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Count Sergei Yulyevich Witte
Count Sergei Yulyevich Witte , 1849-1915, Russian premier. A railway administrator, he became minister of communications (1892) and minister of finance (1892-1903). He introduced the gold standard, reformed finances, encouraged the development of Russian industries with the help of foreign capital, ...
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Russo-Japanese War
Russo-Japanese War 1904-5, imperialistic conflict that grew out of the rival designs of Russia and Japan on Manchuria and Korea . Russian failure to withdraw from Manchuria and Russian penetration into N Korea were countered by Japanese attempts to negotiate a division of the area into spheres o...
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Kronshtadt
Kronshtadt , city, NW European Russia, on the small island of Kotlin in the Gulf of Finland, c.15 mi (20 km) from Saint Petersburg . It is one of the chief naval bases for the Russian Baltic fleet. The harbor is icebound for several months each year. It was founded (1703) by Peter I as a port and a...
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pogrom
pogrom , Russian term, originally meaning "riot," that came to be applied to a series of violent attacks on Jews in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th cent. Pogroms were few before the assassination of Alexander II in 1881; after that, with the connivance of, or at least without hindrance ...
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Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov , 1905-84, Russian novelist. Sholokhov won international fame for an epic novel of his native land, The Silent Don (4 vol., 1928-40; tr. in 2 vol., And Quiet Flows the Don, 1934, and The Don Flows Home to the Sea, 1941). The work, which won a Stalin Prize in 19...
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Maxim Maximovich Litvinov
Maxim Maximovich Litvinov , 1876-1951, Russian revolutionary and Soviet diplomat. A Jew, he changed his name from Wallach after joining the Social Democratic party. He became a member of the Bolshevik wing after the party split (1903). He took part in the Revolution of 1905 and subsequently spent ye...
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Nicholas II
Nicholas II 1868-1918, last czar of Russia (1894-1917), son of Alexander III and Maria Feodorovna .
Road to Revolution
Nicholas was educated by private tutors and the reactionary Pobyedonostzev . Alexander III gave his son little training in affairs of state, and Nicholas proved to be...
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Valentin Petrovich Katayev
Valentin Petrovich Katayev , 1897-1986, Russian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. Katayev's novels portray almost the entire range of Soviet life, from the period of the New Economic Policy ( The Embezzlers, 1926, tr. 1929) through the first Five-Year Plan ( Time, Forward!, 1932, tr. 1...
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Treaty of Portsmouth
Treaty of Portsmouth 1905, treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War. It was signed at the Portsmouth Naval Base, New Hampshire, on Sept. 5, 1905. Negotiations leading up to the treaty began in the spring of 1905 when Russia had suffered severe defeats and Japan was in financial difficulties. Therefore,...
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Vladivostok
Vladivostok , city (1989 pop. 634,000), capital of Maritime Territory (Primorsky Kray), Russian Far East, on a peninsula that extends between two bays of the Sea of Japan. It is the chief Russian port on the Pacific (kept open in winter by icebreakers), the terminus of the Trans-Siberian RR and the ...
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