Aksan, Virginia H. (2002). “Ottoman Military Matters.” Journal of Early Modern History 6 (1):52-62.
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Kagan, Frederick W., and Higham, Robin, eds. (2002). The Military History of Tsarist Russia. New York: Pal- grave. Menning, Bruce W. (1984). “Russian Military Innovation in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century.” War amp; Society 2 (1):23-41.
(b. 1947), vice president of the Russian Federation, governor of Kursk Oblast, general-major of aviation, Hero of the Soviet Union.
Alexander Rutskoi was born on September 16, 1947 in Kmelnitsky, Ukraine, to a professional military family. He graduated from a pilot training school in 1966 and joined the Soviet Air Forces. In the 1980s he served in Afghanistan as deputy commander, commander of the air regiment, and deputy commander of aviation for the Fortieth Army. He was shot down twice; the second time, his Su-25 crashed in Pakistan, where he was interned and then repatriated. In late 1988 he received the award Hero of the Soviet Union. In 1988 and 1989 he attended the Voroshilov Military Academy of the General Staff. In 1990 he was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR (Russian Federation) and to the Central Committee of the newly organized Communist Party of the RSFSR. He displayed a strong Russian nationalist bias and in 1991 helped to found Communists for Democracy and supported Boris Yeltsin.
Yeltsin named Rutskoi as his vice presidential running mate in his successful campaign for the presidency of Russia. During the August Coup (against Gorbachev), Rutskoi organized the defense of the Russian White House. Yeltsin promoted him to the rank of general-major and entrusted him with a number of delicate issues, such as border issue negotiations with Ukraine and Kazakhstan and Chechen independence. When Yeltsin embarked upon radical economic reforms, Rutskoi publicly expressed his doubts concerning the direction of
Vice President Alexander Rutskoi tries to calm the crowd as his 1993 parliamentary rebellion begins to collapse. © MALCOLM LINTON/LIAISON. GETTY IMAGES
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Yeltsin’s policy. Yeltsin moved to effectively isolate his vice president. As a consequence of these developments, Rutskoi drifted toward the parliamentary opposition led by parliament speaker Ruslan Khas-bulatov. This struggle between president and parliament came to a violent head in September and October 1993. Yeltsin crushed the revolt with armed forces and arrested its leadership. Rutskoi was arrested and removed from the office of vice president, and the position of vice president was abolished.
In 1994 the Russian parliament granted amnesty to Rutskoi and other rebels of 1993. Rutskoi went on to organize a Russian nationalist party, Power (Derzhava) which competed in the 1995 parliamentary elections and joined the Red-Brown opposition to Yeltsin in the summer 1996 presidential elections. A leading figure of the anti- Yeltsin nationalist opposition, Rutskoi ran for and won the post of governor of Kursk Oblast in October 1996 and served in that office to 2000. He stood for reelection but was disqualified by the Central Elections Commission, which ordered his name stricken from the ballot for election campaign law violations and abuses as governor. Rumors interpreted the government’s actions as a direct response to Rutskoi’s criticism of the president during the Kursk disaster. See also: AFGHANISTAN, RELATIONS WITH; AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; KURSK SUBMARINE DISASTER; OCTOBER 1993 EVENTS; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aron, Leon. (2000). Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Thomas Dunne Books. Chugaev, Sergei. “Khasbulatov amp; Co.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (January/February 1993).
(b. 1946), chair of the State Duma in 1994 and 1995, secretary of the Security Council from 1996 to 1998, and leader of the Socialist Party of Russia.
Ivan Rybkin was born on October 20, 1946, in the Voronezh countryside. He graduated from the Volgograd Agricultural Institute in 1968, completed graduate school there, and worked as a teacher until 1983. With the beginning of perestroika, he launched an ambitious political career and became the second secretary of the Volgograd Oblast committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1990, he was selected as a people’s delegate to the RSFSR, where he headed the Communists of Russia fraction. In 1993 and 1994 he was vice-chair of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), but in April 1994 he left the KPRF. As of the fall of 1993, he was a member of the Agrarian Party, on whose list he was elected to the Duma. In this capacity he proved a pragmatic politician. He lost the support of the leftists (in 1995 he was excluded from the Agrarian Party), but gained the support of the Kremlin.
In the summer of 1995, the Kremlin brought forth an initiative to create two centrist blocs for the elections: a right-centrist bloc headed by Premier Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin, and a left-centrist bloc. This latter subsequently came to be called the “Ivan Rybkin bloc,” which gained 1.1 percent of the electoral votes. The bloc was dissolved, but Rybkin was nonetheless elected to the Duma by single-mandate district in his homeland, Voronezh Oblast. Before the second round of presidential elections, Boris Yeltsin created the Political Advisory Council to the President of the Russian Federation, which included representatives of parties and public associations that had not made it into the Duma. Rybkin, who had recently registered the Socialist Party, was appointed chair of the council. A few months later, Rybkin replaced Alexander Lebed as secretary of the Security Council, in which capacity he worked until 1998, focusing mainly on Chechnya. His deputy was for some time Boris Berezovsky, with whom Rybkin maintains close relations.
In 2001-2002, with the discussion and adoption of the law on political parties, which required the presence of branch offices in at least half the regions of the country, the processes of integration strengthened considerably. From mid-2001 onward, Rybkin participated in talks concerning the creation of a United Social-Democratic Party of Russia, along with Mikhail Gorbachev and other well-known politicians. The unification process was difficult, due not so much to divergence of views as to a clash of ambitions. In the fall of 2001, when the process seemed complete, Rybkin’s Socialist Party even disbanded, in anticipation of joining forces with the new party, but the merger broke at the last minute. It was effected only in March 2002, and on a visibly more modest scale.
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On the basis of the Socialist Party, Alexei Pod-berezkin’s Spiritual Heritage movement, and dozens of small organizations with socialist tendencies, the Socialist United Party of Russia was finally created. Rybkin became its chair. The honeymoon period was short, however, and within a few weeks, Ry-bkin resigned as chair and the Socialist Party of Russia left the coalition. In April 2003, at a congress of the Socialist United Party of Russia, he was officially removed from the position of chair and excluded from the party. His alleged offenses included an open letter to Putin, which called for ending the Chechnya war and beginning negotiations with Aslan Maskhadov; collaboration with the SPS; and unsanctioned contacts with Berezovsky. See also: CHECHNYA AND CHECHENS; PUTIN, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH
McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. McFaul, Michael; Petrov, Nikolai; and Ryabov, Andrei, eds. (1999). Primer on Russia’s 1999 Duma Elections. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.
NIKOLAI PETROV
