by James Millar
Success brought pressures to conform. With the ascendancy of Josef Stalin and the mobilization of society commencing with the First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932), writers could no longer feel safe pursuing their private visions as long as they avoided criticism of communist rule. They were now expected to produce work useful to the state. Babel made abortive attempts to conform but mostly sought the safety of seclusion and silence. As he said at the First Congress of Soviet Writers: “I have so much respect for [the reader] that I am struck dumb.” Nevertheless, he produced some outstanding work in the thirties, including “Guy de Maupassant” (1932) and “Di Grasso” (1937)- two parables of the life of the artist. He was arrested as a spy on May 15, 1939. Like millions of
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innocent men and women, he fell victim to Soviet tyranny; he was shot on January 27 of the following year.
Babel wrote many fine stories and several interesting plays. Among his best work are his cycles. The Odessa Tales treat a crew of Damon Runyon-like gangsters and their cohorts of the Jewish ghetto of Moldavanka. They are not clothed in realism’s ordinary dress but in the colorful garments of romance or the crazy garb of comedy. The stories are designed to charm, not move the reader, though their rejection of Jewish resignation to suffering is a common theme for Babel. The four tales comprising The Story of My Dovecot have greater depth. They tell of the breaking away of a Jewish boy from his highly pressured home-the father is compensating for the indignities wrought by anti-Semitism. Red Cavalry is a masterpiece. It weaves its complex ways between irreconcilable an-tagonisms-of constancy and change, action and culture, revolution and tradition-to offer an image of the tragic character of human life. See also: PURGES, THE GREAT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carden, Patricia. (1972). The Art of Isaac Babel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ehre, Milton. (1986). Isaac Babel. Boston: Twayne. Poggioli, Renato. (1957). “Isaac Babel in Retrospect.” In The Phoenix and the Spider. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trilling, Lionel. (1955). Introduction to The Collected Stories, by Isaac Babel. New York: New American Library.
MILTON EHRE
used by the peasants to oppose state policy, and sometimes led to the temporary dissolution of newly formed collective farms. Their frequent use in the winter of 1929-1930 likely played a role in the party leadership’s decision to slow the pace of collectivization in March 1930.
The gendered aspect of babi bunty was very important. The Bolsheviks considered peasant women to be an especially backward social group, one incapable of organized political action. They believed that babi bunty were incited by kulaks and other anti-Soviet elements, who were manipulating the women. Because of this belief, the Bolsheviks responded with propaganda instead of force. Peasant men who resisted Soviet policies during this period, on the other hand, were treated with great violence. The peasants’ recognition that participants in babi bunty would be treated leniently made these actions a favored form of resistance to collectivization. Although babi bunty only slowed the collectivization process, their frequency likely played a role in the state’s decision eventually to grant peasants some concessions, such as the right for each family to retain one cow. See also: BOLSHEVISM; COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; KULAKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Viola, Lynne. (1992). “Bab’i bunty and Peasant Women’s Protest during Collectivization.” In Russian Peasant Women, eds. Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Viola, Lynne. (1996). Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
BRIAN KASSOF
BABI BUNTY
A set of actions used by peasant women to resist collectivization between 1928 and 1932.
It derives from the words baba, a pejorative term describing uncultured peasant women, and bunt, a spontaneous demonstration or protest. Babi bunty encompassed a range of actions intended to disrupt collectivization, including interrupting village meetings, harassing Soviet officials, and reclaiming seed, livestock, or household goods that previously had been seized by the collective farm. These actions were among the more effective means BABI YAR MASSACRE See WORLD WAR II.
BAIKAL-AMUR MAGISTRAL RAILWAY
Traversing eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East, the Baikal-Amur Magistral Railway (BAM) runs north of and parallel to the Trans-Siberian Railway. The “BAM Zone,” the term used to describe the territory crossed by the railroad, includes regions within the watersheds of Lake Baikal and the Amur River, the latter of which forms a major part of the Russian border with China. An area crisscrossed by
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a number of formidable rivers, the BAM Zone presented seismic, climatic, and epidemiological challenges to builders from the 1930s until the early 1990s.
The Soviet government conceived of BAM as a second railway link (the Trans-Siberian Railway being the first) to the Pacific Ocean that would improve transportation and communications between the European and Asian sectors of the USSR. The initial BAM project was built from Komsomolsk on the Amur River to Sovetskaya (now known as Im-peratorskaya) Gavan on the Pacific coast by labor camp and prisoner-of-war labor from 1932 to 1941 and again from 1945 to 1953, when it was abandoned in March of that year after Stalin’s death.
In March 1974, Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev proclaimed that the construction of a new and much longer BAM project would fall to the Young Communist League, known as the Komsomol. In Brezhnev’s mind, experience on what the state heralded as the “Path to the Future” would instill a sense of inclusion among the Soviet Union’s younger generations. In addition, the USSR undertook the new BAM to bolster Soviet trade with the dynamic economies of East Asia and to secure an alternative route between the nation’s European and Asian sectors in the event that the Trans-Siberian Railway was seized by China. At its height, BAM involved more than 500,000 Komsomol members who severely damaged the ecology of the BAM Zone while expending some 15 to 20 billion dollars in a highly wasteful and inefficient endeavor that reinforced the inadequacies of Soviet-style state socialism among BAM’s young constructors.
In October 1984, a golden spike was hammered into place in a ceremony that marked the official completion of the “Project of the Century.” In reality, however, only one-third of BAM’s 2,305-mile-long track was fully operational by the early 1990s, although the railroad was declared complete in 1991. BAM remains one of the Russian Federation’s least profitable railways. See also: COMMUNIST YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS; RAILWAYS; TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Asia Trade Hub. (2001). “Russia Watch.” «http://www .asiatradehub.com/russia/railway.asp». Josephson, Paul R. (1992). “Science and Technology as Panacea in Gorbachev’s Russia.” In Technology, Culture, and Development: The Experience of the Soviet Model, ed. James P. Scanlan. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Mote, Victor L. (1977). “The Baykal-Amur Mainline.” In Gateway to Siberian Resources (The BAM), ed. Theodore Shabad and Victor L. Mote. New York: Scripta.
CHRISTOPHER J. WARD
BAKATIN, VADIM VIKTOROVICH
(b. 1937), Russian and Soviet political and Communist Party figure, Soviet Minister of Internal Affairs, 1988-1990; last chairman of KGB, 1991; first chairman of Inter-Republic Security Service from 1991.
Vadim Bakatin was born in Kemerovo Oblast. Educated at the Novosibirsk Construction Engineering Institute, he worked as an engineer in construction in Kemerovo from the early 1960s until the early 1970s. He joined the Communist Party in 1964 and in the mid-1970s served as a local party official, rising to the position of Secretary of the Kemerovo Oblast Committee in 1977. Bakatin attended the High Party School and in 1985 joined the Inspectorate of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). In 1986 he served on the Central Committee. After brief service as First Secretary of the Kemerovo Oblast Committee, Bakatin was appointed Minister of Internal Affairs in 1988, and he served in that post u
ntil 1990. In 1991 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency of Russia, warning about the dangers of overly rapid reform. Campaigning in May 1991 he stated that “Making capitalism out of socialism is like making eggs out of an omelette.” Bakatin opposed the August 1991 coup attempt and then was appointed director of the KGB. He undertook the purge of the KGB senior leadership that had supported Vladimir Kryuchkov, the former director and coup plotter. With the collapse of Soviet power in the fall of 1991, Bakatin oversaw the breakup of the KGB and then briefly served as the first chairman of the Inter-Republic Security Service. In 1992 he published a personal memoir of his role in the break-up of the KGB under the title, Izbavlenie ot KGB: Vremya - sobytiya -lyudi (Deliverance from the KGB: The time, the events, the people). Later he went into business and became the director of the Baring Vostok Capital Partners, a direct investment company. He remained loyal to Mikhail Gorbachev and has spoken favorably of his efforts at reform. See also: STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gevorkian, Natalia. (1993). “The KGB: ‘They Still Need Us’.” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 49(1):36-38. Knight, Amy. (1996). Spies without Cloaks: The KGB’s Successors. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Waller, J. Michael, and Yasmann, Viktor J. (1995). “Russia’s Great Criminal Revolution: The Role of the Security Services,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 11(4): 276-297.
JACOB W. KIPP
BAKHTIN, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH
(1895-1975), considered to be Russia’s greatest literary theoreticians, whose work has had an important influence, in Russia and abroad, on several other fields in the social sciences and humanities.
Born in Orel into a cultured bourgeois family, Bakhtin earned a degree in classics and philology. During the Civil War, he moved to Nevel, where he worked as a schoolteacher and participated in study circles, and later moved to Vitebsk. In 1924 Bakhtin and his wife moved back to Leningrad, but he found it difficult to obtain steady employment. He was arrested in 1929 and charged with participation in the underground Russian church, but managed nevertheless to live most of the 1930s and 1940s in productive obscurity, publishing regularly. He and his work were rediscovered during the 1950s, and over the years his writings have continued to influence the development of philology, linguistics, sociology, and social anthropology, to name just a few related disciplines.
Many of Bakhtin’s contemporary systematiz-ers of Russian thought sought to discover laws of society or history and to formulate models designed to explain everything. Bakhtin, however, sought to show that there could be no such comprehensive system. In this sense he set himself against the main currents of European social thought since the seventeenth century, and especially against the traditional Russian intelligentsia. Drawing upon literary sources, he tried to create pictures of self and society that contained, as an intrinsic element, what he called surprisingness. In his view, no matter how much one knows of a person, one does not know everything and cannot unfailingly predict the future (even in theory). Instead, he argued, there is always a surplus of humanness, and this is what makes each person unique. Like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy before 1880, and Anton Chekhov, Bakhtin belongs to the great anti-tradition of Russian thought that, unlike the dominant groups of the intelligentsia, denied that any system could explain, much less redeem, reality.
In his earliest work, Bakhtin developed various models of self and the other, and attempted to develop an approach to ethics. He believed that ethics could not be a matter of applying abstract rules to particular situations, but comes instead from careful observation and direct participation in ultimately unrepeatable circumstances. He argued that through a reliance on rules and ideology, rather than really engaging oneself with a given situation, one is using an alibi and, thus, abdicating responsibility. He countered this approach by saying that, in life, there is no alibi.
As an enemy of all comprehensive theories, Bakhtin opposed formalism and structuralism, although he learned a good deal from them. Basically, he accepted the usefulness of certain formal approaches and methods employed by these theoretical schools, but insisted that human purpose-fulness and intentionality lay behind these formal models. Unlike the formalists and structuralists, he developed a theory of language and the psyche that was based on the concrete utterance (what people actually say), and on open-ended dialogue. This latter is perhaps the most famous of the concepts he introduced.
Bakhtin developed a theory of polyphony, which he elaborated in his book on Dostoyevsky (1929). With this theory, he tries to show how an author deliberately creates without knowing what his or her characters will do next, and, in so doing, the author also creates a palpable image of true freedom. Bakhtin equated that freedom to that which is enjoyed by God, who did not foresee the outcome of the creatures made by God. In taking this stance, he argued against the determinists or predestinarians, for he believed that people are truly free and ever-surprising, if they are as the polyphonic novel represents them.
Bakhtin’s work on the novel during the 1930s and 1940s is justly renowned. It is certainly his most durable contribution to semiotics. He identifies how novelistic language works; how the self and plot are tied to concepts of time and becoming; and how elements of a parodic (or carnivalis-tic) spirit have infused the novel’s essence. This theory, as well as in theories of culture that he developed during the 1950s, emphasized dialogue,
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temporal openness, surprisingness, the uniqueness selfhood, and fundamental principles of ethical responsibility. See also: CHEKHOV, ANTON PAVLOVICH; DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; TOLSTOY, LEO NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1968). Rabelais and His World, tr. H?l?ne Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and tr. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Clark, Katerina, and Holquist, Michael. (1984). Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morson, Gary Saul, and Emerson, Caryl. (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
GARY SAUL MORSON
BAKU
Baku is the capital of Azerbaijan and a major port on the Caspian Sea. The city was first taken by Peter I in the 1710s and held for two decades. The entire region of Caucasia was conquered by Russian forces in a war against Iran in the 1800s and confirmed by the 1813 Treaty of Gulistan.
Baku has meant two things to Russia: oil and strikes. The former has had the more enduring significance. The Baku oil fields were the object of Russian desire since the occupation by Peter I. Significant output began only with drilling in the 1870s. The oil rush of the last third of the nineteenth century brought thousands of Russian peasants to the Baku region to work in the oil fields. By the imperial census of 1897, the Russians were nearly as numerous as the native Azerbaijani Turks (approximately 37,400 to 40,000). By the 1903 city census, the Russians outnumbered them (57,000 to 44,000). Other national groups came to Baku. Armenians were a small but economically powerful minority with long-established communities, mostly involved in trade. Iranian Azerbaija-nis crossed the border in large numbers. They were part of the same ethnic and religious group, speaking the same language as did the local residents. There were also communities of Georgians, Jews, Germans, and peoples from the Caucasus Mountains. Europeans arrived as investors, engineers, and skilled technicians. By 1900, Baku had a telephone system, European-style buildings, and an active City Council (Duma). It had a relatively high crime rate and a reputation akin to that of the Wild West in North America.
In the dangerous conditions of the oil fields, a labor movement emerged around the turn of the century. The Russian Social Democrats regarded Baku’s activity as an alarm bell for the strik
e movement across the southern part of the empire. Baku provided a training ground for such future luminaries as Grigory Ordzhonikidze and Josef Stalin. For a time under Menshevik leadership, the Baku Committee of the party permitted the formation of a special party only for the Muslim workers, the Hummet. Class solidarity usually broke down along national lines, however, and the violence occasionally led to arson in the oil fields. In 1918 a Bolshevik-led government, known as the Baku Commune, ran the city briefly before the city fell to the invading Turkish army. Baku was the capital of the independent Republic of Azerbaijan (1918-1920) and, from April 1920 to 1991, of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan.
Although Baku’s oil was largely depleted by the 1920s, the city was a target of Nazi advances in World War II. The Soviet Gosplan invested very little in the oil industry in Baku after the war and left its infrastructure to languish.
In the post-Soviet period, offshore drilling has taken the place of the old wells as a prize for foreign investors. Russia has tried, again, to maintain access to the oil and has fought proposals by Azerbaijan and foreign oil companies that seek to route the oil around Russian pipelines and Black Sea ports. See also: AZERBAIJAN AND AZERIS; CAUCASUS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Altstadt, Audrey. (1986). “Baku: Transformation of a Muslim Town.” In The City in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Michael F. Hamm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
AUDREY ALTSTADT
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BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL ALEXANDROVICH
(1814-1876), world-famous revolutionary and one of the founders of Russian anarchism and revolutionary populism.
Although born into a nobleman’s family, Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was hostile toward the tsarist system and the traditional socioeconomic and political order. An extreme materialist, he was bitterly antireligious and saw organized religion as oppressing people.
