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heart of Manchuria and linked Chita in eastern
Siberia with Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean,
was completed in 1903. In 1904 the Russians
completed a railroad linking the city of Harbin in
central Manchuria with Port Arthur. War broke
out between Japan and Russia in February 1904
and was fought mostly across parts of Manchuria.
As a result of the Treaty of Portsmouth of August
1905, which ended the war, both sides agreed to
restore Manchuria to China.
In 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria and estab-
lished a puppet state known as Manchukuo.
Soviet forces briefly occupied Manchuria in
1945-46, after Japan's defeat in World War II,
but at the conclusion of the Chinese civil war in
1949 the area was once again firmly under Chi-
nese control.
as
Hope Against Hope
(1970) and
Hope Abandoned
(1972).
Mandelstam, Osip Emilovich
(1891-1938)
poet
One of the best and most famous Russian poets
of the 20th century, Mandelstam was born into a
Jewish merchant's family in Warsaw and grew
up in St. Petersburg. He enrolled in St. Peters-
burg University, where he studied French litera-
ture. He published his first poems in the
magazine
Apollon
at the age of 19. With Anna
AKHMATOVA
and Nikolai
GUMILEV
, he founded the
Acmeist movement in 1912, which sought to
bring a clearer, more direct style to a Russian lit-
erary world dominated by symbolism. During
the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing
civil war, he emerged as a voice stressing human
values and the absolute importance of human
dignity. The political culture of Communist Rus-
sia was alien to him and he published two nov-
els as well as poetry during the 1920s. Later he
acquired an individual poetic voice of excep-
tional clarity. Although shy by nature, he was
amazingly bold in openly criticizing
STALIN
in a
poem, written in November 1933, where he
referred to him as a Kremlin mountaineer, with
leering cockroach whiskers, who enjoyed killing
peasants with his half-human gang. His arrest,
only a matter of time, came in May 1934. Man-
delstam spent his last four years between prison,
exile, and labor camps. He died in December
1938 in transit to the Arctic Circle concentration
camps in the Magadan region, but his burial
place remains unknown.
Mandelstam, Nadezhda Yakovlevna
(1899-1990)
writer
The widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam, Man-
delstam was born Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khaz-
ina in the Volga River town of Saratov. She grew
up in Kiev, where she studied art under Alek-
sandra Ekster. In 1919, she met her future hus-
band, and they married soon after. She shared
her husband's increasing political problems and
his early exile experiences until his arrest in May
1934. As the wife of an “enemy of the people,”
she was prohibited from living in Moscow, mov-
ing instead to Tashkent, Ulianovsk, and other
cities, where she tried to make a living teaching
English. During these long decades, she tirelessly
kept her husband's literary heritage alive, by
memorizing his poems being the person most
responsible for saving one of the greatest 20th-
century Russian poets from oblivion. In 1958,
she was allowed to return to Moscow. Mandel-
stam achieved international recognition with the
publication of two outstanding and poignant
volumes of memoirs that are generally consid-
ered among the best testimonies of the
STALIN
era. The memoirs were published in Russian in
New York and Paris and translated into English
Martov, Yuli Osipovich
(1873-1923)
revolutionary
One of the prominent early leaders of the Rus-
sian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP),
Martov was Vladimir
LENIN
's main antagonist
before the party split into two factions, Menshe-
vik and Bolshevik. He was born Yuli (Iulii)
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