Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  Childbirth practices reflect traditional ideas. Women stay in the hospital for at least a week after a birth, during which time fathers are allowed to see mother and baby only briefly. Infants used to be swaddled at birth and continue to be bundled tightly, especially when venturing outside. Many customary beliefs about medical or supernatural dangers surround pregnancy, birthing, and new babies.

  Academic standards are high, and students are well trained in world history, foreign languages, music, mathematics, and science. Although the figures have gradually dropped since the Soviet years, more than 90 percent of the population completes secondary education, and around 12 percent go on for higher education. The literacy rate is one of the world’s highest. Post-secondary education confers social prestige and is more and more essential for economic success.

  RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND PRACTICES

  Most Russians identify themselves as Orthodox Christians. Not all are active church members, but observance of major holidays is increasing. The state has returned thousands of churches, icons, and religious objects appropriated during the Soviet period to local religious communities. Orthodox practice hinges on the emotive experience of liturgy and the veneration of icons, and the faithful light candles, pray, and bow before sacred images of the Virgin Mary and the saints. Rural houses feature a special corner where the family’s icon hangs, and many apartments have an icon shelf. Religious practices were proscribed during the Soviet era but continued anyway.

  Pre-Christian practices and beliefs have persisted over a millennium of Orthodoxy. Traditional beliefs about forest and house spirits, the evil eye, and metaphysical healing are found everywhere- and are especially strong in rural areas. Certain prohibitions stem from them; for example, evil intentions are attracted by bragging about good fortune or health, and can be cured only by metaphysical intervention of some kind.

  Folk medicine is highly developed. Herbal remedies are used for everyday maladies. Professional practitioners advertise their services for treating serious illnesses and life problems. Homeopathy, the application of leeches, mineral baths, light therapy, and other treatments are popular. Physicians may also prescribe herbal teas, tinctures, and plasters.

  Proper treatment and remembrance of the dead is important. The dead are prevented from staying among the living by covering mirrors with black cloth, laying out the body in ways that help usher out the spirit, and accompanying the deceased from home to church and from church to cemetery in elaborate processions. In the church or hall where the body is displayed, mourners circle the open coffin counterclockwise and kiss the body or put flowers on it. After burial, mourners gather to share vodka and food while remembering the deceased with stories and anecdotes. The soul remains on earth for forty days, when a second gathering is held to bid it farewell as it departs for heaven. The anniversary of a death is memorialized every year;

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  some people travel long distances to visit the graves of their loved ones.

  CALENDRICAL RITUAL

  Holidays fill the calendar. Some are Orthodox or pre-Christian, some mark historical events, some are secular, and a few, like Valentine’s Day, are post-Soviet imports. March 8, International Women’s Day, is a legal holiday. Men bring flowers to the women in their lives and congratulate female friends, coworkers, and relatives. May Day, commemorating international labor solidarity, heralds the coming of spring. Victory Day on May 9 celebrates the Soviet capture of Berlin and the end of World War II in Europe. This holiday is sacred to older people, who gather to remember family, friends, and comrades lost in the war. Russia Day, June 12, marks independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 with parades and fireworks. October Revolution Day, November 7, is celebrated mostly by communists nostalgic for Soviet power. New Year’s Eve is the most lavish secular holiday. Grandfather Frost and the Snow Maiden leave gifts under a decorated New Year’s Tree, and people gather for song, feasting, vodka, and champagne. The party may last all night. The observance of Christmas and Easter and other Orthodox holidays has grown since the end of Soviet religious repression.

  FOOD

  Bead and potatoes are the basic everyday foods. Cabbage, carrots, and beets are staple vegetables; onions and garlic are used liberally. Russians generally love meat. Sausage, salami, pork, beef, mutton, chicken, and dried or salted fish are widely available and inexpensive.

  Breakfast is a quick snack of coffee or tea with bread and sausage or cheese. Lunch is a hot meal, with soup, potatoes, macaroni, rice or buckwheat kasha, ground meat cutlets, and peas or grated cabbage (or, for business people, a quick meal in one of the increasing number of fast-food caf?s). A later supper may consist of boiled potatoes, soured cabbage, and bread or simply bread and sausage or cheese. There is a huge array of cakes, pies, and chocolates.

  Russian cuisine features many dairy products, such as tvorog, a local version of cottage cheese, and many hard cheeses and fermented milk products. These items can be purchased from large shops or farmers’ markets or made at home. In provincial towns, fresh milk is sold from trucks, although bottles and cartons of pasteurized milk are available everywhere. Russians are great tea drinkers.

  Fruits are widely cultivated in home gardens. Fruits and berries are made into preserves, compotes, cordials, and concentrates for the winter months. Mushroom picking is an art, and many people salt, dry, or pickle them. Cabbage, cucumbers, garlic, and tomatoes are salted or pickled. The chronic shortages of the Soviet era led many people to produce food for themselves. The impoverishment of the post-socialist era means that a significant portion of the population continues to depend on their own produce. Some estimates hold that 80 percent of the vegetables consumed in Russia are grown in small family plots.

  Coffee has grown in popularity and is often served thick and strong. Although wine, beer, cognac, and champagne are popular, vodka reigns among alcoholic beverages.

  Ceremonial occasions highlight food customs. Communal feasting marks birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, the achievement of a goal, important purchases, and major holidays. Tables are laden with salads, appetizers, sausage and cheese, and pickled foods, followed by meat and potatoes, and meat or cabbage pies. Vodka and wine are drunk throughout the meal, which may continue for many hours. Toasting is elaborate and can be sentimental, humorous, poetic, ribald, or reverential. Vodka is always drunk straight, accompanied by a pickled or salty food.

  A growing number of people observe Lenten fasts during which they consume no meat, butter, eggs, or vodka. Easter provides an opportunity for a fast-breaking celebration with special foods.

  EVERYDAY ETIQUETTE

  Language rules play a significant part in good manners. When addressing elders, except for parents and grandparents, persons of higher status, strangers, and acquaintances, people use the second-person plural pronoun. The informal second-person singular is used only among friends, within the family, and among close coworkers of equal status. Addressing someone formally entails using the person’s full name and patronymic. Misuse of the informal mode is insulting.

  Table rituals are also important. Hosts and hostesses try to show unfailing generosity, and guests

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  must accept hospitality with a willingness to be served, pampered, and stuffed full of food and drink.

  Sitting on the floor or putting one’s shoes on a table is prohibited. Proper femininity requires that clothes be immaculately clean and pressed, grooming fastidious, and comportment elegant and reserved. By contrast, in crowds, on lines, and on public transport, active shoving and pushing are the norm. In Soviet times, demure, nonflashy dress was valued, but this norm has changed with the explosion of fashion and the growth of subcultural identity.

  The word uncultured is used by older people against family or strangers as a reprimand for inappropriate behavior. The public use of this reprimand diminished as the social status of elders fell after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and as aggressive behavior in t
he cities became a mark of the coolness of youth.

  CULTURAL SYMBOLS AND ARTS

  The cupolas of Moscow’s St. Basil’s Cathedral are a popular visual symbol of Russia both within the country and abroad. Photographs of St. Basil’s and many other churches and cathedrals adorn homes, offices, and media images.

  Bread symbolizes central aspects of the national self-image. It is the mark of hospitality, as in the ritual of khleb-sol (“bread and salt”), welcoming visitors with a round loaf with a salt cellar on top. In broader terms, bread is the symbol of life. Other foods are also cultural symbols: black caviar, which signifies luxury; mushrooms and berries, the gifts of forest and dacha; pancakes served before Lent; the potato, symbol of survival in hard times, and vodka, symbolizing camaraderie and mischief-making.

  Forest plants, animals, and objects are also important symbols. Birches conjure up the romance of the countryside; wolf, bear, and fox, are ubiquitous in folktales and modern cartoons; the peasant cottage signifies the intimate world of the past. Inside the cottage are other cultural symbols: the huge clay stove, the samovar, and the Orthodox icon in its corner. Although most Russians live in urban apartments, images of traditional rural life are still meaningful.

  Conversation is rich with metaphors and proverbs, summarizing a complex view of shared identity. Russians think of the soul (dusha) as an internal spiritual conjunction of heart, mind, and culture. Friendship depends on a meeting of souls, accomplished through shared suffering or joy-or by feasting and drinking. Soul is said to be one of the metaphysical mechanisms that unite Russians into a people (narod). Stemming from the ancient Slavic for “kin” and “birth,” and meaning “citizens of a nation,” “ethnic group,” or “crowd,” narod refers to the composite identity of the people through history and is often invoked by politicians. People speak in terms of belonging by “blood”; a person is thought of as having Russian blood, Jewish blood, Armenian blood, or some other ethnic blood, and culture is supposedly transmitted through the blood.

  Cultural symbols abound in folk art. Animal, bird, plant, solar, and goddess motifs, and a palette of reds and golden yellows with traces of black and green prevail in painted wooden objects and embroidered textiles. Soviet state studios kept many folk media alive, and the postsocialist period has seen independent craftspersons return to traditional mythological motifs. Folk art objects are popular and are found in homes everywhere.

  The end of Soviet power meant an explosive opening of Russia to the world, with all of the changes for better and worse that come with globalization. Popular culture in Russia has become characterized by the vibrant and fertile mixing of local and international styles in music, art, literature, and film. Obsessions with mafia criminals, the new wealthy (so-called New Russians), biznis-meny, and modern technology fill the media. Yet alongside this, indigenous artistic genres, shared symbols and values, and social practices hold their own and continue to shape the world of meaning and identity. See also: FEMINISM; FOLKLORE; MARRIAGE AND FAMILY LIFE; NATIONALISM IN THE ARTS; NATIONALITIES POLICY, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICY, TSARIST; NATION AND NATIONALITY; ORTHODOXY; PEASANTRY; SLAVOPHILES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam. (1992). Russian Traditional Culture: Religion, Gender, and Customary Law. Ar-monk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Billington, James H. (1970). The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. New York: Vintage Books. Boutenko, Irene A., and Razlogov, Kirill E., eds. (1997). Recent Social Trends in Russia, 1960-1995. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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  FEDERATED SOCIALIST REPUBLIC

  Boym, Svetlana. (1994). Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dunn, Stephen P., and Dunn, Ethel. (1988). The Peasants of Central Russia. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Hilton, Alison. (1995). Russian Folk Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hubbs, Joanna. (1988). Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ivanits, Linda. (1989). Russian Folk Belief. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Kingston-Mann, Esther, and Mixter, Timothy, eds. (1991). Peasant Economy, Culture and Politics of European Russia, 1800-1921. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Laitin, David D. (1998). Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ledeneva, Alena V. (1998). Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Millar, James R., and Wolchik, Sharon L., eds. (1994). The Social Legacy of Communism. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Pesmen, Dale. (2000). Russia and Soul: An Exploration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pilkington, Hilary. (1998). Migration, Displacement, and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia. London: Routledge. Ries, Nancy. (1997). Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rzhevsky, Nicholas, ed. (1998). The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Shalin, Dmitri N., ed. (1996). Russian Culture at the Crossroads: Paradoxes of Post-Communist Consciousness. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sokolov, Yuri M. (1971). Russian Folklore, tr. Catherine Ruth Smith. Detroit: Folklore Associates.

  NANCY RIES

  RUSSIAN SOVIET FEDERATED SOCIALIST REPUBLIC

  The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, or RSFSR, formed on November 7, 1917, was one of the four original republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) when the latter was founded by treaty in December 1922. The RSFSR’s establishment was later confirmed in the 1924 constitution. The other three were Ukraine, Belorussia (now called Belarus), and Transcaucasia (divided in 1940 into Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia). Even after ten more republics were added, for a total of fifteen republics, the RSFSR remained the largest, with more than half the population and three-quarters of the USSR’s territory (6,591,000 square miles). Moscow was the capital of both the RSFSR and the USSR as a whole. Situated in Eastern Europe and North Asia, the RSFSR was surrounded on the east, north, and northwest by the Pacific, Arctic, and Atlantic Oceans. It had frontiers in the northwest with Norway and Finland, in the west with Poland and the three Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), and in the south with China and Outer Mongolia and the Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Ukraine. In the new Soviet Union, which geographically replaced the old Russian Empire, the name Russia was not officially used. Lenin and other Bolshevik authorities intended to blend the national and the international to recognize each nationality by granting autonomy to national groups, while binding these groups together in a higher union and allowing new groups to enter regardless of historic frontiers. In 1922 the expectation of world revolution was still alive. Thus, the founding of the USSR-and the RSFSR within it-was a decisive step toward uniting the workers of all countries into one World Soviet Socialist Republic.

  Although Lenin supported national self-determination as a force to undermine the tsarist empire, he adopted federalism rather late, as a response to Ukrainian and Georgian attempts to establish truly independent republics. The Red Army crushed these attempts in 1920-1921, but such use of brute force and the specter of Great Russian chauvinism troubled Lenin. He and others pressed for the federalization not only of the sovereign republics within the USSR, but also the federalization of the RSFSR. By 1960 the RSFSR consisted of fifteen “autonomous soviet socialist republics” (ASSRs), six territories (krai), forty-nine regions (oblast), six autonomous oblasts, and ten national districts (okrug). The federal structure undoubtedly gave some dignity, self-respect, and sense of equal cooperation to many of the numerous nationalities.

  In the late 1980s, partly due to the perestroika, glasnost, and new thinking (novomyshlenie) policies of the incumbent general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet republics-including and espe1327

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  cially the RSFSR-began to challenge the legislative authority of the Soviet Communist Party and the “Mosco
w center.” By October 1990, fourteen republics had passed declarations of either independence or sovereignty over USSR laws. The RSFSR’s declaration of sovereignty and the rising popularity of Boris Yeltsin (elected chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR in May 1990 and then president of the RSFSR in June 1991) were key factors in prompting Gorbachev to attempt to replace the original 1922 union treaty with a new document giving the republics more power. This in turn prompted hardliners in the Kremlin to stage a coup in August 1991. When it failed, Yeltsin’s power and influence eclipsed Gorbachev’s. Yeltsin convened with leaders of Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan in Alma Ata in December 1991 to declare the nullification of the 1922 union treaty and announce the official extinction of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev publicly confirmed the latter on December 25, 1991. The RSFSR is now called the Russian Federation. See also: RUSSIAN FEDERATION; UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Fitzsimmons, Thomas, ed. (1974). RSFSR, Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Gilbert, Martin. (1993). Atlas of Russian History, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Hosking, Geoffrey. (1993). The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sakwa, Richard. (2002). Russian Politics and Society, 3rd ed. New York: Routledge.