Halperin, Charles J. (1986). The Tatar Yoke. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers.
The term kulturnost (“culturedness”) originates from the Russian kultura (culture) and can be translated as “cultured behavior,” “educatedness,” or simply “culture.”
Kulturnost is a concept used to determine the level of a person’s or a group’s education and culture, which can be purposefully transferred and individually adopted. It first appeared in the 1870s when the narodniki (group of liberals and intellectuals) tried to bring education and enlightenment to the working and peasant masses. A “cultured person” (kulturnyi chelovek) was one who mastered culture.
The meanings of kulturnost can differ with time, place, and context. It became a strategy of the Soviet regime in the 1930s, when millions of peasants poured into the cities and new construction sites, and their nekulturnost (uncultured behavior) seemed to endanger public order. Cultural policy aimed to transform them into disciplined Soviet citizens by propagandizing kulturnost, which in this context demanded good manners, personal hygiene (e.g. cleaning teeth), dressing properly, but also a certain educational background, level of literacy, and basic knowledge of communist ideology.
Kulturnost was thus part of a broader Soviet civilizing mission addressing the Russian peasants, but also native “backward” peoples. In the creation of a new Soviet middle class, kulturnost centered on individual consumption. Values and practices that were formerly scorned as bourgeois could be reestablished on the basis of kulturnost in the 1930s.
As an integration strategy used by the regime and as a reference point for various parts of the
KURBSKY, ANDREI MIKHAILOVICH
population, kulturnost gained significance in the formation of Russian and Soviet identities. See also: NATIONALITIES POLICY, SOVIET; PEASANTRY
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1992). The Cultural Front. Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Volkov, Vadim. (2000). “The Concept of Kul’turnost’. Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process.” In Stalinism. New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick. London and New York: Routledge.
(1912-1993), second ethnic Kazakh to lead the Kazakh Communist Party, member of the Soviet Politburo.
Born in Alma-Ata, Dinmukhammed Kunayev became a mining engineer after graduating from Moscow’s Kalinin Metals Institute in 1936. He joined the Communist Party in 1939 and soon became chief engineer, and then director, of the Kounrad Mine of the Balkhash Copper-Smelting Combine. Between 1941 and 1945 he was deputy chief engineer and head of the technical section of the Altaipolimetall Combine, director of the Ridder Mine, and then director of the extensive Lenino-gorsk Mining Administration. From 1942 to 1952 he also was deputy chairman of the Kazakh Council of People’s Commissars. Having obtained a candidate’s degree in technical sciences in 1948, he became a full member of the Kazakh Academy of Sciences in 1952 and served as its president until 1955 and as chairman of the Kazakh SSR’s Council of Ministers from 1955 to 1960.
By now a regular delegate to both the Kazakh and Soviet Party Congresses and Supreme Soviets, Kunayev progressed within the Communist hierarchy as well. In 1949 he became a candidate, and in 1951 a full member, of the Kazakh Central Committee, and in 1956 a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU. A member of the Kazakh Party’s Bureau, he first served as the powerful first secretary from 1960 to 1962 and, after chairing the ministerial council from 1962 to 1964, served again as first secretary from 1964 to 1986. In 1966 he also became a candidate member of the Soviet Central Committee’s Politburo, in 1971 he was promoted to full membership, and he was twice named a Hero of Socialist Labor (1972, 1976). Much of his success was due to the patronage of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who himself earlier had been the Kazakh Party’s first secretary. Critics charged that Kunayev showered Brezhnev with gifts and cash, but left politics to Party officials while he focused on the interests of his large and corrupt Kazakh clan. Even so, he did promote the concept of Kaza-khstani citizenship and, in December 1986, his dismissal for corruption and replacement by the Russian Gennady Kolbin sparked the Alma-Ata riots. Despite Kunayev’s ejection from the Politburo in January 1987, in 1989 his supporters secured his election to the Kazakh parliament, and he remained a deputy until he died near Alma-Ata in 1993. In late 1992 his clan and former Kazakh officials honored him by establishing a Kunayev International Fund in Alma-Ata. It had the proclaimed goals of strengthening the Kazakh Republic’s sovereignty, improving its living standards, and reviving the Kazakh cultural heritage. See also: CENTRAL COMMITTEE; COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; KAZAKHSTAN AND KAZAKHS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Olcott, Martha Brill. (1995). The Kazakhs, 2nd ed. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution.
(1528-1583), prince, boyar, military commander, emigr?, writer, and translator.
A scion of Yaroslav’s ruling line, Kurbsky began his career at Ivan IV’s court in 1547. From 1550 on, Kurbsky participated in military campaigns, including the capture of Kazan (1552). In 1550 he was listed among the thousand elite military servitors in Muscovy. In 1556 Kurbsky received the highest court rank, that of boyar. During the Livonian war, Kurbsky became a high-ranking commander (1560). In 1564 Kurbsky fled to Sigis-mund II Augustus, ruler of Poland and Lithuania, fearing persecution in Muscovy. Kurbsky’s defecKURDS tion resulted in the confiscation of his lands and the repression of his relatives in Muscovy.
Receiving large estates from Sigismund II, Kurb-sky served his new lord in a military capacity, even taking part in campaigns against Muscovy (1564, 1579, 1581). Kurbsky tried to integrate himself into Lithuanian society through two marriages to local women and participation in the work of local elective bodies. At the same time, he was involved in numerous legal and armed conflicts with his neighbors.
A number of literary works and translations are credited to Kurbsky. Among them are three letters to Ivan IV, in which Kurbsky justified his flight and accused the tsar of tyranny and moral corruption. His “History of the Grand Prince of Moscow” glorifies Kurbsky’s military activities and condemns the terror of Ivan IV. Kurbsky is sometimes seen as the first Russian dissident, though in fact he never questioned the political foundations of Muscovite autocracy. Continuing study of Kurb-sky’s works has overturned traditional descriptions of him as a conservative representative of the Muscovite aristocracy. Together with his associates, Kurbsky compiled and translated in exile works from various Christian and classical authors. Kurb-sky’s literary activities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth are a striking example of contacts between Renaissance and Eastern Orthodox cultures in the second half of the sixteenth century. Kurbsky’s interest in theological and classical writings, however, did not make him part of Renaissance culture or alter his Muscovite cultural stance.
Edward L. Keenan argues that the texts attributed to Kurbsky were in fact produced in the seventeenth century and that Kurbsky was functionally illiterate in Slavonic. Keenan’s hypothesis is based on the dating and distribution of the surviving manuscripts, on textual similarities between works credited to Kurbsky and those by other authors of later origin, and on his idea that members of the sixteenth-century secular elite, including Kurbsky, remained outside the tradition of church Slavonic religious writing. Most experts reject Keenan’s ideas. His opponents offer an alternative textual analysis and detect circumstantial references to Kurbsky’s letters to Ivan IV in sixteenth-century sources. Scholars have discovered an earlier manuscript of Kurbsky’s first letter to Ivan IV and have provided considerable information on Kurbsky’s life in exile, on his political importance as an opponent of Ivan IV, and on the cultural interaction between the church and secular elites in Muscovy. Though Kurbsky claimed he could not write Cyrillic, this statement is open to different interpretations. Other Muscovites, whose ability to write is well documented, also made similar declarations. Kurbsky’s major works were translated into English by J. L. I. Fen-nell: The Correspondence between Prince Kurbsky and Tsar Ivan IV of Russia (1955); Prince A. M. Kurbsky’s History of Ivan IV (1963). See also: IVAN IV; LIVONIAN WAR; YAROSLAV VLADIMIRO-VICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
