Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  Their good fortune changed, however, following the decisive defeat of the Left Opposition at the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927. Having supported Bukharin and the right’s position on the cautious implementation of the NEP, Stalin, in 1928, abruptly reversed his position and adopted the rapid industrialization program of the left. He and his new majority in the Politburo then attacked the Right Opposition over various issues including forced grain requisitions, the anti-specialist campaign, and industrial production targets for the First Five-Year Plan. Outnumbered and unable to launch a strong challenge against Stalin, the Right Opposition sought an alliance with Kamenev and Zinoviev, for which the Right Opposition was subsequently denounced at the Central Committee plenum in January 1929.

  Under attack politically, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky signed a statement acknowledging their “errors” that was published in Pravda in November 1929. Nonetheless, Bukharin was removed from the Politburo that same month. The following year Rykov and Tomsky were also expelled from the Politburo. By the end of 1930 the trio was removed from all positions of leadership, and moderates throughout the party were purged; this officially marked the defeat of the Right Opposition. Having already destroyed the Left Opposition, Stalin was now the uncontested leader of the Soviet Union.

  The Great Purges of the late 1930s brought further tragedy to the leaders of the defunct Right Opposition. With his arrest imminent, Tomsky committed suicide in 1936. Two years later Bukharin and Rykov were arrested and tried in the infamous show trials of 1938. Despite the fact that they could not possibly have committed the crimes that they were accused of, and that their confessions were clearly secured under torture, both were found guilty and executed.

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  See also: BUKHARIN, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH; LEFT OPPOSITION; RYKOV, ALEXEI IVANOVICH; TOMSKY, MIKHAIL PAVLOVICH; UNITED OPPOSITION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Cohen, Stephen, F. (1973). Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938. New York: Oxford University Press. Erlich, Alexander. (1960). The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924-1928. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merridale, Catherine. (1990). Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin: The Communist Party in The Capital, 1925-32. New York: St. Martin’s Press. to his dismissal as professor) and his opera “The Golden Cockerel” (1907), which was condemed by censorship, because it could be interpreted as criticism of tsarist rule, conributed to his renown and reputation as an artist with political revolutionary leanings. Furthermore, as one of the masters of Russian national music in the nineteenth century, he achieved enormous importance and influence in the cultural history of the Soviet Union, particularly since the cultural changes toward Great Russian patriotism under Stalin. See also: MIGHTY HANDFUL; MUSIC; NATIONALISM IN THE ARTS

  KATE TRANSCHEL

  RIMSKY-KORSAKOV, NIKOLAI ANDREYEVICH

  (1844-1908), prominent Russian composer who contributed to the formation of a Russian national music in the nineteenth century.

  Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, a naval officer by training, came to study professionally as a member of Mily Balakirev’s amateur circle of composers (“Mighty Handful”). An active composer under Balakirev’s guidance since 1861, he became a professor of composition and instrumentation at the St. Petersburg conservatory ten years later. Rimsky-Korsakov is regarded as one of the most significant composers and musicians of Russia in the nineteenth century.

  Together with Balakirev and Alexander Borodin, who numbered among his closest creative partners in the 1860s, Rimsky-Korsakov developed a specific Russian idiom in orchestral music. As an opera composer, although he wrote a few historical operas, Rimsky-Korsakov especially stands for the Russian fairy and magic opera, the genre of which he brought to a culmination. Of high though not undisputed merit were the completions, revisions, and instrumentations of opera torsos of Borodin and Musorgsky, even if Rimsky-Korsakov partly neglected the composers’ original intentions. Finally, he made significant contributions to musical education. Not only did his textbook of harmony become the widely acknowledged standard in Russia, but he also acted as a teacher and example for outstanding Russian composers. His support of students in the Revolution of 1905 (leading

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Seaman, Gerald R. (1988). Nikolai Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov: A Guide to Research. New York: Garland.

  MATTHIAS STADELMANN

  RODZIANKO, MIKHAIL VLADIMIROVICH

  (1859-1924), an anti-Bolshevik who led the conservative faction of the Octobrist Party in the pre-revolutionary legislative Duma and served as president of that body from 1911 to 1917, then emigrated in 1920 to Yugoslavia, where he completed a memoir, The Reign of Rasputin.

  Devoutly Orthodox, conservative, nationalist, and loyal to the tsar, Mikhail Rodzianko also believed in the semiconstitutional system established in 1906 and strove to make it work. He never grasped that Nicholas II at heart rejected the new order. The Duma leader was therefore always puzzled when the tsar ignored Rodzianko’s pleas to rid the court of Rasputin’s pernicious influence and to form a competent ministry.

  An archetype of the old order, he came from a prosperous landed family, received an elite education, served in the army, and then became a district marshal of nobility and zemstvo executive. Chosen for the State Council in 1906 and elected to the Third Duma in 1907, Rodzianko became Duma president in 1911. He actively promoted the war effort after 1914, and in 1916 warned the tsar that incompetent ministers were undermining the struggle against the Central Powers and endangering the survival of the monarchy itself.

  During the Revolution of 1917, Rodzianko urged the tsar to appoint a government in which

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  the people would have confidence and which he hoped to head. As the revolution deepened he reluctantly agreed to help persuade Nicholas to abdicate. Because of his political conservatism, he was not asked, however, to serve in the new Provisional Government.

  As a believer in both the tsardom and constitutionalism, he could only watch in dismay as Russia sank into radical revolution and civil war. In emigration he found himself reviled by monarchists as having betrayed the tsar, and rejected by liberals as having failed to be reformist enough. See also: DUMA; NICHOLAS II; OCTOBRIST PARTY; REVOLUTION OF 1905

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi. (1981). The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Hosking, Geoffrey. (1973). The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907-14. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rodzianko, Mikhail V. (1973). The Reign of Rasputin: An Empire’s Collapse. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.

  JOHN M. THOMPSON

  ROERICH, NICHOLAS KONSTANTINOVICH

  (1874-1947), artist, explorer, and mystic.

  Born in St. Petersburg and educated at the Academy of Arts, Roerich established himself as a painter of scenes from Slavic prehistory. Works such as The Messenger (1897), Visitors from Overseas (1901-1902), and Slavs on the Dnieper (1905) combined a bold use of color with Roerich’s expertise as a semi-professional archaeologist. Roerich joined the World of Art Group and designed sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. His greatest fame resulted from his designs for Prince Igor (1909) and The Rite of Spring (1913), the libretto of which he cowrote with Igor Stravinsky.

  In 1918, Roerich and his family left Soviet Russia for Scandinavia, England, then the United States. In New York, Roerich and his wife, Helena, founded a spiritual movement: Agni Yoga, an offshoot of Theosophy. Roerich’s followers included Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture (and later vice-president). His backers built a museum for him in Manhattan and sponsored him on two expeditions to Asia. From 1920 onward, Roerich’s painting took on an Asiatic, mystical character, featuring gods, gurus, and Himalayan mountainscapes.

  Roerich visited India in 1923. From 1925 to 1928, he and hi
s family completed a mammoth trek through Ladakh, Chinese Turkestan, the Altai Mountains, the Gobi Desert, and Tibet. Ostensibly leading an American archaeological, ethnographic, and artistic expedition, the Roerichs also secretly visited Moscow, and the true purpose of their journey remains a matter of debate. Roerich established a research facility in the Himalayan village of Nag-gar, India, and lobbied for the passage of an international treaty to protect art in times of war. This effort gained him two nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1934-1935, Roerich, bankrolled by Wallace and the U.S. government, traveled to Manchuria and Mongolia. The expedition stirred up great scandal, leading Wallace and most of Roerich’s supporters to break with him by 1936. Roerich’s U.S. assets were seized. The Roerichs remained in India, supporting the freedom movement there and befriending its leaders, such as poet Ra-bindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru. Roerich died in 1947. Nehru, the new leader of independent India, gave his eulogy.

  Roerich’s occultism and the mysteries surrounding his expeditions have shaped both popular and academic understanding of his life. Western scholars acknowledge the importance of his early art, but have criticized his later works; they have tended to be suspicious about the political and mystical motives underlying his expeditions. After the late 1950s, Soviet scholars reinstated Roerich as an important figure in the Russian artistic canon, but downplayed his occultism and controversial actions. Non-academic writing on Roerich is either hagiographic-Agni Yoga has a worldwide following, and the Russian movement has enjoyed tremendous popularity since 1987-or lurid and sensationalistic, accusing Roerich of espionage and collaboration with the Soviet secret police. Since the early 1990s, emerging evidence indicates that the Roerichs believed a new age was imminent and that one of its necessary preconditions was the establishment of a pan-Buddhist state linking Siberia, Mongolia, Central Asia, and Tibet. The Roerichs also sought to involve themselves in the struggle between Tibet’s key political figures, the Panchen (Tashi) Lama and Dalai Lama. Rather than

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  straightforward espionage, the purpose of Roerich’s expeditions seems to have been the fulfillment of these grandiose, but ultimately quixotic, ambitions. See also: BALLET; OCCULTISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Decter, Jacqueline. (1997). Messenger of Beauty: The Life and Visionary Art of Nicholas Roerich. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press. McCannon, John. (2001). “Searching for Shambhala: The Mystical Art and Epic Journeys of Nikolai Roerich.” Russian Life 44(1):48-56. Meyer, Karl, and Brysac, Shareen Blair. (1999). Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. Washington, DC: Counterpoint. Williams, Robert C. (1980). Russian Art and American Money: 1900-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  JOHN MCCANNON

  ROMANIA, RELATIONS WITH

  Founded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia gained their autonomy from the Hungarian kings with the election of native princes. The status of these principalities was comparable to that of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, and they shared allegiance to the patriarch of Constantinople. During the fifteenth century, the chief threat they faced was Turkish expansionism in the Balkans. Their earliest contact with Moscow occurred when Ivan III negotiated a marriage alliance with Steven the Great of Moldavia (1457-1604). His daughter, Elena, became the bride of Ivan the Young, whose son Dmitry became heir to the throne.

  THE LIBERATION OF ROMANIAN LANDS FROM THE TURKS

  As the power of the Romanian princes declined and those of the grand dukes increased, the former tried to switch their allegiance from Constantinople to Moscow. Such contacts encouraged Nicholas Milescu, a Moldavian boyar, to serve Tsar Alexei as ambassador to China. The earliest attempt at signing a treaty of alliance with Russia was made by Prince Dmitry Cantemir of Moldavia, who invited Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725) to deliver the country from the Turks. The liberation failed with Peter’s defeat on the River Pruth in 1711, but it opened a career for Dmitry at St. Petersburg as a Westernizer, and for his daughter, Maria, who dedicated herself to emancipating the Russian women.

  The true liberator of Romanian lands was Catherine the Great (r. 1762-1796) who, in three campaigns against the Turks, reached the Dniester River. The Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji (1774) gave Russia formal influence in the principalities, with two consuls at Bucharest and Jassy. French interference with these provisions occasioned the Russo-Turkish War of 1802-1812, which gave Russia the Bessarabian half of Moldavia. Although the Greek revolution of 1821 began in Moldavia, Tsar Alexander I (r. 1801-1825) denounced it because of the anti-revolutionary stance of the Holy Alliance (an informal agreement among Christian monarchs to preserve European peace). Russia’s greatest gain occurred following the Treaty of Adrianopole, when Tsar Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855) established a protectorate over both Romanian provinces, thus taking over the nominal Turkish suzerainty. Although native Romanian princes continued to be elected, power now resided with the two Russian proconsuls who were headquartered in Bucharest and Jassy.

  Russia demanded that the new generations be schooled at St. Petersburg, but Romanians preferred the schools in Paris, where many of their young people participated in the 1848 revolution against the July monarchy. When they returned home and attempted to continue that revolution in the Romanian capitals, Russia suppressed the movement and reoccupied the provinces under more stringent conditions. The Congress of Paris, which followed the Crimean War (1853-1856), suppressed the Russian protectorate, internationalized Danubian navigation, reunited Bessarabia with Romania, and attempted to revise the constitution of both states. The Romanians took the initiative of electing Alexander Ion Cuza in 1859 as prince of the United Principalities, as Moldavia and Wallachia were now called, but this arrangement disturbed Austria and Turkey more than it did Russia.

  The overthrow of Cuza in a military coup, and the advent of Prince Charles of Hohenzollern Sig-maringen in 1866, was greeted positively by Austria after he visited Tsar Alexander II (r. 1855-1881) at Livadia in 1869. The Bosnian crisis that led to the Balkans war of independence (1877-1878) gave Russia the opportunity to avenge its defeat in 1856. Initially neutral during this war, Romania nonetheless gave Russia a right of passage to Bulgaria, albeit with misgivings. However, when Grand Duke Nicholas ran into difficulties at Plevna, in Bulgaria, he ap1292

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  pealed to Prince Charles for military assistance, and placed him in command of the Russo-Romanian forces, which were ultimately victorious. At the Congress of Berlin (1878), where postwar negotiations took place, Russia demanded retrocession of southern Bessarabia in exchange for recognition of Romania’s independence.

  Relations between Romania and Russia improved when the heir to the Romanian throne, Ferdinand of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, married Princess Marie, a forceful personality and the granddaughter of Tsar Alexander and Queen Victoria. In February 1914 Prince Ferdinand visited St. Petersburg to arrange another political marriage, this time between his son Prince Carol with one of Tsar Nicholas’ daughters. During the summer the entire imperial family sailed to Constanta to further the marital alliance, but it came to naught because it incurred protests from Vienna.

  With the outbreak of World War I, King Charles felt bound by treaty to join the Central Powers (Prussian and Austria) against Russia, but politicians of all the parties that had been affected by Hungary’s repression of the Romanias in Transylvania forced a declaration of neutrality. Wooed both by Russia, which supported Romania’s claim to Transylvania, and by the Central Powers who offered the return to Romania of Bessarabia, Romania’s prime minister Ion Bratianu ultimately declared war on Germany and Austria Hungary, largely because he was impressed by Russian general Alexei Brusilov’s victories in Poland. In 1916, the joint German-Bulgarian offensive forced the Romanian army to withdraw to Moldavia, where Russian troops helped them to stabilize the front. However, the fall of Russia’s Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky i
n November 1917 and the advent of the Bolsheviks to power in Russia undermined resistance and led to the Russo-German Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (December 1917), which the Romanians refused to attend.

  Plans to evacuate the Romanian royal family to Russia were scrapped, although the Romanian gold reserves that had been sent ahead to Moscow for this purpose were never returned. When the pro-German government of Marghiloman finally surrendered in the Treaty of Bucharest, Southern Do-brogea was ceded to Germany’s ally, Bulgaria, and southern Bessarabia was returned to Romania. Within the province there raged civil war between the Red army, Ukrainian partisans, and Romanian nationalists who had convened a council and proclaimed independence from Russia. Great Romania of the interwar years formally came into existence as a result of the Conference of Paris in 1918. The cession of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina was signed at the Treaty of Sevres, but was never recognized by the newly reconstituted Soviet Union. Romania initially had no contact with the Soviets, and a cordon sanitaire was maintained by a network of alliances (known as the “little entente”), with French backing (1921). Diplomatic relations were finally reopened in 1934 due to the efforts of Romania’s long-serving foreign secretary, Nicolae Titulescu, who worked against the wishes of the newly crowned King Carol II. Conscious of Hitler’s increasing threat to European security at this time, Titulescu worked out a pact of mutual assistance with the Soviet Union on the eve of the Munich crisis of 1938. This pact allowed the Soviet airforce to cross Romanian territory in defense of Czechoslovakia, but Stalin never took advantage of this offer, having secretly allied himself with Hitler at that time.

  When Hitler and Russia attacked and then divided Poland, neutral Romania gave refuge to the remnants of the Polish opposition forces, most of whom had come from the Russian zone and later fought alongside the French and British, much to Stalin’s annoyance. With the fall of France, Romania also fell within the German orbit, leading to the dictatorship of Marshall Ion Antonescu. The dismantling of Romania began with the Molotov-Ribentrop Pact, which ceded Bessarabia and northern Bucovina to the Soviet Union (August 2, 1940). It therefore was inevitable that Antonescu would join the Wehrmacht in its attack on the Soviet Union (June 1941). The Romanian army occupied Odessa, which became the capital of “Transnistria,” a newly created territory that was administrated but never formally annexed by the Romanian authorities. The siege of Stalingrad, in which 300,000 Romanians were killed or wounded, provided a decisive turning point for Romania’s participation in the war, and persuaded Marshall Antonescu and King Michael to withdraw from the fighting. Though Molotov preferred negotiating with Antonescu, it was King Michael who, on August 23, 1944, did a political “about-face” and ordered the Romanian army to attack the Germans. The breakdown of the Romanian front greatly facilitated the liberation of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, hastened the Allied push to Berlin, and ultimately shortened the war in Europe.