population.
When Ehrenburg was pressured to sign the letter in late January 1953, he first stalled for time and then wrote a personal appeal to Stalin that urged the dictator to bar Pravda from publishing material that might compromise the USSR’s reputation abroad. This apparently caused Stalin to think twice about the campaign and a second, more mildly worded collective letter was commissioned later that February. This letter called for the punishment of the “doctor-murderers,” but also drew a clear distinction between the Soviet Jewish community and their “bourgeois,” “Zionist” kin abroad. It concluded by proclaiming that the Soviet Jews wanted nothing more than to live as members of the Soviet working class in harmony with the other peoples of the USSR. Curiously, although Ehren-burg and other prominent Soviet Jews ultimately signed this second letter, it never appeared in print. Some commentators believe this to be indicative of ambivalence on Stalin’s part regarding the Doctors’ Plot as a whole during the last two weeks of his life.
Although neither draft of the collective letter explicitly mentioned plans for the Siberian exile of the Jews, many argue that this was the ultimate intent of the Doctors’ Plot. Since the opening of the Soviet archives in 1991, however, scholars have searched in vain for any trace of the paper trail that such a mass operation would have left behind. The absence of documentation has led some specialists to consider the rumors of impending deportation to be a reflection of social paranoia within the Soviet Jewish community rather than genuine evidence of official intent. This theory is complicated, however, by the accounts of high-ranking party members like Anastas I. Mikoyan and Nikolai A. Bulganin that confirm that the Jews risked deportation in early 1953. It is therefore best to conclude that speculative talk about possible deportations circulated within elite party circles on the eve of Stalin’s death, precipitating rumors and hysteria within the society at large. That said, it would be incautious to conclude that formal plans for the Jews’ deportation were developed, ratified, or advanced to the planning stage without corroborating evidence from the former Soviet archives. See also: JEWS; PRAVDA; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brent, Jonathan, and Naumov, Vladimir. (2003). Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against Jewish Doctors. New York: HarperCollins. Kostyrchenko, Gennadi. (1995). Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO See PASTERNAK, BORIS LEONIDOVICH.
The Dolgans (Dolgani) belong to the North Asiatic group of the Mongolian race. They are an Altaic people, along with the Buryats, Kalmyks, Balkars,
Chuvash, Evenks, Karachay, Kumyks, Nogay, and Yakuts. This Turkic-speaking people number today about 8,500 and live far above the Arctic Circle in the Taymyr (or Taimur) autonomous region (332,857 square miles, 862,100 square kilometers), which is one of the ten autonomous regions recognized in the Russian Constitution of 1993. This region is located on the Taymyr peninsula in north central Siberia, which is actually the northernmost projection of Siberia. Cape Chelyuskin at the tip of the peninsula constitutes the northernmost point of the entire Asian mainland. Located between the estuaries of the Yenisei and Khatanga rivers, the peninsula is covered mostly with tundra and gets drained by the Taymyra River. The Taymyr autonomous region also includes the islands between the Yenisei and Khatanga gulfs, the northern parts of the Central Siberian Plateau, and the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago. The capital is Dudinka. On the Taimyr Peninsula the Dolgans are the most numerous indigenous ethnic group. A few dozen Dolgans also live in Yakutia, on the lower reaches of the River Anabar.
Generally, the languages of the indigenous peoples of the Eurasian Arctic and subarctic can be grouped into four classes: Uralic, Manchu-Tungus, Turkic, and Paleo-Siberian. The Dolgan language is part of the northeastern branch of the Turkic language family and closely resembles Yakut. Although Dolgan is particularly active among the twenty-six languages of the so-called Peoples of the Far North in Russia, the small number of speakers (6,000 out of the total population of 8,500) of this rare aboriginal language in Siberia prompted UNESCO to classify Dolgan as a “potentially endangered” language. The demographical and ecological problems of the Taymyr region also work against the language. As for writing, the Dol-gans lack their own alphabet and rely on the Russian Cyrillic.
The name Dolgan became known outside the tribe itself only as late as the nineteenth century. The word derives from dolghan or dulghan, meaning “people living on the middle reaches of the river.” Some ethnologists believe the word comes from the term for wood (toa) or toakihil?r, meaning people of the wood. Although originally a nomadic people preoccupied mostly by reindeer hunting and fishing, the advent of the Russians in the seventeenth century led to the near destruction of the Dolgans’ traditional economy and way of life. The Taymyr, or Dolgan- Nenets National Territory, was proclaimed in 1930. The next year old tribal councils were liquidated, the process of collectivization initiated. Taymyr’s economy in the early twenty-first century depends on mining, fishing, and dairy and fur farming, as well as some reindeer breeding and trapping. See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; NORTHERN PEOPLES; SIBERIA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam.(1995). Culture Incarnate: Native Anthropology from Russia. Armonk, NY.: M.E. Sharpe. Smith, Graham. (1990). The Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union. New York: Longman. Trade directory of the Russian Far East: Yakut Republic, Chita Region, Khabarovsk Territory, Primorsky Territory, Amur Region, Kamchatka Region, Magadan Region, Sakhalin Region. (1995). London: Flegon Press.
DOLGORUKY, YURI VLADIMIROVICH See
Sixteenth-century domestic handbook.
The term domostroi, which literally means “domestic order,” refers to a group of forty-three manuscript books produced in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Less than a dozen copies explicitly contain the title: “This book called Do-mostroi has in it much that Christian men and women, children, menservants, and maidservants will find useful.” All, however, share a basic text that is clearly recognizable despite additions, deletions, and variations.
Where Domostroi came from, who wrote it- or, more probably, compiled it-and when, remain matters for debate. So does the process by which the text evolved. Traditionally, it has been linked to the north Russian merchant city of Novgorod and dated to the late fifteenth century, although significant alterations were made until the mid-sixteenth century. This view attributes one version to Sylvester, a priest of the Annunciation Cathedral in the Kremlin, who came from Novgorod and supposedly had a close relationship with Ivan IV the
DOMOSTROI
Terrible (1533-1584). Sylvester has proven to be a shadowy figure, his authorship of Domostroi is unlikely, and his friendship with Ivan the Terrible has often been questioned. Nevertheless, the possibility that Domostroi could somehow explain the Terrible Tsar continues to fascinate.
More recent research suggests that Domostroi was compiled in Moscow, probably in the 1550s, a period when Russian society was undergoing reform and reestablishing its links to Europe. One manuscript refers to an original written in 1552. Two copies (representing different versions) have watermarks from the 1560s or 1570s; and information in Sylvester’s letter to his son, usually found at the conclusion of the type of Domostroi associated with him, suggests a date for the letter of approximately 1560. One copy of the Sylvester type also includes a reference to Tsaritsa Anasta-sia, Ivan the Terrible’s first wife, who died in 1560. Therefore the text was probably circulating in the capital by the late 1550s.
This early period produced four major variants: a Short Version (associated with Sylvester), a Long Version, and two intermediate stages. All cover the family’s obligations from three angles: its duties toward God, relationships between family members, and the practical tasks involved in running a large household. “Family,” in Domostroi, means not only a husband, a wife, and their children but also dependent members of the extended family and servants, most of whom would have been slaves in the sixteenth century. Although slaves often had their own homes and practiced a craft, they were still considered dependent members of the family that owned
