RUSSIA

A History

Third Edition

Edited by Gregory L. Freeze

PREFACE

Russia, it is fair to say, does not automatically evoke feelings of empathy and goodwill in the West: the media, politicians, and even many scholars regard Russia with a mixture of condescension, antipathy, and fear. Not that Russia, or at least its rulers, has not done much to deserve the hostility; territorial expansion and brutal violation of human rights—by both the old and new regimes—provide ample fodder for those predisposed to characterize Russia as a threat to Western civilization. But the pervasive antipathy is often dismissive of the favourable dimensions of the Russian experience; a Russophobic tone too often becomes the default, reinforcing ill-informed stereotypes of omnipotent authoritarianism, backwardness, and alcoholism. These stereotypes have deep historic roots, dating back to the sixteenth-century travellers’ accounts, but only came to dominate popular images of Russia in the modern period, which were shaped by anti-Russian diatribes in the mass media of the nineteenth century and, far more profoundly, by the ideological battles of the twentieth century and the Cold War. Historical scholarship on Russia has done, until recently, too little to correct these politicized stereotypes and produce a more balanced, better informed picture. Scholarly studies of Russia, in fact, appeared rather belatedly, most of them after the Second World War, and long bore the taint and distortions of the Cold War.

This volume takes advantage of two major developments in the field—one conceptual, the other empirical. Conceptually, Russian historians have turned from a narrow focus on political history and given, increasingly, more attention to society, economy, and culture. The result is a more sophisticated appreciation for the importance for the other spheres, not merely as ‘reflecting what the state demands’, but in shaping the course of Russian history. This means ascribing more agency to historical actors and appreciating the role of culture, especially religion, in shaping popular culture and political behaviour. Empirically, recent scholarship takes advantage of the ‘archival revolution’ that followed the break-up of the USSR, which enabled unprecedented access to archival sources, especially for the twentieth century. The archival revolution of 1991 was neither sudden (it had antecedents in the previous decade) nor complete (much, in particular the police archives, offers at best nominal access). Nevertheless, serious scholarship on Russian history in the twentieth century has become possible; scholars are no longer forced to rely on party directives, Pravda, and the selective memory in ‘memoirs’. The result has been an extraordinary, ongoing profusion of scholarship, much of it concentrated on the Soviet period, and this new research has significantly enhanced and often recast our understanding of key issues, processes, and outcomes.

But much remains fundamental, with continuities running across the centuries, from earliest times to the present. One is the role of geography: although one must be wary of geographical determinism (the notion that geography predetermined development), it certainly has had an enormous impact on Russia’s historical development. On the one hand, it has blessed the inhabitants of Russia with extraordinary natural resources—rich farmland, especially the black-earth areas to the south, and vast mineral resources (from energy like coal, natural gas, and oil, to a vast range of ferrous and non-ferrous metals). On the other hand, not all was blessed. Most fundamental is Russia’s great northern location; the Russian heartland is in a belt lying between 50 and 60 degrees northern latitude (roughly equal to central Canada); St Petersburg has the same latitude as southern Alaska. All this has meant a harsh climate, not the temperate conditions enjoyed by the United States and Europe; it also means a shorter growing season—several months fewer, giving tillers of the soil far less flexibility in adapting to the vagaries of weather. Rainfall is also fickle; it tends to be heaviest in the north-east (where the soil is less fertile) and less predictable in the south-east (the heartland of black-soil agriculture along the Volga River). And the natural resources, while rich, are dispersed; not until the coming of the railway was it possible to bring together the country’s vast reserves of iron ore and coal in areas like the Don Basin. The first millennium of Russian history, up to the nineteenth century, thus unfolded under conditions of a marginal economy—one continually visited by disaster, constrained by backward agriculture, and separate from the emerging world economy.

The sheer vastness of the land mass also had a profound impact. It not only ensured access to land, but encouraged an incessant migration that made governance and control extremely difficult. The scale and continuity of such migration led V. O. Kliuchevskii, the doyen of pre-revolutionary historians, to make internal ‘colonization’ a key factor in Russian history, even explaining the shift the political centre from Kiev to the northeast. No doubt, population movement in this immense expanse made labour (not land) the scarce resource, and that significantly complicated the task of governing, taxing, and conscripting. These problems steadily intensified since the seventeenth century, as the state steadily expanded its borders to include new regions—first in the east (Siberia) in the seventeenth century, then in the south and west in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (incorporating border territories from Finland to the Caucasus to Central Asia). As the Empire grew, indeed exponentially (from 1,554 square kilometres in 1328 to 14.1 million in 1646, then to 21.8 million in 1914), even extraordinary demographic growth (far higher and longer than in Western Europe) could do little to increase population density. As a result, by 1913 the inhabitants per square kilometre in Russia were just 7.5 (compared to 182 in Great Britain, 124 in Germany, and 74 in France).

That population was not only dispersed but increasingly diverse: expansion brought an increasing proportion of non-Russians into the Empire. The non-Russians were hardly new; some small ethnic minorities were already incorporated in Muscovite Rus’ by the sixteenth century; already by 1719 ethnic Russians comprised only 70.7 per cent of the population (with Ukrainians representing another 12.9 per cent, along with various other groups). That was but a prelude to the rapid growth of non-Russian minorities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1914 Russian had decreased from a majority to the largest minority (44.6 per cent) of the Empire; other major groups included Ukrainians (18.1 per cent), Belorussians (4.0 per cent), Poles (6.5 per cent), Jews (4.2 per cent), Tatars (1.8 per cent), and a kaleidoscopic array of many others—Estonians, Chuvash, Kalmyks, Bashkirs, Finns, Latvians, Germans, Kazakhs, Armenians, Azeris, Uabeks, Lithuanians, Georgians, Moldavians, and numerous tiny ethnic groups. The 1917 Revolution initially reduced the quotient of non-Russians, but the re-acquisition of old territories (for example, in the South Caucasus and Central Asia) and absorption of new territories in 1939 and 1945 replenished the number of non-Russians. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, Russians comprised a bare majority (50.8 per cent) of the USSR. In the post-Soviet era ethnic Russians again constituted a dominant, but shrinking contingent; by the early twenty-first century they comprised only 79.8 per cent of the Russian Federation (2002 census). In short, the ‘Russian’ Empire was multinational, at times reducing ethnic Russians to the status of ‘largest minority’. Not without cause did the term rossiiskii—‘Russian’, a Latin derivative used to refer to statehood, not ethnicity—come to dominate discourse in the Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras: rossiiskii became a political, not ethnic, identity.

Not only ethnicity but another key aspect of culture—religion—has figured prominently in shaping Russia and its identity. On the one hand, ‘Russian’ seems coterminous with ‘Eastern Orthodoxy’—perhaps not in a real sense since the symbolic conversion of élites in 988, but certainly since the ‘Christianization’ of the popular classes in the late medieval and early modern periods. One key difference between Russia and the West has been the role of religion: in contrast to the dechristianization that beset Western Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Russian Orthodoxy retained a firm grasp on popular culture, with observance rates several times higher than in the West. Even Stalin’s anti-religious campaign in the 1930s proved futile; the Church recovered its presence, despite persecution, in the remaining years of the Soviet regime and experienced a major upsurge in post-Soviet Russia. But this multi-ethnic land is also multi-confessional, with an array of other Christian and non-Christian subjects. The non-Orthodox became increasingly numerous and assertive in the Imperial period, especially from the mid-nineteenth century, and survived the Stalinist and post-Stalinist anti-religious campaigns to comprise a significant element in post-Soviet Russia, with approximately one-sixth of the population professing Islam in addition to many other, if smaller, religious communities.

To cope with so complex, dispersed, and heterogeneous a country, for centuries the élites have engaged in a protracted, laborious process of state-building. That process commenced in the Kievan era, with the creation of the first institutions and the adoption of the first law code, but the results were mainly symbolic; governmental institutions remained incomplete and vulnerable, quickly dissolving under the impact of invasion from without and revolution from within. The main phase of building state institutions came after the sixteenth century, but took on a systematic, conscious form in the eighteenth century with the Petrine reforms. Even the wilful rulers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found it difficult to construct, finance, and staff the instruments of rule; compared to contemporary European states (and contrary to Gogolian stereotypes), Russia was woefully undergoverned, a state where the autocrat had unbounded authority but limited operational power. Only in the late nineteenth century did the regime construct a more substantial set of institutions and impose its will, and its law, on the everyday lives of the tsar’s subjects. That all ended in the 1917 revolution and the tumultuous years of civil war that followed; it took the Bolsheviks more than a decade to re-establish some semblance of rule, but only incompletely—as the chaos and irrationality of Stalinist rule in the 1930s would attest. The ensuing decades sought to build a more efficient state, but continuously encountered the same set of recurring problems—a dearth of human and material resources, the mind-boggling complexity of ruling so immense and so diverse a realm. The year 1991 brought not only the break-up of the USSR but the disintegration of central government; Russia became a ‘failing state’, without the rudimentary capacity to make and implement law. Only the accession of Putin in 2000 brought a renewed attempt to re-establish ‘law and order’—to adopt laws, implement them, and ensure what Putin grandiloquently called the ‘dictatorship of law’.

Power abroad has been as important as power within: great power status has long served to legitimize the authority of the privileged and the deprivation of the disprivileged. To be sure, regimes since Peter the Great have also invoked ‘common weal’ (obshchee blago), be it prosperity in the Imperial period or egalitarianism in the Soviet era. But power abroad has been a significant theme, first in ensuring security in the medieval period and safety on an open plain visited by threatening powers, whether the Mongols from the East or crusaders and Catholics from the West. International status became far more important in the modern era, especially after Peter and Catherine raised Russia to the status of a great power in the eighteenth century; the triumph over Napoleon in 1812 then elevated Russia from a great power to the great power, and for the next four decades no European state seemed to wield its resources, could field an army of its size, and could remain immune to the bacillus of revolution. The defeat in the Crimean War inaugurated nearly a century of diminished status, not to be reversed until the Second World War made the USSR one of the two superpowers. For another half-century, at great cost and with diminishing return, Moscow clung to that superpower status, but it all came to an inglorious end in 1991. The Yeltsin years saw a marginalized Russia, barely able to contain insurrection from within, let alone play a major role on the world stage. It was only with the Putin era, when economic growth allowed the rebuilding of the military and reassertion of geostrategic power, that Russia was able to return to the rank of a great power. Whatever fate holds for Russia, I hope that this volume will enable readers to look upon Russia with greater understanding, to dispense with the Cold War (and pre-Cold War) stereotypes that have so distorted our vision and marred our relations with Russia.

GREGORY L. FREEZE

Brandeis University

2009

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

John T. Alexander is professor of history at the University of Kansas. His major publications include Autocratic Politics in a National Crisis (1969), Emperor of the Cossacks (1973), Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia (1980), and Catherine the Great (1989). He is currently preparing a comparative biography of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, and a study of the four Russian empresses of the eighteenth century.

Gregory L. Freeze is the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of History at Brandeis University. His major publications include The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in Eighteenth-Century Russia (1977), The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform (1983), and From Supplication to Revolution: A Documentary Social History of Russia (1988). He was director of the Russian Archival Project and edited the volume on the pre-revolutionary holdings of the State Archive of the Russian Revolution (Fondy Gosudarstvennogo Arkhiva Rossiiskoi Federatsii po istorii Rossii XIX-nachala XX vv. [1994 ]). He is currently completing two works, one on ‘Religion and Society in Modern Russia, 1730–1917’, and the other on ‘Bolsheviks and Believers: Russian Orthodoxy in Soviet Russia, 1917–1941’.

William C. Fuller, Jr. is professor of strategy and power at the United States Naval War College. He is the author of Civil–Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914 (1985), Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 (1992), and The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia (2006).

William B. Husband is professor of history at Oregon State University. He is author of Revolution in the Factory: The Birth of the Soviet Textile Industry, 1917–1920 (1990) and ‘Godless Communists’: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (2000); he also edited The Human Tradition in Modern Russia (2000). He is currently working on a study, tentatively entitled ‘Nature in Modern Russia: A Social History’.

Nancy Shields Kollmann is professor of history at Stanford University. A specialist in Russian social and political history, she has written Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System (1987) and By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (1999).

Gary Marker is professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (1985) and Imperial Saint: The Cult of St. Catherine and the Dawn of Female Rule in Russia (2007). He has co-edited Reinterpreting Russian History (1994) and edited two other volumes, Ideas, Ideologies, and Intellectuals in Russian History (1993) and Catherine the Great and the Search for a Usable Past (1994).

Janet Martin is professor of history at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. She is the author of Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and its Significance for Medieval Russia (1986) and Medieval Russia, 980–1584 (1995).

Daniel T. Orlovsky is professor of history at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. He is the author of The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802–1881 and edited Beyond Soviet Studies (1995). He is currently compiling a documentary history of the Provisional Government of 1917, Russia’s Democratic Revolution, for the Yale series ‘Annals of Communism’.

David L. Ransel is the Robert F. Byrnes Professor of History and director of the Russian and East European Institute at Indiana University. He is the author of The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (1975), Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (1988), Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria (2000), and A Russian Merchant’s Tale: The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchenov (2009). He co-edited a seminal collection of essays, Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (1998) as well as Polish Encounters, Russian Identity (2005).

Lewis Siegelbaum is professor of history at Michigan State University. He has written extensively on Russian and Soviet labour history. Among his books are Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (1988); Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918–1929 (1992), Workers of the Donbass Speak: Survival and Identity in the New Ukraine, 1989–1992 (co-authored, 1995), Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents (2000), and Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (2008).

Hans-Joachim Torke was professor of Russian and East European history at the Free University of Berlin. His publications include Das russische Beamtentum in der ersten Hälfe des 19. Jahrhunderts (1967) and Das staatsbedingte Gesellschaft im Moskaner Reich (1974).

Reginald E. Zelnik was professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley. He was the author of Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia (1971), editor and translator of the memoirs of Semen Kanatchikov (A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia (1986)), and, more recently, published Law and Disorder on the Narova River: The Kreenholm Strike of 1872 (1995).

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

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND DATES

Transliteration follows a modified version of the Library of Congress system. For the sake of readability the ‘soft sign’ has been omitted for the better known terms (e.g. Streltsy not Strel’tsy). In the case of those names that have already achieved recognition in the West, that form will be followed here (e.g. Peter, not Petr; Trotsky, not Trotskii; Beria, not Beriia). The same applies to certain terms (e.g. soviet, not sovet; boyar, not boiar).

Dating until February 1918 follows the Julian (‘Old Style’) calendar, which lagged behind the modern Gregorian (‘New Style’) calendar: eleven days in the eighteenth century, twelve days in the nineteenth century, and thirteen days in the twentieth century. Hence the ‘October Revolution’ on 25 October, for example, actually occurred on 7 November in the modern calendar. Dates from 14 February 1918 (when the Soviet government adopted the Gregorian calendar) conform to those in the West, whether for international or domestic matters.

1. From Kiev to Muscovy

THE BEGINNINGS TO 1450

JANET MARTIN

In these early centuries East Slavic tribes and their neighbours coalesced into the Christian state of Kievan Rus. Its ruling Riurikid dynasty oversaw increasing political complexity, territorial expansion, economic growth, and frequent warfare, but was defeated by Mongol invaders. During the ensuing Mongol era a junior dynastic branch extended its authority and laid the foundations for a new state—Muscovy.

THE formative centuries of the Russian state are perhaps best divided into three main periods: the era of Kievan Rus from its roots in the ninth century to the Mongol invasion of 1237–40; a century of ‘Mongol dominance’ from 1240 to c.1340, during which Kievan traditions and structures lost their potency and the Rus principalities adapted to Mongol or Tatar suzerainty; and the period from c.1340 to the mid-fifteenth century when the foundations of the new state of Muscovy were laid.

Kievan Rus

The lands that made up Kievan Rus were located in the forest zone of Eastern Europe along a group of rivers, the Dnieper, the western Dvina, the Lovat-Volkhov, and the Volga, the headwaters of which all emanate from the Valdai hills. They were populated mainly by Slavic and Finnic tribes. The members of those tribes supported themselves, to some degree, by fishing, hunting, and gathering fruits, berries, nuts, mushrooms, honey, and other natural products in the forests around their villages. But the Slavs were primarily agriculturalists. In natural forest clearings or in those they created by the slash-and-burn method, they typically cultivated one or more cereal grains and also raised livestock as well as supplementary crops, such as peas, lentils, flax, or hemp.

Although each tribe followed its own leaders and worshipped its own set of gods, they interacted with one another, at times exchanging goods, at others fighting one another. The more adventurous among their members transported the most valuable goods their societies produced (for example, fur pelts and captive slaves) to the markets of distant neighbours—Bulgar on the mid-Volga, the Khazar capital of Itil at the base of the Volga, and the Byzantine outpost of Kherson on the coast of the Crimean peninsula. There they exchanged their goods for oriental finery and, most conspicuously, silver coin.

The transformation of these tribes into the state of Kievan Rus is shrouded in uncertainty. Legends and literature recorded much later, archaeological evidence, and the notations of foreign observers, however, suggest that by the early ninth century Scandinavian adventurers (known variously as ‘Varangians’ and ‘Rus’) had entered the Slav lands. Primarily attracted by the silver at the Volga market centres, they plundered Slav villages and carried their booty to the same markets that the Slavs themselves had visited. In the course of the ninth century the Varangians established more permanent ties to the native populace: each band of Varangians protected its own group of Slavs from competing Scandinavian pirates in exchange for regular tribute payments. Those stable relationships were mutually beneficial. The Slavs were relieved of the sporadic, violent raids, while the armed Rus bands received regular supplies of goods used in their exchanges for silver and oriental luxury products. Gradually, the Rus leaders acquired the character of princes, and the Slav populace became their subjects.

According to a legend in the Primary Chronicle (compiled during the eleventh and early twelfth centuries) one of the first Rus princes was called Riurik. The legend states that Riurik and his brothers were ‘invited’ by Slav tribes to rule their lands. Tribes that dwelled in the general vicinity of the Lovat and Volkhov rivers and the lands to their east had ejected previous Scandinavian protectors, but then became embroiled in warfare among themselves. Unable to reconcile their differences, the chronicler explained, they called upon Riurik in 862 to restore peace and rule over them.

Riurik, the legend continued, survived his two brothers to become sole ruler until his own death in 879 or 882. A regent, Oleg, then ruled on behalf of Riurik’s young son Igor. After Oleg’s death (912) Igor reigned until 945; a tribe called the Drevliane killed him after he attempted to collect more than its standard tribute payment. Igor’s wife, Olga, assumed the regency and took cunning revenge upon her husband’s murderers. Their son, Sviatoslav, claimed his father’s place in 962.

By that time the realm of the Riurikid clan had expanded substantially. According to the Chronicle, the tribes subject to the Riurikids had increased to include the Krivichi (in the region of the Valdai hills), the Poliane (around Kiev on the Dnieper river), and the Drevliane (south of the Pripiat river, a tributary of the Dnieper). The Riurikids, furthermore, had taken command of the Dnieper, a major commercial artery. From the vantage-point of Kiev they could control all traffic moving down towards the Black Sea, the Byzantine colony of Kherson, and towards the sea route to the Don river and the Khazar Empire. Oleg in 907 and Igor, less successfully in 944, conducted military campaigns against Constantinople, which resulted in treaties permitting the Rus to trade not only at Kherson, but at the rich markets of Constantinople itself, where they mingled with merchants and had access to goods from virtually every corner of the known world.

Sviatoslav (962–72) continued to expand his forefathers’ domain. He first subdued the Viatichi, who inhabited lands along the Oka and Volga rivers and had previously paid tribute to the Khazars, and in 965 he launched a campaign against the Khazars themselves. His venture led to the collapse of their empire and, subsequently, the destabilization of the lower Volga and the steppe, a region of grasslands south of the Slav territories. Although he did rescue Kiev from the Pechenegs (a nomadic Turkic population that occupied the steppe) in 968, Sviatoslav devoted most of his attention to establishing control over lands on the Danube river. Forced to abandon that project by the Byzantines, he was returning to Kiev when he was killed by the Pechenegs in 972.

Shortly after Sviatoslav’s death his son Iaropolk became prince of Kiev, but conflict erupted between him and his brothers. After one died in battle against him, another brother, Vladimir, fled from Novgorod, the city that he governed, to raise an army in Scandinavia. Upon his return in 980, he first engaged the prince of Polotsk, one of the last non-Riurikid rulers of the East Slav tribes. Victorious, Vladimir married the prince’s daughter and added the prince’s military retinue to his own army, with which he then defeated Iaropolk and seized the throne of Kiev. Vladimir also subjugated the Radimichi (east of the upper Dnieper river), and in 985 attacked the Volga Bulgars; the agreement he subsequently reached with the latter was the basis for peaceful relations that lasted for a century. Vladimir’s triumphs over competing rulers and neighbouring powers established him as the sole ruler of the East Slav tribes and gave his heirs a monopoly over the right to succeed him. His family, which traced its lineage to Riurik, the progenitor of the dynasty, ruled the lands of Rus until 1598.

Over the next generations Vladimir and his successors continued to extend their domain and to create an apparatus to govern it. The political structure they devised for Kievan Rus was based on the concept that its lands were the possession of the dynasty. Thus, as his father had done, Vladimir assigned a portion of his realm to each of his principal sons. Thereafter, the Riurikid princes continued to share the lands of Kievan Rus and the responsibilities for administering and defending them.

Princely administration gradually replaced tribal allegiance and authority. As early as the reign of Olga, officials representing the Kievan ruler began to replace tribal leaders. Vladimir extended this practice by assigning particular lands to his sons, to whom he also delegated responsibility for tax-collection, for protection of communication and trade routes, and for local defence and territorial expansion. Each prince also had his own military force, which was supported by tax revenues, commercial fees, and booty seized in battle. After Vladimir’s son Grand Prince Iaroslav (d. 1054) issued a law code known as the Russkaia pravda, the Rus princes also became enforcers of Riurikid law. The administration of justice, which upheld both Riurikid authority and social order, yielded revenues in the form of court fees and fines. The Russkaia pravda, as amended by Iaroslav’s sons and later provisions that continued to be added to it until the thirteenth century, remained in force long after the Kievan era; it was not formally replaced until the law code (Sudebnik) of 1497 was adopted.

Over the two centuries following Vladimir’s death (1015), Kievan Rus became an amalgam of principalities, whose number increased as the dynasty itself grew. The main principalities in the centre of the realm were Kiev, Chernigov, and Pereiaslavl. Galicia and Volhynia (south-west of Kiev) gained the status of separate principalities in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, respectively. During the twelfth century Smolensk (north of Kiev on the upper Dnieper) and Rostov-Suzdal (in the north-east) similarly emerged as powerful principalities. The north-western portion of the realm was dominated by Novgorod, whose strength rested on its lucrative commercial relations with Scandinavian and German merchants of the Baltic as well as on its own extensive empire that stretched to the Ural mountains by the end of the eleventh century. After 1097 each of these principalities (with the exceptions of Novgorod and Kiev) was identified with its own branch of the dynasty.

The Riurikid dynasty also converted Kievan Rus to Christianity and thereby provided it with a uniform religious and cultural framework. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam had long been known in these lands, and Olga had personally converted to Christianity. When Vladimir assumed the throne, however, he set idols of Norse, Slav, Finn, and Iranian gods, worshipped by the disparate elements of his society, on a hilltop in Kiev in an attempt to create a single pantheon for his people. But for reasons that remain unclear he soon abandoned this attempt in favour of Christianity. He thereupon gave up his numerous wives and consorts and married Anna, the sister of the Byzantine emperor Basil. The patriarch of Constantinople appointed a metropolitan to organize the see of Kiev and all Rus, and in 988 Byzantine clergy baptized the population of Kiev in the Dnieper river.

Christianity was not confined to Kiev. When Prince Vladimir dispatched his sons to their portions of his realm, each was accompanied by clergymen and charged with establishing and defending Christianity as well as the dynasty’s own authority. In some regions the introduction of the new religion and its clergy met overt resistance. When representatives of the new Church threw the idol of the god Perun into the Volkhov river in Novgorod, for example, their action provoked a popular uprising. Elsewhere resistance was passive; the populace simply continued to honour their traditional gods and practise their rituals in relatively private settings. Thus, although the lands of Rus formally entered the Christian world in 988, it was centuries before the population transferred their faith and loyalties to the Christian Church.

In the mean time, however, the Church, supported by the Riurikid princes, transformed the cultural face of Kievan Rus, especially in its urban centres. The change occurred first in Kiev, which was not only the seat of the senior Riurikid prince, but also the ecclesiastical centre of Kievan Rus. Vladimir removed the pagan idols he had previously erected and in their stead ordered the construction of Christian churches. The most notable was the Church of the Holy Virgin (also known as the Church of the Tithe), which was built in stone and flanked by two other palatial structures. The ensemble formed the centre-piece of ‘Vladimir’s city’, which was surrounded by new fortifications. A generation later Prince Iaroslav expanded this sector of the city by replacing the walls built by his father with new fortifications that encompassed the battlefield on which he defeated the Pechenegs in 1036. Inset into its southern wall was the Golden Gate of Kiev. Within the protected area he constructed a new complex of churches and palaces, the most imposing of which was the stone-built Cathedral of St Sophia—the church of the metropolitan and the symbolic centre of Christianity in Kievan Rus.

These projects brought Byzantine artists and artisans to Kiev. Following Byzantine architectural models, they designed and decorated the early Rus churches and taught their techniques and skills to local apprentices. The visiting artisans were most heavily concentrated in Kiev, which became the centre of craft production in Kievan Rus during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Native and visiting artisans—blacksmiths and stonecutters, carpenters and potters, leather workers, goldsmiths and silversmiths, glassmakers and bone-carvers—produced an array of products, including stone blocks and bricks for the new cathedrals, armour and weapons for the princes’ retinues, fine jewellery for members of the élite, and pottery and buttons for commoners. The adoption of Christianity also stimulated an expansion of Kievan commerce: marble and glazed tiles, icons and silver frames, and numerous other items used in the construction, decoration, and rites of the churches were added to the silks and satins, wines and oils, and other staple imports from Byzantium.

The expansion of Kiev’s commercial and craft activity was accompanied by an increase in its population. By the end of the twelfth century between 36,000 and 50,000 persons—princes, soldiers, clergy, merchants, artisans, unskilled workers, and slaves—resided in the city. Kiev, the political capital of Kievan Rus, had become the ecclesiastical, commercial, and artisanal centre of the realm as well.

Other towns underwent similar, but less dramatic development. Novgorod was also influenced by Christianity and Byzantine culture. Although it had initially been a centre of violent opposition to Christianity, its landscape too was quickly altered by the construction of new, wooden churches and, in the middle of the eleventh century, by its own stone Cathedral of St Sophia. Although Novgorod’s economy continued to be centred on its foreign trade, by the twelfth century some artisans were emulating Byzantine patterns in new crafts, such as enamelling and fresco-painting. Novgorod’s flourishing economy supported a population of 20,000 to 30,000 by the early thirteenth century. Similar developments occurred in Chernigov, where the Church of the Transfiguration of Our Saviour (1035) had heralded the arrival of Christianity. The construction of the stone Church of the Mother of God in Smolensk (1136–7) and of the Cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir (1158) proclaimed that wealth and Christianity were spreading across the Riurikid realm.

While architectural design and the decorative arts of mosaics, frescos, and icon-painting, all associated with church construction, were the most visible aspects of the Christian cultural transformation, new literary genres, including chronicles, saints’ lives, and sermons, also appeared in Kievan Rus. Although much of the ecclesiastical literature was translated from Greek originals, the clergy of Kievan Rus also began to make their own contributions. The outstanding products of indigenous literature from this era were the Primary Chronicle or ‘Tale of Bygone Years’ (compiled by monks of the Monastery of the Cave which was founded in the mid-eleventh century outside Kiev) and the ‘Sermon on Law and Grace’, composed (c.1050) by Metropolitan Hilarion (the first native Rus to be head of the Kievan Church). By agreement with the Riurikids the Church also assumed legal jurisdiction over a range of social practices and family affairs, including birth, marriage, and death. Ecclesiastical courts had jurisdiction over church personnel and responsibility for the enforcement of Christian standards and rituals in the larger community. Although the Church received added revenue from its courts, the clergy were only partially successful in their efforts to convince the populace to abandon their pagan customs. But to the degree that they were accepted, the spiritual guidance, the promise of salvation, and the social norms and cultural forms of the Church provided a common identity for the diverse tribes comprising Kievan Rus society.

As the Riurikid dynasty and Christian clergy displaced tribal, political, and spiritual leaders, their political and religious–cultural structures transformed the conglomeration of East Slav tribes into a dynamic and flourishing state. The political system balanced a diffusion of administrative and military power against principles of dynastic sovereignty and seniority; it elevated Kiev to a position of centrality within the realm; and it provided an effective means of defending and expanding the realm.

Within this system each prince supported his own military retinue, and had the authority and the means to hire supplementary forces; he was also responsible for conducting relations with his immediate neighbours. Thus the princes who ruled Novgorod in the eleventh century pushed the Rus border west to Lake Peipus, provided security for the trade routes to the Gulf of Finland, and also participated in the creation of Novgorod’s northern empire. Similarly, the princes of Suzdal in the twelfth century extended their domain to the north and east—at the expense of the Volga Bulgars. And, through the first half of the eleventh century, the grand princes of Kiev conducted relations with western neighbours (Poland and Hungary), Byzantium, and the Pechenegs on the steppe.

The dynastic system, however, also encouraged co-operation among the princes when they faced crises. Concerted action was prompted particularly by the Polovtsy, another population of Turkic nomads that moved into the steppe and displaced the Pechenegs in the second half of the eleventh century. Prince Vsevolod Iaroslavich of Pereiaslavl, who commanded the first line of defence for the southern frontier, was defeated by a Polovtsy attack in 1061. When they launched a new campaign in 1068, Prince Vsevolod and his brothers, Iziaslav of Kiev and Sviatoslav of Chernigov, combined their forces. Although the Polovtsy were victorious, they retreated after another encounter with Sviatoslav’s forces. With the exception of one frontier skirmish in 1071, they then refrained from attacking the Rus for the next twenty years.

When the Polovtsy did renew hostilities in the 1090s, the Riurikids were engaged in their own intradynastic conflicts. Their ineffective defence allowed the Polovtsy to reach the environs of Kiev and burn the Monastery of the Caves. But after the princes had resolved their differences at a conference in 1097, they once again mounted impressive coalitions that not only repulsed Polovtsy attacks, but pushed deep into the steppe and broke up the federation of Polovtsy tribes responsible for the aggression. These campaigns yielded comparatively peaceful relations that facilitated trade between Kievan Rus and the Polovtsy and kept the trade route linking Kiev and Constantinople secure for the next fifty years.

But the political organization of the Riurikids also contributed to repeated dynastic conflicts over succession to the throne of Kiev. Although the princes were dispersed, it was understood that the senior member of the eldest generation of the dynasty was heir to the Kievan throne. Succession thus followed a lateral pattern, with the throne of Kiev passing to a grand prince’s brothers and cousins, then to their sons.

The proliferation and complexity of the Riurikid family however, generated recurrent confusion over the definition of seniority, the standards for eligibility, and the lands subject to lateral succession. Disagreements over succession provoked intradynastic warfare; the outcome of the conflicts refined the ‘rules’. For example, a challenge to the seniority of Iaroslav’s sons was mounted by a grandson of Iaroslav’s elder brother (concurrently with the Polovtsy attack on the Rus lands in 1068–9); following its failure, eligibility for succession was restricted to those princes whose fathers had been grand prince of Kiev. In 1097, when wars over lands to be transferred along with the Kievan throne became so severe that they impaired a successful defence against the Polovtsy, a princely conference resolved that each principality in Kievan Rus would henceforth be the possession of a single branch of the dynasty. The only exceptions were Kiev itself, which in 1113 reverted to the status of a dynastic possession, and Novgorod, which had asserted the right to select its own prince by 1136.

But even as confrontations and conferences resolved disputes, the evolving rules of succession to the grand princely throne failed to anticipate new disputes stemming from the growth of the dynasty and state. As a result, throughout the twelfth century the dynasty was embroiled in numerous controversies, often triggered by attempts of members of younger generations to bypass their elders and to reduce the number of princely lines eligible for the succession. These conflicts escalated as dynastic branches formed rival coalitions, drew upon the enlarged populations and economic resources of their own principalities to enhance their military capabilities, and also fought for control over secondary regions, especially Novgorod, whose wealth and power could give a decisive advantage in the battles for the primary objective, Kiev.

The greatest confrontations involved the heirs of Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh (1113–25). By the time of his death, his sons had become the exclusive heirs to the grand princely throne; first Mstislav (1125–32), then Iaropolk (1132–9) ruled as grand prince. An attempt by Iaropolk to arrange for his nephew (Mstislav’s son) to be his successor provoked objections from his younger brother, Iurii Dolgorukii, the prince of Rostov-Suzdal. The struggle persisted until 1154, when Iurii finally ascended to the Kievan throne and restored the traditional order of succession.

An even more destructive conflict commenced after the death in 1167 of Grand Prince Rostislav Mstislavich (who had appropriately succeeded his uncle Iurii). When a member of the next generation (Mstislav Iziaslavich, the prince of Volhynia) attempted to seize the throne, a coalition of princes formed to oppose him. Led by Iurii’s son Andrei Bogoliubskii, it represented the senior generation of eligible princes, but also included the sons of the late Grand Prince Rostislav and the princes of Chernigov. The conflict culminated in 1169, when Andrei’s sons led a campaign that resulted in the flight of Mstislav Iziaslavich and the sack of Kiev. Andrei’s brother Gleb, as prince of Pereiaslavl (traditionally the main seat of the house of Monomakh), became grand prince of Kiev.

Prince Andrei personified the growing tensions between the increasingly powerful principalities of Kievan Rus and their centre Kiev. As prince of Vladimir-Suzdal, he concentrated on the development of Vladimir and challenged the primacy of Kiev by building the Church of the Dormition in 1158 and his own Golden Gate. He also constructed his own palace complex of Bogoliubovo outside Vladimir, conducted campaigns against the Volga Bulgars, celebrated a victory over them in 1165 by building the Church of the Intercession nearby on the Nerl river, and extended his influence over Novgorod. Andrei used his power and resources, however, to defend the principle of generational seniority in the succession to Kiev. But his victory was short-lived: when Gleb died in 1171, Andrei’s coalition failed in its attempt to secure the throne for another of his brothers. The renewed struggle ended instead with a prince from the Chernigov line on the Kievan throne; his reign and the accompanying dynastic peace lasted until 1194.

By the turn of the century, eligibility for the Kievan throne was confined to three main lines: princes of Volhynia, Smolensk, and Chernigov. When the prince of Volhynia (representing the junior generation) claimed the throne, the rules of eligibility and succession were temporarily waived due to the sheer power that he was able to muster. Although the primacy of the senior generation was restored upon his death in 1205, new rivalries emerged. By the mid-1230s, princes of Chernigov and Smolensk were locked in a prolonged conflict over Kiev. But in this case the combatants were of the same generation and each was the son of a grand prince; dynastic traditions were offering little guidance for determining which prince had seniority.

The dynastic contests of the early thirteenth century had serious consequences. During the hostilities Kiev was sacked twice more, in 1203 and 1235. The strife revealed the divergence between the southern and western principalities (which were deeply enmeshed in the conflicts) and those of the north and east (which were indifferent). Intradynastic conflict, compounded by the lack of cohesion among the components of Kievan Rus, undermined the system of shared power that had previously ensured the integrity of the realm. Kievan Rus was thus left without effective defences when it had to face a new, overwhelming threat from the steppe—the Mongols.

The Rus Principalities under Mongol Domination

In 1237–40, the Mongols extended their empire, founded by Genghis Khan, over the lands of Rus. Their first victim was the north-eastern principality of Riazan. After besieging and sacking its capital, the Mongols next destroyed the fortified outpost of Moscow and then advanced northward towards the capital of the main principality in the north-east, Vladimir. By the time they arrived there in early February 1238, its prince, Iurii Vsevolodich, had left the city to gather an army; meeting little resistance, the invaders laid siege, stormed, and sacked Vladimir as well as the neighbouring town of Suzdal. When Prince Iurii belatedly brought up his army to face the Mongols, it suffered a crushing defeat in a battle on the Sit river (4 March 1238). The Mongols then proceeded westward towards Novgorod, but broke off their campaign to summer in the steppe. The following winter they subdued the Polovtsy and the peoples of the North Caucasus.

The Mongols resumed their assault on the lands of Rus in 1239, when they conquered Pereiaslavl (March) and Chernigov (October). A year later, after conducting additional campaigns in the steppe and the Caucasus, they laid siege to Kiev. The date of its fall—December 1240—marks the collapse of Kievan Rus. The Mongols continued their advance westward, subduing Galicia and Volhynia and pressing into Poland and Hungary. They halted their advance only in September 1242, when their leader Batu was recalled to Mongolia for the selection of a new great khan.

The Mongol campaigns devastated the lands of Kievan Rus. Among its major towns, Riazan, Vladimir, and Suzdal in the north-east, and Pereiaslavl, Chernigov, and Kiev in the southwest had been severely damaged. The ruling élite was also decimated. At the Battle of Sit alone, Prince Iurii Vsevolodich, three sons, and two nephews had all been killed. The invaders also ravaged the villages and fields in their path; peasants who were not slain or enslaved fled to safer locales. Where the Mongols passed, farming, trade, and handicrafts ceased. The Mongol invasion shattered the economic vitality and cultural vibrancy characteristic of Kievan Rus.

The Mongol invasion, however, did not disturb all the norms and traditions of the Kievan Rus. The devastation was neither ubiquitous nor total. In the north-east some towns, such as Rostov, Tver, and Iaroslavl, had not been touched. Although initially strained by the influx of refugees, these communities ultimately benefited economically from the labour and skills brought by their new residents. Novgorod, which similarly escaped the Mongol onslaught, continued to engage in commercial exchanges with its Baltic trading partners and import vital goods, including silver, to the Rus lands.

Lines of authority also remained unbroken: the metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus was still the leader of the Orthodox community, and the Riurikid dynasty remained the ruling house of Rus. While the Mongols pursued their westward campaign, the Riurikid princes were left to restore order, organize recovery efforts, and attempt to avert further invasion and destruction. They followed dynastic custom: the senior surviving prince of the eldest generation assumed the highest position in the northeast. When Prince Iurii Vsevolodich of Vladimir was killed at the Battle of Sit, his brother Iaroslav succeeded to his throne; their younger brothers, sons, and nephews assumed the thrones of other principalities—Suzdal, Starodub, Rostov, and Novgorod—in accordance with the dynastic rules of succession. In the southwestern principalities the princes of Volhynia and Chernigov similarly resumed their former seats.

The distribution of lands and resources among the remaining princes facilitated effective defensive measures against other foes. As early as July 1240 Prince Alexander, son of Prince Iaroslav Vsevolodich, earned the epithet ‘Nevsky’ by defeating the Swedes in a battle on the Neva river, thereby repulsing their attempt to seize control over Novgorod’s routes to the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea. In another battle at Lake Peipus in 1242, he halted an eastward drive of the Teutonic Knights, who had been threatening the frontiers of Novgorod and Pskov.

When Batu returned to the steppe, he organized his realm as the Kipchak khanate or Desht-i-Kipchak, but commonly called the Golden Horde. It encompassed not only the Rus principalities but the steppe lands, extending from the Danube river in the west through the northern Caucasus and across the Volga river to the Sea of Aral. Its capital was Sarai, built on the lower Volga river. The Golden Horde constituted one component of the much larger Mongol Empire, which, at its peak, spanned an area stretching from Rus, Persia, and Iraq in the west to China and the Pacific Ocean in the east. The khans of the Golden Horde were subordinate to the great khan of the Mongol Empire (at least until the end of the thirteenth century), and their policies were shaped by imperial politics and their interactions with other components of the empire.

These factors influenced the nature of the khans’ relationships with the Riurikid princes. The khans assumed the right to confirm the Riurikid princes’ right to rule; to obtain a patent of authority (iarlyk), each prince had to present himself before the khan in symbolic recognition of his suzerainty. But to accomplish their broader goals, the khans also demanded from the Rus princes obedience and tribute—initially in the form of men, livestock, furs, and other valuable products, later in silver. The Church also recognized the khan as the supreme secular authority in Rus.

The practice of issuing patents reflected the new association of the Riurikid princes with the Mongol khans; that association gradually altered the political, especially dynastic, structures inherited from Kievan Rus. In 1243 Batu issued a patent to Iaroslav Vsevolodich to rule in Vladimir; similarly, c.1245, he confirmed Daniil Romanovich as prince of Galicia and Volhynia. Only Mikhail of Chernigov, the last of the Riurikids to go to the horde, met a different fate: when he refused to perform the rituals of obeisance, the khan had him executed (September 1246). The Riurikids confirmed in office, however, collaborated with the khan and his agents (baskaki) in the implementation of his orders and policies. And, when Riurikid princes competed for seniority, they appealed to the khan for arbitration and support. Thus, when Prince Alexander Nevsky’s brother Andrei seized the throne of Vladimir from their uncle in 1248, and later conspired with Daniil of Galicia and Volhynia against the Mongols, Alexander turned to the Mongols for support. By placing Alexander (the elder of the two brothers) on the throne, the khan was upholding dynastic custom. Alexander subsequently obediently served the Mongol khan: he not only helped to remove his brother, but forced Novgorod in 1259 to submit to a Mongol census that then became the basis for tribute collection.

When Alexander Nevsky died in 1263, the khan passed over the rebellious Andrei (who had become prince of Suzdal), and conferred the office of grand prince on their younger brothers—first Iaroslav Iaroslavich (d. 1271/2), then Vasilii (d. 1277). When the throne passed to the next generation, however, Alexander Nevsky’s sons competed to become grand prince of Vladimir. Like their father, they each appealed to the Mongols for help. But the horde itself was engaged in a power struggle that lasted through the 1280s and 1290s. As a result, Mongol support was divided: Alexander’s eldest son and legitimate heir received a patent and military assistance from Nogai, a powerful Mongol chieftain in the western portion of the horde’s lands, while his younger brother obtained the support of the khan at Sarai. The contest lasted until the elder brother died in 1294, and the younger legitimately succeeded to the throne. By 1299 the Mongols’ internal dissension ended with the military triumph of Khan Tokhta, the death of Nogai, and reassertion of the khan’s authority over the entire horde.

Even as Nevsky’s two sons waged their battles, two other princes—their younger brother Daniil and their cousin Mikhail Iaroslavich of Tver—emerged as influential political figures in north-eastern Rus. With Daniil’s death in 1303, followed by that of the grand prince in 1304, the throne of Vladimir passed with the approval of the khan to the next eligible member of their generation—Mikhail of Tver. But then a radically new situation arose. The princes of Moscow refused to recognize Mikhail. Under the leadership of Prince Iurii Daniilovich they went to war against him in 1305 and again in 1308. In 1313 Mikhail went to pay obeisance to the new Khan Uzbek. In his absence Iurii extended his own influence over Novgorod, whose commercial wealth was critical for satisfying the khan’s demand for tribute. When summoned to appear before the khan and account for his behaviour, Iurii deftly used his new resources to outbid and outbribe Mikhail. He not only avoided punishment, but won the hand of Uzbek’s sister in marriage as well as the patent for the throne of Vladimir. For his refusal to acquiesce Mikhail was recalled to the horde and in 1318 he was executed. Iurii held the throne of Vladimir until 1322.

According to dynastic rules, however, Prince Iurii of Moscow lacked legitimacy; his authority depended solely on the endorsement and military support of Uzbek. The khan’s favour was contingent upon Iurii’s ability to perform his functions as senior prince—to collect and deliver the tribute from Rus. But Iurii did not have the support of all the Riurikids; four times in as many years Uzbek had to dispatch military expeditions to assist his brother-in-law, and in 1322 he returned the throne of Vladimir to the legitimate heir, Alexander of Tver. Five years later an anti-Mongol uprising in Tver forced Alexander to flee. In the aftermath Iurii’s brother Ivan (known later as ‘Ivan Kalita’ or ‘Money-bags’) secured the Vladimir throne. With the exception of a few brief interludes later in the fourteenth century, the princes of Moscow retained the position of grand prince until their dynastic line expired at the end of the sixteenth century.

By the time the princes of Moscow had gained seniority in northern Rus, the south-western principalities were wholly detached. Like their northern neighbours, they too had recognized the suzerainty of the Golden Horde after the Mongol invasion. But by the middle of the fourteenth century, Galicia and Volhynia had been absorbed into the realms of Poland and Lithuania. During the following decades Lithuania added Kiev, Chernigov, and Smolensk to its domain as well. The lands of Rus lost their territorial integrity.

Simultaneously, the unity of the metropolitanate was also being threatened. Despite the broadening political gulf between the northern and south-western principalities, they had all continued to form a single ecclesiastical community. After Metropolitan Maxim moved from Kiev to the north-east in 1299, however, the unity of the see was repeatedly challenged. First, the prince of Galicia secured the establishment of a short-lived metropolitanate (c.1303–8); later, the rulers of Poland and Lithuania urged the creation of separate metropolitanates for the Orthodox inhabitants of the lands they had incorporated. Church patriarchs established a series of sees (c.1315–1340s), but under pressure from the metropolitans in north-eastern Rus, disbanded each of them.

Thus, a century after the Mongols destroyed Kiev, the institutions that had given cohesion both to Kievan Rus and to the post-invasion principalities were crumbling. The state had fragmented, and the unity of the Church was in jeopardy. Furthermore, the dynasty’s complex rules of seniority and succession had been supplanted by the authority of the khans, who had begun to confer the throne of Vladimir not on the dynasty’s legitimate heirs—the senior, eligible princes—but on the princes most likely to fulfil their demands: the Daniilovichi of Moscow.

The Foundations of Muscovy

Daniilovich rule was not automatically accepted by the rest of the dynasty. Although the legitimate heir, Alexander of Tver, had been soundly defeated, opponents of Daniilovich dominance surfaced repeatedly through the fourteenth century. Their pressure compelled the Muscovite princes to adopt policies aimed at retaining Mongol favour, neutralizing the dynastic opposition, and developing domestic sources of legitimacy. As a result of such efforts to stay in power, they also strengthened their own territorial, economic, and military base. The Daniilovichi thus transformed the distribution of power in the lands of northern Rus and laid the foundations for a new state—Muscovy.

The adversaries of the Daniilovichi were also Riurikids. Their domains, known as apanages (udely), had been carved out of older, larger principalities in accordance with a custom, dating from the Kievan Rus era, of subdividing the lands ruled by a dynastic branch to accommodate all its members and also to share the responsibilities for administration and defence. The practice was particularly pronounced among the Rostov clan, whose lands were carved into numerous apanages, including Iaroslavl, Beloozero, and Ustiug. The apanage princes of Rostov joined the various coalitions against the Daniilovichi and in support of the legitimate princes from the house of Tver.

Their protests, however, made virtually no impression on the Mongol khans, who maintained the Moscow princes—Ivan Daniilovich, then his sons Semen (ruled 1341–53) and Ivan II (ruled 1353–9)—in power. Only once did an anti-Daniilovich coalition achieve success: when Ivan II died and the Golden Horde itself entered a period of internal conflict, a coalition secured the confirmation of the prince of Suzdal as grand prince. Within three years, however, the Moscow line in the person of Dmitrii Ivanovich (later known as Dmitrii Donskoi) had recovered the Vladimir throne.

Although the Mongol khans paid little attention to them, the Daniilovichi themselves did respond to their dynastic opponents. One strategy they adopted to neutralize them was to form marital alliances. Ivan I arranged marriages for his daughters with the sons of two of his most vocal opponents, the princes of Beloozero and Iaroslavl; his niece became the wife of Prince Konstantin Mikhailovich of Tver, a champion of the anti-Daniilovich group. Ivan’s son Semen married the daughter of the late Alexander of Tver despite the Church’s disapproval of this, his third marriage. In 1366 Prince Dmitrii followed the pattern by marrying the daughter of his former rival, the prince of Suzdal. These marriages, all concluded with dynastic branches whose members had been reluctant to recognize the predominance of Moscow, created bonds of kinship and alliance. Although they could not transform the Daniilovichi into the senior dynastic line, they did have the effect of elevating the Daniilovichi’s informal status with their in-laws and, thereby, helped to mute, if not completely neutralize, their opposition.

Another strategy adopted by the Daniilovichi was to subordinate princes from other branches of the dynasty and simultaneously to expand their own territorial domain. The Moscow princes ruled two sets of territories: lands that belonged to their patrimony (otchina) of Moscow and lands that were attached to the grand principality of Vladimir. Even before they became grand princes of Vladimir the princes of Moscow had extended their realm to include Serpukhov, Kolomna, and Mozhaisk; through the fourteenth century they continued to acquire new territories and add them to their patrimonial domain. Ivan Kalita is credited with aggressively expanding his family’s domain and acquiring the principalities of Beloozero and Uglich (formerly Rostov apanages) and Galich. His grandson, Dmitrii Donskoi, consolidated control over Galich, absorbed the principality of Starodub, and also brought the independent principality of Rostov under his influence.

Territorial expansion provided a variety of assets and advantages. One was control over rivers, which had strategic as well as commercial value. By acquiring Serpukhov, Kolomna, and Mozhaisk, Muscovy encompassed the entire length of the Moscow river as well as the segment of the Oka between Kolomna and Serpukhov that formed the southern boundary of the principality. Dmitrii Donskoi later sponsored the construction of walled monasteries at these towns and, thereby, fortified the border. The Moscow princes also controlled a significant section of the Volga river from Kostroma (part of the grand principality of Vladimir) to Nizhnii Novgorod. The principality of Uglich, located between two of the remaining independent principalities, Iaroslavl and Tver, contained another segment of the Volga. Remote from the main body of Moscow’s holdings were Beloozero and the independent but subordinate principality of Ustiug, which commanded the main trade routes that spanned the lands of the north.

Territorial expansion also brought a larger populace under the direct rule of the Muscovite princes. Moscow’s economic and tax base was, correspondingly, broadened. Retainers of subordinated princes, furthermore, were motivated to transfer their allegiance to Moscow, whose own military force and administrative staffs were thereby enlarged and strengthened. The Muscovite princes were able to collect transit and customs fees from the traffic and commercial transactions conducted along their roads and rivers and in their towns. Their control over segments of the Volga also gave them a greater role in the transport of goods down that river to Bulgar and Sarai, hence in the Mongols’ extensive trade network.

Even though it was growing, Moscow’s territory was divided into relatively few apanages. During the reign of Dmitrii Donskoi (1362–89), only one apanage principality (Serpukhov) was carved out of Muscovy’s lands for his cousin. After Dmitrii’s death in 1389, his eldest son (Vasilii I) inherited the throne; each of Dmitrii’s other four sons then received an apanage principality. But due to their failure to produce sons of their own, most of their lands eventually reverted to the grand prince. The only one to survive was the apanage principality of Mozhaisk (later divided into two principalities, Mozhaisk and Vereia). At least until the death of Vasilii I (1425), the few apanage princes of Moscow as well as their senior advisers and military commanders (who held the rank of boyar) were loyal supporters of the grand prince. This internal territorial and political cohesion provided a central, unified core for the expanding state of Muscovy.

The wealth Moscow derived from its increased population, extended lands, and commerce was reflected in the introduction of monumental stone buildings into the wooden town. After the Mongol invasion the princes in north-eastern Rus could not afford to construct major buildings. Tver was the first to accumulate sufficient wealth (by the end of the thirteenth century) to resume the construction of stone cathedrals. Moscow followed: in 1326 its Prince Ivan (the future Grand Prince Ivan Kalita) and Metropolitan Peter co-sponsored the construction of the Church of the Dormition. Soon afterwards four more stone churches were built inside Moscow’s kremlin. Prince Dmitrii rebuilt Moscow’s kremlin fortifications in stone in 1367, fortified some towns and outposts on Muscovy’s frontier, and also ordered the restoration of the Dormition Cathedral in Vladimir. In conjunction with the renewed construction activity, the arts of fresco- and icon-painting also revived. In the 1340s the walls of the kremlin churches were painted with frescos by Byzantine and Russian artists. Those of the Dormition Cathedral in Vladimir were painted with frescos at the commission of Vasilii I by Andrei Rublev, one of the greatest artists of the era.

Half a century after the Mongols set them on the throne of Vladimir, the princes of Moscow had transformed their realm. In addition to its visual signs, their growing power was manifested in Prince Dmitrii’s military victories first over a challenger from Tver, and then over a general from the Golden Horde itself—Mamai. These confrontations occurred while the discord within the Golden Horde, begun concurrently with his own ascension to the throne, intensified. Dmitrii, indeed, had obtained his patent from Mamai, to whom he had pledged to deliver the tribute gathered from his lands. Yet Dmitrii found it increasingly difficult to make those tribute payments for at least two reasons. As the conflicts in the horde disrupted the Volga markets in the 1360s and 1370s, Moscow’s revenue from commercial customs and transit fees collected from its Volga trade correspondingly declined. Second, Novgorod, whose commercial activities were responsible for importing silver into the Russian lands, was quarrelling with its Baltic Sea trading partners, who restricted the flow of silver to Novgorod and even temporarily suspended trade with Novgorod.

Mamai gambled on the supposition that he might receive larger tribute payments from another prince, and transferred the patent for the Vladimir throne twice, in 1370 and 1375, to the prince of Tver—Dmitrii’s chief rival. These actions provoked open warfare between Moscow and Tver in 1371–2 and 1375. Despite the fact that Tver received support from Mamai as well as Lithuania, both outbursts of hostility ended in victory for Moscow. In 1375 the prince of Tver agreed to recognize Dmitrii as his ‘elder brother’ and as the legitimate grand prince of Vladimir; Mamai also returned the patent for the throne to Dmitrii.

Nevertheless, within a few years Dmitrii and his patron Mamai were at war. Because of the mounting discord in the horde and the seizure of Sarai by Tokhtamysh (a Mongol khan from the eastern half of the horde’s territory), Mamai’s own situation had become desperate. To defeat Tokhtamysh he had to obtain supplementary troops, his own forces having been weakened by a bout of bubonic plague. For that he required funds. Mamai, therefore, demanded that Dmitrii pay the tribute in full. But Dmitrii, whose revenues had been reduced, hesitated. Mamai raised an army and, with promises of assistance from Lithuania, advanced upon his former protégé. Dmitrii gathered an army drawn from the numerous principalities over which he and his forefathers had established ascendancy. On 8 September 1380 the two armies fought in the battle of Kulikovo; it was here Dmitrii earned the epithet ‘Donskoi’. Dmitrii’s armies were victorious over Mamai, whose Lithuanian allies failed to arrive. Mamai suffered another defeat in an encounter with Tokhtamysh the following year. Having restored order in the horde, Tokhtamysh launched his own campaign against Dmitrii and the other Russian princes in 1382. He laid siege to Moscow, which had been abandoned by Dmitrii, and restored Mongol authority over the Russian principalities. He reasserted the horde’s demand for tribute and reconfirmed the Rus princes on their thrones.

The battle of Kulikovo did not terminate the Muscovite princes’ subordination to the Mongol khans, but it did reduce their dependence upon them for legitimacy. The battle demonstrated Moscow’s pre-eminence among the principalities of north-eastern Rus; no other branch of Riurikids ever again challenged the seniority of the Muscovite line and its claim to the position of grand prince of Vladimir. Although the princes of Moscow formally recognized the suzerainty of the khan of the Golden Horde, their practice, begun by Dmitrii Donskoi, of naming their own heirs implicitly minimized the significance of the khan’s right to bestow the patent to rule.

The Daniilovich success, however, was still incomplete. Although Dmitrii Donskoi had been able to mobilize a large number of northeastern principalities to defeat Mamai in 1380, some important lands remained beyond the range of his authority. One was Nizhnii Novgorod, whose prince refused to place his retainers under Muscovite command at the battle of Kulikovo. Another was Tver; despite its prince’s recent recognition of Dmitrii’s seniority, its forces did not join Dmitrii’s army. A third land, Novgorod, had similarly declined to participate.

Dmitrii’s successors set about to remedy that situation. Vasilii I gained control over Nizhnii Novgorod and made a concerted, but less successful, effort to take control of parts of Novgorod’s northern empire. Even before his reign, a monk, known as Stefan of Perm, had created a new bishopric for the far north-eastern portion of Novgorod’s realm; the newly converted inhabitants (the Zyriane or Komi tribes) transferred their tribute payments from Novgorod to Moscow. Vasilii I attempted to gain control of another region subject to Novgorod—the Dvina land, rich in fish, fur, and other natural products that constituted major sources of Novgorod’s wealth. Although his repeated efforts to annex the Dvina land failed, Vasilii did acquire Ustiug, which controlled access to both the Dvina and Vychegda rivers. Continuing pressure on its northern empire did, however, gradually undermine Novgorod’s control over its economic resources; Vasilii II then defeated the weakened Novgorod militarily in 1456 and his successor Ivan III finally absorbed it into Muscovy in 1478. Ivan III continued the process by also annexing Tver in 1485.

The efforts of the Muscovite princes to consolidate their position within their growing realm benefited from the Church, which, already in the fourteenth century, was advocating unity and centralization. The Church’s indirect endorsement of the Daniilovichi of Moscow provided a measure of domestically based legitimacy, which initially supplemented, but ultimately replaced Mongol favour as a justification for holding the throne of Vladimir.

Church support for the Daniilovichi was neither automatic nor explicit. Indeed, in the early fourteenth century Metropolitan Maxim (d. 1305) used his influence to discourage Iurii of Moscow from challenging the succession of Mikhail of Tver to the Vladimir throne. Although Metropolitan Peter, who succeeded Maxim, had sharp differences with Grand Prince Mikhail, he too did not unambiguously support Moscow. But he did co-sponsor the Church of the Dormition in Moscow, and when he died a few months after its construction had begun, he was buried in its walls; a shrine dedicated to him subsequently arose on the site. The association of Peter (who was canonized in 1339) with Moscow contributed to the city’s growing reputation as an ecclesiastical centre.

For Metropolitan Peter and his successor Theognostus, however, the political fortunes of various princes were secondary to ecclesiastical concerns, the most pressing of which was maintaining the integrity of the metropolitanate of Kiev and all Rus. For the metropolitans of the second half of the fourteenth century, Alexis and Cyprian, that issue became a preoccupation. Just as Alexis became metropolitan in 1354, the Lithuanian prince Olgerd succeeded in establishing a metropolitanate over the Orthodox bishoprics in his realm, including Kiev and western Chernigov. The Lithuanian metropolitan was related to Olgerd’s wife, a princess from the house of Tver. Alexis responded by formally transferring his seat from Kiev to Vladimir (a move made, de facto, by Maxim). Subsequent efforts to reunite his see took him to Constantinople, Sarai, and Kiev (where he was held in captivity from 1358 to 1360). Only in 1361, when the metropolitan of the Lithuanian see died, did he succeed in bringing the south-western Rus bishoprics back under his jurisdiction.

In 1375 the metropolitanate of Kiev and Lithuania was revived; its metropolitan, Cyprian, was expected to succeed Alexis and reunite the two sees. But when Alexis died in 1378 and Cyprian arrived in Moscow, he was humiliated and expelled by Prince Dmitrii. The prince gave his support to Pimen, who became metropolitan in 1380. Cyprian and Pimen competed for dominance within the Rus Church until the latter, as well as Prince Dmitrii, died in 1389. Cyprian was then able to return to Moscow; he led the Church until his own death in 1407.

Cyprian, supported by monastic spiritual leaders of northeastern Rus, was an exponent of ecclesiastical unity. That theme was expressed in icons and frescos sponsored by the Church. It was also articulated in literature, which, like architecture and painting, was recovering from the decline it had suffered in the aftermath of the Mongol invasion. The Laurentian Chronicle, copied by the monk Lavrentii in 1377, for example, incorporated the Primary Chronicle and a second component covering events to the year 1305. Its broadly inclusive subject-matter and character, which drew upon sources from northern as well as southern Rus, affirmed the continuity and unity of the Orthodox community in all the lands of Rus.

Once Cyprian had become the unchallenged head of the Church, he placed even more emphasis on the themes of unity and continuity. His Life of St Peter (the former metropolitan) highlighted Peter’s relationship with Prince Ivan Kalita, whom he praised specifically as the initiator of the process of ‘gathering the Rus lands’. The Trinity Chronicle, compiled at his court, similarly praised Ivan Kalita and his grandson Dmitrii Donskoi. Its underlying premiss was that all the principalities of Rus formed a single ecclesiastical community and that Moscow had replaced Kiev as its centre. Although these themes were meant to relate to the Church, they implicitly promoted the concept of a politically unified secular state as well; such a state was envisioned as a necessary aid in the creation and protection of the ecclesiastical unity of the see.

By the mid-fifteenth century Church texts characterized Dmitrii Donskoi as the hero of Kulikovo and stressed his role as the prince who had gathered an army drawn from many of the lands of Rus, to oppose the Tatars. They also likened his grandson Vasilii II to Vladimir; the latter had introduced Christianity to Rus and had subsequently been canonized as a saint, while the former was depicted as the protector of the Orthodox faith for rejecting a union with the Roman Church (1439) and supporting the Russian prelates’ decision (1448) to name their own metropolitan without confirmation by the patriarch of Constantinople.

The deep concern of the Church to preserve the territorial and, after 1439, the spiritual integrity of the metropolitanate enhanced the prestige of the Muscovite princes, whose political policies were compatible with the causes of the Church. The Church, while pursuing and justifying its own ecclesiastical goals, furnished the Daniilovichi with ideological concepts that legitimized their rule.

By 1425 Muscovy had strengthened both its material and ideological foundations. The new domestic sources of legitimacy, however, remained secondary as long as the Golden Horde continued to be powerful and to support the Daniilovichi. Despite a devastating attack by Timur (Tamerlane) on Sarai and its other market centres in 1395, the horde was able to maintain its dominance over the Rus princes, to collect tribute from them, and even to launch a major campaign and besiege Moscow (1408). Lithuania similarly exerted a strong influence over the lands of Rus. It incorporated Smolensk (1395) and became increasingly involved in Novgorod, Tver, and Riazan. Vasilii I, who had married the daughter of Vitovt, the grand prince of Lithuania, not only met Lithuania’s expansion with relative passivity, but named Vitovt one of the guardians of his son, Vasilii II.

Shortly after Vasilii I died in 1425, however, the balance of power in the region shifted. Muscovy’s neighbours, Lithuania and the Golden Horde, had imposed internal order and external limits on the Rus lands. But in 1430 the Lithuanian grand prince died, and his realm fell into political disarray. At virtually the same time the Golden Horde, which had never fully recovered from the economic disruptions caused by Timur, began to disintegrate. During the next two decades the Golden Horde split into four divisions: the khanate of Kazan on the mid-Volga, the Crimean khanate, the khanate of Astrakhan, and the remnant core—the Great Horde.

Once Muscovy’s neighbours had weakened, the Daniilovichi reverted to intradynastic warfare. At issue, as during the Kievan Rus era, was a principle of succession. In the second half of the fourteenth century the princes of Moscow (in the absence of living brothers and eligible cousins) had regularly named their eldest sons as their heirs. Although this practice established a vertical pattern of succession, it was adopted as a matter of necessity, not as a deliberate plan to replace the traditional lateral succession system. When Vasilii I died, however, he left not only his son Vasilii II, but four brothers. As long as his son’s guardians (who included Vitovt of Lithuania and Metropolitan Photius) were alive, no one quarrelled with his succession.

But in 1430–1, within a year of one another, Vitovt and Photius both died. Shortly afterwards, the eldest of Vasilii II’s uncles challenged his nephew for the throne of Vladimir. He and Vasilii each appealed to the Mongol Khan Ulu-Muhammed. Although Vasilii was awarded the patent, his uncle none the less contested the decision and seized Moscow in 1433. When he died in 1434, his sons continued the war even though, according to the principle of seniority their father had invoked, they had no claim to the throne. The prolonged war was both brutal and decisive. By the time it was concluded, Vasilii had blinded one cousin and had in turn been blinded by another; he had been captured and released by the Tatars of Ulu-Muhammed’s horde (1445) as it migrated to the mid-Volga where it subsequently formed the khanate of Kazan; he had welcomed into his service two of the khan’s sons who assisted him against his cousins; he had established Moscow’s control over the vast majority of the northern Rus lands and increased its authority over Novgorod; and he had subdued his relatives—apanage princes in Muscovy—and restricted succession to his own direct heirs.

The triumph of Vasilii II over his uncle and cousins enabled him and his heirs to continue, virtually without restraint, the process of consolidating Muscovite authority over the northern Rus lands and forming a centralized, unified state to govern them. The principle of vertical succession, confirmed by the war, limited the division of lands to the formation of apanage principalities for the grand prince’s immediate relatives. It correspondingly restricted the proliferation of large, competitive armies under the control of autonomous princes. In addition to subordinating most of the northern principalities to Moscow, the altered succession system served to unify and consolidate the Russian lands around Moscow. By the mid-fifteenth century the princes of Moscow had fashioned a new political structure, centred around their own enlarged hereditary domain and their dynastic line, within which eligibility for the post of grand prince had been narrowly defined. Built upon territorial, economic, military, and ideological foundations that displaced both the traditional heritage of Kievan Rus and Tatar authority, the new state of Muscovy was thus poised to exploit the disintegration of Golden Horde and the reduction of Lithuanian expansion and to become a mighty Eastern European power.

2. Muscovite Russia 1450–1598

NANCY SHIELDS KOLLMANN

Sixteenth-century Muscovy was a diverse ensemble of regions, ethnic groups, cultures, historical traditions, and geographic differences. To rule this expanding empire, Moscow’s sovereigns devised strategies of governance that were flexible, integrating, and minimalist; they used coercion rarely, but ruthlessly. The result was a loosely centralized political system rich in ambition, poor in resources, and resilient in the face of crisis.

RUSSIA’S sixteenth century, like that of the Mediterranean in Fernand Braudel’s eyes, was a ‘long sixteenth century’. The hundred and fifty years from 1450 to the death of Tsar Fedor Ivanovich in 1598 was a cohesive era shaped by the tension between the interventionist policies of a state desperate to control its people and the nagging realities of geography, limited resources, and cultural diversity.

It was long-term geographical, institutional, and cultural realities that shaped Muscovy’s drive to mobilize its human and natural resources. So we will try to see the realm as Moscow’s rulers saw it, again evoking Braudel with a focus on long-term sources of change (geography, climate, settlement patterns, trade routes, and other aspects of Braudel’s ‘la longue durée’) and middle-level ones (social and religious structures, ideational systems, etc.) in preference to individuals, wars, and events. But we need to start briefly with Braudel’s ‘histoire événementielle’ to define the constantly expanding territory with which we will be concerned.

‘Russia’ constituted the realm of the grand princes (after 1547, the tsars) of Moscow, the Daniilovich line of the Riurikid dynasty that traced its descent to the rulers of Kievan Rus. Moscow amassed regional power starting in the fourteenth century; by 1450, after a decisive dynastic war, it embarked on expansion that continued unabated into the nineteenth century. Although much has been made of Moscow’s relentless expansion, it was hardly unusual for the time. In Europe the Habsburgs and Jagiellonians were building empires, while England, France, and the Dutch were expanding overseas. They may have justified their expansion by the theory of mercantilism while Muscovy claimed to be restoring the ‘patrimony’ of Kievan Rus, but the motives—pursuit of resources, wealth, power—were the same.

Muscovy’s expansion easily equalled that of other sixteenth-century empires. Russia expanded along lucrative trade routes, towards the Baltic, along the Volga, and into fertile steppe or the fur-bearing north and Siberia. Despite pious claims, much of what Muscovy won had not been part of Kievan Rus and Muscovy’s expansionist zeal never turned to the Ukrainian heartland in the sixteenth century. Under Ivan III Moscow acquired, through marriage, inheritance, coercion, or conquest, contiguous territories that had once been sovereign principalities: Riazan, 1456–1521; Iaroslavl, 1463; Rostov, 1463, 1474; Tver, 1485. With the conquest in 1478 of the Baltic trading city of Novgorod came a rich hinterland stretching to the Urals. Since the conquest of Novgorod and of Pskov in 1510 under Vasilii III put Muscovy face to face with the grand duchy of Lithuania and Sweden, much of the sixteenth century was consumed with wars on the western border, including the draining and fruitless war for Livonia (1558–82). Under Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) and Fedor Ivanovich Muscovy moved on several fronts, conquering Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan at the Caspian Sea in 1556, thereby assuring Russian control of the Volga river route. The steppe on either side became the next target of expansion in the second half of the century. Simultaneously, from the 1580s Muscovy was asserting political control into western Siberia, seeking the treasure of furs.

The only significant diversion that Moscow’s rulers faced from these foreign policy goals was the era of the oprichnina (1564–72), a murky episode in which about half the tsardom (almost all the lucrative trading areas north and northwest of Moscow, stretching to the White Sea, plus several major towns in the centre) was designated as Ivan IVs personal realm. Parallel élites, armies, and bureaucracies were formed, with attendant confiscations of land and purges of individuals, clans, institutions, and regions deemed hostile to Ivan IV. The oprichnina might have been intended to consolidate central power, as some have argued, but more likely was the fruit of Ivan IVs own personal devils. Some, such as V. O. Kliuchevskii and S. B. Veselovskii, have argued that Ivan was insane or paranoid; Edward L. Keenan suggests that a debilitating spinal illness made Ivan create the oprichnina in an attempt to abdicate power, an argument made all the more persuasive by Ivan’s later year-long abdication (1574/5) and by his erratic behaviour (he married several times, throwing clan-based court politics into disarray; even after 1572 he patronized a parallel élite of low-born families called the court [dvor]). Certainly some explanation in the psychological realm is required, since evidence shows that the oprichnina had no positive social or political consequences, devastating much of the centre of the realm and disrupting social and institutional structures.

The Span of the Russian Empire

We will begin by surveying the regions that made up Russia in the sixteenth century. There were three large divisions: the north, the centre, and the frontier, primarily a steppe frontier but also including the western border with the grand duchy of Lithuania. The north stretched from the Gulf of Finland in the west to beyond the Urals in the east and from the White Sea south to about 60° L. The north is a land of taiga, a largely coniferous forest turning into tundra and permafrost as one goes north; in addition to the taiga’s acidic and leached soil, its marshiness and the brevity of the growing season (only three to four months, sufficient for only one crop) make it inhospitable to agriculture. This was an area of forest exploitation and trade.

The regions of the north from west to east included Karelia, centred around Lakes Onega and Ladoga and stretching north to the Kola peninsula; the Northern Dvina and Sukhona river basins (Pomore); the Mezen and Pechora river basins (home of the Komi-Zyriane); and the Perm and Viatka lands (key inland fur-trapping regions north-east of Moscow focused on the upper Viatka, Vychegda, and Kama rivers, also home to the Komi-Permians). The indigenous population here was Finno-Ugric speakers of the Uralic language family. Sparse Russian settlement hugged the rivers and shoreline, barely touching the far-eastern Viatka and Perm lands until late in the sixteenth century. Christianity came with Russian settlement but made few inroads among non-East Slavs throughout this time. In the tundra band lived nomadic reindeer herdsmen, fishermen, and hunters: the Finno-Ugric Lapps in Karelia and east of them the Nentsy (called in Russian Samoedy) who speak a Samoedic Uralic language. From the 1580s Muscovite expansion drove across the Urals, moving quickly up the Ob and Irtysh rivers and into the Enisei basin. Garrisons were founded at Tobolsk on the upper Irtysh river in 1587 and at Tomsk on the upper Ob in 1604. But Russian settlement in Siberia remained sparse indeed, save for the garrisons of musketeers and Cossacks mustered from local populace or imported from the north, supported in turn by grain requisitions from Viatka, Perm, and other parts of the north. These garrisons collected tribute from the native peoples: farthest to the north were the Nentsy (Samoedy) living east of the Ob; south of them lived the Ostiaki (the Khanty in Russian) and inland to the west between the Permians and the Ob river lived the Voguly (Mansy to the Russians), also Finno-Ugric speakers.

Since Novgorodian times the dominant social and political organization among East Slavs and the Finno-Ugric population in the taiga lands from Karelia to Perm was the commune (mir, volost), composed of what contemporary sources call the ‘black’ or taxed peasants who were subject to the tsar directly and not subordinate to landlords as well. (Among native peoples of the Urals and western Siberia, however, Russia did not impose communal organization.) Northern communes differed from the nineteenth-century Russian peasant commune where land and labour were collectively shared. These were fiscal entities, territorial groupings of Slavs or non-Slavs for purposes of local administration and taxation. Nor is the term ‘peasant’ particularly appropriate for this populace. Members of communes were not primarily farmers, even the East Slavs among them, but were fishers, bee-keepers, traders, hunters, trappers, and artisans.

Straddling the border between the north and the centre were the Novgorod and Pskov lands to the north-west and the Beloozero and Vologda area north of Moscow. The north-west, including Novgorod and its five contiguous ‘fifths’ (piatiny), and Pskov and its environs, remained a centre of Baltic trade in the sixteenth century, and also supported at least a subsistence level of agriculture and relatively dense population. The Beloozero and Vologda areas lay on active trade routes to the White Sea and were productive centres for fish, salt, and furs. In these various lands the Russian population outnumbered Finno-Ugric speakers by the end of the century. Novgorod and Pskov had long been centres of Christianity and the Beloozero and Vologda areas became, from the mid-fifteenth century, magnets of energetic monastic colonization. Monasteries such as the St Cyril and Ferapontov monasteries near Beloozero, the Spaso-Prilutskii in Vologda, and the Solovetskii Monastery on the White Sea—expanded by taking over settled peasant lands and in the course of the sixteenth century became major local political and economic powers.

Although part of the Muscovite realm from the late 1400s, the north and north-west remained distinct as regions. When Moscow adopted at mid-century a new tax unit for arable land (the large sokha), for example, these areas retained the smaller, Novgorodian unit of measure. Similarly, surviving coin hoards from the second half of the century show a distinct split in the circulation of coinage between a north-west arena and a Moscow central one. Finally, gentry in the north-west were called upon to serve only within that region.

The centre, or ‘Moscow region’ (Zamoskov’e) in contemporary sources, differed from the north and the southern borderlands by its relative ethnic homogeneity, the economic primacy of agriculture, and the social power of landlords. By the early sixteenth century, the centre stretched from Beloozero and Vologda in the north to the Oka river and Riazan lands in the south; its western bounds were the upper Volga Tver lands and its eastern ones lay just beyond the lower Oka and its confluence with the Volga at Nizhnii Novgorod. An extension of the European plain that begins at the Atlantic, the region has a mixed deciduous-coniferous forest. It shares with Europe a continental climate, but its northerly latitude and distance from warming ocean currents made for harsher conditions. The winters are long (five months of snow cover) and cold (January mean temperature is −10.3°C or 13.5°F) and the growing season commensurately short (four to five months); because the soil was not particularly fertile, save for a triangle of loess north-west of Vladimir, yields were at subsistence level. Animal husbandry was limited by the sparseness of yields and the length of the winter which made provisioning large herds prohibitive; as a result natural fertilizer was inadequate. The populace supplemented its diet with food from the forests (hunting, fishing, berries, nuts, mushrooms) and income from artisan work.

The social structure in the centre was more complex than in the north. Settlement here was almost uniformly East Slavic, the indigenous Finno-Ugric peoples having been assimilated by the sixteenth century. Most of the populace, whether urban or rural, was taxed. Peasants lived in small hamlets (one to four households) and practised cultivation systems ranging from primitive slash-burn to three-field rotations depending upon population density, length of settlement in a region, and other factors. In 1450 most peasants were still free of landlord control, living in communes and paying taxes only to the tsar, but by the end of the sixteenth century virtually all of these ‘black’ peasants had been distributed to private landholders. Like the black peasants, artisans and petty merchants in towns were formed into urban communes (posad), which also paid taxes (here assessed not on arable land but as an annual rent or obrok), sales tax, customs, and other duties.

The non-taxpaying landholding strata were either military or ecclesiastical. The clerical populace was divided into ‘black’ (monks, nuns, and hierarchs—all celibate) and ‘white’ clergy (married parish priests). Church landholding increased at a phenomenal rate after 1450; particularly in the turbulent 1560s–70s landholders donated land in large amounts to monasteries, despite repeated legislation prohibiting such gifts (1551, 1572, 1580, 1584). But the Church’s wealth was unevenly distributed: diocesan episcopates and a handful of major monasteries (for example, St Cyril-Beloozero, Simonov, Trinity-Sergius) had immense holdings by the end of the century, but one-fifth of the monasteries possessed no or fewer than five peasant households, and most parish churches possessed none at all.

Secular landholders were all obliged to serve the Moscow grand prince as a part of a cavalry army. A few select families lived in Moscow and enjoyed hereditary privileges to be boyars, that is, counsellors of the grand prince. The rest of the élite ranged from wealthy, large landholders to rank-and-file cavalrymen (called ‘boyar’s children’ [deti boiarskie]). The landholding élite was not a corporate estate with juridical protection, but it did enjoy freedom from taxation, an almost exclusive claim to landownership and high status.

Over the course of the sixteenth century other social groups developed, primarily in the centre. The tsar’s élite merchants (gosti) were first mentioned in the 1550s; by the 1590s two less prestigious associations of official merchants (the gostinnaia and sukonnaia hundreds) were recorded. Merchants managed the tsar’s monopolies (salt, fur, vodka, and the like) or served as tax farmers, customs collectors, and entrepreneurs. In return they enjoyed the right to hold service tenure and hereditary land and to use the tsar’s own courts instead of local governors’ courts. The highest ranks of the chancery secretaries (d’iaki) could also hold hereditary or service tenure lands and utilize the tsar’s courts. Most worked in Moscow, but a few were stationed in the provinces (in 1611 the relative numbers were 55 and 17). In the second half of the sixteenth century most secretaries came from the lesser cavalry ranks. Situated socially between the taxed and non-taxed populations were non-cavalry army units, and of course there were also people who did not fit in—those who refused to be caught in the webs of landlord’s control or urban taxation: vagrants (guliashchie liudi), minstrels (skomorokhi) so vilified by the Church, holy fools, unemployed sons of priests, defrocked clergy, isolated hermits—in sum, the flotsam characteristic of the social diversity of premodern societies.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the centre was its juridical diversity. Much of this land was exempt from the grand prince’s government and taxation, a situation that rulers not only tolerated but used to their advantage. Grand princes countenanced areas that were virtually sovereign islands of political independence—the old apanage (udel) principalities, granted to members of the ruling dynasty and other notables. Apanages enjoyed autonomy from the grand prince’s taxation and judiciary and maintained small armies and boyar élites of their own. They were enjoined only against conducting independent foreign policy. From 1450 to 1550 apanages proliferated with the dynasty: Ivan III and Vasilii III each had four brothers, and Ivan IV, one as well as two adult sons. Each received lands with an apanage capital in towns such as Dmitrov, Volok, Uglich, Vologda, Kaluga, and Staritsa.

Similar to dynastic apanages were the holdings of some high-ranking princely families, called ‘service princes’. The apanage rights of princes from the upper Oka basin—the Mosal’skie, Mezetskie, Belevskie, Novosil’skie and others—were extinguished in the early sixteenth century, but two such clans, the Vorotynskie and Odoevskie princes, retained autonomy until 1573. Similarly, descendants of the ruling dynasty of the grand duchy of Lithuania long kept their rights: the Bel’skie until 1571, the Mstislavskie until 1585. Descendants of the ruling lines of Suzdal, Rostov, and other principalities likewise kept some vestige of autonomous rights into the mid-sixteenth century. The grand princes also actively created islands of autonomies as a political strategy. In the mid-fifteenth century, for example, Vasilii II’s government created a quasi-independent Tatar principality at Kasimov, designed as a refuge for a dissident line of the Kazan ruling dynasty and their Tatar retinues and thus as a focal point of opposition to the khanate of Kazan. It was located on the Oka river below Riazan and endured until the mid-seventeenth century. In the mid-sixteenth century an analogous apanage for a line of the Nogai Horde was created at Romanov, which lasted until 1620. In the Urals the Stroganov family acquired quasi-autonomous authority over vast tracts of lands in return for its colonization and trade activities.

Even more expansively the state accorded landlords judicial and administrative authority over their peasants except for major crimes. Ecclesiastical lands were particularly separate. By age-old statutes and tradition, the Orthodox Church had jurisdiction over all the Muscovite Orthodox populace in crimes declared church-related (such as heresy, sacrilege, inheritance, divorce, and adultery); it also exercised virtually total jurisdiction over the people living on its lands. Similarly, Muscovite towns, particularly in the centre, epitomized the patchwork quilt of administration and status that Russian society amounted to in the sixteenth century. Side by side with the taxpaying urban posad in most towns were privileged properties called ‘white places’ (i.e. untaxed), which competed with the trade of the posad. They could be enclaves of musketeers, postal workers, the tsar’s artisans, Europeans, or Tatars; they could be urban courts of monasteries, great boyars, and large landholders. Such communities enjoyed preferential treatment in taxes, tolls, customs, and immunities from the tsar’s judiciary and administration.

It is important to recall, however, that the grand princes tolerated local autonomies as a quasi-bureaucratic convenience; they did not countenance political independence and they kept apanage princes and leading boyars and landholders on a tight rein. They often imposed surety bonds (poruchnye zapisi) on boyars or treaties on their kinsmen to guarantee their loyalty. The grand princes’ closest kin were particularly distrusted, a bitter legacy of the dynastic war of the mid-fifteenth century, when the principle of linear dynastic succession triumphed over collateral succession but at the cost of bitter internecine battles. In succeeding generations uncles and cousins who loomed as potential rivals were closely controlled, forbidden to marry, imprisoned, or even executed. Within ten years of Ivan III’s death in 1505 all collateral lines of the clan had died out, save the Staritsa line, which was finally extinguished in the oprichnina in 1569. The perils of this aggressive pruning of the family tree were exposed in 1598 when the dynasty itself died out, destabilizing the political system almost terminally.

As diverse and dynamic as the centre was, even more volatile was the frontier on the west and south. In some ways calling this area the ‘frontier’ to the exclusion of the others is inaccurate. The north and centre were also riddled with ‘frontiers’—between Slavs and non-Slavs, Orthodox and non-Christians, farmers and trappers, Muslims and ‘pagans’. All these social interfaces generated tensions, synergies, and cross-cultural fertilization. But in the west and the south the classic meaning of ‘frontier’ as outposts of defence and conquest applies. In climate, precipitation, soil quality, and other key measures of agrarian fertility, these lands were far superior to those north of them and thus were coveted. On the west the frontier began with the Novgorod and Pskov lands south of the Gulf of Finland and extended south to the Smolensk area and south again to the upper Oka river region. This relatively narrow north-south strip, located between the sixtieth and fiftieth latitudes, moved from taiga at the Novgorod end through deciduous-coniferous mixed forest, approaching steppe in the south. These lands flanked the grand duchy of Lithuania and were hotly contested throughout the century; between 1491 and 1595 Muscovy spent a total of fifty years at war on the western front. After the rout of the Livonian War (1558–82) and the Time of Troubles (1598–1613) Muscovy yielded lands from Karelia to beyond Smolensk to Sweden (Treaty of Stolbovo, 1617) and the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania (Treaty of Deulino, 1618).

On the western frontier, as in the centre, Moscow tolerated administrative and social diversity. For example, when Smolensk was annexed in 1514, Vasilii III affirmed by charter the landholding and judicial rights historically granted to the region by the grand dukes of Lithuania. Similarly as we have seen, princes from the upper Oka area retained autonomies as ‘service princes’ in Muscovy well into the sixteenth century.

On the south the frontier ran just south of the middle, west–east stretch of the Oka river, from around Tula across the Riazan lands to the border with the Kazan khanate in the east. Moving south from this forested zone one quickly encounters steppe (a prairie rich in grey and black soils), a line that moves roughly diagonally, south-west to north-east, from Kiev to Kazan. This south flank was exposed to raids and warfare: in the sixteenth century the Crimean Tatars made forty-three major attacks on the Muscovite lands, and the Kazan khanate forty. After Moscow conquered Kazan in 1552, the Nogai Horde of the lower Volga took its place as Moscow’s steppe adversary. Already in the 1530s Muscovy fortified a line south of the Oka and at mid-century it conquered Kazan and Astrakhan (1552, 1556). A generally east-west line of fortifications pushed steadily southward from the 1550s; Muscovy also constructed a network of fortresses to fortify the Kazan heartland and Kama basin. In the 1580s Muscovy began to subjugate the Bashkirs, a Tatar nomadic people, on a southern tributary of the Kama, constructing a fort at Ufa in 1586; most of the Bashkirs remained subjects of the Siberian khan until Muscovy’s final defeat of the khan in the late 1590s. A final stage of southern frontier fortification witnessed bold extensions of fortresses down the land and river routes used by the Nogais and Crimeans: Elets (1592), Belgorod, and Tsarev Borisov on the Donets river (1593, 1600).

The Kazan conquest added ethnically and religiously diverse lands to Russia: the élite was Tatar and Muslim, descended from the Golden Horde, but it presided over a variety of peoples who followed animistic cults. They included Finno-Ugric speakers (the Mari or Cheremisy and the Mordva) and Turkic speakers (the Chuvash, said to descend from the Volga Bulgars who had controlled the Volga before the Mongol invasion). The Chuvash and Mordva by and large inhabited the high, right bank of the Volga; the Tatars and Mari, the lowland left bank between the Volga and Kama rivers which had been the heartland of the Kazan khanate. Although fur-trapping, bee-keeping, and trade all engaged the populace, this was also an area of settled agriculture from the twelfth century: the land here was thinly forested or steppe, and the soil was the famous ‘blackearth’ topsoil, a thick layer rich in humus and nutrients.

With Russian conquest the Tatar populace was forcibly removed from the city of Kazan and those dwellings and shops were awarded to artisans, peasants, and lesser military servitors imported from the centre. The lands surrounding Kazan were distributed as service landholdings; there were no free peasant communes here as in the north and little hereditary land (votchina) save that granted to the newly founded archbishopric of Kazan (1555) and new monasteries. Christianization remained a minor goal for the Muscovite state here. Local élites were left relatively untouched as long as they remained loyal to the tsar; they collected the tribute (iasak) and administered communities according to local traditions. Muscovite governors were instructed to govern fairly without coercion. Nevertheless Muscovy was challenged repeatedly by uprisings of Cheremisy, Tatars, and Mari in the 1550s and thereafter.

Culture and Mentality

So diverse a populace cannot be said to have possessed a single mentality. Certainly sources on this for the non-Christian subjects of the tsar are lacking. But since clichés abound about the Russian character even for the Muscovite period, it is worth assessing sixteenth-century Orthodox East Slavs’ attitudes towards the supernatural, community, and family, based on contemporary sources. (One should take with a grain of salt the reports of foreign travellers about popular culture since many were biased by Catholic and Protestant viewpoints, by a post-Reformation zeal for a more rational or more personal spirituality, or by a fascination with the ‘exotic’.)

Sixteenth-century Russians were nominally Orthodox Christian, but that statement is as misleading as saying that most Europeans before the Reformation were Catholic. Just as in pre-Reformation Europe, sixteenth-century Russian Orthodoxy combined Christian beliefs with practices drawn from the naturalist and animistic beliefs of the various Finno-Ugric peoples with whom the East Slavs came in contact. At the 1551 ‘Stoglav’ Church Council (called ‘Stoglav’ or ‘One Hundred chapters’ after the document it issued), the hierarchy identified a wide incidence of improper religious practices, but apparently lacked the resources to change them. Parish schools or seminaries were nonexistent, parish organization was weak, books, sermons, and learning were limited to ecclesiastical élites. The council had to content itself with establishing some mechanisms to supervise parish clergy but otherwise just exhort the faithful to avoid what it considered ‘pagan’ behaviour. By examining death rituals, marriage ceremonies, prayers, and a range of celebratory practices, one can discern a ‘popular culture’, that is, a range of beliefs and practices exhibited by the entire social range which was distinct from the prescriptions of the official Church. That culture featured a view of the world significantly different from the typical Christian one as Eve Levin points out. Rather than seeing the world as basically good, created by God and disrupted by the Devil, sixteenth-century Russians seem to have regarded it as a universe of powerful natural forces ‘neither good nor evil but wilful and arbitrary’. They identified these forces in Christian terms (the Devil) or terms drawn from Finno-Ugric beliefs (nezhit, a force of evil in nature; bears and foxes were equated with evil). They summoned supernatural forces to protect themselves, drawing both on Christian intercessors (Jesus, Mary, and others) and Finno-Ugric (appealing to the power of ritual sites like bathhouses or trees and herbs imbued with supernatural powers). These customs showed no social distinctions: even the tsar’s marriage ceremony shared folk customs associated with fertility; boyars are recorded consulting folk healers; wills with evocations of non-Christian attitudes stem from the landed class.

The Church in the sixteenth century railed against many of these practices, and had some success in asserting its presence and rituals at key moments such as death and marriage. It promoted a new vision of spirituality as well. Until the early 1500s, monasteries, monks, and an ascetic way of life had constituted the norm in church teaching about social and religious behaviour. But as monasteries became less exemplary with greater worldly success, the church hierarchy diversified the focus of spiritual life, offering saints’ cults, sermons, other moralistic writings and teachings, and more ritual experiences to appeal more broadly. As Paul Bushkovitch has noted, official spirituality in the sixteenth century emphasized the collective, public experience of the faith, not the more inner-directed, personal piety that developed among the élite in the next century.

Attitudes towards daily life in the élite can be gleaned from a handbook of household management (the Domostroi), which was most probably based on a foreign secular model, but edited in an Orthodox Christian vein in Muscovy in the mid-sixteenth century. The Domostroi depicts the family as the structuring principle of the community and of the polity; the grand prince is portrayed as the head of the realm construed as a ‘household’, just as the father is the head of an extended household of wife, children, servants, and other dependents. Both patriarchs rule justly but firmly; each demands obedience and responds with just and fair treatment. Women and children are to behave and obey; physical force is recommended to fathers to keep them in line. But women also have remarkably broad latitude and responsibility. Offsetting its otherwise more typical Muscovite misogynistic views of women is the Domostroi’s parallel depiction of them as capable household managers, empowered in the domestic realm. Theirs is the primary responsibility for leading the family to salvation by the example of virtue and piety; theirs is the responsibility of making the household economy and servants productive by skilful management. Christian values such as charity to the poor and just treatment of dependents are balanced by a keen attention to sexual probity all of which values worked towards social stability as much as piety. The Domostroi did not circulate widely in the sixteenth century, but to some extent it did reach the landed gentry.

One can hardly argue that Russians were particularly spiritual or ‘pagan’ in the sixteenth century. This was a typically eclectic premodern Christian community. And, significantly, the church’s de facto tolerance of syncretism, paralleled by the state’s toleration of religious diversity (the Orthodox Church was specifically enjoined against aggressive missionary work in newly conquered areas such as Kazan and Siberia), helped ensure that the sixteenth century passed with remarkably little societal tension over matters of belief, a stark and oft-noted contrast to the turbulent sixteenth century of Reformation in Europe.

Administrative and Economic Strategies of Autocracy

A similar flexibility characterized the administrative, political, and fiscal strategies of the state: rather than trying to fit a uniform policy to lands of dazzling differences, the state modified policies to fit local needs, while never losing sight of its fundamental goals. Muscovite rulers were obsessed with the same issues as their European counterparts: bureaucracy, taxation, and the army. The goal has often been called ‘absolutism’, but the term is applicable only if it is redefined. Recent scholarship shows that in England and France as well as in Muscovy, ‘absolute’ authority was achieved by tolerating and co-opting traditional institutions and élites, rather than by replacing them with rational bureaucratic institutions. What resulted was not homogenization, ‘centralization’, or ‘autocracy’, but resource mobilization.

Muscovy’s first concern in the sixteenth century was to expand its army. The army was primarily a cavalry, composed of a landed élite that served seasonally and provided its own equipment, horses, and training. Expansion was possible after Ivan III developed on a large scale the principle that servitors would be compensated with land given in conditional tenure (pomest’e). Until then hereditary landholding (votchina) had supported landowners and their retinues. The grand prince’s role in recompense was presumably limited to booty and largesse. The large-scale use of service landholding began in Novgorod: over 1,300 service estates were assigned to men transferred there from the centre, while Novgorodian deportees received lands in conditional tenure in the centre (Moscow, Vladimir, Murom, Nizhnii-Novgorod, Pereiaslavl-Zalesskii, Iurev-Polskoi, Rostov Velikii, Kostroma, and elsewhere). Recipients of service land were socially diverse: princes (mainly from Iaroslavl and Rostov), boyars and lesser non-princely families, and also clients (posluzhil’tsy) of such families (who constituted 20 per cent of service land recipients in Novgorod). Thus the service landholding system enriched and expanded the cavalry élite as a whole.

Muscovy found still other ways to expand the army. It recruited infantry militias from the peasants and townspeople by assessing a fixed number of recruits per unit of arable land or households in urban communes. In the north this system persisted through the sixteenth century for purposes of local defence; in areas where ‘black’ peasants were transferred to landlord control, landlords then recruited men according to a calculus issued in 1556—one man per every 100 chetverti of land. Richard Hellie estimates the resultant forces at 25,000 to 50,000 by the end of the century. But these forces were untrained and unspecialized. More valuable to the state were new formations of troops. Responding to the European ‘military revolution’, Russia began to develop regiments of artillery and musketeers (called collectively by the seventeenth century sluzhilye liudi po priboru or ‘contract’ servitors). In the mid-sixteenth century their numbers are estimated to have been around 30,000, thus outnumbering the cavalry servitors (approximately 21,000). By the end of the century there were about 30,000 cavalrymen, some 20,000 musketeers alone, significant numbers of artillery (3,500), as well as frontier Cossack and non-Russian troops (Bashkirs, Tatars).

Contract servitors were most probably recruited from the peasantry or impoverished landed élite; they did not enjoy the high social status or landholding privileges of the cavalry élite. They were garrisoned in towns throughout the realm, but especially on the southern frontier. They stood as a middle social stratum between the taxpaying artisans of the posad and the landed gentry. They supported themselves from trade and farming their own plots; they paid no state tax (the obrok levied on posad people), but did pay tax on their sales.

These military innovations had tremendous impact on Muscovite social structure over the course of the sixteenth century, but differentially so. In the north, not including the Novgorod and Pskov areas, the land would not support nor did local needs require the service landholding system and a landed cavalry élite. Garrisons manned by locally mustered Cossack, musketeers, and militia met the need for border defence. Conversely, the southern steppe frontier had a preponderance of contract servitors living in commune-type regiments. This area had relatively little hereditary landholding (secular or ecclesiastical), few enserfed peasants, few large landholders. What service landholding estates there were were small, farmed by poor cavalrymen with few peasants, making a lower cavalry class distinct from their relatively better-off counterparts in the centre. Social boundaries were fluid on the frontier. Here one finds such anomalies as musketeers holding service landholdings and cavalrymen serving as infantry and holding no land in conditional tenure; here all servitors, even gentry, were obligated to farm state properties and to provide grain reserves.

But in the centre and north-west the service landholding system had a great impact on social relations. By the end of the century service landholding dominated here, although in the centre a significant minority of land remained hereditary. Hereditary tenure was preferred because in theory service landholdings could not be transferred. But since many service tenure holders also held hereditary land, and since service holdings from the very beginning were treated de facto as transferable and hereditable, and since hereditary landholders were also obliged to serve Moscow, hereditary owners (votchinniki) and service tenure holders (pomeshchiki) did not constitute separate social forces, as has traditionally been thought. The landholding élite constituted a consolidated élite, with divisions in power, wealth, and status based on regional association and family heritage, but not according to the type of landholding.

Muscovite grand princes used the system of service landholding to create stronger regional élites by resettlement. From the early sixteenth century they moved new settlers from the centre to areas previously conquered: Novgorod (1478), Viazma (1494), Toropets (1499), Pskov (1510), and Smolensk (1514). Later they continued to make grants of land in conditional tenure to populate newly conquered areas or to bolster frontier economies shattered by war. In the 1570s, for example, petty landholders from the Novgorod environs were moved to the western border (Velikie Luki, Toropets, Dorogobuzh, Smolensk, Viazma), while others were moved to recently captured territories in Livonia. When Russians were driven out of Livonia, they were resettled on the Novgorod frontier. These relocations severed original regional attachments but created new ones elsewhere, forging new regional élites and perhaps a more integrated centre.

Other policies also worked to create regional ‘corporations’ and a central élite. Laws from Ivan III’s time forbade landholders in almost all regions, for example, to sell land to non-locals;parallel injunctions kept land within princely clans. Up until the mid-century Muscovy mustered the bulk of the army by region or princely clans; by the end of the sixteenth century it had developed a more differentiated system of regional gentry ‘corporations’ arranged around towns (goroda). At the social apex was the ‘sovereign’s court’ (gosudarev dvor) with about 3,000 men at mid-century and set apart by privileges and largesse. In land, for example, by the end of the century the highest ranks received 3.5 times more service tenure land than the lowest. They also received largesse from the grand prince: after the victory of Kazan, Ivan IV is said to have distributed 48,000 roubles’ worth of precious objects to his men in three days of feasting. The sovereign’s court also had access to the Kremlin and the person of the ruler, attending daily and at ceremonial occasions and accompanying him on pilgrimages.

The grand princes also forged the metropolitan élite by bolstering the principle of clan. Access to boyar rank was hereditary within clans. Traditionally the number of clans with such access was small: from the 1300s to 1462 it stayed around ten. But with the influx of new servitor families, rulers added new clans to integrate and stabilize the élite. From 1462 to 1533, the number of boyar clans rose from around fifteen to twenty-four, and after the turbulence of Ivan IV’s minority (1533–47) it nearly doubled to forty-six. Rulers used their own marriages to establish the political pecking order among the boyars: with his marriage in 1547 to a daughter of a leading faction (the Romanov clan), for example, Ivan IV resolved the struggles during the period of his minority. In 1555 he went a step further towards reconciliation in the élite by marrying off his distant cousin to a member of the boyar clan, the Bel’skie princes, who had been on the ‘losing’ side in the minority.

Rulers made clan the organizing principle of the sovereign’s court below the boyar level as well. In the system of precedence (mestnichestvo) they offered protection to injured honour for servitors who alleged that their military assignments were beneath their clan’s dignity, measured by genealogy and military service. To that end extensive official records of service and genealogies of the élite were compiled from Ivan III’s time (razriadnye and rodoslovnye knigi).

The Moscow-based sovereign’s court became increasingly high born in the aftermath of the oprichnina and Ivan IVs death when the many low-born families that Ivan IV had patronized in the dvor were relegated to provincial service, while the highborn families who had served in the oprichnina or the regular government (zemshchina) remained in Moscow. Socially, the impact of sixteenth-century policy was not to destroy a ‘feudal’ élite or raise up ‘new men’, as has been often held, but rather to consolidate the landed military élite in the centre into Moscow-based and regional ‘corporations’, divided by status, wealth, and duties.

One reason that the grand princes assiduously cultivated regional solidarities is that they came to use such communities for local administration. Traditionally, Muscovy had ruled through governors (namestniki) in the larger centres and local officials (volosteli) in smaller communities who collected taxes and administered the lands and, in return, received kormlenie (‘feeding’, i.e. material support) from the local populace. Starting in Ivan III’s time, however, the state began to create specialized officers to collect specific taxes and duties—for example, officials to collect taxes for urban fortifications. In the late 1530s the state gave authority over local law and order to ‘brigandage elders’, who were elected by local communities; in the mid-1550s it gave tax-collection authority to boards of taxpayers—peasants or townsmen—elected by their communes. In the centre governors were in effect abolished. The result was not only better local government and higher revenues but also the strengthening of community solidarities in many parts of the realm. In the centre and northwest, landlords became a pillar of the tsar’s administration. They ran the brigandage system and oversaw tax-collection by peasant communes. In the north communal organization was the beneficiary; communes took on all these roles in the absence of gentry to do brigandage work. The work of overseeing was provided by chancery offices in Moscow. The oprichnina and other economic and political dislocations of the 1560s-80s, however, dealt a harsh blow to gentry and to peasant communes in the centre and north-west, and going into the seventeenth century the principle of local representation in governance, except in the north, was severely compromised. A system of governors returned, but the social solidarity of regional gentry communities endured into the seventeenth century.

Many places in the realm, however, stayed outside these administrative reforms and their attendant social impact. As we saw in the Smolensk lands, for example, the indigenous élite retained privileges and social structures of the grand duchy of Lithuania. In non-East Slav areas—western Siberia, the middle Volga, the tundra reaches of the Lapps and Nentsy—the Russians maintained a traditional tribute system (iasak), paid in furs, other goods, and some services and collected by local élites and communities. Where local forces were lacking, Moscow sent specially appointed officials (danshchiki) to collect the annual payment and otherwise left the status quo untouched. (The iasak was phased out as the basis of taxation in Siberia only between 1822 and 1917.) Similarly in major cities on strategic borders (Novgorod, Pskov, Kazan, Astrakhan, Tomsk) governors exercised overall authority, since there was little social basis here for local fiscal or criminal administration. At the same time numerous servitor units stationed here, such as Cossacks, Streltsy (musketeers), and ‘privileged hetman’ (belomestnye atamany), enjoyed autonomies and communal landholdings as regimental units and ran their own affairs collectively.

Not surprisingly, Muscovy did not constitute a uniform legal community. Many legal codes served these various communities. Ecclesiastical law codes came to the Rus lands from Byzantium. The most significant compendium, known as the ‘Rudder’ (kormchaia kniga), was a collection of Byzantine secular and ecclesiastical codes. For day-to-day affairs communes and landlords apparently used the Russkaia pravda, a compendium of customary law from the Kievan era that still circulated in Muscovite lands (a new redaction was even compiled in the early seventeenth century). The grand princes and boyar council promulgated three law codes (1497, 1550, 1589) as procedural handbooks for judges. The 1589 edition was suited to the social structure and economic patterns of the north; contemporary sources also refer to separate law codes in use for the Perm lands (zyrianskii sudebnik).

Such administrative eclecticism strengthened the state, creating quasi-bureaucratic organs that freed grand princes to concentrate on those few issues they considered their own: supreme judicial authority, foreign policy, the army and defence, and above all the mobilization and exploitation of resources. It was a minimalist state, run by the ruler, his counsellors, and a household-based bureaucracy reminiscent of the Carolingian court. Until the mid-sixteenth century the work of the fisc, foreign policy, and the mustering of troops constituted the provenance of two general offices, the treasury, and the court (in the sense of household, not judiciary). By the 1560s, the term prikaz (chancery) was used to denote the many new offices that were being established to meet new needs (the Brigandange, Slavery, and Streltsy Chanceries, for example) or to separate out specific functions (Military Service, Service Land, Foreign Affairs, Postal System Chanceries). By the end of the century there were approximately twenty-four chanceries, a system that was efficient but eclectic and irrational by modern, Weberian standards. No single principle governed the organization and jurisdiction of chanceries. Some had responsibility for a particular social group (the military élite, foreigners); others exercised one function over the entire realm (Fortifications, Slavery, Criminal Chanceries), or had total authority over a particular territory (the Kazan Chancery). Initially led by secretaries, from the time of Boris Godunov boyars ran more and more chanceries, presaging the transformation of the military élite into the ‘noble official’ class that has been chronicled for the seventeenth century.

No less important to the sixteenth-century state than the expansion of the army was the mobilization of wealth. That impelled a new fiscal strategy in 1551—elimination of the tax immunities traditionally enjoyed by lay and ecclesiastical landholders. But the government was inconsistent, issuing new immunities in times of political turbulence (1530s-40s, 1560s-70s, 1590s). At mid-century the state commuted taxes from payment in kind and services to cash, changed the tax assessment unit in the centre, raised existing taxes (especially for the postal system), and introduced new ones. The tribute-bearing peoples of Siberia and the middle Volga also filled Moscow’s coffers, as did a tax on any furs brought to market from Siberia by Russian traders. Income from the tsar’s monopolies such as salt and alcohol production (analogous to medieval European kings’ monopolies or regalia) was also significant and the state aggressively patronized entrepreneurs, whether Russian (the Stroganovs) or foreign (the English Muscovy company received a charter of trade privileges c .1555). Trade through the White Sea with the British and Dutch grew to great proportions in the second half of the century.

But the government’s drive to mobilize eventually blew up in its face. Taxes rose precipitously in the sixteenth century, exceeding the parallel inflationary rise of the century. It has been calculated that taxes rose 55 per cent from 1536 to 1545, another 286 per cent (with commutations to cash) from 1552 to 1556, another 60 per cent in the 1560s, and another 41 per cent in the 1570s before they began a steady decrease in the face of economic distress. At the same time in the 1560s and 1570s the north-west and centre experienced great disruptions from the oprichnina, Livonian War, and natural disasters that included plague, crop failure, and famine. Petty landlords responded by squeezing their peasants for more income, while larger landholders lured peasants to their lands with loans and tax breaks. They also began to consolidate their holdings into demesnes and to extract labour services, two to three days per week by the end of the century on much secular land. Trying to shelter the landed élite, the state ended taxation on landlord’s demesne in the 1580s, shifting the tax burden all the more to peasants. In response the average peasant plot decreased: at the beginning of the century many peasant holdings were the equivalent of a man-sus (in Russian, vyt, that is, the unit of land considered sufficient to support a peasant family). But from the 1570s most holdings ranged between just one-half to one-eighth of a vyt.

All this spelled disaster for peasants and petty gentry, especially in the northwest and centre. Thousands fled to new landlords in the centre or to the relative freedom of the Volga and Kama basins, the Dvina lands, or the southern border. Depopulation was acute: in the mid-1580s only 17 per cent of the land in the Moscow environs was being cultivated, while in the northwest 83 per cent of settlements were deserted. Towns suffered disproportionately: while the populations of urban communes had risen in the first half of the century, posad populations fell by 61 per cent in the 1550s-80s, and then another 45 per cent from the 1580s to the 1610s. In Novgorod in 1582, for example, a census recorded only 122 urban households as occupied and over 1,300 abandoned for such reasons as death of the family (in 76 per cent of the cases) and impoverishment (18 per cent). The economic situation stabilized in the late 1580s, but Russia was plunged again into turmoil by the turn of the century: not only foreign invasion, but crop failure and pestilence accompanied the end of the dynasty in 1598.

Having no other way to support its cavalry, and unwilling to transform this privileged estate into less prestigious contract servitors, the state endeavoured to secure peasant labour for landlords. In 1580 it forbade some peasants to change landlords and in 1592–3 made the ban universal, capping a legislative process that had commenced with restrictions on the peasant’s right to move in the law codes of 1497 and 1550. These ‘forbidden years’ were perceived as temporary but, with the exception of 1601–2, endured thereafter. This incremental enserfment affected most directly the peasants of landlords in the centre, northwest, and steppe frontier, but it also had an impact in the north and Siberia. Cadastres compiled throughout the realm in the 1580s and 1590s served as the basis for registering peasants in communes; they were then forbidden to leave, whether or not they were subject to landlords as well.

Sixteenth-century peasants faced with economic disaster and enserfment had two options. One was to flee to the frontier. Despite decrees beginning in the 1590s that steadily extended the statute of limitations on the recovery of runaway peasants, peasants with the means still had an opportunity to move. For most, however, the older option in hard times—debt slavery—was far more viable. Increasingly in the sixteenth century individuals sold themselves into a limited ‘service-contract’ (kabal’noe) slavery. Slavery offered them not only a loan but also refuge of a lord and freedom from the taxes and services due the state. Understandably, over the course of the sixteenth century, the government sought to regulate hereditary slavery and manumission, to forbid servitors to assume this status (1550), and to limit its duration (1586, 1597).

Mechanisms of Social Integration

The grand princes’ primary goals in the sixteenth century may have been expanding their territory and extracting resources from it, but to do so they needed a minimal degree of social cohesion in the realm as a whole to ensure stability. Their major strategy in this regard, as we have suggested, was to tolerate diversity. Even in contemporaneous Europe, where national realms were small and often ethnically cohesive and where dynasties worked assiduously to create a national unity, the reality was that stability was based not on the ruler’s coercive power but on social traditions of deference to authority and loyalty to community and region. All the more so for Muscovite rulers. They had limited tools of integration and used them judiciously. As in other states, however, they relied on coercion and meted out harsh punishment to disloyal servitors, tax cheats, and rebellious subjects. They were particularly inclined to declare boyars to be in ‘disgrace’ (opala) for brief periods (often a few days) to chasten them and keep them in line. Frequently they tempered the punishments with last-minute reprieves, bestowing their benevolent ‘mercy’ and ‘favour’. They also made abundant use of such harsh punishments as confiscation of property demotion in rank, exile, imprisonment, and execution whenever their authority was challenged. But given the limits of central power in an early modern state, Muscovite tsars relied upon rewards, symbols, and ideas to inculcate loyalty and to disseminate an image of a unified realm. And they put most of their energies into appealing to the élite since its loyalty was crucial to the state’s goals.

Active techniques of integration that touched all society seem to have focused on the Orthodox population. The non-Orthodox (called ‘tribute’ people) generally were neither integrated into the élite (except for the highest clans among them) nor addressed by many of the less tangible institutions of integration. The Church was one of few institutions whose rituals and symbolism reached across the realm; conveniently its teachings legitimated the secular government as appointed by God. The Church and state recognized local holy men as saints on the national or local levels and thus worked to integrate disparate parts of the realm into a putative Orthodox community. Rulers used ritual moments, such as pilgrimages and processions, to demonstrate the ruler’s power, piety, and relationship to his men and people; such moments were often accompanied by the distribution of alms, the founding of new monasteries and chapels, and other overtures to the local community. Ivan IV participated almost incessantly in annual pilgrimages that traversed the centre of the realm; rulers’ ceremonial entrances into conquered cities (see examples in chronicles sub anno 1478, 1552, and 1562) show the tsar both as humble penitent and powerful leader.

Rulers also used architecture as a symbolic statement. Ivan III reconstructed the Kremlin churches into a magnificent ensemble (including a family cathedral, the metropolitan’s see, and a mortuary cathedral) that demonstrated not only his power and strength but, by incorporating architectural motifs from Novgorod and Pskov, the breadth of his conquests. Significantly, the centre-piece of the ensemble was the Dormition (Uspenskii) Cathedral, copied specifically from the metropolitan’s see in Vladimir, not the Kiev example. Throughout the sixteenth century, this church was replicated—at the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, in Pereiaslavl-Zalesskii, Rostov, Vologda, Kazan, and elsewhere—stamping the landscape with a specifically Muscovite cultural idiom. Grand princes also left symbols of their authority in new churches and monasteries built to commemorate military victories (Sviazhsk, 1551; Kazan, 1552; the Church of the Intercession on the Moat or ‘St Basil’s’ in Moscow, 1555–61; Narva, 1558; Velikie Luki, 1562) or to spread their patronage (Mozhaisk, 1563; Pereiaslavl, 1564).

The state also extended protection to all society for ‘injured honour’ (beschest’e) , implicitly defining the state as a community unified by honour. Honour was defined as loyalty to the tsar, to the Church, to one’s social rank, to family and clan. Specifically excluded from the community of honour were ‘thieves, criminals, arsonists, and notorious evil men’, while even minstrels, bastards, and slaves were included (1589 law code). The state also appealed to all its inhabitants with a vision of community by according all subjects, even non-Orthodox, the right to petition the ruler. Individuals used formulae that accentuated their personal dependence on him: they referred to themselves with self-deprecating, although stylized, labels and beseeched the ruler for ‘favour’, be it a grant of land, release from service, or the resolution of litigation. Around 1550 a ‘Petitions Chancery’ was founded to encourage individuals to bring their grievances directly to the ruler.

Petitions, like the Domostroi, suggest symbolically that the ruler and his people were united in a patriarchal, personal family, that the realm constituted a single, homogeneous community. It has been noted that early seventeenth-century texts portray the tsardom as a ‘God-dependent’ community in which all, high and lowly, are personally dependent on the ruler and all equally share a responsibility to serve him loyally and offer him virtuous counsel when he errs. Sixteenth-century chronicle sources also strike these themes of consensus, unanimity, and patrimonial dependence, emphasizing the personal affection between grand princes and their boyars, or criticizing boyars for not giving the ruler counsel or for seeking ‘personal power’ (samovlastie). It is impossible to say how well these ideas were internalized by various strata of the population, but they were consistently and clearly articulated in the sources.

The central focus for building a cohesive state was the court, which sought to project a coherent public image of the realm and its relationship to the élite. Genealogies of the Daniilovich family traced its descent to the Vladimir-Suzdal principality (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), while panegyrics and hagiography created a pantheon of Muscovite heroes, most notably Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi (1359–89). The court also patronized cults of the ‘Moscow miracle-workers’, three fourteenth- and fifteenth-century metropolitans (Peter, Alexis, Iona) closely associated with the ruling dynasty. All these texts identified Moscow accurately with its fourteenth-century roots.

In the sixteenth century this vision became more universalist and less accurate. Genealogical tales of the Muscovite grand princes began to extend the family line through Kiev to ancient Rome in a typically Renaissance quest for a classical heritage. By the mid-century even more grandiose visions were constructed, with their roots firmly in the Orthodox past. Metropolitan Makarii’s mid-century compilations of hagiography chronicles, and didactic texts presented Muscovy as a holy kingdom, part of universal Christianity, linked through Kiev Rus to Byzantine Christianity and ultimately to God’s creation of the earth. Icons such as ‘Blessed is the Heavenly Host’ (popularly known as the ‘Church Militant’), new court ceremonies such as Epiphany and Palm Sunday processions, and fresco cycles that filled the interiors of the Kremlin churches and palaces after the fires of 1547, all elaborated a ‘Wisdom Theology’ that immersed the reader or viewer in a biblical world. This vision was decidedly apocalyptic, lending great drama to the symbolic message and perhaps dispensing tension or exaltation among the viewers.

One should be quite clear about what Muscovite ideology was not saying in the sixteenth century. Moscow was not, for example, styling itself the ‘Third Rome’, heir to Rome and Byzantium and natural leader of the world. The ‘Moscow, the Third Rome’ text was a minor theme encountered in only a few ecclesiastical texts; it was originally used only to exhort the tsars to be just and humble, not to justify overweening power. It was most warmly embraced in the seventeenth century, and then by the schismatic Old Believers, at the same time that it was being discredited by the official Church. Nor did Muscovite ideology primarily exalt the tsar as next to God in power and as separate and above the common man. Although this viewpoint, associated with the Byzantine philosopher Agapetus, makes its appearance in mid-sixteenth-century texts, it was usually balanced with Agapetus’ injunction to rulers to govern justly and with mercy. Nor did Muscovy see itself as a secular or pluralistic kingdom. There is no trace in sixteenth-century Muscovy of the keen debates over the natio that flourished in sixteenth-century England, France, Poland, and seventeenth-century Ukraine. Russia was outside that world of discourse; it defined itself in religious, not secular terms, as a family and community, not a state.

Much of this imagery directly appealed to the élite by making use of allegorical military themes. Moscow’s boyars and élite, although illiterate, could absorb a consistent vision of the state and their place in it by gazing at the frescos, battle standards, and icons that decorated the churches and chambers where they attended the tsar. Allegorically these depicted the state as the Lord’s heavenly army, a remarkably apt and probably compelling image for a state whose élite was defined by military service.

The image of the state as a Godly community of virtuous warriors and dependents of the tsar was acted out in collective meetings that first appeared in the mid-sixteenth century. Councils of the Land (zemskie sobory) were summoned at the initiative of the ruler; he set the agenda which usually concerned the issue of war and peace, but occasionally succession and taxation. Those present generally came from non-taxed social strata. The Councils were not parliamentary assemblies; they possessed neither legal definition, nor legislative initiative, nor decision-making power, nor consistent and representative composition. They seem to have fulfilled other functions than legislation; indeed, in the wake of the abolition of regional governors, they served as means of communication of state policy to the countryside to mobilize support for its military and fiscal policy. They also played an important symbolic role by physically creating a community of tsar and people in ritual fashion that may have worked cathartically as Emile Durkheim described rituals working to energize the community, to build bonds, and to resolve tensions. Clearly these were the challenges that stood before Muscovite rulers in the sixteenth century as they sought to bolster stability in constantly growing and vastly diverse lands.

The Autocratic Project

They were not alone in facing such challenges. Religious, linguistic, cultural, and regional diversity was typical of premodern states across the European plain. French kings, for example, ruled over several language communities and had to contend with a basic division in legal relations between pays d’etat (where estates negotiated laws and finances with the kings) and pays selection (where the king’s officers had direct authority). French towns and rural communities used many different legal codes and fiscal systems; corporate groups—estates, guilds, municipalities, professions—enjoyed privileged status. Rulers tried to make diversity work for them, tolerating differences, co-opting élites, maintaining established customs and regional associations as a means to consolidate their own power in the long run.

At first glance Muscovy would seem to have been less successful at these ‘absolutizing’ goals than England or France in the sixteenth century. With the débâcles of the oprichnina, the Livonian Wars, exorbitant taxation, and peasant flight, Muscovy ended the sixteenth century impoverished and politically vulnerable. But if judged over the longer term, Muscovy had achieved a surprising degree of success. The course charted by Ivan III and Vasilii III endured. Ivan IV did not transform political relationships or institutions, nor create a new élite. Many boyar families who dominated politics from Ivan III’s time survived the oprichnina and remained part of the élite into the next century; the new families that Ivan IV patronized by and large fell to provincial gentry status by the end of the century. Resource mobilization, development of a bureaucracy, military reform, and the consolidation of the élite survived the traumas of the 1560s-1580s, as did the march towards enserfment.

At this point it might be appropriate to reflect on the historical significance of Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’, whose enigmatic personality and actions have often been the main concern of narratives of Russia in the sixteenth century. His importance has been exaggerated in part because the oprichnina has long been considered Muscovy’s equivalent to the great clashes of monarchy and nobility or Church and state that made sixteenth-century European politics so turbulent. In other words, Ivan was writ large for historiographical imperatives. But, as already suggested, the oprichnina had no discernible political programme and no lasting results. Ivan’s significance has also been inflated because of the writings attributed to him, primarily a series of letters addressed to the émigré boyar, Prince A. M. Kurbskii, that articulated a claim to unlimited patrimonial power. But Edward L. Keenan has raised serious questions about the authenticity of Ivan’s and Kurbskii’s letters on the basis of manuscript history, content analysis, and linguistic style. Although most scholars have not accepted Keenan’s arguments, many recognize as apocryphal some later pieces of the correspondence and some related texts; the debate and manuscript research on the question endures. Keenan’s challenge sparked a fresh round of enquiry into the political and cultural world Ivan inhabited: was he literate, classically educated, and ahead of his time in political philosophy, or was he—like grand princes, tsars, and boyars before and after him to the mid-seventeenth century—cut from the same cloth as the Muscovite warrior élite, illiterate and little educated, but fiercely loyal to the ethos of Orthodox patrimonial authority? In any case, quandaries over Ivan’s personality and motives pale in the face of Braudel’s ‘longue durée’: Ivan IV did not divert, although he did disrupt, the Daniilovich project. His government, like that of his father and grandfather, made its main task the expansion of the tsardom, the consolidation of the élite, and the integration of a large and disparate realm. Perhaps the best indicator that the Muscovite rulers had managed to increase cohesion in their realm by the end of the sixteenth century was the fact that disparate forces—service tenure landholders from the centre, Cossacks of the steppe frontier, communes of the north—mobilized in the Time of Troubles to rescue the state from foreign invasion. Moscow’s rulers had at least consolidated an élite sufficiently cohesive to hold the state together. This achievement, done at the high human cost of enserfment, was possible because of the skilful use of coercion and co-option, but especially because of the state’s minimalism. However autocratically they styled themselves, Moscow’s rulers could exert their authority in only very narrow arenas. Sixteenth-century Russia is customarily called an ‘autocracy’, taking up the appellation (samoderzhets) that Boris Godunov introduced into the tsar’s title. But if this was an autocracy, it was a pragmatically limited one.

3. From Muscovy towards St Petersburg 1598–1689

HANS-JOACHIM TORKE

From the time of Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina to the ascension of the Romanovs in 1613, Muscovy experienced uninterrupted crisis—extinction of a dynasty, foreign intervention, and tumultuous social and political upheaval. The seventeenth century witnessed a restless transition, as, amidst continuing upheaval at the dawn of modernity, Muscovy embarked on state-building, Westernization, and territorial expansion.

THE seventeenth century has long been a focus of historiographic debate. Impressed by the broad-ranging reforms of Peter the Great (1689–1725), most early historians tended to emphasize the ‘break’, juxtaposing a traditional Muscovy of the seventeenth century to a Westernizing state of the eighteenth. But for over a century specialists have realized that the Petrine reforms built upon changes initiated by his predecessors in the seventeenth century. The army, finances, state administration—favourite areas of Petrine reform—were also the subject of government reforms in the seventeenth century. While many of these reforms were driven by practical need, they reflected a desire not only to import Western technology and military experts, but also to reshape foreign and domestic policy in terms of Western ideas and theories.

Crisis: The Time of Troubles (1598–1613)

The age of transformation began with acute crisis—the ‘Time of Troubles’ (smutnoe vremia). This protracted crisis inaugurated a new period in Russian history, marked by fundamental changes that would culminate in the passing of ‘Old Russia’ and the onset of new ‘troubles’ in the 1680s. Perhaps the best schema for the Time of Troubles, devised over a century ago by the historian Sergei Platonov, divides this period into successive ‘dynastic’, ‘social’, and ‘national’ phases that followed upon one another but, to a significant degree, had some overlap.

The period begins with the extinction of the Riurikid line in 1598. The general crisis also had long-term social causes—in particular, the exhaustion of the land and its resources by the Livonian War and the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, which had devastated the boyars and triggered new restrictions on the peasants’ freedom of movement. Without the trauma of 1598, however, the ensuing disorder would probably neither have been so intense nor have persisted for the entire seventeenth century, which contemporaries aptly called a ‘rebellious age’. This first phase was portentous both because the only dynasty that had ever reigned in Russia suddenly vanished without issue, and because the ensuing events triggered the first assault on the autocracy. In the broadest sense, the old order lost a principal pillar—tradition (starina); nevertheless, there remained the spiritual support of the Orthodox Church (which held firm for several more decades) and the service nobility (which retained its resiliency until well into the eighteenth century). The year 1598 had one further consequence: a tradition-bound people could not believe that the dynasty had actually come to an end and therefore tended to support false pretenders claiming to be descendants of the Riurikids.

Muscovy responded to the extinction of its ruling dynasty by electing a new sovereign. Interestingly, no one as yet proposed to emulate other countries by electing someone from a foreign ruling house—a remarkable testament to the insularity of Muscovite society. Such a proposal, undoubtedly faced an insuperable religious obstacle—obligatory conversion to Orthodoxy. In the end the choice fell on Boris Godunov—a Russian nobleman, though not from an élite family (i.e. descending from another Riurikid line or the Lithuanian grand princes). Nonetheless, Boris had single-mindedly prepared his advancement under Tsars Ivan the Terrible (1533–84) and Fedor Ivanovich (1584–98): he himself married the daughter of a favourite in Ivan’s court; his sister Irina married Ivan’s successor, Fedor. Because the latter was personally incapable of exercising power, Godunov became regent and excluded all other competitors. After Fedor’s death, on 17 February 1598 Boris was formally ‘elected’ as Tsar Boris by a council (sobor) of approximately 600 deputies drawn from the upper clergy, the boyar duma, and representatives of the service nobility who had gathered in Moscow. Although transparently stage-managed by Boris, the council seemed to confirm that the realm had ‘found’ the candidate chosen by God Himself.

The Church, which Boris had earlier helped to establish its own Patriarchate, supported his election. The new tsar could also count on the sympathy of the lower nobility. But Boris also had to use coercion to eliminate rivals among the boyars—such as Fedor Nikitich Romanov, the head of a family with marital ties to the Riurikids, who was banished in late 1600 and forced to take monastic vows in 1601 (with the name Filaret). That tonsure effectively eliminated him from contention for worldly offices.

Nevertheless, Boris’s position was anything but secure. Apart from the fact that his government was beset with enormous burdens and problems, Boris himself failed to evoke veneration from his subjects. In part, that was because he had married the daughter of Grigorii (Maliuta) Skuratov—the oprichnik blamed for murdering Metropolitan Filipp of Novgorod in 1569. Moreover, his blatant efforts to ascend the throne lent credence to rumours that he had arranged the murder of Tsarevich Dmitrii, Ivan’s last son, in 1591. Although an investigatory commission under Vasilii Shuiskii (a rival whom Boris had deftly appointed to lead the investigation) confirmed that the death was accidental, the death of the 9-year-old Tsarevich remains a mystery to this day. Indeed, it made no sense for Boris to kill the boy: at the time of Dmitrii’s death, it was still conceivable that Fedor would father a son and avert the extinction of the Riurikid line. Nevertheless, Boris’s adversaries exploited suspicions of regicide—a view which, because of Alexander Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov (which Modest Mussorgsky later made into an opera), has persisted to the present.

Nor was Boris able to consolidate power after accession to the throne. His attempt to tighten control over administration failed—largely because of the traditional ‘Muscovite procrastination’ and corruption. His plan to reconstruct the towns also went awry, chiefly for want of a middle estate. Nor was he able to train better state servants: when, for the first time, Muscovy dispatched a contingent (eighteen men) to study in England, France, and Germany, not a single one returned. He recruited large numbers of European specialists (military officers, doctors, and artisans), but met with remonstrations from the Orthodox Church. Clearly, Boris had an open mind about the West: he not only solicited the support of ruling houses in the West, but also sought to consolidate his dynastic claims through attempts to marry his daughter Ksenia to Swedish (later Danish) princes, although such plans ultimately came to nought.

Boris attempted to establish order in noble-peasant relations, but nature herself interceded. From the early 1590s, in an attempt to protect petty nobles and to promote economic recovery, the government established the ‘forbidden years’, which—for the first time—imposed a blanket prohibition on peasant movement during the stipulated year. In autumn 1601, however, Boris’s government had to retreat and reaffirm the peasants’ right to movement: a catastrophic crop failure in the preceding summer caused massive famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The following year the government again had to rescind the ‘forbidden year’, a step that virtually legalized massive peasant flight. Moreover the government welcomed movement towards the southern border area (appropriately called the dikoe pole, or ‘wild field’), where they helped to reinforce the Cossacks and the fortified towns recently established as a buffer between Muscovy and the Crimean Tatars. But many peasants sought new landowners in central Muscovy adding to the social unrest. In fact, in 1603 the government had to use troops to suppress rebellious peasants, bondsmen (kholopy), and even déclassé petty nobles.

That uprising signalled the onset of phase two—the social crisis. This stage, however, overlapped with the dynastic crisis: as the general sense of catastrophe mounted, rumours suddenly spread that Tsarevich Dmitrii had not died at Uglich, but had miraculously survived in Poland-Lithuania. In 1601 a pretender surfaced in Poland, winning the support of adventurous magnates (in particular, the voevoda of Sandomierz, Jerzy Mniszech); he was actually a fugitive monk, Grigorii, who had fled from Chudov Monastery in Moscow and originally came from the petty nobility, bearing the name Iurii Otrepev before tonsure. That, at least, was the public claim of Boris Godunov, who himself had fallen ill and steadily lost the ability to rule. That declaration had no more effect than his representations to the Polish king, Zygmunt III, who remained officially uninvolved, but had secret assurances from the ‘False Dmitrii’ that Poland would receive Smolensk and other territories were he to succeed.

When the Polish nobles launched their campaign from Lvov in August 1604, their forces numbered only 2,200 cavalrymen. When they reached Moscow in June 1605, however, this army had grown tenfold, for many others—especially Cossacks—had joined the triumphal march to Moscow.

By the time they entered the Kremlin, Boris himself had already died (April 1605), and his 16-year-old son Fedor was promptly executed. Of Boris’s reign, only the acquisition of western Siberia (with outposts as remote as the Enisei) and the expansion southward were achievements of enduring significance.

The pretender initially succeeded in persuading the populace that he was the real Dmitrii. The boyars were less credulous; several were judged guilty of a conspiracy under the leadership of Vasilii Shuiskii. But the pretender had the support of Boris’s enemies (seeking personal advantage) and those who believed that the ‘Pseudo-Dmitrii’ (ostensibly a ‘Riurikid’) would restore the old order. Dmitrii, however, had secretly converted to Roman Catholicism, promised enormous territories to his Polish benefactors (especially Mniszech, whose daughter Maryna he had married), and even agreed to permit missionary activities by Catholic priests and to participate in a crusade against the Turks. Before fulfilling these commitments, he attempted to ensure the support of the petty nobility, for example, by issuing a decree in 1606 that re-established the five-year statute of limitations on the forcible return of fugitive peasants.

None the less, Dmitrii failed to consolidate his hold on power. Above all, the Polish presence exposed old Russian culture to massive Western influence and provoked a strong reaction, especially against the foreigners’ behaviour—their clothing, customs, and contempt for Orthodox religious rites. Popular unrest reached its peak during the wedding ceremonies in May 1606 (intended to supplement Catholic rites conducted earlier in Cracow, though without formal marriage of the betrothed). Offended by the provocative behaviour of Polish aristocrats, Vasilii Shuiskii and fellow boyars organized a conspiracy that resulted in the overthrow and murder of the ‘False Dmitrii’.

It is hardly surprising that Shuiskii himself mounted the throne—this time ‘chosen’ by fellow boyars, not a council of the realm. The scion of an old princely line and descendant of Alexander Nevsky he represented the hope of aristocratic lines pushed into the background by Boris and Dmitrii. During the coronation ceremonies, Shuiskii openly paid homage to the boyars, not only promising to restore the right of the boyar duma to judge cases of capital punishment (denied by Ivan the Terrible), but also vowing neither to punish an entire family for the offence of a single member nor to subject their property to arbitrary confiscation. These concessions did not constitute an electoral capitulation for a limited monarchy, but were meant only to ensure a return to genuine autocracy.

Shuiskii immediately faced a serious challenge—the Bolotnikov rebellion, the first great peasant uprising in the history of Russia. To oppose the ‘boyar tsar’, Ivan Bolotnikov—himself a fugitive bondsman—mobilized a motley force of peasants and Cossacks from the south (who for several years had been fomenting disorder in the region), service nobles with military experience, and some well-born adversaries of Vasilii. The rebels did manage to encircle Moscow in October 1606, but their movement collapsed when petty nobles—alarmed by the insistent demand of peasants for freedom—abandoned Bolotnikov to join the other side. Bolotnikov, who had poor administrative skills, retreated to Tula; a year later, after months of siege by government troops, the town finally capitulated and turned Bolotnikov over for execution. In the interim, Vasilii cleverly attempted to win the nobility’s allegiance by promulgating a peasant statute (9 March 1607) that extended the statute of limitations on the forcible recovery of fugitive peasants from five to fifteen years. The decree answered their primary demand: by tripling the period of the statute of limitations, his decree greatly increased the chances for finding and recovering fugitives. The statute also afforded some legal protection to the bondsmen: henceforth they might be held in bondage only on the basis of a written document (kabala).

Hardly had Vasilii eliminated the threat from peasants and Cossacks when he faced a new menace from the Poles: in late 1607 yet another pretender, likewise claiming to be Tsarevich Dmitrii, crossed the border with an army of Polish-Lithuanian warriors. The past of this second False Dmitrii is murky but he apparently came from the milieu of the first. Although the Polish government and Catholic Church remained in the background, members of the Polish nobility under Jan Sapieha participated in his siege of Moscow in mid-1608. After establishing headquarters in the village of Tushino, he was joined by the wife of the first False Dmitrii, ‘Tsarina Maryna’, who ‘recognized’ the husband who had so miraculously survived. Filaret Romanov (whom the first False Dmitrii elevated to metropolitan, thereby facilitating a return to politics) also made his way to Tushino. As other adversaries of Vasilii also came, Tushino became the centre of a counter-government, with its own administration, and was recognized as the legitimate power by much of the realm.

Simultaneously, several towns along the upper Volga established their own army (the ‘first contingent’), which proceeded to liberate Vladimir, Nizhnii Novgorod, and Kostroma. This army evidently had no ties with Vasilii, who was forced to accept the assistance of some 5,000 Swedish mercenaries.

Muscovy now entered phase three—the ‘national crisis’: in May 1609 the Polish Sejm approved a request by King Zygmunt III for funds to invade Russia—nominally under the pretext of repulsing a Swedish threat to Poland-Lithuania. Thus, by the autumn of 1609, two foreign armies—Swedish and Polish—were operating on Russian soil: the Poles concentrated on taking Smolensk, while the Swedes forced Vasilii to cede Korela and Livonia as compensation for their help. After some initial tensions, Moscow and Sweden soon enjoyed military success, overrunning the camp at Tushino at the end of 1609; a few months later the Swedish troops marched into Moscow. As most of the Poles retreated toward Smolensk, the second False Dmitrii settled down in Kaluga, but was slain by his own supporters at the end of 1610.

Nevertheless, Vasilii’s hold on power steadily deteriorated, partly because of suspicions that the jealous tsar was responsible for the mysterious death of a popular commander, M. V. Skopin-Shuiskii. Vasilii’s forces, moreover, had failed to liberate Smolensk from Polish control.

As Vasilii’s power waned, in February 1610 his foes struck a deal with the king of Poland: his son Władysław, successor to the Polish throne, would become tsar on condition that he promise to uphold Orthodoxy and to allow the election of a monarch in accordance with Polish customs. He also had to guarantee current landholding relations and official ranks (chiny), the legislative power of the boyar duma and an imperial council (analogues to the Sejm and Senate), and the preservation of peasant dependence. The agreement also provided for a military alliance between the two states. Thus, for the first time in Russian history, élites set terms for accession to the throne. These conditions were reaffirmed in a new agreement on 17 August 1610, with the added proviso that the future tsar convert to Orthodoxy.

A month earlier, the conspirators (who evidently included Filaret) had already deposed Vasilii and forced him to take monastic vows. The Polish negotiator was hetman S. Żótkiewski, who had conquered Moscow and, as commander of the Polish-Lithuanian occupation, held power in the capital. The agreement provided for a council of seven boyars (legitimized by an ad hoc council of the realm), which, with a changing composition, sought to govern during the interregnum. The boyars hoped to use the Polish tsar to overcome the internal strife, but their attempt would ultimately founder on the lesser nobility’s fear of a boyar oligarchy.

That Muscovy obtained neither a Polish tsar nor a limited monarchy in 1610 was due to a surprising turn of events in Smolensk. There the Polish king received a ‘great legation’ from Moscow (with over 1,200 persons) to discuss the details of succession. Despite the mediation of Żótkiewski, the negotiations broke down as the two parties refused to compromise—chiefly over the demand by Russians (especially patriarch Germogen) that the future tsar convert to Orthodoxy, and over the Polish insistence that Moscow cede Smolensk. Zygmunt now announced that he himself wished to become tsar, which effectively eliminated any possibility of conversion to Orthodoxy. The tensions were soon apparent in Moscow, where the high-handed behaviour of the Poles and their Russian supporters triggered a popular uprising in February-March 1611. The leader of resistance was Patriarch Germogen, who issued impassioned proclamations against the Poles before finally being interned. In April the king had members of the ‘great legation’ (including Metropolitan Filaret and the former Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii) deported to Poland and put on exhibition before the Sejm.

All this culminated in a great national uprising led by towns on the Volga. The provinces were still aflame with unrest and disorder: by mid-1611 eight pretenders claimed to be the ‘true’ Tsarevich Dmitrii; countless bands of peasants and Cossacks, purporting to fight for ‘freedom’, engulfed the land in conflict and plunder; Swedes tightened their hold on Novgorod (intended as a pawn to press other territorial demands) and ruled the entire north; and the Tatars invaded from the south.

In response Nizhnii Novgorod and Vologda raised the ‘second levy’, which united with the former supporters of the second False Dmitrii and advanced on Moscow. The army was led by P. Liapunov, the district governor (voevoda) of Riazan; like other district governors, he was originally a military commander, but had since become head of civil administration in his district. The supreme council of his army functioned as a government (for example, assessing taxes), but avoided any promise of freedom for fugitive peasants once the strife had ended. Despite written agreements, Liapunov’s forces suffered from profound internal conflict, especially between peasants and petty nobles; Liapunov himself was murdered in the summer of 1611, marking an end to the ‘second contingent’. The ‘Council of Seven Boyars’ in Moscow, meanwhile, continued to hope for the arrival of Władysław.

The ‘third levy’, though beset with internal differences, nevertheless liberated Moscow in October 1612. This army had been created a year earlier by K. Minin, the elected head of Nizhnii Novgorod, who persuaded the population to endorse a special tax amount (up to 30 per cent of their property). Many nobles joined this army, including its commander—Prince Dmitrii Pozharskii, who established headquarters in Iaroslavl. Minin and Pozharskii later became national heroes, memorialized to this day in a monument on Red Square. But the critical factor in their victory was the decision of Cossacks under Prince Trubetskoi to join their side in the midst of the battle.

The liberation of Moscow did not mean an end to the turbulent ‘Time of Troubles’: for years to come, large parts of the realm remained under Swedish and Polish occupation. But it was at least possible to elect a new tsar in 1613, a date traditionally accepted as the end to the Time of Troubles. Still, the ramifications of this era were momentous and enduring, especially the large-scale intrusion of the West, which generated much commentary—and controversy—among writers such as Ivan Timofeev, Avramii Palitsyn, Semen Shakhovskoi, and Ivan Khvorostinin. And, despite the election of a new tsar, society became more self-conscious as it entered upon decades of tumult in the ‘rebellious century’.

New Beginnings: The First Romanov (1613–1645)

In 1613 Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov—Tsar Michael in popular literature—was only one of several candidates for the throne of Muscovy. Although not yet even 17 years of age, he had already been considered for this position three years earlier. But circumstances were now more complex: in contrast to Boris’s election in 1598, this time some proposed to summon a foreigner—either Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg or the Swedish prince, Karl Phillip.

Because of the patriotic mood after the expulsion of Poles from the Kremlin, however, there was nevertheless a strong preference to choose a Russian candidate. Rivalry among candidates eventually eliminated all but one—the young Romanov, widely regarded as a surrogate for his father Filaret, still in Polish detention; the latter’s martyr-like captivity, in fact, contributed to his son’s election. Michael came from a relatively young boyar family, which first gained prominence when it provided the first wife of Ivan the Terrible. But the old boyar clans, given to bickering among themselves, savoured this humble background—and Michael’s youth, which promised to make him easier to manipulate. The electoral assembly of 700 delegates was initially unable to reach a consensus, but on 21 February 1613 finally acceded to vigorous agitation from nearby towns that Michael be chosen as the compromise candidate. In the aftermath of the Time of Troubles, when the throne had changed hands so frequently, few could have foreseen that this dynasty would remain pure-blooded until 1762 and, with the infusion of some outside (mainly German) elements, retain the throne until 1917.

In contrast to Shuiskii, Michael made no concessions to obtain the throne. Indeed, the participants themselves wanted to restore the autocracy ‘of the good old days’ that had ensured order and stability. In foreign policy, restoration meant expulsion of foreign foes; in domestic policy, it meant resolving the conflict between landholders and peasants, which had disintegrated into virtual chaos. Despite this call for restoration, the election did not bring an end either to popular unrest or to the intrusion of Western culture.

The re-establishment of autocracy naturally did not mean that Michael—above all, given his youth—ruled alone. Initially, he was under the influence of powerful favourites from the Mstislavskii and Saltykov clans. After 1619, when peace with Poland brought an exchange of prisoners (including Filaret), the young tsar fell under the dominance of his father, who became a virtual co-ruler and even bore the tsarist title of ‘Great Sovereign’: in Muscovy it was simply inconceivable that a father might occupy a lower rank than his son. This paternal dominance also corresponded to their personalities, Filaret being energetic, his son meek and pious.

Foreign Policy and War

The accomplishments before Filaret’s return, however, should not be underestimated. The primary task was to equip an army to fight the Swedes and Poles; because of the economic destruction and havoc wrought by marauding bands of peasants and Cossacks, however, it proved extremely difficult to raise the requisite funds. To obtain the needed levies, Michael summoned several ‘councils of the realm’ (sobory); although these could not issue binding resolutions (contrary to what historians once assumed), they provided the government with information about economic conditions in the provinces. The government used this information to levy special taxes—normally 5 per cent, sometimes up to 10 per cent, of the property value and the business turnover. In addition, it forced the richest merchants of the realm, the Stroganovs of Novgorod, to make contributions and loans. By 1618 the government had raised seven special levies to cut a budget deficit that, in 1616, had run to over 340,000 roubles.

Moscow finally concluded peace with its two adversaries. After Vasilii had been deposed, the Swedes remained ensconced in Novgorod and Ingermanland—perhaps with the intent of preventing an alliance between Muscovy and Poland. But Gustavus Adolphus decided to make peace, partly because the resistance of Novgorodians was so intense, partly because he needed Moscow as an ally in an impending conflict that would mushroom into the Thirty Years War. On 25 February 1617 the two sides signed the Treaty of Stolbovo, on terms favourable to Moscow: although the latter had to pay 20,000 silver roubles and to cede Ingermanland and eastern Karelia, in exchange it obtained the return of Novgorod and Swedish recognition of the tsarist title. Nevertheless, the agreement reaffirmed Swedish predominance on the Baltic Sea for another century.

Relations with Poland-Lithuania were more difficult. The Poles declined to recognize Michael; the Russians naturally refused to accept Władysław as tsar. After mediation efforts collapsed, the Poles launched a new military offensive in 1617 and were able to attack the city of Moscow in the autumn of 1618. That same year, however, the two sides agreed to an armistice of fourteen and a half years: both were exhausted from the conflict, the Polish Sejm (confronted with the outbreak of the Thirty Years War) denied more funds, and Moscow fervently wanted an exchange of prisoners. The armistice, signed in the village of Deulino (north of Moscow), compelled Moscow to renounce its claim to west Russian areas (Severia, Chernigov, and—with a heavy heart—Smolensk). The question of Smolensk, together with the Poles’ refusal to renounce their claim to the throne of Moscow, carried the seeds of future conflict.

Internal Affairs and the Smolensk War

After his return in 1619, Filaret became the patriarch of Moscow (which, for the sake of propriety, was formally bestowed by the patriarch of Jerusalem). The world now seemed to be in order, even in the relations between father and son. Nevertheless, the government faced serious problems; in addition to seeking vengeance on Poland, Filaret had to address the question of tax reform. To finance the Streltsy (a semi-regular military unit of musketeers created to defend the court and borders), in 1614 the government already imposed some new special levies—‘Streltsy money’ from townspeople and ‘Streltsy grain’ from peasants. The government also increased the ‘postal money’, the largest regular tax. It assessed these levies on the basis of a land tax unit (sokha), which took soil quality into account, but was none the less so high that many commoners preferred to abandon their community and become indentured bondsmen of a secular lord, a monastery, or tax-free town. Because of the principle of collective responsibility (krugovaia poruka), those who remained behind had to assume the obligations of the bondsmen and thus pay even higher taxes. Ever since 1584 the government had periodically prohibited this form of tax evasion, but with scant effect. Filaret also failed to achieve a satisfactory solution, partly because he himself was an interested party: the Patriarchate owned approximately a thousand plots of land in Moscow, which were duly exempted from the ban. In effect, the government only forbade indentureship, not the acceptance of tax evaders. More successful in the long run was the gradual conversion of the tax base from land to household, a process that commenced in the 1620s but only reached completion in 1679.

Filaret’s policy towards towns was still less successful. The basic problem was that, without a strong middle class, the towns did not constitute juridical entities. Filaret moved the rich merchants to Moscow to serve in central administrative offices (prikazy), but that policy only emptied towns at the provincial level. Moreover, the government put foreign policy over the interests of indigenous merchants: foreigners, especially British, engaged in retail trade throughout Muscovy, enjoyed exemption from most customs duties, and even had fishing rights in the White Sea. These privileges were the target of a collective petition from thirty-one Russian merchants in 1627—the first of numerous such complaints in the next decades. The townsmen of Moscow also complained of other burdens, such as billeting, in a collective petition of 1629.

In 1621–2 Filaret considered a new attempt to reconquer Smolensk and compel the Poles to recognize the Romanov dynasty. On the basis of information from a council of the realm, however, he realized that the country was simply unprepared for such an undertaking. But the Thirty Years War soon afforded an opportunity for vengeance; as an important ally of Sweden, Moscow was later named in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Although Moscow did not directly participate in the conflict, from 1628 it delivered commodities such as grain (which, as a state monopoly, yielded a huge profit) and, more important, in 1632–4 went to war with Poland, which was forced to divert forces to the east. Meanwhile, with Swedish aid, the Russians built their military force into a standing army with approximately 66,000 soldiers (the so-called ‘Troops of the New Order’), which included approximately 2,500 Western officers under the Scottish colonel, Alexander Leslie. Nevertheless, Filaret, who died in 1633 in the midst of the war, had overestimated Moscow’s power: the campaign proceeded so badly that the commander-inchief, M. B. Shein, in the wake of mass desertion by his soldiers (which was hardly unusual at the time) and the futile siege of Smolensk, was found guilty of treason and executed. The two sides agreed to a new peace at Polianovka in 1634. Wladystaw did renounce his claim to the tsarist throne, but in exchange Moscow had to pay 20,000 roubles and to return all the areas that it had occupied.

The Final Years

Nevertheless, the war drew Muscovy even closer to the West. Besides the Troops of the New Order (temporarily disbanded for lack of funds), the most tangible sign of Europeanization was the influx of Western merchants and entrepreneurs. Dominance shifted from the English to the Dutch: Andries Winius obtained monopoly rights to construct ironworks in the towns of Tula and Serpukhov (the first blast furnace began operations in 1637); the Walloon Coyet established the first glass plant in the environs of Moscow. The driving impulse, as in other spheres, was the demand for military armaments.

For the time being, the Orthodox Church was able to contain Western influence in cultural matters. The main spiritual influence, instead, came from Ukraine—for example, a proposal in 1640 by the metropolitan of Kiev, Petr Mohyla, to establish an ecclesiastical academy in Moscow, and the import of books with the ‘Lithuanian imprint’ (which, because of their Roman Catholic content, were prohibited). The Church also denounced as ‘heresy’ the correction of church books, which had commenced in 1618 (in conjunction with the development of printing) and sought to compare Russian liturgical texts with the Greek originals.

The religious tensions were also accompanied by increasing social conflict. In 1637 the tsar’s service people filed their first collective petition and later persuaded him to reduce their service obligations by half. But as yet the government spurned their other demands—for a decentralization of the judicial system (to avoid expensive trials, corruption, and procrastination in Moscow) and for the total abolition of a statute of limitations on the return of runaway peasants. Michael did, however, extend the statute of limitations for the recovery of fugitives (from five to nine years). After another petition in 1641, he increased the term to ten years for the general fugitives and fifteen years for peasants who had been forcibly seized by other landowners.

In foreign affairs too the tsar had to make a difficult decision. In 1637 the Don Cossacks of Muscovy attacked the Turkish fortress of Azov and for four long years held out against the Ottoman army and fleet. A council of the realm in 1642, however, expressed deep reservations, and the tsar persuaded the Cossacks to abandon the fortress. War with Turkey would have certainly entailed immense losses, and the Sultan had already threatened to exterminate the entire Orthodox population of his empire. Similarly, Moscow continued to spurn the centuries-old urging of the West for a crusade against the Ottoman Empire.

By contrast, Muscovy’s eastward expansion proved far more successful. After the first penetration into Siberia in the late sixteenth century, the government had sanctioned—sometimes ex post facto—the conquests of Cossack units acting on their own initiative: they thus founded Eniseisk in 1619 and Iakutsk in 1632, and reached the Pacific at the Sea of Okhotsk in 1639. To the south Moscow established timid contacts with China, sending its first envoy to Peking in 1619.

In general, the first Romanov tsar achieved a certain consolidation, but could not quell mounting social and spiritual ferment that would soon explode into major upheavals during the next reign.

The End of an Era: Tsar Alexis (1645–1676)

The New Tsar

The new tsar—father of Peter the Great—embodied the cultural confrontation of the seventeenth century: devotion to old Russian tradition versus attraction to the achievements of West European civilization. Tsar Alexis (Aleksei Mikhailovich) overcame this cultural conflict, which proved profoundly disturbing in domestic life, through success in foreign affairs. His eventful reign was marked by a fierce battle between the old and the new, which indeed was reflected in the personality of the tsar himself. On the one hand, he took Ivan the Terrible as the ideal model and understood old Russian autocracy as rulership that was simultaneously gentle and harsh; on the other hand, he was the first tsar to sign laws on his own authority, to permit realistic portraits of his person, and to receive and write personal letters in the real meaning of the word. Throughout his lifetime he sought friendships—for example, with Patriarch Nikon and the head of the foreign office, A. L. Ordin-Nashchokin, whose human individuality (like that of the tsar) for the first time is reflected in contemporary sources. Indeed, the pre-revolutionary historian Platonov suggested that the individual personality made its first appearance in old Russia.

The Moscow Uprising of 1648

The young tsar’s first friend, brother-in-law, and former teacher, was B. I. Morozov. One of many ‘powerful magnates’ (sil′ nye liudi), Morozov amassed enormous wealth by taking personal control of the most important and lucrative central offices (prikazy). By the time of his death, Morozov owned 9,100 peasant households (55,000 peasants) in nineteen districts—along with numerous manufactories, mills, and illicit distilleries. Tsar Alexis, following an order from his father, also empowered Morozov to investigate government administration and to conduct reforms to reduce social tensions. Morozov could in fact boast of certain achievements, but some of his measures aroused popular discontent. Thus, after being forced to cancel a new salt tax, in 1648 he attempted to collect arrears from the preceding two years—in effect tripling the tax burden for 1648.

This measure ignited a major uprising in June 1648, which together with the fires that swept through Moscow, cost approximately two thousand lives. Crowds murdered high-ranking, corrupt officials; with tears in his eyes, the tsar could do nothing more for Morozov than secure Morozov’s banishment. By the end of July the rebellion generated more than seventy petitions that led to some concrete changes, including the cancellation of tax arrears as well as monetary levies for the tsar’s bodyguards, the Streltsy. The latter, in fact, felt threatened by the new foreign troops and tended to support the rebels. Morozov did return in late October, but was never again to play a major role. The government faced the fearful spectre of a new Time of Troubles, especially when nobles and merchants aggressively pressed demands, sometimes even filing joint petitions. This solidarity, and the fact that Moscow itself was practically in rebel hands, forced the government in June 1648 to accede to an ultimatum that it convoke a council of the realm. The council, which convened that autumn, elected to compile a new law code (the Ulozhenie), which was promulgated on 29 January 1649 to replace the law code (sudebnik) of 1550.

At least 8.5 per cent of the 967 articles in this law code derived from initiatives of the population. It also drew upon earlier legislation and the Lithuanian Statute (from which came the first formal defence of the tsar and court). In general, it conceded many of the demands that had been raised during the preceding decades. The most famous was the establishment of serfdom, which at first only bound the peasant to the soil (i.e. restricted their mobility). The preparations for enserfment had been laid by earlier decrees extending the time-limit for the search and return of fugitive peasants; as early as February 1646, the government indicated its intention to issue a total ban on peasant movement. The law code thereby satisfied the nobility’s demand to retrieve runaways without any time-limit. This initial bondage to the soil would evolve into a far more comprehensive ‘serfdom’ in the eighteenth century. Significantly, the prohibition on mobility also applied to the towns: anyone who owed taxes could not change their residence. The law code also forbade boyars to accept taxpayers as ‘bondsmen’ (kholopy); it also attacked the special interests of the Church by forbidding the clergy to accept landed estates and by reducing the competence of ecclesiastical courts. At the same time, however, the government still repulsed demands to decentralize the judicial system and to expand locally elected government.

Hence the victory of the petty nobility and townspeople did not mean a weakening of autocracy. On the contrary the uprising impelled the tsar to take measures that had been long deferred and that served primarily to strengthen the bonds between autocracy and the lower nobility.

The law code itself did not address the long-standing grievances of the Russian merchants against foreign competition. But the government found a pretext to expel foreigners on 1 June 1649, when Alexis expressed his outrage over the execution of Charles I and banished the English from domestic trade in Muscovy. In 1654 he extended the prohibition to merchants from Holland and Hamburg. In general, the law code (published in a press run of 2,400 copies and distributed to all officials as the first law code) did more to bolster the old order than to build a new one. It was, consequently, already outdated by the time of Peter the Great. Remarkably enough, however, it officially remained in force until 1 January 1835, as Alexis’s successors found themselves unable to compile a new code or even to issue a revised edition.

Continuing Instability

After the bitter experience of 1648, the tsar never again let the initiative slip from his grasp during subsequent urban uprisings. New disorders erupted three years later in Novgorod and Pskov; located on the western border, the two cities had always held a special status because of their commercial relations and were especially opposed to the competition of Western merchants. The discontent intensified because of the government’s pro-Swedish policies, which, in accordance with the Peace of Stolbovo of 1617, required Muscovy to deliver grain to Sweden; that, however, caused higher grain prices at home and produced particular hardship for a grain-importing area like Pskov. The result was an uprising that erupted first in Pskov and soon spread to Novgorod. After Alexis’s forces occupied the latter city and carried out several executions, the people of Pskov peacefully surrendered, bringing the rebellion to an end.

In 1662 the tsar faced far greater peril during the ‘coppercoin uprising’ in Moscow. The unrest itself was due to the war begun in 1654 against Poland-Lithuania: to finance the war, the government not only assessed special taxes and loans, but also minted copper coins that the people deemed to be worthless. Meanwhile, the owners of copper kitchenware bribed the mint masters to make coins from their copper pots; when the guilty officials were given only a light punishment, popular anger only intensified. The copper minting also caused inflation: whereas one copper rouble was equal to one silver rouble in 1658, this ratio rose to four to one by 1661, and then jumped to fifteen to one two years later. Compounded by other hardships, popular discontent in the summer of 1662 led to the formation of mobs, which demanded to speak to the tsar himself and moved en masse towards his summer residence in Kolomenskoe, south of Moscow. After Alexis promised to investigate the matter, the throng headed back towards Moscow. On the way, however, they came upon other rebels and decided to return to Kolomenskoe, which once again found itself in peril. This time the tsar ordered his Streltsy to disperse the crowd (now some nine thousand strong) with force; in the aftermath sixty-three rebels were executed, and many others sent into exile.

The ‘rebellious century’ was not limited to urban revolts: in 1670–1 peasants joined the greatest rebellion of the seventeenth century—a mass insurrection that began on the periphery under the leadership of Stepan (‘Stenka’) Razin. The rebellion sprang from the ranks of the Don Cossacks, who lived south of Muscovy’s ever-expanding border and had their own autonomous military order (military council as well as the election of the ataman as chief and other officials). Through the influx of fugitive peasants, bondsmen, and petty townsmen, the Cossacks had multiplied to the point where they had their own ‘proletariat’—some ten to twenty thousand Cossacks who could no longer support themselves by tilling the land. Their plight was aggravated by Moscow’s decision to reduce its paid ‘service Cossacks’ to a mere 1,000 persons. War with Poland in 1654–67 increased the flight of people to the untamed southern steppes (dikoe pole). Although the government was not unhappy to see the strengthening of barriers against the Crimean Tatars, it promulgated a statute of limitations on fugitives and ordered the forcible return of 10,000 fugitives. Amidst this unrest, in 1667 Stepan Razin summoned Cossacks to join a traditional campaign of plunder and led some 2,000 Cossacks to the lower Volga, ultimately reaching the Persian coast in 1668–9. Over the next two years, however, the expedition turned into a popular rebellion against landowners and state authorities. With some 20,000 supporters, Razin prepared to strike at Moscow itself. Although he did establish a Cossack regime in Astrakhan and issued radical promises to divide all property equally, he had no coherent political programme and explicitly declared autocracy inviolable. In Simbirsk his forces attracted peasants, some non-Russian peoples, and petty townsmen and service people from the middle Volga. In the spring of 1671, however, Razin was betrayed by his own Cossack superiors: handed over to tsarist authorities, he was later executed in Moscow.

Cossacks and Borderland Politics

Cossacks, certainly those on the Dnieper, exerted a major influence on Alexis’s foreign policy. Indeed, together with the Moscow uprising, their actions made 1648 a watershed in Russian history: under the leadership of hetman Bohdan Khmelnitskii, they rebelled against their Polish-Lithuanian authorities. They had several main grievances: the oppression of Ukrainian peasants by Polish magnates and their Jewish stewards, discrimination against the Orthodox Church by Roman Catholicism, and a reduction in Cossack registration (i.e. the number of Cossacks in the paid service of the Polish king). Khmelnitskii hoped to achieve his goal—formation of a separate Cossack republic of nobles—with the aid of the Moscow tsar. The latter, while sympathetic to the idea of protecting his Orthodox brethren, was nevertheless exceedingly cautious: support for the Cossacks clearly meant war with Poland-Lithuania. Although Moscow yearned to settle old scores (dating back to its defeat in 1634 and above all the forfeiture of Smolensk), as yet it did not feel strong enough for such an undertaking. It was the Orthodox Church, particularly after Nikon’s elevation to the Patriarchate in mid-1652, that induced Moscow to support the Cossacks in February 1653.

For Moscow, of course, this co-operation was conceivable only if it entailed Cossack recognition of the tsar’s sovereignty, and Khmelnitskii duly complied, taking a unilateral vow of loyalty in Pereiaslavl on 8 January 1654. Russian and Soviet historians subsequently portrayed this oath as a merger of Ukraine with Muscovy, even a ‘reunification’ of Muscovy with Kiev Rus. By contrast, Ukrainian historiography depicts this oath as the beginning of an independent ‘hetman state’, which lasted until the time of Catherine the Great. In reality however, the oath merely signified nominal subordination and guaranteed the hetman and his followers a social and legal order with a considerable autonomy, even in foreign affairs (except for relations with Poland and the Ottomans). Although Alexis henceforth proclaimed himself ‘Autocrat of All Great and Little Rus’, incorporation of Ukraine into the Russian Empire did not actually come until the eighteenth century.

The anticipated war, which commenced immediately in 1654 and lasted until 1667, was waged in western Russia. The very first year Moscow reconquered the long-sought Smolensk, and the next year its forces captured Minsk and Vilna as well. For Moscow, the only dark cloud was the fact that their quick victories had tempted the Swedes to intervene and attempt to seize the Polish ports in the Baltic. In 1656 Moscow opened hostilities against Sweden and by the following year had conquered most of Livonia. But Reval (Tallin) and Riga withstood the Russian siege; confronted with new military hostilities with Poland, Moscow concluded the Peace of Cardis with Sweden in 1661 on the basis of status quo ante bellum. In 1667 Moscow and Poland agreed to the armistice of Andrusovo, with a compromise partition of Ukraine: Poland renounced its west Russian gains of 1618, Moscow its claims to right-bank Ukraine (i.e. west of the Dnieper), with the exception of Kiev. The armistice was of considerable significance: it marked the beginning of the end for Poland’s status as a great power in Eastern Europe but also brought an epoch-making reversal in Moscow’s relationship to the Turks.

Initially, the driving force behind foreign policy was Ordin-Nashchokin, the Western-oriented ‘foreign minister’. As the district governor (voevoda) of Pskov in the first half of the 1660s he had excelled in reducing social tensions, and he was also responsible for the ‘New Commercial Statute’ (1667), which strengthened the merchant class on the basis of mercantilistic ideas. His Western orientation contributed significantly to the Europeanization of Russia, which now became still more pronounced. In 1671 he was succeeded as head of the foreign chancellery by A. S. Matveev, who had married a Scottish woman (Lady Hamilton) and who was still more open-minded about the West. In contrast to Ordin-Nashchokin, who was interested chiefly in the Baltic Sea, Matveev was far more concerned about the southern border. In 1672, in the wake of Andrusovo, Moscow reversed a centuries-old tendency and now urged the West to support Poland against the Turks. The reason for this shift was simple: Moscow itself now shared a common border with the Ottoman Empire.

Western Influence and Church Schism

Acquisition of left-bank Ukraine was important for yet another reason: it brought an influx of learned men, and their new ideas, from that region. One was F. M. Rtishchev, who introduced polyphonic music, founded the first poorhouse and first hospital, and brought Ukrainian educational influence to Moscow (with the establishment of a school at Andreev Monastery). For the first time the state began to take up social tasks, in effect embarking on the path of Western absolutism. Similarly, it also began to require more education of those in civil service, created state economic monopolies, and established a ‘Secret Chancellery’ (originally just the tsar’s private chancellery, but after 1663 a kind of economic administration that foreigners often regarded as a supervisory or police organ). Beginning in 1649 it refurbished its ‘troops of the new order’ and in 1668 even attempted to construct the first naval fleet (its five ships, however, being torched during the Razin rebellion in Astrakhan).

Alexis also behaved differently, especially after his marriage in 1671 to a woman who was more open-minded about the West. In 1672 the tsar and his family attended the first theatrical performance in Russia: the tragicomedy Ahasuerus and Esther, composed by the Lutheran pastor Johann Gottfried Grigorii. The play, which lasted nine (!) hours and was staged at the family’s summer residence in Preobrazhenskoe, marked the emergence of a ‘court theatre’; the following year it staged the ballet Orpheus und Eurydice by Heinrich Schütz. And table music also became common at the court.

The Orthodox Church opposed the penetration of Western culture, but with declining effectiveness. However, its will did initially prevail: in 1652, for example, foreigners were forcibly resettled from Moscow to its environs—the North Europeans (‘Germans’) to the so-called ‘new German suburb’ (novaia nemetskaia sloboda) and the Poles to special districts. Subsequently, however, the influence of the Church steadily declined. One reason was the establishment of the ‘Monastery Chancellery’ in 1649, a secular body responsible for judicial matters involving both lay and ecclesiastical parties. Its creation was a distant analogue to the ‘Church Regulatory Charters’ in the West. Two other critical factors in the Church’s decline were the ‘Nikon affair’ and the schism.

In the first half of the seventeenth century the Church had already split into opposing camps of reformers and conservatives, their position partly traceable to Ukrainian influences, but also to the practical problem of correcting liturgical books. With respect to the latter, the central question was whether to standardize texts on the basis of Greek originals presumed to be uncorrupted (the opinion of Patriarch Iosif), or concentrate on internal spiritual life (as demanded by a group of clergy under Vonifatev, the father-confessor of Tsar Alexis). The latter’s circle of ‘Friends of God’ (subsequently known as the ‘Zealots of Piety’ in the literature) included the future Patriarch Nikon, who served as metropolitan of Novgorod for three years before his elevation to the patriarchate in 1652. As patriarch he expanded the correction of texts into a fundamental reform of church ritual in 1653; the primary goal was to reverse the separate development of Russian Orthodoxy that had been in progress ever since the fall of Constantinople in the mid-fifteenth century. Moreover, by re-establishing ritual unity with the Kiev metropolitanate, such reform could also reinforce the political union with Ukraine.

These reforms, however, evoked fierce opposition from his former friends in the Zealots of Piety. Among them was the cathedral archpriest, Avvakum Petrovich, who became Nikon’s intransigent adversary and leader of the ‘old ritualists’ or ‘old believers’—that is, those who remained loyal to the old rites and defended the national religious idea against ‘re-Hellenization’. Nikon, however, enjoyed the support and friendship of the tsar; by 1653 Avvakum and his friends were already imprisoned, and two years later Avvakum himself was banished into exile, where he wrote his autobiography, the first in Russian history and justly famous for its literary and stylistic qualities. In 1667 a church council upheld Nikon’s reforms and excommunicated its opponents, thereby formalizing the schism (raskol) in the Church.

Naturally, the causes of the schism went much deeper than a blind attachment to the old rites. Rather, the Old Belief represented a much broader social movement—a protest against enserfment, the centralizing activities of the government, and the intrusion of Western innovations. It also acquired apocalyptical expectations (especially in the north) and, after martyrdom of Bishop Pavel of Kolomna in 1657, claimed many more victims, Avvakum himself being burnt at the stake in 1682. The Old Believers also established a powerful centre at the Solovetskii Monastery on the White Sea, where the resistance of some 500 monks and fugitives from the Razin rebellion grew into an outright uprising. With a heavy heart Tsar Alexis used force to suppress the rebellion; the monastery, however, fiercely resisted and was finally taken only through betrayal.

The council of 1667 recognized the Nikonian reforms as valid, but also took measures against Nikon himself. At issue was his conception of the patriarch’s power: this peasant’s son stubbornly insisted that the tsar be subordinate to the patriarch—i.e. that they did not constitute a diarchy, the model that prevailed under Filaret and Michael. The tsar, favourably inclined towards Nikon, at first acquiesced and conferred the title ‘Great Sovereign’ on the patriarch in 1654, despite the absence of kinship (in contrast to Filaret’s case). But Nikon later far exceeded the Byzantine conception of a ‘symphony’ between the secular and sacred domains and exploited the fact that the status of the tsar in the Russian Church had never been precisely formulated. Alexis cautiously expressed a different opinion in 1657–8, and it soon came to a personal confrontation between the two men. Nikon withdrew, but refused to resign from his office; according to canon law, only the Eastern patriarchs could order his removal. At the end of 1666 the tsar convened such a council, but with only the less important patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria personally present. Not surprisingly, the latter—who were materially dependent upon Russian support—found Nikon guilty and even recommended expanding the tsar’s power in the Church. After a few Russian bishops protested, the council settled on a compromise that ascribed worldly matters to the tsar, spiritual matters to the patriarch. Although this formula nominally preserved the status of the Church, it could not conceal the fact that the Church emerged from the schism and the Nikon affair deeply weakened. Thus the devastation that the Time of Troubles had dealt to tradition (starina) now extended to the Church, hitherto the sole spiritual power and a second pillar of autocracy. The reign of Alexis, so rich in rebellion, came to an end; the way was now free for a breakthrough to the modern era.

The Dawning of Modernity (1676–1689)

The Reign of Fedor (1676–1682)

Alexis’s eldest son, who had received elaborate preparation to accede to the throne, died in 1670. Thus, when Alexis himself died six years later, the throne passed to his second eldest son, the sickly and bed-ridden Fedor, who was not quite 15 years old and had only another six years to live. Next in line included Ivan, who was mentally retarded, and then the 4-year-old Peter (Petr Alekseevich) from Alexis’s second marriage, a strong and robust child who would go down in history as Peter the Great. Under the circumstances, the head of the foreign chancellery, A. S. Matveev, urged Peter’s mother, Natalia Naryshkina, to speak out in favour of her son. But his suggestion ignited a power struggle between the Naryshkins and the family of Alexis’s first marriage (the Miloslavskiis, from which had come Fedor, Ivan, and their sister Sofia). Once the Miloslavskiis gained the upper hand, Matveev paid dearly for his initiative: dismissal and banishment into exile. The new tsar Fedor thus lost a Western-oriented statesman of great ability and a main conduit for West European cultural influence. It must have been a heavy blow to the tsar, who himself had been educated by Simeon Polotskii (a West Russian monk and poet), knew Polish, and wore Western clothing.

However, the West could hardly be ignored over the long term. That was clearly demonstrated by the ‘Turkish question’: after centuries of spurning appeals for an alliance against the Turks, Moscow now chose to confront the Ottoman Empire and waged its first war (from 1676 to 1681, virtually the entire reign of Fedor). The campaign, conducted without Western support, focused on Ukraine and hetman P. Doroshenko’s attempt to unite both the right and left banks of the Dnieper. But the war ended inconclusively, as the Peace of Bakhchisarai (1681) simply reaffirmed the status quo ante bellum and hence Moscow’s possession of left-bank (eastern) Ukraine.

Domestically, xenophobic measures (for example, closing the tsar’s ‘German’ theatre) foundered on needs for systematic Europeanization. Thus, in contrast to the gradual military and economic policies of earlier decades, Moscow now began a conscious modernization of autocracy—amazingly enough, during the ‘weak’ reign of Fedor. The changes occurred not merely because the time was ‘ripe’, but because of vigorous support from the tsar’s favourites and advisers, especially V. V. Golitsyn.

The two most elemental reforms concerned taxation and the army—those spheres where the premodern state made the greatest demands on subjects. In 1679 the state completed a fiscal reform begun in the 1620s: it shifted the tax base from land to household, using a census of 1678–9 (which indicated an approximate population of 11.2 million subjects) and recorded in special ‘revision books’. According to historian P. N. Miliukov, the new household-based tax produced revenues of 1.9 million roubles and enabled Moscow to abolish the ‘Streltsy levies’. Altogether, the army consumed 62 per cent of state revenues (1.5 million roubles). The new standing army, which now essentially displaced the noble regiments, put at the tsar’s disposal approximately 200,000 troops (including Ukrainian Cossacks). It was divided into eight military districts, which later formed the basis for Peter’s division of the realm into eight administrative regions (gubernii).

Closely related to the military reform was the abolition of the ‘system of precedence’ (mestnichestvo). This system, which tied service position to birthright and the career of forefathers, was a serious problem: it blocked appointment on the basis of merit and ability and spawned endless litigious disputes. It was already subjected to some restrictions: in 1550 for wartime service and in 1621 for diplomatic missions. The well-born opposed these incursions, not only because they were so materially bound to service (in contrast to Western nobles), but also because they regarded precedence a matter of honour.

Nevertheless, in 1682 Fedor abolished precedence. Above all, his government understood that precedence must not be extended to the ever-expanding lower strata of servitors (chancellery secretaries; big merchants [gosti]), where individual merit was critical. Abolition of precedence actually formed part of a larger reform proposal prepared under Golitsyn’s leadership and approved by the tsar. Abolition of precedence was also closely linked to military reform—the disbanding of military units called the ‘hundreds’ and the introduction of regiments, companies, and Western service ranks. Lineage books were still compiled (to determine claims to noble status), but they included the lower nobility and even non-noble ranks. The manifesto abolishing precedence is still more remarkable for its invocation of natural law—dramatic testimony to the declining influence of the Orthodox Church. Specifically, in justifying the reform, Fedor explained that he held the reins of power from God in order to govern and to issue laws for the ‘general welfare’ (obshchee dobro). Thus this manifesto, composed entirely in the spirit of European absolutism, marked the onset of modernity in Russia. The government now had philosophical support for borrowing from the West; the traditional touchstone—‘as it was under earlier great sovereigns’—no longer prevailed. Although other reform plans did founder on the opposition of clergy and noble élites, Western rationality began to displace Orthodoxy, hitherto the sole authority.

Moreover, Fedor’s reforms improved administration and, especially, finances. The government achieved a certain level of bureaucratization in Moscow, if not a general centralization. At the same time, it also strengthened its power at the provincial level, chiefly by investing more authority in the district governor (voevoda). The underlying dynamic was a pragmatic response to the shortage of competent people (a fundamental problem throughout Russian history), which was most apparent at the provincial level. The government also decided to conduct a land survey, which had long been demanded by the nobility and was finally undertaken after Fedor’s death. But further discussions of tax reform and the convocation of townspeople and peasants under Golitsyn’s leadership were interrupted by Fedor’s death. These initiatives suggest a programme of reform that, had he lived longer, could have reached the scale it did under Peter the Great.

The reform, moreover, also included plans to establish the first institution of higher learning. The proposal originated with Simeon Polotskii: although Polotskii himself died in 1680, his pupil Silvestr Medvedev prepared the draft statute for a ‘Slavic-Greek-Latin’ school in 1682. Its programmatic introduction also invoked the concept of ‘general welfare’, thus reflecting the influence of the early Enlightenment; although still alluding to the sagacity of Solomon, the document also spoke of orderly justice and administration and adduced cameralist ideas of the well-ordered ‘police state’ (Policeystaat). Fedor, whose first wife was Polish, had a marked propensity for the Polish Latin world; as the historian V. O. Kliuchevskii observed, Russia would have obtained its Western culture from Rome, not Peter’s Amsterdam, had Fedor reigned for ten to fifteen years and bequeathed a son as his successor.

Struggle for Succession

Fedor’s death in 1682 unleashed a new power struggle between the Miloslavskii and Naryshkin clans, each determined to resolve—to their own advantage—the succession claim of the two half-brothers, Ivan (a Miloslavskii) and Peter (a Naryshkin). Legally and especially theologically, precedence rested with the feeble-minded Ivan. Fearful that the Miloslavskiis would continue Fedor’s ‘Latinizing’ tendencies, however, the patriarch himself interceded on behalf of the intelligent Peter: he convoked a council to proclaim the new ruler and annulled the exile of Matveev. But before the latter could return to Moscow, the situation had radically changed.

Whereas Peter’s interests were represented by his mother Natalia Naryshkina, his half-sister Sofia became the leader of the Miloslavskiis. Her education marked by strong Ukrainian and Polish influences, Sofia herself symbolized the emancipation of élite women, who had been kept in the background in old Russia. During the next seven years she actually governed the country and thus became a precursor to the empresses who would rule in the eighteenth century. The pro-Petrine historiography has propagated a highly negative image of Sofia (including the insinuation that, from the outset, she conspired to seize power for herself). In fact, however, Sofia at first sought only to secure her family’s position by ensuring the coronation of Ivan.

But she could hardly have succeeded had she not been able to exploit a simultaneous revolt of the Streltsy—élite troops created a century and a half earlier, but since subjected to a precipitous economic and social decline. Indeed, their salaries had fallen and at the very time that they were forbidden to supplement their income by plying a trade in Moscow. They especially resented the ‘troops of new order’ and felt themselves to be victims of discrimination. Hostility towards them was in fact widespread: the government distrusted the Streltsy because so many of them were Old Believers; the nobility despised them for giving refuge to fugitive serfs; and taxpayers identified them with the loathsome ‘Streltsy tax’. The Streltsy also complained that they were maltreated by their superiors and even used as unfree labour.

Although Peter had already ascended the throne, the Miloslavskiis conspired to exploit this discontent. They set 15 May 1682 (the anniversary of the suspicious death of the Tsarevich Dmitrii in Uglich) as the date for a massacre that, according to plans, was to take the lives of forty-six adversaries. To incite the mass of Streltsy, they spread false rumours that the Naryshkins had murdered Ivan; it did not help when the Streltsy who stormed the Kremlin were shown that Ivan was alive. For three days long they raged, killing some seventy victims, including Matveev (who had just returned from exile) and other high officials. The young Peter had to watch this bloodbath and suffered a nervous shock that had a profound impact on the rest of his life.

To Sofia’s credit, she herself acted with moderation and persuaded the Streltsy to allow the mere banishment of many other boyars. She also reached a compromise agreement with I. A. Khovanskii (head of the Streltsy Chancellery and the rebels’ leader) for the coronation of both tsareviches, as Ivan V and Peter I, on 26 May (using a specially constructed double throne). The manifesto justifying this diarchy cited precedents in world history but also practical advantages: one tsar could remain in the Kremlin while the other led military campaigns. More problematic was the regency of Sofia (which had been offered by the Streltsy): Ivan was already of age and Peter’s mother could have been his regent.

As the rebels continued to indulge in a violent reign of terror (the ‘Khovanshchina’) and declared all bondsmen to be free, Sofia attempted to pacify them with gifts of money. But the Streltsy felt increasingly insecure. In early June they demanded that the government rename them ‘court infantry’ and also acknowledge the honourable goals of their rebellion—through a formal declaration and erection of a column on Red Square that would explain why so many famous men had to perish. Their political programme could have exerted considerable influence had the Streltsy themselves enjoyed the support of the general populace. But they had the support only of Old Believers, who—after Avvakum’s immolation (on the eve of the rebellion)—regarded Khovanskii as their leader. At his insistence a debate over the true belief was staged in the Kremlin, with the participation of the patriarch and numerous high-ranking church officials. But the most sensational moment came when, contrary to tradition, Sofia herself intervened in the debate and, using deft arguments, dealt Khovanskii a defeat. She then put the rebels under pressure by announcing that the court was moving out of Moscow.

It did so that summer. Although élites usually went to Kolomenskoe to pass the summer, her real intent became apparent when the tsars failed to return to the Kremlin for new year celebrations on 1 September. The Streltsy were now blamed for having driven off the government. Shortly thereafter Sofia charged Khovanskii with high treason and had him executed without trial. The government finally returned to Moscow in November, but only after the Streltsy had begged for forgiveness and removed their column from Red Square. Security for the Kremlin was now assigned to a noble regiment (a step that inadvertently laid the foundations for the recurring palace coups by guard regiments in the eighteenth century). The Streltsy threat neutralized, Sofia now assumed the reins of power, with the ‘tsars’ appearing only for Kremlin celebrations.

The Regency of Sofia (1682–1689)

Her regency lasted just seven years, almost as brief as Fedor’s reign. V. V. Golitsyn, her leading official and probably her lover, continued his predecessor’s foreign policy and cultivated contacts with the West.

However, reform initiatives were now rare; because plans for domestic reform were, unfortunately, poorly preserved, much about her reign must remain speculative. The tensions between the Miloslavskiis and the Naryshkins apparently hampered decision-making, but Sofia did tackle three problems: she finally began the long-awaited land survey, intensified the search for fugitives, and gave the conditional service estate (pomest′e) the same juridical status as the hereditary family estate (votchina). The last reform thus eliminated any distinction between the two forms of landholding—something that the service nobility had demanded. But this concession also served to level the nobility—something that the autocracy itself had wanted.

Golitsyn’s tolerant attitude towards the West proved advantageous for the foreigners’ suburb and even Jesuits. This was in marked contrast to the vigorous persecution of Old Believers, who were even burned at the stake if they refused to recant. Such harshness derived from the government’s lingering fear of a new uprising of the Streltsy. But immolation failed to quell the religious dissenters and even impelled them to commit mass suicide—from apocalyptical fears that the Last Judgement was imminent, that they might somehow be ensnared in the service of Anti-Christ. As a result, some 2,700 Old Believers in Paleostrov Monastery and several thousand more in Berezov (on the Volok) burnt themselves alive in 1687–8 alone; after a year of siege another 1,500 in Paleostrov put themselves to the torch.

The infusion of Western culture also brought a major confrontation between ‘Latinizers’ and ‘Hellenizers’. The two chief protagonists included a monk Evfimii (a collaborator of Patriarch Ioakim) and Silvestr Medvedev (the Polotskii pupil who drafted the charter for the Slavonic-Greek-Latin academy in 1682). Under the patriarch’s direction, Evfimii revised that statute so as to replace Latin with Greek and to exclude teachers from Ukraine and Lithuania. The struggle, which lasted for several years, produced a number of learned treatises. When the academy finally opened in 1687 as the first school of higher learning in Russia, its curriculum nevertheless included Latin—as well as such subjects as grammar, poetics, rhetoric, didactics, and physics. Nevertheless, pressure against the ‘Latinizer’ Medvedev steadily mounted, for Sofia feared a new schism, particularly when many Old Believers—from anti-Hellenistic sentiments—expressed sympathy for the Latinizers.

By then Sofia had come to nourish her own ambitions. In 1685 she began to appear at public ceremonies that had traditionally been reserved for the tsar; in 1686 she affixed the title of ‘Autocratrix’ to her portrait. And, apparently, she sought formal coronation after signing the Eternal Peace with Poland in 1686, the greatest triumph of her regency. The agreement ratified the Armistice of Andrusovo (1667), for the Poles now realized the need to co-operate with Russia on the Ukrainian-Ottoman border. Therefore they now recognized the partition of Ukraine and approved Russia’s entry into an anti-Turkish coalition that had been formed as the ‘Holy League’ (Habsburg, Poland, and Venetia) in 1684. In addition, the rulers recognized each other’s title and granted freedom of confession to each other’s fellow believers—the Orthodox in Poland-Lithuania, Catholics in Muscovy. This religious policy had been preceded by subordination of the Kievan metropolitanate to the Moscow Patriarchate in 1685, a long-cherished goal of the Russian Orthodox Church. Moscow also obtained a stronger claim to a protectorate over the Orthodox Christians under the Turkish yoke, something which it had already asserted for several decades. However, the tolerance promised to Catholics alienated the distrustful patriarch and impelled him to embrace Peter in the next coup of 1689.

Peter: Seizure of Power

This coup indirectly stemmed from the Eternal Peace itself. After the Poles and Habsburgs dealt a decisive defeat to the Turks at Vienna in 1683, the allies demanded that Russia launch an attack on the Crimea to ease the burden on the West. Under the supreme command of Golitsyn, Russian troops thereupon made two campaigns against the Crimean Tatars (in 1687 and 1689) and both times met with defeat. But in both cases Sofia—who needed success—suppressed the truth: to portray the military campaign as a victory, she lavished praise and gifts on Golitsyn and the returning troops. Her Eastern policy was no more successful: Russia established diplomatic relations with China (through the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689), but did so at the price of renouncing claims to the Amur region. The deception and disinformation generated growing tensions between Sofia and Peter, even to mutual suspicions of murder. Fearing a new Streltsy uprising, in August 1689 Peter fled to the Trinity-Sergius Monastery north of Moscow. The turning-point came in September when the troops came over to his side, enabling Peter to claim power in his own right and to place his half-sister under house arrest in Novodevichii Convent.

Although Peter had seized power, for the moment he changed nothing in his own life, as he himself continued to take more interest in sea travel than in state affairs. Nevertheless, the rebellious turbulence of the seventeenth century had come to an end; the Streltsy mutiny in 1698 was merely an epilogue. If one looks at the government of the great tsar in the light of the seventeenth century, it is clear that his reforms—which made so great an impression in the West—emerged directly from the traditions of the seventeenth century and hardly constituted a ‘revolution’. The seventeenth century had already signalled a major breakthrough—a self-conscious emancipation from the fetters of ‘Old Russia’.

4. The Petrine Era and After 1689–1740

JOHN T. ALEXANDER

Peter inaugurated an imperial, radically Europeanized period of Russian history. Building on seventeenth-century roots, he broadened reform to include virtually every dimension of the state and warfare, society, economy, and culture. His heirs, invariably invoking Peter as a secular icon to legitimize power and policies, continued (if less ambitiously) his efforts to remake medieval Muscovy into modern Russia.

PETER I is associated with many ‘firsts’ in Russian history. He was the first legitimate Muscovite ruler to have that name in Russian and European languages (Piter in Dutch), the first to use a Roman numeral after his name, the first to travel incessantly by land and water and to venture abroad, the first to be titled emperor and ‘the Great, Most Wise Father of the Fatherland’, the first to inspire radical change in diverse spheres of activity, the first to found urban sites sharing his name, the first to be buried in St Petersburg, and the first to imprint his name on an entire era encompassing the birth of modern Russia in an expanded, European context. His imperious personality impressed his world so emphatically that his impact remains vividly controversial even now. Inscribed ‘Great Hope of the Future’, the medal struck at his birth in the Kremlin on 30 May 1672 announced the dynastic sentiments vested in the huge baby, some thirty-three inches long. This label inaugurated a series pinned on Peter during his busy life (1672–1725) and long afterwards. Many lauded his personal attributes: warrior-tsar, artisan-tsar, tsar-transformer, Renaissance man, the great reformer who gave Russia a new ‘body’ primed for a new ‘soul’. Others deplored negative qualities: Anti-Christ, the ‘Bronze Horseman’, first Bolshevik, brutal despot, cult figure and personification of a totalitarian-style dictatorship bent on forcible expansion—a ruthless ruler likened to such melancholy fanatics as Ivan the Terrible, Lenin, and Stalin. His towering physique—six feet seven inches tall as an adult—overshadowed contemporaries much as his historical shade dominates modern Russian political and cultural discourse. His physiognomy and figure have been depicted in many media and languages over three centuries. Both his fame and notoriety have assumed legendary stature.

It is amazing that the initial offspring of Tsar Alexis by his second wife should have been so precocious and so long-lived in contrast to the sickly sons and multiple daughters of his first marriage. Indeed, this novelty proved crucial in the selection of 9-year-old Peter by an impromptu assemblage to succeed his half-brother Fedor on 27 April 1682. A mere figurehead for a regime of his Naryshkin relatives, Peter’s elevation evoked immediate resistance from his father’s first family, the Miloslavskiis, led by Sofia in defence of the dynastic seniority of Ivan, aged 16. Sofia and her Miloslavskii relatives exploited dissension among the Streltsy to channel animosity towards the Naryshkins; the result was the riot in May 1682, described in the previous chapter, as also are the events of Sofia’s regency.

Young Peter’s marriage to Evdokiia Lopukhina on 27 January 1689 forecast imminent maturity. Although the marriage was unhappy (the groom soon departed for nautical diversions on Lake Pleshcheevo), Evdokiia gave birth to the future tsarevich Alexis in February 1690—another blow to the Miloslavskiis’dynastic interests. Sofia, though styled ‘autocratrix’ on a par with her brothers, was never crowned officially, her authority waning as Peter’s partisans championed his cause anew. Who initiated the final showdown in August 1689 is uncertain, but Peter’s ‘party’ quickly gained greater armed support in ostensibly forestalling a new Streltsy conspiracy while Sofia had to yield Fedor Shaklovityi—her new favourite and head of the Streltsy—for interrogation under torture and execution. At the end of September she entered the Novodevichii Convent as a lay person. After another abortive Streltsy mutiny in 1698 she accepted political extinction by taking monastic vows and died in monastic seclusion in 1704.

Early Travels and the Azov Campaigns

Peter did not, however, immediately assume Sofia’s role in government, relinquishing the more prominent posts to his Naryshkin relatives and their friends, such as Boris Golitsyn, Tikhon Streshnev, and Fedor Romodanovskii. The tsar still resided at Preobrazhenskoe and in the autumn of 1690 participated in elaborate ‘play’ manœuvres featuring a scripted ‘defeat’ of the Streltsy by a combined force of noble cavalry, play regiments, and foreign-style troops. His shipbuilding and sailing on inland waters also continued, as did his fascination with fireworks in company with foreign mercenaries such as Franz Lefort and Patrick Gordon. He began to sign himself ‘Petrus’, to drink heavily, and to smoke tobacco. He ignored his deserted wife’s letters and openly pursued Anna Mons, the daughter of a German wine merchant in the Foreign Suburb. When Peter suffered bloody diarrhoea for two weeks in December 1692, fears of Sofia’s return to power fanned rampant rumours and, allegedly, plans for flight by Lefort and company.

Despite his mother’s misgivings, Peter left Moscow in July 1693 with a substantial entourage to spend seven weeks at Archangel. He became the first Muscovite ruler to see the far north and to sail the open sea. He also helped lay down a seagoing vessel for future voyages. His horizons were widening by the hour. His mother’s death in January 1694 only momentarily interrupted preparations for a longer sojourn at Archangel, from 18 May to 5 September. He made extended voyages; during one he barely survived a storm by landing on the island of Solovki where he planted a cross with a Dutch inscription and European-style date, ‘This Cross was made by Captain Piter anno Domini 1694’—evidence that he knew Dutch and already foresaw reforms in European terms. The budding fleet began using a white-blue-red flag based on the Dutch standard. Upon returning to Moscow, from 23 September to 18 October 1694 Peter organized grandiose military manœuvres involving over 7,000 men. A satirical pamphlet recorded the exercises along with exhibitions such as twenty-five dwarfs marching to military music. With the Streltsy again slated for defeat, ‘bombardier Peter Alekseev’ celebrated his last simulated engagement before real battle with Turks and Tatars. In concert with the Holy League of Austria, Poland-Lithuania, and Venice with financial backing from the papacy, the 22-year-old tsar aimed to mount the international stage by recouping Vasilii Golitsyn’s losses.

Overweening ambition was apparent in Peter’s choice of the primary target: the Ottoman fortress of Azov near the mouth of the Don river. A more difficult objective than the Crimea itself, Azov would require combined land and sea operations. Peter and his senior military advisers sought to avoid Golitsyn’s error of marching across barren steppes by bringing most forces far south by boat. The main attack was also augmented by a thrust westward under the boyar Boris Sheremetev to divert Tatar forces and capture Turkish border forts. Though the siege of Azov began by early July 1695, lack of a flotilla precluded any naval blockade; while the Ottomans reinforced and resupplied their garrison by sea, the attackers suffered great losses from Turkish sallies and the absence of unified command. Peter’s insistence on a desperate storm on 5 August brought huge losses; a mining operation on 16 September harmed only the besiegers; another costly assault the next day barely failed. Lifting the siege on 20 October, the Muscovites sustained further losses—from exhaustion, frosts, and disease—during the retreat.

The campaign taught the impatient tsar several harsh lessons, duly recorded in official journals (preserved for the rest of the reign). But retention of two Turkish watchtower forts (renamed Novosergeevsk) indicated that Peter was already countenancing a new compaign.

The new year began inauspiciously: Peter fell ill for nearly a month and his brother Ivan died suddenly on 29 January. Ivan’s death formally ended the dynastic dualism, affirmed Peter’s sole sovereignty, and cleared the way for an aggressively reformist militarist regime. Health restored, Peter hurried to Voronezh to assemble hundreds of barges and galleys for the new attack. If the first Azov campaign proved more difficult than anticipated, the second brought the fortress’s capitulation with stunning ease on 19–20 July 1696. Austrian engineers assisted in supervising the siege-works. Command of the land forces was centralized under ‘generalissimus’ Aleksei Shein. Ironically, Muscovite sea-power had predetermined the outcome by forestalling Ottoman relief efforts although Cossack boats did most of the fighting at close quarters—not the vessels built so feverishly at Voronezh. Sailing into the Sea of Azov, Peter sought out a site for a new naval station some leagues westward, at a point called Taganrog. Construction began at once as did rebuilding Azov itself; the Muscovites intended to stay permanently. Returning to Moscow in late September, Peter staged a Roman-style triumph with ceremonial gates—the first of many—decorated with Julius Caesar’s aphorism: ‘He came, he saw, he conquered’. A more menacing demonstration transpired at Preobrazhenskoe a week later: the Dutch deserter Jakob Jansen, whose betrayal had dearly cost the first Azov campaign, was broken on the wheel and then beheaded before a huge crowd.

The Grand Embassy to Europe

Amidst these celebrations Peter felt the fragility of Muscovite military and, especially naval power. Even before returning from Azov he began to plan a large diplomatic and recruiting mission to the naval powers of Venice and Holland. This ‘Grand Embassy’ engaged as many as 270 persons (Peter himself incognito among many ‘volunteers’) and huge amounts of baggage, all estimated to have cost the stupendous sum of 200,000 roubles. The main mission spent sixteen months away from Moscow, 9 March 1697 to 25 August 1698, the longest and grandest Muscovite embassy ever. It was related to other missions such as sixty-one courtiers sent to study navigation; it was the first instalment of some twenty-six groups totalling more than a thousand ‘volunteers’ sent abroad systematically for study and training in the period 1697–1725 (other individuals went on their own). A parallel mission was undertaken by the eminent boyar Boris Sheremetev, who recruited foreign officers, lavished gifts wherever he went in Poland and Italy, and also visited the knights of Malta who awarded him the Order of Malta. The linguistically gifted Peter Postnikov, a recent graduate of the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy just completing MD and Ph.D. degrees at Padua’s famed university, joined the Grand Embassy in Holland.

Peter tried to keep the Grand Embassy strictly secret at home and employed special invisible ink for sensitive communications. These precautions may have sprung from apprehensions that ‘ill-intentioned’ persons might exploit the tsar’s absence, as earlier Streltsy had allegedly plotted to murder the tsar and restore Sofia and Vasilii Golitsyn. After an investigation by the Preobrazhenskii Bureau (the police organ given national jurisdiction over political crimes in late 1696), Colonel Ivan Tsykler and two supposed boyar accomplices were gruesomely beheaded over the exhumed corpse of Ivan Miloslavskii, dead since 1685. The incident occurred a week before Peter’s departure abroad. The Preobrazhenskii Bureau had also investigated a ‘Missive’ by Abbot Avraamii criticizing state fiscal policies. Though absolved of malicious intent, Avraamii was banished to a provincial monastery and three minor officials accused of assisting him were sent into hard labour. All these punishments were obviously intended to intimidate potential opposition while Peter lingered abroad indefinitely.

In diplomatic terms the Grand Embassy largely failed because of Moscow’s ignorance of current European politics and consequent poor timing. Efforts to buttress the anti-Ottoman alliance proved unavailing: Muscovy’s allies made peace with the Turks at the congress of Karlowitz in January 1699, a step that left Peter livid at Austrian and Venetian perfidy, ‘taking no more notice of him than a dog’. The embassy arrived too late to influence the Treaty of Ryswick of September 1697 ending the War of the League of Augsburg or the treaty between the Holy Roman Empire and France a month later. Still, Peter met several European counterparts, especially the military hero William of Orange (William III of England), Frederick III (elector of Brandenburg and soon to be king in Prussia), Emperor Leopold I, and Augustus II (elector of Saxony and newly elected king of Poland-Lithuania). Peter’s instant friendship with the flamboyant Augustus II, together with Moscow’s vigorous support of his election to the Polish throne, soon translated into an alliance aimed against Sweden. Moreover, the muddled Muscovite diplomacy showed that they must maintain permanent representation at the main European courts and provide longer training for those serving abroad. Dr Postnikov’s linguistic facility and European experience, for example, resulted in appointment to the Muscovite delegation to the congress of Karlowitz and ultimately side-tracked his medical career in favour of diplomatic service in France, where he died in about 1709.

As regards recruitment of skilled manpower, intellectual and cultural broadening, the entire experience reaped manifold rewards and left vivid impressions. The host governments strove to impress the tirelessly inquisitive and shyly charming tsar. His portrait in armour was painted in Holland and England by Aert de Gelder and Godfrey Kneller. He saw all the local sights, from Antony van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopic glasses and Fredrik Ruysch’s anatomical museum to Dresden’s famous Kunstkammer and Isaac Newton’s English mint, hospitals, botanical gardens, theatres, industrial enterprises, government and church institutions. The German polymath Gottfried von Leibniz failed to win an audience, but transmitted ambitious proposals through Lefort’s son. Peter observed mock naval engagements in Holland and England, spent much time in shipyards, drank prodigiously, and twice rammed other vessels while sailing an English yacht on the Thames. The versatile and extravagant Marquis of Carmarthen enthralled the tsar with his nautical innovations and helped obtain a monopoly on importing tobacco to Russia via financial machinations and the gift of the Royal Transport, the most modern experimental ship in the English navy. Furthermore, Carmarthen assisted in recruiting such English ‘experts’ as professor of mathematics Henry Farquharson, shipwrights Joseph Nye and John Deane, and engineer John Perry. All played crucial parts in building the new Russian navy.

Peter’s learned advisers, Jacob Bruce and Peter Postnikov, visited educational, medical, and scientific institutions, bought many books, medicaments, and instruments, and hired several hundred specialists including some sixty military surgeons. The embassy led directly to the hiring of Dr Nikolaas Bidloo, a Dutch physician, and Dr Robert Erskine, a Scotsman educated in London and on the continent. Both spent the rest of their lives in Russia, became close friends of Peter, and advised him on matters medical, scientific, and cultural. A Fellow of the Royal Society, Erskine served as the first imperial physician and head of the entire professional medical faculty; in 1707 Bidloo founded the first permanent hospital and surgical school in Moscow, equipped with an anatomical theatre and a large botanical garden. In preparation for further Europeanizing changes, Peter granted a fifteen-year monopoly on book imports to the Dutch printer Jan van Thessing. The bustling cities and harbours, merchant marines and fleets, armies and industries of Europe and England reinforced his determination to pursue change. While in Vienna in July 1698 Peter aborted plans for lengthy visits to Venice and Rome when he learned of the Streltsy mutiny and attempted march on Moscow.

Though quickly suppressed, the Streltsy mutiny afforded an ideal pretext to purge the despised ‘janissaries’ through ghastly tortures and massive public executions. Several victims were displayed outside Sofia’s convent cell. The Streltsy constituted the first sizeable Muscovite institution that the tsar abolished; others such as the boyar duma, the council of the realm, and the gosti (privileged merchants and state fiscal agents) were already in eclipse or simply not summoned by the militarily preoccupied sovereign. He also divorced Evdokiia by incarceration in a monastery. After supervising almost a thousand Streltsy interrogations and executions, three weeks later Peter left for Voronezh. There he laid the specially designed keel of the 58–gun Predestinatsiia, a harbinger of his soaring ambitions while he privately vowed to dissipate his own ‘dark cloud of doubt’.

His southern nautical ambitions inspired two more sojourns at Voronezh in the spring of 1699, interrupted only by Lefort’s funeral in Moscow and the founding in March of the Order of the Apostle Andrew the First-Called, Muscovy’s first knightly order. After launching the Predestinatsiia on 27 April amid great fanfare Peter reached the Sea of Azov with fourteen ships of the line by early June. Later that summer the tsar’s squadron accompanied the 46–gun Krepost’ (Fortress) to the straits of Kerch demanding passage for his envoy to Constantinople.

Peter soon refocused on the Baltic in anticipation of joining Denmark and Saxony to partition the sprawling Swedish Empire under its boy-king, Charles XII. The warrior-tsar’s levy of recruits in November 1699 raised 32,000 men termed ‘immortals’ and destined for lifetime service. The new century was celebrated on 1 January 1700 by official adoption of the Julian calendar and twenty-four-hour day amid cannon-salutes, fireworks, and festive decorations.

Reforms for War

Eager for action in October 1700 Peter, at the death-bed of Patriarch Adrian, called for educated clergy, military, civil servants, architects, and those who knew ‘the doctor’s healing art’. German-speaking advisers such as Heinrich van Huyssen and the Livonian adventurer Johann Reinhold von Patkul were aware of cameralist notions of promoting prosperity through enlightened administration and good order (‘Police’, a term lacking in the Russian vocabulary). Peter’s manifesto of April 1702 inviting foreigners—military officers, craftsmen, and merchants—to enter his service appeared in Patkul’s German translation and adumbrated an emerging reform programme:

It has been Our foremost concern to govern Our lands in a manner that would bring home to Our subjects Our intention to ensure their welfare and increase. To this end We have endeavoured not only to promote trade, strengthen the internal security of the state and preserve it from all manner of dangers which might harm the common good, but also to institute good order [Polizei] and whatever else contributes to the improvement [Cultur] of a people in order that Our subjects may soon become fit to form all manner of associations and exercise various skills along with other Christian and civilized peoples.

With an artisan’s eye and pragmatic mind, Peter envisioned the transformation of Russia into a great power, its state and society based on technology and an organization aimed at maximizing production. Its hallmarks would be a European-type army and navy (supported by heavy industry to produce arms), planned urban conglomerations after the model of St Petersburg, and large-scale public works, particularly canals linking the major waterways and productive centres into an integrated economic whole. Peter even commissioned Perry to oversee a canal connecting the Volga and the Don, an over-ambitious project not realized until the 1930s.

To supply the armed forces with skilled native personnel, Peter began founding makeshift educational institutions. He put Farquharson and two English students in charge of the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation (housed in the former quarters of a Streltsy regiment); its enrolments grew from 200 pupils in 1703 to over 500 by 1711. Farquharson assisted Leontii Magnitskii in compiling the encyclopaedic Arifmetika (1703), one of the first Russian books to use Arabic numerals, and fulfilled diverse duties. He copied out other textbooks for his students, wrote, translated, and edited scientific works, and supervised thirty-eight translations by others. He surveyed the Petersburg to Moscow road, charted the Caspian Sea, and went to Voronezh in 1709 to observe the solar eclipse. Transferred with 305 pupils to the St Petersburg Naval Academy in 1715, he rose to brigadier rank in 1737 and left a library of 600 books (half from the Naval Academy) upon his death. An artillery school was set up in Moscow in 1701, its 180 pupils increasing to 300 within three years, but it led a precarious existence until transferred to St Petersburg with 74 pupils in 1719. Private schools and tutoring continued as usual. Allowed back in 1698, the Jesuits had a boarding-school with about thirty boys until the order was expelled again in 1719. A German gymnasium opened under the Lutheran pastor Ernst Glück with state assistance in 1705; with seven teachers and seventy-seven pupils in 1711, it taught Greek and Latin, modern languages (including Swedish), geography, ethics, politics, rhetoric, arithmetic, deportment, and riding. It closed in 1715.

Little did Peter foresee that the apparently easy war against Sweden would burgeon into two decades of incessant campaigning over huge expanses of land and water between shifting coalitions of powers great and small. The Great Northern War (1700–21), so designated in retrospect, consumed the bulk of his life. His role as warrior-tsar was etched into the marrow of the Europeanizing empire and shaped virtually every institution and policy adopted over its tortuous course. The demands of long-term warfare, most notably during the first years, account for the peculiarly frenzied and economically wasteful character of the early Petrine reforms.

If Peter blithely entered the conflict, he was shocked by Charles XII’s swift victory over Christian IV of Denmark and Augustus II’s failure to seize Riga. The Swedes’ decisive defeat of the Russian siege of Narva compelled the tsar to reconstitute and rearm the army almost overnight. Over the next eight years some 138,000 recruits were raised; the term rekrut began to be used in about 1705, one of some 3,500 foreign terms adopted in Petrine Russia. By the end of the reign twenty-one general and thirty-two partial levies conscripted over 300,000 men for the army and the fleet.

The armed forces became the model for the Europeanized society that Peter doggedly pursued. Utilizing European norms and Muscovite traditions, ‘selfmaintenance’ first of all, he fitfully constructed an integrated force under uniform conditions of service, subject to discipline on hierarchical principles, the officer corps trained in military schools, and the whole managed by a centralized administration guided by written codes. The organization was constantly reshuffled as the ostensibly standing army and expensive fleet showed wanton ways of melting away (or rotting in the case of ships) from continuous mass desertion as well as shortfalls in recruitment and losses to disease and combat.

Despite constant losses from accident, inferior workmanship, poor maintenance, and difficult harbours, the navy grew swiftly, with 34 ships of the line mounting between 46 and 96 cannon, 15 frigates, 4 prams, 10 snows, and almost 100 smaller vessels and galleys deploying 2,226 cannon with crews and troops totalling 28,000 men by 1724. Ship names reflected victories and territorial gains: Standart (banner or rallying-point), Kronshlot, Triumf, Derpt, Narva, Fligel′-de-Fam (Dutch Flying Fame). The first ship of the line launched in 1710 was called Vyborg, and Alexander Menshikov presented Peter with the Dutch-built frigate Sv. Samson (St Samson) in honour of the Poltava victory. Peter personally launched the 54–gun Poltava at St Petersburg on 15 June 1712, while the Hangö victory of 1714 was celebrated in 1719 by the huge 96–gun Gangut.

Exceeding 174,000 men by 1711 and totalling almost 304,000 in 1725, the armed forces engulfed 90 per cent of the state budget in the former year and still 73 per cent in the latter, a time of peace. Service was essentially lifelong for officers and enlisted men alike. Military service enshrined the principle of merit as explicated in the Table of Ranks, the system of fourteen grades (thirteen in practice) applied to all three branches of state service—military, civil, and court. Military ranks enjoyed preference over civil, and all thirteen in the military conferred noble status as opposed to only the top eight in the civil service. Squabbles over precedence and place-seeking did not end, however; the concept of merit involved ambiguous notions of time in grade, individual achievement, education, and potential. Predictably, the great majority of officers came from noble backgrounds, and the two guards regiments constituted specially privileged preserves. An exception was Alexander Menshikov’s Ingermanlandskii Regiment, a unit close in status to the two guards regiments with the highest proportion of non-noble officers (18 of 56). Menshikov, longtime crony of the tsar and energetic soldier-administrator-entrepreneur, came from dubious origins and fabricated a fanciful noble genealogy. Unable to write more than his name, he was promoted to aristocratic rank (Peter obtained for him the honorific title of prince of the Holy Roman Empire) and busily accumulated immense wealth. Having already abolished the rank of boyar and aware that Russian noble titles were devalued by the practice of equal inheritance, Peter introduced two European titles, count and baron, but conferred them infrequently and only for meritorious service. Baron Peter Shafirov, for example, gained his title in 1710; Baron Andrei Osterman obtained his in 1721 for negotiating peace with Sweden.

State service proved burdensome for nobles and their families, as Peter strove to ensure that military service take precedence over civil and that young noblemen fulfil their service obligations. When established in 1711, the Senate was ordered to hunt down and register noble boys as young as 10 so that they could be sent to school before beginning service at 15. Relatives were to denounce those in hiding; in 1722 such youths were outlawed as if bandits. But enforcing these prescriptions in distant provinces was problematical at best; towards the end of Peter’s reign, Ivan Pososhkov decried the ease with which provincial nobles evaded service and concealed fugitives. Efforts to recover deserters oscillated between blandishments and threats, neither achieving much success.

The peasantry furnished the bulk of all recruits, whether for the armed forces, the ‘manufactories’, naval yards, or construction sites. They also provided most of the tax revenues. To guarantee the flow of revenue for the armed forces, the country was divided into huge provinces each of which was to support different regiments. Continual mobilization peaked in the Swedish invasion of 1708–9, by which time the central government had largely disintegrated. The country consisted of satrapies like Ingermanland presided over by Menshikov in St Petersburg; virtually all Peter’s energies focused on the showdown with Sweden.

Prolonged war stimulated Muscovy’s fledgling industry, especially iron and copper production, and to replace Sweden as a major supplier. In 1700 six iron smelters produced around 2,000 tons; by 1710 seventeen provided over 5,000 tons annually, the total redoubling in 1720. By 1725 twenty-four ironworks, eight operated by Tula merchant Nikita Demidov in the Urals, produced more than 14,000 tons: half from Demidov’s plants, almost three-quarters from the Urals. The first silver mines began production at Nerchinsk in south-eastern Siberia. Most iron went to the armed forces as did the output of the other ninety or so manufactories founded in Petrine Russia. After 1715, however, Russian bar-iron and sailcloth became substantial exports. Nikita Demidov gained noble status and accumulated a huge fortune. Because Petrine statistics are so scanty, one cannot confidently assess costs or living standards. Agricultural prices may have more than doubled over 1701–30, whereas industrial employment reached 18,400 by 1725.

Batic Expansion and Victory at Poltava

The Northern War’s first years saw Peter and his generals gradually devise a strategy of nibbling away at Swedish dominion in the Baltic while Charles XII pursued Augustus II into Central Europe. Thus the Russians seized control of the Neva river by the spring of 1703, when the Peter and Paul Fortress was founded in the river’s delta, the centre for a new frontier town and naval base. Further westward a fortress-battery called Kronshlot was hastily erected near the island of Kotlin, where the harbour of Kronstadt would soon be built. Peter and Menshikov personally led a boat attack on two Swedish warships at the mouth of the Neva in early May that brought Russia’s first naval victory, celebrated by a medal inscribed ‘The Unprecedented Has Happened’. Tsar and favourite were both made knights of the Order of Saint Andrew. In 1704 Dorpat and Narva fell to the Russians, as mounted forces ravaged Swedish Estland and Livland. Among the captives taken in Livland was a buxom young woman, Marta Skavronska, soon to become Russified as Catherine (Ekaterina Alekseevna). She enchanted Peter successively as mistress and common-law wife, confidante and soul-mate, empress and successor. Adept at calming his outbursts of rage, she matched his energy and bore him many children.

Peter certainly needed emotional comfort during these years of constant travels to the northern and western fronts, periodic illnesses, and the frazzling turnabouts of coalition warfare and civil war. His own role in government mushroomed so quickly that a personal Kabinet (chancery) was founded around 1704 under Aleksei Makarov whose clerk’s rank soon evolved into cabinet secretary. While the Russians won localized victories in the north-west, exiled Streltsy suddenly seized Astrakhan in August 1705 and threatened to incite other Volga towns and the Don Cossacks. The rebels railed against shaving beards and wearing European clothing, endorsed the Old Belief, and massacred more than 300 persons and the local prefect. After Field Marshal Boris Sheremetev recaptured Astrakhan in March 1706, the Preobrazhenskii Bureau investigated more than 500 individuals (including 401 Streltsy), executed 314 of them, and banished the rest into hard labour. But tranquillity lasted barely a year: a similar outbreak led by the Don Cossack Kondratii Bulavin convulsed the lower Don in 1707–8—just as Charles XII invaded western Russia and Ukraine, where he was joined by Hetman Ivan Mazepa with a force of Ukrainian Cossacks. In the mean time Saxony had left the war, with Augustus II yielding the Polish throne to the Swedish-supported Stanislaus Leszczyńnski. Russia now faced Sweden alone.

Foreseeing prolonged conflict, Peter and his commanders had decided in December 1706 on ‘scorched earth’ tactics to sap the Swedes’ strength and mobility while exploring a negotiated settlement. Peter fell ill several times amidst the constant tension. ‘Severe fever’ laid him low in Warsaw in July 1707, ‘five feet from death’ in delirium; another fever and mercurial medications confined him to bed in St Petersburg in May 1708, dissuading him from rushing to Azov against Bulavin. At Azov in April and May 1709, just before the climactic confrontation at Poltava, the tsar again took ‘strong medicines’ but after his chills and fever broke in August, still felt depressed and weak. A month later he boasted to Catherine of drinking bouts with his Polish allies.

The murderously frigid winter of 1708–9, together with epidemic disease, inadequate clothing, and short rations, conspired to divert the Swedes from Moscow, where earthworks had been thrown up around the Kremlin, and to await supplies and link up with Mazepa in Ukraine. This detour allowed Peter’s flying column to intercept the Swedish relief force at Lesnaia on 28 September 1708: day-long fighting ended in shattering defeat for the Swedes. By the end of the year several thousand Swedes had died from exposure.

The general engagement that Peter had so long postponed and Charles XII had so pursued came at Poltava on 27 June 1709. By then the Swedish army was no match, outnumbered almost two to one and outgunned seventy cannon to four. The predicament was symbolized by the king himself being shot in the foot ten days before (on his twenty-seventh birthday) so that he had to be carried about the field on a litter. He barely escaped capture after his army’s demise. Although Sheremetev was the commander-in-chief, Peter took the field, his hat and saddle shot through. Within two hours the Swedish forces crumbled before the hail of Russian cannonfire, musketry, and Menshikov’s slashing cavalry. The ensuing rout left some 9,000 Swedish dead on the field; 16,000 more surrendered three days later at nearby Perevolochna. Poltava placed a ‘firm stone’ in the foundation of St Petersburg, as the tsar expostulated in relief. Paintings and other artistic media quickly produced portrayals of Peter at Poltava, a favourite theme thenceforth.

The triumph was consolidated within eighteen months. The northern alliance was reconstituted with the addition of Prussia and the dethronement of Leszczyńnski in Poland. Sweden was offered peace on generous terms, but when the absent Charles XII refused to negotiate, Russian forces conquered the Baltic region in 1710 from Vyborg in the north to Reval and Riga in the west and south (despite a widespread plague epidemic that devastated Sweden but largely spared Russian territory). Incorporation of these non-Slavic territories led directly to the proclamation of Russia as a European-type empire. Indeed, Peter began using the designation imperator vserossiiskii (‘emperor of all the Russias’) as early as 31 May 1712 in a charter to his consul in Genoa while Sheremetev styled him ‘Your Imperial Highness’ in a petition of 1 August 1711 as did the merchants of Riga in a petition of 4 September 1712. Notifying Menshikov of his election as honorary fellow of the Royal Society in October 1714, Isaac Newton termed Peter ‘your Emperor, His Caesarian Majesty’.

Peter’s broadening political horizons also led him to arrange marriages of several relatives to foreign rulers. His niece Anna Ivanovna married the duke of Courland in late 1710 and his niece Ekaterina Ivanovna the duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in April 1716 in the presence of Peter, Catherine, and Augustus II. Neither marriage proved successful in personal terms; Anna was widowed almost immediately and Ekaterina returned to Russia with her young daughter in 1722. Tsarevich Alexis’s marriage to Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel in October 1711 proved equally painful for the spouses although it did produce a granddaughter and grandson, the future Peter II. All these matches accented Russia’s rising international stature and resolute entry into the European dynastic marriage market.

Cutural Revolution and Europeanizing Reforms

After 1711 Peter could devote more attention and longer consideration to a broader array of affairs. He pursued a number of initiatives that amounted to a ‘Cultural Revolution’ and accelerated the process of Europeanization by introducing the fruits of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Discovery, and the Scientific Revolution. Renaissance elements may be discerned in the new emphases on education, book-learning, and publishing. The number of presses, for instance, increased from three to ten by 1725, all under state control. Peter endorsed a simplified civil orthography in 1707, but presses and fonts remained so scarce that one-third of the secular titles before 1725 appeared in the old script. The annual number of titles rose from six or seven in the last decades of the seventeenth century to as many as forty-five per year in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The content of printed material also changed, with government pronouncements, laws, and military writings constituting almost two-thirds of all publications in the period 1700–25. Many were translations from foreign publications; slightly less than one-quarter treated religion, Muscovy’s traditional staple. Still, devotional writings were reprinted so frequently they comprised about 40 per cent of all books published in the Petrine era.

Russia’s first periodical, Vedomosti, began appearing in late 1702 and offered an official selection of ‘news’, celebrating governmental authority and military victories more than general information or commercial reports. The number of issues per year varied wildly, dropping from fourteen annually in 1708–12 to seven in 1713–17 and only one in 1718. Print runs also oscillated oddly—from a high of 875 in 1709 (the year of Poltava) to only 205 in 1712. Readership was obviously small, perhaps declining, and minuscule compared to England or Holland.

Peter personally collected a library of 1,663 titles in manuscript and printed books in Russian and foreign languages. He also purchased the private collections of Dr Robert Erskine and others, which laid the basis for the Library of the Academy of Sciences and, by 1725, comprised some 11,000 volumes. Assisted by Erskine, Jacob Bruce, and other scholars, Peter founded the first public museum, the Kunst-Kamera in St Petersburg, and collected European paintings, chiefly of the Dutch and Flemish schools. Indeed, his picture gallery at Mon Plaisir in Peterhof was the first of its kind in Russia, with about 200 paintings by 1725. To encourage visitation, the Kunst-Kamera charged no entry fee and had a budget of 400 roubles for free refreshments (coffee, wine, vodka, and the like). Renaissance notions likewise stimulated Petrine interest in secular history and the idea of Russia ‘entering a new era’. Peter himself led the way, with a concern to document military affairs and travels, an interest that eventually supported the compilation of an official history of the Swedish War, not complete before his death and published only in 1770–2.

In another exhibition of Renaissance spirit Peter encouraged the liberation of élite women, his own female relatives in the first instance, and their attendance at public receptions called ‘assemblies’. He authorized the first secular public theatre on Red Square in 1701. Opened in 1702 with elaborate sets and stage machinery, this ‘comedy chamber’ presented plays in German staged by a German company from Danzig. An abject failure crippled by a lack of Russian plays, a suitable literary language, and an audience, the theatre disbanded in 1706. Its sets, costumes, and scripts were handed over to Peter’s sister Natalia, who established a court theatre at Preobrazhenskoe in 1707 that was soon transferred to St Petersburg and lasted until her death in 1716. It pioneered the presentation of European plays of chivalry and romance. In Kiev meanwhile Feofan Prokopovich, Ukrainian born and partly educated in Rome, composed the tragicomedy Vladimir while teaching at the Mohyla Academy. A historical drama focusing on Russia’s conversion to Christianity and with many topical politico-cultural overtones, Vladimir was dedicated to Mazepa, who attended the first performance. This dedication had to be dropped after Mazepa’s defection in 1708. Other plays were staged at Dr Bidloo’s surgical school in Moscow including two by Fedor Zhurovskii, Slava Rossiiskaia (Russia’s Glory) and Slava pechal′naia (Grieving Glory), which respectively commemorated Catherine I’s coronation in 1724 and Peter’s death in 1725.

The Reformation informed Petrine efforts to transform the Orthodox Church. In 1694 Peter discontinued the Palm Sunday practice of the tsar on foot leading the patriarch on horseback across Moscow’s Red Square. In 1698 he criticized monks and monasticism, in 1700 reproved Patriarch Adrian for the Church’s failure to educate the young, and in 1701 re-established the Monastery Bureau to manage church lands. Most striking was his radical decision to replace the Patriarchate with a council of hierarchs, the Holy Synod. He personally favoured Bible-reading; his library contained several copies of the New Testament but only one of the Old. Although Peter believed in justification by faith alone, he scorned superstition and discouraged the veneration of icons.

Peter’s penchant for travel celebrated the Age of Discovery as did his absorption in naval and maritime affairs. The Persian Campaign of 1722–3 exemplified an urge for Oriental expansion, also revealed in an abortive secret mission to Madagascar in 1723–4. Themes of exploration and expansion stayed with Peter until the end of his life, when he commissioned the first Bering Expedition to investigate north-east Asia and North America for possible colonization.

The Scientific Revolution had enthralled Peter even before his first journey abroad, and his early acquaintance with foreign and native scholars reinforced ventures in the sciences, arts, and technology. Peter corresponded for more than twenty years with G. W. von Leibniz, whom he put on the payroll in 1711 and ultimately in 1724, founded the Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts in St Petersburg as the centre of state-organized research in the new Russian Empire. This multi-purpose institution combined research, teaching, and museum functions; it utilized a broad definition of ‘sciences’ encompassing secular knowledge that included arts and crafts, history and literature.

St Petersburg as the New Capital and Renewed Dynastic Disarray

As befitted a new European sovereign, Peter spent much time outside Muscovy’s old borders: a total of almost nineteen months in the years 1711–13 that spanned the disastrous Pruth campaign, two extended visits to Carlsbad for water cures and to witness Alexis’s wedding, and meetings with Leibniz at Torgau, Teplitz, and Carlsbad in 1711. The tsar’s ‘Paradise’ at St Petersburg became the new capital in about 1713 with the transfer of the court and higher government.

In microcosm the city advertised many Petrine ideals. It was European in concept, name, and style—the style synonymous with the newly popular term arkhitektura. Its name and layout, the fortress and cathedral of Peter and Paul and the city crest all pointed to parallels with imperial Rome. Planned for commercial and economic efficiency (Peter even contemplated centring the city on the island of Kotlin in the Gulf of Finland!), security from fire (but not flood), and impressive splendour, the ‘Residenz-Stadt’ grew rapidly thanks to forced labour and forced resettlement in combination with vigorous state patronage and flourishing foreign trade carried in foreign vessels. With the arrival of the court and many state agencies, the state’s presence in the guise of the huge Admiralty establishment, armoury facilities at nearby Sestroretsk, and the army and guards regiments fuelled a boom in local construction. Following the formation of the collegiate system of central administration after 1715, the city’s chief architect, Domenico Trezzini, began in 1722 a huge unitary corpus for the eleven administrative colleges on Vasilevskii Island, a grandiose project only completed ten years later. By 1725 St Petersburg had a population of about 50,000 (with large seasonal fluctuations, as peasant labourers congregated during the spring-to-autumn shipping season), and featured several impressive palaces (Menshikov’s in particular) with even more opulent estates flanking the approaches. The Summer Garden boasted abundant statuary and Peter’s small Summer Palace, but his attempt to organize a zoo complete with elephant and polar bears faltered when the animals died.

Moscow remained the old capital and largest city, but after 1710 Peter visited it sparingly. Much of 1713–14 he passed on board ship co-ordinating the land and sea conquest of Finland, highlighted by the naval victory of Hangö—a nautical Poltava—on 27 July 1714. The European sojourns and campaigns culminated in a second triumphal tour, this time accompanied by Catherine except to France, for twenty months in 1716–17. Off Copenhagen in October 1716 Peter was named honorary admiral of the combined Danish, Dutch, English, and Russian fleets—pleasing recognition of Russia’s new maritime might. Yet the ageing tsar was often mentally distraught, as hinted by twelve nocturnal dreams he recorded in 1714–16. Seriously ill in Holland for a month in early 1717, he later took the waters at Pyrmont and Spa. Both consorts grieved for the baby boy lost four hours after birth at Wesel in Holland on 2 January 1717.

Dynastic distress ensued even earlier with the death of Alexis’s wife in October 1715 shortly after having borne a son (and first grandson), Peter Alekseevich, followed soon by Catherine’s delivery of a son, Peter Petrovich. Peter and Catherine had been privately married in Moscow in March 1711, a ceremony repeated publicly in St Petersburg on 19 February 1712, the tsar joking that ‘it was a fruitful wedding, for they had already had five children’. This tardy marriage to a foreign commoner struck the English envoy as ‘one of the surprising events of this wonderfull age’. Catherine quickly became the focus of a European-type court largely Germanic in cultural terms. At Moscow in February 1722 and St Petersburg the next year Catherine and her ladies donned Amazon costumes to celebrate Shrovetide.

Peter’s relationship with Alexis, never close, became strained as his deteriorating health raised the succession issue. Alexis vowed to renounce the throne and enter a monastery, but did neither and suddenly fled abroad clandestinely—an acute embarrassment to his father. Enticed to return by the wily diplomat Peter Tolstoy, Alexis underwent intensive secret investigation that came to involve dozens of people, including Alexander Kikin (a former confidant of the tsar in disrepute for financial malfeasance), his mother, and Archpriest Iakov Ignatev (the tsarevich’s father-confessor). Kikin was accused of inspiring Alexis’s flight abroad and the others of fostering hatred for his father. All were tortured; Kikin, the archpriest, and several others—including Elena’s acknowledged lover—were all executed. After prolonged interrogation and torture Alexis himself was sentenced to death for treason in June 1718, perishing in prison in disputed circumstances. Although the investigation disclosed close contacts between the tsarevich and many prominent noblemen, the official version blamed Alexis’s treasonous conspiracy on ‘the long beards’, that is, supposedly reactionary churchmen. In fact, many potential sympathizers did not wish to return to old Muscovy but disliked Peter’s capricious despotism on behalf of breakneck change.

Alexis’s demise complicated the succession: Peter Petrovich—the tsar’s son by Catherine, not yet four but already three feet four inches tall—died on 25 April 1719, dealing another dynastic blow. ‘The Czar took the loss of his only son so much at heart, that he run his head against the wall of the chamber and was seized with two convulsion fits’, remarked the English envoy, who speculated that Catherine had passed childbearing age. She had one more daughter, Natalia, born in 1718 who died a month after her father in March 1725, and possibly two more still births. The Alexis affair, reminiscent of Ivan the Terrible’s murder of his son, may have exacerbated Peter’s tendency towards paranoia and alienation from former intimates such as Menshikov and, ultimately, Catherine herself. It also coincided with the formation of a hypercentralized and militarized police regime bent on resolute action dictated by an ageing autocrat disinclined to accept any counsel.

Outwardly the Petrine government went from triumph to triumph with the Peace of Nystadt ending the Great Northern War in 1721 and Peter proclaimed emperor of all the Russias and ‘the Great, Most Wise Father of the Fatherland’. Prussia and Holland recognized the new title the very next year, Sweden and Denmark in 1723 and 1724, but Austria delayed until the early 1740s and Poland only conceded in 1764. Peter captained the triumphal Persian campaign in 1722 that added new territories along the Caspian Sea in emulation of Alexander the Great. A new succession law, announced in 1722, gave the reigning ruler the right to name whomever he chose to succeed him, and Catherine I was proclaimed empress and crowned in Moscow in May 1724.

Peter’s death on 28 January 1725 happened so suddenly that he could not designate an heir. His health had long been in doubt despite visits to the mineral springs at Olonets. He travelled there in January 1719, for example, contracting ‘a violent cold on the road’. He was also tormented by ‘a weakness in his left arm, which was occasioned at first by his being let blood by an unskilful surgeon, who, missing the vein, made an incision in the nerve that lies by it’. Such pains led Peter to take the waters twice in 1724 in February and June. To Catherine he praised the curative qualities of the waters but complained of urinary difficulty and diminished appetite. In St Petersburg later that summer he was bedridden twice for almost two weeks between 16 August and 12 September 1724. He was one of those driven persons who cannot slow down, no matter what the doctors advise.

The condition that caused his death sparked controversy then and now, primarily whether it was venereal-related or not. Recent Russian scholars are split between gonorrhoea or uraemia. Considering the length and incredible tempo of his life, the cause of death may be less significant than the superhuman achievements of the ‘body’ and ‘soul’ involved. After the traditional forty days of mourning Peter’s body was interred in a magnificent casket in a small temporary wooden church amid the still uncompleted Peter and Paul Cathedral—the first Russian ruler to be buried outside Moscow. Feofan Prokopovich pronounced a brief grandiloquent funeral oration that was widely distributed and translated and that compared the late tsar to biblical prophets and kings—Samson, Japhet, Moses, David, Solomon, and Constantine.

Russia without Peter

Catherine succeeded Peter the day of his death via a bloodless palace coup master-minded by Menshikov and backed by the guards’ military muscle. The coup pre-empted the claims of Peter’s grandson, Peter Alekseevich, but Catherine endorsed the traditional right of male succession as personified in the 9-year-old boy. Menshikov and the other Petrine ‘principals’ had apparently talked Catherine out of becoming regent for Peter on grounds that such an arrangement would foster division and discord. Just before his death Peter I had approved the marriage of his eldest daughter, Anna Petrovna, to Karl Frederick, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, a secret article of the contract providing that the Russian ruler might bring back Anna’s male issue as successor to the Russian throne. Considering the late great tsar’s estrangement from Catherine during the final three months of his life (because of a scandal involving William Mons), her actual succession entailed abundant surprise and irony. Most amazingly, Catherine I inaugurated virtually continuous female rule in Russia for almost seventy years. Paradox also abounded in the efforts exerted over her reign of barely twenty-six months to undo several Petrine policies.

Some reaction against the imperious Petrine legacy was probably inevitable. Three decades of unremitting mobilization had engendered widespread crisis in much of the expanded empire, troubles lately compounded by harvest failures, massive peasant flight, and near bankruptcy. Hence Catherine’s first steps included reduction of the poll-tax (from 74 to 70 copecks) and withdrawal of the army from the provinces. Her government also strove to economize the workings of the inflated Petrine administration by abolishing many offices and dispensing with salaries for low-ranking civil servants in favour of restoring the customary practice of charging petitioners for official services. Much wrangling raged over bloated military expenditures in particular.

Though empress and autocratrix in name, Catherine I was so tired and sickly that her reign looked to be short. A new era of ‘clique government’ ensued much like that which had prevailed for almost a quarter century after Alexis’s death in 1676. This oligarchy assumed institutional shape on 8 February 1726 under a new governmental body, the Supreme Privy Council, a six-man council empowered to advise the empress and headed by the masterful Menshikov But he was ageing and so uncertain of his future that he vainly attempted to become duke of Courland. As Catherine’s demise approached in the spring of 1727, Menshikov endeavoured to safeguard his future by purging two rivals, Count Peter Tolstoy and his brother-in-law Policemaster-General Anton Devier, who were sentenced to death for conspiracy and treason before banishment to remote regions. Just prior to Catherine’s death on 7 May 1727 Menshikov oversaw the compilation of her ‘Testament’, which named Peter Alekseevich ‘sukt-sessor’ under a joint regency of nine persons. With a minor on the throne, Menshikov’s dominance seemed assured. He sought to conciliate young Peter by freeing his grandmother, the nun Elena, and arranged his daughter Maria’s betrothal to the future tsar on 25 May 1727. Barely a month later Duke Karl Frederick of Holstein and his wife Anna left for Kiel, removing two more political rivals from the scene. Even so, prolonged illness in the summer of 1727 enabled Menshikov’s rivals led by Ivan Dolgorukii and the crafty Andrei Osterman to rally the Supreme Privy Council against Menshikov’s ‘tyranny’, so the ‘semi-sovereign despot’ was placed under house-arrest on 8 September 1727. Stripped of his honours, jewels, and multiple estates, Menshikov was exiled with his family to Berezov in Siberia, where he died in 1729.

Peter II’s reign proved as brief and uneventful as Catherine I’s. He hardly ‘reigned’, for actual power rested with the Supreme Privy Council until he suddenly died of smallpox as an unmarried minor on 18/19 January 1730. The general domestic tranquillity was underlined by abolition of the Preobrazhenskii Bureau in 1729. Peter II moved the court and several offices to Moscow, where he spent the last two years of his life mainly hunting in silent protest against the rigours of Petersburg life.

Peter II died without issue and without designating a successor, thereby precipitating renewed political crisis. The Supreme Privy Council, now expanded to eight aristocrat-officials—four Dolgorukiis and two Golitsyns—endeavoured to resolve the dynastic dilemma by secretly offering the throne on restrictive conditions to Anna Ivanovna, the widowed duchess of Courland and childless niece of Peter the Great. This move inadvertently inaugurated a month of intense political manœuvring. Led by the widely experienced Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn, the privy councillors sought to establish an oligarchical constitution that would limit monocratic arbitrary rule (autocracy) by making the council permanent and hedging Anna’s sovereignty with restrictions. Failure to publicize the council’s ‘Conditions’ (Konditsii)—a new term in Russian political discourse—and its other proposals for reform fanned rumours of an aristocratic grab for supreme power, inflaming immediate opposition and alternative platforms backed by several hundred aristocrats and lesser nobles in some cases. When the ‘Conditions’ were finally announced at a meeting of about eighty dignitaries on 2 February 1730, additional projects had been put forward, one signed by 361 persons, and Anna had already arrived in Moscow and become the focus of a loose coalition suspicious of the oligarchs and of the effort to abridge the autocrat’s authority. Osterman and Feofan Prokopovich contacted confederates in the guards and even released broadsides attacking the Supreme Privy Council with the spectre of disunity and chaos. Within a few weeks the competing groups had neutralized each other, so that Anna tore up the ‘Conditions’ and proclaimed herself ‘Empress and Self-upholder of All Russia’. She abolished the Supreme Privy Council and gradually dispatched all the Dolgorukiis into exile. Dmitrii Golitsyn remained free, albeit largely silent, until imprisoned in 1737, a year before his death. He accepted responsibility for the constitutional fiasco, remarking: ‘The banquet was ready, but the guests were unworthy’.

From this tumultuous inception, Anna’s reign exhibited familiar elements of ‘clique government’ along with a confusing mix of conservative restoration, continuity with Petrine policies, and occasional reform. Her reign has endured a generally bad press, mostly Petrine in perspective but also animated by antipathy to female rule and Germans. She has often been viewed as a puppet controlled by her ‘German’ favourite, Ernst Johann Biron, her reign later derided as the notorious time of ‘Bironovshchina’ (‘Biron’s repressive regime’). Such crude indictments have recently receded in favour of renewed attention to important continuities in the ruler’s role, foreign policy and territorial expansion, economic development, and institutional change. Whatever Anna’s intimate relationship with Biron, who was named count and senior chamberlain in 1730 and by whom she may have had a son, he held no significant independent status until elected duke of Courland in 1737 and named regent upon Anna’s death. His fragile regency lasted barely three weeks until overthrown by Field Marshal Burkhard von Münnich. Biron’s presumed role behind the scenes and attempt to marry a son to the empress’s niece provoked accusations of dynastic ambitions, like a new Godunov or Menshikov, whereas his love of horses, cards, and theatrical troupes fostered charges of talking to people as if they were horses and to horses as if they were people. In fact, his influence on high policy appears to have been minimal, and the Chancery of Secret Investigative Affairs, as the secret police was renamed in 1730, handled no more than 2,000 cases as compared to 2,478 during Elizabeth’s first decade of rule and about the same number during her second. Foreigners did not enjoy undue preference during Biron’s alleged hegemony, and he had little to do with the persecution of Old Believers, some twenty thousand of whom are supposed to have been exiled during Anna’s reign (a patently inflated statistic). Besides, Anna’s regime was dominated by Russian aristocrats: Chancellor Gavriil Golovkin, Vice-Chancellor Andrei Osterman, Prince Aleksei Cherkasskii, and later Pavel Iaguzhinskii and his successor Artemii Volynskii. The execution of Volynskii on 27 June 1740 on charges of treasonous conspiracy has often been blamed on Biron, though the court that condemned him consisted solely of Russian magnates.

Like her predecessors, the widowed and (officially) childless Anna confronted succession problems throughout her reign. She kept a sharp eye on the orphaned Karl Peter Ulrich in Holstein, Peter the Great’s sole surviving grandson, and on the vivacious Elizabeth and her small ‘Young Court’. To reinforce the dynastic line of her Miloslavskii relatives, she adopted her half-German, half-Russian niece, daughter of the duke and duchess of Mecklenburg and russified as Anna Leopoldovna, upon the death of the latter’s mother in 1733. This princess was converted to Russian Orthodoxy, given a European-style education, and reluctantly married Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel-Bevern in July 1739. They promptly sired a son, Ivan Antonovich, the future Ivan VI, born on 12 August 1740, just two months before the empress’s own sudden death on 17 October. Regent for her infant son after Biron’s overthrow, Anna Leopoldovna showed little interest in ruling and was easily deposed by the competing dynastic line personified by Elizabeth as the old Miloslavskii-Naryshkin rivalry reappeared.

Anna Ivanovna’s government had adopted several policy changes bruited during the constitutional crisis of her accession. The unpopular Petrine law on single inheritance was abrogated, for instance, and the Noble Cadet Corps was founded in St Petersburg, its graduates entering the military as officers. Officers’ pay was made equal to that of foreigners, and the lifetime service requirement was shortened to twenty-five years with one son entirely exempted. The court returned to St Petersburg in January 1733 amid great ceremony. Links to the interior were improved by completion of the Ladoga Canal, a showpiece supervised by the German military engineer Burkhard von Münnich, whom Anna richly rewarded and promoted to field marshal. He gained a chequered military reputation in leading the Russian armies to victory in the War of the Polish Succession in 1733–5 and the related Russo-Turkish War of 1736–9. Both conflicts involved allied coalitions and gained some success, especially Münnich’s multiple invasions of the Crimea despite substantial Russian losses partly because of a large outbreak of plague. Russia defeated the Turks and the Crimean Tatars, but Austria’s sudden withdrawal limited territorial gains to so-called New Serbia and Azov without the right to fortify the latter. These were Russia’s first triumph over the Turks since Peter the Great’s second Azov campaign and first successful invasion of the Crimea. Another major gain of territory came via the Orenburg expedition, a state-sponsored venture led by Vasilii Tatishchev and others that pushed the Russian frontier into the southern Urals, opening abundant lands to cultivation and mining. The huge Bashkir revolts that greeted this Russian invasion lasted from 1735 to 1740 and resulted in the extermination or resettlement of almost one-third of the Bashkir population. This rich new territory accelerated the economic boom begun in Petrine times and compensated for the loss of the Caspian lands returned to Persia in 1735.

Economic and Cultural Continuities

Indeed, Russian ironworks and copperworks multiplied in the post-Petrine decades, twenty of the former being built in the Urals from 1726 to 1733, thirteen of the latter from 1726 to 1737. Russian exports of iron to England presented serious competition to Sweden and were only one of many commodities regulated by the new Anglo-Russian trade treaty of 1734. St Petersburg blossomed as a major seaport, especially for exports, but Archangel was revived by the fairer tariff of 1731. Most of Russian iron and copper production went to the armed forces, the mint, or for export. The fleet was somewhat revived as the Anna, a huge ship of the line with 140 guns, was launched by the English shipwright Richard Brown in June 1737 with a ball and a banquet.

Post-Petrine Russia also manifested many continuities in cultural affairs. The Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts, planned by Peter and endorsed by the Senate, officially opened in December 1725 under the presidency of Dr Laurentius Blumentrost, Moscow-born and European educated. On 27 December 1725 Georg Bülffinger, professor of physics at the academy, delivered a speech in Latin (111 pages!) on the value of such institutions and studies, especially on the means of determining longitudes. A copy was sent to the University of Cambridge Library. Catherine I’s son-in-law, Duke Karl Frederick of Holstein, attended the session. Another speech was given on 1 August 1726 by Jakob Hermann on the history of geometry and the perfection of telescopes with a reply by Christian Goldbach. The audience included Catherine I herself, but the preface of the published speech (Petropoli, 1727) explained that most of Hermann’s address was not delivered, while the empress actually heard a German panegyric by Georg Bayer praising her and the origins of the Russian people.

To ensure international recognition, the academy’s protocols were published in Latin until 1734, German until 1741. All the academicians were foreigners, perhaps the most eminent being the mathematician Leonhard Euler who worked in Russia 1727–41 and again from 1766 until his death in 1783. Though the academy developed slowly and unevenly, it attracted some gifted individuals, notably Mikhail Lomonosov, the great polymath from provincial origins, who as a mature student absorbed the best of Muscovite education in Moscow and Kiev before attending St Petersburg’s academic university and then advanced study abroad. In literary affairs Antiokh Kantemir and Vasilii Trediakovskii began to make their mark. Foreign scholars such as G. F. Müller accompanied the Bering expeditions, collected many sources on the history of Siberia, and collaborated in a variety of publications. Outside the academy the versatile engineer and administrator Vasilii Tatishchev began compiling a monumental history of Russia—and in Russian—that was only published decades after his death in 1750. Ballet was initiated under Anna with the work of Jean-Baptiste Landé and the arrival of several foreign theatrical troupes.

If Catherine the Great is usually credited with infusing Russia with ‘soul’, Peter the Great’s earlier efforts merit mention. In 1718 the poet Aaron Hill lauded ‘this giant-genius sent; | Divinely siz’d—to suit his crown’s extent!’ To our late twentieth-century ears Hill’s encomium rings ominously:

He breath’d prolific soul, inspir’d the land, And call’d forth order, with directive hand. Then, pour’s whole energy, at once spread wide, And old obstruction sunk, beneath its tide. Then, shad’wing all, the dread dominion rose, Which, late, no hope, and now, no danger knows.

5. The Age of Enlightenment 1740–1801

GARY MARKER

These decades witnessed a flourishing Empire—with ever-expanding borders, demographic and economic growth and a blossoming in aristocratic arts and culture. But it was no golden age for commoners: townsmen suffered from crippling restrictions, serfs became mere chattels, and minorities underwent administrative Russification. The result was widespread unrest and, most dramatically, the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773–75.

AFTER Peter’s death in 1725 and another fifteen years of troubled and ill-defined rule, the next six decades witnessed a self-conscious reassertion of the Petrine legacy. For the remainder of the century, indeed of the old regime, legitimacy was linked to the name and achievements of Peter, officially canonized both as the founder of the All-Russian Empire and its great Europeanizer. Ironically, this epitome of masculine authority, this father of the fatherland, was enshrined and succeeded by strong female rulers, first his daughter Elizabeth (1741–61) and, after the brief reign of Peter III (1761–2), Catherine the Great (1762–96).

The paradox of strong female rule in a patriarchal system of authority added yet another riddle to the enigmas of Russian politics. What did sovereignty and ‘autocracy’ really mean, especially in so vast a realm with so primitive a bureaucracy? What was the relationship between the absolute authority of the ruler and the everyday power of clan patronage? In a country without a fixed law of succession, where the death of every ruler evoked a political crisis that invited court circles and guards regiments to intercede in the choice of a new ruler, it is indeed surprising that ‘autocracy’ should have remained firmly entrenched.

Yet it did, accompanied by a fascination with the precedent of the Roman Empire that reshaped the regime’s own sense of identity. The classical influence found ubiquitous expression—medals and coins depicting Catherine as a Roman centurion, the statue of Minin and Pozharskii (the national heroes of the Time of Troubles) draped in Roman togas, the classical columns on St Isaac’s Cathedral and numerous governmental buildings in St Petersburg, and the odes and panegyrics celebrating Catherine the Great. An exemplar of the latter is an ode by Mikhail Lomonosov, the prominent scholar and patriotic thinker, who sought to pay homage to the new empress: ‘Sciences, celebrate now: Minerva has Ascended the Throne.’

These classical images not only linked Russia to contemporary Europe (where a revival of classical antiquity was in full swing), but also suggested ties to the accepted fount of imperial authority—ancient Greece and Rome. Significantly, classicism functioned to separate Russia’s ‘imperiia’ from the lineage of the contiguous Byzantine and Mongol Empires, which it had traditionally invoked to legitimize territorial claims and even validate the mantle of rulership. But eighteenth-century expansion to the east, south, and west had little to do with the Byzantine and Mongol legacies; hence the soaring leap across space and time to establish cultural ties with classical empires—which had made similar grandiose claims—became an ideological imperative. That impulse lay behind the proclamation in 1721 that Russia was an empire, a claim embraced by Peter’s successors and integral to the new state identity.

However imposing the classical representations of power may have been, they were meaningless if people refused to submit to its will. And in Russia, more so than in many other states, the theatricality of imperial and autocratic power had little relevance to the everyday life of people remote from court and capital. As the historian Marc Raeff has observed, the rulers of eighteenth-century Russia attempted to graft the cameralist order of Central Europe’s ‘well-ordered police state’ onto the apparent sprawling disorder of the empire’s multiple populations. Although the police state could not create social order by itself, it did articulate an institutional and conceptual framework that allowed state institutions to proclaim their sovereignty.

Expansion and Foreign Policy

The navy and the standing army had deteriorated severely in the decade after Peter’s death, but they nonetheless remained a powerful force and consumed most of the state’s revenues—approximately 70 to 90 per cent in any given year during the eighteenth century. Russia concentrated most of its forces along the southern waterways and the borders of the Ottoman Empire, but major resources had to be diverted to deal with other conflicts—for example, those that ended in the defeat of Sweden (1743) and the annexation of the Crimean peninsula (1783).

Of particular import was Russia’s involvement in the Seven Years War (1755–62). Initially, Russia interceded as an ally of Austria and France against Prussia; despite the expense and losses, the campaigns were advancing successfully and, during the final months of Elizabeth’s reign, Russian troops were making steady progress towards Berlin. Peter III, however, suddenly terminated Russia’s participation (whether from blind admiration for things Prussian or from an awareness that the state coffers were empty) and switched sides, to the outrage of his erstwhile allies. Catherine initially repudiated this volte-face in policy, but in a few years took a similar tack—chiefly because the new alignment (including Austria as well as Prussia) provided the only way to secure Russia’s growing interest in Poland.

Prior to the outbreak of war with revolutionary France in the 1790s, however, Russia’s foreign policy focused primarily on the Black Sea. The old chestnut of a primeval Russian ‘urge to the sea’ has long since faded into well-deserved oblivion, but the Black Sea did affect vital national interests—as an outlet to international waters and especially international markets. Although Peter the Great gained a foothold on the Baltic (through the acquisition of Livland and Estonia in 1721), he had had much less success against the Ottoman Empire, leaving the Black Sea out of reach. Thus the strategic waterways that connected the Black Sea with the eastern Mediterranean still traversed territories under Ottoman control. Obviously, any attempt to satisfy these territorial ambitions meant long-term enmity between the Ottoman and Russian Empires. But Catherine did nourish such far-reaching ambitions; at one point, she embraced the vision of southern dominion articulated by her favourite, Prince Grigorii Potemkin, and even spoke of ‘liberating’ Constantinople in the 1780s and making it her new capital.

Fortunately for Russia, however, cooler heads prevailed. Turkish miscalculations helped: when the Grand Vizier declared war on Russia in 1768, he assumed that other European powers would come to his aid. When this assistance failed to materialize and the Porte was left to face Russia on its own, the two powers waged a bloody and exhausting war for six full years. In the end, Russia prevailed and forced the Ottomans to sue for peace at the village of Kuchuk Kainarji on 10 July 1774. The treaty forced Turkey to cede Azov and a small strip of land on the Black Sea to Russia, to recognize the independence of the Crimean peninsula, and to grant passage to Russian merchant ships (but not warships) through the Dardanelle straits. It also empowered Russia to construct a Black Sea war fleet, a concession that greatly enhanced its military firepower on the southern border. The treaty also authorized the Russian ambassador to make representations on behalf of a newly established Orthodox Church in Constantinople, a somewhat vague concession, but one that would loom large in nineteenth-century diplomacy.

Given this sea access to the West both on the Baltic and in the Black Sea, Russian interest in the three partitions of Poland had little to do with sea-power. Rather, it was a reaction to the precipitous decline of a major power, where the domestic political order had been so subverted by external influence that it ceased to be a viable independent state. The decline invited the first partition—by Russia, Prussia, and Austria—in July 1772: Russia obtained mainly what is now Belarus, while Austria and Prussia annexed Galicia and West Prussia respectively, effectively denying sea access for the rump Polish state. The catalyst for the second partition (by Russia and Prussia in January 1793) was a Polish constitution of 1791, which created a hereditary (as opposed to the traditionally elected) Polish monarchy, established an elected legislature, and abolished the liberum veto that had been so destabilizing. After this partition ignited a Polish uprising (led by the hero of the American War of Independence, Tadeusz Kosciuszko), Russia and its allies signed a new series of agreements in 1795 that expunged Poland from the map of Europe.

Population and Social Order

The Russian Empire experienced enormous growth not only in territory, but also in population during the eighteenth century. Natural growth alone accounted for much of this growth—from about ten or eleven million inhabitants in 1700 to about twenty-eight million by the end of the century. The annexation of new territories added greatly to this amount, increasing the total population to over forty million in the 1790s. It was, moreover, an overwhelmingly rural empire: although some estimates run higher, the government’s own censuses consistently show that over 90 per cent of the population belonged to the peasantry and still more lived in rural areas.

These subjects bore multiple identities. All belonged to a specific legal estate (noble, serf, state, peasant, and numerous lesser ones); virtually everyone (the élite excepted) was also attached to a specific location. These social categories, in turn, belonged to one of two large aggregate categories—the podatnye (those disprivileged groups liable for the poll-tax) and the nepodatnye (those exempt). Much more was at stake than the poll-tax: registration in the poll-tax population carried onerous obligations like conscription and corporal punishment that, taken together, formed the great divide in the social order. Women were identified, if at all, by the standing of their fathers or husbands. These identities proliferated unsystematically during the eighteenth century, often leaving little correlation between legal status, wealth, and occupation. Many nobles had neither land nor serfs; most ‘merchants’ neither traded nor produced commodities; and most ‘traders’, juridically were not merchants.

Indicative of the incongruity between juridical status and human activity was the special category of raznochintsy, which literally designated people who fitted none of the accepted ranks or grades. The state employed the category in so many mutually exclusive ways that it was virtually devoid of any coherent meaning; the status, which few voluntarily espoused, was essentially an ad hoc juridical trope that the state invoked when its usual categories, themselves highly artificial, were found to be wanting or inappropriate. In the end, the categories that the state used to classify its population were overlapping, contradictory, often incoherent. Still, these juridical categories provide a useful (if crude) map to the social order, helping to identify groups in terms of their relative rights and obligations.

Townspeople and Merchants

Russia’s urban population was, as already suggested, exceedingly small—some 3 per cent according to the official census of the 1760s, slightly more by the end of the century. The overwhelming majority of urban residents belonged to the legal status of townspeople (meshchane), inscribed in the poll-tax (1.24 roubles—almost twice that of peasants) and liable for the attendant disabilities—most notably, conscription and corporal punishment. The term ‘townsman’ itself was misleading; although many engaged in artisan crafts or petty trades, they also supported themselves through agriculture by tilling garden plots, tending orchards, and raising various kinds of livestock.

The élite in urban society held the rank of merchants (kuptsy), the subject of much legislation in the eighteenth century (which culminated in the ‘Charter to the Towns’ in 1785). It was chiefly for purposes of taxation, not economic regulation, that the state divided merchants into three ‘guilds’ (gil′dy). According to the system in place before 1775, merchants had to have disposable capital of over 100 roubles to register in the first guild, 50 roubles for the second, and 10 roubles for the third. The guild status, in fact, said nothing about the volume or form of their commercial activities; once all internal tariffs were abolished in 1754, merchants—regardless of guild—could engage in whatever trade they chose, with few restraints. Indeed, ‘merchants’ did not necessarily even engage in commerce; by some estimates, 80 per cent of the Moscow merchants registered in the third guild in 1766 did not engage in trade.

The guild status, however, played a critical role in determining status and obligations. Each guild bore specific responsibilities and had to bear a tax based on their declared kapital. The primary urban service was to participate in the urban magistrate (magistrat), the elected (and mostly unpaid) councils obligated to collect (but not levy) taxes, to keep population records, to oversee town services (for example, fire-fighting, public health, and road construction), and to maintain law and order. Given the relative frequency and popularity of drunken mêlées (kulachnye boi), this last responsibility was important. The magistrates also had to deal with major crises like food shortages and epidemics, as in the Moscow plague riots of 1771. In return, guild members had certain privileges—the right to engage in certain types of commerce, display their wares, hang signs, and a few other modest advantages.

Their status was anything but secure, however. If a merchant’s declared capital fell below the specified minimum, he was obliged either to register in the next lowest guild or even to drop from merchant status into the ranks of the common townspeople. Such downward mobility was exceedingly common. As has been recently demonstrated, only a fraction of merchant families in Moscow and provincial towns remained in the first and second guilds for more than a generation; although a few connived to be elevated into the nobility the great majority dropped into the third guild or the common townspeople.

Catherine clarified the legal standing of merchants after 1775 and, in the process, significantly raised the minimum requirements for guild registration. In contrast to the small sums required earlier, merchants now had to declare 10,000 roubles of capital for the first guild, 5,000 for the second, and 1,000 for the third. Those who lacked such capital had to register either in artisanal guilds or in the general pool of urban commoners. Predictably, the new standard caused the massive demotion of merchants unable to meet the new property qualifications: the number of registered merchants plummeted from over 213,053 in 1772 to 24,562 in 1775, a decline of 88 per cent. However, those excluded from guilds could still trade, since the correlation between legal and commercial status was minimal. Still, those who lost guild status became ordinary members of the poll-tax population, with all the attendant disabilities—taxation, conscription, labour, and hindrances to travel.

The few who remained in the merchant guilds, however, enjoyed important new privileges. One was formal exclusion from the poll-tax rolls, although at the price of paying an annual 1 per cent levy on their capital. Moreover, members of the first and second guilds were exempt from the degradation of corporal punishment, could not be consigned to work in onerous places (such as salt mines), and enjoyed important symbols of social status (for example, the privilege of riding in carriages). And they could buy themselves out of military and civil recruitment. Catherine’s legislation also defined their privileged spheres of commercial activity: the first guild could engage in foreign trade, the second in national trade, and the third in local and regional trade.

Catherine also created a further élite category that included trained professionals, businessmen with capital over 50,000 roubles, wholesalers, shipbuilders, and people deemed ‘eminent citizens’ (imianitye grazhdane, i.e. wealthy merchants who had been elected to serve in an official post). This élite, in recognition of their service, enjoyed a host of privileges that ranked them near the nobility in standing, except for the fact that their titles were not hereditary and they could not own serfs. As one might expect, many of these eminent citizens ultimately obtained those privileges by successfully petitioning for elevation into the ranks of nobility.

State Peasants and Interstitial Categories

The category of state peasants was a catch-all term to identify those living on state lands and owing dues to the state rather than to private landlords. Most state peasants lived in agricultural settlements as members of a repartitional commune, but some, like the odnodvortsy (homesteaders) in the south, functioned as family units. As for economic activity, most were primarily engaged in agriculture. In the north, working in heavily wooded territory and handicapped with poor soil and extensive frost, state peasants supplemented—and even replaced—agriculture with other activities, such as fishing, trapping, beekeeping, and logging. In the case of those who lived near waterways and canals, many worked on barges, hauling them downstream with teams of rope-pullers working each side of the river. And state ‘peasants’ living along the White Sea worked mainly as commercial fishermen and whalers. In areas where the state sought to foster industrial growth it assigned some state peasants to factories and plants, where, as ‘ascribed’ (pripisnye) peasants, they had to supply a stipulated amount of labour each year. In short, the umbrella category of ‘state peasant’ was primarily a definition of tax and other obligations, not a coherent economic or social classification.

One important subgroup of state peasants had formerly belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church—primarily monasteries, occasionally to parish churches. Despite recurrent attempts by Peter the Great and his successors to sequester or at least exploit this population, the Church succeeded in retaining ownership and limiting any exactions by the state. In 1762, however, Peter III secularized the Church’s landed estates and transferred its peasants to state jurisdiction. Although Catherine temporarily rescinded that edict, in 1764 she confiscated these lands and peasants once again. She then converted this population into a special category called ‘economic peasants’ (named after the ‘College of the Economy’ established to administer them), essentially just another of the myriad subgroups within the larger aggregate of state peasants.

The peasant population also included a congeries of other smaller social units. One category, bridging the status of state and seigneurial peasant, was the ‘crown’ (dvortsovye) peasants, who lived on crown land, held this hereditary status, and owed dues to the imperial family. A substantial population (over half a million males, or 5 per cent of the peasantry), these peasants were administered by a governmental agency and hence were more approximate to state than seigneurial peasants. Yet another special category was the ‘possessionary’ (possessionnye) peasant, who was ‘possessed’ by a factory or plant: declining to extend the noble privilege of owning serfs to other social groups, the government permitted industrial enterprises (not their owners) to purchase unfree labour.

Regardless of juridical status, most peasants did not occupy themselves exclusively, or sometimes even primarily, with field work. Even in agricultural communities, peasant households spent the long winter months indoors, repairing tools, tending animals, and threshing or milling grain. A substantial proportion of peasants hired themselves out for seasonable labour and participated actively in rural fairs. So many peasants engaged in the local and regional markets that the law designated them as ‘trading peasants’, who legally remained members of the peasantry, but whose long-term presence in commerce had become a recognized fact.

Serfs

If any population did roughly correspond to our conception of the primordial peasant wedded to the land, it was the serfs. According to the poll-tax census of the 1760s, Russia had 5.6 million male serfs (56.2 per cent of the peasant population). For all practical purposes, Russian serfs were invisible to Russian law and justice: subject to their squires (who collected dues, designated recruits, and meted out punishment), the serf had virtually no identifiable status in the imperial system. It is, in that sense, ironic that the Russian term for serfdom—‘serf law’ (krepostnoe pravo)—was distinctive precisely for the absence of ‘law’ to regulate the mutual relations between squire and serf. In this legal vacuum nobles could—and did—modify the obligations of serfs at will, not to mention sell and relocate them. By the late eighteenth century Russian ‘serfdom’ bore less in common with Old World serfdom than with New World slavery.

Some developments did, however, work in the serfs’ favour. In purely economic terms, the poll-tax (set at 70 copecks per male soul in the first half of the century) remained at the same level—notwithstanding the sharp inflation of succeeding decades. In real terms, then, the material burden of the poll-tax declined substantially. In addition, the natural growth of the population diminished the per capita burden of other obligations, especially recruitment, but also such duties as portage and temporary road work. And, given the exigencies of state service, many nobles had little opportunity to meddle in the daily lives of their peasants. If a recent historian’s findings for the village of Petrovskoe in Tambov province are typical, or even widespread, some serfs exercised considerable collective control over their working and life routines.

Still, the second half of the eighteenth century marked a major deterioration in serfs’ legal status. Many squires, as we shall see, had strong incentives and new opportunities to intercede in village life, encroach on its quotidian autonomy and assert new powers of regulation and control. Peasant communities, moreover, had few legal mechanisms of resistance; no longer full-fledged subjects (ceasing, after 1741, to take an oath of allegiance to the sovereign), serfs—in contrast to state peasants—did not even have the right to petition the emperor. Except for serious crimes or disputes involving other estates, the landlord exercised virtual private-law authority on his estate. He had final authority over serf marriages, although as a practical matter these were typically arranged by the peasant families and councils of elders. When an important piece of legislation filtered down to the locality it was often the landlord’s responsibility to have it read aloud by the local priest, bailiff, or scribe. And, in moments of ‘disobedience’ and rebellion, the landlord could summon governmental authorities to send police or troops to restore order and punish the intransigent.

How did the serfs respond to all these changes? At one level, it seems unlikely that serfs were well informed about the law and its impact on what they deemed to be tradition. After all, serf communities had few contacts with anyone from the government and conducted their day-to-day relations mostly within their own institutions—the household and commune. Nor did they have much opportunity to become more familiar with the law: they could not legally file petitions and—in contrast to state peasants—did not participate in the Legislative Commission of 1767–8 (an experience that, especially through the preparation of ‘instructions’, raised the legal consciousness of other groups). Nevertheless, as the ethnographer M. M. Gromyko has argued, serfs probably had some familiarity with law and, with time, increasingly invoked decrees (real or bogus) in the defence of their rights and justice. A higher awareness of the outside world was particularly likely given the peasants’ non-agrarian activities (especially for those who travelled regularly to towns to trade or work) and the geographic dispersion and intermixture of social categories, whereby the most diverse status groups—from serf to state peasant—lived in close proximity. It was, in short, no accident that in the 1770s and subsequent decades, serfs became increasingly restive and exhibited their own judgement on this consummately ‘immoral economy’.

Nobility

Although the nobility stood at the apex of the social pyramid, with claims to pedigree and precedence, its status was uncertain and ambiguous. Significantly, the collective term for nobility, dvorianstvo, did not prevail until the mid-century and lacked precise meaning, much less a clear English-language equivalent. The Petrine Table of Ranks of 1722 compounded this confusion by creating a mechanism to elevate the meritorious to personal nobility and, if they rose high enough, to hereditary nobility. Whether of ancient lineage or parvenu, nobles enjoyed important and distinctive privileges, including exclusion from the onerous poll-tax and its attendant disabilities.

Nevertheless, until 1762 the nobility still owed service to the state, ordinarily in the military. As a practical matter, however, many evaded this obligation, a nonfeasance that actually increased—partly because of the quantum increase in service demands under Peter, partly because of the state’s transparent inability to coerce compliance. Moreover, lifetime service took nobles away from their estates, transforming them into absentee landlords who were obliged to depend upon stewards (often peasant-born estate managers) to oversee day-to-day operations and to mediate social and economic relations with the peasants. Such management was not only expensive (diverting scarce labour from the field) but extremely inefficient and unreliable, riddled with graft and deception. Finally service was financially onerous, even for middling and élite strata—especially the requirement that they maintain two or more residences (for which they received no specific compensation), including one in St Petersburg for the most successful.

Still, for the ambitious and well connected, cosmopolitan service was an absolute necessity, bringing not only status and power, but wealth as well. The nominal salaries, though niggardly for the lower and middle range of servitors, were quite substantial for the upper range of the Table of Ranks. And to that must be added the spoils of service, which, in this venality-ridden order, often far exceeded any legal income. Servitors could always dream of special imperial grants, and in fact rulers transferred over 100,000 peasants and millions of acres of arable land to private hands during the last half of the eighteenth century.

Such largesse was not only desirable but essential, for few nobles found their landed estates to be a source of substantial income. Above all, agricultural productivity lagged far behind that in Western Europe and showed little trace of the concurrent ‘agricultural revolution’. Moreover, most nobles belonged to the category of petty landowners, with scanty resources and meagre incomes. The truly rich with more than 1,000 male souls comprised only about 1 per cent of the hereditary nobility; another 17 per cent (the ‘middling nobility’) owned between 100 and 1,000 male souls. Four out of five noble households owned fewer than 100 male souls, most having fewer than twenty, or even none at all.

Even for those with substantial numbers of serfs, the net return on their estates was uncertain and paltry. Above all, Russian agriculture—with its three-field system, primitive technology, and unfavourable climate—produced far less than the modernizing estates in the West. Peasants consumed the bulk of this scant output (with a diet exceeding 3,000 calories per day, including much protein, according to some research); and another 10 per cent of that was lost through spillage and spoilage. The net yield left little for squire and state.

Compounding agricultural inefficiency was the system of partible inheritance that negated ‘economies of size’. Peter had attempted to impose a system of single inheritance in 1714, but the adverse reaction among nobles ultimately impelled Anna to rescind the law in 1731. Restored in full force, partible inheritance guaranteed real estate to all heirs, including widows, but doomed noble estates to endless division to the point where they ceased to be economically viable. Unless new resources could be secured, this system inevitably reduced a noble family to penury and virtual landlessness within a few generations. Moreover, even in the best of circumstances, estates were fragmented, with individual villages, meadows, lakes, and forests parcelled among several owners. This land ‘system’ gave rise to endless disputes and litigation (lasting decades, sometimes more than a century) over boundaries and ownership. Even when service (whether through grants or purchase) brought new property, the new lands were usually remote from the family estate and gave no opportunity to form a single, large estate.

Given this economy, families that had already achieved hereditary nobiliary status recognized the importance of retaining high standing on the Table of Ranks. Historians have demonstrated that, during the first four or five decades of its existence, old aristocratic families dominated the upper levels of the Table of Ranks and collectively prevented large numbers of parvenus from achieving hereditary noble status. A manifesto by Peter III on 18 February 1762, however, freed the nobility from obligatory service and significantly reshaped service patterns for the nobility. This famous decree, interestingly, has confounded historians as much as it did contemporaries: why did Peter III choose to ‘emancipate’ the nobles from service? After all, the fundamental premiss of the imperial system was an implicit social contract based on universal service: serfs toiled for nobles so that the latter could serve the state. Did the manifesto not nullify one of the principal moral foundations of serfdom? Where indeed was the state to recruit for civil servants and military officers if not from the nobility? And how, without service, were noble clans to remain economically viable?

Although historians have not reached a consensus on these questions, most reject the old canard that the nobility collectively demanded its ‘freedom’ and that this ‘concession’ marked the beginning of a noble oligarchy. Nobles needed service, and service needed nobles—a fundamental symbiosis not to be changed by a mere paper manifesto. It is by no means clear that most nobles welcomed the change. Contemporary tales may have portrayed the roads from St Petersburg as clogged with nobles departing for their family estates, but—according to the few scholarly studies on the subject—most nobles still chose to serve, thereby avoiding the inevitable decline in their family fortunes.

Nevertheless, the manifesto did contribute to the formation of a new noble consciousness of its station in Russian society. The fact that the decision to serve now rested with them (‘unto eternity and to all generations to come’), not with the monarch, seemed to reconstitute the hereditary nobility as a corporate body endowed, in the words of the manifesto, with ‘freedom and liberty’.

But why did the state abolish the service requirement? Contemporary gossips speculated that the manifesto was merely concocted to cover a nocturnal dalliance of Peter III and his mistress. More likely, the manifesto came from the emperor’s personal secretary, D. V. Volkov, who wanted the Table of Ranks to serve state interests, not the nobility. In Volkov’s view, the old élite clans had transformed the service ranks into a facsimile of the medieval system of precedence (mestnichestvo) based on birthright, thereby denying the state an opportunity to recruit, promote, and reward the meritorious with rank, pay, ennoblement, and political influence. Thus the manifesto of 1762 endeavoured to separate service rank from social status, at once enabling the state to replenish its service class with outsiders and to accord a respectable alternative for those who chose not to serve.

State policy for the next two decades, which culminated in the Charter to the Nobility in 1785, sharpened the distinction between service (as a voluntary attribute of nobility) and privilege (as the temporal reward for this historic service). In the event, nobles obtained important and exclusive privileges: to own serfs, to register family patents and heraldry books with local governments, to convene provincial assemblies (which were to provide officials for local government), to appoint local judges, to be exempt from corporal punishment, to travel at home and abroad without special permission, and to ride about in carriages (a symbolic, but important gesture). Most concessions emphasized the provincial locus of noble status; they also provided symbolic and material venues outside the capital and the service system onto which the meaning of nobility could be inscribed.

Nobles also acquired new and weighty economic advantages. Above all, they had a legal monopoly on the ownership of servile labour: they alone could buy and sell serfs, with or without land; they could even break up serf families, send the unruly into hard labour (while deducting the deportees from recruit quotas), and wilfully increase feudal dues (as quitrent, corvée, or both). They could engage in any occupation or trade, and could also open manufactories to exploit the free labour of their serfs. For all these ventures they had exclusive access to cheap credit: they also had special access to the country’s sparse credit reserves through long-term, low-interest (5–6 per cent) loans from the Noble Land Bank established in 1754.

The consequences of the new distinction between service and status were simultaneously momentous and disorienting. From the perspective of the ‘police state’, corporate privilege whetted the aspirations of an élite ‘estate’ now distinguished by its inalienable rights, not its duty to serve. Moreover, with the expansion of state administration, especially at the provincial level, nobles could now retire from the capitals, yet retain the trappings of privilege. Thus many were able to flaunt their status, indulge in conspicuous consumption beyond their means, and open clubs and lodges for their amusement and, on rare occasions, for the discussion of more serious matters.

Some, however, did devote themselves to the development of their estates. At a minimum, they sought to reorganize and manage their estates personally and more effectively—no small task given the diffuse landholding. An audacious few attempted to redesign rural life according to the latest ‘scientific’ methods, even issuing learned ‘instructions’ to their bailiffs on how to run their estates. Some also carried the injunction ‘to administer justice to the peasants without prejudice or oppression’ (in the words of a Soviet historian), but the main impulse was to regulate social and economic life on the estate—not unlike what the enlightened absolutist was attempting to do at a macro level.

Others, however, were only interested in their estate’s output, not its operation, and preferred to give free rein to their poetic imaginations—organizing serf theatres or choruses, constructing English gardens or French waterfalls, and inventing local family festivals to celebrate the virtue and bonhomie of their enlightened paternal vision. Of course, many of these same people remained in service; their periodic visit to the family estate, now inscribed with a poetics of permanence and heritage (which belied the fluid, transitory realities of noble landownership), represented a naïve return to innocence.

Not without cause has Catherine’s era been dubbed the ‘golden age of the Russian nobility’. Never had they been so privileged, so economically advantaged, and so handsomely rewarded for doing so little. In exchange, however, they abdicated nearly all political pretensions. Although they might act on behalf of clan and patronage network, they did not mount a defence of their social estate. In part, that is because they had no need to be institutionally or politically active: they had done quite well vis-à-vis other groups—and without involving themselves collectively in politics or raising an ideological challenge to the autocracy. Hence the vaunted palace coups—which not only installed individual rulers but also resulted in the murder of two sitting monarchs (Peter III in 1762 and Paul I in 1801) and one former monarch (Ivan VI)—did not precipitate a constitutional crisis. At issue was only the person of the nominally all-powerful autocrat, not the system itself. As a result, the aggressive intrigue, the discourse about good rulers and polities, and the ‘legislomania’ of the second half of the eighteenth century rarely proceeded very far towards imposing formal limitations on ruler-ship. Increasingly, the succession crisis of 1730 appeared as an aberration, not to be revisited until the Decembrist revolt of 1825.

All of these material advantages coexisted uneasily with a deepening moral discomfort among the service nobility over the legitimacy of their special privilege. Although most still served, they were no longer bound to do so. Educated and literary nobles freely invoked the language of freedom, rights, and virtue at the very moment when they legally became the sole group in Russian society with the right to hold fellow subjects in virtual slavery. The embryonic provincial assemblies and noble courts were a far cry from French parlements or the manor-based authority of the English peerage. Increasingly, the edifice of hereditary nobility rested upon the precarious claim of historic, ancestral service. This malaise did not, however, precipitate a full-fledged identity crisis during the eighteenth century; most nobles were anything but rootless and alienated. But the discomfort was real and unresolved, evoking a rare but important cri de cœur in the final decades of the century.

A Multinational Empire

From its very outset Russia had included diverse peoples and, as the boundaries of the state expanded, this multi-ethnic character became more pronounced. Coming to terms with these newly acquired ethnicities, cultures, and religions took on both administrative and symbolic importance for Elizabeth, Peter III, and Catherine II. Much of this expansion had been accomplished during the seventeenth century, with the incorporation of the vast Siberian expanses and much of Ukraine, followed by territorial gains in the Baltics and elsewhere during the reign of Peter the Great. But expansion was particularly marked during the reign of Catherine the Great, as the Russian Empire annexed most of Poland (through the three partitions), the Crimea and the northern Caucasus. In the process, the empire came to include large numbers of Poles, Jews, Tatars, and Caucasian peoples.

Recently, the demographic historian V. M. Kabuzan produced estimates of the ethnic distribution of the Russian Empire during the eighteenth century shown in the table.

Although the government was committed to a model (perhaps ‘illusion’ is a more accurate description) of administrative uniformity, relations between St Petersburg and the outlying non-Russian populations varied considerably. In the case where local élites accommodated themselves to Russian rule, willingly swore allegiance to the monarch, and demonstrated their ability to run their territories by keeping order and supplying labour and revenue, these peoples retained considerable autonomy and saw their separate traditions, institutions, and social organizations remain largely intact. Unfortunately, most of the new subjects proved troublesome, either because they believed fiercely in their right to independence (as was true with Poland and the Crimean Tatars) or because they were deemed to be too alien to be trusted (as was the case with Jews in the former Polish territories).

Money, Finances, and Markets

Historians customarily portray the Russian economy as eternally backward, technologically primitive, and fundamentally unproductive. Although these characterizations are not entirely off the mark, they do not accurately characterize the Russian economy in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the contrary, the growth rates in Russia were then comparable to those in England—a remarkable fact given England’s technical superiority and the onset of its industrial expansion. Russia was a net exporter of numerous raw materials, not only the traditional forest products like timber and furs, but also such agricultural products as hemp, rye, and tallow (and—by some accounts—silver).

Ethnic groupings in the Russian Empire, 1760s-1790s (in millions)

The domestic market also became more active and complex. Apart from the seasonal flow of peasants to towns (bringing wares, trade, and food), some areas of the empire provided a ready market for agricultural goods. That was true of cities in general, but especially the newly built capital, St Petersburg, which expanded from nothing to over a quarter of a million inhabitants by the end of the century. Because the surrounding soil was so marshy and infertile, St Petersburg had to plunge its supply lines deep into the empire, with the requisite network of canals and roads. Similar conditions obtained in the dense forest territories of northern Russia, where poor soil and adverse climate made agriculture marginally productive; as a result, the local population had to import food from the south, providing yet another stimulus to internal trade. The robust trade in agricultural products also fostered a proliferation in rural fairs, which expanded in number (from 383 per year in the 1750s to 3,180 in the 1790s), geographic breadth, and commodities exchanged. Although most fairs were seasonal and lasted only a few days, they had nevertheless become a mainstay of the rural economy.

The primary beneficiaries of expansion were the state and landlords, not the serfs. The former profited directly from a profound eighteenth-century ‘price revolution’, which, coming much later than similar inflation in Western Europe, brought a fourfold increase in the price of grain, hemp, flax, and textiles. This price revolution, moreover, impelled many landlords to transfer their serfs from quitrent to corvée dues. Whereas quitrent provided a regular monetary sum, corvée labour enabled the squire to increase the volume of his own production and hence profit from the rising prices on agricultural commodities. As a result, a historic shift took place in serfdom wherein peasants from the central black earth regions, heretofore working the land mostly on quitrent, were consigned increasingly to corvée, much to their dismay and resentment.

An additional measure which greatly advantaged landlords was colonization. Catherine believed firmly in the mercantilist notion that population equalled wealth. She did all in her power to promote immigration to the empire, including inviting whole communities of religious dissenters, mostly Mennonites, to resettle from southern Germany to southern Russia. She also opened borderlands in the south-east (near Ufa and Orenburg) and south-west (in the territories north of the Black Sea known officially as ‘New Russia’) to nobles, granting vast tracts of land to those who resettled their serfs there. Apart from mercantilism, here the empress was also motivated by concerns of security: by settling large Russian populations on borderlands historically populated by Turkish peoples (mostly Bashkirs and Kalmyks), Tatars, and Cossacks, she hoped to domesticate these peoples and integrate them into the empire. Catherine further believed that the borderlands were ripe for agricultural exploitation. Endowed with fertile soil and favourable climate, this underpopulated region had remained untapped for centuries because their open plains made them difficult to defend and vulnerable to incursions from without.

Quitrent and corvée: serf dues

By the late eighteenth century, however, the balance of power in the south had shifted from the indigenous populations in favour of the Russian state. Cossack hosts and tribal populations retained considerable autonomy and, in most instances, enjoyed exemption from conscription and the poll tax. But their service obligations as subject peoples were now firmly inscribed in law and practice. None of them favoured the influx of Russian nobles and serfs, but, beyond verbal protests and occasional disturbances, they were powerless to resist. As a result, the vast rich expanse of the Black Sea basin was now opened for cultivation. These lands generated higher yield, with seed grain ratios of 4:1 to 5:1 rather than the usual 3:1 in central Russia. A large portion of this output went to market and, because of the proximity to the Black Sea, for export. To handle this burgeoning trade, in 1794 Catherine founded the port city of Odessa, which within a few decades would become one of the largest cities in the empire.

These developments—the price revolution, the expansion of rural markets, the export of grain, and the increasing control over serf labour—proved a veritable windfall for those nobles able to take advantage of them. According to one estimate, their profit from corvée rose from 36 copecks per male serf in 1710 to 10 roubles in 1800, a rate that far exceeded by sevenfold the general inflation rate. In practice, only a relatively large estate was able to exploit this opportunity, and that required a noble family to remain visible and acquire enough land so as to counteract the downward pressure of partible inheritance. Although some nobles succeeded, many others did not, widening further the stratification along the continuum of poor and rich noble.

Taken as a whole, Russia’s eighteenth-century economy presented quite a paradox. On one hand, it could boast of burgeoning trade and markets, increased exports, rapid expansion of paper money, and very healthy growth rates. On the other hand, all of this led somehow to a wealthier and more privileged nobility alongside a weaker, smaller, and less secure merchant status. The centre of gravity for wealth, social power, and even population stood far more firmly in the countryside in 1800 than it had a century earlier.

The Pugachev Rebellion

Probably the single greatest blow to the moral foundations of the existing order was the fateful decision by Peter III to free the nobility from service. The reciprocal principle of universal service—serfs serve the noble, the nobles serve the state—had provided the primary justification for serfdom; Peter the Great had said as much, as had every one of his successors. It was the tsar’s will; and, as the Orthodox Church taught, God Himself demanded obedience to the tsar’s will. But ‘freeing’ the nobles had abrogated this reciprocity. Here and there serfs circulated rumours that this was just the first step, that soon the tsar would free them as well. When this did not happen, and when Peter III was deposed shortly afterwards, these rumours were transmuted into a variant of the familiar pretender myth: Catherine II and her cohort were illegitimate (indeed, German!) usurpers, Peter III was not dead but had taken refuge with loyal Orthodox peasants until he could return triumphantly, reclaim his throne, and complete his emancipatory project. This myth spawned numerous pretenders during the 1760s and 1770s, some as far away as Silesia, Hungary, and the Urals, all claiming to be the true Peter.

The greatest challenge, however, came from a rebellion led by a fugitive Don Cossack, Emelian Pugachev, who waged intermittent campaigns against the state between 1772 and 1774. Like previous rebellions, this one drew principally on disaffected frontier Cossacks—in this case the Iaik Cossacks north of the Caspian Sea, who were fighting a lengthy and losing struggle to maintain autonomy from the imperial state. But the rebellion eventually attracted many other disaffected elements, producing the bloody Pugachevshchina that could only be suppressed by a full-scale military expedition.

Pugachev began to proclaim himself the avenging Peter III sometime in 1772 and assembled his own ‘court’, surrounding himself with confederates who renamed themselves after leading figures in the capital. This cadre of impersonators gathered a small contingent of Cossacks and fugitive ‘possessionary’ factory serfs and next proceeded to lay siege to Kazan and Orenburg. Success increased credibility and garnered new support; soon some of the Turkic peoples of the southern Volga (Kalmyks, Bashkirs, Kazakhs, and Tatars) joined the rebellion. In 1774 the conflagration spread to the mining settlements at the foot of the Urals, and Ekaterinburg found itself besieged.

Once the Russo-Turkish War ended in 1774, Catherine could now redeploy the returning regiments to deal with Pugachev. His forces were on the run, losing control of most of the towns they had earlier overwhelmed. But in midsummer of 1774 they crossed the Volga into territories populated mostly by Russian serfs. At one point Pugachev acquired a printing press and began to issue manifestos and decrees declaring the serfs free and ordering them to wreak vengeance against their ‘former’ masters. To the dismay of nobles and state officials, such radical appeals struck a sympathetic chord with many serfs, who seized lands, pillaged granaries and warehouses, and torched numerous manor-houses. Over 1,500 landlords were reported killed before the wave of violence was suppressed. What began as a frontier rebellion had turned into a dangerous peasant jacquerie.

Despite widespread support, Pugachev’s forces were no match for the experienced military and suffered a decisive defeat in August 1774. A month later Pugachev was delivered to the authorities by erstwhile followers in the town of Iaitskii gorodok. At last the rebellion was over, and the perpetrators were shipped to Moscow where they were paraded in the streets in cages before being interrogated, tried, and executed. But troubling questions lingered. Never before had a Cossack revolt succeeded in rousing so many peasants. Did the serfs really believe that Pugachev was Peter, and did they genuinely think themselves free and empowered to act violently? Certainly this was their defence once the rebellion was crushed, but such claims were made by peasants desperately trying to minimize the state’s retribution against them. Whatever the peasants actually thought, the whole episode showed that the myth of freedom ‘in the name of the tsar’ was sufficient to mobilize serfs for organized violence. Whether or not serfs looked upon their bondage as unjust in the wake of the 1762 manifesto is a matter of conjecture, but the mere fact that they acted as if they did introduced a new element into the political cosmology of the countryside: the incompatibility of justice and serfdom now that universal service was no more.

Although the Pugachevshchina was the last great Cossack-led rebellion, it forced Catherine to recognize the dangers of ‘under-government’ at the provincial level. Leaving administration largely to local landlords may have sufficed in peaceful times, but Pugachev’s activities coincided with a war that forced many landlords to resume their careers in uniform and thus leave provincial service. In the absence of full-time civil administrations, whole regions found themselves virtually bereft of governmental personnel, a vacuum that allowed the popular violence to spread uncontrolled. In response, Catherine decided upon a major restructuring of provincial government, a process that culminated in the Statute on Provincial Administration in 1775 and the Law on Provincial Police (blagochinie) in 1782.

These two reforms expanded the number of provincial governments from eight to thirty-five (later the number rose to fifty), each having a population between 300,000 and 400,000 souls. Each provincial capital had a full-time and salaried civil staff headed by a governor, who was appointed personally by the sovereign and given a large salary and high grade on the Table of Ranks. In addition, there was to be a commander-in-chief, appointed by the Senate, with responsibility for maintaining order. Courts and judgeships were established, and responsibility for staffing them was shared by the central authorities and the local nobility. Charity, education, wardship, and the like fell under the aegis of a newly established body called the Board of Public Welfare, an agency headed by the governor but managed by representatives from the local élites.

The Law on Provincial Police nominally established local police offices and empowered them to maintain order, keep track of religious minorities and schismatics, and oversee local publishing. But in practice these responsibilities, like many of the provisions in the 1775 Statute, were honoured mostly in the breach, at least during the eighteenth century; hence serious investigations typically had to be handled by other agencies. Nevertheless, the two statutes had the combined effect of establishing a civil presence sufficient to prevent local disturbances from getting out of control. By the minimalist standards of Russian government in the eighteenth century, this was one definition of success.

The Church, Dissenters, and Popular Religion

With the sequestration of church lands and peasants in 1764, Catherine severely limited the Church’s resources and capacity to address its various problems. However, the ‘Common on Church Properties’ provided a modest budget for ecclesiastical administration and some funds for monasteries (many of which, however, were abolished as redundant and ‘useless’). But that budget contained no funds to provide proper support for the parish churches and their staffs. Given the lack of endowments, benefices, or tithes, parish clergy had to support themselves primarily by cultivating the plot of parish church land and by exacting gratuities for various religious rites (for example, baptism, weddings, and burials). Significantly, the parish as an institution was also losing its centrality in daily life: it did not form a lower unit of civil administration, had indeed no juridical status in state law, and even lost some of its traditional functions as the commercial and cultural vortex of the community.

At the same time, parish clergy underwent far-reaching changes in their status and training. The Spiritual Regulations of 1721 had required them to be educated, to know Feofan Prokopovich’s catechism, to read laws and important notices to the parishioners, and to maintain accurate parish registries of births, deaths, and marriages. As ever, imperial fiat was slow to become everyday fact, but in the second half of the century parish clergy did in fact find it necessary to fulfil these various mandates. Perhaps the most significant change pertained to formal education: from the 1740s the Church gradually erected a network of diocesan seminaries where, increasingly, the clergy’s sons were forced to enroll—on pain of exclusion from the clergy and even conscription into the army. It took time, of course, to construct a seminary system based on the Latin curriculum of Jesuit schools, but by the mid-1780s nearly every diocese had established such a seminary, with advanced classes in philosophy and theology. Few students completed the course of study, however, and most departed at the first opportunity to fill a vacant clerical position in their home region. Nevertheless, ecclesiastical élites—above all, the ‘learned episcopate’ and isolated members of the parish clergy—did master the curriculum and, on the basis of their education, held the top positions in church administration.

For most rural clergy, however, a schooling based on rote memory and Latin curriculum was irrelevant to the service in a village church. Although church leaders recognized the shortcomings of the new seminary, they remained staunch adherents of the classical curriculum, chiefly because it provided a symbolic link to a sacred antiquity and placed the clerical élite on the same level as learned savants in the West. But the classical curriculum crowded out instruction in subjects essential for rural clergy, such as homiletics, the teachings of church fathers, and dogmatic theology. Equally startling was the scanty instruction in civil Russian. In the wake of Peter the Great’s language reforms, Church Slavonic was increasingly remote from the civil Russian of official documents and cosmopolitan society—a significant handicap in the light of the extensive secular duties ascribed to parish priests. Not until the 1780s did the Church attempt to rectify the deficiency by introducing parallel literacy instruction in Slavonic and civil Russian, and by offering specifically ‘Russian classes’ (russkie shkoly) in the seminaries.

Hamstrung by these material and cultural deficiencies, the Church found itself ill-equipped to combat the spiritual deficiencies of its flock. Despite the claims to be ‘Holy Rus’, the clergy knew that they faced formidable problems among the nominally Orthodox. These included not only simple superstition and ignorance, but far more deep-rooted problems—such as shamanism, worship of nature or ancestors, and deviant interpretations of basic Orthodox doctrines (for example, the Trinity, the resurrection, and the annunciation). The line between popular Orthodoxy and heresy remained blurry and shifting; its rank-and-file parish clergy had neither the training, nor the independence, nor the incentive to make the mass of illiterate peasants into self-conscious Orthodox believers.

Moreover, the Church faced a formidable adversary in the ‘Old Belief’. Indeed, the threat of dissent increased, not least because the state had assumed a far more tolerant attitude towards Old Believer communities. The new policy permitted many Old Believers to return from distant borderlands to central Russia, even within a relatively short distance from Moscow itself. More distant Old Believer strongholds, such as those of Vyg and Klintsy maintained close contact with their brethren across the realm, often circulating manuscripts and printed books to sustain the Old Belief. Compared to most peasants, the Old Believers could boast of a higher rate of literacy and also had a sharper grasp of their basic beliefs. They were thus a serious threat to the Church and its uncertain flock of believers.

Enlightenment and Élite Culture

Compared to the problems of the Old Belief and popular religion, the cosmopolitan Enlightenment represented a matter of relatively minor concern for Church and state. Indeed, Catherine the Great herself was a principal progenitor and propagandist of Enlightenment ideas. Drawing upon the Petrine tradition, but also relying almost verbatim on the works of contemporary European writers, Catherine adumbrated a full-blown theory of enlightened absolutism, one which combined a faith in reason and reform with a recognition of the absolute authority of the monarch. These principles reached their apotheosis in the ‘Great Instruction’ (Bol′shoi nakaz) that she prepared in advance for the Legislative Commission (1767–8). It was a most remarkable document, one that began by proclaiming Russia to be both a European and absolutist state, but followed with prolix chapters replete with references to reason, rights, tolerance, and happiness.

Her ‘Great Instruction’ was not, of course, the only product of the Russian Enlightenment. Indeed, such sentiments and values came to pervade the service élite—newly educated, mostly noble in origin, who imagined themselves to be European gentlemen (and women), moral, fashionable, and literary. Their new cultural world conferred great privilege and honour on the printed word, reading, and writing. It identified France’s ‘Republic of Letters’ as the model of choice, the philosophe as the preferred (if postured) identity.

The first secular men of letters—Vasilii Trediakovskii, Antiokh Kantemir, Alexander Sumarokov, and Mikhail Lomonosov—received their education before mid-century either at the newly established academies for military cadets or at seminaries for prospective priests. Each proved to be a prolific essayist, poet, and translator; each endeavoured to preside over the emergent secular print culture housed at the Academy of Sciences. During the 1750s, however, élite secondary education underwent a significant transformation; it now placed far greater emphasis on modern languages, belles-lettres, and gentlemanly pursuits (fencing, dancing, parade-ground assembly)—all at the expense of narrowly technical subjects. Equally important was the establishment of Moscow University in 1755 (Russia’s first), with its affiliated secondary boarding-schools (pansiony) in Moscow and Kazan.

For the next two generations Moscow University and, especially, its two boarding-schools, would train cohorts of literati who would subsequently establish the main translation societies, journals, and printing presses. Although they received little or no income for their literary endeavours, these first intellectuals devoted at least as much time to their cultural activities as to service and, indeed, saw these activities as a proper extension of their official duties. Their cultural engagement was facilitated by the reduced demands of state service: commissioned officers had few daily responsibilities in peacetime, those in administration rarely had to work more than three or four mornings a week. Favoured with such leisure, the young literati embraced the world of letters, expanding the annual number of publications from under 100 in the 1740s to about 500 in the late 1780s. They created a new genre of literary and polemical journalism, an enterprise that, by the 1770s, was producing two or three new periodicals a year. Most literary journals had tiny press runs (rarely more than a few hundred copies per issue) and often failed after just a few issues. Nevertheless, others quickly took their place, keeping the spirit of creation and engagement alive.

Indeed, journals and publishing circles were the principal foci of secular intellectual activity. As such, they were decidedly noble (dominated by service nobles) and cosmopolitan, housed either in Moscow or St Petersburg. Their audiences, predictably, were also urban and noble; for example, over three-quarters of all subscribers to journals were members of the hereditary nobility. Book readers were less likely to subscribe (hence register their status), but here too the vast majority came from the nobility.

Significantly, the new cultural activity gradually moved intellectual life towards autonomy from state and monarch. Court patronage did remain as an essential feature of literary and cultural life; until 1783, for instance, nearly all secular publications came from institutional presses, mainly the typographies at the Academy of Sciences and Moscow University. Increasingly, however, these presses left editorial decisions to the literati themselves, for they printed most manuscripts with few changes, especially if the author or translator helped pay the bill. Even this modicum of control vanished in 1783, when Catherine gave private individuals the right to own presses without prior approval.

That decree effectively neutralized the monarch’s ability to direct and control literature, not because of any ideological conflict, but because writers could now pursue literature independently of the government. In large measure the literati gained this autonomy precisely because they had not posed a threat to the existing structures of authority, whether formal or informal. In fact, the vast majority of writers shared Catherine’s enlightenment vision of the state as the principal agent of improvement and moral direction; few raised basic questions about the existing social order. All concurred with the empress that Russia was part of Europe, that reinforcing this affinity served the best interests of the fatherland and individual. Some dissented, it is true. Most notably, the great journalist and publisher Nikolai Novikov railed against mindless slavishness towards French fashion (‘Voltairianism’) and launched major publication ventures, such as the Drevniaia rossiiskaia vivliofika (‘Ancient Russian Library’) in twenty volumes, to celebrate Russia’s own antiquity and traditional culture. But even he devoted immense attention to translations and adaptations from contemporary French and English letters. For example, the so-called satirical journals of 1769–74 (The Painter, The Drone, Bits of This and That, and others) included pieces purloined directly from Joseph Addison’s Spectator.

During the 1770s and 1780s, however, the initial concord between writers and empress gradually deteriorated, largely over such issues as French influence and political virtue. Some traditionalist voices, such as M. M. Shcherbatov’s On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, castigated a purported decline of public virtue and respect for fatherland. Others, as in Denis Fonvizin’s play The Minor, raised subtle questions about the erosion of virtue in political leadership. This critical strain reached its most radical expression in the—legal—printing of Alexander Radishchev’s Journey From St Petersburg to Moscow (1790), a scathing attack on Catherine and the Russian social order, serfdom included. The tome outraged the empress, who penned furious rebukes in the margins of her copy, ordered all available copies destroyed, and subjected the author to trial and banishment into Siberian exile.

Radishchev’s views were quite exceptional, however. Far more common were the moral and spiritualist misgivings that pulsated in the Masonic lodges, especially those of the Moscow Rosicrucians around Novikov and his spiritual overseer, Johann Schwartz, a Rosicrucian from Berlin. During the 1780s the Moscow Rosicrucians grew increasingly distressed over the spiritual and religious decline of cosmopolitan Russia, the soulless fashionability and the frivolity that (in their view) permeated élite society. Novikov himself was a major purveyor of the Encyclopaedist Enlightenment and entertaining literature, but his lodge steadily moved away from the celebration of amusement. Even signs of political engagement can be discerned; in 1785, for example, some Rosicrucians developed connections to the court ‘party’ around the Tsarevich Paul; some even entertained the idea of making him emperor before his mother’s death—apparently on the basis of (false) rumours that Paul was more sympathetic to their moral agenda. Whatever the case, the affinity between Rosicrucianism, Paul, free publishing, and geographic distance aroused growing distrust among Catherine’s officials, with a steady chilling in the relations between ruler and writers.

The chill had consequences. In 1785, because of the flirtation with Paul and the publication of religious materials (still a monopoly of the Orthodox Church), the state launched a formal investigation of Novikov’s publications that ended in a mild reprimand. Two years later Catherine ordered an empire-wide raid of book stores to impound dangerous, seditious titles. By the early 1790s, once the violent anti-monarchism of the French Revolution had become a disturbing reality, Catherine (and later her successor, Paul) erected a harsh and repressive censorship, greatly restricting the import of foreign books (banned entirely for a few months in 1800), imprisoning eminent figures such as Novikov, and ultimately closing most private presses. By 1800 publishing had declined to a trickle; literary journalism had all but disappeared; and the international book trade was virtually nil. Although recovery came quickly after the new Emperor Alexander I (1801–25) eased restrictions, state and letters now constituted two separate spheres, with only coercive censorship—not common values—providing the old link between them.

Reign of Paul (1796–1801)

Catherine the Great succumbed to a stroke on 17 November 1796. Her final years were marked by bitterness and political repression, but without any fundamental retreat from the tenets of enlightened absolutism. Her love-affairs, always semi-public, took on the aura of scandal, while unpopular favourites such as Platon Zubov garnered unwonted influence on public policy. The legislative fervour of her earlier reign was gone, and Catherine’s self-construction as a reforming ruler could not adjust to the new political antinomies of revolution and legitimacy. Her son, Paul I, shared none of her commitments to reform and progress; indeed, most accounts describe him as being openly hostile to his mother and everything that she stood for. His five-year reign saw the enactment of numerous decrees that distanced Paul from the powerful families at court, and ultimately turned them against him. His most noteworthy act was to decree, in 1797, that serfs could be forced to work no more than three days per week of corvée—a nominal attempt to curb abuses that had seen some landlords forcing their peasants to work five or six days on estate lands, leaving very little time for them to work on their own fields. This decree apparently had little effect on actual practice, but it deepened the gulf between Paul and his magnates. The unpopular repression of literati and some political figures, as well as the less than successful direction of Russia’s initial clashes with Napoleon, convinced leading court parties that Paul had to be removed. With the tacit agreement of his son and successor, the future Alexander I, a small conspiracy of military leaders and Masonic lodge members arrested and quickly murdered Paul in the bedroom of the newly constructed Michael Castle, on the night of 11 March 1801.

In many respects, the preceding decades had fulfilled the agenda of the Petrine era and set a new one for the nineteenth century. Thus Peter still cast a long shadow over the entire eighteenth century: so much that Peter had decreed but had been unable to implement actually came into existence in the decades that followed his reign. In that sense, his successors not only claimed lineage to Peter to legitimize their power, but also attempted to realize (if in modified form) his ambitions. Much else, however, was new—the changes in noble status, the territorial gains in the south, and the far-reaching acculturation of élites in the two capitals. At the same time, many other issues were still unresolved, most notably the powder keg of serfdom and the role of the Westernized nobility. These and other problems would be the centre of attention in the coming decades of the nineteenth century.

6. Pre-Reform Russia 1801–1855

DAVID L. RANSEL

The regime began the century in a reformist spirit and met the challenge of the Napoleonic invasion, but thereafter abjured far-reaching reform and, especially, the emulation of Western models. By the 1850s it faced a disaffected élite at home and, as the Crimean War demonstrated, could no longer compete militarily with the European great powers.

IF the murder of Tsar Paul in 1801 brought instant relief to the political élite of Russia, it did not have the same healthy effect on the new ruler, Alexander I, son of the murdered tsar. Alexander was himself a conspirator, for he had authorized the overthrow of his father, if not his assassination, and the new tsar initially expressed despair about the killing, feelings of incompetence about ruling, and stark fear that he too might be killed. The recent series of executions and overturns of European rulers had made royalty insecure everywhere in Europe. And Russia had its own tradition of rebellion, including at least nine violent changes of regime in the preceding 120 years. Alexander was understandably concerned not to offend powerful persons at court or in the armed forces. His fears may have deterred him from articulating any plan of political action other than a vague promise to rule in the manner of his grandmother Catherine the Great, whom most nobles remembered fondly for her readiness to protect their interests. The new ruler’s failure to establish a clear political or social programme encouraged groups within the political élite to work out their own proposals for change.

Early Efforts at Reform

The first concern of governing élites was to establish a framework of legality, by which they meant protection of the person and property of nobles. Tsar Paul had assaulted their security time and again. Beyond this, the leadership understood that Russia’s administrative and social institutions needed reform. During the eighteenth century, most Russian nobles had become Europeanized and the best educated among them regarded themselves as members of a wider European society. They could not remain unaffected by the revolutionary changes occurring in Europe and the challenge these changes presented to the dynastic and feudalist regime that they led. Opinions about how best to meet that challenge coalesced in three groups at court.

Initially the most important was the group near Alexander who had plotted and carried out the overthrow and assassination of Tsar Paul. The principal leaders were a military man Count Peter Pahlen and a civil servant Nikita Panin. They hoped to impose constitutional limitations on tsarist power and may even have obtained Alexander’s agreement to such a reform before the coup d’état. Their aim was to prevent a recurrence of the despotism that they had just ended. At first, Alexander appeared to be frightened of these men, fearful perhaps that if he did not do their bidding, they would turn on him as they had on his father. To counter their influence he summoned to St Petersburg friends from his youth in whom he had more confidence. This group of advisers became known as Alexander’s ‘young friends’ or ‘the unofficial committee’.

The young friends included men who had grown up with Alexander, or associates of these men. Unlike Alexander, all of them had spent time abroad and acquired a comparative measure of Russia’s development. They were well aware of Russia’s need for administrative and social reform if the country were to compete successfully with the Western powers. Among the young friends were Adam Czartoryski, a Polish aristocrat and later acting Minister of Foreign Affairs for Alexander, Pavel Stroganov, a mathematician who had studied in Switzerland and in France and had joined a Jacobin club in Paris, Viktor Kochubei, another well-educated member of the Russian upper class and for most of the 1790s Russian envoy to the Ottoman government, and Nikolai Novosiltsev, at 40 the oldest of the ‘young friends’, scion of a large landholding family, and a cousin of Pavel Stroganov. In contrast to the other political groupings, these men were not interested in placing restrictions on the power of the monarch but in using his supreme authority to bring Russia closer, socially and economically, to the West. This meant promoting economic development under an enterprising middle class and doing something about serfdom, which these men considered a disgrace and an anachronism. Such aims prompted worried conservatives to refer to these advisers as the ‘Jacobin gang’.

With the support of his ‘young friends’ and his increasing popularity with the public (the result of a series of decrees overturning his father’s despotic rules affecting the nobility and the armed forces) Alexander soon began to feel more secure on the throne, sufficiently so to dispatch the assassins. Within two months of the coup d’état, he forced Pahlen to retire to his estates in the Baltic region and, a few months later, ordered Panin into internal exile as well.

A third group with which the new ruler had to contend was the ‘old men’ of the Senate. The Senate was Russia’s highest administrative and judicial institution and the seat of the leading noble families. During the reign of Catherine II, senators had opposed constitutional projects and relied upon the favour of the empress and their own command of slow-acting collegial institutions to keep policy under their control and to protect their interests. In not following the constitutionalists of their own time, they sacrificed the opportunity to institutionalize the legislative process and thus lost the chance to make law something other than the mere declaration of the monarch’s will, whether expressed orally or in writing. This choice left them defenceless against Paul, who saw the leading institutions as an obstacle to Russia’s moral and social regeneration. Now the old men of the Senate at last understood the importance of constitutionalism and proposed new powers for the Senate, including rights to represent the public, propose taxes, nominate candidates for high administrative posts, co-opt new members of the Senate, and to question tsarist decrees not in conformity with established law or practice (a right of remonstrance similar to that of the French parlement). This programme of conservative constitutionalism, which aimed at limiting abuse of power by the sovereign and protecting the political and economic position of the high nobility, encountered stiff opposition from both the ‘young friends’ (who saw it as a barrier to social reforms) and the bureaucratic conservatives (who regarded it as a recipe for governmental paralysis of the kind that led to the revolution in France).

The best that the ‘old men’ of the Senate could obtain was the right to receive reports from top government departments and the right of remonstrance, both of which were announced in a decree on the reform of the Senate in September 1802. The more important, at least potentially, was the right of remonstrance; but it proved hollow: the first time the senators invoked this right, Alexander berated them for their effrontery and abruptly withdrew it. At issue was a decree about military service that violated earlier pronouncements about the nobility’s freedom from required service (first issued in 1762 and renewed in 1785). The Senate initially agreed to the decree but then impulsively decided to oppose it. The procurator general (administrative head of the Senate), though favouring a larger constitutional role for that body, disagreed with its action and urged Alexander to reject it. Alexander himself treated the whole process with contempt. One might well ask what kind of basic rights the tsar would recognize if he was willing to grant and withdraw them on a whim. As for the rest, no one seemed to be aware that an important principle of government was at stake; this episode seemed to show that Russian leaders had no understanding of what legal order was.

The rejection of the Senate’s demands was a sign that constitutional reform was not on the agenda, despite the rhetoric of the emperor and his associates. The Senate would have had to be a key institution in such a reform but, instead of gaining in stature, it quickly descended to an institution of secondary importance. Its administrative leadership was supplanted by government ministries, established in 1802 to replace Peter’s collegial boards. The Senate was left as merely the highest appellate court of the land.

If reform was to occur, it had to be limited to changes in social and economic relationships and not touch the political order. Here the role of the ‘young friends’ was important. Above all, they wanted change in Russian serfdom. The impulse was not new with them: Catherine the Great had intimated eventual abolition of the serf order in Russia thirty-five years earlier in her ‘Instruction to the Legislative Commission of 1767’. Her son Paul took the first step towards regulating relations between serfs and masters in an edict limiting corvée labour (barshchina) to three days a week (1797). Alexander and his young friends supported such reform, spoke of the need to abolish serfdom, but in the final analysis proposed small changes that did not threaten the established social order. They imposed a ban on the advertisement of serfs for sale and issued a law on Free Cultivators (1803), whereby landlords—with the approval of the emperor—could free whole villages of serfs on the basis of agreements negotiated with the peasants. But this transaction, which required the voluntary participation of the landlord and payments on the part of the peasants, resulted in fewer than 50,000 manumissions by the end of the reign—an infinitesimal percentage of the tens of millions of serfs. Somewhat greater progress was made in the Baltic provinces of Estland, Lifland, and Kurland, where local nobles agreed to regulate serf obligations and grant the peasants rights to their lands. These were steps towards what would be a full-scale emancipation of the serfs in the Baltic provinces in the years 1816–18.

An important initiative early in Alexander’s reign came in the field of higher education. Although the Russian Empire boasted universities at Moscow, Dorpat, and Vilnius, only the first of these educated predominantly Russian students (the other two served, respectively, German and Polish constituencies). To these, Alexander added three new universities (Kharkov, Kazan, and St Petersburg, the founding of the last delayed until 1819) on the basis of equality of admissions without regard to class status. It was hoped that the universities would train the public servants so badly needed by the Russian government. A continuing concern of the ruling élite throughout the first half of the nineteenth century was the inadequate supply of talented administrators and consequent frustration of government action either by an absence of qualified personnel or by corrupt practices of ill-educated and undisciplined officials. The educational institutions founded by Alexander and their expansion during subsequent reigns went far towards supplying trained people for administration.

Missing from the court and high politics of Alexander’s reign was the participation of women, a dimension of Russian politics prominent in the eighteenth century. The sole exception was imperial charity, which included the largest foundling homes in Europe, hospitals, schools, huge manufacturing operations and banking institutions—all were managed efficiently and lovingly by Paul’s wife, Empress Maria Fedorovna, until her death in the late 1820s. Except for this traditional female concern, women lost their former prominent place in government; Paul’s succession law of 1797 specifically excluded women from rulership until all male heirs from all collateral lines of the imperial family had died off. The change coincided with a shift in the mores of the society and court towards a reinforcement of the domesticity of élite women, stressing their role in early child-rearing and intimate family social life, in contrast to politics and court entertainment. Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, who served during Catherine II’s reign as director of both the Russian Academy and the Imperial Academy of Sciences, justifiably complained of the misogyny of Alexander’s court and the diminished place of women in Russian society more generally. Henceforth, the importance of women in Russian politics, apart from the symbolic roles of women in the imperial family, would be in individual acts of protest and in movements of opposition to the established order.

International Affairs

Although the reforming impulse at the Russian court did not die out after 1803, it had to give way for a time to the government’s concern with international affairs. Peter the Great’s conquests in the early eighteenth century had brought Russia into the European state system; the ensuing wars and alliances showed Russia to be an intimate partner in the balances and conflicts of the system. The country could not stand apart from the upheaval now being caused in the European state system by Napoleonic France’s wide-ranging conquests, rearrangements of national borders, and dominance of continental policy.

At first, Alexander merely put a close to the wildly fluctuating policies of his father, who had begun his reign as an enemy of France and ended it as France’s ally against England. Alexander recalled an expeditionary force his father had sent to conquer British territories in India and composed other differences with Great Britain so that the mutually beneficial trade between the two countries could resume. In 1803, when hostilities reignited between France and Great Britain, Alexander hoped to be able to act as a peacemaker and tried above all to restrain Napoleon’s expansionist policies. Relations between Russia and France took a sharp turn for the worse in 1804 when Napoleon seized the Duke of Enghien from a neighbouring neutral country and had him summarily executed for plotting the overthrow of the French government. Alexander’s protest at the execution was met with contempt from Napoleon. Soon after, Russia joined a new coalition against Napoleonic France, which led to war the following year and a major defeat of Austrian and Russian forces at Austerlitz. After further defeats in 1806, abandonment by his allies, and the opening of hostilities between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, Alexander saw no option but withdrawal from the war largely on terms dictated by Napoleon in the summer of 1807 at Tilsit, a town on the Niemen river in Poland. The famous accords signed at Tilsit had the practical effect of dividing Europe between France and Russia and also committed Russia to adhere to the continental blockade through which France hoped to undermine British commerce and finances.

Mikhail Speranskii’s Reforms

Concern about the inadequacies of the Russian political order continued. Alexander seemed to see the problem as essentially one of personnel, a shortage of honest and effective administrators. Others, however, recognized the need as well for structural changes. One of these was Mikhail Speranskii, a priest’s son, who rose from humble origins to the pinnacle of Russian government. A brilliant seminary student and teacher, he became secretary to a highly placed aristocrat, served in the Ministry of Internal Affairs early in Alexander’s reign, and by 1808 had risen to the position of State Secretary, the leading official for domestic affairs. No less than Alexander, Speranskii lamented the deficiencies of Russian officials and convinced the tsar to introduce exams for promotion to senior government ranks, a step that did not endear him to the many noble officials who had gained their positions through patronage and without the necessary educational and technical qualifications. Speranskii also proposed legal and financial reforms and achieved some success in stabilizing the currency and increasing tax revenues. His financial measures included a temporary tax on the nobility, which, again, won him no friends among that important class.

The most sweeping changes proposed by Speranskii touched political and administrative organization and included a plan for the separation of powers patterned on Montesquieu’s ideas. He proposed to divide the Senate into separate administrative and judicial hierarchies and to create a third branch of government, the legislative, with an assembly elected on a narrow franchise. The entire system was to be capped by a cabinet headed by the emperor and called the State Council. Although Speranskii undoubtedly had won the emperor’s agreement to pursue such a project, Alexander ultimately refused to approve major changes and implemented only the plan for the State Council, which was established in 1810 together with a reorganization of government ministries. By this time, the clouds of war were again gathering as Napoleon prepared the invasion of Russia. Whether or not Alexander was inclined to additional government reforms, this was not the time to launch a political experiment that could have compromised lines of authority. Moreover, Speranskii was unpopular with the nobility because of his crack-down on incompetence and support of financial policies harmful to noble interests. The nobility supplied Russia’s military leadership and officer corps, and to solidify support for the regime in the face of the impending challenge, Alexander sacrificed Speranskii’s policies and indeed Speranskii himself, whom he exiled to Siberia on trumped-up charges just before the invasion by Napoleon’s armies.

Napoleon’s Invasion

Napoleon’s Grande Armée entered Russia in June 1812. Its forces numbered nearly half a million, almost twice the strength of the Russian army. However, only half the invading army was French, the rest being composed of troops from countries conquered by Napoleon, which were less than reliable instruments for the pursuit of French aims. The size of Napoleon’s army also presented grave problems of supply, especially after the Russian generals decided to withdraw deep into the country while stripping away supplies and housing in the path of Napoleon’s advance. Napoleon had hoped to destroy the Russian army in the western borderlands or, if they chose not to fight near the border, to corner them at the first great fortress city of Smolensk, where he was certain they would make a stand. He miscalculated. The Russians mounted a spirited but brief defence of Smolensk, withdrawing after just two days and burning the city as they left. Russian generals, particularly Mikhail Kutuzov, to whom Alexander gave command after the fall of Smolensk, had learned in earlier encounters with the French that they could not expect to win a pitched battle against Napoleon’s superior leadership and disciplined troops. Their hope lay in the exhaustion of the Grande Armée as failing supplies and disease steadily reduced its numbers, morale, and fitness. Alexander courageously supported this strategy despite its unpopularity with a large segment of influential opinion and mounting, sometimes vicious, criticism of his national leadership.

The Russians could not surrender Moscow without a fight and decided to make a stand at Borodino, a village in the western reaches of Moscow province. This epochal battle proved costly for both sides, but especially so for the French, who could not replace their losses at Borodino—nearly one-third of the remaining able-bodied men. Although the Russians pulled back (to save what remained of their army) and left open the road to Moscow, Napoleon’s occupation of the ancient capital brought no resolution to the conflict. Moreover, as Napoleon reached the heights above the city’s western outskirts and waited for the ‘boyars’ to greet him in submission, he saw not a delegation of the defeated but ominous veins of smoke rising from many points in the city, signs of the fires set by retreating Muscovites that would rage for nearly a week and leave much of the capital in ruins. It was the middle of September by the time Napoleon entered Moscow, a devastated city without adequate shelter for his troops; foraging parties sent out of the town encountered fire from Russian troops, and the Russian winter was soon to close in. Alexander steadfastly refused to negotiate. The hopelessness of the French position was apparent.

A month after its arrival, the Grande Armée departed from Moscow, moving out towards the south in the hopes of retreating through a region untouched by the Russian scorched-earth policy. But Russian forces met the invaders at Maloiaroslavets and forced them back onto the path of destruction by which they had entered the country, helping to turn what might have been an orderly withdrawal into an increasingly desperate and disorganized flight. Russian partisans harried Napoleonic forces and picked off stragglers the entire way. Napoleon himself abandoned the army to its fate and made a dash for France to raise new forces. Only about 10 per cent of the original invading army was able to escape from Russia in good order. The end of the Napoleonic empire in Europe was in sight. Alexander, emotionally lifted by the great victory and inspired by a wartime religious conversion, prepared to play a leading role in creating a new order for Europe.

THE APPROACH TO BORODINO

After the War

The post-Napoleonic settlement for the European world associated with the name of the Congress of Vienna created a long period of general peace for the continent despite continuing stormy calls for democracy and national self-determination and the occasional limited conflicts they generated. The new state system, often mistakenly labelled a balance of power, was in reality a set of interlocking hegemonies exercised by Russia, Great Britain, and Austria. As long as the governments of these countries were able to maintain amicable relations, no major conflicts arose in Europe or its dependencies. Towards the end of Alexander’s reign, the principles of the system—the legitimacy of established governments and territorial integrity of existing countries—were tested by the rebellion of Greeks within the Ottoman Empire. Many Russians were sympathetic to the Greek cause. Catherine the Great had even worked out a plan in her time to resurrect Greece under the rulership of her grandson Constantine (named purposely after the last Byzantine emperor). But Alexander did not succumb to calls for Russian intervention on the side of the Greeks, and he held to the ideas of legitimacy and stability of established relations. Russia played a larger role in the Greek conflict after Alexander’s death, when a part of Greece became independent. Conflicts in this region ultimately destroyed the Congress of Vienna settlement, but during Alexander’s reign, Russia supported the conservative European regimes in resisting popular aspirations throughout the continent for greater political participation and national expression.

In Russia itself, the same conflict being played out on the European stage between dynastic (and in some cases still feudalistic) regimes and the proponents of democratic nationalism was repeated on a smaller scale. The stunning victory over Napoleonic France resolved the earlier doubts on the part of most of Russia’s leaders about the country’s administration and social system. The autocrat had held firm, the nobility had served and led the conquering army, the common people had remained loyal and even fought partisan campaigns against the invader. The victory strengthened the ruling groups’ belief in the system such that they no longer saw the necessity for fundamental reform. The mood had begun to shift in favour of the conservative voices in high politics. This mood accompanied a European-wide change in political thinking away from the rationalist, mechanistic ideas of the eighteenth century towards organic theories of society on the model enunciated by Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, and Friedrich Karl von Savigny. De Maistre, a refugee from Napoleonic Europe who spent many years in Russia, was able to exert a direct personal influence on Russian statesmen.

Until recently, historians have seen the post-Napoleonic period (or final ten years) of Alexander’s reign as a single piece characterized by a sharp turn away from the reform policies of the previous era. In terms of the outcomes, this view may still be justified. Yet recent research has made a strong case for dividing the period into two five-year segments, in which the first witnessed a continuing sympathy on the part of the tsar and some of his close advisers for the reform ideas of the early reign. Alexander continued as late as 1818 to speak publicly of his wish to establish a constitutional order for Russia, and privately he was still expressing such hopes in 1820. Work on a draft constitution was apparently also in progress as late as 1820. Nor had Alexander given up on making a start towards emancipating serfs from bondage to private landlords despite opposition from most of the nobles in high government. In 1818 he instructed one of his closest aides, General Aleksei Arakcheev, to design a project for emancipation and the following year ordered his minister of finance to work out the fiscal problems associated with a possible emancipation. Finding no support for a broad project of reform in 1820, Alexander proposed at least to bar the sale of serfs separate from their families and without land. But this proposal too met near unanimous opposition from the members of the State Council.

The reform impulse died after 1820. Vigorous opposition from the nobility finally convinced the tsar of the hopelessness of attempting a change in the status of the serfs. The courts, dominated by the nobility, were even proving reluctant to enforce laws for the protection of serfs already on the books. Since ideas of constitutional order were linked in the minds of reformers with the necessity for emancipation of the serfs, opposition to serf reform doubled as opposition to constitutionalism. It seems, moreover, that Alexander had lost interest in the idea of a constitution for Russia after dealing with the increasingly refractory Polish diet (Sejm). In 1821 he told a French envoy that constitutional government may be appropriate for enlightened nations, but would be unworkable in the less educated societies of Europe. No more was heard about a constitution for Russia, and, indeed, the government now turned to repression of any voices that echoed the tsar’s earlier promises of a constitutional order.

Some reforms were implemented in the post-war period of Alexander’s reign, but they were of an entirely different kind; they represented an accommodation and adaptation to the given political and social system. The most prominent such reform was the creation of military settlements, frontier colonies for the maintenance of army units in peacetime. Since it was impossible to demobilize an army of former serfs and send them back to their estates and yet too expensive to keep them continually under arms, the government settled them on lands occupied by state peasants near the frontier and set them to producing their own maintenance through farming. The reform included some enlightened features such as subsidies to families, government-sponsored health care and birthing services, and regulation of community hygiene. Even so, the settlements were not popular with either the peasants or the soldiers on whom they were imposed. They joined the hard labour of peasant farming and a highly regimented military life in a combination so odious that it frequently sparked mutinies. Surprisingly, in view of the poor record of the settlements in saving on military expenditures and the easy target they made for opponents of the regime, this reform was the most enduring of Alexander’s reign. Military settlements lasted until the Great Reforms of the 1860s.

This period also brought conservative reform to Russian universities. Under the influence of a religious revival following the victory over Napoleon and Alexander’s own spiritual conversion during the war, the Ministry of Education was combined in a dual government department with the Directorate of Spiritual Affairs (the former Holy Synod). In 1819 a member of this institution’s governing committee, Mikhail Magnitskii, visited Kazan University and discovered to his horror that professors were teaching about the rights of citizens and the violence of warfare. Although Magnitskii could think of no better recommendation than closing down the university, Alexander decided instead to appoint him rector with powers to reform the institution. Magnitskii promptly dismissed eleven professors and shifted the curriculum towards heavy doses of religion and the classics, a direction that was subsequently followed at St Petersburg University and others.

Decembrist Rebellion

The shift to conservatism was not shared by all of Russia’s élite. Many of the young men who had fought in the campaigns against Napoleonic France returned home with a different spirit. They had liberated Europeans from French domination and brought their own country to the first rank among European nations. Proud of Russia’s leadership, they yearned to make their country the equal of Europe in other respects: to end serfdom at home and to enjoy there the kind of constitutional order that existed in France, the United States of America, and other enlightened states. In other words, they combined ideas of liberalism and constitutionalism with elements of modern, romantic nationalism. They met to discuss their hopes and dreams in private clubs, successors of the Masonic lodges to which their fathers and grandfathers had belonged.

At first, they thought that Alexander shared their beliefs and hopes. His postwar pronouncements about a constitution for Russia encouraged this belief, just as the tsar’s conservative advisers had warned him it would. But increasing repression at home, the reform of the universities, Alexander’s opposition to movements for national independence in Greece and elsewhere soon disillusioned those hoping for a continuation of the liberal reform plans of the early reign. When Alexander reinstituted a secret police regime in 1821 following a rebellion in one of the élite regiments of the capital cities, the young dissidents formed secret societies and prepared for revolution. Although the leaders were divided on their ultimate aims—some preferring a federated system, others a unified state; some preferring a constitutional monarchy, others a republic—they held together long enough to attempt a putsch during an interregnum in December 1825 caused by the sudden death of Alexander on a tour of the south of the country. The tsar died childless, and confusion about which of his two brothers was supposed to succeed to the throne gave the insurgents an opportunity to strike. The rebellion had two phases, the first in the capital St Petersburg and the second two weeks later in the Ukraine; both were quickly defeated. Five leaders were hanged, and 284 other participants, many from the most prominent families of the nobility, were imprisoned or exiled to Siberia. This insurgency, known to history as the Decembrist Rebellion, exhibited features of both a palace guards coup of the eighteenth century and a modern revolution in the name of popular sovereignty. However, by virtue of a rich legacy of memoirs, poetry, art, and historical reconstruction, the event shed its archaic features and became semioticized into the first act of the Russian Revolution. An important element of its appeal was the role of the wives of the Decembrists, many of whom left comfortable upper-class homes and followed their convicted husbands into Siberian exile. Although women had made such sacrifices earlier, the Decembrists’ wives were the first to be inscribed as a literary model and hence the first to provide a script for Russian women’s selfless devotion to the cause of resistance to autocracy.

Nicholas I: The Early Years

The new tsar, Nicholas I, had not expected to become ruler and had prepared for a military career. Historians have been inclined to interpret his policies and behaviour as those of a militarist martinet. If Alexander has been known for his earnest planning for political and social reform (and even perhaps excused, because of the epic struggle with France, for not having carried it through), Nicholas has usually been described as a ruler lacking in vision, a thoroughgoing conservative who sought only to hold back change. This contrast is misleading. Alexander was ultimately far more committed to the rhetoric of reform than its substance, and Nicholas’s actual accomplishments surpassed those of his older brother. Indeed, both regimes shared central values and goals, including most prominently a dedication to the notion of disciplined administration, legality in governance, and the role of the tsar as benevolent overseer of this legal order (however imperfectly these ideas may have been realized in practice). The misleading contrast in the popular picture of the two regimes may stem from the sharply differing reform methods of the two rulers. Alexander and his ‘friends’ adopted a deductive approach to reform typical of the age of rationalism in which they were nurtured, whereas Nicholas preferred an inductive approach of investigating issues exhaustively before implementing changes. Moreover, having learned from the Decembrist revolt the dangers of encouraging hopes of reform, Nicholas insisted on the strictest secrecy in the consideration and formulation of plans for change. The reforms that he introduced were carefully thought through and implemented under controlled conditions. Though intended to strengthen the given system of authority and property relations, Nicholas’s reforms laid an essential foundation for the momentous social, economic, and legal transformations of the next reign.

The first months of Nicholas’s reign were taken up with the investigation and prosecution of the Decembrist rebels, a task that the new ruler delegated to Mikhail Speranskii, the reformist state secretary of the previous reign who had been exiled to Siberia in 1812. After this, Speranskii and a former member of Alexander I’s ‘committee of friends’, Viktor Kochubei, were put in charge of a commission to look into government operations and recommend changes where needed. The commission’s broad mandate advised it to discover: what is good now, what cannot be left as it stands, and what should replace it. The commission sat for several years and produced a shelf of reports. Its final recommendations proposed incremental improvements in established institutions and policies rather than fundamental reforms. In regard to serfdom, the commissioners advised against allowing the transfer of serfs from field work to the squire’s household (to allay fears caused by an increasing number of landless peasants); it also proposed to improve the situation of state peasants in ways that would create a model for emulation by private landlords. In regard to the upper class, the commission wanted to restrict the flow of new entrants to the nobility through the Table of Ranks and instead to reward deserving non-nobles with privileges not tied to hereditary status. Concern for the preservation of the nobility found expression in a recommendation to establish entail and thereby prevent the fragmentation of noble landed estates. The commission also took up some of Speranskii’s favourite ideas about the division of the Senate into separate administrative and judicial bodies.

But before reforms could proceed, a number of challenges rocked the regime at the start of the 1830s, a circumstance that strengthened the hand of those who favoured repression over reform. After three decades of the Russian army’s steady, successful penetration of the Caucasus Mountains and subjection of its peoples, a reaction occurred. Native peoples overcame their differences and united in a resistance that threatened to disrupt Russia’s near-eastern policies. Second, the Russian home front was stricken by a devastating cholera epidemic, the first in a series of outbreaks that recurred in the nineteenth century. Initially, the hardest hit was the south-central agricultural province of Tambov, where terrified peasants rioted and in some instances were joined by the soldiers dispatched to bring them under control. When the epidemic spread to the capital cities, disturbances erupted there as well. In one case, Tsar Nicholas himself, no coward, rode on horseback into a panicked and rioting crowd on Haymarket Square in St Petersburg, scolded them, and sent them home. The third and most disturbing event, however, was a national rebellion in Poland towards the end of 1830. Sparked by the overthrow of the restored Bourbon monarch Charles X in France earlier that year, which provided a stimulus for rebellion in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, the Polish insurgency lasted through much of 1831 and brought an end to the Poles’ autonomy in internal affairs. The constitution granted Poland by Alexander I was replaced by an Organic Statute, making Poland an integral or ‘organic’ part of the Russian Empire.

In response to these crises and the continuing challenge of liberal ideas and national aspirations, Russian leaders devised a new ideological formula (later dubbed ‘Official Nationality’) that sought to co-opt the spirit of romantic nationalism and put it to the service of fortifying a dynastic, imperialist regime. The new formula, first enunciated in 1832 by the deputy minister of education, Sergei Uvarov, exalted the principles of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. The first implied a rejection of the Voltairian scepticism of the eighteenth-century court and likewise an end to the experiments with biblical fundamentalism sponsored by Alexander I. The principle of Autocracy was meant to reinforce the notion of a personal rule sanctioned by divine right, which was necessarily incompatible with either enlightened absolutism (and its appeal to Reason), conservative constitutionalism (as proposed in the reform projects of Nikita Panin, Alexander Bezborodko, and Mikhail Speranskii), or the radicalism of the Decembrists. The murky principle of Nationality (narodnost) stressed the unique character (samobytnost’) of the Russians as a people and therefore the inappropriateness of foreign political and social institutions for Russia. Thus Uvarov’s new formula sought to replace the universalistic assumptions of the Enlightenment by asserting the distinctive character of Russia and its political and social systems. But, unlike modern cultural relativism, it conferred a higher value on Russian ideas, institutions, and especially on the Russian people, who were celebrated as trusting, faithful, and pure of heart.

Reforms of the Mature Years

However delusory the new ideology of Official Nationality, a number of significant reforms were carried out by the regime that fostered it. One of the most important of these reforms was the creation of a comprehensive law code, the first since 1649. Again, the tsar turned to Mikhail Speranskii and asked him to direct the work. Speranskii departed from the previous generation’s (and his own earlier) method of designing reforms on general principles and borrowing directly from foreign models; in line with the new notions about the organic nature of society, he assembled past law, beginning with the Code of 1649 and including the thousands of statutes enacted in the intervening 180 years (omitting some, such as those related to government crises); the Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire was published between 1828 and 1830 in 45 volumes and has been an invaluable tool for historians ever since. He then distilled from this compendium a thematically organized fifteen-volume codex of living, currently applicable law called the Digest of Laws, which went into effect in 1835. Though not systematic and normative, the new code addressed the contradictions and chaos of the accumulated statutes and presented law in a usable form, accessible to courts throughout the land. Yet, as government officials understood, a country without a corps of jurists knowledgeable about and committed to a legal system was a country in which laws remained vulnerable to manipulation in courts influenced by bribery and clientelism. Here, too, Nicholas’s government made a valuable contribution, opening a School of Jurisprudence in 1835 to train sons of élite families in modern legal practice. The graduates of this institution played an indispensable role in the creation and widely acknowledged success of the sweeping juridical reforms of the 1860s, which adopted such key features of Anglo-American practice as justices of the peace, trial by jury, and life tenure for judges.

Important changes were also made in state financial policy. Half a century of war and administrative expansion paid for by increasingly inflated paper money (assignats) had wreaked havoc on state finances. Building on ideas initially sketched by Speranskii during Alexander I’s reign, the Minister of Finance, Egor Kankrin, succeeded in bringing inflation under control by tying the value of assignats to that of the silver rouble and thereby laid a solid foundation for economic growth. The Crimean War at the close of the reign, it is true, undid much of this work and left Russia poorly prepared to manage the costs of the reforms of the 1860s, but matters would have been far worse without Kankrin’s policies.

Nicholas should be given credit for preparing the ground for the reform of serfdom, even if during his reign little change occurred in the actual status of the serfs. At best, a law passed in 1842 allowed landlords to manumit with land serfs who were able to come up with a high buy-out price. But this option, dependent as it was on the acquiescence of the landlord, resulted in few manumissions. The law nevertheless underlined the government’s insistence that freed serfs be provided with land, an ominous sign for noble landlords who hoped that emancipation would recognize their title to all the lands currently in their possession. More significant was a reform of state peasants carried through by the Ministry of State Domains under the leadership of Count P. D. Kiselev. This reform, introduced in the late 1830s and early 1840s, granted state peasants a measure of self-government, village schools, public-health facilities, and agricultural extension services; it also shifted the method of taxation from an assessment on individuals to an assessment on the amount of cultivable soil, a fairer measure because of its link to potential productivity. This reform, though affecting only peasants under state supervision, bore unmistakable implications for the eventual abolition of serfdom. Indeed, during the latter half of Nicholas’s reign secret committees were already at work designing such a reform.

Lest there be any doubt about the government’s willingness to infringe on the nobility’s rights and privileges, Nicholas also enacted a reform of the nobility itself, a remarkable and revealing act in European affairs, demonstrating that the Russian upper class was not a self-governing social estate of the European type that had evolved ahead of or in tandem with the monarchy but rather a creation of the monarchy, its place and privileges subject to definition by the ruler. The reform was occasioned by a growing division in the nobility between those who built their economic livelihood and status on the management of their serf estates and those who did so primarily on positions in the state administration. Many of the second group had acquired patents of nobility by education and advancement through the Table of Ranks, and these new arrivals did not share the values of the established landed nobility. In response to pressure from the hereditary landed nobility to restrict entry to the class, Nicholas’s reform commission proposed to create new status designations to reward persons who advanced through merit to high government office. But Nicholas, no doubt rightly, feared that such a change would impede the government’s efforts to recruit capable men for government service; he did not agree to end ennoblement through the Table of Ranks but only to stiffen requirements for attaining personal nobility and hereditary nobility (qualification for individual nobility for life being raised from the 14th to the 9th rank, that for hereditary from the 8th to the 5th rank). The principal effect of this change was to speed up promotion through the ranks.

At the same time, Nicholas made other changes in the status of the nobles. He raised property qualifications for voting in local assemblies of the nobility, reduced the length of legal foreign residence for nobles from five years to three, pressured nobles to serve in provincial government before applying for posts at the centre, and limited their rights of buying and selling serfs. Given the division within the noble estate, these measures might be opposed or favoured by one or the other constituency. The important point is that they all violated the Charter to the Nobility granted by Catherine II in 1785 and demonstrated the ruler’s determination not to be bound by fundamental rights supposedly adhering to the nobility. The reform of the nobility prefigured the far-reaching assault on noble privilege that occurred in the following reign.

Intellectual and Cultural Life

The intellectual life of Nicholas I’s Russia developed in the shadow of the Decembrist revolt and was therefore constrained in its public expression by tough, if flexible, government censorship. Many accounts of this era, especially those by Western visitors and critics such as the Marquis de Custine, describe Nicholas’s Russia as a night-time of repression. It needs to be kept in mind that most educated Russians, including the brilliant and much-admired Alexander Pushkin, agreed on the necessity of censorship, however much they may have chafed at its limits. It is also important to recall that this was a period of extraordinary cultural creativity, the golden age of Russian letters. Not only was it the era of Pushkin, perhaps the greatest poet in all of Russian history (and whose government censor was, interestingly, Tsar Nicholas himself!), but it was also the time when Russian high culture broke free of its former imitation of Western arts and produced works that themselves reshaped the contours of world culture. In the novels and verse of Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov appeared the ‘superfluous man’, the hero turned antihero. The work of Nikolai Gogol contained at once biting satires on the human failings of his own time and fantastical characters and plot turns that anticipated the post-modernist writings of our own age. These writers and the novelist Ivan Turgenev, whose Sportsman’s Sketches for the first time portrayed Russian serfs as fully formed human actors, paved the way from Romanticism to realism in European literature.

The usual picture of the intellectual life of this time derives from the narrative constructed by the victorious revolutionary leaders of our own century and focuses on the few oppositional figures whom later revolutionaries counted as their inspiration. The story begins with Peter Chaadaev, a thoughtful and conscience-stricken military officer who left the army after Alexander I’s brutal repression of the Semenovskii guards regiment. His writings criticized the idealism of the Decembrists and their futile attempt to impose foreign political institutions on Russia, but he is best known for his ringing indictment of government propagandists and the self-congratulatory stance of Official Nationality. The only one of his ‘philosophical letters’ to be published during Nicholas’s reign inveighed against the sterility and backwardness of every aspect of Russian life, beginning with the empty ritualism of the Orthodox religion and continuing on to the country’s intellectual poverty and useless veneer of Western institutions devoid of the true spirit of the Western political order. The outburst—the later revolutionary Alexander Herzen called it ‘a shot resounding through a dark night’—was so unimaginable in the highly censored press of the era that when it appeared in a prominent magazine in 1836, Nicholas pronounced its author a madman and subjected him to regular medical examinations. The unfortunate publisher suffered a worse fate—exile to Siberia. Chaadaev was aberrant, however, only in having the courage to speak out. Others were writing and saying similar things in private. Educated Russians had no wish to leave the definition of Russia’s proper purpose and destiny to government propagandists.

Even before the publication of Chaadaev’s letter, young Russians had been coming together in small groups, ‘circles’ as they were called, at regular weekly meetings to discuss literature, philosophy, and national purpose, but Chaadaev’s letter crystallized many issues and forced the young thinkers to define their stance towards Russia’s development. Some accepted the position that Russia was a European country whose social evolution lagged behind the rest of Europe and whose political institutions had been deformed by the unbridled power of autocracy. These ‘Westernizers’ saw Russia’s proper course in liberalism, constitutionalism, the rule of law, and Western enlightenment. Others adopted a nativist position that superficially resembled the government’s programme of Official Nationality. However, these thinkers, known as Slavophiles, regarded the government as an alien institution imposed by Peter the Great and responsible for breaking Russia’s natural evolution from the seventeenth-century tsardom, which the Slavophiles believed was characterized by a familial attachment of the people to their tsar, by Orthodox piety and a sense of community among the people and between the people and the ruler. Like the Westernizers, the Slavophiles were opposed to serfdom, bureaucratic supervision of social and intellectual life, and the militarism of Nicholas’s regime. In other words, the famous debate of the 1840s between the Westernizers and Slavophiles was a contest over the meaning of Russia’s past and Russia’s future. Both sides opposed the Russian present.

Our inherited narrative ends the era of more or less open discussion of these matters with a celebrated exchange in 1847 between Nikolai Gogol and the literary critic Vissarion Belinskii. In a work titled Selected Correspondence with Friends, Gogol gave a ringing endorsement to key propositions of Official Nationality advising Russians to love their ruler, accept their station in life, and spend more time in prayer. Belinskii, though unable to reply in print, responded with a letter that enjoyed wide circulation in manuscript copy. He lambasted Gogol for his obscurantism and betrayal of his own earlier writings, which had held government administrators up to ridicule and demonstrated the absurdity of serfdom. This exchange, plus the departure of Alexander Herzen (a major figure in the intellectual circles of the time) for Europe in 1847, marked the close of this period, except for a final act—the suppression of the Petrashevskii circle amidst a ferocious government crack-down provoked by the European revolutions of 1848. Although the members of this circle did little more than read forbidden writings and discuss socialist ideas, the government’s fears of sedition were so deep that twenty-one of the members of the circle received death sentences, which, however, were commuted to Siberian exile minutes before the executions were to be carried out. Among those made to suffer this death watch and personal psychological trauma was the later literary giant Fedor Dostoevsky

This story of the intellectual life of the era as a struggle between a severely repressive government and an increasingly alienated educated public, though enshrined in the literature by later revolutionaries, does not paint an accurate picture. The dissidents were a small minority. Most educated Russians took pride in the knowledge that their country was the strongest land power in the world and a respected member of the European concert of nations. They felt secure from outside threats and were enjoying a period of relative economic prosperity. Although the few dissidents and some foreign visitors lamented government supervision of intellectual life, most Russians recognized the need for censorship and were able to create and consume a rich and varied cultural life within its bounds. Over 200 new periodical publications were begun in Nicholas’s reign, and several dozen were on the market at any one time. The creative arts flourished; the Russian opera came into its own in the works of Mikhail Glinka and Alexander Dargomyzhsky the paintings of Karl Briullov, Alexander Ivanov, and Ivan Aivazovskii shifted artistic style away from classicism to romanticism, while the genre painting of Pavel Fedotov and others captured characteristic moments of Russian life. A rapid growth of scientific literature and scientific investigation was evident. Official Nationality and Slavophilism were symptoms of educated Russians’ need for a clearer sense of national identity and their place in the world; the result was plans for historical and ethnographic museums to house representations of the people and culture of Russia. This was the period of the founding of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, which set out to map literally and figuratively the physical and cultural boundaries of the nation. Its establishment in early 1845 was followed by a major ethnographic research programme to discover the folklore, material life, and practices of the Russian and other peoples inhabiting the empire. Nicholas’s reign also saw an increasing effort by the Orthodox Church to raise the educational, religious, and moral level of the common people through a rapid growth of local schooling and printings of inexpensive editions of didactic literature. The Church likewise launched new efforts in the missionary field, including work in the Altai Mountain region, eastern Siberia, and Alaska that led to linguistic and ethnographic reports that corresponded to the work of the Geographic Society. Indeed, the Geographic Society could well stand as a symbol for an age whose leaders were intent on recording the economic, topographical, and human conditions of the empire. This process reflected Nicholas’s inductive approach to reform, the exhaustive study of conditions before acting, an impulse that helped prepare the Great Reforms of the 1860s while encouraging educated Russians to find a personal and national identity in service to the common people.

Close of the Reign

The final years of Nicholas’s reign effaced many of its most important achievements. The success with which a flexible censorship had allowed for important scientific and cultural growth while checking dissident opinion was lost in the orgy of repression that followed the news of revolution in Europe in 1848. The continuing expansion and democratization of the educational system and the opportunities for Russians to continue higher studies abroad succumbed to the same crack-down when, in the wake of the Petrashevskii circle’s arrest, Nicholas slashed university enrolments by two-thirds and ordered all Russians studying abroad to return home (unwisely, as it turned out, because the returning students brought with them detailed and accurate information about the upheavals occurring in their places of study). The progress being made on peasant reform came to a halt, as the tsar feared further social change of any kind. Even the success of the government in stabilizing the currency and promoting economic development was harmed by the expensive and futile war in the Crimea.

The outbreak of this war nullified one of Nicholas’s greatest achievements: his reversal of the constant warfare of the previous two reigns and maintenance of a long period of peace and security for his country. Armed conflict occurred during his reign, but it involved pacification of the borderlands of the Caucasus and Poland and did not threaten the security or livelihoods of most Russians. When Russian troops did venture abroad, they stayed close to their borders, for example, brief sorties into Persia and the Danubian principalities early in the reign and an expedition to Hungary in 1849 to suppress a nationalist insurgency. Even the Crimean War at the end of his reign was not a conflict Nicholas consciously sought out for the aggrandizement of Russia or himself. Indeed, he very much wished to avoid a war provoked by an assertive French government claiming rights over sacred institutions in Palestine. These demands raised questions about Russia’s protectorate over Christians in the Ottoman Empire, a position affirmed in the peace treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardji (1774) but disputed by the Turks. As the diplomatic conflict escalated in early 1853, the Russian government counted on the support of Austria (which it had rescued from dismemberment four years before) and Britain (which had recently been in conflict with France over their respective positions in the Middle East). But Nicholas badly miscalculated. Austria threatened to join the Ottomans if Russia attacked through the Balkans; Britain played a double game, urging the Ottomans to avoid war but also indicating that they could expect British support if war broke out. With Russia seemingly isolated but still making stiff demands for the right to protect Ottoman Christians, the Turks decided to resist and force an armed conflict.

For want of a better place to engage (Austria blocked an invasion of the Balkans and Russia could not challenge the allies at sea), the two sides fought the decisive battles in the Crimea and nearby port cities on Russia’s Black Sea coastline. Though a strong force on paper, the army on which Nicholas had lavished much of his attention was no match for the allies. Much of its strength had to be deployed elsewhere to protect against possible attacks on other borders, the forces sent to the Crimea were supplied by ox cart because of Russia’s late start into railway building, Russian weapons (not upgraded since earlier wars) had far shorter effective range than the enemy’s, sanitary conditions were appalling, and disease claimed far more men than did battle. The result was demoralization and defeat. In the midst of this ruin of his diplomacy, army, finances, and record of peace and security, Nicholas took ill and died of pneumonia in early February 1855.

Conclusions

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Russian government and society changed in a number of important respects. Though threatened by French power at the beginning of this era, Russians met the challenge of an invading force much superior in numbers to their own and went on to conquer and occupy Napoleonic France. For the next forty years, Europeans regarded Russia as the continent’s most formidable power. But as often happens, victory brought complacency. Russian leaders failed to recognize the need for technological development and left the country poorly prepared for the next great struggle. Russia lagged in weapons development, logistical support, education, and industry—all the things that constitute the strength of a state. It is enough to observe that on the eve of the Crimean War, when railways had already spread their tentacles through much of Western Europe, Russia was just completing its first major line between Moscow and St Petersburg. Russia’s military in the century before 1850 had defeated Prussia and France when each was at the height of its power; for nearly another century Russians would prove incapable of defeating any country but Ottoman Turkey. Japan defeated the Russians in 1904–5, Germany in 1914–18, and Poland in 1920; and even little Finland in 19 39–40 held off an immeasurably superior Soviet force for more time than anyone could have believed possible. A decisive shift in Russia’s international position had occurred in the reign of Nicholas I.

Domestic affairs proved more successful. Although the nineteenth century began with promises of constitutional government and serf emancipation, these goals were incompatible and unrealizable. Constitutional government would have turned legislative power over to the very landed élite who opposed the reform of serfdom. This élite resisted even the timid reform initiatives that the autocrats were ultimately able to enact. Substantive change in the serf order required the co-operation of the landed nobility, and this was not forthcoming until the shock of defeat in the Crimean War caused the élite to recognize the need to end agrarian bondage and move towards a modern economy capable of meeting the challenge of Western power. The government did nevertheless make important improvements that prepared the ground for the revolutionary changes of the next era. Among these improvements were the growth and differentiation of government administration, creation of a law code and regulation of legal practice, a disciplined economic policy and stable currency, and the expansion of educational opportunity.

The growth of education, so necessary for the building of economic and military strength, also brought two developments that threatened the imperial state: nationalism and the desire for political participation. Both of these impulses found powerful expression in the Decembrist rebellion of 1825. Despite the government’s attempt to co-opt the nationalist spirit through the imperialist doctrine of Official Nationality, a specific Russian nationalism continued to evolve in the writings of Chaadaev, the Slavophiles, and even the Westernizers. Soon it was joined by other nationalist programmes emerging first in Poland, Ukraine, and Finland, an impulse that by the twentieth century spread to other non-Russian peoples of the empire and destroyed the hold of a centralizing imperial ideology. The desire for political participation and its frustration by periodic government repression drove a wedge between government and some members of educated society as early as the 1820s. Thereafter the divide widened. The dissidents, though few at first and never a threat to the government in this period, exercised great symbolic force by challenging a fundamental tenet of tsarist ideology: the notion that the ruler was a good father who cared for and was at one with his children, the people of Russia. When many of the nation’s most talented sons and daughters were being repressed by the regime and half the tsar’s ‘children’, the peasant serfs, continued in bondage, the dissidents could well ask what kind of fatherly care was the ruler providing? The failure of the regime to draw many of the country’s best people into its service or to provide them with a national mission they could support augured ill for the future.

7. Reform and Counter Reform 1855–1890

GREGORY L. FREEZE

Stunned by the Crimean War débâcle, Russian statesmen rebuilt basic institutions and even abolished the linchpin of the old order, serfdom. But these ‘Great Reforms’ had serious shortcomings, generated widespread discontent, and ignited an organized revolutionary movement. By the 1880s the regime embarked on ‘counter-reforms’ to rebuild a powerful state based on autocratic state power.

THE period 1855–90 marks Russia’s transition from counterrevolution to revolution—from the ‘Gendarme of Europe’ to the bastion of revolutionary forces. That transition reflected the profound impact of the ‘Great Reforms’, which brought not only far-reaching changes (the emancipation of serfs and a host of other Westernizing, modernizing reforms), but also a new kind of politics and relationship between state and society. In so many respects, the epoch of reform and counter-reform encapsulated the fundamental processes at work in the history of Russia: the dangerous and unpredictable consequences of reform, the awakening of unfulfilled expectations, the unleashing of liberal and revolutionary movements, and the powerful, implosive impact of borderland minorities on politics in the central heartland.

Why Reform?

Despite its odious reputation as the bulwark of brutal reaction, the Russia of Nicholas I had incessantly, if clandestinely, pondered the prospects and process of reform. From the very first years of his reign, and partly in response to the Decembrist uprising, Nicholas I (1825–55) did not fail to discern the fundamental problems afflicting his land—from its corrupt bureaucracy to the serfdom that seemed so similar to slavery. Although the state under Nicholas recognized the need for reform, even in the case of serfdom, it had resisted taking decisive and especially public measures and, instead, contented itself primarily with cautious and (above all) secret reforms. Fear of uncontrolled social disorders, an unquestioning belief in the power and omniscience of bureaucracy, a smug assurance of Russia’s military prowess despite its markedly un-Western system and economic backwardness—all this encouraged the conceit that Russia could be a great power and maintain its traditional social and political order. That order alone seemed immune to the revolutionary bacillus that had infected the rest of Europe in 1830 and 1848; Russia’s very distinctiveness (samobytnost) seemed responsible for its unparalleled stability at home and its military power abroad.

With Nicholas’s death, however, the regime soon embarked on wide-ranging reform, including the Gordian knot of serf emancipation. To explain why the Russian state finally embarked on reform, historians have advanced a number of theories. One explanation, popular among pre-revolutionary and Western historians, emphasized the triumph of liberal humanitarian ideas within the higher ranks of state and society: imbued with Western values and culture, these élites could not fail to recognize the contradiction to their own status as serf-owners. While the influence of Western ideas can hardly be denied for some parts of the élite, it certainly did not extend to the nobility as a whole; most, in fact, vehemently opposed emancipation. Some Marxist historians, chiefly Soviet, have emphasized the economic factor:as the nobility found their estates becoming less productive, as their debts and the spectre of bankruptcy increased, the serf-owners themselves supposedly came to recognize the inefficiency of serfdom and the validity of criticism by Western liberal economists. Again, although isolated expressions of these views can be found, such sentiments were hardly prevalent among most members of the government or the nobility. A third interpretation stresses fear of peasant unrest: cognizant of the statistics on murder and the incidence of peasant rebellion (which swelled from 990 disorders in 1796–1826 to 1,799 disorders in 1826–56), nobles and bureaucrats purportedly came to realize that emancipation alone, not procrastination, could ensure social stability in the countryside. While fear certainly did grip many members of the provincial nobility, it did not figure significantly in the calculations of the high-ranking state officials who actually engineered emancipation. The latter, the emperor concluded, were indeed wont to exploit noble fears, but they themselves did not evince real concern for their own safety.

Why, then, did the regime finally take the fateful step towards emancipation? Although the factors cited above to some degree did abet the process, the key linchpin in fact was the débâcle of the Crimean War. That foreign fiasco led to domestic reconstruction, for it exposed the real backwardness and weakness of the old servile order and all that it connoted. The Crimean War not only exacted a high cost in lives, resources, and prestige, but also vitiated the main impediment to reform—the belief that the existing order was consonant with stability and power. As a liberal Slavophile Iurii Samarin wrote in 1856: ‘We were vanquished not by the foreign armies of the Western alliances, but by our own internal weaknesses’. The same year a liberal Westernizer Boris Chicherin wrote that, without the abolition of serfdom, ‘no questions can be resolved—whether political, administrative, or social’. Even before the war had been irrevocably lost, conservatives as well as liberals had come to much the same conclusion.

Emancipation of the Serfs

The critical question became not whether, but how the serfs were to be emancipated. In part that ‘how’ concerned the terms of emancipation—whether they would receive land (in what quantities and at what price) and whether they would become full-fledged citizens. These two issues became the central focus of the reform debates inside and outside the government. But emancipation also raised a further question: how was reform to be designed and implemented, what indeed were to be the politics of reform? Was the state simply to promulgate emancipation (perhaps with the assistance of secret committees, to use the previous tsar’s methods) or was society itself somehow to be involved in this process? The politics of reform were as important as the terms of emancipation, for they were fraught with long-term implications about the relationship between state and society and, especially the status and role of old élites.

The ‘reform party’ was a coalition of different interests with a common objective. It was, in any event, not the mere handiwork of a reformist monarch. Although the traditional historiography inclined to personalize politics and ascribe much to the emperor himself, and although Alexander II (1855–81) acquired an official accolade as ‘Tsar-Liberator’, he was in fact highly conservative and a deeply ambivalent reformer. Far more important was the constellation of what W. Bruce Lincoln has called the ‘enlightened bureaucrats’, the gosudarstvenniki (state servitors) who identified more with the interests of the state than those of their own noble estate. Indispensable because of their superior education and practical experience, the enlightened bureaucrats (such as Nikolai Miliutin and Ia. S. Solovev) played a critical role in the reform process. Another influential party of reformers was to be found in the military; generals such as Mikhail Gorchakov concurred that ‘the first thing is to emancipate the serfs, because that is the evil which binds together all the things that are evil in Russia’. And some members of the imperial family (especially the tsar’s brother, Konstantin, and his aunt Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna) were also instrumental in the reform process. Although the reformers encountered significant resistance (above all, from the nobility, certain segments of the bureaucratic élites, and the police), the catastrophe in the Crimea had made the argument for reform, including emancipation, irresistible.

The process of emancipation, however, was by no means unilinear: it was only gradually, through trial and error, that the regime finally formulated the specific terms of the Emancipation Statutes in 1861. In his first year, in fact, Alexander deliberately tried to discourage the wild expectations that traditionally accompanied each new accession to the throne and often ignited a wave of rumours and peasant disorders: he replaced reputed reformers (such as the Minister of Interior, D. G. Bibikov, and the Minister of State Domains, P. D Kiselev) with men known for their arch-conservative opinions.

By 1856, however, the defeat in the Crimea was not to be denied and neither could the exigency of fundamental reform. In a famous speech to the nobility of Moscow on 30 March 1856, Alexander ostensibly endeavoured to reassure the serf-owners, but ended his comments with a clear intimation of the imperative need for reform ‘from above’:

Rumours have spread among you of my intention to abolish serfdom. To refute any groundless gossip on so important a subject, I consider it necessary to inform you that I have no intention of doing so immediately. But, of course, you yourselves realize that the existing system of serf-owning cannot remain unchanged. It is better to begin abolishing serfdom from above than to wait for it to begin to abolish itself from below.

Although Alexander may have hoped that the nobility, mindful of its traditional ‘service ethos’ would take its own initiative, nothing of the sort transpired. As the Third Section (secret police) was well aware, ‘the majority of the nobility believe that our peasant is too uncultured to comprehend civil law; that, in a state of freedom, he would be more vicious than any wild beast; that disorders, plundering, and murder are almost inevitable’.

On 1 January 1857 Alexander resorted to the favourite device of his father: he appointed a secret commission with the charge of designing the reform of serfdom. The commission was, however, dominated by old-regime officials, most of whom were adamantly opposed to reform; moderates were a distinct minority. Over the next several months the commission slowly worked out an extremely conservative reform project whereby peasants were to compensate the squire for their homestead, to receive no arable land, and to obtain freedom, but only through an extremely protracted process. A vexed emperor, dismayed by the snail’s pace of work, castigated the commission for lethargy and procrastination: ‘I desire and demand that your commission produce a general conclusion as to how [emancipation] is to be undertaken, instead of burying it in the files under various pretexts’. Coming under the influence of Western advisers, who warned of the dire social consequences of a landless emancipation, Alexander reiterated that his ‘main anxiety is that the matter will begin of itself, from below’.

A major turning-point came on 20 November 1857, when the government issued a directive to the governor-general of Vilna that became the famous ‘Nazimov Rescript’. The directive (which shortly afterwards was also sent to all other governors) instructed the governor to organize provincial assemblies of the nobility to discuss the terms of emancipation most suitable for their own region. However, the rescript did not give the nobles carte blanche, but set the basic parameters of reform: the landlord was to retain the land and police powers, but some provision was also to be made for peasant land purchases and self-administration. The underlying strategy was to shift the reform process from the pettifogging bureaucracy to society and to propel reform forward by mobilizing the support of the nobility itself. The Minister of Interior made it perfectly clear that local officials were to engineer assent: ‘[The serf-owner] must be brought to his senses and persuaded that at this point there is no turning back, and that the nobility is obligated to execute the will of the Sovereign, who summons them to cooperate in the amelioration of peasant life’ (a euphemism for serfdom). Shortly afterwards, Alexander established the ‘Chief Committee on Peasant Affairs’ to oversee the reform process. At the same time, the government significantly relaxed censorship (the word glasnost′ for the first time, in fact, coming into vogue). A dramatic break with the reform politics of Nicholas I, this very publicity made reform appear all the more irrevocable and inevitable.

To the government’s dismay, however, virtually the entire nobility either opposed emancipation or demanded that its terms be cast to serve their own selfish interests. The Third Section reported that ‘most of the nobles are dissatisfied [with plans for emancipation]’, and explained that ‘all their grumbling derives from the fear that their income will diminish or even vanish altogether’. Resistance was especially strong in the blackearth areas, where land was valuable and nobles fiercely opposed any scheme for compulsory alienation of their property. In special cases (for example, where land was poor in quality) some nobles were more inclined to support emancipation, but only on condition that they be compensated for the person of the serf, not just the land itself.

Distressed by this response, persuaded of the perils of a landless emancipation (which threatened to create a ‘rural proletariat’), the emperor was persuaded to resume ‘emancipation from above’—by the state, with only nominal participation of the nobility. By December 1858 a liberal majority had come to prevail on the Main Committee. It shared a consensus on two critical points: the peasantry must become a free rural class (with the commune replacing the squires’ police powers), and must have the right to purchase an adequate land allotment. Although the government retained the fiction of noble participation (a special ‘editorial commission’ was to rework the recommendations of provincial noble assemblies), in fact the liberal majority now proceeded to design a reform that would deprive the nobility not only of their police powers but also of a substantial portion of their land.

Without the police powers to coerce peasants to work their lands, without a complete monopoly on land, many nobles feared total ruin. As a ranking member of the ministry wrote, ‘the landlords fear both the government and the peasantry’. To consult and ostensibly to mollify the government invited representatives of the nobility to come to St Petersburg and express their views in August 1859 (from the non-blackearth provinces) and January 1860 (from the blackearth provinces). On both occasions the government encountered fierce criticism and, more shocking still, even audacious demands for political reform. Although the tsar officially rebuked such demands and protests, the Editorial Commission none the less made some gratuitous attempts to represent emancipation as an expression of the nobility’s collective will. The commission had completed the main work by October 1860; after a final review by the State Council (an extremely conservative body that inserted some last-minute, pro-noble provisions), Alexander signed the statute into law on 19 February 1861. Fearful of peasant protests, public announcement was delayed for another two weeks—when the onset of Lent (and the end of the merry-making of Shrovetide was past) promised to produce a more sober and docile peasantry.

The government had good reason for anxiety: the 360–page statute was mind-boggling in its complexity, but one thing was clear—it corresponded little to the expectations of the peasantry. Although they were granted ‘the status of free rural inhabitants’ (with the right to marry, acquire property, conduct trade, and the like), they were still second-class citizens. Emancipation did foresee a gradual integration of peasants into society, but for the present they remained separate, bound to their own local (volost′) administration and courts. To ensure police power over the former serfs, the government shifted authority from the squire to the commune and resorted to the traditional principle of ‘collective responsibility’ (krugovaia poruka), which made the ex-serfs collectively accountable for taxes or indeed all other social and financial responsibilities. For the next decades the peasantry were to be the subject of special disabilities and obligations—such as the poll-tax (until 1885), corporal punishment (until 1904), and passports to restrict movement (until 1906).

For the peasants, however, the most shocking part of their ‘emancipation’ was the land settlement. In the first place, it was not even immediate; for the next two years peasants were to continue their old obligations to the squire as the government compiled inventories on landholdings and the peasants’ obligations as serfs. Thereafter these ‘temporary obligations’ were to remain in force until both sides agreed to a final settlement, whereupon the peasants would acquire a portion of the land through government-financed redemption payments. Peasants who had customarily assumed that the land was theirs now discovered that they would have to make immense redemption payments over a forty-nine-year term. The redemption payments were, moreover, increased by inflated evaluations of the land (up to twice its market value before emancipation). And worst of all, the emancipation settlement had special provisions to ensure that the nobility retained at least a minimum part of their estate; as a result of ‘emancipation’, peasants suffered a loss of land that they had utilized before emancipation—from 10 per cent in the non-blackearth provinces to 26 per cent in the blackearth provinces.

The government itself wondered, with deep anxiety, ‘what will happen when the people’s expectations concerning freedom are not realized?’ The answer was not long in coming. Whereas the number of disorders had been low on the eve of emancipation (just 91 incidents in 1859 and 126 in 1860), the announcement of emancipation ignited a veritable explosion of discontent in 1861—some 1,889 disorders. The most serious confrontations took place in the blackearth provinces (about half of the disorders were concentrated in ten provinces) and, especially, on the larger estates. In many villages peasants—incredulous that these could have been the terms of the ‘tsar’s’ emancipation—adamantly refused to co-operate in compiling inventories. As a peasant in Vladimir province explained, ‘I will not sign the inventory, because soon there will be another manifesto—all the land and forests will be given to the peasantry; but if we sign this inventory, then the tsar will see this signature and say: “they’re satisfied, so let it be”’. In many cases military troops had to be summoned to pacify the unruly peasants; among the worst incidents was the bloody confrontation in a village called Bezdna in Kazan province, where the troops panicked and started to shoot, killing and wounding hundreds of unarmed peasants. Although the number of disorders gradually declined (849 in 1862, 509 in 1863, 156 in 1864), the village continued to seethe with resentment and discontent.

Not only peasants, however, would have cause to bemoan emancipation: the former serf-owners were also appalled by its terms. They lost all their police powers, effectively depriving them of any opportunity to force their former serfs to fulfil their old obligations. Nor could squires be certain that they would be able to secure, at reasonable prices, what had earlier been ‘free’ serf labour to cultivate their lands. Most important, the nobles lost a substantial portion of their land; although in theory they received compensation, much of this went to pay off old debts and mortgages (62 per cent of all serfs had already been mortgaged before emancipation). In short, nobles found themselves short of capital and uncertain of labour, hardly a formula for success in the coming decades. Not surprisingly, emancipation provided a new fillip for gentry liberalism and, especially, demands for the formation of a national assembly of notables to serve as a counterweight to the ‘reds’ in the state bureaucracy. In 1862, for example, the nobility of Tver issued an address to the emperor: ‘The convocation of delegates of all Russia is the sole means for achieving a satisfactory solution to the problems that the [emancipation] statutes of 19 February have posed but not resolved.’ Dismayed by the terms of emancipation and by their de facto exclusion from the decision-making process, even the socially conservative among the nobility could give their assent to the political programme of ‘gentry liberalism’.

The Other Great Reforms

Although emancipation was the most explosive and significant reform, the government also undertook to carry out reforms on many of the other fundamental institutions of the realm. In part, this reformist zeal derived from the general ‘Crimean syndrome’, which had seemed to demonstrate not only the evil consequences of serfdom, but the general bankruptcy of the old administrative and social order. In addition, many of the reforms derived from the consensus of liberal officials that not only serfs, but society more generally must be ‘emancipated’ from the shackles of state tutelage, that only this emancipation could liberate the vital forces of self-development and progress. The centralized state had clearly failed to ensure development; freedom thus must be accorded to society. But emancipation itself mandated some changes: abolition of serfdom had eliminated the squire’s authority (which had been virtually the only administrative and police organ in the countryside) and hence required the construction of new institutions.

One was a new set of local organs of self-government called the zemstvo. Because the pre-reform regime had been so heavily concentrated in the major cities (with only nominal representation in rural areas) and plainly lacked the human and material resources to construct an elaborate system of local administration, in 1864 the government elected to confer primary responsibility on society itself by establishing a new organ of local self-government, the zemstvo. The reform statute provided for the creation of elected assemblies at the district and provincial level; chosen from separate curiae (peasants, townspeople, and private landowners), the assemblies bore primary responsibility for the social and cultural development of society’s infrastructure. Specifically, by exercising powers of self-taxation of the zemstvo, ‘society’ in each province was to build and maintain key elements of the infrastructure (such as roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, asylums, and prisons), to provide essential social services (public health, poor relief, and assistance during famines), and to promote industry, commerce, and agriculture.

A second major sphere of reform was education, both at the elementary and higher levels. Of particular urgency was the need for elementary schooling: if the former serfs were to become part of the body politic and good citizens, it was essential that the massive illiteracy be overcome. First through the initiative of the Orthodox Church, later the Ministry of Education and the zemstvo, a host of schools sprang up across the countryside. In contrast to the clandestine reformism under Nicholas I, the liberal bureaucrats not only drafted legislation but also published these plans to solicit comment at home and abroad; they then drew heavily on these critical comments as they prepared the final statutes on schools and universities. The Elementary School Statute of 1864 provided the legal framework for this multi-tier system but left financing as the legal responsibility of the local community. A parallel statute sought to regulate and promote the growth of secondary schools. More complex, and political, was reform at the university level, which had been shaken by student unrest and appeared to be a hotbed of radicalism. Nonetheless, the University Statute of 1863 generally dismantled the crippling restrictions of Nicholas I’s rule and transformed the university into a self-governing corporation, with far greater rights for its teaching staff and even some recognition of student rights.

The third (and arguably most liberal) reform was the judicial statute of 1864. Russian courts had been notorious for their corruption, inefficiency, and rank injustice; indeed, so notorious were they that Nicholas had initiated reform by establishing a commission in 1850 to rebuild the court system. But that commission had been dominated by old-regime bureaucrats who lacked formal legal training; in 1861 Alexander, persuaded of their incompetence, abolished that commission and established an entirely new committee, which was dominated by liberal gosudarstvenniki (civil servants devoted to the state and its interests). Drawing heavily upon European models, the commission adumbrated the following ‘fundamental principles’ of the new order: equality of all before the law; separation of the judiciary from administration; jury trial by propertied peers; publicity of proceedings; establishment of a legal profession and bar; and security of judicial tenure. As in the educational reform, the commission published its basic principles and invited commentary by the public and legal specialists. It then reviewed these comments (summarized in six published volumes) and made appropriate adjustments before the statute was finally promulgated in November 1864.

A fourth important focus of reform was the military, which had acquitted itself so badly during the Crimean War and was plainly in need of thoroughgoing reconstruction. The military leaders, indeed, proved to be energetic reformers, eager to rebuild the army and to borrow freely on Western models. The result was a protracted and far-reaching set of reforms—measures for technological rearmament, administrative reorganization, professionalization of military schools. But one essential reform—replacement of a huge standing army without reserves by universal military training—proved politically difficult, chiefly because the reform abrogated the nobility’s right not to serve (conferred in 1762 and deemed a fundamental privilege). Nonetheless, military reforms prevailed: the Universal Military Training Act of 1874 established all-class conscription, with the terms of service determined solely by education, not social origin or rank. The statute inadvertently had the effect of strengthening peasant interest in popular education, since a two-year elementary schooling could reduce the term of service from six to two years.

A fifth reform was the reform of city government in 1870. The main problem with the existing urban system was that it excluded important residential categories (above all, the nobility) from tax and other obligations, thereby weakening the social and fiscal basis of city government. A commission established in 1862 first conducted a massive survey of public opinion (obtaining formal reports from commissions in 509 cities and towns) and then designed a new self-governing order based on the election of a city council (with curiae weighted according to property ownership). Like the zemstvo, the city council was to provide basic social services, promote commerce and industry, and generally assume responsibility for the development of its own city.

A sixth reform was censorship, which had exercised so notorious and pernicious an influence in pre-reform Russia. The late 1850s had already witnessed a gradual relaxation of censorship (as the regime tolerated public comment on serf emancipation and other reform plans), but the pressure for reform accelerated with the proliferation of journals and newspapers in the 1860s. To a considerable degree, the government found it practically impossible to engage in pre-censorship. It therefore issued the ‘Temporary Regulations’ of 1865, which abolished most pre-censorship in favour of punitive measures (involving suspensions or closing). Although censorship was by no means eliminated, the new regulations significantly enhanced the ability of the press to publish quickly and, within limits, to exercise some freedom of expression.

The seventh reform concerned the Russian Orthodox Church, which had internalized many norms, structures—and problems—of state and society. Critics emphasized the deplorable condition of seminaries, the caste-like profile of the parish clergy (who had to marry and whose own sons replaced them), the corrupt and inefficient condition of ecclesiastical administration and courts, and the poor support accorded most parish clergy. Special commissions designed a broad range of reforms, including the establishment of parish councils in 1864 (to raise funds for local needs), the reform of ecclesiastical schools in 1867 (modernizing curriculum and opening the schools to youths from all social classes), the formal abolition of the clerical caste in 1867, and a radical reorganization of parishes in 1869 (essentially combining small, uneconomic parishes into larger units). Still more reforms were in preparation, including a liberalization of ecclesiastical courts and censorship.

These Great Reforms thus affected a broad set of social, administrative, and cultural institutions. Most reflected a common set of principles—vsesoslovnost′ (‘all-estateness’, i.e. all estates were to participate), glasnost (‘publicity’, i.e. with societal participation in planning and implementing reform), and clear willingness to draw upon Western models. Moreover, most reforms aspired to shift power—and responsibility—from the state to society or particular social groups. Aware that the state lacked the capability or even financial means to modernize, the reformers endeavoured to liberate society’s own vital forces and to create structures (from the zemstvo to parish councils) where local initiative could sponsor development.

Economic Development

Although the government appeared to have won the political struggle, in fact deep structural changes were dramatically reshaping society and economy—and not necessarily in the direction of stability or controllable change. By the late 1890s the realm would be shaken by profound unrest—from the factory to the village—that ultimately derived from the pattern of economic and social change in the preceding decades. The key dynamic here was the explosive combination of agricultural crisis and industrialization.

The roots of the agricultural crisis clearly go back to the very terms of emancipation: emancipation transferred the land to the peasant commune, not the individual peasant. The system was partly designed so as to ensure payment, for communal ownership also meant communal (not individual) responsibility for tax and redemption payments. This arrangement greatly facilitated tax-collection (sparing the state the onus of tracking down individual defaulters); given collective accountability, the commune had a powerful motive for ensuring that land was apportioned according to the ability to use it (i.e. according to the number of able-bodied workers in a family). Since family composition naturally changed over time (through births, marriages, and deaths), the commune periodically redistributed land to take these changes into account. Communal landownership also had another appealing feature: it guaranteed each peasant the right to a fair share of land and therefore served to avoid creating a landless proletariat. Indeed, the statute made it virtually impossible for a peasant to alienate his land even if he so wished.

While this arrangement ensured tax-collection and averted the formation of a rural proletariat, it was nevertheless fraught with significant long-term consequences. First, it tied the peasant to the village: since he could not alienate the land, he could not relocate permanently to the city (but, at most, obtain seasonal passports from his commune). Because of this impediment to migration to the city and because of the high rate of demographic growth (the population nearly doubled between 1863 and 1913), the inevitable result was the shrinking average size of peasant allotments—from 5.1 dessiatines (1860) to 2.7 (1900). Although the peasantry did purchase and lease private lands, such acquisitions failed to compensate for the steady demographic growth in the peasantry. The result, heard all across the empire by the late nineteenth century, was the central battle-cry of rebellious peasants—‘Land! Land! Land!’

Apart from encouraging peasants to eye jealously the huge fields of the nobility, the individual utilization of small allotments meant that the peasantry (despite their aggregate holdings) could not take advantage of economies of size and afford new technology. Moreover, communal landholding also proved highly inefficient: to ensure that each peasant had a share of the different kinds and quality of communal land, to link land allotment with a family’s labour resources, the Russian commune divided its fields into tiny strips (sometimes a yard wide) and periodically redistributed these (taking strips from families with fewer workers and giving them to families with more). This system of land utilization may have been socially just, but it was also economically regressive: it wasted much land on pathways, discouraged individual peasants from improving their strips (which were only temporary allotments), and forced all the peasants to observe the traditional three-field system (to avoid cross-fertilization, no peasant could violate communal practices).

The nobility, at least in theory, were far more advantageously positioned: they retained at least one-third of their entire arable land and obtained capital as compensation for the land redeemed by peasants. While many did seek to modernize and rationalize their estates, they soon encountered serious problems. One was a dearth of investment capital: much of the compensation vanished to cover old debts, and venture capital was as yet difficult to obtain. Labour constituted an additional problem; emancipation had taken away the ‘free’ corvée and obliged landowners to hire peasant workers, who were exceedingly expensive and notoriously unproductive. Nor were most estates easily linked to the domestic or foreign grain markets; until the railway knitted the empire together and cut transportation costs, many landowners had little incentive to modernize their estates in hopes of increasing productivity and output.

Saddled with all these disadvantages, peasant and gentry agriculture were soon to experience the most devastating factor of all: the collapse of the world grain markets in the 1870s and 1880s. The key was a steady increase in supply, as the railway and new oceanic shipping enabled a massive influx of grain from North American and other grain-producing areas outside Europe. The result was a sharp drop in grain prices between 1870 and 1890—about 38 per cent for wheat, 29 per cent for rye, and 41 per cent for barley. By the late 1870s a noble official in the blackearth province of Orel wrote that ‘anyone who looks at [this district] might well think that it has been ravaged by a hostile army—so pitiful has its position become’. The steady rise in peasant arrears (overdue tax and redemption payments) and a sharp increase in noble bankruptcies signalled the emergence of a full-scale agrarian crisis.

Industrialization, which had been so retarded and even discouraged by the pre-reform regime, faced considerable obstacles. The country still lacked a proper institutional infrastructure; its regressive business law made it possible to establish a mere thirty-two corporations by 1855. Nor was it easy to mobilize and attract venture capital, either from domestic or foreign sources, because of the lack of a domestic banking network and Russia’s low credibility on international money markets. Transportation, especially the virtual non-existence of railways (the only line before 1855 ran between the two capitals), meant that key resources (such as iron ore and coal) and markets could not be easily and economically linked. Russia was also technologically backward; it still imported 70 per cent of all machinery and relied heavily upon outmoded technology. And labour, whether under serfdom or emancipation (which deliberately restricted mobility), was problematic in terms of quantity, skills, and cost.

As in agriculture, emancipation did not primarily seek to serve economic needs or to foster development. Indeed, its initial impact on industrial production proved negative: emancipation of factory serfs brought production at many plants to a standstill, especially in the important metallurgical plants in the Urals. Still, the regime now had a new and deeper appreciation for the importance of industrialization, especially in the wake of the débâcle of the Crimean War. As one highranking official explained: ‘Russia is not Egypt or the Papal States—to be content to purchase materials for her entire army from abroad; we must build our own factories to make arms in the future.’ Supported by the military lobby and a small but influential corps of economists, the government was far more sensitive to the needs of industrial and commercial development.

Although the aggregate growth was relatively modest (especially in the 1860s and 1870s), by the mid-1880s the country embarked on an extraordinarily high rate of growth. A considerable part of the growth was concentrated in the vital area of transportation; the total of railway lines increased nearly thirteenfold (from 2,238 versts in 1861 to 28,240 versts in 1887). Simultaneously, the industrial base grew substantially: from 15,000 to 38,000 enterprises (with a corresponding increase in fixed capital, labour force, and output). The corporate structure also expanded substantially; during the years 1861–73 alone, the number of joint-stock companies increased from 78 (with capital of 72 million roubles) to 357 (with 1.1 billion roubles capital). Altogether, industrial production roughly doubled in the quarter-century after emancipation.

Nevertheless, the ‘take-off was yet to come. If 1913 industrial production was 100, by 1885 the empire had only achieved 21 per cent of that output. Despite the growth, Russian industry still suffered from such perennial problems as the lack of venture capital and low labour productivity. Both the heavy and light industrial branches relied heavily upon old technology, had a low level of mechanization, and made only limited use of steam power. Russia still had to import much of its machinery and even a substantial proportion of its iron and steel from abroad. Moreover, for the first time, the industrial sector was now becoming vulnerable to international business cycles; the economic depression in the empire in the 1870s coincided closely with that in Western Europe. Finally, industrialists also faced a remarkably soft domestic market; the mounting economic woes of the countryside—whether in peasant communes or on gentry manors—limited demand for the goods of the factory.

Despite the weakness of the countryside and gains in the factory, the country grew even more dependent upon grain exports. These had already risen from 16 to 31 per cent in the pre-reform period (1801–60); over the next three decades grain rose to represent 47 per cent of all exports, thereby constituting the backbone of foreign trade and the vital linchpin in the balance of payments. Like the rest of Europe, Russia also gravitated from free trade to protectionism, with an inexorable rise from the low tariffs of the 1850s and 1860s—first to a 10 per cent tariff in 1881, then 20 per cent in 1885, and finally to a prohibitive tariff of 33 per cent in 1891.

Society

The Great Reforms sought to permit some social change, but it also endeavoured to ensure that it was slow and gradual. Hence many of the reforms were consciously ‘all-estate’ (vsesoslovnyi), not ‘non-estate’ (vnesoslovnyi); that is, they deliberately sought to include all estates, but to include people qua members of the estate, not to disregard estates altogether. Hence the zemstvo included nobles, peasants, and townspeople, but segregated them in separate electoral curiae. And, as a famous contemporary painting by one of the ‘itinerants’ (peredvizhniki) showed, the social distances remained great indeed.

The nobility itself underwent profound change in the wake of emancipation. Juridically, it not only lost the right to own serfs but also surrendered important privileges and perquisites, especially those pertaining to its special access to civil and military service. The new legislation opened schools, including the élite military officer schools, to non-nobles; the inexorable result was a steady influx of non-nobles into institutions of higher learning and, subsequently, into the military and civil service. The change was most dramatic in that old bastion of noble privilege, the officer corps, where the proportion of hereditary nobles shrank from 81 per cent in the 1860s to a mere 12 per cent by the end of the century. The nobles not only forfeited old privileges but also had to bear new responsibilities and burdens. Most notable was the retraction of their right not to serve by the Universal Military Training Act of 1874. Economically, as already pointed out, many nobles fared badly under the conditions of post-emancipation agriculture; especially once the international grain crisis descended on Russia, their debts mounted rapidly, leading to a sharp increase in bankruptcies (from a handful in the 1870s to 2,237 in 1893) and in land sales (by 1905 nobles had sold over 40 per cent of their land held at emancipation). Little wonder that, amidst such distress, the nobility proved such fertile ground for opposition in the zemstvo and, from the 1890s, would spearhead the first phase of the ‘liberation movement’.

A second component of the élite was the ‘nobility of the pen’—the bureaucracy. Although it had early on become differentiated from the landholding nobility (and, especially at the provincial level, had been recruited from non-nobles), this ‘democratization’ accelerated sharply after 1855 and inexorably recast officialdom, even the élite bureaucracy in the two capitals. Although the very top rungs of the civil service remained the purview of blue-blooded nobles, the middling and lower ranks now drew primarily on other groups, especially the offspring of clergy, townsmen, and the educated professions. But even more remarkable than the change in social composition was the enormous growth in aggregate size of the civil service, which swelled from just 112,000 in 1857 to 524,000 in 1900 in the Table of Ranks (plus many others in lower positions). The ‘state’, which in pre-reform Russia had been chiefly myth, was rapidly being reified, even in the countryside, where the bureaucracy was gradually coming face to face with the peasantry.

A third component of élite society consisted of men of means—the old merchants but also the new stratum of rich industrialists and bankers. A relatively thin stratum of society, this ‘bourgeoisie’ actually consisted of several different groups. One important component included Muscovite industrialists and merchants, whose roots went back to the period of Nicholas I and who derived their wealth chiefly from the production and sale of consumer goods (especially textiles) on the domestic market. By all accounts they tended to be more conservative, even in religious matters (with a disproportionate share of Old Believers). Another group was quite different—the St Petersburg industrialists and financiers, who were active in banking and heavy industry. Since much of their activity depended on good relations with the government, they tended to be very conservative politically. The third, highly visible, group consisted of non-Russians, both those from minority groups (especially Jews) and from foreigners (like the Nobel family). In relative terms, this commercial-industrial élite remained very small and, for the most part, remote from politics.

The ‘semi-privileged’ social orders included the clergy of the Orthodox Church—the parish clergy as well as those serving in monasteries and convents. Although the Great Reforms had endeavoured to improve their status and material condition (indeed, publicists spoke of an ‘emancipation’ of the clergy, not unlike that of the serfs), in fact the reforms had catastrophic consequences. Above all, the reforms failed to improve the material condition of clergy, for neither the state nor the people proved willing to change the form or amount of material support. The parish statute of 1869, which proposed to amalgamate parishes into larger and more viable economic units, likewise proved a dismal failure: while it did reduce the number of clerical positions and hence increase the ratio of parishioners to priests, it failed to generate greater income, as parishioners pronounced traditional sums sacred or even reduced them. The seminary reform of 1867 may have improved the curriculum, but it also shifted much of the financial burden of seminaries to the parish clergy. At the same time, the reform gave the clergy’s sons new opportunities to leave the clerical estate, and they did so in vast numbers (comprising 35 per cent of university students in 1875, for example). As this mass ‘flight of the seminarians’ gained momentum, the Church suddenly encountered an acute shortage of candidates and had to ordain men of inferior education. By the 1880s observers could already discern an absolute decline in the educational level of the clergy, a process that would continue unabated until the end of the ancien régime and indeed beyond.

Another semi-privileged stratum consisted of the new professions, which gained markedly in numbers, status, and self-awareness in the decades after 1855. Previously, most professions had not even enjoyed legal recognition or, at most, simply comprised a subordinate unit of the civil service (for example, doctors and surveyors). After 1855 their number rapidly proliferated, in no small measure because of the rapid expansion of institutions of higher learning and specialized training. As a result, between 1860 and the end of the century, the total number of university and technical-school graduates increased from 20,000 to 85,000; beyond these graduates were many more who failed to graduate or who had an élite secondary-school education. Many of these discovered greatly expanded opportunities for employment not only in state service and the private sector, but also in the new organs of local self-government—the zemstvo and city council, which became a major employer for teachers, doctors, statisticians, agronomists, and the like. By the 1880s, for example, the zemstvo employed some 23,000 white-collar professionals, including 15,000 teachers, 1,300 doctors, and 5,000 registered ill-trained medical practitioners (fel′ dshery). Some, most notably lawyers and doctors, raised their corporate juridical status by establishing a professional organization, with the right not only to regulate but also to represent their profession. Because of their growing size, importance, and organization, the new professional intelligentsia was rapidly becoming a major force in Russian society and politics. It would play a central role in the liberation movement from the 1890s.

The rank-and-file ‘burghers’ (meshchane) constituted a highly variegated group in the towns, ranging from petty merchants and skilled artisans to the unemployed, unskilled, and unwanted. Certainly their number was increasing sharply, as the cities themselves grew rapidly in size, even more rapidly than the population as a whole. It remained more protean than powerful; while wielding little influence in state and society, it did absorb the steady influx of migrants from the countryside and also became a major source of the upwardly mobile into the new semi-professions and civil service.

The largest, and most disprivileged, segment of society was of course the peasantry. Apart from the economic problems bequeathed by emancipation, the peasants also suffered from legal discrimination (special obligations like the poll-tax, for example) and subordination to the commune. Despite the reformers’ attempt to inhibit a sudden social transformation of the traditional village, the peasantry none the less did undergo some far-reaching changes. One was a gradual stratification; despite the levelling effect of the commune, the village came to have its own ‘have-much’ and ‘have-nothing’ families, along with the mass of ‘have-littles’. And the families themselves began to change, with the gradual breakup of the patriarchal, extended family and formation of smaller, independent family units. Peasant society also came inexorably to reflect changes in urban culture, as increased contact with the city (especially through seasonal labour) helped to disseminate a new material culture, attitudes, and values to the countryside. Partly because of such changes, but also because of the Universal Military Training Act (which reduced service on the basis of education) and the opportunities open to the literate and schooled, the peasantry began to abandon its traditional antipathy towards the school as a useless luxury. Although the reduction of illiteracy was an enormous task, the new schools did have a distinct impact.

Another group, the workers, had antecedents in the pre-reform era, with some forebears going back to the metallurgical and textile plants of the eighteenth century. The steady, if modest, industrial growth from the 1850s to the 1880s brought a substantial increase in the number of workers, from roughly 700,000 in 1865 to 1,432,000 in 1890. While many of these were seasonal (returning part of the year to cultivate their communal plot of land), a small but growing number had been born in the city or had permanently relocated there. The workers also displayed the explosive volatility for which they would later become so renowned; the St Petersburg textile strike of 1870, a watershed in Russian labour history, heralded the onset of a new era of spontaneous outbursts and, ultimately, more conscious and organized strikes.

The condition and consciousness of women, more generally, underwent a significant transformation during these decades. From the mid-1850s the impact of the women’s movement in the West gradually became apparent, especially among those in élite status groups. By 1866 the first women’s journal appeared, followed shortly after by a ‘Proclamation’ (admittedly penned by a man) and the major infusion of radical women into the revolutionary movement. Still more important was the emergence of female professionals; though banned from the civil service, they appeared in increasing numbers in certain professions (especially teaching), sometimes acquired a Western medical degree, or turned to a popular female career equally popular in the West—monasticism and church service. But all this change had to overcome the opposition of society and regime, which still excluded women from the university and resisted proposals to improve their civil rights. Typical was the failure to reform the laws on divorce and separation, which were highly restrictive and left many women defenceless against abusive spouses and loveless marriages.

The empire’s numerous minorities had long been a subject of intense concern. Although the ‘Great Russians’ comprised a majority (and, together with Ukrainians and Belorussians, nearly three-quarters of the population in European Russia), the empire had a huge and highly differentiated bloc of minorities. Some, like the Ukrainians and Belorussians, were Orthodox by faith and, despite some stirrings in a tiny nationalist intelligentsia, as yet did not pose a serious threat to the territorial integrity of the realm or its internal political stability. And many of the ‘internal’ minorities, located within Russian-dominated areas, had already been Russified to a considerable degree. The government also sought to suppress neo-Slavophile chauvinism, especially demands for repressive measures against various minorities; typical was Alexander’s sharp rebuke in 1869 to Iurii Samarin for his inflammatory book, The Borderlands of Russia.

Indeed, in some regions the government launched far-reaching reforms to ameliorate the condition of selected minorities. Certainly the most remarkable beneficiaries were Jews, who, ever since the establishment of the Pale of Settlement in the late eighteenth century, had suffered from a crescendo of disabilities and discriminatory laws, especially in the reign of Nicholas I. In 1856, shortly after coming to the throne, Alexander II vowed ‘to review all the existing decrees on the Jews with the general goal of fusing this people with the indigenous population’, and in fact did approve a series of important reforms. That same year his government abolished the discriminatory rules on military conscription, which had drafted Jewish youths not only at a higher rate but also at a younger age, as part of a deliberate strategy to subject the ‘cantonists’ to forcible conversion.

From the mid-1850s the government even began to dismantle the restrictions of the Pale of Settlement—although only for selected, valuable members of the Jewish community: first-guild merchants (1859), certain categories of artisans (1865), and finally all Jews with a university degree (1879). Similar concessions were extended to certain other minorities. For example, in the grand duchy of Finland, where a Swedish élite held sway, Finnish was adopted for use in provincial government and courts (1856), later in customs and schools; in 1863 it was formally recognized, along with Swedish, as one of the two official languages.

But the era of Great Reforms included repression as well as concession, especially when the government encountered overt opposition and organized resistance. By far the most volatile area was Congress Poland: long a hotbed of open discontent and the site of a major rebellion in 1830–1, the Poles had jubilantly celebrated news of Russia’s defeats in the Crimean War and, despite state attempts at conciliation, became still more rebellious in the first years of the new regime. Tensions steadily mounted in the area and finally exploded in the Polish rebellion of 1863. Although this insurrection was more easily suppressed than that of 1830–1, it none the less precipitated a systematic campaign of repression: abolition of the Polish governmental councils (1867), reorganization of the area into ten Russian administrative provinces (1868), conversion of Warsaw University into a Russian institution (1869), and introduction of the Russian judicial system (1876). Blaming the Catholic Church for fanning anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox sentiments, the government took steps to neutralize this threat by confiscating Catholic property and imposing new controls on its administration (1864–5). The area continued to seethe with discontent and remained a constant source of instability and ferment. The state also resorted to force in the Caucasus, which had been annexed decades earlier, but remained a cauldron of unrest and armed resistance. Although a military campaign in 1857–62 achieved a modicum of control, Russian power remained tentative and vulnerable.

The 1860s and 1870s also marked the expansion of Russian rule into Central Asia, which had long been subject to Russian influence and pressure, but only now came firmly into its orbit of control. Although the motive may have been partly commercial (an interest in its capacity for cotton production), far more important was the need to establish a firm and reliable border in the area. Whatever the motive, between 1864 and 1873 Russia gradually reduced the three khanates (Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand) to a protectorate status, with unmistakable Russian predominance.

The Revolutionary Movement

Even as the government embarked on the Great Reforms, it encountered not only dissatisfaction among peasants and nobles, but also opposition from an important new force in society—radical youth who collectively came to be called the ‘intelligentsia’. Although Russia had had its share of radicals before, they had not constituted a self-conscious social group, with a distinctive identity and subculture. By the 1860s, however, they had gained sufficient critical mass and developed a new social identity, first as ‘the new people’ (from N. G. Chernyshevskii’s novel, What is to be Done? [1863]) and eventually as the ‘intelligentsia’. Set apart by a special subculture (with distinctive dress, speech, mores, and values), still drawn disproportionately from the upper reaches of society, the intelligentsia none the less conceived of itself as a supraclass force and charged with representing the interests of ‘society’, especially its lower orders. Sharing a common Weltanschauung (which provocatively abjured their fathers’ idealism and romanticism in the name of science and materialism), they believed that they could escape the elusive, ethereal forces of history and, with the aid of science and rational planning, construct society and state along entirely new lines. The model for young radicals was skilfully etched in Ivan S. Turgenev’s famous novel, Fathers and Sons (1862), with the sharp contrast between the older generation and the archetypical lower-class antithesis, Bazarov.

The radicals of the 1860s, still few in number but concentrated in the capitals, marked the first real effluence of an organized revolutionary movement. For the most part these early radicals waged the fight with proclamations, like that of Young Russia in 1862: ‘With full faith in ourselves and our strength, in the people’s sympathy for us, in the glorious future of Russia (to whose lot it has fallen to be the first country to achieve the glorious work of socialism), we will utter a single cry: “To the axe!!” and then strike the imperial party without restraint … in the city squares … in the narrow streets of the cities, in the broad avenues of the capital, in the villages and in the small towns’. These early revolutionaries, however, also established the first conspiratorial organizations to wage a battle against autocracy in the name of the people. Alarmed by the upsurge of student disorders, revolutionary proclamations, scattered acts of random violence (from the fires of St Petersburg in 1862 to the failed assassination of Alexander II in 1866), the government grew increasingly repressive in seeking to contain this new and growing wave of radicalism.

The 1860s were only a pallid harbinger of what would come in the 1870s. In contrast to the 1860s, this next stage was marked by an idealization of the peasantry and, especially, hopes that they were on the verge of a bloody Jacquerie against the nobility and autocracy. Later encapsulated in the term ‘populism’ (narodnichestvo), the movement of the 1870s emphasized both the significance of the peasant commune (as an embryonic unit of communism), but also the moral and spiritual strength of the people. The movement indeed affected a whole generation of intellectuals, from writers wont to celebrate the peasantry to zemstvo statisticians intent upon demonstrating the economic superiority of communal agriculture. But for the populist radicals eager to demolish autocracy and truly emancipate the people, it was axiomatic that the peasantry itself was a vital revolutionary force that at most required the co-ordination of the intelligentsia.

In the first phase the radicals were deeply influenced by the teaching of Peter Lavrov, whose Historical Letters (1869) emphasized the duty of the intelligentsia—who had acquired their culture and education at the expense of the common folk—to repay their enormous debt by bringing culture and education to the folk. Although Lavrov’s challenge to ‘repentant noblemen’ initially encouraged attempts to disseminate books and literacy, it eventually mushroomed into a more radical campaign of ‘going to the people’ in 1874–6. That new phase drew less from Lavrov than from the anarchist teachings of M. Bakunin and P. Kropotkin, who believed that the peasantry was innately revolutionary and needed only encouragement. As a result, several thousand members of the urban intelligentsia flooded into the countryside—as teachers, blacksmiths, and the like—for the purpose of fusing with the people. Despite some positive response by the peasantry, the police easily identified and arrested most of these urban misfits and effectively decimated the rank-and-file activists. Though nominally still espousing confidence that revolution could still come from below, the intelligentsia now turned to terrorism—violent attacks on high-ranking officials, the emperor included—in a vain, but desperate attempt to ignite popular revolt and obtain vengeance for the uncompromising violence and repression of the state. Organized in a conspiratorial organization called ‘Land and Freedom’ (Zemlia i volia), the terrorists waged war on the autocracy and bureaucracy even as some of their number continued attempts to ignite a popular Jacquerie from below.

By 1879, however, revolutionary populists turned increasingly to terrorism and, for all practical purposes, abandoned hope of popular insurrection. As the organization’s very name ‘the People’s Will’ (Narodnaia volia) suggested, the revolutionaries now envisioned themselves as the agents of revolution acting on behalf of the peasantry. This phase of the populist movement drew on the teachings of P. Tkachev, who emphasized that Russia’s very backwardness meant the lack of a strong bourgeoisie or nobility and hence the lack of a real social base for autocracy. ‘In reality’, he wrote, ‘the [state’s] power is only apparent and imagined; it has no roots in the economic life of the people, and it does not embody the interests of any class’. But this desperate paroxysm of violent terrorism also derived from fear: their encounter with the village (reinforced by the vignettes of populist writers and the numbers of the zemstvo statisticians) revealed that the commune was beginning to dissolve, that the collective was giving way to the kulak. Russia’s very development posed the danger that the commune, its special path to the future, was heading unmistakably towards disintegration. It was thus becoming increasingly urgent, the populists believed, that they strike down the very embodiment of the hateful state—the emperor himself.

Counter-Revolution and Counter-Reform

Although the crescendo of revolutionary violence provided one major reason for the government’s retreat from the liberal reformism of the 1860s, it was not the only or even the primary reason. No less important was the simple fact that the liberal reforms had failed to work as anticipated or, indeed, had sometimes created new problems while aggravating old ones. Moralizing historians have long been wont to blame the revolutionary intelligentsia for Russia’s failure to tread the Western liberal path, but in fact the reforms—themselves deeply influenced by Western models—proved highly dysfunctional and destructive.

The zemstvo reform that established elected bodies of self-government is a case in point. In part, the government was dismayed to find that these organs promptly proceeded to raise political demands—above all, that the edifice be crowned by a national zemstvo. Although the government for the moment was able to stifle such pretensions, in moments of crisis—as in the late 1870s—the zemstvo liberals seized upon the government’s weakness and vulnerability to renew their demand for political, not mere administrative, reform. No less important, the zemstvo failed to exercise its authority and in fact proved highly lethargic, falling far short of expectations. While most nobles had little interest in levying local property-based taxes to build schools for peasants, the latter lacked the means to build schools that seemed to offer no immediate material benefit.

Judicial reform proved equally dismaying. In part, contemporaries were deeply alarmed by an apparent explosion in the crime rate, a perception magnified in turn by lurid reporting in the press. Apart from the dissolution of the squire’s police powers over the peasantry, some contemporaries were wont to blame the judicial system itself, especially the purported (but exaggerated) leniency of the jury system. More worrisome for the government was the apparent inability of the judicial system to combat political crime and revolutionary terrorism; as a result, the government transferred crimes against the state to a government body (1872) and erected military tribunals to deal with terrorists (1878). When the revolutionaries used public trials as a political stage, when a jury acquitted a female terrorist who had shot and wounded the governor of St Petersburg, the government became still more disenchanted with its system of Western justice. That disillusionment extended to virtually all the other reforms as well—the liberal censorship that tolerated attacks on the government, the universities that produced so many radical revolutionaries, the church reform that left priests in even worse straits than before, and the emancipation that appeared responsible for the plight of both nobles and peasants.

All this served to erode the reform ethos of the 1860s, even among those who had participated in designing the reforms. A former Minister of Interior, P. A. Valuev, was now more sensitive to the dilemmas of stimulating social initiative from below: ‘The Russian people, for centuries, have been accustomed to strong authority and its uniform application everywhere. Only government authority, balanced in its weight and with equal, forceful influence on all the far-flung parts of our state, will be able to guide society to its further development on a true and lawful path’. Even more radical was the shift in sentiment of K. P. Pobedonostsev, who had helped design the liberal judicial reform of 1864 but within a few years had become the chief spokesman for conservative retrenchment.

Although the government had begun to revise and repair the Great Reforms earlier, the watershed came in the acute political crisis of the late 1870s. The regime found itself now confronted not only by a relentless political terrorism but also by growing restiveness in educated society—at least partly because of yet another débâcle in foreign affairs, the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8. The conflict had promised to protect Russia’s coreligionists from persecution in the Ottoman Empire, and restore Russia’s place as a great power; despite the high costs incurred, however, all these gains were undone at the congress of Berlin. By 1879 educated society (which included conservative, not just liberal elements in the nobility) were adamantly demanding political reforms like a constitution and a national assembly. Pobedonostsev, the arch-enemy of such demands, wrote to the emperor’s heir that ‘what I hear [in St Petersburg] from high-placed and learned men makes me sick, as if I were in the company of half-wits and perverted apes. I hear everywhere the trite, deceitful, and accursed word—constitution’. Indeed, some of the more liberal segments (headed by nobles from Tver) had even entered into clandestine contact with the revolutionary populists.

When repression alone failed to stifle the revolutionary movement, in February 1880 Alexander II appointed a new Minister of Interior, M. T. Loris-Melikov, to deal with the crisis. His tactic, known as the ‘dictatorship of the heart’, continued the war against revolutionaries but also made a calculated attempt to solicit the support of Russia’s more conservative, propertied elements in society. Although wrongly described as a parliamentary reform, his plan essentially foresaw a series of consultative commissions (not unlike those that preceded emancipation) to help advise the government on the proper course of action. Both the preparatory and general commissions would include regular state officials and members elected by the zemstvo and city councils; their task was to make a systematic review of the Great Reforms. This scheme was not, however, intended as a permanent institution; as Loris-Melikov himself explained, ‘it would be unthinkable for Russia to have any form of popular representation based on Western models’. Reassured, Alexander II approved the proposal on 1 March 1881.

That same day the terrorists finally got their quarry: a bomb mortally wounded the emperor, who died a few hours later. Although his successor, Alexander III (1881–94), at first hesitated, he was eventually persuaded by Pobedonostsev to reaffirm the fundamental principles of autocracy in a manifesto of 29 April 1881. The manifesto, implicitly a repudiation of Loris-Melikov’s plan and indeed of the Great Reforms, led immediately to the resignation of the liberal ministers and to the formation of a far more conservative government. The path was now open for a far-reaching revision of the earlier legislation.

Although contemporaries (especially liberals) characterized the new measures as a ‘reaction’, they did not constitute a ‘restoration’ of the old order. It was, of course, plain to all that neither serfdom nor the order it sustained could be reestablished. What the new government did seek to do, however, was to reassert the primacy of dynamic state leadership and autocracy. The ‘counter-reforms’ in censorship (1882) and education (1884), for example, specifically sought to emphasize the state’s power and dispensed with earlier hopes that society would show initiative and responsibility. Particularly important on the agenda was the re-establishment of firm police power; the ‘temporary regulations of 14 August 1881’ created ‘extraordinary’ security powers which, in fact, were renewed every three years and expanded to a growing list of areas until the regime finally fell in 1917. Indeed, the regime of Alexander III was wont to cultivate and reward proizvol—the gratuitous display of arbitrariness and power—among its officials. Reassertion of the autocratic principle had increasingly assumed the form of a counter-Rechtsstaat, a volte-face in policy that was all the more anathema and provocative for liberal, educated society.

The 1880s also signalled an important new era in state policy towards national minorities. Although Alexander II had dealt brutally with the rebellious Poles, he had not engaged in systematic, coercive Russification and even made significant concessions in some instances. His son’s government, by contrast, launched a far more aggressive campaign, one that crossed the divide from administrative to cultural Russification. Perhaps the most striking example of the change in policy concerned the Baltic Germans, an élite that had served the empire loyally and that had enjoyed the special confidence and protection of Alexander III’s predecessors. From the mid-1880s, however, St Petersburg took vigorous measures to ‘Russify’ the area, requiring that Russian be used in state offices (1885–9) and elementary and secondary schools (1887–90), that the imperial police and judicial system be adopted (1889), and that the German university of Dorpat be Russified as Iurev University (1889–93). Simultaneously, the government reversed its earlier concessions to Jews. The most important repressive measures included the 1887 quotas limiting the number of Jewish students in secondary schools and universities (10 per cent in the Pale, 5 per cent outside, and 3 per cent in the two capitals). Later measures included rules to exclude Jews from the bar (1889), zemstvo (1890), and city councils (1892). Similar encroachments were made on other groups, even those like the Finns, who had hitherto enjoyed special protection, but now were exposed to a gradual Russification that would reach a crescendo in the late 1890s.

But paternalistic autocracy also made concessions, at least for its putative base of ‘loyal subjects’. For the nobles it created a new Noble Bank (with special low-interest rates) and, in an imperial manifesto of 1885, made new promises of a greater role: ‘The Russian nobles [will] preserve their preponderance in the military command, local governments, courts, and in the dissemination (through example) of the precepts of faith and fidelity’. The government also made concessions to the lower social groups as well—such as the Peasant Bank (1883) to assist in land purchases and the abolition of the poll-tax (1885). Disturbed by unrest among factory workers and influenced by the social policy in Bismarckian Germany, the government also adopted a number of far-reaching laws to restrict child labour and other labour abuses in 1882–6. By 1890 repression, moderated by such social concessions, appeared to have restored stability to the realm: disorders in the factory and village were at a nadir, even the revolutionary movement appeared to constitute no real match for the regime’s police forces.

But the dominant element, especially in contemporary perception, was ‘reaction’—blind attempts to repress and refasten the shackles of the old order. This reversion was all the more intolerable because it seemed to reverse the gains of the 1860s and 1870s. It was, indeed, in many instances outright counterproductive. While seeking to reconstruct the multinational empire into a homogeneous state, with uniform Russian culture and administration from border to border, the government was merely succeeding in accelerating the development of national consciousness and revolutionary sentiments, even among the most loyal minorities in the empire. To a very considerable degree, the geographic periphery was becoming the political centre: the rebellious sentiments, combined with weakness of state control, was turning the borderlands into the staging-ground and bastion of revolution. The revolutionary movement would recruit heavily from these borderlands as the ancien régime gradually slid towards the abyss of 1917.

8. Revolutionary Russia 1890–1914

REGINALD E. ZELNIK

Rapid industrialization, though vital for military power abroad, ignited deep-rooted unrest in both town and country. By 1905 this ‘modernizing autocracy’ suffered humiliating defeat in the East and revolutionary upheaval at home. In the aftermath, despite grudging if important concessions, the regime failed to establish the social solidarity—or submission—needed to survive the onslaught of modern warfare.

Introduction and Background

ANY analysis of imperial Russia at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth must include the obvious but essential reminder that Russia was still an autocracy (samoderzhavie). This was not simply a garden-variety old regime, with a divinely anointed absolute monarch at the top and a system of legally defined social estates (sosloviia= Stände), headed by the nobility defining its social hierarchy. It was also an old regime whose sovereigns, even the most ‘liberal’ (Alexander II), self-consciously resisted the dilution of their sovereign power, the delegation of that power to intermediary institutions, and its limitation by any constitutional mechanism. Although laws abounded, and had even been codified, until 1906 Russia’s rulers refused to recognize as definitive any body of law that could not be subordinated to or reversed by the autocratic will, as it often was. There was, again until 1906, no equivalent of a Reichstag, no universal manhood suffrage (indeed no suffrage of any sort at the national level), no legal parties to outlaw (as German Social Democracy had been outlawed in 1878), no labour unions or other free associations of workers to persecute and harass.

It was also a regime that deeply distrusted and only grudgingly tolerated any kind of independent civic association organized from below, not only by the lower classes, but even by society’s élites. It was still more distrustful of organizational activity that brought those élites into contact with ‘the people’ in social contexts free from state supervision or that seemed likely to escape the reach of government oversight and control. It was, in short, a polity in which invisible mechanisms of cultural hegemony, civic normalization, embourgeoisement, positive or negative integration—or whatever other metaphor one chooses to suggest the idea of social control without flagrant resort to force majeure—were neither readily available nor easily deployed.

The Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s did, however, represent a significant change in the mode of government, marking Russia’s entry into a new era. During this period the serfs were freed, the zemstvo was introduced as an element of civil society at the local level, trial by jury and a relatively independent judiciary and bar were authorized, and the free professions were permitted to begin an open if vexed existence, with their own professional associations. It was also a period when some branches of government attracted a new breed of enlightened bureaucrat, less reluctant to open his mind to new ways and ideas, even while forced to submit to the domination of officials of an earlier stamp.

All these developments seemed to contradict the principle of unbridled autocracy, while a (more or less) capitalist industrialization, first in the 1870s and 1880s, then more intensively in the 1890s, moved powerfully, if never decisively, against the grain of old status-based hierarchies. Nevertheless, notwithstanding all these dramatic (and to important elements of the government) disturbing changes, indeed in part because of them, there was enormous reluctance to allowing the winds of change to blow in the direction of a liberalized political system, where society might seek to fulfil its aspirations independently of the state.

This is not to say that the state could snuff out all the ventures of society, of unofficial Russia acting in an organized capacity and a ‘civilizing spirit’. For with the slow but continuing development of Russia’s public sphere (in a word, of glasnost’), each decade from the 1870s—even the ‘reactionary’ 1880s and 1890s—witnessed the appearance, sometimes even with official approval, of new initiatives from below. They came mainly from members of the educated élite (less often from peasants or workers), many of them openly dedicated to high-minded public causes, to social progress, and to forging positive links between the ‘people’ (narod) and ‘society’. As long as such activity respected certain limits, even if never fully trusted by the government, it was tolerated to some extent, even during the so-called era of ‘counter-reforms’ of the late 1880s and 1890s.

The traditional version of the story of late imperial Russia, one that highlights the promise of the Great Reforms, but then goes on to recount the erosion of that promise in the age of ‘reaction’, is not without its virtues: the Great Reforms did promise constructive and enlightened (if not necessarily liberal) change, and the decades of the 1880s–1890s did witness a reversal of certain reforms of the previous reign, especially in the areas of local self-government and higher education.

Yet some important qualifications must be added to this seductively clear picture. From the very outset the Great Reforms were beset by serious contradictions: the coexistence of peasant courts and special administrative punishment with a new, Western-model jury system; abolition of serfdom but preservation of special disabilities for peasants—an internal passport system, compulsory redemption payments, and obligatory membership in communes; acceptance of a new property-based franchise as the foundation of local government, but reaffirmation of institutions based on the traditional juridical estates (not to mention the de facto dominance of the hereditary gentry, barely 1 per cent of the population). At the same time, even during counter-reforms and reaction, radical changes overtook society, economy, and government policy and continued to move the country in a more Westerly, ‘progressive’, modern (if not truly liberal) direction. In sum, at almost every point between the emperors’ most dramatic manifestos—the Emancipation manifesto of 1861 and the October manifesto of 1905—Russian society was in a state of tension, with multiple protagonists and antagonists, some of them seeking a radical reconfiguration of power and policy.

Industrial Progress and Rural Hunger

Around the time of the ‘counter-reform’ of 1890, the revised zemstvo statute, the tensions in Russian society became increasingly apparent. The ‘Witte era’ (1892–1903) was about to begin. These were the years marked by the influence, if not full political dominance, of the controversial but eminent Minister of Finance, Sergei Witte (Vitte), the former railway executive whose provocative developmental economic policies raised the ire of so many gentry and caused so much friction within the government itself. The policies of his predecessor, Ivan Vyshnegradskii (1887–92), anticipated those of Witte and also exposed their problematic consequences. Among the most important policy initiatives launched by Vyshnegradskii and continued by Witte was the pressure, applied through taxation, to force peasants to market grain at low prices. These ministers of finance also imposed a high protective tariff, which grew with time and made it increasingly difficult for market-oriented grain producers to purchase much-needed machinery and chemical fertilizers abroad. The ‘modernizing’ purpose here was to further economic progress by improving Russia’s balance of trade and by promoting domestic industries. But the consequence was to alienate both gentry and peasantry, the tsar’s élite servitors and his poorest subjects, respectively. Though often in conflict with each other over such issues as land use, both groups felt squeezed by the ministry’s developmental policies (a situation, grosso modo, that could be traced back to Peter the Great). And as always, the image of poor peasants victimized by government policy provided grist to the mill of the liberal and radical intelligentsia, with their keenly felt obligation to the people and reluctance to equate ‘progress’ with capitalist development (the populist writer Nikolai Mikhailovskii being a good case in point). In this instance, however, the criticism of modernizing ‘bureaucracy’, from both the right and the left, conservatives and liberal alike, did not mean that the state was walking sensibly down the middle of the road. It was not.

The accumulating resentments multiplied in 1891–2, when large parts of the Russian countryside, some twenty provinces in all, experienced this period’s greatest famine (followed by devastating cholera and typhus epidemics), a human catastrophe with casualties in the hundreds of thousands. Historians still argue about responsibility—whether famine was the product of government policies or the deeper cyclical malfunction of a backward agrarian structure. Apart from the famine as such, they argue about whether the peasants’ lot was actually worsening by ‘objective’ measurements (for example, caloric intake), about the meaning of rural overpopulation (was demographic growth a sign of ‘progress’—a reflection of declining mortality?), and even about the best methods for measuring such assessments. This debate will continue, a scholarly controversy that echoes England’s classic ‘standard-of-living’ debate. But whatever the truth about ‘objective’ conditions, there can be no doubt that contemporaries were deeply alarmed about the famine and its aftermath, or that their ‘subjective’ perception fuelled resentment against state programmes that seemed inherently harmful to society in general and to ‘the people’, especially the peasants (over 80 per cent of the population), in particular. The Ministry of Finance won few friends with its programme for economic progress.

This negative assessment of state policy in the 1890s readily reinforced existing attitudes of the educated public. Russia’s radical intellectuals (best typified by the sometime liberal, sometime radical, N. K. Mikhailovskii), but even many moderates (not to mention the eccentric, politically enigmatic figure of Leo Tolstoy), generally placed a low premium on economic development, widely viewed as attainable only at the common people’s expense. Less surprising but no less important was the low value placed on economic progress by conservative intellectuals, whose fear of what today is called the evils of modernization or Westernization—Alexander Solzhenitsyn comes readily to mind—sometimes made them odd allies with people who otherwise stood far to their left.

From a political perspective, the most important result of the famine was revitalization of the zemstvo, earlier a locus of nongovernmental public activity and liberal aspirations, but in the 1880s restricting itself to ‘small deeds’. Ineffective in efforts to combat famine when utilizing only its own resources, by late 1891 the government was once again driven to encourage the very kind of grass-roots, voluntary social action that it normally distrusted—from the relief work of district zemstvos and university students to the charitable efforts of national cultural figures such as Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. Society was summoned back to life to take part in a national war on poverty.

Throughout the most hard-hit areas of Russia, the hungry blackearth and Volga provinces, the zemstvos took the lead (although, as Richard Robbins has argued, the degree of successful co-operation between zemstvo and central government is often underestimated). The point, however, is not that the zemstvos’ efforts were universally successful (far from it), but that their self-confidence, self-assertion, and self-importance were given an enormous boost, so much so that in the immediate post-famine years, some zemstvos again challenged the central government.

The advent of Nicholas II to the throne in 1894 encouraged zemstvos and other civic bodies to convert their newly acquired prestige into a political force. In keeping with their as yet modest goals, perhaps encouraged by the recent flashes of co-operation with the government, their approach—except for the aggressive Tver zemstvo—was the traditional supplication: a hopeful request to the new, little-known young monarch to include them in his policy deliberations. His notorious response in January 1895 rejected such aspirations as ‘senseless dreams’ and reaffirmed the autocratic principles of his beloved father, Alexander III. This insensitive response was only the first of several dramatic moments (the 1896 Khodynka Field tragedy, when hundreds of spectators were trampled to death at the Moscow coronation ceremonies, was the next) that disrupted constructive dialogue between state and society in the first ten years of Nicholas’s rule.

Revival of the Left

The events of 1891–2, with the continued rigidity of autocratic governance in the years that followed, helped to revive the radical left, which, like the more moderate zemstvo movement, had been licking its wounds in the 1880s. True, the People’s Will and other like-minded, terror-oriented grouplets (including a short-lived conspiratorial student band in 1887 dominated by Alexander Ulianov, Lenin’s elder brother) had never entirely ceased their plotting. But until the new mood of the 1890s, they had entertained precious little hope, certainly less than in the 1870s, of effective contact with the ‘people’ (whether peasants or workers) on the one hand, or with zemstvos and other moderates or liberals on the other. From the mid-1890s, however, radicals saw new opportunities: alliances, however uneasy, with increasingly disaffected liberals to their right; contact, however awkward, with the ‘people’, especially the growing numbers of factory workers in and near the rapidly industrializing larger cities. Except for the earlier stages of the 1905 Revolution, co-operation between liberals and socialist radicals never seemed brighter than in the early 1890s. The so-called ‘People’s Rights Party’ (1893–4), a populist-oriented organization that jettisoned terrorism, stressed the importance of political freedom and welcomed both radicals and moderates to join its ranks. Although that party was short-lived, the entire period from 1892 to early 1905 saw on-again-off-again efforts of the more flexible radicals, both populist and Marxist, and the more daring liberals to find common ground. At the same time, more cautious liberals courted the more enlightened members of the bureaucracy, who in turn were willing to co-operate with ‘trustworthy’ leaders of the zemstvo movement, especially the so-called neo-Slavophiles. It was as if every point on the Russian political spectrum, save the most extreme ones, was occupied by someone desperately seeking to hold hands with allies to the right and to the left.

Labour Unrest

Thanks to Witte’s initial success, in the 1890s Russia experienced a rate of industrial growth never to recur until the 1930s. Indeed, industrial production: increased at an average of 8 per cent per annum, higher even than that of the USA. Did this rapid growth augur progress or conflict? As in other countries, the answer was both: ‘progress’, as Russia’s national economy closed the gap somewhat with other European countries, but also ‘conflict’ as Russian cities experienced the tell-tale warning signs of urban blight, working-class dissatisfaction, and gathering social tensions.

The renewed labour unrest that erupted in some of the factories of centra Russia, including Moscow, in the mid-1890s, was dwarfed by a succession of city-wide strikes in St Petersburg’s textile industry in 1896–7. Never before had labour unrest been so widespread and so well co-ordinated in a single Russian city, indeed, not in just any city but in the imperial capital, seat of royal authority and centre of imperial administration.

But were these strikes of great political significance? Historians have debated this point, opinions ranging from those who see them as spontaneous and purely economic, to those who read them as early successes of a young Russian Marxism. Although the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP) was not officially founded until 1898, Marxist circles were already in full flower in the capital by mid-decade. While the influence of early Russian Marxism should not be exaggerated, Allan Wildman has clearly demonstrated that the spontaneous labour movement was aided, abetted, and to some degree even inspired by Marxist agitators, some of whom had been closely connected with the young Marxist Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov.

But of still greater historical importance was the strikes’ indirect political significance: Russians of all persuasions saw them as a major historical moment, pregnant with either promise or peril, depending on the observer’s politics. Not that these perceptions were always consistent or predictable. In government circles, for example, some interpreted the strikes as a ‘wake-up call’, warning of the dire consequences of continuing Witte’s policies, while others saw them as evidence of the need for enlightened labour legislation to meet the needs of a modern industrializing society. A few officials, at times including Witte himself, went so far as to contemplate the legalization of labour unions, while the Minister of Interior proposed to shorten the working day (a logical extension of labour legislation on women and minors promulgated in the 1880s). A limit on the working day was introduced in 1897; (partial) legalization of unions did not come until 1906, however, and then in a very different context.

In the wake of the Petersburg strikes of 1896–7, even conservative officials who loathed Witte’s industrialization schemes recognized the need to contain working-class unrest. As often happened, such awareness was motivated by a mixture of direct Russian and vicarious European experience. Just as the Paris Commune of 1871 had precociously alerted Russians to potential dangers in their own urban centres, the spread of social democracy and labour militancy among ‘disloyal’ German workers, when added to such events as the Petersburg strikes, convinced conservatives in the Ministry of Interior, most notably the notorious Sergei Zubatov, that police-supervised associations were needed to stem the tide of unrest. To men like Witte, however, the very idea of placing the fate of industrial labour in the hands of the police (later described by critics as ‘police socialism’) was a foolish provocation. Moreover, such approaches seemed like yet another expression of gentry hostility to Witte’s policies, so rampant in the Ministry of Interior. Lacking a clear alternative, the Witte faction vacillated between advocacy of simple repression and of such daring moves as the legalization of unions. The tension between Witte and Zubatov over labour policy was emblematic of a larger tension between the Ministry of Interior and the Finance Ministry, with the basic direction of social and economic policy at issue.

The Role of Foreign Policy

Given the social and political strains produced by Witte’s policies, historians have asked whether they were necessary. Might an alternative path have been followed? Even if one forgoes foreign-policy determinism (Primat der Auβenpolitik), one must still concede that Russia’s relations with the outside world, and especially with the European powers, configured the context for the policies of the Finance Minister, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes at a further remove. Russia’s frail finances severely restricted the risks that the government could assume in foreign policy, especially with respect to the critical areas of the Balkans and the Black Sea, but also with respect to expansion in the Far East. At the same time, Russia’s presumptive but precarious position as a ‘great power’ provided an underlying motivation for the pursuit of economic development, industrial strength, and financial independence.

To be sure, Russia’s rulers always had the theoretical option of abdicating their great-power aspirations. But to do so would have threatened to undermine the entire regime, dynasty and all. It is hard to imagine a Romanov ruler openly agreeing to renunciation of great-power status, which would have entailed the closing of the Black Sea to Russian shipping, the resurrection of an independent Poland, perhaps even the abandonment of Peter the Great’s Baltic conquests and withdrawal from Central Asia. It took little imagination to itemize the potential losses from such an abdication—not to mention the symbolic significance of the forswearing of Russia’s traditional role, ever since the eighteenth century, as protector of Christian minorities from their Ottoman oppressors. A Russian ruler who openly repudiated these ambitions effectively abandoned his claim to be emperor, and to rule—and, quite conceivably, the moral and political support of the gentry élite.

Such considerations belie the historical possibility of a very different course. There were indeed real choices to be made, but they were between a bold, adventuristic, risk-taking policy that courted the twin dangers of humiliation and bankruptcy, and a more cautious, conservative policy that postponed immediate gratification and gambled on economic development as the key to future claims to power. The latter policy underlay Witte’s domestic programme, though a cautious posture was increasingly difficult to maintain as Russia became entangled in Asian adventures.

The successful pursuit of a cautious foreign policy also required stable relations with Germany. Yet those relations were strained by the Russo-German tariff war, already under way when Vyshnegradskii took office in 1887, at a time when there was little reason to be sanguine about Russia’s international position. A war scare with England two years earlier had added yet another chapter to the story of Russian humiliations in Paris in 1856 and Berlin in 1878. By the time Witte succeeded Vyshnegradskii, the Russian military—despite the misgivings of political conservatives and enemies of republicanism—had begun its turn to France, a move long favoured by Pan-Slavs and liberals alike. In 1892, even a cautious Foreign Ministry (still ever mindful of the need to get on well with Germany) concluded its first, quite limited entente with Paris. By the end of the decade Russian economic as well as foreign policy were more oriented towards France than ever, with French bankers, businessmen, and government officials filling gaps created by the withdrawal of Germans. This of course meant more potential conflict with Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and—though there were temporary respites in the tariff wars from 1894 to 1901—ultimately with Germany itself, thereby creating a vicious circle that made loans from France all the more imperative. But until the turn of the century, it was still too early to foresee the potential conflict brewing with Japan over the two countries’ competing ambitions in the Far East.

Revolutionary ‘Parties’

In the 1890s these foreign-policy issues were of little concern to the Russian left. As was their wont, radicals were more attentive to the fate of peasants and workers, with workers attracting an ever-greater share of their attention. If labour policy and attitudes towards workers exposed and intensified divisions in the government, they also produced divisions on the left, which had never been without its internal conflicts over how best to relate to the people that it aspired to lead or represent. Even in the 1870s, when revolutionaries envisioned the peasantry as the repository of their ‘Utopian’ dreams, they had already become heavily involved in the lives of urban workers, especially those in St Petersburg. This involvement entailed closer and closer contacts in that city between a marginalized group of young factory workers and a self-marginalized group of student intelligentsia, with the two groups interacting within the confines of the clandestine ‘circle’ (kruzhok), meeting in the overcrowded apartment of some of the members. These gatherings were the spiritual descendants of the intelligentsia circles of the age of Nicholas I, yet differed to the extent that they now drew many genuine plebeians into their orbit. Though the strategies and tactics varied over time (for example, armed rebellion vied with peaceful propaganda, tight conspiracy with openness), the circles had a powerful, persistent institutional presence right up to the revolutionary events of 1905, and to some extent beyond. Often heterogeneous in its class composition, the ‘all-class’ circle or ‘mixed-class’ circle soon gave birth to an illegitimate offspring—the circle composed exclusively of workers, who often struggled to define themselves in opposition to the intelligentsia-dominated, socially mixed groups that had spawned them.

By increasing the size and concentration of the working class, Witte’s policies expanded the arena of radical activity and opened the door to a Marxist perspective on the left. By the eve of 1905 the left included competing revolutionary strategies, each eventually embodied in a ‘party’: the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR, or simply the SRs, formally constituted in 1901) and two rival factions of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP), the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (products of the party’s schism in 1903). ‘Party’ is placed in quotation marks to emphasize that none was a party in the traditional West European political sense, that is, an organization that existed for the competitive pursuit of national elective office: there was no such office before 1906. Instead, these parties were underground organizations, seeking to overthrow the existing system and—here came some monumental disagreements—replace it either temporarily, with a liberal-democratic, constitutional polity and market economy (a ‘bourgeois phase’), or permanently, with a ‘socialist’ order (in any case a clearly non-capitalist socioeconomic system). Among European Marxists, nowhere was the issue of the succession of revolutionary ‘phases’ more hotly debated than in Russia, yet another expression of the reworking of West European experience into a relatively backward socioeconomic context.

The SRs, identifying strongly with populist traditions of the 1870s and the terrorism of People’s Will, welcomed signs of worker rebelliousness, but treated workers as but another component part of the larger ‘people’, whose centre of gravity remained in the huge peasant majority. Both workers and peasants, from the SR perspective, were victims of state-sponsored capitalism, a system that lacked a broad social base or other redeeming feature and could still be short-circuited either by revolutionary action or reversal of government policy. Most SRs were of the ultra-revolutionary persuasion. They were often high-energy revolutionary performers, and their patience with any schemes for a ‘transitional’ or temporary phase, postponing socialism to some more distant point in time, was, for the moment, very thin. There was, to be sure, a handful of populist-oriented publicists in the 1890s who believed in peaceful persuasion and other lawful means, but these ‘Legal Populists’ had lost much of their influence by the end of the century.

Some Marxists, those who became the Mensheviks, did not believe Russia ready for ‘proletarian’ or ‘socialist’ revolution and set as their proximate goal a ‘bourgeois’ revolution, whereby not workers—their ostensible constituency—but the enemy camp of capitalists would be the immediate beneficiary. Strictly speaking, the Mensheviks were following the logic of Orthodox Marxism, or that, at least, was their own perception. Capitalism was evil, of course, but a necessary evil, which carried the seeds of a socialist future in its womb. Rapid economic growth was therefore a sign of progress, auguring a liberal, bourgeois revolution (though one that the working class might have to lead!) in the near term, a proletarian revolution sometime thereafter. This complex analysis led some ‘Legal Marxists’ (Peter Struve, despite his early misgivings about the ‘cowardice’ of the Russian bourgeoisie, is the most illustrious example) away from socialism and all the way into the liberal, non-revolutionary camp. It was an analysis, however, that would not necessarily appeal to workers, even those who eschewed revolutionary rhetoric and practice.

Finally, there were the Bolsheviks, who, like the Mensheviks, claimed to spurn much of the populist legacy—glorification of the commune, rejection of a capitalist phase, terrorism. But the Bolsheviks shared the populists’ thoroughgoing impatience with intermediary, liberal-type solutions, their almost personal contempt for liberals, and even for revolutionaries who tolerated them (Lenin best embodied this contempt), and their furious rejection of any form of attentisme. As Marxists they had no choice but to share the Menshevik belief that the growth of capitalism in Russia was secure and augured progress; this indeed had been the central argument in Lenin’s huge, statistically burdened book The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899). But as Russian revolutionary maximalists they would seek every possible way to drive their insurrectionary train past the capitalist station with, at most, the shortest of stops.

None of the revolutionaries, and least of all the future SRs, could openly endorse Witte’s policies. But the two main groups of Marxists (there were still others, the most vital of which was the Jewish Social Democratic ‘Bund’) did greet the spread of capitalist industry as evidence of the predictive power and dialectical astuteness of their Marxist ‘science’ and welcomed the appearance of both industrial bourgeoisie and industrial proletariat as positive omens of impending class struggle. New labour unrest provided them with further evidence: the militant ‘Obukhov defence’ in St Petersburg in 1901 and general strikes in Rostov-on-the-Don and Odessa in 1903, Russia’s greatest year of labour unrest before 1905. Predictably, the industrial recession that set in around 1900, discrediting the Witte system in the eyes of many, was viewed by most Marxists not as a sign of the weakness of Russia’s economy (and its dependence on foreign capital), but as further evidence that a capitalist Russia was now enmeshed in the international business cycle. It was.

Militant Moderates: 1900–1904

The years 1900–4, while displaying great continuity with the 1890s, also witnessed some important new lines of development. One was a burgeoning aggressiveness and self-assertion on the part of liberal constitutionalists. Their centres of gravity were both the zemstvos (including zemstvo employees, generally more radical than their gentry employers) and the thriving professional associations of lawyers, doctors, academics, and journalists, all of them inspired by resurgent unrest among university students (which, after all, most professional intelligentsia had been). At the same time, these years also witnessed the revival of revolutionary terrorism. Usually conducted by a conspiratorial section of the PSR, this terrorism evoked unexpected sympathy among other, less radical members of educated society, many of whom were increasingly alienated from the autocratic state. And, perhaps most important, during these years Russia’s Asian policy became increasingly expansionist and aggressive, culminating in a fateful war with Japan in 1904–5. That war, and especially its glaringly unsuccessful conduct and the resulting national humiliation, served to raise the level of political unrest in almost every layer of society and within every political grouping, pushing Russian political dialogue several degrees to the left.

The immediate political beneficiary was the movement of liberal constitutionalists. Having started to stir again in the 1890s, they now came to life as never before and, I would argue, never again. By 1902 zemstvo activists—including zemstvo agronomists and other employees, the so-called ‘Third Element’—joined together with urban professionals and even some former Marxists to organize their own illegal, left-liberal paper (Liberation, published in Stuttgart under the editorial leadership of Struve). In one respect, namely their conception of a newspaper as ‘political organ’ and organizing centre for their movement, the ‘Liberationists’ were not very different from Lenin, who in his famous 1902 tract What is to be Done? treated the SD paper Iskra (the Spark) with the same tender adulation as Struve and his colleagues soon were treating Osvobozhdenie (Liberation).

Liberals also turned out to be ingenious at developing their own non-revolutionary yet militant tactics, of which the most effective was the ‘banquet campaign’ of November-December 1904 (inspired by a similar campaign before the French Revolution of 1848). They used the pretence of every plausible anniversary celebration—from the Emancipation to the 1864 judicial reforms—to assemble, in defiance of government restrictions, and draw society’s attention to the need for constitutional reform. Unsuccessful war had been a major catalyst for change half a century earlier, a lesson not lost on the constitutionalists of 1904–5. And whereas the assassination of Alexander II had purportedly thwarted reform, the new wave of assassinations (which included three imperial ministers and a grand duke and culminated in the SR murder of Plehve, the hated Minister of Interior, in July 1904) actually served to debase the government’s credit and quicken the winds of change. That even liberals like Pavel Miliukov seemed to welcome news of Plehve’s assassination was a sure sign of trouble ahead for the state.

The tsar’s decision to replace Plehve with a moderate, Peter Sviatopolk-Mirskii (already known for his willingness to appease radical students), as the new Minister of Interior was less a reflection of the tsar’s enlightenment and flexibility than of his vacillation and despair. And it was interpreted as such by contemporaries. After a brief optimistic ‘spring’ based on a false hope that the new minister would be allowed to bring about some fundamental change, the process of political polarization resumed. The contentiousness of autocracy’s enemies now grew apace, as even moderates waited impatiently for the moment that would advance their cause.

Enter Father Gapon: A Road to Bloody Sunday

That moment was soon provided by St Petersburg’s industrial workers. In 1904, in what seemed like a reprise of the Zubatov experiment (defunct since the summer of 1903) without Zubatov, the charismatic Orthodox priest Georgii Gapon had succeeded in mobilizing thousands of members into his ‘Assembly of Russian Factory Workers’. Originally approved and even financed by the police (with the goal of weaning workers away from the radicals and bolstering their commitment to autocracy by providing safe outlets such as tea-rooms and public lectures), Gapon’s organization soon took on a life of its own. On the one hand, some of his most trusted aides turned out to be former Marxists who, though no longer very revolutionary, still provided workers with intense exposure to the Western model of a legal labour movement and notions of civil rights and constitutional order. On the other hand, the grass-roots movement—and in this respect gaponovshchina recapitulated the story of zubatovshchina—developed its own dynamic as defender of the interests of its worker-members.

Both worker militancy and the mood of the former Marxists could not fail to be influenced by society’s leftward swing, especially in the hothouse atmosphere of the capital. When in December 1904 some workers at the giant Putilov factory, members of Gapon’s Assembly, were dismissed, with little justification, in what appeared to be an effort to reduce the Assembly’s influence, the organization could not maintain its credibility unless it rose to the defence of the injured parties. In a sense, everything that had happened to the Assembly over the past year—its organization into neighbourhood branches, the swelling of its ranks, its members’ exposure to liberal and worker-centred political discourse—had conspired to prepare it for this moment of truth. To this concoction must be added the charismatic and sympathetic personality of Gapon himself, who came to embody all the workers’ conflicting and confusing aspirations, lending them palpable personification at a moment when the workers might otherwise have lacked unity and direction.

The outcome was a city-wide general strike in January 1905 and a dramatic decision, taken almost simultaneously at the grass-roots and upper levels of Gapon’s organization, to organize a mass march on the Winter Palace with a petition for Tsar Nicholas, ‘our father’. Undoubtedly drafted in large part by the workers’ ex-Marxist intellectual advisers, but also with ample feedback from many workers, the petition combined class-centred demands for higher wages and shorter hours (the eight-hour day, an ‘economic’ demand with special political resonance) with a liberal political programme that included a constitution and free elections based on direct, universal manhood suffrage.

The decision of the emperor was no less dramatic. It was to disregard the petitioners by failing to appear at the palace to receive the petition. Even more fateful was the decision to authorize military units to fire on advancing petitioners. Since the procession—which included women and children—not only was unarmed but carried Orthodox crosses and icons (Sergei Eisenstein’s filmed depiction of marchers carrying red flags and likenesses of Marx should be ignored) and sang patriotic songs, the order to shoot to kill proved particularly repulsive. Indeed, it turned public opinion against the tsar almost as soon as word got out that well over a hundred were dead and many more were wounded on this ‘Bloody Sunday’ (9 January 1905).

The 1905 Revolution

The year 1905 defies succinct summary, in part because the situation changed so radically from month to month, even week to week, in part because each of the various historical actors—workers, peasants, soldiers, liberal intelligentsia, radical political parties, national minorities, students, even clergy—followed a distinct trajectory even if at times displaying a modicum of coordination. Still, whatever its vicissitudes, 1905 was a watershed in the history of late imperial Russia. By early 1906 these varied movements had driven their common enemy to grant a quasi-constitutional political order, based in principle on the rule of law and in some respects comparable to the troubled constitutional order in Germany. Hence it would not be amiss—though the point should not be overstated—to treat pre-and post-1905 Russia as having discrete historical characteristics.

What happened in 1905 to prepare Russia for change and what accounts for the limits of the change that occurred? Let us begin with the workers, whose January procession had transformed a liberal protest movement (which rarely transgressed the boundaries of civil disobedience) into outright acts of revolution. At issue is not who deserves more credit (or blame) for launching the revolution, workers or liberal professionals: each played an indispensable role and each encouraged the other. Rather, the task is to understand how labour’s clashes with the state drove the revolution in an ever more bellicose direction, forcing the authorities into moderate concessions such as creation of the ‘Shidlovskii Commission’ to hear the grievances of the workers’ elected representatives. In this classic example of ‘too little too late’, elections were held but the elected body never convened. As a result, the government not only augmented the frustration and anger of already embittered workers but also inadvertently provided them with their first large-scale experience of electoral activity (though a small number of factories had held elections in compliance with a 1903 law on factory elders). This electoral experience subsequently helped workers select and shape their own leadership and prepared them in the autumn for elections to the Petersburg ‘soviet’ (Russian for ‘council’). The latter was an extraordinary assembly of workers’ representatives, initially a city-wide strike committee, but soon evolving into what was virtually a shadow government, led for a while by the militant Marxist Leon Trotsky.

The fact that the soviet began as a strike committee shows that it was the strike movement above all that catapulted workers into the forefront in 1905. September was the key month, for it witnessed a nation-wide general strike, originating with Moscow printers but forming its central nervous system along the railway lines of which Witte had been so justly proud, with the old Moscow– St Petersburg line as the network’s spinal column. The strike gave birth to the Petersburg soviet in October, with other towns soon following the capital’s model. Although the term dvoevlastie was not used until 1917, the transformation of such soviets from strike committees into revolutionary governing bodies represented Russia’s first portentous experiment with ‘dual power’.

Although a Peasant Union had already been formed in July, September was also a pivotal month for the peasant phase of 1905. In general terms, it was the absence of government troops—off fighting the Japanese on Russia’s eastern frontiers until the war ended in August, then slowly returning to central Russia on the politically inflamed railways—and the example of unpunished worker defiance that facilitated the appearance of peasant unrest. But more specifically it was the end of the harvest season that triggered September’s intense wave of rural upheaval, including the widespread theft and destruction of gentry property. The confluence of these two great streams—peasant rebellion and working-class militance—drove the government to make concessions sufficiently meaningful to split the liberation movement.

Here the role of the liberal professionals becomes all-important. Their movement, first represented by the Union of Liberation, was transformed into that organization’s militant successor, the ‘Kadet’ or Constitutional Democratic Party (which also absorbed the organization of zemstvo constitutionalists). If the defiance of professionals and liberal zemstvo men in late 1904 had emboldened the labour movement, the militancy of workers and peasants later gave wavering liberals the courage to defy the government and form their own party. Although the movements of workers, peasants, and professionals remained distinct, in the autumn of 1905 they came close to walking hand in hand, however briefly, a cooperation already anticipated earlier in May by the creation of the ‘Union of Unions’, a coalition of organizations headed by Miliukov. That Union was more an association of professionals than of blue-collar workers, but it had a broad range of member organizations, and its inclusion of railwaymen gave the coalition not only symbolic but real material power.

Faced with these adverse circumstances, coupled with a resounding military defeat (though the peace with Japan signed in Portsmouth in August proved less humiliating than expected) and the painfully slow return from the front of reliable troops (some of whom were in a mutinous mood), the tsar now pledged the biggest concessions to society he had ever made. Earlier, even as recently as August, reform proposals by his government had consistently lagged behind society’s leftward-moving curve. Various configurations of advisory and consultative bodies had been discussed (most notably the so-called Bulygin Duma in August), but none granted genuine legislative independence, let alone election by anything resembling a democratic franchise.

On 17 October, however, Nicholas issued a manifesto containing a vague promise to grant an elected legislative body (elected not directly or equally, however, but at least on the basis of near universal male suffrage) as well as civil and religious liberties and—for the first time in Russian history—the right to organize unions and political parties. When the detailed electoral law was issued in December, it clearly favoured Russia’s already privileged classes, but was surprisingly generous to peasants, at least in comparison to workers.

Here at last was a document, the ‘October Manifesto’, with enough substance to divide the opposition. Because it fell far short of the fully-fledged Constituent Assembly (in effect the end of the autocratic system) demanded by most of the left, including Kadets, the Manifesto failed to put an immediate end to the revolution. But because it went as far as it did, it proved satisfactory to the regime’s more moderate critics, including many zemstvo constitutionalists who, having now grown wary of the destructive force unleashed by the popular classes in Russia’s city streets and villages, organized a political party called the Union of 17 October; its members (‘Octobrists’) vowed to co-operate with the government as long as it held to the Manifesto’s promises.

Although the government still faced a bloody struggle, it soon was able to recoup its forces sufficiently to arrest the Petersburg soviet and to suppress the December uprising of workers and revolutionaries in Moscow. Thanks in part to continuing upheaval among ethnic minorities and peasants, calm would not be fully restored for another year and a half, and then only with the aid of field courts martial and other draconian measures. But the back of the revolution had been broken, especially in the capital cities, and the army, despite some flashes of rebelliousness, was now obeying orders.

National Minorities

This account of 1905 would be incomplete without a word about the national minorities. Russia’s previous expansion had extended Romanov rule into Ukraine, Poland, Bessarabia, the Baltics, Finland, Crimea, the Caucasus, Siberia, and Central Asia (the last two regions being special targets of internal peasant migration during this period). Like Austria-Hungary, Russia was truly a multinational empire, though one in which the dominant nation held a much greater numerical preponderance than did Germans in the Habsburg lands (according to Russia’s census of 1897, the population of 125 million included some 57 million ‘Great Russians’, plus another 22 million Ukrainians and 6 million Belorussians). At varying rates and intensity, minority discontent (in some cases reflected in massive emigration to America and elsewhere) was steadily mounting, especially once Alexander III had made coerced assimilation, though unevenly applied, official policy. Particularly aggrieved were Poles (whose rights were sharply curtailed after the 1863 uprising), Finns (whose status as a semi-independent grand duchy was subjected to major encroachments), and Jews (who though always subject to official discrimination, fell victim to a series of bloody pogroms in 1881–2 and most notoriously in Kishinev in 1903, and were exposed to a new series of discriminatory measures beginning with the infamous ‘May Laws’ of 1882). Poles, Finns, and Jews played particularly active roles in 1905, but other minorities, especially in Transcaucasia and the Baltic region (most notably the Latvians), also had significant nationalist, socialist, and liberal (sometimes all three simultaneously) movements. In the autumn of 1905 Jews were again the victims of pogroms (though the degree of government connivance remains uncertain).

Within certain limits, many Russian political groups, including liberals and Marxists, sympathized with the national and religious minorities and incorporated defence of their rights in their platforms, including in some cases the right to national autonomy and even independence. Marxists defended the right of nations to self-determination in principle (though just what constituted a viable ‘nation’ was always a thorny question), while urging their comrades among the national minorities to work for proletarian unity rather than secession and independence.

SRs, because they tended to favour a loosely organized, federal political system, found it easy to co-operate with the minorities. Kadets, however, increasingly vulnerable to the currents of Russian nationalism and generally wedded to the goal of a liberal but unitary state, tempered their sympathy for minorities with an uneasy hostility to the more radical demands, especially in the case of Poles and Ukrainians. Octobrists, whose statist nationalism was much more brazen than that of Kadets, were firmly opposed to most minority aspirations; that chauvinist spirit was increasingly apparent in the Octobrist-dominated Third Duma, especially in its measures to reduce Finland to the status of a mere province.

Constitutional Russia?

The apparent defeat of the revolution at the end of 1905 (in fact still far from a total rout) did not mean that the government felt sufficiently confident to risk rescinding its October promises. To do so, in any case, was to hazard the loss of the still less than solid support of Octobrists, many of whom were uneasy about becoming identified as a government party. In 1906 the government therefore kept its promise to hold elections for the lower house (the State Duma), to grant broader (though by no means unrestricted) rights of free expression and assembly, to allow workers to form unions, and to confer various other rights. The old State Council, formerly appointed by the tsar, was transformed into an upper house; one half was still appointed by the tsar, the balance elected from mostly conservative institutions on a very restricted and undemocratic franchise. Although imperial ministers were still appointed by the tsar, they were now allowed to function as a cabinet, with a chairman (in effect, a Prime Minister) whose power derived, personality aside, from his critical position between the other ministers and the sovereign.

Did all this mean that Russia now had a ‘constitution’? Historians who have argued over this word have really been arguing about something else: the likelihood of Russia’s non-violent evolution into a liberal polity between 1906 and 1914 (when the disruptions of war thoroughly changed the terms of debate), a question to which we will return. For brevity’s sake, Western historians sometimes subsume this debate under the catch-phrase ‘optimism’ (no revolution) versus ‘pessimism’ (inevitability of revolution). Suffice it to say that, insofar as ‘constitution’ means a set of fundamental laws that are meant to be binding on the government as well as the people, Russia formally acquired such a system on 23 April 1906. But the more important issue is not the formal definition of this system but its durability, stability, and capacity to function.

One source of instability was formal: the infamous Article 87, which empowered the tsar to dissolve the Duma and promulgate new laws in the interval between elections. Because the same article also required that, for such laws to be valid, the next Duma must approve them within two months, Article 87 by itself did not directly undermine the new order, but it did create a situation where an insecure or embattled regime could promulgate a law to change the Fundamental Laws themselves, and thereby alter the composition of the next Duma. Such an action was illegal, tantamount to a coup d’état, which was precisely the term employed when the ‘Prime Minister’, Peter Stolypin, did just that on 3 June 1907. There was yet another formal source of instability; the Fundamental Laws invested the tsar (still called ‘autocrat’) and his appointed ministers with what appeared to be full power over diplomacy and war, but made any increase in the military budget contingent on the approval of the Duma.

The Stolypin Reform

No less important than the contradictions inherent in the Fundamental Laws were the political and social challenges that brought these problems to the surface. Foreign policy questions had saturated domestic politics from 1890 to 1905, and they continued to do so in the post-revolutionary years. Despite or perhaps because of Russia’s recent military defeat, the aspiration to renewed great-power status and to participation in Weltpolitik continued unabated. Russia’s military position, however, was weaker than ever, especially in the light of losses suffered in the Russo-Japanese War. The consequent growth of the deficit made the costs of rearmament very difficult to meet. If this deficit was ever to be overcome, the economy had to recover and social stability had to be restored.

First and foremost this meant seeking a fresh solution to the peasant land problem. The question, in the new post-1905 context, was whether the solution to land hunger, so vehemently expressed by peasant insurgency in 1905 (and there was much more to come in 1906), should be attained by the compulsory redistribution of gentry land, and if so, whether with compensation (the liberal or Kadet position) or without (the radical position).

No one, whether in or out of government, could fail to see that the agrarian status quo was no longer tenable, as the termination of redemption payments even before 1905 bears witness. But the post-1905 government, and the extremely astute Stolypin in particular (first as head of the Ministry of Interior, but soon thereafter as Russia’s third ‘Prime Minister’—following Witte and the less than competent Ivan Goremykin)—had a solution, indeed one that Witte himself had advocated earlier. The central idea was to reallocate not gentry lands but communal lands, and to transfer them to individual peasant proprietors in the form of compact, enclosed, self-standing farmsteads. The reform was promulgated without Duma approval in November 1906, but was later approved and extended by the conservative Third Duma. This complex approach, Stolypin’s so-called ‘wager on the strong’, was intended to create a productive class of hard-working, individualistic, free farmers (‘yeomen’ if one likes them, ‘kulaks’ if one does not), a new class of property owners with a strong stake in the existing system, men whose legal personalities and citizenship status in contrast to the peasants emancipated in the 1860s and their descendants—would cease to differ from those of other landowners.

This was, in the jargon of the Russian left, a ‘bourgeois’ reform, sponsored and supervised by the state, but with powerful implications for a Russian future where social position would derive from capital and labour, not from the status ascribed by birth. It was, in a sense, the belated fulfilment of the original promise of 1861, a promise that the government had feared to fulfil lest disruption of the communal structure foster proletarianization, unrest, even rebellion. But now that serious unrest and rebellion had been taking place even in the presence of the communal order, a major rationale for the status quo had been eliminated, at least in the eyes of many conservatives.

Who, then, was left to support the ‘anachronistic’ commune? A surprisingly broad range of groups, from the PSR on the left to anti-individualist conservatives on the right. Almost every political programme that called for confiscation of gentry lands, whether with or without compensation, entailed the transfer of those lands to village communes (or to larger townships consisting of communes), not to individual peasants. Even liberals who looked forward to a system of individual proprietorship saw this as the result of a natural evolutionary process, not aggressive state measures (though it should be noted that the Stolypin programme was based, in part, on voluntary compliance). Peasants themselves were no doubt torn, but to the extent that they were represented in the first two Dumas by the new ‘Trudovik’ (Labour) Party and by large numbers of peasant and peasant-oriented independents, they often resisted both the spirit and the letter of Stolypin’s master plan.

It was this resistance—dramatized by the failure of the government’s efforts to seek collaboration with some Kadets and other moderates—that impelled Stolypin to carry out his ‘coup’, that is, to dissolve the Second Duma (more radical than the First) and revise the electoral law to ensure a more conservative composition. Peasants had once been the regime’s golden hope; but having demonstrated that, be they monarchist or otherwise, they could not be relied on to vote with the government, they were now deprived of much of their electoral weight. The same fate befell the rebellious minorities. The landed gentry, who were never fully trusted by the state, but who now exhibited signs of disillusionment with the Kadets (for example, by routing Kadet candidates in zemstvo elections) and a greater readiness to rally to their tsar, gained vastly disproportionate electoral rights. The change in franchise redounded to the benefit of the Octobrists and parties to their right. The new law was complex, but the result was a ‘loyal’ Duma, with moderate Octobrists (fortified by the adherence of many industrialists) and conservative Nationalists providing Stolypin with a safe majority, at least for the moment. Kadets were now reduced in number, subdued in spirit, and internally divided; SDs and SRs, though fielding candidates, elected too few delegates to give them an effective voice.

The Period of the Third Duma: 1907–1912

Despite strict limitations on its competence (military matters as such were excluded), serious policy issues were discussed in the halls of the Third Duma (1907–12), the only one to survive for its full five-year term (the Fourth came close). But some of these issues led to serious conflict, demonstrating the fragility of the government’s relationship with even a conservative Duma. Three particularly controversial issues were: (1) control over budgetary matters, especially the debate over the naval budget in 1909, which raised the issue of the Duma’s competence more than issues of substance (though the navy’s desire to sponge up resources badly needed by the army was a perennial source of strife); (2) the so-called Western zemstvo crisis of 1911, where the Council of State sought, successfully at first, to thwart Stolypin’s plan, which was to extend elected zemstvos to six Western border provinces, but without enhancing the power of Polish Catholic noble landowners; (3) Stolypin’s and the Duma’s long efforts, also thwarted by the State Council, to extend the zemstvos to the lower township (volost′) level. Without engaging the complex details of these divisive issues, suffice it to say that each revealed the lack of a clear consensus that could unite the upper and lower houses with each other or with Stolypin’s cabinet (itself very divided), or any of these institutions with the tsar, given the strange vagaries of mood at the imperial court. At the same time, it must be granted that agreement was possible on some important matters, including the agrarian reform and (during the Fourth Duma) a progressive workers’ insurance law, partially modelled on the programmes of Bismarck.

If the situation is addressed more generally, it makes sense to say that the politics of the Third (and Fourth) Duma regularly presented the Octobrists, now the pivotal party in the Duma, with the same choice: either to turn rightward to co-operate with the Nationalists (essentially a pro-government and Stolypinoriented coalition), or to turn leftward to the Kadets (essentially an oppositionist coalition, though moderate in tone and ‘loyal’ in content). In most respects the Duma’s extreme right and extreme left were irrelevant to these coalitions, neither being truly committed to the compromise politics of a parliament, preferring the direct-action politics of the street. As a result, the other major players in this political drama were the government (Stolypin’s, and later Kokovtsev’s, cabinet) and the State Council, consistently dominated by a conservative-to-reactionary majority that either favoured the government or criticized its policies from the perspective of the respectable right. Since all laws had to be approved by both houses, the State Council could sabotage any serious liberal legislative initiative that the Duma promoted (as it did on occasion).

Problems of the Pre-War Period: 1912–1914

By the time the Fourth Duma was elected in 1912, some evidence had accumulated that the system erected by Stolypin was starting to work, but there also was plenty of evidence that it could not—hence the unending historiographical debate between ‘optimists’ and ‘pessimists’. For the latter, the most dramatic evidence was the assassination of Stolypin himself in September 1911 by an SR, probably one of Russia’s ubiquitous double agents. Although none of Stolypin’s successors had comparable abilities, historians have suggested that even had Stolypin lived he was well on his way to dismissal. Relations with his erstwhile Octobrist allies had hit an all-time low, almost driving the Octobrist leader Alexander Guchkov (sometime chairman of the Duma and in a sense the first of the ‘pessimists’) to despair. Stolypin’s Duma calculus had shifted from Octobrists to the more narrowly based Nationalists. Stolypin was distrusted by the State Council’s conservative majority, his own cabinet, and courtiers close to the very tsar who had appointed him. Other ‘pessimist’ evidence may be adduced, including renewed unrest in the universities: by 1910–11, especially in Moscow, professors and students (among them, since 1905, a substantial number of women) protested against government efforts to rescind the concessions made to them in 1905; they were now in a virtual state of war with the Minister of Education, Lev Kasso.

Even before the Fourth Duma had convened, Stolypin’s successors faced yet another alarming problem: the resuscitation of a militant labour movement in the capital and elsewhere. The trigger was news that government troops had massacred over a hundred striking miners at the Lena goldfields in March 1912. The explosion of strikes and demonstrations led to stunning Bolshevik victories, at the expense of the more moderate Mensheviks, in elections to the Duma, union governing boards, and newly organized workers’ insurance boards. This revitalized unrest continued to intensify right up to the outbreak of war in 1914, providing the most persuasive evidence for the pessimist school.

On the ‘positive’ side of the ledger, optimists can cite evidence, if not of great achievements, then at least of some stabilization in the political and social status quo. Duma factionalism and wrangling had failed to pose a successful challenge to government authority; the opposition parties were bitterly divided and in disarray; revolutionary activity was virtually dormant for several years; even some of the radical intelligentsia questioned their own past values; and the Third Duma had made some progress in certain areas, especially in elementary education. Most tellingly, the agrarian reform, if by no means a proven success at this early stage, had finally received the Duma’s blessing and was in the process of being implemented without provoking significant peasant unrest (for a while turning even Lenin, in a peculiar sense, into an unwilling ‘optimist’).

On the international scene, as on the domestic, evidence could be cited of both success and failure. The greatest failure had come in 1908, when a series of diplomatic misunderstandings left Russia helplessly embarrassed when Vienna unilaterally annexed the disputed Balkan provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Competition between the army and the navy often attaining a high degree of rancour (contributing to the divisiveness of Duma politics), was depleting the budget and demoralizing the military. (Military historians generally agree that the navy’s demands were particularly unrealistic.) Earlier plans for establishing Russian hegemony over Mongolia and Manchuria were forcibly scaled down. Key Russian decision-makers were bitterly divided over how far to the west Russia should commit itself to a fortified defensive perimeter against Germany and Austria.

On the other hand, important diplomatic problems appeared to be resolved. Beginning in 1907 relations with Japan and England had significantly improved, and in 1909 Paris, though still a wary ally (witness France’s restraint at the time of the 1908 annexation crisis), agreed to advance Russia a generous five-year loan. This was an enormous boost to Russia’s economy, facilitating several successive years of industrial recovery (though even that recovery, because industrialists were reluctant to share its rewards with their workers, contributed to the militancy of the strike movement that destabilized urban Russia a few years later). Finally, the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, while in some ways frightening to Russian military planners, had the consequence of committing them to a ‘Western’-oriented strategy and, for better or worse, a readiness for full rather than partial mobilization in the event of a major international crisis.

Literature and the Arts

Perhaps the most difficult spheres of Russian life to place squarely in the framework of the optimist–pessimist debate are literature and the arts. Without doubt, the reign of Nicholas II (and especially its last decade or so) witnessed extraordinary artistic creativity, so much so that cultural historians routinely use such terms as ‘silver age’, ‘second golden age’, and ‘cultural renaissance’. In poetry in particular, but also in fiction, theatre, music, and the plastic arts (characteristically, the walls between these fields were often scaled), new ‘modernist’ modes of expression, with Symbolism in the lead, asserted themselves among the cultural élite. Modernism boldly challenged the hegemony of realism, positivism, and a socially oriented and utilitarian civic art that had dominated Russian aesthetics for decades. As part of this challenge, modernists introduced religious, metaphysical, and philosophically idealist perspectives into artistic and intellectual discourse (as, for example, in the collection of essays published in 1902 entitled Problems of Idealism). It should be said, however, that such intellectual experimentation had little effect on the taste of a new mass reading public, a group that expanded rapidly with the growth of primary education and the popular press.

If the first essential steps in a modernist direction preceded the 1905 Revolution, the years that followed were particularly creative, with avant-garde writers such as Andrei Bely Zinaida Gippius, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Valerii Briusov, Alexander Blok, and Vasilii Rozanov producing some of their most creative (and controversial) work. The Symbolist perspective that now dominated soon spawned a series of competing, often polemicizing movements (Acmeism, Futurism, and others), but all purportedly rejected what they viewed as the prosaic civicmindedness of nineteenth-century Russian writers. Not surprisingly, many readers, including members of the political intelligentsia, were hostile to the modernists, viewing their artistic products as esoteric, self-indulgent, and out of touch with popular needs (not to mention popular tastes).

Related to, if distanced from, the modernist rejection of traditional Russian aesthetics was a concurrent rebellion against the traditional assumptions of the left and liberal intelligentsia. Because it originated within the intelligentsia itself, that rebellion sometimes took the form of severe self-criticism. In 1909 a group of prominent intellectuals—among them Struve, Sergei Bulgakov, and other veteran leftists who now harboured painful second thoughts—published Vekhi (Signposts), a symposium that repudiated their past commitment to Marxism and atheism, their lack of national spirit, and their former narrowly political aesthetics; the collection unleashed a stormy backlash, not only from the far left, but also from the likes of Miliukov.

The affinity between the modernists and their civic-minded cultural rivals may have been greater than either side cared to admit. They not only had similar backgrounds, they shared the typically Russian notion that art and literature must perform a specially high moral mission for the nation. Though their solutions differed, they assumed that the writer was duty-bound and able to resolve the apparent antagonism between life and art. And, notwithstanding their programmatic differences, they all tended to view the existing order, and especially the governing bureaucracy, with some contempt. By no means did Russia’s Bloks and Maiakovskiis serve as props of the old regime. In sum, neither the splits in the ranks of the cultural intelligentsia nor the defensive postures adopted by liberal and radical people of letters in the face of the modernist challenge were necessarily good news for the government.

In the last analysis, the optimist–pessimist debate, though perhaps unavoidable, is a thought-experiment, a kind of metaphysical sparring match inseparable from counter-factual speculation about Russia’s likely fate in the absence of world war. It must be pointed out, however, that a serious ambiguity, even confusion, is often found in how the optimists pose the question. Is proof for their position to be found in the trajectory of economic, social, and political progress that was followed from 1907 to 1914? If so, the evidence, on balance, is rather thin. Their case is strongest in the economic realm (especially if one concentrates on heavy industry and ignores the explosive issue of dependency on foreign investment) and in the visible signs of a vibrant, modern urban culture—advertisement, commercial press, cinemas. But the optimists have greater difficulty when they try to build their case on the government’s capacity to ensure social peace and on the political stability brought about by the coup d’état of 3 June 1907. Here the point is not simply that urban social stability lasted only until 1912 or that the rift between privileged society and court (thanks to the influence of Rasputin and the empress) was growing wider. For even if we granted the government’s capacity, prior to the war, for maintaining a precarious social peace (for upholding order, if not law), this would not serve as evidence that problems were being solved or progress was being made. Indeed, it was precisely the government’s ability to maintain order through coercion, while restricting progress and upholding autocratic rule, that allowed so many social and political sores to fester, thereby promoting maximalist visions of social and political change.

It was a sign of weakness, then, not strength, that the Russian regime that went to war in the summer of 1914 had successfully resisted becoming a functioning constitutional monarchy. Nicholas II may have succeeded in achieving his goal of January 1895, not only to retain but even to invigorate the symbols and rituals of monarchy that adorned his English cousin; he also retained, while wielding it ineptly, much of the power of personal rule. Despite a promising beginning in 1906, the symbolic and the substantive spheres of authority were never fully separated in Russia, neither in real life nor in the fantasy-life of a monarch who in June 1914, contemplating yet another coup, came close to abrogating the legislative powers of the Duma, just as the nation was poised to join in a momentous struggle for its very survival.

9. Russia in War and Revolution 1914–1921

DANIEL T. ORLOVSKY

The thunder of artillery shells signalled the onset of uninterrupted war, revolution, and civil war. These years brought massive destruction; not only a dynasty, but vast numbers of people, resources, and territories vanished in the conflagration. Amidst these ruins, the Bolsheviks—inspired as much by old social hatreds as new revolutionary visions—attempted to build a new proletarian order.

THE years separating the outbreak of war in 1914 and the announcement of the ‘New Economic Policy’ in 1921 form a critical watershed in modern Russian history. The revolutions of 1917, while not an unbridgeable caesura, fundamentally transformed the polity and social order. This era also had a profound impact on the ‘bourgeois’ West, which in the coming decades had to contend with the spectre of a socialist Prometheus in the East.

The First World War

In a memorandum of February 1914 P. N. Durnovo, a former Minister of Internal Affairs, implored the emperor to avoid war with Germany. The Kaiserreich, he argued, was a natural ally, joined by imperial ties of blood and by conservative principles and institutions; it was the alliance with democratic Britain and France that was unnatural. Moreover, the strains of war might topple the fragile order reconstructed from the shambles of 1905. But Durnovo was more prescient than persuasive: within months the government found itself helplessly sucked into the whirlpool of war.

Above all, it feared another diplomatic defeat in the Balkans, not simply out of sympathy for Balkan nationalism, but because of the volatile domestic situation. After decades of high-stakes gambling, in 1908 Russia had suffered a humiliating defeat when Austria annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina and then reneged on a promised quid pro quo. Russia seemed to be losing its long quest to dominate the Ottoman Empire and Black Sea. Russian policy was also driven by its desire to recover great-power status, by its fear of Germany’s growing economic and military might, and by its strategic and diplomatic commitments to France and Britain. And, like the other powers, Russia was unduly deferential towards strategic planning and the general staffs, the ideology of the offensive, and the illusion that war could be localized and won quickly. None imagined the trench warfare, the carnage, the destruction of élites and empires, or the profound domestic upheavals that the ‘Great War’ would bring.

Declaration of war in Russia evoked a moment of ‘patriotic union’, symbolically captured on film that showed Nicholas bowing before several hundred thousand loyal subjects who had massed to sing ‘God Save the Tsar’. Unity proved ephemeral: military defeats and domestic strains rekindled the smouldering social and political conflict. Although Russia did not fare badly against Austria and Turkey, by early 1915 German divisions had dealt a string of shattering defeats. Russia’s stock of ammunition and weapons was perilously low; neither domestic production nor imports could satisfy the gargantuan demand of this first modern war. As morale plummeted, the army replaced a decimated officer corps with young officers from lower social ranks—non-aristocrats who had minimal training and little authority over peasant soldiers. By early 1915 one high official declared that Russia could only pray to her patron saints and rely upon her vast spaces and the spring mud to slow the relentless German advance. Failing the divine intercession of saints and mud, Russia needed ‘total war’—a complete mobilization of resources, human and material.

War, however, proved particularly difficult for Russia, one reason being that the ‘crisis was at the top’—a mutual alienation that divided state and ‘Society’ (professional and economic élites), which had rejected state tutelage and demanded a role in running the country. The war gave centrist parties a splendid opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism and, simultaneously, to exploit the alliance with democratic France and Britain and the wartime crisis in order to extort concessions from the state. Such ambitions reinforced Nicholas’s tendency to distrust ‘Society’, to select weak ministers, to heed his wife’s inept advice, and to reassert the inviolability of autocratic power. Within a few months the ‘patriotic union’ had dissipated; the rancour of prewar politics and recrimination resumed in full force.

To mollify the opposition, however, in mid-1915 Nicholas agreed to replace the most odious ministers with men enjoying the confidence of ‘Society’. These gestures, together with new military débâcles, only redoubled the Duma’s determination to extract political concessions: in August 1915 centrist Duma parties formed the ‘Progressive Bloc’ to press long-standing demands—above all, for a government ‘responsible’ to the Duma. Confronted by a hostile majority in the Duma, appalled by his ministers’ readiness to compromise, Nicholas prorogued the Duma and assumed personal command of the army, relinquishing power to chosen viziers, his unstable wife, and an unsavoury entourage that included the dissolute ‘Grishka’ Rasputin. Military defeat, political incompetence, personal stubbornness, and an adamant refusal to share political power or even consider the question negotiable—all this gradually dispelled the mystique of the Romanov dynasty and even fuelled suspicions that Nicholas and Alexandra were themselves traitors.

Nicholas did, however, accord ‘Society’ a greater practical role in the war by establishing new institutions outside the Duma. Most important were ‘the Union of Zemstvos’ and ‘Union of Municipalities’ (with a joint co-ordinating body called ‘Zemgor’), but these too were rooted in bastions of liberalism—the zemstvo and municipal Duma. Their charge was to organize refugee relief, food supply, and even industrial production and distribution. Another important institution was the War Industries Committee; established on the initiative of Moscow industrialists, its network of local committees mobilized medium and small-scale industry to produce military equipment and ammunition.

The war economy inexorably increased bureaucratic intervention in the economy, if in partnership with the private sector. This co-operation included special councils (on defence, food supply, fuel, and transport), with a mixed membership and a monopoly over vital materials like sugar, leather, and metals. This process (which emulated the policy of other belligerents) enhanced the power of the responsible branches of the bureaucracy and set them against the more traditional ministries still closely tied to the court and nobility. As the lines between ‘public’ and ‘private’ blurred, three competing centres of economic and political power emerged: the state bureaucracy, private industry and capital, and public organizations (with a mixed composition, strong ethos of public service, and moral opposition to vested political and economic interests).

Although the military record improved in 1916 (partly because of the contribution of public organizations), the war also had profound repercussions for the lower social orders. Mobilization of manpower, industries, and transportation inevitably caused disruptions in the production and distribution of food, with dire consequences at the front and at home. Increasingly, the state lost the capacity to requisition food, fuel, and manpower, reflecting the decline in its moral authority or sheer capacity to coerce. Those close to the front suffered most: Russia’s scorched-earth policy denied Germany the spoils of victory, but also unleashed a tidal wave of refugees that overwhelmed the administration and economy of interior provinces. Still more dangerous were the labour and agrarian questions, raised but not resolved by the Revolution of 1905; as inflation and food shortages ravaged the home front, disaffection also spread rapidly among the soldiers and sailors. Unrest also simmered among the lower-middle class and white-collar ‘labourers’, of unpredictable political behaviour, but deeply affected by the privations of war. A state at war also found it increasingly difficult to cow, let alone control, its national minorities; even ‘backward minorities’ grew rebellious—the largest insurrection of 1916, claiming thousands of lives, erupted in Turkestan in response to a new conscription drive. And, as inflation and food shortages reached critical levels at home, disaffection also spread rapidly among the soldiers. By the autumn of 1916 discontent was so intense that the police were issuing dire warnings that the regime’s very existence was in jeopardy And the government itself, paralysed by ‘ministerial leapfrog’ and the tsar’s absence from the capital (to direct the war effort from military headquarters), was steadily losing control of the situation.

The February Revolution

Few contemporaries imagined that, after three centuries of rule, the Romanov dynasty could vanish in several days. Even fewer could have predicted that, within months, a moderate regime of liberals and socialists would disintegrate and in October surrender power to Bolsheviks marching under the banner of ‘All Power to the Soviets’.

The February Revolution began with street demonstrations in Petrograd to protest against food shortages, a direct consequence of wartime privation and the regime’s inability to provision even the volatile capital. For months police officials had issued dire warnings and taken preventive measures (arresting, for example, worker representatives to the Central War Industries Committee). On 23 February (8 March NS) a crowd of women seized the occasion of International Women’s Day to demonstrate against the high bread prices and food shortages.

Their march coincided with calls by the revolutionary underground (from Bolsheviks and others) to resume the demonstrations of December and January. The next day crowds of strikers and demonstrators took to the streets, some reaching the centre of Petrograd. When the regular police failed to disperse the crowds, local authorities called out the troops, but again without effect. The next day Petrograd was virtually paralysed by a general strike. Desperate to regain control, on 26 February the authorities resorted to firearms: the Volhynian regiment opened fire, killing several dozen demonstrators. This volley proved suicidal: the next day the same Volhynian unit (joined by several guards regiments) took sides with the crowds. The insurgents then seized arsenals, emptied the gaols, and burnt the central headquarters of the hated political police. By 28 February the tsarist ministers were under arrest; the police itself had discreetly vanished.

As the government in Petrograd disintegrated, Nicholas desperately struggled to retain power. He formally dissolved the State Duma, attempted to return to the capital, but soon found himself stranded in a provincial town. There, at the urging of his own generals and Duma politicians, he agreed to abdicate for the sake of domestic tranquillity and the war effort. Ironically, his final act as emperor was characteristically illegal: in contravention of the 1797 Law of Succession, Nicholas abdicated not only for himself but also for his son. His abdication, compounded by the dissolution of the Duma, raised the question of legitimacy that would bedevil the Provisional Government throughout its brief existence. The designated heir, Nicholas’s brother Michael, declined the throne until a constituent assembly had defined the nature of the Russian state. Michael probably had no inkling that his decision would bring the monarchy to an end and dramatically accelerate the revolutionary process.

Still earlier, two contenders for power had already emerged in Petrograd. One was the State Duma, which the tsar had dissolved on 27 February and hence had no legal right to rule. None the less, the Duma deputies convened in Tauride Palace and created a ‘Provisional Duma Committee’ that included members from conservative, liberal, and even socialist parties. In essence, the Duma represented ‘propertied society’ (tsenzovoe obshchestvo), which received a preponderant share of power in the Duma under the 1907 electoral law. The Duma Committee took steps to claim power, restore order, and establish contact with the leading public organizations. They also dispatched ‘commissars’ to take command of key ministries, including the Ministry of Communications that controlled the all-important railways. Implicitly acknowledging a lack of legitimacy, the Duma members called its committee ‘provisional’ as would the ‘Provisional Government’. Until conditions permitted a constituent assembly to convene, however, it claimed the right to rule.

The Duma deputies, however, were not the only claimants to power: a mélange of intellectuals, party operatives, and trade-union leaders simultaneously convened in another wing of the same Tauride Palace. Drawing on the experience of 1905, they re-established the famous ‘soviet’ and summoned workers and soldiers to send elected representatives. The result was the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, led by an Executive Committee composed mostly of moderate socialist intellectuals. Curiously, the soviet leaders made no claim to rule: scarred by the failure of 1905, they intended to observe the ‘iron laws’ of a two-stage revolution, whereby a ‘bourgeois’ revolution would beget a ‘bourgeois’ government to rule for a discrete interval before a second, socialist revolution. Because the tsarist police left revolutionary parties in disarray (with ranking members in prison or in exile), the soviet leaders also felt unqualified to seize the reins of power and deemed the ‘bourgeoisie’ better suited for this historic task. Some were also overawed by the myth of counter-revolution, which seemed less likely if Russia were ruled by a bourgeois government.

The year 1917 was a complex story of ‘dual power’, the Provisional Government representing ‘Society’, the soviet representing workers, peasants, and soldiers. With the approval of the soviet, the Duma Committee established a ‘Provisional’ Government, its cabinet drawn largely from liberal Duma circles. Thus the ‘bourgeois’ government required by socialist theory had finally emerged. It vowed to hold free elections for a Constituent Assembly and, in the interim, was to exercise the plenitude of executive, legislative, and even judicial power of the ancien régime. From the outset the Provisional Government had an uncertain status: the Duma committee had simply usurped power, and the soviet agreed to give its support ‘only in so far as’ the government followed the ‘democratic’ script for the Revolution.

Provisional Government

History has judged the Provisional Government harshly, but one must remember that it ruled during a raging war and profound social cataclysm. Eight months afforded little time to build a new state, wage war, and resolve acute social and political questions that had accumulated over many decades.

Its ministers included the leading figures in the Progressive Bloc and public organizations. Most prominent were the Kadet Party leader, P. N. Miliukov (Minister of Foreign Affairs) and the Octobrist leader, A. I. Guchkov (Minister of War). Other appointments proved fateful—in particular, the choice of Prince Georgii Lvov as Minister-President and Minister of Internal Affairs. Although Lvov distinguished himself as head of the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos and Towns, he was a weak leader and ill-equipped to lead a democratic revolutionary state. At best he exuded a dreamy Slavophile faith in ‘the people’ (narod); at worst he refused to use the instruments of power to restore public order or instil respect for the rule of law that he so cherished. Some appointments were surprising, especially the choice of A. I. Konovalov (a Moscow industrialist) as Minister of Finance and an obscure Kievan sugar magnate, M. I. Tereshchenko, as Minister of Trade and Industry. Although socialists in the Petrograd Soviet declined to join the cabinet, one did agree to serve: Alexander Kerensky a radical SR and Duma deputy, became Minister of Justice.

On 8 March the Provisional Government announced its ‘Programme’ of democratic principles and goals, which envisioned a revolutionary transformation on liberal principles, with appropriate guarantees of civil rights and more autonomy for minorities. The government also vowed to establish the rule of law and later appointed a juridical commission to give counsel on legislation and inculcate respect for the judicial order. But the most far-reaching plank in this Programme was its promise to end bureaucratic hegemony over political life and to create self-government at every level, down to the township (volost’) level. In effect, the government refashioned the pre-revolutionary structure (provincial administration, zemstvos, and town dumas) into a new system of zemstvos and town dumas now elected on the basis of democratic suffrage. The new bodies were to assume the powers of police and administration that had long been identified with autocracy itself. The Programme promised to convoke a constituent assembly ‘democratically’ elected and empowered to resolve the questions of legitimacy and to determine the form of the new Russian state. It was a heady agenda, one not easily realized, especially in the throes of war and social upheaval.

The February Revolution produced not only a liberal, reformist government, but also the soviets, supported by popular forces committed to ‘democracy’. The Petrograd soviet formally recognized the Provisional Government, but immediately began to encroach on its authority. The most famous instance was ‘Order No. 1’: a harbinger of social revolution in the army, it established the soviet’s authority over army units and created soldiers’ committees to check the regular command hierarchy, thereby unleashing a radical ‘democratization’ in the army itself. The military committees, nominally obliged to maintain order, fanned revolutionary and anti-war sentiments among soldiers and officers.

In the provinces the revolution was greeted with jubilation and a replication of ‘dual power’. As word spread from Petrograd, local activists seized power from tsarist administrators and police, who silently melted away. The new structure emerged with astonishing rapidity. Committees of Public Organizations, usually centrist, took formal authority. Chairmen of the old zemstvo boards briefly replaced tsarist governors until ‘commissars’ were sent. Simultaneously, workers and soldiers created soviets in towns, while peasants formed their own village organs—volost committees, peasant unions, and even peasant soviets.

‘Democratization’ extended to the grass roots, blanketing the Russian landscape with township and village committees, factory committees, and every imaginable variety of soviet, union, and professional organization. These organs—manned sometimes by plebeians, but often by white-collar workers—filled the power vacuum left by the ancien régime. As the revolution unfolded, better organized, often antagonistic social groups emerged as the main actors.

Amidst this ‘democratization’, the Provisional Government endeavoured to rule and reform. It granted virtual independence to Poland (in any event, under occupation by the Central Powers) and autonomy to Finland, freed political prisoners, drafted legislation on self-government, made plans for judicial reform, and established countless committees to consider other critical issues. Indeed, the government contemplated or initiated reform in virtually every imaginable sphere—in education (democratization of access and administration), labour relations (the eight-hour day and arbitration chambers), corporate law, and religion (secularization of schools, liberalization of divorce, and separation of Church and state).

It proved far easier, however, to appoint committees than to reform. Apart from the magnitude of its agenda, the government had to rely on the old tsarist bureaucracy and to operate in the absence of an elected, authoritative legislature. Typically, the government established a committee, with great fanfare, collected data and drafted laws, but inevitably elected to defer the main issues for resolution by the constituent assembly. Still, given its narrow timeframe, the government addressed a broad range of critical issues.

Meanwhile, the revolution did not stand still. Within a few weeks, it was clear that the Provisional Government must immediately address new problems (especially food shortages and greater industrial production) as well as old ones (such as land and labour reform). Ultimately, the government was driven to nullify its liberal Programme and adopt very different social and economic policies, essentially more corporatist and socialist than liberal. On 25 March, for example, the government established a grain monopoly to regulate prices for cereals and mandate deliveries to the state—in effect, declaring all grain to be state property. To manage this monopoly, it created a new hierarchy of provisioning committees and ultimately a Ministry of Food Supply. When the government entrusted provisioning (and much of consumer supply) to co-operatives, it undermined not only the market for foodstuffs but also the established commercial infrastructure of the empire. Thus a regime professing liberalism and tarred as ‘bourgeois’ asserted state authority over the economy, shoving aside entire business firms and an entire class. But in the case of land reform the government acted with less abandon: consigning this matter to resolution by the constituent assembly it merely created a Main Land Committee to ‘study’ the issue and directed local land committees to gather information and adjudicate land disputes over such matters as rents and competing land claims.

In the interim, the question of war eroded the foundations of ‘dual power’. At issue were war aims and hence the terms for stopping the carnage. On 14 March the Petrograd Soviet issued an ‘Appeal to All the Peoples of the World’, repudiating expansionist war aims and espousing instead ‘revolutionary defencism’, i.e. to prosecute the war only in defence of Russia and its revolution against German authoritarianism and imperialism. It became clear, however, that the government had not abandoned the tantalizing gains promised by its allies. To allay soviet apprehensions, on 28 March the Provisional Government issued a ‘Declaration on War Aims’ renouncing territorial claims, but on condition that peace cause neither humiliation nor the deprivation of ‘vital forces’. In fact, the government retained its original war aims: in a note to the allies on 18 April, the Foreign Minister (Miliukov) ascribed the government’s Declaration to domestic politics and reaffirmed its determination to observe all treaty obligations, with the implication that the allies must also honour their promises, especially on Constantinople and the Straits.

News of this note ignited a new political crisis in Petrograd, with mass demonstrations on 23–4 April protesting against the government’s foreign policy. The worker and soldier demonstrators carried banners demanding peace and ‘Down with the Bourgeois Government’, and ‘Down with Miliukov and Guchkov’. The Provisional Government refused to deploy troops and use force to restore order. After the two most unpopular ministers (Guchkov and Miliukov) resigned, the government invited the Petrograd soviet to help form a coalition. The soviet leaders reluctantly agreed, a decision that instantly blurred the lines of dual power and made them culpable for the policies of the Provisional Government. This first coalition, which included six socialist ministers (including Viktor Chernov as Minister of Agriculture), avowed a commitment to ‘revolutionary defencism’ in foreign policy, state regulation of the economy, new taxes on the propertied classes, radical land reform, and further democratization of the army.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks

Prior to Vladimir Lenin’s return in the famous ‘sealed train’ in early April, the Bolsheviks had already undergone a radical shift in party policy. At the outbreak of the February Revolution, the radical underground activists who dominated the Petrograd apparatus rejected the ‘bourgeois Provisional Government’ and demanded a revolutionary soviet government. But the ranking Bolshevik leaders (including Iosif Stalin) who returned to the capital in early March overruled the radicals and not only joined other socialists in supporting bourgeois rule, but even sought reconciliation with the Mensheviks. This initial crisis revealed deep internal differences that would persist throughout 1917 and beyond.

The differences emerged again in the ‘April crisis’ following Lenin’s return on 3 April. Such divisions made Lenin’s role decisive: his powerful drive, and obsessive belief in revolution overcame the internal party fissures and gave the Bolsheviks a decisive edge over moderate socialists and the Provisional Government. Lenin’s ‘April Theses’ promised peace, bread, land, and workers’ control—that is, not only to end the unpopular war and food shortages, but also to satisfy long-standing grievances. Most controversial of all, he demanded the elimination of dual power and transfer of ‘all power to the soviets’. The ‘professional revolutionaries’ in the party were aghast; it took all Lenin’s energy and personal authority to overcome their caution and to unite the party behind his vision.

His vision drew on mass radicalism and his own ideological utopianism. It also offered a strategic alternative to the discredited ideologies of autocracy and liberalism, which were splintered, politically ineffective, and without a deep social base. The language of socialism and class conflict became the idiom of public discourse for the press, rally, public meeting, and all manner of political propaganda. Lenin projected a strong vision of transforming through technocratic change, of reshaping consciousness, and of making the proletariat a true universal class—for itself and, if need be, in spite of itself.

The All-Russian Crisis

The first coalition quickly exposed the gulf between liberalism and socialism—and the government’s inability to bridge that chasm. The conflicts in the coalition correlated directly with the declining authority of the Provisional Government (and, by contrast, to the surge in Bolshevik influence). On a whole range of issues the coalition could neither agree internally nor satisfy the spiralling expectations of various social groups.

Disagreement in the coalition was profound, especially on central questions like economic regulation, labour, and land. Liberal and socialist ministers agreed on the need for government regulation of the economy, but for radically different ends: liberals sought to preserve the market in wartime, socialists imagined the beginnings of socialist planning. The two sides also differed on the land question: liberals wanted to uphold private property and legality, whereas the left sought to sanction peasant land seizures and local ‘initiative’ regardless of legal niceties. As to workers’ demands (for higher wages, shorter hours, and worker control), the liberal ministers supported factory owners in the patriotic production for the war. Socialists were in a quandary: as state officials supporting labour discipline and resumption of work, they risked appearing as capitalist stooges and becoming easy targets for Bolshevik attacks.

The war itself was divisive. It made liberals illiberal, disposed to defer elections and constituent assembly until more propitious times; they were also under pressure from the allies to keep fighting. The war also invited attacks from the left; neither ‘revolutionary defencism’ nor the ‘renunciation of territorial claims’ stopped the carnage or defused popular discontent. The fact that non-Bolshevik socialists actively supported the war effort (even the June offensive) was grist for Bolshevik propagandists, who identified their own anti-war stance with popular will and tarred all war advocates, especially socialists, as enemies of the people. The disastrous June offensive had no effect on German lines and only hastened the demise of the Russian army, shattering the fragile truce between officers and soldiers and unleashing a wave of mass insubordination and desertion.

Equally explosive was the nationality question. The revolution was a powerful catalyst for the development of national consciousness, encouraging entire peoples to demand autonomy and independence and calling into question the very existence of the Russian Empire. Although national movements varied considerably, most demanded democratization and self-government and drew their leadership from the intelligentsia and ‘semi-professions’—white-collar personnel employed by the co-operatives, zemstvos, schools, and the like. In Finland and Ukraine, for example, activists created national equivalents of the class-based soviets that became centres of growing national consciousness and power. Even the ‘backward’ Muslims organized a Muslim Congress in May to proclaim their hostility to Russian colonialism and to demand autonomy.

Shaken by these anti-Russian movements, neither socialists nor liberals were prepared to comprehend, let alone control, the national revolutions of 1917. In essence, their term ‘imperial’ (vserossiiskii, ‘all-Russian-empire’) connoted ‘Russian’ (russkii), denying any special status for non-Russian peoples; their term ‘statehood’ (gosudarstvennost’) subsumed empire, not just state. Believing that the revolution and new state were a ‘democratic’ antithesis to tsarism, the Provisional Government naïvely assumed that by definition this state could not oppress minority nationalities, that their programme of self-government and democratization would satisfy the aspirations of national minorities, that the latter would be only too grateful. They thus tended to hypostatize the Russian state and to insist that national groups support the democratic revolution and its government. The ministers dimly understood modern nationalism, perhaps because it was so flaccid among Russians themselves. They failed to anticipate that national strivings would quickly escalate into demands for autonomy and independence, and that as minority and Russian interests diverged, the government inevitably would tread in the footsteps of the tsars. Surprised and dismayed, the Provisional Government and much of Russian public opinion accused the minorities of stabbing Russia in the back and undercutting its democratic revolution.

Still more menacing was the threat from lower classes in the Russian heartland—above all, the workers. Some historians have revived an earlier tendency to denigrate the workers’ role in the revolution and even discount it altogether. Recent works by Richard Pipes and Martin Malia, for example, deny that the revolution had any significant social dimension and claim that the prime mover was ideology, the intelligentsia, or some primal Russian obsession with power and authoritarianism. While this ‘un-revisionism’ rightly suggests that the revolution involved more than working-class aspirations, it revives the anti-Bolshevik stereotypes of ‘working-class backwardness’—hence Bolshevik manipulation, hence the illegitimacy and ‘un-Marxian’ character of the 1917 Revolution. Ironically, this conservative view derives from Menshevik sour grapes: to account for their own failure to attract workers, Mensheviks claimed that the workers were just green peasants easily seduced by cunning Bolsheviks.

Beyond the Mensheviks’ confession of their own political ineptness, this thesis has little to commend it: collective action of workers profoundly shaped the politics of 1917. Indeed, the aggressive measures of factory owners and the government’s inability to mediate or satisfy minimal demands contributed to the steady radicalization of the workers. The result, as S. A. Smith has shown, was the growing importance of organizations such as factory committees, as a powerful force for ‘democratization’ demanding workers’ control and self-management and as hotbeds of Bolshevik activism. These organizations enabled Bolsheviks to offer an alternative to the trade unions and to outflank their Menshevik rivals. Nor can any serious account of 1917 ignore strikes and their impact. According to Diane Koenker and William Rosenberg, the eight months of revolution in 1917 witnessed 1,019 strikes involving 2,441,850 workers and employees, led by metal and textile workers (as before), but reinforced by printers and service personnel. It was all a clear expression of dissatisfaction with the Provisional Government and moderate socialists.

Revolution also swept across the countryside, where peasants now found little to prevent the realization of long-standing claims and aspirations. Their maximalist expectations were evident early, as in a resolution from Riazan: ‘The revolution is already three weeks old and nothing has happened yet’—a transparent allusion to the all-important land question. Although the government initially dampened expectations of immediate repartition of land, by early summer the peasant movement had gathered a full head of steam, with a steady increase in disorder, violence, and collective seizure of land. The peasants shared a fundamentally revolutionary, not liberal, conception of law and justice: land should belong to those who actually cultivate it, not the landlords and speculators who merely prevented this rational distribution of land. The war redoubled their feeling of injustice: while city folk obtained draft exemptions and special concessions, the long-suffering village sacrificed its men for slaughter at the front.

The agrarian question deepened the rift within the coalition. The Main Land Committee and Chernov’s Ministry of Agriculture became bastions of SR influence and, contrary to the express wishes of the Provisional Government, proposed the ‘socialization’ of land—that is, the abolition of private property and transfer of ownership to peasant communes. The Ministry believed that, in the midst of revolution, just demands took precedence over the laws of a defunct regime. But liberal ministers saw only a crass violation of the rule of law and resigned from the coalition. Significantly, the socialists themselves were divided on this issue. Whereas Chernov fanned the flames of peasant revolution, the Menshevik Minister of Internal Affairs ordered his apparatus to combat peasant lawlessness and to assert control over the land committees. Such fissures, along ideological and class lines, paralleled and deepened the divisions in society at large.

By early summer the coalition was in a shambles, its popularity waning. The First All-Russian Congress of Soviets in June exposed deep rifts on the left and subjected the coalition to withering criticism. To stave off a Bolshevik challenge, the soviet leadership cancelled anti-government demonstrations on 10 June and ordered its own march a week later. It proved a stunning fiasco, as soldiers and workers carried Bolshevik banners: ‘Down with the Capitalist Ministers’, ‘Peace’, and ‘Down with the Bourgeoisie’. The rhetoric of class war prevailed: conciliation, appeals to unity and ‘nation’, in fact any appeals not based squarely on ‘class’ and ‘class conflict’ fell on deaf ears.

The crisis culminated in the famous ‘July Days’, when soldiers and workers (with the aid of lower-echelon Bolshevik organs) staged an abortive insurrection. The July Days bequeathed unforgettable visual images—the populace scattering under rifle fire in Petrograd’s main squares, angry crowds attacking soviet leaders (‘Why haven’t you bastards taken power?’). The government blamed the Bolsheviks, arrested several key leaders, and accused Lenin himself of ‘treason’ (claiming that he had taken German money to subvert the democratic revolution). As Alexander Rabinowitch has shown, however, the Bolshevik leaders did less to lead than to follow popular radicalism. Troops loyal to the Provisional Government suppressed the disorders, but the crisis reinforced the rhetoric of violence, the sense of insurmountable problems, and lack of confidence in the government’s ability to deal with them. For the short term, however, the combination of force and anti-Bolshevik propaganda restored some semblance of authority.

But in fact state authority continued to disintegrate. The government now operated under the cloud of military catastrophe, even the threat that Germans would occupy Petrograd itself. And on the domestic front its problems were legion: land seizures and pogroms, strikes and demonstrations by workers, massive breakdowns in supply and transport, and the strident demands of nationalities. In early July the first coalition finally collapsed from disagreements over Ukrainian autonomy (which, to the liberals’ dismay, the socialists proposed to acknowledge) and Chernov’s agrarian policies (which the liberals saw as sanctioning illegal peasant actions). Once Prince Lvov and the Kadet ministers resigned, only a rump cabinet of socialists remained in charge.

That government now became the personal instrument of Kerensky, who succeeded Lvov as Prime Minister. Kerensky was vain, egotistical, and poorly versed in the left-wing ideologies that he would have to combat. A consummately inept politician, he became a caricature of the strong executive he pretended to be. By late July he had fashioned a second coalition, which called for state intervention in the economy and peace without indemnities or annexations.

But this coalition was new in another sense: responsible neither to parties nor the soviet, it steadily abandoned a commitment to parliamentary democracy and, instead, sought legitimacy in pseudo-parliamentary assemblies. Thus in mid-August, amidst much pomp and ceremony, Kerensky convoked the so-called ‘State Conference’ in Moscow. It included representatives of traditional corporate interests (government ministries, the Academy of Sciences, and social estates), as well as delegates from the ‘democratic’ institutions (self-government, co-operatives, the ‘labouring’ intelligentsia, and the like). While the left declaration of 14 August reaffirmed the commitments of July, the centre and right catalogued the horrors of the deepening revolution. Ministers spoke candidly about the enormous problems facing the regime. All felt the drama, the sense that things could not go on, that new upheavals were imminent, either from a German attack or a coup from the left or right. Public voices were already warning that either Kornilov or Lenin would sunder this Gordian knot.

The Kornilov Affair

General Lavr Kornilov, a war hero of modest origins, became a key public figure in 1917 because of his principles and his determination to suppress disorder during the April crisis. When Kerensky appointed the general as commander-in-chief after the summer offensive, he implicitly sanctioned Kornilov’s plan to restore the army’s fighting capacity by restoring discipline and the death penalty (though without dismantling the army’s democratic committees). But Kornilov had broader political ambitions, for he doubted that the coalition had the will either to win the war or to stabilize the domestic front. Regarding the government as a soviet hostage, he concluded that a true patriot must put an end to dual power. This judgement coincided with that of many landowners, industrialists, and political figures on the centre and right: only suppression of ‘democracy run amok’ could save Russia. In late August Kornilov led loyal troops on a march towards Petrograd to restore order.

Much ink has been spilled on the Kornilov affair, mostly along predictable political lines, with the left accusing the general of an attempted coup (Kornilov did order the march on Petrograd to destroy the soviet and install himself as a Napoleonic strongman) and the right and centre (who accuse Kerensky of goading Kornilov to act and then perfidiously betraying him). Both accounts are true: the general did attempt a coup, believing that he had Kerensky’s support; and Kerensky did lose his nerve and renege, sacrificing the general in a desperate effort to regain popular support. Workers and paramilitary units known as Red Guards were mobilized quickly to repulse ‘counter-revolution’ and, without much bloodshed, arrested Kornilov and disarmed his troops. Kerensky dissolved the second coalition and declared himself head of a new government, a five-man ‘Directory’.

The Kornilov affair had enormous repercussions. Kerensky’s machinations soon became public, severely damaging his personal authority. It also lent new credibility to the spectre of counter-revolution—a myth that greatly exaggerated the power of conservative forces, but none the less impelled workers, soldiers, and activists to organize militias, Red Guards, and ad hoc committees to defend the revolution. Even when the Kornilov threat had passed, these armed forces refused to disband and became a powerful threat to the government itself. Thus the Kornilov affair, though a farce and fiasco, further eroded support for Kerensky’s government and facilitated the Bolshevik seizure of power, without, however, in any way pre-ordaining the methods or timing of the October Revolution.

The Coming of October

As Kerensky’s authority faded, the strikes reached a newcrescendo in September. They revealed that the workers no longer believed in the capacity of the government to honour its pledges or in the willingness of factory owners to negotiate in good faith. The collapse of production, lock-outs, unemployment, violence, and social polarization profoundly changed the scale and tenor of the strikes. For three days in September, a strike by 700,000 railway workers paralysed transportation; in mid-October 300,000 workers struck at textile factories in Ivanovo and nearby communities; ‘workers’ included pharmacists as well as oil workers. Mood, not just numbers, is critical: the strikes often culminated in violent confrontations that accelerated the breakdown of law and order (already marked by a rise in looting, physical violence, and vigilante street justice). Koenker and Rosenberg point out that the strikes became the workers’ main ‘form of participatory politics’, ‘the central conduit of labour mobilization and, to a large extent, of management mobilization as well’. The workers’ animosities and aspirations provided the primary drive and justification for early Soviet power—even if, ultimately, the Bolsheviks were to subvert the workers’ democratic impulses and to transform their institutions (soviets, factory committees, trade unions, co-operatives) into instruments of mobilization, hierarchy, and control.

In a desperate bid to stabilize the situation, Kerensky manœuvred to form yet another coalition cabinet. To offset popular radicalism, he wanted representatives of ‘propertied’ society—the same circles of the Kadet Party and Moscow business circles discredited in the popular mind as Kornilov’s accomplices. In mid-September, the soviet and democratic circles sponsored a Democratic Conference to unite the representatives of ‘democracy’ and to guide Kerensky in forming a stable government. Rather than enhance the regime’s stability and legitimacy, the meeting proved a disaster: the delegates at first voted in favour of a coalition, but without the Kadets—an absurd proposition, since the Kadets were the only ‘bourgeois’ party disposed to ally with ‘democracy’. Later, despite Bolshevik opposition, on 25 September the conference voted for a coalition and thus paved the way for Kerensky’s final cabinet. The moderate left and centre thereby sacrificed their last opportunity to seize power or at least form a ‘unified socialist government’. Desperately seeking to end the crisis, the conference voted to summon another gathering—the Council of the Republic, or so-called ‘pre-parliament’. Intended as a surrogate for the constituent assembly and boycotted by the Bolsheviks, this weak body convened in October to hear gloomy ministerial and committee reports about the deepening crisis; it was the final sounding-board for the aspirations of Russia’s democratic revolution and its Provisional Government.

The Bolshevik Party meanwhile, debated the prospects of this ‘revolutionary situation’. The Kornilov episode had unleashed a new wave of radicalism, which was reflected not only in an upsurge of agrarian disorders and urban strikes, but also in pro-Bolshevik votes and elections in the soviets. Encouraged by this remarkable shift in mood, Lenin now revived the slogan ‘all power to the soviets’ abandoned after the July Days.

But internal dissension also rent the Bolsheviks. From various hiding-places Lenin bombarded the Central Committee with letters demanding that the party seize power in the name of the working class. His ‘Letters from Afar’ were a forceful blend of theory and practice, dogma and power. No blind believer in an ‘inevitable’ Bolshevik victory, Lenin insisted that the moment be seized, lest the Germans invade or strike a deal with Kerensky. Confronted with Lenin’s demand for an immediate armed uprising, party members revealed deep differences in their assessment of the situation. Two ‘Old Bolsheviks’, L. B. Kamenev and G. E. Zinoviev, believed that a broad-based socialist coalition, not the Bolsheviks alone, should take power. But the majority (including Trotsky and Stalin) acquiesced in Lenin’s demand: on 10 October, by a 10–2 vote, the Central Committee secretly endorsed Lenin’s theses on seizing power. But it hedged this decision: without setting a timetable, it called for patient work among the troops and proposed to await the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets later in October to legitimize a seizure of power in the name of the soviets. Meanwhile, the Petrograd soviet made a tactical decision of great practical significance when it established the ‘Military Revolutionary Committee’. Ostensibly created to defend Petrograd against the Germans, this Bolshevik-dominated body, working under the cover of soviet legitimacy, became the Bolshevik command centre during the October Revolution.

The Bolsheviks brilliantly exploited the situation, but owed much to ‘objective conditions’—the ongoing war and economic collapse, the weakness of the government, the fissures within possible rival parties, and the inability of interest groups and democratic organizations to mobilize public opinion. The Bolsheviks exploited Kerensky’s ill-timed counter-assaults to evoke the spectre of ‘counter-revolution’ and, on the night of 24 October, began seizing key centres of power in Petrograd (the Winter Palace itself, of little strategic value, was seized only the next evening). The Bolsheviks then informed the assembled soviet congress that they had taken power in the name of the soviets and were creating a temporary Workers’ and Peasants’ Government. The frustrated SR and Menshevik delegates could only denounce the action and stalk out of the assembly. As Kerensky fled Petrograd in a vain search for support, the Bolsheviks set about constructing a new state order.

Rebuilding the State

October signified much, but huge questions remained—how to extend and consolidate soviet power over the vast empire, and how to build the world’s first socialist state and society. Bolsheviks had to address these problems under conditions of war, not only the ongoing Great War but a violent civil war implicit in Bolshevik ideology and the process by which they had come to power.

These first years were, in Merle Fainsod’s felicitous phrase, ‘the crucible of communism’—an attempt to create a socialist state, economy, society, and culture later known as ‘war communism’. The latter phrase signifies much, not only the wartime conditions, but also a violent militancy that informed Bolshevik measures. Historians have passionately debated the regime’s intentions, the coherence of its war communist programme, the relative weight of civil war and ideology as causal factors, and the role of Lenin. Estimates of Lenin vary wildly, from that of malevolent ideologue and precursor of Stalin to that of a moderate pragmatist opposed to utopian leaps. Some see the ‘seeds of totalitarianism’ (to use an outmoded term) in Bolshevism itself; others blame the crescendo of authoritarianism and violence on the civil war alone.

Such one-sided interpretations obscure the ambiguities, alternatives, and texture of early Soviet history. October most certainly did not mark the end of the revolution; the new Bolshevik regime had to surmount the same social and national movements that destroyed its predecessors. But the Bolsheviks approached these issues in their own inimitable way. In particular, they attached great significance to ideology—hence the obsessive determination to build socialism as the historical antithesis of capitalism. Regarding ‘class war’ as the dominant reality, they ruthlessly sought to abolish the market and associated ‘bourgeois’ institutions, cultural values and ethical norms. Still, Bolshevik behaviour cannot be reduced to ideology: they also drew—sometimes unconsciously, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes enthusiastically—on traditional political culture and bureaucratic power. It was not the contradictions between these different impulses but their fusion that led to the great successes—and excesses—of the early Soviet regime.

The Bolsheviks used the cover of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets to legitimize the seizure of power and formation of a workers’ and peasants’ government. But they made haste not only to consolidate power but to use it. That meant a torrent of decrees—like the land decree, which formally nationalized land but in reality empowered peasants to complete the agrarian revolution on their own terms. The Bolsheviks also demolished symbols of the old regime—its ranks, titles, and traditional social estates. They also sought to establish a monopoly on political discourse, re-establishing censorship and banning ‘bourgeois’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ newspapers. Given the disintegration of administration and law in 1917, early Bolshevik rule (as Peter Kenez has suggested) was largely ‘rule by decree’ using threat, exhortation, and propaganda.

Constructing power—not only in Petrograd and Moscow, but in the interior and borderlands—was the primary concern. This process replicated the seizure of power itself, as so-called ‘military-revolutionary committees’ and garrison troops seized power in the name of the ‘soviet’. But Lenin sought to monopolize power, not just construct it—hence his fierce opposition to the idea of a coalition with other socialists. Although his first government was eventually forced to include some left SRs, the coalition lasted only a few brief months. Important too was Lenin’s decision to retain the ministerial bureaucracy and cabinet executive: rather than destroy these creatures of the tsarist regime (as recently envisioned in his State and Revolution), he simply relabelled ministries ‘commissariats’ and the cabinet ‘Council of People’s Commissars’. With this legerdemain he rebaptized these bodies as qualitatively different, purportedly because they were now part of a workers’ and peasants’ state and presumably staffed by proletarians.

That was a masterful illusion: few proletarians were prepared for such service. It created, however, a golden opportunity for the white-collar employees of the tsarist and provisional governments, not only the army of petty clerks and provincial officials, but also mid-level technical and administrative personnel in the capitals. They found the transition easy, for example, from local War Industries Committees and zemstvo economic organs into ‘proletarian’ institutions like the Supreme Council of the National Economy (Vesenkha) and its local ‘economic councils’ (Sovnarkhozy). War Communism spawned a fantastic profusion of economic bureaucracies, including vertical industry monopolies called ‘Main Committees’ (Glavki) that were direct heirs of the earlier administration. Thousands of employees and technical personnel, economists, statisticians, agronomists, and middle- and lower-ranking managers, specialists with higher education, university graduates, and sundry other professionals poured into these organizations. Typical was the case of doctors and lesser medical personnel, who quickly found a home in revolutionary projects for public health. Similarly scientists and engineers eager to remake the world after technocratic visions eagerly joined in ‘building socialism’. Hence the Bolshevik triumph was a triumph of the lower-middle strata providing the very infrastructure of the Soviet state. In this sense the white-collar engagement was as important as the workers’ and peasants’ movements lionized in official discourse and mythology.

But the most unique—and devastatingly efficient—innovation of these early years was the creation of the hybrid ‘party-state’. Membership in the party itself grew exponentially, from a mere 23,600 members in January 1917 to 750,000 four years later. The party gradually metamorphosed into a hierarchically organized bureaucracy, with the discipline mandated in Lenin’s ‘democratic centralism’. At the apex the Central Committee began to specialize in function and policy area to become a shadow cabinet exercising real power. At all levels this party-state system had overlapping competence, with party functionaries in a ‘Bolshevik faction’ making decisions and ensuring implementation. Local party secretaries were plenipotentiaries, directing state institutions and soviets. To control key management positions, the party created the famous nomenklatura system for assigning reliable party members to these posts. The Bolshevik organs gradually marginalized the ‘soviets’ in whose name the revolution had been made; they also eliminated any corporate bodies and social organizations that might temper ministerial power. Hence the key revolutionary institutions of 1917—soviets, factory committees, trade unions, co-operatives, professional associations, and the like—were gradually subsumed into the new bureaucracy or extinguished outright.

This party apparatus became Stalin’s institutional base in the struggle for power. When the Central Committee created the ‘Orgburo’ (Organizational Bureau) to manage this apparatus in 1919, it was under Stalin’s command. Hence, even before becoming General Secretary in 1922, Stalin controlled major appointments, including those of provincial party secretaries; he thereby shaped the composition of party conferences and congresses, a critical asset in the power struggles of the 1920s. Stalin also was the first head of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin), another organ of paramount influence.

Others, however, discerned here a mortal danger to the proletarian state. Many protested against the privileges of ‘bourgeois specialists’ and their prominent role in the new state. Lenin himself rejected such ‘specialist-baiting’, dismissing fears of bourgeois contamination on the grounds that these people now worked for a socialist state and the working class. Bureaucratization was another cause of concern; ‘Democratic Centralists’, a faction at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, demanded decentralization and shift of power from party apparatchiki to soviet democracy. Another group, the ‘Workers’ Opposition’, defended the autonomy of trade unions and the principle of workers’ control. Predictably, the party hierarchy denounced such dissenters and reasserted ‘democratic centralism’ to command obedience and submission.

In December 1917, faced with what seemed to be regime-threatening opposition, Lenin created a supreme political police—the ‘Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage’, known by its Russian acronym Cheka. At its head was a Polish Bolshevik, Feliks Dzerzhinskii, charged with becoming the ‘sword of the revolution’ against ‘class’ enemies, real and imagined. He rapidly made the Cheka a state within a state, arbitrarily meting out revolutionary justice and terror. His empire constructed a network of prisons and labour camps that later became the world’s first concentration camp system.

A critical turning-point came in January 1918, when the long-awaited Constituent Assembly finally convened in Petrograd. Lenin had permitted elections to the Constituent Assembly, something that the socialists and liberals had endlessly promised but endlessly deferred. Bolsheviks garnered only a quarter of the votes, the PSR emerging the clear victor—but only, the Bolsheviks argued, because the ballot failed to distinguish between left SRs (who supported October) and right SRs (who did not). Well before the Assembly convened, Lenin made clear his hostility towards a ‘bourgeois’ (hence irrelevant) parliament. The result was a single, seventeen-hour session on 5–6 January: after passionate SR and Menshevik fulminations against the Bolsheviks, Lenin simply dissolved the Assembly and forbade further sessions.

Civil War

By the spring of 1918, the Bolsheviks had extended soviet authority to the Russian heartland but could hardly claim to have a firm grasp on power. For the next three years they would combat and defeat an incredible array of adversaries: White armies of patriots and anti-communists, liberals and SRs, peasant rebels (‘greens’) and urban anarchists, and minority movements spread along the borderlands and inside Russia proper itself. The regime would also combat interventionist forces from Britain, France, the United States, and Japan, and in 1920 became embroiled in a bitter war with Poland. By early 1921, however, the regime had vanquished adversaries, signed treaties with its neighbours, and turned its attention to reintegration and rebuilding.

The civil war began in the winter of 1917/18. Apart from small bands of patriotic officers (interested more in continuing the war against Germany than in defeating Bolsheviks), the first important ‘White’ leader was General M. V. Alekseev. Together with General Kornilov, in January 1918 he created the Volunteer Army in the Don region: its goal was to cast off the German-Bolshevik yoke and reconvene the Constituent Assembly. Throughout its existence, this army operated within the territory of the Don and Kuban Cossacks—a serious handicap, since the Cossacks had their own agenda independent of saving the Great Russian state. The Don Cossack ataman, General A. M. Kaledin, did offer his services to the White generals, but he was unceremoniously abandoned by the Cossacks when a Red force invaded and elicited popular support. After Kornilov himself fell in battle at Ekaterinodar, command passed to General Anton Denikin—an uncharismatic, but intelligent commander of great personal integrity.

Other White forces gathered along the Volga and in Siberia. Perhaps most significant was the Czech Legion, tsarist POWs scheduled for repatriation; ordered to disarm, they resisted and soon found themselves at war with the Bolsheviks. In Siberia (with its strong tradition of autonomous regionalism and great ethnic diversity), moderate SRs and Kadets created the ‘Siberian Regional Council’ at Omsk. On the Volga, radical SRs under Chernov established the ‘Committee to Save the Constituent Assembly’ (Komuch). These SRs evoked little popular support and deemed White generals a greater menace than the Bolsheviks—a sentiment reciprocated by the military. In September 1918 they met at Ufa in a lame attempt to re-establish the Provisional Government (as a ‘Directory’), but it lacked even a programme, much less an apparatus to implement it. In November 1918 the military ousted the radicals (in a coup marked by executions and brutality that were becoming the norm) and installed Admiral A. Kolchak as military dictator and ‘Supreme Ruler’. Kolchak was emblematic of White leadership: a man of deep personal integrity, courage, and patriotism, but a taciturn and erratic personality completely lost in the world of politics. His forces never mounted a sustained threat; he even failed to obtain diplomatic recognition from the allies (at the instigation of Woodrow Wilson, who heeded Kerensky’s advice). He was finally captured and executed by the Cheka in early 1920.

The previous year had already marked the high point of the White assault, mounted from the south by A. I. Denikin’s Volunteer Army. He launched the offensive in the spring of 1919, but made the fatal blunder of splitting his army into two units: a smaller force under Baron P. N. Wrangel (which captured Tsaritsyn on 30 June), a larger formation advancing into the Donbas. In the ‘Moscow Directive’ of 3 July Denikin ordered an assault on the capital along a very broad front stretching from Samara to Kursk. It was an all-or-nothing gamble, for Denikin realized that the Red Army was growing more powerful by the hour, and that further Allied support was dubious. He counted on enthusiasm from the momentary flush of victory, as his armies rapidly captured Kursk, Voronezh, Chernigov, and (on 13–14 October) Orel—a town just 300 kilometres from Moscow. Simultaneously White forces under N. N. Iudenich advanced on Petrograd. But White fortunes soon changed: on 18–19 October Semen Budennyi’s Red Cavalry counter-attacked and smashed the White army advancing on Tula; it was only a matter of time before victory followed in the north, the Crimea, and Ukraine. The final denouement came in 1920, as the remaining White forces, under General Wrangel, were evacuated to Constantinople.

Bolshevik victories, which seemed unlikely, were due to several factors. Geography afforded great strategic advantage: the Bolshevik hold on the central provinces permitted shorter lines of supply and communications, whereas White forces were stretched out along the periphery—in the south, along the Volga, in Siberia, western borderlands, and Ukraine. Moreover, Bolsheviks were better prepared to mobilize human and material resources, for their state administration capitalized on the personnel and organizations of preceding regimes. Whites, by contrast, were inept administrators; their camp was a mobile army engaged in field operations, with neither the skill nor the inclination to put down administrative roots.

Ideology was also important in the Bolshevik victory. The socialist vision had not lost its lustre for many workers, peasants, and white-collar workers. Although Bolshevik social and economic polices unquestionably provoked considerable opposition, the government at least had policies and, more important, provided a public discourse to rationalize these as essential for plebeian victory in a class war. By contrast, the Whites symbolized property and privilege; they utterly failed to articulate an alternative vision acceptable to workers, peasants, and other plebeians caught up in the revolutionary storm.

Bolshevik nationality policy also contributed to their success. Whereas most (especially patriotic Whites) sought to re-establish the empire, the Bolsheviks recognized the volatility of the nationality question and promised national self-determination—albeit, with the proviso that self-determination be subordinate to the interests of the proletariat. Despite the activities of the Commissariat of Nationalities (led by Stalin), the Bolsheviks actually could only abide and applaud the breakup of the empire. By mid-1918 independent states had arisen in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Finland, and Belorussia; a powerful pan-Islamic movement was sweeping through the Muslim peoples of Central Asia. However much Lenin wished to reconquer the lost territories, this consummate Realpolitiker accepted the status quo, if only temporarily. He also wrapped policy in a theory of ‘federalism’, which granted nationalities the trappings of statehood but within the framework of a Russian socialist state.

The Bolshevik cause also benefited from the fractious disunity of their adversaries. They were indeed a motley group—radical socialists, anarchist peasants, moderate Kadets and Octobrists, and of course arch-conservative officers from the gentry. Ultimately the main adversary was the White officer corps, which tended to replicate the politics—and mistakes—of 1917. Thus they plainly despised moderate socialists, even in the cause against Bolsheviks. Moreover, White generals such as Kolchak, Iudenich, and Wrangel were miserable administrators and even worse politicians. That was particularly evident in the nationality question: though fighting amidst non-Russian peoples on the periphery, the Whites loudly proclaimed their goal of resurrecting ‘Great Russia’, with all the minority territories. Such nationalistic views, while typical of the officer corps (and indeed the centre and moderate parties in the Dumas and Provisional Government), were naturally opprobrious to aspiring national groups like the Cossacks.

Intervention by the allies, however much they might have loathed Bolshevism, had little military effect. It could hardly be otherwise: a momentous revolution in the vast Russian spaces could not be channelled, let alone halted or reversed, by the tiny tactical forces of the allied powers. Exhausted by four years of total war, fearful of domestic unrest, the allies provided some men and equipment, but lacked the clear purpose and persistence necessary to stay the course. Nor did they even share common goals. Under Winston Churchill’s leadership, Britain supplied the most money and equipment; its primary aim was to contain German power (and avert a German-Russian alliance) and to prevent Russian advances in Asia and the Near East. For its part, Japan landed troops for the simple purpose of acquiring territory in the eastern maritime provinces. Wilson dispatched American soldiers but eagerly seized on Soviet peace feelers, first at an abortive conference in Prinkipo in late 1918, later in a mission by William Bullitt and the writer Lincoln Steffens to Moscow in early 1919. In the end the allies, having denied unconditional support to the Whites, gradually withdrew from the conflict, having done little more than to reify the myth of hostile ‘imperialist aggression’ against the young socialist state.

War Communism

The civil war left a deep imprint on Bolshevik political culture. War made the Red Army the largest, most important institution in the new state: it absorbed vast resources and, to ensure political reliability, deliberately conscripted the most ‘class-conscious’ elements of the working class and party. As a result, the army not only represented a military force but also provided the formative experience for the first generation of Bolsheviks. Not surprisingly, Soviet Russia developed as a military-administrative state, the military idiom and norm permeating government, economy, and society. Civil war reinforced the ideology of class conflict that informed Bolshevik policy, not just propaganda, during these early years.

Of course, the party still embraced a broad spectrum of opinion and interests. Its radical, impatient wing demanded that socialism be constructed immediately, in a militant fashion. At the time of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty (March 1918), ‘left-wing communists’ also hoped to ride the wave of history and export the revolution beyond Soviet borders. L. Kritsman, in an influential tract written during the civil war, codified the notion of militant and heroic communist state-building and adumbrated a coherent policy agenda of ‘War Communism’—proletarian and collectivist. Lewis Siegelbaum has demonstrated that this famous term has been used without analytical precision, and that a heady mixture of realism and utopian ideology actually shaped Bolshevik policy from mid-1918 to early 1921.

Lenin himself reflected this mix of fantasy and common sense. On many issues he was pragmatic and at odds with the radicals—as, for example, in the bitter controversy over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, where he dismissed left-wing communism as an ‘infantile disorder’. Pragmatism likewise informed his concessions to bourgeois specialists (whom he consistently shielded) and his view on trade unions (where he opposed Trotsky’s militant plans to conscript labour). Lenin was also cautious about nationalizing industry in late 1917 and early 1918; his ‘state socialism’, modelled on the German wartime economy, did not entail state take-over of economic life until much later. All this has inclined some historians to distance Lenin from the radicals and to depict his pragmatism as a clear antecedent for the evolutionary, gradualist plan of socialist development known as the New Economic Policy in the 1920s. Indeed, Lenin himself introduced the term ‘war communism’ in 1921 to discredit his opponents.

Nevertheless, Lenin had not shorn all the radical impulses that brought him power. He was instrumental in establishing the Communist International and pressing its revolutionary mission abroad. He also introduced radical agrarian and food-supply policies. In the spring of 1918, for example, when the new regime faced the perennial grain crisis that bedevilled both the tsarist and provisional governments, Lenin expanded the latter’s ‘grain monopoly’ into a full-scale food supply dictatorship. Similarly Lenin was never comfortable with the original land decree, which closely echoed the SR ‘socialization of the land’—all the more since the countryside was teeming with SR agronomists and surveyors, intent on realizing their own, not the Bolshevik, vision of land reform. Theirs was profoundly non-Marxist, insensitive to ‘class’ or aims of radical transformation.

That vision, which placed so much faith in the peasantry, was anathema to Lenin. Instead, he propagated a scheme of collectivized agriculture and established some prototype large-scale collective farms, appropriately aimed at the ‘poor and landless peasantry’. Although the chaos of the civil war permitted few such experiments, they provided the precedent and rationale for more Promethean efforts in Stalin’s ‘Great Turn’ of 1929–30. More telling still was Lenin’s attempt to foment class war in the villages. At bottom he applied a crude Marxist sociology of village society that divided the peasants into a small class of rich exploiters (the infamous kulaki, often simply the most competent farmers), self-sufficient ‘middle peasants’ (seredniaki), and the revolutionary and exploited ‘poor peasants’ (bedniaki). To stoke the fires of intra-village revolution, the Bolsheviks created ‘Committees of Poor Peasants’ (kombedy) to implement Soviet decrees and to drive the wealthier from power. This policy pitted neighbour against neighbour; it often fostered violence and the settling of old scores that had nothing to do with ‘class struggle’. Moreover, in many blackearth regions peasants viewed Bolshevik commissars, grain detachments, army draft apparatus and the like as worse than any conceivable class enemy. The result was a fierce civil war between organized peasant bands, sometimes called ‘greens’, and Bolshevik forces. Recent research has revealed the extraordinary intensity of this brutal conflict in Tambov and other grain-producing regions as Red Army detachments came to pacify the village. Here civil war persisted long after the Whites had been crushed, providing a primary impulse for the ‘New Economic Policy’ in early 1921.

War Communism also informed the construction of social orders, with appropriate status and disabilities. In the first constitution (July 1918), labour was a universal duty and defined social status. To the toiling classes of workers and peasants were juxtaposed the ‘formers’ (byvshie), i.e. members of the former exploiting class—nobility, bourgeoisie, clergy, and the like. All these ‘exploiters’ were deprived of civil rights and legally classified as the ‘disenfranchised’ (lishentsy). They had no right to work, but could be mobilized for menial labour or public works. Not all the social terror came from above: murderous pogroms against Jews and spontaneous assaults on clergy and other ‘formers’ were also a regular part of daily life during these violent years.

These years of terror and discrimination also brought incredible hardship and privation. Despite the banner of historical progress, the country appeared to have reversed course, with a return to a natural economy, barter, wages in kind, and ‘currency’ in the form of eggs, clothing, and other basic necessities. It was the era of the ‘bagmen’ (meshchochniki), petty traders who plied the black market in grain and other goods. The state summarily and sporadically punished the black marketeers, but in fact had to tolerate a sector that still supplied much of the food and basic commodities.

Revolutionary Culture

Besides the market-place, culture was another key battleground. Under the Provisional Government, cultural leaders organized unions and demanded the creation of a Ministry of Culture to replace the traditional state and court patronage of the arts. As important as cultural creation was cultural destruction (the iconoclastic demolition of symbols from the ancien régime) and the search for new symbols and festivals.

Here too the party divided into radical and conservative camps, reflected in the debate between A. A. Bogdanov and Lenin over the historical meaning of culture and its place in a proletarian state. Both recognized the importance of culture for revolutionary transformation, but had long disagreed on fundamental principles of Marxism and culture. Lenin (the more orthodox Marxist) saw culture as pure superstructure, subordinate to class conflict and the task of seizing and rebuilding power. Culture (from literacy campaigns to university learning) was crucial, yet secondary; it was just another component of the superstructure. Lenin’s conservative tastes carried an aversion to utopian experiments, an affinity for classical Russian culture, and a desire to integrate artists and writers into well-defined hierarchies under party control. His tool was A. V. Lunacharskii’s bailiwick, the Commissariat of Enlightenment, the very ‘Ministry of Culture’ that intellectuals and artists had proposed in 1917. This new patron of the arts sponsored a full range of artistic activities (including the feeding, shelter, and clothing of the intelligentsia); it also attempted to create a new educational system based on such radical doctrines as the Unified Labour School, which jettisoned traditional disciplines and substituted practical work and learning through labour.

Bogdanov’s vision, similar to that of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, could hardly have been more different. It posited the defining role of culture—i.e. cultural transformation was the pre-condition of social and political transformation. To complete the revolution, argued Bogdanov, it was vital to have ‘new people’ mastering the dominant forces of technocracy and technology, information and language. The new people had to create their own culture and hence create themselves. Bogdanov was a true radical, rejecting the traditional high culture as the product of old élites and hence antithetical to the needs of the proletariat. To help fashion proletarian culture (therefore its own essence or being), Bogdanov created the ‘Proletarian Culture Movement’ (proletkult’), a fusion of organization and theory at the grass-roots level all across the country. It enabled ‘workers’ (broadly defined to include not only factory workers, but also white-collar employees, peasants, and others) to produce their own cultural artifacts, from literature to stage performances, from belles-lettres to literary readings. Although the movement was for a time exceedingly popular, that very popularity sealed its doom: proletcult was culture ‘from below’, inevitably representing an alternative to party dogma and inviting different readings of Marxism itself. In addition, the ‘cultural front’ (a military metaphor typical of the time) had too many players (not only the Commissariat of Enlightenment, but the trade unions and party itself), all competing for scarce resources. By the early 1920s, in short, proletarian culture faced a phalanx of determined foes in this ‘proletarian’ state.

Revolutionary enthusiasm pervaded culture and society at many other levels. It was a driving force in high culture—fine arts, literature, architecture, which reflected powerful modernist currents, buttressed by aggressively anti-bourgeois and apocalyptic topoi. ‘Non-objective’ movements like suprematism, as well as constructivism and futurism, flourished in the heady atmosphere of revolution. The same spirit penetrated daily life, most dramatically in the question of the family and women’s status. After secularizing marriage and radically liberalizing divorce, the party sought to address these questions by creating the Women’s Section (Zhenotdel), an apparatus summoned to fashion a new Soviet woman—proudly proletarian, independent, an activist in the vanguard of the party as a leader and builder of consciousness. This vision, like revolutionary culture itself, would arouse rising hostility and suspicion from state and society alike in the 1920s.

In these years, however, the Bolsheviks were cultural revolutionaries, particularly in their feverish attempt to construct a new symbolic world—with new icons, new language, new monuments, new festivals—to bestow legitimacy on the new order. Suggestive of this campaign was the attempt, in early 1918, to sponsor a competition for the design of monuments to commemorate the great deeds of the Russian Socialist Revolution. Lenin himself issued a ‘plan’ for legitimate festivals and for rewriting the past (especially the ‘history’ of the still ongoing revolution itself). The use of festivals for education, socialization, and morale was quickly apparent—in the well-orchestrated celebrations of May Day, the first anniversary of the Revolution in 1918, and later in the public participatory spectacle to re-enact the October Revolution in 1920. Of course there were glitches and crudities (for example, offering special rations and luxury goods to arouse ‘enthusiasm’), and this political theatre allowed variant decodings. The regime also adopted the Gregorian calendar, modernized the alphabet, and expropriated urban space (by renaming streets and squares). Finally, Bolshevik ‘God Builders’ (i.e. those who saw Bolshevism as a new religion with the proletariat as deity) began to foster a cult of Lenin, especially after an SR terrorist critically wounded Lenin in 1918. Party intellectuals then made haste to foster the idea of his immortality and to promote the public worship of this new saint, casting the die for the far more ominous elaborations in later years.

10. The New Economic Policy (NEP) and the Revolutionary Experiment 1921–1929

WILLIAM B. HUSBAND

With NEP, the new Bolshevik regime pragmatically sought to consolidate power and rebuild a shattered economy. But these were also years of insoluble economic problems, fierce social tensions, and deep divisions in the party. Ultimately, NEP did more to exacerbate than solve fundamental problems; it was a critical prelude to Stalin’s ‘great turn’ in the late 1920s.

ONCE the Bolsheviks had consolidated their victory in the Russian civil war, the revolutionary experiment in socialism could begin in earnest. The defeat of principal military enemies in conjunction with the use of mass mobilization and repressive force seriously impaired those rivals not completely driven from the political arena. By that time, the Bolsheviks had already undertaken a broad programme of social and economic change. They attempted to co-ordinate all economic life by creating the Supreme Council of the National Economy in 1917, soon thereafter nationalized factories, and outlawed private trade. Their endorsement of workers’ control aspired to establish innovative management and labour relations, and the collapse of the national currency appeared to hasten the transition to a barter economy. New laws attacked social institutions and practices that reflected the values of the former regime. And in both city and village, workers and peasants implemented their own agendas, beginning with the appropriation of property belonging to élites of the old order.

Only revolutionary maximalists could have equated these early measures with socialism: by the early 1920s building a new society was still a task for the future. Despite the bold language of revolutionary pronouncements, years of ‘government by decree’ in 1917–20 had given the Communist Party only a paper hold on most spheres of life, while seven years of warfare had reduced the national economy to ruin. During the closing months of the civil war, the population increasingly demanded that the state produce tangible improvements to justify the sacrifices made in the name of revolution. As public tolerance of grain requisitioning and other emergency measures reached its limit, workers and peasants openly defied Soviet power. Even the most ideological Bolshevik could not deny the gravity of the situation. In March 1921—on the eve of the important Tenth Party Congress—the state had to use force to repress an anti-Bolshevik uprising at the Kronstadt Naval Base, a bastion of revolutionary radicalism in 1917.

Both in response to public pressure and in keeping with their own ideological predilections, in 1921–9 the Bolsheviks pursued what would be the most open and experimental phase of Russian communism. The turning-point came in 1921 when the Tenth Congress endorsed the controversial New Economic Policy (NEP). Its aims were many: to ease public resentment against the emergency measures of the civil war; to regularize supply and production through a limited reintroduction of the market; to invigorate the grass-roots economy and generate investment capital for industrialization; and, in general, to lay the foundation for the transition to socialism at some unspecified but inevitable future date. At the same time, the political and military victory demanded that revolutionaries fulfil their promise of a more equitable social and economic order. In that sense, the extensive destruction of the pre-revolutionary system in 1917–20 provided a mandate for broad reconstruction and social transformation.

With opportunity, however, came responsibility; the real tasks of a ruling party soon brought the limitations of Bolshevism into sharp focus. The political leaders were divided; their control of the country was largely illusory. The international proletarian revolution that the Party had confidently predicted failed to materialize, and Soviet Russia found itself the steady object of international suspicion and antagonism. Ongoing economic problems threatened the survival of the regime, forcing compromises on the state that engendered widespread resentment. Social and artistic innovations produced genuine improvements, but their unanticipated results frequently offended public sensibilities. In the end, NEP promoted at once conservative and revolutionary sentiments. Paradoxically, enthusiasm for experimentation and for Stalinist regimentation sprang from the same source.

The Politics of Revolutionary Consolidation

The Communist Party faced a pressing need in 1921 to transform itself from a revolutionary cadre into an effective ruling institution. Early in the year, the Bolsheviks continued to increase repression and centralization despite popular discontent; only in the face of the Kronstadt revolt did the awareness of the need to retreat strike root. The leadership also faced challenges within the party. One faction advocated the reinstitution of greater internal democracy; another sought to restore the independence of trade unions; and a third complained that the party had lost its revolutionary vision. Faced with such contradictory pressures, the Tenth Party Congress did not rush into political reform. It did endorse NEP—a market, an end to grain requisitioning, a tax on harvests, and denationalization of small-scale enterprises—but not before the Bolsheviks had outlawed opposing political parties and banned party factions.

In the politics of the 1920s, the Bolsheviks were neither omnipotent nor single-minded. As before, their policy reflected as much mass pressure as Marxist ideology; the problem of discipline was as great as ever. Regional and local institutions were weak, unreliable, even non-existent; considerable segments of intermediate and lower officials resisted central authority and opposed the NEP. When Lenin declared that the party would pursue NEP ‘seriously and for a long time’, he tacitly admitted that Bolshevism had failed to establish a dictatorship of workers and poorer peasants. Rather, Lenin admitted, Soviet power had produced a burgeoning bureaucracy that was staffed largely by officials from the old regime and by opportunists, especially in the local areas.

The Eleventh Party Congress (March–April 1922) specifically addressed this issue. Lenin himself complained that communists frequently adopted the ways of the pre-revolutionary ministries and thus launched the attack on bureaucratism. The delegates resolved to tighten discipline in lower organs and to combat the internal factionalism that had earlier been outlawed but by no means eradicated. Partly in an effort to reach these objectives, the Central Committee elected I. V. Stalin as General Secretary—i.e. head of the Secretariat, a post with extensive appointment powers. Although he would use these prerogatives for his own political advancement, the initial intent was to reform the personnel apparatus of the party.

Lenin’s partial incapacitation by a cerebral haemorrhage in May 1922 seriously altered the dynamics of Soviet politics, however, and the reformism adopted at the Eleventh Congress never ran its intended course. Lenin’s deteriorating health—he suffered additional strokes in December 1922 and March 1923—triggered a succession crisis and exacerbated factional conflict that lasted well beyond his death in January 1924. Uncertainty and instability prevailed at the top. Lenin’s authority, unparalleled if not always unchallenged, was personal rather than institutional. His dominance derived from his experience, intellect, and political acumen, not any title or office. To replace Lenin, it was necessary not just to name a successor, but to reconsider the very concept of leadership in the party.

Lenin himself contributed to the contentiousness when he dictated his so-called ‘testament’ in December 1922, emphasizing the shortcomings of all major political figures. It declared that Nikolai Bukharin was ‘the favourite of the whole party’ and its ‘most significant theoretician’, but weak on dialectics and somewhat scholastic. Lenin noted that Grigorii Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev had wavered at the time of the October Revolution—which was ‘not, of course, accidental’. Of the younger Bolsheviks, G. L. Piatakov was too preoccupied with administration ‘to be relied on in a serious political situation’. And Lenin especially feared that a rivalry between Stalin and Leon Trotsky might split the party. Although Trotsky was ‘certainly the most able man in the present Central Committee’, he was given to ‘excessive self-confidence’ and an exaggerated concern with ‘the administrative aspect of affairs’. Stalin as General Secretary ‘had concentrated boundless power in his hands’, and Lenin worried whether Stalin would ‘always know how to use this power with sufficient caution’. In a postscript he added that ‘Stalin is too rude’ to be General Secretary and recommended that ‘the comrades consider removing Stalin from this post’.

The succession struggle commenced even before Lenin died. In 1923 and despite a pledge of collective leadership, a triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev accused Trotsky of Bonapartist aspirations. At the same time, Lenin launched his own assault against Stalin: he strongly criticized Stalin’s treatment of minority nationalities and threatened to sever relations for Stalin’s insulting behaviour towards Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin’s wife. Lenin also asked Trotsky, Stalin’s most bitter rival, to represent his views at the forthcoming Twelfth Party Congress of April 1923. But Trotsky, for reasons still unclear, chose not to present Lenin’s case against Stalin and thereby squandered a unique opportunity to use Lenin’s authority against Stalin. By December 1923 the triumvirs had prevailed in party infighting and put Trotsky and his followers on the defensive.

Lenin’s death in January 1924 had a mixed impact. Publicly, it signalled the beginning of a cult of Lenin: thousands viewed the open coffin, Petrograd became Leningrad, and quasi-religious symbolism of Russian Orthodoxy crept into the funeral. And over the objections of Krupskaia, the Central Committee placed the embalmed body on permanent display in Red Square. Behind the scenes, however, Lenin’s death—long anticipated—did not interrupt adversarial high politics. In February 1924 the Central Committee launched a recruitment campaign, the Lenin Enrolment, to ‘proletarianize’ the party by admitting more actual industrial workers. Although this step would ultimately erode the meaning and significance of party membership, in the short term it added primarily to the numerical strength of Stalin’s supporters. By the time the Thirteenth Party Congress opened at the end of May 1924, over 128,000 new candidates had joined. That number would soon surpass 240,000, thus increasing the size of the party by more than half. The triumvirate also fortified itself in other ways. Krupskaia pressed the leadership to make public the criticisms in Lenin’s testament, which had been kept secret (even from the party members for over a year), but was rebuffed. When Trotsky attacked Zinoviev and Kamenev in his Lessons of October, published for the anniversary of the revolution, he succeeded only in driving them back into a closer alliance with Stalin. And in December 1924 Stalin cast down an ideological challenge to Trotsky, counterposing his own idea of ‘socialism in one country’ to Trotsky’s concept of ‘permanent revolution’. Stalin’s argument—that the Soviet Union could create a socialist state without an international proletarian revolution—directly controverted Trotsky’s belief that the final victory of socialism depended on successful revolutions in the West. With the prospects of international revolution clearly receding (especially after the Ruhr débâcle of 1923), Stalin’s view resonated strongly with the rank and file.

With Trotsky weakened, the struggle entered a second phase in early 1925 when the triumvirs turned against one another. In 1924 Stalin had already begun to use his appointment powers as General Secretary to replace followers of Zinoviev and Kamenev with his own. This rivalry now intensified, just as the character of NEP itself became the central public issue. Indeed, 1925 would prove to be the apogee of private economic initiative during NEP. Zinoviev, ostensibly alarmed at capitalist ‘excesses’ in a socialist state, went on the attack. That impelled Bukharin, NEP’s strongest advocate in the top leadership, to join forces with Stalin. Ultimately however, this phase of the struggle was decided more along factional than policy lines. At the Central Committee meeting of October 1925 and again at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December, the more numerous Stalin–Bukharin bloc simply ran roughshod over the Zinoviev–Kamenev group.

The third phase of the succession produced an unlikely alliance: the ‘united opposition’ of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev in 1926–7. Seeking to offset the support for Stalin (and, to a lesser degree, Bukharin) in the rank and file, these former foes resorted to direct action to achieve what they had been unable to gain in internal party politics. This strategy unravelled even before it was implemented. When one of the opposition’s conspiratorial meetings was easily uncovered in mid-1926, the Central Committee charged Zinoviev with violating the party ban on factions and removed him from the Politburo. In late September, the ‘united opposition’ took their case directly to the factories by staging public demonstrations, but without success. As the party press mobilized its full wrath against them, in early October 1926 the trio capitulated and publicly recanted. Trotsky was removed from the Politburo, and Kamenev lost his place as candidate member. After further machinations and conflicts, in October 1927 the trio was dropped from the Central Committee, followed by the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev from the party itself in November. One month later, the Fifteenth Congress revoked the party membership of Kamenev. Zinoviev and Kamenev would be readmitted in 1928 following a humiliating recantation, but Trotsky was first exiled and then forcibly deported in 1929.

Hostile as the factional struggle thus far had been, nothing prepared—or could prepare—the country for its final act. In 1928–9, Stalin moved against what he labelled the ‘right opposition’ led by Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov (head of the Council of People’s Commissars, Sovnarkom), and the trade unionist Mikhail Tomskii. Neither the party nor the public had reason to expect this offensive. Certainly the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927 had endorsed nothing stronger than greater restrictions on the most prosperous peasants, the gradual and voluntary collectivization of agriculture, and an increased effort to develop heavy industry. The congress gave no strong signal that the party was about to scuttle NEP, yet when this final phase concluded, NEP had ended and the USSR was engulfed in class warfare.

Stalin proceeded cautiously, but as always with a strong sensitivity to the prevailing political opinion. By the late 1920s the belief that the revolution had failed to fulfil expectations of 1917 became widespread in Soviet society; a renewed socialist radicalism pervaded the Central Committee and many rank-and-file communists as well. The population outside the party deeply resented the privileges still accorded to managers, engineers, and technical personnel a full decade after Red October. The fact that such a large proportion of state officials were neither workers nor peasants provided an additional irritant. Many also believed that kulaks (the pejorative term for the most prosperous peasants) were withholding their grain from the market in an economy of scarcity. And everywhere one encountered bitterness and jealousy towards those who had used NEP to enrich themselves.

Stalin did not create this mood or control it, but he knew how to exploit it. His first target was a shortage of grain. Marketings by the end of 1927 were down 20 per cent from the previous year. Due to low prices being paid by the state, peasants with a surplus simply held it back in the hope of better terms, used it to fatten livestock for slaughter, diverted it to the illegal production of grain alcohol, or in some cases shifted to planting more profitable industrial crops. These factors, compounded by poor harvests in several areas, accounted for the drop. Stalin, however, placed the blame elsewhere. On a three-week tour of Siberia that began in mid-January 1928, he repeatedly declared the same culprits to be greedy kulaks and local officials too lenient in dealing with them.

He also fanned class hostilities in industry. In March 1928, at Stalin’s personal invitation, the state initiated a show trial of fifty engineers, the first of several against the ‘bourgeois specialists’. Stalin made the class underpinnings of this Shakhty affair, as it became known, the main theme in a speech to the party in April 1928. The defendants, primarily men who had held responsible posts under tsarism and three Germans working under state contracts, were charged with sabotaging coal-mining in the vital Donets basin and conspiring with foreign capitalists. The Shakhty Trial, held in May-July, became a mass spectacle. Newspapers prominently featured the proceedings and sought to intensify class antagonisms.

The General Secretary broadened his assault on the right opposition. In the second half of 1928, Bukharin worried that Stalin would use the power of the Secretariat to replace the editorial staffs of important national publications with his own appointees. And that is precisely what he did. By the end of the year he had also replaced the leading officials in the Moscow branch of the party and in the national trade-union organizations, both of which had previously eluded his control. In February 1929, Stalin led a Politburo attack on Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii for factionalism; the denunciation came into full public view in August. Bukharin was removed from the Politburo in November 1929; Rykov and Tomskii would suffer the same fate in 1930.

This was not, however, merely an exercise in power politics: vital policy issues played a significant role in the outcome. When he made public the specific charges against the ‘right deviation’ in 1929, Stalin accused his rivals of an excessive and non-socialist sympathy for independent economic development. His own formula therefore called for a more rapid, centrally planned, and avowedly ideological transformation to pure socialism. Against detractors who considered its high quotas and objectives unrealistic, Stalin sponsored the First Five-Year Plan in April 1929 (declared retroactively to have begun in October 1928). Its emphasis on accelerated development of heavy industry was the direct converse of Bukharin’s call for a gradual transition and non-centralized endeavours. With his role as party leader secure, in late 1929 Stalin pressed for the immediate collectivization of agriculture and liquidation of the kulaks as a class.

Stalin had read the national mood correctly. His campaign against gradualists and bourgeois specialists was replicated in practically every administrative and professional institution in the country as impatient radicals attacked their more cautious colleagues and those who remained from the tsarist period. The state taxed the private economic sector out of existence, ended the market experiment, and dispossessed even small-scale entrepreneurs. Workers and peasants received preferential treatment in spheres such as education, and NEP’s permissive social and artistic experiments came under full-scale attack. The succession to Lenin was over, NEP was abandoned, and a cultural revolution had begun.

But consolidating the revolution entailed more than seizing the commanding heights of politics. Better than any other high-ranking Bolshevik, Stalin had understood the significance of the changing size and character of the party in the 1920s. From 23,600 in January 1917 it had expanded to 750,000 at the beginning of NEP. This number contracted to fewer than 500,000 at the time the Lenin Enrolment began in 1924, but by the end of the decade total membership had climbed to 1.5 million (including candidate members). In general, the new recruits were young, urban, male, and poorly educated.

Numbers alone, however, do not tell the full story. The All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik)—the party’s official name until 1952—differed significantly from pre-revolutionary Bolshevism. Whereas participation in an illegal, underground cadre required a special revolutionary dedication, the new circumstances demanded other things of those who joined after 1921. Whereas the pre-revolutionary party put a premium on loyalty and proficiency in ideological matters (with sophistication in Marxist theory a prerequisite for a leading position), NEP required different criteria, not always appreciated by the old guard. An ability to carry out assignments, even a certain ruthlessness, proved more important once the party was in power. Indeed, Stalin’s dubious credentials as a theorist, which had first caused experienced Bolsheviks to underestimate him, were not nearly as important to the new recruits. Moreover, Stalin appealed to the idealism that appeared, especially among the young, in the last years of NEP. Appointment powers and the ferocity of Soviet politics notwithstanding, Stalin could not have triumphed had he been supported only by ideologues, cynics, and opportunists. His supporters also included many idealists who believed that measures like the Five-Year Plan, collectivization of agriculture, and cultural revolution held the key to the transition to genuine socialism. For the young radicals attracted by Stalin’s opposition to NEP, the policy had never been a pragmatic retreat, but a betrayal of the basic ideals and goals of the revolution.

Harnessing such idealism was important. While it is true that party members now held key positions in most institutions and enterprises, this alone did not ensure total control or total obedience. Throughout the decade local officials continued to ignore central directives, formulate policy on their own, behave dishonestly and immorally, and in general to comport themselves in ways that reflected badly on Soviet power. And as late as 1929, the Soviet administrative apparatus barely existed in the countryside. In sum, by 1929 the politics of consolidating Red October and Stalin’s emergence as leader had led to a redefinition of leadership and, by extension, of the party itself. All this provided the immediate background for the different kind of revolution that would commence with the ‘Great Turn’ of 1929–30.

Foreign Policy of an Internationalist State

International politics presented a special challenge for the Soviet state. In the Marxist schema, the Russian Revolution was but the first of a forthcoming wave of proletarian uprisings that the communists would lead and support. In the conditions of 1921– 9, however, the Bolsheviks could furnish little more than encouragement and example; Soviet Russia during NEP needed not the rapid exportation of revolution, but above all time to heal its wounds and strengthen itself militarily. Thus, while by no means abandoning the Marxist vision of the future, the immediate focus of Soviet foreign policy was survival and state interest. Not surprisingly, Bolshevik international behaviour was also entwined with Soviet domestic politics.

The Comintern (Communist International) was founded in 1919 and served as the co-ordinating centre of the world workers’ movement. Although it was based in Moscow, the Soviet state maintained the fiction that the Comintern was an independent body without government ties. The fact that no less a figure than Zinoviev served as its head—from its founding until his disgrace in 1926—belied such claims, however. The Bolsheviks attempted to co-ordinate Comintern activities with the national priorities of the Soviet state, and by the early 1920s it was clear that Moscow was dictating Comintern policy. When, for example, the country needed a breathing spell in 1921, fiery rhetoric from the Comintern gave way to a more diplomatic posture towards Europe. The open promotion of revolution was redirected almost exclusively towards Asia. In 1924 the emergence of Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’ further curbed the language of international proletarian revolution. In addition, Zinoviev’s replacement by Bukharin as Comintern head in 1926 was clearly a by-product of Soviet internal politics, as was Bukharin’s replacement with Stalin’s protégé Viacheslav Molotov in July 1929.

The Comintern also tried to define the correct relationship towards right-wing groups and non-communist socialists. In 1928 the Sixth Comintern Congress aroused considerable dismay in foreign ranks by forbidding alliances between revolutionary Marxists and moderate socialists. It asserted that the greatest danger came not from the many emerging fascist groups in Europe, but from the moderate parties on the left. This led to key defections, notably but not exclusively among French communists, who felt that Realpolitik dictated a common cause with other leftist elements in their own countries against the increasingly menacing right. This policy also hampered the German Communist Party by channelling its energy against socialists rather than the Nazis. Thus, by the end of the decade, Bolsheviks had made the Comintern centralized and subservient, but at the cost of reducing its effectiveness abroad.

In its foreign policy, a pragmatic internal logic governed Soviet behaviour. Revolutionary Russia faced a hostile international community in 1921: the overthrow of tsarism by a mass movement had alarmed the ruling élites in the West, giving rise to the Red Scare. The Bolshevik state compounded such fears when it nationalized industry, including foreign-owned enterprises, and repudiated the pre-1917 national debt (much of which was held by foreign creditors).

As Russia entered NEP, Lenin adumbrated the concept of peaceful coexistence. He argued that the capitalist and socialist camps could both compete and co-operate, and that military conflict between them was not necessarily inevitable. Socialist states could interact, especially economically, with the capitalist world because in any long-term competition socialism would ultimately prevail. Such thinking fitted the circumstances of the early 1920s. In the absence of the Western assistance that was to have come from the international proletarian revolution, it was vital that the Soviet republic end its diplomatic isolation and, if possible, attract financial help. This would not be easy. As the decade opened, no major industrial nation had yet given the revolutionaries diplomatic recognition, nor was there any sign of support for providing significant investment.

Pragmatism, within limits dictated by the internationalist element of Marxism, therefore shaped Bolshevik foreign relations. Soviet Russia’s unalloyed hostility to the League of Nations before 1927 contained elements of both. But it was surely economics, not ideology, that led to the Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement (March 1921), and to Bolshevik participation in the Genoa Conference (April 1922). The latter, organized by the major industrial powers to discuss the reconstruction of the European economy, produced a rude shock: Germany and Russia, the two pariah states of Europe, independently unveiled their own Treaty of Rapallo, which officially renounced mutual claims and foresaw closer economic ties between the two. The treaty also gave Germany and Russia diplomatic leverage to play England and France off against one another. Perhaps most important of all, it laid the grounds for secret German-Soviet military cooperation: Germany could conduct training and weapons testing (forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles) on Soviet soil, and in return the Russians benefited significantly from the exposure to German military expertise. Rapallo was partially undone in 1925 when the Western powers included Germany in the Locarno Pact, which sought to stabilize European politics by achieving an agreement on permanent borders. The blow of being excluded from Locarno was softened only partially for the Soviets when Germany and the USSR reaffirmed Rapallo in 1926 with the Treaty of Berlin.

Russian relations with the West were mercurial. Britain’s first Labour government granted diplomatic recognition to the USSR in early 1924, and Italy and France—although not the United States—soon followed. By October, however, relations already became strained when the ‘Zinoviev letter’ caused a scandal during British elections. Allegedly a directive on tactics from the Comintern to the British Communist Party, the publication of this forgery played a role in the Conservative victory. By May 1927 matters deteriorated to the point that Britain severed diplomatic ties, and France demanded in October that the Soviet Union recall its ambassador. Stalin capitalized on the furore: although legitimately concerned, he publicly exaggerated the imminent danger of military conflict and deftly exploited the ‘war scare’ against the Trotsky–Zinoviev–Kamenev bloc in the politics of succession.

In the end, the Soviet state achieved little in foreign relations during NEP: nor was it able to ignite international revolution to improve appreciably its standing in Europe. When Stalin ascended to top leadership, he replaced Lenin’s policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with a philosophy that emphasized the link between internal mobilization and foreign threats: the concept of hostile capitalist encirclement. But behaving as if surrounded by enemies bent on the destruction of the country only served further to estrange the USSR. Hence Soviet Russia ended the 1920s much as it had begun the decade—without reliable allies and widely distrusted.

‘Building Socialism with Capitalist Hands’

Economic life in 1921–9 reflected the full measure of the national crisis the Bolsheviks inherited, the consequences of party political struggles, and the limitations that ideology imposed on proposed courses of action. The problems were fundamental and ubiquitous; conflict over the correct policy of industrialization left the party deeply divided. An incomplete and inconsistent commitment to NEP both nationally and locally undermined its effectiveness. Ongoing economic chaos and recurrent crises continued to plague the grass roots.

In terms of national development, the leadership felt an acute need for a strategy of industrialization. By 1921 the economy certainly had to be resuscitated for practical reasons, but other important considerations also played a part. Above all, orthodox Marxism had posited that socialism could come into being only in a fully industrialized economy. That was hardly the case in Russia: the Bolsheviks had made a ‘proletarian revolution’ in an overwhelmingly agrarian country. To square the circle, all party leaders accepted as axiomatic that Soviet Russia must industrialize to continue on the road to socialism. But that left the door open for fundamental disagreements over the tempo and short-term priorities. In the event, implementing NEP as a step in this long-term undertaking (what Lenin called ‘building socialism with capitalist hands’) in no way ensured unity even at the highest levels.

There were more pressing matters, however, before industrialization reached the top of the agenda. By 1921 the country faced almost total economic collapse: gross industrial output had fallen to less than one-fifth of the level before the First World War, production in some industries such as textiles was a mere one-tenth. Matters were hardly less catastrophic in agriculture: when the 1921 harvest produced significantly less than half the pre-war average, famine and epidemics ensued, claiming millions of lives. By 1922 hyper-inflation had driven prices, particularly those for agricultural products, to astronomical heights. In response, the government created a new currency backed by gold, the chervonets. This tight-money policy, however, caused difficulties in wage payments at many factories, triggering strikes and disorders.

The year 1923 witnessed the famous ‘scissors crisis’, a complete reversal of the price relationships of the previous year. In essence, agriculture had now begun to recover more quickly than industry. Although food was still not abundant, the shortage was no longer desperate. The supply of agricultural products thus outstripped the production of manufactured goods; as a result the index for industrial prices in 1923 rose to a level three times higher than agricultural prices. When plotted on a graph, these price indices—industrial prices rising, agricultural prices falling—resembled scissors, hence the name. In response, peasants resorted to grain-hoarding and a low level of marketing in the subsequent two years; that caused agricultural prices to recover in 1924–5, although obviously not in the way the state desired. As a result, the scissors crisis further exposed the fragility of NEP, suggested an incompatibility of private agricultural and industrial sectors, and—perhaps of greater long-term significance—reinforced the chronic fears of the kulak.

Nevertheless by 1924 the national economy began a recovery of sorts. Industrial reconstruction proved deceptively rapid: restarting factories closed during the civil war caused a sharp rise in manufacturing output. Supply networks also began to function once again: the workers who had fled during the civil war and famine made their way back to the plants. As a result, the output of large-scale industry reached nearly half its pre-war scale in 1924 and 75 per cent a year later. Industrial exports rose to nine times what they had been at the beginning of the decade, even if still but a third of pre-war figures. Recovery was still more marked in agriculture: by 1924 the cultivation of arable land approached 1913 levels, and marketable output in agriculture increased 64 per cent between 1922 and 1925.

But this was recovery, not expansion of the pre-war base. And industry, in particular, soon reached a point of diminishing returns. Seven years of warfare, followed by new hardships in the early 1920s, had destroyed a significant portion of the industrial base. There had been virtually no renewal of the capital stock since before the First World War; what the Russian civil war had not destroyed was badly worn or outmoded. Restarts could increase output, but without significant new investment it could never reach the pre-war standard. But that was precisely the Bolsheviks’ charge: to create the industrial foundation for socialism. And trade and foreign investment, although up considerably after 1921, fell far short of underwriting a venture of such magnitude.

This was the context of the party debate over industrialization. All leading protagonists agreed that the transformation was necessary and that the peasantry would absorb the chief cost. But they disagreed on three main issues: (1) tempo; (2) whether short-term development would centre first in heavy or light industry; and, (3) the degree of peasant entrepreneurship the state would tolerate during the process. Simply put, all sides agreed that capital investment would be generated in agriculture and ‘pumped over’, as the communists phrased it, to the industrial sector. The left—Trotsky and the economist Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, joined later by Zinoviev and Kamenev—favoured the rapid development of heavy industry and the substitution of centralized planning for the market. The right—Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii—championed a gradual tempo, the development of consumer goods manufacturing, and above all an alliance (smychka) with the peasantry. In their view, a tax on peasant profits could generate the needed investment capital. Scholars frequently present Stalin’s position as simply opportunistic. In one popular scenario, he first cynically sides with the right; then, after the left was politically defeated in 1927, he shifts maliciously to a position even more radical than that of Trotsky–Preobrazhenskii in order to attack the right.

In reality, the politics was more subtle and complex. It began in 1924, when Preobrazhenskii addressed the Bolsheviks’ need to create the material pre-conditions for socialism in Russia. Marx had written that in the early stages of Western industrialization, entrepreneurs practised ‘primitive capitalist accumulation’ by denying workers the full value of their labour and by reinvesting a significant portion of the surplus profit. Preobrazhenskii called for something analogous in the USSR. Since, however, the majority of toilers were not factory workers, but peasants, Preobrazhenskii proposed a ‘primitive socialist accumulation’ by turning the terms of trade against the peasantry. By setting state prices for agricultural produce artificially low but artificially high for industrial goods, the state could create the analogue of profit to be reinvested. This position, with its hostility towards peasant prosperity and to market economics, signalled a fundamental attack on NEP.

Bukharin countered in 1925. He argued that the Preobrazhenskii plan risked alienating the peasants, and he reiterated the logic of the smychka. Not exploiting but taxing a prosperous peasantry made more economic and political sense. For Bukharin, industrialization would best result from a healthy economy that was reinvigorating itself in stages from the bottom upward. In this spirit he borrowed a phrase attributed to François Guizot that would haunt him politically: hoping to drive home the importance of grass-roots prosperity for long-term economic growth, Bukharin encouraged the peasants to ‘enrich yourselves’. He warned that investment in heavy industry, as Preobrazhenskii proposed, was suicidal: such ventures required several years to produce a return, and in the interim the Soviet economy would collapse. Investment in the production of consumer goods, he reasoned, was more rational in an impoverished country that needed a rapid return on its limited capital. Preobrazhenskii replied that Bukharin’s more gradual tempo posed the larger danger. What was left of the national economy would erode while implementing it.

Stalin was not simply opportunistic: he too was a proponent of heavy industrialization in 1924–5, but in his own way. At that time Stalin was politically aligned with Bukharin, and he allowed Bukharin the main role in articulating their public position against the opposition. It is doubly significant, however, that Stalin’s formula of ‘socialism in one country’ in December 1924 ascribed primary importance to the development of heavy industry. Of even greater importance, before 1925 had ended, Stalin took special care to distance himself publicly from Bukharin’s slogan ‘enrich yourselves’, which opponents of Bukharin denounced as excessively sympathetic to the kulaks.

It is, of course, beyond question that Stalin wanted fervently to become party leader in the 1920s, but this does not mean that he desired only power, free of ideological or policy preferences. Something far more complex guided his behaviour. Stalin adjusted his short-term course of action several times during the decade in response to manifold crises, but the same can be said of all party leaders. More significant is his unwavering commitment to certain ideas—above all, an ongoing preference for heavy industry and an abiding fear that kulaks withholding grain from the market could undermine the state and its programmes. Equally consistent was his antidote of using state power to deal with recalcitrant social elements. Thus, when Stalin attacked the right opposition in late 1927–early 1928, this marked an assault on his remaining political rivals and an intensification of a position he had defined by mid-decade. In early 1928, when he blamed the kulaks for the grain shortage (and, by extension, for jeopardizing the industrialization programme) he certainly brought his ideas more clearly into public view, but they were nothing new. The Stalinist tempo of industrialization and collectivization would later outstrip anything Trotsky and Preobrazhenskii had envisioned, but it was foreshadowed in the positions he established earlier against gradualism in industrialization and against NEP agriculture.

The full scope of economics, however, reached far beyond policy-making at the national level. Local considerations loomed large, for NEP pulled the state and society in contradictory and frequently conflicting directions. It ended outright starvation, but not hard times. It also renewed social antagonisms: most Russians still struggled to subsist, while private traders—the Nepmen—often made exorbitant profits and enjoyed a life-style of conspicuous consumption.

The petulance of lower officials, in combination with a limited enthusiasm at the top, produced an inconsistent implementation of NEP in various regions of the country. Private trade was legal but not secure. Some local officials disobeyed national directives and arrested Nepmen on the basis of laws already repealed, or simply on their own whim. In 1923–4, as Lenin lay dying, the national leadership responded to public resentment against Nepmen by arbitrarily closing 300,000 private enterprises. This proved short-sighted: by late 1924 it was clear that the state itself could not provide many of the services it had eliminated. In some locales, driving out the private traders had closed up all supplies; areas called ‘trade deserts’ sprang up where Nepmen had previously operated. But the period 1925–7—not coincidentally the high point of Bukharin’s influence—brought a policy reversal; it was during these years that the Soviet state showed its greatest tolerance of private enterprise under NEP. Understandably sceptical of resuming business at first, many Nepmen had to be reconvinced of the state’s sincerity, but by the end of 1927 the market was in full swing again.

The following year, however, brought yet another change of course. In early 1928 Stalin’s rhetoric against the ‘right deviation’ began to include talk of a showdown with both kulaks and Nepmen. The state used administrative measures to crack down on private entrepreneurs, and it increased business taxes exponentially. If a Nepman somehow scraped together enough to pay an initial levy the tax-collector doubled the bill on his next visit. The state even applied a retroactive tax to those who had already gone out of business. Those who could not pay had their possessions seized and were thrown into the street; they lost access to ration cards, housing, and other public services. The entire process could take as little as three days.

Their fate as lishentsy aroused scant sympathy. NEP had brought back not only the market, but also prostitution, gambling, drugs, and other affronts to public morality. The fact that many Nepmen flaunted their wealth caused deep anger. Moreover, the preferential treatment the state gave the trained specialists, engineers, and factory managers from the old regime, who were technically not Nepmen per se, did nothing to make NEP more popular with the masses. In a different vein, a large number of Russians distrusted the profit motive and operated from the belief that personal enrichment can come only at the expense of another. The prevailing prices beyond the means of most citizens certainly reinforced this view. In the end, Nepmen became the focus of all these resentments.

The lowest level of the economy experienced additional problems. Stricter cost-accounting in reopened factories and the demobilization of six million Red Army soldiers increased unemployment from 640,000 in 1923 to more than 1.3 million in 1929. In addition, rural poverty drove the desperate into the cities despite the shortage of jobs. Moscow, for example, gained 100,000 new residents per year. Not surprisingly, the major urban centres experienced acute housing problems: not enough spaces and chronic disrepair in overcrowded, occupied units. The homeless population overwhelmed urban social services. Gangs of homeless orphans, the besprizorniki, in combination with the unemployed, contributed to a serious rise in crime as both groups fed an expanding corps of thieves, petty hoodlums, and prostitutes.

The situation, however, was not universally bleak. Workers’ real wages rose steadily, albeit slowly, throughout the decade. By the late 1920s the shortages of goods and services were far less serious than at the beginning of NEP. The Soviet state could point to legitimate improvements in public health, working conditions, and infant mortality rates. And if workers still devoted too much of their income and energy to acquiring housing, food, and clothing, the standard of living stood well above that of 1918–21.

The village underwent its own transformation. By 1921 millions had acquired private holdings from the seizure of land belonging to the nobility, Church, crown, and richer peasants. As a result, the number of farms rose sharply, but the average size fell. In addition, the peasant commune—subjected to a frontal assault in the Stolypin reforms—reappeared. And when the commune reinstituted traditional, collective modes of cultivation, agriculture regressed technologically. Inefficient strip-farming, along with the primitive three-field system of crop rotation, once again predominated. In 1928 more than five million households utilized the traditional wooden plough, the sokha; the scythe and sickle still reaped half the annual harvest. Such backwardness of technique meant a low yield per acre, which in turn aggravated the long-standing peasant ‘land hunger’. With more mouths to feed than such agriculture could support, the village had to push its marginal elements towards the city.

This village economics both influenced and was influenced by other realities. Social differentiation in the rural areas narrowed;as extremes of income closed, categories such as kulak, middle peasant, and poor peasant became blurred. Moreover, the Soviet state had only a minimal administrative presence in the countryside. After grain requisitioning ended in 1921, the villages had recouped much of their pre-revolutionary insularity and control over internal affairs. Although rural soviets formally held power, the peasant commune actually exercised the principal authority over day-to-day economics and law. And it was not until 1925 that the Communist Party made a serious attempt to increase membership in its rural organizations. In short, the Russian village—historically separated from and suspicious of the towns—closed ranks. In 1921–9, it identified with its own past and its own interests, not with Bolshevik visions of a revolutionary transformation.

‘The New Soviet Man’

Despite upheavals, the Bolsheviks did not narrow their social vision, which went far beyond the transfer of political authority, reassessment of foreign relations, and redistribution of goods and services discussed thus far. While that political and economic reorientation was a mandatory first step, the Bolsheviks understood ‘revolution’ more broadly: it must also encompass a fundamental transformation of not only social institutions, but also values, myths, norms, mores, aesthetics, popular images, and traditions. Ultimately, the result would be not only a citizen of a new type (known in Bolshevik parlance as ‘the new Soviet man’) but nothing less than the recasting of the human condition for the better.

In 1921–9, therefore, a central element in the process the Bolsheviks called ‘building socialism’ was the inculcation of a new world-view. Bolshevism held that if Russia were to progress from its present condition through socialism to communism, society would have to understand its collective experience in a new way, that is, in terms of the rational application of scientific principles to human development. As Marxists, the Bolsheviks believed this would promote a more objective understanding of social existence that would, in turn, achieve greater mass co-operation and co-ordination among citizens. As Russian revolutionaries, they also intended that it would enable science and technology to help overcome economic and material backwardness.

Such an undertaking presented a multi-faceted challenge. At the very least it required extensive utilization of state power, and central authorities initiated ambitious projects—ranging from the eradication of illiteracy to the electrification of the whole country. By the end of NEP, the regime would ultimately use its administrative power to attempt to reconceptualize law, eliminate religious superstitions, recast education, and in general construct a proletarian culture in both the aesthetic and sociological sense. But wielding power was not enough: the Bolsheviks recognized that they could not simply impose new modes of thinking on society. Laws and decrees alone, even when backed by repression, could not automatically alter popular consciousness. They therefore also launched an unprecedented effort to educate and indoctrinate the masses.

Some campaigns to create the ‘new Soviet man’ addressed specific audiences. Party organizations such as the Zhenotdel (Women’s Department) and the Komsomol (Young Communist League) concentrated on distinct groups, but suffered from the fact that—as in politics and economics—the party did not speak with a single voice. Even before the announcement in early 1930 that the Zhenotdel would be disbanded, for example, tepid support from the party leadership and open hostility from local officials undercut agitational and instructional work among women. For its part, the Komsomol instructed adolescents on topics as diverse as basic politics and sexual morality, but was frequently criticized for accomplishing little.

Other messages focused on correcting specific problems and were aimed at society as a whole. To deal with the problem of chronic alcohol abuse, for example, the Bolsheviks initially continued the prohibition policy adopted by the tsarist state in 1914. When this failed to stem the widespread production of illegal spirits, the government conceded defeat and in 1925 reintroduced the state production of vodka. In a different instance, until conservatives finally prevailed in mid-1929, reformers sought to improve criminal justice by making penalties more lenient and taking into account the circumstances surrounding crime. To cite a third case, the state took steps to improve public health and sanitation. Building on reforms initiated in the last decades of imperial Russia, the People’s Commissariat of Health raised the level of professionalism in health care markedly after 1921; preventive medicine and the curtailment of infectious diseases subsequently made impressive strides. But inadequate funding impeded additional plans to improve sanitation, and the reluctance of doctors to take rural posts left medicine in the countryside largely in its pre-revolutionary condition.

In their effort to create a new social ethos, the Bolsheviks also devoted special energy to redefining the family and the individual. Perceiving the patriarchal, religiously sanctioned family as tsarist society in microcosm, Soviet state legislation in 1918 gave official recognition only to civil marriages, made divorce readily available, declared the legal equality of women, and granted full rights to children born out of wedlock. Subsequent decrees stripped fathers of their extensive legal and proprietary authority over wives and children and dropped adultery from the list of criminal offences. Easing the divorce law had particularly rapid and widespread ramifications. Under tsarism, civil and church law made divorce impossible except for a few, and then only after lengthy proceedings. Allowing Soviet citizens to dissolve marriages easily produced a true social revolution. In addition to contributing to a general atmosphere of emancipation for all citizens, liberalizing divorce assaulted patriarchal authority, provided women with new social latitude, and co-opted a valued prerogative of the Russian Orthodox Church.

But these innovations also led to family instability and astronomical rates of family dissolution. The 1918 provisions also made it difficult to collect alimony and support for children; by the time of NEP a significant portion of married women equated easy divorce with desertion. In theory, the emerging socialist society was to assume greater responsibility for child-rearing and for social welfare; in reality, however, such plans were no more than declarations of intent, for the state simply lacked the resources to implement them. It was not the state but individual women—whose wages rose but still lagged behind pay for males and who endured higher rates of unemployment—who bore the brunt. Thus, while the new family law seemed to enhance the legal position of women, it also subverted the males’ traditional responsibilities towards wives and children.

The issue of divorce was closely tied to an emotional exchange taking place at the same time over public morality. One side attacked traditional standards of sexual conduct as arbitrary bourgeois restraints on the individual, and there was no shortage of young men in particular who rallied to the philosophy of free love. Those less sanguine about discarding existing conventions too quickly however, emphasized the already familiar issues of social stability, male accountability, and economic plight of the female. In the second half of the 1920s, these champions of collective responsibility prevailed over the proponents of individual choice—or, to view matters from another perspective, social conservatives defeated supporters of sexual liberation. In any event, both the party and Komsomol began to take a more direct interest in the personal lives of members, strenuously to oppose promiscuity, and to uphold heterosexual marriage as the social norm.

The introduction of legalized abortion produced additional tension. On the eve of NEP, the state reacted to a spate of illegal abortions by allowing doctors to terminate pregnancies in state hospitals without charge. This decision, although expedient, complicated the issue of building a new society. Indeed, according to prevailing wisdom among state officials, neither abortions nor the rights of the individual over society were being condoned. Rather, the argument ran, in the more prosperous times that lay in the future, once an adequate child-care system was in place, and when better-educated women achieved a higher socialist consciousness, Soviet female citizens would recognize the social obligation of child-bearing. This did not occur in the 1920s. By the middle of the decade, registered abortions climbed to more than 55 per 100 births. Evidence also indicates that in the countryside the travel and paperwork involved in a hospital abortion caused rural women to continue to rely on illegal practitioners and folk remedies.

The state, therefore, moderated some of its early enthusiasms with the Family Code of 1926. This new legislation addressed the issue of desertion by extending official sanction—and with it the right to alimony and child support—to unregistered unions, and it established joint ownership of property acquired during the marriage. But it also relaxed divorce requirements further by transferring jurisdiction from the courts to a simple procedure at a government office, with notification of the other spouse sometimes only by postcard. By the end of the 1920s the urban Soviet divorce rate was the highest in the world.

In the countryside the impact was less. Church weddings were sustained far more strongly in rural areas, where marriage and birth-rates remained high. Divorces, although more numerous than previously, never approached city levels; peasants proved less eager to dissolve marital unions than their urban counterparts. Also, when the reassertion of communal authority once again made the peasant household the predominant social unit, the prospect of dividing joint property was a legal nightmare. As a result, traditional rather than Soviet legality continued to prevail in the village.

Soviet youth, the citizens of the future, also occupied a central place in revolutionary thinking, and here the Bolsheviks faced an especially difficult situation: juvenile ‘hooliganism’ and homeless orphans had already emerged under tsarism, and the years of world war, revolution, and civil war had greatly exacerbated the problems. Thus the first years of NEP reduced the early Soviet declaration that ‘there will be no courts or prisons for children’ to a pious wish. By 1921 the besprizorniki had not only proliferated in numbers, but exhibited behaviour indicating that many were beyond the reach of any attempt to reintegrate them. As a result, in the 1920s far more besprizorniki encountered the criminal justice system than experimental rehabilitation programmes. Especially in the first half of the decade, homeless children became a fixture of the Soviet social landscape, wreaking havoc that caused all of society to demand action.

Concern for the young, however, was not limited to dealing with juvenile miscreants. Creating the ‘new Soviet man’ also demanded a revolution in education, seen as the engine of social change. Narkompros (the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment) was called upon simultaneously to expurgate the social residue of bourgeois society, produce proletarian citizens, and cope with a dearth of economic resources. Ideally, Soviet education would transcend the narrowness (deemed characteristic of the tsarist approach), enhance the substance of instruction, and also eradicate élitism by providing free public education for all. Innovators in Narkompros devised a new pedagogy, the ‘Complex Method’, which would not teach just academic subjects, but life itself. The Complex Method would integrate the study of nature, society, and labour in order to prepare graduates for successful entry into both the labour force and society. In addition, the new pedagogy would promote secularism by teaching materialist, scientific values.

There were successes as well as problems. The retention rate of girls enrolled in elementary schools in urban areas, but not total enrolment of girls, rose in the 1920s. Workers and peasants received increased access to higher education. A special institution for workers, the rabfak, provided an equivalent of secondary education; by 1928 rabfak graduates constituted a full third of entrants to institutions of higher learning. Night courses were added, and there was an aggressive national campaign to end illiteracy. Also, by 1921 the newly founded Communist Academy and the Institute of Red Professors were training Marxist scholars for careers in the social sciences.

But failure was also common. Shortages of funds plagued all facets of education, and schools were forced to supplement their meagre budgets by reintroducing student fees. In addition, Narkompros encountered sharp internal divisions over the wisdom of the Complex Method; resistance was even greater in the schools. Most experienced teachers ignored the new curriculum and continued to teach traditional subjects. Moreover, classroom instructors greeted secularism with little enthusiasm, especially in the numerous instances when rural teachers were also wives of priests. Finally, the preferential enrolment of more workers and peasants in universities—where males still outnumbered females by a margin of three to one—fostered a lowering of standards, and charges of faulty preparation also haunted the graduates of the Institute of Red Professors.

No Bolshevik assault on tradition could overlook religion. Existence, Marx taught, determines consciousness, and only knowledge derived from observed reality, without the intercession of any external force or mover, is valid. Therefore, if religion had been ‘the opiate of the masses’ under the old order, religious belief in the new world constituted superstition and, as such, an impediment to creating a progressive, scientific society. In 1918, therefore, the Soviet state decreed a separation of Church and state that nationalized church land and property without compensation. Outside the law, anti-religious militants desecrated churches and monasteries in the atmosphere of atrocity during the Russian civil war, and a significant number of bishops and priests died violently before 1921.

Given the party’s implacable hostility, it might appear incongruous to describe NEP as a period when the persecution of religion was relaxed, but compared to 1918–21, this was in fact the case. Not wanting to alienate the peasants further, the government softened its attack between 1921 and the onset of the forced collectivization of agriculture in 1929. Thus the state allowed both religious and anti-religious propaganda, and its Commission on Religious Questions advocated the eradication of religion only through agitation and education. The commission restrained rather than incited anti-religious violence and regularly ruled in favour of groups of believers against local officials. The Union of Militant Atheists did not hold its founding congress until 1925; it began serious work only following its second gathering three years later. Anti-religious propaganda was therefore the responsibility of all party organs, which in practice meant that it was conducted ad hoc and at most incorporated within its general advocacy of secularism. Even in national publications such as Bezbozhnik (The Godless), anti-religious tracts and caricatures of priests shared space with articles on popular science, public health, the eradication of illiteracy, the evils of anti-Semitism, and even the improvement of personal hygiene.

State and Church of course remained foes. In this regard, the Russian Orthodox Church was vulnerable, for it entered the revolutionary era divided and demoralized. Its leadership was ill-prepared to resist the surrender of sacrosanct valuables to the state, ostensibly for famine relief in 1921–2. The fact that liberal offshoots of the main Church were often more accommodating to state power undercut Orthodoxy further, as did the rising number of conversions to other denominations, especially the Baptist Church. Moreover, official disapproval by no means halted illegal assaults on churches and clergy; local soviets utilized existing laws to confiscate places of worship for use as workers’ clubs, cinemas, and libraries. Finally, as NEP came to an end, the state enacted a new law on religious associations in 1929 that restricted religious activity only to registered congregations, banned all religious instruction and proselytizing, and presaged the still more brutal assault on the Church soon to come.

To what degree did this mixture of repression and education produce the desired result? On the one hand, Church and state sources of the period both reported a sharp decline of religiosity in the cities, especially among the young. There was also no shortage of testimony from the countryside that prerevolutionary peasant anticlericalism had grown into religious indifference during NEP, among village males in particular. Frequently, the mock processions staged by the Komsomol to parody Easter and Christmas worship bitterly split villages along generational lines. On the other hand, the Church and state regarded peasant women as consistently devout. And in the realm of religion-as-social-ritual, some who ceased observing (including party members) nevertheless hedged their bets by baptizing their children or undergoing a second, church wedding. Soviet attempts to raise labour productivity by eliminating the numerous rural religious holidays were unqualified failures, while at the same time traditional apocalyptic formulas—including the coming of the Antichrist—entered the world of peasant rumour when the threat of collectivization grew. In the end, it is not possible to quantify the level of religious belief in the 1920s since the 1926 census contained no query about it, but in 1937 57 per cent of the population still identified themselves as believers (45 per cent of those in their twenties, but 78 per cent of those in their fifties). In sum, formal religion loosened its hold on Soviet society during NEP, especially among the younger and urban segments. Since this drop was both incomplete and not accompanied by the eradication of Russian belief in supernatural intervention in human affairs, however, the official state position by 1929 was that the most important anti-religious work still lay ahead.

All dimensions of the new world view converged in high and popular art. As NEP opened, the revolutionary society was already embroiled in controversy over how best to reconstruct culture. Could a proletarian culture evolve organically, or must the new society first master bourgeois elements and build further? Opinions differed. Revolutionary intellectuals in an aggressive institution called ‘Proletkult’ (Proletarian Cultural-Educational Institutions) wanted to create an entirely new culture to operate independently of government institutions (especially Narkompros), and to receive extensive state support. In addition, artists working both inside and outside the Proletkult championed a number of movements—Futurism, Constructivism, Objectivism, Acmeism, Cubism, and others—rooted in pre-revolutionary radical expression that was now liberated. And among the intelligentsia that comprised much of the party leadership, many agreed with Lenin and Trotsky that Soviet society must make bourgeois aesthetics the basis of proletarian culture. In 1921–9, all these views reached the public.

It was no coincidence that in a country battling against illiteracy, the Bolsheviks placed special emphasis on the visual arts. The party had been an innovator in the political applications of poster art in its rise to power, and it continued to rely on this powerful means for influencing mass attitudes. The revolutionaries placed strong faith in other visual media as well. The cinematic and thematic innovations of directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Dovzhenko, and Vsevelod Pudovkin put the Soviets in the front rank of world film in the 1920s. They and others combined the art of political persuasion with imagery and techniques unprecedented in the medium. Frequently they succeeded too well, however, and their sophisticated presentations baffled their intended audience, who in the 1920s continued to prefer escapist American and German adventure films to those designed for their edification.

Painting and sculpture entered the process in a related way. Simply put, pre-revolutionary experimental artists such as Kazimir Malevich and Vasilii Kandinskii viewed art as an essentially spiritual activity free of ideological or other restraints, and they and like-minded others continued to produce prolifically during the 1920s. But their view collided with the conception of art advanced by the likes of Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko—that the artist was essentially an engineer in the service of proletarian society, that his art must not only be beautiful, but useful. Acting on slogans like ‘art into life’ and ‘art is as dangerous as religion as an escapist activity’, these Constructivists produced works that not only celebrated the mechanistic, materialist world-view, but demonstrated how to implement it. Such thinking inspired art, not all of it strictly Constructivist, that ranged from the idealization of ordinary objects to a more noble representation of labourers.

The artistic currents also influenced architecture. One did not have to be a communist to envision a future world of skyscrapers and rationally designed, utilitarian working and living spaces. In the first half of the 1920s, economic scarcity largely limited innovation to the realm of conceptualization, but the ideas were imaginative and diverse—garden cities, symmetrical urban utopias, and high-rise apartment dwellings. After 1925, however, it became possible actually to carry out designs that fostered additional creativity. Everything from the redesign of household furniture to workers’ clubs and massive public buildings became the object of architectural scrutiny, and the Soviet pavilion was by far the most radical at the 1925 Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts.

NEP influenced the non-visual arts as well. In music, important emigrations weakened the ranks of classical composers, despite the emergence of Dmitrii Shostakovich in the mid-1920s. In popular culture, while Nepmen supported pre-revolutionary forms, jazz made its first inroads, but met with a mixed review from the party. In literature, the situation was different. A variety of poets and satirists—Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Esenin, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelshtam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Zoshchenko—evoked every emotion, from shocking society out of its bourgeois complacency to scoring the foibles of the new regime. Fedor Gladkov’s Cement was the first proletarian novel, but many others soon delved into the revolutionary experience. New works recounted heroic events and employed the genre of science fiction to put forward utopian and dystopian visions.

By the late 1920s, however, eclecticism in the arts came under as much fire as did gradualism in other spheres. Militants in the Komsomol, Institute of Red Professors, and a number of organizations such as RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) grew impatient and pressed for a more rapid adoption of proletarian values. Youthful exuberance, idealism, and the results of protracted exposure to state propaganda inspired confrontations over a correct social politics and led to the removal of gradualists and the former bourgeoisie from positions of influence. In short, the pre-conditions of Stalinism that had emerged in politics and economics converged with a predisposition towards cultural revolution. At the end of the decade, the strategy of creating a new world-view shifted from inculcation to imposition.

Conclusion

NEP, a period of experimentation, taught valuable lessons. When the Bolsheviks came to power, they understood more clearly what they opposed than how to implement a singular conception of the future. And while the decade of the 1920s produced a wide range of innovation, it also tapped a strong reservoir of traditionalism. By the mid 1920s experimentation was under fire from within. Revolutionary ardour in politics, economics, and society did not diminish, but life itself forced a serious reassessment of what was both possible and desirable. By 1928–9, therefore, Bolshevik rule had given rise to widespread sentiment for realizing the promise of the proletarian revolution more rapidly, and it had also spawned a backlash against the results of ill-conceived programmes. Ironically, these sentiments were as much complementary as conflicting. And both would play a central role in the Stalinist upheavals about to begin.

11. Building Stalinism 1929–1941

LEWIS SIEGELBAUM

The 1930s brought monumental change—reflected most dramatically in the great purges and ‘terror’, most fundamentally in the campaign to collectivize agriculture and build a modern industrial economy. The regime expended, prodigiously and wastefully, human capital in what was advertised as the building of socialism, but what can better be described as the building of Stalinism.

THE 1930s have long represented a watershed in the grand narratives of Soviet history. According to the Marxist-Leninist version, de rigueur in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s, it was the decade of ‘socialist construction’. Under the leadership of I. V. Stalin (or in the post-1956 de-Stalinized variant, the Communist Party), the Soviet people confounded sceptics, both domestic and foreign, by rapidly and enthusiastically constructing gigantic factories and dams, transforming backward villages into collective farms, and in the process becoming citizens of a genuinely socialist society. Their achievement was celebrated and formalized in the ‘Stalin Constitution’ of 1936, which guaranteed civil rights and equality among all the peoples of the USSR. But hectic industrialization and collectivization were not simply functions of ideological correctness. The threat of imperialist aggression that loomed throughout the period further justified this tremendous effort. Industrialization thus guaranteed survival of the nation and the cause of socialism that it represented.

Diametrically opposed is a version more familiar to Western scholars. It holds that in the 1930s the Soviet Union became a full-blown ‘totalitarian’ society in which formal legality—including the 1936 Constitution—was a mere smokescreen for the dictatorship of the Communist Party and the caprice of its General Secretary, Stalin. The labour camps that dotted the outer reaches of the nation represented one manifestation of the regime’s repressiveness; the collective farms, supposedly an advancement on small-scale private agriculture, were also a form of incarceration, a ‘second serfdom’ for the peasantry. Industrial workers, ostensibly the ruling class, found themselves subjected to a harsh regimen of speed-ups and without recourse to independent representation or organized protest, while the intelligentsia was cowed into silence or conformity.

As different as are these two renditions of the Soviet 1930s, they exhibit two common qualities. One is the emphasis on transformation. That is, both acknowledge that between 1929 and 1941 the Soviet Union changed dramatically and, so it seemed, irrevocably. The other is that they absolutize the transformations they register—categorically positive in the Marxist-Leninist version and no less categorically negative in the Western view.

Obviously, both cannot be right. Even in the heyday of the Cold War, when scholarship was at its most polarized, one could find formulations that fell somewhere between the two poles. On the left, non-Soviet Marxists posited a ‘state capitalist’ social formation in which the bureaucracy functioned as the ruling class. Others stressed the neo-traditionalist elements of Stalinism, perceiving a ‘Great Retreat’ to traditional Russian (Orthodox) values, while still others argued for a more polymorphic understanding of power and its exercise.

Only in the 1970s, however, did professional historians begin to contribute to the scholarly discourse, offering treatments more subtle than those available in earlier accounts. This new work, often social historical in nature, made a conceptual shift from preoccupation with the state to a focus on society.

Consequently, the totalitarian model of Soviet politics, which depicted the state as the absolute arbiter of people’s fortunes, began to yield to an understanding of how different social groups—workers and managers on the shop-floor, peasants on state and collective farms, and the non-Russian peoples—employed techniques of resistance and accommodation to ‘negotiate’ their relationship with party and state officials. Excursions into cultural history and anthropology have since deepened this understanding through the inclusion of such cultural practices as anniversary celebrations, polar expeditions, aviation, music, film, the theatre, and literature.

Ironically but understandably, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the annihilation of its Communist Party has led to the revival of the totalitarian model, especially within the Russian scholarly community. This is not necessarily a bad thing: ‘revisionist’ scholarship tended to obscure the total claim of the regime on its population, a claim that demanded acclamatory participation and was sanctioned by coercive, even arbitrary, forms of rule. Even if this claim was mythic and unrealizable, its very aspiration was of fundamental importance, for it shaped—or at least affected—social and personal lives in the 1930s, 1940s, and for some time thereafter. None the less, this ‘totalitarian’ state was rife with turbulence in the formal institutions of state and society in the 1930s; indeed, this instability was inherent in the Stalinist articulation of a totalistic agenda. In seeking to actualize its total claim on society, the Stalinist regime unleashed social mobility and flux; the lethal politics of implementation and a political culture of grandiosity and conformity masked an inherent unpredictability in political and social life.

‘There is no fortress the Bolsheviks cannot take’

After the confusion of NEP, a policy that purported to build socialism through capitalist practices but appeared to many communists to build capitalism through socialist retreat, the Stalinist initiatives—the ‘Great Turn’—appeared to set priorities right. Instead of letting the market mediate in relations between state-owned industry and peasant agriculture, the state would centrally allocate resources and assign prices according to its own determination of rationality and need. Instead of 25 million peasant households producing agricultural goods on small plots with primitive methods and inadequate machinery, the state would assist peasants to establish collective farms, practise scientific farming, and remit their surpluses as partial payment for the equipment they leased. And in contrast to high levels of industrial unemployment endemic to NEP, investment in construction and industrial expansion would provide millions of new jobs and expand the size of the proletariat.

This programme was nothing if not ambitious. Devised and advertised as the ‘Five-Year Plan for Industrialization and Socialist Construction’, it represented a radical break with previous economic policy and previous understanding of economic laws—now condemned as ‘bourgeois’. For the first time, the state would not only intervene in economic relations but actually serve as the chief, even sole, manager of the economy. In its ‘optimal’ version, the Five-Year Plan aimed to increase investment by 228 per cent, industrial production by 180 per cent, electrical generation by 335 per cent, and the industrial labour force by 39 per cent. But even these levels were deemed too modest by the regime: by the end of 1929 ‘Five in Four’—that is, the fulfilment of the Plan in four years—became official policy.

How is this ‘riotous optimism’, in Alec Nove’s phrase, to be explained? Was it designed to mobilize available human resources—heedless of the real capabilities for reaching targets? This is an intriguing possibility, but not yet substantiated by concrete evidence. Or was this a political plan to provoke and discredit ‘Right Oppositionists’ (Nikolai Bukharin and others), who sought to scale down targets? It can be argued that Stalin exploited the ‘politics’ of the plan, but that the process of target inflation goes beyond such tactical manœuvres. The circumstantial should not be overlooked: with the onset of the Great Depression, the Five Year Plan had tremendous propagandistic value. Indeed, the Soviet regime expended much effort to demonstrate the contrast between general economic crisis in the capitalist world and the extraordinary feats of construction and industrial expansion in the Soviet Union. Technomania was a further impulse: the introduction of new mechanized technology, much of it imported from the West, promised bountiful, even unimaginable returns.

But the ‘over-ambitious’ Five-Year Plan (Holland Hunter), and in a larger sense the entire Stalin revolution, derived from the merger of two hitherto discrete elements within Bolshevism. One was Prometheanism, the belief that collective human effort could accomplish transformative miracles. The other was revolutionary maximalism, a psychology of egalitarianism, expropriation, even a belief in the creative role of violence. The former had its roots in nineteenth-century machine worship; the latter in the voluntarist strain of populists of the 1870s and Bolsheviks (in contrast to Mensheviks) after the turn of the century. Together, they comprised a new political culture, one that sought to ‘catch up to and overtake’ the advanced capitalist countries but, in its very haste, reproduced some elements of backward Russia.

Promoted from the top and exalted by the emerging cult of Stalin, the new political culture set the tone for industrialization and a good deal else. As Moshe Lewin has noted, ‘the readiness not to bother about cost, not being too squeamish about means, the ability to press hard on institutions and people—this was the style and the temperament of those Stalinists, for whom most old guard Bolsheviks were by now too European and too “liberal”’. Pressed by V. M. Molotov, G. K. Ordzhonikidze, L. M. Kaganovich, and other Politburo members who fanned out across the country on trouble-shooting missions, the directors of industrial enterprises and far-flung construction sites resorted to all manner of stratagems in their dealings with supply agencies and in turn pressed hard on their subordinates. Provincial (obkom) party secretaries experienced the same sort of pressure and likewise learned to deflect it downwards. As a result, Stalin concentrated power at the top even as he diffused responsibility downward through thousands of vintiki (little screws) who had their own strategies for survival.

Industrialization was analogous to a gigantic military campaign—with recruitment levies, mobilizations, ‘fronts’ (Donbas coal, the Dneprstroi dam, Magnitogorsk, the Stalingrad Tractor Factory), ‘light cavalry raids’ of the Komsomol against bureaucratic practices, heroic ‘shock troops of labour’ thrown into the breach, and victories (mostly symbolic) and frequent setbacks. In this frenzied atmosphere, replete with threats, verbal abuse, and recrimination, Angst was combined with enthusiasm, individual opportunism with collective effort. The result was a constant state of emergency, ubiquitous shortage, and near total chaos.

Yet, by 1932 the regime could boast of some real achievements. Gross industrial production, measured in 1926–7 roubles, rose from 18.3 milliards to 43.3 milliards, actually surpassing the optimal plan. Producers’ goods, valued at 6.0 milliards in 1927–8, reached 23.1 milliards in 1932 compared to a projected 18.1 milliards, and within that category, the value of machinery more than quadrupled. Even taking into account considerable statistical inflation (i.e. the overpricing of machinery), these were impressive results. Less impressive were the rise in consumer goods production—from 12.3 milliard to 20.2 milliard roubles—and significant shortfalls in the output of coal, electricity, and steel. Total employment in construction, transportation, and industry did surpass the plan, increasing from 11.3 million to 22.8 million people.

The War against the Peasants

Simultaneously Stalin launched an assault on the final bastion of the old order—the hinterlands that encompassed the predominantly grain-growing provinces of Russia and Ukraine, the arid steppes of Central Asia, and the hunting and fishing preserves of the far north and Siberia. Here, according to the census of 1926, lived nearly 80 per cent of the Soviet Union’s 142 million people. Here too was the greatest challenge to the Communist Party leadership and its ambitions for socialist construction. Communists were few and far between in the Soviet countryside: in July 1928 they numbered 317,000 (22.7 per cent of the party’s total membership)—one communist for every 336 rural dwellers. Most were recent recruits with only the most tenuous grasp of communist ideology. Although teachers, agronomists, and other white-collar professionals represented the state and could propagandize the fruits of Soviet rule, the peasant masses generally were distrustful of ‘their’ village soviets and the Soviet government at large, a wariness borne of a history of endless depredations by outsiders.

This attitude was mutual. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of ‘alliance’ (smychka) or rather because prosperous peasants (kulaks, literally ‘the tightfisted’) seemed to profit from the concessions associated with NEP, Soviet authorities regarded the peasantry as a petty bourgeois mass of small property-holders and a major barrier to the building of socialism. By all accounts, the grain procurement crisis of 1927–8 was the turning-point in this conflictual relationship. Having personally supervised the campaign to seize grain and other foodstuffs in the Urals and western Siberia, Stalin hit on the idea of organizing collective and state farms to pump out surpluses. These rural production units, fitfully and ineffectually sponsored in the past, henceforth became the regime’s formula for socialist construction in the countryside that was to serve the over-arching goal of industrialization.

The industrialization drive itself was suffused with military metaphors, but collectivization was the real thing, a genuine war against the peasants. The ‘fortresses’ in this war were the peasants’ ‘material values’—their land, livestock, draught animals, and implements, all of which were to be confiscated and pooled as collective property. Party propagandists characterized mass collectivization as a ‘rural October’, analogous to the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Petrograd in 1917. But collectivization and the resistance it provoked among the peasants cost vastly more in lives than the October Revolution or even the ensuing civil war.

Not all peasants opposed collectivization. The poorest elements in the villages (the bedniak families without land or the means to work it) probably welcomed the prospect of gaining access to the property of their better-off neighbours. But the mass of ‘middle peasants’ (seredniaki) was not swayed by promises of tractors and credits. As a peasant told Maurice Hindus (a Russian-Jewish émigré who visited his native village), ‘Hoodlums and loafers … might readily join a kolkhoz. What have they to lose? But decent people? They are khoziaeva [independent producers and householders], masters, with an eye for order, for results. But what could they say in a kolkhoz? What could they do except carry out the orders of someone else. That’s the way I look at it.’

The way Stalin looked at it, as he made clear at a party conference in April 1929, was that the kulaks were fomenting opposition to collectivization. This ad hoc ‘theory’ of the ‘intensification of the class struggle’ henceforth guided party policy as if it were a universal truth. Over the ensuing months, the party sought to accelerate the formation of collective farms. By June, one million—out of some 25 million—peasant households had enrolled in 57,000 collectives. Obviously, though, the vast majority still held back. Regional party appa-ratchiki, spurred on by directives and plenipotentiaries from the centre, pleaded with and cajoled village assemblies. ‘Tell me, you wretched people, what hope is there for you if you remain on individual pieces of land?’ an agitator shouted at the peasants in Hindus’s village. ‘You will have to work in your own old way and stew in your old misery. Don’t you see that under the present system there is nothing ahead of you but ruin and starvation?’ ‘We never starved before you wise men of the party appeared here,’ was the reply.

The rhythm of collectivization, like much else during the First Five-Year Plan, proceeded in fits and starts. During the summer and autumn of 1929, the rate accelerated largely due to two initiatives: the enactment by local officials of ‘wholescale’ (sploshnaia) collectivization in certain grain-growing areas of the North Caucasus and lower Volga; and the establishment of giant collectives absorbing whole groups of villages. Most were of the relatively loose kind (i.e. tozy rather than arteli or kommuny), whereby households retained ownership of seed, machinery, and draught animals. Meanwhile, the administrative infrastructure for collective farming began to take shape with the formation of an all-Union Kolkhoztsentr for channelling credits and equipment, and a Traktortsentr (Tractor Centre) for overseeing the establishment of machine tractor stations (MTS).

The most intense phase occurred during the winter of 1929/30. The signal was Stalin’s article in Pravda, published on the thirteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Entitled ‘The Great Turn’, it claimed that the ‘middle peasant’—that 80 per cent mass of the village—‘is joining the collective’. On the basis of recommendations produced by a special Politburo commission under A. Iakovlev, the Commissar of Agriculture, the party’s Central Committee issued its fateful decree, ‘On the Tempo of Collectivization’, on 5 January 1930. The decree called for collectivizing not merely the 20 per cent of arable land envisioned by the First Five-Year Plan, but ‘the huge majority of peasant farms’ in the most important grain regions by the autumn of 1930. It also rejected the toz in favour of the more ‘advanced’ arteli.

The question of what to do with the kulaks was finally resolved in a Central Committee decree of February 1930. They were to be expropriated—‘liquidated as a class’—and subjected to one of three fates: (1) resettled on inferior land outside the kolkhoz; (2) deported and resettled on land in other districts; or (3) arrested and sent to prisons or labour camps in remote parts of the country. By 1933 approximately 1.5 million people had been subjected to the second form of dekulakization and 850,000–900,000 to the third. That almost any peasant who agitated against collectivization could be labelled a kulak (or ‘subkulak’ a kulak sympathizer) was the key point: ‘dekulakization’ was as much a weapon of intimidation against non-kulaks as it was a sledge-hammer against the well-to-do peasants.

By March 1930 an estimated 55 per cent of peasant households at least nominally had enrolled in collective farms. At this point, however, Stalin decried the excesses of local officials, claiming that they were ‘dizzy with success’. This admonition let loose the floodgates holding peasants within the kolkhoz and, as recently declassified archival documents testify, caused acute consternation among provincial agents of collectivization who feared ‘re-kulakization’. By June only 23 per cent of households remained within collective farms. The reversal was short-lived, however. Fines and compulsory sales of property for peasants unable (or unwilling) to meet delivery quotas drove many back into the kolkhoz system; by July 1931 the proportion of households had risen to 53 per cent, and a year later to 61.5 per cent. This included the pastoral Kazakhs who were subjected to ‘denomadization’, a process that virtually wiped out their sheep herds and, in conjunction with a typhus epidemic, led to the death of approximately 40 per cent of the population between 1931 and 1933. Throughout the Soviet Union, the losses of livestock due to slaughter and neglect were enormous: by 1933 the numbers of cattle, pigs, and sheep were less than half what they had been in 1928.

The peasants’ traditional strategies in this war of survival—prevarication, dissimulation, and other ‘weapons of the weak’—were of limited utility. They also resorted to more direct forms of resistance—theft of kolkhoz property, the slaughter of livestock, women’s riots, and murder of collective farm officials (including workers dispatched to the countryside as ‘Twenty-Five Thou-sanders’ to assist in the collectivization drive). All this suggests the scale of peasant desperation. As if calculated to intensify the apocalyptic mood, the authorities intensified anti-religious campaigns, including pogroms against priests and church property. Thousands of churches, synagogues, and mosques were closed or converted into meeting-halls, cinemas, cowsheds, and the like. The exact number of peasants executed, killed in skirmishes, or dead from malnutrition and overwork in the labour camps defies precise determination, but undoubtedly ran into millions.

Peasant resistance to collectivization also spawned opposition, if less dramatic, in the party itself. Some who had supported Stalin against Bukharin and the ‘Right Opposition’ began to have second thoughts in the wake of the collectivization drive. By late 1930 several prominent party members of the RSFSR and Trans-caucasian governments expressed misgivings that Stalin construed as factionalism and opposition (‘the Syrtsov–Lominadze Right-Left Bloc’). Retribution did not prevent the formation of other groups in 1932, most notably the conspiratorial circle of M. N. Riutin and the group of A. P. Smirnov, G. G. Tolmachev, and N. B. Eismont. Even loyal Stalinists such as S. V. Kosior, I. M. Vareikis, K. Ia. Bauman, and M. A. Skrypnyk began to question the growing centrism of power as well as Stalin’s pro-Russian nationality policy.

In sum, the state won only a partial victory over the peasantry. True, it did bring the peasants under its administrative control and, through the machine tractor stations, made them technologically dependent. The kulaks and the clergy, rival élites in the village, had been annihilated. But peasant resistance extracted certain concessions, such as the legalization of private plots and the exclusion of domestic animals from the collective. In the longer term, a combination of administrative incompetence, underinvestment, and peasant alienation led to extremely low levels of productivity and thus an agricultural sector that, rather than providing resources and capital investment for industrial development, became a net drain on economic growth.

A Nation on the Move

Not unlike the enclosures at the dawn of the English Industrial Revolution, collectivization ‘freed’ peasants to work and live else where. Of course, there was nothing new about peasant seasonal out-migration (otkhod), particularly from villages in the ‘landhungry’ provinces of central Russia. But during the First Five-Year Plan, the number of peasant departures increased dramatically, in 1931–2 reaching an all-time high. Between 1928 and 1932, according to a recent estimate, at least ten million peasants joined the urban work-force as wage or salary earners.

In general, departures took three forms: involuntary deportations (through dekulakization); relocation through agreements between collective farms and individual industrial enterprises (a process known euphemistically as orgnabor or ‘organized recruitment’); and voluntary independent movement officially labelled samotek or ‘drifting’. These distinctions are analytically useful but hardly capture the scale or complexity of population movement in the 1930s. There was much ‘push’ (to leave the village), but also much ‘pull’ (demand for labour at the other end). Such was the competition among recruiters that train-loads of recruits were waylaid and rerouted to other destinations. In other cases, recruits upon arrival found working or living conditions so unappealing that they soon moved on—via samotek—to places where conditions were reportedly better. As Stephen Kotkin has noted, ‘The train, that ally of the Bolshevik leadership and its bureaucrats and planners, was being used against them: construction workers were using the trains to tour the country’.

The growth of Magnitogorsk, the celebrated socialist ‘planned’ city built on the steppe behind the Urals, was spectacular: from 25 inhabitants in March 1929 to 250,000 by the autumn of 1932. But older cities swelled too. Moscow’s population increased from 2.2 million in 1929 to 3.6 million by 1936; Leningrad’s rose from 1.6 million in 1926 to 3.5 million by the end of the 1930s. Regional centres, particularly in the industrial heartland, were also inundated by newcomers. Stalino (Donetsk), a coal and steel town in the Donbas, doubled its population between 1926 and 1937, reaching 246,000 by the latter year.

This phenomenal growth in urban population did not in itself constitute urbanization, a process that normally suggests qualitative as well as quantitative change. Indeed Moshe Lewin’s neologism, ‘ruralization’—the squeezing of the village into the city and the subjection of urban spaces to rural ways—is more accurate. Railway stations became temporary shelters, clearinghouses of information, informal labour exchanges, and (illicit) bazaars. Factories took on many of the same functions, as did parks.

Housing construction could not possibly keep pace with the population increase. At Magnitogorsk and other construction sites, newcomers were ‘housed’ in tents and hastily constructed dormitories where bedspace was often assigned in shifts. To accommodate the in-migrants, in 1931 municipal authorities in Leningrad deported thousands of ‘parasites and other nonworking elements’—i.e. the pre-revolutionary nobility, the clergy, youths expelled from the student body because of their ‘old regime’ backgrounds, and those who had been purged from the Soviet apparatus. This social cleansing freed some 200,000 sq. m. of living space, mostly in the form of communal apartments where several families shared a kitchen, bathroom, and toilet. Global statistics for per capita living space in the entire USSR show a decline from a crowded 5.65 sq. m. in 1928 to an even more crowded 4.66 sq. m. by 1932.

Food too was in short supply. The shortages were due not only to disruptions caused by collectivization and increased urban demand (from the influx of peasants), but also because of the low priority given to food-processing in the First Five-Year Plan. The state imposed a ration on most foodstuffs in 1929, whereby urban residents exchanged their coupons at Workers’ Co-operative stores. They also relied on cafeterias and other communal dining facilities, government stores (where the quality—and prices—of food was higher), or, if they could afford it, the peasant markets.

In December 1932 the state introduced internal passports for urban dwellers, thereby making flight to the cities more difficult for the dispossessed and hungry in the villages. This measure, which remained in effect for decades, closely followed a decree denying ration cards to those guilty of absenteeism from work. Their combined effect was to put a temporary halt to in-migration and to trigger the deportation or ‘voluntary’ exodus of several hundred thousand people from the cities. The timing of the passport law was all-important. Harsh climate, primitive technology, and the necessity of marketing or turning over a substantial proportion of the crop had left peasant producers without a margin to build up reserves. After three years of borrowing from the previous year’s seed grain to deliver to an expanding urban population, the Red Army, and foreign consumers, there was no margin left.

The resulting famine of 1933 has been described by both Western and Russian scholars as ‘man-made’ or ‘artificial’ on the grounds that its primary cause was the excessively high procurement quotas set by the state. Some note the disproportionate effect on Ukrainian peasants and claim that the famine was deliberate and genocidal. But recent analyses of the data on the 1932 harvest have shown that, contrary to the official yield of 69.9 million metric tons (which approximated the grain harvests for preceding and successive years), the real output was well below 50 million tons. If so, the famine was precipitated by an absolute shortage of grain. That the rural population (not only in Ukraine) suffered disproportionately and that this deprivation was due to a political decision are not in question: procurements displaced famine from the city to the village. Altogether, it is estimated that the famine took 2.9 million lives in Ukraine and 4.2 million throughout the USSR in 1933.

Cultural Revolution

In addition to industrialization and agricultural transformation, the 1930s witnessed a third revolution—in culture. This ‘cultural revolution’ signified not only the overturning of previously existing scientific standards and aesthetic values, but full-scale assaults against their bearers—the technical and cultural intelligentsia—and their replacement by workers from the bench as well as (often self-designated) representatives of the proletariat. In retrospect, the cultural revolution underscores the instability and provisionality of the modus vivendi between the intelligentsia (the sole collective survivor among the prerevolutionary élites) and the Communist Party. Lenin’s conception of cultural revolution—essentially, raising the masses to the level of the bourgeoisie by enlisting the aid of ‘bourgeois specialists’—was pursued more or less faithfully by his lieutenants who came from relatively cultured backgrounds, relied on the expertise of such specialists, and rewarded them accordingly. But to many party militants, such dependence merely perpetuated the cultural dominance of a group that displayed haughtiness and condescension towards the masses (and, not incidentally, party members) and dubious loyalty to the ideals of communism.

Tensions exploded in the spring of 1928 when fifty-three mining engineers were charged with wrecking and sabotage of mining installations in the Shakhty district of the North Caucasus. What set off the explosion was not so much the trial itself, as the ‘lessons’ that Stalin drew from the affair. In contrast to other high-ranking officials, who warned of the economically disruptive consequences of igniting mass resentment against specialists and therefore sought to play down the case, Stalin invoked ‘class vigilance’, warned that ‘Shakhtyites are now ensconced in every branch of our industry’, and demanded extensive purges not only of industrial administration, but throughout the Soviet, trade-union, and party apparatuses, educational institutions, and central economic organs.

The purges were essentially of two kinds, each extensive and feeding off the other. ‘Social purging’ (i.e. the exclusion of individuals from privileged backgrounds from institutions of higher education) was most pronounced in 1928–9. Usually carried out by Komsomol and local party committees, this type of purge was often spontaneous, irritated authorities in the affected commissariats, and ultimately provoked resolutions of condemnation. The second, more formal, purge was conducted by special commissions of Rabkrin (the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate) and the party’s Central Committee. With a mandate from the Sixteenth Party Conference, Rabkrin removed some 164,000 Soviet employees in the course of 1929–30. The purge in the party, which removed about 11 per cent of its members in 1929, sought primarily to expel careerists, corrupt elements, and those guilty of criminal offences, but it also took into account political criteria, such as the failure to carry out the party line in the countryside.

Purges constituted one aspect of the cultural revolution: no less important was the intensification and politicization of struggles within the professions. These conflicts generally pitted the pre-revolutionary (predominantly non-Marxist) intelligentsia against the new Soviet intelligentsia (overwhelmingly communist). What the former interpreted as a full-scale assault against culture itself, the latter saw only as its ‘proletarianization’. The former expected intellectuals to set an example for the masses or to take them under their wing; the latter advocated subordination to and learning from the masses. This reversal of valorization prematurely terminated many careers and led to the temporary abolition of secondary-school education. Not for nothing did the Marx–Engels metaphor of ‘withering away’ of school and law appeal to cultural revolutionaries.

Perhaps the best-documented struggle of the cultural revolution was in literature. Thus, writers and critics affiliated with the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (with the Russian acronym RAPP) fought bitterly against their Marxist rivals in the ‘Literary Front’ (Litfront). And both stridently attacked the political aloofness of ‘fellow travellers’, as well as the decadent individualism of the literary avant-garde. The former Komsomol activist, L. L. Averbakh, helped RAPP to establish, if only briefly, ‘proletarian hegemony’ (typified by its cult of the ‘little man’) over literature. Time Forward!, Valentin Kataev’s novel of 1932 about a record-breaking shift at Magnitogorsk, represented its apotheosis. But what has been called a ‘wave of reaction’ against this ethos of the First Five-Year Plan was apparent even before the end of the Plan. ‘It was as if’, writes Katerina Clark, ‘everyone had tired of the “little man”, of sober reality and efficiency; they looked for something “higher”.’ This yearning corresponded to Stalin’s own impatience with the turbulence of literary politics. On 23 April 1932 a Central Committee resolution ‘On the Reformation of Literary-Artistic Organizations’ formally abolished RAPP and called for the creation of a ‘single Union of Soviet Writers with a communist fraction in it’.

The ‘proletarian episode’ in Soviet literature had its analogues in other fields such as legal theory, pedagogy, and architecture. In each case, rival claimants to the correct interpretation of Marxism battled it out, employing such terms of abuse as ‘bourgeois pseudo-science’, ‘Menshevizing idealism’, and ‘right deviation-ism’. As in literary criticism, the iconoclastic and even nihilistic tendencies of the cultural revolutionaries (E. B. Pashukanis’s ‘commodity exchange’ theory of the law; V. N. Shulgin’s notion of the ‘withering away of the school’; anti-urbanism among town planners) ran their course until the Central Committee—or, in the case of historical writing, Stalin himself—intervened to restore order if not the status quo ante.

The third dimension of the cultural revolution, which has received much attention from historians, was the rapid and systematic promotion of workers into white-collar positions, either directly from ‘the bench’ or after crash-course training programmes at institutions of higher education. As Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown, this programme of proletarian ‘advancement’ (vydvizhenie) represented ‘the positive corollary of the campaign against the “bourgeois” intelligentsia and the social purging of the bureaucracy’. In time, the beneficiaries of this process (the vydvizhentsy), formed the new Soviet intelligentsia, which was more numerous, plebeian, and (befitting an industrializing nation) technically oriented than its bourgeois predecessor. And it was also more beholden to the political leadership. Two themes thus dominate most accounts of the cultural revolution. One was its anti-intellectualism, tinged with a certain xenophobic colouring. The other was its social radicalism, rendered as ‘revolution from below’, where ‘below’ signified three distinct phenomena: the spontaneous actions of lower-level party committees and the Komsomol, the revolt of younger and previously marginal elements within the professions, and the promotion of proletarians. But one should not overlook the degree to which the cultural revolution was coded as a male pursuit and the advantage that proletarianism gave to ethnic Russians at the expense of peoples in less industrialized areas. Dissolution of both the party’s women’s department (Zhenotdel) and Jewish section (Evsektsiia) in 1930 may well have reflected these biases.

Communist Neo-Traditionalism

In 1933, after several years of almost unceasing tumult, the Soviet Union embarked on the Second Five-Year Plan. Early drafts of the Plan exhibited the same ‘great leap forward’ psychology that had characterized its predecessor. But by late 1932, when it became clear that the economy was overstrained, the key indices were scaled back. Instead of the 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity originally projected for 1937, the revised version (adopted by the Seventeenth Party Congress in February 1934) called for 38 billion; the target for pig iron was cut from 22 million to 14.5 million tons, and so forth. Referring to the famine, Alec Nove observes: ‘The terrible events of 1933 may have had their influence, by a kind of shock therapy’. The plan, still ambitious if scaled back, shifted the emphasis from ever-increasing inputs of labour, punctuated by occasional bouts of shock work (now deprecated as ‘storming’), and towards the assimilation and mastery of technology. As Stalin told a plenary session of the Central Committee in January 1933, the ‘passion for construction’ of the First Five-Year Plan had to be replaced by the passion for mastering technology. That required more vocational training, but also more labour discipline.

Few terms appeared more frequently in Bolshevik discourse in the early 1930s than ‘labour discipline’. Precisely because the industrial labour force had absorbed millions of male peasants and unskilled urban women, the demands for increasing labour discipline became ever shriller, the measures to combat violations ever harsher. Stricter control over the organization of production led to the abrogation of several First Five-Year Plan innovations: the ‘continuous work week’ (nepreryvka, a staggered schedule of four days on and one day off); the ‘functional system of management’ (a Taylorist approach that in its Soviet application encouraged parallel lines of authority and avoidance of personal responsibility); and production collectives and communes (shopfloor units that workers organized to protect themselves from the fluctuations in wages and the general disorganization of production).

The restoration of a more hierarchical approach to management entailed an expansion of the responsibilities, prestige, and privileges of managerial and technical personnel. ‘The ground should shake when the director goes around the factory,’ declared M. M. Kaganovich in a pep talk to managers, adding that ‘workers like a powerful leader’. Successful directors had to do more than shake the ground. Presiding over vast complexes with tens of thousands of workers, they learned how to wheel and deal for scarce resources, establish cosy relations with local party and NKVD officials, read the signals emanating from Moscow, and above all fulfil—or at least appear to fulfil—the quantitative targets of the plan. As a veteran journalist later recalled, ‘it was during those years that the names of metallurgical factory directors became known, not only to a narrow circle of economic officials, but broad sections of the Soviet public. For their work, for their successes, the country celebrated them as in wartime it had followed the successes of military leaders.’

Engineers were also celebrated. Stalin had already signalled the official rehabilitation of the old technical intelligentsia in 1931, but no less important was a parallel and longer-lasting phenomenon—the rehabilitation of engineering as a profession. Symbolic of the engineers’ new stature was the injunction to writers at the founding congress of the Writers’ Union in 1934 that they become ‘engineers of human souls’. It has been pointed out that the engineer-designer, icon of technical mastery and order, began to supplant the production worker as the main protagonist in contemporary novels and films.

These changes in industrialization and labour policies constituted part of a larger process: consolidation of a system that was generally known, though not officially acknowledged, as Stalinism. If the Stalin revolution was more or less coterminal with the First Five-Year Plan, then Stalinism—the repudiation of egalitarianism and collectivist ‘excesses’ of that revolution—was its outcome.

Retaining the ideological prop of a dogmatized Marxism (officially renamed ‘Marxism-Leninism’), Stalinism identified the political legitimacy of the regime not only in the October Revolution, but also in pro-Russian nationalism and glorification of state power. It thus incorporated a conservative and restorative dimension, emphasizing hierarchy, patriotism, and patriarchy.

The Stalinist system depended on an extensive network of officials, the upper echelons of whom were included in the party’s list of key appointments (nomenklatura). Wielding vast and often arbitrary power, these officials ruled over their territories and enterprises as personal fiefs and were not above—or below—developing their own cults of personality. Leon Trotsky, one of the earliest and most trenchant critics of the Stalinist system, regarded it as essentially counter-revolutionary (‘Thermidorist’), a product of the international isolation of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian backwardness, and the political expropriation of the Soviet working class by the bureaucracy. But unlike many others who followed him down the path of communist apostasy, Trotsky did not consider the bureaucracy a ruling class. Bureaucrats, after all, were constrained from accumulating much in the way of personal property and, as the periodic purges of the decade demonstrated, lacked security of tenure. This was why Trotsky wrote that ‘the question of the character of the Soviet Union is not yet decided by history’. It was, rather, a ‘contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism’.

Notwithstanding its exercise of terror and monopolistic control of the means of communication, the bureaucratic apparatus alone could not sustain the Stalinist system. Another dimension of Stalinism, which has only recently received attention from historians, was its assiduous cultivation of mass support and participation—through education and propaganda, leadership cults, election campaigns, broad national discussions (for example, of the constitution, the Comintern’s Popular Front strategy, and the ban on abortions), public celebrations (such as the Pushkin centennial of 1937), show trials, and other political rituals. The system, then, was more than a set of formal political institutions and ‘transmission belts’. In addition to forging a new political culture, it also fostered and was sustained by a particular kind of mass culture.

James van Geldern has characterized this culture in spatial terms as ‘the consolidation of the centre’, a consolidation that ‘did not exclude those outside, [but] aided their integration’. The centre was Moscow, the rebuilding of which constituted one of the major projects of these years. Moscow came to represent ‘the visible face of the Soviet Union … a model for the state, where power radiated out from the centre to the periphery’. Corresponding to a shift in investment priorities, the heightened cultural significance of the capital ‘signalled a new hierarchy of values, by which society’s attention shifted from the many to the one outstanding representative’. The Moscow Metro, a massive engineering project that ‘mocked utility with its stations clad in semi-precious stone’, became an object of not only Muscovite but national pride. The towering Palace of Soviets (the excavation for which involved the razing of the great gold-domed Church of Christ the Saviour) would have been the source of even greater pride had the project not been abandoned and the pit turned into a large outdoor swimming pool.

The periphery was integrated not only through a vicarious identification with the centre but by being recast as an asset. Taming the vast wild spaces of the USSR (for example, through industrial projects such as Magnitogorsk or the settlement of nomads on collective farms) transformed them into both economic and cultural resources. Folklorism, characterized by Richard Stites as ‘politicized folk adaptation’, made a strong comeback via Igor Moiseev’s Theatre of Folk Art, founded in 1936, and a national network of amateur folk choirs and dance ensembles. These ‘prettified and theatricalized Stalinist ensembles … [promoted] images of national solidarity, reverence for the past, and happy peasants’, images that were re-inforced by highly publicized photographs of smiling peasants, decked out in ‘ethnic’ or folk garb, meeting Stalin in the Kremlin.

The imagined harmony of the mid-1930s went beyond folk ensembles and photo opportunities. At the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii—all vanquished political enemies of Stalin—repudiated their previous positions and heaped praise on Stalin’s wise leadership. The congress, in a show of reconciliation, applauded their speeches. The Kolkhoz Congress of 1935, where Stalin announced that ‘socialism’ had been achieved in the countryside, represented another type of reconciliation: shortly afterwards the government issued a kolkhoz statute (conferring certain guarantees and concessions) and dropped legal proscriptions against former kulaks.

‘Life has become more joyous,’ Stalin exulted in November 1935. Endlessly repeated and even set to song, the ‘life is joyous’ theme—the myth of a joyful people achieving great feats and adoring their genial leader (vozhd’)—was woven into the fabric of Soviet life. If previously life’s satisfactions were derived from the knowledge that one’s work was contributing to the building of socialism, now the formula was reversed: the achievement of socialism, officially proclaimed in the 1936 Constitution, was responsible for life’s joyfulness which in turn made work go well. It suddenly became important to demonstrate the prowess of outstanding individuals in a variety of fields: Soviet aviators, dubbed ‘Stalin’s falcons’, took to the skies to set new records; arctic explorers trekked to the North Pole in record time; mountain climbers scaled new peaks; the pianist Emil Gilels and the violinist David Oistrakh won international competitions. All covered the Soviet Union with national glory.

But the most celebrated individual feat of the decade was fittingly in the field of material production. On the night of 30 August 1935, Aleksei Stakhanov, a 30-year-old Donbas coalminer, hewed 102 tons of coal—more than fourteen times the norm for a six-hour shift. Stakhanov achieved his record thanks to a new division of labour that enabled him to concentrate on coal-cutting while others cleared debris, installed props, and performed other auxiliary tasks. Within days of the record, which Pravda had rather perfunctorily reported, other miners were surpassing it. But only after some prompting from the People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry, ‘Sergo’ Ordzhonikidze, did the Stakhanovite movement take off, spreading rapidly to other industries and to agriculture.

Stakhanovism was a complex phenomenon, both something more and something less than what higher political authorities intended. Idiomatically, it encompassed such a broad range of themes—mastery of technology, the creation of the New Soviet Man, the cultured working-class family, role reversal (the Stakhanovite was the expert; the expert became student of the Stakhanovite), upward social mobility—that internal contradictions were bound to occur. It tapped into popular desires for public recognition, adequate conditions of work, and consumer goods that at least some Stakhanovites enjoyed. At the same time, it raised these same expectations among workers who either could not become Stakhanovites or, having achieved that status, did not receive commensurate rewards. Resentment also increased as Stakhanovite records inexorably led to higher output norms for rank-and-file workers.

Moreover, expectations of political leaders that Stakhanovites’ innovations and production records would raise labour productivity all around were largely unfulfilled. Indeed, in some measure Stakhanovism was dysfunctional, as managers concentrated on supplying workers in the ‘leading’ professions, machinery became overstrained, and inter-shop deliveries broke down. Just three months into the ‘Stakhanovite year’ of 1936, speeches of political leaders and the press began to use words like ‘saboteur’ and ‘wrecker’ to describe managers and engineers who had ostensibly blocked the application of Stakhanovites’ methods or whose enterprises had failed to meet their targets. It was all Ordzhonikidze could do to deflect these charges and prevent the demoralization of industrial cadres in the face of what looked like a revival of cultural revolution specialist-baiting. In fact, something far more lethal was in store not only for enterprise directors, but also for Soviet officials, political functionaries, and military officers.

The Great Purges

The subject of harrowing memoirs and painstakingly researched academic studies, of folk legend and official investigations, the Great Purges continue to fascinate and appall. Emblematic of Stalinism, the ‘repressions’—to employ the term more common in Russian parlance—of 1936—8 seem to have been so arbitrary in victimization, so elusive in motivation as to defy explanation. Access to long-closed archives of the NKVD, while clarifying some issues, has not yet yielded a satisfactory explanation. Indeed, even what hitherto were assumed to be incontrovertible, basic facts are now in question.

According to the once standard version, Stalin initiated the Great Purges by arranging the assassination of the Leningrad Party boss, Sergei Kirov, in December 1934. Stalin’s purpose here was twofold. First, he sought to eliminate a potential rival. Reputedly the leader of a ‘moderate’ faction within the Politburo, Kirov had also received more votes than Stalin himself in the elections to the Politburo at the Seventeenth Party Congress. Second, by claiming that the assassination was the work of ‘Zinovievists’ and ultimately inspired by Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin could legitimize the physical annihilation of former leaders of the opposition, their retinues, and eventually anyone else on whom he chose to pin the label ‘enemy of the people’. This grand scheme for mounting a campaign of terror included the verification of party documents in 1935, the three public show trials of former oppositionists (Zinoviev and Kamenev in August 1936; Piatakov and Radek in January 1937; and Bukharin and Rykov in March 1938), the execution of Marshal Tukhachevskii and most of the Red Army general staff in June 1937, the elimination of nearly the entire regional leadership of the party later that year, and the arrest and disappearance of prominent persons from a wide variety of fields. The NKVD and its commissar, N. I. Ezhov, were the ruthless executors of Stalin’s designs, and indeed the entire period is sometimes referred to as the ‘Ezhovshchina’ (the evil epoch of Ezhov).

Treating these events as instances of a single phenomenon, most scholars assumed that Stalin was intent on eliminating any potential source of opposition, beginning with past opponents but eventually including any who might appear to be unreliable in the future. Some have suggested that the Nazis’ assumption of power in Germany and the increasing prospect of international war provided the impetus—or at least pretext—for Stalin’s actions. Other accounts have emphasized the pathological nature of Stalin’s suspiciousness and his psycho-dramatic replay of Ivan the Terrible’s elimination of the boyars. Still others stress an inherent imperative of the totalitarian system: not only to atomize and terrorize society, but to achieve a turnover of cadres. Another interpretation derives the Great Terror from the bureaucratic imperatives associated with the NKVD’s aggrandizement of power and its supervision of the GULAG. Whatever the dynamics, the traditional historiography shared a consensus that the Great Terror and purges represented a unitary process and that they served some rational function.

J. Arch Getty was the first to challenge the prevailing consensus. He noted the heavy reliance on rumour and gossip in memoirs, questioned the existence of a Stalin–Kirov rivalry or a moderate faction in the Politburo, and denied the existence of a master plot concocted by Stalin. Basing his analysis primarily on materials in the Smolensk Party Archive (seized first by the German army in the Second World War, then taken by American forces from the Germans) he argued that the party apparatus was hardly an efficient machine implementing the dictates of its leader, but a ‘petrified bureaucracy’ incapable even of keeping track of its members. According to Getty, the Great Purges actually derived from the failure of two campaigns to renovate the party: a series of operations to purge passive and degenerate members, and the initiatives spearheaded by Andrei Zhdanov to give party cadres a political education and to introduce ‘party democracy’ through contested secret ballot elections. The anti-bureaucratic impulse here struck a responsive chord with lower-ranking party members, but aroused resistance from regional party secretaries. As Ezhov undertook a search for enemies, which had extended from former oppositionists to regional military commanders, such resistance took on a sinister colouring. ‘Anti-bureaucratic populism and police terror’ created a vicious cycle of accusation, denunciations, and arrests that decimated the ranks of the party and certain high profile professions.

When Getty recently revisited the ‘politics of repression’, he concluded that ‘glasnost’ and the collapse of the Communist Party have put the secretive history of Stalinism on a more evidentially sound footing’. He notes that the investigation of a Politburo commission found no evidence of Stalin’s participation in Kirov’s assassination or the prior or subsequent existence of a moderate bloc; he therefore reiterates his scepticism about the planned nature of the terror. ‘Indecision and chaos’, he argues, were more evident in the evolution of repression before mid1937. Thereafter, it is at least as plausible that Ezhov was pursuing his own agenda, which may—or may nothave coincided with Stalin’s. Not that, in Getty’s view, this exonerates Stalin from responsibility; on the contrary, Stalin was an active participant, personally edited lists of defendants and their statements for the 1936 and 1937 show trials, signed tens of thousands of death sentences, and established target figures for executions in each province. But some scholars remain dissatisfied with Getty’s interpretation and even assert that Getty glossed over ‘one of the darkest and most tragic episodes in Soviet history’.

As in the historiographical controversy among Germanists over ‘intentionalist’ vs. ‘function-structuralist’ interpretations of the Holocaust, this debate raises some complex and profound issues: the process of decision-making at the highest levels, the role of Stalin himself, popular attitudes and participation, the actual quantitative scale of the repression, and its immediate and longer-term psychic effects. Neither orthodox nor revisionist, Moshe Lewin suggests that the terror was a function of Stalin’s unwillingness to be bound by the system he himself had built and presided over. This system had brought to the fore new social groups, especially state functionaries, who though powerful, lacked security of office and sought it in greater social stability and ‘socialist legality’. It was just this craving that threatened Stalin’s role as unfettered autocrat. Thus, two models coexisted uneasily and at some point collided. In the long run, the bureaucratic model, relying on the nomenklatura, would prevail; but during 1936–8, the autocratic model, consisting of the cult, the police, and a demonological mentality, was in ascendance.

That mentality was not Stalin’s alone. Gabor Rittersporn has argued that attributing political conflict and the shortcomings of daily life to ‘plots’, ‘wrecking’, and the ‘intensification of the class struggle’ was not simply a matter of scapegoating, but reflected real belief. Subjected to a public discourse that postulated the achievement of socialism and the ubiquity of subversion, many people understood irregularities, shortages, or other deviations from what was supposed to happen in Manichean terms. They knew that they were not enemies or conspirators, but had no way of being sure about their bosses, colleagues, neighbours, even friends and relatives. Bukharin, who believed the accusations against Kamenev, was no different from Lev Kopelev and other ‘true believers’ convinced of the need for unrelenting cruelty to deal with enemies. Those lower down the social hierarchy, including many workers with grievances against their bosses and peasants still angry over collectivization, evidently considered the reprisals against party and state functionaries to be just retribution.

Even those who knew that innocent people had been arrested recoiled from the idea that Stalin condoned such action. ‘We thought (perhaps we wanted to think) that Stalin knew nothing about the senseless violence committed against the communists, against the Soviet intelligentsia’, the novelist and journalist Ilia Ehrenburg recalled. Many blamed Ezhov, whose removal as People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs in December 1938 prompted one self-described ‘ordinary citizen of the USSR’ to write to the Central Committee urging it to ‘correct the Ezhovite mistakes so that the NKVD will really begin to fight against elements hostile to Soviet power, and honest working people will be guaranteed normal and peaceful work’.

Such letters—and there are many in recently opened archives—should not be construed as prima facie evidence of popular support for the terror. But they do suggest that the machinations in the Kremlin were not the whole story. In Belyi Raion of the Smolensk district, the defining political issues were not ‘Trotskyite and fascist wrecking’, but the crop failure of 1936, shortfalls in procurement targets, admission of former kulaks into collective farms, and other local issues. But at a certain point in 1937 local élites responsible for economic failures or bossism could find themselves so labelled.

As to the number of people arrested and shot by the NKVD, research by Russian and Western scholars in recently opened archives has produced estimates that are considerably lower than those previously posited. According to Viktor Zemskov, slightly less than one million people were confined in NKVD run camps on 1 January 1937, a number that rose to 1.3 million by 1939; another 315,000 people were in ‘corrective labour colonies’ in 1940. These figures are a good deal lower than earlier estimates (for example, Robert Conquest’s number of seven million in the camps by 1938), but they do not include people incarcerated in prisons, special resettlements, or other places of detention. It also remains unclear how many were ‘politicals’, convicted of engaging in ‘propaganda or agitation’ against the Soviet state, a crime punishable by five to eight years in a camp; an archival document indicates that the GULAG population sentenced for ‘counter-revolutionary offences’ was 12.6 per cent in 1936 and 33.1 per cent in 1940. As for executions by order of military tribunals, ‘troikas’, and other special bodies, official figures show 1,118 executions in 1936, 353,074 in 1937, 328,618 in 1938, and 2,552 in 1939. According to information released by the KGB in 1990, the total executed in 1937–8 represented 86.7 per cent of all death sentences carried out ‘for counter-revolutionary and state crimes’ between 1930 and 1953. Mass burial sites, recently uncovered at Kuropaty in Belarus and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, constitute one of the most horrifying relics of the Stalin era.

Who were the victims? We have long known about the prominent party officials, military officers, and members of the scientific and cultural élites. The publications of Conquest and Roy Medvedev in the early 1970s added more names, notably from the non-Russian republics. More recently, thanks to greater archival access and innovative research, the sociology of victimization has become more precise. It now seems clear that the most vulnerable groups were the party élite, former oppositionists, high-ranking economic officials, and military officers. Contrary to earlier assumptions, Old Bolsheviks—those who joined the party before the October Revolution—and members of the intelligentsia were not disproportionately repressed.

Several conclusions are in order here. First, vulnerability or risk must be correlated with proportionality: even if the majority of camp inmates were peasants and workers, those in élite positions were at greater risk if the data are compared to their numbers in the population at large. Second, the tragic fate of family members—vividly and movingly described in the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Anna Larina (wife of Bukharin), and others—must be taken into account in any overall assessment of the purges. Notwithstanding Stalin’s earlier injunction (‘sins of the fathers should not be visited upon their sons’), said in reference to the offspring of dekulakized peasants, family members—sons, daughters, wives, and even more distant relatives—were frequently subjected to interrogation and incarceration in orphanages and camps. Third, no amount of statistical work is likely to explain why so many individuals were summarily executed in 1937–8 and why this ‘ultimate sentence’ was prescribed more sparingly after Lavrentii Beria became the NKVD’s commissar. Finally, to comprehend the repression of these years, use of a term like ‘the Terror’, with its implication of unitariness, tends to obfuscate the overlapping patterns and cross-currents of repression.

The Enemy Without/The Enemy Within

Corresponding to the Great Turn of the late 1920s, the Comintern directed communist parties to expel ‘Right opportunists’ from their ranks and abandon tactical alliances with Social Democrats, henceforth labelled ‘social fascists’. This ‘class war’ strategy, which persisted until the mid-1930s, disorganized working-class opposition to fascism and proved particularly disastrous in Germany. The call by the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel) for total disarmament evoked nothing but scepticism in European capitals, but the Soviet Union did succeed in normalizing relations with neighbouring countries and establishing full diplomatic relations with the United States in 1933.

The triumph of the Nazis in Germany and the consolidation of a Japanese puppet state (Manchukuo) on the Soviet Union’s eastern borders precipitated the Comintern strategy of Popular Fronts with all ‘progressive forces’ and an intensification of Soviet efforts to achieve collective security with the European democracies. These policies bore fruit in the form of mutual assistance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia (in 1935) and the election of a Popular Front government in France (in 1936). But the great test of the European commitment to contain fascism—the chief aim of the popular fronts—was the Spanish Civil War. Despite Soviet assistance to the Republic—or perhaps because European statesmen feared a ‘red’ Spain more than one ruled by Franco—the Western powers failed the test. The betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich (September 1938) confirmed Soviet suspicions that neither Britain nor France were unduly concerned about Nazi expansion to the East.

For the Soviet Union, the decade of the 1930s lasted until the Nazi invasion of 22 June 1941. The increasing likelihood of war in Europe precipitated a radical shift in foreign policy away from seeking collective security with the Western democracies and towards an accommodation with Hitler. Acting on secret provisions of the Soviet–German Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939, Soviet armed forces occupied eastern Poland, the three Baltic republics, and the Romanian province of Bessarabia. Finland resisted territorial concessions along its eastern border; in the ensuing ‘Winter War’ (1939–40) the Red Army triumphed, but with difficulty and only because of superior numbers.

In the mean time, the regime moved to restore the authority, if not security of cadres in state and industrial management—badly shaken by the Great Purges and wary of denunciations from below. Laws stipulating a longer working day and draconian punishment for tardiness and absenteeism put teeth into demands for labour discipline. The Stakhanovite movement continued to celebrate high achievers among workers; but as the regime sought to close ranks with managerial and technical personnel, it now tended to attribute innovations to engineers. A steady diet of Soviet patriotism—psychological preparation for war—accompanied a massive build-up of the armed forces and defence industries.

Ten years earlier, in the midst of the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin told a conference of economic officials that they could not afford to slacken the pace of industrialization because to do so ‘would mean falling behind. And those who all behind get beaten’. He thereupon recited all the beatings ‘backward’ Russia lad suffered—by ‘Mongol khans’, ‘Turkish beys’, Swedish feudal lords, the Polish and Lithuanian gentry, British and French capitalists, and ‘Japanese barons’. ‘All beat her—because of her backwardness … military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness’. But, he added, correlating gender with political transformation, ‘Mother Russia’ has since become the socialist fatherland. ‘Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? … We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under’.

Stalin’s forced-pace industrialization undoubtedly contributed mightily to he Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War. The tempo of industrialization was literally killing and extremely wasteful, but by 1941 the USSR had closed he gap, militarily and industrially. The greatest spurt occurred during the ‘three good years’ of industrialization (1934–6). By 1937 steel output was nearly three times greater than in 1932, coal production had doubled, and electricity generation had risen by 250 per cent. Thereafter, the Great Purges and the channelling of investments into armaments—defence expenditure quadrupled between 1936 and 1940—caused growth rates in these and other branches of industry to subside. But on the eve of the war, Soviet industry was producing 230 tanks, 700 military aircraft, and more than 100,000 rifles every month. However, agriculture still lagged. A major crop failure in 1936—a yield even smaller than the official harvest for 1932—strained the state’s reserves and distribution network; it has even been argued that this crisis contributed to the political events of 1937. Because of increased military expenditure, investments in the collective and state farm system remained woefully minuscule.

But ‘backwardness’ is qualitative, not merely quantitative. In cultural and political terms, the USSR’s backwardness was perpetuated, even intensified, not because party and state officials tried to do too little, but because they tried to do too much. Browbeating the nation into modernity and socialism—the two were deemed to be synonymous—Stalin and his lieutenants provoked much resistance, but also conjured up demons of their own Manichean imaginings. These they combated with cults, reliance on miracles, and a great deal of force. They thus conformed to what Moshe Lewin has called ‘the contamination effect’, whereby radical and rapid transformation in fact ensures the survival of fundamental continuities, especially in social behaviour and political culture. Hence, the methods employed in ‘building socialism’, derived from previous centuries and combined with twentieth-century technology, actually built something called Stalinism.

12. The Great Fatherland War and Late Stalinism 1941–1953

WILLIAM C. FULLER, JR

Few events loom larger in Russian historical memory than the ‘Great Fatherland War’. Why was Stalin’s Soviet Union so ill-prepared for the conflict and how did it nevertheless manage to prevail? In the aftermath of victory, heedless of the threat of a cold or even thermonuclear war, the ageing tyrant rebuilt Stalinism at home and expanded its reach abroad.

At four a.m. (Moscow time) on 22 June 1941, several thousand pieces of German ordnance simultaneously thundered into Soviet territory. Operation Barbarossa had begun, initiating four years of the most brutal and destructive war in history. From the very beginning the Soviet–German conflict was waged with a ferocity and savagery that was unparalleled in modern times. When Hitler announced his move against Russia to his highest officers (30 March 1941), he made it absolutely clear that he expected his troops to discard every principle of humanity, chivalry, or international law. This was, he said, to be a war ‘of extermination’.

The 153 divisions of the invasion force formed three army groups—north, centre, and south. Army Group North was to punch through the Baltic republics in the direction of Leningrad. Army Group Centre was supposed to entrap and destroy Soviet units in the western expanses of the country. And, the third force—Army Group South—to drive south-east of the Pripet marshes and slice Ukraine off from the rest of the Soviet state.

It was obviously impossible to mask the colossal military preparations for Barbarossa. Since February, Germany had been concentrating forces on the Soviet frontier, ‘explaining’ this as a defence against British air raids. In the months, weeks, and days prior to 22 June, the Soviet government received over eighty discrete warnings of German attack. None the less, the surprise was virtually total. Though aware of the massing of German forces but unwilling to accept the truth, at 1 a.m. Stalin issued orders to Soviet military commanders not to shoot even if the Germans penetrated Soviet territory so as to avoid ‘dangerous provocations’.

It was in part this ill-conceived order that enabled the Wehrmacht to achieve astonishing results on the very first day of the invasion. By 23 June, for example, elements of Army Group Centre had already advanced sixty miles. Directives from Moscow, commanding Soviet units to launch vigorous counterattacks, only played into German hands. Since most of the Soviet air force had been destroyed on the ground, and since Soviet formations were poorly organized and undermanned, the abortive counter-attacks tore even larger holes in Soviet defensive lines. By mid-July the Germans had conquered Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia, and most of right-bank Ukraine. By August Army Group North had put Leningrad under siege, Centre had captured Smolensk, and South was investing Odessa on the shores of the Black Sea.

At this point Hitler intervened, redirecting offensive operations to achieve the rapid capture of Leningrad and Ukraine. Although Kiev fell in mid-September, Leningrad continued to resist. Hitler changed his strategic emphasis once again, this time detaching over 1.8 million men for ‘Operation Typhoon’—an assault on Moscow. By mid-October the German army was within sixty miles of the capital.

During these first few dreadful months of war, Germany and her allies—Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Finland—had overrun territory larger than France. They took two-thirds of the pre-war Soviet industries and lands that produced one-third of the country’s total agricultural output. By the end of 1941 the invaders had destroyed almost 84 per cent of the pre-war active Soviet armed forces: 1.5 million Soviet troops were dead while another 3 million were German POWs. Two million of the latter would perish by February.

Soviet Weakness in 1941

What accounted for Soviet weakness in June 1941? It clearly did not stem from a neglect of defences. By the late 1930s the Soviet Union was a thoroughly militarized state; Soviet defence outlays in 1941 amounted to over 43 per cent of the country’s GNP. Nor was there a gross imbalance in numbers or technology: in the immediate invasion zone roughly 2.8 million Soviet soldiers confronted about 3 million Germans, supported by twelve Finnish and six Romanian divisions. Similarly, whereas Germany and her allies attacked with 3,600 tanks and 2,500 planes, the Soviet armed forces disposed of over 20,000 tanks (of which 1,862 were modern T-34s or KVs) and at least 10,000 combat aircraft.

What then were the reasons behind Russia’s dismal military performance that summer? One reason was clearly the quality and skill of its enemy. At the operational and tactical levels of war the German Wehrmacht was then the finest army in the world. Other reasons, however, inhered in a series of self-inflicted wounds—a bitter legacy of the 1930s.

One of the gravest was the political purge of the Soviet military. It began in June 1937 with the announcement that Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii and seven other prominent Soviet soldiers had been convicted of treason and executed. At the same time Stalin delivered a speech in which he called for the discharge of ‘all vacillating army men’ from their posts—a statement taken by the Soviet political police, the NKVD, as a direct order for comprehensive terror against the Soviet officer corps. The pretext here was the putative existence of a ‘Trotskyite conspiracy’ within the Red Army that was scheming to stage a coup and install a military dictator. Although accurate statistics are still lacking, it would appear that some 35,000–40,000 officers were removed from their commands (many of them shot or condemned to hard labour in the camps). In other words, at least 35 per cent of the officer corps was purged. The eliminated included three of the five Soviet marshals, thirteen of the fifteen army commanders, fifty-seven of the eighty-seven corps commanders, 110 of the 195 divisional commanders, and all but one fleet commander in the navy.

The impact of this repression upon the Soviet armed forces cannot be exaggerated. It served to demoralize the Red Army, not only because of the arrests and executions, but also because Stalin upgraded the role of the political commissars and reinstituted dual command. However, those removed possessed invaluable technical knowledge. Tukhachevskii, for example, had been the prophet of mechanization and motorization; yet the purges eliminated not only Tukhachevskii but also some of his closest associates. Repression was a never-ending spiral: arrest was followed by interrogation and torture, which did not end until the accused confessed and named ‘accomplices’. To be minimally plausible, such accusations typically implicated immediate associates; as a result, the purges were most destructive to the more technical branches, especially armour.

The military purges must be distinguished from other forms of political terror in the 1930s: an investigation by the Party in the Khrushchev era established that the order for the military repression came from the top and used patently fabricated evidence. To this day, the rationale for the military purges remains a mystery. One theory holds that Stalin—misled by what had happened in the Spanish Civil War—had come to believe that Tukhachevskii’s expertise was dispensable. Another is that Stalin sought to check signs of excessive independence within the military, signs that had become visible as far back as the ill-fated Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934. And some believe that Stalin feared Tukhachevskii’s popularity, seeing him as a potential rival. In any event, the purges slowed down when the ‘Winter War’ of 1939–40 with Finland exposed the weaknesses of the Red Army. Certain officers (including such gifted leaders as K. K. Rokossovskii) were released from the camps and reinstated. None the less, on the very eve of the war, three-quarters of Soviet commanders had been in their posts for less than a year. And at the highest echelons, the Red Army was led by talentless sycophants and overrated cavalry men from the civil war era.

Another weakness had to do with doctrine and planning. For a variety of reasons, the Soviet leadership believed that a war with Germany would most likely start after an extended period of crisis, which would give the Red Army time to mobilize. Thus a formal declaration of war would be followed by a brief defensive phase, in which Soviet forces would check and repel the invader near the frontier; the Red Army would then open an offensive into Central Europe. Thus, Soviet military and political élites presupposed a short war, largely fought on the enemy’s soil; they paid little attention to the possibility that the war might become protracted, that it might require the USSR to organize a defence in depth.

The relative de-emphasis on defence also had implications for frontier fortifications. Whereas the Soviet Union possessed a considerable network of these in 1939, expansion by 1941 (as a result of the annexation of the Baltics, eastern Poland, and Bessarabia) had pushed the frontier 150 to 300 kilometres to the west. Work on new lines commenced in 1940, but procrastination and disorganization slowed progress. In February and March 1941 the Soviet command decided to cannibalize existing fortifications in order to build the new ones. The result was that neither set was operational when the war came: only a quarter of the new fortifications had been built on the new borders, while the pillboxes of the 1939 Stalin line were useless, semi-demolished and stripped of their weapons and ammunition.

Finally, the greatest blame for the ruinous start to the war must rest with Stalin himself. After the signing of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact in 1939, Stalin had constructed a foreign policy based on co-operation and collusion with the Nazis, evidently hoping that they would exhaust themselves in a lengthy war of attrition against the French and British. This delusion vanished with the fall of France in 1940. Although Stalin thereafter came to believe that an armed confrontation with Germany was unavoidable, he none the less supposed that Moscow—not Berlin—would determine its timing. After all, it was unlikely that Hitler would turn east while Britain remained unsubdued. In the spring of 1941, although Stalin permitted the mobilization of some of the reserves, he insisted that war with Germany would not come until the following May at the earliest. He therefore saw Hitler’s massive military build-up of 1941 as the prelude to negotiations, not war. From Stalin’s perspective, the only real danger was that war might break out accidentally; it was to guard against this contingency that Stalin was so determined to avoid ‘provoking’ Hitler. That is why Stalin disregarded G. K. Zhukov’s advice (May 1941) to launch an immediate preventive attack to disrupt the concentration of the German army, as well as that of S. K. Timoshenko, whose frantic request to transfer forces from the interior to the border was not approved until June. In a very real sense, Stalin’s miscalculations foreordained the military surprise and devastating consequence of the invasion.

Once the fact of German invasion was beyond dispute, the authoritarianism and centralization of Stalin’s regime showed only torpidity and inertia in the face of military emergency. For example, Moscow’s order in the evening of 22 June for the west front to destroy the German concentration at Suvalki was useless: the advancing enemy was no longer there. When Stalin personally began to direct the war effort, his command that the Red Army cede no territory and his refusal to countenance withdrawal squandered tons of equipment and material and consigned hundreds of thousands of troops to death or captivity. Fifty-six per cent of all military casualties suffered by the Soviet Union during the Second World War occurred during the first eighteen of its forty-seven months. The Red Army paid dearly for Stalin’s errors in dealing with Hitler.

Phases of the War

By early autumn, despite a succession of military disasters, morale in the Red Army had stiffened. Party officials reported to Stalin that ‘flights of military units [from the battlefield] have become rarer’, and wounded soldiers were observed bearing their arms with them to the field hospitals, rather than tossing them away, as formerly. As a result of this, as well as better organization and better generalship, Germany’s string of triumphs in Russia came to an abrupt end with the battle of Moscow. The failure of the second German assault on the city in November enabled Zhukov to counter-attack in early December, forcing the Germans to fall back between 100 and 250 kilometres.

At this point Stalin ordered the Red Army to attack, not along one or two axes of advance, but along the entire two thousand kilometres of front from the Black Sea to the Baltic. This overambitious offensive had largely spent itself by April 1942. The Soviet General Staff thereupon recommended a strategic defence in order to reinforce the army and build up stocks of equipment. Stalin agreed at first, but then authorized an attack in May designed to liberate Kharkov. It disastrously misfired. The Russians retired behind the northern Donets and the Germans occupied the Crimean peninsula.

Hitler had a new plan: a south-east advance into the Don, Kuban, and Volga regions as a first step towards the conquest of oil-rich Transcaucasia. Operation Blue began in the spring of 1942. By mid-July 1942 it was evident that the Germans were driving for Stalingrad on the lower reaches of the Volga. In late August, General Friedrich von Paulus’s forces had crossed the Don and attacked Stalingrad. After two weeks of shelling, bombing, and bloody street fighting, the Germans were in possession of most of the city. The Soviets, however, had no intention of capitulating; on 19 November they counter-attacked (‘Operation Uranus’), penetrating and encircling Paulus’s army from both north and south. Now Paulus himself was besieged.

Time was not on the side of the Germans at Stalingrad. Hitler flatly forbade any attempt at a break-out, even though the Soviets succeeded in stalling F. E. Manstein’s relief columns. As the temperature fell, so too did reserves of food and ammunition; the Luftwaffe’s attempt to supply Paulus’s forces by air failed. Finally, at the end of January and in early February 1943, Paulus and the remnants of his sixth army surrendered. One hundred and fifty thousand of his men were casualties; another hundred thousand were prisoners of war. Although the battle of Stalingrad did not predetermine German defeat in the war, it made a total German victory extremely improbable.

Emboldened by success at Stalingrad, the Red Army launched a series of offensives in the early months of 1943. These had three important results. First, the Soviets managed to cut a corridor through German lines to relieve beleaguered Leningrad. Second, by April they had effectively demolished Germany’s positions in the northern Caucasus. Finally by February the Red Army had defeated the German second army near Voronezh, forcing it to retreat two hundred miles, creating a bulge in the German lines known as the Kursk salient.

Hitler saw this salient as a major opportunity: a decisive blow there might shatter Russia’s defences and allow him to regain the initiative. The German plan for ‘Operation Citadel’ entailed two simultaneous thrusts towards Kursk, one south from Orel, the second north from Kharkov. However, Hitler decided to stockpile still more military equipment and postponed Operation Citadel from the spring until the summer of 1943. This delay enabled Soviet intelligence to discover the time and place of the attack and also permitted a massive reinforcement and fortification of the battlefield.

The German preliminary bombardment that began on 5 July was answered by an even more intense counter-bombardment, indicating just how ready the Soviets were. The battle of Kursk was the largest tank battle in world history, with six thousand vehicles engaged on each side. It was also distinguished by an unprecedented scale of carnage and slaughter, even on the eastern front. The upshot was a Soviet victory; by the end of July, Germany had lost half a million soldiers and was forced to retreat another two hundred miles. This battle was a true turning-point in the Second World War, for henceforth the Germans would be largely on the defensive in the east.

By January 1944 the Red Army had raised the siege of Leningrad and had crossed the old 1939 border. In May it had liberated Ukraine and was driving deep into Poland and Romania. The most significant event of the year, however, was ‘Operation Bagration’, the Russian attack on Army Group Centre, which held a salient in Lithuania and Belorussia that protruded into Soviet lines. At the end of June the Soviets struck into the salient with a series of co-ordinated thrusts, even one staged through the Pripet marshes. Offensive operations continued until the end of the summer, utterly destroying seventeen German divisions, and reducing the combat strength of another fifty divisions by half.

By the end of 1944, Soviet armies had already overrun Romania and were swinging north towards Budapest. The central group of Soviet fronts were poised to clear Poland of the enemy, before invading Germany itself. The first step in this process was the Vilna–Oder operation in January and February 1945, where the Red Army used its superior numbers and firepower to smash into East Prussia. Indeed, certain units under Zhukov’s command had crossed the Oder and were but forty miles from Berlin. But because Zhukov’s forces were exhausted and had outrun their supply lines, the Soviet High Command decided to defer the battle for Berlin until the spring. In mid-April 1945, some 2.5 million Soviet troops squared off against 1 million Germans, many of them young boys, cripples, or old men. There was little doubt about the outcome. By 25 April Berlin was encircled; two days later Soviet troops had shot their way into the centre of the city; two days after that Adolf Hitler killed himself. The German government’s emissaries travelled to Zhukov’s headquarters and signed the act of unconditional surrender on 9 May 1945.

With Germany now defeated, Stalin honoured his pledge to the British and American allies to enter the war against Japan. Over the next three months tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers entrained for the Far East. On 9 August (the very day that the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki) Stalin’s forces erupted into Manchuria and rapidly pulverized the Japanese Kwantung army. Within days Tokyo had decided to treat with its enemies. On 2 September 1945 Soviet representatives were present to witness the Japanese surrender on the deck of the American battleship Missouri.

How the Soviets Won the War

To understand how the Soviet Union managed to prevail in its war with Nazi Germany it is no less important to consider the reasons for German failure as the reasons for Soviet success. In key respects, the Germans undermined their own war effort.

In the first place, German strategy for the invasion of the Soviet Union was based on entirely erroneous intelligence. For example, prior to the war the Germans had calculated that the Red Army had only 200 divisions; by early August 1941 they had identified 360. The German intelligence services also under-counted the Soviet tank park (by at least 50 per cent) and grossly underestimated the scale, and productivity of the Soviet war economy. Nazi racist ideology also contributed to this depreciation of the enemy. Regarding the Russian as an Untermensch, Hitler was supremely confident that the Germans could conquer the Soviet Union to the Urals in three months, for the entire rotten structure of the Soviet state would surely collapse ‘as soon as we kick the door in’. The battle of Moscow, however, soon demonstrated that the war was not going to be brief. And Hitler had given no thought to a protracted war in the east, specifically to its economic and logistical dimensions.

Ideology also dictated German aims in Russia, and this had major implications for the conduct of the war. With one lightning summer campaign, Hitler aimed to reverse thousands of years of Eastern European history: to overthrow the Soviet government, eradicate communism, and annex Soviet territory as far east as the Urals. This newly acquired Lebensraum could then be used to support a population of some 100 million additional Germans or Germanized Scandinavians. In the course of this process, ‘racially undesirable populations’, especially Jews and Gypsies, were to be systematically exterminated. The fate of the Slavs, and the Russians in particular, was not merely slavery but tribalism: denied any future possibility of a state of their own, they were to be confined to squalid villages and maintained in filth and ignorance.

But the Nazis’ genocidal policies in the occupation zone ultimately detracted from the prosecution of the war, diverting thousands of troops, as well as hundreds of locomotives and wagons, from military operations. The Nazis’ bestial treatment of the Slavs was also ultimately self-defeating, since it alienated them by the millions. Hence the German side failed to capitalize on the anti-communist sentiments of the peasants; not until the very end of the war (and even then with reluctance) did the Nazis authorize the raising of entire Russian military units to fight Stalin. Confiscations of food, fuel, tools, and clothing as well as rape, torture, and shootings undercut German efforts to extract economic benefits from occupied territories. After the harvest of 1942, for instance, the Germans permitted peasants to retain only enough grain for two-thirds of a pound of bread a day. These starvation rations depopulated the countryside and engendered flight or sullen non-co-operation among the survivors. The deportation of almost five million people for work in Germany further exacerbated the labour shortage in the occupied zone. Agricultural output fell by 50 per cent in the areas under Hitler’s control: although his armies in the east could be fed locally, very little in the way of a surplus remained for shipment back to the Reich.

The Nazi leadership was slow to grasp that the economy of its eastern conquests had to be rebuilt and managed, not merely plundered. By the time it finally did, the expropriations and atrocities had hardened resistance to German rule and fuelled the growth of the partisan movement, which may have enrolled as many as 200,000 people by 1943.

None the less the Germans were defeated not only by themselves but by their Soviet enemies. Paradoxically the USSR won the war both because of and despite the Stalinist system.

Although the blunders of the Soviet leadership had enabled a surprise attack and a summer of catastrophic defeat, certain characteristics of the regime helped the country weather those initial shocks. Stalin himself observed in November that ‘any other country that had lost as much as we have would have collapsed’, and there was some truth in his remarks. The upheavals and turbulence of the 1930s had taught the mass of Soviet citizens a healthy respect for the power of the state and had inspired belief in its solidity and permanence. This psychic capital, combined with an immediate tightening of the monopoly on information (all radios in the country were confiscated at the end of June) enabled the regime to insulate the population from knowledge of the military débâcle and to combat rumour and panic.

Second, the extreme centralization of the Soviet dictatorship, so cumbrous in the opening phase of the war, eventually proved to be an asset; this authoritarianism permitted the state to mobilize the people and the resources necessary to prosecute total war. Mobilization entailed conscripting millions as soldiers, and millions more as labourers. On the very first day of the war Moscow called up almost all classes of reservists born after 1905. At the same time, it issued a new labour law that compelled vast numbers of Soviet civilians, both men and women, to take up war-related work. Industrial absenteeism was soon declared a felony; railways, waterways, and even many factories were placed under martial law. The State Defence Committee (GKO), created in June 1941 to unify the direction of the war effort, accelerated the evacuation of industrial enterprises from the western borderlands to the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia. By November of that year the regime had dismantled and shipped 1,523 plants east; roughly 1,200 of them were up and operating by mid-1942.

The management of the Soviet war economy was no easy task, especially in view of the army’s ravenous appetite for fresh manpower. The Soviet Union would eventually draft 16 per cent of its population into the armed forces during the war, thus permitting the Red Army at its height to maintain 11.2 million people under arms. Such unprecedented military conscription stripped the factories and farms of able-bodied men, thereby creating a labour shortage of staggering proportions. The release of prisoners from GULAG (the net outflow was 1.1 million people during the war) provided scant relief. Women, children, and the elderly had to substitute for the absent soldiers. By the end of the summer of 1941 women comprised 70 per cent of the industrial labour force in Moscow.

Matters were still worse in the countryside, as agriculture was feminized, demechanized, and deprived of draft animals. The proportion of women in the rural labour force increased from 40 per cent on the eve of the war to 70 per cent in 1943 and 82 per cent in 1944. The Red Army also requisitioned machines and horses in vast numbers—some 400,000 by the end of 1942, and almost half the horses from the collective farms by the end of the war. Peasant women experimented with harnessing cows to till the fields; others pulled the ploughs themselves. All of this had dire implications for food production, as agricultural yields in the uninvaded zone plummeted in 1943 to less than 50 per cent of the pre-war level. And this paltry stock of food had to sustain a population swollen by twenty-five million refugees.

Despite the severity of the labour and food problems, and despite clumsy inefficiencies in balancing the needs of the army and the needs of the economy, the Soviet Union was clearly winning the industrial war against Nazi Germany even as early as 1942. Although in that year Russia’s supply of steel and coal was only one-third that of Germany, it nevertheless manufactured twice the number of weapons. Simply put, the Soviets outproduced the Germans. All types of new armaments from aircraft and tanks down to automatic pistols were designed, machined, and delivered to the front. New industrial plants were built from scratch and operated twenty-four hours a day. Some of them were gigantic, such as the tank factory in Cheliabinsk, which boasted sixty-four separate assembly lines. Between 1943 and 1945 Soviet factories turned out over 73,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, 82,000 aircraft, and 324,000 artillery pieces.

The USSR thus acquired the wherewithal to fight, and the government deserves some credit for this achievement. Munitions do not, however, win wars all by themselves: skilful generalship is also necessary. Once the rank incompetence of figures such as S. M. Budennyi and K. E. Voroshilov had been amply demonstrated, Stalin’s regime was in fact successful in identifying and promoting dozens of talented commanders; G. K. Zhukov, I. S. Konev, K. K. Rokossovskii, N. F. Vatutin, A. M. Vasilevskii, and B. M. Shaposhnikov—to name but a few—were instrumental in planning campaigns and leading Soviet armies to victory. The Soviet High Command improved throughout the war and in its later phases Soviet generals were responsible for numerous advances in tactics and operational art. Soviet generals also became adept at ‘combined arms’ warfare—that is, the integrated and mutually supportive employment of artillery, armour, infantry, and air power. They evinced brilliance in the use of reconnaissance, camouflage, and deception. And they perfected the mobile force structure that was the hallmark of Soviet offensives from 1943–5.

We come to Stalin himself. What role did his leadership play in the Soviet war effort? That Stalin was a despotic butcher is beyond dispute; he also bears direct responsibility for the catastrophic losses in the first months of the war. Deceived by Hitler, guilty of issuing the inept orders that disorganized the Red Army’s defences, Stalin also sought to divert blame from himself by executing scapegoats. When the western front crumbled under the German onslaught, its commander—General D. G. Pavlov—was arrested in July and shot for treason. (His real crime, it now appears, was to have courageously protested against the military purges in 1938.) Firing-squads claimed the lives of twenty-nine other Soviet generals in 1941 and 1942; Stalin personally signed many of the death warrants.

Nevertheless, one cannot disregard Stalin’s positive contributions. First, for many Soviet citizens, he became a symbol of national unity, an embodiment of the spirit of resistance. Certain of his speeches and writings, such as his first wartime address (3 July 1941) and the famous ‘not one step back’ order-of-theday (29 July 1942) are said to have rallied the people and given invaluable boosts to their morale. Second, so great was the terror that he inspired at the highest echelons of party and state that a rebuke from him, let alone a threat, could elicit impressive performances from factory managers and generals alike. Finally, although Stalin committed military blunders throughout the war, he improved as a strategist—not least because he became aware of his own professional limitations. Unlike Hitler, he encouraged strategic debate and did not hesitate to solicit or accept advice. Zhukov praised his accomplishments in the strategic arena, as did several allied generals.

The Stalinist system then did help the USSR win the war. But without the contribution of the Western allies, victory would not have been achieved as quickly as it was. Without the contribution of the peoples of the Soviet Union, victory would not have been achieved at all.

The Second World War was a war of coalitions, and coalitional warfare typically leads to friction among the alliance partners. Russia’s relationship with her British and American allies was no exception. Thus Stalin held that Roosevelt and Churchill—as leaders of capitalist, imperialist states—were by definition hostile to Soviet interests. The Soviet tyrant worried lest Washington and London collude against him, particularly over the question of the second front. Moscow had been appealing for the opening of a second front to draw German forces away from Russia since late 1941; indeed, Stalin courted his allies with such gestures as abolition of the Communist International in the hope of speeding up their invasion of the continent. Owing to the Pacific war and operations in Africa and Italy, however, D-Day did not come until June 1944. Stalin regarded this as a ‘treacherous delay’, since he had been led to believe that the attack would occur a year earlier. Indeed, his frustration apparently induced him to extend peace feelers to the Germans in 1943.

From the standpoint of London and Washington, Stalin’s evasiveness and penchant for secrecy were irritants. The spectre of a separate Soviet-German peace was, however, truly petrifying: the Western allies were well aware that the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the struggle with Hitler’s legions. Until the Normandy landing, Germany never deployed less than 90 per cent of her best combat troops against the Soviet Union. In the end, 80 per cent of all German casualties in the war would be inflicted on the eastern front. Franklin Roosevelt and Churchill also believed that Soviet participation would be essential for the rapid defeat of Japan. Both of these considerations militated in favour of concessions to Stalin in the interest of keeping the coalition together.

One such concession was the delivery of crucial supplies to Russia with no strings attached. The British and Americans shipped these stocks to Pacific and White Sea ports, or conveyed them overland through occupied Iran. Ten per cent of all Soviet tanks and 12 per cent of all Soviet combat aircraft came from Stalin’s Western allies. American Lend-Lease also furnished 427,000 motor vehicles, one million miles of telephone wire, a quarter of a million field telephones, and fifteen million pairs of boots. The allies also provided aircraft steel, petroleum, zinc, copper, aluminium, and chemicals. Especially important, given the Soviet food crisis, was the transfer of comestibles. The United States alone gave enough concentrated food to the Soviet Union to have supplied twelve million soldiers with half a pound for every day of the war. The total value of British aid came to £420 million; that of the United States to almost $11 billion.

Although the Soviet Union could have won the war without allied supplies, their delivery none the less shortened the war. Allied trucks, jeeps, aircraft fuel, and communications equipment made possible the enormous mobile offensives of 1943–5. Western assistance also allowed the Soviet Union to keep millions of people in uniform (eight million by one calculation) whom it otherwise would have had to withdraw from the front to prevent a collapse of the economy.

In the strictly military arena, the Western allies rendered valuable services to the Soviet Union even before the break-out from Normandy pinned down 105 German divisions. Operations in the Middle East, Sicily, and Italy drained Axis resources. The Anglo-American bombing campaign against Germany was so massive that, in the judgement of some scholars, it constituted a second front all by itself. At the very least, since the German anti-tank gun doubled as an antiaircraft gun, thousands of these weapons were kept trained on British and American aeroplanes, not Soviet tanks. Finally, after November 1943 Hitler’s strategy in Europe was to de-emphasize the Eastern Front and to build up strength to repel the allied invasion that he anticipated in France or Norway. This decision also alleviated the pressure on the USSR.

None the less the greatest credit for victory in the war surely belongs to the Soviet population itself. It was Soviet men and women who sowed the fields, operated the lathes, stormed enemy positions, and survived siege and occupation. They often did so with signal heroism under conditions of unspeakable deprivation.

The war exacted appalling sacrifices from Soviet citizens. The USSR lost more soldiers than did any other belligerent. Nor was the civilian population spared. One million people succumbed to famine or disease during the siege of Leningrad alone—more than all combat deaths sustained by the British, Commonwealth, and American armed forces put together. In the urban areas of the country factory labourers put in twelve-to sixteen-hour working days and achieved record outputs. And they did so despite malnutrition: by 1942 official rations provided a caloric consumption nearly a quarter less than the prewar norm. This led to an explosion in black marketeering and grotesquely inflated prices; in 1945 a kilo of butter in Rostov-on-the-Don cost 1,000 roubles. Rural Russia felt hunger and want too. The government’s official rationing system deliberately excluded peasants, and left them to their own provisions. Consumption of bread (the chief staple in the peasant diet) declined to 40 per cent of pre-war levels. Manufactured goods, including such necessities as clothing and medicine, were virtually unavailable.

What sustained the people through these trials? What kept them working and fighting? Revulsion from the barbarism of the Nazis was certainly one motivation. On a deeper level, however, there was a sense that the war was a national struggle. For millions of people the war was for the survival of Russia, not necessarily for the defence of communism. No doubt for that reason the regime itself chose to sell the war to the population by using symbols and images from pre-revolutionary Russian history, not socialist bromides. Stalin relaxed ideological controls: the poems, novels, and journalism of the early war years were remarkably free from cant. He also initially put some restraints on the activities of the secret police, and in 1943 permitted the Orthodox Church to re-establish the Patriarchate. Such measures of liberalization encouraged the belief that victory would bring still more substantive reforms. Agents in occupied territories fed these expectations by apparently spreading the rumour that Stalin intended to de-collectivize agriculture as soon as Hitler had been beaten. Nevertheless, millions of ardent communists marched off to war; millions more joined the Communist Party during the war. But most of those who waged war did so not because they wanted to preserve the Soviet Union as it was, but in the hope that it would soon evolve into something better. This is yet another sense in which the war was won despite the Soviet regime.

The Costs of the War

By the time the war was over 8.6 million Soviet troops and at least 17 million civilians had been killed. Twenty-five million survivors were homeless; zemlianki, or earthen huts, provided the only shelter for hundreds of thousands. The war had destroyed 1,700 towns, 70,000 villages, 30,000 factories, and 65,000 kilometres of railway. It has been estimated that one-third of the national wealth had been obliterated. The gross yield of all foodstuffs produced in the country in 1945 was only 60 per cent of what it had been in 1940. Still worse, severe drought would visit the harvest of 1946, bringing famine and typhus in its train.

Nevertheless, the Soviet Union had gained power and prestige from the war. Battered at it was, the USSR was the strongest land power left standing on the continent of Europe. In the post-war era, the Soviet Union had to rebuild its economy, while coping with unique opportunities (and dangers) abroad.

Soviet Domestic Policies after the War

First on the agenda was economic reconstruction. Rapid demobilization was essential: the armed forces had to release soldiers, sailors, and airmen for work in the factories and farms. Over 11 million men strong in late 1945, the Red (now Soviet) Army numbered just under three million three years later.

Labour was but one of the factors of production. Another was capital. The state raised money by manipulating its currency, slashing interest rates, and reducing the face value of war bonds. It also showed considerable interest in foreign economic transfers through the continuation of American Lend-Lease, reparations, and exploitation of any territories occupied by the Red Army. In August 1945, however, the Truman administration suspended unconditional Lend-Lease assistance to Russia. Russian expectations for a considerable share of reparations from the western zones of occupied Germany were similarly frustrated (despite the promises that the Soviets felt had been made during the Potsdam Conference in June 1945). In Soviet-held territories matters were different: Soviet authorities openly looted eastern Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary for machinery and equipment (even entire industrial plants were dismantled and shipped back to the Soviet Union). Indeed, self-collected Soviet reparations are estimated to have provided 3 to 4 per cent of total Soviet budgetary receipts. With regard to Eastern Europe (and eventually Manchuria), the Soviet Union established theoretically ‘bilateral joint-stock companies’, which provided raw materials, machines, and finished goods at rock-bottom prices.

Because, however, such methods were insufficient to defray the total bill for the recovery, the government resorted to a traditional expedient—squeezing rural society to finance economic expansion. In September 1946 Stalin signed a decree on the ‘liquidation of the abuses of the statute of the agricultural artel and collective farm’. This and supplemental laws reduced the size of private plots and levelled confiscatory taxes on the income that they were supposed to generate. Cash payments for daily labour on the collective farms dwindled; in 1952 collective farmers in Tula earned just one kopeck a day. At the same time, the regime burdened the rural population with enormous state delivery quotas for agricultural goods. Compulsory deliveries amounted to at least half the collective farm output of grain, meat, and milk from 1945 to 1948; the prices that the state deigned to pay were actually less than production costs. These extortionate policies led in the short term to the famine of 1946 and to the impoverishment and immiseration of the villages. The result was a new exodus from country to town that, by Stalin’s death in 1953, had involved nine million people.

The goal was of course to rebuild the country’s industrial base. The Fourth Five-Year Plan (adopted in March 1946) set the target of matching and exceeding pre-war levels of production by the end of 1950. In fact, the Soviet Union fulfilled this plan in most significant sectors; by 1950 gross industrial output exceeded that of 1940 by 40 per cent.

If reconstruction of the economy was a matter of the highest importance, the imposition of stricter domestic political controls was also a priority. Indeed, the screws began to tighten in the last years of the war. One major sign of this was the mass deportation of over a million indigenous people of the Crimea, Caucasus, and Caspian steppe to Kazakhstan and Siberia, ostensibly for collaboration with the Nazis or ‘objective characteristics’ that predisposed them to do so.

The repression might at first seem to make no sense: after all, the war probably expanded the regime’s base of popular support. At the very least, the Soviet government could legitimize its claim on power by pointing to its military victory over Nazism. Certainly the Communist Party had never been healthier. The war years also witnessed an explosion in party recruitment—from 3.8 million members in 1941 to 5.7 million by May 1945. By the war’s end, 69 per cent of party members had joined since 1942.

But these statistics had to trouble Stalin: the party was his instrument of personal rule. How trustworthy could it be when diluted by hundreds of thousands of new communists admitted under the lax rules and perfunctory screening of wartime? Clearly it would be necessary to purge the party of its slackers and opportunists. Then there was the Soviet military, whose profile at the end of the war was a bit too high for Stalin’s taste. To guard against potential ‘Bonapartism’, Stalin reorganized the High Command, personally assumed the portfolio of Minister of Defence, and conducted a ‘purge of the victors’, i.e. the arrest or demotion of many prominent officers. Insecurity about the reliability of party and army was therefore one reason behind the political and ideological crack-down.

Another was the civil war on the westernmost borders of the Soviet state. In Ukraine, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army were conducting full-blown military operations to prevent the reintegration of Ukraine into the USSR. The scale of the problem was immense: at the end of 1945 the Red Army had deployed over half a million troops against the Ukrainian partisans. This armed resistance in Ukraine persisted until well into the 1950s.

Anti-Soviet guerrillas were also active in Estonia, Latvia, and particularly Lithuania. Annexed by Moscow in 1940 and occupied by Germany during the war, the Baltic republics wanted independence, not Soviet communism. Stalin pacified the Baltics by a tradition hallowed in Muscovite history—the forcible exchange of populations. As a result, by 1949 a quarter of the inhabitants of the Baltic states had been ‘resettled’ to the RSFSR, replaced by ethnic Russians.

Finally, reconstruction on the scale and at the tempo envisioned by Stalin would have been impossible without the reinstitution of the strict pre-war discipline and police controls. The population had to be mobilized, prepared for additional suffering, and shielded from corrupting Western influence. The imperative for stern internal political control produced a massive propaganda campaign, emphasizing sacrifice and vigilance. It was also expressed in the adoption of internal policies of extraordinary and stunning brutality.

In February 1946 Stalin gave his much quoted ‘electoral speech’. This address, which reiterated the old formula that the internal contradictions of capitalism inevitably gave rise to war, baffled those Western politicians who had predicted an era of cordiality with Russia. For Soviet citizens, however, the speech was an unmistakable signal that good relations with the Western allies would not continue in the post-war era, that they were not to expect cultural or political liberalization.

One telling indicator of the retrenchment was the labour-camp population, which swelled by millions after the war. The regime imprisoned hundreds of thousands of displaced persons and so-called ‘enemy elements’ from the Eastern European and Baltic countries. Axis POWs comprised another major source of prisoners, of whom many remained in captivity until the mid-1950s. German POWs played a conspicuous role in the construction of ‘Stalinist teeth’—the ghastly skyscrapers that blighted the Moscow skyline after the war, including the new building of Moscow State University.

The fate of Soviet POWs and slave labourers held by the Nazis was particularly cruel. Approximately a million Soviet prisoners survived the final collapse of Hitler’s Reich. Millions of other Soviet citizens, many of them women, were sent to Germany as Ostarbeiter. Many of these people were recaptured by the Red Army; the Western allies deported hundreds of thousands of others back to the Soviet Union. There execution or lengthy terms in the camps typically awaited them.

Why did they meet such savage treatment? The repatriated did indeed include some collaborators; between five hundred thousand and one million Soviet citizens, including some POWs, had actually served in the Wehrmacht, or in auxiliary or support formations in 1944 and 1945. But Stalin’s definition of guilt was capacious enough to include those whose only crime had been to be taken alive: his Order No. 270 early in the war branded any soldiers who surrendered as traitors. Even before the war was over, the Soviet government sent liberated Russian POWs to special camps for ‘verification’—which usually ended in consignment to the GULAG. As for the Ostarbeiter, Stalin evidently suspected spies to be among them. Even involuntary residence abroad might have left favourable impressions of the West, dangerous if disseminated in Soviet society.

In the cultural sphere, the Central Committee’s decision of August 1946 on the journals Zvezda and Leningrad marked the beginning of the Zhdanovshchina—a xenophobic campaign to purify Soviet intellectual life of Western, bourgeois influences. The campaign derived its name from its organizer, A. A. Zhdanov, one of Stalin’s most prominent lieutenants. Making examples of the poet Anna Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, Zhdanov insisted that formalism, political neutrality, and aestheticism had no place in Soviet literature. The literary establishment scampered to conform with the new party line. Scores of dreary novels celebrated the party’s victory in the Great Patriotic War, taught hostility to the West, and promoted the materialist and professional values that ostensibly appealed to the mid-level managers, engineers, and technicians who were the essential personnel in rebuilding the country. The purpose of fiction and belles-lettres was education and indoctrination, the provision of what Zhdanov woodenly called ‘genuine ideological armament’.

It was shortly the turn of the cinema industry. In September 1946 the Central Committee attacked several recent films, including those by the highly regarded directors V. I. Pudovkin and S. M. Eisenstein. The film that brought Eisenstein to grief was his historical epic Ivan the Terrible, part II. Stalin had greatly enjoyed the first part in 1944; he may even have identified with its depiction of Ivan IV as a fearless nationalist and decisive leader surrounded by traitorous boyars. But the second part, which showed a doubting, half-crazed tsar unleashing a reign of terror, was too much for the Soviet despot. Eisenstein was compelled publicly to apologize for his mistakes.

Other spheres of thought and culture also underwent ideological purification in the post-war years, from theatre and art to philosophy and economics. Nor was music spared; in February 1948 the party censured such distinguished composers as D. D. Shostakovich, S. S. Prokofiev, and A. I. Khachaturian for ‘formalism’ and insufficient use of folk themes. Even the natural sciences were not immune from persecution. Thus the expulsion of twelve persons from the Academy of Agricultural Sciences in August 1948 confirmed the triumph of the quack agronomist T. D. Lysenko, whose bizarre theory—that characteristics acquired by an organism in one generation could be genetically transmitted to the next—was utterly incompatible with modern biology and genetics. But the regime embraced Lysenko, whose ‘discoveries’ held the promise of limitless human power over nature. Soviet agriculture and biological science were to bear the scars of Lysenkoism for years.

Zhdanov died in the summer of 1948, but the cultural repression persisted. In early 1949 the press exposed an ‘unpatriotic group of drama critics’. And at the Nineteenth Congress of the Party in 1952, G. M. Malenkov was still insisting that the typicality of a novel’s characters bore witness to the correctness of the author’s ideological attitude.

Foreign Policy and the Cold War

Wartime alliances almost never persist once the threat that brought them into existence disappears. It is hardly surprising, therefore that the bonds of the Grand Alliance predictably weakened in the aftermath of the war. The deteriorating relationship between the Soviet Union and its former allies soon gave way to the overt hostility of the Cold War. From Washington, it appeared that Stalin was orchestrating a world-wide campaign of aggression against the West. The year 1946 saw Soviet pressure on Turkey over the Dardanelles, a communist insurrection in Greece, and the establishment of Soviet-backed Azeri and Kurdish regimes in northern Iran. Simultaneously the communization of Eastern Europe proceeded apace, culminating in the dramatic Czechoslovak coup of February 1948. Later that same summer, Stalin blockaded the western zones of occupied Berlin. The following year Mao Tse-tung defeated his nationalist enemies and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. And in 1950 Kim Il Sung’s forces swarmed across the 38th parallel, touching off the Korean War.

There are, of course, many theories about the origins of the Cold War. Some of the more fanciful blossomed precisely because the dearth of reliable information about the Soviet side made it impossible ultimately to disprove them. Thus while some works argued that Stalin initially sought accommodation with the West and only took the path of confrontation in 1948, others argued the exact reverse—that Stalin was harshest towards the West prior to that date and at his most conciliatory thereafter. Still other studies concluded that Stalin was weaker after the Second World War than before, and accounted for the evolution of Soviet foreign policy largely in terms of domestic politics or the clashing preferences of his subordinates.

With the partial opening of Soviet archives, we now have more evidence than before. The data are, however, far from complete; no definitive interpretation of Soviet foreign relations has yet emerged. The discussion that follows is based on three premises: that Stalin was firmly in charge of international affairs; that he was both an ideologue and a geopolitician; and that two signal post-war objectives were to avoid war while strengthening Soviet control over foreign communist parties.

Stalin was not, in principle, averse to war. In fact, his Marxist Weltanschauung predisposed him to believe in inevitable armed conflict between the Soviet Union and the capitalist world. In the spring of 1945, as Soviet tanks rolled towards Berlin, he informed a horrified delegation of Yugoslavian communists that ‘the war will soon be over. We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years and then we will have another go at it.’

As that comment suggests, Stalin was aware that the Soviet Union was too devastated to wage war in the near future. Then, too, the United States had emerged from the Second World War with greatly increased relative strength and with the atomic bomb. But here was the rub: Soviet ideology made all capitalist regimes ipso facto anti-communist. What then would prevent a great capitalist coalition, led by the United States, from exploiting the Soviet Union’s temporary debility to launch an annihilating attack? How was Stalin to shield the USSR from such a blow?

The answer was to bluff—to project an exaggerated image of Soviet military might. This entailed denying the West accurate knowledge about the true situation within the Soviet Union by waging a massive counter-intelligence campaign, by prohibiting even the most mundane contacts between Soviet citizens and foreigners, and by severely curtailing the movements and activities of Western diplomats, attachés, journalists, even tourists. Swathed in an impermeable miasma, thought to be possessed of overwhelming military power, the Soviet Union would buy the time necessary to rebuild, rearm, and acquire nuclear weapons. Thus, paradoxically and counter-intuitively the best way to avoid war was to pretend that the USSR was in fact ready to risk one.

Simultaneously Stalin had to avoid unnecessarily provoking the West or arousing Western suspicions, but to take a hard line against the plots that the imperialists would surely concoct against the USSR. In 1946, for instance, he backed the Azeri and Kurdish separatists in northern Iran (in response to what he saw as British oil intrigues). His government condemned the Marshall Plan in 1947 and ordered the French and Italian communists to sabotage it. And in June 1948, he retaliated to a Western currency reform (which he thought prefigured the establishment of a capitalist West Germany) by imposing the Berlin blockade.

Yet Stalin was willing to retreat when the price of confrontation grew too high or threatened war. For example, he pulled out of northern Iran, informing the Azeri communists that he did not want to give Britain an excuse to remain in Egypt, Syria, and Indonesia. And after eight months of tension he lifted the blockade of Berlin.

Stalin thus attempted to strike an extremely delicate balance in the conduct of foreign relations, but if successful the Soviet Union might benefit in both the long and short term. After all, Soviet truculence might persuade Western governments that the USSR was too hard a nut to crack. In that event, capitalist states might soon revert to their usual rapacious competition for markets. With any luck, such commercial rivalry might produce internecine wars among the capitalist states, which could debilitate them all, thereby advantageously positioning the USSR for the eventual day of military reckoning.

Another important objective for Stalin was to reimpose discipline and centralized control over the international communist movement. There were several considerations operating here. First, Stalin believed that he alone could formulate the correct strategy and tactics, which should be binding on communists everywhere. His leadership was particularly necessary to prevent headstrong foreign communists from unduly alarming the Western powers. Second, if directed by Moscow, non-ruling communist parties and front groups might pressure Western governments to act in ways favourable to Soviet interests. Third, the maximum economic exploitation of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe would only be possible if communist governments were installed there. Although Stalin might have been delighted by the prospect of further acquisitions in Europe and Asia, these could be forgone. But Eastern Europe was nonnegotiable; it was the great prize the Soviet Union had won in the Second World War. The East European countries were to be Sovietized; as Stalin put it, ‘whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.’ It goes without saying that Stalin expected the Eastern European communists to submit obediently to his dictation.

The problem, however, was that many foreign communists exhibited an annoying independence. Non-ruling parties were eager to make gains; communists who had seized power in Eastern Europe were often too ideologically fervid to heed Stalin’s cautionary advice. The Chinese communists are a good example: despite Stalin’s suggestion that they form a coalition with the nationalists, they made a hard push for military victory in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Similarly Stalin opposed the Greek communist insurrection of 1946–8 as premature. The Czechoslovakian coup of February 1948—an event usually interpreted as awakening even the most generous Western observers to Stalin’s ambitions—was very likely launched by the Czech communists themselves, not at Moscow’s behest. Finally, the Soviet–Yugoslavian rupture of 1948 originated in Stalin’s inability to moderate Tito’s recklessness either at home or abroad.

Stalin sought to impose his will on the Eastern European communists by a variety of means. One was territorial expansion. A series of post-war treaties annexed large parts of eastern Prussia, eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and Ruthenia to the Soviet state. This westward expansion gave the Soviet Union a common border with its Czechoslovak and Hungarian client states. Another instrument was the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), established in 1948, specifically to ensure Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. Finally after the break with Tito, Stalin resorted to an ‘anti-nationalism’ campaign of terror and purges. Important communist leaders such as R. Slansky (Czechoslovakia), T. Kostov (Bulgaria), W. Gomulka (Poland), and L. Rajk (Hungary) were imprisoned or executed, as were thousands of others.

Certain elements of Stalin’s post-war domestic and foreign agendas were closely interrelated. The key imperatives—war avoidance and economic reconstruction—were obviously congruent. The explosion in the labour camp population also served to fulfil several of Stalin’s goals; it mobilized forced labour to rebuild the country and insulated Soviet society from first-hand testimony about the West. And, significantly, Stalin did achieve several key objectives. A robust Soviet economy rose out of the rubble of war; the USSR enhanced its military power. Stalin’s regime made significant investments in military research and development, developed a plan to modernize its military hardware, and broke the American nuclear monopoly by acquiring its own atomic bomb in 1949.

Yet it is also obvious that other components in Stalin’s programme were contradictory. Bellicose rhetoric, if essential to justify the demands on the Soviet population, invalidated both the Soviet peace offensives as well as efforts to confuse the West about Soviet intentions. The same point applies to efforts to control Eastern Europe. Since Stalin’s authority over the foreign communists was at first imperfect, he could not prevent such events as the Greek civil war from frightening Western statesmen. But his own territorial expansion and political terror, used to solidify his power in Eastern Europe, tended to confirm, rather than allay, Western suspicions. The most important contradictions lay in the irreconcilability among Stalin’s domestic and foreign objectives. In 1945 Stalin had expected a rapid American withdrawal from a weakened, squabbling Europe. By 1949, largely because of his own policies, he found himself confronting European states that were reacquiring confidence and repairing the damage of war. NATO was cementing Western unity and the United States had extended an open-ended political commitment to the new alliance. After Stalin authorized the Korean War (partially as a subtle bid to enhance his influence with Mao Tse-tung) that American commitment became much more military.

Stalin’s Last Years

In December 1949 Stalin celebrated his seventieth birthday. It was an occasion of national jubilation. The price of many consumer goods was lowered. Party and state organizations all over the country vied with each other in tendering gifts and extravagant professions of loyalty to the great leader. A special exhibition—‘J. V. Stalin in Representational Art’—opened, featuring scores of paintings and sculptures to glorify every phase of his life. The official review of the exhibition bore the title: ‘An Inexhaustible Source of Creative Inspiration’.

The post-war era was the apogee of Stalin’s cult of personality. Stalin was accorded god-like veneration: he was the hero of plays and the subject of folksongs; symphonies and odes were composed in his honour; canals and dams were dedicated to his name. Statues of gypsum, concrete, granite, and marble were erected in his image. Orators praised him as ‘the father of the peoples’, ‘the coryphaeus of all sciences’, the ‘highest genius of mankind’, and ‘the best friend of all children’. Rapturous enthusiasm greeted his every pronouncement. When he took it into his head to author a treatise on linguistics, learned philologists wrote letters to the newspapers humbly thanking the leader for setting them straight.

However gratifying, universal adulation did not relax Stalin’s vigilant concern for his personal power. In the last years of his reign the tyrant took pains to keep his closest associates in a constant state of poisonous antagonism and mutual suspicion. It is not known whether his motivation was authentic fear of conspiracy, belief in the efficacy of divide et impera, or mere perversity. Immediately after the war, Stalin elevated Zhdanov as a counterweight to Malenkov Upon the former’s death, Stalin permitted Malenkov and the chief of the secret police, Beria, to purge Zhdanov’s old power base in Leningrad on the charge of ‘anti-party activity’. This ‘Leningrad affair’ resulted in the expulsion of two thousand communists from party and state jobs and two hundred executions, including that of N. A. Voznesenskii, a member of the Politburo. Stalin then summoned N. S. Khrushchev from Ukraine to Moscow as a counterweight to Malenkov. As for Beria, the Georgian purges of 1951 exterminated many of his staunchest supporters and political clients.

The most ominous manifestation of Stalin’s mistrust of his subordinates occurred in the very last months of his life. In January 1953 the press announced the arrest of nine physicians for conspiring to assassinate the top Soviet leadership with toxic medical treatments. Anti-Semitism, on the ascent in the USSR since the end of the war, figured prominently in the ‘doctor’s plot’—seven of the accused were Jewish. The ‘plot’, it has been speculated, was the first step in a campaign of terror against Jews. In any event, Stalin most probably instigated the affair of the ‘doctor murderers’ to serve as a pretext for the elimination of Beria, and perhaps other high figures in the regime.

Before any of this could happen, on 5 March 1953 Stalin finally died of a stroke. The official announcement of his passing evoked shock and then grief from millions. The dictator’s body reposed in state within the Kremlin, and columns of mourners paid their last respects. Even as a corpse Stalin brought calamity: five hundred people were trampled to death in Moscow because of poor security on the day of his funeral. Stalin was gone, but Stalinism remained. There would ensue a struggle for the succession. And when this was over, Stalin’s heirs would undertake the reconstruction and reform of the system he had bequeathed them.

13. From Stalinism to Stagnation 1953–1985

GREGORY L. FREEZE

After 1953, as the structural faults became increasingly apparent, Stalin’s successors applied various panaceas to repair or conceal the fissures. But neither the spasmodic reformism of Khrushchev nor the systematic standpattism of Brezhnev had much effect. Despite superpower status abroad and repression at home, by the early 1980s the USSR—like its leadership—was tottering on the verge of collapse.

AFTER decades of personalized tyranny, news of Stalin’s illness had a traumatic impact on the population. Recalling the recent ‘doctors’ plot’ (with transparent anti-Semitic overtones), some contemporaries suspected that ‘the doctors are involved in this. If that is confirmed, then the people will be still more outraged against the Jews.’ Many found the idea of life without the all-knowing Vozhd′ (Leader) unthinkable. Hope of instantaneous justice was gone. As one letter to the Central Committee put it: once Stalin is dead, ‘there won’t be anyone to complain to. If something happens now, people say: “We’ll complain to Comrade Stalin”, but now there won’t be anyone.’

But there was ‘someone’, in fact several of them, all fighting to succeed the Leader. That successor, however, would inherit not only the panoply of power but also the other legacy of Stalinist rule: a host of critical problems. These problems unleashed a torrent of letters to newspapers, government organs, and especially the Central Committee.

The problems were daunting in their complexity and gravity. One was power itself: Stalin himself had so personalized power, leaving the lines of institutional authority so amorphous and confused, that many key organs (even the Central Committee) had atrophied and virtually disappeared. To re-establish regular governance, it was essential to rebuild the institutions of party and state administration. Related to this was another grisly legacy—the victims and survivors of the purge and terror. Apart from posthumous rehabilitation, the most urgent question concerned the two million politicals and common criminals currently in the GULAG and still larger numbers in exile and banishment. Stalin’s heirs also had to resolve critical economic questions—above all, whether to continue Stalin’s one-sided industrialization (which emphasized heavy industry) or to develop agriculture and light industry. The Stalinist model, as one acerbic letter to the Central Committee noted, had produced not communism but ‘deficitism’. N. S. Khrushchev admitted that ‘there is little milk or meat’ and asked: ‘What kind of communism is this if there are no sweets or butter?’ That ‘deficitism’ exacerbated social tensions, for it did not apply to everyone. Stalinist social policy had vigorously combatted ‘levelling’ (uranilovka) in favour of sharp wage differentials and a highly stratified social order, with scarce resources being diverted to political élites and the scientific-technical intelligentsia. A letter to the Central Committee complained bitterly that ‘of late our country has simply forgotten the simple person—the worker, the kolkhoznik. All that the press and radio talk about is the academicians, scholars, agronomists, engineers.’ Another critical domestic issue was minority tensions, especially in the newly annexed territories of the West. As authorities confirmed, ‘in many districts [of western Ukraine] an anti-Soviet nationalist underground still exists and is actively operating as armed bands that commit sabotage, plunder, and terrorize the population and party-Soviet activists’.

In foreign policy Stalin’s heirs faced another knot of difficult questions—from the Korean War and Maoist pretensions to the infernal ‘German Question’ and Tito’s challenge in Yugoslavia. Resolutions of these problems also had major domestic implications, above all for the military budget, which consumed an inordinate share of national income. Even the ‘official’ military budget of 1952 (a pale reflection of reality) revealed a 45 per cent increase since 1950. Clearly, a regime seeking to modernize its economy could ill afford to divert so many resources—capital, labour—to so unproductive a sector.

Historical scholarship on the post-Stalinist period is still in its infancy. Until recently most literature belonged to the genre of ‘Kremlinology’—a mélange of inferences and wild guesses based on party propaganda, diplomatic gossip, distorted statistics, and symbolic gestures. Recently, however, Russian authorities have declassified materials from the super-secret ‘Kremlin Archive’ (renamed ‘Presidential Archive’) and from the operational files of the Central Committee. This chapter draws heavily upon these materials. It aims to present a fresh portrait of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras—named after two men who symbolize two different approaches to salvaging Stalin’s legacy: reform and retrenchment. By the early 1980s, however, it was obvious that neither had worked.

Perils of Reform

The first decade after Stalin’s death was marked by change so profound that perceptive observers began to question the static ‘totalitarian’ model that still shaped Cold War policy towards the Soviet Union. That decade was an era of frenetic reformism not only in the political system but also in society, economy, culture, and nationality policy. It was also a time of excesses and errors, which Khrushchev’s critics attributed to his boorishness, his penchant for ‘harebrained schemes’, and his reckless search for panaceas. The ill-repute of the Khrushchev era was so intense that, in the days of perestroika, even reformers were loath to invoke his name or reconsider his strategies. In that sense, perhaps the worst legacy of Khrushchevism was not that reform failed, but that it deterred new attempts until it was too late.

The Struggle for Succession

On the evening of 5 March, two hours before Stalin’s death, his heirs met in the Kremlin to assign spheres of power. The most prominent appointments included Georgii Malenkov (Stalin’s heir apparent) as chairman of the Council of Ministers, Lavrentii Beria as head of the Ministry of Interior (reorganized to include the Ministry of State Security), and Viacheslav Molotov as Foreign Minister. After a bizarre incident involving Pravda (which published a self-serving photomontage of Malenkov, ostensibly without his knowledge), on 14 March Malenkov resigned as ranking secretary in the Central Committee and assumed leadership of the state apparatus. Power in the Central Committee now devolved on Khrushchev, who eventually (September 1953) assumed the title of ‘First Secretary’.

Initially at least, Khrushchev seemed an unlikely pretender for power: he did not even speak at Stalin’s funeral, an honour reserved for the big three—Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov. None the less, Khrushchev was the consummate party functionary, bore the imprimatur of a top-ranking Stalin aide, and had close ties throughout the party apparatus. He also had extraordinary sangfroid and the capacity to speak effectively; his role at the Central Committee plenums, in particular, shows a self-confident ‘apparatchik’s apparatchik’. But he also knew how to relate to the common folk; an incorrigible populist, he loved to visit factories and kolkhozy to see conditions for himself. Khrushchev had a genuine concern for popular welfare. As Ukrainian party secretary, in 1947 he had even had the temerity to resist Stalin’s unreasonable demands for grain deliveries that ignored crop failure and famine—an act of defiance that earned a furious Stalinist epithet of ‘populist’ and temporary replacement by L. M. Kaganovich. By the end of the year, however, Khrushchev was reinstated as Ukrainian First Secretary and subsequently, in December 1949, summoned to Moscow as a secretary of the Central Committee and First Secretary of the Moscow party committee.

Beria, with the vast forces of the Interior Ministry and secret police at his command, was the most formidable contender. Recent archival disclosures have shown that, whether from conviction or cunning, Beria suddenly struck the pose of ‘liberal’ reformer. Within days of Stalin’s death, he not only spoke of the need to protect civil rights but even arranged an amnesty on 27 March that released many prisoners (too many common criminals, in Khrushchev’s view), including some people associated with the élite (for example, Molotov’s wife, Mikoyan’s son, and Khrushchev’s own daughter-in-law). Beria also shifted the GULAG from his own domain and later proposed that it be liquidated ‘in view of its economic inefficiency and lack of prospects’. He also exposed some major fabrications in late Stalinism, most notably the ‘doctors’ plot’ (4 April) and also proposed to release 58,000 former ‘counter-revolutionaries’ from permanent exile. The security chief even challenged the policy of Russian predominance in non-Russian republics; heeding Beria’s recommendation, on 12 June 1953 the party leadership agreed to condemn various ‘distortions’, to replace officials who did not speak the local language, and to require the use of the local language in republican communications. Beria also took an interest in foreign affairs, proposing to allow a unified (but neutral) Germany and to seek a rapprochement with Yugoslavia.

United by fear if not principle, Beria’s adversaries called a meeting of the Presidium on 26 June 1953 and, in his presence, voted unanimously for his immediate dismissal and arrest. Shortly afterwards they convened a plenum of the Central Committee to discuss the ‘criminal anti-party and anti-state activities of Beria’. An opening address by Malenkov gave a vivid description of how Beria ‘put the Ministry of Interior above the party and government’, with the result that the ministry ‘acquired too great an influence and was no longer under the control of the party’. Malenkov also castigated Beria’s newfound liberalism (in particular, his mass amnesty of criminals and proposals for a radical change in policy towards Germany and Yugoslavia) and denounced his maladroit attempts to gather information on ‘shortcomings in the work of party organs’ and even to maintain surveillance on members of the Presidium. The second main address was delivered by Khrushchev, who reiterated the attack on Beria’s belated liberalism and bluntly accused the police of fabricating ‘many falsified cases’. Six months later Beria and five of his close associates were tried, pronounced guilty, and shot.

The principal threat eliminated, the chief contenders were the two main speakers at the July plenum—Malenkov and Khrushchev. At one level, the two simply manœuvred to broaden their respective political bases—Malenkov in the state apparatus, Khrushchev in the party. But they also raised important issues, especially questions of economic development and agricultural policy. Malenkov proposed a ‘liberal’ policy giving greater emphasis to light industry, chiefly by diverting resources from agriculture; in his view, the regime had ‘solved’ the production problem and could rely on an intensification of production (i.e. mechanization, electrification, and increased use of mineral fertilizers). In response Khrushchev challenged the emphasis on consumer goods and, especially, Malenkov’s cheerful assumption that the agricultural question was ‘solved’. Khrushchev proposed to increase, not cut, investment in the agricultural sector, above all through the ‘Virgin Lands’ programme—an ambitious scheme to convert huge tracts of pastureland in southern Siberia and Kazakhstan to arable land. By shifting wheat production to the Virgin Lands, the Ukraine could grow the corn needed to provide fodder for greater meat and milk production.

Khrushchev’s programme, however, proved a hard sell in the party. Investment in agriculture (a radical break from Stalin’s utter neglect) encountered stiff opposition from conservatives in the centre, especially the ‘metal-eaters’ in heavy industry; it also elicited opposition from Central Asians, who feared wind erosion, Moscow’s intervention and control, and a mass influx of Russians. By August 1954, however, the First Secretary had prevailed: a joint party-government decree endorsed the Virgin Lands programme and raised the target for newly cultivated land from 13 million to 30 million hectares by 1956. Blessed with unusually good weather, the Virgin Lands programme initially brought huge increases in agricultural output (a 35.3 per cent increase between 1954 and 1958), causing the ebullient Khrushchev to make the foolhardy prediction that in two or three years the Soviet Union could satisfy all its food needs.

Simultaneously, Khrushchev declared war on ‘bureaucracy’. In part, he was seeking to undermine Malenkov’s power base—the state apparatus, which was indeed bloated (with 6.5 million employees by 1954). But Khrushchev, the former provincial party chief, also recognized the need to decentralize and shift power and responsibility to the republic level. As a result, by 1955 he had cut the number of Union-level ministries in half (from 55 to 25) and state employees (by 11.5 per cent). This decentralization significantly enhanced the authority of national republics; for example, enterprises under republic control rose from one-third of total industrial output (1950) to 56 per cent (1956). The shift was especially marked in Ukraine, where the republic-controlled output rose from 36 to 76 per cent.

By late 1954 Khrushchev’s programme, and its main architect, had triumphed over Malenkov. The latter, defeated on policy issues and confronted with ominous references to his ‘complicity’ in fabricating the ‘Leningrad affair’, resigned in December 1954. Two months later, he was formally replaced by N. Bulganin as premier, Khrushchev’s nominal co-equal in the leadership.

Cultural Thaw and De-Stalinization

Amid the struggle over power and policy, the regime cautiously began to dismantle the Stalinist system of repression and secrecy. Symbolically, in late 1953 it opened the Kremlin itself to visitors; during the next three years, eight million citizens would visit this inner sanctum of communist power. Openness also extended to culture, hitherto strait-jacketed by censorship and ideology. The change was heralded in V. Pomerantsev’s essay ‘On Sincerity in Literature’ (December 1953), which assailed the Stalinist canons of socialist realism that had prevailed since the 1930s. Thus began a cautious liberalization that took its name from Ilia Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw (1954), and that extended to many spheres of cultural and intellectual life. It even applied to religion—long a favourite target of persecution; a party edict of 10 November 1954, responding to complaints about illegal church closings, admonished party zealots to avoid ‘offensive attacks against clergy and believers participating in religious observances’.

The most important change, however, was crypto-de-Stalinization—a cautious repudiation of the ‘cult of personality’ that commenced immediately after Stalin’s death. The initiative came from above, not below. Not that all in the leadership supported such measures; Stalin’s henchmen, such as Voroshilov and Kaganovich, themselves deeply implicated, remained inveterate foes of de-Stalinization. Apart from some early veiled critiques (for example, Malenkov’s comment about ‘massive disorders’ under the ‘cult of personality’), the principal sign of Stalin’s ‘disgrace’ was sheer silence about the leader. For example, the regime declined to ‘immemorialize’ Stalin by renaming the Komsomol in his honour, dropped plans to transform Stalin’s ‘near dacha’ into a museum, and let 1953 pass without mention of the ‘Stalin prizes’ or the customary celebration of his birthday. Servile quotations from Stalin quietly disappeared; authors who persisted were roundly criticized for ignoring Marx and Lenin. The silence did not go unnoticed; in July a party secretary in Moscow wrote to Khrushchev to enquire ‘Why have editorials in Pravda recently ceased to include quotations and extracts from the speeches and works of I. V. Stalin?’

Why did Stalin’s closest associates decide to demote the Leader to a non-person? Apart from a desire to distance themselves from Stalin’s (and their own) crimes, de-Stalinizers had several motives. Zealous ‘de-Stalinizers’ (including Khrushchev) were zealous communists: they denounced the cult for its voluntarism and for crediting Stalin, not the party or people, for the great achievements of industrialization and victory over fascism. That is why, for example, authorities decided to interdict a poem by A. Markov that failed to show the people as the ‘creative force in history’ and assigned ‘the main place in the poem’ to Stalin, who is ‘shown in the spirit of the cult of personality’. In a memorandum of 27 April 1953 the philosopher G. A. Aleksandrov denounced the cult and opposed reprinting the Stalin biography—partly because of its ‘many factual inaccuracies and editorial mistakes’, but mainly because of its ‘populist-subjectivist view on the role of the individual and especially of leaders in history’ and because of its failure ‘to elucidate sufficiently the role of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the struggle of the Soviet people for socialism and communism’. Khrushchev similarly complained that Stalin had been ‘a demigod’, who ‘was credited with all accomplishments, as if all blessings came from him’.

Zealous de-Stalinizers, moreover, had personally experienced Stalin’s fearsome tyranny. Close family members of Stalin’s top associates were counted among his victims—kinsmen, even immediate family members, of members in the Politburo. Postwar campaigns like the ‘Leningrad affair’ swept away top figures in the party, leaving many others feeling profoundly vulnerable. The philosopher Aleksandrov himself had been a victim of the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign: after A. A. Zhdanov denounced his history of Western philosophy (for exaggerating West European influence on Marxism) in June 1947, Aleksandrov was replaced as ideological watchdog by M. A. Suslov. In Stalin’s final years top aides grew fearful that the dictator had new designs on them; according to Khrushchev, only the dictator’s death prevented him from carrying out plans to arrest Molotov and Mikoyan.

Khrushchev himself had reason to fear the ageing tyrant. The most dramatic incident involved Khrushchev’s proposal to increase agricultural output by merging kolkhozy into larger ‘agrocities’. He advertised this idea in a Pravda article on 4 March 1951, but without first obtaining Stalin’s endorsement—probably because Stalin no longer read many documents. After Stalin subjected the article to devastating criticism, a terror-stricken Khrushchev hastily sent Stalin a letter of abject self-abasement and pleaded for the opportunity to denounce himself: ‘Profoundly distraught by the mistake I committed, I have been thinking how this could best be corrected. I decided to ask you to let me correct this mistake myself. I am prepared to publish in the press and to criticize my own article, published on 4 March, examining its false theses in detail’.

Khrushchev and his supporters also addressed the question of the cult’s victims and initiated a cautious rehabilitation, beginning first with élite figures. A typical early case involved I. M. Gronskii, a former editor of Izvestiia; sentenced to fifteen years in prison for ‘wrecking’, in June 1953 he petitioned the Central Committee to review his case. An investigation confirmed that his ‘confession’ was obtained through coercion and that he was innocent. In May 1954 the party established special commissions to review the cases; during the first year, these cautious commissions rehabilitated 4,620 individuals, leaving the mass of politicals—and ordinary criminals—in the maws of GULAG.

Apart from appeals for rehabilitation, the regime had other reasons for concern about GULAG. Above all, this prison empire became increasingly volatile, with frequent and violent disorders. The most famous, at ‘Gorlag’ (Norilsk) in 1953, required a military assault that left more than a thousand prisoners dead. Insurrections also exploded at Steplag (1954), Kolyma (1955), and Ozerlag (1956). More important, the ‘corrective labour’ system was anything but corrective: rates of recidivism were shockingly high. According to one study (April 1956), 25 per cent of current prisoners were former inmates. But such results were inevitable for a system manned by people with abysmally low professional standards: three-quarters of the camp administrators did not even have a secondary education. The size and complexity of GULAG also militated against better results. The population of camps and prisons (2,472,247 on 1 January 1953) declined after the Beria amnesty, but then increased sharply. On 1 January 1956 the prisons held 1.6 million inmates (with another 150,000 in transit or under investigation); GULAG’s 46 corrective labour camps and 524 labour colonies held another 940,880 people (including 113,739 guilty of ‘counter-revolutionary activity’). In short, initial measures had barely altered the Stalinist prison-camp system; it was the Twentieth Party Congress that would open the floodgates for rehabilitation and reform.

Twentieth Party Congress (1956)

The first such assembly since Stalin’s death, the Twentieth Party Congress was a watershed in the political history of modern Russia. It sought to revitalize the party by including many new faces, not only among the 1,349 voting delegates, but also in the leadership: roughly half of the oblast and regional secretaries, even the Central Committee, were new. That turnover reflected Khrushchev’s campaign to consolidate power: one-third of the members of the Central Committee came from Khrushchev’s Moscow and Ukrainian ‘tail’ or entourage. The congress began in humdrum fashion, with little hint of the coming fireworks; Khrushchev’s report as First Secretary made only passing reference to Stalin. Critical tones, however, reverberated in the speeches of M. Suslov (about the ‘cult of the individual’) and Anastas Mikoyan (who attacked the cult and Stalin’s last opus, The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR).

But the bombshell exploded unexpectedly on 24 February when delegates were summoned to an unscheduled, late-night speech by Khrushchev behind closed doors. His speech on ‘the cult of the personality and its consequences’, a text of 26,000 words requiring four hours for delivery, offered a devastating account of Stalin’s crimes after Kirov’s murder in December 1934. It presented shocking statistics on the number of party members, congress delegates, and military leaders who perished in the 1930s amid ‘mass violations of socialist legality’. The report also blamed Stalin for catastrophic mistakes in the Second World War, for the mass deportation of entire peoples, and for other crimes after the war. By suggesting that the cult appeared after collectivization and industrialization (which were thus not called into question), Khrushchev sought to distinguish between Stalin’s crimes and Soviet achievements and to uphold the principle that ‘the true creators of the new life are the popular masses led by the Communist Party’. The main thrust of the speech was incorporated in a Central Committee resolution of 30 June 1956 ‘On Overcoming the Cult of the Individual and its Consequences’.

By then the rehabilitation process was already in high gear. The regime advised investigatory commissions that many convictions were based on un-proven accusations or ‘confessions obtained through the use of illegal methods of investigation’. Nevertheless, it exempted whole categories from rehabilitation: ‘nationalists’ in Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltics who had fought against the Soviet Union during the war as well as those ‘who were really exposed as traitors, terrorists, saboteurs, spies and wreckers’. To accelerate the process, a party commission was sent to interview political prisoners and judge whether they should be released. The undertaking was enormous, involving more than one hundred thousand ‘counterrevolutionaries’. According to a report from 15 June 1956, authorities had already released 51,439 prisoners (including 26,155 politicals) and reduced the sentences for another 19,093. Although restricted to cases initiated after 1935 (on the specious grounds that ‘mass violation of individual rights’ commenced only then), by 1961 rehabilitation gradually enveloped a large number of Stalin’s victims, including half of the politicals who had been executed.

De-Stalinization was also fraught with foreign repercussions. Khrushchev’s secret speech, leaked by a Polish communist, quickly found its way into print (with the assistance of the American CIA). It had an extraordinary impact on foreign communists—many of whose comrades-in-arms had perished in the Stalinist repressions. In April 1956 the Pravda correspondent in Bonn reported that West German communists reacted favourably to the speech, yet wanted to know why the CPSU had failed to stop Stalin and, more important, ‘where is the guarantee that the Soviet comrades will not again make mistakes and bring harm to the fraternal parties through their new mistakes?’ Khrushchev personally had to fend off similar questioning from Italian communists. The attack on Stalin also contributed to the rebellious mood in Poland, where demonstrations in Poznan ended in bloodshed and brought a change in party leadership.

The main explosion came in Hungary: in late April 1956 the Soviet ambassador, Iurii Andropov, warned Moscow that de-Stalinization had exacerbated internal tensions and provoked criticism from Stalinists in the Hungarian Politburo. By September Andropov’s dispatches became increasingly alarmist, with warnings about an anti-communist movement and disintegration of the Hungarian Communist Party. The popular movement culminated in street demonstrations on 23 October, when angry crowds smashed Stalinist statues and shouted demands for democratization and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The next day the Hungarian party elected Imre Nagy as its chief, and he promptly summoned Andropov to ask about Soviet troop movements in eastern Hungary. The denouement came soon: after Hungary declared itself a neutral state, on 4 November the Russian army invaded and suppressed the popular insurrection with raw force. A week later the KGB chief reported that Soviet forces had arrested 3,773 ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and seized 90,000 firearms.

The attack on Stalin also had reverberations inside the USSR. Rehabilitation involved such vast numbers that even Khrushchev became anxious. Thus, to protect ‘state interests’ and understate the scale of repression, the KGB falsely informed relatives that many of the executed had received sentences of hard labour and died of natural causes. More problematic was the fate of entire peoples deported to Siberia and Central Asia for alleged collaboration—such as the Karachai, Chechens, Ingushi, Kabardinians, and Balkars. Although the government began in April 1956 to allow certain groups (the main exceptions being the Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars) to return home, repatriation created new problems of its own when returnees demanded restitution of property. The result was fierce ethnic conflict, such as the four-day riot in August 1958 that involved Russians, Chechens, and Ingushi.

But the political resonance from de-Stalinization was muted in Russia. A KGB report on ‘anti-Soviet’ activities during celebrations for the October Revolution in 1956 cited only minor incidents—for example, ‘hooligans’ demolished two sculptures of Stalin in Kherson, shredded photographs of party leaders in Sevastopol, defaced a portrait of Khrushchev in Serpukhov, and disseminated anti-Soviet leaflets in Batumi. The action of a tenth-grade student in Iaroslavl (who marched past the tribune with a banner that read: ‘We demand the removal of Soviet troops from Hungary’) was as unique as it was courageous. Nevertheless, the ‘vigilant’ leaders became anxious and on 14 December 1956 approved the proposals of a special commission (chaired by L. I. Brezhnev) to combat the growth of anti-Soviet sentiments and activities. The next year the KGB crushed a student democratic movement at Moscow State University that, under the leadership of L. Krasnopevtsev, had distributed leaflets and agitated in favour of full-scale democratization. In Archangel the police uncovered a tiny group that categorically repudiated the Stalinist legacy: ‘Stalin, having destroyed his personal adversaries, established a fascist autocratic regime in the USSR, the brutality of which has no equals in history’.

All this galvanized Stalinists to oppose Khrushchev and his policies. Although Khrushchev later claimed to have broad support in the party, many party members—including several members of the Politburo—opposed de-Stalinization. Stalwarts like A. M. Peterson of Riga openly challenged the new policy: ‘Comrades in the Central Committee, do you really not feel that the party expects from you a rehabilitation of Stalin?’ Pro-Stalinist sentiments were particularly strong in Stalin’s home republic of Georgia; news of Khrushchev’s secret speech had even ignited street demonstrations in Tbilisi.

The foreign and domestic turbulence impelled Khrushchev to retreat from a public campaign against Stalin, with the rationalization that the ‘people’ were not yet ready for the new line. Although individual rehabilitations continued, the regime took steps to curtail debate and criticism of Stalin. A telling sign of the change was the famous ‘Burdzhalov’ affair in October 1956 involving a historical journal (Voprosy istorii), which had published revelations about Stalin’s role in 1917 and subsequent falsification in Soviet historiography. By reprimanding the chief editor and cashiering the assistant editor (E. N. Burdzhalov, the principal culprit), the regime made clear that it would not tolerate anything that might delegitimize the revolution and its own claims to power.

The zig-zags in policy aroused confusion and criticism from below. Local party officials quoted one member as complaining that ‘the leaders of party and state have become muddled in criticizing the cult of personality of Stalin: at first they condemned him, but now they have started to praise him again’. In January 1957 an engineer wrote to the Central Committee to complain that ‘there are two N. S. Khrushchevs in the Central Committee of CPSU: the first N. S. Khrushchev with complete [adherence to] Leninist principles directly exposes and wages battle against the personality of Stalin; the second N. S. Khrushchev defends the actions of Stalin that he personally perpetrated against the people and party during his twenty years of personal dictatorship.’ Individual rehabilitation continued, but Khrushchev now turned his attention from de-Stalinization to political and administrative reform.

Democratization and Decentralization

The years 1957–61 marked the apogee of Khrushchev’s attempt at structural reform along two main lines. One was ‘democratization’, a campaign to dislodge an entrenched bureaucracy and to shift responsibility directly to ‘the people’. Khrushchev was the consummate populist, fond of hobnobbing with workers and peasants and flaunting his closeness to the people. He was also profoundly suspicious of ‘bureaucrats’ and ‘partocrats’ (party functionaries). And their numbers were legion; as a Central Committee resolution (21 May 1957) acidly observed, since 1940 primary party organizations had increased twofold, but their number of salaried functionaries had grown fivefold. To combat bureaucratization and ensure ‘fresh forces’, Khrushchev applied term limits not only to regional and oblastsecretaries (two-thirds of whom were replaced between 1955 and 1960), but even to those in élite organs: two-thirds of the Council of Ministers and one-half of the Central Committee changed between 1956 and 1961. The objective, as a party resolution explained in 1957, was to eradicate the cult of personality and ‘ensure the broad participation of the working masses in the management of the state’. This also meant an expansion of party membership, which increased from 6.9 million to 11.0 million members between 1954 and 1964 (60 per cent of whom were listed as workers and peasants in 1964). Khrushchev also sought to expand the people’s role in running the state—for example, by increasing the authority of organs of ‘popular control’ and reviving ‘comrade courts’ to handle minor offences and misdemeanours.

The second, related thrust of reform was decentralization—a perennial Russian panacea for solving problems and inciting initiative at the grass roots. By 1955 Khrushchev had already transferred 11,000 enterprises (along with planning and financial decisions) from central to republican control. Moscow went further in May 1956, reassigning the plants of twelve ministries to republic jurisdiction. The capstone to decentralization came in 1957 with the establishment of sovnarkhozy—105 regional economic councils given comprehensive authority over economic development. Republican authorities gained so much power that their prime ministers became ex officio members of the USSR Council of Ministers. Khrushchev also dismantled much of the old bureaucracy (including 140 ministries at the republic, union-republic, and union levels). The underlying idea was to bring decision-making closer to the enterprise to ensure better management and greater productivity.

Decentralization, together with resentment over de-Stalinization, fuelled growing opposition to Khrushchev. Although Khrushchev had strong support in the Central Committee (where republic and provincial secretaries—the main beneficiaries of reform—dominated), he faced stiff opposition in the ruling Presidium. The latter represented old party élites and entrenched officialdom in Moscow, who not only watched their empires shrivel or disappear, but sometimes had to relocate to a provincial site. When, for example, Khrushchev relocated the main offices of the Ministry of Agriculture 100 km. from Moscow (to be closer to the fields!), top officials had a daily commute of two to three hours in each direction.

One month after the sovnarkhoz reform was promulgated, Khrushchev faced a full-blown revolt in the Presidium. On 18 June his nominal co-equal, Bulganin, asked Khrushchev to convene a meeting of the Presidium, where a majority was prepared to vote his dismissal. Khrushchev, however, insisted that only the body that elected him—the Central Committee—could authorize his dismissal; with the assistance of military aircraft (supplied by his ally, Marshal Zhukov), Khrushchev flew Central Committee members from their provincial posts to Moscow. His adversaries in the Presidium finally agreed to convene a special plenum of the Central Committee. The result was a complete rout of Khrushchev’s opponents, who were denounced as ‘the Anti-Party Group’ and their leaders (Malenkov, Kaganovich, and Molotov) expelled from the Central Committee. The new Presidium included critical supporters, such as Marshal Zhukov, and high-level functionaries like L. I. Brezhnev and A. I. Kosygin who would later have Khrushchev himself removed. Although, for the sake of appearances, Bulganin was allowed temporarily to remain head of the state, in March 1958 Khrushchev assumed his post as chief of state.

Having tamed the opposition, Khrushchev next dealt with his key supporter—Marshal Zhukov. The latter had begun to voice the military’s dissatisfaction with Khrushchev’s decision to scale down the army (from 5.8 million in 1950 to 3.6 million in 1960) and to deny costly weapons systems (cutting the military’s share of the budget in 1956 from 19.9 per cent to 18.2 per cent). On 29 October 1957, just a few weeks after the spectacular launch of the world’s first artificial satellite Sputnik (4 October), a party resolution denounced Zhukov for restricting its role in the army (thereby ‘violating Leninist party principles’) and for propagating ‘a cult of Comrade G. K. Zhukov … with his personal complicity’. The last major political counterpoint to Khrushchev appeared to have been removed.

Economy, Society, and Culture

The late 1950s represented the golden age for the Khrushchev economy, which boasted extraordinarily high rates of growth in the industrial and agricultural sectors. Altogether, the annual rate of growth in the GNP increased from 5.0 per cent in 1951–5 to 5.9 per cent in 1956–60 (the Fifth Five-Year Plan). The most spectacular progress was to be found in the industrial sector: the total growth (80 per cent) even exceeded the ambitious plan target (65 per cent). In 1987 Soviet analysts revealed that this was by far the most successful industrial growth of the whole post-Stalinist era. With labour productivity rising by 62 per cent and the return on assets (‘profit’) amounting to 17 per cent, the Soviet economy made enormous strides. The launching of the satellite Sputnik seemed to demonstrate the might, if not superiority, of the Soviet system. As Soviet industrial production increased from 30 to 55 per cent of American output between 1950 and 1960, Khrushchev seemed to have good ground for his bravado about ‘overtaking and surpassing’ America.

Agriculture, the unloved stepchild of Stalinist economics, became a new focus of development. The policy yielded immediate results, as output increased 35.3 per cent (1954–8); the ‘Virgin Lands’ programme opened up an additional 41.8 million hectares of arable land, which produced high yields and a spectacular bumper crop in 1958. Altogether, the average annual output between 1949–53 and 1959–63 increased by 43.8 million tons (28.9 million tons of which came from the virgin lands). Not only gross output but productivity was higher: the yield per hectare rose from 7.7 centners (100 kg.) per hectare (1949–53) to 9.1 (1954–8). Encouraged by this success, Khrushchev cut back the investment in agriculture (its share of investment falling from 12.8 per cent in 1958 to 2.4 per cent in 1960), on the assumption that the virgin lands would sustain large harvests. He also forced kolkhozniki to grow more maize, though at the expense of other grains (oats production, for example, fell by two-thirds). And he applied decentralization to agriculture, chiefly by liquidating ‘machine tractor stations’ (January 1958) and undercutting the power of party bureaucrats.

‘Democratization’ also meant a higher standard of living for ordinary citizens—a rather unexpected policy, given Khrushchev’s earlier criticism of Malenkov for ‘consumerism’. There was much social inequity to overcome: because of Stalinist wage differentials, the ‘decile coefficient’ (the official standard for income distribution, measured as the difference between the ninth and first deciles) was 7.2 in 1946—far higher than that in capitalist countries (the comparable figure for Great Britain in the 1960s was 3.6). Resentment against the privileged informed this anonymous letter to the Komsomol in December 1956: ‘Please explain why they babble (if one may so speak) about the well-being of the people, but there is really nothing of the sort; things are getting worse—and worse for us than in any capitalist country’. The letter derided the endless radio propaganda about progress towards communism: ‘You [party élites] of course have communism; we have starvationism, inflationism, and exploitationism of the simple working people’. A letter from eleven workers in Lithuania ridiculed state propaganda ‘that people live badly under the capitalists’ and declared that the common people live worse in the USSR, that ‘this is not socialism, but just a bordello (bardak) and hard labour’.

Khrushchev took important steps to improve popular well-being. One was a revolution in labour policy: he decriminalized absenteeism and turnover, made drastic reductions in wage differentials, and established a minimum wage. After fixing a ‘poverty line’, the regime reduced the number below this limit from 100 million in 1958 to only 30 million a decade later. As a result, the decile coefficient dropped from the Stalinist 7.2 (1946) to 4.9 (1956) and then to 3.3 (1964). Considerable improvements were made among the lowest-paid segments of society—rural labour: between 1960 and 1965, the average income of kolkhozniki rose from 70 to 80 per cent of the average-paid state employees. Although the kolkhoznik remained a second-class citizen (without pensions, sickness benefits, or even a passport), his material condition had improved significantly.

Khrushchev also increased social services, housing, and educational opportunities. Expenditure on social services increased by only 3 per cent in 1950–5, but rose by 8 per cent in 1956–65. As a result, the housing stock doubled between 1955 and 1964; although built mostly as the notorious ‘Khrushchev barracks’ (with low ceilings, tiny rooms, and shoddy construction), it was a serious response to the housing shortage and rapid urbanization. Notwithstanding the ideological antipathy towards ‘private ownership’, in 1955 the regime launched a programme to construct privately owned flats from personal savings (with a down-payment of 15–30 per cent and a mortgage with 0.5 per cent interest rate). The Khrushchev regime also ‘democratized’ the educational system: dismayed that 80 per cent of all university students were coming from the intelligentsia, in 1958 Khrushchev abolished school and university tuition fees and dramatically restructured secondary schooling to force all children into the labour force for two years to learn a trade.

Although decentralization abetted the special interests of individual nationalities, Khrushchev detested ‘petty-bourgeois nationalism’. That attitude clearly informed school language policy where Moscow took steps to promote Russian language instruction. This policy elicited considerable opposition from minority nationalities; a Belorussian complained in 1956 that his ‘language has now been expelled from all state and Soviet institutions and institutions of higher learning in the republic’. The main objective was not simply closer ties (sblizhenie), but the assimilation (sliianie) of small nations into Soviet Russian culture.

Twenty-Second Party Congress (October 1961)

The ‘extraordinary’ Twenty-First Party Congress of 1959 dealt with primarily economic questions (including a scheme to restructure the five-year plan into a seven-year plan), but otherwise did not mark a significant event. That could hardly be said of the Twenty-Second Party Congress, attended by some 4,400 voting delegates. Above all, it signalled a new and open offensive against Stalinism. Khrushchev himself implicated Stalin in Kirov’s murder and suggested that several leading cadres (Kaganovich, Molotov, and Voroshilov) personally abetted Stalin in perpetrating the crimes. The Congress also raised the question of Stalin’s mummified corpse, which since 1953 had rested alongside Lenin in the Mausoleum. This time the party was blessed with instructions from the next world, kindly transmitted by a deputy from Leningrad, D. A. Lazurkina: ‘Yesterday I asked Ilich [Lenin] for advice and it was as if he stood before me alive and said, “I do not like being beside Stalin, who inflicted so much harm on the party”.’ The congress resolved to remove Stalin because of his ‘serious violations of Leninist precepts, his abuse of power, his mass repressions of honest Soviet people, and his other actions during the cult of personality’. The former dictator was reburied in an unmarked grave along the Kremlin wall.

The congress also adopted a new party programme, the first since 1919. It included brash predictions that the Soviet Union would surpass the United States by 1970 and complete the construction of communism by 1980. It also included new rules to ensure ‘democratization’ in the party and preclude the formation of a vested bureaucratic class. It also called for ‘the active participation of all citizens in the administration of the state, in the management of economic and cultural development, in the improvement of the government apparatus, and in supervision over its activity’. To ensure popular participation, the new party rules set term limits on officials at all levels—from a maximum of sixteen years for Central Committee members to four years for local officials. The goal was to ensure constant renewal of party leadership and the infusion of fresh forces—even at the top, where a quarter of the Central Committee and Presidium were to be replaced every four years. However, the rules had an escape clause for ‘especially important’ functionaries (such as Khrushchev himself, presumably). Finally, the programme sought to replace full-time functionaries with volunteers and part-time staff, thereby reducing the number of paid functionaries and ensuring more involvement by the rank and file. The new programme, understandably, was the kind that would not do much to raise Khrushchev’s popularity among the ‘partocrats’.

From Crisis to Conspiracy

Despite Khrushchev’s apparent triumph at the party congress in 1961, within three years the very men who led the ‘prolonged, thunderous ovations’ were feverishly conspiring to drive him from power. The populist was becoming unpopular, not only in the party, but among the broad mass of the population. Several factors help to account for his fall from power.

One was a string of humiliating reverses in foreign affairs. Khrushchev, for example, took the blame for the Sino-Soviet split: although relations were already strained (because of Chinese resentment over insufficient assistance and respect), the tensions escalated into an open split under Khrushchev. De-Stalinization was partly at issue, but still more divisive was Khrushchev’s ‘revisionist’ theory of peaceful coexistence and his refusal to assist the Chinese in acquiring a nuclear capability. Next came the Berlin crisis of 1961; although provoked by the East German leadership (as is now known), at that time the crisis was blamed on Khrushchev, who appeared to have fecklessly brought Soviet–American relations to the brink of war. That débâcle was soon followed by the Cuban missile crisis. After publicly denying the presence of missiles, the Soviet Union was embarrassed by clear CIA aerial photographs, prominently displayed at a stormy session of the United Nations Security Council. Confronted by an American ‘quarantine’ of Cuba, Khrushchev was forced to back down; although he obtained important concessions in secret negotiations, the public impression was one of total Soviet capitulation. Khrushchev suffered another fiasco in India, the recipient of massive economic and military aid, but an unreliable ally—a ‘neutral’ that did not hesitate to criticize the Soviet Union or its surrogate Communist Party in India. But India was hardly the only recipient; by 1964, for example, the USSR had given 821 million dollars to Egypt, 500 million to Afghanistan, and 1.5 billion to Indonesia (which became pro-Chinese in 1963). Such foreign aid brought scant political return and became increasingly unpopular at home, especially amid the food shortages and sputtering economy. Finally, party élites were embarrassed by Khrushchev’s penchant for vulgar jokes and crude behaviour—as in the infamous ‘shoe-pounding’ escapade during Harold Macmillan’s speech at the United Nations session in 1960.

A second factor in Khrushchev’s demise was his cultural policy, which gradually alienated both the intelligentsia and general population. Even earlier, as in the 1958 campaign of vilification against Boris Pasternak (whose Doctor Zhivago—illegally published abroad—had won a Nobel Prize), Khrushchev made clear that the ‘thaw’ did not mean artistic freedom. Nor was he even consistent: one month after authorizing publication of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich he publicly castigated modern art at the ‘Thirty Years of Moscow Art’ exhibition. He was also increasingly distrustful of writers; as he declared in 1962, ‘Do you know how things began in Hungary? It all began with the Union of Writers.’ In December 1962 and March 1963 Khrushchev and party ideologues convened special meetings with writers to reaffirm the limits on literary freedom. One early victim was the future Nobel prizewinning poet, Joseph Brodsky who did not belong to the official Writers’ Union and was therefore convicted of ‘parasitism’ in February 1964. The intelligentsia was not the only victim: in 1961 Khrushchev launched a vigorous anti-religious campaign, ending nearly a decade of qualified tolerance. The campaign affected all religious confessions, but was particularly devastating for the Russian Orthodox Church: over the next four years, the regime closed 59 of its 69 monasteries, 5 of its 8 seminaries, and 13,500 of its 22,000 parish churches.

A third reason for Khrushchev’s downfall was economic, as his policies and panaceas began to go awry. As Soviet economist Abel Aganbegyan demonstrated, the growth rate in the early 1960s declined by a factor of three—the result of systemic inefficiency, waste, and backwardness permeating every sector of the economy. And, despite official claims of ‘full employment’, the real unemployment rate was 8 per cent nationally and as high as 30 per cent in small towns. Aganbegian identified three main causes: (1) massive defence allocations, which diverted 30 to 40 per cent of the work-force into primary or secondary defence plants; (2) failure to modernize and automate production; and, (3) ‘extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters’, compounded by a primitive planning apparatus that lacked computers or even reliable economic data. ‘We obtain many figures’, he noted, ‘from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration’. The result was hoarding, low labour productivity, shoddy quality, forced savings, and the omnipresent defitsity (goods shortages) that fed inflation and a booming black market. Recent data confirm Aganbegian’s analysis, showing a sharp drop in the growth indicators for the gross domestic product (from 5.9 per cent in 1956–60 to 5.0 per cent in 1961–5) and investment (from 16 per cent in 1958 to 4 per cent in 1961–3).

But economic problems were most apparent in agriculture: although average grain output rose from 98.8 million tons in 1953–6 to 132.1 in 1961–4, that yield fell short of expectations and demand. According to one calculation, the grain output needed to satisfy demand in 1955 was 160 tonnes; that was about 20 per cent more than average output in 1961–4. Moreover, output fell behind increases in personal income: although per capita agricultural production increased slightly during 1959–65, disposable money income rose dramatically (48 per cent in 1958–64). The increased demand was also due to population growth (33 per cent) and urbanization (250 per cent), leaving more and more people dependent on the agricultural sector. In short, Khrushchev had severely underestimated demand and overestimated output.

The miscalculation had several causes. One was just bad luck: the drought of 1963 caused an abysmal harvest of 107 million tonnes—larger than a Stalin harvest, but only 61 per cent of plan targets. The low harvest forced the Soviet Union, which had recently boasted of overtaking America, to take the ignominious step of purchasing twelve million tonnes of grain abroad. But it was not only bad luck and bad weather: Khrushchev himself contributed to the failure in agriculture. He was blindly devoted to maize; apart from climatic and technological problems, its cultivation met with adamant peasant resistance, duly reported by the KGB: ‘We don’t need to sow corn; it will just cause a lot of trouble and bring little use’. But the First Secretary, sullied as the kukuruznik (‘maize-man’), was determined, especially after his visit to the United States in 1959, to grow maize. By 1962 he had forced peasants to plant 37 million hectares of maize, of which only 7 million ripened in time for harvest. Nor did his panacea—the Virgin Lands programme—work the expected miracle. As a result of drought, erosion, and weed infestation, the output from the virgin lands fell far short of plan expectations. After the first bumper harvests, output steadily declined in the late 1950s, partly for want of grass covers and fertilizers to renew the soil. Worse still was the irreversible damage caused by feckless cultivation of areas unsuited for grain production: in 1960–5 wind erosion ruined twelve million hectares of land (four million in Kazakhstan alone)—roughly half of the virgin lands.

Moreover, Khrushchev’s ‘decentralizing’ strategy weakened administrative control, inviting evasion, resistance, and malfeasance. The most famous case involved the party secretary of Riazan, A. N. Larionov, who ‘over-fulfilled’ the meat quota in 1959 threefold, but by illicit means—by slaughtering dairy as well as beef cattle and by purchasing meat from neighbouring provinces. His miraculous achievements were loudly celebrated in Pravda, but the next year the newly minted ‘Hero of Socialist labour’ committed suicide to avoid the awful day of reckoning. His case was hardly exceptional. An official investigation revealed that party secretaries in Tiumen oblast ‘engaged in all kinds of machinations to deceive the government, included reports on unproduced and unsold production to the state, thereby creating an apparent prosperity in agriculture in the oblast and inflicted great harm to the state, kolkhoz, and sovkhoz’. The problem was bad policy, not just bad people. After years of massive allocations to agriculture, Khrushchev suddenly reduced the flow of investment. Difficulties for this sector were further compounded by the decision in 1958 to abolish machine tractor stations, forcing collective farms to purchase this equipment and divert scarce resources into capital goods. Moreover, Khrushchev ambitiously pursued his earlier fetish for merging collective farms into ever larger units, their total number falling by nearly a third in 1953–8 (from 91,200 to 67,700); such mergers, however, failed to bring ‘economies of size’ and eroded effective administration. It also reinforced the kolkhoznik’s devotion to his individual plot, which yielded over half their income in 1960 (with even higher proportions in some areas—for example, 75 per cent in Lithuania). When Khrushchev urged collective farmers to abandon their monomaniacal cultivation of private plots, one peasant in Kursk eloquently summarized popular sentiment in an encounter with the First Secretary: ‘Nikita, what’s got into you, have you gone off your rocker?’

Although the regime took special measures to provide cities with basic necessities, it also attempted to dampen demand in June 1962 by raising prices—38 per cent on meat and 25 per cent on butter. The price increases aroused intense popular discontent and even disorders. To quote a KGB report from June 1962: ‘In recent years some cities in our country have experienced mass disorders, accompanied by pogroms of administrative buildings, destruction of public property, and attacks on representatives of authority and other disorderly behaviour’. Although police tried to blame ‘hooligan’ elements (including people so diverse as former ‘Nazi collaborators, clergy, and sectarians’), the root cause of course lay much deeper.

Those causes were clearly visible in the most famous disorder of all—in Novocherskassk in June 1962. It began at a locomotive plant, where workers rebelled against rising food prices, wage cuts (30 per cent), and a backlog of unresolved grievances (housing shortages, work safety, and even food-poisoning of 200 workers). The workers quickly won the support of local townspeople; as the KGB later reported, the ‘man-in-the-street’ believed that ‘prices should have been left as they were, that the salaries of highly paid people should be reduced, [and] that aid to underdeveloped socialist countries should cease’. When the striking workers marched into the centre of Novocherkassk, they attracted a crowd of some 4,000 people and managed to repulse the assault of local police and, later, even armoured units. ‘Mass disorders’ continued the next day, as the insurgents seized the offices of the city party committee and tried to storm the KGB and militia headquarters. Moscow hastily dispatched a key Khrushchev aide, F. R. Kozlov, who denounced the ‘instigators’ as ‘hooligan elements’, defended the price rise, but promised to improve the food supply. Troops were eventually able to restore order, but not before taking scores of civilian lives.

But Khrushchev’s fatal error was to attack the ‘partocracy’—the central and local élites who comprised the only real organized political force. His attempt to democratize and ensure renewal, especially through ‘term limits’, posed a direct threat to career officials, from highest to lowest echelons. Decentralization itself was anathema to apparatchiki, especially those holding power in Moscow. His original scheme of sovnarkhozy not only reduced the power of Moscow functionaries, but also forced many to depart for provincial posts—‘I myself had to work in a sovnarkhoz’, a high-ranking functionary later complained. In 1962 Khrushchev undermined his base of support even among provincial officialdom through his scheme to divide the party into industrial and agricultural branches at the regional and oblast levels, thereby undercutting the power of local potentates. And, for all the pain, decentralization seemed only to beget corruption, falsified reports, and non-compliance. In response, Khrushchev was forced to build a new layer of intermediate bodies and central organs to co-ordinate—and control—the sovnarkhozy. The drift towards recentralization culminated in a decision of March 1963 to establish the ‘Supreme Economic Council of the USSR’—in essence, an attempt to reassert central control over the lower economic councils.

Finally, Khrushchev’s colleagues came to feel that he had begun to rule imperiously and, at the time of his removal, denounced him for taking decisions impetuously and ignoring collective opinion. Although Khrushchev gamely responded (‘But you, who are present here, never spoke to me openly and candidly about my shortcomings—you always nodded in agreement and expressed support!’), the critique was not amiss. As a high-ranking functionary, A. Shelepin, observed, Stalin—but not the cult—had expired: ‘[Khrushchev] was also a vozhd′ [Leader]. And the same psychology of the vozhd′ remained. And in the subordinates’ relationship to the vozhd′. No one had the courage to speak out against him’. The fact that Khrushchev had assumed both party leadership and the top position in the state—because it was too much work, because it centralized too much power—also elicited criticism. There was keen resentment too over his tendency to promote family members, such as his son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei, who was made editor of Izvestiia and recipient of undeserved awards and privileges.

The plot to depose Khrushchev evidently commenced as early as February 1964, led primarily by Nikolai Podgornyi and Brezhnev. Khrushchev did receive some prior warnings, but did not take them seriously. The opportunity came in October, as Khrushchev was vacationing at his Crimean dacha: the conspirators summoned him back to Moscow for an extraordinary session of the Central Committee and subjected him to devastating criticism. In his defence Khrushchev emphasized that he had ‘worked all the time’, but professed to greet his removal, through democratic means, as a ‘victory of the party’ over Stalinist illegalities. The public announcement of his ‘retirement’ castigated the former First Secretary for ‘crudeness’, ‘bombastic phrases and braggadocio’, and ‘overhasty conclusions and hare-brained schemes divorced from reality’. Granted a ‘personal pension’, Khrushchev lived in obscurity until his death on 11 September 1971.

Perils of Restoration

With Khrushchev’s removal, the ‘old guard’—most of whom had served under Stalin—sought to restore stability and order to the political system. Although initially evincing interest in economic reform, this ‘new old régime’ became increasingly restorationist, even with respect to the persona of Stalin, and averse to extensive change in policies or personnel. Subsequently castigated as the ‘era of stagnation’, the two decades after Khrushchev’s removal were a marvel of contradictions—economic decline amid apparent prosperity, détente and confrontation, harsh repression and a burgeoning human rights movement. By the early 1980s, however, restoration had plainly failed, stagnation devolving into the systemic crisis that would trigger the frenetic reformism of perestroika and final demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

From Reform to Restoration

The regime made the dismantling of Khrushchev’s unpopular reforms its first priority. It abolished the 1961 rules on ‘term limits’ (in favour of ‘stability’ in party leadership) and reasserted the principle of centralization—and, by extension, the power and prerogatives of the Moscow partocracy The new regime quickly abolished Khrushchev’s sovnarkhozy and re-established ‘all-union’ ministries in Moscow, with a corresponding reduction of authority at the republic and oblast levels. It also scrapped Khrushchev’s educational reform, which had proven immensely unpopular. Restoration was the principal theme of the Twenty-Third Party Congress in March 1966, which reinstated old terms like ‘Politburo’ (for ‘Presidium’) and ‘General Secretary’ (for ‘First Secretary’).

Initially, at least, the regime professed an interest in economic reform. Responding to earlier proposals (most notably, a famous article in 1962 by Evsei Liberman entitled ‘The Plan, Profit and Bonus’) and current assessments of the Soviet economy, the government—under the leadership of Aleksei Kosygin—sought to change the economy itself, not simply the way it was administered. Although favourably disposed towards recentralization, the reforms attempted to overcome the crude quantitative criteria of gross output that purported to show plan fulfilment but actually produced mountains of low-quality output. The reform proposed to measure (and reward) real economic success by placing more emphasis on sales and profits; it also assessed a small charge on capital to ensure efficiency and to limit production costs. In September 1965 the regime adopted plans to rationalize planning and introduce computers, to enhance the power of plant managers, to merge plants into larger production units (ob ′edinenie), and—most important—to replace gross outputs with gross sales. The new strategy also included tighter controls, a stress on automation, and the purchase of advanced technology from the West (for example, the 1966 contract with Fiat to build a plant in Stavropol oblast called Togliatti).

The reforms yielded short-term gains (especially in labour productivity), but soon foundered on several major obstacles. First, despite the incentives for productivity (e.g. penalties for excessive production costs), it was the State Price Committee, not the market, that set prices and therefore determined costs, value, and ‘profitability’. Second, managers lacked the authority to discharge unproductive or redundant workers—a legacy of caution after events in Novocherkassk. Third, despite lip-service to technological innovation, ‘success’ meant fulfilling quarterly and annual production plans; that low time horizon effectively militated against long-range strategies and drove managers to focus on short-term results. Recentralization meant tighter control by the Moscow partocracy a major impediment to innovation and change. And despite the fanfare about ‘automation’ and ‘cybernetics’, the Soviet Union missed the computer revolution: the number of computers per capita in the United States was seventeen times higher and at least a full generation ahead. By the late 1960s the Soviet leadership abandoned the pretence of economic reform and settled into an unruffled commitment to the status quo.

As reform at home stalled, the regime intervened to suppress change elsewhere in the Soviet bloc—above all, the famous ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968. After the Czech Action Programme’ of April 1968 proclaimed the right of each nation to follow its ‘own separate road to socialism’, the country was engulfed by autonomous movements demanding not only economic efficiency, but fundamental changes in the social and political order. On 10 August the Communist Party itself drafted new party statutes to require secret balloting, set term limits, and permit intra-party factions. Although the party chief Alexander Dubček promised to stay in the Warsaw Pact (seeking to avoid Hungary’s provocative mistake in 1956), Soviet leaders found the experiment of ‘socialism with a human face’ too threatening and led a Warsaw Bloc invasion on 21 August to restore hardliners to power.

The regime also had to suppress dissent at home. It had grounds for concern: the KGB reported that 1,292 authors in 1965 had composed and disseminated 9,697 ‘anti-Soviet’ documents (mostly posters and leaflets). It identified about two-thirds of the authors—a motley array that included workers (206), schoolchildren (189), university students (36), state employees (169), pensioners (95), collective farmers (61), and even party members (111). Protest also became public for the first time in decades, as some two hundred dissidents held a demonstration on Pushkin Square, with one demonstrator bearing the sign, ‘Respect the Constitution’.

Although most dissenters were dealt with ‘prophylactically’ (a KGB euphemism for intimidation), the Kremlin leadership decided to send a clear message to dissidents. In February 1966 it staged the famous show trial of two dissident writers, Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniel, who had published satirical works abroad and, of course, without official permission. The court predictably found them guilty of ‘anti-Soviet’ activity and meted out harsh sentences (seven years of hard labour for Siniavskii, five for Daniel). The KGB boasted that the trial not only evoked an outpouring of popular demands that the ‘slanderers’ be severely punished, but also that it had intimidated the intelligentsia. Simultaneously, authorities launched an attack on Alexander Nekrich’s historical monograph, 22 June 1941, which blamed Stalin personally for the Nazis’ initial success in the war and thus contravened official plans to rehabilitate Stalin. In response, party functionaries campaigned against Nekrich’s study as allegedly based on ‘the military-historical sources of capitalist countries’.

The repression was harsh but ineffective. When, for example, the regime organized a public discussion of Nekrich’s work at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in February 1966, the audience openly supported Nekrich and subjected a ‘loyal’ party hack to humiliating insults and censure. Sixty-three Moscow writers signed an open letter of protest against the Siniavskii-Daniel trial, and another two hundred prominent intellectuals sent a letter to the Twenty-Third Party Congress demanding that the case be reviewed. Nor did the demonstrative repression intimidate the intelligentsia or even end public demonstrations: a few days after the invasion of Czechoslovakia dissidents staged a short demonstration on Red Square, carrying placards that read ‘Hands off the ČSSR’, ‘For Your and Our Freedom!’ and ‘Down with the Occupiers!’. Dissent was particularly animated among national minorities. For example, the Crimean Tatars—still denied repatriation and restitution—organized a demonstration in April 1968 that culminated in hundreds of arrests. The Muslim peoples of Central Asia also became increasingly restive; as the KGB reported (after a fierce mêlée at Semipalatinsk in June 1965), Kazakhs resented the fact that Russian was the official language and that ethnic Russians monopolized the best positions in the army, state, and administration.

Years of Stagnation

Amid all this turbulence, Brezhnev steadily consolidated his power. An associate observed that, in contrast to Khrushchev, ‘Brezhnev never read anything except Krokodil’, a lightweight satirical magazine that he even brought to meetings of the Politburo. As the years passed Brezhnev also grew increasingly vain, fond of medals and praise. He encouraged fawning and toadying, like that in a 1973 report by the KGB head, Iurii Andropov, claiming that people regarded Brezhnev’s recent speech as ‘a new creative contribution to the theory of Marxism-Leninism’, that it ‘brilliantly reveals the paths and prospects of communist construction in the USSR and inspires new heroic feats of labour in the name of strengthening our multinational state, the unity and solidarity of the Soviet people’. Three years later Brezhnev was awarded the rank of ‘marshal of the Soviet Union’, his fifth medal for the ‘Order of Lenin’, and his second medal as ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’. (Satirists later speculated that he died from a chest operation, undertaken to broaden his chest to hold more medals.) The same year he ‘won’ a Lenin Prize for his memoirs, with this explanation: ‘For their popularity and their educational influence on the mass of readers, the books of Leonid Ilich are unrivalled.’ Popular demand, however, was less than insatiable: after his death, a report on state bookshops disclosed a backlog of 2.7 million copies of unsold, let alone unread, books. After a new constitution in 1977 established the office of president as titular head of state, Brezhnev assumed that position as well. With good reason, A. N. Shelepin argues that ‘Brezhnev was a great, very great mistake’.

Brezhnev consolidated not only his own power but also that of the partocracy: article 6 of the new constitution formally established the CPSU as the leading force in Soviet society. The party also expanded its presence through sheer growth: although the rate of growth after 1964 was slower, the party none the less increased its ranks from 12.5 million (1966) to 17.5 million (1981), an increase of 40 per cent.

But the most significant accommodation was Brezhnev’s ‘trust in cadres’ and resolve to end ‘the unjustified reshuffling and frequent replacement of cadres’. In contrast to Khrushchev, who sought to rejuvenate the party through democratization and turnover, Brezhnev left most members in their position until death or incapacitation. As a result, the average age of Politburo members rose from 55 to 68 between 1966 and 1981; by then half were over the age of 70 and would die within the next few years. The pattern was true of the Central Committee: because of the high rate of return (rising from 54 per cent in 1961 to 89 per cent in 1976–81), 44 per cent of the membership of the Central Committee was unchanged between 1966 and 1981, with an inevitable rise in the average age from 56 to 63. Low turnover rates also characterized lower echelons of the party; thus the proportion of oblast secretaries retaining their positions rose from 33 per cent under Khrushchev to 78 per cent in the period 1964–76.

This partocracy ossified into gerontocracy, devoid of dynamic leadership. It was not only inimical to change but physically incapable; Brezhnev himself, ravaged by ailments and strokes, gradually deteriorated into a breathing mummy. His colleagues were likewise so infirm that, shortly after his death, the Politburo solemnly addressed the issue of age and ‘solved’ the problem by setting limits on the hours and days that its members should work. This ossified leadership invited rampant corruption and crime, not only in the outlying republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia, but also in core Russian oblasti like Krasnodar, Rostov, and Moscow itself. Although the party periodically purged the corrupt (nearly 650,000 lost party membership on these grounds between 1971 and 1981), it did little to stop the rot, especially at upper levels. That decay even touched Brezhnev’s own family, as police arrested close friends and associates of his daughter.

Economy and Society

Brezhnev’s stewardship also brought sharp economic decline. Whereas national income rose 5.9 per cent per capita in 1966–70, thereafter it fell sharply, bottoming out at 2.1 per cent in 1981–5. GNP followed a similar trajectory: 6 per cent in the 1950s, 5 per cent in the 1960s, 4 per cent from 1970–8, and 2 per cent in subsequent years. This corresponded, predictably, to a decrease in the rate of growth in investment capital (from 7.6 per cent in 1966–70 to 3.4 per cent in 1976–80, including a mere 0.6 per cent in 1979). The regime deftly juggled statistics to mask the malaise: by emphasizing not physical output but ‘rouble value’ (showing a 75 per cent increase in 1976–83), it took advantage of the hidden price inflation and concealed the modest increase in gross production (a mere 9 per cent in the same period).

Agriculture was still the Achilles heel of the Soviet Prometheus. Agricultural output at first increased (by 21 per cent in 1966–70, compared to 12 per cent in 1961–5), but thereafter the rate of growth declined (to just 6 per cent in 1981–5). Apart from bumper harvests (for example, 235 million tons of grain in 1978), most crops were mediocre or outright failures. Thus the yield for 1975 was a mere 140 million tons—the worst since 1963 and 76 million short of the goal. And because of limited port capacities, the government could import only 40 million tons, the shortfall causing a higher rate of slaughter and long-term consequences for animal husbandry. A desperate regime made new concessions on private plots and even encouraged city-dwellers to have garden plots. By 1974 private agriculture consumed one-third of all man-hours in agriculture and one-tenth in the entire economy. The private plots were phenomenally productive: in 1978, for instance, they occupied just 3 per cent of arable land but produced 25 per cent of total agricultural output.

Agriculture became a drag on the whole economy, devouring an ever larger share of scarce investment capital. According to G. A. E. Smith, its share of investment rose from 23 per cent (1961–5) to 27 per cent in 1976–80; allocations to the entire agro-industrial complex (for example, fertilizer plants) increased from 28 to 35 per cent. The United States, by comparison, allocated a mere 4 per cent of investment capital to agriculture. Although total output did increase (the yield for 1976–80 being 50 per cent greater than that for 1961–5), it did not keep pace with demand or rising production costs (covered primarily by gargantuan government subsidies). Subsidized bread prices were so low that peasants even used government bread for fodder. Nevertheless, spot shortages and price adjustments remained a source of hardship that periodically triggered food riots, such as those in Sverdlovsk (1969), Dnepropetrovsk (1972), and Gorky (1980).

The regime could boast of better results in the industrial sector, yet still failed to match past performance or reach plan targets. It could claim salient achievements like the mammoth ‘Baikal–Amur’ project—a 3,000 kilometre railway north of the old Trans-Siberian and linking eastern Siberia with the Pacific.

But the general record on output and productivity was dismal. Although the regime periodically spoke of revamping the system, it did little to raise critical indicators like product quality or labour productivity. Far more characteristic was the bureaucratic posturing, the attempt to solve economic problems with administrative decrees (which mushroomed to more than 200,000 in the late 1970s). Increasingly, the main goal was not reform but control, primarily through the formation of central industrial associations to ensure subordination and vertical integration in a specific sphere of industry.

This decline in industrial growth had many causes. Some were inherent in a ‘command economy’, with all its inefficiencies and bottle-necks, compounded by the incompetence of a superannuated leadership. Moreover, the hidden inflation of the Soviet price system (which allowed plants to reprice essentially the same products) encouraged managers to ignore productivity and avoid retooling that involved short-term costs and unwanted—and unnecessary—risks. So long as the state provided a guaranteed market and set the prices, it was pointless to cut costs or even worry about cost-effectiveness.

Labour constituted another major problem. The difficulty was partly quantitative: whereas the labour force had increased by 23.2 million in 1960–70, that growth fell to just 17.8 million in 1970–80 and to 9.5 million in 1980–90. For a labour-intensive economy heavily dependent on manual labour, the sharp reduction in labour inputs was devastating. Labour was also maldistributed, being concentrated not in industrialized areas but in backward regions like Central Asia, where the willingness to relocate was minimal. Labour also showed a high turnover rate (25 to 30 per cent) that directly undermined continuity and training. Nor was labour so tractable; strikes, rare under Stalin, openly challenged the regime’s authority. In 1968, for example, workers struck at twenty large industrial enterprises, chiefly because of grievances over wages and production norms, sometimes because of tactless management and unwarranted deductions.

Paradoxically, contemporaries saw the 1970s as a decade of unprecedented well-being. The Twenty-Fourth Party Congress (March 1971) renewed the perennial pledge to support heavy industry and defence, but also laid a new emphasis on consumer goods. The Ninth Five-Year Plan (1971–5) even projected higher growth for consumer goods than for capital goods; although that goal was not met, it did signal a marked change. Given the precipitous decline in agricultural and industrial sectors, the ‘mirage’ of prosperity is puzzling.

Much of the explanation rests in fortuitous circumstances on foreign markets. The primary elixir was oil: after the 1973 oil crisis, the enormous profits from oil kept the leaky Soviet vessel afloat. A simultaneous commodity boom also increased revenues for an economy that exported primarily raw materials, making the terms of trade still more favourable. The surge in gold prices (for example, the 75 per cent increase in 1979) further added to state coffers. Although the USSR had already accumulated a substantial foreign debt (17 billion dollars), that sum paled in comparison with current revenues from hydrocarbon and raw material exports. As a result, the Soviet Union was able to use its hard-currency earnings to pay for the import of producer goods, consumer products, and endless shiploads of grain.

Alongside this inefficient state economy, a ‘second’ (or ‘black’) economy emerged to satisfy the demand for deficit goods and services. According to one estimate, some twenty million people worked on the black market to supply the demand for 83 per cent of the general population. Because of rampant corruption, repression of the black market became increasingly symbolic and inconsequential. The result was a subclass of ‘underground’ millionaires whose illicit earnings became a prime source of private investment after 1985.

‘High Brezhnevism’ also marked the apogee of the nomenklatura—a term denoting not merely the list of key positions, but the social and political élite who monopolized them. According to estimates for 1970, this élite included about 700,000 individuals: 250,000 people in state and party positions, 300,000 members in economic sectors, and another 150,000 in science and research. By 1982 this group had increased to some 800,000 people and, together with their families, comprised about 3 million people (1.2 per cent of the Soviet population).

Although a golden age for the nomenklatura, the Brezhnev era also attempted to improve the lot of the general population. Despite the rising cost of living (about 1 per cent per annum), real wages increased still more sharply (50 per cent between 1967 and 1977). The state also established a five-day working week, mandated a minimum vacation of 12–15 days, raised the minimum monthly wage (first to 60 roubles, later to 70 roubles), and expanded Khrushchev’s social welfare (which increased fivefold between 1950 and 1980). The regime gave particular attention to the ‘underclass’, as in the decision of 1974 to provide an income subsidy to alleviate poverty. It also made a concerted effort to improve the lot of collective farmers, three-quarters of whom initially fell below the official ‘poverty line’ (with a quarter even below the official subsistence minimum). The goal was not just to ensure social justice but to cauterize social haemorrhaging—the flight of rural labour, especially youths and males, from the village. As a result, by the 1970s rural wages were only 10 per cent lower than those for urban workers and were supplemented by a significant income from the private plots.

Despite petrodollars and state welfare, Soviet society revealed signs of acute stress. One was hyper-alcoholism: surplus income, amid widespread goods deficits, led to a massive increase in alcohol sales (77 per cent in the 1970s alone). Another disturbing indicator was infant mortality, which jumped from 22.9 (per 1,000 live births) in 1971 to 31.6 in 1976. Another cause of concern was the decrease in the average number of children per family (from 2.9 in 1970 to 2.4 in 1978). The demography carried ominous political and ethnic overtones: whereas the average family in the RSFSR in 1970 was 1.97, family size among the Muslim peoples of Central Asia was nearly three times higher—for example, 5.64 in Uzbekistan and 5.95 in Turkmenistan.

Détente

To counteract the international furore over the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Brezhnev government embarked on a policy of calculated détente. Whatever the motive, it led to an impressive array of agreements on trade, arms, human rights, and even the German question. This environment also favoured a marked improvement in Soviet–American relations. The end to the Vietnam War, long a festering issue, doubtless helped. But both sides found an array of common interests, especially in trade and military security, which could foster collaboration in spite of significant spheres of difference. The first important sign was SALT-I, a ‘strategic arms limitation treaty’ in 1972 that set limits on offensive missiles and anti-ballistic missiles for five years. This agreement was followed by others—on nuclear accidents, joint space operations, and a further arms agreement finally signed in June 1979 as ‘SALT-II’.

Nevertheless, the 1970s were years of instability and conflict. Apart from Western concern about domestic Soviet policy (especially with respect to human rights issues, including Jewish emigration and suppression of dissidents), Moscow continued efforts to increase its presence and influence around the globe, especially in underdeveloped countries. After failing to achieve a significant improvement in relations with China or to increase its authority in Asia, Moscow showed a growing interest in Africa and especially South Yemen (which became a Marxist republic in 1978). Moscow relied not only on subversion but subvention (to be sure, promises outpaced deliveries: of 13 billion dollars promised in 1954–77, only 7.2 billion actually materialized). And aid came increasingly in the form of military assistance and arms, as Soviet arms shipments increased exponentially.

The coup de grâce for détente was the decision to intervene in Afghanistan in December 1979. Ever since a Marxist faction seized power in April 1978, Moscow had given strong support to the regime in Kabul and its social and cultural transformation. Although willing to provide assistance (including Soviet ‘advisers’ to guide the ‘socialist transformation’), Moscow abjured a direct military role as likely to ‘expose’ the weakness of the Afghan government and to ‘inflict serious harm on the international authority of the USSR and significantly reverse the process of détente’. In December 1979, however, a rump meeting of the Politburo elected to intervene militarily because of the region’s strategic importance, popular opposition to the Afghan government, and rumours that Kabul was making overtures to the American government. Whatever the rationale, the result was catastrophic: the Soviet Union found itself snared in a military quagmire that consumed vast resources, cost enormous casualties, and had a devastating effect on the Soviet Union’s international position.

Dissent

The 1970s also marked the emergence of two broad-based dissident movements—one in defence of human rights, the other representing national minorities, both sharing a common cause against an authoritarian regime. They steadily gained in strength, notwithstanding domestic repression and foreign ambivalence bred by détente. A KGB report of December 1976 (on thousands of cases) gives some idea of the main currents of dissent: ‘revisionism and reformism’ (35 per cent), ‘nationalism’ (33.7 per cent), ‘Zionism’ (17.5 per cent), ‘religion’ (8.2 per cent), ‘fascism and neo-fascism’ (5.6 per cent), and other miscellaneous matters. Although samizdat included many different works, the main voice for the movement was a samizdat journal Chronicle of Current Events, which appeared first in 1968 and managed to publish bi-monthly issues almost uninterruptedly (except for an eighteen-month gap in 1972–4).

Compared to the preceding decade, this dissident movement of the 1970s was different in several respects. First, although belles-lettres remained important, the movement itself became much more political. A KGB report in 1970 noted that the earlier samizdat had been primarily literary, but of late consisted chiefly of ‘political programmatic’ materials, influenced mainly by Yugoslav and Czechoslovak literature. Second, dissent was more widespread, spilling beyond secret circles and tiny demonstrations to envelop larger segments of society, with nearly 300,000 adherents (mostly supporters and sympathizers, including some 20,000 political prisoners and people under surveillance or investigation). That was a far cry from the ‘35 to 40’ dissidents that the KGB reported a few years earlier. The growth of dissent was also apparent in the mushrooming of samizdat, which included some 4,000 volumes in 1979. The KGB warned that dissent was especially strong among the young—in its view, because they were denied access to professional organizations (for example, only 48 of the 75,490 members of the Union of Writers being under the age of 30). Third, dissent was better organized, especially after Andrei Sakharov (a full member of the prestigious Academy of Sciences and leading figure in Soviet nuclear development) and others founded the ‘Human Rights Committee’ in November 1970.

Predictably, the dissident movement aroused growing concern, especially in the KGB. Dismayed by the Politburo’s reluctance to deal with Sakharov, in September 1973 the KGB chief, Andropov, warned that the failure to act not only enraged honest Soviet citizens but also encouraged ‘certain circles of the intelligentsia and youth’ to flout authority. Their motto, he claimed, was ‘Act boldly, publicly, involve Western correspondents, rely on the support of the bourgeois press, and no one will dare touch you’. Emphasizing the need to interdict the ‘hostile activities of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov’, he proposed to put Solzhenitsyn on trial (afterwards offering him foreign exile) and to quarantine Sakharov in Novosibirsk. After Solzhenitsyn’s forced extradition and deprivation of citizenship in 1974, the regime focused increasingly on Sakharov, whom the KGB accused in 1975 of ‘evolution in the direction of open anti-Sovietism and direct support for the forces of international reaction’. Although the KGB urgently demanded vigorous action against Sakharov, the Politburo demurred—in large part for fear of the negative repercussions on détente. But patience wore thin, even for the timorous Brezhnev, who made this comment at a Politburo meeting of 8 June 1978: ‘The reasons for our extraordinary tolerance of Sakharov are known to all. But there is a limit to everything. To leave his attacks without a response is impossible.’ Western furore over Afghanistan removed the final inhibition; with nothing to lose, the regime approved a KGB proposal to exile Sakharov to the closed city of Gorky, thereby cutting off his access to Westerners.

While dissenters like Sakharov and writers like Solzhenitsyn captured world attention, no less significant was the political dissent sweeping minority nationalities. The most visible, for Western observers, was the Jewish movement, the product of official anti-religious repression (by the 1970s only thirty synagogues existed in European Russia) and an anti-Israeli foreign policy that fanned popular anti-Semitism. But powerful nationalist movements also appeared in all the republics, especially in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Caucasus. The intensity of nationalist sentiment was dramatically revealed in 1978, when mass demonstrations in Tbilisi forced the government to abandon plans to eliminate Georgian as the official state language inside the republic. Tensions also mounted in the Muslim republics of Central Asia, fuelled by a steady influx of Russian immigrants and the repression of Islam.

The government itself realized that it had failed to assimilate minorities. That failure was amply demonstrated in a secret report of 1978, which detailed the obstacles to Russification of schools, including a lack of qualified teachers: ‘Many of the teachers in minority elementary schools have only a poor knowledge of Russian. There are cases where, for this reason, Russian is not taught at all’. The failure of linguistic Russification was clearly apparent in Central Asia: the proportion claiming total ignorance of Russian language ranged from 24 per cent among Uzbeks to 28 per cent among Tajiks and Turkmen. Even graduates of specialized technical schools had a poor command of Russian. In response, the regime proposed to establish a special two- or three-month course in Russian for those due to perform military service. As Brezhnev admitted at the Twenty-Sixth Party Congress in February 1981, the government had made scant progress in its campaign to assimilate minorities and combat nationalism.

Towards the Abyss

When Leonid Brezhnev died on 10 November 1982, he bequeathed a country mired in profound systemic crisis. Its economic problems were daunting; amid falling prices on energy and commodities, the regime lacked the resources either to reindustrialize or to restructure agriculture. Although the KGB had seemingly decapitated the leadership of the democratic and nationalist movements, anti-regime sentiments were intense and widespread. Nor had the Brezhnev government achieved stability and security in foreign policy: the invasion of Afghanistan, débâcles elsewhere around the globe, even erosion of the Warsaw Bloc (especially in Poland) provided profound cause of concern and an endless drain on resources.

Neither of Brezhnev’s immediate successors, the former KGB chief Andropov or the quintessential party functionary Konstantin Chernenko, survived long enough to address the ugly legacy of the ‘years of stagnation’. Andropov placed the main emphasis on law and order, even for solving the economic crisis, with the explanation that ‘good order does not require any capital investment whatever, but can produce great results’. He also waged a vigorous campaign against corruption and, lacking Brezhnev’s veneration for ‘stability of cadres’, replaced a quarter of the ministers and oblast secretaries in a desperate attempt to revitalize the system. But within fifteen months he too was dead, with power devolving on Chernenko—an elderly partocrat whose only distinction was to have been Brezhnev’s chief adviser. In the end Chernenko became the old élite’s last hurrah—an ageing and ailing leader, he ‘reigned’ but only for one year before dying from emphysema and respiratory-cardiovascular problems in March 1985.

As the Politburo assembled to confirm the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to the post of General Secretary, the prospects for survival were bleak. Internationally, it had paid an enormous cost for the Afghanistan invasion and faced an awesome challenge from the aggressively anti-communist administration of Ronald Reagan in Washington. Domestically, its economy had ground to a halt, paralysed by profound structural problems in agriculture and industry and now deprived of lucrative revenues from the export of energy and raw materials. The new General Secretary, whatever his personal proclivities, had good cause to ponder the options for a fundamental ‘perestroika’.

14. A Modern ‘Time of Troubles’

FROM REFORM TO DISINTEGRATION, 1985–1999

GREGORY L. FREEZE

The fourteen and half years between Chernenko’s death and Putin’s presidency loomed like a redux of the ‘Time of Troubles’ in the early seventeenth century. What began as systemic reform turned into systemic collapse—dissolution of the Soviet Union, disastrous economic regression, profound social upheavals, and loss of superpower status. Mikhail Gorbachev initiated the reforms, aiming to reinvigorate and ultimately transform the Soviet system. His ‘perestroika’, however, unleashed forces and expectations even as it failed to satisfy minimal requirements. Dissolution of the Soviet Union, at the initiative of Russia under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin, marked an end of communism and heralded a new attempt to reconstruct Russia after a Western model of democracy and free markets. That transition proved far more difficult, disruptive, and destructive than any imagined; the result was systemic breakdown of the economy, polity, and social system. By the late 1990s, Russia had been degraded from a superpower to a ‘failed state’ with an ‘undeveloping’ economy.

The General Secretary as Reformer: Mikhail Gorbachev

By any standard, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev had an extraordinary career. Born in 1931 in the agricultural heartland of southern Russia, he lived through the difficult 1930s and personally experienced the full weight of German occupation. After the war he not only studied but laboured, with distinction, earning the Order of the Red Banner of Labour by helping a collective farm produce a record harvest. That distinction, and raw intelligence, earned him a coveted place at Moscow State University in 1950, and set him apart from others who matriculated by dint of military service or family connections. Gorbachev majored in law and, by all accounts, demonstrated a keen mind and exceptional curiosity. Upon graduation in 1955, in accordance with the Soviet system of ‘assignment’, authorities returned him to Stavropol’, where he quickly rose in the local party hierarchy. Gorbachev also continued graduate studies, specializing in agriculture and earning a reputation for expertise in what was undeniably the Achilles heel of the Soviet economy. That expertise, plus ties to people like Iurii Andropov, helped to catapult Gorbachev to Politburo membership in 1978 and brought him from a provincial backwater to the very centre of power. With Chernenko’s death on 10 March 1985, the Politburo—with a strong recommendation by the éminence grise, Andrei Gromyko—made the youthful Gorbachev the new general secretary, the youngest general secretary since Stalin assumed that post in 1922.

Although elevated to power by the old guard, Gorbachev was cut from a very different cloth. He was a ‘post-Stalinist’ member of the élite: he formally joined the party in 1952, but made his career under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Profoundly influenced by Khrushchev’s revelations and reforms, Gorbachev belonged more to the free-thinking shestidesiatniki (‘people of the 1960s’) than the older Stalinist cadres who dominated the party apparatus. Foreign travel in the 1970s broadened his horizons, reinforcing his intellectual curiosity and encouraging a broader, even critical perspective of the Soviet system. Gorbachev nurtured ties to intellectuals like Aleksandr Iakovlev, who would figure prominently in the attempt to transform the Soviet system. Thus the 1970s and 1980s, along with ‘stagnation’, generated a critically thinking élite, which included such figures as Abel Aganbegian and Tat’iana Zaslavskaia, who worked in research institutes and bore the accolade institutchiki. Gorbachev’s wife Raisa had close connections to these intellectual circles and played a key role in broadening his intellectual horizons. The impact was evident even before he became general secretary; in December 1984, four months prior to becoming party head, Gorbachev candidly spoke about ‘a slowdown of economic growth at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s’ and hinted at the need for far-reaching changes. Heeding advice from prominent institutchiki, Gorbachev spoke openly about the need to consider price, cost, and efficiency and thus challenged the basic premisses of the command economy that had impeded innovation and growth.

Power, Discipline, and Economic Growth

Vision was not enough: Gorbachev understood that he must consolidate power and change leadership at the very top. Thus, in his very first month in office, he had five allies promoted to key positions, with three becoming members of the Politburo. Over the next two years he engineered a massive turnover in the leadership, replacing the elderly and conservative with younger cadres and institutchiki disposed to transform the existing order. All this had a profound impact on discourse and policy discussions; the Politburo itself began to discuss issues hitherto regarded as taboo.

As the new general secretary consolidated power, he was not primarily seeking to transform the existing system but rather to make it more efficient. He initially laid a heavy emphasis on ‘discipline’. That included a campaign against corruption, much in the spirit of Andropov, but broadened to include not just venality but also the violations of work discipline and alcoholism which bore such heavy costs for the nation’s health and economy. The anti-alcoholism campaign entailed its own high costs, including the destruction of valuable vineyards, a sharp decrease in state revenues, and a boom in the production of untaxed (and unsafe)moonshine. The campaign also elicited popular discontent: in a sputtering economy rife with defitsity (deficit consumer goods), alcohol had absorbed the surplus money in circulation, but Gorbachev’s temperance campaign severely aggravated the ubiquitous problem of deficit goods.

The principal thrust of Gorbachev’s strategy, however, was a huge increase in capital investment—the traditional Soviet recipe for raising the rate of economic growth. Gorbachev promoted an ‘acceleration’ (uskorenie) that was indeed ambitious—a twofold increase in investment which, he predicted, would increase industrial output 20 per cent in the next fifteen years. He also resorted to deficit financing; given the drop in state revenues and the reluctance to limit consumption (by raising prices on deficit goods), Gorbachev chose to cover the budget deficit by expanding the monetary supply and by relying on domestic and especially foreign loans and credits. That strategy presumed that the increased investment could overcome structural problems and eventually recoup the ‘loans’ through higher rates of economic growth.

Economy: Structural Constraints

Like most of the élite, Gorbachev lacked a rudimentary economic education needed for understanding the structural problems that beset the Soviet economy. Simply put, since the 1970s the Soviet economy came to depend less on growth than the export of raw materials, especially oil, natural gas, metals, and other commodities. By the mid-1980s, that strategy foundered partly because of new global dynamics, above all the drop in prices for energy, but also because of the stagnation in domestic production. In the case of oil, for example, the price plunged from 70 dollars a barrel in 1979–81 to just 20 dollars in the mid-1980s. Simultaneously, Soviet production—which had increased in the 1960s and 1970s—suddenly faltered; the exploitation of new oil and gas fields became increasingly difficult and expensive, and precisely at a time when investment capital was scarce and needed for other sectors for Gorbachev’s ‘acceleration’. Indeed, 1985—Gorbachev’s first year as general secretary—recorded the first decrease in oil production. The future was indeed bleak: Soviet economists calculated that the country needed to increase its investment nearly fivefold merely to maintain current levels of production. Nor, when oil prices were high, had the regime built up a reserve fund; rather, having squandered the windfall of the 1970s, it increasingly had to rely on loans and credits, using export earnings to serve its mounting debt.

Agriculture was equally problematic. Confronted with unstable harvests and low productivity, the government invested heavily in agriculture and at a rate far exceeding that of Western countries. Thus, despite the priority of ‘acceleration’ and mounting economic problems, the government allocated substantial resources to agriculture (17.1 per cent of all capital investment, 1985–90). Nevertheless, the agricultural sector failed to meet domestic demand and forced the government to divert hard currency to import grain from abroad. It abjured the alternative (raising food prices), fearing that this would exacerbate popular discontent over the ubiquitous ‘deficits’. The government therefore continued to sell staples at below-cost prices—20 per cent for bread, 74 per cent for beef, and 61 per cent for milk.

As a result, Gorbachev’s government piled up budgetary deficits. On the one hand, it had declining revenues—largely because of the fall in earnings from energy exports, but also because of the sharp contraction in excise taxes (from the anti-alcohol campaign). On the other hand, the government indulged in a spending spree as it simultaneously sought to subsidize agriculture, stimulate industrial growth, import foreign goods, and keep low prices for consumer goods. To finance this budget deficit, the Gorbachev regime assumed new debts (which rose from 18.1 billion dollars in 1981 to 27.2 billion in 1988, and still more sharply over the next few years). By 1990, however, it became increasingly difficult to service the foreign debt, and authorities reported that they had to use ‘almost the entire income from the oil and gas exports’ to pay the interest on the debt. Gorbachev was well aware of the deficit and debt, but saw no alternative to the imports: ‘We have to buy, because we cannot live without this.’

International Dynamics

Gorbachev, an expert in agriculture but not in international relations, nevertheless made the latter sphere integral to his strategy for change. Above all, he believed that a resumption of détente—better relations with the West—would enable Moscow to ratchet down military expenditures and thereby free more funds for ‘acceleration’. He therefore made international relations a priority and, aided by his new minister of foreign affairs, Eduard Shevardnadze, took charge of foreign affairs and directed diplomats and party functionaries to ‘rethink’ the country’s foreign policy.

The military was indeed an immense drag on the Soviet economy—by some estimates devouring as much as 16 per cent of the GDP. Revealingly, even Politburo members knew little about the military budget and its impact on the economy; only in the autumn of 1986 did they learn that defence consumed 40 per cent of the state budget, not counting the subsidies and aid given to allies in the communist bloc and to developing countries. The sheer size of the armed forces, together with the gargantuan costs of maintaining nuclear parity, diverted critical resources that could have been funnelled towards such urgent priorities of revitalization as investment in the industrial sector. As Gorbachev stressed in May 1986, it was essential to reduce the crushing pressure generated by ‘the vice of defence expenditures’.

It was not just finances that concerned Gorbachev: he also came to believe that nuclear disarmament was an urgent priority. He was already familiar with the writings of the nuclear disarmament movement and, revealingly, authorized the return of Andrei Sakharov—a leading exponent of nuclear disarmament—from exile in Gorkii. Gorbachev’s personal commitment was greatly strengthened by the events of 26 April 1986, when a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl exploded and spewed immense amounts of radioactive materials into the atmosphere. The disaster cost dearly in terms of human life (thousands killed, nearly half a million exposed to high doses of radiation) and resources (billions of roubles). The disaster hardened Gorbachev’s resolve to reverse the nuclear arms race; as he told members of the Politburo, ‘we learned what nuclear war can be’.

All this propelled Gorbachev’s bold initiative for disarmament. In August 1985 his government announced a unilateral moratorium on nuclear tests and internally began to revise its nuclear strategy, shifting the goal from ‘nuclear parity’ to ‘nuclear sufficiency’—that is, a downscaled military which would reduce costs yet guarantee deterrence. Sensitive to economic imperatives, Gorbachev warned that Moscow must avoid being ‘drawn into an arms race which is beyond our capacity’ and which Moscow was bound to ‘lose’. Gorbachev’s charm offensive won strong support from European leaders, most notably Margaret Thatcher, the arch-conservative British prime minister, who wrote to US President Ronald Reagan that Gorbachev ‘was much less constrained, more charming, open to discussion and debate, and did not stick to prepared notes’.

The United States, however, was a hard nut to crack. The conservative administration of Ronald Reagan was aggressively anticommunist; in 1983 the president himself characterized the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’ and shortly afterwards announced the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI, popularly known as ‘Star Wars’)—a defensive missile system designed to negate parity and mutual deterrence. Key officials, such as CIA director Robert Gates, dismissed perestroika as a sham and Gorbachev’s overtures as a ruse. The ideological intransigence in Washington, predictably, strengthened the hand of Politburo critics who regarded an agreement with the anti-communist Reagan as impossible. Such pessimism seemed justified by the stalemate at Reykjavik (11–12 October 1986), when Reagan—largely because of SDI—spurned Gorbachev’s proposals to achieve nuclear disarmament within a decade. A conservative like the KGB head Viktor Chebrikov thereupon argued that ‘the Americans understand only power’, and the military redoubled its demand for still more resources.

But Washington was not the only obstacle to improving Soviet–American relations: a fair share of the blame rests with Moscow itself. Gorbachev himself was loath to abandon Soviet clients in the third world, despite the fact that they cost the Soviet Union immense sums—in financial and military assistance—that the Kremlin could ill afford. The Afghan conflict was particularly troublesome. Although some in Moscow (including the military) endorsed rapid disengagement, Gorbachev and others feared that a precipitous withdrawal would unleash a bloodbath and gravely compromise Russia’s vital interests. As an interim solution, Gorbachev proposed to ‘indigenize’ the conflict: that is, promote ‘Afghanization’—making pro-Moscow Afghanis responsible for combating the Islamists. But that policy too ran afoul of America’s engagement, especially its clandestine support of Islamic insurgents; the Afghan question, which had ended détente, continued to weigh heavily on Soviet–American relations.

Perestroika: From Modest Renovation to Fundamental Reconstruction

Gorbachev sought to transform domestic, not just foreign policy. His central idea, ‘perestroika’, was elastic; its meaning could range from modest renovation to systemic, fundamental transformation. Initially, Gorbachev himself thought in terms of ‘renovation’ but gradually came to embrace a far more radical vision. His rhetoric reflected the shift: in 1987 the traditional ‘democratic centralism’ (a Leninist phrase denoting single-party dictatorship) gave way to ‘pluralism’, appearing first as ‘socialist pluralism’ (implying plurality of opinion) but eventually as ‘competitive pluralism’ (denoting a multi-party political system).

Gorbachev not only talked about democratization, but began to experiment with its application. He first did so in the 1987 elections to local soviets, with multiple candidates in 5 per cent of the races. But the critical breakthrough came in elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies in March 1989, when a third of deputies were elected in open territorial elections (the rest being designated by the Communist Party and by various institutions). The popular elections were open to non-party candidates and, to the shock and dismay of party élites, many leading party candidates—including prominent first secretaries in several oblasts—went down in defeat. Flamboyant oppositionists won impressive victories; Boris Yeltsin, former party leader in Moscow who had broken with Gorbachev and emerged as the leader of anti-Kremlin forces, won 89.6 per cent of the ballots.

Democratization, however, exposed Gorbachev to popular will—a hazardous vulnerability as the economic situation rapidly deteriorated. The earlier elixir—using hard-currency earnings from the export of energy and natural resources—was fast disappearing, as production, prices, and therefore earnings plummeted. Gorbachev thus found it increasingly difficult to sustain both capital investment and the import of grain and basic consumer goods. The goods shortages (defitsity) intensified, for the government declined to raise prices (for fear of popular unrest) to absorb the ‘monetary overhang’ (the gap between the rising income in paper roubles and the available goods). The inevitable result was an acute shortage of basic goods.

Gorbachev had heralded ‘glasnost’ (openness and publicity) as the motor of change, but that too served to erode his authority. The free press, especially its shocking revelations about the travesties of earlier regimes, undermined not only the regime’s legitimacy but Gorbachev’s own stature. Gorbachev had hoped to ride the wave of democratic forces, but discovered that he could not satisfy rising expectations, either material or political, and that failure inevitably took a toll on his approval ratings.

As Gorbachev embraced radical perestroika, he still held a clear preponderance of power. He had acted promptly to replace a majority of members in the Politburo and Central Committee; in April 1989 he induced 110 full and candidate members of the Central Committee to resign ‘voluntarily’ and thereby enable the influx of people loyal to the general secretary.

Growing Opposition, Shrinking Base

Even as Gorbachev consolidated power in the party, the CPSU itself was steadily losing its authority, cohesion, and legitimacy. Five months after the Congress of People’s Deputies met in 1989, the proportion of the population expressing ‘trust’ in the Communist Party plunged from 52 to 21 per cent. Even the loyalty of rank-and-file party members was quickly fading; by 1989 only 27 per cent declared that they would rejoin the party. The number of party members, which had steadily increased in the post-Stalin era, began to decline—from 19 million members in October 1988 to 15 million in August 1991.

The party also became a source of opposition, as criticism—even among Gorbachev’s erstwhile supporters—rapidly intensified. The party élite had initially acquiesced and acceded to the general secretary’s will, but increasingly came to believe that Gorbachev’s glasnost and democratization were undermining the party’s power and privilege. Glasnost had spawned a profusion of independent newspapers and journals; their shocking revelations about the atrocities perpetrated in the Stalin era not only demonstrated Stalin’s personal culpability but also exposed the party’s failure to oppose the senseless repression and terror. Nor did party leaders welcome Gorbachev’s pluralism; the profusion of organized political movements and free elections increasingly made them feel isolated and humiliated. The party élite was also alarmed by the revolutionary forces sweeping the Soviet bloc, as countries like Poland, East Germany, and Hungary openly asserted their interests and independence. The most famous challenge by the party’s old guard came in a March 1988 newspaper article by Nina Andreeva, a Leningrad chemistry teacher, who castigated the attacks on Stalin as defamatory and who denounced perestroika as a disastrous assault on the country’s basic socialist principles.

Gorbachev’s popularity also declined among the general public. Public opinion surveys showed a precipitous drop in his approval rating, while that of his critics—above all, the former Moscow party boss, Boris Yeltsin—skyrocketed. Little wonder then that, when the Congress of People’s Deputies created a presidential post in March 1990, Gorbachev decided to have the Congress (where a majority of deputies were party members) choose the first president of the USSR rather than face a general election. A popular vote meant greater legitimacy, but also greater risk. As a result, however, Gorbachev lacked the mandate given to Yeltsin when the latter, two months later, won an overwhelming majority of the popular vote to become the first president of Russia. All this emboldened the neformaly (informal political organizations) to become more assertive. ‘Democratic Russia’, established earlier (January 1990), demanded an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly of power, establishment of strict control over the KGB, creation of a ‘regulated’ market economy, and sovereignty for the Russian republic.

The mounting opposition drove Gorbachev to retreat from his radical vision and to seek the support of more conservative quarters. He became increasingly cautious, especially after the trenchant criticism openly expressed at the Congress of People’s Deputies, and sought to appeal to his base in the party. Gorbachev also spurned radical economic proposals (to replace a command economy with free markets) and created a Presidential Council that was dominated by conservative political figures. None of this, of course, endeared him to disgruntled members of the party, not to mention the more democratic, reform-minded members of the public.

The steady erosion of Gorbachev’s political power, moreover, only served to encourage the explosive nationalist movements that were gaining momentum all across the borderland republics of the Soviet Union. Such aspirations in fact had already emerged in the preceding decades, but could now burst into full view under perestroika. Indeed, perestroika—with its themes of ‘democratization and glasnost’—empowered nationalities, especially in the Baltics, Ukraine, and Caucasus, to demand more autonomy, official predominance of the indigenous language, the precedence of their own economic interests, and ultimately total independence. Gorbachev first encountered the surprising intensity of nationalist strivings in December 1986, when Kazakh students demonstrated to protest Moscow’s decision to replace the Kazakh first secretary with an ethnic Russian. Gorbachev beat a hasty retreat, exposing the centre’s vulnerability and readiness to compromise. Anti-Soviet movements were especially powerful in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the last to be incorporated into the USSR and the first to proclaim independence in 1991.

Nationalism gave rise not only to demands for independence but also to inter-ethnic conflict, especially in areas of mixed ethnic populations (often the product of deliberate, planned settlement of Russians). Although ethnic tensions were hardly new, conflicts intensified as state power seemed to weaken and as Gorbachev sought to ‘unleash’ popular forces. The violence was especially intense in the Caucasus, most notably in an Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan—the Nagorno-Karabakh region that soon became the focal point of armed conflict between Armenians and Azeris.

Nationalist movements also proliferated throughout the Soviet bloc. The critical turning point came in East Germany in the autumn of 1989, when Gorbachev—convinced that the regime was on the verge of collapse—refused to intercede and prop up an unpopular, faltering communist regime. Demolition of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 not only marked the end of the Soviet bloc but also demonstrated to nationalists inside the Soviet Union that the unthinkable had now become possible.

Crisis and Dissolution

The year 1991 was a watershed in modern Russian history: it marked the dissolution of the USSR into fifteen sovereign republics, the largest of which was the Russian Federation. This process, while under way before Gorbachev, accelerated sharply in the late 1980s and encouraged republic leaders to demand total sovereignty and independence, not mere autonomy.

Determined to resist this process, Gorbachev desperately sought to preserve the Soviet Union as a federal state. He first arranged a national referendum in April 1991, where a majority voted for preserving the USSR, but that could not stem the tidal wave of nationalist movements that had emerged throughout the Soviet Union. In a last attempt to save some semblance of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev laboured to win adoption of a ‘New Union Treaty’, which would transform the unitary Soviet state into a loose confederation with a common presidency, foreign policy, and military. Gorbachev persuaded a majority of republic leaders to accept the treaty and scheduled a formal signing ceremony in Moscow on 20 August 1991.

The very prospect of such a treaty precipitated a last-ditch attempt by conservative élites, including his own vice-president, the chief of the KGB, and some military officers, to attempt a coup d’état. When Gorbachev left Moscow to take a holiday at his summer retreat at Foros in the Crimea (with plans to return to Moscow in time for the signing ceremony on 20 August), that gave his adversaries (including some whom Gorbachev had appointed to bolster his power) an opportunity to launch a putsch. The scheme immediately went awry. The conspirators had expected Gorbachev to acquiesce; when they dispatched emissaries to demand that he surrender power, however, they met with a categorical refusal. Although some participants later claimed that Gorbachev acquiesced (even colluded), the preponderance of evidence shows that he categorically opposed the cabal of conspirators. Placing Gorbachev under house arrest, the conspirators declared a national emergency and established a State Emergency Committee ‘to manage the country and effectively maintain the regime in a state of emergency’. Ill prepared and poorly led, they failed to establish control over the ‘force ministries’ (including the military), lacked any semblance of a coherent plan to seize power, and within three days capitulated in ignominious defeat. The most famous, enduring legacy of the ‘putsch’ was the image of Boris Yeltsin, astride a tank in downtown Moscow, leading those opposed to the coup and emerging as the victorious hero in the whole affair. Shortly afterwards, at Yeltsin’s insistence, Gorbachev outlawed the Communist Party, thereby dismantling the institutional bastion of the Soviet political system. The putsch also gave the republics an easy opportunity to declare independence, and within days, at most weeks, they hastened to do so, a process that culminated in a Ukrainian referendum of 1 December 1991, when over 90 per cent of the electorate voted in favour of independence.

Formal dissolution of the USSR came a week later. On 8 December 1991 the leaders of the three main Slavic republics—Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus—gathered at a Belorussian natural reserve called Belavezhskaia pushcha to consider the future of the USSR. The three parties, without consulting the other twelve republics, agreed to dissolve the USSR and signed what became known as the Belavezh Accord. Later that month, representatives from most republics (except Georgia and the Baltic states) convened in Alma-Ata and agreed to create the ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’. On 25 December 1991 Gorbachev resigned as president of the USSR; the Soviet Union had ceased, even nominally, to exist.

Constructing the Russian Federation

As one of the newly independent states, Russia inherited the lion’s share of the Soviet Union’s assets, land, and population. But dissolution did not mean resolution: the fifteen republics were still closely entangled, with interdependent economies and complex interspersing of ethnic groups. Most Russians, for example, resided in the Russian Federation, but another 25 million ethnic Russians resided in the ‘near abroad’—the other former Soviet republics. It was one thing to dismantle the Soviet state; it was quite another to disentangle the knot of economic, ethnic, and cultural ties that had been forged over the many decades of tsarist and Soviet rule.

Nor was the Russian Federation itself a cohesive unit. Apart from the substantial ethnic and religious minorities, it lacked the set of independent political institutions needed to resolve critical problems and differences. Yeltsin had disestablished the Soviet Union and had outlawed the Communist Party, but did not have an alternative political base and organization. He had made tactical alliances with nationalist and democratic movements, but showed a commitment to neither; elected president of the Russian Federation in 1991, for the next eight years he lacked a coherent vision and programme and instead concentrated on the consolidation of ‘presidential’ powers. Throughout, Yeltsin had to combat an independent, oppositionist parliament, which only reinforced his predilection to rule imperiously rather than govern democratically. He initially had a legal mandate for that authority: in the twilight of the Soviet Union, the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies gave him broad powers, but for only one year, with 1 December 1992 as the date for their expiration. Yeltsin used that power to convert the Soviet administration into Russian institutions, sometimes by simply renaming them, but often by conducting more fundamental reorganization. He also created a para-governmental apparatus directly responsible to the president (the ‘Presidential Administration’), which steadily grew in size and power.

Yeltsin’s most fateful decision was to embrace fully the so-called ‘shock therapy’, a radical prescription for an accelerated transition from a command economy to free markets. It was based on the prevailing neoliberal nostrum, which included deregulation of prices, privatization, and budget austerity, with the goal of a rapid transition to a more efficient, competitive economic system based on the Western model. Gorbachev had rejected this formula, but Yeltsin had no such inhibitions; he believed that it would produce instantaneous results and also elicit Western aid and credits. His acting prime minister, Egor Gaidar, firmly believed in the neoliberal programme which celebrated the end of the Cold War and seemingly heralded the global triumph of Western, free-market democracy.

That neoliberal prescription, as Gorbachev had foreseen, entailed enormous costs. First, it failed to generate the anticipated windfall of revenues from the privatization of state property and from a higher level of productivity. On the contrary, it led to a sharp decline in production and prices for energy exports, leaving the government insolvent. Moreover, dissolution of the USSR sundered the ties that characterized the interdependent, autarchical Soviet economy; factories dependent on other republics—for resources or markets—suddenly had neither. As production and trade contracted, the government saw a corresponding decline in tax revenues. But Moscow was fearful of slashing expenditures: it dared neither to reduce social services (health care, education, and pensions) nor to cut subsidies to state enterprises (which would only swell the ranks of the unemployed). Instead, Yeltsin printed money with abandon, with the inevitable result of astronomical inflation—a mind-boggling increase of 2,609 per cent in 1992, which wiped out years of individual savings and left the entire economic and social edifice in total shambles.

This social and economic crisis formed the background to rising tensions between President Yeltsin and the parliament, which only intensified once Yeltsin’s extraordinary powers expired in December 1992. Parliamentary and presidential sides negotiated but failed to reach an agreement, especially on the difficult issues facing a country in post-communist transition. In April 1993 Yeltsin arranged a national referendum on his draft constitution, but won by a bare majority. That heralded an open confrontation between Yeltsin and the parliament, impelling each to manoeuvre and seek popular support. By the autumn of 1993, in the face of impending economic collapse and mass discontent, a desperate Yeltsin resorted to raw force and illegal, non-constitutional means: on 21 September 1993 he disbanded the parliament and announced plans for elections and a referendum on a new draft constitution. The parliament actively resisted Yeltsin’s d’état; the president stormed the parliament, crushed the opposition (with nearly 200 killed and hundreds more wounded), and reiterated plans for a constitutional referendum and new parliamentary elections.

The balloting in December 1993 did nothing to resolve the political crisis. In the referendum, a majority of voters approved the Yeltsin constitution, but by a slim majority; given the low rate of voter participation, less than a third of the electorate approved the new constitution—and even these did so before Yeltsin released the actual text of this foundational document. Nor did the parliamentary elections (to what was now called the ‘State Duma’) give Yeltsin a reliable legislature; on the contrary, the opposition had a clear majority (with the Communist Party the largest contingent) determined to combat Yeltsin every step of the way. For the next six years Yeltsin had to govern without parliamentary support, and that only reinforced his predisposition toward personal rule and gravely complicated the government’s capacity to identify and resolve critical problems.

The Yeltsin Presidency

Boris Yeltsin reigned but did not rule. Although he claimed broad authority and built a personal (‘presidential’) administration to exert his will, Yeltsin actually had limited power. At the central level an oppositionist Duma fiercely contested his policies and sabotaged his legislative agenda. The new Duma elections in December 1995 did not help: the result was a two-thirds anti-Yeltsin majority (with the Communist Party ascendant), which was still more obstreperous, feeling empowered by the vote, Yeltsin’s low approval ratings, and keen awareness of the country’s desperate economic situation. But the Duma had only negative power: it could obstruct, but not impose its own will or chart a new direction. The Yeltsin constitution of 1993 sought to create a ‘super-presidency’ and therefore limited the parliament’s power to initiate legislation, check the executive branch, and impeach Yeltsin and his officials. The Duma did have the power to reject the president’s nominee for prime minister, but could do so only at its own peril: after three negative votes, the president could dissolve the Duma and call for new elections. That would force Duma deputies to risk losing their privileges and perquisites, a gamble that few deputies were willing to take. Once approved, the prime minister and his administration were not accountable to parliament. Nor did the Duma, given the reports of corruption and scandalous behaviour (fisticuffs and brawls during its august sessions), enhance its stature in public opinion. Still, as Yeltsin’s popularity plummeted and the domestic economic crisis deepened, the Duma had ample opportunity to trumpet the regime’s incompetence and corruption. The Duma dramatically demonstrated its amour propre and authority in September 1998, when it forced Yeltsin to withdraw his original nominee for prime minister and to accept a candidate—Evgenii Primakov—who enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the Duma, not the president.

Lacking the support of either the electorate or the parliament, Yeltsin became ever more imperious and erratic. As his threat to cancel elections in 1996 revealed, he was hardly a convinced democrat; faced with universal unpopularity, he acted more like a party boss determined to impose his will, regardless of the Duma or public opinion. Most, including former close associates, concur with a former press secretary that Yeltsin ‘has no ideology of his own except the ideology of power’. For Yeltsin, ruling meant decreeing: in 1996, when the Duma passed 230 laws, the president promulgated 1,000 personal ukazy (decrees) and signed another 2,000 edicts and directives from his Presidential Administration. Apart from ‘ukazomania’, Yeltsin showed a strong penchant for wilfulness, with no apparent purpose other than to remind his entourage who was boss. During one yachting trip in Siberia, ‘Tsar Boris’ became furious with an aide and had him thrown overboard; another aide, positioned on the lower deck, saw the figure soar past, extremities wildly flailing, and at first glance thought it to be some exotic Siberian fowl. Yeltsin’s fondness for drink did not help; after imbibing the president was reportedly fond of drumming out rhythms on the foreheads of hapless aides and allegedly even bestowed this honour on President Oskar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan. Yeltsin turned the state cabinet into a royal court.

The court did not want for new faces: Yeltsin’s self-assertiveness expressed itself most dramatically and destructively in a high turnover of top officials. After Yeltsin sacked Viktor Chernomyrdin as prime minister in March 1998 (for appearing more presidential than the president), the country witnessed a parade of four different prime ministers in sixteen months. The Kremlin turned into a game of musical chairs; altogether, during his second term, Yeltsin had five prime ministers, three foreign ministers, three defence ministers, five finance ministers, five chiefs of staff, and seven heads of the national Security Council. Worse still, competence and tenure appeared to be inversely related, as the hasty dismissals of Aleksandr Lebed (as secretary of the Security Council in November 1996) and Evgenii Primakov (as prime minister in March 1999) attest. Given Yeltsin’s inability to govern, the turnover only accelerated the breakdown of rational, orderly governance.

It also flung the door wide open to corruption, with inordinate influence devolving upon close advisers and supporters, collectively known as the ‘Family’. An inner circle dominated by Yeltsin’s daughter (Tatiana Diachenko, officially appointed a paid presidential adviser in 1997) controlled access to Yeltsin and shaped decision-making. The entourage included some ‘oligarchs’, rich businessmen who had amassed fabulous wealth by dubious means and connections to high officials, and who repaid the favours by financing Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996. This élite included figures like Boris Berezovskii (former mathematician, car dealer turned plutocrat), who openly boasted that the oligarchs controlled ‘50 per cent of the Russian economy’, played a critical role in Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, and therefore claimed the right to ‘occupy the key posts in the government and to benefit from the fruits of victory’. Berezovskii himself became deputy head of the Security Council; another oligarch, Vladimir Potanin, served as deputy prime minister responsible for economic policy. But the oligarchs soon squabbled over the spoils of victory and used their control of the media to disseminate kompromat (compromising materials) about top officials, further eroding public trust in the Yeltsin government.

As the ‘centre’ imploded, the eighty-nine ethnic republics and regions became increasingly independent and assertive. In his struggle with Gorbachev, Yeltsin himself had encouraged centrifugal tendencies by urging local authorities to withhold taxes and act on their own—most vividly telling the leadership in Tatarstan in 1990 to ‘grab as much sovereignty as you can swallow’. The breakdown of central authority accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as republics and oblasti all across Russia withheld taxes, proclaimed ‘sovereignty’, appointed officials, and—in seventy of the eighty-nine regions—adopted laws and constitutions at variance with the federal constitution and laws. In Yeltsin’s second term, as the political and economic crisis deepened, some regions adopted price and export controls to protect their citizens. As in the case of the oligarchs, Yeltsin dispensed privileges and property in exchange for political support, codifying such deals in bilateral treaties with over half of the regions.

A critical factor in the breakdown of the central government was its inability to collect taxes from citizens and enterprises. Thus, between 1989 and 1997 state revenues fell by nearly 45 per cent, partly because the regions reduced the transfer of revenues, partly because individuals and enterprises simply refused to pay taxes (in 1997, only 16 per cent of the taxpayers paid in full and on time, 50 per cent partially and belatedly, and 34 per cent nothing at all). When the government proposed tax reform for small businesses, petty entrepreneurs were aghast: ‘Don’t do anything: it is fine as it is! We evade all taxes, from the profit tax to the value-added tax. We’ve learned how to circumvent all the assessments for social services.’ Yeltsin had partly ‘legalized’ the tax evasion by making special deals with influential companies; others simply refused to pay (the top eighty enterprises accounted for 40 per cent of the tax arrears). Other factors behind the decline in tax revenues included the breakdown of the state apparatus for tax collection, the proliferation of a ‘shadow economy’ unrecorded in accounting books, and corruption vigorously promoted by organized crime. Tax collection came to resemble civil war: in 1996 twenty-six tax officials were murdered and eighteen tax offices subjected to bombings and armed assault. In October 1997 Yeltsin conceded the magnitude of the peril and established an ‘extraordinary commission’ (invoking the same Russian initials as the first Soviet secret police, VChK) to collect taxes. A desperate government imposed a plethora of new taxes (more than 200 separate taxes were on the books in 1997), but these were riddled with special-interest concessions and open to arbitrary interpretation and manipulation. By the late 1990s, government revenues amounted to a mere 16 billion dollars—equivalent to 1 per cent of the revenues flowing into the US Treasury.

A poor state is a corrupt state: underpaid civil servants, from ministers to militiamen, openly demanded bribes. Venality permeated the highest ranks of the government; the most sensational case involved accusations by Swiss investigators that Pavel Borodin (a Kremlin official in charge of presidential properties and patron of the future president Vladimir Putin) had accepted 65 million dollars in kickbacks from two Swiss firms for contracts to renovate Kremlin properties. Corruption also created opportunities to appropriate state assets at a nominal price. One oligarch observed in 1997 that politics was the most lucrative business in Russia—a candid allusion to insider deals, special privileges, and ‘fire-sale’ prices on state property for those with the right political connections.

As tax revenues plummeted, the state had to cut back on basic services—from law enforcement and national defence to education and public health. Although the number of state employees increased (especially those in the ‘Presidential Administration’), the government steadily reduced its allocations for essential services. The budget for law enforcement, for example, fell by 17 per cent; the inevitable result was a personnel flight that hobbled not only the Interior Ministry but even the fearsome KGB (now the FSB, the Russian abbreviation for ‘Federal Security Service’). This breakdown led to a privatization of violence, as private security firms—non-existent in 1992—swelled to 10,804 firms with 156,000 employees in 1998 (of whom 23 per cent came from the Interior Ministry and 8 per cent from the FSB).

Still more striking was the decline in national defence: the budget dropped to one-seventh of Soviet levels, with devastating consequences for the military-industrial complex and the armed forces themselves. The government channelled its few resources into maintaining the strategic nuclear forces in a state of readiness, but had to make drastic cuts in research and development, suspend the acquisition of new weapons, delay payment of paltry wages, and reduce operational funds (to the point where ships stayed in dock and warplanes on the ground). By the end of the 1990s, Russia’s air force and navy were perilously under-maintained and obsolescent; the fleet of nuclear submarines, for example, shrank from 247 to 67 (some of which were not in service). Penury bred corruption and theft, most sensationally in the disappearance of fissionable materials—including, as the chief of the Security Council admitted in 1996, over half of the country’s ‘portable nuclear devices’. Morale plummeted; dearth and dedovshchina (the brutal maltreatment of conscripts by superiors) led to desertion, suicide, and multiple homicides. Not surprisingly, conscription ceased to function properly, as a majority of recruits paid bribes for exemption or simply ignored the draft notices.

Fiscal crisis and neoliberal ideology combined to force the government to make sharp reductions in social services and cultural needs. In education, for example, state penury—amidst inflation—shrank teacher salaries to nominal sums (when indeed they were paid) and made teachers a salient part of strike movements. Students suffered as well: despite the constitutional guarantee of free education, schools and universities—especially élite institutions—increasingly expected students to pay fees and bribes. Similar woes beset the public health system: universal medical coverage gave way to fee-based services that were beyond the means of 95 per cent of the population. Budget ‘austerity’ also took its toll on culture: the institutions of the fine arts—museums, cinema, theatres, and concert halls—suffered a sharp decline in revenues, not only from state subsidies, but also from an impoverished public (theatre ticket sales, for example, fell by 50 per cent between 1990 and 1997). Cinema fared no better: Mosfilm studios—which had earlier produced 60 feature films a year—produced one or two. Russian film-makers could still produce prize-winning artistic successes (for example, Nikita Mikhailkov’s Burnt by the Sun and Sergei Bodrov’s Prisoner of the Mountains), but the Russian film industry had all but collapsed.

To compensate for its dwindling revenues, the central government resorted to desperate financial measures. The most notorious was the ‘shares-for-loans’ programme in 1996–8, which used state assets (including oil and mineral companies) as collateral for loans from the leading banks. Although the government could theoretically redeem the property, its virtual bankruptcy meant that the loan was tantamount to sale. And at bargain-basement prices: with the ‘auctions’ rigged and competitors excluded, creditor banks organized the auctions and—predictably—emerged with the winning ‘tender’ and at a fraction of the real market value. For example, Mikhail Khodorkovskii’s bank Menatep acquired Yukos oil (valued at 7 to 10 billion dollars) for a mere 159 million dollars, paving the way for Khodorkovskii to amass fabulous wealth and become the richest man in Russia. All sixteen ‘auctions’ followed the same insider pattern. Yeltsin’s government portrayed the transactions as legitimate ‘privatization’ (privatizatsiia), but observers aptly described it as ‘grabization’ (prikhvatizatsiia). The giveaways enriched the insider but not the state; this ‘fire sale of the century’ failed to generate the vast revenues that it had anticipated.

The government continued to seek foreign and domestic loans, but found it exceedingly difficult to attract foreign capital, chiefly because Yeltsin’s government was in ill repute and had failed to comply with prior commitments. Not that compliance was easy: the West made loans and credits contingent—with ‘conditionalities’ that dictated a tight money policy and fiscal austerity. That monetary policy reflected fiscal reality, specifically, the imperative need to service public foreign debt, which forced the government to divert revenues from governance, defence, law enforcement, and essential social programmes. The government also had to cut subsidies to unprofitable enterprises (exposing them to bankruptcy and the workers to unemployment) and to reduce social services in such vital areas as education and public health. A desperate Kremlin also resorted to three-month treasury notes to cover gaps in current cash flows. Although that strategy brought short-term relief, it was tantamount to a financial pyramid, whereby the state—with interest rates rising and tax revenues falling—had to borrow more and more just to cover its spiralling debt.

In August 1998 that pyramid collapsed. Admittedly, the Yeltsin government was not solely responsible; it was also a victim of a sudden 39 per cent plunge in oil prices (from 18 dollars a barrel in 1997 to 11 dollars in 1998) and the East Asian financial crisis (which frightened off investors from developing markets). But the fundamental problem was a ballooning deficit covered by short-term, high-interest treasury bills. As revenues fell and interest mounted, even a last-minute World Bank loan could not stave off insolvency: on ‘Black Monday’, 17 August 1998, the government defaulted on treasury bills worth 40 billion dollars and offered no clear prescription for extracting itself from the crisis. Yeltsin thundered that the value of the rouble would not fall; it was solid as a rock, and plummeted accordingly. The default pushed Russia’s credit rating to the lowest levels, caused the Russian stock market to lose 88 per cent of its value, ruined five of the ten largest banks, wiped out a third of small and medium businesses, and cut real wages by two-thirds. Not surprisingly, Yeltsin’s approval rating dropped to a mere 2 per cent.

‘Catastroika’

The financial crisis of August 1998 was but the culmination of an unparalleled economic decline precipitated by the disastrous ‘shock therapy’ of Yeltsin’s first term. Although the government retreated from that original strategy, it still adhered to the neoliberal strategy of macroeconomic stabilization, market liberalization, and privatization of state assets. Under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the government eventually brought inflation under control (from 2,609 per cent in 1992 to 11 per cent in 1997), liberalized most sectors, slashed subsidies and social expenditures, and by 1996 had privatized approximately 70 per cent of all state enterprises. The government could boast that it had not only halted the massive decrease in GDP but, for the first time since 1991, had even briefly achieved slight economic growth (in the third quarter of 1997), along with a 600 per cent boom on the Russian stock market.

By 1998, however, the net result was eight years of catastrophic decline on an unprecedented scale. The GDP dropped a staggering 43 per cent from 1991 to 1997; to put that into perspective, the Great Depression in the United States entailed only a 32 per cent decline; even the colossal devastation of the Second World War reduced the Soviet GDP by just 24 per cent. As Russia hurtled downwards, developed countries enjoyed unprecedented economic prosperity, widened the gap between themselves and Russia, and even threatened to reduce Russia to the rank of a third-world state. The decline was staggering; in 1980 the per capita GDP of Russia was 38 per cent of the United States, but that had dropped to just 4 per cent by 1999. Even when adjusted for purchasing power parity (to offset distortions in exchange rates), Russia’s per capita GDP in 1999 was only 4,200 dollars—slightly more than Botswana (3,900 dollars), but less than Namibia (4,300 dollars) and Peru (4,400 dollars). The post-Soviet depression affected not only industrial production but also agriculture, where gross output contracted by a third and an even greater decrease in the country’s livestock (by approximately a half).

As important as quantitative decline was the qualitative regression: as investment collapsed and Soviet factories faced keen competition from world markets, Russia devolved into a supplier of raw materials and energy resources. The result was a primitivization of the Russian economy: manufacturing branches (including high-tech and defence industries) either converted to the production of low-grade consumer goods or shut down completely. For example, computer chip production fell from 1.6 billion dollars in 1989 to 385 million dollars in 1995; a leading electronics manufacturer in 1992 was producing shampoo four years later. The aerospace branch that had earlier produced 2,500 planes per annum and accounted for 60 per cent of the world’s fleet was virtually idle; in 2000 it produced just four aeroplanes (compared to 489 by Boeing). As Russian exports concentrated on energy and raw material, the economy became heavily dependent upon volatile markets subject to huge price fluctuations. Agriculture underwent a similar decline. For lack of state subsidies, private capital, and effective demand, agricultural producers reduced the use of fertilizers (by 89 per cent) and even machinery (cutting petrol consumption 74 per cent).

Russia also suffered a major degradation in fixed capital and human resources. Given the dearth of investment (because of scanty foreign direct investment, capital flight, high interest rates, and tight money policies), Russian machinery became obsolescent and hence progressively less competitive on international and even domestic markets. The losses in human capital were also immense, especially because of the massive ‘brain drain’ that robbed the country of much of its talented, educated élite. The degradation applied even to those who stayed, as many—especially the young—abandoned education and technology for the higher-paying jobs in the trade and business sector.

Despite rosy expectations, transition brought devastating economic decline. Liberalization gave Russian producers access to global markets, but also exposed them to its volatility, prices, standards—which could have a major impact on production costs and profitability. For example, Soviet energy prices were but a third of those prevailing on world markets; deregulation of domestic energy prices thus gave inefficient enterprises little chance to survive. Moreover, the break-up of a single Soviet ‘economic space’ suddenly deprived producers of their traditional sources of supply and sale. Indeed, the former Soviet republics looked elsewhere, and inter-republic trade within the CIS shrank 70 per cent in the 1990s.

While some decline was inevitable, the magnitude of what happened in the 1990s surpassed even the direst predictions. One factor was the acute dearth of capital investment, which plummeted by 92 per cent between 1989 and 1997. Thus, given the depreciation of existing plants and machinery (increasingly obsolescent and depleted), Russia actually experienced a disinvestment, with fixed capital declining 12 per cent by 1998. The state, given its fiscal woes, was powerless to stop this decline in capital investment. Nor did Russia’s ‘new entrepreneurs’ provide the needed capital. Most lacked the resources; privatization simply conferred property rights, often on insiders who lacked the capital or business acumen to modernize or even sustain these enterprises. One observer offered this apt description of the privatization of large-scale state enterprises: ‘We sold off a herd of elephants at rabbit prices, and now a new class of owners is trying to feed them at the price of a carrot a day.’ Insider privatization did not create a class of innovative entrepreneurs but simply spawned a class of businessmen who openly declared that politics was the fast track to personal enrichment, not innovation and investment. Thus ‘entrepreneurs’ not only corrupted politicians, but politicians corrupted the ‘entrepreneurs’. And once successful, the entrepreneurs hastily spirited their ill-gotten gains abroad, with the capital flight of the 1990s exceeding 200 billion dollars.

This haemorrhage of precious capital far exceeded the paltry influx of foreign investment—a cumulative 29.4 billion dollars, with just 12.8 billion coming as foreign direct investment (FDI). That was far short of the fabulous sums predicted by Western economic advisers and promised by Western political leaders. Apart from loans (intended to promote monetary stabilization, but increasingly used to service Russia’s foreign debt and to line anonymous pockets), international agencies and private investors found the Russian market too corrupt and risky, especially in the case of FDI. The tales of the defrauded, even murdered, deterred all but the most adventurous. As a result, Russia attracted a fraction of global investments (for example, under 1 per cent of global FDI in 1995—less than Peru’s share, a tenth of China’s). Even more striking was the contrast with East European states, where the per capita FDI was twelve times higher. The capital famine (given depreciation, hence net disinvestment) resulted in ‘deindustrialization’ and concentrated the country exports in the volatile market for raw materials, metals, and energy resources.

Bad policy—driven by the neoliberalism of foreign creditors and Western consultants—exacerbated the country’s economic problems. The chief economist of the World Bank later observed that the reformers were ‘overly influenced by excessively simplistic textbook models of the market economy’, which inspired a mystical faith in the ‘market’, gainsaid the role of the state, and ignored the need to construct the institutional foundations of a market economy. As the state failed (its institutions collapsing, its finances withering, its power declining), it could not design and implement a prioritized economic strategy like that successfully employed by the ‘Asian tigers’. Indeed, as Yeltsin traded state property and privileges for political support, Russia devolved from a ‘command economy’ into what the Nobel Laureate Douglas North decried as the ‘anarchy … that we have been observing in Russia’.

The bad advice was not always disinterested: Western countries—particularly the United States—benefited from the economic collapse which marginalized and impoverished the former superpower. Given the close nexus between the West and economic reform (reinforced by propaganda campaigns, like that financed by the United States to sing the praises of privatization), a majority of Russians suspected that the West had deliberately caused economic havoc in order to achieve economic colonization of Russia and to ensure America’s global hegemony. Some Western advisers exploited Russia’s plight for personal gain. In the most notorious case, the US Justice Department charged that the Harvard Institute for International Development (which had received 40 million dollars in government grants and controlled a portfolio of 350 million dollars in aid) had mishandled the aid money and that its principals had engaged in insider trading. Such revelations filled the Russian press, reinforcing popular disenchantment and distrust of the government, market reforms, and their Western sponsors.

Society: Polarization, Degradation, and Deviance

The impoverishment of the many and enrichment of the few had a profound, polarizing impact on society. Whereas the Soviet regime engaged in egalitarian ‘levelling’ (especially in the post-Stalin era), the post-Soviet order was unabashedly anti-egalitarian. One index of economic stratification, the decile ratio (comparing the income of the top 10 per cent with the bottom 10 per cent), leaped from a relatively egalitarian 4 : 1 (1990) to 15 : 1 (1994) and remained at that level for the rest of the 1990s. Another measure is the Gini coefficient, with 0 being total equality, 1.00 total inequality; analysts regard 0.20–0.30 as relatively egalitarian, and anything over 0.40 a sign of growing income disparity and inequality. In Russia’s case, the coefficient jumped from 0.26 in 1991 and climbed to 0.40 in 1999. Although increasing inequality also characterized Western societies in the 1980s and 1990s (the Gini index, for example, rising to 0.31 in Western Europe and 0.43 in the United States), the differentiation in Russia was both more extreme in scale and more compressed in time.

The minuscule élite of wealthy Russians—derisively called ‘new Russians’, a pejorative for the uncouth nouveau riche—were in fact not so new: approximately two-thirds of them, especially the first wave, used their party, especially Komsomol (the communist youth organization), connections to acquire assets and amass capital. They went from party cards, not rags, to riches. Mikhail Khodorkovskii, at one point the wealthiest billionaire in Russia, began in the Komsomol organization, where he used its connections and resources to start a computer business that eventually turned into a huge financial and industrial empire. Much the same was true of the other tycoons. Apart from buying political influence and special privileges, such ‘entrepreneurs’ often had ties with organized crime—an association admitted by some 40 per cent in one poll, with the real rate doubtless being much higher. Ironically, Soviet criminalization of the black market forged a natural link between economic and ordinary criminals, producing a close nexus between the new market economy and organized crime.

But it was a corrupt state, not the Komsomol or organized crime, that enabled the richest to appropriate state property on a massive scale. In most cases, the new economic élite relied heavily upon insider connections, especially during the ‘shares-for-loans’ in 1996–8. Not that the chief officials were unaware of what was happening. Anatolii Chubais, the architect of privatization (which earned him approval abroad and opprobrium at home), told an interviewer in 1997 that the oligarchs ‘are stealing absolutely everything …. But let them steal and take property; they will become owners and decent administrators of that property.’ Beneath the Olympian heights of the ‘seven oligarchs’ was a small stratum of lesser winners who occupied key positions and profited accordingly. The proliferation of luxury imports (more top-of-the-line Mercedes being sold in Moscow than in Europe), the construction of palatial mansions, and the flood of spendthrift Russians to élite shops and resorts in the West all attested to the fabulous wealth of the ‘new Russians’.

Well below them was a small middle class, with modest resources and incomes but a few times the average wage—though light years removed from the élites. It was partly on the basis of cultural, occupational, and educational descriptors that they imagined themselves to be part of a ‘middle class’. However, compared with those on subsistence wages, this middle class enjoyed access to Western goods unimaginable in Soviet times. Private car ownership, while increasing in the 1970s and 1980s, doubled in the 1990s (jumping from 63.5 to 128.1 per 1,000 residents) and included vast numbers of imports. Still, this ‘virtual middle class’—in terms of sheer size, assets, income, and political influence—bore scant resemblance to its peer in Western Europe.

At the bottom was the mass of society—the disprivileged and dispossessed. About half of this underclass consisted of the ‘working poor’, those whose disposable income plunged by two-thirds in the 1990s and, for most of them, was unpaid and in arrears. The working poor included most civil servants and state employees (for example, teachers and doctors) as well as those trapped in unprofitable or mismanaged enterprises. It helped little when the employers offered to ‘pay’ the wages in kind, such as gas pistols, coffins, and brassieres; teachers in Altai were first offered toilet paper, then funeral accessories, and finally vodka to settle their wage arrears. The other half of this underclass found itself below the poverty line (that is, had an income beneath the subsistence minimum). They included the unemployed (a category unknown in Soviet times, but—by conservative calculations—reaching 14 per cent of the workforce in 1999), the elderly (whose pensions were devalued by hyperinflation), single-parent families, and an array of social outcasts—the homeless, waifs, the disabled, and refugees from the Caucasus and other areas of conflict. Although estimates vary, in 1999 the CIA estimated that 40 per cent of the Russian population—over fifty million people—were below the poverty line (compared to 12 per cent in the United States). Although official figures can overstate the scale of the problem (since they do not take into account tax evasion, black-market earnings, and the subsistence gardening that augmented the declared incomes), the level of poverty was none the less extraordinary, whether measured by Soviet or Western standards.

One revealing index of immiseration was demographic decline: from 148.6 million 1993 to 146.3 million in 2001. This population decrease was partly due to a low birth rate (among the lowest in the world), but chiefly to a sharp increase in mortality. One revealing indicator was the drop in life expectancy, which peaked at 65 for men and 75 for women in 1985 but had dropped to 59 for men and 72 for women in 2000. While partly due to a high rate of infant mortality (two to three times that of Western countries), higher death rates became pandemic for the working-age population. Particularly revealing was the prospect for a 16-year-old male living to the age of 80: the rate in the United States was 88 per cent, but a mere 58 per cent in Russia—only slightly higher than a century earlier (56 per cent in 1895). Given these dismal patterns, contemporary studies by the United Nations and the Russian Academy of Sciences project that Russia’s initial population of 148.6 million (1993) will shrink to 130 million by 2015 and even drop to 100 million by 2050, perhaps sinking as low as 70 or 80 million. Such a cataclysmic decrease means an immense contraction in labour inputs and, simultaneously, a dangerous imbalance in the proportion of the workforce to pensioners (dropping officially from 2 : 1 in 1991 to 1.4 : 1 in 1999).

Critics attribute this demographic implosion to the destitution engendered by transition. Both nuptiality and fertility fell sharply: fewer married and still fewer bore children, with 70 per cent of pregnancies terminated through abortion. Still more important was the rise in mortality, especially in the middle range of the labour force. That was partly due to a deterioration in diet, with a significant reduction in meat consumption (33 per cent) and dairy products (over 40 per cent). Even with a compensatory increase in carbohydrate consumption, Russian daily caloric intake in the 1990s was only 62 per cent of the norm recommended by the World Health Organization. Bad living habits (astronomic rates of smoking and massive consumption of cheap alcohol) also took a toll; the explosion of prostitution (with 4,000 brothels in Moscow alone) raised sexually transmitted diseases to epidemic proportions (the syphilis rate, for example, increased seventyfold in the 1990s); and the vast increase in drug addiction spawned new scourges like Aids. Russia reported 135,000 officially registered HIV cases, but the real rate was probably five times greater; in specific cases, the increase was of horrifying magnitude—for example, the number of HIV-infected in Tver jumped from 8 in 1997 to 2,342 four years later. Even diseases once thought to be eradicated have roared back in full force; in particular, deadly strains of tuberculosis—widespread in the large prison population—have produced a mortality rate thirty times that of the United States.

Crime also increased sharply. The homicide rate, for example, rose to thirty times that of a gun-free United Kingdom and even three times that of the gun-rich America. The exponential increase in crimes of person and property overwhelmed the law-enforcement, judicial, and penal systems. In 1997, for example, the 28,677 employees in the procuracy (the office for legal prosecution) issued 427,000 arrest warrants and sought to process 1.2 million court cases; St Petersburg courts in 1996 were scheduling the docket for the year 2000. State prisons and labour camps held over a million citizens (a per capita incarceration rate sixteen times that of Western Europe and comparable only to the United States), but could not afford to house or feed them adequately. Particularly ominous was the intense growth of organized crime; by the late 1990s, Russia reportedly had 8,000 gangs with tens of thousands of mobsters. Apart from sensational contract murders (which claimed the lives of prominent politicians, journalists, bankers, and businessmen), organized crime invaded the new economy. In one city, 80 per cent of the businesses admitted paying the mafia for ‘protection’ (normally half of their profits); the Interior Ministry estimated that organized crime held one-third of the capital and the bulk of stock shares in the country. The deputy prime minister, Boris Nemtsov, did not exaggerate when decrying the pervasive influence of ‘gangster capitalism’.

‘Multi-polarity’ and the ‘Near Abroad’

The post-Soviet honeymoon in relations with the West, especially the United States, did not last beyond the mid-1990s. In addition to minor irritants (for example, recurring accusations of intelligence activities), the principal issues were three: NATO’s decision to incorporate former Eastern bloc countries and even former Soviet republics, Western military intervention in Yugoslavia, and American plans to construct a national missile defence (NMD) system.

The spectre of NATO expansion, under discussion during Yeltsin’s first term, now became a reality. Whereas Yeltsin’s first foreign minister, the complaisant ‘Atlantist’ Andrei Kozyrev, had acquiesced to such plans (in hopes of maintaining good relations), his departure in January 1996 signalled a new era of hardening resistance and truculence on the part of the Kremlin. The latter argued that the end of the Cold War made military alliances like NATO superfluous, and that security and stability in Europe required a new, comprehensive structure which included Russia itself. From Moscow’s perspective, NATO proposals to incorporate the former Eastern bloc countries—especially the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—were tantamount to deploying NATO forces on Russian borders. The West, under American leadership, ignored Russia’s objections: in July 1997 NATO formally resolved to admit three former Eastern bloc countries (Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary) and to consider the inclusion of others in 2002. Powerless to stop the process, Russian rhetoric—official and public—became increasingly vitriolic.

Events in Yugoslavia reinforced anti-NATO sentiments. As Yugoslavia disintegrated and the Serbian government under Slobodan Milošević fought to preserve the country’s integrity, Kosovo—a Yugoslav province with a secessionist Albanian majority—became the focus of attention. Contending that the Serb government was preparing to perpetrate atrocities (with a new wave of ‘ethnic cleansing’), in March 1999 NATO—under American leadership—launched a massive air assault. Significantly, it did so without authorization from the United Nations (where any such request in the Security Council was certain to meet with a Russian veto) or, in the American case, even from the US Congress (which, constitutionally, has the power to declare war). The military intervention outraged the Russian government and public, partly because of the sentimental ties to the Serbs (as fellow Slavs and as Orthodox coreligionists), partly because of the flagrant disregard for Russian interests and the unilateral decision to intervene militarily. Both official and unofficial Russia castigated the NATO operation as counter-productive, precipitating the ethnic conflict it sought to prevent. From Moscow’s perspective, at least, Kosovo became an object lesson in Washington’s arrogant belief in its unilateral right to intercede wherever and whenever it chose.

The final cause of growing tension was Washington’s decision to revive the ‘Star Wars’ project of the 1980s—the construction of a missile defence system. Warning that ‘rogue states’ like North Korea and Iran were developing nuclear weapons and ballistic delivery systems, the United States stepped up its research and development on a national missile defence (NMD) to repulse such limited attacks. Despite the rhetoric about Iran and North Korea, the NMD not only violated the 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty (which allowed each side to construct a missile defence system around a single site—a missile complex in the American case, Moscow in the Russian case) but also created the spectre that subsequent development could neutralize Chinese and ultimately Russian deterrence. Despite test failures and questions about technical feasibility, and despite the much-acclaimed personal ties between Yeltsin and President Bill Clinton, Washington continued to work on the project—to the dismay of Russia and even some American allies in Europe, who feared a unilateral dismantling of the nuclear arms structure constructed over the previous three decades. Although the Clinton administration deferred a final decision on development and deployment (because of international criticism and early test failures), the project remained alive and elicited enthusiastic support from conservative quarters, notably the then presidential candidate, George W. Bush.

Marginalized in the West, Russia increasingly turned its attention to the former Soviet republics—the ‘near abroad’ (the very term implying a special relationship). Although Russia played a leading role in creating the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in 1991 and adopting the collective security treaty of 1992, the Yeltsin government took little notice of the former ‘fraternal republics’ during his first term in office. That changed dramatically in the mid-1990s. Apart from disenchantment with the West, Russia now recognized the importance of economic ties with the CIS: these countries were once integral elements of a single system and offered markets where Russian products were still competitive. Moscow also claimed a strong interest in the fate of ethnic Russians, twenty-five million of whom found themselves outside the Russian Federation and appealed for protection. Ethnicity also raised delicate border issues, as in the Crimea, which Khrushchev had ‘given’ to Ukraine in 1954 but which had a Russian majority that identified with Moscow, not Kiev. Finally, Islamic fundamentalism also posed a growing threat not only to the newly independent states of Central Asia, but also to the Caucasus (above all, Chechnya) and potentially to other Muslim republics in the Russian Federation. Moscow had some incentive to exaggerate the threat of Islamic radicalism in order to refurbish its leadership and influence in the newly independent states of the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Russia also chose to play the ‘Chinese card’. The time was opportune: Beijing shared its concern about Islamic radicalism (especially among the Muslim Uigur population of Xinjiang province) and opposed ‘unipolarity’ (a code word for American hegemony). The improvement in Sino-Russian relations commenced under Gorbachev and accelerated sharply in the second half of the decade. The turning point came in April 1996, when Russia, China, and three Central Asian states (Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan) met in Shanghai and agreed to establish the ‘Shanghai Five’, which was to promote economic cooperation, coordinate foreign policy, and make reciprocal military reductions and the like. Above all, Beijing and Moscow were determined to resist American pretensions to global dominance, to repulse Western meddling in their internal affairs (whether human rights or secession-prone regions like Xinjiang and Chechnya), and to combat Islamic radicalism. This collaboration proved all the more attractive as American engagement (and especially a willingness to become embroiled in far-off Central Asia) waned, creating a vacuum and need for joint action by the two regional powers—China and Russia.

From the Abyss to Renewal

On the eve of the new millennium Russia found itself mired in profound crisis. The most obvious problem was the economic collapse that ensued after it defaulted on loan repayment in August 1998, precipitating a downward, vertiginous economic spiral that erased the modest recovery begun in 1997. The economic turmoil had a devastating impact on society, from élites to disprivileged, and seemed to presage a whole new phase of debilitating economic regression. At home and abroad, Yeltsin’s policies appeared a total fiasco; even though much was beyond his control (such as the Asian financial crisis that turned global, with a devastating impact on Russia), Yeltsin bore the blame. He no longer enjoyed, or appeared to curry, the patronage of the West, which had exploited—in the view of many Russians, even facilitated—Russia’s demise as a great power. Amidst all these woes, the ‘strong presidency’ devolved into a weak executive; the president himself was not only politically but even physically debilitated (barely able to appear in public without the physical assistance of aides). Yeltsin also was losing his long-fought battle with the Duma, which imposed its own prime minister in September 1998, became increasingly aggressive, and even laid plans to impeach the unpopular president. Constitutionally deprived of the right to re-election, his approval rating reduced to single digits, ‘Tsar Boris’ was already a ‘lame duck’. By August 1999 he, and his regime, appeared ready to expire; it was precisely at that point that he named Vladimir Putin prime minister—the man who would soon become his anointed successor.

15. Rebuilding Russia

GREGORY L. FREEZE

THE first years of the twenty-first century witnessed a spectacular recovery in Russia—the rebuilding of central state power, a fast-paced economic boom, and reassertion of that country’s status as a major global power. Leading this renaissance was Vladimir Putin, former KGB officer and Boris Yeltsin’s anointed successor, a man determined to restore Russia to its ‘rightful’ place in the world. He benefited from the fortuitous surge in the global economy (which generated an insatiable demand for Russia’s abundant energy resources); that windfall enabled Putin not only to claim responsibility for reversing a decade of catastrophic economic decline but also to re-establish a centralized state. His two-term presidency (2000–8) thus brought both prosperity and power: high rates of economic growth, reassertion of Moscow’s control over subordinate regions, creation of more effective instruments of rule, and increased support for the military. In 2008 Putin, who opposed changing the constitutional two-term limit, ceded the presidency to his protégé Dmitrii Medvedev, but retained real power as prime minister. The Medvedev presidency, however, was soon confronted with a steep global recession that had devastating consequences for the Russian economy, which had remained so heavily dependent on energy exports. Globalization under Putin had returned Russia to the ranks of world powers, economic and political; the global financial crisis under Medvedev threatened to erase all the gains of the Putin era.

The End of the Yeltsin Era

Boris Yeltsin’s final months in office could hardly have been more tumultuous. After a band of Chechen commandos invaded the neighbouring Russian republic of Dagestan and inflicted heavy casualties, Yeltsin summarily dismissed the current prime minister Sergei Stepashin and appointed a virtual unknown, Vladimir Putin—the fifth prime minister in two years. Putin came from the former KGB, where he had served as an intelligence officer in East Germany, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, before resigning amidst the abortive coup of August 1991 (‘As soon as the coup began, I immediately decided which side I was on’) and joining the anti-coup forces led by Leningrad mayor Anatolii Sobchak. Putin subsequently became a top aide to Sobchak, with the specific charge of attracting foreign investment. After Sobchak lost re-election as mayor in 1996, Putin moved to Moscow to serve as an assistant to Pavel Borodin, a Yeltsin aide responsible for managing Kremlin properties. Putin quickly climbed the Kremlin hierarchy, appointed first as deputy chief of staff for relations with the subordinate regions (March 1997), next as director of the secret police, the FSB (July 1998), and finally as the head of the Security Council (March 1999). In August the Chechnya crisis and Stepashin’s dismissal catapulted Putin into the post of prime minister. Within a few weeks, after bombings (officially attributed to Chechen terrorists) in Moscow and other cities cost 310 lives, Putin persuaded Yeltsin to order federal forces to invade Chechnya and eradicate the source of the terrorism.

With Yeltsin’s second and final term due to expire in July 2000, the Kremlin came to view Putin as a viable successor. Why Putin was chosen has been the subject of much speculation. The athletic 48-year-old Putin was certainly a striking contrast to the doddering, besotted, 69-year-old Yeltsin. Putin was articulate and well educated; he first received a degree in law, later earned a ‘candidate’ degree (Ph.D.) in economics, and had strong ties to influential liberal economists. His résumé glistened with experience: the service in Germany, Petersburg, and Moscow provided valuable preparation in critical areas of foreign and domestic policy. Putin also came across as a man of the people, willing—whether as cool calculation or a flash of temper—to use shocking vulgarities to make his point and an impression. He also acted like a president even before he became one: he wielded unprecedented authority as prime minister, playing a far more important and independent role in policy-making than had any of his predecessors. As Yeltsin looked for a successor, Putin’s meteoric rise in popularity—from a Yeltsinesque 2 per cent approval rating in August 1999 to 50 per cent four months later—gave every reason to believe that Putin could prevail even in a hotly contested presidential election. Some of Yeltsin’s critics adduce an additional reason for choosing Putin: kompromat (compromising materials), including allegations that his government, not terrorists, perpetrated the bombings used to justify the invasion of Chechnya. This kompromat, they argue, guaranteed that as president Putin would not dare to turn against Yeltsin and the ‘Family’.

While such accusations do not seem credible, they do highlight an important reason for Putin’s skyrocketing popularity: the Chechen conflict enabled Putin to demonstrate his mettle in an all-out military campaign to establish Russian control over Chechnya and eradicate terrorism. Contemporary polls showed that the ‘second’ Chechen war elicited public support both for the campaign and the prime minister, whose decisive leadership promised a clear military victory. And the military campaign appeared to succeed: within months, after relentless artillery bombardment, Russian forces stormed the Chechen capital of Groznyi—from which they had been so ignominiously expelled earlier—and launched search-and-destroy operations against pockets of guerrilla resistance. Although Chechnya hardly became a model of tranquillity, Putin demonstrated a willingness to use massive force, on a far greater scale than in the first Chechen war, and these early victories propelled his approval rating ever higher.

All this provided a favourable background for the new Duma elections of 19 December 1999. This time the Kremlin was determined to ensure the election of a supportive Duma—in contrast to the hostile majorities that prevailed in the 1993 and 1995 elections. Within a month of Putin’s appointment as prime minister, pro-Kremlin figures established a new party, ‘Unity’ (Edinstvo), to represent the regime in the election; it offered no specific programme other than to proclaim a commitment to the country’s ‘territorial integrity and national greatness’. Bankrolled by the oligarchs, bathed in favourable media coverage, and endorsed by a growing number of weathervane governors, the new party catapulted from nothing to win almost as many votes as the long-established Communist Party. Together with allied parties and independents, Unity headed a pro-government majority in the Duma and, given Putin’s popularity (even among Communists), ensured a cooperative Duma—quite unlike what Yeltsin had had to endure.

In the flush of that electoral victory, Yeltsin used his new year’s address on 31 December 1999 to drop a bombshell: he announced his resignation, effective immediately, with Prime Minister Putin (as the constitution stipulated) ascending to the office of acting president. Although Yeltsin rhetorically spoke of inaugurating a new millennium with a new president, the main purpose was to hasten the elections, which by law had to be held within three months of his resignation. Seeking to capitalize on Putin’s popularity, perhaps fearful that it might fade by summer (especially if the country became mired in a protracted Chechen war), Yeltsin resigned early in order to ensure Putin’s election. Putin immediately rewarded the former president: his first act was to guarantee immunity to Yeltsin and his immediate family from prosecution—a step widely regarded as a payback (if not precondition) for his early promotion.

With elections scheduled for 26 March 2000, Putin was the only real candidate. The few serious contenders, such as the former prime minister Evgenii Primakov and Moscow mayor Iurii Luzhkov, became the target of smear campaigns in oligarch-owned media and withdrew their candidacy. As in 1996, the nominally ‘independent’ media provided lavish coverage of Putin, from his everyday perorations to his bravado as co-pilot in a military jet flown to Chechnya six days before the election (a dramatic contrast to ‘Tsar Boris’). Putin won a majority (53 per cent) in the first round and thus avoided a run-off such as Yeltsin had had to endure in 1996. Indeed, whereas Yeltsin barely edged out the communist Gennadii Ziuganov in the first round in 1996, Putin received nearly twice as many votes (39.7 million) as Ziuganov (21.9 million). Despite claims of vote-rigging, Putin was a clear winner; even if a run-off had been necessary, few doubt that he would have dealt Ziuganov a crushing defeat. Putin thus became president with both a cooperative Duma and a popular mandate; he had an unprecedented opportunity to embark on a new course and realize his vision of a new, more prosperous, and more powerful Russia.

The Putin Vision

Boris Yeltsin had no coherent political philosophy or goals, but the same could hardly be said of Vladimir Putin. On 29 December 1999, two days before Yeltsin resigned and made him acting president, Putin posted on the internet a manifesto called ‘Russia at the Turn of the Millennium’, which had been prepared under his guidance by the newly established Centre for Strategic Development. Thereafter Putin regularly presented his views in an address to the Federal Assembly (a joint session of the two houses of parliament), a ‘state of the union’ speech identifying achievements, elucidating problems and setting goals. He also held an annual televised press conference ‘with the nation’, a kind of virtual town meeting, where citizens phoned in, wrote emails, and appeared on live TV asking Putin to address broad issues and their own personal problems. These three-hour town meetings were carefully staged, excluded political critics, and allowed Putin to demonstrate his amazing grasp of detail and data (aided, to be sure, by having the questions in advance). But these personal appearances, interviews, and speeches (routinely posted on the presidential website) revealed a firm commitment to several core principles and values.

One was patriotism—a salient theme in his rhetoric. He emphasized that patriotism was essential for binding so heterogeneous, so dispersed a nation together, especially at a time of adversity which required the country to rebuild its basic institutions, economy, and power. In his first day in office Putin reiterated that a crisis dictates decisive action: ‘Russia is in the midst of one of the most difficult periods in its history. For the first time in the past 200–300 years, it is facing a real threat of sliding into the second, and possibly, even third echelon of world states.’ In the face of adversity, he declared, ‘patriotism is a source of courage, staunchness and strength of our people. If we lose patriotism and national pride and dignity, which are related to it, we will lose ourselves as a nation capable of great achievements.’ To nurture that patriotism, Putin refurbished evocative, and unifying, national symbols. In December 2000, for example, he persuaded the parliament to adopt a new national anthem (with new lyrics, including references to God, but using the music from the Soviet anthem), to proclaim the two-headed tsarist eagle as a state emblem, and to codify the use of the tricolour as the Russian flag. He also amended Yeltsin’s decision to rename 7 November (the Soviet commemoration of the October Revolution) as ‘the day of concord and reconciliation’. Putin shifted the holiday to 4 November to celebrate ‘the day of national unity’, recalling the defeat of Polish occupiers in the Kremlin by a popular militia in 1612. He later restored the red flag, and then the red star, for Russian military forces. It seemed entirely natural when, asked at a town meeting ‘What do you love most?’ Putin instantly replied: ‘Russia.’ Disingenuous or not, such rhetoric helped to consolidate his image as national leader and to revalorize commitment to the country and its resurrection.

A second leitmotif was Putin’s nuanced conception of Russia’s past and its place in the larger scheme of things. In general, he portrayed Russia as an integral part of Europe and bore little sympathy for the then fashionable theory of ‘Eurasianism’, which holds that Russia is a civilization nurtured by both European and Asian roots. Although a Europeanist, Putin none the less rejected the idea that Russia must replicate European development and insisted that it must follow its own course, that it need not obey the demands of Western countries: ‘We are a major European nation; we have always been an integral part of Europe and share all its values and the ideals of freedom and democracy. But we will carry out this process ourselves, taking into account all our specific characteristics, and do not intend to report to anyone on the progress we make.’ He also expressed a positive, but qualified, view of the Soviet experience. His ‘Millennium Manifesto’ declared that it ‘would be a mistake not to recognize the unquestionable achievements’ of the Soviet era, but added that ‘it would be an even bigger mistake not to realize the outrageous price our country and its people had to pay for that social experiment’. He reiterated that view in April 2005 when he characterized the break-up of the Soviet Union as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’ but promptly added that it was impossible to fantasize about resurrecting the old Soviet state. That qualified nostalgia corresponded to the general public mood; a 2001 poll showed that 79 per cent regretted the breakup of the USSR, but that 58 per cent deemed its re-establishment impossible.

A third core element was Putin’s belief in a strong state. As the ‘Millennium Manifesto’ stressed, ‘our state and its institutions and structures have always played an exceptionally important role in the life of country and its people’. A strong state, he argued, was a precondition for individual liberty, for only it could provide security and stability. As he explained in July 2000, ‘an effective state and democratic state’ alone can defend basic freedoms and create ‘the conditions for the social well-being for our motherland’. Six years later he defended his efforts to rebuild a strong state, which could ensure ‘the implementation of the laws that have been adopted’ and see that they were adopted in the first place. In particular, Putin insisted on the need to reclaim the power that Yeltsin had devolved on the eighty-nine regions of the Russian Federation. Putin’s idea of a ‘new federalism’ was essentially a call to restore the ‘power vertical’, the hierarchy of authority that accorded primacy to central institutions, laws, and practices. Putin’s stint as Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff for relations with the regions had convinced him that ‘the vertikal, the vertical chain of government, had been destroyed and that it had to be restored’. In some sense, Putin was simply affirming the importance of ‘good governance’—a central theme since the late 1990s, when even ardent advocates of globalization (such as the World Bank) rejected the neoliberal programme and emphasized the need for effective governance. The United States, itself once a bastion of neoliberalism, came to the same view; its Millennium Challenge Accounts, established in 2002, made good governance a precondition for US foreign aid. Putin, at least in part, simply applied that new theme in global development to Russia itself.

But Putin went further, arguing not only for good governance but for a strong state, which should play a prominent role in the economic sphere. Reflecting the new emphasis on the linkage between ‘good governance’ and economic growth, as well as the strong statist traditions of Russian history, Putin insisted that the state must direct economic development. That view permeated his kandidat dissertation, ‘The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources during the Formation of a Market Economy’, defended at the St Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997 (after Putin moved to Moscow and became immersed in administrative duties). The 218–page dissertation, distilled in an article published two years later, specifically argued that the state should have the final voice in energy and natural resource policy. It was not, however, a reversion to a Soviet command economy: ‘The state must regulate the extractive complex using purely market methods, and in this regard the state must assist the development of processing industries based on the extractive complex.’ Such a state, argued Putin, would enable Russia to grow at twice the rate of the West and reduce ‘Russia’s lag behind developed countries in terms of GDP per capita’. Although some passages were allegedly plagiarized, the dissertation expressed Putin’s own vision of a ‘managed economy’, the antithesis of the neoliberal ‘Washington Consensus’, yet in no ways identical with the étatisme of the Stalinist command economy.

A fourth, less salient component of Putin’s thinking was a stress on social solidarity and justice. At one level, he referred to the need to provide the social services and safety net that so distinguished the Soviet system; even if that meant adjustments (converting some benefits to monetary amounts, or reconfiguring the social security system of pensions), Putin professed a commitment to the idea of a ‘social market’—one rooted in the fundamentals of the free market, but constrained to serve the essential needs of the population. In May 2004, for example, he declared that the market must support the social sphere—by developing a mortgage market, reforming health care, and implementing educational reform. That ‘social market’ idea remained a consistent theme; when asked in December 2008 to define Russia’s political and social system, he responded that it is ‘a social welfare state with a market economy’.

Economy: From Bust to Boom

The crisis of 1998 triggered a catastrophic drop in GDP, but then gave way to a burst of sustained economic growth. The turnaround was already apparent in 1999, with clear signs of recovery, including a modest increase in GDP, and that heralded eight years of impressive growth, with an average annual increase of 7 per cent in GDP. By 2007 Russia had largely overcome the devastating contraction of the 1990s, its GDP slightly surpassing that of 1991 (but still below the level in 1989). Under Putin the GDP in ‘purchasing power parity’ (PPP, which corrects distortions of nominal currency values) rose from 1.115 trillion dollars (2000) to 2.087 trillion (2007), making Russia’s economy the eighth largest in the world.

This economic surge had a salutary impact on a host of indicators. The per capita GDP (PPP) rose from 4,200 dollars (2000) to 14,600 dollars (2008); personal income also increased (fourfold). The growth also brought a huge increase in state revenues, which enabled the government to increase expenditures on social needs (e.g. pensions) and state institutions, yet run a budget surplus for seven straight years. The government was also able to retire some of the public foreign debt inherited from Soviet times and doubled in the Yeltsin years; by 2008 early repayment had saved billions of dollars on servicing the debt and reduced public debt from 130 per cent to 18 per cent of GDP (below that of developed European states). Putin’s government simultaneously amassed huge foreign exchange reserves (rising from a mere 8 billion dollars in 1999 to 460 billion dollars by the end of his presidency, peaking a few months later at 598 billion dollars)—the third largest foreign exchange reserves (surpassed only by China and Japan). In 2004 his government created a Stabilization Fund (special resources for a ‘rainy day’), which was divided in February 2008 into a Reserve Fund (liquid assets to cushion fluctuation in budget revenues) and National Well-Being Fund (based on a Norwegian model and designed to turn petrodollars into profitable investments in blue-chip companies).

This rapid growth was primarily due to the red-hot global economy of those years, which generated a sharp surge in demand for commodities, especially hydrocarbons, metal, and timber—Russia’s principal exports. The rising demand for oil, for example, brought a 1,225 per cent increase in the price on global markets (from 12 dollars a barrel in 1998 to 147 dollars in July 2008). Each dollar increase in oil prices, in turn, meant approximately an additional billion dollars in Russian export earnings. This same pattern prevailed in the prices for other Russian commodity exports, such as natural gas and metals like steel and aluminium. The Russian economic boom was also due, paradoxically, to the crisis of 1998, which led to a sharp devaluation of the rouble that, in turn, made exports ‘cheaper’ and imports ‘dearer’. The result was not only more exports but a surge in domestic demand, especially for consumer goods; the increase in personal incomes also stimulated greater consumer demand that provided a further spur to production and growth.

But the global economic boom was not the only cause of Russia’s economic recovery: government policy was also a factor. In contrast to the neoliberal ‘Washington Consensus’ that dictated Russian policy in the 1990s (privatization, deregulation, macroeconomic stability, and budget austerity that marginalized the state), the new ‘Moscow Consensus’ ascribed a major role to the state. Given Russia’s traditional étatisme and the new global emphasis on ‘good governance’ (propounded by the World Bank and leading economists), Putin’s stress on the state was neither original nor surprising. In Russia’s case, it meant more government control, even controlling ownership; that was especially true of ‘strategic’ sectors—the energy and metal production that dominated Russia’s exports and generated growth and prosperity. It was not, however, merely a matter of ‘renationalization’ in key sectors: Putin also sought to stimulate private investment by improving the business environment—by simplifying the licensing procedure, by introducing international accounting standards, and by requiring greater transparency. His government also cut the corporate tax rate from 32 to 24 per cent to encourage foreign direct investment (FDI), which had been negligible in the 1990s—in contrast to other transition communist states. Although the accrued FDI did increase (from 12 billion dollars in 2000 to 45 billion in 2007), it remained comparatively modest and tended to be narrowly focused in the hydrocarbon sector, as multinationals attempted to exploit Russia’s enormous natural resources. Putin took steps to staunch capital flight, as Russian entrepreneurs and enterprises shifted their wealth to safe havens abroad; he not only reduced the outflow of capital but even managed, by 2006–8, to achieve some capital repatriation for investment in Russia. Impressive as the growth was, it did have its dark sides.

Above all, Russia was heavily dependent on commodities, but the demand (and price) for these goods directly reflect international economic conditions, good as well as bad, and historically these have been highly volatile. Russia’s commodity dependence was extraordinary; in 2006, for example, oil and gas alone accounted for 55 per cent of export earnings and 52 per cent of treasury revenues (up from 25 per cent in 2003). The sheer profitability of commodities tended to distort investment and growth, with far less allocation of fixed capital for other sectors, such as manufacturing. Failure to diversify, in turn, left Russia unusually dependent on commodity exports and hence all the more vulnerable to global economic dynamics. No less important, Russia found it difficult to increase, or even sustain, current production levels. The pipeline system was thirty to forty years old and costly to maintain; new oil fields in the north and north-east posed severe climatic and soil conditions, making their development increasingly expensive and problematic. The government compounded these problems by limiting the role of foreign companies in ‘strategic’ economic spheres, thereby forfeiting the chance to attract the FDI needed to exploit the new deposits.

Despite Putin’s pro-business policies, Russia’s business environment still laboured under a poor reputation. Thus the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ reports ranked Russia 120th of 181 countries, listed serious difficulties and disadvantages, and emphasized the pervasive corruption. Annual reports by Transparency International—based on surveys of businesses—gave Russia a low ranking; the report for 2008, for example, ranked Russia 147th of 180 countries (below Kenya and Bangladesh). A Transparency International survey that focused on 22 developed and rapidly developing countries placed Russia at the very bottom (below India, Mexico, and China). A study by INDEM (Information Science for Democracy, founded in 1990 as one of the first Russian NGOs) reported a sevenfold increase in bribes between 2001 and 2005; the next year it found that companies diverted 7 per cent of their turnover for bribes and kickbacks. It was not only a matter of rampant bribery; the requisite institutional framework (laws and organizations to regulate the economic sphere) remained inadequate and invited abuse and delay. The Putin government attempted to improve corporate governance and the banking sector, but failed to meet the international standards needed to reassure foreign investors. Not that ‘regulation’ was effective in developed countries, even in the United States;until the financial crash of 2008, however, Western institutional safeguards seemed sufficient and put Russia at a distinct disadvantage.

Some critics argue that the ‘Moscow Consensus’ so exaggerated the state’s role that it was counter-productive. They argue that Putin favoured large-scale enterprises like Gazprom (the natural gas monopoly) to the detriment of small and medium-sized enterprises, which play a central role in the economic growth of developed countries. Thus, whereas these small enterprises account for over half of economic activity in developed countries, in Russia they produce just 15 per cent of the GDP. Putin’s critics also argued that state intervention can lead to political distortions: Putin wanted not only to ensure state control over strategic sectors, but also to rein in politically active oligarchs, especially those linked to Yeltsin’s ‘Family’ and those who displayed political aspirations. In particular, it was widely thought that political motivation, not economic planning, led to the prosecution of powerful ‘oligarchs’ like Boris Berezovskii, Vladimir Gusinskii, and Mikhail Khodorkovskii. Whatever the merits of such accusations, they had a chilling effect on global investors and tarnished Russia’s image in international business circles. Finally, some critics argued that renationalization led to slower growth, even stagnation, as in oil production; the cumbersome state proved far less efficient and tended to repulse, not attract, FDI.

Politics and Power

Such criticism and reservations notwithstanding, the Putin presidency brought prosperity to the people and popularity to its president. His approval ratings rose to stratospheric heights—75 per cent in December 2005 and 86 per cent three years later. That popularity guaranteed an overwhelming victory in presidential elections; his 53 per cent in March 2000 jumped to 71 per cent in March 2004 (with the Communist candidate garnering just 14 per cent). Although Putin experienced brief phases of popular dissatisfaction (most notably in 2005, when he modified the various entitlements of pensioners), the overall trajectory was precisely the opposite of Yeltsin—upward, not downward.

Putin converted popularity into power. Although initially beholden to the ‘Family’ and its oligarchs, he reduced their role and replaced them with his ‘own’ people. The most striking change was the growing presence of the siloviki (people of the ‘power ministries’—the security organs, interior ministry, and military). He showed a strong preference for people from his home base, St Petersburg, and appointed these people to the Security Council, Presidential Administration, and executive branch. For all his adulation of the state, Putin distrusted rank-and-file officialdom and relied on trusted associates to impose his will.

Putin also made the election of a ‘presidential parliament’—one ruled by supporters, not adversaries—a priority. The election of 1999, on the eve of Putin’s accession to the presidency, produced a ‘loyal’ Duma, and Putin (who claimed to be a ‘supra-party president’ and ran as an independent) actively promoted a new presidential party, ‘United Russia’. By winning the support of other parties, by dispensing patronage, and by establishing a large base of party members, the pro-government party won an overwhelming majority in the 2003 and 2007 Duma elections. As a result, pro-government deputies increased from 26 per cent in 1993 to 75 per cent in 2007 (consisting mostly of United Russia party members), with a corresponding decrease in parliamentary opposition. The Communist Party, once the largest party in the Duma, fell from 33 per cent in 1995 to 12 per cent in 2007, its membership rolls shrinking from 500,000 in the mid-1990s to 165,000 in October 2007 (when United Russia, revealingly, reported a membership of 2 million). The nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, headed by the flamboyant Vladimir Zhirinovskii, dropped from 24 per cent (1993) to 12 per cent. Even more dramatic was the decline of the liberal parties, which fell from 29 per cent in 1993 to 4 per cent in 2007 and failed to meet the minimum threshold to qualify for representation in the Duma.

The Putin regime used that parliamentary majority to change the political system. Arguing that a plethora of small parties can lead to political instability, in 2001 the Duma passed the government-sponsored ‘Law on Parties’ which restricted electoral participation to ‘national parties’—that is, those which not only had a minimum number of members, but which had branches all across Russia. The goal was to empower a few national parties and to eliminate small parties representing a particular region, ethnicity, confession, and the like. That same logic underlay the decision to replace the 1993 electoral system, which allocated one-half of the Duma seats to ‘single mandate districts’ (with the election of individuals, regardless of party affiliation), and the other half by ‘proportionate representation’ (allocated on the basis of a party’s share of the general vote). At Putin’s suggestion, in May 2005 parliament made proportionate representation the sole basis of the electoral system, thereby reinforcing the power of registered national parties. To marginalize small parties still further, parliament raised the minimum share of votes (from 5 to 7 per cent) as a precondition for representation in the Duma. The changes were controversial; critics complained that it denied some voters any representation, while advocates argued that these rules precluded the representation of radical fringe groups, promoted the formation of viable parties, and thereby ensured political stability and a productive parliament.

The ongoing war in Chechnya, which initially raised Putin’s popularity, began to arouse mounting criticism, especially from Western governments and human rights organizations. Although Russian forces established some semblance of control, they failed to crush all resistance or to end devastating terrorist acts. And the war took a heavy toll—on the Russian military (at least 4,572 killed and 15,549 wounded, with other counts running much higher), insurgents (at least 13,000), and civilians (low-end estimates ran between 30,000 and 40,000). This carnage eroded popular support in Russia itself (with 69 per cent, by 2005, favouring an end to the fighting and peaceful resolution), impelling the Kremlin to ‘Chechenize’ the conflict by putting pro-Moscow Chechens in charge and relying on Chechen, not Russian, forces. Moscow arranged for Ramzan Kadyrov to succeed his father (killed in a terrorist attack) as the president of Chechnya; the young Kadyrov quickly earned a reputation for brutality and the ‘disappearances’ of 2,000 to 3,000 fellow Chechens. The repression in Chechnya, even if provoked by criminal acts of terrorism, elicited sharp criticism in Western circles and reinforced criticism of Putin for ‘authoritarian’ tendencies.

Criticism of ‘human rights’ violations also gained currency from the well-publicized prosecution of leading oligarchs. The most sensational cause célèbre commenced in 2003, when Mikhail Khodorkovskii, the richest man in Russia and the sixteenth richest in the world, became the target of police investigations and prosecution. Khodorkovskii, by all accounts, had amassed his fortune during perestroika and the Yeltsin years by dubious means; during the ‘loans for shares’ phase, he acquired the oil company Yukos—worth billions of dollars—for a fraction of its real value. But it was not Khodorkovskii’s past but his political ambitions—including financial support for oppositionist forces—that reportedly triggered a full-scale investigation by the procuracy. In October 2003 he was arrested by a squad of special forces as he boarded a private jet and brought to Moscow for prosecution on charges of fraudulent privatization, use of an illegal offshore company to conceal profits, and corporate and individual tax evasion. Authorities claimed that Yukos owed 15 billion dollars in back taxes and fines, and that Khodorkovskii personally owed another 2 billion dollars. Convicted in May 2005, he was sentenced to nine years in a corrective labour camp—triggering outcries by Putin’s critics, at home and abroad, that the prosecution was purely political.

The Khodorkovskii case also seemed to substantiate fears that Putin wanted not only to silence oligarchs but to muzzle the media. In the Yeltsin era, as oligarchs acquired television channels and prominent newspapers, the result was not so much a free press as a media dominated by special interests, kompromat, and scurrilous gossip. That kind of journalism, especially when directed against those in power, did little to endear the media to authorities. Putin himself was incensed by negative coverage of the Chechnya war and criticism of his failure to respond personally to the sinking of the submarine Kursk in August 2000; he also took exception to the caricature of his persona in a popular TV show ‘The Puppets’ (Kukly). He gave vent to his vexation in a public speech where he said that ‘sometimes [the media] turn into means of mass disinformation and tools of struggle against the state’. His government deliberately acted to bring the media under control. That was dramatically evident in May 2000 when masked security officers raided the media giant owned by Vladimir Gusinskii; state pressure (and debts) forced Gusinskii to relinquish his media assets (most importantly, an influential TV channel); Gazprom, the state natural gas monopoly, gained control of Gusinskii’s holdings and, in short order, virtually all other television stations. Putin’s government also dealt harshly with individual journalists, such as Andrei Babitskii, who worked for the American-financed Radio Liberty and dispatched highly critical accounts of events in Chechnya. Nor did the regime do much to protect investigative journalists; the murder of Anna Politkovskaia in October 2006 (which Putin dismissed as ‘insignificant’) was but one of eighty-eight journalists slain between 1996 and 2006. The annual ‘World Press Freedom Index’, compiled by Reporters without Borders, placed Russia in the bottom quintal of surveyed countries (141st of 173 countries, just above Ethiopia and Tunisia).

Equally controversial—and fodder for charges of ‘authoritarianism’—was the government’s decision to regulate and restrict the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which had proliferated in post-Soviet Russia. By 2001 the government had registered some 400,000 NGOs; that number swelled to 500,000 by 2006. In the view of many Westerners, the NGO gives voice to civil society, performs essential services, and lobbies states and international organizations for ‘good causes’. But the murky legal status of the NGO in international law invites abuses, especially by ‘GONGOs’—‘government-organized NGOs’, funded by states and only masquerading as representatives of civil society. Russian sensitivity to foreign-funded NGOs intensified when these played a salient, sometimes decisive role in the ‘colour’ revolutions—in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005), all the more when (as in Georgia and Ukraine) they brought to power regimes seeking ties with the West, not Russia. Moscow’s suspicions were not unfounded; in 2005, for example, the US government awarded 85 million dollars to a variety of organizations in Russia with the goal of promoting ‘democratization’. Private organizations, such as George Soros’s ‘Open Society’, also provided financial support for Russian NGOs. Putin complained about the subversive role of foreign-funded NGOs and in 2006 initiated legislation requiring NGOs to register, indicate the source of funding, and refrain from activities detrimental to Russian interests. Western observers, especially in the United States, denounced these measures as an attempt to throttle a burgeoning civil society and democratic forces. Increasingly, the Western media and specialists discerned a resurgence of authoritarianism; the Economist Intelligence Unit, for example, ranked Russia 107th of 167 states in terms of its democratization.

Western criticism elicited scathing rejoinders from Moscow. In April 2007 Putin complained that such attacks seek to foment internal turmoil ‘in order to plunder once again the nation’s resources with impunity’ and ultimately ‘to deprive our country of its economic and political independence’. He complained that ‘there has been an increasing influx of money from abroad, which is being used to intervene directly in our internal affairs’. He called this intervention ‘colonialism’ in a new guise, with the old mission of ‘civilization’ glossed as ‘democratization’, but with the same goal: to advance the authors’ vested interests. When the British foreign secretary demanded that Russia change its constitution (which blocked the extradition of a Russian citizen who, according to London, had murdered a former KGB officer residing in England), a livid Putin did not mince words: ‘The British officials are making proposals to change our Constitution that are insulting for our nation. London forgets that Great Britain is no longer a colonial power and that Russia has never been its colony.’ Rebuffing such Western intervention, Putin reaffirmed his commitment to ‘the development of a free, democratic country’, but on Russia’s terms: ‘Russia … will decide for itself the pace, terms, and conditions of moving towards democracy.’ He added that the United States—so eager to teach democracy to others—has failed to reform the electoral college (which subverts the will of the majority), to regulate campaign finance (to end the plutocratization of politics), or to avert the voting irregularities that determined the outcome of the 2000 presidential election.

Rebuilding the Russian State

Yeltsin had presided over the demolition of the centralized Russian state. That was partly due to the economic crisis: an impoverished nation could ill afford the subsidies, services, and military establishment of the Soviet era. But the state’s decline was also due to the neoliberal goal of minimizing the government and its budget (deemed unproductive). The ‘failing state’ syndrome in Russia also had political roots—the stalemate between the presidency and parliament, the decentralization that paralysed the centre’s capacity to rule and even collect taxes. Putin undertook to rebuild the state by transforming its tax system, institutions of governance, and the military.

One priority was re-establishing a centralized state administration. The eighty-nine administrative units became virtually autonomous under Yeltsin—issuing their own laws, ignoring directives from Moscow, retaining most tax revenues, and concluding ‘bilateral treaties’ with Moscow. From the outset Putin sought to create ‘a single vertical line of executive power’. He forced provincial units to increase tax transfers to Moscow (from 30 to 70 per cent), gave federal law precedence over local ‘constitutions’ and laws, and demanded strict observance of Moscow’s policies. He also established seven super-districts headed by a polpred (plenipotentiary), a viceroy charged with overseeing the subordinate administrative units and ensuring compliance with Moscow’s directives. But the polpred failed to control the subordinate regions, especially the popularly elected governors, and Putin then took steps to undercut the governors’ power. He first eliminated their ex officio membership in the Federation Council (the upper house of parliament) and replaced them with locally elected representatives. The key change, however, was to replace the popular election of governors by a new system: from February 2005 all were to be nominated by the president, with confirmation by the invariably pliant local legislatures. The governor henceforth represented Putin, not the local region.

A second focus was taxation. The first step was vigorous tax collection to detect fraud and combat arrears; in 2000, Putin’s first year as president, tax revenues jumped 60 per cent. The Putin government expanded tax audits (examining the filings of 440,000 enterprises and 311,000 individuals in 2001). The government, moreover, simplified taxation such that the government collected 98 per cent of its revenues from four main sources—the value-added tax, excise, profits, and user fees for natural resources. The government also adopted a flat income tax (13 per cent) and merged sundry levies into a single social security tax. Moscow made a concerted effort to combat the misuse of public funds by adopting a new budget code, increasing transparency, closely auditing state procurements, and resisting Duma proposals for a splurge in social expenditures. As a result, the government could cut taxes (for example, lowering the corporate tax rate) yet achieve a budget surplus (first in 2000, with a 6 billion dollar surplus, followed by surpluses every year through 2008).

In other spheres, however, Putin’s record was less impressive and, in some cases, such as reform of the judiciary, positively disappointing. Putin himself indulged in rhetoric about a ‘dictatorship of law’—a Rechtsstaat based on the rule of law. He did make some improvements, including increased funding for the judiciary (a fourfold increase in the salaries and 18 per cent increase in the number of judges) and decriminalization of minor offences (replacing incarceration with fines, thereby reducing the prison population from 1,084,000 inmates in 2001 to 878,000 in 2007). Much else remained on paper, including the lofty principles embodied in the Criminal Procedural Code of 2002, which enhanced the rights of defence lawyers, limited preliminary detention to 48 hours, affirmed habeas corpus, and guaranteed the accused a two-hour meeting with an advocate prior to any interrogation. In reality, as the Khodorkovskii case demonstrated, the Kremlin still resorted to ‘telephone justice’, with calls from above ensuring the ‘right’ verdict. Not only did the promise to expand the jury system to all eighty-nine administrative districts fail to have the desired impact, but the regime severely limited its competence in December 2008, specifically excluding the jury from cases involving terrorism, hostage-taking, illegal armed units, treason, attempts to overthrow authority, sabotage, and organizing massive disorder or revolt.

Nor did Putin’s team succeed in trimming the bureaucracy and improving its quality. On the contrary, the civil service became bigger if not better, growing by 50 per cent (from 1.0 to 1.5 million in 2000–6). Putin himself complained that state officials were ‘ill-prepared for working out and implementing the decisions appropriate to the country’s present needs’, and on another occasion declared that ‘we should limit the power of bureaucrats, make them comply with laws, and provide for the transparency and openness of bureaucratic procedures’. Despite some flowery rhetoric, Putin also failed to eradicate corruption; as he admitted himself in May 2006, little had been achieved in eliminating a ‘major obstacle’ to development—corruption.

Military reform proved equally elusive. The tragic sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk in August 2000 symbolized the pitiable state of the military: the sole recovery vehicle of the Northern Fleet was inoperative, having been cannibalized for spare parts. The increase in state revenues did, however, enable the government to increase the military budget from 7 billion dollars in 2001 to 30 billion in 2006. That spending enabled the development and testing of a new ICBM, the RS-24 (with a 10,000-kilometre range and MIRV capability) and the renewed production of nuclear submarines (with the launching of several in 2007—the first in seventeen years). That same year the government adopted a seven-year, 200 billion dollar rearmament plan to create a new generation of missiles, planes, and aircraft carriers. However, as Putin emphasized in May 2006, ‘we must not sacrifice the interests of socio-economic development to develop our military complex’. As a result, the Russian military budget remained comparatively small (that of the United States being twenty-five times greater) and did not even suffice to achieve an acceptable level of combat readiness. As the chief of the general staff declared in December 2008, only 17 per cent of the military units were combat ready, half of the warships were at anchor, and the like. Finally, still more problematic was the transformation of the military from a conventional force into one better suited to fight insurgencies and respond rapidly to crises. In particular, the government failed to abolish conscription and create an all-volunteer professional army, partly because of the spectre of high costs (exaggerated by military opponents of the change) and partly because of the low rate of re-enlistment by contract soldiers. As a result, Putin left the military slightly improved, but much as he found it—underfunded, unprepared, and untransformed.

Society and Culture

The prosperity of the Putin years significantly raised living standards. That meant, above all, a significant drop in the poverty level, as the number of those with incomes below the subsistence minimum fell from 40 to 16 per cent during Putin’s two terms. Not only the economic boom but government policy accounted for this decrease, especially its decision to raise pensions and keep pace with inflation. Unemployment, similarly, fell by half (from 12.4 to 5.9 per cent between January 1999 and January 2008). The rise in personal income (12 per cent per annum) reduced the army of poor and created a small, but growing, ‘middle class’, with 20 per cent of the population self-identifying themselves in this category. But the social sphere also offered negatives: the demographic crisis deepened, as the population continued to decline (from 146.3 million in 2001 to 142.0 million in 2008).

Prosperity also failed to diminish inequality. The decile ratio (the proportion of the richest 10 per cent to the poorest 10 per cent), which had already jumped from a relatively egalitarian 4.5 (1991) to 13.8 (2001), edged upward to 15.6 by late 2007 (compared to 15.9 in the United States and 13.6 in the UK). Another measure of inequality, the Gini coefficient, rose from 0.399 in 2001 to 0.415 in 2008. And, apart from the handful of ‘oligarchs’ (such as Khodorkovskii) who ran afoul of the regime, the rich became the super-rich, with the number of billionaires increasing from 17 (2003) to 53 (2006) and controlling some 400 billion dollars in assets (or about one-third of the GDP).

A stronger, richer state could afford more social services, but Putin’s government was no spendthrift, preferring instead to build up foreign exchange reserves and a stabilization fund. The state budget allocated 3 to 4 per cent of the GDP for health and education; and nearly 6 per cent for social security—in real terms, a marked improvement over the 1990s. In education, for example, the number of students in higher education (including new private universities as well as state institutions) rose from 4.7 million (2000–1) to 7.5 million (2007–8). Such gains were reflected in the World Bank’s ‘Human Development Index’ (HDI), an aggregated numerical rating that calculated a host of different variables (such as health services, education, and gender empowerment): Russia, while still significantly below other developed countries, none the less lifted its rating from 0.776 in 1995 to 0.806 in 2006.

But Russia still lagged far behind the developed countries. That was apparent in its rank in the World Bank’s HDI: despite the improved score, in 2006 Russia was only 73rd of 179 countries and, over the entire post-Soviet era (1990–2006), had actually suffered a 0.014 drop in its aggregate HDI indicator (compared to a 0.156 rise in China). That decline was due mainly to the disastrous 1990s, but also reflected Putin’s reluctance to invest in the social sector. Thus in public health Russia’s ranking was even below its HDI score; revealingly, the World Health Organization ranked Russia 127th out of 192 countries. Official reports cited serious deficiencies: much of the medical equipment was obsolescent, the drug supply met only 30 to 40 per cent of demand, and more than two-thirds of those polled (in August 2006) complained that they could not get ‘good’ health care. The result was a decline in life expectancy; during Putin’s tenure, 2000–8, it dropped from 67.2 to 65.9 years. Russia, like other developed countries, also faces a looming pension crisis; by 2010 sheer demography—the widespread phenomenon of population ageing, with a higher mean age—dictated that the pension costs would rise steeply (50 per cent in a few years, according to some projections), and precisely at a time when the proportion of working population to retired elder would shrink. Another dark side, crime, also significantly worsened under Putin: the number of reported crimes rose 21 per cent (from 2.95 million to 3.58 million in 2000–8). In short, the Putin era witnessed some improvements in the social sphere, but the country still faced major challenges—some were due to the ‘catastroika’ of the 1990s, some reflected budget austerity, and others (in particular, demographic) resulted from long-term processes that were hardly unique to Russia.

By contrast, the picture in the cultural sphere was much brighter, for the relative affluence of the Putin era proved a tremendous boon for creativity in the arts. The resurgence was particularly apparent in cinema, with the production of prize-winning films that earned international renown. Nikita Mikhalkov’s The Twelve (2007), based on the famous Twelve Angry Men, adapted the plot to show a Chechen youth who had allegedly murdered his Russian stepfather: the jury overcame ethnic stereotypes to declare the youth ‘not guilty’. Aleksandr Sokurov directed Russian Ark (2003), an innovative (if dizzying) film about the entire history of Imperial Russia, staged with 867 actors and produced in a single, uninterrupted shooting of 96 minutes, with the Hermitage as its backdrop. Contemporary Russian art, repressed in the Soviet era and ignored in the perestroika era and immediate post-Soviet years, suddenly came into favour after the turn of the twenty-first century. Ilya Kabakov’s 1981 painting La Chambre de luxe (1981) sold for 4.1 million dollars, and in 1998 the Tretiakov Art Museum displayed contemporary art in its first exhibition on twentieth-century Russian art. Buoyed by this demand, much of it coming from the wealthy ‘new Russians’, Sotheby’s opened a Moscow branch in May 2007, and Christie’s also made plans to enter the new lucrative Russian market. Literature also produced some popular but sophisticated best-selling novels, such as Viktor Pelevin’s The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2005) and Vladimir Sorokin’s dystopian novel A Day in the Life of an Oprichnik (2006).

The Putin era also witnessed a revival of religion, especially the Orthodox Church. The resurgence of Orthodoxy had begun during the perestroika and Yeltsin eras, but accelerated under Putin. The president himself, who unabashedly and (to all appearances) sincerely identified with Orthodoxy, emphasized his ties to the Church from the very outset, with a procession to the Cathedral of Annunciation immediately after his inauguration in May 2000. In subsequent years he reaffirmed those ties to the Church, with quasi-pilgrimages to hallowed sites and public expression of respect for the Church, its leaders, and the faith.

The public, especially ethnic Russians, also displayed a growing identification with the Church. Whereas 24 per cent of the population self-described themselves as Orthodox in 1990, that quotient reached 62 per cent in 2005 and 73 per cent in 2008. Some observers, however, regarded such professions of piety to be more rhetorical than real; church attendance remained extremely low and only 2 per cent knew all of the Ten Commandments. Nonetheless, the popular affirmation of belief stimulated the recovery of institutional Orthodoxy, the number of registered parishes growing from 8,729 in 1999 to more than 12,214 parishes in 2006. After the death of Patriarch Aleksii II, closely associated with the Putin government, on 5 December 2008, the Church elected Kirill I and conducted the enthronement ceremony on 1 February 2009. The new patriarch brought a more liberal reputation to the office, especially in theological and liturgical issues, even in the contentious question of ecumenical ties (perhaps heralding better relations with the Vatican). Kirill was also quick to express a commitment to social issues: ‘Our Christian duty is to care for the suffering, for the orphaned, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, the prisoners, and the homeless. We can help all of these to regain hope. The voice of the Church should reinforce the voice of the weak and those deprived of power, so that they may find fitting justice.’

The new prominence of the Orthodox Church, including the demonstrative display of ties to the country’s leaders and government, aroused deep concern among secularists and adherents of other confessions. Most controversial of all were the attempts by the Church to reclaim a role in education, including demands for ‘religious education’ and even instruction in the ‘foundations of Orthodox culture’. That provoked vehement opposition from secularists, including academicians; even state officials spoke in favour of allowing only generic instruction in ‘world religions’, not a specifically Orthodox curricular requirement. The government’s caution derived from the fact that Russia remains, despite the renaissance of Orthodoxy, a multi-confessional state. Of the total registered local religious communities (22,523), the remaining 10,309 (45.8 per cent) belong to a variety of Christian and non-Christian groups. By far the largest was Islam, with 3,668 communities (16 per cent of the registered religious groups), which represent a Muslim population estimated at 20 to 24 million, with strong concentrations in the north Caucasus, Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan. Muslims constituted the fastest growing segment of the population, increasing 40 per cent since 1989, with 2.5 million in Moscow itself. Muslims also used the religious freedom in post-Soviet Russia to reclaim property and reopen mosques, which increased from 150 in 1991 to approximately 6,000 in 2006.

Russia and the World

The economic boom and state-building encouraged the Putin leadership to reclaim Russia’s former status as a major power. In talks with the Italian prime minister in 2007, Putin bluntly asserted his country’s claim to global power: ‘As Russia’s economic, political and military capabilities grow in the world, it is emerging as a competitor—a competitor that has already been written off. The West wants to put Russia in some pre-defined place, but Russia will find its place in the world all by itself.’ From the very outset, Putin embraced an ambitious foreign policy that would eventually be called the ‘new realism’. Its basic premiss was that Russia should foreground its economic and business interests, yet continue to seek integration into the global economy. Putin showed some sensitivity to ‘soft power’ as an alternative to military force. He also demonstrated a willingness to cooperate with the West in the wake of 11 September 2001, agreeing to open Russian air space for the NATO campaign in Afghanistan and acquiescing in the creation of temporary US airbases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

However, Moscow’s response to 9/11 did not presage better relations with Washington, which steadily worsened thereafter. To be sure, Putin famously charmed the American president George W. Bush, who, after a summit in June 2001, gushed: ‘I looked into that man’s eyes and saw that he is direct and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. And I saw his soul.’ But others in his administration saw something else—a former KGB officer, a challenge to American dominance, an obstacle to the onward march of ‘democracy’. At the very outset of the Bush presidency, his then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, declared that ‘Russia is a threat to the West in general and to our European allies in particular’. Six years later Vice-President Richard Cheney, in a meeting of East European leaders, accused Moscow of using energy as a political weapon and demanded that it ‘return to democratic reform’.

The challenge from Washington did not go unanswered. Shortly after the Cheney speech (which ignited an uproar in Russia), Putin bristled that ‘we are categorically against such intervention into our affairs’, and a high-ranking official (and regime ideologue), Viacheslav Surkov, declared that Russia must defend its rights as a ‘sovereign democracy’. The minister of foreign affairs, Sergei Lavrov, castigated America’s arrogant ‘transformational diplomacy’ (codeword for the promotion of democracy), neo-containment rhetoric, and unipolarity. Putin himself responded in kind to what he saw as American hypocrisy and provocations. Thus, after Bush unveiled a memorial to the ‘victims of communism’ (accompanied by a wave of anti-Soviet declarations), Putin recommended that the United States—which was so generous in exposing the dark sides of Russian history—look back at its own sorry record: ‘We have not used nuclear weapons against a civilian population [as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki]. We have not sprayed thousands of kilometres with chemicals [an allusion to agent orange], or dropped seven times more bombs [in Vietnam]’ than in all of the Second World War. In early 2007 Putin fumed that Russia is ‘constantly being taught about democracy, but for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn it themselves’.

Substantive differences fuelled the rancour and rhetoric. One was Moscow’s concern about American expansionism, especially in ‘post-Soviet space’—the former Soviet republics and Russia’s neighbours. Above all, Putin opposed Washington’s campaign to promote pro-Western democracy by financing the ‘colour revolutions’, bringing to power regimes which would not only replicate Western democracy but also ally with the West against Moscow. American intervention succeeded in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, where support (monetary, not merely rhetorical) for ‘democratic forces’ helped to topple current governments and install pro-Western regimes. It was precisely this foreign intervention that provoked the 2006 decision to regulate NGOs that relied on Western, official or private, financing.

A second flashpoint of contention was the Middle East. Russia deemed the American military attack on Iraq an unjustified, illegal violation of the UN Charter. Putin emphasized that the Americans had failed to find weapons of mass destruction—the putative reason for launching a military invasion without authorization from the UN Security Council. Iran was another bone of contention. The West, led by Washington, accused Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons and insisted on harsh sanctions to prevent the ‘nuclearization’ of Iran. Moscow, however, resisted such demands and refused to cancel its contract to build a nuclear plant at Bushehr (ostensibly for peaceful purposes). It also reportedly sold sophisticated anti-aircraft battery units to Iran, which severely complicated American and Israeli threats to launch a pre-emptive military strike against Iran’s nuclear installations.

A third issue was disarmament and nuclear deterrence. The dispute erupted at the very beginning of the Bush presidency, when Washington decided unilaterally to renounce the ABM treaty of 1972—which limited each side to a single missile defence system—and to resume development of Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’, the National Missile Defence (NMD) system, initially in North America, but later in Europe as well. The NMD in Europe was purportedly intended to neutralize a potential Iranian or North Korean missile threat by positioning a missile defence unit in Poland and an advanced radar system in the Czech Republic. Russia vehemently objected, suspecting that the real objective was to neutralize Russia’s own nuclear deterrence. Given the size of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, Moscow’s argument did not seem very compelling; no doubt more weighty were other considerations, especially the fear that NMD would generate new technological spin-offs (to Russia’s disadvantage) and strengthen America’s strategic superiority. The Putin government also realized that NMD would unleash a new arms race (forcing Russia to undertake a costly modernization of its own nuclear defence system), which was most unwelcome at a point when Moscow sought to limit military expenditures in order to concentrate on economic development and diversification. Another thorny issue was the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) between NATO and the Warsaw Pact Countries, which limited the size and deployment of military forces along the borders of Western states and the Soviet bloc. That agreement had been revised in 1999 (to account for the break-up of the USSR and Warsaw Pact), but the revised text gave rise to new disputes, with the result that only Russia and three close allies ratified the new text. Angered by the Western refusal to ratify the revised text, Russia formally withdrew from the CFE in December 2007, declaring that it could no longer tolerate a one-sided disarmament policy.

A fourth issue was NATO expansion: to Moscow’s consternation, NATO—under American leadership—actively recruited and incorporated former Warsaw bloc countries and even former Soviet republics. Russia grew increasingly alarmed as NATO expanded eastward, encompassing former Warsaw Pact countries and former Soviet republics in the Baltics, with the ex-communist lands coming to comprise 40 per cent of NATO membership. Nor did the campaign show any signs of stopping: the United States vigorously supported the inclusion of Ukraine and Georgia, especially after their ‘orange’ and ‘rose’ revolutions brought pro-Western regimes to power. Some European members of NATO opposed the American démarche, partly because of Russia’s opposition but also because neither Ukraine nor Georgia met the prerequisites for membership. Washington none the less extracted a NATO declaration of ‘intent’ to initiate the process of admission to NATO. Putin in turn protested that some in the West ‘have not been able to move on from the stereotypes of bloc thinking and prejudices, which are a carry-over from the epoch of global confrontation’. All this led to a famous Putin outburst about American hegemonism in a Munich conference in February 2007: ‘The United States has overstepped its borders in all spheres—economic, political, and humanitarian—and has imposed itself on other states.’

The mounting tensions with Washington encouraged Moscow to strengthen its ties to Europe. Not only was the latter its main trade partner, but it was also a natural partner for Russia as a ‘European’ country. Closer relations, however, proved elusive, in large measure because of recurring reports about military abuses in Chechnya and other human rights violations—which Moscow dismissed as unacceptable interference in its internal affairs. Tensions were also inflamed by Russia’s conflict with Ukraine over natural gas exports: Moscow’s decision to shut down the gas pipelines in January 2006 and January 2009 caused considerable hardship in Europe, which relied on Russia for a quarter of its natural gas and suspected that Russia was not only putting pressure on Ukraine but also indulging in political pressure and blackmail.

Amidst these complications, Putin—the ‘Europeanist’—gradually began to reorient strategy to the East, especially China. The latter was a major target of arms exports and shared many of Russia’s foreign policy aims—especially, its concern about the ‘unipolar hegemonism’ of the United States, the latter’s penchant for ‘humanitarian intervention’ and violation of state sovereignty, NATO enlargement, and the Islamist fundamentalism which threatened both Russia and China. In 2001, the ‘Shanghai Five’, established five years earlier by Russia, China, and three former Soviet republics (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan), was reconstituted as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), tasked not only with promoting economic relations but also with coordinating policy and enhancing mutual ties. In 2004 SCO established an ‘anti-terrorist centre’ to combat the radical Islamist movements and the following year resolved to reduce American influence and military presence in the region. In August 2005 Russia and China held their first joint military exercises, underscoring that SCO and their bilateral ties had moved significantly beyond the economic sphere.

The Putin government, with little success, sought to maintain its influence in the ‘near abroad’—the former Soviet republics—partly because these countries now held a sizeable Russian diaspora, partly for geopolitical reasons. It had no success whatsoever in the Baltic states, which hastened to join the European Union and NATO and flagrantly violated the rights of ethnic Russians on their territories. Relations with Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia steadily deteriorated. In Moldova’s case, Russia continued to support Trans-Dniester, a pro-Russian secessionist territory; despite agreements to withdraw Russian forces, Russia continued to deploy a military contingent and support the region’s demands for autonomy. Relations with Ukraine sharply deteriorated after the ‘orange revolution’ in late 2004, both because Moscow had backed the losing candidate for president and because the new government in Kiev tilted strongly toward the West. Apart from historical enmity (including Ukrainian demands that golodomor, the famine which accompanied collectivization in the early 1930s, be recognized as genocide), there were other, more urgent contemporary issues. One was the status of the Crimea (which Khrushchev generously transferred to Ukraine in 1954, but which had a population composed primarily of ethnic Russians). The two sides had earlier agreed to ‘share’ the Black Sea fleet, but that too became a point of contention. Economics, above all the price of natural gas, also played a role. Given Ukraine’s Western tilt, Moscow saw no reason to continue Ukraine’s 60 per cent discount on natural gas prices (a subsidy amounting to three to five billion dollars a year); Kiev’s refusal to pay old debts and to negotiate new rates led Russia to shut off gas deliveries on two occasions, which ended in temporary agreements, but did not remove the question as a source of future conflict. Relations with Georgia, especially after the ‘rose revolution’ in 2003, also became increasingly acrimonious. As Georgia strengthened its ties to the West, Russia bolstered support for two secessionist areas of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, populated by a non-Georgian majority; Russian peacekeepers had enabled both territories to remain virtually autonomous since the early 1990s. In August 2008, in a bid to reassert control (and with the promise of American support), Georgia launched an offensive in South Ossetia, but quickly suffered a devastating defeat at the hand of Russian forces. Russia’s action elicited much criticism, especially from the American administration, adding to the rancour in Russian-American relations. Russia (and only one other state, Nicaragua) formally recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, to the fury of officials in Washington and Tbilisi. Moscow’s action, however, should not have come as a surprise. Two years earlier, as the West prepared to recognize an independent Kosovo, Putin warned that such an action would provide a precedent: ‘If someone believes that Kosovo can be granted full state independence, then why should we refuse the same to Abkhazia or South Ossetia?’

Some areas of the former Soviet Union, however, maintained close ties to Moscow. Belarus, indeed, even sought some kind of quasi-political union; while such proposals were current in the 1990s, Putin was less enamoured and the public likewise became increasingly sceptical, given the Belarusian economy and the ill repute of its mercurial president Aleksandr Lukashenko. Moscow attached far greater importance to its relations with the countries of Central Asia, partly because of the sympathies of Russian and Russified populations there, but also because they shared a common desire to contain Islamist fundamentalism and terrorism.

As Putin’s tenure drew to a close in early 2008, it was clear that Moscow was seeking to reassert its stature as a major power. But in fact Putin’s regime had achieved little; his gratuitous attacks, however popular at home, aggravated tensions with the West. The United States, in particular, increasingly came to regard Russia as a threat to its power and to the process of democratization.

2008: A New President

As Putin’s second term drew to a close, with prosperity at home and Putin’s popularity at an all-time high, his supporters proposed to amend the constitutional limit of two consecutive terms in the presidency. However, Putin himself rejected that proposal and instead promoted the candidacy of his deputy prime minister, Dmitrii Medvedev. Like Putin, Medvedev came from St Petersburg, had a law degree (he even taught Roman civil law at St Petersburg University), and had worked for that city’s liberal mayor Sobchak in the early 1990s. In 1999 Putin appointed Medvedev deputy head of the governmental administration, next made him deputy head of the presidential administration, and then promoted him to be its director in 2003. At one point in 2000 Medvedev also served as chairman of the board of directors of Gazprom, the state’s natural gas monopoly. In 2005 Putin designated Medvedev first deputy prime minister, with responsibility for health care, demography, agriculture, and education, thereby giving him visibility in high-profile issues. Despite conjecture about Medvedev’s possible liberalism, during the election campaign he unequivocally embraced Putin’s ideal of a strong ‘vertical’ authority: ‘I am deeply convinced that, if Russia turns into a parliamentary republic, it will soon cease to exist. What it needs is a strong presidential authority. These lands were brought together over centuries, and it is simply impossible to govern them in any other way.’

Medvedev held an insuperable advantage in the presidential campaign. He not only had Putin’s public support but quickly announced that he would appoint the popular Putin as prime minister, ensuring that Putin and his policies would remain in place. Indeed, the pair campaigned as a team under the slogan ‘Together we shall win.’ The opposition, divided and weak, deprived of the state-controlled mass media, had little prospect of victory. Western observers questioned the legitimacy of the election; the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (which routinely monitors elections) declined to participate, citing ‘severe restrictions on its observers by the Russian government’. Those who did come to observe reported a ‘fair but unequal election’. One study found that Medvedev had six times more coverage than his rivals; some oppositionists claimed forged election protocols. Few, however, doubt that Medvedev won a landslide victory, with 71.3 per cent of the vote against 18.0 per cent and 9.5 per cent for the next two candidates.

With Medvedev’s election and installation as president in May, Putin became prime minister. The new government enjoyed popularity and power: although the two were often described as a ‘tandem’, Putin unquestionably was a power unto himself. Some of his popularity even rubbed off on the ‘government’, which traditionally had extremely low approval ratings, but now saw its approval shoot up to 60 per cent, with still higher ratings for Medvedev and Putin.

The post-Putin ‘tandem’ continued Putin’s foreign and domestic policies. In foreign policy Russia continued to oppose the placement of NMD facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic; failing to persuade the Bush administration to reconsider, Moscow remained hopeful that the new government of Barak Obama would be prepared to compromise. Moscow did succeed in persuading NATO to delay plans to admit Ukraine and Georgia, despite strong pressure from the American government. The military conflict with Georgia in August 2008 exacerbated tensions, but neither the United States nor its European allies pressed their demands that Russia withdraw its forces and recognize Georgia’s sovereignty over the breakaway regions. The Medvedev presidency also reaffirmed Putin’s domestic policies in a long-term plan called ‘Strategy for 2020’, which was drafted in June 2008 and outlined goals and policies for the next dozen years. The plan envisioned a fivefold increase in wages, threefold increase in housing construction, doubling in research and development, and a demographic transformation (with the population growing to 145 million and life expectancy rising from 65 to 70). Such optimistic projections derived largely from the high rate of economic growth in the first months of 2008; buoyed by an investment boom, in the first quarter of 2008 the GDP grew at an annual rate of 8.5 per cent, among the highest in all the Putin years. The future could hardly have looked brighter when the price of oil reached $147 a barrel in July 2008. At that point, Russia seemed clearly poised for years of continuous prosperity and power.

From Global Boom to Global Recession

The American banking and mortgage meltdown in the second half of 2008 triggered a global crisis, with severe repercussions for all the globalized states, Russia included. The Russian leadership had no doubts about where to place the blame. As the contagion spread, on 1 October 2008 Putin bluntly declared that ‘everything happening now in the economic and financial sphere began in the United States’, and a month later President Medvedev hammered home the same theme: ‘The US economy … pulled financial markets all around the globe down with it in its fall’, adding that Americans ‘did not listen to the numerous warnings from its partners (including from us)’.

Moscow had good cause for anger and alarm: the crisis had an immediate, devastating impact on the Russian economy. Oil prices plunged: from 147 dollars a barrel in July to less than 40 dollars by the end of the year—a 73 per cent drop. To rescue a falling rouble and failing corporations, the government had to raid the foreign exchange reserves that it had carefully accumulated; the reserves—once the world’s third largest—shrank from 598 billion dollars to 426.5 billion by early January, and dropped to 388 billion a month later (a decrease of 35 per cent). These measures, however, failed to staunch the decline of the rouble, which lost a third of its value against the dollar and returned to its exchange value at the time of the 1998 crisis. The Russian stock exchange nosedived, dropping from a high of 2,488 points in May 2008 to 507 by February 2009 (an 80 per cent decline). The crisis in the financial, banking, and securities sector carried over to the ‘real economy’, bringing a sudden halt to the high growth rate of the GDP. Putin initially projected an overall growth rate of 6 per cent in 2008, but later calculations reduced that to 5.6 per cent—the lowest since 4.7 per cent in 2002 and saved only by the high growth rate in the first half of the year.

The crisis did not spare the oligarchs. Although the magnitude of the crisis evoked images of 1998, this time roles were reversed: in 1998 the oligarchs had bailed out the government, but now the state had to rescue the oligarchs. Authoritative sources reported that the twenty-five richest oligarchs lost 240 billion dollars, that they and individual companies struggled to service the colossal corporate debt (478 billion dollars) amassed in recent years. The case of the aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska was instructive. His original wealth of 30.5 billion dollars had shrunk to 9.6 billion, with an outstanding debt of 18.6 billion. Oligarchs appealed to the government for emergency loans (Deripaska receiving 4.6 billion dollars, for example) and sought to sell valuable assets to achieve greater liquidity (Roman Abramovich, for example, purportedly seeking a buyer for his English football club, Chelsea).

The financial crisis also had a profound impact on state finances. Instead of the budget surpluses, the precipitous drop in global energy prices—source of more than half of the state revenues—meant a fall in revenues and a ballooning deficit. In early January 2009 the government projected a deficit equal to 3.2 per cent of the GDP, but a month later revised that estimate and projected a deficit of 6.1 to 7.6 per cent; outsiders forecast an even larger deficit (on the order of 8 to 8.5 per cent). Such projections depended, first and foremost, on the price of oil, and as the price of oil dropped below 40 dollars a barrel, Moscow was forced to revise its budget projections (which earlier assumed the price of oil would be twice as high), with the inevitable consequence of still greater deficits.

Despite the global economic crisis (which reduced the demand for Russia’s energy exports) and internal financial problems, the government not only resisted budget cuts but even made plans to increase pensions and unemployment compensation. Those policies helped to sustain high popular approval ratings for both Putin (83 per cent) and Medvedev (78 per cent) in December 2008, four months into the crisis. There was, to be sure, growing concern; those who thought the country was moving in the right direction dropped from 61 to 43 per cent during the same four months. Although the approval ratings showed some slippage, even for Putin, faith in his leadership remained unwavering.

Putin certainly did all in his power to buoy confidence. Apart from assistance for debt-ridden companies and banks (with a 200 billion dollar stimulus package), Putin staged his seventh ‘national town meeting’ on 4 December 2008—as before, a well-rehearsed and impressive conference with the public, not just journalists, which lasted over three hours and allowed the prime minister to respond to phone calls, emails, text messages, and live interaction with small groups around the country. He answered 76 questions and demonstrated his usual mastery of detail, grasp of broader issues, empathy for fellow citizens, and flashes of humour. The public voiced a broad range of concerns—demands for tougher sanctions against paedophiles, the dangers of inflation, the violence perpetrated by ‘skinheads’ against minorities, traffic congestion, and even the weather (‘When will it snow?’, to which Putin responded ‘That’s up to God’). Other than the weather, Putin made clear that everything else was up to him and his government. Putin also exuded sympathy for those in need, like that in a message from an elderly woman: ‘To Putin. From Nadezhda Mukhanova, a pensioner, 68 years old. My pension is 3,500 roubles [116 dollars]; fire wood costs 10,000 roubles [333 dollars]. How can I survive?’ In such cases Putin promised to have the relevant ministry investigate or to direct local authorities to take action. As for the general economic crisis, a confident Putin offered reassurance: ‘Russia has seen greater problems and coped with them. We shall cope with the present crisis too if we follow the right course and are purposeful about our complicated economic and social matters.’ He noted that the country’s large foreign exchange reserves would ‘allow us to plan for a soft landing’.

By early 2009, however, the prospects for a soft landing appeared to be fading. Putin predicted that the GDP would grow by 2.5 per cent in 2009, but other estimates were far more pessimistic, with forecasts that the GDP would decline by 3.0 to 15.0 per cent, depending on the price of oil and metals on international markets. In June 2009 the World Bank offered a more disinterested forcast, predicting that the GDP would decline by 7.5 per cent in 2009, but actually show a growth of 2.5 per cent in 2010. The range in projections reflected not so much political prejudice or posturing as the uncertainties in the global economy; given Russia’s reliance on commodity exports, the health of the global economy—and the demand for Russian resources—would determine the magnitude and duration of the Russian recession. Putin had achieved much during his two terms, promoting prosperity at home, amassing huge foreign exchange reserves, creating a stabilization fund, and reestablishing a centralized government. He positioned Russia as well as possible, but a country that gained so much from global boom was fated to lose just as much from a global bust. His plans for a ‘soft landing’ would depend heavily on global market forces far beyond his control.

MAPS

TERRITORIAL EXPANSION AND GROWTH OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE, 1260–1904

KIEVAN RUSSIA, 1054–1238

RUSSIA c.1396 AND THE RISE OF MOSCOW, 1300–1584

EUROPE AT THE TIME OF PETER THE GREAT

THE PROVINCES OF EUROPEAN RUSSIA

RUSSIA, ITS EMPIRE, AND ITS NEIGHBOURS IN THE 20TH CENTURY

THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR

THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS IN 1950

THE USSR IN 1991

CHRONOLOGY

For a detailed chronology of Russian history, see Francis Conte (ed.), Great Dates in Russian and Soviet History (New York, 1994).

860–1240 — Era of Kievan Rus

862 — Traditional date for arrival of ‘Riurik’ of Varangians (Norsemen), founder of Riurikid dynasty (862–1598)

980–1015 — Vladimir reigns as grand prince of Kiev

988 — Conversion of Kievan Rus to Eastern Orthodox Christianity

1019–54 — Iaroslav reigns as grand prince of Kiev

1037–46 — Construction and decoration of Church of St Sofia in Kiev

1051 — Hilarion consecrated as metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus

1055 — Polovtsy appear on steppe

1061 — Polovtsy attack territories of Rus

1072 — Canonization of Princes Boris and Gleb

1096 — Polovtsy attack Kiev and burn Pecherskii Monastery

1097 — Princely conference at Liubech

1113–25 — Vladimir Monomakh reigns as grand prince of Kiev

1132–6 — Emergence of semi-autonomous Novgorod

1147 — First chronicle mention of Moscow

1156 — Construction of first kremlin walls in Moscow

1169 — Armies of Prince Andrei Bogoliubskii of Vladimir sack Kiev

1191–2 — Novgorod signs commercial treaty with Scandinavians and Germans

1223 — Battle of Kalka: first encounter of Mongols with Kievan Rus

1237–40 — Mongol conquest of Kievan Rus, culminating in the sack of Kiev

1240 — Prince Alexander Nevsky defeats Swedes on the Neva

1240–1340 — Early Mongol Suzerainty

1242 — Prince Alexander Nevsky defeats Teutonic Knights at Lake Peipus

1300 — Moscow conquest of Kolomna: beginning of ‘in-gathering’ of Russian land

1317–28 — Metropolitan moves to Moscow

1327–41 — Ivan I (Kalita), designated grand prince of Vladimir, by the Mongol khan

1340–1584 — Rise of Muscovy

1337 — Founding of Holy Trinity Sergius Monastery

1359–89 — Dmitrii Donskoi reigns as grand prince of Moscow

1367 — Construction of stone kremlin in Moscow

1380 — Battle of Kulikovo

1389–1425 — Vasilii I reigns as grand prince of Moscow

1425–62 — Vasilii II reigns as grand prince of Moscow

1433–53 — Civil war between Vasilii II and his kinsmen

1448 — Bishop Iona of Riazan selected metropolitan, without the approval of Constantinople

1453 — Fall of Constantinople

1462–1505 — Ivan III (the Great) reigns as grand prince of Moscow

1463 — Moscow acquires the principalities of Iaroslavl and part of Rostov

1478 — Moscow annexes Novgorod

1480 — Battle of Ugra, nominal end of Moscow subordination to Mongols

1485 — Moscow conquers Tver

1497 — Ivan III issues a brief law code (Sudebnik), with the first broad limitation on peasant movement

1499 — Moscow acquires the principalities of Viatka

1505–33 — Vasilii III reigns as grand prince of Moscow

1510 — Moscow absorbs the city-state of Pskov

1514 — Smolensk conquered

1521 — Annexation of Riazan, last independent principality in central Russia

1533–84 — Ivan IV reigns in minority as grand prince (1533–47), then tsar of Moscow (1547–84)

1537 — Local judicial and administrative reforms, with the election of ‘brigandage elders’ (gubnye starosty)

1547 — Ivan IV crowned tsar

1550 — Law code (sudebnik) promulgated

1551 — Church council (‘Hundred Chapters’ or Stoglav) proposes church reforms

1552 — Conquest of Kazan

1555 — Reform of local fiscal system (zemskie starosty)

1556 — Astrakhan conquered

1558–83 — Livonian War, ending with threats that cede lands to Poland-Lithuania and Sweden

1564 — Publication of first book

1564–72 — Oprichnina, Ivan’s personal domain

1570 — Oprichnina forces sack Novgorod

1571 — Crimean Tatars storm and burn Moscow

1575 — Ivan IV abdicates temporarily in favour of Semen Bekbulatovich

1580 — First law forbidding peasants to change landlords

1582 — Ermak’s initial conquest of khanate of western Siberia

1584–1613 — Time of Troubles

1584 — Fedor Ivanovich reigns as tsar, with Boris Godunov ruling behind the scenes

1589 — Law code (sudebnik); establishment of Patriarchate

1591 — Death of Tsarevich Dmitrii

1598 — Fedor dies, marking the extinction of the Riurikid dynasty

1598–1605 — Boris Godunov reigns as tsar

1605–6 — First False Dmitrii reigns as tsar

1606–7 — Bolotnikov rebellion

1606–10 — Reign of ‘boyar’ tsar, Vasilii Shuiskii

1610–13 — Interregnum: boyar intervention, Polish rule

1612 — Liberation of Moscow by Minin and Pozharskii (October)

1613–1689 — Muscovy: Restored and Reconstructed

1613 — Election of Michael Romanov, onset of new dynasty (1613–1917) 1613–45 Mikhail reigns as tsar

1617 — Treaty of Stolbovo with Sweden

1618 — Armistice of Deulino with Poland

1619 — Filaret (Romanov) consecrated as patriarch

1632–4 — Polish war

1645–76 — Alexis reigns as tsar

1648 — Moscow uprising

1649 — Law code (Sobornoe ulozhenie)

1650 — Novgorod and Pskov rebellions

1652 — Establishment of separate foreigners’ settlement (nemetskaia sloboda) in Moscow; consecration of Nikon as Patriarch

1653 — First church reforms, which eventually led to schism (raskot)

1654 — Cossacks under Bohdan Khmelnitskii recognize Moscow’s suzerainty

1666–7 — Church council: condemnation of Nikon, formal beginning of schism

1667 — Armistice of Andrusovo with Poland

1667–71 — Stenka Razin rebellion

1672 — First theatrical performance

1676–81 — First Russo-Turkish war

1676–82 — Fedor reigns as tsar

1682–9 — Regency of Sofia; nominal rule of Peter I and Ivan V

1682 — Peter I proclaimed tsar, then co-tsar with older half-brother Ivan V; aboltion of precedence; Streltsy revolt

1686 — ‘Eternal Peace’ with Poland-Lithuania and joining Holy League against the Ottoman Turks

1687–9 — Vasilii Golitsyn’s failed campaigns against the Crimean khanate

1689 — Russian-Chinese Treaty of Nerchinsk

1689–1740 — Petrine Russia and Aftermath

1689 — Peter I (the Great) assumes power, ruling until his death in 1725

1690 — Birth of Tsarevich Alexis

1693–4 — Peter travels to Archangel to sample sea voyages

1695–6 — Azov campaigns: initial failure, eventual success

1697–8 — Peter’s ‘Grand Embassy’ to Western Europe

1698 — Revolt of the Streltsy suppressed

1700–21 — Northern War between Russia and Sweden

1700 — Russian defeat at Narva; death of Patriarch Adrian; adoption of European (Julian) calendar

1701 — Opening of the Moscow school of mathematics and navigation

1702 — Manifesto welcoming foreigners to Russia; opening of first public theatre in Moscow

1703 — Foundation of St Petersburg; publication of first newspaper (Vedomosti)

1705–6 — Streltsy revolt at Astrakhan

1707–8 — Cossack revolt on lower Don led by Bulavin

1708 — Adoption of civil alphabet

1709 — Russian victory at Poltava

1710 — Russian conquest of Baltics

1711 — Foundation of the Senate; marriage of Peter to Catherine; defeat at Pruth

1713 — Court and many administrative agencies transferred to St Petersburg; earnest preparations for administrative reform commence

1714 — Russian naval victory at Hangö; Naval Academy established in St Petersburg

1715–17 — First Russian expedition to Central Asia

1716–17 — Peter’s second extended trip to Europe

1717–18 — Administrative colleges (kollegii) established

1718 — Investigation, trial, and execution of Tsarevich Alexis and other alleged conspirators

1721 — Adoption of imperial title; publication of the Ecclesiastical Regulation and foundation of the Holy Synod

1722 — New succession law; Table of Ranks promulgated

1722–3 — Persian Campaign along the Caspian Sea

1722–4 — Completion of first universal (male) census; first collection of ‘soul tax’

1724 — Foundation of the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences at St Petersburg

1725 — Death of Peter I; accession of Catherine I

1725–7 — Reign of Catherine I; hegemony of Alexander Menshikov

1726–30 — Predominance of Supreme Privy Council

1727–30 — Reign of Peter II; downfall and exile of Menshikov

1730 — ‘Constitutional Crisis’ after the death of Peter II, accession of Anna Ivanovna as empress (1730–40); abolition of Supreme Privy Council; emergence of Biron as favourite

1733–5 — War of the Polish Succession, Russia in alliance with Austria

1735 — Orenburg founded on south-eastern border and southern Urals; Turkic Bashkirs resist Russian encroachment in a full-blown colonial war till 1740

1736–9 — Russo-Turkish War

1740 — Death of Anna Ivanovna

1740–1 — Ivan VI, with Anna Leopoldovna as regent

1741–1801 — Age of Enlightenment

1741–61 — Reign of Elizabeth

1741–3 — Russo-Swedish War

1754 — Abolition of internal tariffs; establishment of Noble Bank

1755 — Moscow University established

1756–62 — Russian participation in Seven Years War

1760 — Nobles given right to exile serfs to Siberia

1761–2 — Reign of Peter III

1762 — Manifesto freeing the nobility from obligatory service (18 February)

1762–96 — Reign of Catherine II

1764 — Secularization of Church lands and peasants

1766 — Publication of ‘The Great Instruction’ by Catherine the Great

1767–8 — Legislative Assembly (Ulozhennaia komissiia) convened

1768–74 — Russo-Turkish War

1771 — Bubonic plague; Moscow riots

1772 — First Partition of Poland (July)

1774 — Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardji with Turkey, recognizing Russian protectorate over Christians in the Ottoman Empire

1773–5 — Pugachev rebellion

1775 — Statute on Provincial Administration

1781–6 — Administrative absorption of Ukraine

1782 — Law on Provincial Police

1785 — Charter to the Nobility; Charter to the Towns

1787–92 — Russo-Turkish War

1790 — A. N. Radishchev’s Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow published

1793 — Second Partition of Poland

1794 — Odessa founded

1795 — Third and final partition of Poland

1796–1801 — Reign of Paul

1797 — Edict limiting corvée labour (barshchina) to three days per week; Law of Succession

1800–1855 — Pre-Reform Russia

1801–25 — Reign of Alexander I

1801 — Annexation of Georgia

1802 — Establishment of ministries

1804 — Educational reform; establishment of three additional universities; Pale of Settlement, restricting Jewish residency to the Western provinces

1804–7 — Russian participation in alliance against Napoleon

1807 — Peace of Tilsit

1807–11 — Speransky Reforms

1809 — Acquisition of Finland

1810 — State Council established

1812 — Napoleon invades Russia (June); Battle of Borodino; Moscow burnt (September); French retreat

1815 — Holy Alliance; establishment of Congress Poland

1816–19 — Landless emancipation of Baltic serfs

1819 — Establishment of St Petersburg University

1825 — Decembrist revolt

1825–55 — Reign of Nicholas I

1830 — Publication of The Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire

1830–1 — Polish rebellion

1833 — First modern law code (Svod zakonov) published, taking effect in 1835

1836 — Publication of P. Ia. Chaadaev’s ‘Philosophical Letter’

1837–42 — State peasant reforms under P. D. Kiselev

1842–51 — Construction of first Russian railway line (St Petersburg-Moscow)

1847 — Exchange between N. Gogol and V. Belinskii

1849 — Petrashevskii circle

1853–6 — Crimean War

1855–1890 — Great Reforms and Counter-Reform

1855–81 — Reign of Alexander II

1856 — Peace of Paris, ending the Crimean War; Alexander’s speech to the nobility of Moscow, intimating the need to reform serfdom ‘from above’

1857 — Secret commission for serf reform established (1 January); Nazimov Rescript (20 November) inviting nobility to collaborate in reform; ‘Chief Committee on Peasant Affairs’ under Rostovtsev established to oversee emancipation

1859–60 — Noble deputations come to St Petersburg (August 1859; January 1860)

1861 — Emancipation Manifesto (19 February)

1862 — Publication of I. S. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

1863 — Polish Rebellion; publication of N. G. Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done?; University Statute issued

1864 — Zemstvo (local self-government) established; judicial reform; elementary school reform

1865 — Censorship reform (‘Temporary Regulations’)

1865–85 — Conquest, absorption of Central Asia

1866 — Assassination attempt on Alexander II

1867–9 — Church reforms (abolition of caste in 1867; restructuring of seminary; reorganization of parishes in 1869)

1869 — Publication of P. Lavrov’s Historical Letters and L. Tolstoy’s War and Peace

1870 — City government reform

1872 — Russian publication of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital

1874 — Universal Military Training Act, culminating military reforms

1874 — Populist ‘going to the people’

1876–9 — Revolutionary populist organization, Land and Freedom

1877–8 — Russo-Turkish War

1878 — Peace of Berlin

1879 — Terrorist organization, People’s Will, established to combat autocracy

1879–80 — Publication of F. Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov

1879–81 — ‘Crisis of Autocracy’—terrorism, ‘dictatorship of the heart’

1881–94 — Reign of Alexander III

1881 — Temporary Regulations of 14 August 1881 (establishing ‘extraordinary’ police powers to combat revolutionary movement)

1881–2 — Pogroms

1882 — May laws (discriminating against Jews)

1882–4 — Counter-reform in censorship (1882), education (1884), Church (1884)

1882–6 — Reform acts to protect industrial labour

1884 — First Marxist organization, under G. Plekhanov, established abroad

1885 — Noble Land Bank established; abolition of poll-tax

1885–1900 — Russification in borderlands

1889 — New local state official, the ‘Land Captain’, established

1890–1914 — Revolutionary Russia

1890 — Zemstvo counter-reform (restricting autonomy and franchise)

1891–2 — Famine

1891–1904 — Construction of Trans-Siberian Railway

1892 — City government counter-reform (restricting autonomy and franchise)

1892–1903 — S. Iu. Witte as Minister of Finance

1894–1917 — Reign of Nicholas II

1895 — ‘Senseless dreams’ speech by Nicholas II

1896–7 — St Petersburg textile strikes; St Petersburg Union for the Liberation of Labour established

1897 — Gold standard; first modern census

1898 — Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party founded

1899 — V. I. Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia published

1901–2 — Party of Social Revolutionaries (PSR) established

1902 — Peasant disorders in Poltava and Kharkov (March-April); Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? published

1903 — Union of Liberation (left-liberal organization) established; RSDWP splits into Bolshevik (under V. I. Lenin) and Menshevik (under Iu. Martov) factions; south Russian labour strikes (Rostov-on-the-Don and Odessa); Kishinev anti-Semitic pogroms

1904 — Corporal punishment abolished

1904–5 — Russo-Japanese War

1905–7 — Revolution of 1905

1905 — Bloody Sunday (9 January); October Manifesto (17 October) promising political reform and civil rights

1906 — First State Duma; Stolypin land reforms

1907 — Second State Duma; coup d’état of 3 June

1907–12 — Third State Duma

1909 — Publication of Vekhi (‘Signposts’)

1911 — Assassination of P. A. Stolypin (September)

1912 — Lena Goldfields massacre and ensuing strike wave (March-May)

1912–17 — Fourth State Duma

1914–1921 — War, Revolution, Civil War

1914 — Outbreak of First World War

1915 — Progressive Bloc and political crisis (August)

1916 — Central Asia rebellion; murder of Rasputin

1917 — February Revolution (23 February-1 March); establishment of Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies (1 March); abdication of Nicholas II (2 March); ‘Programme’ of the Provisional Government (8 March); Appeal to All the Peoples of the World’ by Petrograd Soviet (14 March); Lenin’s return to Russia (3 April) and the April crisis’ in the party; Petrograd crisis (23–4 April); coalition governments (May-October); first All-Russian Congress of Soviets’ (June); ‘July Days’; Kornilov mutiny (25–8 August); publication of Lenin’s State and Revolution; Bolshevik seizure of power (25 October); elections for Constituent Assembly (25 November); establishment of the Cheka (7 December)

1918 — Constituent Assembly meets (5–6 January); separation of Church and state; civil war commences; first Soviet constitution (July)

1919 — Height of White challenge (autumn 1919); establishment of the Comintern

1920 — Soviet-Polish War

1921–1929 — Era of the New Economic Policy (NEP)

1921 — Kronstadt revolt (2–17 March); Tenth Party Congress (8–16 March), which promulgated ‘New Economic Policy’

1921–2 — Famine

1922 — Eleventh Party Congress (27 March-2 April); Stalin elected General Secretary (3 April); Genoa Conference, with Soviet participation (April); German-Russian treaty at Rapallo; Lenin’s first stroke (26 May); Lenin’s second stroke (16 December); Lenin dictates ‘testament’ (25 December)

1923 — Lenin adds postscript to ‘testament’ calling for Stalin’s dismissal as General Secretary (4 January); Lenin’s third stroke (9 March)

1924 — Death of Lenin (21 January); party launches ‘Lenin Enrolment’ campaign (February); Stalin publicizes ‘Socialism in One Country’ (December)

1925 — Apogee of NEP (April)

1926 — ‘United Opposition’ of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev emerges in the Central Committee (6–9 April); Zinoviev removed from the Politburo (14–23 July); Trotsky and Kamenev removed from Politburo (23–6 October); Bukharin replaces Zinoviev as chairman of Comintern; Family Code to reform marriage and divorce

1927 — ‘War Scare’ with Great Britain (May-August); Trotsky and Zinoviev expelled from Central Committee (21–23 October); Trotsky and Zinoviev expelled from party (15 November); Fifteenth Party Congress, which approves Kamenev’s expulsion from the party (2–19 December); First Five-Year Plan

1928 — Trotsky exiled to Alma-Ata (16 January); Shakhty Trial (18 May-5 July) and beginning of the ‘cultural revolution’; first Five-Year Plan officially commenced (1 October)

1929–1940 — Stalin Revolution

1929 — Defeat of the ‘Right Opposition’ (Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii); ban on ‘religious associations’ and proselytizing (April); Stalin condemns ‘right deviation’ (21 August); Bukharin dropped from Politburo (10–17 November); celebration of Stalin’s fiftieth birthday and beginning of the ‘cult of the individual’ (21 December); Stalin calls for mass collectivization and liquidation of kulaks (27 December)

1930 — Mass collectivization launched (5 January); Stalin’s ‘Dizziness from Success’ published in Pravda (2 March)

1932 — Issue of internal passports (December)

1932–3 — Famine in Ukraine and elsewhere

1933 — Second Five-Year Plan (1 January 1933–December 1937)

1934 — Seventeenth Party Congress (January); first congress of Union of Soviet Writers (August); assassination of Sergei Kirov (December)

1935 — Model collective farm statute (February); Stakhanovite movement begun (September)

1936 — New family law restricting abortion and divorce (June); show trial of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others (August); Ezhov appointed head of NKVD (September); promulgation of Stalin Constitution (December)

1937 — Show trial of Radek, Piatakov, and others (January); execution of Marshal Tukhachevskii and Red Army officers (June); height of ‘Great Terror’ (to late 1938)

1938 — Third Five-Year Plan (1 January 1938–June 1941); trial of N. Bukharin, Rykov, and others (March); introduction of ‘labour book’ for workers (December); Beria succeeds Ezhov as head of NKVD (December)

1939 — Nazi–Soviet pact (August); Soviet invasion of eastern Poland (September); Soviet–Finnish ‘winter war’ (November 1939–March 1940)

1940 — Soviet annexation of Baltic states (June)

1941–1953 — Great Fatherland War and Post-War Stalinism

1941 — Nazi Germany invades USSR (22 June); formation of State Defence Committee (30 June); emergency legislation to mobilize labour, institute rationing, lengthen working day, and criminalize absenteeism (June-December); Stalin’s speech to the nation (3 July); Germans reach Smolensk (16 July); beginning of siege of Leningrad (July); fall of Kiev (19 September); battle for Moscow (November–December); USA approves Lend-Lease aid for the USSR (7 November); Soviet counter-offensive (December 1941–February 1942)

1942 — Anglo-Soviet alliance (May); fall of Sevastopol (July); Battle of Stalingrad (August 1942–February 1943)

1943 — Surrender of von Paulus at Stalingrad (31 January); battle of Kursk (July); Stalin eases restrictions on Russian Orthodox Church (September); Teheran Conference (November); beginning of deportations of nationalities from northern Caucasus

1944 — Siege of Leningrad broken (January); Belorussian operation and destruction of German army group ‘Centre’ (June-July); Soviet armies penetrate Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Hungary (July-December)

1945 — Soviet invasion of Germany (January); Yalta Conference (February); US and Soviet forces meet at the Elbe (25 April); German unconditional surrender (9 May); Potsdam Conference (July-August); Soviet invasion of Manchuria (9 August); formal Japanese surrender (2 September)

1946 — Stalin’s ‘electoral speech’ (February); attacks on leading intellectuals, onset of ‘Zhdanovshchina’; decree on collective farms (September).

1947 — Famine in Ukraine (1947–8); formation of Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform (September)

1948 — Communist coup in Czechoslovakia (February); start of Berlin blockade (May)

1949 — Leningrad affair; formation of NATO (April); end of Berlin blockade (May); Soviet atomic bomb test (August)

1950 — Outbreak of Korean War (25 June)

1951 — Nineteenth Party Congress

1952 — Doctors’ plot (January); death of Stalin (5 March)

1953–1985 — From Stalinism to Stagnation

1953 — G. Malenkov becomes head of state, Beria head of the NKVD and police, N. S. Khrushchev first secretary of the party; denunciation of doctors’ plot; arrest of L. Beria (26 June; executed in December); first hints of de-Stalinization and cultural ‘thaw’

1954 — Publication of I. Ehrenburg’s The Thaw; rehabilitation commission established (May); Khrushchev’s ‘Virgin Lands programme’ adopted

1955 — Malenkov replaced by Bulganin as head of state

1956 — Twentieth Party Congress (Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ denouncing Stalin); CC resolution ‘On Overcoming the Cult of the Individual and Its Consequences’ (30 June); Hungarian insurrection (November)

1957 — Decentralization proposal (sovnarkhozy) adopted in May; anti-party group defeated (June); demotion of Marshal Zhukov (October); ‘Sputnik’ launched (October)

1958 — Boris Pasternak awarded Nobel Prize for Doctor Zhivago; new penal code, eliminating category of ‘enemies of the people’ (December)

1959 — Sino-Soviet split becomes public; Twenty-First Party Congress; Khrushchev launches maize campaign 1960 American reconnaissance plane, U-2, shot down inside Russia

1961 — Capital punishment extended to economic crimes (May); Twenty-Second Party Congress (October); Stalin’s body removed from Kremlin (31 October); first manned space flight

1962 — Publication of A.Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Novocherkassk disorders (June); Cuban missile crisis (October)

1963 — Exceptionally poor harvest

1964 — Removal of N. S. Khrushchev (14 October)

1965 — CC approves plan for economic reform (September); publication of A. Nekrich’s 22 June 1941

1966 — Trial of dissident writers Iu. Daniel and Andrei Siniavskii (February); Twenty-Third Party Congress (March) 1968 Demonstration by Crimean Tatars (April); invasion of Czechoslovakia (August); first issue of Chronicle of Current Events

1970 — Establishment of Human Rights Committee (November)

1971 — Jewish demonstration in Moscow, beginning of large-scale Jewish emigration

1972 — SALT-I (arms limitations); Shevardnadze becomes party boss in Georgia

1974 — Deportation of Solzhenitsyn from USSR

1975 — Helsinki agreement on European Security and Co-operation; Sakharov awarded Nobel Prize for peace

1976 — Twenty-fifth Party Congress

1977 — New Soviet constitution; Brezhnev becomes President of the USSR

1978 — Trial of Anatolii Shcharanskii

1979 — SALT-II (arms limitation agreement); Soviet intervention in Afghanistan

1980 — Exile of Sakharov to Gorky (January)

1981 — Twenty-Sixth Party Congress

1982 — Death of L. I. Brezhnev (10 November), replaced by Andropov

1984 — Andropov dies, replaced by Chernenko (February)

1985 — Chernenko’s death, replacement by Mikhail Gorbachev (11 March)

1985–1995 — From Perestroika to Dissolution of the USSR

1985 — Mikhail Gorbachev elected General Secretary (11 March); Eduard Shevardnadze appointed Foreign Minister (2 July); first superpower summit between Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in Geneva (November)

1986 — Tbilisi disorders, with twenty demonstrators slain by Soviet troops (9 April); Chernobyl disaster (26 April); riots in Alma-Ata (December)

1987 — Twenty-seventh Party Congress (February-March); new law on ‘socialist enterprise’; Yeltsin dismissed as Moscow party chief (November)

1988 — Nineteenth Party Conference transforms role of Communist Party (June)

1989 — Ethnic conflict erupts in Nagorno-Karabakh (February); USSR Congress of People’s Deputies elected in partly democratic elections (March); anti-perestroika letter by Nina Andreeva; Gorbachev announces plan to withdraw from Afghanistan (April); miners’ strike (July 1989); first national movement, Sajudis, forms in Lithuania (November)

1990 — Election of People’s Deputies of Russian Federation (March); formation of Communist Party of the Russian Federation, with Ivan Polozkov as leader (June); Twenty-eighth Party Congress, with defection of Boris Yeltsin and leaders of Democratic Platform to establish their own party; Gorbachev elected President of the USSR (September)

1991 — Soviet troops attack TV centre in Vilnius, killing 14 (January); Boris Yeltsin elected President of the Russian Federation (June); ultimatum to Gorbachev to resign in favour of Gennadii Ianaev signals beginning of attempted coup (18 August); Yeltsin makes his way to White House to lead opposition to putsch (19 August); attempted coup collapses (21 August); Yeltsin announces plans for economic reform (October); Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Azerbaijan declare independence (August-September); Chechnya declares independence (November); Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus agree on formation of Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) (8 December); CIS formally constituted in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan (21 December); resignation of Gorbachev (25 December); formal dissolution of the USSR (31 December)

1992 — Gaidar introduces radical ‘shock therapy’ economic reforms (January); constitutional referendum (April); Tashkent summit (March); Black Sea accord between Ukraine and Russia (August); privatization vouchers issued (1 October); Yeltsin appoints V. Chernomyrdin as Prime Minister (14 December)

1993 — START-II signed by United States and Russia (3 January); leaders of Central Asia agree in principle on loose union (January); mounting conflict between Yeltsin and Parliament, which votes to strip the President of his economic powers (March); national referendum of 25 April shows support for Yeltsin (58 per cent of votes) and constitution; Yeltsin dismisses parliament and announces new elections (21 September); after parliament impeaches Yeltsin and poses armed resistance, Yeltsin storms the Parliament building, with upward of 200 killed (3–4 October); many CIS states (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, followed by others) establish their own national currencies (November); national vote to approve constitution (57 per cent) and to elect new Duma, with nearly a quarter of the votes for V. Zhirinovskii’s nationalist party (12 December)

1994 — Russian-Belarus economic union (5 January); State Duma amnesties those involved in the October 1993 events (26 February); speculative pyramid scheme based on MMM stock fund fails (29 July); Yeltsin signs agreement with Bashkortostan to define its powers and sovereignty (3 August); Yeltsin, at stopover at Shannon airport, fails to meet with Irish prime minister, reportedly because of illness and inebriation (30 September); crash of ruble (11 October); after peace talks with Chechnya collapse, Moscow launches military assault (11 December)

1995 — Rehabilitation of 1.5 million victims from World War II in Gulag (25 January); removal of Sergei Kovalev, critic of Chechnya conflict, as human rights commissioner (10 March); founding congress of pro-government party, ‘Our Home is Russia,’ headed by Viktor Chernomyrdin; Chechen armed unit seizes hostages in Budennovsk, with casualties and successful escape of Chechens (June); Duma elections make the Communist Party the largest party with 22 per cent of the vote, while reducing Zhirinovskii’s Liberal Democratic Party to 11 per cent (17 December)

1996 — Treaty of the Four (Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan) seeks to enhance integration in economic and foreign policy (29 March); formation of the ‘Shanghai Five’ (Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and China) on multilateral non-aggression and policy coordination (26 April); the Paris Club of governmental creditors agrees to reschedule the Russian state debt of 38 billion dollars (29 April); first round of the presidential election, giving Yeltsin 35 per cent of the vote, but not an absolute majority, with 32 per cent voting for Ziuganov of the Communist Party and 15 per cent for the popular ex-general Lebed (16 June); Yeltsin appoints Lebed as secretary of the Security Council, with the latter throwing his support behind Yeltsin (18 June); run-off for the presidential election, with Yeltsin winning 54 per cent of the vote against Ziuganov’s 40 per cent (3 July); liberal economist and architect of the second privatization, Anatolii Chubais, appointed chief of staff of Presidential Administration (15 July); Lebed and the Chechen leader, Aslan Maskhadov, announce the Khasaviurt Accord (31 August); Yeltsin dismisses Lebed (17 October); Yeltsin successfully undergoes quintuple bypass heart surgery (5 November); three-quarters of the country’s miners go on strike to protest wage arrears (3–11 December); the Shanghai Five agree to reduce military forces along common borders (27 December)

1997 — Maskhadov (with 65 per cent of the vote) elected president of Chechnya, which now calls itself the Republic of Ishkeriia (27 January); major reshuffling of the Russian government, with Chubais appointed first deputy prime minister (March); Chinese-Russian declaration calling for ‘multipolar’ rather than ‘bipolar’ world (23 April); Shanghai Five agree to further reductions in military forces along the Chinese border (24 April); Yeltsin and Maskhadov sign treaty of principles on peaceful relations, but without a clear resolution on the final status of Chechnia (12 May); Belarus and Russia sign a treaty providing for greater cooperation but not fusion of the two states (23 May); Russia and Ukraine agree to respect existing boundaries, to withhold support from secessionist movements, to divide Black Sea fleet, and to share use of Sevastopol port (31 May); the Madrid conference of NATO formally decides to admit Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic as full members (July); creation of a supreme tax agency, named after the infamous Cheka, to increase state revenues (October); Chubais and several top aides are accused of accepting large book advances from a bank involved in privatization (13 November)

1998 — Chernomyrdin replaced by Kirienko as the prime minister (March-April); renewed miners’ strike blocks the Trans-Siberian Railway (May); international creditors extend new 22.6 billion dollar lending package (13 July); default on short-term treasury bonds, followed by Kirienko’s dismissal (17 August); Yeltsin condemns US missile strikes against ‘terrorist bases’ in Afghanistan and Sudan (21 August); after the Duma rejects Yeltsin’s first nominee (Chernomyrdin), Evgenii Primakov is nominated and confirmed as the new prime minister (September); murder of a prominent Duma deputy under suspicious circumstances (20 November); Belarus and Russia sign agreement to unify (25 December)

1999 — Clinton Administration announced plans to develop the National Missile Defence (NMD) system and to modify the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty (January); USA imposes sanctions against three Russian institutions for alleged technology transfer to Iran (10 January); five countries (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Russia) establish a Customs Union and Common Economic Space for the free movement of goods, capital, services, and labour (26 February); Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic formally join NATO (12 March); after NATO unleashes military bombardment of Kosovo, Russia suspends relations with NATO (March); Primakov dismissed and replaced by Sergei Stepashin as prime minister (May); IMF loan of 22 billion dollars (July); after another Chechen military attack, Stepashin is replaced by Vladimir Putin as prime minister (August); after bombings in three cities, attributed to Chechen terrorists, Putin orders bombing of Groznyi (23 September) and Russian military invasion of Chechnya (1 October); Duma elections return a pro-government majority, with a Putin-endorsed ‘Unity’ party nearly overtaking the Communist Party (19 December); Putin’s internet posting of his ‘Russia at the Turn of the Millennium’ (29 December); Yeltsin announces resignation, with Putin becoming the acting president (31 December)

2000-… — Rebuilding Russia

2000 — Pro-Kremlin ‘Unity’ Party and Communists make a deal to split most committee chairs (18 January); London Club of commercial creditors writes off 37% of the Soviet-era debt and agrees to reschedule the balance (February); Russia restores relations with NATO (February); Russian forces take Groznyi (March); presidential election, with Putin winning 53% of the vote (26 March); police raid on Gusinskii’s media headquarters (11 May); Putin establishes plenipotentiaries (polpredy) over seven super-districts (13 May); Putin abolishes State Committee for Environmental Protection (17 May) to promote more favourable business environment; sinking of the submarine Kursk with 118 lives lost (12 August); Putin distances himself from the previous regime, announcing that he can answer only for the last 100 days (29 August); Boris Berezovskii, amidst investigation of alleged crimes, goes into self-declared exile (November); adoption of tsarist (flag, coat of arms) and Soviet (anthem, red banner) symbols (December)

2001 — Tax reform, including adoption of 13% flat tax on personal income and simplification of social security taxes (January); the government forces the last independent TV station to stop broadcasting (January); the arrest of FBI agent Robert Hanssen as Russian spy (February), leading to departure of Russian embassy staff who had alleged contacts with Hanssen (March); state-controlled Gazprom takes over Gusinskii’s media empire (April); Shanghai Five expanded to include Uzbekistan and reconstituted as Shanghai Cooperation Organization (June); Russia and China sign Good Neighbour Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, the first treaty since 1950, accompanied by agreements to sell Tupolev jets and to build energy pipelines (July); initial Law on Parties limits participation to national parties and eliminates regional, special interest parties in national elections (11 July); Putin’s vacation turns into a pilgrimage to the most famous holy monasteries in northern Russia (August); in response to the terrorist attacks in the United States, Russia expresses condemnation and facilitates American military action in Afghanistan (September); at the Crawford summit (at President Bush’s ranch in Texas), the two sides fail to break the deadlock on the ABM treaty, but do agree to sharp reductions in strategic nuclear warheads (13–15 November); adoption of judicial reforms to improve law enforcement, with more secure, better-compensated, and more judges (November); USA announces withdrawal from ABM Treaty, effective after six months (December); to create better business environment and encourage foreign investment, Russia adopts a new ‘Labour Code’ giving companies more latitude in hiring and firing and limits collective bargaining rights (30 December)

2002 — Pro-business tax reform, as corporate tax is reduced (January); two parties, Unity and Fatherland-All Russia, merge to form ‘United Russia’ as pro-government, ruling party in Duma; Putin-Bush sign nuclear arms deal, reducing nuclear arsenals by two-thirds (24 May); USA recognizes RF as having market economy (June); Russia becomes full-fledged member of the G-8 (July); adoption of new Criminal Procedural Code, which bestows significant new rights on the accused and the defence, and transfers power from the procuracy to judges (July); Chechen terrorists seize Moscow theatre, Nordost, taking 800 hostages; most rebels and 129 hostages are killed when special forces storm the building (October); Russia removed from the OECD blacklist of countries that launder illicit funds (November)

2003 — Chechnya referendum, denounced by human rights organizations, affirms that Chechnya will remain part of the Russian Federation (March); the government closes TVS, the only national television station not controlled by the state (June); Kyrgyzstan grants Russia a military base at Kant, giving parity with the United States’ base at Manas (September); oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovskii arrested for fraud, tax evasion, and other offences (October); pro-government party United Russia wins Duma elections and, with allies, holds two-thirds of seats (7 December)

2004 — Establishment of Stabilization Fund to create reserves and the capacity to counteract short-term fluctuations in global commodity markets (1 January); Putin wins presidential election with 71% (14 March); pro-Russian president of Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov, assassinated in Groznyi (May); Chechen terrorists down two passenger liners, almost simultaneously (August); Beslan tragedy, as Chechen terrorists seize 1,347 hostages and special forces intercede, ultimately with at least 330 hostages (including 186 children) being slain under murky circumstances (1–3 September); the government seizes assets of Yuganskneftegaz, main asset of Khodorkovskii’s Yukos, to cover its tax arrears (August); Putin, citing needs for heightened security, announces new measures to bolster capacity of effective state rule, including presidential appointment of governors in lieu of popular election (13 September); a new process for the selection of governors (presidential nomination, confirmation by regional legislature); revised Law on Parties imposes further restrictions on small parties (October); federal law authorizing the president to nominate governors is adopted (12 November); Russia ratifies Kyoto Protocol, providing the requisite number of signatories for Kyoto to take effect (4 November)

2005 — New system to monetize welfare payments leads to mass protests (January); Moscow agrees to supply fuel for Iran’s Beshehr nuclear facility (February); Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov killed by Russian special forces (March); ‘Public Chamber’, as para-legislative collective ombudsman, created by Duma (March) and signed into law by Putin (April); adoption of new electoral law establishing proportionate representation and abolishing single-mandate districts (18 May); trial concluded for Mikhail Khodorkovskii, who is found guilty of tax evasion and fraud and sentenced to nine years incarceration (31 May); Gazprom acquires Izvestiia from Vladimir Potanin as government strengthens its control over media (June); SCO calls for withdrawal of US from military bases and to withdraw forces from Central Asia (July); Russia and Germany sign agreement to construct gas pipeline under Baltic Sea (September); terrorists attack police and other targets in Nal’chik (October); ‘Russia Today’ as English-language TV programme commences operation (December); adoption of Law on NGO registration (23 December), which takes effect 10 April 2006.

2006 — Russia cuts delivery of natural gas to Ukraine in dispute over prices, with immediate impact on transit deliveries to Europe (January); Russia surpasses Saudi Arabia in oil output (June); Putin dismisses procurator-general and intensifies campaign against corruption (June); Chechen insurrectionary leader Musa Sadaev killed (17 June); Russian special forces kill Shamil Basaev, infamous Chechen warlord who claimed responsibility for multiple terrorist acts (10 July); rouble becomes convertible currency (July); Russia hosts G8 summit in St Petersburg (July); Duma unanimously endorse government request for permission to send special forces anywhere in the world to track down terrorists (July); investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaia murdered (7 October); Russia and USA agree on terms for Russian accession to the World Trade Organization (November); former KGB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko dies from radioactive substance, allegedly at the hands of Russian security organs (23 November)

2007 — US announces plan to deploy National Missile Defence system in Poland and Czech Republic (January); Putin speech at Munich conference, with vehement criticism of the United States for expansionism and attempt to establish global supremacy (10 February); police disrupt planned rally of anti-Putin groups in Moscow (April); former president Boris Yeltsin dies (April); Putin proposes joint missile defence system to resolve dispute over US plans for NMD installations in Poland and Czech Republic (June); Russia sends expedition to Arctic to expand territorial claims and plants flag on seabed at North Pole (August); Russia resumes, after 15 years, long-range patrols of Russian strategic bombers (August); Russia formally suspends participation in 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty limiting heavy military armaments (November); Duma elections gives pro-government party, United Russia, a two-thirds majority in the Duma, with the Communist Party—once the largest party—reduced to just 12% of the vote (10 December); Putin declares support for Dmitrii Medvedev, first deputy prime minister, to succeed him as president (10 December); Time chooses Putin as ‘person of the year’ (19 December) 2008 Stabilization fund divided into ‘Reserve Fund’ (liquid assets to cushion budget from fluctuations in commodity, especially energy, prices) and National Well-being Fund for investment in blue-chip companies (February); Dmitrii Medvedev elected president of Russia with 71% of the vote (March); Medvedev inaugurated as president, Putin named prime minister (May); Georgian forces launch attack on breakaway region South Ossetia, but routed in counter-attack by Russian forces (August); Putin accuses United States of ‘orchestrating’ the Georgian military offensive (28 August); the financial crisis in United States triggers a sharp fall in Russian stock market and price on energy (September-October); death of Patriarch Aleksii II (5 December); constitutional amendment extends the next presidential term to six years and the next Duma term to five years (29 December)

2009 — Russia suspends natural gas delivery to Ukraine in dispute over arrears, unpaid fines, and rates, causing disruption in transit deliveries to Europe and eliciting widespread criticism for ‘energy blackmail’ (January); installation of new patriarch, Kirill I (1 February)

PLATES

1. 1169: Novgorod icon about victory in the struggle for Kievan succession

2. Kizhi wooden church from the fourteenth century

3. Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich 1645–76

4. 17th century: Engraving of peasants

5. Peter the Great

6. Catherine the Great

7. Religious procession in the 1870s, (Ilya Repin painting)

8. Nicholas II and family

9. Peasant elders c.1910

10. Petrograd demonstration in 1917

11. Antireligious campaign

12. Sculpture by Vera Mukhina, ‘The Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman’

13. Doctoring photographs

14. Ukrainian collective farmers handing a corn wreath to Nikita Khrushchev, 19 September 1963

15. Party Congress: Brezhnev, Podgnorny, Andropov, Kosygin

16. Reagan and Gorbachev at Geneva summit

17. Yeltsin after the defeat of the coup in August 1991

18. Putin and Medvedev (May day, 2008)

FURTHER READING

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL GUIDES

American Historical Association, Guide to Historical Literature (2nd edn., New York, 1961, and 3rd edn., New York, 1995), comprehensive guides to bibliography and specialized literature, the 2nd edn. containing the classical titles, the latter emphasizing the literature of the recent decades.

GENERAL HISTORIES

R. Auty and D. Obolensky (eds.), An Introduction to Russian History (Cambridge, 1976), valuable collection of essays, broad in scope and rich in bibliography.

M. T. Florinsky, Russia: A History and Interpretation (2 vols., New York, 1953), detailed account to 1917, drawing heavily on pre-revolutionary scholarship.

G. Hosking, Russia and the Russians (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), broad survey of Russian history from its origins to the present.

———and R. Service (eds.), Reinterpreting Russia (London, 1999), essays that examine important issues over several centuries.

V. O. Kliuchevskii, History of Russia (5 vols., New York, 1911–31), classic pre-revolutionary history to 1825.

P. I. Liashchenko, History of the National Economy of Russia to the 1917 Revolution (New York, 1949), informative, rich history from Soviet perspective.

N. V. Riasanovsky and M. Steinberg, A History of Russia (7th edn., New York, 2005), standard textbook survey.

I. FROM KIEV TO MUSCOVY: THE BEGINNINGS TO 1700

GENERAL HISTORIES AND MONOGRAPHS

J. Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia (New York, 1969), economic and social history from the era of Kiev Rus to the abolition of serfdom in 1861.

R. O. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, 1304–1613 (London, 1987), informed and highly readable interpretative survey.

R. S. Hellie, Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725 (Chicago, IL, 1982), thorough study of law and practice of slavery.

D. H. Kaiser, The Growth of the Law in Medieval Russia (Princeton, NJ, 1980), on the evolution of triadic, state-initiated legal institutions and concepts by Ivan III’s time.

J. L. H. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar (Oxford, 1985), detailed history of army until 1874 conscription reform.

N. S. Kollmann, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, NY, 1999), on the meaning of ‘honour’ and ‘dishonour’ in Muscovite law and society.

E. Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700 (Ithaca, NY, 1989), study of ecclesiastical sources on such matters as marriage, sexual crimes, sexual deviance.

J. Martin, Medieval Russia, 980–1584 (Cambridge, 1995), comprehensive survey drawing upon most recent scholarship with new interpretations and analysis.

M. Perrie (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, i: From Early Rus to 1689 (Cambridge, 2006), authoritative essays on institutions, society, and culture in pre-Petrine Russia.

A. E. Presniakov, The Tsardom of Muscovy (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1978), classic pre-revolutionary account.

G. Vernadsky, A History of Russia (5 vols., New Haven, CT, 1943–69), survey from prehistory to 1682 and reflecting the perspective of the Eurasian school.

1. THE BEGINNINGS TO 1450

S. Cross and O. P. Sherbowitz-Werzor (eds. and trans.), The Primary Russian Chronicle: Laurentian Text (3rd edn., Cambridge, 1973), basic source for early history.

F. L. I. Fennell, The Emergence of Moscow, 1304–1359 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1968), detailed examination of Moscow’s growing political importance, emphasizing inter-princely conflicts, Mongol influence, and relations with neighbouring principalities.

———The Crisis of Medieval Russia, 1200–1304 (London, 1983), detailed political narrative.

C. J. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde (London, 1987), reinterpretation of Mongol impact, counterbalancing destructive aspects with evidence of close, pragmatic Mongol-Rus relationships.

J. Martin, Treasury of the Land of Darkness (Cambridge, 1986), on international fur trade from the ninth to fifteenth centuries.

B. A. Rybakov, Kievan Rus (Moscow, 1989), Marxist interpretation by leading Soviet historian.

Ya. N. Shchapov, State and Church in Early Russia (New Rochelle, NY, 1993), collection of essays on the institutional structure of the Church and its relations with the princes of Kievan Rus.

2. MUSCOVITE RUSSIA, 1450–1598

G. Alef, Rulers and Nobles in Fifteenth-Century Muscovy (London, 1983), essays on the institutions, symbols of autocracy.

P. Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia (Oxford, 1992), on the change in élite religious life.

R. O. Crummey Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Élite in Russia, 1613–1689 (Princeton, NJ, 1983), social history of the Muscovite aristocracy.

H. W. Dewey (comp., trans., ed.), Muscovite Judicial Texts, 1488–1556 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1966), texts of the law codes of 1497 and 1550 and other key documents.

J. L. I. Fennell, Ivan the Great of Moscow (London, 1963), political biography.

E. L. Keenan, Jr., The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha: The Seventeenth-Century Genesis of the ‘Correspondence’ Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), controversial challenge to the authenticity of a set of crucial sixteenth-century sources.

M. Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire 1500–1800 (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), survey of Russian expansion into the southern and south-eastern steppe.

V. O. Kliuchevskii, A History of Russia, 5 vols. (London, 1911–13), classic account by pre-revolutionary scholar, emphasizing colonization, endogamous forces of development.

N. S. Kollmann, Kinship and Politics (Stanford, Calif., 1987), shows family and clan at the heart of Muscovite power hierarchy and political conflict.

I. de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible: First Tsar of Russia (New Haven, CT, 2005), readable, scholarly account of the infamous sixteenth-century tsar.

S. F. Platonov, Ivan the Terrible (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1974), translation of splendid pre-revolutionary biography.

A. E. Presnaikov, The Tsardom of Muscovy (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1978), excellent introduction to the early history of autocracy and its institutions.

R. G. Skrynnikov, Ivan the Terrible (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1981), detailed political narrative by leading Soviet historian.

I. Thyrêt, Between God and Tsar: Religious Symbolism and the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia (DeKalb, Ill., 2001), monograph showing how female piety served to empower royal women in Muscovite society.

3. FROM MUSCOVY TOWARDS ST PETERSBURG, 1598–1689

C. Bussow, The Disturbed State of the Russian Realm (Montreal, 1994), translation of important contemporary account.

R. O. Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors (Princeton, NJ, 1983), social and political history of aristocracy in seventeenth-century Russia.

C. S. L. Dunning, Russia’s First Civil War (University Park, Pa., 2001), detailed account of the Time of Troubles.

R. S. Hellie, The Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 1600–1725 (Chicago, IL, 1999), valuable compendium of information on economic development in early modern Russia.

———Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago, IL, 1971), parallel studies of enserfment and landed military élite.

———(ed. and trans.), Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649 (vol. i, Irvine, Calif., 1988), parallel Russian and English texts of critical, formative law code.

L. Hughes, Sophia: Regent of Russia, 1657–1704 (New Haven, CT, 1990), on the origins of the Petrine reform era.

V. M. Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces: The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Stanford, Calif., 1996), original study of the provincial dimension to Muscovite politics.

———Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and its Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY, 2006), on Muscovite maps as a reflection of contemporary representation of imagination of the realm.

P. Longworth, Alexis, Tsar of All the Russias (London, 1984), broad survey of mid- seventeenth-century Muscovy.

G. Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford, Calif., 1999), a critical, innovative study showing the relatively limited scale of the schism in seventeenth-century Muscovy.

M. Perrie, Pretenders and Popular Monarchism in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars of the Time of Troubles (Cambridge, 1995), analysis of the pretender phenomenon.

S. F. Platonov, The Time of Troubles (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1970), sweeping pre-revolutionary analysis, emphasizing the interaction of dynastic, social, and national crises.

———Boris Godunov (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1973), classic liberal account.

R. G. Skrynnikov, The Time of Troubles (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1988), detailed, nationalistic account.

C. Stevens, Soldiers in the Steppe (De Kalb, Ill., 1995), on military reform and social development in Muscovy.

II. IMPERIAL RUSSIA, 1689–1917

GENERAL HISTORIES AND MONOGRAPHS

P. Avrich, Russian Rebels, 1600–1800 (New York, 1976), on four great popular insurrections.

D. R. Brower and E. J. Lazzerini (eds.), Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington, Ind., 1997), stimulating collection of essays on the interaction between Imperial Russia and its non-Russian borderlands.

J. Burbank and D. L. Ransel (eds.), Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (Bloomington, Ind., 1998), collection of innovative new studies with an emphasis on the cultural dimension.

R. O. Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist (Madison, WI, 1970), pioneering case study of dissenting Old Believers.

B. Engel, Women in Russia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge, 2004), up-to-date summary incorporating recent scholarship.

W. Fuller, Jr., Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 (New York, 1992), fascinating analysis of military strategy and policy.

P. Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 1850–1917 (New York, 1986), general survey.

R. P. Geraci and M. Khodarkovsky (eds.), Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY, 2001), on religious interaction between various Christian and non-Christian confessions.

D. Geyer, Russian Imperialism (New Haven, CT, 1987), on interaction of foreign and domestic policy to 1914.

B. Jelavich, A Century of Russian Foreign Policy, 1814–1914 (Philadelphia, PA, 1964), excellent survey.

D. Longley The Longman Companion to Imperial Russia, 1689–1917 (Harlow, 2000), useful reference volume on Imperial Russia.

D. Lieven (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, ii: Imperial Russia, 1689–1917 (Cambridge, 2006), wide-ranging, thematic essays on institutions and processes of change in Imperial Russia.

H. D. Löwe, Tsar and Jews (Chur, 1993), careful analysis of the Jewish question in the Russian Empire.

M. L. Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861 (Ithaca, NY, 2002), analysis of the property rights of noble women as a reflection of women’s status and the aspirations of nobility.

B. N. Mironov, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 2 vols. (Boulder, Colo., 2000), comprehensive, quantitative study of society and state in Imperial Russia.

T. C. Owen, The Corporation under Russian Law, 1800–1917 (Cambridge, 1991), valuable study of the development of corporations in Imperial Russia.

W. M. Pintner and D. K. Rowney (eds.), The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980), pioneering essays on bureaucracy and civil service.

M. Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime (New York, 1983), broad synthetic study of Russia from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.

D. Ransel, Mothers of Misery (Princeton, NJ, 1988), original study of child abandonment and foundling care in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A. M. Schrader, Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, Ill., 2002), exploration of penal practice and reform as prism of social identities and status in Imperial Russia.

H. Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917 (Oxford, 1967), detailed account, with particular attention to institutional, diplomatic, and minority history.

W. Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, NY, 2004), suggestive analysis of steppe colonization and its role in empire-building.

A. Swift, Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley, CA, 2002), exploration of a neglected but important sphere of popular culture.

E. K. Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (De Kalb, Ill., 1997), comprehensive study of the complex social categories, with rich bibliography.

C. D. Worobec, Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (De Kalb, Ill., 2001), pioneering study of female possession in law, religious life, psychiatry, and literature.

R. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy (2 vols., Princeton, NJ, 1995–2000) on the symbols, ceremonies and culture of rulership.

4. THE PETRINE ERA AND AFTER, 1689–1740

M. S. Anderson, Peter the Great (London, 1978), traditional biography, with emphasis on foreign policy.

E. V. Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great (Armonk, NY, 1993), revisionist interpretation.

G. Barany, The Anglo-Russian Entente Cordiale of 1697–1698 (Boulder, Colo., 1986), on the ‘Grand Embassy’.

P. Bushkovitch, Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671–1725 (New York, 2001), political narrative, with strong emphasis on the antecedents and genesis of the Petrine reforms and rulership.

J. Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture (Chicago, IL, 1988), beautifully illustrated and broadly conceived.

———(ed.), Peter the Great Transforms Russia (3rd edn., Lexington, Ky., 1991), anthology of major interpretative essays.

M. Curtiss, A Forgotten Empress (New York, 1974), the only book-length treatment on Anna in English.

L. Hughes, Peter the Great (New Haven, CT, 2002), engaging scholarly biography.

L. Hughes Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven, CT, 1998), the standard general synthesis of the Petrine era.

A. Lentin (ed. and trans.), Peter the Great: His Law on the Imperial Succession in Russia (Oxford, 1995), translation of important defining political statement, ‘The Truth of the Monarch’s Will’.

E. J. Phillips, The Founding of Russia’s Navy (Westport, Conn., 1995), new interpretation on the origins of the Russian navy.

I. Pososhkov, The Book of Poverty and Wealth (Stanford, Calif., 1987), translation of important writing by a merchant in Petrine Russia.

N. V. Riasanovsky The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought (New York, 1985), overview of rhetorical and historical representations of Peter.

E. A. Zitser, The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great (Ithaca, NY, 2004), explores the discursive revolution in Petrine era.

5. THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1740–1801

J. T. Alexander, Catherine the Great (New York, 1989), modern scholarly biography.

E. V. Anisimov, Empress Elizabeth (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1995), important study of key period of state-building.

G. L. Freeze, The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1977), on transformation of the married parish clergy into a social and cultural caste.

R. E. Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility, 1762–1785 (Princeton, NJ, 1973), examines the politics of terminating obligatory state service for the nobility.

———Provincial Development in Russia (New Brunswick, NJ, 1984), case study of provincial life and administration in Catherinean Russia.

W. G. Jones, Nikolay Novikov (Cambridge, 1984), standard work on leading publisher and intellectual figure.

J. D. Klier, Russia Gathers her Jews (De Kalb, Ill., 1986), on the formation of the Pale of Settlement.

J. P. LeDonne, Ruling Russia (Princeton, NJ, 1984), controversial attempt to provide ‘class’ interpretation of state and policies.

I. de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven, CT, 1981), comprehensive portrait of Russian state and society in the second half of the eighteenth century.

G. Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton, NJ, 1985), on the role of state and public in the development of print culture.

M. Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia (New York, 1966), imaginative attempt to explain how Petrine servitors became the disaffected intelligentsia.

———The Well-Ordered Police State (New Haven, CT, 1983), comparative study of cameralism and its transplantation to Imperial Russia.

D. L. Ransel, The Politics of Catherinean Russia (New Haven, CT, 1975), highly original analysis of clan and politics.

C. Whittaker, Russian Monarchy: Eighteenth-Century Rulers and Writers in Political Dialogue (DeKalb, Ill., 2003), on the emerging discourse about monarchy and its legitimacy.

6. PRE-REFORM RUSSIA, 1801–1855

W. L. Blackwell, The Beginnings of Russian Industrialization, 1800–1860 (Princeton, NJ, 1968), on obstacles and achievements of economic growth in pre-reform era.

R. Friedman, Masculinity, Autocracy, and the Russian University, 1804–1863 (New York, 2005), considers how university studies shaped the sexual and political identity of Russian males.

J. M. Hartley, Alexander I (London, 1994), informed, readable survey.

A. von Haxthausen, Studies on the Interior of Russia (Chicago, IL, 1972), highly influential German analysis of Russian society in the 1840s.

S. L. Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia (Chicago, IL, 1986), case study of a serf estate in Tambov province.

W. B. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform (De Kalb, Ill., 1982), on the Nicholaevan pre-reforms and the officials who laid the groundwork for the Great Reforms.

———Nicholas I, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias (De Kalb, Ill., 1989), positive, revisionist assessment of the emperor, with clear summary of state policy.

M. Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–1855 (New York, 1971), brilliant intellectual history of both the age and the progenitor of Russian agrarian socialist thought.

A. M. Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (DeKalb, Ill., 1997), on political thought in the wake of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era.

D. Moon, Russian Peasants and Tsarist Legislation on the Eve of Reform (Houndmills, 1992), on the serf question and stability in the pre-reform era.

M. Raeff, Michael Speransky (The Hague, 1957), political biography within the context of Russia’s institutional development in the early nineteenth century.

J. Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca, NY, 2007), microhistory of the Bakunin family suggesting a linkage between the personal and ideological.

M. Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews (Philadelphia, PA, 1983), informative study of Jewish policy based on published sources.

E. K. Wirtschafter, From Serf to Russian Soldier (Princeton, NJ, 1990), on the social conditions of lower ranks in pre-reform era.

7. REFORM AND COUNTER-REFORM, 1855–1890

N. Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca, NY, 2005), on the role of Russian sectarians in colonizing the south Caucasus between the 1830s and 1890s.

D. R. Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850–1900 (Berkeley, CA, 1990), excellent synthesis of urban history in post-reform era.

B. Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools (Berkeley, CA, 1986), on the peasant role in shaping the content of elementary education.

———and J. Bushnell (eds.), Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881 (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), important collection of essays on individual great reforms.

C. Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, Ill., 2002), stimulating study of the role of nineteenth-century Russian painting and literature in making landscape an integral part of national identity.

T. E. Emmons and W. Vucinich (eds.), Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government (Cambridge, 1982), on the composition and role of the zemstvo in the post-reform era.

D. Field, The End of Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), classic monograph on noble and state interaction in shaping the terms of emancipation.

———Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boston, MA, 1989), penetrating analysis of two major peasant disorders in 1860s and 1870s.

G. L. Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Princeton, NJ, 1983), study of church reform (goals, politics, problems) within the larger context of social and political change.

C. Johanson, Women’s Struggle for Higher Education in Russia, 1855–1900 (Kingston, 1987), on the problem of female access to higher education.

W. B. Lincoln, The Great Reforms (DeKalb, Ill., 1990), best general overview of great reforms.

D. Staliunas, Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863 (Amsterdam, 2007), case study of nationality policy and its impact on the north-west.

S. F. Starr, Decentralization and Self Government in Russia, 1830–1870 (Princeton, NJ, 1972), on under-institutionalization and the zemstvo reform of 1860s.

R. Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia (2nd edn., Princeton, NJ, 1991), survey of different streams of women’s movement.

F. Venturi, Roots of Revolution (Chicago, IL, 1983), detailed narrative account.

T. R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia (De Kalb, Ill., 1996), important monograph on the western borderlands, with particular attention to Polish and Jewish nationalism.

P. A. Zaionchkovskii, The Russian Autocracy under Alexander III (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1976), on counter-reforms of 1880s.

———The Russian Autocracy in Crisis, 1878–1882 (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1979), on the dramatic confrontation of autocracy and revolutionary terrorism.

R. E. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia (Stanford, Calif., 1971), on the early history of the labour movement and state response.

———Law and Disorder on the Narova River: The Kreenholm Strike of 1872 (Berkeley, CA, 1995), microhistory of an early labour conflict.

8. REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890–1914

A. Ascher, The Russian Revolution of 1905 (2 vols., Stanford, Calif, 1988–92), best synthesis of recent scholarship.

———P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford, Calif., 2001), excellent study of Stolypin’s attempt to build a new order.

V. E. Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion (Berkeley, CA, 1983), detailed account of worker politics and mobilization, 1905–14.

J. Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite (Berkeley, CA, 1985), urban history of Moscow in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

J. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read (Princeton, NJ, 1985), study of popular reading culture, consumption, and major themes.

J. Bushnell, Mutiny and Repression (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), close analysis of the uneven pattern of soldiers’ involvement in revolution.

C. J. Chulos, Converging Worlds: Religion and Community in Peasant Russia, 1861–1917 (DeKalb, Ill., 2003), study of popular Orthodoxy in Voronezh province.

B. E. Clements et al. (eds.), Russia’s Women (Berkeley, CA, 1991), on women’s experiences and problems in modern Russia.

E. W. Clowes et al. (eds.), Between Tsar and People (Princeton, NJ, 1991), on the emergence of civil society.

H. J. Coleman, Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905–1929 (Bloomington, Ind., 2005), model study of Baptism and its relationship to tsarist and Soviet state.

O. Crisp and L. H. Edmondson (eds.), Civil Rights in Imperial Russia (Oxford, 1989), on reform and civil rights in early twentieth century.

J. Daly, The Watchful State: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1906–1917 (DeKalb, Ill., 2004), positive portrait of the political police in its struggle to combat the revolutionary movement.

T. Emmons, Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia (Cambridge, 1983), on liberal and moderate parties as they prepare for the first Duma.

L. Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness (Ithaca, NY, 1992), a study of Russian society and culture seen through the prism of sex and gender.

O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York, 1996), broad narrative account from the 1890s to the mid-1920s.

W. C. Fuller, Jr., Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914 (Princeton, NJ, 1985), insightful study of tension between military professionalism and civil service.

C. Gaudin, Ruling Peasants: Village and State in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb, Ill., 2007), interesting exploration of peasant responses to ever more intrusive state from the 1880s.

M. F. Hamm (ed.), The City in Late Imperial Russia (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), case studies of several leading cities.

J. F. Hutchinson, Politics and Public Health in Revolutionary Russia, 1890–1913 (Baltimore, MD, 1990), study of medical profession and its response to issues of public health and politics.

D. C. B. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (New York, 1983), on domestic causes of Russian entry into war.

———Russia’s Rulers under the Old Regime (New Haven, CT, 1989), prosopographical and biographical study of State Council.

R. T. Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia (Princeton, NJ, 1982), on shift of gentry from opposition to a conservative defence of old order.

S. Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia (Cambridge, 2006), examines the discourse on suicide to explore issues like selfhood and institutional conflict and power.

L. McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Régime (Princeton, NJ, 1991), on the development of a mass circulation press.

J. Neuberger, Hooliganism (Berkeley, CA, 1993), on youth and crime in St Petersburg.

J. Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917 (Oxford, 1999), critical account of the Stolypin reforms from the perspective of peasant responses.

A. J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982), sophisticated account of merchant-industrial élites in post-reform era.

R. G. Robbins, The Tsar’s Viceroys (Ithaca, NY, 1987), on profile and role of governors at end of old regime.

H. Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley, CA, 1986), an important series of essays on the complexities of state policy and politics.

J. A. Sharp, Russian Modernism between East and West: Natalia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde (New York, 2006), on the creativity and achievements of Goncharov and Russian modernism before the outbreak of war.

V. Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (New York, 2004), study of lay piety in late Imperial Russia.

J. Smele and A. Heywood (eds.), The Russian Revolution of 1905: Centenary Perspectives (London, 2005), essays reflecting recent scholarship and especially valuable for the attention to the provinces and periphery.

E. C. Thaden (ed.), Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855–1914 (Princeton, NJ, 1981), valuable collection of essays on post-reform minority policy.

A. M. Verner, The Crisis of Autocracy (Princeton, NJ, 1990), close analysis of the emperor and bureaucratic élite responses to the challenges of revolution.

T. H. Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (New York, 1963), classic account of Witte and his industrialization policies.

N. B. Weissman, Reform in Tsarist Russia (New Brunswick, NJ, 1981), on the problem of rebuilding a more effective system of local government.

A. L. Wildman, The Making of a Workers’ Revolution: Russian Social Democracy, 1891–1903 (Chicago, IL, 1967), on the relations between Marxist intellectuals and politicized workers.

R. E. Zelnik (ed.), Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia: Realities, Representations, Reflections (Berkeley, CA, 1999), valuable essays on worker-intelligentsia relations in the pre-revolution.

III. SOVIET HISTORY AND BEYOND

8. GENERAL HISTORIES AND MONOGRAPHS

K. E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin (Princeton, NJ, 1978), path-breaking study of the Soviet technical intelligentsia.

J. S. Curtiss, The Russian Church and the Soviet State, 1917–50 (New York, 1953), balanced treatment of Soviet religious policies.

R. W. Davies et al. (eds.), The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (Cambridge, 1994).

J. Degras (ed.), Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, 1917–41, 3 vols. (New York, 1978), important collection of documents.

M. Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1965), classic institutional and political history from pre-revolutionary roots to the Khrushchev era.

J. L. Gaddis, Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States (2nd edn., New York, 1990), good overview of Soviet–American relations.

W. Z. Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution (Cambridge, 1993), on Soviet family policy from the revolution to the mid-1930s.

L. R. Graham, Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union (New York, 1987), treats the impact of ideology on science.

T. Hasegawa, The Northern Territories Dispute and Russo-Japanese Relations, 2 vols. (Berkeley, CA, 1998), comprehensive account of the territorial dispute that has divided the two powers since the eighteenth century.

M. Heller and A. Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, 2 vols. (New York, 1992), vigorously anti-Soviet émigré history, with fresh detail on many subjects.

G. A. Hosking, The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1993), excellent, well-informed account.

C. Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven, CT, 2007), on the history of children and adolescents in twentieth-century Russia.

P. Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State (Cambridge, 1985), insightful treatment of propaganda as critical instrument in early phase of Soviet state-building

———Cinema and Soviet Society (2nd edn., New York, 2001), reinterpretation of film and its impact, 1917–53.

M. Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (New York, 1985), analysis by the doyen of the first generation of historians of the Soviet period.

M. McAuley Soviet Politics, 1917–1991 (rev. edn., Oxford, 1992), standard survey of political history.

———Russia since 1914 (Harlow, 1998), useful reference source with brief thematic entries as well as a detailed chronology, biographies, and statistics.

R. McNeal et al. (eds.), Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (5 vols., Toronto, 1974–82), basic set of translated official party resolutions.

M. E. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York, 1994), lively, critical account of Soviet ideology and rule.

E. Mawdsley and S. White, The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev (Oxford, 2000), prosopography of the Central Committee from 1917 to 1991.

J. L. Nogee and R. H. Donaldson, Soviet Foreign Policy since World War II (4th edn., New York, 1992), authoritative, wide-ranging account of foreign policy.

A. Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 1917–91 (3rd edn., Harmondsworth, 1992), standard, but dated, history of Soviet economy.

R. R. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991 (New York, 2000), history of the Soviet army and its development.

———Red Commanders: A Social History of the Soviet Army Officer Corps, 1918–1991 (Lawrence, Kan., 2005), profile of the Soviet military officers, but more in terms of organizational than social history.

W. G. Rosenberg (ed.), Bolshevik Visions, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1990), valuable collection of documents on the cultural revolution.

L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (2nd edn., New York, 1971), full political history of the Soviet Communist Party.

R. Service, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), detailed survey, with emphasis on political history.

G. Simon, Nationalism and Policy towards the Nationalities in the Soviet Union (Boulder, Colo., 1991), systematic overview of Soviet nationality policies.

R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams (New York, 1991), sweeping account of utopian vision in early Soviet culture.

R. G. Suny (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, iii: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2006), collection of essays on key spheres of Soviet history.

A. Vatlin and L. Malashenko (eds.), Piggy Fox and the Sword of Revolution: Bolshevik Self-Portraits (New Haven, CT, 2006), caricature sketches by members of the Bolshevik élite in the 1920s-1930s.

D. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley, CA, 1999), environmentalism during the Soviet era.

9. RUSSIA IN WAR AND REVOLUTION, 1914–1921

E. Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution (London, 1990), critical analysis of historiography on 1917.

———V. Iu. Cherniaev, and W. G. Rosenberg (eds.), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921 (Bloomington, Ind., 1997), essays and guide to the revolutionary era.

P. Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921 (Princeton, NJ, 1991), standard account.

S. Badcock, Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia (Cambridge, 2007), well-researched attempt to explain the failure of the Provisional Government in 1917.

F. Benvenuti, The Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 1918–22 (Cambridge, 1988), on party-military relations.

R. P. Browder and A. Kerensky (eds.), The Russian Provisional Government, 1917: Documents, 3 vols. (Stanford, Calif., 1961), valuable but tendentious collection of documents.

E. N. Burdzhalov, Russia’s Second Revolution: The February 1917 Uprising in Petrograd (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), masterly account of the Petrograd revolution.

E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923, 3 vols. (London, 1985), classic study of the revolution and civil war.

W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1987), reprint of well-informed, highly readable account.

B. Farnsworth, Alexandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution (Stanford, Calif., 1980), biography of leading feminist, and a useful introduction to the ‘women’s question’ in the early Soviet era.

M. Ferro, October 1917: A Social History of the Russian Revolution (London, 1980), examines the aspirations and expectations of different social groups.

O. Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside (Oxford, 1989), solid regional study of the peasantry’s role in the civil war.

———and B. I. Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The

Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, CT, 1999), exploration of the political culture emerging amidst the revolutionary upheavals of 1917.

S. Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of the Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge, 1970), standard account of cultural politics during the civil war.

P. Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking (Bloomington, Ind., 1999), on the six million refugees displaced during the First World War.

A. Gleason, P. Kenez, and R. Stites (eds.), Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), important collection of essays.

W. Husband, Revolution in the Factory: The Birth of the Soviet Textile Industry, 1917–1920 (New York, 1990), on workers, trade unions, and revolution.

H. F. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, NY, 1995), on the disintegration of a common sense of nationhood during the war.

J. L. H. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization (New York, 1976), comprehensive synthesis.

D. P. Koenker and W. G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton, NJ, 1989), careful analysis of strikes and labour protest.

———and R. G. Suny (eds.), Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), valuable collection of essays.

M. McAuley, Bread and Justice (Oxford, 1991), broad-ranging study of Bolshevik policies and institution building in Petrograd.

M. McCauley (ed.), The Russian Revolution and the Soviet State, 1917–1921 (London, 1988), valuable collection of primary sources.

R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1991), anti-revisionist, political account.

———Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York, 1994), popular survey, casting blame on the intelligentsia and traditional Russian political culture for rise of authoritarianism.

A. Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution (Bloomington, Ind., 1968), close study of the July uprising in 1917.

D. J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922 (Princeton, NJ, 2002), in-depth study of a province during the civil war, with powerful evidence of its devastating impact.

———Revolution on the Volga (Ithaca, NY, 1986), case study of the 1917 Revolution in Saratov.

T. F. Remington, Building Socialism in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh, PA, 1984), on self-defeating attempts at mass mobilization.

R. Sakwa, Soviet Communists in Power (New York, 1988), on politics and government in Moscow during the civil war.

J. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb, Ill., 2003), on the role of the military in nation building in late Imperial and early Soviet periods.

J. Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–1923 (New York, 1999), reassessment of Bolshevik nationality policies, stressing improvization and the ad hoc nature of policy and its implementation at local level.

S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–18 (Cambridge, 1983), sensitive analysis of Petrograd workers during the revolution.

M. D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca, NY, 2002), examines literary works of ‘proletarian’ writers in late Imperial and early Soviet periods.

———(ed.), Voices of Revolution (New Haven, CT, 2001), valuable collection of primary documents, accompanied by interpretative text.

R. A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge, 2000), synthesizes the large volume of recent scholarship.

J. D. White, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921 (London, 1994), recent general account.

A. K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1980–7), massively researched, standard account of the devolution of the army in 1917.

10. THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY AND REVOLUTIONARY EXPERIMENT, 1921–1929

A. M. Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists (Berkeley, CA, 1987), analysis of NEP and ‘nepmany’.

———And Now my Soul Has Hardened (Berkeley, CA, 1994), study of the homeless orphans (bezprizorniki) during NEP.

F. L. Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (DeKalb, Ill., 2007), on the ‘sexual enlightenment’ campaign of doctors and public health workers in the 1920s.

E. H. Carr, The Interregnum, 1923–1924 (Harmondsworth, 1969), Socialism in One Country, 1924–1926, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1970), and (with R. W. Davies), Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1971–4), magisterial study of the first decade of Soviet rule.

W. J. Chase, Workers, Society, and the Soviet State (Urbana, Ill., 1987), on Moscow workers during the 1920s.

S. F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (Oxford, 1980), political and intellectual biography of leading Bolshevik.

V. P. Danilov, Rural Russia under the New Regime (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), analysis of peasants in the 1920s by the leading Russian agrarian historian.

J. Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924–1941 (New Haven, CT, 2005) on the role of Soviet authorities and an American Jewish organization in promoting Jewish agricultural communities in the Crimea and southern Ukraine.

S. Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge, 1979), provocative study of social changes and formation of a new élite.

———A. Rabinowitch, and R. Stites (eds.), Russia in the Era of NEP (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), collection of essays by leading scholars.

C. Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863–1922 (New York, 1986), valuable study of the artistic turmoil and experimentation in the 1920s.

J. Heinzen, Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917–1929 (Pittsburgh, PA, 2004), study of Commissariat of Agriculture and institution building in the countryside.

L. E. Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), interesting assessment of the attempt to use education to engineer social change.

J. Hughes, Stalin, Siberia, and the Crisis of the New Economic Policy (Cambridge, 1991), shows how Stalin’s experience in Siberia provided the impetus to collectivization.

W. B. Husband, ‘Godless Communists’: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (De Kalb. Ill., 2000), on anti-religious campaigns in the early Soviet era.

L. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (New York, 2001), on early Bolshevik theory and policy towards childhood education.

D. Koenker, Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY, 2005), sophisticated case study in Soviet labour history.

M. Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), on the transformation of Soviet newspapers in the 1920s and early 1930s.

R. Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism (New York, 1974), examines the clash between Bolshevik ambitions and Soviet realities, with much data about party, society, and culture.

L. L. Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle (DeKalb, Ill., 2000), on alcohol and the workers culture in Leningrad.

L. H. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918–1929 (Cambridge, 1992), comprehensive review of major issues.

R. C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929 (New York, 1973), biography of Stalin’s origins and rise to prominence.

C. Ward, Russia’s Cotton Workers and the New Economic Policy (Cambridge, 1990), original and penetrating look at factory life during NEP.

M. von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship (Ithaca, NY, 1990), study of military and politics in early Bolshevik state.

S. White, The Bolshevik Poster (New Haven, CT, 1988), excellent analysis with rich collection of illustrations.

E. A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, Ind., 1997), on Bolshevik policy and practice toward women.

———Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia (Ithaca, NY, 2005), on the political theatre of the early Soviet regime.

D. J. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses (Cambridge, 1992), on debates, films, and reaction of critics and viewers.

11. BUILDING STALINISM, 1929–1941

G. Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca, NY, 2003), analysis of the lishentsy (‘disenfranchised’) as a social class in Stalinist Russia.

V. Anderle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia (New York, 1988), sociological enquiry into workplace interaction.

D. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), on the construction of Russian national heroes, myths, and images.

M. Buckley, Mobilizing Soviet Peasants: Heroines and Heroes of Stalin’s Fields (Lanham, Md., 2006), study of rural ‘Stakhanovitism’ in the 1930s.

W. J. Chase, Enemies within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939 (New Haven, CT, 2001), interpretative documentary volume on the Comintern during the purges.

R. Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York, 1990), updated version of classic account from the perspective of the ‘totalitarian’ school.

A. Dallin and F. I. Firsov (eds.), Dmitrov and Stalin, 1934–1943: Letters from the Soviet Archives (New Haven, CT, 2000), interpretative essay and translation of newly declassified documents.

V. P. Danilov, N. A. Ivnitskii, D. Kozlov, and L. Viola (eds.), The War against the Peasantry, 1927–1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside (New Haven, CT, 2005), valuable collection of new archival documents on collectivization.

R. W. Davies, The Industrialization of Soviet Russia, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1980–91), continuation of the E. H. Carr multi-volume history.

S. Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge, 1997), fascinating summary of police reports about the popular mood in Leningrad in the 1930s.

S. Davies and J. Harris (eds.), Stalin: A New History (Cambridge, 2005), collection of essays that reflect recent scholarship and some new archival sources.

E. T. Ewing, The Teachers of Stalinism: Policy, Practice, and Power in Soviet Schools of the 1930s (New York, 2002), monograph on primary and secondary schoolteachers and their attempt to school and resocialize Soviet children.

M. Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, 1958), path-breaking analysis based on the Smolensk party archive.

O. Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York, 2007), narrative focused on individual experiences and the personal dimension.

S. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington, Ind., 1979), treats upheavals in the professions from the perspective of social history.

———The Cultural Front (Ithaca, NY, 1992), ten essays on the complex relationship between the intelligentsia and political authority.

———Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Oxford, 1999), description of daily life in the 1930s.

———Stalin’s Peasants (Oxford, 1994), on peasant response and adaptation to collectivization.

———Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, NJ, 2005), collection of essays on social identity.

D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization (Armonk, NY, 1986), on the regime’s attempt to subdue worker resistance.

V. Garros, N. Korenevskaya, and T. Lahusen (eds.), Intimacy and Terror (New York, 1995), fascinating collection of diaries from the 1930s.

J. A. Getty, Origins of the Great Purges (Cambridge, 1985), ‘revisionist’ account of inner-party politics, drawing mainly on the Smolensk party archive.

———and R. T. Manning (eds.), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge, 1993), essays that reflect the emerging revisionist view of the purges and terror.

———and O. V. Naumov (eds.), The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven, CT, 2001), interpretative documentary of the great terror, with many newly declassified documents.

G. Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (Cambridge, 1990), on the formation of the Stalinist dictatorship as a break with Leninist system.

W. Z. Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia (New York, 2002), Soviet gender policy and women’s integration into the working class in the 1930s.

G. Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven, CT, 1999), an archivally based study stressing Stalin’s interest in collective security and denying any plan for preemptive war in 1941.

P. Gregory, The Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives (Cambridge, 2004), critique of Stalinist model, incorporating recent archival materials and reflecting a pro-market perspective.

———(ed.), Behind the Façade of Stalin’s Command Economy: Evidence from the Soviet State and Party Archives (Stanford, Calif., 2001), collection of essays on the Stalinist economy, informed by new archival access.

———and N. Naimark (eds.), The Lost Politburo Transcripts: From Collective Rule to Stalin’s Dictatorship (New Haven, CT, 2008), collection of essays assessing the stenograms of meetings by the leadership that only became available within the last decade.

J. Gronow, Caviar with Champaigne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia (Oxford, 2003), on Soviet consumer goods and new values being promoted in the mid-1930s.

B. Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism (Princeton, NJ, 1992), on Stalinism as cultural system.

M. Hindus, Red Bread (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), perceptive account by empathetic eyewitness.

J. Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), on the construction of ‘socialist selfhood’ through a close analysis of several diarists from the 1930s.

K. Heller and J. Plamper (eds.), Personality Cults in Stalinism/Personenkulte im Stalinismus (Göttingen, 2004), collection of sophisticated essays on the origins and dynamics of the personality cult.

D. Hoffman, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, NY, 2003), on the construction of Stalinism as a culture.

L. E. Holmes, Stalin’s School: Moscow’s Model School No. 25, 1931–1937 (Pittsburgh, PA, 1999), microhistorical case study of a model school in the 1930s.

J. Hughes, Stalinism in a Russian Province (New York, 1996), on collectivization in Siberia.

H. Hunter, ‘The Overambitious First Five-Year-Plan’, Slavic Review, 32 (1973), 237–57, famous essay on the dysfunctions of inflated plan objectives.

C. Kelly, Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (London, 2005), careful account of Pavlik Morozov, the ‘heroic youth’ who informed on his own father in the 1930s and in retribution was later killed.

O. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven, CT, 2004), valuable collection of documents and analysis by leading specialist.

H. Kostiuk, Stalinist Rule in the Ukraine (Munich, 1960), detailed account of terror in the Ukraine.

S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain (Berkeley, CA, 1995), analysis of Stalinism as functioning social system.

H. Kuromiya, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s (New Haven, CT, 2007), close study of the cases of individual victims of the purge and terror.

M. Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power (New York, 1975), systematic analysis of collectivization.

J. McCannon, Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union, 1932–1939 (Oxford, 1998), interesting account of Soviet Arctic and its public role in the Stalin era.

N. Mandelshtam, Hope against Hope (New York, 1970), valuable memoir on the intelligentsia experience of the 1930s.

———and T. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY, 2001), on Soviet nationality policy in the 1920s and 1930s, with particular focus on Ukraine and Central Asia.

R. A. Medvedev, Let History Judge (2nd edn., New York, 1989), gold mine of information by dissident Soviet historian.

D. Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY, 2004), study of the unveiling campaign, in Uzbekistan in the late 1920s and 1930s.

E. Osokina, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941 (Armonk, NY, 2001), study showing consumer shortages and black market as endemic to the Stalinist economy.

K. Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, Ind., 2000), on festivals and holidays as an important dimension of Soviet political culture.

M. Payne, Stalin’s Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism (Pittsburgh, 2001), study of the motives, problems, and achievements of a grandiose Stalinist project in Central Asia.

Iu. A. Poliakov, A Half Century of Silence: The 1937 Census (New York, 1992), interesting data on the suppressed census of 1937.

E. A. Rees (ed.), Decision-Making in the Stalinist Command Economy, 1932–1937 (New York, 1997), essays on how the Stalinist regime actually made economic decisions.

G. T. Rittersporn, Stalinist Implications and Soviet Complications (Chur, 1991), revisionist critique of totalitarian historiography.

W. G. Rosenberg and L. H. Siegelbaum (eds.), Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialization (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), collected essays on social mobility, workplace politics, and labour culture.

J. Rossman, Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, Mass. 2005), valuable monograph on the response of workers’ in Ivanovo.

J. Scott, Behind the Urals (Bloomington, Ind., 1966), graphic account of the building of Magnitogorsk.

L. H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–41 (Cambridge, 1986), on the Stakhanovite movement as a window on to industrial relations.

———and A. Sokolov (eds.), Stalinism as a Way of Life (New Haven,

CT, 2000), interpretative documentary on life and work in Stalinist Russia.

P. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge, 1996), close study of a key institution.

D. Thorniley, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Rural Communist Party, 1927–39 (New York, 1988), shows party weakness and failure to establish control over the village.

R. C. Tucker (ed.), Stalinism (New York, 1977), important collection of essays.

———Stalin in Power (New York, 1990), treats Stalin Revolution as a reversion to the developmental mode in pre-revolutionary Russia.

L. Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin (New York, 1996), innovative examination of the culture of peasant resistance and collectivization.

———The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (Oxford, 2007), study of kulaks sent to special labour camps in early 1930s.

D. Volkogonov, Stalin (New York, 1991), draws heavily upon new archival materials.

12. THE GREAT FATHERLAND WAR AND LATE STALINISM, 1941–1953

C. Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement (Cambridge, 1987), excellent account of anti-Soviet units formed from Soviet prisoners of war.

J. A. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism (3rd edn., Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1990), study of nationalist movements in the Ukraine during the Second World War.

J. Barber and Andrei Dzeniskevich (eds.), Life and Death in Besieged Leningrad, 1941–44 (New York, 2005), essays on the Leningrad blockade with new data on the scale of privation and morbidity.

———and M. Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–45 (London, 1991), pioneering study examines how Soviet system withstood Nazi invasion.

O. Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45 (New York, 1986), discusses the German prosecution of the eastern campaign as a ‘race war’.

F. Belov, The History of A Collective Farm (New York, 1955), inside account of life on a collective farm.

Y. Boshyk (ed.), Ukraine during World War II (Edmonton, 1986), articles on German occupation and Ukrainian resistance.

R. Brody, Ideology and Political Mobilization (Pittsburgh, 1994), on benefits and limits of Soviet ideology in validating the regime’s authority and controlling its citizens during the war.

G. Bucher, Women, the Bureaucracy and Daily Life in Postwar Moscow, 1945–1953 (Boulder, Colo., 2006), examination of the extraordinary burden imposed on women and the shortfall of promised social services in post-war reconstruction.

T. A. Chumachenko, Church and State in Soviet Russia: Russian Orthodoxy from World War II to the Khrushchev Years (Armonk, NY, 2002), well-researched account of the Church in the late Stalin and Khrushchev eras.

R. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), on the historiography of the war.

M. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York, 1962), classic account of three encounters between Stalin and Yugoslav communists in the 1940s.

T. Dunmore, Soviet Politics, 1945–53 (New York, 1984), general survey, contesting the totalitarian thesis and showing bureaucratic conflict as key to decision-making.

J. Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad (New York, 1975), superior military analysis of the war up to Stalingrad.

———The Road to Berlin (Boulder, Colo., 1983), still the best history of the war from 1942 to its conclusion.

D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II (Cambridge, 2002), on worker wartime resistance (chiefly by evasion and flight) against harsh working and living conditions.

H. Fireside, Icon and Swastika (Cambridge, 1971), on the revival of the Orthodox Church under German occupation and rapprochement between state and Church in 1943.

J. Fürst (ed.), Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London, 2006), essays reflecting the growing interest in post-war Soviet era.

J. Garrard and C. Garrard (eds.), World War II and the Soviet People (London, 1993), articles on the home front during the war.

D. Glantz and J. House, When Titans Clashed (Lawrence, Kan., 1995), operational military history.

S. N. Goncharov, J. W. Lewis, and X. Litai, Uncertain Partners (Stanford, Calif., 1993), collective work of international team tapping new archival documentation.

Y. Gorlizki and O. Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle (Oxford, 2004), critical reappraisal of decision-making in the post-war Stalinist regime.

M. Harrison, Soviet Planning in Peace and War, 1938–45 (Cambridge, 1985), good account of the wartime economy.

D. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven, CT, 1994), superb monograph on the Soviet atomic bomb programme.

W. Moskoff, The Bread of Affliction (Cambridge, 1990), first-rate study of agriculture and food supply during the war.

D. E. Murphy, What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa (New Haven, CT, 2005), close analysis informed by new archival sources.

A. M. Nekrich, The Punished Peoples (New York, 1978), on the deportation of nationalities during the Second World War.

R. Pennington, Wings, Women, and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat (Lawrence, Kan., 2001), on the significant role of women in the Soviet air force during the war.

C. Porter and M. Jones, Moscow in World War II (London, 1987), social history from perspective of sympathy for the Soviet government.

H. Ragsdale, The Soviets, the Munich Crisis, and the Coming of World War II (New York, 2004), recent survey of the diplomatic background to the outbreak of war.

A. Resis (ed.), Molotov Remembers (Chicago, IL, 1994), provides insights into Soviet policy in the 1940s and 1950s.

D. Reynolds (ed.), The Origins of the Cold War in Europe (New Haven, CT, 1994), collection of articles highlighting post-Cold War scholarship.

H. Shukman (ed.), Stalin’s Generals (New York, 1993), short biographies of top Soviet commanders during the war.

R. W. Stephan, Stalin’s Secret War: Soviet Counterintelligence against the Nazis, 1941–1945 (Lawrence, Kan., 2004), on Stalin’s actions to prevent Germany from recruiting agents in the Soviet military and intelligence.

R. Thurston and B. Bonwetsch (eds.), The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (Urbana, Ill., 2000), wide-ranging essays on the war’s impact and popular reaction.

G. L. Weinberg, A World at Arms (Cambridge, 1994), prize-winning general history of the Second World War.

E. Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957 (Armonk, NY, 1998), on public opinion in post-war Stalin era.

13. FROM STALINISM TO STAGNATION, 1953–1985

S. H. Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif., 2001), on the Novocherkassk strike of 1962 and its repression.

S. Bialer, Stalin’s Successors (Cambridge, 1980), on party leadership in post-Stalinist era.

V. Bonnell and G. Breslauer (eds.), Russia in the New Century: Stability of Disorder (Boulder, Colo., 2001), essays on the late Yeltsin era.

G. W. Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders (London, 1982), penetrating assessment of leadership styles and achievements.

R. A. Divine (ed.), The Cuban Missile Crisis (2nd edn., New York, 1988), contains new information and recollection of key participants.

J. Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church (Beckenham, 1986), informed contemporary history.

L. Grau and M. A. Gress (eds.), The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost (Lawrence, Kan., 2002), the Russian General Staff’s post-mortem on the Afghan conflict, stressing Russia’s adaptation and the impact of American bounties and weapons for the insurgency.

G. A. Hosking, Beyond Socialist Realism (New York, 1980), scintillating analysis of ‘village writers’.

J. L. H. Keep, Last of the Empires (Oxford, 1995), sweeping recent history of post-war USSR.

N. S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers (3 vols., Boston, MA, 1970–90), edited versions of memoirs.

P. Jones (ed.), The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (London, 2006), essays on the impact of de-Stalinization on the public, policy, and culture.

S. N. Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchevism (Boston, 1990), memoir of Khrushchev’s son.

N. Lubin, Labour and Nationality in Soviet Central Asia (Princeton, NJ, 1984), on the complex problems of labour and economic development.

A. McAuley, Economic Welfare in the Soviet Union (Madison, 1979), on poverty and income distribution.

M. McCauley (ed.), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), useful collection of essays.

———Nikita Khrushchev (London, 1991), reliable, up-to-date biography.

J. Millar (ed.), Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the U.S.S.R. (New York, 1987), results of survey of former Soviet citizens.

M. Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective (New York, 1980).

M. J. Sodaro, Moscow, Germany, and the West from Khrushchev to Gorbachev (Ithaca, NY, 1990), expert account.

W. Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (New York, 2003), standard political biography based on exhaustive research.

———S. Khrushchev, and A. Gleason (eds.), Nikita Khrushchev (New Haven, CT, 2000), informative collection of essays on Khrushchev and his role.

A. P. Van Goudoever, The Limits of Destalinization in the Soviet Union (London, 1986).

V. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), informative survey of post-Stalinist foreign policy of the USSR.

14. A MODERN ‘TIME OF TROUBLES: FROM REFORMS TO DISINTEGRATION’ 1985–1999

A. Åslund, Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform (2nd edn., Ithaca, NY, 1991), critique of Gorbachev’s reforms, arguing in favour of a rapid transition to the market economy.

Z. Barany and R. G. Moser (eds.), Russian Politics: Challenges of Democratization (Cambridge, 2001), broad essays on politics, centre-periphery relations, economic reform, and the armed forces in the 1990s.

M. R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge, 2002), on the differentiated, but decisive impact of nationalist movements in the break-up of the USSR.

A. Brown, The Gorbachev Factor in Soviet Politics (2nd edn., New York, 1992), incisive analysis of Gorbachev’s role and significance.

———Seven Years That Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford, 2007), valuable retrospective on Gorbachev and perestroika, emphasizing the dynamics that drove policy and decision-making.

M. Buckley (ed.), Perestroika and Soviet Women (Cambridge, 1992), on the women’s question in the Gorbachev era.

P. Chaisty, Legislative Politics and Economic Power in Russia (New York, 2006), on lawmaking in post-Soviet Russia, emphasizing the parliament’s negative role (in delaying, obstructing legislation) prior to the emergence of Putin’s United Russia.

A. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (University Park, Pa., 2000), valuable memoir by a close aide to Gorbachev.

T. J. Colton, Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), detailed, sophisticated analysis of the 1995 parliamentary and 1996 presidential elections.

———Yeltsin: A Life (New York, 2008), definitive biography.

W. L. Daniel, E. Stewart, and H. Stewart, The Orthodox Church and Civil Society in Russia (College Station, Tex., 2006), analysis of three parishes during the renaissance of Orthodoxy in post-Soviet Russia.

C. Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (New York, 2000), account of insider politics and corruption.

E. T. Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia (Washington, DC, 2007), informed assessment of the economic crisis and perestroika by the first prime minister in the Yeltsin government.

G. J. Gill, Collapse of a Single-Party System (Cambridge, 1994), on the demise of the Soviet system.

———and R. D. Markwick, Russia’s Stillborn Democracy? From Gorbachev to Yeltsin (Oxford, 2000), introduction to politics in the transition era.

M. S. Gorbachev, Perestroika (rev. edn., 1988), discussion of the ‘new thinking’ that shows the lack of clear vision, especially on realizing perestroika.

———Memoirs (New York, 1996), spirited defence of his leadership during perestroika.

T. Gustafson, Capitalism Russian-Style (Cambridge, 1999), readable, inclusive account of the transition period.

G. M. Hahn, Russia’s Revolution from Above, 1985–2000: Reform, Transition, and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002), general survey of perestroika and the break-up of the USSR.

G. A. Hosking, The Awakening of the Soviet Union (rev. edn., Cambridge, Mass., 1991), early assessment of the Gorbachev era.

———et al., Independent Political Movements in the Soviet Union 1985–91 (London, 1992), on the emergence of political pluralism.

J. F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991 (Washington, DC, 1997), on the high politics of perestroika.

———The Logic of Economic Reform in Russia (Washington, DC, 2001), emphasizes the pernicious role of the West in promoting corrupt practices in the economic transition.

International Monetary Fund, A Study of the Soviet Economy, 3 vols. (Washington, 1991), wide-ranging survey of the Soviet economy on the eve of the dissolution of the USSR.

A. C. Lynch, How Russia Is Not Ruled: Reflections on Russian Political Development (Cambridge, 2004), surveys Soviet legacies and turbulent 1990s.

M. McCauley, Gorbachev (London, 1998), overview of Gorbachev and his role in the final years of the USSR.

M. McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change (Ithaca, NY, 2001), political overview from perestroika to 1996 election.

P. Nagy, The Meltdown of the Russian State (Cheltenham, 2000), detailed critique of politics and economy policy in the 1990s.

R. Sakwa, Gorbachev and his Reforms, 1985–1990 (New York, 1991), positive assessment of Gorbachev as reformer.

A. Shleifer and D. Treisman, Without a Map: Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia (Cambridge, 2000), vigorous defence of economic policies advocated by outside consultants.

G. Smith (ed.), The Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union (London, 1990), wide-ranging coverage.

S. S. Smith, The Politics of Institutional Choice: The Formation of the Russian State Duma (Princeton, NJ, 2001), on presidential and Duma politics in the late 1990s.

S. L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), shows how decentralization enabled local officials to divert assets and resources to own ends.

K. Stoner-Weiss, Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge), on the complex interrelationship of the centre and provinces under Yeltsin.

L. M. Sundstrom, Funding Civil Society: Foreign Assistance and NGO Development in Russia (Stanford, Calif., 2006), study of selected NGOs and the role of foreign assistance.

R. G. Suny, The Revenge of the Past (Stanford, Calif., 1994), on nationalism and the demise of the Soviet system.

J. Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, 1989–1998 (New York, 1998), trenchant critique of Western aide to the former Eastern bloc countries.

S. White, Gorbachev and After (3rd edn., Cambridge, 1992), short narrative of perestroika.

B. Yeltsin, Against the Grain (London, 1990), autobiography, with revealing insights into the author’s rise to power.

W. Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy: Russian Elite and Mass Perspectives, 1993–2000 ( Princeton, NJ, 2002), on the contrast between the international values of élites and the isolationist indifference of lower classes.

15. REBUILDING RUSSIA

P. Baev (ed.), Russian Energy Policy and Military Power: Putin’s Quest for Greatness (London, 2008), essays examining hydrocarbon revenues and their impact on military power and reform.

T. J. Colton and S. Holmes (eds.), The State after Communism: Governance in the New Russia (Lanham, Md., 2006), examination of Putin’s emphasis on the state and effective governance.

———and M. McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000 (Washington, DC, 2003), sophisticated analysis of the Duma and presidential elections which inaugurated the Putin era.

D. R. Herspring, Putin’s Russia: Past Imperfect, Future Uncertain (Lanham, Md., 2003), articles sketching Russia at the start of the new millennium.

R. Kanet (ed.), Russia: Re-emerging Great Power (New York, 2007), essays on Russian foreign policy under Putin.

A. Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works; The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business (Ithaca, NY, 2006), modus operandi of politics and business in the post-Soviet era.

A. Politkovskaya, A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia (New York, 2007), report by investigative journalist whose murder in 2006 became a cause célèbre and ignited much criticism of the Putin regime.

A. Pravda (ed.), Leading Russia: Putin in Perspective (Oxford, 2005), essays on Putin’s first term.

V. Putin, First Person (New York, 2000), political statement in first presidential campaign.

C. Ross (ed.), Local Politics and Democratization in Russia (New York, 2009), essays on politics in the Putin era, accenting the residual power at local level despite Putin’s ‘vertikal’.

R. Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice (2nd edn., London, 2008), richly detailed account of Putin’s objectives and difficulties.

———Russian Politics and Society (4th edn., New York, 2008), systematic and unusually dispassionate analysis of the Putin era.

L. Shevtsova, Putin’s Russia (Washington, 2003), critical treatment of Putin’s policies and power.

———Russia—Lost in Transition: The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies (Washington, DC, 2007), negative assessment of post-Soviet governments.

S. White (ed.), Politics and the Ruling Group in Putin’s Russia (New York, 2008), articles on élite politics, the ‘oligarchs’, and decision-making.

INTERNET SITES

http://www.gov.ru home site of the Russian government, with links to the office of the president, parliament, and various ministries and state agencies

http://rferl.org/newsline/search/org archive of daily news reports since 1997

http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/default.html archive of news reports, short articles, commentaries, and documents since 1996.

PHOTOGRAPHIC ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

© The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library: 5, 6; © Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow/The Bridgeman Art Library: 7; © Camera Press: 16; © Roberto Koch/Contrasto/Eyevine: 17; © Hulton Archive/Getty Images: 8; © Robert Harding Picture Library: 12; © David King Collection; 11, 13; © Jack Kollmann: 2; © AP/Press Association Images: 18; © Rex Features: 10; © RIA Novosti: 4, 14, 15; © GIM Collection/State/Historical Museum, Moscow: 3; © Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow: 1; © V&A Images, The Victoria & Albert Museum: 9

INDEX

Abkhazia 520–1

ABM see Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty

abortion 332–3, 361, 482, 550

Abramovich, R. 525

absolutism 45, 86, 92, 161, 166, 186

Academy of Sciences 115, 118–9, 130, 162–3, 174, 287, 447, 482

‘acceleration’ (uskorenie) 454, 456

acmeism 266, 388

Addison, J. 266, 338

Admiralty 120

Adrian, Patriarch 108, 119, 543

Adzhubei, A. 434

Afghanistan 428, 445, 448–9, 515, 553–4

Africa 389, 445

Aganbegian, A. 429–30, 453

Agapetus 59

Agricultural Sciences, Academy of 397

agriculture 34–7, 42, 66, 138, 145, 153, 209, 215–6, 218, 226, 280, 285, 302, 314, 316–7, 322–4, 326, 328, 335, 341–2, 344, 349, 354, 355, 363, 372, 386, 391, 397, 407, 411, 422, 424, 430–1, 440–1, 449–50, 452, 455–6, 475–6, 522

Ahasuerus and Esther 87

AIDS 483

Aivazovskii, I. 193

Akhmatova, A. 339, 396–7

Alaska 194

alcoholism 444, 453

Aleksandrov, G.A. 414

Alekseev, M.V. 296

Aleksii II, Patriarch 514, 562

Alexander I 165–6, 168, 185–6, 188, 191, 193, 202, 545–7

Alexander II 202, 223, 226, 230–2, 234, 240, 250, 256, 546

Alexander III 240, 256, 278, 547

Alexander Nevsky 15–16, 68, 539–40

Alexander of Tver 17, 19–20

Alexander the Great 123

Alexandra 271

Alexandria, patriarch of, 89

Alexis, Metropolitan 26, 58

Alexis, Tsar 79–80, 82–5, 87–8

Alexis, tsarevich 116, 120–2

All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) 317; see also Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Alma-Ata, 464, 550, 554

alphabet, Cyrillic, 306, 543

Altai, 194, 481

Amsterdam 78, 93

Amur River 98, 441

Ancient Russian Library 164

Andreeva, N. 460, 554

Andrei, prince 12, 16, 539

Andrei (Bogoliubskii), prince 12, 539

Andropov, Iu. 418, 438, 447, 449, 452–3, 553

Andrusovo, Armistice of, 86, 98, 542

Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement (1921) 320

Anglo-Russian Trade Treaty (1734) 129

Anna 6

Anna Ivanovna, empress 116, 124–9, 131, 146, 544

Anna Leopol’dovna 128

Anna Petrovna 124

Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) 517, 557, 559

Anti-Christ 97, 101

anti-party group 422, 552

anti-religious campaign 337, 350, 429

Antioch, patriarch of, 89

apanage (udel) 19, 38

‘April Theses’ 281

Arakcheev, A. 180

Aral Sea 372

Archangel 102–3, 129, 419, 542

architecture 6, 35, 56, 305, 337, 339, 357

‘archival revolution’ x

Arifmetika 109

Armenia 299, 426

army 4, 13, 22–4, 37–8, 45–9, 52, 59, 63, 67, 70, 72, 74, 77–9, 91, 109–15, 120, 124, 134, 159, 176–8, 180–1, 185, 191, 196, 211, 215–16, 255, 261, 264, 220, 270–1, 277, 280, 282, 287, 289, 293, 296–8, 300, 302–3, 327, 354, 365–6, 371, 374–82, 510–11, 550–1; see also military; soldiers

art 7, 22, 26, 190, 265–6, 299, 337–8, 387, 397, 429, 513

artel 349, 393

article 87: 258

artisan 7–8, 37, 39, 42, 47, 66, 101–2, 109, 138–9, 178, 180, 221, 223–4, 385, 395

Asia 119, 256, 300, 344, 419, 438, 444, 548, 555, 561

Assembly of Russian Factory Workers 250

Astrakhan 28, 32, 41, 51

atomic bomb 383, 399, 402, 552

Augustus II 106, 110, 113, 115–16

Austerlitz, 175

Austria 103–4, 106, 123, 129, 134–6, 175, 179, 195–6, 245, 256, 264, 270, 393, 544

Austria-Hungary 245, 256

autocracy 45–6, 48, 51, 53, 62, 64, 69, 74, 80, 82, 84, 90–1, 97, 126, 132–3, 149, 184, 186, 192, 226–8, 231–2, 234–5, 250, 253, 277, 281, 544–7

Averbakh, L.L. 356

Avvakum 88, 89, 95

Azerbaijan 299, 462, 554

Azeris 398, 400, 462

Azov 79, 101–4, 108, 115, 129, 135, 193, 542, 547

Babitskii, A. 505

Bakhchisarai, Peace of, 91

Baku 215, 227

Bakunin, M. 227

Balakhna, 343

Balkan Wars (1912–13) 265

Balkans 195–6, 243, 270

Balkars 419

Baltic Germans 232

Baltic Sea 23, 31

Baltics 154, 256, 378, 395, 417, 462, 518, 543

banks and banking 148, 173, 216, 219, 232, 473–5, 478, 483, 496, 499–500, 511–12, 524, 526, 544, 547, 557

Baptist Church 336

‘Barge Haulers’ 223

barshchina xix, 173, 545

Basaev, S. 561

Bashkirs 41, 47, 129, 151–2, 154, 156, 544

Bashkortostan 515, 555

Basil, Byzantine emperor, 6

baskaki 16

batrak xix

Batu 14–16

Batumi 419

Bauman, K. Ia. 351

Bayer, G. 130

Bazarov, 226

bedniak xix

Beggrov, A.K. 194

Belarus 136, 369, 464, 521, 554–7; see also Belorussia

Belavezh Accord 464

Belevskie 39, 49

Belgorod 42

Belinskii, V.G. 192, 546

belomestnye atamany 51

Beloozero 19–21, 35–7

Belorussia xii, 151–2, 223, 256, 299, 375, 382, 426, 464, 551; see also Belarus

Belskie, princes 39

Bely, A. 265

Belyi raion 368

Berezov 97

Berezovskii, B. 469, 501, 558

Beria, L.P. 370, 404, 439, 410–11, 416, 550, 552

Bering Expedition 119, 130

Berlin 134, 165, 230, 244, 320, 379, 382–3, 398–400, 428, 546, 552

Berlin, Peace of, 546

Berlin, Treaty of, 320

beschest’e 57

Beshehr 560

Beslan 560

besprizorniki xix, 328, 334–5

Bessarabia, 256, 371, 378, 402

Bezborodko, A. 186

Bezbozhnik 336

Bezdna 208

Bibikov, D.G. 203

Bidloo, N. 107, 119

Biron, E.J. 127–8, 544

Bismarck, O. 233, 262

Bits of This and That 164

Black Sea, 3, 135–6, 154–5, 196, 243, 270, 375, 380, 520, 554, 557

blackearth 42, 205–7, 215, 239, 302

black peasant 37, 46

‘Blessed is the Heavenly Host’ (icon), 58

Blok, A. 265–6

Bloody Sunday 250, 252, 548

Blumentrost, L. 130

Board of Public Welfare 158

Bodrov, S. 473

Boeing 476

Bogdanov, A.A. 303–4

Bogoliubovo 12

Bolotnikov, I. 69

Bolotnikov rebellion 69

Bolsheviks 246–7, 269, 273–4, 280–1, 284, 286, 289–92, 295–302, 305, 307–11, 317–21, 329–33, 340, 343–5, 348–70

bondsmen 67, 69, 76, 81, 84, 95

Bonn 418

books 43, 78, 88, 91–2, 107, 109–10, 117–18, 148, 161, 165, 181, 227, 439, 471

Borderlands of Russia 223

Boris (Godunov) 52, 62, 65–8

Boris Godunov 66

Borodin, P. 471, 490, 545

Borodino, Battle of, 177, 545

Bosnia 264

Bosnia-Herzegovina 270

Botswana 475

Bourbon 186

bourgeoisie 219, 228, 235, 246–8, 260, 269, 275–6, 279–80, 285, 289, 292–3, 295–6, 301, 303, 305, 315–6, 332, 334, 337–40, 344, 347, 355, 357, 396, 426, 447

Boyar Duma xix, 65, 68

Boyars 22, 37–8, 44, 46, 55, 58–9, 61, 68–9, 71

Braudel, F. 31–2, 62

Brest-Litovsk Treaty 301

Brezhnev, L.I. 406, 408, 419, 434, 437–40, 443–5, 448–9

British Communist Party 320

Briullov, K. 193

Briusov, V. 265

Brodsky, J. 429

Bronze Horseman 101, 133

Brothers Karamazov 547

Brown R. 130

Bruce, J. 107, 118

Budennyi, S.M. 298, 387

budget 75, 111, 118, 159, 258, 261, 264, 335, 393, 408, 423, 454–6, 465, 471–3, 497–9, 507–8, 510–12, 525, 562

Bülffinger, G. 130

Bukharin, N. 311, 313–16, 318–19, 324–7, 344, 351, 362, 367, 549–50

Bulavin, K. 114–15, 543

Bulgakov, S. 266

Bulganin, N. 412, 422–3, 552

Bulgaria 393, 402

Bulgars 2, 4, 9, 12, 21, 42

Bullitt, W. 300

Bulygin Duma 254

Burdzhalov, E.N. 420

bureaucracy 38, 45, 61, 66, 71, 133, 200, 204, 208, 218–19, 227, 238, 241, 266, 272, 278, 293–4, 310, 342, 357, 360, 366, 412, 421–2, 509

Burke, E. 180

Burnt by the Sun 473

Bush, G.H.W. 473

Bush, G.W. 486, 515–7, 523, 559

Bushkovitch, P. 44

byvshie 303

Byzantium 2–4, 6–9, 22, 51, 58–9, 89, 133, 179

Cambridge University 130, 134

cameralism 109

capital flight 476–7, 499

capitalism 246–8, 292, 344, 360, 395, 484, 547

Cardis, Peace of, 86

Carlsbad 120

Carolingian court 52

Caspian Sea 32, 110, 123, 129, 156, 219, 394, 543

Cathedral of Annunciation 513

Cathedral of St Sophia 7–8

Cathedral of the Dormition 8, 22

Cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin 32

Catherine I: 119, 123–6, 130, 134, 547

Catherine II (the Great) xiii, 85, 131–41, 149–51, 153–9, 161, 163–6, 168, 170, 172–3, 179, 190, 194, 544

Catholicism 27, 43, 68–9, 78, 85

Caucasus xi, 13–15, 151, 185, 195, 224, 256, 330, 349, 355, 381, 394, 440, 448, 462, 481, 486, 514, 551

cavalry 37–8, 46–7, 54, 67, 102, 116, 298, 346

censorship 165–6, 190, 193–4, 205, 212, 229, 231, 292, 413, 546–7

Central Asia 225, 244, 256, 299, 344, 346, 386, 412, 419, 438, 440, 442, 444, 448, 486–7, 521, 543, 546, 548, 555, 561

Central Committee 290, 294, 310–14, 349, 356–8, 368, 396–7, 406–10, 414–17, 420–2, 427, 434, 439, 459–60, 549

Central Powers 278

Central War Industries Committee 273

Centre for Strategic Development 493

CFE see Conventional Forces in Europe

Chaadaev, P.Ia. 191, 197, 545

Chancery of Secret Investigative Affairs 127

Charles I 82

Charles X: 186

Charles XII: 108, 110, 113–16

Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel 116

Charter to the Nobility 148, 190, 545

Charter to the Towns 138, 545

charters 41, 53, 88, 97, 116, 138, 148, 190, 517, 545; see also laws; statutes; manifestoes

Chebrikov, V. 457

Chechnya 486–7, 490–2, 503–5, 519, 554–8, 560

Cheka xix, 295, 297, 548, 557

Chekhov, A. 239

Cheliabinsk 387

Cheney, R. 516

Cheremisy 42

Cherkasskii, A. 128

Chernenko, K. 449, 451–2, 553

Chernigov 5, 8, 12–16, 18, 26, 76, 298

Chernobyl 456, 554

Chernomyrdin, V. 469, 555, 557

Chernov, V. 280, 285–6, 297

chernozem xix

Chernyshevskii, N.G. 225, 546

chetvert’ xix

Chicherin, B. 201

China 15, 20, 42, 46, 50, 79, 95–6, 98, 107, 127, 156, 158, 172, 251, 288, 313, 365, 368, 396–8, 402, 431, 445, 472, 478, 487, 498, 500, 512, 519, 545, 551, 556, 559

cholera 186, 238

Christian IV: 110

Chronicle of Current Events 446, 553

Chubais, A. 480, 556–7

Chudov Monastery 67

Church Council of 1551 (stoglav) 43

Church Council of 1666–67: 542

Church of Christ the Saviour 361

Church of Lazarus 35

Church of St Dmitrii 11

Church of the Dormition 12, 22, 25

Church of the Holy Virgin 7

Church of the Intercession 11–12

Church of the Intercession on the

Moat 57

Church of the Mother of God (Smolensk) 8

Church of the Tithe 7

Church of the Transfiguration of Our

Saviour 8

Churchill, Winston 300, 388–9

Chuvash 42, 151–2

CIA 418, 428, 457, 481

cinema 267, 336, 338, 351, 397, 473, 512

CIS: see Commonwealth of Independent States

city 4, 7–8, 13, 16, 26, 32, 37, 42, 61, 75, 83, 93, 120–1, 155–6, 159, 173, 177, 205, 210–14, 221–23, 255, 258, 267, 272, 274, 285, 287–8, 308, 314, 317, 328, 333, 335, 339, 346, 352–4, 358, 372, 374, 380–3, 409, 412, 423, 432, 441, 448, 457, 459, 467, 483, 486, 503, 507, 522, 540, 546–7, 560

city council 211, 221, 231–2

civil war 114, 278, 291–2, 295–302, 307–8, 323, 333, 335, 348, 370, 377–8, 394, 402, 471, 540, 548–9

Clinton, W. J. 485–6, 557

Clark, K. 357

class struggle 248, 302, 348, 367

clergy 6–9, 37–8, 43, 65, 82, 88, 92, 108, 110, 159–61, 212, 219–20, 252, 303, 336, 351, 353, 413, 432

colour revolutions 516

climate x-xi, 36

Cold War 342, 397–8, 400, 408, 466, 484

collective farm (kolkhoz) xx, 302, 341–4, 347, 350, 352, 362, 368, 386, 393, 431–3, 437, 444, 452, 550, 551

collective responsibility (krugovaia poruka) 76, 206, 332

Collective Security Treat (1992) 486

collectivization 314, 316–7, 326, 335, 337, 341, 347, 351, 353–4, 367, 417, 520, 550

College of the Economy 141

colonization xi, 35, 39, 119, 153, 477

Cominform xix

Comintern (Communist International) 318, 320, 361, 370; see also Third International

commerce 7, 14, 21–3, 33, 35, 47, 138–9, 142, 175, 209, 212

Commission on Religious

Questions 335

Committees of Public

Organizations 278

Commonwealth of Independent States

(CIS) xix, 477, 486, 554–5

commune 35, 37, 42, 46–7, 50–1, 54–5, 62, 140, 143, 205–6, 213–4, 217, 221, 226, 228, 236, 242, 247, 260, 285, 328–9, 359

communism 226, 290–1, 293, 300–3, 329, 355, 384, 391, 395, 407, 414, 425, 427, 451, 516

Communist Academy 334

Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) xix, 308–9, 317, 319–20, 329, 341–3, 347, 355, 366, 391, 394, 414, 417–18, 428, 436, 459–61, 464–5, 467, 492, 502, 554–6, 558, 562

Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) xix, 554

Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire 187, 545

Complex Method 334–5

Congress of Berlin, 230

Congress of People’s Deputies (CPD), xix, 459–61, 465, 554

Congress of Vienna 178

Conquest, R. 368

Constantine 124, 179

Constantinople 6, 10, 26, 27, 88, 108, 135–6, 280, 298, 540

Constituent Assembly 253, 255, 274, 277–9, 282, 290, 295–7, 548–9

constitution 126, 128, 136, 150, 169, 170–2, 180–3, 186, 192, 197, 230, 234, 246, 248–52, 254–8, 267, 302, 341–2, 361–2, 437, 439, 466–7, 470, 472, 485, 488–9, 492, 506–8, 521, 544, 549–50, 553–5, 562

constitutional monarchy 183, 267

constructivism 305, 338

Continental Blockade 174–5

continuous workweek 359

Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) 518, 562

Copenhagen 121

corporal punishment 110, 137–9, 148, 207, 548

corvée (barshchina) 148, 153–4, 155, 166, 172, 215, 545

Cossacks 34, 47, 51, 67, 72

Council of Ministers 409, 421–2

Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) 293, 314

Council of Seven Boyars 71–2

Council of the Realm (zemskii sobor) xxiii, 59, 65, 68, 71, 77, 79, 81, 108

Council of the Republic 290

counter-revolution 199, 227–8, 230, 233, 275, 288, 291, 293, 360, 369, 410, 416–8

Coup d’état of 3 June 1905 258, 267

Courland, duke of, 116, 125, 127

courts 8–9, 38–9, 82, 106, 150, 158, 181, 187, 206, 210, 212, 224, 232, 236, 255, 333, 421, 483

Coyet, B. 78

CPU xix; see Congress of People’s Deputies

CPRF xix; see Communist Party of the Russian Federation

CPSU: see Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Cracow 68

Crawford summit 559

crime 39, 229, 328, 369, 396, 483

Crimea 28, 98, 103, 129, 151, 196, 203, 411, 463, 520

Crimean Tatars 41, 66

Crimean War xiv, 168, 188, 194–7, 199, 201, 211, 216, 224, 546

Cuba 428, 553

cubism 338

cultural revolution 116–7, 119, 145, 305, 316–7, 340, 354–8, 364, 550

currency 175, 195, 197, 303, 308, 322, 392, 400, 443, 455, 459, 497, 561

Cyprian, Metropolitan 26–7

Czartoryski, A. 170

Czech Action Programme 436

Czech Legion 297

Czech Republic 484, 517, 523, 557, 561–2

Czechoslovakia 370–1, 401–2, 438, 445, 552–3

D-Day 389

Dagestan 490

Daniel, Iu. 437–8, 553

Daniil of Galicia 16

Daniil Romanovich 16

Daniilovichi 18–20, 24–5, 28

danshchik 51

Danube 4, 15

Danzig 118

Dardanelles 398

Dargomyzhsky, A. 193

Dashkova, E. 173

Day in the Life of an Oprichnik 513

De Custine, Marquis 190

De Gelder, A. 106

De Maistre, J. 180

De-Stalinization 412–3, 417–20, 422, 428, 552

Deane, J. 107

decree, 55, 68–9, 81, 143, 146, 157, 163, 166–7, 170–1, 223, 229, 292–3, 301–2, 308, 330, 331, 335, 349, 354, 393, 412, 442, 468, 551; see also law; manifestoes; statutes

dedovshchina 472

deficit (budgetary) 75, 259, 407, 443–4, 454–5, 474, 525

defitsity (goods shortage) 430, 454, 459

dekulakization 349–50, 352

Demidov, N. 113

democracy 172, 235, 242, 277, 282, 287–9, 295, 309, 366, 429, 451, 466, 495, 500, 507, 515–6

democratic centralism 294–5, 458

Democratic Conference 248

Democratic Platform 554

Democratic Russia 461

democratization 194, 218, 277, 278, 280, 282, 283–4, 418–19, 421, 424, 427, 439, 458–61, 506, 521

demography xi, 444, 512, 522; see also population

Denikin, A.I. 297–8

Denmark 66, 108, 110

Deripaska, O. 525

Derpt 111

Desht-i-Kipchak 15

détente 434, 445–6, 448, 456, 458

deti boiarskie 37

Deulino, Treaty of 41, 76, 548

Development of Capitalism in Russia 248, 547

Devier, A. 125

Diachenko, T. 469

dikoe pole xix, 67, 84

‘Dictatorship of the Heart’ 230, 547

Directorate of Spiritual Affairs 182

disorders 82, 200–1, 203–4, 207–8, 226, 233, 286, 290, 322, 413, 415, 432, 547, 553–4

dissent 161, 437–8, 446–7

divorce 40, 108, 223, 278, 305, 331–3, 434, 549–50

‘Dizziness from Success’ 550

Dmitrii Ivanovich (Dmitrii Donskoi) 20–7, 58, 540

Dmitrii, tsarevich 65–6, 68–72

Dmitrov 38

Dnepropetrovsk 441

Dneprstroi dam 346

Dnieper 3–6, 84, 86, 91

Doctor Zhivago 429, 552

doctors’ plot 406, 410, 552

‘Doing Business’ 500

Dolgorukii, I. 125

Dolgorukiis 126

Domostroi 44–5, 57

Don River 3, 103

Don Coassacks 79, 83, 114

Donbas 293, 346, 352, 363

Donets River 42, 315, 383

Donetsk 352

Dormition (Uspenskii) Cathedral 56–7

Dorogobuzh 48

Doroshenko, P. 91

Dorpat 114, 173, 232

Dostoevsky, F. 193, 547

Dovzhenko, A. 338

Dresden 106

Drone, The 164

dual power (dvoevlastie) 253, 275, 277, 279–81, 287

Dubčcek, A. 436

Duchy of Warsaw 174

Duma, xix, 254, 257–64, 268, 271–2, 274–7, 287, 299, 467–8, 491–3, 502–3, 508, 548, 555, 557–62

Durkheim, É. 60

Durnovo, P.N. 269–70

Dvina River 1, 25, 34, 54, 57

Dzerzhinskii, F. 295

d’iaki 38

D’Oldendorf 179

East Germany 460, 462, 490

East Prussia 382

East Slav 1, 4, 9, 34–6, 43, 51

Eastern Orthodoxy, see Russian

Orthodox Church

Ecclesiastical Regulation 543

economy 8, 45, 100, 141, 144, 146, 151, 153, 155, 197, 213, 237, 241, 246, 248, 259, 264, 272, 279–80, 282, 287, 291, 293, 300–3, 307–8, 314, 320–3, 325, 327, 341, 344, 358, 383, 385–6, 390, 392, 394, 402, 408, 423, 428, 429, 435, 440–3, 450–6, 461, 465–6, 469, 471, 476, 478, 480, 483, 489, 494, 496–8, 515, 521, 524, 527, 559

education 43, 87, 94, 130, 162, 182, 189, 202, 210, 227, 231, 265, 278, 334, 336, 361, 366, 397, 454, 471, 474, 476, 511, 547

Egypt 216, 400, 428

Ehrenburg, I. 368, 413, 552

Eighth Party Congress, 295, 554

Eisenstein, S. 252, 338, 397

Eismont, N.B. 351

Ekaterina Ivanovna 116

Ekaterinburg 156

Ekaterinodar 297

Ekaterinoslav 256

Elbe 551

electoral law 255, 260, 275, 561

electrification 323, 330, 411

Elets 42

Eleventh Party Congress 310, 549

Elizabeth 127–8, 132, 134–6, 150, 544

emancipation (serf) 173, 180–1, 197, 199, 200–9, 213–19, 221, 229–30, 237, 249, 545–6

Emergency Committee 463

emigration 256, 443, 447, 463, 553

Enghien, Duke 174

England 32, 46, 53, 59–60, 66, 106–7, 117, 129, 151, 174, 238, 244, 264, 320, 507

English Muscovy Company 53

Enisei River 34, 67

Eniseisk 79

enlightened absolutism 161, 166, 186

enlightenment 93, 133, 135, 137, 140, 143, 146, 149, 155, 158, 161–6, 187, 192, 250, 544

Enlightenment, Commissariat

of 304–5, 334

Ermak 541

Erskine, R. 107, 118

Esenin, S. 339

estate 37, 46–7, 54, 60, 66, 137, 217–18, 220, 234, 237, 287, 292

Estland 114, 172

Estonia 135, 151–2, 395, 462, 484, 554

eternal peace 98, 542

Euler, L. 130

Eurasianism 494

Evdokiia 101, 108

Evfimii 97

exports 113, 129, 151, 155, 217, 301, 318, 323, 443, 450, 454–5, 499, 466, 470, 476, 478, 489, 498–500, 519, 525, 527

Ezhov, N.I. 365–8, 370, 550

factory committees 278, 284, 289, 294

Fainsod, M. 291

Falconet, É M. 133

False Dmitrii 67–8, 70

family 8, 10, 32, 39–40, 43–5, 48, 54, 56–9, 65, 68, 75, 87, 90, 94, 96, 98, 101, 125, 140–1, 146–9, 155, 170, 173–4, 202, 213–14, 219, 221, 223, 305, 331–3, 363, 369–70, 414, 434, 440, 444, 452, 469, 491–2, 501–2, 549–50

famine 53, 66, 209, 238–9, 322–3, 336, 354, 358, 390, 392–3, 410, 478, 520, 547, 549, 550–1

Far East 243, 245, 383–4

Farquharson, H. 101, 109

fascism 370, 414, 446

Fatherland-All Russia, 559

Fathers and Sons 225, 546

FDI: see Foreign Direct Investment

February Revolution 273–4, 277, 280, 287, 548

Federation Council 508

Fedor Alekseevich 90–4, 96, 101

Fedor Ivanovich 31, 32, 40, 65–7

Fedotov, P. 193

Federal Security Service (FSB) 472

Ferapontov Monastery 35

Fergana Grand Canal 372

Fifteenth Party Congress 314, 549

Fifth Five-Year Plan 423

Filaret (Romanov) 64, 70–4, 76–7, 89, 542

finances (state) 60, 63, 93, 151, 153, 175, 188, 196, 243, 456, 478, 525

Finland xi, 9, 15, 33, 40, 120–1, 197–8, 224, 256–7, 278, 283, 299, 371, 376, 378, 545

Finno-Ugric 34–6, 42–4

First All-Russian Congress of

Soviets 285, 548

First Five-Year Plan 316, 348–9, 352–3, 356, 358–60, 371, 549–50

First Secretary 409–10, 412, 416, 430, 432, 434–5, 462, 552

Fitzpatrick, S. 357

Fligel’-de-Fam 111

folklorism 362

Fonvizin, D. 164

‘forbidden years’ 54, 66

foreign debt 443, 455, 474, 478, 498

foreign direct investment (FDI) 476, 478, 499, 500–1

foreign exchange reserves 498, 511, 524, 527

Foreign Office (Inozemnyi prikaz) 78, 80

foreign policy 33, 38, 52, 74, 77, 84, 86, 96, 127, 134–5, 149, 243–4, 258, 280, 318–19, 371, 379, 397–400, 408, 448, 449, 456, 458, 463, 487, 515, 519, 523, 556

Foreign (‘German’) Suburb 87, 97, 102

foreign trade 8, 120, 140, 217

foundling homes 173

Fourteenth Party Congress 313

Fourth Five-Year Plan 393

France xi, 31, 46, 59, 60, 66, 106, 121, 134–5, 162, 170–1, 174–5, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186, 195–6, 244–5, 264, 270–1, 296, 320–1, 370–1, 376, 379, 390

Franco, S.B. 371

Frederick III 106

Free Cultivators Law 172

French Revolution of 1789: 165

French Revolution of 1848: 249

Friends of God 88

FSB: see Federal Security Service

Frunze 344

Fundamental Laws 258; see also constitution

futurism 266, 305, 337

Gaidar, E. 465, 554

Galich, 20

Galicia 5, 14, 16, 18

Gangut 111

Gapon, G. 250–1

Gates, R. 457

Gazprom 501, 505, 522, 558, 561

GDP: see gross domestic product

General Secretary 295, 310–11, 313, 315, 342, 435–6, 438, 450–3, 455, 460, 549, 553

Genghis Khan 13

Genoa 116

Genoa Conference 320, 549

gentry 36, 47–8, 50–1, 54, 61, 208, 215, 217, 237, 243–4, 248, 254, 259, 260–1, 299, 371; see also nobility

Georgia 404, 420, 448, 464, 506, 516, 518, 520–1, 523, 545, 553, 562

German Communist Party 319

Germany xi, 66, 153, 186, 197, 233, 244–5, 253, 264, 269–70, 272, 296, 320, 365, 370, 375–84, 387, 389–420, 460, 462, 490, 551, 561

Germogen, Patriarch 71

Getty, J.A. 365, 367

Gilels, E. 362

gini coefficient 479, 511

Gippius, Z. 265

Gladkov, F. 339

glasnost xx, 205, 213, 236, 366, 459–61

glavki 293

Gleb, prince 12, 539

Glinka, M. 193

globalization 489, 496

Glück, E. 110

GNP 376, 423, 440; see also Gross

National Product

Godunov, Boris: see Boris (Godunov)

Godunov, Fedor 67

Godunova, Ksenia 66

Gogol, N. 190, 192, 546

gold standard 547

Golden Gates of Kiev 7

Golden Gates of Vladimir 12

Goldbach, C. 130

Golden Horde, 15, 18–19, 22–4, 28–9

Golitsyn, B. 102

Golitsyn, D. 126–7

Golitsyn, V.V. 91–3, 96–8, 102–3, 105, 542

golodomor 520

Golovkin, G. 128

Gomulka, W. 402

GONGO 506

‘good governance’ 496, 499

Good Neighbor Treaty of Frendship and Cooperation 559

Gorbachev, M.S. 450–7, 459–60, 553–4

Gorbacheva, R. 453

Gorchakov, M. 202

Gordon, P. 102

Goremykin, I. 259

Gorky 441, 448, 553

gosti 37, 92, 108; see also merchants

gosudarstvenniki xx, 202, 210

governors 38, 42, 50–1, 60, 72, 86, 93, 158, 204, 229, 278, 492, 508, 560

grain procurement 347

Gramsci, A. 304

Grand Embassy 104–6, 542

Grande Armée 177

Great Britain 174, 179, 424, 507, 549;

see also England

Great Depression 345, 475

Great Horde 28

Great Instruction 161–2, 544

Great Patriotic War 372, 397; see also World War II

Great Reforms 182, 194, 199, 207, 209–12, 217, 219, 224–5, 230–1, 235–6, 546

Great Terror 368, 553; see also purges

Great Turn 307, 318, 344, 349, 370

Greece 133, 179, 183, 398

Greens 296, 302

Gregorian calendar 306

Griboedov, A. 357

Grigorii, J.G. 87

Gromyko, A. 143, 452

Gronskii, I.M. 415

gross domestic product (GDP) 430, 456, 475, 496–8, 501, 511, 523–7

Groznyi 491, 558, 560

Guchkov, A.I. 263, 276, 280

guilds 60, 138–9

Guizot, F. 325

GULAG xx, 365, 369, 386, 396, 407, 410, 415–6, 555

Gulf of Finland 9, 15, 33, 40, 120

guliashchie liudi 38

Gusinskii, V. 501, 505, 558

Gustavus Adolphus 75

Habsburgs 32, 98

hagiography 58

Hamburg 82

Hangö 111, 121, 543

Hanssen, R. 558

Harvard Institute for International

Development 479

Haymarket Square 186

HDI see Human Development Index

heavy industry 109, 219, 267, 314, 316, 324–6, 363, 407, 412, 443

Hellenizers 97

Hellie, R. 46

Helsinki agreement 553

Hermann, J. 130

Herzegovina 264, 270

Herzen, A. 191–2

Hilarion, Metropolitan 8, 539

Hill, A. 131

Hindus, M. 348

Historical Letters 227, 546

historiography 85, 94, 202, 365, 420

HIV 483

Hitler, A. 371, 374–5, 379–81, 383–4, 387–91, 396

Holland 31–2, 53, 78, 82, 100, 103–7, 111, 117–18, 121, 123, 345

Holy Alliance 545

Holy League 98, 103, 542

Holy Synod 119, 182, 543

hooliganism 333

Human Development Index (HDI) 511–2

human rights 435, 445–7, 503–4, 519, 553, 555, 560

Human Rights Committee 447, 553

‘humanitarian intervention’ 519

Hungarian Communist Party 418

Hungarian insurrection 557

Hungary 9, 14, 156, 195, 245, 256, 376, 393, 402, 418–19, 429, 436, 460, 484, 551–2, 557

Hunter, H. 345

Iaguzhinskii, P. 128

Iaik Cossacks 156

Iaitskii Gorodok 157

Iakovlev, A. 349, 452

Iakutsk 79

Ianaev, G. 554

iarlyk 15

Iaropolk 4–5, 11

Iaroslav 6–7

Iaroslav Iaroslavich 16

Iaroslav Vsevolodich 15–16

Iaroslavl 14, 19–21, 32, 46, 72, 419, 540

iasak xx, 42, 51

icons 7–8, 22, 26, 40, 58–9, 62, 100, 119

idealism 225, 265, 357

ideology 59, 198, 270, 284, 291–2, 298, 300–1, 310, 320–1, 347, 383–4, 389, 399, 413, 468, 472

Igor 3

imperator vserossiiskii 116

Imperial Russian Geographic

Society 194

imperialism 279

imports 7, 14, 23, 34, 42, 107, 270, 456, 480–1, 498

INDEM 500

India 174, 428, 500

Indonesia 400, 428

industrial revolution 351

industrialists 317, 219, 261, 264, 272, 287

industrialization 213, 215–6, 234–5, 242, 308, 321–6, 341–3, 354, 360, 372, 407, 414, 417, 443, 478

industry 109, 113, 196, 209, 212, 217, 219, 241, 248, 267, 272, 276, 293, 301, 314–6, 319, 322–6, 344, 346, 355, 363, 372, 407, 414, 417, 443, 450, 478

inflation 53, 83, 142, 153, 155, 188, 273, 322, 344, 346, 425, 430, 440, 442, 466, 472, 475, 481, 511, 526

Ingermanland 75, 112–13

Ingermanlandskii Regiment 112

Ingushi 419

institutchiki 453

intelligentsia 221, 223, 225, 227–8, 238, 245–6, 248, 252, 264, 266, 282, 284, 287, 304, 338, 342, 354–7, 359, 368–9, 407, 425, 428–9, 437–8, 447

‘intensification of the class

struggle’ 348, 367

International Monetary Fund (IMF) 475, 557

International Women’s Day 273–4

investment 215, 267, 308, 320, 323–5, 344, 351, 361, 372, 402, 411, 424, 430–1, 440–1, 443, 449, 454, 455–6, 459, 476, 477–8, 498–9, 500, 523, 559, 562

Iakim, Patriarch 97

Iona, Metropolitan 58, 540

Iosif, Patriarch 88

Iran 6, 389, 398, 400, 485, 517, 557, 560

Iraq 15, 517

Islam 6, 299, 448, 458, 486–7, 514, 519, 521

Italian Communist Party 400, 418

Italy 105, 186, 320, 389–90

Itil 2

Iudenich, N.N. 298–9

Iurev University 232

Iurev-Polskii 46

Iurii Daniilovich 17

Iurii Dolgorukii 11–12

Iurii Vsevolodich 13–14

Ivan Daniilovich 19

Ivan I (Kalita) 18, 20, 22, 27, 540

Ivan II 19, 26

Ivan III (‘the Great’) 32, 38, 40, 46, 48, 50, 52, 56, 59, 61, 540

Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) 32–3, 38, 40, 49–50, 56, 61–5, 68, 540–1

Ivan V 95, 542

Ivan VI 128, 150, 544

Ivanov, A. 193

Ivanovo 289

Iziaslav of Kiev 10

Izvestiia 415, 434, 561

Jagiellonians 32

Jansen, J. 104

Japan 197, 245, 249, 253–4, 259, 264, 296, 300, 370–1, 383, 389, 498, 548, 551

Jerusalem, patriarch of, 76

Jesuits 97, 110, 160

Jewish Section (Evsektsiia) 358

Jews xii, 6, 85, 151, 219, 223, 224, 232, 248, 256, 303, 348, 356, 384, 404, 406, 445, 447–8, 545, 547, 553

Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow 164, 545

judicial statute (1864) 210

judiciary 38, 40, 52, 210, 235, 508–9;

see also courts

Julian calendar 108

Julius Caesar 104

July Days (1917) 286, 290, 548

kabala 55, 69

Kabardinians 419

Kabakov, I. 513

Kabinet 114

Kabuzan, V.M. 151

Kadets xx, 254–5, 257, 259–62, 276, 286, 289, 297, 299

Kadyrov, A. 560

Kadyrov, R. 504

Kaganovich, L. 345, 359, 410, 413, 422, 426

Kaledin, A.M. 296

Kalka, Battle of, 359

Kalmyks 154, 156

Kaluga 38, 70

Kama River 34, 41–2, 54

Kamenev, L.B. 290, 311–15, 321, 324, 362, 364–5, 367, 549–50

Kandinskii, V. 338

Kankrin, E. 188

Kantemir, A. 130, 162

Kapital, Das 546

Karachai 419

Karelia 34–5, 41, 75

Karl Frederick 124–5, 130

Karl Phillip 73

Karlowitz, Congress of, 106

Kasimov 39

Kasso, L. 263

Kataev, V. 356

Kazakhstan 394, 411, 431, 487, 519, 554–7

Kazan 28–9, 32, 39, 41–2, 45, 49, 51–2, 57, 156, 162, 173, 182, 208, 541

Kazan University 182

Keenan, E.L. 33, 61

Kenez, P. 293

Kerch, Straits of, 108

Kerensky, A.F. 276, 286–91, 297

KGB xx, 369, 418–9, 430, 432, 437–8, 446–9, 457, 461, 463, 472, 489–90, 507, 515, 561

Khachaturian, a.I. 397

Khanate of Astrakhan 28

Khanate of Bukhara 225

Khanate of Khiva 225

Khanate of Kokand 225

Khanate of western Siberia 541

Khanty 34

Kharkov 173, 380–1, 547

Khasaviurt Accords 556

Khazars 2–4

Kherson 2–3, 419

Khmelnitskii, B. 84–5, 542

Khodorkovskii, M. 473, 480, 501, 504, 509, 511, 560–1

Khodynka Field 240

kholopy 67, 81

Khovanshchina 95

Khovanskii, I.A. 95–6

Khrushchev, N.S. 377, 404, 406–35, 438–9, 444, 452, 486, 520, 552–3

Khvorostinin, I. 73

Kiev 2–6, 8, 10–11, 13–14, 16, 18–19, 26–8, 30, 32, 41, 51, 57–8, 78, 85–6, 88, 98, 118, 130, 276, 375, 433, 486, 520, 539, 551

Kievan Rus 1–30

Kikin, A. 122

Kim Il Sung 398

Kipchak Khanate 15

Kirgizia 344

Kirienko, S. 557

Kirill I, Patriarch 514, 562

Kirov, S. 364–6, 416, 426, 550

Kiselev, P.D. 188, 203, 545

Kishinev 256, 548

Kizhi 35

Klintsy 161

Kliuchevskii, V.O. xi, 33, 93

Kneller, G. 106

Kochubei, V. 170, 185

Koenker, D. 284, 289

Kokovtsev, V.N. 262

Kola Peninsula 34

Kolchak, A. 297, 299

kolkhoz: see collective farm

Kolkhoz Congress 362

Kolkhoztsentr 349

kollegii 543

Kolomenskoe 83, 96

Kolomna 20–1, 89, 540

Kolyma 393, 415

Kolyma Tales 393

kombedy 302

Komi 25, 34, 370, 544

Komi-Permians 34

Komi-Zyriane 34

kompromat 470, 491, 505

Komsomol xx, 330, 332, 337, 339, 343, 346, 355–6, 358, 413, 424, 480

Konev, I.S. 387

Konovalov, A.I. 276

Konstantin Mikhailovich 20

Konstantin Nikolaevich 202

Kopelev, L. 367

Korean War 398, 403, 408, 552

Korela 70

Kormchaia kniga 51

kormlenie 50

Kornilov, L. 287–9, 290, 296–7, 548

KoIJciuszko, T. 136

Kosior, S.V. 351

Kosovo 485, 521, 557

Kostov, T. 402

Kostroma 21, 46, 70

Kosygin, A.I. 423, 435, 438

Kotkin, S. 352

Kotlin Island 114, 120

Kovalev, S. 555

Kozlov, F.R. 433

Kozyrev, A. 484

Krasnodar, 440

Krasnopevtsev, L. 419

Kremlin 22, 26, 37, 47, 49, 52, 56–9, 67, 73, 78, 94–6, 101, 115, 230, 362, 368, 404, 408–9, 413, 427, 437–8, 449, 458–9, 469, 471, 471, 484, 490–2, 494, 504, 509, 539–40, 552, 558

Kritsman, L. 301

Krivichi 3

Krokodil 425, 438

Kronshlot 111, 114

Kronstadt 114, 308–9, 549

Kronstadt Revolt 309, 549

Kropotkin, P. 227

krugovaia poruka: see collective

responsibility

Krupskaia, N. 311–12

Krylov, I. 192

Kuban 380

Kuban Cossacks 296

Kuchuk Kainarji, Treaty of, 135–6, 195, 544

kulak, xx, 228, 259, 302, 314–16, 323, 325–7, 329, 347–52, 362, 368, 370, 550

Kulikovo, Battle of, 24, 27, 540

Kunst-Kamera (St Petersburg) 118

Kunstkammer (Dresden) 106

Kurbskii, A.M. 61

Kurland 172

Kursk 298, 381–3, 432, 505, 551

Kursk (submarine) 509, 558

Kutuzov, M. 177

Kyoto Treaty 560

Kyrgyzstan 469, 487, 506, 515, 517, 519, 556–7, 560

labour: see workers

labour camps 295, 342, 349, 351, 393, 402, 416, 483, 504; see also GULAG

labour discipline 282, 358–9, 371

labour unions: see trade unions

Lake Ladoga 34, 128

Lake Onega 34–5

Lake Peipus 9, 15, 540

Lake Pleshcheevo 101

‘Land and Freedom’ 227, 546

land captain 547

Landé, J.B. 131

landholding 37, 40–2, 46–8, 51, 53, 62, 71, 74, 97, 149, 170, 207, 214, 218

Lapps 34, 51

Larina, A. 369

Larionov, A.N. 431

Latinizers 97

Latvia 256, 375, 395, 462, 484, 554

Laurentian Chronicle 26

Lavrentii (monk) 27

Lavrov, P. 227, 546

Lavrov, S. 516

law 5, 8, 17, 20, 48, 50–2, 54, 57, 60, 80–2, 89, 92, 112, 114, 117, 123, 125, 128, 130, 133, 138, 142–3, 146, 154, 158–9, 171–3, 181, 187–8, 192, 203, 206, 210, 215, 221, 223, 229, 233–5, 247–8, 252–3, 255–6, 258, 260–2, 267, 274–8, 285, 287, 289, 293, 308, 310, 326, 329–32, 335–6, 344, 354, 356–7, 371, 374, 385–6, 393, 410, 434, 449, 452, 464–5, 468, 470–1, 474, 483, 490, 492, 495, 500, 503, 506–9, 522, 540–7, 550, 554, 559–61

law codes 5, 51, 52, 54, 57, 81–2, 187, 197, 540–2, 545

Law of Succession 133, 274

Law on Parties 503, 559–60

Law on Provincial Police 158, 544

Lazurkina, D.A. 426

League of Nations 320

Lebed, A. 469, 556

Lefort, F. 102, 107–8

left-wing communism 301

Legislative Commission 143, 161, 172, 544

Leibniz, G.W. von 107, 119, 120

Lejeune, L. 177

Lena Goldfields 263, 548

Lend-Lease 389, 392–3, 551

Lenin, V.I. 101, 240, 247–9, 264, 280–1, 286–90, 292–6, 299–306, 310–12, 316, 319, 321, 326, 338, 341–2, 352–3, 355, 360, 364, 375, 381–2, 385, 390, 396–7, 404, 411–14, 420, 423, 426–9, 468, 460, 490, 547–9, 551–2

Lenin Enrolment 316, 549

Leningrad 312, 352–4, 375, 381–2, 390, 396–7, 404, 412–14, 426, 460, 490, 551–2; see also St Petersburg;

Petrograd

‘Leningrad affair’ 404, 412, 414, 552

Leopold I 106

Lermontov, M. 190

Leslie, A. 77

Lesnaia 115

Lessons of October 312

Leszczyñski, S. 115–16

‘Letters from Afar’ 290

Leveling (uranilovka) 407

Levin, E. 43

Lewin, M. 345, 353, 367, 373

Liapunov, P. 72

Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) 502, 555

liberalism 182, 192, 208, 272, 279, 281, 411, 478, 496, 522

liberation movement 218, 221, 254

Liberman, E. 435

Life of St Peter 27

Lifland 172

Lincoln, W.B. 202

lishentsy xx, 303, 327

Literary Front 356

Lithuania 18, 22–4, 26, 28–30, 32–3, 39, 41, 51, 65, 67–71, 75, 78, 81, 83–5, 97–8, 103, 106, 151, 371, 375, 382, 395, 425, 432, 462, 484, 541–2, 554

Litvinenko, A. 561

Liubech 539

Livland 114, 135

Livonia 32, 41, 48, 53, 60, 64, 70, 86, 109, 541

Livonian War 41, 53, 60, 64, 541

loans 53, 55, 75, 83, 148, 245, 264, 454–5, 473–4, 478, 480, 487, 504, 525, 557

Locarno Pact 320

Lomonosov, M. 115, 130, 133, 162

London 85, 107, 388–9, 507

London Club 558

Lopukhina, E. 101

Loris-Melikov, M.T. 230–1

Lovat-Volkhov 1

lubok (wood-block) 143

Lukashenko, A. 521

Lunacharskii, A.V. 304

Luzhkov, Iu. 492

Lvov, 67

Lvov, Prince G. 276, 286

Lysenko, T.D. 397

Machine Tractor Stations 349, 351, 424, 431

Macmillan, H. 428

Madagascar, 119

Madrid Conference 557

Magnitogorsk 346, 352–3, 356, 361

Magnitskii, L. 109

Magnitskii, M. 182

Main Land Committee 279, 285

Makarii, Metropolitan 58

Makarov, A. 114

Malenkov, G. 398, 404, 409–13, 422, 424, 552

Malevich, K. 338

Malia, M. 283

Maloiaroslavets 178

Malta, knights of, 105

Mamai 23–4

Manchukuo 370

Manchuria 264, 383, 393, 551

Mandelshtam, O. 339

Mandelstam, N. 369

manifesto 92, 95, 109, 146–7, 157, 208, 231–2, 237, 255, 493, 495, 543–4, 546, 548

Manstein, F.E. 381

Mansy 34

manufaktura xx

Mao Tse-tung 396, 402–3

Mari 42

Maria Fedorovna 173

Markov, A. 414

Marquis of Carmarthen 107

marriage 8, 10, 17, 20, 32, 43–4, 49, 68, 87, 90, 101, 116–7, 121, 124, 143, 159, 213, 223, 305, 331–3, 543, 549

Marshall Plan 400

Martov, Iu. 548

Marx, K. 200, 253, 335, 413, 546

Marxism 242, 247, 266, 303, 305, 320–1, 357, 360, 414, 437–8

Marxism-Leninism, Institute of, 360, 437

Maryna, tsarina 70

Maskhadov, S. 556, 560

masonry, 165–6, 183

Matveev, A.S. 86, 90, 94–5, 100

Maxim, Metropolitan 18, 25–6

Maximilian of Habsburg 73

Maximilian II 49

May Day 305, 312

May Laws 256, 547

Mayakovsky, V. 339

Mazepa, I. 115, 119

Mecklenburg-Schwerin, duke of, 116, 128

medicine 115, 331, 374, 391

Mediterranean 31, 135

Medvedev, D. 520, 523–5, 562

Medvedev, R. 369, 489

Medvedev, S. 93, 97

Menatep Bank 473

Mennonites 153

Mensheviks 246–8, 263, 281, 284–5, 291, 296, 343, 548

Menshikov, A. 111–14, 116, 121–2, 124–5, 127, 543

mercantilism 32, 154

merchants 3, 5, 7, 37–8, 75, 77–8, 81–2, 86, 92, 102, 107–9, 113, 116, 135, 137–40, 155, 219, 221, 223–4

Merezhkovskii, D. 265

meshchane 138, 221; see also townspeople

meshochniki 303

mestnichestvo 49, 92, 147

Mexico 500

Meyerhold, V. 357

Mezen 34

Mezetskie 39

Michael, Tsar 73–5, 79, 89, 541

Michael Castle 166

Michael, Grand Duke 274

middle class 77, 170, 273, 481, 511

Middle East 195, 390, 517

middle peasant (seredniak) 302, 329, 348–9

Mikhail Iaroslavich 17

Mikhail of Chernigov 16

Mikhail of Tver 25

Mikhailovskii, N.K. 238–9

Mikhalkov, N. 512

military 3–5, 9, 11, 16–17, 19, 21–2, 30, 37, 42, 47, 49–50, 52, 57, 59–63, 66, 69–72, 75–8, 83, 86, 91–2, 95, 98, 103–4, 106–9, 111–12, 117–18, 124–5, 128–9, 135, 140, 144, 146, 156–7, 162, 166, 169, 171, 176, 181–2, 184, 191, 196–7, 200, 202, 208, 211, 216, 218, 222–4, 229, 232, 234, 244, 252, 254, 258–9, 261, 264, 265, 270–3, 277, 286, 288, 291, 293, 297, 299–300, 305, 307, 309, 319–21, 346, 347, 359, 364, 366, 369, 372, 375–81, 384–6, 388, 390, 394–5, 399–403, 408, 415, 417, 422–3, 428, 437, 445–6, 449, 452, 456–8, 463, 472, 484–5, 487, 489, 491–2, 494, 502–3, 507, 509–10, 515, 517–19, 523, 546, 555–62

Miliukov, P.N. 91, 250, 254, 266, 276, 280

Miliutin, N. 202

Millennium Manifesto 495

Miloslavskiis, 90, 92, 94, 96, 101, 105, 128

Miloševićc, S. 484

miners 263, 363, 554, 556–7

Minin, K. 72

Minor, The 164

minorities xii, 132, 151, 158, 199, 223–4, 232–3, 244, 252, 255–7, 261, 273, 277, 283, 330, 438, 446, 448–9, 465, 526

Minsk 86

mir 86

MMM stock fund 555

Mniszech, J. 67–8

Mniszech, M. 68, 70

modernism 265, 305

modernization 239, 443, 518

Mohyla, P. 78

Mohyla Academy 118

Moiseev, I. 362

Moldova 151, 520, 554

Molotov, V.M. 319, 345, 367, 379, 409–10, 414, 422, 426

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 379

monastery 8, 10, 21, 24, 26, 35, 37, 40, 42, 44, 56–7, 65, 67–8, 71, 76, 87, 89, 97–9, 102, 105, 108, 119, 122, 141, 159, 219, 223, 335, 337, 429, 539–40, 559

money 18, 76, 95, 151, 153, 155, 188, 216, 286, 300, 322, 392, 430, 454, 466, 474, 476, 479, 506

Monastery of the Cave 8, 10

Mongolia 14, 264

Mongols 13–18

Mons, A. 102

Mons, W. 124

Montesquieu, C.L. 175

Mordva 42

Morozov, B.I. 80–1

Mosalskie 39

Moscow 13, 16–19, 21–9, 31, 36–8, 40–1, 46, 48–52, 54, 57–9, 62, 65, 67–73, 75–81, 83–7, 91, 93–4, 96, 98–9, 102–3, 106, 115, 119, 121, 123, 126, 130, 138–9, 157, 161–3, 175, 177, 179, 196, 203, 206, 230, 240, 253, 255, 263, 272, 276, 287, 289, 293, 297, 300, 315, 317–18, 328, 352, 359, 361, 363, 367, 374, 375–6, 379–80, 383, 385–6, 389, 395–6, 401–2, 404–5, 410–13, 416, 418–19, 421–22, 426, 429, 432, 433–8, 440, 445–6, 452, 456–9, 461–4, 466, 480, 483–90, 492, 496, 499, 501, 504, 506–8, 513, 515–21, 523–24, 539–45, 554–5, 560–1

‘Moscow Consensus’ 499, 501

Moscow General Hospital and Surgical School 107

Moscow Metro 361, 363

Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation 109, 543

Moscow State University 396, 419, 452

Moscow University 162–3, 544

Moscow-Volga Canal 367

Mosfilm 473

Mozhaisk 20–2, 57

Mstislav Iziaslavich 11–12

Mstislavskie princes 39

MTS xxi; see Machine Tractor

Stations

Müller, G.F. 130

Multi-polarity 482

Munich Agreement 371

Münnich, B. von 127, 129

Murom 46

music 87, 103, 265, 339, 343, 397, 469, 494

Musketeers: see Streltsy

Muslim Congress 283

Mussorgsky, M. 66

Nagasaki 383

Nagorno-Karabakh 462, 554

Namibia 475

Nagy, I. 418

namestnik 50

Napoleon 166, 168, 174–80, 182, 196, 545

narodnichestvo 226

narodnost 187

Narva 57, 110–11, 114, 543

Narva 111

Naryshkina, N. 90, 94

Naryshkins 90, 95–6, 101

National Missile Defense (NMD) 484–5, 517–18, 523, 557, 562

National Security Council 469

national self-determination 179, 256, 299

National Well-Being Fund 498, 562

nationalism 179, 183, 186, 197, 257, 270, 283, 360, 402, 426, 446, 449, 462

nationality xi-xii, 186–7, 191–3, 197, 282, 299, 351, 408

NATO 403, 484–5, 515, 518–20, 523, 552, 557–8

natural gas 454–5, 498–99, 501, 505, 519–20, 522, 561–2

natural law 92

Naval Academy 110, 543

Navy 107, 109, 111, 134, 249, 261, 264, 377, 472

Nazi Germany 383, 387, 551

Nazimov Rescript 204, 546

‘near abroad’ 464, 484, 486, 520

Near East 300

neformaly 461

Nekrich, A. 437–8, 553

Nemtsov, B. 484

Nentsy, 34, 51

neoliberalism 465–6, 472, 475, 478, 496, 499, 507

NEP xxi; see New Economic Policy

Nepman 326–7, 339

Nerchinsk, Treaty of, 98, 113, 542

Nerl 12

Neva River 15, 114, 133, 194, 290, 311, 423, 438–9, 449, 539, 548, 553

New Commercial Stattue 86

New Economic Policy (NEP) xxi,

307–10, 312–28, 330, 332–3, 335–7, 339–40, 343–4, 347, 549

‘new realism’ 515

New Russia 154

‘new Russians’ 480

New Serbia 129

New Soviet Man 329–30, 332, 334–6, 338, 363

New Union Treaty 463

New York 289

newspapers 212, 244, 293, 315, 404, 407, 460, 504, 543

Newton, I. 106, 116

Nezhit 44

NGO 500, 505–6, 517, 561

Nicaragua 521

Nicholas I 182–4, 190, 197, 200, 205, 210, 219, 223, 238–9, 245, 255, 545

Nicholas II 238–40, 251, 255, 265, 267, 270–1, 274, 282, 547–8

Niemen 175

Nikon, Patriarch 80, 85, 88–90, 542

Nikon Chronicle 45

Nineteenth Party Conference 554

Nineteenth Party Congress 552

Ninth Five-Year Plan 443

Nizhnii Novgorod 21, 24, 36, 70, 72

NKVD 359, 364–5, 367–8, 370, 377, 550, 552

Nobel 219

Nobel Prize 429, 478, 552, 558

nobility 65–7, 69, 72, 81, 85, 91–2, 96, 102, 112–3, 122, 126, 128, 137, 141–2, 144–50, 154–7, 162–3, 167, 169–70, 172, 175–6, 180, 185, 188–90, 201–2, 204–6, 208, 215, 218–19, 225, 227, 229–30, 232, 261, 339, 544, 546–7; see also gentry

Noble Bank 232, 544

Noble Cadet Corps 128

Noble Land Bank 148, 547

Nogai Horde 16, 39, 41–2

nomenklatura xxi, 294, 360, 367, 443–4

Norilsk 415

North, D. 478

North Caucasus 13, 349, 514

North Korea 485, 517

Northern War 110, 113, 123, 542

Norway 390

Nove, A. 344, 358

Novgorod 4–6, 8–9, 11–17, 23–5, 28–9, 32, 35–6, 40–1, 46, 51, 54, 56–7, 65, 70, 72, 75, 82–3, 88, 539–42

Novikov, N. 164–5

Novocherkassk 432, 436, 553

Novodevichii Convent 98–9, 102

Novosergeevsk 104

Novosibirsk 447

Novosilskie 39

Novosiltsev, N. 170

nuclear disarmament 456–7

Nye, J. 107

Nystadt, Peace of, 123

Ob River 34

objectivism 338

obrok 37, 47

October Manifesto 237, 255, 548

October Revolution (1917) 288, 291, 306, 311, 348–9, 360, 369, 419, 494

Octobrists 255, 257, 261–3, 276, 299

Oder 382

Odessa 155, 248, 256, 375, 545, 548

odnodvortsy 140

Odoevskie princes 39

Official Nationality 186–7, 191–3

Ogurtsov, 94

oil 215, 265, 289, 380, 400, 443, 454–5, 473–4, 498–501, 504, 523–7, 560–1

Oistrakh, D. 363

Oka River 4, 21, 36, 38–41

Old Belief 59, 89, 114, 161

Old Bolsheviks 290, 369

Old Testament Trinity (icon) 24

Oleg 3

Olga 3, 5

Olgerd 26

oligarchs 469, 471, 492

Olonets 123

Omsk 297

On the Corruption of Morals 164

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 429, 553

Onega River 34–5, 183, 367, 389, 457

opala 55

Open Society 506

Operation Bagration 382

Operation Barbarossa 374

Operation Blue 330

Operation Citadel 381

Operation Tycoon 375

Operation Urans 381

oprichnina 33, 40, 50–1, 53, 60–1, 63–4, 541

optimists 263, 267

Order of St Andrew 114

Order of the Apostle Andrew the

First-Called 108

Ordin-Nashchokin, A.L. 80, 86

Ordzhonikidze, G.K. 345, 363–4

Orel 215, 298, 381

Orenburg 129, 153, 156, 544

Organic Statute 186

Organization for Security and

Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) 522, 559

Orgnabor 352

Orpheus und Eurydice 87

Orthodox Church: see clergy; Russian

Orthodox Church

OSCE see Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe

Osterman, A. 112, 125–6, 128

Ostiaki, 34

Osvobozhdenie 249

Otrepev, Iu. 67

Ottoman Empire 79, 85–6, 91, 98, 103–4, 106, 134–5, 170, 175, 179, 195, 197, 230, 244–5, 270, 542, 544

Ozerlag 415

Padua 105

Pahlen, P. 169–70

Painter, The 164

Palace of Congresses 438

Pale of Settlement 223–4

Paleostrov Monastery 97

Palestine 195

Palitsyn, A. 73

Palmquist 78

Panin, N. 169–70, 186

Papal States 216

Paris Club 556

Paris Commune 242

Paris, Peace of, 242

partible inheritance 146, 155

partocracy 433, 435–6, 439–40

party conferences 295, 348, 356, 554

party congresses 295, 308–14, 358, 362, 364, 378, 416, 426–7, 435, 438, 443, 449, 549–50, 552–4

Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR) xxi, 547, 246, 249, 250, 263, 276, 285, 287, 291, 296, 302, 547

Pashukanis, E.B. 357

passport system 236, 354, 425

Patkul, J.R. von 109

Patriarch of Constantinople, 6, 27

patriarchate 65, 76, 85, 88, 98, 119, 391, 541

patrimony 20, 32

Paul I: 149, 166, 168

Paulus, F. von 380–1, 551

Pavel, bishop of Kolomna 89

Pavlov, D.G. 388

‘peaceful coexistence’ 319, 321, 428

Peasant Bank 232

Peasant Union 253

peasantry 14, 35–7, 40, 42, 46–7, 50–1, 53–5, 60, 64, 66–9, 71–2, 74, 76, 79–81, 83–5, 89, 93, 113, 120, 124, 136–8, 140–2, 145, 149, 152–3, 156–7, 159, 161, 166, 172, 181, 185–6, 188–90, 195, 198, 201, 203–9, 211, 213–15, 219, 221–2, 225–7, 229, 232, 236–8, 240, 245–6, 252–6, 259–60, 264, 270, 274–5, 278, 282, 284–6, 191–6, 198–9, 302–4, 308, 310, 314, 316, 322–5, 328–9, 333–7, 339, 342–4, 346, 347–54, 356, 358, 362, 367, 369–70, 384, 386, 391, 421, 430–3, 441, 540–1, 544–7

Pechenegs 4, 7, 9

Pecherskii Monastery 539

Pechora 34

Peking 79

Pelevin, V. 513

pensions 425, 434, 437, 466, 481–2, 497, 502, 511–12, 525–6

People’s Deputies 459–61, 465, 554

People’s Rights Party 240

People’s Will 240, 246, 546

peredvizhniki 218

Pereiaslavl 5, 10, 12–14, 46, 57, 85

perestroika xxi, 435, 450–1, 457–61, 504, 513, 553–4

Perevolochna 116

Perm 34–5, 52

Perry, J. 107, 109

Persia 15, 129, 195

Peru 475, 478

Perun 6

pessimists 263

Peter and Paul Cathedral 123

Peter and Paul Fortress 114

Peter I (‘the Great’) xiii, 63, 78–9, 82, 90, 95, 98, 100, 112, 124, 126, 128–9, 131, 135, 141, 151, 155, 160, 174, 192, 238, 244, 543

Peter II 116, 125–6, 543–4

Peter III 132, 134, 141, 146–7, 149–50, 155–6, 544

Peter, Metropolitan 22, 25–6, 58

Peterhof 118

Petersburg soviet 253, 255

Peterson, A.M. 420

Petitions Chancery 57

Petrashevskii circle 193–4, 546

Petrograd 273–7, 279–80, 286, 288, 290–1, 293, 295, 298, 312, 348, 548

Petrograd soviet 275–7, 279–80, 290, 548

Petrovskoe 142

Photius, Metropolitan 29

Piatakov, G.L. 311, 365, 550

Pimen, Metropolitan 26

Pipes, R. 283

plague 53

Platonov 64, 80

Plehve, G. 250

Plekhanov, G. 547

Plenipotentiary (polpred) 508

Pobedonostsev, K.P. 230–1

Podgornyi, N.V. 434, 438

pogroms 256, 286, 303, 350, 432, 547–8

Poland 9, 14, 18, 59, 70, 72–7, 83–6, 98, 103, 105–6 116, 123, 135–6, 151, 174–5, 186, 195, 197, 224, 244, 256, 278, 296, 371, 378, 382, 402, 418, 449, 460, 484, 517, 523, 541–2, 544–5, 551, 557, 561–2

Poland-Lithuania 103, 106, 541–2

Poliane 3

Polianovka 78

Policeystaat 93

Polish constitution (1791) 136

Polish rebellion of 1830–1: 545

Polish rebellion of 1863: 224, 546

Polish sejm 72, 75, 181

Polish Succession, War of, 129, 544

Politburo 313, 315, 345, 349, 364–6, 404, 414, 418, 420, 435, 438–40, 446–8, 450, 452–3, 456–7, 459, 549–50

Politkovskaia, A. 505, 561

poll tax 124, 137–9, 142, 144, 154, 207, 221, 232, 547

Polotsk 4, 90, 93, 97

Polotskii, S. 90, 93, 97

Polovtsy 9–11, 13, 539

Polozkov, I. 554

Poltava 114–7, 121, 543, 547

Poltava 111

Pomerantsev, V. 413

pomest’e 46

Popular Front 361, 370

population xi, 7–9, 11, 22, 34–8, 54, 56, 58, 72, 79, 81, 91, 120, 129, 134, 136–9, 141–2, 144, 147, 151, 153–5, 158, 214, 221, 223, 237–8, 256, 308, 314, 328, 337, 343, 350, 352–4, 369, 380, 384–6, 390–1, 393, 395, 402, 406, 408, 416, 427–8, 430, 443–4, 460, 462, 464, 473, 481–3, 486, 497, 509, 511–16, 520–3

populism 226–8, 230, 238, 241, 246–7, 345, 366, 409–10, 414, 421, 427, 546

poruchnye zapisi 40

posad xxi, 37, 39, 47, 54

positivism 265

posluzhil’tsy 46

Pososhkov, I. 112

Postnikov, P. 105–7

Potanin, V. 469, 561

Potemkin, G. 135, 149

Potsdam Conference 393, 551

poverty line 425, 444, 481, 510

‘power ministries’ 502

Pozharskii, d. 72, 133, 541

Poznan 418

Pravda x, 349, 363, 409, 413, 415, 418, 431, 550

Predestinatsiia 108

Preobrazhenskii Bureau 105, 114, 126

Preobrazhenskii, E. 324–6

Preobrazhenskoe 87, 102, 104, 118

Presidential Council 461

presidential elections 491, 501, 507, 556, 558, 560

Presidium 410–11, 422, 435

price revolution 153, 155

prikaz xxi, 52, 77, 80

Primary Chronicle 3, 8, 27

‘primitive socialist accumulation’ 324

Prinkipo Conference 300

Primakov, E. 468–9, 492, 557

printing 78, 157, 162, 164, 194, 414

Pripet marshes 375, 382

Prisoner of the Mountains 473

privatization 465–6, 472–3, 475, 477, 479–80, 490, 504, 555–7

professions 60, 219–22, 235, 283, 356, 358–9, 363, 366, 403, 513

Progressive Bloc 271, 276, 548

Prokof’ev, S.S. 397

Prokopovich, Feofan 118, 123, 126, 159

Poletkult xxi, 304, 337

Promethianism 345

prostitution 327, 483

Protestantism 43, 126

provincial administration 158, 277, 544

Provisional Duma Committee 275

Provisional Government 274–81, 283–8, 290, 293, 297, 299, 301, 303, 548

Prussia 33, 106, 116, 123, 134–6, 174, 196, 382, 402

Pruth campaign 120, 543

Pskov 15, 32, 35, 40, 47–8, 51, 56, 82–3, 86, 540, 542

PSR see Party of Socialist

Revolutionaries

Public Chamber 560

publishing 117, 158, 163, 165, 437; see also newspapers;

printing

Pudovkin, V.I. 338, 397

Pugachev, E. 156–7

Pugachev Rebellion 132, 155–6, 158, 544

purges 341, 355–6, 360, 363–6, 369, 371–2, 377–8, 388, 402, 404; see also Great Terror

Pushkin, A.S. 66, 190, 192, 361

Putilov factory 251

Putin, V.V. xiv, 451, 471, 488, 527, 558–62

putsch (1991) 463–4, 554

Pyrmont 121

quitrent (obrok) 148, 153–4

rabfak xxi, 334

Rabonowitch, A. 286

Rabkrin xxi; see Workers’ and

Peasants’ Inspectorate

Radek, K. 365, 550

Radimichi 4

Radio Liberty 505

Radishchev, A.N. 164, 545

Raeff, M. 134

railways 196, 216, 253, 275, 353, 385

Rajk, L. 402

Rapallo, Treaty of, 320, 549

Rasputin, G. 267, 271, 548

rationalism 184

Razin, F. 83

Razin Rebellion 84, 89, 542

Razin, S. 84

raznochintsy 137

razriadnye knigi 50

re-kulakization 350

Reagan, R. 450, 457, 517, 553

realism 190–1, 265, 301, 413, 515

Red Army 289, 298, 300, 302–3, 327, 337, 354, 365, 371, 374, 377–83, 386, 392, 395–6, 550

Red Guards 288

Red Professors, Institute of, 334–5, 339

Red Scare 319

Red Square 72, 95–6, 118–198, 230, 312, 385, 438

redemption payments 207, 213, 215, 236, 259

reform 43, 61, 63, 76, 88, 91–3, 96, 100, 109, 126–7, 158, 161, 166, 168–73, 176–7, 179–90, 192, 194–7, 199–200, 209–20, 222–3, 225, 227–30, 233, 237, 240, 250, 254, 257–60, 262, 264, 278–80, 302, 310, 400, 405, 408–12, 415–16, 418, 420–2, 424, 427, 430, 432, 434–6, 442, 451, 461, 470, 479, 497, 507–8, 516, 541, 543, 545–9, 553–4, 558–9

Reformation 43, 45, 117, 119

refugees 272

rehabilitation 334, 359, 407, 415–18, 420, 552, 555

religion xi, 6, 117, 159, 161, 182, 191, 278, 306, 335, 337–8, 413, 446, 513;

see also Russian Orthodox Church

Renaissance 58, 101, 117–8, 489, 514

Repin, I. 223

Reporters without Borders, 505

Republic of Ishkeriia 556

Reserve Fund 455, 498, 562

Reval 86, 116

revolt 94, 150, 157, 184, 190, 227, 309, 358, 422, 509, 542–3, 545, 549; see also disorders; uprising

Revolution of 1905: 273, 548

revolutionary defencism 279–80, 282

Reykjavik Summit 457

Riazan 14, 28, 32, 36, 39, 41, 72, 284, 431, 540

Riga 86, 110, 116, 420

Rice, C. 516

Riga 86, 110, 116, 420

‘right deviation’ 316, 327, 550; see also Right Opposition

Right Opposition 314–5, 326, 344, 351, 550

Rittersporn, G. 367

Riurik 1, 3–4

Riurikid 4, 6–10, 14–17, 19, 24, 31–2, 64–6, 68, 539, 541

Riutin, M.N. 351

Robbins, R. 239

Rodchenko, A. 338

rodoslovnye knigi 50

Rokossovskii, K.I. 378

Roman Empire 59, 106, 112, 133

Romania 371, 376, 382, 393, 551

Romanov, F.N. 65, 70–7, 89, 542

Romanovs 49, 63

romanticism, 191, 193, 225

Rome 58–9, 93, 107, 118, 120, 133, 209, 269, 302, 345, 440, 507

Romodanovskii, F. 102

Roosevelt, F.D. 388–9

Rosenberg, W. 284, 289

Rosicrucians 165

rossiiskii xii

ROSTA 303

Rostislav Mstislavich 11–12

Rostov 14–15, 19–21, 32, 39, 46, 57, 248, 391, 440, 540, 546, 548

Rostov-Suzdal 5, 11

Rostovtsev, Ia.I. 546

Rowlandson, T. 136

Royal Society 107, 116

Rozanov, V.V. 265

RSFSR, 351, 395, 444

Rtishchev, F.M. 87

Rublev, A. 22

Rudder 51

Ruhr 313

‘Russia at the Turn of the

Millennium’ 493, 558

Russian Academy of Sciences see Academy of Sciences

Russian Ark 513

Russian Association of Proletarian

Writers 339, 356

Russian Federation xii, 411, 462, 464–5, 486, 495, 554, 560

Russian Orthodox Church xii-xiii, 6–9, 11–12, 16, 18, 20, 22, 25–7, 32, 35, 37–40, 43–5, 52, 56–9, 61, 64–6, 68–9, 71, 78, 82, 85, 87–90, 92, 96, 98, 106, 119, 122–3, 136, 141, 156, 159–61, 165, 194, 210, 212, 214, 219–20, 223–4, 229, 278, 300, 328, 331, 333, 335–7, 350, 361, 388–9, 391, 413, 429, 513–14, 539, 541–2, 544, 546–7, 549, 551; see also clergy; monasteries

Russian Social Democratic Workers

Party (RSDWP) 242, 246, 253, 547

russification 132, 232, 448, 547

Russkaia Pravda 5, 51

Russo-Japanese War 249, 259, 548

Russo-Swedish War of 1741–3: 544

Russo-Turkish War of 1676–81: 542

Russo-Turkish War of 1736–9: 129, 544

Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74: 157, 544

Russo-Turkish War of 1787–92: 544

Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8: 230, 546

Ruthenia 402

Ruysch, F. 106

Rykov 314–5, 324, 362, 365, 550

Ryswick, Treaty of, 106

Sacred Book of the Werewolf 513

Sadaev, M. 561

St Basil’s Cathedral 57

St Cyril Monastery 35, 37

St Isaac’s Cathedral 133

St Petersburg 100, 109–111, 113, 115–16, 118–23, 126, 128–30, 133, 145, 147, 149, 151–3, 163–4, 169, 173, 182–3, 194, 196, 206, 219, 222, 226, 229–30, 232, 241–2, 245, 248, 250, 253, 255, 483, 490, 496, 502, 522, 543, 545–7, 561; see also Leningrad; Petrograd

St Petersburg Naval Academy 110, 543

St Petersburg University 182, 522, 545

Sajudis, 554

Sakharov, A.D. 447–8, 456, 553

SALT-I, 445, 553

SALT-II 445, 553

Saltykov 74

Samara 298

Samarin, Iu. 201, 223

samizdat 446–7

samobytnost’ 187, 200

samoderzhets 62

Samoedy 34

samotek 352

samovlastie 58

Sandomierz 67

Sapieha, J. 69

Sarai, 15, 17, 21, 23, 26, 28

Savigny, F.K. von 180

Saxony 106, 108, 115

Scandinavia 2–5, 539

Schmidt, G.F. 135

scholarship 46, 342–3, 408

schools, see education

Schütz, H. 87

Schwartz, J. 165

science 119–20, 225, 248, 330, 334, 336, 339, 357, 397, 403, 444

scientific revolution 117, 119

SCO see Shanghai Cooperation

Organization

Sea of Okhotsk 79

SD 249, 261, 269; see also Russian

Social Democratic Workers Party

Second All-Russian Congress of

Soviets 290, 292

Second Five-Year Plan 358, 550

Secret Chancellery 87

secret police 127, 183, 203, 391, 404, 410, 471, 490; see also KGB; NKVD;

Third Section

secretariat 310, 315

secularization of Church lands 141, 544

Security Council 469, 472, 485, 490, 502, 517, 556

Sejm 70–2, 75, 181

Selected Correspondence with Friends 192

Semen 19–20

Semen (Bekbulatovich) 541

Semipalatinsk 344, 438

Senate 71, 112, 130, 158, 1702, 176, 182, 185, 543

Serbia 129, 484

seredniak xxii, 302, 348

serf 94, 132, 137, 140–6, 148–9, 153–7, 166, 172–3, 181, 185, 188–91, 197–8, 202, 205–8, 210, 212, 218, 220, 235, 544–6

serfdom 81, 142, 146, 153, 155, 157, 164, 167, 170, 172, 182, 185, 188–9, 191–2, 197, 199–202, 204–5, 209, 216, 231, 236, 342, 546

Sermon on Law and Grace 8

Serpukhov 20–1, 78, 419

Sestroetsk 120

Sevastopol 419, 551, 557

Seven Years War 134, 544

Seventeenth Party Congress 358, 362, 364, 378, 550

Severia 76

Shafirov, P. 112

Shakhovskoi, S. 73

Shakhty Trial 315, 355, 550

Shaklovityi, F. 102

Shalamov, V. 393

Shanghai Five 487, 519, 556; see also Shanghai Cooperation Organization

Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) 519, 561

Shaposhnikov, B.M. 387

shares-for-loans programme 437, 480

Sharutin 94

Shcharanskii, A. 553

Shcherbatov, M.M. 164

Shein, A. 104

Shein, M.B. 77

Shelepin, A.N. 433, 439

Sheremetev, B. 103, 105, 114–6

shestidesiatniki 452

Shevardnadze, E. 456, 553

‘shock therapy’ 358, 465, 475, 554

Shostakovich, D. 339, 397

Shuiskii, V. 66, 68–9; see also Vasilii (Shuiskii)

Shulgin, V.N. 339, 397

Siberia 32–5, 41, 45, 51, 53–4, 67, 78–9, 113, 125, 130, 150, 164, 176, 183, 185, 191, 193–4, 256, 297–8, 315, 344, 347, 352, 386, 393–4, 411, 419, 441, 468, 541, 544, 547, 557

Sicily 390

Siegelbaum L. 301

Silesia 156

siloviki 502

Simbirsk 84–5

Simonov Monastery 37

Siniavskii, A. 437–8, 553

Sit, Battle of, 14–15

Sixteenth Party Conference 356

Skavronska, M. 114, 126; see Catherine I

skhod 260

skomorokh 38

Skopin-Shuiskii, M.V. 70

Skrypnyk, M.A. 351

Skuratov, G. 65

Slansky, R. 402

Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy 97, 105

Slavophiles 191–2, 197, 201, 223, 241, 276

Slovakia 376

sluzhilye liudi po priboru 47

smallpox 126, 164

Smirdin, A. 192

Smirnov, A.P. 351

Smith, G.A.E. 441

Smith, S.A. 284

Smolensk 5, 12, 18, 28, 40–1, 48, 51, 67, 70–1, 76–8, 85, 98, 177, 368, 375, 540, 551

Smolensk Party Archive 365

smutnoe vremia 64

smychka xxii, 324

Sobchak, A. 490, 522

socialism 226, 243, 247, 281, 292, 294, 300–1, 307–9, 312, 316–19, 321–5, 327, 329, 341–3, 347, 360, 362, 367, 372–3, 414, 416, 425, 436–7, 549

‘socialism in one country’ 312, 318, 325, 549

socialist realism 413

Sofia 90, 94–8, 100–2, 105, 108, 539, 542

Sokurov, A. 513

soldiers 7, 77, 179, 181, 186, 252, 270, 273, 275, 277–8, 282, 285–6, 288, 300, 327, 337, 374, 376, 380–3, 385–6, 390, 392, 396, 510, 548

Solovetskii Monastery 35

Solovev, Ia.S. 202

Solovki 103; see also Solovetskii

Monastery

Solzhenitsyn, A. 239, 429, 447–8, 553

Sorokin, V. 513

Soros, G. 506

soslovie xxii

South Ossetia 520–1, 562

South Yemen 445

Soviet-Finnish War 551

Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, 371, 556

Soviet-Polish War 549

soviet 85, 149, 197, 200, 253, 255, 273, 275–81, 283, 285–96, 300–2, 305, 308–10, 312, 314, 317–23, 325, 327–39, 341–6, 347, 350, 352–64, 367–72, 374–8, 380–402, 404, 407–8, 412, 414, 417–20, 423, 426–30, 433, 435–40, 443–7, 449, 451–2, 454–8, 460–6, 470–2, 475–7, 479–82, 484, 486, 494–8, 505, 507, 512–3, 516, 518–21, 539, 548–9, 558

sovkhoz: see state farm

sovnarkhoz 393, 421–2, 433, 435, 552

Sovnarkom: see Council of People’s Commissars

Spanish Civil War 370, 377

Spaso-Prilutskii Monastery 35

‘specialist-baiting’ 295, 364

Spectator 164

Speranskii, M. 175–6, 185–8

Sportsman’s Sketches 191

Sputnik 423, 552

SR see Party of Socialist

Revolutionaries

Stabilization Fund 498, 511, 527, 560, 562

Stakhanov, A. 363–4, 371, 550

Stakhanovite 363–4, 550

Stalin xiii, 101, 280, 289–90, 292, 294–5, 299, 302, 307, 309–19, 321, 324–7, 340–52, 354–5, 357–81, 383–5, 387–8, 390–91, 393–420, 422, 424–6, 428, 430–1, 433–4, 438, 440, 442–3, 447, 449, 452, 460, 479, 496, 549–52

Stalingrad 380–1, 551

Stalingrad Tractor Factory 346

Stalinism 340–3, 360–1, 364, 366, 373–4, 381, 405, 410, 426, 551

Standart 111

starina 64, 90

Starodub 15, 21

START-I: 555

START-II: 555

State and Revolution 293, 548

State Circus 328

State Committee for Environmental

Protection 558

State Domains, Ministry of 188, 203

State Duma see Duma

state farm (sovkhoz) xxii, 347, 372

state peasants 140–1, 143, 181, 185, 188, 545

Statute on Provincial

Administration 158

statutes 40, 55, 68–9, 78–9, 81, 84, 86, 93, 97, 158–9, 186–7, 203, 206, 208–11, 214, 220, 237, 362, 393, 436, 544, 546, 550

Stavropol 436, 452

Stefan of Perm 25

Steffens, L. 300

Stepashin, S. 490, 557–8

Steplag, 415

steppe 4, 9–10, 13–15, 32–3, 41–2, 47, 54, 62, 84, 103, 346, 352, 394, 485, 319, 539

Stites, R. 362

Stoglav 43

Stolbovo, Treat of, 41, 75, 82, 541

Stolypin, P. 258–63, 328, 548

Stolypin land reform 548

Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) 380, 457

‘Strategy for 2020’ 523

Streltsy (musketeers) 51–2, 76, 81, 83, 91, 94–103, 105, 107–9, 114, 542–3

Streshnev, T. 102

strikes 222, 241–2, 248, 251, 253, 263, 274, 284, 286, 288–90, 322, 442, 472, 547–8, 554, 556–7

Stroganov family 39, 53, 75

Stroganov, P. 170

Struve, P. 247, 249, 266

succession law (1797) 123, 543

Sudan 557

sudebnik 5, 52, 81, 540–1; see also law codes

Sukharevka, 317

Sukhona 34, 57

Sumarokov, A. 162

Summer Palace 120–1

suprematism 305

Supreme Council of the National

Economy (Vesenkha) 293, 307

Supreme Economic Council of the

USSR 433

Supreme Privy Council (125–6, 543–4)

Surkov, V. 516

Suslov, M.A. 414, 416

Suzdal 5, 12–16, 20, 32, 39, 58

Sverdlovsk 441

Sviatopolk-Mirskii, P. 250

Sviatoslav 3, 10

Sviazhsk 57

Sv. Samson 111

Sweden 32, 41, 70, 77, 82, 86, 106, 110, 112–13, 115–16, 123, 129, 134, 541–2

symbolism 265

syphilis 483

Syr Darya River 372

Syria 400

Syrtsov-Lominadze Right-Left Bloc 351

Table of Ranks 111, 144–7, 158, 185, 189, 219, 543

Taganrog 104

taiga 1, 34–5, 41

Tajikistan 487, 556–7

Tajiks 448

Tale of Bygone Years 8

Tallin l74; see also Reval

Tambov 142, 186, 302

Tashkent Summit 554

Tatars xii, 27, 29, 39, 41–2, 47, 67, 72, 84, 98, 103, 129, 151, 154, 156, 419, 438, 470, 515, 541, 553

Tatarstan 470, 515

Tatishchev, V. 129, 131

Tatlin, V. 305, 338

Tauride Palace 274–5

taxation 5, 21, 35–40, 45, 47, 50–1, 53, 55, 59–60, 72, 75–6, 80–1, 83, 91, 93–4, 113, 138, 139, 141, 154, 171, 175, 188, 206, 211, 213–15, 229, 237, 280, 310, 316, 324, 327, 347, 393, 455, 466, 470–1, 474, 482, 499, 504, 507–8, 543, 557–61

Taylorism 359

Tbilisi 420, 448, 521, 554

Teheran Conference 551

‘temporary obligations’ 207

Temporary Regulations of 1865: 212, 546

Temporary Regulations of 14 August

1881: 231, 547

Tenth Party Congress 308–9, 549

Teplitz 120

Terem Palace 94

Tereshchenko, M.I. 276

terror 95, 228–31, 240, 295, 303, 306, 335, 341, 361, 365–8, 370, 377, 388, 397, 402–4, 407–8, 415, 417, 460, 490–1, 503–4, 509, 519, 521, 546–7, 550, 557–61

terrorism 227–31, 241, 246–7, 249, 306, 417, 490–1, 503–4, 509, 519, 521, 546–7, 557

Teutonic Knights 15

Thatcher, M. 456

Theognostus, Metropolitan 26

Third Five-Year Plan 550

Third International 305; see also Comintern

Third Rome 59

Third Section xxii, 203, 205

Thirteenth Party Congress 312

Thirty Years War 75, 77

Tilsit, Peace of, 174–5, 545

Time 562

Time of Troubles 40–1, 62, 64, 67, 69, 73–4, 81, 90, 133, 451, 541

Timofeev, I. 73

Timoshenko, S.K. 379

Timur (Tamerlane) 28

Tito, J.B. 401–2, 408

Tiumen, 431

Tkachev, P. 227

Tobolsk 34

Togliatti auto plant 436

Tokhta, Khan 17

Tokhtamysh 23–4

Tolmachev, G.G. 351

Tolstoy, L. 238–9, 546

Tolstoy, P. 122, 125

Tomsk 51

Tomskii, M. 314–5, 324, 362, 550

Torgau 120

Toropets 48

totalitarianism 101, 292, 342–3, 364, 408

towns 8, 14, 21–2, 33, 37–40, 46–7, 49–50, 54, 60, 66–7, 70, 72, 74, 76–8, 81–2, 84, 93, 114, 132, 137–9, 144, 152, 157, 209, 211, 218–9, 221, 223, 226, 253, 256, 260, 262, 276–8, 329, 392, 429, 432, 545

trade unions 284, 289, 294–5, 301, 305, 309, 314, 352

Traktortsentr 349

Transcaucasus 256, 334, 547

Trans-Dniester 520

Transparency International 500

Trans-Siberian Railway 344, 441

Trediakovskii, V. 130, 162, 380

Trezzini, D. 120

tribute 2–4, 10, 15–17, 23–6, 28, 34, 37, 42, 49, 51, 53, 56

Trinity Chronicle 27

Trinity-Sergius Monastery 37, 57, 99, 540

Triumf 111

triumvirate 311–2, 438

‘Troops of the New Order’ 77–8, 87

Trotsky, L. 253, 289–90, 301, 311–15, 321, 324, 326, 338, 360, 368, 377, 549–50

Trubetskoi 73

Trudovik (Labour) Party 260

Tsarev Borisov 42

Tsaritsyn 297

Tsvetaeva, M. 339

Tsykler, I. 105

tuberculosis 483

Tukhachevskii, M. 365, 376–8

Tula 41, 69, 78, 104, 113, 116, 191, 251, 298, 313, 326, 367

tundra 34, 51

Turgenev, I.S. 191, 225, 546

Turkestan 273, 334

Turkestan-Siberian (Turksib)

Railway 344

Turkey 79, 91, 98, 103–4, 129, 154–5, 157, 197, 230, 270, 371, 398, 542, 544–6; see also Ottoman Empire

Turkmenistan 444

Tushino 69

Tver 14, 17–26, 28, 32–3, 36, 46, 208, 230, 240, 483, 540

Twelfth Party Congress 311

Twentieth Party Congress 416, 552

Twenty-eighth Party Congress 554

Twenty-fifth Party Congress 553

Twenty-first Party Congress 426, 552

‘Twenty-five Thousanders’ 350

Twenty-fourth Party Congress 443

Twenty-second Party Congress 426, 554

Twenty-seventh Party Congress 554

Twenty-sixth Party Congress 449, 553

Twenty-third Party Congress 435, 438, 553

Twelve, The 512

Twelve Angry Men 512

U-2: 552

Ufa 41, 153, 297

Uglich 20–1, 38, 40, 67, 95

Ugnatev, Ia. 122

Ugra, Battle of, 540

Ukraine xii, 32, 59, 78, 85–88, 91, 94, 97–8, 115, 118, 150, 183, 197, 223, 256–7, 283, 286, 298–9, 344, 346, 354, 375, 382, 394–5, 404, 407, 409–12, 416–17, 448, 462, 464, 486, 506, 516, 518–20, 523, 544, 550–1, 554, 557, 561–2

Ukrainian Cossacks 91, 115

Ulianov, A. 240

Ulianov, V.I. 242; see also Lenin, V.I.

Ulozhenie 81, 542

Ulrich, A. xxii, 128

Ulrich, K.P. 128

Ulu-Muhammed, Khan 29

unemployment 289, 327, 332, 344, 429, 471, 511, 525

Unified labour School 304

Union for the Liberation of

Labour 547

Union of Liberation 254, 548

Union of Militant Atheists 336

Union of Municipalities 272

Union of SovietWriters 357, 550; see also Writers’ Union

Union of Unions 254

Unipolarity 486, 516

United Nations 428, 482, 485, 517

United Nations Human Rights

Commission 555

United Nations Security Council 428, 517

United Opposition 313, 315, 549

United Russia 502, 559–60, 562

United States 136, 182, 188, 215, 296, 300, 320, 338, 366, 370, 383, 389–92, 399, 402–3, 418, 424, 427–9, 445–6, 457–8, 483–7, 496, 500, 505–7, 510–11, 515–21, 523–4, 552, 555, 559–62

Unity (Edinstvo) 492

universal manhood suffrage 235, 251

universal military training 211, 218, 222, 546

university 105, 130, 162–3, 182, 194, 210, 220, 223–4, 232, 239, 248, 294, 304, 396, 419, 425, 437, 452, 522, 544–6

University Statute 210, 546

Uralic language family 34

Urals 5, 32–5, 39, 113, 129, 156, 242, 347, 352, 383–4, 386–7, 544

Urbanization 352, 452, 430, 443

uskorenie 454

Ustiug Velikii 19, 21, 25

utopianism 281, 292, 301, 304, 339

Uvarov, S. 186–7

Uzbek, Khan 17

Uzbekistan 372, 444, 448, 515, 519, 555, 558

Valdai Hills 1, 3

Valuev, P.A. 229

Van Geldern, J. 361

Van Huyssen, H. 108

Van Leeuwenhoek, A. 106

Van Thessing, J. 107

Varangians 2, 539

Vareikis, I.M. 351

Vasilevskii, A.M. 387

Vasilevkii Island 120

Vasilii (Shuiskii) 69–72; see also Shuiskii, V.

Vasilii I 21–2, 24–5, 28, 540

Vasilii II 25, 27–9, 39, 41, 540

Vasilii III 32, 38, 41, 61, 98, 540

Vatutin, N.F. 387

Vedomosti 117, 543

Vekhi (Signposts) 266, 548

Velikie Luki 48, 57

Venetia 98, 106

Venetsianov, A. 190

Venice 103–4, 107

Vereia 22

Versailles, Treaty of, 320

vertikal 496

Veselovskii, S.B. 33

Vesenkha xxii

Viatichi 3

Viatka 34, 540

Viazma 48

Vienna 49, 98, 107, 179, 264

Vietnam War 445

Vilna (Vilnius) 86, 173, 204, 382, 554

Virgin Lands 411–12, 424, 431, 552

Vitovt 28–9

Vladimir 7–8, 12–14, 16–18, 25–7, 29, 36, 46, 57–8, 70, 208, 539–40

Vladimir Monomakh 11, 539

voevoda xxii, 67, 72, 86, 93

Voguly 34

Volga 1–2, 4, 9, 12, 15, 21, 23, 28–9, 32, 36, 41–2, 51, 53, 54, 70, 72, 84–5, 109, 114, 156–7, 223, 239, 297–8, 349, 367, 380, 419

Volga Bulgars 4, 9, 12, 42

Volga Germans 419

Volhynia 5, 12, 14–16, 18

Volkhov 1, 3, 6

Volkov, D.V. 147

Vologda 35–6, 38, 57, 72

Volok 38, 97

volost xxii, 35, 50, 206, 262, 272, 278

volosteli 50

Volunteer Army 296–7

Volynskii, A. 128

Vonifatev, S. 88

Voprosy istorii 420

Voronezh 104, 108, 110, 298, 381

Voroshilov, K. 367, 387, 413, 426

Voroshilovgrad 411

Vorotynskie princes 39

votchina xxii, 42, 46, 96

votchinniki 48

vozhd’ 362, 406, 433–4

Voznesenskii, N.A. 404

Vsevolod Iaroslavich, Prince 10

Vyborg 116

Vyborg 111

Vychegda 25, 34

Vyg 161

Vyshnegradskii, I. 237, 244

vyt xxii, 54

wages 251, 282, 303, 328, 332, 359, 442, 444, 472, 474, 481, 523

War and Peace 546

War Communism 291, 293, 300–3

War Industries Committees 272, 273, 293

War of the League of Augsburg 106

War of the Polish Succession 129, 544

Warsaw 115, 174

Warsaw Pact 436–7, 449, 518

Warsaw University 224

Washington 398, 450, 457–8, 485, 499, 516–9, 521; see also United States

Washington Consensus 496, 499

Wesel 121

West German 400, 418

West Prussia 136

Westernizers 191–2, 197

Westphalia, Peace of, 77

What Is To Be Done? 225, 249, 546–7

white army 298

White House (Moscow) 554

‘white places’ 39

White Sea 33, 35, 53, 57, 77, 89, 140, 389

whites 298–300, 302

Wildman, A. 242

William of Orange 106

Wilson, W. 297, 300

Winius, a. 78

Winter Palace 133, 251, 291

Witte, S.Iu. 237, 241–4, 246, 248, 253, 259, 547

Władysław 70, 72, 75

Woe from Wit 357

women 45, 94, 118, 137, 162, 173, 174, 183–4, 214, 222–3, 242, 252, 263, 273–4, 305, 330–3, 337, 350, 358–9, 385–6, 390, 396, 482

workers 222, 233, 235–6, 240, 242, 245–7, 250–5, 257, 262–4, 275, 278, 281–6, 288–9, 291–5, 298, 303–4, 307–8, 310, 312, 314, 316, 318, 323–4, 328, 334–6, 338–9, 342–3, 350, 352–4, 356–7, 359, 363, 367, 369, 371, 380–7, 421, 432, 436–7, 442, 444, 474, 547–8, 550

Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin) 295, 356

workers’ control 281, 284, 295, 308

Workers Opposition 295

World Bank 474–5, 478, 496, 499–500, 511–12

World Health Organization (WHO), 483, 512

World Press Freedom Index 505

World War I 269–70, 274, 322–3, 328, 548

World War II 366, 380, 382, 388, 399, 401, 417, 475, 516; see also Great

Fatherland War

Wrangel, P.N. 297–9

Wreckers 417

Writers’ Union 359, 429; see also Union of Soviet Writers

Xinjiang 486–7

Yalta Conference 551

Yeltsin, B.N. 451, 459, 461, 464–71, 473–5, 478, 484–95, 498, 501–2, 504, 507, 513, 554–58

Young Russia 226

Yuganskneftegaz 560

Yugoslavia 399, 401, 408, 410–11, 484, 551

Yukos Oil 473, 504, 560

Zamoskov’e 36

Zaslavskaia, T. 453

Zealots of Piety 88

zemshchina 50

zemskii sobor: see Council of the Realm

Zemskov, V. 368

Zemstvo xxiii, 209–11, 213, 218, 220–1, 226, 228–30, 232, 235, 237, 239–41, 248–9, 254–5, 261–2, 272, 276–8, 283, 293, 546–7

Zhdanov, A.A. 366, 396–8, 404, 414, 551

Zhdanovshchina 396–7, 551

Zhenotdel (Women’s Section) xxiii, 305, 330, 358

Zhirinovskii, V. 502, 553

Zhukov, G.K. 380, 382–3, 387–8, 422–3, 552

Zhukovskii, V. 192

Zhurovskii, F. 119

Zinoviev 290, 311–15, 318, 320–21, 324, 362, 364–5, 549–50

Zionism 446

Ziuganov, G. 493, 556

Zoshchenko, M. 339, 396–7

Żtkiewski, S. 71

Zubatov, S. 242–3, 250

zubatovshchina 251

Zubov, P. 166

Zygmunt III 67, 70–1

Zymlinanskii 214

Zyriane 25, 34

Zyrianskii sudebnik 52

Copyright

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Russia : a history / edited by Gregory L. Freeze.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–19–956041–7 (pbk.)

1. Russia–History. 2. Soviet Union–History. 3. Russia (Federation)–History–1991

I. Freeze, Gregory L., 1945

DK40.R848 2009

947–dc22                2009026415

Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

Printed in Great Britain

on acid-free paper by

Clays Ltd., St Ives Plc

ISBN 978–0–19–956041–7

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Content

RUSSIA
A History
Third Edition
Edited by Gregory L. Freeze

PREFACE

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

GLOSSARY OF TERMS, ABBREVIATIONS, AND ACRONYMS

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND DATES

1. From Kiev to Muscovy THE BEGINNINGS TO 1450 JANET MARTIN

Kievan Rus

The Rus Principalities under Mongol Domination

The Foundations of Muscovy

2. Muscovite Russia 1450–1598 NANCY SHIELDS KOLLMANN

The Span of the Russian Empire

Culture and Mentality

Administrative and Economic Strategies of Autocracy

Mechanisms of Social Integration

The Autocratic Project

3. From Muscovy towards St Petersburg 1598–1689 HANS-JOACHIM TORKE

Crisis: The Time of Troubles (1598–1613)

New Beginnings: The First Romanov (1613–1645)

Foreign Policy and War

Internal Affairs and the Smolensk War

The Final Years

The End of an Era: Tsar Alexis (1645–1676)

The New Tsar

The Moscow Uprising of 1648

Continuing Instability

Cossacks and Borderland Politics

Western Influence and Church Schism

The Dawning of Modernity (1676–1689)

The Reign of Fedor (1676–1682)

Struggle for Succession

The Regency of Sofia (1682–1689)

Peter: Seizure of Power

4. The Petrine Era and After 1689–1740 JOHN T. ALEXANDER

Early Travels and the Azov Campaigns

The Grand Embassy to Europe

Reforms for War

Batic Expansion and Victory at Poltava

Cutural Revolution and Europeanizing Reforms

St Petersburg as the New Capital and Renewed Dynastic Disarray

Russia without Peter

Economic and Cultural Continuities

5. The Age of Enlightenment 1740–1801 GARY MARKER

Expansion and Foreign Policy

Population and Social Order

Townspeople and Merchants

State Peasants and Interstitial Categories

Serfs

Nobility

A Multinational Empire

Money, Finances, and Markets

The Pugachev Rebellion

The Church, Dissenters, and Popular Religion

Enlightenment and Élite Culture

Reign of Paul (1796–1801)

6. Pre-Reform Russia 1801–1855 DAVID L. RANSEL

Early Efforts at Reform

International Affairs

Mikhail Speranskii’s Reforms

Napoleon’s Invasion

After the War

Decembrist Rebellion

Nicholas I: The Early Years

Reforms of the Mature Years

Intellectual and Cultural Life

Close of the Reign

Conclusions

7. Reform and Counter Reform 1855–1890 GREGORY L. FREEZE

Why Reform?

Emancipation of the Serfs

The Other Great Reforms

Economic Development

Society

The Revolutionary Movement

Counter-Revolution and Counter-Reform

8. Revolutionary Russia 1890–1914 REGINALD E. ZELNIK

Introduction and Background

Industrial Progress and Rural Hunger

Revival of the Left

Labour Unrest

The Role of Foreign Policy

Revolutionary ‘Parties’

Militant Moderates: 1900–1904

Enter Father Gapon: A Road to Bloody Sunday

The 1905 Revolution

National Minorities

Constitutional Russia?

The Stolypin Reform

The Period of the Third Duma: 1907–1912

Problems of the Pre-War Period: 1912–1914

Literature and the Arts

9. Russia in War and Revolution 1914–1921 DANIEL T. ORLOVSKY

The First World War

The February Revolution

Provisional Government

Lenin and the Bolsheviks

The All-Russian Crisis

The Kornilov Affair

The Coming of October

Rebuilding the State

Civil War

War Communism

Revolutionary Culture

10. The New Economic Policy (NEP) and the Revolutionary Experiment 1921–1929 WILLIAM B. HUSBAND

The Politics of Revolutionary Consolidation

Foreign Policy of an Internationalist State

‘Building Socialism with Capitalist Hands’

‘The New Soviet Man’

Conclusion

11. Building Stalinism 1929–1941 LEWIS SIEGELBAUM

‘There is no fortress the Bolsheviks cannot take’

The War against the Peasants

A Nation on the Move

Cultural Revolution

Communist Neo-Traditionalism

The Great Purges

The Enemy Without/The Enemy Within

12. The Great Fatherland War and Late Stalinism 1941–1953 WILLIAM C. FULLER, JR

Soviet Weakness in 1941

Phases of the War

How the Soviets Won the War

The Costs of the War

Soviet Domestic Policies after the War

Foreign Policy and the Cold War

Stalin’s Last Years

13. From Stalinism to Stagnation 1953–1985 GREGORY L. FREEZE

Perils of Reform

The Struggle for Succession

Cultural Thaw and De-Stalinization

Twentieth Party Congress (1956)

Democratization and Decentralization

Economy, Society, and Culture

Twenty-Second Party Congress (October 1961)

From Crisis to Conspiracy

Perils of Restoration

From Reform to Restoration

Years of Stagnation

Economy and Society

Détente

Dissent

Towards the Abyss

14. A Modern ‘Time of Troubles’ FROM REFORM TO DISINTEGRATION, 1985–1999 GREGORY L. FREEZE

The General Secretary as Reformer: Mikhail Gorbachev

Power, Discipline, and Economic Growth

Economy: Structural Constraints

International Dynamics

Perestroika: From Modest Renovation to Fundamental Reconstruction

Growing Opposition, Shrinking Base

Crisis and Dissolution

Constructing the Russian Federation

The Yeltsin Presidency

‘Catastroika’

Society: Polarization, Degradation, and Deviance

‘Multi-polarity’ and the ‘Near Abroad’

From the Abyss to Renewal

15. Rebuilding Russia GREGORY L. FREEZE

The End of the Yeltsin Era

The Putin Vision

Economy: From Bust to Boom

Politics and Power

Rebuilding the Russian State

Society and Culture

Russia and the World

2008: A New President

From Global Boom to Global Recession

MAPS

CHRONOLOGY

PLATES

FURTHER READING

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL GUIDES

GENERAL HISTORIES

I. FROM KIEV TO MUSCOVY: THE BEGINNINGS TO 1700

GENERAL HISTORIES AND MONOGRAPHS

1. THE BEGINNINGS TO 1450

2. MUSCOVITE RUSSIA, 1450–1598

3. FROM MUSCOVY TOWARDS ST PETERSBURG, 1598–1689

II. IMPERIAL RUSSIA, 1689–1917

GENERAL HISTORIES AND MONOGRAPHS

4. THE PETRINE ERA AND AFTER, 1689–1740

5. THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1740–1801

6. PRE-REFORM RUSSIA, 1801–1855

7. REFORM AND COUNTER-REFORM, 1855–1890

8. REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890–1914

III. SOVIET HISTORY AND BEYOND

8. GENERAL HISTORIES AND MONOGRAPHS

9. RUSSIA IN WAR AND REVOLUTION, 1914–1921

10. THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY AND REVOLUTIONARY EXPERIMENT, 1921–1929

11. BUILDING STALINISM, 1929–1941

12. THE GREAT FATHERLAND WAR AND LATE STALINISM, 1941–1953

13. FROM STALINISM TO STAGNATION, 1953–1985

14. A MODERN ‘TIME OF TROUBLES: FROM REFORMS TO DISINTEGRATION’ 1985–1999

15. REBUILDING RUSSIA

INTERNET SITES

PHOTOGRAPHIC ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INDEX

Copyright