Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Perrie, Maureen. (1995). Pretenders and Popular Monar-chism in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars of the Time of Troubles. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
CHESTER DUNNING
Our Home Is Russia (Nash Dom-Rossiya, or NDR) was a sociopolitical movement and a ruling party from 1996 to 1998. Formed in the spring of 1995 according to a plan of the president’s administration as one of two ruling parties-the party of the “right hand,” with the prime minister at the head-it immediately launched forward. The NDR movement’s council, founded in May 1995 with Victor Chernomyrdin at the head, included thirty-seven heads of regions, a few ministers, and heads of large industrial enterprises and banks. The federal NDR list for the Duma elections was headed by Chernomyrdin, the famous film director Nikita Mikhal-kov, and General Lev Rokhlin, a Chechnya war hero. Subsequently both the prime minister and the film director renounced the mandates, and Rokhlin, entering the Duma, soon came into opposition against Boris Yeltsin and he then left the NDR fraction; and founded the Movement in Support of the Army. The NDR list received seven million votes (10.1%, third place) and forty-five Duma seats; this was taken as defeat of the ruling party. In the single-mandate districts, out of 108 proposed candidates, ten were elected. In the 1996 presidential elections, NDR backed Yeltsin.
With Chernomyrdin leaving the prime minis-tership in the spring of 1998, NDR entered a period of crisis. The effort on the part of the young ambitious leader of the NDR fraction in the Duma, Vladimir Ryzhkov, to turn NDR from a party of heads into a neoconservative political party of “values” proved unsuccessful. Discussions of merging with the blocs A Just Cause and Voice of Russia and the movement New Force were fruitless as well. Allies of NDR in the elections amounted to the weak Forward, Russia of Boris Fyodorov and the Muslim movement Medzhlis. The programmatic positions of NDR amount to moderate-reformist ideas and a declaration of conservative-liberal values. The federal list was headed by Chernomyrdin and the Saratov governor Dmitry Ayatskov. NDR did not make it into the Duma, as it received 0.8 million votes (1.2 percent). Nine NDR candidates from single-mandate districts, including Chernomyrdin and Ryzhkov, entered the pro-government fraction Unity and the group People’s Deputy. In May 2000, the eighth and last congress of NDR, which at the time had 125,000 members, decided to form part of the party Unity, created on the foundation of the movements Unity, All Russia, and NDR. See also: CHERNOMYRDIN, VIKTOR STEPANOVICH; MOVEMENT IN SUPPORT OF THE ARMY; UNITY (MEDVED) PARTY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democ-racry. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.
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The Pacific Fleet is headquartered in Vladivostok, capital of the Maritime (Primorsky) Territory. Not surprisingly, given Russia’s status as a Pacific nation with vital interests in the Asia-Pacific region, the Pacific Fleet is one of Russia’s most powerful naval forces. The city of Vladivostok, established in 1860, occupies most of Muraviev-Amursky Peninsula, named after the governor general of Eastern Russia during the mid-nineteenth century. Two bays, Amursky and Ussurysky, wrap the peninsula, mirroring with their names two great rivers of the Russian Far East, the Amur, and the Ussury, its tributary.
Beginning in the 1600s, Russian explorers first reached Siberia’s eastern coastline and founded the city of Okhotsk (1647). Until the mid-1800s, however, China’s dominance of the southern regions of eastern Siberia restricted Russian naval activities. The construction of the port city of Vladivostok intensified Russia’s need for adequate transportation links. Tsar Alexander III drew up plans for the Trans-Siberian Railway and began building it in 1891. Despite the enormity of the project, a continuous route was completed in 1905, stimulated by the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War a year earlier. Vladivostok became Russia’s main naval base in the east after Port Arthur (located in Chinese territory and ceded to Russia in 1898) fell in January 1905 during the war. After World War I, Japan seized Vladivostok and held the key port for four years, initially as a member of the Allied interventionist forces that occupied parts of Russia after the new Bolshevik government proclaimed neutrality and withdrew from the war. At the end of World War II, Stalin broke the neutrality pact that had existed throughout the war in order to occupy vast areas of East Asia formerly held by Japan. It was through Vladivostok, moreover, that some of the Lend-Lease aid, the most visible sign of U.S.-Soviet cooperation during World War II, passed on its way to Murmansk.
The Pacific Fleet includes eighteen nuclear submarines that are operationally subordinate to the Ministry of Defense and based at Pavlovsk and Ry-bachy. The blue-water striking power of the Pacific Fleet lies in thirty-four nonnuclear submarines and forty-nine principal surface combatants. The Zvezda Far Eastern Shipyard in Bolshoi Kamen, a couple of hours north of Vladivostok, serves as the chief recycling facility for the Fleet, although it is in disrepair. The Pacific Fleet’s additional home ports
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include Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Magadan, and Sovetskaya Gavan. As far as air power is concerned, the Pacific Fleet consisted during the mid-1990s of 250 land-based combat aircraft and helicopters. Two bomber regiments stationed at Alekseyevka constituted its most powerful strike force. Each regiment consisted of thirty supersonic Tu-22M Backfire aircraft. The land power of the Pacific Fleet consisted of one naval infantry division and a coastal defense division. The naval infantry division included more than half of the total manpower in the Russian naval infantry. During the mid-1990s, the Pacific Fleet infantry was reorganized into brigades.
During the late 1990s, a joint headquarters was established commanding the land, naval, and air units stationed on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Despite funding shortfalls during the early twenty-first century, the Russian Pacific Fleet continues to demonstrate its resolve to increase combat readiness. Russian Pacific Fleet submarines carry out missions of regional security, strategic deterrence, protection of strategic assets, and training for anti- surface warfare. See also: BALTIC FLEET; BLACK SEA FLEET; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; NORTHERN FLEET; TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Busmann, Gerd, and Meier, Oliver. (1997). The Nuclear Legacy of the Former Soviet Union: Implications for Security and Ecology. Berlin: Berliner Information-szentrum f?r Transatlantische Sicherheit (BITS) in cooperation with Heinrich-B?ll-Stiftung. Da Cunha, Derek. (1990). Soviet Naval Power in the Pacific. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Morris, Eric. (1977). The Russian Navy: Myth and Reality. New York: Stein and Day. Stephan, John J. (1994). The Russian Far East: A History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Due to the concerted efforts of both the eastern and western churches, Christianity largely replaced Slavic paganism during the course of the ninth and tenth centuries. There are primarily three sources for information about Slavic paganism: written accounts, archaeological discoveries, and ethnographic evidence. As literacy was introduced to the East Slavs only with their conversion to Christianity in 988 C.E., and the written sources were most often compiled by Christian monks or missionaries, much of what is known about East Slavic paganism from written accounts is of questionable accuracy. The sources begin with the Byzantine historian Procopius (sixth century) and include Arab travel accounts, reports of Christian missionary activity, and references in the Primary Chronicle and the First Novgorod Chronicle. Archaeological evidence has provided some information on pagan temples, particularly among the West Slavs on the island of R?gen in the Baltic Sea. In addition, what may have been a temple to Perun, god of thunder, was excavated near Peryn, south of Novgorod in 1951, and several sites
