Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  The Life was meant both to edify and to advance the cause of Yulianya. Though there is no indication of an official sanctification, she has been worshipped as a saint since the latter half of the seventeenth century in and around the village of Lazarevo, near Yulianya’s burial site in Murom. She is commemorated on October 15 and January 2. Her relics are preserved in the Murom City Museum. See also: HAGIOGRAPHY; RELIGION; SAINTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Greenan, T. A. (1982). “Iulianiya Lazarevskaya.” Oxford Slavonic Papers 15:28-45. Howlett, Jana, tr. (2002). “The Tale of Uliania Osor’ina.” Available at «http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~jrh11/ uliania.html».

  NADA BOSKOVSKA

  OSTARBEITER PROGRAM See WORLD WAR II.

  OSTROMIR GOSPEL

  The Ostromil Gospel is an eleventh-century Gospel book, and the earliest dated Slavic manuscript.

  According to its postscript, the Ostromir Gospel was copied by the scribe Gregory for the governor (posadnik) of Novgorod, Ostromir, in 1056 and 1057. The manuscript contains 294 folios, and each folio is divided into two columns. Gospels or evangeliaries were books of Gospel readings arranged for use in specific church services. In the Slavic tradition they were called aprakos Gospel, which derives from the Greek for “holy day.” Because of their important function in the celebration of the liturgy, they were very frequently copied. There are two types of evan-geliaries. Short evangeliaries contain readings for all days of the cycle from Palm Sunday until Pentecost and for Saturday and Sunday for the remainder of

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  the year. Full evangeliaries have Saturday and Sunday readings for Lent as well as for all days of the week for the rest of the year. The Ostromir Gospel is the oldest of the short evangeliaries. It is notable for its East Slavic dialect features, its remarkable miniatures depicting three of the Gospel writers, and its dignified uncial writing, which was often used in copying biblical texts. Some scholars have maintained that the Ostromir Gospel goes back to an East Bulgarian reworking of an earlier Macedonian Glagolitic text, while others deny a Glagolitic connection. The pioneering Russian philologist Alexander. Vostokov produced an influential edition of the Ostromir Gospel in 1843 (reprint 1964). Facsimile editions were published in St. Petersburg/Leningrad in 1883 and 1988. First preserved in the St. Sophia cathedral in Novgorod and then in one of the Kremlin churches in Moscow, the Ostromir Gospel is now located in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg (formerly the State Public Library). See also: KIEVAN RUS; RELIGION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Schenker, Alexander, M. (1995). The Dawn of Slavic: An Introduction to Slavic Philology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  DAVID K. PRESTEL

  OSTROVSKY, ALEXANDER NIKOLAYEVICH

  (1823-1886), playwright and advocate of dramatists’ rights.

  Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky wrote and coauthored some fifty plays, translated foreign plays into Russian, and worked tirelessly to improve conditions for actors, dramatists, and composers. Half a dozen of his works form the core repertory for the popular theater movement, a series of initiatives to advance enlightenment and acculturation that steadily expanded theater production and attendance in Russia from the 1860s to World War I.

  Young Ostrovsky studied languages, ancient and modern, with tutors and his stepmother, a Swedish baroness. While a student at Moscow University, he regularly attended performances at the Maly Theater. A civil service position, as clerk in the Commercial Court, acquainted him with the subculture of the Russian merchantry in the “Over-the-River” district south of the Kremlin in the 1840s. Merchants then seemed exotic to educated Russians because, like the peasants, they had resisted Westernization, maintained the patriarchal family life and customs prevalent from the sixteenth century, and held a strictly formal attitude toward legality. Ostrovsky’s first published work, revised as It’s a Family Affair-We’ll Settle It Ourselves (1849) brought him to the attention of the publisher of the journal The Muscovite, and he became its editor in 1850. In his “Slavophile period” Ostrovsky set out to explore with a circle of friends what was good and unique about Russians. They studied and sang folk songs and frequented taverns, especially at festival times, to savor the witty repartee between factory hands and performers.

  Ostrovsky would go on to write historical plays that let him exploit the pithy Russian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that predated the language’s syntactical remodeling and massive borrowing of foreign words. In this way, and by focusing on cultural enclaves that had survived into the modern period, Ostrovsky mined the equivalent of an Elizabethan linguistic vein for dramatic purposes. A new regime in politics brought him an unparalleled opportunity to steep himself in the living residue of Old Russian. After the Crimean War, Alexander II’s Naval Ministry commissioned professional writers to go to various river ports and describe the local people and manners. Ostrovsky, assigned a section of the Volga, traveled there in 1856 and 1857. He noted on index cards hundreds of unfamiliar words and expressions with examples of usage. As he traveled, he observed how the steamship and other innovations were undercutting ancient patterns of courtship and family organization and overturning assumptions about the world.

  His best-known play, The Storm (1859), which drew on this experience, won the prestigious Uvarov prize for literature. It shows the old ways- at their harmonious best and despotic worst- compromised by a transportation revolution that was shrinking space and accelerating time, and urbanization that promoted civic life as a value while redefining public and private space. Commercial prosperity and a scientific outlook increasingly sanctioned individual autonomy and rights.

  From the beginning, Ostrovsky wrote in a realist style, freely depicting the rude manners and behavior observable in actual life. For a time this caused censors to deny permission to perform his plays. But as cultural nationalism advanced, his

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  Playwright Alexander Ostrovsky. portrayal of strengths set in relief by flaws and crudeness became irresistible. His true-to-life situations made his plays enormously accessible. He seemed to define “Russianness” by showing individuals confronting concrete social and ethical dilemmas as they moved beyond the traditional culture, where custom dictated behavior.

  In 1881 he drafted a proposal for a Russian national theater, which appealed to Alexander III’s Great Russian chauvinism by arguing that the existence of a Russian school of painting and Russian music gave reason to hope for a Russian school of dramatic art. He claimed that an already extant body of Russian plays demonstrated the ability to teach the “powerful but coarse peasant multitude that there is good in the Russian person, that one must look after and nurture it in oneself.”

  When Ostrovsky died at Shchelykova, his country estate located between the Volga towns of Kostroma and Kineshma, he was at his desk translating one of Shakespeare’s plays into Russian. In the Soviet period a community for retired actors would be built on the property. His plays continue to be performed in Russia to enthusiastic audiences. The richness of their language and the deft incorporation of folk songs and dances in the works of his Slavophile period ensure their survival, even as the historical nuances of authority and status that motivate much of the action recede from living memory. See also: SLAVOPHILES; THEATER

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Hoover, Marjorie L. (1981). Alexander Ostrovsky. Boston: Twayne Publishers. Thurston, Gary. (1998). The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia, 1862-1919. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Wettlin, Margaret. (1974). “Alexander Ostrovsky and the Russian Theatre before Stanislavsky.” In Alexander Ostrovsky: Plays. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

  GARY THURSTON

  OTREPEV, GRIGORY

  (c. 1580-1606), Russian monk who supposedly became the false Tsar Dmitry.

  Yuri Bogdanovich Otrepev, the son of an infantry officer, became the monk Grigory as a teenager and eventually entered the prestigious Miracles Monastery in th
e Moscow Kremlin. There he became a deacon, and his intelligence and good handwriting soon brought him to the attention of Patriarch Job (head of the Russian Orthodox Church), who employed Grigory as a secretary.

  In 1602 a group of monks, including Grigory and the future Tsar Dmitry, fled to Poland-Lithuania. Their departure greatly upset Tsar Boris Godunov and Patriarch Job. When one of the runaways identified himself as Dmitry of Uglich (the youngest son of Tsar Ivan IV who supposedly died as a child), the Godunov regime launched a propaganda campaign identifying “False Dmitry” as Grigory Otrepev. Stories were fabricated that Grig-ory had become a sorcerer and tool of Satan or that he had committed crimes while in the service of the Romanov family (opponents of Tsar Boris). Although no credible witnesses ever came forward to verify that Grigory and “False Dmitry” were the

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  same person, Tsar Dmitry’s enemies never tired of claiming that he was really Otrepev.

  The sensational image of the evil, debauched, and bloodthirsty monk Grigory pretending to be Tsar Dmitry continues to haunt modern scholarship. Many historians have accepted at face value the most lurid propaganda manufactured by Dmitry’s enemies, but careful study of the evidence reveals that it is impossible to merge the biographies of Grigory and “False Dmitry.” Grigory Otrepev was last seen by an English merchant shortly after the assassination of Tsar Dmitry in 1606; then he disappeared. See also: DMITRY, FALSE; GODUNOV, BORIS FYODOR-OVICH; TIME OF TROUBLES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Perrie, Maureen. (1995). Pretenders and Popular Monar-chism in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars of the Time of Troubles. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

  CHESTER DUNNING

  OUR HOME IS RUSSIA PARTY

  Our Home Is Russia (Nash Dom-Rossiya, or NDR) was a sociopolitical movement and a ruling party from 1996 to 1998. Formed in the spring of 1995 according to a plan of the president’s administration as one of two ruling parties-the party of the “right hand,” with the prime minister at the head-it immediately launched forward. The NDR movement’s council, founded in May 1995 with Victor Chernomyrdin at the head, included thirty-seven heads of regions, a few ministers, and heads of large industrial enterprises and banks. The federal NDR list for the Duma elections was headed by Chernomyrdin, the famous film director Nikita Mikhal-kov, and General Lev Rokhlin, a Chechnya war hero. Subsequently both the prime minister and the film director renounced the mandates, and Rokhlin, entering the Duma, soon came into opposition against Boris Yeltsin and he then left the NDR fraction; and founded the Movement in Support of the Army. The NDR list received seven million votes (10.1%, third place) and forty-five Duma seats; this was taken as defeat of the ruling party. In the single-mandate districts, out of 108 proposed candidates, ten were elected. In the 1996 presidential elections, NDR backed Yeltsin.

  With Chernomyrdin leaving the prime minis-tership in the spring of 1998, NDR entered a period of crisis. The effort on the part of the young ambitious leader of the NDR fraction in the Duma, Vladimir Ryzhkov, to turn NDR from a party of heads into a neoconservative political party of “values” proved unsuccessful. Discussions of merging with the blocs A Just Cause and Voice of Russia and the movement New Force were fruitless as well. Allies of NDR in the elections amounted to the weak Forward, Russia of Boris Fyodorov and the Muslim movement Medzhlis. The programmatic positions of NDR amount to moderate-reformist ideas and a declaration of conservative-liberal values. The federal list was headed by Chernomyrdin and the Saratov governor Dmitry Ayatskov. NDR did not make it into the Duma, as it received 0.8 million votes (1.2 percent). Nine NDR candidates from single-mandate districts, including Chernomyrdin and Ryzhkov, entered the pro-government fraction Unity and the group People’s Deputy. In May 2000, the eighth and last congress of NDR, which at the time had 125,000 members, decided to form part of the party Unity, created on the foundation of the movements Unity, All Russia, and NDR. See also: CHERNOMYRDIN, VIKTOR STEPANOVICH; MOVEMENT IN SUPPORT OF THE ARMY; UNITY (MEDVED) PARTY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democ-racry. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.

  NIKOLAI PETROV

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  PACIFIC FLEET

  The Pacific Fleet is headquartered in Vladivostok, capital of the Maritime (Primorsky) Territory. Not surprisingly, given Russia’s status as a Pacific nation with vital interests in the Asia-Pacific region, the Pacific Fleet is one of Russia’s most powerful naval forces. The city of Vladivostok, established in 1860, occupies most of Muraviev-Amursky Peninsula, named after the governor general of Eastern Russia during the mid-nineteenth century. Two bays, Amursky and Ussurysky, wrap the peninsula, mirroring with their names two great rivers of the Russian Far East, the Amur, and the Ussury, its tributary.

  Beginning in the 1600s, Russian explorers first reached Siberia’s eastern coastline and founded the city of Okhotsk (1647). Until the mid-1800s, however, China’s dominance of the southern regions of eastern Siberia restricted Russian naval activities. The construction of the port city of Vladivostok intensified Russia’s need for adequate transportation links. Tsar Alexander III drew up plans for the Trans-Siberian Railway and began building it in 1891. Despite the enormity of the project, a continuous route was completed in 1905, stimulated by the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War a year earlier. Vladivostok became Russia’s main naval base in the east after Port Arthur (located in Chinese territory and ceded to Russia in 1898) fell in January 1905 during the war. After World War I, Japan seized Vladivostok and held the key port for four years, initially as a member of the Allied interventionist forces that occupied parts of Russia after the new Bolshevik government proclaimed neutrality and withdrew from the war. At the end of World War II, Stalin broke the neutrality pact that had existed throughout the war in order to occupy vast areas of East Asia formerly held by Japan. It was through Vladivostok, moreover, that some of the Lend-Lease aid, the most visible sign of U.S.-Soviet cooperation during World War II, passed on its way to Murmansk.

  The Pacific Fleet includes eighteen nuclear submarines that are operationally subordinate to the Ministry of Defense and based at Pavlovsk and Ry-bachy. The blue-water striking power of the Pacific Fleet lies in thirty-four nonnuclear submarines and forty-nine principal surface combatants. The Zvezda Far Eastern Shipyard in Bolshoi Kamen, a couple of hours north of Vladivostok, serves as the chief recycling facility for the Fleet, although it is in disrepair. The Pacific Fleet’s additional home ports

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  include Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Magadan, and Sovetskaya Gavan. As far as air power is concerned, the Pacific Fleet consisted during the mid-1990s of 250 land-based combat aircraft and helicopters. Two bomber regiments stationed at Alekseyevka constituted its most powerful strike force. Each regiment consisted of thirty supersonic Tu-22M Backfire aircraft. The land power of the Pacific Fleet consisted of one naval infantry division and a coastal defense division. The naval infantry division included more than half of the total manpower in the Russian naval infantry. During the mid-1990s, the Pacific Fleet infantry was reorganized into brigades.

  During the late 1990s, a joint headquarters was established commanding the land, naval, and air units stationed on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Despite funding shortfalls during the early twenty-first century, the Russian Pacific Fleet continues to demonstrate its resolve to increase combat readiness. Russian Pacific Fleet submarines carry out missions of regional security, st
rategic deterrence, protection of strategic assets, and training for anti-surface warfare. See also: BALTIC FLEET; BLACK SEA FLEET; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; NORTHERN FLEET; TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Busmann, Gerd, and Meier, Oliver. (1997). The Nuclear Legacy of the Former Soviet Union: Implications for Security and Ecology. Berlin: Berliner Information-szentrum f?r Transatlantische Sicherheit (BITS) in cooperation with Heinrich-B?ll-Stiftung. Da Cunha, Derek. (1990). Soviet Naval Power in the Pacific. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Morris, Eric. (1977). The Russian Navy: Myth and Reality. New York: Stein and Day. Stephan, John J. (1994). The Russian Far East: A History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  JOHANNA GRANVILLE

  PAGANISM

  Due to the concerted efforts of both the eastern and western churches, Christianity largely replaced Slavic paganism during the course of the ninth and tenth centuries. There are primarily three sources for information about Slavic paganism: written accounts, archaeological discoveries, and ethnographic evidence. As literacy was introduced to the East Slavs only with their conversion to Christianity in 988 C.E., and the written sources were most often compiled by Christian monks or missionaries, much of what is known about East Slavic paganism from written accounts is of questionable accuracy. The sources begin with the Byzantine historian Procopius (sixth century) and include Arab travel accounts, reports of Christian missionary activity, and references in the Primary Chronicle and the First Novgorod Chronicle. Archaeological evidence has provided some information on pagan temples, particularly among the West Slavs on the island of R?gen in the Baltic Sea. In addition, what may have been a temple to Perun, god of thunder, was excavated near Peryn, south of Novgorod in 1951, and several sites that were likely associated with cult practices have been found at Pskov, in the Smolensk region, and Belarus. Generally, however, archaeological sites are able to provide more information about material culture than about the spiritual life of a preliterate people. Ethnographic material was not systematically collected until the nineteenth century, which makes it difficult to separate genuine information from later accretions. One can summarize, based on evidence from all these sources, however, that early Slavic religion was animistic, in that it personified natural elements. It also deified heavenly bodies and recognized the existence of various spirits of the forest, water, and household. Ritual sacrifice was likely used to appease the pagan deities, and amulets were used to ward off evil. In accordance with widespread Indo-European practice, the early Slavs likely cremated their dead, but even before the Christian era burial was also practiced. Chernaya Mogila, a burial site in Chernigov that dates from the tenth century provides strong evidence for a belief in the afterlife, as three members of a princely family were interred with the horses, weapons, and utensils that they would need for existence in the next world.