by James Millar
This time Batu succeeded in getting a quriltai of 1251 to select his own candidate, M?ngke, who was the son of Tolui (Chinghis Khan’s youngest son). Batu had apparently reached agreement with Sorghaqtani, the widow of Tolui, thus forming an alliance of Jochids and Toluids against the ?g?deids. M?ngke and Batu then launched a joint attack on the ?g?deids and their supporters, the Chaghadaids. As a result of Batu’s role in elevating M?ngke to qaghan and in helping him to consolidate his hold on that position, Batu had a relatively free hand in ruling his own khanate.
A sky worshiper, Batu followed a policy of religious toleration, but seems not to have been pleased by the conversion of his brother Berke to Islam, for, according to William of Rubruck, Batu changed Berke’s yurt to the eastern part of the Khanate beyond the Volga River to reduce his contacts with Muslims, which he thought harmful. The Mongol and Turkic sources refer to Batu as sain, which means “good” or “wise,” and in the Rus sources before c. 1448, Batu is depicted as a powerful tsar to whom the Rus princes had to pay obeisance. After 1448, the Russian sources increasingly depict Batu as a cruel plunderer and enslaver of the Rus land. See also: GOLDEN HORDE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Halperin, Charles J. (1983). “The Defeat and Death of Batu.” Russian History 10:50-65. Juvaini,‘Ata-Malik. (1958). The History of the World-Conqueror, tr. J. A. Boyle; 2 vols. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Juzjani. (1881). Tabakat-I Nasiri, tr. H. G. Raverty. London: Printed by Gilbert and Rivington. Rashid al-Din. (1998-1999). Jami'u’t-Tawarikh: Compendium of Chronicles, a History of the Mongols, tr. W. M. Thackston. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Near Eastern Languages. Vernadsky, George. (1951). The Mongols and Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. William of Rubruck. (1990). The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Great Khan M?ngke, 1253-1255, tr. Peter J. Jackson. London: Hakluyt Society.
DONALD OSTROWSKI
BAUER, YEVGENY FRANTSEVICH
(1865-1917), film director.
Yevgeny Bauer was the most original and important film director in prerevolutionary Russian cinema. In addition to directing, he frequently wrote, designed, and shot his films.
Bauer was born into an artistic family and graduated from the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. He worked as a theater artist and set designer before making films. Soon after going to work for the Khanzhonkov studio, he became their best-paid director with an alleged salary of 40,000 rubles. His life came to an early end in 1917: While preparing for an acting
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role near Yalta, he broke his leg in a fall, caught pneumonia, and died.
Bauer’s films rank among the best early cinema melodramas, comedies, and psychological thrillers. His greatest films complicate melodramatic conventions to tell stories about people caught amid the cultural changes and political instability of the late-tsarist era. Bauer also specialized in the neo-Gothic psychological drama, exploring the dreams and obsessions of urban middle-class characters in an increasingly commercialized world. Typical Bauer characters search futilely for love and meaning in a chaotic world, in which adults lack authority and moral leadership and young people are willful, egocentric, and morally adrift.
Bauer delighted in inventing new ways for the film camera to tell stories. His experiments with camera movement, lighting, and set design created complex three-dimensional spaces. He employed furniture, architecture, fashionable clothing, special effects, and layers of gauzy curtains to animate the social world in which his characters lived and to penetrate the psychological worlds that contained their private visions. He used lighting particularly effectively to enhance the beauty and talent of his actors and the drama of a scene.
His films include Twilight of a Woman’s Soul (1913), Child of the Big City (1914), Daydreams (1915), The Dying Swan (1916), A Life for a Life (1916), and To Happiness (1917). See also: MOTION PICTURES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McReynolds, Louise. (2000). “The Silent Movie Melodrama: Evgenii Bauer Fashions the Heroinic Self.” In Self and Story in Russia, eds. Stephanie Sandler and Laura Engelstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tsivian, Yuri, et al., eds. (1989). Testimoni Silenziosi: Film Russi, 1908-1919 (Silent Witnesses: Russian Films, 1908-1919). Italian and English. Pordenone, Italy: Edizioni Biblioteca dell’immagine; London: British Film Institute. Youngblood, Denise. (1999). The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908-1918. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
JOAN NEUBERGER
BAZAROV, VLADIMIR ALEXANDROVICH
(1874-1939), Marxist philosopher and economist.
Born Vladimir Alexandrovich Rudnev in Tula and educated at Moscow University, Vladimir Bazarov (his chosen pseudonym) joined the Bolsheviks in 1904 and produced a Russian translation of Capital between 1907 and 1909. Before 1917 his most important works were philosophical, and his key associate was Alexander Bogdanov; after 1917 his most important contributions were economic, and his key associate was Vladimir Groman. Attacked by Vladimir Lenin in 1908 as an idealist and for criticizing Georgy Plekhanov’s materialism, in fact Bazarov was of positivist philosophical persuasion. After 1900, Bogdanov and Bazarov had attempted to defend their interpretation of Marx against the Legal Marxist revisionists. Instead of the neo-Kantian notion that the individual person must always be treated as an end, never solely as a means, Bazarov championed the collectivist ideal and the proletarian-class perspective, the fusion of human souls as the supreme outcome of communism. Even so Lenin labeled Bazarov a “Machist.”
After the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, Bazarov became a leading Gos-plan (State Planning Commission) commentator on the restoration process occurring in the Soviet economy and on the principles of drafting perspective plans as the first specification of the general plan. He advocated a combination of two methods of planning, one teleological (focusing on ultimate goals), the other genetic (focusing on existing trends), the former predominating in industry, the latter in agriculture. Bazarov analyzed cyclical and secular economic development using models imported from natural science, namely wave mechanics and chemical equilibrium, and he warned of a tendency toward relative underproduction in Soviet-type economies. He also proposed criteria for optimal plans and methods for estimating the structure of consumer demand. Bazarov was arrested in 1930 and bracketed with Menshevik wreckers. See also: GOSPLAN
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bazarov, Vladimir A. (1964). [1925]. “On ‘Recovery Processes’ in General.” In Foundations of Soviet Strategy for Economic Growth, ed. Nicholas Spulber. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Jasny, Naum. (1972). Soviet Economists of the Twenties. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
VINCENT BARNETT
BEARD TAX
The beard tax is the best known of a series of measures enacted by Tsar Peter I to transform and regulate the appearance of his subjects. As early as 1698 the tsar ordered many of his prominent courtiers to shave their beards, and in 1699 he began to mandate the wearing of European fashions at court functions. In subsequent years a series of regulations ordered various groups to adopt German (i.e., European) dress. In 1705 decrees were issued prohibiting the buying, selling, and wearing of Russian dress by courtiers, state servitors, and townspeople. In the same year the wearing of beards, which was favored by Orthodox doctrine, was prohibited and the beard tax was instituted. With the exception of the Orthodox clergy, anyone who wanted to wear a beard was ordered to pay a special tax and obtain a token (znak) from government officials. Although no extensive studies have examined the implementation of the beard tax and related decrees, the fact that they had to be repeated upon subsequent occasions would indicate that compliance was far from universal. Old Believers (Orthodox Church members who rejected reforms in ritual and practice) were disproportionately affected by the beard tax and they alone were ordered by law to wear old-styl
e Russian dress (to separate them from the mainstream of society). The beard tax was never a major component of state revenue, and by the reign of Catherine II even the regulations on Old Believers began to be relaxed. See also: OLD BELIEVERS; PETER I; TAXES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hughes, Lindsey. (1998). Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
BRIAN BOECK
During the Black Repartition, which occurred during the revolutionary events of 1917 and 1918, Russian peasants seized land owned by noble and absentee landlords and the more substantial peasants, some of whom had consolidated holdings during the Stolypin reforms of 1906-1914. Thus the number of peasant holdings increased markedly, and the size of the average plot declined. Many villages returned to the scattered strips and primitive tools characteristic of tsarist times. Use of the wooden plow, sickle, or scythe were common among the poorer peasants. These subsistence agriculturists typically had one cow or draft animal, along with a small wooden house and naturally had little or nothing to sell in the market. Many poor peasants had been proletarian otkhodniki (migrants) or soldiers before and during the war, but the economic collapse forced them to return to their ancestral villages. The village community (ob-shchina or mir) resumed its authority over the timing of agricultural tasks and occasional repartition. Hence the Bolshevik Revolution constituted a social and economic retrogression in the countryside.
Considering their economic plight, the bed-nyaki, along with the landless batraki, were expected to be rural allies of the proletariat. According to Bolshevik thinking in the period of War Communism and the New Economic Policy, these lower classes would support the government’s policy and would eventually be absorbed into collective or communal farms. Those middle peasants (sered-nyaki) with slightly more land and productive capital were expected to tolerate Bolshevik policy only, while the so-called kulaks would oppose it. In reality the various peasant strata lacked any strong class lines or reliable political orientation. See also: BLACK REPARTITION; KULAKS; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; PEASANTRY; SEREDNYAKI; WAR COMMUNISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lewin, Moshe. (1968). Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, tr. Irene Nove and John Biggart. London: Allen and Unwin.
MARTIN C. SPECHLER
BEDNYAKI
A traditional Russian term denoting a poor peasant household, one without enough land or capital to support itself without hiring out family members to work on neighbors’ fields.
BELARUS AND BELARUSIANS
Bounded by Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, and Ukraine, Belarus is an independent country of about the size of Kansas. In 2000 its population was about 10.5 million. Over the course of its
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Belarus, 1992. © MARYLAND CARTOGRAPHICS. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION history, this territory has been of part of Kievan Rus, the Grand Principality of Lithuania, Poland-Lithuania, the Russian Empire, interwar Poland (western Belarus only), and the Soviet Union.
The origin of the name Belarus is obscure. Its territory, encompassing much of the drainage systems of the Pripyat River and upper reaches of the Nieman, Western Dvina, and Dnieper Rivers, comprises the medieval Polotsk and Turov principalities, with the addition of the western lands of Smolensk and Chernigov around Mogilev and Gomel, but minus the territory south of Pinsk.
Some specialists consider the forests and swamps of southwestern Belarus part of the original homeland of Slavic speakers and possibly the Indo-Europeans. Baltic speakers inhabited much of Belarus before Slavic speakers migrated there after 500 C.E. Around 900 the Slavic Dregovichi and Radmichi inhabited the eastern half of Belarus, while Baltic Iatvingians dwelled in the northwest. Specialists’ opinions differ as to when and where a distinct Belarusian language and people formed and the degree to which they represent a Baltic and eastern Slavic mixture.
Around 980 Polotsk was under a separate Varangian prince, the non-Riurikid Rogvolod, whom Vladimir of Novgorod slew en route to seizing Kiev. Vladimir’s son Iziaslav, by Rogvolod’s daughter Ragneda, founded there the first lasting Rus territorial subdynasty, and the latter’s son and grandson, Briachislav and Vseslav Briachislavich (d. 1101), built up Polotsk. Vseslav’s granddaughter St. Evfrosynia founded a noted convent there.
In the 1100s Polotsk split into subprincipalities and by 1200 Volhynia controlled the Brest region, while Germans were eliminating Polotsk’s traditional loose overlordship over the tribes of modern Latvia. In the early 1200s the Smolensk princes spearheaded commercial agreements with the Baltic Germans and Gotland Swedes, which included Vitebsk and Polotsk.
By the mid-1200s, Lithuanian princes-some Orthodox Christians, some pagans controlled- Polotsk, Novogrudok, and nearby towns. With the pagan Lithuanian absorption of all the former Polotsk and Turov lands in the 1300s, the surviving local Rus princes transformed into territorial aristocrats. Rus institutions spread into ethnic Lithuania, and Rus became the domestic chancery language of the ethnically mixed realm. For about half of the fourteenth century, a separate Western Rus metropolitanate was located in Novogrudok. Minsk grew in importance at this time near the divide between the Nieman and Dnieper watersheds. The Orthodox Lithuanian prince Andrei of Polotsk (d. 1399) fought at Kulikovo against Mamai in 1380.
The 1385 Polish-Lithuanian dynastic Union of Krevo (in western Belarus) privileged nobles who converted to Catholicism. After a civil war in the 1430s, the local Orthodox Rus nobility obtained these same, Polish-inspired rights, but Orthodox prelates never acquired the same political privileges as their Catholic counterparts. Starting with Brest in 1390, several Rus towns obtained a form of Neumarkt-Magdeburg, the most prevalent form of medieval autonomous city law to spread into east-central Europe. After the misfired Church Union of Florence of 1439, Moscow’s authority split with the metropolitanate of Kiev, which retained the dioceses in Belarus.
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With the dynastic union, some Rus acquired a genuine Western education, and Rus writers created a set of Lithuanian chronicles with a legendary foundation of the leading families and the realm. Jewish culture flourished, and some holy scripture and other Jewish books were translated directly from Hebrew into the local Rus dialect. In 1517 Frantishek Skoryna of Polotsk initiated systematic Kirillic and Slavic printing with his Gospels.
During the 1500s, with growing estate agriculture, a form of serfdom binding peasants to the land with about two days of labor dues per week became the dominant peasant status, but the Rus-language First Lithuanian Statute of 1529 was one of the most advanced law codes in Europe at that time. Moscow’s occupation of Polotsk in 1563 led to the stronger Polish-Lithuanian Union of Lublin in 1569, whereby Lithuania transferred its Ukrainian lands to Poland, but retained the Belarusian territories. The brilliant, Orthodox-turned-Catholic Leo Sapieha (Leu Sapega) compiled the Rus-language Third Lithuanian Statute in 1588, which remained in use for more than two centuries. He also organized the renowned state archive or Metrika.
Under the impact of the Protestant Reformation, the Lithuanian Radvilas (Radzivil) family turned their central Belarusian fortress town of Nesvizh into a center of Calvinist learning and printing, but with the arrival of the Counter Reformation, Nesvizh became a Roman Catholic stronghold. Jesuits founded schools there and in six other Belarusian towns and helped cause the polo-nization of the local Rus nobility.
In 1596 the Polish crown, but not the Sejm (parliament), tried to force the Church Union of Brest on the Orthodox in 1596, creating at first an Eastern Rite Uniate hierarchy without many faithful, and leaving most of the faithful without a hierarchy. Over the course of time, however, the Uniate Church grew and a Catholic-influenced Uni-ate Basilian Order of monks took over the great monasteries in Belarus. In 1623 angry Vitebsk Orthodox murdered their fanatic Uniate bishop Iosafat Kunchvich, who had confiscated their churches and monasteries, and the crown responded with mass executions. In 1634 the Orthodox Church regained
its legality but not much property. Some talented Orthodox clerics, such as Simeon Polotsky (1629-1680), made splendid careers in Moscow. A 1697 decree banned the use of Rus in official state documents. By the late eighteenth century, the Uni-ate Church was far stronger than the Orthodox in Belarus and in the western regions many commoners had become Roman Catholic.
Belarusians constituted perhaps one-eighth of the insurgents in the mid-seventeenth century who rebelled against the serfdom and Catholic-Uniate privileges in Poland-Lithuania, but then suffered heavily from the Muscovite invasions in 1654-1655 and 1659. Ethnic Belarus urban life declined, and Jews, despite some heavy losses in the uprisings, became more prominent in many towns. Brest, however, lost its regional cultural preeminence among the Litvak Jews to Vilnius in Lithuania.
The Belarus lands suffered again during the Great Northern War, especially during the period from 1706 to 1708, due to the Swedish-Russian fighting there. Later in the eighteenth century the economy recovered, stimulated by domestic and international markets and led by enlightened estate management and manufactures.
Polish-language serf theaters appeared in 1745, and Poland’s educational reforms of 1773 established an ascending network, with divisional schools in Brest, Grodno, and Novogrudok, and a university in Vilnius. Several Belarusians were active in the Polish Enlightenment.
The three-stage annexation of Belarus by Russia during the partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) had profound effects. The emperors respected Polish culture and educational and religious institutions only until the Polish uprising of 1830-1831. Subsequently, cooperative Belarusians played a major role in weakening Catholicism, suppressing the Uniate Church, restoring Orthodoxy and Russianizing education, as well as publishing historical documents and doing normal administrative work.
