Encyclopedia of Russian History
Page 365
An Udmurt national congress convened in 1918. A Votiak Autonomous Oblast was formed in 1920 and upgraded to Udmurt Autonomous Republic in 1934. Native-language schooling developed rapidly, but as early as 1931 a trumped-up anti-Soviet “Finno-Ugric plot” decimated the elites. Udmurtia itself became the site of numerous slave labor camps. All Udmurt textbooks were ordered destroyed around 1970.
Udmurtia (population 1.6 million), on the borderline of forest and steppe, is dominated by its capital, Izhkar (Izhevsk in Russian; population 600,000), a major center of Soviet military industry. Russian immigration reduced the Udmurts from 52 percent of the Republic population in 1926 to 31 percent in 1989. Russian passersby chastised those few who dared to speak Udmurt in city streets.
Within the Republic 76 percent of Udmurts consider the ancestral language their main one. Liberalization enabled an Udmurt cultural society to form in 1989. Later called Demen (Together), it spawned an activist youth organization, Shundy (The sun). Udmurtia’s Russian-dominated Supreme Soviet proclaimed Russian and Udmurt coequal state languages, but implementation has been limited. In 1991 an Udmurt National Congress established a permanent Udmurt Kenesh (Council). Udmurt-language schooling began to develop slowly. See also: FINNS AND KARELIANS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lallukka, Seppo. (1982). The East Finnic Minorities in the Soviet Union: An Appraisal of Erosive Trends. Helsinki: Annales Academiae Scientarum Fennicae. Taagepera, Rein. (1999). The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State. London: Hurst.
REIN TAAGEPERA
UEZD
The uezd is an administrative-territorial unit that was used in pre-Soviet Russia and the early Soviet Union. During the formation of the Moscow state during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it designated an area that included both a town and its hinterland, and which came under the jurisdiction of a namestnik (governor). From the late sixteenth century, the uezd was under the jurisdiction of a voyevod (military governor). Under Peter I, the uezd became a subdivision of governments and provinces. Between 1775 and 1780, Catherine II’s reform of the Russian Empire’s territorial administration recreated the uezd as the primary subdivision of a guberbiya (government), based on a (male) population of between twenty and thirty thousand.
Each uezd, which was itself subdivided into volosti (boroughs), came under the jurisdiction of an ispravnik (district captain) who was elected every three years by the district assembly of the nobility. The district captain held responsibility for the maintenance of law and order and for fiscal administration. In European Russia, the 1864 zemstvo reform created assemblies at the uezd level, elected on a restrictive property-based franchise. Every three years, the uezd assembly elected an executive board responsible for district administration. It also elected delegates to an assembly at the guberniya level. Provincial governors had to ratify the appointment of the president of each uezd board and, from 1890, of all its members (at the same time the assembly franchise was further narrowed). After the February Revolution in 1917, the Provisional Government introduced the office of district commissar to represent the central state in the localities; after the Bolshevik revolution authority passed to the executive committee of the uezd soviet. At the end of the 1920s, the Soviet government dissolved both the uezd and volost levels of territorial administration, subdividing the new oblasti (regions) directly into raiony. See also: LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION
NICK BARON
1598
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
UKAZ
UGRA RIVER, BATTLE OF
The decisive moment of the defensive campaign led by Ivan III against the horde of Khan Ahmad, in October-November 1480.
Relations between the Great Horde and Moscow entered a crisis in the 1470s. Ivan III refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of Akhmad or to pay him tribute. Entering into an anti-Muscovite alliance with the grand prince of Lithuania and the Polish King Casimir, Ahmad started to campaign in the late spring of 1480. Ivan III adopted defensive tactics: In July he marched to the town of Kolomna and ordered his troops to guard the bank of the Oka River, but Ahmad made no attempt to force the Oka; instead he moved westward to the Ugra River where he hoped to meet his ally, King Casimir. The latter, however, never came.
For several months both sides temporized, and only in October did fighting break out. Muscovite troops, led by Ivan’s III son Ivan and brother Andrew, repulsed several Tatar attempts to cross the Ugra. Clashes alternated with negotiations which, however, met with no success. Finally, on November 11, 1480, the khan withdrew, thus acknowledging the failure of his attempt to restore his lordship over Rus.
In Russian historical tradition this event is celebrated as the end of the Mongol yoke. The roots of this tradition date back to the 1560s, when anonymous author of the so-called Kazan History wrote of the dissolution of the Horde after the death of Ahmad (1481) and hailed the liberation of the Russian lands from the Moslem yoke and slavery. In modern historiography, Nikolai Karamzin was the first to link the liberation with the events of 1480. Later, Soviet publications echoed this view. Another judgment of the same events was pronounced by the famous nineteenth-century Russian historian, Sergei Soloviev, who ascribed the downfall of the yoke not to the heroic deeds of Ivan III but to the growing weakness of the Horde itself. The same argument was put forward by George Vernadsky (1959), who maintained that Rus freed itself from dependence on the Horde not in 1480 but much earlier, in the 1450s. In Anton Anatolevich Gorskii’s view, the liberation should be dated not to 1480 but to 1472, when Ivan III stopped paying tribute to the khan.
Military aspects of the 1480 event also remain controversial. Some scholars consider the battle a
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
large-scale military operation and honor the strategic talent of Ivan III; but others stress his hesitations or even deny that any battle took place, referring to the events of 1480 as merely the “Stand on the Ugra River” (Halperin, 1985). See also: GOLDEN HORDE; IVAN III
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Halperin, Charles. (1985). Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press. Vernadsky, George. (1959). Russia at the Dawn of the Modern Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
MIKHAIL M. KROM
UKAZ
A decree, edict, or order issued by higher authority and carrying the weight of law. In English, ukase.
The Dictionary of the Imperial Russian Academy (1822) defined ukaz (plural ukazy) as “a written order issued by the Sovereign or other higher body.” Senior churchmen and the Senate, for example, could issue an ukaz, but no one had power independent of the ruler. An edict or order signed personally by the ruler was known as imennoi ukaz. Up to the end of the seventeenth century, the tsar’s ukazy were recorded by scribes, but from the 1710s onwards the more important ones were printed, either as individual sheets or in collections. In 1722 Peter I issued an ukaz on the orderly collection, printing, and observance of existing laws. It ended: “Let this ukaz be printed, incorporated into the regulations, and published. Also set up display boards, according to the model supplied in the Senate, to which this printed ukaz should be glued, and let it always be displayed in all places, right down to the lowest courts, like a mirror before the eyes of judges. . . . This ukaz of His Imperial Majesty was signed in the Senate in His Majesty’s own hand.” The very sheets of paper bearing the ruler’s printed command were imbued with his authority.
Given the significance attached to the Russian sovereign’s written command and signature, the anglicized term “ukase” has connotations of absolutism. It is often coupled with other instruments
1599
UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS
of autocratic rule, such as the knout and exile to hard labor, as a symbol of despotic government. See also: PETER I
LINDSEY HUGHES
UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS
Ukraine is a country
in Eastern Europe, the second most populous among the Soviet successor states and Europe’s second largest country after Russia. Its population in 2001 was 48,457,100, with ethnic Ukrainians comprising 77.8 percent of the total. Russians constitute by far the largest ethnic minority in the country (17.3%). Ukrainians are an Eastern Slavic people who speak the Ukrainian language, which is closely related to Russian and uses the Ukrainian version of the Cyrillic alphabet. The capital of Ukraine is Kiev (Kyiv). Geographically, Ukraine consists largely of fertile level plains that are ideal for agriculture. The country’s main river is the Dnieper (Dnipro).
EARLY HISTORY
Ukraine did not exist in its current territorial form until the twentieth century. In ancient times, different parts of Ukraine were inhabited by the Scythians and Sarmatians, but Slavic tribes moved into the area during the fifth and sixth centuries. During the ninth century, the Varangians, who had controlled trade on the Dnieper, united the East Slavic tribal confederations into the state known as Kievan Rus. During the late tenth century, the Rus princes accepted Christianity and began developing a high culture in Church Slavonic. Scholars, however, believe that modern Ukrainian is a lineal de-scendent of the colloquial language that was spoken in Kievan Rus. The power of Kievan Rus began declining during the twelfth century, and during the thirteenth it was conquered by the Mongols. After the fall of Kiev, linguistic divergences between the languages spoken by Eastern Slavs in the Ukrainian and Russian lands began to harden.
Indigenous state tradition in the Ukrainian territories was extinguished during the early fourteenth century with the decline of the Galician-Volhynian Principality in the west. During the second half of this century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a rising Eastern European empire at the time, annexed virtually all the Ukrainian lands ex1600 cept Galicia, which was claimed by Poland. But the East Slavic lands preserved considerable autonomy, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania even adopted the local Ruthenian language as its state language. This changed in 1569, when the dynastic union between Lithuania and Poland evolved into a constitutional union. The indigenous nobility gradually became Polonized, cities came to be dominated by Poles and Jews, and the local peasantry was en-serfed and exploited. In 1596 a crisis in the Orthodox Church and pressure from Polish Catholics prompted the majority of Ukrainian Orthodox bishops in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to sign an act of union with Rome, resulting in the creation of the Uniate Church and a religious rift between the Orthodox and Uniate churches. From that time, social grievances of the Ukrainian lower classes coalesced with religious and national anxieties.
These growing tensions found their expression in the Cossack rebellions. The Cossacks were a class of free warriors that emerged during the sixteenth century on Ukraine’s southern steppe frontier. Although originally employed by Polish governors to defend steppe settlements against the Crimean Tatars, the Cossacks, many of whom had been peasants fleeing serfdom, identified with the religious and social concerns of lower-class Ukrainians. In 1648 a large Cossack revolt turned into a peasant war. Led by a disgruntled Cossack officer named Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the rebels, who had secured Tatar support and had seen their ranks swelled with peasant recruits, inflicted several crushing defeats on the Poles. Khmelnytsky, who had been elected the Cossack leader, or hetman, and calling himself a defender of Orthodoxy and the Ruthenian people, soon began building a de facto independent Cossack state. Looking for allies against Poland, in 1654 Khmelnytsky concluded the Pereiaslav Treaty with Muscovy; the significance of this treaty remains a subject of controversy.
Whether it was intended as a temporary diplomatic maneuver or a unification of two states, according to the treaty, the Cossack polity accepted the tsar’s suzerainty while preserving its wide-ranging autonomy. In the long run, however, the Russian authorities gradually curtailed the Cossacks’ self-rule and, by the late eighteenth century, had established their direct control of Ukraine. The last serious attempt to break with Russia took place under Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who joined Charles XII of Sweden in his war against Tsar Peter I, but
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS
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Ukraine, 1992. © MARYLAND CARTOGRAPHICS. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION the Russian army and the loyalist Cossacks defeated the united Swedish-Ukrainian forces in the Battle of Poltava (1709). The last hetman, a largely symbolic figure, was forced to resign in 1764, and in 1775 the Russian army destroyed the Zaporozhian Host, the principal bastion of the Ukrainian Cossacks.
IMPERIAL RULE
Poland remained the master of Galicia, Volhynia, and other Ukrainian lands west of the Dnieper until its partitions in the years from 1772 to 1795. Following the disappearance of the Polish state, Galicia became part of the Austrian Empire, while other Ukrainian territories were incorporated into the Russian Empire, ruled by the Romanov Dynasty. The Ukrainian people’s experience within the two empires was markedly different. The Romanovs abolished the administrative distinctiveness of Ukrainian territories and promoted the assimilation of Ukrainians. The apogee of this policy was the 1863 official ban on Ukrainian-language publications, which was reinforced in 1876. Yet, the Russian conquest of the Crimea in 1783 opened up the southern steppes for colonization, thus greatly expanding Ukrainian ethnic territory. Following the abolition of serfdom in 1861, industrial development began in earnest in southeastern Ukraine, resulting in the creation of large coal and metallurgical centers in the Donbas and Kryvyi Rih regions. The Russian cultural physiognomy of cities and industrial settlements produced an assimilated working class, which would identify politically with all-Russian parties.
Like elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Ukrainian national revival began with the discovery of a
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
1601
UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS
new notion of nationality as a cultural and linguistic community. Literature soon emerged as the primary vehicle of cultural nationalism, and the great poet Taras Shevchenko came to be seen as its high priest. Together with other members of the Cyril and Methodius Society (1845-1847), Shevchenko also laid the foundations of Ukrainian political thought, which revolved around the idea of transforming the Russian Empire into a democratic federation. Such was the reasoning of the hro-mady (communities), secret clubs of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, which spearheaded the Ukrainian national movement during the second half of the century. Ukrainian political parties began emerging at the turn of the twentieth century, yet could not built a mass support base during the short period of legal existence between the Revolution of 1905 and the beginning of World War I.
The Habsburg Empire, in contrast, was based simultaneously on accommodating its major nationalities and pitting them against each other. In addition to Transcarpathia, which for centuries
had been part of the Hungarian crown, during the late eighteenth century the Habsburgs acquired two other ethnic Ukrainian regions: Eastern Galicia and Northern Bukovyna. In Galicia the landlord class was overwhelmingly Polish, whereas in Bukovyna Ukrainians competed with Romanians for influence. Although they were never Vienna’s favorites, the Ruthenians of the Habsburg Empire did not experience the repressions against their national development that were suffered by the Little Russians (Ukrainians) in the Russian Empire. Ukrainians benefited from educational reforms that established instruction in their native language, and by the official recognition of the Uniate Church, which would become their national institution.
Ukrainians emerged as a political nationality during the Revolution of 1848, when they established the Supreme Ruthenian Council in Lviv and put forward a demand to divide Galicia into Ukrainian and Polish parts. The abolition of serfdom in 1848, however, did not lead to the industrial transformation of Ukrainian territories, which remained an agrarian backwater. Land hunger and rural overpopulation resulted in mass emigration of Ukrainians to North America, beginning in the 1880s. Modern political parties began emerging during the 1890s, and the introduction in 1907 of a universal suffrage provided Ukrainians with increasing political representation. However, the Ukrainian-Polish ethnic conflict in Galicia deepened during the early twentieth century. Developments
1602
in Bukovyna largely paralleled those in Galicia, while Transcarpathia remained politically and culturally dormant.
WORLD WAR I AND THE REVOLUTION
Galicia and Bukovyna were a military theater during much of World War I. The annexation of these lands and the suppression of Ukrainian nationalism there was one of Russia’s war aims, but Russian control of Lviv proved short-lived. In the Russian Empire, the February Revolution of 1917 triggered an impressive revival of Ukrainian political and cultural life. In March of that year representatives of Ukrainian parties and civic organizations formed the Central Rada (Council) in Kiev, which elected the distinguished historian Mykhail Sergeyevich Hru-shevsky as its president. Instead of a dual power, the situation in the Ukrainian provinces resembled a triple power, with the Russian Provisional Government, the Soviets, and the Rada all claiming authority.