Encyclopedia of Russian History
Page 373
Valentin Lavrentivich Ianin and other scholars argue that Novgorod’s government was oligarchic rather than republican in nature, and that the veche had no real power. They argue that it was an oligarchy of landowners who wielded real power in the city. Some argue it is these landowners who are referred to in the Rigan chronicle as the three-hundred golden-girdled men and made up the Council of Lords (Soviet gospod) that ran day-today government in Novgorod. However, the Rigan chronicle is the only such reference to the three-hundred golden-girdled-men, and Russian sources mention neither the Council nor the three hundred. The veche lasted longest in Pskov, and was disbanded by Grand Prince Basil III in 1510, when he brought that city under the direct rule of Moscow. See also: GRAND PRINCE; KIEVAN RUS; MUSCOVY; NOVGOROD THE GREAT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Birnbaum, Henrik. (1981). Lord Novgorod the Great: Essays on the History and Culture of a Medieval City. Los Angeles: Slavica Publishers. Ianin, Valentin Lavrentevich. (1990). “The Archaeology of Novgorod.” Scientific American 262(3):84-91. Tikhomirov, Mikhail Nikolaevich. (1959). The Towns of Ancient Rus, tr. Y. Sdovnikov. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House.
MICHAEL C. PAUL
VEKHI
Vekhi (“Landmarks” or “Signposts”), a collection of seven essays published in 1909, ran through five editions and elicited two hundred published rejoinders in two years. Historian Mikhail Gershenzon proposed the volume reappraising the Russian intelligentsia, wrote the introduction, and edited the book. Pyotr Struve selected the contributors, five of whom had contributed to a 1902 volume, Problems of Idealism, and had attended the 1903 Schaffhausen Conference that laid the foundation for the Union of National Liberation. Himself a founder of the Constitutional Democratic (Cadet) Party in 1905, Struve had served in the Second Duma in 1907, then went on to edit the journal Russian Thought. In his essay he argued that the intelligentsia, because it had coalesced in the 1840s under the impact of atheistic socialism, owed its identity to standing apart from the government. Thus, when the government agreed to restructure along constitutional lines in 1905, the intelligentsia proved incapable of acting constructively toward the masses within the new framework.
Bogdan Kistyakovsky discussed the intelligentsia’s failure to develop a legal consciousness. Their insufficient respect for law as an ordering force kept courts of law from attaining the respect required in a modern society. Alexander Izgoyev (who, like Gershenzon, had not contributed to the 1902 anti-positivist volume) depicted contemporary university students as morally relativist, content merely to embrace the interests of the long-suffering people. Russian students compared very unfavorably to their French, German, and British counterparts, lacking application and even a sense of fair play. Nikolai Berdyayev, considering the intelligentsia’s philosophical position, found utilitarian values had crowded out any interest in pursuing truth. Sergei Bulgakov showed how the intelligentsia had undertaken a heroic struggle for socialism and progress but lost sight of post-Reformation Europe’s gains with respect to individual rights and personal freedom.
For Semen Frank, as for Gershenzon and Struve, the intelligentsia’s failure of leadership in the 1905 revolution warranted a reappraisal of their fundamental assumptions. His essay emphasized the nihilistic sources of the intelligentsia’s utilitarianism: material progress, national education, always viewed as a means to another end. Moreover, he saw Russian Marxists as obsessed by a populist drive to perfect society through redistribution and faulted them for their penchant for dividing all humanity into friends and enemies. Gershenzon asserted, in the book’s most controversial sentence, that “so far from dreaming of union with the people we ought to fear the people . . . and bless this government which, with its prisons and bayonets, still protects us from the people’s fury.”
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
1635
VERBITSKAYA, ANASTASIA ALEXEYEVNA
The essays suggested Russia had reached a milestone and was ready for turning. Five of the contributors had earlier abandoned Marxism under the influence of neo-Kantian concerns over personal freedom and morality. They had participated in the establishment of a liberal political party, but now recoiled at the Cadet Party’s recklessness and ineffectiveness in parliamentary politics. A modernist document, Vekhi called for a rethinking of the enlightenment project of acculturation and proposed exploration of the depths of the self as an alternative to venerable populist and nihilist programs. See also: BERDYAYEV, NIKOLAI ALEXANDROVICH; CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; DUMA; INTELLIGENTSIA; STRUVE, PETER BERNARDOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boobbyer, Philip. (1995). S. L. Frank: The Life and Work of a Russian Philosopher. Athens: Ohio University Press. Brooks, Jeffrey. (1973). “Vekhi and the Vekhi Dispute.” Survey 19(1):21-50. Schapiro, Leonard. (1987). “The Vekhi Group and the Mystique of Revolution.” In Russian Studies, ed. Ellen Dahrendorf. New York: Viking Penguin.
GARY THURSTON
VERBITSKAYA, ANASTASIA ALEXEYEVNA
(1861-1928), prose writer, playwright, scenarist, and publisher.
Anastasia Verbitskaya enjoyed a lengthy career in which she first published prose fiction in serious “thick journals,” but then turned to writing novels in a popular vein, garnering herself a wide reading public on the eve of World War I. At this time she also embarked on a film career, writing scripts for several movies that brought her even more renown. Most of Verbitskaya’s writing centers around the keys to happiness for the modern woman caught between competing desires and interests-work, love, sexuality, and motherhood.
Verbitskaya was the middle child of a professional military man stationed in Voronezh and a mother who was born to a provincial actress but who confined herself to performances in amateur productions. Verbitskaya was eventually sent off to boarding school, the Elizavetinsky Women’s Institute in Moscow. In 1879 she entered the Moscow
1636
Conservatory to study voice, leaving after only two years to accept a job as a music teacher at her former boarding school. In 1882 she married Alexei Verbitsky, an engineer, with whom she had three sons. The family needed money, so Verbitskaya worked at various jobs, in 1883 obtaining her first stint at a newspaper. Her inaugural fiction, a novella entitled “Discord,” appeared in 1887 in the thick journal Russian Thought. It contains many of the themes that will appear subsequently in much of Verbitskaya’s work. The story encompasses the roles that can often be found in left-leaning fiction espousing women’s liberation-economic independence and service to the downtrodden-but also establishes new roles and goals for the heroine. Verbitskaya and other contemporary women writers would develop these themes further in the 1890s and early twentieth century: the search for self-fulfillment in relations with men, including sexual fulfillment and an exploration of one’s artistic creativity.
During the 1890s Verbitskaya’s fictional works became longer, and she produced her first novel, Vavochka (1898). She also wrote plays, the best of which is the comedy Mirages (1895), which was staged at the Maly Theater. By 1902, Verbitskaya had decided to become independent of others’ literary tastes and created her own publishing house, issuing her own work and the translated novels of Western European writers concerned with the woman question. Not only did this venture show her quest for independence, it also showed her interest in literature as a commercial venture. Verbitskaya continued to demonstrate her commitment to the woman question through extra-literary activities. She was a member of various charitable and civic organizations that helped women, in 1905 becoming the chair of the Society for the Betterment of Women’s Welfare.
In the politically charged atmosphere after the 1905 revolution and with the censorship greatly curtailed, Verbitskaya embarked on the first of her popular novels, Spirit of the Time (1907-1908). She seems to have found a formula that would render this and her next novel, The Keys to Happiness (1908-1913), bestsellers. She combined highbrow political, philosophical, and aesthetic concerns with frequent, titillating scenes of sexual seduction. Both thes
e novels sold in numbers that were unheralded in Verbitskaya’s day. She also managed to produce an interesting two-volume autobiography To My Reader (1908 and 1911) while she was writing Keys to Happiness.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
VIENNA, CONGRESS OF
In 1913 when Verbitskaya had completed Keys, she was invited to write the screenplay for a full-length film based on the novel. The film was a great box-office success, breaking all previous records, and catapulted Verbitskaya into a movie career. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Verbitskaya’s career suffered because of official scorn for her “boulevard” novels. She died in 1928. However, with the revival of the commercial book market in post-Soviet Russia, Verbitskaya has made a bit of a comeback: Three of her popular novels were reprinted in 1992 and 1993. See also: FEMINISM; THICK JOURNALS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Engelstein, Laura. (1992). The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Holmgren, Beth, and Goscilo, Helena. (1999). “Introduction” to Keys to Happiness. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Marsh, Rosalind. (1998). “Anastasiia Verbitskaia Reconsidered.” In Gender and Russian Literature: New Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rosenthal, Charlotte. (2003). “Anastasiia Alekseevna Verbitskaia.” In Russian Writers in the Age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, ed. Judith E. Kalb and J. Alexander Ogden. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 593. Detroit: Gale Group.
CHARLOTTE ROSENTHAL
VIENNA, CONGRESS OF
The Vienna Congress provided the conclusion to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Negotiations took place in France from February to April of 1814, in London during June of that year, in Vienna from September 1814 to June 1815, and then again in Paris from July to November of 1815. The chief representatives included Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereigh of Britain; his ally, Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar von Metternich of Austria; F?rst Karl August von Hardenberg of Prussia; and Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-P?rigord, Prince de B?n?vent of France. Tsar Alexander I directed the Russians, aided and influenced by his diverse multinational coterie of assistants: Count Andreas Razu-movsky, who was ambassador to Austria; the Westphalian Graf Karl Robert von Nesselrode, who served as a quasi-foreign minister; the Corfu Greek
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Count Io?nnis Ant?nios Kapodstrias; the Corsican Count Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo; the Prussian Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein; the Alsatian Anstedt; and the Pole Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski.
At the peak of his influence in early 1814, Alexander directed the non-punitive occupation of Paris and the exile of Napoleon I to Elba. The Treaty of Chaumont established the Quadruple Alliance to contain France, while the first Treaty of Paris restored the French monarchy. Alexander also helped block a Prussian scheme to frustrate France and Austrian designs on Switzerland and Piedmont-Sardinia, but supported the attachment of Belgium to the Netherlands and part of the Rhineland to Prussia as checks on French power. In London, however, he frightened the British with plans to reunite the ethnic Polish lands as his own separate kingdom.
At Vienna, the British, Austrians, and French thwarted this scheme, which was supported by a Prussia bent on annexing all of Saxony. By January 1815 Alexander was ready to compromise, an attitude strengthened by Napoleon’s temporary return to power in March. The Final Act of June 4, 1815, drawn up by Metternich’s mentor, Friedrich Gentz, reflected this spirit of compromise. Austria retained Galicia, and Prussia regained Poznan and Torun, and also acquired part of Saxony and more of the Rhineland. Most of the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw became the tsarist Kingdom of Poland. Denmark obtained a small duchy as partial compensation for Norway, which the Swedish crown acquired as Russian-sponsored compensation for the loss of Finland. A German Confederation dominated by Austria and, to a lesser extent, Prussia, but with Russian support for such middle-sized states as W?rttemberg, replaced the defunct Holy Roman Empire. The Ottomans remained outside the Final Act, refusing to allow Anglo-French-Austrian mediation of differences with Russia as a precondition of a general guarantee.
Back in Paris, Alexander promoted the Holy Alliance, which Metternich insisted be an ideal brotherhood of Christian sovereigns, not peoples, as the Russian emperor envisioned. Of the Europeans, only the British, the Papacy, and the Ottomans refused to sign it. The (Congress of) Vienna system weathered revolutions and diplomatic crises. Except for Belgian independence in 1830, Europe’s borders remained essentially stable until 1859. See also: ALEXANDER I; FRENCH WAR OF 1812; NAPOLEON I
1637
VIETNAM, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Grimsted, Patricia Kennedy. (1969). The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schroeder, Paul. (1994). The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848. Oxford: Oxford University/ Clarendon.
DAVID M. GOLDFRANK
VIETNAM, RELATIONS WITH
The Soviet Union began its relationship with Vietnam through the Communist International (Comintern), one of whose purposes was to support the liberation of colonized peoples from Western colonial powers. From the last half of the nineteenth century until 1954, the formerly unified nation of Vietnam was divided into three segments (Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina), along with Cambodia and Laos, within the French colony Indochine (Indochina).
Prior to 1930 some politicized members of Vietnamese society had a connection to the Soviet Union through membership in the French Communist Party or its political fronts. During the 1920s the Comintern invited several radical Vietnamese political activists to Moscow for political education and training. The most prominent of these was a man of many aliases whose most frequent alias prior to World War II was Nguyen Ai Quoc, a founding member of the French Communist Party who later became better known through his final alias, Ho Chi Minh. Quoc became a full-time functionary of the Comintern and, on their instructions, founded the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in 1930. Although most of its members were Vietnamese, the ICP staked a claim to succeed France politically in all of its Southeast Asian colonies. The idea of an Indochinese Federation, modeled on the Soviet Union-with the Vietnamese playing the same dominant role vis-a-vis the Cambodians and Laotians as the Russians did with the other nationalities and republics within the USSR-was a Comintern political concept that was to both guide and bedevil the politics of the Southeast Asian region for much of the twentieth century.
From 1930 until 1950 the Soviet Union’s relations with the Vietnamese revolutionaries in French Indochina were limited mainly to training and political advice. At the end of World War II, during
1638
the brief power vacuum that followed Japan’s surrender and withdrawal from the region, Ho Chi Minh led a small band of ICP controlled guerrillas, though under the guise of its political front, the Viet Mnh, to seize power in a Bolshevik-style coup d’?tat. He proclaimed the independence of the so-called Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in September 1945. The DRV was not recognized by any nation, and France’s return to reclaim its former Asian colonies led to the outbreak of war between France and the DRV/Viet Minh at the end of 1946.
Geography prevented the Soviet Union from effectively aiding Ho Chi Minh until 1950, when the victory of the Chinese communists in the Chinese civil war changed the balance of power in Asia. In January 1950 Josef Stalin agreed to Ho’s request for increased aid. Thus in early 1950 all of the Soviet bloc nations recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and China undertook the Soviet Bloc’s task of direct military, economic, and political assistance to the Vietnamese communists.
Following the Geneva Conference of 1954, of which the Soviet Union was cochair, France agreed to abandon its former colonies, and Indochina was divided into the independent nations of Cambodia and Laos, with Vietnam temporarily divided at the seventeenth parallel into the communist controlled DRV (North) and the noncommunist Republic of Vietnam (South). The United States replaced the French as
the patrons of the noncommunist Vietnamese in South Vietnam, and the Soviet Union along with its then-ally China, maintained substantial political, economic, military, and diplomatic support to North Vietnam. During the late 1950s the Vietnamese communists in Hanoi began an uprising against the government in South Vietnam. The Soviet Union supported the DRV against the American-backed South. This Soviet commitment to the Vietnam War increased during the era of Brezhnev and Kosygin, as China’s split with the Soviet Union, which had emerged publicly in 1963, caused a competition between Moscow and Beijing for influence in Hanoi. Thousands of Soviet citizens were sent to Vietnam as military and economic advisers during the 1960s. After 1968 Hanoi turned more toward Moscow as its principle source of aid and advice. Yet the USSR, fearing that it would be dragged by the Vietnamese into a direct confrontation with the United States, wanted to find a political rather than a military settlement to the Vietnam War. However, the domestic opposition to the war within the United States caused a cutback of American aid to South Vietnam during
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
VIKINGS
1974-1975, and a precipitate military collapse of South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese army in April 1975.
During the 1970s Moscow and Hanoi increased their ties, at Beijing’s expense. The Soviet Union acquired access to the former U.S. military base at Cam Ranh Bay, and thus was able to project its naval and air power into Asia on a scale never before realized. A Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between the USSR and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) was signed in November 1978. When the SRV came into conflict with the China-backed Cambodian communists (known in the West as the Khmer Rouge), Soviet arms facilitated the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978. Moscow and its allies supported Vietnam’s subsequent decade-long occupation of Cambodia, but the rest of the members of the United Nations condemned the occupation. Vietnam became a diplomatic as well as an economic liability for Moscow.