Encyclopedia of Russian History
Page 139
Historians have characterized Golitsyn as a “Westernizer,” one of a select band of educated and open-minded Muscovite boyars. His modern views were reflected not only in his encouragement of contacts with foreigners, but also in his library of books in foreign languages and his Moscow mansion in the fashionable “Moscow Baroque” style, which was equipped with foreign furniture, clocks, mirrors, and a portrait gallery, which included Golitsyn’s own portrait. The French traveler Foy de la Neuville (the only source) even credited Golitsyn with a scheme for limiting, if not abolishing, serfdom, which is not, however, reflected in the legislation of the regency. Golitsyn’s downfall was brought about by a mixture of bad luck and poor judgement in court politics. Peter I never forgave him for his association with Sophia and thereby forfeited the skills of one of the most able men of his generation. See also: FYODOR ALEXEYEVICH; SOPHIA ALEXEYEVNA (TSAREVNA); WESTERNIZERS.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hughes, Lindsey. (1982). “A Seventeenth-century West-erniser: Prince V.V. Golitsyn (1643-1714).” Irish Slavonic Studies 3:47-58. Hughes, Lindsey. (1984). Russia and the West: The Life of a Seventeenth-Century Westernizer, Prince Vasily Vasil’evich Golitsyn (1643-1714). Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners. Smith, Abby. (1995). “The Brilliant Career of Prince Golitsyn.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19:639-645.
LINDSEY HUGHES
GONCHAROVA, NATALIA SERGEYEVNA
(1881-1962), artist, book illustrator, set and costume designer.
Natalia Sergeyevna Goncharova was born on June 21, 1881, in the village of Nagaevo in the Tula province; she died on October 17, 1962, in Paris. She lived in Moscow from 1892 and enrolled at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in 1901 to study sculpture. She met Mikhail Larionov in 1900-1901 who encouraged her to paint and became her lifelong companion. They were married in 1957. In 1906 she contributed to the Russian Section at the Salon d’Au-tomne, Paris. In 1908-1910 she contributed to the three exhibitions organized by Nikolai Ri-abushinsky, editor of the journal Zolotoe runo (The Golden Fleece) in Moscow. In 1910 she founded with Larionov and others the Jack of Diamonds group and participated in their first exhibition. In 1911 the group split and from 1911-1914 she participated in a series of rival exhibitions organized
GONCHAROV, IVAN ALEXANDROVICH
by Larionov: the “Donkey’s Tail” (1912), the “Target “(1913), and the “No. 4” (1914). Throughout this period she worked in several styles- Primi-tivist, Cubist, and, in 1912-1913, Futurist and Rayist. Her work immediately became a lightning rod for debate over the legitimacy and cultural identity of new Russian painting. In 1910 a one-day exhibition of Goncharova’s work was held at the Society for Free Esthetics. The nude life studies she displayed on this occasion led to her trial for pornography in Moscow’s civil court (she was acquitted). Major retrospective exhibitions of Gon-charova’s work were organized in Moscow (1913) and St. Petersburg (1914). Paintings of religious subject matter were censored, and in the last exhibition temporarily banned as blasphemous by the Spiritual-Censorship Committee of the Holy Synod.
On April 29, 1914 Goncharova left with Larionov for Paris to mount Sergei Diagilev’s production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’Or (a collaboration between herself and choreographer Mikhail Fokine). Also in 1914, the Galerie Paul Guillaume in Paris held her first commercial exhibition. During the 1920s and 1930s she and Lari-onov collaborated on numerous designs for Diagilev and other impresarios. Returning briefly to Moscow in 1915, she designed Alexander Tairov’s production of Carlo Goldoni’s Il Ventaglio at the Chamber Theater, Moscow. After traveling with Diagilev’s company to Spain and Italy, she settled in Paris with Larionov in 1917. In 1920-1921 she contributed to the “Exposition internationale d’art moderne” in Geneva and in 1922 exhibited at the Kingore Gallery, New York. From the 1920s onward she continued to paint, teach, illustrate books, and design theater and ballet productions. After 1930, except for occasional contributions to exhibitions, Larionov and Goncharova lived unrecognized and impoverished. Through the efforts of Mary Chamot, author of Goncharova’s first major biography, a number of their works entered museum collections, including the Tate Gallery, London, the National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and the National Art Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand. In 1954 their names were resurrected at Richard Buckle’s “The Diagilev Exhibition” in Edinburgh and London. In 1961 Art Council of Great Britain organized a major retrospective of Goncharova’s and Larionov’s works, and numerous smaller exhibitions were held throughout Europe during the 1970s. In 1995 the Mus?e national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris organized a large exhibition of their work in Europe. Exhibitions were also held at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (1999, 2000). The first retrospective of her Russian oeuvre since 1914 was held at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg in 2002. See also: DIAGILEV, SERGEI PAVLOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Artcyclopedia Web site. (2003) «www.artcyclopedia .com/artists/goncharova_natalia.html». Chamot, Mary. (1972). Gontcharova Paris: La Biblio-theque des Arts. Lukanova, Alla and Avtonomova, Natalia, eds. (2000). Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova. Exhibition Catalogue. Moscow: State Tretiakov Gallery. Petrova, Evgeniia, ed. (2002). Natalia Goncharova: the Russian Years. Exhibition Catalogue. St. Petersburg: The State Russian Museum and Palace Editions.
JANE A. SHARP
GONCHAROV, IVAN ALEXANDROVICH
(1812-1891), writer.
Born in Simbirsk to a family of wealthy merchants, Ivan Goncharov moved to Moscow for his schooling in 1822 and then moved to St. Petersburg in 1835 where, with a few breaks, he remained until his death. He worked from 1855 to 1867 as government censor, a post that earned the criticism and mistrust of many of his contemporaries. Although his politics as a censor were clearly conservative when it came to reviewing Russian journals, he also used his position to allow many important and liberal works of literature into print, including works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Alexander Herzen. Goncharov’s unfounded accusation of plagiarism against the novelist Ivan Turgenev in 1860 caused a scandal in the literary world; Goncharov suffered from bouts of neurosis and paranoia and lived most of his life in sedentary seclusion.
Goncharov is known primarily for three novels- A Common Story (1847), Oblomov (1859), and The Precipice (1869)-as well as a travel memoir of a government expedition to Japan, The Frigate Pallas (1855-1857). By far his best-known work is Oblomov, whose hero, an indolent and dreamy Russian nobleman, became emblematic of a Russian social type, the superfluous man. The figure of Oblomov made such a deep impression on readers that the radical critic Nikolai Dobrolyubov popGORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH ularized the term oblomovshchina (oblomovitis) to describe the ineptitude of the Russian intelligentsia. Goncharov’s novels rank him among the best Russian realist writers, yet his university years in Moscow at the height of the Russian romantic movement and his consequent attraction to its ideals places him within the era of the Golden Age of Russian literature. policies in a semi-market economy, and most important, the nature of peasant responses to market forces when facing the imperatives of an industrialization drive. See also: AGRICULTURE; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; PEASANT ECONOMY; SCISSORS CRISIS
See also: GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ehre, Milton. (1974). Oblomov and His Creator; the Life and Art of Ivan Goncharov. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lyngstad, Alexandra, and Lyngstad, Sverre. (1971). Ivan Goncharov. New York: Twayne Publishers. Setchkarev, Vsevolod. (1974). Ivan Goncharov: His Life and Works. Wurzburg: Jal-Verlag.
CATHERINE O’NEIL
GOODS FAMINE
The concept of the goods famine refers to excess demand (at prevailing prices) for industrial goods in the Soviet Union during the latter half of the 1920s. The importance of this excess demand can only be understood within the context of the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s and the underlying forces leading to excess demand. Specifically, the goo
ds famine was an outgrowth of the Scissors Crisis and state policies relating to this episode.
Specifically, in the middle and late 1920s, the quicker recovery of agricultural production relative to industrial production meant that increases in the demand for industrial goods could not be met, an outcome characterized as the goods famine. State policy was ultimately successful in forcing a reduction of the prices of industrial goods. The concern was that a goods famine might drive rural producers, unable to purchase industrial goods, to reduce their grain marketings. This was viewed as a critical factor limiting the possible pace of industrialization.
The goods famine is important to the understanding of the changes implemented by Stalin in the late 1920s. Moreover, these events relate to economic issues such as the nature and organization of the industrial sector (e.g., monopoly power), state
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gregory, Paul R. (1994). Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First Five Year Plan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zaleski, Eugene. (1971). Planning for Economic Growth in the Soviet Union, 1918-1932. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
ROBERT C. STUART
GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH
(b. 1931), Soviet political leader, general editor of the CPSU (1985-1991), president of the Soviet Union (1990-1991), Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1990).
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union during a period of sweeping domestic and international change that saw the dismantling of communist systems throughout Europe and ended with the disintegration of the USSR itself, was born in the southern Russian village of Privolnoye in Stavropol province. His parents were peasants and his mother was barely literate.
Mikhail Gorbachev did not have an easy childhood. Born on March 2, 1931, he was just old enough to remember when, during the 1930s, both of his grandfathers were caught in the purges and arrested. Although they were released after prison, having been tortured in one case and internally exiled and used as forced labor in the other, young Misha Gorbachev knew what it was like to live in the home of an enemy of the people.
The war and early postwar years provided the family with the opportunity to recover from the stigma of false charges laid against the older generation, although the wartime experience itself was harsh. Gorbachev’s father was in the army, saw action on several fronts, and was twice wounded. Remaining in the Russian countryside, Gorbachev and his mother had to engage in back-breaking
GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH
work in the fields. For two years Gorbachev received no schooling, and for a period of four and one-half months the Stavropol territory, including Privolnoye, was occupied by the German army. In Josef Stalin’s time, those who had experienced even short-lived foreign rule tended to be treated with grave suspicion.
Nevertheless, the Gorbachevs engaged as wholeheartedly in the postwar reconstruction of their locality as they had in the war effort. Exceptionally, when he was still a teenager, Gorbachev was awarded the Order of Red Banner of Labor for heroic feats of work. He had assisted his father, a combine operator (who was given the Order of Lenin) in bringing in a record harvest in 1948. The odds against a village boy gaining entry to Moscow State University in 1950 were high, but the fact that Gorbachev had been honored as an exemplary worker, and had an excellent school record and recommendation from the Komsomol, made him one of the exceptions. While still at high school during the first half of 1950, Gorbachev became a candidate member of the Communist Party. He was admitted to full membership in the party in 1952.
Although the Law Faculty of Moscow University, where Gorbachev studied for the next five years, hardly offered a liberal education, there were some scholars of genuine erudition who opened his eyes to a wider intellectual world. Prominent among them was Stepan Fyodorovich Kechekyan, who taught the history of legal and political thought. Gorbachev took Marxism seriously and not simply as Marxist-Leninist formula to be learned by rote. Talking, forty years later, about his years as a law student, Gorbachev observed: “Before the university I was trapped in my belief system in the sense that I accepted a great deal as given, assumptions not to be questioned. At the university I began to think and reflect and to look at things differently. But of course that was only the beginning of a long process.”
Two events of decisive importance for Gorbachev occurred while he was at Moscow University. One was the death of Stalin in 1953. After that the atmosphere within the university lightened, and freer discussion began to take place among the students. The other was his meeting Raisa Maximovna Titarenko, a student in the philosophy faculty, in 1951. They were married in 1953 and remained utterly devoted to each other. In an interview on the eve of his seventieth birthday, Gorbachev described Raisa’s death at the age of 67 in 1999 as his “hardest blow ever.” They had one daughter, Irina, and two granddaughters.
After graduating with distinction, Gorbachev returned to his native Stavropol and began a rapid rise through the Komsomol and party organization. By 1966 he was party first secretary for Stavropol city, and in 1970 he became kraikom first secretary, that is, party boss of the whole Stavropol territory, which brought with it a year later membership in the Central Committee of the CPSU. Gorbachev displayed a talent for winning the good opinion of very diverse people. These included not only men of somewhat different outlooks within the Soviet Communist Party. Later they were also to embrace Western conservatives-most notably U.S. president Ronald Reagan and U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher-as well as European social democrats such as the former West German chancellor Willy Brandt and Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez.
However, Gorbachev’s early success in winning friends and influencing people depended not only on his ability and charm. He had an advantage in his location. Stavropol was spa territory, and leading members of the Politburo came there on holiday. The local party secretary had to meet them, and this gave Gorbachev the chance to make a good impression on figures such as Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov. Both of them later supported his promotion to the secretaryship of the Central Committee, with responsibility for agriculture, when one of Gorbachev’s mentors, Fyodor Kulakov, a previous first secretary of Stavropol territory, who held the agricultural portfolio within the Central Committee Secretariat (along with membership in the Politburo), died in 1978.
From that time, Gorbachev was based in Moscow. As the youngest member of an increasingly geriatric political leadership, he was given rapid promotion through the highest echelons of the Communist Party, adding to his secretaryship candidate membership of the Politburo in 1979 and full membership in 1980. When Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982, Gorbachev’s duties in the Party leadership team were extended by Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov, who thought highly of the younger man. When Andropov was too ill to carry on chairing meetings, he wrote an addendum to a speech to a session of the Central Committee in December 1983, which he was too ill to attend in person. In it he proposed that the Politburo and Secretariat be led in his absence by GorGORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH bachev. This was a clear attempt to elevate Gorbachev above Konstantin Chernenko, a much older man who had been exceptionally close to Brezhnev and a senior secretary of the Central Committee for longer than Gorbachev. However, Andropov’s additions to his speech were omitted from the text presented to Central Committee members. Cher-nenko had consulted other members of the old guard, and they were united in wishing to prevent power from moving to a new generation represented by Gorbachev.
The delay in his elevation to the general secretaryship of the Communist Party did Gorbachev no harm. Chernenko duly succeeded Andropov on the latter’s death in February 1984, but was so infirm during his time at the helm that Gorbachev frequently found himself chairing meetings of the Politburo at short notice when Chernenko was too ill to attend. More importantly, the sight of a third infirm leader in a row (for Brezhnev in his last years had also been incapable of working a full day) meant that even the normally docil
e Central Committee might have objected if the Politburo had proposed another septuagenarian to succeed Chernenko. By the time of Chernenko’s death, just thirteen months after he succeeded Andropov, Gorbachev was, moreover, in a position to get his way. As the senior surviving secretary, it was he who called the Politburo together on the very evening that Cher-nenko died. The next day (March 11, 1985) he was unanimously elected Soviet leader by the Central Committee, following a unanimous vote in the Politburo.
Those who chose him had little or no idea that they were electing a serious reformer. Indeed, Gorbachev himself did not know how fast and how radically his views would evolve. From the outset of his leadership he was convinced of the need for change, involving economic reform, political liberalization, ending the war in Afghanistan, and improving East-West relations. He did not yet believe that this required a fundamental transformation of the system. On the contrary, he thought it could be improved. By 1988, as Gorbachev encountered increasing resistance from conservative elements within the Communist Party, the ministries, the army, and the KGB, he had reached the conclusion that systemic change was required.