Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  During the fourteenth century local officials played a greater role in the city’s governance and administration. Tensions between them and their princes developed as disputes arose over the princes’ demands for tribute payments and control of territories in Novgorod’s northern empire, including the North Dvina land, which Grand Prince Vasily I (r. 1389-1425) unsuccessfully tried to seize in 1397. The conflicts between Novgorod and Moscow reached critical proportions in the fifteenth century. Novgorod occasionally, in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, turned to Lithuania for a prince and resisted making tribute payments to Moscow. In 1456 Grand Prince Vasily II (r. 1425-1462) defeated Novgorod militarily. The ensuing Treaty of Yazhelbitsy curtailed Novgorod’s autonomy, particularly in foreign affairs. When Novgorod nevertheless sought closer relations with Lithuania in 1470-1471, Grand Prince Ivan III defeated Novgorod at the Battle of Shelon (1471). In 1478 he removed the symbolic veche bell, replaced Novgorod’s local officials with his own governors, and effectively annexed Novgorod to Muscovy.

  COMMERCE

  Novgorod’s political importance derived from its commercial strength. Its location on the Volkhov River, which flowed northward into Lake Ladoga, gave it access through the Baltic Sea to Scandinavia

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  and northern Europe. It thus became the northern Rus terminus of the route “from the Varangians to the Greeks,” which followed the Dnieper River to Kiev and beyond to the Black Sea and Byzantium. Novgorod was also linked by waterways and portages to the Volga River, the route to Bulgar on the Volga, Khazaria, the Caspian Sea, and the Muslim East.

  Novgorod’s commerce was the main source of silver for the Russian lands. In the tenth century, silver dirhams were imported from the Muslim East. Some were reexported to the Baltic region; others circulated in the lands of Rus. From the eleventh century, when the Islamic silver coins were no longer available, Novgorod imported silver from its European trading partners. In addition, Novgorod imported European woolen cloth, weapons, metals, pottery, alcoholic beverages, and salt. From the east and Byzantium it imported silks and spices, gems and jewelry, and glassware and ceramic pottery.

  Novgorod not only functioned as a transit center, reexporting imported goods; it also traded its own goods, chiefly wax, honey, and fur. By the end of the twelfth century Novgorod extended its authority over a vast northern empire stretching to the White Sea and to the Ural Mountains. It collected tribute in fur from the region’s Finno-Ugric populations; its merchants traded with them as well. By these means it secured a supply of luxury fur pelts for export. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it also exported large quantities of squirrel pelts.

  During the tenth and eleventh centuries Novgorod’s main European trading partners were Scandinavians. By the twelfth century they had established their own trading complex around the Church of St. Olaf on the market side of the city. From the twelfth century, German merchants, who established their own trading depot at Peterhof, were successfully competing with the Scandinavians for Novgorod’s trade. In the 1130s Prince Vsevolod transferred control over weights and measures-the fees collected for weighing and measuring goods that were sold in the marketplace- and judicial authority over trade disputes to Novgorod’s bishop, the wax merchants’ association, which was associated with the Church of St. John, and the tysyatsky.

  Novgorod’s commerce survived the invasion of the Mongols, who encouraged the transport of imported and domestic goods as tribute and as commercial commodities down the Volga River to their capital at Sarai. Although disputes led to occasional interruptions in Novgorod’s trade with the Hansa, as in 1388 to 1392 and in 1443 to 1448, it persisted until 1494, when Grand Prince Ivan III closed Peterhof.

  SOCIETY AND CULTURE

  Novgorod was one of the largest cities in the lands of Rus. In the twelfth century it covered an area of over one thousand acres. With the exception of the area containing the Cathedral of St. Sophia, which was set within a citadel from the mid-eleventh century, Novgorod was an open city until the late fourteenth century or early fifteenth century, when a town wall was built. The Volkhov River divided the city into two halves, the Sophia side on the west bank and the market side on the east. It was further subdivided into five boroughs (kontsy) and streets.

  Novgorod’s population in the early eleventh century is estimated to have been between ten and fifteen thousand and to have doubled by the early thirteenth century. Estimates for the fifteenth century range from twenty-five to fifty thousand. The wealthiest and most politically active and influential strata in Novgorod’s society were the boyars and great merchants. Lower strata included merchants of more moderate means, a diverse range of artisans and craftsmen, unskilled workers, and slaves. Clergy also dwelled in and near the city. Peasants occupied rural villages in the countryside subject to Novgorod.

  Civil strife repeatedly occurred within the city. In the extreme, riots broke out, and victims were thrown off the bridge into the Volkhov River. But more commonly, order was maintained by the combined princely-local administration that regulated business and adjudicated legal disputes. The populace relied on formal documentation issued by city officials for business transactions, property sales and donations, wills, and other legal actions. Birchbark charters, unearthed in archaeological excavations, attest that it was common for Nov-gorodians to communicate about daily personal, household, and business activities in writing. The bishops’ court also was a center of chronicle writing.

  The urban population dwelled in a wooden city. Roads and walkways were constructed from split logs. Urban estates owned by boyars and wealthy merchants lined the roads. While they dwelled in

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  the central residential buildings on the estates, shopkeepers, craftsmen, and other dependents lived and worked in smaller houses in the courts, which also included nonresidential buildings and were surrounded by wooden fences. Although the city boasted a drainage system, the accumulation of refuse required repeated repaving of the roads; frequent fires similarly required the reconstruction of buildings. Many of the town’s craftsmen were correspondingly engaged in logging, carpentry, and other trades involving wood.

  Some buildings, especially churches, were of masonry construction. The Cathedral of St. Sophia, built in 1045-1050 from undressed stone set in pink-colored mortar and adorned with five domes, was the first such structure built in Novgorod. Sponsored by Prince Vladimir Yaroslavich, it became the bishop’s cathedral, the centerpiece of the Sophia side of the city. From the beginning of the twelfth century, princes, bishops, and wealthy bo-yars and merchants were patrons of dozens of masonry churches. Generally smaller than the Cathedral of St. Sophia, they were located on both sides of the river and also in monasteries outside the city. Novgorodian and visiting artists and artisans designed and built these churches and also painted icons and frescoes that decorated their interiors. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they had developed distinctive Novgorodian schools of architecture and icon painting.

  The boyars and wealthy merchants of the city also owned landed estates outside the city. Although women generally did not participate in public and political affairs, they did own and manage property, including real estate. Among the best known of them was Marfa Boretskaya, who was one of the wealthiest individuals in Novgorod on the eve of its loss of independence. On those provincial estates, peasants and nonagricultural workers engaged in farming, animal husbandry, fishing, hunting, iron and salt manufacture, beekeeping, and related activities. Although it was not uncommon for the region’s unfavorable agricultural conditions to produce poor harvests, which occasionally caused famine conditions, the produce from these estates was usually not only sufficient to feed and supply the population of the city and its hinterlands, but was cycled into the city’s commercial network. After Ivan III subjugated Novgorod, he confiscated the landed estates and arrested or exiled the boyars and merchants who had owned them. He
seized landed properties belonging to the archbishop and monasteries as well. See also: BIRCHBARK CHARTERS; KIEVAN RUS; NOVGOROD, ARCHBISHIOP OF; NOVGOROD JUDICIAL CHARTER; POSADNIK; ROUTE TO GREEKS; RURIKID DYNASTY; VIKINGS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Birnbaum, Henrik. (1981). Lord Novgorod the Great: Essays in the History and Culture of a Medieval City-State, Part I: Historical Background. Columbus, OH: Slavica. Dejevsky, N. J. (1977). “Novgorod: The Origins of a Russian Town.” In European Towns: Their Archaeology and Early History, ed. M. W. Barley. London: Council for British Archaeology by Academic Press. Karger, Mikhail K. (1975). Novgorod: Architectural Monuments, 11th-17th Centuries. Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers. Langer, Lawrence N. (1976). “The Medieval Russian Town.” In The City in Russian History, ed. Michael Hamm. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Michell, Robert and Forbes, Nevill, trs. (1914). The Chronicle of Novgorod 1016-1471.London: Royal Historical Society. Raba, Joel. (1967). “Novgorod in the Fifteenth Century: A Re-examination.” Canadian Slavic Studies 1:348-364. Thompson, Michael W. (1967). Novgorod the Great. New York: Praeger.

  JANET MARTIN

  NOVIKOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH

  (1744-1818), writer, journalist, satirist, publisher, and social worker.

  Nikolai Ivanovich Novikov was a prominent writer, journalist, publisher, and social worker who began the vogue of the satirical magazine. Catherine II’s efforts to proliferate ideas of the Enlightenment had injected new vigor in Russian writers in the early 1760s. Hoping to demonstrate to the West that Russia was not a despotic state, she established a “commission for the compilation of a new code of laws” in 1767 and published “instructions” for the commission in major European languages-a treatise entitled Nakaz dlya komissii po sochineniyu novogo ulozheniya. She also began the publication in early 1769 of a satirical weekly modeled on the English Spectator entitled All Sorts and Sundries (Vsyakaya vsyachina) and urged intellectuals to follow her example. For a brief period, all editors were freed from preliminary censorship.

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  An enthusiastic believer in the Enlightenment, Nikolai Novikov accepted the challenge and published a succession of successful journals-Truten (The Drone, 1769-1770), Pustomelya (The Tattler) in 1770, Zhivopisets (The Painter) in 1772, and others. Novikov became a pioneer in the journalistic movement in the 1770s and 1780s, and the works of prose appearing in his journals amounted to both a new literary phenomenon for Russian culture and a new form for the expression of public opinion. He took Catherine’s “instructions” seriously and cultivated works that delved deeply into questions of political life and social phenomena that formerly lay within the sole jurisdiction of the tsarist bureaucracy-topics that could be considered before only in secret and with official approval. In addition to editing and publishing four periodicals and a historical dictionary, The Library of Old Russian Authors (1772-1775) in thirty volumes, Novikov also took over the Moscow University Press in 1778. His publishing houses operated first in St. Petersburg and then in Moscow, offering a prodigious quantity of books designed to spread Enlightenment ideas at a modest price. Novikov dedicated himself and his fortune to the advancement of elementary education as well, publishing textbooks and even the first Russian magazine for children.

  Novikov can be viewed as a tragic figure in Russian history. Abruptly in 1774 Catherine II blocked publication of his journals because of their sharp attacks on serious social injustice. By imperial order she stopped further books from being produced. In 1791 she closed his printing presses. Regarding education as her own bailiwick, she was probably irked by Novikov’s successful activities. Novikov’s association with the Freemasons also alienated her. A middle-of-the-road theorist rather than a purist, Novikov was sometimes caught in a paradox between his keen appreciation of European Enlightenment and his high regard for the ancient Russian virtues. Freemasonry seemed to offer a way out of the paradox to a firm moral standpoint.

  Catherine II, however, had always opposed secret societies, which had been outlawed in 1782 (although Freemasonry had been exempted). Her predecessor Peter III, whom she had skillfully dethroned, had been favorably disposed towards Freemasonry. Equally, her political rival and personal enemy, the Grand Duke Paul, was a prominent Freemason. Further, since the break with England, Russian Freemasonry had come under the influence of German Freemasonry, of which Frederick the Great, the archenemy of Catherine, was a dominant figure. To Catherine, it must have seemed that everyone she disliked intensely was a Freemason.

  Novikov was arrested but never tried and was sentenced by imperial decree to detention in the fortress of Schl?sselburg for fifteen years. He was released when Paul became emperor in 1796, but retired from public life in disillusionment to study mysticism. He never could engage fully in Moscow’s literary world again. See also: CATHERINE II; ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF; JOURNALISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Jones, W. Gareth. (1984). Nikolay Novikov, Enlightener of Russia. New York: Cambridge University Press. Levitt, Marcus C. (1995). Early Modern Russian Writers: Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Detroit: Gale Research.

  JOHANNA GRANVILLE

  NOVOCHERKASSK UPRISING

  On June 1, 1962, in response to a sharp increase in the price of butter and meat, a strike erupted at the Novocherkassk Electric-Locomotive Works, which employed 13,000 workers. The stoppage immediately spread to neighboring industrial enterprises. Efforts of the local authorities to halt the strike proved fruitless. So alarmed was the central government headed by Nikita Khrushchev that six of the top party leaders were sent to deal with the situation. Although a negotiated settlement was not ruled out, several thousand troops, as well as tank units, were deployed.

  The following day, thousands of workers marched into town to present their demands for price rollbacks and wage increases. During the confrontation between the strikers and the government forces, shooting broke out that resulted in twenty-four deaths and several score serious injuries. Hundreds were arrested, and a series of trials followed. Seven strikers were condemned to death, and many more were imprisoned for long terms. The regime effectively covered up what had occurred. Outside the USSR, little was known about the events until

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  Alexander Solzhenitsyn devoted several pages to them in The Gulag Archipelago. In the last years of the Gorbachev era, information was published in Soviet media for the first time.

  The Novocherkassk events, which became known as “Bloody Saturday,” contributed to the demise of the USSR. Never daring to raise food prices again, the leadership was compelled to subsidize agriculture even more heavily, thus severely unbalancing the economy. Moreover, as information about the massacre of strikers became known, the legitimacy of what has long been proclaimed “the workers’ state” was decidedly undermined. See also: KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; SOLZHEN-ITSYN, ALEXANDER ISAYEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Baron, Samuel H. (2001). Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1962. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kozlov, Vladimir A. (2002). Mass Uprisings in the USSR. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

  SAMUEL H. BARON

  NOVOSIBIRSK REPORT

  The Novosibirsk Report was a document that helped provide the technical background for Gorbachev’s perestroika policy.

  The document that became known as the “Novosibirsk report” was written by Tatiana Za-slavskaya for a conference that was held in the western Siberian city of Novosibirsk in 1985. The organizers of that conference had a limited number of copies of her report made for participants in the conference. Within a short time, however, copies of the report were handed over to Western journalists in Moscow, ensuring that the document would become widely known and hotly debated. Communist Party officials sharply reprimanded Zaslavskaya and Abel Aganbegian, the chief organizer of the conference, for the unorthodox conclusions that she had offered. After Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, the kind of thinking found in Zaslavkay
a’s writings was endorsed by the highest leadership of the Party-state regime. Zaslavskaya became one of Gorbachev’s advisers, the head of the Soviet Sociological Association, and a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR. She has become a legendary figure among Russian sociologists.

  Zaslavskaya’s report for the conference in Novosibirsk in 1983 was of great significance in Soviet intellectual history because it challenged principles that had been fundamental to the social sciences since they were imposed by Josef Stalin in the 1930s. Stalin had asserted that in a socialist society, in contrast to capitalist society, there was a basic consistency between the forces of production (including natural resources, labor, and technology) and the relations of production (the mechanisms of managing the economy). Zaslavskaya argued that in the Soviet Union, the level of technology and the skills and attitudes of the workforce had undergone enormous change since the 1930s, while the centralized institutions that managed the economy had changed very little, setting the system up for crisis unless basic changes were made. Stalin had also authored the doctrine of the moral and political unity of Soviet society, based on the assumption that there were no fundamental conflicts among classes or groups in the USSR. Zaslavskaya pointed out that there were groups with a vested interest in resisting changes in the system of management of the economy, and that reform would arouse conflicts among groups with mutually opposed interests. She also repudiated the habit of regarding workers as “labor resources” analagous to machines, and called for greater attention to the “human factor” in production, which would require consideration of the values and attitudes of workers, including their desire for a form of management that would give them greater independence. Zaslavskaya’s reasoning provided the background for the drive for radical restructuring of the Soviet system, though she assumed that reform would take place within the framework of a socialist economy. See also: PERESTROIKA; ZASLAVSKAYA, TATIANA IVANOVNA