Krylov, Ivan. (1977). Krylov’s Fables, tr. with a preface by Sir Bernard Pares. Westport, CT: Hyperion Press. Stepanov, N. L. (1973). Ivan Krylov. New York: Twayne.
(b. 1924), Soviet police official; head of the KGB from 1988 to 1991.
Born in Volgograd, Russia, Vladimir Kryuchkov joined the Communist Party in 1944 and became a full-time employee of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol). In 1946 Kryuchkov embarked on a legal career, working as an investigator for the prosecutor’s office and studying at the All-Union Juridical Correspondence Institute, from which he received a diploma in 1949. Kryuchkov joined the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1951 and enrolled as a student at the Higher Diplomatic School in Moscow. He received his first assignment abroad in 1955, when he was sent to Hungary to serve under Soviet Ambassador Yuri Andropov. Kryuchkov was in Budapest during the Soviet invasion in 1956 and was an eyewitness to the brutal suppression of Hungarian nationalists by Soviet troops. After returning to Moscow in 1959, he worked in the Central Committee Department for Liaison with Socialist Countries, which his former supervisor Andropov now headed. In 1967, when Andropov was appointed to the leadership of the KGB, the Soviet police and intelligence apparatus, he brought Kryuchkov, who rose to the post of chief of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence) in 1977. In 1988 Soviet party leader Mikhail Gorbachev appointed Kryuchkov chairman of the KGB. Although Kryuchkov voiced public support for Gorbachev’s liberal reforms, he grew increasingly
KULAKS
alarmed by the threats to Soviet unity posed by the non-Russian republics. In August 1991, Kryuchkov and his hard-line colleagues in the government declared a state of emergency in the country, hoping that Gorbachev, who was vacationing in the Crimea, would support them. When Gorbachev refused, they backed down and were arrested. Kryuchkov was released from prison in 1993 and in 1996 published his memoirs, A Personal File (Lichnoye delo), where he defended his attempt to keep the Soviet Union together and accused Gorbachev of weakness and duplicity. See also: ANDROPOV, YURI VLADIMIROVICH; AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEEVICH; INTELLIGENCE SERVICES; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF
Knight, Amy. (1988). The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union. Boston: Allen and Unwin. Knight, Amy. (1996). Spies Without Cloaks: The KGB’s Successors. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
to represent the interests of the Orthodox Church in the Holy Land. Because Russia no longer needed an alliance with an independent Zaporozhian Cossack host, this military and diplomatic success led to its destruction and the end of any notion of an autonomous Ukraine for more than a hundred years. The treaty symbolized the consolidation of Russian control of the southern steppe, the rise of Russia as a great European and Middle Eastern power, and the beginning of the end of Turkish supremacy in the area. No wonder there were great celebrations in Moscow a year later, during which the foremost Russian military heroes were lavishly rewarded and Rumyantsev was given the honorific Zadunyasky (“beyond the Danube”). More than any other event, the treaty established Catherine II as “the Great” in terms of Russian expansion. The Ottoman loss, however, left a vacuum in the eastern Mediterranean open for the ambitions of Napoleon I twenty-five years later, and many more battles in the eastern Mediterranean would result. Perhaps the shattering international impact of the treaty is the ghost behind the Middle Eastern and Balkan problems of the twentieth century and beyond.
KUCHUK KAINARJI, TREATY OF
The first war between Russia and Turkey during the reign of Catherine the Great began in 1768. After the Russians won a series of victories and advanced beyond the Danube River deep into Ottoman territory in the Balkans, Field Marshal Peter Rumyant-sev and Turkish plenipotentiaries met in an obscure Bulgarian village and signed a peace treaty on July 10, 1774. The war was a major victory for Catherine’s expansionist policy and a realization of the goals of Peter the Great in the south. The Russian Empire gained permanent control of all the fortress-ports on the Sea of Azov and around the Dneiper-Bug estuary, the right of free navigation on the Black Sea, including the right to maintain a fleet, and the right of passage through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles for merchant vessels. The Tatar khanate of the Crimean Peninsula was recognized as independent, thus removing the Ottoman presence from the northern shore of the Black Sea and essentially bringing the area under Russia control (it was peacefully annexed in 1783), and the Turks paid an indemnity of 4.5 million rubles, which covered much of the Russian costs of the war.
The treaty also gave Russia the right to maintain consulates throughout the Ottoman Empire and See also: CATHERINE II; RUMYANTSEV, PETER ALEXAN-DROVICH; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, John T. (1989). Catherine the Great: Life and Legend. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Madariaga, Isabel de. (1981). Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great. New Haven: Yale University Press.
The term kulak came into use after emancipation in 1861, describing peasants who profited from their peers. While kulak connotes the power of the fist, the nearly synonymous term miroyed means “mir-eater.” At first the term “kulak” did not refer to the newly prosperous peasants, but rather to village extortioners who consume the commune, men of special rapacity, their wealth derived from usury or trading rather than from agriculture. The term never acquired precise scientific or economic definition. Peasants had a different understanding of the kulaks than outsiders; however, both definitions focused on social and moral aspects. During the
twentieth century Lenin and Stalin defined the kulaks in economic and political terms as the capitalist strata of a polarized peasantry. Exploitation was the central element in the peasants’ definition of the miroyed as well as in outsiders’ definition of the kulak. Peasants, by contrast, attributed power to the kulak and limited their condemnation to peasants who exploited members of their own community. The kulaks also played an important political role in self-government of the peasant community. In the communal gathering they controlled decision making and had great influence on the opinion of the rest of the peasants.
The meaning of the term changed after the October Revolution, as the prerevolutionary type of kulak seldom survived in the village. In the 1920s the kulaks were in most instances simply wealthier peasants who, unlike their predecessors, were incontestably devoted to agriculture. They often were only slightly distinguishable from the middle peasants. Thus many Bolshevik leaders denied the existence of kulaks in the Soviet countryside. When in the mid-1920s the question of differentiation of the peasantry became part of the political debate, the statisticians had to provide a picture based on Lenin’s assumption of class division. As social differentiation was still quite weak, it was impossible to define a clear class of capitalist peasants. The use of hired laborers and the leasing of land was under control of the rural soviets. Traditional forms of exploitation in the countryside, such as usury and trading, had lost their significance due to the growing cooperative organization of the peasantry. Since the use of hired laborers-a sign of capitalist exploitation-made it difficult to find a significant number of peasant capitalists for statistical purposes, a mixture of signs of wealth and obscure indicators of exploitation came into use in definition of the kulak: for example, ownership of at least three draught animals, sown area of more than eleven hectares, ownership of a trading establishment even without hired help, ownership of a complex and costly agricultural machine or of a considerable quantity of good quality implements, and hiring out of means of production. In general, the existence of one criterion was enough to define the peasant household as kulak. The statisticians thus determined that 3.9 percent of the peasantry consisted of kulaks.
It was exactly its indefiniteness that allowed the Bolsheviks to use the term kulak to initiate class war in the Soviet countryside toward the end of the 1920s. In order to force the peasants into the kolkhoz, the Politburo declared the almost nonexistent group of kulaks to be class enemies. Every peasant who was unwilling to join the kolkhoz had to fear being classified as kulak and subjected to expropriation and deportation. The justification lay in the political role the stronger peasants played in the communal assemblies. Together with the bulk of the peasants they were skeptical of any ideas of collective farming. The sheer existence of successful individual peasants ran counter to the Bolshevik aim of collectivization.
