vodka, symbolizing camaraderie and mischief-making.
Forest plants, animals, and objects are also important symbols. Birches conjure up the romance of the countryside; wolf, bear, and fox, are ubiquitous in folktales and modern cartoons; the peasant cottage signifies the intimate world of the past. Inside the cottage are other cultural symbols: the huge clay stove, the samovar, and the Orthodox icon in its corner. Although most Russians live in urban apartments, images of traditional rural life are still meaningful.
Conversation is rich with metaphors and proverbs, summarizing a complex view of shared identity. Russians think of the soul (dusha) as an internal spiritual conjunction of heart, mind, and culture. Friendship depends on a meeting of souls, accomplished through shared suffering or joy-or by feasting and drinking. Soul is said to be one of the metaphysical mechanisms that unite Russians into a people (narod). Stemming from the ancient Slavic for “kin” and “birth,” and meaning “citizens of a nation,” “ethnic group,” or “crowd,” narod refers to the composite identity of the people through history and is often invoked by politicians. People speak in terms of belonging by “blood”; a person is thought of as having Russian blood, Jewish blood, Armenian blood, or some other ethnic blood, and culture is supposedly transmitted through the blood.
Cultural symbols abound in folk art. Animal, bird, plant, solar, and goddess motifs, and a palette of reds and golden yellows with traces of black and green prevail in painted wooden objects and embroidered textiles. Soviet state studios kept many folk media alive, and the postsocialist period has seen independent craftspersons return to traditional mythological motifs. Folk art objects are popular and are found in homes everywhere.
The end of Soviet power meant an explosive opening of Russia to the world, with all of the changes for better and worse that come with globalization. Popular culture in Russia has become characterized by the vibrant and fertile mixing of local and international styles in music, art, literature, and film. Obsessions with mafia criminals, the new wealthy (so-called New Russians), biznis-meny, and modern technology fill the media. Yet alongside this, indigenous artistic genres, shared symbols and values, and social practices hold their own and continue to shape the world of meaning and identity. See also: FEMINISM; FOLKLORE; MARRIAGE AND FAMILY LIFE; NATIONALISM IN THE ARTS; NATIONALITIES POLICY, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICY, TSARIST; NATION AND NATIONALITY; ORTHODOXY; PEASANTRY; SLAVOPHILES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam. (1992). Russian Traditional Culture: Religion, Gender, and Customary Law. Ar-monk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Billington, James H. (1970). The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. New York: Vintage Books. Boutenko, Irene A., and Razlogov, Kirill E., eds. (1997). Recent Social Trends in Russia, 1960-1995. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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Boym, Svetlana. (1994). Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dunn, Stephen P., and Dunn, Ethel. (1988). The Peasants of Central Russia. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Hilton, Alison. (1995). Russian Folk Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hubbs, Joanna. (1988). Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ivanits, Linda. (1989). Russian Folk Belief. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Kingston-Mann, Esther, and Mixter, Timothy, eds. (1991). Peasant Economy, Culture and Politics of European Russia, 1800-1921. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Laitin, David D. (1998). Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ledeneva, Alena V. (1998). Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Millar, James R., and Wolchik, Sharon L., eds. (1994). The Social Legacy of Communism. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Pesmen, Dale. (2000). Russia and Soul: An Exploration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pilkington, Hilary. (1998). Migration, Displacement, and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia. London: Routledge. Ries, Nancy. (1997). Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rzhevsky, Nicholas, ed. (1998). The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Shalin, Dmitri N., ed. (1996). Russian Culture at the Crossroads: Paradoxes of Post-Communist Consciousness. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sokolov, Yuri M. (1971). Russian Folklore, tr. Catherine Ruth Smith. Detroit: Folklore Associates.
NANCY RIES
The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, or RSFSR, formed on November 7, 1917, was one of the four original republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) when the latter was founded by treaty in December 1922. The RSFSR’s establishment was later confirmed in the 1924 constitution. The other three were Ukraine, Belorussia (now called Belarus), and Transcaucasia (divided in 1940 into Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia). Even after ten more republics were added, for a total of fifteen republics, the RSFSR remained the largest, with more than half the population and three-quarters of the USSR’s territory (6,591,000 square miles). Moscow was the capital of both the RSFSR and the USSR as a whole. Situated in Eastern Europe and North Asia, the RSFSR was surrounded on the east, north, and northwest by the Pacific, Arctic, and Atlantic Oceans. It had frontiers in the northwest with Norway and Finland, in the west with Poland and the three Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), and in the south with China and Outer Mongolia and the Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Ukraine. In the new Soviet Union, which geographically replaced the old Russian Empire, the name Russia was not officially used. Lenin and other Bolshevik authorities intended to blend the national and the international to recognize each nationality by granting autonomy to national groups, while binding these groups together in a higher union and allowing new groups to enter regardless of historic frontiers. In 1922 the expectation of world revolution was still alive. Thus, the founding of the USSR-and the RSFSR within it-was a decisive step toward uniting the workers of all countries into one World Soviet Socialist Republic.
Although Lenin supported national self-determination as a force to undermine the tsarist empire, he adopted federalism rather late, as a response to Ukrainian and Georgian attempts to establish truly independent republics. The Red Army crushed these attempts in 1920-1921, but such use of brute force and the specter of Great Russian chauvinism troubled Lenin. He and others pressed for the federalization not only of the sovereign republics within the USSR, but also the federalization of the RSFSR. By 1960 the RSFSR consisted of fifteen “autonomous soviet socialist republics” (ASSRs), six territories (krai), forty-nine regions (oblast), six autonomous oblasts, and ten national districts (okrug). The federal structure undoubtedly gave some dignity, self-respect, and sense of equal cooperation to many of the numerous nationalities.
In the late 1980s, partly due to the perestroika, glasnost, and new thinking (novomyshlenie) policies of the incumbent general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet republics-including and espe1327
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cially the RSFSR-began to challenge the legislative authority of the Soviet Communist Party and the “Moscow center.” By October 1990, fourteen republics had passed declarations of either independence or sovereignty over USSR laws. The RSFSR’s declaration of sovereignty and the rising popularity of Boris Yeltsin (elected chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR in May 1990 and then president of the RSFSR in June 1991) were key factors in prompting Gorbachev to attempt to replace the original 1922 union treaty with a new document giving the republics more power. This in turn prompted hardliners in the Kremlin to stage a coup in August 1991. When it failed, Yeltsin’s power and influence eclipsed Gorbachev’s. Yeltsin convened with leaders of Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan in Alma Ata in December 1991 to declare the nullification of the 1922 union treaty and announce the official extinction of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev publicly confirmed the latter on December 25, 1991. The RSFSR is now called the Russian Federation. See also: RUSSIAN FEDERATION; UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fitzsimmons, Thomas, ed. (1974). RSFSR, Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Gilbert, Martin. (1993). Atlas of Russian History, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Hosking, Geoffrey. (1993). The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sakwa, Richard. (2002). Russian Politics and Society, 3rd ed. New York:
