensive reading of authors such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Helv?tius, and demonstrated a lively interest in politics from her earliest years. Her passion for learning, and for theories of education, would prove constant throughout her life.
In 1759 Dashkova married Prince Mikhail Ivanovich Dashkov and bore him three children in quick succession: Anastasia (1760-1831), Mikhail (1761-1762), and Pavel (1763-1807). Their marriage was happy, but short-lived: Mikhail died after a brief illness in 1764, leaving Dashkova with the task of paying his debts and rearing their two surviving children. Significantly, Dashkova chose never to remarry. Moreover, her relationship with her children became the source of recurring sorrow to Dashkova, who outlived her son and disinherited her daughter.
By far the most significant figure in Dash-kova’s life, however, was Empress Catherine II, whom Dashkova met in 1758, while the former was Grand Duchess and twice the age of the fifteen-year-old Dashkova. According to Dashkova, the attraction between the two was immediate, if only because-as she writes with some exaggeration in her Memoirs-“there were no other two women at the time . . . who did any serious reading” (p. 36).
The defining moment in Dashkova’s life took place in 1762, when the young princess took part in the palace revolution that overthrew Peter III and brought Catherine, his wife, to power. While historians continue to debate the precise role that Dashkova played in the coup, Dashkova places herself at the center of the revolt in her Memoirs. Catherine initially rewarded Dashkova’s loyalty with gifts of money and property. Within a short time, however, the relationship between the two women deteriorated-the result, perhaps, of Dashkova’s exalted claims for her role in Catherine’s ascension to the throne.
Following the death of her husband in 1764, Dashkova spent much of the next two decades in self-imposed exile from the Russian court. From 1769 to 1771, and again from 1775 to 1782, Dashkova traveled abroad, overseeing her son’s education in Scotland and meeting with prominent figures of the Enlightenment, such as Diderot, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, and Adam Smith. After Dashkova returned to Russia, in 1783 Catherine appointed her director of the Academy of Sciences, which the previous director had left in considerable disarray. Not only did Dashkova restore the fortunes of the Academy-much as she would affairs on her various estates-but she also inspired Catherine to found the Russian Academy, with the goal of compiling the first Russian etymological dictionary and fostering Russian culture. In her role as director of both academies, Dashkova was instrumental in bringing Enlightenment ideas to Russia. Dashkova also wrote and published extensively: She translated works on education, travel, and agriculture; composed verse and several plays
; and oversaw the publication of several journals.
After quarrelling with the empress over the publication of the Yakov Knyazhnin’s play Vadim Novgorodsky, which Catherine claimed was an attack on autocracy, Dashkova requested a leave of absence from the Academy in 1794. Catherine’s death in 1796 brought further misfortune to Dashkova: In order to punish her for the role she played in the downfall of his father, Emperor Paul exiled Dashkova to a remote estate in northern Russia. One year later, after Dashkova appealed for clemency on the grounds of ill health, Paul
DASHNAKTSUTIUN
permitted her to return to Troitskoye, her estate near Moscow. Paul’s death and the accession of Alexander I to the throne in 1801 brought an end to Dashkova’s exile, but she chose to spend her remaining years at Troitskoye, managing her holdings and writing her celebrated memoirs.
As a historical figure, Dashkova remains significant for her prominent role in the intellectual life of eighteenth-century Russia: She exemplified the Enlightenment ideal of the educated woman, or femme savante, and inspired both admiration and anxiety among her contemporaries for her unusual achievements. Furthermore, her accomplishments illuminate central themes in the social and cultural history of Russia: female intrigue and patronage during the era of empresses; the persistence of noble family politics in the emerging bureaucratic state; and the Russian reception of the Enlightenment. See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; CATHERINE II; PETER III
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dashkova, E. R. (1995). The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova: Russia in the Time of Catherine the Great, tr. and ed. Kyril Fitzlyon, with an introduction by Jehanne M. Gheith. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
MICHELLE LAMARCHE MARRESE
DASHNAKTSUTIUN
The Hay heghapokhakan dashnaktsutiun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation, ARF, Dashnak Party, or Dashnaktsutiun) was founded in 1890 in Tbilisi, by Russian Armenian intellectuals, in order to help Armenians in the Ottoman Empire obtain economic and political reforms. The party established branches throughout the Ottoman and Russian Empires as well as in Europe and the United States. At different times the party supported guerrilla activities, political action, and Western intervention as means to achieve its goals in the Ottoman Empire.
In the Russian Empire the Dashnaktsutiun led the opposition to the anti-Armenian policies of the tsarist government (1903-1905) and, subsequently, the militia forces that clashed with Azerbaijani Turks in the Caucasus during the revolution of 1905-1907. In 1914 it supported a Russian plan for reforms in Ottoman Armenia. During World War I it also organized Russian-supported Armenian volunteer units in Eastern Armenia to help Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
The genocide committed by the Young Turk government against the Armenian population ended the presence of the party in Turkey. With the disintegration of the Russian Empire, the Dash-naktsutiun led the first independent Armenia, 1918-1920, only to cede power to the Bolsheviks in 1920. The party, along with other noncommu-nist groups, was banned from Soviet Armenia.
In the diaspora the Dashnaktsutiun focused on community-building, representing Armenians in host countries, and pursuing national aspirations internationally. Until the 1960s that meant a free and independent Armenia. Beginning in the 1970s, the party shifted its focus from an anticommunist and anti-Soviet crusade to an anti-Turkish campaign for the recognition of the genocide and territorial reparations from Turkey, for which Russian and USSR support was considered essential.
The Dashnaktsutiun has claimed a special position in Armenian history through its maximalist demands for the reconstitution of historic Armenia. Having reestablished itself in Armenia in 1990, the party reserved the right to resist by force any government it considered unacceptable; it opposed the leadership of the national movement that rose in Armenia in 1988 and accepted with reluctance the country’s declaration of independence in 1991. Vehemently opposed to the first president, Levon Ter-Petrossian, it has been more supportive of the second, Robert Kocharian. Nonetheless, despite substantial contributions from its diasporan segment, the Dashnaktsutiun has been unable to make significant gains in Armenia’s elections.
The Dashnaktsutiun is a tightly knit, disciplinarian organization with grass roots mechanisms in many communities. It is financed mainly by membership dues and donations by sympathizers. See also: ARMENIA AND ARMENIANS; CAUCASUS; NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; TURKEY, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Libaridian, Gerard J. (1996). “Revolution and Liberation in the 1892 and 1907 Programs of the Dashnakt-sutiun.” In Transcaucasia, Nationalism and Social Change, rev. ed., ed. Ronald G. Suny. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION
Ter Minassian, Anaide. (1984). Nationalism and Socialism in the Armenian Revolutionary Movement. Cambridge, MA: Zoryan Institute.
GERARD J. LIBARIDIAN
DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION
Secret society, active from 1816 to 1825 in Russia, named after its unsuccessful revolt in Saint Petersburg on December 14, 1825.
The Decembrist movement began as a secret society named the Union of Salvation, active from 1816 to 1818 in St. Petersburg. The Union of Welfare, created in 1818, followed. The latter existed until 1821, united more than two hundred members, and had branches in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kishinev, and other cities of the Russian empire. Both societies were organized by young officers who had recently returned from a foreign military campaign during the Napoleonic wars. Convinced that the Russian army had granted freedom to European people, these liberally minded and well-educated young members of the Russian nobility were disappointed by the politics of Alexander I, whose reforming plans outlined at the beginning of his reign were not realized. Observing the steep growth of nationalism in Europe, and following the tradition of “love for the fatherland” of the Russian educated nobility in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Decembrists were inclined toward extreme patriotism. They imagined the Russian people as a nation and acted in its name. Taking as an example the German Tu-gendbund (Union of Virtue), active in Prussia throughout Napoleon’s occupation, members of secret societies claimed the national revival as their main aim. In particular, this nationalistic tendency expressed itself in demands for the discharge of foreigners from Russian positions of authority. Freemasonry, with its idealism and moral imperative on the one hand and secrecy and ritualization on the other, also contributed to the movement. Many participants of Russian secret societies were simultaneously members of Masonic lodges.
The main goal of the Union of Welfare was to influence public opinion. Its members aspired to create favorable conditions for constitutional reforms in Russia aimed at the moral and spiritual improvement of the elite and society as a whole. Many members were engaged in the establishment of Lancaster’s school system in Russia, as they believed it promoted enlightenment among the poor classes and in the army. Literature, playing an important role in Russian public life since the reign of Catherine the Great, was also an important field of activity for the Union of Welfare and other Decembrist societies. Many Decembrists contributed to Russian political lyrics and literary romanticism and were members of various literary societies. The conspirators Kon-draty Ryleyev, Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, and Wilhelm Kuchelbecker were famous writers of their time.
New secret societies created on the basis of the Union of Welfare were more conspiratorial and better organized. The Southern Society, with its absolute leader, colonel Pavel Pestel, appeared in 1820 in Tulchin; and the Northern Society was founded in 1821 in St. Petersburg. Nikita Muraviev and Nikolai Turgenev were the main figures of the latter society. In the summer of 1825 the Southern Society took members of the Society of United Slavs, hoping to create a Pan-Slavic confederation. The conspirators discussed projects of the Russian constitution and ways of performing an armed revolt and regicide.
Pestel’s Russian Justice, accepted as a program of the Southern Societ
y, and Muraviev’s “Constitution” were the most representative of the Decembrists’ constitutional projects. Both projects provided for the abolition of serfdom. Muraviev offered constitutional monarchy, a federal organization of the country, and property qualification at elections. Pestel’s radical project provided for creation of a centralized Jacobin-like republic and specific land reform, dividing land into private and public sectors. According to Pestel’s project, dictatorship of a provisional government was to last ten to fifteen years after the revolt, whereas the leaders of the Northern Society suggested early election of authority.
Immediate cause for the conspirators to act was the succession crisis. On November 19th, 1825, childless Alexander I died unexpectedly in the south of Russia in Taganrog, far from the capital. According to the law of 1797, the oldest of his brothers, Grand Duke Konstantin, Viceroy of Poland, was to become the successor. However, in 1820 Konstantin had entered a morganatic marriage, and in 1822, in a private letter to Alexander, he had abandoned his right to the Russian throne. In 1823
DECREE ON LAND
Alexander signed a manifesto wherein he proclaimed his next eldest brother Nicholas the successor. It is unknown why this document was kept secret from the public. When news of the death of Alexander reached the capital, the general governor of St. Petersburg, Mikhail Miloradovich, convinced Nicholas that the guards were not loyal to him and would consider his accession to the throne a usurpation. Nicholas and the army swore allegiance to Konstantin, who was residing in Poland. The latter was not willing to accept authority, and yet he did not renounce it publicly. In the dangerous situation of interregnum, Nicholas became emperor and set the new oath of allegiance for December 14.
Taking advantage of disorder in the troops and government, members of secret societies decided to persuade soldiers not to swear an oath to Nicholas. The plan of revolt was developed in Ryleyev’s apartment on the night of December 13. The conspirators composed a manifesto to the Russian people, in which “the abolition of the former government” was proclaimed. Colonel Prince Sergei Trubetskoy, one of the leaders of the Northern Society, was appointed as the leader of the revolt.