by James Millar
The Turks declared war in August 1787, Potemkin taking supreme command of all Russian forces in the south. He panicked for some weeks when the new Black Sea fleet was scattered by storms and Ottoman invasion threatened, but Catherine kept faith in his military abilities, and Potemkin led Russia to land and sea victories that eventually won the war in 1792. He missed the final victory, however, dying theatrically in the steppe outside Jassy on October 16, 1791. See also: CATHERINE II; PUGACHEV, EMELIAN IVANOVICH; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, John T. (1989). Catherine the Great: Life and Legend. New York: Oxford University Press. Madariaga, Isabel de. (1981). Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great. New Haven: Yale University Press. Montefiore, Simon Sebag. (2000). Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Raeff, Marc. (1972). “In the Imperial Manner.” In Catherine the Great: A Profile, ed. Marc Raeff. New York: Hill and Wang.
JOHN T. ALEXANDER
POTEMKIN MUTINY
The Potemkin Mutiny that took place during the 1905 Russian Revolution on board of battleship Knyaz Potemkin Tavricheskiy of the Russian Black Sea Fleet on June 14-25, 1905.
The Potemkin, commissioned in 1902, was commanded by Captain Golikov. On June 14, while at sea on artillery maneuvers, its sailors protested over the quality of meat that was brought on board that day for their supper. The ship’s doctor inspected the meat and declared it fit for human consumption.
The sailors, dissatisfied with this verdict, sent a deputation, headed by Grigory Vakulenchuk, a sailor and a member of the ship’s Social Democrat organization, to Golikov. There was a confrontation between the delegation and Commander Gilyarovsky, the executive officer, who killed Vakulenchuk. This sparked a revolt, during which Golikov, Gilyarovsky, and other senior officers were killed or thrown overboard. Afanasy Ma-tushenko, a torpedo quartermaster and one of leaders of the ship’s Social Democrats, took command.
On June 15, the Potemkin arrived at Odessa, where the crew hoped to get support from striking workers. At 6 A.M., the body of Vakulenchuk was brought to the Odessa Steps, a staircase that connected the port and the city. By 10 A.M., some five thousand Odessans gathered there in support of the sailors. The gathering was peaceful throughout the day, but toward evening there was rioting, looting, and arson throughout the harbor front. By 9:30 P.M., loyal troops occupied strategic posts in the port and started firing into the crowd.
On June 16, authorities allowed the burial of Vakulenchuk, but refused sailors’ demand for amnesty. That day, the Potemkin shelled Odessa with its six-inch guns. On June 17, mutiny broke out on the battleship Georgi Pobedonosets and other
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ships of the Black Sea Fleet. However, by June 19 this mutiny was put down.
On June 18 the Potemkin set out from Odessa to the Romanian port of Constanza, where sailors’ request for supplies was refused. The ship left the port the following day, but returned on June 25, after failing to secure supplies in Feodosia. The sailors surrendered the ship to Romanian authorities and were granted safe passage to the country’s western borders.
The Potemkin mutiny was a spontaneous event, which broke the plans by socialist organizations in the Black Sea Fleet for a more organized rebellion. However, it tapped into widespread disaffection on the part of the Russian people over their conditions during the reign of Nicholas II. The mutineers found sympathy among the people of Odessa. While the mutiny was crushed, it, together with other events in the 1905 Russian Revolution, provided an important impetus to constitutional reforms that marked the last years of the Russian Empire. See also: BLACK SEA FLEET; REVOLUTION OF 1905
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ascher, Abraham. (1988). The Revolution of 1905. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hough, Richard. (1961). The Potemkin Mutiny. New York: Pantheon Books. Matushenko, Afansky. (2002). “The Revolt on the Armoured Cruiser Potemkin.” «http://www.marxist .com/History/potemkin.html».
IGOR YEYKELIS
POTSDAM CONFERENCE
The Potsdam Conference was the last of the wartime summits among the Big Three allied leaders. It met from July 17 through August 2, 1945, in Potsdam, a historic suburb of Berlin. Representing the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain respectively were Harry Truman, Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill (who was replaced midway by Clement Atlee as a result of elections that brought Labor to power). Germany had surrendered in May; the war with Japan continued. The purpose of the Potsdam meeting was the implementation of the agreements reached at Yalta. The atmosphere at Potsdam was often acrimonious, presaging the imminent Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. In the months leading up to Potsdam, Stalin took an increasingly hard line on issues regarding Soviet control in Eastern Europe, provoking the new American president and the British prime minister to harden their own stance toward the Soviet leader.
Two issues were particularly contentious: Poland’s western boundaries with Germany and German reparations. When Soviet forces liberated Polish territory, Stalin, without consulting his allies, transferred to Polish administration all of the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse (western branch) Rivers. While Britain and the United States were prepared to compensate Poland for its territorial losses in the east, they were unwilling to agree to such a substantial land transfer made unilaterally. They would have preferred the Oder-Neisse (eastern branch) River boundary. The larger territory gave Poland the historic city of Breslau and the rich industrial area of Silesia. Reluctantly, the British and Americans accepted Stalin’s fait accompli, but with the proviso that the final boundary demarcation would be determined by a German peace treaty.
Reparations was another unresolved problem. The Soviet Union demanded a sum viewed by the Western powers as economically impossible. Abandoning the effort to agree on a specific sum, the conferees agreed to take reparations from each power’s zone of occupation. Stalin sought, with only limited success, additional German resources from the British and American zones. Agreements reached at Potsdam provided for: Transference of authority in Germany to the military commanders in their respective zones of occupation and to a four-power Allied Control Council for matters affecting Germany as a whole. Creation of a Council of Foreign Ministers to prepare peace treaties for Italy, Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, and Romania and ultimately Germany. Denazification, demilitarization, democratization, and decentralization of Germany. Transference of Koenigsberg and adjacent area to the Soviet Union.
Just prior to the conference, Truman was informed of the successful test of the atomic bomb in New Mexico. On July 24 he gave a brief account of the weapon to Stalin. Stalin reaffirmed his commitment to declare war on Japan in mid-August.
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While the conference was in session, the leaders of Britain, China, and the United States issued a proclamation offering Japan the choice between immediate unconditional surrender or destruction.
Though the facade of allied unity was affirmed in the final communiqu?, the Potsdam Conference marked the end of Europe’s wartime alliance. See also: TEHERAN CONFERENCE; WORLD WAR II; YALTA CONFERENCE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Feis, Herbert. (1960). Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gormly, James L. (1990). From Potsdam to the Cold War: Big Three Diplomacy, 1945-1947. Wilmington, DE: SR Books. McNeil, William H. (1953). America, Britain and Russia: Their Cooperation and Conflict, 1941-1946. London: Oxford University Press. Wheeler-Bennett, John W., and Nicholls, Anthony. (1972). The Semblance of Peace: The Political Settlement after the Second World War. London: Macmillan.
JOSEPH L. NOGEE
POZHARSKY, DMITRY MIKHAILOVICH
(1578-1642), military leader of the second national liberation army of 1611-1612.
Prince Dmitry Mikhailovich Pozharsky belonged to the Starodub princes, a relatively minor clan. He came to prominence as a military commander during the r
eign of Vasily Shuisky. While recovering from wounds sustained during service in the first national liberation army of 1611, Pozharsky was invited to lead the new militia, which was being organized by Kuzma Minin at Nizhny Novgorod. In March 1612 he led an army from Nizhny to Yaroslavl, where he remained for four months as head of a provisional government that made military and political preparations for the liberation of Moscow from the Poles. The capital was still besieged by Cossacks under Ivan Zarutsky, who supported the claim to the throne of tsarevich Ivan, the infant son of the Second False Dmitry and Marina Mniszech; others, including Prince Dmitry Trubetskoy, swore allegiance to a Third False Dmitry who had appeared in Pskov. Pozharsky himself, perhaps to neutralize the threat from the Swedes who had occupied Novgorod, seemed to favor the Swedish prince Charles Philip. Pozharsky left Yaroslavl only after Zarutsky and Trubetskoy had renounced their candidates for the throne. Following Zarutsky’s flight from the encampments surrounding Moscow, Pozharsky and Trubetskoy liberated the capital in October 1612 and headed the provisional government, which convened the Assembly of the Land that elected Michael Romanov as tsar in January 1613. Pozharsky was made a boyar on the day of Michael’s coronation, and he performed a number of relatively minor military and administrative roles during Michael’s reign. Along with Minin, Pozharsky was subsequently regarded as a national hero and served as a patriotic inspiration in later wars. See also: ASSEMBLY OF THE LAND; COSSACKS; MININ, KUZMA; ROMANOV, MIKHAIL FYODOROVICH; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dunning, Chester L. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Perrie, Maureen. (2002). Pretenders and Popular Monar-chism in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars of the Time of Troubles, paperback ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Skrynnikov, Ruslan G. (1988). The Time of Troubles: Russia in Crisis, 1604-1618, ed. and tr. Hugh F. Graham. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.
MAUREEN PERRIE
PRAVDA
Pravda (the name means “truth” in Russian) was first issued on May 5, 1912, in St. Petersburg by the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party. Its aim was to publicize labor activism and expose working conditions in Russian factories. The editors published many letters and articles from ordinary workers, their primary target audience at the time.
Pravda was a legal daily newspaper subject to postpublication censorship by the tsarist authorities. These authorities had the power to fine the paper, withdraw its publication license, confiscate a specific issue, or jail the editor. They closed the
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Nikolai Bukharin and Maria Ulyanova, sister of Lenin, at work at the Communist Party newspaper, Pravda. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS paper eight times in the first two years of its existence, and each time the Bolsheviks reopened it under another name (“Worker’s Truth,” etc.). In spite of police harassment the newspaper maintained an average circulation of about forty thousand in the period 1912 to 1914, probably a higher number than other socialist papers (but small compared to the commercial “penny newspapers”). About one-half of Pravda’s circulation was distributed in St. Petersburg. After the authorities closed the paper on July 21, 1914, it did not appear again until after the February Revolution of 1917.
Pravda reopened on March 5, 1917, and published continuously until closed down by Russian Republic president Boris Yeltsin on August 22, 1991. From December 1917 until the summer of 1928 the newspaper was run by editor in chief Nikolai Bukarin and Maria Ilichna Ulyanova, Lenin’s sister. When Bukharin broke with Josef Stalin over collectivization, Stalin used the Pravda party organization to undermine his authority. Bukharin and his supporters, including Ulyanova, were formally removed from the editorial staff in 1929. By 1933 the newspaper, now headed by Lev Mekhlis, was Stalin’s mouthpiece.
Throughout the Soviet era access to Pravda was a necessity for party members. The paper’s primary role was not to entertain, inform, or instruct the Soviet population as a whole, but to deliver Central Committee instructions and messages to Soviet communist cadres, foreign governments, and foreign communist parties. Thus, as party membership shifted, so did Pravda’s presentation. In response to the influx of young working-class men into the Party in the 1920s, for example, editors simplified the paper’s language and resorted to the sort of journalism that they believed would appeal to this audience-militant slogans, tales of
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heroic feats of production, and denunciation of class enemies.
Pravda also produced reports on popular moods. This practice began in the early 1920s as Bukharin and Ulianova played a leading role in organizing the worker and peasant correspondents’ movement in the Soviet republics. Workers and peasants (many of them Party activists) wrote into the newspaper with reports on daily life, often shaped by the editors’ instructions. Newspapers, including Pravda, received and processed millions of such letters throughout Soviet history. Editors published a few of these, forwarded some to prosecutorial organs, and used others to produce the summaries of popular moods, which were sent to Party leaders.
After the collapse of the USSR nationalist and communist journalists intermittently published a print newspaper and an online newspaper under the name Pravda. However, the new publications were not official organs of the revived Communist Party. See also: JOURNALISM; NEWSPAPERS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brooks, Jeffrey (2000). Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Culture from Revolution to Cold War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kenez, Peter (1985). The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lenoe, Matthew. (1998). “Agitation, Propaganda, and the ‘Stalinization’ of the Soviet Press, 1922-1930.” Pittsburgh, PA: Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1305. Roxburgh, Angus (1987). Pravda: Inside the Soviet News Machine. New York: George Brazillier.
MATTHEW E. LENOE
PREOBRAZHENSKY GUARDS
The Preobrazhensky Regiment and its slightly junior counterpart, the Semenovsky Life Guard Regiment, trace their histories to 1683, when Peter the Great as tsarevich created two “play regiments.” Named after villages near Moscow, the regiments initially consisted of Peter’s boyhood cronies and miscellaneous recruits who engaged in war games in and around the mock fortress of Pressburg. The regiments attained formal status in 1687, followed in 1700 by official appellation as Guards. More than guarantors of the tsar’s physical security, these regiments served as models for the emergence of a standing regular Russian army. With adjustments, Peter structured them on the pattern of European-style units that Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich had first introduced into Russian service. As they evolved, the guards became officer training schools for an assortment of gentry youths and foreigners who remained reliably close to the throne. In setting the example, the tsar himself advanced through the ranks of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, serving notably in 1709 as a battalion commander at Poltava. Non-military missions for guards officers and non-commissioned officers often extended to service as a kind of political police for the sovereign. By 1722, Peter’s guards (with cavalry) numbered about three thousand troops, and his Table of Ranks recognized their elite status by according their complement two-rank seniority over comparable grades in the regular army.
During the half-century after Peter’s death, a mixture of tradition, proximity to the throne, elite status, and gentry recruitment propelled the Preo-brazhensky Regiment into court politics. Every sovereign after Peter automatically became chief of the regiment; therefore, appearance of the ruler in its uniform symbolized authority, continuity, and mutual acceptance. Meanwhile, because Peter had made gentry service mandatory, noble families often registered their male children at birth on the regimental list, thus assuring early ascent through the junior grades before actual duty. In effect, the Guards became a bastion of gentry interests and
sentiment, and various parties at court eventually drew the Preobrazhensky Regiment into a series of palace intrigues and coups. Officers of the regiment played conspicuous roles in the palace coups of 1740 and 1741 that overthrew successive regents for the infant Ivan VI in final favor of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. Members of the regiment displayed an even higher profile during the coup of July 1762 that deposed Peter III in favor of his German-born wife, who became Empress Catherine II. She counted prominent supporters within the regiment, and she pointedly dressed as a Preo-brazhensky colonel during the campaign on the outskirts of the capital to arrest her husband. On re-entry into St. Petersburg, Catherine personally rode at the head of the regiment. Yet, whatever the level of guards’ participation in this and previous coups, there was never any genuine impulse to create an alternative military government; solicitous
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attention from the traditional monarchy seemed adequate recompense for guards’ conspiratorial complicity.
