Encyclopedia of Russian History

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Commitment to the nonuse of force became

Shevardnadze’s most important contribution to the

end of communism and the Cold War, permitting

the virtually nonviolent demise of the Soviet em-

pire and the Soviet Union itself. Shevardnadze was

more adamant on this issue than was Gorbachev;

he opposed the use of force in Tbilisi, Georgia, in

1989 and in the Baltics in 1990. Shevardnadze rec-

ognized from his Georgian experience that the use

of force against non-Russian minorities would be

counterproductive, and particularly opposed Gor-

bachev’s reliance on the military. Shevardnadze re-

signed as foreign minister because of Gorbachev’s

turn to the political right wing and, during his res-

ignation speech in December 1990, he predicted that

the use of force would undermine perestroika. The

violence in Lithuania and Latvia three weeks later,

condoned by Gorbachev, proved him right.

When Shevardnadze returned to Georgia, he ini-

tially ruled by emergency decree, without the legit-

imacy of law and with the support of corrupt and

brutal paramilitary forces. Finally elected Georgia’s

second president in 1995 (and reelected in 2000), he

embarked on another campaign to rid Georgia of

corruption, reform the economy, and restore polit-

ical stability.

In 1992 Shevardnadze returned to an indepen-

dent Georgia that was far worse off than when he

had departed for Moscow nearly seven years ear-

lier. His predecessor, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, an ul-

tra-nationalist who was both inept and corrupt,

used his office to restrict civil liberties and to ac-

cumulate great personal wealth. Civil strife was de-

stroying the country, and the economy was in

ruins. As the head of the state, Shevardnadze was

forced to pursue a humiliating course, taking Geor-

gia into the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of

Independent States in 1993 and requesting a Rus-

sian military presence in western Georgia to

counter secessionist forces in Abkhazia. Just as he

had been accused of favoring Western interests

when he was Soviet foreign minister, now he was

charged with betraying Georgian interests as chair-

man of his ancestral homeland.

Shevardnadze survived at least two well-

organized assassination attempts in 1995 and

1998 as well as bloody conflicts with ethnic sep-

aratists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The Rus-

sian wars in nearby Chechnya led to increased

pressure on his government from Moscow and a

greater Russian presence along Georgia’s borders.

Increased Russian involvement in the Caucasus, in-

stability in Central Asia, and weak neighboring

governments in Armenia and Azerbaijan added to

the pressures on Shevardnadze. Numerous scan-

dals within the Georgian military weakened na-

tional security and gave Russian forces greater

opportunities to penetrate the Georgian military.

Increased U.S. involvement in Central Asia because

of the war against terrorism, the Russian interest

in the Caucasus because of the war in Chechnya,

and the overall political and military weakness of

the states of the Caucasus had the potential to con-

tribute to Shevardnadze’s vulnerability.

Shevardnadze, who could have retired from

public life in 1991 as an honored statesman, en-

gaged in yet another battle, this time to keep his

country from self-destruction. The opposition of

high-ranking Russian general officers, who blamed

Shevardnadze for the demilitarization and breakup

of the Soviet Union, were likely to contribute to

the discontinuity of his government in Tbilisi. Un-

like Gorbachev, who turned to writing books and

delivering lectures, Shevardnadze chose a different

path—one that nearly cost him his life on more

than one occasion. With its breathtakingly beauti-

ful Black Sea coast, mountains, ancient culture, rich

agricultural land, and energetic people, Georgia

could certainly emerge as a peaceful and prosper-

ous modern state, and Shevardnadze’s first prior-

ity was to advance the country toward that goal.

See also: GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS; MOVEMENT FOR DE-

MOCRATIC REFORMS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ekedahl, Carolyn McGiffert, and Goodman, Melvin A.

(2001). The Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze. Washing-

ton, DC: Brassey’s.

Palazchenko, Pavel. (1997). My Years with Gorbachev and

Shevardnadze: The Memoir of a Soviet Interpreter. Uni-

versity Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

Shevardnadze, Eduard. (1991). The Future Belongs to Free-

dom. New York: The Free Press.

Shevardnadze, Eduard. (1991). My Choice: In Defense of

Democracy and Freedom. Moscow: Novosti.

ELVIN

OODMAN

SHEVCHENKO, TARAS GREGOREVICH

(1814–1861), Ukraine’s national poet.

Born a serf, Taras Shevchenko was orphaned

early in life. His owner noticed his artistic ability

SHEVCHENKO, TARAS GREGOREVICH

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while he was serving as a houseboy and appren-

ticed him to an icon and mural painter. In 1838

some Russian and Ukrainian intellectuals in St. Pe-

tersburg organized a lottery and used the proceeds

to buy his freedom. Afterwards, Shevchenko stud-

ied under Karl Briullov at the Academy of Fine Arts,

graduating in 1845. While still a student, he pub-

lished a short collection of romantic poems, Kobzar

(The Bard, 1840), that established his reputation as

a poet. His early folklorism and idealization of the

Cossacks soon gave way to poetry of social critique

that prophesied rebellion. Shevchenko’s poems of

the 1840s denounced serfdom and the Russian au-

tocracy and celebrated Slavic brotherhood. In 1847

he was arrested in Kiev on the charge of belonging

to the secret Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood. A

search by the gendarmes discovered his satirical

poems, including an unflattering portrayal of

Nicholas I and his wife, and in consequence the tsar

sentenced Shevchenko to military service in Central

Asia, adding a special prohibition on writing and

painting. Following his release in 1857, Shevchenko

was not permitted to reside in Ukraine. He settled

in St. Petersburg, where he died in 1861.

Shevchenko was a realist artist of note. Even

during his lifetime, his contribution to the devel-

opment of modern Ukrainian culture and national

consciousness earned him the reputation of

Ukraine’s “national bard.” His sophisticated poeti-

cal works transformed folk idioms into a modern

literary product, while his vision of popular justice

and democracy influenced generations of Ukrain-

ian activists. After Shevchenko’s death, Ukrainian

patriots transferred his remains to Chernecha Hill

near Kaniv, in Ukraine, which immediately became

a place of pilgrimage. The cult of Shevchenko con-

tinued to grow in Ukraine during the twentieth

century, for patriots viewed him as a symbol of

national culture and statehood. In the eyes of the

communists, however, Shevchenko was a symbol

of social liberation and friendship with Russia. In

post-Soviet Ukraine Shevchenko is the most revered

figure in the pantheon of the nation’s “founding

fathers.”

See also: CYRIL AND METHODIUS SOCIETY; NATIONALISM

IN THE SOVIET UNION; NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EM-

PIRE; UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grabowicz, George G. (1982). The Poet as Mythmaker: A

Study of Symbolic Meaning in Taras Ševc



enko. Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Shevchenko, Taras. (1964). Poetical Works, trans. C. H.

Andrusyshen and Watson Kirkconnell. Toronto:

University of Toronto Press.

Zaitsev, Pavlo. (1988). Taras Shevchenko: A Life. Toronto:

University of Toronto Press.

ERHY

EKELCHYK

SHLYAPNIKOV, ALEXANDER

GAVRILOVICH

(1885–1937), highly skilled metalworker, trade

union leader, and revolutionary.

Alexander Shlyapnikov, an ethnic Russian from

the town of Murom in central Russia, joined the

Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1902

and became a Bolshevik in 1903; he was impris-

oned in 1904 and 1905–1907. From 1908 to 1916

he lived in Western Europe. During World War I,

Shlyapnikov organized a route through Scandi-

navia into Russia for smuggling illegal Marxist lit-

erature and Bolshevik correspondence.

In February 1917 Shlyapnikov led the Bolshevik

Party organization in Petrograd and became a mem-

ber of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd So-

viet of Workers’ Deputies. Subsequently Shlyapnikov

became chairman of the All-Russian Metalworkers’

Union (1917–1921). He became commissar of labor

(1917–1918) after the October 1917 Revolution.

During the Russian civil war, Shlyapnikov was chair-

man of the Revolutionary Military Council of the

Caspian-Caucasian Front (1918–1919).

From 1919 to 1921 Shlyapnikov led the Work-

ers’ Opposition and advocated the role of unionized

workers in directing and organizing the economy.

Shlyapnikov continued to criticize Soviet economic

policy and treatment of workers throughout the

1920s. In 1933 he was purged from the Commu-

nist Party. In 1935 he was arrested on false charges,

imprisoned, and sent into internal exile. In 1936 he

was arrested again. In September 1937, in a closed

session, the Military College of the USSR Supreme

Court found Shlyapnikov guilty of terrorist activ-

ities, based on false testimony from compromised

witnesses, and ordered his execution. Shlyapnikov

was rehabilitated of criminal charges in 1963 and

restored to membership in the Communist Party in

1988.

See also: BOLSHEVISM; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS

PARTY; WORKERS’ OPPOSITION

SHLYAPNIKOV, ALEXANDER GAVRILOVICH

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Daniels, Robert. (1988). The Conscience of the Revolution:

Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia. Boulder, CO:

Westview Press.

Shliapnikov, Alexander. (1982). On the Eve of 1917, tr.

Richard Chappell. London: Allison and Busby.

ARBARA

LLEN

SHOCK THERAPY

The term shock therapy has come to arouse a great

deal of controversy. Its original use was related to

the use of electrical shocks as therapy in psychi-

atric treatment. In economic policy, it has been used

to describe powerful austerity measures designed

to break spirals of very rapid inflation. More re-

cently, it has been used as a blanket term for poli-

cies designed to reform the postsocialist economies

of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The

latter also is where the main controversies have

arisen.

The divergence of opinion concerning reform

policy can be attributed in large part to the dis-

parate nature of the tasks involved. Setting out to

break inflation is different from seeking to under-

take a broad socioeconomic transformation from

failed centrally planned economies into functioning

market economies. Above all, the political implica-

tions are very different.

In a first stage, beginning after the fall of the

Berlin Wall in 1989, postsocialist governments in

Central Europe embarked on economic reform pro-

grams that featured rapid liberalization and broad-

based privatization. It has been held by some that

those who succeeded did so because they applied

shock therapy. Others, notably so people from the

region, have rejected such claims, arguing that for-

eign advice had little to do with their achievements.

The main test of shock therapy came in the

first half of 1992, when the Russian government

of Yegor Gaidar sought to implement rapid and

radical systemic change. The bulk of all prices were

liberalized and state owned enterprises were in-

formed that their life support systems, in the form

of direct financial links to the state budget, would

be terminated.

It was believed that this “shock” to the system

also would bring a form of therapy in its wake. As

enterprise managers realized that they could no

longer count on automatic subsidies from the state

budget, they would be forced into producing goods

that could be sold on real markets, at prices that

would cover their costs. It was expected that within

a period of one-half of one year or so the transi-

tion should be completed. From there on the Rus-

sian economy would be growing at a healthy pace,

and no more foreign economic support would be

needed.

By the summer of 1992 it became painfully ev-

ident that the project was failing. Enterprises had

responded to the government’s austerity measures

not by cultivating markets, but by developing a

subsequently chronic practice of non-payments.

Losses of government subsidies were met by re-

duced payments on due taxes and wages. Failures

to receive payments from customers were met by

refusals to pay suppliers. Reduced government or-

ders were met by reductions in output, but could

not result in closures since there was no bank-

ruptcy law.

It was also clear that the associated ambitions

of bringing stability to government finance had met

with equal disaster. Inflation was spiraling out of

control, ending up at well more than 2,000 per-

cent for the year as a whole, and persistent deficits

in the state budget would come to haunt the gov-

ernment for several years to come.

Ten years later the evidence remains fairly

bleak. Between 1991 and 1998, the Russian econ-

omy lost around 40 percent of GDP and more than

80 percent of capital investment. There was mass

impoverishment of the population, serious decay

of the country’s infrastructure, and a general

widening of the technology gap against the indus-

trialized world. In August 1998, a brewing finan-

cial crisis produced a massive crash, leaving

investors with tens of billions of dollars in losses.

In the policy debates that surrounded the ini-

tial failures of rapid systemic change, two differ-

ent sides emerged. One side, representing many

market analysts, argued that the reason behind the

initial failures was linked to insufficient shock. In

their view, the crash of 1998 actually was a good

thing, laying the groundwork for the economic up-

turn in 2000 and 2001.

The other side, representing mainly non-econ-

omists and a minority of uninvolved academic

economists, held that the policy of shock therapy

as such has been at fault, and that a set of alter-

native policies would have allowed much of the de-

struction to be avoided. Today it would seem fair

to say that the latter represents the majority view.

SHOCK THERAPY

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

See also: ECONOMY, CURRENT; GAIDAR, YEGOR TIMURO-

VICH; PRIVATIZATION; YELTSIN, BORIS.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aslund, Anders. (1995). How Russia Became a Market

Economy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Hedlund, Stefan. (1999). Russia’s “Market” Economy. Lon-

don: UCL Press.

Nelson, Lynn D., and Kuzes, Irina. (1995). Radical Re-

form in Yeltsin’s Russia. New York: M.E. Sharpe.

TEFAN

EDLUND

SHOCKWORKERS

Shockworkers (udarniki), a term originating dur-

ing the Russian Civil War to designate workers

performing especially arduous or urgent tasks,

reemerged during the late 1920s and was applied

thereafter to all workers and employees who as-

sumed and fulfilled obligations over and above their

work assignments. The rise of the Stakhanovite

movement in 1935 reduced the prestige of the

shockworker title, and it all but disappeared dur-

ing the late 1940s and early 1950s, only to resur-

face again under the guise of shockworkers of

Communist labor. From about ten million in 1966,

the number of such workers increased to 17.9 mil-

lion in 1971 and twenty-four million (or twenty-

six percent of all wage and salary workers) by

1975.

The checkered history of shockwork in the

USSR faithfully mirrors changing approaches by

the Communist Party to the task of mobilizing

workers and stimulating their commitment to rais-

ing labor productivity. If during the Civil War it

was associated with voluntary Communist Satur-

days (subbotniki), then during the late 1920s it

arose primarily among young industrial workers

who were eager to demonstrate their skills on new

equipment and methods of production. From 1929

onward, shockwork invariably was linked with so-

cialist competitions in which brigades of workers

overfulfilling production quotas or meeting other

obligations assumed in competition agreements

were rewarded with prizes and privileged access to

scarce goods and services.

But as the number of shockworkers increased

to slightly more than forty percent of all industrial

workers, the value of the title became debased.

Moreover, the brief period of extra physical exer-

tion (known as “storming”) associated with shock-

work was ill suited to complex and interrelated pro-

duction processes. Shockwork became a regular

feature of Soviet industrial and agricultural life in

the post-Stalin era as a result of the responsibility

placed on lower-level trade union, Komsomol, and

party officials to exercise leadership and record

progress along bureaucratically predetermined

lines. Workers seeking to extract favors from these

organizations or demonstrate their suitability for

promotion into their ranks went along with the

game.

See also: INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET; STAKHANOVITE

MOVEMENT; SUBBOTNIK

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kuromiya, Hiroaki. (1988). Stalin’s Industrial Revolution:

Politics and Workers, 1928–1932. New York: Cam-

bridge University Press.

EWIS

H. S

IEGELBAUM

SHOLOKHOV, MIKHAIL ALEXANDROVICH

(1905–1984), Russian writer and Soviet loyalist

who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1965.

Mikhail Sholokhov was born in the Don Cos-

sack military region in 1905. During the civil war

he joined the Bolsheviks, twice being on the verge

of execution for his views. In 1922 he moved to

Moscow to pursue a career as a writer. In 1924 he

published his first short story and then published

regularly throughout the 1920s. After 1924 he

moved back to the Cossack regions to remain close

to his stories.

The first volume of his most important work,

the Quiet Flows the Don (Tikhii Don, 1928–1940) was

published in 1928. It is a portrayal of the strug-

gles of the Don Cossacks against the Red army in

Southern Russia, and is noted for its objectivity and

lack of positive Bolshevik characters. The work was

an instant success. Sholokhov would publish three

more volumes in the course of his lifetime. This

work has been tainted by unsubstantiated claims

of plagiarism.

His second major novel was the story of the

triumph of collectivization in the early 1930s,

entitled Virgin Soil Upturned (Podnyataya tselina,

1932–1960). This work was trumpeted as one of

the masterpieces of Socialist Realism.

SHOCKWORKERS

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Sholokhov joined the Communist Party in

1932 and was a loyal adherent to the party line

for the rest of his life, though outspoken in his crit-

icism of the quality of Soviet writing.

He was one of the most honored authors of the

Soviet period. His short stories and novels were

published in massive editions. He was a member of

the Supreme Soviet and Central Committee,

awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, and

won both the Lenin and Stalin Prizes. He was ac-

knowledged for his writing in the West as well, re-

ceiving the Nobel Prize of literature in 1965 for

Tikhii Don.

See also: STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH

SHORT COURSE

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brandenberger, David. (1999). “The ‘Short Course’ to

Modernity: Stalinist History Textbooks, Mass Cul-

ture, and the Formation of Russian Popular National

Identity, 1934–1956.” Ph.D. diss, Harvard Univer-

sity, Cambridge, MA.

AVID

RANDENBERGER

SHOSTAKOVICH, DMITRI DMITRIEVICH

(1906–1975), highly controversial composer, at the

same time outstanding musical representative of

the Soviet Union and tragic figure in tension be-

tween acceptance and rejection of his music by the

Soviet regime.

Dmitry Shostakovich’s acculturation and his

musical training at the Petrograd, then Leningrad,

conservatory took place in the new Soviet state.

Overnight Shostakovich rose to fame with a rous-

ing performance of his first symphony in 1926. He

was seen as a beacon of hope in Soviet music. The

young composer succeeded in fulfilling the high-

flying expectations in the following years. Over-

whelming applause was given to the opera Lady

Macbeth of Mtsensk District (1934). This coarsely re-

alistic work based on a novel by Nikolay Leskov

was celebrated as a first milestone in the develop-

ment of a genuine Soviet musical theatre. In 1936,

however, a devastating review based on ideological

criteria was published in Pravda. Shostakovich was

caught—after Josef Stalin had watched the opera

with greatest displeasure—in the trap of the ag-

gressive, intrigue-dominated cultural policy. The

composer was branded in public as aesthetizing for-

malist and his work as extreme left abnormality.

These typical expressions of Soviet politico-cultural

discourse meant that his music was too dissonant

and complicated for Party taste. Ensuing condem-

nations not only by the officialdom but even by

previously enthusiastic fellow composers greatly

worried Shostakovich, as did the arrest and execu-

tion of his friend and patron Soviet Marshal Mikhail

Tukhachevsky in the course of the Great Terror in

1937. Nonetheless, during the same year he man-

aged to rehabilitate himself with his fifth sym-

phony. In fact, the work signals a clear stylistic turn

to a more moderate musical language, but to at-

tribute this exclusively to political pressure seems

misguided. Previous works indicate a break with

aesthetic radicalism; moreover, Shostakovich prac-

ticed all his life through diverse styles of composi-

tion. He even wrote operetta-like light music, which

cannot be dismissed simply as reluctantly per-

formed commissioned work. From the end of the

1930s, however, Shostakovich successfully devel-

oped forms of musical expression that realized his

aesthetical ideas and at the same time met the de-

mands of Socialist Realism for comprehensibility

and popular appeal. His individuality and hetero-

geneity, his inclination toward the grotesque and

sarcasm, and the profound seriousness and expres-

siveness of his works left the audience fascinated,

but again and again provoked conflicts with the of-

ficial state organs. In spite of vehement accusations

in 1948, he soon was integrated again into the So-

viet music elite, but only the Thaw following

Stalin’s death made general conditions more favor-

able for the composer and his oeuvre. During his

last two decades he could act as a respected per-

sonality of Soviet cultural life.

Shostakovich and his work have been highly

disputed and exposed to ideologically charged in-

terpretations. Shostakovich was seen as a faithful

communist, an opportunistic conformist, a secret

dissident, or an oppressed genius. In any case, he

was a Soviet citizen, who, like many others, stood

by his home country but also got in trouble with

its officials. Regardless of all political factors, he

was one of the outstanding composers of the So-

viet Union and perhaps the last great symphonist

of music history.

See also: CULTURAL REVOLUTION; MUSIC; PURGES, THE

GREAT; THAW, THE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bartlett, Rosamund. (2000). Shostakovich in Context. Ox-

ford: Oxford University Press.

Fanning, David, ed. (1998). Shostakovich Studies. Cam-

bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Fay, Laurel E. (2000). Shostakovich: A Life. Oxford: Ox-

ford University Press.

Ho, Allan B. (2000). Shostakovich Reconsidered. London:

Toccata Press.

ATTHIAS

TADELMANN

SHOW TRIALS

Staged trials of opponents of the Soviet regime held

in Moscow between 1936 and 1938.

The most visible aspect of Josef Stalin’s Great

Purges was a series of three Moscow show trials

SHOSTAKOVICH, DMITRI DMITRIEVICH

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

staged in August 1936, January 1937, and March

1938. Former leading members of the Bolshevik

Party were put on trial for treason and generally

confessed, often after being physically tortured, to

participation in elaborate terrorist conspiracies

against the Soviet state, ranking officials of the

Communist Party, and Stalin personally. The tri-

als were carefully staged and scripted, covered in

the national and international press, and intended

to justify in public the purges of the Party and the

state apparatus that Stalin was implementing in

1937 and 1938.

The sixteen defendants at the first trial, includ-

ing Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, described

by the prosecutors as the “Trotskyity-Zinovievite

Terrorist Center,” were charged with plotting to kill

Stalin and several of his top lieutenants, including

Sergei Kirov, who had been assassinated in 1934,

very likely on Stalin’s orders. All sixteen were

found guilty and shot within twenty-four hours

of the verdict.

The defendants at the second trial, including

Yuri Piatakov, Karl Radek, and fifteen other promi-

nent Old Bolsheviks, termed the “Parallel Center”

by the prosecutors, were charged with plotting ter-

rorist acts and engaging in active espionage in the

service of Japan and Nazi Germany. Thirteen of the

defendants were shot.

The final and most important of the three tri-

als included several of the most prominent mem-

bers of the Bolshevik old guard: Nikolai Bukharin,

Politburo member and chief theorist of the NEP;

Alexei Rykov, chair of the Council of People’s Com-

missars; and Genrikh Yagoda, head of the Secret Po-

lice (NKVD) until 1936. The twenty-two defendants

in this trial, members of a putative Anti-Soviet

Right-Trotskyite Bloc, confessed under extreme

physical pressure to terrorism, conspiracy to kill

Party leaders, espionage, the murder of Maxim

Gorky, and the attempted murder of Vladimir Lenin

in 1918, among other crimes. Bukharin, the most

important defendant, accepted responsibility for all

the crimes named in the indictment but refused to

confess to specific criminal actions; nonetheless, he

was sentenced to death along with eighteen of the

other defendants. Stalin and his secret police tightly

controlled all three trials from behind the scenes;

the outcome was preordained.

The term show trials usually refers to the

Moscow trials, but it can also denote the numer-

ous other trials staged throughout the USSR in

1937 and 1938, under orders from Stalin and the

Politburo. The Bolsheviks organized these provin-

cial show trials, at least seventy of which were ap-

proved by the Politburo, to show the people that

saboteurs, “wreckers,” and traitors were a threat

even at the local level.

Finally, the term can also describe any number

of staged political trials held throughout the early

Soviet period, especially between 1921 and 1924

and again from 1928 to 1933, such as the Indus-

trial Party trial of 1930, in which eight prominent

technical and engineering specialists were accused

of sabotage and espionage and were sentenced to

terms in prison.

See also: GREAT PURGES, THE; GULAG; STALIN, JOSEF VIS-

SARIONOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Conquest, Robert. (1990). The Great Terror: A Reassess-

ment. New York: Oxford University Press.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1993). “How the Mice Buried the Cat:

Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Rus-

sian Provinces.” Russian Review 52:299–320.

Medvedev, Roy. (1989). Let History Judge: The Origins and

Consequences of Stalinism. New York: Columbia Uni-

versity Press.

AUL

M. H

AGENLOH

SHUISKY, VASILY IVANOVICH

(1552–1612), tsar of Russia (1606–1610).

Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky was a descendant of

one of the oldest and most illustrious princely fam-

ilies of Russia. His uncle, Ivan Petrovich Shuisky,

was one of the regents of the mentally retarded

Tsar Fyodor I, and Vasily became a boyar at Fyo-

dor’s court. During the late 1580s, Boris Godunov

(Tsar Fyodor’s brother-in-law) managed to become

sole regent, and Shuisky clan members were ban-

ished from Moscow; some of them died mysteri-

ously while in exile. By 1591, however, Vasily and

his three younger brothers (sons of Ivan Andreye-

vich Shuisky) were back in the capital, where

Vasily became the leader of the family and resumed

his place in the boyar council. When Dmitry of

Uglich (Tsar Ivan IV’s youngest son) died myste-

riously in 1591, Vasily Shuisky was chosen to lead

the investigation; he concluded that the boy acci-

dentally killed himself.

SHUISKY, VASILY IVANOVICH

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Upon the death of Tsar Fyodor in 1598, Shuisky

made no attempt to prevent Boris Godunov from

becoming tsar; nevertheless, Tsar Boris feared and

persecuted the Shuisky clan. During False Dmitry’s

invasion of Russia, however, Tsar Boris turned to

Vasily Shuisky for help. In January 1605 Shuisky

took command of the tsar’s army fighting against

False Dmitry and defeated Dmitry’s forces at the

battle of Dobrynichi. Shuisky then waged a terror

campaign against the population of southwestern

Russia that had sided with False Dmitry. In the

meantime, the rebellion in the name of the true tsar

spread like wildfire. After Tsar Boris’s death in April

1605, Shuisky was recalled to Moscow by Tsar

Fyodor II, and he did not participate in the rebel-

lions that overthrew the Godunov dynasty.

At the outset of Tsar Dmitry’s reign, Shuisky

was convicted of treason but was only briefly ex-

iled. Back in Moscow, he secretly plotted to over-

throw Tsar Dmitry, claiming that Dmitry was an

impostor named Grigory Otrepev. During the cel-

ebration of Tsar Dmitry’s wedding to the Polish

Princess Marina Mniszech in May 1606, Shuisky

created a diversion while his henchmen killed the

tsar. Shuisky managed to seize power, but many

Russians were unwilling to accept the usurper Tsar

Vasily IV. His enemies circulated rumors that Tsar

Dmitry had survived the assassination attempt and

would soon return to punish the traitors. Within

a few weeks, Tsar Vasily was confronted by a pow-

erful civil war that spread from southwestern

Russia to over half the country. In the fall of 1606,

rebel forces under Ivan Bolotnikov besieged

Moscow and nearly toppled Shuisky. Tsar Vasily’s

armies drove the rebels back and eventually de-

feated Bolotnikov in late 1607, but by then another

rebel army supporting the second false Dmitry

challenged Shuisky’s weak grip on the country. For

many months Russia had two tsars and two cap-

itals, and chaos reigned throughout the land. In

desperation, Tsar Vasily eventually turned to Swe-

den for support. In 1609 King Karl IX sent military

forces into Russia to aid Shuisky and seize terri-

tory. That prompted Polish military intervention,

and in June 1610 Tsar Vasily’s army was crushed

by Polish forces at the battle of Klushino. In

Moscow a rebellion of aristocrats (including the Ro-

manovs) toppled Tsar Vasily, forcing him to be-

come a monk. Soon Moscow opened its gates to

the Polish army, and Shuisky was shipped off to

Poland, where he was imprisoned and died in Sep-

tember 1612.

See also: BOLOTNIKOV, IVAN ISAYEVICH; DMITRY, FALSE;

FILARET ROMANOV, PATRIARCH; MNISZECH, MARINA;

TIME OF TROUBLES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bussow, Conrad. (1994). The Disturbed State of the Rus-

sian Realm, tr. G. Edward Orchard. Montreal:

McGill-Queen’s.

Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The

Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dy-

nasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer-

sity Press.

Massa, Issac. (1982). A Short History of the Beginnings and

Origins of These Present Wars in Moscow, tr. G. Ed-

ward Orchard. Toronto: University of Toronto

Press.

Skrynnikov, Ruslan. (1988). The Time of Troubles: Russia

in Crisis, 1604–1618, tr. Hugh Graham. Gulf Breeze,

FL: Academic International Press.

HESTER

S. L. D

UNNING

SHUMEIKO, VLADIMIR FILIPPOVICH

(b. 1945), Russian legislator.

Vladimir Shumeiko graduated from Rostov

Polytechnical Institute with an engineering degree in

1972. He made his early career as an engineer in

Krasnodar. After working at the Krasnodar Electri-

cal Measurement Instruments Factory (1963–1970),

he moved to the All-Union Research Electrical Mea-

surement Instruments Institute (1970–1985), then

returned to Krasnodar as head of the electrical in-

struments production association.

Shumeiko’s political career began in 1990,

when he was elected to the USSR Congress of Peo-

ple’s Deputies. He followed that victory with a seat

in the RSFSR Supreme Soviet. Also in 1990, he was

named deputy chair of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet

Committee on Economic and Property Reform. As

“shock therapy” reforms unfolded, Boris Yeltsin

brought several industrial directors into his gov-

ernment. Shumeiko, president of the Confederation

of Associations of Entrepreneurs, was appointed

first deputy prime minister in June 1992; in De-

cember the new prime minister Viktor Cher-

nomyrdin reappointed him as first deputy chair.

In the fall of 1993, the Supreme Soviet began

investigating several members of Yeltsin’s cabinet

for corruption, including Shumeiko. He briefly re-

signed from the government on September 1 and

SHUMEIKO, VLADIMIR FILIPPOVICH

1390

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

joined Yeltsin in plotting what to do with the re-

calcitrant legislature. Shumeiko returned to the

government on September 22, after Yeltsin’s order

to dissolve parliament. The next month, Yeltsin

named him Minister of Press and Information.

Shumeiko switched to the newly created Fed-

eration Council, becoming chair of that house in

January 1994, a post that also gave him a seat on

the Russian Security Council. He formed his own

political movement, Reforms—New Course, in De-

cember 1994. Shumeiko lost his seat in January

1996, when Yeltsin changed the basis of member-

ship in the Federation Council. Since then, Shumeiko

has unsuccessfully tried to return to a legislative

office. As of 2003 he was chairman of the petro-

leum company Evikhon.