with Valentin Pavlov.
Ryzhkov unsuccessfully ran against Boris Yeltsin for the Russian presidency in June 1991. He then assumed a variety of corporate positions, including chairman of the board of Tveruniversal Bank (1994-1995), chairman of the board of Prokhorovskoye Pole, and head of the Moscow Intellectual Business Club. He won a seat in the Russian State Duma in 1995 and 1999 as head of “Power to the People,” a bloc aligned with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. See also: CENTRAL COMMITTEE; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; GOSPLAN; PERESTROIKA; POLITBURO; PRIME MINISTER
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Goldman, Marshall. (1992). What went Wrong with Per-estroika. New York: Norton.
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In addition to the saints inherited from the Early Church and Byzantium, the Orthodox Church in Rus soon began to create its own objects of veneration. The saints belonged to three main categories: (1) spiritual and secular leaders who rendered significant service to the Church; (2) martyrs; and (3) those who exhibited extraordinary spiritual gifts, specifically the power to perform miracles, especially through their relics. Although the miracles were not a formal precondition under canon law, popular Orthodoxy placed a high value on this quality, primarily if manifested in “uncorrupted remains” (netlennye moshchi). The miracle of physical preservation, attested by an official examination of the crypt, reinforced belief in the power to perform miracles and hence intercede on behalf of the disabled and distressed.
Canonizations in the Russian Orthodox Church have proceeded in a highly uneven fashion. In early medieval Russia (from Christianization in 988 to the 1547 Church Council), the Russian Church canonized only nineteen figures; the first to be so honored were the princes Boris and Gleb, whose nonresistance to a violent death amidst the fratricidal warfare made them the very model of kenoti-cism. The first major burst of canonizations came during the Church Councils of 1547 and 1549, which, reflecting Muscovy’s new self-assertion as the Third Rome, recognized thirty-nine new saints. Subsequently the church slowly expanded the number of saints, but that process came to a virtual halt in 1721: It canonized only five new saints before Nicholas II ascended the throne in 1894 and sought to bolster autocracy by favoring canonization and emphasizing the religious foundations of autocracy. The Bolshevik Revolution brought all of that to an end; the new regime actively engaged in de-canonization, opening scores of saints’ crypts (to demonstrate that the “uncorrupted relics” were frauds) and consigning relics to museums and storage. Although the Church was able to canonize five saints in the 1960s and 1970s, an era of large-scale canonizations opened in 1988. Over the next decade the church canonized a long list of prominent medieval figures (i.e., Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy and the icon-painter Andrei Rublev) as well as many martyred during the Soviet era.
By 1999 the Russian Orthodox Church had a total of 1,362 saints. The majority came from the hierarchy (11.5%) and monastic orders (49.9%); few of the parish clergy were canonized (1.8%), all,
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indeed, on the basis of marytyrdom. In addition to a substantial number of princes and tsars (6.9%), the church canonized ordinary lay martyrs (24.5%), some “fools-in-Christ” (3.2%), and laypersons venerated for their extraordinary spirituality (2.3%). These saints are, moreover, overwhelmingly male (96.4%). Since 1999, the church has begun to change these proportions, chiefly because of the ongoing canonization of martyrs (e.g., more than a thousand in August 2000). While some decisions have been exceedingly controversial (above all, the canonization of Nicholas II and his family), the church seeks to pay homage to the ordinary priests and parishioners who paid the ultimate price for their unswerving faith during the merciless repressions of the first decades of Soviet rule. See also: HAGIOGRAPHY; ORTHODOXY; RELIGION; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
Freeze, Gregory. (1996). “Subversive Piety: Religion and the Political Crisis in Late Imperial Russia.” Journal of Modern History 68:308-50. Grunwald, Constantin de. (1960). Saints of Russia.. London: Hutchinson.
GREGORY L. FREEZE
The famous folklore scholar G. V. Ksenofontov has compared the once nomadic Sakha people to a branch of an apple tree carried around the world by the wind and finally taking root. The Sakha, or Yakut, people are the descendants of Turkic nomads and originated in the region around Lake Baikal in what is now Russia. But in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Mongols arrived from the south, along with other peoples, and the Sakha moved north and east, settling eventually in the basin of the river Lena, later called Yakutia.
In the early twenty-first century, Yakutia or the Republic of Sakha is an autonomous republic within Russia in the far northeast, five times the size of France. Known as the “Land of Soft Gold” for the rich furs that come from the region, Yakutia is home to the Sakha people, as well as four other indigenous cultural groups (the Even, the Evenki, the Yukagir, and the Chukchi). The name “Yakut” comes from the Evenk word yako, mean1344 ing stranger. The Russians arriving in the seventeenth century adopted the Evenk word for the local population. The capitol of the Republic of Sakha is Yakutsk, its largest city.
Russians sent to gather fur and other riches for the tsar, made Yakutia a stopping point on their way to the Pacific Ocean during the eighteenth century. They brought new agricultural techniques to the Sakha, who were primarily cattle and horse breeders, but the local population paid a price in fur tax for these innovations. A Yakut cook peers out from a restaurant window encased in frozen snow. © DEAN CONGER/CORBIS
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
In 1923 Soviet power was established in Yakutsk. It was declared an autonomous republic under the name of Yakutia, but was still economically and politically controlled by the Soviet Union. It received its official name (Republic of Sakha) when the Declaration of Sovereignty of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) was signed on September 27, 1990. The Republic of Sakha has a president, elected for a term of five years.
Always a resource-rich region, Yakutia plays a large role in Russia’s economy. The main industry in the republic is mining. The Republic of Sakha produces 99 percent of Russia’s diamonds, 24 percent of its gold, and 33 percent of its silver. It is also a major producer of coal, natural gas, tin, timber, fish, and other natural resources. The diamond mining industry is the main source of Russia’s foreign currency income; the multinational De Beers company partnership with the Russian company Almazy Rossii-Sakha (Diamonds of Russia and Sakha) was established in 1992.
The Sakha summer festival, Ysyakh, is held in June, celebrating the ancestors’ movement of their cattle to pasture in the steppe. The festival opens with the solemn ritual of feeding the fire and includes sport contests and horse races, as well as kumys, a traditional beverage made of fermented mare’s milk.
Since 1991, the Sakha language has been a mandatory class in primary schools, and some 92 percent of ethnically Sakha people speak their own language. It is not considered to be an endangered language, unlike the Chukchi, Even, or Evenki languages. The some 400,000 Sakha people living and working in the Republic of Sakha take pride in their strong and unique heritage. See also: CHUKCHI; EVENKI; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Argounova, Tatiana. (2000). “Republic of Sakha (Yakutia).” «http://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/resources/rfn/ sakha.html». Hiller, Kristin. (1997). “Big River of Siberia.” Russian Life 9:16-24. Slezkine, Yuri. (1994). Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vitebsky, P. (1990). “Yakut.” In The Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union, ed. Graham Smith. London: Longman.
