Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  KORZHAKOV, ALEXANDER VASILIEVICH

  The term koryak derives from the word for reindeer (kor). When combined with its prepositional suffix, korak means “with (or at) the reindeer.” This is not surprising, given the Koryak’s heavy reliance on reindeer for a wide range of bare essentials, including meat, transportation, household articles, fat (to light indoor lamps), materials for constructing mobile dwellings (yarangas), bones (for tools and household items), and hides (to make clothes, footwear, and even diapers and sanitary napkins). When referring to themselves, however, the Koryaks do not use the term. Instead, they call themselves either nimilany (“residents of a settled village”) or chavchuvens (nomadic reindeer people).

  In contrast to some other non-Russian nationalities, such as the Tuvinians, the Koryaks are a minority in their own region. Russians and Ukrainians make up more than 75 percent of the total population. The remaining 25 percent are Koryaks, Chukchi, Itelmens, and Evenki. Koryaks make up only one-fifth of the indigenous Siberian population. See also: EVENKI; NORTHERN PEOPLES; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; SIBERIA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Berdahl, Daphne, and Bunzl, Matti. (2000). Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Humphrey, Caroline. (2002). The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Keay, John. (2002). The Mammoth Book of Explorers. New York: Carroll amp; Graf. Reid, Anna. (2003). The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia. New York: Walker amp; Company. Whybrow, Helen. (2003). Dead Reckoning: Great Adventure Writing from the Golden Age of Exploration, 1800-1900. New York: W. W. Norton.

  JOHANNA GRANVILLE

  KORZHAKOV, ALEXANDER VASILIEVICH

  (b. 1950), aide to President Boris Yeltsin.

  Alexander Vasilievich Korzhakov was the most trusted aide of President Boris Yeltsin until Yeltsin dismissed him in 1996. From 1970 until 1989 he worked in Administration 9 of the KGB, which provided personal security for senior Soviet officials. From 1985 to 1987 he was a bodyguard to Yeltsin, and remained loyal to him after Yeltsin was politically disgraced in 1987. For this the KGB dismissed him in 1989. During Yeltsin’s political resurrection Korzhakov resumed work as his bodyguard. From 1991 he headed the Presidential Security Service (PSS) with the rank of major general, and increasingly became a close political adviser to Yeltsin. In August 1991 he played an important role in Yeltsin’s successful defeat of the three-day hardline coup.

  In October 1993, Korzhakov apparently played a key role in persuading the defense minister to have the military storm the parliament. Also, he personally arrested the leaders of the armed opposition.

  Later he turned the PSS into what Yeltsin called his personal “mini-KGB.” He built up departments for personal surveillance, political dirty tricks, and political and economic analysis. He encouraged Yeltsin to become politically more authoritarian and less liberal on economic reform, and even advocated specific policies on oil. As he freely admitted in his revealing memoir about Yeltsin, he played a major role in recruiting Boris Berezovsky and other rich businessmen to support Yeltsin financially and through their media. Thus he helped turn them into oligarchs with political clout. In 1995 he even arranged for Berezovsky to control, financially and otherwise, the newly created television company, Public Russian Television. It was important, he argued, to have a major channel that was firmly pro-administration and would counter the widespread criticism of the Kremlin in the existing media.

  In 1996 Yeltsin appointed Korzhakov to one of the two teams that organized his reelection bid, the team headed by Oleg Soskovets. But Korzhakov feared that Yeltsin would lose, and therefore urged him to find a pretext to postpone the election and close down the parliament, or Duma. In March, Yeltsin took his advice, but opposition in the cabinet thwarted his plans at the last minute. In May he named Korzhakov his first adviser. In June, however, when Korzhakov and his allies clashed with the second election team in a fierce struggle for influence over Yeltsin, the latter suddenly opted for the second team, headed by Anatoly Chubais, and dismissed Korzhakov.

  In February 1997 Korzhakov was elected to the Duma as an independent from Tula. In 1999 he

  KOSMODEMYANSKAYA, ZOYA

  was reelected on a Fatherland ticket and served on the Defense Committee. During the late 1990s he gave lengthy interviews detailing numerous allegedly corrupt activities of Yeltsin, his family, Chubais, and others, but did not discuss his own business affairs. He was never sued for libel or slander, apparently because the people he exposed believed he had evidence for what he said. Of special significance were his repeated accounts of how Berezovsky gave Yeltsin three million dollars in 1994, claiming this was a payment of royalties on Yeltsin’s memoirs, when in fact the book had earned negligible royalties.

  In 2001 Korzhakov was instrumental in launching the monthly investigative newspaper Stringer. See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; OCTOBER 1993 EVENTS; SOSKOVETS, OLEG NIKOLAYEVICH; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.

  PETER REDDAWAY

  Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya hanged by the Nazis. © HULTON

  ARCHIVE

  KOSMODEMYANSKAYA, ZOYA

  (1923-1941), partisan girl known as “Tanya” in World War II and canonized as Russian war heroine; also known as the Soviet Joan of Arc, she was posthumously awarded the honorary title Hero of the Soviet Union.

  At the outbreak of war in June 1941, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, member of the Moscow Komsomol (Communist Youth), volunteered for the partisan movement. According to the official Soviet version, in December 1941, while carrying out a military assignment behind the front line, she was caught by the Germans, arrested, tortured, and finally hanged.

  The young girl’s tragic end was used as propaganda to arouse hatred for the cruel enemy and convey the necessity for vengeance. Written for this purpose, the numerous reports, which emphasized her courage, steadfastness, and exceptional strength of resistance, portrayed her as a true Soviet model and saint who had endured torture and chosen death over betraying her comrades-a model example for sacrificial death in the “Holy War” against fascism.

  She shared the fate of many other daring and fearless compatriots who were popularized as heroes and heroines in the same manner. Yet Kosmode-myanskaya differed in that the public responded with compassion and affection, even abroad. Her unusual popularity cannot be explained by her heroic exploit alone, being that many others were called heroes for the same or similar behavior in fighting the enemy. Rather the visual and verbal depiction of her short life and tragic fate by several outstanding artists, poets, and filmmakers contributed to the unusually high degree of veneration.

  In additon to dozens of publications on her exemplary life, bearing true hagiographic qualities, including poems (one by Margarita Aliger), songs, paintings, plays, it was a documentary photograph published in the newspaper Pravda on the occasion of her death that drew the public’s attention because it broke with the traditional Soviet style of

  KOSYGIN, ALEXEI NIKOLAYEVICH

  visual representation. Most influential, however, was the film Zoya directed by Lev Arnshtam (1944). The beauty and the performance of the actress Galina Vodyanitskaya in the role of Kosmode-myanskaya left a lasting impression in popular consciousness that turned the partisan heroine into a symbol of identity for more than one postwar generation of young Soviet women imitating her in dress, hairdo, and manner.

  In the post-Soviet debate on the legend and reality of Soviet war heroes, some voices turned her into a henchman of Stalin’s plan of “scorched earth,” killed by the villagers, not by the Germans; others raised questions about her identity. Still, Kosmodemyanskaya is one of the few members of the Soviet pantheon of heroes who did not fall victim to the strong iconoclas
tic movement of the 1990s. Kosmodemyanskaya’s place in history lies beyond historical truth; it is founded on her power as a legend that became part of collective memory.

  Her grave can be found in the Moscow Novodevishche Cemetery, a special museum and a monument by M. G. Manizer in the village Petr-ishchevo, the place of her execution, near Moscow. See also: WORLD WAR II

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Kosmodemyanskaya, Liubov. (1942). My daughter Zoya. Moscow: Foreign Language Press. Sartorti, Rosalinde. (1995). “On the Making of Heroes, Heroines, and Saints.” In Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, ed. Richard Stites. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

  ROSALINDE SARTORTI

  KOSYGIN, ALEXEI NIKOLAYEVICH

  (1904-1980), Soviet prime minister.

  Alexei Kosygin was born into a worker’s family in St. Petersburg. After finishing schooling at the Leningrad Cooperative Technical School in 1924, he moved to Siberia and worked in a series of positions in the cooperative movement. It was while in Siberia, in 1927, that he joined the Communist Party. After returning to Leningrad he completed further studies at the Leningrad Textile Institute in 1935. Reflecting the opportunities opened up by the Stalinist terror and the patronage of Leningrad party boss Andrei Zhdanov, Kosygin moved rapidly from being a foreman and shop superintendent in the Zhelyabov factory through a series of industrial, city, and party posts, until in 1939 he became people’s commissar for the textile industry. From April 1940 until March 1953 he was deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (from 1946 Council of Ministers), or deputy prime minister; from June 1943 until March 1946 he was also prime minister of Russia. During this period, he likewise held a series of ministerial appointments, principally in the light industry and consumer goods industry areas. Kosygin had become a full member of the Party’s Central Committee in 1939, a candidate member of the Politburo in March 1946, and a full member in February 1948.

  Kosygin’s upward trajectory was halted in connection with the fall of Zhdanov and the Leningrad Affair. Although one of the intended victims of this affair, Kosygin survived, but at the Nineteenth Party Congress in 1952 he was dropped to candidate status in the Presidium (as the Politburo was then called). Following Stalin’s death and the consolidation of the position of one of Kosygin’s enemies, Georgy Malenkov, Kosygin was dropped altogether from the enlarged Presidium in March 1953. At the same time, he was removed as deputy prime minister. He retained a ministerial position in the consumer goods/light industry sector and was restored as deputy prime minister in December 1953. He held this post until December 1956 when he became deputy chair (and from 1959 chair) of the state planning body. With Malenkov’s fall as part of the Antiparty Group, in June 1957 Kosygin was restored to candidate membership of the Presidium and in the following month to the deputy prime ministership. He retained this post, from May 1960 as first deputy chairman, until October 1964, when he became chairman of the Council of Ministers, or prime minister. In May 1960 he also became a full member of the Central Committee Presidium.

  The fluctuations in Kosygin’s official positions in the early to mid-1950s reflect the vicissitudes of factional politics in the late-Stalin and early post-Stalin periods. In particular, Kosygin’s fortunes seem to have been related inversely to those of Malenkov. Khrushchev’s triumph over the Anti-party Group consolidated Kosygin’s position near the apex of Soviet politics, but it was Kosygin’s turning against Khrushchev that later allowed Kosygin to attain prime ministership. When the Soviet leadership tired of Khrushchev, they turned

  KOSYGIN REFORMS

  to Kosygin and Brezhnev. In the initial post-Khrushchev period, there seemed to be a general balance both between these two leaders and within the broader party leadership. Initially Kosygin was actively involved in foreign policy, including overseeing the Tashkent Agreement between India and Pakistan in 1965, negotiating with U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson at Glassboro in 1967, and conducting key talks with the Chinese in 1965 and 1969. He was the sponsor of the so-called Liber-man economic reforms (also known as the Kosy-gin reforms) in September 1965, which sought to generate greater autonomy from party control for the economic managers, although he also tightened central direction of the economy by eliminating the regional economic councils. Kosygin basically sought the more efficient management of the economy, but with the hostile Soviet reaction to the Prague Spring, the likelihood of liberalizing moves in the economy was eliminated. The suppression of the Prague Spring marked the ascendancy of Brezhnev and the clear subordination of Kosygn, who remained prime minister until his retirement in October 1980, and therefore through most of the period that Gorbachev would later call the “era of stagnation”. He was more a technocrat than a politician, but bears some of the responsibility for the Soviet Union’s perilous economic situation during the 1980s. See also: BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; KOSYGIN REFORMS; LENINGRAD AFFAIR; MALENKOV, GEORGY MAXIM-ILYANOVICH; ZHDANOV, ANDREI ALEXANDROVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Breslauer, George W. (1982). Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics. London: Allen amp; Unwin. Gelman, Harry. (1984). The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of D?tente. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tatu, Michel. (1968). Power in the Kremlin: From Khrushchev to Kosygin. New York: Viking.

  GRAEME GILL

  KOSYGIN REFORMS

  After Nikita S. Khrushchev was removed in October 1964, Alexei N. Kosygin (1904-1980) became chairman of the USSR Council of the Ministers, as part of a duumvirate with Leonid Brezhnev. Within months the new leadership restored the industrial ministerial structure, which Khrushchev had replaced with regional sovnarkhozy (economic councils). Gosplan regained its prime role in economic planning.

  In September 1965, Kosygin announced a comprehensive planning reform that implemented some of the ideas of the Kharkov economist Yevsey Liber-man and many other industrial economists who had urged relying on the profit indicator instead of detailed and numerous directives, which often conflicted with each other. Profitability had for some time been one of the indicators of plan fulfillment, though the main indicator was still gross output (valovaya produktsia, orval for short), as compared with planned levels. Now the directives would be seven in number, with profitability on capital (at controlled prices, not market ones)-or sales, for consumer goods firms-to constitute the main bonus-forming indicator. Instead of four standard indicators for use of labor, there would be only one: the wage fund.

  Other obligatory tasks were to be sales (real-izatsiya), assortment, payments to the budget, centralized investments, new techniques to be introduced, and mandatory supply tasks. The infamous val would be abandoned, along with the cost reduction target, both of which jeopardized quality of production. Depending on the enterprise’s success in increasing sales and the profit rate-and subject to fulfillment of the other tasks in plan- retained profits would go to new investments, social facilities and housing, and extra worker bonuses. This provision was intended to enhance material incentives for those engaged at the enterprise. Though differentiated and quite complicated, these norms were supposed to be stable. After paying a new capital charge of 6 percent, more than half of net profits usually went to the state, however, not to enterprise funds. New enterprise whole prices would be announced by 1967 but still based on costs, not market scarcity. This would permit the end to subsidies for loss-making enterprises.

  One advantage of the sovnarkhozy system was retained: The regional inter-industrial supply depots were preserved under the State Committee on Material Supplies (Gossnsab). Wholesale trade was thereby to be expanded. Several other state committees were also established for price setting and for science and technology. Concern for technological change was also reflected in the creation of science-production associations, intended to make a better connection between research, technology, and the introduction of new goods.

  KOTOSHIKHIN, GRIGORY KARPOVICH

  No sooner were these reforms implemented than significant modifications had to be introd
uced to regulate the size and distribution of enterprise funds. New targets were added for consumer goods and quality; later in the 1970s, labor productivity, gross output, and other targets returned to the mandatory list. Supply problems persisted; little wholesale trade occurred.

  Most specialists believe that the Kosygin reforms failed because of continuing imbalances between feasible supplies and the demands of the Party-controlled government, the unwillingness to release prices, and bureaucratic resistance to any radical change. But tinkering and experiments continued until 1982. Perestroika would revive many of the basic ideas of the Kosygin reforms, with a very different denouement: chaos and collapse rather than reversal and stagnation. See also: ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; KOSYGIN, ALEXEI NIKOLAYEVICH; LIBERMAN, YEVSEI GRIGOREVICH; PER-ESTROIKA; SOVNARKHOZY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (1998). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 6th ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Nove, Alec. (1986). The Soviet Economic System, 3rd ed. Boston: Allen amp; Unwin.

  MARTIN C. SPECHLER

  KOTOSHIKHIN, GRIGORY KARPOVICH

  (c. 1630-1667), Muscovite official, ?migr?, and author.

  As an under-secretary of the Muscovite Chancery for Foreign Affairs, Grigory Kotoshikhin was one of the few seventeenth-century Russians allowed to travel to the West, on diplomatic missions to Poland and Sweden. In 1663 he began to give information on foreign policy to the Swedish agent in Moscow. The following year he fled abroad, finally settling in Stockholm. At the behest of the Swedish government he compiled a lengthy description of the Muscovite state. Fatally injuring his landlord in a drunken quarrel, Kotoshikhin was sentenced to death. On the eve of his execution he embraced the Lutheran faith.

  Kotoshikhin’s manuscript was soon translated into Swedish but then forgotten. Rediscovered in the late 1830s, it was published in Russia in 1840 under the title On Russia in the Reign of Alexis Mikhailovich. Though its importance as a historical source was immediately recognized, the evaluation of Kotoshikhin’s account in Russia and the Soviet Union would long be influenced by ideological considerations. In the nineteenth century, Westernizers praised Kotoshikhin for exposing Muscovite backwardness, while Slavophiles condemned him for blackening Muscovite reality. In the late Stalin period and beyond, the dictates of hyper-nationalism obligated scholars to excoriate Kotoshikhin as a traitor who defamed his country to please his Swedish hosts.