by James Millar
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
YEVTUSHENKO, YEVGENY ALEXANDROVICH
Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin (also spelled Es-enin) born in 1895 in Konstantinovo, a farm village in the Riazan province, where he attended school. He came to prominence in Petrograd in 1915 as part of a group of “Peasant Poets.” His early work was noted for its elegiac portrayal of rural life and religious themes.
Yesenin was an ambivalent supporter of the October Revolution and the Soviet state. He tried to write on revolutionary themes, but his explorations of intimate relationships, urban street life, and the disappearance of old rural Russia were more popular. Yesenin was also known for his charisma, heavy drinking, and scandalous behavior. He was married three times, once to the American dancer Isadora Duncan. Yesenin committed suicide in December 1925, shortly after writing his final poem, “Good-bye, My Friend, Good-bye,” in his own blood.
Yesenin’s popularity continued after his death, as readers were drawn to his unconventional lifestyle and introspective poetry. This concerned the Communist leadership, who believed that Yesenin had both reflected and encouraged a growing sense of disaffection and “hooliganism” among Soviet youth. Numerous attacks on “Yeseninism” appeared in the Soviet press in 1926 and 1927. He was also criticized by the so-called proletarian writers for his anti-urban bias and individualism. As a result, official policy toward Yesenin’s works was ambivalent, and no new editions of his work were published between 1927 and 1948.
There was increased interest in Yesenin’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. His influence was evident on the rising generation of bard-singers, such as Vladimir Vysotsky, and also on the emerging “Village Prose” movement. One of Yesenin’s illegitimate sons, Alexander Volpin-Yesenin, was an early dissident and human rights advocate. Major collections of Esenin’s work include Radunitsa (1916), The Hooligan’s Confession (1921), and Selected Works (1922).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McVay, Gordon. (1976). Esenin: A Life. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. Slonim, Marc. (1977). Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems, 1917-1977, 2nd rev. ed. London and New York: Oxford University Press.
BRIAN KASSOF
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
YEVTUSHENKO, YEVGENY ALEXANDROVICH
(b. 1932), Russian poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, photographer, film actor; member of Congress of People’s Deputies, 1989-1991.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko was brought up in Siberia by his mother; when she moved with him to Moscow in 1944 she registered his date of birth as 1933. He published his first poem in 1949 and his first book in 1952. Yevtushenko studied at the Union of Writers’ training school, the Gorky Literary Institute, Moscow, in the early 1950s. He emerged after 1956 as one of the leading lights of the Thaw under Nikita Khrushchev, in many ways epitomizing its values and aspirations, and has remained a public figure ever since. His personal lyrics expressed a new and liberating sense of passionate individuality, and his poems on public themes called for and declared a fresh commitment to revolutionary idealism, in the spirit of Mayakovsky. His attitudes were underpinned by a frequently asserted commitment to the supremacy of Russia as a fountainhead of positive human values, notwithstanding Russia’s own dark history and the blandishments of Western civilization.
Yevtushenko declaimed his poetry in a histrionic manner that has reminded some Americans of U.S. fundamentalist preachers. In the early 1960s Yevtushenko became hugely popular in Russia, and his recitals (often in the company of his then wife Bella Akhmadulina, Andrei Voznesensky, and Bulat Okudzhava) attracted large crowds to the stadiums in which they were characteristically held. Yev-tushenko’s national and international reputation was established by two poems in particular, “Baby Yar” (published September 1961) and “The Heirs of Stalin” (published in Pravda, October 1962), which call respectively for unrelenting vigilance against anti-Semitism and the recurrence of Stalinism in Russia.
Yevtushenko soon began travelling abroad, a proclivity that has eventually taken him by his own count to ninety-five different countries. More than any other aspect of his activities, his freedom and frequency of travel led others to question the fundamental nature of his relationship with the Soviet authorities. His own protestations about how he was continually censored, rebuked, and restricted, and how he persistently used his position to plead for others in more parlous situations, have increasingly been interpreted as part and parcel of his conniving in being used as a licensed dissident
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YEZHOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH
whose fundamental adherence to the Soviet system and willingness to accommodate himself to it never wavered. His outstanding poetic mastery has never been in doubt, but beginning in the 1970s, the rise of poets who rejected Yevtushenko’s flamboyant style, public posturing, and acceptance of privilege led to a growing view of him as a figure of the hopelessly compromised past. Partly in response, Yevtushenko branched out into other areas of creativity. During the later 1980s he demonstratively led the way in publishing Russian poetry that had been censored during the Soviet period. Since the collapse of the USSR he has lived mainly in the United States, regularly traveling back to Russia for public appearances, and has continued to publish prolifically in a variety of genres and argue his case in media interviews. See also: MAYAKOVSKY, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH; OKUDZHAVA, BULAT SHALOVICH; THAW, THE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Yevtushenko, Yevgeny. (1991). The Collected Poems, 1952-1990, ed. Albert C. Todd. New York: Holt. Yevtushenko, Yevgeny. (1995). Don’t Die Before You’re Dead. New York: Random House.
GERALD SMITH
YEZHOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH
(1895-1940), USSR State Security chief (1936-1938); organizer of the Great Terror of 1937-1938.
Of humble origins and scant education, Nikolai Yezhov rose from tailor to industrial worker, soldier, and Red Army and Communist Party functionary. Since the early 1920s he was a provincial party secretary in Krasnokokshaisk (Mari province), Semipalatinsk, Orenburg, and Kzyl-Orda (Kazakh republic). In 1927 he was transferred to Moscow to become involved in personnel policy for the party Central Committee and the USSR People’s Commissariat of Agriculture. In 1930 he was promoted to chief of the Personnel Department of the Central Committee. In 1934 he was included in the Central Committee and appointed chief of the party Control Commission.
From 1935 on, as Secretary of the Central Committee, he was in the top echelon of the party. He was charged with supervising the USSR People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), or state
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security service, and its investigation of Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov’s murder, as well as with organizing major purge operations in the party in order to curb the party apparatus, which Josef Stalin deemed too independent. From 1936 on he organized major show trials against Stalin’s rivals in the party. On September 25, 1936, Stalin appointed him People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs. This was followed by a large purge operation in the NKVD involving the liquidation of his predecessor Genrikh Yagoda and his supporters, as well as mass arrests within the party.
On July 30, 1937, by order of Stalin and the Party Politburo, Yezhov issued NKVD Order 00447, “Concerning the Operation Aimed at the Subjecting to Repression of Former Kulaks, Criminals, and Other Anti-Soviet Elements.” The operation was to involve the arrest of almost 270,000 people, some 76,000 of whom were immediately to be shot. Their cases were to be considered by “troikas,” or bodies of the party chief, NKVD chief, and procurator of each USSR province, who were given quotas of arrests and executions. In return, the regional authorities requested even higher quotas, with the encouragement of the central leadership.
Another mass operation was directed against foreigners living in the USSR, especially those belonging to the nationalities of neighboring countries (e.g., Poles, Germans, Finns). The Great Terror was intended to liquidate elements thought insufficiently loyal, as well as alleged “spies.” All in all, from August 1937 through November 1938, more than 1.5 million peop
le were arrested for counterrevolutionary and other crimes against the state, and nearly 700,000 of them were shot; the rest were sent to Gulag concentration camps. By order of Yezhov, and with Yezhov personally participating, the prisoners were tortured in order to make them “confess” to crimes they had not committed; the use of torture had the approval of Stalin and the Politburo.
In April 1937, Yezhov was included in the leading five who in practice had taken over the leading role from the Politburo, and in October of that same year he was made a Politburo candidate member. In April 1938, the leadership of the People’s Commissariat of Water Transportation was added to his functions. But in fact, it was the beginning of his decline. In August, Stalin appointed Lavrenty Beria as his deputy and intended successor. After sharp criticism, on November 23, 1938, Yezhov resigned from his function as NKVD chief, though for the time being he stayed on as People’s Commissar of
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
YUDENICH, NIKOLAI NIKOLAYEVICH
Water Transportation. People close to him were arrested, and under these conditions his wife, Yevge-nia, committed suicide; Yezhov abandoned himself to even more drinking than he was accustomed to.
On April 10, 1939, he was arrested. He could not bear torture and during interrogation confessed everything: spying, wrecking, conspiring, terrorism, and sodomy (apparently, he had maintained frequent homosexual contacts). On February 2, 1940, he was tried behind closed doors and sentenced to death, to be shot the following night.
His fall was given almost no publicity, and during the ensuing months and years he was practically forgotten. Only since the 1990s have details about his life, death, and activities become known. In spite of this, during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s, he was brought up as nearly the only person responsible for the terror; the term Yezhovshchina, or the time of Yezhov, was brought into use. Some historians of the Stalin period indeed tend to stress Yezhov’s personal contribution to the terror, relating his dismissal to his over-zealousness. As a matter of fact, Stalin suspected him of disloyal conduct and of collecting evidence against prominent party people, including even Stalin himself. Others believe that he obediently executed Stalin’s instructions, and that Stalin dismissed him when he thought it expedient. See also: GULAG; PURGES, THE GREAT; STALIN, JOSEF VIS-SARIONOVICH; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conquest, Robert. (1990). The Great Terror: A Reassessment. London: Hutchinson. Getty, J. Arch, and Naumov, Oleg V. (1999). The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, tr. Benjamin Sher. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jansen, Marc, and Petrov, Nikita. (2002). Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Khlevnyuk, Oleg (1995). “The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937-1938.” In Soviet History, 1917-53: Essays in Honour of R.W. Davies, ed. Julian Cooper et al. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Medvedev, Roy. (1989). Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, rev. and expanded ed., tr. George Shriver. New York: Columbia University Press. Starkov, Boris A. (1993). “Narkom Ezhov.” In Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, eds. J. Arch Getty and
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Roberta T. Manning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
MARC JANSEN
YUDENICH, NIKOLAI NIKOLAYEVICH
(1862-1933), general in the Imperial Russian Army, hero of World War I, and anti-Bolshevik leader.
Of noble birth, Nikolai Yudenich began his glittering military career upon graduating, with first-class marks, from the General Staff Academy in 1887. He served on the General Staff in Poland and Turkestan until 1902, participated in the Russo-Japanese War (earning a gold sword for bravery), worked as deputy chief of staff from 1907, and became chief of staff of Russian forces in the Caucasus in 1913. During World War I, Yudenich distinguished himself as Russia’s most consistently successful general, inflicting numerous defeats upon Turkey, notably at Sarikamish (December 1914) and, in August 1915, repulsing Enver Pasha’s invasion in 1915, and in capturing Erzurum, Tre-bizond, and Erzincan (February-July 1916). He consequently figured prominently in Russian wartime propaganda. With the overthrow of the Romanovs in February 1917, Yudenich regained overall command of the Caucasus Front. However, dismayed by the revolution and reluctant to cooperate with the Provisional Government, he was retired from active service in May. He returned to Petrograd and lived underground for a year after the October Revolution, before fleeing to Finland. Thereafter he headed anti-Bolshevik forces in the Baltic region, as commander-in-chief of the Northwest Army. Like other White leaders, Yudenich failed to establish an effective political regime or to attract sufficient support from the Allies, and suffered strained relations with the non-Russian peoples of his base territory. Nevertheless, he masterminded the Whites’ advance to the outskirts of Petrograd in the autumn of 1919. However, Trotsky pushed his forces back into Estonia, where they were interned before being disbanded in 1920. Yudenich was briefly arrested by the Estonian government, but was allowed to settle into exile in France. He largely shunned ?migr? politics until his death, in Saint-Laurent-du-Var. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; WHITE ARMY; WORLD WAR I
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YUGOSLAVIA, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mawdsley, Evan. (2000). The Russian Civil War. Edinburgh: Birlinn.
JONATHAN D. SMELE
YUGOSLAVIA, RELATIONS WITH
The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was proclaimed on December 1, 1918, and was renamed Yugoslavia on October 3, 1929 by Alexander Karad-jordjevic. The creation of the new enlarged South Slav state and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia together ruptured the once-strong bonds between Russia and the South Slav lands, especially Serbia. Marshal Josip Broz Tito defied Stalin and introduced his own brand of communism in Yugoslavia. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS
Russian support for Serbia in the summer of 1914 had helped precipitate World War I, which destroyed the Romanov dynasty and eventually brought the Bolsheviks to power. Like its neighbors, the new Yugoslav state was fiercely anticommunist. In 1920 and 1921 the kingdom joined Romania and Czechoslovakia in a series of bilateral pacts that came to be known as the Little Entente. The alliance was primarily aimed at thwarting Hungarian irreden-tism (one country’s claim to territories ruled or governed by others based on ethnic, cultural, or historic ties), since the former kingdom of Hungary had lost approximately 70 percent of its prewar territory. The Little Entente also served as part of France’s eastern security system designed to contain both Germany and Bolshevik Russia. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, relations between Moscow and Belgrade were but a shadow of that which had preceded World War I. Not only was Yugoslavia a supporter of the postwar settlements that had aggrandized its territory, but it also sought to isolate the Bolshevik revolution; moreover, it had little trade with the new Soviet state, in part because prewar relations between St. Petersburg and Belgrade had been based almost entirely on diplomatic and cultural rather than economic links. In addition, the rise of Nazi Germany left much of Yugoslav trade within the Third Reich’s orbit.
In 1941 Germany occupied Yugoslavia. Two groups, the Chetniks, led by Dra a Mihailovic, and the Partisans, under Josip Broz Tito, a Moscow-trained communist, fought the Germans and at the same time vied for supremacy within Yugoslavia. Although Tito emerged victorious and Stalin’s so-called Percentages Agreement with Winston Churchill gave Moscow 50 percent influence in Yugoslavia, the Red Army had not occupied the country, and thus the Soviet Union was unable to influence developments there as it could in other areas of central and southeastern Europe. Tito’s popularity and mass following stood in contrast to the situation in the other countries of the future “bloc,” where there were at best small native communist parties dominated by the Soviet Union.
As a result, the communist state created in Yugoslavia in 1946 was independent of Soviet stewardship even though its constitution was initially modeled on the S
oviet constitution. From the outset, Tito pursued an independent domestic policy and an aggressive foreign one. His ambitions threatened both Stalin’s leadership (by his promotion of national communist movements) and also peace in Europe (by such actions as the shooting down of American planes during the Trieste Affair, the Italian-Yugoslav border dispute, and his support for the communists in the Greek Civil War). When Tito attempted to create a separate customs
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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
YURI DANILOVICH
union with Bulgaria without consulting the Soviet Union beforehand, and refused to abandon the effort as Stalin demanded, a break, usually referred to as the Tito-Stalin split, quickly followed.
On June 28, 1948, the Cominform, the umbrella communist propaganda organ directed by Moscow, expelled Yugoslavia, charging Tito with betraying the international communist movement. Stalin hoped that this would force Yugoslavia to submit to Soviet leadership, but he miscalculated. Instead, Tito turned to a West that was all too willing to forget his ideology and past actions and provide assistance to enable Yugoslavia to pursue its own command economy and an independent diplomatic and political stance that served as a counterforce to the Soviet leader. Yugoslavia, for example, supported the United Nations resolution authorizing resistance to the invasion of South Korea in June 1950. Tito soon became one of the founders of the nonaligned movement, which held its first conference in Belgrade in 1961.
Stalin’s death in 1953 opened the door for a partial rapprochement with Belgrade. Issues such as navigation and trade along the Danube River were resolved, but the ideological rift never entirely healed. In May 1955 Nikita Khrushchev visited Belgrade, and the following year Tito visited to Moscow, and the Cominform, which dissolved in April 1956, renounced its earlier condemnations. Despite seemingly cordial relations, however, the strains between Moscow and Belgrade persisted, especially after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, which saw the independent-minded Hungarian revolt crushed, and the arrest and subsequent murder of Imre Nagy, the Hungarian prime minister, who had taken refuge in the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest from 1956 until 1958. In 1957 Tito angered Moscow by refusing to sign a declaration commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
