Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  SERHY YEKELCHYK

  165

  BOYAR

  BOYAR

  BOYAR DUMA

  In the broadest sense, every privileged landowner could be called a boyar; in a narrower sense, the term refers to a senior member of a prince’s retinue during the tenth through thirteenth centuries, and marked the highest court rank during the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. The word boyar probably stems from a Turkic word meaning “rich” or “distinguished.” Coming from a mixed social and ethnic background, boyars served a prince, but they had the right to change their master, and enjoyed full authority over their private lands.

  The relationship between a prince and his bo-yars varied across the regions. In the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, boyars acquired considerable political power in some principalities ruled by members of the Ryurikid dynasty and in Novgorod, where they formed the governing elite. In the Moscow and Tver principalities, boyars acknowledged the sovereignty of the prince and cultivated hereditary service relations with him. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the rank of bo-yar became the highest rung in the Muscovite court hierarchy. It was reserved for members of elite families and was linked with responsible political, military, and administrative appointments.

  During the seventeenth century, the rank of boyar became open to more courtiers, due to the growing size of the court, and it gradually disappeared under Peter the Great. It is often assumed that all boyars were members of the tsar’s council, the so-called Boyar Duma, and thereby directed the political process. This assumption led some historians to assume that Muscovy was a boyar oligarchy, where boyars as a social group effectively ran the state. However, there was always a hierarchy among the boyars: A few boyars were close advisors to the tsar, while most acted as high-ranking servitors of the sovereign. See also: BOYAR DUMA; MUSCOVY; OKOLNICHY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Kollmann, Nancy Shields. (1987). Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345-1547. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Poe, Marshall T. (2003). The Russian Elite in the Seventeenth Century. 2 vols. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.

  SERGEI BOGATYREV

  Boyar Duma is a scholarly term used to describe the royal council or the upper strata of the ruling elite in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. The term duma often appears in the sources with the meaning “advice,” “counsel,” or “a council.” The influential Romantic historian Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin first used the combination “boyar duma” (boyarskaya duma), which is never encountered in the sources.

  East Slavic medieval political culture, which relied heavily on scripture, morally obligated every worthy prince to discuss all weighty matters with his advisers. In the tenth through fifteenth centuries, princes often discussed political, military, and administrative issues with other members of the ruling family, senior members of their armed retinue, household officials, church leaders, and local community leaders. The balance of power between the ruler and his counselors, as well as the format and place of their meetings, varied depending on the circumstances. The Muscovite tsars adopted the tradition of consulting with their closest entourage, continuing to do so even during periods of political turmoil, like the Oprichnina and the Time of Troubles. The 1550 Legal Code refers to the tradition of consultation, but there were no written laws regulating the practice of such consultations or limiting the authority of the ruler in favor of his advisers in judicial terms.

  The growing social and administrative complexity of the Muscovite state during the sixteenth century resulted in the increasing inclusion of distinguished foreign servitors, high-ranking cavalrymen, and top-level officials at meetings with the tsar. The sources describe the practice of consultations by inconsistently using various terms, including duma. From the mid-sixteenth century, the term blizhnyaya duma (privy duma) appears in the documents more regularly.

  The state school of nineteenth-century Russian historiography interpreted the tradition of consultations between the ruler and his advisers in formal, legal terms. Historians linked the appearance of a clearly structured council, which they termed the boyar duma, with the formation of the court rank system during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was assumed that the boyar duma included all people holding the upper court ranks of boyar, okolnichy, counselor cavalryman (dumny dvoryanin), and counselor secretary (dumny dyak).

  166

  BRAZAUSKAS, ALGIRDAS

  Students of law treated the boyar duma as a state institution by focusing on its functions and competence.

  The artificial concept of the boyar duma as a group of people entitled to sit on the council because of their status became a basis for various interpretations of the character of the pre-Petrine state and its politics. Vasily Osipovich Klyuchevsky pioneered this trend by describing the boyar duma as “the fly-wheel that set in motion the entire mechanism of government.” Klyuchevsky’s concept of the boyar duma was developed in the numerous prosopographical and anthropological studies of the Muscovite elite. Vasily Ivanovich Sergeyevich questioned the concept of the boyar duma, observing that there is no documentary evidence of participation of all holders of the upper court ranks in consultations with the ruler. In line with this approach, other scholars shift their emphasis in the study of the practice of consultations from the court ranks of the sovereign’s advisers to the cultural background of this practice. See also: BOYAR; MUSCOVY; OPRICHNINA; TIME OF TROUBLES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Alef, Gustave. (1967). “Reflections on the Boyar Duma in the Reign of Ivan III.” The Slavonic and East European Review. 45:76-123. Bogatyrev, Sergei. (2000). The Sovereign and His Counsellors: Ritualised Consultations in Muscovite Political Culture, 1350s-1570s. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. Also available at «http://ethesis .helsinki.fi/julkaisut/hum/histo/v/bogatyrev/». Kleimola, Ann M. (1985). “Patterns of Duma Recruitment, 1505-1550.” In Essays in Honor of A. A. Zimin, ed. Daniel Clarke Waugh. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers.

  SERGEI BOGATYREV

  BRAZAUSKAS, ALGIRDAS

  (b. 1932), Lithuanian political leader.

  Algirdas Mykolas Brazauskas emerged as a major public figure in the Soviet Union in 1988. A member of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party (LCP) since 1976, a member of the party’s biuro (equivalent of Politburo) since

  Lithuanian Communist Party leader Algirdas Brazauskas led his republic’s break from Moscow in 1991. © STEPHAN FERRY/LIAISON. GETTY IMAGES. 1977, and by training an engineer, he had been a specialist in construction and economic planning. In 1988 he won note as a party leader who dared to appear on a public platform with the leaders of the reformist Movement for Perestroika (Sajudis) in Lithuania. He became a popular figure, and in October, with the approval of both Moscow and Sajudis leaders, he replaced Ringaudas Songaila as the party’s First Secretary.

  In his work as First Secretary of the LCP from 1988 to 1990, Brazauskas became a model for reformers in other republics throughout the Soviet Union. He pursued a moderate program for decentralizing the Soviet system, attempting to loosen Moscow’s control of Lithuania step by step. In this he had to strike a balance between party leaders in Moscow who demanded tighter controls in Lithuania and rival Lithuanians who demanded a sharp

  167

  BREST-LITOVSK PEACE

  break with Moscow. He experienced sharp criticism from both sides for being too lenient toward the other, yet he remained a popular figure within Lithuania.

  Brazauskas presided over the dismantling of the Soviet system in Lithuania. In 1988 and 1989, as First Secretary of the LCP, he held the highest reins of political power in the republic, although he held no post in the republic’s government. In December 1989, the Lithuanian parliament ended the Com munist Party’s supraconstitutional authority in the republic. Then the LCP separated itself from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In January 1990 Brazauskas took the post of president of the Lithuanian Supreme Council, Lithuania�
�s parlia ment. After new elections in February and March 1990 returned a noncommunist majority, Vytautas Landsbergis became the president of the parlia ment, and Brazauskas lost the reins of power, although he still led the LCP and became deputy prime minister. The Lithuanian government had replaced the party as the seat of power in the re public. During the Soviet blockade of Lithuania in 1990, Brazauskas headed a special commission that planned the most efficient use of Lithuania’s lim ited energy resources. In January 1991 he resigned as deputy prime minister and remained in the op position until the Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party (LDLP), the successor to the LCP in indepen dent Lithuania, won the parliamentary elections in the fall of 1992. After serving briefly as president of the parliament, in February 1993, he was elected president of the Republic. As president he could have no party affiliation, and he accordingly withdrew from the LDLP. At the conclusion of his five-year presidential term in 1998, he retired from politics, but in 2000, still a popular figure, he returned, or ganizing a coalition of leftist parties that won a plurality of seats in parliamentary elections. In 2001 he assumed the post of Lithuanian prime minister. See also: LITHUANIA AND LITHUANIANS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Senn, Alfred Erich. (1995). Gorbachev’s Failure in Lithuania. New York: St. Martin’s. Vardys, V. Stanley, and Sedaitis, Judith B. (1997). Lithuania: The Rebel Nation. Boulder, CO: Westview.

  ALFRED ERICH SENN

  BREST-LITOVSK PEACE

  The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Soviet Russian and Imperial Russia, signed in March of 1918, ended Russia’s involvement in World War I.

  In the brief eight months of its existence, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was labeled an obscene, shameful, and dictated peace by various members of the Soviet government that signed it. Since then, it has been condemned by Western and Soviet historians alike. Under threat of a renewed German military advance, Russia agreed to give up 780,000 square kilometers of territory, fifty-six million people, one-third of its railway network, 73 percent of its iron ore production, and 89 percent of its coal supply. What remained of the former Russian empire now approximated the boundaries of sixteenth-century Muscovy.

  An onerous separate peace with an imperialist power was far from what the Soviet regime had hoped to achieve by promulgating Vladimir Lenin’s Decree on Peace within hours of the October Revolution. This decree, which appealed to all the peoples and governments at war to lay down their arms in an immediate general peace without annexations or indemnities, was to the Bolsheviks both a political and a practical necessity. Not only had Bolshevik promises of peace to war-weary workers, peasants, and soldiers enabled the party to come to power-but the Russian army was on the verge of collapse after years of defeat by Germany. The Allies’ refusal to acknowledge this appeal for a general peace forced the Bolsheviks and their partners in the new Soviet government, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), to begin negotiations with the Central Powers.

  The German-Soviet armistice signed at German divisional headquarters in Brest-Litovsk in mid-December was only a short-term triumph for the Bolshevik-Left SR government. When negotiations for a formal treaty commenced at the end of the month, the German representatives shocked the inexperienced Russians by demanding the cession of areas already occupied by the German army: Poland, Lithuania, and western Latvia. Debates raged within the Bolshevik Party and the government over a suitable response. Many Left SRs and a minority of Bolsheviks (the Left Communists) argued that Russia should reject these terms and fight a revolutionary war against German imperialism. Leon Trotsky proposed a solution of “neither war nor peace,” whereas Lenin insisted that the government accept the German terms to gain a “breathing space” for

  168

  BREZHNEV DOCTRINE

  exhausted Russia. Trotsky’s formula prevailed in Petrograd, but after Trotsky announced it at Brest-Litovsk, the Germans resumed the war and advanced toward Petrograd. With Lenin threatening to resign, the Soviet government reluctantly bowed to Germany’s demands, which now became even more punitive, adding the cession of Ukraine, Finland, and all of the Baltic provinces. Soviet representatives signed the treaty while demonstratively refusing to read it; the fourth Soviet Congress of workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies ratified it, signifying the immense popular opposition to continuing the war. The Left SRs, however, withdrew from the government in protest.

  The Brest-Litovsk peace exacerbated the civil war that had begun when the Bolshevik Party came to power in Petrograd in October 1917. The SRs, the dominant party in the Constituent Assembly dissolved by the Soviet government in December 1917, declared an armed struggle against Germany and the Bolsheviks in May 1918. In July 1918 the Left SRs attempted to break the treaty and reignite the war with Germany by assassinating the German ambassador. Various Russian liberal, conservative, and militarist groups received Allied support for their ongoing war against the Bolshevik regime. Thus the effects of the Brest-Litovsk peace continued long past its abrogation by the Soviet government when Germany surrendered to the Allies in November 1918. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH; WORLD WAR I

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Debo, Richard K. (1979). Revolution and Survival: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1917-18. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mawdsley, Evan. (1996). The Russian Civil War. Boston: Allen and Unwin. Swain, Geoffrey. (1996) The Origins of the Russian Civil War. London: Longman.

  SALLY A. BONIECE

  BREZHNEV CONSTITUTION See CONSTITUTION OF 1977.

  BREZHNEV DOCTRINE

  Although in its immediate sense a riposte to the international condemnation of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the “Brezhnev Doctrine” was the culmination of the long evolution of a conception of sovereignty in Soviet ideology. At its core was the restatement of a long-standing insistence on the right of the USSR to intervene in a satellite’s internal political developments should there be any reason to fear for the future of communist rule in that state.

  Linked to the name of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Leonid Brezhnev, because of its encapsulation in a speech he read in Warsaw on November 13, 1968, the doctrine had already been expounded by ideologue Sergei Kovalev in Pravda on September 26, 1968, and, before the invasion, by Soviet commentators critical of the Czechoslovak reforms. It resembled in most respects the defense of the invasion of Hungary in 1956, and included aspects of earlier justifications of hegemony dating to the immediate postwar period and the 1930s.

  Sovereignty continued to be interpreted in two regards: first, as the right to demand that the non-communist world, including organizations such as the United Nations, respect Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, and second, as permitting the USSR’s satellites to determine domestic policy only within the narrow bounds of orthodox Marxism-Leninism. Any breach of those parameters would justify military intervention by members of the Warsaw Pact and the removal even of leaders who had come to power in the ways that the Soviet political model would consider legitimate.

  The elements of the Brezhnev Doctrine reflecting the exigencies of the late 1960s were the intensified insistence on ideological uniformity in the face of a steady drift to revisionism in West European communist organizations as well as factions of ruling parties, and on bloc unity before venturing a less confrontational coexistence with the West. Preoccupied with protecting the Soviet sphere against external challenges and internal fissures, the Brezhnev Doctrine lacked the ambitious, more expansionist tone of earlier conceptions of sovereignty.

  Although not officially overturned until Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze radically reconceptualized foreign policy in the late 1980s, the future of the Brezhnev Doctrine was already in doubt when the USSR decided not to invade Poland in December 1980, after the emergence of the independent trade union, Solidarity. The debates in the Politburo at that time revealed a shift

  169

  BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH

  in the
thinking of even some of its more hawkish members toward a discourse of Soviet national interest in place of the traditional socialist internationalism. See also: BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; CZECHOSLOVAKIA, INVASION OF

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Jones, Robert A. (1990). The Soviet Concept of “Limited Sovereignty” from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Brehznev Doctrine. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Ouimet, M. J. (2000). “National Interest and the Question of Soviet Intervention in Poland, 1980-1981: Interpreting the Collapse of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine.’” Slavonic and East European Review 78:710-734.

  KIERAN WILLIAMS

  BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH

  Leonid Brezhnev waves to the crowd during his visit to the White House in June 1973. © BETTMANN/CORBIS (1906-1982), leading political figure since the early 1960s, rising to Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and leader of the ruling Politburo.

  Leonid Illich (“Lyonya”) Brezhnev’s rise in Soviet politics was slow but sure. He was Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party from 1964, and after April 1966 he took the office of General Secretary. His tenure as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet spanned 1961 to 1963 and from 1977 to 1982. Brezhnev led the ruling Politburo from October 1964, after organizing the ouster of Nikita S. Khushchev, until his death. Although Brezhnev’s ultimate successor, the reformer Mikhail S. Gorbachev, would accuse him of presiding over an era of stagnation (zastoi, literally a standstill) in the Soviet Union’s economic development and political progress, many Russians remember his era as a “golden age” (zolotoi vek) when living standards steadily improved. This was the result of his policy of borrowing from the West, combined with the twofold doubling of world oil prices and a deliberate decision after 1971 to reallocate production in favor of consumer products and foods. Together with Brezhnev’s policy of vainly trying to achieve military superiority over every possible combination of foreign rivals and the growing corruption that he deliberately encouraged, the reallocation from industrial goods to consumption and agriculture did in fact lead to a slowing of the expansion of output that Soviet leaders deemed to constitute economic growth. It was this slowdown that lent credibility to Gorbachev’s later charge of stagnation.