Kiev, continuing the eastern trade through intermediaries on the middle Volga in Volga Bulgaria. Also by the tenth century, the Vikings traveling through Russia had entered the service of the Byzantine Emperor (tenth through twelfth centuries) and helped found the first East Slavic kingdom, Kievan Rus.
The Russian Primary Chronicle relates that in 862 the Viking Rurik and his kin were invited by Slavic and Finnic tribes to come and rule over them, after which they developed a system of tribute that encompassed northwestern Russia, Kiev, and its neighboring tribes. The Chronicle’s account is substantiated by finds of Scandinavian-style artifacts (tortoise shell brooches, Thor’s hammer pendants, wooden idols, armaments), and in some cases graves, found at Staraya Ladoga, Ryurikovo Gorodishche, Syaskoe Gorodishche, Timerevo, and Gnezdovo. These sites were tribal and commercial centers and riverside waystations, typical of those found along trade routes used by the Rus, most notably that of the Volga Route to the Islamic Caliphate and the Route to the Greeks along the Dnieper.
In contrast to Viking activity in the West, which is characterized primarily by raiding and large-scale colonization, the Rus town network and subsequent tribal and political organization was designed for trade. Subject tribes living along river systems supplied the Rus with the furs, wax, honey, and slaves that they would further exchange for Islamic silver (especially dirhams), glass beads, silks, and spices in southern markets. The Rus expansion into Byzantine markets began in earnest in the early tenth century, with Rus attacks
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VILNIUS
on Constantinople in 907, 911, and 944, which resulted in trade agreements. By the end of the century, in 988-989, Vladimir I (ruled 980-1015), a quarter Viking through his father Svyatoslav, had married into the Byzantine royal family and converted to Byzantine Christianity, thereby laying the foundation for the Eastern Slavic relationship with the Greek world.
The tenth century marks the high point of Viking involvement in the East. Much of the Scandinavian-style jewelry found in European Russia and a majority of the Scandinavian-style graves date to the second and third quarters of the tenth century. Vladimir I and his son Yaroslav the Wise (ruled 1019-1054) enlisted Viking mercenary armies in internecine dynastic wars. In the eleventh century, however, the Viking foot soldier armies had become obsolete as the Rus princes were forced to adapt to another enemy in the south, the Turkic nomads who fought on horseback. The defeat of Yaroslav’s Viking mercenaries by a nomadic army at the Battle of Listven (1024) is indicative of this trend. See also: GNEZDOVO; KIEVAN RUS; NORMANIST CONTROVERSY; PRIMARY CHRONICLE; ROUTE TO GREEKS; VLADIMIR, ST.; YAROSLAV VLADIMIROVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Franklin, Simon, and Shepard, Jonathan. (1996). The Emergence of Rus, 750-1200. London: Longman. Noonan, Thomas S. (1997). “Scandinavians in European Russia.” In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, ed. Peter Sawyer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pritsak, Omeljan. (1981). The Origin of Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Stalsberg, Anne. (1988). “The Scandinavian Viking Age Finds in Rus: Overview and Analysis.” In Bericht der R?misch-Germanischen Kommission 69. Mainz am Rhein, Germany: Philipp Von Zabern.
VILNIUS
The capital of the Lithuanian Republic and historically the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Vilnius occupies a special place in a number of national cultures. Lithuanians constitute a majority of the city’s 543,000 inhabitants. Russians make
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up about 20 percent, Poles 19 percent, Belarusians 5 percent, and Jews 2 percent. Jews, who according to the Russian census of 1897 had constituted a plurality of the population, have called “Vilna” (or in Yiddish “Vilne”) the “Jerusalem of the North,” a center of rabbinic learning. Poles considered “Wilno” Polish in culture. Some Belarusians, pointing to the Grand Duchy’s multinational character, insist that Vilna should be part of their state. Under Russian rule in the nineteenth century, Vilna was the administrative center of the empire’s Northwest Region.
When the great Eastern European empires collapsed at the end of the World War I, Vilnius became a bone of contention between the newly emerging states. Between 1918 and 1923, the flag symbolizing sovereignty over the city and region changed at least eight times. The two major contenders were Lithuania and Poland, although the city also briefly served as the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic and then the Lithuanian-Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. In July 1920, as part of its recognition of Lithuanian independence, Soviet Russia agreed with Lithuania’s claims to Vilnius, but in October 1920 Polish forces seized the city, establishing the rogue state of Central Lithuania. In 1923, Poland formally incorporated the territory, but Lithuania refused to recognize Polish sovereignty. Still claiming Vilnius as their capital, the Lithuanians called Kaunas their provisional capital and insisted that Poland and Lithuania were in a state of war.
After Soviet forces had occupied Eastern Poland in September 1939, the Soviet government turned Vilnius over to the Lithuanians. The Polish government in exile protested the Lithuanians’ move into Vilnius, but after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the western powers chose not to challenge the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland. In 1940, and again from 1944 to 1945, Soviet troops occupied Lithuania, and Vilnius was the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic until 1991.
Under Soviet rule, Lithuanians dominated the city’s cultural life. Before World War I, when Lithuania lay on the border between Imperial Russia and Imperial Germany, the Russians had limited the economic growth of the region and the development of the city. Therefore few Lithuanians had come to the city from the countryside. After 1945 the Soviet government permitted and even encouraged Poles to emigrate from the USSR to the Polish People’s Republic, and Lithuanians flowed to the city. The decade of the 1960s, when the
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Lithuanian population reached 45 to 47 percent, was decisive in the development of the city’s Lithuanian character.
In January 1991 Soviet troops in Vilnius seized a number of public buildings in an unsuccessful effort to crush Lithuanian independence, and the city became a symbol of the failure of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika. See also: JEWS; LITHUANIA AND LITHUANIANS; POLAND
Cohen, Israel. (1992). Vilna. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Senn, Alfred Erich. (1966). The Great Powers, Lithuania, and the Vilna Question. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill.
ALFRED ERICH SENN VINIUS, ANDREI DENISOVICH See WINIUS, ANDRIES DIONYSZOON.
Nikita Khrushchev promoted two major agricultural programs in his first years as general secretary: the corn program and, as he called it, the virgin and wasteland program. These two programs were interrelated. An important objective of agricultural policy was to increase the production of meat and milk significantly to meet the demands of the population. To produce more meat and milk required more feed. His solution was to expand greatly the production of corn (maize) throughout the Soviet Union. The virgin lands program was created to prevent the reduction of the wheat area as the corn area increased. This aspect of the virgin lands program is often missed, but in a speech on February 14, 1956, Khrushchev highlighted it: “The interests of increasing production of grain required a change in the structure of acreages, for the purpose-while extending the acreage under wheat, groats, and other crops-of sharply increasing acreage under corn.” He noted that in 1955 there were 18 million hectares of corn sown, some 13.6 million hectares more than in 1954. Without the virgin lands program, the area of wheat would have been substantially reduced, and a crisis in the bread supply would have occurred. The new lands were
