provided the legal pretext for an invasion. Shakhrai and minister of defense Pavel Grachev convinced Yeltsin that an attack on Chechnya would be quick and painless; ultimately, the attack was launched in December 1994. Shakhrai’s prediction proved false, however, as the first Russo-Chechen war lasted until August 1996.
Yeltsin summarily fired Shakhrai in June 1998, when the lawyer questioned the constitutionality of a possible third term as president for Yeltsin. However, Shakhrai was not unemployed for long. In October, prime minister Yevgeny Primakov appointed Shakhrai as his own legal advisor. Shakhrai also won a Duma seat for Perm oblast during the 1999 election. As of 2003 he was a member of the influential Russian Foreign and Defense Policy Council and was teaching at Moscow State Institute for International Relations (MGIMO). See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; PARTY OF RUSSIAN UNITY AND ACCORD
Dunlop, John B. (1998). Russia Confronts Chechnya.: Roots of a Separatist Conflict. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lieven, Anatol. (1998). Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power. New Haven: Yale University Press.
ANN E. ROBERTSON
This famous trial based on fabricated charges was used by Stalin to start a three-year attack on the technical intelligentsia of the USSR and to discredit moderates within the political leadership. Fifty-three mining engineers and technicians, including some top officials and three German engineers, were accused of acts of sabotage and treason dating back to the 1920s and taking part in a conspiracy directed from abroad (involving French
Courtroom scene from the Shakhty sabotage trial in 1928. © TASS/SOVFOTO
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finance and Polish counterespionage). The story of conspiracy was fabricated by the Unified State Political Administration (OGPU) officials in the North Caucasus mining district known as the Donbass and focused on such acts as wasting capital, lowering the quality of production, raising its costs, mistreating workers, and other forms of “wrecking.”
Held in a large auditorium at the House of Trade-Unions in Moscow, this six-week-long trial was arranged for maximum publicity, with movie cameras, a hundred journalists in attendance, and a different public audience each day. The presiding judge over the specially organized judicial presence was Andrei Vyshinsky, famous for his appearance as prosecutor at the major show trials of the 1930s; the prosecutor at the Shakhty trial was the Bolshevik jurist Nikolai Krylenko. For evidence, the prosecution relied on confessions of the accused, but twenty- three of the defendants proclaimed their innocence, and a few others retracted their confessions at trial. As a political show trial Shakhty was imperfect. Still, all but four of the accused were convicted, and five of them executed.
In the wake of the Shakhty trial, non-Marxist engineers and technicians were placed on the defensive and many fell victim to persecution. “Specialist baiting” ranged from verbal harassment to firing from jobs, not to speak of arrests and convictions in later trials, including the well-known “Industrial Party” case. By 1931, when Stalin called a halt to the anti-specialist campaign, Soviet engineers had been tamed and any nascent threat of technocracy defeated.
On the political level, the Shakhty trial served Stalin as a vehicle for radicalizing economic policy and sending a message of warning to moderates in the leadership (such as Alexei Rykov and Nikolai Bukharin). If nothing else, the persecution of the “bourgeois specialists” weakened one of the constituencies that supported a relatively cautious and moderate approach to industrialization. With hindsight it is clear that the Shakhty trial, along with the renewal of forced grain procurements, signaled the coming end of the class-conciliatory New Economic Policy and the start of a new period of class war that would culminate in the forced collectivization from 1929 to 1933. An important manifestation of the new class war was the Cultural Revolution from 1928 to 1931, in which young communists in many fields of art, science, and professional life were encouraged to attack and supplant their non- Marxist senior colleagues.
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See also: SHOW TRIALS; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
Bailes, Kendall. (1978). Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-1941. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1978). “Cultural Revolution as Class War.” In Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kuromiya, Hiroaki. (1997). “The Shakhty Affair.” South East European Monitor 4(2):41-64.
(1797-1871), the most famous and successful anti-Russian Islamic resistance leader during the nineteenth century; lionized by Chechen and Dagestani nationalists and co-opted by Russian literature and the public consciousness as a sign of tsarist imperial expansion and the Russian mission in Asia.
Born in Gimri, modern Dagestan, Shamil demonstrated an early skill with weapons and horses. He entered a madrassah where he learned grammar, logic, rhetoric, and Arabic. There he joined the Murids, of the Naqshbandi- Khalidi Sufi order, in 1830. Following the transfer of Dagestan from Persia to the Russian Empire, Murids initiated a jihad against Russia under the leadership of Shamil’s mentor, the first imam of Dagestan, Ghazi Muhammed. After his death and the brief leadership of Hamza Bek, Shamil became the third imam of Dagestan and declared it an independent state in 1834. His personal charisma, political acumen, state building, and military ability as well as his blending of an egalitarian interpretation of Shari’a (Islamic Law) with proclamations of jihad against the Russian advance made him a popular political and religious leader (even among the non-Muslims of the North Caucasus).
For twenty-five years (1834-1859), Shamil led raids on Russian positions in the Caucasus. He reached the peak of prestige in 1845 devastating the advance of Mkhail Vorontsov, who organized an army to complete the final conquest of the Caucasus. In these years of struggle, Shamil unified the disparate communities of the North Caucasus, built a state, organized a regular army, and completed the Islamicization of Dagestan and Chechnya. In
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
1857, the Russian Empire took a more aggressive stance; Generals Alexander Baryatinsky and Nikolai Evdokimov overwhelmed the weaker and exhausted forces of Shamil. By April 1859 his fortress at Vedeno fell and Shamil retreated to Mount Gu-nib. On September 6, 1859, Shamil surrendered to the Russians and the resistance movement never recovered. He was taken to St. Petersburg for an audience with Tsar Alexander II, paraded around Russia as a hero and menace, and then exiled to Kaluga. In March 1871 he died and was buried in Medina.
Drawing from the rich literary tradition of Alexander Pushkin, Mkhail Lermontov, and Alexander Bestuzhev- Marlinsky, Shamil emerged as a Caucasian hero of Russian Romanticism and a symbol of Russian expansion and its civilizing mission. Shamil was an international celebrity; his exploits serialized in numerous languages. Soviet historians initially lauded Shamil as a hero of a national liberation movement against tsarist imperialism; this became problematic when his name was linked with anti-Russian and anti-Bolshevik opposition. Thus, Shamil was depicted by Soviet historians during the second half of the twentieth century as personally progressive while his movement was corrupted by anti-popular and religious elements. See also: CAUCASUS; ISLAM; NATIONALISM IN THE TSARIST PERIOD
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gammer, Moshe. (1994). Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and
