By the mid-1820s, the Balkans and the Black Sea basin festered with unresolved problems and differences, including recurring cycles both of popular insurrection and Turkish repression and of various Russian claims and Turkish counterclaims. Most blatantly, in violation of the Treaty of Bucharest (1812), Turkish troops had occupied the Danubian principalities, and the Porte had encroached on Serbian territorial possessions and autonomy. On March 17, 1826, Tsar Nicholas I issued an ultimatum demanding Turkish adherence to the Bucharest agreement, withdrawal of Turkish troops from Wallachia and Moldavia, and entry via plenipotentiaries into substantive negotiations. An overextended and weakened Sultan Mahmud
Jelavich, Barbara. (1974). St. Petersburg and Moscow: Tsarist and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1814-1974. Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press. Seton-Watson, Hugh. (1967). The Russian Empire 1801-1917. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press.
BRUCE W. MENNING
(1823-1886), Slavophile and Panslav ideologue and journalist.
Son of the famous theater critic Sergei Timo-feyevich Aksakov, Ivan Aksakov received his early education at home in the religious, patriotic, and literary atmosphere of the Aksakov family in Moscow. He attended the Imperial School of JuAKSAKOV, KONSTANTIN SERGEYEVICH risprudence in St. Petersburg, graduating in 1842. After a nine-year career in government service, Ak-sakov resigned to devote himself to the study of Russian popular life and the propagation of his Slavophile view of it. Troubles with the censorship plagued his early journalistic ventures: Moskovsky sbornik (Moscow Miscellany) (1852, 1856) and Russkaya beseda (Russian Conversation); his newspaper, Parus (Sail), was shut down in 1859 because of Aksakov’s outspoken defense of free speech.
In his newspapers Den (Day) and Moskva (Moscow), Aksakov largely supported the reforms of the 1860s and 1870s, but his nationalism became increasingly strident, as the historical and critical publicism of the early Slavophiles gave way, in the freer atmosphere of the time, to simpler and more chauvinistic forms of nationalism, often directed at Poles, Germans, and Jews. In 1875 Aksakov became president of the Moscow Slavic Benevolent Committee, in which capacity he pressed passionately for a more aggressive Russian policy in the Balkans and promoted the creation of Russian volunteer forces to fight with the Serbs. He was devastated when the European powers forced Russia to moderate its Balkan gains in 1878. “Today,” Aksakov told the Slavic Benevolent Committee, “ we are burying Russian glory, Russian honor, and Russian conscience.”
In the 1880s Aksakov’s chauvinism became more virulent. In his final journal, Rus (Old Russia), he alleged that he had discovered a worldwide Jewish conspiracy with headquarters in Paris. Ak-sakov’s increasing xenophobia has embarrassed Russians (and foreigners) attracted to the more courageous and generous aspects of his work, but the enormous crowds at his funeral suggest that his name was still a potent force among significant segments of the Russian public at the time of his death. See also: AKSAKOV, KONSTANTIN SERGEYEVICH; JOURNALISM; NATIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE; PANSLAV-ISM; SLAVOPHILES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lukashevich, Stephen. (1965). Ivan Aksakov (1823-1886): A Study in Russian Thought and Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Riasanovsky, Nicholas. (1952). Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles: A Study of Romantic Ideology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walicki, Andrzej. (1975). The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought. Oxford: Clarendon.
(1817-1860), Slavophile ideologue and journalist.
Konstantin Aksakov was a member of one of the most famous literary families in nineteenth-century Russia. His father was the well-known theater critic and memoirist Sergei Aksakov; his brother, Ivan Aksakov, was an important publicist in the 1860s and 1870s.
During his university years in the early 1830s, Konstantin Aksakov was a member of the Stanke-vich Circle, along with Mikhail Bakunin and Vissarion Belinsky. He underwent a period of apprenticeship to Hegel, but, like several other Slavophiles, was most influenced by his immediate family circle, which was the source of the communal values he was to espouse and the dramatic division in his thought between private and public.
Toward the end of the 1830s Aksakov drew close to Yury Samarin, and both of them fell under the direct influence of Alexei Khomyakov. Ak-sakov’s Hegelianism proved a passing phase; he evolved into the most determinedly utopian and ideologically minded of all the early Slavophiles. A passionate critic of statist historical interpretations, Aksakov viewed Russian history as marked by a unique relationship between the state and what he called “the land” (zemlya). At one level the division referred simply to the allegedly limited jurisdiction of state power in pre-Petrine Russia over Russian society. At another level “the land” signified the timeless religious and moral truth of Christianity, while the state, however necessary for the preservation of “the land,” was external, soulless, and coercive. The Russian peasant’s communal existence had to be protected from the contagion of politics. Behind Aksakov’s static “Christian people’s utopia” lay the romantic hatred of social and political rationalism, a passion that animated all the early Slavophiles. Aksakov died suddenly in the Ionian Islands in the midst of a rare European trip. See also: AKSAKOV, IVAN SERGEYEVICH; KHOMYAKOV, ALEXEI STEPANOVICH; SLAVOPHILES
ALASH ORDA
Christoff, Peter. (1982). An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Russian Slavophilism, Vol. 3: K.S. Aksakov: A Study in Ideas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Riasanovsky, Nicholas. (1952). Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walicki, Andrzej. (1975). The Slavophile Controversy. Oxford: Clarendon.
Alash Orda is the autonomous Kazakh government established by the liberal-nationalist Alash party in December 1917. Alash was the mythical ancestor of the Kazakhs, and Alash Orda (Horde of Alash) long served as their traditional battle cry. His name was adopted by the Kazakh nationalist journal, Alash, that was published by secularist Kazakh intellectuals for twenty-two issues, from November 26, 1916, to May 25, 1917. Alash Orda then was taken as the name of a political party founded in March 1917 by a group of moderate, upper-class Kazakh nationalists. Among others, they included Ali Khan Bukeykhanov, Ahmed Baytursun, Mir Yakub Dulatov, Oldes Omerov, Magzhan Zhum-abayev, H. Dosmohammedov, Mohammedzhan Tynyshbayev, and Abdul Hamid Zhuzhdybayev. Initially, the party’s program resembled that of the Russian Constitutional-Democrats (Kadets), but with a strong admixture of Russian Menshevik (Social Democrat) and Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) ideas. Despite later Soviet charges, it was relatively progressive on social issues and demanded the creation of an autonomous Kazakh region. This program was propagated in the newspaper Qazaq (Kazakh), published in Orenburg. The paper had a circulation of about eight thousand until it was closed by the Communists in March 1918.
After March 1917, Alash Orda’s leaders dominated Kazakh politics. They convened a Second All-Kirgiz (Kazakh) Congress in Orenburg from December 18 through December 26, 1917. On December 23, this congress proclaimed the autonomy of the Kazakh steppes under two Alash Orda governments. One, centered at the village of Zham-beitu and encompassing the western region, was headed by Dosmohammedov. The second, headed by Ali Khan Bukeykhanov, governed the eastern region from Semipalatinsk. Both began as strongly anti-Communist and supported the anti-Soviet forces that were rallying around the Russian Constituent Assembly (Komuch): the Orenburg Cossacks and the Bashkirs of Zeki Velidi Togan. In time, however, the harsh minority policies of Siberia’s White Russian leader, Admiral Alexander Vasilievich Kolchak, alienated the Kazakh leaders. Alash Orda’s leaders then sought to achieve their goals by an alignment with Moscow. Accepting Mikhail Vasilievich Frunze’s November 1919 promise of amnesty, most Kazakh leaders recognized Soviet power on December 10, 1919. After further negotiations, the Kirgiz Revolutionary Committee (Revkom) formally abolished Alash Orda’s institutional network in
