and Evenki have also lived on this territory for centuries. Administratively the Koryaks live in the Koryak Autonomous Region (okrug), a territory approximately the size of Arizona and which is one of the ten autonomous regions recognized in the Russian Constitution of 1993.
The Koryak Autonomous Region is just one part of the larger Kamchatka Peninsula, which includes the Karaginsky and Komandorsky islands in the Bering Sea. With an area of about 490,425 square miles, the countries England, Portugal, Belgium, and Luxembourg together could be placed on the territory of Kamchatka. The peninsula contains many volcanoes, some of them active. The Koryak territory is mostly forest tundra, as well as tundra in the subarctic climate belt. The highest temperature in the summer is 34° centigrade and the lowest in the winter (in the central and northern parts of the peninsula) falls to about -49° centigrade.
KORZHAKOV, ALEXANDER VASILIEVICH
The term koryak derives from the word for reindeer (kor). When combined with its prepositional suffix, korak means “with (or at) the reindeer.” This is not surprising, given the Koryak’s heavy reliance on reindeer for a wide range of bare essentials, including meat, transportation, household articles, fat (to light indoor lamps), materials for constructing mobile dwellings (yarangas), bones (for tools and household items), and hides (to make clothes, footwear, and even diapers and sanitary napkins). When referring to themselves, however, the Koryaks do not use the term. Instead, they call themselves either nimilany (“residents of a settled village”) or chavchuvens (nomadic reindeer people).
In contrast to some other non-Russian nationalities, such as the Tuvinians, the Koryaks are a minority in their own region. Russians and Ukrainians make up more than 75 percent of the total population. The remaining 25 percent are Koryaks, Chukchi, Itelmens, and Evenki. Koryaks make up only one-fifth of the indigenous Siberian population. See also: EVENKI; NORTHERN PEOPLES; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; SIBERIA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berdahl, Daphne, and Bunzl, Matti. (2000). Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Humphrey, Caroline. (2002). The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Keay, John. (2002). The Mammoth Book of Explorers. New York: Carroll amp; Graf. Reid, Anna. (2003). The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia. New York: Walker amp; Company. Whybrow, Helen. (2003). Dead Reckoning: Great Adventure Writing from the Golden Age of Exploration, 1800-1900. New York: W. W. Norton.
(b. 1950), aide to President Boris Yeltsin.
Alexander Vasilievich Korzhakov was the most trusted aide of President Boris Yeltsin until Yeltsin dismissed him in 1996. From 1970 until 1989 he worked in Administration 9 of the KGB, which provided personal security for senior Soviet officials. From 1985 to 1987 he was a bodyguard to Yeltsin, and remained loyal to him after Yeltsin was politically disgraced in 1987. For this the KGB dismissed him in 1989. During Yeltsin’s political resurrection Korzhakov resumed work as his bodyguard. From 1991 he headed the Presidential Security Service (PSS) with the rank of major general, and increasingly became a close political adviser to Yeltsin. In August 1991 he played an important role in Yeltsin’s successful defeat of the three-day hardline coup.
In October 1993, Korzhakov apparently played a key role in persuading the defense minister to have the military storm the parliament. Also, he personally arrested the leaders of the armed opposition.
Later he turned the PSS into what Yeltsin called his personal “mini-KGB.” He built up departments for personal surveillance, political dirty tricks, and political and economic analysis. He encouraged Yeltsin to become politically more authoritarian and less liberal on economic reform, and even advocated specific policies on oil. As he freely admitted in his revealing memoir about Yeltsin, he played a major role in recruiting Boris Berezovsky and other rich businessmen to support Yeltsin financially and through their media. Thus he helped turn them into oligarchs with political clout. In 1995 he even arranged for Berezovsky to control, financially and otherwise, the newly created television company, Public Russian Television. It was important, he argued, to have a major channel that was firmly pro-administration and would counter the widespread criticism of the Kremlin in the existing media.
In 1996 Yeltsin appointed Korzhakov to one of the two teams that organized his reelection bid, the team headed by Oleg Soskovets. But Korzhakov feared that Yeltsin would lose, and therefore urged him to find a pretext to postpone the election and close down the parliament, or Duma. In March, Yeltsin took his advice, but opposition in the cabinet thwarted his plans at the last minute. In May he named Korzhakov his first adviser. In June, however, when Korzhakov and his allies clashed with the second election team in a fierce struggle for influence over Yeltsin, the latter suddenly opted for the second team, headed by Anatoly Chubais, and dismissed Korzhakov.
In February 1997 Korzhakov was elected to the Duma as an independent from Tula. In 1999 he
KOSMODEMYANSKAYA, ZOYA
was reelected on a Fatherland ticket and served on the Defense Committee. During the late 1990s he gave lengthy interviews detailing numerous allegedly corrupt activities of Yeltsin, his family, Chubais, and others, but did not discuss his own business affairs. He was never sued for libel or slander, apparently because the people he exposed believed he had evidence for what he said. Of special significance were his repeated accounts of how Berezovsky gave Yeltsin three million dollars in 1994, claiming this was a payment of royalties on Yeltsin’s memoirs, when in fact the book had earned negligible royalties.
In 2001 Korzhakov was instrumental in launching the monthly investigative newspaper Stringer. See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; OCTOBER 1993 EVENTS; SOSKOVETS, OLEG NIKOLAYEVICH; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.
PETER REDDAWAY
Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya hanged by the Nazis. © HULTON
(1923-1941), partisan girl known as “Tanya” in World War II and canonized as Russian war heroine; also known as the Soviet Joan of Arc, she was posthumously awarded the honorary title Hero of the Soviet Union.
At the outbreak of war in June 1941, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, member of the Moscow Komsomol (Communist Youth), volunteered for the partisan movement. According to the official Soviet version, in December 1941, while carrying out a military assignment behind the front line, she was caught by the Germans, arrested, tortured, and finally hanged.
The young girl’s tragic end was used as propaganda to arouse hatred for the cruel enemy and convey the necessity for vengeance. Written for this purpose, the numerous reports, which emphasized her courage, steadfastness, and exceptional strength of resistance, portrayed her as a true Soviet model and saint who had endured torture and chosen death over betraying her comrades-a model example for sacrificial death in the “Holy War” against fascism.
She shared the fate of many other daring and fearless compatriots who were popularized as heroes and heroines in the same manner. Yet Kosmode-myanskaya differed in that the public responded with compassion and affection, even abroad. Her unusual popularity cannot be explained by her heroic exploit alone, being that many others were called heroes for the same or similar behavior in fighting the enemy. Rather the visual and verbal depiction of her short life and tragic fate by several outstanding artists, poets, and filmmakers contributed to the unusually high degree of veneration.
In additon to dozens of publications on her exemplary life, bearing true hagiographic qualities, including poems (one by Margarita Aliger), songs, paintings, plays, it was a documentary photograph published in the newspaper Pravda on the occasion of her death that drew the public’s attention because it broke with the traditional Soviet style of
KOSYGIN, ALEXEI NIKOLAYEVICH
