Marples, David R. (1988). The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster. London: Macmillan. Medvedev, Zhores. (1992). The Legacy of Chernobyl. New York: Norton. Petryna, Adriana. (2002). Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shcherbak, Yurii. (1988). Chernobyl: A Documentary Story. London: Macmillan. Yaroshinskaya, Alla. (1995). Chernobyl: The Forbidden Truth. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
(b. 1938), prime minister of the Russian Federation from December 1992 to March 1998.
Trained in western Siberia as an engineer and later an economist, Viktor Chernomyrdin alternated between working as a communist party official who monitored industrial enterprises and actually running such enterprises in the gas industry. From 1978 he worked in the heavy industry department of the party’s central apparatus in Moscow, before becoming minister for the oil and gas industries in 1985. In 1989 he was a pioneer in turning part of his ministry into the state-owned gas company Gazprom. He was the first chairman of the board, and oversaw and benefited from its partial privatization.
In 1990 he ran for the newly formed Russian Republic (RSFSR) Congress of People’s Deputies, but lost. In May 1992 President Yeltsin appointed him a deputy prime minister of the newly independent Russian Federation. In December, following an advisory vote of the Congress in which he finished second, a politically besieged Yeltsin made him prime minister. Although a typical Soviet official in most respects, Chernomyrdin gradually adapted to free market processes. His concern not to move too precipitately on economic reform enabled him, with his powers of conciliation and compromise, to appease the communists in some measure throughout the 1990s. They looked to him to moderate the radicalism of the “shock therapist” wing of the government.
In the regime crisis of fall 1993, when, violating the Constitution, Yeltsin dispersed the parliaCHERNOV, VIKTOR MIKHAILOVICH
Viktor Chernomyrdin speaks to journalists after the Duma rejected Yeltsin’s attempts to reappoint him prime minister in
1998. © SACHA ORLOV/GETTY IMAGES
ment by military force amid much bloodshed, Chernomyrdin supported Yeltsin without wavering. His reputation suffered as a result of both this and his poor handling of the financial crisis of October 1994 (Black Tuesday). Nonetheless, in April 1995 he founded the first avowedly pro-government political party, “Our Home is Russia”, which was covertly funded by Gazprom. This was designed to create a reliable, pro-Yeltsin bloc in the parliament elected in December 1995. However, although Chernomyrdin predicted that it would win almost a third of the 450 seats, in the event it got only 55, gaining the support of a mere 10.1 percent of voters. Apart from the fact that he was a weak leader, it had suffered from public allegations by prominent figures that his earlier leadership of Gazprom had enabled him to accumulate personal wealth of some five billion dollars. Apparently his denials did not convince many voters. Later, the public documentation of massive corruption in his government did not evoke even pro forma denials.
In March 1998 Yeltsin dismissed him without explanation, only to nominate him as acting prime minister the following August. However, the parliament twice refused to confirm him, seeing him as one of the individuals most responsible for the financial collapse of that month. So the floundering president withdrew his nomination. However, Yeltsin named him the next spring as his special representative to work with NATO on resolving the Yugoslav crisis over Kosovo.
In 1999 and 2000 Chernomyrdin chaired the Gazprom Council of Directors, and from 1999 to 2001 he was a parliamentary deputy for the pro-Kremlin party Unity. In 2001 President Putin made him ambassador to Ukraine. Here he supervised a creeping Russian takeover of the Ukrainian gas industry that stemmed from Ukraine’s inability to finance its massive gas imports from Russia. See also: ECONOMY, POST-SOVIET; OCTOBER 1993 EVENTS; OUR HOME IS RUSSIA PARTY; PRIVATIZATION; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press. Shevtsova, Lilia. (1999). Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
(1873-1952), pseudonyms: ‘Ia. Vechev’, ‘Gardenin’, ‘V. Lenuar’; leading theorist and activist of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
Viktor Chernov was born into a noble family in Samara province. He studied at the Saratov gymnasium, but was transferred to the Derpt gymnasium in Estonia as a result of his revolutionary activity. In 1892 Chernov joined the law faculty at Moscow University, where he was active in the radical student movement. He was first arrested in April 1894 and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress for six months. Chernov was exiled to Kamyshin in 1895, but was transferred to Saratov and then to Tambov because of poor health. He married Anastasia Nikolaevna Sletova in 1898. In the same year, he organized the influential “Brotherhood for the Defense of People’s Rights” in Tambov, a revolutionary peasants’ organisation.
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In 1899 Chernov left Russia, and for the next six years he worked for the revolutionary cause in exile. He joined the newly formed Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1901, and from 1903 he was a central committee member. His role in the party was predominantly as a political theorist and writer. He formulated the party’s philosophy around a blending of Marxist and Populist ideas, propounding that Russia’s communal system offered a “third way” to the development of socialism. He reluctantly supported the use of terror as a means of advancing the revolutionary cause.
Chernov returned to St. Petersburg in October 1905, and proposed that the party follow a moderate line, suspending terrorist activity and opposing further strike action. In July 1906 he again left Russia, this time for Finland. He continued his revolutionary work abroad, not returning to Russia until April 1917. Chernov joined the first coalition Provisional Government as Minister for Agriculture in May 1917, despite misgivings about socialist participation in the Provisional Government. His three months in government raised popular expectations about an imminent land settlement, but his tenure as minister was marked by impotency. The Provisional Government refused to sanction his radical proposals for reform of land use.
Chernov struggled to hold the fractured Socialist Revolutionary Party together, and stepped down from the Central Committee in September 1917. He was made president of the Constituent Assembly, and after the Constituent Assembly’s dissolution, was a key figure in leftist anti-Bolshevik organizations, including the Komuch. He believed that the Socialist Revolutionary Party needed to form a “third front” in the civil war period, fighting for democracy against both the Bolsheviks and the Whites. He left Russia in 1920, and was a passionate contributor to the emigr? anti-Bolshevik movement until his death in 1952 in New York. Chernov was a gifted intellectual and theorist who ultimately lacked the ruthless single-mindedness required of a revolutionary political leader. See also: SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burbank, Jane. (1985). “Waiting for the People’s Revolution: Martov and Chernov in Revolutionary Russia, 1917-1923.” Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique 26(3-4):375-394. Chernov, Victor Mikhailovich. (1936). The Great Russian Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Melancon, Michael. (1997). “Chernov.” In Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914-1921, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Chernaiev, and William G. Rosenberg. London: Arnold.
Pessimistic neo-naturalism and muckraking during and after glasnost.
Chernukha is a slang term popularized in the late 1980s, used to describe a tendency toward unrelenting negativity and pessimism both in the arts and in the mass media. Derived from the Russian word for “black”
