HISTORICAL DICTIONARY A–Z - Russia: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 146

one for the czar's wife and one for his mother.
Every egg had a different design based on a top-
ical event, such as the coronation or the inaugu-
ration of the TRANS - SIBERIAN RAILROAD , which
was kept secret until the greatly anticipated offi-
cial presentation of the egg to the imperial fam-
ily. Fabergé's reputation spread worldwide after
the 1900 Paris World Exhibition, where his art
was featured. Of the 54 eggs he designed for the
imperial family, 47 survive; 10 are in the Krem-
lin, the rest scattered around the world, mostly
in private collections. In February 2004 Russian
industrialist Viktor Vekselberg acquired the
Forbes collection of Fabergé, including nine
imperial eggs. Vekselberg announced plans to
return the eggs to Russia.

which he headed from 1946 to 1954. This period
coincided with the worst years of Andrei ZHDA -
NOV 's postwar campaign of anti-Western cultural
orthodoxy. Although a loyal executor of the gov-
ernment's commands in the field of literature,
Fadeev himself was not exempt from the gov-
ernment's watchful eye. In 1945 he published his
best-known work, The Young Guard, about the
World War II exploits of partisan fighters in the
Donbas region behind German lines, for which
he later received the Stalin Prize for literature.
Nevertheless, the novel was subject to criticism
that he failed to show the leading role of the
COMMUNIST PARTY in the struggle against the
Germans, and in 1951 he published a revised
version that did precisely that. The course of
events after STALIN 's death in 1953 affected him
deeply. Disillusioned by the “Secret Speech” of
February 1956, where Premier Nikita KHRUSH -
CHEV denounced Stalin's crimes and personality
cult, Fadeev committed suicide three months
later.

Fadeev, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich
(1901-1956)
writer
One of the more talented representatives of liter-
ary socialist realism, Fadeev also prospered in the
treacherous world of Soviet literary politics as a
faithful advocate of the official party line in liter-
ature during the harshest years of Stalinist rule.
He was born Aleksandr Bulyga in the town of
Kimry, near Moscow. In 1918 he joined the BOL -
SHEVIK Party and took part in the civil war of
1918-20, which later served as the background
for the events described in his first novel, The
Rout, which tells of the adventures of a band of
Red guerrilla fighters in the Siberian Far East.
Published in 1927 at a time when the emerging
school of socialist realism had still not been fully
co-opted to serve the interests of the Soviet
estate, the novel was quite frank in its depiction
of civil war life and was well received by the
Soviet public and literary establishment. From
1929 to 1940 he worked on a second, more
ambitious novel, The Last of the Udege, about an
indigenous Siberian people embarking on the
Soviet-style panacea of socialist development,
which he never completed. In the meantime,
Fadeev had entered literary politics, first as head
of the proletarian literature movement RAPP and
later as a member of the Union of Soviet Writers,

False Dmitrii
impostors
The name given to three pretenders who claimed
the Muscovite throne during the chaotic period
known as the TIME OF TROUBLES (1598-1613).
Each of the pretenders claimed to be the true
Dmitrii of Uglich, the young son of IVAN IV whose
mysterious death in 1591 was widely blamed on
Boris GODUNOV , the de facto regent during the
reign of his brother-in-law FEODOR I (1584-98)
and czar from 1598 to 1605. The first False
Dmitrii, most likely a monk named Grigorii
Otrepev, surfaced in 1601 but soon fled to
Poland-Lithuania. There he gathered support
from important nobles, but no official recogni-
tion from the Polish government, and married
Marina Mnizech, the daughter of a local aristo-
crat. In October 1604, he returned to Muscovy
with the armed assistance of Polish and Lithua-
nian nobles. Despite repeated defeats, the False
Dmitrii's troops persisted until April 1605, when
Boris Godunov suddenly died. Godunov's young
son, FEODOR II , was named czar, but after numer-