Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  The gradually more tense political relations did not prevent the establishment of growing economic and cultural ties. Russia accounted for 5 to 6 percent of Swedish imports in the late nineteenth century, but in the years leading up to the October Revolution, Russia was the third- or fourth-largest destination of Swedish exports. Swedish direct investment grew and, for instance, Nobel Industries developed a substantial presence in Russia. Sweden harbored many intellectual refugees from Russia.

  Sweden remained neutral in World War I, in spite of popular pressures for an alliance with Germany. The neutral position allowed Sweden, as the first Western power, to establish relations with the new Bolshevik regime. A Swedish-Soviet trade treaty was signed in the autumn of 1918, although formal diplomatic recognition only followed in 1924. Ties again deteriorated in the 1930s but, following the rise of fascism, Sweden backed Soviet membership in the League of Nations. In spite of an official position of neutrality during World War II, Sweden openly supported its neighbor during the Soviet-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940. A brief conflict with the Soviets in 1942 followed Soviet efforts to sink Swedish freight ships carrying German goods. Another source of tension came from the flight of many Balts (mainly Latvians and Estonians) to Sweden. While 160 Baltic military officers were returned to the USSR in 1945 and 1946, civilian refugees were permitted to stay in Sweden.

  The Soviets strongly opposed Swedish efforts to establish Nordic security cooperation after the

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  SYTIN, IVAN DMITRIEVICH

  war, and Sweden returned to its policy of non-alignment, albeit with secret cooperation with the West. Moscow valued Sweden’s decision not to acquire nuclear weapons, and the two countries often found themselves adopting similar positions regarding international disputes. Sweden gained further favor by staying out of the European Economic Community and by supporting the ESCE (European Coal and Steel Community) process. Growing tensions were caused by Afghanistan and sightings of Soviet submarines in Swedish waters, one of which was stranded in 1981. Ties were normalized under Gorbachev. Commercial relations were relatively modest during the Soviet and post-Soviet period. See also: DENMARK, RELATIONS WITH; FOREIGN TRADE; GREAT NORTHERN WAR; LIVONIAN WAR; NARVA, TREATY OF; NORWAY, RELATIONS WITH; NYSTADT, TREATY OF; STOLBOVO, TREATY OF

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Kirby, David. (1990). Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Baltic World, 1492-1772. London: Longman. Kirby, David. (1995). The Baltic World, 1772-1993: Europe’s Northern Periphery in an Age of Change. London: Longman.

  JARMO T. KOTILAINE

  SYN BOYARSKY

  A ranking in the Muscovite state service system, held by provincial petty noble cavalrymen who comprised the bulk of the campaign army up to the middle of the seventeenth century.

  The syn boyarsky (pl. deti boyarskie) comprised Muscovy’s middle service class, below the metropolitan nobility but higher in status than the contractually recruited commoner cossacks and musketeers. Syn boyarsky literally means “boyar’s son,” reflecting this group’s mixed origins (younger sons of Moscow boyars, slave or free retainers of formerly independent appanage princes, sons of clergymen or peasants, etc.) in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

  The syn boyarsky was legally free in the sense that he was exempt from taxes, and he was entitled to own peasants and to sue in defense of his precedence honor. But he was required to serve the

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  sovereign for life in the field army, in the garrisons, and in the lower levels of provincial administration. A few deti boyarskie owned some allodial land, but most depended primarily upon the sovereign’s bounty in service-conditional land and cash and grain issues to outfit themselves and their retainers for duty. The syn boyarsky’s bounty entitlements were determined in part by his service capacity as assessed at inspection and in part by his past service, past rank, and the services and ranks of his forebears. The average syn boyarsky owned no more than five or six peasant tenants. Upon retirement his son or another male kinsman usually received part or all of his service lands and took over his service obligations. See also: BOYAR; MESTNICHESTVO; MUSCOVY; POMESTIE; STRELTSY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  BRIAN DAVIES

  SYTIN, IVAN DMITRIEVICH

  (1851-1934), Russia’s leading pre-Revolution publisher of books, magazines, and the top daily newspaper, Russian Word (Russkoye slovo).

  Ivan Dmitrievich Sytin, had literate but poor peasant parents and only two years of schooling in his native village of Gnezdnikovo, Kostroma Province. Venturing first to the Nizhny Novgorod Fair at fourteen as helper to a fur-trading uncle, he apprenticed at fifteen to a Moscow printer-merchant who helped him start a business in 1876, the year of his marriage to a cook’s daughter who would be vital to his success.

  Like his mentor, Sytin issued calendars, posters, and tales that itinerant peddlers sold to peasants throughout the countryside. When in 1884 Leo Tolstoy needed a publisher for his simple books (the Mediator series) meant to edify the same readership, his choice of Sytin raised this unknown to respected status among intellectuals. Sytin then began to publish for well-educated readers and branched into schoolbooks, children’s books, and encyclopedias by investing in the new mass-production German presses that cut per-unit costs. His rise as an entrepreneur who exploited the latest technol1509

  SYTIN, IVAN DMITRIEVICH

  ogy led contemporaries to tag him “American” in method.

  Sytin claimed that he became a newspaper publisher in 1894 at Anton Chekhov’s urging, and he hired able editors and journalists who made his Russian Word the most-read liberal daily in Russia. Lessening censorship and rapid industrialization in the last decades of the tsarist regime helped Sytin add to his publishing ventures and kept him a millionaire through the economic disruption of World War I. After the 1917 Revolution, Sytin received assurances from Vladimir Lenin that he could publish for the Bolshevik regime, only to be cast off as a capitalist after Lenin died in 1924. The final decade of his life was marked by gloom, austerity, and obscurity, offset only by his church attendance and his writing of memoirs (published in the USSR in 1960 in a shortened edition). His downtown Moscow apartment is today an exhibition center in his honor. See also: JOURNALISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Lindstrom, Tha?s. (1957). “From Chapbooks to Classics: The Story of Intermediary.” American Slavic and East European Review 16:190-201. Ruud, Charles A. (1990). Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow, 1851-1934. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Watstein, J. (1971). “Ivan Sytin-An Old Russian Success Story.” Russian Review 30:43-53.

  CHARLES A. RUUD

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  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  TABLE OF RANKS

  The Table of Ranks [or rankings] of all official posts (Tabel’ o Rangakh Vsekh Chinov) divided government service into three vertical columns: military (voinskie), civil (statskie), and court (privdvornye). The military column was further subdivided into infantry, guards, artillery, and navy. These vertical columns were divided horizontally into ranks or classes (klassy), from rank fourteen up to rank one, each containing a variable number of posts or offices (chiny). The most crowded ranks were the civilian ones, with sometimes a dozen or more posts packed into each to accommodate newly created central and provincial officials, whereas each rank in the guards column contained just one post. Nineteen explanatory points accompanied the chart.

  Like many of Peter I’s modernizing reforms, the Table of Ranks rationalized changes that had already occurred piecemeal and replaced the old overlapping ranking systems inherited from the seventeenth century, which did not differentiate between civilian and military posts. It incorporated titles such as general, major, and colonel that had been in use in certain regiments since the 1630s, new offices such as chancellor and vice-chancellor, and court
grades introduced after Peter’s marriage in 1712 for use in the new tsaritsa’s court. The 1722 edict also contained points from foreign ranking systems, especially from Prussia, Denmark, and Sweden. Peter himself edited the final version and incorporated suggestions from the Senate and governmental departments.

  As the grid layout made plain, one of the purposes of the Table of Ranks was to correlate status across different branches of service. For example, chancellor in the civil service and field marshal-general in the army both held rank one. To occupy a position on the table at all was to be privileged, for the fourteen ranks related only to the officer class in the armed forces and its equivalent in the civil service. Noncommissioned officers, regular troops, and their civilian equivalents were not included. The table was strict about qualifications for jobs. Neither post nor rank could be inherited or bought. At the same time, birth and marriage continued to confer privilege. The first of the accompanying explanatory points confirmed the precedence of princes of the blood and royal sons-in-law. Point eight allowed sons of princes, counts, barons, and other aristocrats free access to places

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  TAGANKA

  where the court assembled before others holding lowly office (chin), but the sovereign still wished to see them distinguish themselves from others in all cases according to their merit. Even the highest born would not be awarded any rank until they had served the tsar and the fatherland. Conversely, non-nobles who managed to enter the table received hereditary noble status upon attaining military rank fourteen or civilian rank eight. Civil offices in ranks nine to fourteen conferred personal noble status only. Women were ranked according to their husbands or fathers, depending on their marital status, apart from ladies-in-waiting, holding court service ranks in their own right.

  The Table of Ranks endorsed the belief that nobles were the natural leaders in a society of orders composed of categories with unequal rights. It did not demonstrate a consistent commitment to meritocracy to the detriment of lineage, nor did it specifically raise commoners at the expense of nobles. Nobles who failed to attain a post on the table did not lose their noble status. The Holstein envoy H. F. de Bassewitz writes: “What [Peter] had in mind was not the abasement of the noble estate. On the contrary, all tended towards instilling in the nobility a desire to distinguish themselves from common folk by merit as well as by birth.” The final explanatory point specified that people were to have clothing, carriages, and livery appropriate to their office and calling.

  Peter did not intend to diminish the traditional elite in principle, nor did he do so in practice. In 1730, of the 179 army and navy officers and officials in ranks one through four of the table, nine-tenths were descended from old Muscovite noble clans and a third from men who recently had been boyars. Over the centuries, some posts on the table were abolished and others were created to accommodate the staff of academies, universities, and other new institutions. Orders and medals became associated with various grades. It became harder for non-nobles to enter the table. But the basic principles established by Peter I continued until 1917, and consciousness of rank and striving for promotion and honors left a deep imprint on Russian society and culture. See also: PETER I

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Hughes, Lindsey. (1998). Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Meehan-Waters, Brenda. (1982). Autocracy and Aristocracy. The Russian Service Elite of 1730. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

  LINDSEY HUGHES

  TAGANKA

  The Taganka emerged in 1964, under the leadership of Yuri Lyubimov, as one of the young theaters reflecting the generational split within the Soviet intelligentsia following the year of protest (1956). A theater of young comrades-in-arms, Taganka believed in its mission: making audiences aware of contemporary moral, political, and social dilemmas. Aesthetically, it revived Meyerhold’s tradition. A theater of synthesis, it mobilized various resources: music, dance, pantomime, acrobatics, masks, the shadow-play, and others. Many shows began outside and proceeded through the lobby into the auditorium. The Taganka opened with Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, putting into practice Brecht’s own theory of epic theatre. The Taganka’s approach to the repertoire was unique: it often produced prose adaptations (A Hero of Our Time, 1964; Master and Margarita, 1977); and poetic montage (Antiworlds, 1965; Listen! Mayakovsky!, 1967). Lyubimov’s Taganka, with its brilliant actors, such as Vladimir Vysotsky, Veni-amin Smekhov, and Valery Zolotukhin, and no less brilliant designer, David Borovsky, quickly became a cultural landmark. Despite continuous battles with censorship, it was never closed down and was held out to the West to display artistic freedom in the USSR. However, Lyubimov lost his Soviet citizenship in 1984, while in London. The Theater’s new leader, Anatoly Efros, a follower of Konstan-tin Stanislavsky, took it in a different direction. Whereas Lyubimov had developed shows, Efros developed actors. Under perestroika, the Taganka lost its status as gadfly of the society. Lyubimov’s return in 1989 did little to reinstate the status. A split within the theater, initiated by N. Gubenko, dealt a serious blow to the Taganka and it never recovered the status that it held before 1984. See also: PERESTROIKA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Beumers, Birgit. (1997). Yury Lyubimov at the Taganka Theatre 1964-1994. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

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  TAJIKISTAN AND TAJIKS

  Gershkovich, Alexander. (1989). The Theater of Yuri Lyu-bimov: Art and Politics at the Taganka Theatre in Moscow. New York: Paragon House.

  MAIA KIPP

  TAJIKISTAN AND TAJIKS

  The Tajiks are the most prominent indigenous non-Turkic population in Central Asia. They are of Persian/Iranian ethnic descent, although their exact origin is subject to debate. Legends link the Tajiks with Alexander the Great and his campaign in the region north of Afghanistan and west of China- what is today Tajikistan. More likely, contemporary Tajiks are descendants of the Persian-speaking population that resided in the sedentary regions of what is now Central Asia, particularly in the country of Tajikistan.

  Tajikistan had a population of 6,719,567 in 2002, of which approximately 4,361,000 were ethnic Tajik (64.9%). However, if one adds to that the million or so Tajiks that live in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, respectively, the number increases to well above six million Tajiks in Central Asia. What makes these calculations difficult is the fact that defining oneself as a Tajik is a construct of the Soviet era. Prior to the early twentieth century, people in the region defined themselves more on tribal and clan affiliations or by their adherence to Islam than to an ethnic identity. In neighboring Uzbekistan, for example, ethnic Tajiks claim that they are actually more prominent than the official statistics of that country suggest. Within the Republic of Tajikistan, other significant minorities include Uzbeks (25.0%) and Russians (3.5%). Many Russians emigrated from Tajikistan immediately after the break-up of the Soviet Union, particularly during the period of the civil war (1992-1997). Most of the Uzbeks live in the northern region of Sogd, previously known as Leninobod (Leninabad). The remaining Russians live in the capital city of Dushanbe, which in 2002 had an overall population of 590,000, although that figure undoubtedly was an underestimation.

  The Tajiks speak an eastern dialect of Farsi, the language of Iran. The languages are mutually intelligible; although as modern Tajik is written in the Cyrillic script and not in the Arabic script, there can be difficulties between the two. Indeed, throughout the past century, Tajik has been writENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  An elderly Tajik man drinks tea as another plays a traditional musical instrument at a Dushanbe street market. © AFP/CORBIS ten in Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic scripts. It is the intention of the current government to return to the Arabic script, although the practical difficulties of such a move have slowed any such effort.

  In contrast to the Iranians, the Tajiks are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi School, not Shi’a Muslims like Iranians. This is the result of
the history of religious centers in the region, such as Bukhara and Samarkand in Uzbekistan, where a number of ethnic Tajiks live. More importantly, the Safavid dynasty that made Shi’a Islam the official religion of Persia did not control the traditional Tajik territories. There is a small sect of Isma’ili Shi’a in the Badakhshon area of eastern Tajikistan that is loyal to the spiritual leader of the Aga Khan. In addition, the non-Tajiks in the country practice a range of religions.

  Tajiks point to the Sassanid dynasty of the early tenth century as a founding moment in their history. Traditionally, the Tajiks-or Tajik speakers- occupied urban areas of Central Asia, especially the key trading cities of Samarkand and Bukhara.

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  TAJIKISTAN AND TAJIKS

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