The Soviet Century

GLOSSARY OF RUSSIAN TERMS

apparat: party administration. (We sometimes use apparaty for administrative bodies in general, but apparatchik always refers to an official of the party apparatus.)

belye: the ‘Whites’ – the predominantly monarchist camp that fought the ‘Reds’ (krasnye) during the Civil War.

derzhava: an old Russian term for the state. It derives from the verb derzat’, meaning to hold or keep, and implies a holding or someone’s property. It refers directly to the political essence of the Tsarist state: samoderzhavie (autocracy) and samoderzhets (autocrat). The term derzhavnost’, which is also found, refers to a conception of the state as a great power.

Esery: Socialist Revolutionaries (or SRs) – non-Marxist socialists who were very active in the soviets and the Provisional Government. They cooperated with the ‘Whites’ on and off. Their left wing briefly cooperated with the Bolsheviks, but broke with them over the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with the Germans, which they opposed.

generalnyi sekretar’ (shortened to gensek): General-Secretary of the CPSU, elected by the party congress. In addition, there existed Central Committee secretaries, whose status varied. Some were in charge of spheres of activity, but not members of the Politburo. Members of the latter (with the exception of the general-secretary) could not have secretarial functions. This was true of Gromyko, for example, who was in charge of the Foreign Affairs Ministry.

Gosplan: State Committee for Economic Planning.

Gossnab: State Committee for Material and Technical Supplies – a kind of super-ministry organizing supplies of the raw materials, machinery and finished products required by enterprises. The remainder of the exchanges between economic ministries and their enterprises were carried out by their own purchasing (snaby) and marketing (sbyty) agencies.

Gulag (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei): the General Camp Directorate, located in the NKVD. The official name for the camps was ITL (ispravitel’notrudovye lageria, corrective labour camps). Under Stalin, ITK (ispravitel’notrudovye kolonii, corrective labour colonies) were reserved for lesser offenders and juveniles. There were also spetsposeleniia (places of deportation) for those condemned to periods of exile: they were supervised by the NKVD, but not subject to the camp regime. Camp inmates – zakliuchennye – were referred to in shorthand as zeki (singular: zek).

ITK: See Gulag.

ITL: See Gulag.

ITR (inzhinerno-tekhnicheskie rabotniki): engineers and technicians, holding positions entailing supervision, higher in rank than manual labourers or people without qualification (rabochie).

Kadety: Cadets – Constitutional Democrats – the broadly liberal party in Tsarist and post-Tsarist Russia, who joined the ‘Whites’ during the Civil War and pursued their activity abroad thereafter.

khoziain: broadly used to refer to a manager-owner (e.g. of a farm) and anyone holding the senior position in a workplace hierarchy. In popular usage, it also refers to the evil spirit haunting the house.

kolkhoz: collective farm (kollektivnoe khoziaistvo: ‘collective enterprise’). Its members were known as kolkhozniki.

kollegia: here mostly a collegium composed of the top officials in any ministry.

Komsomol: Union of Communist Youth – the party’s youth organization.

kulak: pejorative nickname given to better-off, entrepreneurial peasants (kulak means fist). The kulaks were persecuted during Stalinist collectivization. Many were deported to remote areas (mainly in Siberia).

mensheviki: members of a Marxist Social-Democratic party, which played a leading role in the soviets in 1917 and the Provisional Government. They did not collaborate with the Whites, but were excluded from political life by the Bolsheviks. They continued with their political activity from abroad.

MVD: See NKVD.

nachal’nik: a boss. Nachal’stvo refers to the whole layer of such bosses. For senior party officials, the term rukovodiashchii rabotnik (literally ‘leading worker’) was used.

nepmen: beneficiaries of the NEP (New Economic Policy) introduced in 1921; neo-bourgeois.

NKVD: People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which became the Interior Ministry (MVD). In 1962, it was transformed into the MOOP (Ministerstvo Okhrany Obshchestvennogo Poriadka, or Ministry for Public Order), but lost its status as a ministry covering the whole USSR. Union status was restored to it in 1966 and it reverted to its old name (MVD) two years later. Under Stalin, this commissariat contained a special extra-judicial body responsible for dealing expeditiously with the mass of people accused of treason or political offences. At a local level, the same task was performed by a troika – a body of three officials comprising the local party secretary, prosecutor, and NKVD chief.

nomenklatura: the list of posts to be filled under Central Committee supervision.

Orgburo: organizational bureau of the Central Committee.

Politburo: leading body of the CPSU. Stalin replaced it by the Presidium of the Central Committee. It was restored after Khrushchev’s dismissal in 1964.

politrabotniki: party cadres.

praktik (plural: praktiki): people in technical or administrative posts who had no formal training for them, but learned their trade on the job.

profilaktika: prophylaxis, or the ‘preventive’ policy adopted by the KGB under Khrushchev and continued after him. It consisted in warning people suspected of engaging in forms of political opposition of the consequences if they persisted.

prokuratura: the Prosecutor’s Office (State Prosecutor). Prosecutor General refers to the central official at Union level.

sekretariat: office serving the Central Committee.

sluzhashchie: literally, ‘employees’. The term refers to officials at all levels, from blue-collar workers to the highest-level nachal’stvo.

snaby-sbyty: supply and marketing agencies in ministries and enterprises.

sovkhoz: state agricultural enterprise (sovetskoe khoziaistvo).

sovnarkhoz: council of the national economy (Soviet narodnogo khoziaistva). This was the name taken by several central or local agencies. But they are best known as the economic councils introduced by Khrushchev throughout the country to replace the economic ministries, which were temporarily disbanded.

Sovnarkom: Council of People’s Commissars (Soviet narodnykh kommissarov), later the Council of Ministers. The two terms are used interchangeably here.

STO: Soviet Truda i Oborony (Council of Labour and Defence), a government coordinating body in Stalin’s time.

tenevaia ekonomika: the shadow economy, or a variety of economic activities, from the wholly illegal and criminal to the semi-legal and legal (but performed in a private capacity).

tolkach: from the verb tolkat’ (to push). Refers to a semi-legal figure dispatched by an organization or enterprise to ‘push’ supply agencies into delivering the requisite goods.

Uchreditel’noe Sobranie (abbreviated to uchredilka): the Constituent Assembly that convened in Petrograd in January 1918 with an SR majority, and which was dispersed by the Bolsheviks.

uklady: designates social layers or strata.

upravlentsy: literally ‘those who perform leadership roles’.

zastoi: stagnation. The term is used to refer to the post–1970 period (often also characterized as zastoinye gody, or the years of stagnation).

zek: See Gulag.