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Paris that ended the Crimean War in that same
year. Defeated in war and forbidden to place
warships in the Black Sea, Russia, under Gor-
chakov's guidance, looked eastward and waited
for the right moment to undo the most onerous
clauses of the Treaty of Paris. That moment came
in 1870 when Russia took advantage of Euro-
pean preoccupation with the Franco-Prussian
War to unilaterally abrogate the provisions that
banned Russian warships from the Black Sea. As
foreign minister, Gorchakov also presided over
Russian expansion into Central Asia, although
the foreign ministry was often put on the spot by
ambitious generals such as Mikhail
CHERNIAEV
who would present it with de facto conquests.
Nevertheless, Gorchakov successfully defended
Russian expansion to the outside world. In 1864,
in the early stages of the Russian imperial thrust
into Central Asia, Gorchakov issued a much-
quoted circular that defended Russia's actions in
terms of a civilizing mission analogous to that
articulated by other European empires and the
United States to justify their own territorial
expansion. In the last decade of his life, Gor-
chakov's diplomatic touch began to lose its lus-
ter. In 1873 he agreed to join Germany and
Austria-Hungary in the League of Three Emper-
ors, an alliance that was undermined by per-
sonal rivalry with the German chancellor Otto
von Bismarck. In 1877, the foreign ministry was
unable to resist Russian pan-Slav public pressure
to enter a war with Turkey. Following Russia's
victory in the
RUSSO
-
TURKISH WAR OF
1877-78
,
Gorchakov was unable to restrain his ambitious
aide Nikolai Ignatiev from overplaying the Rus-
sian hand at the Treaty of
SAN STEFANO
(1878).
The backlash in European capitals over that
treaty's terms led to the Congress of Berlin of
that year that took away many of Russia's diplo-
matic and territorial gains, and was seen by Gor-
chakov as his greatest diplomatic defeat. In
declining health and taking the blame for the
decisions of the Congress of Berlin, the octoge-
narian Gorchakov was minister only in name for
the last four years of his life while his future suc-
cessor, Nikolai
GIERS
, ran the Foreign Ministry.
Gorky, Maksim
(1868-1936)
writer
Gorky, born Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, is
often accorded the not entirely flattering title
“father of Soviet literature.” Although he came
to advocate the ideas of socialist realism and
made many compromises with the
STALIN
regime
in his last years, his whole body of work is more
rich and complex than the epithet might suggest.
Born to a family of artisans, and orphaned from
an early age, he was raised by his relatives in a
strongly patriarchal household, and was given
little formal education. As a young man, he
tramped around Russia, taking many odd jobs,
experiences that he later drew on for his richly
realistic stories and that he would later recall
compellingly in his three volumes of autobiogra-
phy,
My Childhood
(1913),
My Apprenticeship
(1918), and
My Universities
(1923). A writer since
1892, he achieved his first major success in 1898
with short stories that chronicled his vagabond
life, then with his play
The Lower Depths
(1902).
He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1905, and his
later writings were strong critiques of capitalist
society from a Marxist viewpoint (
Mother,
1907;
The Artamonov Business,
1925;
Klim Sangin,
1927-36). For many years, the royalties from his
works were one of the main sources of income
for the
BOLSHEVIKS
. During a lecture tour of the
United States (1906), he scandalized American
audiences by openly traveling and living with a
woman who at the time was not his wife, the
actress Maria Andreeva. From 1906 to 1913 he
joined the émigré colony on Capri, where he dis-
played his independent, anti-Leninist streak by
founding with Aleksandr Bogdanov the left-
wing Vpered (Forward) faction and by joining
Anatolii Lunacharsky in developing the quasi-
religious ideology of “God-building,” an attempt
to supplement Marxism with a new religion for
the working classes. After the 1917 February
Revolution, he expressed his non-Bolshevik
social democratic views in his newspaper,
Novaia
zhizn
(
New Life
), which opposed the Bolshevik
seizure of power and published the reservations
of
ZINOVIEV
and
KAMENEV
. After the revolution,
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