with some ministers and the tsar’s entourage, and the visceral refusal of Nicholas II to accept an independent legislature made it almost impossible for the Duma to be the engine of reform in old-regime Russia. See also: CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF 1906; NICHOLAS II
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hosking, Geoffrey. (1973). The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907-14. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pares, Sir Bernard. (1939). The Fall of the Russian Monarchy. London: Jonathan Cape. Pinchuk, Ben-Cion. (1974). The Octobrists in the Third Duma, 1907-12. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Tokmakoff, George. (1981). P. A. Stolypin and the Third Duma: An Appraisal of Three Major Issues. Washington, DC: University Press of America.
(1900-1955), composer.
The Soviet composer Isaak Dunayevsky has been compared to Irving Berlin and the other great songsters of the 1930s and 1940s in America. Like Berlin, he was a Russian-born Jewish composer whose musical fertility gained him fame and wealth in the realm of popular songs and musical comedy for film and stage. Unlike the American, he spent his most productive years under the shadow of the Great Dictator, Josef Stalin. This meant walking a tightrope from which a slight breeze could topple him. That tightrope was Soviet mass song, a genre embedded within a larger cultural system known as Socialist Realism, the officially established code of creativity fashioned in the early 1930s. Mass song required both political message and broad popular appeal, a combination usually possible only in moments of urgent national solidarity, as in wartime. Irving Berlin united these elements successfully in the two world wars, and in between settled for the unpolitical forms of love ballads and novelty tunes. Dunayevsky had to sustain the combination before, after, and during World War II.
Dunayevsky, born near Kharkov in Ukraine, began as a student of classical music. After the Russian Revolution, he played with avant-garde forms but eventually settled into composing popular music. His first big hit was the score for Makhno’s Escapades (1927), a circus scenario that mocked the civil war anarchist leader of a Ukrainian partisan band opposed to the Bolsheviks. Dunayevsky went on to compose some twenty film scores, a dozen operettas, and music for two bal416
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lets and about thirty dramas. His lasting legacy is the music from the enormously popular musical films of the 1930s: Happy-Go-Lucky Guys, Circus, Volga, Volga, and Radiant Road, all featuring the singing star of the era, Lyubov Orlova, and directed by her husband, Grigory Alexandrov. A fountain of melody, Dunayevsky wove elements of folk song, Viennese operetta styles, and jazz into optimistic declamatory tunes that captivated Soviet listeners for decades. The lyrics of the most famous of these, “Vast Is My Native Land” (1936), from the film Circus, celebrated the official image of Russia as a great nation, filled with free and happy citizens. The Dunayevsky mode was overshadowed somewhat during World War II, when more somber and intimate songs prevailed. His postwar hit, the music for Kuban Cossacks (1950), enhanced the propaganda value of that film, which idealized the affluence of Cossacks and peasants on the collective farms of the Kuban region. Dunayevsky died in 1955. See also: MOTION PICTURES; SOCIALIST REALISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jelagin, Juri. (1951). Taming of the Arts, tr. N. Wreden. New York: Dutton. Starr, S. Frederick. (1983). Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union. New York: Oxford University Press. Stites, Richard. (1992). Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
the Kansu province settled in Kyrgyzstan and today number approximately 30,000. Rebels from the Shensi province generally settled in Kazakhstan, where they number roughly 37,000. The third group fled to the Russian Empire later in 1881.
After their exodus, the rebels (named Dolgans by the Russians) cut off all contact with China, but nevertheless continued to refer to themselves as Chinese Muslims (Hui-Zu). They settled mainly along the Chu River on the banks of which the Kyr-gyz capital of Bishkek (named Frunze in the Soviet period) is situated. This river also forms part of the border between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
The Dungan language is Mandarin Chinese, but with heavy influence of Persian (Farsi), Arabic, and Turkish. In addition to Dungani, many speak Kyr-gyz, and the younger ones also speak Russian. Dungani is written not in Chinese characters but Cyrillic script, and has three tones rather than four.
Generally, the Dungans in Kyrgyzstan are less devoted as Muslims than their kin in Kazakhstan. All Dungans subscribe to the Hanafite Muslim school of thought, established by the theologian Imam Abu Hanifa (699-767), who has shaped the Central Asian form of Islam. While elderly Dun-gans strictly observe Islamic law, their younger offspring usually ignore Islam until they reach their forties. Elders run village mosques, and the clergymen are supported by property taxes and the worshipers’ donations. At present, although the Bible has been translated into Dungani, no Dungans are Christians. Living mostly in the river valleys, the Dungans are primarily farmers and cattle breeders, although some grow opium.
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The Dungans (Dungani) are descendants of the Hui people who traveled to the northwestern provinces of China, namely the Kansu and Shensi provinces from the seventeenth to thirteenth centuries. Originally scholars, merchants, soldiers, and handicraftsmen, they gradually intermarried with the Han Chinese. Although they learned the Chinese language, they also retained their knowledge of the Arabic language and Muslim faith. From 1862 to 1878 the Hui people rebelled, and the Chinese emperor ruthlessly suppressed them. Three groups of Hui rebels fled across the Tien Shan mountains into Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Those who lived in See also: CENTRAL ASIA; ISLAM; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
Dyer, Svetlana Rimsky-Korsakoff. (1979). Soviet Dungan Kolkhozes in the Kirghiz SSR and the Kazakh SSR. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Israeli, Raphael. (1982). The Crescent in the East: Islam in Asia Major. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Curzon Press. Javeline, Debra. (1997). Islam Yes, Islamic State No for Muslim Kazakhstanis. Washington, DC: Office of Research and Media Reaction, USIA. Kim, Ho-dong. (1986). “The Muslim Rebellion and the Kashghar Emirate in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University.
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Li, Shujiang, and Luckert, Karl W., (1994). Mythology and Folklore of the Hui, a Muslim Chinese People. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Gheith, Jehanne. (1999). “Durova.” In Russian Literature in the Age of Pushkin and Gogol: Prose, ed. Christine A. Rydel. Dictionary of Literary Biography, 1999. Detroit: Gale Research.
(1783-1855), cavalry officer and writer.
Nadezhda Durova (“Alexander Alexandrov,” “Cavalry Maiden”) served in the tsarist cavalry throughout Russia’s campaigns against Napoleon. Equally remarkably, in the late 1830s she published memoirs of those years (The Cavalry Maiden [Kava-lerist-devitsa], 1836; Notes [Zapiski], 1839) and fiction in the Gothic/Romantic vein drawn from her military experience, much of it narrated by a female officer. At first she masqueraded as a boy, but in December 1807 Alexander II learned of the woman soldier in his army and, impressed by accounts of her courage in the East Prussian campaign, gave her a commission in the Mariupol Hussars under his name, Alexandrov. In 1811 Durova transferred to the Lithuanian Uhlans. During the Russian retreat to Moscow in 1812 she served in the rear guard, engaging in repeated clashes with the French. Bored with peacetime service and annoyed at not receiving promotion, Durova resigned her commission in 1816. She became briefly famous after The Cavalry Maiden was published, an experience she described laconically in “A Year of Life in St. Petersburg” (God zhizni v Peterburge,
