Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bartlett, Rosamund. (2000). Shostakovich in Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fanning, David, ed. (1998). Shostakovich Studies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Fay, Laurel E. (2000). Shostakovich: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ho, Allan B. (2000). Shostakovich Reconsidered. London: Toccata Press.

  MATTHIAS STADELMANN

  SHOW TRIALS

  Staged trials of opponents of the Soviet regime held in Moscow between 1936 and 1938.

  The most visible aspect of Josef Stalin’s Great Purges was a series of three Moscow show trials

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  SHUISKY, VASILY IVANOVICH

  staged in August 1936, January 1937, and March 1938. Former leading members of the Bolshevik Party were put on trial for treason and generally confessed, often after being physically tortured, to participation in elaborate terrorist conspiracies against the Soviet state, ranking officials of the Communist Party, and Stalin personally. The trials were carefully staged and scripted, covered in the national and international press, and intended to justify in public the purges of the Party and the state apparatus that Stalin was implementing in 1937 and 1938.

  The sixteen defendants at the first trial, including Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, described by the prosecutors as the “Trotskyity-Zinovievite Terrorist Center,” were charged with plotting to kill Stalin and several of his top lieutenants, including Sergei Kirov, who had been assassinated in 1934, very likely on Stalin’s orders. All sixteen were found guilty and shot within twenty-four hours of the verdict.

  The defendants at the second trial, including Yuri Piatakov, Karl Radek, and fifteen other prominent Old Bolsheviks, termed the “Parallel Center” by the prosecutors, were charged with plotting terrorist acts and engaging in active espionage in the service of Japan and Nazi Germany. Thirteen of the defendants were shot.

  The final and most important of the three trials included several of the most prominent members of the Bolshevik old guard: Nikolai Bukharin, Politburo member and chief theorist of the NEP; Alexei Rykov, chair of the Council of People’s Commissars; and Genrikh Yagoda, head of the Secret Police (NKVD) until 1936. The twenty-two defendants in this trial, members of a putative Anti-Soviet Right-Trotskyite Bloc, confessed under extreme physical pressure to terrorism, conspiracy to kill Party leaders, espionage, the murder of Maxim Gorky, and the attempted murder of Vladimir Lenin in 1918, among other crimes. Bukharin, the most important defendant, accepted responsibility for all the crimes named in the indictment but refused to confess to specific criminal actions; nonetheless, he was sentenced to death along with eighteen of the other defendants. Stalin and his secret police tightly controlled all three trials from behind the scenes; the outcome was preordained.

  The term show trials usually refers to the Moscow trials, but it can also denote the numerous other trials staged throughout the USSR in 1937 and 1938, under orders from Stalin and the

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  Politburo. The Bolsheviks organized these provincial show trials, at least seventy of which were approved by the Politburo, to show the people that saboteurs, “wreckers,” and traitors were a threat even at the local level.

  Finally, the term can also describe any number of staged political trials held throughout the early Soviet period, especially between 1921 and 1924 and again from 1928 to 1933, such as the Industrial Party trial of 1930, in which eight prominent technical and engineering specialists were accused of sabotage and espionage and were sentenced to terms in prison. See also: GREAT PURGES, THE; GULAG; STALIN, JOSEF VIS-SARIONOVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Conquest, Robert. (1990). The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1993). “How the Mice Buried the Cat: Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces.” Russian Review 52:299-320. Medvedev, Roy. (1989). Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. New York: Columbia University Press.

  PAUL M. HAGENLOH

  SHUISKY, VASILY IVANOVICH

  (1552-1612), tsar of Russia (1606-1610).

  Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky was a descendant of one of the oldest and most illustrious princely families of Russia. His uncle, Ivan Petrovich Shuisky, was one of the regents of the mentally retarded Tsar Fyodor I, and Vasily became a boyar at Fyo-dor’s court. During the late 1580s, Boris Godunov (Tsar Fyodor’s brother-in-law) managed to become sole regent, and Shuisky clan members were banished from Moscow; some of them died mysteriously while in exile. By 1591, however, Vasily and his three younger brothers (sons of Ivan Andreye-vich Shuisky) were back in the capital, where Vasily became the leader of the family and resumed his place in the boyar council. When Dmitry of Uglich (Tsar Ivan IV’s youngest son) died mysteriously in 1591, Vasily Shuisky was chosen to lead the investigation; he concluded that the boy accidentally killed himself.

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  SHUMEIKO, VLADIMIR FILIPPOVICH

  Upon the death of Tsar Fyodor in 1598, Shuisky made no attempt to prevent Boris Godunov from becoming tsar; nevertheless, Tsar Boris feared and persecuted the Shuisky clan. During False Dmitry’s invasion of Russia, however, Tsar Boris turned to Vasily Shuisky for help. In January 1605 Shuisky took command of the tsar’s army fighting against False Dmitry and defeated Dmitry’s forces at the battle of Dobrynichi. Shuisky then waged a terror campaign against the population of southwestern Russia that had sided with False Dmitry. In the meantime, the rebellion in the name of the true tsar spread like wildfire. After Tsar Boris’s death in April 1605, Shuisky was recalled to Moscow by Tsar Fyodor II, and he did not participate in the rebellions that overthrew the Godunov dynasty.

  At the outset of Tsar Dmitry’s reign, Shuisky was convicted of treason but was only briefly exiled. Back in Moscow, he secretly plotted to overthrow Tsar Dmitry, claiming that Dmitry was an impostor named Grigory Otrepev. During the celebration of Tsar Dmitry’s wedding to the Polish Princess Marina Mniszech in May 1606, Shuisky created a diversion while his henchmen killed the tsar. Shuisky managed to seize power, but many Russians were unwilling to accept the usurper Tsar Vasily IV. His enemies circulated rumors that Tsar Dmitry had survived the assassination attempt and would soon return to punish the traitors. Within a few weeks, Tsar Vasily was confronted by a powerful civil war that spread from southwestern Russia to over half the country. In the fall of 1606, rebel forces under Ivan Bolotnikov besieged Moscow and nearly toppled Shuisky. Tsar Vasily’s armies drove the rebels back and eventually defeated Bolotnikov in late 1607, but by then another rebel army supporting the second false Dmitry challenged Shuisky’s weak grip on the country. For many months Russia had two tsars and two capitals, and chaos reigned throughout the land. In desperation, Tsar Vasily eventually turned to Sweden for support. In 1609 King Karl IX sent military forces into Russia to aid Shuisky and seize territory. That prompted Polish military intervention, and in June 1610 Tsar Vasily’s army was crushed by Polish forces at the battle of Klushino. In Moscow a rebellion of aristocrats (including the Romanovs) toppled Tsar Vasily, forcing him to become a monk. Soon Moscow opened its gates to the Polish army, and Shuisky was shipped off to Poland, where he was imprisoned and died in September 1612.

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  See also: BOLOTNIKOV, IVAN ISAYEVICH; DMITRY, FALSE; FILARET ROMANOV, PATRIARCH; MNISZECH, MARINA; TIME OF TROUBLES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bussow, Conrad. (1994). The Disturbed State of the Russian Realm, tr. G. Edward Orchard. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s. Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Massa, Issac. (1982). A Short History of the Beginnings and Origins of These Present Wars in Moscow, tr. G. Edward Orchard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Skrynnikov, Ruslan. (1988). The Time of Troubles: Russia in Crisis, 1604-1618, tr. Hugh Graham. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.

  CHESTER S. L. DUNNING

  SHUMEIKO,
VLADIMIR FILIPPOVICH

  (b. 1945), Russian legislator.

  Vladimir Shumeiko graduated from Rostov Polytechnical Institute with an engineering degree in 1972. He made his early career as an engineer in Krasnodar. After working at the Krasnodar Electrical Measurement Instruments Factory (1963-1970), he moved to the All-Union Research Electrical Measurement Instruments Institute (1970-1985), then returned to Krasnodar as head of the electrical instruments production association.

  Shumeiko’s political career began in 1990, when he was elected to the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies. He followed that victory with a seat in the RSFSR Supreme Soviet. Also in 1990, he was named deputy chair of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet Committee on Economic and Property Reform. As “shock therapy” reforms unfolded, Boris Yeltsin brought several industrial directors into his government. Shumeiko, president of the Confederation of Associations of Entrepreneurs, was appointed first deputy prime minister in June 1992; in December the new prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin reappointed him as first deputy chair.

  In the fall of 1993, the Supreme Soviet began investigating several members of Yeltsin’s cabinet for corruption, including Shumeiko. He briefly resigned from the government on September 1 and

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  SIBERIA

  joined Yeltsin in plotting what to do with the recalcitrant legislature. Shumeiko returned to the government on September 22, after Yeltsin’s order to dissolve parliament. The next month, Yeltsin named him Minister of Press and Information.

  Shumeiko switched to the newly created Federation Council, becoming chair of that house in January 1994, a post that also gave him a seat on the Russian Security Council. He formed his own political movement, Reforms-New Course, in December 1994. Shumeiko lost his seat in January 1996, when Yeltsin changed the basis of membership in the Federation Council. Since then, Shumeiko has unsuccessfully tried to return to a legislative office. As of 2003 he was chairman of the petroleum company Evikhon. See also: YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

  ANN E. ROBERTSON

  SIBERIA

  Often called the “Wild East,” beautiful but austere, Siberia is one of the least populated places on earth. Western Siberia is the world’s largest and flattest plain, across which tributaries of the Ob and Irtysh rivers wend their way north to the Arctic Ocean. This orientation means that in spring the mouths of the rivers are yet frozen while their upper reaches thaw, creating the world’s largest peat bog in the middle of the plain; thus, the lowland is arable only in the extreme south. Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East tend to be rugged and mountainous, with thin soils at best. Beneath this chiefly soil-less veneer lies some of the world’s oldest rock. Higher mountains and active volcanoes rise along the easternmost edge, where the Pacific Ocean plate subducts beneath Asia. Here also the majority of the rivers drain northward, perpendicular to the main east-west axis of settlement. Only along the Pacific seaboard do the rivers flow east, the longest of which is the Amur, which, together with its tributaries, forms the boundary between China and Russia. On the border between Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East, the region boasts the world’s oldest and deepest lake, Baikal. Including some of the purest water on earth, Lake Baikal holds more than twenty percent of the globe’s freshwater resources.

  Human settlement resembles a mostly urban, beaded archipelago strung along the Trans-Siberian

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  Railroad from the Urals cities of Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg to Vladivostok, 4,000 miles away in the east. In between, rest the large cities of Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Khabarovsk. Novosibirsk, which means “New Siberia,” is largest of all with 1.5 million people.

  The densest settlement pattern conforms to Siberia’s least severe climates, which align themselves in parallel belts from harsh to harshest at right angles to a southwest-northeast trend line. Deep within the interior of Asia and surrounded by mostly frozen seas, Siberia experiences the most continental climates on the planet. One-time maxima of more than ninety degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) are possible in the relatively short Siberian summers except along the coasts, whereas one-time minima of minus-ninety degrees Fahrenheit (-68 degrees Celsius) have been recorded in the long winters of Sakha (Yakutia). This broad range of temperatures is not recorded anywhere else. Fortunately, the winter frost is typically dry and windless, affording some relief to the isolated towns and hamlets located in the sparsely populated northeast.

  Although western geographers accept the entire northeastern quadrant of Eurasia as the region known as Siberia, Russian geographers officially accept only Western and Eastern Siberia as such, excluding the Russian Far East, or Russia’s Pacific Rim. Including the Russian Far East, Siberia spans 5,207,900 square miles (13,488,400 square kilometers) and makes up more than three-fourths of the Russian land mass. By this definition, Siberia is a fourth bigger than Canada, the world’s second largest country. It extends from the Ural Mountains on the west to the Pacific Ocean on the east. North to south it spans an empty realm from the Arctic Ocean to the borders of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China. It is empty because, although it occupies 23 percent of Eurasia, it environs less than 1 percent of the continent’s population. Siberia is so massive that citizens of the U.S. state of Maine are closer to Moscow than are residents of Siberia’s Pacific Coast.

  The Russian word Sibir has at least six controversial origins, ranging from Hunnic to Mongolic to Russian. The Mongol definition is “marshy forest,” which certainly typifies much of the Siberian landscape.

  To many Westerners, the name evokes a popular misconception that people who live in Siberia are exiles or forced laborers. Although it is accurate

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  SIBERIA

  Schoolchildren cross-country ski on the frozen Tura River near Tyumen. © DEAN CONGER/CORBIS to suggest that the region became a place of exile as early as the 1600s and remained that way long after, most Siberians freely migrated there. The Great Siberian Migration, which occurred between 1885 and 1914, witnessed the voluntary movement of 4 million Slavic peasants into the southern tier of the area, facilitated by the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway (1891-1916). In fact, the tributary area of that railway became, and remains, the primary area of Siberian settlement. The rest of Siberia represents a vast underdeveloped backwater, containing fewer than one person per square mile.

  Soviet dictator Josef Stalin successfully endeavored to force the development of the “backwater” by creating a vast system of labor camps, further tarnishing Siberia’s image. At least 1.5 million forced laborers and convicts occupied the region’s north and east between 1936 and 1953. Some of the camps remained in use until the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991). Between 1953 and 1991, extraordinary financial and material incentives lured the vast majority of migrants to the harshest regions. After 1991, when the incentives were terminated, hundreds of thousands of residents departed for more hospitable and economically stable destinations.

  Although Siberia’s future is unpredictable, the region remains rich in resources. Most lie in austere, largely unexplored areas far from potential consumers. Thus, like their relatives of the past, modern Russians continue to refer to Siberia as the future or cupboard of the nation. Unfortunately, although teeming with natural wealth, the cupboard remains locked. See also: CHINA, RELATIONS WITH; FAR EASTERN REGION; NORTHERN PEOPLES; PACIFIC FLEET; TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bobrick, Benson. (1992). East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia. New York: Poseidon. Bychkova-Jordan, Bella, and Jordan-Bychkov, Terry. (2001). Siberian Village: Land and Life in the Sakha Republic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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  SILVER AGE

  Hudgins, Sharon W. (2003). The Other Side of Russia.: A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East College Station: Texas A amp;M University Press. Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1994). The Conquest of a
Continent: Siberia and the Russians. New York: Random House. Marx, Steven G. (1991). Road to Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.. Mote, Victor L. (1998). Siberia Worlds Apart. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Thubron, Colin. (1999). In Siberia. New York: Harper Collins. Treadgold, Donald W. (1957). The Great Siberian Migration. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tupper, Harmon. (1965). To the Great Ocean. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.

  VICTOR L. MOTE SIGNPOSTS See VEKHI.

  SIKORSKY, IGOR IVANOVICH

  (1889-1972), scientist, engineer, pilot, and entrepreneur.

  Igor Sikorsky designed the world’s first four-engined airplane in 1913 (precursor to the most successful bomber of World War I) and the world’s first true production helicopter. His single-rotor design, a major breakthrough in helicopter technology, remains the dominant configuration in the early twenty-first century. The winged-S emblem still signifies the world’s most advanced rotorcraft.

  Born in Kiev, Russia, Sikorsky was the youngest of five children. His father, a medical doctor and psychologist, inspired him to explore and learn. He developed a keen interest in mechanics and astronomy. While still a schoolboy he built several model aircraft and helicopters, as well as bombs. After completing formal education in Russia and France, Sikorsky attracted international recognition in 1913 at the age of twenty-four when he designed and flew the first multimotor airplane. In 1918, Sikorsky decided to flee his native country: “What were called the ideals and principles of the Marxist revolution were not acceptable to me.” He left Pet-rograd (St. Petersburg) by rail for Murmansk and from there boarded a steamer for England. Having lost all his savings, he arrived in England with only a few hundred English pounds. He settled in the United States in 1919, eventually founding the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation, the forerunner of the Sikorsky Division of United Technologies. In the early twenty-first century the corporation manufactures helicopters for sale around the world. Continually designing aircraft, Sikorsky received many other patents, including patents for helicopter control and stability systems. He grasped the humanitarian advantages of helicopters over airplanes. “If a man is in need of rescue,” he said, “an airplane can come in and throw flowers on him, and that’s just about all . . . but a direct-lift aircraft could come in and save his life.” In the 1930s, Sikorsky designed and manufactured a series of large passenger-carrying flying boats that pioneered the transoceanic commercial air routes in the Caribbean and Pacific. See also: AVIATION