governmental service was compulsory until 1736, when the service requirement for the dvorianstvo was reduced to twenty-five years. In 1740 they could choose between military or civil service. Then in 1762 Peter III freed the dvorianstvo from all service requirements. His wife Catherine II in 1785 promulgated the Charter of the Nobility, whose infamous Article 10 freed the dvorianstvo from corporal punishment and thus made them a privileged caste. The measures of 1762 and 1785 created the conditions for the Russian dvorianstvo to begin to look like gentry living elsewhere in Europe west of Russia.
The years 1762 to 1861 were the “Golden Age” of the dvorianstvo. Its members were the potentially leisured, privileged members of society. Many differed little from peasants; a few were extraordinarily rich. They were the bearers and creators of culture. The Achilles heel of the dvorianstvo was its penchant for debt to finance excessive consumption, including imported goods that were equated with modernization and Westernization. The emancipation of the peasantry in 1861 initiated the decline of the dvorianstvo, whose members lost their slave- owner-like control over their peasants. The dvorianstvo was compensated (excessively) for the land granted to the peasants, but debts were deducted from the compensation. Other reforms gradually cost the dvorianstvo their control over the countryside. Their inability to manage their funds and estates and in general to cope with a modernizing world is metonymically portrayed in Anton. P. Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard, which came to be the name of the era for the dvorianstvo. By the Revolution of 1917 the dvorianstvo lost control over their initial bastion, the army, and nearly all other sectors of life as well. In the summer of 1917 the peasantry seized much of the dvorianstvo land, which was all confiscated when the Bolsheviks took power. Some members of the dvorianstvo joined the Whites and died in opposition to the Bolsheviks, while others emigrated. Those who remained in the USSR were deprived of their civil rights until 1936. See also: BOYAR; CHARTER OF THE NOBILITY; LAW CODE OF 1649; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; SYN BOYARSKY; TABLE OF RANKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blum, Jerome. (1961). Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press. Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hellie, Richard. (1982). Slavery in Russia 1425-1725. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
(b. 1960), adviser to her father, President Boris Yeltsin.
Tatiana Dyachenko became an adviser to her father, President Boris Yeltsin, in the last few years of his rule. Trained as a mathematician and computer scientist, she worked in a design bureau of the space industry until 1994. She then worked for the bank Zarya Urala (Ural Dawn).
In the early 1990s her father’s ghostwriter Valentin Yumashev introduced her to the Mafia-connected businessman Boris Berezovsky. The latter courted her with attention and lavish presents, and handed her father three million dollars that he claimed were royalties on Yeltsin’s second volume
DYAK
of memoirs. This episode launched the rise of the businessmen oligarchs who became highly influential in Yeltsin’s administration.
In February 1996, with a popular approval rating in single digits as he began his ultimately successful run for reelection, Yeltsin appointed Dyachenko to his campaign staff. Here she worked closely with key oligarchs and the campaign director Anatoly Chubais. That summer, she facilitated her father’s ouster of his hitherto most trusted aide, Alexander Korzhakov, and then the ascent of Chubais to head the Presidential Administration.
In June 1997 Yeltsin formally appointed her one of his advisers, responsible for public relations. In 1998 she was named a director of Russia’s leading TV channel, Public Russian Television (ORT), controlled by Berezovsky.
In 1999, as Yeltsin’s power ebbed, Dyachenko’s lifestyle fell under scrutiny with the unfolding of various top- level scandals. For example, the Swiss firm Mabetex was revealed to have paid major kickbacks to Kremlin figures, with Dyachenko and other Yeltsin relatives allegedly having spent large sums by credit card free of charge.
After her father’s resignation in December 1999, Dyachenko continued to be an influential coordinator of her father’s political and business clan and an unpaid adviser to the head of Vladimir Putin’s Presidential Administration Alexander Voloshin.
Dyachenko has three children, one by each of her three husbands. See also: YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Klebnikov, Paul. (2000). Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia. New York: Har-court. Yeltsin, Boris. (2000). Midnight Diaries. New York: Public Affairs.
State secretary, professional administrator.
The dyak (state secretary) spearheaded Muscovy’s bureaucratic transformation from the late 1400s into the Petrine era. Moscow professional administrators, seventeenth-century dyaks guaranteed daily chancellery operation, served in the governing tribunals, and supervised the clerks. Dyaks authorized document compilation, verified and signed documents after clerks drafted them, and sometimes wrote up documents.
Technical expertise was the dyak’s sine qua non. Talent and experience governed promotion and retention of dyaks. Of appanage slave origin, the dyaks were docile, functionally literate, efficient paperwork organizers, and artificers of chancellery document style and formulae. Less than eight hundred dyaks served in seventeenth-century chancelleries, annually between 1646 and 1686; forty-six (or 6%) of all dyaks achieved Boyar Duma rank. The decrees of 1640 and 1658 formally converted dyaks and clerks into an administrative caste by guaranteeing that only their scions could become professional administrators. Dyaks’ sons began as clerks, but father-son dyak lineages were uncommon, as few clerks ever became dyaks.
Almost half of the chancellery dyaks (some Moscow dyaks received no administrative postings) worked in one chancellery. Dyaks worked on average 3.5 years per state chancellery, their average earnings decreasing from one hundred rubles in the 1620s to less than ninety rubles in the 1680s. They could also receive land allotments as pay. In contrast, counselor state secretaries could earn two hundred rubles in the 1620s, and their salaries nearly doubled in the 1680s.
Seventeenth-century dyaks’ social position declined, although their technical skills did not. Dyaks served also in provincial administrative offices, and numbered between 33 to 45 percent of their chancellery brethren. Few ever entered capital service. See also: BOYAR DUMA; CHANCELLERY SYSTEM; PODY-ACHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Peter B. (1978). “Early Modern Russian Bureaucracy: The Evolution of the Chancellery System from Ivan III to Peter the Great, 1478-1717.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago. Plavsic, Borovoi. (1980). “Seventeenth- Century Chanceries and Their Staffs.” In Russian Officialdom: The Bu-reaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, eds. Walter McKenzie Pint-ner and Don Karl Rowney. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
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(1877-1926), Polish revolutionary; first head of the Soviet political police. “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, the feared chief of the Bolshevik political police. © BETTMANN/CORBIS
Felix Dzerzhinsky descended from a Polish noble family of long standing, with known paternal roots in seventeenth-century historic Lithuania. His father Edmund taught physics and mathematics at the male gymnasium in Taganrog before retiring to the family estate located in present-day Belarus. His mother, Helena Janus-zewska, came from a well-connected aristocratic family. After Edmund’s death in 1882, she raised Felix in a devout Roman
