Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  With vast energy and unscrupulous methods, Nechayev involved more than one hundred people in his conspiracy. Its only notable achievement, however, was the murder of Ivan Ivanov, who had tried to opt out. Nechayev and four others lured Ivanov to a grotto on the grounds of the Petrov Agricultural Academy in Moscow, where they murdered him on November 21, 1869. Nechayev escaped to Switzerland and remained at large until arrested by Swiss authorities in August 1872. They extradited him to Russia, where he was tried for Ivanov’s murder and imprisoned in 1873. Nechayev died in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1882.

  Some historians have presented Nechayev as an extremist who harmed his cause, while others have studied him as a clinical case. Early Soviet histori1032

  NEMCHINOV, VASILY SERGEYEVICH

  ans admired him as a Bolshevik type. In the period of glasnost and after, Russian writers saw in Nechayev a forerunner of Stalin and other pathologically destructive dictators. See also: BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL ALEXANDROVICH; DOS-TOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; HERZEN, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH; TERRORISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Avrich, Paul. (1974). Bakunin and Nechaev. London: Freedom Press. Pomper, Philip. (1979). Sergei Nechaev. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Prawdin, Michael [Charol, M.]. (1961). The Unmentionable Nechaev. New York: Roy Publishers. Venturi, Franco. (1960). Roots of Revolution. New York: Knopf.

  PHILIP POMPER

  NEKRASOV, NIKOLAI ALEXEYEVICH

  (1821-1878), one of Russia’s most famous poets.

  Painfully aware of the injustice of serfdom, Nikolai Nekrasov (the “master poet of the peasant masses”) was the first poet to make the “People” (narod) the focal point of his poetry-especially the downtrodden, who became the symbol of national suffering and exploitation. In one of his masterpieces, the satiric folk epic Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia? (written between 1873 and 1877), seven peasants try endlessly to guess the answer to the question in the title. Nekrasov also served for thirty years as editor of Sovremenik (The Contemporary), a journal he bought in 1847. Ivan Tur-genev, Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky, and Fyodor Dostoevsky gladly sent their writings to him, and soon Nekrasov became a leading intellectual figure of the time. Censorship was at its height at the beginning of his career, intensified by the French Revolution of 1848 and later the Crimean War (1854-1856), and Nekrasov was only able to write freely after the death of Nicholas I and the accession of the liberal Alexander II.

  The decade from 1855 to 1865 was one of the bright periods in Russian literature. Serfdom was abolished (1861), Sovremenik’s readership steadily increased, and Nekrasov published some of his finest poems, including “The Peasant Children,” “Orina, the Mother of a Soldier,” “The Gossips,” “The Peddlers,” and “The Railway.” Some contemporaries criticized Nekrasov for his didacticism and prosiness. The enthusiastic response of radical revolutionaries to his poetry confirmed their suspicion that he was primarily a propagandist. But Nekrasov, as he wrote to Leo Tolstoy, believed that the role of a writer was to be a “teacher” and a “representative for the humble and voiceless.”

  Nekrasov’s empathy for the poor and oppressed stemmed from his life experiences. He was the son of a noble family that had lost its wealth and land. His father, an officer in the army, had eloped with the daughter of a Polish aristocrat, inducing her to give up her wealth. The couple settled in Yaroslav Province on the Volga River, where the young Nekrasov could hear and see convicts pass on their way to Siberia. His father, who had become the local police chief, often took Nekrasov with him on his rounds, during which the boy heard the condescending way he spoke to peasants and witnessed the cruel corporal punishments he inflicted on them. When Nekrasov was seventeen, his father sent him to St. Petersburg to join the army, cutting off his funds when he disobeyed and tried to enter the university instead. It took the poet three years of near-starvation before he could make enough money from his writing to survive. See also: GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE; POPULISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Birkenmayer, Sigmund S. (1968). Nikolaj Nekrasov: His Life and Poetic Art. Paris: Mouton. Kates, J. (1999). In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press. Peppard, Murray B. (1967). Nikolai Nekrasov. New York: Twayne. Smith, Vassar W. (1996). Lermontov’s Legacy: Selected Poems of Eight Great Russian Poets, with Parallel Texts in English Verse Translation. Palo Alto, CA: Zapad Press.

  JOHANNA GRANVILLE

  NEMCHINOV, VASILY SERGEYEVICH

  (1894-1964), Soviet statistician, mathematical economist, and reformer.

  Though originally trained as a statistician, Nemchinov became one of the most versatile and productive members of the Soviet economics es1033

  NEMTSOV, BORIS IVANOVICH

  tablishment. During the early period of his career, his specialty was agricultural economics and statistics, on which he published a number of important theoretical works. He developed methods for measuring livestock herds and grain harvests from aerial observations, which were intended to remove human error but led ironically to the scandalous exaggeration of Soviet grain harvests. In 1940 he became director of the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy in Moscow. He was elected academician of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences in 1940, and of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1946.

  Nemchinov was often in political trouble. In 1948, in the struggle with Trofim Lysenko over genetics, he harbored a number of modern geneticists in the Timiryazev Academy and defended them against the Lysenko forces. As a result, he was forced out as Academy director and was even removed from his position in the statistics department. He went home to await arrest, but the Soviet Academy of Sciences stood by him, and he was appointed chairman of a new Council on Productive Forces. He remained an important figure in the Academy, holding, for example, the position of academician-secretary of the department of economic, philosophical, and legal sciences from 1954 to 1958.

  The final phase of his career centered on the introduction of mathematical methods into Soviet economics. In 1958, he organized in the Academy of Sciences the first laboratory devoted to the application of mathematical methods in economics, which later became the Central Economic-Mathematical Institute. He was the driving force in setting up the first conference on mathematical methods in economic research and planning in 1960. He headed the scientific council on the use of mathematical methods and computer technology in economic research and planning in the Academy and organized the faculty of mathematical methods of analysis of the economy at Moscow State University. His role in developing linear programming methods and economic models was rewarded posthumously in 1965 by the conferral of the Lenin Prize. See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; LYSENKO, TROFIM DENISOVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Nemchinov, Vasilii. (1964). Use of Mathematics in Economics. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.

  ROBERT W. CAMPBELL

  NEMTSOV, BORIS IVANOVICH

  (b. 1959), prominent liberal politician and leader of the Union of Right Forces.

  Born in Sochi, Boris Ivanovich Nemtsov received a doctorate in physics in 1990. From 1990 to 1993 he was a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, serving on the Council for Legislative Affairs. In 1991 President Boris Yeltsin made him the governor of Nizhny Novgorod.

  Nemtsov quickly moved to transform the province into a cutting-edge experiment in free-market economics. Obtaining a license to open a business in post-communist Russia plunged would-be entrepreneurs into a nightmare of bureaucratic corruption. Nemtsov made it possible to register new businesses by mail, and allowed the project to go forward if the petitioner received no answer within a reasonable amount of time. Equally innovative in agricultural affairs, Nemtsov enabled members of collective farms to acquire individual plots, and he introduced tax breaks for struggling businesses. To deal with the inefficient Soviet practice whereby industrial enterprises had to provide housing and other social services for employees, the new governor encouraged companies to raise wages instead so that their workers could afford to pay for rent
and utilities. These policies and Nemtsov himself proved immensely popular, and he was elected governor outright in 1995, receiving 60 percent of the vote. Nemtsov was so popular, in fact, that the Yeltsin camp of reformers briefly considered running him for president in 1996 against the communist Gennady Zyuganov. Nothing came of this, but in 1997, after Yeltsin’s reelection, Nemtsov reluctantly accepted the office of first deputy prime minister.

  In Moscow Nemtsov and his colleagues launched a program of economic “shock therapy.” The new deputy minister was charged with making bidding for government contracts more open and competitive, forcing railroads and electricity suppliers to cut their prices, reducing household utility rates by 30 percent, and overhauling the Pension and Securities Insurance Fund. Little wonder Nemtsov called his job “politically suicidal” (Aron, 2000, p. 367).

  Nemtsov began by making all government contracts valued at more than 900 million rubles, including military contracts, subject to competitive bidding. He then plunged into the state’s sale of 25 percent of Svyazinvest, the national telecom1034

  NENETS

  munications enterprise. Nemtsov publicly declared that the sale would be a national test of the government’s ability to take on the notorious “oligarchs” who had looted many of Russia’s assets in the years after communism.

  The losers in the bidding for Svyazinvest used their media outlets to open a blistering campaign against the government, but more serious was a sharp drop in global oil prices, a vital source of government income. Simultaneously a financial crisis that had begun in Asia spread to Russia, causing investors to flee from emerging market economies. By the spring of 1998 Russia was on the verge of economic collapse, and in March Yeltsin dismissed his entire cabinet, including Nemtsov. The following year Nemtsov was elected to the Duma of the Russian Federation. See also: BUREAUCRACY, ECONOMIC; KIRIYENKO, SERGEI VLADILENOVICH; PRIVATIZATION; SHOCK THERAPY; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH A Nenets woman and her two children from Antipayuta settlement, northern Russia. © JACQUES LANGEVIN/CORBIS SYGMA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Aron, Leon. (2000). Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life. London: HarperCollins. Talbott, Strobe. (2002). The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy. New York: Random House.

  HUGH PHILLIPS

  NENETS

  The Nenets are the most numerous of Russia’s northern peoples, numbering about 35,000, and one of the most northerly. Their homelands stretch along the Arctic coast, from northeastern Europe to the Taymyr Peninsula. Most Nenets are concentrated in the Nenets Autonomous District and the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District. Much of their territory is tundra; and their economy, based on large-scale reindeer pastoralism, has been the main adaptation to this harsh environment. The Nenets language belongs to the Samoyedic branch of the Uralic languages. Language retention among Nenets is higher than among most other northern peoples, due to the remoteness of their settlements and their continuing nomadism.

  Western Nenets have a long history of contact with Russians, some paying tribute to Novgorod by the thirteenth century, and to the Tatars shortly thereafter. As Russians began to colonize Siberia in the mid-seventeenth century they met occasional fierce resistance from Nenets groups. They also incorporated Nenets into state-building projects, resettling some to Novaya Zemlya in the nineteenth century, in an effort to ensure sovereignty over those islands.

  The Soviets began to establish reindeer-herding collective farms in Nenets territory in 1929. Repression of wealthy herders followed, as did the confiscation of their reindeer and the general seden-tarization of children, elderly, and some women. Nenets opposed such moves in several uprisings, which the Soviets quelled, then covered up. However, given the minimal prospects for developing this part of the Arctic, the Soviets generally encouraged the continuation of traditional Nenets activities.

  Nenets homelands are particularly rich in oil and gas deposits. As technology improved by the latter twentieth century, making exploitation of these resources viable even given the harsh Arctic clime, development ensued. The greatest challenges for the Nenets became the construction of gas wells and pipelines across their reindeer pastures. Reindeer herds at the beginning of the twenty-first century exceeded pasture carrying capacity, and pasture destruction due to hydrocarbon development has exacerbated this problem. Development also encouraged massive in-migration into Nenets

  1035

  NEOCLASSICISM

  homelands by non-Nenets peoples. In post-Soviet years, these gas-rich areas experienced less out-migration than other northern areas.

  Since the demise of the Soviet Union, Nenets have actively pursued their rights, creating regional Nenets organizations for this purpose. Reindeer-herding leaders have established ties with herders in Finland, Sweden, and Norway to pursue complementary agendas of economic development and environmental protection. See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; NORTHERN PEOPLES; SIBERIA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Golovnev, Andrei V., and Osherenko, Gail. (1999). Siberian Survival: The Nenets and Their Story. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Krupnik, Igor. (1993). Arctic Adaptations: Native Whalers and Reindeer Herders of Northern Eurasia. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

  GAIL A. FONDAHL

  NEOCLASSICISM

  Neoclassicism is often termed simply classicism in Russia as, unlike those European countries which had experienced the Renaissance, Russia was exploring the classical vocabulary of ancient Greece and Rome for the first time. Classical motifs had appeared in Russia in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries but it was not until the 1760s that a coherent classical revival emerged, fueled by the work of scholars such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose publications were generating a more comprehensive understanding of the forms and functions of classical art. The effect of this growing veneration for the noble grandeur of classical forms is evident in the Marble Palace (1768-1785) in St. Petersburg by Antonio Rinaldi, in which the flamboyant exuberance of the Baroque is partially displaced by a more dignified restraint. Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe also applied neoclassical principles in his design for the Academy of Arts (1765-1789), itself a prime conduit of European artistic debates. The low dome, rusticated basement, and giant order of columns and pilasters serve as a visual reminder of the classical ideal to which the Academy’s students were expected to aspire. During Catherine II’s reign, neoclassicism flourished in the private sphere, notably in the work that the Scottish architect Charles Cameron undertook at Tsarskoye Selo after his arrival in Russia in 1779. Cameron, who greatly admired the studies of the antique by Andrea Palladio and Charles-Louis Cl?risseau and had himself published drawings of Roman baths, decorated his interiors at Tsarskoye Selo with glass or ceramic columns and molded plaster reliefs inspired by recently-discovered classical sites. Cameron went on to work for Catherine’s son Paul at Pavlovsk, where his Temple of Friendship (1780-1782) in the park correctly deployed the Greek Doric order for the first time in Russia. The classical revival was also gathering momentum in the work of the Italian architects Vincenzo Brenna and Giacomo Quarenghi, who had worked with the great neoclassical artist Anton Raphael Mengs in Rome. The Hermitage Theater (1783-1787), one of Quarenghi’s masterpieces, is articulated with giant engaged Corinthian columns, niches, and statuary, while the great curved form of the auditorium is visible from the outside.

  Russian as well as foreign architects were working in the neoclassical style. Vasily Bazhenov, who had studied abroad as one of the first two recipients of a travel scholorship from the Academy of Arts, designed an enormous new palace complex for the Moscow Kremlin in 1768. While never realized for financial reasons, it would have applied the language of classicism on a monumental scale. His contemporary Matvei Kazakov never studied abroad, as Bazhenov had done, but brought Moscow neoclassicism to its apogee in the Senate in the Kremlin (1776-1787). Like its near contemporary in London, William Chambers’s Somerset House, the Senate building uses the authority of classical fo
rms to signify power and public purpose.

  Under Alexander I, neoclassicism, also known in this period as the Alexandrian or Empire style, became increasingly prominent in the public domain. Designed by the serf-architect Andrei Voronikhin, the Mining Institute (1806-1811) in St. Petersburg included a twelve-column Doric portico and pediment based on the Temple of Poseidon at Paestum, while Thomas de Thomon reconstructed the Stock Exchange (1805-1810) as a Greek temple. The most ambitious project was Adrian Zakharov’s new Admiralty (1806-1823), in which strong geometric masses and classical ornamentation coexist with specifically Russian refer1036

  NERCHINSK, TREATY OF

  ences. The great central pavilion is decorated with free-standing and low-relief sculptures and an open colonnade, and yet is topped by a golden spire which recalls that of the old Admiralty, while the frieze over the portal depicts Neptune presenting a trident to Peter the Great. These allegorical and structural references to the Russian past result in a distinctly national interpretation of the neoclassical style.