With the Bolshevik revolution, Stanislavsky and MAT were reduced to poverty. From 1922 to 1924, Stanislavsky toured Europe and the United States with the company’s earliest and most famous productions in an effort to recoup financial stability. During this period, he also began to write, publishing My Life in Art in 1924. This period guaranteed his international influence.
Upon returning to Moscow, Stanislavsky faced growing Soviet control over the arts. His connections with the West and his production of Mikhail Bulgakov’s play about White Russians, The Days of the Turbins (1926), came under attack. From 1934 to 1938, during the Soviet purges, Stanislavsky was weakened by an enlarged heart and confined to his home. Stalin simultaneously canonized the director’s realistic work as the vanguard of Socialist Realism. Isolated from the wider world, Stanislavsky continued to write, teach, and develop his ideas in his home until his death in 1938 of a heart attack. See also: BULGAKOV, MIKHAIL AFANASIEVICH; CHEKHOV, ANTON PAVLOVICH; MOSCOW ART THEATER; SOCIALIST REALISM; THEATER
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benedetti, Jean. (1990). Sta.nisla.vski: A Biography. New York: Routledge. Carnicke, Sharon Marie. (1998). Stanislavsky in Focus. London: Harwood/Routledge. Smeliansky, Anatoly. (1991). “The Last Decade: Stanislavsky and Stalinism.” Theatre 12(2):7-13.
SHARON MARIE CARNICKE STARCHESTVO See SPIRITUAL ELDERS.
(1946-1998), martyred political figure and human rights activist.
Galina Starovoitova was one of Russia’s leading human rights advocates and served in the first post-Soviet Russian government. Murdered by unknown assailants on November 20, 1998, in St. Petersburg, she was eulogized as “a symbol of courage and outspokenness,” “one of the brightest lights of Russian independence and reform moveENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
ment,” and a leader with an “uncompromising dedication to democracy.”
Starovoitova was born in Chelyabinsk, earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in social psychology, and in 1980 received a Ph.D. from the Institute of Ethnography, USSR Academy of Sciences. She worked as an ethnographer and psychologist, and published scientific works in both fields, with a specialization in inter-ethnic relations and cross- cultural studies.
Her political activities began in the late 1980s with the Moscow Helsinki Group, a human rights organization led by Andrei Sakharov and other prominent dissident leaders. She joined with Sakharov to campaign for the rights of Armenians in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, and in 1989, in appreciation, was elected to the USSR Congress of Peoples’ Deputies from Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. The Congress elected her to serve in the Supreme Soviet, where she became one of the co-founders of the pro-reform Inter-Regional Group of Deputies. A year later, she was elected to the Russian parliament from a constituency in St. Petersburg and became a co-chair of the Democratic Russia Party.
After the USSR collapsed, Starovoitova became an adviser to President Boris Yeltsin on inter-ethnic affairs, but she resigned in 1992 because of disagreements over policy in the Caucasus region and frustration with a government still beholden to elements of the old Soviet system. From 1993 to 1994 she was a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., and the following year she taught at Brown University.
In 1995 Starovoitova was elected to the Russian Duma, where she became a prominent spokeswoman on human rights, the war in Chechnya, the environment, women’s rights, wage issues, housing, antisemitism, and religious freedom. In 1996, she ran for the presidency, the first Russian woman to do so. She talked of running again in 2000, and before her death announced that she would run for governor of Leningrad oblast. Starovoitova saw Russia’s communists and nationalists as standing in the way of democratization, and they in turn were her main opponents. Shortly before her death, she spoke out forcefully about political corruption, and many speculate that her investigations in this area precipitated her murder.
Millions of Russians mourned Galina Starovoi-tova’s death, and a kilometer-long line of people waited in the cold to pay their respects. The invesENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Democratic activist Galina Starovoitova was murdered outside her apartment in St. Petersburg. © ANTONOV/RPG/CORBIS SYGMA tigation of her murder was turned over to the highest authorities, but despite the interrogation of hundreds of witnesses, the detention of hundreds of suspects, and pledges to catch those guilty of the crime, no one was charged. Several Russians view the murder as a political assassination perpetrated either by organized crime or corrupt political officials. See also: ORGANIZED CRIME; SAKHAROV, ANDREI DMITRIEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Diuk, Nadia. (1999). “Galina Starovoitova.” Journal of Democracy 10:188-190. Powell, B. (1998). “Requiem for Reform.” Newsweek. December 7, 1998, p. 38.
PAUL J. KUBICEK START See STRATEGIC ARMS REDUCTION TALKS.
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(1873-1966), Bolshevik, secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, 1919- 1920.
Yelena Stasova belonged to a prominent St. Petersburg intelligentsia family. In the early 1900s she became a secretary of the illegal St. Petersburg committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. Stasova was an effective administrator and conspirator, as well as a staunch supporter of Vladimir Lenin. Arrested in 1907, she spent the next ten years in exile, first in the Caucasus and then in Siberia.
After the revolution, in 1917 and 1918, Stasova was a secretary of the Petrograd party committee. She chose to concentrate on the mundane but crucially important work of administration, keeping records, dispersing funds, and handing out job assignments. In 1919, when Central Committee Secretary Yakov Sverdlov died, Lenin tapped Stasova to replace him. She struggled to improve the organization of the party’s central administration, but her efforts did not dispel charges of chronic inefficiency in the Secretariat. In 1920, Lenin responded by replacing Stasova with three male secretaries. She left the party leadership having played an important part in building the Communist Party’s apparatus.
For the rest of her long life Stasova took insignificant assignments. In the 1930s she headed the International Organization for Aid to Revolutionaries. Her obscurity probably helped her survive the party purges and aid some of its victims. In the 1950s and 1960s she published several versions of her memoirs, all dedicated to restoring the reputation of the party’s founders. Stasova died of natural causes. See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; FEMINISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clements, Barbara Evans. (1997). Bolshevik Women. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
(1824-1906), music and art critic whose aesthetics of realist and national expression in the arts served as a model for socialist realism.
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Born into a prominent upper-class family (his father was a noted architect), Vladimir Stasov graduated in 1843 from the elite St. Petersburg School of Jurisprudence and also studied piano. After a period in various undistinguished civil service jobs, he was appointed secretary to Prince Antaoly N. Demi-dov in 1851 and spent almost three years in the West, mostly in Florence. Back in Russia he found employment in the Imperial Public Library in the capital, and from 1872 until his death he headed its arts department.
Stasov’s voluminous writings consist of polemical feuilletons, monographs on individual musicians and painters, and long overviews of developments in the arts (both in Russia and the West), as well as on Russian
