Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  During his tenure as metropolitan, two other major compendious works were begun that were completed only after his death. One was the Book of Degrees (Stepennaya kniga), a complete rewriting

  MAKHNO, NESTOR IVANOVICH

  of the Rus chronicles to provide a direct justification for the ascendancy of the Muscovite ruling dynasty from Vladimir I. The other was the Illuminated Compilation (Litsevoi svod), based on the Rus chronicles. Twelve volumes were projected, of which eleven volumes are extant with more than ten thousand miniatures.

  Makary died on December 31, 1563. He was buried the next day in the Uspensky Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin. Despite apparent attempts immediately after his death and in the seventeenth century to raise him to miracle worker (chu-dotvorets) status, Makary was not canonized until 1988. See also: BOOK OF DEGREES; IVAN IV; KAZAN; METROPOLITAN; MUSCOVY; SUDEBNIK OF 1550; TRINITY-ST. SERGIUS MONASTERY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Ci evskij, Dmitrij. (1960). History of Russian Literature: From the Eleventh Century to the End of the Baroque. ’s-Gravenhage: Mouton. Miller, David B. (1967). “The Literary Activities of Metropolitan Macarius: A Study of Muscovite Political Ideology in the Time of Ivan IV.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, New York. Pelenski, Jaroslaw. (1974). Russia and Kazan: Conquest and Imperial Ideology (1438-1560s). The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton.

  DONALD OSTROWSKI

  established a peasant army in southeastern Ukraine and during the Civil War proved himself to be a brilliant and innovative (if unorthodox) commander. Makhno’s forces battled the Central Powers, Ukrainian nationalists, the Whites, and the Reds (although he also periodically collaborated with the latter). Makhno’s Revolutionary Insurgent Army played a decisive role in defeating the Whites in South Russia in 1919 and 1920, utilizing techniques of partisan and guerilla warfare to dramatic effect. The Makhnovists also oversaw an enduringly influential anarchist revolution (the Makhnovshchina) in southern Ukraine, summoning non-party congresses of workers and peasants and exhorting them to organize and govern themselves. In 1920, having refused to integrate his forces with the Red Army and hostile to Bolshevik authoritarianism, Makhno became an outlaw on Soviet territory. In August 1921, Red forces pursued him into Romania. After suffering imprisonment there and in Poland and Danzig, Makhno settled in Paris in 1924. In 1926, he helped create Arshinov’s Organizational Platform of Libertarian Communists, but broke with his former mentor when Arshinov came to terms with Moscow. Thereafter, Makhno devoted himself to writing. In 1934, in poverty and isolation, he died of the tuberculosis he had originally contracted in tsarist prisons, but his name and achievements are revered by anarchists the world over. He is buried in P?re La Chaise Cemetery, Paris. See also: ANARCHISM; CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922

  MAKHNO, NESTOR IVANOVICH

  (1889-1934), leader of an insurgent peasant army in the civil war and hero of the libertarian Left.

  Born in Ukraine of peasant stock in Hulyai-Pole, Yekaterinoslav guberniya, Nestor Makhno (n? Mikhnenko) became an anarchist during the 1905 Revolution. Makhno’s father had died when he was an infant, so he worked as a shepherd from the age of seven and as a metalworker in his teens, attending school only briefly. In 1910, following his arrest two years earlier for killing a police officer, Makhno was condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment because of his youth. Freed in 1917 from a Moscow prison, where he had befriended the anarchist Peter Arshinov, Makhno returned to Hulyai-Pole to chair its soviet and organize revolutionary communes. In 1918, he

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Arshinov, Peter. (1974). History of the Makhnovist Movement. Detroit: Black amp; Red.

  JONATHAN D. SMELE

  MALENKOV, GEORGY MAXIMILYANOVICH

  (1902-1988), prominent Soviet party official.

  Georgy Maximilyanovich Malenkov was born in Orenburg on January 13, 1902. In 1919 he joined the Red Army, where he worked in the political administration at various levels during the Russian civil war. In April 1920, he became a member of the Bolshevik Party, and during the following month he married Valentina Alexeyevna Golubtsova, a worker in the Central Committee (CC) apparatus.

  MALENKOV, GEORGY MAXIMILYANOVICH

  Malenkov’s career during the 1920s was typical of many during that period. He was a ruthless party official without any clear political views. He studied at the Moscow Higher Technical Institute between 1921 and 1925, during which time he was a member of a commission investigating “Trotskyism” among fellow students. In 1925 he became a technical secretary of the Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee.

  During the early 1930s he worked in the Moscow party committee as the head of the section for mass agitation, conducting a purge of opposition members. Between 1934 and 1939 he ran the party organization for the Central Committee and reviewed party documents in preparation for the Great Purge beginning in 1936. Malenkov took an active role in various aspects of this purge, supervising particularly harsh actions in Belarus and Armenia in 1937.

  In 1937 Malenkov was appointed a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (he was promoted to the Presidium in 1938), and in this same year became the deputy to Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD. By 1939 Malenkov was also a member of the party Central Committee (CC), and shortly he became the head of the administration of party cadres and a CC secretary.

  Before the outbreak of the war with Germany, Malenkov became a candidate member of the Politburo. During the war, he supplied planes to the Red Air Force, and he appears to have undertaken his tasks efficiently. Josef Stalin relied on Malenkov increasingly after 1943. In that year Malenkov headed a committee of the Soviet government for the restoration of farms in liberated areas, and after mid-May 1944, he was the deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR (second only to Stalin himself). From March 18, 1946, Malenkov was a member of the ruling Politburo.

  During the ascendancy of Andrei Zhdanov after the war, Malenkov’s career briefly declined. After the exposure of a scandal in the aviation industry, he lost both his deputy chairmanship of the government and his role as CC secretary controlling party personnel, in March and May 1946, respectively. Thanks to the intervention of Lavrenty Beria, however, he was able to recover both positions by August. In 1948 he took over the position of ideological secretary of the CC and was also given responsibility for Soviet agriculture, at that time the most backward sector of the Soviet economy.

  Georgy Malenkov, Soviet prime minister, 1953-1955. COURTESY

  OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  During the late Stalin period, Malenkov once again played a leading role in new purges, including the Leningrad Affair and the exposure of the “Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.” The aging leader entrusted him to present the main report at the Nineteenth Party Congress (the first party congress in thirteen years). With Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, Malenkov became the chairman of the Council of Ministers (prime minister) and the main party secretary. On March 14, however, the latter position was given to Khrushchev.

  Malenkov joined with Khrushchev to overcome a putsch by Beria in 1953, but then a power struggle between the two leaders developed. Malenkov eventually had to make a public confession regarding his failure to revive Soviet agriculture. By

  MALEVICH, KAZIMIR SEVERINOVICH

  February 1955, he was demoted to a deputy chairman of the government and given responsibility over Soviet electric power stations. Malenkov and former old-guard Stalinists Lazar Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov resented Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization speech at the Twentieth Party Congress of February 1956. In 1957 the three engineered a majority vote within the Presidium for Khrushchev’s removal. Khrushchev, however, was able to reverse the vote in a CC plenum, which saw the defeat of the so-called Antiparty Group. On June 29, Malenkov lost his positions in the Presidium and the Central Committee.

  Though he was still relatively young, Malen-kov’s career was effectively over. He became the director of a hydroelectric power station in Ust-Kamengorsk, and subsequently of a therma
l power station in Ekibastuz. In 1961, the Ekibastuz city party committee expelled him from membership, and Malenkov retired on a pension until his death in Moscow on January 14, 1988. He is remembered mainly as a loyal and unprincipled Stalinist with few notable achievements outside of party politics. See also: ANTI-PARTY GROUP; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; LENINGRAD AFFAIR; PURGES, THE GREAT; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Ebon, Martin. (1953). Malenkov: A Biographical Study of Stalin’s Successor. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Radzinsky, Edward. (1996). Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Moscow’s Secret Archives. New York: Doubleday.

  DAVID R. MARPLES

  class. Deviations from that official style were the products of subordinate classes. All art, prior to the rule of the proletariat, therefore, manifested the ideology of some class. But the revolution would bring about the destruction not merely of the bourgeoisie, but of all classes as such. Consequently, the art of the proletarian revolution must be the expression of not merely another style but of absolute, eternal, “supreme” values.

  Constructivism was brought into Soviet avant-guard architecture primarily by Vladimir Tatlin and Malevich. Malevich’s “Arkhitektonica,” Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (the “Tatlin Tower”), and El Lissitsky’s “Prouns” shaped in large measure the conceptualizations of the modernist architects as they sought a means to combine painting, sculpture, and architecture. Tatlin’s stress on utilitarianism was challenged by Malevich’s Suprematism, which decried the emphasis of technology in art and argued that artists must search for “supreme” artistic values that would transform the ideology of the people. Malevich thus contrasted the work of engineers, whose creations exhibited simple transitory values, with aesthetic creativity, which he proclaimed produced supreme values. Malevich warned: “If socialism relies on the infallibility of science and technology, a great disappointment is in store for it because it is not granted to scientists to foresee the ‘course of events’ and to create enduring values” (Malevich, p. 36). His “White on White” carried Suprematist theories to their logical conclusion. With the turn against modern art under Josef Stalin, Malevich lost influence and died in poverty and oblivion. See also: ARCHITECTURE; CONSTRUCTIVISM; FUTURISM.

  MALEVICH, KAZIMIR SEVERINOVICH

  (1878-1935), founder of the Suprematist school of abstract painting.

  Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was initially a follower of Impressionism. He was influenced by Pablo Picasso and Cubism and became a member of the Jack of Diamonds group, whose members were the leading exponents of avant-garde art in pre-World War I Russia. According to the Supre-matists, each economic mode of production generated not only a ruling class but also an official artistic style supported by that dominant social

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Malevich, Kazimir. (1959) The Non-Objective World, tr. Howard Dearstyne. Chicago: P. Theobald. Milner, John. (1996). Kazimir Malevich and the Art of Geometry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  HUGH D. HUDSON JR.

  MALTA SUMMIT

  A summit meeting of U.S. President George W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev took place on December 2-3, 1989, on warships of the two countries anchored at Malta in the Mediterranean. The

  MANDELSHTAM, NADEZHDA YAKOVLEVNA

  meeting, the first between the two leaders, followed the collapse of communist bloc governments in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia (Romania would follow three weeks later). Soviet acceptance of this dramatic change, without intervention or even opposition, dramatically underscored the new outlook in Moscow.

  President Bush, who had been reserved and cautious in his assessment of change in the Soviet Union during most of 1989, now sought to extend encouragement to Gorbachev. Most important was the establishment of a confident relationship and dialogue between the two leaders. No treaties or agreements were signed, but Bush did indicate a number of changes in U.S. economic policy toward the Soviet Union to reflect the new developing relationship. Malta thus marked a step in a process of accelerating change.

  Two weeks after the Malta summit, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze paid an unprecedented courtesy visit to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) headquarters in Brussels. Clearly the Cold War was coming to an end. Indeed, at Malta, Gorbachev declared that “the world is leaving one epoch, the ‘Cold War,’ and entering a new one.”

  Some historians have described the Malta Summit as the last summit of the Cold War; others have seen it as the first summit of the new era. In any case, it occurred at a time of rapid transition and reflected the first time when prospects for future cooperation outweighed continuing competition, although elements of both remained. See also: COLD WAR; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Beschloss, Michael R., and Talbott, Strobe. (1993). At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Garthoff, Raymond L. (1994). The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.

  RAYMOND L. GARTHOFF

  Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelshtam (n?e Khaz-ina) is known primarily for her two books detailing life with her husband, the Modernist poet Osip Mandelshtam, and the years following his death in Stalin’s purges. She grew up in Kiev in a tight-knit, intellectually gifted family, fondly recalled in three biographical sketches. With the onset of revolution and civil war, she enjoyed a bohemian existence as a painter in the artist Alexandra Ekster’s studio.

  In 1922 Nadezhda married Mandelshtam, and the two moved to Moscow and then to Leningrad in 1924. In 1925 her friendship with the poet Anna Akhmatova began. Osip Mandelshtam was arrested in Moscow in 1934 after writing a poem that denounced Josef Stalin. Nadezhda accompanied him into exile in Voronezh until 1937 and in 1938 was present when he was arrested and sent to the gulag where he died. She escaped arrest the same year.

  For the next two decades, Nadezhda Man-delshtam survived by teaching English and moved frequently to avoid official attention. In 1951 she completed a dissertation in linguistics. She also began working on her husband’s rehabilitation and researching his life and fate. Many of his poems survived because she committed them to memory. Her first book of memoirs, Vospominaniia (New York, 1970, translated as Hope Against Hope, 1970), was devoted to her final years with Osip Man-delshtam and to a broader indictment of the Stalinist system that had condemned him. The book, which circulated in the Soviet Union in samizdat, attracted attention and praise from Soviet and Western readers. Her second book, Vtoraia kniga (Paris, 1972, translated as Hope Abandoned, 1974), offended some Russian readers with its opinionated descriptions of various literary figures. Treatments of Nadezhda Mandelshtam’s work have noted her success in achieving a strong and vibrant literary voice of her own even as she transmitted the cultural legacy of a previous generation. See also: AKHMATOVA, ANNA ANDREYEVNA; GULAG; MANDELSHTAM, OSIP EMILIEVICH; PURGES, THE GREAT; SAMIZDAT

  MANDELSHTAM, NADEZHDA YAKOVLEVNA

  (1899-1980), memoirist and preserver of her husband Osip Mandelshtam’s poetic legacy.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Brodsky, Joseph. (1986). “Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980): An Obituary.” In Less Than One: Selected Essays. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Holmgren, Beth. (1993). Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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  MANDELSHTAM, OSIP EMILIEVICH

  Proffer, Carl R. (1987). The Widows of Russia and Other Writings. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.

  JUDITH E. KALB

  MANDELSHTAM, OSIP EMILIEVICH

  (1891-1938), Modernist poet and political martyr.

  One of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets, Osip Mandelshtam died en route to the gulag after writing a poem critical of Josef V. Stalin. Born to a cultured Jewish family in Warsaw, Man-delshtam spent his childhood in St. Petersburg, traveled in Europe, and, in 1909, began to frequ
ent the literary salon of the Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov. In 1911, while enrolled at St. Petersburg University, he joined the Guild of Poets headed by Nikolai Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetsky and subsequently became a leading figure in a new poetic school called Acmeism. His collections Kamen (Stone, 1913), Tristia (1922), and Stikhotvoreniia (Poems, 1928) show a poet steeped in world culture and focused on themes such as language and time, concepts also addressed in his prose works. In 1922 Mandelshtam married Nadezhda Khazina, who later wrote memoirs of their life together.

  Mandelshtam recognized that the Bolshevik takeover in 1917 threatened the cultural values he held dear, and in his poetry and essays of the 1920s he attempted to define the relationship of the poet to the age. Literary prose such as Shum vremeni (The Noise of Time, 1925) and Egipetskaia marka (The Egyptian Stamp, 1928) included autobiographical themes. By the late 1920s, Mandelshtam’s lack of adherence to Soviet norms led to increasing difficulties in getting published. A trip to the Caucasus and Armenia in 1930 provided new inspiration for creativity. But in 1934, after writing a poem critical of Stalin, Mandelshtam was arrested in Moscow and sent to Voronezh for a three-year exile. During this period he wrote Voronezhskie tetradi (Voronezh Notebooks), preserved by his wife. In May 1938, Mandelshtam was arrested once again, sentenced to a Siberian labor camp, and considered a non-person by the Soviet government. He died the same year. In 1956 his rehabilitation began, and in the 1970s a collection of his poetry was published in the Soviet Union. See also: GULAG; MANDELSHTAM, NADEZHDA YAKOV-LEVNA; PURGES, THE GREAT