HISTORICAL DICTIONARY A–Z - Russia: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 112

KOLCHAK 's White troops. Chapaev's place in
Soviet history as a legendary commander, how-
ever, owes more to the literary efforts of his polit-
ical commissar, Dmitrii Andreevich Furmanov
(1891-1926), than to the relative importance of
his own military exploits. In his immensely pop-
ular novel Chapaev (1923), Furmanov glorified
the commander he had worked with to create the
image of a down-to-earth, cunning and wise, self-
made revolutionary commander—a folk hero for
the new Soviet era. The civil war provided ample
adventure material for the Soviet public, and the
civil war partisans, riding horseback into battle,
replaced the prerevolutionary Cossack as the folk
symbol of independence and daring. Chapaev
became the prototype of tough, rude, loyal, and
witty civil war commanders who treated their
troops as equals but were ultimately wiser and
more cunning than they. A man of the people,
this folk hero was also contemptuous of brass and
bureaucrats. The legend of Chapaev really took
off with the wildly successful film adaptation Cha-
paev (1934), for many decades one of the gen-
uinely popular films among Soviet audiences. An
entire “cultural industry” developed around the
figure of Chapaev that included songs and chil-
dren's games. But the widespread existence of
unofficial jokes and song parodies also revealed
that the Soviet public must have also felt that Cha-
paev's glorification was excessive.

anov Institute. Chayanov's work on the optimal
size of peasant farms was much discussed during
the 1920s and would later be rediscovered in the
West during the 1960s. In 1927 he was accused
without foundation of belonging to an anti-
Soviet “working-peasant party” but was later
released. Feeling the pressure of an increasingly
intolerant and politicized scholarly climate,
Chayanov reformulated his earlier views and
now advocated the creation of massive factory
farms. Nevertheless, he was arrested in 1930 and
sentenced to death in 1937. He was executed in
1939. During the 1980s his earlier views on the
peasant economy, still socialist in content, were
reevaluated, as Mikhail GORBACHEV and like-
minded reformists sought to find alternative
paths of socialist development. Chayanov was
formally rehabilitated in 1988.

Chechnya
An autonomous republic of the Russian Federa-
tion of about 5,800 square miles (15,000 square
kilometers) located in the northern Caucausus,
Chechnya has been the site of a brutal war for
independence since 1992. Descendants of a
mountain-dwelling people organized in clans,
most of the 1.2 million Chechens are Muslim.
From the 16th to the 18th century, the entire
Caucasus region became the object of a three-
cornered struggle among Ottoman Turkey,
Safavid Persia, and Czarist Russia. In the mid-
18th century Sheikh Mansur, a Chechen, led a
resistance movement against foreign invaders,
but he was captured by Russian forces in 1791.
During the 19th century, Russia began its cam-
paign to annex the lands of the northern Cauca-
sus but met with fierce resistance in the areas of
modern-day Chechnya and Dagestan. Especially
noteworthy was the resistance movement led by
Imam SHAMIL , known as the Lion of Dagestan,
from the 1830s until his capture in 1859. At the
time of the collapse of the Russian Empire and
the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chechens
again rebelled against Russian rule, but by 1920
they had been brought under Soviet rule. During
the 1930s, like other peoples of the Soviet Union,

Chayanov, Aleksandr Vasilievich
(1888-1939)
economist, writer
An influential agrarian economist of the 1920s
who also contributed to art and archaeology and
wrote science fiction, Chayanov became a victim
of the purges of the 1930s. Born in Moscow, he
graduated from the Moscow Institute of Agricul-
ture in 1910 and was appointed to its faculty in
1918. By then he had already established himself
as an important agrarian economist with the
publication of his Essays on the Theory of the Peasant
Economy (1912-13). In 1920 he was appointed
director of the Research Institute for Agricultural
Economics in Moscow, also known as the Chay-