HISTORICAL DICTIONARY A–Z - Russia: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 228

returned to Moscow, where he lived quietly for
several decades until his death.

century. The plains of Manchuria were home to
the nomadic Manchu peoples who invaded
China in 1644 and established the Qing dynasty,
which remained in power until 1911. Russian
exploration in the vicinity of the AMUR RIVER led
to the first conflicts between Russians and Chi-
nese and the first attempt to fix a boundary
between the two nations through the Treaty of
NERCHINSK (1689). By the terms of the treaty, in
effect until 1858, the Amur River valley and
Manchuria itself remained firmly under Chinese
control. By the mid-19th century, however, Rus-
sia was able to exploit China's political weakness
and annex large amounts of land neighboring
Manchuria. In 1858, the Treaty of Aigun gave
the left bank of the Amur River to Russia, while
the Treaty of Peking (1860) established the two
countries' frontier along the Amur and Ussuri
Rivers, with Russia gaining all land between the
two rivers and the Sea of Japan. As a result of
the two treaties, China surrendered more than
400,000 square miles of land north and east of
historic Manchuria and lost its access to the Sea
of Japan.
During the last decade of the 19th century,
Russia began to assert its power in the region,
seeking to absorb Manchuria into its economic
sphere of influence, even while the region
remained nominally Chinese. Competing inter-
ests over a thinly populated but potentially rich
land brought Russia and Japan into greater con-
flict between 1895 and 1905. After the First
Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), Japan briefly
gained control of the Liaodong Peninsula but
was prevented from making any permanent
gains in the region by the concerted diplomatic
efforts of Russia, Germany, France, and Great
Britain. In 1898, concerned over the Japanese
expansion in the region, Russia in turn arranged
for a 25-year lease of the southern part of the
peninsula, including the towns of Dalian and
Port Arthur. In 1900, Russia moved to occupy
the rest of Manchuria, which it held until the
RUSSO - JAPANESE WAR of 1904-05. The Russian-
controlled CHINESE EASTERN RAILWAY , a spur of the
TRANS - SIBERIAN RAILROAD that cut through the

Malevich, Kazimir Serafimovich
(1878-1935)
artist
Malevich, a painter of Polish origin, was one of
the forerunners of 20th century abstract paint-
ing. He studied in Kiev and at the Moscow Art
School. Starting as a follower of the impression-
ists, Malevich progressed through phases of
Cézanne and Van Gogh influences, expression-
ism, fauvism, and cubism to the creation of his
own style, which he called Suprematism, in
which only geometrical elements were used in
construction. His first Suprematist paintings were
exhibited in 1915 in Petrograd; they were formal
arrangements of geometrical elements, notably a
black square on a white ground. In 1918 he
showed his famous “white on white” series.
Malevich attempted to re-create the two-dimen-
sional spirituality of icons through the medium
of abstract painting. After the 1917 Revolution
and the Bolshevik seizure of power, when many
painters proclaimed utilitarian social functions of
art as the only true ones, Malevich continued to
insist on the primarily spiritual values of abstract
paintings. From 1919 to 1921, he taught art in
Moscow and Leningrad. During the 1920s he
traveled to Weimar, Germany, where he met
Wassily KANDINSKY and published his own The
Non-Objective World. Unlike Kandinsky, CHAGALL ,
and many other Russian artists, he remained in
Russia after the revolution, and in the last years of
his life was forced by the obligatory doctrine of
socialist realism to cease his original creative
work, and painted only a few intimate portraits in
a stiff “realist” manner. Malevich died in poverty
in 1935.

Manchuria
A historic region of northeastern China that
became the object of Russian expansionist inter-
ests from the late 17th century to the early 20th