1955. Vienna was often a site for international meetings, such as the summit between Nikita S. Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy in 1961, prior to the Berlin and Cuban crises. Austria’s entry into the European Union ended its neutrality and placed its relations with Russia on a new footing as part of Russia’s relationship with the EU. See also: BALKAN WARS; COLD WAR; CRIMEAN WAR; POLAND; SEVEN YEARS’ WAR; THREE EMPERORS’ LEAGUE; VIENNA, CONGRESS OF; WORLD WAR I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allard, Sven. (1970). Russia and the Austrian State Treaty: A Case Study of Soviet Policy in Europe. University Park: Pennsylvania State University. Bridge, F. R. (1990). The Habsburg Monarchy Among the Great Powers, 1815-1918. New York: Berg. Jelavich, Barbara. (1974). St. Petersburg and Moscow: Tsarist and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1814-1974. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press. Jelavich, Barbara. (1991). Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, 1806-1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Poe, Marshall. (2000). A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476-1748. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rossos, Andrew. (1981). Russia and the Balkans: Inter-Balkan Rivalries and Russian Foreign Policy, 1908-1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
AUTOCRACY
Autocracy was the form of government in Russia until 1905 when, in theory, a constitutional monarchy was established. The Russian autocratic order can date its origins to the rise of Moscow during the Mongol occupation. The official conception of the autocracy stressed that all political power and legitimacy emanated from the autocrat, who claimed to be God’s representative on earth. According to Russia’s Fundamental Laws of 1832, “The All- Russian Emperor is an autocratic and unlimited monarch.” He had the ability to overcome society more easily than most of his counterparts to the west of Russia simply because the tenets of autocratic thought did not accept the notion that the monarch should consult social groups or other forms of organized societal elements, and institutional constraints on monarchical power did not exist.
One of the justifications for autocracy was its perceived position as being above all classes. It was portrayed as the ideal arbiter between the various self-interested groups in society, ensuring that exploitation did not take place between them and implementing supreme truth and justice. In addition, autocracy was stressed as Russia’s prime and unique historical force, pushing the country towards greatness and providing for national unity in a multi-ethnic empire and internal stability. The emergence of Russia as an empire and a great European power symbolized for many the autocracy’s achievements.
At the base of autocratic ideology was the idea of a strong union between the people and the autocratic tsar, whose paternalistic image was stressed. While carrying the title of autocrat, he was also known as the “little father” who protected his people from the bureaucracy and worked for their ultimate benefit. There is considerable debate over the extent to which the Soviet political system, and specifically Stalinism, was rooted in this heritage of autocracy.
The autocracy was dependent on the character and modus operandi of the autocrat. As the coordinating pivot of the entire system, he determined
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the autocracy’s actions and reactions. If the autocrat failed to ensure a degree of harmony and unity among the highest servants of the state, or could not fulfil this role and refused to support a minister to act as the coordinating point of the government, he contributed greatly to disorder and paralysis within the autocracy. This scenario was played out during the reign of the last emperor, Nicholas II.
The educated upper classes did not believe that the autocracy was without some constraints. These, however, were not legal, but moral, and based on history, culture, religion, and tradition. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, debate over the future of autocracy increased. The Decembrist Revolt of 1825 was the first sign of open dissatisfaction with autocracy. Forced to embark on a policy of modernization in the middle of the nineteenth century, the autocracy struggled to deal with its consequences. By the end of the nineteenth century, the autocracy was seem more as an obstacle than a positive force. After the Revolution of 1905, the tsar was still called autocratic, but a parliamentary system now existed. Autocracy’s ultimate failure to incorporate to any sufficient degree the greatly enlarged educated and working classes, a step which would have in theory put an end to autocracy, became of the major causes of the collapse of the monarchy. See also: DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION; LIBERALISM; REVOLUTION OF 1905; TOTALITARIANISM; TSAR, TSARINA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dukes, Paul. (1982). The Making of Russian Absolutism 1613-1801. London: Routledge. McDaniel, Tim. (1988). Autocracy, Capitalism, and Revolution in Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rogger, Hans. (1992). Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, 1881-1917. London: Routledge. Verner, Andrew. (1990). The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
The Avars are one of the many people of the Dagestan Republic of the Russian Federation. Numbering 496,077 within Dagestan at the 1989 Soviet census, they formed 28 percent of this republic’s population. This made them the largest ethnic group in Dagestan (the Dargins were second, with 15.8 percent), but still far from a majority. There were a total of 600,989 Avars in the Soviet Union in 1989. Of this total, 97 percent spoke Avar as their first language. Nearly 61 percent, a significant number of the adults, claimed fluency in Russian as a second language.
The Avar language is a member of the Avaro-Andi-Dido group of the Northeast Caucasian family of languages. In Soviet times this would have made the them a part of the larger Ibero-Caucasian family, a classification now seen as a remnant of Soviet druzhba narodov politics. It is written in a modified Cyrillic alphabet that was introduced in 1937. A Latin alphabet had been used previously, from 1928 to 1937. Before that an Arabic script was used. A modest number of books have been published in Avar. From 1984 to 1985, fifty-eight titles were published. Being without their own eponymous ethnic jurisdiction, the Avars were less privileged in this category than the Abkhaz, for example, whose jurisdiction was the Abkhazian Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR). With only one-sixth of the population of the Avars, the Abkhazians nonetheless published some 149 books in their language in the same period.
The most prominent leader of Caucasian resistance against the encroachment of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century was an Avar man named Shamil. Curiously, his power base was centered not among his own people, but among the Chechens immediately to the west.
In the delicate multiethnic balance of Dagestani politics, the Avars have occupied a preeminent, if not a dominant, status, especially in the post-Soviet period. The Avar language is often spoken by members of other ethnic groups within the Dagestan Republic as a means of gaining access to power structures. One of the disputes in Dagestan involves the Chechens. Part of the Chechen Republic’s territory that had been absorbed by Dagestan after the Chechen deportation in 1944 was never returned. Avars occupied some of this territory, and the return of Chechens seeking their land has resulted in ongoing conflict.
The ethnogenesis of the Avars is often linked to the people of the same name who appeared with the Hunnic invasions of late antiquity. These Avars original from East Central Asia with other Turkic102
AVIATION
speaking peoples, and so the connection with a people speaking a vastly different language is difficult to make. See also: CAUCASUS; DAGESTAN DARGINS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
Ethnologue «www.ethnologue.com» Hill, Fiona. (1995). Russia’s Tinderbox: Conflict in the North Caucasus and its Implication for the Future of the Russian Federation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Karny, Yoav. (2000). Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
