(1804-1857). Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar debuted in 1836 and told the story of the peasant Ivan Susanin, who sacrificed his life during the Times of Troubles to save the young Mikhail Romanov. The opera was hailed as the beginnings of a national school in Russian music.
Glinka’s works paved the way for the foundation of the Russian Musical Society in 1859. The society, founded by the brothers Nikolai and Anton Rubinstein, in turn established conservatories in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The conservatories stressed European musical techniques and training, and their most famous student was Petr Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). Almost immediately after the founding of the conservatories, a group of composers known as the Mighty Handful, or just “the five,” rebelled against the stress on European music. Their musical scores instead included folk songs and Russian religious music. The most famous and consistent practitioner of this approach was Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881), whose best-known works are the historical operas Boris Godunov (1869) and Khovanshchina (1886), which told the stories of the tragic Muscovite tsar and events early in the reign of Peter the Great, respectively. Mussorgsky used the work of Pushkin as the libretto for the former and claimed that the paintings of Repin inspired the latter. Tchaikovsky, although derided as not Russian enough by the Mighty Handful, also composed works that in turn became associated with the musical expression of Russianness. His ballets Swan Lake (1875-1876), Sleeping Beauty (1888-1889), and The Nutcracker (1891-1892) remain among the most popular and most performed in Russia and abroad, while his “1812 Overture” (1880) is synonymous with patriotic music throughout the world.
Although literature, art, and music served as the most important media through which Russian artists articulated their views on national identity, other cultural forms did the same. By the early twentieth century, the Russian ballet of Sergei Diaghilev, featuring music by Igor Stravinsky and sets designed by artists of the Russian avant garde, became an important tool for expressing ideas of Russianness, particularly abroad. Throughout the century, churches, monuments, and other architectural sites literally built upon ideas of Russian history and culture, from the Alexandrine column dedicated to 1812 in St. Petersburg to the millennium memorial in Novgorod that commemorated the founding of the Russian state. Even decorative arts, including jewelry and porcelain, helped to pioneer the “Russian Style” (russky stil) by the late 1800s.
Popular culture also dealt with themes of Russian nationalism and Russia’s past. Lubki, prints and chapbooks that originated during the seventeenth century, circulated throughout Russia and served as important sources for the expression of national identity and for the dissemination of ideas promoted in other artistic forms. Russian folk art and music was rediscovered by numerous artists over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and helped to inspire works from Mussorgsky’s melodies to Wassily Kandinsky’s canvases. Moreover, the works of all the artists mentioned above became more widely known through the growth of newspapers, journals, museums, and cultural life throughout Russia.
Russian nationalism expressed in the arts contained a multitude of ideas. For some, “Russia” represented a European state that had developed its own sense of identity since Peter the Great. For others, “Russia” had produced a unique culture that blended East with West. Although no consensus on Russian national identity existed, Russian cultural figures from Pushkin to Tolstoy to Mussorgsky all strove to define it in their own way and all left important manifestations of Russianness in their works. See also: ARCHITECTURE; BALLET; CHAADAYEV, PETER YAKOVLEVICH; MIGHTY HANDFUL; MUSIC; SLAVOPHILES; WESTERNIZERS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Billington, James. (1966). The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. New York: Knopf. Brumfield, William. (1993). A History of Russian Architecture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cracraft, James. (2003). The Revolution of Peter the Great. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cracraft, James, and Rowland, Daniel, eds. (2003). Architectures of Russian Identity: 1500 to the Present. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ely, Christopher. (2002). This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Figes, Orlando. (2002). Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Garafola, Lynn, and Baer, Nancy Van Norman, eds. (1999). The Ballet Russes and Its World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gray, Camilla. (1986). The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863-1922. London: Thames and Hudson. Hilton, Alison. (1995). Russian Folk Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1998). Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of a Thousand Years of Artistic Life in Russia. New York: Viking. Marks, Steven. (2002). How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rogger, Hans. (1960). National Consciousness in Eighteenth- Century Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rzhevsky, Nicholas, ed. (1998). The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Stavrou, Theofanis, ed. (1983). Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Taruskin, Richard. (1997). Defining Russia Musically. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tolz, Vera. (2001). Russia: Inventing the Nation. London: Arnold. Valkenier, Elizabeth Kridl. (1989). Russian Realist Art: The State and Society; the Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press.
STEPHEN M. NORRIS
The triumph of the October Revolution and collapse of the Russian empire increased national movements among the different nationalities that lived in the country. The Bolshevik government based its nationalities policy on the principles of Marxist-Leninist ideology. According to these principles, all nations should disappear with time, and nationalism was considered a bourgeois ideology. However, the Bolshevik leaders saw that the revolutionary potential inherent in nationalism could advance the revolution, and thus supported the ideas of self-determination of the nations.
The Declaration of the Rights of the People of Russia, proclaimed one month after the October Revolution on November 21, 1917, recognized four major principles:
1. equality and sovereignty of the peoples of the Russian empire; 2. the right of nations to self-determination; 3. abolition of all privileges based on nationality or religion; 4. freedom and cultural development for national minorities (i.e., dispersed nationalities and those living outside their historic territories).
But, after the official declaration of the principles, the Soviet government resisted the realization of these ideals. Even in the cases of Finland and Poland, whose right to independence was acknowledged by Vladimir Lenin before the revolution, acceptance of their independence was given by the Bolsheviks only reluctantly, after several attempts to reverse independence failed. During the Soviet-Polish war of 1920, Bolshevik leaders tried to install a pro-Soviet Polish government, however, they lost the war and thus did not achieve their goal. Of all the different nations which coexisted uneasily in the Russian empire, only Poland, Finland and Baltic countries (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) received independence after the October Revolution. However, the Baltic countries remained independent only until 1940, when the Soviet Army occupied their territory.
After the October Revolution, Soviet leaders had hoped for the sparking of a socialist revolution throughout the world. Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky proposed the doctrine of “Permanent Revolution” that would spread from country to country. However, this was not to be the reality. By the beginning of the 1920s it became obvious even to the Soviet leaders that autonomous nations would remain.
The final goal of the Soviet national policy was the integration of all national groups into a universal (communist) empire. However, their short and medium-term strategies were completely different, so far as they encouraged the emergence of sub-imperial nationalities, in hopes that such maturation was a necessary historical stage which had to be traversed before proletarian internationalism could become fully effective.
INTERNATIONAL RESISTANCE TO THE SOVIET REGIME
Different nations of the former Russian empire believed that the collapse of the monarchy gave them a chance for independence. The establishment of Soviet power in the national republics was strongly resisted. The Russian empire had the reputation as
1000
the “prison of nations,” thus, nationalities that were newly liberated from the one yoke after the February
