Encyclopedia of Russian History

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tensions with the West, over both Germany, and

Yugoslavia. But he always played second fiddle

to party boss Khrushchev. A year after Bulganin

sided with the Stalinist Anti-Party Group against

Khrushchev (1957), he was dismissed as both prime

minister and marshal. Relegated to a minor eco-

nomic post, he subsequently retired in 1960.

See also: KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Khrushchev, Nikita. (1974). Khrushchev Remembers: The

Last Testament, tr. and ed. Strobe Talbott. London:

Andre Deutsch.

Taubman, William; Khrushchev, Sergei; and Gleason,

Abbott, eds. (2000). Nikita Khrushchev. New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press.

OGER

D. M

ARKWICK

BULGARIANS

The Bulgarians, or Bulgars, belonged to the Turco-

Altaic language group and originated from western

Siberia, along the valley of the Irtish River. During

the first and second centuries

. they migrated in

the direction of eastern Europe and settled in the re-

gion north of the Caucasus. There, the proto-

Bulgarians mingled with local native tribes of Iran-

ian origin, whose cultural achievements and social

hierarchy had a substantial impact on their further

development. The proto-Bulgarians were called Bul-

gars for the first time by a Roman chronographer in

354. During the seventh century, they merged with

the Slavic tribes inhabiting the territory bordering the

Black Sea, between Romania and Turkey, in south-

eastern Europe, which is present-day Bulgaria.

The Bulgarians took over the newcomers’

Slavic language. The Turkish conquest of Bulgaria

in 1396 hampered the development of the Bulgar-

ian language for several centuries, but after the

Bulgarians achieved independence in 1878, a mod-

ern literary language based on the vernacular

emerged. Modern Bulgarian, which is generally said

to date from the sixteenth century, borrowed

words from Greek, Turkish, Russian, French, and

German. Although it resembles Slavic languages,

Bulgarian has a definite article and has almost com-

pletely dropped the numerous case forms of the

noun. It uses position and prepositions (like Eng-

lish) to indicate grammatical relationships in a sen-

tence instead of using cases (like Russian).

Once an independent kingdom, Bulgaria was

dominated by the communist Party from 1946 un-

til 1990, when a multiparty system was adopted.

During the communist period, when Bulgaria was

under the control of the Union of Soviet Socialist Re-

publics (USSR), the once dominant agricultural sec-

tor was overtaken by manufacturing. After World

War II, all industrial enterprises were nationalized

and operated under a series of five-year economic

plans, modeled after the Soviet system, with finan-

cial aid from the USSR. Bulgaria enjoyed one of the

most prosperous economies of the Soviet bloc. The

transition from the old command economy to a de-

mocratic, market-oriented economy, initiated after

the collapse of the communist regime, has been slow.

Mass privatization of state-owned industry was

sluggish, although privatization of small-scale in-

dustry, particularly in the retail and service sectors,

accelerated. Under communism, Bulgarians became

accustomed to free health services, but Bulgaria’s

post-communist governments have not had the fi-

nancial resources to maintain these services. In 2003,

52 percent of the population was employed in ser-

vices, 36 percent in industry, and 12 percent in agri-

culture. Most Bulgarians (85%) are Bulgarian

Orthodox, while 13 percent are Muslim, 0.8 percent

are Jewish, 0.5 percent are Roman Catholic, and 0.2

percent are Uniate Catholic. The remainder, about

0.5 percent, are of Protestant, Gregorian-Armenian,

and other faiths.

See also: ALTAI; BULGARIA, RELATIONS WITH; NATIONAL-

ITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES,

TSARIST; TATARSTAN AND TATARS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bell, John D. (1998). Bulgaria in Transition: Politics, Eco-

nomics, Society, and Culture after Communism. Boul-

der, CO: Westview Press.

Bristow, John A. (1996). The Bulgarian Economy in Tran-

sition: Studies of Communism in Transition. Brookfield,

VT: Edward Elgar.

Crampton, R. J. (1997). A Concise History of Bulgaria. New

York: Cambridge University Press.

Dimitrov, Georgi, and Banac, Ivo. (2003). The Diary of

Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949. New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press.

OHANNA

RANVILLE

BULGARIA, RELATIONS WITH

Relations between Russia and Bulgaria are marked

by their closeness in alphabet, language, culture,

BULGARIA, RELATIONS WITH

183

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

and religion. Between the tenth and eighteen cen-

turies both nations used a literary language that

had emerged originally in Bulgaria together with

the Cyrillic alphabet. In the tenth and eleventh cen-

turies, Bulgarian Orthodox culture served as the

foundation of Russia’s nascent culture and polity

(reinforced by a second wave of Bulgarian influ-

ences in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries),

whereas the Russian variant of the common cul-

tural tradition played a crucial role in the renais-

sance of Bulgarian culture and language in the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From the

beginning of modern Bulgarian education in the

1830s, Russian language and literature have had a

solid presence in the Bulgarian school curriculum,

and the concomitant impact of Russian culture and

ideas has dramatically influenced key developments

in Bulgarian history, such as the emergence of na-

tionalism, liberalism, and constitutionalism in the

nineteenth century, and of communism, forced

collectivization and industrialization, and a glas-

nost-inspired pro-democracy movement in the

twentieth.

Political relations can be traced back to Bul-

garia’s triangular relationship with Kiev and Con-

stantinople in the ninth to eleventh centuries.

Bulgaria’s repeated loss of independence and the

fragmentation of Rus made contacts episodic until

the rise of the Russian Empire and its many wars

with Turkey in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-

turies. In the war of 1877 to 1878, Russia liber-

ated Bulgaria from Turkish rule and laid the

foundations of its state institutions. Mounting

bilateral disagreements led to the severing of diplo-

matic relations in 1886. Bulgaria’s de facto inde-

pendence was recognized by Russia in 1896, after

the failure of a protracted campaign of military

conspiracies and assassinations backed by Alexan-

der III. Until 1912 Bulgaria maneuvered between

the Balkan policies of Austria-Hungary and Rus-

sia. In 1912 it entered into an alliance with Serbia

and Greece under Russian tutelage. This alliance

won the First Balkan War against Turkey, but dis-

agreement between the allies led to the Second

Balkan War in 1913, which ended in Bulgaria’s de-

feat and the decline of Russian influence in Sofia.

When Bulgaria entered War World I by attacking

Serbia in September 1915, Russia declared war on

Bulgaria and its fleet bombarded Varna. In 1916

Russian and Romanian troops opened a new front

against Bulgaria but were defeated. In March 1918

Russia signed a peace treaty in Brest-Litovsk with

the Central Powers, including Bulgaria.

Bulgaria’s defeat by the entente in September

1918 led to radicalization and the rise of Bolshevik

influence. The Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP)

was formed in 1919 as a section of the Comintern.

In 1923 the Comintern prompted the unprepared

BCP to start an uprising, which ended in defeat,

reprisals, and the banning of the party. Bulgaria

established diplomatic relations with the USSR in

1934; until then relations had been tense because

of Moscow’s encouragement of BCP subversion,

which culminated in a spectacular explosion in a

Sofia cathedral in April 1925, with 123 dead and

several hundred wounded. Bilateral relations im-

proved markedly after the conclusion of the Soviet-

German nonaggression pact in 1939. In November

and December 1940, the USSR attempted to gain

German and Bulgarian consent for the inclusion of

Bulgaria in the Soviet security sphere, but by that

time Bulgaria had effectively joined the German-led

coalition. Friction over Bulgaria was one of the rea-

sons behind Hitler’s decision to attack the USSR in

1941. Bulgaria served as a supply base for the Ger-

man army, but was officially neutral in the Soviet-

German war and diplomatic relations were

preserved. Between 1941 and 1944, with the help

of the BCP and noncommunist Bulgarian Rus-

sophiles, the USSR engaged in a relentless espi-

onage, sabotage, and guerrilla campaign against

Bulgaria. In September 1944 the USSR declared war

shortly after the formation of a pro-Western gov-

ernment in Sofia, and Soviet troops advanced un-

opposed while a BCP-controlled putsch overthrew

the government. The Bulgarian army was mobi-

lized to fight German troops as part of the Soviet

war effort, while the BCP killed and imprisoned

thousands of its opponents in an attempt to cleanse

the country of potential anti-Soviet elements.

When Soviet troops left Bulgaria in 1947 the

country had already become a one-party state. Its

security services and army, foreign and internal

politics, economy, and culture were dominated by

Soviet advisers. Every facet of Bulgarian society

was forcibly reshaped along Russian-Soviet lines.

Destalinization after 1953 led to some relaxation

of Soviet controls. While the other satellites all at-

tempted to move away from the Soviet model, Bul-

garia came to be perceived as the closest Soviet ally.

Under the rule of Todor Zhivkov (1954–1989), the

Bulgarian elite enjoyed unique and unparalleled ac-

cess to Soviet decision-making institutions, Soviet

resources, and Soviet society in general. Compared

with other European members of the Council for

Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), the Bul-

BULGARIA, RELATIONS WITH

184

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

garian economy had grown most dependent on the

Soviet, with the USSR accounting for more than

half of overall Bulgarian trade throughout the

1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Glasnost gave a major boost to the creation of

a small but vocal pro-democracy movement in Bul-

garia in 1988 and 1989. In November 1989

Zhivkov was removed with Soviet connivance,

which ushered in the era of multiparty politics in

Bulgaria.

After the collapse of the COMECON, the War-

saw Pact, and the USSR in 1991, bilateral trade was

limited largely to Russian oil and gas exports to

Bulgaria, and political contacts became episodic.

Boris Yeltsin visited Bulgaria in August 1992, and

Vladimir Putin did so in March 2003.

See also: BALKAN WARS; BULGARIANS; COUNCIL FOR MU-

TUAL ECONOMIC ASSISTANCE; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crampton, Richard J. (1983). Bulgaria, 1878–1918. Boul-

der, CO: East European Monographs.

Dimitrov, Vesselin. (2001). Bulgaria: The Uneven Transi-

tion. London: Routledge.

Durman, Karel. (1988). Lost Illusions: Russian Policies to-

wards Bulgaria in 1877–1887. Uppsala: Acta Uni-

versitatis Uppsaliensis.

Haramiev-Drezov, Kyril. (1993). “Russian-Bulgarian Re-

lations on a New Footing.” RFE/RL Research Report

2(15):33–38.

Jelavich, Charles. (1958). Tsarist Russia and Balkan Na-

tionalism. Russian Influence in the Internal Affairs of

Bulgaria and Serbia, 1879–1886. Berkeley: Univer-

sity of California Press.

Sumner, Benedict H. (1937). Russia and the Balkans,

1870–1880. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

YRIL

REZOV

BUND, JEWISH

The term Bund is an abbreviation of der algemeyner

yidisher arbeter bund in rusland un poyln and refers

to the General Jewish Labor Union in Russia and

Poland (after 1901 the name added Lithuania to

Poland and Russia). Founded in Vilna in 1897 by

a group of Jewish Social Democrats, it was one of

the forces behind the establishment of the Russian

Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP) in Minsk

in 1898. The Bund was an integral part of the

RSDWP in the Russian Empire until it split from

the party in 1903, rejoining it in 1906. The Bund

pioneered Jewish political activism in the Russian

Empire, while making important contributions to

the development of a modern, secular Jewish cul-

ture in eastern Europe.

The movement originated among russified

Jewish intellectuals, the Vilna Group, who were

well-grounded in the theories of social democracy

circulating in the Russian Empire—including

Poland—in the 1890s. As convinced and enthusias-

tic cosmopolitans, they did not seek to create a

specifically Jewish movement. Nor were the masses

of Jewish artisans seen as a suitable substitute for

an industrial proletariat. Nonetheless, on the Rus-

sian model, a few activists founded circles that

sought to provide a general and political education

for artisans, and to transform them into revolu-

tionary activists. In 1894 the publication of two

influential pamphlets, Shmuel Gozhansky’s Letter

to Agitators and Arkady Kremer’s On Agitation,

marked a major change in strategy, a move to mass

agitation and the pursuit of specific economic goals.

Given that the vernacular language of 97 percent

of Jews in the Russian Empire was Yiddish, the move

to mass agitation also marked a permanent com-

mitment to the use and development of that lan-

guage. The movement proved successful at attracting

members by engaging in practical work, such as

the creation of strike funds and self-help bodies, and

publication of a Yiddish-language press and agita-

tional materials. Over time the Bund ideology de-

veloped an emphasis on the importance of Yiddish

as a central element in Jewish secular culture.

The Bund was formed in 1897 to unite scattered

Jewish Social Democratic groups throughout the

Pale of Settlement. It combined a central political or-

ganization led by professional revolutionaries and a

mass movement directed to economic and political

change. The organization produced a number of out-

standing revolutionary leaders such as John Mill,

Vladimir Medem, and Yuli Martov. In 1898 Bund

members were major participants in the foundation

of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. At

this meeting the Bund was granted full autonomy

as to the geographical area of its activities, and a free

hand to deal with the unique problems of the Jew-

ish working class. This autonomy was ostensibly

the cause of the split of the Bund from the RSDWP

in 1903; in fact, criticism of the Bund’s position was

only a tactical maneuver on the part of Vladimir

Ilich Lenin, in his effort to impose his ideological

BUND, JEWISH

185

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

agenda upon the RSDWP. There was thus no seri-

ous obstacle to the readmission of the Bund to the

party in 1906.

One of the most successful elements of the So-

cial Democratic movement in the Russian Empire

(in terms of numbers and organizational abilities),

the Bund was active in the creation of self-defense

groups to resist pogroms. Its commitment to Yid-

dish did much to foster the development of Yiddish

language, literature, and culture. The Bund devel-

oped a program that called for Jewish cultural au-

tonomy in a democratic Russian Empire. After 1905

the Bund had to compete with a broad variety of

Jewish political activities, including various forms

of Zionism, which it sharply opposed. In October

1917 the Bund joined other moderate socialists to

oppose the Bolshevik seizure of power, but the out-

break of pogroms in 1918 led many Bundists to

welcome the protective role of the Red Army in the

Pale. Bundists were a principle source of personnel

recruited to the task of bringing the revolution to

the Jewish street, through work in the Jewish Sec-

tions of the party and the state. The Bund was for-

mally merged with the Russian Communist Party

in 1921, while remaining a significant political force

outside the Soviet Union, particularly in interwar

Poland and the United States.

See also: JEWS; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Frankel, Jonathan. (1981). Prophecy and Politics: Social-

ism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Jacobs, Jack, ed. (2001). Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe:

The Bund at 100. New York: New York University

Press.

Mendelsohn, Ezra. (1970). Class Struggle in the Pale: The

Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in

Tsarist Russia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press.

Tobias, Henry J. (1972). The Jewish Bund in Russia: From

Its Origins to 1905. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-

sity Press.

OHN

D. K

LIER

BUNIN, IVAN ALEXEYEVICH

(1870–1953), poet and a master of prose fiction;

the first Russian to win the Nobel prize for litera-

ture (1933).

Ivan Alexeyevich Bunin was the scion of an an-

cient aristocratic family from the heartland of Old

Russia, the fertile countryside south of Moscow

that produced so many writers from the gentry,

among them Turgenev and Tolstoy. Much of his

early fiction depicts the decline of the class he was

born into. The celebratory tone of “Antonov’s Ap-

ples” (1900) makes it exceptional. However, it is

purely commemorative, a song of praise for a way

of life that has passed away. A lyric apprehension

of nature is a central feature of Bunin’s art. With-

out religious faith or political commitment, he finds

sustenance in a pantheistic attitude or in aristo-

cratic stoicism. The Village (1909–1910), a natu-

ralistic portrait, is more typically grim. Its subject

is the barbarity and backwardness of Russian

provincial life. “Dry Valley” (1911) is one of the

supreme masterpieces of modern fiction. In this

haunting novella Bunin’s lyrical reverie attains

mythic and tragic resonance. Experience is filtered

through layers of memory to evoke an image of

the patriarchal estate of Old Russia as a landscape

of violence and ruin.

Bunin fled Russia after the Revolution. He set-

tled in Paris but traveled much. Separated from the

Russian countryside he knows so intimately, he

tends to become abstract—as in his exotic Eastern

tales and much of his work in emigration. “Gen-

tleman from San Francisco” is a masterpiece of his

international style. A work of cold, jewel-like

beauty, it may be read as a satire of bourgeois civ-

ilization or an allegory of the vanity of human am-

bition in the face of death—a favorite theme of

Bunin’s, especially in his later years.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Poggioli, Renato. (1957). “The Art of Ivan Bunin.” In The

Phoenix and the Spider. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-

versity Press.

Woodward, James B. (1980). Ivan Bunin: A Study of His

Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press.

ILTON

HRE

BUREAUCRACY, ECONOMIC

Each of the fifteen union republics had its own state

apparatus, which paralleled that of the USSR as a

whole. Although there was an elected government

(the Supreme Soviet), the USSR Council of Ministers

(Sovet Ministrov SSSR) conducted the business of gov-

BUNIN, IVAN ALEXEYEVICH

186

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

ernment and constituted the highest oversight and

executive body of the Soviet economic bureaucracy.

It was composed of industrial ministers, chairmen

of various state committees, and chairmen of agen-

cies with ministerial status. The chairman of the

Council occupied the most powerful position in the

state apparatus, in effect the position of prime min-

ister. At various stages of Soviet history, the head

of the Communist Party of the USSR and the head

of the state were the same person, but this was not

always the case. The Council of Ministers was re-

sponsible for the enactment of the economic policies

of the Communist Party by the state bureaucracy.

The Council of Ministers was the main source of

economic legislation; it coordinated and directed the

activities of the state committees and the ministries,

and supervised national economic planning, state

budget, and credit and currency systems. It was au-

thorized to reverse the decisions of ministries and

make and execute the key resource-allocation deci-

sions of the Soviet economy.

State economic committees were subordinated to

the Council of Ministries of the USSR in the vast So-

viet economic bureaucracy. Gosplan SSSR (the state

planning committee) was the most important such

agency, followed by more than forty state commit-

tees and agencies with ministerial status involved in

economic affairs. Gosplan was subdivided into in-

dustrial departments, such as coal, ferrous metals,

and machinery, and also had summary departments,

such as finance, dealing with functions that crossed

functional bodies. Gosplan was primarily responsi-

ble for executing the directives of the Council of Min-

istries and preparing annual operational plans for the

industrial ministries with the participation of the lat-

ter. In addition, Gosplan was charged with the prepa-

ration of long-term (five-year) plans and longer-term

perspective plans, which had more operational sig-

nificance for investment planning. Gosplan had con-

siderable responsibilities concerning supply planning

and distribution of production (supplies) among

ministries; it also arbitrated disputes among min-

istries or state committees and dealt with the prob-

lem of regional coordination.

Other state economic committees can be divided

into three groups: Gossnab SSSR (the State Com-

mittee for Material Technical Supply), the financial

state committees, and other functional state com-

mittees. Gossnab SSSR assisted Gosplan with the al-

location of key material inputs (funded goods) to the

ministries. The reforms of Prime Minister Alexei

Kosygin of 1965 assumed, among other things, the

assignment to Gossnab of the responsibility for the

allocation of producer goods. The ministerial supply

organizations that had dominated the rationing of

funded goods largely disappeared. The tasks of

Gossnab included honing the operational details for

detailed assortments of funded goods according to

the general allocations outlined by Gosplan. Gossnab

acted as an executive arm of Gosplan in matters of

supply planning by maintaining actual warehouses

and distribution points from which ministries drew

materials. Gossnab applied itself to the creation of a

wholesale trade system based on direct contracts be-

tween suppliers and users. By the late 1970s Gossnab

handled only one-half of the value of rationed goods.

Despite reform efforts, markets for producer goods

failed to emerge, and the traditional system of ma-

terial supplies and balances continued to function.

Two financial state committees, the Ministry of

Finance and the State Bank (Gosbank), worked di-

rectly with enterprises, unlike other economic min-

istries. The Ministry of Finance monitored the use

of credit by enterprises (working with the min-

istries), and was responsible for collections of rev-

enues for the budget. At the local level, Ministry of

Finance officials were interested primarily in col-

lecting profit taxes, fixed payments, and capital

charges from enterprises. The ministry played an

important role in limiting managerial staff positions

in state bureaucratic organizations and monitored

compliance. Its responsibility for the development

and execution of the state budget authorized the

Ministry of Finance to give an independent opinion

on the correspondence of economic plans to party

economic policy—a right that Gosplan did not have.

Banking services were provided by Gosbank.

This bank combined the services of a central bank

and a commercial bank, but due to the absence of

credit and capital markets Gosbank did not perform

some traditional banking functions (open market

operations, commercial paper transactions, and so

forth). The major functions performed by Gosbank

were to make short-term loans for working capi-

tal (supply of credits in accordance with credit re-

quirements planned by the Ministry of Finance), to

oversee enterprise plan fulfillment, to create money,

and to monitor payments to the population as a

center for all accounts. Therefore, Gosbank acted as

the Finance Ministry’s agent by booking the pay-

ments of taxes and fees to the state budget through

Gosbank accounts while monitoring the flow of

wage payments and credit through the economy.

The third group consisted of the State Com-

mittee on Prices (Goskomtsen), the State Committee

BUREAUCRACY, ECONOMIC

187

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

on Labor and Wages (Goskomtrud), the State Com-

mittee on Science and Technology (Goskomtekhnika),

the State Committee on Construction (Gosstroy),

and the State Committee on Standards (Goskom-

standart). These committees worked primarily in

setting rules and establishing norms to be observed

by the ministries and their subordinate enterprises.

For those goods whose prices were to be set cen-

trally, the State Committee on Prices set the prices;

for other goods, it established rules for price set-

ting by individual ministries. The State Committee

on Labor and Wages established staffing norms and

spelled out the rules of compensation and pay. The

State Committee on Science and Technology set

norms for scientific work and collaborated with

Gosplan on science policy. The State Committee on

Construction set standards for documenting con-

struction projects and assisted Gosplan in site and

project selection. The State Committee on Standards

established rules for judging quality standards.

The main function of state committees was the

generation of information useful to the Council of

Ministries and Gosplan in making planning deci-

sions. Their information on norms, technology,

and quality standards gave Gosplan independent

data useful for the evaluation of ministry requests.

The rules developed by functional state committees

helped the Council of Ministries and Gosplan to

constrain the activities of the industrial ministries

in order to limit their opportunistic behavior.

See also: COMMAND ADMINISTRATIVE ECONOMY; GOS-

BANK; GOSPLAN; MINISTRIES, ECONOMIC

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gregory, Paul R. (1990). Restructuring the Soviet Economic

Bureaucracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

Press.

Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian

and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure.

Boston: Addison Wesley.

AUL

R. G

REGORY

BURYATS

The Buryats, originally a nomadic herding people

of Mongolian stock, live in the South-central re-

gion of Siberia, in the territory bordering Mongo-

lia, with Lake Baikal on its western border and

Yablonovy Ridge to the east.

The Buryats are one of the nationality groups

that was recognized by Soviet authorities and had

an autonomous republic of its own, along with the

Yakuts, the Ossetians, the Komi, Tuvinians,

Kalmyks, and Karelians. Of the five republics lo-

cated east of the Ural Mountains in Asian Russia,

four—Buryatia, Gorno-Altay, Khakassia, and

Tuva—extend along Russia’s southern border with

Mongolia. After the changes of the immediate post-

Soviet years, the Buryat Republic, or Buryatia (for-

merly the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist

Republic, or ASSR), continues to exist in the Russ-

ian Federation and is recognized in the Russian con-

stitution passed in 1993. Besides the republics, the

constitution recognizes ten autonomous regions,

whose status, like that of the republics, is based on

the presence of one or two ethnic groups. One of

these regions is Aga Buryat, in which Buryats make

up 55 percent of the population; the rest are Rus-

sians.

One of the largest ethnic groups in Siberia, the

Buryats number well over one million in the early

twenty-first century. In 1994 the population of the

republic was about 1.1 million, of which more than

one-third lived in the capital city, Ulan-Ude, which

lies at the junction of the Uda and Selenga Rivers.

Other cities in Buryatia include Babushkin,

Kyakhta, and Zakamensk. All are situated by key

rivers, including Barguzin, Upper Angara, and

Vitim. Occupying 351,300 square kilometers

(135,600 square miles), Buryatia has a continen-

tal climate and mountainous terrain, with nearly

70 percent of the region covered by forests.

Contrary to popular belief, Buryatia, and

Siberia in general, is not a frozen wasteland year-

round. The Siberian winter extends from Novem-

ber to March. In fact, the Siberian flag contains the

colors green and white in equal horizontal propor-

tions, with the green representing the Siberian taiga

(the largest forest in the world) and the white rep-

resenting the snow of winter. This taiga shelters

vast amounts of minerals, plants, and wildlife,

some of which are quite rare and valuable. Along

with huge hydroelectric reserves, Buryatia pos-

sesses rich stores of bauxite, coal, gold, iron ore,

uranium, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, tung-

sten, lignite, graphite, shales, mercury, tin, and rare

earth minerals. The main industries derive from

coal extraction, timber harvesting, textiles, sugar

refining (from beets), engineering (including loco-

motive building and boat repairs), and food pro-

cessing (mostly wheat and vegetables, such as

potatoes).

BURYATS

188

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

The peoples of Siberia fall into three major

ethno-linguistic groups: Altaic, Uralic, and Paleo-

Siberian. The Buryats are one of the Altaic peoples,

speakers of Turkic languages widely distributed in

the middle Volga, the southern Ural Mountains,

the North Caucasus, and above the Arctic Circle.

Buryatia is the center of Buddhism in Russia. In

fact, it is a place where three religions coexist peace-

fully: shamanism, Buddhism, and Orthodoxy. The

Siberian region even gave rise to the languages from

which the term shaman is derived. Shamanism is

a belief in unseen gods, demons, and ancestral spir-

its responsive only to priests (shamans) with mag-

ical and healing powers.

The Buryats have not always been a part of

Russia. From 1625 to 1627, the Russian Tsar

Mikhail Fyodorovich (first of the Romanov dy-

nasty) sent an expedition to explore the Bratskaya

land. This first boat expedition, underestimating

the ferocity of the Angara River’s rapids, never

completed the journey, but nevertheless word

spread that Buryat farmers were eager to trade.

Later that century, the Russians—in search of

wealth, furs, and gold—annexed and colonized the

area. Some Buryats, dissatisfied with the proposed

tsarist rule, fled to Mongolia, only to return to their

native country saying, “Mongolia’s Khan beheads

culprits, but the Russian Tsar just flogs them. Let

us become subjects of the Russian Tsar.” In 1923

the Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Soviet Socialist

Republic was founded, which consisted of the land

on which Buryats lived. Fourteen years later, in

1937, Buryat was forced to split to into three parts:

the Buryat-Mongol ASSR, and the Irkutsk and the

Chita provinces. That population division remains

in the post-Soviet era. During the 1970s Soviet au-

thorities forbade Buryats from teaching the Buryat

language in schools. In 1996 the Russian Parlia-

ment finally passed a bill concerning the nation-

alalities policy of the Russian Federation, allowing

the Buryatlanguage and native customs to be

taught and preserved.

See also: ALTAI; KALMYKS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SO-

VIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; SIBERIA; TUVA

AND TUVINIANS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam. (1997). Shamanic Worlds:

Rituals and Lore of Siberia and Central Asia. Armonk,

NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Hudgins, Sharon. (2003). The Other Side Of Russia: A Slice

of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East. College Sta-

tion: Texas A&M University Press.

Preobrazhensky, Alexander. (1993). “The Beginning of

Common Road,” International Affairs, May 1993.

Tkacz, Virlana, Sayan Zhambalov, et al. (2002). Shanar:

Dedication Ritual of a Buryat Shaman in Siberia. New

York: Parabola Books.

OHANNA

RANVILLE

BUTASHEVICH-PETRASHEVSKY,

MIKHAIL VASILIEVICH

(1821–1866), Russian revolutionary democrat and

political organizer.

A graduate of St. Petersburg University Law

Department and a clerk at the Foreign Ministry,

Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevsky founded (in

1844) and headed a clandestine society of educated

youth, from moderate to radical, that were opposed

to Tsarism and serfdom. The “Petrashevskians” (pe-

trashevtsy) held gatherings at his home on Fridays;

their members included Fyodor Dostoyevsky, then

an upstart story writer, and a future nationalist

thinker Nikolai Danilevsky. Petrashevskians en-

gaged in the study of Western democratic and so-

cialist thought, in particular, the works of Charles

Fourier, French utopian socialist and advocate of

reorganizing society into a federation of grassroots

communes (falanstères). Petrashevsky apparently

organized a falanstère in his own estate, although

it was subsequently destroyed by peasants. Petra-

shevskians authored and published two issues of

The Pocket Dictionary of Foreign Words (1846, 1849)

that included explanations for a number of terms

from the “revolutionary” lexicon and was later

used against them as incriminating evidence. They

also disseminated the Letter of Belinsky to Gogol that

was banned in Russia. Their circle is viewed as Rus-

sia’s closest reflection of the revolutionary move-

ments of 1848 in Western and Central Europe. In

1849, with the onset of political repression in Rus-

sia after the revolutions in Europe had been

crushed, Petrashevsky was arrested together with

other members of his circle. Most of them, except

himself, pleaded guilty of anti-government activi-

ties, and all were sentenced to death, but the sen-

tence was revoked by Nicholas I; the announcement

was made at the last moment at the scene of the

execution. For Petrashevsky, death penalty was re-

placed by a lifetime sentence to forced labor in a

penal colony in Eastern Siberia. In 1856 he declined

the pardon offered by Alexander II to political pris-

oners as part of the general amnesty.

BUTASHEVICH-PETRASHEVSKY, MIKHAIL VASILIEVICH

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

See also: DANILEVSKY, NIKOLAI YAKOVLEVICH; DOS-

TOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; PETRASHEVTSY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Evans John L. (1974). The Petrasevskij Circle, 1845–1849.

The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton.

MITRI

LINSKI

BYLINA

Oral epic song type.

The term bylina is a nineteenth-century schol-

arly innovation, although it is found with a dif-

ferent meaning (“true happening”) in the Lay of

Igor’s Campaign and Zadonshchina. Folksingers gen-

erally called any such songs starina or starinka

(song of olden times). Known first from the sev-

enteenth and eighteenth centuries, the bylinas were

mainly collected in the nineteenth and the first half

of the twentieth. They had survived on the mar-

gins of the Russian state: in the north, the Urals,

parts of Siberia, and among cossacks in the south.

Since true epics are relatively scarce in world folk-

lore, the Russian repertoire is significant. It is also

notable for its relative brevity (typically a few hun-

dred lines) and native subjects and heroes.

Epic composition of some kind probably was

practiced in early medieval times, as witness liter-

ary reflections in the Lay of Igor’s Campaign, Zadon-

shchina, passages of the Destruction of Ryazan, and

the tale of Kozhemyaka in the Primary Chronicle.

The first two of these would seem to indicate that

epic singing started in princely courts and was per-

formed by professional bards. But the bylina

known to researchers it was performed by peasant

singers of tales, both men and women. Most of the

surviving examples are set in Kievan Rus in the time

of a Prince Vladimir (unclear which one), often

with the heroes anachronistically fighting Tatar

armies, and this suggests that the songs originated

in later centuries when Kiev as capital was only a

vague memory and circumstances could be con-

fused with those of the Tatar Yoke. Attempts have

been made to attach certain of the exploits to his-

torical events, but this remains doubtful. Rather, it

seems that bylinas are fictions reflecting wish ful-

fillment pervasive in Russian folklore; with super-

human strength and prowess, native heroes always

win against the steppe enemies, turning history up-

side down.

Being improvisational, performances differ ac-

cording to the talents and tastes of performers. It

is believed that early practitioners were profession-

als who chanted to the accompaniment of a

stringed instrument, the gusli. In modern times the

bylinas were often spoken or sung (the latter es-

pecially by cossacks). The bylina’s metrical princi-

ple is accentual: a fixed number of strong stresses

(three or two) per line, usually with the last stress

on the third from last syllable (marking the end of

the line) and often with the first stress coming on

the third syllable of the line. The number of weak

syllables between stresses varies. Conventionally,

extra syllables and words might be inserted in or-

der to get the desired spacing of stresses.

Approximately one hundred subjects of the

bylina are known. Scholars categorize the epic

songs either chronologically (old and new) or by

region (Kievan and Novgorodian). The older heroes

(Volkh, Svyatogor) are called that because they ap-

pear to be connected with ancient myths. Charac-

teristic Kievan heroes (bogatyrs) are Ilya Muromets,

Dobrynya Nikitich, and Alyosha Popovich, while

Dyuk Stepanovich is an aristocratic dandy and

Sukhman a rare tragic hero. The few bylinas from

Novgorod (Sadko, Vasily Buslayev) reflect the com-

mercial interests of that merchant republic of the

North.

Related to the bylinas as epic compositions are

the so-called historical songs and spiritual songs.

See also: FOLK MUSIC; FOLKLORE; HISTORICAL SONGS; LAY

OF IGOR’S CAMPAIGN; MUSIC; SKAZ; ZADONSHCHINA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bailey, James, and Ivanova, Tatyana, tr., ed. (1999). An

Anthology of Russian Folk Epics. Armonk, NY: M. E.

Sharpe.

Sokolov, Y. M. (1971). Russian Folklore, tr. Catherine

Ruth Smith. Detroit: Folklore Associates.

ORMAN

W. I

NGHAM

BYZANTIUM, INFLUENCE OF

Toward the end of the tenth century—the conven-

tional date is 988—Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich

of Kiev made Christianity the official religion of his

people, the Rus. In choosing his faith, he also had

to choose between its two institutional structures—

that of the Western (Latin) Church under the au-

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

thority of the pope in Rome, and that of the East-

ern (Greek) Church under the authority of the Pa-

triarch of Constantinople (Byzantium). Although

the two churches were not formally in opposition

at the time—the Great Schism occurred in 1054—

nevertheless they had grown apart over the cen-

turies, and each had developed its own distinctive

features. Vladimir chose the Byzantine version, a

decision with consequences at many levels. How-

ever, the nature and extent of Russia’s Byzantine

heritage has been controversial. Some have argued

that, since Christianity was imported into Rus from

Byzantium, the culture that grew therefrom can-

not be said to have been merely influenced by

Byzantium: it simply was Byzantine, a local de-

velopment from and within the broader Byzantine

tradition. Others, by contrast, stress the active na-

ture of cultural borrowing—namely, the adoption

and adaptation of selected elements of Byzantine

culture to serve local needs and hence to develop a

native culture that, while indebted to Byzantium

in superficial aspects of form, was indigenous in

substance and essence. Such are the crude extremes.

The more productive discussion lies in the nuances

between the two.

For seven hundred years from the official Con-

version, high-status cultural expression among the

East Slavs of Rus and then of Muscovy was almost

entirely limited to the celebration, affirmation, and

exposition of Christianity, and hence was almost

entirely limited to the appropriate forms inher-

ited—directly or indirectly—from Byzantium. In

painting this was the age of the icon: not really art

in the modern sense (as the product of an individ-

ual artist’s imaginative creativity), but a devotional

image, a true and correct likeness according to the

approved prototypes. In architecture, public spaces

were dominated by churches, whose basic design—

most commonly a cross-in-square or domed cross

layout—was Byzantine in origin. As for writing,

90 percent or more of all that was written, copied,

and disseminated was ultimately derived from

Church Slavonic texts translated from Greek. Over

time, cultural production in all these media could

of course acquire local features—in the develop-

ment and composition of the full-height iconosta-

sis, for example, or in the elaboration of roof-tiers,

the onion-shaped dome, or in the robust styles of

native chronicles—and local perceptions of such

cultural production could vary widely. Overall,

however, the Byzantine links were explicit, and

Byzantium remained the acknowledged source of

authoritative example and precedent.

A Byzantine churchman visiting Rus would

thus have found part of the surroundings famil-

iar; but still he would not have felt entirely at

home. Outside the explicitly ecclesiastical, the Rus

reception of Byzantine culture was more patchy.

For example, Byzantium itself maintained a tradi-

tion of classical Greek learning, but there is little or

no sign of any Rus interest in this before the late

seventeenth century. Byzantium possessed a large

corpus of written law. Church law (canon law)

was in principal accepted by Rus together with

Christianity, but in practice could be assimilated

only gradually and partially through accommoda-

tion to local custom, while Byzantine civil law (de-

rived from Roman law) seems to have made not

made an impact. The Rus did not, therefore, accept

Byzantine culture as a complete package. The bor-

rowing was partial, selective, and thus in a sense

non-Byzantine.

The continuing Rus reception of Byzantine cul-

ture in the later Middle Ages is somewhat para-

doxical: as the visual elements (e.g., styles of

painting and building) became progressively diluted

through local developments, so the non-visual el-

ements (e.g., ideas, ideology) were more assidu-

ously adopted into official culture. The Muscovite

State of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was

more Byzantine in its structures than any of the

earlier Rus principalities, in that it was a relatively

unitary empire headed by an autocrat supported

by a growing administrative bureaucracy. More-

over, since the fall of Constantinople to the Turks

in 1453, it was self-consciously the only surviv-

ing Orthodox empire and thus could be projected

as Byzantium’s successor. Emblems of this new

status were woven into the fabric of Muscovite self-

presentation: in the formal adoption of the title of

tsar for the ruler; in the establishment of a patri-

archate in place of the old metropolitanate; in the

construction of imperial genealogies linking the

Muscovite dynasty with Imperial Rome; in tales of

the transfer of imperial regalia from Byzantium to

ancient Kiev; and in the articulation of the notion

that Moscow was—in world-historical terms—the

“third Rome.”

Ostensibly the reforms of Peter the Great

brought about a decisive break. Peter’s new capital

was a radical statement of non-Byzantinism in the

physical environment, and Western Europe became

the new model for prestigious cultural production,

whether in architecture and painting or in writing,

printing, performing, and philosophizing. The

Church continued to produce icons and profess the

BYZANTIUM, INFLUENCE OF

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

ancient faith, but it no longer enjoyed its virtual

monopoly of the high-status media. However, does

this necessarily mean that the Byzantine compo-

nent of Russian culture disappeared? Perhaps, and

perhaps not. The question of the Byzantine legacy

in post-Petrine Russia is periodically controversial.

Some have regarded Russian Byzantinism as a fea-

ture only of the remote past, while others have seen

it as pervasive even after Peter (whether in true

Russian spirituality or, by contrast, in the long

continuation of autocratic, authoritarian theocratic

forms of government). Such, once more, are the

two poles of a debate that can have no objective

resolution, since the terms of reference are more

ideological than historical. Yet through such de-

bates Russia’s Byzantine heritage remains very

much alive, at least as an issue for discussion, af-

ter more than a thousand years.

See also: ARCHITECTURE; ORTHODOXY; PETER I

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Franklin, Simon. (2002). Byzantium-Rus-Russia: Studies

in the Translation of Christian Culture. Aldershot, UK:

Ashgate.

Meyendorff, John. (1981). Byzantium and the Rise of Rus-

sia: A Study of Byzantino-Russian Relations in the

Fourteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press.

Obolensky, Dimitri. (1971). The Byzantine Common-

wealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1500. London: Weiden-

feld and Nicolson.

Obolensky, Dimitri. (1994). Byzantium and the Slavs.

Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Thomson, Francis J. (1999). The Reception of Byzantine

Culture in Mediaeval Russia. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

IMON

RANKLIN

BYZANTIUM, INFLUENCE OF

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