Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Fedotov, George P. (1966). The Russian Religious Mind. Vol. II: The Middle Ages. The Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  ROBERT ROMANCHUK

  KIRIYENKO, SERGEI VLADILENOVICH

  (b. 1962), former prime minister of the Russian Federation and a leader of the liberal party Union of Right Forces. Kiriyenko was born in Sukumi, which is presently in Abkhazia, nominally a part of the Republic of Georgia. In 1993 he received a degree in economic leadership from the Academy of Economics. Soon he founded a bank, Garantiya, in Nizhny Novgorod. He was so successful that the governor, Boris Nemtsov, recommended that he take over the nearly bankrupt oil company, Norsi. He succeeded once again, breaking the apathy that allowed a bad situation to fester. He first threatened to close the company, hoping this would spur workers’ efficiency. It did not. So he worked out a complicated restructuring plan that involved tax breaks and new negotiations with workers, suppliers, and buyers. Kiriyenko managed to convince all parties that it was in their joint interests to increase production, and within a year production increased about 300 percent.

  Kiriyenko now had a national reputation, and Russian President Boris Yeltsin made him minister for fuel and energy in 1997. In this capacity he favorably impressed American President Bill Clinton’s Russian specialist Strobe Talbott. In March 1998 Yeltsin shocked Russia and the world when he fired his long-time prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and announced his intention to replace him with Kiriyenko. There ensued a bitter battle between Yeltsin and the Duma over Kiriyenko’s appointment. Only on the third and last vote did the Duma confirm Kiriyenko. In his first speech as prime minister, Kiriyenko pointed out that Russia faced “an enormous number of problems.”

  Despite his talents, Kiriyenko could not change some basic facts. By July 1998 unpaid wages totaled 66 billion rubles ($11 billion); service of the government debt consumed almost 50 percent of the budget; the price of oil, one of Russia’s chief exports, was falling; and a financial crisis in Asia had investors fleeing “emerging markets,” Russia included. In June a desperate Yeltsin telephoned Clinton to ask him to intervene in the deliberations of the International Monetary Fund on Russia’s behalf. It was too late. In August the Russian government in effect declared bankruptcy, and Yeltsin dismissed the Kiriyenko government. As of June 2003, Kiriyenko was president of Russia’s chemical weapons disarmament commission. See also: NEMTSOV, BORIS IVANOVICH; UNION OF RIGHT FORCES; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Aron, Leon. (2000). Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life. London: HarperCollins. Talbott, Strobe. (2002). The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy New York: Random House.

  HUGH PHILLIPS

  KIROV, SERGEI MIRONOVICH

  (1886-1934), Leningrad Party secretary and Politburo member.

  Born in 1886 as Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov in Urzhum, in the northern Russian province of Viatka, Kirov was abandoned by his father and left orphaned by his mother. He spent much of his childhood in an orphanage before training as a mechanic at a vocational school in the city of Kazan from 1901 to 1904. He became involved in radical political activity during his student years, after which he moved to Tomsk and joined the Social Democratic Party, garnering attention as a local party activist before the age of twenty. Kirov joined the Bolshevik Party and was arrested in 1906 for his activities in the revolutionary events of 1905 in Tomsk. After his release in 1909, he moved to Vladikavkaz and resumed his career as a professional revolutionary, taking a job with a local liberal newspaper and changing his last name to Kirov. He continued his party activities in the Caucasus in the years before the October Revolution, serving in various capacities as one of the leading Bolsheviks in the Caucasus during the Revolution and civil war eras. Kirov occupied the post of secretary of the Azerbaijan Central Committee from 1921 to 1926. In 1926 he became a candidate memKLYUCHEVSKY, VASILY OSIPOVICH

  Sergei Kirov, the popular leader of the Leningrad Party Committee, was assassinated in 1934. © BETTMANN/CORBIS ber of the Politburo and took the position of first secretary of the Leningrad Provincial Party organization, playing a major role in the political defeat of Grigory Zinoviev by Josef Stalin. Kirov gained full Politburo membership in 1930 and retained his position as head of the Leningrad Party organization until his death in 1934.

  On December 1, 1934, a lone gunman named Leonid Nikolaev murdered Kirv at the Leningrad party headquarters. Kirov’s murder served as a pretext for a wave of repression that was carried out by Stalin in 1935 and 1936 against former political oppositionists, including Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, and against large sectors of the Leningrad population. The connection between Kirov’s death and the coordinated repression of 1935 and 1936 has led numerous contemporary observers, as well as later scholars, to speculate that Stalin himself arranged the murder in order to justify an attack on his political opponents. Proponents of this theory argue that Kirov represented a moderate opposition to Stalin in the years 1930 to 1933, in particular as an opponent to Stalin’s demand in 1932 for the execution of the oppositionist Mikhail Riutin; they also argue that provincial-level party bosses wanted to replace Stalin with Kirov as general secretary of the Bolshevik Party at the Seventeenth Congress in 1934. Archival research carried out after the fall of the USSR has generally failed to support these claims, suggesting instead that Kirov was a dedicated Stalinist and that Kirov’s murderer was a disgruntled party member working without instruction from higher authorities. Stalin’s repressive response to the Kirov murder was likely a cynical use of the assassination for his own political ends as well as a genuine response of shock at the murder of a high-level Bolshevik official. Proponents of Stalin’s responsibility, however, have not conceded the argument, and the debate is unlikely to be resolved without substantial additional evidence. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; PURGES, THE GREAT; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Conquest, Robert. (1989). Stalin and the Kirov Murder. New York: Oxford University Press. Knight, Amy. (1999). Who Killed Kirov? New York: Hill and Wang. Lenoe, Matt. (2002). “Did Stalin Kill Kirov and Does It Matter?” The Journal of Modern History 74: 352-80.

  PAUL M. HAGENLOH

  KLYUCHEVSKY, VASILY OSIPOVICH

  (1841-1911), celebrated Russian historian.

  Vasily Klyuchevsky was born to the family of a priest of Penza province. In 1865 he graduated from the Moscow University (Historical-Philological Department). In 1872 he earned a master’s degree and in 1882 a doctorate. In 1879 he became associate professor, and in 1882 professor, of Russian history at Moscow University. He was named corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1889 and academician of history and Russian antiquities in 1900. Klyuchevsky was connected with government and church circles. From 1893 to 1895 he taught history to Grand Duke Georgy, son of Alexander II. In 1905 he took part in a conference organized by Nicholas II on the new

  KLYUCHEVSKY, VASILY OSIPOVICH

  press regulations and also participated in conferences on designing the state Duma. He was the holder of many decorations and in 1903 was given the rank of Privy Councilor. After legalization of political parties in October 1905, Klyuchevsky ran for election to the First State Duma on the Constitutional Democratic ticket, but lost.

  Klyuchevsky was a pupil and follower of Sergei Solovev and his successor in the Department of Russian History at Moscow University. His main works are: (1) Drevne-russkie zhitiya sviatykh kak istorichesky istochnik (The Old Russian Hagiography as a Historical Source), published in 1872, in which he proved that hagiography did not contain reliable historical facts; (2) Boiarskaya Duma drevnei Rusi (The Boyar Duma of Old Russia), published in 1882, in which he studied the history of the most important government institution in pre-Petrine Russia; (3) Proiskhozhdenie krepostnogo prava v Rossii (The Genesis of Serfdom in Russia), published in 1885, in which he suggested a new conception of the origi
n of serfdom according to which serfdom was engendered by peasants’ debts to landowners and developed on the basis of private-legal relations, the state only legalizing it; (4) Podushnaya podat i ot-mena kholopstva v Rossii (Poll-Tax and the Abolition of Bond Slavery in Russia), published in 1885, in which he showed that a purely financial reform had serious socio-economic consequences; and (5) Sostav predstavitelstva na zemskikh soborakh drevnei Rusi (The Composition of Representatives at Assemblies of the Land in Old Russia), published in 1892, in which he substantiated the point of view that the assemblies were not representative institutions. Klyuchevsky prepared a number of special courses on source study, historiography of the eighteenth century, methodology, and terminology and wrote many articles on the history of Russian culture.

  Starting in 1879 Klyuchevsky taught a general course on Russian history from the ancient times to the Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s. This course is regarded as a summation of his research findings and interpretations. Klyuchevsky believed that world history developed in accordance with certain objective regularities, “peoples consecutively replacing one another as successive moments of civilization, as phases of the development of humankind,” and that in the history of an individual country these regularities play out under the influence of particular local conditions. He analyzed Russian history through three principal categories: the individual, society, and environment. In his opinion, these elements determined the process of a country’s historical development. The objective of his course was to discover the “secret” of Russian history: to assess what had been done and what had to be done to put the developing Russian society into the first rank of European nations. In his opinion, a student who mastered his course should become “a citizen who acts consciously and conscientiously,” capable of rectifying the shortcomings of the social system of Russia.

  Klyuchevsky was a positivist and tried to attain positive scientific knowledge in his course. However, from the point of view of his admirers, the most valuable and attractive feature of his course consisted in his artistic descriptions of historical events and phenomena, replete with vivid images and everyday scenes of the past; his original analysis of sources and psychological analysis of historical figures; and his skeptical and liberal judgments and evaluations-in other words, in his figurative and intuitive comprehension and artistic representations of the past. He spoke ironically of the shortcomings of the social system, social institutions, manners, and customs, and censured the faults of tsars and statesmen. All these qualities attracted crowds of students who understood his ideas of the past as comments on current conditions. His course exhibited such mastery of literary style that in 1908 he was named an honorary member of Russian Academy of Sciences in belles lettres.

  At the Moscow University Klyuchevsky created his own school, which prepared such prominent historians as Alexander Kizevetter, Matvei Lyubav-skii, Yuri Got’e, Pavel Milyukov, and others. Klyuchevsky’s works continue to enjoy popularity and to influence historiography in Russia to this day. See also: EDUCATION; HISTORIOGRAPHY; UNIVERSITIES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Byrnes, Robert F. (1995). V. O. Kliuchevskii: Historian of Russia. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Kliuchevskii, V. O. (1960). A History of Russia, tr. C. J. Hogarth. New York: Russell and Russell. Kliuchevskii, V. O. (1961). Peter the Great, tr. Liliana Archibald. New York: Vintage. Kliuchevskii, V. O. (1968). Course in Russian History: The Seventeenth Century, tr. Natalie Duddington. Chigago: Quadrangle Books.

  BORIS N. MIRONOV

  KOLCHAK, ALEXANDER VASILIEVICH

  KOKOSHIN, ANDREI AFANASIEVICH

  (b. 1946), member of the State Duma; deputy chairman of the Duma Committee on Industry, Construction, and High Technologies; chairman of Expert Councils for biotechnologies and information technologies; director of the Institute for International Security Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences; chairman of the Russian National Council for the Development of Education.

  A graduate of Bauman Technical Institute, Kokoshin worked for two decades with the Institute of the United States and Canada of the Academy of Sciences (ISKAN), rising to the position of deputy director and establishing a reputation as one of the leading experts on U.S. defense and security policy. He received his doctorate in political science and is a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences.

  In the late 1980s Kokoshin collaborated on a series of articles that promoted a radical change in Soviet defense policy, supporting international disengagement, domestic reform, and the technological-organizational requirements of the Revolution in Military Affairs. In 1991 he opposed the August Coup. With the creation of the Russian Ministry of Defense in May 1992, he was appointed first deputy minister of defense with responsibility for the defense industry and research and development. In May 1997 Russian President Boris Yeltsin named him head of the Defense Council and the State Military Inspectorate. In March 1998 Yeltsin appointed him head of the Security Council. In the aftermath of the fiscal crisis of August 1998, Yeltsin fired Kokoshin. In 1999 Kokoshin ran successfully for the State Duma.

  Kokoshin has written extensively on U.S. national security policy and Soviet military doctrine. He championed the intellectual contributions of A. A. Svechin to modern strategy and military art. His Soviet Strategic Thought, 1917-1991, was published by MIT Press in 1998. See also: SVECHIN, ALEXANDER

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Kipp, Jacob W. (1999). “Forecasting Future War: Andrei Kokoshin and the Military-Political Debate in Contemporary Russia.” Ft. Leavenworth: Foreign Military Studies Office. Kokoshin, A. A., and Konovalov, A. A. eds. (1989). Voenno-tekhnicheskaia politika SShA v 80-e gody. Moscow: Nauka. Larionov, Valentin, and Kokoshin, Andrei. (1991). Prevention of War: Doctrines, Concepts, Prospects. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

  JACOB W. KIPP

  KOLCHAK, ALEXANDER VASILIEVICH

  (1873-1920), admiral, supreme ruler of White forces during the Russian civil war.

  Following his father’s example, Alexander Kolchak attended the Imperial Naval Academy, and graduated second in his class in 1894. After a tour in the Pacific Fleet and participation in scientific expeditions to the Far North, he saw active duty during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). By July 1916 he merited promotion to vice-admiral and command of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

  Kolchak continued to serve under the Provisional Government following the February Revolution of 1917, but resigned his command when discipline broke down in his ranks. At the time of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October, Kolchak was abroad. But he responded with alacrity to the invitation of General Dimitry L. Horvath, manager of the Chinese Eastern Railway, to help coordinate the anti-Bolshevik forces in Manchuria.

  White resistance to Soviet rule was also mounting along the Volga and in western Siberia, as well as in the Cossack regions of southern Russia. During May and June 1918 in Samara, KOMUCH (Committee of Members of the Constituent As-sembly)-a moderate socialist government with pretensions to national legitimacy-emerged to compete with the even more anti-Bolshevik but autonomist-minded Provisional Siberian Government (PSG) in Omsk for leadership of the White cause. Under pressure from the Allies, KOMUCH agreed to merge with PSG into a five-man Directory as a united front against the Bolsheviks in September 1918. But the short-lived Directory lasted only until November 18. On that day, Kolchak was appointed dictator with the ambitious title of supreme ruler of Russia-and in due course recognized as such by the two other main White military commanders, Anton Denikin in the south and Nikolai Yudenich in the Baltic region.

  The arrival of French General Maurice Janin, as commander-in-chief of all Allied forces in Russia, complicated the issue of the chain of command

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  KOLKHOZ

  and authority. Its significance became obvious when Janin and the “Czechoslovak Legion” (pris-oners-of-war from the Austro-Hungarian Army who were in the process of being repatriated with Allied assistance) took over guarding the Trans-Siberian railway and proceeded at their discretion to
block the passage of the supreme ruler’s echelons.

  While Kolchak’s British-trained army came to number approximately 200,000 men (with a very high proportion of officers), it was never an effective fighting machine. Moreover, the admiral failed to implement a popular political program. Indeed, he was unable to unite the White forces completely, even in Siberia and the Far East. The Russian heartland remained under control of the Bolsheviks, and their depiction of the admiral as a tool of the old regime and foreign interests had enough of the ring of truth.

  For Kolchak the military tide turned decisively in the summer of 1919. In mid-November his capital in Omsk fell. By late December, the chastened supreme ruler was in the less-than-sympathetic custody of Janin and the hastily departing Czech Legion. Consequently, even his safe passage to Irkutsk-where the moderate socialist Political Center had just taken over-could not be guaranteed. When the Center demanded Kolchak as the price of letting the Legion and Janin go through, the Admiral was unceremoniously surrendered on January 15, 1920. To forestall Kolchak’s rescue by other retreating White forces, he was shot early on February 7. His dignified conduct at the end has long been admired by White emigr?s, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kolchak’s reputation has undergone a dramatic rehabilitation in Russia as well. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; WHITE ARMY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Dotsenko, Paul. (1983). The Struggle for a Democracy in Siberia, 1917-1921. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Pereira, N. G. O. (1996). White Siberia. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Smele, Jonathan D. (1996). Civil War in Siberia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Varneck, Elena, and Fisher, H. H., eds. (1935). The Testimony of Kolchak and Other Siberian Materials. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  N. G. O. PEREIRA

  KOLKHOZ See COLLECTIVE FARM; COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE.

  KOLLONTAI, ALEXANDRA MIKHAILOVNA