by James Millar
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Avrich, Paul. (1970). Kronstadt 1921. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Getzler, Israel. (1983). Kronstadt, 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
A. DELANO DUGARM
KROPOTKIN, PYOTR ALEXEYEVICH
(1842-1921), Russian revolutionary.
Born into a family of the highest nobility, Kropotkin (the “Anarchist Prince,” according to his 1950 biographer George Woodcock) swam against the current of convention all his life. He received his formal education at home and then at the Corps of Pages in St. Petersburg, graduated in 1862, and, to the tsar’s astonishment, requested a posting to Siberia rather than the expected court career. There he remained until 1867. Siberia was a liberation for Kropotkin, contrary to the experience of others. He participated as a geographer and naturalist in expeditions organized by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (IRGS). He was also entering his parallel career as a revolutionary: for him, Russia’s Age of Great Reforms was that of the discovery of unchanging corruption among Siberian state officials.
In 1867 Kropotkin returned to St. Petersburg where he enrolled at the University (he never graduated), supporting himself by working for the IRGS. His scientific reputation grew and in 1871 he was offered the post of IRGS secretary, which he rejected. Events in his own life (the death of his tyrannical father), in Russia (the growth of a revolutionary student movement), and in the world (the Paris Commune) strengthened his revolutionary feelings. In 1872 he visited Switzerland for the
KROPOTKIN, PYOTR ALEXEYEVICH
first time to discover more about the International Workingmen’s Association and on his return to Russia began to frequent the Chaikovsky Circle. As his 1976 biographer Martin Miller revealed, Kropotkin authored the Circle’s principal pamphlet, “Must We Examine the Ideal of the Future Order?” (1873).
Kropotkin was by this time (though the title was yet to be invented) an anarchist-communist- that is, he advocated the destruction of state tyranny over society (as anarchist predecessors like William Godwin, Pierre Proudhon, and Mikhail Bakunin had done) on one hand, while on the other he sought a communist, egalitarian transformation of society (like Karl Marx, only without using the authority of the state). This paradox required the dissolution of national government and its post-revolutionary replacement by a free federation of small communes, a local government freely administered from below rather than national and imposed from above. Revolutionaries from privileged backgrounds must organize the preceding popular revolt by propaganda and persuasion only: Workers and peasants must make the revolution themselves.
In March 1874 Kropotkin was arrested for his revolutionary activities and interrogated over a two-year period. Moved to a military hospital, he was liberated in a complex, sensational escape organized by his comrades. Kropotkin continued his revolutionary career in the Jura Federation, Switzerland, comprising the anarchist sections of the International, and from early 1877 began for the first time to take part in public political life: demonstrating, making speeches, attending congresses, writing articles. This activity is chronicled in detail in Caroline Cahm’s 1983 biography. Around 1880, the issue of terrorism or “propaganda by the deed,” as was the expression of the time, arose. This was crystalized by the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. Although not approving assassination as a political method, Kropotkin was unwilling to condemn the assassins, explaining their actions as the result of impotent desperation. At the end of 1882 he was arrested in France for revolutionary activity in which, for once, he had not participated. Sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, he was released following international pressure in early 1886 and settled in London, England.
For a living and for the cause, Kropotkin now lectured throughout Britain and wrote for numerous publications. His principal fame during the British period derived from his books, including In Russian and French Prisons (1887), Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899), Fields, Factories, and Workshops (1899), Mutual Aid (1902), Modern Science and Anarchism (1903), Russian Literature (1905), The Terror in Russia (1909), and The Great French Revolution (1909). With British comrades, he launched the anarchist journal Freedom. He wrote frequently for political publications in several languages. He was greatly encouraged by the 1905 revolution in Russia.
Kropotkin’s writings during these years of exile are parts of an ongoing argument with those hegemonic Victorian thinkers Thomas Malthus, Herbert Spencer, and Charles Darwin. He takes issue with Malthus’s bleak vision to argue that humanity’s future is not limited by its reproductive success, but by science and equality. Nature shows the role of mutual aid in its evolution, analogous to the freely cooperating communes of postrevolu-tionary humanity. Anarchist communism is not merely desirable, but inevitable. Kropotkin’s optimistic view of science no longer commands respect, but to many his works beckon us to a wonderful future.
In 1917, in old age, Kropotkin was able to return to revolutionary Russia. He worked for a while on various federalist projects and died in Dmitrov, a Moscow province. His last major work, Ethics, was published posthumously and incomplete in 1924. See also: ANARCHISM; BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL ALEXAN-DROVICH; IMPERIAL RUSSIAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cahm, Caroline. (1989). Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism 1872-1886. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cahm, Caroline, Colin Ward, and Ian Cook. (1992). P. A. Kropotkin’s Sesquicentennial: A Reassessment and Tribute. Durham: University of Durham, Centre for European Studies. Miller, Martin A. (1976). Kropotkin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Slatter, John (ed.). (1984). From the Other Shore: Russian Political Emigrants in Britain 1880-1917. London: Frank Cass. Woodcock, George, and Ivan Avakumovic. (1950). The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin. London: Boardman.
JOHN SLATTER
KRUPSKAYA, NADEZHDA KONSTANTINOVNA
KRUPSKAYA, NADEZHDA KONSTANTINOVNA
(1869-1939), revolutionary, educator, head of Glavpolitprosvet (the Chief Committee for Political Education) and deputy head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, full member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (1927-1939), wife of Vladimir Ilich Lenin.
A native of St. Petersburg, Nadezhda Krup-skaya developed an early and lifelong interest in education, especially that of adults. Beginning in the 1890s, she taught in workers’ evening and adult education schools. In Marxist circles she met Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (Lenin). When she and Lenin were both arrested in 1895 and 1896, she followed him to Siberia as his fianc?e and later as his wife. While in exile, Krupskaya wrote her most famous work, The Woman Worker (first published in 1901 and 1905). Here she explored the problems faced by women as workers and mothers.
From 1901 to 1917 Krupskaya shared Lenin’s life in exile abroad, helping to direct his correspondence and build up the organization of the Party. She worked on the editorial boards of the journals Rabotnitsa, Iskra, Proletary, and Sotsial-Demokrat. She also began writing about theories of progressive American and European education, especially those of John Dewey. In the 1920s these ideas on education were to have some impact on Soviet schooling, though they were then reversed in the 1930s.
After 1917 she headed the newly created Extra-Curricular Department of the Commissariat of Education, which was later replaced by the Chief Committee on Political Education (Glavpolitprosvet). She also worked in the zhenotdel (the women’s section of the Party), editing the journal Kommunistka, but never heading the section.
In 1922 and 1923, when Lenin was seriously incapacitated with illness, Krupskaya quarreled badly with Josef Stalin, whom she found rude and boorish. When Lenin died in January 1924, Krup-skaya found herself isolated and increasingly drawn to side with the Leningrad Opposition led by Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. By the fall of 1926, however, she had defected from the Opposition. From 1927 to 1939 she served as a full member of the (now much weakened) Central Committee of the Party. During the height of the Purges, she tried to save some of S
talin’s victims,
Nadezhda Krupskaya, wife of Vladimir Lenin, seated at her desk. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS including Yuri Pyatakov, but without success. Although Stalin gave a eulogy at her funeral in 1939, her works were suppressed until Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw.
Historians have tended to minimize Krupskaya’s importance, viewing her primarily as Lenin’s wife. Yet she played a crucial role in establishing the Party, building up the political education apparatus that reached millions of people, and keeping women’s issues on the political agenda. See also: ARMAND, INESSA; EDUCATION; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; ZHENOTDEL
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McNeal, Robert H. (1972). Bride of the Revolution. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Noonan, Norma C. (1991). “Two Solutions to the Zhen-skii Vopros in Russia and the USSR, Kollontai and
791
KRYLOV, IVAN ANDREYEVICH
Krupskaia: A Comparison.” Women and Politics 2(3):77-100. Stites, Richard. (1975). “Kollontai, Inessa, and Krupskaia: A Review of Recent Literature.” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 9(1):84-92. Stites, Richard. (1978). The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wood, Elizabeth A. (1997). The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press.
ELIZABETH A. WOOD
KRYLOV, IVAN ANDREYEVICH
(1769-1844), writer, especially of satirical fables, who is often called the “Russian Aesop.”
The son of a provincial army captain who died when he was ten, Krylov had little formal education but significant artistic ambitions. Entering the civil service in Tver, Krylov was subsequently transferred to the imperial capital of St. Petersburg in 1782, which gave him access to the most prominent of cultural circles. Although he began his literary career penning comic operas, when he joined Nikolai Novikov and Alexander Radishchev on the editorial board of the satirical journal Pochta dukhov (Mail for Spirits) in 1789, he became recognized as a leading figure in Russia’s Enlightenment. When the French Revolution made enlightened principles particularly dangerous during the last years of the reign of Catherine the Great, Krylov left St. Petersburg to escape the more severe fates suffered by his coeditors. He spent five years traveling and working in undistinguished positions.
In 1901, with the assumption of the throne by Catherine’s liberally minded grandson, Alexander I, Krylov moved to Moscow and resumed his literary career. Five years later, he returned to St. Petersburg, returning also to satire. He began translating the works of French storyteller Jean La Fontaine, and in the process discovered his own talents as a fabulist. Moreover, his originality coincided with the intellectual movement to create a national literature for Russia. His new circle was as illustrious as the old, including the poet Alexander Pushkin, who was the guiding spirit behind the evolution of Russian into a literary language.
Krylov’s fables, which numbered more than two hundred, featured anthropomorphized animals who made political statements about contemporary Russian politics. This satirical style allowed him to describe repressive aspects of the autocracy without suffering the wrath of Catherine’s heirs. He received government sinecure with a position in the national public library, where he worked for thirty years. Many of his characters and aphorisms continue to resonate in Russian popular culture. See also: CATHERINE II; ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF; PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Krylov, Ivan. (1977). Krylov’s Fables, tr. with a preface by Sir Bernard Pares. Westport, CT: Hyperion Press. Stepanov, N. L. (1973). Ivan Krylov. New York: Twayne.
LOUISE MCREYNOLDS
KRYUCHKOV, VLADIMIR ALEXANDROVICH
(b. 1924), Soviet police official; head of the KGB from 1988 to 1991.
Born in Volgograd, Russia, Vladimir Kryuchkov joined the Communist Party in 1944 and became a full-time employee of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol). In 1946 Kryuchkov embarked on a legal career, working as an investigator for the prosecutor’s office and studying at the All-Union Juridical Correspondence Institute, from which he received a diploma in 1949. Kryuchkov joined the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1951 and enrolled as a student at the Higher Diplomatic School in Moscow. He received his first assignment abroad in 1955, when he was sent to Hungary to serve under Soviet Ambassador Yuri Andropov. Kryuchkov was in Budapest during the Soviet invasion in 1956 and was an eyewitness to the brutal suppression of Hungarian nationalists by Soviet troops. After returning to Moscow in 1959, he worked in the Central Committee Department for Liaison with Socialist Countries, which his former supervisor Andropov now headed. In 1967, when Andropov was appointed to the leadership of the KGB, the Soviet police and intelligence apparatus, he brought Kryuchkov, who rose to the post of chief of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence) in 1977. In 1988 Soviet party leader Mikhail Gorbachev appointed Kryuchkov chairman of the KGB. Although Kryuchkov voiced public support for Gorbachev’s liberal reforms, he grew increasingly
KULAKS
alarmed by the threats to Soviet unity posed by the non-Russian republics. In August 1991, Kryuchkov and his hard-line colleagues in the government declared a state of emergency in the country, hoping that Gorbachev, who was vacationing in the Crimea, would support them. When Gorbachev refused, they backed down and were arrested. Kryuchkov was released from prison in 1993 and in 1996 published his memoirs, A Personal File (Lichnoye delo), where he defended his attempt to keep the Soviet Union together and accused Gorbachev of weakness and duplicity. See also: ANDROPOV, YURI VLADIMIROVICH; AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEEVICH; INTELLIGENCE SERVICES; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Knight, Amy. (1988). The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union. Boston: Allen and Unwin. Knight, Amy. (1996). Spies Without Cloaks: The KGB’s Successors. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
AMY KNIGHT
to represent the interests of the Orthodox Church in the Holy Land. Because Russia no longer needed an alliance with an independent Zaporozhian Cossack host, this military and diplomatic success led to its destruction and the end of any notion of an autonomous Ukraine for more than a hundred years. The treaty symbolized the consolidation of Russian control of the southern steppe, the rise of Russia as a great European and Middle Eastern power, and the beginning of the end of Turkish supremacy in the area. No wonder there were great celebrations in Moscow a year later, during which the foremost Russian military heroes were lavishly rewarded and Rumyantsev was given the honorific Zadunyasky (“beyond the Danube”). More than any other event, the treaty established Catherine II as “the Great” in terms of Russian expansion. The Ottoman loss, however, left a vacuum in the eastern Mediterranean open for the ambitions of Napoleon I twenty-five years later, and many more battles in the eastern Mediterranean would result. Perhaps the shattering international impact of the treaty is the ghost behind the Middle Eastern and Balkan problems of the twentieth century and beyond.
KUCHUK KAINARJI, TREATY OF
The first war between Russia and Turkey during the reign of Catherine the Great began in 1768. After the Russians won a series of victories and advanced beyond the Danube River deep into Ottoman territory in the Balkans, Field Marshal Peter Rumyant-sev and Turkish plenipotentiaries met in an obscure Bulgarian village and signed a peace treaty on July 10, 1774. The war was a major victory for Catherine’s expansionist policy and a realization of the goals of Peter the Great in the south. The Russian Empire gained permanent control of all the fortress-ports on the Sea of Azov and around the Dneiper-Bug estuary, the right of free navigation on the Black Sea, including the right to maintain a fleet, and the right of passage through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles for merchant vessels. The Tatar khanate of the Crimean Peninsula was recognized as independent, thus removing the Ottoman presence from the northern shore of the Black Sea and essentially bringing the area under Russia control (it was peacefully annexed in 1783), and th
e Turks paid an indemnity of 4.5 million rubles, which covered much of the Russian costs of the war.
The treaty also gave Russia the right to maintain consulates throughout the Ottoman Empire and See also: CATHERINE II; RUMYANTSEV, PETER ALEXAN-DROVICH; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, John T. (1989). Catherine the Great: Life and Legend. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Madariaga, Isabel de. (1981). Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great. New Haven: Yale University Press.
NORMAN SAUL
KULAKS
The term kulak came into use after emancipation in 1861, describing peasants who profited from their peers. While kulak connotes the power of the fist, the nearly synonymous term miroyed means “mir-eater.” At first the term “kulak” did not refer to the newly prosperous peasants, but rather to village extortioners who consume the commune, men of special rapacity, their wealth derived from usury or trading rather than from agriculture. The term never acquired precise scientific or economic definition. Peasants had a different understanding of the kulaks than outsiders; however, both definitions focused on social and moral aspects. During the
KULAKS
twentieth century Lenin and Stalin defined the kulaks in economic and political terms as the capitalist strata of a polarized peasantry. Exploitation was the central element in the peasants’ definition of the miroyed as well as in outsiders’ definition of the kulak. Peasants, by contrast, attributed power to the kulak and limited their condemnation to peasants who exploited members of their own community. The kulaks also played an important political role in self-government of the peasant community. In the communal gathering they controlled decision making and had great influence on the opinion of the rest of the peasants.