Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Hughes, Lindsey. (1990). Sophia, Regent of Russia, 1657-1704. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  NIKOLAOS A. CHRISSIDIS

  MEDVEDEV, ZHORES ALEXANDROVICH

  (b. 1925), biochemist and author.

  Zhores Alexandrovich Medvedev was born in Tbilisi, Georgia. He is the identical twin brother of

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  historian Roy Alexandrovich Medvedev. Zhores Medvedev graduated from the Timiryazev Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1950 and received a master’s degree in biology from the Moscow Institute of Plant Physiology that same year. Between 1951 and 1962 he conducted research at the Timiryazev Academy and soon earned international acclaim for his work on protein biosynthesis and the physiology of the aging process.

  In addition to his reputation as a biologist and a gerontologist, Medvedev is known for his criticism of the Lysenko regime in Soviet science. His book The Rise and Fall of the Lysenko Regime circulated in samizdat versions in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and was published in the West in 1969. Medvedev was forbidden to travel abroad and was kept under strict KGB surveillance. On May 29, 1970, Medvedev was arrested in his home and put into a mental hospital in the provincial town of Kaluga. He was kept there for two weeks while a psychiatric committee attempted to rationalize his confinement in medical terms.

  On his first trip abroad, to London in 1973, Medvedev’s Soviet citizenship was revoked, and he settled in London as an ?migr?. His Soviet citizenship was restored in 1990, and his numerous works have subsequently been published in Russia. Apart from numerous articles and papers on gerontology, genetics, and biochemistry, he has authored books on such important figures as Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev and written on Soviet nuclear disasters and Soviet science in general. See also: LYSENKO, TROFIM DENISOVICH; MEDVEDEV, ROY ALEXANDER

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Medvedev, Zhores A., and Medvedev, Roy A. (1971). A Question of Madness. New York: Knopf.

  R?SA MAGN?SD?TTIR

  simplicity and avoidance of decorative rhetoric, bold use of color, windowed front facade, and unusual exterior staircase that cut diagonally across the rectangular two-storied building. But his most impressive work in the Soviet Union was his club architecture, none more striking than the Rusakov Club, designed and built between 1927 and 1929 for the Union of Municipal Workers.

  A graduate of the prestigious Moscow school of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, Melnikov in 1920 joined the Soviet parallel to the Bauhaus, the Higher State Artistic and Technical Studios (VKhUTEMAS), where the struggle for control over the direction of revolutionary architecture was fought until discussion was terminated by a new Stalinist orthodoxy. Melnikov refused to join either of the two competing architectural organizations, but remained closely associated with the Association of New Architects (ASNOVA), especially in his quest for a new “architectural language” for the age. Despite this association, his work influenced architects in both camps. Melnikov concerned himself with the functional demands of a building and with the rational organization of the composition. But he was most concerned with devising a unique expressive appearance that would unite spatial organization with innovative interior design, employing such forms that would make the buildings appear “as individualists against the general backdrop of urban building.” Melnikov’s architectural language consisted of elementary geometric forms such as cylinders, cones, and parallelepipeds. It is the cylinder that forms the basis for Melnikov’s own home, built between 1927 and 1929 on Krivoarbatsky Lane off Moscow’s famed Arbat.

  In 1937 Melnikov was accused of practicing the grotesquerie of formalism and of obstructing and perverting the resolution of the problem of the type and form of Soviet architecture. He was driven from architectural practice. See also: ARCHITECTURE

  MELNIKOV, KONSTANTIN STEPANOVICH

  (1908-1974), a leading theoretician among modernist architects. Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov rose to fame in the West as a result of his design for the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts in 1925, a building marked by its dramatic formal

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Khan-Magomedov, Selim Omarovich. (1987). Pioneers of Soviet Architecture: The Search for New Solutions in the 1920s and 1930s. New York: Rizzoli. Starr, S. Frederick. (1978). Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  HUGH D. HUDSON JR.

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  MEMORIAL

  MEMORIAL

  Memorial, a self-described “international, historical-educational, human rights, and charitable society,” was founded in Moscow in 1988. Its original inspiration lay in the work of scattered professional and amateur historians who had quietly and often covertly done independent research on Soviet history, realizing that their works might never see the light of day, at least in their lifetimes. In some cases they had given their work to the young Leningrad historian Arseny Roginsky, who from 1976 to 1981 included them in his anonymously produced samizdat (typewritten, self-published) journal Pamyat, or Memory. He then smuggled the journal abroad, where successive issues were published in Russian as separate volumes.

  Memorial emerged in 1987, when individuals started to collect money to erect a monument to the victims of Josef Stalin’s “great terror.” This goal was achieved when a short tribute to these victims was carved on a boulder from a concentration camp near the Arctic Circle, and, on October 30, 1990, the boulder was installed in a square facing the Moscow headquarters of the KGB. In the meantime, Memorial had chosen the former dissident leader Andrei Sakharov as its honorary chairman and established groups in dozens of towns all over the USSR. However, official resistance to the new organization remained tenacious. Only in 1991 did the authorities give it the legal registration that it needed.

  Memorial’s mandate for historical research concerns all varieties of official persecution and discrimination conducted against individuals and groups during the Soviet era. Its researchers have sought access to governmental archives, rummaged through the buildings of abandoned concentration camps, and searched for the many unmarked and overgrown burial grounds that hold the remains of millions of prisoners who died in captivity. They have also solicited documents, letters, and oral history from surviving victims and witnesses. Apart from building up Memorial archives in Moscow and elsewhere, the researchers have had their work published by Memorial in Russian and other languages in hundreds of journals, newspapers, and books.

  Memorial also researches current violations of human rights in Russia and other former Soviet republics, especially when these occur on a large scale. Examples are atrocities committed during the two Chechnya wars, and continuing official discrimination against the Meskhi Turks, who were deported from southern Georgia in 1944.

  Memorial’s charitable work consists of helping victims of oppression and their relatives (e.g., materially and with legal problems).

  Memorial’s activities have been directed from Moscow by a stable core of individuals, including Roginsky, Nikita Okhotin, and Alexander Daniel. Its funding has primarily come from bodies such as the Ford Foundation, the Soros Foundation, and the Heinrich Boll Stiftung in Germany, and a few domestic sources.

  Since the early 1990s most of public opinion in Russia has become indifferent or even hostile to the work of Memorial. However, its members derive hope from pockets of societal support and the launching in 1999 of an annual competition for essays on Memorial-type themes by high-school children that attracted 1,651 entries during its first year. Some members recall that, after the fall of Adolf Hitler in Germany, three decades went by before German society began seriously to confront the Nazi era and to create a more reliable national memory. A similar or longer period may be needed in the former USSR, before Russian society, in particular, can face up to myriad grim truths about the seven decades of communism. In the interim, Memorial has unearthed small pieces of truth about hundreds of deportations and millions of deat
hs. See also: CHECHNYA AND CHECHENS; HUMAN RIGHTS; SAKHAROV, ANDREI

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Adler, Nanci. (1993). Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement. Westport, CT: Praeger.

  PETER REDDAWAY

  MENDELEYEV, DMITRY IVANOVICH

  (1834-1907), chemist; creator of the periodic table of elements.

  Dmitry Mendeleyev was born in Tobolsk, Siberia, where his father was the director of the local gymnasium. In 1853 he enrolled in the Main Pedagogical Institute in St. Petersburg, which

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  trained secondary school teachers. His early interest in chemistry focused on isomorphism-the groups of chemical elements with similar crystalline forms and chemical properties. In 1856 he earned a magisterial degree from St. Petersburg University and was appointed a private docent at the same institution. In 1859 a state stipend took him to the University of Heidelberg for advanced studies in chemistry. In 1861 he returned to St. Petersburg University and wrote Organic Chemistry, the first volume of its kind to be published in Russian. He offered courses in analytical, technical, and organic chemistry. In 1865 he defended his doctoral dissertation and was appointed professor of chemistry, a position he held until his retirement in 1890.

  In 1868, with solid experience in chemical research , he undertook the writing of The Principles of Chemistry, a large study offering a synthesis of contemporary advances in general chemistry. It was during the writing of this book that he discovered the periodic law of elements, one of the greatest achievements of nineteenth-century chemistry. In quality this study surpassed all existing studies of its kind. It was translated into English, French, and German. In 1888 the English journal Nature recognized it as “one of the classics of chemistry” whose place “in the history of science is as well-assured as the ever-memorable work of [English chemist John] Dalton.”

  An international gathering of chemists in Karlsruhe in 1860 had agreed in establishing atomic weights as the essential features of chemical elements. Several leading chemists immediately began work on establishing a full sequence of the sixty-four elements known at the time. Mendeleyev took an additional step: he presented what he labeled the periodic table of elements, in which horizontal lines presented elements in sequences of ascending atomic weights, and vertical lines brought together elements with similar chemical properties. He showed that in addition to the emphasis on the diversity of elements, the time had also come to recognize the patterns of unity.

  Beginning in the 1870s, Mendeleyev wrote on a wide variety of themes reaching far beyond chemistry. He was most concerned with the organizational aspects of Russian industry, the critical problems of agriculture, and the dynamics of education. He tackled demographic questions, development of the petroleum industry, exploration of the Arctic Sea, the agricultural value of artificial fertilizers, and the development of a merchant navy in Russia. In chemistry, he elaborated on specific aspects of the periodic law of elements, and wrote a large study on chemical solutions in which he advanced a hydrate theory, critical of Svante Arrhenius’s and Jacobus Hendricus van’t Hoff’s electrolytic dissociation theory. At the end of his life, he was engaged in advancing an integrated view of the chemical unity of nature. Mendeleyev saw the future of Russia in science and in a philosophy avoiding the rigidities of both idealism and materialism.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Mendeleev, Dmitry. (1901). The Principles of Chemistry, 4 vols. New York: Collier. Rutherford, Ernest. (1934). “The Periodic Law and its Interpretation: Mendeleev Centenary Lecture,” Journal of the Chemical Society 1934(1):635-642. Vucinich, Alexander. (1967). “Mendeleev’s Views on Science and Society.” ISIS 58:342-351.

  ALEXANDER VUCINICH

  MENSHEVIKS

  The Menshevik Party was a moderate Marxist group within the Russian revolutionary movement. The Mensheviks originated as a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP). In 1903, at the Second Party Congress, Yuli O. Martov proposed a less restrictive definition of party membership than Vladimir I. Lenin. Based on the voting at the congress, Lenin’s faction of the party subsequently took the name Bolshevik, or “majority,” and Martov’s faction assumed the name Menshevik, or “minority.” The party was funded by dues and donations. Its strength can be measured by proportionate representation at party meetings, but membership figures are largely speculative because the party was illegal during most of its existence.

  Russian revolutionaries had embraced Marxism in the 1880s, and the Mensheviks retained Georgy Plekhanov’s belief that Russia would first experience a bourgeois revolution to establish capitalism before advancing to socialism, as Karl Marx’s model implied. They opposed any premature advance to socialism. A leading Menshevik theorist, Pavel Borisovich Akselrod, stressed the necessity of establishing a mass party of workers in order to assure the triumph of social democracy.

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  During the 1905 Revolution, which established civil liberties in Russia, Akselrod called for a “workers’ congress,” and many Mensheviks argued for cooperation with liberals to end the autocracy. Their Leninist rivals vested the hope for revolution in a collaboration of peasants and workers. Despite these differences, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks participated in a Unification Congress at Stockholm in 1906. The Menshevik delegates voted to participate in elections to Russia’s new legislature, the Duma. Lenin initially opposed cooperation but later changed his mind. Before cooperation could be fully established, the Fifth Party Congress in London (May 1907) presented a Bolshevik majority. Ak-selrod’s call for a workers’ congress was condemned. Soon afterward the tsarist government ended civil liberties, repressed the revolutionary parties, and dissolved the Duma.

  From 1907 to1914 the two factions continued to grow apart. Arguing that the illegal underground party had ceased to exist, Alexander Potresov called for open legal work in mass organizations rather than a return to illegal activity. Fedor Dan supported a combination of legal and illegal work. Lenin and the Bolsheviks labeled the Mensheviks “liquidationists.” In 1912 rival congresses produced a permanent split between the two factions.

  During World War I many Mensheviks were active in war industries committees and other organizations that directly affected the workers’ movement. Menshevik internationalists, such as Martov, refused to cooperate with the tsarist war effort. The economic and political failure of the Russian government coupled with continued action by revolutionary parties led to the overthrow of the tsar in February (March) 1917. The Menshe-viks and another revolutionary party, the Socialist Revolutionaries, had a majority in the workers’ movement and ensured the establishment of democratic institutions in the early months of the revolution. Since the Mensheviks opposed an immediate advance to socialism, the party supported the concept of dual power, which established the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet. In response to a political crisis that threatened the collapse of the Provisional Government, Menshe-viks who wanted to defend the revolution, labeled defensists, decided to join a coalition government in April 1917. Another crisis in July did not persuade the Menshevik internationalists to join. Thereafter, the Mensheviks were divided on the Revolution. The Provisional Government failed to fulfill the hopes of peasants, workers, and soldiers.

  Because the Mensheviks had joined the Provisional Government and the Bolsheviks were not identified with its failure, the seizure of power by the Soviets in November brought the Bolshevik Party to power. Martov’s attempts to negotiate the formation of an all-socialist coalition failed. Men-sheviks opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed by the Bolsheviks, who now called themselves the Communist Party. Marginally legal, the Mensheviks opposed Allied efforts to crush the Soviet state during the civil war and, though repressed by the communists, also feared that counterrevolutionary forces might gain control of the government. Mensheviks established a republic in Georgia from1918 to 1921. At the
end of the civil war, some workers adopted Menshevik criticisms of Soviet policy, leading to mass arrests of party leaders. In 1922 ten leaders were allowed to emigrate. Others joined the Communist Party and were active in economic planning and industrial development. Though Mensheviks operated illegally in the 1930s, a trial of Mensheviks in 1931 signaled the end of the possibility of even marginal opposition inside Russia. A Menshevik party abroad operated in Berlin, publishing the journal Sotsialis-tichesky Vestnik under the leadership of Martov. Dan emerged as the leader of this group after Mar-tov’s death in 1923. To escape the Nazis the Men-sheviks migrated to Paris and then to the United States in 1940, where they continued publication of their journal until 1965. See also: BOLSHEVISM; CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY; MAR-TOV, YURI OSIPOVICH; MARXISM; PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; SOVIET MARXISM