November and December in Russian History

1957

november 3

The dog Laika shot into history on this day 45 years ago, becoming the first mammal to orbit the Earth, just one month after Sputnik circled the Earth as the first satellite.

1967

november 4

Moscow’s Ostankino Television Tower became operational on this day. At a height of 533 meters, it is one of the tallest structures in the world and the tallest free-standing structure in Europe and Asia. Built with three meter thick rings, it weighs over 51 thousand tons and houses television and radio stations, a meteorological station and a three story restaurant. It has had an infamous place twice in recent history, first during the 1993 coup attempt, when armed skirmishes took place there, and in 2000, when a fire caused millions in damage.

1852

november 6

Writer Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak (1852-1912) was born on this day, 150 years ago. His novels about the emergence of capitalism in Siberia and the customs and morals of the workers in the first Ural mines brought him widespread fame.

1902

november 7

One hundred years ago, actress Rina Zelyonaya was born in Tashkent. She worked in radio, film and on the stage in Moscow and Leningrad for over 50 years, beginnning in 1920. In her over 40 roles in film, her talent for creating distinct, memorable characters shone through. She is best remembered for her portrayal of aunt Ganymede in the screen adaptation of Yuri Olesha’s Three Fat Men (1966)—a small role which she turned into a show-stealer, and for her Mrs. Hudson in many Russian film adaptations of Sherlock Holmes adventures. Zelyonaya died in 1991 in Moscow.

1917

november 7

Petrograd soldiers and sailors occupied the Winter Palace, arresting the Provisional Government and inaugurating the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing civil war.

1887

november 13

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, a pathbreaking botanist and geneticist was born on this day. A tireless scientist, he traveled the world on expeditions to gather rare plant species and spearheaded an effort to describe and archive plants and seeds (which by 1940 had over 200,000 samples). He was the first president of the All Union Academy of Agricultural Science from 1929-1935 and vice president from 1935-1940. Beginning in 1936, Vavilov became the most public and outspoken opponent of the ideological genetic theories of Lysenko. Yet, while he disagreed with Lysenko et al, he allowed that they had a right to their differing opinions. The Powers the Be, however, did not share Vavilov’s intellectual generosity. He was arrested in 1940, accused of espionage and anti-Soviet activity, which he courageously refuted in his trial. He was given the death penalty but died in prison in January 1943.

1842

november 15

The influential Russian populist, Nikolai Mikhailovsky (1842-1904), was born on this day. An articulate follower of Lavrov and Chernyshchevsky, Mikhailovsky felt that Russian peasant society offered an historical alternative to capitalism at then Russia’s stage of development, insofar as it allowed for a more rounded and fully valued development of the individual. He saw the counterpoint of individualism and the state to be a driving force in history and developed a conception of “heroes” and “the masses” that warned against the dangers of the masses blindly following heroes, to the detriment of individualism. He was an eloquent critic of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev and others, and a leading polemicist against Marxism.

1942

november 19

The Soviet counter-attack at Stalingrad began on this day. The battle, which is the focus of our article on page 34, was the turning point in the Second World War.

1792

november 20

Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792-1856), was born today. One of the earliest graduates of the new Kazan University, Lobachevsky went on to become a professor and later rector of that institution, leading it skillfully through its early development. As a mathematician, he developed ground-breaking theories of non-Euclidean or hyperbolic geometry. His work was dismissed during his lifetime and credit for his discoveries often went to his German or French counterparts. But his work helped free the thinking of late 19th and early 20th century mathematicians, laying the mathematical foundations for relativity theory.

1942

november 22

Russian theater and film actor Vasily Bochkaryov turns 60 today. A prolific actor on the Russian stage (Theater on Malaya Bronnaya, Stanislavsky Theater, Maly Theater), Bochkaryov has appeared in hundreds of plays since his debut in 1964, working with almost every important director and actor of his time. He has also appeared in numerous films, including Who Pays for Success? and Such a Short Long Life.

1892

november 26

Alexander Osmyorkin (1892-1953), artist and representative of the group “Bubnovy valet” was born on this day. Like all “bubnovaletsy,” Osmerkin was greatly influenced by Cezanne, as well as French fauvism and cubism. His earliest work was cubist, but later he moved toward impressionism. He did many portraits, several noted landscapes and the “zakaznoy” historical painting “The Taking of the Winter Palace” (1927). He also worked as a teacher and as a stage actor.

1842

november 27

Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, a geographer and theoretician of anarchism, was born on this day into a family descended from the ancient line of Rurik. After many years in military service, Kropotkin conducted several important geological surveys, then, in the 1870s, fell under the influence of anarchism while traveling abroad. He was an active propagandist and was thrown in a tsarist jail in 1874, left Russia in 1876, and subsequently lived abroad for much of the next 40 years of his life, advocating “communal anarchism.”

1927

december 6

Russian film director and scriptwriter Vladimir Naumov was born 75 years ago. Much of his impressive body of work is in the romantic, epic war film genre (and most of it with Alexander Alov), including notable films such as Peace to All Who Enter (1962) and Teheran-43 (1981). In the 1960s, he experimented in fantastic works based on Dostoyevsky and Bulgakov, but later returned to more conventional subjects, notably, his films on the Stalin era, Law (1989) and Ten Years Without Right of Correspondence (1990). His 1971 film with Alov, The Flight, was notable for its sympathetic treatment of White officers in the Civil War, and also received much critical acclaim.

1237

december 7

This date marks the beginning of the Mongol-Tatar invasion of Rus’ by Khan Batu. The infamous Tatar Yoke is traditionally dated from six years later and lasting through 1480.

1902

december 7

This is the centenary of graphic artist and master book illustrator Tatiana Mavrina (1902-1996). Born in Nizhny Novgorod, she studied in Moscow and, together with her husband, Nikolai Kuzmin, was a member of the “Group 13” from 1929-1931—a group that fought to keep art free of ideological tentacles. She went on to become an esteemed illustrator of fairy tales and, among hundreds of other works, compiled a multi-year cycle of paintings Around Old Russian Towns (1942-1968). Her art work embodied many traditions of Russian folk art, of which she was an avid collector.

1802

december 8

The bicentennial of the birth of poet and Decembrist Alexander Odoyevsky (see Russian Life Dec., 1995) is today. His exile to Siberia likely prevented a full flowering of his artistic talent. He died in 1839, at the age of just 37.

1892

december 11

Master of the sculpted portrait Sarra Lebedeva (1892-1967) was born 110 years ago today. Her deeply impressionistic portraits skillfully employ their medium to provide rich psychological interpretations. One of her most famous works is her 1925 sculpture of Felix Dzerzhinsky, which shows a man wearied by his work, but at the same time a fearsome emblem of state power. Lebedeva also created many notable sculptures of artists and famous persons, from Mikhoels and Mukhina to Tvardovsky, Efros and Chkalov. Her 1965 portrait of Boris Pasternak set over his grave until the 1990s, when it was replaced with a replica.

1932

december 16

Composer Rodion Shchedrin was born on this day into a family of professional musicians. He studied classical composition and achieved an early and enduring success, primarily through his theatrical works, including such ballets as “Little Humpbacked Horse” (1960), “Carmen Suite” (1967), “Anna Karenina” (1972), “Dead Souls” (1977), “Lady with a Dog” (1986) and “Lolita” (1993). He has also been a highly prolific composer of works for piano and for orchestra, as well as soundtracks for film. His early works were in a very conventional, Soviet folkloric style, but later his style evolved to what is best described as “eclectic,” unifying elements of folk art and the avant-garde. He himself has called his art “post-avant-garde.” He is a virtuoso pianist and often performs his own works. In Russia, Shchedrin’s name often goes hand in hand with that of his wife, world famous ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, to whom he dedicated “Carmen Suite.”

1872

december 16

General Anton Denikin, head of the White forces in the Russian Civil War (see article, page 50), was born on this day 130 years ago. He fought in the Russo-Japanese War and, in WWI, rose to the rank of Commander-in-Chief of the South-Western Army Group in August 1917. He supported Kornilov’s revolt and thus was subsequently imprisoned by the Bolsheviks. He escaped from prison in October 1917 and joined Kornilov’s army in the south. When Kornilov died in April 1918, Denikin became commander of the White forces. Late in 1918, the Whites fought back against the Bolsheviks with modest success, but soon suffered a series of defeats that beat Denikin’s army back to the Crimea. In April 1920, Denikin decided to leave Russia and spent most of the rest of his life in France. He died in 1947.

1957

december 18

Actor of stage and film, Igor Sklyar, turns 45 today. Sklyar rocketed to fame with his roles as Kostya Ivanov in the musical by Karen Shakhnazarov, Jazzmen (1983), but had actually gotten his start in film ten years earlier, as Nikolai Maslenka in the film Youth of the Northern Fleet (1973). In Jazzmen he showed not only a superb film presence, but also a rare talent among actors to sing, dance, and play a musical instrument. An actor with wide-ranging skills, he has skillfully acted the part of a fascist, a driver, a singer, a village idiot-savant, and a businessman. He won the award for Best Male Actor (Kinotavr, 1994) for his role as Sergei Kozhin in Year of the Dog. In the 1980s Sklyar also won acclaim on the pop stage for his joyful song “For a week, till the 2nd.”

1942

december 30

Vladimir Bukovsky, one of the most famous dissidents of the late Soviet era, turns 60 today. Arrested numerous times in the mid-1960s for demonstrating openly against the Soviet government, he spent 12 years confined to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps for his views and actions. In 1976 he was deported from the USSR in a prisoner swap with a Chilean Communist, and has since lived in Cambridge, England, where he continues to work for human rights.

The father of Russian drama, Aleksandr Sumarokov, was born 285 years ago, on November 14, 1717. Also an extremely prolific poet who wrote in every conceivable genre, he was the first Russian nobleman to take on literature as a vocation and did a great deal to increase the respect given to literature by Russian society. A staunch rationalist and idealist, he could stomach neither parochial provincialism nor mercenary court versifying, and had a very difficult and often self-righteous character, incited, some argue, by a long competition with his literary superior, Mikhail Lomonosov. In 1756, Sumarokov was appointed the first director of the Russian Theater in Petersburg, which grew largely due to his efforts (and his plays, which formed the theater’s first repetoire). He adhered to the theory of “enlightened monarchy” and welcomed Catherine II’s ascension to power, but she turned out to be hostile to his liberal views and his difficult personality. As a result, he died in poverty in 1761.