unravel, with the result that in August 1633, Wladyslaw IV, newly elected King
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
of Poland, arrived in Shein’s and Izmailov’s rear with a Polish relief army of 23,000 and placed the Muscovite besiegers under his own siege. In January 1634 Shein and Izmailov were forced to sue for armistice in order to evacuate what was left of their army. They had to leave their artillery and stores behind.
On their return to Moscow, Shein and Izmailov were charged with treason and executed. By the terms of the Treaty of Polianovka (May 1634) the Poles received an indemnity of twenty thousand rubles and were given back all the captured towns save Serpeisk. The next opportunity for Muscovy to regain Smolensk, Seversk, and Chernigov came a full twenty years later when Bogdan Khmelnit-sky and the Ukrainian cossacks sought Tsar Alexei’s support for their war for independence from the Commonwealth. See also: FILARET ROMANOV, METROPOLITAN; NEW- FORMATION REGIMENTS; POLAND; THIRTEEN YEARS’ WAR
Fuller, William C, Jr. (1992). Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600-1914. New York: Free Press.
BRIAN DAVIES
Catherine II (the Great) founded the Smolny Institute for Girls, officially the Society for the Upbringing of Noble Girls, in 1764. Its popular name comes from its site in the Smolny Monastery on the left bank of the Neva River in St. Petersburg. Inspired by Saint-Cyr, a boarding school for girls in France, Smolny was part of Catherine’s educational plan to raise cultured, industrious, and loyal subjects.
Ivan Betskoy, the head of this reform effort, was heavily influenced by Enlightenment theorists. Drawing on the ideas of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Betskoy’s pedagogical plan for Smolny emphasized moral education and the importance of environment. Girls lived at Smolny continuously from age five to eighteen without visits home, which were deemed corrupting. As at all-male schools such as the Corps of Cadets and the Academy of Arts, Smolny stressed training in the fine arts, especially dance and drama. The curriculum also included reading, writing, foreign languages,
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physics, chemistry, geography, mathematics, history, Orthodoxy, needlepoint, and home economics. The range of subjects led Voltaire to declare Smolny superior to Saint-Cyr. In 1765, a division with a less extensive curriculum was added for the daughters of merchants and soldiers.
Catherine held public exams and performances of plays at Smolny, and took her favorite pupils on promenades in the Summer Gardens. Portraits of these favorites were commissioned from the painter Dmitry Levitsky. Smolny also became a stop for visiting foreign dignitaries. Its graduates were known for their manners and talents and were considered highly desirable brides. Some became teachers at the school, and a few were promoted to ladies-in-waiting at court.
Peter Zavadovsky, who directed Catherine’s commission to establish a national school system, succeeded Betskoy as de facto head of Smolny in 1783. He replaced French with Russian as the school’s primary language and altered the curriculum to emphasize the girls’ future roles as wives and mothers.
After Catherine’s death in 1796, Maria Fe-dorovna took over the institute and made changes that set Smolny’s course for the rest of its existence. The school’s administration became less personal and more bureaucratic. The age of admittance was changed from five to eight, in recognition of the importance of mothering during the early years of a child’s life, and the rules forbidding visits home were relaxed.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Smolny maintained its reputation as the most elite educational institution for girls. Its name was regarded as synonymous with high cultural standards, manners, and poise, although sometimes its graduates were considered naive and ill-prepared for life outside of Smolny. The many references to Smolny in the Russian literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attest to the school’s cultural significance.
In October 1917, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks appropriated the Smolny Institute and made it their headquarters until March 1918. Since then, the Smolny campus has continued to be used for governmental purposes, eventually becoming home to the St. Petersburg Duma. Several rooms have been preserved as a museum of the institute’s past. See also: CATHERINE II; EDUCATION; ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF; ST. PETERSBURG
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Black, Joseph L. (1979). Citizens for the Fatherland: Education, Educators, and Pedagogical Ideals in Eighteenth Century Russia. New York: Columbia University Press. Nash, Carol. (1981). “Educating New Mothers: Women and the Enlightenment in Russia.” History of Education Quarterly 21:305-306.
Smychka, meaning “alliance” or “union” in Russian, was used during the New Economic Policy (NEP), particularly by those Bolsheviks who supported a moderate policy toward the peasantry, to describe a cooperative relationship between workers and peasants.
In 1917 the revolutionary alliance of proletariat and peasantry against the tsarist ruling classes led to victory, but by the end of the Civil War the smychka had been severely weakened by harsh War Communism policies of forcible confiscation of grain. Vladimir Lenin introduced the NEP in 1921 to restore the smychka, ending confiscatory policies toward the peasantry and allowing limited private enterprise.
The Bolsheviks were in the awkward position of claiming to represent the proletariat but actually ruling over a peasant population that they regarded as potentially bourgeois. In the 1920s they debated what policies should be applied to the peasantry, that is, what the smychka should mean. In his last writings, particularly “On Cooperation” and “Better Fewer, But Better” (both 1923), Lenin argued that the smychka meant gaining the peasants’ trust by recognizing and meeting their needs. Through cooperatives, he said, the vast majority of peasants could be gradually won over to socialism. Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and others members of the right built their program of gradual evolution to socialism on Lenin’s last writings, seeing the smychka as a permanent feature of Soviet life and calling for concessions to the peasantry. The left feared that the peasant majority could swallow the revolution and resisted concessions, hoping that rapid industrialization would end the need for alliance with the peasantry.
The inherent tensions between Bolshevik goals and peasant needs threatened to rupture the smychka. In the 1923 Scissors Crisis, prices for agriENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
SOBCHAK, ANATOLY ALEXANDROVICH
cultural products plummeted at the same time that those of state-produced manufactured goods rose sharply, opening a price gap that discouraged peasants from marketing agricultural products. Adjustments kept the smychka in place, and 1925 was the high point of pro-peasant policies. The Grain Crisis of 1928 and subsequent defeat of the right weakened the smychka, and the massive collectivization drive of 1929-1930 ended it completely. See also: COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; GRAIN CRISIS OF 1928; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; SCISSORS CRISIS; WAR COMMUNISM
Cohen, Stephen F. (1971). Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. New York: Random House. Lewin, Moshe. (1968). Russian Peasants and Soviet Power. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
(1937-2000), law professor; mayor of St. Petersburg.
Anatoly Sobchak was one of the leading liberal politicians of the perestroika era. Born in Chita, he completed a law degree at Leningrad State University in 1959. He settled permanently in Leningrad in1962 and joined the faculty of Leningrad State University in 1973, heading the economic law institute and rising to be dean. Unusually for
