The first USSR Congress of People’s Deputies elected Lukyanov chairman of the newly reconfigured Supreme Soviet in 1990. This post allowed him to control the parliamentary agenda. He was repeatedly accused of stonewalling legislation he did not like and putting bills he supported to vote multiple times if they were voted down.
Despite his close personal links with Gorbachev, Lukyanov sided with opponents of Gorbachev’s policies. The hard-line Soyuz faction particularly favored Lukyanov over Gorbachev. During his December 1990 resignation speech to the Congress, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze specifically criticized Lukyanov for interfering in Soviet- German relations and for his desire for a dictatorship.
LUZHKOV, YURI MIKHAILOVICH
As Gorbachev’s new Union Treaty neared ratification in summer 1991, hard-line members of the Soviet leadership hierarchy staged a coup to overthrow Gorbachev and prevent adoption of the treaty. Though Lukyanov was not a member of the State Committee for the State of Emergency that briefly seized power August 19-21, 1991, he supported their efforts. Lukyanov was arrested following the coup’s collapse, then amnestied in February 1994 and elected to the Russian Duma in 1995 and 1999, where he chaired the parliamentary committee on government reform. See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH held various second-rank positions in cultural administration and spent much time abroad, partly for health reasons. In 1933 he was appointed ambassador to Spain, but died before assuming the position. His reputation plummeted after his death, but from the 1960s to the 1980s, thanks partly to the untiring work of his daughter, Irina Luna-charskaya, he became a symbol of a (pre-Stalinist) humanistic Bolshevism protective of the intelligentsia and committed to the advancement of high culture. See also: BOLSHEVISM; CULTURAL REVOLUTION; EDUCATION; PROLETKULT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Wishnevsky, Julia. (1991). “Anatolii Luk’yanov: Gorbachev’s Conservative Rival?” RFE/RL Report on the USSR 3(23):8-14.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1970). The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917-1921. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. O’Connor, Timothy Edward. (1983). The Politics of Soviet Culture: Anatolii Lunacharskii. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.
(1875-1933), Bolshevik intellectual and early Soviet leader.
Born the son of a state councilor, Anatoly Lu-nacharsky joined the Social Democratic movement in 1898 and was soon arrested. As an exile in Vologda, he met Alexander Bogdanov. In Paris in 1904 both men joined the Bolshevik faction, but they left it again in 1911 after clashes with Lenin over philosophy. Bogdanov advocated empiriocrit-icism, claiming that only direct experience could be relied on as a basis for knowledge. Lunacharsky promoted God-building, an anthropocentric religion striving toward the moral unity of mankind. Lunacharsky rejoined the Bolshevik Party in August 1917 and became the first People’s Commissar of Enlightenment (Narkom prosveshcheniya, or Narkompros), serving from October 1917 to 1929. A prolific writer on literature and the arts and an important patron of the intelligentsia, Lunacharsky was often regarded within the party as too “soft” for a Bolshevik. From the mid-1920s he was increasingly marginalized, and his last years at Narkompros were marked by fierce battles over education and culture as his soft line in policy was discredited with the onset of the Cultural Revolution. After his resignation from Narkompros, he
LUZHKOV, YURI MIKHAILOVICH
(b. 1936), Russian politician and mayor of Moscow.
Yuri Luzhkov became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1968 and remained a member until the party was outlawed in the wake of the failed coup of August 1991. He left a management career in the chemical industry to become a deputy to the Moscow City Council (Soviet) in 1977. In 1987, his political career took a great stride forward when Boris Yeltsin became First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party organization. In keeping with the Soviet practice of assigning party members to multiple responsibilities, Luzhkov was appointed deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and first deputy to the chair of the Moscow City Executive Committee.
Luzhkov was appointed chair of the City Executive Committee following Gavriil Popov’s election as mayor of Moscow in 1990. The following year he was elected Popov’s vice mayor. During the August 1991 coup, he helped organize the defense
LYSENKO, TROFIM DENISOVICH
Yuri Luzhkov is sworn in for his second term as mayor of Moscow, December 29, 1996. © REUTERS NEWMEDIA INC./CORBIS services to the parliament and deployed the city’s police to forcibly disband meetings and demonstrations organized in support of the legislature.
Luzhkov remained mayor of Moscow, but his regime has not been without controversy. He has come under particular criticism for the manner in which privatization of municipal property has been carried out. On several occasions the press has charged the mayor with corruption, favoritism, and using his position for personal gain. Despite this, the city’s relatively good economic situation in comparison with the rest of the country has made Luzhkov enormously popular with Muscovites. He was reelected with 88 percent of the vote in 1996.
However, the mayor’s efforts to rid the city of those without residency permits has undermined his popularity with the rest of the country. When Luzhkov announced his candidacy to the 2000 presidential elections and formed the bloc Fatherland-All Russia, supporters of Vladimir Putin were able to organize a negative ad campaign, which quickly marginalized the mayor’s bloc. Following Putin’s electoral victory, Luzhkov moved to defend his political position by declaring his loyalty to the new president. See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; FATHERLAND-ALL RUSSIA; MOSCOW; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH of the White House, the parliament building of the Russian Federation from which Boris Yeltsin organized the resistance to the efforts of conservatives within the CPSU to undo the Gorbachev reforms.
Following the collapse of the coup and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union, a struggle emerged between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the legislature over the course of reform. Luzhkov, owing to his strong support for Yeltsin in the conflict, was made mayor by presidential decree when Popov was forced to resign. The decree was met with opposition within the Moscow City Council, which tried unsuccessfully on two occasions to unseat Luzhkov.
As his predecessor had done, Luzhkov threw his support behind Yeltsin in the confrontation with the Russian parliament. At the height of the conflict following Yeltsin’s September 1993 decree dissolving the legislature, which resulted in an armed standoff, the mayor cut off utilities and
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Luzhkov, Yuri M. (1996). Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears: Reflections of Moscow’s Mayor. Chicago: James M. Martin.
(1898-1976), agronomist and biologist.
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was born in Karlovka, Ukraine, to a peasant family. He attended the Kiev Agricultural Institute as an extramural student and graduated as doctor of agricultural science in 1925. A disciple of horticulturist Ivan Michurin’s work, Lysenko worked at the Gyandzha Experimental Station between 1925 and 1929 and coined his theory of vernalization in the late 1920s. His vernalization theory described a process where
Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko measures the growth of wheat in a collective farm near Odessa, Ukraine. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS winter habit was transformed into spring habit by moistening and chilling the seed.
During the agricultural crisis of the 1930s, Soviet authorities started supporting Lysenko’s theories. By the
