Zosima from office and convened another Moscow synod in 1504, which condemned five heretics to death, including the late Kuritsyn’s brother Ivan Volk, a state secretary expert in the law, and Archimandrite Kassian of Novgorod’s Yurev Monastery. Others, like the merchant Semon Klenov, were imprisoned.
The accusations against the “heretics” reveal a hodgepodge of tenets rather than a coherent sect. The dissidents allegedly elevated Old Testament law, denigrated Christian scripture and patristic writings, attacked icons and monasticism, and denied the Trinity and the Incarnation. They dissimulated in the presence of steadfast adherents of Orthodoxy, practiced astrology and black magic, and after the end of the Russian Orthodox year 7000 (1492 C.E.) ridiculed Christian writings that had predicted the Second Coming around that time, and especially the New Testament for describing its own era as the last epoch. They also opposed the condemnation of heretics and demanded that repentant heretics not be punished.
Whatever Jewishness lies behind these accusations may go back to the scriptural, astronomical, and philosophical interchanges between Jews and Orthodox Christians in western Rus during the fifteenth century. Fyodor Kuritsyn’s “Laodician Epistle,” a chain poem, is reminiscent of Jewish wisdom literature. In addition, the dissidents were more open to secular culture and rationalism than most representatives of the official church. Some of the accusations of heresy may have derived from issues pertaining to specific icons, to various Nov-gorodian practices, to the use of Jewish astronomical knowledge, to Moscow’s treatment of conquered Novgorod, and even to church lands. Whatever the case, when a similar outbreak of dissidence occurred in Novgorod and Moscow during the 1550s, it was attributed to Protestant, not Jewish, influences. The phenomenon of dissidence prompted Archbishop Gennady to assemble a coterie of Orthodox and Catholic experts to compile the first complete Slavonic Bible and make other useful translations. See also: IVAN III; JOSEPH OF VOLOTSK, ST.; KURITSYN, FY-ODOR VASILEVICH; NOVGOROD THE GREAT; ORTHODOXY; POSSESSORS AND NON-POSSESSORS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Klier, John. (1997). “Judaizing without Jews? Moscow-Novgorod, 1470-1504.” In Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 1359-1584, ed. Ann M. Kleimola and Gail D. Lenhoff. Moscow: ITZ-Garant. Tauber, Moishe. (1995). “The Kievan Jew Zacharia and the Astronomical Works of the Judaizers.” In Jews and Slavs, vol. 3, ed. Wolf Moskovich, Shmuel Shvarzbard, and Anatoly Alekseev. Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press.
Abortive Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd in July 1917.
On July 3-5, 1917, in Petrograd, militant soldiers, sailors, and factory workers staged an abortive uprising. For weeks, local Bolshevik, Anarchist, and Left Socialist Revolutionary organizers had agitated against the Provisional Government and for immediate transfer of power to the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies. This call to action resonated with workers engaged in bitter labor conflicts and among garrison soldiers facing deployment to the front. July 3 witnessed a flurry of meetings, demonstrations, and strikes. That evening tens of thousands of soldiers and workers, led by left socialist agitators, marched on the city center and insisted that the Soviet assume power. However, the Soviet’s Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary leaders, already engulfed in a crisis in the government coalition, refused.
The Bolshevik Military Organization and Petersburg Committee pushed for an uprising while the Central Committee wavered. Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev initially urged restraint but tentatively endorsed the demonstrations in the early hours of July 4. The party’s leader, Vladimir Lenin, remained absent from Pet-rograd until midday.
On July 4 huge crowds of armed workers, soldiers, and sailors controlled the city’s streets; nearly four hundred people died in scattered fighting and random shootings. Crowds again demanded that unwilling Soviet leaders accept power. Lenin and the Central Committee meanwhile debated the possibility of a successful seizure of power. By evening, the tenor of events had changed dramatically. When the government publicly alleged that Lenin was a German agent, several garrison units turned against the demonstrations. Rumor spread that sol713
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diers were marching on Petrograd to defend the government. By morning on July 5, the inchoate seizure of power collapsed. The government arrested several Bolshevik leaders, on whom it blamed the uprising. Lenin went into hiding, and his party suffered a significant temporary decline.
The July Days resonated throughout Russia- rallies for Soviet power, for instance, took place in Moscow, Saratov, Krasnoyarsk, and other provincial cities-but its chief significance lay in exposing the fragility of the Provisional Government and in accelerating the polarization of Russian politics and society.
Rabinowitch, Alexander. (1968). Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wade, Rex A. (2000). The Russian Revolution, 1917. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Kabardians are one of the titular nationalities of the north Caucasian Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria in the Russian Federation. The population of the republic, whose capital city is Nalchik, is 790,000, of whom 48 percent are Kabardian. Of these, 55 percent are rural and engaged in agriculture, animal husbandry, and metallurgy, as well as in health services in the well-known spa resorts of the region. Kabardians also live in the adjacent Stavropol Krai, the Krasnodar Krai, and in North Ossetia.
Kabardian is linguistically classified as East Circassian, and the Kabardians belong to the same eth- nolinguistic family as the Adyge and the Cherkess who live in neighboring republics. Policies on nationalities during the Soviet era established these three groups as separate “peoples” and languages, but historical memory and linguistic affinity, as well as post-Soviet ethnic politics, perpetuate notions of ethnic continuity. An important element in this has been the contact, since the break-up of the Soviet Union, with Kabardians living in Turkey, Syria, Israel, Jordan, western Europe, and the United States. These are the descendents of migrants who left for the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century after the Russian conquest of the Caucasus. In the 1990s a number of Kabardian families from the diaspora settled in Nalchik, but integration remains fraught with social and legal problems.
The Kabardians are largely Muslim, though a small Kabardian Russian Orthodox group inhabits the city of Mozdok in Ossetia. Other religious influences, including Greek Orthodox Christianity and indigenous beliefs and rituals, can still be discerned in cultural practices. The Soviet state discouraged Islamic practice and identity but supported cultural nation-building. Kabardian folk-dance groups (i.e., “Kabardinka”) have achieved widespread fame.
In the post-Soviet period, interethnic tensions led, in the early 1990s, to an attempted partition of the republic between the two nationalities, but this did not come to pass. The wars in Abkhasia (between 1992 and 1993) and Chechnya (1994-1997; 1999-2000) affected Kabardian sympathies and politics, causing the Russian state to intermittently infuse the republic with resources to prevent the spreading of conflict. Islamic movements, generally termed “Wahhabism,” are in some evidence, and mosque building and religious instruction and practice are on the increase.
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See also: ABKHAZIANS; ADYGE; CAUCASUS; CHERKESS; CHECHNYA AND CHECHENS; ISLAM; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
Baddeley, John F. (1908). The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus. London: Longmans, Green amp; Co. Borxup, Marie Bennigsen, ed. (1992). The North Caucasus Barrier: The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Gammer, Moshe. (1994). Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of
