Encyclopedia of Russian History

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artists, writers, and journalists responded to Gor-

bachev’s call for “openness” with works that ex-

posed the long–repressed underside of Soviet life:

the misery of the communal apartment, the daily

lives of homeless alcoholics, and the hypocrisy of

established authority figures. One of the most

prominent themes in the chernukha of the 1980s

was Soviet youth, particularly in film and on stage:

the new generation was repeatedly depicted as mer-

cantile, hedonistic, and bereft of any moral com-

pass. Yet even if these young people were presented

in a fashion calculated to provoke the audience’s

outrage, blame was almost always attributed to the

older generations: to the parents who failed to pro-

vide a model worth emulating, and to the system

itself, which reduced all human relations to a ques-

tion of survival and dominance.

Though chernukha was initially a breath of

fresh air after decades of sanitized news and enter-

tainment, by the post–Soviet era the majority of the

purveyors of “highbrow” culture began to reject it

in favor of postmodern playfulness or a return to

sentimentality. By contrast, variations on cher-

nukha are still a crucial part of Russian popular cul-

ture, from the daily news magazines devoted to

violent crime and horrible accidents, to the action

films and novels where sadistic violence and rape are

taken for granted. Though these forms of enter-

tainment are distant from the ideological struggles

that helped spawn the phenomenon in the 1980s,

they show that the aesthetic of chernukha is still

very much a part of the post–Soviet landscape.

See also: GLASNOST; MOTION PICTURES; PERESTROIKA;

TELEVISION AND RADIOS; THICK JOURNALS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Genis, Alexander. (1999). “Perestroika as a Shift in Lit-

erary Paradigm.” In Russian Postmodernism: New Per-

spectives on Post–Soviet Culture, eds. Mikhail Epstein,

Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka Vladiv–Glover.

New York: Berghan.

LIOT

ORENSTEIN

CHERNYSHEV, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH

(1786–1857), minister of war for Nicholas I,

1826–1852.

Alexander Ivanovich Chernyshev was born on

January 10, 1786, entered the Russian army at

the age of fifteen, and advanced rapidly through

the ranks, participating in all of Russia’s cam-

paigns against Napoleon. During the Tilsit Period

(1807–1812) Alexander I sent Chernyshev to

Napoleon to serve as a channel of communica-

tions. Napoleon took a liking to Chernyshev and

undertook to lecture him in the finer points of

war, information that Chernyshev duly brought

back to Alexander before the outbreak of hostili-

ties. In November 1812, Chernyshev became an

adjutant-general, and commanded various Cos-

sack detachments in the campaigns of 1812 to

1815. In 1819, Chernyshev became a member of

the committee Alexander established to reform the

organization and legal structures of the Don Cos-

sack host.

Nicholas I promoted Chernyshev to the rank of

general-of-cavalry and appointed him minister of

war in 1826. From that position, Chernyshev

played the leading role in devising and implement-

ing a major reform of the Russian military admin-

istration between 1831 and 1836. This reform

abolished the position of chief of the main staff and

unified control over the entire military administra-

tion in the person of the war minister. Chernyshev

also presided over the first successful codification

of Russian military law, completed in 1838 with

the assistance of Mikhail Mikhailovich Speransky.

In 1841, Chernyshev was created a prince.

The bases of the enormous mobilization that

supported Russia’s efforts in the Crimean War, as

well as the support of those troops, were largely

established by Chernyshev’s reforms. The funda-

mental military structure developed by those re-

forms, furthermore, especially the predominance of

the War Ministry as opposed to a General Staff, re-

mained the basic organization of the Russian Im-

perial Army down to the collapse of the empire,

and continues to serve as the basic structure of the

Russian Federation’s armed forces. Chernyshev died

on June 20, 1857.

See also: ALEXANDER I; COSSACKS; MILITARY REFORMS;

NICHOLAS I

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kagan, Frederick W. (1999). The Military Reforms of

Nicholas I: The Origins of the Modern Russian Army.

New York: St. Martin’s.

Menning, Bruce. (1988). “A.I. Chernyshev: A Russian Ly-

curgus.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 30(2):192–219.

REDERICK

W. K

AGAN

CHERNYSHEV, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH

243

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

CHERNYSHEVSKY, NIKOLAI

GAVRILOVICH

(1828–1889), Russian radical journalist, writer, lit-

erary critic, and thinker.

Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was the

son of an Orthodox priest. From 1842 to 1845 he

attended the theological seminary in Saratov, and

in 1850 he graduated from the Department of His-

tory and Philology of the University of St. Peters-

burg. Chernyshevsky was a polyglot; he knew

eight foreign languages. As a student Chernyshev-

sky impressed his professors with his distin-

guished knowledge in literature and linguistics,

and they predicted that he would have a bright

academic career.

After two years of teaching in Saratov from

1851 to 1853, Chernyshevsky returned to St. Pe-

tersburg. There Chernyshevsky began to write for

the popular journals Otechestvennye Zapiski (Annals

of the Fatherland) and Sovremennik (Contemporary).

In 1859 he became editor in chief of Sovremennik.

There he published his Ocherki gogolevskogo perioda

russkoi literatury (Essays on the Gogolian Period in

Russian Literature), “his first and most important

contribution to literary criticism” according to Eu-

gene Lampert (1965, p. 110). Soon Chernyshevsky

became very popular among radical youth and was

called a “prophet of the young generation” (Irina

Paperno, 1988).

However, Chernyshevsky was not satisfied

with only doing journalist work; he attempted to

continue his academic career and prepared his dis-

sertation, “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Real-

ity” (1855). This dissertation presented a doctrine

about the superiority of reality over art. He believed

that nothing could be more beautiful than that

which exists in reality; as he wrote, “Beauty is life.”

According to Chernyshevsky, art should be a “text-

book of life.” He rejected “art for art’s sake.” How-

ever, the Academic Board of the University of St.

Petersburg did not share Chernyshevsky’s views on

art and did not approve his dissertation. According

to T. Pecherskaya, Chernyshevsky said that his dis-

sertation was his interpretation of the ideas of the

philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, but the conserva-

tive Academic Board could not understand him.

After his unsuccessful attempt to pursue an

academic career, Chernyshevsky continued his

journalistic work and published many essays on

art, literature, philosophy, and radical socialist

thought. He was a materialist and followed the

ideas of German philosophers of the early and mid-

nineteenth century. Chernyshevsky propounded

radical ideas in his essays and criticized the eman-

cipation of serfs by the government from the rad-

ical point of view. He believed that the liberation of

the serfs without land was inadequate and mock-

ingly cruel to the peasants. Francis B. Randall (N.

G. Chernyshevskii, 1967, preface) wrote that

Chernyshevsky called himself a “socialist” but took

his doctrine “not from Marx but from the French

radicals of the decades before the revolution of

1848.” Chernyshevsky believed in the peasant com-

mune as the germ of the future socialist society

and called for a peasant revolution in his publica-

tions. Fearing Chernyshevsky’s growing influence,

the government closed Contemporary in 1861 and

put its editor under secret police surveillance. In

July 1862 Chernyshevsky was arrested and im-

prisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Pe-

tersburg. During his two years of imprisonment

from 1862 to 1864, when Chernyshevsky waited

for his sentence, he wrote his most famous novel

What Is to Be Done? and several other works of fic-

tion. In the novel What Is to Be Done? Cherny-

shevsky described the life of a new type of people,

who lived by their own labor and led a new kind

of family life, where the enlightened woman was

a man’s lifelong companion. The novel popularized

the ideas of women’s equality and “cooperative so-

cialism”; it depicted the future society as a society

of equality and happiness for all. This novel was a

synthesis of Chernyshevsky’s sociopolitical, philo-

sophical, and ethical views. The novel became very

popular among the radical youth. Aside from the

ideas it contained, this work was not a great liter-

ary achievement. Lampert (op. cit., p. 224) states

that Chernyshevsky “wrote his novel on a fairly

low imaginative plane.” All his heroes speak with

the same voice, men and women alike. Cherny-

shevsky himself did not have any delusions about

his literary talent. He wrote his wife from Siberia:

“I have not a trace of artistic talent . . . and all [the

novel’s] merit consists merely in its truthfulness”

(Lampert, op. cit., p. 223).

In spite of the lack of direct evidence of Cherny-

shevsky’s participation as a member in the revolu-

tionary organizations, he was condemned to

fourteen (later reduced to seven) years of forced la-

bor, followed by lifelong exile in Siberia. According

to Lampert, “the government had come to realize

the extent of Chernyshevsky’s influence on the

younger generation; it knew what his views were,

and it had taken fright.” The government consid-

CHERNYSHEVSKY, NIKOLAI GAVRILOVICH

244

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

ered Chernyshevsky’s ideas a danger to the exist-

ing order.

On May 19, 1864, the ceremony of “civil exe-

cution” was performed on Chernyshevsky in the

center of St. Petersburg in Mytninskaya Square.

“After sentence has been read out he was forced to

kneel, a sword was broken over his head and he

was then set in a pillory by a chain,” wrote Alexei

Suvorin (Lampert, op. cit., p. 130). However, in-

stead the reaction of condemnation anticipated by

the authorities, the big crowd stood silent. Then

somebody from the crowd threw a bunch of flow-

ers at Chernyshevsky’s feet.

Chernyshevsky spent more than twenty-five

years in prison, forced labor, and exile. During this

time he continued to write fiction, essays, and

philosophical works (the most famous of his philo-

sophical works was The Nature of Human Knowl-

edge). The last years of his life he devoted to the

translation of Georg Weber’s Universal History.

Chernyshevsky refused to ask the authorities for

“imperial mercy” even when they encouraged him

to do so. Chernyshevsky believed that he was in-

nocent and thus did not need be forgiven by the

government. Chernyshevsky’s fortitude brought

him respect even from among his opponents. The

respect for Chernyshevsky and deep sympathy for

his misfortune was expressed by the Russian writer

Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Chernyshevsky received permission from the

authorities to return to his native city of Saratov

only four months before his death. Government

persecution fueled the image of Chernyshevsky as

a “revolutionary saint.” His works were denied pub-

lication in Russia until the first Russian revolution

in 1905. However, the novels and essays of Cherny-

shevsky were spread around the country illegally,

often in handwritten copies. His novel What Is to Be

Done? became a table book of several generations of

Russian radical youth. This novel was considered a

classic of Russian literature in Soviet times. After

the collapse of the socialist system, people lost in-

terest in the pro-socialist ideas and works of

Chernyshevsky. He died on October 29, 1989.

See also: DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; JOUR-

NALISM; SOCIALISM; WHAT IS TO BE DONE

BIBLOGRAPHY

Lampert, E. (1965). Sons against Fathers. Studies in Rus-

sian Radicalism and Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon.

Paperno, Irina. (1988). Chernyshevsky and the Age of Re-

alism: A Study of the Semiotic of Behavior. Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press.

Randall, Francis B. (1967). N. G. Chernyshevskii. New

York: Twayne.

Tompkins, Stuart Ramsay. (1957). The Russian Intelli-

gentsia: Makers of the Revolutionary State. Norman:

University of Oklahoma Press.

ICTORIA

HITERER

CHERVONETS

A gold-backed currency introduced by the Soviet

government in 1922 as part of the New Economic

Policy (NEP).

The Soviet Union did not possess a stable cur-

rency at the end of the civil war, and the govern-

ment realized that it could not achieve its ambitious

economic development plans without first solving

this pressing monetary problem. Accordingly, a

Sovnarkom decree of October 11, 1922, authorized

the Soviet state bank to issue the chervonets bank

note as the equivalent of the prerevolutionary ten-

ruble gold coin (7.74232 grams of pure gold). This

legislation required at least 25 percent of chervontsy

(plural) to be backed by precious metals and hard

currency. The first paper chervontsy appeared in

December 1922, and in 1923 the state bank (Gos-

bank) also began issuing gold chervonets coins (pri-

marily for use in foreign trade). The chervonets

circulated alongside the rapidly depreciating sovz-

nak (“Soviet note”) ruble until February 1924,

when the state bank began to withdraw the sovz-

nak ruble from circulation and established the cher-

vonets as the country’s sole legal tender, equal to

ten “new” rubles. Through the 1920s, the cher-

vonets was officially quoted on foreign exchanges.

However, this attempt to maintain a “hard” Soviet

currency was controversial almost from its incep-

tion and quickly ended along with the NEP itself.

On June 9, 1926, the government passed a resolu-

tion forbidding the export of Soviet currency

abroad, and in February 1930 Soviet currency was

withdrawn from foreign exchanges, and private ex-

changes of foreign currency for chervontsy were

banned.

See also: NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; RUBLE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Goland, Yurii. (1994). “Currency Regulation in the NEP

Period.” Europe-Asia Studies 46(8).

CHERVONETS

245

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Gregory, Paul R. (1994). Before Command: An Economic

History of Russia from Emancipation to the First Five-

Year Plan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

ULIET

OHNSON

CHESME, BATTLE OF

The battle of Chesme (“fountain” in Turkish) was

fought on the night of July 5–6, 1770 between a

Russian squadron under the command of Count

Aleksei Grigoryievich Orlov and an Ottoman fleet

under Hassan Bey at Chesme bay on the western

Anatolian Mediterranean coast. Orlov had nine

ships of the line, three frigates, a bomb ship, and

a number of smaller vessels under his command.

Ottoman forces numbered sixteen line ships, six

frigates, six xebecs, thirteen galleys, and thirty-two

galliots. Orlov’s plan was to send in vessels to at-

tack the tightly clustered Ottoman squadron at an-

chor in the bay. On the evening of June 26, Orlov

sent a detachment of four line ships, two frigates,

a bomb ship, and four fire ships under the com-

mand of Captain S.K. Greig into the anchorage. A

fire ship under the command of Lieutenant Il’in

soon set an Ottoman 84-gun line ship alight, and

the fire soon spread to other vessels. In total num-

bers the destruction was the greatest naval victory

in the days of sail; the Ottomans lost fifteen line

ships, six frigates and about fifty smaller vessels.

About ten thousand Ottoman sailors died in the

battle, and the Russians captured a number of Ot-

toman ships, including five galleys and the frigate

Rodos-60. Empress Catherine the Great awarded

Orlov the title of “Count Chesmensky” for his par-

ticipation in the victory. The strategic result for

Russia was command of the sea in the Aegean dur-

ing the remainder of its war with the Ottoman Em-

pire. When a peace treaty was signed at Küçük

Kaynarca in 1774, the Ottoman Empire recognized

Russian claims to represent Christian interests in

the empire.

See also: CATHERINE II; ORLOV, GRIGORY GRIGORIEVICH;

RUSSO-TURKISH WARS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Daly, Robert Welter. (1958). “Russia’s Maritime Past,”

In The Soviet Navy, ed. Malcolm George Saunders.

London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

OHN

C. K. D

ALY

CHICHERIN, GEORGY VASILIEVICH

(1872–1936), revolutionary and diplomat.

Georgy Chicherin was born on November 12,

1872, in Karaul, Tambov Province, into an aristo-

cratic family of declining fortunes. He studied in the

history and philology faculty at St. Petersburg Uni-

versity. After graduation, he worked in the archives

department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Af-

fairs. Disillusioned with the Romanov regime, Chi-

cherin fled to Western Europe in 1904, spending the

next fourteen years immersed in socialist émigré pol-

itics. He belonged to the Menshevik wing of Russian

socialism, but his strong opposition to World War I

aligned him with Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik

faction.

Returning to Russia in January 1918, Chicherin

joined the Bolshevik Party and soon was appointed

commissar of Foreign Affairs. He was uniquely

qualified for the post, possessing a thorough

knowledge of diplomatic history, experience in the

tsarist Foreign Ministry, command of several for-

eign languages, familiarity with European condi-

tions, and considerable negotiating experience from

his days in the fractious émigré community. Block-

daded by the Allies during the period of Civil War

and foreign intervention in Russia, Chicherin used

radio and the press to create a novel diplomacy of

propaganda. Bolshevik appeals to the governments

and peoples of the West for fair treatment of So-

viet Russia were mixed with revolutionary calls to

overthrow those same imperialist regimes.

The failure of the Bolshevik Revolution to spread

abroad convinced Chicherin that a new period of cap-

italist stabilization had begun. He led the diplomatic

component of the USSR’s New Economic Policy

(NEP), seeking peaceful relationships with the great

powers as well as foreign trade, technology, loans,

and investment. Chicherin coined the term “peace-

ful coexistence” to characterize this new era of tem-

porary accommodation with the capitalist world.

Chicherin’s major diplomatic successes were the

1921 Anglo-Soviet Trade Treaty and, with Germany,

the 1922 Rapallo Treaty and 1925 Berlin Treaty. He

saw strong political, economic, and even military ties

with Germany as the key to preventing a European-

wide anti-Soviet alliance of capitalist powers. He also

fought tirelessly against the League of Nations be-

cause he saw it as the framework for an anti-Soviet

coalition. In the 1920s the USSR received full diplo-

matic recognition from all the great powers, except

CHESME, BATTLE OF

246

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

the United States. These successes were offset by

a number of failures. The USSR was unable to se-

cure sufficient financial and technological assistance

from the West. Britain and France continued to man-

ifest undisguised hostility toward Moscow, causing

Kremlin leaders to fear renewed armed intervention

against Soviet Russia. Germany moved closer to the

Anglo-French camp by signing the Locarno Accords

in 1925 and joining the League of Nations.

Chicherin saw opportunities in the national-

liberation movements in Asia. Support for anti-

colonial struggles, he hoped, would sap the strength

of the imperialist powers.

Chicherin was never a significant figure in

Kremlin politics, though he was elected to the

Party’s Central Committee in 1925. He played a

significant role in foreign policy formulation be-

cause Lenin greatly valued his knowledge, experi-

ence, and abilities. After Lenin’s incapacitating

stroke in 1922, Chicherin began to lose influence,

and was eclipsed gradually by his deputy, Maxim

Litvinov. A combination of Chicherin’s estrange-

ment from the Stalinist elite and his increasingly

poor health virtually eliminated his role in foreign

affairs after 1928. He was replaced by Litvinov as

foreign commissar in 1930 and lived on a pension

until his death, of natural causes, in 1936.

See also: CENTRAL COMMITTEE; LEAGUE OF NATIONS;

LITVINOV, MAXIM MAXIMOVICH; RAPALLO, TREATY OF

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jacobson, Jon. (1994). When the Soviet Union Entered World

Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

O’Connor, Timothy E. (1988). Diplomacy and Revolution:

G.V. Chicherin and Soviet Foreign Affairs, 1918–1930.

Ames: Iowa State University Press.

EDDY

J. U

LDRICKS

CHINA, RELATIONS WITH

From the mid-nineteenth century to the present,

one of the core problems in Russian foreign policy

has been how to manage relations with China. A

vast Eurasian land power, Russia adjoins China, its

giant neighbor to the south, along the sparsely

populated territories of eastern Siberia and the Mar-

itime Province. Further to the west, the buffer states

of Mongolia and Kazakhstan lie between Russia and

China. For most of the past century and a half,

Russia enjoyed a significant power advantage vis-

à-vis China in military and economic terms. The

world recognized Russia as one of the great pow-

ers. Meanwhile, China, weakened by domestic tur-

moil and foreign imperialism, experienced the

successive traumas of dynastic collapse, civil wars,

revolution, and radical communism. More re-

cently, following the dissolution of the Soviet

Union in 1991, the balance of power between the

two countries has shifted in favor of China. In the

short term, a diminished post-Communist Russia,

shorn of its Central Asian territories as well as its

western borderlands, has worked out an amicable

relationship with China. In the longer term, how-

ever, Russian policymakers, like their tsarist and

Soviet predecessors, will continue to confront the

question of whether an increasingly powerful

China is friend, foe, or changeling.

FROM THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

TO 1917

Russian-Chinese relations date from the seven-

teenth century. Russia’s eastward expansion at the

time was driven by a spirit of adventure, the quest

for profits in the fur trade, and the dream of state

aggrandizement. Unruly bands of freebooting Cos-

sacks led by Russian adventurers such as Yerofei

Khabarov established initial contacts along the

Amur River with tribal dependents of China’s rul-

ing Qing dynasty. Conflicts that flared up within

an as-yet-undefined frontier area came to the at-

tention of Chinese officials, who viewed the Rus-

sians as the latest in a long series of armed

aggressors from Central Asia. Meanwhile, early

Russian diplomatic missions to Beijing, intended to

promote commerce and to gauge the strength of

the Chinese Empire, ran afoul of China’s elaborate

court ritual that the Russians neither understood

nor respected. The Russian exaction of tribute from

tribal peoples whom the Qing considered their de-

pendents, and the encroachment of armed Russian

settlements along the Amur, led to military clashes

between Russian and Chinese forces in the 1680s.

In 1689, the Treaty of Nerchinsk, the first modern

international treaty between China and a European

country, began to define a boundary between the

two empires and established rules for regulating

commercial intercourse. The Treaty of Kiakhta in

1728 readjusted the commercial relationship, fur-

ther defined the border, and granted Russia per-

mission to build an Orthodox church in Beijing,

which became the nucleus of Russian sinology.

Thereafter, relations stabilized for the next century

on the basis of equality, reciprocity, limited com-

merce, and peace along the border.

CHINA, RELATIONS WITH

247

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

In the mid-nineteenth century, Russia seized the

opportunity afforded by the decline of the Qing dy-

nasty to expand its eastern territories at China’s ex-

pense. Its ultimate objective was to bolster its status

as a European great power by playing an imperial

role in East Asia. Nikolai Muraviev, the governor-

general of Eastern Siberia, was the most prominent

of the new generation of empire builders who were

determined to make Russia a Pacific power. Com-

bining the threat of force with skillful diplomacy

and blandishments, Muraviev and his peers im-

posed upon China the Treaties of Aigun (1858),

Peking (1860), and Tarbagatai (1864), which added

665,000 square miles (1,722,342 square kilome-

ters) to the Russian Empire in Central Asia, eastern

Siberia, and the Maritime Province. In 1896 Rus-

sian officials bribed and bullied China to grant per-

mission to build the Chinese Eastern Railway across

Manchuria (Northeast China), to connect the Trans-

Siberian Railway with Vladivostok, Russia’s major

port on the Pacific Ocean. Russian occupation of

Manchuria in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion, an

antiforeign Chinese nativist movement, and grow-

ing tension with imperial rival Japan over Man-

churia and Korea, led to the Russo-Japanese War

and Russia’s humiliating defeat. With the Rising

Sun ascendant, Russian influence in China was re-

stricted to northern Manchuria and the Central

Asian borderlands.

SOVIET-CHINESE RELATIONS,

1917–1991

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had a profound

and lasting impact upon Russian-Chinese relations.

In the aftermath of the collapse of the Qing dy-

nasty in 1912, China dissolved into civil war and

chaos. A small but determined band of revolution-

ary Chinese intellectuals, disillusioned with West-

ern liberal democracy, discovered in Russian

Bolshevism a template for political action. Desiring

to revive China and promote revolutionary social

transformation, they responded to Bolshevik ap-

peals by organizing the Chinese Communist Party

(CCP) in 1921 and joining the Communist Inter-

national (Comintern), which ordered the fledgling

CCP into alliance with the Chinese Nationalists led

by Sun Yat-sen. Moscow dispatched veteran revo-

lutionary Mikhail Borodin and hundreds of mili-

tary and political advisers to China in the early

1920s to guide the Chinese revolutionary move-

ment to victory. The Comintern dictated strategy

and tactics to the CCP. In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek,

Sun Yat-sen’s successor, severed his alliance with

the CCP, slaughtered tens of thousands of com-

munists, and expelled all the Soviet advisers. The

revolutionary project lay in ruins.

Meanwhile, playing a complicated game, Bol-

shevik Russia and, after 1924, the Soviet Union,

successfully maneuvered to retain the imperial

gains tsarist Russia had wrested from China in the

preceding century. In other words, the Soviet Union

simultaneously pursued both statist and revolu-

tionary goals vis-à-vis China. Under its new leader,

Mao Zedong, the CCP continued to look toward

Moscow for ideological and political guidance while

pursuing its own path to power.

On July 7, 1937, Japan’s creeping aggression

against China escalated into a full-scale war. To de-

flect the threat of Japanese attack against Siberia

and the Maritime Province, the USSR provided Chi-

ang Kai-shek substantial military and financial aid

in his lonely war of resistance against Japan. So-

viet military advisers were attached to Chiang’s

armies, and Soviet pilots defended Chinese cities

against Japanese attack. In 1941, however, Moscow

signed a neutrality treaty with Tokyo, and Soviet

aid to China dried up.

The renewed civil war in China (1946–1949)

that followed hard upon victory in World War II

culminated in the victory of the Chinese Commu-

nist Party and the establishment of the People’s Re-

public of China on October 1, 1949. Although

suspicious of Mao Zedong, the Soviet dictator Josef

Stalin quickly extended diplomatic recognition to

the new communist government and, after inten-

sive negotiations, signed a thirty-year Treaty of

Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance on Feb-

ruary 14, 1950, with the PRC. Mao Zedong pro-

claimed that the Soviet Union provided a model of

socialism for China to emulate. Thousands of So-

viet civilian and military experts flooded into China

while tens of thousands of Chinese students stud-

ied in the USSR and the East European satellite

states.

Within a few years, however, a combination

of Soviet high-handedness, Chinese suspicion, and

differences over international political strategy

eroded the bonds of Sino-Soviet friendship. Beijing

challenged Moscow’s leadership of international

communism, claimed huge chunks of Russian ter-

ritory, and condemned the USSR as a “social im-

perialist” state. In 1969, fighting broke out along

the contested eastern and central Asian borders, and

a large-scale war loomed but did not materialize.

The Sino-Soviet Cold War gradually dissipated in

the 1980s as new leaders came to power in Moscow

CHINA, RELATIONS WITH

248

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

and Beijing. During Soviet leader Mikhail Gor-

bachev’s summit in Beijing in May 1989, the two

countries proclaimed a new era of amity.

AFTER THE FALL

Post-communist Russia suffered a sharp decline in

economic and political power just as China was en-

joying its greatest period of economic growth that

translated into military power and international in-

fluence. Yet the two countries soon found common

cause in their opposition to the exercise of unilat-

eral American global power. Russian President Boris

Yeltsin and his Chinese counterpart Jiang Zemin in

1996 proclaimed a new Russian-Chinese strategic

partnership that was largely rhetorical. By that

time the border issue between the two countries

had been basically settled, and stability restored to

the relationship. However, Russians in eastern

Siberia and the Maritime Province objected to an in-

flux of Chinese illegal migrants and traders whose

presence, they said, constituted a growing threat

to Russia’s hold over territories acquired only in

the mid-nineteenth century. Levels of Russian-

Chinese trade remained quite modest, although

Russia became a main supplier of advanced mili-

tary technology to the newly affluent Chinese who

could now afford to pay. Within Russia debate con-

tinued over the question of whether China could

be trusted as a friendly neighbor or whether grow-

ing Chinese power would eventually turn north

and seek to reassert dormant historical claims

against a weakened Russian state.

In cultural terms, Russian influence upon China

peaked in the early to mid-twentieth century, but

receded thereafter, leaving very little residue ex-

cept among the older generation of Chinese who

CHINA, RELATIONS WITH

249

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Mao Zedong escorts Nikita Khrushchev to the airport, following celebrations marking the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic

remember the brief era of Sino-Soviet friendship in

the 1950s. Chinese influence upon Russian culture

is also considerably less than it is in other West-

ern countries, particularly the United States. Racist

and condescending attitudes are present on both

sides of the relationship along with genuine admi-

ration and understanding of each society’s cultural

achievements on the part of educated Russian and

Chinese elites.

See also: ALGUN TREATY OF; CENTRAL ASIA; COLD WAR;

COLONIAL EXPANSION; COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL;

FAR EASTERN REGION; JAPAN, RELATIONS WITH;

KARAKHAN DECLARATION; NERCHINSK, TREATY OF;

SIBERIA; PEKING, TREATY OF

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clubb, O. Edmund. (1971). China and Russia: The “Great

Game.” New York: Columbia University Press.

Mancall, Mark. (1971). Russia and China: Their Diplo-

matic Relations to 1728. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press).

Paine, S. C. M. (1997). Imperial Rivals: Russia, China, and

Their Disputed Frontier. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Quested, Rosemary. (1984). Sino-Russian Relations: A

Short History. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin.

Tien-fong Cheng. 1957. A History of Sino-Russian Rela-

tions. Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press.

TEVEN

I. L

EVINE

CHIRIKOV, ALEXZEI ILICH

(1703–1748), naval officer and explorer.

An instructor at St. Petersburg’s Naval Acad-

emy, Alexei Ilich Chirikov was selected in 1725 to

be one of two assistants to Vitus Bering, recently

appointed by Peter the Great to travel to Kamchatka

and, from there, determine whether Asia and Amer-

ica were united.

Bering’s first Kamchatka expedition (1728–1730)

was criticized for not having proven conclusively

that Asia and America were not physically linked.

Indeed, Chirikov had disagreed with Bering on the

question of when the expedition should turn back,

arguing that further exploration was needed. In re-

sponse, Bering proposed an ambitious series of voy-

ages and surveys that, together, became the Great

Northern Expedition. Bering undertook a second

survey of Russia’s northeasternmost waters. His

second-in-command was Chirikov.

In the summer of 1740, Bering’s ships, the St.

Peter and St. Paul—captained by Bering and

Chirikov, respectively—set sail for Petropavlovsk in

Kamchatka. From there, the ships departed in June

1741. Shortly after, the ships separated and never

reestablished contact. The crew of the St. Peter

sighted Alaska in July, then wintered on the isle

now called Bering Island. Bering himself perished;

the survivors returned to Petropavlovsk in the fall

of 1742.

In July 1741, Chirikov and the crew of the St.

Paul discovered Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago.

Short of food and fresh water, the St. Paul returned

to Kamchatka in October 1741, having lost eight

sailors. The following May, Chirikov sailed east

again, searching for Bering and his crew. Unfor-

tunately, the St. Paul sailed past Bering Island. In

June, after exploring the Aleutians, Chirikov turned

back once more. In August 1742, Chirikov sailed

into Petropavlovsk—only a few days before the

survivors of the St. Peter voyage returned.

For his participation in the Great Northern Ex-

pedition, Chirikov was promoted to the rank of

captain-commander in 1745. In 1746 he helped to

compile new Pacific maps, based on data the Expe-

dition had gathered.