Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  After briefly taking part in liberal politics, Shatalin established and chaired the Reforma Foundation. His twilight years were overshadowed by the Audit Chamber’s inquiry into a mutually profitable relationship between a bank affiliated with his foundation and government managers of social security funds. See also: FIVE-HUNDRED-DAY PLAN

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Hough, Jerry F. (1997). Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-1991. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Shatalin, S.; Petrakov, N.; Aleksashenko, S.; Yavlinsky, G.; and Fedorov, B. (1991). 500 Days: Transition to the Market. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

  DMITRI GLINSKI

  SHCHARANSKY, ANATOLY NIKOLAYEVICH

  (b. 1948), prominent Jewish dissident.

  Anatoly Shcharansky was arrested on March 15, 1977, after being denied permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union. A twenty-nine-year1380 old computer expert at the time, Shcharansky had been a leading figure in the Helsinki Group, the oldest human rights organization in the Soviet Union, founded by Yuri F. Orlov on May 12, 1976, for the purpose of upholding the USSR’s responsibility to implement the Helsinki commitments. The Helsinki Agreement had been promulgated a year earlier (August 1975), its text published in full in both Pravda and Izvestia. The formation of the Moscow Helsinki Group sparked the creation of several human rights organizations throughout the Soviet Union. Shcharansky was a founding member of the group, along with Ye-lena Bonner (Andrei Sakharov’s wife), Anatoly Marchenko, Ludmilla M. Alexeyeva, and others. In the first three years of the group’s work, nearly all of its members were arrested or sentenced to psychiatric hospitalization as a way to repress their activities.

  Shcharansky’s arrest was part of a Soviet campaign against dissidents begun in February 1977. Others were arrested before him: Alexander Gins-burg (February 4), Ukrainian dissidents Mikola Rudenko and Olexy Tikhy (February 7), and Yuri Orlov (February 10). In June 1977, Shcharansky was charged with treason, specifically with accepting CIA funds to create dissension in the Soviet Union. After a perfunctory trial, he was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He was finally released in February 1986, when he and four other prisoners were exchanged for four Soviet spies who had been held in the West. Shcharansky finally emigrated to Israel, where he first changed his name to Natan Shcharan before settling on Natan Shcharansky. He is active in Israeli politics. See also: JEWS; REFUSENIKS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Gilbert, Martin. (1986). Shcharansky, Hero of Our Time. New York: Viking. Goldberg, Paul. (1988). The Final Act: The Dramatic, Revealing Story of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group. New York: Morrow. Shcharansky, Anatoly; Bonner, Elena; and Alekseeva, Li-udmilla. (1986). The Tenth Year of The Watch. New York: Ellsworth. Shcharansky, Anatoly, and Hoffman, Stefani. (1998). Fear No Evil: The Classic Memoir of One Man’s Triumph Over a Police State. New York: Public Affairs.

  JOHANNA GRANVILLE

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  SHCHERBATOV, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH

  SHCHEPKIN, MIKHAIL SEMEONOVICH

  (1788-1863), an actor from the serf estate who revolutionized acting styles with his realistic portrayals.

  Born in Ukraine into a family owned by Count G. S. Volkenshtein, the young Mikhail Shchepkin began performing in the private theater maintained on the estate. Indeed, many nobles used their serfs’ skills for entertainment, and Shchepkin represented an important source of talent for the professional stage. Especially gifted, by 1800 he was allowed to participate in amateur productions in nearby Kursk. Though still a serf, he joined several provincial touring companies as he rose to stardom. Finally, in 1822, one of his noble fans, Prince N. G. Repin, persuaded his owner to free him. Later that year Shchepkin made his debut in Moscow, and in 1824 he began his legendary rule at the imperial Maly Theater, where he dominated in comedy and drama, including William Shakespeare’s corpus, for the next forty years. From his theatrical base in Moscow, he also toured the provinces and appeared on St. Petersburg’s imperial stage.

  Shchepkin’s artistic significance lies in his influence over the transformation of acting styles, developing multi-dimensional characters instead of simulating the single stereotype. His breakthrough came in 1830, in his characterization of the fatuous Muscovite nobleman Famusov in Alexander Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit. Six years later, Shchepkin’s rendition of Khlestakov, the petty bureaucrat mistakenly identified by corrupt provincial officials as one of the tsar’s investigators in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General, assured the move toward realism.

  His great talent, and popularity on stage, gave him access to Russia’s highest literary circles, where he helped novelist Ivan Turgenev write for the stage. Ironically, though, he surrendered his place at center stage when he refused to modify his style to accommodate the next level of realism, plays written in colloquialisms by Russia’s historically most popular playwright Alexander Ostrovsky from the 1860s. See also: THEATER

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Senelick, Laurence. (1984). Serf Actor: The Life and Art of Mikhail Shchepkin. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

  LOUISE MCREYNOLDS

  SHCHERBATOV, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH

  (1733-1790), historian, publicist, and government servitor.

  Mikhail Mikhailovich Shcherbatov was a scion of one of Russia’s oldest families of the nobility. His father-in-law, Prince Ivan Shcherbatov (1696-1761), was Russian minister to the court of St. James from 1739 to 1742, and from 1743 to1746. Upon retirement from military service in 1762 following Peter III’s Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility, Mkhail Shcherbatov went on to serve as a deputy to Catherine II’s Legislative Commission (1766-1767), and then as Russia’s official historiographer, beginning in 1768.

  Shcherbatov is perhaps best known for his publication On the Corruption of Morals in Russia (O Povrezhdenii Nravov v Rossii), in which he criticizes Peter the Great’s introduction of the Table of Ranks (1722). He argued that the rank system reduced the prestige of the old nobility and allowed the rise of a mediocre and materialistic class of servitors. “By the regulations of the military service, which Peter the Great had newly introduced,” he wrote, “the peasants began with their masters at the same stage as soldiers of the rank and file: It was not uncommon for the peasants, by the law of seniority, to reach the grade of officer long before their masters, whom, as their inferiors, they frequently beat with sticks. Noble families were so scattered in the service that often one did not come again in contact with his relatives during his whole lifetime.” Shcherbatov believed in the innate inequality of human beings and genetic superiority of the noble aristocracy. He lamented the decline of the pre-Petrine nobility’s influence during the eighteenth century, because he did not believe one could achieve the genetic superiority of the latter by meritorious service alone. While he did advocate a constitutional form of government, he urged that Russia be ruled by a hereditary monarch, who would be constrained only by a constitution and checked only by a Senate composed of the old nobility with extensive financial, judicial, and executive powers. See also: KULTURNOST; TABLE OF RANKS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Cross, A. G., and Smith, G. S., eds. (1994). Literature, Lives, and Legality in Catherine’s Russia. Cotgrave, Nottingham, UK: Astra Press.

  JOHANNA GRANVILLE

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  1381

  SHEVARDNADZE, EDUARD AMVROSIEVICH

  SHEVARDNADZE, EDUARD AMVROSIEVICH

  (b. 1928), foreign minister coincident with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

  Eduard Shevardhadze was minister of internal affairs of the Georgian Republic from 1965 to 1972, first secretary of the republic from 1972 to 1985, foreign minister of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1990 and again in 1991, and president of the Republic of Georgia from 1992 onward.

  Until 1985, Eduard Shevardnadze’s career had been entirely within the Soviet republic of Georgia. The character traits he brought with him from Georgia would serve him well during his years as foreign minis
ter. He was a man of considerable viAs foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze implemented Gorbachev’s “new thinking” in international relations. ARCHIVE

  PHOTOS, INC. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

  sion, with a strong sense of purpose. He was also a superb politician-opportunistic, flexible, pragmatic, and ruthless. He was a natural actor, as every great politician must be, and he was a man of action, a problem-solver impatient with obstacles, and a brutal political infighter. Perhaps most important, he was a Georgian with cosmopolitan leanings, not a Russian who distrusted the West.

  Shevardnadze used the available instruments of power to advance his career and further his policy objectives in Georgia at the outset of his career. He repressed dissidents and removed real and potential opponents. An outstanding Soviet apparatchik, he acted the role of sycophant to the leaders of the Soviet Union, extolling the virtues of those in a position to help him. But he brought to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow a commitment to radical change, a willingness to implement reform in an unorthodox manner, and the political skills and strength to accomplish his goals.

  When Shevardnadze was appointed foreign minister of the Soviet Union in 1985, it was widely assumed that he would be little more than a mouthpiece for Mikhail Gorbachev, who would conduct his own foreign policy. In turning to a regional party leader with no foreign-policy background, however, Gorbachev was relying on personal instinct and political acumen. As party leader in Georgia during the 1970s and early 1980s, Shevardnadze battled corruption and introduced the most liberal political and economic reforms of any Soviet regional leader. Gorbachev’s long association with Shevardnadze was rooted in shared frustration with the inefficiencies and corruption of the communist system, and he believed that his friend had the understanding and political skills necessary to formulate and implement a new foreign policy.

  Shevardnadze played a critical role in conceptualizing and implementing the Soviet Union’s dramatic about-face during the 1980s. Considered the moral force behind “new political thinking” in the former Soviet Union, Shevardnadze was the point man in the struggle to undermine the forces of inertia at home and to end Moscow’s isolation abroad. Two U.S. secretaries of state, George Shultz and James Baker, have credited him with convincing them that Moscow was committed to serious negotiations with the United States. Each became a proponent of reconciliation in administrations that were intensely anti-Soviet; each concluded that the history of Soviet-U.S. relations and the end of the Cold War would have been far different had it not been for Shevardnadze.

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  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  SHEVCHENKO, TARAS GREGOREVICH

  Commitment to the nonuse of force became Shevardnadze’s most important contribution to the end of communism and the Cold War, permitting the virtually nonviolent demise of the Soviet empire and the Soviet Union itself. Shevardnadze was more adamant on this issue than was Gorbachev; he opposed the use of force in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1989 and in the Baltics in 1990. Shevardnadze recognized from his Georgian experience that the use of force against non-Russian minorities would be counterproductive, and particularly opposed Gorbachev’s reliance on the military. Shevardnadze resigned as foreign minister because of Gorbachev’s turn to the political right wing and, during his resignation speech in December 1990, he predicted that the use of force would undermine perestroika. The violence in Lithuania and Latvia three weeks later, condoned by Gorbachev, proved him right.

  When Shevardnadze returned to Georgia, he initially ruled by emergency decree, without the legitimacy of law and with the support of corrupt and brutal paramilitary forces. Finally elected Georgia’s second president in 1995 (and reelected in 2000), he embarked on another campaign to rid Georgia of corruption, reform the economy, and restore political stability.

  In 1992 Shevardnadze returned to an independent Georgia that was far worse off than when he had departed for Moscow nearly seven years earlier. His predecessor, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, an ultra-nationalist who was both inept and corrupt, used his office to restrict civil liberties and to accumulate great personal wealth. Civil strife was destroying the country, and the economy was in ruins. As the head of the state, Shevardnadze was forced to pursue a humiliating course, taking Georgia into the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States in 1993 and requesting a Russian military presence in western Georgia to counter secessionist forces in Abkhazia. Just as he had been accused of favoring Western interests when he was Soviet foreign minister, now he was charged with betraying Georgian interests as chairman of his ancestral homeland.

  Shevardnadze survived at least two well-organized assassination attempts in 1995 and 1998 as well as bloody conflicts with ethnic separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The Russian wars in nearby Chechnya led to increased pressure on his government from Moscow and a greater Russian presence along Georgia’s borders. Increased Russian involvement in the Caucasus, instability in Central Asia, and weak neighboring

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  governments in Armenia and Azerbaijan added to the pressures on Shevardnadze. Numerous scandals within the Georgian military weakened national security and gave Russian forces greater opportunities to penetrate the Georgian military. Increased U.S. involvement in Central Asia because of the war against terrorism, the Russian interest in the Caucasus because of the war in Chechnya, and the overall political and military weakness of the states of the Caucasus had the potential to contribute to Shevardnadze’s vulnerability.

  Shevardnadze, who could have retired from public life in 1991 as an honored statesman, engaged in yet another battle, this time to keep his country from self-destruction. The opposition of high-ranking Russian general officers, who blamed Shevardnadze for the demilitarization and breakup of the Soviet Union, were likely to contribute to the discontinuity of his government in Tbilisi. Unlike Gorbachev, who turned to writing books and delivering lectures, Shevardnadze chose a different path-one that nearly cost him his life on more than one occasion. With its breathtakingly beautiful Black Sea coast, mountains, ancient culture, rich agricultural land, and energetic people, Georgia could certainly emerge as a peaceful and prosperous modern state, and Shevardnadze’s first priority was to advance the country toward that goal. See also: GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS; MOVEMENT FOR DEMOCRATIC REFORMS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Ekedahl, Carolyn McGiffert, and Goodman, Melvin A. (2001). The Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze. Washington, DC: Brassey’s. Palazchenko, Pavel. (1997). My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze: The Memoir of a Soviet Interpreter. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Shevardnadze, Eduard. (1991). The Future Belongs to Freedom. New York: The Free Press. Shevardnadze, Eduard. (1991). My Choice: In Defense of Democracy and Freedom. Moscow: Novosti.

  MELVIN GOODMAN

  SHEVCHENKO, TARAS GREGOREVICH

  (1814-1861), Ukraine’s national poet.

  Born a serf, Taras Shevchenko was orphaned early in life. His owner noticed his artistic ability

  1383

  SHLYAPNIKOV, ALEXANDER GAVRILOVICH

  while he was serving as a houseboy and apprenticed him to an icon and mural painter. In 1838 some Russian and Ukrainian intellectuals in St. Petersburg organized a lottery and used the proceeds to buy his freedom. Afterwards, Shevchenko studied under Karl Briullov at the Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1845. While still a student, he published a short collection of romantic poems, Kobzar (The Bard, 1840), that established his reputation as a poet. His early folklorism and idealization of the Cossacks soon gave way to poetry of social critique that prophesied rebellion. Shevchenko’s poems of the 1840s denounced serfdom and the Russian autocracy and celebrated Slavic brotherhood. In 1847 he was arrested in Kiev on the charge of belonging to the secret Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood. A search by the gendarmes discovered his satirical poems, including an unflattering portrayal of Nicholas I and his wife, and in consequence the tsar sentenced Shevchenko to military service in Central Asia, adding a special prohibition on
writing and painting. Following his release in 1857, Shevchenko was not permitted to reside in Ukraine. He settled in St. Petersburg, where he died in 1861.

  Shevchenko was a realist artist of note. Even during his lifetime, his contribution to the development of modern Ukrainian culture and national consciousness earned him the reputation of Ukraine’s “national bard.” His sophisticated poetical works transformed folk idioms into a modern literary product, while his vision of popular justice and democracy influenced generations of Ukrainian activists. After Shevchenko’s death, Ukrainian patriots transferred his remains to Chernecha Hill near Kaniv, in Ukraine, which immediately became a place of pilgrimage. The cult of Shevchenko continued to grow in Ukraine during the twentieth century, for patriots viewed him as a symbol of national culture and statehood. In the eyes of the communists, however, Shevchenko was a symbol of social liberation and friendship with Russia. In post-Soviet Ukraine Shevchenko is the most revered figure in the pantheon of the nation’s “founding fathers.” See also: CYRIL AND METHODIUS SOCIETY; NATIONALISM IN THE SOVIET UNION; NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE; UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Grabowicz, George G. (1982). The Poet as Mythmaker: A Study of Symbolic Meaning in Taras ?evcenko. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

  1384

  Shevchenko, Taras. (1964). Poetical Works, trans. C. H. Andrusyshen and Watson Kirkconnell. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Zaitsev, Pavlo. (1988). Taras Shevchenko: A Life. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.