Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  If the height of Pobedonostsev’s influence was after the assassination of Alexander II, his influence had significantly waned by 1896. His last years were quiet ones. He had never enjoyed court life, and in his later years he went out even less frequently. He did not officially retire until 1905, but by then younger men had been appointed, Nicholas II had ascended to the throne, and many of Pobedonostsev’s policies were once again being disputed. Pobedonostsev died of pneumonia in 1907. By the time of his death, other statesmen had assumed power, and his funeral was little noticed, with only a few in attendance. See also: ALEXANDER III; HOLY SYNOD; NICHOLAS II; SLAVOPHILES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Byrnes, Robert F. (1968). Pobedonostsev: His Life and Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

  MICHELLE DENBESTE

  PODGORNY, NIKOLAI VIKTOROVICH

  (1903-1983), party and government leader.

  Nikolai Podgorny rose to political prominence under Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, only to play a key role in his ousting in October 1964. Ukrainian by birth and an engineer by vocation, Podgorny started his career in the Ukrainian sugar industry in the 1930s. Throughout the war he held a number of posts responsible for food production, particularly in the Ukraine, where he developed close links with Khrushchev. After the war, his career path shifted to the party. By 1953, the year Josef Stalin died, he was Second Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party. Podgorny’s star rose as Khrushchev rose to power. In 1956, the year Khrushchev denounced Stalin, Podgorny was elected to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Central Committee. Khrushchev personally nominated him for Ukrainian Communist Party First Secretary in 1957 and for the powerful post of CPSU Central Committee Secretary in 1963, by which time he was also a full member of the CPSU’s leading body, the Presidium. While somewhat conservative, Podgorny was an enthusiastic supporter of some of Khrushchev’s more “hare-brained schemes” (the accusation used to justify his dismissal in October 1964), such as the division of the party into industrial and agricultural sections. Nevertheless, Podgorny, like almost all Khrushchev’s Ukrainian appointees, turned against his patron, colluding with Leonid Brezhnev in seeking Central Committee support to remove Khrushchev as party First Secretary. Podgorny went on to become Soviet head

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  PODZOL

  of state, but rivalry with party secretary Brezhnev saw his demise in 1977. See also: BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; CHANCELLERY SYSTEM; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Taubman, William; Khrushchev, Sergei; and Gleason, Abbott, eds. (2000). Nikita Khrushchev. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tompson, William J. (1995). Khrushchev: A Political Life. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan with St Antony’s College, Oxford.

  ROGER D. MARKWICK

  PODYACHY

  The clerk (podyachy), who wrote, filed, and handled government documents of the seventeenth-century Russian central and provincial administration.

  Little-known during the 1500s, chancellery clerks expanded: 575 in 1626, but 2,762 in 1698. After 1700, their numbers plunged. Divided in three salary groups (senior, middle, junior) by service record and seniority, clerks’ pay varied from 0.5 to fifty rubles; the mean decreased from 11.5 to 9.5 rubles. Most earned from one to ten rubles. Pay was also in service land and kind. Clerks could receive supplements for special assignments, holidays, and other needs, and resort to bribery. Signatory (pody-achy so pripisyuu) and document (podyachy so spravoy) clerks were elite senior clerks. Clerk novitiates between ages ten and fifteen learned skoropis (cursive longhand) and documentary formulae, and acquired office sense; many were washed out. During the 1600s, the number of clerks working without regular pay, thanks to budgetary constraints, increased significantly.

  Numbers varied from 446 in the Service Land Chancellery to one in several smaller chancelleries; median and mean figures per chancellery were ten and nine (1620s) and twenty-three and fifty-two (1680s). Between three percent and ten percent were promoted to dyak. Not part of the Moscow service group, they were nonetheless respected for their expertise. Central clerks were dispatched into the field (land surveys, military headquarters duty, diplomatic service, etc.); mortality was high.

  The number of provincial clerks varied from 750 (1640s) to nearly 1,900 (1690s). They worked under the town military governor (voyevoda), subordinated to the chancelleries. Working in Moscow and the provinces, the private scribe (ploshchadnoy podyachy) read and wrote private documents for a fee. See also: CHANCELLERY SYSTEM; DYAK

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Brown, Peter B. (1978). “Early Modern Russian Bureaucracy: the Evolution of the Chancellery System from Ivan III to Peter the Great, 1478-1717.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago. Plavsic, Borovoi. (1980). “Seventeenth-Century Chanceries and Their Staffs.” In Russian Officialdom: The Bu-reaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth Century to the Twentieth Century, eds. Walter McKen-zie Pintner and Don Karl Rowney. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

  PETER B. BROWN

  PODZOL

  Podzols are subarctic soils of the cold, humid northern coniferous forest (taiga), found between the mixed forests of the temperate zone and the tundras of the arctic zone. Known as spodosol in the Seventh Approximation Soil Classification system, podzol derives from the Russian terms pod, or “under,” and zol, or “ash.” Very infertile because of the leaching of basic soil nutrients (calcium, sodium, potassium, magnesium, and so on), podzols are composed of layers known as horizons. The A-horizon comprises a shallow needleleaf litter zone, a narrow strongly acidic humus zone, and a broader ash-grey to chalky leached (A-2) horizon made up of silica, or sand. Beneath this infertile horizon is the zone of illuviation, or B-horizon, in which the leached nutrients of the A-horizon accumulate. Beyond the B-horizon is a totally inorganic C-horizon composed of weathered bedrock. Without substantial fertilization, podzols are suitable only for the growing of berries and root crops. See also: CLIMATE; GEOGRAPHY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Strahler, Arthur N. (1969). Physical Geography, 3rd ed. New York: Wiley.

  VICTOR L. MOTE

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  POGODIN, MIKHAIL PETROVICH

  POGODIN, MIKHAIL PETROVICH

  (1800-1875), prominent Russian historian, journalist, and publisher.

  A Slavophile and professor of Russian history at Moscow University (1835-1844), Mikhail Pogodin wrote a seven-volume history of Russia (1846-1857) and a three-volume study entitled The Early History of Russia (1871). His conservative journal The Muscovite (1841-1856) defended the policies of Tsar Nicholas I.

  Pogodin began life in humble circumstances, as the son of a serf, but his ultranationalist views helped to boost him to prominence. His association with the secret society Lovers of Wisdom (Lyubo-mudry) at Moscow University also helped his career. Founded in 1823 toward the end of the reign of Alexander I by Prince Vladimir Odoyevsky (1803-1869) and others, this society was, to some extent, a continuation of the Masonic Astrea Lodge. The circle-consisting of a dozen members who met in secret-tended to disregard politics and propound the philosophic ideas of Friedrich von Schelling and other Romantic thinkers. The society published the journal Mnemosyne until it was dissolved soon after the Decembrist uprising in 1825.

  Pogodin believed that the natal gentry-style aristocracy had compromised and outlived itself. He wrote that Nicholas I, who died in 1855, had imposed upon Russia “the quiet of a graveyard, rotting and stinking, both physically and morally.” As a Pan-Slavist, he often suggested that God’s hand was at work in Russian history, preparing the nation for a great mission of peace and order. He compared the conquest of Siberia by Yermak in 1581 with that of South America by Hernando Cort?z. “We have discovered one third of Asia,” he wrote in 1837. “Is that not worthy of celebration like America’s discovery by Christopher Columbus?”

  During the 1850s, Pogodin got into a debate with Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Maksymovych (1804-1873) over the legacy of Kievan Rus. Pogodin developed the
untenable thesis that the Great Russians originally inhabited the Kiev region and that only after the Mongols forced them to flee to the northeast during the eleventh and twelfth centuries did the Ukrainians (“Little Russians”) migrate into the area. According to Pogodin, the Ukrainians arrived much later from somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains. Pogodin’s views were expanded on by the philologist Alexei Sobolevsky. The oldest school of thought about the legacy of Kievan Rus claims that the first leaders and organizers of the state were the Varangians, a group of Scandinavians who raided the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea during the ninth century and penetrated into Eastern Europe toward Byzantium along the Dnieper River. This Norman (Normanist) theory rests mainly on a literal interpretation of the Primary Chronicle (Tale of Bygone Years, or Povest vremennykh let), a document written by monks of the Kievan Monastery that covers the period up to 1118.

  Throughout the nineteenth century, Ukrainian historians challenged the Normanist theory, downplaying the Varangian influence on the formation of Rus. They argued that Ukrainians were autochthonous (indigenous) in their territories and that the principality of Galicia-Volhynia was the successor to the Kievan state.

  However, the tsarist autocracy constantly censored these revisionists, which, besides Maksy-movych, included Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Dmytro Ba-halii, Dmytro Doroshenko, and Mykola Chubaty. Nonetheless, the Normanist theory, with certain modifications, remains the basis of Western historiography of Russia and Ukraine.

  Despite Pogodin’s humble beginnings, his portrait was painted by the famous artist Vasily Perov (1834-1882), and he was buried with other luminaries in the Novodevichy Cemetery. See also: NORMANIST CONTROVERSY; SLAVOPHILES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Wilson, Andrew. (2000). The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

  JOHANNA GRANVILLE

  POGROMS

  Pogrom, a Russian word that originally had several meanings, such as “beating,” “defeat,” “smashing,” or “destruction,” has come to be identified with violent attacks on the persons and property of one ethnicity by large crowds of other ethnicities, in particular, attacks on Jews by ethnic Russians. The first occurrence that historians generally agree was a pogrom took place in Odessa in 1821, and pogroms against Armenians took place in Azerbai1190

  POKROVSKY, MIKHAIL NIKOLAYEVICH

  jan in 1988 and 1990. Most pogroms in Russian history, however, took place in three major waves: 1881-1884, following the assassination of Alexander II; 1903-1906, following the announcement of the October Manifesto; and 1919-1921, during the Russian Civil War. In the first wave, more than 250 pogroms were recorded, mostly within the Pale of Settlement in present-day Ukraine. Beginning in April 1881, the largest and most violent were in the large cities, but then radiated out through the countryside, often along the railroad lines. Most pogroms occurred in the spring and summer of 1881, with ever smaller numbers in the next three years. These were less violent than later waves, with probably only forty deaths in 1881. The next wave began in 1903 with the infamous Kishinev pogrom, accelerated through the dislocations of war and revolution, and reached a great crescendo at the end of 1905. In the two weeks after the October Manifesto, it is estimated that seven hundred pogroms occurred throughout Russia, leaving nine hundred dead and eight thousand wounded. Unlike other waves, pogroms occurred at this time in many places outside of the Pale of Settlement, including small cities with an insignificant or nonexistent Jewish population; in the latter cases, students and political activists were often the major targets.

  The classic explanation of these pogroms was that either the tsarist regime, or forces close to and supportive of the regime, encouraged these pogroms as a way of directing popular discontent away from the government and onto a visible minority group. While still widely held today, this explanation has been convincingly challenged in recent years by historians who have pointed out the complex and varied reactions the regime had to pogroms, the lack of archival evidence for such a conspiracy, the regime’s deep fear of any sort of popular violence, and a general belief that the Russian government was incapable of organizing such widespread and, in the case of October 1905, simultaneous disturbances. However, if the old conspiracy theory is breaking down, no consensus explanation has emerged to replace it. The last great wave of pogroms, in 1919-1921, was the bloodiest and the most atypical, occurring after the fall of the imperial regime and during conditions of bitter strife in which violence of every kind was unrestrained. Concentrated in Ukraine, all parties to the conflict carried out pogroms at one point or another, but the most organized and bloodiest were perpetrated by the White Volunteer Army. Condoned by officers and carried out by Cossacks, with some looting by peasants, these pogroms may account for 150,000 deaths. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; JEWS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; OCTOBER MANIFESTO; PALE OF SETTLEMENT

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Aron, I. Michael. (1990). Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Judge, Edward H. (1992). Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom. New York: New York University Press. Klier, John D. (1993). “Unravelling of the Conspiracy Theory: A New Look at the Pogroms.” East European Jewish Affairs 23:79-89. Klier, John D., and Lambroza, Shlomo, eds. (1992). Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

  DAVID PRETTY

  POKROVSKY, MIKHAIL NIKOLAYEVICH

  (1868-1932), leading Soviet historian of the 1920s and early 1930s, chief administrator of the social sciences, and a principal enforcer of Marxist orthodoxy.

  Mikhail Pokrovsky served as Vice-Commissar of Education; Chairman of the Presidium of the Communist Academy and Chairman of its Society of Marxist Historians; Full Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (briefly before his death); and was also a member of the Presidium of the Central Control Commission and held numerous other positions.

  Pokrovsky studied history at the Imperial Moscow University under the supervision of Vasily Klyuchevsky and Pavel Vinogradov. In 1905 he embraced Marxism as a creed and methodology. As a result of revolutionary activities, he spent the years from 1907 to 1917 in exile, mostly in France. There he produced his most important scholarly works, notably his five-volume History of Russia since Ancient Times. In it he stated his major thesis: Russian history manifested the same pattern of development as did other European societies in that capitalism was a natural outcome of class conflict and not a foreign implant. Russian autocracy, a mere variant of European absolutism, was created by and served the interests of merchant capitalism. The latter was an ill-defined category that Pokrovsky

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  POLAND

  borrowed from Karl Marx. This thesis placed Pokrovsky at odds with most other Russian historians, who asserted that Russian autocracy, unlike European absolutism, had the power to fashion social relationships; it was, in a certain sense, “supra-class.” Most of Pokrovsky’s numerous subsequent writings reiterated this thesis and attacked the non-Marxist historians who did not share it.

  Pokrovsky returned to Russia in August 1917 and held prominent positions in the Moscow Soviet. After the Bolsheviks took power he largely confined his activities to the pedagogical, scholarly and propaganda institutions of the Soviet government and the Communist Party. He was the party-designated leader of what was called the historical front, an array of institutions designed to establish the hegemony of Marxist doctrine and to circumscribe and finally eliminate all non-Marxist doctrines and convert or silence their adherents.

  Pokrovsky elaborated a theory of cultural revolution that justified the provisional pluralism implied by the policies mentioned above: the building of communism with the hands of non-communists, at least in the short term. The policy and his theory began to flounder during the late 1920s. His concept of merchant capitalism and his leadership of the historical front came under attack from a faction of rival historians. Hastening to
get in step with Josef Stalin, Pokrovsky aggressively attacked non-Marxist scholars as class enemies, but his theory of merchant capitalism clashed with Stalin’s theory of socialism in one country. In 1931 Stalin upheld the authority of Pokrovsky. His “school” (i.e., associates and former students) dominated the scholarly and propaganda apparatus until 1936. In that year Stalin signaled a vituperative campaign against the ideas of Pokrovsky: he was branded as anti-Marxist and petty bourgeois, largely because his works were devoid of nationalist sentiment. Pokrovsky had helped to devise the repressive instruments that were used against him posthumously. Almost his entire school was physically annihilated. Because Pokrovsky was an anti-Stalin symbol, he received a partial rehabilitation in the years of Nikita Khrushchev’s predominance. During the early twenty-first century his name has almost entirely lost its symbolic weight. See also: MARXISM; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Barber, John. (1981). Soviet Historians in Crisis, 1928-1932. London: Macmillan Press in association with the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham. Enteen, George M. (1978). The Soviet Scholar-Bureaucrat: M.N. Pokrovsky and the Society of Marxist Historians. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Pokrovsky, M. N. (1966). History of Russia from the Earliest Times to the Rise of Commercial Capitalism, tr. J. D. Clarkson and M. R. M. Griffiths. 2nd ed. Bloom-ington, IN: University Prints and Reprints. Pokrovsky, M. N. (1993). Brief History of Russia, tr. D. S. Mirsky. 2 vols. London: Martin Lawrence Limited.