Russia A History Read online

  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)

  lasak

  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)

  Koms
omol

  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 outp
ost 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.