by James Millar
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lewin-Epstein, Noah; Ro’i, Yaacov; and Ritterband, Paul, eds. (1997). Russian Jews on Three Continents: Migration and Resettlement. London: Frank Cass. Morozov, Boris, ed. (1999). Documents on Soviet Jewish Emigration. Portland, OR: Frank Cass.
JONATHAN D. WALLACE
REGIONALISM
Regionalism is the idea or practice of dividing a country into smaller units for political, economic, social, and cultural purposes. Politically, regionalism is linked to decentralized or federalist governments. Regionalism is both cultural and political, as its political success is linked to the development of a regional culture. From 1759 to the 1860s, Russian regionalism was primarily cultural. After 1861, Siberian regionalism combined cultural with political demands. Under the Soviets, regionalism retreated to a mainly cultural sphere of action. After 1991, regionalism became a major political force.
In the eighteenth century, regional studies arose from the center’s interest in geography and from the periphery’s traditions of chronicle writing and regional pride. In the Petrine era, Vasily Tatishchev established regional geography in theory and practice by organizing expeditions to explore the regions. During the eighteenth century, medieval chronicles evolved into more secular histories of a town or region. In 1759 Vasily Kres-tinin founded the first Russian local historical society, the Society for Historical Investigations, in Arkhangelsk. Krestinin’s work on Arkhangelsk history merged the statist genre of descriptive geography with the chronicle traditions of the Russian north. Regional journals, such as The Solitary Bumpkin (Uyedinenny Poshekhonets) (Yaroslavl, 1786-1787) and Irtysh (Tobolsk, 1789-1791), also helped to foster a regional identity. The establishment of provincial newspapers in all European provinces in 1837 furthered the process.
In the 1850s and 1860s, Siberian regionalism (oblastnichestvo) combined the scholarship of federalist historian Afanasy Shchapov and the political activity of Nikolai Yadrintsev, for which the latter and his group were arrested for separatism and exiled to Arkhangelsk until 1874. Siberian regional-ists argued that Siberia was a colony of Moscow and demanded political rights. After 1905, Siberian regionalists were elected to the Duma and discussed the idea of a Siberian regional duma. The provincial statistical committees, established in 1834, the zemstvo (1864), and the provincial scholarly archival commissions (1884) all published widely on regional issues.
After the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks set out to centralize the country. During the civil war, regions such as Siberia and Kaluga proclaimed their independence. By the end of the civil war, however, political regionalism was under attack. The most viable regionalist institution was the sovnarkhozy, or the regional economic councils. In 1932 they were eliminated. Until Gorbachev, there was little room for political regionalism. Moscow appointed regional leaders and, apart from some passive resistance, they were obedient. Culturally, the 1920s were the golden age of regional studies (krayevedenie), but that ended in 1929 and 1930, when the Academy of Sciences and the Central Bureau of Regional Studies and their regional affiliates were purged. In 1966, the Society for Preservation of Monuments of History and Culture was established, with the right to open provincial branches, which helped to create an institutional base for regional studies.
In 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, the regions began to rise in political power. Legally, there were eighty-nine regions within the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). The RSFSR was unusual in that it was a federation within the larger federation of the Soviet Union. Its administrative divisions can be grouped into two main categories: the mainly non-Russian ethnically-based republics and the ethnically Russian territorially based regions. In 1990 the “parade of sovereignties” began, as the Union Republics (republics of the Soviet Union) became independent states. The RSFSR declared its sovereignty on June 12, 1990. Boris Yeltsin, who had just been elected chair of the RSFSR’s Supreme Soviet, hoped to make Gorbachev’s leadership of the Soviet Union redundant by ending the Soviet Union. In August 1990, Yeltsin told the heads of two of the RSFSR’s autonomous republics to “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow.” In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, despite Gorbachev’s efforts to save it with the Union Treaty. The RSFSR’s autonomous republics had been about to sign the Union Treaty both as members of the RSFSR and as Union Republics. Later, several of the autonomous republics argued for their sovereignty as independent states. After 1991 there were two rounds of treaties to bind the eighty-nine “subjects” (as all the administrative divisions were
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termed) together as the Russian Federation. The first was the Federation Treaties, which divided powers between the center and the republics and regions in an often ambiguous manner. The 1993 Russian Constitution superseded the Federation Treaties, setting off the second round of treaties, which often allowed conflicting laws to coexist. Yeltsin’s administration was marked by an increase in regionalism, as regional elites gained power while the central state collapsed. Yeltsin signed a series of bilateral treaties with the subjects, ceding central power and producing an ad hoc system of asymmetrical freedom.
Vladimir Putin has made curbing regionalism a main priority of his presidency. One of his primary interests has been to create a single legal space in the Russian Federation by ensuring that the law of the subjects can no longer contradict federal law. To this end, he has created seven super regions superimposed over the other eighty-nine and staffed by presidential appointees. In general, Putin’s desire for a strong central state is not easily reconciled with regionalist demands for a more decentralized government. See also: FEDERATION TREATIES; GEOGRAPHY; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; SOVNARKHOZY; UNION TREATY; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Evtuhov, Catherine. (1998). “Voices from the Provinces: Living and Writing in Nizhnii Novgorod, 1870-1905.” Journal of Popular Culture 34(4):33-48. Gel’man, Vladimir. (1999). “Regime Transition, Uncertainty, and Prospects for Democratisation: The Politics of Russia’s Regions in a Comparative Perspective.” Europe-Asia Studies 51:939-956. Herd, Graeme P., and Aldis, Anne, eds. (2003). Russian Regions and Regionalism: Strength through Weakness. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Nikitin, N. P. (1966). “A History of Economic Geography in Pre-Revolutionary Russia.” Soviet Geography: Review and Translation 7(9):3-37. Von Mohrenschildt, Dimitri. (1981). Toward a United States of Russia: Plans and Projects of Federal Reconstruction of Russia in the Nineteenth Century. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
SUSAN SMITH-PETER
REITERN, MIKHAIL KHRISTOFOROVICH
(1820-1890), financial official during the reign of Alexander II. As minister of finances, state secretary, member of the State Council, and chairman of the Council of Ministers, Count Mikhail Khristoforovich Reitern oversaw Russia’s finances during the epoch of the Great Reforms. Reitern was born in the city of Poreche in Smolensk guberniya. His father, a Livonian-German nobleman who distinguished himself in Russian military service, died when the boy was thirteen, leaving his widow to raise fourteen children. Mikhail attended the prestigious Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo on a scholarship and graduated in 1839. Like most of his classmates, he embarked upon a career in state service, joining the Ministry of Finance in 1840. Three years later he transferred to the Ministry of Justice, where he remained until 1854, when he joined the staff of the chief of the Main Naval Staff, Grand Duke Kon-stantin Nikolayevich (the second son of Emperor Nicholas I).
As one of the so-called Konstantinovtsy, the circle of reform-minded officials around the grand duke, Reitern carried out a variety of special commissions and inspections, and championed a series of innovations that included cutting the number of state-owned enterprises, abolishing obligated labor, and contracting with private firms. He was largely responsible for the Naval Ministry’s establishing a pension fund for naval officers. In 1855 Reitern went abroad to study
finance and administrative practices in Prussia, the United States, France, and England. His reports stressed the utility of private capital in the development of the national economy. On his return in 1854, he was appointed to the special committees on railroad development and the banking system. The latter led to the founding in 1860 of Russia’s first central bank, the State Bank. Reitern subsequently returned to the Ministry of Finances as a senior official and in 1861 was named to the Commission on Financing Peasant Affairs, which worked out the financial arrangements for the emancipation of the serfs.
In 1862 Alexander II appointed Reitern minister of finances, a post he held until 1878. During his tenure he fostered greater glasnost in Russian state finances (including the first published budget in 1862) and reformed the tax system to include more indirect taxation, such as excise taxes on spirits and salt. He sought unsuccessfully to restore the convertibility of Russia’s paper rubles into gold and silver, and in addition worked to balance the budget but did not succeed until in the sixth year of his tenure. Reitern was keen to sustain the empire’s credit rating on international financial markets, but
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his efforts were frustrated by the economic consequences of the Polish Rebellion of 1863. Reitern promoted private railroad construction, shaped the policies of the State Bank to enhance private investment, and drafted legislation for joint stock companies. His tenure witnessed a great expansion of Russian railroads from a little more than a thousand miles in 1862 to close to fourteen thousand by 1878. He favored both the integration of the national economy into the world economy and the development of Russian industry as necessary to ensure the empire’s welfare and security. In 1876, as war loomed with Turkey, Reitern warned Alexander II that the conflict would threaten Russia’s credit and finances, offering to resign when Alexander II nonetheless decided upon war. At the emperor’s request, he remained in office until the conflict was over and resigned in June 1878.
Reitern remained a member of the State Council, and in 1881 Alexander III appointed him chairman of the Council of Ministers, a post he held until 1886, when he retired because of poor health. See also: ECONOMY, TSARIST; GREAT REFORMS; RAILWAYS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kipp, Jacob W. (1975). “M. Kh. Reutern on the Russian State and Economy: A Liberal Bureaucrat during the Crimean Era.” Journal of Modern History 47 (3): 437-459.
JACOB W. KIPP
RELIGION
Russia has been multireligious from its very inception. When Kiev Rus adopted Eastern Orthodoxy in 988, a gradual Christianization began, advancing slowly from urban elites to the lower classes and countryside. Pagan belief and practice persisted, however, and was sometimes incorporated into Orthodox ritual. Prerevolutionary historians termed the resulting syncretism “dual faith” (dvoyeveriye), emphasizing the survival of paganism and superficiality of the Orthodox veneer. While simplistic, that reductionist view of popular religion suggests the complexity of religious cultures, the institutional backwardness of the church, and the daunting geographic scale of the task it faced. Not until the eighteenth century did the church, in any real sense, construct the administrative tools needed to standardize and regulate popular Orthodoxy. By that time the empire was exploding in size and religious diversity. Although medieval Russia had absorbed peoples of other faiths (such as the Muslim Tatars), religious pluralism became a predominant feature in the modern period. The state annexed vast new territories of Siberia and eastern Ukraine (in the seventeenth century) and then added an array of new lands and peoples in the eighteenth (Baltics, western Ukraine, Belarus) and nineteenth centuries (the Caucasus, Poland, Finland, and Central Asia). That expansion increased the size and complexity of the non-Orthodox population exponentially. Although, according to the census of 1897, the population remained predominantly Eastern Orthodox (69.3%), the empire had substantial numbers of non-Orthodox believers (often concentrated in geographic areas): Muslims (11.1%), Catholics (9.1%), Jews (4.2%), Lutherans (2.7%), Old Believers (1.8%), and various other Christian and non-Christian groups. Indeed, the figures on the non-Orthodox side are understated: the census failed to record adherents of persecuted movements seeking to evade legal trouble.
This waxing religious pluralism posed a serious problem for a regime once imbued with a messianic identity as the Third Rome. Although the process of accommodation commenced in the seventeenth century, it sharply accelerated in the eighteenth, as the regime sought to recruit foreign mercenaries, specialists, and colonists. To reaffirm the precedence of the Russian Orthodox Church, the government adopted the principle of static religious identity: each subject was to retain the original faith (the sole permissible form of conversion being to Orthodoxy, with conversion from Orthodoxy criminalized as apotasy). For state officials devoted to raison d’?tat what mattered most was stability, not salvation-much to the chagrin of Orthodox zealots. Indeed, that secularity prevailed in the imperial manifesto of April 17, 1905, which, in a futile attempt to quell the revolution of 1905, granted freedom of religious belief. After an interlude of broken promises and rising tensions, the February Revolution finally brought full religious freedom (including freedom of official religious affiliation and practice).
That freedom was short-lived: Once the Bolshevik regime came to power in October 1917, it persecuted religious groups, with the assumption that such superstition would promptly wither away. Dismayed by signs of a religious revival, in 1929 the party unleashed a massive assault on all religions, systematically closing houses of worship
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Procession of clergy outside Moscow’s city walls, 1867. © AUSTRIAN ARCHIVES/CORBIS and subjecting not only clergy but also believers to repression. To no avail: The January 1937 census revealed that 55.3 percent of those over age 14 declared themselves believers. That impelled the regime to redouble its efforts. In 1937-1941, hundreds of thousands were arrested and large numbers executed.
Although World War II forced the Stalinist regime to tolerate the reestablishment of many religious organizations, these encountered growing pressure that continued past Stalin’s death in 1953. The post-Stalinist regimes proved indefatigable in efforts to efface the remnants of superstition. They did achieve a reduction in organized religion: the number of religious organizations in the USSR declined by a third (from 22,698 in 1961 to 15,202 in 1985).
Even if religious organizations had dwindled, the government proved far less effective in combating religious observance. Indeed, data from the latter period of Soviet rule showed clear signs of religious revival. In the case of baptism, for example, even if the aggregate figures between 1979 and 1984 decreased (by 6.7%), authorities could not fail to notice increases in some non-Russian republics (19.9% in Georgia, for example) and even in the RSFSR (1.5%). Baptism rates, moreover, skyrocketed among non-Orthodox Christians, with increases of 43.6 percent among Lutherans, 33.3 percent among Methodists, and 52.1 percent among Men-nonites. Data about monetary contributions-an increase of 17.8 percent between 1979 and 1984- gave the regime further cause for worry. These funds allowed established religions to bolster their central administrations (45.9% of funds), expand support for clergy (14.3%), and spend more on religious artifacts and literature (17.4%).
Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika in the mid-1980s brought a significant improvement in the
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status and activism of religion. That, doubtless, was a key factor behind the stunning 36.6 percent increase in religious groups in the Soviet Union (from 12,438 in 1985 to 16,990 in 1990); in the RSFSR, the rate of growth was only slightly slower-32.6 percent (from 3,003 in 1985 to 3,983 in 1990). The expansion of organized religion hardly abated after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991: In the Russian Federation, the number of registered religious organizations rose fivefold (to 20,200 on December 31, 2000).
That growth has been somewhat troubling for the Russian Orthodox Church. Although a majority of the citizens in the R
ussian Federation profess some vague allegiance to Orthodoxy, observants are relatively few (4.5%), and still fewer attend services on a regular basis. Still more alarming has been the exponential growth of non-Orthodox religious groups, especially Christian evangelical and Pentecostal movements. In an effort to contain cult movements, the law on religious organizations (October 1997) posed barriers to the registration of new religious groups, that is, those that had emerged within the last fifteen years, chiefly from foreign missions. Nevertheless, by the closing deadline for registration on December 31, 2000, Russian Orthodoxy claimed only a slight majority (10,913) of the 20,200 religious organizations in the Russian Federation; the rest consisted of Muslim (3,048), Evangelicals (1,323), Baptists (975), Evangelical Christians (612), Seventh-Day Adven-tists (563), Jehovah’s Witnesses (330), Old Believers (278), Catholics (258), Lutherans (213), Jews (197), and various smaller groups. See also: CATHOLICISM; HAGIOGRAPHY; ISLAM; JEWS; MONASTICISM; ORTHODOXY; PAGANISM; PROTESTANTISM; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; SAINTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, John. (1994). Religion, State, and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Corley, Felix. (1996). Religion in the Soviet Union: An Archival Reader. New York: New York University Press. Geraci, Robert P., and Khodarkovsky, Michael. (2001). Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hosking, Geoffrey A. (1991). Church, Nation, and State in Russia and Ukraine. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lewis, David C. (1999). After Atheism: Religion and Ethnicity in Russia and Central Asia. New York: St. Martin’s Press.