of bureaucratic corruption. Nemtsov made it possible to register new businesses by mail, and allowed the project to go forward if the petitioner received no answer within a reasonable amount of time. Equally innovative in agricultural affairs, Nemtsov enabled members of collective farms to acquire individual plots, and he introduced tax breaks for struggling businesses. To deal with the inefficient Soviet practice whereby industrial enterprises had to provide housing and other social services for employees, the new governor encouraged companies to raise wages instead so that their workers could afford to pay for rent and utilities. These policies and Nemtsov himself proved immensely popular, and he was elected governor outright in 1995, receiving 60 percent of the vote. Nemtsov was so popular, in fact, that the Yeltsin camp of reformers briefly considered running him for president in 1996 against the communist Gennady Zyuganov. Nothing came of this, but in 1997, after Yeltsin’s reelection, Nemtsov reluctantly accepted the office of first deputy prime minister.
In Moscow Nemtsov and his colleagues launched a program of economic “shock therapy.” The new deputy minister was charged with making bidding for government contracts more open and competitive, forcing railroads and electricity suppliers to cut their prices, reducing household utility rates by 30 percent, and overhauling the Pension and Securities Insurance Fund. Little wonder Nemtsov called his job “politically suicidal” (Aron, 2000, p. 367).
Nemtsov began by making all government contracts valued at more than 900 million rubles, including military contracts, subject to competitive bidding. He then plunged into the state’s sale of 25 percent of Svyazinvest, the national telecom1034
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munications enterprise. Nemtsov publicly declared that the sale would be a national test of the government’s ability to take on the notorious “oligarchs” who had looted many of Russia’s assets in the years after communism.
The losers in the bidding for Svyazinvest used their media outlets to open a blistering campaign against the government, but more serious was a sharp drop in global oil prices, a vital source of government income. Simultaneously a financial crisis that had begun in Asia spread to Russia, causing investors to flee from emerging market economies. By the spring of 1998 Russia was on the verge of economic collapse, and in March Yeltsin dismissed his entire cabinet, including Nemtsov. The following year Nemtsov was elected to the Duma of the Russian Federation. See also: BUREAUCRACY, ECONOMIC; KIRIYENKO, SERGEI VLADILENOVICH; PRIVATIZATION; SHOCK THERAPY; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH A Nenets woman and her two children from Antipayuta settlement, northern Russia. © JACQUES LANGEVIN/CORBIS SYGMA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aron, Leon. (2000). Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life. London: HarperCollins. Talbott, Strobe. (2002). The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy. New York: Random House.
The Nenets are the most numerous of Russia’s northern peoples, numbering about 35,000, and one of the most northerly. Their homelands stretch along the Arctic coast, from northeastern Europe to the Taymyr Peninsula. Most Nenets are concentrated in the Nenets Autonomous District and the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District. Much of their territory is tundra; and their economy, based on large-scale reindeer pastoralism, has been the main adaptation to this harsh environment. The Nenets language belongs to the Samoyedic branch of the Uralic languages. Language retention among Nenets is higher than among most other northern peoples, due to the remoteness of their settlements and their continuing nomadism.
Western Nenets have a long history of contact with Russians, some paying tribute to Novgorod by the thirteenth century, and to the Tatars shortly thereafter. As Russians began to colonize Siberia in the mid- seventeenth century they met occasional fierce resistance from Nenets groups. They also incorporated Nenets into state-building projects, resettling some to Novaya Zemlya in the nineteenth century, in an effort to ensure sovereignty over those islands.
The Soviets began to establish reindeer-herding collective farms in Nenets territory in 1929. Repression of wealthy herders followed, as did the confiscation of their reindeer and the general seden-tarization of children, elderly, and some women. Nenets opposed such moves in several uprisings, which the Soviets quelled, then covered up. However, given the minimal prospects for developing this part of the Arctic, the Soviets generally encouraged the continuation of traditional Nenets activities.
Nenets homelands are particularly rich in oil and gas deposits. As technology improved by the latter twentieth century, making exploitation of these resources viable even given the harsh Arctic clime, development ensued. The greatest challenges for the Nenets became the construction of gas wells and pipelines across their reindeer pastures. Reindeer herds at the beginning of the twenty-first century exceeded pasture carrying capacity, and pasture destruction due to hydrocarbon development has exacerbated this problem. Development also encouraged massive in-migration into Nenets
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homelands by non-Nenets peoples. In post-Soviet years, these gas-rich areas experienced less out-migration than other northern areas.
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, Nenets have actively pursued their rights, creating regional Nenets organizations for this purpose. Reindeer-herding leaders have established ties with herders in Finland, Sweden, and Norway to pursue complementary agendas of economic development and environmental protection. See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; NORTHERN PEOPLES; SIBERIA
Golovnev, Andrei V., and Osherenko, Gail. (1999). Siberian Survival: The Nenets and Their Story. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Krupnik, Igor. (1993). Arctic Adaptations: Native Whalers and Reindeer Herders of Northern Eurasia. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Neoclassicism is often termed simply classicism in Russia as, unlike those European countries which had experienced the Renaissance, Russia was exploring the classical vocabulary of ancient Greece and Rome for the first time. Classical motifs had appeared in Russia in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries but it was not until the 1760s that a coherent classical revival emerged, fueled by the work of scholars such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose publications were generating a more comprehensive understanding of the forms and functions of classical art. The effect of this growing veneration for the noble grandeur of classical forms is evident in the Marble Palace (1768-1785) in St. Petersburg by Antonio Rinaldi, in which the flamboyant exuberance of the Baroque is partially displaced by a more dignified restraint. Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe also applied neoclassical principles in his design for the Academy of Arts (1765-1789), itself a prime conduit of European artistic debates. The low dome, rusticated basement, and giant order of columns and pilasters serve as a visual reminder of the classical ideal to which the Academy’s students were expected to aspire. During Catherine II’s reign, neoclassicism flourished in the private sphere, notably in the work that the Scottish architect Charles Cameron undertook at Tsarskoye Selo after his arrival in Russia in 1779. Cameron, who greatly admired the studies of the antique by Andrea Palladio and Charles-Louis Cl?risseau and had himself published drawings of Roman baths, decorated his interiors at Tsarskoye Selo with glass or ceramic columns and molded plaster reliefs inspired by recently-discovered classical sites. Cameron went on to work for Catherine’s son Paul at Pavlovsk, where his Temple of Friendship (1780-1782) in the park correctly deployed the Greek Doric order for the first time in Russia. The classical revival was also gathering momentum in the work of the Italian architects Vincenzo Brenna and Giacomo Quarenghi, who had worked with the great neoclassical artist Anton Raphael Mengs in Rome. The Hermitage Theater (1783-1787), one of Quarenghi’s masterpieces, is articulated with giant engaged Corinthian columns, niches, and statuary, while the great curved form of the auditorium is visible from the outside.
Russian as well as foreign architects were working in the neoclassical style. Vasily Bazhenov, who had studied abroad as one of the first two recipients of a travel scholorship from the Academy of Arts, designed an enormous new palace complex for the Moscow Kremlin in 1768. While never realized for financial reasons, it would
