Russia

Country, eastern Europe and northern Asia, formerly the preeminent republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Area: 6,592,800 sq mi (17,075,400 sq km). Population (2005 est.): 143,420,000. Capital: Moscow. The population is primarily Russian; minorities include Tatars and Ukrainians. Languages: Russian (official), various Turkic and Uralic languages. Religions: Christianity (mostly Eastern Orthodox, also Protestant); also Islam. However, about one-third of the people are nonreligious or atheist. Currency: ruble. The land and its environments are varied, including the Ural Mountains and ranges in eastern Siberia, the highest peaks being on the Kamchatka Peninsula. The Russian Plain contains the great Volga and Northern Dvina rivers, and in Siberia are the valleys of the Ob, Yenisey, Lena, and Amur rivers. Tundra covers extensive portions in the north, and in the south there are forests, steppes, and fertile areas. The economy was industrialized from 1917 to 1945 but was in serious decline by the 1980s. In 1992 the government decreed radical reforms to convert the centrally planned economy into a market economy based on private enterprise. Russia is a federal republic with a bicameral legislative body; its head of state is the president, and the head of government is the prime minister. What is now the territory of Russia was inhabited from ancient times by various peoples, including the Slavs. The area was overrun in the 8th century BC – 6th century AD by successive nomadic peoples, including the Sythians, Sarmatians, Goths, Huns, and Avars. Kievan Rus, a confederation of principalities ruling from Kiev, emerged c. the 10th century; it lost supremacy in the 11th – 12th century to independent principalities, including Novgorod and Vladimir. Novgorod ascended in the north and was the only Russian principality to escape the domination of the Mongol Golden Horde in the 13th century. In the 14th – 15th century the princes of Moscow gradually overthrew the Mongols. Under Ivan IV (the Terrible), Russia began to expand. The Romanov dynasty arose in 1613. Expansion continued under Peter I (the Great) and Catherine II (the Great). The area was invaded by Napoleon in 1812; after his defeat, Russia received most of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw (1815). Russia annexed Georgia, Armenia, and Caucasus territories in the 19th century. The Russian southward advance against the Ottoman Empire was of key importance to Europe (see Crimea). Russia was defeated in the Crimean War (1853 – 56). Chinese cession of the Amur River's left bank in 1858 marked Russia's expansion in East Asia. Russia sold Alaska to the U.S. in 1867 (see Alaska Purchase). Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War led to an unsuccessful uprising in 1905 (see Russian Revolution of 1905). In World War I Russia fought against the Central Powers. The popular overthrow of the tsarist regime in 1917 marked the beginning of a government of soviets (see Russian Revolution of 1917). The Bolsheviks brought the main part of the former empire under communist control and organized it as the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (coextensive with present-day Russia). The Russian S.F.S.R. joined other soviet republics in 1922 to form the U.S.S.R. Upon the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, the Russian S.F.S.R. was renamed and became the leading member of the Commonwealth of Independent States. It adopted a new constitution in 1993. During the 1990s and into the early 21st century, it struggled on several fronts, beset with economic difficulties, political corruption, and independence movements (see Chechnya).

For more information on Russia, visit Britannica.com.

The history of Russian photography, though rich, is unevenly documented, with much more literature on the pre-revolutionary years and the 1920s than on the period between ‘high’ Stalinism and Gorbachev. At the end of the 1980s Y. V. Barchatova and others published a book, later translated as A Portrait of Tsarist Russia, that gave a fascinating overview of the photograph collections held in Russian museums. Yet, with exceptions such as the pictures taken by the last imperial family, most of them have barely been evaluated or written about. (Other major collections, like Leonid Andreyev's autochromes, and Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii's pre-1915 colour photographs of the Russian Empire, exist abroad.) Future research will certainly bring more material to light. However, the break-up of the USSR and the appearance of many new states on the borders of today's Russian Federation will also make it harder to write the history of photography in the former Soviet and tsarist states.

To 1917

Russian photographers in this period were numerous, innovative, and alert to developments in other countries. Many of them travelled abroad; Sergei Levitsky, one of St Petersburg's leading portraitists, learned daguerreotypy in Paris and Rome in the 1840s, won a gold medal in Paris for daguerreotypes of the Caucasus in 1851, and spent the early 1860s running a studio in the French capital; Prokudin also worked in Paris, after studying in Berlin; and the pictorialist Sergei Lobovikov exhibited and won numerous awards at exhibitions in Europe before 1914. Under the last two tsars, Russian photographic societies and journals constantly discussed the latest technical advances, while the Bulla agency in St Petersburg had many non-Russian clients. This international orientation reappeared, briefly, between the end of the Civil War (1918-20) and the establishment of Stalinism.

News of both Daguerre's and Talbot's inventions arrived and was discussed in Moscow and St Petersburg early in 1839. The Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg sent one of its members, I. Hammel, on an investigative mission to Paris and London, during which he met Daguerre and Isidore Niépce and obtained a daguerreotype outfit and numerous documents, which were discussed by the academy in September. Already nearly four months earlier, however, the chemist and botanist Julius Fritzsche had reported in detail on Talbot's process. There was considerable press interest, and two Russian photography handbooks appeared before the end of that year.

As in other countries, portraiture was the mainstay of early photography. Moscow's first commercial studio was opened in the summer of 1840 by Alexei Grekov (1779/80-  mid-1850s), who reduced exposure times for the daguerreotype to about two minutes. By the middle of the decade, as knowledge increased and materials became easier to obtain, other establishments were proliferating in Moscow and other cities. As in other branches of Russian science and technology, many important early practitioners were of non-Russian extraction: for example, the semi- itinerant daguerreotypist Alfred Davignon, the German or Austrian Karl August Bergner, who set up in Moscow in the early 1850s, and the St Petersburg painter and photographer André Denier. But Russians included the aristocratic Levitsky, who opened his St Petersburg studio in 1849; and others entered the profession in the wake of the carte de visite boom from c.1860. Particularly important in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s was Andrei Karelin, who established himself in the important commercial centre of Nizhni Novgorod in the 1860s, and in addition to portraiture (in and outside the studio) made a name for himself in landscape and topographical photography and folkloric scenes.

The 1860s and 1870s, when the Russian Empire was expanding vigorously southwards and eastwards, witnessed a spate of ethnographic photography, created by military survey teams, professionals sponsored by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, and photographers established in the new territories. Examples included a Turkestan Album (1872) by the Tashkent-based G. N. Nekhoroshev, and a three-volume compilation on the far-eastern Amur region by V. Lanin. Ethnographic pictures featured prominently in the Russia contribution to the 1875 Paris Exhibition. Both the ethnographic albums and the work of contemporary social-realist photographers combined posed studio photographs with others taken out of doors, with the latter becoming increasingly important for the realists. One example was the Scottish-born William Carrick, whose radical sympathies led him to photograph peasants and Volga boatmen on location in the Simbirsk region in the 1870s. His work has much in common with the politically reformist painters of the realist ‘Itinerant’ school, such as Ilya Repin, whose celebrated Volga Boatmen was completed in 1873. Also interesting were the controversial open-air pictures of Don Cossacks by Ivan Boldyrev in the late 1870s. This radical strain in Russian photography persisted. Boldyrev later took pioneering underground pictures of anthracite miners, which were among the earliest photographs of Russia's emerging working class, and Maxim Dimitriev recorded grim scenes from the 1891-2 famine.

The year 1858, meanwhile, had seen the founding of what seems to have been the first Russian photographic society, in Odessa, and of the journal Svetopis (Light-Painting). Not surprisingly, considering the artistic background and interests of many Russian photographers, debates about the relationship between photography and ‘fine’ art continued during the later decades of the century. It therefore seems odd that ‘art photography’ in the narrower sense of pictorialism emerged in Russia much later than abroad. As late as 1900, when Alfred Horsley Hinton submitted an article about it to the journal Fotograf Liubitel (Amateur Photographer) an editorial dismissed the movement as suitable for England because of the ‘fog and smog’ and Germany ‘where short-sightedness is highly developed’, but not Russia. The anti-pictorialists, such as Prokudin-Gorskii (soon to be editor of Fotograf Liubitel), included some of the most technically progressive members of the photographic establishment. In the event, Russian pictorialism became particularly associated with the Kiev-based Daguerre Society, and two Kiev photographers, Nikolai Petrov (1876-1940) and Lobovikov. The latter especially was a fervent advocate of gum printing and other pigment processes and, like pictorialists elsewhere—for example, the Hofmeister brothers—regarded the making of the negative as the beginning of a lengthy process that enabled the photographer to achieve truly painterly effects. His highly manipulated landscapes and peasant scenes won awards at major international salons in Dresden (1909), Budapest (1910), and Hamburg (1911). In 1911, a contingent of distinguished foreigners, including Steichen, Käsebier, Puyo, and Dubreuil, submitted to the International Salon of Artistic Photography in Kiev. The fact remained, however, that pictorialism abroad was well past its peak, although debates about it continued in Russia well into the First World War and it continued to flourish after the revolution.

From the 1880s onwards increasing numbers of salons were held, including an All-Russian Photographic Exhibition in Moscow in 1889, and photographic activity continued to expand under Nicholas II (1894-1917), who was himself a keen photographer. Societies and journals proliferated, and there was progress in fields such as medical, police, aerial, and botanical photography, often involving Russian inventions. Panoramic photography became something of a Russian speciality, from the tsar downwards. In 1909 Prokudin's ambitious project to document the empire using his own colour process received generous official support. Other forms of documentary photography also continued to flourish; there are anonymous photographs of the Moscow slums on the eve of the 1905 Revolution that would have done credit to Riis or Hine. Commercial enterprises included foreign firms like Boissonas & Eggler and (now) Russian ones such as C. E. de Hahn and Bulla: a portrait and general photographer, but also one the world's earliest major picture agencies. Karl Bulla and his sons Alexander and Viktor, together with more obscure figures like G. Fried, documented Russia's war effort in 1914-18, and in 1917 some of the most important revolutionary events in Petrograd (St Petersburg).

Since 1917

Notwithstanding the upheavals of 1917 and its aftermath, the full cultural impact of the revolution was not felt until the enunciation of Socialist Realism in 1934, with a period of disputatious pluralism in between. From an early stage, however, the propaganda value of both photography and film was recognized and, with Lenin's encouragement, photographic posters and displays were used both in cities and on the agitprop trains and steamers dispatched throughout Russia's still largely illiterate society; Pyotr Otsup's Lenin portraits were disseminated in millions of copies. But probably the most important vehicle for photographic propaganda was the illustrated press—journals like Pravda, Izvestia, Rabochaya Gazeta, Ogonyok, and growing numbers of others, to which many Soviet photographers contributed. Also important was photography's use in propaganda abroad, for example in prestige events like the Russian Exhibition in Zurich in 1929 and the 1937 Paris World Exhibition. High-quality journals like USSR in Construction were aimed to a large extent at a foreign audience, and approved Soviet photographs appeared in foreign communist papers like the Arbeiter illustrierte Zeitung, and were distributed via Willi Münzenberg's Unionbild agency. The question was, however, what kind of images would best represent Soviet aims and values.

As already noted, pictorialism remained popular in the 1920s, although it was increasingly attacked by communist ideologues as elitist, decadent, and remote from contemporary reality. In 1928 the formerly pro-pictorialist Fotograf asked: ‘Are we acting correctly in allowing ourselves to be enticed by the sunsets and sunrises in artistic photography to the detriment of themes from Soviet life?’ Finally it was officially anathematized by Socialist Realism, although—as would be the case with the avant-gardes—leading practitioners such as Abram Shterenberg (1894-1979) and Mosei Nappel'baum (1869-1958) trimmed their sails in order to survive; Alexander Grinberg (1885-1979), however, spent years in the Gulag.

More significant than late pictorialism was the experimental and New Vision-inspired work that, especially after materials again became readily available in the mid-1920s, featured prominently in the ‘cultural revolution’ of the early Soviet era. For leading avant-garde figures like Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, photography's mission, in conjunction with graphic art, was to supplant painting as socialism's leading representational medium. However, an important influence on photography was cinema, especially the ideas of the documentary film-maker and theorist Dziga Vertov (1896-1943), and journals like Kinofot and Sovetskoe Kino hosted important discussions of both media. By the late 1920s, film and photography were the subject of complex debates; although the plethora of theoretical positions did not entirely correspond to actual practice.

Fundamental to the new Soviet photography as propagated by Rodchenko and his allies was rejection of pictorialism as elitist and individualistic, and the adoption of a New Vision aesthetic perceived as more in tune with an emerging socialist society. Machines, mass-produced objects, and industrial development would be its central themes, with individuals represented as components of a gleaming productivist mechanism. Further, the properties of film and lenses would be exploited to promote a literally new vision of the world. An influence here was Moholy-Nagy's Painting Photography Film (1924). But another was Vertov, especially his concept of the ‘cinematic eye’ (Kino-Glaz), ‘which, more comprehensively than any human eye, could investigate the chaos of visual phenomena’. For Vertov the camera's role was not to transcribe reality in an illusionistic, literal way, but to break it up into discrete elements and construct something radically new—just as Russian society was being broken up and reconstructed as socialism. Rodchenko wrote in 1928: ‘The lens of the camera may record what it will be possible for the cultured person to see in a socialist society.’ This meant ultra-high and-low viewpoints, soaring diagonals, reeling verticals, and the distortions created by wide-angle lenses and extreme close-ups. One other aspect of the radicals' anti-elitism was the notion of mass amateur photography, in which workers would record the reality of their own lives and provide material for Soviet photojournalism. This clearly resembled the ideas of the worker-photographer movement in Germany, and was to prove equally unrealistic.

In the late 1920s Rodchenko was active in the Futurist-and Constructivist-influenced Left Front of the Arts (LEF; f. 1925), as art director of the experimental journal Foto i Film, and in LEF's successor, the October group. With Boris Ignatovich (1899-1976), he also contributed photo-essays to another new magazine, Dayesh (f. 1929), on subjects ranging from the Moscow zoo and the Bolshoi Theatre (Rodchenko) to the battery farm run by the secret police (Ignatovich). Rodchenko also effectively led the photography section of yet another radical group, New October, which mounted summer photographic exhibitions in 1930 and 1931.

By this time, however, a strong backlash against avant- gardism—denounced as ‘formalist deviationism’, or ‘leftism’—was developing. It was identified with journals like Proletarskoe Foto, the Russian Society of Proletarian Photographers (ROPF), and photojournalists such as Arkadi Shaikhet and Max Alpert, whose famous and (in general) much more conventional photo-essay A Day in the Life of a Moscow Worker had appeared in 1931. Their central complaint was that the avant-garde's images were incomprehensible to the working masses and ugly to boot: hence, for example, the vitriolic attack on Rodchenko's famous low-angle Pioneer Trumpeter (1930). But there was also nationalistic resentment of the real or supposed indebtedness of Rodchenko and his friends to foreign, especially German, modernism. There were echoes here of the much larger contest between intellectual supporters of world revolution on the one hand and advocates of ‘socialism in one country’, which put the USSR's interests first, on the other. In the background was Stalin's increasing dominance, following the death of Lenin in 1924, the expulsion of Trotsky, the early completion of the first Five-Year Plan, and the beginning of agricultural collectivization.

Pressure on the radicals increased between c. 1931 and the proclamation of Socialist Realism at the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Rodchenko resigned from New October which, with other cultural groups, was dissolved in 1932. Socialist Realism essentially imposed a re-engineered version of late 19th-century Realism as the representational norm for artists, film-makers, and photographers in Stalin's Russia (and its later-acquired satellites). In practice, however, the distinction between it and ‘formalism’ was not absolute, or not initially. On the one hand, pictures from Rodchenko's modernistic White Sea Canal photographs, published in USSR in Construction in 1933, were included in the 1935 Masters of Soviet Photographic Art exhibition in Moscow, together with images like Girl with a Leica (1934). On the other, A Day in the Life had included some New Vision-inspired shots, and the style continued to be used by photojournalists for inherently modernistic subjects like dams and steelworks. By November 1937, however, when the first All-Union Exhibition of Photographic Art opened in Moscow, the avant-garde as an entity had ceased to exist, its members forced to change tack or retreat from the public eye into laboratories or editorial offices.

Between 1941 and 1945, Russian photographers produced some of the Second World War's most powerful war photography. They included Alpert, Baltermants, Khaldei, Boris Kudoyarov (the siege of Leningrad), Petrussov, Shaikhet, and many others, working for all the main papers, Frontovaya Illustratiya, and the TASS agency. They had to overcome the chaos of initial Russian defeats, changes in the propaganda line, and, occasionally, alarming interventions by Stalin.

After the war, Socialist Realism reigned supreme, at least officially: it would be premature to generalize about the total output of Russian photographers in the second half of the 20th century. But the USSR's thousands of professional photojournalists were expected to treat approved subjects in an upbeat, accessible way: enthusiastic congress delegates, the achievements of workers and kolkhoz farmers, Young Communists, military parades, and heroic cosmonauts. The yearbooks and national salons, with their obligatory Uzbek, Georgian, and Cossack scenes, projected the image of a multi-ethnic but unified Soviet society. Typical almost to the point of parody of ‘high’ Socialist Realism was Baltermants's The Announcement of Stalin's Death (1953), an impeccably lit and posed image of factory workers gathered round a radio that could have been adapted from a 19th-century painting. As in the 1930s, however, modernistic shots were acceptable when the occasion demanded: for example, Valery Gende-Rote's Yury Gagarin (1961), a dramatic overhead picture of the cosmonaut striding diagonally down a ceremonial carpet. Officially taboo, on the other hand, were images of dissidence, religious activity, pollution, alcoholism, sex, or (in general) nudity; although it remains to be seen how far Russia's army of amateurs, sustained by a considerable photographic industry, informally recorded these aspects of the Soviet scene.

Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) policy in the late 1980s permitted the increased visibility of a generation of ‘new’ (though not particularly young) documentary photographers, some of them brilliantly talented, who set out to capture the texture of everyday life without the formerly obligatory optimistic framing, and demonstrated a less inhibited approach to the anomic and dysfunctional aspects of Soviet society. Among them was Boris Mikhailov, who was to become internationally the most celebrated Russian photographer of the post-Soviet era. However, the origins of this apparently new movement went back to the 1960s, and especially to developments in the Baltic republics. Lithuania in particular tacitly allowed photographers like Alexandras Macijauskas to distance themselves from Socialist Realism, and several other leading ‘new’ documentarists of the Gorbachev period were Lithuanian (and soon, of course, to become citizens of an independent country).

Since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Federation has begun to acquire the features of a mature photographic culture, though hampered by economic crises and uncertainties about freedom of expression. The founding of the Moscow House of Photography, increased interest in Russia's early photographic history and collections, the rediscovery of forgotten figures—for example, Leonid Andreyev and the documentarist Leonid Shokin (1895-1962)—the proliferation of exhibitions and contacts with developments abroad, all seem to herald the country's integration into the international photographic scene.

— Robin Lenman

Bibliography

• Morozov, S., and Lloyd, V. (eds.), Soviet Photography 1917-1940: The New Photo-Journalism (1984).
• Mražkova, D., and Remeš, V., Another Russia: Through the Eyes of the New Soviet Photographers (1986).
• Barchatova, Y. V., et al., A Portrait of Tsarist Russia: Unknown Photographs from the Soviet Archives, trans. M. Robinson (1990).
• Elliott, D. (ed.), Photography in Russia 1840-1940 (1992).
• Tupitsyn, M., The Soviet Photograph (1996).
• Tihanov, G. (ed.), ‘The Russian Avant-Garde’, History of Photography, 24 (2000)

The Russian Federation (formerly the RSFSR, one of the fifteen republics of the USSR) covers almost twice the area of the United States of America, or 17,075,200 square kilometers (6,591,100 square miles). It is divided into eighty-nine separate territories. The country reaches from Moscow in the west over the Urals and the vast Siberian plains to the Sea of Okhotsk in the east. The Russian Federation is bounded by Norway and Finland in the northwest; by Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, and Ukraine in the west; by Georgia and Azerbaijan in the southwest; and by Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China along the southern land border. The Kaliningrad region is a Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea and is bordered by Lithuania and Poland.

The Russian Federation was established in 1991, when the USSR disintegrated and the former RSFSR became an independent state. A declaration of state sovereignty was adopted on June 12, 1991 (now a national holiday), and official independence from the USSR was established on August 24,1991. The Russian Federation replaced the USSR as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. The term Russia has been applied loosely to the Russian Empire until 1917, to the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) from 1917 to 1991, to the Russian Federation since 1991, or even (incorrectly) to mean the whole of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The term has also been used to designate the area inhabited by the Russian people, as distinguished from other Eastern Slavs and from non-Slavic peoples.

Moscow, the ninth largest city in the world, the largest Russian city, and the capital of the Russian Federation, was founded in 1147. The city's focal point is Red Square, bound on one side by the Kremlin and its thick red fortress wall containing twenty towers. The tsars were crowned there; in fact, Ivan the Terrible's throne is situated near the entrance. The second largest city, St. Petersburg, is situated northwest of Moscow and was known as a cultural center with elegant palaces. The city is spread over forty-two islands in the delta of the Neva River.

The terrain of the Russian Federation consists of broad plains with low hills west of the Urals; vast coniferous forest and tundra in Siberia; and uplands and mountains along the southern border regions. Although the largest country in the world in terms of area, the Russian Federation is unfavorably located in relation to the major sea lanes of the world. Despite its size, much of the country lacks proper soils and climates (either too cold or too dry) for agriculture. It does, however, have enormous resources of oil and gas, as well as numerous trace metals.

Since 1991, Russia has struggled in its efforts to build a democratic political system and market economy to replace the strict social, political, and economic controls of the Communist period. The country adopted a constitution on December 12, 1993, and established a bicameral Federal Assembly (Federalnoye Sobraniye). Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was elected to the office of president of the Federation on May 7, 2000, with 52.9 percent of the vote, as opposed to 29.2 percent for the Communist representative, Gennady Zyuganov, and5.8 percent for the democratic centrist, Grigory Yavlinsky.

Bibliography

Brown, Archie, ed. (2001). Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin: Political Leadership in Russia's Transition. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Herspring, Dale R., ed. (2003). Putin's Russia: Past Imperfect, Future Uncertain. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Kotkin, Stephen. (2001). Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970 - 2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Malia, Martin. (1999). Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum. Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press.

Satter, David. (2003). Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Shevtsova, Lilia. (2003). Putin's Russia. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Sunlop, John B. (1993). The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

—JOHANNA GRANVILLE

Russia emerged as a state at the end of the fifteenth century on the northeastern periphery of Europe, with a thin population spread over the forest belt of the east European plain. Never having seen either feudalism or serfdom, its society was different from that of western Europe. Its Christianity came from Byzantium, which further set it apart from its western neighbors. During the sixteenth to eighteenth century Russian society changed rapidly, with the appearance of serfdom, economic growth, and expansion south into the steppe and east to Siberia. The Russian state grew in size and sophistication, especially after the reign of Peter I the Great (ruled 1682–1725). Peter inaugurated a vast cultural revolution, bringing European secular culture to Russia and thus including Russia in the circle of European civilization.

Growth of the State

The core of the Russian state was the Moscow principality, which gained control of the original Russian ethnographic territory with the annexation of Novgorod (1478), Pskov (1510), and other neighboring regions. Essentially a household state managed by a few secretaries and the boyar elite, the Russian state began to acquire the trappings of state administration in the reign of Ivan IV, "the Terrible" (ruled 1533–1584). The growth of the state in the center was not matched by a corresponding development in local administration. The abolition of "feeding," direct payments in kind from local areas to provincial governors, occurred in the 1540s. From then on the treasury paid local officials, but tax collection remained largely in the purview of the local communities, which collected the dues as a service to the crown. Thus the grand claims of the tsars to autocracy met very sharp limits in the small size and limited competence of administration, especially local administration.

In the seventeenth century the central apparatus grew swiftly, reaching some two thousand officials and scribes by the 1680s. Again provincial administration lagged behind, with huge areas managed only by a governor with a staff of some five to ten clerks and scribes and little or no armed force. Even the cadastres that registered landholdings and tax obligations of the rural population were compiled almost entirely on the bases of the village communities' own reports of their population and holdings. These cadastres allowed the state to collect an annual tax on peasant households, mainly to support the army. The collections were also in the hands of the village communities, which meant that collection was slow and often in arrears. The state did have some more effective tools for raising revenue, such as the sales tax and the vodka monopoly. Older systems persisted, such as the expectations that musketeers would live partly from trade and handicrafts and that the gentry cavalry would live from their estates, both serving in the military only during the summer months. These methods were enough to ensure Russia success in some wars and expansion to the south and east. At the same time the state had little effective control over the countryside. Confronted with popular unrest, as in 1604–1605, 1648–1650, and 1671–1672 (the great Cossack revolt of Stepan Razin), the tsar could do little more than call out the army and hope that it could restore order.

Administrative reform. Ultimately, the existing forms proved inadequate in the face of the larger aims of Peter the Great. Peter transformed the Russian state. After several experiments, he established the Senate to coordinate government and take the routine tasks away from the tsar, eleven colleges or ministries headed by a committee for central administration, a reorganized local administration, and the Table of Ranks (1722) to regulate promotions and status in the army and civil service. His army was a permanent body, living in barracks and ready to fight at any time of the year. He shifted the burden of taxes further onto the peasantry by the introduction of the "soul tax," levied on individuals, not households. He attempted to increase the size and effectiveness of provincial administration, but here he was less successful. Some of his measures in this area had to be rescinded as too complex and expensive.

Catherine II the Great (ruled 1762–1796) and her son Paul I (ruled 1796–1801) continued the reordering of the state along European lines. Catherine redrew internal boundaries into more easily administered provinces, increasing the size and rationalizing the structure of provincial governments. She also introduced modest participation by the gentry into the judicial system, as well as similar forms of participation in the courts for the urban elites. Her Charter to the Nobility (1785) specified the rights and obligations of the gentry, for the first time introducing such formulations into Russian legislation. The outcome was a great increase in efficiency in the provinces, but the neglect of the central administration. Her son Paul recentralized government in the 1790s. Both reigns prepared the way for a more modern central state after 1801. The result was a relatively modern government in St. Petersburg, still resting on thin foundations in the provinces. If to a lesser extent than in the sixteenth century, the autocracy of the tsars still meant grand claims and more limited reality. Society was only in part subject to state direction.

Social Structure and Economy

For the whole of the early modern period Russia remained an agrarian society. In the sixteenth century Russian peasants inhabited settlements often of two to four small households, widely scattered along the rivers and lakes of the central and northern forest zones. While the peasants of the center and northwest cultivated grain and raised livestock in modest quantities, northern peasants derived most of their livelihood from hunting and selling furs and obtaining other forest products as well as preparing salt from saline springs. The life of the Russian peasantry changed fundamentally at the end of the sixteenth century with the appearance of serfdom. Unfortunately little is known about the process and causes of enserfment. The law regulated only peasant movement, at first allowing landlords to bring back peasants who left the estates within five years, but by 1649 allowing them to do so in perpetuity. The restrictions on peasant mobility, though difficult to enforce in practice, corresponded to the state's need for a stable tax base and populated land to reward the gentry cavalrymen.

By the mid-seventeenth century a bit over half of the Russian peasants were serfs of secular landlords, about a fifth serfs of the monasteries and bishops, and another fifth, concentrated in the north, the Urals, the Volga region, Siberia, and the southern border, remained free and normally without gentry or ecclesiastical landlords. The north prospered in these years, especially as the increasing trade with Holland and England opened new markets for furs and other forest products and the expansion of population in Russia itself meant a growing market for salt. The population of Russia grew rapidly after recovery from the Time of Troubles (1598–1613), reaching about eleven million by the 1670s. Much of the increase came from colonization of new land in the south and the Volga region.

Among the peasants of Russia who were not serfs, nearly half were also non-Russian in ethnicity. The largest groups lived in the middle Volga region, the descendants of the peoples of the Kazan' Tatar khanate. The Muslim Tatars lived in villages around Kazan', while the Bashkir pastoralists occupied the steppe to their southeast toward the southern Urals. To the north, east, and west of these Turkic-speaking peoples were other, smaller Turkic and Finnic groups, animists in religion. All of them paid a tax to the state called yasak and were not enserfed. Similarly, the incorporation of the Ukrainian Cossack Hetmanate into Russia as an autonomous unit brought in Ukrainian peasants who were legally free (mainly as Cossacks), and more than half of whom also owned their own land.

Among peasants and townspeople, households were small, comprising the nuclear family and occasionally a relative. Better-off townspeople and northern peasants might have a servant or two in addition, while the nobles maintained large staffs of house servants, artisans, and stewards. Some of the latter were bondsmen in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, a status that merged with serfdom in the early eighteenth century. The greatest aristocrats maintained huge establishments in Moscow, with hundreds of servants as well as a large body of administrators for their vast estates. Toward the very end of the seventeenth century the aristocrats began to build the first country houses, mostly within a few hours' ride of Moscow.

The ruling elite of Russia was organized in a system of court and military ranks, at the top being the Duma ranks—boyar; okol'nichii, a sort of junior boyar; Duma gentleman; and Duma secretary—in all about a hundred men from some two hundred families by 1600. They formed the pinnacle of the sovereign's court, and in turn the core of the Moscow ranked gentry. Below them were the provincial gentry, organized for purposes of military service around provincial towns or forts, more or less coinciding with residence and landholding patterns. Men with Duma ranks, especially the two highest, held all important household positions at the court, military commands, and provincial governorships, and in the seventeenth century also headed almost all chanceries (prikazy). Immensely wealthy, the boyars also provided the inner circle of advisers, formally through the Duma or tsar's council and informally as friends or favorites of the tsar. Other than the tsar's relatives by marriage, powerful men from outside this circle were extremely rare.

In elite families women were secluded in separate parts of the houses and did not join in the all-male banquets that were the staple of elite socialization. Women of all classes were expected to dress modestly, in the voluminous traditional Russian clothing and with their hair covered, and to obey fathers and husbands. But women also owned and managed property, including tax obligations to the state. This was particularly true of the mothers and wives of the gentry, whose men were often away with the army every summer for years in a row. In merchant families the men traveled to distant markets while the women stayed home and ran the business as well as the household.

Social control. The inability of the state to regulate social life to the extent of Western societies placed a premium on various forms of communal solidarity. The urban and peasant communities collected taxes themselves and judged many petty crimes and civil disputes. The absence of any police or military force over large areas meant that even serious crimes (murder, rape, banditry) were often left to local communities, rather than to state authorities as required by law. The local communities had a conception of what sort of actions by administrators were incorrect and petitioned the tsar or revolted if these were violated. Sometimes state and community norms coincided. Many disputes over slander, verbal arguments, and insults were settled in state courts as disputes over honor. Everyone in the Russian state, even slaves and serfs, had honor, and an insult to that honor was punished by fines or, if the victim was higher in rank, by beating, prison, or various rituals of humiliation. Repeated violations of the community and state norms of honor put the offender outside the protection of his neighbors, as did witchcraft (the majority of accused witches were male).

Religion and Culture

Until the very end of the seventeenth century, culture in Russia was essentially equivalent to religion. Though the predecessors of the Russian princes had received Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium, Russia did not inherit the secular culture of Byzantium, with its ancient Greek classics. The language of the church was not Greek but Church Slavonic, a dialect of early medieval Bulgaria. Thus the religious literature of Russia had its foundation in Slavonic translations of the church fathers and some later Byzantine theological and devotional literature.

Until 1448 the Orthodox church in Russia was under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople, who appointed the metropolitan of Kiev and later of Moscow. Most of the metropolitans were thus Greeks or southern Slavs, and the Moscow princes had little say in their appointment. At the council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–1445), however, the Greek metropolitan of Moscow, Isidoros, went over to Rome, and the Russian church and the Moscow prince deposed him, appointing the Russian Iona in his place. The Orthodox church thus became in fact autocephalous. Even after the restoration of Orthodoxy in Constantinople, the Russians continued to select their own metropolitan. Conflicts between the princes and tsars and the metropolitans were inevitable, especially as the tsars tried to increase their power over the church in the course of the centuries. If Metropolitan Makarii was an ally to Ivan the Terrible, his successors were expected to obey, and Metropolitan Filipp was murdered for opposing Ivan in 1569. The elevation of the metropolitan to the rank of patriarch by the Greeks in 1589 regularized Russia's relations with the Greek church, but the new patriarch, Iov, was very much the tsar's man.

Structurally the church in Russia differed in some ways from the Byzantine model. In place of the many small eparchies in the former Byzantium, the sees of Russian bishops were very extensive, and bishops were few in number and controlled little landed wealth, except for the metropolitan (later patriarch) of Moscow. The monasteries, in contrast, were as great and wealthy as those of the Greeks, if not more so. Collectively they were the lord of at least a fifth of the peasantry, more in central Russia. They were also the spiritual centers of Orthodoxy, producing almost all the saints and the devotional literature, original and translated from Greek. Only the metropolitan of Moscow himself, and to some extent the archbishop of Novgorod, had comparable spiritual authority and power at the start of the sixteenth century.

Laymen came to the monasteries for occasional spiritual advice, but also for pilgrimages to the burial places of holy monks and saints. They came for cures at the many shrines, both relics of saints and miracle-working icons. The elite and the provincial gentry tried to bury their dead in the monastery cemeteries and pay for liturgies for the dead. Particular monasteries became the objects of charity of particular clans and families, who endowed them with land, money, and valuable vestments, books, and even whole churches. Most larger monasteries enjoyed valuable immunities from taxation as well as from local judges and administrators. The parish clergy of the sixteenth century largely served churches created by private foundations and were subject to the founders' jurisdiction. They lived poorly on small parcels of land or meager income from services and gifts from parishioners. The clergy was not yet a hereditary caste, though most parish clergy were of humble origin, while monks were usually lesser gentry landholders. The ruling elite almost never entered monastic life voluntarily, though they gave generously to support it and buried their dead at the great monasteries.

Religious life for the laity in the sixteenth century revolved around the celebration of the liturgy in daily life, observation of the many fasts, and processions and pilgrimages to local shrines and monasteries. Preaching was virtually nonexistent, and the spiritual and moral direction came mainly from the clergy as spiritual fathers of laymen, each parish priest and sometimes monks taking on a group of families to follow through life.

Reform within the church. In the seventeenth century the Orthodox church saw many changes. The increasing influence of Kiev and the Ukrainian church under Polish rule played a major role. The Orthodox church in Kiev retained its dogmatic beliefs but also began to present them in the neo-Scholastic forms of Catholic theology. The basis of learning was no longer the fathers but Latin grammar and the Jesuit curriculum in language and philosophy. Preaching became a prominent part of religious life, while miracle cults and shrines were secondary and mainly served the purpose of confessional propaganda. Simultaneously in Russia reformers among the parish clergy called for greater propagation of Orthodox teaching and stronger discipline, coming to influence Tsar Alexis I (ruled 1645–1676) on these matters. In 1649 the tsar invited the first of a series of Kiev-trained clergy to Moscow to aid in translation of religious texts. They also preached in and around the court, giving a strong impulse to native reformers.

Earlier in the century Patriarch Filaret (d. 1633) had been a powerful figure, dominating his son, Tsar Michael (ruled 1613–1645), as long as he was alive, but his power came more from his position as the tsar's father than from his position in the church hierarchy. In 1652 Nikon, one of the reformers, was selected patriarch by the reformers in the church, with the informal pressure of the tsar. Besides taking a crucial role in secular politics, Nikon introduced liturgical reforms that ultimately caused a schism in the church. He left the office in 1658 over a quarrel with the tsar, a dispute only resolved by his deposition at the council of 1666–1667. The later patriarchs Ioakim (reigned 1674–1690) and Adrian (1690–1700) reinforced the power of the patriarchate and the clergy, striving especially hard and largely successfully to remove the parish clergy from the power of gentry church founders and place them under ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

In the later seventeenth century the impulses from Kiev grew stronger every decade, reinforced by the establishment in 1687 of the first real school in Russia, the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy in Moscow. Though its teachers were Greeks, they were Italian-educated and relied exclusively on Jesuit textbooks. These changes in the church, supported by the increasing flow of secular texts from the west, especially from Poland, changed the culture of the court and ruling elite, taking them away from traditional Orthodoxy with its monastic orientation toward a lay religion that included a much stronger moral element as well as some elements of secular culture. Greater changes were ahead.

Cultural change and secularization. These changes came from Peter the Great, who vastly accelerated the pace and scope of change. Culturally, his reign was a revolution. He sent young noblemen abroad to study languages, mathematics, and other subjects. He ordered the printing presses to produce a long series of texts basic to secular culture, elementary reading texts, introductions to history, architecture, mathematics, geography, and military sciences. He reoriented the ritual of the court away from the pilgrimages and virtually daily attendance at liturgy to secular celebrations of great victories and name-days and birthdays of the tsar's family and favorites. His new city of St. Petersburg was a port city with European-style architecture and only one monastery, in contrast to the dozens in and around Moscow. By the end of his reign the basic ideas of European politics, art, and learning were available in textbooks translated into Russian. In thirty-six years, the old exclusively religious culture came to an end.

The church also changed rapidly in Peter's time. At the death of Patriarch Adrian Peter appointed a Ukrainian, Stefan Iavorskii, as locum tenens of the patriarchate. Throughout his reign he preferred Ukrainians to Russians as bishops, a practice that continued until the 1760s. Eventually Peter abolished the patriarchate altogether and established in its place the Holy Synod, a board composed of laymen and clergy appointed by the tsar to run the church. The monasteries came to play a very subordinate role. In the later seventeenth century their revenues had already been placed under state control, and Peter reestablished that policy, hoping to use them as hospitals and schools rather than centers of ascetic spirituality.

Building a Modern State

Peter's political and administrative measures were not as radical, but they nevertheless had major effects. They produced a European style of absolutism in the central government, though still without sufficient apparatus outside the capital. Combined with victory over Sweden and the acquisition of a Baltic seacoast and new capital, Peter's state-building made Russia a major regional power, and one with a European culture. His successors in the eighteenth century continued to reorder and build the state, maintaining Russia's power as well. In the 1730s Empress Anna (ruled 1730–1740) upheld Russian influence in Poland and retained a foothold on the Black Sea. Russia was an active participant in the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), emerging with no concrete gains but considerable prestige owing to the defeat of Frederick the Great of Prussia. It was Catherine the Great who made Russia a great power in Europe, with two successful Turkish wars (1768–1774, 1787–1792) and the partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795). These victories moved Russia's borders far to the west, incorporating most of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania and conquering Crimea and the whole of the northern Black Sea coast.

While the years from Peter's death until the middle of the reign of Elizabeth (ruled 1741–1762) were devoted to court intrigues and succession struggles, the 1750s saw the resumption of policies designed to modernize state and society. Under the influence of her favorite, Count Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, Elizabeth founded Russia's first university in Moscow (1755) and encouraged other cultural projects, such as Russian-language theater at court. Other measures included fostering trade and industry, the abolition of internal tolls, and other economic projects. Plans to free the nobility from obligatory military service and to confiscate monastery lands came to fruition only after Elizabeth's death.

Catherine's reign saw more extensive political projects in the Legislative Commission (1767) and reorganization of provincial as well as central administration. These measures included a certain element of participation by the nobility and urban elites, as well as the delineation of their rights and privileges in law. By the end of her reign the issue of serfdom arose, most sharply in the work of Aleksandr Radishchev, who condemned the institution on moral and economic grounds. Catherine herself was by then alarmed at the French Revolution and sent Radishchev to prison, but his ideas, like her own measures, were typical products of the European Enlightenment.

Russian Culture in the Age of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was the first European current of thought to be fully received in Russia. Peter's cultural revolution had laid a foundation not only by example but through new institutions as well. His plan for an Academy of Sciences was realized in 1725, after his death. The academy brought scientists and scholars of European reputation to St. Petersburg, where they not only pursued their researches but also taught Russian students. The Noble Cadet Corps, based on the European noble academies, came into being in 1731, teaching young noblemen a curriculum that emphasized modern languages, law, history, and the sciences as well as proper behavior at court. Few formal schools followed its example, but private tutors among the gentry and private gymnasia supplemented the few state schools. The theater, dramatic and musical, flourished at the court, joined in the 1750s by a Russian-language dramatic theater and even theaters outside the capital. The Academy of Arts (1758) trained Russian painters to supplement the few Western and Western-trained artists already at work. Catherine founded a Society for the Translation of Foreign Books in 1768, which merged into the Academy of Letters in 1783. St. Petersburg evolved into a city of largely baroque and classical architecture, built by Italians and Germans. Even in Moscow and the provinces classical palaces sprang up alongside ancient churches and monasteries in the older Russian styles.

Both within the framework of these institutions and outside of them, Russians absorbed European thought and culture with great speed. Most of the well-known European writers of the time appeared in Russian translation—all of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, except Du contrat social (1762; Social contract), had appeared by 1780. Works that remained untranslated nevertheless circulated widely, since the elite generally knew either German or French by mid-century. Russia contributed little that was original to European culture in the eighteenth century. Its art and literature followed European patterns, as with Aleksandr Petrovich Sumarokov's (1717–1744) tragedies, based on the models of Jean Racine and Voltaire. Even the church followed European patterns, in spite of the turn toward Russian rather than Ukrainian bishops in the 1760s. Earlier in the century the seminaries and other church schools continued the seventeenth-century Jesuit curriculum inherited from Kiev, but gradually other trends emerged. Pietism was a major influence after about 1750, with Johann Arndt's Vier Bücher vom wahren Christentum (1605–1609; True christianity) a work widely read, even by such luminaries as St. Tikhon Zadonskii. The great preachers of Catherine's time, such as Metropolitan of Moscow Platon Levshin, followed Lutheran models, preaching a mildly rationalized Christianity and sentimentalizing morality.

Political thought stayed within the framework created elsewhere by Voltaire, Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu, and others, propounding ideas of enlightened absolutism, aristocratic rights and privileges, and the need to create legal order. Radishchev was unusual in his radicalism in the face of serfdom, but he too borrowed his theoretical arguments from European writers on slavery, such as the abbé de Raynal. The importance of the eighteenth century lay not in original contributions but in the thorough integration of European thought and art into Russian culture.

Social and Economic Changes and Imperial Expansion

Underneath the intellectual growth and ferment Russian society moved within the inherited framework of serf agriculture, but some new phenomena emerged. The settlement of the southern steppe with its rich black earth soil continued, especially after the Turkish wars and the defeat of Crimea. The southern steppe zone gradually became an area of great estates worked mainly by labor services, which diminished or disappeared in central Russia. The new ports on the Black Sea gave an outlet to grain from the steppe, while central Russia turned more to market gardening, crafts, and seasonal labor such as transport on the great rivers. The result was a boom for the gentry, who began to build great country houses on their estates, even those far from the cities. Nobles tried to use the latest ideas in European agrarian practices to enhance their incomes. In Peter's reign noblewomen had emerged from seclusion to mix freely with men and women outside the family at home and at court. They retained more property rights and played a larger role in estate management than women farther west. For non-elite women, however, little changed.

The serf peasants of central Russia found themselves neighbors of the "economic peasants" when monastic lands were confiscated in 1764 and put under the College of the Economy. Many of the former monastery villages were great centers of crafts and trade, producing dynasties of wealthy merchants. In these villages and those of great noblemen the crafts began to turn into more modern enterprises. In the Sheremetev villages of Ivanovo and Voznesensk serf entrepreneurs built cotton textile factories and hired their fellow serfs as laborers. The Urals, with more primitive technology but low costs, became a major iron producer. By the 1760s St. Petersburg was the center of Russian trade in the Baltic, as Peter had hoped, becoming the home of an international business community of Russians, Germans, Swedes, Britons, Dutch, and other commercial peoples. In the Volga area the growing trade with Persia and Central Asia came to a large extent into the hands of the Kazan' Tatars, giving them a new significance in the area and incidentally a leading role among Muslims in Russia. The conquest of the south and the foundation of Odessa in 1794 gave rise to a new port and new trade, dominated by Greeks, Jews, Bulgarians, Poles, and even some Russians, exporting grain to western Europe and trading with the Ottoman Empire. In remote Siberia, the Russian-American Company entered the fur trade in Alaska.

Russia's population grew rapidly, reaching some thirty-six million by 1800, of which only about six million came from territorial annexation. This demographic expansion, which continued into the twentieth century, provided an important stimulus to economic growth and to colonization of the southern steppe as well as eastern regions. If the center and south of Russia prospered, the north went into decline, resulting from the decline of the northern salt industry and the shift of the fur trade ever farther east. The Siberian economy was hampered by low population, but the discovery of silver and gold in the 1720s laid the foundation for a new and increasingly important industry, one largely under state control.

The expansion of the empire brought in new peoples. The nomadic Bashkirs, Kalmyks, and Tatars were now fully inside Russian borders in the south. The partitions of Poland brought most of the Ukrainian people into Russia, as well as Lithuanians and Belarusians. In the vast formerly Polish territories the nobility was almost entirely Polish, and initially Russia maintained Polish local gentry institutions, placing them under Russian governors. The towns in this area were largely Jewish in population, bringing another new people into the Russian orbit. As with the Polish nobility, Russian policy initially preserved preexisting community structures. In the old Ukrainian Hetmanate, the defection of Hetman Ivan Mazepa to Sweden in 1708 led Peter to appoint his own hetman and later abolish the office. Local institutions and laws remained, however, until the 1780s, when Catherine's reform of provincial administration meant the end of the Hetmanate's remaining autonomy. It also meant the integration of the Cossack nobility into the Russian imperial nobility, reflected in high positions in the army and government. Similarly, the German nobility of the Baltic provinces retained local rights and elected institutions until the 1780s, while Baltic German families played an increasingly central role in St. Petersburg. As many conservative Polish magnates chose to serve the tsars as well after 1796, the Russian ruling elite took on an increasingly multiethnic character, with Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians prominent in all spheres of the government and military services.

At the end of the eighteenth century Catherine's son Paul, frightened by the French Revolution, satisfied his conservative instincts by a recentralization of government, paradoxically coupled with some restoration of local gentry rights in the Baltic provinces and elsewhere. His eccentric personality, however, led to his assassination on 11 March 1801, ushering in a new century and a return to more liberal measures under his son Alexander I. Russia's society, state, and especially culture changed rapidly in the early modern era, but not enough to erode the basic structures. Those would have to wait for more powerful forces still to come.

Bibliography

Avrich, Paul. Russian Rebels 1600–1800. New York, 1972.

Bushkovitch, Paul. Peter the Great. Lanham, Md., 2001.

——. Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York, 1992.

Cracraft, James. The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture. Chicago, 1988.

Crummey, Robert O. Aristocrats and Servitors: the Boyar Elite in Russia 1613–1689. Princeton, 1983.

——. The Formation of Muscovy 1304–1613. London and New York, 1987.

De Madariaga, Isabel. Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great. New Haven, 1981.

Dixon, Simon. The Modernization of Russia 1676–1825. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1999.

Dukes, Paul. The Making of Russian Absolutism 1613–1801. London and New York, 1990.

Garrard, J. G., ed. The Eighteenth Century in Russia. Oxford, 1973.

Hartley, Janet. A Social History of the Russian Empire 1650–1825. London, 1999.

Hughes, Lindsey. Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, 1998.

Kollmann, Nancy Shields. By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia. Ithaca, N.Y., 1999.

Le Donne, John P. Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order 1700–1825. New York and Oxford, 1991.

Marker, Gary. Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia 1800–1800. Princeton, 1995.

Martin, Janet. Medieval Russia 980–1584. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.

Moon, David. The Russian Peasantry 1600–1930: The World the Peasants Made. London and New York, 1999.

Platonov, S. F. Moscow and the West. Trans. by J. Wieczynski. Hattiesburg, Miss., 1972.

Raeff, Marc. Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime. New York, 1984.

Thyret, Isolde. Between God and the Tsar: Religious Symbolism and the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia. De Kalb, Ill., 2001.

—PAUL BUSHKOVITCH

Russian food is typically hearty in taste, with mustard, horseradish, and dill among the predominant flavorings. The cuisine is distinguished by the many fermented and preserved foods that are necessitated by the short growing season of the Russian North. Cabbage (sauerkraut) and cucumbers (pickles) are enjoyed greatly, as are a wide range of salted fish, vegetables, and meats. Fish and produce are also frequently dried or brined for lengthy storage. Foraged foods, especially mushrooms, are important to both Russian diet and culture. Although the Russians have never excelled at making hard cheeses, they prepare an expert array of fresh dairy products, such as creamy curd cheese (tvorog) and various cultured yogurt-like preparations (riazhenka, prostokvasha), in addition to excellent sour cream (smetana). Honey is the traditional Russian sweetener and is used as the basis for drinks, fruit preserves, and desserts. Early condiments (known as vzvar, from the word "to boil") consisted of onions or beets cooked slowly in honey until rich and sweet.

Russian cuisine is known for its extensive repertoire of soups. The national soup (shchi) is made from cabbage, either salted (sauerkraut) or fresh, in which case it is known as "lazy" shchi. The beet soup (borshch) commonly associated with Russian cuisine is actually native to Ukraine, to the south of Russia; it became popular abroad following Jewish emigration from that region. Soup is traditionally served at the midday meal and is accompanied by an assortment of small pies, croutons, or dumplings. The Russian diet tends to be high in carbohydrates, with a vast array of breads, notably dark sour rye, and grains, especially buckwheat (grechnevaya kasha).

The national cuisine is further distinguished by wonderful pies filled with myriad combinations of meat, fish, or vegetables. Prepared in all shapes and sizes, pies are both festive and a practical way to use up leftovers. The most elegant pie is, perhaps, the kulebyaka, a multilayered fish pie with thin pancakes (blinchiki), kasha, and salmon (including the spinal marrow or viziga) that was adopted into French cuisine as coulibiac.

Diet of the Early Slavs

Early Slavic agriculture was largely grain based. Hearty crops like rye, oats, barley, buckwheat, spelt, and millet provided the mainstay of the diet, most often in the form of gruel or baked into cakes made of meal sweetened with honey and flavored with berry juice. Although wheat was cultivated in the South, it remained of secondary importance. From the Scythians, a Eurasian tribe that roamed the steppes of southern Russian from the eighth to the fourth centuries B.C.E., the early Slavs learned how to make leavened breads, using primarily sourdough. Grains were supplemented by legumes (gorokh), an important source of protein. Freshwater fish and wildfowl, both of which were abundant, provided additional sources of protein. Vegetable and nut oils (especially hempseed and linseed), foraged mushrooms and berries, and orchard fruits such as cherries, pears, plums, and apples supplemented the largely carbohydrate diet. Also critical were cultivated vegetables, including turnips, beets, radishes, onions, garlic, cabbage, and cucumbers. Turnips were an important staple until the widespread (and enforced) cultivation of the potato in the nineteenth century. Given the geographical limitations on agriculture, much of the population lived in a state between hunger and starvation, and up through the twentieth century Russia experienced frequent famines.

The earliest domestic livestock included cows, pigs, sheep, and goats; chicken, ducks, geese; turkey was introduced somewhat later. Butter was traditionally prepared from cow's milk by heating sour cream, rather than by churning it from sweet cream, a method the Russians learned only in the eighteenth century from the Finns.

By the twelfth century the Russians were already boiling down salt from water from the White Sea, but salt remained an expensive commodity that only the wealthy could afford. Even those who could afford salt used it sparingly. A seventeenth-century German visitor Adam Olearius, complained that "in Moscow, they use coarse salt fish, which sometimes stinks because they are thrifty with the salt. Nevertheless, they like to eat it." In general, the affluent had a plentiful assortment of fish, meat, fruits, vegetables, and grains, a diet that contrasted greatly with the meager rations of most of the population, who subsisted on little more than oatmeal gruel (tolokno) and rye bread. Although the soil around Moscow and in the south of Russia yielded excellent produce, the growing season was short, and most people did not have access to a variety of foods.

Cooking Methods

Apart from the methods used for preserving food, boiling and baking were the most common ways of preparing foods (frying and grilling were also practiced). By 1600 rich and poor alike were cooking food in the Russian masonry stove (pech'), which was massive enough to take up nearly one-quarter of a peasant cottage. This stove defined the living space, demarcating the female and male spheres of the room into the cooking area (female) to the left of the hearth, and the icon-dominated "beautiful corner" (male) to the right. The earliest stoves had no flue, causing smoke to issue directly into the cottage; more prosperous families replaced these "black" stoves with more refined "white" stoves fitted with chimney pipes. Russian peasants generally believed that the stove held mystical powers, with a house spirit (domovoi) residing beneath or behind it.

Food could be prepared in many different ways on the stove—boiled, baked, steamed, roasted, and braised. Many of Russia's most typical dishes reflected the specific properties of the stove, which blazed and was very hot after firing and then gradually diminished in the intensity of its heat. Breads and pies were baked when the oven was still very hot, either right in the fire's ashes or immediately after they had been scraped out. Once the temperature began to fall, grain dishes could cook in the diminishing heat, which ensured that porridges were crusty on top and creamy within. As the oven's heat continued to subside, the stove was ideal for the braised vegetables and slow-cooked stews that represent the best of Russian cooking. Dairy products were cultured in any residual oven heat.

Whether the medieval Russian diet was varied or sparse, the cooking methods for rich and poor were nearly analogous. Although Tsar Peter the Great introduced the cooktop (plita) from Holland in the eighteenth century, and metal stoves became common in urban dwellings in the nineteenth century, the Russian stove remained in use in the countryside well into the twentieth century.

Influence of the Russian Orthodox Church

In 988 Grand Prince Vladimir of Kievan Russia adopted Christianity for his people. Many of the existing pagan celebrations, such as those marking the seasonal solstices, were transformed into religious holidays like Christmas and Easter. The Orthodox Church had a profound influence on the Russian diet, dividing the year into feast days (skoromnyi) and fast days (postnyi). The latter accounted for approximately 180 days of the year. The fast periods largely coincided with times in the agricultural year when food supplies were running low. Most Russians took fasting seriously, strictly following the proscriptions against meat and dairy products. In addition to meatless Wednesdays and Fridays, the Russians also observed extended fasts, the most important of which were the Great Lenten Fast (forty days, plus one week, Passion Week, which precedes Easter), the Christmas or Filippov Fast (the six weeks preceding Christmas), the Fast of Saints Peter and Paul (beginning in late May or June and lasting from one to six weeks, depending on when Easter fell); and the Fast of the Dormition (two weeks in August). On the most stringent fast days (Lent and the Dormition Fast), even fish and vegetable oil were forbidden. Generally, the poorer the household, the more devoutly it fasted, since meat and dairy products were at best scarce even on non–fast days. For the wealthy, fasting did not necessarily mean deprivation. A mid-seventeenth-century state dinner given on a fast day for the English ambassador Carlisle offered no fewer than five hundred dishes, not one of which was made with meat products. Throughout the nineteenth century, cookbooks offered suggestions for both feast day and fast day meals. In addition to recipes for fish and vegetarian dishes, the cookbooks provided information on substituting nut oils and almond milk for dairy products in cooking and baking.

Holidays and Ritual Foods

Numerous feast days compensated for the stringent fasts. Feasts were held in celebration of weddings, funerals, and the name days of saints, which the Russians observed instead of birthdays. Many religious holidays were also considered feast days. Just before the rigorous Lenten fast came Butter Week (Maslenitsa), similar to Mardi Gras, except that it lasted a full week. Although no meat was allowed, the Russians consumed excessive amounts of dairy products, most often in the form of blinies. These traditional yeast-raised pancakes, made with buckwheat or wheat flour, are porous enough to soak up plenty of melted butter. Topped with caviar, smoked fish, pickled herring, or sometimes jam, the bliny can be traced back to pagan times, when the early Slavs baked round pancakes in the image of the sun to welcome its return at winter's end.

Easter is the most important holiday in the Russian Orthodox year. Throughout Easter week a table is kept laden with food. The two most traditional foods are kulich, a tall loaf of bread enriched with eggs, butter, sugar, and candied fruits, glazed with confectioners' sugar, and often topped with a rose; and paskha, fresh farmer's cheese mixed with cream and butter and molded into a pyramid shape. Raisins or nuts are used to decorate it with the letters XB for "Christ is Risen."

Virtually every festive occasion calls for a special bread. Pies, such as an elaborate chicken pie layered with vegetables (kurnik), are served at weddings; a sweet, pretzel-shaped loaf (krendel') is traditional for name days; and animal-shaped buns are distributed to Christmas revelers. These buns, as well as the lark-shaped breads baked to celebrate the return of the birds in spring, predate the Christian era. Other breads, such as one baked in the shape of a ladder for the holiday of the Ascension, have Christian roots. Kut'ia, which is a dish of wheat berries sweetened with honey and flavored with dried fruits or nuts, is traditionally served at funeral repasts.

The Tradition of Hospitality

The Russian word for hospitality (khlebosol'stvo) derives from the words for bread (khleb) and salt (sol'). Taken together, they mean a regalement with that which is most basic to life, and that which is a luxury. A large, round loaf milled from the finest flour (karavai) was traditionally presented as a symbol of hospitality or was offered to newlyweds as a housewarming gift. The loaf often had an indentation in the top crust to hold a small dish of salt. The act of honoring guests lies at the heart of the Russian national identity. As counseled by the Domostroi, a sixteenth-century manual that teaches household management and piety, guests are sacred; by receiving them well, you also serve God. One should offer guests are the very best food available. The Russians took this advice to heart: even the poorest households did not turn strangers away.

The sharing of bread was ritualized in the practice of "begging for crusts," which occurred whenever food shortages threatened the peasantry. Unlike simple begging, which was looked down upon, "begging for crusts" was accepted as part of the natural order: each peasant family knew that the situation could be reversed, and next time they might be the ones in need of food after a bad harvest.

In medieval Russia hospitality to foreigners was expressed through the institution of the podacha, a ritualized presentation of food. Privileged guests at the tsar's palace were given confectionery items to bring home at the end of each feast; the amount given was determined by the person's rank. Anyone unable to attend the festivities might have the podacha delivered to his residence by couriers, who would parade through the streets of Moscow in a display of the tsar's power and largesse.

Today, the hissing samovar or tea urn is the acknowledged symbol of Russian hospitality, ready to serve unexpected guests at a moment's notice. However, this tradition is relatively recent, as use of the samovar became widespread only in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Alcohol Consumption

The Primary Chronicle, Russia's earliest historical record, relates that Grand Prince Vladimir proclaimed "Drinking is the joy of Rus' " when he chose Christianity over Islam, which forbids the consumption of alcohol. From the earliest times the Russians enjoyed alcoholic beverages, especially mead, a fermented honey wine flavored with berries and herbs; kvas, a mildly alcoholic beverage made from fermented bread or grain; berezovitsa, lightly fermented birch juice; and beer. Distilled spirits, in the form of vodka, appeared only in the fifteenth century, introduced from Poland and the Baltic region. Vodka was originally used for medicinal purposes, but it gradually displaced the older beverages in popularity, and by the seventeenth century spirits were already causing social problems. Because the high taxes on vodka filled the state coffers, the government was not eager to curtail use of the substance (a few privileged noblemen were given the right to produce vodka, but the government basically had a monopoly on its production). In the late nineteenth century the famous chemist Dmitri Mendeleev set the optimal alcoholic content of vodka at 40 percent spirits diluted with distilled water. Commercial producers capitalized on Mendeleev's pronouncement, and Russia has been known ever since for its excellent vodka.

Tsar Ivan the Terrible established the first taverns (kabaki) in the sixteenth century by for the sole benefit of his elite guards. Since then the government has vacillated between strict and lax approaches to vodka consumption, at times encouraging it to build up the state treasury and ease public unrest, at other times curtailing access to the drink. Tsar Peter the Great was known to ply his guests with drink in order to find out what was really going on at court, and he himself engaged in drinking binges that lasted for days at a time. More recently, in the Soviet era, two Communist leaders, Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev, attempted to control access to vodka. Their ill-fated attempts caused widespread discontent, as well as severe shortages of sugar, which people purchased in bulk to produce moonshine.

Eastern Influence on Russian Cuisine

In 945 Russia, though still not unified, initiated trade with Constantinople, the seat of the Byzantine Empire. In exchange for honey and furs, the Russians received rice, spices, and wines. In 1237 the Mongols invaded the Russian principalities, and for nearly two hundred years Russia had to pay tribute to the Golden Horde. The occupation was not without culinary benefits. The Mongols reopened the ancient trade routes between China and the West, which had become too dangerous due to frequent tribal wars. Foods introduced along these routes included noodles and cultured milk products such as koumiss, the fermented mare's milk drunk by Turkic nomads.

With Russia's conquest of the Volga region in the mid-sixteenth century, the Russians were able to trade for spices like pepper, saffron, cinnamon, and ginger, as well as rhubarb, which became an extremely lucrative export crop. Also from the Volga region came sweet watermelons from Astrakhan, at the mouth of the Volga, and increased access to sturgeon, sterlet, and caviar from the Caspian Sea.

Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible; 1530–1584) led a series of Eastern campaigns to subjugate the khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Tatar Bashkiria; in 1582 he also annexed Siberia. This eastward expansion introduced the Russians to pel'meni, wonton-like pockets of boiled dough filled with ground meat and onions. The Russians serve these dumplings either with vinegar and mustard or with butter and sour cream. Pel'meni are frequently made in large quantities at the beginning of winter and kept frozen outdoors in a bag, ready for boiling into a quick meal. Exotic fresh and dried fruits were also introduced from the East, and raisins and dried apricots have held a prominent place in Russian cuisine ever since.

Tea also arrived in Russia by way of Siberia. As early as 1567 emissaries from Ivan IV had spoken of this strange brew, but it wasn't until 1638 that tea found its way to the royal court. The signing of the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 established regular trade between Russia and China. From then on tea became a valuable commodity, although until the nineteenth century tea drinking was largely confined to Moscow's urban population.

With the expansion of the Russian Empire into the Caucasus and central Asia, beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing under Soviet rule, dishes from Eastern cuisines entered into the Russian repertoire. From Georgia came grilled meats (shashlyki), flattened chicken cooked under a brick (tabaka), and herbed kidney beans (lobio); from Armenia came flat bread (lavash); from Azerbaijan, ground lamb kebabs (lyulya-kebab); from Tatar Crimea, fried meat pies (chebureki); from Uzbekistan, rice pilaf (plov) and dumplings (manty); and from Kyrgyzstan, lamb and noodle stew (lagman).

The Era of Muscovy

During the era of Muscovy (from the fourteenth to early eighteenth centuries) the disparity between rich and poor became firmly established, resulting in two very different cuisines. The poor ate little more than bread, gruel, and soup made from vegetables and grains. The wealthy, on the other hand, ate so lavishly that foreign visitors like the French envoy Foy de la Neuville, on a 1689 visit, declared them gluttons. Foreigners generally considered the Russians uncivilized, not only due to their prodigious appetites, but also due to the pleasure they so openly expressed from their meals via belching and other bodily sounds.

The wealthy indulged in feasts that lasted for hours. Pickled or salted beef, ham, suckling pig, elk, boar, lamb, and rabbit all appeared on the table. Swan was considered the most luxurious of birds, although the wealthy also enjoyed crane, heron, black grouse, hazel hen, partridge, lark, goose, duck, and chicken. Veal was rarely consumed, and the Russian Orthodox Church forbade eating doves, since the birds symbolized the Holy Spirit. Hot and cold soups, noodle dishes, roasts, and sauces were seasoned with onion, garlic, pepper, saffron, and sometimes savory. The combination of sweet and sour so typical of medieval foods throughout Europe was especially compatible with Russian tastes. Rich, dark swan meat was often served with vinegar or a combination of sour milk, pickles, and prunes.

The tsar's table was furnished year-round with fish from distant waters, transported whole or in pieces, fresh or salted, or brined in barrels. Sturgeon and sterlet were brought live in tanks from the Caspian Sea to Moscow; whitefish came from Lake Ladoga; and several varieties of salmon were sent overland from the Kolsk Peninsula in the far North. Pike, bream, perch, pike-perch, and many other sorts of excellent fish were caught in the rivers and ponds around Moscow.

Eighteenth-Century Reforms

The reforms carried out by Peter I (the Great; 1672–1725) affected virtually every aspect of Russian life. Upper-class women, who had previously lived in seclusion, were allowed into male company and could eat at the same table as men. Peter introduced napkins from Holland (until his reign, tables had been covered with short cloths, the edges of which were used to wipe the hands and mouth while eating). Since large joints of meat were carved and served in small pieces at table, several people would generally share forks and knives among them, but Peter encouraged the use of individual twopronged forks.

In the kitchen, the most significant development for Russian cuisine was the introduction of the Dutch range, which, contrary to the traditional Russian stove, relied on a cooktop more than on oven chambers. This change necessitated more labor-intensive cooking methods as well as new utensils. Saucepans, for instance, replaced the customary earthenware pots.

Peter was eager to acquaint Russians with new foodstuffs and culinary methods that he had learned on his extensive travels. From Holland he imported not only hothouse vegetables and fruits (pineapples became a particular Russian passion), but also aged cheeses, which the Russians did not know how to make. He sought grape varietals that could thrive in southern Russia and placed the two-centuries-old Astrakhan winery under the supervision of a French vintner to increase its quality and production.

In 1712 the imperial court moved from Moscow to Saint Petersburg. The design of the commercial center (Gostinyi dvor) incorporated a canal right in the building so that boats could unload their wares on site. Petersburg's significant foreign population influenced the city's eating habits, and foods such as waffles and artichokes found welcome reception. Furthermore, the young Russian men whom Peter had sent abroad to further their education returned with new tastes. Seeking more variety in their diet, they began to import exotic foods. When Peter hired a Saxon as his private chef, the nobility soon followed suit. Thus Russia's first foreign chefs came primarily from Saxony, Bavaria, and Austria.

Because the founding of Saint Petersburg had caused trade to decline at the far northern port of Archangel on the White Sea, in 1721 Peter issued an ukaze ordering his people to eat ocean fish. Previously the Russians had used only freshwater fish from rivers and lakes, and many were suspicious of such strange species as cod, whiting, and mackerel.

French Influence on Russian Cuisine

The culinary changes wrought during Peter's thirty-six-year reign were so great that by the time his daughter Elizabeth seized the throne in 1741, lemons and oranges were no longer a luxury, and English beer was in greater vogue than traditional Russian brews. As the century progressed, more and more European influences came to bear on traditional Russian methods. The vocabulary introduced into Russian over the course of the eighteenth century reveals influences from the Dutch, German, English, and ultimately French cuisines. By the close of the eighteenth century, food in the homes of the wealthy was unabashedly French, and Russia's most affluent families employed French chefs, whose style supplanted the Germanic influences of Peter's era.

With so much foreign influence, Russian cuisine lost its simple national character and became increasingly complex. By the end of century, meat was cut into small pieces that demanded complicated handling, as opposed to the large joints of meat that had been roasted or braised in the great Russian stove, or grilled on a spit. As the nineteenth century drew near, many French dining habits were firmly entrenched in Russia, although sometimes with a Russian twist. One practice that came into vogue among the aristocracy was the open table, at which any nobleman, invited or not, was welcome to dine. The conservative prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, in his treatise On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, complained that the nobility's excessive socializing at table led to moral deterioration. He was troubled that the nobility gave so little thought to the relationship between the food served and the religious obligations underlying it. Even so, Peter the Great's reforms and the subsequent refinements to the table broadened and polished Russian cuisine. Adapting western trends to their own needs and tastes, the Russians ultimately made their table quite sophisticated.

Table Service and Meal Times

The Russian peasantry ate their meager fare from a communal bowl, with each individual wielding his or her own spoon. The wealthy, however, sat down to a vastly different table, which was also distinct from its European counterparts. By the seventeenth century society meals throughout Europe were served in the style known as service à la française, which meant that for each course, all of the foods were set out on the table, ranked according to size and symmetrically arranged. The Russians ate in a manner that came to be known as service à la russe (it eventually replaced the French style of service in Europe in the late nineteenth century). Here the table was not previously laid with the foods for each course. Instead, each dish was brought individually to the table and presented with fanfare before being removed to the kitchen or sideboard for carving. Each diner received a portioned serving, which ensured that the food was still hot and at the peak of freshness. Furthermore, diners were not limited to the foods located within reach. The drawback of service à la russe was that it entailed a large and well-trained staff.

Under Peter the Great, the multicourse banquets typical of the Muscovite era began to evolve into the sequence of four courses that is familiar today. Peter's war with Sweden and his travels in Holland resulted in the introduction of the lavish zakuska (hors d'oeuvres) table that has become the hallmark of Russian cuisine. Adapted from the Swedish smorgasbord, an array of salted and smoked foods, including caviar, salmon, sturgeon, herring, pickles, and ham, is offered before the main course. Open-faced sandwiches with meat or cheese reflect a direct borrowing from Dutch practice. After the zakuski, soup is served, then a main course, followed by dessert.

Meal times were rather flexible. The wealthy, having no immediate tasks to attend to, often slept late and did not have breakfast until mid-morning. The main meal of the day (obed) took place at around 2:00 P.M., followed by a late-afternoon collation or tea, then supper between 8:00 and 10:00 P.M. Peasant families had more structured mealtimes. Breakfast (zavtrak) was typically eaten at 5:00 or 6:00 A.M., followed by the so-called second breakfast (vtoroi zavtrak) at around 10:00 A.M., providing a break from the day's labors. Dinner was eaten any time between 12:00 and 2:00 P.M., with a midday snack (poldnik) at 4:00 or 5:00 P.M. Supper (uzhin) was generally served at 8:00 P.M., and, after tea drinking became an established custom in the late nineteenth century, tea (chai) often followed. For those who could afford a variety of foods, the Russian breakfast was a hearty affair, complete with porridge (often buckwheat or semolina), smoked or pickled fish, and eggs or pancakes. The main meal of the day was still not considered complete without a soup course before the entrée.

Revolutionary Changes

The indulgent lifestyle of the aristocracy and gentry came to an abrupt end with the Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent establishment of the Soviet Union. The new Bolshevik government undertook a radical transformation of social life, promoting as one of their platforms the liberation of women from kitchen drudgery. To this end, vast communal dining facilities ("factory kitchens") were set up. However, because the food was bad, and most families did not like the impersonal cafeteria style of these facilities, the experiment ultimately failed. What did take hold, however, were communal kitchens in urban houses that had been requisitioned by the government. The great influx of people into the cities following the Revolution of 1917 caused a housing shortage that led to the creation of communal apartments, with sometimes as many as a dozen families sharing a kitchen. Communal kitchens, some of which still exist, contributed to the disintegration of family life and created social tensions.

The political and economic turmoil of the Civil War (1917–1922), coupled with drought in the Volga region, caused a severe famine between 1921 and 1922, in which nearly half a million people died. But this loss of life is small in comparison to the many millions who perished during Joseph Stalin's enforced collectivization of agriculture, which he carried out between 1929 and 1934, especially in Ukraine. Under this policy, private farms were destroyed and agriculture organized into state-run collective farms (kolkhozy). Collectivization proved disastrous for Soviet agriculture, as it was inefficient and discouraged personal initiative. The Soviet Union was forced to import much of its grain from the United States and Canada and frequently suffered from food deficits.

The Soviet Era

The Soviet Union was never a fully egalitarian society. Most of the populace subsisted on a monotonous diet of poor-quality food, but the government and cultural elite had access to special stores and goods, so they were able to eat well. Although the government ensured that no one went hungry (all factory workers, for instance, received a free lunch at state expense), the average diet was not especially nutritious, as it was low in fresh fruits and vegetables.

The Soviet period was marked by extraordinary hardship. Following collectivization and the political purges of the late 1930s, the Russians endured World War II, also known as the Great Patriotic War. During the Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944), which lasted for nearly nine hundred days, roughly one million people died of starvation. At the most critical point in the siege, the bread ration for factory workers was only 250 grams (8.8 ounces) a day, 125 grams (4.4 ounces) for all others, with no other food available. Leningraders resorted to eating whatever they could scavenge from the city or find in their apartments, including tooth powder, Vaseline, glycerine, cologne, wallpaper paste scraped from the walls, flour dust collected from cracks in the kitchen floorboards, and spattered grease that was licked from the kitchen walls.

Although life stabilized after the war, the Soviet era was generally characterized by a low standard of living. Shopping was especially difficult, with long lines even for basic foodstuffs. There was very little variety. When socalled deficit items did suddenly appear, shoppers had to stand in line for hours. The vocabulary reflected this reality: products were "obtained" (dostat') rather than "bought" (kupit'). Because of the hierarchy of food distribution, country dwellers flooded daily into Moscow, increasing the crowds and further limiting availability.

The state food stores had very little to offer, but decent foodstuffs could be purchased at the farmers' markets, where entrepreneurs from Georgia, Armenia, and central Asia sold lemons, melons, and high-quality meat and produce, often at steep prices. To survive, most Soviet citizens became adept at working the unofficial barter economy, and they knew how to take advantage of the black market. Restaurants were few; those that existed frequently offered only one item from their menu and subjected diners to surly service. Therefore most Russians ate at home. The Soviet-era kitchen table became the site of the most important social interactions, where information was exchanged, poetry recited, politics argued, friendships expressed. Despite the food shortages, the difficulty of shopping, and the cramped living space, Russians still took pride in being generous toward their guests, and the tradition of hospitality endured.

Post-Soviet Russia

The Soviet Union was officially disbanded at the end of 1991. The following year saw the introduction of stringent market reforms, which brought economic hardship to the general population. With a safety net no longer in place, beggars appeared on the streets. The countryside, in particular, suffered from insufficient food. Russia's economic problems were exacerbated by the crash of 1998, when the ruble lost two-thirds of its value. Still, the Russians are a resourceful people, and in the early twenty-first century the economy was back on its feet.

The collapse of the Soviet state initially brought a rash of investors to Russia, and numerous fast-food chains, such as McDonald's, gained a foothold. In response to so many Western imports, a feeling of national pride gradually emerged, and domestic chains like Russkoye Bistro began to compete with the foreign establishments. Homegrown products again appeared on the market when the economic turmoil of the 1990s caused many foreign firms to leave. Once the economy stabilized, many restaurants opened that offered expensive and elegant pre-Revolutionary fare, nostalgic country-style cooking, and ethnic cuisine. After seventy years of isolation under Soviet rule, the populace was eager to experiment with new tastes.

With the appearance of self-service grocery stores, shopping was simplified, and it was no longer necessary to stand in line for food. However, one might question whether shrink-wrapped tomatoes imported from the Canary Islands represent progress when locally grown produce can be bought at the market or at curbside kiosks. The slick grocery stores with their aisles of imported goods and the expensive restaurants were status symbols for the wealthy class of New Russians who had money to spare: the majority could not afford them. These New Russians also bought food magazines (unheard of during the Soviet era) and cookbooks: both the French Cordon Bleu cooking course and the Hare Krishna Book of Vegetarian Cooking were translated into Russian. Young Russians became increasingly aware of diet and nutrition, the down side being that eating disorders began to appear.

Meanwhile, average Russians could only admire the glossy publications and the wide variety of foods, which were beyond their means. Police in a number of cities have had to put Operation Harvest into effect to protect the potato fields—which were now private property—from hungry poachers. Significantly, the consumerism of the moneyed class was balanced by a return to spiritual values, as many Russians once again expressed their identity through the foods they choose either to eat or forego.

Caviar

The Russians were the first to develop a caviar industry based on the several varieties of sturgeon that they fished, and the world's best caviar still comes from the Caspian Sea. The thirteenth-century court of Grand Prince Yaroslav of Novgorod had a special sturgeon master to oversee the procurement, preparation, and serving of sturgeon. The roe was particularly relished. (Although Russians consider sturgeon roe the finest, they also enjoy the eggs from such fish as burbot, white salmon, pike, carp, and grayling, although technically this roe is not considered caviar.)

Making caviar is extremely labor-intensive, as the fish eggs are both fragile and perishable. The roe must be extracted by hand, then kept cold during processing (generally at 28°–32°F [–2°–0°C]) to keep it fresh. Salt is added to lower the temperature at which the eggs will freeze, as well as to help preserve them. The best fresh caviar, which contains roughly 4 percent salt, is known as malosol ("little salt" in Russian). Today, for exports to Europe, the Russians also add a small amount of borax to the roe, which works as a preservative and reduces the need for salt. Borax gives the eggs a slightly sweeter taste and makes them a bit oilier. Russia omits the borax for caviar imported into the United States, which prohibits the sale of borax-treated eggs.

The flavor and quality of caviar depend on the type of sturgeon it is taken from. The most common types, in decreasing order of size, are beluga, osetra, and sevruga. Beluga sturgeon can weigh over two thousand pounds; its roe is a pearly gray and has a very subtle flavor. Many Russians prefer the strong flavor of payusnaya or pressed caviar, made from eggs that have been broken in processing or from very mature eggs pressed into a concentrate the consistency of thick jam.

Caviar was standard fare for the wealthy on the numerous fast days dictated by the Russian Orthodox Church, when meat and dairy products were proscribed. Medieval Russians often left the roe in the egg sac. They seasoned it with salt and pepper, then dusted it with flour and fried it, serving an onion, cranberry, or saffron sauce on the side. Sometimes they offered the cooked caviar cold, cut into slices and flavored with an herb vinegar or mustard sauce. For the Muscovite dish kal'ia, pressed caviar was cut into thin rounds, then placed in an earthenware pot with chopped onion, pepper, pickles, pickle brine, and water. This mixture was steamed in the Russian stove, with additional pepper added upon serving. Nineteenth-century culinary fashion called for slicing pressed caviar and serving it in a napkin as "serviette caviar." Elena Molokhovets, Russia's Mrs. Beeton, suggested a more practical use for pressed caviar. In her classic cookbook, A Gift to Young Housewives, she explains how to clarify bouillon with pressed caviar, using onequarter pound of the caviar in place of two egg whites.

By the mid-nineteenth century the finest sturgeon caviar had become rare enough that it was generally served unadorned. Astrakhan caviar, with its large, gray grains, was considered the ultimate roe. It was served on toast points or mounded in a pyramid and decorated with lemon wedges with croutons on the side. Late-nineteenth-century cookbooks sometimes cautioned against buying caviar with a greenish tinge, which was caused by treatment with a dye containing copper salts.

All varieties of sturgeon are endangered, due to environmental pollution and poaching (there is a thriving black market in caviar in southern Russia). The political and economic chaos that afflicted Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union caused many foreign purveyors to turn to Iran for the highest quality caviar. Now, in order to keep up with world demand for the roe, scientists are experimenting with farm-raised sturgeon, particularly in the Caspian waters belonging to Kazakhstan.

Bibliography

Baron, Samuel H., ed. and trans. The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967.

Chamberlain, Lesley. The Food and Cooking of Russia. London: Allen Lane, 1982.

de la Neuville, Foy. A Curious and New Account of Muscovy in theYear 1689. Edited and introduced by Lindsey Hughes. Translated from the French by J. A. Cutshall. London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, 1994.

Glants, Musya, and Joyce Toomre, eds. Food in Russian History and Culture. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Goldstein, Darra. A Taste of Russia: A Cookbook of Russian Hospitality, 2d ed. Montpelier, Vt.: Russian Life Books, 1999.

Goldstein, Darra. "Gastronomic Reforms under Peter the Great: Towards a Cultural History of Russian Food." Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 48 (2000): 481–510.

Herlihy, Patricia. The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in LateImperial Russia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Kliuchevskii, V. O. Istoriia russkogo byta: Chteniia v shkole i doma [History of Russian daily life: Readings at school and at home]. Moscow, 1867. Reprint, Moscow: Vash Vybor TsIRZ, 1995.

Kovalev, V. M. and N. P. Mogil'nyi. Russkaia kukhnia: Traditsii i obychai [Russian cuisine: Traditions and customs]. Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1990.

Kostomarov, N. I. Domashniaia zhizn' i nravy velikorusskogo naroda: utvar', odezhda, pishcha i pit'e, zdorov'e i bolezni, nravy, obriady, priem gostei [Domestic life and morals of the great Russians...]. Moscow, 1887. Reprint, Moscow, 1993.

Lotman, Iu. M., and E. A. Pogosian. Velikosvetskie obedy [High Society Dinners]. St. Petersburg: Pushkinskii fond, 1996.

Petit, Alphonse. La Gastronomie en Russie. Paris: Chez l'Auteur, 1860.

Pokhlebkin, V. V. Natsional'nye kukhni nashikh narodov [National cuisines of our peoples]. Moscow: Pishchevaia Promyshlennost', 1978.

Pouncy, Carolyn, ed. and trans. The "Domostroi": Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Pryzhov, I. T. Istoriia kabakov v Rossii v sviazi s istoriei russkago naroda [History of taverns in Russia in connection with the history of the Russian people]. 1863. Reprint, Moscow: Book Chamber International, 1991.

Smith, R. E. F., and David Christian. Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Tereshchenko, A. V. Byt russkogo naroda [Daily life of the Russian people]. Vol. 3. Sankt-Peterburg: Ministerstvo vnutrennykh del, 1848.

Toomre, Joyce, trans. and introduction. Classic Russian Cooking:Elena Molokhovets' A Gift to Young Housewives. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Wasson, Valentina Pavlovna, and R. Gordon Wasson. Mushrooms, Russia and History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1957.

—Darra Goldstein

A vast nation that stretches from eastern Europe across the Eurasian land mass. It was the most powerful republic of the former Soviet Union; ethnic Russians composed about half of the population. It is the world's largest country. Its capital and largest city is Moscow.

• Russia was ruled by czars of the Romanov family from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.
• Peter the Great, a czar who reigned in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, attempted to westernize Russian government and culture.
• During the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks, under Lenin, took control of the government; communists governed from 1917 until 1991.
• Russia now occupies the seat on the Security Council of the United Nations formerly held by the Soviet Union.

The international dialing code for Russia is:   7

Recipes

Geographic Setting and Environment

Russia is the largest country in Europe, with 6.6 million square miles (17 million square kilometers). It is 1.8 times the size of the United States. Russian land extends to the Arctic Ocean in the north. Russia shares borders with China and Mongolia to the south, and Ukraine, Latvia, Belarus, Lithuania, and Finland to the west. About three-fourths of the land is arable (able to be farmed), although the output from farms decreased during the 1980s and 1990s. After the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) broke apart in 1991, the Russian government started a program to encourage small farmers. From 1991 to 2001 about 150,000 new small farms were established.

History and Food

Russia has a history of a diet based on crops that can thrive in cold climates, such as grains (rye, barley, buckwheat, and wheat), root vegetables (beets, turnips, potatoes, onions), and cabbage. Ivan III (ruled 1462–1505) brought Italian craftsmen to Russia to build public buildings. These craftsmen introduced pasta, frozen desserts (gelato and sherbet), and pastries to the Russian diet.

Peter I (ruled 1682–1725), known as "The Great," included a French chef in his court. It was during his reign that Russians began to serve meals in courses, rather than to serve all the food at once. From that time until the Russian Revolution in 1917, many wealthy Russian families employed French chefs. When French chefs returned home to France, they introduced popular Russian dishes to the people of Europe. The Salade Russe, known in Russia as Salat Olivier or Salad Rusky was created during the era of Nicholas II (in power until 1917) by a French chef.

See Salat Olivier (Russian Salad) recipe.

Food of the Russians

Traditional Russian cooking relied on a pech' or oven, rather than a burner as a heat source. The oven had two compartments—one for slow cooking and the other for quick baking. The pech' also heated the homes of the peasants, and therefore occupied a central spot in the main room of the house. Traditional dishes include roasted meats, vegetables, soups, and stews. A staple of the Russian diet is dark, heavy bread. It is not uncommon for a family of four to eat three or four loaves of bread a day. Also popular are bliny (thin pancakes), and a variety of savory and sweet pies called either piroghi (large pies) orpirozhki (small pies). They are usually filled with fish, cheese, jam, cabbage, mushrooms, chopped hard-cooked eggs, or meat. The possibilities are unlimited. These pies are served alone or with soup at lunch. Hot sweetened tea, called chai, is served frequently from a samovar (large brass boiler) that heats water and steeps the tea leaves to form a concentrated mixture.

Russians eat more fish than most other cultures because, under the Russian Orthodox Church, many days of the year were fasting days and fish was the only meat allowed. Sturgeon is the favorite fish of the Russians, from which black caviar (fish eggs) is collected. Kissel, a piece of stewed fruit thickened with cornstarch with milk poured over it, is a traditional dessert.

Bliny is a traditional Russian dish that is eaten in great quantity during Maslyanitsa (Butter Week, the Russian equivalent of Mardi Gras), the last week before Lent. Good bliny must be very thin, the thinner the better. Bliny may be served with sweet or savory filling or with butter, sour cream, caviar, fresh fruit, or smoked fish.

See Bliny (Russian Pancakes) recipe.

See Bliny Filling recipe.

See Cabbage Pirozhki or Piroghi recipe.

Food for Religious and Holiday Celebrations

The Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the New Year on January 1, Christmas on January 7 and Epiphany on January 19. At New Year's, Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost), a character from folklore, may be seen at holiday events distributing pryaniki, a sweet cookie to signify wishes for a sweet new year. The Russian equivalent for Mardi Gras happens during Maslyanitsa (Butter-week) when bliny are eaten nonstop. For Easter, Orthodox Russian women bake cakes and decorate them elaborately to resemble the rounded domes of the Orthodox churches. The cakes are given either to the priest on Easter Sunday, or served at home. The Easter bread is always cut lengthwise instead of in vertical slices. Pashka, a cold mixture of soft cheese (tvorog), butter, almonds, and currants, is formed in a special mold shaped like a pyramid with the top cut off to represent the tomb of Jesus. Russian Easter eggs are often colored red to signify the resurrection of Jesus. This is done by hard-boiling eggs with either red onion peel or beets. Roast pork is served for the main meal at Easter. A roast goose is traditional at Christmas.

See Pashka recipe.

See Sbiten (Russian National Winter Beverage) recipe.

Mealtime Customs

Russians eat four meals a day, starting with zavtrak or "morning coffee." Lunch, or obyed, is a small two-dish meal lasting from 12 noon until 1 p.m. Usually kasha, or baked buckwheat, is served at lunch. Dinner, or uzhin, is the most elaborate meal beginning at 6 p.m. and typically featuring four courses. The first course is zakuski or "little bite." Zakuski may feature a few simple appetizers (such as bread and cheese or herbed butter) to twenty or more elaborate creations requiring hours of preparation. Selodka, or herring with a vinegar and oil dressing, is the best-known appetizer, and it almost always makes an appearance during the zakuski. The first course is often soup, although soup may also be the entrée. Favorite soups include borscht (beet soup traditionally served with sour cream); shchyee (cabbage soup); and solyanka (a tomato-based chowder). The main course may be roast meat, with potatoes and root vegetables. Dessert may be ice cream or cheesecake. A few hours after dinner, usually around 9 or 10 p.m., Russians have their fourth and final meal of the day, centered on the samovar (ornate urn for serving coffee or tea) for tea and cakes, such as Sharlotka (Apple Cake). Visitors are encouraged to drop in for tea at night, sometimes staying until midnight. Restaurants often end the meal with Klyukva S Sakharom (Frosted Cranberries).

See Borscht (Beet Soup) recipe.

See Sharlotka (Apple Cake) recipe.

See Klyukva S Sakharom (Frosted Cranberries) recipe.

See Semechki (Toasted Sunflower Seeds) recipe.

See Chai Po-Russki (Tea, Russian-Style) recipe.

Politics, Economics, and Nutrition

At the beginning of 2001, Russians continued to struggle with shortages of some food items. According to a World Bank report, about 3 percent of children under age five are underweight, and about 13 percent have not grown to the appropriate height for their age. These are both signs that a small percentage of young children in Russia are not receiving adequate nutrition from their daily diet.

Further Study

Books

Goldstein, Darra. A La Russe: A Cookbook of Russian Hospitality. 2nd ed. Montpelier, VT: Russian Life Books, 1999.

Kropotkin, Alexandra. The Best of Russian Cooking. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1997.

Toomre, Joyce. Classic Russian Cooking: Elena Molokhovets' A 'Gift to Young Housewives.' Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Visson, Lynn. The Russian Heritage Cookbook. Dana Point, CA: Casa Dana Books, 1998.

Volokh, Anne with Mavis Manus. The Art of Russian Cuisine. New York: MacMillan, 1983.

Web Sites

Russian Foods. [Online] Available http://www.russianfoods.com/ (accessed January 31, 2001).

Zina's Cookbook. [Online] Available http://www.russophile.com/cook/index.html (accessed August 17, 2001).

There are three main wine-producing regions in Russia-the area along the Caspian Sea just north of Azerbaijan, which is known for its dessert wines the area south of the city of Krasnodar, along the Black Sea and somewhat inland; and the area surrounding the city of Rostov, north of the Black Sea on the Sea of Azov. The two latter regions make red, white, and sparkling wines. Although most Russian wines are made from indigenous grape varieties like rkatsiteli Black Tsimlyansky, Pletchistik, and Saperavi, some western European grapes are now being cultivated.

Spiritualism was first introduced in Russia by people who had been introduced to the subject abroad, witnessing manifestations of psychic phenomena and acquaintance with the works of Allan Kardec, the French exponent of Spiritism.

The new doctrine found its followers chiefly among the members of the professions and the aristocracy, finally including the reigning monarch of that time, Alexander II. Members of his family and entourage also became devoted adherents. Because of the immense influence of such converts, the progress of Spiritualism in Russia was made smoother.

Much of the spiritualist propaganda, manifestations, and publications were conducted under various ruses and deceptions such as the circulation of a paper entitled "The Rebus," professedly devoted to innocent rebuses and charades and only incidentally mentioning Spiritualism, the real object of its being.

Among the distinguished devotees of the subject was Prince Wittgenstein, aide-de-camp and trusted friend of Alexander II, who not only avowed his beliefs openly but arranged for various mediums, including D. D. Home, to give séances before the emperor. The Czar was impressed, and, from that time onward he consulted mediums and their prophetic powers as to the advisability of any contemplated change or step in his life.

Another Russian of high position socially and officially was Alexander N. Aksakof, who interested himself in Spiritualism, arranging séances to which he invited the scientific men of the University, editing a paper Psychische Studien, translating into Russian the works of Emanuel Swedenborg and various French, American, and English writers of the same subject, thus becoming a leader in the movement.

Later, with his friends Boutlerof and Wagner, professors respectively of chemistry and zoology at the University of St. Petersburg, he specially commenced a series of séances for the investigation of the phenomena in an experimental manner and a scientific committee was formed under the leadership of Professor Mendeleyef, who afterward issued an adverse report on the matter. This accused the mediums of trickery and their followers of easy credulity and the usual warfare proceeded between the scientific investigators and spiritual enthusiasts.

At the other extreme of the social scale, among the peasantry and uneducated classes generally, the grossest superstition existed, a profound belief in supernatural agencies and cases were often reported in the columns of Russian papers. Stories abounded of wonder-working, obsession and various miraculous happenings, all ascribed to demoniac or angelic influence, or in districts where the inhabitants were still pagan to local deities and witchcraft.

The final years of the Romanov dynasty were dominated by the strange charismatic figure of the monk Rasputin, murdered shortly before the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Grigory Yefimovich, was a Siberian peasant who had entered a monastery at 18, but left, married and had 4 children. He became absorbed in a peculiar sect that promoted licentious behavior—"Rasputin" was the nickname he was given because it means, "debauched one." Rasputin entered the royal circle in 1903 in the height of the popularity of the occult among the socially elite. He did not meet the royal family until 1905, but quickly gained favor particularly with the Czarina because he was able to help control the young Alexander's bleeding due to his hemophilia. Evidence suggests that Rasputin engaged his hypnotic prowess to calm the child which resulted in easing the bleeding.

During the same period, Russian philosopher and mystic, Peter Demianovitch Ouspensky, (1878-1947) who was a disciple of Georgei Ivanovitch Gurdijeff in connection with the Theosophy movement of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky began to rise to prominence in small elite circles of Europe. According to Peter Washington in his 1993 book, Madame Blavatsky's Baboon, "The self-taught Ouspensky was tempted more by Luciferean visions of self-transcendance, dreaming of a humanity remade in the image of gods by its own strenuous efforts." Ouspensky was never officially a member of the Theosophical Society, which was banned in Russia until 1908. By 1914 when World War I began and the revolution in Russia became imminent, Ouspensky moved away from Theosophy. He was in an ongoing search to raise consciousness—his own and others—in order to understand why, as was his belief, humans continued to relive past lives, and past mistakes.

In the modern era, especially during the 1960s, there was widespread modern interest in parapsychology in the USSR. Its popularity emerged again after the ultraconservative science of the Stalin era. One of the pioneers in this psychic renaissance was Leonid L. Vasiliev (1891-1966), who helped to establish the first parapsychology laboratory in the Soviet Union, at Leningrad. His book Mysterious Manifestations of the Human Psyche (1959) was published in the United States under the title Mysterious Phenomena of the Human Psyche (University Books, 1965).

One possible stimulus for Soviet interest in extrasensory perception (ESP) was the belief that ESP might have military significance. In 1959, a story was leaked in the French press that the United States Navy had experimented with telepathic communication between the atomic submarine Nautilus and a shore base.

Another surprising Soviet interest was disclosed in the readiness of the authorities to permit lectures and demonstrations by Hindu hatha yogis. This had nothing to do with prerevolutionary bourgeois cults of mysticism, but rather indicated willingness to learn about the alleged paranormal physical feats claimed for yoga. Russians have always placed great importance on physical training and sport. In addition, any system of physical culture that promised unusual feats of endurance or control of automatic nervous functions might also have relevance to the physical stresses involved in space travel.

By 1966 the Soviet Union was financing more than twenty centers for the scientific study of the paranormal, involving an annual budget of around 12 to 20 million rubles ($13 to $21 million). Soviet parapsychologists studied reports of such American psychics as Edgar Cayce, Jeane Dixon, and Ted Serios, as well as the parapsychological research of J. B. Rhine and his colleagues.

Throughout the 1960s, Soviet parapsychologists investigated the phenomena of their own sensitives in such fields as dowsings, psychokinesis, telepathy, psychic healing, and eyeless sight. Soviet individuals such as Nina Kulagina in psychokinesis and Rosa Kuleshova who claimed abilities such as fingertip vision (eyeless sight) became widely known and discussed even outside the Soviet Union.

Perhaps because of such international publicity, Soviet authorities sporadically suppressed information on parapsychological research, while a backlash of dogmatic conservatism impeded parapsychology studies. The essentially practical investigations into paranormal faculties by Soviet scientists did hold out hope through the 1970s that they might achieve a real breakthrough in such fields of study.

In his book Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion? (1983), Martin Ebon claims that in the early 1970s the KGB took over extensive parapsychological research to attempt to identify psi particles in order to discover unknown communication channels in living cells for the transfer of information and to conduct follow-up studies on such subjects as hypnosis at a distance. On a popular level, interest has grown in such areas as thoughtography and UFOs.

In the book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain (1970), Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder revealed the wide range of Soviet research in parapsychology. Much of their book was based on firsthand interviews and observations during visits to the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries. The book is useful as a record of information on individuals and organizations at the peak of Communist psychic research.

Eyeless Sight and Psychokinesis

Rosa Kuleshova, exponent of fingertip vision or eyeless sight, reportedly suffered from overexposure of her talent and for a time was accused of cheating before her strange abilities were reasserted. Meanwhile, Abram Novemeisky at the Nizhnig Tagil Pedagogical Institute in the Urals experimented with graphic arts students; he claimed that one in six individuals could distinguish between two colors by fingertip vision.

Yakov Fishelev of the Sverdlovsk Pedagogical Institute confirmed such findings and also experimented with subjects at the Pyshma school for the blind, starting with fingertip color recognition and then developing the ability to distinguish shapes of letters. S. N. Dobronravov of Sverdlovsk reported that he had found "skin sight" potential in 72 percent of children, mostly between the ages of 7 and 12.

At the Filatov Institute Laboratory of the Physiology of Vision, in Odessa, an experiment was conducted by Dr. Andrei Shevalev. His subject was Vania Dubrovich, an eight-year-old boy blind from early childhood, whose eyes and optical nerves had been removed. Shevalev attached a lens to Vania's forehead, and the boy learned to distinguish degrees of light through the lens. This experiment claimed to open up new possibilities of "skin glasses."

In the field of psychokinesis (PK), the unusual ability of Nina Kulagina to move small objects at a distance without contact was first discovered by L. L. Vasiliev, after Kulagina had demonstrated a talent for "skin vision." Vasiliev found that she could influence a compass needle by holding her hands over it. In further PK tests it was discovered that she could disturb or move objects at a distance. Film records were made demonstrating her PK ability. Among other feats Kulagina apparently changed the flow of sand in an hourglass and made letters appear on photographic paper by mental force. In early reports, her identity was at first hidden under the pseudonym Nelya Mikhailovna.

In March 1988 Kulagina won a libel action against the magazine Man and Law, published by the Soviet Justice Ministry. Two articles by Vyacheslav Strelkov published in the magazine described her as "a swindler and a crook." The Moscow court ruled that Strelkov had no firm evidence on which to base his allegations, and the magazine was ordered to publish an apology. In a subsequent appeal to the Moscow city court, the district court's ruling was upheld: "the articles published by Man and Law besmirch the honor and dignity of Nina Kulagina and…it must publish an apology."

Recent Developments

In the freer atmosphere of public debate and expression of opinion arising from the Mikhail Gorbachev policy of glasnost, public support and discussion of psychic matters increased. Psychic healing received much attention, and the healer Barbara Ivanova treated many prominent officials. She has also undertaken distant healing through the telephone.

In the field of dowsing and radiesthesia, Soviet scientists like G. Bogomolov and Nikolai Sochevanov have collected data to support the reality of such phenomena. With recently developed techniques and apparatus, dowsers have been used to locate damaged cables, water pipes, and electrical lines, as well as underground minerals and water. One series of dowsing tests suggested that women dowsers have a higher ability than men. Dowsing and radiesthetic work is now reported as the "biophysical effect."

Soviet experiments in telepathy are well advanced. Vasiliev studied spontaneous telepathy for nearly 40 years and collected hundreds of circumstantial accounts. In 1967 Yuri Kamensky in Moscow claimed to successfully relayed a telepathic message to Karl Nikolaiev in Leningrad; the message was in a form of Morse code. Other telepathy experiments involved the transmission of emotions, monitored by EEG records. A number of experiments were conducted to ascertain optimum conditions for telepathic transmission, involving a complex of touch, visualization, and thought.

Sometimes a biological sympathy between sender and receiver (heartbeat, brain wave, and similar synchronism) was found to facilitate transmission. Even the influence of highfrequency electromagnetic waves on telepathy was studied, while the neurologist Vladimir Bekhterev experimented with telepathy between human beings and animals.

One development in Soviet parapsychology claiming a significant amount of attention in the 1970s was Kirlian photography, developed by Semyon D. Kirlian and Valentina C. Kirlian, as a method of photographing a corona discharge in human beings and other objects both living and inanimate. It was hoped that an auralike phenomena had been discovered, but the effects reported early in experimentation were later shown to be an effect of differential pressure placed on the film by objects being photographed.

In 1960 the Soviet Academy of Sciences declared that the search for UFOs was "unscientific." However it seems that reports of UFOs were closely studied, a matter of control of Soviet air space, and some Soviet researchers were prepared to consider the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligences.

Over the past two or three decades, there have been many reports of UFO phenomena from the USSR. On October 9, 1989, the Soviet news agency, TASS, astonished the world by reporting claims that a UFO had landed on the evening of September 27, 1989, in a park at Voronezh, a city of 900,000 inhabitants some three hundred miles southeast of Moscow, and that the UFO occupants had walked about and been seen by many people (cf. Flying Saucer Review, vol. 34, no. 4, 1898).

The practical and scientific investigations of Soviet scientists into every major aspect of the paranormal was in sharp contrast to the more romantic interest of Western countries, where psychics demonstrate for entertainment. The down-to-earth Soviet approach into the how and why of the paranormal appeared to be yielding results with clearly practical applications.

The strong, and long-held folk traditions of the Russian people are expected to emerge as the country re-shapes its identity. In his book, The Russian Challenge and the Year 2000, Russian ex-patriate Alexander Yanov, living in the United States since 1975, discussed the issues facing the country since the fall of the Soviet Empire. He noted that, "Orthodox marxisim has been exhausted as an ideological resource for the system, just as the ideology of tsarism was exhausted at the beginning of the twentieth century. Alternative ideological resources are needed to enable the empire to survive a 'systemic' crisis." Published two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yanov's book offered an interesting perspective while reform was anticipated. As Russians continue to pursue a free, elective government as a commonwealth, political reform will begin to shape other apsects of Russian life, as well. The curiosity that they have demonstrated for centuries regarding the inner workings of their consciousness—throughout artistic, cultural and religious pursuit especially—could evolve dramatically in the area of parapsychology, as well. While continuing in the economically stressed atmosphere of the demise of the USSR and the emergence of the Commonwealth of Independent States, parapsychology has suffered and its future is as yet not discernible.

Sources:

[Note: For an authoritative survey of Soviet research in parapsychology and psychotronics, see the journal Psi Research, edited by Larissa Vilenskaya, published quarterly by Washington Research Institute and Parapsychology Research Group, San Francisco, California.]

Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

Ebon, Martin. Psychic Discoveries by the Russians. New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1963. Reprint, New York: New American Library, 1971.

——. Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion? New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983.

Hobana, Ion, and J. Weverbergh. Unidentified Flying Objects from Behind the Iron Curtain. London: Souvenir Press, 1974. Reprint, London: Corgi, 1975.

Ostrander, Sheila, and Lynn Schroeder. Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970. Reprint, New York: Bantam, 1971. Washington, Peter. Madame Blavatsky's Baboon. New York: Schocken Books, 1993.

Yanov, Alexander. The Russian Challenge and the Year 2000. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.