by James Millar
In 1992 GUM was reorganized as a joint-stock company. According to a 1991 formula, one-quarter of the shares went to the Moscow city government and one-quarter to employees, while the balance was sold to private investors. Lev Gumilev belonged to the old Russian intelligentsia. His father, Nikolai Gumilev, was a prominent poet of the Silver Age and a victim of Bolshevik terror. His mother, Anna Akhmatova, was one of the greatest Russian women poets. Lev Gumilev’s ties with the old intelligentsia led to frequent imprisonments from the 1920s to the 1950s in Josef Stalin’s Gulag (prison camp system). Gumilev joined a punishment battalion in 1944 and fought in the Battle of Berlin. In spite of this, he became a major intellectual figure in Leningrad and developed an international reputation for his studies of the ancient Turkic and Mongol peoples. He combined historical and archeological research with historical geography to develop a new discipline, ethnography (narodovedenie) in the Department of Oriental Studies of Leningrad State University. Soviet scholar circles found thought anti-Marxist in his research and publications. He was accused of ignoring the role of the class struggle in history. Gumilev was particularly concerned with the relationship between culture and nation and the impact of biological energy and morals upon the development of ethnic groups. He advanced a theory of ethno-genesis to explain the rise and decline of particular ethnic groups in terms of biological and not social factors. He stressed the absence or presence of drive (passionarnost) in a particular people as manifest in the personalities of leaders to explain the people’s role in the unfolding of the nation’s history. These ideas have had a profound influence on Russian nationalist thought and the development of Eurasian-ism in contemporary Russia. See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; NATIONALISM IN THE SOVIET UNION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Shnirelman, Viktor, and Panarin, Sergei. (2001). “Lev Gumilev: His Pretensions as a Founder of Ethnology and his Eurasian Theories.” Inner Asia 3:1-18
JACOB W. KIPP
See also: RED SQUARE
JULIE HESSLER
GUMILEV, LEV NIKOLAYEVICH
(1912-1992), dissident historian, geographer, and ethnographer in the Soviet Union.
GUMILEV, NIKOLAI STEPANOVICH
(1886-1921), poet executed by the Bolsheviks.
Born in Kronstadt and educated at the Tsar-skoye Selo Gymnasium, Nikolai Stepanovich Gu-milev was a major Silver Age poet and a victim of
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Bolshevik repression. Gumilev, his first wife, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam were the foremost representatives of acmeism, a movement emphasizing concrete personal experience that arose in response to the dominant symbolist school of poetry during the 1910s. Gumilev also played a central role in the St. Petersburg-based Guild of Poets, a literary organization intermittently active between 1910 and 1921.
As a monarchist and self-styled “poet-warrior,” Gumilev volunteered to serve in the Russian army in August 1914. In 1918 he returned to Petrograd, where he worked as an editor and translator for the World Literature series.
Gumilev was arrested by the Bolsheviks in August 1921 for his alleged part in an anti-Soviet plot. Although the charges were almost certainly fabricated, Gumilev and sixty others were executed within weeks, over the protest of many writers. His execution was part of a sustained campaign against intellectuals by the Bolsheviks, who hoped to stifle potential dissent while loosening economic and social controls during the New Economic Policy. Gumilev’s execution is frequently cited as evidence that the systematic use of state terror was an integral part of communist rule, not an aberration associated with Stalinism. Many contemporaries viewed the deaths of Gumilev and the poet Alexander Blok, just twelve days apart, as symbolic of the destruction of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia.
Gumilev’s work was banned in the Soviet Union from 1923 until 1986. His poetry has become very popular in Russia since that time, with more than forty editions of his works appearing. Major collections included Romantic Flowers (1908), Alien Sky (1912), Quiver (1916), and The Pillar of Fire (1921). Gumilev also wrote several plays. See also: AKHMATOVA, ANNA ANDREYEVNA; BLOK, ALEXANDER ALEXANDROVICH; MANDELSHTAM, OSIP EMILIEVICH; SILVER AGE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gumilev, Nikolai. (1999). The Pillar of Fire and Other Poems, trans. Richard McKane, intro. by Michael Basker. London: Anvil Poetry Press. Sampson, Earl D. (1970). “Nikolay Gumilev: Towards a Reevaluation.” Russian Review 29(3):301-311.
BRIAN KASSOF
GYPSY
Gypsies (tsygane in Russian, while Roma is the name preferred by this group) have been one of the most visible and yet least powerful of ethnic groups in Russia. The population is considerably larger than the 153,000 in the Russian Federation who were listed as Gypsies in the 1989 census. This is due to underreporting, a high birth rate, and immigration from former Soviet republics. Roma leaders claim a population of at least one million. As is true of Roma populations all over Europe, little is known of their ethnic origins and history as a people, though it is theorized that Gypsies originated in India. Many migrated to Russia by way of Germany and Poland during the eighteenth century after suffering persecution there. Romani, the language spoken by most gypsies, has Indo-European roots with some links to ancient Sanskrit.
Gypsies are widely dispersed across Russia, with communities in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Samara, Komi Republic, Sverdlovsk, Vologda, Volgograd, Voronezh, Yaroslavl, and elsewhere. Following long-standing cultural traditions, Roma have resisted assimilation and exist on the margins of society. Geographic dispersal and social margin-alization meant that the Roma did not enjoy the state support that often characterized Soviet nationality policy. Gypsies had no territorial entity of their own, no schools offering instruction in their own language, and no newspapers. The first Roma newspaper in Russia began publication in Samara only in 2001. Even under Josef Stalin, however, the cultural role of gypsies in Soviet society was recognized. In 1931 the Romen Theater opened in Moscow. It was the first theater in the world to showcase gypsy culture, and gypsy actors and musicians performed and were trained there. The theater continues to be active in post-Soviet Russia. Gypsy themes have been prominent in Russian culture, particularly through the popular film Tabor Goes to Heaven (Tabor ukhodit v nebo) which was released in 1976.
In Russia as in the rest of Eastern Europe, gypsies have been the object of public scorn and official repression. Many have traditionally engaged in illegal or semilegal occupations such as black marketeering, petty theft, fencing stolen goods, and organized begging. This is both a cause and effect of the lack of acceptance of gypsies in Russian society. During the Soviet period, gypsies often engaged in black-market selling of alcohol and
GYPSYMANIA
perfume, as well as fortune-telling and other occult arts. State repression of the gypsies reached a new height during the Nikita Khrushchev period. New regulations issued in 1957 attempted to restrict their movements outside of places where they were registered. This attempt to prevent the movement of gypsies has continued in post-Soviet Russia, with the police sometimes tearing down illegal gypsy settlements and forcing residents to return to their home region. With the expansion of private enterprise in post-Soviet Russia, the Roma reportedly have been squeezed out of their traditional commercial occupations, with even fortune-telling taken over by non-gypsy entrepreneurs who had an easier time dealing with the authorities. There has been an increasing incidence of gypsies involved in more serious crimes, such as the drug trade, a tendency bemoaned by leaders of the Roma community.
In 2000 the Russian government officially recognized the need for gypsies to have a political voice, and it authorized the creation of a council that would defend gypsy interests. Its leaders have campaigned against frequent stereotyping of gypsies in the media and have condemned police harassment based solely on ethnic identity. See also: GYPSYMANIA; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Crowe, David M. (1994). A History of Gypsies of Eastern
Europe and Russia. New York: St. Martin’s Press. European Roma Rights Center (2003). “Written Comments of the European Roma Rights Center Concerning the Russian Federation for Consideration by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination at its Sixty-second Session, March 3-21, 2003.” «http://www.errc.org/ publications/legal/CERD-Russia_Feb_2003»
DARRELL SLIDER
GYPSYMANIA
Gypsymania took both literary and musical forms during the early nineteenth century. The gypsy theme-imagined scenes from their life and customs-captivated Russian poets. Alexander Pushkin’s contributions gained popularity and immediately entered the literary canon. Gyp-symania in music (tsyganshchina) outlasted the literary genres. Its sources-choirs comprising free, serf, and state peasant ethnic gypsies (Roma) and Russian composers who adapted gypsy motifs to popular romances-were blended by star performers such as Stesha (Stepanida Sidorovna Soldatova, 1784-1822) and her successors. Tsy-ganshchina’s attraction rested on lyrics, music, and performance style. Song lyrics represented gypsies as hot-blooded, wild in love, cruel in hatred, and enamored of freedom and the open road. The music was marked by sharp contrasts and sudden changes of tempo. The critic Apollon Grig-orev wrote in 1847: “If you seek sounds, if you seek expression for those undefined, incomprehensible, sorrowful ‘blues’ (khandra), you make off to the Gypsies, immerse yourself in the hurricane of these wild, passionate, oppressively passionate songs.” An English visitor to a Moscow cafe during the 1850s described the performance of a gypsy choir wearing expensive and gaudy garments. They sat or lay on the floor; the soloist was joined by the company who drank and smoked as they strolled from table to table, stamping their feet. As cafes, restaurants, and phonograph records proliferated during the early twentieth century, gypsymania launched the careers of a half dozen superstars of the era who often emulated in life the emotional turbulence of their songs. Most Russians found them irresistible.
Critics accepted both the traditional music of the Roma, because it bore a folkish spirit, and the stylizations of composers at play like Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms. The middle range, by far the most popular, invited rancor: the local vernacular adorned with gypsy devices of rhythm, sonority, instrumentation, and phrasing. In Russia, songs composed in the gypsy manner, such as “Two Guitars” and “Dark Eyes,” evoked repugnance among some critics. Ironically, genuine gypsies when playing Roma music also borrowed from local styles, and this habit accounts for the huge variety among the various authentic gypsy styles from Spain to Finland. Under Bolshevism, hostility to tsyganshchina took on a political edge. During the 1920s, classical musicians lamented its vulgarity, and proletarian composers charged the music with inciting decadence, bourgeois values, and miscreant sexuality. The gypsy genre disappeared during the Cultural Revolution (1928- 1931), and a form of gypsy music was partially
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revived, in a sanitized form, with the founding of See also: FOLK MUSIC; GYPSY; PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER the Teatr Romen in 1931 where something like SERGEYEVICH genuine Roma performances were mounted. Recordings by other Soviet singers of selected gypsy songs were released under the watchful eye BIBLIOGRAPHY of the censors. With the coming of glasnost under Stites, Richard. (1992). Russian Popular Culture: EnterMikhail Gorbachev, every kind of previously taboo tainment and Society since 1900. Cambridge, UK: gypsy songs resurfaced, only to be drowned out Cambridge University Press. soon by Western rock and hip-hop. RICHARD STITES
622 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
HAGIOGRAPHY
Various types of narratives with documentary and commemorative functions for the Orthodox Church are also regarded as important literary works in the medieval Russian canon. Sacred biographies (vitae) were written about persons who had followed Christ’s example in life and shown evidence of powers after death to intercede for believers, attributes that qualified them for sainthood. A short summary of the saint’s life was read initially at the ceremonial inauguration of the feast day and thereafter to honor the saint’s memory. Longer vitae circulated in religious anthologies of devotional readings. Eulogistic biographies of rulers, initially written for the funeral service, were recorded in chronicles, then revised for hagiographical anthologies. Tales from the Patericon record episodes from the lives of holy monks, their teachings, or the history of a monastic community. The vitae also include extended accounts of miracles worked by icons, some of which are viewed as local or national symbols, as well as tales of individual miracles.
When the Kievans converted to Christianity during the reign of Vladimir I (d. 1015), they received Greek Orthodox protocols for the recognition and veneration of saints, as well as a corpus of hagiographical texts. Beginning in the eleventh century, Kievan monks produced their own records of native saints. Veneration for the appanage princes Boris and Gleb, murdered in the internecine struggles following the death of their father Vladimir, inspired three extended lives that are regarded as literary classics. Also influential was the life of Theodosius (d. 1074), who became a monk and helped to found the renowned Kiev Cave Monastery. His biography, together with stories of the monastery’s miraculous founding and of its monks, was anthologized in the Kiev Cave Monastery Patericon. The earliest hagiographical works from the city-state of Novgorod, surviving in thirteenth-century copies, focus on the bishops and abbots of important cloisters. Lives of Suz-dalian saints, such as the Rostov bishops Leontius, Isaiah, and Ignatius, and the holy monk Abraham, preserve collective memories of clerics who converted the people of the area to Christianity.
In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Russian monks fled the cities, moving into wilderness areas to live as hermits, then founded monasteries to house their disciples. The writings produced in these monastery scriptoria promoted
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asceticism as the highest model to which a Christian could aspire. Biographies of saints were supplemented with long prefaces, prayers, laments, and digressive praises employing the poetic imagery and complex syntactic structures characteristic of hymnography. An introductory commonplace, declaring the writer’s wish to write an account that will be a fitting crown or garland of praise for the saint, has inspired some scholars to group these lives into a hagiographical school whose trademark is “word-weaving” (pletenie sloves). The most prominent writers of this school include Metropolitan Cyprian (c. 1330-1406), identified by some as a Bulgarian and others as a Serb, who wrote a revised life of the holy Metropolitan Peter in 1381; Epiphanius the Wise (second half of the fourteenth century to the first quarter of the fifteenth century), author of the first life of St. Sergius of Radonezh and St. Stephen of Perm (1390s); and Pachomius the Logothete, an Athonian monk sometimes identified as a Serb, who was commissioned to rewrite the lives of widely venerated holy men from Novgorod, Moscow, and leading monasteries between 1429 and 1484.
Sixteenth-century Muscovite hagiographers composed expansive narratives celebrating saints and icons viewed as protectors of the Russian tsar-dom. The most influential promoter of the Muscovite school was Macarius. While serving as archbishop of Novgorod (1537-1542), Macarius ordered the collection of saints’ lives and icon legends, as well as other translated and original religious texts, for a twelve-volume anthology known as the Great Menology (Velikie Minei Chetii). The first “Sophia” version was donated to the Novgorod Cathedral of Holy Wisdom in 1541. During his tenure as metropolitan of Moscow (1542-1563), Macarius commissioned additional lives of saints who were recognized as national patrons at the Church Councils of 1547 and 1549, for a second expanded version of this anthology, which he donated to the Kremlin Cathedral of the Dormition in 1552. A third fair copy was prepared between 1550 and 1554 for presentation to Tsar Ivan the Terrible. Between 1556 and 1563, expanded sacred biographies of Kievan rulers Olga and Vladimir I, appanage princes and princesses and four Moscow metropolitans, as well as an ornate narrative about the miracles of the nationally venerated icon Our Lady of Vladimir, were com
posed for Macarius’s Book of Degrees. These lives stressed the unity of the Russian metropolitan see and the theme that the line of Moscow princes had prospered because they followed the guidance of the Church. In the seventeenth century, two twelve-volume hagiographical anthologies were produced by clerics affiliated with the Trinity-Sergius Monastery: the Trinity monk German Tulupov and the priest Ioann Milyutin. Their still unpublished menologies preserve lives of native Russian saints and legends of local wonder-working icons not included in earlier collections. In 1684 the Kiev Cave Monastery monk Dmitry (Daniel Savvich Tuptalo), who would be consecrated metropolitan of Rostov and Yaroslavl in 1702, began to research Muscovite, Western, and Greek hagiographical sources. Dmitry’s goal was to retell the lives of saints and legends of wonder-working icons in a form accessible to a broad audience of Orthodox readers. The first version of his reading menology was printed in 1705 at the Kiev Cave Monastery. In 1759, a corrected edition printed in Moscow became the authorized collection of hagiography for the Russian Orthodox Church. Also noteworthy as sources on the spirituality of the seventeenth century are the lives of Old Believer martyrs (Archpriest Avvakum, burned as a heretic on April 1, 1682, and Lady Theodosia Morozova who died in prison on November 2, 1675) and the life of the charitable lay-woman Yulianya Osorina, written by her son Kallistrat, district elder (gubnaya starosta) of Murom between 1610 and 1640. See also: KIEVAN CAVES PATERICON; ORTHODOXY; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; SAINTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bosley, Richard. (1997). “The Changing Profile of the Liturgical Calendar in Muscovy’s Formative Years.” In Culture and Identity in Muscovy: 1359-1584, eds. A. M. Kleimola and G. D. Lenhoff. Moscow: ITZ-Garant. Ebbinghaus, Andreas. (1997). “Reception and Ideology in the Literature of Muscovite Rus.” In Culture and Identity in Muscovy: 1359-1584, eds. A. M. Kleimola and G. D. Lenhoff. Moscow: ITZ-Garant. Fennell, John. (1995). A History of the Russian Church to 1448. New York: Longman. Hollingsworth, Paul, tr. and ed. (1992). The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lenhoff, Gail D. (1997). Early Russian Hagiography: The Lives of Prince Fedor the Black (Slavistiche Ver?f-fentlichungen 82). Berlin-Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Prestel, David K. (1992). “Biblical Typology in the Kievan Caves Patericon.” The Modern Encyclopedia of Religions
