Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  In spite of Allied promises not to change the country’s social structure, Romania’s fate was

  1293

  ROMANOVA, ANASTASIA

  sealed by an agreement between Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin, in which 90 percent of Romania’s territory was ceded to the Soviets. A Stalinist regime was established in the annexed territory, with Stalin’s prot?g?, Ana Pauker, placed in charge. The Treaty of Paris (1947) confirmed the cession of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to Russia and northern Dobrogea to Bulgaria. Northern Transylvania, which had been taken by Hitler and given to the Hungarians, was returned to Romania at the insistence of Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov. Romania faced severe economic and financial conditions as a result of war reparations claims made by the Soviets, and the country was never formally recognized for their ultimate support of the Allied cause during the final years of the war.

  With the forced abdication of King Michael in December 1947, the People’s Republic of Romania was initially organized upon the Soviet model. Agriculture was collectivized, industry nationalized, the language Slavicized, and the former ruling class exterminated in Soviet-run labor camps. In 1952, even before Stalin’s death, the secretary general of the Communist Party in Romania, Ghe-orghe Gheorghiu Dej, began purging those who were deemed to have been Stalinist supporters, and he attempted to construct a Romanian socialist state. The Polish and Hungarian crisis of 1956 and Nikita Krushchev’s denunciation of Stalin triggered Romania’s further disengagement from the Soviet bloc. Alhough cofounders of the Warsaw Pact and member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, Dej also sought admission to the United Nations and UNESCO; refused to be involved in the Soviet conflicts with the Chinese, Yugoslavs, or Albanians; retained good relations with Israel; vetoed Khruschev’s plans to make Romania an agricultural state; and, in 1958, eliminated the Soviet army of occupation.

  Dej’s successor, Nicolae Ceausescu, who came to office in 1965, created the Romanian Socialist Republic and added to the Presidency of the Council the title of President of the Republic, becoming the leading political official in the state. Although obligated to resume Romania’s alliance with the USSR, Ceausescu also established diplomatic relations with West Germany and strengthened contact with France and the United States by hosting Charles de Gaulle in 1968 and Richard Nixon in 1969. He also visited the Queen of England and reestablished trade relations with the West.

  During the Czech crisis of 1968, Ceausescu joined Tito in repealing Leonid Brezhnev’s doctrine of the right of intervention and refused to allow Romania’s participation in military exercises with members of the Warsaw Pact. He went so far as to question Russia’s right to occupy Bessarabia. Ceausescu also ignored Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to soften his dictatorial rule over Romania, despite the fall of the Berlin Wall and that event’s implications for the fate of the now crumbling Soviet Union. This precipitated a bloody revolution and, ultimately, Ceausescu’s death. Post-communist Romania has made considerable progress with democratization and, with Moscow’s consent, joined NATO in 2002. See also: CRIMEAN WAR; PARIS, CONGRESS AND TREATY OF 1856; WORLD WAR I; WORLD WAR II

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Florescu, Radu R. (1997). The Struggle against Russia in the Romanian Principalities. IASI: Center for Romanian Studies. Moseley, M. P. E. (1934). Russian Diplomacy and the Opening of the Eastern Question in 1838 and 1839. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

  RADU R. FLORESCU

  ROMANOVA, ANASTASIA

  (d. 1560), first wife of Russia’s first official tsar, Ivan IV, and dynastic link between the Rurikid and the Romanov dynasties.

  Anastasia Romanova, daughter of a lesser bo-yar, Roman Yuriev-Zakharin-Koshkin, and his wife, Yuliania Fyodorovna, became Ivan IV’s bride after an officially proclaimed bride-show. After her wedding in November 1547, Romanova had difficulty producing royal offspring. Her three daughters died in infancy, and her eldest son, Dmitry Ivanovich, died as a baby in a mysterious accident during a pilgrimage by his parents in 1553. Her second son, Ivan Ivanovich (born in 1554), suffered an untimely end in 1581 at the hands of his own father. The incident caused the transfer of power after Ivan IV’s death to Romanova’s last son, the sickly Fyodor Ivanovich (1557-1598), whose childlessness set the stage for the Time of Troubles and the emergence of the Romanov dynasty. After a prolonged illness, Romanova passed away in August 1560 and was buried in the Monastery of the Ascension in the Kremlin, much mourned by the common people of Moscow.

  1294

  ROMANOV DYNASTY

  Scholars generally emphasize Romanova’s positive influence on Ivan IV’s disposition, her pious and charitable nature, and her dynastic significance as the great-aunt of Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov. This view, however, is largely based on later sources and thus reflects more the tsarina’s image than her actual person. Recent research on Romanova’s pilgrimages to holy sites and embroideries from her workshop suggests that Romanova actively shaped her role as royal mother by promoting the cults of Russian saints who were credited with the ability to promote royal fertility and to protect royal children from harm. See also: IVAN IV; ROMANOV DYNASTY; RURIKID DYNASTY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Kaiser, Daniel. (1987). “Symbol and Ritual in the Marriages of Ivan IV.” Russian History 14(1-4):247-262. 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

  ROMANOVA, ANASTASIA NIKOLAYEVNA

  (1901-c. 1918), youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra Fedorovna.

  Anastasia Nikolayevna’s place in history derives less from her life than from the legend that she somehow survived her family’s execution. The mythology surrounding her and the imperial family remains popular in twentieth-century folklore.

  Following the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917, members of the royal family were imprisoned, first at the Alexander Palace outside Petrograd and later in the Siberian city of Tobolsk. Finally Nicholas and his immediate family were confined to the Ipatiev House in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk). According to official accounts, local communist forces executed Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children, and four retainers during the night of July 16, 1918. Because no corpses were immediately located, numerous individuals emerged claiming to be this or that Romanov who had miraculously survived the massacre. Most claimants were quickly dismissed as frauds, but one “Anastasia” seemed to have better credentials than the others.

  The first reports of this “Anastasia” came in 1920 from an insane asylum in Berlin, where a young woman was taken following an attempt to drown herself in a canal. Anna Anderson, as she came to be known, was far from the beautiful lost princess reunited with her grandmother, as Hollywood retold the story. Instead, she was badly scarred, both mentally and physically, and spent the remainder of her life rotating among a small group of patrons, eventually marrying historian John Ma-hanan and settling in Charlottesville, VA, where she remained until her death on February 12, 1984.

  No senior surviving member of the Romanov family ever formally recognized Anderson as being Anastasia. Instead, her supporters came largely from surviving members of the royal court, many of whom were suspected of using Anderson for financial gain. Anderson did file a claim against tsarist bank accounts held in a German bank. Extensive evidence was offered on her behalf, from eyewitness testimony to photographic comparisons. The case lasted from 1938 to 1970, and eventually the German Supreme Court ruled that her claim could neither be proved nor disproved.

  Interest in Anderson’s case revived in 1991, following the discovery of the Romanov remains outside Yekaterinburg. Two skeletons were unaccounted for, one daughter and the son. Anderson’s body had been cremated, but hospital pathology specimens were later discovered and submitted for DNA testing in 1994. Although the results indicated that Anderson was Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker, Anderson’s most die-hard supporters still refused to
accept the results. The Yekaterinburg remains were interned in the Cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg on July 17, 1998, eighty years after the execution. See also: NICHOLAS II; ROMANOV DYNASTY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Kurth, Peter. (1983). Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson. Boston: Little, Brown. Massie, Robert K. (1995). The Romanovs: The Final Chapter. New York: Random House.

  ANN E. ROBERTSON

  ROMANOV DYNASTY

  Ruling family of Russia from 1613 to 1917; before that, a prominent clan of boyars in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries.

  1295

  ROMANOV DYNASTY

  The origins of the Romanovs are obscured by later (post-1613) foundation myths, though it appears certain enough that the founder of the clan was Andrei Ivanovich Kobyla, who was already a boyar in the middle of the fourteenth century when he appears for the first time in historical sources. Because of the way the line of descent from Andrei Kobyla divided and subdivided over time, there has often been confusion and misidentification of the last names of this clan before it became the ruling dynasty in 1613 under the name Romanov. Andrei Kobyla’s five known sons were the progenitors of numerous boyar and lesser servitor clans, including the Zherebtsovs, Lodygins, Boborykins, and others. The Romanovs-as well as the Bezzubtsevs and the Sheremetev boyar clan-descend from the youngest known son of Andrei Kobyla, Fyodor, who had the nickname “Koshka.” The Koshkin line, as it would become known, would itself subdivide into several separate clans, including the Kolychevs and the Lyatskys. The Romanovs, however, derive from Fyodor Koshka’s grandson Zakhary, a boyar (appointed no later than 1433) who died sometime between 1453 and 1460. Zakhary lent his name to his branch of the clan, which became known as Za-kharins. Zakhary’s two sons, Yakov and Yuri, were both prominent boyars in the last quarter of the fifteenth century (and for Yakov, into the first decade of the sixteenth). Yuri’s branch of the family took the name Yuriev. Yuri’s son, Roman, from whom the later Russian dynasty derives its name, was not a boyar, but he is mentioned prominently in service registers for the second quarter of the sixteenth century. Roman’s son Nikita was one of the most important boyars of his time-serving as an okolnichy (from 1559) and later as a boyar (from 1565) for Ivan the Terrible. Nikita served in the Livonian War, occupied prominent ceremonial roles in various court functions including royal weddings and embassies, and, on the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584, took a leading part in a kind of regency council convened in the early days of Ivan’s successor, Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich. Nikita retired to a monastery in 1585 as the monk Nifont. Roman Yuriev’s daughter Anastasia married Tsar Ivan the Terrible in 1547, a union that propelled the Yuriev clan to a central place of power and privilege in the court and probably accounts for the numerous and rapid promotions to boyar rank of many of Nikita’s and Anastasia’s relatives in the Yuriev clan and other related clans. It was also during this time that the Yurievs established marriage ties with many of the other boyar clans at court, solidifying their political position through kinship-based alliances. With the marriage of Anastasia to Ivan, the Yuriev branch of the line of descent from Andrei Kobyla came firmly and finally to be known as the Romanovs.

  The transformation of the Romanovs from a boyar clan to a ruling dynasty occurred only after no fewer than fifteen years of civil war and interregnum popularly called the Time of Troubles. During the reign of Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich (1584-1598), Nikita’s son Fyodor became a powerful boyar; and inasmuch as he was Tsar Fyodor’s first cousin (Tsar Fyodor’s mother was Anastasia Yurieva, Fy-odor Nikitich’s aunt), he had been considered by some to be a good candidate to succeed to the throne of the childless tsar. The election to the throne fell in 1598 on Boris Godunov, however, and by 1600, the new tsar began systematically to exile or forcibly tonsure members of the Romanov clan. Scattered to distant locations in the north and east, far from Moscow, the disgrace of the Romanovs took its toll. In 1600 Fyodor Nikitich was tonsured a monk under the name Filaret and was exiled to the remote Antoniev-Siidkii monastery on the Dvina River. His brothers suffered exile and imprisonment as well: Alexander was sent to Usolye-Luda, where he died shortly thereafter; Mikhail was sent to Nyrob, where he likewise died in confinement; Vasily was sent first to Yarensk then to Pe-lym, dying in 1602; Ivan was also sent to Pelym, but would be released after Tsar Boris’s death in 1605. Fyodor Nikitich’s (now Filaret’s) sisters and their husbands also suffered exile, imprisonment, and forced tonsurings. Romanov fortunes turned only in 1605 when Tsar Boris died suddenly and the first False Dmitry assumed the throne. The status of the clan fluctuated over the next few years as the throne was occupied first by Vasily Shuisky, the “Boyar Tsar,” then by the second False Dmitry, who elevated Filaret to the rank of patriarch.

  When finally an Assembly of the Land (Zem-sky sobor) was summoned in 1613 to decide the question of the succession, numerous candidates were considered. Foreigners (like the son of the king of Poland or the younger brother of the king of Sweden) were quickly ruled out, though they had their advocates in the Assembly. Focus then turned to domestic candidates, and then in turn to Mikhail Romanov, the sixteen-year-old son of Filaret, who was elected tsar. Debate among historians has since ensued about the reasons for this seemingly unlikely choice. Some point to the kinship ties of the Romanovs with the old dynasty through Anasta-sia’s marriage to Ivan the Terrible, or to the gen1296

  ROMANOV DYNASTY

  A 1914 portrait of Nicholas II, his wife, and children. Clockwise from left: Olga, Maria, Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, Anastasia, Tsarevich Alexei, and Tatiana. POPPERFOTO/ARCHIVE PHOTOS/HULTON/ARCHIVE. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION. eral popularity of the Yuriev clan during Ivan’s violent reign. Others point to the fact that Mikhail Romanov was only sixteen and, according to some, of limited intelligence, indecisive, and sickly, and therefore presumably easily manipulated. Still others point to the Cossacks who surged into the Assembly of the Land during their deliberations and all but demanded that Mikhail be made tsar, evidently because of the close ties between the boy’s father (Filaret) and the Cossack supporters of the second False Dmitry. A final and persuasive argument for the selection of Mikhail Romanov in 1613 may well be the fact that, in the previous generation, the Yuriev-Romanov clan had forged numerous marriage ties with many of the other boyar clans at court and therefore may have been seen by the largest number of boyars attending the Assembly of the Land as a candidate “of their own.”

  At the time of Mikhail Romanov’s election, his father Filaret was a prisoner in Poland and was released only in 1619. On his return, father and son ruled together-Filaret being confirmed as patriarch of Moscow and All Rus and given the title “Great Sovereign.” Mikhail married twice, in 1624 to Maria Dolgorukova (who promptly died) and to Yevdokia Streshneva in 1626. Their son Alexei succeeded his father in 1645 and presided over a particularly turbulent and eventful time-the writing of the Great Law Code (Ulozhenie), the Church Old Believer Schism, the Polish Wars, and the slow insinuation of Western culture into court life inside the Kremlin. Alexei married twice, to Maria Miloslavskaya (in 1648) and to Natalia Naryshk-ina (in 1671). His first marriage produced no fewer than thirteen known children, including a daughter, Sophia, who reigned as regent from 1682 to 1689, and Tsar Ivan V (r. 1682-1696). His second marriage gave Tsar Alexei a son, Peter I (“the Great”), who ruled as co-tsar with his half brother Ivan V until the latter’s death in 1696, then as sole tsar until his own death in 1725.

  Succession by right of male primogeniture had been a long-established if never a legally formulated custom in Muscovy from no later than the fifteenth

  1297

  ROMANOV DYNASTY

  century onward. The first law of succession ever formally promulgated was on February 5, 1722, when Peter the Great decreed that it was the right of the ruler to pick his successor from among the members of the ruling family without regard for primogeniture or even the custom of exclusive male succession. By this point, the dynasty had few members. Peter’s son by his
first marriage (to Yev-dokia Lopukhina), Alexei, was executed by Peter in 1718 for treason, leaving only a grandson, Peter (the future Peter II). Peter the Great also had two daughters (Anna and the future Empress Elizabeth) by his second wife, Marfa Skavronska, better known as Catherine I. Peter had half sisters-the daughters of Ivan V, his co-tsar, including the future Empress Anna-but even so, the dynasty consisted of no more than a handful of people. Perhaps ironically, Peter failed to pick a successor before his death, but his entourage selected his widow Catherine as the new ruler over the obvious rights of Peter’s grandson. This grandson, Peter II, took the throne next, on Catherine’s death in 1727, but he died in 1730; and with his passing, the male line of the Romanov dynasty expired. Succession continued through Ivan V’s daughter, Anna, who had married Karl-Friedrich of Holstein-Gottorp. Their son, Karl-Peter, succeeded to the throne in 1762 as Peter III. Except for the brief titular reign of the infant Ivan VI (1740-1741)-the great grandson of Ivan V who was deposed by the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna (ruled 1741-1762)-all Romanov rulers from 1762 onward are properly speaking of the family of Holstein-Gottorp, though the convention in Russia always was to use the style “House of Romanov.”