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Documents for "Russian, Soviet, and CIS History":
  • Adrianople, Treaty of also called Treaty of Edirne, 1829, peace treaty between Russia and the Ottoman Empire (see Russo-Turkish Wars ). Turkey gave Russia access to the mouths of the Danube and additional territory on the Black Sea, opened the Dardanelles to all commercial vessels, granted autonomy to Serbia, promised autonomy...
  • August Coup attempted coup (Aug. 18-22, 1991) against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. On the eve of the signing ceremony for a new union treaty for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, members of the Politburo and the heads of the Soviet military and security services detained...
  • Bolshevism and Menshevism the two main branches of Russian socialism from 1903 until the consolidation of the Bolshevik dictatorship under Lenin in the civil war of 1918-20. The Russian Social Democratic Labor party, secretly...
  • boyars upper nobility in Russia from the 10th through the 17th cent. The boyars originally obtained influence and government posts through their military support of the Kievan princes. Their power and...
  • Communist party in Russia and the Soviet Union, political party that until 1991 exercised all effective power within the Soviet Union, and, as the oldest and for a long time the only ruling Communist party in the...
  • Cossacks Rus. Kazaki, Ukr. Kozaky, peasant-soldiers in Ukraine and in several regions of Russia who, until 1918, held certain privileges in return for rendering military service. The first Cossack companies were formed in the 15th...
  • Decembrists in Russian history, members of secret revolutionary societies whose activities led to the uprising of Dec., 1825, against Czar Nicholas I. Formed after the Napoleonic Wars, the groups comprised officers who had served in Europe and had been influenced by Western liberal ideals. They advocated the establishment of representative...
  • duma Russian name for a representative body, particularly applied to the Imperial Duma established as a result of the Russian Revolution of 1905. The parliamentary organization of 1906, largely the...
  • Emancipation, Edict of 1861, the mechanism by which Czar Alexander II freed all Russian serfs (one third of the total population). All personal serfdom was abolished, and the peasants were to receive land from the landlords and pay them for it. The state advanced the money to the landlords...
  • Fedor For Russian rulers thus named, use Feodor.
  • Five-Year Plan Soviet economic practice of planning to augment agricultural and industrial output by designated quotas for a limited period of usually five years. Nations other than the former USSR and the Soviet...
  • glasnost Soviet cultural and social policy of the late 1980s. Following his ascension to the leadership of the USSR in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev began to promote a policy of openness in public discussions about current and historical problems. The policy was termed glasnost [openness]. The brutality of the Stalin era, such as the great purges and the Katyn massacre, were acknowledged, and the corruption and stagnation of the Brezhnev era were sharply criticized. Soviet leaders became more receptive both to the media and to foreign leaders as a new period of detente opened between East and West. Gorbachev hoped that a candidness...
  • Golden Horde, Empire of the Mongol state comprising most of Russia, given as an appanage to Jenghiz Khan's oldest son, Juchi, and actually conquered and founded in the mid-13th cent. by Juchi's son, Batu Khan , after the Mongol or Tatar (see Tatars ) conquest of Russia. The name was derived from the Russian designation Zolotaya Orda, used by the Russians to designate the Mongol host that had set up a magnificent gleaming tent camp along the Volga River. The empire, also called the Kipchak Khanate, had its capital first at Sarai...
  • Gulistan, Treaty of 1813, signed by Russia and Iran (Persia) at Gulistan, a village in what is now NW Azerbaijan. It ended the Russo-Persian war that had begun in 1804. Persia ceded the khanates forming the...
  • Kadets members of the Russian Constitutional Democratic party. Founded in 1905, the Kadets sought a constitutional government that would guarantee universal suffrage, freedom of speech, a popularly...
  • Kievan Rus medieval state of the Eastern Slavs. It was the earliest predecessor of modern Ukraine and Russia. Flourishing from the 10th to the 13th cent., it included nearly all of present-day Ukraine and Belarus and part of NW European Russia, extending as far N as Novgorod and Vladimir. According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, a medieval history, the Varangian Rurik established himself at Novgorod c.862 and founded a dynasty. His successor, Oleg or Oleh (d. c.912), shifted his attention to the south, seized Kiev (c.879), and established the new Kievan state. The Varangians were also known as Rus or Rhos ; it is possible that this name was early extended to the Slavs of the Kievan state, which became known as Kievan Rus. Other theories trace the name Rus to a Slavic origin. Oleg united the Eastern Slavs and freed them from the suzerainty of the Khazars. His successors were Igor or Ihor (reigned 912-45) and Igor's widow, St. Olga or Olha, who was regent until about 962. Under Olga's son, Sviatoslav or Svyatoslav (d. 972), the Khazars were crushed, and Kievan power was extended to the lower Volga and N Caucasus. Christianity was introduced by Vladimir I or Volodymyr I (reigned 980-1015), who adopted (c.989) Greek Orthodoxy from the Byzantines. The reign (1019-54) of Vladimir's son, Yaroslav the Wise, represented the political and cultural apex of Kievan Rus. After his death the state was divided into principalities ruled by his sons; this soon led to civil strife. A last effort for...
  • Kuchuk Kainarji, Treaty of 1774, peace treaty signed at the end of the first of the Russo-Turkish Wars undertaken by Catherine II of Russia against Sultan Mustafa III of the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). It was signed at the...
  • Kulikovo, battle of 1380, victory of Grand Duke Dmitri Donskoi of Moscow over Khan Mamai of the Golden Horde. The battle was fought on a plain by the Don near the present village of Kurkino, Russia, SE of Tula. Although the victory was the first Russian defeat of the Tatars, it did not eliminate Mongol...
  • Lodomeria Latinized name of the duchy of Volodymyr. See Volodymyr-Volynskyy.
  • mir former Russian peasant community. The mir, which antedated serfdom (16th cent.) in Russia, persisted in its primitive form until after the Russian Revolution of 1917. In a community of free...
  • Moscow, grand duchy of state existing in W central Russia from the late 14th to mid-16th cent., with the city of Moscow as its nucleus. Its formation and eventual ascendancy over other Russian principalities and over the...
  • narodniki Russian populists, adherents of an agrarian socialist movement active from the 1860s to the end of the 19th cent. Influenced by the writings of Aleksandr Herzen , the narodniki attempted to adapt socialist doctrine to Russian conditions; they envisaged a society in which sovereignty would rest with small self-governing economic units resembling the traditional Russian...
  • NEP see New Economic Policy.
  • New Economic Policy (NEP), official economic reconstruction program of the USSR from 1921 to 1928. It replaced the economic policies of "war Communism" (1918-21), an emergency program established by Lenin during the civil war. War Communism had included forced requisition of grain, nationalization of all trade and industry, strict control of labor, payment in kind, and confiscation of financial...
  • Pan-Slavism theory and movement intended to promote the political or cultural unity of all Slavs. Advocated by various individuals from the 17th cent., it developed as an intellectual and cultural movement in the 19th cent. It was stimulated by the rise of romanticism and nationalism, and it...
  • perestroika Soviet economic and social policy of the late 1980s. Perestroika [restructuring] was the term attached to the attempts (1985-91) by Mikhail Gorbachev to transform the stagnant, inefficient command economy of the Soviet Union into a decentralized market-oriented economy. Industrial managers and local government and party officials were granted...
  • 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 from, the government, there were many pogroms throughout Russia. Soldiers and police often looked on without interfering...
  • Portsmouth, Treaty of 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...
  • 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 of influence. The Russian...
  • Slavophiles and Westernizers designation for two groups of intellectuals in mid-19th-century Russia that represented opposing schools of thought concerning the nature of Russian civilization. The differences between them,...
  • Socialist Revolutionary party in Russian history, an agrarian party founded by various Populist groups in 1901. Its program, adopted in 1906, called for the overthrow of the autocracy, the establishment of a classless society,...
  • Theodore For Russian rulers thus named, use Feodor.
  • Turkmanchai, Treaty of 1828, agreement signed by Russia and Persia at the village of Turkmanchai (Torkaman), East Azerbaijan prov., NW Iran. It concluded the Russo-Persian war that had begun in 1825 and forced Persia to...
  • Waldemar For Russian rulers thus named, use Vladimir.
  • zemstvo [Rus., from zemlya =land], local assembly that functioned as a body of provincial self-government in Russia from 1864 to 1917. The introduction of the zemstvo system was one of the major liberal reforms in the reign...
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