Hrynko and Olexandr Shumsky, occupied important positions in the Soviet Ukrainian party leadership and government. Shumsky rose to prominence after 1923 as a leader of the Ukrainiza-tion drive, although by the end of the decade he was criticized for his national deviation. During the 1930s most former Borotbisty, including Panas Lyubchenko, who had risen to the position of the head of the republican government, fell victim to the Stalinist terror. Among the very few survivors was the celebrated filmmaker Olexandr (Alexander) Dovzhenko. See also: UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Borys, Juriij. (1980). The Sovietization of Ukraine, 1917-1923, 2nd ed. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. Maistrenko, Ivan. (1954). Borotbism: A Chapter in the History of Ukrainian Communism, tr. George S. N. Luckyj with the assistance of Ivan L. Rudnytsky. New York: Research Program on the USSR.
165
In the broadest sense, every privileged landowner could be called a boyar; in a narrower sense, the term refers to a senior member of a prince’s retinue during the tenth through thirteenth centuries, and marked the highest court rank during the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. The word boyar probably stems from a Turkic word meaning “rich” or “distinguished.” Coming from a mixed social and ethnic background, boyars served a prince, but they had the right to change their master, and enjoyed full authority over their private lands.
The relationship between a prince and his bo-yars varied across the regions. In the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, boyars acquired considerable political power in some principalities ruled by members of the Ryurikid dynasty and in Novgorod, where they formed the governing elite. In the Moscow and Tver principalities, boyars acknowledged the sovereignty of the prince and cultivated hereditary service relations with him. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the rank of bo-yar became the highest rung in the Muscovite court hierarchy. It was reserved for members of elite families and was linked with responsible political, military, and administrative appointments.
During the seventeenth century, the rank of boyar became open to more courtiers, due to the growing size of the court, and it gradually disappeared under Peter the Great. It is often assumed that all boyars were members of the tsar’s council, the so-called Boyar Duma, and thereby directed the political process. This assumption led some historians to assume that Muscovy was a boyar oligarchy, where boyars as a social group effectively ran the state. However, there was always a hierarchy among the boyars: A few boyars were close advisors to the tsar, while most acted as high-ranking servitors of the sovereign. See also: BOYAR DUMA; MUSCOVY; OKOLNICHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kollmann, Nancy Shields. (1987). Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345- 1547. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Poe, Marshall T. (2003). The Russian Elite in the Seventeenth Century. 2 vols. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
Boyar Duma is a scholarly term used to describe the royal council or the upper strata of the ruling elite in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. The term duma often appears in the sources with the meaning “advice,” “counsel,” or “a council.” The influential Romantic historian Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin first used the combination “boyar duma” (boyarskaya duma), which is never encountered in the sources.
East Slavic medieval political culture, which relied heavily on scripture, morally obligated every worthy prince to discuss all weighty matters with his advisers. In the tenth through fifteenth centuries, princes often discussed political, military, and administrative issues with other members of the ruling family, senior members of their armed retinue, household officials, church leaders, and local community leaders. The balance of power between the ruler and his counselors, as well as the format and place of their meetings, varied depending on the circumstances. The Muscovite tsars adopted the tradition of consulting with their closest entourage, continuing to do so even during periods of political turmoil, like the Oprichnina and the Time of Troubles. The 1550 Legal Code refers to the tradition of consultation, but there were no written laws regulating the practice of such consultations or limiting the authority of the ruler in favor of his advisers in judicial terms.
The growing social and administrative complexity of the Muscovite state during the sixteenth century resulted in the increasing inclusion of distinguished foreign servitors, high-ranking cavalrymen, and top-level officials at meetings with the tsar. The sources describe the practice of consultations by inconsistently using various terms, including duma. From the mid-sixteenth century, the term blizhnyaya duma (privy duma) appears in the documents more regularly.
The state school of nineteenth-century Russian historiography interpreted the tradition of consultations between the ruler and his advisers in formal, legal terms. Historians linked the appearance of a clearly structured council, which they termed the boyar duma, with the formation of the court rank system during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was assumed that the boyar duma included all people holding the upper court ranks of boyar, okolnichy, counselor cavalryman (dumny dvoryanin), and counselor secretary (dumny dyak).
166
Students of law treated the boyar duma as a state institution by focusing on its functions and competence.
The artificial concept of the boyar duma as a group of people entitled to sit on the council because of their status became a basis for various interpretations of the character of the pre-Petrine state and its politics. Vasily Osipovich Klyuchevsky pioneered this trend by describing the boyar duma as “the fly-wheel that set in motion the entire mechanism of government.” Klyuchevsky’s concept of the boyar duma was developed in the numerous prosopographical and anthropological studies of the Muscovite elite. Vasily Ivanovich Sergeyevich questioned the concept of the boyar duma, observing that there is no documentary evidence of participation of all holders of the upper court ranks in consultations with the ruler. In line with this approach, other scholars shift their emphasis in the study of the practice of consultations from the court ranks of the sovereign’s advisers to the cultural background of this practice. See also: BOYAR; MUSCOVY; OPRICHNINA; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alef, Gustave. (1967). “Reflections on the Boyar Duma in the Reign of Ivan III.” The Slavonic and East European Review. 45:76-123. Bogatyrev, Sergei. (2000). The Sovereign and His Counsellors: Ritualised Consultations in Muscovite Political Culture, 1350s-1570s. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. Also available at «http://ethesis .helsinki.fi/julkaisut/hum/histo/v/bogatyrev/». Kleimola, Ann M. (1985). “Patterns of Duma Recruitment, 1505-1550.” In Essays in Honor of A. A. Zimin, ed. Daniel Clarke Waugh. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers.
(b. 1932), Lithuanian political leader.
Algirdas Mykolas Brazauskas emerged as a major public figure in the Soviet Union in 1988. A member of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party (LCP) since 1976, a member of the party’s biuro (equivalent of Politburo) since
Lithuanian Communist Party leader Algirdas Brazauskas led his republic’s break from Moscow in 1991. © STEPHAN FERRY/LIAISON. GETTY IMAGES. 1977, and by training an engineer, he had been a specialist in construction and economic planning. In 1988 he won note as a party leader who dared to appear on a public platform with the leaders of the reformist Movement for Perestroika (Sajudis) in Lithuania. He became a popular figure, and in October, with the approval of both Moscow and Sajudis leaders, he replaced Ringaudas Songaila as the party’s First Secretary.
In his work as First Secretary of the LCP from 1988 to 1990, Brazauskas became a model for reformers in
