Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  Vice President Alexander Rutskoi tries to calm the crowd as his 1993 parliamentary rebellion begins to collapse. © MALCOLM LINTON/LIAISON. GETTY IMAGES

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  Yeltsin’s policy. Yeltsin moved to effectively isolate his vice president. As a consequence of these developments, Rutskoi drifted toward the parliamentary opposition led by parliament speaker Ruslan Khas-bulatov. This struggle between president and parliament came to a violent head in September and October 1993. Yeltsin crushed the revolt with armed forces and arrested its leadership. Rutskoi was arrested and removed from the office of vice president, and the position of vice president was abolished.

  In 1994 the Russian parliament granted amnesty to Rutskoi and other rebels of 1993. Rutskoi went on to organize a Russian nationalist party, Power (Derzhava) which competed in the 1995 parliamentary elections and joined the Red-Brown opposition to Yeltsin in the summer 1996 presidential elections. A leading figure of the anti-Yeltsin nationalist opposition, Rutskoi ran for and won the post of governor of Kursk Oblast in October 1996 and served in that office to 2000. He stood for reelection but was disqualified by the Central Elections Commission, which ordered his name stricken from the ballot for election campaign law violations and abuses as governor. Rumors interpreted the government’s actions as a direct response to Rutskoi’s criticism of the president during the Kursk disaster. See also: AFGHANISTAN, RELATIONS WITH; AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; KURSK SUBMARINE DISASTER; OCTOBER 1993 EVENTS; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Aron, Leon. (2000). Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Thomas Dunne Books. Chugaev, Sergei. “Khasbulatov amp; Co.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (January/February 1993).

  JACOB W. KIPP

  RYBKIN, IVAN PETROVICH

  (b. 1946), chair of the State Duma in 1994 and 1995, secretary of the Security Council from 1996 to 1998, and leader of the Socialist Party of Russia.

  Ivan Rybkin was born on October 20, 1946, in the Voronezh countryside. He graduated from the Volgograd Agricultural Institute in 1968, completed graduate school there, and worked as a teacher until 1983. With the beginning of perestroika, he launched an ambitious political career and became the second secretary of the Volgograd Oblast committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1990, he was selected as a people’s delegate to the RSFSR, where he headed the Communists of Russia fraction. In 1993 and 1994 he was vice-chair of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), but in April 1994 he left the KPRF. As of the fall of 1993, he was a member of the Agrarian Party, on whose list he was elected to the Duma. In this capacity he proved a pragmatic politician. He lost the support of the leftists (in 1995 he was excluded from the Agrarian Party), but gained the support of the Kremlin.

  In the summer of 1995, the Kremlin brought forth an initiative to create two centrist blocs for the elections: a right-centrist bloc headed by Premier Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin, and a left-centrist bloc. This latter subsequently came to be called the “Ivan Rybkin bloc,” which gained 1.1 percent of the electoral votes. The bloc was dissolved, but Rybkin was nonetheless elected to the Duma by single-mandate district in his homeland, Voronezh Oblast. Before the second round of presidential elections, Boris Yeltsin created the Political Advisory Council to the President of the Russian Federation, which included representatives of parties and public associations that had not made it into the Duma. Rybkin, who had recently registered the Socialist Party, was appointed chair of the council. A few months later, Rybkin replaced Alexander Lebed as secretary of the Security Council, in which capacity he worked until 1998, focusing mainly on Chechnya. His deputy was for some time Boris Berezovsky, with whom Rybkin maintains close relations.

  In 2001-2002, with the discussion and adoption of the law on political parties, which required the presence of branch offices in at least half the regions of the country, the processes of integration strengthened considerably. From mid-2001 onward, Rybkin participated in talks concerning the creation of a United Social-Democratic Party of Russia, along with Mikhail Gorbachev and other well-known politicians. The unification process was difficult, due not so much to divergence of views as to a clash of ambitions. In the fall of 2001, when the process seemed complete, Rybkin’s Socialist Party even disbanded, in anticipation of joining forces with the new party, but the merger broke at the last minute. It was effected only in March 2002, and on a visibly more modest scale.

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  On the basis of the Socialist Party, Alexei Pod-berezkin’s Spiritual Heritage movement, and dozens of small organizations with socialist tendencies, the Socialist United Party of Russia was finally created. Rybkin became its chair. The honeymoon period was short, however, and within a few weeks, Ry-bkin resigned as chair and the Socialist Party of Russia left the coalition. In April 2003, at a congress of the Socialist United Party of Russia, he was officially removed from the position of chair and excluded from the party. His alleged offenses included an open letter to Putin, which called for ending the Chechnya war and beginning negotiations with Aslan Maskhadov; collaboration with the SPS; and unsanctioned contacts with Berezovsky. See also: CHECHNYA AND CHECHENS; PUTIN, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. McFaul, Michael; Petrov, Nikolai; and Ryabov, Andrei, eds. (1999). Primer on Russia’s 1999 Duma Elections. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.

  NIKOLAI PETROV

  Moscow and Petrograd soviets and participated in the October revolution. He became commissar for internal affairs in the first Bolshevik government, but resigned because of his support for a coalition government. In April 1918, however, he accepted the post of chairperson of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, and in February 1921 he became deputy chairman of Sovnarkom. After Lenin’s death in January 1924 he became chairman. He was also a member of the Politburo from 1922 until 1930.

  Rykov was a leading supporter of the New Economic Policy, and allied with Stalin in his struggle with Leon Davidovich Trotsky, Grigory Yevseye-vich Zinoviev, and Lev Borisovich Kamenev, which lasted from 1926 to 1928. When Stalin lashed out against the Right Opposition, of which Rykov was one of the leaders, he was defeated, discredited, and ultimately dismissed from his senior positions by 1930. Rykov was arrested in February 1937. With Nikolai Alexandrovich Bukharin and Genrikh Grig-orevich Yagoda, Rykov was one of the leading defendants at the third show trial, and was executed in March 1938. See also: BOLSHEVISM; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; MENSHE-VIKS; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; POLITBURO; RIGHT OPPOSITION; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY; SOVNARKOM

  DEREK WATSON

  RYKOV, ALEXEI IVANOVICH

  (1881-1938), Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician, one of the leaders of the Right opposition.

  Born in Saratov province, the son of a tradesman, Alexei Rykov joined the Social Democratic Party in 1898 and supported the Bolsheviks after their split with the Mensheviks. He played an active part in the 1905 revolution. In 1907, however, he began to work for reconciliation between the two wings of the party. In exile in Paris for two years, he returned to Russia in 1911 but was soon arrested and exiled to Siberia.

  Returning to Moscow after the revolution of February 1917, Rykov became a member of the

  RYLEYEV, KONDRATY FYODOROVICH

  (1795-1826), a poet who played a leading role in organizing the mutiny of the military units in St. Petersburg that occurred on December 14, 1825 (the so-called Decembrist Uprising).

  Born into the family
of an army officer, Kon-draty Fyodorovich Ryleyev also became an officer and served in units stationed in West Europe after the defeat of Napoleon’s armies. He saw the general backwardness of Russian society sharply contrasted with the capitalist countries of Western Europe. Upon returning to St. Petersburg, Ryleyev became active in a variety of social and political circles. In 1823 he joined the secret Northern Society. Situated in St. Petersburg and headed by Nikita Muraviev and Sergei Trubetskoi, it consisted of moderate reformists who leaned toward establishment of a constitutional monarchy, modeled after

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  the English version. By contrast, the Southern Society, created by Pavel Pestel in Tulchin, gathered together more radical members of the movement, and demanded complete eradication of the extant tsarist autocracy and the establishment of a democratic republic based upon on universal suffrage.

  With the exception of his earliest works, Ryleyev’s poems are romantic in style. Their themes reflect patriotic sentiments and concern with the course of Russian history. His verses ushered in ideas about the duty to sacrifice one’s artistic calling in service to the downtrodden masses well before Nikolay Nekrasov preached them in his own poetry. Tragically, Ryleyev was not able fully to develop his poetic talents, and his celebrity is mainly due to the martyrdom he underwent in the cause of freedom. He was one of the five rebels who were executed, along with Pestel, Kakhovskoi, Mu-raviev-Apostol, and Bestuzhev-Riumin, for their roles in the Decembrist Uprising. His sarcastic wit has also become legend. Apparently, just as Ryleyev was about to be hanged, the rope broke and he fell to the ground. Bruised and battered, he got up, and said, “In Russia they do not know how to do anything properly, not even how to make a rope.” An accident of this sort usually resulted in a pardon, so a messenger was sent to Tsar Nicholas to know his pleasure. The tsar asked, “What did he say?” “Sire, he said that in Russia they do not even know how to make a rope properly.” “Well, let the contrary be proved,” said Nicholas. See also: DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Obolonskii, A. V., and Ostrom, Vincent. (2003). The Drama of Russian Political History: System Against Individuality. College Station: Texas A amp;M University Press.

  JOHANNA GRANVILLE

  RYUTIN, MARTEMYAN

  (1890-1937), leader of an anti-Stalin opposition group that emerged within the Russian Communist Party in the 1930s.

  Martemyan Ryutin was born on February 26, 1890, the son of a Siberian peasant from the Irkutsk province. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1914. During the civil war, he fought against Alexander Vasilievich Kolchak’s forces in Siberia, and in the early 1920s he held party posts in Irkutsk and Dagestan. In 1925, Ryutin became party secretary in the Krasnaya Presnia district of Moscow, and in 1927 he was elected a non-voting member of the party Central Committee. In the following year he incurred Stalin’s wrath for his conciliatory attitude towards Bukharin and his followers.

  Experience of the collectivization drive convinced Ryutin of the ruinous nature of Stalin’s economic policies, and the criticisms he voiced led, at the end of 1930, to his expulsion from the party and a brief spell of imprisonment. In 1932, Ryutin and some associates circulated a manifesto, “To All Members of the Russian Communist Party,” which condemned the Stalin regime and demanded Stalin’s removal from power. Ryutin also composed a more detailed analysis of Stalin’s dictatorship and economic policies in the essay “Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship” (first published in 1990). He was arrested, along with his group, in September 1932. Although Stalin wanted the death penalty, the Politburo, at the insistance of Sergei Mironovich Kirov, rejected the demand, and Ryutin was sentenced to ten years imprisonment. Ryutin, however, was re-arrested in 1936 on a trumped-up charge of terrorism, and was executed on January 10, 1937. See also: KIROV, SERGEI MIRONOVICH; KOLCHAK, ALEXANDER VASILIEVICH; PURGES, THE GREAT; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Conquest, Robert. (1990). The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press. Getty, J. Arch, and Naumov, Oleg V. (1999). The Road to Terror : Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939: Annals of Communism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Medvedev, Roy Aleksandrovich, and Shriver, George. (1989). Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. New York: Columbia University Press. Tucker, Robert C. (1990). Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941. New York: Norton.

  JAMES WHITE

  RYZHKOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH

  (b. 1929), USSR prime minister under Gorbachev and a leading figure in economic reform.

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  Born in Donetsk Oblast, Nikolai Ryzhkov joined the Party in 1956 and graduated from the Ural Polytechnical Institute in Sverdlovsk in 1959. He spent his early career as an engineer at the Or-dzhonikidze Heavy Machine-Building Institute and was named director in 1970. Following his successes in the Urals, Ryzhkov became involved in all-union economic matters.

  Ryzhkov served as a deputy in the USSR Council of the Union (1974-1979) and a deputy in the USSR Council of Nationalities (1974-1984). Ryzhkov was first deputy chair of the USSR Ministry of Heavy and Transport Machine-Building (1975-1979) and later first deputy chair of the USSR State Planning Commission (Gosplan) (1979-1982). He became a full member of the CPSU Central Committee in 1981, chairing the Diplomatic Department (1982-1985) and later the USSR Council of Ministers (September 1985-December 1990), making him the de facto Soviet prime minister. Ryzhkov was the chief administrator of the Soviet economy in the last half of the 1980s. He became a full Politburo member in April 1985 and chaired the Central Committee Commission that assisted victims of the 1988 Armenian earthquake. As the economy stalled, protests grew, and the Kremlin debated the Five-Hundred-Day Plan, Ryzh-kov suffered a heart attack on December 25, 1990. He subsequently resigned, and Gorbachev replaced him with Valentin Pavlov.

  Ryzhkov unsuccessfully ran against Boris Yeltsin for the Russian presidency in June 1991. He then assumed a variety of corporate positions, including chairman of the board of Tveruniversal Bank (1994-1995), chairman of the board of Prokhorovskoye Pole, and head of the Moscow Intellectual Business Club. He won a seat in the Russian State Duma in 1995 and 1999 as head of “Power to the People,” a bloc aligned with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. See also: CENTRAL COMMITTEE; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; GOSPLAN; PERESTROIKA; POLITBURO; PRIME MINISTER

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Goldman, Marshall. (1992). What went Wrong with Per-estroika. New York: Norton.

  ANN E. ROBERTSON

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  SAINTS

  In addition to the saints inherited from the Early Church and Byzantium, the Orthodox Church in Rus soon began to create its own objects of veneration. The saints belonged to three main categories: (1) spiritual and secular leaders who rendered significant service to the Church; (2) martyrs; and (3) those who exhibited extraordinary spiritual gifts, specifically the power to perform miracles, especially through their relics. Although the miracles were not a formal precondition under canon law, popular Orthodoxy placed a high value on this quality, primarily if manifested in “uncorrupted remains” (netlennye moshchi). The miracle of physical preservation, attested by an official examination of the crypt, reinforced belief in the power to perform miracles and hence intercede on behalf of the disabled and distressed.

  Canonizations in the Russian Orthodox Church have proceeded in a highly uneven fashion. In early medieval Russia (from Christianization in 988 to the 1547 Church Council), the Russian Church canonized only nineteen figures; the first to be so honored were the princes Boris and Gleb, whose nonresistance to a violent death amidst the fratricidal warfare made them the very model of kenoti-cism. The first major burst of canonizations came during the Church Councils of 1547 and 1549, which, reflecting Muscovy’s new self-assertion as the Third Rome, recognized thirty-nine
new saints. Subsequently the church slowly expanded the number of saints, but that process came to a virtual halt in 1721: It canonized only five new saints before Nicholas II ascended the throne in 1894 and sought to bolster autocracy by favoring canonization and emphasizing the religious foundations of autocracy. The Bolshevik Revolution brought all of that to an end; the new regime actively engaged in de-canonization, opening scores of saints’ crypts (to demonstrate that the “uncorrupted relics” were frauds) and consigning relics to museums and storage. Although the Church was able to canonize five saints in the 1960s and 1970s, an era of large-scale canonizations opened in 1988. Over the next decade the church canonized a long list of prominent medieval figures (i.e., Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy and the icon-painter Andrei Rublev) as well as many martyred during the Soviet era.

  By 1999 the Russian Orthodox Church had a total of 1,362 saints. The majority came from the hierarchy (11.5%) and monastic orders (49.9%); few of the parish clergy were canonized (1.8%), all,

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  indeed, on the basis of marytyrdom. In addition to a substantial number of princes and tsars (6.9%), the church canonized ordinary lay martyrs (24.5%), some “fools-in-Christ” (3.2%), and laypersons venerated for their extraordinary spirituality (2.3%). These saints are, moreover, overwhelmingly male (96.4%). Since 1999, the church has begun to change these proportions, chiefly because of the ongoing canonization of martyrs (e.g., more than a thousand in August 2000). While some decisions have been exceedingly controversial (above all, the canonization of Nicholas II and his family), the church seeks to pay homage to the ordinary priests and parishioners who paid the ultimate price for their unswerving faith during the merciless repressions of the first decades of Soviet rule. See also: HAGIOGRAPHY; ORTHODOXY; RELIGION; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH