Encyclopedia of Russian History

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by James Millar


  As a result, the macroeconomic indicators that reflect material resources are not balanced and comparable with the volume and the structure of financial resources. Also, export and import indicators in MPS are presented in a simplified way and differ from the similar indicators used in the balance of payments (SNA concept). Missing in the MPS approach are such indicators as disposable income, savings, and public debt.

  The MPS system, which underwent some changes in the USSR in 1957, remained essentially the same for more than thirty years thereafter until the SNA system was introduced in the statistical practice of the countries in transition following the breakup of the Soviet Union. See also: COMMAND ADMINISTRATIVE ECONOMY; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Belkindas, Misha V., and Kostinsky, Barry L. (1990). “Official Soviet Gross National Product Accounting.” In Measuring Soviet GNP: Problems and Solutions, A Conference Report. Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Intelligence.

  MATRYOSHKA DOLLS

  World Bank. (1992). Statistical Handbook: States of the Former USSR (Studies of Economies in Transformation, 3). Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. (1993). Historically Planned Economies, A Guide to the Data, by Paul Marer, et al. Washington DC: World Bank.

  MISHA V. BELKINDAS

  MATRYOSHKA DOLLS

  The matryoshka, a set of four to eight hollow wooden dolls of graduated size nesting inside each other, is the most familiar item of Russian folk art today and possibly one of the most ancient. Legends abound of similar nesting dolls in Siberia, executed in precious metals, and the rounded female figure was a familiar fertility symbol in pagan Russia. Yet the matryoshka may well be of comparatively recent origin, its form derived from a Japanese prototype that caught the eye of the avant-garde artist Sergei Malyutin during the 1890s. Malyutin’s patroness, Princess Tenisheva, was an active promoter of the folk art revival of this period; he sought out items with appeal for the Russian market that could be made at the crafts school on her estate, Talashkino. It was here that Malyutin designed the first known matryoshka.

  The most ubiquitous matryoshka is the pink-cheeked peasant woman in native sarafan, her head covered with the traditional scarf. Variations soon appeared, however. Nests of dolls with the faces of famous writers, members of artistic circles, military heroes, or members of a family were created during the early twentieth century. A century later, though the original doll is still being produced, matryoshka painters have adapted to the modern market, creating nesting sets of Soviet political leaders, U.S. presidents, Russian tsars, literary figures, and famous Russian portraits. Modern ma-tryoshkas by skilled artists, who often work in acrylic paint, command correspondingly high prices; though folk art in form, in execution they are works of high art.

  Colorfully painted nesting dolls are essential souvenirs from a trip to Russia. PHOTOGRAPH BY SUSAN D. ROCK. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

  MAXIM THE GREEK, ST.

  See also: FOLKLORE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Hilton, Alison. (1995). Russian Folk Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

  PRISCILLA ROOSEVELT

  MATVEYEV, ARTAMON SERGEYEVICH

  (1625-1682), military officer, diplomat, courtier, boyar.

  The son of a non-noble bureaucrat, Artamon Matveyev began his career at the age of thirteen as a court page and companion to the future Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. He soon became colonel of a musketeer regiment and traveled much of Russia and its borderlands on military and diplomatic missions. He helped negotiate the union of Ukraine with Russia in 1654, defended the tsar in the Copper Riots of 1662, and guarded many foreign embassies, including the clerics arriving to judge Patriarch Nikon in 1666 and 1667. By 1669, although still a musketeer colonel, he had become a stolnik (table attendant, a high court rank), namest-nik (honorary governor-general) of Serpukhov, and head of the Ukrainian Chancellery (Malorossysky Prikaz).

  Soon his fortunes rose even higher. After the death of Tsaritsa Maria Miloslavskaya, the tsar is said to have visited Matveyev’s home and met the family’s foster daughter Natalia Naryshkina, whom he married. This made Matveyev the tsar’s de facto father-in-law, traditionally a very powerful position in Muscovite politics. He quickly added leadership of the Department of Foreign Affairs or Posolsky Prikaz (in effect becoming Russia’s prime minister), several other diplomatic or regional departments, and the State Pharmacy to his Ukrainian Chancellery post. He skillfully formulated foreign policy and dealt with governments as diverse as England, Poland, the Vatican, Persia, China, and Bukhara. He also improved Russia’s medical facilities, headed publishing, mining, and industrial ventures for the tsar, and organized the creation of a Western-style court theater.

  Foreign visitors noted his diverse responsibilities. They often referred to him as “factotum,” the man who does everything. They also remarked on his knowledge of and interest in their societies. A patron of education and the arts, he kept musicians in his home, had his son taught Latin, and collected foreign books, clocks, paintings, and furniture. He remained close to the tsar, although he rose slowly through the higher ranks. At the birth of the future Peter the Great in 1672, he was made okol-nichy (majordomo), and in 1674 he received the highest Muscovite court rank, boyar.

  With the sudden death of Tsar Alexei in 1676, things changed. The succession of sickly fourteen-year-old Tsar Fyodor brought the Miloslavsky family back into power. Matveyev immediately began to lose posts, prominence, and respect. During his journey into “honorable exile”-provincial governorship in Siberia-he was convicted of sorcery. He was stripped of rank and possessions and exiled, first to the prison town of Pustozersk and later to Mezen. Tsar Fyodor’s death and Peter’s accession in 1682 brought Matveyev back to Moscow in triumph, but only days later he was killed when pro-Miloslavsky rioters surged through the capital.

  Because of his decades of service, his prominence, fall, and dramatic death, and a collection of autobiographical letters from exile, Matveyev received frequent and generally favorable attention from Russian writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their works ranged from scholarly biographies and articles to poems, plays, and children’s books. He became less visible in the twentieth century, when Soviet historians lost interest in supporters of the old regime. To date there has been only fragmentary treatment of his life in English. See also: ALEXEI MIKHAILOVICH; BOYAR; COPPER RIOTS; NARYSHKINA, NATALIA KIRILLOVNA; NIKON, PATRIARCH; PETER I

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bushkovitch, Paul. (2001). Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

  MARTHA LUBY LAHANA

  MAXIM THE GREEK, ST.

  (c. 1475-1556), Greek monk canonized in the Orthodox Church.

  A learned Greek monk, translator, and writer resident in Muscovy who was imprisoned by Muscovite authorities and never allowed to return

  MAYAKOVSKY, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH

  home, Maxim had great moral and intellectual authority with contemporaries and posterity and was canonized in 1988. Born Michael Trivolis (Triboles) in the Greek city of Arta some twenty years after the Turkish capture of Constantinople, he went to Italy as a young man, where he was in contact with many prominent Renaissance figures. Under the influence of Savonarola he became a monk in the San Marco Dominican Monastery (1502), but two years later he returned to Greece, entering the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos under the monastic name of Maximos, rejecting Roman Catholicism and the humanist world of his youth, and concentrating upon the Eastern Orthodox theological tradition. In 1516 he was sent to Moscow to correct Russian ecclesiastical books. There he fell into disfavor with Grand Prince Vasily and Metropolitan Daniel, the head of the Russian Church, was twice convicted of treason and heresy (1525, 1531), and eventually died in Muscovy without being exonerated or regaining his freedom. During much of this time he translated biblical and Byzantine texts into Russian, and authored original compositions, including critical, historical, liturgical, philo
logical, and exegetical works, demonstrations of his own orthodoxy and innocence, descriptions of the world (he was the first to mention Columbus’s discovery of the New World), explication of the ideals and practice of monasticism, and a great deal else. He instructed Russian pupils in Greek, and inspired the study of lexicography and grammar.

  Despite his official disgrace, Maxim’s voluminous compositions were greatly revered and very influential in Old Russia; his biography and writings have been the subject of thousands of scholarly books and articles. See also: DANIEL, METROPOLITAN; MUSCOVY; MONASTI-CISM; ORTHODOXY; POSSESSORS AND NON-POSSESSORS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Haney, Jack V. (1973). From Italy to Muscovy: The Life and Works of Maxim the Greek Munich: W. Fink. Obolensky, Dimitri. (1981). “Italy, Mount Athos, and Muscovy: the Three Worlds of Maximos the Greek (c. 1470-1556).” Proceedings of the British Academy 67:143-161. Olmsted, Hugh M. (1987). “A Learned Greek Monk in Muscovite Exile: Maksim Grek and the Old Testament Prophets.” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 3:1-73. Sevcenko, Ihor. (1997). “On the Greek Poetic Output of Maksim Grek [revised version].” Byzantinoslavica 78:1-70. Taube, Moshe, and Olmsted, Hugh M. (1988). “Povest’ o Esfiri: The Ostroh Bible and Maksim Grek’s Translation of the Book of Esther.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 11(1/2):100-117.

  HUGH M. OLMSTED

  MAYAKOVSKY, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH

  (1893-1930), poet, playwright.

  Vladimir Mayakovsky was born in Bagdadi, Georgia (later renamed Mayakovsky in his honor). His father’s death of tetanus in 1906 devastated the family emotionally and financially, and the themes of death, abandonment, and infection recurred in many of Mayakovsky’s poems. As a student, Mayakovsky became an ardent revolutionary; he was arrested and served eleven months for his Bolshevik activities in 1909. In 1911 he was accepted into the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, where he met David Burlyuk, who was beginning to gather the Hylaean group of artists and poets: Nikolai and Vladimir Burlyuk, Alexandra Exter, Viktor (Velemir) Khleb-nikov, Alexei Kruchenykh, and Benedikt Livshits. In 1912 the group issued its first manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” the highly charged rhetoric that created a scandalous sensation announcing the arrival of Futurism in the artistic culture of Russia. The poets and artists of Hylaea, Mayakovsky in particular, were associated in the popular press with social disruption, hooliganism, and anarchist politics.

  Mayakovsky was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik revolution; much of his artistic effort was devoted to propaganda for the state. He wrote agitational poems and, combining his considerable artistic skill with his ability to write short, didactic poems, constructed large posters that hung in the windows of the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA). He also wrote and staged at the Moscow State Circus a satirical play, Mystery Bouffe, which skewered bourgeois culture and the church. His most political poems, “150,000,000” (1919) and “Vladimir Ilich Lenin” (1924), became required reading for every Soviet schoolchild and helped create the image of Mayakovsky as a mythic hero of the Soviet Union, a position that Mayakovsky found increasingly untenable in the later 1920s. Mayakovsky remained a relentless foe of bureaucratism and authoritarianism in Soviet society; this

  MEDVEDEV, ROY ALEXANDROVICH

  earned him official resentment and led to restrictions on travel and other privileges. On April 14, 1930, the combined pressures of Soviet control and a series of disastrous love affairs, most notably with Lili Brik, led to Mayakovsky’s suicide in his apartment in Moscow. See also: BOLSHEVISM; CIRCUS; FUTURISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Brown, Edward J. (1973). Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jangfeldt, Bengt. (1976). Majakovskij and Futurism, 1917-1921. Stockholm: Almqvist amp; Wiksell. Markov, Vladimir. (1969). Russian Futurism: A History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Woroszylski, Wiktor. (1970). The Life of Mayakovsky. New York: Orion Press.

  MARK KONECNY

  MAZEPA, HETMAN IVAN STEPANOVICH

  (c. 1639-1709), Hetman (Cossack military leader) of Left-Bank Ukraine, 1687 to 1708.

  Hetman Ivan Mazepa was raised in Poland and educated in the West, returning to Ukraine in 1663 to enter the service of the Polish-sponsored hetman Peter Doroshenko during the turbulent period of Ukrainian history known as the Ruin. In 1674 he transferred his allegiance to the Moscow-appointed hetman Ivan Samoilovich, whom he replaced when the latter fell from favor during Russia’s campaign against the Crimean Tatars in 1687. He owed his promotion partly to the patronage of Prince Vasily Golitsyn.

  In the 1680s to 1700s Mazepa remained loyal to Russia. In 1700 he became one of the first recipients of Peter I’s new Order of St. Andrew. But he did not regard himself as permanently bound, as he governed in princely style and conducted a semi-independent foreign policy. In 1704, during the Great Northern War against Sweden, he occupied part of right-bank (Polish) Ukraine with Peter I’s permission. However, Mazepa was under constant pressure at home to defend Cossack rights and to allay fears about Cossack regiments being reorganized on European lines. The final straw seems to have been Peter’s failure to defend Ukraine against a possible attack by the Swedish-sponsored king of Poland, Stanislas Leszczynski. Mazepa clearly believed that his obligations to the tsar were at an end: “We, having voluntarily acquiesced to the authority of his Tsarist Majesty for the sake of the unified Eastern Faith, now, being a free people, wish to withdraw, with expressions of our gratitude for the tsar’s protection and not wishing to raise our hands in the shedding of Christian blood” (Subtelny).

  At some point in 1707 or 1708, Mazepa made a secret agreement to help Charles XII of Sweden invade Russia and to establish a Swedish protectorate over Ukraine. In October 1708 he fled to Charles’s side. Alexander Menshikov responded by storming and burning the hetman’s headquarters at Baturin, a drastic action which deprived both Mazepa and the Swedes of men and supplies. Mazepa brought only 3,000 to 4,000 men to aid the Swedes, who were defeated at Poltava in July 1709. Mazepa fled with Charles to Turkey and died there.

  Peter I regarded the defection of his “loyal subject” as a personal insult. Mazepa was “a new Judas,” whom he (unjustly) accused of plans to hand over Orthodox monasteries and churches to the Catholics and Uniates. In his absence, Mazepa was excommunicated, and his effigy was stripped of the St. Andrew cross and hanged. He remains a controversial figure in Ukraine, while elsewhere he is best known from romanticized versions of his life in fiction and opera. See also: COSSACKS; MENSHIKOV, ALEXANDER DANILO-VICH; PETER I

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Babinsky, Hubert. (1974). The Mazepa Legend in European Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press. Mackiv, Theodore. (1983). English Reports on Mazepa, 1687-1709. New York: Ukrainian Historical Association. Subtelny, Orest. (1978). “Mazepa, Peter I, and the Question of Treason.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 2:158-184.

  LINDSEY HUGHES

  MEDVEDEV, ROY ALEXANDROVICH

  (b. 1925), dissident historian.

  Roy Medvedev is renowned as the author of the monumental dissident history of Stalinism, Let

  MEDVEDEV, SYLVESTER AGAFONIKOVICH

  History Judge, first published in English in 1972. The son of a prominent Soviet Marxist scholar who was murdered by Stalin in the 1930s, Medvedev pursued a teaching career before becoming a researcher in the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Josef V. Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress (1956) spurred his interest in the Soviet past. Medvedev joined the Communist Party at this time. The further repudiation of Stalin at the Twenty-Second Congress (1961) impelled him to begin writing his anti-Stalinist tome, which was completed in 1968. Fearful that Stalin would be rehabilitated and repression renewed, Medvedev decided to publish it abroad. Let History Judge reflected the dissident thinking that emerged in the 1960s among intellectuals who, like Medvedev, sought a reformed, democratic socialism and a return to Leninism. Meanwhile, his opposition to any rehabilitation of Stalin led to h
is expulsion from the party. Medvedev was often subject to house arrest and KGB harassment under Leonid Brezhnev, but he managed to publish abroad numerous critical writings on Soviet history and politics. The liberalization under Mikhail Gorbachev allowed publication of a new edition of Let History Judge and Medvedev’s return to the party and political life. The demise of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party allowed him to found a new socialist party and continue as a prolific, critical writer on Russian political life. See also: DE-STALINIZATION; DISSIDENT MOVEMENT

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Medvedev, Roy. (1972). Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, ed. David Joravsky, tr. Colleen Taylor. London: Macmillan. Medvedev, Roy. (1989). Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, rev. and expanded edition, ed. and tr. George Shriver. New York: Oxford University Press.

  ROGER D. MARKWICK

  MEDVEDEV, SYLVESTER AGAFONIKOVICH

  (1641-1691), author, poet, and polemicist.

  Simeon Agafonikovich Medvedev (monastic name: Sylvester) began his career as a secretary (podyachy) in one of the Muscovite chancelleries. In that capacity, he participated in diplomatic missions, until in the early 1670s he became a monk. A student of Simeon Polotsky, he acted as his teacher’s secretary and editor, and acquired connections in the court of Fyodor Alexeyevich (r. 1676-1682). After Polotsky’s death, he assumed the mantle of his teacher as the court poet, first of Fyodor, and then of Sofia Alexeyevna (regent, 1682-1689). After 1678, he also worked as editor (spravshchik) in the Printing Office. During the 1680s, he was occupied with three main activities: working in the Printing Office, authoring polemics on the moment of tran-substantiation (Eucharist conflict), and teaching in a school in the Zaikonospassky monastery. He repeatedly urged Sophia Alexeyevna to establish an Academy in Moscow, based on a plan (privilegia) that Polotsky may well have drawn up. When such an Academy was established in 1685 (the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy), it was the Greek Ioannikios and Sophronios Leichoudes, and not Medvedev, who were chosen to head it. This, together with the Eucharist conflict, created enormous animosity between Sylvester and the Greek teachers. Patriarch of Moscow Joakim (in office 1672-1690) gradually but systematically undermined Medvedev, a monk who refused to obey him in the Eucharist conflict. While Sofia was in power, Medvedev felt well protected. After Peter I’s coup in August 1689, Medvedev fled Moscow. He was arrested, brought to the Trinity St. Sergius Monastery, tortured, and obliged to sign a confession renouncing his previous errors regarding the Eucharist in 1690. Joakim’s victory was complete. After a year of detention, Sylvester was also accused as a collaborator in a conspiracy against Peter the Great, Joakim, and their supporters. He was condemned to death and beheaded in 1691. Author of several polemical works on the transub-stantiation moment, he also composed orations, poetry, and panegyrics. To him are also attributed works on Russian bibliography and an account of the musketeer rebellion of 1682. See also: FYODOR ALEXEYEVICH; JOAKIM, PATRIARCH; ORTHODOXY; SLAVO-GRECO-LATIN ACADEMY

 

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