Encyclopedia of Russian History
Page 129
HUGH D. HUDSON JR.
FYODOR ALEXEYEVICH
(1661-1682), tsar of Russia, February 9, 1676 to May 7, 1682.
Fyodor was the ninth child of Tsar Alexis and his first wife, Maria Miloslavskaya. He became heir to the throne following the death of an elder brother in 1670. Fyodor is said to have studied Latin and Polish with the Belarusian court poet Simeon Polot-sky, but sources indicate that his education was predominantly traditional, with some modern elements. Just fourteen on his accession in 1676, Fy-odor ruled without a regent, but was supported by a number of advisors and personal favorites, notably his chamberlain Ivan Yazykov and the brothers Alexei and Mikhail Likhachev. Less intimate with the tsar, but highly influential, was Prince Vasily Golitsyn. Members of Fyodor’s mother’s family, the Miloslavskys, were less prominent, although they succeeded early in the reign in securing the banishment of Artamon Matveyev and several members of the rival Naryshkin clan. There were power struggles throughout the reign. There were also rumors that Fyodor’s ambitious sister Sophia Alekseyevna regularly attended his sickbed. In fact, Fyodor, although delicate, was by no means the hopeless invalid depicted by some historians. Records show that he regularly participated in ceremonies and presided over councils. He married twice. His first wife Agafia Grushetskaya (of part-Polish extraction) and her newborn son died in July 1681. In February 1682 he married the noblewoman Marfa Apraksina.
FYODOR II
The central event of Fyodor’s reign was war with Turkey (1676-1681), precipitated by Turkish and Tatar incursions into Ukraine, compelling Russia to abandon the fort of Chigirin on the Dnieper. The treaty of Bakhchisarai (1681) established a twenty-year truce. War determined economic policy. In 1678 a major land survey was conducted in order to reassess the population’s tax obligations, providing the only reliable, if partial, population figures for the whole century. In 1679 the household rather than land became the basis for taxation. Provincial reforms included abolition of some elected posts and wider powers for military governors. Fyodor’s major reform was the abolition of the Code of Precedence (mestnichestvo) in 1682. An associated scheme to separate civil and military offices and create permanent posts was shelved, allegedly after the patriarch warned that such officials might accumulate independent power. In 1681 and 1682 a major church council sought to raise the caliber of priests and intensified the persecution of Old Believers.
Fyodor had his portrait painted, encouraged the introduction of part-singing from Kiev, and approved a charter for an academy modeled on the Kiev Academy (implemented only in the late 1680s). Polish fashions and poetry became popular with courtiers, but traditionalists regarded “Latin” novelties with suspicion. Tsar Alexis’s theatre was closed down, and foreign fashions were banned. Historians remain undecided whether Fy-odor was a sickly young nonentity manipulated by unscrupulous favorites or whether he showed promise of becoming a strong ruler. His reign is best viewed as a continuation of Russia’s involvement in international affairs and of mildly Westernizing trends, especially via Ukraine and Poland. See also: ALEXEI MIKHAILOVICH; GOLITSYN, VASILY VASILIEVICH; PETER I; SOPHIA
FYODOR II
(1589-1605), Tsar of Russia and son of Boris Go-dunov.
Fyodor Borisovich Godunov was born in 1589 and eventually became tsar. His father, Boris Go-dunov, was the regent of the mentally retarded Tsar Fyodor I. Fyodor Godunov’s mother, Maria, was the daughter of Tsar Ivan IV’s favorite, Malyuta Sku-ratov (the notorious boss of the oprichnina, the tsar’s hand-picked military and administrative elite). Upon the death of the childless Tsar Fyodor I in 1598, Boris Godunov became tsar, and Fyodor Borisovich became heir to the throne. Contemporaries described young Fyodor as handsome, athletic, and kind. Like his older sister Ksenya, Fyodor was well educated and learned from his father the art of government as he grew up. Fyodor was also an avid student of cartography, and he is credited with drawing a small map of Moscow, included on a well-known Dutch map of Russia published in 1614.
In April 1605 Tsar Boris died, and Fyodor was proclaimed Tsar Fyodor II. Although well prepared to rule, the sixteen-year-old tsar was soon overwhelmed by the civil war his father had been fighting against supporters of someone claiming to be Dmitry of Uglich (the youngest son of Tsar Ivan IV). Several of Fyodor’s courtiers immediately began plotting to overthrow him, but it was the rebellion of the tsar’s army on May 7, 1605, that sealed the fate of the Godunov dynasty. Tsar Fyo-dor II was toppled in a bloodless popular uprising in Moscow on June 1, 1605. Several days later he and his mother were strangled to death, and it was falsely reported that they had committed suicide. Almost no one mourned the death of Fyodor II; Moscow was too busy celebrating the arrival of Tsar Dmitry. See also: DMITRY OF UGLICH; FYODOR ALEXEYEVICH; GO-DUNOV, BORIS FYODOROVICH; IVAN IV; OPRICHNINA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bushkovitch, Paul. (2001). Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Soloviev, Sergei. (1989). History of Russia: Vol. 25, Rebellion and Reform: Fedor and Sophia, 1682-1689, ed. and tr. Lindsey Hughes. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dunning, Chester (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Skrynnikov, Ruslan (1985). “The Rebellion in Moscow and the Fall of the Godunov Dynasty.” Soviet Studies in History 24:137-54.
LINDSEY HUGHES
CHESTER DUNNING
FYODOROV, BORIS GRIGORIEVICH
FYODOR IVANOVICH
(1557-1598), Tsar of Russia reigned 1584-1598.
Fyodor Ivanovich was the second son of Ivan IV (“The Terrible” or Ivan Grozny). Ascending the throne in 1584, three years after his father killed his older brother Ivan in a fit of rage, Fyodor Ivanovich was nevertheless too mentally deficient to govern. His brother-in-law, Boris Godunov (the brother of his wife Irene), ruled instead as regent. Fyodor did not have children and thus was the last descendant of Rurik to occupy the Russian throne.
Fyodor’s father Ivan IV had the longest reign in Russian history, from 1533 to 1584, and the first half of his reign was marked by constructive achievements in both foreign and domestic policy. His defeat of the Tartars of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556) opened the way southward and eastward to Russian expansion. He also welcomed the British explorer Richard Chancellor in 1553-1554 and established commercial relations with England. By 1560 Ivan IV had established the power and legitimacy of the tsar. He authorized reforms in the army and even established a consultative body known as the zemsky sobor to debate issues and provide advice (although only when he solicited it).
After the death in 1560 of his first wife Ana-stasia-whom he suspected had been poisoned- Ivan IV became moody and violent. Withdrawing from the boyars and the church, he insisted on personal control, exercised through the establishment of the oprichnina-the private police force he could order to kill his personal enemies. In 1591, just seven years after he killed his oldest son, Ivan’s youngest son Dmitry died under mysterious circumstances, possibly by the hand of Boris Go-dunov, a member of the lesser nobility who had become Ivan’s proteg?. In 1584 when Ivan’s second son Fyodor Ivanovich became tsar, Godunov shrewdly exploited Fyodor’s feeble-mindedness to assume de facto power as regent. When Fyodor died in 1598, the zemsky sobor elected Godunov as tsar.
Godunov was an effective regent and tsar. Although he did nothing to ease the burden on the peasants (issuing a decree in 1601 limiting their rights to move from one estate to another), Go-dunov made strides in economic development and colonization of Siberia. He also established the patriarchate in 1589. Before then the Russian church recognized the patriarch of Constantinople (now Istanbul). Under Godunov’s tutelage, Russia waged successful wars against the Tatars (1591) and Sweden (1595).
Plots, intrigues, and natural disasters soon undermined Godunov’s power, however. A stranger appeared, claiming to be Ivan’s youngest son, Dmitry (the first of three “False Dmit
rys”). A famine from 1601 to 1603 stimulated rural unrest and opposition to Godunov’s rule. Godunov was killed in 1605 while suppressing a revolt during the advance on Moscow of one of the False Dmitrys. His death ushered in a “Time of Troubles” (Smut-noye vremya), which lasted until the establishment of the Romanov dynasty in 1613. See also: DMITRY, FALSE; GODUNOV, BORIS FYODOR-OVICH; IVAN IV; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bobrick, Benson. (1987). Fearful Majesty: The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible. New York: Putnam. Grey, Ian. (1973). Boris Godunov: The Tragic Tsar. New York: Scribner. Lamb, Harold. (1948). The March of Muscovy: Ivan the Terrible and the Growth of the Russian Empire, 1400-1648. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Yanov, Alexander. (1981). The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
JOHANNA GRANVILLE
FYODOROV, BORIS GRIGORIEVICH
(b. 1958), economist, deputy prime minister (1992-1993), finance minister (1990, 1993), advocate of liberal economic reform.
Boris Fyodorov, an ambitious young economist who served briefly as deputy prime minister, found a business career more fruitful than politics. Fyo-dorov graduated from the Moscow Institute of Finance and went on to earn candidate and doctor’s degrees at Moscow State University (1985) and the USA/Canada Institute (1990). From 1980 to 1987 he worked at Gosbank, and then at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations. He was part of the team led by Grigory Yavlinsky that prepared the Five-Hundred-Day Plan in 1990. In July 1990 he became finance minister in the Russian Federation government, but resigned in December. From April 1991 to October 1992 he worked for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development,
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and then spent two months as Russian director at the World Bank. In December 1992 he became deputy prime minister in Boris Yeltsin’s cabinet, taking on the job of finance minister in March 1993. In December 1993 he was elected to the State Duma from a Moscow constituency as a member of Yegor Gaidar’s Russia’s Choice party.
Fyodorov fell out with Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin in January 1994, citing frustration with weak monetary and fiscal discipline. He then formed a liberal parliamentary fraction, Union of December 12, and in 1995 created his own party, Forward Russia, which mixed advocacy of market reform with patriotic slogans, including support for the war in Chechnya. He was reelected to the Duma in December 1995, famously publishing a book of blank pages entitled “The Economic Achievements of the Chernomyrdin Government.” From May to September 1998 he headed the State Tax Administration, but his political career did not progress. In subsequent years he remained a prominent advocate of further liberal reforms and a defender of minority shareholder interests. In 2000 he was elected a member of the board of Gazprom and Unified Energy Systems, the two largest companies in Russia. See also: CHERNOMYRDIN, VIKTOR STEPANOVICH; FIVE-HUNDRED-DAY PLAN; GAIDAR, YEGOR TIMUROVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kranz, Patricia Kranz. (1998). “No Tax Man Ever Had It Tougher.” Business Week 3585:51.
PETER RUTLAND
FYODOROV, IVAN
(c. 1510-1583), the most celebrated among printers in old Rus.
Ivan Fyoderov (also called Ivan Fyodorovich, Fyodorov syn, Moskvitin, and drukar Moskvitin) was the initiator of printing in Muscovy and Ukraine, and was a printer also in Belarus. He produced the first printed Church Slavonic Bible (the “Ostroh Bible” of 1580-1581), the first Russian (or other East Slavic) textbook (Bukvar, 1574), and the first printed Russian alphabetical subject index, calendar, and poem. He was an accomplished craftsman in numerous trades, and a man of broad vision and great persistence. Altogether, Ivan played an important role in the promotion of literacy and Eastern Orthodox confessional unity, and he introduced a high level of content, design, and craftsmanship into a critically needed profession. Ivan Fyodorov, the first Russian printer. Painting by Alexander Moravov. © TASS/SOVFOTO
Born sometime around 1510 in Muscovy, he studied at Krakow University, where he probably received training in Greek and Latin, and from which he graduated in 1532. Subsequently, he worked as deacon in the St. Nikola Gostunsky church in the Moscow Kremlin, serving from some time after 1533 until 1565. He was selected by Tzar Ivan IV “Grozny” to initiate an official printing press in Moscow where, together with his partner Petr Mstislavets, he printed books that were needed for an expanding Russian Orthodox Church. These included the first dated Russian imprint, the Apos-tol of 1563-1564, and two editions of the Chasovnik (Horologion, 1565). Several anonymous Moscow editions from the immediately preceding period (c. 1553-1563) are also generally ascribed to Ivan. His Moscow activity was cut short by what he de
FYODOROV, IVAN
scribes in one of his later editions as the antagonism of narrow-minded people, and he moved to Zabludovo in Belarus together with his son (also named Ivan) and Petr Mstislavets. Here he opened a new print shop under the sponsorship of Hetman G. A. Khodkevich and produced several more editions, including the Evangelie uchitelnoe (1569, Instructive Evangelary) and a psalter (1570). Advised by his aging sponsor to retire to farming on land provided him, he declined, saying he was suited to sowing not seeds but the printed word. Instead, he moved to the city of Lviv (now in Ukraine), where with his son he printed more editions, including a reprint of his Moscow Apostol (1573-1574), and the Bukvar (1574, Primer).
Federov subsequently established one more print shop, on the estate of Prince Kostiantyn (Con-stantine) of Ostroh, participating in the latter’s defense of Eastern Orthodoxy against increasing pressure from Western denominations. The major publication among the several issued there was the famous Ostroh Bible, which remains of prime historical, textual, and confessional importance. The first complete printed Church Slavonic Bible, it was issued in a large print-run and widely distributed among East Slavic lands and abroad, surviving in the early twenty-first century in some 300 copies. In 1581 Ivan left Ostroh to return to Lviv, where he died on December 15, 1583. He was buried in the Onufriev Monastery; his gravestone read, in part, “printer of books not seen before.” The literature devoted to Ivan Fyodorov is vast, well exceeding two thousand titles, mostly in Russian and other Slavic languages. See also: EDUCATION; IVAN IV
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Ivan Fedorov’s Primer of 1574: Facsimile Edition,” with commentary by Roman Jakobson; appendix by William A. Jackson. (1955). Harvard Library Bulletin IX-1:1-44. Mathiesen, Robert. (1981). “The Making of the Ostrih Bible.” Harvard Library Bulletin 29(1): 71-110. Thomas, Christine. (1984). “Two East Slavonic primers: Lvov 1574 and Moscow 1637.” British Library Journal 10(1): 60-67.
HUGH M. OLMSTED
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GAGARIN, YURI ALEXEYEVICH
(1934-1968), cosmonaut; first human to orbit Earth in a spacecraft.
The son of a carpenter on a collective farm, Yury Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino, Smolensk Province. During World War II, facing the German invasion, his family evacuated to Gzi-atsk (now called Gagarin City). Gagarin briefly attended a trade school to learn foundry work, then entered a technical school. He joined the Saratov Flying Club in 1955 and learned to fly the Yak-18. Later that year, he was drafted and sent to the Orenburg Flying School, where he trained in the MIG jet. Gagarin graduated November 7, 1957, four days after Sputnik 2 was launched. He married Valentina Goryacheva, a nursing student, the day he graduated.
Gagarin flew for two years as a fighter pilot above the Arctic Circle. In 1958 space officials recruited air force pilots to train as cosmonauts. Gagarin applied and was selected to train in the first group of sixty men. Only twelve men were taken for further training at Zvezdograd (Star City), a training field outside Moscow. The men trained for nine months in space navigation, physiology, and astronomy, and practiced in a mockup of the spacecraft Vostok. Space officials closely observed the trainees, subjecting them to varied physical and mental stress tests. They finally selected Gagarin for the first spaceflig
ht. Capable, strong, and even-tempered, Gagarin represented the ideal Soviet man, a peasant farmer who became a highly trained cosmonaut in a few short years. Sergei Korolev, the chief designer of spacecraft, may have consulted with Nikita Khrushchev, Russia’s premier, to make the final selection.
Gagarin was launched in Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome near Tyu-ratam, Kazakhstan. The Vostok spacecraft included a small spherical module on top of an instrument module containing the engine system, with a three-stage rocket underneath. Gagarin was strapped into an ejection seat. He did not control the spacecraft, due to uncertainty about how spaceflight would affect his physical and mental reactions. He orbited the earth a single time at an altitude of 188 miles, flying for one hour and forty-eight minutes. He then ejected from the spacecraft at an altitude of seven kilometers, parachuting into a field near Saratov. His mission proved that humans could survive in space and return safely to earth.
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Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin prepares to be the first man to orbit the Earth. © BETTMANN/CORBIS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
Gagarin was sent on a world tour to represent the strength of Soviet technology. A member of the Communist Party since 1960, he was appointed a deputy of the Supreme Soviet and named a Hero of the Soviet Union. He became the commander of the cosmonaut corps and began coursework at the Zhukovsky Institute of Aeronautical Engineering. An active young man, Gagarin often felt frustrated in his new life as an essentially ceremonial figure. There were many reports of Gagarin’s resulting depression and hard drinking. In 1967, however, he decided to train as a backup cosmonaut in anticipation of a lunar landing.