Bauer’s films rank among the best early cinema melodramas, comedies, and psychological thrillers. His greatest films complicate melodramatic conventions to tell stories about people caught amid the cultural changes and political instability of the late-tsarist era. Bauer also specialized in the neo-Gothic psychological drama, exploring the dreams and obsessions of urban middle-class characters in an increasingly commercialized world. Typical Bauer characters search futilely for love and meaning in a chaotic world, in which adults lack authority and moral leadership and young people are willful, egocentric, and morally adrift.
Bauer delighted in inventing new ways for the film camera to tell stories. His experiments with camera movement, lighting, and set design created complex three-dimensional spaces. He employed furniture, architecture, fashionable clothing, special effects, and layers of gauzy curtains to animate the social world in which his characters lived and to penetrate the psychological worlds that contained their private visions. He used lighting particularly effectively to enhance the beauty and talent of his actors and the drama of a scene.
His films include Twilight of a Woman’s Soul (1913), Child of the Big City (1914), Daydreams (1915), The Dying Swan (1916), A Life for a Life (1916), and To Happiness (1917). See also: MOTION PICTURES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McReynolds, Louise. (2000). “The Silent Movie Melodrama: Evgenii Bauer Fashions the Heroinic Self.” In Self and Story in Russia, eds. Stephanie Sandler and Laura Engelstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tsivian, Yuri, et al., eds. (1989). Testimoni Silenziosi: Film Russi, 1908-1919 (Silent Witnesses: Russian Films, 1908-1919). Italian and English. Pordenone, Italy: Edizioni Biblioteca dell’immagine; London: British Film Institute. Youngblood, Denise. (1999). The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908-1918. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
(1874-1939), Marxist philosopher and economist.
Born Vladimir Alexandrovich Rudnev in Tula and educated at Moscow University, Vladimir Bazarov (his chosen pseudonym) joined the Bolsheviks in 1904 and produced a Russian translation of Capital between 1907 and 1909. Before 1917 his most important works were philosophical, and his key associate was Alexander Bogdanov; after 1917 his most important contributions were economic, and his key associate was Vladimir Groman. Attacked by Vladimir Lenin in 1908 as an idealist and for criticizing Georgy Plekhanov’s materialism, in fact Bazarov was of positivist philosophical persuasion. After 1900, Bogdanov and Bazarov had attempted to defend their interpretation of Marx against the Legal Marxist revisionists. Instead of the neo-Kantian notion that the individual person must always be treated as an end, never solely as a means, Bazarov championed the collectivist ideal and the proletarian-class perspective, the fusion of human souls as the supreme outcome of communism. Even so Lenin labeled Bazarov a “Machist.”
After the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, Bazarov became a leading Gos-plan (State Planning Commission) commentator on the restoration process occurring in the Soviet economy and on the principles of drafting perspective plans as the first specification of the general plan. He advocated a combination of two methods of planning, one teleological (focusing on ultimate goals), the other genetic (focusing on existing trends), the former predominating in industry, the latter in agriculture. Bazarov analyzed cyclical and secular economic development using models imported from natural science, namely wave mechanics and chemical equilibrium, and he warned of a tendency toward relative underproduction in Soviet-type economies. He also proposed criteria for optimal plans and methods for estimating the structure of consumer demand. Bazarov was arrested in 1930 and bracketed with Menshevik wreckers. See also: GOSPLAN
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bazarov, Vladimir A. (1964). [1925]. “On ‘Recovery Processes’ in General.” In Foundations of Soviet Strategy for Economic Growth, ed. Nicholas Spulber. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Jasny, Naum. (1972). Soviet Economists of the Twenties. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
The beard tax is the best known of a series of measures enacted by Tsar Peter I to transform and regulate the appearance of his subjects. As early as 1698 the tsar ordered many of his prominent courtiers to shave their beards, and in 1699 he began to mandate the wearing of European fashions at court functions. In subsequent years a series of regulations ordered various groups to adopt German (i.e., European) dress. In 1705 decrees were issued prohibiting the buying, selling, and wearing of Russian dress by courtiers, state servitors, and townspeople. In the same year the wearing of beards, which was favored by Orthodox doctrine, was prohibited and the beard tax was instituted. With the exception of the Orthodox clergy, anyone who wanted to wear a beard was ordered to pay a special tax and obtain a token (znak) from government officials. Although no extensive studies have examined the implementation of the beard tax and related decrees, the fact that they had to be repeated upon subsequent occasions would indicate that compliance was far from universal. Old Believers (Orthodox Church members who rejected reforms in ritual and practice) were disproportionately affected by the beard tax and they alone were ordered by law to wear old-style Russian dress (to separate them from the mainstream of society). The beard tax was never a major component of state revenue, and by the reign of Catherine II even the regulations on Old Believers began to be relaxed. See also: OLD BELIEVERS; PETER I; TAXES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hughes, Lindsey. (1998). Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
During the Black Repartition, which occurred during the revolutionary events of 1917 and 1918, Russian peasants seized land owned by noble and absentee landlords and the more substantial peasants, some of whom had consolidated holdings during the Stolypin reforms of 1906-1914. Thus the number of peasant holdings increased markedly, and the size of the average plot declined. Many villages returned to the scattered strips and primitive tools characteristic of tsarist times. Use of the wooden plow, sickle, or scythe were common among the poorer peasants. These subsistence agriculturists typically had one cow or draft animal, along with a small wooden house and naturally had little or nothing to sell in the market. Many poor peasants had been proletarian otkhodniki (migrants) or soldiers before and during the war, but the economic collapse forced them to return to their ancestral villages. The village community (ob-shchina or mir) resumed its authority over the timing of agricultural tasks and occasional repartition. Hence the Bolshevik Revolution constituted a social and economic retrogression in the countryside.
Considering their economic plight, the bed-nyaki, along with the landless batraki, were expected to be rural allies of the proletariat. According to Bolshevik thinking in the period of War Communism and the New Economic Policy, these lower classes would support the government’s policy and would eventually be absorbed into collective or communal farms. Those middle peasants (sered-nyaki) with slightly more land and productive capital were expected to tolerate Bolshevik policy only, while the so-called kulaks would oppose it. In reality the various peasant strata lacked any strong class lines or reliable political orientation. See also: BLACK REPARTITION; KULAKS; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; PEASANTRY; SEREDNYAKI; WAR COMMUNISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lewin, Moshe. (1968). Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, tr. Irene Nove and John Biggart. London: Allen and Unwin.
A traditional Russian term denoting a poor peasant household, one without enough land or capital to support itself without hiring out family members to work on neighbors’ fields.
Bounded by Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, and Ukraine, Belarus is an independent country of about the size of Kansas. In 2000 its population was about 10.5 million. Over the course of its
