hermit), and former abbot of Simonov Monastery. It rapidly gained brethren, land, and renown. At Cyril’s death in 1427, its patron was the prince of Belozersk-Mozhaisk, and its titular head was the Archbishop of Rostov, to whom Kirillov was administratively subordinated by 1478.
Social and administrative reforms occurred under Abbot Trifon, who lived from about 1434 to about 1517. Trifon was a monk of the Athos-linked St. Savior Monastery on the Rock, and later became Archbishop of Rostov (1462-1467). At this point the monastery gained the name “Kirillov” and, probably, its strict cenobitic (communal- disciplinarian) rule. It entered a relationship with the Moscow authorities. During the civil wars, Trifon loosed Basil II from his cross oath to Dmitry Shemyaka (1446); Cyril was canonized in 1448 and his vita (life) was written by Pachomius the Logothete in 1462. Tri-fon’s successor and fellow St. Savior monk, Abbot Cassian, who lived from about 1447 until about 1469, went on a Moscow embassy to the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople.
During Trifon’s abbacy, a Byzantine-influenced school flourished, where basic texts of grammar, logic, cosmology, and history circulated. Its legacy was a bibliographical trend whose representatives (such as Efrosin, fl. 1463-1491) compiled and catalogued much of the literary inheritance of Bulgaria, Kievan Rus, and Serbia, and edited important works of Muscovite literature (such as the epic Zadonshchina) and chronography (the First Sophia Chronicle). Kirillov’s great library (1,304 books by 1621) has survived almost intact.
From 1484 to 1514, Kirillov was a focal point for the Non-Possessors, abbots and monks- including Gury Tushin, Nilus Sorsky, and Vassian Patrikeev-who rejected monastic estates and promoted hesychast ideals of mental prayer and her-mitism. After 1515, Kirillov followed the Possessor trend, whose first leader, Joseph of Volok, had praised the cenobitic discipline of several of its early abbots. Kirillov’s sixteenth-century abbots achieved high rank, such as Afanasy (1539-1551), later bishop of Suzdal, whom Andrew Kurbsky called “silver-loving,” and from 1530 to 1570 their land-holdings expanded terrifically (at mid-seventeenth century Kirillov was the fifth-largest landowner in Muscovy).
Attracting wealth, privileges, and pilgrims from the central government as well as the boyar aristocracy, Kirillov lost self-governance to Moscow. Ivan IV, whose birth was ascribed to St. Cyril’s intervention and who expressed a wish to join Kir-illov’s brethren in 1567, took over its administration, lecturing its abbot and boyar monks (such as Ivan-Jonah Sheremetev) on piety in a letter of 1573. (Boris Godunov later selected Kirillov’s abbot, and the False Dmitry chose its monks.) By the mid-sixteenth century, Kirillov had become fiscally subject to the bishop of Vologda, and by century’s end to the patriarch.
In the 1590s Kirillov was transformed from a cultural center into a fortress, with stone towers and walls that withstood Polish-Lithuanian attacks during the Time of Troubles. Its infirmary treated monks and laymen, and its icon-painting and stonemasonry workshops sold their wares to Muscovites. Kirillov was also used as a prison. Its most illustrious detainee, Patriarch Nikon, was held in solitary confinement from 1676 to 1681 without access to his library, paper, or ink.
From the eighteenth century, Kirillov lost its military importance, and an economic and spiritual decline began. It was closed by Soviet authorities in 1924 and transformed into a museum. In 1998 monastic life at Kirillov was partly restored.
KIRIYENKO, SERGEI VLADILENOVICH
See also: CAVES MONASTERY; SIMONOV MONASTERY; TRINITY ST. SERGIUS MONASTERY
Fedotov, George P. (1966). The Russian Religious Mind. Vol. II: The Middle Ages. The Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
(b. 1962), former prime minister of the Russian Federation and a leader of the liberal party Union of Right Forces. Kiriyenko was born in Sukumi, which is presently in Abkhazia, nominally a part of the Republic of Georgia. In 1993 he received a degree in economic leadership from the Academy of Economics. Soon he founded a bank, Garantiya, in Nizhny Novgorod. He was so successful that the governor, Boris Nemtsov, recommended that he take over the nearly bankrupt oil company, Norsi. He succeeded once again, breaking the apathy that allowed a bad situation to fester. He first threatened to close the company, hoping this would spur workers’ efficiency. It did not. So he worked out a complicated restructuring plan that involved tax breaks and new negotiations with workers, suppliers, and buyers. Kiriyenko managed to convince all parties that it was in their joint interests to increase production, and within a year production increased about 300 percent.
Kiriyenko now had a national reputation, and Russian President Boris Yeltsin made him minister for fuel and energy in 1997. In this capacity he favorably impressed American President Bill Clinton’s Russian specialist Strobe Talbott. In March 1998 Yeltsin shocked Russia and the world when he fired his long-time prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and announced his intention to replace him with Kiriyenko. There ensued a bitter battle between Yeltsin and the Duma over Kiriyenko’s appointment. Only on the third and last vote did the Duma confirm Kiriyenko. In his first speech as prime minister, Kiriyenko pointed out that Russia faced “an enormous number of problems.”
Despite his talents, Kiriyenko could not change some basic facts. By July 1998 unpaid wages totaled 66 billion rubles ($11 billion); service of the government debt consumed almost 50 percent of the budget; the price of oil, one of Russia’s chief exports, was falling; and a financial crisis in Asia had investors fleeing “emerging markets,” Russia included. In June a desperate Yeltsin telephoned Clinton to ask him to intervene in the deliberations of the International Monetary Fund on Russia’s behalf. It was too late. In August the Russian government in effect declared bankruptcy, and Yeltsin dismissed the Kiriyenko government. As of June 2003, Kiriyenko was president of Russia’s chemical weapons disarmament commission. See also: NEMTSOV, BORIS IVANOVICH; UNION OF RIGHT FORCES; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aron, Leon. (2000). Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life. London: HarperCollins. Talbott, Strobe. (2002). The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy New York: Random House.
(1886-1934), Leningrad Party secretary and Politburo member.
Born in 1886 as Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov in Urzhum, in the northern Russian province of Viatka, Kirov was abandoned by his father and left orphaned by his mother. He spent much of his childhood in an orphanage before training as a mechanic at a vocational school in the city of Kazan from 1901 to 1904. He became involved in radical political activity during his student years, after which he moved to Tomsk and joined the Social Democratic Party, garnering attention as a local party activist before the age of twenty. Kirov joined the Bolshevik Party and was arrested in 1906 for his activities in the revolutionary events of 1905 in Tomsk. After his release in 1909, he moved to Vladikavkaz and resumed his career as a professional revolutionary, taking a job with a local liberal newspaper and changing his last name to Kirov. He continued his party activities in the Caucasus in the years before the October Revolution, serving in various capacities as one of the leading Bolsheviks in the Caucasus during the Revolution and civil war eras. Kirov occupied the post of secretary of the Azerbaijan Central Committee from 1921 to 1926. In 1926 he became a candidate memKLYUCHEVSKY, VASILY OSIPOVICH
Sergei Kirov, the popular leader of the Leningrad Party Committee, was assassinated in 1934. © BETTMANN/CORBIS ber of the Politburo and took the position of first secretary of the Leningrad Provincial Party organization, playing a major role in the political defeat of Grigory Zinoviev by Josef Stalin. Kirov gained full Politburo membership in 1930 and retained his position as head of the Leningrad Party organization until his death in 1934.
On December 1, 1934, a lone gunman named Leonid Nikolaev murdered Kirv at the Leningrad party headquarters. Kirov’s murder served as a pretext for a wave of repression that was carried out by Stalin in 1935 and 1936 against former political oppositionists, including Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, and against large sectors of the Leningrad population. The connection between Kirov’s death and the coordinated repression of 1935 and 1936 has led numerous contemporary observers, as well as later scholars, to speculate that Stalin himself arranged the murder in order to justify an attack on his political opponents. Proponents of this theory argue that Kirov represented a moderate opposition to Stalin in the years 1930 to 1933, in particular as an opponent to Stalin’s demand in 1932 for the execution of the oppositionist Mikhail Riutin; they also argue that provincial-level party
