March 27 in Russian history

1776: Prince Urusov and an English theatre manager founded the Petrovsky theatre in Moscow. About fifty years later the thatre became known as Bolshoi. Actually, there's probably no reason to write a lot about the theatre, since I wrote about Bolshoi a couple of months ago. In 1951, an American magazine Collier's published an article where the authors proposed a lewd musical to be staged in Bolshoi after the US victory over the USSR in the upcoming World War.

1793: After the event known as the Second Partition of Poland, Russia obtained Belorussia and the right-bank Ukraine. On March 27, 1793, Catherine II issued the manifesto proclaiming the inclusion of the right-bank Ukraine into Russia.

1878: Russian peasant Fyodor Blinov patented "the special carriage with endless rails for transportation of cargo along highways and roads". These endless rails are now known as caterpillar tracks. Fyodor's parents were serfs. He started his "career" as a burlak (barge hauler). Later he became a stoker and a motorman on the river ships. In 1877 he built the first vehicle with caterpillar tracks. This carriage had no engine and was moved by horses. In 1878 he files a patent application and in 1879 the patent is granted. In 1883 he founded an enterprise which produced fire pumps. In 1881, during the tests, two horses were able to move his carriage loaded with 550 poods (8,800 kilograms). In 1881-1888 he was busy with a working track tractor. When finished, the tractor had a steam engine with the power of 12 horse powers and had the speed of 3.2 kmph. In 1889 the tractor was demonstrated on the agricultural exhibition in Saratov.

1952: Student of the Urals Polytechnical Institute Boris Yeltsin was sent down from the institute for multiple absences from lessons. About forty years later I retraced his steps (in another university, though).

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February 26 in Russian history

1832: Poland becomes a part of the Russian Empire. After the Third Partition of Poland, a semi-autonomous state was formed on the territory belonging to Russia, the Congress Kingdom of Poland. The Kingdom had a constitution but was ruled by the Russian emperor. With time, emperors Alexander I and, especially, Nicholas I began to violate the constitution and became autocratic rulers. This was one of the reasons which caused the uprising of 1830. After the suppression of the uprising, in February 1832, a new decree was issued, called the Organic Statute of the Kingdom of Poland which abolished the Polish army and the Sejm (legislative body). The Statute officially turned Poland into a part of the Empire.

1878: Ivan Franko is put under trial on the false accusation of being a member of a socialist organization. Franko was an interesting personality. He was born in 1856 near Lviv, in Galicia, which was a part of Austria-Hungary at that time. Lviv (Lemberg) was the capital of Galicia. The region was inhabited mostly by Ukrainians (or Ruthenians), but ruled by the Polish aristocracy. In 1875, Franko entered the Lviv university and joined a circle of the so called "moscowphiles". The popularity of pro-Russian sentiments in the Western Ukraine in XVIII-XIX centuries may be explained by weak self-identification of the Ruthenians. In spite of relatively tolerant position of the government of Austria-Hungary towards the Ukrainian language, this language was perceived as "low" and "uncultured" by the Ukrainians themselves. The attempts of self-identification were directed to affiliation with a larger cultural unity: Polish, Russian or Austria. The Russian party was one of the strongest for a number of reasons, especially in the second half of the XIX century. They published a number of magazines and newspapers. Trying to limit the influence of the moscowphiles, the Austrian authorities started a number of trials, accusing them in treason and anti-Austrian conspiracies. Ivan Franko was a member of one such group and he was sentenced to 9 months in jail and had to leave the university after the term. He spent these months in one room with thieves and vagabonds. This period defined his writing style. He wrote about workers and peasants who were forced by poverty to commit crimes. He also writes stories from Jewish life, which was rather unusual in those days, when anti-Semitism was a norm of everyday life. His stories were often called "radical" and "naturalistic", but the critics recognized the talent of the writer. Paradoxically, the moscowphiles gave the first impulse to the Ukrainian national movement, partially because Austria saw Russia as the worst of the three evils and attempted to replace the moscowphile tendencies with the ideas of the Ukrainian revival.

1917: Civil unrest in Petrograd. The State Duma is dissolved. On midday, demonstrations begin, which are dispersed with armed forces. Barricades are built on the streets and a general strike begins.

January 31 in Russian history

1714: When Peter I travelled in Europe, he visited Kunstkabineten, or collections of rarities, in various countries. When he came back to Russia, he organized such "cabinet of rarities", Kunstkamera, and ordered to collect various interesting things all over Russia. In 1714, when Russian capital was moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg, the collection was also transferred there and on January 31, it was opened in the Summer Palace. In the times of Peter I, the collection consisted mostly of exotic animals, anatomical anomalies, weapon, ethnografic rarities. The collection grew with time and in 1820s-1830s it was split into a number of museums: Ethnografic, Egyptian, Zoological, Mineralogical and others. In 1878, two of them formed the modern Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, one of the most interesting museums in St. Petersburg.

Historian Sergey Platonov

I plan to use this blog to publish a very condensed, sketchy translation of a course in Russian history, written by one of the best Russian historians of the XX century -- Sergey Fyodorovich Platonov. Wikipedia has a very short article about this outstanding personality, but since, in my opinion, he deserves a more detailed biography, I would like to start with a short description of his life.

All articles from this blog will also be posted at Sima Qian Studio history forum.

Sergey Platonov was born in Chernigov, not far from Kiev, on June 16, 1860. In 1878 he entered the St.Petersburg university. In 1888, he published his first large work, where he tried to use Russian folk-tales as a source of new information about the period called the Time of Troubles (the interregnum between 1598-1613), which remained his favourite period for the rest of his life. The work was published both as a thesis and as a monography and received the Uvarov Award of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In 1899, he became a doctor of sciences and published 'The Time of Troubles' (translation by John T. Alexander published by University Press of Kansas in 1987), an extensive review of the Russian society of the early XVII century.

Platonov became famous when he prepared two history courses: Lectures on Russian history (1899) for universities and a Coursebook on Russian history for schools (1909-1910). For some years, Platonov taught the children of emperor Alexander III, duke Mikhail and duchess Olga. Nikolay II, though, didn't like his works, since they "did not cause love to the fatherhood or the pride of the Russian people." Platonov attempted to avoid the subjective viewpoints of other historians of that period: Kluchevsky's liberalism, conservative monarchism of Ilovaisky, marxism of Pokrovsky. "There is no need to introduce any personal viewpoints into history, since a subjective idea is not a scientific idea."

His opinion of the Bolshevist revolution was negative. The political program of the Soviets is "contrived and utopian," he said. "My worldview was based on Christian morale, positivist philosophy and scientific theory of evolution. Atheism is just alien to me as the religious dogmatism." After the revolution, he worked as the chairman of the Russian administration of archives, director of Pushkin House and the Library of the Academy of Sciences. He published new works about Peter I, relations between Russia and Europe in XVI-XVII centuries, earliest Russian settlements on the banks of the Arctic Ocean, etc.

In 1929, OGPU (ex-Cheka) checked the archives, managed by Platonov and found some documents written by Nikolay II and his brother Mikhail. Platonov was accused of hiding these documents (he reported about them in 1926) and dismissed. Worse than that, in 1930, he was accused of participation in a counter-revolutionary monarchist plot and arrested together with many other famous non-marxist historians.

In August 1931, the main 'criminals' were sentenced to 5 years of exile and deported to Samara, where I live. In 1933, he died here in Samara, but I still do not know where.

(posted at SimaQianStudio)