Encyclopedia of Russian History

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form. Peter used those regiments to seize power

from Sophia Alexeyevna, then ruling as regent, and

establish himself in sole rule. Unlike the streltsy

musketeer units that had been the elite element in

the Russian army to that point, the guards were

trained and equipped in the style of Western Euro-

pean armies, and drilled by Western officers.

Their original complements were entirely no-

ble, including the enlisted ranks, and the guards

regiments served as the principal training ground

for officers for the line units. The guards, especially

the Preobrazhensky regiment, often provided es-

corts for the tsar, even accompanying him on his

tour of Europe. They also fought in his wars, play-

ing an important role at the Battle of Narva in 1700

and throughout the Northern War. The guards

served a political function under Peter as well, par-

ticipating in the arrests of nobles and other gov-

ernmental activities.

With Peter’s death, the guards regiments in-

creased in political significance. A demonstration by

both regiments played a role in bringing Peter’s

wife, Catherine I, to power peacefully. They also

brought Anna and Elizabeth to power through

forceful coup d’état, and participated in Catherine

II’s seizure of the throne and murder of her hus-

band, Peter III. Although they continued to partic-

ipate in the smaller wars of the eighteenth century

against Poland, Sweden, and Turkey, they did not

play an important role in the Seven Years’ War.

Their numbers were nevertheless expanded, includ-

ing the formation of the Izmailovsky Regiment by

Anna and the Cavalier-Guard Cavalry Regiment, as

well as the Guard Horse Regiment, among others.

The political significance of the guards regi-

ments fell between Catherine the Great’s reign and

the end of the Napoleonic wars, while the guards’

combat role increased. They accompanied Alexan-

der I to battle in the war of 1805 and played an

important role on the Austerlitz battlefield. They

also participated in the 1812 campaign, including

a prominent role in the Battle of Borodino, and they

fought throughout the following two years of con-

flict against France. The Napoleonic Wars saw a

significant reorganization of the guards similar to

that which occurred throughout the Russian army

at that time. In 1806 a guards division was formed

of the three guards infantry regiments. In 1811 an

Independent Guards Corps was formed, which per-

sisted in various forms until the end of the empire.

The years after Napoleon’s defeat saw a resur-

gence in the guards’ political importance. In 1820

the Semenovsky Guards Regiment mutinied, and

the rebellion had to be suppressed by other, loyal,

troops. And in 1825, during the interregnum fol-

lowing the death of Alexander I, guards troops par-

ticipated in the abortive Decembrist Rebellion,

likewise suppressed by troops loyal to Nicholas I,

the new tsar. Although the individuals who par-

ticipated in the rebellions were punished, the guards

as a whole were not. Indeed, the number of guards

units mushroomed through the nineteenth cen-

tury, so that in 1914 there were seventeen infantry

and fourteen cavalry regiments with four artillery

brigades, in addition to smaller detachments. The

guards also spread into the navy in the form of in-

dividual units and ships.

Guards units participated in the Russo-Turkish

Wars of 1828–1829 and 1877–1878, and individ-

ual guards officers participated as volunteers in the

Russo-Japanese War. The guards units were used

to help put down the Revolution of 1905. The

guards regiments then played a prominent role in

all of the major campaigns of World War I. Their

ranks were decimated by the casualties they in-

curred, however, and by 1917 most guards units

were filled with simple conscripts. Their political

reliability, therefore, was no greater than that of

any other army units. As a result, guards regi-

ments garrisoned in Petrograd participated in the

February Revolution against the government and

helped bring down the tsarist regime. Guards units

also helped the Bolsheviks to power in October.

Throughout the imperial period, members of

the guards units received a number of significant

privileges. In particular, guards officers were

granted an additional one or two steps on the Table

of Ranks, depending upon which units they be-

longed to (this benefit was reduced by one step to-

ward the end of the nineteenth century). The tsars

and tsaritsas and their favorites frequently served

as the colonels of the guards regiments, and ap-

pointments in those regiments were keenly sought

as a step toward political, social, and, of course,

military advancement. On the whole, guards regi-

ments did not perform better in combat than most

good, well-trained regiments of the regular army.

With the advent of communist rule the guards

regiments were disbanded. In 1941, however,

Josef Stalin reestablished the concept of “guards”

in a new form. Following the Battle of Smolensk,

five rifle divisions were redesignated the First

through the Fifth Guards Infantry Divisions for

extraordinary valor as units in combat. Thereafter

other units, including divisions, corps, and armies,

GUARDS, REGIMENTS OF

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

received the designation “guards” as a reward for

valor in battle.

See also: MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; PETER I

REDERICK

W. K

AGAN

GUBA ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM

The guba system made communities partially re-

sponsible for their own policing and entrusted the

investigation and partial adjudication of felony

cases to local elected officials.

In the early sixteenth century the local admin-

istration of criminal justice was in the hands of

vicegerents (namestniki) appointed by the grand

prince and remunerated with the right to collect

their own feeding maintenance (kormlenie). An in-

creasing number of community complaints that

the vicegerents were corrupt or unable to deal de-

cisively with banditry led the government of Grand

Prince Ivan IV to begin issuing in 1538 and 1539

ordinance charters permitting petitioning commu-

nities to remove criminal justice affairs from their

vicegerents’ jurisdiction and entrust them to crim-

inal justice chiefs (gubnye golovy) elected from the

local middle service class and criminal justice elders

(gubnye starosty) elected from the more prosperous

local peasants and taxpaying townsmen. A guba

was the territorial jurisdiction of an elected crimi-

nal justice chief or elder, be it an urban posad com-

mune or a rural canton. The elected guba executives

and their deputies (tselovalniki) were made respon-

sible for hunting down and arresting bandits and

other felons, investigating and trying felony cases,

and carrying out the sentences upon them.

This guba reform appears to have been moti-

vated less by the need to respond to sharpening

class conflict than by Moscow’s interest in achiev-

ing greater specialization in and central control over

provincial criminal justice matters than had been

possible with the vicegerents. The degree of gen-

uine administrative autonomy it conceded to the

recipient communities was limited in that the com-

munities, once given the privilege of electing guba

officials, were under collective responsibility for

their performance, and their guba officials were re-

quired to submit reports and accounts to a super-

vising commission of boyars at Moscow. By 1555

this supervising commission had evolved into the

Robbery Chancellery (Razboyny prikaz). It is unclear

whether guba officials themselves ever had the au-

thority to pronounce death sentences upon felons,

or whether the right of verdict in capital cases had

to be reserved for the Robbery Chancellery. Some

see in the 1550 Sudebnik law code Moscow’s in-

tent of universalizing the guba system, but there

is no evidence this was accomplished.

The development of norms for guba policing,

investigations, and hearings is reflected in a series

of sources: the first guba community charters of

the 1530s through the 1550 Sudebnik code; the

1555 Ordinance Book of the Robbery Chancellery;

the revisions of this Ordinance book produced be-

tween 1617 and 1631; Chapter Twenty-One of the

1649 Ulozhenie law code; and the 1669 New De-

cree Statutes on Theft, Robbery, and Murder Cases.

Some elements of traditional diadic justice remained

to the end: for example, continued partial reliance

on community hue and cry to apprehend crimi-

nals, and some continued reliance on community

polling (povalny obysk) to establish guilt on the ba-

sis of reputation in the community’s eyes. But in

these successive ordinances, the shift to a more tri-

adic criminal justice system became more appar-

ent, especially from 1617 on, as seen in increasing

emphasis placed on proactive struggle against brig-

andage and greater use of torture to produce con-

fessions and name accomplices. In the 1669 New

Decree Statutes, the guba organs are instructed in

how to cooperate with special inquistors sent from

Moscow to conduct mass dragnets. The tendency

after the Time of Troubles was also to subordinate

most guba offices to the offices of the chancellery-

appointed town governors (voyevodas). In 1679 the

guba offices were abolished and the town gover-

nors given full authority over felony cases. The

purpose was apparently to simplify the financing

of local government and reduce the number of elec-

tive offices in which men might take refuge from

military duty. But it had the effect of increasing

the workload of the town governors and provid-

ing more opportunities to corrupt them, so the

guba system was restored in 1684.

See also: COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY; IVAN IV; LAW CODE

OF 1649; SUDEBNIK OF 1550; TIME OF TROUBLES

RIAN

AVIES

GUBERNIYA

The highest unit of administrative-territorial divi-

sion in prerevolutionary Russia.

GUBA ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

In 1708 Peter I decreed the organization of Rus-

sian territory into eight large administrative regions

(Petersburg, Moscow, Arkhangelsk, Smolensk, Kiev,

Kazan, Azov, and Siberia), each under the jurisdic-

tion of a centrally appointed governor. Between

1713 and 1719, each government was subdivided

into provintsii (provinces) and uezdy (districts). By

the time of Catherine II’s accession in 1762, Rus-

sian territory had been reorganized into twenty

governments. During the first decade of her reign,

Catherine resolved to rationalize the territorial divi-

sion and administration of imperial territory. Her

“Constitution for the Administration of Govern-

ments” of 1775 established forty guberny, each with

a male population of between 300,000–400,000 (by

the end of her reign the number of governments

had increased to fifty-one). Each government was

subdivided into several okrugy or uezdy of between

twenty and thirty thousand male inhabitants. This

system was retained in European Russia through-

out the nineteenth century, but the new territories

of the imperial periphery were organized into

general-governorships and, later, oblast (regions).

The 1864 zemstvo reform established assemblies in

many provinces, elected on a narrow, indirect fran-

chise, which were responsible for nominating an

executive board with responsibility for regional eco-

nomic administration. Judicial and policing matters

remained the responsibility of the governor, who

also ratified the appointment of the president of the

executive board. After the February Revolution of

1917, the Provisional Government replaced gover-

nors with commissars and after the Bolshevik Rev-

olution authority passed to the executive committee

of the regional soviet. Between 1924 and 1929 the

new regime dissolved governments and replaced

them with oblast and kraya.

See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; LO-

CAL GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION; UEZD;

ZEMSTVO

ICK

ARON

GUILDS

Organizations of merchants in groups called a

“hundred” (sto or sotnya) existed in medieval Nov-

gorod and in Muscovy. The first organization of

merchants in guilds (gildy; singular gildia) occurred

in December 1724, when Peter I divided the urban

population into a first guild, composed of wealthy

merchants, doctors, pharmacists, ship captains,

painters, and the like; a second guild, comprising

retail traders and artisans; and all others, called the

“common people.”

Although the word guild was borrowed from

medieval European practice, guilds in Russia had

purely administrative functions: to categorize mer-

chants according to the extent of their economic

activities and to collect fees from them. Merchants

also bore heavy responsibilities of unpaid state ser-

vice, such as tax collection and service on munici-

pal boards, law courts, and other local institutions.

A decree issued on January 19, 1742, specified

three merchant guilds. In a decree of March 17,

1775, Catherine II freed merchants from the soul

tax and set 500 rubles of declared capital as the

minimum requirement for enrollment in the mer-

chant estate, subject to the payment of 1 percent

of declared capital each year. A law issued on May

25, 1775, set specific minimum amounts: 10,000

rubles for the first guild, 1,000 rubles for the sec-

ond, and 500 rubles for the third. In her Charter

to the Cities, promulgated on April 21, 1785,

Catherine II increased the minimum capital re-

quirements to 5,000 rubles for the second guild and

1,000 rubles for the third. By abolishing the mer-

chants’ former monopoly on trade and industry,

Catherine allowed the gentry and serfs to engage

in ruinous competition with the merchants, free of

the annual guild payment. Many enterprising mer-

chants fled this precarious situation by rising into

the gentry. The merchant estate therefore remained

small and weak.

In 1839 a first-guild certificate, costing 600

rubles, entitled a merchant with at least 15,000

rubles in assets to own ships and factories, to

offer banking services, and to trade in Russia and

abroad. Second-guild certificates, sold for 264

rubles, entitled merchants whose stated wealth sur-

passed 6,000 rubles to manage factories and en-

gage in wholesale or retail trade in Russia. Members

of the third guild were permitted to conduct retail

trade in the city or district where they resided, pro-

vided they owned assets worth 2,400–6,000 rubles

and purchased certificates costing 1.25 percent of

the declared amount.

The third guild was abolished in 1863 and a new

fee structure established, but the link between large-

scale economic activity and membership in the mer-

chant estate was already dissolving. Laws issued in

1807, 1863, and 1865 allowed non-merchants en-

gaged in manufacturing and wholesale commerce

GUILDS

615

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

to enroll in a merchant guild while maintaining their

membership in another social estate as well. From

1863 onward, anyone, regardless of social status or

even citizenship, could create and manage a corpo-

ration. Still, many industrialists and traders enrolled

in merchant guilds, as their fathers and grandfathers

had done, to demonstrate their commitment to a

group identity separate from the gentry.

See also: CAPITALISM; CHARTER OF THE CITIES; MER-

CHANTS; RUSSIA COMPANY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baron, Samuel H. (1980). Muscovite Russia: Collected Es-

says. London: Variorum.

Bushkovitch, Paul. (1980). The Merchants of Moscow,

1580–1650. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hittle, J. Michael. (1979). The Service City: State and

Townsmen in Russia, 1600–1800. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.

HOMAS

C. O

WEN

GULAG

Stalinist labor camps.

The prison camp system of the Stalin era,

whose acronym in Russian (GULag—hereafter Gu-

lag) stood for Glavnoye upravlenie lagerei, or Main

Camp Administration, grew into an enormous net-

work of camps lasting into the mid-1950s. Other

penal institutions, including prisons, labor colonies,

and special settlements, supplemented the labor

camps to form a vast number of sites available to

the Soviet government for the incarceration and ex-

ile of its enemies. While much larger than both its

tsarist and Soviet antecedents in size and scope,

Stalin’s prison empire evolved along lines clearly

established over centuries of Russian rule. But the

gulag far outpaced all predecessor systems and be-

came an infamous symbol of state repression in the

twentieth century.

Although unprecedented in reach, the labyrinth

of Stalinist camps had its roots in both the tsarist

and early Soviet periods. The secret police under the

tsars, ranging from the oprichniki at the time of

Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century to the

Third Section and Okhranka of later years, estab-

lished the broad historical outlines for Stalinist in-

stitutions. Imprisonment, involuntary servitude,

and exile to Siberia formed a long and well-known

experience meted out by these prerevolutionary or-

gans of state security. Soon after the October Rev-

olution, however, the new government under the

leadership of Vladimir Lenin also issued key reso-

lutions on incarceration, forced labor, and internal

exile that explicitly set the stage for the gulag. The

Temporary Instructions on Deprivation of Freedom

(July 1918) and the Decree on Red Terror (Sep-

tember 1918) took aim at class enemies of the new

regime to be sent to prison for various offenses.

Other Bolshevik decrees from as early as January

1918 stipulated arrest and hard labor for political

opponents of the new state as well as workers

who had violated the labor code. The initial Soviet

secret police agency, the Cheka (acronym for the Ex-

traordinary Commission for Combatting Counter-

revolution and Sabotage), controlled many but not

all of the camps, which would in time be reinte-

grated with other prison structures and grow to an

immense scale.

Other than proportion, one of the critical dif-

ferences between this embryonic camp system un-

der Lenin and its successor under Stalin concerned

the problem of jurisdiction. In Lenin’s time, the So-

viet government lacked a centralized administra-

tion for its prison organizations. The Cheka, People’s

Commissariat of the Interior, and People’s Com-

missariat of Justice all oversaw various offshoots

of the penal camp complex. In 1922 and 1923, the

GPU (State Political Administration) and then the

OGPU (Unified State Political Administration) re-

placed the Cheka as the main secret police organi-

zation and assumed command over many of the

labor camps. The first and largest cluster of prison

camps under its authority, the primary ones of

which existed on the Solovetski Islands in the White

Sea to the north of Petrograd (renamed Leningrad

in 1924), became known at this time as SLON

(Northern Camps of Special Designation). While

Lenin left no blueprint for a future camp leviathan

under Stalin, the infamous archipelago of Gulag

sites that lasted until the time of Nikita Khrushchev

clearly grew out of these early variants. In 1930,

the gulag was officially established just as the pa-

rameters of the labor camp network began to ex-

pand greatly after Stalin’s consolidation of power.

The tremendous growth in inmate numbers

throughout the 1930s proved a defining feature of

Stalinism, and certainly one that sets it apart from

previous eras. Whereas prisoner counts of the

Stalin era would rise into the millions, neither the

tsars nor Soviet leaders before 1929 incarcerated

GULAG

616

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

more than a few hundred thousand inmates. The

collectivization of agriculture and the dekulakiza-

tion campaign in the early 1930s began new trends

in the Soviet Union, ushering in much higher rates

of imprisonment. The Great Purges later in the

decade again increased these statistics, particularly

in the number of political prisoners sentenced to

the Gulag. Other events, such as signing of the

Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in August 1939,

led to further waves of inmates, including Polish

and Baltic citizens who joined their Soviet coun-

terparts in remote camp zones across the USSR. By

the 1940s, the Stalinist labor camps contained a

multinational assortment of prisoners.

The troika, or three-person extrajudicial panel

that could both try and sentence the accused even

in absentia, became infamous in the late 1930s as

a common mechanism for dispatching enemies of

the state to widespread gulag regions. Comprising

fourteen sections, Article 58 of the well-worn So-

viet Criminal Code found extensive and arbitrary

application throughout the Stalin era as the labor

camps began to stretch to all corners of the nation.

The organs of state security became preoccupied

with the shipment of prisoners to penal sites across

the country. One of the most legendary in the early

1930s involved construction of the Baltic–White

Sea Canal. Other inmates labored under similarly

hostile conditions on the Solovetski Islands, or at

gulag sites in and around Vorkuta, Magadan, Pe-

chora, and Karaganda.

Throughout its history, the gulag served both

a punitive and economic function. From its very

origins, Soviet prisons and camps had been repos-

itories for enemies of the regime. Useful both for

isolating and punishing real and imagined oppo-

nents, the labor camps in particular became a tool

of repressive state policy. But while inefficient and

substandard in many respects, the gulag fulfilled a

vital economic role as well. Russia had long wres-

tled with the question of adequate labor in remote

parts of the empire, which only compounded the

GULAG

617

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Perm-35, the last Soviet gulag. © P.P

ERRIN

/CORBIS SYGMA

intractable problems of a cash-poor economy na-

tionwide. Although the roots of serfdom can in part

be found in such conditions, Peter the Great in later

years addressed numerous shortcomings with ever-

increasing levels of coercion that expanded the

realm of forced labor to include large prisoner con-

tingents and peasants ascribed to factories. Politi-

cal exile and hard labor became synonymous with

Siberia in particular, and provided a blueprint for

the Stalin era.

Although going far beyond Petrine goals, Stalin

employed similar methods in the twentieth cen-

tury. Inmates offered a bottomless pool of work-

ers to be sent to areas historically poor in labor

supply. The most famous and important gulag

zones, focused upon the procurement of lumber

and minerals, were located in remote northern and

eastern regions of the USSR far from population

centers. Leaving aside the question of productivity

and efficiency, both of which registered at exceed-

ingly low levels in the camps, the Soviet state

sought a fulfillment of industrialization targets in

such areas through the widespread application of

prison contingents. But the labor camps soon grew

beyond this scope, and began to fill economic func-

tions within a larger national framework. Some

gulag sites in time even appeared in and around

major cities and industries. The Soviet government

expanded the use of inmates in numerous large-

scale construction projects, particularly involving

railroad, canal, and highway plans. Eventually, the

secret police concentrated inmate scientists in spe-

cial prison laboratories known as sharashkas,

where vital technical research proceeded under the

punitive eye of the state.

While circumstances proved much better in such

special design bureaus, most inmates throughout

the gulag system both lived and worked under gru-

eling conditions. Aside from enervating physical la-

bor in extreme winter climates, prisoners suffered as

well from poor living arrangements and minimal

food rations. Hard labor in the mines and forests of

Siberia was backbreaking and required a stamina

that few inmates could maintain over long periods.

Turning Marxism on its head, inmates also received

caloric norms based upon a sliding scale of labor out-

put that penalized low production levels even from

the least healthy. Moreover, prisoners were subject

to the whims of an unpredictable camp hierarchy

that meted out harsh punishments for offenses,

however minor. The threat of the isolator or length-

ier terms of incarceration hung over every inmate

and made the camp population dread the seemingly

wanton authority of the camp bosses.

As a rule, conditions within the camps worsened

over time up through the end of the 1930s and early

1940s. The brunt of this fell on the politicals, who

as a result of the Great Purges had begun to arrive

in the gulag in significant numbers by this time.

Constituting the most dangerous element in the view

of the Soviet government, political prisoners occu-

pied the lowest rung in the camps. Moreover, prison

bosses favored actual criminals convicted for far

lesser economic crimes, and placed them in positions

of authority within the informal camp structure.

The result was an inverted universe in which nor-

mal societal mores were suspended and the rules of

the criminal world came to the fore. For many in-

mates, such moral corrosion proved even more oner-

ous than the physical hardships of camp life.

The gulag incarcerated several million inmates

over the length of its existence. Archival records re-

veal that the numbers were not as high as those

posited by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others in

previous years, although exact counts remain elu-

sive for several reasons. In terms of the gulag

proper, the highest camp figures for any one time

were to be found in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Even then, there were not much more than two

million prisoners on average within the camps at

any given moment. Additional totals from internal

exile, special settlement, and labor colonies aug-

mented this number. But statistics convey only a

narrow viewpoint on the reality of the gulag,

which proved to be one of the most repressive

mechanisms in the history of the Soviet Union.

See also: BERIA, LAVRENTI PAVLOVICH; PRISONS; PURGES,

THE GREAT; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF; YEZHOV,

NIKOLAI IVANOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Applebaum, Anne. (2003). Gulag: A History. New York:

Broadway Books.

Ginzburg, Evgeniia. (1967). Journey into the Whirlwind,

tr. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward. New York:

Harcourt, Brace, and World.

Ivanovna, Galina Mikhailovna. (2000). Labor Camp So-

cialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System,

ed. Donald J. Raleigh, tr. Carol Flath. Armonk, NY:

M. E. Sharpe.

Khlevniuk, Oleg. (2003). History of the Gulag. New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. (1974–1978). The Gulag Archi-

pelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investi-

GULAG

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

gation, 3 vols. tr. Thomas P. Whitney and H. Wil-

letts. New York: Harper and Row.

AVID

J. N

ORDLANDER

GUM

The acronym GUM stands for Main Department

Store (Glavnyi universal’nyi magazin), and indeed,

from the time it opened in 1953, GUM was the So-

viet Union’s largest and busiest retail establishment.

Located on the northeast corner of Red Square, GUM

occupies the historic premises of Moscow’s Upper

Trading Rows. This enormous glass-roofed com-

plex, completed in 1893, might be considered an

early shopping mall; in the late imperial period, it

housed between three hundred and one thousand

shops at a time. The Upper Trading Rows were na-

tionalized along with other commercial businesses

in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, and

were almost immediately converted into office space

for the new Soviet bureaucracy. The New Economic

Policy of the 1920s brought a brief revival of trade

in the building when the municipal government es-

tablished a five-and-dime emporium there, but it

soon reverted to administrative use.

When the premises were refurbished for retail-

ing during the early 1950s, the emphasis was no

longer on discounted sales. GUM became the So-

viet capital’s most prestigious store, with special-

ized departments for such luxuries as Central Asian

rugs, televisions, crystal stemware, and fur coats.

Another department, Section 200, sold luxury

wares exclusively to the Soviet elite; entry into this

department was by permit only.

In 1992 GUM was reorganized as a joint-stock

company. According to a 1991 formula, one-

quarter of the shares went to the Moscow city

government and one-quarter to employees, while

the balance was sold to private investors.

See also: RED SQUARE

ULIE

ESSLER

GUMILEV, LEV NIKOLAYEVICH

(1912–1992), dissident historian, geographer, and

ethnographer in the Soviet Union.

Lev Gumilev belonged to the old Russian intel-

ligentsia. His father, Nikolai Gumilev, was a promi-

nent poet of the Silver Age and a victim of Bolshevik

terror. His mother, Anna Akhmatova, was one of

the greatest Russian women poets. Lev Gumilev’s

ties with the old intelligentsia led to frequent im-

prisonments from the 1920s to the 1950s in Josef

Stalin’s Gulag (prison camp system). Gumilev

joined a punishment battalion in 1944 and fought

in the Battle of Berlin. In spite of this, he became a

major intellectual figure in Leningrad and developed

an international reputation for his studies of the an-

cient Turkic and Mongol peoples. He combined his-

torical and archeological research with historical

geography to develop a new discipline, ethnogra-

phy (narodovedenie) in the Department of Oriental

Studies of Leningrad State University. Soviet scholar

circles found thought anti-Marxist in his research

and publications. He was accused of ignoring the

role of the class struggle in history. Gumilev was

particularly concerned with the relationship be-

tween culture and nation and the impact of bio-

logical energy and morals upon the development

of ethnic groups. He advanced a theory of ethno-

genesis to explain the rise and decline of particular

ethnic groups in terms of biological and not social

factors. He stressed the absence or presence of drive

(passionarnost) in a particular people as manifest in

the personalities of leaders to explain the people’s

role in the unfolding of the nation’s history. These

ideas have had a profound influence on Russian na-

tionalist thought and the development of Eurasian-

ism in contemporary Russia.

See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; NATIONALISM IN THE

SOVIET UNION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Shnirelman, Viktor, and Panarin, Sergei. (2001). “Lev

Gumilev: His Pretensions as a Founder of Ethnology

and his Eurasian Theories.” Inner Asia 3:1–18

ACOB

W. K

IPP

GUMILEV, NIKOLAI STEPANOVICH

(1886–1921), poet executed by the Bolsheviks.

Born in Kronstadt and educated at the Tsar-

skoye Selo Gymnasium, Nikolai Stepanovich Gu-

milev was a major Silver Age poet and a victim of

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Bolshevik repression. Gumilev, his first wife, Anna

Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam were the fore-

most representatives of acmeism, a movement em-

phasizing concrete personal experience that arose

in response to the dominant symbolist school of

poetry during the 1910s. Gumilev also played a

central role in the St. Petersburg–based Guild of Po-

ets, a literary organization intermittently active be-

tween 1910 and 1921.

As a monarchist and self-styled “poet-warrior,”

Gumilev volunteered to serve in the Russian army

in August 1914. In 1918 he returned to Petrograd,

where he worked as an editor and translator for

the World Literature series.

Gumilev was arrested by the Bolsheviks in Au-

gust 1921 for his alleged part in an anti-Soviet plot.

Although the charges were almost certainly fabri-

cated, Gumilev and sixty others were executed

within weeks, over the protest of many writers.

His execution was part of a sustained campaign

against intellectuals by the Bolsheviks, who hoped

to stifle potential dissent while loosening economic

and social controls during the New Economic Pol-

icy. Gumilev’s execution is frequently cited as ev-

idence that the systematic use of state terror was

an integral part of communist rule, not an aber-

ration associated with Stalinism. Many contempo-

raries viewed the deaths of Gumilev and the poet

Alexander Blok, just twelve days apart, as symbolic

of the destruction of the prerevolutionary intelli-

gentsia.

Gumilev’s work was banned in the Soviet

Union from 1923 until 1986. His poetry has be-

come very popular in Russia since that time, with

more than forty editions of his works appearing.

Major collections included Romantic Flowers (1908),

Alien Sky (1912), Quiver (1916), and The Pillar of

Fire (1921). Gumilev also wrote several plays.

See also: AKHMATOVA, ANNA ANDREYEVNA; BLOK,

ALEXANDER ALEXANDROVICH; MANDELSHTAM, OSIP

EMILIEVICH; SILVER AGE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gumilev, Nikolai. (1999). The Pillar of Fire and Other Po-

ems, trans. Richard McKane, intro. by Michael

Basker. London: Anvil Poetry Press.

Sampson, Earl D. (1970). “Nikolay Gumilev: Towards a

Reevaluation.” Russian Review 29(3):301–311.

RIAN

ASSOF

GYPSY

Gypsies (tsygane in Russian, while Roma is the name

preferred by this group) have been one of the most

visible and yet least powerful of ethnic groups in

Russia. The population is considerably larger than

the 153,000 in the Russian Federation who were

listed as Gypsies in the 1989 census. This is due to

underreporting, a high birth rate, and immigration

from former Soviet republics. Roma leaders claim

a population of at least one million. As is true of

Roma populations all over Europe, little is known

of their ethnic origins and history as a people,

though it is theorized that Gypsies originated in In-

dia. Many migrated to Russia by way of Germany

and Poland during the eighteenth century after suf-

fering persecution there. Romani, the language spo-

ken by most gypsies, has Indo-European roots with

some links to ancient Sanskrit.

Gypsies are widely dispersed across Russia,

with communities in Moscow, St. Petersburg,

Samara, Komi Republic, Sverdlovsk, Vologda, Vol-

gograd, Voronezh, Yaroslavl, and elsewhere. Fol-

lowing long-standing cultural traditions, Roma

have resisted assimilation and exist on the margins

of society. Geographic dispersal and social margin-

alization meant that the Roma did not enjoy the

state support that often characterized Soviet na-

tionality policy. Gypsies had no territorial entity of

their own, no schools offering instruction in their

own language, and no newspapers. The first Roma

newspaper in Russia began publication in Samara

only in 2001. Even under Josef Stalin, however,

the cultural role of gypsies in Soviet society was

recognized. In 1931 the Romen Theater opened in

Moscow. It was the first theater in the world to

showcase gypsy culture, and gypsy actors and mu-

sicians performed and were trained there. The the-

ater continues to be active in post-Soviet Russia.

Gypsy themes have been prominent in Russian cul-

ture, particularly through the popular film Tabor

Goes to Heaven (Tabor ukhodit v nebo) which was re-

leased in 1976.

In Russia as in the rest of Eastern Europe, gyp-

sies have been the object of public scorn and offi-

cial repression. Many have traditionally engaged

in illegal or semilegal occupations such as black

marketeering, petty theft, fencing stolen goods,

and organized begging. This is both a cause and

effect of the lack of acceptance of gypsies in Russ-

ian society. During the Soviet period, gypsies of-

ten engaged in black-market selling of alcohol and

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perfume, as well as fortune-telling and other oc-

cult arts. State repression of the gypsies reached a

new height during the Nikita Khrushchev period.

New regulations issued in 1957 attempted to re-

strict their movements outside of places where

they were registered. This attempt to prevent the

movement of gypsies has continued in post-Soviet

Russia, with the police sometimes tearing down

illegal gypsy settlements and forcing residents to

return to their home region. With the expansion

of private enterprise in post-Soviet Russia, the

Roma reportedly have been squeezed out of their

traditional commercial occupations, with even for-

tune-telling taken over by non-gypsy entrepre-

neurs who had an easier time dealing with the

authorities. There has been an increasing incidence

of gypsies involved in more serious crimes, such

as the drug trade, a tendency bemoaned by lead-

ers of the Roma community.

In 2000 the Russian government officially rec-

ognized the need for gypsies to have a political

voice, and it authorized the creation of a council

that would defend gypsy interests. Its leaders have

campaigned against frequent stereotyping of gyp-

sies in the media and have condemned police ha-

rassment based solely on ethnic identity.

See also: GYPSYMANIA; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET;

NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crowe, David M. (1994). A History of Gypsies of Eastern

Europe and Russia. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

European Roma Rights Center (2003). “Written Com-

ments of the European Roma Rights Center Con-

cerning the Russian Federation for Consideration

by the United Nations Committee on the Elimina-

tion of Racial Discrimination at its Sixty-second Ses-

sion, March 3–21, 2003.” <http://www.errc.org/

publications/legal/CERD-Russia_Feb_2003>

ARRELL

LIDER

GYPSYMANIA

Gypsymania took both literary and musical

forms during the early nineteenth century. The

gypsy theme—imagined scenes from their life

and customs—captivated Russian poets. Alexan-

der Pushkin’s contributions gained popularity

and immediately entered the literary canon. Gyp-

symania in music (tsyganshchina) outlasted the

literary genres. Its sources—choirs comprising

free, serf, and state peasant ethnic gypsies (Roma)

and Russian composers who adapted gypsy mo-

tifs to popular romances—were blended by star

performers such as Stesha (Stepanida Sidorovna

Soldatova, 1784–1822) and her successors. Tsy-

ganshchina’s attraction rested on lyrics, music,

and performance style. Song lyrics represented

gypsies as hot-blooded, wild in love, cruel in ha-

tred, and enamored of freedom and the open road.

The music was marked by sharp contrasts and

sudden changes of tempo. The critic Apollon Grig-

orev wrote in 1847: “If you seek sounds, if you

seek expression for those undefined, incompre-

hensible, sorrowful ‘blues’ (khandra), you make

off to the Gypsies, immerse yourself in the hur-

ricane of these wild, passionate, oppressively pas-

sionate songs.” An English visitor to a Moscow

cafe during the 1850s described the performance

of a gypsy choir wearing expensive and gaudy

garments. They sat or lay on the floor; the soloist

was joined by the company who drank and

smoked as they strolled from table to table,

stamping their feet. As cafes, restaurants, and

phonograph records proliferated during the early

twentieth century, gypsymania launched the ca-

reers of a half dozen superstars of the era who

often emulated in life the emotional turbulence of

their songs. Most Russians found them irre-

sistible.

Critics accepted both the traditional music of

the Roma, because it bore a folkish spirit, and the

stylizations of composers at play like Franz Liszt

and Johannes Brahms. The middle range, by far

the most popular, invited rancor: the local ver-

nacular adorned with gypsy devices of rhythm,

sonority, instrumentation, and phrasing. In Rus-

sia, songs composed in the gypsy manner, such as

“Two Guitars” and “Dark Eyes,” evoked repug-

nance among some critics. Ironically, genuine gyp-

sies when playing Roma music also borrowed from

local styles, and this habit accounts for the huge

variety among the various authentic gypsy styles

from Spain to Finland. Under Bolshevism, hostil-

ity to tsyganshchina took on a political edge. Dur-

ing the 1920s, classical musicians lamented its

vulgarity, and proletarian composers charged the

music with inciting decadence, bourgeois values,

and miscreant sexuality. The gypsy genre disap-

peared during the Cultural Revolution (1928–

1931), and a form of gypsy music was partially

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revived, in a sanitized form, with the founding of

the Teatr Romen in 1931 where something like

genuine Roma performances were mounted.

Recordings by other Soviet singers of selected

gypsy songs were released under the watchful eye

of the censors. With the coming of glasnost under

Mikhail Gorbachev, every kind of previously taboo

gypsy songs resurfaced, only to be drowned out

soon by Western rock and hip-hop.

See also: FOLK MUSIC; GYPSY; PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER

SERGEYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stites, Richard. (1992). Russian Popular Culture: Enter-

tainment and Society since 1900. Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press.

ICHARD

TITES

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