Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and instead pressed for its dissolution. In the days that followed, Gorbachev would try in vain to preserve the USSR, but there was little mass or elite support for its continued existence, at least in these three republics.
The treaty noted that “the USSR has ceased to exist as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality” and stated that the activities of bodies of the former USSR would be henceforth discontinued. Its drafters asserted the authority to do this by noting that Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus were the three surviving original founders of the Soviet state in 1922. In its stead, these three republics agreed to form a new organization, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which was designed to foster a variety of forms of economic, political, social, and military cooperation. Specifically, the accords guaranteed equal rights and freedoms to all residing in those states, provided for the protection of ethnic and linguistic minorities, recognized each state’s borders, emphasized the need for arms control, preserved a united military command and common military-strategic space, and pledged cooperation on the Chernobyl disaster. Later that December, eight more former Soviet republics would join the CIS, and by December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag was at last removed from the top of the Kremlin.
No participant has produced a definitive and detailed account of the meeting in Belovezhska Pushcha, and the accords remain the subject of some controversy, particularly in Russia. At the time of its signing, the agreement was widely celebrated, with only five deputies in the Russian legislature voting against its ratification, and Ukraine adding twelve reservations to its ratification, directed toward weakening any sort of new union or commonwealth. However, over the course of time, many, especially in Russia and Belarus, have disputed the right of the three leaders to conclude this treaty and have lamented the lack of open debate and popular input into its conclusion. In March 1996, the Russian Duma voted overwhelmingly to annul it, and this action led many to fear possible Russian attempts to reestablish the Soviet Union or some other form of authority over other republics. Moreover, in the 1990s the accord began to lose popularity among the Russian population, which, public opinion polls repeatedly revealed, began to regret the breakup of the Soviet Union. See also: COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES; UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Library of Congress. “The Minsk Agreement.” (n.d.) «http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/belarus/by_appnb .html». Norwegian Institute of International Affairs-Centre for Russian Studies. (n.d.). “Belovezh Agreement, Creating the CIS.” «http://www.nupi.no/cgi-win/ Russland/krono.exe?895». Norwegian Institute of International Affairs-Centre for Russian Studies. (n.d.). “Reactions to Creation of CIS.” «http://www.nupi.no/cgi-win/Russland/ krono.exe? 2149». Olcott, Martha Brill. (1999). Getting It Wrong: Regional Cooperation and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
(1880-1934), symbolist poet, novelist, essayist.
Andrei Bely was born Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev on October 26, 1880, in Moscow. His father, Nikolai Bugayev, was a professor of mathematics at Moscow University and a renowned scholar; his mother, Alexandra, was dedicated to music, poetry, and theater. This dichotomy was to influence and torment Boris throughout his life: He would resist both parents’ influences while continually seeking syntheses of disparate subjects.
At age fifteen, Boris met the intellectually gifted Soloviev family. Vladimir Soloviev was a philosopher, poet, theologian, and historian whose concept of the “Eternal Feminine” in the form of “Sophia, the Divine Wisdom” became central to Symbolist thought. Vladimir’s younger brother Mikhail took Boris under his wing, encouraging him as a writer and introducing him to Vladimir Soloviev’s metaphysical system.
From 1899 to 1906 Boris studied science, then philosophy at Moscow University. However, his absorption in his writing and independent research interfered with his formal studies. Restless and erratic, he took interest in all subjects and confined himself to none. His idiosyncratic writing style derives in part from his passionate, undisciplined approach to knowledge, a quality that would later
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be deemed decadent by socialist critics, including Leon Trotsky.
Mikhail Soloviev applauded Boris’s early literary endeavors and suggested the pseudonym Andrei Bely (“Andrew the White”). Bely’s four Symphonies (1902-1908) combine poetry, music, and prose. Bely’s first poetry collection, Gold in Azure (Zoloto v lazuri, 1904), uses rhythms of folk poetry and metrical innovations. Like Alexander Blok and other Symbolists, Bely saw himself as a herald of a new era. The poems of Gold in Azure are rapturous in mood and rich in magical, mythical imagery. Bely’s next poetry collections move into murkier territory: Ashes (Pepel, 1909) expresses disillusionment with the 1905 revolution, while Urn (Urna, 1909) reflects his affair with Blok’s wife, Lyubov, which caused hostility, even threats of duels, between the two poets.
Bely followed his first novel, The Silver Dove (Serebryany golub, 1909), with Petersburg (1916), which Vladimir Nabokov considered one of the four greatest novels of the twentieth century (Strong Opinions, 1973). It concerns a terrorist plot to be performed by Nikolai Apollonovich against his father, Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov. The novel’s nonsensical dialogue, ellipses, exclamations, and surprising twists of plot, while influenced by Nikolai Gogol and akin to the work of the Futurists, take Russian prose in an unprecedented direction. The novel’s main character is Petersburg itself, which “proclaims forcefully that it exists.”
While writing Petersburg, Bely found a new spiritual guide in Rudolf Steiner, whose theory of anthroposophy- the idea that each individual, through training, may access his subconscious knowledge of a spiritual realm-would inform Bely’s next novel, the autobiographical Kitten Letayev (Kotik Letayev, 1917-1918).
Like other Symbolists, Bely welcomed the October Revolution of 1917. He moved to Berlin in 1921, but returned in 1923 to a hostile literary climate. Bely tried to make room for himself in the new era by combining Marxism with anthroposo-phy, but to no avail.
A prolific and influential critic, Bely wrote more than three hundred essays, four volumes of memoirs, and numerous critical works, including his famous Symbolism (1910), which paved the way for Formalism, and The Art of Gogol (Masterstvo Gogolya, 1934). He died of arterial sclerosis on August 1, 1934. See also: BLOK, ALEXANDER ALEXANDROVICH; SILVER AGE; SOLOVIEV, VLADIMIR SERGEYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexandrov, Vladimir. (1985). Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Elsworth, J. D. (1983). Andrey Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Maslenikov, Oleg A. (1952). The Frenzied Poets: Andrey Biely and the Russian Symbolists. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mochulsky, Konstantin. (1977). Andrei Bely: His Life and Works, tr. Nora Szalavitz. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.
(1874-1948), philosopher.
Nikolai Berdyayev, a scion of the landed gentry, was born on an estate near Kiev. The Russian philosopher best known in the West, he moved from Marxism to Kantian Idealism to a Christian existentialism meshed with leftist political views. A lifelong opponent of bourgeois society and bourgeois values, in emigration he called capitalism and communism equally unchristian.
As a leader in the religious and philosophical renaissance of the early twentieth century, he decried the atheism and dogmatism of the revolutionary intelligentsia, while also polemicizing against the otherworldliness and passivity enjoined by historical Christianity. He believed that a Third Testament would supersede the Old and the New Testaments.
Expelled from Russia by the Bolshevik government in late 1922, in 1924 he settled near Paris and played an active role in ?migr? and French intellectual and cultural life. His books were translated into many languages. His critique of the revolutionary intelligentsia and his articulation of the Russian idea had a profound impact on late Soviet and post-Soviet thought.
Berdyayev’s philosophy is anthroposophic, personalistic, subjective, and eschatological. He emphasized the supreme value of the person, opposed all forms of objectification, and exalted a freedom
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