by James Millar
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Then the situation changed dramatically. On January 5, 1762, the Empress Elizabeth died. Her successor, Peter III, was a fervent admirer of Frederick II and all things Prussian. When he took the throne, Peter ended the war with Prussia, called his troops back, and returned all territorial gains. As a result, Frederick recovered and defeated the Austrians. France, defeated in North America and more disinterested about the continental war, also signed a treaty with Prussia. Frederick’s “miracle” had resulted from Russia’s flip-flop, and his victory brought the first step toward Prussian domination of Germany.
At home, Peter III’s decision ran counter to Russia’s strategic and political interests. Contemporaries called the conflict the “Prussian War,” and even popular prints of the time depicted the war as a struggle solely between Russia and Prussia. The decision to hand Frederick victory thus did not go over well within any segment of the population. Catherine, Peter’s German wife, led a palace coup against her husband that toppled him from power on July 9, 1762. Catherine II’s rise to power would have been inconceivable had it not been for Russia’s participation in the war. See also: AUSTRIA, RELATIONS WITH; CATHERINE II; ELIZABETH; FRANCE, RELATIONS WITH; PETER III; PRUSSIA, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, Fred. (2001). Crucible of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. New York: Vintage. Keep, John L. H. (2002). “The Russian Army in the Seven Years’ War.” In The Military and Society in Russia, 1450-1917, ed. Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe. Leiden: Brill. Leonard, Carol. (1993). Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
STEPHEN M. NORRIS
SHAHUMIAN, STEPAN GEORGIEVICH
(1878-1918), Bolshevik party activist and theorist on the nationality question; principal leader of the Bolsheviks in Baku during the Russian Revolution who perished as one of the famous Twenty-Six Baku Commissars.
Born into an Armenian family in Tiflis (Tbilisi), the young Shahumian was educated in local
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schools before entering the Riga Polytechnic Institute in 1900. Active in Armenian student political circles, he turned toward Marxism in Riga. Expelled for his political activities, Shahumian continued his studies at the University of Berlin, where he joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RS-DRP). He grew close to Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, translated the Communist Manifesto into Armenian, and was elected a delegate to the Fourth (Stockholm) and Fifth (London) Congresses of the RSDRP. Shahumian was active in the strike movement in Baku during the first Russian revolution (1905-1907) and throughout the years of reaction and repression of the labor movement, and was arrested and imprisoned several times. When the February Revolution broke out, he returned from exile in Astrakhan and assumed leadership of the Baku Bolsheviks.
Elected chairman of the Baku Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, Shahumian was the most important figure in Baku politics in 1917 and 1918. After the October Revolution, Lenin’s government appointed him Extraordinary Commissar for the Affairs of the Caucasus. Shahumian headed the Council of People’s Commissars, the de facto government of the Baku Commune, from April through July 1918. Although he was moderate in temperament and tolerant of diverse political parties, his brief tenure was marked by a brash attempt to expand Soviet power throughout the Caucasus by military means. As the Turkish army approached Baku, the soviet voted to invite Persia-based British forces to defend the city. Shahumian’s government stepped down and soon was arrested. On September 20, 1918, anti-Bolsheviks brutally executed twenty-six commissars, among them Shahumian, in the deserts of Transcaspia (now Turkmenistan). The Soviet government blamed the British for their deaths and commemorated them as martyrs to the revolution. Reburied in a mass grave in Baku, they became the inspiration for paintings, songs, poems, and films. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, anticommunist Azerbai-janis disinterred their corpses and destroyed their monuments. See also: ARMENIA AND ARMENIANS; BAKU; BOLSHEVISM; CAUCASUS; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1972). The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
RONALD GRIGOR SUNY
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(b. 1956), lawyer and former minister of nationalities.
Sergei Shakhrai trained as a lawyer at Rostov State University and attained the rank of candidate of juridical sciences from Moscow State University (MGU) in 1982. He then taught law at MGU until 1990. Shakhrai was a Party member from 1988 to August 1991.
In 1990, Shakhrai was elected to the new RSFSR Congress of People’s Deputies, where he quickly became chair of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet Committee for Legislation. He simultaneously served Boris Yeltsin as a counselor for legal and nationalities affairs. In 1992 he was named a member of the Russian Federation Security Council and deputy chair responsible for nationality issues. During the November-December 1992 ethnic unrest in North Ossetia and Ingushetia, Shakhrai served as head of the temporary regional administration. A Terek Cossack, he also chaired the Russian parliamentary committee on the rehabilitation of the Cossacks. In November 1992, Shakhrai was appointed a deputy prime minister.
In legal matters, Shakhrai argued Yeltsin’s case in the 1992 Constitutional Court hearings on the legality of the president’s banning of the CPSU, a decree written by Shakhrai himself. He also served as Yeltsin’s representative to the 1993 Duma commission drafting a new Russian constitution and negotiated many of the subsequent federal power-sharing treaties. Shakhrai became leader of the Party of Russian Unity and Accord in October 1993, running on their ticket in the December 1993 Duma election. However, he resigned from the party when the party joined the Our Home is Russia movement in August 1995.
Shakhrai was transferred from deputy prime minister to minister of nationalities and regional policy in January 1994. This move was soon overturned; by April he was reappointed deputy prime minister and in May removed as minister of nationalities. However, he continued to influence the decisions of his replacement, Nikolai Yegorov.
Shakhrai’s work in law and nationality affairs combined in the issue of Chechnya. Despite Chechen president Dzhokar Dudayev’s assertions otherwise, Shakhrai insisted that Chechnya remained an integral part of the Russian Federation. When Dudayev refused to ratify the new constitution, despite Shakhrai’s repeated attempts at negotiation, he
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SHAKHTY TRIAL
provided the legal pretext for an invasion. Shakhrai and minister of defense Pavel Grachev convinced Yeltsin that an attack on Chechnya would be quick and painless; ultimately, the attack was launched in December 1994. Shakhrai’s prediction proved false, however, as the first Russo-Chechen war lasted until August 1996.
Yeltsin summarily fired Shakhrai in June 1998, when the lawyer questioned the constitutionality of a possible third term as president for Yeltsin. However, Shakhrai was not unemployed for long. In October, prime minister Yevgeny Primakov appointed Shakhrai as his own legal advisor. Shakhrai also won a Duma seat for Perm oblast during the 1999 election. As of 2003 he was a member of the influential Russian Foreign and Defense Policy Council and was teaching at Moscow State Institute for International Relations (MGIMO). See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; PARTY OF RUSSIAN UNITY AND ACCORD
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dunlop, John B. (1998). Russia Confronts Chechnya.: Roots of a Separatist Conflict. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lieven, Anatol. (1998). Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power. New Haven: Yale University Press.
ANN E. ROBERTSON
SHAKHTY TRIAL
This famous trial based on fabricated charges was used by Stalin to start a three-year attack on the technical intelligentsia of the USSR and to discredit moderates within the political leadership. Fifty-t
hree mining engineers and technicians, including some top officials and three German engineers, were accused of acts of sabotage and treason dating back to the 1920s and taking part in a conspiracy directed from abroad (involving French
Courtroom scene from the Shakhty sabotage trial in 1928. © TASS/SOVFOTO
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
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finance and Polish counterespionage). The story of conspiracy was fabricated by the Unified State Political Administration (OGPU) officials in the North Caucasus mining district known as the Donbass and focused on such acts as wasting capital, lowering the quality of production, raising its costs, mistreating workers, and other forms of “wrecking.”
Held in a large auditorium at the House of Trade-Unions in Moscow, this six-week-long trial was arranged for maximum publicity, with movie cameras, a hundred journalists in attendance, and a different public audience each day. The presiding judge over the specially organized judicial presence was Andrei Vyshinsky, famous for his appearance as prosecutor at the major show trials of the 1930s; the prosecutor at the Shakhty trial was the Bolshevik jurist Nikolai Krylenko. For evidence, the prosecution relied on confessions of the accused, but twenty-three of the defendants proclaimed their innocence, and a few others retracted their confessions at trial. As a political show trial Shakhty was imperfect. Still, all but four of the accused were convicted, and five of them executed.
In the wake of the Shakhty trial, non-Marxist engineers and technicians were placed on the defensive and many fell victim to persecution. “Specialist baiting” ranged from verbal harassment to firing from jobs, not to speak of arrests and convictions in later trials, including the well-known “Industrial Party” case. By 1931, when Stalin called a halt to the anti-specialist campaign, Soviet engineers had been tamed and any nascent threat of technocracy defeated.
On the political level, the Shakhty trial served Stalin as a vehicle for radicalizing economic policy and sending a message of warning to moderates in the leadership (such as Alexei Rykov and Nikolai Bukharin). If nothing else, the persecution of the “bourgeois specialists” weakened one of the constituencies that supported a relatively cautious and moderate approach to industrialization. With hindsight it is clear that the Shakhty trial, along with the renewal of forced grain procurements, signaled the coming end of the class-conciliatory New Economic Policy and the start of a new period of class war that would culminate in the forced collectivization from 1929 to 1933. An important manifestation of the new class war was the Cultural Revolution from 1928 to 1931, in which young communists in many fields of art, science, and professional life were encouraged to attack and supplant their non-Marxist senior colleagues.
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See also: SHOW TRIALS; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bailes, Kendall. (1978). Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-1941. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1978). “Cultural Revolution as Class War.” In Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kuromiya, Hiroaki. (1997). “The Shakhty Affair.” South East European Monitor 4(2):41-64.
PETER H. SOLOMON JR.
SHAMIL
(1797-1871), the most famous and successful anti-Russian Islamic resistance leader during the nineteenth century; lionized by Chechen and Dagestani nationalists and co-opted by Russian literature and the public consciousness as a sign of tsarist imperial expansion and the Russian mission in Asia.
Born in Gimri, modern Dagestan, Shamil demonstrated an early skill with weapons and horses. He entered a madrassah where he learned grammar, logic, rhetoric, and Arabic. There he joined the Murids, of the Naqshbandi-Khalidi Sufi order, in 1830. Following the transfer of Dagestan from Persia to the Russian Empire, Murids initiated a jihad against Russia under the leadership of Shamil’s mentor, the first imam of Dagestan, Ghazi Muhammed. After his death and the brief leadership of Hamza Bek, Shamil became the third imam of Dagestan and declared it an independent state in 1834. His personal charisma, political acumen, state building, and military ability as well as his blending of an egalitarian interpretation of Shari’a (Islamic Law) with proclamations of jihad against the Russian advance made him a popular political and religious leader (even among the non-Muslims of the North Caucasus).
For twenty-five years (1834-1859), Shamil led raids on Russian positions in the Caucasus. He reached the peak of prestige in 1845 devastating the advance of Mkhail Vorontsov, who organized an army to complete the final conquest of the Caucasus. In these years of struggle, Shamil unified the disparate communities of the North Caucasus, built a state, organized a regular army, and completed the Islamicization of Dagestan and Chechnya. In
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SHATALIN, STANISLAV SERGEYEVICH
1857, the Russian Empire took a more aggressive stance; Generals Alexander Baryatinsky and Nikolai Evdokimov overwhelmed the weaker and exhausted forces of Shamil. By April 1859 his fortress at Vedeno fell and Shamil retreated to Mount Gu-nib. On September 6, 1859, Shamil surrendered to the Russians and the resistance movement never recovered. He was taken to St. Petersburg for an audience with Tsar Alexander II, paraded around Russia as a hero and menace, and then exiled to Kaluga. In March 1871 he died and was buried in Medina.
Drawing from the rich literary tradition of Alexander Pushkin, Mkhail Lermontov, and Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Shamil emerged as a Caucasian hero of Russian Romanticism and a symbol of Russian expansion and its civilizing mission. Shamil was an international celebrity; his exploits serialized in numerous languages. Soviet historians initially lauded Shamil as a hero of a national liberation movement against tsarist imperialism; this became problematic when his name was linked with anti-Russian and anti-Bolshevik opposition. Thus, Shamil was depicted by Soviet historians during the second half of the twentieth century as personally progressive while his movement was corrupted by anti-popular and religious elements. See also: CAUCASUS; ISLAM; NATIONALISM IN THE TSARIST PERIOD
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gammer, Moshe. (1994). Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan. London: Frank Cass.
MICHAEL ROULAND
SHAPOSHNIKOV, BORIS MIKHAILOVICH
(1882-1945), marshal (1940), general staff officer, military theorist, and chief of the Red Army General Staff.
Originally a career officer in tsarist service, Sha-poshnikov graduated in 1910 from the Nicholas Academy of the General Staff, then served in Turkestan, where he possibly contracted malaria, and in the Warsaw Mlitary District. He attained regimental command during World War I, joined the Red Army in 1918, and occupied high staff positions during the Russian civil war, usually as
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
planner or intelligence officer. He next served on the Worker’s and Peasants’ Red Army (RKKA) staff, then from 1925 to 1928 commanded the Leningrad and Moscow military districts. From 1928 to 1931 he was RKKA chief of staff, followed by a tour as commander of the Volga Military District. From 1933 to 1935 he headed the Frunze Military Academy, after which he commanded the Leningrad Military District. From 1937 to 1940 he served as second chief of the newly created Red Army General Staff, followed by appointment after the Winter War (1939-1940) as deputy Defense Commissar. At the end of July 1941, despite ill health, he replaced Georgy Zhukov to serve as chief of the General Staff until May 1942. While recovering from either nervous exhaustion or malaria, he reverted to assignment as deputy defense commissar, followed in 1943-1945 by tenure as chief of the Academy of the General Staff.
An officer of intellect and experience, Shaposh-nikov left his mark on nearly every important military organizational and doctrinal innovation of the 1920s and 1930s. His most important scholarly work was Brain of the Army (published in three volumes, 1927-1929), in which he studied the Austrian model of Conrad von Hoetzendorf and the
tsarist experience in 1914 to argue for the creation of a modern Soviet general staff headed by an “integrated great captain.” The consummate general staff officer, Shaposhnikov was one of the few officers who enjoyed Josef Stalin’s open respect, and nearly every subsequent chief of the Red Army/Soviet General Staff considered himself Shaposh-nikov’s disciple. See also: MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Erickson, John. (1962). The Soviet High Command. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
BRUCE W. MENNING
SHATALIN, STANISLAV SERGEYEVICH
(1934-1997), Soviet economist; advocate of decentralization and market reforms.
Born in a family of upper-level functionaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Stanislav Shatalin graduated from the economics department of the Moscow State University and
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entered academia in the era of the Thaw. In 1965 he joined an influential school of economists at the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute (TsEMI) who were developing and advocating the System of Optimal Functioning for the Economy (SOFE) based on mathematical modeling. He shared the highest-ranking State Award, served as deputy director of the All-Union Institute for Systems Studies and director of the Institute for Economic Forecasting that had separated from TsEMI, and became full member of the Academy of Sciences in 1987. In 1989 and 1990, he emerged as a key advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev and a rival to the government economic team of Leonid Abalkin, and was appointed to the Presidential Council. He coau-thored the Five-Hundred-Day Plan, a reform program that was eventually declined by Gorbachev, partly because of its emphasis on the decentralization of the Union, but was widely acclaimed in the West. This program contained, albeit in a different sequence, the essential elements of the subsequent reforms of the 1990s (although some argue that the five hundred days was more gradual and mindful of the social consequences of drastic deregulation).