Nationality and, later, as a Panslav. Tyutchev’s most prominent articles, as well as a number of his poems, were written in support of the patriotic, nationalist, or Panslav causes. They lacked originality and even high quality, at least by the poet’s own standards. Yet Tyutchev’s power of expression was so great that occasionally these items became indelible parts of Russian consciousness and culture: One cannot understand Russia by reason, Cannot measure her by a common measure: She is under a special dispensation- One can only believe in Russia. See also: GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mirsky, D. S. (1949). A History of Russian Literature. New York: Knopf. Nabokov, Vladimir. (1944). Three Russian Poets: Selections from Pushkin, Lermontov and Tyutchev in New Translations by Vladimir Nabokov. Norfolk, CT: New Directions. Pratt, Sarah. (1984). Russian Metaphysical Romanticism: The Poetry of Tiutchev and Boratynskii. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. (1992). The Emergence of Romanticism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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On May 1, 1960, an American high-altitude U-2 spy plane departed from Pakistan on a flight that was supposed to take it across the USSR to Norway. Shot down near Sverdlovsk, with its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, captured, the flight triggered a Cold War crisis, aborted a scheduled four-power summit meeting, and poisoned Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s relations with U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Aware that U-2 spy flights constituted a grave violation of Soviet sovereignty, Eisenhower reluctantly approved them beginning in 1956 to check on the Soviet missile program. Even after the May Day 1960 flight was shot down, Khrushchev hoped to proceed with the summit scheduled for May 16 in Paris. But by not revealing he had shot down the plane and captured its pilot, and by waiting for Washington to invent a cover story and then unmasking it, Khrushchev provoked Eisenhower to take personal responsibility for the flight. After that, Khrushchev felt he had no choice but to wreck the summit, cut off relations with Eisenhower, and await the election of Eisenhower’s successor.
It is highly uncertain whether the Paris summit could have produced progress on Berlin and a nuclear test ban. Russian observers such as Fyodor Burlatsky and Georgy Arbatov contend that Khrushchev used the U-2 incident as an excuse to scuttle what he anticipated would be an unproductive summit. More likely, Khrushchev was lured by the flight and its fate into a sequence of unintended consequences that undermined not only his foreign policy but his position at home. See also: COLD WAR; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beschloss, Michael R. (1986). Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair. New York: Harper and Row. Taubman, William. (2003). Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: W. W. Norton.
Of the 747,000 Udmurts (1989 census), formerly called Votiaks, approximately 497,000 live in the Udmurt Republic, north of Tatarstan, but many live in Bashkortostan. Their language belongs to
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the Finno-Ugric family and is mutually semi-intelligible with Komi, further north. Most are Caucasian, with a remarkable number of redheads, but Asian features also occur.
Southern Udmurts were subjected to the Bol-gar Empire from 1000 C.E. on, and later to the Kazan Khanate. After annexing the multinational Viatka Republic (1489), Moscow laid formal claim to all Udmurt lands but controlled only the north. The south was occupied after the destruction of Kazan (1552), yet massive uprisings continued up to 1615. Most Udmurts were forcibly baptized in the mid-1700s, but spectacular anti-animist trials flared as late as 1894-1896, and 7 percent of Udmurts declared themselves animist in the 1897 census. An Udmurt-language calendar started in 1904 and the first newspaper in 1913.
An Udmurt national congress convened in 1918. A Votiak Autonomous Oblast was formed in 1920 and upgraded to Udmurt Autonomous Republic in 1934. Native-language schooling developed rapidly, but as early as 1931 a trumped-up anti-Soviet “Finno-Ugric plot” decimated the elites. Udmurtia itself became the site of numerous slave labor camps. All Udmurt textbooks were ordered destroyed around 1970.
Udmurtia (population 1.6 million), on the borderline of forest and steppe, is dominated by its capital, Izhkar (Izhevsk in Russian; population 600,000), a major center of Soviet military industry. Russian immigration reduced the Udmurts from 52 percent of the Republic population in 1926 to 31 percent in 1989. Russian passersby chastised those few who dared to speak Udmurt in city streets.
Within the Republic 76 percent of Udmurts consider the ancestral language their main one. Liberalization enabled an Udmurt cultural society to form in 1989. Later called Demen (Together), it spawned an activist youth organization, Shundy (The sun). Udmurtia’s Russian-dominated Supreme Soviet proclaimed Russian and Udmurt coequal state languages, but implementation has been limited. In 1991 an Udmurt National Congress established a permanent Udmurt Kenesh (Council). Udmurt-language schooling began to develop slowly. See also: FINNS AND KARELIANS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lallukka, Seppo. (1982). The East Finnic Minorities in the Soviet Union: An Appraisal of Erosive Trends. Helsinki: Annales Academiae Scientarum Fennicae. Taagepera, Rein. (1999). The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State. London: Hurst.
The uezd is an administrative-territorial unit that was used in pre-Soviet Russia and the early Soviet Union. During the formation of the Moscow state during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it designated an area that included both a town and its hinterland, and which came under the jurisdiction of a namestnik (governor). From the late sixteenth century, the uezd was under the jurisdiction of a voyevod (military governor). Under Peter I, the uezd became a subdivision of governments and provinces. Between 1775 and 1780, Catherine II’s reform of the Russian Empire’s territorial administration recreated the uezd as the primary subdivision of a guberbiya (government), based on a (male) population of between twenty and thirty thousand.
Each uezd, which was itself subdivided into volosti (boroughs), came under the jurisdiction of an ispravnik (district captain) who was elected every three years by the district assembly of the nobility. The district captain held responsibility for the maintenance of law and order and for fiscal administration. In European Russia, the 1864 zemstvo reform created assemblies at the uezd level, elected on a restrictive property-based franchise. Every three years, the uezd assembly elected an executive board responsible for district administration. It also elected delegates to an assembly at the guberniya level. Provincial governors had to ratify the appointment of the president of each uezd board and, from 1890, of all its members (at the same time the assembly franchise was further narrowed). After the February Revolution in 1917, the Provisional Government introduced the office of district commissar to represent the central state in the localities; after the Bolshevik revolution authority passed to the executive committee of the uezd soviet. At the end of the 1920s, the Soviet government dissolved both the uezd and volost levels of territorial administration, subdividing the new oblasti (regions) directly into raiony. See also: LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION
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