the seventh and eighth centuries, followed by Arab conquest and Islamic conversions during the eighth and ninth centuries and Persian Samanid dominion during the tenth century. The rise of the Karakhanids brought lasting Turkicization of the Ferghana Valley during the eleventh century. The Chaghatay Ulus of the Mongol Empire during the thirteenth century and the Turkic Timur (Tamerlane) and his grandson Ulugh Bek during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries introduced a period of burgeoning literature and Islamic erudition, followed by centuries of shifting local powers and instability under the various Turkic groups. Kokand khans ruled from the late eighteenth century until the Russian Empire annexed the valley as the Ferghana oblast to the Turkestan governor-generalship in 1876.
During the establishment of Soviet power in Central Asia (1920s and 1930s), the valley provided a fertile area for the Basmachi movement. In 1924, it was divided between the Uzbek SSR, the Tajik ASSR, and the Kirgiz ASSR. As a result, the valley inherited several cross border enclaves in a traditionally interwoven ethnic region. Despite a tradition of multiethnic cooperation, late-Soviet unrest and ethnic clashes erupted there in 1989 between
FEUDALISM
Uzbeks and Meshkhetian Turks, and in 1990 between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Osh. The famous Ferghana Canal was an early Soviet engineering project celebrated in prose, poetry, and film. See also: BASMACHIS; CENTRAL ASIA; UZBEKISTAN AND UZBEKS
Manz, Beatrice Forbes. (1987). “Central Asian Uprisings in the Nineteenth Century: Ferghana Under the Russians.” Russian Review 46 (3):267-281. Tabyshalieva, Anara. (1999). The Challenge of Regional Cooperation in Central Asia: Preventing Ethnic Conflict in the Ferghana Valley. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace.
According to the nearly unanimous consensus of Western scholars, pre-Soviet Russian scholars, and most Soviet scholars until the mid- to late-1930s, feudalism never appeared in Russia. By the end of the 1930s, however, it became the entrenched dogma in the Soviet Union that Russia had experienced a feudal period. Post-Soviet Russian historians have been unable to rid themselves of this erroneous interpretation of their own history, in spite of Western arguments to the contrary that have been advanced since 1991.
The fundamental issue is whether the term “feudalism” has any meaning other than “agrarian regime,” that is, that most of the population lives in the countryside and makes its living from farming and that most of the gross domestic product is derived from agriculture. If that is all it means, then Russia was feudal until after World War II. Most definitions of feudalism, however, involve other criteria as well, which, as defined by George Vernadsky and others, typically encompass: (1) a fusion of public and private law; (2) a dismemberment of political authority and a parcellization of sovereignty; (3) an interdependence of political and economic administration; (4) the predominance of a natural, i.e., nonmarket, economy; (5) the presence of serfdom. Presumably all of these criteria, not just one or two, should be present for there to be feudalism in a locality.
The first historian to posit the existence of feudalism in Russia was Nikolai Pavlov-Silvansky (1869-1908), who based his theory primarily on the political fragmentation of Russia from the collapse of the Kievan Russian state in 1132 to the consolidation of Russia by Moscow by the early sixteenth century. The basic problem with that thesis is that there was no serfdom until the 1450s. Moreover, there were no fiefs. In 1912 Lenin defined feudalism as “land ownership and the privileges of lords over serfs.” Mikhail Pokrovsky (1868-1932) worked out a “Soviet Marxist” understanding of Russian feudalism and traced its origin and major cause (large landownership) to the thirteenth century. “Feudalism” was necessary to legitimize the October Revolution and Soviet power. According to Marx, human history went through the stages of (1) primordial/primitive communism; (2) slave-owning; (3) feudalism; (4) capitalism; (5) imperialism; (6) socialism; (7) communism. The fact that Russia in reality never experienced “stages” two through five made it difficult to claim that the October Revolution was historically inevitable and therefore legitimate. Inventing “stages” three through five was therefore politically necessary.
A major problem for the Soviets was that Russia never knew a slave-owning stage (as in Greece and Rome). This “problem” was worked out in the early 1930s by a Menshevik historian, M. M. Tsvibak (who was liquidated a few years later in the Great Purges), with the claim that Russia had bypassed the slave-owning period entirely, that feudalism arose about the same time as the Kievan Russian state during the ninth century, or even earlier. Boris Grekov, the “dean” of Soviet historians between 1930 and 1953 (he allegedly had no use for Stalin), earlier had alleged that Russia had passed through a slave-owning stage, but he took the Tsvibak position in the later 1930s, and that remained the official dogma to the end of the Soviet regime. As a result, nearly all of Russian and Ukrainian history was deemed feudal and succeeded by “capitalism” with the freeing of the serfs from seignorial control in 1861. See also: MARXISM; PEASANTRY; SLAVERY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vernadsky, George. (1939). “Feudalism in Russia.” Speculum 14:302-323.
(1782-1867), Metropolitan of Moscow, theologian, and churchman.
Throughout his long career, Filaret (Vasily Mikhailovich Drozdov) played a central role in important matters of church, state, and society: as a moving force behind the Russian translation of the Bible, as a teacher of the Orthodox faith through his famous catechism, sermons, and textbooks, and as a reformer of the church, particularly its monasteries. His widespread reputation as a man of profound faith and great integrity made him the government’s natural choice to compose the emancipation manifesto ending serfdom in 1861. When he died in 1867, the country went into mourning. As Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the future over-procurator of the Holy Synod, wrote on the day of the metropolitan’s funeral: “The present moment is very important for the people. The entire people consider the burial of the metro[politan] a national affair.”
Filaret’s early career focused on reform of religious education, which he shifted from the Latin scholastic curriculum of the eighteenth century to a Russian and Bible-centered one during the early nineteenth century. He wrote two Russian textbooks in 1816 inaugurating a new Orthodox Biblical theology: An Outline of Church-Biblical History (Nachertanie tserkovno-bibleiskoi istorii) and Notes on the Book of Genesis (Zapiski na knigu Bytiya). By this time he was also heavily engaged in a contemporary Russian translation of the Bible that would carry the Christian message to the Russian people more effectively than the Slavonic Bible published during the previous century. He personally translated the Gospel of John. In 1823 he wrote a new Orthodox catechism with all of its Biblical citations in Russian. His abilities and work quickly advanced his career. He became a member of the Holy Synod in 1819 and archbishop of Moscow in 1821 (metropolitan in 1826).
Filaret’s new Bible and catechetical initiatives provoked opposition in church and governing circles, who saw them as signs of Orthodoxy’s deepening dependence on Protestantism. The critics soon stopped the Bible translation, burned its completed portions, and redirected church education on what Filaret called the “reverse course to scholasticism.” His catechism was reissued in 1827 in revised form and in Slavonic. Under these circumstances, Filaret had to rethink his own position and ideas. While he never departed from his belief that the church must communicate its teachings in a language people could understand (he finally won publication of a Russian translation of the Bible during the more liberal reign of Alexander II), Fi-laret now gave his ideas a more explicitly patristic underpinning, as evidenced in the dogmatic theology he eloquently and poetically expressed in his sermons. Moreover, he sponsored publication of the Writings of the Holy Fathers in Russian Translation (1843- 1893). One eminent Russian theologian identifies the new work as the crucial moment in the “awakening of Orthodoxy” in modern times, the moment when Russian theology began to recover the teachings of the Eastern church fathers and to define itself with respect to both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.
While many aspects of Filaret’s activity as a leader of the Russian church for more than forty years bear mentioning, his efforts to reform and strengthen monasticism stand out. He promoted contemplative asceticism (hesychasm) on the territory of the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius monastery and elsewhere. Fully reformed monasteries, he believed, might inspire the return of the Old Ritualist and reconvert Byzantine Rite Catholics (Uniates) of Poland. He encouraged informal women’s communities to become monasteries, and during the 1860s devised badly needed guidelines for all monasteries, stressing wherever possible that they follow the rule of St. Basil with its obligation for
