Everything Flows (27 page)

Abakumov, Viktor Semyonovich (1908–1954): Head of the MGB (formerly known as the NKVD, later as the KGB) from 1946 to 1951. He directed the 1949 purge known as the Leningrad Affair. He was arrested before Stalin’s death “for lack of zeal in combating the Doctors’ Plot.” After Stalin’s death, he was accused of complicity with Beria, although in fact he and Beria were rivals, and executed.

Avvakum (c. 1621–1682): Russian priest who led the opposition to Patriarch Nikon’s reform of Russian Orthodox rituals. He was imprisoned, exiled, and finally burned at the stake. His autobiography, written in a vivid, conversational Russian, is considered a masterpiece.

Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1814–1876): Along with Prince Kropotkin, the most important Russian anarchist; an opponent of Marx.

Bandera, Stepan Andriyovych (1909–1959): One of the leading figures in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a Ukrainian political movement created in 1929 with the aim of establishing an independent Ukrainian state. The military wing of the OUN, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, created in 1942, was a major Ukrainian armed resistance movement.

Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich (1811–1848): The most important nineteenth-century Russian literary critic; a radical and a Westernizer.

Benckendorff, Count Aleksandr Khristoforovich
(1783–1844): A Russian statesman, now best remembered for having established the Third Section—a secret police force—under Nicholas I and for having been, in effect, Pushkin’s personal censor.

Beria, Lavrenty Pavlovich (1899–1953): Head of the NKVD from November 1938 until December 1945, after which he was deputy prime minister until Stalin’s death. During the first months after Stalin’s death, Beria, Malenkov, and Khrushchev formed a ruling troika. In June 1953, however, Beria was arrested, and in December he was executed.

Bernstein, Eduard
(1850–1932): An important German Social Democrat, the founder of the reformist, nonrevolutionary current of socialism known as evolutionary socialism.

Blok, Alexandr (1880–1921): The finest of the Russian symbolist poets, referred to by Anna Akhmatova as “the tragic tenor of the epoch.”

Bolshevik: In 1903, the Russian Social Democrat Party, a Marxist party founded in 1898, split into two factions: the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, and the Mensheviks, led by Martov. Bolshevik means “majority,” and Menshevik means “minority,” but these names are deceptive—the Bolsheviks were, in fact, the smaller faction. They astutely managed to acquire their more impressive name as a result of winning one particular vote, relating to the composition of the editorial board of
Iskra
, the party’s main organ.

Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600): An Italian occult philosopher and cosmologist. Burned at the stake by the Inquisition, Bruno is sometimes seen as one of the first martyrs for science. He was remarkable for both his intelligence and his courage. In Russian culture, however, his name has become a byword for fanaticism; he has often been contrasted with Galileo, who was, of course, more ready to compromise.

Budyonny, Semyon Mikhailovich (1883–1973): A civil war hero and ally of Stalin.

Bukharin, Nikolay Ivanovich (1888–1938): One of the most important of the Old Bolsheviks. In 1926 Bukharin became president of the Communist International, or Comintern. From 1926 to mid-1928 Bukharin was an ally of Stalin; it was Bukharin who first outlined the Stalinist theory of Socialism in One Country. According to this theory, it was no longer necessary to encourage revolution in the capitalist countries, since Russia could and should achieve socialism alone. From mid-1928, Bukharin opposed Stalin’s program of crash industrialization and forced collectivization, supporting a continuation of the more liberal policies (the New Economic Policy) that had been in force since 1924. Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo in late 1929; he and his supporters were by then known as the Right Opposition, or Right Deviationists. In 1934 Bukharin was “rehabilitated” by Stalin and appointed editor of
Izvestiya
. Bukharin was arrested in 1937 and charged with conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state. He was tried in March 1938, in the last of the Moscow Trials, and executed soon afterward.

Bulgakov, Sergey Nikolaevich (1871–1944): A Russian Orthodox theologian, philosopher, and economist. After a period as a Marxist, he returned to Orthodoxy and, in 1903, published
From Marxism to Idealism.
He published another important book,
Unfading Light
, in 1917 and was ordained as a priest in 1918. After rising to prominence in church circles, he was expelled from Russia in late 1922.

Catherine the Great (1729–1796): Empress of Russia from 1762 until 1796. Marrying into the Russian Imperial family, she came to power with the deposition of her husband, Peter III, and presided over a period of growth in Russian influence and culture. During her reign the Russian Empire expanded southward and westward at the expense of both the Ottoman Empire and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. She wanted to be seen as an enlightened despot and corresponded regularly with Voltaire. At the same time, however, she did more to tie the Russian serf to his land and to his lord than any sovereign since Boris Godunov.

Chaadaev, Pyotr Yakovlevich (1794–1856): An important Russian writer and thinker. His
Philosophical Letters
are highly critical of Russia’s intellectual isolation and social backwardness. Only the first of these letters was published during his lifetime; the others circulated in manuscript. This first letter began the long battle, so important in nineteenth-century Russian thought, between the Westerners and the Slavophiles.

Chapaev, Vasily Ivanovich (1887–1919): A Russian Civil War hero.
Chapaev
is the title of a famous 1934 film based on his exploits. He is also the subject of countless Soviet jokes.

Chernov, Viktor Mikhailovich (1873–1952): A founder of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Minister for agriculture in the provisional government in 1917, and chairman of the Constituent Assembly before it was disbanded by the Bolsheviks in January 1918.

Chernyshevsky, Nikolay Gavrilovich (1828–1889): Revolutionary writer and philosopher, the founder of the populist movement, and an important influence on Lenin. In 1862, after being arrested and imprisoned, he wrote the novel
What Is to Be Done?
This was an important inspiration for Lenin and other Russian revolutionaries. The hero is ascetic and ruthlessly disciplined; in order to develop strength for his work as a revolutionary, he sleeps on a bed of nails and eats only meat.

Chichibabin, Aleksey Yevgenyevich (1871–1945): An important chemist who won the Lenin Prize in 1926. After being allowed to go to Paris in 1930, he defected and chose to remain there.

Comintern: The Communist International (also known as the Third International) was an international organization founded in Moscow in March 1919. Its aim was to fight “by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State.” The Comintern held seven World Congresses altogether—the last was in 1935—but it had lost its importance by the late 1920s. It was officially dissolved in 1943.

Constituent Assembly: A democratically elected constitutional body convened after the October Revolution. It met for thirteen hours on January 5 and 6, 1918, before being dissolved by the Bolsheviks, who had won only about a quarter of the overall vote. The Bolsheviks had 168 deputies; the Socialist Revolutionaries around twice as many.

Cunow, Heinrich (1862–1936): A German Social Democrat theoretician, critical of Marx.

Degaev, Sergey
(1857–1920): An active member of the People’s Will, and at the same time an agent for the tsarist secret police, or Okhranka
.
He betrayed several important revolutionaries. He admitted his guilt after being questioned by his comrades and was ordered, under threat of death, to assassinate Colonel Sudeikin, the head of the Okhranka. After assassinating Sudeikin in 1883, he emigrated to the United States, where he lived the rest of his life under a false name.

Denikin, Anton Ivanovich (1872–1947): Commander of the White Armies in the south of Russia during the civil war.

Eikhe, Robert Indrikovich (1890–1940): Old Bolshevik, responsible for grain requisitioning in the mid-1920s, and western Siberia Party chief in the 1930s. He was executed in 1940.

Engels, Friedrich (1820–1895): A German social scientist and philosopher, co-author with Karl Marx of
The Communist Manifesto
(1848).

Etinger, Yakov Gilyarievich (1887–1951): A Jewish doctor accused of killing Zhdanov and Shcherbakov under the pretense of treating them.

Fet, Afanasy Afanasyevich (1820–1892): The most important Russian poet of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The radicals hated him for his conservative political views, but he had a profound influence on the Russian symbolist movement.

Frankfurt, Semyon Mironovich (1888–1937): In charge of the construction of two of the most important Soviet metalworks plants, in Kuznetsk and Orsk-Khalilov. He was arrested and executed in 1937.

Gershuni, Grigory Andreyevich (1870–1908): One of the founders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

Gogol, Nikolay Vasilyevich (1809–1852): A Ukrainian-born Russian writer. The novel
Dead Souls
and the short story “The Overcoat”
(both 1842) are among his masterpieces. Gogol’s contemporaries mostly saw him as a social satirist, not realizing that Gogol saw himself primarily as a prophet and preacher. Gogol intended
Dead Souls
to be the first part of a modern
Divine Comedy
; the next part was to depict the hero’s purification. Gogol, however, ended up burning the second part of the novel in 1852, having come to believe that his imaginative work was sinful. He died soon afterward.

Golovaty, Ferapont Petrovich: An old beekeeper from the Volga region who, in December 1942, told local officials that he wanted to give all his personal savings—100,000 rubles—toward the construction of a warplane for the Stalingrad front. Golovaty’s “personal initiative” received huge publicity.

Gorky, Maksim (1868–1936): A famous writer, seen as a founder of socialist realism. Though a friend of Lenin, he criticized him during and after the October Revolution for his suppression of freedom. During the 1920s and early 1930s he lived mainly in Capri. He visited the Soviet Union several times after 1929 and returned for good in 1932, supporting Stalin’s cultural policies—though probably with misgivings. He undertook several publishing initiatives, one of which was a series with the general title
The History of Factories and Mills
. The circumstances of his death are obscure; the NKVD chief, Genrikh Yagoda, later confessed to having ordered him to be poisoned by his doctors, but this may have been a false confession. It is, nevertheless, possible that he was killed on Stalin’s orders.

Gugel, Yakov Semyonovich (1895–1937): In charge of the construction of Magnitogorsk, a vast metalworks in the Urals. He was arrested and executed in 1937.

Gvakhariya, Georgy Vissarionovich (1901–1937): The extremely successful director of the S. M. Kirov Iron and Steel Plant in the Donbass region, a huge factory employing some twenty thousand workers and hundreds of technical and economic personnel. He was arrested and executed in 1937.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831): A German philosopher, and one of the founders of German idealism.

Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich (1812–1870): An important liberal and pro-Western writer and thinker. From 1857 to 1867, first from London and then from Geneva, he published the radical periodical
The Bell
. Though banned in Russia, it had a wide illegal circulation there and was of real influence.

Hilferding, Rudolf (1877–1941): An Austrian Social Democrat theoretician, critical of Marx.

Ipatyev, Vladimir Nikolaevich (1867–1952): A prominent Russian chemist. He defected to the United States in 1927, where he spent the last twenty years of his life.

Ivan the Terrible (1530–1584): Grand prince of Moscow from 1533 and Tsar of All Russia from 1547. A devout, intelligent, but mentally unstable ruler, whose long reign saw the conquest of the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan and transformed Russia into a huge multiethnic and multiconfessional state. The first half of his reign saw peaceful reforms and modernization. In 1565, however, he created the Oprichnina, a section of mainly northeastern Russia under his own direct rule and policed by his personal servicemen, the
oprichniki
. The Oprichnina was intended as a tool against the powerful hereditary nobility, or boyars, but its creation was an indication of Ivan’s increasing paranoia. The second half of his reign was marked by famine, plague, long unsuccessful wars, and ever increasing violence on the part of the
oprichniki
.

Izotov, Nikita Alekseyevich (1902–1951): A Donbass miner supposed to have produced, in a single day, thirty times more coal than the norm.

Kaledin, Aleksey Maksimovich (1861–1918): A Russian cavalry general who led the Don Cossack White armies in the opening stages of the civil war.

Kalmykov, Betal Edykovich (1893–1940): An important Soviet politician from the north Caucasus, who was first secretary of the Kabardino-Balkariya autonomous republic.

Kalyaev, Ivan Platonovich (1877–1905): A poet, terrorist, and member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. After assassinating Grand Duke Sergey Aleksandrovich in 1905, he was hanged.

Kamenev, Lev Borisovich (né Lev Borisovich Rosenfeld, 1883–1936): An important Old Bolshevik. During the period of Lenin’s illness (1923–1924), Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Stalin allied against Trotsky and succeeded in marginalizing him. In December 1925, however, Kamenev publicly demanded that Stalin be removed from his position as general secretary. With only Zinoviev and the Leningrad delegation behind him, Kamenev was defeated. Kamenev then formed a United Opposition with Zinoviev and Trotsky, but this too was crushed; Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Trotsky were all expelled from the Party in December 1927. After publicly “acknowledging their mistakes,” both Zinoviev and Kamenev were readmitted to the Party. They were courted by Bukharin in the summer of 1928, at the beginning of his own ill-fated struggle with Stalin—but this was reported to Stalin and used against Bukharin. After being arrested in December 1934, Zinoviev and Kamenev were both sentenced to prison. In August 1936, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen others, mostly Old Bolsheviks, were put on trial a second time. The charges including involvement in the assassination of the Old Bolshevik Sergey Kirov in 1934, as well as attempting to kill Stalin. This trial of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center was the first of the Moscow Trials. Like the other defendants, Kamenev was found guilty and shot.