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centrally located Arbat Street in Moscow, where
fans could inscribe messages.
Germany and Czechoslovakia, before settling in
Paris in 1925, where they lived in poverty. Again
following her husband, who by now had
switched political sympathies and worked for
the Soviet secret police, she returned with her
son to Moscow in 1939. She briefly worked as a
translator but was not allowed to publish her
own work. Evacuated to the Tatar Autonomous
Republic after the outbreak of World War II,
with her husband and daughter arrested, and
unable to find work of any kind, she took her
own life on August 31, 1941, in the town of
Elabuga, on the Kama River. Tsvetaeva was a
writer of strong and simple fundamental ideas,
all essentially romantic: the isolation and sanctity
of the creative artist; the injustice and inhuman-
ity of bourgeois society; the moral superiority of
the individual over the mass; the impossibility of
reciprocated sexual love; the sordid inadequacy of
material reality. More personal is her passionate
commitment to lost causes. She worked in cycles
moving from romantic to classical dramas to
longer poems, including her two masterpieces
Poema gory
(
Poem of the Mountain
) (Paris, 1926)
and
Poema kontsa
(
Poem of the End
) (Prague,
1926). In the 1930s she turned to criticism and
autobiography, at which she also excelled. Her
work was not published in the Soviet Union
until the 1960s, when she was hailed as one of
the four great Russian poets of the 20th cen-
tury, along with Anna
AKHMATOVA
, Osip
MAN
-
DELSTAM
, and Boris
PASTERNAK
.
Tsushima, Battle of
(1905)
The final and decisive naval battle of the
RUSSO
-
JAPANESE WAR
of 1904-5 in the course of which
most of Russia's lumbering Baltic Sea Fleet was
sunk or captured by a more mobile Japanese fleet
led by Admiral Heihachiro Togo. The Baltic Sea
Fleet, under the command of Admiral Zinovy
Rozhdestvensky, had left St. Petersburg in Octo-
ber 1904 to relieve the Pacific Fleet that had
been captured in Port Arthur in the initial stages
of the war. The battle took place from May 27 to
May 29, 1905, near Tsushima Island in the Sea
of Japan between Japan and Korea. By the time
the battle had ended with a Japanese victory, the
Russian fleet had lost 20 of its warships and
more than 4,000 sailors, while three admirals,
including Rozhdestvensky, and more than 7,000
sailors were captured. In turn, Japan lost three
torpedo boats and 116 sailors. After the Battle of
Tsushima, even with Japan the clear victor, both
sides were ready for an armistice. Japan requested
that U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt serve as
the mediator for a peace treaty, and negotiations
were completed in Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
in August 1905.
Tsvetaeva, Marina Ivanovna
(1892-1941)
poet
An inventive and tempestuous poet, Tsvetaeva
was born in Moscow and brought up in a cul-
tured family that traveled frequently to western
Europe. She began writing at the age of 10, and
later joined a circle of young writers and play-
wrights that became the Third Studio of the
Moscow Arts Theater. Her personal life was dif-
ficult. She married early and survived the Rus-
sian Revolution and civil war alone with her
daughter in Moscow, while another daughter
died. In 1922 she followed her husband, Sergei
Efron, a former White officer, into emigration in
Tukhachevsky, Mikhail Nikolaevich
(1893-1937)
military commander
Tukhachevsky was the leading Soviet military
strategist of his time and one of the principal vic-
tims of
STALIN
's 1937 purge of the officer corps. He
was born to a noble family and grew up in Penza
and Moscow. He received his military training
first from the Moscow Cadet Corps and then the
Alexandrov Military Academy, from which he
graduated in 1914. At the time of World War I he
was posted to the Imperial Guards. In 1915 he
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