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a literary-historical investigation of the vast net-
work of labor camps that had mushroomed dur-
ing the Stalin years. For his efforts, Solzhenitsyn
was arrested and deported from the Soviet
Union in February 1974.
In exile, he settled in Vermont and completed
the second and third volumes of
The Gulag
Archipelago.
Lionized by the Western press for his
opposition to the Soviet system, he gradually
came to antagonize his hosts for his equally
powerful critiques of Western consumerism and
individualism, articulating a political vision that
called for the renewal of Russia's authoritarian
and Christian traditions. He revised his earlier
novel
August 1914,
first published in 1971, and
made it a part of an ambitious series entitled
The
Red Wheel.
His previously banned works were
finally published in the Soviet Union during the
late 1980s. After his citizenship was restored in
1990, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 in
grand fashion, traveling westward to Moscow
along the
TRANS
-
SIBERIAN RAILROAD
.
chate (1686), and the opening of the
SLAVIC
-
GRECO
-
LATIN ACADEMY
in Moscow (1686). In for-
eign affairs, Russia concluded a treaty of peace
and alliance promising “eternal peace” with
Poland in 1686 that recognized Russian control
of part of the Ukraine. Less successful was the
Treaty of
NERCHINSK
, signed in 1689, by which
Russia established diplomatic relations with
China but gave up its claims to the Amur
region. Sophia's growing political ambitions and
Golitsyn's unsuccessful campaigns in 1687-89
against the Tatar Khanate of Crimea led to
widespread criticism that broke out into the
open in 1689. Tensions between Sophia and the
Naryshkin family grew until August 1689,
when an attempt to use the disgruntled
streltsy
regiments against Peter I and his family back-
fired. One month later, Sophia was arrested and
forced to retire to the Novodevichii Convent on
the outskirts of Moscow, which she herself had
endowed. There, Sophia lived as a nun under
the name of Sister Susanna until her death on
July 14, 1704.
Sophia
(1657-1704)
(Sofiia Alekseevna)
regent
The sixth child of Czar
ALEKSEI
and his first wife,
Maria Miloslavskaia, Sophia ruled as regent from
1682 to 1689. She received an unusually good
education from Simeon of Polotsk. On the death
of her brother Czar
FEODOR III
in 1682, Sophia
assumed the leadership of the Miloslavsky fam-
ily faction against the supporters of her father's
second wife, the Naryshkin family. During the
streltsy
(a hereditary military caste) riots of May
1682, Sophia exercised a moderating influence
and engineered a compromise that placed her
brother
IVAN V
, a Miloslavsky, and her half brother
PETER I
, a Naryshkin, as corulers, with herself as
regent. In her regency she was assisted by her
lover, Prince Vasili
GOLITSYN
, who proved to be a
mostly capable administrator. In domestic
affairs, her reign witnessed the institution of for-
mal persecution of
OLD BELIEVERS
(1684), the
transfer of the office of the Metropolitan of Kiev
under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriar-
Soviet-Polish War
(1919-1920)
A 20-month war that took place during the
final stages of the Russian civil war, the Soviet-
Polish War developed from the need to define
and consolidate the borders of the new inde-
pendent state of Poland and the Bolshevik
desire to spread their revolution westward into
Europe. The fighting began in February 1919
on what is now Belorussian soil, as both coun-
tries sought to take advantage of the with-
drawal of German troops from Poland as part of
the World War I armistice. While Soviet troops
advanced westward into Polish-held territory
up to the Bug River, Polish troops pushed east-
ward into Soviet-held territory up to the Berez-
ina River. While the
BOLSHEVIKS
believed that
victory over Poland would allow them to link up
with a revolutionary Germany and guarantee
the success of their own revolution, the Polish
leader Józef Piłsudski (1867-1935) was hoping
to restore the borders of historic Poland before
the 18th-century partitions that had led to its
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