by James Millar
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fennell, John. (1983). The Crisis of Medieval Russia 1200-1304. London: Longman. Martin, Janet. (1995). Medieval Russia 980-1584. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
MARTIN DIMNIK
DMITRY MIKHAILOVICH
DMITRY, FALSE
(d. 1606), Tsar of Russia (1605-1606), also known as Pretender Dmitry.
Dmitry of Uglich, Tsar Ivan IV’s youngest son (born in 1582), supposedly died by accidentally cutting his own throat in 1591; however, many people believed that Boris Godunov had the boy murdered to clear a path to the throne for himself. In 1603 a man appeared in Poland-Lithuania claiming to be Dmitry, “miraculously” rescued from Go-dunov’s assassins. With the help of self-serving Polish lords, the Pretender Dmitry assembled an army and invaded Russia in 1604, intending to topple the “usurper” Tsar Boris. The Godunov regime launched a propaganda campaign against “False Dmitry,” identifying him as a runaway monk named Grigory Otrepev. Nevertheless, “Dmitry’s” invasion was welcomed by many Russians; and, after Tsar Boris’s sudden death in April 1605, “Dmitry” triumphantly entered Moscow as the new tsar. This mysterious young man, who truly believed that he was Dmitry of Uglich, was the only tsar ever raised to the throne by means of a military campaign and popular uprisings.
Tsar Dmitry was extremely well educated for a tsar and ruled wisely for about a year. Contrary to the conclusions of many historians, he was loved by most of his subjects and never faced a popular rebellion. His enemies circulated rumors that he was a lewd and bloodthirsty impostor who intended to convert the Russian people to Catholicism, but Tsar Dmitry remained secure on his throne. In May 1606, he married the Polish princess Marina Mniszech. During the wedding festivities in Moscow, Dmitry’s enemies (led by Prince Vasily Shuisky) incited a riot by claiming that the Polish wedding guests were trying to murder the tsar. During the riot, about two hundred men entered the Kremlin and killed Tsar Dmitry. His body was then dragged to Red Square, where he was denounced as an impostor. Shuisky seized power and proclaimed himself tsar, but Tsar Dmitry’s adherents circulated rumors that he was still alive and stirred up a powerful rebellion against the usurper. The civil war fought in the name of Tsar Dmitry lasted many years and nearly destroyed Russia. See also: DMITRY OF UGLICH; GODUNOV, BORIS FYODOR-OVICH; IVAN IV; MNISZECH, MARINA; OTREPEV, GRIG-ORY; SHUISKY, VASILY IVANOVICH; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barbour, Philip. (1966). Dimitry Called the Pretender: Tsar and Great Prince of All Russia, 1605-1606. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Perrie, Maureen. (1995). Pretenders and Popular Monar-chism in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars of the Time of Troubles. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
CHESTER DUNNING
DMITRY MIKHAILOVICH
(1299-1326), Prince of Tver and grand prince of Vladimir.
Dmitry Mikhailovich (“Terrible Eyes”) was born on September 15, 1299. Twelve years later he led a campaign against Yury Danilovich of Moscow to capture Nizhny Novgorod. But Metropolitan Peter, a supporter of Moscow, objected. Dmitry therefore cancelled the attack. In 1318, when Khan Uzbek executed his father Mikhail, Dmitry succeeded him to Tver. Soon afterward, he strengthened his hand against Moscow by marrying Maria, daughter of Grand Prince Gedimin, thereby concluding a marriage alliance with the Lithuanians. In 1321 Yury, now the Grand Prince of Vladimir, marched against Dmitry and forced him to hand over his share of the Tatar tribute and to promise not to seek the grand princely title. In 1322, when Yury delayed in taking the tribute to Khan Uzbek, Dmitry broke his pledge. He rode to Saray to complain to the khan that Yury refused to hand over the tribute and to ask for the grand princely title. For his service, the khan granted him the patent for Vladimir. Because Yury objected to the appointment, Uzbek summoned both princes to Saray, but the khan never passed judgment on them. On November 21, 1325, Dmitry murdered Yury to avenge his father’s execution. He therewith incurred the khan’s wrath. The latter sent troops to devastate the Tver lands and had Dmitry executed in the following year, on September 13, 1326. See also: GOLDEN HORDE; GRAND PRINCE; METROPOLITAN; YURI DANILOVICH
DMITRY OF UGLICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fennell, John L. I. (1968). The Emergence of Moscow 1304-1359. London: Secker and Warburg. Martin, Janet. (1995). Medieval Russia 980-1584. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
MARTIN DIMNIK
broad sectors of the population and influential factions at court endorsed the notion that Dmitry had miraculously escaped death. Over a dozen seventeenth-century texts excoriate Godunov for Dmitry’s murder, and historians have debated the events surrounding his death and public resurrection ever since.
DMITRY OF UGLICH
(1582-1591), youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, whose early death was followed by the appearance of two “False Dmitry” claimants to the throne in the Time of Troubles.
Dmitry Ivanovich, the son of Tsar Ivan IV, was born in 1582 at a time of dynastic crisis. The tsare-vich Ivan Ivanovich had been killed in 1581, and his mentally impaired brother Fedor had failed to produce offspring after several years of marriage. Dmitry’s mother, Maria Nagaia, was the last of the many wives taken by Ivan IV. Although their marriage was considered uncanonical, the birth of Dmitry raised hopes that the Rurikid line might continue. Upon the death of Ivan IV in 1584, Boris Godunov moved to protect the interests of his brother-in-law, Tsarevich Fedor, by removing Dmitry and the Nagoi clan from Moscow and exiling them to the town of Uglich. The Nagois were kept under close surveillance, and the young Dmitry, who suffered from epilepsy, grew up in Uglich surrounded by nannies and uncles. On May 15, 1591, the boy’s body was discovered in a pool of blood in a courtyard. Upon hearing the terrible news, the Nagois incited a mob against Godunov’s representatives in Uglich and several were murdered. A commission of inquiry sent from Moscow concurred with the majority of eyewitnesses that Dmitry’s death was an accident caused by severe epileptic convulsions that broke out during a knife-throwing game, causing him to fall on a knife and slit his own throat. Rumors of Godunov’s complicity began to circulate almost immediately, but they were not officially accepted at court until 1606. In that year tsar Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky, who had headed the commission of inquiry that pronounced Dmitry’s death an accident fifteen years earlier, brought the Nagoi clan back to court and proclaimed Dmitry’s death a political murder perpetrated by Godunov. Shuisky also organized the transfer of Dmitry’s remains to Moscow and promoted the cult of his martyrdom for propaganda purposes. During the Time of Troubles, See also: DMITRY, FALSE; GODUNOV, BORIS FYODOR-OVICH; IVAN IV; RURIKID DYNASTY; SHUISKY, VASILY; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Penn State University Press.
BRIAN BOECK
DOCTORS’ PLOT
On January 13, 1953, TASS and Pravda announced the exposure of a conspiracy within the Soviet medical elite. Nine doctors-including six with stereo-typically Jewish last names-were charged with assassinating Andrei A. Zhdanov and Aleksandr S. Shcherbakov and plotting to kill other key members of the Soviet leadership. These articles touched off an explosion of undisguised chauvinism in the press that condemned Soviet Jews as Zionists and agents of United States and British imperialism. The Doctors’ Plot (Delo vrachei) was the product of an intensely russocentric period in Soviet history when non-Russian cultures were routinely accused of bourgeois nationalism. It marked the culmination of state-sponsored anti-Semitism under Josef Stalin and followed in the wake of the 1948 murder of Solomon M. Mikhoels and subsequent anti-Cosmopolitan campaigns.
Much of the Doctors’ Plot remains shrouded in mystery, due to the fact that virtually all relevant archival material remains tightly classified. Even its design and intent are unclear, ins
ofar as the campaign was still evolving when it was abruptly terminated after Stalin’s death in March 1953. Although it was officially denounced shortly thereafter as the work of renegades within the security services, most scholars suspect that Stalin played a major role in the affair. Some believe that the inflammatory press coverage was intended to provoke a massive wave of pogroms that would give
DOLGANS
Stalin an excuse to deport the Soviet Jews to Siberia. Adherents of this view differ over what precisely was to catalyze such a wave of popular anti-Semitism. According to some commentators, the court philosopher Dimitry I. Chesnokov was to publicly justify the sequestering of the Jews in Marxist-Leninist terms. Others suggest that the campaign in the press would climax with the show trial and execution of the Jewish “doctor-murderers” on Red Square. But the most common story involves an attempt to publish a collective letter to Pravda signed by approximately sixty prominent Soviet Jews that would condemn the traitorous doctors and propose that the entire Jewish community be “voluntarily” deported to Siberia to exculpate its sins. In each of these cases, the exiling of the Jews was to be accompanied by a thorough purge of party and state institutions, a murderous act that would apparently combine elements of the Great Terror with the Final Solution.
Of the three scenarios, only the collective letter to Pravda finds reflection in extant archival sources. Composed at Agitprop in mid-January 1953 by Nikita. A. Mikhailov, the collective letter condemned the “doctor-murderers,” conceded that some Soviet Jews had fallen under the influence of hostile foreign powers, and demanded “the most merciless punishment of the criminals.” I. I. Mints and Ia. S. Khavinson circulated this letter within the Soviet Jewish elite and coerced many, including Vasily S. Grossman and S. Ia. Marshak, to sign it. Others, however, refused. Although the letter did not explicitly call for mass deportations, Ilya G. Ehrenburg and V. A. Kaverin read the phrase “the most merciless punishment” to be a veiled threat against the entire Soviet Jewish population.
When Ehrenburg was pressured to sign the letter in late January 1953, he first stalled for time and then wrote a personal appeal to Stalin that urged the dictator to bar Pravda from publishing material that might compromise the USSR’s reputation abroad. This apparently caused Stalin to think twice about the campaign and a second, more mildly worded collective letter was commissioned later that February. This letter called for the punishment of the “doctor-murderers,” but also drew a clear distinction between the Soviet Jewish community and their “bourgeois,” “Zionist” kin abroad. It concluded by proclaiming that the Soviet Jews wanted nothing more than to live as members of the Soviet working class in harmony with the other peoples of the USSR. Curiously, although Ehren-burg and other prominent Soviet Jews ultimately signed this second letter, it never appeared in print. Some commentators believe this to be indicative of ambivalence on Stalin’s part regarding the Doctors’ Plot as a whole during the last two weeks of his life.
Although neither draft of the collective letter explicitly mentioned plans for the Siberian exile of the Jews, many argue that this was the ultimate intent of the Doctors’ Plot. Since the opening of the Soviet archives in 1991, however, scholars have searched in vain for any trace of the paper trail that such a mass operation would have left behind. The absence of documentation has led some specialists to consider the rumors of impending deportation to be a reflection of social paranoia within the Soviet Jewish community rather than genuine evidence of official intent. This theory is complicated, however, by the accounts of high-ranking party members like Anastas I. Mikoyan and Nikolai A. Bulganin that confirm that the Jews risked deportation in early 1953. It is therefore best to conclude that speculative talk about possible deportations circulated within elite party circles on the eve of Stalin’s death, precipitating rumors and hysteria within the society at large. That said, it would be incautious to conclude that formal plans for the Jews’ deportation were developed, ratified, or advanced to the planning stage without corroborating evidence from the former Soviet archives. See also: JEWS; PRAVDA; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brent, Jonathan, and Naumov, Vladimir. (2003). Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against Jewish Doctors. New York: HarperCollins. Kostyrchenko, Gennadi. (1995). Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
DAVID BRANDENBERGER
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO See PASTERNAK, BORIS LEONIDOVICH.
DOLGANS
The Dolgans (Dolgani) belong to the North Asiatic group of the Mongolian race. They are an Altaic people, along with the Buryats, Kalmyks, Balkars,
DOLGORUKY, YURI VLADIMIROVICH
Chuvash, Evenks, Karachay, Kumyks, Nogay, and Yakuts. This Turkic-speaking people number today about 8,500 and live far above the Arctic Circle in the Taymyr (or Taimur) autonomous region (332,857 square miles, 862,100 square kilometers), which is one of the ten autonomous regions recognized in the Russian Constitution of 1993. This region is located on the Taymyr peninsula in north central Siberia, which is actually the northernmost projection of Siberia. Cape Chelyuskin at the tip of the peninsula constitutes the northernmost point of the entire Asian mainland. Located between the estuaries of the Yenisei and Khatanga rivers, the peninsula is covered mostly with tundra and gets drained by the Taymyra River. The Taymyr autonomous region also includes the islands between the Yenisei and Khatanga gulfs, the northern parts of the Central Siberian Plateau, and the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago. The capital is Dudinka. On the Taimyr Peninsula the Dolgans are the most numerous indigenous ethnic group. A few dozen Dolgans also live in Yakutia, on the lower reaches of the River Anabar.
Generally, the languages of the indigenous peoples of the Eurasian Arctic and subarctic can be grouped into four classes: Uralic, Manchu-Tungus, Turkic, and Paleo-Siberian. The Dolgan language is part of the northeastern branch of the Turkic language family and closely resembles Yakut. Although Dolgan is particularly active among the twenty-six languages of the so-called Peoples of the Far North in Russia, the small number of speakers (6,000 out of the total population of 8,500) of this rare aboriginal language in Siberia prompted UNESCO to classify Dolgan as a “potentially endangered” language. The demographical and ecological problems of the Taymyr region also work against the language. As for writing, the Dol-gans lack their own alphabet and rely on the Russian Cyrillic.
The name Dolgan became known outside the tribe itself only as late as the nineteenth century. The word derives from dolghan or dulghan, meaning “people living on the middle reaches of the river.” Some ethnologists believe the word comes from the term for wood (toa) or toakihil?r, meaning people of the wood. Although originally a nomadic people preoccupied mostly by reindeer hunting and fishing, the advent of the Russians in the seventeenth century led to the near destruction of the Dolgans’ traditional economy and way of life. The Taymyr, or Dolgan-Nenets National Territory, was proclaimed in 1930. The next year old tribal councils were liquidated, the process of collectivization initiated. Taymyr’s economy in the early twenty-first century depends on mining, fishing, and dairy and fur farming, as well as some reindeer breeding and trapping. See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; NORTHERN PEOPLES; SIBERIA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam.(1995). Culture Incarnate: Native Anthropology from Russia. Armonk, NY.: M.E. Sharpe. Smith, Graham. (1990). The Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union. New York: Longman. Trade directory of the Russian Far East: Yakut Republic, Chita Region, Khabarovsk Territory, Primorsky Territory, Amur Region, Kamchatka Region, Magadan Region, Sakhalin Region. (1995). London: Flegon Press.
JOHANNA GRANVILLE
DOLGORUKY, YURI VLADIMIROVICH See
YURI VLADIMIROVICH.
DOMOSTROI
Sixteenth-century domestic handbook.
The term domostroi, which literally means “domestic order,” refers to a group of forty-three manuscript books produced in the sixteenth, seventeenth
, and eighteenth centuries. Less than a dozen copies explicitly contain the title: “This book called Do-mostroi has in it much that Christian men and women, children, menservants, and maidservants will find useful.” All, however, share a basic text that is clearly recognizable despite additions, deletions, and variations.
Where Domostroi came from, who wrote it- or, more probably, compiled it-and when, remain matters for debate. So does the process by which the text evolved. Traditionally, it has been linked to the north Russian merchant city of Novgorod and dated to the late fifteenth century, although significant alterations were made until the mid-sixteenth century. This view attributes one version to Sylvester, a priest of the Annunciation Cathedral in the Kremlin, who came from Novgorod and supposedly had a close relationship with Ivan IV the
