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)

iasak — 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