Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  1179

  PIMEN, PATRIARCH

  were subjected to extensive retouching and manipulation-not for creative ends, but for the falsification of reality and history. An abrupt change took place during World War II, when Soviet photojournalists equipped with 35-millimeter cameras produced spontaneous images that captured the terrors and triumphs of war.

  Soviet amateur photography flourished in the late 1920s with numerous worker photography circles. Amateur activity was stimulated by the development of the Soviet photography industry and the introduction of the first domestic camera in 1930. Later that decade, however, government regulations increasingly restricted the activity of amateur photographers, and the number of circles quickly diminished. The material hardships of the war years further compounded this situation, practically bringing amateur photographic activity to a standstill. With independent activity severely circumscribed, Soviet photography was essentially limited to the carefully controlled area of professional photojournalism.

  During the Thaw of the late 1950s, the appearance of new amateur groups led to the cultivation of a new generation of photographers engaged in social photography that captured everyday life. Their activity, however, was largely underground. By the 1970s, photography played an important role in Soviet nonconformist and conceptual art. Artists such as Boris Mikhailov appropriated and manipulated photographic imagery in a radical critique of photography’s claims to truth. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many photographic publications and industrial enterprises gradually disappeared. While professional practitioners quickly adapted to the new market system and creative photographers achieved international renown, the main area of activity was consumer snapshot photography, which flourished in Russia with the return of foreign photographic firms. See also: CENSORSHIP; NATIONALISM IN THE ARTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Elliott, David, ed. (1992). Photography in Russia, 1840-1940. London: Thames and Hudson. King, David. (1997). The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia. New York: Metropolitan Books. Sartori, Rosalind. (1987). “The Soviet Union.” In A History of Photography: Social and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Jean-Claude Lemagny and Andr? Rouill?. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Shudakov, Grigory (1983). Pioneers of Soviet Photography. New York: Thames and Hudson. USSR in Construction. (1930-1941, 1949). Moscow: Go-sizdat. Walker, Joseph, et al. (1991). Photo Manifesto: Contemporary Photography in the USSR. New York: Stewart, Tabori amp; Chang.

  ERIKA WOLF

  PIMEN, PATRIARCH

  (1910-1990), patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church from June 2, 1971, to May 3, 1990.

  Sergei Mikhailovich Izvekov took monastic vows in 1927 and worked with church choirs in Moscow. Later, as Patriarch Pimen, his excellent musical sense led him to forbid singers to embellish the liturgy with operatic flourishes.

  During World War II Pimen allegedly concealed his monastic vows and served as an army officer in communications or intelligence. When discovered, he was incarcerated, and his political vulnerability was said to have figured in the Soviet authorities’ decision that he could be controlled as patriarch. More friendly sources recount his heroism in protecting his men with his own body under bombardment. His official biography omits his military service.

  Judgments of Pimen as patriarch are mixed. He was accused of being withdrawn, passive, and increasingly infirm. On the other hand, he was a gifted poet, radiated spirituality, and was said to have defended the integrity of the Church against corrupting modernism and reckless innovation. Pi-men’s moment came when Communist General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev decided to greet the millennium of Russia’s conversion to Christianity by improving relations with the Church. Gorbachev received Pimen on April 29, 1988, and more than eight hundred new parishes were permitted to open that year. Sunday schools, charitable works, new seminaries and convents, and other concessions to church needs followed. Whether these tangible benefits justified Pimen’s political collaboration with the Soviet regime is a controversial question. See also: RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; RUSSIFICATION

  1180

  PIROGOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Pospielovsky, Dimitry. (1984). The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime 1917-1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

  NATHANIEL DAVIS

  PIROGOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH

  (1810-1881), scientist, physician, proponent of educational reform.

  Nikolai Pirogov was born in Moscow where his father managed a military commissary. After graduating from the medical school of Moscow University, he enrolled at the Professors’ Institute at Dorpat University to prepare for teaching in institutions of higher education. In Dorpat he specialized in surgical techniques and in pathological anatomy and physiology. After five years at Dor-pat, he went to Berlin University in search of the latest knowledge in anatomy and surgical techniques. While in Berlin he was appointed a professor at Dorpat, where he quickly acquired a reputation as a successful contributor to anatomy and an innovator in surgery. In 1837-1839 he published Surgical Anatomy of Arterial Trunks and Fasciae in Latin and German.

  In 1841 Pirogov accepted a teaching position at the Medical and Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg, the most advanced school of its kind in Russia. He lectured on clinical service in hospitals and pathological and surgical anatomy. His major work published under the auspices of the Medical and Surgical Academy was the four-volume Anatomia Topographica (1851-1854) describing the spatial relations of organs and tissues in various planes. He was also the author of General Military Field Surgery (1864), relying heavily on his experience in the Crimean War (1853-1855). In recognition of his scholarly achievement, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences elected him a corresponding member.

  Tired of petty academic quarrels and intrigues, Pirogov resigned from his professorial position in 1856. In the same year he published “The Questions of Life,” an essay emphasizing the need for a reorientation of the country’s educational system. The article touched on many pedagogical problems of broader social significance, but the emphasis was on an educational philosophy that placed equal emphasis on the transmission of specialized knowledge and the acquisition of general education fortified by increased command of foreign languages. He also pointed out that, because of the low salaries, Russian teachers were compelled to look for additional employment, which limited their active involvement in the educational process. In his opinion, one of the most pressing tasks of the Russian government was to make the entire school system accessible to all social strata and ethnic groups.

  The government not only listened to Pirogov’s plea for a broader humanistic base of the educational system, but in the same year appointed him superintendent of the Odessa school district. Two years later, he became the superintendent of the Kiev school district. In his numerous circulars and published reports he advocated a greater participation of teachers’ councils in decisions on all aspects of the educational process.

  Apprehensive of the long list of his liberal reforms, the Ministry of Public Education decided in 1861 to ask Pirogov to resign from his high post in education administration. His dismissal provoked a series of rebellious demonstrations by Kiev University students.

  Pirogov’s government service, however, did not come to an end. In 1862 he was assigned the challenging task of organizing and supervising the education of Russian students enrolled in Western universities. In 1866 the government again retired him; the current minister of public education thought that the supervision of foreign education could be done more effectively by a “philologist” than by a “surgeon.”

  In 1881 a large group of scholars gathered in Moscow to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Pirogov’s engagement in science. Four years later, an even larger group founded the Pirogov Society of Russian Physicians with a strong interest in social medicine. It was not unusual for the periodic conventions of the Society to be attended by close to two thousand persons. See also:
EDUCATION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Frieden, Nancy M. (1981). Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 1856-1905. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vucinich, Alexander. (1963-1970). Science in Russian Culture, vols. 1-2. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  ALEXANDER VUCINICH

  1181

  PISAREV, DMITRY IVANOVICH

  PISAREV, DMITRY IVANOVICH

  (1840-1868), noted literary critic, radical social thinker, and proponent of “rational egoism” and nihilism.

  Born into the landed aristocracy, Dmitry Ivanovich Pisarev studied at both Moscow University and St. Petersburg University, concentrating on philology and history. From 1862 to 1866, Pis-arev served as the chief voice of the journal The Russian Word (Russkoye slovo), a journal somewhat akin to The Contemporary (Sovremennik), which was published and edited by the poet Nikolai Nekrasov (1821-1878). In 1862 Pisarev was imprisoned in the Petropavlovsk Fortress for writing an article criticizing the tsarist government and defending the social critic Alexander Herzen, editor of the London-based ?migr? journal The Bell (Kolokol). Ironically, Pisarev’s arrest marked his own rise to prominence, coinciding with the death of Nikolai Dobrolyubov in 1861 and arrest of Nikolai Chernyshevsky in 1862. During his incarceration for the next four and one-half years, Pisarev continued to write for the The Russian Word, including several influential articles exhibiting his literary panache: “Notes on the History of Labor” (1863), “Realists” (1864), “The Historical Ideas of Auguste Comte” (1865), and “Pushkin and Belinsky” (1865). His articles on Plato and Prince Metternich, and especially the article “Scholasticism of the Nineteenth Century” brought him fame as a literary critic.

  Pisarev differed from other, more liberal, social reformers of the first half of the decade, since he stressed individual-ethical aspects of socioeconomic reforms, such as family problems and the difficult position of women in society. When Cherny-shevsky’s novel What is to Be Done (Chto delat?) came out in 1863, Pisarev praised it as a utilitarian tract focusing on the positive aspects of nihilism (generally, the view that no absolute values exist). At the same time, Pisarev criticized Chernyshevsky for his intellectual timidity and failure to develop his ideas far enough. According to Pisarev, a functional society did not need literature (“art for art’s sake”), and literature, therefore, should simply merge with journalism and scholarly investigation as descriptions of reality. He even assaulted the reputation of Alexander Pushkin, claiming that the poet’s work hindered social progress and should be consigned to the dustbin of history.

  Rather than scorn Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (Otsy i deti), written in 1862, as Chernyshevsky did, claiming it castigated the radical youth, Pisarev strongly identified with the novel’s hero Bazarov-a nihilist who believes in reason and has a scientific understanding of society’s needs, but rejects traditional religious beliefs and moral values. “Bazarov,” Pisarev wrote, “is a representative of our younger generation; in his person are gathered together all those traits scattered among the mass to a lesser degree.” To Pis-arev, Bazarov’s “realism” and “empiricism” reduced all matters of principle to individual preference. Turgenev’s hero is governed only by personal caprice or calculation. Neither over him, nor outside him, nor inside him does he recognize any regulator, any moral law. Far above feeling any moral compunction against committing crimes, the new hero of the younger generation would hardly subordinate his will to any such antiquated prejudice.

  Pisarev’s readers gleaned in the author himself some of these same extremist, nihilist tendencies. However, while Pisarev was an extremist intellectual, he was an honest one. He eloquently advocated such practical social types as Bazarov- activists for the intelligentsia, that is, people who could play the role of a “thinking proletariat.” Yet Pisarev himself did not advocate a political revolution. He believed society, and above all the mass of the people, could be transformed through so-cioeconomic change. He simply denounced whatever stood in the way of such peaceful change more trenchantly than any of his predecessors had. Thus this urging to attack anything that seemed socially useless sounded more revolutionary than it really was.

  Upon his release from prison, Pisarev contributed articles to the journals The Task (Delo) and Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski). Although he drowned in the Gulf of Riga in 1868, at the age of twenty-eight, his ideas continued to influence other writers, notably Fyodor Dos-toyevsky. In Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie) Dostoyevsky’s hero Raskolnikov (from the word raskol or “split”) shows what occurs when one flaunts moral principles and takes a human life. In The Possessed (Besy) Dostoyevsky shows his reader the worst ways in which human beings can abuse their freedom. Several characters in this novel act on horrifying beliefs, leaving numerous dead bodies in their wake. Raskolnikov’s views pale next to the shocking behavior of the “demons” whom Dostoyevsky feared most: human beings who lose their perspective and let the worst side of their natures predominate.

  1182

  PLATON (LEVSHIN)

  See also: DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE; INTELLIGENTSIA; NIHILISM AND NIHILISTS; TURGENEV, IVAN SERGEYEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Berdiaev, Nikolai, and Shatz, Marshall. (1994). Vekhi: A Collection of Articles About the Russian Intelligentsia. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Freeborn, Richard. (1982). The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak. New York: Cambridge University Press. Glicksberg, Charles Irving. (1975). The Literature of Nihilism. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Hingley, Ronald. (1969). Nihilists: Russian Radicals and Revolutionaries in the Reign of Alexander II, 1855-81. New York: Delacorte Press. Pozefsky, Peter C. (2003). The Nihilist Imagination: Dmitrii Pisarev and the Cultural Origins of Russian Radicalism (1860-1868). New York: Peter Lang.

  JOHANNA GRANVILLE

  PLANNERS’ PREFERENCES

  The term “planners’ preferences” was introduced by Abram Bergson, in his study (1961) of Soviet national income, to capture the idea that the Soviet economy was ultimately directed by the top leadership of the Communist Party, rather than by consumer sovereignty as in market economies. The preferences of said leadership provide the determining orientation and socially desired objectives of a socialist economic plan designed to govern all economic activity over a defined period. As such, the term refers to the objective function used in economic analyses to “rationalize” the decisions and actions of producers and distributors of economic goods and services in a planned or Soviet-type economy. These objectives are to replace the objectives implicit in the market aggregation of consumers’ and users’ preferences in a properly functioning market economic system. Such preferences (tastes, needs, and desires), together with income constraints, determine the demands for goods and services. These demands, together with technological possibilities for supply, then determine the market prices offered for these goods and services, and hence underlie the market prices (key coordinating and incentive signals) in a market economy. Similarly, planners’ preferences are supposed to underlie planned prices and production and distribution commands in a centrally planned economy, capturing the rationale of, and rationality behind, the comprehensive economic plan. In principle they can reflect social and collective objectives beyond any individual or organizational preference ordering, and hence capture and optimally respond to “externalities” of a social, political, or environmental nature. As such, they are sometimes used to describe the objective function in a formal welfare economic analysis of policy issues or problems. In the practice of centrally planned economies, however, they appear largely to reflect the interests and objectives of the dictator or (later) ruling elite (nomenklatura), when not merely serving as an ex post facto rationalization for observed planning decisions. See also: BUREAUCRACY, ECONOMIC; MARKET SOCIALISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bergson, Abram. (1961). The Real National Income of Soviet Russia since 1928. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
. Bergson, Abram. (1964). The Economics of Soviet Planning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  RICHARD ERICSON

  PLATON (LEVSHIN)

  (1737-1812), Orthodox metropolitan of Moscow.

  Born the son of a church sexton in the village of Chasnikovo near Moscow, Peter Levshin (the future Metropolitan Platon) attended the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy in Moscow before taking monastic vows at the St. Sergius-Holy Trinity Lavra in 1758. He adopted the name Platon and within three years had become rector of the Lavra seminary.

  Platon’s eloquence and learning attracted Empress Catherine II (r. 1762-1796), who in 1763 appointed him tutor to her son and heir, Paul. Platon’s lectures for the tsarevich were published in 1765 under the title Orthodox Teaching; or, a Short Course in Christian Theology. Translated into German and English, this work earned Platon an international reputation as an Orthodox thinker.

  In 1766 Platon became a member of the Holy Synod, the ruling council of the Russian Orthodox Church. Consecrated archbishop of Tver in 1770,

  1183

  PLATONOV, SERGEI FYODOROVICH

  he was appointed archbishop of Moscow in 1775, a post he retained for the rest of his life. Platon proved to be an effective administrator. Immediately upon taking office, he revamped the ecclesiastical bureaucracy by issuing new rules for clerical superintendents. He also worked to improve the education and material living standards of the secular clergy. In his effort to create an enlightened clergy, Platon added modern foreign languages, medicine, history, and geography to the seminary curriculum. In recognition of his achievements, Catherine promoted him to the rank of metropolitan in 1787.

  By then, however, Platon’s relationship to the empress had begun to deteriorate. In 1785 Catherine II had ordered him to investigate Nikolai Novikov (1744-1816), a Freemason and prominent publisher. To her dismay, Platon declared Novikov an exemplary Christian. Despite Platon’s finding, Catherine had Novikov arrested a few years later in 1792. That same year, she granted Platon permission to enter a partial retirement by moving to Bethany, his monastic retreat on the grounds of the Holy Trinity Lavra.