Encyclopedia of Russian History

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Zosima from office and convened another Moscow

synod in 1504, which condemned five heretics to

death, including the late Kuritsyn’s brother Ivan

Volk, a state secretary expert in the law, and Archi-

mandrite Kassian of Novgorod’s Yurev Monastery.

Others, like the merchant Semon Klenov, were im-

prisoned.

The accusations against the “heretics” reveal a

hodgepodge of tenets rather than a coherent sect.

The dissidents allegedly elevated Old Testament

law, denigrated Christian scripture and patristic

writings, attacked icons and monasticism, and de-

nied the Trinity and the Incarnation. They dissim-

ulated in the presence of steadfast adherents of

Orthodoxy, practiced astrology and black magic,

and after the end of the Russian Orthodox year

7000 (1492

.) ridiculed Christian writings that

had predicted the Second Coming around that time,

and especially the New Testament for describing its

own era as the last epoch. They also opposed the

condemnation of heretics and demanded that re-

pentant heretics not be punished.

Whatever Jewishness lies behind these accu-

sations may go back to the scriptural, astronomi-

cal, and philosophical interchanges between Jews

and Orthodox Christians in western Rus during the

fifteenth century. Fyodor Kuritsyn’s “Laodician

Epistle,” a chain poem, is reminiscent of Jewish

wisdom literature. In addition, the dissidents were

more open to secular culture and rationalism than

most representatives of the official church. Some

of the accusations of heresy may have derived from

issues pertaining to specific icons, to various Nov-

gorodian practices, to the use of Jewish astronom-

ical knowledge, to Moscow’s treatment of conquered

Novgorod, and even to church lands. Whatever the

case, when a similar outbreak of dissidence oc-

curred in Novgorod and Moscow during the 1550s,

it was attributed to Protestant, not Jewish, influ-

ences. The phenomenon of dissidence prompted

Archbishop Gennady to assemble a coterie of Or-

thodox and Catholic experts to compile the first

complete Slavonic Bible and make other useful

translations.

See also: IVAN III; JOSEPH OF VOLOTSK, ST.; KURITSYN, FY-

ODOR VASILEVICH; NOVGOROD THE GREAT; ORTHO-

DOXY; POSSESSORS AND NON-POSSESSORS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Klier, John. (1997). “Judaizing without Jews? Moscow-

Novgorod, 1470–1504.” In Culture and Identity in

Muscovy, 1359–1584, ed. Ann M. Kleimola and Gail

D. Lenhoff. Moscow: ITZ-Garant.

Tauber, Moishe. (1995). “The Kievan Jew Zacharia and

the Astronomical Works of the Judaizers.” In Jews

and Slavs, vol. 3, ed. Wolf Moskovich, Shmuel

Shvarzbard, and Anatoly Alekseev. Jerusalem: He-

brew University Press.

AVID

M. G

OLDFRANK

JULY DAYS OF 1917

Abortive Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd in July

1917.

On July 3–5, 1917, in Petrograd, militant sol-

diers, sailors, and factory workers staged an abortive

uprising. For weeks, local Bolshevik, Anarchist, and

Left Socialist Revolutionary organizers had agitated

against the Provisional Government and for im-

mediate transfer of power to the Soviets of Work-

ers and Soldiers Deputies. This call to action

resonated with workers engaged in bitter labor con-

flicts and among garrison soldiers facing deploy-

ment to the front. July 3 witnessed a flurry of

meetings, demonstrations, and strikes. That evening

tens of thousands of soldiers and workers, led by

left socialist agitators, marched on the city center

and insisted that the Soviet assume power. How-

ever, the Soviet’s Menshevik and Socialist Revolu-

tionary leaders, already engulfed in a crisis in the

government coalition, refused.

The Bolshevik Military Organization and Pe-

tersburg Committee pushed for an uprising while

the Central Committee wavered. Leon Trotsky,

Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev initially urged

restraint but tentatively endorsed the demonstra-

tions in the early hours of July 4. The party’s

leader, Vladimir Lenin, remained absent from Pet-

rograd until midday.

On July 4 huge crowds of armed workers, sol-

diers, and sailors controlled the city’s streets; nearly

four hundred people died in scattered fighting and

random shootings. Crowds again demanded that

unwilling Soviet leaders accept power. Lenin and

the Central Committee meanwhile debated the pos-

sibility of a successful seizure of power. By evening,

the tenor of events had changed dramatically.

When the government publicly alleged that Lenin

was a German agent, several garrison units turned

against the demonstrations. Rumor spread that sol-

JULY DAYS OF 1917

713

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

diers were marching on Petrograd to defend the

government. By morning on July 5, the inchoate

seizure of power collapsed. The government ar-

rested several Bolshevik leaders, on whom it blamed

the uprising. Lenin went into hiding, and his party

suffered a significant temporary decline.

The July Days resonated throughout Russia—

rallies for Soviet power, for instance, took place in

Moscow, Saratov, Krasnoyarsk, and other provin-

cial cities—but its chief significance lay in expos-

ing the fragility of the Provisional Government and

in accelerating the polarization of Russian politics

and society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rabinowitch, Alexander. (1968). Prelude to Revolution: The

Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Wade, Rex A. (2000). The Russian Revolution, 1917. New

York: Cambridge University Press.

ICHAEL

C. H

ICKEY

JULY DAYS OF 1917

714

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

KABARDIANS

Kabardians are one of the titular nationalities of the

north Caucasian Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria in

the Russian Federation. The population of the re-

public, whose capital city is Nalchik, is 790,000, of

whom 48 percent are Kabardian. Of these, 55 per-

cent are rural and engaged in agriculture, animal

husbandry, and metallurgy, as well as in health ser-

vices in the well-known spa resorts of the region.

Kabardians also live in the adjacent Stavropol Krai,

the Krasnodar Krai, and in North Ossetia.

Kabardian is linguistically classified as East Cir-

cassian, and the Kabardians belong to the same eth-

nolinguistic family as the Adyge and the Cherkess

who live in neighboring republics. Policies on na-

tionalities during the Soviet era established these

three groups as separate “peoples” and languages,

but historical memory and linguistic affinity, as

well as post-Soviet ethnic politics, perpetuate no-

tions of ethnic continuity. An important element

in this has been the contact, since the break-up of

the Soviet Union, with Kabardians living in Turkey,

Syria, Israel, Jordan, western Europe, and the

United States. These are the descendents of mi-

grants who left for the Ottoman Empire in the late

nineteenth century after the Russian conquest of

the Caucasus. In the 1990s a number of Kabardian

families from the diaspora settled in Nalchik, but

integration remains fraught with social and legal

problems.

The Kabardians are largely Muslim, though a

small Kabardian Russian Orthodox group inhabits

the city of Mozdok in Ossetia. Other religious in-

fluences, including Greek Orthodox Christianity and

indigenous beliefs and rituals, can still be discerned

in cultural practices. The Soviet state discouraged

Islamic practice and identity but supported cultural

nation-building. Kabardian folk-dance groups (i.e.,

“Kabardinka”) have achieved widespread fame.

In the post-Soviet period, interethnic tensions

led, in the early 1990s, to an attempted partition

of the republic between the two nationalities, but this

did not come to pass. The wars in Abkhasia (be-

tween 1992 and 1993) and Chechnya (1994–1997;

1999–2000) affected Kabardian sympathies and

politics, causing the Russian state to intermittently

infuse the republic with resources to prevent the

spreading of conflict. Islamic movements, generally

termed “Wahhabism,” are in some evidence, and

mosque building and religious instruction and

practice are on the increase.

715

See also: ABKHAZIANS; ADYGE; CAUCASUS; CHERKESS;

CHECHNYA AND CHECHENS; ISLAM; NATIONALITIES

POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baddeley, John F. (1908). The Russian Conquest of the Cau-

casus. London: Longmans, Green & Co.

Borxup, Marie Bennigsen, ed. (1992). The North Cauca-

sus Barrier: The Russian Advance towards the Muslim

World. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Gammer, Moshe. (1994). Muslim Resistance to the Tsar:

Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan.

London: Frank Cass.

Jaimoukha, Amjad. (2001). The Circassians: A Handbook.

London: Curzon Press.

Jersild, Austin. (2002). Orientalism and Empire: North

Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier,

1854–1917. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens

University Press.

Matveeva, Anna. (1999). The North Caucasus: Russia’s

Fragile Borderland. Great Britain: The Royal Institute

of International Affairs.

ETENEY

HAMI

KADETS See CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY.

KAGANOVICH, LAZAR MOYSEYEVICH

(1893–1991), Stalinist; deputy prime minister of

the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1957.

Known for his viciousness, Lazar Kaganovich

was a staunch Stalinist and a ruthless participant

in the purges of the 1930s. Born near Kiev, Ukraine,

Kaganovich became active in the Social Democratic

Party from 1911 and served as the first secretary

of the Ukrainian Communist Party from 1925 to

1928. A brilliant administrator, Kaganovich served

on the Presidium of the CPSU from 1930 to 1957

and held numerous important posts, including first

secretary in the Moscow Party Organization

(1930–1935), key administrator of the Agricultural

Department of the Central Committee (1933), peo-

ple’s commissar of transport (1935), and people’s

commissar of heavy industry (1935). In December

1944 he was appointed deputy prime minister of

the Soviet Union.

An influential proponent of forced collectiviza-

tion, Kaganovich advocated harsh repression of the

rich peasants, or kulaks, in the late 1920s. During

the grain procurement campaign of 1932, Kagano-

vich headed a commission that was sent to the

North Caucasus to speed up grain collection. On

November 2 his commission adopted a resolution

that called for the violent breakup of kulak sabo-

tage networks and the use of terror to break the

resistance of rural communists. The result was the

arrest of thousands and the deportation of tens of

thousands of rural inhabitants.

His belief in the efficacy of coercion led him to

develop a strategy that called for indiscriminate

mass repression of workers as a way to increase

productivity and punish what he considered anti-

Soviet actions in industry. As commissar of trans-

port, Kaganovich was particularly hard on railway

men, calling for the death sentence for various of-

fenses that might lead to the breakdown of Soviet

transport plans. He devised the so-called theory of

counterrevolutionary limit setting on output that

he used to destroy hundreds of engineering and

technical cadres.

In the Great Purges (1936–1938) Kaganovich

took the extreme position that the Party’s interests

justified everything. In the summer of 1937

Kaganovich was sent to carry out purges of local

Party organizations in Chelyabinsk, Yaroslavl,

Ivanovo, and Smolensk. Throughout 1936 and

1937 he also had all his deputies, nearly all road

chiefs and political section chiefs, and many other

officials in transport arrested without any grounds

whatsoever. In August 1937 he demanded that the

NKVD (secret police) arrest ten officials in the Peo-

ple’s Commissariat of Transport because he

thought their behavior suspicious. All were arrested

as spies and shot. He ultimately had thirty-eight

transport executives and thousands of Party mem-

bers arrested.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, Kaganovich

opposed Nikita Khrushchev’s proposal to admit er-

rors committed by the Party under Stalin’s leader-

ship. He remained an oppositionist, eventually

allying with Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molo-

tov, and Dmitry Shepilov, in the so-called Anti-

Party Group that attempted to remove Khrushchev

from power in 1957. Following the failed coup,

Kaganovich was removed from his position as

deputy prime minister and assigned to managing a

potash works in Perm oblast. He died there of nat-

ural causes in 1991.

See also: COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; KULAKS;

PURGES, THE GREAT; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH

KADETS

716

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

ment. New York: Oxford University Press.

Courtois, Stephane, et al. (1999). The Black Book of Com-

munism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.

Crankshaw, Edward. (1970). Khrushchev Remembers.

Boston: Little, Brown.

Kahn, Stuart. (1987). The Wolf of the Kremlin. New York:

Morrow.

ATE

RANSCHEL

KAL 007

On September 1, 1983, a Soviet SU-15 shot a Ko-

rean civilian 747 airliner from the sky. All 269

passengers on board perished. Korean authorities

publicly stated the plane had mistakenly strayed

off its intended course by some 365 miles. This

was caused by a technical error programmed into

the inertial navigation system by the plane’s pilot,

according to Korean authorities. Unfortunately,

the plane entered Soviet territory over the Kam-

chatka peninsula where submarines were located

and, on the night of the flight, a secret test of an

SS-25 Soviet missile reportedly was planned. A

U.S. RC-135 spy plane was in the area, and it is

assumed the Soviets believed they were destroying

the RC-135 or a civilian version of a spy plane. So-

viet Colonel Gennadi Osipovich was the pilot given

the responsibility of challenging and eventually

shooting and destroying Korean Airlines flight

007. Osipovich recalled in a 1996 interview in the

New York Times how he pulled alongside the air-

liner and recognized in the dark the configuration

of windows indicating a civilian airliner. He be-

lieved this civilian airliner could have a military

use and believes to this day, according to the in-

terview, that the plane was on a spy mission. He

regrets not shooting the plane down over land so

that such proof could be recovered. If Osipovich

had waited another twenty to twenty-five seconds

to destroy the plane, KAL 007 would have been

over neutral territory, which most likely would

have averted the incident. A serious U.S.-Soviet

diplomatic fallout ensued.

See also: KOREA, RELATIONS WITH

IMOTHY

HOMAS

KALININGRAD

At the 1945 Potsdam Conference, the Western al-

lies acceded to Josef Stalin’s demand that the north-

ern third of East Prussia be awarded to the Soviet

Union. He provided two justifications for the trans-

fer of the territory that would be renamed Kalin-

ingrad: The USSR needed an ice-free port on the

Baltic Sea, and, through the annexation, the Ger-

mans would compensate the Soviet people for the

millions of lives they lost at the hands of the Nazi

invaders. The American president, Franklin D. Roo-

sevelt, and the British prime minister, Winston

Churchill, said in the Potsdam Protocol that the

transfer of territory was contingent upon a final

peace treaty; this treaty was never signed by the

Allied and Axis powers.

The Prussians, who originally occupied the

area, lost their lands after the Teutonic Knights in-

vaded the southern shores of the Baltic littoral in

the thirteenth century. By the seventeenth century,

the Prussians—cousins to the Latvians and Lithua-

nians, all of whom spoke a closely related lan-

guage—disappeared as a nation, and the German

invaders henceforth adopted the name “Prussians.”

Russians never lived in East Prussia, although

in 1758, during the Seven Years War, Russian

troops briefly occupied the capital Königsberg and

some surrounding territory. After World War I, the

German province of East Prussia was created on

this territory but was separated from the rest of

Germany by the Polish Corridor. Poland was

awarded the southern two-thirds of old East Prus-

sia after World War II, and the Soviet Union took

control of its northern third, about the size of

Northern Ireland. Henceforth most of the German

residents fled, or were forced from the area, and

their farms and cities were occupied by migrants

from other areas of the Soviet Union. Most were

Russians and by the mid-1990s this westernmost

Russian region had about 930,000 residents. About

80 percent lived in urban areas, the rest in the coun-

tryside.

During the Cold War, Kaliningrad was a closed

territory with a heavy military presence: The

USSR’s Baltic Sea fleet was located there along with

contingents of ground and air defense units. It was

the first line of defense against an attack from the

west and could be used simultaneously for offen-

sive operations in a westward coup de main.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,

Kaliningrad became an “exclave” of the Russian Fed-

KALININGRAD

717

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

eration (i.e., a geographical anomaly, since it was

a political entity of Russia but surrounded by

Lithuania, Poland, and the Baltic Sea). All land and

rail routes to and from Kaliningrad to Russia hence-

forth had to traverse foreign borders.

In the 1990s Kaliningrad was perceived simul-

taneously as a flash point of conflict with its neigh-

bors and a gateway to Europe. The first perspective

was based on the presence of large numbers of

Russian troops, and on Russian fears that foreign

interests (in Germany and Lithuania) claimed the

oblast. By the late 1990s none of these latent points

of conflict became manifest. According to U.S. gov-

ernment estimates, there were 25,000 Russian mil-

itary personnel in the oblast, and no foreign

government had claims on it.

But Kaliningrad did not become a gateway to

Europe either. On the contrary: Afflicted by daunt-

ing economic, political, and social problems, Kalin-

ingrad was described by Western observers as a

“black hole” in the center of Europe. Today the

oblast no longer receives the heavy subsidies it en-

joyed during the Soviet era, and it has experienced

greater dips in its agricultural and manufacturing

sectors than other Russian regions. To make mat-

ters worse, the region’s residents and political lead-

ership complained that the authorities in Moscow

have ignored them, or have adopted conflicting

policies that have exacerbated the oblast’s economic

problems.

To attract domestic and foreign investment,

first a “free” and then a “special” economic zone

was created. But Moscow’s failure to enact enabling

legislation, or to change existing laws, have un-

dercut the zones. After Russia’s August 1998 fiscal

crisis, Kaliningrad’s economic situation deteriorated

further. By 2000 the European Union indicated that

it was prepared to address the “Kaliningrad Ques-

tion” through its Northern Dimension—a develop-

ment plan for Russia’s northwestern regions—but

they received mixed signals from Moscow.

Russian authorities expressed concern that Kalin-

ingraders would suffer once Poland and Lithuania

entered the EU and adopted stricter border controls.

Also, while President Vladimir Putin indicated that

he desired closer ties with Europe, his representa-

tives in Moscow and Kaliningrad were slow to

adopt a common approach toward the oblast’s

problems. By the fall of 2002, however, the EU and

Russia reached an agreement on providing transit

documents (and a sealed train) to facilitate travel

to and from Kaliningrad to Russia through Lithua-

nia.

Many European and American analysts believe

that Kaliningrad can serve as a test case and demon-

strate how the West might help Russia in its drive

to build a democratic and capitalist society.

See also: ECONOMY, POST-SOVIET; PRUSSIA, RELATIONS

WITH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fairlie, Lyndell D., and Sergounin, Alexander. (2001). Are

Borders Barriers? Helsinki: The Finnish Institute of In-

ternational Affairs.

Joenniemi, Perti, and Prawitz, Ian, eds. (1998). Kalin-

ingrad: The European Amber Region. Aldershot, UK:

Ashgate.

Krickus, Richard J. (2002). The Kaliningrad Question. Lan-

ham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

ICHARD

J. K

RICKUS

KALININ, MIKHAIL IVANOVICH

(1875–1946), Bolshevik, president of the USSR in

1922.

Active in the Russian Social Democratic Party

from 1898, Mikhail Kalinin was an Old Bolshevik

who held numerous important positions, includ-

ing chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive

Committee (1919) and president of the USSR (1922).

Born of peasant parents in Tver Province,

Kalinin moved to St. Petersburg in 1889 and found

employment at the Putilov factory. Kalinin’s peas-

ant origins and experience as a skilled industrial

worker made him an attractive representative of

the Communist Party. After the October Revolu-

tion in 1917, he became the chief administrator in

Petrograd. He quickly rose to prominence as a

member of the party’s Central Committee from

1919, a full member of the Politburo from 1925,

and chair of commissions to prepare Soviet consti-

tutions in 1923 and 1936.

In defense of the New Economic Policy (NEP),

Kalinin allied with Josef Stalin against Leon Trot-

sky and the Left Opposition in struggles for power

following Vladimir Lenin’s death. When Stalin

switched sides, adopting the Left’s program of

forced collectivization of agriculture, Kalinin sided

KALININ, MIKHAIL IVANOVICH

718

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

with Nikolai Bukharin in advocating moderation.

Urging a conciliatory approach toward the peas-

antry, Kalinin opposed harsh treatment of the ku-

laks. While never publicly criticizing Stalin, Kalinin

expressed reservations about the terror of the

1930s. He continued to serve the party as a pro-

pagandist until the end of World War II, and was

one of the few Old Bolsheviks to survive the Stal-

inist purges. On June 3, 1946, Kalinin died of can-

cer.

See also: BOLSHEVISM; CONSTITUTION OF 1936

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kalinin, M. I. (1950). On Communist Education: Selected

Speeches and Articles. Moscow: Foreign Languages

Pub. House.

ATE

RANSCHEL

KALMYKS

The Kalmyks, who call themselves the Khalmg, are

descendants of the Oyrats people originating from

western Mongolia (Jungaria). These were nomadic

tribes, kindred to the Mongols in material culture,

language, and religion. Today, most Kalmyks live

in Kalmykia (the Republic of Kalmykia), which is

one of the twenty-one nationality based republics

of the Russian Federation recognized in the 1993

Russian Constitution. Kalmykia (about 29,400

square miles) is located in southeastern Russia on

the northwestern shore of the Caspian Sea. Its cap-

ital, Elista, has more than 90,000 residents. Salt

lakes abound in the region, but Kalmykia lacks per-

manent waterways. Lying in the vast depression

of the north Caspian lowland, the territory con-

sists largely of steppe and desert areas.

In 2000 roughly 314,300 people lived in

Kalmykia. Its population was 45 percent Kalmyk,

38 percent Russian, 6 percent Dagestani, 3 percent

Chechen, 2 percent Kazak, and 2 percent German.

Representatives of the Torgut, Dorbet, and Buzawa

tribes also inhabit the republic. In contrast to

some of the other non-Russian languages spoken

in the Russian Federation, the Kalmyk language

(Kalmukian) has been classified as an “endangered

language” by UNESCO due to the declining num-

ber of active speakers. Very few children learn the

language, and those who do are not likely to be-

come active users.

Another characteristic that distinguishes the

Kalmyks from many non-Russian nationalities is

their long and tortuous past. Due to the deficit of

pasture lands and to feudal internecine dissension,

the Oyrat tribes migrated westward from Chinese

Turkistan to the steppes west of the mouth of the

Volga River in the late sixteenth and early seven-

teenth centuries. Between 1608 and 1609, the

Oyrats pledged their allegiance to the Russian tsar.

As allies, they guarded the Russian Empire’s east-

ern frontier during the reign of Peter I (the Great),

from 1682 to 1725. Under Catherine II, however,

the Kalmyks’ fortune changed, and they became

vassals. Unhappy with this situation, about

300,000 Kalmyks living east of the Volga began to

return to China, but were attacked en route by

Russian, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz warriors. Another

group residing west of the Volga had remained in

Russia, adopting a seminomadic lifestyle and prac-

ticing Lamaist Buddhism. They became known as

the Kalmyk, which in Turkish means “remnant,”

referring to those who stayed behind.

In 1920 the Kalmyk autonomous oblast (prov-

ince) was established, which became the Kalmyk

Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) in

1934. However, the Kalmyks’ status shifted radi-

cally again when, in 1943, Josef Stalin dissolved the

republic and deported some 170,000 Kalmyks to

Siberia. He sought to punish the Kalmyk units who

had fought the Russians in collaboration with the

Germans. Stalin forcibly resettled a total of more

than 1.5 million people, including the Volga Ger-

mans and six other nationalities of the Crimea and

northern Caucasus: the Crimean Tatars, Chechens,

Ingush, Balkars, Karachai, and Meskhetians. Other

minorities evicted from the Black Sea coastal region

included Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians.

Things improved for the Kalmyks when in

1956 Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, de-

nounced the earlier deportation as criminal and

permitted about 6,000 Kalmyks to return the fol-

lowing year. The Kalmyk ASSR was officially

reestablished in 1958. Thirty-five years later, the

Russian Constitution of 1993 officially recognized

the Republic of Kalmykia (Khalmg Tangch). That

year, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov won the first presiden-

tial elections in the new republic. His program fo-

cused on socioeconomic improvements and the

revival of Kalmyk language.

See also: CONSTITUTION OF 1993; NATIONALITIES POLI-

CIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

KALMYKS

719

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Amitai-Preiss, Reuven, and David Morgan. (2000). The

Mongol Empire and Its Legacy. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

Bormanshinov, Arash. (1991). The Lamas of the Kalmyk

People: The Don Kalmyk Lamas. Bloomington: Indiana

University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies.

Hammer, Darrell P. (1997). Russia Irredenta: Soviet Na-

tional Policy Reappraised. Washington, DC: National

Council for Soviet and East European Research.

Kappeler, Andreas. (2001). The Russian Empire: A Multi-

ethnic History. New York: Longman.

Nekrich, A. M. (1978). The Punished Peoples: The Depor-

tation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the

Second World War. New York: Norton.

Warhola, James W. (1996). Politicized Ethnicity in the

Russian Federation: Dilemmas of State Formation.

Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press.

OHANNA

RANVILLE

KAMENEV, LEV BORISOVICH

(1883–1836), Bolshevik leader, Soviet state official,

purged and executed under Stalin.

Born July 18, 1883, in Moscow and raised

in Tbilisi, Lev Borisovich Rosenfeld entered the rev-

olutionary movement while studying law at

Moscow University. In 1901 he joined the Russian

Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) and adopted

the pseudonym Kamenev (“man of stone”). In 1903

the RSDLP split into two factions, and Kamenev

aligned himself with the Bolsheviks and Vladimir

Ulyanov (Lenin). Kamenev’s revolutionary activi-

ties brought several arrests and brief periods of ex-

ile. During the 1905 Revolution, Kamenev proved

an outstanding orator and organizer. In 1908 he

joined Lenin’s inner circle in exile, then led the Bol-

shevik faction in Russia’s State Duma. In Novem-

ber 1914, tsarist police arrested Kamenev for

endorsing Lenin’s “defeatist” position on the war

and exiled him to Siberia.

The February 1917 Revolution brought Kamenev

back to Petrograd. He initially rejected Lenin’s

“April Thesis” and on the Bolshevik Central Com-

mittee (CC) opposed the idea of seizing power.

Instead he endorsed an all-socialist coalition gov-

ernment. On October 23, 1917, the CC endorsed

Lenin’s call for insurrection; Kamenev balked. He

resigned from the CC on October 29, but rejoined

it during the October Revolution and became chair

of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets

(CEC). Still he pursued an all-socialist coalition. Be-

cause the CC rejected these efforts, Kamenev again

quit on November 17, 1917. He also resigned from

the CEC, on November 21, 1917, after the Coun-

cil of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) issued de-

crees without CEC approval. Kamenev recanted on

December 12, 1917, and rejoined the CC in March

1918.

Afterward, Kamenev held high-level govern-

ment and Party positions, including chair of the

Moscow Soviet (1919–January 1926), and mem-

berships on the Sovnarkom (1922–1926), the

Council of Labor and Defense (1922–1926), the CC

(1918–1926), and the Politburo (1919–1926). A

“triumvirate” of Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, and

Josef Stalin assumed tacit control of the Party and

state in 1923, as Lenin lay dying, and engaged in

a fierce campaign of mutual incrimination against

Leon Trotsky over economic policy and bureau-

cratization. By January 1925 the triumvirate had

defeated Trotsky’s Left Opposition, but a rift

emerged pitting Kamenev and Zinoviev against

Stalin and the Politburo’s right wing. In December

1925, Kamenev criticized Stalin’s dictatorial ten-

dencies at the Fourteenth Party Congress; this led

to his condemnation as a member of the New Op-

position. Demoted to candidate Politburo status,

Kamenev was stripped of important state posts. In

the spring of 1926, he and Zinoviev joined Trot-

sky in a United Opposition, criticizing the CC ma-

jority’s “pro-peasant” version of the New Economic

Policy. The majority stripped him of Politburo

membership in October 1926. The United Opposi-

tion continued in vain through 1927; the majority

removed Kamenev from the CC on November 14,

and the Party’s Fifteenth Congress expelled him on

December 2, 1927. In ritual self-abnegation, he re-

canted and was readmitted to the Party in June

1928. He subsequently held minor posts, and faced

the threat of arrest.

Kamenev was arrested, again expelled from the

Party, and exiled to Siberia in October 1932, for

purported association with Martemian Ryutin’s

oppositionist group. Released, then readmitted to

the Party in December 1933, he briefly served in

Moscow bureaucratic publishing posts. On De-

cember 16, 1934, he was arrested once more, for

alleged complicity in the murder of Sergei Kirov. At

a January 16, 1935, secret trial he was falsely con-

victed for conspiring to kill Kirov and sentenced to

five years imprisonment; an additional five-year

sentence was added after a second secret trial in

July 1935, for allegedly plotting to kill Stalin. In

KAMENEV, LEV BORISOVICH

720

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

July 1936, Kamenev conceded to Stalin’s demand

for a public show trial. This August 1936 specta-

cle concluded with sixteen “Trotskyist-Zinovievist

plotters” convicted on a range of fantastic charges,

including spying for the Nazis. Despite Stalin’s

promise to spare the lives of Old Bolsheviks, all were

condemned to death. On August 24, 1936,

Kamenev was executed alongside Zinoviev.

See also: SHOW TRIALS; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH;

ZINOVIEV, GRIGORY YEVSEYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rabinowitch, Alexander. (1976). The Bolsheviks Come to

Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd. New York:

Norton.

Schapiro, Leonard. (1971). The Communist Party of the So-

viet Union, 2nd ed. New York: Vintage.

Tucker, Robert C. (1990). Stalin in Power: The Revolution

From Above, 1928–1941. New York: Norton.

Voskresensky, Lev. (1989). Names That Have Returned:

Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Grigori Zinovyev, Lev

Kamenev, Grigori Sokolnikov, Martemyan Ryutin.

Moscow: Novosti.

ICHAEL

C. H

ICKEY

KANDINSKY, VASSILY VASSILIEVICH

(1866–1944), artist.

In 1889, after studying at Moscow University

in law and economics, Vassily Vasilievich Kandin-

sky participated in an expedition to the Vologda

province in the north of Russia, sponsored by the

Imperial Society for Natural Sciences, Ethnogra-

phy, and Anthropology. The folk art, music, and

rituals of the far north were influences that

prompted his later decision to abandon his law pro-

fession for art at the age of thirty.

In 1897 Kandinsky moved to Munich to study

at the private art school of Anton Abè, where he

met Alexei von Jawlensky and Marianne Werefkin.

After finishing his studies in the Munich Academy

in 1901, Kandinsky joined the Expressionist asso-

ciation, Phalanx, where he met Gabrielle Münther,

a student at the Phalanx school. Although Kandin-

sky maintained Munich as his principle place of res-

idence, he exhibited in Moscow at the Moscow

Association of Artists, at the Izdebsky Salon in

Odessa, and with the Neue Künstlerveriningung in

Munich, all the while maintaining and strengthen-

ing the contacts between Russian artists and their

German counterparts.

By 1911 Kandinsky was the leading represen-

tative of the Russian avant-garde, participating in

the Jack of Diamonds show and organizing the

Blaue Reiter group with Franz Marc, inviting David

Burliuk and the Hyleans to participate in the exhi-

bition and the Blaue Reiter Almanac. In 1912 he

published his theory of art, Concerning the Spiritual

in Art, in Munich. After the outbreak of World War

I, he returned to Russia and actively participated in

Russian cultural life. After the Revolution of 1917,

he served in IZO Narkompros (The Visual Arts Sec-

tion of the People’s Commissariat for Enlighten-

ment). From 1918 he taught at the SVOMAS (Free

Art Studio), and in 1920 he became director of

INKhUK (The Institute of Artist Culture). By 1921

the art establishment began to turn away from ab-

straction in art toward more realistic representa-

tion, and a disillusioned Kandinsky returned to

Germany to participate in Bauhaus.

KANDINSKY, VASSILY VASSILIEVICH

721

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Lev Kamenev rose through the Bolshevik ranks to become a

member of the Politburo, only to be later executed on Stalin’s

orders. © B

ETTMANN

/CORBIS