by James Millar
Karamzin elaborated a new political stance while editing the Messenger of Europe in 1802 and 1803. A professed realist, he argued for a strong central government, whose legitimacy would lie in balancing conflicting interests and preventing the emergence of evil. Karamzin grew disenchanted with Napoleon, who had first seemed to bring forth peace and stability, but his infatuation with consolidated political power endured.
In October 1803, Karamzin became official historiographer to Tsar Alexander I. He uncovered many yet unknown sources on Russian history, including some that subsequently perished in the Moscow fire of 1812. In 1811 Karamzin submitted his Memoir on Ancient and New Russia, which contained a biting critique of the policies of Alexander I, but vindicated autocracy and serfdom. The Memoir signaled Karamzin’s turn away from an Enlightenment-inspired universalist notion of history and affirmed the distinctness of Russia’s historical path.
In 1818 Karamzin published the first eight volumes of his History of the Russian State, an instant bestseller. The History consists of two parts: a naive-sounding account of events, close in style to the Chronicles, with minimal narratorial intrusions and an apparent lack of overriding critical principle; and extensive footnotes, which display considerable skepticism in the handling of sources and sometimes contradict the main narrative. The narrative rests on the notion that the course of events is vindicated by their outcome-the consolidation of the Russian autocratic state-but it lets stories speak for themselves.
Due to this narrative and political stance, the immediate reception of the History was mostly negative. Yet after the publication of three more volumes from 1821 to 1824, which included a condemnation of the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the reception began to shift (the last volume was published posthumously in 1829). Alexander Pushkin called the History “the heroic deed of an honest man,” and Karamzin’s stance of moral independence came to the foreground. The History continued to be read in the nineteenth century, primarily as a storehouse of patriotic historical tales. It fell into disfavor during Soviet times, yet met an intense period of renewed interest in the perestroika years as part of an exhumation of national history. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF; HISTORIOGRAPHY; NATIONALISM IN THE ARTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Black, J.L., ed. (1975). Essays on Karamzin: Russian Man-of-Letters, Political Thinker, Historian, 1766-1826. The Hague: Mouton. Wachtel, Andrew Baruch. (1994). An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
ANDREAS SCH?NLE
KASYANOV, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH
(b. 1957), prime minister of the Russian Federation.
Kasyanov graduated from the Moscow Automobile and Road Institute and worked for the State
KATKOV, MIKHAIL NIKIFOROVICH
Construction Committee and Gosplan, State Planning Committee, from 1981 to 1990. He moved to the economics ministry, and in 1993 Boris Fyodorov brought him to the Finance Ministry to take charge of negotiations over Russia’s foreign debts. Fluent in English, Kasyanov became deputy finance minister in 1995 and finance minister in May 1999. In January 2000 he was appointed first deputy prime minister under prime minister and acting president Vladimir Putin. Katyanov, praised by Putin as a “strong coordinator, ” was named prime minister of the government in May 2000, winning easy confirmation from the State Duma in a vote of 325 to 55. The calm, gravel-voiced Kasyanov was seen as a figure with close ties to Boris Yeltsin’s inner cir-cle-the owners of large financial industrial groups.
Despite repeated rumors of his impending dismissal, Kasyanov was still in office in mid-2003. He oversaw cautious but substantial reforms in taxation and the legal system, but liberals criticized him for failing to tackle the “natural monopolies” of gas, electricity, and railways. This led to some embarrassing criticism from members of his own administration, such as economy minister German Gref and presidential economic advisor Andrei Il-larionov, not to mention public admonition from President Putin in spring 2003 for failing to deliver more rapid economic growth. In Russia’s super-presidential system, the job of prime minister is a notoriously difficult one. Although the prime minister has to be approved by the State Duma, once in office he answers only to the president, and has no independent power beyond that which he can accumulate through skillful administration and discreet political maneuvering. See also: GOSPLAN; PUTIN, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH assistant professor of philosophy at Moscow University. In 1851 he became editor of the daily Moskovskie Vedomosti (Moscow News), and in 1856 he also became editor of the journal Russky Vestnik (Russian Messenger).
Katkov changed his political preferences several times during his life. In the 1830s he shared the ideas of the Russian liberal and radical intelligentsia and was close to the Russian literary critic Vissarion Be-linsky, radical thinker Alexander Herzen, and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. In the early 1840s Katkov broke his connections with the radical intelligentsia, instead becoming an admirer of the British political system. During his early journalistic career, he supported the liberal reforms of Tsar Alexander II and wrote about the necessity of transforming the Russian autocracy into a constitutional monarchy.
The Polish uprising had a great impact on the changing of Katkov’s political views from liberalism to Russian nationalism and chauvinism. He published a number of articles favoring reactionary domestic policies and aggressive pan-Slavic foreign policies for Russia. The historian Karel Durman wrote, “Katkov claimed to be the watchdog of the autocracy and this claim was widely recognized.” As one of the closest advisors of Tsar Alexander III, Katkov had a great impact on Russian policies. According to the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod Constantine Pobedonostsev, “there were ministries where not a single important action was undertaken without Katkov’s participation.” Durman points out that in no other country could a mere publicist standing outside the official power structure exercise such an influence as had Katkov in Russia. See also: ALEXANDER II; ALEXANDER III; INTELLIGENTSIA; JOURNALISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Shevtsova, Lilia. (2003). Putin’s Russia. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
PETER RUTLAND
KATKOV, MIKHAIL NIKIFOROVICH
(1818-1887), Russian journalist and publicist.
The son of a minor civil servant, Mikhail Niki-forovich Katkov graduated from Moscow University in 1838 and attended lectures at Berlin University in 1840-1841. From 1845 to 1850 Katkov was an
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Durman, Karel. (1988). The Time of the Thunderer. Mikhail Katkov, Russian Nationalist Extremism and the Failure of the Bismarckian System, 1871-1887. New York: Columbia University Press. Katz, Martin. (1966). Mikhail N. Katkov. A Political Biography 1818-1887. Paris: Mouton amp; Co.
VICTORIA KHITERER
KATYN FOREST MASSACRE
Katyn Forest, a wooded area near the village of Gneizdovo outside the Russian city of Smolensk,
KAUFMAN, KONSTANTIN PETROVICH
was the scene in early 1940 of a wholesale killing by the Soviet NKVD (Narodny Komissariat Vnu-trennykh Del), or secret police, of 4,143 Polish servicemen, mostly Polish Army officers. These victims, who had been incarcerated in the Kozielsk Soviet concentration camp, constituted only part of the genocide perpetrated against Poles by the NKVD in 1939 and 1940.
The Poles fell as POWs into Soviet hands just after the Soviet Red Army occupied the eastern half of Poland under the terms of two notorious Molo-tov-Ribbentrop pacts: the Nazi-Soviet agreements signed between the USSR and Nazi Germany in August and September 1939. The crime, committed on Stalin’s personal orders at the opening of World War II, is often referred to as the Katyn Massacre or the Katyn Forest Massacre.
The incident was not spoken of for sixty years. Even such Western leaders as President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill placed little or no credence in reports of the crime at the time, despite the fact that informed Poles had provided proof. For his part, Churchill urged exiled Polish officials such as Vla
dislav Siko-rski to keep the incident quiet lest the news upset the East-West alliance of the Soviet and Western powers fighting Nazi Germany.
These first deaths came after one of the most notorious of several repressions by the Stalin regime against Poles. In 1939, notes Robert Conquest, besides the 440,000 Polish civilians sent to Soviet concentration camps as a result of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland beginning in September, the Soviets took 200,000 POWs during the Red Army’s campaign in Poland. Most of these officers and enlisted men of the Polish Army wound up in camps at Kozielsk, Starobelsk, and Os-tachkov. Of these, only forty-eight were ever seen alive again. Later Stalin promised Polish officials that the Soviet government would “look into” the disappearance of these men. But Soviet officials refused to discuss the matter whenever it was again raised.
With the coming of World War II, that is, the war between Germany and the USSR after June 21, 1941, the German Army swept into eastern Poland. In 1943 the Germans, as occupiers of Poland, came across the Polish corpses at Katyn. They duly publicized their grim discovery to a skeptical world press, blamed the Soviets for the terror, and shared their find with a neutral European medical commission based in Switzerland. The members of this commission were convinced that the mass graves were the result of Soviet genocide, but they voiced their findings discreetly, sometimes refusing even to give an opinion.
In 1944, when the Red Army retook the Katyn area from the Wehrmacht, Soviet forces exhumed the Polish dead. Again they blamed the Nazis. Many people throughout the world supported the Soviet line.
It was not until near the end of communist rule in Russia in 1989 with the unfurling of the new policy of glasnost (openness) in the USSR, that partial admission of the crime was acknowledged in Russia and elsewhere. Later, after the demise of communist rule in Russia, two further sites were found where Poles, including Jews, were executed. The number of victims of the killings at all three sites totaled 25,700. See also: SOVIET-POLISH WAR; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARI-ONOVICH; WORLD WAR II
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conquest, Robert. (1990). The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press. Crozier, Brian. (1999). The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire. Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing. Crozier, Brian. (2000). “Remembering Katyn.” «http:// www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/digest/002/ crozier.html».
ALBERT L. WEEKS
KAUFMAN, KONSTANTIN PETROVICH
(1818-1882), Russian general (of Austrian ancestry) who became governor-general (viceroy) of Turkestan following its conquest.
Konstantin Petrovich Kaufman’s fame came as the ruler of Russia’s new colony in Central Asia. His previous military experience had scarcely prepared him for his career as creator of colonial Turkestan. He trained as a military engineer and served for fifteen years in the Russian army fighting the mountain tribes in the Caucasus. His achievements during his service there called him to the attention of a fellow officer, General Dimitri Milyutin. When Milyutin became minister of war in the 1860s, he needed a trustworthy, experienced officer to govern Turkestan. Kaufman was his choice.
KAZAKHSTAN AND KAZAKHS
At the time Kaufman received his appointment in 1867, the conquest of Turkestan had only begun. He became commander of the Russian frontier forces there and had authority to decide on military action along the borders of his territory. When neighboring Turkish principalities began hostile military action against Russia, or when further conquests appeared feasible, Kaufman assumed command of his troops for war. By the end of his rule, Russia’s borders enclosed much of Central Asia to the borders of the Chinese Empire. Only Khiva and Bukhara remained nominally independent khanates under Russian control. Turkestan’s borders with Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan were for many years a subject of dispute with Great Britain, which claimed a sphere of domination there.
Kaufman had charge of a vast territory far removed from European Russia. Its peoples practiced the Muslim religion and spoke Turkic or Persian languages. It so closely resembled a colony, like those of the overseas possessions of European empires, that he took example from their colonial policies to launch a Russian civilizing mission in Turkestan. He ended slavery, introduced secular (nonreligious) education, promoted the scientific study of Turkestan’s various peoples (even sending an artist, Vasily Vereshchagin, to paint their portraits), encouraged the cultivation of improved agricultural crops, and even attempted to emancipate women from Muslim patriarchal control. Kaufman’s means to achieve these ambitious goals were meager, because of the lack of sufficient funds and the paucity of Russian colonial officials. Also, he feared that radical reforms would stir up discontent among his subjects. His fourteen-year period as governor-general brought few substantial changes to social and economic conditions in Turkestan. However, it ended the era of rule by Turkish khans and left Russia firmly in control of its new colony. See also: TURKESTAN
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barooshian, Voohan. (1993). V. V. Vereshchagin: Artist at War. Gainsville: University Press of Florida. Brower, Daniel. (2002). Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press. MacKenzie, David. (1967). “Kaufman of Turkestan: An Assessment of His Administration (1867-1881).” Slavic Review 25 (2): 265-285.
DANIEL BROWER
KAZAKHSTAN AND KAZAKHS
Kazakhstan, a Eurasian region inhabited since the mid-1400s by the Kazakh people, comprises an immense stretch of steppe that runs for almost 3,200 kilometers (2,000 miles) from the Lower Volga and Caspian Sea in the west to the Altai and Tien Shan mountain ranges in the east and southeast. In the early twenty-first century, the Kazakh republic serves as a bridge between Russian Siberia in the north and the Central Asian republics of Kirghizia/Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkme-nia/Turkmenistan in the south. To the east it is bounded by the region of the People’s Republic of China that is known as Xinjiang (Sinkiang) or Chinese Turkestan. With an area of some 2,71,500 square kilometers (1,050,000 square miles), Kazakhstan is almost twice the size of Alaska. As the Kazakh SSR it was the largest republic in the USSR next to the Russian Federation and was sometimes known as the Soviet Texas. The climate is severely continental, with January’s mean temperatures varying from -18 degrees Celsius (0 degrees Fahrenheit) in the north to -3 degrees C (27 degrees F) in the south, and July’s from 19 degrees C (66 degrees F) in the north to 28-30 degrees C (83-86 degrees F) in the south. Annual precipitation in the north averages 300 millimeters (11.7 inches), in the mountains 1,600 millimeters (62 inches), and in the desert regions less than 100 millimeters (3.9 inches). Fortunately, the region is one of inland drainage with a number of rivers, the Irtysh, Ili, Chu, and Syr Darya included, that flow into the Aral Sea and Lake Balkhash. This permits the extensive irrigation that now threatens the Aral Sea with extinction.
Originally peopled by the Sacae or Scythians, by the end of the first century B.C.E. the area of Kazakhstan was populated by nomadic Turkic and Mongol tribes. Known to the Chinese as the Usun, they were the ancestors of the later Kazakhs. First, however, these tribes formed a succession of loose, tribal-based confederations known as khaganates (later khanates). Of these the most powerful was the Turgesh (or Tiurkic) of the sixth century C.E. Other nomadic empires followed its collapse in the 700s, beginning with the Karakhanids who ruled southern Kazakhstan or Semireche from the 900s to the 1100s. They were replaced by the Karakitai (Kara Khitai), who succumbed to the Mongols during 1219-1221. Subsequently these tribes were included in the semiautonomous White Horde, which was established by Orda, the eldest son of Genghis
KAZAKHSTAN AND KAZAKHS
Public square in Astana, the new post-Soviet capital of Kazakhstan. © LIBA TAYLOR/CORBIS Khan’s eldest son Dzhuchi, as a component of the more extensive Mongol Golden Horde. Having established itself between the Altai Mountains and Syr Darya River, the White Horde quickly gained control of Semireche and East Turkestan as well. But if its rulers were descendants of the Mongol royal line, most of its populace were ethnically Turkic.
With the collapse o
f that empire, these tribes at first were subject to the Nogai Tatars, formerly of the Golden Horde, and then of the Uzbeks. By 1447 the latter had conquered the territory between the Syr Darya and Irtysh Rivers, the inhabitants of whom became known as the Uzbek Kazakhs. Yet the White Horde lingered, civil strife and fights for power were constant, and in 1465 two of its princes, the brothers Janibek (Dzhanibek) and Gerei, led a number of Turkic tribes in a migration southeast to Mogulstan (Mogolistan), which once was part of the domain of Genghis Khan’s second son Chagatai, and which now was an independent state. They were welcomed by its ruler and given lands on the Chu and Talas Rivers, where they formed a powerful Kazakh khanate. By the late 1400s this had extended its power over much of the formerly Uzbek-controlled Desht-i Kipchak, or Kipchak Steppe. Over the next few decades most of the Kazakh tribes-the Kipchaks, Usuns, Dulats, and Naimans included-were united briefly under Kasym Khan (1511-1518). He extended their power southward while giving his subjects a period of relative calm. Internal strife then reemerged after his death, and the Kazakh state began disintegrating as its components joined with other tribes arriving from the collapsing Nogai Horde. Having merged during the 1600s they formed themselves into three nomadic confederations known as “hordes” or zhuzy (dzhuzy): the Ulu (Large, Great, or Senior) in Semireche, the Kishiu (Small, Lesser, or Junior) between the Aral and Caspian Seas, and the Orta (Middle) in the central steppe. But taken together, they were now an ethnically distinct people, known to the Russians since the latter 1500s as the Kir-giz-Kazakhs, with a social system based on the families and clans that continued to influence Kazakh politics into the twenty-first century.
