the gentry, bureaucracy, intelligentsia, and peasantry toward commercial and industrial activity. The weakness of the Russian middle class constituted an important element in the collapse of the liberal movement and the victory of the Bolshevik party in the Russian Revolution of 1917. See also: CAPITALISM; ECONOMY, TSARIST; FOREIGN TRADE; GUILDS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Freeze, Gregory L. (1986). “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History.” American Historical Review 91:11-36. Owen, Thomas C. (1981). Capitalism and Politics in Russia: A Social History of the Moscow Merchants, 1855-1905. New York: Cambridge University Press. Owen, Thomas C. (1991). “Impediments to a Bourgeois Consciousness in Russia, 1880-1905: The Estate Structure, Ethnic Diversity, and Economic Regional916
ism.” In Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rieber, Alfred J. (1982). Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
The Meskhetian Turks are a Muslim people who originally inhabited what is today southwestern Georgia. They speak a Turkic language very similar to Turkish. Deported from their homeland by Josef V. Stalin in 1944, the Meskhetian Turks are scattered in many parts of the former Soviet Union. Estimates of their number range as high as 250,000. Their attempts to return to their homeland in Georgia have been mostly unsuccessful.
While other groups deported from the Caucasus region at roughly the same time were accused of collaborating with the Nazis, Meskhetian Turk survivors report that different reasons were given for their deportation. Some say they were accused of collaborating, others say they were told that the deportation was for their own safety, and still others were given no reason whatsoever. The deportation itself was brutal, with numerous fatalities resulting from both the long journey on crammed railroad cars and the primitive conditions in Central Asia where they were forced to live. Estimates of the number of deaths range from thirty to fifty thousand.
In the late 1950s Premier Nikita Khrushchev allowed the Meskhetian Turks and other deported peoples to leave their camps in Central Asia. Unlike most of the other deported peoples, however, the Meskhetian Turks were not allowed to return to their ancestral homeland. The Georgian SSR was considered a sensitive border region and as such was off limits. The Meskhetian Turks began to disperse throughout the Soviet Union, with many ending up in the Kazakh, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz SSRs and others in Soviet Azerbaijan and southern European Russia. They were further dispersed in 1989 when several thousand Meskhetian Turks fled deadly ethnic riots directed at them in Uzbekistan. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Meskhetian Turks have tried to return to their ancestral homeland in newly independent Georgia, but they face strong opposition. Georgia already has a severe refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people displaced by conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In addition, the substantial Armenian population of the Meskhetian Turks’ traditional homeland does not want them back. The Georgians view the Meskhetian Turks as ethnic Georgians who adopted a Turkic language and the Muslim religion. They insist that any Meskhetian Turks who wish to return must officially declare themselves Georgian, adding Georgian suffixes to their names and educating their children in the Georgian language.
The Meskhetian Turks are scattered across the former Soviet Union, with the largest populations in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Russia. In southern European Russia’s Krasnodar Krai, the local population of Meskhetian Turks, most of whom fled the riots in Uzbekistan, have received particularly rough treatment. The Meskhetian Turks of this region are denied citizenship and, according to Russian and international human rights organizations, frequently suffer bureaucratic hassles and physical assaults from local officials intent on driving them away. In 1999, as a condition of membership in the Council of Europe, the Georgian government announced that it would allow for the return of the Meskhetian Turks within twelve years, but despite international pressure it has taken little concrete action in this direction. See also: DEPORTATIONS; GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS; ISLAM; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blandy, Charles. (1998). The Meskhetians: Turks or Georgians? A People Without a Homeland. Camberley, Surrey, UK: Conflict Studies Research Centre, Royal Military Academy. Open Society Institute. (1998). “Meskhetian Turks: Solutions and Human Security.” «http://www.soros .org/fmp2/html/meskpreface.html/». Sheehy, Ann, and Nahaylo, Bohdan. (1980). The Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans and Meskhetians: Soviet Treatment of Some National Minorities. London: Minority Rights Group.
The practice of appointing men from eminent families to high positions in the military or government according to social status and service record.
Mestnichestvo or “precedence” refers to a legal practice in Muscovy whereby a military officer sued to avoid serving in a rank, or “place” (mesto), below a man whose family he regarded as inferior. The practice was open only to men in the most eminent families and arose in the second quarter of the sixteenth century as a result of rapid social change in the elite. Eminent princely families joining the grand prince’s service from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Khanate of Kazan, and Rus principalities challenged the status of the established Muscovite boyar clans. Thus mestnichestvo arose in the process of the definition of a more complex elite and was inextricably connected with the compilation of genealogical and military service records (rodoslovnye and razryadnye knigi).
Relative place was reckoned on the basis of family heritage and the eminence of one’s own and one’s ancestors’ military service. A complicated formula also assigned ranks to members of large clans so that individuals could be compared across clans. Litigants presented their own clan genealogies and service precedents in comparison with those of their rival and their rival’s kinsmen, often using records that differed from official ones. Judges were then called upon to adjudicate cases of immense complexity.
In practice few precedence disputes came to such detailed exposition in court because the state acted in two ways to waylay them. From the late sixteenth century the tsar regularly declared service assignments in a particular campaign “without place,” that is, not counting against a person’s or his clan’s dignity. Secondly, the tsar, or judges acting in his name, peremptorily resolved suits on the spot. Some were dismissed on the basis of evident disparity of clans (“your family has always served below that family”), while other plaintiffs were reassigned or their assignments declared without place. Tsars themselves took an active role in these disputes. Sources cite tsars Ivan IV, Mikhail Fyodorovich, and Alexei Mikhailovich, among others, castigating their men for frivolous suits. Significantly, only a tiny number of mestnichestvo suits were won by plaintiffs. Most resolved cases affirmed the hierarchy established in the initial assignment. Some scholars have argued that precedence allowed the Muscovite elite to protect its status against the tsars, while others suggest that it benefited the state by keeping the elite preoccupied with petty squabbling. Source evidence, however, suggests that precedence rarely impinged on military preparedness or tsarist authority. If anything, the regularity with which status hierarchy among clans was reaffirmed suggests that precedence exerted a stabilizing affirmation of the status quo.
In the seventeenth century the bases on which precedence functioned were eroded. The elite had expanded immensely to include new families of lesser heritage, lowly families were litigating for place, and many service opportunities were available outside of the system of place. Mestnichestvo as a system of litigation was abolished in 1682, while at the same time the principle of hereditary elite status was affirmed by the creation of new genealogical books for the new elite. See also: LEGAL SYSTEMS; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kollmann, Nancy Shields. (1999). By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
