History of Russia

Economic and social development

Liberation from serfdom (land reform) was a benefit for the peasants that should not be underrated. The decades that followed brought a growth of prosperity and self-reliance to at least a substantial minority. In 1877, when about four-fifths of the land due to be transferred to the former serfs was actually in their possession, this “allotment land” constituted about half of the arable land in 50 provinces of European Russia. A further one-third of the arable land was still owned by the nobility, and the rest belonged to a variety of individual or collective owners. In 1905 substantially more than half the arable land was in allotment land, while another 10 percent belonged to individual peasants or to peasant associations; the nobility's share of arable land had fallen to a little more than 20 percent. Peasant land had increased by more than 99 million acres (40 million hectares) between 1877 and 1905, of which more than half had been obtained by purchase from landowners and the remainder by the completion of the transfer of allotment land. Peasant purchases had been assisted by loans from the Peasants' Land Bank, set up by the government in 1882. The Nobles' Land Bank, set up in 1885, made loans to landowners at more favourable rates of interest; it may have retarded, but did not prevent, the passage of land from landowners to peasants. In 1894 the rate of interest charged by the two banks was equalized.

Though many peasants improved their position, agriculture remained underdeveloped, and widespread poverty continued to exist. One of the main reasons for this was the indifference of the government to agriculture. The government's economic policy was motivated by the desire for national and military power. This required the growth of industry, and great efforts were made to encourage it. Agriculture was regarded mainly as a source of revenue to pay for industry and the armed forces. Exports of grain made possible imports of raw materials, and taxes paid by peasants filled the state's coffers. The redemption payments were a heavy charge on the peasants' resources, though a gradual fall in the value of money appreciably reduced that burden with the passage of years. Consumption taxes, especially on sugar, tobacco, matches, and oil, affected the peasants, and so did import duties. In 1894 the government introduced a liquor monopoly that drew enormous revenues from the peasants, to whom vodka was a principal solace in a hard life. The techniques and tools of agriculture remained extremely primitive, and farm output low; virtually nothing was done to instruct peasants in modern methods.

The second main cause of peasant poverty was overpopulation. The vast landmass of Russia was, of course, sparsely populated, but the number of persons employed in agriculture per unit of arable land, and relative to output, was extremely high compared with western Europe. There was a vast and increasing surplus of labour in the Russian villages. Outlets were available in seasonal migration to the southern provinces, where labour was needed on the great estates that produced much of the grain that Russia exported. Peasants could also move permanently to new land in Siberia, which at the end of the century was absorbing a yearly influx of 200,000, or they could find seasonal work in the cities or seek permanent employment in the growing industrial sector. These alternatives were not enough to absorb the growing labour surplus, which was most acute in the southern part of central Russia and in northern Ukraine, in the provinces of Kursk and Poltava. Peasants competed with each other to lease land from the landlords' estates, and this drove rents up. The existence of the large estates came to be resented more and more, and class feeling began to take the form of political demands for further redistribution of land.

The difficulties of agriculture were also increased by the inefficiency of the peasant commune (mir), which had the power to redistribute holdings according to the needs of families and to dictate the rotation of crops to all members. In doing so, it tended to hamper enterprising farmers and protect the incompetent. In defense of the commune it was argued that it ensured a living for everyone and stood for values of solidarity and cooperation that were more important than mere profit and loss. Russian officials also found it useful as a means of collecting taxes and keeping the peasants in order. The 1861 settlement did provide a procedure by which peasants could leave the commune, but it was very complicated and was little used. In practice, the communal system predominated in northern and central Russia, and individual peasant ownership was widespread in Ukraine and in the Polish borderlands. In 1898 in 50 provinces of European Russia, about 198 million acres (80 million hectares) of land were under communal tenure, and about 54 million (22 million) were under individual tenure.

The dispute over the peasant commune divided the ranks both of officialdom and of the government's revolutionary enemies. The Ministry of the Interior, which stood for paternalism and public security at all costs, favoured the commune in the belief that it was a bulwark of conservatism, of traditional Russian social values, and of loyalty to the tsar. The Socialist Revolutionaries (Socialist Revolutionary Party) favoured it because they took the view that the commune was, at least potentially, the natural unit of a future socialist republic. The Ministry of Finance, concerned with developing capitalism in town and country, objected to the commune as an obstacle to economic progress; it hoped to see a prosperous minority of individual farmers as a basis of a new and more modern type of Russian conservatism. The Social Democrats (Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party) agreed that the commune must and should be replaced by capitalist ownership, but they saw this only as the next stage in the progress toward a socialist revolution led by urban workers.

The emancipation of the serfs undoubtedly helped capitalist (industrialization) development, though this began rather slowly. A rapid growth of railways came in the 1870s, and in the same decade the exploitation of petroleum began at Baku in Azerbaijan. There was also progress in the textile and sugar industries. Only in the 1890s did the demand for iron and steel, created by the railway program and by military needs in general, begin to be satisfied on a large scale within Russia. By the end of the century there was a massive metallurgical industry in Ukraine, based on the iron ore of Krivoy Rog and the coal of the Donets Basin. The iron industry of the Urals, which lost a large part of its labour force when the serfs (serfdom) became free to leave, lagged far behind. Poland was also an important metallurgical centre. Textiles were concentrated in the central provinces of Moscow and Vladimir; by the end of the century they were drawing much of their raw cotton from the newly conquered lands of Central Asia. Baku was also booming, especially as a supplier of petroleum to the Moscow region. St. Petersburg had begun to develop important engineering and electrical industries. Count Sergey Witte (Witte, Sergey Yulyevich, Graf), minister of finance from 1892 to 1903, was able to put Russia on the gold standard in 1897 and to encourage foreign investors. French and Belgian capital was invested mainly in the southern metallurgical industry, British in petroleum, and German in electricity.

Industrial growth began to produce an urban working class (proletariat), which seemed fated to repeat the history of workers in the early stages of industrial capitalism in Western countries. The workers were unskilled, badly paid, overworked, and miserably housed. Uprooted from the village communities in which they had at least had a recognized place, the peasants' children who flocked into the new industrial agglomerations suffered both physical and moral privation. This was especially true of central Russia, where the surplus of labour kept wages down to the minimum. It was in St. Petersburg, where employers found it less easy to recruit workers, that the transformation of the amorphous mass of urban poor into a modern working class made the most progress. St. Petersburg employers were also less hostile to government legislation on behalf of the workers. In 1882 Finance Minister Nikolay Khristyanovich Bunge (Bunge, Nikolay Khristyanovich) introduced an inspectorate of labour conditions and limited hours of work for children. In 1897 Witte introduced a maximum working day of 11.5 hours for all workers, male or female, and of 10 hours for those engaged in night work. Trade unions (organized labour) were not permitted, though several attempts were made to organize them illegally. The Ministry of the Interior, being more interested in public order than in businessmen's profits, occasionally showed some concern for the workers. In 1901 the head of the Moscow branch of the security police, Col. Sergey Vasilyevich Zubatov (Zubatov, Sergey Vasilyevich), encouraged the formation of a workers' society intended to rally the workers behind the autocracy, but it was largely infiltrated by Social Democrats. Strikes were strictly forbidden but occurred anyway, especially in 1885, 1896, 1902, and 1903.

A Russian business class also developed rapidly under the umbrella of government policy, benefiting especially from the high protective tariffs and the very high prices paid for government purchases from the metallurgical industry. Russia's industrial progress took place under private capitalism, but it differed from classical Western capitalism in that the motivation of Russian industrial growth was political and military, and the driving force was government policy. Russian and foreign capitalists provided the resources and the organizing skill, and they were richly rewarded. The richness of their rewards accounted for a second difference from classical capitalism: Russian capitalists were completely satisfied with the political system as it was. Whereas English and French capitalists had material and ideological reasons to fight against absolute monarchs and aristocratic upper classes, Russian businessmen accepted the principle and the practice of autocracy.

Education and ideas

In 1897, at the time of the first modern census in Russia, there were 104,000 persons who had attended or were attending a university—less than 0.1 percent of the population—and 73 percent of these were children of nobles or officials. The number who had studied or were studying in any sort of secondary school was 1,072,977, or less than 1 percent of the population, and 40 percent of these were children of nobles and officials. In 1904, primary schools managed by the Ministry of Education had rather more than 3,000,000 pupils, and those managed by the Orthodox church not quite 2,000,000. The combined figure represented only 27 percent of the children of school age in the empire at that time. Persistent neglect of education could no longer be explained by sheer backwardness and lack of funds: the Russian Empire of 1900 could have afforded a modern school system, albeit rudimentary, if its rulers had considered it a top priority.

In the last half of the 19th century, the word intelligentsia came into use in Russia. This word is not precisely definable, for it described both a social group and a state of mind. Essentially, the intelligentsia consisted of persons with a good modern education and a passionate preoccupation with general political and social ideas. Its nucleus was to be found in the liberal professions of law, medicine, teaching, and engineering, which grew in numbers and social prestige as the economy became more complex; yet it also included individuals from outside those professions—private landowners, bureaucrats, and even army officers. The intelligentsia was by its very nature opposed to the existing political and social system, and this opposition coloured its attitude toward culture in general. In particular, the value of works of literature (literary criticism) was judged by the intelligentsia according to whether they furthered the cause of social progress. This tradition of social utilitarianism was initiated by the critic Vissarion Belinsky (Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich) and carried further by Nikolay Aleksandrovich Dobrolyubov (Dobrolyubov, Nikolay Aleksandrovich) in the late 1850s. Its most extreme exponent was Dmitry I. Pisarev, who held that all art is useless and that the only aim of thinking people should be “to solve forever the unavoidable question of hungry and naked people.” In the last decades of the century the chief spokesman of social utilitarianism was the sociological writer Nikolay K. Mikhaylovsky (Mikhaylovsky, Nikolay Konstantinovich), a former supporter of the revolutionary organization Narodnaya Volya. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Russian literature was faced with two censorships—that of the official servants of the autocracy and that of the social utilitarian radicals. Yet the great writers of this period—Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy, Leo), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor), and others—though profoundly concerned with social issues, did not conform to these criteria.

The intelligentsia did not consist of active revolutionaries, although it preferred the revolutionaries to the government, but it was from the intelligentsia that the professional revolutionaries were largely recruited. The lack of civil liberties and the prohibition of political parties made it necessary for socialists to use conspiratorial methods. Illegal parties had to have rigid centralized discipline. Yet the emergence of the professional revolutionary, imagined in romantically diabolical terms in the Revolutionary Catechism of Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich) and Sergey Nechayev (Nechayev, Sergey Gennadiyevich) in 1869 and sketched more realistically in What Is to Be Done? by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich), in 1902, was not entirely due to the circumstances of the underground political struggle. The revolutionaries were formed also by their sense of mission, by their absolute conviction that they knew best the interests of the masses. For these men and women, revolution was not just a political aim; it was also a substitute for religion. It is worth noting that a proportion of the young revolutionaries of the late 19th century were children of Orthodox priests or persons associated with religious sects. It is also worth noting that the traditional Russian belief in autocracy, the desire for an all-powerful political saviour, and the contempt for legal formalities and processes had left its mark on them. The autocracy of Nicholas II was, of course, odious to them, but this did not mean that autocratic government should be abolished; rather, it should be replaced by the autocracy of the virtuous.

Russian revolutionary socialism at the end of the century was divided into two main streams, each of these being subdivided into a section that favoured conspiratorial tactics and one that aimed at a mass movement to be controlled by its members. The Socialist Revolutionary Party (Socialist Revolutionaries; founded in 1901 from a number of groups more or less derived from Narodnaya Volya) first hoped that Russia could bypass capitalism; when it became clear that this could not be done, they aimed to limit its operation and build a socialist order based on village communes. The land was to be socialized but worked by peasants on the principle of “labour ownership.” The Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (Social Democrats; founded in 1898 from a number of illegal working-class groups) believed that the future lay with industrialization and a socialist order based on the working class. The Socialist Revolutionaries were divided between their extreme terrorist wing, the “Fighting Organization,” and a broader and looser membership that at one end merged imperceptibly with radical middle-class liberalism. The Social Democrats were divided between Lenin's group, which took the name Bolshevik (derived from the Russian word for “majority,” after a majority won by his group at one particular vote during the second congress of the party, held in Brussels and London in 1903), and a number of other groups that were by no means united but that came to be collectively known as Menshevik (derived from the word for “minority”). The personal, ideological, and programmatic issues involved in their quarrels were extremely complex, but it is a permissible oversimplification to say that Lenin favoured rigid discipline while the Mensheviks aimed at creating a mass labour movement of the western European type, that the Mensheviks were much more willing to cooperate with nonsocialist liberals than were the Bolsheviks, and that Lenin paid much more attention to the peasants as a potential revolutionary force than did the Mensheviks. These divisions arose because the Mensheviks adhered to orthodox Marxism, while Lenin was prepared to rework basic Marxist thought to fit Russian political reality as he saw it.

Russification policies

After the Crimean War the Russian government made some attempt to introduce in Poland a new system acceptable to the Polish population. The leading figure on the Polish side was the nobleman Aleksander Wielopolski (Wielopolski, Count Aleksander). His pro-Russian program proved unacceptable to the Poles. Tension increased, and in January 1863 (January Insurrection) armed rebellion broke out. This rebellion was put down, being suppressed with special severity in the Lithuanian and Ukrainian borderlands. In order to punish the Polish country gentry for their part in the insurrection, the Russian authorities carried out a land reform on terms exceptionally favourable to the Polish peasants. Its authors were Nikolay Milyutin (Milyutin, Nikolay Alekseyevich) and Yury Samarin, who genuinely desired to benefit the peasants. The reform was followed, however, by an anti-Polish policy in education and other areas. In the 1880s this went so far that the language of instruction even in primary schools in areas of purely Polish population was Russian. At first, all classes of Poles passively acquiesced in their defeat, while clinging to their language and national consciousness, but in the 1890s two strong, though of course illegal, political parties appeared—the National Democrats and the Polish Socialist Party, both fundamentally anti-Russian.

After 1863 the authorities also severely repressed all signs of Ukrainian nationalist activity. In 1876 all publications in Ukrainian, other than historical documents, were prohibited. In Eastern Galicia, however, which lay just across the Austrian border and had a population of several million Ukrainians, not only the language but also political activity flourished. There the great Ukrainian historian Mikhail Hrushevsky and the socialist writer Mikhail Drahomanov published their works; Ukrainian political literature was smuggled across the border. In the 1890s small illegal groups of Ukrainian democrats and socialists existed on Russian soil.

From the 1860s the government embarked on a policy designed to strengthen the position of the Russian language and nationality in the borderlands of the empire. This policy is often described as “Russification.” The emphasis on the Russian language could also be seen as an attempt to make governing the empire easier and more efficient. However, though Russian was to be the lingua franca, the government never explicitly demanded that its non-Russian subjects abandon their own languages, nationalities, or religions. On the other hand, conversions to Orthodoxy were welcomed, and converts were not allowed to revert to their former religions. The government policy of Russification found its parallel in the overtly Russian nationalist tone of several influential newspapers and journals. Nor was Russian society immune to the attraction of national messianism, as the popularity of Nikolay Yakovlevich Danilevsky (Danilevsky, Nikolay Yakovlevich)'s Russia and Europe in the decades after its first appearance in 1869 attested. For most supporters of Russification, however, the policy's main aim was to consolidate a Russian national identity and loyalty at the empire's centre and to combat the potential threat of imperial disintegration in the face of minority nationalism.

Ironically, by the late 19th and early 20th century some of the most prominent objects of Russification were peoples who had shown consistent loyalty to the empire and now found themselves confronted by government policies that aimed to curtail the rights and privileges of their culture and nationality. The Germans of the Baltic provinces were deprived of their university, and their ancient secondary schools were Russified. The Latvians and Estonians did not object to action by the government against the Germans, whom they had reason to dislike as landowners and rich burghers, but the prospect of the German language being replaced by the Russian had no attraction for them, and they strongly resented the pressure to abandon their Lutheran faith for Orthodoxy. The attempt to abolish many aspects of Finnish autonomy united the Finns in opposition to St. Petersburg in the 1890s. In 1904 the son of a Finnish senator assassinated the Russian governor-general, and passive resistance to Russian policies was almost universal. Effective and widespread passive resistance also occurred among the traditionally Russophile Armenians (Armenian) of the Caucasus when the Russian authorities began to interfere with the organization of the Armenian church and to close the schools maintained from its funds.

Of the Muslim peoples of the empire, those who suffered most from Russification were the most economically and culturally advanced, the Tatars (Tatar) of the Volga valley. Attempts by the Orthodox church to convert Muslims and the rivalry between Muslims and Orthodox to convert small national groups of Finno-Ugrian speech who were still pagans caused growing mutual hostility. By the end of the century the Tatars had developed a substantial merchant class and the beginnings of a national intelligentsia. Modern schools, maintained by merchants' funds, were creating a new Tatar educated elite that was increasingly receptive to modern democratic ideas. In Central Asia (Central Asia, history of), on the other hand, modern influences had barely made themselves felt, and there was no Russification. In those newly conquered lands, Russian colonial administration was paternalistic and limited: like the methods of “indirect rule” in the British and French empires, it made no systematic attempt to change old ways.

The position of the Jews (Jew) was hardest of all. As a result of their history and religious traditions, as well as of centuries of social and economic discrimination, the Jews were overwhelmingly concentrated in commercial and intellectual professions. They were thus prominent both as businessmen and as political radicals, hateful to the bureaucrats as socialists and to the lower classes as capitalists. The pogroms (pogrom), or anti-Jewish riots, which broke out in various localities in the months after the assassination of Alexander II, effectively ended any dreams for assimilation and “enlightenment” on the western European pattern for Russia's Jewish community. At this time there also arose the oft-repeated accusation that anti-Semitic excesses were planned and staged by the authorities, not only in Ukraine in 1881 but also in Kishinev in 1903 and throughout the Jewish Pale of Settlement in 1905. The view of government-sponsored pogroms has not, however, been corroborated by documental evidence. Indeed, the officials in St. Petersburg were too concerned with maintaining order to organize pogroms that might pose a direct threat to that order. However, some local government officials were certainly at least remiss in their duties in protecting Jewish lives and properties and at worse in cahoots with the anti-Semitic rioters. The most important result of the 1881 pogrom wave was the promulgation in May 1882 of the notorious “temporary rules,” which further restricted Jewish rights and remained in effect to the very end of the Russian Empire. By the turn of the century the terms Jews and revolutionaries had come to be synonymous for some officials.

Foreign policy

During the second half of the 19th century, Russian foreign policy gave about equal emphasis to the Balkans and East Asia. The friendship with Germany and Austria weakened, and in the 1890s the Triple Alliance of Germany,Austria-Hungary, and Italy stood face to face with a Dual Alliance of France and Russia.

The demilitarization of the Black Sea coast that had resulted from the Crimean War was ended by the London Conference of 1871, which allowed Russia to rebuild its naval forces. In 1876 the Serbo-Turkish War produced an outburst of Pan-Slav feeling in Russia. Partly under its influence, but mainly in pursuit of traditional strategic aims, Russia declared war on Turkey (Russo-Turkish wars) in April 1877. After overpowering heavy Turkish resistance at the fortress of Pleven (Pleven, Siege of) in Bulgaria, the Russian forces advanced almost to Istanbul. By the Treaty of San Stefano (San Stefano, Treaty of) of March 1878 the Turks accepted the creation of a large independent Bulgarian state. Fearing that this would be a Russian vassal, giving Russia mastery over all the Balkans and the straits, Britain and Austria-Hungary opposed the treaty. At the international Congress of Berlin (Berlin, Congress of), held in June 1878, Russia had to accept a much smaller Bulgaria. This was regarded by Russian public opinion as a bitter humiliation, for which the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck (Bismarck, Otto von) was blamed. In 1885–87 a new international crisis was caused by Russian interference in Bulgarian affairs, with Britain and Austria-Hungary again opposing Russia. Once more, Russia suffered a political reverse. In the 1890s, despite the pro-Russian sentiment of many Serbs and Bulgarians, neither country's government was much subject to Russian influence. In the crises that arose in connection with the Turkish Armenians and over Crete and Macedonia, Russian policy was extremely cautious and on the whole tended to support the Turkish government. In 1897 an Austro-Russian agreement was made on spheres of influence in the Balkans.

The attempt of Bismarck to restore Russo-German friendship through the Reinsurance Treaty of 1887, with a view to an ultimate restoration of the alliance of Russia, Germany, and Austria, did not survive Bismarck's fall from power in 1890. The Russian government, alarmed by indications of a closer cooperation between the Triple Alliance and Britain and by some signs of a pro-Polish attitude in Berlin, reluctantly turned toward France. The French needed an ally against both Germany and Britain; the Russians needed French capital, in the form both of loans to the Russian government and of investment in Russian industry. The Franco-Russian alliance was signed in August 1891 and was supplemented by a military convention. Essentially, the alliance was directed against Germany, for it was only in a war with Germany that each could help the other. Later, however, there were to be plans in case war with Britain broke out.

Russia established diplomatic and commercial relations with Japan by three treaties between 1855 and 1858. In 1860, by the Treaty of Beijing, Russia acquired from China a long strip of Pacific coastline south of the mouth of the Amur and began to build the naval base of Vladivostok. In 1867 the Russian government sold Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million. The Treaty of St. Petersburg between Russia and Japan in 1875 gave Russia sole control over all of Sakhalin (Sakhalin Island) and gave Japan the Kuril Islands.

The systematic Russian conquest of Turkistan, the region of settled population and ancient culture lying to the south of the Kazakh steppes, began in the 1860s. This was watched with distrust by the British authorities in India, and fear of Russian interference in Afghanistan led to the Anglo-Afghan War (Anglo-Afghan Wars) of 1878–80. In the 1880s Russian expansion extended to the Turkmen lands on the east coast of the Caspian Sea, whose people offered much stiffer military resistance. The Russian conquest of Merv in 1884 caused alarm in Kolkata (Calcutta), and in March 1885 a clash between Russian and Afghan troops produced a major diplomatic crisis between Britain and Russia. An agreement on frontier delimitation was reached in September 1885, and for the next decades Central Asian affairs did not have a major effect on Anglo-Russian relations. At the same time, Russia and Britain battled for influence over the weakening Iranian state.

Much more serious was the situation in East Asia. In 1894–95 the long-standing rivalry between the Japanese and Chinese in Korea led to a war between the two Asian empires, which the Japanese won decisively. Russia faced the choice of collaborating with Japan (with which relations had been fairly good for some years) at the expense of China or assuming the role of protector of China against Japan. The tsar chose the second policy, largely under the influence of Count Witte (Witte, Sergey Yulyevich, Graf). Together with the French and German governments, the Russians demanded that the Japanese return to China the Liaodong Peninsula, which they had taken in the treaty of peace. Russia then concluded an alliance with China in 1896, which included the establishment of the Russian-owned Chinese Eastern Railway, which was to cross northern Manchuria from west to east, linking Siberia with Vladivostok, and was to be administered by Russian personnel and a Russian police force with extraterritorial rights. In 1898 the Russian government went still further and acquired from China the same Liaodong Peninsula of which it had deprived the Japanese three years earlier. There the Russians built a naval base in ice-free waters at Port Arthur (Lüshun) (Lüshun; now in Dalian, China). They also obtained extraterritorial rights of ownership and management of a southern Manchurian railroad that was to stretch from north to south, linking Port Arthur with the Chinese Eastern Railway at the junction of Harbin. When in 1900 the European powers sent armed forces to relieve their diplomatic missions in Beijing, besieged by the Boxer Rebellion, the Russian government used this as an opportunity to bring substantial military units into Manchuria. All of this bitterly antagonized the Japanese. They might have been willing, nonetheless, to write off Manchuria as a Russian sphere of influence provided that Russia recognize Japanese priority in Korea, but the Russian government would not do this. It was not so much that the tsar himself wished to dominate all of East Asia; it was rather that he was beset by advisers with several rival schemes and could not bring himself to reject any of them, particularly since he underestimated Japan's resolution and power. The British government, fearing that Russia would be able to establish domination over the Chinese government and so interfere with the interests of Britain in other parts of China, made an alliance with Japan in January 1902. Negotiations between Russia and Japan continued, but they were insincere on both sides. On the night of Jan. 26/27 (Feb. 8/9, New Style), 1904, Japanese forces made a surprise attack on Russian warships in Port Arthur, and the Russo-Japanese War began.

Hugh Seton-Watson Nicholas V. Riasanovsky Dominic Lieven

The last years of tsardom

The revolution of 1905 (Russian Revolution of 1905)–06

The Russo-Japanese War brought a series of Russian defeats on land and sea, culminating in the destruction of the Baltic fleet in the Tsushima Strait. The defeat finally brought to a head a variety of political discontents simmering back at home. First the professional strata, especially in the zemstvos and municipalities, organized a banquet campaign in favour of a popularly elected legislative assembly. Then, on Jan. 9 (Jan. 22, New Style), 1905, the St. Petersburg workers, led by the priest Georgy Gapon (leader of the Assembly of Russian Factory Workers), marched on the Winter Palace to present Emperor Nicholas with a loyal petition containing similar but wider-ranging demands. They were met by troops who opened fire on them, and about 130 were killed.

News of this massacre, known as Bloody Sunday, spread quickly, and very soon most of the other social classes and ethnic groups in the empire were in uproar. There were student demonstrations, workers' strikes, peasant insurrections, and mutinies in both the army and navy. The peasants organized themselves through their traditional village assembly, the mir, to decide when and how to seize the land or property of the landlords. The workers, on the other hand, created new institutions, the Soviets (soviet) of Workers' Deputies: these, consisting of elected delegates from the factories and workshops of a whole town, organized the strike movement there, negotiated with the employers and police, and sometimes kept up basic municipal services during the crisis.

The revolutionary movement reached its climax in October 1905, with the declaration of a general strike and the formation of a soviet (council) in St. Petersburg itself. Most cities, including the capital, were paralyzed, and Witte (Witte, Sergey Yulyevich, Graf), who had just concluded peace negotiations with the Japanese, recommended that the government yield to the demands of the liberals and create an elected legislative assembly (Duma). This the tsar reluctantly consented to do, in the manifesto of Oct. 17 (October Manifesto) (Oct. 30, New Style), 1905. It did not end the unrest, however. In a number of towns, armed bands of monarchists, known as Black Hundreds, organized pogroms against Jewish quarters and also attacked students and known left-wing activists. In Moscow the soviet unleashed an armed insurrection in December, which had to be put down with artillery, resulting in considerable loss of life. Peasant unrest and mutinies in the armed services continued well into 1906 and even 1907.

Throughout the period from 1905 to 1907, disorders were especially violent in non-Russian regions of the empire, where the revolutionary movement took on an added ethnic dimension, as in Poland, the Baltic provinces, Georgia, and parts of Ukraine. There was also persistent fighting between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the towns of Transcaucasia.

A campaign of terrorism, waged by the Maximalists of the Socialist Revolutionary Party against policemen and officials, claimed hundreds of lives in 1905–07. The police felt able to combat it only by infiltrating their agents into the revolutionary parties and particularly into the terrorist detachments of these parties. This use of double agents (or agents provocateurs, as they were often known) did much to demoralize both the revolutionaries and the police and to undermine the reputation of both with the public at large. The nadir was reached in 1908, when it was disclosed that Yevno Azef, longtime head of the terrorist wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, was also an employee of the department of police and had for years been both betraying his revolutionary colleagues and organizing the murders of his official superiors.

The split in the Social Democratic Party was deepened by the failure of the 1905 revolution. Both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks agreed that a further revolution would be needed but disagreed fundamentally on the way to bring it about. The Mensheviks favoured cooperation with the bourgeois parties in the Duma, the new legislative assembly, in order to legislate civil rights and then use them to organize the workers for the next stage of the class struggle. The Bolsheviks regarded the Duma purely as a propaganda forum, and Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich) drew from 1905 the lesson that in Russia, where the bourgeoisie was weak, the revolutionaries could combine the bourgeois and proletarian stages of the revolution by organizing the peasantry as allies of the workers. He was also moving closer to Leon Trotsky (Trotsky, Leon)'s theory that the forthcoming Russian revolution, taking place in the country that was the “weak link” of international imperialism, would spark a world revolution. Lenin did not reveal the full extent of the changes in his ideas until 1917, but in 1912 the split with the Mensheviks was finalized when the Bolsheviks called their own congress in Prague that year, claiming to speak in the name of the entire Social Democratic Party.

The State Duma

The October Manifesto had split the opposition. The professional strata, now reorganizing themselves in liberal parties, basically accepted it and set about trying to make the new legislature, the State Duma, work in the interest of reform. The two principal socialist parties (Socialist Revolutionary Party), the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats, saw the manifesto as just a first step and the Duma (which at first they boycotted) as merely a tribune to be exploited to project their revolutionary ideas.

The empire's Fundamental Laws were amended in 1906 to take account of the Duma. Russia was still described as an “autocracy,” though the adjective “unlimited” was no longer attached to the term, and an article confirming that no law could take effect without the consent of the Duma effectively annulled its meaning. Alongside the Duma there was to be an upper chamber, the State Council, half of its members appointed by the emperor and half elected by established institutions such as the zemstvos and municipalities, business organizations, the Academy of Sciences, and so on. Both chambers had budgetary rights, the right to veto any law, and the ability to initiate legislation. On the other hand, the government was to be appointed, as before, by the emperor, who in practice seldom chose members of the Duma or State Council to be ministers. In addition, the emperor had the right to dissolve the legislative chambers at any time and, under Article 87, to pass emergency decrees when they were not in session.

The Duma electoral law, though complicated, did give the franchise to most adult males. The first elections, held in spring 1906, produced a relative majority for the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets (Kadet)), a radical liberal group drawn largely from the professional strata that wished to go beyond the October Manifesto to a full constitutional monarchy on the British model and to grant autonomy to the non-Russian nationalities. The next largest caucus, the Labour Group (Trudoviki), included a large number of peasants and some socialists who had ignored their comrades' boycott. The two parties demanded amnesty for political prisoners, equal rights for Jews, autonomy for Poland, and—most important of all—expropriation of landed estates for the peasants. These demands were totally unacceptable to the government, which used its powers to dissolve the Duma. The new premier, Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin (Stolypin, Pyotr Arkadyevich), then used Article 87 to pass his own agrarian reform (Stolypin land reform) (see below), known as the Stolypin land reform, and to institute special summary courts-martial against terrorists; under the jurisdiction of these courts, some 600–1,000 suspects were executed.

In early 1907 new elections were held; to the government's disappointment, the Social Democrats (Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party), having abandoned their boycott, did very well, coming in as the third largest party, behind the Kadets and the Trudoviki. The monarchists also performed better than before, so that the house was sharply polarized, but with a preponderance on the left. Unable to pass his agrarian law through it or to cooperate with its majority in any other way, Stolypin advised the tsar to dissolve the Second Duma on June 3 (June 16, New Style), 1907.

Nicholas did not, however, abolish the Duma altogether, as some of his advisers wished. Instead, he and Stolypin altered the electoral law in favour of landowners, wealthier townsfolk, and Russians to the detriment of peasants, workers, and non-Russians. The Third Duma, elected in autumn 1907, and the Fourth, elected in autumn 1912, were therefore more congenial to the government. The leading caucus in both Dumas was the Union of October 17 (known as the Octobrists (Octobrist)), whose strength was among the landowners of the Russian heartland. The Octobrists acknowledged the October Manifesto as a sufficient basis for cooperation with the government and accepted Stolypin's agrarian program as well as his desire to strengthen the position of the Russian nation throughout the empire.

In practice, however, their cooperation did not bear much legislative fruit beyond the agrarian reform. Many nobles were worried by Stolypin's proposed reform of local government and justice, which would have weakened their dominant position in the localities. They were also alarmed that more and more land was passing from their control to other social classes. Their opposition was articulated by a pressure group known as the United Nobility, which had numerous members in the State Council and close personal links with the imperial court. Stolypin increasingly found that his reform measures, passed by the Duma, were being blocked in the State Council.

Frustrated but not wanting to lose all momentum, Stolypin fell back on nationalist measures, for which he could rely on support from his right-wing opponents both in the Duma and the State Council. Such was the bill restricting Finland's special liberties, passed in 1910. He proposed introducing zemstvos into the western provinces; since most landowners there were Polish, he added a special provision to bolster the vote of Russian peasants. The right wing of the State Council objected to this weakening of the landowners, and, receiving the tacit support of the emperor, they defeated the vital clause in the bill in March 1911. Stolypin, dismayed and angry, suspended both houses for three days and introduced the western zemstvos under Article 87. This egregious violation of the spirit of the Fundamental Laws lost him the support of the Octobrists, who went into opposition. Stolypin was, then, already fatally weakened politically when he was assassinated in September 1911. His murderer was both a Socialist Revolutionary and a police agent whose motives have remained obscure.

Although the legislative achievements of the Duma were meagre, it should not be written off as an ineffective body. It voted credits for a planned expansion of education that was on target to introduce compulsory primary schooling by 1922. Although it could not create or bring down governments, it could exert real pressure on ministers, especially during the budget debates in which even foreign and military affairs (constitutionally the preserve of the emperor alone) came under the deputies' scrutiny. These debates were extensively reported in the newspapers, where they could not be censored, and enormously intensified public awareness of political issues. Partly as a result, the period 1905–14 saw a huge growth in the publication of newspapers, periodicals, and books, both in the capital cities and in the provinces.

Not all the results of this heightened political awareness were happy for the government, of course. In 1910–11, following the death of Leo Tolstoy, who had been excommunicated by the Orthodox church and was refused an ecclesiastical burial, there was serious student unrest, and several Moscow State University professors resigned in protest at government arbitrariness. Furthermore, in 1912, after a disorder at the Lena gold mines, where some 200 workers were killed by troops, the workers' movement revived. Strikes and demonstrations broke out in many of the largest cities, culminating in the erection of barricades in St. Petersburg in July 1914. This time, however, the workers were on their own: there was no sign that peasants, students, or professional people were prepared to join their struggle.

One area where the failure to reform had very serious effects was in the church. Most prelates and clergymen wanted to see the Orthodox church (Russian Orthodox church) given greater independence in relation to the state, perhaps by restoring the patriarchate and assigning authority within the church to a synod elected by clergy and laity. Many also favoured internal reform by strengthening the parish, ending the split between white (parish) and black (monastic) clergy, and bringing liturgy and scriptures closer to the people. An elected church council was to have taken place in 1906 to debate these reforms, but in the end Stolypin and Nicholas decided not to convene it, as they feared its deliberations would intensify political discontent in the country. Thus, the church remained under secular domination until 1917 and fell increasingly under the influence of Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin (Rasputin, Grigory Yefimovich), a starets (holy man) of dubious reputation who became a favourite of the imperial couple because he was able to stanch the bleeding of their son Alexis, who suffered from hemophilia.

Agrarian reforms

The 1905 revolution showed that the village commune ( mir) was not a guarantor of stability, as its protagonists had claimed, but rather an active promoter of unrest. Stolypin's attempt to undermine it was therefore part of his program for restoring order. But he had economic aims in mind as well. He aimed to give peasant households the chance to leave the commune and also to consolidate their strip holdings, enclosing them in one place as privately owned smallholdings in order to lay the basis for a prosperous peasant commercial agriculture.

The reforms, promoted energetically by the minister of agriculture, Aleksandr Vasilevich Krivoshein, enjoyed a tangible if not sensational measure of success. By 1915 some 20 percent of communal households had left the communes, and about 10 percent had taken the further step of consolidating their strips into one holding. All over the country, land settlement commissions were at work surveying, redrawing boundaries, and negotiating with the village assemblies on behalf of the new smallholders. Not unnaturally, individual withdrawals often aroused resentment, and the reform worked more effectively when whole villages agreed to consolidate and enclose their strips. Many households, both within and outside the commune, were joining cooperatives to purchase seeds and equipment or to market their produce. A good many peasants from the more densely settled regions of Russia were migrating to the open spaces of Siberia and northern Turkestan, whither Krivoshein attracted them by offering free land, subsidies for travel, and specialist advice. In nearly all categories, agricultural output rose sharply between 1906 and 1914, though in international grain markets Russia was beginning to lose ground to the United States, Canada, and Argentina.

While the non-Russian peoples had made considerable political and cultural gains in 1905–06, these were largely reversed after 1907. Ukrainian nationalism gained ground despite the efforts to suppress it and spread from its nucleus among the professional strata to embrace a growing number of both peasants and workers. In Poland, Russian was restored (after a brief interval in 1905–07) as the language of tuition in all schools, while local government assemblies were introduced with artificially inbuilt Russian majorities. The Finnish Diet, resisting a reduction in its powers, was reduced to the status of a provincial zemstvo, and Finland was submitted to direct rule from St. Petersburg.

Among Muslims the reform movement known as Jādid temporarily found an outlet for its political aspirations in the Muslim Group in the Duma. With the new electoral law of 1907, however, nearly all Muslims lost their representation in the house. Many of their leaders subsequently emigrated to Turkey, encouraged by the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. In Central Asia, industrialization and the increasing colonization of the grazing lands of the Turkic nomadic peoples by immigrants from European Russia caused bitter resentment and led to a widespread and violent rebellion that broke out in 1916.

War and the fall of the monarchy

After 1906 Russia for some time had to pursue a cautious foreign policy in order to gain time to carry out reforms at home, to refit its army, and to rebuild its shattered navy. It set about these goals with the help of huge French loans that were contingent on the strengthening of the Franco-Russian alliance in both the diplomatic and military sense.

Excluded as a serious player in East Asia, Russia paid much more attention to the affairs of the Balkans, where the vulnerability of the Habsburg monarchy and that of the Ottoman Empire were generating an increasingly volatile situation. Besides, the Octobrists and many of the Rights who supported the government in the Duma took a great interest in the fate of the Slav nations of the region and favoured more active Russian support for them.

Operating from a position of weakness and under pressure from home, the Russian foreign minister, Aleksandr Petrovich Izvolsky (Izvolsky, Aleksandr, Count), attempted to conclude a deal with his Austrian counterpart, Alois, Count Lexa von Aehrenthal (Aehrenthal, Alois, Graf (count) Lexa von), whereby Austria would occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina (over which it had exercised nominal suzerainty since 1878) in return for permitting a revision of the Straits Convention (Straits Question) that would allow Russia to bring its warships out of the Black Sea if it were at war but Turkey were not. There was subsequent disagreement about what had been agreed, and, in the event, Austria occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnian crisis of 1908) unilaterally, without making Russia any reciprocal concessions. Russia protested but was unable to achieve anything, as Germany threw its support unequivocally behind Austria.

Izvolsky had to resign after this public humiliation, and his successor, Sergey Dmitriyevich Sazonov (Sazonov, Sergey Dmitriyevich), set about building an anti-Austrian bloc of Balkan states, including Turkey. This failed, but instead Russia was able to sponsor a Serbian-Greek-Bulgarian-Montenegrin alliance, which was successful in the First Balkan War (Balkan Wars) against Turkey (1912–13). This seemed to herald a period of greater influence for Russia in the Balkans. Austria, however, reacted by demanding that the recently enlarged Serbia be denied an outlet to the Adriatic Sea by the creation of a new state of Albania. Russia supported the Serbian desire for an Adriatic port, but the European powers decided in favour of Austria. The Balkan alliance then fell apart, with Serbia and Greece fighting on the side of Turkey in the Second Balkan War (1913). (See also Balkan Wars.)

The assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand (Francis Ferdinand, archduke of Austria-Este) in June 1914 and the subsequent Austrian ultimatum to Serbia thus placed Russia in a very difficult situation. If Russia let Serbia down and yielded yet again to Austrian pressure, it would cease to be taken seriously as a participant in Balkan affairs and its prestige as a European great power would be seriously compromised. The alternative was to escalate the Balkan conflict to the point where Germany would come in behind Austria and a general European war would ensue. Understandably by the standards of the time, Russia chose the second alternative. Nicholas II hoped that, by mobilizing only those forces on his border with Austria-Hungary, he could avoid both German intervention and escalation into world war. The result, however, was World War I and the destruction of the monarchy in 1917.

The immediate effect of the outbreak of war was to strengthen social support for the monarchy. The Duma allowed its sessions to be suspended for some months, and a number of a voluntary organizations came into existence to lend support to the war effort. Zemstvo and Municipal unions were set up to coordinate medical relief, supplies, and transport. Unofficial War Industry Committees were established in major cities and some provinces to bring together representatives of local authorities, cooperatives, merchants, industrialists, and workers for mutual consultation on economic priorities. These were supplemented in the summer of 1915 by government-sponsored Special Councils in the fields of defense, transport, fuel, and food supplies. Civil society seemed to be maturing and diversifying as a result of the national emergency.

In 1914 the Franco-Russian alliance proved its value. The German army could have crushed either France or Russia alone but not both together. The Russian invasion of East Prussia in August 1914 was a failure: in two unsuccessful battles nearly 150,000 Russians were taken prisoner. The invasion did, however, cause the Germans to withdraw troops from their western front and thus enable the French to win the First Battle of the Marne (Marne, First Battle of the) (Sept. 6–12, 1914). The entry of Turkey into the war on the side of Germany was a major setback, since it not only created a new front in the Caucasus (where the Russian armies performed rather well) but, by closing the straits, enormously reduced the supplies that the Allies could deliver to Russia. The failure of the British and French campaign in the Dardanelles and the entry of Bulgaria into the war on the German side meant that no relief could come from the south.

When the Central Powers launched a spring offensive in 1915, therefore, the Russian army was already short of munitions. The Germans and Austrians were able to occupy the whole of Poland and begin advancing into the western provinces and the Baltic region, unleashing a flood of refugees, who aggravated the already serious transport situation.

The military reverses of 1915, and especially the shortage of munitions, generated a strong swell of opinion in the Duma and State Council in favour of trying to compel the government to become more responsive to public opinion. The centre and left of the State Council combined with all the centre parties in the Duma, from the Moderate Rights to the Kadets, to form a Progressive Bloc. Its aim was to bring about the formation of a “government enjoying public confidence,” whose ministers would be drawn, if possible, partly from the legislative chambers. The bloc called for a broad program of political reform, including the freeing of political prisoners, the repeal of discrimination against religious minorities, emancipation of the Jews, autonomy for Poland, elimination of the remaining legal disabilities suffered by peasants, repeal of anti-trade-union legislation, and democratization of local government. This program had the support of eight ministers, at least as a basis for negotiation, but not of the premier, Ivan Logginovich Goremykin (Goremykin, Ivan Logginovich), who regarded it as an attempt to undermine the autocracy.

The emperor did not approve of the Progressive Bloc either. For Nicholas, only the autocratic monarchy could sustain effective government and avoid social revolution and the disintegration of the multinational empire. He entertained quite different notions of how to deal with the crisis. In August 1915 he announced that he was taking personal command of the army, leaving the empress in charge of the government. He moved with his suite to Mogilyov, in Belarusia, where he remained until the revolution. However, he played only a ceremonial role, allowing his military chief of staff, Gen. Mikhail Vasilyevich Alekseyev (Alekseyev, Mikhail Vasilyevich), to act as true commander in chief. During the next few months Nicholas dismissed all eight ministers who had supported the Progressive Bloc. Though he was unable to play the coordinating role that was so vital to the running of government, he still insisted that he was autocrat, maintaining ultimate power in his hands and preventing capable ministers from coordinating the administration of the government and war effort. From afar he ordained frequent pointless ministerial changes (dubbed by malicious gossip “ministerial leapfrog”), partly under the influence of his wife and Rasputin. Even loyal monarchists despaired of the situation, and in December 1916 Rasputin was murdered in a conspiracy involving some of them.

Ironically, the military situation improved greatly in 1916. The Polish and Baltic fronts were stabilized, and in 1916 Gen. Aleksey Alekseyevich Brusilov (Brusilov, Aleksey Alekseyevich) launched a successful offensive in Galicia, took nearly 400,000 Austrian and German prisoners, and captured Chernovtsy (Czernowitz).

In the end it was the economic effect of the war that proved too much for the government. The shock of the munitions shortage prompted a partly successful reorganization of industry to concentrate on military production, and by late 1916 the army was better supplied than ever before. But life on the home front was grim. The German and Turkish blockade choked off most imports. The food supply was affected by the call-up of numerous peasants (peasant) and by the diversion of transport to other needs. The strain of financing the war generated accelerating inflation, with which the pay of ordinary workers failed to keep pace. Strikes began in the summer of 1915 and increased during the following year, taking on an increasingly political tinge and culminating in a huge strike centred on the Putilov armament and locomotive works in Petrograd (the name given to St. Petersburg in August 1914) in January 1917. The government made matters worse by arresting all the members of the worker group of the Central War Industries Committee.

The February (March, New Style) Revolution (Russian Revolution of 1917) (see Russian Revolution of 1917) began among the food queues of the capital, which started calling for an end to autocracy. Soon workers from most of the major factories joined the demonstrations. The vital turning point came when Cossacks summoned to disperse the crowds refused to obey orders and troops in the city garrison mutinied and went over to the insurgents. The workers and soldiers rushed to re-create the institution they remembered from 1905, the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (soviet). Soon their example was followed in many other towns and army units throughout the empire. Faced by the threat of a civil war that would undermine the war effort, the military high command preferred to abandon Nicholas II in the hope that the Duma leaders would contain the revolution and provide effective leadership of the domestic front.

By agreement between the Petrograd soviet and the Duma, the Provisional Government was formed, headed by Prince Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvov (Lvov, Georgy Yevgenyevich, Prince) (chairman of the Zemstvo Union) and consisting mainly of Kadets and Octobrists, though Aleksandr Fyodorovich Kerensky (Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich) joined it from the Trudoviki. On March 2 (March 15, New Style), this government's emissaries reached Pskov, where the emperor (absolutism) had become stranded in his train, attempting to reach Petrograd. He dictated to them his abdication and thus brought to an end the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty.

Hugh Seton-Watson Geoffrey Alan Hosking Dominic Lieven

Soviet Russia

After the monarchy

The following is a general overview of the history of Russia during the period of Soviet domination. For full coverage of the history of the Soviet Union, see the article Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The February Revolution of 1917 (Russian Revolution of 1917) was spontaneous, leaderless, and fueled by deep resentment over the economic and social conditions that had prevailed in imperial Russia under Tsar Nicholas. The country, having been sucked into World War I, found the strains of fighting a modern war with a premodern political and economic system intolerable. The tsar was well-meaning but fell short as a war leader and was unable to cope with the burdens of being head of state. His wife, Alexandra, meddled in government and, while encouraging her husband to be a strong tsar, sought the advice of Rasputin on matters of state. The strain of the war, complicated by the intrigues and machinations within the royal house, caused a great gulf to develop between the monarchy and educated society and between the tsar and the rest of the population.

Hardly a hand was raised in support when the imperial order collapsed in February (March, New Style) 1917. The key factor had been the defection of the military. Without this instrument of coercion, the tsar could not survive. Most Russians rejoiced, but a political vacuum had been created that needed immediate attention. The Provisional Government that had been formed was to remain in office until a democratic parliament, the Constituent Assembly, was convened in January 1918. The new government was bourgeois, or middle-class, representing a tiny segment of the population. However, the soviets (soviet), which were proliferating rapidly, did not contest the right of the bourgeoisie to rule.

As Bolshevik domination grew in Petrograd, Moscow, and other major cities, the soviets accepted the idea that the revolution that would give them power would take place in two stages: the bourgeois and the socialist. How long this transition period would last was a debatable point. The Mensheviks (Menshevik), the moderate socialists, held that Russia had to pass through its capitalist phase before the socialist one could appear. The Bolsheviks (Bolshevik), the radical socialists, wanted the transition period to be short. Their firebrand leader, Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich), sensed that power could be seized rather easily. The government was weak, and it could not rely on the army. With its large complement of peasants and workers in uniform, it was this group that formed the natural constituency of the socialists (Socialist Revolutionary Party). Like the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the main agrarian party, did not advocate a rush to power. More than 80 percent of the population lived in the countryside, a fact that made the Socialist Revolutionaries certain to be the leading party when the Constituent Assembly was elected.

The Provisional Government was undone by war, economic collapse, and its own incompetence. Being a temporary administration, it postponed all hard decisions—what should be done about land seizures by the peasants, for example—for the Constituent Assembly. A fatal mistake by the government was its continued prosecution of the war. Middle-class politicians believed wrongly that one of the reasons for the February Revolution was popular anger at the incompetence of the conduct of the war. Disgruntled peasant-soldiers wanted to quit the army. They did not perceive Germany to be a threat to Russian sovereignty, and they deserted in droves to claim their piece of the landlord's estate. Industrial decline and rising inflation radicalized workers and cost the Provisional Government the needed support of the professional middle classes. The Bolshevik slogan of “All power to the soviets” was very attractive. Dual power prevailed. The government seemingly spoke for the country, but in reality it represented only the middle class; the soviets represented the workers and peasants. Moderate socialists—Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries—dominated the Petrograd and Moscow soviets after February, but the radical Bolsheviks began to win local elections and by September had a majority in the Petrograd Soviet.

The October (November) Revolution (Russian Revolution of 1917)

One of the turning points in the struggle for power was the attempt by Gen. Lavr Kornilov (Kornilov, Lavr Georgiyevich), who had been appointed commander in chief, to take control of Petrograd in August 1917 and wipe out the soviet. Aleksandr Kerensky (Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich), the prime minister, had been negotiating with Kornilov but then turned away and labeled Kornilov a traitor, perceiving his attack as a possible attempt to overthrow the government. Kerensky agreed to the arming of the Petrograd soviet, but after the failed coup the weapons were retained. The Bolsheviks could now consider staging an armed uprising. Had the Constituent Assembly been called during the summer, it could have undercut Lenin and his close colleague Leon Trotsky (Trotsky, Leon). Probably a majority of the population favoured state power passing to the soviets in October. They envisaged a broadly based socialist coalition government taking over. The October Revolution was precipitated by Kerensky himself when, angered by claims that the Bolsheviks controlled the Petrograd garrison, he sent troops to close down two Bolshevik newspapers. The Bolsheviks, led by Trotsky, feared that Kerensky would attempt to disrupt the Second All-Russian Congress, scheduled to open on October 25 (November 7, New Style); they reacted by sending troops to take over key communications and transportation points of the city. Lenin, who had been in hiding, appeared on the scene to urge the Bolsheviks to press forward and overthrow the Provisional Government, which they did on the morning of October 26. After the almost bloodless siege, Lenin proclaimed that power had passed to the soviets.

Lenin, at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in October (November, New Style) 1917, managed to secure and head a solely Bolshevik government—the Council of People's Commissars, or Sovnarkom. The Bolsheviks also had a majority in the Soviet Central Executive Committee, which was accepted as the supreme law-giving body. It was, however, the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), the Bolsheviks' party, in which true power came to reside. This governmental structure was to last until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918. However, when it became clear that the Bolsheviks did not hold a majority, Lenin disbanded the assembly, setting the stage for civil war. 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. In the immediate post-October days, a majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee favoured a coalition government, and Lenin eventually had to give in. Some Socialist Revolutionaries were added in December 1917, but the first and last coalition government remained in office only until March 1918, when, making great land concessions, the Bolsheviks accepted the defeatist Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (Brest-Litovsk, treaties of), ending Russian participation in World War I. The Socialist Revolutionaries, disagreeing with the terms of the treaty, resigned. The Bolsheviks, through the refined skills of the party leader Yakov Sverdlov, had the Congress of Soviets under control by the summer of 1918. Local soviets continued to defy the Bolsheviks but to no avail. Democracy received little nurturing and was never institutionalized; politics remained personalized. The cult of the strong leader gradually emerged, with local “Lenins” cropping up throughout the land.

The Civil War and War Communism (1918–21)

The Civil War (Russian Civil War)

One side can start a war, but it takes two to end one. The Bolsheviks found that this principle applied to themselves after October, when they expected to disengage quickly from World War I. Of the three points of their effective slogan—“Peace, land, and bread”—the first proved to be the most difficult to realize. Trotsky, the silver-tongued Bolshevik negotiator, had lectured the Germans and Austrians on Georg Hegel (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich)'s philosophy and other abstruse subjects at Brest-Litovsk. He thought that he had time on his side. He was waiting for news of revolution in Berlin and Vienna. It never came, and the Bolsheviks found themselves at the Germans' mercy. The issue of peace or war tore the Bolsheviks apart. Lenin favoured peace at any price, believing that it was purely an interim settlement before inevitable revolution. Nikolay Bukharin (Bukharin, Nikolay Ivanovich), a left-wing Bolshevik in the early Soviet period, wanted revolutionary war, while Trotsky wanted neither war nor peace. Trotsky believed the Germans did not have the military muscle to advance, but they did, and eventually the very harsh peace of the Brest-Litovsk treaty was imposed on Russia. The Socialist Revolutionaries left the coalition, and some resorted to terrorism, the target being the Bolshevik leadership. Ukraine slipped under German influence, and the Mensheviks held sway in the Caucasus. Only part of Russia—Moscow, Petrograd, and much of the industrial heartland—was under Bolshevik control. 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 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 Reds were opposed by the “Whites,” anticommunists led by former imperial officers. There were also the “Greens” and the anarchists, who fought the Reds and were strongest in Ukraine; the anarchists' most talented leader was Nestor Makhno. The Allies (Britain, the United States, Italy, and a host of other states) intervened on the White side and provided much matériel and finance. The Bolsheviks controlled the industrial heartland of Russia, and their lines of communication were short. Those of the Whites, who were dispersed all the way to the Pacific, were long. The Reds recruited many ex-tsarist officers but also produced many of their own. By mid-1920 the Reds had consolidated their hold on the country.

The feat of winning the Civil War and the organizational methods adopted to do so made a deep impact on Bolshevik thinking. Joseph Stalin, a party leader, talked about the party in terms of an army. There were political fronts, economic struggles, campaigns, and so on. The Bolsheviks were ruthless in their pursuit of victory. 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. Among the targets of the Cheka were Russian nationalists who objected strongly to the bolshevization of Russia. They regarded bolshevism as alien and based on western European and not Russian norms. Lenin was always mindful of “Great Russian” chauvinism, which was one reason he never permitted the formation of a separate Russian Communist Party apart from that of the Soviet Union. Russia, alone of the U.S.S.R.'s 15 republics, did not have its own communist party. It was belatedly founded in 1990.

War Communism

Lenin did not favour moving toward a socialist economy after October, because the Bolsheviks lacked the necessary economic skills. He preferred state capitalism, with capitalist managers staying in place but supervised by the workforce. Others, like Bukharin, wanted a rapid transition to a socialist economy. The Civil War caused the Bolsheviks to adopt a more severe economic policy known as War Communism, characterized chiefly by the expropriation of private business and industry and the forced requisition of grain and other food products from the peasants. The Bolsheviks subsequently clashed with the labour force, which understood socialism as industrial self-management. Ever-present hunger exacerbated the poor labour relations, and strikes became endemic, especially in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks, however, pressed ahead, using coercion as necessary. The story was the same in the countryside. Food had to be requisitioned in order to feed the cities and the Red Army. The Reds informed the peasants that it was in their best interests to supply food, because if the landlords came back the peasants would lose everything.

Soviet Russia adopted its first constitution in July 1918 and fashioned treaties with other republics such as Ukraine. The latter was vital for the economic viability of Russia, and Bolshevik will was imposed. It was also imposed in the Caucasus, where Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan were tied to Bolshevik Russia by 1921. Many communists regarded Russia as acquiring imperialist ambitions. Indeed, Moscow under the Georgian Joseph Stalin (Stalin, Joseph), the commissar for nationalities, regarded imperial Russia's territory as its natural patrimony. Russia lost control of the Baltic states and Finland, however. Lenin's nationality policy was based on the assumption that nations would choose to stay in a close relationship with 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, Stalin. As commissar for nationalities, he sought to ensure that Moscow rule prevailed.

New Economic Policy (1921–28)

Forced requisitioning led to peasant revolts, and the Tambov province revolt of 1920 in particular forced Lenin to change his War Communism policy. He and the Bolshevik leadership were willing to slaughter the mutinous sailors of the Kronstadt (Kronshtadt Rebellion) naval base in March 1921, but they could not survive if the countryside turned against them. They would simply starve to death. A tactical retreat from enforced socialism was 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 in March 1921. A ban on factionalism in the party was also imposed. This ban was needed to prevent local party groups from overturning the decisions of the congress. 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. The monetary reform of 1923 provided a money tax that brought an end to forced requisitioning. The economy was back to its 1913 level by the mid-1920s, and this permitted a vigorous debate on the future. All Communist Party members agreed that the goal was socialism, and this meant the dominance of the industrial economy. The working class, the natural constituency of the Communist Party, had to grow rapidly. There was also the question of the country's security. Moscow lived in fear of an attack during the 1920s and concluded a number of peace treaties and nonaggression pacts with neighbouring and other countries.

Soviet Russia gave way to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) in 1922, but this did not mean that Russia gave up its hegemony within the new state. As before, Moscow was the capital, and it dominated the union. Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich)'s death in January 1924 set off a succession struggle that lasted until the end of the decade. Stalin eventually outwitted Trotsky, Lenin's natural successor, and various other contenders. Stalin, who had become general secretary of the party in 1922, used the party as a power base. The economic debate was won by those who favoured rapid industrialization and forced collectivization. The NEP engendered not only a flowering of Russian culture but also that of non-Russian and non-Slavic cultures. Russia itself had been an empire with many non-Russian citizens, and the emergence of numerous national elites was a trend of considerable concern to Stalin (Stalin, Joseph) and his leadership.

The Stalin era (1928–53)

Stalin, a Georgian, surprisingly turned to “Great Russian” nationalism to strengthen the Soviet regime. During the 1930s and '40s he promoted certain aspects of Russian history, some Russian national and cultural heroes, and the Russian language, and he held the Russians up as the elder brother for the non-Slavs to emulate. Industrialization developed first and foremost in Russia. collectivization, though, met with considerable resistance in rural areas. Ukraine in particular suffered harshly at Stalin's hands because of forced collectivization. He encountered strenuous resistance there, for which he never forgave the Ukrainians. His policies thereafter brought widespread starvation to that republic, especially in 1932–33, when possibly millions may have died. Nevertheless, many party officials from Ukraine came to Moscow to make their careers, among them Nikita S. Khrushchev, who would succeed Stalin. The armed forces were dominated by Russians and Ukrainians, but the upper echelons of the Communist Party did not contain as many Ukrainians as might have been expected, given the size of that republic. The political police, on the other hand, had many non-Russians at the top, especially Georgians and Armenians.

Russian industry expanded rapidly under Stalin, with Ukrainian in second place. The industrialization of the Caucasus and Central Asia (Central Asia, history of) began during the 1930s, and it was the Russians, aided by the Ukrainians, who ran the factories. The labour force was also predominantly Russian, as was the emerging technical intelligentsia. Stalin's nationality policy 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 nationality policy. He came to the conclusion that a Sovietized Russian elite would be more effective as an instrument of modernization. In the non-Russian republics, Russians and Ukrainians were normally second secretaries of the Communist Party and occupied key posts in the government and political police. Diplomats were predominantly Russian. The Soviet constitution of 1936 was democratic—but only on paper. It 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 (Tatar) 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, but this was not acknowledged, and no autonomous republic was established. 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. New industry usually attracted Russian and Ukrainian labour rather than the locals, and this changed the demographic pattern of the U.S.S.R. Russians spread throughout the union, and by 1991 there were 25 million living outside the Russian republic, including 11 million in Ukraine. Russians and Ukrainians made up more than half the population of Kazakhstan (Kazakh) in 1991. Almost half the population of the capital of Kyrgyzstan and more than a third of the population of Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, were Russian at the time the union ended in 1991.

The German invasion in June 1941 resulted in much of Ukraine being overrun. Many Ukrainians welcomed the Wehrmacht (German armed forces). Stalin was already displeased with the Ukrainians, and this reinforced his feelings. (In his victory toast after the war, he drank to the Russian triumph over the Germans.) This was in line with Stalin's wartime policies, through which he rehabilitated the Russian Orthodox Church while identifying himself personally with previous Russian leaders such as the medieval prince Dmitri Donskoy and the tsars Ivan IV (the Terrible) and Peter I (the Great).

The Russians, however, suffered as much as anyone else during the purges and repression that characterized Stalin's reign. Stalin vandalized Russian cultural monuments and destroyed many fine examples of Russian architecture. He was personally responsible for the destruction of some of Moscow's finest cathedrals. It was as if Stalin were trying to expunge Russia's past and build a new Russia in his own image. This was ironic given that Stalin spoke Russian with a Georgian accent.

Victory over Germany precipitated an upsurge of Russian national pride (nationalism). Russia, in the guise of the U.S.S.R., had become a great power and by the 1970s was one of two world superpowers. The advent of the Cold War in the 1940s led to Stalin tightening his grip on his sphere of influence in eastern and southeastern Europe. Russian was imposed as the main foreign language, and Russian economic experience was copied. This was effected by having Russian and other communist officials in ministries. A dense network of treaties enmeshed the region in the Russian web. War reparations went first and foremost to Russian factories. Paradoxically, when the United Nations was first set up, in 1945, Stalin did not insist that Russia have a separate seat like the Ukrainian and Belorussian republics had, a move that suggests he regarded the U.S.S.R.'s seat as Russia's.

The Bolsheviks had always been mindful of minorities on their frontiers, and the first deportation of non-Russian minorities to Siberia and Central Asia began in the 1920s. Russian Cossacks (Cossack) also were removed forcibly from their home areas in the north Caucasus and elsewhere because of their opposition to collectivization and communist rule. On security grounds, Stalin deported some entire small nationality groups, many with their own territorial base, such as the Chechen and Ingush, from 1944 onward. They were accused of collaborating with the Germans. The Volga Germans were deported in the autumn of 1941 lest they side with the advancing Wehrmacht. Altogether, more than 50 nationalities, embracing about 3.5 million people, were deported to various parts of the U.S.S.R. The vast majority of these were removed from European Russia to Asiatic Russia. Nearly 50 years later, Pres. Boris Yeltsin apologized for these deportations, identifying them as a major source of interethnic conflict in Russia.

The late Stalin period witnessed campaigns against Jews and non-Russians. Writers and artists who dared to claim that Russian writers and cultural figures of the past had learned from the West were pilloried. Russian chauvinism took over, and anything that was worth inventing was claimed to have been invented by a Russian.

The Khrushchev (Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich) era (1953–64)

After Stalin's death in 1953, a power struggle for leadership ensued, which was won by Nikita Khrushchev (Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich). His landmark decisions in foreign policy and domestic programs markedly changed the direction of the Soviet Union, bringing détente with the West and a relaxation of rigid controls within the country. 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 U.S.S.R. and in eastern and southeastern 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 (Malenkov, Georgy Maksimilianovich), was skilled in administration and headed the government.Izvestiya (“News of the Councils of Working People's Deputies of the U.S.S.R.”), 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 leadership was not enamoured of the idea, since they did not want more Russians in their republic. The Kazakh leadership was dismissed, and the new first secretary was a Malenkov appointee; he was soon replaced by Leonid I. Brezhnev (Brezhnev, Leonid Ilich), a Khrushchev protégé 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 (Khrushchev's secret speech)” at the 20th Party Congress (Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) 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 hard-line foreign policy. De-Stalinization had unexpected consequences, especially in eastern and southeastern Europe in 1956, where unrest became widespread. The Hungarian uprising in that year was brutally suppressed, with Yury V. Andropov (Andropov, Yury Vladimirovich), 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 had similar failures and triumphs in foreign policy outside the eastern European sphere. Successes in space exploration under his regime brought great applause for Russia. Khrushchev improved relations with the West, establishing a policy of peaceful coexistence that eventually led to the signing of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of 1963. But he was at times eccentric and blunt, traits that sometimes negated his own diplomacy. On one occasion he appeared at the United Nations and, in his speech, emphasized his point 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 offhanded 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 defense budget. Hence, he turned out to be his own worst enemy, accelerating the arms race with the United States rather than decelerating it, which was his underlying objective. His alarmingly risky policy of installing nuclear weapons in Cuba (Cuban missile crisis) for local Soviet commanders to use should they perceive that the Americans were attacking brought the world seemingly close to the brink of nuclear war.

Khrushchev was a patriot who genuinely wanted 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 (Gorbachev, Mikhail), who later became 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 with considerably more concern for minorities. Economic problems, however, continued to plague the union. Khrushchev attempted to reform the industrial ministries and their subordinate enterprises but failed. He discovered that industrial and local political networks had developed, which made it very difficult for the central authority to impose its will. Under him there was a gradual dissipation of power from Moscow to the provinces. This strengthened the Russian regions. The agricultural policy, which was successful for a few years, eventually fell victim to lean drought years, causing widespread discontent.

The Brezhnev (Brezhnev, Leonid Ilich) era (1964–82)

After Khrushchev came the triumvirate of Leonid I. Brezhnev, Aleksey N. Kosygin (Kosygin, Aleksey Nikolayevich), and N.V. Podgorny (Podgorny, Nikolay). 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. Brezhnev 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. However, under Brezhnev the U.S.S.R. reached its apogee in the mid-1970s: it acquired nuclear parity with the United States and was recognized as a world superpower. Détente flourished in the 1970s but was disrupted by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

Under Brezhnev, Russia dominated the U.S.S.R. as never before. Three-fourths of the defense industries, the priority sector, were in Russia, and the republic accounted for about three-fourths of the Soviet gross national product. 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. The availability of medical care, higher education, and decent accommodation reached levels unprecedented in the Soviet context. But the income from the sale of Russia's natural resources also allowed the Soviet regime to evade undertaking necessary but potentially politically dangerous structural economic reforms.

Kosygin recognized the seriousness of the problems facing the Soviet economic structure more than did Brezhnev and attempted to implement reforms in 1965 and 1968, but the Brezhnev leadership stopped them. By the mid-1970s, growth in the non-natural resource sector of the economy had slowed greatly. The Soviet economy suffered from a lack of technological advances, poor-quality products unsatisfactory to both Soviet and foreign consumers, low worker productivity, and highly inefficient factories. At the same time, the agricultural sector of the economy was in crisis. The government was spending an increasing amount of its money trying to feed the country. Soviet agriculture suffered from myriad problems, the resolution of which required radical reforms. In sum, by the 1970s, continued economic stagnation posed a serious threat to the world standing of the U.S.S.R. and to the regime's legitimacy at home.

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 the dissenting novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich), was to deport them. These exiles then became the voice of Russian culture abroad. The academician Andrey Sakharov (Sakharov, Andrey Dmitriyevich) could not be imprisoned, for fear of Western scientists cutting off contact with the Soviet Union, but he was exiled to the closed city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod). Sakharov was released in 1986 and returned to Moscow. In 1989 he was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies, and many of the causes for which he originally suffered became official policy under Mikhail Gorbachev (Gorbachev, Mikhail)'s reforms.

The Gorbachev era: perestroika and glasnost

When Brezhnev died in 1982, most elite groups understood that the Soviet economy was in trouble. Due 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 (Andropov, Yury Vladimirovich) and then Konstantin Chernenko (Chernenko, Konstantin Ustinovich) led the country from 1982 until 1985, but their administrations failed to address critical problems. Andropov believed that the economic stagnation could be remedied by greater worker discipline and by cracking down on corruption. He did not regard 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 1985, he launched perestroika (“restructuring”). His team was more heavily Russian than that of his predecessors. It seems that initially even Gorbachev believed that the basic economic structure of the U.S.S.R. was sound and therefore only minor reforms were needed. He thus pursued an economic policy that aimed to increase economic growth while increasing capital investment. Capital investment was to improve the technological basis of the Soviet economy as well as promote certain structural economic changes. His goal was quite plain: to bring the Soviet Union up to par economically with the West. This had been a goal of Russian leaders since Peter the Great unleashed the first great wave of modernization and Westernization. After two years, however, Gorbachev came to the conclusion that deeper structural changes were necessary. In 1987–88 he pushed through reforms that went less than halfway to the creation of a semi-free market system. The consequences of this form of a semi-mixed economy with the contradictions of the reforms themselves brought economic chaos to the country and great unpopularity to Gorbachev. Gorbachev's radical economists, headed by Grigory A. Yavlinsky, counseled him that Western-style success required a true market economy. Gorbachev, however, never succeeded in making the jump from the command economy to even a mixed economy.

Gorbachev launched glasnost (“openness”) as the second vital plank of his reform efforts. 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 modeled on the U.S. 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 defense burden, perhaps equivalent to 25 percent of the gross national product, was crippling the country. This had led to cuts in expenditures in education, social services, and medical care, which hurt the regime's domestic legitimacy. Moreover, the huge defense expenditures that characterized the Cold War years were one of the causes of Soviet economic decline. Gorbachev therefore transformed Soviet foreign policy. He traveled abroad extensively and was brilliantly successful in convincing foreigners that the U.S.S.R. was no longer an international threat. His changes in foreign policy led to the democratization of eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War. 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.

As the U.S.S.R.'s economic problems became more serious (e.g., rationing was introduced for some basic food products for the first time since Stalin) and 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 reemergence of Russian nationalism seriously weakened Gorbachev as the leader of the Soviet empire.

In 1985 Gorbachev brought Boris Yeltsin (Yeltsin, Boris) to Moscow to run that 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 of People's Deputies 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 newfound 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 led to a bloody confrontation in Vilnius in January 1991, after which Yeltsin called upon Russian troops to disobey orders that would have them shoot unarmed civilians.

Yeltsin's politics reflected the rise of Russian nationalism. 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 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. In the later Gorbachev years, the opinion that the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and establishment of the U.S.S.R. were mistakes that had prevented Russia from continuing along the historical path traveled by the countries of western Europe and had made Russia more economically backward vis-à-vis the West gained greater acceptance.

Collapse of the Soviet Union

An ill-conceived, ill-planned, and poorly executed coup attempt occurred Aug. 19–21, 1991, bringing an end to the Communist Party and accelerating the movement to disband the Soviet Union. The coup was carried out by hard-line 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 U.S.S.R. president, but, when Gorbachev returned from house arrest in the Crimea, Yeltsin set out to demonstrate that he was the stronger leader. Yeltsin banned the Communist Party in Russia and seized all of its property. From a strictly legal point of view, this should have been done by court order, not by presidential decree. Russia systematically laid claim to most Soviet property on its territory.

Martin McCauley Dominic Lieven

Post-Soviet Russia

The Yeltsin (Yeltsin, Boris) presidency (1991–99)

The U.S.S.R. legally ceased to exist on Dec. 31, 1991. The new state, called the Russian Federation, set off on the road to democracy and a market economy without any clear conception of how to complete such a transformation in the world's largest country. Like most of the other former Soviet republics, it entered independence in a state of serious disorder and economic chaos.

Economic reforms

Upon independence, Russia faced economic collapse. The new Russian government not only had to deal with the consequences of the mistakes in economic policy of the Gorbachev period, but it also had to find a way to transform the entire Russian economy. In 1991 alone, gross domestic product (GDP) dropped by about one-sixth, and the budget deficit was approximately one-fourth of GDP. The Gorbachev government had resorted to printing huge amounts of money to finance both the budget and the large subsidies to factories and on food at a time when the tax system was collapsing. Moreover, the price controls on most goods led to their scarcity. By 1991 few items essential for everyday life were available in traditional retail outlets. The entire system of goods distribution was on the verge of disintegration. The transformation of the command economy to a market-based one was fraught with difficulties and had no historical precedent. Since the central command economy had existed in Russia for more than 70 years, the transition to a market economy proved more difficult for Russia than for the other countries of eastern Europe. Russian reformists had no clear plan, and circumstances did not give them the luxury of time to put together a reform package. In addition, economic reform threatened various entrenched interests, and the reformists had to balance the necessities of economic reform with powerful vested interests.

Although Soviet industry was one of the largest in the world, it was also very inefficient and expensive to support, complicating any changeover to a market-based economy. Industry was heavily geared toward defense and heavy industrial products whose conversion to light- and consumer-based industries would require much time. The industrial workforce, though highly educated, did not have the necessary skills to work in a market environment and would therefore need to be retrained, as would factory and plant managers.

In an effort to bring goods into stores, the Yeltsin government removed price controls on most items in January 1992—the first essential step toward creating a market-based economy. Its immediate goal was achieved. However, it also spurred inflation, which became a daily concern for Russians, whose salaries and purchasing power declined as prices for even some of the most basic goods continued to rise. The government frequently found itself printing money to fill holes in the budget and to prevent failing factories from going bankrupt. By 1993 the budget deficit financed by the printing of money was one-fifth of GDP. Consequently, the economy became increasingly dollarized as people lost faith in the value of the ruble. Inflationary pressures were exacerbated by the establishment of a “ruble zone” when the Soviet Union collapsed: many of the former republics continued to issue and use rubles and receive credits from the Russian Central Bank, thereby further devaluing the ruble. This ruble zone became an onerous burden for the Russian economy as an additional source of inflation. In the summer of 1993 the government pulled out of the ruble zone, effectively reducing Russian influence over many of the former Soviet republics.

During the Soviet era the factory had been not only a place of work but was also often the base of social services, providing benefits such as child care, vacations, and housing. Therefore, if the government allowed many industries to collapse, it would have had to make provisions not only for unemployed workers but for a whole array of social services. The government's infrastructure could not cope with such a large additional responsibility. Yet the inflation caused by keeping these factories afloat led to waning support for both Yeltsin and economic reform, as many average Russians struggled to survive. Starved for cash, factories reverted to paying workers and paying off debts to other factories in kind. Therefore, in many areas of Russia a barter economy emerged as both factories and workers tried to accommodate themselves to the economic crisis. Moreover, debts between factories were enormous; though they were diligently recorded, there was little hope of eventual collection. Thus, it was not uncommon for workers to go months without being paid and for workers to get paid in, for example, rubber gloves or crockery, either because they made such things themselves or because their factory had received payment for debt in kind.

In 1995 the government, through loans secured from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and through income from the sale of oil and natural gas, succeeded in stabilizing the national currency by establishing a ruble corridor. This corridor fixed the exchange rate of the ruble that the Russian Central Bank would defend. Consequently, the rate of inflation dropped, and some macroeconomic stabilization ensued. However, the government continued to borrow large sums of money on domestic and foreign markets while avoiding real structural reforms of the economy. By failing to establish an effective tax code and collection mechanisms, clear property rights, and a coherent bankruptcy law and by continued support of failing industries, the government found it increasingly expensive to maintain an artificially set ruble exchange rate. The problem was that the government-set exchange rate did not reflect the country's economic reality and thereby made the ruble the target of speculators. As a result, the ruble collapsed in 1998, and the government was forced to withhold payments on its debt amid a growing number of bankruptcies. The ruble eventually stabilized and inflation diminished, but the living standards of most Russians improved little, though a small proportion of the population became very wealthy. Moreover, most economic gains occurred in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and a handful of other major urban areas, while vast tracts of Russia faced economic depression.

Another element of economic reform was the privatization of Russian industries. Reformists in the Yeltsin government sought to speed privatization, hoping that the threat of a return to communism would be more remote once a Russian capitalist class had developed. The reformists, like many Western economists, believed that only by privatizing factories and enterprises and letting them fight for survival would the economy have any hope of recovering. Initially, the government implemented a voucher system according to which every citizen could in theory become a stakeholder in Russian industry and its privatization. Russians could invest their voucher (the sum of 10,000 rubles), sell it, or use it to bid for additional shares in specific enterprises. However, the average Russian did not benefit from this rather complicated scheme. By the end of 1992, some one-third of enterprises in the services and trade fields had been privatized.

The second wave of privatization occurred in 1994–95. However, to the average Russian, the process seemed to benefit solely the friends of those in power, who received large chunks of Russian industry for little. In particular, Russia's companies in the natural resource sector were sold at prices well below those recommended by the IMF to figures who were close to “the Family,” meaning Yeltsin and his daughter and their allies in the government. From this process emerged the “oligarchs,” individuals who, because of their political connections, came to control huge segments of the Russian economy. Many of these oligarchs bought factories for almost nothing, stripped them, sold what they could, and then closed them, creating huge job losses. By the time Yeltsin left office in 1999, most of the Russian economy had been privatized.

The stripping of factories played a major role in the public's disenchantment with the development of capitalism in Russia. To many Russians, it seemed that bandit capitalism had emerged. The majority of the population had seen their living standards drop, their social services collapse, and a great rise in crime and corruption. As a result, Yeltsin's popularity began to plummet.

Political and social changes

Having played a key role in defeating the attempted coup against Gorbachev in 1991, Yeltsin saw his popularity surge. A skillful politician, he was first elected president of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic in 1991 before the collapse of the U.S.S.R, and he was reelected in 1996. Although he had come to represent for many the face of political and economic reform, his first priority was the preservation of his own power and authority. In dealing with those around him in both the government and the bureaucracy, Yeltsin effectively utilized a divide-and-rule strategy that led to the emergence of various factions that battled each other. Indeed, in some cases bureaucrats spent more time in conflict with each other than they did governing the country. Yeltsin also had the tendency to frequently remove ministers and prime ministers, which led to abrupt changes in policy. Throughout his presidency Yeltsin refused to establish his own political party or to align himself openly with any party or group of parties. Instead, he believed that the president should remain above party politics, though he was at the heart of the political process, playing the role of power broker—a position he coveted—until his resignation in 1999.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian Federation continued to be governed according to its Soviet-era constitution. The office of president had been added to the political structure of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic in 1991. However, the constitution did not specify which branch, legislative or executive, held supreme power. Political differences over various issues (e.g., the course of economic reform and the power of both the Communist Party and industrial interests) manifested themselves as constitutional conflicts, with Yeltsin's supporters arguing that ultimate power rested with the president and his opponents charging that the legislature was sovereign. Personality clashes between Yeltsin and the parliamentary leadership led to a break between the legislative and executive branches.

High inflation and continued economic crisis placed great pressure on Yeltsin. The government's focus on financial stabilization and economic reform to the apparent neglect of the public's social needs contributed to the growing political battle between the legislative and executive branches. Complicating Yeltsin's difficulties was the fact that many deputies in the parliament had vested interests in the old economic and political structure. The leader of the parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov, and Yeltsin both sought support from regional elites in their political battles with each other by promising subsidies and greater local control. The political battle between Yeltsin and Khasbulatov climaxed in March 1993 when Yeltsin was stripped of the decree-making powers that he had been granted after the August 1991 attempted coup. Yeltsin was not prepared to accept total defeat. On March 20 Yeltsin announced that he was instituting an extraordinary presidential regime until April 25, when a referendum would be held over who “really ruled” Russia. He stated that during this period any acts of parliament that contradicted presidential decrees would be null and void. Many of Yeltsin's ministers, including Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin (Chernomyrdin, Viktor Stepanovich), only half-heartedly supported the president's move, and Yeltsin, after intense political haggling, was forced to back down. Nonetheless, it was agreed that a referendum would be held on April 25. Four questions were posed to the Russian people, written by the Congress of People's Deputies to embarrass Yeltsin: (1) Do you trust the President of the Russian Federation, Boris Nikolaevich 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? In addition, the Congress passed a provision that, for a question to be approved, it needed the backing of at least half of all eligible voters (and not just half of the actual ballots cast); however, the Constitutional Court ruled that only the latter two questions needed at least 50 percent and that the first two questions were nonbinding. With Yeltsin's camp using the slogan “Da, da, nyet, da” (“Yes, yes, no, yes”), the results were a victory for Yeltsin. Nearly three-fifths of voters expressed confidence in him personally, and more than half supported his economic and social policies. Half of voters favoured early presidential elections, but two-thirds supported early parliamentary elections; however, with only 43 percent of eligible voters backing early parliamentary elections, Yeltsin was forced to continue his uneasy relationship with the Congress.

In the summer of 1993 Yeltsin established a Constitutional Convention to draw up a new post-Soviet constitution. The parliament also set up its own Constitutional Committee. Inevitably, presidential and parliamentary constitutional drafts were contradictory, and the increasing number of regional leaders who supported the parliamentary version worried Yeltsin. Thus, the referendum results did not end the political conflict between Yeltsin and the parliament, and that conflict grew more intense on Sept. 21, 1993, when Yeltsin issued a series of presidential decrees that dissolved the parliament and imposed presidential rule that would exist 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 in his vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoy, as president. Weapons were then handed out to civilians to defend the parliamentary 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 Congress. The most serious battle took place around the television station at Ostankino. By this time, crowds of parliamentary supporters had begun to fill the streets of Moscow, and it seemed a civil war was going to erupt in the middle of the capital, prompting Yeltsin to declare a state of emergency in Moscow on October 4. Shortly thereafter, tanks begin firing on the parliamentary building and on the deputies inside, leading to the surrender and arrest of everyone inside the building, including the speaker of the parliament and Rutskoi. With the defeat of parliamentary forces, the way was clear for elections to a new parliament and a referendum on a new constitution in December 1993.

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 legislature, 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 also was given the power to dismiss the Duma and call for new parliamentary elections. Under the new constitution the prime minister was the vital link connecting the executive with the legislative branch. Although the prime minister was accountable to the parliament, he first had to maintain the president's confidence to remain in office. The premiership of Viktor Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin's longest-serving prime minister (1992–98), reflected the extent to which a Russian prime minister was dependent on the president—and not the parliament—for his mandate to rule. Yeltsin dismissed Chernomyrdin in 1998, ostensibly for failing to implement reforms energetically enough, though there was the suspicion that the prime minister had offended the president's ego by acting a bit too independently and grooming himself to succeed Yeltsin as president.

In the first two Dumas (elected in 1993 and 1995), the Communist Party of the Russian Federation was the single largest party, though it was never close to becoming a majority party. The Communist Party, which inherited the infrastructure of the dissolved Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had the most effective nationwide organization. Other parties found it difficult to project their message outside the major urban areas. Party loyalties were weak; deputies jumped from one party to another in the hope of improving their electoral chances. Worrying to many was the success of the ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, which captured 22.8 percent of the vote in 1993 (though its share of the vote declined thereafter). Nevertheless, despite hostile and even at times inflammatory rhetoric directed toward both Yeltsin and Russian foreign policy, Zhirinovsky's party generally backed the executive branch. Throughout the 1990s, hundreds of parties were founded, but most were short-lived, as the appeal of many was based solely on the personality of the founder. For example, the liberal party of acting prime minister Yegor Gaidar (1992), Russia's Choice, floundered once Gaidar was forced out of government at the end of 1992. Chernomyrdin's party, Our Home Is Russia, suffered a similar fate soon after Yeltsin dismissed him as prime minister.

The relationship between the Duma and President Yeltsin was characterized by public shows of anger and opposition; behind the scenes, however, compromises were more often than not hammered out by political foes. Moreover, Yeltsin had no qualms about threatening the Duma with dissolution if and when it seemed to be proving recalcitrant to presidential bills. Deputies, fearful of losing their extensive perks of office, such as a flat in Moscow, and of an electorate angry with all politicians, regularly backed down when faced with the implicit threat of dissolution. During Yeltsin's second term, some deputies tried to initiate impeachment proceedings against him, but, because of the many legal obstacles to such a move, Yeltsin easily avoided impeachment.

During Yeltsin's presidential terms, the weakened Russian state failed to fulfill its basic responsibilities. The legal system, suffering from a lack of resources and trained personnel and a legal code geared to the new market economy, was near collapse. Low salaries led to a drain of experienced jurists to the private sector; there was also widespread corruption within law enforcement and the legal system, as judges and police officials resorted to taking bribes to supplement their meagre incomes. The country's health, education, and social services were also under incredible strain. Due to a lack of resources, law-enforcement agencies proved unable to combat the rising crime. The collapse of medical services also led to a decline in life expectancy and to concerns over the negative rate of population growth; doctors and nurses were underpaid, and many hospitals did not have enough resources to provide even basic care.

One consequence of the political and economic changes of the 1990s was the emergence of Russian organized crime. For most of the Yeltsin administration, shoot-outs between rival groups and the assassinations of organized-crime or business figures filled the headlines of Russian newspapers and created greater disgust among Russians over the course of economic reform and democracy. The explosive rise in crime came as a shock to most Russians, who under the Soviet period had very rarely come into contact with such incidents. The assassinations of well-known and well-liked figures, such as human rights advocate Galina Starovoitova, served to underscore the Yeltsin regime's inability to combat crime. By the end of the Yeltsin era, the open warfare between organized-crime groups had diminished not because of effective state action but because of the consolidation of the remaining criminal groups that had emerged victorious from the bloody struggles.

Ethnic relations and Russia's “near-abroad”

Post-Soviet Russia emerged with formidable ethnic problems. Many of the autonomous ethnic regions that were part of the empire—formed before 1917—no longer wished to be under Russian hegemony, and ethnic Russians comprised less than four-fifths of the population of the Russian Federation. Inevitably, the question of ethnic identity emerged. The term rossiyanin was used to designate a citizen of the Russian Federation and was not given any ethnic Russian connotation. Yeltsin established a committee to construct a Russian identity and national idea that could be used to rally people around the new Russian Federation. The committee failed after several years of attempts, finding that a national idea and identity needed to come from below and not from above, since history had shown that the creation of an identity from above leads to the establishment or strengthening of an authoritarian or totalitarian state. The Russian Orthodox Church reestablished itself as a force in the moral guidance of reborn Russia, but there were many other religions among the minority groups, particularly Islam. Russia continued to face problems associated with governing a multiethnic state within a democratic framework.

During the Yeltsin years, Russia's numerous administrative regions sought greater autonomy. For example, Tatarstan negotiated additional rights and privileges, and the republic of Chechnya declared independence in 1991, before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Chechen nationalism was based on the struggle against Russian imperialism since the early 19th century and the living memory of Stalin's massive deportations of the Chechen population in 1944 that had resulted in the deaths of a large segment of the population. In late 1994 Yeltsin sent the army into Chechnya in the aftermath of a botched Russian-orchestrated coup against the secessionist president, Dzhokhar Dudayev. There were fears that if Chechnya succeeded in breaking away from the Russian Federation, other republics might follow suit. Moreover, Dudayev's Chechnya had become a source of drug dealing and arms peddling. In 1995 Russia gained control of the capital, Grozny. However, in 1996 Russian forces were pushed out of the capital city. Yeltsin, faced with an upcoming presidential election and great unpopularity because of both the war and economic problems, had Gen. Aleksandr Lebed sign a cease-fire agreement with the Chechens. The Russians subsequently withdrew from the republic, postponing the question of Chechen independence.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was established to serve as a forum for the former Soviet republics. All the former republics eventually joined, except the Baltic republics. Moscow coined the term “the near-abroad” when discussing its foreign policy toward the newly independent states. Russia still hoped to maintain influence over most of these former republics, and it considered both the Caucasus and Central Asia its special area of interest, raising fears that Moscow would use the CIS as a mechanism for achieving this aim. Aid from the Russian government to Russian separatists in the Dniester region of Moldova and intervention in the Tajik civil war were illustrative of Moscow's attempt to maintain influence in these areas. In addition, the Russian government was prepared to use other means of exerting influence, such as economic pressure on Ukraine and the threat of separatism in Georgia, to attain its ends.

However, Moscow did more to undermine the CIS through its inconsistent policies, lack of organizational leadership, and tendency to work bilaterally with the governments of the newly independent republics. At CIS meetings many announcements were made about closer integration among the member states, and a plethora of documents were signed, but very little was done. In 1996 Russia and Belarus began a process that, it was proclaimed, would eventually result in the unification of the two countries. However, by the early 21st century there was still no sign that unification would occur. Given Russia's severe economic difficulties, which limited its ability to provide financial and military assistance to its neighbours (at least until the surge in oil prices in the early 21st century), it found it difficult to retain influence over its near-abroad. Even regarding access to Russia's markets by its neighbours, Russian officials were wary of allowing too many goods to flow into the country for fear that it would further weaken Russian industry.

The collapse of the Soviet Union left some 30 million Russians outside the borders of the Russian Federation. The largest Russian populations were in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and the Baltic countries. Governments in these countries feared that Moscow could, if it wanted, use the Russian populations there to pressure the governments to adopt policies friendly to Moscow. However, during the 1990s Moscow refrained from following such an approach—sometimes to the great criticism of the Russians living in these areas.

Foreign affairs

For several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin placed a high priority on relations with the West, particularly with the United States. The initial honeymoon period in U.S.-Russian relations ended abruptly, as it became increasingly clear that some geopolitical goals of each country were incompatible. Russia opposed the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Although Russia eventually accepted the inevitability of NATO expansion to some countries, the government tried to thwart the entry of former Soviet republics and to construct a viable bilateral relationship with NATO so that it would have some influence over the organization's decisions. While Moscow was still wary of NATO, it attempted to strengthen its economic and political relations with the European Union. Policy disagreements over the Balkans—in particular, U.S. support for armed intervention against the Yugoslav government of Slobodan Milošević (Milošević, Slobodan)—also contributed to the cooling of relations between Washington and Moscow.

The collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States as the sole superpower. As a result, the Russian government tried to not only come to terms with the loss of empire and superpower status but also create a foreign policy doctrine reflecting the new global geopolitical reality. Russia's increasing concern with U.S. hegemony in the world system became a constant theme in Russian foreign policy, especially after Yevgeny Primakov became foreign minister in 1995. Primakov stressed the need for a multipolar system of international relations to replace the unipolar world dominated by the United States. In an attempt to counter U.S. power, Moscow strengthened its political and military relations with China and India, although friction between New Delhi and Beijing made it unlikely that a strong trilateral alliance would emerge to challenge the United States. Russia's relations with Iran and differences in approaches to Iraq further increased tensions in Russian-U.S. relations.

During the Yeltsin years the normal foreign-policy-making mechanisms did not perform well, as various bureaucratic bodies fought for control over the direction of Russia's external relations. Moreover, Yeltsin himself exhibited inconsistency in his foreign policy; his divide-and-rule strategy was an effective barrier to the establishment of greater order in Russia's foreign relations, though Primakov attempted to give some direction to Russia's foreign policy. Consequently, Russian foreign policy during this period was characterized by aimlessness, contradictions, and confusion.

Rewriting history

The Yeltsin period witnessed changes in Russian historiography. During the Soviet period, history was written on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, which placed class struggle and the inevitable emergence of communism at the centre of history. With the collapse of the Soviet Union—and with it Marxist-Leninist dogma—Russian historians began to reevaluate the historiography of the Soviet and tsarist periods. They were aided by the opening of archives in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Historians engaged in serious debate as to whether the events of 1917 were inevitable or not. The belief that the Bolshevik Revolution had thrown Russia off the evolutionary course traveled by other European countries gained wide acceptance. Popular histories began to glorify the tsarist period, and Peter I, Catherine II, Alexander II, and others became positive figures in Russian history. Nicholas II was viewed more sympathetically, with emphasis placed on his great love for his family and Russia. The reburial of his remains and those of the immediate imperial family, all of whom were executed together in 1918, in the Peter-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg in 1999 brought to a head the partial transformation of Nicholas II's position in Russian history. The opening of the archives also gave historians an unprecedented opportunity to rewrite the history of the Soviet period. The Stalin period and the role of Lenin in the emergence of a totalitarian state after the revolution were the first targets of this new history. Documentary evidence reflecting thinking at the highest levels during and after World War II also gave historians an opportunity to reevaluate the origins of the Cold War, which in many instances led to debunking conventional wisdom among Western historians of Soviet intentions at the time.

Martin McCauley Dominic Lieven

The Putin presidency

Toward the end of Yeltsin's tenure as president, Vladimir Putin (Putin, Vladimir) began playing a more important role. During the Soviet period, he joined the KGB and worked in East Germany for many years. Fluent in German and proficient in English, Putin worked for the liberal mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, in the initial post-Soviet period and ended up in Moscow when Sobchak failed to be reelected mayor in 1996. In July 1998 Putin became director of the Federal Security Service, one of the successor organizations of the KGB, and in August 1999 Yeltsin plucked Putin out of relative obscurity for the post of prime minister.

Separatism

As prime minister, Putin blamed Chechen secessionists for the bombing of several apartment buildings that killed scores of Russian civilians, prompting the Moscow government to send Russian forces into the republic once again. (Evidence never proved Chechen involvement in these bombings, leading some to believe that the Russian intelligence services played a role in them.) The campaign enjoyed some initial success, with Grozny falling quickly to the Russians. Putin's popularity soared, and Yeltsin, having chosen Putin as his successor, resigned on Dec. 31, 1999. Putin became acting president, and his first official act as president was to grant Yeltsin a pardon for any illegal activities he might have committed during his administration.

In the presidential election held in March 2000, Putin easily defeated Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov in the first round of balloting, winning 52.9 percent of the vote to secure a full term as president. Although the Russian military was able to win control of Chechnya, Chechen fighters fled to the mountains and hills, threatening Russian forces with a prolonged guerilla war. Fighting continued during the next two years, but by 2002 it had abated, and Putin, confident in Russia's military position, sought talks with what remained of the Chechen leadership. Nevertheless, in October 2002, Chechen separatists seized a Moscow theatre and threatened to kill all those inside; Putin responded by ordering special forces to raid the theatre, and during the operation some 130 hostages died—mostly as the result of inhaling gas released by the security forces in order to subdue the terrorists.

Despite worries arising from his years working for the intelligence services, many Russians came to believe that Putin's coolness and decisiveness would enable him to establish economic and political order in the country and deal with the Chechen problem. After years of Yeltsin's unpredictable behaviour, the upsurge in violent crime, and the decline in both living standards and Russia's prestige abroad, Russians were ready for a leader with an agenda and the mental capacity to implement it. Putin soon moved to reassert central control over the country's 89 regions by dividing the country into seven administrative districts, each of which would be overseen by a presidential appointee. The new districts were created to root out corruption, keep an eye on the local governors, and ensure that Moscow's will and laws were enforced. During the Yeltsin years, contradictions between Russian federal law and that of the regions had created great chaos in the Russian legal system, and Putin worked to establish the supremacy of Russian Federation law throughout the country. Putin even enjoyed success in taming the independent-minded regions, as the republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan reluctantly brought their constitutions into accord with that of the Russian Federation in 2002.

Foreign affairs

Although Putin hoped to maintain a strategic partnership with the United States, he focused on strengthening Russia's relations (both security and economic) with Europe, particularly Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, after the September 11 attacks in 2001 on the United States by al-Qaeda (Qaeda, al-), Putin was the first foreign leader to telephone U.S. President George W. Bush (Bush, George W.) to offer sympathy and help in combating terrorism. Moreover, Russia established a council with NATO on which it sat as an equal alongside NATO's 19 members. Russia also reacted calmly when the United States officially abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, established temporary military bases in several of the former Soviet states in Central Asia, and dispatched special forces on a training mission to Georgia, where there were suspected al-Qaeda training bases.

However, Putin was wary of U.S. unilateralism and worked to strengthen Russian ties with China and India and maintain ties with Iran. In 2002–03 he opposed military intervention against Iraq (Iraq War) by the United States and the United Kingdom and developed a joint position with France and Germany that favoured a more stringent inspections regime of Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction (weapon of mass destruction) program rather than the use of military force (see also Iraq War).

Putin brought new life to the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) by providing relatively active Russian leadership, in sharp contrast to the Yeltsin years, and he strengthened Russia's ties with the Central Asian republics in order to maintain Russian influence in this vital area. Under Yeltsin the Russian army, starved of funds, had lost much of its effectiveness and technological edge. Russian defeats in the first Chechen war only underlined the appalling state in which the armed forces found itself. Through greater arms sales, Putin hoped to increase funding for the armed forces, particularly for personnel and for the research and development sector of the Russian military industrial complex.

The oligarchs (oligarchy)

Putin also took steps to limit the political and economic power of the infamous oligarchs, whom many Russians considered to be thieves and one of the main causes of the myriad problems facing Russia. Although Putin did not and could not destroy the business elite, he made it clear that certain limits on their behaviour would be expected. Those oligarchs who were either openly against Putin during the presidential campaign or critical of his policies faced the Kremlin's wrath. For example, in 2001 Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, two of Russia's richest men, were stripped of their electronic media holdings, and Berezovsky was removed from his position of influence at Russian Public Television, Russia's most widely watched television channel. And in 2003 Russia's richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the oil giant Yukos, was arrested and eventually convicted of fraud and tax evasion. The campaign against certain oligarchs caused fear among many about Putin's commitment to freedom of speech and the press. During the Yeltsin era the media had become a tool in the hands of the oligarchs, who used their individual media outlets in their battles with each other and with political figures. On the other hand, certain television stations consistently contradicted the reports of government-controlled stations on issues such as corruption and the wars in Chechnya, thereby providing an alternative source to government news sources. While under Yeltsin the government did not try to reassert control over the mass media, television networks (or their owners) seen as unfriendly to Putin and his policies faced closure by the government—usually on charges of nonpayment of taxes and financial mismanagement.

Political and economic reforms

Putin proved adept at constructing a stable relationship with the Duma. Yeltsin's automatic hostility to the Communist Party had resulted in a shaky relationship with the Duma and an inability to obtain passage of a number of reform measures. Putin was better able to work with the parties in the Duma and secured the passage of bills that reformed the tax, judicial, labour, and bankruptcy systems, provided property rights, adopted national symbols and the flag, and approved arms treaties. In addition, unlike Yeltsin, Putin was not inclined to frequent changes in the cabinet or premiership, thereby creating conditions for policy consistency and political stability that ordinary Russians appreciated. Putin also attempted to reduce the number of political parties—in particular, regional parties—in Russia by requiring that parties have registered offices and at least 10,000 members in at least half of Russia's regions to compete in national elections.

Despite some domestic opposition, Putin pursued economic reforms, believing that the Russian economy's long-term health was tied to deep structural reforms that the Yeltsin administration had ignored, though implementing such reforms proved difficult. Putin secured passage of legislation creating a new tax code that simplified and streamlined the tax system in order to encourage individuals and businesses to pay taxes and to improve the efficiency of paying and collecting taxes. As a result of these measures, the state's rate of tax collection dramatically increased. Coupled with a surge in income from the increase in world oil prices, the Russian government enjoyed a budget surplus and was able pay off some of its external debt. Putin was also keen to attract foreign investment into Russia in order to reduce Russia's dependence on Western loans (which he believed threatened the country's national interests and long-term economic prospects) and to help finance the refurbishment and expansion of Russian industry. Russia also sought to increase its exports by promoting the sale of oil, natural gas, and arms. The reforms implemented by Putin—as well as his demeanour—produced political stability and economic vitality not seen in the country during the 1990s and gave Russia a sense of confidence as it entered the 21st century.

Putin's presidency also witnessed a change in the way Russians viewed the Soviet past. Whereas under Yeltsin popular histories and general opinion were critical of the Soviet period and nostalgic for the prerevolutionary period, during Putin's tenure aspects of the Soviet period—for example, the victory in World War II, Russia's superpower status, and even the Stalinist period—were again glorified (Stalin was described in one teaching manual as “the most successful leader of the U.S.S.R.”), and this dualism was reflected in the country's symbols. Despite nostalgia among some communists for the Soviet period and uncertainty among many about the future, by the early 21st century Russia seemed poised to set upon the long path of economic and political development. However, deep structural problems in the economy remained, and the number of people living in poverty remained high.

Dominic Lieven

Despite criticism that he had centralized too much power in the presidency and was curtailing freedoms won with the dismantling of the Soviet Union, Putin remained popular and was reelected in 2004 in a landslide, garnering more than 70 percent of the vote. During his second term, Putin's popularity continued to be high, and speculation loomed that he, constitutionally ineligible to run for another term in office because of term limits, might engineer a change to the constitution to allow him to be reelected. Instead, Putin surprised many observers in October 2007 by announcing that he would head the list of the pro-Putin United Russia party in parliamentary elections. In December 2007 United Russia won more than three-fifths of the vote and 315 of the Duma's 450 seats. Less than two weeks later, Putin anointed First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev (Medvedev, Dmitry) as his successor as president for the 2008 elections. In turn, Medvedev subsequently announced that he would appoint Putin prime minister if his campaign succeeded, thus giving Putin a platform by which to continue his dominance of Russian politics. In March 2008, in a contest that some Western election observers (such as the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe) considered not fully fair or democratic, Medvedev was easily elected president, winning 70 percent of the vote. Medvedev took office on May 7, 2008; Putin was confirmed as prime minister the next day.

The Medvedev presidency

Just three months into his presidency, Medvedev was confronted with a growing military conflict between Russia's neighbour Georgia and South Ossetia, a separatist region of Georgia that borders the Russian republic of North Ossetia–Alania. As fighting between Georgian and Ossetian forces escalated in August 2008, Russia sent thousands of troops across the border with the goal of supporting rebels in not only South Ossetia but also Abkhazia, another separatist region within Georgia. Despite a French-brokered cease-fire, hostilities continued, and Russian troops remained in Georgia. Russia's actions heightened tensions between it and the West. In response to condemnation from NATO, which Georgia hopes to join, Russia suspended its cooperation with the Atlantic alliance. In September the Russian government agreed to withdraw its troops from Georgia; however, it planned to maintain a military presence in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, whose independence it had recognized.

Ed.