Encyclopedia of Russian History
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Following Fyodor’s death in 1682, in the absence of mature males of royal blood, Sophia entered the political arena, as Muscovite conventions allowed royal women to do. She was motivated by the decision to make her half-brother Peter (b. 1672) sole ruler in preference to the elder, but physically and mentally handicapped, Tsarevich Ivan (b. 1666). Exploiting the Moscow militia’s (musketeers’) action to air grievances and take revenge on unpopular officers and officials in Peter’s government, in May 1682 Sophia and her party were able to secure Ivan’s accession as joint tsar with Peter. Most historians refer to Sophia as regent to her brothers, although she was never formally appointed as such. Even so, she was widely regarded as ruler and consolidated her authority by successfully quelling the continuation of musketeer unrest in 1682 during the period known as the Khovanshchina. She began to add her name to those of her brothers in royal edicts and to take part in public ceremonies and receptions, discarding some of the restrictions of the terem.
The dual monarchy required a new configuration of power at court in order to defuse tensions and achieve a consensus. Many additional men were promoted to boyar status. The ascendancy of the Mloslavsky clan was marginal, and by the late 1680s they lost ground to Peter’s maternal relatives the Naryshkins and their clients. Sophia relied on Prince Vasily Golitsyn to spearhead both her foreign and her domestic policy, although later the
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SORGE, RICHARD
Portrait of Regent Sophia Alexeyevna by Ilya Repin. © ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS secretary Fyodor Shaklovity rose to prominence. The regime’s crowning achievement was the 1686 treaty with Poland, which ratified the Treaty of An-drusovo (1667) in return for Russia’s agreement to sever relations with the Ottoman empire and enter the Holy League, a stepping-stone toward Russia’s ascendancy over Poland, achieved later in Peter I’s reign. At home, efforts continued to maximize the fulfillment of service requirements and the payment of tax liabilities and to maintain law and order. Mildness in some areas, for example banning the cruel practice of burying alive women who murdered their husbands, was offset by savage penalties against Old Believers (edict of 1685). At the same time, developments in foreign policy forced the regime to relax restrictions on non-Orthodox foreigners, which annoyed conservatives. Russia offered sanctuary from persecution to French Protestants and made concessions to foreign merchants and industrialists to encourage them to set up businesses. In 1689 commercial treaties were signed with Prussia. Russia’s first institute of
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higher education, the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, founded in 1685, also relied on foreign teachers.
Like many powerful women, Sophia has been accused of Machiavellian tendencies. Although there is no evidence that she intended Peter harm, she did adopt a highly visible rulership profile and began to use the feminine form of the title “autocrat” (samoderzhitsa). She sponsored an impressive building program in the fashionable Moscow Baroque style and had her portrait with crown, orb, and scepter painted and reproduced in prints. Poets praised her, playing on the associations of her name (Sophia the Holy Wisdom). All this fueled fears that she planned to be crowned and spawned rumors of plots against Peter and his mother. Ultimately, her regime was undermined by the failure of two military campaigns against the Crimea in 1687 and 1689, leading to a standoff provoked by Peter’s supporters. This time the musketeers’ support for Sophia was lukewarm and did not quell her opponents. Some of her supporters were executed, and Sophia herself was banished to a convent. In 1698 the musketeers rebelled again. Rumors circulated that Sophia was the instigator, but the evidence was inconclusive. Nevertheless, Peter forced her to take the veil under the name Susannah. She died in the Novodevichy convent in Moscow in 1704. See also: FYODOR ALEXEYEVICH; GOLITSYN, VASILY VASILIEVICH; IVAN V; PETER I; STRELTSY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hughes, Lindsey. (1988). “’Ambitious and Daring Above her Sex’: Tsarevna Sophia Alekseevna (1657-1704) in Foreigners’ Accounts.” Oxford Slavonic Papers 21: 65-89. Hughes, Lindsey. (1990). Sophia.: Regent of Russia., 1657-1704. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thyret, Isolde. (2000). Between God and Tsar. Religious Symbolism and Royal Women of Muscovite Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
LINDSEY HUGHES
SORGE, RICHARD
(1895-1944), Soviet spy.
Richard Sorge was born to a German family in Baku. His father was a petroleum engineer and his grandfather, Friedrich Sorge (1828-1906), a colENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
SOROKOUST
league of Marx. In 1910 the family returned to Germany, where Sorge later studied in Berlin and Hamburg Universities. Drafted into the German army, he was a participant in World War I, and the combat experience converted him to socialism. In 1919 he joined the Communist Party of Germany. He held various positions as teacher and miner before returning to the Soviet Union in 1924, where a year later he joined the Communist Party and worked for various institutions before joining the military intelligence (GRU) in 1929. His duties took him to London and Los Angeles, and in 1930 to China. Returning to Germany, he established contacts with the military intelligence and Gestapo and was sent undercover as a journalist to Tokyo, and eventually as the press attach? in the German embassy. His scandalous life, which included heavy drinking and several affairs, served as a cover for his activities as a Soviet agent. The German military attach? was the source of much information, and through him, Sorge found out the plans for Operation Barbarrossa and duly informed Moscow. This news went counter to Josef Stalin’s belief, who did not anticipate war in 1941, and he even thought Sorge was a double agent. Beria also discounted similar reports from his own agents in Germany, which confirmed Sorge’s warnings. The end result was the greatest military disaster to befall the Soviet Union, when Hitler attacked as Sorge had reported. In his work, Sorge received help from the Japanese communists and from his radio operator, Max Klausen (1899-1979). Born in Germany, Klausen immigrated to the Soviet Union in 1927 and a year later joined the military intelligence. After serving in China, he was sent to Japan in September 1935, where he joined up with Sorge. Like Sorge, he was arrested in 1941, but he survived and lived in East Germany.
Sorge’s loose life finally brought him to the attention of the Japanese counterintelligence, which arrested him in October 1941. After two years in prison, Sorge was sentenced to death on September 29, 1943, and was hanged. There is no evidence that the Soviet government in any way intervened in his behalf, and in fact, Sorge’s long-suffering wife, E. A. Maximova (1909-1943), was arrested (September 4, 1942) by the NKVD and perished in prison camp. Only during Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw were Sorge’s services to the Soviet Union recognized, and on November 11, 1962, he was posthumously awarded the title of hero of the Soviet Union, and his wife was rehabilitated. Sorge’s life has been subject of numerous books, but his legacy remains that of one of the greatest intelligence
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coups of all time gone to waste because those in the position of power failed to heed it. See also: MILITARY INTELLIGENTSIA; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF; WORLD WAR II
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Johnson, Chalmers. (1990). An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Tokyo Spy Ring. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Whymant, Robert. (1996). Stalin’s Spy: Richard Sorge and the Tokyo Spy Ring. London: I. B. Tauris.
MICHAEL PARRISH
SOROKOUST
The sorokoust, or forty divine liturgies (i.e., eu-charistic services), is a series of orthodox liturgical commemorations celebrated in memory of a dead person.
The number forty derives from the Orthodox tradition that it takes the soul forty days to reach the throne of God. Because of the similarity in sound, it is sometimes thought that the term is connected to the Russian sorok, “forty,” and usta, “month,” but in fact it derives from the Middle Greek sarakoste, “forty” (ancient Greek thessarakoste). The forty liturgies are part of the stan
dard Orthodox ritual for the dead, corresponding genetically and functionally to the Catholic tricenarius, or thirty masses. A tale from the Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) about the helpfulness of the thirty masses for the souls of the departed (bk. IV, chap. 57) appears in Greek and Russian manuscripts with the number changed to forty. The first Old Russian sources that mention the sorokoust date from twelfth-century Novgorod. Canonical texts decry the practice of arranging for sorokousty in advance of a person’s death or even of celebrating them while the person is still alive. Last wills and testaments from Muscovite Russia frequently provide for comparatively small donations to be distributed by the departed’s executor to as many as forty churches where sorokousty were to be celebrated for the departed. A more limited version of the sorokoust, a commemoration in the regular liturgy for forty days, is still practiced in the early twenty-first century in Russian Orthodox churches. See also: ORTHODOXY; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; SINODIK
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SOSKOVETS, OLEG NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Steindorff, Ludwig. (1994). Memoria in Altru?land. Stuttgart: Steiner.
LUDWIG STEINDORFF
SOSKOVETS, OLEG NIKOLAYEVICH
(b. 1949), industrialist, inventor, powerful minister in the Russian government from 1993 to 1996.
Trained as a metallurgical engineer, from 1971 until 1991 Oleg Soskovets worked at the Karaganda Metallurgical Factory in Kazakhstan, rising from the shop floor to become the general director in 1988. In 1991 a police investigation of financial abuses led to the arrest of several of his colleagues, but he himself was not prosecuted.
In 1989 he was elected to the newly formed USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, and in 1991 he served briefly as minister of metallurgy in the USSR government. In January 1992 President Boris Yeltsin named him to head a state metallurgy commission, but that spring he was made deputy prime minister and minister of industry in the government of Kazakhstan. Again, he left after a few months, when the attorney general’s office reopened the factory corruption case.
Named to head a state committee on metallurgy, Soskovets returned to Moscow in October 1992, only for Yeltsin five months later to appoint him deputy prime minister and overseer of Russian industry. He became close to Yeltsin’s security aide Alexander Korzhakov and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, and chaired government meetings in the latter’s absence. He was a hawk on the first Chechnya war, and in February 1995 Yeltsin sent him to Chechnya with the thankless task of restoring economic and social life in the still war-torn republic. Later, unanswered allegations suggested that he had profited handsomely from the government cash sent to Chechnya for reconstruction.
Over time, Korzhakov started pressing Yeltsin to replace Chernomyrdin with Soskovets. In January 1996 Yeltsin named him to head the campaign for Yeltsin’s reelection. However, Soskovets and Korzhakov favored postponement of the election, fearing that Yeltsin might lose. Eventually forced into a runoff, Yeltsin fired them both in June.
After this, Soskovets became an assistant to Mayor Yuri Luzhkov of Moscow and continued his
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work for the Association of Financial-Industrial Groups, of which he became chairman in 1995. Press and TV expos?s linked him to allegedly criminal activity by the Mafia-connected brothers Mikhail and Lev Chernoi, colleagues of his in the metals industry. Although he made no effective response to the charges, he was not prosecuted. See also: KORZHAKOV, ALEXANDER VASILIEVICH; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.
PETER REDDAWAY
SOSLOVIE
By the mid-nineteenth century, the term soslovie (pl. sosloviya) had come to designate hereditary groups such as the nobility, clergy, townspeople, and peasantry. Although soslovie is often regarded as the Russian equivalent to West European terms (the English estate, the French ?tat, and the German Stand), it differed from these in several important respects.
Above all, the term appeared quite belatedly- in its modern sense only in the early nineteenth century. In contrast to medieval Europe, where estates had long been the basis of the social hierarchy, medieval Muscovy knew nothing similar-in language or social reality-to the corporate estates of Western Europe. Instead, just as the Muscovite state had “gathered in” principalities and lands, so too had it accumulated but not amalgamated disparate status groups based on occupation, residence, and ethnicity. Indeed, one lexicon of Muscovite language recorded nearly five hundred status groups. Although Muscovy sometimes used generic terms like chin (rank) to designate elite groups and bifurcated society into “service” (sluzhilye) and tax-bearing (tiaglye) categories, it recognized the distinct status of individual groups. Characteristically, even the nobility lacked a collective name; the service people (sluzhilye liudi) remained kaleidoscopic: elite princely clans and aristocratic boyars at the apex, with marginal, interstitial groups such as single-homesteaders (odnodvortsy) and musketeers (streltsy) at the bottom. The peasantry, similarly, consisted of various groups, from serfs and indentured slaves to crown and state peasants.
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Desperate to mobilize human resources, the eighteenth-century state sought to simplify this social order. One key impulse came from Peter the Great’s new poll tax, which forced the state to identify the specific subgroups of the privileged and to merge the numerous categories of the disprivi-leged. Amalgamation was first apparent in collective terms for the privileged nobility, initially as shlyakhetstvo (a Polish loanword) and by mid-century as dvoryanstvo, the modern term. From the 1760s, chiefly in an effort to transplant West European models of an urban third estate, some officials groped for a new terminology, but did not settle upon a generic term to describe and aggregate the smaller social units.
Only in the first decades of the nineteenth century did the term soslovie finally emerge in its modern sense. The word had earlier denoted “gathering” or “assembly,” but nothing so abstract as corporate estate. In the early nineteenth century, however, the term soslovie came to signify not only formal institutions (such as the Senate), but also corporate social groups. Although other, competing terms still existed (such as zvanie and sostoianie to designate occupation and status groups), the term soslovie became-in law, state policy, and educated parlance-the fundamental category to describe huge social aggregates such as the nobility. The new terminology gained formal recognition in a new edition (1847) of the Academy dictionary of the Russian language, which defined soslovie as “a category of people with a special occupation, distinguished from others by their special rights and obligations.”
The term not only persisted, but conveyed extraordinary intensity and complexity. Soslovie was more than a mere juridical category; it signified a group so hermetically sealed, so united by kinship and culture that some lexicographers invoked the word caste (kasta) as a synonym. The estate system, moreover, proved highly adaptable: New status groups-privileged subgroups (i.e., merchants), ethnic groups (i.e., Jews), and new professions (i.e., doctors)-became distinct sosloviya. The proliferation of estates reflected the regime’s desire to fit other groups into the existing soslovie order, as well as the ambition of these groups to gain formal legal status. Hence the complex of Russian sosloviya was far more differentiated and protean than a simplistic four-estate paradigm would suggest.
The soslovie system reached its apogee, in legal recognition, lexical clarity, and social reality, in the mid-nineteenth century, but it was increasingly subject to erosion and challenge. In part, the regime itself-which had celebrated the soslovie as a bulwark of social stability against the revolutionary forces sweeping Western Europe-concluded that some social mobility and change was essential for the country’s development and power. To be sure, the Great Reforms of the 1860s made the inclusion of all estates (vsesoslovnost) a fundamenta
l principle; the reforms sought not to abolish estates but to mobilize them all, whether for supporting new institutions (e.g., the organs of local self-government) or for supplying soldiers and officers for the army. But the emergence of revolutionary movements increased the regime’s concern about social stability and, especially from the 1880s, inspired much rhetoric and some measures to reaffirm the soslovie order.
At the same time, modernizing processes like urbanization and industrialization were steadily eroding the soslovie boundaries. Rapid economic growth, in particular, had a critical, corrosive impact: the plethora of new professions and semi-professions, together with the rapid growth of the industrial labor force, undermined the significance of the estate marker. Not that the soslovie was irrelevant; it was still the only category in passports, it was often correlated with opportunity and occupation, and it bore connotations of prestige or stigma. Nevertheless, social identities became blurred and confused; profession and property, not estate origin, became increasingly important in defining status and identity.
As a result, by the early twentieth century, the distinctive feature of Russian society was the amor-phousness and fluidity of social identities. In contrast to the traditional Western paradigm (“estates into classes”), Russian society exhibited a complex of “estates and classes,” with mixed and overlapping identities. The government itself, with its franchise laws and policies in the wake of the 1905 Revolution, came increasingly to count upon property, not hereditary status, in allocating electoral power and defining its social base. The privileged, such as conservative nobles, fought to preserve the soslovie order; the propertied and progressive deemed abolition of sosloviya a precondition for the creation of a modern civil society. Although the Bolshevik regime on October 28, 1917, dissolved all estate distinctions (one of its first acts), it did not in fact dispense with this category as it endeavored to identify adversaries. Hence personnel documents, from university applications to judicial