by James Millar
The closure of Moskovsky vestnik in 1830 marked the end of the Lovers of Wisdom as a group. But the death of Venevitinov, often considered their most talented member, in 1827, had already dealt them a blow, as did the departure of many key members from Moscow in the late 1820s. In the early 1830s, the group’s members developed in new directions. Some of them, such as Kireyevsky and Khomyakov, eventually became leaders of the Slavophile movement, arguably the most coherent and original strain in nineteenth-century Russian thought. See also: DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION; KHOMYAKOV, ALEXEI STEPANOVICH; KIREYEVSKY, IVAN VASILIEVICH; ODOYEVSKY, VLADIMIR FYODOR-OVICH; POGODIN, MIKHAIL PETROVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gleason, Abott. (1972). European and Muscovite: Ivan Kireevsky and the Origins of Slavophilism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Koyr?, Alexandre. (1929). La philosophie et le probl?me national en Russie au d?but du XIXe si?cle. Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honor? Champion.
VICTORIA FREDE
LUBOK
Broadsides or broadsheet prints (pl. lubki).
Broadsides first appeared in Russia in the seventeenth century, probably inspired by German woodcuts. Subjects were depicted in a native style. Captions complemented the printed images. The earliest lubki represented saints and other religious figures, but humorous illustrations also circulated that captured the parody spirit of skomorok (minstrel) performances of the era-especially the wacky wordplay of the theatrical entr’actes.
In the 1760s prints began to be made from metal plates, facilitating production of longer texts. Lithographic stone supplanted copper plates, but in turn gave way to cheaper and lighter zinc plates in the second half of the nineteenth century. Pedlars bought the pictures in bulk at fairs or in Moscow and sold them in the countryside. Originally acquired by nobles, the images were taken up by the merchantry, officials, and tradesmen before becoming the province of the peasantry in the nineteenth century, at which point lubok, in its adjectival form, came to mean “shoddy.” It was also in the nineteenth century that the term came to refer to cheap printed booklets aimed at popular audiences.
Lubki depicted historical figures, characters from folklore, contemporary members of the ruling family, festival pastimes, battle scenes, judicial punishments, and hunting and other aspects of everyday life, along with religious subjects. The prints decorated peasant huts, taverns, and the in-sides of lids of trunks used by peasants when they moved to cities or factories to work. The native style of the prints was adapted by Old Believers in the nineteenth century in their manuscript printing. Avant-garde artists in the early twentieth century drew inspiration from the style in their neo-primitivist phase. An “Exhibition of Icons and Lubki” was held in Moscow in 1913. See also: CHAPBOOK LITERATURE; OLD BELIEVERS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bowlt, John E. (1998). “Art.” In The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Literature, ed. Nicholas Rzhevsky. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Brooks, Jeffrey. (1985). When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Farrell, Dianne E. (1991). “Medieval Popular Humor in Russian Eighteenth Century Lubki.” Slavic Review 50:551-565.
GARY THURSTON
LUBYANKA
LUBYANKA
The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission on the Struggle Against Counter-Revolution, Sabotage, and Speculation (VCHk, or Cheka) was founded by the Bolsheviks in December 1917. Headed by Felix Dz-erzhinsky, it was responsible for liquidating counterrevolutionary elements and remanding saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries to be tried by the revolutionary-military tribunal. In February 1918 it was authorized to shoot active enemies of the revolution rather than turn them over to the tribunal.
In March 1918 the Cheka established its headquarters in the buildings at 11 and 13 Great Lub-yanka Street in Moscow. Between the 1930s and the beginning of the 1980s, a complex of buildings belonging to the security establishment grew up along Great Lubyanka Street. The building at No. 20 was constructed in 1982 as the headquarters of the KGB (Committee of State Security), now the FSB (Federal Security Bureau), for Moscow and the Moscow area. The famous Lubyanka Internal Prison was situated in the courtyard of what is now the main building of the FSB on Lubyanka Street. Closed in the 1960s, it is at present the site of a dining room, offices, and a warehouse. All its prisoners were transferred to Lefortovo. In the time of mass reprisals, prisoners were regularly shot in the courtyard of the Lubyanka Prison. Automobile engines were run to drown out the noise. Suspects were brutally interrogated in the prison’s basement.
In addition to the FSB headquarters, the buildings on Lubyanka Street also include a museum of the history of the state security agencies. The office of Lavrenty Beria, long-time chief of the Soviet security apparatus, has been kept unchanged and is open to visitors. See also: BERIA, LAVRENTI PAVLOVICH; DZERZHINSKY, FELIX EDMUNDOVICH; GULAG; LEFORTOVO; MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR; PRISONS; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF
A statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky-the first head of the Soviet secret police-looms over Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Following the failed August 1991 coup attempt by Communist Party hard-liners, this statue was torn down. © NOVOSTI/SOVFOTO
LUKASHENKO, ALEXANDER GRIGORIEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burch, James. (1983). Lubyanka: A Novel. New York: Atheneum.
GEORG WURZER
LUKASHENKO, ALEXANDER GRIGORIEVICH
(b. 1954), president of Belarus.
Alexander Grigorievich Lukashenko became president of Belarus on July 10, 1994, when he defeated Prime Minister Vyachaslav Kebich in the country’s first presidential election, running on a platform of anti-corruption and closer relations with Russia. He established a harsh dictatorship as president, amending the constitution to consolidate his authority.
Lukashenko was born in August 1954 in the village of Kopys (Orshanske Rayon, Vitebsk Oblast), but most of his early career was spent in Mahileu region, where he graduated from the Mahileu Teaching Institute (his speciality was history) and the Belarusian Agricultural Academy. From 1975 to 1977, he was a border guard in the Brest area. He then spent five years in the army before returning to Mahileu, and the town of Shklau, where he worked as manager of state and collective farms, and also in a construction materials combine. He was elected to the Belarusian Supreme Soviet in 1990, where he founded a faction called Communists for Democracy. In the early 1990s he chaired a commission investigating corruption.
In April 1995, several months into his presidency, Lukashenko organized a referendum that replaced the country’s state symbols and national flag with others very similar to the Soviet ones and elevated Russian to a state language. A second referendum in November 1996 considerably enhanced the authority of the presidency by reducing the parliament to a rump body of 120 seats (formerly there were 260 deputies), establishing an upper house closely attached to the presidency, and curtailing the authority of the Constitutional Court. Lukashenko then dated his presidency from late 1996 rather than the original election date of July 1994.
By April 1995, Lukashenko had established a community relationship with Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, which went through several stages before being formalized as a Union state in late 1999. Under Vladimir Putin, however, Russia distanced itself from the agreement and in the summer of 2002 threatened to incorporate Belarus into the Russian Federation.
Lukashenko clamped down on opposition movements and imposed tight censorship over the media. His contraventions of human rights in the republic have elicited international concern. See also: BELARUS AND BELARUSIANS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Marples, David R. (1999). Belarus: A Denationalized Nation. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Zaprudnik, Jan. (1995). Belarus: At a Crossroads in History. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
DAVID R. MARPLES
LUKYANOV, ANATOLY IVANOVICH
(b. 1930), chair of the USSR Supreme Soviet during the August 1991 coup attempt.
Anatoly Lukyanov studied law at Moscow State University, gr
aduating in 1953. While at the university, he chaired the University Komsomol branch, and Mikhail Gorbachev was deputy chair. Lukyanov joined the Party in 1955 and began a career within the Party apparatus. He was appointed to the Central Committee Secretariat in 1987. By 1988, Lukyanov was named a candidate member of the Politburo and first deputy chair of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet.
The first USSR Congress of People’s Deputies elected Lukyanov chairman of the newly reconfigured Supreme Soviet in 1990. This post allowed him to control the parliamentary agenda. He was repeatedly accused of stonewalling legislation he did not like and putting bills he supported to vote multiple times if they were voted down.
Despite his close personal links with Gorbachev, Lukyanov sided with opponents of Gorbachev’s policies. The hard-line Soyuz faction particularly favored Lukyanov over Gorbachev. During his December 1990 resignation speech to the Congress, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze specifically criticized Lukyanov for interfering in Soviet-German relations and for his desire for a dictatorship.
LUZHKOV, YURI MIKHAILOVICH
As Gorbachev’s new Union Treaty neared ratification in summer 1991, hard-line members of the Soviet leadership hierarchy staged a coup to overthrow Gorbachev and prevent adoption of the treaty. Though Lukyanov was not a member of the State Committee for the State of Emergency that briefly seized power August 19-21, 1991, he supported their efforts. Lukyanov was arrested following the coup’s collapse, then amnestied in February 1994 and elected to the Russian Duma in 1995 and 1999, where he chaired the parliamentary committee on government reform. See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH held various second-rank positions in cultural administration and spent much time abroad, partly for health reasons. In 1933 he was appointed ambassador to Spain, but died before assuming the position. His reputation plummeted after his death, but from the 1960s to the 1980s, thanks partly to the untiring work of his daughter, Irina Luna-charskaya, he became a symbol of a (pre-Stalinist) humanistic Bolshevism protective of the intelligentsia and committed to the advancement of high culture. See also: BOLSHEVISM; CULTURAL REVOLUTION; EDUCATION; PROLETKULT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Wishnevsky, Julia. (1991). “Anatolii Luk’yanov: Gorbachev’s Conservative Rival?” RFE/RL Report on the USSR 3(23):8-14.
ANN E. ROBERTSON
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1970). The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917-1921. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. O’Connor, Timothy Edward. (1983). The Politics of Soviet Culture: Anatolii Lunacharskii. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.
SHEILA FITZPATRICK
LUNACHARSKY, ANATOLY VASILIEVICH
(1875-1933), Bolshevik intellectual and early Soviet leader.
Born the son of a state councilor, Anatoly Lu-nacharsky joined the Social Democratic movement in 1898 and was soon arrested. As an exile in Vologda, he met Alexander Bogdanov. In Paris in 1904 both men joined the Bolshevik faction, but they left it again in 1911 after clashes with Lenin over philosophy. Bogdanov advocated empiriocrit-icism, claiming that only direct experience could be relied on as a basis for knowledge. Lunacharsky promoted God-building, an anthropocentric religion striving toward the moral unity of mankind. Lunacharsky rejoined the Bolshevik Party in August 1917 and became the first People’s Commissar of Enlightenment (Narkom prosveshcheniya, or Narkompros), serving from October 1917 to 1929. A prolific writer on literature and the arts and an important patron of the intelligentsia, Lunacharsky was often regarded within the party as too “soft” for a Bolshevik. From the mid-1920s he was increasingly marginalized, and his last years at Narkompros were marked by fierce battles over education and culture as his soft line in policy was discredited with the onset of the Cultural Revolution. After his resignation from Narkompros, he
LUZHKOV, YURI MIKHAILOVICH
(b. 1936), Russian politician and mayor of Moscow.
Yuri Luzhkov became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1968 and remained a member until the party was outlawed in the wake of the failed coup of August 1991. He left a management career in the chemical industry to become a deputy to the Moscow City Council (Soviet) in 1977. In 1987, his political career took a great stride forward when Boris Yeltsin became First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party organization. In keeping with the Soviet practice of assigning party members to multiple responsibilities, Luzhkov was appointed deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and first deputy to the chair of the Moscow City Executive Committee.
Luzhkov was appointed chair of the City Executive Committee following Gavriil Popov’s election as mayor of Moscow in 1990. The following year he was elected Popov’s vice mayor. During the August 1991 coup, he helped organize the defense
LYSENKO, TROFIM DENISOVICH
Yuri Luzhkov is sworn in for his second term as mayor of Moscow, December 29, 1996. © REUTERS NEWMEDIA INC./CORBIS services to the parliament and deployed the city’s police to forcibly disband meetings and demonstrations organized in support of the legislature.
Luzhkov remained mayor of Moscow, but his regime has not been without controversy. He has come under particular criticism for the manner in which privatization of municipal property has been carried out. On several occasions the press has charged the mayor with corruption, favoritism, and using his position for personal gain. Despite this, the city’s relatively good economic situation in comparison with the rest of the country has made Luzhkov enormously popular with Muscovites. He was reelected with 88 percent of the vote in 1996.
However, the mayor’s efforts to rid the city of those without residency permits has undermined his popularity with the rest of the country. When Luzhkov announced his candidacy to the 2000 presidential elections and formed the bloc Fatherland-All Russia, supporters of Vladimir Putin were able to organize a negative ad campaign, which quickly marginalized the mayor’s bloc. Following Putin’s electoral victory, Luzhkov moved to defend his political position by declaring his loyalty to the new president. See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; FATHERLAND-ALL RUSSIA; MOSCOW; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH of the White House, the parliament building of the Russian Federation from which Boris Yeltsin organized the resistance to the efforts of conservatives within the CPSU to undo the Gorbachev reforms.
Following the collapse of the coup and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union, a struggle emerged between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the legislature over the course of reform. Luzhkov, owing to his strong support for Yeltsin in the conflict, was made mayor by presidential decree when Popov was forced to resign. The decree was met with opposition within the Moscow City Council, which tried unsuccessfully on two occasions to unseat Luzhkov.
As his predecessor had done, Luzhkov threw his support behind Yeltsin in the confrontation with the Russian parliament. At the height of the conflict following Yeltsin’s September 1993 decree dissolving the legislature, which resulted in an armed standoff, the mayor cut off utilities and
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Luzhkov, Yuri M. (1996). Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears: Reflections of Moscow’s Mayor. Chicago: James M. Martin.
TERRY D. CLARK
LYSENKO, TROFIM DENISOVICH
(1898-1976), agronomist and biologist.
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was born in Karlovka, Ukraine, to a peasant family. He attended the Kiev Agricultural Institute as an extramural student and graduated as doctor of agricultural science in 1925. A disciple of horticulturist Ivan Michurin’s work, Lysenko worked at the Gyandzha Experimental Station between 1925 and 1929 and coined his theory of vernalization in the late 1920s. His vernalization theory described a process where
LYSENKO, TROFIM DENISOVICH
Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko measures the growth of wheat in a collective farm near Odessa, Ukraine. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS winter habit was transformed into spring habit by moistening and chilling the seed.
; During the agricultural crisis of the 1930s, Soviet authorities started supporting Lysenko’s theories. By the mid-1930s Lysenko’s dominance in agricultural sciences was clearly established as he founded agrobiology, a pseudoscience that promised to increase yields rapidly and cheaply. He became president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1938 and director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences in 1940. Lysenko and his followers, Lysenkoites, have long been thought to have had a direct line to the Stalinist terror apparatus as they targeted geneticists that they thought opposed Lysenkoism, most famously noted scientist Nikolai Vavilov.
As Lysenko’s political influence increased, he expressed his views more forcefully. His view of genetics was irrational and based neither on reason nor scientific experimentation. His theory of heredity rejected established principles of genetics, and he believed that he could change the genetic constitution of strains of wheat by controlling the environment. For example, he claimed that wheat plants raised in the appropriate environment produced seeds of rye.
By 1948 education and research in traditional genetics had been completely outlawed in the Soviet Union. The 1948 August Session of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences gave the Ly-senkoites official endorsement for these views, which were said to correspond to Marxist theory. From that moment, and until Josef Stalin’s death, Lysenko was the total autocrat of Soviet biology. His position as Stalin’s henchman in Soviet science has been compared to Andrei Zhdanov’s role in culture during this time of high Stalinism.