commissar of labor and later as head of the People’s Secretariat, the first Soviet government in Ukraine, and in April 1918 he was instrumental in the creation of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine. After the Bolsheviks were forced to withdraw from Ukraine by the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Skrypnyk joined the Cheka, but he returned to Ukraine when the Civil War ended.
As people’s commissar of justice of the Ukrainian Republic (1922-1927), Skrypnyk helped to build a Soviet Ukrainian state and ensure its rights within the Soviet Union. Starting in 1923, when the Kremlin introduced the policy of nativization, he actively promoted the implementation of its Ukrainian incarnation or ukrainization. During his tenure as people’s commissar of education (1927-1933), he was active in ukrainizing the republic’s press, publishing, education, and culture. Although Skrypnyk remained an orthodox Bolshevik and an enemy of Ukrainian nationalism, he stood out as the Ukrainian leader who was most vocal in his opposition to Moscow’s centralism and great-power chauvinism. He also distinguished himself by engineering the standardization of Ukrainian orthography- the so-called Skrypnykivka system (1927)-and founding the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism (1928). In 1933, when Josef Stalin condemned his ukrainization policies as nationalistic, Skrypnyk committed suicide. He was rehabilitated in the mid-1950s, and in post-Soviet Ukraine he is respected as a defender of Ukrainian culture and sovereignty. See also: BOLSHEVISM; NATIONALISM IN THE SOVIET UNION; UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mace, James. (1983). Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
1401
Martin, Terry. (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923- 1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Slavery in one form or another has been a central feature of East Slavic and Russian history from at least the very beginning almost to the present day. Its presence and its offshoots have lent a particular coloration to Russian civilization that can be found in few other places.
One common social science definition of slavery is that the slave is an outsider; namely, that he or she is of a different race, religion, caste, or tribe than that of his or her owner. In cases where that was not true, slaveholders resorted to fiction, which made the slave (usually an infant abandoned by its parents) appear to be an outsider. Or a slave might be a lawbreaker who by his crime had placed himself outside of society: one who, in Orlando Patterson’s phrase, was “socially dead.” This could include debtors, who were regarded as thieves because they could not or would not repay borrowed money or goods, or criminals who could not pay fines.
Russia included such outsiders as slaves, but (along with Korea) also enslaved its own people. This was unusual and made Russian slavery distinctive. Because of its atypical nature, some people have questioned whether Russian rabstvo and especially kholopstvo were in fact “really slavery.” However, a thoughtful examination indicates that all such individuals in fact were slaves. All varieties of slaves were treated equally under the law.
From the dawn of Russian history, as everywhere else on Earth at the time, slaves were typically products of warfare-East Slavic tribes fighting with each other or with neighboring Turkic, Iranian, Finnic, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish, Germanic, and other peoples. Such victims were true outsiders who could be either enslaved in Rus itself or taken abroad into the international slave trade. Slaves were mentioned in every Russian law code. As the earliest such code, the Russkaia pravda, grew in size from its earliest redaction compiled in about 1016 to its full size, the so-called Expanded Pravda a special section on slavery was added. It enumerated some of the avenues into slavery, such as sale of prior slaves, self-sale, becoming a steward, and marriage of a free person to a slave. An
1402
indentured laborer could be sold into slavery as recompense for crimes. As in all slave systems, the owner was responsible for a slave’s offenses, much as an owner is responsible for his dog. The heyday of medieval Russian slavery followed the collapse of political unity after 1132, and each of the dozen or so independent principalities waged civil war against each other as well as the steppe nomads and neighboring sedentary peoples to the west. As always-until probably the 1880s-Russia was a labor-short country, so those desiring extra hands often enslaved them. Much of twelfth-century farming was done by slaves living in barracks.
The Mongol invasion and conquest made the situation worse. The Mongols enslaved skilled individuals and dispatched them to Karakorum, Sarai, and other corners of the earth. The dozen or so principalities of Rus in 1237 fragmented into fifty, perhaps even one hundred-each enslaving the labor of other principalities. Many of these slaves were shipped to Novgorod, whose famous slave market was at the busy intersection of Slave and High Streets, where professional readers and writers set up their business composing and reading for customers the famous birch-bark letters. Slaves from Novgorod were shipped into the Baltic, to England, to other Atlantic countries, and into the Islamic lands of the Mediterranean.
While the unification of the East Slavic lands by Moscow put an end to the capture of other East Slavs into slavery, Russia was still short of labor, and the appetite for slaves did not decline. In Kievan Rus the Orthodox Church had provided charity, but this diminished with the rise of Moscow. In order for the impoverished to survive, the practice began to develop of those in need selling themselves into what was described as “full slavery.” This was a form of perpetual, lifelong slavery in which offspring were described as hereditary slaves. Most societies could not withstand the tension inherent in enslaving their own people, but this did not seem to bother the Russians. From the outset Russian society had consisted not only of East Slavs, but also the ruling Varangian/Viking element, conquered indigenous Iranians, Finns, and Balts, plus any Turkic, Mongol, or other people who wanted to live in Rus. There were no barriers to intermarriage among these peoples, and the sole distinction came to be (perhaps after 1350, or even the 1650s) those who allegedly were Orthodox Christians and those who were not. Thus the insider-outsider dichotomy was weakly developed, and this perhaps permitted Russians to enslave their own people.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Russian Slave Life by Sergei Vladimirovich Ivanov. © SUPERSTOCK
In the sixteenth century full slavery came to be replaced by what is best translated as limited service contract slavery (kabalnoye kholopstvo), known elsewhere (in Parthia) as antichresis. It worked as follows: A person in need or who did not desire to control his own life found a person who would buy him. (Two-thirds of the cases involved primarily young males, the other third females.) They agreed on a price; the slave took the money from his buyer and agreed to work for him for a year in lieu of paying the interest on the money. If he did not repay the loan (or a third person-presumably another buyer-did not repay it for him), he defaulted and became a full slave. By the 1590s there were many such slaves. Serfdom was in full development, and the slave had the advantage that he had to pay no taxes, whereas the serf did. Slavery was becoming so popular that the powerful government unilaterally changed the terms of limited service contract slavery: The limitation was changed from the one year of the loan to the life of the person giving the loan. There was a dual expropriation here: The person taking the loan (i.e., selling himself) could no longer pay it off, and the person granting the loan (i.e., buying the slave) could not pass the slave to his heirs. This became the premier form of slavery until the demise of the institution in the 1720s. Two changes were introduced: in the 1620s a maximum price of two rubles, and in the 1630s an increase of the maximum to three rubles. This meant that some would-be slaves could find no buyer because their price was too high, whereas others were forced to sell themselves for less than their “market price” would have been without the price controls. Regardless, slavery introduced a form of dependency such that those who were manumitted almost always resold themselves upon the death of the owner, often to the deceased owner’s heirs. About 10 percent of the entire population were slaves.
Russia was the sole country in the world with a central office (the Slavery Chancellery) in the capital controlling the institution of slavery. All slaves had to be registered. In the 1590s a reregistration of all slaves was required, in which about half of all slaves were limited service contract slaves and the others were of half a dozen other varieties. There were military captives, subject to return
