Realism, for example, Sinyavsky (or “Abram Tertz”) advocated nothing more radical than a return to the adventurous style of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Nonetheless, following a January 1966 press campaign of vicious denunciations, the pair was convicted at a show trial in February. Sinyavsky received seven years, and Daniel five, in a strict-regime labor camp.
Conservative elements in the Leonid Brezhnev-Alexei Kosygin regime, determined to crack down on the intellectual experimentation of the Nikita Khrushchev years, presumably intended the affair as the signal of a stricter cultural line and as a warning to intellectuals to keep quiet. But the signal was ambiguous-the conservatives were not yet firmly in control-and the warning ineffectual. Sinyavsky and Daniel refused to play their assigned roles, pleading not guilty and defending themselves in court vigorously. A public Moscow protest against the arrests in December 1965 was followed by a petition campaign, an increase in open protest and samizdat, and, ultimately, the appearance of the Chronicle of Current Events in April 1968. In fact, the Sinyavsky-Daniel case is widely viewed as a
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spark that galvanized the dissident movement by raising the specter of a return to Stalinism and by convincing many intellectuals that it was futile to work within the system. See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; MAYAKOVSKY, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH; SHOW TRIALS; THAW, THE
Hayward, Max, ed. and tr. (1967). On Trial: The Soviet State versus “Abram Tertz” and “Nikolai Arzhak,” revised and enlarged edition. New York and Evanston, IL: Harper amp; Row.
SIXTH PARTY CONGRESS See OCTOBER REVOLUTION.
A literary term originally defined as “orientation toward oral speech” in prose fiction, can also indicate a type of oral folk narrative.
Boris Eikhenbaum first described skaz, derived from the verb skazat (“to tell”), in a pair of 1918 articles as a kind of “oral” narration that included unmediated or improvisational aspects. Formalists and other critics developed this analytical tool during the 1920s, including Yuri Tynianov (1921), Viktor Vinogradov (1926), and Mikhail Bakhtin (1929). Tynianov analyzed the effect of skaz, arguing that it enabled the reader to enter the text, but did not really clarify the mechanism through which it worked.
Vinogradov and Bakhtin helped refine the concept of skaz as a stylistic device. Vinogradov developed the idea that skaz comprised a series of signals that aroused in the reader a sense of speech produced by utterance, not writing. Bakhtin placed skaz within his own larger theory of narration, defining it as one kind of “double-voiced utterance” (the others being stylization and parody) in which two distinct voices-the author’s speech and another’s speech-were oriented toward one another within the same level of conceptual authority. The effect of oral speech is, therefore, not the primary characteristic of skaz for Bakhtin.
Since the 1920s skaz has been identified both as a distinctive characteristic of Russian literature (in the work of Gogol, Zamiatin, Zoshchenko, and
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others) and as a narrative device present in most world literatures. Since the beginning of the 1980s and the rediscovery of Bakhtin’s work, his concept of skaz has served as a starting point for further debate: for instance, over whether the relationship between author and narrator is mutual and interactive. See also: BYLINA; LESKOV, NIKOLAI SEMENOVICH; BAKHTIN, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH; GOGOL, NIKOLAI VASI-LIEVICH
Hodgson, Peter. (1983). “More on the Matter of Skaz: The Formalist Model.” In From Los Angeles to Kiev: Papers on the Occasion of the Ninth International Congress of Slavists, Kiev, September, 1983, ed. Vladimir Markov and Dean S. Worth. Columbus, OH: Slav-ica Publishers. Terras, Victor, ed. (1985). Handbook of Russian Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Titunik, I. R. (1977). “The Problem of Skaz (Critique and Theory).” In Papers in Slavic Philology, ed. Benjamin A. Stolz. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications.
SKOBELEV, MIKHAIL DMITRIYEVICH
(1843-1882), famous officer in the Russian imperial army active in the conquest of Turkestan and in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1888.
Born to a Russian noble family, Mikhail Sko-belev became a member of the officer corps of the Russian army. In 1869, having received an education in military schools, he joined Russian forces completing the conquest of Central Asia.
He first distinguished himself in military operations in the Fergana Valley (now in Uzbekistan), where in 1875 anti-Russian rebel forces had overthrown the khan of Kokand (allied with Russia). He quickly formulated his own strategy of colonial war, summed up in the guidelines “slaughter the enemy until resistance ends,” then “cease slaughter and be kind and humane to the defeated enemy.” He destroyed several rebel towns during his campaign, leaving thousands of dead among the rebels and the civilian population. When leaders of the revolt surrendered, he recommended to the tsar that they be pardoned. As a reward for his military triumph, he was promoted to the rank of major general and, at the age of thirty, became the military ruler of the Fergana Valley.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
When the Russian Empire declared war on the Ottoman Empire in 1877, Skobelev joined the Russian armies moving against the Turks. His bravery and military skill earned him the command of one of the Russian armies in the campaign. He led his troops in the capture of the key Ottoman-fortified city along the western Black Sea coast protecting Constantinople. His desire for rapid victory resulted in heavy losses among his troops, but his exploits preserved his image in Russia as the triumphant “White General.”
Skobelev’s final military triumph came in another war in Central Asia. Faced with the revolt of nomadic Turkmen tribes, the tsarist government sent him in 1880 to force the nomads to submit to imperial rule. He was successful, applying once again his brutal strategy of colonial warfare. In early 1881 his troops stormed the major Turkmen fortress of Geok-Tepe (now in Turkmenistan), slaughtering half of the defenders as well as many civilians. His reputation among Russian imperialists was at its peak. However, the new tsar, Alexander III, was suspicious of his desire for fame and his political ambitions. Following Skobelev’s triumph in Turkestan, the government sent him to a remote military post in western Russia. There he began a public campaign to restore his reputation, but died shortly afterward of a heart attack. See also: CENTRAL ASIA; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Meyer, Karl, and Brysac, Shareen. (1999). Tournament of Shadows: The Race for Empire and the Great Game in Central Asia. New York: Counterpoint Press. Rich, David. (1998). The Tsar’s Colonels: Professionalism, Strategy, and Subversion in Late Imperial Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
(1872-1933), Ukrainian Bolshevik leader and advocate of ukrainization.
Born in Ukraine, Mykola Skrypnyk joined the revolutionary movement in 1901 as a student at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, from which he never graduated. Until 1917 he lived the
life of a professional revolutionary, organizing the Bolshevik underground in Saratov, Odessa, Kiev, and Moscow. During this period, Skrypnyk was arrested fifteen times and repeatedly exiled to Siberia, and spent more than a year in voluntary exile in Switzerland. During the October Revolution he was a prominent member of the Military Revolutionary Committee in Petrograd. In 1918, on the suggestion of Vladimir Lenin, Skrypnyk moved to Ukraine to counterbalance the Russian chauvinism of the local Bolshevik leadership. He served there as people’s
