end of 1756, Russia signed a new alliance with its traditional ally, Austria. The sides had been drawn.
After war broke out in 1756 on the continent, Frederick’s forces enjoyed success against the Aus-trians. By April 1756 the Prussians reached Prague. In the Bohemian capital the Austrians rallied, and Frederick’s forces retreated. At that point Austria’s allies, including Russia, entered the conflict. Despite the numbers stacked against him, Frederick continued to win surprising victories, and 1757 established his reputation as a brilliant commander.
The following year brought mixed results and mounting casualties for the Russians, who lost twelve thousand troops at August’s Battle of Zorn-dorf. In 1759 the allies, and particularly Russia, ratcheted up the pressure. Led by General Pyotr Saltykov, the Russian army occupied Frankfurt in June 1759. By 1760 Frederick had only half the numbers of his Russian and Austrian opponents, who began to close the circle against Frederick. Russian commanders in particular focused on Berlin, and even occupied the Prussian capital for three days in September and October 1760. Exhausted by the continuous marching demanded of eighteenth-century warfare, the two sides fought no serious battles for the rest of 1760 and most of 1761. Frederick’s situation, however, was grave. Russia and Austria could count on more soldiers and supplies, and Prussia was cut off from Silesia, a major supplier of food.
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Then the situation changed dramatically. On January 5, 1762, the Empress Elizabeth died. Her successor, Peter III, was a fervent admirer of Frederick II and all things Prussian. When he took the throne, Peter ended the war with Prussia, called his troops back, and returned all territorial gains. As a result, Frederick recovered and defeated the Austrians. France, defeated in North America and more disinterested about the continental war, also signed a treaty with Prussia. Frederick’s “miracle” had resulted from Russia’s flip-flop, and his victory brought the first step toward Prussian domination of Germany.
At home, Peter III’s decision ran counter to Russia’s strategic and political interests. Contemporaries called the conflict the “Prussian War,” and even popular prints of the time depicted the war as a struggle solely between Russia and Prussia. The decision to hand Frederick victory thus did not go over well within any segment of the population. Catherine, Peter’s German wife, led a palace coup against her husband that toppled him from power on July 9, 1762. Catherine II’s rise to power would have been inconceivable had it not been for Russia’s participation in the war. See also: AUSTRIA, RELATIONS WITH; CATHERINE II; ELIZABETH; FRANCE, RELATIONS WITH; PETER III; PRUSSIA, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, Fred. (2001). Crucible of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. New York: Vintage. Keep, John L. H. (2002). “The Russian Army in the Seven Years’ War.” In The Military and Society in Russia, 1450-1917, ed. Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe. Leiden: Brill. Leonard, Carol. (1993). Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
(1878-1918), Bolshevik party activist and theorist on the nationality question; principal leader of the Bolsheviks in Baku during the Russian Revolution who perished as one of the famous Twenty-Six Baku Commissars.
Born into an Armenian family in Tiflis (Tbilisi), the young Shahumian was educated in local
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schools before entering the Riga Polytechnic Institute in 1900. Active in Armenian student political circles, he turned toward Marxism in Riga. Expelled for his political activities, Shahumian continued his studies at the University of Berlin, where he joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RS-DRP). He grew close to Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, translated the Communist Manifesto into Armenian, and was elected a delegate to the Fourth (Stockholm) and Fifth (London) Congresses of the RSDRP. Shahumian was active in the strike movement in Baku during the first Russian revolution (1905-1907) and throughout the years of reaction and repression of the labor movement, and was arrested and imprisoned several times. When the February Revolution broke out, he returned from exile in Astrakhan and assumed leadership of the Baku Bolsheviks.
Elected chairman of the Baku Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, Shahumian was the most important figure in Baku politics in 1917 and 1918. After the October Revolution, Lenin’s government appointed him Extraordinary Commissar for the Affairs of the Caucasus. Shahumian headed the Council of People’s Commissars, the de facto government of the Baku Commune, from April through July 1918. Although he was moderate in temperament and tolerant of diverse political parties, his brief tenure was marked by a brash attempt to expand Soviet power throughout the Caucasus by military means. As the Turkish army approached Baku, the soviet voted to invite Persia-based British forces to defend the city. Shahumian’s government stepped down and soon was arrested. On September 20, 1918, anti-Bolsheviks brutally executed twenty-six commissars, among them Shahumian, in the deserts of Transcaspia (now Turkmenistan). The Soviet government blamed the British for their deaths and commemorated them as martyrs to the revolution. Reburied in a mass grave in Baku, they became the inspiration for paintings, songs, poems, and films. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, anticommunist Azerbai-janis disinterred their corpses and destroyed their monuments. See also: ARMENIA AND ARMENIANS; BAKU; BOLSHEVISM; CAUCASUS; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1972). The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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(b. 1956), lawyer and former minister of nationalities.
Sergei Shakhrai trained as a lawyer at Rostov State University and attained the rank of candidate of juridical sciences from Moscow State University (MGU) in 1982. He then taught law at MGU until 1990. Shakhrai was a Party member from 1988 to August 1991.
In 1990, Shakhrai was elected to the new RSFSR Congress of People’s Deputies, where he quickly became chair of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet Committee for Legislation. He simultaneously served Boris Yeltsin as a counselor for legal and nationalities affairs. In 1992 he was named a member of the Russian Federation Security Council and deputy chair responsible for nationality issues. During the November-December 1992 ethnic unrest in North Ossetia and Ingushetia, Shakhrai served as head of the temporary regional administration. A Terek Cossack, he also chaired the Russian parliamentary committee on the rehabilitation of the Cossacks. In November 1992, Shakhrai was appointed a deputy prime minister.
In legal matters, Shakhrai argued Yeltsin’s case in the 1992 Constitutional Court hearings on the legality of the president’s banning of the CPSU, a decree written by Shakhrai himself. He also served as Yeltsin’s representative to the 1993 Duma commission drafting a new Russian constitution and negotiated many of the subsequent federal power-sharing treaties. Shakhrai became leader of the Party of Russian Unity and Accord in October 1993, running on their ticket in the December 1993 Duma election. However, he resigned from the party when the party joined the Our Home is Russia movement in August 1995.
Shakhrai was transferred from deputy prime minister to minister of nationalities and regional policy in January 1994. This move was soon overturned; by April he was reappointed deputy prime minister and in May removed as minister of nationalities. However, he continued to influence the decisions of his replacement, Nikolai Yegorov.
Shakhrai’s work in law and nationality affairs combined in the issue of Chechnya. Despite Chechen president Dzhokar Dudayev’s assertions otherwise, Shakhrai insisted that Chechnya remained an integral part of the Russian Federation. When Dudayev refused to ratify the new constitution, despite Shakhrai’s repeated attempts at negotiation, he
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