“Killers of Christ,” for Catherine highly regarded their entrepreneurship and unofficially encouraged their entry into New Russia (Ukraine) in 1764.
European immigrants responded eagerly to the manifesto, some twenty thousand arriving during Catherine’s reign. Germans settling along the Volga were the largest group, especially the Herrnhut (Moravian Brethren) settlement at Sarepta near Saratov and Mennonite settlements in southern Ukraine. Because of the empire’s largely agrarian economy, most settlers were farmers. The expense of the program was large, however, so its cost- effectiveness is debatable. A century later many Volga Germans resettled in the United States, some still decrying Catherine’s allegedly broken promises. See also: CATHERINE II; JEWS; ORLOV, GRIGORY GRIG-ORIEVICH; PALE OF SETTLEMENT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bartlett, Roger P. (1979). Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia 1762-1804. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Khodarkovsky, Michael. (2002). Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press.
The 8,500 Mansi (1989 census), formerly called Voguls, live predominantly in the Hanti-Mansi Autonomous Region (Okrug), in the swampy basin of the Ob river. Their language belongs to the Ugric branch of the Finno-Ugric family. It has little mutual intelligibility with the related Hanti language, farther northeast, and essentially none with Magyar (Hungarian). Most Mansi have Asian features. One of the most distinctive features of Mansi (and Hanti) culture is an elaborate bear funeral ceremony, honoring the slain beast.
The Mansi historical homeland straddled the middle Urals, southwest of their present location on the Konda River. They offered spirited resistance to Russian encroachment during the 1400s, highlighted by prince Asyka’s counterattack in 1455. The Russians destroyed the last major Mansi principality, Konda, in 1591. Within one generation, Moscow ignored whatever capitulation treaties had been signed. As settlers poured into the best Mansi agricultural lands, the Mansi were soon reduced to a small hunting and fishing population. By 1750 most were forced to accept the outer trappings of Greek Orthodoxy, while practicing animism in secret. Russian traders reduced people unfamiliar with the notion of money and prices to loan slavery that lasted for generations.
When the Ostiako-Vogul National Okrug Dis-trict-the present Hanti-Mansi Autonomous Oblast-was created in 1930, the indigenous population was already down to 19 percent of the total population. By 1989, the population had dropped to 1.4 percent, due first to a massive influx of deportees and then to free labor, after discovery of oil during the 1950s. The curse of Arctic oil impacted the natives, who were crudely dispossessed, as well as the fragile ecosystem. Gas torching and oil spills became routine.
Post-Soviet liberalization enabled the Hanti and Mansi to organize Spasenie Ugry (Salvation of Yu-gria, the land of Ugrians) that gave voice to indigenous and ecological concerns. Thirty-seven percent of the Mansi population (and few young
MARI EL AND THE MARI
people) spoke Mansi in the early 1990s. A weekly newspaper, Luima Serikos, had a circulation of 240 in 1995. Novels on Mansi topics by Yuvan Sestalov (b. 1937) have many readers in Russia. See also: FINNS AND KARELIANS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; NORTHERN PEOPLES
Forsyth, James. (1992). A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony, 1581-1990. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Taagepera, Rein. (1999). The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State. London: Hurst.
The Mari, or Cheremis, are an indigenous people of the European Russian interior; their language and that of the Mordvins compose the Volgaic branch of the Finno-Ugric language family.
As subjects of the Volga Bolgars and Kazan Tatars, medieval Mari tribes experienced cultural and linguistic influences mainly from their Turkic neighbors. Later on, Slavic contacts became prominent, and the Russian language became the principal source of lexical and syntactic borrowing. The early twentieth-century initiatives to create a single literary language did not come to fruition. Consequently, there are two written standards of Mari: Hill and Meadow. The speakers of various western, or Hill Mari, dialects constitute hardly more than 10 percent of the Mari as a whole.
In the basin of the Middle Volga, the medieval Mari distribution area stretched from the Volga-Oka confluence to the mouth of the Kazanka River. Under Tatar rule, the Mari were active participants in Kazan’s war efforts. Apparently due to their loyalty and peripheral location, Mari tribal communities were granted home rule. However, the final struggle between the Kazan Khanate and Moscow brought an intraethnic cleavage: the Hill Mari sided with the Russians, whereas the Meadow Mari remained with the Tatars until the fall of Kazan in 1552.
The submission to Moscow was painful: The second half of the sixteenth century saw a series of uprisings, known as the Cheremis Wars, which decimated the Meadow Mari in particular. The Russian invasions triggered population movements that also reshaped the Mari settlement area: a part of the Meadow Mari migrated to the Bashkir lands and towards the Urals. For about two hundred years, the resettlement was sustained by land seizures, fugitive peasant migrations, and Chris-tianization policies. The outcome of all this was the formation of the Eastern Mari. In terms of religion, these Mari have largely kept their traditional “paganism,” whereas their Middle Volga coethnics are mostly Orthodox, or in a synchretic way combine animism with Christianity.
The Mari ethnic awakening took its first steps with the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions. In 1920 the Bolsheviks established the Mari autonomous province. It was elevated to the status of an autonomous republic in 1936-the year of the Stalinist purges of the entire ethnic intelligentsia. Since 1992, the republic has been known as the Republic of Mari El.
At the time of the 1989 census, 324,000 Mari out of a total of 671,000 were residents of their titular republic. There the Mari constituted 43.2 percent of the inhabitants, whereas Russians made up 47.5 percent. Outside Mari El, the largest Mari populations were found in Bashkortostan (106,000) as well as in Kirov and Sverdlovsk provinces (44,000 and 31,000 respectively). Indicative of linguistic assimilation, 17 percent of the Mari considered Russian their native language during the 1994 microcensus.
In 2000 Mari El was a home for 759,000 people. Within Russia, it is an agricultural region, poor in natural resources and heavily dependent on federal subsides. Within the republic’s political elite, the Mari have mainly performed secondary roles, and this situation has deteriorated further since the mid-1990s. Because Russians outnumber the Mari, and because the Mari still lag behind in terms of urbanity, education, and ethnic consciousness, Russians dominate the republic’s political life. See also: FINNS AND KARELIANS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fryer, Paul, and Lallukka, Seppo. (2002). “The Eastern Mari.” «http://www.rusin.fi/eastmari/home.htm». Lallukka, Seppo. (1990). The East Finnic Minorities in the Soviet Union: An Appraisal of the Erosive Trends. (AnMARKET SOCIALISM nales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Ser. B, vol. 252). Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Taagepera, Rein. (1999). The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State. London: Hurst.
The economic doctrine of market socialism holds that central planners can make active and efficient use of “the market” as a mechanism for implementing socially desired goals, which are developed and elaborated through central planning of economic activity. Focusing on the elimination of private property and wealth, and on the central determination and control of all investment and development decisions, it posits that the planned determination and adjustment of producers’ and asset prices could allow markets to implement the desired allocations in a decentralized manner without sacrificing central or social control over outcomes or incomes. Thus egalitarian social outcomes and dynamic economic growth can be achieved simultaneously, without the disruptions and suffering imposed by poorly coordinated private investment decisions resulting in a wasteful business cycle.
The idea of market socialism arose from the realization that classical socialism, involving the collective
