Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  GREEKS

  the Truman Doctrine. Thanks to massive military and economic aid from the United States, which came just in time, the communists, who had established a provisional government in the northern mountains, were ultimately defeated.

  Relations between Greece and the USSR cooled with the former’s admission to NATO in 1952. Beginning in the mid-1950s, NATO’s southeastern flank experienced periodic cycles of international tension. The problem in Cyprus, where the population is split between Greek-Cypriots (approximately 78%) and Turkish-Cypriots (18%) led eventually to a Turkish invasion of the island on July 20, 1974, to protect the Turkish-Cypriot minority.

  Nevertheless, Greek-Soviet ties established during the 1980s not only survived the political upheaval that ended the Soviet Union, they even improved. In 1994 Greece signed new protocols with Russia for delivery of natural gas from a pipeline to run from Bulgaria to Greece. In 2002, during its fourth presidency of the European Union (EU), Greece repeatedly called for improved relations with Russia. At the Russia-EU summit in Brussels on November 11, 2002, Prime Minister Costas Simitis emphasized the importance of implementing the Brussels agreement on the Kaliningrad region, an enclave on the Baltic Sea that would be cut off from the rest of Russia by the Schengen zone when Poland and Lithuania joined the EU. Greece also prepared a new strategy for greater cooperation between Russia and the EU, which is Russia’s largest trading partner. See also: BALKAN WARS; KIEVAN RUS; ORTHODOXY; ROUTE TO GREEKS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Gerolymatos, Andr?. (2003). The Balkan Wars: Conquest, Revolution, and Retribution from the Ottoman Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond. New York: Basic Books. Gvosdev, Nicholas. (2001). An Examination of Church-State Relations in the Byzantine and Russian Empires with an Emphasis on Ideology and Models of Interaction. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Joseph, Joseph S. (1999). Cyprus Ethnic Conflict and International Politics: From Independence to the Threshold of the European Union. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Koliopoulos, John S. (1999). Plundered Loyalties: World War II and Civil War in Greek West Macedonia. New York: New York University Press. Prousis, Theophilus. (1994). Russian Society and the Greek Revolution. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

  JOHANNA GRANVILLE

  GREEKS

  As early as 1000 B.C.E., pre-Hellenic Greeks, in search of iron and gold, explored the southeast shores of the Black Sea. Beginning in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C.E., Greeks established fishing villages at the mouths of the Danube, Dnieper, Dniester, and Bug Rivers. They founded the colony of Olbia between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C.E. near the South Bug River and carried on trade in metals, slaves, furs, and later grain. Greek jewelry, coins, and wall paintings attest to the presence of Greek colonies during the Scythian, Sarmatian, and Roman domination of the area.

  During the late tenth century C.E., Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rus accepted the Orthodox Christian religion after marrying Anna, sister of Greek Byzantine Emperor Basil II. With the conversion came the influence of Greek Byzantine culture including the alphabet, Greek religious literature, architecture, icon painting, music, and crafts. The East Slavs carried on a vigorous trade with Byzantium following the famous route “from the Varangians to the Greeks”-from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

  With the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, many Greeks, fleeing onerous taxes, emigrated to Russia. Ivan III (1462-1505) married Sophia, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, giving rise to the Muscovite claim that Moscow was the “Third Rome.” Ivan, like many future Russian rulers, employed Greeks as architects, painters, diplomats, and administrators.

  The opening of the Black Sea grain trade with Western Europe and the Near East during the early nineteenth century gave impetus to a large Greek immigration to the Black Sea coast. Greek merchant families prospered in Odessa, which was the headquarters of the Philiki Etaireia Society, advocating the liberation of Greece from Turkey (1821-1829).

  In 1924 some 70,000 Greeks left the Soviet Union for Greece. Of the estimated 450,000 Greeks at the time of Stalin, 50,000 Greeks perished during the collectivization drive and Purges of the

  GREEN MOVEMENT

  1930s. Greeks, especially from the Krasnodar Region, were sent to the Solovki Gulag and to Siberia. In 1938 all Greek schools, theaters, newspapers, magazines, and churches were closed down. In 1944 Crimean and Kuban Greeks were exiled to Kazakhstan. Between 1954 and 1956 Greek exiles were released, but they could not return to the Crimea until 1989. The last major immigration of Greeks to the Soviet Union began in 1950 with the arrival of about 10,000 communist supporters of the Greek Civil War of 1949. The Soviet census for 1970 showed 57,800 persons of Greek origin. The Soviet census for 1989 had 98,500 Greeks in Ukraine and 91,700 Greeks in Russia. The 2001 census for Ukraine reported 92,500 Greeks. See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; ORTHODOXY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Herlihy, Patricia. (1979-1980). “Greek Merchants in Odessa in the Nineteenth Century.” Eucharisterion: Essays Presented to Omeljan Pritsak on His Sixtieth Birthday by his Colleagues and Students. Harvard Ukrainian Studies 3-4(1):399-420. Herlihy, Patricia. (1989). “The Greek Community in Odessa, 1861-1917.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 7:235-252. Prousis, Theophilus C. (1994). Russian Society and the Greek Revolution. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Rostovtzeff, Michael I. (1922). Iranians and Greeks in South Russia. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  PATRICIA HERLIHY

  GREEN MOVEMENT

  Green Movement is the term used to describe peasant resistance to the Bolshevik government during the Russian Civil War.

  The first rebellions against the Bolshevik government began in 1918 and increased with frequency and intensity through the civil war period. In 1918 and 1919 peasant rebellions were poorly organized and localized affairs, easily suppressed by small punitive expeditions. In 1920, however, after the defeat of the White armies, the Bolsheviks faced large, well-organized peasant insurgent movements in Tambov, the Volga and Urals regions, Ukraine, and Siberia. The causes of the rebellions were similar. After the failure of Committees of the Rural Poor to bring a reliable government to the countryside, the Bolshevik regime relied on armed detachments to procure grain and recruits, and to stop the black market in food and consumer goods. The depredations of these detachments, the only representatives of the Soviet government that most peasants saw, became increasingly severe as war communism ground down the Russian economy. By 1920, many peasants had little grain left, even as communist food supply organizations made greater demands on them. Large numbers of young men-deserters and draft-dodgers from the Red Army-hid in villages and the surrounding countryside from armed detachments sent to gather them.

  The Soviet-Polish war, beginning in August 1920, increased the demands on peasants for food and recruits, and stripped the provinces of trained, motivated troops. This allowed peasant uprisings that were initially limited to a small area to grow, with armed bands finding willing recruits from the mass of deserters and draft-dodgers. By early 1921 much of the countryside was unsafe even for large Red Army detachments.

  The Green Movement of 1920 and 1921 was qualitatively different from the peasant rebellions the communist government had faced in 1918 or 1919. While many peasant insurgents fought in small independent bands, Alexander Antonov’s Insurgent Army in Tambov and Nestor Makhno’s forces in Ukraine were organized militias whose members had military training. Enjoying strong support from political organizations (often made up of local SRs [Socialist Revolutionists], Anarchists, or even former Bolsheviks), they established an underground government that provided food, horses, and excellent intelligence to the insurgents, and terrorized local communists and their supporters. They were much harder to defeat.

  By February 1921 the communist government suspended grain procurements in much of Russia and Ukraine, and in March, at the Tenth Party Congress, private trade in grain was legalized. The end of the Soviet-Polish war in March also freed elite armed for
ces to turn against the insurgents. In the summer of 1921 hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers, backed by airplanes, armored cars, and artillery, attacked the insurgent forces. In their wake followed the Cheka, who eliminated support for the insurgents by holding family members

  GRIBOEDOV, ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH

  hostage, making villages collectively responsible for guerilla attacks, shooting suspected supporters of the insurgents, and sending thousands more to concentration camps. Facing drought and terror, and with the abolition of forced grain procurement and military conscription, support for the Green Movement collapsed by September 1921. A few leaders, such as Makhno, slipped across the border, but most were hunted down and killed, such as Antonov, who died in a shootout in June 1922. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; COMMITTEES OF THE VILLAGE POOR; SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; WAR COMMUNISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Brovkin, Vladimir, ed. (1997). The Bolsheviks in Russian Society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Figes, Orlando. (1989). Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917-1921. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malet, Michael. (1982). Nestor Makhno in the Russian Civil War. London: Macmillan. Radkey, Oliver. (1976). The Unknown Civil War in Soviet Russia. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

  A. DELANO DUGARM

  GRIBOEDOV, ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH

  (1795-1829), dramatist and diplomat.

  Alexander Griboedov is best known as the author of Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma). The first Russian comedy of manners, the play was written in 1823, but not published until 1833 because of censorship.

  Born in Moscow as the son of a military officer, Griboedov showed talent at an early age in a number of areas. He was admitted to Moscow University at the age of eleven. By the age of sixteen he had graduated in literature, law, mathematics, and natural sciences. He also had a gift for music. The Napoleonic invasion prevented him from pursuing a doctorate. He served in the military from 1812 to 1816. After the war he entered the civil service in the ministry of foreign affairs. In 1818 he was sent to Persia (Iran) as secretary to the Russian mission. There Griboedov added Arabic and Persian to the long list of foreign languages he had mastered (French, German, Italian, and English). In 1821 he transferred to service in the Caucasus, but took a leave of absence in St. Petersburg and Moscow from February 1823 to May 1825 to write Woe from Wit. Although Griboedov was back in the Caucasus by December of 1825, he was nevertheless summoned under arrest for his alleged involvement in the abortive Decembrist uprising of that time. After extensive interrogations, however, he was cleared of suspicion and returned to his diplomatic post. Griboedov negotiated the peace treaty of 1828 that ended the Russo-Persian War. As a reward for his wits, he was appointed Russian minister in Tehran in 1828, where-in ironic mockery of his own play’s title-he was murdered in January 1829 by religious fanatics who attacked the Russian embassy. The twentieth-century novelist Yuri Tynianov wrote about Griboedov’s death in Death and Diplomacy in Persia (1938).

  Woe from Wit, composed in rhymed verse, is a seminal work in Russian culture. Many lines from the play have entered everyday Russian speech as quotations or aphorisms. Its hero, Chatsky, is the prototype of the so-called superfluous man, who criticizes social and political conditions in his country but does nothing to bring about a change. In addition to the gap between generations, the concept of service is a key theme. In a monolithic country with minimal private enterprise, a man’s career choices were either civil or military. Griboedov mocks as shallow and morally irresponsible the character Famusov, who says in the play: “For me, whether it is business matters or not, my custom is, once it’s signed, the burden is off my shoulders.” As for military service, the hero Chatsky prefers to serve the cause and not specific personalities. He says to Famusov: “I should be pleased to serve, but worming oneself into one’s favor is sickening” (Sluzhit’ by rad, prisluzhivat’sia toshno). Famusov rejects such serious loyalty to a higher cause, reminiscing fondly of his uncle who stumbled and hurt himself while in court. When Catherine the Great showed amusement, the uncle deliberately fell again as a way to please her. Here Griboedov appears to counter the poet Gavryl Romanovich Derzhavin’s ode to Catherine (“Felitsa”), written in 1789, in which Catherine is praised as someone who treats subordinates respectfully. The play contains an extensive gallery of satirical portraits that continue to hold relevance to contemporary audiences in Russia and around the world. See also: THEATER

  GRISHIN, VIKTOR DMITRIEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Tynianov, Iurii Nikolaevich. (1975). Death and Diplomacy in Persia, 2nd ed. Westport, CT: Hyperion.

  JOHANNA GRANVILLE

  Reddaway, Peter. (1972). Uncensored Russia: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union. New York: American Heritage Press.

  JONATHAN WEILER

  GRIGORENKO, PETER GRIGORIEVICH

  (1907-1987), leading Soviet human rights activist.

  Born in Ukraine, Peter Grigorenko was a decorated war hero during World War II. He rose to the rank of Major General in 1959. In 1964 Grig-orenko was arrested for participation in the Society for the Restoration of Leninist Principles, which warned of the reemergence of a Stalinist cult of personality. For fifteen months he was in psychiatric hospitals and prisons before being released in 1965. Stripped of a military pension, denied professional work, Grigorenko, at age 58, emerged as a tireless campaigner for human rights. He became a mythic figure among Crimean Tatars for aiding their fight for national rights. He organized demonstrations at dissident trials in the late 1960s and wrote and signed petitions on behalf of dissidents. He attacked the use of psychiatric confinement as a method of punishing political prisoners. For his troubles, he was arrested again, in Tashkent on May 7, 1969, and held in psychiatric confinement until 1974. He subsequently became one of the founding members of the Moscow Helsinki Group, established after the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975. On November 30, 1977, Grigorenko flew to New York with his wife and a son for emergency surgery. While there, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship. Peter Reddaway, writing in 1972 about the Soviet human rights movement, said “if one person had to be singled out as having inspired the different groups within the Democratic movement more than anyone else, then it would surely be [Grigorenko]. Indeed he became, while free, in an informal way the movement’s leader.” Grigorenko died in New York City in 1987. See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT

  GRISHIN, VIKTOR DMITRIEVICH

  (1914-1992), member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

  Twice decorated Hero of Socialist Labor (1974, 1984), Viktor Grishin was one of the highest-ranking members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on the eve of Michael S. Gorbachev’s selection as party leader. Born in Moscow, he received his degree in geodesy in 1932. From 1938 to 1940 he served in the Red Army, during which time he became a member of the CPSU. Following his discharge from the army in 1941, he was assigned to duties in the Moscow Party organization.

  Grishin entered the upper echelons of the party when he was made a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1952. He took on additional responsibilities as the head of Soviet professional unions in 1956, a position he held until 1967. In 1961 he was made a candidate of the Politburo, and in 1967 he became First Secretary of the Moscow Party organization, one of the most powerful posts in the CPSU. By 1971, he was a full member of the Politburo.

  Grishin was one of Gorbachev’s rivals for the post of General Secretary in 1985. In order to ensure the loyalty of the Moscow Party organization, Gorbachev had Grishin removed from both the Politburo and the Moscow Party organization in 1986. He was replaced in both posts by Boris Yeltsin. Grishin was retired from the CPSU and lived on a party pension until his death in 1992. See also: CENTRAL COMMITTEE; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; MOSCOW; POLITBURO

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Alexeyeva, Lyudmila. (1985). Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human Rights. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press. Grigorenko, Petr. (1982). Memoirs. New York: Norton.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Mawdsley, Evan, and White, Stephen. (2000). The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Central Committee and Its Members, 1917-1991. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  TERRY D. CLARK

  GRIVNA

  GRIVNA

  GROMOV, BORIS VSEVOLODOVICH

  A Russian monetary and weight unit used from the ninth or tenth century to the eighteenth century.

  Initially the grivna was a unit of account (twenty-five dirhams or Islamic silver coins) and a unit of weight (c. 68 grams, or 2.4 ounces), used interchangeably for denominating imported coined silver. Since foreign coins fluctuated in weight and fineness and diminished in import frequency, by the late tenth century the grivna weighed around 51.2 grams (1.8 ounces) and equaled fifty cut dirhams. By the eleventh century, the ratio of coins to weight of a grivna was further altered with the appearance of a rodlike, or Novgorodian type, silver ingot in northern Rus, weighing around 200 grams (7 ounces). This unit, called mark in German, like the silver itself, was imported from western and central Europe to northern Russia via the Baltic. Consequently, in Novgorod there developed a 1:4 relationship between the silver ingot, called grivna of silver, and the old grivna, or grivna of kunas. Both units diffused outside of Novgorod to other parts of Russia, including the Golden Horde, but the relationship of the grivna of kunas to the grivna of silver fluctuated throughout the lands until the fifteenth century, when the ingots were replaced by Russian coins. However, the term grivna (grivenka) and the 200 grams (7 ounces) it represented remained in Russian metrology until the eighteenth century.