GLOSSARY
NOTE: The accent of a Russian letter indicates the stress. The letter ë is pronounced “yo” and stressed.
agit-prop
agitation and propaganda
agit-sud/y
agitational trial/s
agitka/i
short agitational performance/s
ataman
Ukrainian and Cossack headman or warlord
Basmachis
Central Asian anti-Communist partisans
besprizornyi/e
abandoned children
burzhui
“bourgeois” (in the pejorative sense)
Cheka
Political police, 1917–1922
chervonets/y
gold-based currency introduced in 1922
dacha
country retreat
denznak/i
“money token”/s
duvan
Turkish word signifying division of loot
Evsektsiia/ii
Jewish section/s of the Communist Party
Glavlit
Central Censorship Bureau created in 1922
Gosizdat
State Publishing House
Gosplan
State Planning Committee
GPU
Successor to Cheka
guberniia/ii
Province/s
gubkom/y
Provincial Committee/s of Communist Party
inogorodnyi/e
“outlander/s” in Cossack regions
jadidism
Muslim reform movement
Kavbiuro
Caucasian Bureau of Communist Party
khozrazchët
self-supporting enterprise
Komsomol
Communist Youth League
Komuch
Committee of the Constituent Assembly (1918)
kulak
well-to-do peasant or peasant hostile to the Communists
meshchanin/ne
burgher/s
muzhik
familiar term for peasant
Narkompros
Commissariat of Enlightenment
nomenklatura/y
person/s qualified for high positions in the Communist Party
OGPU
successor to GPU
paëk
ration
pogrom
beating and looting, usually of Jews
Polrevkom
Polish Committee of Communist Party (1920)
Pomgol
Committee to aid victims of 1921 famine
prodnalog
food tax in kind introduced in 1921
prodrazvërstka
food extraction
Proletkul’t
“Proletarian Culture” movement
Rabfak/i
“Worker Faculty/ies”
Rabkrin
“Worker and Peasant Inspection”
razgrom
assault on property
Revvoensovet
Revolutionary Military Council
Sovnarkom
Council of People’s Commissars
STO
Council of Labor and Defense
uchraspred/y
Communist Party personnel bureaus
uezd
lowest administrative entity
vlast’
power, authority, government
vozhd’
leader
zam/y
deputy chairman/men of Sovnarkom
zemstvo/a
organs of local self-rule in late tsarist Russia