followed two days later by Greece. The Balkan armies quickly defeated the Turks. Bulgarian forces reached the outskirts of Istanbul, and in May 1913 the Treaty of London brought the First Balkan War to a close. The peace did not last long, however, as the creation of a new Albanian state and quarrels among the victors over the spoils in Macedonia led to embitterment, especially on the part of Sofia, which felt cheated out of its Macedonian claims.
On the night of June 29-30, 1913, one month following the peace treaty, Bulgarian troops moved into the north-central part of Macedonia. The other members of the coalition, joined by Romania and, ironically, the Turks, joined in the counterattack. Bulgaria was quickly defeated and, by the Treaty of Bucharest, August 10, 1913, was forced to cede most of what it had gained in Macedonia during the First Balkan War. In addition, the Ottoman Empire regained much of eastern Thrace, which it had lost only months earlier. Romania’s share of the spoils was the southern Dobrudja.
Serbia was the principal victor in the Balkan Wars, gaining the lion’s share of Macedonia as well as Kosovo. Bulgaria was the loser. In many respects, Russia lost as well because the continuing instability in the Balkans undermined its need for peace in the region, a situation clearly demonstrated by the events of the summer of 1914. See also: ALBANIANS, CAUCASIAN; BUCHAREST, TREATY OF; BULGARIA, RELATIONS WITH; GREECE, RELATIONS WITH; MONTENEGRO, RELATIONS WITH; SERBIA, RELATIONS WITH; TURKEY, RELATIONS WITH; YUGOSLAVIA, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jelavich, Barbara. (1964). A Century of Russian Foreign Policy, 1814-1914. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
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Rossos, Andrew. (1981). Russia and the Balkans: Inter-Balkan Rivalry and Russian Foreign Policy, 1908-1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
1950s, but only after experiencing a significant diminution of their population. The alienation of exile has been compounded by the ongoing difficulty of returning to territory that had, in the meantime, been occupied by outsiders. Post-Soviet ethnic conflict has followed along these contours.
The Balkars are a small ethnic group in the northwest Caucasus. They are one of the titular nationalities of the autonomous Karbardino-Balkar Republic in the Russian Federation. In the 1989 Soviet Census, they numbered 85,126. Of that number, 93 percent considered Balkar to be their native language, while 78 percent considered themselves fluent in Russian as a second language. This means that nearly all adults spoke Russian to some extent.
The Balkar language is essentially identical to the Karachay language, spoken in the Karachay-Cherkess Republic. This split is an example of the way in which some languages were fractured into smaller groups for the sake of creating smaller ethnic identities. The Karachay-Balkar language itself is a member of the Ponto-Caspian group of western Turkic languages. Other languages closely related are Kumyk in Dagestan, Karaim in Lithuania, and the Judeo-Crimean Tatar language of Uzbekistan.
Following the general pattern of alphabet politics in the Soviet Union, Balkar was written with an Arabic script until 1924, from 1924 to 1937 with a Latin alphabet, and finally from 1937 to the present in a modified Cyrillic. A modest number of books were published in Balkar during the Soviet period. From 1984 to 1985, for example, fifty- eight titles were published. This is a reasonable number in the Soviet context for the size of their group and for sharing an ethnic jurisdiction. This number is higher than some of the Dagestani peoples who had larger populations, but no jurisdiction of their own.
The Balkar people, as Turks, find themselves surrounded by Circassians and their close neighbors in the northwest Caucasus. They are linguistically a remnant of Turkish groups who migrated along the Eurasian steppe. Historically, in addition to the disruptions of the nineteenth-century Russian conquest of the Caucasus, the Balkars were one of the peoples who suffered deportation at the end of World War II for their alleged collaboration with the Nazis. They were allowed to return in the See also: CAUCASUS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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, Yo’av. (2000). Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The origins of the Russian ballet, like those of most other Western art forms, can be traced to eighteenth- century St. Petersburg, where Empress Anna Ivanovna established the first dancing school in Russia in 1738. This school, whose descendant is the present-day Academy of Russian Ballet, was headed by a series of European dancing masters, the first of whom was Jean-Baptiste Land?.
By the 1740s, Empress Elizabeth employed three balletmasters. The continued presence of ballet in Russia was assured by Catherine II, who established a Directorate of Imperial Theaters in 1766, saw to the construction of St. Petersburg’s Bolshoi Theater in 1783, and incorporated Land?’s school into the Imperial Theater School she founded in 1779.
The tenure of French balletmaster Charles-Louis Didelot (1767-1837) in St. Petersburg (1801-1831) marked the first flowering of the national ballet. The syllabus of the imperial school began to assume its present-day form under Didelot, and his use of stage machinery anticipated the exploitation of stage effects to create atmosphere and build audiences for the ballet across Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. After Didelot’s departure, Jules Perrot led the Petersburg ballet from 1848 to 1859. Arthur Saint-L?on succeeded Perrot and choreographed in St. Petersburg until 1869.
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Dancers from the Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg perform on stage in the 1990s. © BOB KRIST/CORBIS
Russian ballet began to assume its familiar form during the decades of Marius Petipa’s (1818-1910) work in the Imperial Theaters. Petipa came to Petersburg as a dancer in 1847, and became balletmaster in 1862. The ballets Petipa choreographed in Russia functioned as a choreographic response to nineteenth-century grand opera; they featured as many as five acts with numerous scene changes. If Perrot is identified primarily with the development of narrative in Russian ballet, and Saint-L?on could be accused of overemphasizing the ballet’s divertissement at the expense of the story line, Petipa combined the two trends to make a dance spectacle with plots as complex as their choreography. The ballets Petipa staged in St. Petersburg still serve as cornerstones of the classical ballet repertory: Sleeping Beauty (1890), Swan Lake (1895) (with Lev Ivanov), Ray-monda (1898), Le Corsaire (1869), Don Quixote (1869), and La Bayad?re (1877). The distinctive features of nineteenth-century dance represent developments of the Russian school of dancing under Petipa’s leadership. The new focus on the female dancer was the result of recent developments in point technique, which allowed the ballerina not only to rise up on the tips of her toes, but to remain posed there, and eventually to dance on them. Petipa’s choreography emphasizes two nearly opposite facets of the new technique that these technical advances afforded: first, the long supported adagio, in which the woman is supported and turned on point by her partner; second, the brilliant allegro variations (solos) Petipa created for his ballerinas, to exploit the steel toes of this new breed of female dancer.
The work of two ballet reformers characterize the late- and post-Petipa era. Alexander Gorsky became the chief choreographer of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater in 1899 and attempted to imbue the ballet with greater realism along the lines of the dramas of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater. Gorsky’s ballets featured greater cohesion of design elements (sets and costumes) and an unprecedented attention to detail. In Petersburg, Michel Fokine fell under the spell of dancer Isadora Duncan and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Influenced by the free dance of the former, and by the latter’s experiments in stylized symbolist theater, Fokine pioneered a new type of ballet: typically a one-act work without the perceived expressive confines of nineteenth-century mime and
