Russia A History

GLOSSARY OF TERMS, ABBREVIATIONS, AND ACRONYMS

Barshchina

Corvée labour (rendering of serf obligations through personal labour)

Batrak

Landless peasant (in Soviet jargon, a peasant who had no land and earned his support as a hired agricultural labourer)

Bedniak

Poor peasant (in Soviet jargon, a peasant whose farm income was insufficient and who had to hire himself out to kulaks)

Besprizorniki

Homeless, orphaned children in the 1920s

Boyar duma

Boyar council in medieval Russia

CC

Central Committee

Centner

Hundredweight, or 100 kg. (from the German Zentner)

Cheka

Extraordinary Commission (created in December 1917 to ‘combat counter-revolution and sabotage’)

Chernozem

Black-earth region of southern Russia

Chetvert′

Unit of dry measure for grain, equivalent to 288 pounds of rye in the seventeenth century

CIS

Commonwealth of Independent States (established in December 1991 as an association of most of the former Soviet republics)

Cominform

Communist Information Bureau (established in 1947 to coordinate Communist Parties in the Western and Eastern blocs)

CPD

Congress of People’s Deputies (last Soviet parliament elected in 1989)

CPRF

Communist Party of the Russian Federation (the reconstituted CPSU in the post-Soviet era)

CPSU

Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Dikoe pole

The untamed southern steppes (literally meaning ‘wild field’)

Duma

State parliament of tsarist Russia, 1906–17, and post-Soviet Russia; elected city councils after the urban reform of 1870

GDP

Gross domestic product

GKO

State Defence Committee (chief military organ during the Second World War)

Glasnost

Openness or publicity (a reference to the relaxation of censorship controls in the 1850s and again in the late 1980s)

Gosudarstvenniki

Civil servants who were devoted primarily to serving the interests of the state (gosudarstvo), not their own social estate

GULAG

Main Administration of Camps (responsible for management of the labour camps)

lasak

Tribute exacted from non-Russian subject populations in Eastern Russia and Siberia

Kadets

Pre-revolutionary liberal party (name being an acronym of ‘Constitutional-Democrats’)

KGB

Committee for State Security (secret police)

Kolkhoz (pl. kolkhozy)

Collective farm (literally, ‘collective enterprise’, where the peasants nominally own the land, fulfil state grain procurements, and receive compensation as ‘workdays’ that they have contributed)

Komsomol

Communist Youth League

Kulak

Rich peasant (derived from the word for ‘fist’ after 1917 formally used to designate any peasant who ‘exploited’ the labour of others)

Lishentsy

Disenfranched (those members of the former ‘exploiting classes’, such as nobles, bourgeoisie, and clergy, who were deprived of civil rights and subjected to various other forms of discrimination from 1918 to 1936)

Manufaktura

Primitive handicrafts and industrial enterprises in early modern Russia

MTS

Machine Tractor Stations (state units established in 1935 to provide tractor and technical services to the kolkhoz)

Narkomindel

People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs

Narkompros

People’s Commissariat of Education

NEP

New Economic Policy

Nepman

Traders and entrepreneurs who engaged in ‘free enterprise’ during NEP

NKVD

People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs

Nomenklatura

System of appointment lists, emerging in the first years of Soviet power and eventually coming to define the country’s political élite

Oblast

(pl. oblasti) Soviet territorial unit, roughly equivalent to a pre-revolutionary province

Obrok

Quitrent (payment of serf obligations in kind or money)

Oprichnina

The separate state ‘within a state’ established by Ivan the Terrible in 1565; more generally used to designate this reign of terror, which lasted until 1572

Orgburo

Organizational Bureau

Perestroika

Reconstruction (the term adopted to designate a fundamental reform in the Soviet system from the mid-1980s)

Pomest′e

Conditional service estate in Muscovy, but by the eighteenth century equivalent to hereditary family property

Posad

Urban settlement in Muscovy

Prikaz

Term for ‘chancellery’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Proletkult

Proletarian culture movement

PSR

Party of Socialist Revolutionaries

Rabfak

Workers’ faculty (special schools for workers with little or no formal eduction)

Rabkrin

Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (organ to control state and economy, 1920–34)

RSDWP

Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party

RSFSR

Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic

SD

Social Democrat

Seredniak

Middle peasant (in Soviet jargon, a peasant who was self-sufficient, neither exploiting the labour of others nor working in the employee of others)

Smychka

Soviet slogan designating an ‘alliance’ or ‘union’ of the workers and peasants in the 1920s

Soslovie

Social estate (in the sense of the French état or German Stand)

Sovkhoz

State farm (literally, ‘soviet enterprise’, where the state owns all assets and the peasants provide hired labour)

Sovnarkhoz

Council of National Economy: provincial and district organ to manage industry and construction (1917–34); system for decentralized economic management (1957–65)

Sovnarkom

Council of People’s Commissars

SRs

Members of the neo-populist Party of Social Revolutionaries

Streltsy

Musketeers (military units of riflemen organized in the seventeenth century)

Sudebnik

Law code in medieval Russia

Third Section

Tsarist organ of secret police, established as a ‘section’ of the emperor’s personal chancellery in 1826

Ulozhenie

Title of first inclusive law code adopted in 1649 (formally called the Sobornoe ulozhenie)

Vesenkha

Supreme Council of the National Economy (central industrial organ, 1917–32)

Voevoda

District governor in the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries

Volost

Township

Votchina

Hereditary family landed estate

Vyt

Unit of land area and taxation (of varying size)

Zemskii sobor

Council of the realm (informal assemblies convoked for purposes of consultation from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries)

Zemstvo

The provincial and district organs of elected self-government from 1864 to 1917; in the sixteenth century it refers to a system of community self-rule

Zhenotdel

Women’s section in the party