Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  The Lay was first published in 1800, reportedly from a sole surviving North Russian copy of the fifteenth or sixteenth century acquired by Count Alexei Musin-Pushkin. The supposed loss of the manuscript in the fire of Moscow in 1812 has made it possible for some skeptics over the years

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  LAZAREV INSTITUTE

  to challenge the work’s authenticity, speculating that it was a fabrication of the sixteenth century (Alexander Zimin) or even the 1790s (Andr?ea Ma-zon). Up to a point, this has been a classic confrontation of historians and philologists, each group claiming priority for its own method and viewpoint. Much depends on how one views its relationship with Zadonshchina, which clearly bears some genetic connection to it, almost certainly as a later imitation of the Lay.

  Despite the unproven doubts and suspicions of a few, the Slovo o polku Igoreve, in its language, imagery, style, and themes, is perfectly compatible with the late twelfth century, as was demonstrated by leading scholars such as Roman Jakobson, Dmitry Likhachev, Varvara Adrianova-Peretts, and many others. It remains one of the masterpieces of all East Slavic literature. See also: FOLKLORE; ZADONSHCHINA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Zenkovsky, Serge A., tr. and ed. (1974). Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, 2nd ed. rev. New York: Dutton.

  NORMAN W. INGHAM

  LAZAREV INSTITUTE

  The Lazarev Institute (Lazarevskii institut vos-tochnykh iazykov) was founded in Moscow in 1815 by the wealthy Armenian Lazarev (Lazarian) family primarily as a school for their children. In 1827 the school was named the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages (Oriental in the nineteenth-century sense, including the Middle East and Northern Africa) by the State and placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Public Education. For the next twenty years the Lazarev Institute functioned as a special gymnasium that offered language courses in Armenian, Persian, Turkish, and Arabic, in addition to its regular curriculum in Russian. The student body was composed mostly of Armenian and Russian boys aged ten to fourteen. In 1844 there were 105 students: seventy-three Armenians, thirty Russians, and two others. In 1848 the Institute was upgraded to a lyceum and offered classes in the aforementioned languages for the upper grades. The Institute trained teachers for Armenian schools, Armenian priests, and, most importantly, Russian civil servants and interpreters. The government, responding to the importance of the Institute’s role in preparing men to administer the diverse peoples of the Caucasus, funded and expanded the program. Many Armenian professionals and Russian scholars specializing in Transcaucasia received their education at the Lazarev Institute. In 1851 Armenians, Georgians, and even a few Muslims from Transcaucasia were permitted to enroll in the preparatory division, where, in addition to various subjects taught in Russian, they also studied their native tongues. The Russian conquest of Daghestan and plans to expand further into Central Asia made the Lazarev Institute even more necessary. In 1872, following the Three-Emperors’ League, Russia was once again free to pursue an aggressive policy involving the Eastern Question. The State divided the institution into two educational sections. The first served as a gymnasium, while the second devoted itself to a three-year course in the languages (Armenian, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Georgian), history, and culture of Transcaucasia.

  The Lazarev Institute had its own printing press and, beginning in 1833, published important works in thirteen languages. It also published two journals, Papers in Oriental Studies (1899-1917) and the Emin Ethnographical Anthology (six issues). Its library had some forty thousand books in 1913.

  Following the Bolshevik Revolution, on March 14, 1919, the Council of the People’s Commissars of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) renamed the Institute the Armenian Institute and, soon after, the Southwest Asian Institute. In 1920 it was renamed the Central Institute of Living Oriental Languages. A year later it was renamed the Moscow Oriental Institute. In October 1921, a section of the Institute was administered by Soviet Armenia and became a showcase devoted to Armenian workers and peasants. By the 1930s the Institute lost its students to the more prestigious foreign language divisions in Moscow and Leningrad. Its library collection was transferred to the Lenin Library of Moscow. In the last four decades of the USSR, the building of the Institute was home to the permanent delegation of Soviet Armenia to the Supreme Soviet. Following the demise of the USSR, the building of the Institute became the Armenian embassy in Russia. See also: ARMENIA AND ARMENIANS; EDUCATION; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

  LEAGUE OF NATIONS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bournoutian, George. (1998). Russia and the Armenians of Transcaucasia, 1797-1889: A Documentary Record. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Press. Bournoutian, George. (2001). Armenians and Russia, 1626-1796: A Documentary Record. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Press.

  GEORGE BOURNOUTIAN

  LAZAREVSKAYA, YULIANYA USTINOVNA

  See OSORINA, YULIANYA USTINOVNA.

  LEAGUE OF ARMED NEUTRALITY

  Already annoyed by American privateer interference with Anglo-Russian maritime trade in the 1770s, Catherine the Great was even more frustrated by British countermeasures that intercepted and confiscated neutral shipping suspected of aiding the rebellious American colonies. In March 1780 she issued a Declaration of Armed Neutrality that became the basic doctrine of maritime law regarding neutral rights at sea during war. It defined, simply and clearly, the rights of neutral vessels, contraband (goods directly supportive of a military program), and the conditions and restrictions of an embargo, and overall defended the rights of neutrals (the flag covers the cargo) against seizure and condemnation of nonmilitary goods. Having already established herself in the forefront of enlightened rulers, Catherine invited the other nations of Europe to join Russia in arming merchant vessels against American or British transgression of these rights. Because of the crippling of American commerce, most of the infractions were by the British.

  Coming at this stage in the War for Independence, the Russian declaration boosted American morale and inspired the Continental Congress to dispatch Francis Dana to St. Petersburg to secure more formal recognition and support. Although Russia had little in the way of naval power to back up the declaration, it encouraged France and other countries to aid the American cause. Britain reluctantly stood by while a few French and Dutch ships under the Russian flag entered American ports, bringing valuable supplies to the hard-pressed colonies. Even more supplies entered the United States via the West Indies with the help of a Russian adventurer, Fyodor Karzhavin. The military effect was minimal, however, because the neutral European states hesitated about making commitments because of fear of British retaliation. By 1781, however, the United Provinces (the Netherlands), Denmark, Sweden, Austria, and Prussia had all joined the league.

  The league was remembered in the United States, somewhat erroneously, as a mark of Russian friendship and sympathy, and bolstered Anglophobia in the two countries. More generally, it affirmed a cardinal principle of maritime law that continues in effect in the early twenty-first century. Indirectly, it also led to a considerable expansion of Russian-American trade from the 1780s through the first half of the nineteenth century. See also: CATHERINE II; ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bolkhovitinov, Nikolai N. (1975). The Beginnings of Russian-American Relations, 1775-1815. New Haven: Yale University Press. Madariaga, Isabel de. (1963).Britain, Russia and the Armed Neutrality of 1780. London: Macmillan. Saul, Norman E. (1991). Distant Friends: The United States and Russia, 1763-1867. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

  NORMAN E. SAUL

  LEAGUE OF NATIONS

  Formed by the victorious powers in 1919, the League of Nations was designed to enforce the Treaty of Versailles and the other peace agreements that concluded World War I. It was intended to replace secret deals and war, as means for settling international disputes, with open diplomacy and peaceful mediation. Its charter also provided a mechanism for its members to take collective action against aggression.

&nb
sp; Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany initially were not members of the League. At the time of the League’s founding, the Western powers had invaded Russia in support of the anticommunist side in the Russian civil war. The Bolshevik regime was hostile to the League, denouncing it as an anti-Soviet, counterrevolutionary conspiracy of the imperialist powers. Throughout the 1920s, Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin aligned the USSR with Weimar Germany, the other outcast power, against Britain, France, and the

  LEAGUE OF THE MILITANT GODLESS

  League. German adherence to the Locarno Accords with Britain and France in 1925, and Germany’s admission to the League in 1926, dealt a blow to Chicherin’s policy. This Germanophile, Anglo-phobe, anti-League view was not shared by Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov, who advocated a more balanced policy, including cooperation with the League. Moreover, the USSR participated in the Genoa Conference in 1922 and several League-sponsored economic and arms control forums later in the decade.

  Chicherin’s retirement because of ill health, his replacement as foreign commissar by Litvinov, and, most importantly, the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany served to reorient Moscow’s policy. The Third Reich now replaced the British Empire as the main potential enemy in Soviet thinking. In December 1933 the Politburo adopted the new Collective Security line in foreign policy, whereby the USSR sought to build an alliance of anti-Nazi powers to prevent or, if necessary, defeat German aggression. An important part of this strategy was the attempt to revive the collective security mechanism of the League. To this end, the Soviet Union joined the League in 1934, and Litvinov became the most eloquent proponent of League sanctions against German aggression. Soviet leaders also hoped that League membership would afford Russia some protection against Japanese expansionism in the Far East. Unfortunately, the League had already failed to take meaningful action against Japanese aggression in Manchuria in 1931, and it later failed to act against the Italian attack on Ethiopia in 1935. Soviet collective security policy in the League and in bilateral diplomacy faltered against the resolution of Britain and France to appease Hitler.

  When Stalin could not persuade the Western powers to ally with the USSR, even in the wake of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, he abandoned the collective security line and signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact with Hitler on August 23, 1939. Subsequent Soviet territorial demands on Finland led to the Winter War of 1939-1940 and to the expulsion of the USSR from the League as an aggressor. However, Hitler’s attack on Russia in 1941 accomplished what Litvinov’s diplomacy could not, creating an alliance with Britain and the United States. The USSR thus became in 1945 a founding member of the United Nations, the organization that replaced the League of Nations after World War II. See also: CHICHERIN, GEORGY VASILIEVICH; LITVINOV, MAXIM MAXIMOVICH; NAZI-SOVIET PACT OF 1939; UNITED NATIONS; WORLD WAR I; WORLD WAR II

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Buzinkai, Donald I. (1967). “The Bolsheviks, the League of Nations, and the Paris Peace Conference, 1919.” Soviet Studies 19:257-263. Haigh, R.H.; Morris, D.S.; and Peters, A.R. (1986). Soviet Foreign Policy: The League of Nations and Europe, 1917-1939. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble. Haslam, Jonathan. (1984). The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933-39. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Jacobson, Jan. (1994). When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  TEDDY J. ULDRICKS

  LEAGUE OF THE MILITANT GODLESS

  One of the early Soviet regime’s most ambitious attempts at social engineering, the League of the Militant Godless (Soyuz voinstvuyushchikh bezbozh-nikov) was also one of its most dismal failures. Founded in 1925 as the League of the Godless, it was one of numerous volunteer groups created in the 1920s to help extend the regime’s reach into Russian society. These organizations hoped to attract nonparty members who might be sympathetic to individual elements of the Bolshevik program. The word “militant” was added in 1929 as Stalin’s Cultural Revolution gathered speed, and at its peak in the early 1930s, the League claimed 5.5 million dues-paying bezbozhniki (godless).

  Organized like the Communist Party, the League consisted of cells of individual members at factories, schools, offices, and living complexes. These cells were managed by local councils subordinated to regional and provincial bodies. A League Central Council presided in Moscow. Despite the League’s nominal independence, it was directed at each level by the corresponding Communist Party organization.

  The League’s mandate was to disseminate atheism, and, to achieve this goal, it orchestrated public campaigns for the closure of churches and the prohibition of church bell pealing. It staged demonstrations against the observance of religious holidays and the multitude of daily Orthodox practices.

  LEBED, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH

  The League also arranged lectures on themes such as the existence of God, Biblical miracles, astronomy, and so forth. The League’s Central Council published a raft of antireligious publications in Russian and in the languages of national minorities. Larger provincial councils issued their own an-tireligious periodicals.

  The League’s rapid organizational rise seemed to embody the Bolshevik success in transforming Holy Russia into the atheistic Soviet Union. But appearances were misleading. In ironic obeisance to Marxist dialectics, the League reached its organizational peak in the early 1930s before collapsing utterly a few years later when, consolidation taking priority over Cultural Revolution, the Party withdrew the material support that had sustained the League’s rise. The League’s disintegration cast its earlier successes as a “Potemkin village” in the Russian tradition. In the League’s case, the deception was nearly complete: Only a fraction of the League’s nominal members actually paid dues. Many joined the League without their knowledge, as a name on a list submitted by a local party official. Overworked local party officials often viewed League activities as a last priority. The population largely ignored the League’s numerous publications. Local antireligious officials often succeeded in drawing the ire of the local community in their ham-handed efforts to counter Orthodoxy. Indeed, the local versions of debates in the early and mid-1920s between leading regime propagandists and clergymen went so poorly that they were prohibited by the late 1920s.

  The final irony was that whatever secularization occurred in the 1920s and 1930s, little of it can be attributed to the League. Orthodoxy’s retreat in this period was due to the raw exercise of state power that resulted in the closure of tens of thousand of churches and the arrest of many priests. Urbanization and industrialization played their part, as did the flood of new spaces, images, and associations that accompanied the creation of Soviet culture. Only in this final element did the League play a role, and it was a very minor one. The League may have been a symbol of secularization but was hardly an agent of it.

  After a brief revival in the late 1930s, the League faded once again into the background as World War II brought an accommodation with religion. It was formally disbanded in 1947, four years after the death of its founder and leader, Emil-ian Yaroslavsky. Yaroslavsky, an Old Bolshevik, had been a leading propagandist in the 1920s and 1930s. An ideological chameleon, he survived two decades of ideological twists and turns and died a natural death in 1943 at the age of sixty-five.

  Despite its ultimate failure, the League put into clear relief the regime’s fundamental approach to the task of social transformation. Highlighting Bolshevism’s faith in the power of organization and building on the tradition of Russian bureaucracy, the regime emphasized the organizational manifestation of a desired sentiment to such an extent that it eventually superseded the actual sentiment. The state of atheism in Soviet Russia was essentially the same as the state of the League, as far as the regime was concerned. As long as the League was visible, the regime assumed that it had achieved one of its ideological goals. Moreover, the atheism promoted by the League looked a great deal like a secular religion. Here the regime appeared to be taking the path of least resistance, by which fun
damental culture was not changed but simply given a new gloss. This approach boded ill for the long-term success of the Soviet experiment with culture and for the Soviet Union itself. See also: BOLSHEVISM; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Husband, William. (1998). “Soviet Atheism and Russian Orthodox Strategies of Resistance, 1917-1932.” Journal of Modern History 70(1):74-107. Husband, William. (2000). Godless Communists: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Peris, Daniel. (1995). “Commissars in Red Cassocks: Former Priests in the League of the Militant Godless.” Slavic Review 54(2):340-364. Peris, Daniel. (1998). Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

  DANIEL PERIS

  LEBED, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH

  (1950-2002), Soviet, airborne commander, Afghan veteran, commander of the Fourteenth Army, Secretary of the Russian security council, and governor of Krasnoyarsk oblast.

  Alexander Lebed graduated from the Ryazan Airborne School in 1973 and served in the Airborne

  LEFORTOVO

  Forces. From 1981 to 1982 he commanded an airborne battalion in Afghanistan, and then attended the Frunze Military Academy from 1982 to 1985. In 1988 he assumed command of an airborne division, which deployed to various ethno-national hot spots within the USSR, including Tbilisi and Baku. An associate of General Pavel Grachev, the Commander of Airborne Forces, Lebed was appointed Deputy Commander of Airborne Forces in February 1991. In August, Lebed commanded the airborne troops sent to secure the Russian White House during the attempted August coup against Gorbachev. In a complex double game, Lebed neither secured the building nor arrested Yeltsin. In 1992 Pavel Grachev appointed him commander of the Russian Fourteenth Army in Moldova. Lebed intervened to protect the Russian population in the self-proclaimed Transdneistr Republic, which was involved in an armed struggle with the government of Moldova. Lebed became a hero to Russian nationalists. But in 1993 Lebed refused to support the Red-Browns opposing Yeltsin. In 1994 he spoke out against the Yeltsin government’s military intervention in Chechnya, calling it ill prepared and ill conceived. In 1995 Lebed was retired from the military at President Yeltsin’s order. In December 1995 he was elected to the State Duma. He then ran for president of Russia on the Congress of Russian Communities ticket with a nationalist and populist program and finished third (14.7% of the vote) in the first round of the 1996 election, behind Yeltsin and Zyuganov. Yeltsin brought Lebed into his administration as Secretary of the Security Council to ensure his own victory in the second round of voting. But Lebed proved an independent actor, and in August, when the war in Chechnya re-erupted, Lebed sought to end the fighting to save the Army, accepted a cease-fire, and signed the Khasavyurt accords with rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov. The accords granted Chechnya autonomy but left the issue of independence for resolution by 2001. Lebed’s actions angered Yeltsin’s close associates, including Minister of Internal Affairs Anatoly Kulikov, who engineered Lebed’s removal from the government in October 1996. Yeltsin justified the removal on the grounds that Lebed was a disruptive force within the government. In 1998 Lebed ran successfully for the post of Governor of Krasnoyarsk Oblast. On April 28, 2002, he was killed in a helicopter crash outside Krasnoyarsk. See also: MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; TRANS-DNIESTER REPUBLIC