Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  One Turkic leader (khan) founded the Khanate of Khiva shortly afterward. The strongest unifying force among its peoples was the Islamic religion. All the peoples living there belonged to the Sunni branch of Islam. The hot climate permitted the Khivan farmers to grow cotton. It was woven into beautiful rugs, which Khiva’s merchants transported for sale to the Middle East and to Russia. Slavery was common, for nomads brought captives for sale in Khiva whom they had captured in Persia (Shiite Muslims), and in the Siberian plains (Russians). The Khivan peoples were divided by clan and tribal loyalties, and spoke several Turkic languages. The most important division was between the nomadic tribes of the desert and those who lived in towns or farmed the irrigated land. Nomadic raids and revolts unsettled the principality. Frequent wars with neighboring rulers (especially Bukhara) also kept Khiva weak.

  The Russian Empire conquered the khanate in the 1870s. In the eighteenth century, it had begun to expand into the plains of southern Siberia and northern Central Asia, with the goal of colonial domination of the area. In the 1860s its armies began their offensive against the khanates of the southern oasis lands. The khanate forces were poorly armed and quickly capitulated. Khiva surrendered to a Russian army after a brief war in 1873. Some khanates were absorbed into the empire. Khiva (and Bukhara) remained as Russian protectorates, independent in their internal affairs but forced to accept the empire’s control over their foreign affairs. The Khanate of Khiva was left with a shrunken territory within the borders imposed by Russia. Its trade with Russia grew rapidly, for its cotton was in great demand for Russian textile manufacturing.

  Following the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, the khanate briefly regained its full independence. But in 1918 armies under the command of the Communist Party from the revolutionary state of Soviet Russia invaded Central Asia. The Communists won the support of a group of Khivan reformers, who took charge of a tiny state that they called the Khorezm People’s Republic. It lasted only until 1924, when the Soviet government ordered Khorezm’s leaders to agree to the annexation of their state by the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Its lands were divided between the Soviet Republics of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Communists believed that their new ethno-territorial republics, grouped around one majority (“titular”) nationality, would assist in bringing socialism to the Central Asian peoples. Uzbek and Turkmen communists assumed command of the peoples once ruled by the Khivan khan. The city of Khiva became a small regional center. Its ancient walled city was a picturesque reminder of its pre-Russian past. See also: CENTRAL ASIA; TURKMENISTAN AND TURKMEN; UZBEKISTAN AND UZBEKS

  KHMELNITSKY, BOHDAN

  Ichan-Kala, the ancient inner city of Khiva, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its many monuments and oriental architecture. © LUDOVIC MAISANT/CORBIS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Becker, Seymour. (1968). Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-1924. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glazebrook, Philip. (1937). Journey to Khiva. London: Harvill Press. Naumkin, Vitaly. (1992). Khiva. Caught in Time: Great Photographic Archives. Reading, UK: Garnet Publishing.

  DANIEL BROWER

  KHMELNITSKY, BOHDAN

  (c. 1595-1657), hetman of the Zaporozhian Cossack Host (1648-1657) and founder of the Het-manate (Cossack state).

  Born into a family of Orthodox petty gentry, Khmelnitsky fought at the Battle of Cecora (1620) and was taken prisoner to Istanbul for two years. Enrolled as a registered Cossack, he was a military chancellor during the Cossack revolts of 1637 and 1638. In 1646 he took part in a Cossack delegation to King Wladyslaw IV, who sought to win the Cossacks over to his secret plans for a war against the Ottomans. In 1647 a magnate’s servitor attacked Khmelnitsky’s estate. Khmelnitsky found no redress. Arrested in November 1647, he escaped and fled to the traditional Cossack stronghold, or Sich, where he was proclaimed hetman in February 1648. He received support from the Crimean Khanate, and in May Khmelnitsky defeated the Polish armies sent against him. The king died in that month, throwing the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, an elective monarchy, into crisis.

  Throughout 1648, as an uprising raged in Ukraine with attacks on landholders, Catholic clergy, and Jews, Khmelnitsky energetically organized a military force and a civil administration. Defeating what remained of the Commonwealth’s forces in September, he influenced the election of Jan Kazimierz as a propeace candidate. At the end of the year, Khmelnitsky marched east, entering

  741

  KHOMYAKOV, ALEXEI STEPANOVICH

  Kyiv to the acclamation that he was a Moses liberating his people from the “Polish bondage.” He declared his intentions to rule as an autocrat as far as Western Ukrainian Lviv.

  A renewed war (the Battle of Zboriv) proved inconclusive because of the desertion of the Crimean khan. From mid-1649 Khmelnitsky searched for foreign allies against the Commonwealth, but the Tatars remained his only ally. Initially the Ottoman Empire seemed the most likely supporter, but the extension of Ottoman protection in 1651 did not bring the required military assistance. Khmelnitsky sought to gain a status for Ukraine similar to the Ottoman vassal Moldavia, in part by marrying his son into its ruling family. Having been defeated by the Poles at Berestechko in June 1651, he in turn defeated them in June 1652. His Danubian intervention ended in fiasco with his son Tymish’s death in September 1653. The weakened Khmelnitsky then turned more seriously to the Muscovite tsar, and after the Russian decision to take him under “tsar’s high hand” in 1653, he convened a Cossack council at Pereyaslav and took an oath of loyalty to the tsar in January 1654 , but failed to receive an oath from his emissaries. Retaining far greater power in Ukraine than the terms negotiated, Khmelnitsky came to be disillusioned with Muscovy, especially after the truce between Muscovy and the Commonwealth in November 1656. He joined a coalition with Sweden and Transylvania against the Commonwealth (and against Muscovite wishes), but a Transylvanian-Ukrainian invasion had failed just before his death.

  Evaluations of Khmelnitsky and his policies vary greatly, with some seeing him as a great statesman and others as a destructive rebel. The nature of the Pereyaslav Agreement has been the subject of controversy; in Soviet historiography it was viewed as the “reunification” of Ukraine with Russia. See also: COSSACKS; UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Basarab, John. (1982). Pereiaslav 1654: A Historiograph-ical Study. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. Hrushevsky, Mykhailo. (2002). History of Ukraine-Rus’’, vol. 8. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. Stow, Kenneth, and Teller, Adam, eds. (2003). “Gezeirot Ta’’h Jews, Cossacks, Poles, and Peasants in 1648 Ukraine.” Jewish History 17(2). Sysyn, Frank E. (1985). Between Poland and Ukraine: The Dilemma of Adam Kysil, 1600-1653. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for HURI. Sysyn, Frank E. (1995). “The Changing Image of the Hetman: On the 350th Anniversary of the Khmel’’nyts’’kyi Uprising.” Jahrb?cher f?r Geschichte Osteuropas 46: 531-45. Vernadsky, George. (1941). Bohdan, Hetman of Ukraine. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  FRANK E. SYSYN

  KHOMYAKOV, ALEXEI STEPANOVICH

  (1804-1860), slavophile philosopher, theologian, poet, and playwright.

  Alexei Khomyakov was born in Moscow of an old noble family. He was well educated in a pious, traditional, cultivated household, under the particular influence of his devout mother. He was tutored in French, English, and Latin in his childhood and youth, and later added Greek and German. The Khomyakov house burned to the ground in the Moscow fire of 1812, and the family was forced to take refuge on one of their country estates near Ryazan. When Khomyakov first saw St. Petersburg in 1815, the pious young Muscovite allegedly found it a pagan and thoroughly un-Russian place. At the University of Moscow, Khomyakov studied philosophy and theology, but took his kandidat (master’s; in some cases equivalent of Ph.D.) degree in mathematics in 1821.

  Between 1822 and 1825, Khomyakov served in the military, to which he briefly returned in 1828 as the ca
ptain of a regiment, when Emperor Nicholas I appealed for volunteers to fight in the Turkish War. In the early 1820s he also had relations with the so-called Lovers of Wisdom (Ob-shchestvo Lyubomudriya) and published several poems in the Moscow Messenger. Following his first stint in the army, he briefly studied painting in Paris and visited Switzerland and Italy before returning to Russia.

  In the 1820s and the 1830s, Khomyakov was known primarily as a playwright (Ermak, the False Dmitry) and a poet. His poetry is “characterized by rhetorical pathos, a lofty view of the poet’s calling, and a preview of his later Slavophile ideas.” In 1829 he retired from government service to devote himself to literature and his estates, and in 1834 he married Yekaterina Yazykov, the sister of the poet.

  KHOMYAKOV, ALEXEI STEPANOVICH

  Unlike most of his Slavophile contemporaries, Khomyakov had strong practical and scientific interests: He concerned himself with the practical pursuit of profitable agriculture on his estates and followed developments in modern science and even engineering. In addition to his growing theological and practical pursuits, he followed contemporary social and political issues closely. Nevertheless, from his childhood on, he felt that science and politics must always be subordinated to religious values.

  Khomyakov and Ivan Kireyevsky had known each other since the early 1820s, but in the mid-1830s they became close friends. Khomyakov’s “On the Old and New,” followed by Kireyevsky’s “An Answer to Khomyakov” (1839) are the earliest surviving written documents of Slavophilism, as these traditionally minded aristocrats groped for an answer to Peter Chaadayev’s “Philosophical Letter.” Khomyakov was more willing than other Slavophiles to admit that the Russian state had been an important factor in Russian history. He thought the Russian state that arose in the wake of Mongol domination showed an “all-Russian” spirit, and he regarded the history of Russia between the Mongol period and the death of Peter the Great as the consolidation of the idea of the state-a dreadful process because of the damage it did to Russian society, but necessary. Only through Peter’s reforms could the “state principle” finally triumph over the forces of disunity. But now the harmony, simplicity, and purity of pre-Petrine Russia, which had been so badly damaged, must be recovered for future generations.

  If Ivan Kireyevsky may be described as the philosopher of Slavophilism, Khomyakov was surely its theologian. His introduction of the concept of sobornost (often translated as “concialiarity” or “conciliarism”) as a fundamental distinction between the Orthodox Church and the Western confessions took a long time to be recognized in Russia but has become a fundamental aspect of Orthodox theology since his death. Opposing both Catholic hierarchy and Protestant individualism, Khomyakov defined the church as a free union of believers, loving one another in mystical communion with Christ. Thus sobornost is the consciousness of believers in their collectivity. Contrasting with Catholic authority, juridical in nature, was the creative role of church councils, but only as recognized over time by the entire church. Faith, for Khomyakov, was not belief in or commitment to a set of crystallized dogmas, but a prerational, collective inner knowledge or certainty. An excellent brief statement of Khomyakov’s theology can be found in his influential essay The Church Is One, written in the mid-1840s but published only in 1863. He also published three theological treatises in the 1850s entitled “Some Words of an Orthodox Christian about Western Creeds.”

  Clearly Khomyakov’s idea of sobornost had its social analogue in the collective life of the Russian peasant in his village communal council (obshchina), which recognized the primacy of the collectivity, yet guaranteed the integrity and the well-being of the individual within that collective. Sobornost was particularly associated with Khomyakov, but his view of the centrality of the peasant commune was generally shared by the first-generation Slavophiles, especially by Ivan Kireyevsky. In addition, Khomyakov distinguished in his posthumously published Universal History between two fundamental principles, which, in their interaction, determine “all thoughts of man.” The “Iranian” principle was that of freedom, of which Orthodox Christianity was the highest expression, while the Kushite principle, its opposite, rested on the recognition of necessity and had clear associations with Asia.

  Khomyakov, unlike Kireyevsky or the Ak-sakovs, had a special sense of Slav unity, which may have originated in his travels through south Slavic lands in the 1820s. In that limited sense he represented a bridge between Slavophilism and pan-Slavism. As early as 1832 he wrote a poem called “The Eagle,” in which he called on Russia to free the Slavs. At the beginning of the Crimean War, he wrote an even more famous poem entitled “To Russia,” in which he excoriated his country for its many sins but called upon it to become worthy of its sacred mission: to fight for its Slavic brothers. The message of his “Letter to the Serbs” (1860) was similar. Khomyakov died suddenly of cholera in 1860. See also: PANSLAVISM; SLAVOPHILES; THEATER

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Christoff, Peter. (1961). An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Russian Slavophilism: A Study in Ideas, Vol. 1: A. S. Khomiakov. The Hague: Mouton. Riasanovsky, Nicholas. (1952). Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles: A Study of Romantic Ideology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  KHOVANSHCHINA

  Walicki, Andrzej. The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought. Oxford: Clarendon.

  ABBOTT GLEASON

  KHOVANSHCHINA

  The Khovanshchina originated in the struggle over the succession following the death of Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich in 1682. Strictly speaking, the term refers to the period following the musketeer revolt of May 1682, when many leading boyars and officials in the Kremlin were massacred, and the creation of the dual monarchy of Tsars Ivan and Peter under the regency of Tsarevna Sophia Alexeyevna, although some historians use the term loosely as a general heading for all the unrest of 1682. The musketeers demanded that Sophia’s government absolve them of all guilt and erect a column on Red Square to commemorate their service in eliminating “wicked men.” The government duly complied but failed to prevent a new wave of unrest associated with religious dissidents and with the musketeers’ continuing dissatisfaction with pay and working conditions.

  The troops were encouraged to air their grievances by the new director of the Musketeers Chancellery, Prince Ivan Khovansky, a veteran of campaigns against Poland in the 1650s and 1660s. He had shown sympathy for Old Believers while governor in Novgorod and was angered by the prominence of many new men at court whom he, of ancient lineage, regarded as upstarts. Acting as the musketeers’ self-styled “father,” Khovansky made a show of mediating on their behalf and also organized a meeting between the patriarch and dissidents to debate issues of faith. When the defrocked dissident priest Nikita assaulted an archbishop, he was arrested and executed, but his sponsor Kho-vansky remained too popular with the musketeers for the government to touch him. Instead, they tried to reduce the power of the Khovansky clan by reshuffling chancellery personnel. Sophia took the tsars on tours of estates and monasteries, leaving Khovansky precariously in charge in Moscow and increasingly isolated from other boyars.

  Khovansky’s failure to obey several orders allowed Sophia further to isolate him. His fate was sealed by the discovery of an anonymous-and probably fabricated-letter of denunciation. In late September Khovansky and his son Ivan were lured to a royal residence outside Moscow, where they were charged with plotting to use the musketeers to kill the tsars and their family to raise rebellion all over Moscow and snatch the throne. Lesser charges included association with “accursed schismatics,” embezzlement, dereliction of military duty, and insulting the boyars. The charges were full of inconsistencies, but the Khovanskys were beheaded on the spot. The musketeers prepared to barricade themselves into Moscow, but eventually they were reduced to begging Sophia and the tsars to return. They were forced to swear an oath of loyalty based on a set of conditions, the final clause of which threatened death to anyone who praised their deeds o
r fomented rebellion. The government’s victory consolidated Sophia’s regime and marked a stage in the eventual demise of the musketeers.

  These events provided material for Mussorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina (1872-1880), which treats the historical facts fairly loosely and culminates in a mass suicide of Old Believers. See also: FYODOR IVANOVICH; OLD BELIEVERS; SOPHIA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bushkovitch, Paul. (2001). Peter the Great. The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Lindsey. (1990). Sophia Regent of Russia 1657-1704. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Soloviev, Sergei. (1989). History of Russia. Volume 25: Rebellion and Reform. Fedor and Sophia, 1682-1689, ed. and trans. Lindsey Hughes. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.

  LINDSEY HUGHES

  KHOZRASCHET

  Within the planned economy, Soviet industrial enterprises operated on an independent economic accounting system called khozraschet. In principle, enterprises were to operate according to the principle of self-finance, which meant they were to cover their production costs from sales revenue, as well as earn a planned profit. A designated portion of the planned profit was turned over to the industrial ministry to which the firm was subordinate. However, prices paid by firms for input as well as prices earned by firms from the sales of their output were centrally determined and not based upon scarcity or efficiency considerations. Consequently, calculations of costs, revenues, and profit had little pracKHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH tical significance in evaluations of the need to adjust present or future activities of the firm. For example, firms operating with persistent losses were not subject to bankruptcy or closure; firms earning profits did not willingly offer to increase production. Under khozraschet, profits and losses did not serve either a signaling role or disciplinary role, as they tend to do for firms in a market economy.