engineering who graduated in the first half of the 1930s, were prime, albeit unwitting, beneficiaries of the Great Purges. Members of this cohort, sometimes known as “the Brezhnev generation,” entered top party, government, and professional positions at the end of the 1930s and continued to dominate the political elite for close to half a century. See also: COLLECTIVIZATION; CONSTRUCTIVISM; FELLOW TRAVELERS; INDUSTRIALIZATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clark, Katerina. (1995). Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. David-Fox, Michael. (1999). “What Is Cultural Revolution?” Russian Review 58(2):181-201. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1974). “Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1932.” Journal of Contemporary History 9(1):33-52. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ed. (1978). Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1999). “Cultural Revolution Revisited.” Russian Review 58(2):202-209. Gorbunov, V. I. (1969). Lenin on the Cultural Revolution. Moscow: Novosti. Joravsky, David. (1985). “Cultural Revolution and the Fortress Mentality.” In Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, ed. Abbott Glea-son; Peter Kenez; and Richard Stites. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kim, Maksim Pavlovich. (1984). Socialism and Culture. Moscow: USSR Academy of Sciences. Lewis, Robert. (1986). “Science, Nonscience, and the Cultural Revolution.” Slavic Review 45 (2):286-292. Meisner, Maurice. (1985). “Iconoclasm and Cultural Revolution in China and Russia.” In Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, ed. Abbott Gleason; Peter Kenez; and Richard Stites. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Slezkine, Yuri. (1992). “From Savages to Citizens: The Cultural Revolution in the Soviet Far North, 1928-1938.” Slavic Review 51(1):52-76. Weiner, Douglas R. (1988). Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
SHEILA FITZPATRICK BEN ZAJICEK
CUMANS See POLOVTSY. CURRENCY See ALTYN; DENGA; GRIVNA; KOPECK; MONETARY SYSTEM, SOVIET; RUBLE.
(1790-1857), French writer and publicist.
Astolphe de Custine’s fame rests upon his book Russia in 1839, a voluminous travelogue depicting the empire of Nicholas I in an unfavorable light; it became an oft-quoted precursor to numerous subsequent works of professional “Sovietologists” and “Kremlinologists.” Custine was born into an old aristocratic family; both his father and grandfather were executed during the French Revolution. Originally a staunch political conservative, Custine traveled to Russia determined to provide French readers with the positive image of a functioning monarchy. However, the three months spent in the empire of Tsar Nicholas I-whom he met in person-turned Custine into a constitutionalist. Russia’s despotic, incurably corrupt order that entitled the state to any intrusions into its citizens’ lives shocked the European observer with its innate violence and hypocrisy. Custine particularly faulted
CYRIL AND METHODIUS SOCIETY
the Russian establishment for its quasi-military structure introduced by Peter I. Most astounding among his conclusions was the prediction that Russia would face a revolution of unprecedented scope within the next half century.
When Russia in 1839 was published in four lengthy volumes in 1843, it became an immediate bestseller and was translated into English, German, and Danish. Russian diplomats and secret agents tried their utmost to discredit the book and its author; the tsar himself reportedly had a fit of fury while reading Custine’s elaborations. On the other hand, Alexander Herzen and other dissidents praised Russia in 1839 for its accuracy, and even the chief of Russia’s Third Department conceded that the ungrateful French guest merely said out loud what many Russians secretly were thinking in the first place.
Astolphe de Custine, who also wrote other travelogues and fiction, died in 1857. See also: AUTOCRACY; NICHOLAS I. Although the collection has been repeatedly decimated over time, varying numbers of customs books still exist for fifty cities in European Russia and for most of the Siberian fortress towns, virtually all of them dated between 1626 and 1686. The best-preserved collections of early modern customs data are for the Southern Frontier, the Northern Dvina waterway, and the Siberian fortress towns. In contrast, practically all the information of the key commercial centers of Moscow, Yaroslavl’, Arkhangel’sk, and Novgorod, among others, has been lost.
For the early eighteenth century, customs data pertaining to some 300 towns have survived. Dated from 1714 to 1750, 142 books survive in the collections of the Kamer-kollegia. The most important collections are for Moscow, Northern Russia, and the Southern Frontier. The practice of compiling customs books was discontinued following the abolition of internal customs points in 1754. See also: FOREIGN TRADE; MERCHANTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Custine, Marquis de. (1989). Empire of the Czar: A Journey through Eternal Russia. New York: Doubleday. Grudzinska Gross, Irena. (1991). The Scar of Revolution: Custine, Tocqueville, and the Romantic Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hellie, Richard. (1999). The Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 1600-1725. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Customs books (tamozhennye knigi) were official registers of customs and other revenues collected at customs offices between the sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries, and often a source of data on expenditures by the customs administration.
Typical entries in a customs book list the quantities and values of the commodities carried by a given merchant. In addition, they usually give the name, rank, origin, and destination of each merchant. Customs records often include separate sections on particular “special” commodities, such as liquor, horses, cattle, grain, or treasury goods.
All Russian towns, as well as many smaller communities, kept records of all trade passing through them. A total of some 190 seventeenth-century customs books have survived to this day.
CYRIL AND METHODIUS SOCIETY
The first Ukrainian political organization in the Russian Empire, the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood existed from late 1845 to early 1847. A secret society with no clear membership criteria, the brotherhood consisted of a core group of some dozen members and a wider circle of an estimated one hundred sympathizers. The society was led by the historian Mykola (Nikolai) Kostomarov, the minor official Mykola Hulak, and the schoolteacher Vasyl Bilozersky. Scholars continue to disagree as to whether the great poet Taras Shevchenko, the most celebrated affiliate of the group, was a formal member. This organization of young Ukrainian patriots was established in Kiev in December 1845 and, during the fourteen months of its existence, its activity was limited to political discussions and the formulation of a program. Kostomarov wrote the society’s most important programmatic statement, “The Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian
People.” Strongly influenced by Polish Romanticism and Pan-Slavism, this document spoke vaguely of the Christian principles of justice and freedom, but also proposed a number of radical reforms: the abolition of serfdom, the introduction of universal education, and the creation of a democratic federation of all the Slavic peoples with the capital in Kiev. The members of the brotherhood disagreed about priorities and ways of implementing their program. Kostomarov, who stressed the Pan-Slavic ideal, expressed the majority opinion that change could be achieved through education and moral example. Hulak and Shevchenko advocated a violent revolution. Shevchenko, together with the writer Pan-teleimon Kulish, saw the social and national liberation of Ukrainians as the society’s priority. In March 1847 a student informer denounced the society to the authorities, leading to the arrest of all active members. Most of them were subsequently exiled to the Russian provinces, but Hulak received a three-year prison term, while Shevchenko’s poems earned him ten years of forced army service in Central Asia. Soviet historians emphasized the difference between radicals and liberals within the brotherhood, while in post-Soviet Ukraine the group is seen as
