by James Millar
Two of the Simonov Monastery’s leading figures became patriarchs of the Russian Church. Job, who was appointed abbot of Simonov in 1571, was the first patriarch in Russia (1589). In 1642, Joseph, the archimandrite of the Simonov Monastery, was elected to the patriarchy.
During the War of 1812 the Simonov was looted by the Napoleonic armies when they entered a burning Moscow. However, it quickly regained its material well-being. Much of its income was derived from visitors, pilgrims, and donations. Land holdings outside Moscow generated income from the production and milling of grain. In these prac1398 tices, it typified many other Russian monasteries. Of the many famous people buried there, one of the better known is the nineteenth-century writer Ivan Aksakov. See also: CAVES MONASTERY; KIRILL-BELOOZERO MONASTERY; MONASTICISM; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; SERGIUS, ST.; TRINITY ST. SERGIUS MONASTERY
NICKOLAS LUPININ
SINODIK
The sinodik pravoslaviya corresponds to the synod-icon adopted at the council of the Greek Orthodox Church in 843 that condemned the iconoclasts. By the twelfth century, the term also came to mean “memorial book.”
The sinodik pravoslaviya contains the decisions of the seven ecumenical councils, the names of those under anathema, and a list of important persons who deserve “many years of life,” that is, to be remembered eternally. The text was read only once per year in the Orthodox rite, on the first Sunday of Lent. In addition to the Greek version, there are also more recent Georgian, Serbian, and Bulgarian versions. The Russian Primary Chronicle mentions a sinodik under the year 1108, but the Greek form was probably not replaced by a Russian translation until 1274. Starting around the end of the fourteenth century, the names of fallen warriors were also entered in the sinodik pravoslaviya. In 1763, the metropolitan of Rostov, Arseny Matsey-vich, read aloud the anathema in the sinodik pravoslaviya on those who touch church property as a protest against Catherine II’s planned secularization of church landholdings.
The word sinodik took on a second meaning in twelfth-century Novgorod and later in Muscovite Russia. In this second sense it refers to a memorial book, corresponding to the Greek Orthodox diptych, containing the names of dead persons who are to be commemorated in the daily liturgical cycle. Around the end of the fifteenth century, when the number of donors began to grow rapidly, Muscovite monasteries developed a system not found in other Orthodox countries: Donors’ names were entered in books organized around the size of the donation. So-called eternal sinodiki listed the names of donors who had given relatively modest gifts and were read throughout the day. “Daily lists”
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
SINYAVSKY-DANIEL TRIAL
(the names vary) commemorated the donors of more substantial gifts and were read only at certain fixed points in the liturgical cycle. This segmented system flourished until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, and quite often in the seventeenth, sinodiki included “introductions” that detailed the importance and value of care for the deceased. Many Russian monasteries and churches still maintain sinodiki. See also: DONATION BOOKS; ORTHODOXY; PRIMARY CHRONICLE; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
LUDWIG STEINDORFF
SINOPE, BATTLE OF
The battle of Sinope, fought on November 30, 1853, was the last major naval action between sailing ship fleets. The battle resulted from worsening relations between the Ottoman and Russian empires. For naval historians, the battle is notable for the first broad use of shell guns, marking the end of the use of smooth bore cannon that had previously been the primary naval weapon for nearly three centuries. In the spring of 1853 Tsar Nicholas’s emissary Admiral Alexander Menshikov broke off negotiations with the Ottoman Empire. Menshikov opposed plans for a preemptive strike against the Bosporus, and the Russian Black Sea Fleet subsequently prepared for a defensive war within the Black Sea. The Ottoman government ordered a squadron of Vice Admiral Osman Pasha to the Caucasus coast in early November 1853 in support of Ottoman ground forces, but bad weather forced the ships to seek shelter at Sinope. A Russian squadron under Vice Admiral Pavel Stepanovich Nakhimov on his flagship Imperatritsa Maria-60 decided to attack. Following a war council, Nakhimov ordered his officers in an evocation of Nelson at Trafalgar: “I grant you the authority to act according to your own best judgment, but I enjoin each to do his duty.” With six ships of the line and two frigates with 720 guns, Nakhimov attacked an Ottoman squadron of seven frigates, three corvettes, two steamers, two brigs, and two transports mounting 510 guns under shore defenses with 38 pieces of artillery. The shell guns proved lethal in Nakhimov’s two-columned assault; the only Ottoman vessel that managed to escape the carnage was the steam frigate Taif-20 carrying the British
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
officer Slade, who brought news of the defeat to Constantinople. Ottoman losses totaled 15 ships and 3,000 men with the Russians taking 200 prisoners; on the Russian side, 37 were killed and 235 wounded. Osman Pasha, wounded in the engagement, was taken prisoner. See also: MENSHIKOV, ALEXANDER DANILOVICH; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; NAKHIMOV, PAVEL STEPANOVICH; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS; TURKEY, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Daly, Robert Welter. (1958). “Russia’s Maritime Past,” In The Soviet Navy, ed. Malcolm George Saunders. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
JOHN C. K. DALY SINO-SOVIET SPLIT See CHINA, RELATIONS WITH.
SINYAVSKY-DANIEL TRIAL
In September 1965, Soviet authorities arrested a well-known literary critic, Andrei Sinyavsky, and a relatively obscure translator, Yuly Daniel, and charged them with slandering the Soviet system in works published abroad pseudonymously. The works in question were often satirical but in no sense anti-Soviet; in his essay On Socialist Realism, for example, Sinyavsky (or “Abram Tertz”) advocated nothing more radical than a return to the adventurous style of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Nonetheless, following a January 1966 press campaign of vicious denunciations, the pair was convicted at a show trial in February. Sinyavsky received seven years, and Daniel five, in a strict-regime labor camp.
Conservative elements in the Leonid Brezhnev-Alexei Kosygin regime, determined to crack down on the intellectual experimentation of the Nikita Khrushchev years, presumably intended the affair as the signal of a stricter cultural line and as a warning to intellectuals to keep quiet. But the signal was ambiguous-the conservatives were not yet firmly in control-and the warning ineffectual. Sinyavsky and Daniel refused to play their assigned roles, pleading not guilty and defending themselves in court vigorously. A public Moscow protest against the arrests in December 1965 was followed by a petition campaign, an increase in open protest and samizdat, and, ultimately, the appearance of the Chronicle of Current Events in April 1968. In fact, the Sinyavsky-Daniel case is widely viewed as a
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SIXTH PARTY CONGRESS
spark that galvanized the dissident movement by raising the specter of a return to Stalinism and by convincing many intellectuals that it was futile to work within the system. See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; MAYAKOVSKY, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH; SHOW TRIALS; THAW, THE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hayward, Max, ed. and tr. (1967). On Trial: The Soviet State versus “Abram Tertz” and “Nikolai Arzhak,” revised and enlarged edition. New York and Evanston, IL: Harper amp; Row.
JONATHAN D. WALLACE
SIXTH PARTY CONGRESS See OCTOBER REVOLUTION.
SKAZ
A literary term originally defined as “orientation toward oral speech” in prose fiction, can also indicate a type of oral folk narrative.
Boris Eikhenbaum first described skaz, derived from the verb skazat (“to tell”), in a pair of 1918 articles as a kind of “oral” narration that included unmediated or improvisational aspects. Formalists and other critics developed this analytical tool during the 1920s, including Yuri Tynianov (1921), Viktor Vinogradov (1926), and Mikhail Bakhtin (1929). Tynianov analyzed the effect of skaz, arguing that it enabled the reader to enter the text, but did not really clarify the mec
hanism through which it worked.
Vinogradov and Bakhtin helped refine the concept of skaz as a stylistic device. Vinogradov developed the idea that skaz comprised a series of signals that aroused in the reader a sense of speech produced by utterance, not writing. Bakhtin placed skaz within his own larger theory of narration, defining it as one kind of “double-voiced utterance” (the others being stylization and parody) in which two distinct voices-the author’s speech and another’s speech-were oriented toward one another within the same level of conceptual authority. The effect of oral speech is, therefore, not the primary characteristic of skaz for Bakhtin.
Since the 1920s skaz has been identified both as a distinctive characteristic of Russian literature (in the work of Gogol, Zamiatin, Zoshchenko, and
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others) and as a narrative device present in most world literatures. Since the beginning of the 1980s and the rediscovery of Bakhtin’s work, his concept of skaz has served as a starting point for further debate: for instance, over whether the relationship between author and narrator is mutual and interactive. See also: BYLINA; LESKOV, NIKOLAI SEMENOVICH; BAKHTIN, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH; GOGOL, NIKOLAI VASI-LIEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hodgson, Peter. (1983). “More on the Matter of Skaz: The Formalist Model.” In From Los Angeles to Kiev: Papers on the Occasion of the Ninth International Congress of Slavists, Kiev, September, 1983, ed. Vladimir Markov and Dean S. Worth. Columbus, OH: Slav-ica Publishers. Terras, Victor, ed. (1985). Handbook of Russian Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Titunik, I. R. (1977). “The Problem of Skaz (Critique and Theory).” In Papers in Slavic Philology, ed. Benjamin A. Stolz. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications.
ELIZABETH JONES HEMENWAY
SKOBELEV, MIKHAIL DMITRIYEVICH
(1843-1882), famous officer in the Russian imperial army active in the conquest of Turkestan and in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1888.
Born to a Russian noble family, Mikhail Sko-belev became a member of the officer corps of the Russian army. In 1869, having received an education in military schools, he joined Russian forces completing the conquest of Central Asia.
He first distinguished himself in military operations in the Fergana Valley (now in Uzbekistan), where in 1875 anti-Russian rebel forces had overthrown the khan of Kokand (allied with Russia). He quickly formulated his own strategy of colonial war, summed up in the guidelines “slaughter the enemy until resistance ends,” then “cease slaughter and be kind and humane to the defeated enemy.” He destroyed several rebel towns during his campaign, leaving thousands of dead among the rebels and the civilian population. When leaders of the revolt surrendered, he recommended to the tsar that they be pardoned. As a reward for his military triumph, he was promoted to the rank of major general and, at the age of thirty, became the military ruler of the Fergana Valley.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
SKRYPNYK, MYKOLA OLEKSYOVYCH
When the Russian Empire declared war on the Ottoman Empire in 1877, Skobelev joined the Russian armies moving against the Turks. His bravery and military skill earned him the command of one of the Russian armies in the campaign. He led his troops in the capture of the key Ottoman-fortified city along the western Black Sea coast protecting Constantinople. His desire for rapid victory resulted in heavy losses among his troops, but his exploits preserved his image in Russia as the triumphant “White General.”
Skobelev’s final military triumph came in another war in Central Asia. Faced with the revolt of nomadic Turkmen tribes, the tsarist government sent him in 1880 to force the nomads to submit to imperial rule. He was successful, applying once again his brutal strategy of colonial warfare. In early 1881 his troops stormed the major Turkmen fortress of Geok-Tepe (now in Turkmenistan), slaughtering half of the defenders as well as many civilians. His reputation among Russian imperialists was at its peak. However, the new tsar, Alexander III, was suspicious of his desire for fame and his political ambitions. Following Skobelev’s triumph in Turkestan, the government sent him to a remote military post in western Russia. There he began a public campaign to restore his reputation, but died shortly afterward of a heart attack. See also: CENTRAL ASIA; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Meyer, Karl, and Brysac, Shareen. (1999). Tournament of Shadows: The Race for Empire and the Great Game in Central Asia. New York: Counterpoint Press. Rich, David. (1998). The Tsar’s Colonels: Professionalism, Strategy, and Subversion in Late Imperial Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
DANIEL BROWER
SKRYPNYK, MYKOLA OLEKSYOVYCH
(1872-1933), Ukrainian Bolshevik leader and advocate of ukrainization.
Born in Ukraine, Mykola Skrypnyk joined the revolutionary movement in 1901 as a student at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, from which he never graduated. Until 1917 he lived the
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
life of a professional revolutionary, organizing the Bolshevik underground in Saratov, Odessa, Kiev, and Moscow. During this period, Skrypnyk was arrested fifteen times and repeatedly exiled to Siberia, and spent more than a year in voluntary exile in Switzerland. During the October Revolution he was a prominent member of the Military Revolutionary Committee in Petrograd. In 1918, on the suggestion of Vladimir Lenin, Skrypnyk moved to Ukraine to counterbalance the Russian chauvinism of the local Bolshevik leadership. He served there as people’s commissar of labor and later as head of the People’s Secretariat, the first Soviet government in Ukraine, and in April 1918 he was instrumental in the creation of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine. After the Bolsheviks were forced to withdraw from Ukraine by the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Skrypnyk joined the Cheka, but he returned to Ukraine when the Civil War ended.
As people’s commissar of justice of the Ukrainian Republic (1922-1927), Skrypnyk helped to build a Soviet Ukrainian state and ensure its rights within the Soviet Union. Starting in 1923, when the Kremlin introduced the policy of nativization, he actively promoted the implementation of its Ukrainian incarnation or ukrainization. During his tenure as people’s commissar of education (1927-1933), he was active in ukrainizing the republic’s press, publishing, education, and culture. Although Skrypnyk remained an orthodox Bolshevik and an enemy of Ukrainian nationalism, he stood out as the Ukrainian leader who was most vocal in his opposition to Moscow’s centralism and great-power chauvinism. He also distinguished himself by engineering the standardization of Ukrainian orthography- the so-called Skrypnykivka system (1927)-and founding the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism (1928). In 1933, when Josef Stalin condemned his ukrainization policies as nationalistic, Skrypnyk committed suicide. He was rehabilitated in the mid-1950s, and in post-Soviet Ukraine he is respected as a defender of Ukrainian culture and sovereignty. See also: BOLSHEVISM; NATIONALISM IN THE SOVIET UNION; UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mace, James. (1983). Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
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SLAVERY
Martin, Terry. (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
SERHY YEKELCHYK
SLAVERY
Slavery in one form or another has been a central feature of East Slavic and Russian history from at least the very beginning almost to the present day. Its presence and its offshoots have lent a particular coloration to Russian civilization that can be found in few other places.
One common social science definition of slavery is that the slave is an outsider; namely, that he or she is of a different race, religion, caste, or tribe than that of his or her owner. In cases where that was not true, slaveholders resorted to fiction, which made the slave (usually an infant abandoned by its parents) appear to be an outsider. Or a slave might be a lawbreaker who by his crime had placed himself outside of soci
ety: one who, in Orlando Patterson’s phrase, was “socially dead.” This could include debtors, who were regarded as thieves because they could not or would not repay borrowed money or goods, or criminals who could not pay fines.
Russia included such outsiders as slaves, but (along with Korea) also enslaved its own people. This was unusual and made Russian slavery distinctive. Because of its atypical nature, some people have questioned whether Russian rabstvo and especially kholopstvo were in fact “really slavery.” However, a thoughtful examination indicates that all such individuals in fact were slaves. All varieties of slaves were treated equally under the law.
From the dawn of Russian history, as everywhere else on Earth at the time, slaves were typically products of warfare-East Slavic tribes fighting with each other or with neighboring Turkic, Iranian, Finnic, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish, Germanic, and other peoples. Such victims were true outsiders who could be either enslaved in Rus itself or taken abroad into the international slave trade. Slaves were mentioned in every Russian law code. As the earliest such code, the Russkaia pravda, grew in size from its earliest redaction compiled in about 1016 to its full size, the so-called Expanded Pravda a special section on slavery was added. It enumerated some of the avenues into slavery, such as sale of prior slaves, self-sale, becoming a steward, and marriage of a free person to a slave. An
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indentured laborer could be sold into slavery as recompense for crimes. As in all slave systems, the owner was responsible for a slave’s offenses, much as an owner is responsible for his dog. The heyday of medieval Russian slavery followed the collapse of political unity after 1132, and each of the dozen or so independent principalities waged civil war against each other as well as the steppe nomads and neighboring sedentary peoples to the west. As always-until probably the 1880s-Russia was a labor-short country, so those desiring extra hands often enslaved them. Much of twelfth-century farming was done by slaves living in barracks.
