Encyclopedia of Russian History
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Freeze, Gregory. (1996). “Subversive Piety: Religion and the Political Crisis in Late Imperial Russia.” Journal of Modern History 68:308-50. Grunwald, Constantin de. (1960). Saints of Russia.. London: Hutchinson.
GREGORY L. FREEZE
SAKHA AND YAKUTS
The famous folklore scholar G. V. Ksenofontov has compared the once nomadic Sakha people to a branch of an apple tree carried around the world by the wind and finally taking root. The Sakha, or Yakut, people are the descendants of Turkic nomads and originated in the region around Lake Baikal in what is now Russia. But in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Mongols arrived from the south, along with other peoples, and the Sakha moved north and east, settling eventually in the basin of the river Lena, later called Yakutia.
In the early twenty-first century, Yakutia or the Republic of Sakha is an autonomous republic within Russia in the far northeast, five times the size of France. Known as the “Land of Soft Gold” for the rich furs that come from the region, Yakutia is home to the Sakha people, as well as four other indigenous cultural groups (the Even, the Evenki, the Yukagir, and the Chukchi). The name “Yakut” comes from the Evenk word yako, mean1344 ing stranger. The Russians arriving in the seventeenth century adopted the Evenk word for the local population. The capitol of the Republic of Sakha is Yakutsk, its largest city.
Russians sent to gather fur and other riches for the tsar, made Yakutia a stopping point on their way to the Pacific Ocean during the eighteenth century. They brought new agricultural techniques to the Sakha, who were primarily cattle and horse breeders, but the local population paid a price in fur tax for these innovations. A Yakut cook peers out from a restaurant window encased in frozen snow. © DEAN CONGER/CORBIS
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
In 1923 Soviet power was established in Yakutsk. It was declared an autonomous republic under the name of Yakutia, but was still economically and politically controlled by the Soviet Union. It received its official name (Republic of Sakha) when the Declaration of Sovereignty of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) was signed on September 27, 1990. The Republic of Sakha has a president, elected for a term of five years.
SAKHAROV, ANDREI DMITRIEVICH
Always a resource-rich region, Yakutia plays a large role in Russia’s economy. The main industry in the republic is mining. The Republic of Sakha produces 99 percent of Russia’s diamonds, 24 percent of its gold, and 33 percent of its silver. It is also a major producer of coal, natural gas, tin, timber, fish, and other natural resources. The diamond mining industry is the main source of Russia’s foreign currency income; the multinational De Beers company partnership with the Russian company Almazy Rossii-Sakha (Diamonds of Russia and Sakha) was established in 1992.
The Sakha summer festival, Ysyakh, is held in June, celebrating the ancestors’ movement of their cattle to pasture in the steppe. The festival opens with the solemn ritual of feeding the fire and includes sport contests and horse races, as well as kumys, a traditional beverage made of fermented mare’s milk.
Since 1991, the Sakha language has been a mandatory class in primary schools, and some 92 percent of ethnically Sakha people speak their own language. It is not considered to be an endangered language, unlike the Chukchi, Even, or Evenki languages. The some 400,000 Sakha people living and working in the Republic of Sakha take pride in their strong and unique heritage. See also: CHUKCHI; EVENKI; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Argounova, Tatiana. (2000). “Republic of Sakha (Yakutia).” «http://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/resources/rfn/ sakha.html». Hiller, Kristin. (1997). “Big River of Siberia.” Russian Life 9:16-24. Slezkine, Yuri. (1994). Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vitebsky, P. (1990). “Yakut.” In The Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union, ed. Graham Smith. London: Longman.
ERIN K. CROUCH
SAKHAROV, ANDREI DMITRIEVICH
(1921-1989), physicist, political dissident, and member of the Council of People’s Deputies; recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Andrei Sakharov was born into an intelligentsia family in Moscow in 1921. Following in the footsteps of his physicist father, he enrolled at the physics faculty of Moscow University in 1938. Exempted from military service in World War II, Sakharov graduated in 1942 and spent the war years as an engineer at a munitions factory. There he met and married Klavdia Vikhireva (1919-1969), a laboratory technician.
After the war Sakharov undertook graduate work in the laboratory of Igor Tamm. He received his candidate’s degree (roughly equivalent to a Ph.D.) in 1947. In the late 1940s, Sakharov conducted research that led to the explosion of the Soviet hydrogen bomb in 1953. The same year, he was elected a full member of Academy of Sciences. At thirty-two, he was the youngest member in the history of that institution.
Sakharov began to support victims of political oppression as early as 1951 when he sheltered a Jewish mathematician fired from the Soviet weapons program. In 1958 he published two papers on the effects of nuclear explosions and appealed for a ban on atmospheric testing. With this work he began to move beyond physics into political activism.
The 1968 publication in the New York Times of Sakharov’s essay “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom” marked, he wrote in his memoirs, a “decisive step” in his development as a dissident. The essay called for disarmament and rapprochement with the West. As a result of the essay, Sakharov was banned from all weapons research. His wife died shortly thereafter, and Sakharov returned to Moscow and academic physics.
Sakharov became involved in the emerging human rights movement, cofounding the Moscow Human Rights Committee in 1970. Through articles, petitions, interviews, and demonstrations, Sakharov and others in the movement aided political prisoners and advocated the abolition of censorship, an independent judiciary, and the introduction of contested elections. Sakharov married fellow human rights activist Yelena Bonner in 1972. She represented him at the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1975. The Nobel Committee’s citation emphasized Sakharov’s linkage of human rights and international cooperation.
Sakharov’s denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 led to his exile to Gorky in January 1980. He maintained ties with
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SALT
Andrei Dimitrievich Sakharov. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
Moscow and the West via Bonner until her exile in 1984.
In 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev invited Sakharov to return to Moscow. Sakharov immediately became an important and ubiquitous figure in the democratization movement. He was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989. He participated in drafting a new constitution. He lent his personal support to numerous causes, advocating amnesty for political prisoners, disarmament, peaceful solutions to ethnic conflicts, and limits on Gorbachev’s emergency powers. On the eve of his death in December 1989, he was working to abolish Article 6 of the Soviet constitution, which enshrined the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. The article was abolished in March 1990. See also: BONNER, YELENA GEORGIEVNA; CONGRESS OF PEOPLE’S DEPUTIES; DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; GLAS-NOST; HUMAN RIGHTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bonner, Elena. (1986). Alone Together, tr. Alexander Cook. New York: Knopf.
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Lourie, Richard. (2002). Sakharov: A Biography. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Sakharov, Andrei. (1989). Moscow and Beyond, 1986 to 1989, tr. Antonina Bouis. New York: Vintage Books. Sakharov, Andrei. (1990). Memoirs, tr. Richard Lourie. New York: Knopf.
LISA A. KIRSCHENBAUM SALT See STRATEGIC ARMS LIMITATION TREATIES. SALTYKOV-SHCHEDRIN LIBRARY See NATIONAL
LIBRARY OF RUSSIA.
SALTYKOV-SHCHEDRIN, MIKHAIL YEVGRAFOVICH
(1826-1889), one of Russia’s greatest satirists.
Writing for leading radical
journals of his time, Sovremennik (The Contemporary) (1862-1865) and Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland) (1868-1889), Saltykov (pen name Shchedrin) created the most biting satires in Russian literature.
Among his best-known books are Istoriia odnogo goroda (History of a Town) (1869-1870) and Gospoda Golovlevy (The Golovlyov Family) (1875- 1880). History is an account of despotic mayors’ rule of a fictitious town Glupov (Foolsville). The mayors can be distinguished from each other only by the degree of their incompetence and ill will. The book is a satire on the whole institution of Russian statehood and the very spirit that pervades the Russian way of life: routine mismanagement, needless oppression, and pointless tyranny. At the same time, it is an attack on the Russian people for their passivity toward their own fate, for their acceptance of violence and oppression of their rulers.
The Golovlyov Family is a study of the institution of the family as cornerstone of society. In this novel, Saltykov describes moral and physical decline of three generations of a Russian gentry family. The nickname of the novel’s protagonist, Iudushka (“Little Judas”), whose treacherous behavior toward his nearest family is a matter of daily business, became part of Russian speech.
Among Saltykov’s other better-known works are Pompadur i pompadurshi (Pompadours and Pom-padouresses) (1863-1874), Sovremennaia idilliia
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
SAMIZDAT
(Contemporary Idyll) (1877-1883), and Skazki (Fairy Tales) (1869-1886). See also: INTELLIGENTSIA; JOURNALISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Draitser, Emil. (1994). Techniques of Satire: The Case of Saltykov-Shchedrin. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Saltykov-Shchedrin, M. E. (1977). The Golovlyov Family. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. Saltykov-Shchedrin, M. E. (1984). The Pompadours. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.
EMIL DRAITSER
SAMI
The fifty- to eighty thousand Sami (Lapps) live mostly in northern Norway and Sweden, some in Finland, and only about 3 percent (1,600) in the Kola peninsula of the Russian Federation. They represent less than 0.2 percent of the Murmansk oblast population. They reached the Gulf of Bothnia around 1300. Sami and Finnic languages are not mutually intelligible, having split some three thousand years ago. Three to ten Sami languages are distinguished, and the standard literary Sami in the Nordic countries is difficult to understand for the Kola (Kild) Sami, who are also unfamiliar with its Latin script. The reputed Asian features are actually encountered in only 25 percent of the Sami population.
Inhabiting most of present Finland and Karelia one thousand years ago, the Sami were pushed toward the Arctic Ocean by Scandinavian, Finnish, Russian, and Karelian booty seekers. Those in the west were forced to adopt Catholicism and later Lutheranism. Greek Orthodoxy was imposed on the Kola Samis in the early 1500s, after they were subjected by Novgorod around 1300. The first western Sami book was printed in 1619, and the Bible in 1811, while the first Kola Sami book appeared in 1878.
Reindeer herding remains a major occupation. The Soviet Russian authorities annihilated the traditional Kola Sami settlements in the 1930s, relocating them repeatedly to ever larger state or collective farms, where overgrazing severely reduced the number of reindeer. By now Lujaur (Lovozero in Russian) in central Kola remains the only partly Sami district. In 1937 Moscow ordered
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
all Sami publications destroyed. Ten years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sami became again an optional subject in Lujaur schools, and some basic texts were published. A Kola Sami association was formed in 1989 and later joined the worldwide Sami Council. See also: FINNS AND KARELIANS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; NORTHERN PEOPLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beach, Hugh. (1994). “The Sami of Lapland.” In Polar Peoples: Self-Determination and Development, ed. Minority Rights Group. London: Minority Rights Publications. Slezkine, Yuri. (1994). Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Taagepera, Rein. (1999). The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State. London: Hurst.
REIN TAAGEPERA
SAMIZDAT
The term samizdat is most often translated as “self-publishing.” It refers to the clandestine practice in the Soviet Union of circulating manuscripts that were banned, had no chance of being published in normal channels, or were politically suspect. These were generally typescripts, mimeograph copies, or handwritten items.
The practice got its primary impetus in the mid to late 1950s, a period that in a socio-literary context is often referred to as The Thaw. This itself is linked to Nikita Khrushchev’s campaign of de-Stalinization, which provided an opening for literary themes previously disallowed. The opening was frequently arbitrary as the case of Boris Pasternak’s novel Dr. Zhivago proved in 1958. The novel could not be published in the Soviet Union, and Pasternak was brutally vilified despite being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
The fact that broad categories of literature and sociopolitical themes still could not be addressed moved much of this output underground into samizdat. Sometimes this mode of literary output was systematic as with later journals and chronicles. But much of this was done spontaneously on an individual basis. Of key importance is that samizdat is inextricably linked to what came to be the dissident movements in the Soviet Union.
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SAMOILOVA, KONDORDIYA NIKOLAYEVNA
These, in turn, were linked with other groups seeking, in early manifestations, protection of human rights, greater religious freedom, and more ethnic autonomy. As Scammell notes (1984, p. 507), samizdat “had come into existence in the late fifties as a result of the clash between the intellectuals’ post-Stalinist hunger for more freedom of expression and the continuing repressiveness of the censorship.” Freedom of expression was one thing, but it was deadly to the state’s perception of what could be allowed when the political admixture was included. The fact that samizdat and dissent were coeval is impossible to avoid and had great consequences for Soviet history.
From the early 1960s to the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, samizdat had an uneven history. There were periods of extreme repression, for instance in 1972-1973. But samizdat was not quelled. Very often, trials were benchmarks in the advancement of samizdat and its many causes. The February 1966 trial of two writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who had been publishing abroad for several years using pseudonyms, was a sensation since they were given seven and five years respectively at hard labor for allegedly writing anti-Soviet material. Their arrest led to public protests by dissidents. A number of them were then arrested, and this, in turn, led to further protests and corresponding arrests. Books and pamphlets with documents from these trials were frequently compiled and circulated widely in secret. These added much fuel to the fire, and a constant cycle was created. The Soviet government was also severely criticized worldwide because of a new policy of punishing dissident writers by confining them to mental hospitals.
Samizdat and dissent grew despite all impediments. It was a cultural opposition, an independent subculture, as Meerson-Aksenov (1977) called it, and it signified that social and political judgments stemming from sources other than the state were seen to be critically significant. In reality, the Soviet state was stymied by this phenomenon because it no longer knew quite how to handle it. The blanket executions of the 1930s were out of the question. The breadth of the criticism was also sometimes incomprehensible to the government. It could include everything from opposing the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to the latest broadsides against modern art.
The most famous of the systematic publications was The Chronicle of Current Events, which was issued without interruption from 1968 to 1972
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and sporadically thereafter. Other notable publications included the Ukrainian Herad, the Chronicle of the Catholic Church of Lithuania, and historian Roy Medvedev’s Political Diary (which ran from 1964 to 1971). This is by no means to minimize the huge number of individual
contributions. Together they undercut the power and prestige of the Soviet state. See also: CENSORSHIP; DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; GOSIZDAT; JOURNALISM; SINYAVSKY-DANIEL TRIAL
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bukovsky, Vladimir. (1978). To Build a Castle. London: Deutsch; New York: Viking. Meerson-Aksenov, Michael, and Shragin, Boris. (1977). The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’-An Anthology, tr. Nickolas Lupinin. Belmont, MA: Nordland. Reddaway, Peter, ed. and tr. (1972). Uncensored Russia: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union. New York: American Heritage. Scammell, Michael. (1984). Solzhenitsyn: A Biography. New York: Norton.
NICKOLAS LUPININ
SAMOILOVA, KONDORDIYA NIKOLAYEVNA
(1876-1920), Bolshevik; leader of Communist Party Women’s Department.
Konkordiya Samoilova was one of the founders of the Soviet Communist Party’s programs for emancipating women. Born into a priestly family in Irkutsk, she studied in the Bestuzhevsky Courses for Women in St. Petersburg in the 1890s. In 1901 Samoilova became a full-time member of the Social-Democratic Labor Party.
Samoilova spent sixteen years in the revolutionary underground, mostly in St. Petersburg. An editor of Pravda (Truth) in 1913, she created a column on the female proletariat and, in 1914, with Inessa Armand, Nadezhda Krupskaia, and Lyud-mila Stal, founded Rabotnitsa (Female Worker), a newspaper devoted to working-class women. In 1913 she also organized the first celebration in Russia of International Woman’s Day.
In 1917 Samoilova revived Rabotnitsa, which had been closed by the tsarist government. In 1918 she worked closely with Inessa Armand and AlexanENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
SAN STEFANO, TREATY OF
dra Kollontai to establish a women’s department (the Zhenotdel) within the Communist Party. While Armand and Kollontai developed the program for women’s emancipation, Samoilova concentrated on building the department from the ground up. Always an enthusiastic supporter of Vladimir Lenin and a reliable, hard-working, efficient Bolshevik, Samoilova was trusted by the party leadership, despite the fact that she was as ardent an advocate for work among women as the more flamboyant Kollontai. She was also an able propagandist who crafted vivid, accessible speeches and pamphlets. Samoilova died of cholera on a propaganda trip down the Volga in 1920. See also: FEMINISM; KOLLONTAI, ALEXANDRA MIKHAIL-OVNA; ZHENOTDEL