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and in November 1944 with the encouragement
of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and minis-
ter of the interior, Vlasov was allowed to form
the Committee for the Liberation of Russia and
recruit Soviet troops from prisoner-of-war
camps and hard-labor factories. Vlasov became
commander in chief of the Russian Liberation
Army (ROA) and in February 1945 its first divi-
sion was formed, although Hitler was still reluc-
tant to use it for more than propagandistic
purposes. The ROA first fought the Red Army on
the Oder front in April 1945 without much suc-
cess and was then transferred to Czechoslovakia.
During the Prague uprising of May 1945, the
ROA assisted the Czechs in defeating the Ger-
man SS. Vlasov's plans to hand over Czechoslo-
vakia to the Americans was declined. He was
captured by the Red Army later in May and,
according to the Communist Party paper
Pravda,
tried and executed for treason with some of his
officers sometime before August 1946.
GOLDEN HORDE
and two of its successor states, the
khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, while the
principality of
MOSCOW
developed farther up-
stream between the upper reaches of the Volga
and the Oka River. During the 16th century, the
Muscovite state captured most of the river valley
between Kazan and Astrakhan. Scientific investi-
gation of the river and its tributaries took place
mostly between 1700 and the early twentieth
century. The construction of artificial waterways
such as the Volga-Baltic Canal (first built in 1810),
the White Sea-Baltic Canal (built 1931-33), the
Moscow-Volga Canal (built 1932-37), and the
Volga-Don Canal (built 1947-52) have made the
Volga the centerpiece of the world's largest net-
work of commercial waterways linking the
White, Baltic, Caspian, Azov and Black seas.
Vrubel, Mikhail Aleksandrovich
(1856-1910)
artist
Vrubel was the first important painter to break
completely with the dominant ideas of the Pered-
vizhniki (
WANDERERS
). He first studied law at St.
Petersburg University before turning to art and
enrolling in the Society for the Encouragement
of the Arts and at the Academy of Arts from 1880
to 1884. Rejecting the Wanderer's concern with
art as a social service as “journalism,” Vrubel
advocated an art whose elements were signifi-
cant in themselves rather than a means for
communicating socially redeeming messages.
Vrubel reintroduced religious, mythological,
and mythical themes that had long been absent
from Russian art, albeit through his own highly
idiosyncratic prism. His interest in early Russian
icons brought into vogue a venerable art form
that had become neglected. He visited Venice and
restored frescoes in the ancient church of St.
Cyril in Kiev; he also designed murals on themes
from Russian epics. He adapted themes from
Greek mythology into a Russian context as in the
case of Pan, whom he portrayed as a Slavic-look-
ing god with the hands of a Russian peasant. His
travels to Spain resulted in studies of Russian
Volga River
A river whose valley served as the cradle of
medieval and early modern Russia, the Volga
River is the largest river of European Russia and
the European continent. The Volga rises in the
Valdai hills to the northwest of
MOSCOW
and
flows eastward toward
NIZHNII NOVGOROD
and
KAZAN
, where it turns sharply to the south and
flows past Samara, Simbirsk (Ulianovsk) and
Saratov, before reaching Volgograd (known as
Tsaritsyn in pre-revolutionary times). At Vol-
gograd the river turns to the southeast toward
ASTRAKHAN
, where it forms a delta that fans out
into the Caspian Sea. In its course it flows for
almost 2,300 miles and drains a vast area of
about 530,000 square miles that contains about
two-fifths of the population of Russia. Known to
the ancient Greeks as the Rha River and to Arab
cartographers, the Volga was part of medieval
trade routes that linked northern Europe with
Central Asia through the Caspian Sea and Per-
sia. Its banks were site to various medieval states
such as those of the Bulgars, the Khazars, the
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