ST. PETERSBURG
Brumfield, William Craft. (1993). A History of Russian Architecture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Orloff, Alexander, and Shvidkovsky, Dmitri. (1996). St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars. New York: Abbeville Press.
Russian witchcraft is best seen as a remnant of East Slavic, pre-Christian, pagan practices, elements of which survived into modern times. The earliest written record that mentions witchcraft dates to 1024 and appears in a chronicle describing the execution of sorcerers in Suzdal. Literary sources continued to speak of sorcery in later centuries and, in most cases, were connected to allegations of witchcraft causing inclement weather, droughts, crop failure, and other phenomena that resulted in famine and pestilence.
During the Kievan era (roughly 900 to 1240) the most common form of popular (extralegal) witch trial appears to have been ordeal by cold water and execution by burning at the stake. As early as the second half of the eleventh century, however, Rus princes granted the Church official authority over witchcraft trials. Contrary to the Byzantine canonical practice of executing suspected witches, the Rus princes established relatively nominal monetary penalties for practicing sorcery. Despite this, unofficial persecutions of sorcerers continued to take place on occasion.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Muscovy saw a marked increase in the preoccupation with witchcraft. With the 1551 Stoglav Council headed by Ivan IV (1533-1584), the Muscovite government and church took an active interest in battling witchcraft. The council recommended that the state impose the death penalty for sorcerers, and that the church excommunicate such offenders. Ivan IV s Decree of 1552, while disregarding the recommendation of imposing the death penalty, transferred witch trials to state jurisdiction, thereby transforming witchcraft into a civil offence. This formed the background for the use of allegations of criminal witchcraft for political purposes. DurENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY ing the reign of Ivan IV, and more so through the subsequent Time of Troubles, the Muscovite ruling elite invoked charges of witchcraft to persecute their political enemies, both at court and outside of Moscow.
Witchcraft trials saw their heyday during the seventeenth century, when the death penalty came to be systematically applied to the guilty. However, the Muscovite witch hunts were much smaller in scale than those that were occurring in contemporary communities of Western Europe. Although the tsars sent directives to the provinces to fight sorcery until 1682, the orders were not systematic and organized, nor were the persecutions. This, in large part, is because of the deep-rooted dvoeverie (dual-faith, the holding of conflicting belief systems) among most Russians, including the ruling elite, who had ambivalent views toward remnants of pagan practices. Also, unlike in the West, where much of the “witch craze” was directed against women, the Muscovite “witch scare” charged a proportional number of men (warlocks) with sorcery. This was probably connected to the occupation of the accused-unlike in the West, Muscovy men often acted as herbalists and village healers, which were professions commonly associated with witchcraft.
During the reign of Catherine II (1762-1796), the death penalty for witchcraft was abolished and the crime lowered to the level of fraud. In 1775 she transferred cases dealing with witchcraft to courts handling such affairs as popular superstition, juvenile crimes, and the criminally insane. Sorcery, however, persisted among the East Slavic peasants into the nineteenth century, in large part because of their continued use of charms, spells, potions, and herbs in folk medicine. See also: IVAN IV; KIEVAN RUS; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Zguta, Russell. (1977). “Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Century Russia.” The American Historical Review 82(5):1187-1207. Zguta, Russell. (1978). “Witchcraft and Medicine in Pre-Petrine Russia.” The Russian Review 37 (4):438-448.
(1849-1915), minister of communication (1892); minister of finance (1892-1903); chairman of the
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Sergei Witte, a gifted Russian statesman, drafted the 1905 October Manifesto. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUS?E DES 2 GUERRES
Committee of Ministers (1903-1905); prime minister (1905-1906); responsible for program of industrialization and political reforms.
Sergei Witte descended from russified Lutheran Germans on his father’s side and from Russian nobility on his mother’s side. He was born in Tbilisi. In 1865 he finished a Tbilisi gymnasium and in 1870 graduated from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Novorossysk University (Odessa). He dreamt of an academic career, but on his relatives’ insistence he entered the state service on the Odessa Railway. In 1877 Witte moved to the privately owned Society of Southwestern Railways and there made a brilliant career, soon becoming its manager. In 1883 he published a book The Principles of Railway Tariffs for the Transportation of Goods, which earned him renown as a railway expert.
In the 1870s Witte fell under the sway of Slavophile ideas. He took a great interest in the theological writings of Alexei Khomyakov and participated in activities of the Odessa Slavic Philanthropic Society. Here he became a friend to Mikhail Katkov, an influential right-wing journalist. Witte also published feuilletons under a pen name. In 1881 and 1882 he participated in the pro-monarchist secret aristocratic society Svyataya Druzhina (The Holy Retinue) organized on Witte’s advice by his uncle General Rostislav Fadeyev, a well-known military historian and publicist of Slavophile views. In 1882 the society was liquidated.
In 1887 Witte was appointed director of the Railway Department of the Mnistry of Finance. In 1892 he advanced to the post of minister for railways and then to minister of finance. Witte soon became the most influential minister in the government, and his ministry the center of the entire state government. Witte proved to be an outstanding politician, capable of getting his bearings in the most complicated situations, designing long-term programs, and then carrying them out effectively. Soon Witte gave up his Slavophile views and turned into a modernizer of the European type. He sought to accelerate the industrial development of Russia with the aid of state support and foreign capital. He contended that Russia would catch up with advanced Western countries industrially within a decade and would secure a strong position for Russian manufactured goods in the markets of the Near, Middle, and Far East.
The program of industrialization, “the Witte system,” as he called it, included (1) intensive railway building; (2) protectionism and state subsidies for private entrepreneurs; and (3) a great influx of foreign capital to industry, banks, and state loans. Never before in Russia had state economic intervention been used so widely and effectively. The state acted by purely economic means through the state bank and institutions of the Mnistry of Finance, which monitored the activities of joint-stock commercial banks. In order to penetrate the markets of China, Mongolia, Korea, and Persia, the Mnistry of Finance founded the Russo-Chinese, Russo-Korean, and Loan and Discount Banks. Witte’s program achieved the desired results. In the period from 1892 to 1902, state finances were strengthened, foreign investment capital poured in (over 3 billion rubles or 1.544 billion dollars), and a stable monetary system was formed. The highest rates of economic development in Europe were attained (from 1883 to 1904 the volume of industrial output increased 2.7 times, or 6% per year). The annual growth rate of the national income averaged nearly 3.5 percent. The intensive economic development of Russia was accompanied by the improvement of the living stan1670
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dards of the broad masses of the population, as data on the increase in the height of recruits testify.
After setting industry on its feet and ensuring its self-development, Witte planned to carry through an agrarian reform. His attempts, however, met fierce resistance of conservatives. He was able only to simplify
