These measures brought about the destruction of the whole traditional rural way of life. Some peasants dubbed the results a ‘second serfdom’. As more archive materials become available, historians have uncovered more and more cases of peasant resistance, often violent. Since the village church was usually closed as well and the priest arrested, some peasants actually believed that the reign of Antichrist had come, and that anyone who entered a kolkhoz would be ‘branded with the stamp of the beast’.
In truth, both sides had apocalyptic expectations. Taken together with the industrial Five Year Plans, collectivization was the great and decisive struggle to create socialism. Lev Kopelev, a young activist at the time, confessed many years later:
Stalin had said ‘The struggle for grain is the struggle for socialism’. I was convinced we were warriors on an invisible front, waging war on kulak sabotage for the sake of grain needed for the Five Year Plan . . . [and] also for the souls of peasants whose attitudes were bogged down in ignorance and low political consciousness.
The destruction of the traditional village caused a major famine and poisoned the whole of social and economic life. The effects were especially devastating in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Ukraine was a major grain-growing region: the campaign was conducted ruthlessly there, and became enmeshed with the suspicion that Ukrainians might favour treacherously leaving the USSR and joining Poland. Hence the ‘holodomor’, the hunger-famine which many Ukrainians today judge a form of genocide. In Kazakhstan, collectivization entailed ‘sedentarization’, compelling nomads to adopt a settled way of life, which resulted in a catastrophic loss of cattle, and the death or emigration of a third of the population.
By the mid-1930s, many ‘kulaks’ managed to escape from their ‘special settlements’ and find jobs in the towns. Their appearance prompted a second spasm of terrorist activism by the state. In July 1937, Order No 00447 listed categories of ‘socially harmful elements’ to be arrested and, after a summary trial, either shot or sent to the Gulag. They included kulaks, priests, religious believers, old regime officials, and former members of non-Communist movements. The numbers to be arrested in each region were stipulated in advance; in practice, they were often exceeded as local NKVD agents ‘worked towards’ Stalin. In 1937–8, more than 760,000 people were arrested and 387,000 shot. Those who were not killed spent years, sometimes decades, in labour camps where exhausting work, poor nutrition, and inadequate medical care imposed their own death rates.
The manic distrust devastated party cadres too. Given his experience and mentality, Stalin could only interpret difficulties as a sign that enemies had infiltrated the highest levels of the party–state apparatus. The very intensity of the struggle had bred its own enmities, even – or perhaps especially – within such a tightly knit band of leaders. The struggle of black versus white left no room for shades of grey. After Lenin’s death in 1924, each party faction struck a pose of absolute doctrinal rectitude and total moral authority. That meant that disputes over the best strategy tended to polarize opinion, transforming intense trust into intense distrust. Opponents and even waverers had to be treated as deadly enemies, to be attacked and destroyed. When the Central Committee worked out a particular strategy, it had to be adopted unanimously. Those who had reservations about it were accused of being ‘deviationists’, then of being ‘oppositionists’, which implied open hostility. Under such suspicion, Trotsky, Stalin’s principal rival, was expelled from the USSR in 1929. In the 1930s, as the fear of war with Germany grew and social turmoil intensified, the rhetoric escalated further: ‘oppositionists’ became people with ‘terrorist intentions’, then full-scale ‘terrorists’ or ‘enemies of the people’, to be eliminated.
The nomenklatura system intensified these suspicions. Leading Communist officials in all regions defended their own trusted appointees from the prying eyes of the NKVD. Stalin became convinced that, as a result, ‘terrorists’ had ensconced themselves throughout the apparatus. He unleashed the NKVD on them. Between the 17th party congress in 1934 and the 18th in 1939, 110 out of 139 members of the Central Committee were arrested; of 1,966 delegates at the 17th, 1,108 had disappeared by the time of the 18th. In the most sensational cases, former party leaders, comrades of Lenin, were accused, at much-trumpeted show trials, of participating in a great conspiracy, directed from abroad by Trotsky, aimed at murdering the Communist leaders and colluding with foreign powers to restore capitalism in the USSR. Most of them confessed, under pressure from exhausting interrogations, threats to themselves and their families, and perhaps also the feeling that they could save themselves by rendering one last service to the party. They had given their lives to the conviction that history could be made only through the party, and they had no alternative beliefs on which they might make a stand or form an opposition.
Cultural and social policy
The Communists were utopians: they believed they could and should transform people’s consciousness. Armed with the latest technology and with the only correct theory of social evolution, the ‘new Soviet man’ would be able to transform nature and build a more humane society. ‘The average human type’, Trotsky declared, ‘will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx. And beyond this ridge new peaks will rise.’
How this was to be done was much debated during the 1920s. Proletkult, Constructivists, Futurists, and others with attractive Russian acronyms advertised their own nostrums for ‘breaking down the barrier between art and life’ – something they all agreed should be done. Mostly they were experimental and modernist, as seemed to befit a revolutionary culture.
By the 1930s, however, once the Soviet state was firmly established, the party aspired to dominate culture, as it did every other aspect of life. It no longer wanted innovative or ‘revolutionary’ artists: on the contrary, it favoured art forms which reflected the greatness and stability of the state, that is, a conservative, classical, easily appreciated style. In architecture, the pure straight lines and right angles of the international avant-garde gave way to voluptuous neo-Baroque motifs: sculpted banners, statues, and decorative friezes depicting the battles of the class struggle and the triumph of the workers. In the visual arts, abstraction and stylization were supplanted by simple genre scenes of everyday life or heroic tableaux of party leaders receiving the acclaim of an adoring public. In literature, experimentation and obscurity yielded to a sober, easily understood traditional realism, increasingly tending towards the optimistic and idyllic in its portrayal of Soviet life. In all the arts, this saccharine neo-conservatism was dignified with the title ‘socialist realism’.
It was imposed through the nomenklatura-dominated organization of the arts. All professional cultural workers were enrolled in party-supervised ‘creative unions’, whose function was to take care of their material needs and ensure their access to the outlets they needed to bring their work to the public. The Writers’ Union, for example, maintained a network of apartment blocks, holiday homes, and health resorts for writers’ use; it also ran literary journals and publishing houses, and it negotiated contracts for writers. The journal editors played the key role in ensuring that what was published conformed to the ideology and taste of the party leaders. They consulted regularly with Writers’ Union secretaries, with officials of the Central Committee cultural department, and with the state censorship, often negotiating minute and subtle changes to texts to render them acceptable.
This situation was ideal for technically competent, conformist writers. But for mavericks and the highly talented, it posed great difficulties. They might want to fit into the new society, but they found it difficult to curb their own personal creative traits, which disconcerted the second-rate writers whose job it was to supervise them. Boris Pasternak devoted himself to translation; Anna Akhmatova wrote ‘for the desk drawer’; Isaak Babel and Osip Mandelstam were arrested and died in labour camps.
12. A contrast in architectural styles: (a) the constructivist Kharkov Palace of Industry
(b) the neo-Baroque Kievskaia Metro station
Family policy likewise reverted to older values. Initially, the party had aimed to undermine the family, which in their view perpetuated inequalities and old-fashioned outlooks. They were especially anxious to free women from the duties of cooking, cleaning, and child care. In the 1920s, inheritance rights were curtailed, women’s property rights were made equal to men’s, de facto unions were considered as equal to registered marriages, abortion was available on demand, and a spouse could obtain a divorce by simply informing his or her partner.
It was soon discovered, though, that the state could not replace families in looking after children, old people, the sick, and disabled. Hundreds of thousands of orphans appeared on the street, begging and sometimes attacking passers-by or shops. The birth rate fell, which in the long term threatened both industrial development and the armed forces. Family legislation was not the sole cause of these problems, but nevertheless, Communists decided that it was important to have stable families to build socialism. Abortion was again virtually outlawed, and divorce was made much more difficult. Inheritance rights were restored, but only to the offspring of registered marriages.
One long-term problem remained from this compromise. In practice, women once again became responsible for the everyday duties of family life, which few men regarded as incumbent on themselves. Now, though, women were also expected to seek employment; for many, this was a necessity, since low rates of pay made it impossible to maintain a family on just one income. The result was that women were afflicted with a ‘double burden’, and often had to call in grandparents to help with the multiple demands on their time.
From the late 1920s onwards, millions of people were on the move, mostly from the countryside into the towns, either to get away from the kolkhozy or to find employment, often both. Since little extra housing was constructed, they had to crowd together in kommunalki (communal apartments), where a whole family might live in a single room, sharing kitchen, bathroom, and toilet with other families. The necessity to agree acceptable arrangements imposed a certain reluctant interdependence, a modified joint responsibility in subjection to the authorities (who allocated ‘dwelling space’), which in exaggerated form replicated pre-revolutionary village experience. The lack of privacy created ideal conditions for informers, who sometimes made denunciations to the authorities to get rid of unwanted neighbours. Personal relations were decisive; there was no legal or institutional defence against abuse of power.
Work in Soviet enterprises also bolstered joint responsibility. All employees became part of a work team, subject to managers and foremen who had to ensure the fulfilment of Gosplan’s targets and used collective discipline and collective rewards to achieve that. They had power not only over work practices, but often also over housing and social benefits. Everyone became part of a subordinate community, dependent on the bosses for life’s essentials, with no effective individual rights.
National policy
Communist policy towards the non-Russian nationalities was very different from that of the Tsars. Communists believed that nationalism was a powerful but transitory sentiment, which could be harnessed for revolution, but which would in due course give way to a supra-ethnic all-Soviet consciousness.
Initially, the Communists utilized national identity as a way of promoting modernization. They created a federal state, with a hierarchy of ethnically named constituent republics, in which, at least theoretically, power devolved to indigenous elites trained for the purpose – a policy known as korenizatsiia (indigenization). The party specifically set out to encourage the development of non-Russian national languages and cultures. A campaign of likbez (liquidation of illiteracy) provided elementary education in local languages.
In principle, this was an enlightened policy, but from the outset it suffered from its own contradictions. First of all, given the intermingling of peoples throughout the former Russian Empire, designating a certain territory as belonging to a particular people entailed considerable over-simplification. Those who did not belong to a titular nationality felt discriminated against: local cadres tended to favour their co-nationals in housing, education, and employment. This sometimes handicapped Russians. In the Mordvin republic on the Volga, for example, 60% of the population was Russian, but their republic was named after a non-Russian minority. In Ukraine, many Russian parents bitterly resented their offspring having to study Ukrainian, which they considered a ‘farmyard dialect’.
Besides, many Soviet practices directly undermined korenizatsiia. The party, the armed forces, and Gosplan were all tightly centralized, so that the non-Russians’ scope for self-rule was in practice extremely constricted. In any case, during the 1930s, the practical application of korenizatsiia was changed. Internal passports were introduced, in each of which ‘entry no 5’ designated an individual’s nationality. The entry could not be changed, and it gradually became a more important determinant of life chances than social origin.
Moreover, since no socialist revolutions had occurred elsewhere, commitment to world revolution now implied defending Russia at all costs: ‘Socialism in One Country’, as Stalin called it. During the 1930s, party propaganda increasingly emphasized the Russian identity of the Soviet Union as a whole. The Tsars were no longer condemned outright as exploiters of the people, since their conquests had created the great state which was now the Soviet Union. Stalin declared:
We have inherited that state . . . [and] have consolidated and strengthened it as a united and indivisible state, not in the interests of landowners and capitalists, but for the benefit of the workers, of all the peoples who make up that state.
Schools in all republics were required to teach the Russian language. Russian literature, especially Pushkin and Tolstoy, was extolled as the standard for all Soviet writers to emulate. Ethnic units were abolished in the Red Army, and Russian was made the universal language of command. Many nationalities were required to reformulate their written languages using the Cyrillic alphabet. The Soviet peoples were still in principle equal, but the Russians were definitely ‘more equal’ than the others.
Actually, though, this was imperial and not ethnic Russian-ness. It envisaged the Russians primarily as the bearers of a great state. Stalin had little interest in the ethnic customs of the Russian people, which were being destroyed even as the new Russification took hold. In particular, the Russian village commune and the Orthodox Church were being deliberately undermined as an objective of Communist policy.
Soviet educational and economic policies transformed the consciousness of all nationalities, including the Russians. Mass primary education and likbez produced a generation of young people, literate in their own language, and at the same time becoming urbanized. This was the Soviet Union’s greatest long-term achievement. At the beginning of the Second World War, the average Russian Red Army soldier was far more aware of his national traditions than his counterpart only a quarter of a century earlier. But the same was true of non-Russians: thus, the Ukrainians who sought urban employment during the 1930s–1950s were nationally aware, and transformed what had been Russian, Polish, and Jewish towns into Ukrainian ones, centres of a conscious Ukrainian culture.
As the threat of war grew during the 1930s, Stalin perceived some nationalities as potentially treacherous. Poles and Germans were deported from areas near the western borders. In 1937, when Japan invaded China and seemed to threaten the Soviet Union, all Koreans were deported from the Far East. This was not just removal from a sensitive region: after they reached their destinations, Koreans were forbidden to attend Korean-language schools or to read Korean newspapers. For the first time, the Soviet authorities were endeavouring to extirpate the cultural existence of a whole nationality.
They continued such policies during and after the war. As they occupied eastern Poland and the Baltic republics under the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, they deported many local elites – anyone capable of organizing national resistance – to Siberia and Kazakhstan. In the Polish case, this was accompanied by the deliberate mass murder of some 20,000 army officers and professional people. In some cases, entire peoples were deported: notably the Germans, the Chechens, Ingush and Balkars of the North Caucasus, the Kalmyks, and the Crimean Tatars. The legacy of these attempts to destroy whole peoples was their bitter and irrevocable hostility towards the Soviet Union, Communism, and Russians – a legacy which played a decisive role in the ultimate disintegration of the USSR. The first declarations of secession from the USSR came from the Baltic republics, the defection of the Ukrainians in 1991 completed the process, and the Chechens have provoked the most destructive of Russia’s post-Soviet wars.
Chapter 7
The Soviet Union: triumph, decline, and fall
The Second World War and after
The Second World War exemplified in brutal fashion the advantages and disadvantages of Russia’s geostrategic position. When Germany and its allies invaded in June 1941, the Red Army, destabilized by the terror and weakened by poor preparation, suffered terrible early losses, and retreated first of all to the outskirts of Moscow, then as far as the Volga at Stalingrad. The Germans occupied huge areas of the country, killing, enslaving, or deporting the inhabitants. Eventually, though, the strengths of Soviet totalitarian leadership reasserted themselves: the CPSU was able to prioritize the use of resources, shift industry to where it was more secure, and expand the production of armaments. ‘Enemies’ were now all too real, and Soviet citizens were powerfully motivated to fight them. The staunch fighting qualities of the Soviet soldier combined with popular Soviet-Russian patriotism, which even most non-Russians accepted when faced by German brutality. Recovery was gradual, but in the end, the greater size and resources of the Soviet Union, augmented by Allied aid, ensured victory.
As a result of that victory, the USSR gained an ‘outer empire’ in Central Europe and the Balkans, including part of Germany itself. It set about building Soviet-style socialism in its new dependencies, tolerating only minor deviations from the model to accommodate national distinctions. The methods by which pro-Soviet regimes were established and sustained alienated most of the local populations. They also alarmed the former Allies. The result was an ‘iron curtain’ running north–south through the middle of Europe. The traditional Russian–Western dichotomy now entrenched itself anew in the form of military alliances, the Warsaw Pact and NATO. The result was an uneasy peace, universally dubbed ‘Cold War’.
The Second World War had changed Soviet society permanently, not necessarily to the benefit of the population. The ruling elite, both military and civilian, had proved their capacity to govern the country and achieve victory at a time of unprecedented danger. They had also become more independent of Stalin and more capable of defending their own interests. After 1945, terror was still applied, but on a much reduced scale compared with the 1930s. As for ordinary people, those who had survived were traumatized, most of them had lost family members, workplaces, and/or homes, and were more dependent on the ruling elite than ever before.
The official ideology had not changed much on the surface, but its inner content and the mentality of its audience had been transformed. The ‘proletarian internationalism’ of 1917 had now finally been replaced by a confident Russian-Soviet patriotism. ‘Building communism’ was still the official aim as post-war reconstruction got under way. But perpetual change was no longer acceptable, even to the younger generation. On the contrary, the Soviet Union was becoming a deeply conservative society, in which people struggled to acquire the minimum for a decent existence and then preserve it at all costs. Communism became an ever more ghostly aim, receding into an infinite future, whereas victory in 1945 was a definite and remarkable achievement. In subsequent decades, that victory, rather than the 1917 revolution, became the party’s chief claim to popular support. Messianism was increasingly directed to a past event rather than a future one.
The USSR after Stalin
Stalin died in 1953. His legacy created huge difficulties for his successors. They knew that if another Stalin were allowed to emerge, they would probably be among his first victims. They acted quickly to bring the security police – now renamed the KGB – under the control of the Central Committee, so that it could no longer strike unrestrainedly against the nomenklatura elite.
More than that, however, they realized that mass terror was not in the long term a viable system of rule. But how could they keep control without it? Moreover, without revealing the truth about Stalin’s crimes, how could they restrain terror in the future?
In the event, the new party first secretary, Khrushchev, decided on a limited revelation of the truth. At the 20th party congress in 1956, he denounced Stalin’s repression of leading members of the nomenklatura elite and the deportations of nationalities. But he ignored the dekulakization and the famine of the 1930s – implying that these were entirely acceptable. Both what Khrushchev said and what he left unsaid were to become objects of heated controversy over the next decade, mostly in private and in the underground. What was crucial was that he had irrevocably destroyed the party’s façade of unique and total rectitude. If it had made such terrible mistakes and committed such terrible crimes in the past, where was the guarantee it could not do so again? Many long-term prisoners were released from labour camps, but the rehabilitation of those unjustly arrested proceeded haltingly and eventually petered out. Stalin’s ghost hung over everybody.
Khrushchev aimed to regain the population’s trust by offering them growing material prosperity. He re-emphasized the party’s millennial aims: at the 22nd party congress in 1961, he announced that by 1980 the Soviet Union would overtake the USA in industrial output and thereby create ‘the material prerequisites for communism’. Antagonistic social relationships had already come to an end, he claimed, and there was therefore no further need for the state as an organ of repression; it would ‘fade away’ and be replaced by the party as an agent of popular self-government. Khrushchev attempted to democratize the party by limiting the tenure of party secretaries at all levels and stipulating that they should be elected by secret ballot. This infuriated senior officials who since the death of Stalin had become accustomed to regarding their posts as more or less freehold entitlements. It was one reason why Khrushchev fell in 1964, dismissed by the Central Committee.
The new relationship between party and people required a reformed legal system, shorn of catch-all concepts like ‘enemy of the people’ and ‘counter-revolutionary activity’, which enabled prosecutors to incriminate anyone they chose. In principle, the new ‘socialist legality’ was to require genuine evidence of criminal activity to be produced in court before a conviction could be obtained. Judicial procedures were democratized by the introduction of ‘comrade courts’, consisting of ordinary citizens in the workplace or apartment block, empowered to reach a verdict and pronounce sentence on petty crimes. The idea was that society should become self-policing, at least for minor offences.
Stalin’s successors attempted to increase agricultural production and make consumer goods available. Perhaps most important of all, they embarked on a huge programme of domestic construction, with the ultimate aim of providing each family with its own apartment. During the 1960s and 1970s, sufficient progress was made to turn most Soviet citizens into modest de facto property owners, with therefore a stake in preserving the system, whatever its faults. The Soviet welfare system also functioned well enough by the 1960s to give most citizens entitlements to education, child care, and health care, about whose defects they grumbled, without wishing to abolish them. The collective strength of the ruling elite ensured that Soviet society became unyieldingly hierarchical. For most people, the way to get on in life was to elbow one’s way upwards. The idea of a hierarchy of dwelling places may sound strange, but it was an integral part of Soviet life. For the supply of food, consumer goods, and social benefits in a society of scarcity, the best-provided city was Moscow; next came Leningrad and the capitals of the union republics; then towns with enterprises deemed ‘of all-Union significance’; then other towns; and finally at the bottom of the ladder the villages. The aim of young people was to rise as far up this hierarchy as possible, using a mixture of educational qualifications and personal connections to obtain employment and a propiska (residence permit) in a higher-ranking location.
Those born in the villages tried to leave them. The long-term price of collectivization and neglect of agriculture was a poverty-stricken and demoralized countryside, populated mainly by women and elderly men who had not been able to escape. Young men found it easier to escape rural life than women, since military service enabled them to leave the village, acquire new skills, and obtain an urban propiska. Agricultural productivity was very low, as one could see in the empty shelves of grocers’ shops. The Soviet state had to expend precious foreign currency importing grain in order to keep up the tacit ‘social contract’ with the urban workers: cheap food in return for low pay.
In the towns, the struggle for life chances became paramount. For many people, their employer was a vital resource person: if he could negotiate favourable deals with Gosplan, the supply of food, fuel, housing, putevki (paid holidays), and consumer goods was likely to be satisfactory for his employees. The benefits of the social security system were distributed at the workplace, through trade union branches. One might argue that every Soviet workplace was a ‘primary collective’, where the ostensible productive function was secondary to enabling people to conduct the normal and essential business of their lives in spite of the omnipresent pressure from the state.
Life inside the collective was fairly easy. One did not have to work too hard: pilfering, tukhta (padding the figures), and mutual cover-ups ensured that every employee could cope with life, no matter how deficient the collective’s output. Since neither terror nor a normal market were available, it was impossible to eradicate these practices. On the other hand, talented or unusual people found life in the collective very difficult. To ensure its survival, the collective’s members would band together to discipline or extrude individuals who might threaten its existence through non-conformity with prevailing social and political norms. In this way, collectives largely policed themselves: mutual surveillance remained one of their paramount functions.
In the struggle for life chances, another vital lubricator was blat. This was the unofficial mutual exchange of goods and services: one needed a patron with good access to official sources or a friend with a link to the shadow economy, where ‘illegal’ goods were obtainable. If a water pipe in the bathroom burst, then one needed someone to repair it urgently. The state repair system was usually too cumbersome to react speedily and effectively, so one would hastily ring round among friends and find a fitter who had access to the tools and lengths of pipe necessary to do the job. He would be diverting state property for his own personal profit, but at least he would perform the repair competently and in time to avoid major damage. In return, one would either offer some service or commodity, or pay him at a much higher rate than for state services.
Many forms of non-monetary exchange were mediated through personal relationships. If one needed to get one’s son into a good school, one would work through acquaintances who knew the head teacher there. In return, one might be able to provide certain goods or services: a French perfume, an Italian suit, a Japanese tape recorder, or even just regular access to a good car repairer. In the process, one might actually form a good personal relationship. That was not necessary, but it would help to confirm and consolidate the exchange of goods and services. In this way, contrary to the theory of Hannah Arendt, who argued that totalitarianism ‘atomized’ society, new kinds of social bonds were generated, though totally unlike anything envisaged by the party.
This kind of social bonding became crucial in the field of science and culture. The USSR needed highly qualified scientists able to think independently and keep in touch with their foreign colleagues. Their institutes became islands of free thought and exchange of information not available to the ordinary population. Theatres, orchestras, publishing houses, and literary journals had their own tightly knit circles of creative personalities who chafed at party control and pervasive censorship. One of those journals, Novy mir, under its editor, Alexander Tvardovsky, himself a member of the CPSU Central Committee, managed to build on Khrushchev’s revelations and tell more of the truth about the Soviet past. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), which described honestly the routine of a Stalinist labour camp, broke a long-established taboo and aroused heartfelt reactions from its readers. Once again, literature was being forced to assume a civic, even a political, role as a kind of loyal opposition. In Novy mir, readers could follow in muffled form a debate which could not be articulated openly in the media.
The USSR was becoming more permeable. Information from the outside world was reaching it from its own ‘outer empire’, from Western visitors, and from Western short-wave radio stations. At its best, the Soviet education system produced enquiring minds, eager to absorb this information; and in their new private apartments, Soviet citizens could freely discuss with family and friends information and ideas excluded from the public media.
The result was to perpetuate the 19th-century dichotomy between Russia and ‘the West’, only now in a new form. Among free-thinking intellectuals reforming ideas took one of two paths. One could be called ‘internationalist liberal’, embodied in the person of the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov. He proposed that the Soviet Union should introduce genuine rule of law, legalize political opposition, reduce its armaments (especially nuclear), and fulfil the international commitments it had undertaken after the war. His position was strengthened by the Helsinki Final Act (1975), which finally confirmed the Soviet Union’s post-1945 territorial gains, but also stipulated that all signatories should respect ‘human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief’.
The other stream of underground oppositional thinking was Russian nationalist. As we have seen, Russian nationalism can take a mainly ethnic or mainly imperial form, and both trends existed, though the boundaries between them were blurred. What Russian nationalists could agree on was that Russians were a distinctively collectivist people, that unlike individualist, mercenary Westerners, they flourished by mutual support in adverse circumstances. Communist rule had weakened this inherited mutualism, they argued, and it had also reduced the population, blighted the natural environment, undermined the Orthodox Church, and destroyed peasant agriculture. Some, like Solzhenitsyn, thought the solution lay in withdrawing from great power politics, reducing the share of heavy industry in the economy, and returning to a simpler lifestyle based on organic agriculture and artisan production. Others, on the contrary, wanted to augment Russian imperial power by increasing heavy industrial and military production, and to strengthen the position of Russians as the state-bearing nationality by reducing the rights of non-Russians, especially Jews.
All these attitudes were reflected in the top echelons of the CPSU. The stronghold of the liberal Westernizing outlook was the Central Committee’s International Department. The Russianist outlook was strongest in the military and in the RSFSR (Russian republic) party apparatus. The party’s official position was never clearly defined and wavered over time. On the whole, though, the leaders upheld internationalist Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology, while tolerating a simple-minded Russian imperial nationalism as a kind of ‘working ideology’ for everyday use. Obviously, this was not wholly acceptable in the party organizations of the non-Russian republics, but Leonid Brezhnev, CPSU General Secretary (1964–82), adopted a policy of ‘stability of cadres’ which offered their leaders the chance to devise their own local alternatives. They usually protected indigenous patron–client networks and tolerated a limited revival of local languages, histories, and cultures. As a result, by the 1970s, Russians living outside the RSFSR became gradually aware that being Russian was no longer an advantage in looking for education, jobs, or housing.
The end of the USSR
By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union faced a serious internal crisis. It was failing to sustain the two major ‘social contracts’ on which its townsfolk depended: cheap food in return for low pay, and give and take between Russians and non-Russians.
The man who became CPSU General Secretary in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev, took over the views of the International Department. He had become convinced that the USSR was not increasing its security by accumulating nuclear and conventional weapons, but on the contrary undermining it by presenting to the outside world an ‘enemy image’, which provoked other powers to rearm against it. His ‘new thinking’ in foreign policy led him into a series of agreements with US President Reagan, in which both sides made deep cuts in their nuclear and conventional arsenals. At the United Nations, he explicitly renounced the ‘primacy of the class struggle’, which had hitherto been at the core of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and called for ‘a world without violence and wars’ and ‘dialogue and cooperation for the sake of development and the preservation of civilisation’.
Internally, he launched a campaign against corruption and criminality in the nomenklatura elite. He encouraged glasnost (openness), so that ordinary citizens could denounce the misdeeds of their superiors. As his campaign advanced, he became convinced that his efforts were being resisted by what he called ‘a managerial stratum, a ministerial and party apparatus which . . . does not want to give up its privileges’. The Chernobyl nuclear explosion of April 1986, whose seriousness officials tried to conceal from him, confirmed his suspicion. Within a few months, he had broadened glasnost into something more like freedom of speech. He also instituted perestroika (political reform), allowing oppositional political movements to disseminate their ideas, and eventually to take part in elections too. Newspapers began openly to criticize government policy. Sakharov was permitted to propagate his ideas freely, but so were nationalists, Russian and non-Russian. Solzhenitsyn published his three-volume Gulag Archipelago, which gave a fuller account than ever before of the terrible truth about Stalin’s penal empire. A climax was reached in May 1989, when a new Congress of People’s Deputies opened: one after another, speakers denounced the ruling class’s abuses of power. It was televised live, and much of the population took time off work to watch, fascinated and appalled by the spectacle.
It soon became apparent, though, that the Soviet Union could not continue in anything like its present form if there were free speech and pluralist politics. As in the past, the bonds between the ruling class and the mass of people were too brittle to withstand serious strains. Besides, the ‘outer empire’ began to crumble even more quickly under the same pressures, until in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and a series of mostly peaceful revolutions brought non-Communist parties to power. The Warsaw Pact fell apart.
Inside the USSR, the strain fell first on the economy. Gorbachev launched a reform which legalized private economic enterprises. He intended that they should complement the planned state economy, but in practice they took advantage of shortages to offer higher prices to suppliers and charge customers more. As a result, they sucked goods out of the state economy; ordinary consumers could no longer afford everyday purchases. To make matters worse, the economic reforms also disrupted the informal practices by which people had received goods through their workplaces or personal networks. By 1990, it began to look as if routine food supplies might not reach the major cities.
Relations between the nationalities also suffered. The incongruity of simultaneously fostering and suppressing national consciousness now became obvious. Glasnost and political freedom brought festering enmities to the surface. Popular Fronts formed to express the ethnic grievances of the non-Russians. The Baltic republics, whose population had never fully accepted their 1940 incorporation into the USSR, began to demand autonomy, then full secession. Armenians and Azerbaijanis denounced each other, then actually went to war over Nagornyi Karabakh, a territory controlled by Azerbaijan where most of the population was Armenian. Abkhazia demanded secession from Georgia, while Georgia denounced Moscow for encouraging the Abkhazians. In April 1989, the Soviet army had to be called in to deal with massive demonstrations in Tbilisi. It killed at least twenty people, and a public enquiry was launched to investigate its actions.
These ethnic conflicts cast doubt on the viability of the Soviet Union as a federation of ethnically named republics. They also raised the question of the legality of turning the military against unarmed civilians. Commanders became nervous of using force to disperse rioters: they feared they might be held legally responsible for the resulting casualties.
These two developments came together in the Soviet Union’s final crisis, which unexpectedly turned out to be a clash between Russia and the Soviet Union. Russians had long been aware that the non-Russian republics were becoming less hospitable homelands for them. In the late 1980s, their gradual exodus turned into a flood. Russians, who had taken it for granted that they were the dominant nationality and had not needed to defend their own identity, started to form their own organizations.
They had a problem, though: it was by no means clear what their national identity consisted of. There was still no coherent narrative of ‘Russia’. Some Russians considered their country essentially an imperial state; others identified with its culture, religion, or ethnic traditions. Some Russian nationalists idolized Stalin as a great leader; others reviled him as the destroyer of the Russian peasantry and the Orthodox Church. Divided by their own heritage, Russian nationalists could not cooperate with one another, until Gorbachev’s reforms threatened the actual break-up of the Soviet Union. By then it was too late.
Russia was not only a nation. It was also an institution, albeit a powerless one, within the USSR, the RSFSR. Gorbachev’s reforms gave it real power for the first time, and Russian political movements sprang up, both liberal and nationalist-imperialist. At the liberal end, in March 1990 Democratic Russia won many seats in the RSFSR Congress of People’s Deputies, and their spokesman, Boris Yeltsin, gained a perfect platform to denounce the CPSU and demand that Russia be allowed to run its own affairs. In June 1991, he was popularly elected President of the Russian Republic.
The nationalist-imperialists also formed their own political parties, which brought together environmental associations, cultural societies, military-patriotic organizations, and Russian ‘international fronts’ from the non-Russian republics. Their Patriotic Bloc fared poorly in the 1990 elections, but continued to warn of the dangers to which Gorbachev’s peace-loving policy had exposed the Soviet Union. The reunification of Germany and its integration into NATO especially infuriated them: everything the Soviet Union had gained by its victory in the Second World War was, they claimed, now lost or jeopardized.
At the highest level of the CPSU, the nationalist-imperialists naturally had allies, who were becoming increasingly alarmed at Gorbachev’s policies. When he tried to negotiate a new Union Treaty, which would radically redefine the relationships between the Union and the constituent republics, they decided to strike. On 19 August 1991, they formed an Emergency Committee, put Gorbachev under house arrest, and declared a state of emergency. They brought tanks into central Moscow to take the White House, home of the Russian parliament. They neglected, however, to arrest Yeltsin, who clambered on top of one of their tanks and denounced their coup, declaring it a ‘crime against the legally elected authorities of the Russian Republic’.
13. Yeltsin interrupts Gorbachev at the podium, August 1991
This was the decisive moment. Uncertain which authority was legitimate, the army commanders declined to fire on civilians. Without their support, the Emergency Committee could not get a grip on the situation. Their coup collapsed, and within a few days, Yeltsin had outlawed the CPSU. Ukraine declared its independence, and its example was soon followed by most other republics.
The Soviet Union could not survive these blows. In December 1991, Yeltsin met with his Ukrainian and Belorussian counterparts and issued a declaration that ‘the USSR, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, has ceased to exist’. They announced they were setting up a Commonwealth of Independent States and invited the other Soviet republics to join them.
On the Kremlin roof, the hammer and sickle was taken down and replaced by the red-white-blue tricolour, which had been the flag of Russia’s merchant navy before 1917. There was no double-headed eagle on it, which implied that Russia was renouncing its claim to empire. But what was to take its place? What was Russia now? The clash of symbols and narratives continued. The post-Soviet regime took a long time to decide what should be the new national flag, what should be the words of its national anthem, whether Lenin should remain in his Red Square mausoleum (he did), what its principal cities should be named (Leningrad became St Petersburg again, but the surrounding province remained Leningradskaia oblast), whether Nicholas II should be buried with full national honours (he was, in July 1998, but Yeltsin decided to attend only at the last moment, and the Patriarch stayed away). Even the country’s official post-Soviet name, the Russian Federation (Russia), betrayed ambivalence over its status. In the new era of free speech and civil freedom, these issues were passionately debated in public.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was greeted by most of its nationalities as liberation. For Russians, it was more like deprivation – the loss of much of what they regarded as their homeland. Besides, the disappearance of the CPSU removed the cement that had enabled the state to function. Without it, the President and parliament were left facing one another without a mediator, and with no way of getting a grip on the regional strongmen or the new financial magnates. Yeltsin failed to persuade parliament to agree to a new constitution, and instead dissolved it in September 1993. Many of the deputies refused to accept his decision, declared his decree illegal, and deposed him as president. Paramilitary organizations came out to support them, and Yeltsin suddenly faced an armed rebellion in his capital city. He responded by summoning tanks to storm the White House. This time, Pavel Grachev, the Defence Minister, agreed, but insisted that Yeltsin sign a written statement taking responsibility for the bloodshed.
This confrontation finally ended the Soviet era, but it also exposed the continuing weakness of the Russian state, its failure even to ensure its own monopoly of violence. That failure continued to be in evidence in the following two decades. Without the CPSU, the component cells of a state were left floundering, looking for a new legal and symbolic framework which would impart structure and purpose.
In this vacuum of legitimate authority, a full-scale economic reform finally took place. Launched by a bright and arrogant group of young economists, devotees of the radical free-market ‘Washington consensus’, it soon provided yet another example of a Western panacea which proved disastrous when applied to Russia. They launched a mass programme of privatization and freeing of prices, which provoked hyper-inflation and transferred most productive resources into the hands of enterprising and ruthless businessmen – the ‘oligarchs’. The state, meanwhile, was left impoverished and without a reliable method of levying taxes: it could not even pay schoolteachers and pensioners on time. Unable to rely on the police to keep order, firms employed their own private security firms or paid money to protection gangs.
There was now little to prevent non-Russian autonomous republics within Russia declaring their own secession. In the event, only one did so, Chechnia, but the consequences were destructive and far-reaching. After negotiating for three years, Yeltsin decided in 1994 to restore authority by sending in the Russian army. It suffered a series of humiliating reverses and eventually had to withdraw. In 1999, it invaded again, and after a long and indecisive campaign, left Chechnia in the hands of a local warlord under uncertain Kremlin control. The Chechen experience revealed brutally Russia’s weakness and deepened the corruption and violence prevalent in both military and civilian leadership.
Under Yeltsin in the 1990s, then, oligarchs, provincial governors, and ethnic separatists each built their own sub-state networks, controlling access to capital and coercive resources. Ordinary people became more dependent than ever before on their bosses and other local magnates for the routine facilities of life: housing, food, transport, health care, recreation, and the education of their children, even sometimes for their physical safety. Most Western commentators on the early post-Soviet years wrote as if the choice for Russia was between authoritarianism and democracy. In actual fact, the real issue was whether Russia was going to have an effective state at all. If not, its population would have to place its trust in such lower-level leaders and institutions as could protect them and provide them with life’s necessities.
After he became President in 2000, Vladimir Putin in some respects strengthened the state, which he referred to as the ‘power vertical’. In ruthless manner, he brought Chechnia back under nominal Russian control. He simplified taxes, to make them easier to understand and harder to evade; they were also centralized, to facilitate redistribution and alleviate the glaring disparity between richer and poorer regions. Rising oil and gas prices enabled the government to pay schoolteachers and pensioners on time.
Like earlier Russian rulers, however, Putin strengthened the state largely through the manipulation of personalized networks. He ended the election of provincial governors and tightened Kremlin control over them. He made the Duma, the post-1993 parliament, more compliant, and sponsored the largest party, United Russia, as a permanent government majority inside it. In the interests of what he called ‘information security’, he brought most of the media, especially television, under tight supervision. He came to an understanding with the oligarchs, under which the dubious sources of their wealth would not be investigated, provided they kept out of politics. When one of them, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, stepped out of line by financing Duma deputies, he was arrested and charged with fraud, tax evasion, and embezzlement. This was not only an economic move: as well as an oligarch, Khodorkovsky was also a potential presidential candidate. He had proposed strengthening the rule of law, adopting a more open and pluralist style of politics, and a more transparent system of corporate governance, compatible with international standards of financial probity. After his arrest, his successful oil firm, Yukos, passed into the hands of senior government officials, who thus became oligarchs themselves. Robber barons had moved into the highest echelons of the state.
Putin, and his rather shadowy successor, Dmitry Medvedev, have fallen well short of consolidating the state by grounding it in popular trust or stable institutions. Without the rule of law or strong political parties, authoritarian rule means in practice that the wealth of society is the object of competition between powerful patron–client cliques, who are able to operate unchallenged and in the obscurity provided by media deference and censorship. Russian government is still at the mercy of the same cliques, now at the very heart of the state; it has become more corrupt under Putin. Meanwhile, popular unrest is expressed in spontaneous demonstrations and strikes, protesting against local abuses of power but unable to affect the political system as a whole.
Conclusion
In the 16th century, Muscovy improvised an authority structure which would enable it to cope with the challenges it faced both from the steppe and from European great powers. The resulting Russian Empire was remarkably successful: it became the largest territorial state on earth and outlasted most of its rivals. It offered its population basic physical security, modest but assured access to resources, and membership of stable communities. It also proved successful on the whole at integrating non-Russian peoples. On the other hand, the state’s overweening exercise of authority, its dependence on wilful and often corrupt agents, and the general weakness of law and institutions impeded economic development, enfeebled the link between elites and masses, and generated bitter resentments which sporadically burst forth in rebellion. Discontent was intensified in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the penetration of European ideas into ever broader strata of the population.
The First World War nearly destroyed Russia, but it revived for a time as the Soviet Union, and even after the latter’s collapse, it survives in reduced form. The authoritarian and personalized political structure which brought it success in the past is, however, ill-suited to the entirely different challenges Russia faces today, of adjusting to a global high-tech economy and an increasingly interdependent world in which nuclear weapons have made war between major powers virtually impossible.
Today, moreover, Russians are better educated than in the past, and they have incomparably more experience of life outside their own country, especially in Europe and North America. The age-old justification of authoritarianism – that the country faces powerful external threats – is no longer persuasive. The gap between rulers and ruled is widening once more. Russia is one of the world’s great survivors, and it will probably cope in its own way with these challenges. How it will do so is at the moment impossible to say.
Further reading
General
The themes of this book are treated at greater length in Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians, 2nd edn. (2011).
Philip Longworth, Russia’s Empires: Their Rise and Fall from Prehistory to Putin (2005) is a lively and up-to-date account of Russia’s various imperial reincarnations.
On the difficulty of building a Russian nation within a Russian empire, see Vera Tolz, Russia: Inventing a Nation (2001).
Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (2003) tells an important story about the collision of national projects on Russia’s western border.
Marshall Poe, The Russian Moment in World History (2003) briefly presents an important thesis about Russia’s evolution as a state.
Chapter 1
Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200 (1996) is an excellent scholarly introduction to its subject.
Janet Martin, Medieval Russia, 980–1584 (1995).
Serge A. Zenkovsky (ed.), Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles and Tales (1974).
David Morgan, The Mongols (1986).
Robert O. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, 1304–1613 (1987).
Chapter 2
Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier (1998) stresses the Mongol heritage in Muscovy.
Nancy Shields Kollmann, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (1999).
Isabel de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible (2005), a good recent scholarly biography.
Robert Frost, The Northern Wars, 1558–1721 (2000) offers the European background to Muscovy’s evolution into the Russian Empire.
Brian L. Davies, Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500–1700 (2007) does the same for the steppe frontier.
Philip Longworth, The Cossacks (1969).
Chapter 3
John LeDonne, The Russian Empire and the World, 1700–1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment (1997) is not an easy read, but a valuable account of Imperial Russia’s geopolitical situation.
William Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 (1992), similar, with more emphasis on military matters.
Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations (1996).
Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (1998) is now the standard work on Peter the Great.
Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (2002) does the same for Catherine the Great.
Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Russia’s Age of Serfdom, 1649–1861 (2008).
Dominic Lieven, Russia against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807–1814 (2009), not only the best book on its subject, but also an excellent summary of Imperial Russia’s military organization.
Janet Hartley, Alexander I (1994) is a good biography and assessment.
Chapter 4
Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (2000) makes an illuminating comparison between Russia and other major empires.
Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History (2001) is the best account of the development of the non-Russian peoples and their relationship with the imperial state.
Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire (1997) endeavours to do the same for the Russians.
Chapter 5
Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Sakharova (eds.), Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881 (1994).
Dominic Lieven, Nicholas II: Emperor of all the Russias (1993).
Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, 1881–1917 (1983).
Nicholas Rzhevsky (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture (1998).
Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 1850–1917 (1986).
S. A. Smith, The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (2002) offers well what its title suggests.
The second half of Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (1996) provides a good longer narrative of 1917–24.
John L. H. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization (1976) does well what its subtitle promises.
Chapter 6
For a general history of the Soviet Union, see Geoffrey Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union (1992); Ronald Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR and the Successor States (1998); Stephen Lovell, The Soviet Union: A Very Short Introduction (2009).
Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Biography (3 vols, 1985–95) is the best biography of Lenin. Those who want a shorter account will find Adam Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks (1969) still very useful.
Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle (2009) is the best-informed account of Stalin’s terror.
Jörg Baberowski, Der rote Terror: die Geschichte des Stalinismus (2003).
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (1994); and Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (1999).
Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (1964): lively reportage by a journalist on the Soviet home front.
John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (1991).
Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: The Red Army, 1939–45 (2005), and her Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (2000) both throw light on the personal ordeal of ordinary Russians, civilian and military.
Chapter 7
The postwar USSR has yet to receive full scholarly treatment, but John Keep, Last of the Empires: A History of the Soviet Union, 1945–1991 (1995), and Stephen Lovell, The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the Present (2010) are two excellent general studies.
On the most important leaders, see William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2003), and Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (2003).
John Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (1995).
Timothy J. Colton, Yeltsin: A Life (2008).
Lilia Shevtsova, Russia – Lost in Transition: The Yeltsin and Putin Years (2007).
Simon Pirani, Change in Putin’s Russia: Power, Money and People (2010).
Chronology
Principal grand princes and tsars
Kiev
978–1015
Vladimir
1019–54
Iaroslav the Wise
1113–25
Vladimir Monomakh
Novgorod
1236–63
Alexander Nevskii
Moscow
c. 1276–1303
Daniil
1325–41
Ivan I (Kalita)
1359–89
Dmitrii Donskoi
1462–1505
Ivan III
1505–33
Vasilii III
1533–84
Ivan IV (the Terrible)
1584–98
Fedor I
1598–1605
Boris Godunov
1604–13
Time of Troubles
1613–45
Mikhail
1645–76
Aleksei
St Petersburg
1682–1725
(till 1696 jointly with Ivan V) Peter I (the Great)
1727–30
Peter II
1730–40
Anna
1741–61
Elizabeth
1761–2
Peter III
1762–96
Catherine II (the Great)
1796–1801
Paul
1801–25
Alexander I
1825–55
Nicholas I
1855–81
Alexander II
1881–94
Alexander III
1894–1917
Nicholas II
Principal Soviet leaders
1917–24
Vladimir Lenin (as Prime Minister)
1922–53
Joseph Stalin (as Party General Secretary)
1953–64
Nikita Khrushchev (as Party First Secretary)
1964–82
Leonid Brezhnev (as Party General Secretary)
1985–91
Mikhail Gorbachev (as Party General Secretary)
Main events
988
Kievan Rus accepts Christianity
1054
Split between Byzantine and Roman churches
1237–42
Mongol armies conquer most of Rus
1240–2
Alexander Nevskii defeats Swedes and Teutonic Knights
1326
Kiev Metropolitanate transferred to Moscow
1362
Battle of Blue Waters
1380
Battle of Kulikovo
1438–9
Council of Ferrara-Florence
1453
Byzantine falls to the Ottoman Turks
1478
Novgorod acknowledges Muscovite sovereignty
1480
Muscovy ceases to acknowledge sovereignty of Golden Horde
1480s–90s
Golden Horde breaks up
1547
Ivan IV is crowned Tsar
1550
Sudebnik (Law Code)
1552
Conquest and annexation of Kazan
1556
Conquest and annexation of Astrakhan
1556
Decree on Service
1558–82
Livonian War
1564–72
Creation of oprichnina
1571
Crimean Tatars sack Moscow
1589
Creation of Moscow Patriarchate
1613
Zemskii sobor elects Mikhail Romanov Tsar
1648
Dnieper Cossack rebellion against Poland
1649
Ulozhenie (Law Code)
1652–8
Nikon as Patriarch
1654
Annexation of Dnieper Cossack Hetmanate (Ukraine)
1666–7
Church Council anathematizes the Old Belief
1667–71
Rising of Stenka Razin
1703
Establishment of new capital: St Petersburg
1705
Establishment of permanent standing army
1709
Victory over Sweden at Poltava
1721
Abolition of Patriarchate
1721
Annexation of Baltic provinces
1722
Institution of Table of Ranks
1723
Introduction of poll tax
1726
Establishment of Russian Academy of Sciences
1730
Empress Anna rejects ‘Conditions’
1732
Foundation of Cadet Corps
1755
Establishment of Moscow University
1756–63
Seven Years War
1762
Emancipation of dvorianstvo from state service
1767–8
Law Code Commission
1768–74
War with Ottoman Empire
1772, 1793, 1795
Partitions of Poland
1773–5
Pugachev rising
1791
Establishment of Jewish Pale of Settlement
1801
Annexation of Georgia
1805–15
Wars against Napoleon
1812
French invasion of Russia
1825
Decembrist revolt
1830–1
Polish rising
1833
Pushkin completes The Bronze Horseman
1842
Publication of Gogol’s Dead Souls
1853–6
Crimean War
1859
Capture of Shamil
1861
Emancipation of serfs
1863–4
Polish rising
1864–6
Publication of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment
1865–76
Conquest of Kokand, Khiva, and Bukhara
1869
Publication of Tolstoy’s War and Peace
1873–4
Populists’ ‘going to the people’
1874, 1880
First performances of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina
1874
Introduction of universal male military service
1877–8
War against Ottoman Empire
1879
Formation of Narodnaia volia
1881
Assassination of Alexander II
1882
Anti-Jewish May Laws
1898
Formation of Social Democratic Workers’ Party
1899
Imperial Manifesto on Finland
1901
Formation of Socialist Revolutionary Party
1903
SD Party splits into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
1903
Completion of Trans-Siberian Railway
1904–5
Russo-Japanese War
1905–6
First Russian Revolution
October 1905
October Manifesto
April 1906
Formation of State Duma
November 1906
Stolypin’s agrarian reform
June 1907
Revision of Duma electoral law
1911
Assassination of Stolypin
1913
First performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring
August 1914
Outbreak of First World War
1915
Loss of Poland
February–March 1917
February Revolution; formation of Provisional Government and soviets
October 1917
October Revolution
January 1918
Dissolution of Constituent Assembly
March 1918
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; Russia withdraws from the war
1922
Formation of USSR
1922
Stalin becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party
January 1924
Death of Lenin
1928
Beginning of First Five Year Plan
1929
Launch of dekulakization and collectivization of agriculture
1932
Creation of Union of Soviet Writers
1932
Introduction of internal passports and propiska
1932–4
Widespread famine
1937–8
Height of Stalin’s terror
August 1939
Nazi–Soviet Pact
September 1939
Red Army occupies eastern Poland (western Ukraine and Belorussia)
March–May 1940
Katyn mass murder of Poles
June 1940
Annexation of Baltic states
June 1941
Germany invades USSR
August 1942–February 1943
Battle of Stalingrad
1944
Deportation of Caucasian and other peoples
May 1945
Germany surrenders to USSR
1949
Formation of NATO
March 1953
Death of Stalin
1955
Formation of Warsaw Pact
February 1956
20th Party Congress; Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’
1962
Publication of Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
October 1964
Fall of Khrushchev; Brezhnev becomes party leader
1975
Helsinki Final Act
March 1985
Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of CPSU
April 1986
Chernobyl nuclear explosion
1988
Popular Fronts formed in Baltic and elsewhere; beginning of Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict
April 1989
Violent suppression of Tbilisi demonstrations
May 1989
Congress of People’s Deputies in Moscow
November 1989
Fall of Berlin Wall
March 1990
Non-Communist parties legalized
March 1990
Democratic Russia wins seats in RSFSR legislature
March 1990
Lithuania secedes from USSR (followed by Latvia and Estonia)
June 1990
Formation of Russian Communist Party
April 1991
Georgia secedes from USSR
June 1991
Yeltsin elected as President of Russia
August 1991
Emergency Committee coup
December 1991
Dissolution of USSR
1992
Privatization law
September–October 1993
Conflict between Yeltsin and Russian parliament
December 1993
Creation of State Duma
December 1994
Russian army invades Chechnia
September 1999
Start of Second Chechen War
December 1999
Yeltsin resigns as President
March 2000
Putin is elected as President
October 2003
Arrest of Khodorkovsky
March 2008
Medvedev is elected as President
Glossary
artel
workers’ cooperative
Autonomous Republic
in the Soviet administrative hierarchy: a republic one level below the 15 Union Republics
blat
informal exchange of goods and/or services
boyars
leading warriors
Cheka
Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage; security police (1917–22)
CPSU
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
druzhina
squad of armed henchmen
dvorianstvo
nobility
glasnost
openness, transparency
grazhdanstvennost
civic consciousness or spirit
guberniia
province
Gulag
NKVD department which ran prisons and labour camps; the network of prisons and labour camps
iarlyk
Mongol licence to rule
intelligentsia
radical intellectuals
KGB
Committee of State Security; security police (1954–91)
kolkhoz
collective farm
kommunalka
communal apartment
korenizatsiia
indigenization: the policy of promoting non-Russian institutions and cultures
kormlenie
‘feeding’: support in kind for a ruler’s local representative
krugovaia poruka
joint responsibility
lavra
a leading monastery
likbez
liquidation of illiteracy
metropolitan
bishop of a leading city
mir
self-governing local community
narod
people, ethnos
narodnik
populist
NKVD
People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs; security police (1934–46)
nomenklatura
Communist Party appointments system; the ruling class thus generated
obshchestvennost
public opinion; society, as opposed to the state
obshchina
village community
perestroika
political reform (under Gorbachev)
pomeshchik
holder of a pomestie
pomestie
landed estate granted in return for service
pravda
truth, justice
propiska
residence permit
putevki
paid holidays
RSFSR
Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (much the largest of the 15 Union Republics of the USSR)
Rus
the medieval term for the lands of the East Slavs; Rossiia is a Latin translation of it, used from the 17th century
skit
hermitage
skomorokhi
strolling players
sobornost
spirit of community
soviet
originally: workers’ council
starosta
elder
tariqat
Sufi brotherhoods
tukhta
artificially inflating production figures
uezd
district
ulus
a nomadic people and its territory in the Mongol Empire
USSR
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union, consisting of 15 Union Republics
veche
urban assembly
volost
township (peasant institution)
votchina
hereditary estate
zemliachestvo
association of workers from the same province
zemstvo
elected local government assembly
znamenny
traditional Russian liturgical chant
Index
A
Abkhazia 122
Agriculture 89, 100–1, 115–16, 119
Akhmatova, Anna 107
Akhmet, Khan 15
Aleksei, Tsar 30–3, 41
Alexander I 49–53, 65
Alexander II 59
reforms of 71–5
assassination of 82
Alexander Nevsky 8
Alexei Romanov 91
Anna, Empress 42–3
Antichrist 32, 41, 101
Arendt, Hannah 118
Armenia 122
Army, French (Grande Armée) 50–3
Army, Muscovite/Russian/Soviet 18–19
Service Decree (1556) 18
and Cossacks 35–6
standing army 37–8
status of officers 40, 42, 93
Guards 42, 47, 49
recruits 44, 51
and Napoleonic War 50–3
and Crimean War 57–9
Military Conscription Act 72
peasants in 74, 84
and Bloody Sunday 85
in First World War 90–1
soldiers in 1917 revolution 93–4
and Second World War 110, 112–13
and Georgian demonstrations 122
and Chechnia 127
Artel 82, 85
Astrakhan 19
Augustus, Roman Emperor 25
Austria 46, 57
Autocracy 53–4, 73
Azerbaijan 122
B
Baikal, Lake 6
Ballets Russes 80
Balkans 23, 56–8, 112
Balkars 111
Baltic Sea 5, 8, 14, 19, 38, 58
provinces 46, 66–8
republics 111, 122
Barclay de Tolly 51
Barimta 63
Bashkirs 35–6
Batu 6–7
Belorussia 9, 64–5, 125
language of 9
Benkendorf, Count 54
Berlin Wall 121
Black market 117–18
Black Sea 46, 56–9, 68
Blat 117–18
Bloody Sunday 85–6, 90
Blue Waters, Battle of 9
Bolsheviks 84, 92–5, 97
Borodino, Battle of 51
Bosphorus 46, 56
Boyars 14, 17, 26–7
Boyar Duma 14, 28
Brezhnev, Leonid 120
Britain 42, 56–8, 76
Bukhara, Khanate of 63
Byzantium 3, 5, 15–16, 23, 24
C
Cadet Corps 43, 45, 72
Catherine II 33, 36, 46–9
Catholic Church 9, 15, 27
Caucasus 46, 56–8, 68–70
Caves Monastery, Kiev 4
Censorship 73, 90
Central Asia 61–4
Central Committee (of CPSU) 97, 102–4, 115, 118
International Department of 120
Chaadaev, Petr 54
Chechnia 69, 127
Chechens 111
Cheka 97
Chernobyl 121
China 6–7, 17, 25, 74, 111
Chingis Khan 6
Circassian people 69
Civil society 74–6
Civil war 96, 103
Commonwealth of Independent States 125
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) 97–100, 112, 125, 126
20th congress 114
22nd congress 114–15 (see also Central Committee)
Congress of People’s Deputies 121, 123
Constantinople 46, 56
Patriarchate of 25–6, 31–2
Hagia Sophia 56
Constituent Assembly 91, 95–6
Constitution, not granted 73
Constructivists 103
Cossacks 18, 27, 29, 34, 62, 65, 69, 84
Crimea 18, 46
Crimean Tatars 111
Crimean War 56–9
Chuvash people 61
Culture 77–9, 103–4, 107, 118
D
Dagestan 69
Daniil, Great Prince 8
Danube river 46
Decembrists 53
Democratic Russia 123
Denmark 17
Diderot 45
Diplomacy 23, 44–6
Dmitry Donskoi 13
Dmitry, son of Ivan IV 21
Dnieper 2, 29
Dolgoruky family 42
Don river 13, 18
Dorpat University 67
Dostoevsky, Fedor 10, 78
Druzhina 2–3
Duma 88–91, 128
Dvorianstvo, see Nobility
E
Economic reform 122, 126
Education 43, 45, 73, 84, 90, 110, 115, 127
Emancipation Edict of 1861 71–2
Emergency Committee 124
Emperor, title of 37
place in political system 75 (see also individual Emperors and Empresses)
England 34, 37, 40–1
Estonia 67
Europe 44–6
European view of Russia 45
European Enlightenment 45, 53
intellectual imports from 53, 77
and Crimean War 56–9
F
Family policy 107
Fedor, Tsar 26
Feofan the Greek 10
Ferghana Valley 62–3
Ferrara-Florence, Council of 15
Filofei of Pskov 24
Finland 57, 67–8
Finland, Gulf of 38, 46
First World War 64
Fiskaly 42
Five Year Plans 100–1
France 45, 49–53, 55–8, 94
Freemasonry 53
Futurists 103
G
Galicia 9
Gapon, Father 85
Georgia 68–9, 122
Germany 45, 55, 67
and Second World War 111–13
reunification of 124
Germans 111
Germogen, Patriarch 27
Glasnost 121–2
‘Going to the People’ 82
Godunov, Boris 26
Gogol, Nikolai 77–8
Golden Horde 7–8, 13
successors of 15–17, 18–19
Golitsyn family 42
Gorbachev, Mikhail 120–3
Gorchakov 62
Gorky, Maxim 95
Gosplan 100, 108, 116
Great Horde 15
Greek Orthodox Church 31
Guerrillas 51
Gubernii 47–8
Gulag 102, 118, 121
H
Hanseatic League 5, 17
Hegelianism 53, 55
Helsinki Final Act 119
Holy Synod 33, 41
Housing 115–16, 127
I
Iarlyk 7, 8
Iaroslav, Great Prince of Kiev 3, 5
Iaroslavl 27
Industry 74, 100, 108
Ingush people 111
Isidor, Metropolitan 15
Islam 8, 46, 61
in Central Asia 61–4
in the Caucasus 68–70
Italy 31
Iuriev University 67
Ivan I (Kalita) 8–9
Ivan III 15, 18
Ivan IV 20–3
Ivan V 42
J
Japan 111
Jews 64, 66, 76–7, 119
Junker Schools 72
Jurisprudence, Imperial School of 54
K
Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party 88
Kalmyks 17, 35, 61–2, 111
Kandinsky, Vasily 80
Karamzin, Nikolai 53–4
Katkov, Mikhail 76
Kaufman, General 63
Kazakhs 35, 61–3, 101
Kazakhstan 101, 111
Kazan 19
KGB 114
Khiva, Khanate of 63
Khodorkovsky, Mikhail 128
Khrushchev, Nikita 114–15
Kiev 2–6, 29
Great Prince of 2–3
Metropolitan of 5–6, 8–10
Kipchaks 5
Kokand, Khanate of 62
Kolkhozy 100–1, 108
Kommunalki 108
Koreans 111
Korenizatsiia 109–111
Kormlenie 2, 3, 28
Kopelev, Lev 101
Kronstadt 38
Krugovaia poruka 20, 34–6, 44
Kulaks 100–1, 102
Kulikovo, Battle of 13
Kutuzov, General Mikhail 51
L
Land commandant 75
Latvia 67
Law Codes 4, 20, 47, 54–5
Law Courts 73, 75, 115
Law, rule of 54, 74
Lavra of the Holy Trinity 10
Legislative Commission 47
Lenin, Vladimir 84, 97, 102, 103, 125
Leningrad 116, 125
Likbez 110
Lithuania 9, 13, 14, 17, 21, 25, 46
Local government 47, 73, 74, 90
Lutheranism 67
M
Makarii, Metropolitan 25
Malevich, Kazimir 80
Mamai 13
Mandelstam, Osip 107
Mari people 61
Marxism 82–4, 97, 120–1
May Laws of 1882 66
Medvedev, Dmitry 128
Mensheviks 84, 94
Mestnichestvo (lineage hierarchy) 29
Mikhail, Grand Duke 91
Mikhail Romanov, Tsar 28
Military Chancery 18–19, 28
Minin, Kuzma 27
Ministries 50
Ministry of Interior 50, 75
Mir 2, 34, 38, 75
land tenure system 44
and emancipation of serfs 72
and narodniki 81
and 1905 revolution 87
and Stolypin 89
and 1917 revolution 92–3
and collectivisation 100–1, 110
Monasteries 10, 41
Mongols 1, 6–9, 13
Monomakh crown 5, 25
Mordvin people 61, 109
Moskovskie vedomosti 76
Moscow 8, 13, 21–2, 116
Metropolitanate of 10, 15, 25
Patriarchate of 10, 26–8, 31, 33, 37
the ‘Third Rome’ 24–5, 26, 32
the ‘Second Jerusalem’ 25, 32
abolition of Patriarchate 40–1
in Napoleonic War 51
in Second World War 112
Mughal Empire 17
Municipalities 48, 73
Muscovy, Grand Principality of 8, 13–16, 129 Chapter 2
Mussorgsky 79
N
Nagorny Karabakh 122
Napoleon 50–3
Narodnaia volia 82
Narodniki 81
National policy 108–111
Nationalism, Russian 76–7, 97, 112–13, 119–20, 123–4
NATO 113, 124
Navy 38
Black Sea Fleet 56–8
Nazi-Soviet Pact 111
Nesselrode 56–7
Netherlands 37, 39, 41
Neva river 8, 39
Newspapers 75, 84, 91
Nicholas I 54–9
Nicholas II 66, 88, 96, 125
Nikon, Patriarch 30–1
Nizhny Novgorod 27
NKVD 102–3
Nobility 40, 42–3, 49–50
Charter of 47
Polish 65
German 66–8
and emancipation of serfs 71–2
and zemstvos 73, 75
and State Council 90
Nogais 17, 35
Nomenklatura 98, 103–4, 121
Novgorod 4–6, 8, 14, 18
Novy mir 118
O
Obshchestvennost 74, 93
October Manifesto 88–90
October Revolution 94–5
Odessa 46, 66
Old Belief 32–3, 35, 41, 79
Oligarchs 126–8
Oprichnina 22–3
Orenburg 35
Orthodox Church 3, 8, 10–11, 15–16, 23–6, 27–8, 40–1
schism in 30–3
clergy 33
beards and male clothing 40
Uvarov formula 54
forced conversion to 61, 65
in the Baltic 67
and Russian national identity 77
and Lev Tolstoy 79
anti-religious campaign 101, 110
and Russian nationalism 119
and legacy of Stalin 123
Ottoman Empire/Turkey 15, 17, 46, 47, 56–9, 69–70, 74
P
Pale of Settlement, Jewish 66
Palestine 57
Palmerston 57
Pasternak, Boris 107
Paul, Emperor 49
Patron-client networks 23, 28, 98–100, 127–8
Peasants 33–6, 119
in rebellion 35–6, 84, 86–7
state peasants 47
and zemstvos 73
and the economy 74, 84 (see also serfdom)
in army 74, 84
in 1905 revolution 87
in 1917 revolution 92–3
and collectivisation 100
and depopulated villages 116
and legacy of Stalin 123
Peipus, Lake 8
Perestroika 121
Persian Empire 17, 68
Peter I 33, 37–42, 49, 54–5
Peter II 42
Peter III 35, 42, 47
Pietism 53
Poland 9, 17, 27, 29, 46, 57–8, 64–6, 73, 76, 90, 101, 110
Poles 111
Police chiefs 75
political police 75
Polovtsy 5
Poltava, Battle of 38
Pomestia 14–15, 17, 18–19, 35–6
Popular Fronts 122
Pozharsky, Dmitry 27
Primary Chronicle 1, 4
Professional strata 74, 88
Prokopovich, Feofan 41
Proletkult 103
Propiska 116
Provincial governors 74–5, 127–8
Provisional Government 91–5
Prussia 46
Pugachev rebellion 35–6
Pushkin, Alexander 53
Putin, Vladimir 127–8
R
Railways 74, 84
absence of 58
Trans-Siberian 74
Rasputin, Grigory 91
Reagan, Ronald 120
Red Army 96
Red Guards 92, 95
Riazan 6
Riurikovich dynasty 4–5, 8–9
Roman Empire 24–5
Romanticism 53
Rostov 6
RSFSR 120, 123–4
Rublev, Andrei 10–11
Russian Federation 125
Russian language 110
Russian literature 53, 77–8, 110
Russians 109–11, 123, 125–6, 130
Russkaia Pravda 4
Ruthenian (west Russian or Rusin) language 9
S
St Petersburg 38, 53–4, 68, 75, 77, 85, 125
Metropolitan of 85
Soviet of 87
St Sophia Cathedral, Kiev 3
St Sophia Cathedral, Novgorod 5
Sakharov, Andrei 119
Sarai 7
Second World War 112–13
Serfdom 20, 33–6, 38, 43, 48–50, 54, 59
abolition of 71–2
Sergy of Radonezh, St 10, 13
Sevastopol 58
Seven Years War 45
Siberia 34, 60
Khanate of 60
place of exile 65
Trans-Siberian Railway 74
deportations to 111
Shamil 69
Shevchenko, Taras 65
Skomorokhi 30
Slavophiles 53, 55, 71, 81
Sobornost 11, 55
Social Democratic Party 82–4, 85–7
Socialism 53
Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs) 82, 85–7, 94
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 118
Soviets 87
of St Petersburg/Petrograd 87, 92, 94
2nd All-Russian Congress of 94
Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars) 94
Stalin, Joseph 98–9, 102, 110, 114, 115, 121, 123
Stalingrad 112
Startsy (elders) 10
State Council 88
State Duma 88–91
Stolypin, Petr 89
Stravinsky, Igor 80
Sufi brotherhoods 69
Suzdal 1, 6
Sweden 8, 27, 40–2, 46
T
Table of Ranks 40
Tashkent 63
Tatars 17–19, 23, 36, 61
Taxation 23, 34, 126, 127
poll tax 38, 44, 49, 77–8
of Central Asian peoples 63
Teutonic Knights 8, 17
Time of Troubles 26–8, 30
Timur (Tamerlane) 13
Tolstoy, Lev 78–9
Totleben, General 58
Trepov, General 73
Trotsky, Lev 87, 96, 102–3
Tsar, title of 21–3, 28, 41
discrediting of 86, 96
powers of 88
Turkey, see Ottoman Empire
Turkestan 64
Tvardovsky, Alexander 118
Tver 9
U
Udmurt people 61
Uezdy 47–8
Ukraine 2, 64–5
language of 9, 64–5, 109, 125
Hetmanate of 29, 31, 65
church of 31, 64–5
and Gogol 77
holodomor 101
Ukrainians 111
Ulus 7, 13
Uniate (Greek Catholic) Church 64–5
Union of Russian People 66, 77
Urals 34, 36
Uvarov, Count 54
USA 43, 115
V
Valuev 73
Varangians 1, 2
Vasilii III 18
Veche 2, 14
Vikings, see Varangians
Village commune, see mir
Vladimir, Great Prince of Kiev 3, 4
Vladimir Monomakh 5, 25
his Exhortation 6
Vladimir, town of 6
Voevody 28
Volga river 7, 27, 112
region 61, 109
Volost 72, 75
Voltaire 45
Volynia 9
Votchiny 17
W
Warsaw 46
Warsaw Pact 113, 121
Welfare 115–16
Westerners 53, 64, 71, 76
Westphalia, Peace of 44
White Sea 46
Whites, in civil war 96
Women 40, 107–8
Workers 74, 82, 84–7
in 1917 91–2
Writers’ Union 104
Y
Yeltsin, Boris 123–4, 127
Z
Zasulich, Vera 73
Zealots of Piety 30
Zemliachestvo 85
Zemskie sobory 21, 27–8
Zemstvos 66, 73, 74, 75, 90
THE SOVIET UNION
A Very Short Introduction
Stephen Lovell
Almost twenty years after the Soviet Unions’ end, what are we to make of its existence? Was it a heroic experiment, an unmitigated disaster, or a viable if flawed response to the modern world? Taking a fresh approach to the study of the Soviet Union, this Very Short Introduction blends political history with an investigation into the society and culture at the time. Stephen Lovell examines aspects of patriotism, political violence, poverty, and ideology; and provides answers to some of the big questions about the Soviet experience.
www.oup.com/vsi
Expand your collection of
VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS
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190. Relativity
191. The History of Medicine
192. Citizenship
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194. Memory
195. Autism
196. Statistics
197. Scotland
198. Catholicism
199. The United Nations
200. Free Speech
201. The Apocryphal Gospels
202. Modern Japan
203. Lincoln
204. Superconductivity
205. Nothing
206. Biography
207. The Soviet Union
208. Writing and Script
209. Communism
210. Fashion
211. Forensic Science
212. Puritanism
213. The Reformation
214. Thomas Aquinas
215. Deserts
216. The Norman Conquest
217. Biblical Archaeology
218. The Reagan Revolution
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220. Islamic History
221. Privacy
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226. The Laws of Thermodynamics
227. Innovation
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229. The New Testament
230. French Literature
231. Film Music
232. Druids
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254. Planets
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256. Humanism
257. Folk Music
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266. The Scientific Revolution
267. Cancer
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269. Paganism
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271. Science Fiction
272. Herodotus
273. Conscience
274. American Immigration
275. Jesus
276. Viruses
277. Protestantism
278. Derrida
279. Madness
280. Developmental Biology
281. Dictionaries
282. Global Economic History
283. Multiculturalism
284. Environmental Economics
285. The Cell
286. Ancient Greece
287. Angels
288. Children’s Literature
289. The Periodic Table
290. Modern France
291. Reality
292. The Computer
293. The Animal Kingdom
294. Colonial Latin American Literature
295. Sleep
296. The Aztecs
297. The Cultural Revolution
298. Modern Latin American Literature
299. Magic
300. Film
301. The Conquistadors
302. Chinese Literature
303. Stem Cells
304. Italian Literature
305. The History of Mathematics
306. The U.S. Supreme Court
307. Plague
308. Russian History
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