Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  A film that is often considered the last important movie of the Thaw also launched the career of the greatest film artist to emerge in postwar Soviet cinema. This was Ivan’s Childhood (1962, known in the United States as My Name Is Ivan), a stunMOTION PICTURES ning antiwar film that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The director was Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986). By the time Tarkovsky began work on Andrei Rublev in the mid-1960s, Khrushchev had been ousted, and Leonid Brezhnev’s era of stagnation had begun. Cultural icon-oclasm was no longer tolerated, and Tarkovsky’s dystopian epic about medieval Russia’s greatest painter was not released in the USSR until 1971, although it won the International Film Critics’ prize at Cannes in 1969. Tarkovsky toiled defiantly in the 1970s to produce three more Soviet films, Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1975), and Stalker (1980). He emigrated to Europe in 1984 and died of cancer two years later.

  Filmmaking under Brezhnev was generally unremarkable, although two films, Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (1966) and Vladimir Menshov’s Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1979) each won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. The most interesting movies (such as Alexander Askoldov’s The Commissar, 1967) were shelved, not to be released until the late 1980s as part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glas-nost. Among the exceptions to the mundane fare were Larisa Shepitko’s tale of World War II collaboration, The Ascent (1976), and Lana Gogoberidze’s Several Interviews on Personal Questions (1979), which sensitively explored the drab, difficult lives of Soviet women.

  The best-known director to have started his career during the Brezhnev era is Nikita Mikhalkov (b. 1945). Son of Sergei Mikhalkov, a Stalinist writer of children’s stories, the younger Mikhalkov first made a name for himself as an actor. Mik-halkov achieved his greatest successes in the 1970s and 1980s with his “heritage” films, elegiac recreations of Russian life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often adapted from literary classics, among them An Unfinished Piece for Player Piano (1977), Oblomov (1979), and Dark Eyes (1983).

  RUSSIAN CINEMA IN TRANSITION, 1985-2000

  When Gorbachev announced the advent of pere-stroika and glasnost in 1986, the Union of Cine-matographers stood at the ready. After a sweeping purge of the union’s aging and conservative bureaucracy, the maverick director Elem Klimov (b. 1933) took the helm. Although Klimov had made a number of movies under Brezhnev, he did not emerge as a major director until 1985, with the release of his stunning antiwar film Come and See. Under Klimov’s direction, the union began releasing the banned movies of the preceding twenty years, in effect rewriting the history of late Soviet cinema.

  The film that most captured the public’s imagination in that tumultuous period was Georgian, not Russian. Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance (1984, released nationally in 1986) is a surrealistic black comedy-drama that follows the misdeeds of the Ab-uladze family, provided a scathing commentary on Stalinism. Although a difficult film designed to provoke rather than entertain, Repentance packed movie theaters and sparked a national debate about the legacy of the past and the complicity of the survivors.

  Television also became a major venue for filmmakers. Gorbachev’s cultural policies encouraged publicistic documentaries that exposed either the evils of Stalin and his henchmen or the decay and degradation of contemporary Soviet life. Fiction films such as Little Vera (Vasily Pichul, 1988), In-tergirl (Pyotr Todorovsky, 1989), and Taxi Blues (Pavel Lungin, 1990) followed suit by telling seamy tales about the Soviet underclass.

  The movie industry began to fragment even before the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Union of Cinematographers decentralized in mid-1990, and Goskino and Sovexportfilm, which provided central oversight over film production and distribution, had completely lost control by the end of 1990. The early 1990s saw the collapse of native film production in all the post-Soviet states. Centralization and censorship had long been the bane of the industry, but filmmakers had no idea how to raise money for their projects-and were even more baffled by being expected to turn a profit. Market demands became known as “commercial censorship.” Filmmakers also had to contend for the first time with competition from Hollywood, as second-rate American films flooded the market.

  The Russian cinema industry began to rebound in the late 1990s. It now resembled other European cinemas quite closely, meaning that national production was carefully circumscribed, focusing on the art film market. Nikita Mikhalkov emerged the clear winner. By the turn of the century he became the president of the Russian Filmmakers’ Union, the president of the Russian Cultural Foundation, and the president of the only commercially successful Russian studio, TriTe. He established a fruitful partnership with the French company Camera One,

  MOVEMENT FOR DEMOCRATIC REFORMS

  which coproduced his movies and distributed them abroad. He took enormous pride in the fact that Burnt by the Sun, his 1995 exploration of the beginnings of the Great Terror, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture that year, only the third Russian-language film to have done so, and certainly the best.

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, therefore, it seems that the glory days of Russian cinema are past. This past, however, has earned Russian and Soviet films and filmmakers an enduring place in the history of global cinema. See also: AGITPROP; ALEXANDROV, GRIGORY ALEXAN-DROVICH; BAUER, YEVGENY FRANTSEVICH; CHA-PAYEV, VASILY IVANOVICH; CULTURAL REVOLUTION; EISENSTEIN, SERGEI MIKHAILOVICH; MIKHALKOV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; ORLOVA, LYUBOV PETROVNA; SOCIALIST REALISM; TARKOVSKY, ANDREI ARSE-NIEVICH; THAW, THE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Horton, Andrew, and Brashinsky, Mikhail. (1992). The Zero Hour: Glasnost and Soviet Cinema in Transition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kenez, Peter. (2001). Cinema and Soviet Society from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin. London: I. B. Tau-ris. Lawton, Anna. (1992). Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time. New York: Cambridge University Press. Leyda, Jay. (1960). Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. London: Allen amp; Unwin. Taylor, Richard. (1979). The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917-1929. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Richard. (1998). Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, 2nd rev. ed. London: I. B. Tauris. Taylor, Richard, and Christie, Ian, eds. (1988). The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tsivian, Yuri, comp. (1989). Silent Witnesses: Russian Films, 1908-1919. Pordenone and London, 1989. Tsivian, Yuri. (1994). Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception. Friuli-Venezia: Edizioni Biblioteca dell’immagine; London: British Film Institute. Woll, Josephine. (2000). Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw. London: I. B. Tauris. Youngblood, Denise J. (1991). Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918-1935. Austin: University of Texas Press. Youngblood, Denise J. (1992). Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Youngblood, Denise J. (1999). The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908-1918. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

  DENISE J. YOUNGBLOOD

  MOVEMENT FOR DEMOCRATIC REFORMS

  On July 1, 1991, nine well-known close associates of Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the USSR, and Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), called for the establishment of a Movement for Democratic Reform to unite all those who supported human rights and a democratic future for the USSR. The appeal was signed by Arkady Volsky, Gavril Popov, Alexander Rutskoi, Anatoly Sobchak, Stanislav Shatalin, Ed-uard Shevardnadze, Alexander Yakovlev, Ivan Silayev, and Nikolai Petrakov. It endorsed the development of a market economy and the maintenance of the USSR in some form, and declared that a founding Congress would be convened in September to decide whether or not to form a political party.

  Alexander Yakovlev explained that the movement sought to overcome the Party apparat’s resistance to the democratization of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and he openly appealed to reformist Communists to join the movement. President Gorbachev endorsed its formation (many believed that it had been established to provide him with an alternative pol
itical base in the event of a formal split in the CPSU). The Central Committee of the CPSU was skeptical of the movement, and the Communists in the military openly attacked it.

  After the abortive coup against President Gorbachev in August 1991, the leaders of the movement were named to important political posts sought to fill the gap created by the dissolution of the CPSU and openly recruited reformist leaders of the Party as well as members of the “military industrial complex.”

  The founding Congress of the movement was finally convened in December 1991, just days after the collapse of the USSR and the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The Congress called for the formation of a broad coalition of democratic movements and parties, endorsed market reforms, sought the support of emerging entrepreneurs, and supported the CIS with some misgivings.

  MOVEMENT IN SUPPORT OF THE ARMY

  In February 1992 the original movement was replaced by the Russian Movement for Democratic Reform (RMDR), and Gavril Popov was chosen as its chairman. In June 1992 he resigned from his position as mayor of Moscow to devote more time to the development of the movement as a “democratic opposition” to the Yeltsin regime.

  The RMDR became increasingly critical of the Yeltsin regime’s economic policies in 1992 and 1993. It nominated a significant number of candidates for the first elections to the state duma in December 1993. Although it endorsed much of the new Constitution, it was sharply critical of the growth of bureaucracy, the process of privatization, and the continued power of the Communist nomenklatura. It advocated sharp reduction of the bureaucracy, the decentralization of economic power, distribution of land to all citizens, local controls over energy, and a clear demarcation of authority between president, parliament, and government. It received almost 9 percent of the vote in St. Petersburg, but failed to gain the 5 percent of the vote needed for representation in the state duma.

  After the elections of December 1993 RMDR repeatedly assailed the entire reform model of the Yeltsin regime and sought partners to establish an effective democratic opposition. In September 1994 it formed an alliance with Democratic Russia, and in 1995 it worked with other similar organizations to create a Social Democratic Union (SDU) to contest the 1995 elections. After the SDU’s defeat in the elections, the RMDR disappeared from public view. See also: AUSUST 1991 PUTSCH; POPOV, GAVRIL KHARITO-NOVICH; RUTSKOI, ALEXANDER VLADIMIROVICH; SHATALIN, STANISLAV SERGEYEVICH; SHEVARDNADZE, EDUARD AMVROSIEVICH; SOBCHAK, ANATOLY ALEXANDROVICH; VOLSKY, ARKADY IVANOVICH; YAKOVLEV, ALEXANDER NIKOLAYEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Colton, Timothy J., and Hough, Jerry Hough, eds. (1998). Growing Pains: Russian Democracy and the Election of 1993. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russia Democracy Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

  JONATHAN HARRIS

  MOVEMENT IN SUPPORT OF THE ARMY

  The movement, In Support of the Army, War Industry, and War Science (DPA) was founded in July 1997 on the initiative and with the guidance of the chair of the Duma defense committee, Lev Rokhlin, a hero of the war in Chechnya. With the degradation of the army, it soon became a significant anti-government force. After the murder of Rokhlin a year later, his successor as chair of the committee, Viktor Ilyukhin, became head of the party. Ilyukhin was famous for having brought a legal action, during his days as prosecutor, against Mikhail Gorbachev. Next in line to Ilyukhin was Colonel General Albert Mashakov, former commander of the Privolga military district, candidate in the 1991 presidential elections, and notorious for his anti-Semitic statements (he once suggested, for instance, that the DPA should be unofficially called the DPZh, or “Movement Against Jews”). Among the strategies considered by the Left on the eve of the 1999 elections, the “three-columns” idea would have had the DPA at the head of one column. Another strategy called for the formation of a bloc of national-patriotic forces consisting of the DPA, the Russian Popular Movement, the Union of Compatriots “Fatherland,” and the Union of Christian Rebirth. The second idea had the DPA join a united oppositional bloc with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). A third proposal, the one adopted, had the DPA enter the elections independently. The first three places on the DPA list were taken by Ilyukhin, Makashov, and Yuri Saveliev, rector of the Petersburg Technical University, whose popularity rested on his having fired a professor from the United States because of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The DPA list disappeared, but Ilyukhin and one other candidate were elected to the Duma.

  In the early twenty-first century the DPA has little influence and is essentially a satellite of the Communist Party. Ilyukhin, its leader, is a member of the Central Committee of the CPRF. He takes entirely radical positions and plays a certain role in the leadership of the National Patriotic Union of Russia (NPSR). See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

  MSTISLAV

  McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. McFaul, Michael; Petrov, Nikolai; and Ryabov, Andrei, eds. (1999). Primer on Russia’s 1999 Duma Elections. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.

  NIKOLAI PETROV

  MSTISLAV

  (1076-1132), Vladimir Monomakh’s eldest son, grand prince of Kiev, and the progenitor of the dynasties of Vladimir in Volyn and of Smolensk.

  In 1088 Mstislav Vladmirovich’s grandfather Vsevolod appointed him to Novgorod, but in 1093 his father (Monomakh) sent him to Rostov and Smolensk. In 1095 he returned to Novgorod where he ruled for twenty years. In 1096 his father ordered him to campaign against Oleg Svyatoslavich of Chernigov, who was pillaging his Suzdalian lands. Mstislav’s most important victory was defeating Oleg and making him attend a congress of princes in 1097 at Lyubech, where he was reconciled with Monomakh and Svyatopolk of Kiev.

  In 1117 Monomakh, now grand prince of Kiev, summoned Mstislav to Belgorod where, it appears, he made Mstislav coruler. He also designated Mstislav his successor in keeping with his agreement with the Kievans, who had promised to accept Mstislav and his descendants as their hereditary dynasty. Monomakh therewith violated the system of lateral succession allegedly introduced by Yaroslav the Wise. When Monomakh died on May 19, 1125, Mstislav succeeded him. Two years later, when Vsevolod Olgovich usurped Chernigov from his uncle Yaroslav, Mstislav violated the lateral order of succession again by confirming Vsevolod’s usurpation and thus winning his loyalty. Whereas Monomakh had driven the Polovtsy to the river Don, in 1129 Mstislav drove them even beyond the Volga. In 1130, in keeping with Monomakh’s policy of securing his family’s control over the other princely families, Mstislav exiled the disloyal princes of Polotsk to Constantinople and replaced them with his own men. Thus, before he died, he controlled, directly or through his brothers or his sons, Kiev, Pereyaslavl, Smolensk, Rostov, Suzdal, Novgorod, Polotsk, Turov, and Vladimir in Volyn. Moreover, Vsevolod of Chernigov was his son-in-law. Mstislav, called “the Great” by some, died on April 15, 1132, and was buried in the Church of St. Theodore, which he had built. See also: KIEVAN RUS; NOVGOROD THE GREAT; ROTA SYSTEM; VLADIMIR MONOMAKH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Dimnik, Martin. (1994). The Dynasty of Chernigov 1054-1146. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Franklin, Simon, and Shepard, Jonathan. (1996). The Emergence of Rus 750-1200. London: Longman.

  MARTIN DIMNIK

  MURAVIEV, NIKITA

  (1796-1843), army officer who conspired to overthrow Nicholas I.

  Nikita Muraviev was one of the army officers involved in the Decembrist movement to overthrow Tsar Nicholas I. He is best kn
own for the constitution he drafted for a new Russian state. Although he did not actually participate in the uprising on December 14, 1825, he was condemned to death when it failed. His sentence was later commuted to twenty years at hard labor in the Nerchinsk mines. He died in Irkutsk Province.

  In 1813, after studying at Moscow University, Muraviev embarked on a military career, and in 1816 he joined with other aristocratic young officers in organizing a secret society called the Union of Salvation. Led by Paul Pestel, it was renamed the Union of Welfare a year later. Stimulated by the French Revolution (1789) and the Napoleonic Wars (1812-1815), the officers had been influenced by the liberal ideas of French and German philosophers while serving in Europe or attending European universities. The new Russian literature, with its moral and social protest against Russia’s backwardness, also was an important influence, especially the works of Nikolai Novikov, Alexander Radishchev, and the poets Alexander Pushkin and Alexander Gri-boyedov. The Arzamas group, an informal literary society founded around 1815, attracted several men who later became Decembrists, including Nikita Muraviev, Nikolai Turgenev, and Mikhail Orlov.

  MUSAVAT