throughout the 1930s. Academic articles on this medium, and artistic debates discussing the appropriate style and content of Palekh painting, continued from the 1930s to the 1960s. Since the 1970s, Palekh painted boxes and brooches have been viewed as the quintessential tourist souvenir from Russia. See also: FOLKLORE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hilton, Alison. (1995). Russian Folk Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Palekh painted lacquer boxes, popularly thought to be a traditional Russian folk art, were actually a product of the Soviet period. Palekh painting, a delicate and elegant miniature style, is done on the lids As a result of the Napoleonic Wars and the acquisition of the central and eastern provinces of Poland by the Russian Empire during the late eighteenth century, the area extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea became known as the Russian “Pale of Settlement.” Originally established by Catherine the Great in 1791, the Pale (meaning “border”) eventually covered roughly 286,000 square miles (740,700 square kilometers) of territory and grew
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to include twenty-five provinces (fifteen Russian and ten Polish), including Kiev, Grodno, Minsk, Lublin, Bessarabia, and Mogilev. Along with the favorable acquisition of Polish land, the Russian government was faced with a population of ethnic groups that came with the various territories. Although the territories consisted of various groups, including Byzantine Catholics, Germans, Armenians, Tartars, Scots, and Dutchmen, it was the large number of Jews (10% of the Polish population) that was most troubling to the tsars.
In 1804, intending to protect the Russian population from the Jewish people, Alexander I issued a decree that prevented Jews from living outside the territories of the Pale, the first of many statutes designed to limit the freedoms of Russia’s new Jewry. With more than five million Jews eventually living and working within its borders, Russian lawmakers used the confines of the Pale as an opportunity to limit Jewish participation in most facets of social, economic, and political life. With few exceptions, Jews were forced to reside within the Pale’s overcrowded cities and small towns called shtetls, restricted from traveling, prevented from entering various professions (including agriculture), levied with extra taxation, forbidden to receive higher education, and kept from engaging in various forms of trade to subsidize their livelihood. Although Jews in the Pale were destined to a endure a life of poverty and restriction, most managed to make their way into the local economies by working as tailors, cobblers, peddlers, and small shopkeepers. Others, who were less fortunate, survived only by committed mutual aid efforts and strong local networks of support.
As the Russian Empire started experiencing the early stages of industrialization during the 1880s, the Pale began to witness a steady decline in its agricultural, artisanal, and petty entrepreneurial economies. Because of this transition, many independent producers of goods and services could no longer subsist and were forced to find jobs in factories. Very few, especially the Jewish artisans and tailors, were able to continue producing independently or as middlemen to larger manufacturing plants. By the start of the twentieth century, the manufacturing sector was increasingly becoming the primary source of employment in the Pale, with wage laborers producing cigarettes, cigars, knit goods, gloves, textiles, artificial flowers, buttons, glass, bricks, soap, candy, and various other goods. It was ultimately the deteriorating economy within the Pale, coupled with years of anti-Semitism, that served as catalyst for more than two million Jews to emigrate to America between 1881 and 1914. Not long after this exodus, the Pale of Settlement was abolished with the overthrow of the tsarist regime in 1917. See also: ALEXANDER I; BESSARABIA; CATHERINE II; JEWS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Klier, John. (1986). Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia, 1772-1825. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Ro’i, Yaacov, ed. (1995). Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union. Portland, OR: Frank Cass.
(d. 1503) niece of the last two Byzantine emperors and the second wife of Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow.
Sophia Paleologue (Zoe) improved the Russian Grand Prince’s international standing through her dynastic status and promoted Byzantine symbolism and ceremony at the Russian court.
Zoe Paleologue was the daughter of Despot Thomas of Morea, the younger brother of the Byzantine emperors John VIII and Constantine IX, and Catherine, daughter of Prince Centurione Zaccaria of Achaea. After the conquest of Morea by the Ottoman Turks in 1460 and her parents’ subsequent death, Paleologue became a ward of the Uniate cardinal Bessarion, who gave her a Catholic education in Rome as a dependent of Pope Sixtus IV.
After protracted negotiations with the Russian Grand Prince, who saw an opportunity to increase his prestige in a marital union with a Byzantine princess, the Vatican offered Paleologue in a betrothal ceremony to one of Ivan III’s representatives on June 1, 1472. During Paleologue’s trip to Russia, the Byzantine princess assured the Russian populace in Pskov of her Orthodox disposition by abjuring Latin religious ritual and dress and by venerating icons. Paleologue married Ivan III on November 12, 1472, in an Orthodox wedding ceremony in the Moscow Kremlin and took the name Sophia.
Paleologue gave birth to ten children, one of which was the future heir to the Russian throne,
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Basil III. The existence of Ivan Molodoy, the surviving son of Ivan III’s union with his first wife, Maria of Tver, and natural successor to the throne, caused friction between the grand prince and Pale-ologue. According to contemporary Russian chronicles, Paleologue intrigued against Ivan Molodoy and his wife, Elena Voloshanka. Paleologue’s situation at court deteriorated even more after Volo-shanka gave birth to a son, Dmitry Ivanovich. The untimely death of Ivan Molodoy in 1490 inspired rumors that Paleologue had poisoned him. The focus of Paleologue’s and Voloshanka’s dynastic struggle shifted to Dmitry Ivanovich. Ivan III’s decision to make Dmitry his heir in 1497 caused Pa-leologue and her son Basil to revolt. Although Ivan III disgraced Sophia and crowned Dmitry as his successor in the following year, the Byzantine princess emerged victorious in 1499, when Basil was made Grand Prince of Novgorod and Pskov. Conspiring with the Lithuanians, Paleologue put pressure on her husband to imprison Voloshanka and her son Dmitry and to proclaim Basil Grand Prince of Vladimir and Moscow in 1502.
In pursuing her political and dynastic goals, Pa-leologue exploited traditional Byzantine methods to advertise her claims. In a liturgical tapestry she donated to the Monastery of Saint Sergius of Radonezh in 1498, she proclaimed her superior heritage by juxtaposing her position as Tsarevna of Constantinople with the grand princely title of her husband. By exploiting Byzantine religious symbolism, in the same embroidery she expressed her claim that Basil III was the divinely chosen heir to the Russian throne. While there has been no substantiation for the claim of some scholars that Pa-leologue was responsible for the introduction of wide-ranging Byzantine ideas and practices at the Russian court, the Byzantine princess’s knack for political messages draped in religious language and imagery undoubtedly left a lasting mark on medieval Russian culture. See also: BASIL III; IVAN III
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fennell, J. L. I. (1961). Ivan the Great of Moscow. London: Macmillan. Fine, John V. A., Jr. (1966). “The Muscovite Dynastic Crisis of 1497-1502.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 8:198-215. Kollmann, Nancy Shields. (1986). “Consensus Politics: the Dynastic Crisis of the 1490s Reconsidered.” Russian Review 45(3):235-267. Miller, David. (1993). “The Cult of Saint Sergius of Radonezh and Its Political Uses.” Slavic Review 52(4): 680-699. Thyr?t, Isolde. (2001). Between God and Tsar: Religious Symbolism and the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
(1741-1811), explorer, geologist, botanist.
