experience, combined with the developments of the reign of Ivan IV, convinced them that they had the right to consider the po-mestie as their personal property, which not only could be left to their male heirs, but also could be alienated like votchina property: sold, donated to monasteries, given to anyone, used as a dowry, and so forth. This project became the goal of a middle service class “political campaign,” somewhat akin to the political campaign to enserf the peasantry. Such aspirations totally violated the initial purpose of the pomestie and undermined the basic principles of the service state. The Law Code of 1649 carefully retained the distinction between the pomestie (chapter 16, nearly all of whose sixty-nine articles are postdated 1619) and the votchina (chapter 17), but the distinctions were fading in reality. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the po-mestie essentially became hereditary property, but service still was compulsory and holders could not freely alienate it. During the Thirteen Years War (1654-1667), new formation military units began to replace the obsolescent middle service class cavalry, and after 1667 the service state nearly disintegrated. With it went the principle that service was compulsory from pomestie land.
Peter the Great restored the service state in 1700, and all landholders and landowners had to render military service again. But the uniqueness of the pomestie was lost in 1714 when it and the votchina were juridically merged into a single form of land ownership. See also: DVORIANSTVO; ENSERFMENT; LAW CODE OF 1649; SERFDOM; SYN BOYARSKY; VOTCHINA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hellie, Richard, ed. and tr. (1988). The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649. Irvine, CA: Charles Schlacks.
(1905-1995), party official and historian.
Boris Ponomarev was a leading Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) ideologue who for three decades (1954-1986) headed the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee, the body responsible for relations with foreign communist parties. Ponomarev joined the Bolsheviks in 1919. A civil war veteran (serving from 1918 to 1920), he graduated from Moscow State University in 1926. From 1933 to 1936, at a time when historiography was coming under party control, he was deputy director of the CPSU’s Institute of Red Professors. He was on the executive committee of the Comintern, the Soviet-dominated organization of international communist parties, in its last years (1936-1943), and later head of the Comintern’s successor, the Cominform (1946- 1949).
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In 1954 he became head of the International Department. He was elected to the Central Committee in 1956. A party historian, he was elected a candidate member of the Academy of Sciences in 1959, becoming a full Academician in 1962. After Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Josef Stalin at the Twentieth CPSU Congress in 1956, Ponomarev led the team of historians who wrote the new, official History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1959), which replaced Stalin’s notorious Short Course history (1938). But Stalin’s portrait continued to hang on Ponomarev’s office wall. Appointed a secretary of the Central Committee in 1961, he eventually rose to the rank of candidate member of the Politburo in 1972. Never comfortable with reform, Ponomarev, in 1986, was removed as head of the International Department by Mikhail Gorbachev, who retired him from the Central Committee in April 1989. See also: CENTRAL COMMITTEE; COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Archie, ed. (1989). Political Leadership in the Soviet Union. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan with St Antony’s College, Oxford. Nekrich, Aleksandr. (1991). Forsake Fear: Memoirs of an Historian, tr. Donald Lineburgh. Boston: Unwin Hy-man.
(1859-1905), prominent mathematician and physicist.
Russia claims that Alexander Stepanovich Popov invented the radio before the Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi. Determining who was the official inventor of the radio is complicated by nationalistic pride, inadequate documentation of events, and differing interpretations of what constitutes inventing the radio. By what most persons in the West consider objective analysis of the facts known, however, Marconi’s work invariably is recognized as having priority over Popov’s. However, Popov’s numerous achievements do merit both recognition and respect. Popov was the chair of the Department of Physics at St. Petersburg University in 1901 and director of the St. Petersburg Institute of Electrical Engineering in 1905. On May 7, 1895, Popov demonstrated that a receiver could detect the electromagnetic waves produced by lightning discharges in the atmosphere many miles away. Popov’s receiver consisted of a “coherer” made of metal filings, together with an antenna, a relay, and a bell. The relay was used to activate the bell that both signaled the occurrence of lightning and served as a “decoherer” (tapper) to ready the coherer to detect the next lightning discharge. The value this instrument could have in weather forecasting was obvious. In 1865 the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell had predicted that electromagnetic waves existed. In 1888 a German scientist Heinrich Hertz had proven that electromagnetic waves definitely did exist. Still, no one had yet found any practical use for these electromagnetic or “Hertzian” waves.
Almost a year after his first experiment, Popov conducted another public experiment on March 24, 1896 that demonstrated the transmission and reception of information by wireless telegraphy. On that day the Russian Physical and Chemical Society convened at St. Petersburg University. Wireless telegraph signals, transmitted a distance of more than 800 feet (243 meters) from another building on the campus, were audible to all in the meeting room. One professor stood at the blackboard and recorded the alphabetical letters represented by the Morse code signals. The letters spelled out the name “Heinrich Hertz.”
Unfortunately this experiment was never officially recorded. Meanwhile Guglielmo Marconi filed an application for the patent on wireless telegraphy on June 2, 1896, and his first public demonstration occurred in July of that year. Although both of Popov’s experiments took place before Marconi filed the patent, it is widely known that Marconi had already made considerable breakthroughs prior to Popov’s March 24, 1896, experiment, including the transmission and reception of simple messages. Nevertheless, Popov’s achievements were recognized. In 1900 he was awarded a Gold Metal at the Fourth World Congress of Electrical Engineering. See also: TELEVISION AND RADIO
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Birch, Beverley. (2001). Guglielmo Marconi: Radio Pioneer. Woodbridge, CT: Blackbirch Press. Kraeuter, David W. (1992). Radio and Television Pioneers: A Patent Bibliography. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.
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Radovskii, M. I. (1957). Alexander Popov, Inventor of Radio. Moscow: Foreign Language Pub. House.
Colton, Timothy J. (1996). Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
(b. 1936), economist and democratic reformer; mayor of Moscow.
Gavriil Popov was born and educated in Moscow. While studying at Moscow State University (MGU), he headed the Komsomol organization. He joined the economics faculty at MGU in 1959, eventually becoming dean in 1977. In his academic career, Popov authored numerous articles and books focusing on economic management and was editor of the Academy journal Voprosi Ekonomiki (Economic Questions) from 1988 to 1991.
Popov moved from economic research and advising to political activism, consulting with government on management reforms starting in the mid-1960s. The apex of his political career occurred during the late 1980s and early 1990s. After joining the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989, Popov founded and co-chaired the Inter-
