into the 1930s. That
IZVESTIYA
peasants thereafter were able to afford the fuel to compensate for the heat lost through chimneys indicates that peasant incomes were rising.
The other features of the izba were benches around the room, on which the peasants sat during the day and on which many of them slept at night. The most honored sleeping places were on top of the stove. These places were reserved for the old people, an especially relevant issue after the introduction of the household tax in 1678, which forced the creation of the extended Russian family household and increased the mean household size from four to ten. This packing of so many people into the izba must have increased the communication of diseases significantly, another consequence of the izba that remains to be calculated.
The Russian word for “table” (stol) is old, going back to Common Slavic, whereas the word for chair (stul) only dates from the sixteenth century. These facts correspond with historians’ general understandings: most peasant izby had tables, but many probably did not have chairs. Ceilings were introduced in some huts around 1800, pushing the smoke all the way down to the floor. Before 1800 the huts all had pitched roofs and the smoke would rise up under the roof and fill the space from the underside of the roof down to where the smoke line was. With the introduction of the ceiling, that cavity was lost and the smoke went down to the floor. Goods were stored in trunks. See also: PEASANTRY; SERFDOM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hellie, Richard. (2001). “The Russian Smoky Hut and Its Probable Health Consequences.” Russian History 28 (1-4):171-184.
The newspaper Izvestiya was first published on February 28, 1917, by the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies formed during the February Revolution. The paper’s name in Russian means “Bulletin,” and it first appeared under the complete title “Bulletin of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.” Immediately upon seizing power in October 1917, the Bolsheviks appointed their own man, Yuri Steklov, editor-in-chief. In March 1918 the newspaper’s operations were transferred to Moscow along with the Bolshevik government. From an official standpoint the newspaper became the organ of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets-the leading organ of the Soviet government, as opposed to the Communist Party.
For the first ten years of its existence, the paper relied heavily on the equipment and personnel from the prerevolutionary commercial press. In Petrograd, Izvestiya was first printed at the former printshop of the penny newspaper Copeck (Kopeyka), and until late 1926 many of its reporters were veterans of the old Russian Word (Russkoye slovo).
Throughout the Soviet era Izvestiya, together with the big urban evening newspapers such as Evening Moscow (Vechernaya Moskva) was known as a less strident, less political organ than the official party papers such as Pravda. Particularly in the 1920s but also later, the paper carried miscellaneous news of cultural events, sports, natural disasters, and even crime. These topics were almost entirely missing from the major party organs by the late 1920s. In the late 1920s head editor Ivan Gronsky pioneered coverage of “man-against-nature” adventure stories such as the Soviet rescue of the crew of an Italian dirigible downed in the Arctic. Later dubbed “Soviet sensations” by journalists, such ideologically correct yet thrilling stories spread throughout the Soviet press in the 1930s.
In part as a result of its less political role in the Soviet press network, Josef Stalin and other Central Committee secretaries tended to be suspicious of Izvestiya. The editorial staff was subjected to a series of purges, beginning with the firing of “Trot-skyite” journalists in 1925, and continuing in 1926 with the firing of veteran non- Communist journalists from Russkoye slovo. In 1934 the Party Central Committee appointed Stalin’s former rightist political opponent Nikolai Bukharin to the head editorship. However in 1936 and 1937, Bukharin, former editor Gronsky, and many other senior editors were purged in the Great Terror. Bukharin was executed; Gronsky and others survived the Stalinist prison camps.
During the Thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the editor-in-chief of Izvestiya was Alexei Adzhubei, Nikita Khrushchev’s son-in-law, who used the paper to advocate de-Stalinization and Khrushchev’s reforms. Under Adzhubei, Izvestiya writers practiced a “journalism of the person,” which presented “heroes of daily life” and exposed
IZYASLAV MSTISLAVICH
the problems of ordinary Soviet subjects. Adzhubei was removed from the editorship in 1964 when Khrushchev fell, but Thomas Cox Wolfe has argued that the “journalism of the person” laid important ideological groundwork for Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reform program in the second half of the 1980s.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Izvestiya made a successful transition to operation as a private corporation. See also: ADZHUBEI, ALEXEI IVANOVICH; JOURNALISM; UNIVERSITIES Yaroslavichey). In 1073, however, Izyaslav quarreled with his brothers. They drove him out of Kiev and forced him to flee once again to Boleslaw II of the Poles. Failing to obtain help there, he traveled to Western Europe, where he sought aid unsuccessfully from the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV and from Pope Gregory VII. He finally returned to Kiev after his brother Svyatoslav died there in 1076. His last sojourn in Kiev was also short: on October 3, 1078, he was killed in battle fighting his nephew Oleg, Svyatoslav’s son. See also: GRAND PRINCE; KIEVAN RUS; YAROSLAV VLADIMIROVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kenez, Peter. (1985). The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lenoe, Matthew. (1997). “Stalinist Mass Journalism and the Transformation of Soviet Newspapers, 1926-1932.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago. Wolfe, Thomas Cox. (1997). “Imagining Journalism: Politics, Government, and the Person in the Press in the Soviet Union and Russia, 1953-1993.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
(1024-1078), grand prince of Kiev and progenitor of the Turov dynasty.
Before Yaroslav Vladimirovich “the Wise” died in 1054, he designated his eldest living son, Izyaslav, as grand prince of Kiev. Izyaslav and his younger brothers Svyatoslav and Vsevolod ruled as a triumvirate for some twenty years. During that time they asserted their authority over all the other princes and defended Rus against the nomadic Polovtsy (Cumans). However, Izyaslav’s rule in Kiev was insecure. In 1068, after he was defeated by the Polovtsy and refused to arm the Kievans, the latter rebelled, and he fled to the Poles. Because his brother Svyatoslav refused to occupy the throne, Izyaslav returned to Kiev in 1069 with the help of Polish troops. Two noteworthy events occurred during his second term of rule. In 1072 he and his brothers transported the relics of Saints Boris and Gleb into a new church that he had built in Vyshgorod. They also compiled the so-called “Law Code of Yaroslav’s Sons” (Pravda
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dimnik, Martin. (1994). The Dynasty of Chernigov 1054-1146. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Franklin, Simon, and Shepard, Jonathan. (1996). The Emergence of Rus 750-1200. London: Longman.
(c. 1096-1154), grandson of Vladimir Vsevolodo-vich “Monomakh” and grand prince of Kiev.
Between 1127 and 1139, when his father Mstislav and his uncle Yaropolk ruled Kiev, Izyaslav received, at different times, Kursk, Polotsk, southern Pereyaslavl, Turov, Pinsk, Minsk, Novgorod, and Vladimir in Volyn. In 1143 Vsevolod Olgovich, grand prince of Kiev, gave him southern Pereyaslavl again, but his uncle Yuri Vladimirovich “Dolgo-ruky” of Suzdalia objected, fearing that he would use the town as a stepping-stone to Kiev. After Vsevolod died in 1146, the Kievans, despite having pledged to accept his brother Igor as prince, invited Izyaslav to rule Kiev because he belonged to their favorite family, the Mstislavichi. But his reign was insecure, because the Davidovichi of
