Peoples Of Russia Final

Front 1

Geography of the Caucasus

Back 1

• The Caucasian region of the Russian Federation includes a number of Republics: Chechnya, Ingushetiya, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkariya, Karachai-Cherkessia, North Ossetia, kalmykia and Adygea; as well as the larger regions around Krasnodar, Stavropol and Rostov.
• Chechnya, scene of two wars in the 1990s.
• It is about 6,000 square miles in area
• It has fertile plains in the north and mountains in the south

Front 2

Resistance to Russian rule in the Caucasus - 18-19th centuries

Back 2

• The first attempt to mount armed resistance against the Russians occurred during Peter's reign, in 1707.
• It was unsuccessful, and by the early 19th century, and particularly after the end of the Napoleonic wars, the Russians strengthened their control of the North Caucasus.
• The first serious and partially successful rebellion against Russian authority occurred in the period of 1785-91 under the leadership of a religious and political leader named Sheikh Mansur Ushurma
• The next major successful uprising began in the 1820s under the leadership of another religious leader, Sheikh Imam Shamil
• Georgia (along with Ossetia and Abhazia) was annexed into the Russian empire in the early 19th century.

Front 3

The Soviet period in the Caucasus

Back 3

 (early 1900s) During the revolution and civil war, various groups sided with both the Anti-soviet and Soviet forces in attempts to establish a sovereign state in Chechnya
 When the Bolsheviks ultimately prevailed in the civil war independence was not granted, and Chechnya, along with the rest of the North Caucasus, was incorporated into the Soviet Union.
 In February of 1944 Stalin ordered that every man, woman, and child in Chechnya, as well as several other regions of the North Caucasus, be transported into internal exile in Central Asia.
 In 1957, the Chechens and other North Caucasians were allowed to return home

Front 4

The Caucasus since the dissolution of the USSR

Back 4

• In 1992, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Russian Federation was formed, the Chechens refused to sign the Federation Treaty
• On October 22, 2002 Chechen separatists took over a theater in Moscow full of 800 people watching the play "Nord-Ost" and held them hostage, demanding the immediate withdrawal of all Russian forces from Chechnya
• Ultimately the Russian incapacitated everyone in the theater with nerve gas. All the hostage takers and some 130 others were killed
• Chechen rebels constitute a disproportionately large percentage of members of criminal organizations in Russia

Front 5

Geography of Siberia

Back 5

• Area bordered in the west by the Ural Mountains, the south by the Kazakh Uplands, and the East by the Pacific Ocean
• Siberia occupies five million square miles of northern Asia, or a twelfth of the world's landmass
• It encompasses farmland and steppe as well as forest and tundra, for the most part it is cold indeed.
• Winter temperatures average minus 30-40 degrees, and can plunge into the minus 60s.

Front 6

Early Russian forays into Siberia

Back 6

• Russian forays into the territory to the east of the Ural Mountains as early as the Kiev/Novgorod period
• Even then, all regions of Siberia were inhabited.
• Only about one person per every 28 miles.
• Russians were not necessarily conquering the inhabitants, they were more so just looking to extend their land properties

Front 7

Russian settlers in Siberia

Back 7

• By the end of the 17th century there were about the same number of Russians and native inhabitants: 150,000-200,000 each
• Among the reasons for a decrease in native population: small pox (see Dersu)
• By the end of the 19th century there would be close to one million Russians in Siberia
• At the time of the arrival of the Russians, many groups were already established in Siberia
• The first Russian attempt to occupy territory east of the Urals occurred at the end of the 15th century
• Almost from the beginning of Russian expansion into Siberia, therefore, the Russians sent troops and began consolidating territorial gains by building fortresses

Front 8

Russian policy in the Amur River area

Back 8

• The Amur region came for a time in the 19th century to be perceived as a kind of frontier promised land
• The problem with this whole project was that the Amur basin was not, in fact, the paradise that many Russians thought it to be
• The mouth of the Amur did not make a convenient port and the river itself was shallow and difficult to navigate in many places
• Ultimately, the notion of populating the Amur basin was abandoned

Front 9

Soviet development in Siberia

Back 9

• A short-lived "Republic of Siberia" was established
• After the White loss some émigrés fled to Kharbin, a Russian city in China established in the late 19th century to aid Russian businessmen in the region
• Fur was important as before but also precious metals including gold and silver and other metals, coal, oil, timber, and hydroelectric power
• There was a concerted effort to lure workers for two-year stretches by paying significantly higher wages than in European Russia

Front 10

Traditional Siberian language, way of life

Back 10

- There are now some thirty five recognized languages in Siberia
- It seems likely that there were about 120 distinct languages when the Russians arrived in the 16th century but most have disappeared
- Hunting and fishing (Khanti and Mansi), often with permanent dwellings in winter and birch-bark or reindeer skin tents in summer (see Dersu)
- Strong spirit of mutual reliance, so that (for example) the spoils of a hunt would be viewed as collective property

Front 11

Khazaria and the Medieval period

Back 11

• Khazaria was a kingdom bordering on the Slavic world
• The Khazars as an ethnic group existed from the fifth to the 13th centuries c. e.
• Originally there were Jews, Muslims and Christians among the Khazars, but eventually Judaism became the official state religion
• There was relatively little anti-Semitism in medieval Russia, in part because there were few Jews
• The great influx of Jews into the Russian empire took place in the 18th century

Front 12

Treatment of Russian Jews in the 19th century

Back 12

• From that time on there existed what was referred to as the "Jewish problem" or "Jewish question" in Russia.
• Yiddish was the language of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe
• The irony of the "moneylender" claim is that the Jews, in Russia and elsewhere, were forced to take up banking and other business-related professions because they were driven off the land and otherwise restricted in their choice of professions
• As to the issue of assimilation, the irony here was two-fold: the Jews for the most part were not allowed to assimilate; when they did assimilate it made no difference, because the government kept track of nationalities and could and did discriminate against Jews regardless of whether or not they had assimilated.

Front 13

Jews in the Soviet period 1917-1941

Back 13

• The revolution brought an end to the Pale Settlement and an official declaration by the Bolsheviks of an end to anti-Semitism
• There was, particularly in the 1920s prior to Stalin's final consolidation of power in 1928 or so, something of a flowering of Russian culture, and Jewish artists made a strong contribution to this movement
• The official "religion" of the Soviet Union was atheism, which meant that the practice of Judaism as a religion was also discouraged
• There was even an attempt, perhaps a hope, to gather all Jews in one area. This lead to the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, located in a remote corner of Asia near the Manchurian border, in the Khabarovsk district. The regime encouraged Jews to settle there after 1928, and, in 1934, Birobidzhan was declared a 'Jewish Autonomous Region.'

Front 14

Jews during WWI and the post-war period

Back 14

• An organization, the Jewish Antifascist Committee, was formed to aid the war effort and to garner Western and in particular American support
• Several hundred thousand Jews fought in the Red Army during the war
• Altogether, of the 3,103,000 Jews in the Soviet Union when hostilities commenced, 1,480,000, or 47 percent, were lost.
• A campaign was mounted against the Jews after WWII, however, and especially after 1948

Front 15

Jewish outmigration from Russia

Back 15

• Significant Jewish emigration to the United States and Israel did take place during the 1970s and subsequently
• Altogether, from 1971 through 1981, some 256,000 Soviet Jews emigrated. Approximately 145,000 of them went to Israel, and most of the remainder settled in the United States.
• The regime of Leonid Brezhnev cracked down on emigration in the early 1980s.
• In other words, in the 1971-1991 period, a total of 700,000 Soviet Jews emigrated.
• As a result of all this outmigration, there are now substantial Russian-Jewish communities in Israel and in American cities including New York, as well as London, whose Russian population has grown to 200,000 or more in recent years