Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  Born into a family of a poor Russian Orthodox clergyman, Speransky, called by one Russian historian a “self-made man,” won the attention of the tsar and rose to become a count. He was considered brilliant and well-read in the study of European governmental structures, becoming in effect Alexander’s unofficial prime minister. Working in secret (on the tsar’s orders), he drew up a number of reforms. His idea, which the tsar evidently did not wholly endorse, was to retain a strong monarchy but reform it so that it would be based strictly on law and legal procedures of the type found in some European monarchies of the time.

  Speransky’s reform plans did not closely resemble, say, the English or French governmental

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  systems. Yet while Speransky could probably not be considered a liberal reformer on West European terms, by Russian standards his reformism bordered on the radical. This made Speransky extremely unpopular with the tsar’s court, causing the tsar to keep such plans under wraps lest they unduly alienate his court.

  In 1809 and 1812, Speransky drew up the draft of a Russian constitution that bore some resemblance to those of West European monarchies. In one of his projects Speransky even proposed separation of the powers of legislature (in the Duma), judiciary, and the governmental administration. Yet all three were to branch out from the crown. Suffrage would be based on property, at least in the beginning. Election of the Duma would be indirect and necessitate a cautious, four-stage electoral process. Speransky also supported a program for future abolition of serfdom in Russia, reform that he viewed as crucial for any serious top-to-bottom governmental change.

  Historians note that certain measures enacted in 1810-1811 brought “fundamental change to the executive departments of government.” Personal responsibility, it is noted, was to be imposed on ministers, while the functions of executive departments were precisely delimited. Unwarranted interference with legislative and judicial functions would be eliminated. Comprehensive rules were actually enacted for the administration of the ministries.

  Although Speransky’s efforts to reform the antiquated Russian court system failed, his administrative reforms overall modernized the whole bureaucratic machine. These structures remained in effect until the Bolshevik coup d’?tat, or October Revolution, of late 1917.

  After serving as the tsar’s close adviser for some five years, Speransky left St. Petersburg as the appointed Governor-General of the Siberian region. In that post he continued to author reform plans. Some of these were adopted and changed the governmental structure of that large administrative area. But it was in the period of his service as the tsar’s adviser that Speransky made his name in the annals of Russian history, especially as recounted by the famous early nineteenth-century Russian historian, Nikolai M. Karamzin.

  In 1821 Speransky returned to the Russian capital to become a founder of the Siberian Committee for Russian Affairs Beyond the Urals. See also: ALEXANDER I; WESTERNIZERS

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  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Raeff, Marc. (1956). Siberia and the Reform of 1822. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Raeff, Marc. (1957). Michael Speransky, Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772-1839. The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. (1963). A History of Russia. New York: Oxford University Press.

  ALBERT L. WEEKS

  SPIRIDONOVA, MARIA ALEXANDROVNA

  (1884-1941), Socialist Revolutionary terrorist and Left Socialist Revolutionary leader who spent most of her life in prison or exile because of her popular appeal as a revolutionary heroine.

  Maria Spiridonova, daughter of a non-hereditary noble in Tambov Province, became a public symbol of heroic martyrdom during the first Russian revolution of 1905-1907. In January 1906 she shot provincial councilor G. N. Luzhenovsky at the Borisoglebsk Railroad Station, carrying out the death sentence that the Tambov Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) had passed on Luzhenovsky for his cruel suppression of peasant unrest in the district. Spiridonova’s case excited national interest, thus distinguishing her from the many other SR terrorists throughout the empire. A letter Spiridonova wrote from prison was published in a liberal newspaper and debated widely in the national press because it described her torture at the hands of police officials, hinting as well at sexual abuse. Liberal newspapers in particular waxed eloquent about the brutalities inflicted on this beautiful and chaste young woman of the Russian upper classes who had killed a sadistic bureaucrat.

  In March 1906, however, a court-martial sentenced Spiridonova to hanging, then commuted her sentence to life imprisonment, the usual practice in cases of females convicted of political crimes until mid-1906. Eleven years of incarceration in the Nerchinsk penal complex in Siberia followed, during which Spiridonova suffered from depression, nervous prostration, and frequent flareups of tuberculosis, her chronic illness. The Provisional Government’s amnesty of all political prisoners shortly after the February Revolution allowed Spiridonova to return to European Russia in the spring of 1917. Here she was welcomed, given her reputation as heroine and martyr, into the highest level of revolutionary politics in Petrograd and Moscow.

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  SPIRITUAL ELDERS

  Maria Spiridonova endorsed violence for revolutionary goals and was a leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. BROWN BROTHERS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

  As a leader of the Left SR Party, Spiridonova employed the aura of her martyrdom, along with her personal charisma and oratorical skills, to sway peasants, workers, and soldiers against the Provisional Government and to popularize the October Revolution. While she did not hold an official post in the first Soviet government, a Bolshevik-Left SR coalition, she was elected chairperson of the Peasant Section of the Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) of the second, third, and fourth Soviet Congresses. Indeed it was her lifelong concern for the peasants and their welfare that ultimately turned Spiridonova against the Bolsheviks.

  Spiridonova had been an early supporter of Vladimir Lenin’s push to sign a separate peace with Germany, however punitive, because the Russian population was opposed to continuing the war. She adhered to this position despite her party’s objections to the “shameful” Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and withdrawal from the government in protest in March 1918. But when Russian concessions to Germany led to a food supply crisis that the Bolsheviks attempted to resolve with stringent grain-procurement measures in May, Spiridonova repudiated the treaty along with Bolshevik policy. She took a leading role in planning the Left SRs’ assassination of the German ambassador, an attempt to break the treaty and spark a popular uprising that was aborted by the Bolsheviks in July. With her party’s consequent banishment from Soviet politics, a second martyrdom began for Spiridonova. From 1920 on she lived either in prison, under house arrest, in Central Asian exile, or in sanatoria, up to her execution on Josef Stalin’s orders during the German invasion in 1941. See also: BREST-LITOVSK PEACE; LEFT SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; TERRORISM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Rabinowitch, Alexander. (1995). “Maria Spiridonova’s ‘Last Testament.’” Russian Review 54(3):424-446. Radkey, Oliver H. (1958). The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October 1917. New York: Columbia University Press. Radkey, Oliver H. (1963). The Sickle under the Hammer: The Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in the Early Months of Soviet Rule. New York: Columbia University Press. Steinberg, Isaac. (1935). Spiridonova: Revolutionary Terrorist. tr. and eds. Gwenda David and Eric Mos-bacher. London: Methuen.

  SALLY A. BONIECE

  SPIRITUAL ELDERS

  The spiritual elder (starets in Russian, geron in Greek) first appeared in the earliest days of monasticism in Asia Minor. Some elders had far-ranging reputations and attracted other monks who emulated their way of life, sought their counsel, and profited from their experience in acquiring the Holy Spirit. One of the signs of the Spirit is the gift of discernment (dio-rasis), which means, first, knowledge
of the mysteries of God, and, second, an understanding of the secrets of the heart. One who has the gift of discernment can undertake the spiritual direction of others. In the opinion of some Eastern writers, the same gift allows the Spirit to work miracles through the God-bearing practitioners of perfect prayer.

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  In fourteenth-century Byzantium the spiritual elder became central to the hesychast movement associated with Gregory Palamas (1296-1359). The hesychasts combined the practice of the so-called Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”) with the doctrine of theosis, or deification. Mount Athos became their chief center, and from there eldership spread to the Slavic world, producing Russia’s most famous medieval spiritual elder, Nil (Maikov, 1433-1508).

  After a long period of decline, eldership revived first in Ukraine and then in Russia through the efforts of several remarkable elders: Paisy (Velichkov-sky, 1722-1794), translator of the Philokalia, a basic collection of texts on pure prayer; Serafim (Mashnin, 1758-1833) of Sarov, Russia’s most important modern saint; and Amvrosy (Grenkov, 1812-1891), the hermit model for Elder Zosima in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. The popular impact of eldership is recorded in a remarkable anonymous work, The Pilgrim’s Tale. By 1900, the contemplative renaissance had reached its peak, although its creative power could still be seen in the lives of the parish priest John (Sergiev, 1829-1908) of Kronstadt and Mother Yekaterina (1850-1925) of Lesna, who worked among the poor. See also: BYZANTIUM, INFLUENCE OF; MONASTICISM; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Nichols, Robert L. (1985). “The Orthodox Elders (Startsy) of Imperial Russia.” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 1:1-30. Pentkovsky, Aleksei, ed. (1999). The Pilgrim’s Tale. New York: Paulist Press.

  ROBERT L. NICHOLS

  SPORTS POLICY

  The Soviet Olympic program, which would produce more medalists than any other country from 1952 through 1992, got off to a slow start internationally. Early Soviet contacts with foreign competitors were sparse, as the Soviet Union avoided international federations in the 1920s and stayed out of the Olympics, which it regarded as a means of turning workers’ attention from the class struggle and of preparing them for war. This was paralleled domestically by the banning of bourgeois from sports societies.

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  In a 1929 resolution, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union condemned what it called “record mania.” However, by the 1930s party slogans began to call for breaking bourgeois sports records.

  After World War II, the Soviet Union, perhaps because it now could compete with the capitalist countries on an even footing, began an effort to do so and thereby to demonstrate the virtues of its social system. Accordingly, beginning in 1946 Soviet sports associations joined international federations, including, in 1951, the International Olympic Committee.

  By 1946, weightlifter Grigory Novak became the first Soviet world champion in any sport, and in December 1948, the Central Committee explicitly stated as a goal the achievement of “world supremacy in the major sports in the immediate future.” At first the Soviet Union participated mainly in sports in which it had a good chance to win, but at the 1952 Summer Olympics Soviet athletes competed in all sports except field hockey. The Soviet Union first participated in the Winter Olympics in 1956.

  The Soviet drive to surpass the capitalist countries could not always override domestic political considerations. In the late 1940s, some athletes who had competed against foreigners before the war were arrested. Purges, including executions, occurred in 1950, some as part of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign carried out by the government. Similarly, many officials and athletes had been victims of the purges of the 1930s.

  REASONS FOR SOVIET SUCCESS

  One likely reason for the rise of Soviet sports was the urbanization of the country. As elsewhere, sport in the Soviet Union was predominantly urban and remained so even after the Soviet government began to push rural sport in 1948. As late as 1972, it was reported that only ten of the 507 Soviet athletes at the Munich Olympics belonged to rural sports clubs. This was partly a result of rural attitudes and partly because of lack of facilities.

  Another reason for Soviet successes was the relative lack of disapproval of women athletes, a phenomenon matched in Soviet society by the presence of women in heavy labor, both urban and rural. For example, Soviet domination of bilateral track and field competitions with the United States-the Soviets won eleven of thirteen from 1958 to 1975- was largely due to the superior athleticism of Soviet women, as they defeated the American women

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  SPORTS POLICY

  Soviet athletes perform as part of the celebrations for Moscow’s 800th birthday in 1947. © YEVGENY KHALDEI/CORBIS twelve times while Soviet men won only three times. Thus it was for practical as well as propaganda reasons that in 1956 and 1960 the Soviet Union proposed the expansion of the Olympic program, especially to include more women. On the other hand, just as sexism coexisted with celebration of women’s achievements in Soviet society, for a long time there was Soviet opposition to female participation in such allegedly harmful sports as soccer, judo, and karate.

  The Soviets also looked for special opportunities to excel, as when they made a concerted (and successful) effort to field an Olympic champion in team handball when that sport was introduced into the Olympics.

  TRAINING PROGRAMS

  Domestically there were a number of programs designed to encourage athletic talent. Perhaps the best known was GTO (Gotov k Trudu i Oborone-Prepared for Labor and Defense), which was established in 1931 and granted badges of various kinds to people in different age brackets who had achieved certain government-set athletic goals. As in other areas of Soviet life, quotas were set for the earning of badges, and also as in other areas of Soviet life, the setting of quotas often led to falsification of results, in this case leading to the granting of unearned awards.

  Stricter, no doubt, were the standards for the All-Union Sports Classification System established in 1949 with its five categories. At the top was Merited (Zasluzhenny) Master of Sport, followed by Master of Sport, then Classes A, B, and C. Masters of Sport were expected not only to achieve but also to serve as political and ideological examples and to pass on their experience to younger athletes.

  On a national scale, elite athletes were showcased in the Spartakiads. The first Spartakiad was held in 1928, to be revived on a regular basis in 1956, then held quadrennially from 1959.

  By 1963 the Soviet Union already had fifteen institutes of physical education and a much larger number of special secondary schools (tekhnikumy) as well as departments of physical education at pedagogical institutes and schools. There were also scientific research institutes in Moscow, Leningrad,

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  and Tiflis. Despite this, physical education instructors often complained that their subject was given insufficient emphasis in schools compared with academic subjects. Moreover, N. Norman Shneid-man has described physical education in Soviet schools as “generally poor,” contrasting this with the excellent boarding schools, extended day schools, regular sport schools, clubs, and organizations for the best school-age athletes. The special schools were introduced in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

  Graduate departments of the leading institutes of higher learning were responsible for developing methods of training and new equipment and wrote most of the physical education textbooks and reference books. In addition, many leaders and coaches of Soviet national teams had advanced degrees and authored scholarly publications.

  Under Khrushchev, the Soviet Union showed a renewed willingness to learn from the West after the extreme xenophobia of the late Stalin years. Sports was no exception here, as the Soviets invited the American Olympic weightlifting champion Tommy Kono to the Soviet Union in order to interview and film him. The Soviets accor
ded similar treatment to speed skater Eric Heiden in the late 1970s. In turn, the Soviet Union aided other countries, furthering propaganda goals in the process, by providing training, camps, facilities, and equipment to athletes from Africa and Asia, often for free. Soviet coaches also shared their expertise with other socialist countries, some of which surpassed the Soviet Union in certain sports and went on to send their own coaches to other countries. A notable example of this is Bulgaria in weightlifting.

  During glasnost there was considerable criticism of the regimentation of child athletes. Specialization and rigorous training occurred as early as age five, and former Olympic weightlifting champion and future member of Parliament Yuri Vlasov referred to “inhuman forms of professionalism” among twelve- and thirteen-year-old gymnasts, swimmers, and other athletes. Young teenagers often had to spend considerable time away from their families and had to choose a specialty at this young age. However, it should be noted that these phenomena also existed in the United States.

  GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIZATION OF ATHLETES

  Soviet government subsidization of elite athletes, notorious during the era of allegedly pure ama1450 teurism, occurred as early as the 1930s. By 1945 the Council of People’s Commissars established a system that paid cash bonuses for records. In May 1951, in their successful attempt to gain admission to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Soviet delegates to an IOC meeting falsely stated that bonuses were no longer paid.

  Many of the athletes were employed by the three largest sports organizations, Dinamo (Dynamo), run by the security forces; the Soviet Army; and Spartak, run by the trade unions. As in other countries, rival sport societies often lured athletes away from other societies. The best athletes were freed from military and other duties so that they could devote full time to their sports. The result was that Soviet athletes enjoyed a privileged lifestyle, at least while they were bringing glory to the state; after they retired, their standard of living often declined steeply. Of course it was forbidden for Soviets, whether journalists, athletes, or anyone else, to discuss any of this publicly.