Britannica Guide to Russia

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Britannica

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Introducer

Mary Dejevsky is chief editorial writer and columnist at the Independent. A Russia specialist by training, she witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union as Moscow bureau chief for The Times. A regular visitor to Russia, as special correspondent for the Independent, she is a member of the Royal Institute of Inter­national Affairs (Chatham House) in London and of Russia's Valdai Club for international specialists in the region.

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I N С V С L о тл л

т н Е Britannicб G и I D Е ТО

RUSSIA

The essential guide to the nation, its people, and culture

Introduction by Mary Dejevsky

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. www.brirannica.com

First print edition published in the UK by Robinson, an imprint of Constable ФC Robinson Ltd, 2009

Text © 2009 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. Introduction © 2009 Mary Dejevsky

The right of Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. and Mary Dejevsky to be identified as the authors of tins work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copy right. Designs & Patents Act, 1988.

Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the Thistle logo are registered trademarks of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

This cBook edition published by Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

ISBN 978-1-59339-850-7

No parr of this work may be produced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations and Maps vii

Introduction ix

Part 1 Context

Russia - Facts and Figures 3

The Place and the People 13

Part 2 History

Russia before and after the Revolution 33

Post-Stalin Russia to the Fall of Communism,

1953-91 82

135 143

Post-Soviet Russia 104

Part 3 Culture

The Development of the Arts in Russia

Literature

Music 173

The Visual Arts and Film 194

Theatre and Ballet 214

Part 4 Russia Today

10 Governance and the Economy 231

I I Everyday Life in Modern Russia 256

Part 5 Places

12 The Major Sites to Visit 277

Index 321

ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS

illustrations

Cathedral of St Basil the Blessed, Moscow © Corbis, courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.

Red Square, Moscow © D. Staquet/DeA Picture Library, cour­tesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.

Portrait of Catherine the Great (1729-96) by Fyodor Rokotov (1735-1808). The Moscow State Tretyakov Gallery © RIA Novosti/Top foto.co.uk.

Gallery in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg Richard No witz-Na tio n a I Geographic/Getty Images, courtesy of Ency­clopaedia Britannica Inc.

Demonstrators gathering in front of the Winter Palace in Petro- grad in January 1917, shortly before the Russian Revolution Hulton Archive/Getty Images, courtesy of Encyclopaedia Brit­annica Inc.

Mofiument to the Third International; model designed by Vla­dimir Tatlin, 1920. Reconstruction by U. Linde and P. O. Ultvcdt in the Modern Museum, Stockholm © Tatlin; photograph Mod­erna Museet, courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.

Soviet leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924) addressing a crowd in 1920 © Photo.com/Jupiterimages, courtesy of Ency­clopaedia Britannica Inc.

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) ©Photo.com/Jupiterimages, courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837): portrait copied by Fyodor Igin from original by Orest Kiprensky © RIA Novosti/ Topfoto.co.uk.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) The Bettman Archive, courtesy of Encyclopedia Britannica Inc.

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960) with companion Olga Iwinskaja and their daughter Irina in the late 1950s © ullstein- bild/To pfoto.co.uk.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), August 30,1970 © Topfoto.co.uk,

Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin (1934-68) in 1961 Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images, courtesy of En cyclop cedia Britannica Inc.

Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931) on a state visit to Poland © Bernard Bisson & Thierry Orban/Sygma/Corbis.

Military parade in Moscow's Red Square in 1985 Tass/Sovfoto, courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.

12

230 276 307

Vladimir Putin (b. 1952) President of Russia, The Kremlin, Courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.

Maps

Physical map of Russia

Political map of present-day Russia

Moscow

The Trans-Siberian Railway

INTRODUCTION

MARY DEJEVSKY

Russia can claim to be one of the most grievously misunder­stood countries of the early twenty-first century. A vast land mass, with a harsh climate and declining population, the country boasts as rich a history and as glorious a culture as any in the world. Yet the upheavals it experienced in the twentieth century - from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the largely peaceful reversal of that revolution before the century was out - left the country and its people exhausted, while striving to catch up with a European and global main­stream that had largely passed them by.

in between came a brutal civil war, mass emigration of the aristocracy and professional classes, enforced collectivization of agriculture, Stalin's purges, the battle for national survival that was Russia's experience of the Second World War, and ultimate defeat in the Cold War that pitted East against West. By the late 1980s, Russians could do little more than watch as the Soviet empire dissolved around them and the thought-system that had anchored so much of their lives was discredited. Few would have emerged unscathed from such a catalogue of adversity, whether self-inflicted or not.

It is a sign of Russian resilience that after a century of such turmoil, and less than 20 years after the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Russia is settling as smoothly as it is into a new age and a new political system inside new state borders. With three-quarters of the territory and only half the population of the Soviet Union, it is more ethnically and culturally homogeneous (though ethnic minorities still consti­tute roughly one-fifth of the population) in its reconstituted statehood. But it is also - as it appears from Moscow - more vulnerable.

When the predominantly non-Slav republics became inde­pendent in 1991-2, Russia lost what had been a substantial buffer zone to its west, east, and south. The former Soviet bloc countries of east and central Europe and the Baltic states that had formed a reluctant western flank of the Soviet Union then allied themselves with the West, by joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, and Russia's age-old fears of hostile encirclement returned. Security and domestic stability became the twin preoccupations of Russia's post-Soviet leadership.

For all the disappointment regularly expressed outside Rus­sia about the country's slow pace of political and economic development in the post-Soviet years, it is rarely recalled that the consequences of the Soviet Union's demise could have been much, much worse. As the communist system breathed its last and in the often chaotic years that followed, Russia remained intact and - for the most part - free of conflict. Yet at the time this could not have been taken for granted.

When the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, resigned on December 25, 1991, and the Soviet flag was lowered over tlie Kremlin for the last time, the West feared a catastrophe of epic proportions. Contingency plans were in place to prevent already severe food shortages escalating into famine and to cope with perhaps hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing west in the depths of winter. There were fears, too, of a replay of the 1918-20 civil war, if local Communist Party officials and their opponents tried to make a grab for power, even as the national leadership conceded that the game was up.

In the event, the break-up of the Soviet Union was mostly peaceful. The republics that had made up the USSR either seized their independence ahead of time, through leaders who successfully challenged ebbing Soviet power, or - as in much of Central Asia - reluctantly accepted the independence that was thrust upon them. What violence there was erupted at long- tense ethnic fault-lines inside the newly independent states - Georgia, for one - but the main frontiers held.

That the Soviet Union ended less with a bang than a whimper was not due to good fortune alone. It also owed much to measured leadership. As Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev understood that neither the Eastern European Warsaw Pact nor the Soviet Union could be held together by force; he did not fight the inevitable. The president of the post-Soviet Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, chose for the most part a constitutional route to power, seeking a mandate for his popular appeal through the ballot box. Outside Russia, the then US president, George H. W. Bush, and the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, grappled with the largely unforeseen and fast-moving collapse of communism across Europe with flexibility and without panic.

The formal transfer of power in Russia, when it came, was also conducted for the most part with a due sense of dignity and responsibility. Those who had witnessed Yeltsin's public taunting of Gorbachev only four months before, following the aborted coup against the latter, might have anticipated an outburst of unseemly triumphalism. As president of the re­stored independent state of Russia, however, Yeltsin behaved with the modesty and generosity appropriate to a national leader in victory. There was no vicious settling of old scores.

So it was that Russia, with Yeltsin at its head, was inter­nationally recognized as the Soviet Union's successor state, inheriting - on the positive side - its permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and its considerable nuclear arsenal. Russia also gained a place at the top table of the world's economies when it formally joined the Group of Seven (making it the Group of Eight) in 1997. But on the negative side it fell heir to the USSR's international debts and heavily subsidized export obligations to its former allies and constituent republics in Europe and Central Asia.

The reasons for the Soviet Union's decline and eventual fall will long be debated, but they surely include the extensive central planning system, the suspicions harboured by the state towards its citizens, and the inability of the political system to renew itself. Greater exposure to the outside world, as modern communications forced open borders, and the cost of trying to match the US military challenge are also part of the equation.

But an equally significant factor, often underestimated, was the aspiration of Russians to reclaim their national sovereignty. As the countries of east and central Europe, the Baltic states, and the Caucasus sought to retrieve their independent national identities through the 1980s, so Russians, too, started to ques­tion the balance sheet left by 70 years of communism. To the rest of the world, the Soviet Union and Russia might have seemed synonymous, but many Russians saw themselves as powerless within their own country, overburdened by imperial power.

Unlike other constituent republics of the Soviet Union, Russia - or the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic as it was then - had no parliament or Communist Party organization to call its own, (In this respect, its position was somewhat analo­gous to that of England in the devolved United Kingdom.) Of course, ethnic Russians held the lion's share of leadership posts in the Soviet Union's central party and government apparatus. But there were no institutional mechanisms through which Russians could express their Russianness. In this respect, Boris Yeltsin's epic struggle against Mikhail Gorbachev in the last years and months of the Soviet Union was not just political and personal, although undoubtedly it was both of these: it was a duel between a declining Soviet Union and a resurgent Russia. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was Russia's victory and marked its rebirth as a nation.

The rise of Russia and the return of a specifically Russian national consciousness from the late 1980s on was accompanied, and fostered, by an at first hesitant rediscovery of the tsarist past. Gorbachev's policies of perestroika ("restructuring"} and glas- nost ("openness") had facilitated an examination of many hither­to closed chapters of Soviet, but also pre-Soviet, Russian history. In intellectual and political circles the search was on to recover what many felt had been lost, to pick up where Russia's mod­ernization, they felt, had been artificially arrested in 1917.

Old, and sometimes embarrassing, groupings crawled out of the rotten Soviet woodwork around this time, including mon­archists, anarchists, and the openly anti-Semitic nationalist group Pamyat ("Memory"), whose adherents paraded on the margins of the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989-91. A self-styled Liberal Democratic Party, created and led by the rabble-rousing Vladimir Zhirinovsky, capitalized on Russia's national sense of grievance and a growing mood of xenophobia to become, for a time, the third-largest political grouping - in terms of votes received - after the centrist Russian party of power (now called United Russia) and the rump of the once all- powerful Communist Party.

One of the greatest beneficiaries of the new embrace of Russian national sentiment was the Russian Orthodox Church, whose dignitaries became a fixture at national events, starting from Gorbachev's inauguration in 1989. Soviet-era restrictions on church-building and church services were pro­gressively lifted. Congregations across Russia raised funds and rebuilt churches despoiled and desecrated in successive waves of Soviet-era persecution. The reappearance on the rural horizon of freshly gilded domes was an early sign of Russia's national renaissance.

At state level, Russia's spiritual rebirth was symbolized by the rebuilding of the vast Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in central Moscow, which had been notoriously dynamited by Stalin in 1931. The project was initiated by Yeltsin, as Russian president, and the popular mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, and completed - thanks to almost superhuman effort - within the decade. It was paid for by voluntary contributions, raised in part from Russia's new rich - the "oligarchs" and smaller entrepreneurs who had profited from the disorderly privatiza­tions of state industry in the early 1990s. But there were gifts from Russia's "old rich", too - the descendants of noble families who had fled abroad from Soviet power. Their names, as benefactors - linking old Russia and new across a century - are inscribed in the cathedral entrance.

But the visibility of the Orthodox Church in Russia today is not only, or even primarily, an expression of Russians' reli­gious faith. Only a minority claim to be believers or attend church regularly. It is at least as much an expression of

Russianness. In Soviet times, church weddings or christenings tended to be confined to rural areas and were, even then, acts of personal defiance. Today, the number of church weddings, christenings, and funerals has soared. As president, Yeltsin was a regular at services on Russian holidays, and he re­instated Christmas and Easter as national holidays. Vladimir Putin and now Dmitry Medvedev have followed suit, the former having apparently disclosed early in his presidency that he had been christened and still wore the pectoral cross given to him by his grandmother.

But the revival of interest in pre-revolutionary Russia extends far beyond the reintegration of the Orthodox Church into the life of the post-Soviet Russian state. And it goes far beyond simple nostalgia. With the communist system demonstrably bankrupt in every sense and the accelerated free-market reforms of the 1990s summarily ended by the crash of the ruble in 1998, there has been a quest to find other, Russian, ways of doing things. Pyotr Stolypin, the great reforming prime minister under the last tsar, Nicholas II, has been a particular object of study. He and other political and judicial luminaries of the early twentieth century are frequently cited as reference points by, among others, Russia's current president, Dmitry Medvedev,

Class and money are also back as strands of national life, if not in the mass return of aristocratic families and those who sought intellectual freedom in die emigration, then in a revival of some of their ways. Etiquette and formal manners are in the ascendant. Winter balls, modelled on those described so graphically by Leo Tolstoy, are a feature of the social scene. Even the language is changing, as Soviet concepts and formulations are dropped, to be replaced by more elegant, often older, turns of phrase.

The appearance of a new moneyed class, initially in Moscow, but extended now to St Petersburg and increasingly other major cities, was accompanied in its first wave by ostentatious con­sumption. Moscow's western car showrooms and luxury bou­tiques could not restock fast enough for their Russian clientele. Many of those early excesses, though, have been attenuated.

The 1998 economic collapse swept away some fortunes. But among the surviving billionaires, spending habits have been changing. As well as funding property purchases abroad and children's education at British public schools, Russian money has fuelled the international art and antiques market, as wealthy Russians see themselves honour-bound to repatriate master­pieces lost to their homeland as a result of revolution and war.

Townscapes are changing fast. Many cities, not only Mos­cow and St Petersburg, are now ringed with new housing, both high-rise and in executive estates, much of it for private sale. Out-of-town shopping malls have mushroomed, catering to a new generation of urban blue- and white-collar workers with disposable income, and homes to equip. Standards of dress and nutrition are now mostly indistinguishable from those across the western world.

Even so, the discrepancies between rich and poor, and between Russia's private and public domains, remain glaring. In Moscow and St Petersburg some of the most expensive shops and restaurants in the world coexist with stalls where street-sweepers snack on pancakes and pies bought for pen­nies. Glitzy casinos and clubs tout for custom, even as the destitute elderly or disabled beg from passers-by.

Although many town centres are in the course of impressive renovation, with Moscow and St Petersburg leading the way, much public housing remains sub-standard, in rural areas, more remote villages are dying, their mostly elderly popula­tions marooned by changed social priorities. Even in the many newly prosperous villages, where every house seems to have new window frames and a new roof, serviceable footpaths, let alone roads or even mains water and electricity, remain a distant dream. What changes the individual can make are mostly complete; where state effort is needed, however, work has barely begun.

The bonus from surging oil and gas prices in the first years of the new century may have boosted the Russian state's image at home and influence abroad, but it has not - yet - been translated into urgently needed modernization in any general­ized way. A recent master plan outlines projects to bring the dilapidated infrastructure up to international standards by 2020. But neglected transport networks, school buildings, and medical facilities all represent large bills accumulating for the future.

Image, though, counts for much. At grass-roots level, re­surgent Russian patriotism is tangible, matched by a revival of regional and civic pride. The contemporary art and literary scene has a dynamism and fearlessness reminiscent of Berlin in the decade after the Wall fell. Theatre, ballet, and cinema, which languished when Soviet state subsidies fell away, are starting to flourish once again.

Yet it is not just in material things that the Soviet era still casts its shadow. Although a whole generation of young adults has now grown up without communism, their parents and grand­parents bear the scars of those years, in terms of poor health, damaged family life, and an unspoken fear of arbitrary state power. To all this, during the 1990s, was added sudden exposure to a capricious free market, an increase in violent crime, and the risk that the still-fragile state might fracture further.

It was these old and new fears that Vladimir Putin set out to allay when he became president. But the hand he applied was at times heavy. The degree of force used against the Caucasus region of Chechnya when separatists there renewed their fight for independence was condemned outside Russia, and hy brave souls within, Putin set limits on the freedom of state broadcasting, although the Internet and satellite stations are increasingly available and uncensored. What were conceived of as ambitious reforms of the judiciary and state bureaucracy were compromised by corruption. At the same time, the fast- growing middle class, a rediscovery of family life, and an upward trend in the birth rate testify to a nation that believes again in its future.

Today's Russia remains a land of contrasts: between old and new, east and west, town and country, between its public and private faces. And nowhere are they more striking than in central Moscow, w^rhere the luxury shops that have replaced the old state department store, GUM, confront Lenin's Mau­soleum across Red Square, while the fearsome Lubyanka, now home to Russia's state security service, looks out onto a modest stone monument dedicated to those who died in Soviet prison camps. Funded by individual donations, this is the closest thing Russia has to a national monument to the estimated 15-30 million victims of the Gulag. A true reckon­ing with the past is still ahead.

The changes that Russia has experienced within one gen­eration help to explain why it sometimes comes across as oversensitive, self-absorbed, and clumsily defensive about its imperfections in democracy and law. But its periodic snarls can be deceptive. The Russia that is emerging into the twenty-first century is more prosperous, more secure within its borders, and more at ease with itself than for many a year - perhaps even for more than a century.

PART I

CONTEXT

RUSSIA - FACTS AND FIGURES

Official name: Rossiyskaya Federatsiya {Russian Federation).

Form of government: federal multiparty republic with a bicameral legislative body (Federal Assembly comprising the Federation Council: 172 members'; State Duma: 450).

Head of state: President.

Head of government: Prime Minister,

Capital: Moscow.

Official language: Russian.

Official religion: none.

Monetary unit: ruble (RUB). Demography

Population (2007): 141,378,000.

Density (2007): persons per sq mile 21.4, persons per sq kilometre 8.3.

Urban-rural (2007)²: urban 73.0%; rural 27.0%. Sex distribution (2004): male 46.49%; female 53.51%. Age breakdown (2006)^г: under 15. 14.9%; 15-29, 24.7%; 30­44, 21.5%; 45-59. 21.9%; 60-69. 8.4%; 70 and over, 8.6%. Population projection: (2010) 139,390,000; (2020) 132,242,000.

Ethnic composition (2002): Russian 79,82%; Tatar 3,83%; Ukrainian 2.03%; Bashkir I,i5%; Chuvash 1.13%; Chechen 0.94%; Armenian 0.78%; Mordvin 0.58%; Belarusian 0.56%; Avar 0.52%; Kazakh 0.45%; Udmurt 0.44%; Azerbaijani 0.43%; Mari 0.42%; German 0.41%; Kabardinian 0.36%; Ossetian 0.35%; Dargin 0.35%; Buryat 0.31%; Sakha 0.31%; other 4,83%. Religious affiliation (200S): Christian 58.4%, of which Russian Orthodox 53.1%, Roman Cathotic 1.0%, Ukrainian Orthodox 0.9%, Protestant 0.9%; Muslim 8.2%^{3, 4}; traditional beliefs 0.8%; Jewish 0.6%; nonreligious 25.8%; atheist 5.0%; other 1.2%. Major cities (2006)²: Moscow 10,425,075; St Petersburg 4,580,620; Novosibirsk 1,397,015; Yekaterinburg 1,308,441; Nizhny Novgorod 1,283,553; Samara 1,143,346; Omsk 1. 138,822; Kazan 1,112,673; Chelyabinsk 1,092,958; Rostov-na-Donu 1,054,865; Ufa 1,029,616; Perm 993,319. Households (2004): Total households 51,209,000; average household size 2.8; distribution by size (1995): I person 19.2%; 2 persons 26.2%; 3 persons 22.6%; 4 persons 20.5%; 5 persons or more I i.5%.

Vital statistics

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006); 10.3 (world average 20.3); (2005) within marriage 70.0%, outside marriage 30.0%.

Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 15.2 (world average 8.6).

Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): —4,9 {world average i 1.7).

Total fertility rate (average births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.38,

Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 7.8/ 4.5.

Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 58.9 years; female 72.4 years.

Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2006): circulatory diseases 860; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 200; accidents, poisoning, and violence 191, of which suicide 30, transport accidents 27, alcohol poisoning 20; diseases of the digestive system 62; diseases of the respiratory system 58; infectious and parasitic diseases 25. Adult population {ages 15—49) living with HIV (2005); 1.1% (world average 1.0%).

Social indicators

Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 15 and over having no formal schooling 2.1%;

primary education 7.7%; some secondary 18.1%; complete secondary/basic vocational 53.0%; incomplete higher 3.1%; complete higher 16.0%, of which advanced degrees 0.3%. Quality of working life (2006). Average workweek (2004): 40 hours. Annual rate per 100,000 workers of: injury or accident 290; industrial illness 16.0; death I 1.8. Average working days lost to labour strikes per 1,000 employees 0.2.

Social participation. Eligible voters participating in last national election (2003); 55.7%. Trade union membership in total workforce (2003): c. 45%⁵. Social deviance. Offence rate per 100,000 population (2006) for: murder and attempted murder 19.4; rape and attempted rape 6.3; serious injury 36.2; theft I,ISO.4. Incidence per 100,000 popuiation of: alcoholism (1992) 1,727.5; substance abuse (2000) 25.6; suicide (2006) 30.0. Material well-being (2002): durable goods possessed per 100 households: automobiles 27; persona! computers 7; television receivers 126; refrigerators and freezers I 13; washing machines 93; VCRs 50; motorcycles 26; bicycles 71.

National economy

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): US$75,359,000,000.

Budget (2006). Revenue: RUB 6,276,300,000,000 (VAT 24.1%; taxes on natural resources 17.8%; corporate taxes 8.1%; single social tax 5.0%). Expenditures: RUB 4,281,300,000,000 (transfers 21.4%; defence 15.9%; social and cultural services 14.4%; law enforcement 12.9%; debt service 3.9%).

Gross national income (2006): US$956,557,000,000 {US$6,679 per capita).

Production (in metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): wheat 45,006,300, potatoes 38,572,640, sugar beets 30,861,230, barley 18,153,550. sunflower seeds 6,752,860, oats 4,880,270, cabbages 4,073,240, corn (maize) 3,668,560, rye 2,965,060, tomatoes 2,414,860, carrots and turnips 1,918,370, onions 1.788.750, apples 1,617,000, cucumbers 1,423,210, peas 1,157,640; livestock (number of live animals) 21,473,926 cattle, 16,074,449 sheep, 13,454,876 pigs; roundwood {2005) 186.500,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 25%; fisheries production (2005) 3,305,698 {from aquaculture 3%); aquatic plants production {2005) 50,507 {from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying {2005): nickel 315,ООО⁶ [world rank: I]; mica 101,500 [world rank: I]; platinum-group metals 123,000 [world rank: 2]; gem diamonds 21,400,000 carats [world rank: 2]; industrial diamonds 10,400,000 carats [world rank: 3]; vanadium 9,000⁶ [world rank: 3]; iron ore {2004) 56,200,ООО⁶ [world rank: 5]; cobalt 5,000⁶ [world rank: 5]; copper ore 675,000⁶ [world rank: 6]; gold 165,000 kg [world rank: 6]; tin 3,000⁶ [world rank: 7]; molybdenum 3,000⁶ [world rank: 7]. Manufacturing {value added in US$'000,000; 2004): refined petroleum products 14,329; iron and steel 11,801; food products 8,933; chemicals and chemical products 7,709; nonferrous base metals 7,600; beverages 4,446; transportation equipment 4,255; general purpose machinery 3,369; cement, bricks, and ceramics 3,266;

fabricated metai products 1,949; wood products {excluding furniture) 1,922; printing and publishing 1,648; paper products 1,508; textiles and wearing apparel 1,374; rubber products 1,359; electrical equipment 1,165; tobacco products 1,055. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kWhr; 20064)7) 989,017,000,000 ([2005] 940,000,000,000); hard coal {metric tons; 2006-07) 237,700,000 ([2004] 144,978,000); lignite (metric tons; 2006-07) 70,300,000 {[2004] 75,460,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006-07) 3,482,900,000 ([2005] 1,022,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 175,486,000 (94,312,000); natural gas {cu m; 2006-07) 865,524,000,000 {[2005] 402,100,000,000). Population economically active (2006): total 74,146,000; activity rate of total population 52.0% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 73.0%; female 49.4%; unemployed 7.2%). Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 7.5%, in permanent crops 0.1%, in pasture 5.6%; overall forest area (2005) 47.9%.

Household income and expenditure: average household size (2004): 2.8; income per household: RUB 52,400 (US$1,692); sources of monetary income (2006): wages 66.4%⁷, transfers I 3.2%, self-employment I 1.2%, property income 7.2%, other 2.0%; expenditure (2002): food 41.7%, clothing 13.3%, housing 6.2%, furniture and household appliances 5.7%, alcohol and tobacco 3,2%, transportation 2,7%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (US$'000,000) tourism (2005) 5,466; remittances (2006) 3,308; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 average) 8,842. Disbursements for (US$'000,000): tourism (2005)

17,804; remittances (2006) 11,438; FDI {2001-05 average) 8,541.

Foreign trade⁸

Imports (2006): US$137,548,000,000 (machinery, apparatus, and transportation equipment 47.7%; chemicals and chemical products 15,8%; food, beverages, and tobacco 15.7%; nonferrous metals and iron and steel 7.7%). Major import sources (2006): Germany 13.4%; China 9.4%; Ukraine 6.7%; japan 5.7%; Belarus 5.0%; USA 4.7%; France 4.3%; Italy 4.2%; Kazakhstan 2.8%. Exports (2006): US$301,976,000,000 (fuels and lubricants 65.9%; nonferrous metals and iron and steel 16.4%; machinery, apparatus, and transportation equipment 5.8%; chemicals and chemical products 5,6%; wood and paper products 3.1%).

Major export destinations (2006): The Netherlands 11.9%; Italy 8.3%; Germany 8.1%; China 5.2%; Ukraine 5.0%; Turkey 4.8%; Belarus 4.3%; Switzerland 4.0%; Poland 3.8%; UK 3.4%; Finland 3.0%; Kazakhstan 3.0%.

Transport

Railways (2005): length (2007²) 85,000 km; passenger- km 171,600,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 1,858,000,000,000. Roads (2007²): total length 854,000 km (paved 85%). Vehicles (2002): passenger cars 22,342,000; trucks and buses (1999) 5,021,000. Air transport (2006-07): passenger-km 97,510,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 2,980,000,000,

Communications

Daily newspapers (2004⁹): circulation 15,075,000 Television (2003): receivers 50,599,000 Telephones (2005): landlines 40,100,000 Mobile telephones (2005^l0): 120,000,000 Personal computers (2005): 17,400,000 Internet (2006): users 25,689,000 Broadband (2006¹⁰): 2,900,000

Education (2006-07)

Primary (age 6-13) and secondary (age 14—17): schools 61,042; teachers 1,537,000; students 14,798,000; student/teacher ratio 9.6, Vocational, teacher training: schools 2,847; teachers 148,000; students 2,514,000; student/teacher ratio 18.3. Higher: schools 1,090; teachers 409,000; students 7,310,000; student/teacher ratio 17.9,

Health

Health (2006): physicians 690,ООО² (I per 206 persons); hospital beds 1,575,ООО² (I per 90 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 10.2. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,363 (vegetable products 79%, animal products 21%); 170% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military

Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 1,027,000 (army 38.5%, navy 13.8%, air force 15.6%, strategic deterrent forces 7.8%, command and support 24.3%)",

Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 4,1%; per capita expenditure US$217.

Internet resources for further information

Federal State Statistics Service http://www.gks.ru/eng/ default.asp

Central Bank of the Russian Federation http://www.cbr.ru/eng Notes

Based on 86 federal districts as of mid-July 2007.

January I.

Muslim population may be as high as 16%.

ShT'i make up c. 8% of all Muslims.

Mostly based on a claimed membership of 28,000,000 in the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, the successor to the former labour movement.

Metal content,

Includes unreported wages and salaries.

Imports cost, insurance, and freight, exports free on board.

Refers to top 20 dailies only.

Subscribers.

An additional 415,000 personnel in paramilitary forces include railway troops, special construction troops, federal border guards, interior troops, and other federal guard units.

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Russia: physical and geographical

THE PLACE AND THE PEOPLE

Overview

The Russian Federation stretches over a vast expanse of eastern Europe and northern Asia. Once the pre-eminent republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Russia became an indepen­dent country after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Russia is a land of superlatives. By far the world's largest country, it covers nearly twice the territory of Canada, the sec­ond-largest. It spans 11 time zones and incorporates a great range of environments and landforms, from deserts to semi-arid steppes, to deep forests and Arctic tundra. Russia contains Europe's longest river, the Volga, and largest lake, Ladoga, and it is home to the world's deepest lake, Baikal; it also registers the world's lowest recorded temperature outside the North and South poles.

The inhabitants of Russia are diverse. Most are ethnic Russians, but there are also more than 120 other ethnic groups present, speaking many languages and following disparate religious and cultural traditions. Most of the

Russian population is concentrated in the European portion of the country, especially in the fertile region surrounding Moscow, the capital. Moscow and St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) are the two most important cultural and financial centres in Russia and are among the most picturesque cities in the world. Russians are also populous in Asia, however; from the seventeenth century, and particularly throughout much of the twentieth century, a steady flow of ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking people moved eastward into Siberia, where cities such as Vladivostok and Irkutsk now flourish.

Russia's climate is extreme, with forbidding winters that have several times famously saved the country from foreign invaders. Although the climate adds a layer of difficulty to daily life, the land offers a generous source of crops and materials, including vast reserves of oil, gas, and precious metals. That richness of resources has not translated into an easy life for most of the country's people, however: much of Russia's history has been a grim tale of the very wealthy and powerful few ruling over a great mass of their poor and powerless compatriots. Serfdom endured well into the modern era; the years of Soviet communist rule (1917-91), especially the long dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, saw subjugation of a different and more exacting sort.

From the mid-sixteenth century until the early twentieth century an autocratic tsar ruled Russia. In 1917 the Russian Revolution ousted the tsar and established a Russian republic, which, in 1922, became a union republic. During the post- Second World War era, Russia was a central player in inter­national affairs, locked in a Cold War struggle with the United States. In 1991, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia joined with several other former Soviet republics to form a loose coalition, the Commonwealth of Independent

States (CIS). Although the demise of Soviet-style communism and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union brought profound political and economic changes, including the begin­nings of the formation of a large middle class, for much of the post-communist era Russians had to endure a generally weak economy, high inflation, and a complex of social ills that served to lower life expectancy significantly. Despite such profound problems, Russia showed promise of achieving its potential as a world power once again, as if to exemplify a favourite proverb coined in the nineteenth century by Austrian statesman Klemens, Prince of Metternich: "Russia is never as strong as she appears, and never as weak as she appears."

Russia can boast a long tradition of excellence in every aspect of the arts and sciences. Pre-revolutionary Russian society produced the writings and music of such giants of world culture as Anton Chekhov, Aleksandr Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolay Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The 1917 Revolution and the changes it brought were reflected in the works of such noted figures as the novelists Maksim Gorky, Boris Pasternak, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the composers Dmitry Shostakovich and Sergey Prokofiev. The late Soviet and post-communist eras witnessed a revival of interest in once-forbidden artists such as the poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Anna Akhmatova, as well as ushering in new talents such as the novelist Viktor Pelevin and the writer and journalist Tatyana Tolstaya.

The Country

Extending nearly halfway around the northern hemisphere and covering much of eastern and north-eastern Europe and all of northern Asia, Russia has a maximum east-west width of some 5,600 miles (9,000 km) and a north-south extent of 1,500 to 2,500 miles (2,500 to 4,000 km). Bounded to the north and east by the Arctic and Pacific oceans, the country has small frontages in the north-west on the Baltic Sea at St Petersburg and at the detached Russian oblast (region) of Kaliningrad, which also abuts Poland and Lithuania. To the south it borders North Korea, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Geor­gia; to the south-west and west it borders Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as Finland and Norway.

There is an enormous variety of landforms and landscapes within this vast area. Arctic deserts lie in the extreme north, giving way southwards to the tundra and then to the forest zones, which cover about half of the country and give it much of its character. South of the forest zone lie the wooded steppe and the steppe, beyond which are small sections of semi-desert along the northern shore of the Caspian Sea. Much of Russia lies at latitudes where the winter cold is intense and where evaporation can barely keep pace with the accumulation of moisture, giving rise to abundant rivers, lakes, and swamps. Permafrost covers some 4 million square miles (10 million square km), making settlement and road building difficult across large regions.

On the basis of geologic structure and relief, Russia can be divided into two main parts - western and eastern - roughly along the line of the Yenisey River. These sections comprise six relief regions: the Kola-Karelian region, the Russian Plain, the Ural Mountains, the West Siberian Plain, the Central Siberian Plateau, and the mountains of the south and east.

Karelia, the smallest of Russia's relief regions, lies in the north-western part of European Russia between the Finnish border and the White Sea. Karelia is a low, ice-scraped plateau, for the most part below 650 feet (200 metres); low ridges and knolls alternate with lake- and marsh-filled hollows. The Kola Peninsula is similar, but the small Khibiny mountain range rises to nearly 4,000 feet (1,200 metres). Mineral-rich ancient rocks lie at or near the surface in many places.

The Russian Plain (also called the East European Plain) makes up the largest part of one of the great lowland areas of the world, extending from the western border eastwards to the Ural Mountains, and from the Arctic Ocean to the Caucasus Moun­tains and the Caspian Sea. About half of this vast area lies at less than 650 feet (200 metres) above sea level. North of Moscow lie morainic ridges, which stand out above low, poorly drained hollows interspersed with lakes and marshes. South of Moscow there is a west-east alternation of rolling plateaus and extensive plains. In the west the Central Russian Upland separates the lowlands of the upper Dnieper River valley from those of the Oka and Don rivers, beyond which the Volga Hills rise gently before descending abruptly to the Volga River. East of the Volga is the large Caspian Depression, parts of which lie more than 90 feet (25 metres) below sea level. The Russian Plain also extends southward through the Azov-Caspian isthmus (in the North Caucasus region) to the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, the crest line of which forms the boundary between Russia and the Transcaucasian states of Georgia and Azerbaijan; just inside this border is Mount Elbrus, which at 18,510 feet (5,642 metres) is the highest point in Russia.

Though the Ural Mountains form the traditional boundary between Europe and Asia, in terms of travel and transporta­tion they do not present a significant challenge. The north- south spine of the Urals extends about 1,300 miles (2,100 km) from the Arctic coast to the border with Kazakhstan. The highest peak, Mount Narodnaya, reaches 6,217 feet (1,895 metres), but the system is largely composed of a lower series of broken, parallel ridges; several low passes cut through the system, particularly in the central section between Perm and Yekaterinburg, which carry the main routes from Europe into Siberia. Many districts contain mineral-rich rocks.

Russia's most extensive region, the West Siberian Plain, is the most striking single relief feature of the country and quite possibly of the world. Covering an area well in excess of 1 million square miles (2.6 million square km), one-seventh of Russia's total area, it stretches about 1,200 miles (1,900 km) from the Urals to the Yenisey, and 1,500 miles (2,400 km) from the Arctic Ocean to the foothills of the Altai Mountains. The region is characterized by vast floodplains and some of the world's largest swamps, particularly in the northern half. Slightly higher and drier territory is located south of latitude 55 N, where the bulk of the region's population is concentrated.

The Central Siberian Plateau, which takes up most of the area between the Yenisey and Lena rivers, comprises a series of sharply dissected plateau surfaces ranging in elevation from 1,000 to 2,300 feet (300 to 700 metres). Towards its northern edge rise the Putoran Mountains and on the southern side the Eastern Sayan and Baikal mountains; to the north it descends to the North Siberian Lowland, an eastward extension of the West Siberian Plain. Farther north the Byrranga Mountains reach 3,760 feet (1,146 metres) on the Taymyr Peninsula, which extends into the Arctic Ocean. On its eastern side the Central Siberian Plateau gives way to the low-lying Central Yakut Lowland.

Russia's remaining territory, to the south and east, consti­tutes about one-fourth of the country's total area and is dominated by a complex series of high mountain systems. These include the Altai Mountains, which lie on the border with Kazakhstan and Mongolia; the area around Lake Baikal; the Stanovoy, Dzhugdzhur, Kolyma, Verkhoyansk, and

Chersky ranges in the east; and a volcanic zone on the Kamchatka Peninsula. The mountainous zone continues on narrow Sakhalin Island, which is separated from the Siberian mainland by the Tatar Strait.

The Russian landscape is known as much for its many and massive rivers as for its geological variety. Five main drainage basins may be distinguished: the Arctic, Pacific, Baltic, Black Sea, and Caspian. The Arctic basin is drained by three gigantic Siberian rivers: the Ob (2,268 miles [3,650 km]), the Yenisey (2,540 miles [4,090 km]), and the Lena (2,734 miles [4,400 km]). These rivers pro vide transport arteries from the interior to the Arctic sea route, although they are blocked by ice for long periods every year. South-eastern Siberia is drained by the large Amur system into the Pacific. The Dnieper, of which only the и pper reaches are in Russia, and the 1,162-mile-long (1,870 km) Don flow south to the Black Sea, and a small north-western section drains to the Baltic. The longest European river is the Volga. Rising in the Valdai Hills north-west of Moscow, it follows a course of 2,193 miles (3,530 km) to the Caspian Sea. Outranked only by the Siberian rivers, the Volga drains an area of 533,000 square miles (1,380,000 square km). The rivers of the Russian Plain, separated only by short overland portages and supplemented by several canals, have long been important transport arteries; indeed, the Volga system carries two-thirds of all Russian waterway traffic.

In addition to its numerous rivers, Russia contains some 2 million freshwater and saltwater lakes. In the European section the largest are Ladoga and Onega in the north-west, with surface areas of 6,830 (inclusive of islands) and 3,753 square miles (17,690 and 9,720 square km), respectively; others are Peipus, on the Estonian border, and the Rybinsk Reservoir on the Volga north of Moscow. What are described as narrow lakes, some 100 to 200 miles (160 to 320 km) long, are located behind barrages (dams) on the Don, Volga, and Kama. In Siberia similar artificial lakes are located on the upper Yenisey and its tributary the Angara, where the Bratsk Reservoir is among the world's largest. All of these are dwarfed by Lake Baikal, the largest body of fresh water in the world. Some 395 miles (636 km) long and with an average width of 30 miles (50 km), Baikal has a surface area of 12,200 square miles (31,500 square km) and a maximum depth of roughly 5,315 feet (1,620 metres). There are also innumerable smaller lakes found mainly in the ill- drained low-lying parts of the Russian and West Siberian plains, especially in their more northerly parts.

Russia's climate has historically been both a blessing - in times of war, most famously during Napoleon's 1812 invasion-and a heavy burden in terms of the difficulties it imposes on everyday life. The country's vast size and compact shape - the great bulk of the land is more than 250 miles (400 km) from the sea, while certain parts lie as much as 1,500 miles (2,400 km) away - produce a dominance of continental regimes. The great mountain barriers to the south and east shut out the potentially gentler influences from the Indian and Pacific oceans, and the absence of relief barriers on the western and northern sides leaves the country open to Atlantic and Arctic influences. All these factors, combined with the country's northerly latitude, mean that in effect there are only two seasons, winter and summer; spring and autumn are brief periods of rapid change from one extreme to the other. Harsh winter cold is characteristic of most of Russia: the frost-free period exceeds six months only in the North Caucasus, and varies with latitude from five to three months in the European section and from three to less than two months in Siberia. The world's lowest minimum January temperature outside Antarc­tica,-96 F (-71 C), was recorded at Oymyakon in eastern Siberia.

The main characteristics of precipitation throughout Russia are its modest to low total amounts and the pronounced summer maximum. Snow falls in virtually the entire country. The duration of snow cover varies with both latitude and altitude, ranging from 40 to 200 days across the Russian Plain and from 120 to 250 days in Siberia,

Climate, soils, vegetation, and animal life are closely inter­related, and variations among these within Russia form a series of broad latitudinal environmental belts. Moving roughly from north to south are zones of Arctic desert, tundra, taiga, mixed and deciduous forest, wooded steppe, and steppe.

Russia's Arctic desert is completely barren land, often ice- covered, with little or no vegetation. This area is confined to the islands of Franz Josef Land, much of the Novaya Zemlya and Severnaya Zemlya archipelagos, and the New Siberian Islands. Tundra, on the other hand, covers nearly one-tenth of Russian territory. This treeless, marshy plain occupies a nar­row coastal belt in the extreme north of the European Plain, widening to a maximum of about 300 miles (500 km) in Siberia. Tundra soils are extremely poor, highly acidic, and frozen for much of the year. During the summer thaw, drain­age is inhibited by the presence of permafrost beneath the thawed surface layer. Vegetation includes mosses, lichens, and stunted birch, larch, and spruce. Apart from reindeer, which are herded by the indigenous population, the main animal species are the Arctic foxes, musk oxen, beavers, lemmings, snowy owls, and ptarmigan.

South of the tundra, the vast taiga (boreal forest) zone is the largest of Russia's environmental regions, and the world's largest timber reserve. It occupies the Russian and West Siberian plains north of latitude 56 to 58 N, together with most of the territory east of the Yenisey River. In the western section forests of spruce and fir alternate with shrubs and grasses interspersed with pine on lighter soils; in the east these are present too, but the larch predominates. Only small areas have been cleared for agriculture, though coniferous forest is not continuous; there are large stands of birch, alder, and willow, and, in poorly drained areas, huge stretches of swamp and peat bog. The taiga is also rich in fur-bearing animals, such as sables, squirrels, martens, foxes, and ermines, and home to many elks, bears, muskrat, and wolves.

As conditions become warmer with decreasing latitude, de­ciduous species appear in greater numbers and eventually become dominant. Oak and spruce are the main trees, but there are also growths of ash, aspen, birch, elm, hornbeam, maple, and pine. The mixed and deciduous forest belt is widest along Russia's western border and narrows toward the Urals, but much of this zone has been cleared for agriculture, particularly in the European section. As a result, the wildlife is less plentiful, but roe deer, wolves, foxes, and squirrels are common.

Farther south still is the wooded steppe, which, as its name suggests, is transitional between the forest zone and the steppe proper. Forests of oak and other species (now largely cleared for agriculture) in the European section and birch and aspen across the West Siberian Plain alternate with areas of open grassland that become increasingly extensive toward the south. The wooded steppe eventually gives way to the true steppe, which occupies a belt some 200 miles (320 km) across and extends from southern Ukraine through northern Kazakh­stan to the Altai. Russia has a relatively small share of the Eurasian Steppe, mainly in the North Caucasus and lower Volga regions, though pockets of wooded steppe and steppe also occur in basins among the mountains of southern Siberia. The natural steppe vegetation is characterized by turf grasses such as bunch-grass, fescue, bluegrass, and agropyron, with drought-resistant species common in the south. Much of the steppe vegetation, particularly in the west, has been replaced by grain cultivation, in no small part because of the region's chernozem, or black earth, a highly fertile soil of low acidity and high humus content. Typical rodents of the zone include the marmot and other such burrowing animals, and various mouse species. Skunks, foxes, and wolves are common, and antelope inhabit the south. The most common birds are bustards, eagles, kestrels, larks, and grey partridge.

The People

Although ethnic Russians constitute more than four-fifths of the country's total population, Russia is a diverse, multiethnic society. More than 120 ethnic groups, many with their own national territories, speaking some 100 languages, live within Russia's borders.

Many of the minority groups are small - in some cases consisting of fewer than a thousand individuals - and only the Tatars, Ukrainians, Chuvash, Bashkir, Chechens, and Arme­nians have more than a million members each. The diversity of peoples is also reflected in the country's numerous minority republics and autonomous administrative units. In most of these divisions, however, the eponymous nationality (which gives its name to the division) is outnumbered by Russians. Since the early 1990s ethnicity has underlain numerous con­flicts, notably in Chechnya and Dagestan, within and between these units; many national minorities have demanded more autonomy and, in a few cases, even complete independence.

While linguistically the population of Russia can be divided into various groups - the Indo-European, the Altaic, the Uralic, and the Caucasian - the Russian language, a Slavic language of the Indo-European group, predominates and is homogeneous throughout Russia. This unifying factor can largely be explained historically. The Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in east­ern Europe between the third and eighth centuries ad, and the first Slav state, Kievan Rus, arose in the ninth century. After the Tatar (Mongol) invasions the centre of gravity shifted to Mos­cow, and from the sixteenth century the Russian empire ex­panded to the Baltic, Arctic, and Pacific, numerically overwhelming the indigenous peoples. Today, East Slavs - mainly Russians but including some Ukrainians and Belarusians - constitute an overwhelming majority of the total population and are prevalent throughout the country. But Russian is not the country's only Indo-European language: the Ossetes of the Caucasus speak an Indo-Iranian language, and ethnic Germans and Jews (recognized as an ethnolinguistic group rather than a religious one) also employ their own languages in everyday life.

The Altaic grotip is dominated by Turkic speakers. They live mainly in the Central Asian republics, but there is an important cluster of Turkic speakers between the middle Volga and south­ern Urals, comprising the Bashkir, Chuvash, and Tatars. A second cluster, in the North Caucasus region, includes the Balkar, Karachay, Kumyk, and Nogay. There are also numerous Turkic- speaking groups in southern Siberia between the Urals and Lake Baikal: the Altai, Khakass, Shor, To fa lar, and Tuvans. The Sakha (Yakut) live mainly in the middle Lena basin, and the Dolgan are concentrated in the Arctic. Manchu-Tungus languages are spo­ken by the Evenk, Even, and other small groups that are widely dispersed throughout eastern Siberia. The Buryat, who live in the Lake Baikal region, and the Kalmyk, who live primarily to the west of the lower Volga, speak Mongolian tongues.

The Uralic group, which is widely disseminated in the Eurasian forest and tundra zones, has complex origins. Finnic peoples inhabit the European section: the Mordvin, Mari (formerly Cheremis), Udmurt (Votyak) and Komi (Zyryan), and the closely related Komi-Permyaks live around the upper Volga and in the Urals, while Karelians, Finns, and Veps inhabit the north-west. The Mansi (Vogul) and Khanty (Os- tyak) are spread thinly over the lower Ob basin. The Samoye- dic group also has few members dispersed over a vast area: the Nenets in the tundra and forest tundra from the Kola Penin­sula to the Yenisey, the Selkup around the middle Ob, and the Nganasan mainly in the Taymyr Peninsula.

There are numerous small groups of Caucasian speakers in the North Caucasus region of Russia. Abaza, Adyghian, and Kabardian (Circassian) are similar languages but differ sharply from the languages of the Nakh group (Chechen and Ingush) and of the Dagestaman group (Avar, Lezgian, Dargin, Lak, Tabasaran, and a dozen more).

Several Paleo-Siberian groups share a common mode of life in far eastern Siberia but differ linguistically from the other language groups and from each other. The Chukchi, Koryak, and Itelmen (Kamchadal) belong to a group known as Luorawetlan, which is distinct from the Eskimo-Aleut group. The languages of the Nivkh (Gilyak) along the lower Amur and on Sakhalin Island, of the Yukaghir of the Kolyma Lowland, and of the Ket of the middle Yenisey are com­pletely isolated, though it is likely that Yukaghir is a relative of the Uralic languages. How to preserve its linguistic heri­tage is one of Russia's current challenges, in that few of the languages of the smaller indigenous minorities are taught in schools, and so may disappear over the course of the next two generations.

Settlement in Town and Country

Any discussion of Russia's urban-rural divide also must address the population disparity between the European portion of the country and Siberia, the latter of which constitutes three- quarters of the country's territory but contains only about one-fifth of its population. Despite large-scale migrations from west to east, beginning in the 1890s and continuing throughout the next century - including the forced deportations at various times of criminals, political prisoners, and ethnic minorities - today the bulk of the country's population still lives in the main settled belt of European Russia, extending between St Peters­burg (north-western Russia), Kemerovo (Siberia), Orsk (south­ern Urals), and Krasnodar (northern Caucasus).

About one-fourth of Russia's population as a whole lives in rural areas. Population densities in the rural areas of European Russia range from 25 to 250 persons per square mile, with the higher concentrations occurring in the wooded steppe. East of the Urals, across the southern part of the West Siberian Plain, rural densities are considerably lower, rarely exceeding 65 persons per square mile, and beyond the Yenisey settlements are highly dispersed. Thanks partly to industrialization and partly to changing political circumstances, in the second half of the twentieth century rural depopulation was a clear trend, especially in the European section: in the last decades of the century, the rural population there fell by about 25 per cent overall, though it grew in what is now the Southern federal district. Because migration out of rural areas was particularly prevalent among the young, many rural areas are now in­habited primarily by the elderly.

The bulk of the rural population lives in large villages asso­ciated with the collective and state farms (kolkhozy and sovkhozy, respectively) established by the former Soviet regime. These farms have carried on the long-established Russian tradi­tion of communal farming from nucleated settlements. Indivi­dual farms started to reappear in the post-Soviet years. By 1995 there were nearly 300,000 private farms, though in the next decadc the numbers stagnated or declined. Private farms, how­ever, still produce a tiny fraction of agricultural output.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, industrialization and eco­nomic development have led to a substantial increase in urba­nization. Nearly three-fourths of Russia's population now live in what are classified as urban areas. In the cities, particularly Moscow, population densities are comparable with other Eur­opean cities. Moscow, the largest metropolis, has twice the population of its nearest rival, St Petersburg, which in turn dwarfs Russia's other major dries, such as Chelyabinsk, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod (formerly Gorky), Novosibirsk, Omsk, Perm, Rostov-na-Donu, Samara (formerly Kuybyshev), Ufa, and Yekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk).

Several major urban concentrations have developed in the main industrial regions. St Petersburg (the tsarist capital) stands alone as the northernmost metropolis, whereas Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod are part of the large urbanized central industrial region, which has a score of large cities, numerous smaller towns, and an urban population that constitutes about one-fifth of Russia's total. In the Ural Mountains region, the towns are more widely spaced and include numerous small mining and industrial centres, as well as a number of towns with more than 250,000 inhabitants, which altogether amount to an urban population about half that of the Moscow region. The only slightly less populous Volga region has towns strung out along the riverbanks, with a particularly dense concentration in the vicinity of Samara. European Russia also includes a portion of the Donets Basin (Donbass) industrial zone, arbitrarily split by the Russia-Ukraine boundary; this area's largest city is Rostov-na-Donu, but there are numerous smaller centres.

The main urban concentration east of the Urals is in the Kuznetsk Basin (Kuzbass), which is a centre for mining and industry. Majorcitiesalsooccuratwidely separa ted points along the length of the Trans-Siberian Railway, including, from west to east, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, Chita, Khabarovsk, and Vladivostok. A few very isolated cities are located in the far north, notably the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, and mining centres such as Vorkuta and Norilsk. Resort towns are a feature of the North Caucasus region, including Sochi (on the Black Sea), Pyatigorsk, and Mineralnye Vody. Elsewhere, the capitals of provinces and other adminis­trative divisions are the main towns, having grown to consider­able size as the organizing centres for their territories.

During the 1990s Russia began experiencing a negative population growth rate. A primary reason for this was a decline in the fertility rate (particularly of ethnic Russians) similar to that in Japan and in many western European countries. There was also a steep drop in life expectancy beginning in the early 1990s, a result of inadequacies in the health-care system and poor nutrition; high smoking and alcoholism rates and environmental pollution were also con­sidered contributing factors. Declines in life expectancy were more pronounced among men and resulted in a growing gap between the number of men and women in the country.

Until the 1990s migration from the European sector to Siberia was the primary cause of regional variations in population growth rates. For example, in the 1980s, when Russia's population increased by about 7 per cent, growth exceeded 15 per cent in much of Siberia but was less than 2 per cent in parts of western Russia. During the 1990s, however, eastern Siberia (at least according to official statis­tics) suffered a dramatic population decline, a result of substantial outmigrations caused by the phase-out of heavy government subsidies, upon which it was heavily dependent.

The long-declining Russian birth rate has led to a progressive aging of the population. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, for example, less than one-fifth of the population of Russia was below the age of 15, while the proportion of those aged 60 and above was approaching one-fifth. (The proportion of children was generally higher, and that of the elderly lower, among the non-Russian ethnic groups, which have maintained a somewhat higher birth rate.) Russia's aging population and overall drop in fertility rates have led many demographers to foresee a long-term labour shortage in the country.

PART 2

HISTORY

2

RUSSIA BEFORE AND AFTER THE REVOLUTION

Russia from Its Beginnings

The Russian state has its origins in Kievan Rus (tenth to thirteenth centuries), the first Slavic state, which included the cities of Kiev, Novgorod, and Smolensk. It was crushed by the invading Tatars (Mongols) in 1237-40, and a new ccntrc grew at Moscow, The Grand Principality of Moscow, or Muscovy, a medieval principality under the leadership of a line of princes known as the Rurik dynasty, was transformed from a small settlement into the dominant political unit in north-eastern Russia. Its grand princes included Ivan III (Ivan the Great) and Ivan IV (the Terrible), in 1547 first of the rulers of Moscow to be crowned tsar of all Russia. The rule of the Rurik dynasty came to an end in the late sixteenth century.

Following the reign of Boris Godunov (tsar of Russia 1598­1605) and the 15 chaotic years known as the Time of Troubles (1598-1613), the first of the Romanov line of tsars came to power. They ruled for three centuries, during which time Russia rose to

IVAN III, KNOWN AS IVAN THE GREAT (1440-1505)

Grand prince of Moscow (1462-1505)

Ivan led successful military campaigns against the Tatars in the south (1458) and east (1467-9), He subdued Novgorod (1478) and gained control of most of the remainder of the Russian lands by 1485. He also renounced Moscow's subjection to the khan of the Golden Horde (1480) and won a final victory over the khan's sons in 1502, Stripping the boyars (a closed aristocratic class that ruled alongside the grand prince at that time) of much of their authority, he laid the administrative foundations of a centralized Russian state.

become one of the most powerful states in Europe. The dynasty included Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Alexander II. Russia remained under autocratic control until 1917, when the Russian Revolution ousted Nicholas II, the last tsar. A Russian republic was established, which in 1922 became a union republic.

The Nineteenth Century

Some time in the middle of the nineteenth century, Russia entered a phase of internal crisis that in 1917 would culminate in revolution. Its causes were not so much economic as political and cultural. There were three main players in the political arena: the tsar, the peasantry (which, excluding the working class, its subdivision, made up some 80 per cent of the empire's population), and the intelligentsia.

The tsar was absolute and unlimited in his authority.

IVAN IV, KNOWN AS IVAN THE TERRIBLE (1530-84)

Grand prince of Moscow (1533—84) and first tsar of Russia (1547-84)

Ivan IV, grandson of Ivan III, was crowned tsar in 1547 after a long regency (1533-46). He embarked on wide- ranging reforms, including a centralized administration, church councils that systematized the church's affairs, and the first national assembly (1549). He also instituted reforms to limit the powers of the boyars. After conquering Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556), he engaged in an unsuccessful war to control Livonia, fighting against Sweden and Poland (1558-83). After the defeat and the suspected treason of several Russian boyars, Ivan formed an oprichnina, a territory separate from the rest of the state and under his personal control. With a large bodyguard, he withdrew into his own entourage and left Russia's management to others. At the same time, he instituted a reign of terror, executing thousands of boyars and ravaging the city of Novgorod. During the I 570s he married five wives in nine years, and, in a fit of rage, he murdered his son Ivan, his only viable heir, in 1581.

Effectively shutting out the population from participation in government, he was subject to neither constitutional restraints nor parliamentary institutions: he was above the law and the army, one of whose main tasks was maintaining internal order. Imperial Russia developed to a greater extent than any con­temporary country a powerful and ubiquitous security police. It was a crime to question the existing system or to organize for any purpose whatsoever without government permission.

BORIS GODUNOV (e. 1551-1605) Tsar of Russia (IS98-I60S)

After serving in the court of Ivan IV, Godunov was named guardian to Ivan's mentally and physically infirm son Fyodor 1, and became the virtual ruler of Russia as Fyodor's chief adviser from 1584. When Fyodor's young brother Dmitry died mysteriously in 1591, Godunov was suspected of having had him put to death. When Fyodor died without heirs in I $98, an assembly of clergy and gentry elected Godunov tsar. A capable ruler, he instituted many reforms, but continuing boyar opposition and a general famine (1601-3) eroded his popularity. A pretender known as the False Dmitry led an army into Russia, and on Boris's sudden death, resistance broke down. The country lapsed into the Time of Troubles (1606-13), a period of political crisis that lasted until Michael Romanov was elected tsar.

MICHAEL (1596-1645)

Tsar of Russia (1613-45)

and founder of the Romanov dynasty

A young nobleman elected as tsar after the chaotic Time of Troubles, Michael allowed his mother's relatives to direct the government early in his reign. They restored order to Russia and made peace with Sweden (1617) and Poland (1618). In 1619 his father, Philaret, released from captivity in Poland, returned to Russia and became co-ruler and Russian Orthodox patriarch of Moscow. Michael's father dominated the government, increasing contact with western Europe and strengthening central authority and serfdom. After his death in 1633, Michael's maternal relatives once again held sway.

PETER I, KNOWN AS PETER THE GREAT (1672-1725)

Tsar of Russia (1682-1725)

Peter reigned jointly (1682-96) with his half-brother Ivan V and alone from 1696. Interested in progressive influences from western Europe, he visited several countries there (1697-8). After returning to Russia, he introduced western technology, modernized the government and military system, and transferred the capital to the new city of St Petersburg (1703), He further increased the power of the monarchy at the expense of the nobfes and the Orthodox Church, Some of his reforms were implemented brutally, with considerable loss of life. Suspecting that his son, Alexis, was conspiring against him, he had Alexis tortured to death in 17!8. He pursued foreign policies to give Russia access to the Baltic and Black seas, engaging in war with the Ottoman empire (1695-96) and with Sweden in the Second Northern War (1700-21). His campaign against Persia (1722—3) secured for Russia the southern and western shores of the Caspian Sea.

In 1721 Peter was proclaimed emperor; his wife succeeded him as the empress Catherine I. For raising Russia to a recognized place among the great European powers, Peter is widely considered one of the outstanding rulers and reformers in Russian history, but he has also been decried by nationalists for discarding much of what was unique in Russian culture, and his legacy has been seen as a model for Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's brutal transformation of Russian life.

CATHERINE II, KNOWN AS CATHERINE THE GREAT (1729-96)

German-born empress of Russia (1762-96)

The daughter of an obscure German prince, Catherine {born Sophie Friederike Auguste) was chosen at the age of 14 to be the wife of the future Peter III. The marriage was a complete failure. Because her neurotic husband was incapable of ruling, the ambitious Catherine saw the possibility of eliminating him and governing Russia herself. After Peter became emperor in 1762, she conspired with her lover Grigory Orlov to force Peter to abdicate (he was murdered soon after) and have herself proclaimed empress. In her 34-year reign she led Russia into full participation in European political and cultural life. With her ministers she reorganized the administration and law of the Russian empire and extended Russian territory, adding Crimea and much of Poland. Though she had once intended to emancipate the serfs, she instead strengthened the system she had once condemned as inhuman.

Yet while tsarist Russia was absolutist, to maintain its status as a great power it promoted industrial development and higher education, which were inherently dynamic. The result was perpetual tension between government and society, especially its educated element, known as the intelligentsia, which was unalterably opposed to the status quo. Radical intellectuals tried in the 1860s and 1870s to stir the peasants and workers to rebellion. Having met with no response, they adopted methods of terror, which culminated in 1881 in the assassination of Alexander ii. The government reacted with repressive measures, which kept unrest at bay in the short term.

NICHOLAS I (1796-1855) Tsar of Russia (1825-55)

Nicholas, the son of Tsar Paul I, was trained as an army officer. !n 1825 he succeeded his brother Alexander I as emperor and suppressed the Decembrist revolt. His reign came to represent autocracy, militarism, and bureaucracy. To enforce his policies, he created such agencies as the Third Section (political police). In foreign policy, Nicholas quelled an uprising in Poland (1830-1) and aided Austria against a Hungarian uprising (1849). His designs on Constantinople led to war with Turkey (1853) and drew other European powers into the Crimean War. He was succeeded by his son Alexander II.

ALEXANDER II (1818-1881) Tsar of Russia (1855-81)

Alexander succeeded to the throne at the height of the Crimean War, which revealed Russia's backwardness on the world stage. In response, he undertook drastic reform, improving communications, government, and education, and, most importantly, emancipating the serfs (1861). His reforms reduced class privilege and fostered humanitarian progress and economic development. Though sometimes described as a liberal, Alexander was in reality a firm upholder of autocratic principles, and an assassination attempt in 1866 strengthened his commitment to conservatism. A period of repression after 1866 led to a resurgence of revolutionary terrorism, and in 1881 he was killed in a plot sponsored by the terrorist organization People's Will.

ALEXANDER Ml (1845-94) Tsar of Russia (1881-94)

Alexander assumed the throne after the assassination of his father, Alexander II. The internal reforms he instituted were designed to correct what he saw as the too-liberal tendencies of his father's reign. He thus opposed representative government and ardentiy supported Russian nationalism. His political ideal was a nation containing a single nationality, language, religion, and form of administration, and accordingly he instituted programmes such as the Russification of national minorities in the Russian empire and the persecution of non-Orthodox religious groups.

Growing discontent exploded in the Russian Revolution of 1905, an uprising that was instrumental in convincing Nicholas 11 to attempt the transformation of the Russian government into a constitutional monarchy. Despite concessions made by Ni­cholas to cede some of his authority (in Н906 his October Manifesto promised the country a legislative parliament), the prestige of the tsar was weakened further by the First World War and the humiliating defeats that the Russian army suffered at the hands of the Germans. On the home front, economic misman­agement led to food shortages - although Russia produced more than enough to feed itself - while the exceptionally severe winter of 1916-17 only added to the misery of the populace.

The I9!7 Revolution

The Russian Revolution of 1917 actually comprised two revo­lutions: the first, in February (March, New Style), overthrew

NICHOLAS П (1868-1918) Tsar of Russia (1894-1917)

Son of Alexander III, Nicholas received a military education and succeeded his father as tsar in 1894. He was an autocratic but indecisive ruler and was devoted to his wife, Alexandra, who strongly influenced his rule. His interest in Asia led to construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway and also helped cause the disastrous Russo-Japanese War ( 1904—5).

After the Russian Revolution of 1905, Nicholas agreed reluctantly to a representative Duma but restricted its powers, and made only token efforts to enact its measures. His prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, attempted reforms, but Nicholas, increasingly influenced by Alexandra and by the mystic Grigory Rasputin, opposed him; Stolypin was assassinated by a revolutionary in 1911, After Russia suffered setbacks in the First World War, Nicholas ousted the popular Grand Duke Nicholas as commander-in-chief of Russian forces and assumed command himself, at the bidding of Alexandra and Rasputin. His absence from Moscow and Alexandra's mismanagement of the government caused increasing unrest and culminated in the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Nicholas abdicated in March 1917 and was detained with his family by Georgy Y, Lvov's provisional government. Plans for the royai family to be sent to England were overruled by the local Bolsheviks {the majority wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party). Instead Nicholas and his family were sent to the city of Yekaterinburg, where they were executed in July 1918.

RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1905

Unsuccessful uprising in Russia against the tsarist regime

After several years of mounting discontent, a peaceful demonstration was crushed by Tsar Nicholas li's troops in the Bloody Sunday massacre of January 1905. General strikes followed in St Petersburg and other industrial cities. The revolt spread to non- Russian parts of the empire, including Poland, Finland, and Georgia. Anti-revolutionary groups, including the Black Hundreds, opposed the rebellion with violent attacks on socialists and pogroms against Jews.

By October 1905, general strikes had spread to all the large cities, and the workers' councils or soviets, often led by the Mensheviks (the minority wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party), became revolutionary governments. The strikes' magnitude convinced Nicholas II, advised by Sergey Witte, to issue the October Manifesto, promising an elected legislature. The concessions satisfied most moderates, though the more ardent revolutionaries refused to yield, and pockets of resistance in Poland, Georgia, and elsewhere were harshly suppressed as the regime restored its authority. While most of the revolutionary leaders, including Leon Trotsky, were arrested, the revolution forced the tsar to institute reforms such as a new constitution and an elected legislative body (Duma), though he failed to adequately implement various promised reforms.

tlie imperial government, and the second, in October (Novem­ber, New Style), placed the Bolsheviks in power, (Until 1918 Russia still used the Julian or "Old Style" calendar, dating the beginning of the year from December 25; in that year, the Gregorian or "New Style" calendar was adopted, as it had been by most other western countries, in many cases for more than 300 years. The adoption of the new calendar resulted in the loss of 13 days, so that February 1, 1918, became February 14.)

The February Revolution of 1917 was spontaneous, leader- less, and fuelled by deep resentment over the economic and social conditions that had prevailed in imperial Russia under Tsar Nicholas. Hardly a hand was raised in support of the imperial order, and with the defection of the military, the tsar could not survive. After Nicholas's abdication in March, most Russians rejoiced, but a political vacuum was created that needed immediate attention. A Provisional Government was formed and was to remain in office until a democratic parlia­ment, the Constituent Assembly, convened in January 1918. In practice, however, authority was from the outset exercised by the Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg) Soviet, or "Council", a body that claimed to represent the nation's workers and soldiers, but actually was convened and run by an executive committee of radical intellectuals nominated by the socialist parties. Similar soviets sprang up in other cities.

This dual power prevailed because the Provisional Govern­ment was undermined by war, economic collapse, and its own incompetence. The government seemingly spoke for the coun­try, but in reality it represented only the middle class; the soviets represented the workers and peasants. Moreover, being a temporary administration, the government postponed all hard decisions - what should be done about land seizures by the peasants, for example - for the Constituent Assembly.

VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN (1870-1924)

Founder of the Russian Communist Party, leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and architect and builder of the Soviet state

Growing up in a middle-class family, Vladimir llyich Ulyanov, as Lenin was born, was strongly influenced by his eldest brother, Aleksandr, who was hanged in 1887 for conspiring to assassinate the tsar. He studied law and became a Marxist in 1889 while practising law. He was arrested as a subversive in I89S and exiled to Siberia, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya, They lived in western Europe after 1900, At the 1903 meeting in London of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party, Lenin emerged as the leader of the Bolshevik faction. In several revolutionary newspapers that he founded and edited, he put forth his theory of the party as the vanguard of the proletariat, a centralized body organized around a core of professional revolutionaries; his ideas, later known as Leninism, would be joined with Karl Marx's theories to form Marxism-Leninism, which became the communist worldview.

With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Lenin returned to Russia, but he resumed his exile in 1907 and continued his energetic agitation for the next ten years. He saw the First World War as an opportunity to turn a war of nations into a war of classes, and he returned to Russia with the Russian Revolution of 1917 to lead the Bolshevik coup that overthrew the provisional government of Aleksandr Kerensky.

As revolutionary leader of the Soviet state, Lenin

signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany (1918) and repulsed counter-revolutionary threats in the Russian Civil War. It was largely because of his inspired leadership that the Soviet government managed to survive. He guided the formation and strategy of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, and ensured there were sufficient resources to sustain it. But above all it was his political leadership that saved the day for the Soviets. By proclaiming the right of the peoples to self- determination, including the right to secession, he won the active sympathy, or at least the benevolent neutrality, of the non-Russian nationalities within Russia. Indeed, his perceptive, skilful policy on the national question enabled Soviet Russia to avoid total disintegration and to remain a huge multinational state. By making the industrial workers the new privileged class, favoured in the distribution of rations, housing, and political power, he retained the loyalty of the proletariat. His championing of the peasants' demand that they take all the land from the gentry, church, and crown without compensation won over the peasants, without whose support the government could not survive.

In ill health from 1922, Lenin died of a stroke in 1924.

Another fatal mistake was its continued prosecution of the war.

By this time Russia's complex political make-up had crystal­lized into two main parties, both offshoots of the Social Demo­crats (the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party). This party had followed the classic doctrines of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, according to which the development of capit­alism inevitably created a radicalized proletariat that would in time stage a revolution and introduce socialism. The Menshe- viks, the more moderate socialists, held that Russia had to pass through its capitalist phase before the socialist one could appear. The Bolsheviks wanted the transition period to be short. Their firebrand leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870­1924), was a fanatical revolutionary who organized a relatively small but totally devoted and highly disciplined party bent on seizing power, Lenin bad the advantage that, from his base during the First World War in neutral Switzerland, where he had agitated for Russia's defeat, he had attracted the attention of the Germans, who shrewdly supplied him with the money necessary to organize his party and build up a press. A

COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION (CPSU)

Major political party of Russia and the Soviet Union from the Russian Revolution of 1917 to 1991

The CPSU arose from the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party. Also known as the All-Union Communist Party (1925-52), from Н9I8 to the 1980s the CPSU was a monolithic, monopolistic ruling party that dominated the Soviet Union's political, economic, social, and cultural life. The constitution and other legal documents that supposedly regulated the government were actually subordinate to the CPSU, which also dominated communist parties abroad. Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to reform the country's economy and political structure weakened the party, and in 1990 it voted to surrender its constitutionally guaranteed monopoly of power. The Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991 marked the party's formal demise.

third grouping that struggled for power in this period was formed by the Socialist Revolutionaries, the main agrarian party.

Lenin quickly sensed the weakness of the Provisional Govern­ment and the inherent instability of "dual power". He returned to Russia in April 1917, hoping to launch a revolution imme­diately. The majority of his followers, however, doubted it would succeed: they were vindicated in July 1917 when a putsch led by the Bolsheviks badly misfired. They were near success when the government released information on Lenin's dealings with the Germans, which caused angry troops to disperse the rebels and end the uprising. Abandoning his followers, Lenin again left the country, seeking refuge in Finland.

The Bolsheviks remained a minority in the soviets until autumn, by which time the Provisional Government had lost popular support, and many were rallying to Lenin's battle cry, "All power to the soviets!" Increasing war-weariness and the breakdown of the economy overtaxed the patience of the workers, peasants, and soldiers, who demanded immediate and fundamental change. Leon Trotsky, a recent convert to Bolshevism, became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, the country's most important, and immediately turned it into a vehicle for the seizure of power. The result was the so-called October Revolution (November), a classic coup d'йtat carried out by a small group of conspirators - in complete contrast to the spontaneous events of February 1917. The Bolshevik Central Committee made the decision to seize power at a clandestine meeting held on the night of October 10 (October 23). In the meantime they built up an armed force to carry out the coup. Since the Bolsheviks were the only organization with an independent armed force, they took over the Military Revolutionary Committee and used it to topple the govern­ment. During the night of October 24-5, Bolshevik Red

LEON TROTSKY (1879-1940) Russian communist leader

Born to Russian Jewish farmers, Lev Davidovich Bronshtein joined an underground socialist group and was exiled to Siberia in 1898 for his revolutionary activities. He escaped in 1902 with a forged passport using the name Trotsky. He fled to London, where he met Vladimir Lenin. In 1903, when the Russian Social- Democratic Workers' Party split, Trotsky became a Menshevik, allying himself with Lenin's opponents. He returned to St Petersburg to help lead the Russian Revolution of 1905. Arrested and again exiled to Siberia, he wrote Resu/ts and Prospects, setting forth his theory of "permanent revolution". He escaped to Vienna in 1907, worked as a journalist in the Balkan Wars (I9S2-I3), and moved around Europe and the United States until the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought him back to St Petersburg (then Petrograd). There he became a Bolshevik and was elected leader of the workers' soviet.

Trotsky played a major role in the overthrow of the provisional government and the establishment of Lenin's communist regime. As commissar of war (1918-24} Trotsky rebuilt and brilliantly commanded the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. Although favoured by Lenin to succeed him, Trotsky lost support after Lenin's death (1924) and was forced out of power by Joseph Stalin. After a campaign of denunciation, he was expelled from the Politburo (1926) and Central Committee (1927), then banished from Russia (1929), He lived in Turkey and France, where he wrote his

memoirs and a history of the revolution. Under Soviet pressure, he was forced to move around Europe, and he eventually found asylum in 1936 in Mexico, where, having been falsely accused in the purge trials as the chief conspirator against Stalin, he was murdered in 1940 by a Spanish communist.

Guards peacefully occupied strategic points in Petrograd. On the morning of October 25, Lenin, re-emerging from his hideaway, issued a declaration in the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee that the Provisional Government had been overthrown and all power had been assumed by the soviets. The declaration referred neither to the Bolsheviks nor to socialism - unsurprisingly, the inhabitants of the city had no inkling of how profound a change had occurred.

Although Lenin and Trotsky had carried out the October coup in the name of soviets, they intended from the beginning to concentrate all power in the hands of the ruling organs of the Bolshevik Party. The resulting novel arrangement - the prototype of all totalitarian regimes - vested actual sovereignty in the hands of a private organization, called "the Party", which, however, exercised it indirectly, through state institu­tions. Bolsheviks held leading posts in the state: no decisions could be taken and no laws passed without their consent. The legislative organs, centred in the soviets, merely rubber- stamped Bolshevik orders. The state apparatus was headed by a cabinet called the Council of People's Commissars, chaired by Lenin, all of whose members were drawn from the elite of the party. This governmental structure was to last until the convocation of an elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918. However, when it became clear that the

Bolsheviks did not hold a majority, Lenin disbanded the assembly. If the October Revolution was accepted as demo­cratic - supported by a majority of the population - then it ceased to be so soon after this event.

Lenin's hand was strengthened by his conclusion of the Brest- Litovsk armistice (December 1917) and treaty (March 1918) with the Central Powers. Though the terms were harsh - Russia lost territories inhabited by more than one-quarter of its citizens and providing more than one-third of its grain harvest - the treaty saved the Bolshevik regime: for the next eight months it received critical diplomatic and financial support from Ger­many that enabled it to beat back political opponents.

In March 1918 the Bolshevik Party was renamed the Rus­sian Communist Party in order to distinguish it from Social Democratic parties in Russia and Europe, and to separate the followers of Lenin from those affiliated with the non- revolutionary Socialist International. The party was directed by a Central Committee. To streamline work, from March 1919 onwards its management was entrusted to the Secretar­iat, the Organizational Bureau (Orgburo), and the Political Bureau (Politburo). The Secretariat and Orgburo dealt largely with personnel matters, while the Politburo combined legis­lative and executive powers.

Meanwhile, after the country's withdrawal from the First World War, only part of Russia - Moscow, Petrograd, and much of the industrial heartland - was under Bolshevik con­trol. Ukraine slipped under German influence, the Mensheviks held sway in the Caucasus, and much of the countryside belonged to the Socialist Revolutionaries. Given the Bolshevik desire to dominate the whole of Russia and the rest of the former tsarist empire, civil war was inevitable.

The Civil War and the Creation of the USSR

From 1918 to 1920 Russia was torn by a civil war that cost millions of lives and untold destruction. In the context of the Russian Revolution, the term "civil war" had two distinct meanings. It described the repressive measures applied by the Bolsheviks against those who refused to recognize their power seizure and defied their decrees, such as peasants who refused to surrender grain. It also defined the military conflict between the communists' Red Army and various "White" armies formed on the periphery of Soviet Russia for the purpose of overthrowing the communists. Both wars went on concur­rently. The struggle against domestic opponents was to prove even more costly in human lives and more threatening to the new regime than the efforts of the Whites.

In the summer of 1918 the fortunes of the Bolsheviks were at their lowest ebb. Not only had they to contend with rebellious peasants and hostile White armies supported by the Allies, but they lost such support as they had once had among the workers: in elections to the soviets held in the spring of 1918 they were everywhere defeated by rival socialist parties. They dealt with the problem by expelling the Socialist Revo­lutionaries and Mensheviks from the soviets and forcing re- elections until they obtained the desired majorities.

The Bolsheviks' growing unpopularity moved them to resort to unbridled terror. The Cheka (a forerunner of the notorious KGB), or political police, was formed in December 1917 to protect communist power. By the end of the civil war the Cheka had become a powerful force. In the first half of 1918 it carried out not a few summary executions. In July, on Lenin's orders, the ex-tsar and his entire family were murdered in the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg (called Sverdlovsk between 1924 and 1991), where they had been held prisoner. The formal "Red Terror" began in September 1918, The pretext was a nearly successful attempt on the life of Lenin by a Socialist Revolutionary, Fannie Kaplan. As soon as he recovered from what could have been fatal wounds, Lenin ordered the Cheka to carry out mass executions of suspected opponents. Thousands of political prisoners held without charges were shot.

The civil war in the military sense was fought on several fronts. The first "White force, known as the Volunteer Army, formed in the winter of 1917-18 in the southern areas inhabited by the Cossacks. Another army was created in western Siberia; several smaller White armies came into being in the north-west, the north, and the far east. These anti- communist armies were often led by former imperial officers, and all were in varying measures supported by the United Kingdom with money and war materiel. There were also the anti-communist "Greens" and the anarchists, who were strongest in Ukraine; the anarchists' most talented leader was Nestor Makhno. The Allied intervention was initially inspired by the desire to reactivate the Eastern Front of the First World War, but after the Armistice it lost its clear purpose, and it was continued on the insistence of Winston Churchill, who saw in Bolshevism a permanent threat to democracy and world peace. Neither the American nor the French contingents on Russian soil engaged in combat, and they were withdrawn after the Armistice. The British stayed on until the autumn of 1919, doing occasional fighting but mainly providing aid to the White armies.

The Red Army was formed in February 1918, and Trotsky became its leader. He was to reveal great leadership and military skill, fashioning a rabble into a formidable fighting force. The Bolsheviks had been slow in forming a professional army, largely because they feared the prospect of arming peasants, whom they viewed as class enemies. At first they relied mainly on partisans and Latvian volunteers. In the autumn of 1918, however, they decided to proceed with the formation of a regular army manned by conscripts. Command over the troops and the formulation of strategic decisions was entrusted to professional officers of the ex-tsarist army, some 75,000 of whom were drafted. To prevent defections and sabotage, the orders of these officers were subject to approval by Bolshevik political commissars assigned to them. Officer families were treated as hostages. At the height of the civil war the Red Army numbered almost 5 million people.

The decisive battles of the civil war took place in the summer and autumn of 1919. Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, leader of the White forces in Siberia, launched in the spring a drive on Moscow and approached the shores of the Volga, when he was stopped by a numerically superior Red force and thrown back. His army disintegrated later in the year, and he himself was captured and shot without trial, possibly on Lenin's orders (February 1920). Of all the White generals, Anton Denikin came closest to victory. In October 1919 his Volunteer Army, augmented by conscripts, reached Oryol, 150 miles (250 kilo­metres) south of Moscow. In their advance, Cossacks in White service carried out frightful pogroms in Ukraine in which an estimated 100,000 Jews lost their lives. Denikin's lines were stretched thin, and he lacked reserves. He advanced recklessly because he had been told by Britain that unless he took Moscow, the country's new capital, before the onset of winter, he would receive no more assistance. In battles waged in October and November the Red Army decisively crushed the Whites and sent them fleeing pell-mell to the ports of the

JOSEPH STALIN (1879-1953) Soviet politician and dictator

The son of a Georgian cobbler, losif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili studied at a seminary but was expelled for revolutionary activity in 1899. He joined an underground revolutionary group and sided with the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party in 1903. A disciple of Vladimir Lenin, he served in minor party posts and was appointed to the first Bolshevik Centra! Committee (1912). He remained active behind the scenes and in exile (19I3-S7) until the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought the Bolsheviks to power. Having adopted the name Stalin {from Russian stal, "steel"), he served as commissar for nationalities and for state control in the Bolshevik government (1917-23). He was a member of the Politburo, and in 1922 he became secretary-general of the party's Central Committee.

After Lenin's death (1924), Stalin overcame his rivals, including Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinovyev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolay Bukharin, and Aleksey Rykov, and took control of Soviet politics. In 1928 he inaugurated the five-year plans that radically altered Soviet economic and social structures and resulted in the deaths of many millions. In the 1930s he contrived to eliminate threats to his power through the purge trials and through widespread secret executions and persecution.

On the eve of the Second World War Stalin signed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (1939); he attacked Finland, and annexed parts of eastern Europe to

strengthen his western frontiers. When Germany invaded Russia (1941), Stalin took control of military operations. He allied Russia with Britain and the United States; at the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences he demonstrated his negotiating skill. After the war he consolidated Soviet power in eastern Europe and built up the Soviet Union as a world military power. He continued his repressive political measures to control interna! dissent; increasingly paranoid, at the time of his death he was preparing to mount another purge after the so-called Doctors' Plot.

Noted for bringing the Soviet Union into world prominence, at terrible cost to his own people, Stalin left a legacy of repression and fear as well as industrial and military power. In 1956 he and his personality cult were denounced by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev,

Black Sea. By mid-1920 the Reds had consolidated their hold on the country.

In part the Bolshevik triumph can be attributed to superior organization and better understanding of the political di­mensions of the civil war. But in the ultimate analysis it was due mainly to the insurmountable advantages that they enjoyed. The Reds controlled the heartland of what had been the Russian empire, inhabited by some 70 million Russians, while their opponents operated on the periphery, where the population was sparser and ethnically mixed. In nearly all engagements the Red Army enjoyed great pre­ponderance in numbers. It also enjoyed superiority in milit­ary hardware: since most of Russia's defence industries and arsenals were located in the centre of die country, it inherited vast stores of weapons and ammunition from the tsarist army. The Whites, by contrast, were almost wholly dependent on foreign aid.

One of the most significant results of the Bolshevik victory was the reintegration of those borderland areas inhabited by non-Russians that had been separated from Russia at the time of the 1917 Revolution. Although the Bolsheviks ori­ginally had encouraged this separatist process, advancing the slogan of "national self-determination", once in power, they moved decisively to reconquer these territories - realizing that Ukraine, for example, was vital for the economic viab­ility of Russia. Except for those regions that enjoyed strong British or French backing - Finland, the Baltic area, and Poland - by 1921 the Red Army had occupied all the independent republics of the defunct Russian empire, includ­ing Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Lenin's original na­tionality policy had been based on the assumption that nations would choose to stay in a close relationship w^rith Russia, but this proved not to be the case. Many republics wanted to be independent in order to develop their own brand of national communism. The comrade who imposed Russian dominance was, ironically, Joseph Stalin, a Geor­gian. As commissar for nationalities, he sought to ensure that Moscow rule prevailed.

In 1922 Bolshevik-controlled Moscow proclaimed the crea­tion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, composed of Russia, Belorussia (now Belarus), Ukraine, and the Transcau- casian Federation. The first USSR constitution was formally adopted in January 1924. In 1925 the All-Union Communist Party, later the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), was formed. Nominally a league of equals, the USSR was from the beginning dominated by Russians. The federated state structure was a facade to conceal the dictatorship of the Russian Communist Party, the true locus of power.

For Lenin and his associates Russia itself, however, was no more than a springboard from which to launch a global civil war. They feared that if the revolution remained confined to backward, agrarian Russia it would perish under the com­bined onslaught of the foreign "bourgeoisie" and the domestic peasantry. In their view it was essential to carry the revolution abroad to the industrial countries of the West, whose workers, they believed, were anxious to stop fighting one another and topple their exploiters. To organize and finance this effort, they formed in March 1919 the Third International, or "Com­intern". This organization was a branch of the Russian Com­munist Party, and it decreed that communist parties abroad were to be accountable to Moscow and not to their domestic constituencies.

Hoping to exploit the political and economic turmoil af­flicting central Europe after the Allied victory, Moscow sent agents with ample supplies of money to stir up unrest. By the early 1920s the Comintern succeeded in forming in most European countries, especially France and Italy, Communist Party affiliates that it used as pressure groups. The idea of world revolution, however, had to be postponed indefinitely, which compelled the Bolshevik leadership to concentrate on building in Russia an isolated communist state. Ironically, the methods of government that they devised, centred on the one- party monopoly and known since the early 1920s as "total­itarian", were emulated not by elements sympathetic to com­munism but by nationalistic radicals hostile to it, such as Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany.

Creating a Communist Economy

While the Bolsheviks were fighting the Russian Civil War, they had initiated a series of unprecedented measures in­tended to destroy all vestiges of private property and inau­gurate a centralized communist economy. These measures, which in 1921 received the name "War Communism", had two primary objectives. One was political: as Marxists, the Bolsheviks believed that private ownership of the means of production provided the basis of political power. By nation­alizing it, they undermined the opposition. They further acted in the conviction that a centralized and planned economy was inherently more efficient than a capitalist one, and would in no time turn Soviet Russia into rhe most productive country in the world.

War Communism entailed four sets of measures: (1) the nationalization of all the means of production and transporta­tion, (2) the abolition of money and its replacement by barter tokens, as well as by free goods and services, (3) the imposition on the national economy of a single plan, and (4) the intro­duction of compulsory labour. In 1918 all but the smallest industrial enterprises were nationalized. Agricultural land, the main source of national wealth, was for the time being left at the disposal of peasant communes, with the understanding that sooner or later it would be collectivized. Private owner­ship of urban real estate was abolished, as was inheritance. The state (in effect, the Bolshevik Party} became the sole owner of the country's productive and income-yielding assets. Man­agement of this wealth was entrusted to a gigantic bureaucratic organization, the Supreme Council of the National Economy, whose purpose was to allocate human and material resources in the most rational manner.

Money was effectively destroyed by the unrestrained print­ing of banknotes, which led, as intended, to an extraordinary inflation: by January 1923 prices in Soviet Russia, compared with 1913, had increased 100 million times. Ordinary citizens, along with the rich, lost their life savings. Barter and the issuance by government agencies of free goods replaced nor­mal commercial operations. Private trade, whether wholesale or retail, was forbidden. All adult citizens were required to work wherever ordered. The independence of trade unions was abolished, and the right to strike against the nationalized enterprises outlawed.

The policies of War Communism brought about an unpre­cedented economic crisis. In 1920, when the civil war was for all practical purposes over, industrial production was about one-quarter of what it had been in 1913, and the number of employed workers had fallen by roughly one-half. Productiv­ity per worker was one-quarter of the 1913 level. Most painful was the decline in the production of grain. Compelled to surrender all the grain that government officials decided they did not require for personal consumption, fodder, or seed, and forbidden to sell on the open market, the peasants kept reducing their sown acreage. Such reductions, combined with declining yields caused by shortages of fertilizer and draught animals, led to a steady drop in grain production: in 1920 the cereal harvest in central Russia yielded only two-thirds of the '1913 crop. In the cities bread rations w^rere reduced to one or two ounces a day.

It required only one of the periodic droughts that custom­arily afflict Russia to bring about a massive famine: this happened in early 1921. There was a catastrophic plunge in foodstuff production in the areas that traditionally supplied the bulk of grains. At the height of the famine some 35 million people suffered from severe malnutrition. The hungry resorted to eating grass and, occasionally, to cannibalism. The losses would have been still more disastrous were it not for assistance provided by the American Relief Administration, headed by the future US president Herbert Hoover, which, with moneys from the US Congress and voluntary contributions, fed most of the starving. Even so, the human casualties of the 1921 famine are estimated at 5.1 million.

The New Economic Policy, 1921-8

The economic policies of War Communism led inevitably to clashes with the labour force, which had understood socialism as industrial self-management. With the threat and reality of hunger ever present, forced requisitioning was resisted and strikes became endemic, especially in Petrograd. This general situation, coupled with revolt in Tambov province in 1920, forced Lenin to change his War Communism policy - while he and the Bolshevik leadership were willing to slaughter the mutinous sailors of the Kronshtadt naval base in March 1921, they could not survive if the countryside turned against them, A tactical retreat from enforced socialism was therefore deemed necessary, a move that was deeply unpopular with the Bolshevik rank and file. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was inaugurated at the 10th Party Congress, one of the periodic gatherings of party delegates that determined major policies, in March 1921. The key sectors of the economy - heavy industry, communications, and transport - remained in state hands, but light and consumer-goods industries were open to the entrepreneur.

Generally speaking, the NEP had the intended economic results. The peasants, now allowed to control their prop­erty, began to work their holdings profitably. Small traders began to take over the transfer of rural food products to the towns. In the towns small consumer-goods producers began to turn out the products for which the peasants now had an incentive to pay. Overall, the entire country soon began to return to economic normality. Precise figures are still incompletely researched (over the 1920s they are defective mainly for various intrinsic reasons; in the 1930s and later, because of massive falsification), but the speed and extent of the recovery were phenomenal. Roughly speaking, the 1922 crop was already up to three- quarters of normal. Industry, it is true, only reached a quarter of its pre-war production, and most of this was in light industry, such as textiles.

Yet over the whole NEP period the disproportion between agricultural and industrial progress was seen as a major problem, producing what Trotsky described at the 12th Party Congress in 1923 as the "scissors crisis", from the shape of the graph of (comparatively) high industrial and low agricultural prices. The original "scissors crisis" was a short-lived phe­nomenon, due mainly to the government setting prices of agricultural goods too low, and it disappeared when this was remedied. But the party was still faced with the challenge of building up heavy industry. This could be funded, for the most part, only by "primitive socialist accumulation" of resources from the peasant sector, whether by fiscal or by other means.

Thus the NEP was in general regarded as no more than a temporary retreat that would have to be made good as soon as the economy had to some degree recovered. In the Communist Party as a whole the policy was accepted only with reluctance, out of perceived necessity, and by the end of the decade the economic debate would be won by those who favoured rapid industrialization and forced collectivization.

Culture and Ideology

Determined not only to change drastically the political and economic order but also to create a new type of human being, the Bolsheviks attached great importance to every aspect of culture, especially education and religion.

The Bolsheviks suppressed political dissidence by shutting down hostile newspapers and subjecting all publications to preventive censorship. In 1922 they set up a central censorship office, known for short as Glavlit, with final authority over printed materials as well as the performing arts. The 1920s also saw the formation of the Agitation and Propaganda Section of the Central Committee Secretariat, known as agit­prop for short. Affiliated to the Communist Party, this depart­ment aimed to determine the content of all official information, overseeing political education in schools, watch­ing over all forms of mass communication, and mobilizing public support for party programmes. Many artists - writers, dramatists, film-makers - were engaged to this end, and every unit of the Communist Party, from the republic to the local- party level, had an agitprop section; at the local level, agitators (party-trained spokespeople) were the chief points of contact between the party and the public.

In literary and artistic matters, however, as long as Lenin was alive, the regime showed a degree of tolerance absent from other spheres of Soviet life. Aware that the overwhelming majority of intellectuals rejected them, and yet wishing to win them over, the Bolsheviks permitted writers and artists creative freedom as long as they did not engage in overt political dissent. Trotsky popularized the term "fellow travel­lers" for writers who, without joining the communists, were willing to cooperate with them and follow their rules. As a result, the early 1920s saw a degree of innovation in literature and the arts that contrasted vividly with the regime's political rigidity. Among the few writers and artists who joined the Bolsheviks were the Futurists, led by the poet Vladimir Maya- kovsky, who closely followed the models set by their Italian counterparts, and the "constructivists", Russian analogues of the German Bauhaus group. In the theatre and cinema, ex­periments in staging and montage, greatly influenced by Max Reinhardt and D. W. Griffith, were in vogue. Even so, many of Russia's best writers and artists, finding conditions at home insufferable, chose to emigrate. Others withdrew into their private world and gradually ceased to publish or exhibit.

To destroy what they considered the "elitist" character of Russia's educational system, the communists carried out re­volutionary changes in its structure and curriculum. All schools, from the lowest to the highest, were nationalized and placed in the charge of the Commissariat of Enlight­enment. Teachers lost the authority to enforce discipline in the classroom. Open admission to institutions of higher learn­ing was introduced to assure that anyone who desired, regard­less of qualifications, could enrol. Tenure for university professors was abolished, and the universities lost their tradi­tional right of self-government. Fields of study deemed poten­tially subversive were dropped in favour of courses offering ideological indoctrination. These reforms thoroughly disor­ganized the educational system, and in the early 1920s many of them were quietly dropped. Party controls, however, re­mained in place and in the following decade were used by Stalin to impose complete conformity.

The Bolsheviks, in common with other socialists, regarded religious belief as gross superstition, and they were deter­mined to eliminate it by a combination of repression, ridicule, and scientific enlightenment. A decree issued on January 20, 1918 (February 2), formally separated church from state, but it went far beyond its declared purpose by prohibiting religious bodies from engaging in instruction and from collecting dues from their members. Since the state nationa­lized all church property, the clergy were left destitute. In the spring and summer of 1922 numerous incidents of resistance occurred, in consequence of which priests were arrested and numerous believers killed. On Lenin's orders show trials were staged in Moscow, Petrograd, and other cities, in which some priests were sentenced to death and prison terms. A splinter "Living Church", composed of renegade priests and operat­ing under instructions from the Cheka, was created to serve the interests of the state.

Lenin concentrated on the Orthodox establishment because of its traditional links with the monarchy and its hold on the Russian population. But he did not spare the other faiths. A trial of Catholic priests resulted in death sentences and the closure of churches. Synagogues were also desecrated, and Jewish holidays subjected to public derision. Muslim religious institutions suffered the least because of Lenin's fear of ali­enating the colonial peoples of the Middle East, on whose support he counted against the western imperial powers.

The Stalin Era

The first phase of Bolshevik power came to an end with the death of Lenin in January 1924. Lenin's partial, then total, disablement had provided a transitional period for a party leadership to emerge and for policies to be argued. But the leaders on to whom Lenin's heritage devolved were divided. Personal ambition and politico-ideological disagreement re­sulted in a series of factional fights that constituted the political history of the newly formed USSR over the next six years. The major division was between those who thought that the Russian Revolution could not survive on its own and that therefore the main effort should be in supporting re­volution abroad, and those, Stalin most prominent among them, who now proclaimed the slogan "Socialism in One Country".

On the face of it, Trotsky was the natural heir to Lenin, since it was Trotsky who had organized the October 1917 coup and managed the Red Army in the Civil War. A superb orator and lively writer, he had an international reputation. His chances of succeeding Lenin, however, were more apparent than real. Trotsky had joined the Bolshevik party late (August 1917); he thus never belonged to its "Old Guard". He was personally unpopular for his arrogance and unwillingness to work as a member of a team. His Jewishness was no asset in a country in which Jews were widely blamed for the devastations wrought by communism. Last but not least, bored by the routine of paperwork, he was a poor administrator.

Although far less known, Stalin was much better positioned to succeed Lenin. Intellectually unprepossessing, a dull speaker and lacklustre writer, he operated behind the scenes. Having realized early that the centralized system of government that Lenin had created vested extraordinary power in the party machine, Stalin avoided the spotlight and instead concentrated on building up cadres loyal to him. By 1922 he was in a unique position to manipulate policies to his own ends by virtue of the fact that he alone belonged to both the Politburo, which set policy, and the Secretariat, which managed personnel. To thwart Trotsky he entered into alliances that dominated the Politburo and isolated their common rival. At the time of the 15th Party Congress in 1927, Trotsky and his faction were expelled from the party; many Trotskyites were exiled to Siberia or Central Asia, among them Trotsky himself.

Collectivization

Stalin's position as secretary general of the party's Central Committee, from 1922 until his death, provided the power base for his dictatorship. Having achieved a majority in the Politburo, and despite further power struggles - the fear of political rivals was an insecurity that was to dog him through­out his life - Stalin could now turn to the wider struggle, his mission to put socialism into tangible effect. In 1928 he thus abandoned Lenin's quasi-capitalist New Economic Policy in favour of headlong state-organized industrialization under a succession of five-year plans, supported by a socialized agri­culture. This was, in effect, a new Russian revolution more devastating in its effects than those of 1917.

The burden fell most heavily on the peasantry, since Stalin's first concern was to persuade them to sell their grain surplus and feed the cities. With little economic knowledge and unreliable statistics, the party was suspicious of the market mechanism and moreover believed that the peasantry was divided into classes with different and opposed interests. The rich "kulaks", it was held, were implacable enemies of socialism. The "middle peas­ants", constituting the great majority, vacillated but could be brought to the proletarian side. And the "poor peasants", together with the "village proletarians", were reliable allies.

Although this idea of a rich exploiting kulak class was false, policies towards kulaks became harsher. During 1929 many fines were imposed, and dispossessions and even deportations took place. By the end of the year the official policy became "the liquidation of the kulak as a class". Over the following three years, many were arrested en masse, shot, exiled, or absorbed into the rapidly expanding network of Stalinist concentration camps and worked to death under atrocious conditions.

Convinced that only collectivization would make grain available to the authorities, Stalin compelled some 25 million rustic households to amalgamate into kolkhozes, collective or state farms, within a few years. Large grain quotas and crippling fines were imposed on the individual peasants. From mid-1929 decisions on the extent and speed of pro­posed collectivization were changed almost monthly, becom­ing ever more extreme. The First Five-Year Plan as approved in April-May 1929 envisaged 5 million peasant households collectivized by 1932-3; this figure was doubled by Novem­ber and doubled again during December. By the turn of the year it was decreed that collectivization should be completed in Ukraine by the autumn of 1930 and in the other main grain areas by the spring of 1931. One of the most destruc­tive effects of collectivization was in Kazakhstan, where a nomad herding population was forced, largely on ideological grounds, into permanent settlements, for which no economic basis existed. About one-quarter of a million managed to escape over the Chinese border. But, of roughly 4 million Kazakhs, more than a million, possibly more, perished. Elsewhere, resistance was met with attacks by troops and OGPU (political police} units.

The immediate result of the collectivization measures was a catastrophic decline in agricultural output across the country as a whole. Collectivization also imposed great hardship on the peasants, partly because they were left with no surplus on which to live, and partly because of their mass slaughter of farm animals to prevent their livestock being taken by the kolkhoz. Official figures given in 1934 showed a loss of 26.6 million head of cattle (42.6 percent of the country's total) and 63.4 million sheep (65.1 per cent of the total), and this is probably an understatement of the facts.

The government's reaction to the decline in output was to base its requirements for delivery of grain from the kolkhozes not on actual production but rather on what became the basis of Soviet agricultural statistics until 1953 - the "biological yield". This was based on the estimated size of the crop in the fields before harvesting; it was typically more than 40 per cent higher than the reality. And in 1932 even this tenuous link to the facts failed: the figure was distorted by merely multiplying acreage by optimum yield. The grain requisitions made on this basis were ruthlessly enforced by activist squads. Such action left the peasant with a notional but non-existent surplus. As a result, over the winter of 1932­3, a major famine swept the grain-growing areas. Some 4 to 5 million people died in Ukraine, and another 2 to 3 million in the North Caucasus and the lower Volga area. Both the "dekulakization" terror of 1930-2 and the terror-famine of 1932-3 were particularly deadly in Ukraine. During this period about 1.7 million tons (1.5 million metric tons) of grain were exported, enough to have provided some two pounds (one kilogram) a head to 15 million people over three months. There is no doubt that the party leadership knew exactly what was happening and used famine as a means of terror, and revenge, against the peasantry.

Industrialization

Crash industrialization was imposed at the same time as agricultural collectivization, since Stalin had convincingly argued that a slow socialization was impossible. From 1928 to 1929 he began to implement a programme of faster in­dustrialization - in part to sharpen the class struggle with the errant elements of the peasantry.

To this effect a planned economy was to be introduced with, as its first task, the direction of all possible resources into intensive industrialization. The First Five-Year Plan had not been finalized by the time it was announced in April-May 1929, though it had been expected to come into operation six months earlier. In its initial form it prescribed goals for 50 industries and for agriculture, and provided some relation between resources and possibilities, but over the period that followed it was treated mainly as a set of figures to be scaled upward. The industrial growth rate originally laid down was 18-20 per cent (in fact, this had already been achieved, at least on paper). Later in the year Stalin insisted on nearly doubling this rate. The plan was thereafter a permanent feature of Soviet life: the First Five-Year Plan was followed by a series of others. The plan was both the basis of a set of real governmental and economic actions and a concept - organizational, ideological, inspirational, and, it might almost be said, transcendental.

Understanding of the economic side of the industrialization drive of the 1930s was long confused by two factors. The first was the claim by the communists that they were implementing a rational and fulfillable plan. The second, which came later, was the claim that they had in fact secured unprecedented increases in production.

Part of Stalin's industrialization scheme was the movement of people from the country to the towns. Between 1929 and 1932 some 12,5 million new hands were reported to have entered urban work, 8.5 million of them from the countryside (though it was ruled that kulaks should not be given jobs in the factories). These are striking figures, though they did not change the USSR into an urbanized country in the western sense. Even in 1940 just over two-thirds of the population were classified as rural and just under one-third as urban. It was not until the early 1960s that the population became equally urban and rural.

At the end of 1932 it was announced that the First Five-Year Plan had been successfully completed. In fact none of the targets had been reached, or even approached. Extravagant claims were made and continued to be issued until the late 1980s. It was only then revealed by Soviet economists that the true rate of growth in production over the period (including that of the Second Five-Year Plan, slightly less strongly stres­sing heavy industry, which now followed) was only about 3.5 per cent per annum, about the same as that of Germany over the same span of time. Nevertheless, during this period a number of important industrial enterprises were completed, though there was much waste as well. Some undertakings were ill-considered: the Baltic-White Sea Canal, supposedly com­pleted in 1933, employed some 200,000-300,000 forced labourers but proved almost useless. On the other hand, the great Dneproges dam was a generally successful hydroelectric project on the largest scale. The same can be said of the Magnitogorsk foundries and other great factories. The char­acteristic fault was "giantism", the party's inclination to build on the largest and most ostentatious scale. One result was that there were continual organizational problems. More crucial was that the main concern was that production figures must always be at, or beyond, the limits of capacity, so that main­tenance and infrastructure were neglected, with deleterious long-term results.

Moreover, even if the crash programmes had been intrinsi­cally sound, the party had not had time to prepare adequate technical and managerial staff or to educate the new industrial proletariat. And few genuine economic incentives were avail­able: in 1933 workers' real wages were about one-tenth of what they had been in 1926-7. Hence, everything had to be handled on the basis of myth and coercion rather than through rationality and cooperation. It is impossible to estimate such intangibles as the level of genuine enthusiasm among the Komsomols (the young members of the Communist Party} sent into the industrial plants or how long such enthusiasm lasted. But there was certainly an important element of genuine enthusiasts, and the remainder were at least obliged to behave as such.

From October 1930 a series of regressive measures were introduced into labour relations: a decree was issued forbid­ding the free movement of labour, unemployment relief was abolished on the grounds that there was "no more unemploy­ment", and a single day's unauthorized absence from work became punishable by instant dismissal. Punitive measures against negligence were announced, followed by a decree holding workers responsible for damage done to instruments or materials. On August 7, 1932, the death penalty was introduced for theft of state or collective property; this law was immediately applied on a large scale. Finally, on Decem­ber 27,1932, came the reintroduction of the internal passport, which had been denounced by Lenin as one of the worst stigmas of tsarist backwardness and despotism.

Further signs of the increasing restriction of personal free­doms emerged in these years, as changes became apparent in official attitudes toward the intelligentsia and technical ex­perts. It was felt that the new communist specialists in every field were now well enough equipped to take over from their bourgeois predecessors. The result was a tightening of state control of all intellectual endeavour, and a rigid enforcement of soviet ideological criteria in every sphere of culture, science, and philosophy. The summer of 1928 saw the public trial in Moscow of 53 engineers on charges of sabotage in the so- called Shakhty Case. The theme, repeated in endless propa­ganda over the following years, was that bourgeois specialists could not be trusted. Large numbers were subsequently ar­rested. By 1930 more than half of the surviving engineers had no proper training. In all institutes and academies, ideological hacks were intruded to ensure Marxist, or rather Stalinist, purity of theory and practice. Similar repressive measures were exercised in the arts.

The Purges

In late 1934, just when the worst excesses of Stalinism seemed to have spent themselves, Stalin launched a new campaign of political terror against the very Communist Party members who had brought him to power; his pretext was the assassi­nation on December 1 of his leading colleague and potential rival, Sergey Kirov, in Leningrad (as Petrograd had been renamed in 1924, following Lenin's death). That Stalin him­self had arranged Kirov's murder - as an excuse for the promotion of mass bloodshed - was strongly hinted by Nikita Khrushchev in a speech denouncing Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in 1956.

Over the next four years the centre of political life in the Soviet Union was the exposure and suppression of ever- increasing circles of alleged plotters against the regime, all of them linked in one way or another with the Kirov case - with the aim, presumably, to secure Stalin's personal power base. The country was submitted to an intensive campaign against hidden "enemies of the people". This manifested itself both in a series of public, or publicized, trials and in a massive terror operation against the population as a whole. The most brutal stage of the purges came with the appoint­ment in September 1936 of Nikolay Ivanovich Yezhov as chief of the Soviet security police or NKVD (People's Com­missariat of Internal Affairs). During this phase, known as the Yezhovshchina, special extra-legal tribunals were set up, in particular the notorious NKVD "troikas", which sen­tenced hundreds of thousands of people to death in their absence. The mass graves of the victims remained secret until the late 1980s.

The Communist Party itself was devastated. The industrial, engineering, and economic cadres, including those of the railways, were heavily purged. The army also suffered heavy losses. The officer corps as a whole lost about half its members. The cultural world suffered equally: several hundred writers were executed or died in camps, including such figures as Osip Mandelshtam, Boris Pilnyak, and Isaak Babel. The same applied in all the professions. Plots were discovered in the State Hermitage Museum, in the Pulkovo Astronomical Ob­servatory, and throughout academe. Nor was the general public spared. In all, some 5 million people were arrested, of whom no more than 10 per cent survived. The Yezhov­shchina was in fact one of the most brutal terrors in recorded history. The effects were long-lasting.

The purges necessitated a further social and economic component of the Stalinist system: the expansion and development of labour camps, or the Gulag (an abbrevia­tion of the Russian words for Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps), which housed political prison­ers and criminais.

A system of forced labour had begun in Russia soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, and was established by decree on April 15, 1919. It underwent a series of administrative and organ­izational changes in the 1920s, ending with the founding of the Gulag in 1930 under the control of the secret police, OGPU (later, the NKVD and the KGB). But expansion was rapid: in the late 1920s the Gulag had a total inmate population of about 100,000; by 1936, mopping up "political" prisoners from Stalin's collectivization of agriculture, among others, the total had risen to 5 million, a number that was probably equalled or exceeded every subsequent year until Stalin died, in 1953. In the mid-1930s the camps were located largely in the Arctic (such as Kolyma and Vorkuta) but also in Kazakhstan and elsewhere.

Besides rich or resistant peasants arrested during collect­ivization, persons sent to the Gulag included purged Com­munist Party members and military officers, German and other Axis prisoners of war (during the Second World War), members of ethnic groups suspected of disloyalty, Soviet soldiers and other citizens who had been taken prisoner or used as slave labourers by the Germans during the war, suspected saboteurs and traitors, dissident intellectuals, or­dinary criminals, and many utterly innocent people who were hapless victims of Stalin's purges.

Inmates filled the Gulag in three major waves: in 1929-32, the years of the collectivization of Soviet agriculture; in 1936-8, at tlie height of Stalin's purges; and in the years immediately following the Second World War, The Gulag was largely unknown in the West until the publication in 1973 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn claimed that between 1928 and 1953 "some forty to fifty million people served long sentences in the Archipelago". Figures supposedly compiled by the Gulag administration itself (and released by Soviet historians in 1989) show that a total of 10 million people were sent to the camps in the period from 1934 to 1947. The Gulag reached its height in the years of collectivization of Soviet agriculture (1929-32), during Joseph Stalin's purges (1936-8), and immediately after the Second World War. At its extreme it consisted of many hundreds of camps, with the average camp holding 2,000-10,000 prisoners. Most of these camps were "corrective labour colonies" in which prisoners felled timber, laboured on general construction projects (such as the building of canals and railways), or worked in mines. Most prisoners laboured under the threat of starvation or execution if they refused. It is estimated that the combination of very long work­ing hours, harsh climatic and other working conditions, inade­quate food, and summary executions killed off at least 10 per ccnt of the Gulag's total prisoner population each year. Western scholarly estimates of the total number of deaths in the Gulag in the period from 1918 to 1956 range from 15 to 30 million.

The Gulag started to shrink soon after Stalin's death: hundreds of thousands of prisoners were amnestied from 1953 to 1957, by which time the camp system had returned to its proportions of the early 1920s. Several times the Gulag was officially disbanded; its activities were absorbed by var­ious economic ministries, and the remaining camps were grouped in 1955 under a new body, GUITK ("Chief Admin­istration of Corrective Labour Colonies").

Life in a typical camp is incisively described in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago (see also Chapter 3).

Ethnic Minorities

Stalin's nationality policy had promoted native cadres and cultures, but this changed in the late 1920s. Stalin appears to have perceived that the non-Russians were becoming danger­ously self-confident and self-assertive, and he reversed his policy by the mid-1930s. The Soviet constitution of 1936 in effect rearranged the political and nationality map. The boundaries of many autonomous republics and oblasts were fashioned in such a way as to prevent non-Russians from forming a critical mass - Moscow's fear was that they would circumvent central authority. For example, Tatars found themselves in the Tatar (Tatarstan) and Bashkir (Bashkiriya) autonomous republics, although Tatars and Bashkirs spoke essentially the same language. Tatars also inhabited the region south of Bashkiriya and northern Kazakhstan, hut this was not acknowledged, and no autonomous republic was established. On security grounds, Stalin also deported some entire small nationality groups, many with their own territorial base, such as the Chechen and Ingush, from 1944 onwards. Altogether, more than 50 nationalities, embracing about 3.5 million people, were deported to various parts of the Soviet Union. The vast majority of these were removed from European Russia to Asiatic Russia, as Moscow played off the various nationalities to its own advantage. This policy was to have disastrous long-term consequences for Russians, because they were seen as imperialists bent on Russifying the locals. With industrial expansion Russians spread throughout the union as well: by 1991 there were 25 million living outside the Russian republic, including 11 million in Ukraine. President Boris Yeltsin, in apologizing for these deportations, later identified them as a major source of inter-ethnic conflict in Russia in the late twentieth century.

The Second World War and Its Aftermath

During the Second World War Stalin emerged, after an unpro­mising start, as the most successful of the supreme leaders thrown up by the combatant nations. In August 1939, after first attempting to form an anti-Hitler alliance with the western powers, he concluded a pact with Hitler, which encouraged the German dictator to attack Poland and begin the war. Anxious to strengthen his western frontiers while his new but palpably treacherous German ally was still engaged in the west, Stalin annexed eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Romania; he also attacked Finland and extorted terri­torial concessions. In May 1941 Stalin, recognizing the growing danger of German attack on the Soviet Union, appointed himself chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (head of the government); it was his first governmental office since 1923.

Stalin's pre-war defensive measures were exposed as incom­petent by the German blitzkrieg that surged deep into Soviet territory after Hitler's unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union of J une 22,1941. Khrushchev later claimed that Stalin was shocked into temporary inactivity by the onslaught, but, if so, he soon rallied and appointed himself supreme commander-in-chief. When the Germans menaced Moscow in the winter of 1941, he remained in the threatened capital, helping to organize a great counter-offensive. The battle of Stalingrad (in the following winter) and the battle of Kursk (in the summer of 1943) were also won by the Soviet Army under Stalin's supreme direction, turning the tide of invasion against the retreating Germans, who capitulated in May 1945. As war leader, Stalin maintained close personal control over the Soviet battle-fronts, military reserves, and war economy. At first over-inclined to intervene with inept telephoned instructions, as did Hitler, the Soviet generalissimo gradually learned to delegate military decisions.

Stalin participated in high-level Allied meetings, including those of the "Big Three" with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt at Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945). A formidable negotiator, he outwitted these foreign statesmen; his superior skill was acclaimed by Anthony Eden, then British foreign secretary.

On the home front after the war, the primacy of Marxist ideology was harshly reasserted. Stalin's chief ideological hatch­et man, Audrey Zhdanov, a secretary of the Central Committee, began a reign of terror in the Soviet artistic and intellectual world; foreign achievements were derided, and the primacy of Russians as inventors and pioneers in practically every field was asserted. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee set up during the war was dissolved, and its leader, the actor and theatrical producer Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered by the MGB (Ministry of State Security). "Rootless cosmopolitans" with Jewish names, mostly critics and playwrights, were attacked in a new propaganda drive, and many were arrested. In August 1952 came the secret "Crimean Case", in which leading Yiddish writers and others were executed. In 1951 a purge began in Georgia, directed against the closest followers of Lavrenty Beria, formerly Stalin's Commissar for Internal Affairs and himself responsible for purging many of Stalin's opponents during the Second World War. His followers were jailed in the "Mingrelian Affair", which was still being processed when Stalin died; it seems also to have been linked to the Jewish "plotters". Hopes for domestic relaxation, widely aroused in the Soviet Union during the war, were thus sadly disappointed.

The Cold War and Stalin's Final Years

Following the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945 the uneasy wartime alliance between the Allies and the Soviets began to unravel. This developed into the so-called Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. The rivalry that developed between the two blocs was waged on political, economic, and propaganda fronts, and had only limited recourse to weapons.

By 1948 the Soviets had installed left-wing governments in the countries of Eastern Europe that had been liberated by the Red Army. The Americans and the British feared the perma­nent Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and the threat of Soviet-influenced communist parties coming to power in the democracies of western Europe. The Soviets, on the other hand, were determined to maintain control of Eastern Europe in order to safeguard against any possible renewed threat from Germany, and they were intent on spreading communism worldwide, largely for ideological reasons. The Cold War had solidified by 1947-8, when US aid provided under the Marshall Plan to western Europe had brought those countries under American influence and the Soviets had installed openly communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

In 1948 the defection from the Soviet camp of Yugoslavia under the leadership of Marshal Tito struck a severe blow to world communism as a Stalin-dominated monolith. To pre­vent other client states from following Tito's example, Stalin instigated local show trials, manipulated like those of the purges of the 1930s in Russia, in which satellite communist leaders confessed to Titoism (the revisionist form of commun­ism practised by Tito); many were executed.

The Cold War reached its peak in 1948-53. In this period the Soviets unsuccessfully blockaded the western-held sectors of West Berlin (1948-9); the United States and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a unified military command to resist the Soviet presence in Europe (1949); the Soviets exploded their first atomic warhead (1949), thus ending the American mono­poly on the atomic bomb; the Chinese communists came to power in mainland China (1949); and the Soviet-supported communist government of North Korea invaded US- supported South Korea in 1950, setting off an indecisive Korean War that lasted until 1953. Stalin died in that year, and the burden of continuing the Cold War was a legacy he left to his successors.

Stalin arguably made a greater impact on the lives of more individuals than any other figure in history. While the destruc­tion and misery he unleashed are undeniable, he achieved the industrialization of a country which, when he assumed com­plete control in 1928, was still notably backward by compar­ison with the leading industrial nations of the world. By 1937, after less than a decade's rule, he had increased the Soviet Union's total industrial output to the point where it was surpassed only by that of the United States. This, coupled with the Soviet Union's major role in defeating Hitler in the Second World War, helped to establish the USSR as the world's second most powerful industrial and military unit after the United States.

Stalin's particular brilliance was, however, narrowly spe­cialized and confined within the single crucial area of creative political manipulation, where he remains unsurpassed. He was tlie first to recognize the potential of bureaucratic power. By interlinking various levels of authority - the Communist Party, ministries, legislative bodies, trade unions, political police, and armed forces, among others - he was able to weld together a power base that gave him a quarter of a century's virtually unchallenged rule.

3

POST-STALIN RUSSIA TO THE FALL OF COMMUNISM, 1953-91

The Khrushchev Era, 1953-64

The power struggle for leadership that followed Joseph Stalin's death in 1953 was won by Nikita Khrushchev. His landmark decisions in foreign policy and domestic programmes markedly changed the direction of the Soviet Union, bringing detente with the West and a relaxation of rigid controls within the country,

NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV (1894-1971)

Soviet leader

The son of a miner, Khrushchev joined the Communist Party in 1918. In 1934 he was elected to its Central Committee, and in 1935 he became first secretary of the Moscow party organization. He participated in Joseph Stalin's purges of party leaders. In 1938 he became head of the Ukrainian party and in 1939 was made a member

of the Politburo. After Stalin's death in 1953, he emerged from a bitter power struggle as the party's first secretary, and Nikolay Butganin became premier.

In i955. on his first trip outside the Soviet Union, Khrushchev showed his flexibility and the brash, extraverted style of diplomacy that would become his trademark. At the 20th Party Congress in 1956, he delivered a secret speech denouncing Stalin for his "intolerance, his brutality, his abuse of power". Thousands of political prisoners were released. Poland and Hungary used de-Stalinidation to reform their regimes: Khrushchev allowed the Poles relative freedom, but he crushed the Hungarian Revolution by force (1956) when Imre Nagy attempted to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact.

Opposition within the party crystallized in 1957, but Khrushchev secured the dismissal of his enemies and in 1958 assumed the premiership himself. Asserting a doctrine of peaceful coexistence with capitalist nations, he toured the United States in 1959, but a planned Paris summit with President Eisenhower in I960 was cancelled after the U-2 Affair, when the Soviet Union shot down a US reconnaissance plane. In 1962 Khrushchev attempted to place Soviet missiles in Cuba; in the ensuing Cuban missile crisis he retreated. Ideological differences and the signing of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (1963) led to a split with the Chinese, Agricultural failures that necessitated importation of wheat from the West, the China quarrel, and his often arbitrary administrative methods led to his forced retirement in 1964.

Khrushchev, who rose under Stalin as an agricultural spe­cialist, was a Russian who had grown up in Ukraine. During his reign Ukrainians prospered in Moscow. He took it for granted that Russians had a natural right to instruct less fortunate nationals. This was especially evident in the non- Slavic republics of the USSR and in eastern and south-eastern Europe. His nationality policies reversed the repressive policies of Stalin. He grasped the nettle of the deported nationalities and rehabilitated almost all of them; the accusations of dis­loyalty made against them by Stalin were declared to be false. This allowed many nationalities to return to their homelands within Russia, the Volga Germans being a notable exception. (Their lands had been occupied by Russians who, fearing competition from the Germans, opposed their return.) The Crimean Tatars were similarly not allowed to return to their home territory. Their situation was complicated by the fact that Russians and Ukrainians had replaced them in the Crim­ea, and in 1954 Khrushchev made Ukraine a present of the Crimea. Khrushchev abided by the nationality theory that suggested that all Soviet national groups would come closer together and eventually coalesce; the Russians, of course, would be the dominant group. The theory was profoundly wrong. There was in fact a flowering of national cultures during Khrushchev's administration, as well as an expansion of technical and cultural elites.

Khrushchev sought to promote himself through his agricul­tural policy. As head of the party Secretariat (which ran the day- to-day affairs of the party machine) after Stalin's death, he could use that vehicle to promote his campaigns. Pravda ("Truth"), the party newspaper, served as his mouthpiece. His main opponent in the quest for power, Georgy M. Malenkov, was skilled in administration and headed the government, lzvestiya ("News"), the government's newspaper, was Malenkov's main media outlet. Khrushchev's agricultural policy involved a bold plan to rapidly expand the sown area of grain. He chose to implement this policy on virgin land in the North Caucasus and west Siberia, lying in both Russia and northern Kazakhstan, The Kazakh party leaders were not enamoured of the idea, since they did not want more Russians in their republic. The Kazakh leadership was therefore dismissed, and the new first secretary was a Malenkov appointee; he was soon replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, a Khrushchev protege who eventually replaced Khrushchev as the Soviet leader. Thousands of young commu­nists descended on Kazakhstan to grow crops where none had been grown before.

Khrushchev's so-called "secret speech" about the excesses of Stalin's one-man rule, attacking the late Soviet ruler's "intol­erance, his brutality, his abuse of power", at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 had far-reaching effects on both foreign and domestic policies. Through its denunciation of Stalin, it sub­stantially destroyed the infallibility of the party. The congress also formulated ideological reformations, which softened the party's hardline foreign policy. De-Stalinization had unex­pected consequences, especially in 1956 in eastern and south-eastern Europe, where unrest became widespread. The Hungarian uprising in that year was brutally suppressed, with Yury V. Andropov, Moscow's chief representative in Budapest, revealing considerable talent for double-dealing. (He had given a promise of safe conduct to Imre Nagy, the Hungarian leader, but permitted, or arranged for, Nagy's arrest.) The events in Hungary and elsewhere stoked up anti-Russian fires.

Khrushchev invested heavily in and set great store by rock­etry, and successes in space exploration under his regime brought Russia great acclaim. On August 26, 1957, the USSR had startled the world by announcing the successful firing of its first intercontinental ballistic missile. On October 4 of the same year, the first space satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched, followed on November 3 by Sputnik 2, with the dog i.aika on board. So great was Khrushchev's faith in rocketry that he began to regard ground forces as less important and even to cut the size of the military. He also tried to translate the USSR's advances in rocketry into tangible diplomatic success, threa­tening the West with Soviet missiles if it dared to think of attacking. The strategy misfired, however: the result was to stimulate even greater western defence spending and thereby involve the Soviet Union in an expensive arms race that it could not win.

Before the escalation of the arms race, Khrushchev's rule witnessed another crucial development in the Cold War. While from 1953 to 1957 tensions relaxed somewhat, the stand-off remained. It became increasingly apparent that the United States and the Soviet Union were avoiding direct military confrontation in Europe, engaging in actual combat operations only to keep allies from defecting to the other side or to overthrow them after they had done so. This rationale can be seen in the Soviet Union sending troops to preserve communist rule in East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956); for its part, the United States helped overthrow a left-wing government in Guatemala (1954). In 1955 a unified military organization among the Soviet-bloc countries, the Warsaw Pact, was formed, and West Germany was admitted into the six-year-old NATO that same year. East—West relations de­teriorated in 1958-62, particularly during the civil war in the Congo in the early 1960s and over the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

In October 1962 the development of intercontinental bal­listic missiles by both the United States and the Soviet Union brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war. When the Soviets began secretly installing missiles in Cuba that could be used to launch nuclear attacks on US cities, the US Navy blockaded Cuba; the Soviet ground commanders were then given the authority to launch a missile attack, without approval from Moscow, if they perceived that an American invasion was under way. Eventually Khrushchev backed off, and an agreement was reached to withdraw the missiles. The Chinese severely criticized Khrushchev for giv­ing in to the United States and capitalism, and relations between China and the USSR, already uneasy, became worse as a result.

In the following year the two superpowers signed the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, which banned above-ground nuclear weapons testing. But the crisis also hardened the Soviets' determination never again to be humiliated by their military inferiority, and they began a build-up of both conventional and strategic forces that the United States was forced to match for the next 25 years.

While Khrushchev had failures and triumphs in foreign policy, he was often viewed in the West as eccentric and blunt, traits that sometimes negated his own diplomacy. On one occasion he appeared at the United Nations and emphasized a point in his speech by banging a shoe on his desk. Such conduct tended to reinforce certain western prejudices about oafish, peasant behaviour by Soviet leaders, and harmed the Russian image abroad. Khrushchev's forthright remarks oc­casionally caused massive unrest in the world. He told the United States, "We will bury you," and boasted that his rockets could hit a fly over the United States, statements that added to the alarm of Americans, who subsequently increased their defence budget.

As the Soviet defence burden increased, living standards in Russia improved only slowly. Here Khrushchev was often his own worst enemy. He launched many industrial and agricul­tural initiatives, but the net result was an overall decline of growth rates. US specialists calculated that between 1961 and 1965 the annual increase of gross national product (GNP) in the USSR slowed to 5 per cent, industrial output to 6.6 per cent, and agricultural growth to 2.8 per cent. Since the population growth was about 1.4 per cent annually, this meant that there was no tangible improvement in the diet available. Khrushchev correctly perceived that the party ap­paratus was a major barrier to economic progress. In an effort to revitalize the apparatus he split it into separate industrial and agricultural branches in November 1962, but discovered that industrial and local political networks had developed, which made it very difficult for the central authority to impose its will. This reform made Khrushchev deeply unpopular and accelerated his departure from high office, while economic problems continued to plague the union.

Khrushchev was a patriot who had a sincere desire to improve the lot of all Soviet citizens. Under his leadership there was a cultural thaw, and Russian writers who had been suppressed began to publish again. Western ideas about de­mocracy began to penetrate universities and academies. These were to leave their mark on a whole generation of Russians, most notably Mikhail Gorbachev, who was to become the last leader of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev had effectively led the Soviet Union away from the harsh Stalin period. Under his rule Russia continued to dominate the union, but there was con­siderably more concern for minorities.

The Brezhnev Era, 1964-82

After Khrushchev came the triumvirate of Leonid I. Brezhnev, Aleksey N, Kosygin, and N, V, Podgorny, The first was the party leader, the second headed the government, and the third became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, a ceremonial position. By the late 1960s Brezhnev was clearly the dominant leader. His strengths were in manipulating party and government cadres, but he was weak on policy ideas. He ensured that there was an unprecedented stability of cadres within the Communist Party and the bureaucracy, thereby creating conditions for the rampant spread of corruption in the Soviet political and administrative structures. Under Brezhnev, Russia dominated the union as never before, and the republic accounted for about three-fourths of the Soviet GNP. In the mid-1970s the USSR reached its apogee: it acquired nuclear parity with the United States and was recognized as a world superpower. Detente flourished in the 1970s but was disrupted by the Soviet invasion of Af­ghanistan in December 1979.

The economy, at first in the hands of Kosygin, needed attention. He found that the central direction of the economy became more and more difficult to achieve. There were many reforms, but all to no avail. The economy had become very complex, but there was no mechanism, in the absence of the market, to coordinate economic activity in the interests of society. A bureaucratic market took over. Bureaucrats and enterprises negotiated the acquisition of inputs and agreed where the final product should go. The goal of every enterprise was to become a monopoly producer. The core of this system was the military-industrial complex, which accounted for the top quarter of output and had first call on resource allocation.

LEONID BREZHNEV (1906-82) Soviet leader

Brezhnev worked as an engineer and director of a technical school in Ukraine and hetd local posts in the Communist Party; he became regional party secretary in 1939. In the Second World War he was a political commissar in the Red Army and rose to major general (1943), In the 1950s he supported Nikita Khrushchev and became a member of the Politburo, though in 1964 he was the leader of a coalition that ousted Khrushchev, and soon he emerged as general secretary of the party (1966-82). He developed the Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserted the right of Soviet intervention in such Warsaw Pact countries as Czechoslovakia (1968).

In the 1970s Brezhnev attempted to normalize relations with the West and to promote detente with the United States. He was made marshal of the Soviet Union in 1976 and chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1977, becoming the first to hold the leadership of both the party and the state. He greatly expanded the Soviet Union's military-industrial complex, but in so doing he deprived the rest of the Soviet economy. Despite frail health, he retained his hold on power to the end.

On the positive side, the rapid expansion of the chemical, oil, and gas industries boosted exports so that Russia earned most of the union's hard-currency income. The middle class grew in size, as did its average salary, which more than doubled in two decades. Ownership of consumer goods, such as refrigerators and cars, became a realistic expectation for a

growing part of the population. Until the early 1970s the availability of medical care, higher education, and improved accommodation reached levels unprecedented in the Soviet context.

These successes and a few others - some defence sectors and the space industry, and the sale of Russia's natural resources - allowed the Soviet regime to evade undertaking necessary but potentially politically dangerous structural economic reforms. According to US estimates for the years 1966-70 and 1976-80, the Soviet economy went into sharp decline in terms of industrial growth, agricultural output, and investment. Agricultural performance was even worse than the figures implied: over the years 1971—5 there was negative growth annually of 0.6 per cent, despite huge investments in agriculture, with one ruble in three going into agriculture and agriculture-related industry. The result was large annual imports of grain, paid for in US dollars. This was made possible by the explosion of oil prices in the 1970s, which saw the terms of trade turn in favour of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately the oil bonanza was wasted, and little use was made of foreign technology. After the initial improvement in living standards came stagnation or decline. The black mar­ket grew to plug the holes of the planned economy. Along with this went corruption, which had filtered down from the political elites; it eventually became pervasive. Increasing defence expenditure at a time of slowing economic growth led to cuts in investment. Education and medical and social services suffered most. At the end of the Brezhnev era the medical care of the population was a disgrace. In sum, by the early 1980s, continued economic stagnation posed a serious threat to the world standing of the USSR and to the regime's legitimacy at home.

ANDREY SAKHAROV (1921-89)

Russian nuclear physicist and human rights advocate

Sakharov worked with I. Y. Tamm (1895-1971) to develop the Soviet Union's first hydrogen bomb, but in 1961 he opposed Nikita Khrushchev's plan to test a 100- megaton hydrogen bomb in the atmosphere. In 1968 he published in the West "Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom", which called for nuclear arms reduction and criticized Soviet repression of dissidents. He and his wife, Yeiena G. Bonner, continued to advocate civil liberties and reform in the Soviet Union.

in 1975 Sakharov received the Nobel Prize for Peace but was forbidden to travel to Oslo to receive it. In 1980 he was exiled to the closed city Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod); his wife was exiled there in 1984. They were released in 1986 and returned to Moscow. Elected to the Congress of People's Deputies in April 1989, Sakharov had his honours restored and saw many of the causes for which he had fought and suffered become official policy under Mikhail Gorbachev.

It was in the Brezhnev era, thanks largely to the publication in 1973 of The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 by the dis­senting novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, that the extent and horror of the Gulag system of labour camps was fully revealed. Reaction to this work, whose title likens the camps scattered through the Soviet Union to an island chain, was immediate, and provoked outrage and public criticism of Russia's policies.

Also during the 1970s the state gradually lost its monopoly on information control. A counterculture influenced by wes­tern pop music, especially rock, spread rapidly. Russian youth

had become enamoured of western pop stars, and the advent of the audiocassette made it easier to experience their music. The widespread teaching of foreign languages further facilit­ated access to outside ideas. By the end of the Brezhnev era, the Russian intelligentsia had rejected Communist Party values. The party's way of dealing with uncomfortable critics - such as Solzhenitsyn - was to deport them. These exiles then became the voice of Russian culture abroad. The academician Andrey Sakharov could not be imprisoned, for fear of western scien­tists cutting off contact with the Soviet Union, but he was exiled until 1986 to the closed city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod).

The 1960s and 1970s were also a period when the Cold War bipolar struggle between the Soviet and American blocs gave way to a more complicated pattern of international relation­ships in which the world was no longer split into two clearly opposed spheres of influence. A major split had occurred between the Soviet Union and China in 1960 and this widened over the years, shattering the unity of the communist bloc. In the meantime, western Europe and Japan achieved dynamic economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, reducing their relative inferiority to the United States. Less powerful coun­tries had more room to assert their independence, and often showed themselves resistant to superpower coercion or cajol­ing.

The 1970s saw an easing of Cold War tensions as evinced in the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) I and II agree­ments of 1972 and 1979 respectively, in which the USA and USSR set limits on their antiballistic missiles and on their strategic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons. This was followed by a period of renewed Cold War tensions in the early 1980s as the two superpowers continued their massive arms build-up and competed for influence in the Third World. But the Cold War began to break down in the late 1980s during the administration of Soviet leader Mikhail S, Gorba­chev (see below and Chapter 4),

The Gorbachev Era, 1985-91

When Brezhnev died in 1982, most elite groups understood that the Soviet economy was in trouble. Owing to senility, Brezhnev had not been in effective control of the country during his last few years, and Kosygin had died in 1980. The Politburo was dominated by old men, and they were overwhelmingly Russian. Non-Russian representation at the top of the party and the government had declined over time. Yury V. Andropov and then Konstantin Chernenko led the country from 1982 until 1985, but their administrations failed to address critical problems. Andropov believed that the economic stagnation could he remedied by greater worker discipline and by cracking down on corruption. He did not consider the structure of the Soviet economic system itself to be a cause of the country's growing economic problems.

When Gorbachev became head of the Communist Party in March 1985 he was clear about his policy preferences. In a speech on December 10, 1984, he spoke of the need to effect "deep transformations in the economy and the whole system of social relations", to carry through the policies of perestroika ("restructuring" of economic management), the "democratiza­tion of social and economic life", and glasnost ("openness"). His goal was to set in motion a revolution controlled from above. He did not wish to undermine the Soviet system, only to make it more efficient. The leading role of the party and the

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV (b. 1931)

Soviet official, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (7985—9/and president of the Soviet Union (1990-1)

After earning a law degree from Moscow State University (1955), Gorbachev rose through the ranks to become a full Politburo member (1980) and general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1985-91). His extraordinary reform policies of g/osnost and perestroifca were resisted by party bureaucrats; to reduce their power, Gorbachev changed the Soviet constitution in 1988 to allow multi-candidate elections, and removed the monopoly power of the party in 1990. He cultivated warmer relations with the United States, and in 1989-90 he supported the democratically elected governments that replaced the communist regimes of eastern Europe. In 1990 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Russia's economic and political problems led to a 199! coup attempt by hardliners. !n alliance with Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic, Gorbachev quit the Communist Party, disbanded its Central Committee, and shifted political powers to the Soviet Union's constituent republics. Events outpaced him, and the various republics formed the Commonwealth of Independent States under Yeltsin's leadership. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned the presidency of the Soviet Union, which ceased to exist that same day.

PERESTROIKA ("RESTRUCTURING")

Programme instituted in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid- /980s to restructure Soviet political and economic policy

Gorbachev proposed reducing the direct involvement of the Communist Party leadership in the country's governance and increasing the local governments' authority. Seeking to bring the Soviet Union up to economic par with capitalist countries such as Germany, Japan, and the United States, he decentralized economic controls and encouraged enterprises to become self- financing. The economic bureaucracy, fearing loss of its power and privileges, obstructed much of his programme,

central direction of the economy were to stay. l ie thus pursued an economic policy that aimed to increase economic growth while increasing capital investment, which was to improve the technological basis of the Soviet economy as weil as promote certain structural economic changes. His goal was simple: to bring the Soviet Union up to par economically with the West. This had been the aim of Russian leaders since the first great wave of modernization and westernization was unleashed in the early eighteenth century.

Thus perestroika concentrated initially on economic reform. Enterprises were encouraged to become self-financing, coop­eratives were set up by groups of people as businesses, and land could be leased to allow family farming. Machine build­ing was given preference as light and consumer goods took second place. There was to be more technical innovation and worker discipline. Yet all this produced few positive results,

GLASNOST ("OPENNESS")

Soviet policy of open discussion of political and social issues

Glasnost was instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s and began the democratization of the Soviet Union. G/osnost also permitted criticism of government officials and allowed the media freer dissemination of news and information,

and in fact led to a fall in the consumer goods available, and agriculture did not blossom. Not only was the public hostile to Gorbachev's policies, but the cooperatives resented the heavy taxation and, perhaps most significant, the bureaucrats who ran the economy feared that these new activities would under­mine their privileges and power.

Faced with a worsening economic situation, Gorbachev now concluded that deeper structural changes were necessary. He admitted that his first two years of reform had been wasted since he had been unaware of the depth of the crisis when he took over. He now received much advice on how to solve the Soviet Union's economic crisis. There were two basic solu­tions: the socialist solution and the market solution. Suppor­ters of Nikolay Ryzhkov, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, favoured central planning, more efficient adminis­tration, and greater decision-making powers for enterprises and farms. State ownership of the means of production would continue. They called it a "regulated market economy". The radicals advocated a move toward a free-market economy. This involved private ownership of enterprises, land, services, and so on. It also meant the freeing of prices. Gorbachev could not make up his mind and always tried to persuade the two groups to pool their resources and arrive at a compromise. The radicals thought they had convinced Gorbachev in the autumn of 1990 to introduce a 500-day programme that would have implemented a market economy, but he changed his mind and sided with the conservatives. This was a fatal mistake. It left him without a viable economic policy, and the right felt that if they applied enough pressure he would always abandon radical solutions.

One of the reasons Gorbachev shied away from the market was price liberalization. He would not risk sharp price rises because of the fear of social unrest. Despite the abundant evidence of the seriousness of the situation in 1988, the critical year, Gorbachev and other leading communists refused to draw the necessary lessons or to adopt austerity measures. The popular mood was one of spend, spend, spend, and Gorbachev paid only cursory attention to the economy until late 1989. He was never able to construct a viable economic policy or to put in place a mechanism for the implementation of economic policy.

As the second vital plank of his reform efforts Gorbachev launched glasnost. He believed that the opening up of the political system - essentially, democratizing it - was the only way to overcome inertia in the political and bureaucratic apparatus, which had a big interest in maintaining the status quo. In addition, he believed that the path to economic and social recovery required the inclusion of people in the political process. Glasnost also allowed the media more freedom of expression, and editorials complaining of depressed conditions and of the government's inability to correct them began to appear.

As the economic and political situation began to deteriorate, Gorbachev concentrated his energies on increasing his authority (that is to say, his ability to make decisions). He did not, however, develop the power to implement these decisions. He became a constitutional dictator - but only on paper. His policies were simply not put into practice. When he took office, Yegor Ligachev was made head of the party's Central Com­mittee Secretariat, one of the two main centres of power (with the Politburo) in the Soviet Union. Ligachev subsequently became one of Gorbachev's opponents, making it difficult for Gorbachev to use the party apparatus to implement his views on perestroika.

By the summer of 1988, however, Gorbachev had become strong enough to emasculate the Central Committee Secretar­iat and take the party out of the day-to-day running of the economy. This responsibility was to pass to the local soviets. A new parliament, the Congress of People's Deputies, was con­vened in the spring of 1989, with Gorbachev presiding. The new body superseded the Supreme Soviet as the highest organ of state power. The Congress elected a new Supreme Soviet, and Gorbachev, who had opted for an executive presidency modelled on the US and French systems, became the Soviet president, with broad powers. This meant that all the repub­lics, including first and foremost Russia, could have a similar type of presidency. Moreover, Gorbachev radically changed Soviet political life when he removed the constitutional article according to which the only legal political organization was the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev understood that the defence burden, equivalent to perhaps 25 per cent of GNP, was crippling the country. This had led to cuts in expenditure in education, social services, and medical care, which hurt the regime's domestic legitimacy. Moreover, the huge defence expenditure that characterized the Cold War years was one of the causes of Soviet economic decline. Gorbachev therefore transformed Soviet foreign policy. He travelled abroad extensively and was brilliantly successful in convincing foreigners that the USSR was no longer an interna­tional threat. His changes in foreign policy led to the demo­cratization of Eastern Europe. With the collapse of communist regimes in the Soviet-bloc countries of Eastern Europe in 1989­90 - and the subsequent rise to power of democratic govern­ments in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, quickly followed by the unification of West and East Germany under NATO auspices - the Cold War came to a definitive end. On the other hand, Gorbachev's policies deprived the Soviet Union of ideological enemies, which in turn weakened the hold of Soviet ideology over the people.

By 1991 the Russian economy was facing total collapse. The government found it increasingly difficult to intervene decis­ively. The Law on State Enterprises reduced the power of the ministries, and simultaneously the number of officials was cut back sharply. Those who remained were overwhelmed by the workload. Since there was no effective control from Moscow, rising nationalism, ethnic strife, and regionalism fragmented the economy into dozens of mini-economies. Many republics sought independence, others sovereignty, and they all pursued policies of economic autarchy. Barter was widespread. Ukraine introduced coupons, and Moscow issued ration cards. As calls for faster political reforms and decentralization began to increase, the nationality problem became acute for Gorba­chev. Limited force was used in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the Baltic states to quell nationality problems, though Gorbachev was never prepared to use systematic force in order to re­establish the centre's control. The re-emergence of Russian nationalism seriously weakened Gorbachev as the leader of the Soviet empire.

In 1985 Gorbachev had brought Boris Yeltsin to Moscow to run the city's party machine. Yeltsin came into conflict with the more conservative members of the Politburo and was eventually removed from the Moscow post in late 1987, He returned to public life as an elected deputy from Moscow to the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989. When the Congress elected the Supreme Soviet as a standing parliament, Yeltsin was not chosen, since the Congress had an overwhelmingly communist majority. However, a Siberian deputy stepped down in his favour. Yeltsin for the first time had a national platform. In parliament he pilloried Gorbachev, the Commun­ist Party, corruption, and the slow pace of economic reform. Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian parliament despite the bitter opposition of Gorbachev.

In March 1991, when Gorbachev launched an all-union referendum about the future Soviet federation, Russia and several other republics added some supplementary questions. One of the Russian questions was whether the voters were in favour of a directly elected president. They were, and they chose Yeltsin. He used his new-found legitimacy to promote Russian sovereignty, to advocate and adopt radical economic reform, to demand Gorbachev's resignation, and to negotiate treaties with the Baltic republics, in which he acknowledged their right to independence. Soviet attempts to discourage Baltic independence had led to a bloody confrontation in Vilnius in January 1991, after which Yeltsin called upon Russian troops to disobey orders that would have had them shoot unarmed civilians.

Yeltsin's politics reflected the rise of Russian nationalism. In the later Gorbachev years, the opinion that the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and establishment of the USSR were mistakes that had prevented Russia from continuing along the historical path travelled by the countries of western Europe, and had made Russia more economically backward vis-а-vis the West, had gained greater acceptance. Russians began to view the Soviet system as one that worked for its own political and economic interests at Russia's expense. There were increasing complaints that the "Soviets" had destroyed the Russian environment and had impoverished Russia in order to main­tain their empire and subsidize the poorer republics. Conse­quently, Yeltsin and his supporters demanded Russian control over Russia and its resources. In June 1990 the Russian republic had declared sovereignty, establishing the primacy of Russian law within the republic. This effectively under­mined all attempts by Gorbachev to establish a Union of Sovereign Socialist Republics. Yeltsin appeared to be willing to go along with this vision but, in reality, wanted Russia to dominate the new union and replace the formal leading role of the Soviet Union. The Russian parliament passed radical re­forms that would introduce a market economy, and Yeltsin also cut funding to a large number of Soviet agencies based on Russian soil. Clearly, Yeltsin wished to rid Russia of the encumbrance of the Soviet Union and to seek the disbandment of that body.

Collapse of the Soviet Union

An ill-conceived, ill-planned, and poorly executed coup at­tempt occurred on August 19-21, 1991. Its failure brought an end to the Communist Party and accelerated the movement to disband the Soviet Union. The coup was carried out by hard­line Communist Party, KGB, and military officials attempting to avert a new liberalized union treaty and return to the old- line party values. The most significant anti-coup role was played by Yeltsin, who brilliantly grasped the opportunity to promote himself and Russia, He demanded the reinstate­ment of Gorbachev as USSR president, but, when Gorbachev returned from house arrest in the Crimea, Yeltsin set out to demonstrate that he was the stronger leader. In a decisive move, Yeltsin banned the Communist Party in Russia and seized all its property. From a strictly legal point of view, this should have been done by court order, not by presidential decree, but the result was that at a stroke Russia systematically laid claim to most Soviet property on its territory.

4

POST-SOVIET RUSSIA

The Yeltsin Presidency, 1991-9

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) legally ceased to exist on December 31,1991. The Russian republic, renamed the Russian Federation, embarked on the road to democracy and a market economy with no clcar conception of how such a transformation would be completed.

Political and Social Changes

Yeltsin's popularity had surged after the key role he played in defeating the attempted coup against Gorbachev in 1991, when the world saw him on television in an unforgettable image, standing atop a tank and calling on the people to defy the plotters. A skilful politician, he was first elected president of the Russian republic in 1991, soon before the formal end of the USSR, and he was re-elected in 1996. Yet his first priority was to preserve his own power and authority. He managed

BORIS YELTSIN ((931-2007)

Russian politician and president of Russia (1990—9)

After attending the Urals Polytechnic Institute, Yeltsin worked at construction projects in western Russia (I 955­68). He became Communist Party leader in Sverdlovsk in 1976, and he was an ally of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev later charged Yeltsin with eliminating corruption in the Moscow party organization, and as first secretary (mayor) of Moscow (1985-7) he proved a determined reformer. His criticism of the slow pace of reform led to a break with Gorbachev, and Yeltsin lost his position. In 1989 he was elected to the new Soviet parliament by a landslide, then became president of the Russian Republic (1990) and resigned from the Communist Party. In 1991 he won the presidency again in the first popular election in Russian history.

When communist hardliners staged a coup against Gorbachev, Yeltsin successfully opposed it, facing down its leaders with a dramatic outdoor speech in Moscow, He led the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (1991) and began to transform Russia's economy into one based on free markets and private enterprise. Hardliners staged an unsuccessful coup against Yeltsin in 1993. When Chechnya unilaterally declared independence, Yeltsin sent troops to fight the rebels (1994). The Chechnya situation and Russia's deepening economic distress lessened his popularity, but he won re-election over a Communist Party challenger in 1996. After suffering a heart attack, he spent several months recovering. Continuing poor health led to his resignation on December 31, 1999. He was succeeded by Vladimir Putin.

both the government and the bureaucracy with a divide-and- rule strategy that encouraged the various factions to compete for influence. Yeltsin also frequently changed his ministers and prime ministers, leading to abrupt changes in policy. Profes­sing to believe that the president should remain above party politics, he declined to establish his own political party or to align himself openly with any party or coalition. But he remained at the heart of the political process, enjoying his favourite role of power broker until his resignation in 1999.

In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation continued to be governed under its Soviet-era constitution. The office of president had been added to the constitution of the Russian Soviet republic in 1991. However, the constitution did not clearly give supreme power to either the legislative or the executive branch, leading to constitutional conflicts between the two. The breach was exacerbated by personality clashes between Yeltsin and the parliamentary leadership, and by the government's preoccu­pation with financial stabilization and economic reform, ap­parently heedless of the social needs of the public. Complicating Yeltsin's difficulties was the fact that many members of the Congress of People's Deputies had vested interests in the economic and political structure of the com­munist era. The leader of the parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov, and Yeltsin both sought support from regional elites by promising subsidies and greater local control. Their struggle reached a climax in March 1993, when Yeltsin was stripped of the decree-making powers that he had been granted after the attempted coup of August 1991.

Yeltsin was not prepared to accept total defeat. He an­nounced that a referendum would he held on April 25, 1993, over who "really ruled" Russia. He also ruled that any acts passed by parliament that contradicted presidential decrees would be null and void. But Yeltsin's ministers, including Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, only half-heartedly supported this move, and Yeltsin eventually had to back down. Nonetheless, it was agreed that a referendum would be held. Four questions, drafted by the Congress to maximize Yeltsin's embarrassment, were put to the Russian people: (1) Do you trust the President of the Russian Federation, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin? (2) Do you approve of the socio­economic policies implemented by the President of the Russian Federation and the government of the Russian Federation since 1992? (3) Do you consider it essential to hold pre-term elections for the presidency of the Russian Federation? and (4) Do you consider it essential to hold pre-term elections for the People's Deputies of the Russian Federation? The Constitu­tional Court ruled that the first two questions were non- binding and that the latter two needed the backing of at least half of all eligible voters (and not just half of the actual ballots cast). With Yeltsin's camp using the slogan "Da, da, nyet, da" ("Yes, yes, no, yes"), the result was a victory for Yeltsin. However, as only 43 per cent of eligible voters backed early parliamentary elections, Yeltsin was forced to continue his uneasy relationship with the Congress.

In the summer of 1993 both Yeltsin and the parliament drafted versions of a new post-Soviet constitution. Inevitably, the drafts were incompatible, bur an increasing number of regional leaders supported the Congress's version. In Septem­ber 1993 Yeltsin issued a series of presidential decrees that dissolved the parliament and imposed presidential rule until after elections to a new parliament and a referendum on a new draft constitution were held in December. The parliament declared Yeltsin's decree illegal, impeached him, and swore

VIKTOR CHERNOMYRDIN (b. 1938)

Prime minister of Russia (1992-8)

Born in Cherny-Otrog in 1938, Viktor Chernomyrdin, who joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1961, acquired extensive experience as an industrial administrator, having served as deputy chief engineer and director of a natural gas plant in Orenburg in the 1970s. He went to Moscow in 1978 to work for the Central Committee of the CPSU, and in 1982 he was appointed deputy minister of the Soviet natural-gas industry. In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev promoted him to serve as minister of the gas industry. In this post in 1989 Chernomyrdin converted the Ministry of Gas into a state-owned corporate complex called Gazprom, which was one of the few profitable large-scale enterprises in the declining Soviet economy. He remained chairman of the board of Gazprom during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the creation of the Russian Federation in 1991. In June 1992 he became a deputy prime minister and minister of fuel and energy in the reformist government of the Russian acting prime minister, Yegor Gaidar. When Russia's Congress of People's Deputies refused to confirm the liberal Gaidar as prime minister, Yeltsin replaced him with Chernomyrdin on December 14, 1992, As a long-time Soviet administrator, Chernomyrdin was more acceptable to the Congress, which confirmed his nomination.

in his vice-president, Aleksandr Rutskoy, as president. Weap­ons were then handed out to civilians to defend the parliament building, known as the "Russian White House". On Septem­ber 25, troops and militia loyal to Yeltsin surrounded the

building. On October 2 there were armed clashes between troops and supporters of the parliament, who had begun to fill the streets of Moscow. On October 4, Yeltsin declared a state of emergency in Moscow. Shortly thereafter, tanks began firing on the parliamentary building, leading to the surrender and arrest of everyone inside, including Rutskoy. The way was now clear for elections to a new parliament and a referendum on a new constitution in December 1993, which was duly carried.

Yeltsin's new constitution gave the president vast powers. The president appointed the prime minister, who had to be approved by the Duma, the lower house of the new Federal Assembly, and the president could issue decrees that had the force of law as long as they did not contradict federal or constitutional law. The president was also given the power to dismiss the Duma and call for new elections. The prime minister was the vital link connecting the president with the Federal Assembly. Although the prime minister was accoun­table to the Federal Assembly, in practice he could not remain in office without the confidence of the president - as became clear under the premiership of Chernomyrdin.

In trying to implement Yeltsin's economic policies, Cherno­myrdin had steered a middle course between those favouring privatization and other free-market reforms and those advo­cating the continued support of inefficient Soviet-era state enterprises. He cultivated improved relations with the frac­tious Congress and brought inflation under control, while Anatoly Chubais and other reformers in the Cabinet oversaw the privatization of the industrial and commercial sectors of the economy. When Yeltsin won re-election to the presidency in 1996, he retained Chernomyrdin as prime minister. In March 1998, however, Chernomyrdin lost his post when