Encyclopedia of Russian History

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year between Novgorod and the German merchants

lists only one posadnik, one tysiatskii, and “all Lord

Novgorod the Great” as constituting the veche. The

different composition of these veches indicate that

there probably was no set membership, or that

veches were perhaps more democratic when the en-

tire city needed to reach consensus, as when the

city’s Judicial Charter needed ratification, but were

smaller and more oligarchic (or republican rather

than democratic) in nature when the entire city did

not need to ratify a decision, such as with com-

mercial treaties or peace treaties.

Valentin Lavrentivich Ianin and other scholars

argue that Novgorod’s government was oligarchic

rather than republican in nature, and that the veche

had no real power. They argue that it was an oli-

garchy of landowners who wielded real power in

the city. Some argue it is these landowners who

are referred to in the Rigan chronicle as the three-

hundred golden-girdled men and made up the

Council of Lords (Soviet gospod) that ran day-to-

day government in Novgorod. However, the Rigan

chronicle is the only such reference to the three-

hundred golden-girdled-men, and Russian sources

mention neither the Council nor the three hundred.

The veche lasted longest in Pskov, and was dis-

banded by Grand Prince Basil III in 1510, when he

brought that city under the direct rule of Moscow.

See also: GRAND PRINCE; KIEVAN RUS; MUSCOVY; NOV-

GOROD THE GREAT

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Birnbaum, Henrik. (1981). Lord Novgorod the Great: Es-

says on the History and Culture of a Medieval City. Los

Angeles: Slavica Publishers.

Ianin, Valentin Lavrentevich. (1990). “The Archaeology

of Novgorod.” Scientific American 262(3):84–91.

Tikhomirov, Mikhail Nikolaevich. (1959). The Towns of

Ancient Rus, tr. Y. Sdovnikov. Moscow: Foreign Lan-

guage Publishing House.

ICHAEL

C. P

AUL

VEKHI

Vekhi (“Landmarks” or “Signposts”), a collection of

seven essays published in 1909, ran through five

editions and elicited two hundred published rejoin-

ders in two years. Historian Mikhail Gershenzon

proposed the volume reappraising the Russian in-

telligentsia, wrote the introduction, and edited the

book. Pyotr Struve selected the contributors, five

of whom had contributed to a 1902 volume, Prob-

lems of Idealism, and had attended the 1903

Schaffhausen Conference that laid the foundation

for the Union of National Liberation. Himself a

founder of the Constitutional Democratic (Cadet)

Party in 1905, Struve had served in the Second

Duma in 1907, then went on to edit the journal

Russian Thought. In his essay he argued that the in-

telligentsia, because it had coalesced in the 1840s

under the impact of atheistic socialism, owed its

identity to standing apart from the government.

Thus, when the government agreed to restructure

along constitutional lines in 1905, the intelligentsia

proved incapable of acting constructively toward

the masses within the new framework.

Bogdan Kistyakovsky discussed the intelli-

gentsia’s failure to develop a legal consciousness.

Their insufficient respect for law as an ordering

force kept courts of law from attaining the respect

required in a modern society. Alexander Izgoyev

(who, like Gershenzon, had not contributed to the

1902 anti-positivist volume) depicted contempo-

rary university students as morally relativist, con-

tent merely to embrace the interests of the

long-suffering people. Russian students compared

very unfavorably to their French, German, and

British counterparts, lacking application and even

a sense of fair play. Nikolai Berdyayev, consider-

ing the intelligentsia’s philosophical position, found

utilitarian values had crowded out any interest in

pursuing truth. Sergei Bulgakov showed how the

intelligentsia had undertaken a heroic struggle for

socialism and progress but lost sight of post-Re-

formation Europe’s gains with respect to individ-

ual rights and personal freedom.

For Semen Frank, as for Gershenzon and Struve,

the intelligentsia’s failure of leadership in the 1905

revolution warranted a reappraisal of their funda-

mental assumptions. His essay emphasized the ni-

hilistic sources of the intelligentsia’s utilitarianism:

material progress, national education, always

viewed as a means to another end. Moreover, he

saw Russian Marxists as obsessed by a populist

drive to perfect society through redistribution and

faulted them for their penchant for dividing all hu-

manity into friends and enemies. Gershenzon as-

serted, in the book’s most controversial sentence,

that “so far from dreaming of union with the peo-

ple we ought to fear the people . . . and bless this

government which, with its prisons and bayonets,

still protects us from the people’s fury.”

VEKHI

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

The essays suggested Russia had reached a

milestone and was ready for turning. Five of the

contributors had earlier abandoned Marxism under

the influence of neo-Kantian concerns over personal

freedom and morality. They had participated in the

establishment of a liberal political party, but now

recoiled at the Cadet Party’s recklessness and inef-

fectiveness in parliamentary politics. A modernist

document, Vekhi called for a rethinking of the en-

lightenment project of acculturation and proposed

exploration of the depths of the self as an alterna-

tive to venerable populist and nihilist programs.

See also: BERDYAYEV, NIKOLAI ALEXANDROVICH; CON-

STITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; DUMA; INTELLI-

GENTSIA; STRUVE, PETER BERNARDOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boobbyer, Philip. (1995). S. L. Frank: The Life and Work

of a Russian Philosopher. Athens: Ohio University

Press.

Brooks, Jeffrey. (1973). “Vekhi and the Vekhi Dispute.”

Survey 19(1):21–50.

Schapiro, Leonard. (1987). “The Vekhi Group and the

Mystique of Revolution.” In Russian Studies, ed. Ellen

Dahrendorf. New York: Viking Penguin.

ARY

HURSTON

VERBITSKAYA, ANASTASIA ALEXEYEVNA

(1861-1928), prose writer, playwright, scenarist,

and publisher.

Anastasia Verbitskaya enjoyed a lengthy career

in which she first published prose fiction in serious

“thick journals,” but then turned to writing nov-

els in a popular vein, garnering herself a wide read-

ing public on the eve of World War I. At this time

she also embarked on a film career, writing scripts

for several movies that brought her even more

renown. Most of Verbitskaya’s writing centers

around the keys to happiness for the modern

woman caught between competing desires and in-

terests—work, love, sexuality, and motherhood.

Verbitskaya was the middle child of a profes-

sional military man stationed in Voronezh and a

mother who was born to a provincial actress but

who confined herself to performances in amateur

productions. Verbitskaya was eventually sent off

to boarding school, the Elizavetinsky Women’s In-

stitute in Moscow. In 1879 she entered the Moscow

Conservatory to study voice, leaving after only two

years to accept a job as a music teacher at her for-

mer boarding school. In 1882 she married Alexei

Verbitsky, an engineer, with whom she had three

sons. The family needed money, so Verbitskaya

worked at various jobs, in 1883 obtaining her first

stint at a newspaper. Her inaugural fiction, a

novella entitled “Discord,” appeared in 1887 in the

thick journal Russian Thought. It contains many of

the themes that will appear subsequently in much

of Verbitskaya’s work. The story encompasses the

roles that can often be found in left-leaning fiction

espousing women’s liberation—economic indepen-

dence and service to the downtrodden—but also es-

tablishes new roles and goals for the heroine.

Verbitskaya and other contemporary women writ-

ers would develop these themes further in the

1890s and early twentieth century: the search for

self-fulfillment in relations with men, including

sexual fulfillment and an exploration of one’s artis-

tic creativity.

During the 1890s Verbitskaya’s fictional works

became longer, and she produced her first novel,

Vavochka (1898). She also wrote plays, the best of

which is the comedy Mirages (1895), which was

staged at the Maly Theater. By 1902, Verbitskaya

had decided to become independent of others’ liter-

ary tastes and created her own publishing house,

issuing her own work and the translated novels of

Western European writers concerned with the

woman question. Not only did this venture show

her quest for independence, it also showed her in-

terest in literature as a commercial venture. Ver-

bitskaya continued to demonstrate her commitment

to the woman question through extra-literary ac-

tivities. She was a member of various charitable and

civic organizations that helped women, in 1905 be-

coming the chair of the Society for the Betterment

of Women’s Welfare.

In the politically charged atmosphere after the

1905 revolution and with the censorship greatly

curtailed, Verbitskaya embarked on the first of her

popular novels, Spirit of the Time (1907–1908). She

seems to have found a formula that would render

this and her next novel, The Keys to Happiness

(1908–1913), bestsellers. She combined highbrow

political, philosophical, and aesthetic concerns with

frequent, titillating scenes of sexual seduction. Both

these novels sold in numbers that were unheralded

in Verbitskaya’s day. She also managed to produce

an interesting two-volume autobiography To My

Reader (1908 and 1911) while she was writing Keys

to Happiness.

VERBITSKAYA, ANASTASIA ALEXEYEVNA

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

In 1913 when Verbitskaya had completed Keys,

she was invited to write the screenplay for a full-

length film based on the novel. The film was a great

box-office success, breaking all previous records,

and catapulted Verbitskaya into a movie career. Af-

ter the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Verbitskaya’s

career suffered because of official scorn for her

“boulevard” novels. She died in 1928. However,

with the revival of the commercial book market in

post-Soviet Russia, Verbitskaya has made a bit of

a comeback: Three of her popular novels were

reprinted in 1992 and 1993.

See also: FEMINISM; THICK JOURNALS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Engelstein, Laura. (1992). The Keys to Happiness: Sex and

the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia. Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press.

Holmgren, Beth, and Goscilo, Helena. (1999). “Introduc-

tion” to Keys to Happiness. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press.

Marsh, Rosalind. (1998). “Anastasiia Verbitskaia Recon-

sidered.” In Gender and Russian Literature: New Per-

spectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

Press.

Rosenthal, Charlotte. (2003). “Anastasiia Alekseevna

Verbitskaia.” In Russian Writers in the Age of Tolstoy

and Dostoevsky, ed. Judith E. Kalb and J. Alexander

Ogden. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 593.

Detroit: Gale Group.

HARLOTTE

OSENTHAL

VIENNA, CONGRESS OF

The Vienna Congress provided the conclusion to the

French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Ne-

gotiations took place in France from February to

April of 1814, in London during June of that year,

in Vienna from September 1814 to June 1815, and

then again in Paris from July to November of 1815.

The chief representatives included Robert Stewart,

Viscount Castlereigh of Britain; his ally, Klemens

Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar von Metternich of Aus-

tria; Fürst Karl August von Hardenberg of Prussia;

and Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Prince

de Bénévent of France. Tsar Alexander I directed the

Russians, aided and influenced by his diverse multi-

national coterie of assistants: Count Andreas Razu-

movsky, who was ambassador to Austria; the

Westphalian Graf Karl Robert von Nesselrode, who

served as a quasi-foreign minister; the Corfu Greek

Count Ioánnis Antónios Kapodstrias; the Corsican

Count Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo; the Prussian

Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein; the Al-

satian Anstedt; and the Pole Prince Adam Jerzy

Czartoryski.

At the peak of his influence in early 1814,

Alexander directed the non-punitive occupation of

Paris and the exile of Napoleon I to Elba. The Treaty

of Chaumont established the Quadruple Alliance to

contain France, while the first Treaty of Paris re-

stored the French monarchy. Alexander also helped

block a Prussian scheme to frustrate France and

Austrian designs on Switzerland and Piedmont-

Sardinia, but supported the attachment of Belgium

to the Netherlands and part of the Rhineland to

Prussia as checks on French power. In London, how-

ever, he frightened the British with plans to reunite

the ethnic Polish lands as his own separate king-

dom.

At Vienna, the British, Austrians, and French

thwarted this scheme, which was supported by a

Prussia bent on annexing all of Saxony. By Janu-

ary 1815 Alexander was ready to compromise, an

attitude strengthened by Napoleon’s temporary re-

turn to power in March. The Final Act of June 4,

1815, drawn up by Metternich’s mentor, Friedrich

Gentz, reflected this spirit of compromise. Austria

retained Galicia, and Prussia regained Poznan and

Torun, and also acquired part of Saxony and more

of the Rhineland. Most of the Napoleonic Duchy of

Warsaw became the tsarist Kingdom of Poland.

Denmark obtained a small duchy as partial com-

pensation for Norway, which the Swedish crown

acquired as Russian-sponsored compensation for

the loss of Finland. A German Confederation dom-

inated by Austria and, to a lesser extent, Prussia,

but with Russian support for such middle-sized

states as Württemberg, replaced the defunct Holy

Roman Empire. The Ottomans remained outside the

Final Act, refusing to allow Anglo-French-Austrian

mediation of differences with Russia as a precondi-

tion of a general guarantee.

Back in Paris, Alexander promoted the Holy Al-

liance, which Metternich insisted be an ideal broth-

erhood of Christian sovereigns, not peoples, as the

Russian emperor envisioned. Of the Europeans,

only the British, the Papacy, and the Ottomans re-

fused to sign it. The (Congress of) Vienna system

weathered revolutions and diplomatic crises. Except

for Belgian independence in 1830, Europe’s borders

remained essentially stable until 1859.

See also: ALEXANDER I; FRENCH WAR OF 1812; NAPOLEON I

VIENNA, CONGRESS OF

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grimsted, Patricia Kennedy. (1969). The Foreign Ministers

of Alexander I. Berkeley: University of California

Press.

Schroeder, Paul. (1994). The Transformation of European

Politics, 1763–1848. Oxford: Oxford University/

Clarendon.

AVID

M. G

OLDFRANK

VIETNAM, RELATIONS WITH

The Soviet Union began its relationship with Viet-

nam through the Communist International (Com-

intern), one of whose purposes was to support the

liberation of colonized peoples from Western colo-

nial powers. From the last half of the nineteenth

century until 1954, the formerly unified nation of

Vietnam was divided into three segments (Tonkin,

Annam, and Cochinchina), along with Cambodia

and Laos, within the French colony Indochine (In-

dochina).

Prior to 1930 some politicized members of Viet-

namese society had a connection to the Soviet

Union through membership in the French Com-

munist Party or its political fronts. During the

1920s the Comintern invited several radical Viet-

namese political activists to Moscow for political

education and training. The most prominent of

these was a man of many aliases whose most fre-

quent alias prior to World War II was Nguyen Ai

Quoc, a founding member of the French Commu-

nist Party who later became better known through

his final alias, Ho Chi Minh. Quoc became a full-

time functionary of the Comintern and, on their

instructions, founded the Indochinese Communist

Party (ICP) in 1930. Although most of its mem-

bers were Vietnamese, the ICP staked a claim to

succeed France politically in all of its Southeast

Asian colonies. The idea of an Indochinese Federa-

tion, modeled on the Soviet Union—with the Viet-

namese playing the same dominant role vis-a-vis

the Cambodians and Laotians as the Russians did

with the other nationalities and republics within

the USSR—was a Comintern political concept that

was to both guide and bedevil the politics of the

Southeast Asian region for much of the twentieth

century.

From 1930 until 1950 the Soviet Union’s rela-

tions with the Vietnamese revolutionaries in French

Indochina were limited mainly to training and po-

litical advice. At the end of World War II, during

the brief power vacuum that followed Japan’s sur-

render and withdrawal from the region, Ho Chi Minh

led a small band of ICP controlled guerrillas, though

under the guise of its political front, the Viet Minh,

to seize power in a Bolshevik-style coup d’état. He

proclaimed the independence of the so-called De-

mocratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in September

1945. The DRV was not recognized by any nation,

and France’s return to reclaim its former Asian

colonies led to the outbreak of war between France

and the DRV/Viet Minh at the end of 1946.

Geography prevented the Soviet Union from ef-

fectively aiding Ho Chi Minh until 1950, when the

victory of the Chinese communists in the Chinese

civil war changed the balance of power in Asia. In

January 1950 Josef Stalin agreed to Ho’s request

for increased aid. Thus in early 1950 all of the So-

viet bloc nations recognized the Democratic Re-

public of Vietnam, and China undertook the Soviet

Bloc’s task of direct military, economic, and polit-

ical assistance to the Vietnamese communists.

Following the Geneva Conference of 1954, of

which the Soviet Union was cochair, France agreed

to abandon its former colonies, and Indochina was

divided into the independent nations of Cambodia

and Laos, with Vietnam temporarily divided at the

seventeenth parallel into the communist controlled

DRV (North) and the noncommunist Republic of

Vietnam (South). The United States replaced the

French as the patrons of the noncommunist Viet-

namese in South Vietnam, and the Soviet Union

along with its then-ally China, maintained sub-

stantial political, economic, military, and diplo-

matic support to North Vietnam. During the late

1950s the Vietnamese communists in Hanoi began

an uprising against the government in South Viet-

nam. The Soviet Union supported the DRV against

the American-backed South. This Soviet commit-

ment to the Vietnam War increased during the era

of Brezhnev and Kosygin, as China’s split with the

Soviet Union, which had emerged publicly in 1963,

caused a competition between Moscow and Beijing

for influence in Hanoi. Thousands of Soviet citizens

were sent to Vietnam as military and economic ad-

visers during the 1960s. After 1968 Hanoi turned

more toward Moscow as its principle source of aid

and advice. Yet the USSR, fearing that it would be

dragged by the Vietnamese into a direct con-

frontation with the United States, wanted to find

a political rather than a military settlement to the

Vietnam War. However, the domestic opposition

to the war within the United States caused a cut-

back of American aid to South Vietnam during

VIETNAM, RELATIONS WITH

1638

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

1974–1975, and a precipitate military collapse of

South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese army in

April 1975.

During the 1970s Moscow and Hanoi increased

their ties, at Beijing’s expense. The Soviet Union ac-

quired access to the former U.S. military base at Cam

Ranh Bay, and thus was able to project its naval and

air power into Asia on a scale never before realized.

A Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between the

USSR and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV)

was signed in November 1978. When the SRV came

into conflict with the China-backed Cambodian

communists (known in the West as the Khmer

Rouge), Soviet arms facilitated the Vietnamese inva-

sion of Cambodia in December 1978. Moscow and

its allies supported Vietnam’s subsequent decade-

long occupation of Cambodia, but the rest of the

members of the United Nations condemned the oc-

cupation. Vietnam became a diplomatic as well as

an economic liability for Moscow.

With the transformation of Soviet foreign pol-

icy under Mikhail Gorbachev, away from con-

frontation and toward meaningful cooperation

with the West, Vietnam ceased to have much value

to the Kremlin. Deciding to reduce its commitments

to Hanoi, Moscow encouraged a Vietnamese with-

drawal from Cambodia, as well as a political set-

tlement under United Nations auspices.

The Russian Federation, founded in 1991, was

focused on its own economic transformation, not

with subsidizing impoverished Third World clients.

Yet it had inherited an unpaid debt of $10 billion

from Vietnam. Overcoming the massive debt that

had resulted from the failed political-ideological

crusades of the twentieth century assumed greater

significance than any other goal for Russia in its

relations with Vietnam at the beginning of the

twenty-first century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gaiduk, Ilya. (1996). The Soviet Union and the Vietnam

War. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.

Gaiduk, Ilya. (2003). Confronting Vietnam. Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press.

Morris, Stephen J. (1999). Why Vietnam Invaded Cambo-

dia: Political Culture and the Causes of War. Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press.

Quinn-Judge, Sophie. (2003). Ho Chi Minh: The Missing

Years. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of

California Press.

TEPHEN

J. M

ORRIS

VIKINGS

From the 750s to the 1050s, the Vikings were war-

riors, pirates, and traders from Scandinavia who

employed the most sophisticated naval technology

of the time in Northern Europe to launch extensive

raiding and trading expeditions stretching west to

Canadian Labrador and east to the Caspian Sea.

Vikings (called Rus in the Arabic and Varangians

in the Greek sources), primarily from Sweden and

the Isle of Gotland, first entered European Russia in

small groups in search of trade and tribute in the

second half of the eighth century. By the ninth cen-

tury, the Rus had established a complex commer-

cial network stretching from the Baltic to the

Islamic Caliphate. By the tenth century, the Rus ex-

tended this network southward to the Byzantine

Empire via Kiev, continuing the eastern trade

through intermediaries on the middle Volga in

Volga Bulgaria. Also by the tenth century, the

Vikings traveling through Russia had entered the

service of the Byzantine Emperor (tenth through

twelfth centuries) and helped found the first East

Slavic kingdom, Kievan Rus.

The Russian Primary Chronicle relates that in

862 the Viking Rurik and his kin were invited by

Slavic and Finnic tribes to come and rule over them,

after which they developed a system of tribute that

encompassed northwestern Russia, Kiev, and its

neighboring tribes. The Chronicle’s account is sub-

stantiated by finds of Scandinavian-style artifacts

(tortoise shell brooches, Thor’s hammer pendants,

wooden idols, armaments), and in some cases

graves, found at Staraya Ladoga, Ryurikovo

Gorodishche, Syaskoe Gorodishche, Timerevo, and

Gnezdovo. These sites were tribal and commercial

centers and riverside waystations, typical of those

found along trade routes used by the Rus, most

notably that of the Volga Route to the Islamic

Caliphate and the Route to the Greeks along the

Dnieper.

In contrast to Viking activity in the West,

which is characterized primarily by raiding and

large-scale colonization, the Rus town network and

subsequent tribal and political organization was de-

signed for trade. Subject tribes living along river

systems supplied the Rus with the furs, wax,

honey, and slaves that they would further ex-

change for Islamic silver (especially dirhams), glass

beads, silks, and spices in southern markets. The

Rus expansion into Byzantine markets began in

earnest in the early tenth century, with Rus attacks

VIKINGS

1639

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

on Constantinople in 907, 911, and 944, which re-

sulted in trade agreements. By the end of the cen-

tury, in 988–989, Vladimir I (ruled 980–1015), a

quarter Viking through his father Svyatoslav, had

married into the Byzantine royal family and con-

verted to Byzantine Christianity, thereby laying the

foundation for the Eastern Slavic relationship with

the Greek world.

The tenth century marks the high point of

Viking involvement in the East. Much of the Scan-

dinavian-style jewelry found in European Russia

and a majority of the Scandinavian-style graves

date to the second and third quarters of the tenth

century. Vladimir I and his son Yaroslav the Wise

(ruled 1019–1054) enlisted Viking mercenary armies

in internecine dynastic wars. In the eleventh cen-

tury, however, the Viking foot soldier armies had

become obsolete as the Rus princes were forced to

adapt to another enemy in the south, the Turkic

nomads who fought on horseback. The defeat of

Yaroslav’s Viking mercenaries by a nomadic army

at the Battle of Listven (1024) is indicative of this

trend.

See also: GNEZDOVO; KIEVAN RUS; NORMANIST CONTRO-

VERSY; PRIMARY CHRONICLE; ROUTE TO GREEKS;

VLADIMIR, ST.; YAROSLAV VLADIMIROVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Franklin, Simon, and Shepard, Jonathan. (1996). The

Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman.

Noonan, Thomas S. (1997). “Scandinavians in European

Russia.” In The Oxford Illustrated History of the

Vikings, ed. Peter Sawyer. Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press.

Pritsak, Omeljan. (1981). The Origin of Rus’. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Stalsberg, Anne. (1988). “The Scandinavian Viking Age

Finds in Rus: Overview and Analysis.” In Bericht der

Römisch-Germanischen Kommission 69. Mainz am

Rhein, Germany: Philipp Von Zabern.

EIDI

M. S

HERMAN

VILNIUS

The capital of the Lithuanian Republic and histor-

ically the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania,

Vilnius occupies a special place in a number of na-

tional cultures. Lithuanians constitute a majority

of the city’s 543,000 inhabitants. Russians make

up about 20 percent, Poles 19 percent, Belarusians

5 percent, and Jews 2 percent. Jews, who accord-

ing to the Russian census of 1897 had constituted

a plurality of the population, have called “Vilna”

(or in Yiddish “Vilne”) the “Jerusalem of the

North,” a center of rabbinic learning. Poles consid-

ered “Wilno” Polish in culture. Some Belarusians,

pointing to the Grand Duchy’s multinational char-

acter, insist that Vilna should be part of their state.

Under Russian rule in the nineteenth century, Vilna

was the administrative center of the empire’s

Northwest Region.

When the great Eastern European empires col-

lapsed at the end of the World War I, Vilnius be-

came a bone of contention between the newly

emerging states. Between 1918 and 1923, the flag

symbolizing sovereignty over the city and region

changed at least eight times. The two major con-

tenders were Lithuania and Poland, although the city

also briefly served as the capital of the Lithuanian

Soviet Socialist Republic and then the Lithuanian-

Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. In July 1920,

as part of its recognition of Lithuanian indepen-

dence, Soviet Russia agreed with Lithuania’s claims

to Vilnius, but in October 1920 Polish forces seized

the city, establishing the rogue state of Central

Lithuania. In 1923, Poland formally incorporated

the territory, but Lithuania refused to recognize

Polish sovereignty. Still claiming Vilnius as their

capital, the Lithuanians called Kaunas their provi-

sional capital and insisted that Poland and Lithua-

nia were in a state of war.

After Soviet forces had occupied Eastern Poland

in September 1939, the Soviet government turned

Vilnius over to the Lithuanians. The Polish govern-

ment in exile protested the Lithuanians’ move into

Vilnius, but after the German invasion of the Soviet

Union in 1941, the western powers chose not to

challenge the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland.

In 1940, and again from 1944 to 1945, Soviet troops

occupied Lithuania, and Vilnius was the capital of

the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic until 1991.

Under Soviet rule, Lithuanians dominated the

city’s cultural life. Before World War I, when

Lithuania lay on the border between Imperial Rus-

sia and Imperial Germany, the Russians had lim-

ited the economic growth of the region and the

development of the city. Therefore few Lithuanians

had come to the city from the countryside. After

1945 the Soviet government permitted and even en-

couraged Poles to emigrate from the USSR to the

Polish People’s Republic, and Lithuanians flowed

to the city. The decade of the 1960s, when the

VILNIUS

1640

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Lithuanian population reached 45 to 47 percent,

was decisive in the development of the city’s

Lithuanian character.

In January 1991 Soviet troops in Vilnius seized

a number of public buildings in an unsuccessful ef-

fort to crush Lithuanian independence, and the city

became a symbol of the failure of Mikhail Gor-

bachev’s policy of perestroika.

See also: JEWS; LITHUANIA AND LITHUANIANS; POLAND

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cohen, Israel. (1992). Vilna. Philadelphia: Jewish Publi-

cation Society.

Senn, Alfred Erich. (1966). The Great Powers, Lithuania,

and the Vilna Question. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill.

LFRED

RICH

ENN

VINIUS, ANDREI DENISOVICH See WINIUS, AN-

DRIES DIONYSZOON.

VIRGIN LANDS PROGRAM

Nikita Khrushchev promoted two major agricul-

tural programs in his first years as general secre-

tary: the corn program and, as he called it, the

virgin and wasteland program. These two pro-

grams were interrelated. An important objective of

agricultural policy was to increase the production

of meat and milk significantly to meet the demands

of the population. To produce more meat and milk

required more feed. His solution was to expand

greatly the production of corn (maize) throughout

the Soviet Union. The virgin lands program was

created to prevent the reduction of the wheat area

as the corn area increased. This aspect of the vir-

gin lands program is often missed, but in a speech

on February 14, 1956, Khrushchev highlighted it:

“The interests of increasing production of grain re-

quired a change in the structure of acreages, for

the purpose—while extending the acreage under

wheat, groats, and other crops—of sharply in-

creasing acreage under corn.” He noted that in 1955

there were 18 million hectares of corn sown, some

13.6 million hectares more than in 1954. Without

the virgin lands program, the area of wheat would

have been substantially reduced, and a crisis in the

bread supply would have occurred. The new lands

were located primarily in Khazakstan and Siberia,

areas of limited rainfall.

Khrushchev’s objective had been to reclaim 28

to 30 million hectares of virgin land and waste-

land. The estimated area of virgin and fallow land

developed from 1954 to 1956 was 36 million

hectares. Prior to institution of the virgin lands pro-

gram, the sown area of grain in the USSR was ap-

proximately 100 million hectares; in 1954 it was

102 million. By 1956 the grain area had increased

to 128 million hectares, while the wheat area had

increased from 48 million hectares in 1953 to 62

million hectares in 1956, and maize sown for grain

from 3.5 to 9.3 million hectares. Thus he achieved

his objective of increasing the total cropped area

and increasing both wheat- and maize-sown areas.

Not all of the increase in grain area came from

plowing up virgin and wasteland. Aradius Kahan

concluded that 10 million hectares of the increased

sown area could be attributed to the reduction of the

area of fallowed land—land that was in cultivation

but cropped only every other year. In areas of lim-

ited rainfall, land is often fallowed as a way of ac-

cumulating moisture and nitrogen from one year to

the next, which both increases and stabilizes yields.

The practice of fallow is to leave land idle for a year,

but cultivate it to prevent the growth of weeds that

would utilitize the available moisture. The accumu-

lation of moisture and nitrogen through fallow will

increase the yields by 50 or more percent, and, with

the saving of seed, the increase in net yield is even

greater. In this light, more than a quarter of the re-

ported increase in sown area represented a fraud:

The land was neither virgin nor waste.

Was the virgin lands program successful by

Khrushchev’s criteria, namely, increasing the out-

put of wheat and other grains as the corn area ex-

panded? It appears so. In part this was due to good

luck—the weather in the virgin land area in the late

1950s was quite favorable. The national yield of

grain per hectare, as estimated by the government,

was actually higher from 1955 to 1959 than from

1950 to 1954, even though the virgin land area nor-

mally had a somewhat lower yield than the national

average. One positive feature of the virgin lands pro-

gram was that annual yields in the area generally

were negatively correlated with the yields in the Eu-

ropean area of the USSR. This meant that the year-

to-year variations in yields tended to be offsetting

to a significant degree, thus adding stability to the

national average. The average of the official (and ex-

aggerated) estimates of grain production from 1956

to 1960 was 121 million tons, or 41 percent more

than in 1954. Not all of this increase was due to the

virgin lands program, but much of it was.

VIRGIN LANDS PROGRAM

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

The corn program, however, was a dismal fail-

ure and was later largely abandoned. Corn requires

a relatively long and warm growing season and

much more moisture than wheat or most other

grains. Most of the farm areas of the USSR were

short on all three of these. Hardly any of the corn

grown in new areas reached maturity—it had to

be utilized as green feed or silage.

Overall grain production in the USSR more

than doubled between the early 1950s and the late

1980s. Part of this increase was due to the virgin

lands program, but most was due to increased

yields from seed improvements and increased ap-

plications of fertilizer. However, with the demise of

the USSR, grain production has fallen by about 40

percent, while fertilizer use declined by much more.

See also: AGRICULTURE; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET;

KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kahan, Arcadius. (1991). Studies and Essays on the Soviet

and East European Economies, Vol 1: Published Works

on the Soviet Economy. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Re-

search Partners.

Laird, Roy D., ed. (1963). Soviet Agriculture and Peasant

Affairs. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.

D. G

ALE

OHNSON

VIRTUAL ECONOMY

The term virtual economy has been used to describe

conditions in Russia’s transition economy where

privatized enterprises continued to engage in value-

subtracting production because they maintained

buyers from the Soviet era who were willing to

purchase goods at prices that failed to accurately

reflect production costs or market value. Relying

on relational capital, contacts and connections with

other managers and government officials developed

in the Soviet economy, enterprise directors in Rus-

sia’s transition economy were able to acquire re-

sources and goods without cash payments either

prior to, or after, the acquisition. Since neither the

privatization process nor their ongoing operations

provided Russian manufacturing firms with funds

to renovate their obsolete capital stock, enterprise

managers faced few options for upgrading product

quality or changing the firms’ production assort-

ment in order to compete effectively in domestic

and global markets. In effect, the term virtual econ-

omy refers to the situation where Russian priva-

tized firms continued to operate as they had in the

Soviet economy despite the facade that profitabil-

ity considerations and market forces governed their

activities.

As Russia’s transition process progressed in the

1990s, purchases between manufacturing firms in-

creasingly involved barter and other non-monetary

transactions, reducing the cash available for firms

to acquire materials or pay taxes. In a virtual econ-

omy, barter and other non-monetary transactions

play an important role in sustaining ongoing op-

erations which transfer value from productive ac-

tivities to loss-making sectors of the economy.

Reliance on barter transactions restricts the firms’

ability to restructure their operations in order to

produce higher value-added output.

See also: VALUE SUBTRACTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ericson, Richard E, and Ickes, Barry. (2001). “A Model

of Russia’s ‘Virtual Economy.’” Review of Economic

Design 6(2):185–214.

Gaddy, Clifford, and Ickes, Barry. (2002). Russia’s Vir-

tual Economy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institu-

tion Press.

Krueger, Gary, and Linz, Susan J. (2002). “Virtual Real-

ity: Barter and Restructuring in Russian Industry.”

Problems of Post-Communism 49(5):1–13.

Marin, Dalia. (2002). “Trust versus Illusion: What is Dri-

ving Demonetization in the Former Soviet Union.”

Economics of Transition 10(1):173–200.

USAN

J. L

INZ

VKLADNYE KNIGI See DONATION BOOKS.

VLADIMIR MONOMAKH

(1053–1125), one of the ablest grand princes of Kiev

and the progenitor of the Monomashichi of

Vladimir in Volyn, Smolensk, and Suzdalia. Born

Vladimir Vsevolodovich, he inherited his sobriquet

“Monomakh” from his Greek mother, a relative of

Emperor Constantine IX Monomachus.

In reporting his early career in his autobio-

graphical “Instruction” to his sons, Monomakh

writes how his father Vsevolod, a son of Yaroslav

Vladimirovich the Wise, had him administer

VIRTUAL ECONOMY

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Pereyaslavl, Rostov, Smolensk, Turov, and Nov-

gorod, and how he campaigned against Polotsk and

the Czechs. In 1078, when Vsevolod became grand

prince of Kiev, he transferred Monomakh from

Smolensk to Chernigov, therewith depriving his

nephews, Svyatoslav’s sons, of their patrimony. In

1093, when his father died, Monomakh declined

the Kievans’ invitation to be their prince, evidently

not wishing to violate the ladder system of suc-

cession allegedly introduced by Yaroslav the Wise.

He deferred to his genealogically elder cousin Svy-

atopolk Izyaslavich, with whom he formed an al-

liance against the Polovtsy. The latter attacked the

cousins, inflicted a crushing defeat on them, and

then intensified their raids on Rus.

In 1094 Oleg Svyatoslavich and the Polovtsy

evicted Monomakh from Chernigov, forcing him

to occupy his father’s patrimony of Pereyaslavl.

Because Oleg refused to join him and Svyatopolk

against the nomads, the two drove him out of

Chernigov. After Oleg fled to Murom, where he

killed Monomakh’s son Izyaslav, Monomakh wrote

him an emotionally charged letter (the text of

which survives) pleading that he be pacified. Oleg

responded by pillaging Monomakh’s Suzdalian

lands. In response, Monomakh’s son Mstislav of

Novgorod marched against Oleg, defeated him, and

forced him to attend a congress of princes in 1097

at Lyubech, where Oleg submitted to his cousins.

Soon afterward, Svyatopolk broke the Lyubech

agreement by having Vasilko Rostislavich of Tere-

bovl blinded. Monomakh therefore joined his

cousins, the Svyatoslavichi of Chernigov, against

Svyatopolk, and the princes met at Uvetichi in 1100

to settle the dispute. After that, all the cousins, led

by Monomakh, campaigned successfully against

the Polovtsy in 1103, 1107, and in 1111, when

they inflicted a crushing defeat on the nomads at

the river Don.

After Svyatopolk died in 1113, Monomakh

hesitated to occupy Kiev, but the citizens rioted, al-

legedly forcing him to assume power. He thus pre-

empted the Svyatoslavichi who were higher in

seniority. After occupying the throne he issued

laws, the so-called “Statute of Vladimir Mono-

makh,” to alleviate exorbitant interest rates on

loans and to stop other abuses. During his twelve-

year reign Monomakh continued his campaigns

against the Polovtsy, and in 1116 he captured three

of their towns on the river Don. He also waged war

against the Poles, the Chud, the Lithuanians, and

the Volga Bulgars. He devoted much of his energy

to consolidating his rule by evicting disloyal princes

from their domains and replacing them with his

men. Thus, before his death, in addition to Kiev he

controlled Pereyaslavl, Smolensk, Suzdalia, Nov-

gorod, Vladimir in Volyn, Turov, and Minsk.

Moreover, he hoped to secure his family’s su-

premacy in Rus by persuading the Kievans to ac-

cept his eldest son Mstislav and his heirs as their

hereditary dynasty. By doing so, he attempted once

again to break the system of lateral succession to

Kiev allegedly instituted by Yaroslav the Wise. He

died on May 19, 1125.

See also: GRAND PRINCE; KIEVAN RUS; NOVGOROD THE

GREAT; POLOVTSY; YAROSLAV VLADIMIROVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dimnik, Martin. (1994). The Dynasty of Chernigov,

1054–1146. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediae-

val Studies.

Franklin, Simon, and Shepard, Jonathan. (1996). The

Emergence of Rus, 750-1200. London: Longman.

Vernadsky, George. (1948). Kievan Russia. New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press.

ARTIN

IMNIK

VLADIMIR, ST.

(d. 1015), grand prince, best known for his role in

the Christianization of Kievan Rus.

Sources about Vladimir are scanty, and the most

comprehensive one (generally though inaccurately

called the Russian Primary Chronicle) is full of spu-

rious material. Still the following cautious sketch

of the prince’s career is probably accurate for

the most part. Vladimir’s male ancestors, though

Scandinavian, had been ruling the largely Slavic-

speaking land of Rus for at least two generations

by the time of his birth. His grandmother Olga had

been baptized, probably in Constantinople at some

time during the 950s, but had failed to convince

his father Svyatoslav to follow her lead. In 970

Svyatoslav installed Vladimir (perhaps still a child)

as his subordinate prince in Novgorod. Two years

later Svyatoslav died, leaving Vladimir’s brother

Yaropolk to become grand prince. In 976 a power

struggle between Yaropolk and a third brother,

Oleg, led to Oleg’s death and caused Vladimir to

flee Novgorod for Scandinavia. Vladimir returned

to Novgorod in 980, presumably with Scandina-

vian troops, and marched against Yaropolk. In the

VLADIMIR, ST.

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

same year he or his advisers ordered the assassi-

nation of Yaropolk at a peace conference. Yaropolk’s

death left Vladimir in undisputed control of the

Kievan realm.

In the year that he came to power, Vladimir

erected several idols in Kiev and allegedly authorized

that humans be sacrificed to them. He remained a

pagan for roughly the first eight years of his reign,

during which time he, like his father, expanded and

consolidated his power through a series of wars

against neighboring tribes. He also fathered several

sons including Boris and Gleb, Russia’s two most

important native saints, and Yaroslav the Wise,

who would eventually succeed him.

Vladimir’s conversion to Christianity is de-

scribed at considerable length in the Primary Chron-

icle, but many details of this account are dubious.

However, as the Chronicle suggests, the prince was

probably influenced by missionaries and possibly by

memories of his Christian grandmother. Political

considerations were also important in his decision

to convert. Vladimir’s own baptism was certainly

a condition for his final marriage (the one that

forced him to annul multiple prior marriages) to

Anne, sister of the Byzantine emperor Basil II. There

is some controversy over the precise date of this

baptism, as well as the location (the Greek city of

Cherson, according to the Chronicle, or Kiev). In any

case, Vladimir’s personal baptism in 987 or 988 was

followed almost immediately by the official Chris-

tianization of Rus. After baptism the prince seems

to have embarked enthusiastically on a program of

destroying pagan temples, building churches, and

educating new clergy. The latter two projects were

to be vigorously continued by his son Yaroslav.

Although there were Christians in the Kievan

state before Vladimir’s time, the prince’s official

conversion of the land marked a historical turning

point. As Christians, Vladimir’s successors had a

religion in common with their counterparts in the

rest of Europe, fostering communication and po-

litical alliances. The conversion also stimulated the

development of literacy in Kievan Rus and its suc-

cessor states. The conversion had problematic as-

pects as well. Vladimir’s decision to adopt the

religion from Byzantium rather than Rome would

separate Russia culturally from the West in many

respects. The schism between the Western and

Eastern churches, already underway in Vladimir’s

time, became official in 1204 and continues into

the early twenty-first century. Moreover, while lit-

erate Westerners of all nationalities would com-

municate with each other freely in Latin for

centuries to come, the primary written language

of Russia would be Slavic. These factors contributed

greatly to the exclusion of Russia (and, to some ex-

tent, of Ukraine and Belarus) from many Western

European intellectual and cultural developments up

to the end of the seventeenth century.

During the Muscovite period Vladimir was reg-

ularly represented as the founder of the Russian

state. This practice ended with the death of his last

ruling descendant through the male line in 1598.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, his reign

was romanticized in poems, paintings, and novels.

He may also be the prototype of a folkloric ruler

named Vladimir in Russia’s oral epic poetry.

See also: CHRISTIANIZATION; KIEVAN RUS; OLGA; PRIMARY

CHRONICLE; SAINTS; YAROPOLK I; YAROSLAV VLADI-

MIROVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cross, Samuel Hazzard, and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, Olgerd

P., trs. and eds. (1953). The Russian Primary Chron-

icle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval

Academy of America.

Hollingsworth, Paul, tr. (1992). The Hagiography of

Kievan Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Distributed by Harvard

University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute

of Harvard University.

Obolensky, Dimitri. (1971). The Byzantine Commonwealth:

Eastern Europe, 500–1043. New York: Praeger.

Obolensky, Dimitri. (1989). “Cherson and the Conver-

sion of Rus: An Anti-Revisionist View.” Byzantine

and Modern Greek Studies 13:244-256.

Poppe, Andrzej. (1976). “The Political Background to the

Baptism of Rus’: Byzantine-Russian Relations be-

tween 986–989.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 30:195–244.

Reprinted in his The Rise of Christian Russia (1982).

London: Variorum Reprints.

RANCIS

UTLER

VLASOV MOVEMENT

The Vlasov Movement (Vlasovskoye Dvizhenie), or

Russian Liberation Movement, designates the at-

tempt by Soviet citizens in German hands during

World War II to create an anti-Stalinist army, nom-

inally led by Lieutenant-General Andrei Andreye-

vich Vlasov (1900–1946), to overthrow Stalin.

Vlasov gave his name to the movement and died

for his role in it. He did not create the situation and

had little influence over developments.

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY