by James Millar
Procopius makes reference to a Slavic god who is the ruler of everything, but evidence for a larger pantheon comes much later. The twelfth-century Primary Chronicle relates how Prince Vladimir set up idols in the hills of Kiev to Perun, “made of wood with a head of silver and a mustache of gold,” as well as to Khors, Dazhbog, Stribog, Simargl, and Mokosh. In the entries for 907 and 971 C.E., the chronicle reports that the Rus swore by their gods Perun and Volos, the god of the flocks. Perun is
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associated with thunder and the oak tree, thought to be a favorite target of the lightning bolts unleashed by the thunder god. Much less is known about the other gods mentioned in the chronicle. Khors seems to refer to the sun and, as Jakobson points out, is closely connected with Dazhbog, the “giver of wealth,” and Stribog, “the apportioner of wealth.” Simargl appears to be a form of Simorg, the Iranian winged monster, who is at times depicted as a winged dog. The only female in the pantheon is Mokosh, whose name is probably derived from moist, and who is likely a personification of Moist Mother Earth. Some scholars view Mokosh as a remnant of the Great Goddess cult, which struggled against the patriarchal religion of the Varangians (Vikings). The god Volos, identified in the peace treaties as the god of cattle, may be connected with death and the underworld. The association with cattle possibly comes from the efforts of Christian writers to connect him with St. Blasius, a martyred Cappadocian bishop who became the protector of flocks. Although not listed in Vladimir’s pantheon, the god Rod, with his consort Rozhanitsa, is mentioned in other East Slavic sources as a type of primordial progenitor.
After the conversion of Rus, elements of paganism continued in combination with Christian beliefs, a phenomenon that has been called “dvoev-erie” or “dual belief” in the Slavic tradition. References to pagan deities occasionally occur in Christian era texts, most notably as rhetorical ornamentation in such works as the Slovo o polku Igoreve. Syncretism is also apparent in the transformation of Perun into the Old Testament Elijah, who was taken to heaven in a fiery chariot. See also: DVOEVERIE; KIEVAN RUS; OCCULTISM; VIKINGS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barford, Paul M. (2001). The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gimbutas, Marija. (1971). The Slavs. London: Thames and Hudson. Hubbs, Joanna. (1989). Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jakobson, Roman. (1950) “Slavic Mythology.” Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. Vol. 2. New York: Funk and Wagnalls. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. (1953). Ed. and tr. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America.
DAVID K. PRESTEL
PAKISTAN, RELATIONS WITH
An affinity between Pakistan and the Soviet Union would have seemed natural, given the Pakistan’s status as a British colony (until 1947) and the Soviet Union’s role as supporter of nations oppressed by capitalist imperialists. However, in 1959 Pakistan-along with Turkey and Iran-joined the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), which was engineered by President Dwight Eisenhower’s energetic secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. The security treaty replaced the Baghdad Pact and was intended to provide a southern bulwark to Soviet expansion toward the Indian Ocean and the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. CENTO also enabled the United States to aid Pakistan and cement a close security relationship with the country that has thus become the cornerstone of U.S. policy in South Asia for more than three decades. This relationship reinforced Moscow’s efforts to maintain close relations with Pakistan’s rival, India. Beginning in June 1955 with Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s visit to Moscow, and First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev’s return trip to India during the fall of 1955, the foundations were laid for cordial Soviet-Indian relations. While in India, Khrushchev announced Moscow’s support for Indian sovereignty over the Kashmir region. Leading to the eventual partition of British India in 1947, contention between Hindus and Muslims has focused on Kashmir for centuries. Pakistan asserts Kashmiris’ right to self-determination through a plebiscite in accordance with an earlier Indian pledge and a United Nations resolution. This dispute triggered wars between the two countries, not only in 1947 but also in 1965 (Moscow maintained neutrality in 1965). In December 1971, Pakistan and India again went to war, following a political crisis in what was then East Pakistan and the flight of millions of Bengali refugees to India. The two armies reached an impasse, but a decisive Indian victory in the east resulted in the creation of Bangladesh.
New strains appeared both in Soviet-Pakistani relations after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Pakistan supported the Afghan resistance, while India implicitly supported Soviet occupation. Pakistan accommodated an influx of refugees (more
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than 3.2 million people) resulting from the Soviet occupation (December 1979-February 1989). In the following eight years, the USSR and India voiced increasing concern over Pakistani arms purchases, U.S. military aid to Pakistan, and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. In May 1998 India, and then Pakistan, conducted nuclear tests.
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Pakistan’s relations with Washington grew strained, while its relations with Moscow improved. Although Pakistan’s military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, agreed to provide the United States with bases in Pakistan for launching military operations against Pakistan’s erstwhile ally-the Taliban-in Afghanistan, his actions fueled electoral successes of Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan who opposed his pro-U.S. stance. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin played a key mediation role in the Indo-Pakistani conflict. In February 2003, Musharraf met with Putin in Moscow to discuss trade and defense ties. This was the first official state visit by a Pakistani leader to Moscow since Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s. Pakistan and India massed about a million troops along the UNdrawn Line of Control that divides their sectors of the state officially called Jammu and Kashmir- raising international fears of a possible nuclear war. See also: AFGHANISTAN, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hershberg, Eric, and Moore, Kevin W. (2002). Critical Views of September 11: Analyses from Around the World. New York: New Press. Jones, Owen Bennett. (2002). Pakistan: Eye of the Storm. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Weaver, Mary Anne. (2002). Pakistan: in the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wirsing, Robert. (1994). India, Pakistan, and the Kashmir Dispute: On Regional Conflict and Its Resolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press. of lacquered, papier-m?ch? black boxes with crimson interiors. The subjects depict Russian fairy tales, legends, and folk heroes, and during the Soviet period also included scenes of rural life, industrialization, and Soviet leaders and heroes. Palekh boxes, originally created for Soviet citizens, developed a worldwide reputation after being sold at international arts and crafts fairs.
The term palekh comes from the most famous of the three villages (Kholui, Mstera, and Palekh) in which Palekh painting originated. Ivan Golikov, a Palekh icon painter, derived the inspiration for this style from lacquered boxes he saw at the Kustar Museum in 1921. Golikov and others applied egg tempera, rather than oil, to papier-m?ch? boxes and, employing techniques used in icon painting, created objects that resembled traditional folk art. The Artel of Early Painting, a craft collective for Palekh painters founded by Golikov and his colleagues, was established in Palekh in 1924 (artels also existed in Khuloi and Mstera). Palekh painting became an integral part of Soviet applied arts with the establishment of a four-year training program. Exhibitions dedicated to Palekh boxes were held throughout the 1930s. Academic articles on this medium, and artistic debates discussing the appropriate style and content of Palekh painting, continued from the 1930s to the 1960s. Since the 1970s, Palekh painted boxes and brooches have been viewed as the quintessential tourist souvenir from Russia. See also: FOLKLORE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
> Hilton, Alison. (1995). Russian Folk Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
K. ANDREA RUSNOCK
JOHANNA GRANVILLE PALE OF SETTLEMENT
PALEKH PAINTING
Palekh painted lacquer boxes, popularly thought to be a traditional Russian folk art, were actually a product of the Soviet period. Palekh painting, a delicate and elegant miniature style, is done on the lids As a result of the Napoleonic Wars and the acquisition of the central and eastern provinces of Poland by the Russian Empire during the late eighteenth century, the area extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea became known as the Russian “Pale of Settlement.” Originally established by Catherine the Great in 1791, the Pale (meaning “border”) eventually covered roughly 286,000 square miles (740,700 square kilometers) of territory and grew
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to include twenty-five provinces (fifteen Russian and ten Polish), including Kiev, Grodno, Minsk, Lublin, Bessarabia, and Mogilev. Along with the favorable acquisition of Polish land, the Russian government was faced with a population of ethnic groups that came with the various territories. Although the territories consisted of various groups, including Byzantine Catholics, Germans, Armenians, Tartars, Scots, and Dutchmen, it was the large number of Jews (10% of the Polish population) that was most troubling to the tsars.
In 1804, intending to protect the Russian population from the Jewish people, Alexander I issued a decree that prevented Jews from living outside the territories of the Pale, the first of many statutes designed to limit the freedoms of Russia’s new Jewry. With more than five million Jews eventually living and working within its borders, Russian lawmakers used the confines of the Pale as an opportunity to limit Jewish participation in most facets of social, economic, and political life. With few exceptions, Jews were forced to reside within the Pale’s overcrowded cities and small towns called shtetls, restricted from traveling, prevented from entering various professions (including agriculture), levied with extra taxation, forbidden to receive higher education, and kept from engaging in various forms of trade to subsidize their livelihood. Although Jews in the Pale were destined to a endure a life of poverty and restriction, most managed to make their way into the local economies by working as tailors, cobblers, peddlers, and small shopkeepers. Others, who were less fortunate, survived only by committed mutual aid efforts and strong local networks of support.
As the Russian Empire started experiencing the early stages of industrialization during the 1880s, the Pale began to witness a steady decline in its agricultural, artisanal, and petty entrepreneurial economies. Because of this transition, many independent producers of goods and services could no longer subsist and were forced to find jobs in factories. Very few, especially the Jewish artisans and tailors, were able to continue producing independently or as middlemen to larger manufacturing plants. By the start of the twentieth century, the manufacturing sector was increasingly becoming the primary source of employment in the Pale, with wage laborers producing cigarettes, cigars, knit goods, gloves, textiles, artificial flowers, buttons, glass, bricks, soap, candy, and various other goods. It was ultimately the deteriorating economy within the Pale, coupled with years of anti-Semitism, that served as catalyst for more than two million Jews to emigrate to America between 1881 and 1914. Not long after this exodus, the Pale of Settlement was abolished with the overthrow of the tsarist regime in 1917. See also: ALEXANDER I; BESSARABIA; CATHERINE II; JEWS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Klier, John. (1986). Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia, 1772-1825. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Ro’i, Yaacov, ed. (1995). Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union. Portland, OR: Frank Cass.
DIANA FISHER
PALEOLOGUE, SOPHIA
(d. 1503) niece of the last two Byzantine emperors and the second wife of Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow.
Sophia Paleologue (Zoe) improved the Russian Grand Prince’s international standing through her dynastic status and promoted Byzantine symbolism and ceremony at the Russian court.
Zoe Paleologue was the daughter of Despot Thomas of Morea, the younger brother of the Byzantine emperors John VIII and Constantine IX, and Catherine, daughter of Prince Centurione Zaccaria of Achaea. After the conquest of Morea by the Ottoman Turks in 1460 and her parents’ subsequent death, Paleologue became a ward of the Uniate cardinal Bessarion, who gave her a Catholic education in Rome as a dependent of Pope Sixtus IV.
After protracted negotiations with the Russian Grand Prince, who saw an opportunity to increase his prestige in a marital union with a Byzantine princess, the Vatican offered Paleologue in a betrothal ceremony to one of Ivan III’s representatives on June 1, 1472. During Paleologue’s trip to Russia, the Byzantine princess assured the Russian populace in Pskov of her Orthodox disposition by abjuring Latin religious ritual and dress and by venerating icons. Paleologue married Ivan III on November 12, 1472, in an Orthodox wedding ceremony in the Moscow Kremlin and took the name Sophia.
Paleologue gave birth to ten children, one of which was the future heir to the Russian throne,
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Basil III. The existence of Ivan Molodoy, the surviving son of Ivan III’s union with his first wife, Maria of Tver, and natural successor to the throne, caused friction between the grand prince and Pale-ologue. According to contemporary Russian chronicles, Paleologue intrigued against Ivan Molodoy and his wife, Elena Voloshanka. Paleologue’s situation at court deteriorated even more after Volo-shanka gave birth to a son, Dmitry Ivanovich. The untimely death of Ivan Molodoy in 1490 inspired rumors that Paleologue had poisoned him. The focus of Paleologue’s and Voloshanka’s dynastic struggle shifted to Dmitry Ivanovich. Ivan III’s decision to make Dmitry his heir in 1497 caused Pa-leologue and her son Basil to revolt. Although Ivan III disgraced Sophia and crowned Dmitry as his successor in the following year, the Byzantine princess emerged victorious in 1499, when Basil was made Grand Prince of Novgorod and Pskov. Conspiring with the Lithuanians, Paleologue put pressure on her husband to imprison Voloshanka and her son Dmitry and to proclaim Basil Grand Prince of Vladimir and Moscow in 1502.
In pursuing her political and dynastic goals, Pa-leologue exploited traditional Byzantine methods to advertise her claims. In a liturgical tapestry she donated to the Monastery of Saint Sergius of Radonezh in 1498, she proclaimed her superior heritage by juxtaposing her position as Tsarevna of Constantinople with the grand princely title of her husband. By exploiting Byzantine religious symbolism, in the same embroidery she expressed her claim that Basil III was the divinely chosen heir to the Russian throne. While there has been no substantiation for the claim of some scholars that Pa-leologue was responsible for the introduction of wide-ranging Byzantine ideas and practices at the Russian court, the Byzantine princess’s knack for political messages draped in religious language and imagery undoubtedly left a lasting mark on medieval Russian culture. See also: BASIL III; IVAN III
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fennell, J. L. I. (1961). Ivan the Great of Moscow. London: Macmillan. Fine, John V. A., Jr. (1966). “The Muscovite Dynastic Crisis of 1497-1502.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 8:198-215. Kollmann, Nancy Shields. (1986). “Consensus Politics: the Dynastic Crisis of the 1490s Reconsidered.” Russian Review 45(3):235-267. Miller, David. (1993). “The Cult of Saint Sergius of Radonezh and Its Political Uses.” Slavic Review 52(4): 680-699. Thyr?t, Isolde. (2001). Between God and Tsar: Religious Symbolism and the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
ISOLDE THYR?T
PALLAS, PETER-SIMON
(1741-1811), explorer, geologist, botanist.
Peter-Simon Pallas was born in Berlin, where he received his formal education. He also spent some time in Holland and England working in museums with rich collections in natural history. One of his early studies dealing with polyps and sponges was published in the Hague in 1761 a
nd immediately attracted wide professional attention, not only because of the richness and originality of the presented empirical data, but also with its precisely stated general theoretical propositions. In 1763 Pallas became a member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, and a year later he led an exploratory expedition to the Caspian and Baikal areas, concentrating on both natural history and ethnography. Published in three volumes between 1771 and 1778, under the title Travels through Various Provinces in the Russian Empire, and written in German, the study was immediately translated into Russian, and then into French, Italian, and English. Pallas guided several other exploratory expeditions; the trip to Southern Russia, with a heavy concentration on Crimea, proved especially enlightening. All these studies manifested not only Pallas’s observational talents but also his profound familiarity with contemporary geology, botany, zoology, mineralogy and linguistics. His Flora Rossica provided a systematic botanical survey of the country’s trees.
