THE HISTORY OF RUSSIA

Charles E. Ziegler

     The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations
     Frank W. Thackeray and John E. Findling, Series Editors
     Greenwood Press / Westport, Connecticut · London / 1999

Notable People in the History of Russia

Anna Akhmatova ( 1888-1966), brilliant poet whose themes of love were greatly admired before the Revolution. Her work was condemned for its "bourgeois decadence" during the Stalin era.

Aleksandr I ( 1777-1825), Emperor during the Napoleonic wars (ruled 1801-1825). Aleksandr presided over Russia at the height of its influence in Europe.

Aleksandr II ( 1818-1881), called the Tsar-Liberator because he emancipated the serfs, in 1861. His reforms of the 1860s gave way to increasing conservatism in the 1870s, and he was assassinated by Russian terrorists in 1881.

Aleksandr III ( 1845-1894), reactionary tsar who ruled from 1881 to 1894. He crushed the Russian revolutionary movement. His chief advisor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, called parliamentary democracy "the great lie of our time."

Aleksandr Blok ( 1880- 1921), leading Russian poet of the early twentieth century. Sympathetic to the Revolution, he is best known for his poem "The Twelve."

Leonid Brezhnev ( 1906-1982), General Secretary of the Communist Party, 1964-82. He presided over a period of stagnation and, with Richard Nixon, initiated détente (relaxation of tensions) between East and West.

Nikolai Bukharin ( 1888-1938), popular Bolshevik revolutionary and Communist Party theorist. He was convicted and executed in the last of the great show trials.

Catherine II (The Great, 1729-1796), tsarina of Russia from 1762 to 1796. She was literate and enlightened, but strengthened the repressive institution of serfdom and the nobles' privileges.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( 1821- 1881), brilliant novelist, Russophile, and moralist whose writings included Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and Notes from Underground.

Sergel Eisenstein ( 1893- 1948), the director of a number of cinema classics. His films include The Battleship Potemkin (the 1905 Revolution) and October (the Bolshevik Revolution).

Mikhail Gorbachev ( 1931- ), General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1985 to 1991. He initiated reforms that led to collapse of the USSR. Born in the Stavropol region of southern Russia, he was educated as a lawyer at Moscow State University.

Ivan IV (The Terrible, 1530-1584), Muscovite tsar noted for his cruelty. He crushed the power of the aristocracy through his oprichnina, a centralized political and military authority.

Aleksandr Blok ( 1880- 1921), leading Russian poet of the early twentieth century. Sympathetic to the Revolution, he is best known for his poem "The Twelve."

Nikolai Bukharin ( 1888-1938), popular Bolshevik revolutionary and Communist Party theorist. He was convicted and executed in the last of the great show trials.

Catherine II (The Great, 1729-1796), tsarina of Russia from 1762 to 1796. She was literate and enlightened, but strengthened the repressive institution of serfdom and the nobles' privileges.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( 1821- 1881), brilliant novelist, Russophile, and moralist whose writings included Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and Notes from Underground.

Sergel Eisenstein ( 1893- 1948), the director of a number of cinema classics. His films include The Battleship Potemkin (the 1905 Revolution) and October (the Bolshevik Revolution).

Ivan IV (The Terrible, 1530-1584), Muscovite tsar noted for his cruelty. He crushed the power of the aristocracy through his oprichnina, a centralized political and military authority.

Aleksandr Kerensky ( 1881-1970), Socialist Revolutionary lawyer. He was head of the Provisional Government formed after Nicholas II abdicated and was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in November 1917.

Nikita Khrushchev ( 1894-1971), General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1953 to 1964. He promoted partial reforms and the "deStalinization" of the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Lenin (Ulianov, 1870-1924), dedicated Russian revolutionary, political theorist, founder of the Soviet Union, and creator of the Bolshevik Party.

Mikhail Lomonosov ( 1711-1765), Russian peasant who mastered chemistry, physics, astronomy, and geology. He was also a skilled poet and a talented literary scholar. In tribute to his scientific contributions, Moscow State University bears his name.

Nicholas I ( 1796-1855), reactionary tsar whose reign ( 1825-1855) was guided by the principles of autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationalism. His resistance to reform contributed to Russia's defeat in the Crimean War.

Nicholas II ( 1868-1918), the last Romanov ruler ( 1896-1917), a weak and incompetent figure who could not deal with the growing pressures of modernizing Russia. He and his family were killed by the Bolsheviks early in the Civil War.

Nikon (Nikita Minov) ( 1605-1681), Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church from 1652 to 1658. He initiated the 1667 ecclesiastical reforms that led to the Great Schism, dividing Orthodox and Old Believers.

Boris Pasternak ( 1890- 1960), famous in the West for his novel Dr. Zhivago. Pasternak is revered in Russia more for his beautiful poetry.

Peter I (The Great, 1672-1725), tsar of Russia for nearly four decades. He promoted Westernization of Russia, founded the city of St. Petersburg as the new Russian capital, and presided over a major expansion of Russia.

Aleksandr Pushkin ( 1799-1837), generally regarded as the greatest Russian poet. Pushkin dominated Russia's Romantic Age. An adventurer and womanizer, he was killed in a duel defending his wife's honor.

Gregorii Rasputin (ca. 1865-1916), mystic Siberian peasant who claimed to be able to cure Nicholas and Aleksandra's hemophiliac son. He manipulated court life during World War I and was murdered by the Russian nobility.

Ilya Repin ( 1844-1930), leading artist of the Itinerant school, which in the 1860s and 1870s rejected the classical canon of the St. Petersburg art academy to paint realistic themes of Russian life and history.

Andrei Rublev (ca. 1360-1430), masterful painter of religious icons. This monk from the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery is considered Russia's first national painter.

Andrei Sakharov ( 1921-1989), physicist and human rights activist, father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. Banished to internal exile in the city of Gorky 1980-86, elected to USSR Congress of People's Deputies in 1987.

Mikhail Sholokhov ( 1905-1984), Cossack novelist of the Soviet era. Sholokhov's stories about his native Don region, written in a (talented) socialist realist vein, earned him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1965.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ( 1918- ), Soviet dissident, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, and author of a three-volume exposé on the labor camps, The Gulag Archipelago, and many other novels and historical essays, including A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He was expelled from the USSR in 1974 but returned to post-communist Russia in 1994.

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (Djugashvili, 1879-1953), Georgian revolutionary and General Secretary of the Communist Party. He established himself as absolute dictator of the Soviet Union after Lenin's death.

Peter Tchaikovsky ( 1840- 1893), classical music composer who wrote the 1812 Overture, the ballet Swan Lake, and the opera Eugene Onegin.

Leo Tolstoy ( 1828- 1910), a count whose novels included Anna Karenina and the monumental War and Peace. Tolstoy held a fatalistic view of life grounded in his personal interpretation of Christianity.

Leon Trotsky (Bronstein, 1879-1940), Russian-Jewish revolutionary, gifted orator, and Bolshevik Commissar of War ( 1918-1925). He was edged out of power, deported, and later assassinated on Stalin's orders in Mexico City.

Ivan Turgenev ( 1818- 1883), novelist during the realist period of Russian literature, and author of Fathers and Sons. His collection of short stories, Hunting Sketches, humanized the Russian peasantry of the mid- ninteenth century.

Vladimir I (ca. 980-1015), Kievan prince who adopted Orthodox Christianity as the official religion in 988.

Boris Yeltsin ( 1931- ), Communist Party functionary from Sverdlovsk. He became an ardent reformer in the Gorbachev era and the first elected President of Russia.

Gregorii Zinoviev ( 1883-1936), Bolshevik revolutionary and head of the Comintern from 1919 to 1926. He was one of the principal contenders for power after Lenin's death and was executed during the 1930s show trials.

CHARLES E. ZIEGLER is Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Louisville. He is the author of Foreign Policy and East Asia ( 1993), Environmental Policy in the USSR ( 1987), and dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters.