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the event that set the stage for the intervention
of Minin and Pozharsky was the deposition of
Czar
VASILI IV
in 1610 after a five-year period that
had witnessed three czars and the emergence of
two impostors claiming to be Prince Dmitrii of
Uglich, dead since 1591. With the throne vacant,
Polish and Lithuanian armies entered Moscow
and imposed their candidate, Prince Wladyslaw,
son of the Polish king. A nationalist backlash
soon took place centered around the town of
Nizhnii Novgorod, where in September 1611
Kuzma Minin, an elder in the town council, pro-
posed the formation of a fund to raise an army to
dislodge the foreign invaders. After calling for vol-
unteers, he proposed Prince Dmitri Pozharsky as
the army's leader. Pozharsky, a nobleman from
Vladimir in central Russia, had distinguished
himself in an earlier campaign in 1608. The
response to Minin's appeal was impressive, and
an army led by Pozharsky set off for Moscow,
gaining recruits along the way. On the outskirts
of Moscow it joined another army led by Prince
Trubetskoi, and in August and September 1612,
Pozharsky's army attacked the Polish-Lithuanian
troops. By November 1612, the Polish troops
inside the Kremlin surrendered. The endgame of
the Time of Troubles took place in 1613, when
an assembly of the land (
ZEMSKII SOBOR
) met
composed of representatives from across Russia
and chose
MICHAEL ROMANOV
as the new czar,
thus marking the beginning of the
ROMANOV
DYNASTY
, which would rule Russia until 1917.
Pozharsky was allegedly offered the crown first,
but he refused it. For his efforts Minin was made
a noble. In 1818, an imposing monument to the
two leaders was erected in the center of Red
Square. Later it was moved to the edge of the
square, closer to St. Basil's Cathedral, where it
now stands.
sake. In this, they were reacting with particular
vehemence to the ideas of the Peredvizhniki
(
WANDERERS
), who had dominated artistic dis-
course in Russia from the 1870s through the
1890s. The movement took its name from the
journal founded in 1898 by Sergei
DIAGHILEV
and
the painter Aleksandr Benois, which acquainted
readers with the latest trends in western Euro-
pean art while reevaluating the traditions of Rus-
sian art, especially ancient art. Although the
journal ceased publication in 1904, its tenets con-
tinued to influence Russian art for the next
decades. The movement also organized several
exhibitions to which leading Russian artists such
as Mikhail
VRUBEL
, Isaak Levitan, and Valentin
Serov sent their work. The most prominent
members of Mir Iskusstva left Russia after the
1917 Revolutions, among them Benois, Leon
Bakst, Nikolai
ROERIKH
, and Mikhail Larionov. In
emigration a few of them collaborated with
Diaghilev, by then a longtime resident of Paris, in
his Ballets Russes.
Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich
(1890-1986)
revolutionary and Soviet official
A revolutionary who became one of
STALIN
's
most loyal associates, Molotov was the stubborn
face of Soviet diplomacy until his influence
waned in the mid-1950s as Nikita
KHRUSHCHEV
consolidated power. Molotov was born Vyach-
eslav Scriabin, into a middle-class family related
to that of the composer Aleksandr
SCRIABIN
. In
1906 he joined the Bolshevik Party and helped
found the newspaper
Pravda,
which he also
edited. In 1909 he was banished to the northern
province of Vologda for his revolutionary activ-
ity, where he remained until 1911. At the time of
the
FEBRUARY REVOLUTION
of 1917, Molotov was
a member of the Russian bureau of the Bolshe-
vik Party's Central Committee. Unlike his future
mentor Stalin, Molotov argued for opposition to
the Provisional Government, the line that
LENIN
would advocate after his return to Russia in April
1917. In October 1917, as a member of the party's
Mir Iskusstva
(World of Art)
An influential artistic movement at the turn of
the 20th century that rejected the then dominant
utilitarian view that art should serve a socially
useful function, advocating instead art for art's
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