Encyclopedia of Russian History
Page 123
FINNS AND KARELIANS
Finns, Karelians (in Karelian Republic and eastern Finland), Izhorians (Ingrians) and Ingrian Finns (around St. Petersburg), Vepsians (southeast of St. Petersburg), near-extinct Votians (southwest of St. Petersburg), and Estonians speak mutually semi-intelligible Finnic languages. Novgorod absorbed many of them during the thirteenth century, without formal treaties. After defeating the Swedes and taking territory that included the present St. Petersburg, tsarist Russia subjugated all these peoples. Finns, Ingrian Finns, and most Estonians were Lutheran, while Karelians, Vepsians, Izhorians, and Votians were Greek Orthodox. Livelihood has extended from traditional forest agriculture to urban endeavors.
Finland and Estonia emerged as independent countries by 1920, while Karelia became an autonomous oblast (1920) and soon an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1923). Deportations, immigration, and other means of russification have almost obliterated the Izhorians, while reducing the Karelians, Finns, and Vepsians to 13 percent of Karelia’s population (103,000 out of 791,000, in 1989). Altogether, the Soviet 1989 census recorded 131,000 Karelians (23,000 in Tver oblast), 18,000 Finns, and 6,000 Vepsians (straddling Karelia and the Leningrad and Vologda oblasts).
Karelia occupies a strategic location on the railroad to Russia’s ice-free port of Murmansk on the Arctic Ocean. Much of the crucial American aid to the Soviet Union during World War II used this route. The Karelian Isthmus, seized by Moscow from Finland during that war, is not part of the Karelian republic, which briefly (1940 to 1956) was upgraded to a Karelo-Finnish union republic so as to put pressure on Finland.
The earliest surviving written document in any Finnic language is a Karelian thunder spell written on birch bark with Cyrillic characters. Karelia contributed decisively to the world-famous Finnish epic Kalevala. Finnish dialects gradually mutate to northern and western Karelian, to Aunus and Lu-dic in southern Karelia, and on to Vepsian. Given such a continuum, a common Karelian literary language has not taken root, and standard Latin-script Finnish is used by the newspaper Karjalan Sanomat (Karelian News) and the monthly Karjala (Karelia). A Vepsian periodical, Kodima (Homeland), uses both Vepsian (with Latin script) and Russian. Only 40,000 Karelians in Karelia and 22,000 elsewhere in the former Soviet Union consider Karelian or Finnish their main language. Among the young, russification prevails.
Karelia is an “urbanized forest republic” where agriculture is limited and industry ranges from lumber and paper to iron ore and aluminum. The capital, Petrozavodsk (Petroskoi in Karelian), includes 34 percent of Karelia’s entire population. Ethnic Karelians have little say in political and economic management. Hardly any of the republic government leaders or parliament members speak Karelian or Finnish. The cultural interests of the indigenous minority are voiced by Karjalan Rahva-han Liitto (Union of the Karelian People), the
FIREBIRD
Vepsian Cultural Society, and the Ingrian Union for Finns in Karelia.
Economic and cultural interactions with Finland, blocked under the Soviet rule, have revived. Karelia’s future success depends largely on how far a symbiosis with this more developed neighboring country can reach. See also: FINLAND; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; NORTHERN PEOPLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eskelinen, Heikki; Oksa, Jukka; and Austin, Daniel. (1994). Russian Karelia in Search of a New Role. Joen-suu, Finland: Karelian Institute. Kurs, Ott. (1994). “Indigenous Finnic Population of North-west Russia.” GeoJournal 34(4):443-456. Taagepera, Rein. (1999). The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State. London: Hurst.
REIN TAAGEPERA
FIREBIRD
The Firebird (Zhar-ptitsa) is one of the most colorful legendary animal figures of Russian magical tales (fairy tales). With golden feathers and eyes like crystals, she is a powerful source of light, and even one of her feathers can illuminate a whole room. Sometimes she functions as little more than a magical helper who flies the hero out of danger; in other tales her feather and she herself are highly desired prizes to be captured. “Prince Ivan, the Firebird, and the Gray Wolf” depicts her coming at night to steal golden apples from a king’s garden and becoming one object of a heroic quest by the youngest prince, Ivan. Helped by a gray wolf, he ends up with the Firebird as well as a noble steed with golden mane and golden bridle and Princess Yelena the Fair.
The tales became the narrative source for the first of two famous folklore ballets composed by Igor Stravinsky under commission from Sergei Di-aghilev and his Ballets Russes. L’Oiseau de feu, with choreography by the noted Russian Michel Fokine, premiered at the Paris Opera on June 25, 1910, with great success and quickly secured the young Stravinsky’s international reputation. Like his Petrushka that followed it, The Firebird impressed audiences with the colorfulness of both story and music and with its bold harmonic innovations. The two ballets also helped spread awareness of Russia’s rich folk culture beyond its borders. See also: BALLET, FOLKLORE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Guterman, Norbert, tr. (1973). Russian Fairy Tales, 2d ed. New York: Pantheon Books. Taruskin, Richard. (1996). Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press.
NORMAN W. INGHAM
FIRST SECRETARY, CPSU See GENERAL SECRETARY.
FIVE-HUNDRED-DAY PLAN
Proposals for reform of the Soviet economic system began to emerge during the 1960s, and some concrete reforms were introduced. All of these efforts, such as Alexei Kosygin’s reforms in 1965, the new law on state enterprises in 1987, and the encouragement of cooperatives in 1988, basically involved tinkering with details. They did not touch the main pillars of the Soviet economy: hierarchical command structures controlling enterprise activity, detailed central decision-making about resource allocation and production activity, and fixed prices set by the government. The need for reform became ever more obvious in the “years of stagnation” under Leonid Brezhnev. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, reform proposals became more radical, culminating in the formulation of the Five-Hundred-Day Plan, put together at the request of Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin by a group of able and progressive reform economists headed by Academician Stanislav Shatalin and presented to the government in September 1990.
The plan fully accepted the idea of a shift to a market economy, as indicated by its subtitle “transition to the market,” and laid out a timetable of institutional and policy changes to achieve the transition. It described and forthrightly accepted the institutions of private property, market pricing, enterprise independence, competition as regulator, transformation of the banking system, macroeco-nomic stabilization, and the need to open the economy to the world market. It specified a timetable
FIVE-YEAR PLANS
of steps to be taken and provided draft legislation to undergird the changes. One of its more radical elements was its acceptance of the desire of the republics for devolution of central power, and it endorsed their right to economic independence. This feature of the plan was fatal upon its acceptance, as Gorbachev was not ready to accept a diminution of central power.
Parallel with the Five-Hundred-Day Plan, a group in the government worked up an alternative, much less ambitious, proposal. Gorbachev asked the economist Abel Aganbegyan to meld the two into a compromise plan. Aganbegyan’s plan accepted most of the features of the Five-Hundred-Day Plan, but without timetables. By then, however, it was too late. Yeltsin had been elected president of the Russian republic and had already started to move the RSFSR along the path of reform envisioned in the Shatalin plan. This was followed in August 1991 by the abortive coup to remove Gorbachev, and in December 1991 by the breakup of the Union, ending the relevance of the Five-Hundred-Day Plan to a unified USSR. But its spirit and much of its content were taken as the basis for the reform in the Russian republic, and many of the reformers involved in its formulation became officials in the new Russian government. The other republics went their own way and, except for the Baltic republics, g
enerally rejected radical reform. See also: AGANBEGYAN, ABEL GEZEVICH; COMMAND ADMINISTRATIVE ECONOMY; KOSYGIN REFORMS; SHATALIN, STANISLAV SERGEYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aslund, Anders. (1995). How Russia Became a Market Economy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Yavlinsky, G. (1991). 500 Days: Transition to the Market. Trans. David Kushner. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
ROBERT W. CAMPBELL
FIVE-YEAR PLANS
Russian economic planning had its roots in the late nineteenth century when tsarist explorers and engineers systematically found and evaluated the rich resources scattered all around the empire. Major deposits of iron and coal, as well as other minerals, were well documented when the Bolsheviks turned their attention to economic development. Initial attention focused on several centers in south Russia and eastern Ukraine, which were to be rapidly enlarged. Electric power was the glamorous new industry, and both Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin stressed it as a symbol of progress.
By 1927 the planners had prepared a huge three-volume Five-Year Plan, consisting of some seventeen hundred pages of description and optimistic projection. By 1928 Stalin had won control of the Communist Party from Leon Trotsky and other rivals, enabling him to launch Russia on a fateful new path.
The First Five-Year Plan (FYP) laid out hundreds of projects for construction, but the Party concentrated on heavy industry and national defense. In Germany Adolf Hitler was already calling for more “living room.” In a famous 1931 speech Stalin warned that the USSR only had ten years in which to prepare against invasion (and he was right). A 1950 propaganda poster urging farmers to fulfill the Five-Year Plan. The slogan reads, “Let us give to the country 127 million tons of grain per year.” © HULTON ARCHIVE
FLORENCE, COUNCIL OF
The First Five-Year Plan was cut short as planning gave way to confusion. A Second Five-Year Plan was issued in one volume in 1934, already behind schedule. The planners were learning that one-year plans were more effective for managing the economy, leaving the five-year plans to serve as propaganda documents, especially effective abroad where the Great Depression seemed to signal the collapse of capitalism.
The Third Five-Year Plan had limited circulation, and the Fourth was only a pamphlet, issued as a special edition of the party newspaper, Pravda.
The Nazi invasion, starting June 22, 1941, required hasty improvisation, using previously prepared central and eastern bases to replace those quickly overrun by well-equipped German forces. The Nazis almost captured Moscow in December 1941.
After Soviet forces rallied, wartime planners organized hasty output increases, drawing on newly trained survivors of Stalin’s drastic purges. Russian planners worked uneasily with U.S. and British officials as the long-delayed second front was opened, and abundant Lend-Lease supplies arrived.
After the war, improvisation gave way to Stalin’s grim 1946 Five-Year Plan, which held the Soviet people to semi-starvation rations while he rebuilt heavy industry and challenged the United States in building an atomic bomb.
Fortunately for the Soviet people and the world, Stalin died in March 1953, and by 1957 Nikita Khrushchev was able to give Soviet planners a more humane agenda. The next Five-Year Plan was actually a seven-year plan with ambitious targets for higher living standards. Soviet welfare did improve markedly. However, Khrushchev was diverted by his efforts to control Berlin and by his ill-fated Cuban missile adventure. The Party leadership was furious, but instead of having him executed, they allowed him to retire.
This brilliant leader’s successors were a dull lot. The planners returned to previous five-year plan procedures, which mainly cranked up previous targets by applying a range of percentage increases. Growth rates steadily declined.
In 1985 the energetic Mikhail Gorbachev looked for help from Soviet planners, but the planners were outweighed by the great bureaucracies running the system. In a final spasm, the last Five-Year Plan set overambitious targets like those of the first such endeavor. Other Russians contributed greatly by creating new tools for economic management, especially Leonid Kontorovich, who invented linear programming; Wassily Leontief, who invented input-output analysis; and Tigran Khachaturov, who provided skillful political protection for several hundred talented economists as they improved Russian economics. These men rose above the barriers of the Russian planning system and thus deserve worldwide respect. See also: ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bergson, Abram. (1964). The Economics of Soviet Planning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (1990). Soviet Economic Structure and Performance, 4th ed. New York: Harper amp; Row. Hunter, Holland, and Szyrmer, Janusz M. (1992). Faulty Foundations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
HOLLAND HUNTER
FLORENCE, COUNCIL OF
In 1438 Pope Eugenius IV called a church council to consider reunion of the eastern and western churches. The Latin and Greek churches had been drifting apart for centuries and from the year 1054 onward had rarely been in communion with each other. The sack of the Byzantine capital of Constantinople by the western crusaders made it clear that they no longer considered the Greeks their coreligionists and proved to the Greeks of Byzantium that the Latins were not their brothers in faith. But by the fifteenth century, with the Ottoman Turks already in control of most of the territory of the Byzantine Empire and moving on its capital of Constantinople, reunion of the churches seemed to be a necessity if the Christian world were to respond with a united front to the Muslim threat to Europe.
The council convened in 1439 in the Italian city of Ferrara and then moved to Florence. Present were not only the Pope, the cardinals, and many western bishops and theologians, but also the Byzantine Emperor John VIII, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Joseph II, the foremost cleric of the eastern
FOLKLORE
Christian world, and a number of leading officials and clergy of the Byzantine world (including a Russian delegation). The main points of dispute between the two churches were the legitimacy of a western addition to the creed (the “filioque”) and the nature of the church: whether it should be ruled by the Pope or by all the bishops jointly. After much discussion and debate, the delegates of the eastern church, under political pressure, accepted the western positions on the “filioque” and Papal supremacy, and reunion of the churches was solemnly proclaimed.
When the Greek representatives returned home, however, their decision was greeted with derision. Church union was never accepted by the masses of the Eastern Christian faithful. In any case, it became a dead letter with the 1453 Turkish conquest of Constantinople, renamed Istanbul by the Turks. When the Greek Isidore, Metropolitan of Kiev and presiding bishop of the Russian church, returned to Moscow where he normally resided and proclaimed the Pope as the head of the church, he was arrested on the orders of Grand Prince Basil II (“The Dark”) and then diplomatically allowed to escape to Poland. In 1448 he was replaced as metropolitan by a Russian bishop, Jonah, without the consent of the mother church in Constantinople, which was deemed to have given up its faith by submitting to the Pope. From now on, the church of Russia would be an independent (autocephalous) Orthodox church.
The ramifications of the Council of Florence were significant. The rejection of its decisions in the East made it clear that the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches were to be separate institutions, as they are today. Yet the concept of incorporating eastern ritual into Catholicism in certain places, a compromise that evolved at the council, became the model for the so-called uniate church created in Polish-governed Ukraine and Belarus in 1596, whereby the Orthodox church in those lands became part of the Catholic church while retaining its traditional eastern rites. See also: BASIL II; METROPOLITAN; UNIATE CHURCH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cherniavsky, Michael M. (1955). “The Reception of the Council of Florence in Moscow.” Church History 24:347-359. Gill, Joseph. (1961). The Council of Florence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
GEORGE P. MAJESKA
FOLKLORE
Folklore has played a vital role in the lives of the Russian people and has exerted a considerable influence on the literature, music, dance, and other arts of Russia, including such major nineteenth-and twentieth-century writers and composers as Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Peter Tchaikovsky, and Igor Stravinsky.
A folklore tradition has existed and flourished in Russia for many centuries, has been collected and studied for well more than two hundred years, and is represented by a variety of large and small genres, including oral epic songs, folktales, laments, ritual and lyric songs, incantations, riddles, and proverbs.
A simple explanation for the survival of folklore over such a long period of time is difficult to find. Some possible reasons can be found in the fact that the population was predominately rural and unable to read and write prior to the Soviet era; that the secular, nonspiritual literature of the folklore tradition was for the most part a primary source of entertainment for Russians from all classes and levels of society; or that the Orthodox Church was unsuccessful in its efforts to repress the Russian peasant’s pagan, pre-Christian folk beliefs and rituals, which over time had absorbed many Christian elements, a phenomenon commonly referred to as “double belief.” The fact that the Russian peasant was both geographically and culturally far removed from urban centers and events that influenced the country’s development and direction also played a role in folklore’s survival. And Russia’s geographical location itself was a significant factor, making possible close contact with the rich folklore traditions of neighboring peoples, including the Finns, the nomadic Turkic tribes, and the non-Russian peoples of the vast Siberian region.
Evidence of a folklore tradition appeared in Russian medieval religious and secular works of the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries, and conflicting attitudes toward its existence prior to the eighteenth century are well documented. The church considered it as evil, as the work of the devil. But memoirs and historical literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries indicate that folklore, folktales in particular, was quite favorably regarded by many. Ivan the Terrible (1533-1584), for example, hired blind men to tell stories at his bedside until he fell asleep. Less than one hundred