make a better connection between research, technology, and the introduction of new goods.
KOTOSHIKHIN, GRIGORY KARPOVICH
No sooner were these reforms implemented than significant modifications had to be introduced to regulate the size and distribution of enterprise funds. New targets were added for consumer goods and quality; later in the 1970s, labor productivity, gross output, and other targets returned to the mandatory list. Supply problems persisted; little wholesale trade occurred.
Most specialists believe that the Kosygin reforms failed because of continuing imbalances between feasible supplies and the demands of the Party-controlled government, the unwillingness to release prices, and bureaucratic resistance to any radical change. But tinkering and experiments continued until 1982. Perestroika would revive many of the basic ideas of the Kosygin reforms, with a very different denouement: chaos and collapse rather than reversal and stagnation. See also: ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; KOSYGIN, ALEXEI NIKOLAYEVICH; LIBERMAN, YEVSEI GRIGOREVICH; PER-ESTROIKA; SOVNARKHOZY
Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (1998). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 6th ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Nove, Alec. (1986). The Soviet Economic System, 3rd ed. Boston: Allen amp; Unwin.
MARTIN C. SPECHLER
(c. 1630-1667), Muscovite official, ?migr?, and author.
As an under-secretary of the Muscovite Chancery for Foreign Affairs, Grigory Kotoshikhin was one of the few seventeenth-century Russians allowed to travel to the West, on diplomatic missions to Poland and Sweden. In 1663 he began to give information on foreign policy to the Swedish agent in Moscow. The following year he fled abroad, finally settling in Stockholm. At the behest of the Swedish government he compiled a lengthy description of the Muscovite state. Fatally injuring his landlord in a drunken quarrel, Kotoshikhin was sentenced to death. On the eve of his execution he embraced the Lutheran faith.
Kotoshikhin’s manuscript was soon translated into Swedish but then forgotten. Rediscovered in the late 1830s, it was published in Russia in 1840 under the title On Russia in the Reign of Alexis Mikhailovich. Though its importance as a historical source was immediately recognized, the evaluation of Kotoshikhin’s account in Russia and the Soviet Union would long be influenced by ideological considerations. In the nineteenth century, Westernizers praised Kotoshikhin for exposing Muscovite backwardness, while Slavophiles condemned him for blackening Muscovite reality. In the late Stalin period and beyond, the dictates of hyper-nationalism obligated scholars to excoriate Kotoshikhin as a traitor who defamed his country to please his Swedish hosts.
There are indeed a few passages in which Ko-toshikhin lashes out at Muscovite ignorance, dishonesty, superstition, and xenophobia and lauds the “blessed freedom” of the West. But these passionate outbursts, almost certainly interpolations in the original text, are in striking contrast with the content and tone of the rest of the account, which is severely factual and almost entirely free of broad generalizations and value judgments. The level of accuracy is remarkably high, particularly for someone writing in a foreign country with no sources other than the Law Code of 1649. Koto-shikhin emphasized those topics that were of interest to the Swedish government; these corresponded well with what he knew best. There are lengthy descriptions of the central administrative institutions, diplomatic protocol, and court ceremonial; somewhat shorter discussions of the nobility, the army, provincial administration, merchants and trade, and the marriage customs of the upper class; and virtually nothing on the peasantry or the Orthodox Church. Kotoshikhin portrays a government of legal norms and bureaucratic process, and provides strong though not unimpeachable evidence on the constitutional role of the estates of the realm in electing or confirming each tsar from 1584 to 1645.
On Russia in the Reign of Alexis Mikhailovich has been republished a number of times (1859, 1884, 1906, 1984, and twice in 2000; Pennington, 1980, is the definitive edition of the text, with exhaustive linguistic commentaries). It remains a uniquely valuable source. No other Muscovite ever wrote anything comparable, and no Western traveler ever had Kotoshikhin’s expert knowledge.
Kotoshikhin was born ahead of his time. From the reign of Peter the Great onward, Russians were able to adopt Western ways and values while reKOVALEVSKAYA, SOFIA VASILIEVNA maining loyal to their native land. In Kotoshikhin’s generation this was not yet possible. See also: ALEXEI MIKHAILOVICH; LAW CODE OF 1649; SLAVOPHILES; WESTERNIZERS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Weickhardt, George. (1990). “Kotoshikhin: An Evaluation and Interpretation.” Russian History 17: 127- 154.
(b. 1930), dissident, politician, human rights activist.
Sergei Kovalev became famous as a dissident in the 1970s and later as a politician working for human rights in post-communist Russia. Trained as a biologist, he spent much of his early career at Moscow State University. In 1969 he was dismissed for dissident activity. From 1970 to 1974 he worked in a research station.
In 1967 Kovalev became involved in human rights circles, and soon developed a close friendship with fellow dissident Andrei Sakharov. Like Sakharov, he believed in the strategy of insisting on strict application by the authorities of the existing laws, and also of working for law reform. In 1968 he was one of the anonymous founders and editors of the samizdat (typewritten self-published) journal A Chronicle of Current Events, which documented violations of human rights and circulated covertly from hand to hand. In 1969 he was a founding member of the Action Group to Defend Civil Rights in the USSR.
In 1974 he was arrested and eventually tried in closed court. Sentenced to seven years in a strict-regime labor camp, he served his whole term, taking part in numerous protests and hunger strikes by prisoners. On his release he was forced to live from 1984 to 1987 in the remote town of Kalinin.
In the late 1980s Kovalev took part in various initiatives aimed at creating a civil society. In 1990 he was elected on a Democratic Russia ticket to the RSFSR’s Congress of People’s Deputies and its Supreme Soviet. He chaired the latter’s Human Rights Committee, which passed important legislation on refugees, citizenship, procedures for emergency rule, the exculpation of political prisoners, and parliamentary supervision of the security services.
In the fall of 1993 he opposed Yeltsin’s proroguing of the parliament, but did not support the parliamentary opposition. In October Yeltsin appointed him chair of his Commission on Human Rights, and the political movement Russia’s Choice elected him chair of its council. In December he was elected to the new parliament, and as of 2003 has remained a deputy, switching his allegiance in 2001 from the successor of Russia’s Choice to Yabloko.
In 1996 Kovalev resigned from Yeltsin’s Human Rights Commission, in protest against his increasing authoritarianism and the war crimes committed by the military in Chechnya. He continues to be active in a variety of forums, and is widely seen in the early twenty-first century as the leading champion of human rights in Russia. See also: DISSADENT MOVEMENT; MEMORIAL; SAKHAROV, ANDREI DMITRIEVICH; SAMIZDAT
PETER REDDAWAY
(1850-1891), mathematician and writer.
Sofia Korvin-Krukovskaya, growing up on an estate in Vitebsk province, displayed unusual mathematical ability from childhood. Desperate to escape the strictures of gentry womanhood, at eighteen she contracted a “fictive” marriage with the paleontologist and social activist Vladimir Ko-valevsky, who took her to western Europe to study. In 1874 Kovalevskaya, mentored by the eminent German mathematician Karl Weierstrass, received a doctorate from G?ttingen University. Afterward, the Kovalevskys, now married in fact, returned to St. Petersburg, where their daughter was born in 1878. In 1883 Kovalevsky, embroiled in financial scandal connected with an oil company scheme, committed suicide. Unable to find suitable teaching work in Russia, Kovalevskaya, at the urging of Weierstrass and the Swedish mathematician Gus-tav Mittag-Leffler, accepted a professorship in the newly established Stockholm University, becoming the first woman in modern Europe to hold such a post. In Sweden the
