King Nebuchadnezzar’s prophetic dream); the ladder (a conflation of Jacob’s ladder and St. John Climacus’s divine ladder of perfection); and water (baptism). Readers are directed to a detailed table of contents, the first of its kind, which sets forth the book’s unique design and permits individual chapters to be swiftly located. Comparison of the three earliest surviving copies of the text (the Chudov, Tomsk, and Volkov copies, all dated in the 1560s), shows how original entries were altered, supplemented, and sometimes shifted from their initial textual positions by the editors to support their ideological interests.
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The book’s value as an authoritative source and a statement of the nation’s identity was recognized by Peter the Great, who in 1716 ordered a synopsis to be used for his own planned, but never executed, history of Russia. Because of the book’s importance for the canon, the Russian Academy commissioned a printed edition in 1771. As the first cohesive narrative of national history, the Book of Degrees served as a model for subsequent histories of Russia and as a sourcebook for mythological and artistic reconstructions of an idealized past. See also: CHRONICLES; IVAN IV; MAKARY; MUSCOVY
Lenhoff, Gail. (2001). “How the Bones of Plato and Two Kievan Princes Were Baptized: Notes on the Political Theology of the‘Stepennaia kniga.’” Welt der Slaven 46:313-330. Miller, David. (1979). “The Velikie Minei Chetii and the Stepennaia Kniga of Metropolitan Makarii and the Origins of Russian National Consciousness.” Forschungen zur osteurop?ischen Geschichte 26: 263-282.
GAIL LENHOFF
is accused in an anonymous essay, preserved in a single copy of the Sophia First Chronicle, of plotting to marry the Lithuanian nobleman Michael Olelkovich and rule Novgorod with him under the sovereignty of the Lithuanian king. The Cathedral of St. Sophia, seat of the archbishops and emblem of Novgorodian independence, would have thereby come under Catholic jurisdiction. No other sources corroborate these charges against Marfa, although her son Dmitry, who served as mayor during 1470 and 1471, fought against Moscow in the decisive Battle of Shelon (July 14, 1471) and was executed at the order of Ivan III on July 24, 1471. Her other son Fyodor has also been identified with the pro-Lithuanian faction in Novgorod. The evidence for his activity is ambiguous. Nevertheless, he was arrested in 1476 and exiled to Murom, where he died that same year. Following the final campaign of 1478, Ivan III ordered that Muscovite governors be introduced into Novgorod and that the landowning elite be evicted and resettled. On February 7, 1478, Marfa was arrested. Her property was confiscated, and she was exiled. The date of her death is not known. See also: CATHEDRAL OF ST. SOPHIA, NOVGOROD; IVAN III; MUSCOVY; NOVGOROD THE GREAT; POSADNIK
BORETSKAYA, MARFA IVANOVNA
Charismatic leader of the Novgorodian resistance to Muscovite domination in the 1470s.
Marfa Boretskaya (“Marfa Posadnitsa”) was born into the politically prominent Loshinsky family, and married Isaac Andreyevich Boretsky, a wealthy boyar, who served as mayor (posadnik) of Novgorod from 1438 to 1439 and in 1453. She bore two sons, Dmitry and Fyodor. Marfa was widowed in the 1460s but remained one of the wealthiest individuals in Novgorod who owned slaves and sizable estates. Peasants on her lands to the north of Novgorod engaged in fishing, fur hunting, livestock raising, and salt boiling. Her southern estates produced edible grains and flax.
By the middle of the fifteenth century, the relations between the principalities of Moscow and Novgorod, long strained by chronic disputes over trade, taxes, and legal jurisdiction, intensified into overt hostilities. The campaign of 1471 was purportedly undertaken by Ivan III as a response to the efforts of a party of Novgorodian boyars to ally themselves with King Casimir of Lithuania. Marfa
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lenhoff, Gail, and Martin, Janet. (2000). “Marfa Boret-skaia, Posadnitsa of Novgorod: A Reconsideration of Her Legend and Her Life.” Slavic Review 59(2): 343-368.
Borodino was the climactic battle of the Campaign of 1812, which took place on September 7. Napoleon had invaded Russia hoping to force a battle near the frontier, but he pursued when the Russian armies retreated. His efforts to force a decisive battle at Smolensk having failed, Napoleon decided to advance toward Moscow, hoping to force the Russian army, now under the command of Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, to stand and fight. Pressed hard by Tsar Alexander to do so, Kutuzov selected the field near the small village of Borodino, some seventy miles west of Moscow, for the battle. He concentrated his force, divided into two armies under the command of Generals Peter Bagration and
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Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, and constructed field fortifications in preparation for the fight.
Napoleon eagerly seized upon Kutuzov’s stand and prepared for battle. Napoleon’s normal practice would have been to try to turn one of the flanks of the Russian army, which Kutuzov had fortified. Mindful of the Russians’ retreat from Smolensk when he had tried a similar maneuver, Napoleon rejected this approach in favor of a frontal assault. The extremely bloody battle that ensued centered around French attempts to seize and hold Kutu-zov’s field fortifications, especially the Rayevsky Redoubt. The battle was a stalemate militarily, although Kutuzov decided to abandon the field during the night, continuing his retreat to Moscow.
Borodino was effectively a victory for the Russians and a turning point in the campaign. Napoleon sought to destroy the Russian army on the battlefield and failed. Kutuzov had aimed only to preserve his army as an effective fighting force, and he succeeded. Napoleon’s subsequent seizure of Moscow turned out to be insufficient to overcome the devastating attrition his army had suffered. Russia’s losses were, nevertheless, very high, and included Bagration, wounded on the field, who died from an infection two weeks later. See also: FRENCH WAR OF 1812; KUTUZOV, MIKHAIL ILAR-IONOVICH; NAPOLEON I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Duffy, Christopher. (1973). Borodino and the War of 1812. New York: Scribner.
“Fighters” (full name: Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, or Communist-Borotbisty), a short-lived Ukrainian radical socialist party, which played an important role in the revolutionary events in Ukraine from 1918 to 1920.
Originally the left wing of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, the Borotbisty, who derived their name from the party’s weekly, Borotba (Struggle), took control of the Central Committee in May 1918 and formally dissolved their parent party. While supporting the Soviet political order, the Borotbisty advocated Ukrainian autonomy and the existence of an independent Ukrainian army. Although the Borotbisty never had a well-developed organizational structure, the party enjoyed popularity among the poor Ukrainian peasantry. After Bolshevik troops took control of Ukraine in early 1919, Vladimir Lenin sought to quell peasant discontent by including some Borotbisty in the Ukrainian Soviet government. However, as the White and Ukrainian nationalist armies forced the Bolsheviks to retreat, in August 1919 the Borotbisty, together with the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party (Independentists), formed the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbisty) and requested admission to the Communist International as a separate party, without success. Although the Bolsheviks were uneasy about the Borotbist national communist stance, the two parties collaborated again during the Red Army offensive in Ukraine in early 1920. At its height, the Borotbist membership may have reached fifteen thousand. In March 1920 the Kremlin pressured the Borotbisty into dissolving their party and joining the Communist Party of Ukraine, which was the Ukrainian branch of the Bolshevik party. The Borotbist leadership agreed to the dissolution with the understanding that this was the only way to preserve a separate Ukrainian Soviet republic. During the early 1920s some former Borotbisty, such as Hry-hory
