(1984). Bulgakov: Life and Work. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.
(1871-1944), political economist, philosopher, and theologian, whose life and intellectual evolution were punctuated by sharp breaks and shifts in worldview.
Sergei Bulgakov was born into the clerical estate. His father was a rural clergyman in Livny (Or?l province); his mother, of gentry background. Like Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobrolyubov a generation earlier, Bulgakov lost his faith at age fourteen and transferred from the seminary to the secular gymnasium at Elets, and then to Moscow University, where he studied political economy. His book On Markets in Capitalist Conditions of Production (1897) established him, together with Nikolai Berdyayev, Peter Struve, and Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, as one of Russia’s foremost Legal Marxists. While researching his doctoral thesis (“Capitalism in Agriculture”) in Europe, Bulgakov experienced a spiritual crisis, breaking down in pious tears before Raphael’s canvas of the Sistine Madonna in Dresden. Upon his return to Russia, he spearheaded the movement from Marxism to idealism (including among others Berdyayev, Semen Frank, and Struve). Over the next twenty years he became a key participant in the seminal collections
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of articles-Problems of Idealism (1902), Landmarks (1909), From the Depths (1918)-that charted the collective spiritual evolution of an important segment of the Russian intelligentsia. Bulgakov’s idealism translated into political involvement in the Union of Liberation (founded in Switzerland in 1903) and included the drafting of the Cadet (Constitutional Democrat) party’s agrarian program. During the Revolution of 1905, Bulgakov founded a small but intellectually sophisticated Christian Socialist party and was elected to the Second Duma.
Like his fellow liberals and radicals, Bulgakov experienced severe disappointment following Peter Stolypin’s June 3 coup, formulated in his article in Vekhi, criticizing the intelligentsia. But by 1912 he had regained his sense of direction, finally completing his doctoral dissertation in a completely new tone. Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household (translated into English for the first time in 2000) is a work of social theory, and fully part of the “revolt against positivism” (H. Stuart Hughes) characteristic of European social thought in the period from 1890 to 1920. The book established Bulgakov’s prominence as a thinker of the Russian Silver Age. In Philosophy of Economy and his next major work, The Unfading Light (1917), Bulgakov became a religious philosopher, bringing the insights of Orthodox Christianity, and particularly the concept of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, to bear on problems of human dignity and economic activity.
Following the February Revolution, Bulgakov became a delegate to the All-Russian Council of the Orthodox Church; in 1918 he was ordained as a priest. Bulgakov was among the two hundred or so intellectuals Vladimir Lenin ordered shipped out of the new Soviet Union, across the Black Sea to Istanbul, in 1922. In his “second life,” first in Prague and then in Paris, Bulgakov became arguably the twentieth century’s greatest Orthodox theologian, crafting two theological trilogies modeled on the pattern of the liturgy: the “major” (e.g., Agnets Bozhy) and the “minor.” Bulgakov was founder and dean of the St. Sergius Theological Academy in Paris and active in the ecumenical movement, including the Brotherhood of St. Alban’s and St. Sergius and the Russian Christian Student Movement. Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, became a unifying principle in his writing, even leading to the development of a doctrine known as Sophiology. A tragic controversy over Sophia erupted in 1935; Bulgakov’s views were condemned by both the Soviet Orthodox Church and the Synod of the Orthodox Church in Exile in Czechoslovakia. Bulgakov’s final work was a commentary on the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine. In 1944 he died of throat cancer in Paris.
Banned for seventy years in the Soviet Union, the writings of Bulgakov and his fellow Silver Age philosophers experienced a resurgence of popularity beginning in 1989. See also: BERDYAYEV, NIKOLAI ALEXANDROVICH; CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; SILVER AGE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Evtuhov, Catherine. (1997). The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy, 1890-1920. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Valliere, Paul. (2000). Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
(1895-1975), political and military leader.
Nikolai Bulganin was a marshal of the Red Army who rose to the position of Soviet Prime Minister (1955- 1958) under Nikita Khrushchev. Bul-ganin made his career mainly as a security and military official, but he was also an urban administrator. As mayor of Moscow (1931-1937) at a time when the capital was undergoing rapid expansion, he collaborated closely with Khrushchev in the construction of such enduring symbols of Stalinist urbanization as the Moscow metro. Bulganin’s career benefited from the purges (1937-1938). Despite his lack of military training, Josef Stalin actively promoted him as a party commissar to oversee the military. He eventually joined Stalin’s war cabinet in 1944. In 1947 he succeeded Stalin as minister for the armed forces and was promoted to marshal. A year later he joined the Politburo. Shortly after Stalin’s death (1953), he was appointed minister of defense. In the ensuing political confrontation with secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, Bulganin sided with his friend Khrushchev, ensuring the military’s loyalty. Bul-ganin’s subsequent support for Khrushchev against Georgy Malenkov, who was advocating reduced spending on heavy industry, led to Bulganin’s appointment as prime minister. In this post he actively supported Khrushchev’s attempts to defuse
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tensions with the West, over both Germany, and Yugoslavia. But he always played second fiddle to party boss Khrushchev. A year after Bulganin sided with the Stalinist Anti-Party Group against Khrushchev (1957), he was dismissed as both prime minister and marshal. Relegated to a minor economic post, he subsequently retired in 1960. See also: KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH
Khrushchev, Nikita. (1974). Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, tr. and ed. Strobe Talbott. London: Andre Deutsch. Taubman, William; Khrushchev, Sergei; and Gleason, Abbott, eds. (2000). Nikita Khrushchev. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
The Bulgarians, or Bulgars, belonged to the Turco-Altaic language group and originated from western Siberia, along the valley of the Irtish River. During the first and second centuries C.E. they migrated in the direction of eastern Europe and settled in the region north of the Caucasus. There, the proto-Bulgarians mingled with local native tribes of Iranian origin, whose cultural achievements and social hierarchy had a substantial impact on their further development. The proto-Bulgarians were called Bul-gars for the first time by a Roman chronographer in 354. During the seventh century, they merged with the Slavic tribes inhabiting the territory bordering the Black Sea, between Romania and Turkey, in southeastern Europe, which is present-day Bulgaria.
The Bulgarians took over the newcomers’ Slavic language. The Turkish conquest of Bulgaria in 1396 hampered the development of the Bulgarian language for several centuries, but after the Bulgarians achieved independence in 1878, a modern literary language based on the vernacular emerged. Modern Bulgarian, which is generally said to date from the sixteenth century, borrowed words from Greek, Turkish, Russian, French, and German. Although it resembles Slavic languages, Bulgarian has a definite article and has almost completely dropped the numerous case forms of the noun. It uses position and prepositions (like English) to indicate grammatical relationships in a sentence instead of using cases (like Russian). Once an independent kingdom, Bulgaria was dominated by the communist Party from 1946 until 1990, when a multiparty system was adopted. During the communist period, when Bulgaria was under the control of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the once dominant agricultural sector was overtaken by manufacturing. After World War II, all industrial enterprises were nationalized and operated under a series of five-year economic plans, modeled after the Soviet system, with financial aid from the USSR. Bulgaria enjoyed one of the most prosperous economies of the Soviet bloc. The
