area handbook series 

Russia 

a country study 



Russia 

country study 

Federal Research Division 
Library of Congress 
Edited by 
Glenn E. Curtis 
Research Completed 
July 1996 



On the cover: "The Bronze Horseman," statue of Peter 
the Great in St. Petersburg, symbol of Russian autoc- 
racy and subject of a fantasy short story by Aleksandr 
Pushkin 



First Edition, First Printing, 1998. 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 

Russia: a country study / Federal Research Division, Library 
of Congress ; edited by Glenn E. Curtis. — 1st ed. 

p. cm. — (Area handbook series, ISSN 1057-5294) 
(DA Pam; 550-115) 

"Research completed July 1996." 

Includes bibliographical references (pp. 621-665) and 
index. 

ISBN 0-8444-0866-2 (he : alk. paper) 

1. Russia (Federation). I. Curtis, Glenn E. (Glenn 
Eldon), 1946- . II. Library of Congress. Federal Research 
Division. III. Series. IV. Series: DA Pam ; 550-115. 
DK510.23.R883 1997 97-7563 
947.086-dc21 CIP 



Headquarters, Department of the Army 
DA Pam 550-115 



For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office 
Washington, D.C 20402 



Dedicated to the memory of Ray Zickel, with deep appreciation 
for his painstaking work on Soviet Union: A Country Study, 
the predecessor to the current volume. 



iii 



Foreword 



This volume is one in a continuing series of books prepared 
by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress 
under the Country Studies/Area Handbook Program spon- 
sored by the Department of the Army. The last two pages of this 
book list the other published studies. 

Most books in the series deal with a particular foreign coun- 
try, describing and analyzing its political, economic, social, and 
national security systems and institutions, and examining the 
interrelationships of those systems and the ways they are 
shaped by historical and cultural factors. Each study is written 
by a multidisciplinary team of social scientists. The authors 
seek to provide a basic understanding of the observed society, 
striving for a dynamic rather than a static portrayal. Particular 
attention is devoted to the people who make up the society, 
their origins, dominant beliefs and values, their common inter- 
ests and the issues on which they are divided, the nature and 
extent of their involvement with national institutions, and their 
attitudes toward each other and toward their social system and 
political order. 

The books represent the analysis of the authors and should 
not be construed as an expression of an official United States 
government position, policy, or decision. The authors have 
sought to adhere to accepted standards of scholarly objectivity. 
Corrections, additions, and suggestions for changes from read- 
ers will be welcomed for use in future editions. 

Robert L. Worden 
Acting Chief 

Federal Research Division 
Library of Congress 
Washington, DC 20540-4840 
E-mail frds@loc.gov 



v 



Acknowledgments 



The authors are indebted to numerous individuals and orga- 
nizations who gave their time, research materials, and expertise 
on affairs in the Russian Federation to provide data, perspec- 
tive, and material support for this volume. Thanks go to Ray- 
mond Zickel, who organized the early stages of the book's 
preparation, including the selection of chapter authors, and 
who contributed the lacquer-box chapter illustrations. The 
research process was supported by the work of Joseph Rowe 
and David Osborne, who identified numerous valuable 
sources. The publications office of the Organisation for Eco- 
nomic Co-operation and Development in Washington, D.C., 
and Charles Yost of the International Trade Commission also 
contributed useful material. Ray Brandon lent invaluable 
research, editorial, and writing assistance as intern to the book 
editor. 

Thanks also go to Ralph K. Benesch, former monitor of the 
Country Studies/Area Handbook Program for the Department 
of the Army, under whose guidance the plan for the six vol- 
umes on the post-Soviet states was formulated. In addition, the 
authors appreciate the advice and guidance of Sandra W. Med- 
itz, Federal Research Division coordinator of the handbook 
series. Special thanks go to Marilyn L. Majeska, who supervised 
editing; to Andrea T Merrill, who performed the final prepub- 
lication editorial review and managed production; to Wayne 
Home, who designed the book cover and the title page illustra- 
tions for the ten chapters; and to David P. Cabitto, who pro- 
vided graphics support and, together with the firm of 
Maryland Mapping and Graphics, prepared the maps and 
charts. Vincent Ercolano and Janet Willen edited the chapters, 
and Helen Fedor was responsible for assembling and organiz- 
ing the book's photographs. The numerous individuals who 
contributed photographs are acknowledged by name in the 
photograph captions. 

The contributions of the following individuals are gratefully 
acknowledged as well: Barbara Edgerton and Izella Watson, 
who did the word processing and initial typesetting; Janie L. 
Gilchrist and Stephen C. Cranton, who prepared the camera- 
ready copy; and Joan C. Cook, who prepared the Index. 



vii 



Contents 



Page 

Foreword v 

Acknowledgments vii 

Preface xix 

Table A. Chronology of Important Events xxi 

Country Profile xliii 

Introduction liii 

Chapter 1. Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 ..... 1 
Zenon E. Kohut and David M. Goldfrank 

EARLY HISTORY 5 

The Inhabitants of the East European Plain 5 

The East Slavs and the Varangians 6 

The Golden Age of Kiev 6 

The Rise of Regional Centers 8 

The Mongol Invasion 10 

MUSCOVY 11 

The Rise of Muscovy 11 

The Evolution of the Russian Aristocracy 12 

Ivan IV 13 

The Time of Troubles 14 

The Romanovs 17 

Expansion and Westernization 18 

EARLY IMPERIAL RUSSIA 20 

Peter the Great and the Russian Empire 20 

The Era of Palace Revolutions 23 

Imperial Expansion and Maturation: Catherine II . . 24 

RULING THE EMPIRE 28 

War and Peace, 1 796-1 825 28 

Reaction under Nicholas I 31 

TRANSFORMATION OF RUSSIA IN THE NINETEENTH 

CENTURY 33 

Economic Developments 33 

ix 



Reforms and Their Limits, 1855-92 34 

Foreign Affairs after the Crimean War 37 

The Rise of Revolutionary Movements 40 

Witte and Accelerated Industrialization 41 

Radical Political Parties Develop 42 

Imperialism in Asia and the Russo Japanese 

War 43 

THE LAST YEARS OF THE AUTOCRACY 44 

Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1905-07 45 

The Stolypin and Kokovtsov Governments 46 

Active Balkan Policy, 1906-13 48 

Russia at War, 1914-16 49 

The Fatal Weakening of Tsarism 51 

Chapter 2. Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 53 

Thomas Skallerup and James P. Nichol 

REVOLUTIONS AND CIVIL WAR 57 

The February Revolution 57 

The Period of Dual Power 58 

The Bolshevik Revolution 60 

Civil War and War Communism 62 

THE ERA OF THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY. 65 

Lenin's Leadership 66 

Stalin's Rise to Power 68 

Foreign Policy, 1921-28 69 

Society and Culture in the 1920s 70 

TRANSFORMATION AND TERROR 70 

Industrialization and Collectivization 71 

The Purges 72 

Mobilization of Society 74 

Foreign Policy, 1928-39 75 

THE WAR YEARS 76 

Prelude to War 77 

The Great Patriotic War 78 

RECONSTRUCTION AND COLD WAR 81 

Reconstruction Years 81 

Onset of the Cold War 82 

The Death of Stalin 85 

THE KHRUSHCHEV ERA 85 

Collective Leadership and the Rise of Khru- 
shchev 86 



x 



Foreign Policy under Khrushchev 88 

Khrushchev's Reforms and Fall 90 

THE BREZHNEV ERA 91 

Collective Leadership and the Rise of Brezhnev ... 92 

Foreign Policy of a Superpower 93 

The Economy under Brezhnev 95 

Culture and the Arts in the 1960s and 1970s 97 

The Death of Brezhnev 98 

THE LEADERSHIP TRANSITION PERIOD 99 

The Andropov Interregnum 99 

The Chernenko Interregnum 100 

THE GORBACHEV ERA 101 

Gorbachev's First Year 101 

New Thinking: Foreign Policy under Gorbachev . . 102 

Gorbachev's Reform Dilemma 109 

Nationality Ferment 112 

The August Coup and Its Aftermath 117 

Chapter 3. Physical Environment and Population 121 

Glenn E. Curtis and David McClave 

PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT 1 25 

Global Position and Boundaries 125 

Administrative and Territorial Divisions 126 

Topography and Drainage 126 

Climate 134 

ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS 136 

Environmental Conditions 136 

The Response to Environmental Problems 148 

POPULATION 153 

Demographic Conditions 154 

Migration 161 

FUTURE PROSPECTS 167 

Chapter 4. Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 169 

Glenn E. Curtis and Marian Leighton 

ETHNIC COMPOSITION 172 

The Russians 173 

Minority Peoples and Their Territories 1 74 

Other Ethnic Groups 191 

Movements Toward Sovereignty 194 

RELIGION 202 

xi 



The Russian Orthodox Church 203 

Other Religions 210 

Religion and Foreign Policy 220 

THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE 220 

LITERATURE AND THE ARTS 222 

Literature 222 

Music 228 

Ballet 230 

Architecture and Painting 232 

OUTLOOK 234 

Chapter 5. The Society and Its Environment 237 

Glenn E. Curtis and Marian Leighton 

SOCIAL STRUCTURE 239 

Social Stratification 240 

Wages and Work 245 

Rural Life 247 

Social Organizations 248 

The Family 250 

The Role of Women 251 

Sexual Attitudes 255 

EDUCATION 258 

The Soviet Heritage 258 

The Post-Soviet Education Structure 259 

Higher Education 264 

Education and Society 266 

HEALTH 267 

Health Conditions 267 

The Health System 274 

HOUSING 280 

The Soviet Era 280 

Post-Soviet Conditions 281 

Land Reform and Private Enterprise 284 

SOCIAL WELFARE 285 

Pensions 286 

Worker Protection and Benefits 288 

The Homeless 292 

Chapter 6. The Economy 295 

William Cooper 

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 299 

xii 



The Eras of Lenin and Stalin 300 

The Postwar Growth Period 301 

Reform and Resistance 302 

The Perestroika Program 304 

Unforeseen Results of Reform 306 

ECONOMIC REFORM IN THE 1990s 307 

The Yeltsin Economic Program 308 

Monetary and Fiscal Policies 309 

Privatization 314 

Economic Conditions in Mid-1996 318 

NATURAL RESOURCES 321 

AGRICULTURE 323 

Crops 325 

Agricultural Policy 325 

Agricultural Production 330 

ENERGY. 331 

Exploitation and Consumption 331 

Oil 332 

Natural Gas 335 

Coal 336 

Nuclear Energy 337 

Conventional Power Generation 338 

Foreign Investment in Oil and Gas 338 

BANKING AND FINANCE 340 

The Soviet Financial System 340 

The Financial Sector in the 1990s 341 

Taxation 345 

THE LABOR FORCE 347 

Unemployment 348 

Wages 349 

MANUFACTURING 350 

Ferrous Metallurgy 351 

Nonferrous Metallurgy 352 

The Automotive Industry 352 

Machine Building 354 

Light Industry 354 

Chemicals 355 

TRANSPORTATION AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS .... 356 

Transportation 356 

Telecommunications 367 

FOREIGN ECONOMIC RELATIONS 372 

xiii 



Foreign Trade 373 

Foreign Investment 377 

Foreign Debt 379 

THE ECONOMIC OUTLOOK 380 

Chapter 7. Government and Politics 383 

James P. Nichol 

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 385 

THE CONSTITUTION AND GOVERNMENT STRUC- 
TURE 391 

The Executive Branch 391 

The Parliament 400 

The Judiciary 406 

LOCAL AND REGIONAL GOVERNMENT 408 

The Federation Treaty and Regional Power 409 

The Separatism Question 413 

POLITICAL PARTIES AND LEGISLATIVE ELECTIONS ... 415 

The Elections of 1993 415 

The Elections of 1995 417 

CIVIL RIGHTS 419 

General Civil Rights Guarantees 420 

Criminal Justice Protections 421 

THE MEDIA 422 

The Print Media 423 

The Broadcast Media 424 

THE POLITICAL OUTLOOK 426 

Chapter 8. Foreign Relations 429 

James P. Nichol 

THE EMERGENCE OF RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY 433 

The Search for Objectives 434 

The State of the Federation Speeches 436 

THE FOREIGN POLICY MECHANISM 438 

The President 439 

The Security Council 440 

The Parliament 442 

The Government (Cabinet) 444 

REGIONAL POLICIES 447 

The Near Abroad 447 

The United States 454 

Western Europe 461 

xiv 



NATO 463 

Central Europe 465 

China 469 

Japan 471 

Other Asian States 473 

The Third World 477 

The Middle East 478 

Latin America 481 

FOREIGN POLICY PROSPECTS 483 

Chapter 9. The Armed Forces 487 

William Baxter 

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 490 

MILITARY DOCTRINE 494 

Soviet Doctrine 495 

The Doctrine of 1993 496 

THE GEOPOLITICAL CONTEXT 501 

Chechnya 502 

The Commonwealth of Independent States 504 

Kaliningrad 509 

China 510 

The NATO Issue 512 

Nuclear Arms Issues 513 

THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY 515 

Structure and Conditions 516 

The Defense Budget 518 

New Weaponry Acquisitions 518 

Foreign Arms Sales 520 

Prospects for the Defense Industry 523 

FORCE STRUCTURE 524 

Command Structure 525 

Ground Forces 527 

Naval Forces 531 

Air Forces 535 

Air Defense Forces 537 

Strategic Rocket Forces 538 

Airborne Troops 539 

PERFORMANCE 541 

Troop Support Elements 542 

Crime in the Military 545 

Training 547 

xv 



Reform Plans 548 

PROSPECTS FOR THE MILITARY 551 

Chapter 10. Internal Security 553 

Amy W. Knight 

INTERNAL SECURITY BEFORE 1991 555 

SUCCESSOR AGENCIES TO THE KGB 559 

Ministry of Security (MB) 560 

Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK) 562 

Federal Security Service (FSB) 563 

Federal Agency for Government Communica- 
tions and Information (FAPSI) 564 

Main Guard Directorate (GUO) 566 

Federal Border Service and Border Security 567 

SECURITY OPERATIONS IN CHECHNYA 570 

CRIME 571 

Crime in the Soviet Era 571 

The Crime Wave of the 1990s 572 

THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM 577 

Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) 578 

The Procuracy 582 

Criminal Law Reform in the 1990s 583 

Secrecy Laws 585 

How the System Works 586 

PRISONS 588 

OUTLOOK 591 

Appendix. Tables 593 

Bibliography 621 

Glossary 667 

Index 681 

Contributors 725 

List of Figures 

1 Administrative Divisions of Russia, 1996 Hi 

2 The Principalities of Kievan Rus', 1136 8 

3 Territorial Expansion of Muscovy and the Russian 

Empire, 1550-1917 16 

4 Red Army Line, March 1920 64 

xvi 



5 Military Operations Against Germany, 1941-45 80 

6 Topography and Drainage 128 

7 Economic Regions, 1996 322 

8 Major Mineral Deposits, 1996 324 

9 Energy Facilities, 1996 334 

10 Major Roads, 1996 358 

11 Major Railroads, 1996 362 

12 Major Maritime Ports, Airports, and Sea Routes, 

1996 366 

13 Organization of the Ministry of Defense, 1996 526 

14 Military Districts and Fleets, 1996 528 

15 Organization of the Ground Forces, 1996 530 

16 Organization of the Naval Forces, 1996 534 

17 Organization of the Air Forces, 1996 536 

18 Organization of the Air Defense Forces, 1996 540 



xvii 



Preface 



At the end of 1991, the formal dissolution of the Soviet 
Union was the surprisingly swift result of decrepitude within 
that empire. The Russian Federation was one of the fifteen 
"new" nations that emerged from that process; in this form, 
Russians retained much of the domination over nearby minor- 
ity groups that they had exercised in the days of the Russian 
Empire and the Soviet Union. But the major changes that have 
occurred since 1991 fully justify the new subseries of Country 
Studies describing all fifteen of the former Soviet republics in 
their past and present circumstances. The present volume is 
the fifth in the six-volume series, which is the successor to the 
one-volume Soviet Union: A Country Study, published in 1991. 

The marked relaxation of Soviet-era information restric- 
tions, which began in Russia in the late 1980s and accelerated 
after 1991, allows the presentation of reliable, complete infor- 
mation on most aspects of life in the Russian Federation — 
including many of the negative aspects such as corruption, 
environmental degradation, and deterioration of the military 
that were reported only incompletely in earlier volumes. Schol- 
arly articles and periodical reports have been especially helpful 
in accounting for the years of independence in the 1990s and 
in evaluating the earlier times that form the backdrop for the 
most recent period. The authors have described the historical, 
political, economic, and social background of Russia as the 
context for their current portraits. In each case, the author's 
goal was to provide a compact, accessible, and objective treat- 
ment of five main topics: historical background, the society and 
its environment, the economy, government and politics, and 
national security. Military insignia, a standard feature of the 
Country Studies series, have not been included in this volume 
because, at the time of preparation, the Ministry of Defense of 
the Russian Federation was in the process of changing insigina, 
and budget shortages delayed its publication of a comprehen- 
sive chart. Brief comments on some of the more useful, readily 
accessible sources used in preparing this volume appear at the 
end of each chapter. Full references to these and other sources 
used by the authors are listed in the Bibliography. 

In most cases, personal names have been transliterated from 
Russian according to the system approved by the United States 



xix 



Board on Geographic Names (BGN). In the case of widely 
known individuals whose names appear frequently in Latin 
alphabets, such as Joseph V. Stalin and Boris N. Yeltsin, the 
widely used conventional form of the name has been chosen. 
Geographical names are treated in the same way: places such as 
Moscow and St. Petersburg and geographical names such as 
Siberia and Lake Baikal are rendered in conventional form, 
but all other geographical names appear in the transliteration 
of the BGN system. Some Soviet-era place-names such as the 
cities of Gor'kiy and Sverdlovsk have been changed in the 
1990s (to Nizhniy Novgorod and Yekaterinburg, respectively, in 
the case of these two examples), and the newest forms are used 
in this book. 

Organizations commonly known by their acronyms (such as 
IMF — the International Monetary Fund, and KGB — the Com- 
mittee for State Security) are introduced in full form, supple- 
mented with the vernacular form where appropriate. 
Autonomous republics such as the Republic of Chechnya are 
introduced in full form in the detailed description of those 
regions in Chapter 4, but short forms (in the case of this exam- 
ple, Chechnya) are used elsewhere. 

Measurements are given in the metric system; a conversion 
table is provided in the Appendix. The Chronology at the 
beginning of the book lists major historical events in Russia 
from the founding of Kievan Rus' to the significant events of 
the first nine months of 1997. To amplify points in the chap- 
ters, tables in the Appendix provide statistics on the environ- 
ment, the population, economic conditions, political events, 
and the military establishment. 

The body of the text reflects information available as of July 
31, 1996. Certain other portions of the text, however, have 
been updated. The Introduction and Chronology include 
events and trends that have occurred since the completion of 
research, the Country Profile includes updated information as 
available, the Bibliography lists recently published sources 
thought to be particularly helpful to the reader, and Table 23 
includes newly available statistics. 



xx 



Table A . Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



NINTH CENTURY 
ca. 860 

ca. 880 

TENTH CENTURY 
911 

944 

ca. 955 

971 
988 

ELEVENTH CENTURY 
1015 

1019 

1036 

1037 
1051 

TWELFTH CENTURY 



THIRTEENTH CENTURY 
1219-11 



1242 
1253 



FOURTEENTH CENTURY 
1327 



Rurik, a Varangian, according to earliest chronicle of 
Kievan Rus', rules Novgorod and founds Rurik Dynasty. 

Prince Oleg, a Varangian, first historically verified ruler of 
Kievan Rus'. 

Prince Oleg, after attacking Constantinople, concludes 
treaty with Byzantine Empire favorable to Kievan Rus'. 

Prince Igor' compelled by Constantinople to sign treaty 
adverse to Kievan Rus'. 

Princess Olga, while regent of Kievan Rus', converts to 
Christianity. 

Prince Svyatoslav makes peace with Byzantine Empire. 
Prince Vladimir converts Kievan Rus' to Christianity. 



Prince Vladimir's death leads Rurik princes into fratricidal 
war that continues until 1036. 

Prince Yaroslav (the Wise) of Novgorod assumes throne of 
Kievan Rus'. 

Prince Yaroslav the Wise ends fratricidal war and later cod- 
ifies laws of Kievan Rus' into Rus'ka pravda (Justice of 
Rus'). 

Prince Yaroslav defeats Pechenegs; construction begins on 
St. Sofia Cathedral in Kiev. 

Ilarion becomes first native metropolitan of Orthodox 
Church in Kievan Rus'. 



1113-25 


Kievan Rus' experiences revival under Grand Prince 




Vladimir Monomakh. 


1136 


Republic of Novgorod gains independence from Kievan 




Rus". 


1147 


Moscow first mendoned in chronicles. 


1156 


Novgorod acquires its own archbishop. 


1169 


Armies of Prince Andrey Bogolyubskiy of Vladimir-Suzdal' 



sack Kiev, Andrey assumes dtle "Grand Prince of Kiev 
and all Rus'" but chooses to reside in Suzdal'. 



Mongols invade: Kiev falls in 1240; Novgorod and Moscow 
submit to Mongol "yoke" without resisdng. 

Aleksandr Nevskiy successfully defends Novgorod against 
attack by Teutenic Knights. 

Prince Daniil (Danylo) of Galicia-Volhynia accepts crown 
of Kievan Rus' from pope. 



Ivan I, prince of Moscow, nicknamed Ivan Kalita ("Money 
Bags"), affirmed as "Grand Prince of Vladimir" by Mon- 
gols; Moscow becomes seat of metropolitan of Russian 
Orthodox Church. 



Table A. ( Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



1380 

FIFTEENTH CENTURY 
1462 

1478 
1485 

SIXTEENTH CENTURY 
1505 
1510 
1533 

1547 
1552 
1556 
1565 
1571 
1581 
1584 
1589 
1596 
1598 

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
1601 
1605 

1606 
1610 

1610- 13 

1611- 12 

1613 

1631 
1645 
1648 



1649 
1654 
1667 

1670-71 
1676 



Dmitriy Donskoy defeats Golden Horde at Batde of Kuli- 
kovo, but Mongol domination continues undl 1480. 

Ivan III (the Great) becomes grand prince of Muscovy and 
first Muscovite ruler to use tides of tsar and "Ruler of all 
Rus'." 

Muscovy defeats Novgorod. 
Muscovy conquers Tver'. 

Vasiliy III becomes grand prince of Muscovy. 
Muscovy conquers Pskov. 

Grand Prince Ivan IV named ruler of Muscovy at age 
three. 

Ivan IV (the Terrible) crowned tsar of Muscovy. 

Ivan IV conquers Kazan' Khanate. 

Ivan IV conquers Astrakhan' Khanate. 

Oprichnina of Ivan W creates a state within the state. 

Tatars raid Moscow. 

Yermak begins conquest of Siberia. 

Fedor I crowned tsar. 

Patriarchate of Moscow established. 

Union of Brest establishes Uniate Church. 

Rurik Dynasty ends with death of Fedor; Boris Godunov 
named tsar; Time of Troubles begins. 

Three years of famine begin. 

Fedor II crowned tsar; first False Dmitriy subsequently 
named tsar after Fedor IPs murder. 

Vasiliy Shuyskiy named tsar. 

Second False Dmitriy proclaimed tsar. 

Poles occupy Moscow. 

Forces from northern cities and Cossacks organize coun- 
terattack against Poles. 

Mikhail Romanov crowned tsar, founding Romanov 
Dynasty. 

Metropolitan Mogila (Mohyla) founds academy in Kiev. 
Aleksey crowned tsar. 

Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Bogdan Khmel'nitskiy 
(Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyy), revolt against Polish land- 
owners and gentry. 

Serfdom fully established by law. 

Treaty of Pereyaslavl' places Ukraine under tsarist rule. 

Church council in Moscow anathemizes Old Belief but 
removes Patriarch Nikon; Treaty of Andrusovo ends war 
with Poland. 

Stenka Razin leads revolt. 

Fedor III crowned tsar. 



Table A. (Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



1682 
1689 
1696 

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
1700 
1703 
1705-11 
1708 
1709 
1710 
1721 



1722 

1723-32 

1725 

1727 

1730 

1740 

1741 

1762 



1768-74 

1772 

1773-74 

1785 

1787-92 

1792 

1793 and 1795 
1796 

NINETEENTH CENTURY 
1801 

1809 

1812 



Half brothers Ivan V and Peter I named co-tsars; Peter's 
half sister, Sofia, becomes regent. 

Peter I (the Great) forces Sofia to resign regency, Treaty of 
Nerchinsk ends period of conflict with China. 

Ivan V dies, leaving Peter the Great sole tsar; port of Azov 
captured from Ottoman Empire. 

Calendar reformed; war with Sweden begins. 

St. Petersburg founded; becomes capital of Russia in 1713. 

Bashkirs revolt. 

First Russian newspaper published. 
Swedes defeated at Battle of Poltava. 
Cyrillic alphabet reformed. 

Treaty of Nystad ends Great Northern War with Sweden 
and establishes Russian presence on Baltic Sea; Peter 
the Great proclaims Muscovy the Russian Empire; Holy 
Synod replaces patriarchate. 

Table of Ranks established. 

Russia gains control of southern shore of Caspian Sea. 

Catherine I crowned empress of Russia. 

Peter II crowned emperor of Russia. 

Anna crowned empress of Russia. 

Ivan VI crowned emperor of Russia. 

Elizabeth crowned empress of Russia. 

Peter III crowned emperor of Russia; abolishes compul- 
sory state service for the gentry, Catherine II (the 
Great) crowned empress of Russia after Peter Ill's assas- 
sination. 

War with Ottoman Empire ends with Treaty of Kuchuk- 
Kainarji. 

Russia participates in first par d don of Poland. 

Emel'yan Pugachev leads peasant revolt. 

Catherine II confirms nobility's privileges in Charter to 
the Nobility. 

War with Ottoman Empire ends with Treaty of Jassy Otto- 
mans recognize 1783 Russian annexation of Crimea. 

Government initiates Pale of Settlement, restricting Jews 
to western part of the empire. 

Russia participates in second and third partitions of 
Poland. 

Paul crowned emperor of Russia; establishes new law of 
succession. 

Alexander I crowned emperor; conquest of Caucasus 
region begins. 

Finland annexed from Sweden and awarded autonomous 
status. 

Napoleon's army occupies Moscow but is then driven out 
of Russia. 



Table A. ( Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



1817-19 
1825 
1831 
1833 

1837 

1840s and 1850s 
1849 

1853-56 

1855 
1858 

1860 

1861 
1863 
1864 
1866 

1869 

1873-74 

1875 

1877-78 

1879 

1879-80 
1881 

1894 
1898 

TWENTIETH CENTURY 
1903 

1904-05 

1905 



Baltic peasants liberated from serfdom but given no land. 

Decembrist Revolt fails; Nicholas I crowned emperor. 

Polish uprising crushed by forces of Nicholas I. 

"Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality" accepted as guid- 
ing principles by regime. 

First Russian railroad, from St. Petersburg to Tsarskoye 
Selo, opens; Aleksandr Pushkin, foremost Russian 
writer, dies in duel. 

Slavophiles debate Westernizers over Russia's future. 

Russia helps to put down anti-Habsburg Hungarian rebel- 
lion at Austria's request. 

Russia fights Britain, France, Sardinia, and Ottoman 
Empire in Crimean War; Russia forced to accept peace 
settlement dictated by its opponents. 

Alexander II crowned emperor. 

Treaty of Aigun signed with China; northern bank of 
Amur River ceded to Russia. 

Treaty of Beijing signed with China; Ussuri River region 
awarded to Russia. 

Alexander II emancipates serfs. 

Polish rebellion unsuccessful. 

Judicial system reformed; zemstva created. 

Crime and Punishment by Fedor Dostoyevskiy (1821-81) 
published. 

War and Peace by Lev Tolstoy ( 1828-1910) published. 

Army reformed; Russian radicals go "to the people." 

Kuril Islands yielded to Japan in exchange for southern 
Sakhalin Island. 

War with Ottoman Empire ends with Treaty of San Ste- 
fano; independent Bulgaria proclaimed; Russia forced 
to accept less advantageous terms of Congress of Berlin. 

Revolutionary society Land and Liberty splits; People's 

Will and Black Reparation formed. 
The Brothers Karamazov by Fedor Dostoyevskiy published. 

Alexander II assassinated; Alexander III crowned 

emperor. 
Nicholas II crowned emperor. 

Russian Social Democratic Labor Party established and 
holds first congress in March; Vladimir I. Lenin one of 
organizers of party. 

Russian Social Democratic Labor Party splits into Bolshe- 
vik and Menshevik factions. 

Russo-Japanese War ends with Russian defeat; southern 
Sakhalin Island ceded to Japan. 

Bloody Sunday massacre in January begins Revolution of 
1905, a year of labor and ethnic unrest; government 
issues so-called October Manifesto, calling for parlia- 
mentary elections. 



xxiv 



Table A. (Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



1906 
1911 
1914 
1916 

1917 March 



April 

July 

November 

December 
1918 January 

February 
March 



April 
July 

Summer 



August 
November 

1919 January 

March 

1920 January 
February 
April 
July 



First Duma (parliament) elected. 

Petr Stolypin, prime minister since 1906, assassinated. 

World War I begins. 

Rasputin murdered. 

February Revolution, in which workers riot in Petrograd; 
Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Depudes 
formed; Provisional Government formed; Emperor 
Nicholas II abdicates; Petrograd Soviet issues Order 
Number One. 

Demonstrations lead to Aleksandr Kerenskiy's assuming 
leadership in government; Lenin returns to Petrograd 
from Switzerland. 

Bolsheviks outlawed after attempt to topple government 
fails. 

Bolsheviks seize power from Provisional Government; 

Lenin, as leader of Bolsheviks, becomes head of state; 

Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (Russian 

Republic) formed; Consdtuent Assembly elected. 
Cheka (secret police) created; Finns and Moldavians 

declare independence from Russia; Japanese occupy 

Vladivostok. 

Consdtuent Assembly dissolved; Ukraine declares its inde- 
pendence, followed, in subsequent months, by Arme- 
nia, Azerbaijan, Belorussia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, 
and Lithuania. 

Basmachi Rebellion begins in Central Asia; calendar 
changed from Julian to Gregorian. 

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed with Germany, Russia loses 
Poland, Finland, Baldc lands, Ukraine, and other areas; 
Russian Social Democratic Labor Party becomes Rus- 
sian Communist Party (Bolshevik). 

Civil War begins. 

Consdtudon of Russian Republic promulgated; imperial 
family murdered. 

War communism established; intervendon in Civil War by 
foreign expedidonary forces — including those of Brit- 
ain, France, and United States — begins. 

Attempt to assassinate Lenin fails; Red Terror begins. 

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk repudiated by Soviet government 
after Germany defeated by Allied Powers. 

Belorussia established as theoredcally independent Soviet 
republic. 

Communist International (Comintern) formally founded 
at congress in Moscow; Ukrainian Soviet established. 

Blockade of Russian Republic lifted by Britain and other 
Allies. 

Peace agreement signed with Estonia; agreements with 
Latvia and Lithuania follow. 

War with Poland begins; Azerbaijan Soviet republic estab- 
lished. 

Trade agreement signed with Britain. 



XXV 



Table A. ( Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



1921 



1926 
1927 



October 
November 

March 

Summer 
August 



1922 March 



April 



May 
June 

December 



1924 January 
February 

Fall 



1925 April 

November 
December 

April 
October 
Fall 

December 



1928 January 
May 

July 

October 

1929 January 
April 

Fall 



Truce reached with Poland. 

Red Army defeats Wrangel's army in Crimea; Armenian 
Soviet republic established. 

War with Poland ends with Treaty of Riga; Red Army 
crushes Kronshtadt naval mutiny, New Economic Policy 
proclaimed; Georgian Soviet republic established. 

Famine breaks out in Volga region. 

Aleksandr Blok, foremost poet of Russian Silver Age, dies; 
large number of intellectuals exiled. 

Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic 
formed, uniting Armenian, Azerbaijan, and Georgian 
republics. 

Joseph V. Stalin made general secretary of party, Treaty of 
Rapallo signed with Germany. 

Lenin suffers his first stroke. 

Socialist Revolutionary Party members put on trial by State 
Political Directorate; Glavlit organized with censorship 
function. 

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union) estab- 
lished, comprising Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, 
and Transcaucasian republics. 

Lenin dies; constitution of Soviet Union put into force. 

Britain recognizes Soviet Union; other European coun- 
tries follow suit later in year. 

Regime begins to delimit territories of Central Asian 
nationalities; Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan elevated to 
Soviet republic status. 

Theoretician Nikolay Bukharin calls for peasants to enrich 
themselves. 

Poet Sergey Yesenin commits suicide. 

Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) becomes Ail-Union 
Communist Party (Bolshevik). 

Grigoriy Zinov'yev ousted from Politburo. 

Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev ousted from Politburo. 

Peasants sell government less grain than demanded 
because of low prices; peasant discontent increases; 
grain crisis begins. 

Fifteenth Party Congress calls for large-scale collectiviza- 
tion of agriculture. 
Trotsky exiled to Alma-Ata. 

Shakhty trial begins; first executions for "economic 
crimes" follow. 

Sixth Congress of Comintern names socialist parties main 
enemy of communists. 

Implementation of First Five-Year Plan begins. 

Trotsky forced to leave Soviet Union. 

Law on religious associations requires registration of reli- 
gious groups, authorizes church closings, and bans reli- 
gious teaching. 

Red Army skirmishes with Chinese forces in Manchuria. 



xxvi 



Table A. (Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



1930 



1931 



1932 



October 

November 
December 

March 
April 

November 
March 
August 
May 

December 



1932-33 

1933 November 

1934 August 



Tajikistan split from Uzbek Republic to form separate 
Soviet republic. 

Bukharin ousted from Politburo. 

Stalin formally declares end of New Economic Policy and 
calls for elimination of kulaks; forced industrialization 
intensifies, and collectivization begins. 

Collectivization slows temporarily. 

Poet Vladimir Mayakovskiy commits suicide. 

"Industrial Party" put on trial. 

Mensheviks put on trial. 

School system reformed. 

Five-year plan against religion declared. 

Internal passports introduced for domestic travel; peas- 
ants not issued passports. 

Terror and forced famine rage in countryside, primarily in 
southeastern Ukrainian Republic and northern Cauca- 
sus. 

Diplomatic relations with United States established. 
Union of Soviet Writers holds its First Congress. 



September 
December 



1935 February 
May 

Summer 
August 

September 

1936 June 
August 

September 

October 

November 
December 



1937 January 
June 

1938 March 



Soviet Union admitted to League of Nations. 

Sergey Kirov assassinated in Leningrad; Great Terror 
begins, causing intense fear among general populace, 
and peaks in 1937 and 1938 before subsiding in latter 
year. 

Party cards exchanged; many members purged from party 
ranks. 

Treaties signed with France and Czechoslovakia. 

Seventh Congress of Comintern calls for "united front" of 
political parties against fascism. 

Stakhanovite movement to increase worker productivity 
begins. 

New system of ranks issued for Red Army. 

Restrictive laws on family and marriage issued. 

Zinov'yev, Kamenev, and other high-level officials put on 
trial for alleged political crimes. 

Nikolay Yezhov replaces Genrikh Yagoda as head of NKVD 
(secret police); purge of party deepens. 

Soviet Union begins support for antifascists in Spanish 
Civil War. 

Germany and Japan sign Anti-Comintern Pact. 

New constitution proclaimed; Kazakstan and Kyrgyzia 
become Soviet republics; Transcaucasian Soviet Feder- 
ated Socialist Republic splits into Armenian, Azer- 
baijan, and Georgian Soviet republics. 

Trial of "Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center." 

Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskiy and other military leaders 
executed. 

Russian language required in all schools in Soviet Union. 



xxvii 



Table A. ( Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



July 

December 



1939 May 



1940 



1942 



1943 



1944 



August 

September 

October 

November 

December 
March 
April 
June 



August 

1941 April 
May 

June 



August 
November 
December 
May 

July 

November 
February 

May 
July 

September 

November 

January 

May 

June 

October 



Soviet and Japanese forces fight at Lake Khasan. 

Lavrenti Beria replaces Yezhov as chief of secret police; 
Great Terror diminishes. 

Vyacheslav Molotov replaces Maksim Litvinov as commis- 
sar of foreign affairs; armed conflict with Japan at Hal- 
hin Gol in Mongolia continues until August. 

Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact signed; pact includes 
secret protocol. 

Stalin joins Adolf Hitler in partidoning Poland. 

Soviet forces enter Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. 

Remaining (western) portions of Ukraine and Belorussia 
incorporated into Soviet Union; Soviet forces invade 
Finland. 

Soviet Union expelled from League of Nadons. 

Finland sues for peace with Soviet Union. 

Polish officers massacred in Katyn Forest by Soviet troops. 

New strict labor laws enacted; northern Bukovina and 
Bessarabia seized from Romania and subsequendy 
incorporated into Ukrainian Republic and newly cre- 
ated Moldavian Republic, respecdvely. 

Soviet Union annexes Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; 
Trotsky murdered in Mexico. 

Neutrality pact signed with Japan. 

Stalin becomes chairman of Council of People's Commis- 
sars. 

Nazi Germany attacks Soviet Union in Operation Bar- 
barossa. 

Soviet and British troops enter Iran. 

Lend-Lease Law of United States applied to Soviet Union. 

Soviet counteroffensive against Germany begins. 

Red Army routed at Khar'kov, Germans halt Soviet offen- 
sive; treaty signed with Britain against Germany. 

Battle of Stalingrad begins. 

Red Army starts winter offensive. 

German army units surrender at Stalingrad; 91,000 prison- 
ers taken. 
Comintern dissolved. 
Germans defeated in tank battle at Kursk. 

Stalin allows Russian Orthodox Church to appoint patri- 
arch. 

Tehran Conference held. 

Siege of Leningrad ends after 870 days. 

Crimea liberated from German army. 

Red Army begins summer offensive. 

Tuva incorporated into Soviet Union; armed struggle 
against Soviet rule breaks out in western Ukrainian, 
western Belorussian, Lithuanian, and Latvian republics 
and continues for several years. 



August 
1946 March 

Summer 

1947 

September 

1948 June 

Summer 

1949 January 

August 

1952 October 

1953 January 
March 
April 

August 
September 

1955 February 
May 

1956 February 

September 
November 

1957 July 
August 

October 

1958 March 



>.d) Chronology of Important Events 



Stalin meets with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. 
Roosevelt at Yalta. 

Red Army captures Berlin. 

Potsdam Conference attended by Stalin, Harry S. Truman, 
and Churchill, who later is replaced by Clement R 
Atdee. 

Soviet Union declares war on Japan; Soviet forces enter 
Manchuria and Korea. 

Regime abolishes Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (Uni- 
ate); Council of People's Commissars becomes Council 
of Ministers. 

Beginning of "Zhdanovsh china," a campaign against West- 
ern culture. 

Famine in southern and central regions of European part 
of Soviet Union. 

Cominform established to replace Comintern. 

Blockade of Berlin by Soviet forces begins and lasts into 
May 1949. 

Trofim Lysenko begins his dominadon of fields of biology 
and genetics that continues until 1955. 

Council for Mutual Economic Assistance formed; cam- 
paign against "cosmopolitanism" launched. 

Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb. 

All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) becomes Com- 
munist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU); name of 
Politburo is changed to Presidium. 

Kremlin "doctors' plot" exposed, signaling political 
infighting, new wave of purges, and and-Semitic cam- 
paign. 

Stalin dies; Georgiy Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov form 
troika (triumvirate); dtle of party chief changes from 
general secretary to first secretary. 

"Doctors' plot" declared a provocation. 

Beria arrested and shot; Malenkov, Molotov, and Nikita S. 
Khrushchev form new troika. 

Soviet Union tests hydrogen bomb. 

Khrushchev chosen CPSU first secretary; rehabilitadon of 
Stalin's victims begins. 

Nikolay Bulganin replaces Malenkov as prime minister. 

Warsaw Pact organized. 

Khrushchev's "secret speech" at Twentieth Party Congress 
exposes Stalin's crimes. 

Minimum wage established. 

Soviet forces crush Hungarian Revoludon. 

"Andparty group" excluded from CPSU leadership. 

First Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile tested success- 
fully. 

World's first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, launched. 
Khrushchev named chairman of Council of Ministers. 




Period 



Descripdon 



XXIX 



Table A. ( Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



1959 
1960 



1961 



1962 



1963 
1964 



1965 
1966 



1967 



1968 



October 

September 
May 

April 

July 

August 
October 
June 
October 

November 

August 

October 

August 
February 

April 

April 

September 
June 

July 



August 

1969 March 
May 

1970 October 
December 

1972 May 



1973 
1974 
1975 



June 
February 

July 



Nobel Prize for literature awarded to Boris Pasternak; 
campaign mounted against Pasternak, who is forced to 
decline award. 

Khrushchev visits United States. 

Soviet air defense downs United States U-2 reconnais- 
sance aircraft over Soviet Union. 

Cosmonaut Yuriy Gagarin launched in world's first 
manned orbital space flight. 

Khrushchev meets with President John F. Kennedy in 
Vienna. 

Construction of Berlin Wall begins. 

Stalin's remains removed from Lenin Mausoleum. 

Workers' riots break out in Novocherkassk. 

Cuban missile crisis begins, bringing United States and 
Soviet Union close to war. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Deniso- 
vich published in Soviet journal. 

Limited Test Ban Treaty signed with United States and 
Britain. 

Khrushchev removed from power; Leonid I. Brezhnev 
becomes CPSU first secretary. 

Volga Germans rehabilitated. 

Dissident writers Andrey Sinyavskiy and Yuliy Daniel tried 
and sentenced. 

Brezhnev's tide changes from first secretary to general sec- 
retary; name of Presidium is changed back to Politburo. 

Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defects to West. 

Crimean Tatars rehabilitated but not allowed to return 
home. 

Andrey Sakharov's dissident writings published in samiz- 
dat. 

Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons 
(Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty) signed by Soviet 
Union. 

Soviet-led Warsaw Pact armies invade Czechoslovakia. 

Soviet and Chinese forces skirmish on Ussuri River. 

Major General Petr Grigorenko, a dissident, arrested and 
incarcerated in psychiatric hospital. 

Jewish emigration begins to increase substantially. 

Solzhenitsyn awarded Nobel Prize for literature. 

Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) result in signing 
of Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) and 
Interim Agreement on the Limitadon of Strategic 
Offensive Arms; President Richard M. Nixon visits Mos- 
cow. 

Brezhnev visits Washington. 

Solzhenitsyn arrested and sent into foreign exile. 

Apollo/Soyuz space mission held jointly with United 
States. 



XXX 



Table A. (Continued) Chronology of Important Events 

Period Description 



1976 
1977 

1979 

1980 



1981 
1982 



1983 
1984 
1985 

1986 



August 
December 

June 

October 
June 

December 

January 

August 

February 
June 

November 

September 

February 

March 

November 

February-March 
April 



October 
December 

1987 January 
December 

1988 Winter 
May 

May-June 
June 

June-July 
October 

December 



Helsinki Accords signed, confirming East European bor- 
ders and calling for enforcement of human rights. 

Sakharov awarded Nobel Prize for Peace. 
Helsinki watch groups formed to monitor human rights 
safeguards. 

Brezhnev named chairman of Presidium of Supreme 
Soviet. 

New constitution promulgated for Soviet Union. 

Second SALT agreement signed but not ratified by United 
States Senate. 

Soviet armed forces invade Afghanistan. 

Sakharov exiled to Gor'kiy. 

Summer Olympics held in Moscow and boycotted by 
United States and other Western nations. 

CPSU holds its Twenty-Sixth Party Congress. 

Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) talks begin. 

Brezhnev dies; \uriy V. Andropov named general secre- 
tary. 

Soviet fighter aircraft downs South Korean civilian airliner 
KAL 007 near Sakhalin Island. 

Andropov dies; Konstantin U. Chernenko becomes gen- 
eral secretary. 

Chernenko dies; Mikhail S. Gorbachev becomes general 
secretary. 

Gorbachev meets with President Ronald W. Reagan in 
Geneva. 

CPSU holds its Twenty-Seventh Party Congress. 

Nuclear power plant disaster at Chernobyl' releases large 
amounts of radiadon over Russia, Ukraine, and 
Belorussia. 

dasnost launched. 

Gorbachev and Reagan hold summit at Reykjavik. 
Ethnic riots break out in Alma-Ata. 
Gorbachev launches perestroika. 

Soviet Union and United States sign Intermediate-Range 
Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) . 

Ethnic disturbances begin in Caucasus. 

Soviet authorides stop jamming Voice of America broad- 
casts. 

Reagan visits Moscow. 

Millennium of establishment of Chrisdanity in Kievan Rus' 
celebrated in Moscow. 

CPSU's Nineteenth Party Conference tests limits of glasnost 
and perestroika in unprecedented discussions. 

Gorbachev replaces Andrey Gromyko as chairman of Pre- 
sidium of Supreme Soviet; Gromyko retires, and others 
are removed from Politburo. 

Supreme Soviet dissolves itself, preparing way for new 
elected parliament. 



xxxi 



Table A. ( Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



1989 February 

March-April 

April 
May 



June 

July 

August 



September 

October 
November 

December 



1990 January 



February 



March 



Soviet combat forces complete withdrawal from Afghani- 
stan. 

Initial and runoff elections held for the 2,250 seats in Con- 
gress of People's Deputies (CPD); many reform candi- 
dates, including Boris N. Yeltsin, win seats. 

Soviet troops break, up rally in Tbilisi, Georgia, killing at 
least twenty civilians. 

CPD openly criticizes past and present regimes; Gor- 
bachev elected by CPD to new position of chairman of 
Supreme Soviet. 

Free elections in Poland begin rapid decline of Soviet 
Union's empire in Central Europe. 

Coal miners strike in Russia and Ukraine. 

Nationalist demonstrations in Chisinau, Moldavia, lead to 
reinstatement of Romanian as official language of 
republic. Russians and Ukrainians living along Dnestr 
River go on strike, demanding autonomy. 

Soviet Union admits existence of secret protocols to 1939 
Nazi-Soviet Nonagression Pact, which allotted to Soviet 
Union the Baltic countries, parts of then eastern 
Poland, and Moldavia. 

Mass exodus from East Germany begins. 

Ukrainian Popular Movement for Perestroika (Rukh) 
holds founding congress in Kiev. 

Mass protests take place in Berlin and Leipzig. 

Berlin Wall falls. Bulgaria's Todor Zhivkov deposed. Com- 
munist party of Czechoslovakia falls from power. 

Violent revolution in Romania. Nicolae Ceaucescu 
arrested, tried, and shot. 

CPD condemns Nazi-Soviet Nonagression Pact and secret 
protocols. 

Lithuanian Communist Party leaves CPSU. 

Latvian parliament deletes from its constitution reference 
to communist party's "leading role." 

At hasty shipboard summit off Malta, Gorbachev and 
United States president George H.W. Bush declare 
Cold War ended. 

Azerbaijani demonstrators on Soviet side of border with 

Iran dismande border posts. 
Gorbachev fails to heal rift with Lithuanian communists. 

Anti-Armenian pogroms in Azerbaijan. Gorbachev sends 

troops to Baku. 
Central Committee of CPSU votes to strike Article 6, 

which guarantees leading role of communist party, 

from Soviet constitution. 

In elections for Supreme Soviet of Russian Republic, 
Yeltsin wins seat. 

Newly elected Lithuanian parliament declares indepen- 
dence. 

Estonian parliament declares itself in a state of transition 
to independence. 



Table A. (Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



May 



June 



July 



August 



October 



November 



December 



1991 January 



February 
March 



Latvian parliament votes to declare independence after 
unspecified transition period. 

Anti-Soviet demonstrations break out in and around Yere- 
van. 

Yeltsin becomes chairman of Supreme Soviet of Russian 
Republic. 

Communists in Russian Republic vote to form Communist 
Party of the Russian Republic. 

Russia, Uzbekistan, and Moldavia issue declarations of sov- 
ereignty. By October most of the other Soviet republics 
have done likewise. 

Twenty-Eighth Party Congress: Yeltsin quits CPSU; Polit- 
buro stripped of almost all meaning. 

Meeting of Gorbachev and West German chancellor Hel- 
mut Kohl in Stavropol'. German unification within 
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) secured. 

Soviet government and republics open negotiations on a 
new treaty of union. 

Russia and Lithuania sign agreement on trade and eco- 
nomic cooperation. 

Armenia declares independence. 

Germany united; Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty 
(CFE Treaty) signed in Paris. 

Parliament of Russian Republic passes resolution pro- 
claiming that no Soviet law can take effect in the repub- 
lic without republican parliamentary approval. 

Parliament of Russian Republic approves radical eco- 
nomic reform plan, thereby undercutting all-union 
Supreme Soviet's economic reform package. 

Gorbachev awarded Nobel Prize for peace. 

Violence breaks out in Moldavia between Moldavians and 
Russian and Ukrainian separatists. 

Gorbachev proposes new union treaty. 

Eduard Shevardnadze resigns as minister of foreign 
affairs, warning of oncoming dictatorship. 

Parliament of Russian Republic votes to contribute to 
Soviet budget less than one-tenth of central govern- 
ment's request. 

Soviet crackdown on Lithuanian and Latvian indepen- 
dence movements. 

Soviet Ministry of Defense announces plan to send troops 
to seven union republics to enforce military conscrip- 
tion and to round up draft dodgers. 

Russian Republic and the Baltic republics sign mutual 
security pact. 

Baltic countries hold nonbinding plebiscites as demonstra- 
tion of their people's will to secede from Soviet Union. 

Coal miners go on strike in Ukraine, Kazakstan, Arctic 
mines, and Siberia. 

Mass pro-Yeltsin rallies in Moscow. 



xxxiii 



Table A. ( Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



April 
May 

June 

July 
August 



October 
November 



December 



Referendum held on preservation of Soviet Union: 70 per- 
cent vote to remain in union, but Armenia, Georgia, 
Moldavia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia boycott. 

Warsaw Pact officially dissolves. 

Georgia declares independence. 

Russian parliament grants Yeltsin emergency powers. 

Yeltsin gains control over coal mines in Russian Republic. 

Russian government establishes foreign ministry and 
internal security organization. Russian television begins 
broadcasting on second all-union channel. 

By universal suffrage, Yeltsin elected president of Russian 
Republic. 

Last Soviet troops leave Hungary and Czechoslovakia. 

Gorbachev and leaders of seven Soviet republics sign draft 
union treaty. 

Yeltsin bans political acdvity at workplaces and govern- 
ment establishments in Russian Republic; Gorbachev 
signs START I agreement in Moscow with United States 
president Bush. 

Hard-line officials attempt to unseat Gorbachev govern- 
ment; coup fails after three days, elevating Yeltsin's pres- 
tige. 

Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldavia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, 
and Kyrgyz Republic declare independence. Armenia 
and Tajikistan follow in September, Turkmenistan in 
October, and Kazakstan in December. 

Dzhokar Dudayev elected president of newly declared 
Chechen Republic. 

Russian parliament grants Yeltsin sweeping powers to 
introduce radical economic reform. Yeltsin cuts off Rus- 
sian funding of Soviet central ministries. 

Chechens demand independence. Ingush members of 
Chechen Nadonal Congress resign. 

Russia gains control of Soviet natural resources; Yeltsin 
places Russian economy above that of Soviet Union, 
ending possibility of Russia remaining in union. 

Gorbachev fails to win support of republics for new union 
treaty. 

Presidents of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia meet in Minsk 
and proclaim initial Commonwealth of Independent 
States (CIS). 

Yeltsin meets with Soviet defense officials and army com- 
manders to gain support for CIS. 

Russian foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev asks United 
States secretary of state James Baker to recognize inde- 
pendence of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. 

Gorbachev announces that at year's end all central govern- 
ment structures will cease to exist. 

Eleven republics form CIS. 

Soviet Union ceases to exist. Russian flag rises over Krem- 
lin. Control of nuclear arsenal handed over to Yeltsin. 



xxxiv 



Table A. (Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



1992 January 



February 



March 



April 



May 



June 



July 

August 

September 
October 

November 



Russian government lifts price controls on almost all 
goods. 

Beginning of rift between Yeltsin and speaker of Russian 
Supreme Soviet Ruslan Khasbulatov and Russian vice 
president Aleksandr Rutskoy. 

First United States-Russia summit. 

International airlift of food and medical supplies to Rus- 
sian cities begins. 

Fighting breaks out between Moldovan forces and Russian 
and Ukrainian separatists along Dnestr River. 

Eighteen of twenty autonomous republics within Russian 
Federation sign Federation Treaty. Tatarstan and 
Chechnya refuse. 

At first post-Soviet session of Russian CPD, Yeltsin fends off 
vote of no-confidence in his economic program. CPD 
also changes name of Russian Socialist Federation of 
Soviet Republics to Russian Federation. 

Yeltsin calls for a referendum on new constitution that 
would abolish Russian CPD. 

Formation of Russian armed forces. Army general Pavel 
Grachev appointed minister of defense. 

Ten of the eleven CIS presidents sign mutual security 
treaty in Tashkent. Treaty acknowledges demise of uni- 
fied CIS armed forces. 

United States and all four post-Soviet nuclear states vow to 
comply with START agreement. 

Russia joins International Monetary Fund (IMF). 

Russian Supreme Soviet establishes Republic of Ingushetia 
within Russian Federation. 

Russian troops complete withdrawal from Republic of 
Chechnya. 

General Aleksandr Lebed' takes command of 14th Army 
in Moldova. 

Yeltsin makes first appearance at Group of Seven (G-7) 
meeting. 

Russian Supreme Soviet ratifies CFE Treaty. 

Black Sea Fleet evacuates 1,700 Russians from Sukhumi in 
civil-war-torn Georgia. 

Russia completes troop withdrawal from Mongolia. 

Russia launches privatization. 

Last Russian combat troops leave Poland. 

Yeltsin declares state of emergency in North Ossetia and 
Ingushetia in order to halt outbreak of ethnic conflicts. 

Russian troops attack Georgian forces deployed in Abkha- 



December 



Russian troops enter Ingushetia. 

Seventh Russian CPD opens. Yeltsin and parliament clash 
over economic reform and powers. Viktor Chernomyr- 
din becomes prime minister. Yeltsin and congress agree 
to hold referendum on presidential power. Part of same 
deal grants \eltsin extraordinary powers. 



XXXV 



Table A. ( Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



1993 March 



April 



July 



August 
September 



October 



November 
December 



1994 January 



Russia and China pull most of their troops back 100 kilo- 
meters along common border. 

CPD revokes December 1992 deal with Yeltsin, who then 
attempts to impose special rule, but fails. 

Russian troops deployed in Tajikistan as part of CIS peace- 
keeping operation. 

Referendum approves Yeltsin as president and Yeltsin's 
social and economic programs. 

Yeltsin and CPD issue differing draft versions of new Rus- 
sian constitution. 

Constitutional assembly passes draft Russian constitution 

worked out by conciliatory committee. 
Parliament annuls presidendal decrees on economic 

reforms. 

Marshal Yevgeniy Shaposhnikov, having resigned as com- 
mander in chief of CIS joint forces, hands over his 
launch authorization codes to Russian defense minister 
Grachev. 

Russian Central Bank (RCB) announces withdrawal from 
circulation of Soviet and Russian banknotes issued 
between 1961 and 1992. Yeltsin eases some of RCB's 
provisions. 

Yeltsin counters parliament's suspension of privatization. 
Two weeks later, parliament again suspends privatiza- 
tion. Yeltsin issues decree continuing program. 

Yeltsin formally requests that parliament hold early elec- 
tions. 

Yeltsin suspends Vice President Rutskoy based on charges 
of corruption. 

Yeltsin dissolves the CPD and Supreme Soviet and sets date 
for elections in December. 

Supreme Soviet votes to impeach Yeltsin and swears in 
Rutskoy as president; CPD confirms decisions. 

Clashes in Moscow between Yeltsin and Supreme Soviet 
supporters. 

Church mediation of government split collapses; further 
clashes on Moscow streets. 

Top leaders of opposition surrender. Sniper fire continues 
for several days. 

Russia officially asks for revisions to CFE Treaty. 

Yeltsin suspends Constitutional Court and disbands city, 
district, and village Soviets. 

Russian troops land in Abkhazia. 

Parliamentary elections and referendum on new constitu- 
tion are held. Constitution approved. Chechnya does 
not participate in elections. 

Yeltsin and Turkmenistan's president Saparmyrat Niyazov 
sign accord on dual citizenship, first such agreement 
between Soviet successor states. 

Trilateral agreement among Russia, Ukraine, and United 
States prepares for denuclearizing Ukraine's armed 
forces. 



xxx vi 



Table A. (Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



February 



April 



June 
July 



August 
September 

October 



November 

December 

1995 January 
April 

June 

July 
October 



Chernomyrdin states that radical economic reform has 
come to an end in Russia. Reformers quit posts. West- 
ern advisers withdraw their services as advisers to Rus- 
sian government. 

United States Central Intelligence Agency arrests Aldrich 
Ames on charges of spying for Soviet Union and Russia. 

State Duma (lower house of parliament beginning with 
1993 election) grants amnesty to leaders of 1991 coup 
against Gorbachev and leaders of parliamentary revolt 
of October 1993. 

Yeltsin gives speech calling for continued radical restruc- 
turing of economy. 
Russia and Belarus agree to monetary union. 

Central Asian republics, Georgia, and Armenia allow Rus- 
sian participation in patrolling their borders. 

Political leaders meet to sign Civic Accord, which calls on 
signatories to refrain from violence in pursuing politi- 
cal goals. Three of 248 participants refuse to sign, 
among them Gennadiy Zyuganov, leader of Communist 
Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF). 

Yeltsin accelerates market reforms. 

Foreign Minister Kozyrev signs NATO Partnership for 
Peace (PfP) accord. 

Russian and United States troops conduct joint peace- 
keeping exercise in Orenburg, Russia. United States 
conducts maneuvers in Black Sea with Russia, Ukraine, 
and other Black Sea countries. 

Russian government issues statement that situation in 
Chechnya is getting out of control. 

Last Russian troops leave Germany, Estonia, and Latvia. 
Fighting breaks out in Chechnya between Dudayev's and 
opposition forces. 

Ruble loses one-fifth of its value in one day. 

Chernomyrdin and Prime Minister Sangheli of Moldova 
sign agreement on withdrawal of Russia's 14th Army 
from Moldova. 

Dudayev proclaims martial law throughout republic and 
mobilizes all men aged seventeen and older. 

Yeltsin issues ultimatum to warring parties in Chechnya to 
lay down their arms. 

Kozyrev suspends Russia's participation in PfP. 

Russian armored columns enter Chechnya. 

Russia and Kazakstan agree to unify their armies by end of 
1995. 

Human rights activist Sergey Kovalev estimates 10,000 Rus- 
sian soldiers and 25,000 Chechen civilians killed in 
Chechnya since 1994. 

State Duma votes no-confidence in Government (cabi- 
net). Second no-confidence vote fails in State Duma. 

Yeltsin hospitalized, returns to work in August. 

Yeltsin again hospitalized, reappears in November. 



xxxvii 



Table A. ( Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



December 
1996 January 

March 

April 

May 
June 



July 



August 



September 



In parliamentary elections, communists and nationalists 
gain strength, reformists split and in decline. 

Yeltsin replaces Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev with Yev- 
geniy Primakov. Leading liberal reformists dismissed or 
resign. 

After slowdown in privatization and increase in govern- 
ment spending, Russia granted loan agreement worth 
US$10 billion by IMF. 

Leaders of Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus sign cus- 
toms union treaty in Moscow. 

Russia and Belarus sign union treaty with substantial ele- 
ments of reunification. 

Dzhokar Dudayev killed in rocket attack in Chechnya. 

Chechens sign cease-fire agreement, whose terms are 
immediately violated; fighting resumes. 

Yeltsin and Zyuganov, candidate of KPRF, finish first and 
second, respectively, in first round of presidential elec- 
tions, qualifying them for second round. 

Yeltsin fires Grachev and other senior hard-line officials 
and appoints Lebed' chief of Security Council. 

Yeltsin disappears from public view because of undisclosed 
illness. 

Yeltsin defeats Zyuganov in second round of presidential 
election, 54 percent to 40 percent. 

Fighting in Chechnya intensifies. 

Lebed' associate Igor' Rodionov named minister of 
defense, promises military reform; Anatoliy Chubays 
named presidential chief of staff. 

Citing failure of Russian economic reform, IMF withholds 

tranche of 1996 assistance package. 
Yeltsin creates civilian Defense Council. 

Pravda, voice of communism since 1912, renamed Pravda 
5 and begins more objective reporting. 

Yeltsin staff announces Yeltsin will rest for prolonged 
period to recover from election campaign. 

Chernomyrdin confirmed for second term as prime minis- 
ter; Yeltsin names new Government with reformists in 
key positions. 

Chechen guerrillas recapture Chechen capital Groznyy, 
exposing weakness of Russian military, Lebed' achieves 
cease-fire in direct talks with Chechen leaders. 

IMF resumes economic assistance payments. 
Bellona Foundation report exposes mishandling of 
nuclear materials in Arctic regions. 

As cease-fire terms hold, first Russian troops leave Chech- 
nya. 

NATO offers Russia special terms of military cooperation. 

Yeltsin announces he will undergo heart surgery, under 
pressure, he temporarily cedes military command and 
control of internal security agencies to Chernomyrdin. 



Table A. (Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period 



Description 



October 



October-December 



November 



December 



1997 January 



February 

February-March 
March 



Controversy continues over locus of government 
authority. 

Election cycle begins in subnational jurisdictions, contin- 
ues through March 1997. 

Lebed' dismissed as Security Council chief; negotiations 
with Chechnya continue under Ivan Rybkin. 

United States secretary of defense William Perry rebuffed 
in attempt to gain passage of START II by State Duma. 

Government establishes emergency tax commission to 
improve tax collection; collection rate remains poor in 
ensuing months. 

Chubays begins campaign for compliance of regional laws 
with federal constitution. 

Escalating conflict between military and civilian defense 
officials over military reform methods. 

Russia's first bond issue on international market nets US$1 
billion. 

\feltsin undergoes successful open-heart surgery. 

Primakov visits China, Japan, and Mongolia to expand 
markets. 

Third Kilo-class submarine sold to Iran. 

\feltsin remains out of public view until February 1997, his 
administration inactive; opposition calls for impeach- 
ment on health grounds. 

Four-person Consultative Council formed to smooth dif- 
ferences between Government and parliament. 

Primakov agrees to negotiate charter giving Russia special 
status with NATO. 

Federation Council (upper house of parliament since 
1993 elections) claims Ukrainian port of Sevastopol' as 
Russian territory, reopening dispute with Ukraine. 

Long-delayed new Criminal Code goes into effect. 

State Duma passes 1997 budget after long discussions and 
amendments; experts call revenue projections unrealis- 
tic. 

Opposing military reform programs issued by Ministry of 
Defense and civilian Defense Council. 

Presidential and legislative elections in Chechnya; moder- 
ate Asian Maskhadovwins presidency on independence 
platform. 

\eltsin approves Russia's participation in NATO's Bosnia 
peacekeeping force until 1998. 

IMF withholds loan payment because of continued tax sys- 
tem problems. 

Last Russian troops leave Chechnya. 

NATO talks with Russia bring modification of CFE Treaty 
demands on Russia, subject to ratification by members. 

NATO chief Javier Solana visits several CIS nations, which 
entertain closer NATO ties. 

Yeltsin reestablishes his leadership with vigorous state of 
the federation speech. 



xxxix 



Table A. ( Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period Description 



Government streamlining begins with appointments of 
Chubavs and Boris Nemtsov to powerful positions; 
Chernomyrdin's power wanes. 

Second issue of Russian bonds sold on international mar- 
ket; third issue scheduled. 

Nationwide labor action gains lukewarm participation; 
uncoordinated local actions intensify. 

At CIS summit, Yeltsin fails to reassert Russian domination 
as several members take independent positions. 

Helsinki summit with President William J. Clinton yields 
some economic agreements, continued discord on 
NATO expansion. 

Bilateral treaty reaffirms integration of Russia and Belarus. 

April Moscow summit with Chinese president Jiang Zemin 

expresses disapproval of United States world domina- 
tion, yields agreement to reduce troops along shared 
border. 

State Duma postpones ratification of Chemical Weapons 
Convention following United States Congress ratifica- 
tion. 

Government proposal to limit government housing subsi- 
dies brings strong political opposition. 

Prompted by revenue shortages, Finance Minister Chu- 
bays submits budget revision to State Duma, cutting 
US$19 billion in spending. 

May Peace treaty signed by Russia and Chechnya (Chechnya- 

Ichkeria); Chechen independence issue remains unre- 
solved. 

Igor' Sergeyev replaces Igor' Rodionov as minister of 
defense following Rodianov's open conflict with other 
defense authorities. 

New privatization programs begin in housing, natural gas, 
railroads, and electric power. 

Security Council issues new national security doctrine. 

Terms set for new pipeline from Tengiz oil fields (Kazak- 
stan) to Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. 

Russia signs "founding act" agreement with NATO, allow- 
ing participation in NATO decision making; Russia 
agrees to drop opposition to NATO expansion in Cen- 
tral Europe. 

Yeltsin and Ukraine's president Leonid Kuchma sign treaty 
of friendship and cooperation, nominally settling dis- 
putes over territory and ownership of Black Sea Fleet. 

June State Duma recesses for summer without acting on bud- 

get-cut proposal, leaving determination of cuts to Gov- 
ernment. 

Yeltsin names his daughter Tat'yana Dyachenko an official 
adviser. 

Yeltsin participates in Denver G-8 (formerly G-7) meeting 
as full partner for first time. 

Government announces allocation of US$2.9 billion to 
pay long-overdue pensions. 



Xl 



Table A. (Continued) Chronology of Important Events 



Period Description 



Government announces sale of shares in six state-owned 
oil companies to increase revenues. 

Under pressure from Yeltsin, Duma approves new tax code 
aimed at broadening government's revenue base. 

June-July Mishaps aboard Mir space station reinforce international 

doubts about Russia's space program. 

July Yeltsin declares Russia's economy has "turned the corner" 

toward growth and stability, statistics show some 
improvement. 

New CFE treaty reduces arms in Europe, does not limit 
NATO movement into Czech Republic, Hungary, and 
Poland as Russia had demanded. 

Russia offers Japan new conditions for development of dis- 
puted Kuril Islands; bilateral talks address Japanese 
investment elsewhere in Russia's Far East. 

Constitutinal Court rejects Moscow's residency fees as 
unconstitutional. 

Yeltsin announces large-scale program for military reform 
and streamlining. 

First meeting of NATO-Russia joint council establishes 
operational procedures. 

Yeltsin vetoes law restricting activities of non-Orthodox 
religions, after both houses of parliament had over- 
whelmingly passed it, Russian Orthodox Church sup- 
ported it, and human rights organizations condemned 
it. 

Yeltsin's drive against official corruption thwarted as high 
officials refuse to divulge personal finances. 

August Pro-Yeltsin party, Our Home Is Russia, shaken by resigna- 

don of parliamentary leader Sergey Belyayev. 

NATO's Sea Breeze 97 exercise in Ukraine modified from 
military to humanitarian maneuver after protest by Rus- 
sia. 

\feksin announces ruble reform for January 1998, drop- 
ping three zeros from denomination of currency. 

Government submits privatization plan for 1998 and draft 
1998 budget to Sate Duma; budget calls for 2 percent 
growth in GDP and annual inflation of 5 percent. 

Russia and Armenia sign friendship and cooperation 
treaty tightening military and economic ties. 

September Duma reconvenes; atop agenda are tax reform bill and 

consideration of 1998 budget proposal. 

Shakeups of military establishment continue as Yeltsin dis- 
misses his Defense Council chief, Yuriy Baturin, and 
reorganizes Rosvooruzheniye, the foreign arms sales 
cartel. 

Overdue tax payments by Gazprom reach US$2.4 billion. 

Agreement with Chechnya sets terms for repair of Baku 
(Azerbaijan)-Novorossiysk pipeline through Chechnya, 
with October 1997 as completion deadline; negotia- 
tions continue on new pipelines from Central Asia west- 
ward. 



Xli 



Table A. ( Continued) Chronobgy of Important Events 



Period Description 



Russia warns NATO against pressure on Bosnian Serb 
Karadzic faction. 

Foreign trade figures for first half of 1997 announced; 
overall surplus US$18.5 billion, down 3.9 percent from 
first half 1996, including decrease of 11.7 percent in 
CIS trade. 

Duma passes land code without provision for sale of land 
by owner, frustrating Yeltsin's long campaign for reform 
of land ownership. 

Worker protests spread across Russia as wage non-payment 
continues, especially among coal, defense industry, and 
scientific workers. 

Yeltsin signs revised bill on religious organizations after 
"Christianity" added to list of Russia's "traditional," 
unrestricted faiths; human rights and religious groups 
protest. 



xlii 



Country Profile 



Country 

Formal Name: Russian Federation. 
Short Form: Russia. 
Term for Citizen(s): Russian (s). 
Capital: Moscow. 

Flag: Three equal-sized horizontal bands of white (top), red, 
and blue. 

Geography 

Size: 17,075,200 square kilometers. 

Topography: Broad plain with low hills west of Urals in 
European Russia and vast coniferous forests and tundra east of 
Urals in Siberia. Uplands and mountains along southern 
border regions in Caucasus Mountains. About 10 percent of 
land area swampland, about 45 percent covered by forest. 

Climate: Ranges from temperate to Arctic continental. Winter 
weather varies from short-term and cold along Black Sea to 
long-term and frigid in Siberia. Summer conditions vary from 
warm on steppes to cool along Arctic coast. Much of Russia 
covered by snow six months of year. Weather usually harsh and 
unpredictable. Average annual temperature of European 
Russia 0°C, lower in Siberia. Precipitation low to moderate in 
most areas; highest amounts in northwest, North Caucasus, 
and Pacific coast. 

Land Boundaries: Land borders extend 20,139 kilometers: 
Azerbaijan 284 kilometers, Belarus 959 kilometers, China 3,645 
kilometers, Estonia 290 kilometers, Finland 1,313 kilometers, 
Georgia 723 kilometers, Kazakstan 6,846 kilometers, 
Democratic People's Republic of Korea 19 kilometers, Latvia 
217 kilometers, Lithuania 227 kilometers, Mongolia 3,441 
kilometers, Norway 167 kilometers, Poland 432 kilometers, and 
Ukraine 1,576 kilometers. 

Water boundaries: Coastline makes up 37,653 kilometers of 



xliii 



border. Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans touch shores. 

Land Use: 10 percent arable, 45 percent forest, 5 percent 
meadows and pasture, and 40 percent other, including tundra. 

Society 

Population: According to United States government estimates, 
149,909,089. According to official 1996 Russian statistics, 
148,200,000. 

Ethnic Groups: According to 1989 census, Russian 81.5 
percent, Tatar 3.8 percent, Ukrainian 3.0 percent, Chuvash 1.2 
percent, Bashkir 0.9 percent, Belorussian 0.8 percent, 
Mordovian 0.7 percent, and other 8.1 percent. 

Languages: Official language Russian. Approximately 100 
others spoken. 

Religion: In 1996 about 75 percent of believers in Russia 
considered themselves Russian Orthodox, 19 percent Muslim, 
and 7 percent other. Religious activity increased sharply in 
post-Soviet period, given official government and 
constitutional sanction. 

Education: About 98 percent of population over age fifteen 
literate. Constitution guarantees right to free preschool, basic 
general, and secondary vocational education. Basic general 
education compulsory until age fifteen. In 1995 about 500 
postsecondary schools in operation, including forty-two 
universities. Postsecondary technical and vocational schools 
now offer comprehensive education. Private schools and 
universities emerging in mid-1990s. 

Health: Health care free of charge in principle, but adequate 
treatment increasingly depends upon wealth. Doctors poorly 
paid and poorly trained, and hospitals decrepit. Shortages of 
nurses, specialized personnel, and medical supplies and 
equipment persist. National distribution of facilities and 
medical personnel highly skewed in favor of urban areas, 
especially politically sensitive cities. About 131 hospital beds 
per 10,000 population and one doctor for every 275 citizens. 
1994 life expectancy 57.3 years for males, 71.1 years for 
females, having dropped sharply since 1990. Officially reported 
infant mortality rate 19.9 per 1,000 live births in 1994. Poor 
quality of water and air in many areas and excessive smoking 



xliv 



and alcohol use exacerbate poor health of nation. 

Labor Force: About 57 percent of population working age. 
Work force relatively well-educated but ill-suited for challenges 
of post-Soviet economy. In 1994 some 37 percent of labor force 
worked in services, 27.7 percent in industry, 14.9 percent in 
agriculture, 10.9 percent in construction, and 7.6 percent in 
transport and communications. More than 16 percent of labor 
force works for government. 

Economy 

Salient Features: After years of double-digit declines, gross 
domestic product (GDP) shrank by only 4 percent in 1995. 
GDP per capita in 1995 US$4,224. Unemployment rising 
steadily, to estimated 8.5 percent in 1996; official Russian 
numbers about half that amount. Inflation, very high in 1994, 
under much better control under new government policy in 
1995-96; April 1997 rate 1.2 percent. Economy increasingly 
dependent on foreign investment, multilateral loan agencies, 
and rescheduling of foreign debt. Privatization nearly 
complete but meeting political opposition to transformation of 
large state firms. Most prices determined by market. Role of 
organized crime significant, and much economic activity 
officially unaccounted for. 

Agriculture: 6.3 percent of GDP in 1994. Major products grain, 
sugar beets, sunflower seeds, vegetables, fruits, meat, and milk. 

Manufacturing: 28.3 percent of GDP in 1994. Principal 
products machine tools, rolling mills, high-performance 
aircraft, space vehicles, ships, road and rail transportation 
equipment, communications equipment, agricultural 
machinery, tractors and construction equipment, electric- 
power generating and transmitting equipment, medical and 
scientific instruments, and consumer durables. 

Services: 50 percent of GDP in 1994. Tourism important 
source of foreign currency. Expansion of financial, 
communications, and information enterprises contributes to 
growth. Shipping services also major foreign-exchange earner. 

Mining: Considerable mineral wealth, especially iron ore, 
copper, phosphates, manganese, chromium, nickel, platinum, 
diamonds, and gold. Production declined steadily 1990-95. 

Energy: Russia self-sufficient in fuels and energy production. 



xlv 



Natural gas and oil main fuels exploited, coal production 
declining but still significant; long-distance fuel transportation 
a significant problem. Main electricity sources: coal 18 percent, 
nuclear 13 percent, hydroelectric 19 percent, and natural gas 
42 percent. Industry consumes 61 percent of energy 
production. Generation capacity 188 gigawatts. Energy exports 
most important source of foreign exchange. 

Foreign Trade: Trade liberalization ongoing, abolishing export 
duties, restructuring import tariffs, and ending export 
registration in 1996. Main trading partners Germany, Italy, the 
Netherlands, Switzerland, Britain, the United States, Ukraine, 
Kazakstan, Belarus, China, and Japan. Exports for 1995 
estimated at US$77.8 billion, imports US$57.9 billion. Balance 
of payments US$13.1 billion in 1995. Capital flight expected to 
drop to US$1 billion in 1996. Foreign investment strongly 
encouraged in some sectors, but unpredictable commercial 
conditions hinder growth. Outstanding Soviet-era debt by 
Third World countries, between US$100 and US$170 billion, 
could make Russia creditor country on balance. 

Currency and Exchange Rate: Ruble. In July 1997, US$1 
equaled 5,790 rubles. 

Fiscal Year: Calendar year. 

Transportation and Telecommunications 

Roads: 934,000 kilometers in service in 1995, of which 725,000 
kilometers paved or gravel and of which 445,000 kilometers 
serve only specific industries or farms. Automobile travel 
expanding, but roads inadequate in quality and quantity. 

Railroads: 154,000 kilometers wide-gauge in 1995, of which 
87,000 kilometers for common carrier service. 49,000 
kilometers diesel, and 38,000 kilometers electrified. Proportion 
of cargo shipping by rail high by Western standards. System in 
need of large-scale repair. 

Civil Aviation: 2,517 airports, of which fifty-four with paved 
runways over 3,047 meters. In 1990s hundreds of private 
airlines formed. Aeroflot, the state monopoly of Soviet Union, 
now joint-stock company with majority of stock held by 
government. Major international airports include 
Sheremet'evo in Moscow and Pulkovo in St. Petersburg. Flights 
to most major world capitals and major cities within 



xlvi 



Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). 

Ports and Shipping: Main ports Arkhangelsk, Astrakhan', 
Kaliningrad, Kazan', Khabarovsk, Kholmsk, Krasnoyarsk, 
Magadan, Moscow, Murmansk, Nakhodka, Nevel'sk, 
Novorossiysk, Petropavlovsk, Rostov-na-Donu, Sochi, St. 
Petersburg, Tuapse, Vladivostok, Volgograd, Vostochnyy, and 
Vyborg. Merchant fleet 800 vessels in 1995. Some 235 ships 
operating under Maltese, Cypriot, Liberian, Panamanian, St. 
Vincent and the Grenadines, Honduran, Marshall Islands, 
Bahamian, and Vanuatu registry. 

Inland waterways: Total navigable routes in general use 
101,000 kilometers. 

Pipelines: Crude oil, 48,000 kilometers; petroleum products, 
15,000 kilometers; natural gas, 140,000 kilometers. 

Telecommunications: 24,400,000 telephones; 20,900,000 in 
urban areas and 3,500,000 in rural areas in 1995. Development 
of modern communications lines and acquisition of advanced 
equipment slow. Diversity in radio and television programming 
increasing since late 1980s. Access to Internet and cellular 
phones expanding, but poor state of telecommunications 
hinders country's modernization. 

Government and Politics 

Government: Democratic, federative form of government 
under 1993 constitution. Divided into executive, legislative, 
and judicial branches. President, elected to four-year term, sets 
basic tone of domestic and foreign policy, represents state at 
home and abroad. Prime minister appoints Government 
(cabinet) to administer executive-branch functions. Forty 
ministries, state committees, and services; reduction in 
Government size planned late 1996. Prime minister 
administers policy according to constitution, laws, and 
presidential decrees. New Government named August 1996 
following presidential election, retaining some key members 
from previous administration. Boris N. Yeltsin president, first 
elected 1991. Viktor Chernomyrdin prime minister, reap- 
pointed August 1996. Parliament, bicameral Federal Assembly, 
has lower house, State Duma, with 450 members serving four- 
year terms; last election December 1995. Upper house, Fed- 
eration Council, has 178 seats (two members representing the 
executive and legislative bodies of each of the eighty-nine 



xlvii 



subnational jurisdictions). Three highest judicial bodies Con- 
stitutional Court, Supreme Court, and Superior Court of Arbi- 
tration. Judges appointed by president with confirmation from 
the Federation Council required. Jurisprudence advancing 
slowly toward Western standards; jury trials held only in some 
regions. 

Politics: Largest party representation in State Duma by 
Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Liberal- 
Democratic Party of Russia, Our Home Is Russia, and Yabloko 
coalition. More than a dozen other parties have representation 
in State Duma. Personal connections, personalities retain 
impact in politics as national parties develop slowly, 
government figures avoid party affiliation; shifting coalitions 
typical in State Duma. Seventy-eight nominal independents in 
State Duma. 

Administrative Divisions: Twenty-one autonomous republics, 
forty-nine oblasts (provinces), six territories (kraya; sing., kray), 
ten autonomous regions (okruga; sing., okrug), one autono- 
mous oblast. Cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg with separate 
status at oblast level. 

Foreign Relations: In early 1990s, basically pro-Western, drastic 
change from Soviet era. Russia cofounded Commonwealth of 
Independent States (CIS) in 1991 and assumed Soviet Union 
seats in many international organizations. Dependence on 
foreign assistance greatly increased in 1990s. Beginning in 
1993, substantial domestic political pressure mitigated stance 
toward participation in Western-dominated organizations and 
treaties, reemphasis of independent national power. So-called 
Eurasianism assumes unique role in world affairs and primary 
concerns in Asia rather than Europe. Chechnya crisis and 
nuclear transactions with Iran bring international criticism, 
although summits with United States president continue, 1997. 
Policy toward successor states marked by interest in reinte- 
gration of CIS countries and well-being of Russians living 
outside borders of Russian Federation. Expansion of North 
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into Central Europe 
major issue in 1996. Other key issues include improvement of 
relations with China and insistence on strict interpretation of 
the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty). Member of 
Council of Europe, European Bank for Reconstruction and 
Development (EBRD), International Labour Organisation 
(ILO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), International 



xlviii 



Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), NATO Partnership 
for Peace (PfP), United Nations (UN) and its Security Council, 
and World Bank. 

National Security 

Armed Forces: Approximately 1.5 million personnel in 1996, 
but sharp cuts and reorganization forecast. Term of active duty 
two years. Units filled mainly by conscription, with some 
contract personnel. Women may serve if they possess 
specialized skills. Armed forces divided into ground forces, 
naval forces, air forces, air defense forces, strategic rocket 
forces. Ground forces personnel 670,000 (210,000 conscripts); 
naval forces 200,000 (40,000 conscripts); air forces 130,000 
(40,000 conscripts); air defense forces 200,000 (60,000 
conscripts); strategic rocket forces 100,000 (50,000 conscripts). 

Military Presence Overseas: Transcaucasus Group of Forces — 
9,000 personnel in Armenia, with one air defense MiG-23 
squadron. 22,000 personnel in Georgia, with one air force 
composite regiment of thirty-five aircraft. Azerbaijan refuses 
Russian troop presence. Forces in other former Soviet 
republics: Moldova 6,400 personnel, Tajikistan 12,000 
personnel, Turkmenistan 11,000 personnel, and several 
thousand each in Kazakstan and Kyrgyzstan. Contributions to 
UN missions in Angola, Bosnia, Croatia, Georgia, Haiti, Iraq/ 
Kuwait, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Rwanda, and 
Western Sahara. Signal and intelligence personnel in Vietnam, 
Syria, Cuba, Mongolia, and parts of Africa. 

Military Budget: 1997 defense budget submitted August 1996 
allots 100.8 trillion rubles (about US$19 billion), of 260 trillion 
rubles requested by Ministry of Defense. Anticipated 1998 
budget somewhat higher. Maintenance and salaries far below 
required levels. Anti-inflationary budget restraints cause 
dissension among ministries and continued military morale 
decline. 

Internal Security Forces: Reorganized after fall of Soviet Union 
but with many extraconstitutional functions ongoing and only 
partial transparency. Power, but not effectiveness, grows as 
crime wave continues in mid-1990s. Ministry of Internal Affairs 
had 540,000 troops, including regular police and special units, 
in 1996. Federal Border Service, 135,000 troops in 1994, then 
augmented substantially. Main Guard Directorate (presidential 



xlix 



guard), 20,000 troops, 1994. Troops of Federal Security Service 
and Ministry of Internal Affairs heavily involved in Chechnya 
conflict, 1994-96. 



1 



Introduction 



RUSSIA IS THE LARGEST of the fifteen geopolitical entities 
that emerged in 1991 from the Soviet Union. Covering more 
than 17 million square kilometers in Europe and Asia, Russia 
succeeded the Soviet Union as the largest country in the world. 
As was the case in the Soviet and tsarist eras, the center of Rus- 
sia's population and economic activity is the European sector, 
which occupies about one-quarter of the country's territory. 
Vast tracts of land in Asian Russia are virtually unoccupied. 
Although numerous Soviet programs had attempted to popu- 
late and exploit resources in Siberia and the Arctic regions of 
the Russian Republic, the population of Russia's remote areas 
decreased in the 1990s. Thirty-nine percent of Russia's terri- 
tory but only 6 percent of its population in 1996 was located 
east of Lake Baikal, the geographical landmark in south-central 
Siberia. The territorial extent of the country constitutes a 
major economic and political problem for Russian govern- 
ments lacking the far-reaching authoritarian clout of their 
Soviet predecessors. 

In the Soviet political system, which was self-described as a 
democratic federation of republics, the center of authority for 
almost all actions of consequence was Moscow, the capital of 
the Russian Republic. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 
1991, that long-standing concentration of power meant that 
many of the other fourteen republics faced independence 
without any experience at self-governance. For Russia, the end 
of the Soviet Union meant facing the world without the consid- 
erable buffer zone of Soviet republics that had protected and 
nurtured it in various ways since the 1920s; the change 
required complete reorganization of what had become a thor- 
oughly corrupt and ineffectual socialist system. 

Under those circumstances, Russia has undergone an ago- 
nizing process of self-analysis and refocusing of national goals. 
That process, which seemingly had only begun in the mid- 
1990s, has been observed and commented upon with more 
analytic energy than any similar transformation in the history 
of the world. As information pours out past the ruins of the 
Iron Curtain, a new, more reliable portrait of Russia emerges, 
but substantial mystery remains. 



liii 



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JURISDICTIONS 



Magadan (47) 
Chelyabinsk (36) Sakhalin (48) 
Kurgan (37) Kamchatka (49) 

Sverdlovsk (38) Autonomous C 
Tyumen' (39) Birobidzhan (50. 
" <(40) Khabarovsk Oblast) 



Khanty-Mansi (54. 
Tyumen' Oblast) 
Permyak (55. Perm' Oblast) 
Aga Buryat (56. Chita Oblast) 
Ust-Orda Buryat (57, 
< Oblast) 



UlVanovsk (29) Novosibirsk (41) Autonomous Regions: Taymyr (58. Krasnoyarsk Territory) Ingushetia (67) 



Dagestan (72) 
Karelia (62) Kalmykia (73) 

Adygea (63) Udmurlia (74) 

Karachayevo-Cherkessia (64) Talarstan (75) 
Kabardino-Balkaria (65) 
North Osselia 



i-Nenats (52. 

{ Oblast) 
s(53, i 
Arkhangelsk Oblast) 



, Krasnoyarsk Territory) Chechnya (68)' 
Koryak (60. Kamchatka Oblast) Mordovia (69) 
Chukchi (61. Magadan Oblast) 

I El (71) 



Gorno-Altay (78) Primorskiy (88) 

Khakassia (79) ._ . . 

Tyva(BO) Boundary b 

Buryat,a(81) Chechnya a 

Sakha (82) Ingushetia 



Figure 1. Administrative Divisions of Russia, 1996 
lii 



In a history-making year, the regime of President Mikhail S. 
Gorbachev of the Soviet Union was mortally injured by an 
unsuccessful coup in August 1991. After all the constituent 
republics, including Russia, had voted for independence in the 
months that followed the coup, Gorbachev announced in 
December 1991 that the nation would cease to exist. In place of 
the monolithic union, there remained the Commonwealth of 
Independent States (CIS — see Glossary), a loose confederation 
of eleven of the former Soviet republics, which now were inde- 
pendent states with an indefinite mandate of mutual coopera- 
tion. By late 1991, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 
(CPSU — see Glossary) and the Communist Party of the Russian 
Republic had been banned in Russia, and Boris N. Yeltsin, who 
had been elected president of the Russian Republic in June 
1991, had become the leader of the new Russian Federation. 

In the late 1980s, Yeltsin's appeals for political reform gained 
him the enmity of the communist hierarchy, including Gor- 
bachev, but he won the support of a Russian public whose self- 
expression had been liberated by Gorbachev's own policy of 
glasnost (literally, public voicing — see Glossary). In that period, 
the atmosphere of Russia, especially its main cities, Moscow 
and Leningrad, was one of expectation that significant political 
changes finally would occur after the sclerotic decades of the 
Brezhnev regime (1964-82). The first years of Yeltsin's presi- 
dency, which began with an overt challenge to the Soviet 
Union's authority over Russian affairs, brought a surge of activ- 
ity that promised economic and political reform and an end to 
the economic stagnation and social malaise of the 1980s. Both 
Russians and Westerners hoped that Russia could make a short, 
painless transformation to democratic rule and free-market 
economics. Although events of the first five post-Soviet years 
provided some reasons for optimism, all observers soon real- 
ized that whatever transformation Russia was to experience 
would require much more time, and would yield much less pre- 
dictable results, than initially expected. 

At the time it became independent, the Russian Federation 
included nineteen autonomous republics, ten autonomous 
regions, and one autonomous oblast, each designated for a 
particular ethnic group. The ethnically Russian population was 
(and remains) the largest group in all but a handful of the 
republics and autonomous regions; most of the exceptions, 
where the local ethnic groups constitute a majority, are located 
in the North Caucasus. 



liv 



In 1989 the Baltic republics' declarations of sovereignty 
within the Soviet Union began a cascade of similar declarations 
by jurisdictions within Russia. In the second half of 1990 alone, 
ten of Russia's autonomous republics declared sovereignty. 
When Russia became an independent state, perceptions of 
Moscow's weakness further encouraged separatist movements, 
which in turn prompted a long-term campaign by the Yeltsin 
government to maintain the federation intact. Although some 
experts predicted that the Russian Federation ultimately would 
suffer the same fragmentation as the Soviet Union, little evi- 
dence of such an outcome has been seen in the first five years 
of the post-Soviet era. 

In 1992 Moscow began the struggle to preserve the federa- 
tion by inducing all but two autonomous republics (Chechnya 
and Tatarstan) to sign the Federation Treaty defining the 
respective areas of jurisdiction of the national and regional 
governments. The treaty included definitions of sovereignty 
over natural resources and other economic assets. Since the 
treaty was signed, Moscow's hegemony has been threatened in 
several other instances, the most notable being the Republic of 
Chechnya's fulfillment of its 1991 declaration of independence 
by a coup against the republic's Russian-controlled government 
in 1993. Chechnya's defiance and the hapless military response 
that Russia initiated against the republic in 1994 encouraged 
other regions to seek more power. In most cases, including oil- 
rich Tatarstan and diamond-rich Sakha (Yakutia), the Yeltsin 
government has signed compromise bilateral treaties assuaging 
local demands, which are mostly economic. Some of Russia's 
fifty-five lesser jurisdictions — the six territories and the forty- 
nine oblasts — have made similar demands. Because the federal 
government has not been able to enforce its policies on a num- 
ber of issues, the jurisdictions have taken varying approaches to 
economic and political reform, creating a patchwork effect 
that has inhibited interregional cooperation. 

The military failure in Chechnya was the most obvious indi- 
cation of a grave overall decline in post-Soviet Russia's military 
establishment. The Soviet military earned society's gratitude by 
its performance in the Great Patriotic War (as World War II is 
commonly called in Russia), a costly but unified and heroic 
defense of the homeland against invading Nazi armies. In the 
postwar era, the Soviet military maintained its positive image 
and budgetary support in good part because of incessant gov- 



lv 



ernment propaganda about the need to defend the country 
against the capitalist West. 

The demise of the Soviet Union also ended much of the 
threat of military confrontation between Russia and the West 
that had characterized the Cold War. Already in the mid-1980s, 
however, Soviet military doctrine had begun shifting to a more 
defensive posture in recognition of the country's economic 
limitations, even as Soviet occupation of the Warsaw Pact (see 
Glossary) nations and of Afghanistan continued. Beginning in 
1988, the Soviet military establishment suffered a series of 
major blows. The military operation in Afghanistan, which had 
little success against fervid guerrilla forces, was declared a fail- 
ure in 1988, and Soviet forces withdrew after nearly ten years of 
combat. In 1989 the Warsaw Pact alliance began to disintegrate 
as all the East European member nations rejected their com- 
munist governments; the alliance dissolved in 1991, and by 
1994 all Russian forces had left Eastern Europe. 

The third blow, the end of the Soviet Union itself, required 
withdrawal of troops stationed in the other fourteen republics; 
in this process, much equipment and weaponry was left behind 
and claimed by the newly independent states. The successive 
return of large numbers of troops into Russia after each of 
these three events caused an enormous logistical problem for 
the military; furthermore, the morale of the institution was 
seriously eroded by withdrawals of unprecedented magnitude 
from regions assumed to be permanent parts of the Soviet 
domain. At the same time, serious examples of corruption 
were exposed at the highest command levels of the armed 
forces. 

In 1992 the Russian Federation inherited the bulk of the 
Soviet Union's armed forces as well as all of their problems. In 
the early 1990s, there were new ramifications of the morale and 
command problems that had surfaced earlier. In a new social 
environment of permissiveness and diversification, increasing 
numbers of Russia's youth rejected military service as a patri- 
otic duty, many top individuals in the junior officer corps 
resigned because of poor pay and housing, and the incidence 
of crime increased significantly. At the same time, corruption 
and politicization destroyed the unity that had characterized 
the senior officer corps during the Soviet era. These changes 
all occurred as the need for a new set of national security 
guidelines became increasingly evident. Within a few years, 
both the geopolitical and the budgetary conditions of Russia's 



lvi 



military had changed dramatically without appropriate adjust- 
ments in military doctrine. Although the size of the military 
was reduced between 1992 and 1996 from about 2.8 million 
personnel to about 1.5 million, reductions were disproportion- 
ately high in the enlisted ranks, leaving a bloated officer corps. 
In 1996 both the military doctrine (which was updated frag- 
mentarily in 1993) and military equipment still reflected the 
Soviet-era priority of large-scale mechanized land war and/or 
nuclear war to be fought on the continent of Europe. 

In 1996 elements of a new military doctrine appeared, but 
fundamental conflict remained between reformers and hard- 
liners in the policy-making establishment. The strong positions 
taken by the opposing sides suggested that enacting a compre- 
hensive new doctrine would involve a long struggle. Despite 
the diminished capability of Russia's economy to support the 
military, hard-liners insisted that major reductions would dam- 
age national security. As budgetary support of routine military 
readiness has shrunk drastically in the mid-1990s, calls for 
large-scale reform have intensified. Among the main reform 
elements cited are downsizing the armed forces, shifting their 
emphasis to mobile warfare, eliminating much of the corrupt 
and flabby corps of senior officers, relying more heavily on con- 
tract volunteers rather than conscripts, and discarding the con- 
cept of military parity with the United States. In July 1996, the 
State Duma (the lower house of the Russian parliament) began 
hearings on reform measures. In December the Duma recom- 
mended the formation of a federal department to set military 
reform guidelines through 2005, together with a 25 percent 
increase in the military budget. 

The condition of the military forces remains an important 
part of Russia's national self-image. The Chechnya conflict, the 
first post-Soviet test of those forces, revealed shocking insuffi- 
ciencies even in elite units. In mid-1996 the dismissal of Minis- 
ter of Defense Pavel Grachev, upon whom the most blame for 
Chechnya had been heaped, produced no visible improve- 
ment. In August 1996, the sudden loss of the Chechen capital 
of Groznyy, from which Russian forces had driven the Chechen 
guerrillas in 1995, forced the withdrawal of Russian forces 
under the terms of the cease-fire that followed. 

In the second half of 1996, ultimate responsibility for mili- 
tary policy remained balanced uncertainly between civilian and 
military authorities, as it was when Grachev was minister of 
defense. In November 1996, a call for a new military doctrine 



lvii 



by Yeltsin's civilian Defense Council met stiff resistance from 
the Ministry of Defense. 

Grachev's successor, Igor' Rodionov, inherited a force with 
plummeting morale, gravely deteriorating materiel support, 
minimal training, and no clear doctrine. In the second draft 
call of 1996, an estimated 37,000 men out of a target number of 
215,000 conscripts failed to report. This was the largest 
recorded episode of draft dodging since the establishment of 
the Soviet Union. The budget passed in January 1997 added 
only token amounts to the 1996 allotment of US$19 billion. 
The budget provided for only about 38 percent of the Ministry 
of Defense's budget request and made no allowance for infla- 
tion. The 1997 budget package caused Rodionov to curse the 
Ministry of Finance as Grachev had, intensifying tensions 
among the "power ministries" of the Government (cabinet). 
Meanwhile, in the last months of 1996 the pay arrears of the 
Ministry of Defense mounted steadily, and there were rumors 
that military strike committees had been formed. Already in 
August, an estimated US$2.8 billion was owed to Russia's mili- 
tary personnel. Rodionov also repeated Grachev's complaint 
that military units of the internal security agencies received 
funding that should go to the Ministry of Defense. The exact 
troop levels of those units are unknown, but in the second half 
of 1996 some estimates exceeded 1 million. 

Rodionov predicted that the grandiose plans of Yeltsin and 
others for military restructuring and modernization would be 
frustrated without significant expenditures in the transition 
period. The plans included large-scale force reduction, a new 
military doctrine matching Russia's less stressful post-Cold-War 
geopolitical position, and possibly an all-volunteer force. In 
January 1997, the Ministry of Defense submitted a reform plan 
whose first step was increased funding. The Defense Council 
submitted a rival, long-term plan extending beyond 2005 and 
calling for 30 percent reductions in defense and non-defense 
troop levels as the first reform step, citing the country's low 
financial resources. The conflicting emphasis of the two plans 
exacerbated the existing disagreements in the defense estab- 
lishment, specifically between Rodionov and Defense Council 
chief Yuriy Baturin, over the direction of reform. 

Meanwhile, accusations of corruption and incompetence in 
the military establishment continued, with Duma Defense 
Committee chairman Lev Rokhlin, a retired general, levying 
the most serious charges. Those charges combined with the 



lviii 



military's abject failure in Chechnya to further erode the 
authority of the Ministry of Defense under Rodionov. In 
December 1996, Yeltsin forced Rodionov to resign his commis- 
sion in order to move the ministry toward civilian rather than 
military control. 

As Russia's military deteriorated, the arms export activities 
of its defense industries continued to grow. In 1995 Russia 
exported more arms to developing countries than any other 
producer; China was its best customer. Total 1995 sales were 
estimated at US$6 billion, an increase of 62 percent over 1994. 
At the end of 1996, defense authorities announced that foreign 
arms sales would play a prominent role in financing military 
reform in coming years. In early 1997, Russia angered the West 
by selling S-300 missile systems to the Republic of Cyprus and 
by selling a third Kilo-class diesel submarine to Iran. 

Some of the most visible domestic products of the arms 
industry suffered production delays in 1996. In November con- 
struction began on the Yuriy Dolgorukiy, the first in the new 
Severodvinsk class of strategic missile submarines described as 
superior to any existing model and expected to carry Russia's 
sea-based nuclear missiles after 2000. Plans had called for three 
such boats to go into production in 1996. The Petr Velikiy, a 
powerful, heavily armed cruiser whose keel was laid in 1986, 
finally took its maiden voyage in October 1996 after years of 
production delays. In March 1997, the Moscow Aviation Pro- 
duction Association (MAPO) postponed serial production of 
an advanced multifunctional fighter, targeting instead the 
MiG-35 fighter destined for overseas sales. 

The agencies of internal security have fared better than the 
military in the post-Soviet era. Throughout the Soviet period, 
these agencies were among the most firmly entrenched and 
respected national institutions. A succession of internal secu- 
rity agencies, ending with the Committee for State Security 
(Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti — KGB; see Glossary), 
struck fear in the Soviet population by thoroughly penetrating 
all of society and launching periodic purges (the most violent 
of which occurred in the 1930s) against elements of society 
deemed harmful to the socialist state. 

In the post-Soviet era, internal security agencies generally 
have received more solid support from the Yeltsin government 
than the armed forces, although specific agencies have been 
favored. The Federal Security Service (FSB), the most direct 
successor to the KGB, has a broad mandate for intelligence 



lix 



gathering inside Russia and abroad when national security is 
threatened, and no concrete governmental oversight is pre- 
scribed in legislation. Human rights advocates in Russia and 
elsewhere, sensitive to the precedent of unbridled KGB power, 
have criticized the direct presidential control of internal secu- 
rity agencies such as the FSB, and human rights violations have 
been documented. Armed units of the FSB and the Ministry of 
Internal Affairs (MVD) were heavily involved in the Chechnya 
campaign. 

Russia's still-powerful internal security agencies also were hit 
by scandal in 1996 when the former financial head of the Fede- 
ral Agency for Government Communications and Information 
(FAPSI) was imprisoned by its sister agency, the FSB, for 
embezzling large sums from the FAPSI budget. Although the 
affair received no official acknowledgment, the independent 
press reported a major power struggle between powerful suc- 
cessor agencies of the KGB. Such a scenario would continue a 
series of rearrangements of the former KGB agencies that have 
occurred in the 1990s because of political power struggles 
rather than security considerations. 

Rampant, well-publicized corruption in the security agencies 
has eroded public confidence in all of Russian law enforce- 
ment. In July 1996, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) 
reported that 1,400 employees of the regular police (militia) 
had been arrested in 1995 for various types of criminal activity, 
including participation in crimes by criminal organizations of 
the mafiya. That report was the result of the MVD's Clean 
Hands Campaign, a highly publicized public-confidence pro- 
gram begun in 1995 to purge law enforcement agencies of dis- 
honest members. But, according to most accounts, the 1995 
arrests removed only a very small part of Russia's internal secu- 
rity corruption. 

Russia has experimented cautiously with Western-style juris- 
prudence and penal reform. In the mid-1990s, jury trials were 
introduced in some regions, and the rights of accused persons 
and prison inmates were stipulated more concretely. Neverthe- 
less, major elements of the Soviet system remain in the juris- 
prudence of the Russian Federation. For example, procurators 
(public prosecutors) still have both investigative and prosecu- 
torial functions, and expansion of the jury system has met sub- 
stantial resistance among entrenched Soviet-era judges and 
procurators. In addition, prison conditions have deteriorated 
substantially because Russia's crime wave has increased the 



Ix 



prison population but funding is not available for new facilities. 
In early 1997, more than one-quarter of the prison population 
was awaiting trial, and pretrial detention lasted as long as three 
years for some individuals. Russia's procurator general, Yuriy 
Skuratov, reported that his office had been overwhelmed in 
1996 with 1.2 million court cases, for which it had only about 
7,000 investigators. He noted that the same trend was continu- 
ing in 1997. 

After many delays and amendments, a new Criminal Code 
went into effect on January 1, 1997. An estimated 150,000 crim- 
inal cases were expected to require review based on the new 
code, and many prisoners will be released because the laws 
under which they were convicted no longer exist. A separate 
criminal correction code defining conditions in the prison sys- 
tem was scheduled to go into effect in July 1997. 

Compounding Russia's other problems are deteriorating 
environmental conditions, the extent of which became clear 
only gradually during the 1990s. Among the most serious haz- 
ards in Russia are pollution of ground water and bodies of 
water in most of European Russia; air pollution from the vent- 
ing of unprocessed industrial by-products; large concentrations 
of waste chemicals from industry and agriculture; and actual 
and potential radiological pollution from civilian and military 
nuclear installations. 

In August 1996, the Bellona Foundation of Oslo, long a 
vocal critic of Russia's nuclear waste procedures, issued a damn- 
ing report on the threat posed to Arctic regions by Russia's 
nuclear waste disposal practices and at least thirty-six decom- 
missioned nuclear submarines at anchor near Murmansk with 
their reactors on board. Bellona described the Murmansk 
region as having the world's largest concentration of active and 
defunct nuclear reactors, many of which are not maintained or 
disposed of properly. According to the report, the FSB 
obstructed the foundation's investigation and imprisoned Alek- 
sandr Nikitin, the retired Russian naval officer who was a key 
author of the report. As Nikitin's trial was delayed repeatedly, 
his case attracted international protests. 

Meanwhile, the interdepartmental Commission for Ecologi- 
cal Safety, headed by senior environmental authority Aleksey 
Yablokov, continued releasing shocking statistics about Russia's 
environmental quality. For example, in 1996 one in five tap- 
water samples failed to meet public health chemical standards, 
and about 40 percent of sewage was being dumped untreated 



lxi 



into bodies of water, with Moscow and St. Petersburg among 
the regions most affected. In the second half of 1996, Yablokov 
lobbied Yeltsin unsuccessfully to expand the ecological safety 
commission and its funding. 

Russian environmentalists won a battle in December 1996 
when a regional referendum soundly rejected completion of 
the Kostroma Nuclear Power Station, on which construction 
had been suspended after the Chernobyl' disaster of 1986. This 
was Russia's first referendum on such an issue; the 59 percent 
turnout made the vote legally binding. In February 1997, the 
Republic of Sakha announced plans to conserve one-quarter of 
its vast Siberian territory, including the world's largest tract of 
virgin forest, protecting several endangered species and the 
shrinking indigenous population of Evenk nomads. That plan 
bypassed national authorities — an increasingly frequent trend 
in environmental and other matters. The Sakha government 
received a support grant directly from a Swiss environmental 
organization. 

The "social umbrella" of the Soviet Union's socialist system, 
which nominally had guaranteed all citizens employment, 
health care, child care, pensions, and universal, high-quality 
education, also encountered problems. By the 1980s, many of 
the more than 200 million citizens covered by the umbrella 
began receiving fewer benefits or benefits of lesser quality. The 
Soviet education and health systems, which offered top-quality 
service only to the country's political, scientific, and cultural 
elite, were undermined by the infrastructural and organiza- 
tional failures inherent in such centrally planned systems. The 
Soviet concept of guaranteed employment eroded the national 
economy by encouraging slipshod labor and malingering. 

In the 1990s, the state's social welfare system retained the 
bureaucratic complexities of the Soviet era, but it did not keep 
pace with the needs of society. As runaway inflation devalued 
the fixed payments of the pension system, many citizens 
depending on fixed incomes fell below the official poverty line, 
which in late 1996 was about US$67 per month. In 1996 an esti- 
mated 30 percent of those with fixed incomes and about 24 
percent of the total population were in that category. The gov- 
ernment's failure to index welfare programs also reduced the 
value of a wide variety of other entitlements that had provided 
Soviet workers with substantial savings in the cost of living. Nev- 
ertheless, Soviet-era programs such as maternity leave, child 
care, free medical facilities, and housing subsidies remained 



lxii 



substantially unchanged in the mid-1990s, continuing expecta- 
tions that increasingly strained the federal budget. 

Reforms such as pension indexation and differentiation of 
individual contributions to pension funds were only beginning 
to appear in the mid-1990s. By that time, the government's 
inability to collect taxes and other obligated funds had had a 
major impact on social programs. In the fall of 1996, an esti- 
mated US$3 billion in pension payments were overdue. At that 
point, the Pension Fund, which is administered by the Ministry 
of Social Protection, was owed US$8.5 billion by the enterprises 
that are the main contributors. The federal budget also owed 
money to the fund, which by mid-1996 had exhausted its com- 
mercial bank credits by taking loans to make pension pay- 
ments. 

Russia's health care system also deteriorated substantially in 
the 1990s. Equipment and medicines are in increasingly short 
supply, aging facilities have not been replaced, and existing 
facilities often are inaccessible. Medical personnel generally 
are not trained as rigorously as their contemporaries in the 
West, and chronic failures to pay doctors and nurses have exac- 
erbated shortages in those professions. The 1997 national bud- 
get allocated US$1.6 billion for health, an increase of US$158 
million over 1996, but most of the new money was targeted for 
medical centers in large cities. The 1997 figure was 2.6 percent 
of the gross domestic product (GDP — see Glossary), compared 
with the World Health Organization's recommended mini- 
mum share of 5 percent. 

Failures in health care are one aspect of an increasingly 
grave health crisis afflicting the Russian population as a whole 
in the 1990s. Other elements of the crisis include widespread 
and acute environmental pollution of various types, which gov- 
ernment programs and nongovernmental "green" organiza- 
tions have not been able to ameliorate; the continued heavy 
use of tobacco and alcohol and a growing narcotics addiction 
problem; and poor hygiene and nutrition practices among 
large portions of the population. 

In the first ten months of 1996, confirmed cases of human 
immunodeficiency virus (HIV) were four times more numer- 
ous than in all of 1995, with drug addicts accounting for about 
70 percent of cases. Although the official estimate of HIV cases 
was fewer than 2,000 in 1996, other estimates placed the num- 
ber at ten times that many. The Ministry of Health reported 
that only 50,000 of Russia's estimated 2 million drug addicts 



lxiii 



were under treatment for their addiction in 1996. In 1996 
health experts identified alcoholism as the number-one cause 
of premature death in Russia, a situation exacerbated by the 
estimated 68 percent of alcohol products that contain foreign 
substances. By 1995 Russia's average life expectancy had fallen 
to only fifty-seven years for males and seventy-one for females, 
and natural population growth has been negative since 1992. 
In the first nine months of 1996, the population showed a net 
decrease of 350,000, dropping to 147.6 million according to 
the State Committee for Statistics. 

Russia's education system has suffered from the same short- 
ages and lack of support as its health system. And education, 
accorded high value in Soviet society, seems to have lost some 
of its esteem in a fragmented Russian society where many tradi- 
tional institutions are viewed with unprecedented skepticism. 
In the 1990s, the centralized, rigid Soviet education system has 
given way to a system that gives localities substantial autonomy 
in shaping curricula and hiring teachers. This opportunity for 
creativity has been hampered, however, by two conditions: 
because many Soviet-trained Russian educators do not under- 
stand individual initiative and autonomy, many schools have 
perpetuated the rote memorization methods of the past; and, 
as in other aspects of Russian social policy, funding for person- 
nel and infrastructure has been woefully inadequate. Teachers, 
always underpaid in the Soviet system, have been impoverished 
by the Russian system, and many have left the profession since 
1992. In this atmosphere, private schools have begun to offer 
creative curricula to students who can afford to eschew public 
schooling. According to Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Ilyushin, 
by October 1996 education and culture had received only 65 
percent and 30 percent, respectively, of the 1996 budget funds 
allotted to them. In late 1996 and early 1997, the highest pro- 
portion of striking workers were teachers. 

Beginning in the late 1980s, religion assumed a more impor- 
tant role in the lives of many Russians, and in the life of the 
Russian state as well. Russian Orthodoxy, the dominant reli- 
gion of Russia since the ruler Vladimir accepted Christianity in 
A.D. 988, was subservient to the state from the time of Peter the 
Great (r. 1682-1725) until 1917; nevertheless, it exerted a pow- 
erful influence on the spiritual lives of most Russians. In the 
Soviet period, the activities of the church were further 
restricted as most churches and monasteries were closed and 
religious observances strongly discouraged. 



Ixiv 



In the late 1980s, the Gorbachev regime began to restore the 
church's property and rights; official observance of the millen- 
nium of Russian Orthodoxy in 1988 was a watershed event in 
that process. Beginning in 1992, the Russian Orthodox patri- 
archate, which had been restored in 1917 only to be repressed 
for the next seventy years, assumed growing influence in state 
as well as spiritual affairs. Many churches were built and 
restored, and in the early 1990s millions of Russians returned 
to regular worship. However, by early 1997 Orthodox Russians 
attended church at about the same rate as religious believers in 
West European countries. In the 1990s, politicians have eagerly 
sought the opinion of the church on most important issues, 
and in 1996 even the communist presidential candidate, Gen- 
nadiy Zyuganov, made an appearance with Patriarch Aleksiy II 
an important element of his campaign. 

Other religious groups also have enjoyed relative freedom in 
the post-Soviet period, with some limitations. Mainstream Prot- 
estant, Roman Catholic, and Muslim groups are fully accepted 
by the state and the Orthodox Church, but the Orthodox hier- 
archy often has used its dominant position to discourage or 
block the activities of their congregations. The new freedom of 
the Gorbachev era brought a wave of Western evangelical 
groups whose proselytizing the Orthodox hierarchy viewed 
with alarm and hostility. In mid-1996 the State Duma passed 
legislation establishing a state committee to monitor the activ- 
ity of such groups. The law was introduced by nationalist allies 
of the Orthodox Church and opposed by democratic factions 
as unconstitutional. The Jewish community, whose religious 
and cultural activities have blossomed in Russia in the 1990s, 
still experiences subtle forms of discrimination. 

The problems of post-Soviet Russia also are based directly in 
economic circumstances. Some of the reasons for Russia's 
uneven progress are found in the legacy of the Soviet era, oth- 
ers in post-Soviet economic policies. For the majority of Rus- 
sian citizens, the ballyhooed economic reforms of the 1990s 
did not improve the quality of life; indeed, in 1996 the "shock" 
of Russia's transition to a free-enterprise system seemed to be 
intensifying rather than subsiding, as unemployment figures 
rose and more Russians slipped below the official poverty line. 
In the first half of 1996, the number of registered unemployed 
workers increased by 16 percent, totaling 2.7 million — but a 
much higher number of Russians remained unemployed and 
failed to register for meager state benefits. According to an offi- 



lxv 



cial report, average real incomes decreased by about 40 per- 
cent between 1991 and October 1996. 

Russia's society has become increasingly divided according 
to economic categories. As the majority of Russian citizens 
struggle to remain above the poverty line, a small minority 
have prospered through high-risk economic ventures that 
often involve connections with the mafiya, Russia's pervasive 
network of organized criminal organizations. Members of the 
successful minority increasingly are distinguished from the 
majority of society by conspicuous consumption, which has 
engendered strong feelings of resentment. Another type of 
post-Soviet success story is demonstrated by former members 
of the Soviet official elite, the nomenklatura, who have used 
Soviet-era connections to gain access to financial resources and 
influential enterprise positions in the new system. By 1997 
experts had identified a new oligarchy — the post-Soviet entre- 
preneurs who have built personal empires and strong ties with 
the government at the expense of their fellow Russians. Rus- 
sian society also is increasingly divided by generations. Older 
Russians have found adapting to the complexities and chal- 
lenges of post-Soviet society much more difficult than have 
their younger compatriots, so the former often preserve as 
much as possible of their former lives, garnished with nostalgia 
for an idealized Soviet past 

Moscow has become the center of Russia's economic activity, 
both personal and corporate, far outstripping St. Petersburg, 
which in the Soviet era was the more cosmopolitan city. Many 
foreign investors have concentrated their activity in Moscow, 
where all of Russia's large banks are headquartered and where 
the energetic Mayor Yuriy Luzhkov has fostered rapid commer- 
cial expansion with active government participation. Mean- 
while, the luxurious life of the new Moscow upper class has 
spread very little to the hinterlands. 

The increasing availability of land and materials has enabled 
some individuals to escape dependency on the old housing 
subsidy system (which nevertheless remained active in 1997). 
In the transition to a fully privatized housing system that began 
in 1992, the scarcity of resources and high inflation drove pri- 
vate housing prices beyond the reach of most Russians; in the 
mid-1990s, the slow, uneven progress of housing reform meant 
the continued existence of long waiting lists and very crowded 
housing conditions, especially in the cities. 



Ixvi 



The Soviet and Russian economies have been supported by 
one of the richest supplies of natural resources in the world. 
Fuels, minerals, timber, and a well-educated labor force always 
have been strong principal assets of industry. But the location 
of Russia's raw materials often has presented a transportation 
problem. As the industrial centers of European Russia used up 
nearby fuels and other resources, the more distant supplies of 
Siberia have become critical but expensive alternatives. The 
sheer volume of available raw materials encouraged tremen- 
dous waste in the Soviet system; central planning took into 
account neither the possibility of running out of materials nor 
the grave environmental damage caused by uncontrolled 
exploitation. 

Economic policy in the Soviet Union was the exclusive 
domain of planners in the central government, whose quotas 
and distribution decisions ruled virtually all economic activity 
in Russia and the other Soviet republics. Resource apportion- 
ment in that system favored heavy industry and the military- 
industrial complex at the expense of consumer production, 
token revival of which was attempted sporadically beginning 
with the regime of Nikita S. Khrushchev (in office 1953-64). 
The services sector remained underdeveloped, and agricul- 
tural production policy precluded private landownership and 
relied almost entirely on collective farms (see Glossary) and 
state farms (see Glossary). Central allocation of resources and 
price establishment created an inflexible economic system 
whose production and consumption sides had no relation to 
each other. The basic unit of planning, the five-year plan (see 
Glossary), set long-term goals whose basis in real economic 
conditions often was nonexistent by the end of the period. The 
Soviet planning system also produced a substantial class of state 
bureaucrats, many of whom preserved their influential and 
highly profitable positions in state enterprises (and hence their 
stubborn opposition to economic reform) well into the post- 
Soviet era. 

The Soviet state also had full control of foreign trade. The 
vast majority of Russia's overseas commercial activity was con- 
ducted with the nations of the Community for Mutual Eco- 
nomic Assistance (Comecon — see Glossary), all of which 
followed the Soviet model of the centrally planned economy, 
and all of which were governed by Comecon's artificial system 
for allocation of production responsibilities. This closed com- 
mercial system included a high percentage of barter arrange- 



lxvii 



ments. The system was supplemented by equally regimented 
commercial links among the republics of the Soviet Union. An 
important result was that Russian products were exposed to 
very little genuine competition in world markets, despite peri- 
odic efforts to cultivate commercial relationships outside 
Comecon. 

By 1980 the Soviet economy had entered a decline from 
which it never was to emerge. It became obvious that the strong 
central controls that traditionally guided economic develop- 
ment had failed to promote the creativity and productivity 
urgently needed in a highly developed, modern economy. As 
one of the two world superpowers, the Soviet Union was acutely 
conscious that the West, and especially the United States, was 
bypassing it in many areas outside the military field. So, begin- 
ning in the mid-1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev (in 
office 1985-91) experimented with unprecedented economic 
reforms, including limited application of free-market princi- 
ples, in a policy called perestroika (rebuilding — see Glossary). 
However, the Gorbachev concessions were too small and too 
late, so the system's inherent flaws remained. The standard of 
living and productivity both continued to fall until the Soviet 
Union dissolved and central planning was discredited in 1991. 

As president of the Russian Republic, Boris Yeltsin already 
had advocated substantial economic reform prior to Russia's 
independence, in order to begin resurrecting Russia's econ- 
omy from the crisis of the last Soviet years. For the new Russian 
Federation, the Yeltsin administration set ambitious economic 
reform goals in 1992: strict limitation of government spending 
to cut inflation; redirection of state investment from the mili- 
tary-industrial complex and heavy industry toward consumer 
production; a new tax system to redistribute financial resources 
to more efficient sectors; cutting of government subsidies for 
enterprises and eliminating government price controls; and 
lifting of government control of foreign trade. Privatization of 
the major sectors of production, still virtually state monopolies 
in 1991, was another primary goal. 

In 1992 worsening economic conditions brought a confron- 
tation with the Supreme Soviet (legislature) over economic 
policy. The clash forced Yeltsin's dismissal of reform Prime 
Minister Yegor Gaydar and a general modification of reform 
goals under Gaydar' s pragmatic successor, Viktor Chernomyr- 
din. At that point, failing enterprises still received easy credit 
from the banking system and from other enterprises — a contin- 



lxviii 



uation of Soviet-style fiscal management and a crucial flaw that 
began to be corrected only in 1995. 

Many of the goals of the Yeltsin program were met at least 
partially in the first five post-Soviet years, depending on which 
statistics are used to define economic trends. Foreign trade has 
been liberalized significantly, and the list of Russia's trading 
partners now is dominated by West European rather than East 
European and former Soviet countries. The course of foreign 
investment has been uneven. Although Western and Japanese 
firms have shown great interest in joint ventures with Russian 
enterprises, Russia's unfinished and uncertain commercial and 
legal infrastructure has limited foreign participation, and pro- 
tectionist laws restrict foreign activity in industries such as com- 
munications and automobiles. International lenders such as 
the International Monetary Fund (IMF — see Glossary), the 
Paris Club of Western government lenders, and the London 
Club of international commercial banks have provided sub- 
stantial aid, with the caveat that Russia must improve economic 
indicators such as its inflation rate and budget deficits. In 1993 
and 1994, soaring inflation and government deregulation of 
prices robbed consumers of much of their purchasing power 
before a government tight-money policy brought inflation 
under control in 1995 and 1996. In December 1996, prices rose 
by 1.4 percent, although wage arrears made that figure irrele- 
vant for many Russians. 

The Yeltsin privatization program began with small enter- 
prises, a large proportion of which were in private hands by 
1995. Sales of larger enterprises, accomplished in several 
phases, encountered substantial difficulties, however. In 1995 
allegations of corruption slowed the process, as did persistent 
opposition from the antireform State Duma factions. Privatiza- 
tion was virtually halted during the 1996 presidential election 
campaign, but in July 1996 the administration announced new 
goals and a reformed system for ownership transition. Initially 
positive, Western evaluations of Russia's privatization program 
were tempered in 1996 by continued government favoritism 
toward former state enterprises, by the sale of investment 
shares to banks and other institutions with close state connec- 
tions rather than to the public, and by the program's distinct 
slowdown in 1996. In October 1996, the government had col- 
lected only 14 percent of the year's targeted privatization reve- 
nue of US$2.2 billion. In November the planned public sale of 
stock in two major state-owned telecommunications firms, Ros- 



lxix 



telekom and Svyazinvest, was canceled in favor of stock sales to 
two large banks that had financed Yeltsin's 1996 campaign, her- 
alding a new privatization scandal. The 1997 national budget 
set a privatization income goal for 1997 at US$1.1 billion, but 
already in February Vladimir Potanin, head of the privatization 
revenue collection commission, expressed doubt that the goal 
could be met. 

Tax collection remained a major problem for Russia as of 
early 1997. Although some nominal tax reforms were put in 
place, tax collection remained inept, and the system still failed 
to promote private initiative or foreign investment. Despite 
constant government pleas, promises, and reform blueprints, 
and despite substantial pressure from the IMF, in 1997 taxation 
remained the main obstacle to budgetary solvency. 

The government lost large amounts of tax revenue because 
unofficial and illegal commerce is widespread and because the 
State Taxation Service inspires so little respect from legitimate 
businesses. According to an official 1996 estimate, only 16 per- 
cent of Russia's 2.6 million firms were paying taxes regularly, 
and at least twice that number paid no taxes at all. On three dif- 
ferent occasions, the IMF postponed installments of a US$10.1 
billion loan to Russia because of the taxation problem — twice 
in the second half of 1996 and again in February 1997. 

When the official tax shortfall reached US$24.4 billion in 
October 1996, the government began televising appeals for tax- 
law compliance. A new emergency tax commission, headed by 
Prime Minister Chernomyrdin and Chief of Staff Anatoliy Chu- 
bays, targeted seventeen of Russia's largest companies for bank- 
ruptcy proceedings if their huge tax arrears were not paid 
immediately. Among the most delinquent enterprises were 
three subsidiaries of Chernomyrdin's extremely wealthy former 
company, the State National Gas Company (Gazprom), which 
reportedly owed US$2.1 billion. Many large enterprises failed 
to comply, and much of Russia's extensive so-called shadow 
economy remained beyond the reach of the commission. Crit- 
ics characterized the emergency commission as a stopgap tactic 
that delayed fundamental reform in the tax system. According 
to government statistics, in 1996 some 20,000 collection orders 
were issued for back taxes amounting to US$15.7 billion; the 
orders yielded only US$3.8 billion to the state budget. Early in 
1997, Minister of Finance Aleksandr Livshits drafted a new tax 
code that would have saved the government an estimated 
US$30 billion annually. But the plan's anticipated closing of 



lxx 



profitable loopholes attracted sharp resistance. In February 
1997, Minister of Internal Affairs Anatoliy Kulikov, known as a 
hard-liner, was given the task of cracking down on tax violators. 
Yeltsin removed Livshits from his position during the Govern- 
ment reorganization of March 1997. 

In March the Government threatened bankruptcy proceed- 
ings against a new group of ninety nonpaying enterprises, 
many of them quite large, hoping to encourage public sales of 
shares that would dislodge Soviet-era managers in favor of out- 
side investors. At the same time, privatization chief Al'fred 
Kokh was given control of the inept State Taxation Service. 

Besides the chronic tax collection failure, institutional 
remains of the Soviet era also continue to plague economic 
progress. In many large plants, the economic reforms of the 
early 1990s left control with the same managers who had run 
the plants for the state. In the post-Soviet years, managers have 
taken advantage of Russia's new free-market atmosphere, and 
the lack of effective commercial legislation, to line their own 
pockets — often in cooperation with criminal organizations — 
while paying little attention to plant productivity. In 1996 the 
Government increased subsidies to some major automobile 
and defense plants, reversing the direction of privatization and 
further diminishing incentives. 

Another obstacle to economic stability is the pervasive influ- 
ence on economic activity of the mafiya — as commonly used in 
Russia, a term including gangsters, dishonest businesspeople, 
and corrupt officials. In the 1990s, Russia is suffering the 
effects of an increasingly prosperous national network of crimi- 
nals who extort protection money from an estimated 75 per- 
cent of businesses and banks. Individuals refusing such 
payments often are the victims of violent crimes. In 1995 gangs 
controlled an estimated 50,000 private and state enterprises 
and had full ownership of thousands more. Unlike organized 
criminal groups in the West, which specialize in illegal activity 
such as drug trafficking and prostitution, Russia's mafiya spans 
the entire range of the economy, discouraging private enter- 
prise and siphoning off 10 to 20 percent of enterprise profits 
that are neither taxed nor reinvested in legitimate business. 
Organized crime also has been involved in the movement of a 
huge amount of capital — estimated at US$1 to US$2 billion per 
month — out of Russia in the mid-1990s. Such activity has pros- 
pered mainly because of strong links with corrupt officials; an 



lxxi 



estimated 30 to 50 percent of organized crime's proceeds is 
spent on bribes to procurators, police, and bureaucrats. 

This connection is not new in the post-Soviet era; already in 
the Brezhnev era, officials took bribes from the underworld as 
the black market responded to gaps in Soviet production. In 
the early post-Soviet years, reformers implicitly condoned such 
activity in the hope that it would hasten the development of a 
legitimate private-enterprise sector. In 1993, however, govern- 
ment measures against criminals were stimulated by publicity 
about Russia's crime wave and by the success of ultranationalist 
political groups who stressed the crime issue. Many of the 
Yeltsin administration's law enforcement decrees of 1993 and 
1994 were of questionable constitutionality, and they have had 
little overall effect in the mid-1990s because law enforcement 
agencies remain corrupt. 

As Russia has attempted to meet the standards for inflation 
and budget deficits set by international lenders, a key element 
has been limiting the money supply, which was poorly con- 
trolled until 1995. The more stringent policies established that 
year brought loud complaints from regional governments, an 
increase in noncurrency payments that hampered the collec- 
tion of state revenue, and continued wage arrears in state and 
private enterprises suffering cash shortages. Although the 
annual inflation rate for 1996 was 22 percent, compared with 
131 percent in 1995, authorities in the Government and else- 
where blamed a new economic downturn on the tight-money 
policy because private enterprises lacked capital with which to 
expand their operations. 

The 1997 monetary plan of the Russian Central Bank (RCB) 
called for increasing the money supply by 22 to 30 percent dur- 
ing that year, a level not projected to raise inflation above the 
12 percent annual increase forecast by the 1997 national bud- 
get. At the end of 1996, the RCB planned for a ruble deprecia- 
tion of 9 percent during 1997, which would maintain the 
exchange rate at between 5,750 and 6,350 rubles per United 
States dollar at the end of the year. During 1996 the exchange 
rate moved from 4,640 rubles to the dollar to 5,560, an 
increase of nearly 20 percent. 

A Government goal for 1997 was reducing the interest rate 
for domestic bank loans to 20 or 25 percent to provide working 
capital for stagnant enterprises and limit the haphazard, 
uncontrolled interenterprise loans and in-kind payments that 
had proliferated as capital became scarce. However, shares in 



lxxii 



most enterprises remained unavailable to the general public, 
and the high-interest bonds sold by the Government in 1996 
had attracted large amounts of bank capital away from more 
risky investment in private ventures. 

The Government's draft 1997 budget, which had been 
revised by a conciliation commission of legislators and Govern- 
ment representatives, was approved by the State Duma in Janu- 
ary after the four readings required by law. After the first two 
drafts were rejected, the Government added about US$6 bil- 
lion in spending and new tax breaks to stimulate economic 
activity. The changes swung the votes of the Communist Party 
of the Russian Federation (Kommunisticheskaya partiya 
Rossiyskoy Federatsii — KPRF) and its allies, who had lobbied 
for additional government spending, but democratic parties 
such as Yabloko voted against the budget because of inade- 
quate fiscal restraint. The Federation Council (the upper 
house of the parliament) approved the budget but expressed 
serious doubts about the realism of its revenue projections. 

As approved, the budget was based on projections of 11.8 
percent annual inflation and GDP growth of 2 percent for 
1997. The planned budget deficit of about US$16.5 billion 
would be 3.5 percent of the projected GDP figure. However, 
Russian and Western experts, including Russia's minister of 
economics, Yevgeniy Yasin, called the GDP projection greatly 
exaggerated. Yasin's ministry forecast zero GDP growth for 
1997, with recovery beginning in 1998 at the earliest. The bud- 
get did not include a 10 percent increase in Russia's minimum 
wage that went into effect in January 1997 and that would 
entail additional state spending. In 1996 the government's 
issue of bonds with interest rates exceeding 100 percent had 
complicated the budget-balancing process by tripling the gov- 
ernment borrowing of 1995 and inflating the public debt from 
16 to 26 percent of GDP. 

Economic indicators for the first half of 1996 were mostly 
negative. According to an independent Russian survey, com- 
pared with December 1995 the real volume of production and 
services dropped by 11 percent, the number of employed per- 
sons dropped by 4 percent, the real volume of capital invest- 
ment dropped by 54 percent, the average prices of 
manufactured products and purchased products rose by 14 
percent and 25 percent, respectively, and the average wage rose 
by 10 percent. In the first nine months of 1996, total GDP 
dropped by 6 percent, and industrial output dropped by 5 per- 



lxxiii 



cent compared with the same period in 1995. Light industry, 
construction materials, and machine building showed the 
sharpest drops in production, and domestic investment 
declined by 17 percent. 

In the first nine months of 1996, agricultural production 
dropped by 8 percent. Russia's 1996 grain harvest was 69 mil- 
lion tons, one of the smallest in the last thirty years and only a 9 
percent improvement over the disastrously low harvest of 1995. 
An estimated three-quarters of farms lost money, and only two- 
thirds of 1996 budget allotments for farm support were paid 
out. As of early 1997, the restructuring of the agricultural sys- 
tem was one of the major unfulfilled promises of Yeltsin's presi- 
dency. 

Russia's foreign trade position did not improve significantly 
in 1996. Membership in the World Trade Organization 
(WTO — see Glossary), a top priority for acceptance in the 
international free market, continued to be delayed. Although 
some aspects of Russia's trade policy have been liberalized sub- 
stantially, the WTO cited continuing price controls on oil, state 
subsidies to major industries, protective import duties, and 
abrupt changes in tariff and tax policies for foreign companies 
as defects that precluded Russia's membership. According to 
the WTO, stability and transparency were the major missing 
elements in Russia's trade policy. Although the United States 
pledged support for Russia's admittance in 1998, prospects 
were unclear in early 1997. 

Foreign investment for 1996 was forecast to reach only 
slightly more than half the 1995 figure (US$1.5 billion), mainly 
because of continuing uncertainty in Russia's standards for tax- 
ation, accounting, and property rights. In October 1996, an 
international market consulting firm placed Russia below Bra- 
zil, Indonesia, Mexico, and Venezuela in desirability as an 
emerging market opportunity for investors. Corruption, fraud, 
and bureaucratic delays were cited as the main factors in that 
ranking. In November the failure of a Russian space mission to 
Mars lost foreign investors about US$180 million, as well as 
damaging the stature of a key remaining high-technology 
industry. In April the space program suffered further damage 
with the delay of the new Russia-United States International 
Space Station because the Government had not funded a criti- 
cal aerospace contractor. 

On the positive side, in October foreign investors paid 
nearly US$450 million for shares in Gazprom, the natural gas 



lxxiv 



monopoly. About forty joint ventures were active in the oil 
industry in 1996, accounting for about 8 percent of Russia's 
total extraction. Foreign investment in Russia's extraction 
industries was expected to expand significantly beginning in 
1997 as the State Duma expedited approval of the production- 
sharing agreements that are the basis of foreign participation. 

In November 1996, Russia issued its first set of bonds on the 
European market after receiving an unexpectedly high bond 
rating from Western credit agencies. Following Russia's first 
bond rating since 1917, the bonds drew US$1 billion from 
United States, European, and South Korean investors attracted 
by the 9.25 percent interest rate. A place in the bond market 
was expected to help Russia raise money from other interna- 
tional sources. In March 1997, the issue of a second set of 
bonds, this time denominated in German marks, fetched 
US$1.2 billion. A third issue was planned for later in 1997; like 
the second, it was designated to pay overdue pensions and sala- 
ries. 

In late 1996 and early 1997, labor groups showed some signs 
of ending their remarkably passive reaction to the chronic 
wage arrears in many of Russia's industries. (In March 1997, 
the total wage debt was estimated at US$8.5 billion.) Through 
most of 1996, with a few notable exceptions such as the coal 
workers, labor in Russia followed the Soviet pattern of expect- 
ing the government rather than enterprise managers to rem- 
edy their plight. 

The older trade unions, many of whose leaders had been 
hand-picked by plant managers in the Soviet era, generally dis- 
couraged strong actions against employers in the early and 
mid-1990s. Unions formed after 1985 suffered from Russia's 
total lack of labor legislation, which allowed the government 
and enterprise officials to ignore union claims on behalf of the 
workers. Experts pointed to the lack of pressure from a united 
labor movement as a key reason the Yeltsin government failed 
to address the problem of overdue wages. 

In the second half of 1996, strike activity intensified some- 
what. According to government statistics, 356,000 workers at 
more than 3,700 enterprises participated in strikes in the first 
nine months of 1996, with the largest number of strikes in edu- 
cational institutions and coal mines. (Doctors, miners, nurses, 
and teachers were the workers hardest hit by wage arrears.) 

In November 1996 and March 1997, nationwide strikes and 
demonstrations called by the Federation of Independent Trade 



lxxv 



Unions of Russia (Federatsiya nezavisimikh profsoyuzov 
Rossii — FNPR), the largest such organization in the country, 
failed to galvanize widespread support. In the March action, an 
estimated 2 million workers struck or demonstrated, but more 
than 80 percent of those were teachers, and the FNPR had pre- 
dicted substantially heavier participation. Observers attributed 
the low turnout to apathy, lack of trust in the FNPR, and the 
expectation that Yeltsin's recent government reorganization 
would improve the situation. 

The democratization of the political system has followed an 
equally bumpy path in Russia's first post-Soviet years. As with 
economic reform, some elements of political reform appeared 
under Gorbachev in the late 1980s. The policy of glasnost 
allowed public discussion of hitherto taboo subjects, including 
the wisdom of government economic policy in a time of serious 
economic decline. As the Soviet Union's regional jurisdictions 
clamored for various degrees of sovereignty, Boris Yeltsin led 
Russia's challenge to Soviet authority in a number of areas. In 
1991 Russians elected Yeltsin president of their republic in a 
free election; the coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 made 
Yeltsin the most powerful man in Russia, which shortly became 
an independent state. 

From the very beginning, Yeltsin's attempts to promulgate 
reform programs from the office of the presidency encoun- 
tered stiff opposition from antireform factions in the legislative 
branch. Beginning in 1994, that opposition was centered in the 
State Duma. After Yeltsin used military force to overcome an 
open rebellion against his dismissal of the parliament in Octo- 
ber 1993, he achieved passage of a new constitution that pre- 
scribed a strong executive and reduced the powers of the 
legislative branch. However, the first two legislative elections, in 
1993 and 1995, seated large numbers of deputies from the 
KPRF, the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (Liberal'no- 
demokraticheskaya partiya Rossii — LDPR), and other national- 
ist and antireform groups. Under worsening economic condi- 
tions, a seemingly unstoppable crime wave, and a highly 
unpopular war in Chechnya, Yeltsin's popularity plummeted in 
1995 and early 1996. His response was a contradictory series of 
personnel and agency shifts at top government levels, together 
with presidential decrees that often reversed the movement 
toward democratic governance. By early 1996, virtually all 
reformist officials had been removed from positions of influ- 
ence, and a group of hard-liners, led by presidential security 



lxxvi 



chief Aleksandr Korzhakov, Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Sos- 
kovets, and Minister of Internal Affairs Anatoliy Kulikov, seem- 
ingly had the president's ear. 

By that time, Yeltsin's authoritarian use of executive power 
had combined with the Chechnya imbroglio to lose him the 
support of the democratic and reformist factions that had been 
active promoters of early reform policies. As he engaged in an 
uphill presidential campaign, Yeltsin made lavish promises of 
government aid to unemployed workers and state enterprises, 
and allegations of corruption in the latest phase of the privati- 
zation program forced him to remain silent about that aspect 
of his administration. 

The 1996 presidential campaign yielded two distinctly 
opposed theories of governance: the KPRF's frank appeal for 
return to the central rule of Soviet days and Yeltsin's sometimes 
timid commitment to democratization and economic reform. 
In general, however, the national party system remained quite 
fluid. Although a large number of parties with national constit- 
uencies emerged, much shifting occurred among the smaller 
parties as coalitions formed and dissolved. Some forty-three 
parties and coalitions registered for the 1995 legislative elec- 
tions. In 1995 Yeltsin attempted to dominate party politics by 
forming two nominally opposed parties with essentially pro- 
administration positions, but his strategy was unsuccessful. The 
one major party that emerged from his manipulations, Our 
Home Is Russia, captured relatively few seats in the State Duma 
in 1995 but retained national standing as a major party because 
of its identification with Chernomyrdin. 

Of the proreform opposition groups, the Yabloko coalition 
remained the strongest in 1996, but its influence was limited 
because it refused to join forces with other reform parties. The 
candidates of Yabloko and other reformist groups fared poorly 
in the first round of the 1996 presidential election. Meanwhile, 
the KPRF had developed a unified and loyal following among 
Russians disillusioned with Yeltsin and nostalgic for the Soviet 
past. 

As the presidential campaign developed, the KPRF candi- 
date, former CPSU functionary Gennadiy Zyuganov, emerged 
as the prime competitor of Yeltsin. The president used his 
access to broadcast and print media (which feared the repres- 
sion that would result from a KPRF victory) to climb steadily in 
the polls. In the first round, Yeltsin defeated Zyuganov nar- 
rowly. Before the second-round faceoff with Zyuganov, Yeltsin 



lxxvii 



dismissed the most visible hard-liners in his administration, 
added popular third-place finisher Aleksandr Lebed' to his 
administration, and coaxed lukewarm endorsements from 
Yabloko and other reformist parties. 

In the second round, Yeltsin easily defeated Zyuganov, a dull 
campaigner who could not convince undecided voters that a 
KPRF victory would not mean a return to the days of Soviet 
repression. In what amounted to a contest between anti-Yeltsin 
and anticommunist sides, Yeltsin attracted an estimated 17 mil- 
lion voters who had voted for Lebed' or Yabloko candidate 
Grigoriy Yavlinskiy in the first round, and for whom Yeltsin now 
was the lesser of two evils. 

To gain acceptance as the main opposition faction at the 
national level, after the presidential election the KPRF 
attempted to broaden its constituency by forming a coalition 
called the National Patriotic Union of Russia. The coalition 
included the leftist and nationalist groups that had supported 
Zyuganov's 1996 presidential bid. To improve its national 
image from one of disruption to one of constructive coopera- 
tion, the coalition softened its antigovernment rhetoric. A 
prime example of the new approach was KPRF support of the 
Chernomyrdin government's draft budget in the State Duma 
deliberations of December 1996-January 1997. 

The KPRF found this position tenable while Yeltsin was ill 
and the moderate Chernomyrdin had a strong position in the 
Government. However, the Government reorganization of 
March 1997 gave new power to reformists with whom the KPRF 
shared little common ground. The party also showed signs of a 
split between moderates and radicals who rejected compro- 
mise. Meanwhile, young Russians showed little interest in join- 
ing the KPRF, which offered few constructive ideas about 
Russia's future and whose membership increasingly was based 
on an old guard of Soviet-era activists. 

Beginning his second term, Yeltsin filled his new cabinet 
with individuals with reformist credentials. Free-market advo- 
cate Aleksandr Livshits was appointed minister of finance, and 
reformist Yevgeniy Yasin retained his position as minister of the 
economy. In another indication that economic reform would 
continue, Yeltsin named reformist Al'fred Kokh as deputy 
prime minister for privatization. Retained from the previous 
Government were Minister of Foreign Affairs Yevgeniy Prima- 
kov (a 1996 appointee), recently appointed Minister of 



lxxviii 



Defense Igor* Rodionov, and hard-line Minister of Internal 
Affairs Anatoliy Kulikov. 

The Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural 
Resources was redesignated the Ministry of Natural Resources; 
environmental issues were shifted to a new, subcabinet agency, 
the State Environmental Protection Committee, headed by Vik- 
tor Danilov-Danil'yan, who had been minister of environmental 
protection and natural resources in the first Yeltsin administra- 
tion. The only minister affiliated with the KPRF was Aman 
Tuleyev, a strong proponent of reintegration of the CIS states, 
who was appointed to head the Ministry of CIS Affairs. 

In August 1996, Chernomyrdin listed among the new Gov- 
ernment's goals a dramatic reduction of the state bureaucracy, 
including the elimination of twenty-four ministries and agen- 
cies. However, no streamlining occurred until March 1997, 
when Yeltsin dropped three of his deputy prime ministers and 
announced a large-scale Government reorganization as a rem- 
edy for what Yeltsin admitted was poor performance by his sec- 
ond-term appointees. The new, smaller Government was to 
include eight deputy prime ministers (compared with twelve 
previously), twenty-three ministries (three of which were 
headed by deputy prime ministers, and a reduction of one 
from the previous organization), sixteen state committees 
(compared with seventeen previously), and twenty other fede- 
ral agencies. 

A key appointment in this period was Boris Nemtsov as dep- 
uty prime minister in charge of social issues (including the cri- 
sis of wage and pension arrears) and the extremely prob- 
lematic reform of state monopolies and housing subsidies. As 
governor of Nizhniy Novgorod Oblast, Nemtsov had gained 
international recognition for his brilliant regional economic 
reforms. Nemtsov's reputation for honesty also was expected to 
improve the tarnished image of Yeltsin's administration. 

The Government reorganization process required much 
more time than expected because factions struggled to gain 
coveted posts and no qualified persons could be found for oth- 
ers. Reportedly at least twelve individuals refused appointments 
to head ministries and committees. The reorganization also 
sharpened the power struggle between the Government and 
the State Duma, the main political bastion of numerous special 
interests that the initiatives of Chubays and Nemtsov promised 
to attack, and whose patron, Chernomyrdin, now was fading. 



lxxix 



In June 1996, the appointment of former general Aleksandr 
Lebed' as head of the Security Council improved the prospects 
of an already promising political figure. In this position, Lebed' 
remained in the public eye by making controversial speeches 
on matters of policy and by negotiating what turned out to be 
the conclusive cease-fire of the Chechen conflict. Lebed 1 had a 
base of avid supporters who craved charismatic, assertive lead- 
ership. Unlike most other Russian government figures, he cre- 
ated a positive image on television, which by 1996 was the most 
important source of news for most Russians. In October Yeltsin 
responded to continued criticism from Lebed' by dismissing 
him from the Security Council. In the months that followed his 
dismissal, Lebed' polished his public image in Russia and 
abroad. He began preparations for a future presidential cam- 
paign by seeking funds for future political activities, and by 
traveling to the United States and Western Europe. Although 
he virtually disappeared from the pro-Yeltsin television net- 
works after his dismissal, in early 1997 polls indicated that 
Lebed' remained the most popular political figure in Russia. In 
March he established a new opposition party, the Russian Peo- 
ple's Republican Party, which he described as an alternative to 
the KPRF and the ruling elite. 

Early in Yeltsin's second term, the urgency of the Chechnya 
conflict receded as the two sides negotiated the long-term con- 
ditions of the so-called Khasavyurt accords that Lebed' had 
achieved in August 1996. The cease-fire was met with great 
relief by the Russian people as the end of a long ordeal, and 
this attitude contributed to the enduring popularity of Lebed'. 
In October the Khasavyurt accords survived the dismissal of 
their architect; the Chechens reluctantly continued negotia- 
tions after the moderate Ivan Rybkin was named to replace 
Lebed' as Security Council chief and head negotiator on the 
Russian side. In November Yeltsin announced the withdrawal 
of the two Russian brigades that had been designated for per- 
manent occupation of Chechnya, a concession upon which 
Chechen negotiators had adamantly insisted. By February 
1997, all Russian units had been withdrawn. After six Red Cross 
workers and six Russian civilians were murdered — apparently 
by renegade guerrillas — near Groznyy in December 1996, all 
international aid organizations except for the Organization for 
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE — see Glossary) 
removed their personnel from Chechnya. Unreconciled 
Chechen guerrilla groups continued kidnappings in 1997, 



lxxx 



however, and the resettlement of Russian emigres from Chech- 
nya promised to strain the already meager resources of Russia's 
Federal Migration Service. 

In late 1996, Russia took an increasingly conciliatory negoti- 
ating approach with the Chechens, offering agreements restor- 
ing trade, communications, customs relations, and road links 
and resuming oil and gas refining and transport. Russia's best 
hope of keeping Chechnya in the federation in 1997 was eco- 
nomic leverage, because the war had left the republic deci- 
mated and without international ties and because the 
infrastructure already existed for Russia to restore Chechnya's 
most vital industry, oil refining. The main Russian economic 
negotiator was Boris Berezovskiy, a controversial automotive 
and banking mogul who had contributed a large sum to 
Yeltsin's reelection campaign. 

The ultimate status of Chechnya and the payment of war 
reparations remained unresolved in early 1997. The Khasavyurt 
accords called for a five-year waiting period before deciding 
the independence issue, but Russia insisted that the territorial 
integrity of the federation must not be threatened. In January 
1997, Chechnya conducted its first presidential and legislative 
elections; international observers described the election proce- 
dure as fair and open, although refugees from Chechnya, 
including an estimated 350,000 Russians, were not permitted 
to vote. Russia's foreign policy establishment saw Asian 
Maskhadov, the former military leader who easily won the pres- 
idency, as a potential partner in further negotiations, unlike 
the more radical presidential candidates. However, all sixteen 
presidential candidates based their platforms on Chechnya's 
full independence under the name "Republic of Chechnya-Ich- 
keria," and Maskhadov refused to take his rightful seat as a 
republic governor in Russia's Federation Council. Russia's offi- 
cial response to the January elections was muted; by March, the 
terms of a treaty of "peace and agreement" were under serious 
discussion. 

As Yeltsin began his second term, the strength of the presi- 
dent's political position and the nature of his intentions 
remained unclear. Yeltsin ended his first term on an ominous 
note by retreating completely from public view immediately 
after his election victory. The heart attack that Yeltsin suffered 
between the two rounds of the election was identified only later 
as the cause of his disappearance. 



lxxxi 



Beginning with the first round of the presidential election, 
Yeltsin's physical condition exerted a growing influence over 
the political atmosphere in Russia. In the fall of 1996, news of 
the president's very serious heart condition intensified specula- 
tion about the identity of likely successors. As Yeltsin main- 
tained a limited public schedule in that period, three figures, 
Chernomyrdin, Lebed', and Moscow's very popular mayor, 
Yuriy Luzhkov, jockeyed openly for advantage in the antici- 
pated post-Yeltsin era — although Chernomyrdin clearly lacked 
the political appeal of his potential rivals. Those maneuvers 
continued after Yeltsin's heart surgery in November. 

By early 1997, Russia's apparent lack of leadership caused 
intense concern and speculation in the international commu- 
nity, and Yeltsin's popularity again plummeted as workers and 
pensioners remained unpaid. In March 1997, Yeltsin used his 
annual state of the federation speech to the State Duma to reas- 
sure domestic and foreign opinion and to reassert his presiden- 
tial power — a goal that he achieved by delivering a forceful and 
coherent speech. Accusing the Government of failing to exe- 
cute his commands, Yeltsin repeated his unfulfilled 1996 prom- 
ises of wage and pension payments, accelerated economic 
reform, and more efficient government. 

During Yeltsin's absence, another figure bore the brunt of 
opposition attacks on the administration. In 1995 and early 
1996, Yeltsin had dismissed reform economist Anatoliy Chu- 
bays from two high-level economic positions in response to 
strong criticism from antireform factions. However, after 
directing Yeltsin's successful 1996 presidential campaign, Chu- 
bays was rewarded with the chief of staff position in Yeltsin's 
second administration, at the same time increasing the pros- 
pects that the pace of reform would increase. 

Although too unpopular to have a realistic chance at the 
presidency, Chubays maneuvered effectively within the Yeltsin 
administration. He formed an alliance with Yeltsin's ambitious 
daughter, Tat'yana Dyachenko, who was rumored to have sub- 
stantial influence over her father's policy decisions. The work 
of Chubays was widely seen in the dismissal of the Aleksandr 
Korzhakov coterie in June and of Aleksandr Lebed' in October. 
Chubays was credited with maintaining some sort of order dur- 
ing Yeltsin's convalescence in the early stages of the second 
administration, even as Chubays's many enemies spread 
rumors of illegal campaign funding and links with organized 
crime. 



lxxxii 



Despite speculation that Yeltsin would limit Chubays's power 
by increasing the prestige of rivals — a technique Yeltsin had 
used throughout his presidency — in the Government reorgani- 
zation of March 1997 Yeltsin advanced Chubays to the positions 
of deputy prime minister in charge of economic affairs and 
minister of the economy. Chubays now had direct control of 
the governmental restructuring that Yeltsin prescribed to end 
bureaucratic gridlock, and the new faces that Yeltsin appointed 
at that time improved the prospect that the new minister would 
be able to accelerate economic reform in 1997. 

In July 1996, experts had seen Yeltsin's creation of a civilian 
advisory Defense Council as an effort to balance the power that 
Lebed' had gained as chief of the Security Council. In October 
the head of the Defense Council, Yuriy Baturin, supplanted 
Lebed' as the primary architect of military reform, dismissing 
six top generals and reassigning several who remained. By the 
end of 1996, Baturin was in a bitter battle with defense minister 
Rodionov for authority over reform policy. By March 1997, 
Rodionov's position in the administration was reported to be 
quite tenuous. 

Late in 1996, another extraconstitutional organ was formed 
in the Yeltsin administration: a permanent, four-member Con- 
sultative Council that included the president, the prime minis- 
ter, and the speakers of the two houses of the Federal Assembly. 
The council was to meet twice a month in an effort designed to 
smooth differences between the two branches of government. 
The inclusion of the State Duma speaker brought a prominent 
KPRF deputy, Gennadiy Seleznev, into a top advisory group — a 
move calculated by Yeltsin and Chubays to either divide or con- 
ciliate the strongest of the opposition parties. The fourth mem- 
ber of the council was Yegor Stroyev, speaker of the Federation 
Council and usually a Yeltsin supporter. During Yeltsin's ill- 
nesses, Chubays represented the president at council meetings. 

Already in the mid-1990s, the executive branch contained 
numerous directorates and commissions answering only to the 
president. In 1996 the addition of extraconstitutional govern- 
ing bodies such as the Defense Council and the Consultative 
Council continued Yeltsin's propensity to govern by decree and 
outside constitutionally prescribed lines of power. According to 
some experts, the existence of seemingly redundant presiden- 
tial policy-making groups was a new manifestation of Russia's 
long tradition of arbitrary rule; according to others, such 



Ixxxiii 



organs were necessary to circumvent the gridlock of opposition 
in the State Duma. 

In the fall of 1996, Yeltsin's illness brought demands from all 
political factions for clarification of the 1993 constitution's 
vague language on replacing a disabled head of state: the con- 
ditions for such replacement are listed in the constitution, but 
the authority to make the decision is not specified. In this case, 
Yeltsin responded by temporarily delegating to Prime Minister 
Chernomyrdin his authority as commander in chief of the 
armed forces, head of internal security, and custodian of the 
codes needed to unleash a nuclear attack. Within hours of his 
successful heart bypass surgery in November, Yeltsin publicly 
reclaimed full control, apparently seeking to end the impres- 
sion of a power vacuum in Moscow. In the months that fol- 
lowed, however, government assurances of Yeltsin's continued 
competence met increasing skepticism as the president 
appeared only in carefully edited news film. In the first months 
of 1997, KPRF deputies introduced motions in the State Duma 
to impeach Yeltsin on health grounds, and the Duma discussed 
constitutional amendments limiting the powers of the presi- 
dent. 

Between September 1996 and March 1997, Yeltsin's adminis- 
tration faced a new political challenge when a series of regional 
elections provided the KPRF and its nationalist allies another 
opportunity to weaken Yeltsin's political base. Fifty-two of Rus- 
sia's eighty-nine subnational jurisdictions were to elect chief 
executives during that period, and all of those executives are ex 
officio members of the Federation Council, the upper house of 
parliament and a bastion of Yeltsin support until 1997. (The 
chief executives of republics are called presidents; those of 
other jurisdictions carry the title governor or administrative 
head.) 

Before the elections began, experts identified fifteen of 
those constituencies, primarily in the "Red Belt" along the 
southern border from the North Caucasus to the Far East, as 
sure to elect communist leaders. At the end of 1996, a Yeltsin- 
appointed incumbent chief executive had been defeated in 
twenty-four of the forty-four elections decided to that point. 
The KPRF had backed fifteen of the new officials, and six had 
had Yeltsin's support. Among the victors were former vice pres- 
ident and outspoken Yeltsin critic Aleksandr Rutskoy, who was 
elected governor of Kursk Oblast, and Vasiliy Starodubtsev, a 
central figure in the 1991 coup against the Gorbachev govern- 



lxxxiv 



ment, who was elected governor of Tula Oblast. In most cases, 
successful candidates took less partisan positions and were 
more ready to negotiate with their opposition than experts had 
predicted when the elections began. Incumbents generally 
fared better in northern and urban regions where economic 
conditions were the most favorable. Yeltsin's doubtful health 
and the rescinding of his 1996 campaign spending promises 
hampered some progovernment candidates. All the chief exec- 
utives elected in 1996 were expected to wield greater political 
power because they now had direct mandates rather than pres- 
idential appointments, and that legitimacy also would bolster 
the power of the Federation Council vis-a-vis the State Duma in 
the Federal Assembly. 

In 1996 the central government's economic and legislative 
control of subnational jurisdictions continued to slip away as 
the power of regional chief executives increased proportion- 
ally. Governors such as Yevgeniy Nazdratenko of strategically 
vital Maritime (Primorskiy) Territory on the Pacific coast and 
Eduard Rossel' of Sverdlovsk Oblast in the Urals already had 
established personal fiefdoms outside Moscow's control. 
Nazdratenko openly challenged the national administration on 
a number of issues, including the transfer of a small parcel of 
his territory's land to China as part of a Sino-Russian border 
treaty. In 1993 Sverdlovsk Oblast briefly declared itself a repub- 
lic under Rossel'. As of January 1997, Moscow had signed bilat- 
eral agreements, establishing a wide variety of power-sharing 
relationships, with twenty-six subnational jurisdictions. 

By 1996 regional governments raised 50 percent of taxes and 
accounted for 70 percent of government spending in Russia. 
Although only fifteen of eighty-nine subnational jurisdictions 
were net contributors to the federal budget and sixty-seven 
relied on federal subsidies for pensions, in 1996 Moscow still 
had no centralized system to account for movement of funds 
between the federal government and the regions. Many juris- 
dictions complained that the 1997 budget did not allocate suf- 
ficient funds to them to compensate for their tax payments to 
Moscow. As of March 1997, no subnational jurisdiction had 
received a full allotment of federal pension funds, and only ten 
jurisdictions had paid their federal taxes in full. 

In October 1996, the emergency tax committee was forced 
to withdraw its threat of bankruptcy proceedings against the 
Kama Automobile Plant (KamAZ), one of the Republic of 
Tatarstan's largest industries, for nonpayment of federal taxes. 



lxxxv 



Citing the 1994 power-sharing treaty between the republic and 
the federal government, Tatarstan's president Mintimer 
Shaimiyev convinced Chernomyrdin that ending KamAZ's 
favorable tax status would intrude on the republic's economic 
sovereignty. 

Experts predicted that tensions between Moscow and the 
subnational governments would intensify during the shaping 
of Russia's new federal system, especially as that system 
addresses the question of who controls the country's vast 
national resources. After the regional elections, a loose coali- 
tion of jurisdictions that were net contributors to the federal 
budget ("donor regions") was in a position to gain significant 
economic concessions from the federal government. At the 
same time, the eight regional economic associations, which 
include all of Russia's eighty-nine subnational jurisdictions 
except Chechnya, showed new cohesiveness and also were 
expected to gain greater autonomy and attention from Moscow 
in 1997. Those associations are: the Far East and Baikal Associa- 
tion; the Siberian Accord Association; the Greater Volga Associ- 
ation; the Central Russia Association; the Cooperation 
Association of North Caucasus Republics, Territories, and 
Oblasts; the Black Earth Association; the Urals Regional Associ- 
ation; and the Nor th-West Association. 

In October presidential chief of staff Chubays began a cam- 
paign to reverse the movement toward regional autonomy. 
Chubays called for a review of the many regional laws that con- 
travene the national constitution, in an effort to curtail the 
autonomy that such legislation encourages. (Several of the 
regional constitutions adopted after 1991 contain language 
contradicting the national constitution, and the electoral laws 
of some twenty-seven regions reportedly violate federal law.) 
However, the project was postponed because regional procura- 
tors, who would be responsible for such an investigation, lack 
sufficient authority over regional officials. After the elections of 
1996-97 gave most regional leaders a popular mandate, the 
lack of federal sanctions on subnational jurisdictions violating 
federal law became a more significant threat to the integrity of 
the federation as well as to human rights and the balance of 
political power within jurisdictions. Meanwhile, local and 
municipal administrations chafed under restrictions imposed 
by regional jurisdictions, just as the latter complained about 
Moscow's restrictions. 



lxxxvi 



In the post-Soviet period, Russia's foreign policy has shifted 
significantly, most often in response to domestic rather than 
foreign conditions. The early Yeltsin administration, repre- 
sented by Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrey Kozyrev, sought to 
bring Russia fully into the community of nations — especially 
Western nations — and to dispel the aura of the Evil Empire. 
The military and economic competition of the Cold War was 
replaced by a series of cooperative agreements with Western 
powers, including disarmament treaties, that brought eco- 
nomic and humanitarian aid to Russia. The vast set of Soviet 
commitments that spanned the world in the 1980s was reduced 
in an effort to concentrate limited resources in the most useful 
areas. 

However, a strong nationalist faction in the parliament and 
elsewhere saw such complaisance as the surrender of the pre- 
eminent, rightful role in world politics that had been won in 
the Soviet era. This faction, which has been compared with the 
nineteenth-century Slavophile movement that sought to pro- 
tect Russian culture from the harmful intrusion of Western civ- 
ilization, has urged that Russia recapture as much influence as 
possible in the former Soviet Union and the former Soviet 
empire in Central Europe. This process would discourage the 
influence of the West in those regions, countering the ostensi- 
ble drive of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO — 
see Glossary) to push Russia out of the continent of Europe. 
For many advocates of this position, the preferred area of 
closer foreign relations is Asia, and a new anti-Western alliance 
with China is the focal point. 

In the early and mid-1990s, Yeltsin had improved Russia's 
international image by participating in several meetings of the 
Group of Seven (G— 7 — see Glossary) as well as his regular sum- 
mit conferences with United States presidents. In maintaining 
such contacts, Yeltsin attempted to walk a line between making 
concessions to the West that would anger Russian nationalists 
and taking independent positions that would weaken the West- 
ern commitment to aid Russia during its transition period. As a 
result of these conflicting demands, in the mid-1990s Russia's 
foreign policy positions have been inconsistent, and Yeltsin, 
Minister of Foreign Affairs Yevgeniy Primakov, Chernomyrdin, 
and other official spokesmen often have issued contradictory 
statements on important issues. 

On issues such as Chechnya and human rights in Russia, 
Western diplomats refrained in 1996 from criticizing Yeltsin for 



lxxxvii 



fear of damaging his prestige at home. Before the August 1996 
cease-fire in Chechnya, the IMF offered Russia the second-larg- 
est loan in the bank's history, and the Council of Europe (see 
Glossary), considered a guardian of human rights in Europe, 
admitted Russia to its membership despite numerous reports 
of atrocities in Chechnya and noncompliance with the coun- 
cil's policy on capital punishment. 

However, Yeltsin received substantial criticism from the West 
for some policies that failed to comply with international stan- 
dards. Among them were the sale of nuclear reactors, subma- 
rines, and other critical items to Iran in violation of 
international sanctions; continued dumping and careless han- 
dling of nuclear materials by Russia's civilian and military agen- 
cies (criticism coming mainly from Japan and the Scandinavian 
countries, which were most directly affected) ; and Russia's fail- 
ure to comply with the arms limitations of the Conventional 
Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE Treaty — see Glossary). Most of 
the summit meetings of the mid-1990s discussed some or all of 
those questions, but few solutions emerged. Early in 1997, Rus- 
sia's relationship with Iran had become closer, its nuclear safety 
policies remained unchanged, and CFE Treaty modifications 
were under discussion. 

In the mid-1990s, the major point of conflict in the struggle 
over Western influence in Russia was the projected expansion 
of NATO into former Warsaw Pact nations of what is now called 
Central Europe. In 1995 and 1996, numerous statements by the 
Russian government rejected the possibility that countries such 
as Poland and Hungary could enter NATO without dire conse- 
quences. Russia's statements predicted that, by isolating and 
impoverishing Russia, a NATO presence would in fact reacti- 
vate the Cold War. During 1996 government spokesmen threat- 
ened a variety of diplomatic and military reprisals if NATO 
membership were enlarged. Most experts labeled Russia's 
behavior as gamesmanship aimed at gaining the most advanta- 
geous possible position once an inevitable first round of NATO 
expansion occurred. 

Despite Russia's threats, in 1996 eleven European countries, 
including the three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithua- 
nia — reiterated their enthusiasm for gaining NATO member- 
ship. In early 1997, Bulgaria declared its desire to join, and 
Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine sought closer cooperation with 
the alliance. 



lxxxviii 



A potentially important change appeared in the Russian 
position at the end of 1996. In September the United States 
had proposed a charter that would give Russia a special rela- 
tionship with NATO, in an attempt to relieve tensions over the 
expansion issue. In January 1997, Primakov began to negotiate 
such an agreement with NATO secretary general Javier Solana. 
As negotiations proceeded, two of Russia's key goals emerged: 
obtaining more favorable terms in the CFE Treaty and limiting 
the NATO military presence in any new member nation in 
Central Europe. In keeping with Russia's position that NATO is 
an anachronistic leftover of the Cold War, Primakov and Cher- 
nomyrdin demanded a binding treaty obligating NATO to 
reform itself from a military to a "political" organization. 

As conceived in the West, the agreement would offer Russia 
consultation but no veto on NATO expansion decisions; 
increased presence of Russian observers at various NATO com- 
mand levels; and modification of existing arms reduction 
agreements to suit Russia's demands. At the March 1997 Hels- 
inki summit, Yeltsin backed the agreement as a way around the 
issue of NATO expansion, which he still called "a mistake." By 
that time, Primakov and Solana had agreed on most of the 
charter's terms, including a permanent consultative council for 
discussion of issues such as nuclear security, crisis management, 
and peacekeeping operations. However, Primakov insisted on 
restricting the presence of NATO forces in any new member 
nation, a concession that NATO refused because it would inter- 
fere with the alliance's basic commitment to mutual defense. 
Because NATO had set a target date of July 1997 for the first 
official invitations to new member nations, little time was avail- 
able for conflicting views to be mediated. (Russia demanded 
that the signing of the Russia-NATO charter precede and be 
separate from the NATO summit that would announce the invi- 
tations.) 

During his first term in office, Boris Yeltsin continued the 
tradition, begun by Mikhail Gorbachev, of holding regular 
summit meetings with United States presidents. The second 
Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II — see Glossary) was 
a product of a 1993 summit with President George H.W. Bush. 
Western experts saw the drastic nuclear arms reductions of 
START II as a way for Russia to cut military expenses without 
sacrificing national security, at a time when nuclear parity was 
an increasingly expensive proposition. But as Russia's conven- 
tional military forces deteriorated and funding declined in the 



lxxxix 



mid-1990s, nuclear strike capability assumed a more prominent 
place in national security planning. Therefore, by late 1996 
Russian authorities were demanding greater limitations on sea- 
based nuclear warheads, in which the United States has a dis- 
tinct advantage; greater latitude for deployment of land-based 
missiles, in which Russia is strongest; and revision of the START 
II restrictions on the multiple-warhead weapons that Russia 
considers its most formidable threat. 

In October 1996, United States secretary of defense William 
Perry met strong resistance when he tried to convince the State 
Duma and Ministry of Defense officials in Moscow that START 
II ratification would benefit both sides. At the same time, Rus- 
sia also delayed finalizing an agreement on classification of 
anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs), indicating continuing sensitivity 
about the prospect of the United States building a missile inter- 
ception system that would negate much of Russia's nuclear 
strike capacity. Early in 1997, Western defense experts began 
formulating a START III proposal that might leapfrog the 
START II deadlock by eliminating at least some of the most 
serious obstacles. But the largest obstacle was the NATO issue: 
already in 1995, nationalists and many moderates in the State 
Duma refused to even consider START II without assurances 
that NATO would not move eastward, and this linkage 
remained in early 1997. 

In the early stages of Yeltsin's second term, high-level diplo- 
matic contact with the West was fitful and unproductive. In Sep- 
tember a Moscow visit by German chancellor Helmut Kohl, 
Yeltsin's most vocal supporter among Western leaders, failed to 
bridge the two countries' differences on sanctions on Iraq 
(which Russia opposed), NATO expansion, and conditions for 
expanded German investment in Russia. In late December, the 
first foreign leader to confer with Yeltsin after his convales- 
cence was China's prime minister Li Peng rather than a West- 
erner. At that time, Russia and China signed new bilateral 
agreements on cooperation in banking, nuclear power plant 
construction, and the sale of two naval destroyers to China. In 
early 1997, visits by Kohl and French president Jacques Chirac 
to Moscow produced no breakthrough on the NATO expan- 
sion issue. 

The Helsinki summit, the first such meeting since April 
1996, yielded agreements on a range of economic matters; Rus- 
sia was promised an increased role in the G— 7, whose annual 
meetings were to be renamed the Summit of the Eight, and 



xc 



Yeltsin received United States commitments for enhanced 
investment and integration of Russia in global markets and 
support for much-coveted entry into the World Trade Organi- 
zation (WTO — see Glossary) in 1998. Yeltsin pledged renewed 
support for passage of START II in the State Duma, and he sup- 
ported a START III agreement that would further reduce stra- 
tegic arms. The two presidents pledged support for ratification 
of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which faced stiff 
opposition in the legislatures of both countries. Yeltsin also 
unexpectedly accepted an understanding of the Anti-Ballistic 
Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty — see Glossary) that would allow 
the United States to continue developing a limited ABM sys- 
tem. 

Yeltsin's robust performance at the summit also allayed the 
health fears that had haunted his second administration. The 
president received strong criticism from communist and 
nationalist factions for the substantive output of the summit, 
but experts noted that Russia's position in the meeting pro- 
vided little negotiating leverage. 

Russia and NATO did cooperate successfully in Bosnia. In 
September 1996, Primakov expressed Russia's willingness to 
extend the assignment of Russian troops to the NATO interna- 
tional peacekeeping force, IFOR, with which they had func- 
tioned smoothly for more than a year. Russia's continued 
participation was conditioned on the lifting of international 
sanctions against Serbia. The sanctions ended in October; Rus- 
sia took an active part in planning the next phase of the peace- 
keeping operation. In January 1997, Yeltsin approved 
extending Russia's participation through July 1998. 

Recovery of the empire of the Soviet Union became a for- 
eign policy goal of increasing importance in the mid-1990s. In 
the Duma elections of December 1995, every party and group 
mentioned reintegration of the CIS states in its foreign policy 
platform. In 1996 nationalists used a variety of strategies to 
encourage the government to extend Russia's influence in the 
CIS countries. In three former Soviet states plagued with inter- 
nal conflict — Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan — Russian 
troops remained in ostensibly peacekeeping roles, and Russian 
negotiators continued to sponsor talks between hostile groups. 
Many experts called the diplomatic activity an insincere effort 
to achieve stability in areas where continued conflict was the 
only justification for a Russian military presence. 



xci 



In late 1996, the State Duma overwhelmingly approved a 
permanent Russian force in the breakaway Dnestr Moldavian 
Republic (Transnistria) in Moldova, claiming erroneously that 
most of the republic's citizens are Russian and thus require 
protection. (A 1994 treaty with Moldova, which the State Duma 
never ratified, provided for withdrawal of all Russian forces.) 
Early in 1997, Russian officials promised that forces would be 
withdrawn when the Transnistria question was settled, while at 
the same time encouraging the separatists to push for full inde- 
pendence. 

In December 1996, a Federation Council resolution officially 
claimed the city of Sevastopol', located on Ukraine's Black Sea 
coast, as Russian territory. This claim continued Russia's post- 
Soviet dispute with Ukraine over control of the Black Sea Fleet 
that the two countries had inherited from the Soviet Union. 
Moscow mayor Yuriy Luzhkov, hoping to gain national stature 
for future political advancement, became a main spokesman 
for the claim on Sevastopol'. In 1996 Yeltsin and Ukraine's pres- 
ident Leonid Kuchma had negotiated terms for dividing the 
fleet, but the new claims by Russian nationalists threatened to 
sour the recently improved relations between Russia and 
Ukraine. Spurred by Russia's territorial claims, in January 1997 
Ukraine proposed a "special partnership" with NATO, ratifica- 
tion of which was expected at the midyear NATO summit. 

The bitter border disputes that had erupted with Estonia 
and Latvia at the time of those republics' declarations of inde- 
pendence continued into 1997, although in both cases some 
concessions were made in late 1996 and early 1997. As progress 
was made on territorial issues, the main sticking point in 1997 
was Russia's requirement that the two Baltic states change their 
policy against granting dual citizenship to their Russian popu- 
lations. 

Russia also struggled to maintain as much as possible of its 
Soviet-era access to the rich natural resources of the Caspian 
Sea, against the claims of former Soviet republics Azerbaijan, 
Kazakstan, and Turkmenistan. Allied with Iran, Russia called 
for joint jurisdiction of resources by all adjoining states rather 
than allocation according to national borders. The latter sys- 
tem, advocated by the other three former republics, would 
place most Caspian oil fields outside the jurisdiction of Iran 
and Russia. In October 1996, Russia amended its previous 
hard-line approach somewhat, but the issue promised to be 
under negotiation for an extended period. 



xcii 



Early in 1996, a customs union agreement was concluded 
among Belarus, Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia, significantly 
reducing trade barriers within that group (and simplifying the 
smuggling of narcotics from Central Asia into Russia). In 
November 1996, Russia reversed its recent policy of reducing 
credits to other CIS countries, increasing its credit allotment 
for CIS partners by about fifteen times in the 1997 draft bud- 
get. Those credits are limited, however, to the purchase of Rus- 
sian goods. The total debt of CIS countries to Russia was 
estimated at US$6 billion, plus US$3 billion in unpaid energy 
bills, prior to the credit extension. Russia's CIS trade figures for 
early 1997 showed a decline in most categories, with natural 
gas accounting for the bulk of exports within the common- 
wealth. 

Russia's stature in the CIS suffered setbacks in the 1990s as 
other CIS nations took independent positions on a variety of 
issues. From the beginning, charter members Turkmenistan 
and Azerbaijan took very independent positions: contrary to 
Russia's desire to maintain a military presence throughout the 
CIS, Azerbaijan allowed no Russian troops at all on its soil, and 
Turkmenistan maintained joint command of all military units. 
Kazakstan and Turkmenistan continued to seek Western sup- 
port in bypassing the Russian pipelines upon which they previ- 
ously had depended for their oil and natural gas shipments in 
the Soviet system. Early in 1997, Kazakstan's president Nursul- 
tan Nazarbayev, a consistent and influential advocate of eco- 
nomic integration of the newly independent states, criticized 
Russia's leadership of the CIS, calling for diversification of con- 
trol in order to energize the moribund organization. 

Belarus, whose president, Alyaksandr Lukashyenka, had 
pushed his country toward reunification with Russia, suffered a 
constitutional crisis late in 1996. Lukashyenka's bid for authori- 
tarian power provoked strong nationalist opposition in the par- 
liament of Belarus. It also brought unfavorable international 
attention to Russia's dominant position in the new bilateral 
relationship established by the 1996 Community of Sovereign 
Republics treaty. Unsuccessful in mediating the dispute 
between Lukashyenka and the Belarusian parliament, Russia 
continued staunch support for Lukashyenka in early 1997, 
although Russia's reform factions opposed closer relations that 
would require Russia to support Belarus's backward economy. 
A new agreement signed by Yeltsin and Lukashyenka in March 
1997 reaffirmed the 1996 treaty but increased the controversy 



xciii 



in Moscow between reformers — including Chubays and most 
of Yeltsin's new top-level Government appointees — and nation- 
alists, who saw union with Belarus as the first step in restoring 
the Soviet Union. 

In 1996 Uzbekistan, the strongest of the five Central Asian 
CIS states, began a concentrated effort to cultivate commercial 
and diplomatic relations with Western countries and Israel. In 
May 1996, Uzbekistan's president Islam Karimov criticized the 
Economic Cooperation Organization of Islamic nations, of 
which Uzbekistan is a member, for its anti-Israeli and anti- 
United States positions; then he made a state visit to the United 
States to improve bilateral relations. In January 1997, Karimov 
voiced support for expansion of NATO. 

In November Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan 
announced plans for a Central Asian peacekeeping battalion to 
be used in United Nations-sponsored operations and to be 
trained within NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP — see Glos- 
sary) program. The new unit's Western connections were a sig- 
nal that the wealthiest Central Asian countries wished to 
reduce Russia's role in regional security. Russia responded by 
seeking joint action with the Central Asian republics in defend- 
ing against infiltration by Afghanistan's aggressively fundamen- 
talist Taliban movement. The Russian gambit gained support 
from Karimov and Tajikistan's president Imomali Rahmonov. 
At the CIS summit in March 1997, Yeltsin attempted to foster 
unity and to reassert Russia's dominance, but Georgia, Kazak- 
stan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan reiterated their individual 
national concerns, complained about the CIS's ineffectiveness, 
and defended their right to form relationships outside the con- 
text of the full organization. Yeltsin's chief vehicle for eco- 
nomic reintegration was to be his Concept for Integrated 
Economic Development of the CIS, which CIS foreign minis- 
ters refused to discuss pending modification. 

In February 1997, NATO secretary general Javier Solana 
received a warm reception when he visited Georgia and Mol- 
dova. Moldova's president Petru Lucinschi requested a NATO 
security guarantee for the borders of his neutral country, show- 
ing concern for the continued presence of Russian forces in 
Transnistria. Georgia's president Eduard Shevardnadze was 
frustrated after more than two years of fruitless Russia-bro- 
kered negotiations with Georgia's separatist republic, Abkha- 
zia. The failure to resolve territorial and refugee issues there 
postponed Georgia's unification and, ultimately, its indepen- 



xciv 



dence from Russian military assistance. Georgia concluded sev- 
eral bilateral military agreements with NATO member 
countries in 1996. In his talks with Solana, Shevardnadze char- 
acterized Georgia as an integral part of the new European zone 
of security to be formed once NATO expanded. (Early in 1997, 
the Group of Russian Forces in the Transcaucasus began with- 
drawing units from Georgia into Russia as part of the overall 
military downsizing program.) 

Of the countries Solana visited, only Armenia continues to 
seek extensive military assistance from Russia. In 1997 Armenia 
still was under blockade by Azerbaijan and Turkey, traditionally 
hostile Muslim states that nearly surround the country, and 
Russia supported Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict 
with Azerbaijan — factors that made Russia Armenia's only alter- 
native for regional economic and security assistance. 

The appointment of the Arabist Primakov as minister of for- 
eign affairs in January 1996 continued the turn of Russia's for- 
eign policy from West to East, and diplomatic activity in the 
East increased in 1996 — despite official protestations that Rus- 
sia seeks a balance between East and West. By the end of 1996, 
Russia and China had resolved several of the issues that had 
split the major communist powers for several decades, and 
both sides seemed intent on forming additional ties in 1997. 
Meanwhile, accelerated commercial activity in Russia's Mari- 
time (Primorskiy) Territory encouraged new agreements 
between Russia and the two Koreas, and progress was made in 
late 1996 in resolving the fifty-year stalemate with Japan over 
Russian occupation of four of the Kuril Islands. New initiatives 
also went to the prosperous member nations of the Association 
of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), expanding the drive to 
make Russia a Pacific Rim commercial power. In November 
1996, Primakov visited China, Japan, and Mongolia with the 
stated goal of improving Russia's position in vital Asian mar- 
kets. Primakov visited Iran the following month. Russia also felt 
that establishing its identity as an Asian power was crucial 
because it had been excluded from several prosperous Pacific 
Rim trading groups and from talks on Korean unification. 
China's rapid emergence as a world economic power also was a 
primary concern. 

In 1996 Russia saw the presence of Primakov in the Ministry 
of Foreign Affairs, Western sanctions against Iraq, and the elec- 
tion of a hard-line government in Israel as creating conditions 
in the Middle East that would favor a return to the Soviet 



xcv 



Union's role as champion of the Arab countries in the region. 
Russia had a special interest in freeing Iraq from economic 
sanctions because Iraq was to begin repaying its substantial 
debt to Russia once oil exports resumed, and lucrative new 
bilateral deals were negotiated in 1996. For this reason, in Sep- 
tember 1996 the United States bombing of Iraqi targets and 
the threat of extended international sanctions brought harsh 
criticism from Moscow. 

Meanwhile, Russia continued cultivating relations with Iran, 
another international pariah. A third Kilo-class submarine 
went from Russia to Iran in November 1996, and the transfer of 
nuclear-reactor technology continued despite Western objec- 
tions. In the second half of 1996, as another token of Russia's 
importance in the region, Primakov also sought a more active 
role in Arab-Israeli peace talks. 

Whatever its relations with foreign countries, however, no 
foreign power threatened Russia's security in the 1990s, and 
domestic conditions were the key determinant of Russia's 
future. In the 1990s, Russian society, until recently held 
together by the forced observance of Soviet power, seemed to 
lack any sort of glue that could be used to combat the forces of 
economic fragmentation. In the early post-Soviet years, religion 
re-emerged as an important factor in the lives of many Rus- 
sians, but cultural and intellectual institutions showed signs of 
decline (production of art, literature, and scientific books 
dropped sharply in the mid-1990s, as did newspaper publica- 
tion), and citizens showed little interest in forming indepen- 
dent civic groups. Despite guarantees of equal rights in the 
1993 constitution, minority ethnic groups have experienced 
serious discrimination and even violence in Russia's cities, and 
hints of religious intolerance have emerged as well. Social 
resentments have festered as the economic status of most Rus- 
sians deteriorated and a new elite flaunted its wealth. 

The emigre sociologist Vladimir Shlapentokh observed in 
1996 that personal gain had become the most important value 
in Russian society and that the newly democratized govern- 
ment institutions offered little authority against dishonest 
behavior because those institutions are themselves rife with 
corruption. The inability of government to maintain law and 
order through its democratic institutions has provoked author- 
itarian behavior by the Yeltsin administration, whose security 
agencies have maintained a large share of their Soviet-era 
autonomy. 



xcvi 



Optimists point to the next generation of Russians, who will 
have formed their civic habits independent of Soviet influence, 
as the basis of democratic renewal and a new civil society. The 
three orderly and fair national elections of 1993-96 offer some 
hope for this prognosis. The relative calm with which Russians 
have accepted the agonies of transition has provided an oppor- 
tunity for new institutions to develop, but such a passive public 
attitude may not bode well for participatory democracy. West- 
ern influences, which were vital to the postcommunist progress 
of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, have penetrated 
Russia only in random fashion, and they met increasing resis- 
tance in the mid-1990s. That resistance has dampened the gov- 
ernment's commitment to economic and political reform and 
obscured the prognosis for the transition process. 

By 1996 the reforms envisioned in 1992 had reached a pla- 
teau quite short of their final goals. Cynicism, corruption, and 
the president's long period of inactivity had sapped the 
momentum of reform programs, and an entrenched bureau- 
cracy blocked further initiatives. In 1997 Russia remained an 
international power in some respects, but its search for ways to 
preserve that status was increasingly uncertain. 

March 31, 1997 

* * * 

In the months following the preparation of this manuscript, 
several events of importance occurred. In April 1997, shortly 
after the United States Congress ratified the controversial 
Chemical Weapons Convention outlawing the manufacture 
and sale of chemical weapons, the State Duma refused passage 
on the grounds that the cost of destroying Russia's chemical 
weapons supply, the largest in the world, was prohibitively high. 
Although the Duma promised to reconsider the measure in the 
fall of 1997, its decision caused consternation in the United 
States, which had expected reciprocity on that issue. 

In the spring of 1997, Russia continued to affirm its commit- 
ment to craft a foreign policy independent of international 
opinion. In April an official Moscow visit by Iranian head of 
parliament Ali Akbar Nateq-Noori — one day after a German 
court had found Iran guilty of assassinating exiled dissidents — 
was met by expressions of friendship from President Yeltsin. 
There were indications that Russia's military and economic 



xcvii 



deals with Iran, criticized sharply in the West because of Iran's 
support for terrorist groups, would continue or expand. Yeltsin 
and Minister of Foreign Affairs Yevgeniy Primakov also 
expressed support for Syria's position in peace talks with Israel, 
expanding Russia's effort to reestablish influence in the Middle 
East. 

Shortly thereafter, a Moscow summit meeting with Jiang 
Zemin, president of China, produced a statement reinforcing 
the two nations' "multipolar" foreign policy as a balance against 
United States domination of the post-Soviet world. The leaders 
signed an agreement to reduce troops and equipment along 
the Sino-Russian border by 15 percent. The troop maximum 
was set at 130,000 for each side. Neighboring countries Kazak- 
stan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan also signed the agreement. 
Yeltsin announced that military-industrial entrepreneur Arka- 
diy Vol'skiy would head the Russian delegation to a new Sino- 
Russian standing committee on friendship, peace, and develop- 
ment scheduled to go into operation sometime in 1997. In 
April Russia also announced that two new guided-missile 
destroyers, previously intended for the Russian naval forces, 
would be delivered to China in 1997. However, despite official 
rhetoric and new agreements, in mid-1997 a substantial part of 
Russia's foreign policy establishment saw China as a stopgap 
partner until permanent relationships could be forged with the 
United States, Western Europe, and/or Japan. In May 1997, 
Japan and Russia began high-level defense talks, Japan 
dropped its objection to Russia's membership in the G-7 orga- 
nization, and Russia showed some signs of compromise in the 
continuing dispute over four Russian-held islands in the Kuril 
chain north of Japan. Based on Japan's change of policy, Yeltsin 
participated as a full member in the June meeting of the newly 
renamed G— 8. 

In May Primakov's long negotiations with NATO officials 
yielded an agreement defining special status for Russia in 
NATO in return for Russia's acceptance of a first round of 
NATO expansion into Central Europe. The most difficult 
obstacle, Russia's demand that no nuclear or conventional 
NATO forces be deployed in new NATO member nations, was 
overcome by a general statement that neither nuclear nor con- 
ventional forces would be deployed under normal circum- 
stances. Both sides claimed that the agreement vindicated their 
position, although NATO made no firm commitment not to 
deploy forces. The centerpiece of the agreement, which Yeltsin 



xcviii 



signed in Paris on May 27, is a permanent council consisting of 
the secretary general of NATO, a Russian ambassador, and a 
representative of the full NATO membership. Although Yeltsin 
described this council as giving Russia a veto over NATO deci- 
sions, only specific security issues are to be discussed in the new 
body. The alliance's major political decision-making process 
remains separate. The first meeting of the council took place in 

July- 

The agreement, officially termed a "founding act," is not 
legally binding and did not require ratification by the parlia- 
ments of the signatory countries. Having signed the act, Russia 
officially ended its objections to full NATO membership for the 
Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, which are expected to 
become full NATO members in 1999. The agreement also 
improved the prospect that the Russian economy would benefit 
from closer contacts with the West. Public reaction in Russia 
was muted, although nationalist politicians claimed that Russia 
had sustained a serious diplomatic defeat. 

Meanwhile, the status of international arms treaties 
remained unclear. In July talks among the thirty signatory 
nations of the CFE Treaty — including Russia and all the NATO 
countries — yielded Russia some concessions on the ratio of 
NATO to Russian conventional arms in Europe. However, four 
CIS countries — Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine — 
had objected that relaxation of CFE restrictions on Russia's 
flank quotas for troop deployment in or near CIS countries 
would threaten their national security. The final treaty modifi- 
cation made overall force reductions in Europe but did not 
include the limitations on NATO forces in Central Europe that 
Russia had demanded in return for approval of NATO expan- 
sion. 

As of June 1997, Yeltsin had not made a renewed effort to 
gain State Duma ratification of the START II agreement, 
although he had promised President Clinton at the Helsinki 
summit that he would do so. At Helsinki the United States had 
eased some terms of START II to improve the treaty's prospects 
for passage in the Duma. 

In May President Asian Maskhadov of Chechnya (Chechnya- 
Ichkeria) signed a peace treaty with Russia. In the very brief 
treaty, both sides renounced the use of force against the other. 
The official categorization of the agreement as a peace treaty 
was a concession by Russia, which earlier had refused to sign 
such a treaty with what it considered an integral part of the fed- 



xcix 



eration. The document did not mention independence for the 
breakaway republic — a potentially divisive issue that both sides 
avoided in the interest of achieving peace — but the form of the 
treaty was that used between two equal states subject to interna- 
tional law, hence a tacit recognition of Chechnya-Ichkeria's 
independence. 

Russia also signed agreements for economic aid to Chech- 
nya, and Yeltsin's negotiator Boris Berezovskiy offered several 
major concessions, including an official apology for all of Rus- 
sia's historical incursions into Chechnya, in an effort to stave 
off full independence. Meanwhile, radical Chechen groups 
continued kidnappings and terrorist acts, casting doubt on the 
authority of the Maskhadov government. 

Chechnya continued to occupy a critical position in Russia's 
pipeline politics, which became increasingly complex in the 
mid-1990s as more countries sought participation in the oil 
wealth of Azerbaijan and Kazakstan. As its price for allowing oil 
to flow through Chechnya en route to export from Novo- 
rossiysk on the Black Sea, Chechnya demanded recognition as 
a full partner in the endeavor. Because an alternative line 
through Georgia and Turkey would eliminate both Novo- 
rossiysk and Chechnya — hence all Russian participation — from 
lucrative new shipments, in July Russia signed a trilateral agree- 
ment with Azerbaijan and Chechnya, granting Chechnya an 
equal role. Income from oil shipments was expected to be an 
important element in stabilizing Chechnya's still rocky internal 
security situation. 

The international Caspian Pipeline Consortium, founded in 
1992 to bring oil from Kazakstan to the West, has been plagued 
by internal friction among partner companies, which represent 
six countries (Britain, Italy, Kazakstan, Oman, Russia, and the 
United States). In early 1997, however, the consortium showed 
signs of agreement on the Russian section of a new line that 
would deliver oil from Kazakstan's Tengiz fields to Novoros- 
siysk. In April Yeltsin signed the December 1996 agreement on 
division of shares among the consortium partners. Increased 
United States activity in the region's new oil fields was a major 
reason that Russia signed the trilateral pipeline agreement 

Russia's relations with other CIS countries continue to be 
unsettled. In April both houses of Russia's Federal Assembly 
ratified the treaty permitting long-term deployment of Russian 
forces in Armenia. This move caused alarm in neighboring 
Azerbaijan (still fighting and negotiating with Armenia over 



c 



Nagorno-Karabakh), Georgia (through which additional Rus- 
sian troops would pass en route to Armenia), and Turkey (near 
whose border additional Russian troops might be stationed). 
Disclosures of secret deliveries of Russian arms to Armenia in 
1994-96 already had alarmed Azerbaijan, and the military 
treaty seemingly committed Armenia to a long term as a Rus- 
sian satellite. However, the terms of the July 1997 treaty with 
Azerbaijan implicitly reduced the prospect of future Russian 
support for Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. In May 
a friendship treaty with Ukraine resolved division of the Black 
Sea Fleet and jurisdiction in Sevastopol', the fleet's largest port, 
among other treaty provisions. 

Meanwhile, other CIS countries continued to deemphasize 
CIS (largely Russian) investment and trade agreements in favor 
of Western and Japanese deals with more favorable conditions. 
According to an April 1997 report, 90 percent of Kazakstan's 
enterprises had at least some investments from non-CIS 
sources. Because Kazakstan's president Nazarbayev was a 
staunch supporter of CIS integration, this statistic was espe- 
cially bad news for Russia's efforts to bind together and domi- 
nate the organization. In 1997 Russian authorities also were 
alarmed by an incipient trilateral agreement among Azer- 
baijan, Georgia, and Ukraine, which began cooperating in sev- 
eral critical areas of security and economics where Russia had 
enjoyed substantial influence. 

In May 1997, Yeltsin's Security Council completed a long- 
awaited national security doctrine. The document, unpub- 
lished but leaked extensively, included economic, foreign-pol- 
icy, and military elements in a general description of Russia's 
present security situation and its primary goals. Improvement 
of domestic economic and social conditions, rather than geo- 
political advancement, was listed as the primary requirement 
for enhanced national security. The most aggressive element of 
the statement was a revocation of Mikhail Gorbachev's pledge 
that the Soviet Union never would initiate the use of nuclear 
weapons in a war. The new stance was described by Western 
experts as a volley in the diplomatic conflict over NATO expan- 
sion and a reflection of the acute deterioration of Russia's con- 
ventional forces. Because the legislative branch had not been 
consulted in the creative process, experts doubted that the 
anti-Yeltsin State Duma would grant the approval necessary for 
the doctrine to become official. 



ci 



Russia's defense establishment remained unsettled in mid- 
1997 after Yeltsin, long dissatisfied with the pace of military 
reform, fired Chief of Staff Viktor Samsonov and Minister of 
Defense Igor' Rodionov. General Igor' Sergeyev was named to 
replace Rodionov. At the same time, Yeltsin created two new 
military reform commissions. The first, headed by Prime Minis- 
ter Chernomyrdin, was to deal with military construction; the 
second, headed by First Deputy Prime Minister Chubays, was to 
deal with military finances. Experts saw these moves as a victory 
for civilian officials who advocated reassigning the military's 
"hidden reserves" rather than allocating additional funds for 
military reform. In July Yeltsin outlined a comprehensive plan 
for reducing the military and consolidating the five branches 
into two, again emphasizing reallocation of existing resources. 
The drafting procedure and content of the plan attracted 
strong criticism from government and military officials. 

Russia's internal security situation also remained unstable in 
mid-1997 as the country's crime wave continued. The Ministry 
of Internal Affairs (MVD) reported a reduction of 12 percent 
in overall crime in the first quarter of the year, with substantial 
drops in murders, assaults, thefts, and robberies. However, 
there was no evidence of a reduction in mafiya protection activ- 
ity and the corruption and crime associated with it. The 7,500 
murders committed in 1996 were the most ever for a single 
year. Meanwhile, the MVD's "Clean Hands Campaign" reported 
that in 1996 some 21,000 police officials had been fired 
because of misconduct, including mafiya connections. Capital 
punishment continued to be a sensitive political issue: 
although Russia was obligated by its 1996 admission to the 
Council of Europe to end capital punishment, the crime wave 
continued to bolster strong public feeling against such a 
change. Human rights organizations estimated that 140 people 
were executed in 1996, the fourth-largest total in the world. 

The prison system continued to suffer grave problems in 
1997. In April an Amnesty International report listed torture, 
lack of bail, acute crowding, epidemics of tuberculosis, and 
long periods of pretrial detention as frequent conditions in 
Russia's prisons and jails. An estimated 300,000 prisoners (up 
from 233,000 in 1994) were in pretrial custody, which lasted for 
an average of ten months. In mid-1997 the Government 
announced an amnesty program that would affect as many as 
440,000 Russian prisoners, targeting mainly those in pretrial 
detention. Because Russia's incarceration rate was about ten 



cii 



times that of West European nations, its 1997 prison budget 
was much higher than its health care budget. Prison reform 
received little support either from Minister of Internal Affairs 
Anatoliy Kulikov or from the majority of State Duma deputies. 

Overdue wages were another continuing result of the 
national budget deficit. By midyear Russia's workers were owed 
an estimated US$9.5 billion, and the amount continued to 
grow. Although the nationwide labor shutdowns called by 
unions in November 1996 and March 1997 had failed to attract 
wide support, the number of local shutdowns increased notice- 
ably in the first half of 1997. Miners, doctors, and teachers 
blockaded roads and railroads and occupied administrative 
buildings to protest continued wage arrears. Teacher strikes 
affected nineteen of Russia's eighty-nine subnational jurisdic- 
tions, and only fifteen jurisdictions did not owe money to their 
teachers. 

Partly because of low budget allocations for health, in 1997 
new reports indicated that Russia's health crisis was worsening. 
Although the life expectancy for males increased from 57.3 
years to 59.6 years between 1994 and 1996, the drinking and 
smoking habits of Russians, together with continued air pollu- 
tion in many areas, kept mortality rates from cardiac and circu- 
latory diseases more than twice as high as those in the United 
States. The incidence of infectious and parasitic diseases con- 
tinued to increase. Although a major diphtheria vaccination 
program in 1995-96 radically reduced the incidence of that 
disease, tuberculosis cases increased sharply, especially in Rus- 
sia's prisons. In 1997 the minister of health predicted that sex- 
ual promiscuity and drug addiction would cause 800,000 new 
cases of HIV infection by the year 2000. 

Meanwhile, the official government population prediction 
for 2010 called for a decrease of 7.3 million people, and one 
Russian expert predicted a decrease of 12 million by that year. 
In that period, fertility was expected to decline because of 
health problems among women of childbearing age and 
because of the overall aging of the population. 

The overall economic situation continued to be overshad- 
owed by the Government's inability to balance its budget. Con- 
tinuing its effort to improve tax collection — the most often 
cited way of paying overdue state salaries and pensions — in May 
the Chernomyrdin government submitted a new tax code to 
the State Duma for approval. Under Yeltsin's implicit threat to 
dissolve the Duma, the body gave preliminary approval to the 



ciii 



code in June. Meanwhile, major enterprises continued to avoid 
full tax payment. According to an April 1997 State Taxation 
Service report, Gazprom, the natural gas monopoly, used 140 
separate bank accounts to shelter its assets. Of the Govern- 
ment's list of eighty leading tax-evading enterprises, fifty-three 
were in the fuel and energy industry. 

Only 57 percent of projected revenues were collected in the 
first quarter of 1997, leaving arrears of US$12 billion, and only 
63 percent of budgeted expenditures were made. By May the 
Government owed an estimated US$2.2 billion in pensions, 
US$2.3 billion in wages to state workers, and US$1.4 billion in 
child support allowances. The shortfall also reduced economic 
investment, which in the first half of 1997 was only about 95 
percent of the amount invested in the same period of 1996. 

In response to the shortfall, Minister of Finance Anatoliy 
Chubays submitted a proposal to the State Duma for sequestra- 
tion of allotted funds, warning that the Government could not 
continue functioning if major cuts were not made. The revi- 
sions called for reducing spending by US$19 billion. Despite 
strong and widespread opposition to the level and allocation of 
the cuts, in June the Duma adjourned for its summer vacation 
without submitting an alternative plan. 

Meanwhile, the "capital flight" of hard currency (see Glos- 
sary) from Russia continued at a rapid rate in 1997. Interna- 
tional police authorities estimated that US$1 to US$2 billion 
dollars left the country every month, much of it connected 
with illegal activity and invested abroad by Russian emigres. 
Experts identified this trend as a sign of continuing low confi- 
dence in the domestic economy. 

For the first six months of 1997, Russia's GDP shrank by 0.2 
percent, casting doubt on Yeltsin's July assertion that the econ- 
omy had "turned the corner." Positive economic news of early 
1997 included the continuing reduction of inflation, which 
reached an annual rate of 14.5 percent in June — the lowest 
rate since Russia's independence. Also, the reorganization of 
the Government in March caused the IMF to resume monthly 
payments on Russia's US$10 billion loan, which had been sus- 
pended since December. The World Bank also announced a 
two-year loan of US$6 billion to help pay overdue wages and 
pensions. 

In April a series of presidential decrees moved Government 
policy closer to privatization in some sectors, although strong 
political support for the giant monopolies in the State Duma 



civ 



guaranteed that Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov would 
have a hard struggle in breaking them down. According to the 
new privatization goals, Government subsidies of housing and 
municipal services, which were budgeted at US$27 billion in 
1997, were to be reduced. (The average Russian paid only 27 
percent of such costs in 1997.) According to a sliding scale, 
subsidies would reach zero in 2003, although some state hous- 
ing support would remain for the neediest individuals. In the 
spring of 1997, local increases in utility and housing costs 
brought demonstrations in St. Petersburg, and Moscow's pow- 
erful mayor, Yuriy Luzhkov, objected strongly to the national 
proposal. 

Provisions were made for substantial modification of the 
pricing and/or structure of the state-controlled electric power 
industry and the railroad network, and Yeltsin ordered the sale 
of 49 percent of the telecommunications giant Svyazinvest, divi- 
sion of which was one of the most controversial privatization 
issues. In July 25 percent of total Svyazinvest shares were won at 
auction by a group including Russia's Uneximbank and Ger- 
man and United States investors. Because of the backward state 
of Russia's telephone system, telecommunications is consid- 
ered potentially one of Russia's largest growth industries. The 
results of the Svyazinvest auction, which Boris Nemtsov touted 
as fully free and equitable, set off loud protests from the power- 
ful business interests that failed to acquire shares. The issue 
threatened to split the large-business bloc that had supported 
Yeltsin before and after the 1996 election. 

Russia's nineteen railroad companies, which accounted for 
78 percent of freight traffic and 40 percent of passenger traffic 
in 1997, were to be removed from direct control of the Ministry 
of Transportation, under whose management fast-rising rail- 
road fees had added enormous amounts to the overhead of 
railroad-dependent industries such as steel and coal. At the 
same time, rail customers owed the lines an estimated US$1.1 
billion in 1997, and the companies' equipment was in desper- 
ate need of modernization. 

In May Yeltsin announced that Gazprom henceforth would 
be run by a state commission, depriving the gas monopoly of 
the financial freedom that had gained it billions of dollars of 
untaxed profits. Yeltsin already had stripped Gazprom of its 
exclusive right to develop new natural gas deposits, and the 
Government now expected to recover much of Gazprom's 
unpaid taxes through the new commission. Prime Minister 



cv 



Chernomyrdin remained a protector of the industry's special 
status, however. 

In April Yeltsin renewed his appeal for Russia's consumers to 
"buy Russian" to support the domestic economy in the face of 
increased consumption of imported consumer goods. How- 
ever, Russian manufacturers faced a circular dilemma: consis- 
tently low quality kept the demand for Russian goods from 
expanding, but firms were unable to improve quality without 
new profits or increasingly scarce government subsidies. 

In politics, reformist members of the Kremlin's younger gen- 
eration advanced in Yeltsin's Government reorganization. Boris 
Nemtsov, thirty-seven, gained immediate popularity with ordi- 
nary Russians in his new post as deputy prime minister by 
attacking monopolies and bureaucratic corruption; in April 
Nemtsov supplanted Aleksandr Lebed' as Russia's most trusted 
politician in two nationwide polls, although most experts called 
his reform program virtually impossible. Experts in Russia 
already were speaking of Nemtsov as the likely presidential can- 
didate of the "young reformers" in 2000. In April forty-three- 
year-old Sergey Yastrzhembskiy, who had gained wide approval 
as Yeltsin's press secretary, was named deputy chief of staff and 
foreign policy coordinator while retaining his previous posi- 
tion. 

The struggle for power continued at the echelon of govern- 
ment immediately below Yeltsin. The resignation of Cherno- 
myrdin protege Petr Rodionovfrom his post as Minister of Fuel 
and Energy deprived the prime minister of his most important 
Government ally. However, Chernomyrdin's position still gave 
him substantial power vis-a-vis Chubays, an important factor in 
Yeltsin's ongoing policy of checking the ambitions of his most 
powerful subordinates. (Experts also considered the presence 
of Nemtsov and Valentin Yumashev, whom Yeltsin made his 
chief of staff in March, as additional factors preventing Chu- 
bays and his powerful business allies from dominating the 
reform agenda.) 

Human rights continued to have strong political ramifica- 
tions in mid-1997 when both houses of the Federal Assembly 
passed a law restricting the activities of all but four "traditional" 
religions. The Russian Orthodox Church received special sta- 
tus; no other Christian religions were included in the "tradi- 
tional" category The law, successor to legislation introduced 
unsuccessfully by nationalist and communist factions earlier in 
the 1990s, attracted strong condemnation from the Vatican 



cvi 



and human rights groups and strong support from the Russian 
Orthodox hierarchy and the Communist Party of Russia. In 
July Yeltsin vetoed the law — which experts saw as evidence of 
growing anti-Western sentiment in Russian society — as a viola- 
tion of the constitution's human rights guarantees. The fate of 
that law, and the unresolved disputes between the executive 
and legislative branches over budget cuts, privatization, mili- 
tary reform, and tax collection were signs that Yeltsin's new 
government team still faced complex problems in their reform 
campaign. 

August 20, 1997 Glenn E. Curtis 



cvii 



Chapter 1. Historical Setting: Early History 

to 1917 



A beautiful princess, transformed from a white swan, presents herself to Gui- 
don, son of Tsar Saltan (design from lacquer box made in village ofMstera). 



EACH OF THE MANY NATIONALITIES of Russia has a sepa- 
rate history and complex origins. The historical origins of the 
Russian state, however, are chiefly those of the East Slavs, the 
ethnic group that evolved into the Russian, Ukrainian, and 
Belorussian peoples. The major pre-Soviet states of the East 
Slavs were, in chronological order, medieval Kievan Rus', Mus- 
covy, and the Russian Empire. Three other states — Poland, 
Lithuania, and the Mongol Empire — also played crucial roles 
in the historical development of Russia. 

The first East Slavic state, Kievan Rus', emerged along the 
Dnepr River valley, where it controlled the trade route between 
Scandinavia and the Byzantine Empire. Kievan Rus' adopted 
Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in the tenth century, 
beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that 
defined Russian culture for the next thousand years. Kievan 
Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state because of the armed 
struggles among members of the princely family that collec- 
tively possessed it. Conquest by the Mongols in the thirteenth 
century was the final blow in this disintegration; subsequently, 
a number of states claimed to be the heirs to the civilization 
and dominant position of Kievan Rus'. One of those states, 
Muscovy, was a predominantly Russian territory located at the 
far northern edge of the former cultural center. Muscovy grad- 
ually came to dominate neighboring territories, forming the 
basis for the future Russian Empire. 

Muscovy had significant impact on the civilizations that fol- 
lowed, and they adopted many of its characteristics, including 
the subordination of the individual to the state. This idea of 
the dominant state derived from the Slavic, Mongol, and Byz- 
antine heritage of Muscovy, and it later emerged in the unlim- 
ited power of the tsar. Both individuals and institutions, even 
the Russian Orthodox Church, were subordinate to the state as 
it was represented in the person of the autocrat. 

A second characteristic of Russian history has been contin- 
ual territorial expansion. Beginning with Muscovy's efforts to 
consolidate Russian territory as Tatar control waned in the fif- 
teenth century, expansion soon went beyond ethnically Rus- 
sian areas; by the eighteenth century, the principality of 
Muscovy had become the huge Russian Empire, stretching 
from Poland eastward to the Pacific Ocean. Size and military 



3 



Russia: A Country Study 

might made Russia a major power, but its acquisition of large 
territories inhabited by non-Russian peoples began an endur- 
ing pattern of nationality problems. 

Expansion westward sharpened Russia's awareness of its 
backwardness and shattered the isolation in which the initial 
stages of expansion had taken place. Muscovy was able to 
develop at its own pace, but the Russian Empire was forced to 
adopt Western technology to compete militarily in Europe. 
Under this exigency, Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725) and subse- 
quent rulers attempted to modernize the country. Most such 
efforts struggled with indifferent success to raise Russia to 
European levels of technology and productivity. The technol- 
ogy that Russia adopted brought with it Western cultural and 
intellectual currents that changed the direction in which Rus- 
sian culture developed. As Western influence continued, native 
and foreign cultural values began a competition that survives 
in vigorous form in the 1990s. The nature of Russia's relation- 
ship with the West became an enduring obsession of Russian 
intellectuals. 

Russia's defeat in the Crimean War (1853-56) triggered 
another attempt at modernization, including the emancipation 
of the peasants who had been bound to the land in the system 
of serfdom. Despite major reforms enacted in the 1860s, how- 
ever, agriculture remained inefficient, industrialization pro- 
ceeded slowly, and new social problems emerged. In addition 
to masses of peasants seeking land to till, a new class of indus- 
trial workers — the proletariat — and a small but influential 
group of middle-class professionals were dissatisfied with their 
positions. The non-Russian populations resented periodic offi- 
cial Russification campaigns and struggled for autonomy. Suc- 
cessive regimes of the nineteenth century responded to such 
pressures with a combination of halfhearted reform and 
repression, but no tsar was willing to cede autocratic rule or 
share power. Gradually, the monarch and the state system that 
surrounded him became isolated from the rest of society. In 
the last decades of the nineteenth century, some intellectuals 
became more radical, and groups of professional revolutionar- 
ies emerged. 

In spite of its internal problems, Russia continued to play a 
major role in international politics. However, unexpected 
defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 sparked a revolu- 
tion in 1905. At that stage, professionals, workers, peasants, 
minority ethnic groups, and soldiers demanded fundamental 



4 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

reforms. Reluctantly, Nicholas II responded to the first of Rus- 
sia's revolutions by granting a limited constitution, but he 
increasingly circumvented its democratic clauses, and autoc- 
racy again took command in the last decade of the tsarist state. 
World War I found Russia unready for combat but full of patri- 
otic zeal. However, as the government proved incompetent and 
conditions worsened, war weariness and revolutionary pres- 
sures increased, and the defenders of the autocracy grew fewer. 

Early History 

Many ethnically diverse peoples migrated onto the East 
European Plain, but the East Slavs remained and gradually 
became dominant. Kievan Rus', the first East Slavic state, 
emerged in the ninth century A.D. and developed a complex 
and frequently unstable political system that flourished until 
the thirteenth century, when it declined abruptly. Among the 
lasting achievements of Kievan Rus 1 are the introduction of a 
Slavic variant of the Eastern Orthodox religion and a synthesis 
of Byzantine and Slavic cultures. The disintegration of Kievan 
Rus' played a crucial role in the evolution of the East Slavs into 
the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian peoples. 

The Inhabitants of the East European Plain 

Long before the organization of Kievan Rus 1 , Iranian and 
other peoples lived in the area of present-day Ukraine. The 
best known of those groups was the nomadic Scythians, who 
occupied the region from about 600 B.C. to 200 B.C. and 
whose skill in warfare and horsemanship is legendary. Between 
A.D. 100 and A.D. 900, Goths and nomadic Huns, Avars, and 
Magyars passed through the region in their migrations. 
Although some of them subjugated the Slavs in the region, 
those tribes left little of lasting importance. More significant in 
this period was the expansion of the Slavs, who were agricultur- 
ists and beekeepers as well as hunters, fishers, herders, and 
trappers. By A.D. 600, the Slavs were the dominant ethnic 
group on the East European Plain. 

Little is known of the origin of the Slavs. Philologists and 
archaeologists theorize that the Slavs settled very early in the 
Carpathian Mountains or in the area of present-day Belarus. By 
A.D. 600, they had split linguistically into southern, western, 
and eastern branches. The East Slavs settled along the Dnepr 
River in what is now Ukraine; then they spread northward to 



5 



Russia: A Country Study 



the northern Volga River valley, east of modern-day Moscow, 
and westward to the basins of the northern Dnestr and the 
western Bug rivers, in present-day Moldova and southern 
Ukraine. In the eighth and ninth centuries, many East Slavic 
tribes paid tribute to the Khazars, a Turkic-speaking people 
who adopted Judaism about A.D. 740 and lived in the southern 
Volga and Caucasus regions. 

The East Slavs and the Varangians 

By the ninth century, Scandinavian warriors and merchants, 
called Varangians, had penetrated the East Slavic regions. 
According to the Primary Chronicle, the earliest chronicle of 
Kievan Rus', a Varangian named Rurik first established himself 
in Novgorod, just south of modern-day St. Petersburg, in about 
860 before moving south and extending his authority to Kiev. 
The chronicle cites Rurik as the progenitor of a dynasty that 
ruled in Eastern Europe until 1598. Another Varangian, Oleg, 
moved south from Novgorod to expel the Khazars from Kiev 
and founded Kievan Rus' about A.D. 880. During the next 
thirty-five years, Oleg subdued the various East Slavic tribes. In 
A.D. 907, he led a campaign against Constantinople, and in 
911 he signed a commercial treaty with the Byzantine Empire 
as an equal partner. The new Kievan state prospered because it 
controlled the trade route from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea 
and because it had an abundant supply of furs, wax, honey, and 
slaves for export. Historians have debated the role of the Varan- 
gians in the establishment of Kievan Rus'. Most Russian histori- 
ans — especially in the Soviet era — have stressed the Slavic 
influence in the development of the state. Although Slavic 
tribes had formed their own regional jurisdictions by 860, the 
Varangians accelerated the crystallization of Kievan Rus'. 

The Golden Age of Kiev 

The region of Kiev dominated the state of Kievan Rus' for 
the next two centuries (see fig. 2). The grand prince of Kiev 
controlled the lands around the city, and his theoretically sub- 
ordinate relatives ruled in other cities and paid him tribute. 
The zenith of the state's power came during the reigns of 
Prince Vladimir (r. 978-1015) and Prince Yaroslav (the Wise; r. 
1019-54). Both rulers continued the steady expansion of 
Kievan Rus' that had begun under Oleg. To enhance their 
power, Vladimir married the sister of the Byzantine emperor, 
and Yaroslav arranged marriages for his sister and three daugh- 



6 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

ters to the kings of Poland, France, Hungary, and Norway. 
Vladimir's greatest achievement was the Christianization of 
Kievan Rus', a process that began in 988. He built the first great 
edifice of Kievan Rus', the Desyatinnaya Church in Kiev. Yaro- 
slav promulgated the first East Slavic law code, Rus'ka pravda 
(Justice of Rus'); built cathedrals named for St. Sophia in Kiev 
and Novgorod; patronized local clergy and monasticism; and is 
said to have founded a school system. Yaroslav's sons developed 
Kiev's great Peshcherskiy monastyr' (Monastery of the Caves), 
which functioned in Kievan Rus' as an ecclesiastical academy. 

Vladimir's choice of Eastern Orthodoxy reflected his close 
personal ties with Constantinople, which dominated the Black 
Sea and hence trade on Kiev's most vital commercial route, the 
Dnepr River. Adherence to the Eastern Orthodox Church had 
long-range political, cultural, and religious consequences. The 
church had a liturgy written in Cyrillic (see Glossary) and a cor- 
pus of translations from the Greek that had been produced for 
the South Slavs. The existence of this literature facilitated the 
East Slavs' conversion to Christianity and introduced them to 
rudimentary Greek philosophy, science, and historiography 
without the necessity of learning Greek. In contrast, educated 
people in medieval Western and Central Europe learned Latin. 
Because the East Slavs learned neither Greek nor Latin, they 
were isolated from Byzantine culture as well as from the Euro- 
pean cultures of their neighbors to the west. 

In the centuries that followed the state's foundation, Rurik's 
purported descendants shared power over Kievan Rus'. 
Princely succession moved from elder to younger brother and 
from uncle to nephew, as well as from father to son. Junior 
members of the dynasty usually began their official careers as 
rulers of a minor district, progressed to more lucrative princi- 
palities, and then competed for the coveted throne of Kiev. 

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the princes and their 
retinues, which were a mixture of Varangian and Slavic elites 
and small Finno-Ugric and Turkic elements, dominated the 
society of Kievan Rus'. Leading soldiers and officials received 
income and land from the princes in return for their political 
and military services. Kievan society lacked the class institu- 
tions and autonomous towns that were typical of West Euro- 
pean feudalism. Nevertheless, urban merchants, artisans, and 
laborers sometimes exercised political influence through a city 
assembly, the veche, which included all the adult males in the 
population. In some cases, the veche either made agreements 



7 



Russia: A Country Study 




POLOVTSIANS 



HUNGARY K Q(/ 



The twelve principalities 
of Kievan Rus' in 1100 

200 Kilometers 



r 



(Bfac^ Sea 



VOLGA 
BULGARS 



Source: Based on information from David MacKenzie and Michael W. Curran, A 

History of Russia and the Soviet Union, Chicago, 1987, 61. 

Figure 2. The Principalities of Kievan Rus', 1136 

with their rulers or expelled them and invited others to take 
their place. At the bottom of society was a small stratum of 
slaves. More important was a class of tribute-paying peasants, 
who owed labor duty to the princes; the widespread personal 
serfdom characteristic of Western Europe did not exist in 
Kievan Rus', however. 

The Rise of Regional Centers 

Kievan Rus' was not able to maintain its position as a power- 



8 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 



ful and prosperous state, in part because of the amalgamation 
of disparate lands under the control of a ruling clan. As the 
members of that clan became more numerous, they identified 
themselves with regional interests rather than with the larger 
patrimony. Thus, the princes fought among themselves, fre- 
quently forming alliances with outside groups such as the 
Polovtsians, Poles, and Hungarians. The Crusades brought a 
shift in European trade routes that accelerated the decline of 
Kievan Rus'. In 1204 the forces of the Fourth Crusade sacked 
Constantinople, making the Dnepr trade route marginal. As it 
declined, Kievan Rus' splintered into many principalities and 
several large regional centers. The inhabitants of those 
regional centers then evolved into three nationalities: Ukraini- 
ans in the southeast and southwest, Belorussians in the north- 
west, and Russians in the north and northeast. 

In the north, the Republic of Novgorod prospered as part of 
Kievan Rus' because it controlled trade routes from the Volga 
River to the Baltic Sea. As Kievan Rus' declined, Novgorod 
became more independent. A local oligarchy ruled Novgorod; 
major government decisions were made by a town assembly, 
which also elected a prince as the city's military leader. In the 
twelfth century, Novgorod acquired its own archbishop, a sign 
of increased importance and political independence. In its 
political structure and mercantile activities, Novgorod resem- 
bled the north European towns of the Hanseatic League, the 
prosperous alliance that dominated the commercial activity of 
the Baltic region between the thirteenth and seventeenth cen- 
turies, more than the other principalities of Kievan Rus'. 

In the northeast, East Slavs colonized the territory that even- 
tually became Muscovy by intermingling with the Finno-Ugric 
tribes already occupying the area. The city of Rostov was the 
oldest center of the northeast, but it was supplanted first by 
Suzdal' and then by the city of Vladimir. By the twelfth century, 
the combined principality of Vladimir-Suzdal' had become a 
major power in Kievan Rus 1 . 

In 1169 Prince Andrey Bogolyubskiy of Vladimir-Suzdal' 
dealt a severe blow to the waning power of Kievan Rus' when 
his armies sacked the city of Kiev. Prince Andrey then installed 
his younger brother to rule in Kiev and continued to rule his 
realm from Suzdal'. Thus, political power shifted to the north- 
east, away from Kiev, in the second half of the twelfth century. 
In 1299, in the wake of the Mongol invasion, the metropolitan 



9 



Russia: A Country Study 

of the Orthodox Church moved to the city of Vladimir, and 
Vladimir-Suzdal' replaced Kievan Rus 1 as the religious center. 

To the southwest, the principality of Galicia-Volhynia had 
highly developed trade relations with its Polish, Hungarian, 
and Lithuanian neighbors and emerged as another successor 
to Kievan Rus 1 . In the early thirteenth century, Prince Roman 
Mstislavich united the two previously separate principalities, 
conquered Kiev, and assumed the title of grand duke of Kievan 
Rus'. His son, Prince Daniil (Danylo; r. 1238-64) was the first 
ruler of Kievan Rus' to accept a crown from the Roman papacy, 
apparently doing so without breaking with Orthodoxy. Early in 
the fourteenth century, the patriarch of the Orthodox Church 
in Constantinople granted the rulers of Galicia-Volhynia a met- 
ropolitan to compensate for the move of the Kievan metropoli- 
tan to Vladimir. 

However, a long and unsuccessful struggle against the Mon- 
gols combined with internal opposition to the prince and for- 
eign intervention to weaken Galicia-Volhynia. With the end of 
the Mstislavich Dynasty in the mid-fourteenth century, Galicia- 
Volhynia ceased to exist; Lithuania took Volhynia, and Poland 
annexed Galicia. 

The Mongol Invasion 

As it was undergoing fragmentation, Kievan Rus' faced its 
greatest threat from invading Mongols. In 1223 an army from 
Kievan Rus', together with a force of Turkic Polovtsians, faced a 
Mongol raiding party at the Kalka River. The Kievan alliance 
was defeated soundly. Then, in 1237-38, a much larger Mongol 
force overran much of Kievan Rus'. In 1240 the Mongols 
sacked the city of Kiev and then moved west into Poland and 
Hungary Of the principalities of Kievan Rus', only the Repub- 
lic of Novgorod escaped occupation, but it paid tribute to the 
Mongols. One branch of the Mongol force withdrew to Saray 
on the lower Volga River, establishing the Golden Horde (see 
Glossary). From Saray the Golden Horde Mongols ruled 
Kievan Rus 1 indirectly through their princes and tax collectors. 

The impact of the Mongol invasion on the territories of 
Kievan Rus' was uneven. Centers such as Kiev never recovered 
from the devastation of the initial attack. The Republic of 
Novgorod continued to prosper, however, and a new entity, the 
city of Moscow, began to flourish under the Mongols. Although 
a Russian army defeated the Golden Horde at Kulikovo in 
1380, Mongol domination of the Russian-inhabited territories, 



10 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

along with demands of tribute from Russian princes, continued 
until about 1480. 

Historians have debated the long-term influence of Mongol 
rule on Russian society. The Mongols have been blamed for the 
destruction of Kievan Rus', the breakup of the "Russian" 
nationality into three components, and the introduction of the 
concept of "oriental despotism" into Russia. But most histori- 
ans agree that Kievan Rus' was not a homogeneous political, 
cultural, or ethnic entity and that the Mongols merely acceler- 
ated a fragmentation that had begun before the invasion. His- 
torians also credit the Mongol regime with an important role 
in the development of Muscovy as a state. Under Mongol occu- 
pation, for example, Muscovy developed its postal road net- 
work, census, fiscal system, and military organization. 

Kievan Rus' also left a powerful legacy. The leader of the 
Rurik Dynasty united a large territory inhabited by East Slavs 
into an important, albeit unstable, state. After Vladimir 
accepted Eastern Orthodoxy, Kievan Rus' came together under 
a church structure and developed a Byzantine-Slavic synthesis 
in culture, statecraft, and the arts. On the northeastern periph- 
ery of Kievan Rus', those traditions were adapted to form the 
Russian autocratic state. 

Muscovy 

The development of the Russian state can be traced from 
Vladimir-Suzdal' through Muscovy to the Russian Empire. Mus- 
covy drew people and wealth to the northeastern periphery of 
Kievan Rus'; established trade links to the Baltic Sea, the White 
Sea, and the Caspian Sea and to Siberia; and created a highly 
centralized and autocratic political system. Muscovite political 
traditions, therefore, exerted a powerful influence on Russian 
society. 

The Rise of Muscovy 

When the Mongols invaded the lands of Kievan Rus 1 , Mos- 
cow was an insignificant trading outpost in the principality of 
Vladimir-Suzdal'. The outpost's remote, forested location 
offered some security from Mongol attack and occupation, and 
a number of rivers provided access to the Baltic and Black seas 
and to the Caucasus region. More important to Moscow's devel- 
opment in what became the state of Muscovy, however, was its 
rule by a series of princes who were ambitious, determined, 



11 



Russia: A Country Study 

and lucky. The first ruler of the principality of Muscovy, Daniil 
Aleksandrovich (d. 1303), secured the principality for his 
branch of the Rurik Dynasty. His son, Ivan I (r. 1325-40), 
known as Ivan Kalita ("Money Bags"), obtained the title "Grand 
Prince of Vladimir" from his Mongol overlords. He cooperated 
closely with the Mongols and collected tribute from other Rus- 
sian principalities on their behalf. This relationship enabled 
Ivan to gain regional ascendancy, particularly over Muscovy's 
chief rival, the northern city of Tver'. In 1327 the Orthodox 
metropolitan transferred his residency from Vladimir to Mos- 
cow, further enhancing the prestige of the new principality. 

In the fourteenth century, the grand princes of Muscovy 
began gathering Russian lands to increase the population and 
wealth under their rule (see table 2, Appendix). The most suc- 
cessful practitioner of this process was Ivan III (the Great; r. 
1462-1505), who conquered Novgorod in 1478 and Tver' in 
1485. Muscovy gained full sovereignty over the ethnically Rus- 
sian lands in 1480 when Mongol overlordship ended officially, 
and by the beginning of the sixteenth century virtually all those 
lands were united. Through inheritance, Ivan obtained part of 
the province of Ryazan', and the princes of Rostov and Yaro- 
slavl' voluntarily subordinated themselves to him. The north- 
western city of Pskov remained independent in this period, but 
Ivan's son, Vasiliy III (r. 1505-33), later conquered it. 

Ivan III was the first Muscovite ruler to use the titles of tsar 
and "Ruler of all Rus'." Ivan competed with his powerful north- 
western rival Lithuania for control over some of the semi-inde- 
pendent former principalities of Kievan Rus' in the upper 
Dnepr and Donets river basins. Through the defections of 
some princes, border skirmishes, and a long, inconclusive war 
with Lithuania that ended only in 1503, Ivan III was able to 
push westward, and Muscovy tripled in size under his rule. 

The Evolution of the Russian Aristocracy 

Internal consolidation accompanied outward expansion of 
the state. By the fifteenth century, the rulers of Muscovy con- 
sidered the entire Russian territory their collective property. 
Various semi-independent princes still claimed specific territo- 
ries, but Ivan III forced the lesser princes to acknowledge the 
grand prince of Muscovy and his descendants as unquestioned 
rulers with control over military, judicial, and foreign affairs. 

Gradually, the Muscovite ruler emerged as a powerful, auto- 
cratic ruler, a tsar. By assuming that title, the Muscovite prince 



12 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

underscored that he was a major ruler or emperor on a par 
with the emperor of the Byzantine Empire or the Mongol 
khan. Indeed, after Ivan Ill's marriage to Sophia Paleologue, 
the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, the Muscovite court 
adopted Byzantine terms, rituals, titles, and emblems such as 
the double-headed eagle. At first, the term autocrat connoted 
only the literal meaning of an independent ruler, but in the 
reign of Ivan IV (r. 1533-84) it came to mean unlimited rule. 
Ivan IV was crowned tsar and thus was recognized, at least by 
the Orthodox Church, as emperor. An Orthodox monk had 
claimed that, once Constantinople had fallen to the Ottoman 
Empire in 1453, the Muscovite tsar was the only legitimate 
Orthodox ruler and that Moscow was the Third Rome because 
it was the final successor to Rome and Constantinople, the cen- 
ters of Christianity in earlier periods. That concept was to reso- 
nate in the self-image of Russians in future centuries. 

Ivan IV 

The development of the tsar's autocratic powers reached a 
peak during the reign of Ivan IV, and he became known as the 
Terrible (his Russian epithet, groznyy, means threatening or 
dreaded). Ivan strengthened the position of the tsar to an 
unprecedented degree, demonstrating the risks of unbridled 
power in the hands of a mentally unstable individual. Although 
apparently intelligent and energetic, Ivan suffered from bouts 
of paranoia and depression, and his rule was punctuated by 
acts of extreme violence. 

Ivan IV became grand prince of Muscovy in 1533 at the age 
of three. Various factions of the boyars (see Glossary) com- 
peted for control of the regency until Ivan assumed the throne 
in 1547. Reflecting Muscovy's new imperial claims, Ivan's coro- 
nation as tsar was an elaborate ritual modeled after those of the 
Byzantine emperors. With the continuing assistance of a group 
of boyars, Ivan began his reign with a series of useful reforms. 
In the 1550s, he promulgated a new law code, revamped the 
military, and reorganized local government. These reforms 
undoubtedly were intended to strengthen the state in the face 
of continuous warfare. 

During the late 1550s, Ivan developed a hostility toward his 
advisers, the government, and the boyars. Historians have not 
determined whether policy differences, personal animosities, 
or mental imbalance cause his wrath. In 1565 he divided Mus- 
covy into two parts: his private domain and the public realm. 



13 



Russia: A Country Study 

For his private domain, Ivan chose some of the most prosper- 
ous and important districts of Muscovy. In these areas, Ivan's 
agents attacked boyars, merchants, and even common people, 
summarily executing some and confiscating land and posses- 
sions. Thus began a decade of terror in Muscovy. As a result of 
this policy, called the oprichnina, Ivan broke the economic and 
political power of the leading boyar families, thereby destroy- 
ing precisely those persons who had built up Muscovy and were 
the most capable of administering it. Trade diminished, and 
peasants, faced with mounting taxes and threats of violence, 
began to leave Muscovy. Efforts to curtail the mobility of the 
peasants by tying them to their land brought Muscovy closer to 
legal serfdom. In 1572 Ivan finally abandoned the practices of 
the oprichnina. 

Despite the domestic turmoil of Ivan's late period, Muscovy 
continued to wage wars and to expand. Ivan defeated and 
annexed the Kazan' Khanate on the middle Volga in 1552 and 
later the Astrakhan' Khanate, where the Volga meets the Cas- 
pian Sea. These victories gave Muscovy access to the entire 
Volga River and to Central Asia. Muscovy's eastward expansion 
encountered relatively little resistance. In 1581 the Stroganov 
merchant family, interested in fur trade, hired a Cossack (see 
Glossary) leader, Yermak, to lead an expedition into western 
Siberia. Yermak defeated the Siberian Khanate and claimed 
the territories west of the Ob' and Irtysh rivers for Muscovy (see 
fig. 3). 

Expanding to the northwest toward the Baltic Sea proved to 
be much more difficult. In 1558 Ivan invaded Livonia, eventu- 
ally embroiling him in a twenty-five-year war against Poland, 
Lithuania, Sweden, and Denmark. Despite occasional suc- 
cesses, Ivan's army was pushed back, and Muscovy failed to 
secure a coveted position on the Baltic Sea. The war drained 
Muscovy. Some historians believe that Ivan initiated the oprich- 
nina to mobilize resources for the war and to quell opposition 
to it. Regardless of the reason, Ivan's domestic and foreign pol- 
icies had a devastating effect on Muscovy, and they led to a 
period of social struggle and civil war, the so-called Time of 
Troubles (Smutnoye vremya, 1598-1613). 

The Time of Troubles 

Ivan IV was succeeded by his son Fedor, who was mentally 
deficient. Actual power went to Fedor's brother-in-law, the 
boyar Boris Godunov. Perhaps the most important event of 



14 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

Fedor's reign was the proclamation of the patriarchate of Mos- 
cow in 1589. The creation of the patriarchate climaxed the evo- 
lution of a separate and totally independent Russian Orthodox 
Church. 

In 1598 Fedor died without an heir, ending the Rurik 
Dynasty. Boris Godunov then convened a zemskiy sobor, a 
national assembly of boyars, church officials, and commoners, 
which proclaimed him tsar, although various boyar factions 
refused to recognize the decision. Widespread crop failures 
caused a famine between 1601 and 1603, and during the ensu- 
ing discontent, a man emerged who claimed to be Dmitriy, 
Ivan IV's son who had died in 1591. This pretender to the 
throne, who came to be known as the first False Dmitriy, gained 
support in Poland and marched to Moscow, gathering follow- 
ers among the boyars and other elements as he went. Histori- 
ans speculate that Godunov would have weathered this crisis, 
but he died in 1605. As a result, the first False Dmitriy entered 
Moscow and was crowned tsar that year, following the murder 
of Tsar Fedor II, Godunov's son. 

Subsequently, Muscovy entered a period of continuous 
chaos. The Time of Troubles included a civil war in which a 
struggle over the throne was complicated by the machinations 
of rival boyar factions, the intervention of regional powers 
Poland and Sweden, and intense popular discontent. The first 
False Dmitriy and his Polish garrison were overthrown, and a 
boyar, Vasiliy Shuyskiy, was proclaimed tsar in 1606. In his 
attempt to retain the throne, Shuyskiy allied himself with the 
Swedes. A second False Dmitriy, allied with the Poles, 
appeared. In 1610 that heir apparent was proclaimed tsar, and 
the Poles occupied Moscow. The Polish presence led to a patri- 
otic revival among the Russians, and a new army, financed by 
northern merchants and blessed by the Orthodox Church, 
drove the Poles out. In 1613 a new zemskiy sobor proclaimed the 
boyar Mikhail Romanov as tsar, beginning the 300-year reign of 
the Romanov family. 

Muscovy was in chaos for more than a decade, but the insti- 
tution of the autocracy remained intact. Despite the tsar's per- 
secution of the boyars, the townspeople's dissatisfaction, and 
the gradual enserfment of the peasantry, efforts at restricting 
the power of the tsar were only halfhearted. Finding no institu- 
tional alternative to the autocracy, discontented Russians ral- 
lied behind various pretenders to the throne. During that 
period, the goal of political activity was to gain influence over 



15 



Russia: A Country Study 




Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 



the sitting autocrat or to place one's own candidate on the 
throne. The boyars fought among themselves, the lower classes 
revolted blindly, and foreign armies occupied the Kremlin (see 
Glossary) in Moscow, prompting many to accept tsarist absolut- 
ism as a necessary means to restoring order and unity in Mus- 
covy. 

The Romanovs 

The immediate task of the new dynasty was to restore order. 
Fortunately for Muscovy, its major enemies, Poland and Swe- 
den, were engaged in a bitter conflict with each other, which 
provided Muscovy the opportunity to make peace with Sweden 
in 1617 and to sign a truce with Poland in 1619. After an unsuc- 
cessful attempt to regain the city of Smolensk from Poland in 
1632, Muscovy made peace with Poland in 1634. Polish king 
Wladyslaw IV, whose father and predecessor Sigismund III had 
manipulated his nominal selection as tsar of Muscovy during 
the Time of Troubles, renounced all claims to the title as a con- 
dition of the peace treaty. 

The early Romanovs were weak rulers. Under Mikhail, state 
affairs were in the hands of the tsar's father, Filaret, who in 
1619 became patriarch of the Orthodox Church. Later, 
Mikhail's son Aleksey (r. 1645-76) relied on a boyar, Boris 
Morozov, to run his government. Morozov abused his position 
by exploiting the populace, and in 1648 Aleksey dismissed him 
in the wake of a popular uprising in Moscow. 

The autocracy survived the Time of Troubles and the rule of 
weak or corrupt tsars because of the strength of the govern- 
ment's central bureaucracy. Government functionaries contin- 
ued to serve, regardless of the ruler's legitimacy or the boyar 
faction controlling the throne. In the seventeenth century, the 
bureaucracy expanded dramatically. The number of govern- 
ment departments (prikazy; sing., prikaz) increased from twenty- 
two in 1613 to eighty by mid-century. Although the depart- 
ments often had overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions, the 
central government, through provincial governors, was able to 
control and regulate all social groups, as well as trade, manu- 
facturing, and even the Orthodox Church. 

The comprehensive legal code introduced in 1649 illustrates 
the extent of state control over Russian society. By that time, 
the boyars had largely merged with the elite bureaucracy, who 
were obligatory servitors of the state, to form a new nobility, 
the dvoryanstvo. The state required service from both the old 



17 



Russia: A Country Study 

and the new nobility, primarily in the military. In return, they 
received land and peasants. In the preceding century, the state 
had gradually curtailed peasants' rights to move from one land- 
lord to another; the 1649 code officially attached peasants to 
their domicile. The state fully sanctioned serfdom, and run- 
away peasants became state fugitives. Landlords had complete 
power over their peasants and bought, sold, traded, and mort- 
gaged them. Peasants living on state-owned land, however, were 
not considered serfs. They were organized into communes, 
which were responsible for taxes and other obligations. Like 
serfs, however, state peasants were attached to the land they 
farmed. Middle-class urban tradesmen and craftsmen were 
assessed taxes, and, like the serfs, they were forbidden to 
change residence. All segments of the population were subject 
to military levy and to special taxes. By chaining much of Mus- 
covite society to specific domiciles, the legal code of 1649 cur- 
tailed movement and subordinated the people to the interests 
of the state. 

Under this code, increased state taxes and regulations exac- 
erbated the social discontent that had been simmering since 
the Time of Troubles. In the 1650s and 1660s, the number of 
peasant escapes increased dramatically. A favorite refuge was 
the Don River region, domain of the Don Cossacks. A major 
uprising occurred in the Volga region in 1670 and 1671. Stenka 
Razin, a Cossack who was from the Don River region, led a 
revolt that drew together wealthy Cossacks who were well estab- 
lished in the region and escaped serfs seeking free land. The 
unexpected uprising swept up the Volga River valley and even 
threatened Moscow. Tsarist troops finally defeated the rebels 
after they had occupied major cities along the Volga in an oper- 
ation whose panache captured the imaginations of later gener- 
ations of Russians. Razin was publicly tortured and executed. 

Expansion and Westernization 

Muscovy continued its territorial growth through the seven- 
teenth century. In the southwest, it acquired eastern Ukraine, 
which had been under Polish rule. The Ukrainian Cossacks, 
warriors organized in military formations, lived in the frontier 
areas bordering Poland, the Tatar lands, and Muscovy. 
Although they had served in the Polish army as mercenaries, 
the Ukrainian Cossacks remained fiercely independent and 
staged a number of uprisings against the Poles. In 1648 most of 
Ukrainian society joined the Cossacks in a revolt because of the 



18 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

political, social, religious, and ethnic oppression suffered 
under Polish rule. After the Ukrainians had thrown off Polish 
rule, they needed military help to maintain their position. In 
1654 the Ukrainian leader, Bogdan Khmel'nitskiy (Bohdan 
Khmer nyts'kyy), offered to place Ukraine under the protection 
of the Muscovite tsar, Aleksey I, rather than under the Polish 
king. Aleksey's acceptance of this offer, which was ratified in 
the Treaty of Pereyaslavl', led to a protracted war between 
Poland and Muscovy. The Treaty of Andrusovo, which ended 
the war in 1667, split Ukraine along the Dnepr River, reuniting 
the western sector with Poland and leaving the eastern sector 
self-governing under the suzerainty of the tsar. 

In the east, Muscovy had obtained western Siberia in the six- 
teenth century. From this base, merchants, traders, and explor- 
ers pushed eastward from the Ob' River to the Yenisey River, 
then to the Lena River. By the middle of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, Muscovites had reached the Amur River and the outskirts 
of the Chinese Empire. After a period of conflict with the Man- 
chu Dynasty, Muscovy made peace with China in 1689. By the 
Treaty of Nerchinsk, Muscovy ceded its claims to the Amur Val- 
ley, but it gained access to the region east of Lake Baikal and 
the trade route to Beijing. Peace with China consolidated the 
initial breakthrough to the Pacific that had been made in the 
middle of the century. 

Muscovy's southwestern expansion, particularly its incorpo- 
ration of eastern Ukraine, had unintended consequences. 
Most Ukrainians were Orthodox, but their close contact with 
the Roman Catholic Polish Counter-Reformation also brought 
them Western intellectual currents. Through Kiev, Muscovy 
gained links to Polish and Central European influences and to 
the wider Orthodox world. Although the Ukrainian link stimu- 
lated creativity in many areas, it also undermined traditional 
Russian religious practices and culture. The Russian Orthodox 
Church discovered that its isolation from Constantinople had 
caused variations to creep into its liturgical books and prac- 
tices. The Russian Orthodox patriarch, Nikon, was determined 
to bring the Russian texts back into conformity with the Greek 
originals. But Nikon encountered fierce opposition among the 
many Russians who viewed the corrections as improper foreign 
intrusions, or perhaps the work of the devil. When the Ortho- 
dox Church forced Nikon's reforms, a schism resulted in 1667. 
Those who did not accept the reforms came to be called the 
Old Believers (starovery); they were officially pronounced here- 



19 



Russia: A Country Study 

tics and were persecuted by the church and the state. The chief 
opposition figure, the archpriest Awakum, was burned at the 
stake. The split subsequently became permanent, and many 
merchants and peasants joined the Old Believers. 

The tsar's court also felt the impact of Ukraine and the West. 
Kiev was a major transmitter of new ideas and insight through 
the famed scholarly academy that Metropolitan Mogila 
(Mohyla) founded there in 1631. Among the results of this 
infusion of ideas into Muscovy were baroque architecture, liter- 
ature, and icon painting. Other more direct channels to the 
West opened as international trade increased and more for- 
eigners came to Muscovy. The tsar's court was interested in the 
West's more advanced technology, particularly when military 
applications were involved. By the end of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, Ukrainian, Polish, and West European penetration had 
undermined the Muscovite cultural synthesis — at least among 
the elite — and had prepared the way for an even more radical 
transformation. 

Early Imperial Russia 

In the eighteenth century, Muscovy was transformed from a 
static, somewhat isolated, traditional state into the more 
dynamic, partially Westernized, and secularized Russian 
Empire. This transformation was in no small measure a result 
of the vision, energy, and determination of Peter the Great. 
Historians disagree about the extent to which Peter himself 
transformed Russia, but they generally concur that he laid the 
foundations for empire building over the next two centuries. 
The era that Peter initiated signaled the advent of Russia as a 
major European power. But, although the Russian Empire 
would play a leading political role in the next century, its reten- 
tion of serfdom precluded economic progress of any signifi- 
cant degree. As West European economic growth accelerated 
during the Industrial Revolution, which had begun in the sec- 
ond half of the eighteenth century, Russia began to lag ever far- 
ther behind, creating new problems for the empire as a great 
power. 

Peter the Great and the Russian Empire 

As a child of the second marriage of Tsar Aleksey, Peter at 
first was relegated to the background of Russian politics as vari- 
ous court factions struggled to control the throne. Aleksey was 



20 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

succeeded by his son from his first marriage, Fedor III, a sickly 
boy who died in 1682. Peter then was made co-tsar with his half 
brother, Ivan V, but Peter's half sister, Sofia, held the real 
power. She ruled as regent while the young Peter was allowed 
to play war games with his friends and to roam in Moscow's for- 
eign quarters. These early experiences instilled in him an abid- 
ing interest in Western military practice and technology, 
particularly in military engineering, artillery, navigation, and 
shipbuilding. In 1689, using troops that he had drilled during 
childhood games, Peter foiled a plot to have Sofia crowned. 
When Ivan V died in 1696, Peter became the sole tsar of Mus- 
covy. 

War dominated much of Peter's reign. At first Peter 
attempted to secure the principality's southern borders against 
the Tatars and the Ottoman Turks. His campaign against a fort 
on the Sea of Azov failed initially, but after he created Russia's 
first navy, Peter was able to take the port of Azov in 1696. To 
continue the war with the Ottoman Empire, Peter traveled to 
Europe to seek allies. The first tsar to make such a trip, Peter 
visited Brandenburg, Holland, England, and the Holy Roman 
Empire during his so-called Grand Embassy. Peter learned a 
great deal and enlisted into his service hundreds of West Euro- 
pean technical specialists. The embassy was cut short by the 
attempt to place Sofia on the throne instead of Peter, a revolt 
that was crushed by Peter's followers. As a result, Peter had 
hundreds of the participants tortured and killed, and he pub- 
licly displayed their bodies as a warning to others. 

Peter was unsuccessful in forging a European coalition 
against the Ottoman Empire, but during his travels he found 
interest in waging war against Sweden, then an important 
power in northern Europe. Seeing an opportunity to break 
through to the Baltic Sea, Peter made peace with the Ottoman 
Empire in 1700 and then attacked the Swedes at their port of 
Narva on the Gulf of Finland. However, Sweden's young king, 
Charles XII, proved his military acumen by crushing Peter's 
army. Fortunately for Peter, Charles did not follow up his vic- 
tory with a counteroffensive, becoming embroiled instead in a 
series of wars over the Polish throne. This respite allowed Peter 
to build a new, Western-style army. When the armies of the two 
leaders met again at the town of Poltava in 1709, Peter defeated 
Charles. Charles escaped to Ottoman territory, and Russia sub- 
sequently became engaged in another war with the Ottoman 
Empire. Russia agreed to return the port of Azov to the Otto- 



21 



Russia: A Country Study 

mans in 1711. The Great Northern War, which in essence was 
settled at Poltava, continued until 1721, when Sweden agreed 
to the Treaty of Nystad. The treaty allowed Muscovy to retain 
the Baltic territories that it had conquered: Livonia, Estonia, 
and Ingria. Through his victories, Peter acquired a direct link 
with Western Europe. In celebration, Peter assumed the title of 
emperor as well as tsar, and Muscovy officially became the Rus- 
sian Empire in 1721. 

Peter achieved Muscovy's expansion into Europe and its 
transformation into the Russian Empire through several major 
initiatives. He established Russia's naval forces, reorganized the 
army according to European models, streamlined the govern- 
ment, and mobilized Russia's financial and human resources. 
Under Peter, the army drafted soldiers for lifetime terms from 
the taxpaying population, and it drew officers from the nobility 
and required them to give lifelong service in either the military 
or civilian administration. In 1722 Peter introduced the Table 
of Ranks, which determined a person's position and status 
according to service to the tsar rather than to birth or seniority. 
Even commoners who achieved a certain level on the table 
were ennobled automatically. 

Peter's reorganization of the government structure was no 
less thorough. He replaced the prikazy with colleges or boards 
and created a senate to coordinate government policy. Peter's 
reform of local government was less successful, but his changes 
enabled local governments to collect taxes and maintain order. 
As part of the government reform, the Orthodox Church was 
partially incorporated into the country's administrative struc- 
ture. Peter abolished the patriarchate and replaced it with a 
collective body, the Holy Synod, led by a lay government offi- 
cial. 

Peter tripled the revenues of the state treasury through a 
variety of taxes. He levied a capitation, or poll tax, on all males 
except clergy and nobles and imposed a myriad of indirect 
taxes on alcohol, salt, and even beards. To provide uniforms 
and weapons for the military, Peter developed metallurgical 
and textile industries using serf labor. 

Peter wanted to equip Russia with modern technology, insti- 
tutions, and ideas. He required Western-style education for all 
male nobles, introduced so-called cipher schools to teach the 
alphabet and basic arithmetic, established a printing house, 
and funded the Academy of Sciences (see Glossary), which was 
established just before his death in 1725 and became one of 



22 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 



Russia's most important cultural institutions. He demanded 
that aristocrats acquire the dress, tastes, and social customs of 
the West. The result was a deepening of the cultural rift 
between the nobility and the mass of Russian people. The best 
illustration of Peter's drive for Westernization, his break with 
traditions, and his coercive methods was his construction in 
1703 of a new, architecturally Western capital, St. Petersburg, 
situated on land newly conquered from Sweden on the Gulf of 
Finland. Although St. Petersburg faced westward, its Western- 
ization was by coercion, and it could not arouse the individual- 
istic spirit that was an important element in the Western ways 
Peter so admired. 

Peter's reign raised questions about Russia's backwardness, 
its relationship to the West, the appropriateness of reform from 
above, and other fundamental problems that have confronted 
many of Russia's subsequent rulers. In the nineteenth century, 
Russians debated whether Peter was correct in pointing Russia 
toward the West or whether his reforms had been a violation of 
Russia's natural traditions. 

The Era of Palace Revolutions 

Peter changed the rules of succession to the throne after he 
killed his own son, Aleksey, who had opposed his father's 
reforms and served as a rallying figure for antireform groups. A 
new law provided that the tsar would choose his own successor, 
but Peter failed to do so before his death in 1725. In the 
decades that followed, the absence of clear rules of succession 
left the monarchy open to intrigues, plots, coups, and counter- 
coups. Henceforth, the crucial factor for obtaining the throne 
was the support of the elite palace guard in St. Petersburg. 

After Peter's death, his wife, Catherine I, seized the throne. 
But when she died in 1727, Peter's grandson, Peter II, was 
crowned tsar. In 1730 Peter II succumbed to smallpox, and 
Anna, a daughter of Ivan V, who had been co-ruler with Peter, 
ascended the throne. The clique of nobles that put Anna on 
the throne attempted to impose various conditions on her. In 
her struggle against those restrictions, Anna had the support of 
other nobles who feared oligarchic rule more than autocracy. 
Thus the principle of autocracy continued to receive strong 
support despite chaotic struggles for the throne. 

Anna died in 1740, and her infant grandnephew was pro- 
claimed tsar as Ivan VI. After a series of coups, however, he was 
replaced by Peter the Great's daughter Elizabeth (r. 1741-62). 



23 



Russia: A Country Study 

During Elizabeth's reign, which was much more effective than 
those of her immediate predecessors, a Westernized Russian 
culture began to emerge. Among notable cultural events were 
the founding of Moscow University (1755) and the Academy of 
Fine Arts (1757) and the emergence of Russia's first eminent 
scientist and scholar, Mikhail Lomonosov. 

During the rule of Peter's successors, Russia took a more 
active role in European statecraft. From 1726 to 1761, Russia 
was allied with Austria against the Ottoman Empire, which 
France usually supported. In the War of Polish Succession 
(1733-35), Russia and Austria blocked the French candidate to 
the Polish throne. In a costly war with the Ottoman Empire 
(1734-39), Russia reacquired the port of Azov Russia's greatest 
reach into Europe was during the Seven Years' War (1756-63), 
which was fought on three continents between Britain and 
France with numerous allies on both sides. In that war, Russia 
continued its alliance with Austria, but Austria shifted to an alli- 
ance with France against Prussia. In 1760 Russian forces were at 
the gates of Berlin. Fortunately for Prussia, Elizabeth died in 
1762, and her successor, Peter III, allied Russia with Prussia 
because of his devotion to the Prussian emperor, Frederick the 
Great. 

Peter III had a short and unpopular reign. Although he was 
a grandson of Peter the Great, his father was the duke of Hol- 
stein, so Peter III was raised in a German Lutheran environ- 
ment. Russians therefore considered him a foreigner. Making 
no secret of his contempt for all things Russian, Peter created 
deep resentment by forcing Prussian military drills on the Rus- 
sian military, attacking the Orthodox Church, and depriving 
Russia of a military victory by establishing his sudden alliance 
with Prussia. Making use of the discontent and fearing for her 
own position, Peter Ill's wife, Catherine, deposed her husband 
in a coup, and her lover, Aleksey Orlov, subsequently murdered 
him. Thus, in June 1762 a German princess who had no legiti- 
mate claim to the Russian throne became Catherine II, 
empress of Russia. 

Imperial Expansion and Maturation: Catherine II 

Catherine IPs reign was notable for imperial expansion, 
which brought the empire huge new territories in the south 
and west, and for internal consolidation. Following a war that 
broke out with the Ottoman Empire in 1768, the parties agreed 
to the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji in 1774. By that treaty, Russia 



24 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

acquired an outlet to the Black Sea, and the Crimean Tatars 
were made independent of the Ottomans. In 1783 Catherine 
annexed Crimea, helping to spark the next war with the Otto- 
man Empire, which began in 1787. By the Treaty of Jassy in 
1792, Russia expanded southward to the Dnestr River. The 
terms of the treaty fell far short of the goals of Catherine's 
reputed "Greek project" — the expulsion of the Ottomans from 
Europe and the renewal of a Byzantine Empire under Russian 
control. The Ottoman Empire no longer was a serious threat to 
Russia, however, and was forced to tolerate an increasing Rus- 
sian influence over the Balkans. 

Russia's westward expansion under Catherine was the result 
of the partitioning of Poland. As Poland became increasingly 
weak in the eighteenth century, each of its neighbors — Russia, 
Prussia, and Austria — tried to place its own candidate on the 
Polish throne. In 1772 the three agreed on an initial partition 
of Polish territory, by which Russia received parts of Belorussia 
and Livonia. After the partition, Poland initiated an extensive 
reform program, which included a democratic constitution 
that alarmed reactionary factions in Poland and in Russia. 
Using the danger of radicalism as an excuse, the same three 
powers abrogated the constitution and in 1793 again stripped 
Poland of territory. This time Russia obtained most of Belorus- 
sia and Ukraine west of the Dnepr River. The 1793 partition led 
to an anti-Russian and anti-Prussian uprising in Poland, which 
ended with the third partition in 1795. The result was that 
Poland was wiped off the map. 

Although the partitioning of Poland greatly added to Rus- 
sia's territory and prestige, it also created new difficulties. Hav- 
ing lost Poland as a buffer, Russia now had to share borders 
with both Prussia and Austria. In addition, the empire became 
more ethnically heterogeneous as it absorbed large numbers of 
Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Jews. The fate of the 
Ukrainians and Belorussians, who were primarily serfs, 
changed little at first under Russian rule. Roman Catholic 
Poles resented their loss of independence, however, and 
proved to be difficult to integrate. Russia had barred Jews from 
the empire in 1742 and viewed them as an alien population. A 
decree of January 3, 1792, formally initiated the Pale of Settle- 
ment, which permitted Jews to live only in the western part of 
the empire, thereby setting the stage for anti-Jewish discrimina- 
tion in later periods (see Other Religions, ch. 4). At the same 
time, Russia abolished the autonomy of Ukraine east of the 



25 



Russia: A Country Study 

Dnepr, the Baltic republics, and various Cossack areas. With 
her emphasis on a uniformly administered empire, Catherine 
presaged the policy of Russification that later tsars and their 
successors would practice. 

Historians have debated Catherine's sincerity as an enlight- 
ened monarch, but few have doubted that she believed in gov- 
ernment activism aimed at developing the empire's resources 
and making its administration more effective. Initially, Cathe- 
rine attempted to rationalize government procedures through 
law. In 1767 she created the Legislative Commission, drawn 
from nobles, townsmen, and others, to codify Russia's laws. 
Although the commission did not formulate a new law code, 
Catherine's Instruction to the Commission introduced some 
Russians to Western political and legal thinking. 

During the 1768-74 war with the Ottoman Empire, Russia 
experienced a major social upheaval, the Pugachev Uprising. 
In 1773 a Don Cossack, Emel'yan Pugachev, announced that he 
was Peter III. Other Cossacks, various Turkic tribes that felt the 
impingement of the Russian centralizing state, and industrial 
workers in the Ural Mountains, as well as peasants hoping to 
escape serfdom, all joined in the rebellion. Russia's preoccupa- 
tion with the war enabled Pugachev to take control of a part of 
the Volga area, but the regular army crushed the rebellion in 
1774. 

The Pugachev Uprising bolstered Catherine's determination 
to reorganize Russia's provincial administration. In 1775 she 
divided Russia into provinces and districts according to popula- 
tion statistics. She then gave each province an expanded 
administrative, police, and judicial apparatus. Nobles no 
longer were required to serve the central government, as they 
had since Peter the Great's time, and many of them received 
significant roles in administering provincial governments. 

Catherine also attempted to organize society into well- 
defined social groups, or estates. In 1785 she issued charters to 
nobles and townsmen. The Charter to the Nobility confirmed 
the liberation of the nobles from compulsory service and gave 
them rights that not even the autocracy could infringe upon. 
The Charter to the Towns proved to be complicated and ulti- 
mately less successful than the one issued to the nobles. Failure 
to issue a similar charter to state peasants, or to ameliorate the 
conditions of serfdom, made Catherine's social reforms incom- 
plete. 



26 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 



The intellectual westernization of the elite continued during 
Catherine's reign. An increase in the number of books and 
periodicals also brought forth intellectual debates and social 
criticism (see Literature and the Arts, ch. 4). In 1790 Aleksandr 
Radishchev published his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, a 
fierce attack on serfdom and the autocracy. Catherine, already 
frightened by the French Revolution, had Radishchev arrested 
and banished to Siberia. Radishchev was later recognized as the 
father of Russian radicalism. 

Catherine brought many of the policies of Peter the Great to 
fruition and set the foundation for the nineteenth-century 
empire. Russia became a power capable of competing with its 
European neighbors on military, political, and diplomatic 
grounds. Russia's elite became culturally more like the elites of 
Central and West European countries. The organization of 
society and the government system, from Peter the Great's cen- 
tral institutions to Catherine's provincial administration, 
remained basically unchanged until the emancipation of the 
serfs in 1861 and, in some respects, until the fall of the monar- 
chy in 1917. Catherine's push to the south, including the estab- 
lishment of Odessa as a Russian port on the Black Sea, 
provided the basis for Russia's nineteenth-century grain trade. 

Despite such accomplishments, the empire that Peter I and 
Catherine II had built was beset with fundamental problems. A 
small Europeanized elite, alienated from the mass of ordinary 
Russians, raised questions about the very essence of Russia's 
history, culture, and identity. Russia achieved its military pre- 
eminence by reliance on coercion and a primitive command 
economy based on serfdom. Although Russia's economic devel- 
opment was almost sufficient for its eighteenth-century needs, 
it was no match for the transformation the Industrial Revolu- 
tion was causing in Western countries. Catherine's attempt at 
organizing society into corporate estates was already being 
challenged by the French Revolution, which emphasized indi- 
vidual citizenship. Russia's territorial expansion and the incor- 
poration of an increasing number of non-Russians into the 
empire set the stage for the future nationalities problem. 
Finally, the first questioning of serfdom and autocracy on 
moral grounds foreshadowed the conflict between the state 
and the intelligentsia that was to become dominant in the nine- 
teenth century. 



27 



Russia: A Country Study 



Ruling the Empire 

During the early nineteenth century, Russia's population, 
resources, international diplomacy, and military forces made it 
one of the most powerful states in the world. Its power enabled 
it to play an increasingly assertive role in Europe's affairs. This 
role drew the empire into a series of wars against Napoleon, 
which had far-reaching consequences for Russia and the rest of 
Europe. After a period of enlightenment, Russia became an 
active opponent of liberalizing trends in Central and Western 
Europe. Internally, Russia's population had grown more 
diverse with each territorial acquisition. The population 
included Lutheran Finns, Baltic Germans, Estonians, and some 
Latvians; Roman Catholic Lithuanians, Poles, and some Latvi- 
ans; Orthodox and Uniate (see Glossary) Belorussians and 
Ukrainians; Muslim peoples along the empire's southern bor- 
der; Orthodox Greeks and Georgians; and members of the 
Armenian Apostolic Church. As Western influence and opposi- 
tion to Russian autocracy mounted, the regime reacted by cre- 
ating a secret police and increasing censorship in order to 
curtail the activities of persons advocating change. The regime 
remained committed to its serf-based economy as the means of 
supporting the upper classes, the government, and the military 
forces. But Russia's backwardness and inherent weakness were 
revealed in the middle of the century, when several powers 
forced the surrender of a Russian fortress in Crimea. 

War and Peace, 1796-1825 

Catherine II died in 1796, and her son Paul (r. 1796-1801) 
succeeded her. Painfully aware that Catherine had planned to 
bypass him and name his son, Alexander, as tsar, Paul instituted 
primogeniture in the male line as the basis for succession. It 
was one of the few lasting reforms of Paul's brief reign. He also 
chartered a Russian-American company, which eventually led 
to Russia's acquisition of Alaska. Paul was haughty and unsta- 
ble, and he frequently reversed his previous decisions, creating 
administrative chaos and accumulating enemies. 

As a major European power, Russia could not escape the 
wars involving revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Paul 
became an adamant opponent of France, and Russia joined 
Britain and Austria in a war against France. In 1798-99 Russian 
troops under one of the country's most famous generals, Alek- 
sandr Suvorov, performed brilliantly in Italy and Switzerland. 



28 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 



Paul reversed himself, however, and abandoned his allies. This 
reversal, coupled with increasingly arbitrary domestic policies, 
sparked a coup, and in March 1801 Paul was assassinated. 

The new tsar, Alexander I (r. 1801-25), came to the throne 
as the result of his father's murder, in which he was implicated. 
Groomed for the throne by Catherine II and raised in the spirit 
of enlightenment, Alexander also had an inclination toward 
romanticism and religious mysticism, particularly in the latter 
period of his reign. Alexander tinkered with changes in the 
central government, and he replaced the colleges that Peter 
the Great had set up with ministries, but without a coordinat- 
ing prime minister. The brilliant statesman Mikhail Speranskiy, 
who was the tsar's chief adviser early in his reign, proposed an 
extensive constitutional reform of the government, but Alex- 
ander dismissed him in 1812 and lost interest in reform. 

Alexander's primary focus was not on domestic policy but on 
foreign affairs, and particularly on Napoleon. Fearing Napo- 
leon's expansionist ambitions and the growth of French power, 
Alexander joined Britain and Austria against Napoleon. Napo- 
leon defeated the Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz in 1805 
and trounced the Russians at Friedland in 1807. Alexander was 
forced to sue for peace, and by the Treaty of Tilsit, signed in 
1807, he became Napoleon's ally. Russia lost little territory 
under the treaty, and Alexander made use of his alliance with 
Napoleon for further expansion. He wrested the Grand Duchy 
of Finland from Sweden in 1809 and acquired Bessarabia from 
Turkey in 1812. 

The Russo-French alliance gradually became strained. Napo- 
leon was concerned about Russia's intentions in the strategi- 
cally vital Bosporus and Dardenelles straits. At the same time, 
Alexander viewed the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, the French-con- 
trolled reconstituted Polish state, with suspicion. The require- 
ment of joining France's Continental Blockade against Britain 
was a serious disruption of Russian commerce, and in 1810 
Alexander repudiated the obligation. In June 1812, Napoleon 
invaded Russia with 600,000 troops — a force twice as large as 
the Russian regular army. Napoleon hoped to inflict a major 
defeat on the Russians and force Alexander to sue for peace. As 
Napoleon pushed the Russian forces back, however, he became 
seriously overextended. Obstinate Russian resistance combined 
with the Russian winter to deal Napoleon a disastrous defeat, 
from which fewer than 30,000 of his troops returned to their 
homeland. 



29 



Russia: A Country Study 

As the French retreated, the Russians pursued them into 
Central and Western Europe and to the gates of Paris. After the 
allies defeated Napoleon, Alexander became known as the sav- 
ior of Europe, and he played a prominent role in the redraw- 
ing of the map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. In 
the same year, under the influence of religious mysticism, Alex- 
ander initiated the creation of the Holy Alliance, a loose agree- 
ment pledging the rulers of the nations involved — including 
most of Europe — to act according to Christian principles. More 
pragmatically, in 1814 Russia, Britain, Austria, and Prussia had 
formed the Quadruple Alliance. The allies created an interna- 
tional system to maintain the territorial status quo and prevent 
the resurgence of an expansionist France. The Quadruple Alli- 
ance, confirmed by a number of international conferences, 
ensured Russia's influence in Europe. 

At the same time, Russia continued its expansion. The Con- 
gress of Vienna created the Kingdom of Poland (Russian 
Poland), to which Alexander granted a constitution. Thus, 
Alexander I became the constitutional monarch of Poland 
while remaining the autocratic tsar of Russia. He was also the 
limited monarch of Finland, which had been annexed in 1809 
and awarded autonomous status. In 1813 Russia gained terri- 
tory in the Baku area of the Caucasus at the expense of Persia. 
By the early nineteenth century, the empire also was firmly 
ensconced in Alaska. 

Historians have generally agreed that a revolutionary move- 
ment was born during the reign of Alexander I. Young officers 
who had pursued Napoleon into Western Europe came back to 
Russia with revolutionary ideas, including human rights, repre- 
sentative government, and mass democracy. The intellectual 
Westernization that had been fostered in the eighteenth cen- 
tury by a paternalistic, autocratic Russian state now included 
opposition to autocracy, demands for representative govern- 
ment, calls for the abolition of serfdom, and, in some 
instances, advocacy of a revolutionary overthrow of the govern- 
ment. Officers were particularly incensed that Alexander had 
granted Poland a constitution while Russia remained without 
one. Several clandestine organizations were preparing for an 
uprising when Alexander died unexpectedly in 1825. Following 
his death, there was confusion about who would succeed him 
because the next in line, his brother Constantine, had relin- 
quished his right to the throne. A group of officers command- 
ing about 3,000 men refused to swear allegiance to the new 



30 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

tsar, Alexander's brother Nicholas, proclaiming instead their 
loyalty to the idea of a Russian constitution. Because these 
events occurred in December 1825, the rebels were called 
Decembrists. Nicholas easily overcame the revolt, and the 
Decembrists who remained alive were arrested. Many were 
exiled to Siberia. 

To some extent, the Decembrists were in the tradition of a 
long line of palace revolutionaries who wanted to place their 
candidate on the throne. But because the Decembrists also 
wanted to implement a liberal political program, their revolt 
has been considered the beginning of a revolutionary move- 
ment. The Decembrist Revolt was the first open breach 
between the government and liberal elements, and it would 
subsequently widen. 

Reaction under Nicholas I 

Nicholas completely lacked his brother's spiritual and intel- 
lectual breadth; he saw his role simply as one paternal autocrat 
ruling his people by whatever means were necessary. Having 
experienced the trauma of the Decembrist Revolt, Nicholas I 
was determined to restrain Russian society. A secret police, the 
so-called Third Section, ran a huge network of spies and 
informers. The government exercised censorship and other 
controls over education, publishing, and all manifestations of 
public life. In 1833 the minister of education, Sergey Uvarov, 
devised a program of "autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality" 
as the guiding principle of the regime. The people were to 
show loyalty to the unlimited authority of the tsar, to the tradi- 
tions of the Orthodox Church, and, in a vague way, to the Rus- 
sian nation. These principles did not gain the support of the 
population but instead led to repression in general and to sup- 
pression of non-Russian nationalities and religions in particu- 
lar. For example, the government suppressed the Uniate 
Church in Ukraine and Belorussia in 1839. 

The official emphasis on Russian nationalism contributed to 
a debate on Russia's place in the world, the meaning of Russian 
history, and the future of Russia. One group, the Westernizers, 
believed that Russia remained backward and primitive and 
could progress only through more thorough Europeanization. 
Another group, the Slavophiles, idealized the Russia that had 
existed before Peter the Great. The Slavophiles viewed old Rus- 
sia as a source of wholeness and looked askance at Western 
rationalism and materialism. Some of them believed that the 



31 



Russia: A Country Study 

Russian peasant commune, or mir, offered an attractive alterna- 
tive to Western capitalism and could make Russia a potential 
social and moral savior. The Slavophiles, therefore, repre- 
sented a form of Russian messianism. 

Despite the repressions of this period, Russia experienced a 
flowering of literature and the arts. Through the works of Alek- 
sandr Pushkin, Nikolay Gogol', Ivan Turgenev, and numerous 
others, Russian literature gained international stature and rec- 
ognition. Ballet took root in Russia after its importation from 
France, and classical music became firmly established with the 
compositions of Mikhail Glinka (1804-57) (see Literature and 
the Arts, ch. 4). 

In foreign policy, Nicholas I acted as the protector of ruling 
legitimism and guardian against revolution. His offers to sup- 
press revolution on the European continent, accepted in some 
instances, earned him the label of gendarme of Europe. In 
1830, after a popular uprising had occurred in France, the 
Poles in Russian Poland revolted. Nicholas crushed the rebel- 
lion, abrogated the Polish constitution, and reduced Poland to 
the status of a Russian province. In 1848, when a series of revo- 
lutions convulsed Europe, Nicholas was in the forefront of 
reaction. In 1849 he intervened on behalf of the Habsburgs 
and helped suppress an uprising in Hungary, and he also 
urged Prussia not to accept a liberal constitution. Having 
helped conservative forces repel the specter of revolution, 
Nicholas I seemed to dominate Europe. 

Russian dominance proved illusory, however. While Nicholas 
was attempting to maintain the status quo in Europe, he 
adopted an aggressive policy toward the Ottoman Empire. 
Nicholas I was following the traditional Russian policy of resolv- 
ing the so-called Eastern Question by seeking to partition the 
Ottoman Empire and establish a protectorate over the Ortho- 
dox population of the Balkans, still largely under Ottoman 
control in the 1820s. Russia fought a successful war with the 
Ottomans in 1828 and 1829. In 1833 Russia negotiated the 
Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi with the Ottoman Empire. The major 
European parties mistakenly believed that the treaty contained 
a secret clause granting Russia the right to send warships 
through the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits. By the London 
Straits Convention of 1841, they affirmed Ottoman control 
over the straits and forbade any power, including Russia, to 
send warships through the straits. Based on his role in sup- 
pressing the revolutions of 1848 and his mistaken belief that he 



32 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

had British diplomatic support, Nicholas moved against the 
Ottomans, who declared war on Russia in 1853. Fearing the 
results of an Ottoman defeat by Russia, in 1854 Britain and 
France joined what became known as the Crimean War on the 
Ottoman side. Austria offered the Ottomans diplomatic sup- 
port, and Prussia remained neutral, leaving Russia without 
allies on the continent. The European allies landed in Crimea 
and laid siege to the well-fortified Russian base at Sevastopol'. 
After a year's siege the base fell, exposing Russia's inability to 
defend a major fortification on its own soil. Nicholas I died 
before the fall of Sevastopol', but he already had recognized 
the failure of his regime. Russia now faced the choice of initiat- 
ing major reforms or losing its status as a major European 
power. 

Transformation of Russia in the Nineteenth Century 

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were 
times of crisis for Russia. Not only did technology and industry 
continue to develop more rapidly in the West, but also new, 
dynamic, competitive great powers appeared on the world 
scene: Otto von Bismarck united Germany in the 1860s, the 
post-Civil War United States grew in size and strength, and a 
modernized Japan emerged from the Meiji Restoration of 
1868. Although Russia was an expanding regional giant in Cen- 
tral Asia, bordering the Ottoman, Persian, British Indian, and 
Chinese empires, it could not generate enough capital to sup- 
port rapid industrial development or to compete with 
advanced countries on a commercial basis. Russia's fundamen- 
tal dilemma was that accelerated domestic development risked 
upheaval at home, but slower progress risked full economic 
dependency on the faster-advancing countries to the east and 
west. In fact, political ferment, particularly among the intelli- 
gentsia, accompanied the transformation of Russia's economic 
and social structure, but so did impressive developments in lit- 
erature, music, the fine arts, and the natural sciences. 

Economic Developments 

Throughout the last half of the nineteenth century, Russia's 
economy developed more slowly than did that of the major 
European nations to its west. Russia's population was substan- 
tially larger than those of the more developed Western coun- 
tries, but the vast majority of the people lived in rural 



33 



Russia: A Country Study 

communities and engaged in relatively primitive agriculture. 
Industry, in general, had greater state involvement than in 
Western Europe, but in selected sectors it was developing with 
private initiative, some of it foreign. Between 1850 and 1900, 
Russia's population doubled, but it remained chiefly rural well 
into the twentieth century. Russia's population growth rate 
from 1850 to 1910 was the fastest of all the major powers except 
for the United States. Agriculture, which was technologically 
underdeveloped, remained in the hands of former serfs and 
former state peasants, who together constituted about four- 
fifths of the rural population. Large estates of more than fifty 
square kilometers accounted for about 20 percent of all farm- 
land, but few such estates were worked in efficient, large-scale 
units. Small-scale peasant farming and the growth of the rural 
population increased the amount of land used for agricultural 
development, but land was used more for gardens and fields of 
grain and less for grazing meadows than it had been in the 
past. 

Industrial growth was significant, although unsteady, and in 
absolute terms it was not extensive. Russia's industrial regions 
included Moscow, the central regions of European Russia, St. 
Petersburg, the Baltic cities, Russian Poland, some areas along 
the lower Don and Dnepr rivers, and the southern Ural Moun- 
tains. By 1890 Russia had about 32,000 kilometers of railroads 
and 1.4 million factory workers, most of whom worked in the 
textile industry. Between 1860 and 1890, annual coal produc- 
tion had grown about 1,200 percent to over 6.6 million tons, 
and iron and steel production had more than doubled to 2 mil- 
lion tons per year. The state budget had more than doubled, 
however, and debt expenditures had quadrupled, constituting 
28 percent of official expenditures in 1891. Foreign trade was 
inadequate to meet the empire's needs. Until the state intro- 
duced high industrial tariffs in the 1880s, it could not finance 
trade with the West because its surpluses were insufficient to 
cover the debts. 

Reforms and Their Limits, 1855-92 

Tsar Alexander II, who succeeded Nicholas I in 1855, was a 
conservative who saw no alternative but to implement change. 
Alexander initiated substantial reforms in education, the gov- 
ernment, the judiciary, and the military. In 1861 he proclaimed 
the emancipation of about 20 million privately held serfs. Local 
commissions, which were dominated by landlords, effected 



34 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 



emancipation by giving land and limited freedom to the serfs. 
The former serfs usually remained in the village commune, but 
they were required to make redemption payments to the gov- 
ernment over a period of almost fifty years. The government 
compensated former owners of serfs by issuing them bonds. 

The regime had envisioned that the 50,000 landlords who 
possessed estates of more than 110 hectares would thrive with- 
out serfs and would continue to provide loyal political and 
administrative leadership in the countryside. The government 
also had expected that peasants would produce sufficient crops 
for their own consumption and for export sales, thereby help- 
ing to finance most of the government's expenses, imports, 
and foreign debt. Neither of the government's expectations 
was realistic, however, and emancipation left both former serfs 
and their former owners dissatisfied. The new peasants soon 
fell behind in their payments to the government because the 
land they had received was poor and because Russian agricul- 
tural methods were inadequate. The former owners often had 
to sell their lands to remain solvent because most of them 
could neither farm nor manage estates without their former 
serfs. In addition, the value of their government bonds fell as 
the peasants failed to make their redemption payments. 

Reforms of local government closely followed emancipation. 
In 1864 most local government in the European part of Russia 
was organized into provincial and district zemstva (sing., zem- 
stvo), which were made up of representatives of all classes and 
were responsible for local schools, public health, roads, pris- 
ons, food supply, and other concerns. In 1870 elected city 
councils, or dumy (sing., duma), were formed. Dominated by 
property owners and constrained by provincial governors and 
the police, the zemstva and dumy raised taxes and levied labor to 
support their activities. 

In 1864 the regime implemented judicial reforms. In major 
towns, it established Western-style courts with juries. In general, 
the judicial system functioned effectively, but the government 
lacked the finances and cultural influence to extend the court 
system to the villages, where traditional peasant justice contin- 
ued to operate with minimal interference from provincial offi- 
cials. In addition, the regime instructed judges to decide each 
case on its merits and not to use precedents, which would have 
enabled them to construct a body of law independent of state 
authority. 



35 



Russia: A Country Study 

Other major reforms took place in the educational and cul- 
tural spheres. The accession of Alexander II brought a social 
restructuring that required a public discussion of issues and 
the lifting of some types of censorship. When an attempt was 
made to assassinate the tsar in 1866, the government reinstated 
censorship, but not with the severity of pre-1855 control. The 
government also put restrictions on universities in 1866, five 
years after they had gained autonomy. The central government 
attempted to act through the zemstva to establish uniform cur- 
ricula for elementary schools and to impose conservative poli- 
cies, but it lacked resources. Because many liberal teachers and 
school officials were only nominally subject to the reactionary 
Ministry of Education, however, the regime's educational 
achievements were mixed after 1866. 

In the financial sphere, Russia established the State Bank in 
1866, which put the national currency on a firmer footing. The 
Ministry of Finance supported railroad development, which 
facilitated vital export activity, but it was cautious and moderate 
in its foreign ventures. The ministry also founded the Peasant 
Land Bank in 1882 to enable enterprising farmers to acquire 
more land. The Ministry of Internal Affairs countered this pol- 
icy, however, by establishing the Nobles' Land Bank in 1885 to 
forestall foreclosures of mortgages. 

The regime also sought to reform the military. One of the 
chief reasons for the emancipation of the serfs was to facilitate 
the transition from a large standing army to a reserve army by 
instituting territorial levies and mobilization in times of need. 
Before emancipation, serfs could not receive military training 
and then return to their owners. Bureaucratic inertia, however, 
obstructed military reform until the Franco-Prussian War 
(1870-71) demonstrated the necessity of building a modern 
army. The levy system introduced in 1874 gave the army a role 
in teaching many peasants to read and in pioneering medical 
education for women. But the army remained backward 
despite these military reforms. Officers often preferred bayo- 
nets to bullets, expressing worry that long-range sights on rifles 
would induce cowardice. In spite of some notable achieve- 
ments, Russia did not keep pace with Western technological 
developments in the construction of rifles, machine guns, artil- 
lery, ships, and naval ordnance. Russia also failed to use naval 
modernization as a means of developing its industrial base in 
the 1860s. 



36 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

In 1881 revolutionaries assassinated Alexander II. His son 
Alexander III (r. 1881-94) initiated a period of political reac- 
tion, which intensified a counterreform movement that had 
begun in 1866. He strengthened the security police, reorganiz- 
ing it into an agency known as the Okhrana, gave it extraordi- 
nary powers, and placed it under the Ministry of Internal 
Affairs. Dmitriy Tolstoy, Alexander's minister of internal affairs, 
instituted the use of land captains, who were noble overseers of 
districts, and he restricted the power of the zemstva and the 
dumy. Alexander III assigned his former tutor, the reactionary 
Konstantin Pobedonostsev, to be the procurator of the Holy 
Synod of the Orthodox Church and Ivan Delyanov to be the 
minister of education. In their attempts to "save" Russia from 
"modernism," they revived religious censorship, persecuted 
non-Orthodox and non-Russian populations, fostered anti- 
Semitism, and suppressed the autonomy of the universities. 
Their attacks on liberal and non-Russian elements alienated 
large segments of the population. The nationalities, particu- 
larly Poles, Finns, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians, 
reacted to the regime's efforts to Russify them by intensifying 
their own nationalism. Many Jews emigrated or joined radical 
movements. Secret organizations and political movements con- 
tinued to develop despite the regime's efforts to quell them. 

Foreign Affairs after the Crimean War 

After the Crimean War, Russia pursued cautious and well-cal- 
culated foreign policies until nationalist passions and another 
Balkan crisis almost caused a catastrophic war in the late 1870s. 
The 1856 Treaty of Paris, signed at the end of the Crimean War, 
had demilitarized the Black Sea and deprived Russia of south- 
ern Bessarabia and a narrow strip of land at the mouth of the 
Danube River. The treaty gave the West European powers the 
nominal duty of protecting Christians living in the Ottoman 
Empire, removing that role from Russia, which had been desig- 
nated as such a protector in the 1774 Treaty of Kuchuk-Kai- 
narji. Russia's primary goal during the first phase of Alexander 
IPs foreign policy was to alter the Treaty of Paris to regain naval 
access to the Black Sea. Russian statesmen viewed Britain and 
Austria (redesignated as Austria-Hungary in 1867) as opposed 
to that goal, so foreign policy concentrated on good relations 
with France, Prussia, and the United States. Prussia (Germany 
as of 1871) replaced Britain as Russia's chief banker in this 
period. 



37 



Russia: A Country Study 

Following the Crimean War, the regime revived its expan- 
sionist policies. Russian troops first moved to gain control of 
the Caucasus region, where the revolts of Muslim tribesmen — 
Chechens, Cherkess, and Dagestanis — had continued despite 
numerous Russian campaigns in the nineteenth century. Once 
the forces of Aleksandr Baryatinskiy had captured the legend- 
ary Chechen rebel leader Shamil in 1859, the army resumed 
the expansion into Central Asia that had begun under Nicho- 
las I. The capture of Tashkent was a significant victory over the 
Quqon (Kokand) Khanate, part of which was annexed in 1866. 
By 1867 Russian forces had captured enough territory to form 
the Guberniya (Governorate General) of Turkestan, the capital 
of which was Tashkent. The Bukhoro (Bukhara) Khanate then 
lost the crucial Samarqand area to Russian forces in 1868. To 
avoid alarming Britain, which had strong interests in protect- 
ing nearby India, Russia left the Bukhoran territories directly 
bordering Afghanistan and Persia nominally independent. The 
Central Asian khanates retained a degree of autonomy until 
1917. 

Russia followed the United States, Britain, and France in 
establishing relations with Japan, and, together with Britain 
and France, Russia obtained concessions from China conse- 
quent to the Second Opium War (1856-60). Under the Treaty 
of Aigun in 1858 and the Treaty of Beijing in 1860, China 
ceded to Russia extensive trading rights and regions adjacent 
to the Amur and Ussuri rivers and allowed Russia to begin 
building a port and naval base at Vladivostok. Meanwhile, in 
1867 the logic of the balance of power and the cost of develop- 
ing and defending the Amur-Ussuri region dictated that Russia 
sell Alaska to the United States in order to acquire much- 
needed funds. 

As part of the regime's foreign policy goals in Europe, Russia 
initially gave guarded support to France's anti-Austrian diplo- 
macy. A weak Franco-Russian entente soured, however, when 
France backed a Polish uprising against Russian rule in 1863. 
Russia then aligned itself more closely with Prussia by approv- 
ing the unification of Germany in exchange for a revision of 
the Treaty of Paris and the remilitarization of the Black Sea. 
These diplomatic achievements came at a London conference 
in 1871, following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. 
After 1871 Germany, united under Prussian leadership, was the 
strongest continental power in Europe. In 1873 Germany 
formed the loosely knit League of the Three Emperors with 



38 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

Russia and Austria-Hungary to prevent them from forming an 
alliance with France. Nevertheless, Austro-Hungarian and Rus- 
sian ambitions clashed in the Balkans, where rivalries among 
Slavic nationalities and anti-Ottoman sentiments seethed. In 
the 1870s, Russian nationalist opinion became a serious domes- 
tic factor in its support for liberating Balkan Christians from 
Ottoman rule and making Bulgaria and Serbia quasi-protector- 
ates of Russia. From 1875 to 1877, the Balkan crisis escalated 
with rebellions in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria, which 
the Ottoman Turks suppressed with such great cruelty that Ser- 
bia, but none of the West European powers, declared war. 

In early 1877, Russia came to the rescue of beleaguered Ser- 
bian and Russian volunteer forces when it went to war with the 
Ottoman Empire. Within one year, Russian troops were near- 
ing Constantinople, and the Ottomans surrendered. Russia's 
nationalist diplomats and generals persuaded Alexander II to 
force the Ottomans to sign the Treaty of San Stefano in March 
1878, creating an enlarged, independent Bulgaria that 
stretched into the southwestern Balkans. When Britain threat- 
ened to declare war over the terms of the Treaty of San Ste- 
fano, an exhausted Russia backed down. At the Congress of 
Berlin in July 1878, Russia agreed to the creation of a smaller 
Bulgaria. Russian nationalists were furious with Austria-Hun- 
gary and Germany for failing to back Russia, but the tsar 
accepted a revived and strengthened League of the Three 
Emperors as well as Austro-Hungarian hegemony in the west- 
ern Balkans. 

Russian diplomatic and military interests subsequently 
returned to Central Asia, where Russia had quelled a series of 
uprisings in the 1870s, and Russia incorporated hitherto inde- 
pendent amirates into the empire. Britain renewed its con- 
cerns in 1881 when Russian troops occupied Turkmen lands 
on the Persian and Afghan borders, but Germany lent diplo- 
matic support to Russian advances, and an Anglo-Russian war 
was averted. Meanwhile, Russia's sponsorship of Bulgarian 
independence brought negative results as the Bulgarians, 
angry at Russia's continuing interference in domestic affairs, 
sought the support of Austria-Hungary. In the dispute that 
arose between Austria-Hungary and Russia, Germany took a 
firm position toward Russia while mollifying the tsar with a 
bilateral defensive alliance, the Reinsurance Treaty of 1887 
between Germany and Russia. Within a year, Russo-German 
acrimony led to Bismarck's forbidding further loans to Russia, 



39 



Russia: A Country Study 

and France replaced Germany as Russia's financier. When Kai- 
ser Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck in 1890, the loose Russo- 
Prussian entente collapsed after having lasted for more than 
twenty-five years. Three years later, Russia allied itself with 
France by entering into a joint military convention, which 
matched the dual alliance formed in 1879 by Germany and 
Au stri a-Hu ngar y. 

The Rise of Revolutionary Movements 

Alexander II's reforms, particularly the lifting of state cen- 
sorship, fostered the expression of political and social thought. 
The regime relied on journals and newspapers to gain support 
for its domestic and foreign policies. But liberal, nationalist, 
and radical writers also helped to mold public opinion that was 
opposed to tsarism, private property, and the imperial state. 
Because many intellectuals, professionals, peasants, and work- 
ers shared these opposition sentiments, the regime regarded 
the publications and the radical organizations as dangerous. 
From the 1860s through the 1880s, Russian radicals, collec- 
tively known as Populists (Narodniki), focused chiefly on the 
peasantry, whom they identified as "the people" (narod). 

The leaders of the Populist movement included radical writ- 
ers, idealists, and advocates of terrorism. In the 1860s, Nikolay 
Chernyshevskiy, the most important radical writer of the 
period, posited that Russia could bypass capitalism and move 
directly to socialism (see Glossary). His most influential work, 
What Is to Be Done? (1861), describes the role of an individual of 
a "superior nature" who guides a new, revolutionary genera- 
tion. Other radicals such as the incendiary anarchist Mikhail 
Bakunin and his terrorist collaborator, Sergey Nechayev, urged 
direct action. The calmer Petr Tkachev argued against the 
advocates of Marxism (see Glossary), maintaining that a cen- 
tralized revolutionary band had to seize power before capital- 
ism could fully develop. Disputing his views, the moralist and 
individualist Petr Lavrov made a call "to the people," which 
hundreds of idealists heeded in 1873 and 1874 by leaving their 
schools for the countryside to try to generate a mass movement 
among the narod. The Populist campaign failed, however, when 
the peasants showed hostility to the urban idealists and the gov- 
ernment began to consider nationalist opinion more seriously. 

The radicals reconsidered their approach, and in 1876 they 
formed a propagandist organization called Land and Liberty 
(Zemlya i volya), which leaned toward terrorism. This orienta- 



40 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

tion became stronger three years later, when the group 
renamed itself the People's Will (Narodnaya volya), the name 
under which the radicals were responsible for the assassination 
of Alexander II in 1881. In 1879 Georgiy Plekhanov formed a 
propagandist faction of Land and Liberty called Black Reparti- 
tion (Chernyy peredel), which advocated redistributing all 
land to the peasantry. This group studied Marxism, which, par- 
adoxically, was principally concerned with urban industrial 
workers. The People's Will remained underground, but in 
1887 a young member of the group, Aleksandr Ul'yanov, 
attempted to assassinate Alexander III, and authorities arrested 
and executed him. The execution greatly affected Vladimir 
Ul'yanov, Aleksandr's brother. Influenced by Chernyshevskiy's 
writings, Vladimir joined the People's Will, and later, inspired 
by Plekhanov, he converted to Marxism. The younger Ul'yanov 
later changed his name to Lenin. 

Witte and Accelerated Industrialization 

In the late 1800s, Russia's domestic backwardness and vul- 
nerability in foreign affairs reached crisis proportions. At home 
a famine claimed a half-million lives in 1891, and activities by 
Japan and China near Russia's borders were perceived as 
threats from abroad. In reaction, the regime was forced to 
adopt the ambitious but costly economic programs of Sergey 
Witte, the country's strong-willed minister of finance. Witte 
championed foreign loans, conversion to the gold standard, 
heavy taxation of the peasantry, accelerated development of 
heavy industry, and a trans-Siberian railroad. These policies 
were designed to modernize the country, secure the Russian 
Far East, and give Russia a commanding position with which to 
exploit the resources of China's northern territories, Korea, 
and Siberia. This expansionist foreign policy was Russia's ver- 
sion of the imperialist logic displayed in the nineteenth cen- 
tury by other large countries with vast undeveloped territories 
such as the United States. In 1894 the accession of the pliable 
Nicholas II upon the death of Alexander III gave Witte and 
other powerful ministers the opportunity to dominate the gov- 
ernment. 

Witte's policies had mixed results. In spite of a severe eco- 
nomic depression at the end of the century, Russia's coal, iron, 
steel, and oil production tripled between 1890 and 1900. Rail- 
road mileage almost doubled, giving Russia the most track of 
any nation other than the United States. Yet Russian grain pro- 



41 



Russia: A Country Study 

duction and exports failed to rise significantly, and imports 
grew faster than exports. The state budget also more than dou- 
bled, absorbing some of the country's economic growth. West- 
ern historians differ as to the merits of Witte's reforms; some 
believe that domestic industry, which did not benefit from sub- 
sidies or contracts, suffered a setback. Most analysts agree that 
the Trans-Siberian Railroad (which was completed from Mos- 
cow to Vladivostok in 1904) and the ventures into Manchuria 
and Korea were economic losses for Russia and a drain on the 
treasury. Certainly the financial costs of his reforms contrib- 
uted to Witte's dismissal as minister of finance in 1903. 

Radical Political Parties Develop 

During the 1890s, Russia's industrial development led to a 
significant increase in the size of the urban bourgeoisie and 
the working class, setting the stage for a more dynamic political 
atmosphere and the development of radical parties. Because 
the state and foreigners owned much of Russia's industry, the 
working class was comparatively stronger and the bourgeoisie 
comparatively weaker than in the West. The working class and 
peasants were the first to establish political parties because the 
nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie were politically timid. 
During the 1890s and early 1900s, abysmal living and working 
conditions, high taxes, and land hunger gave rise to more fre- 
quent strikes and agrarian disorders. These activities prompted 
the bourgeoisie of various nationalities in the empire to 
develop a host of different parties, both liberal and conserva- 
tive. 

Socialists of different nationalities formed their own parties. 
Russian Poles, who had suffered significant administrative and 
educational Russification, founded the nationalistic Polish 
Socialist Party in Paris in 1892. That party's founders hoped 
that it would help reunite a divided Poland with the territories 
held by Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia. In 1897 Jewish 
workers in Russia created the Bund (league or union), an 
organization that subsequently became popular in western 
Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, and Russian Poland. The Rus- 
sian Social Democratic Labor Party was established in 1898. 
The Finnish Social Democrats remained separate, but the 
Latvians and Georgians associated themselves with the Russian 
Social Democrats. Armenians, inspired by both Russian and 
Balkan revolutionary traditions, were politically active in this 
period in Russia and in the Ottoman Empire. Politically 



42 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

minded Muslims living in Russia tended to be attracted to the 
pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic movements that were developing 
in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. Russians who fused the 
ideas of the old Populists and urban socialists formed Russia's 
largest radical movement, the United Socialist Revolutionary 
Party, which combined the standard Populist mix of propa- 
ganda and terrorist activities. 

Vladimir I. Ul'yanov was the most politically talented of the 
revolutionary socialists. In the 1890s, he labored to wean young 
radicals away from populism to Marxism. Exiled from 1895 to 
1899 in Siberia, where he took the name Lenin from the 
mighty Siberian Lena River, he was the master tactician among 
the organizers of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In 
December 1900, he founded the newspaper Iskra (Spark). In 
his book What Is to Be Done? (1902), Lenin developed the the- 
ory that a newspaper published abroad could aid in organizing 
a centralized revolutionary party to direct the overthrow of an 
autocratic government. He then worked to establish a tightly 
organized, highly disciplined party to do so in Russia. At the 
Second Party Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor 
Party in 1903, he forced the Bund to walk out and induced a 
split between his majority Bolshevik (see Glossary) faction and 
the minority Menshevik (see Glossary) faction, which believed 
more in worker spontaneity than in strict organizational tactics. 
Lenin's concept of a revolutionary party and a worker-peasant 
alliance owed more to Tkachev and to the People's Will than to 
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the developers of Marxism. 
Young Bolsheviks, such as Joseph V. Stalin and Nikolay 
Bukharin, looked to Lenin as their leader. 

Imperialism in Asia and the Russo-Japanese War 

At the turn of the century, Russia gained room to maneuver 
in Asia because of its alliance with France and the growing 
rivalry between Britain and Germany. Tsar Nicholas failed to 
orchestrate a coherent Far Eastern policy because of ministe- 
rial conflicts, however. Russia's uncoordinated and aggressive 
moves in the region ultimately led to the Russo-Japanese War 
(1904-05). 

By 1895 Germany was competing with France for Russia's 
favor, and British statesmen hoped to negotiate with the Rus- 
sians to demarcate spheres of influence in Asia. This situation 
enabled Russia to intervene in northeastern Asia after Japan's 
victory over China in 1895. In the negotiations that followed, 



43 



Russia: A Country Study 

Japan was forced to make concessions in the Liaotung Penin- 
sula and Port Arthur in southern Manchuria. The next year, 
Witte used French capital to establish the Russo-Chinese Bank. 
The goal of the bank was to finance the construction of a rail- 
road across northern Manchuria and thus shorten the Trans- 
Siberian Railroad. Within two years, Russia had acquired leases 
on the Liaotung Peninsula and Port Arthur and had begun 
building a trunk line from Harbin in central Manchuria to Port 
Arthur on the coast. 

In 1900 China reacted to foreign encroachments on its terri- 
tory with an armed popular uprising, the Boxer Rebellion. Rus- 
sian military contingents joined forces from Europe, Japan, 
and the United States to restore order in northern China. A 
force of 180,000 Russian troops fought to pacify part of Man- 
churia and to secure its railroads. The Japanese were backed by 
Britain and the United States, however, and insisted that Russia 
evacuate Manchuria. Witte and some Russian diplomats 
wanted to compromise with Japan and trade Manchuria for 
Korea, but a group of Witte's reactionary enemies, courtiers, 
and military and naval leaders refused to compromise. The tsar 
favored their viewpoint, and, disdaining Japan's threats — 
despite the latter's formal alliance with Britain — the Russian 
government equivocated until Japan declared war in early 
1904. 

In the war that followed, Japan's location, technological 
superiority, and superior morale gave it command of the seas, 
and Russia's sluggishness and incompetent commanders 
caused continuous setbacks on land. In January 1905, after an 
eight-month siege, Russia surrendered Port Arthur, and in 
March the Japanese forced the Russians to withdraw north of 
Mukden. In May, at the Tsushima Straits, the Japanese 
destroyed Russia's last hope in the war, a fleet assembled from 
the navy's Baltic and Mediterranean squadrons. Theoretically, 
Russian army reinforcements could have driven the Japanese 
from the Asian mainland, but revolution at home and diplo- 
matic pressure forced the tsar to seek peace. Russia accepted 
mediation by United States president Theodore Roosevelt, 
ceded southern Sakhalin Island to Japan, and acknowledged 
Japan's ascendancy in Korea and southern Manchuria. 

The Last Years of the Autocracy 

The Russojapanese War was a turning point in Russian his- 
tory. It led to a popular uprising against the government that 



44 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 



forced the regime to respond with domestic economic and 
political reforms. In the same period, however, counterreform 
and special-interest groups exerted increasing influence on the 
regime's policies. In foreign affairs, Russia again became an 
intrusive participant in Balkan affairs and in the international 
political intrigues of the major European powers. As a conse- 
quence of its foreign policies, Russia was drawn into a world 
war for which its domestic policies rendered it unprepared. 
Severely weakened by internal turmoil and lacking leadership, 
the regime ultimately was unable to overcome the traumatic 
events that would lead to the fall of tsarism and initiate a new 
era in Russian and world history. 

Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1905-07 

The Russo-Japanese War accelerated the rise of political 
movements among all classes and the major nationalities, 
including propertied Russians. By early 1904, Russian liberal 
activists from the zemstva and from the professions had formed 
an organization called the Union of Liberation. In the same 
year, they joined with Finns, Poles, Georgians, Armenians, and 
Russian members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party to form 
an antiautocratic alliance. 

In January 1905, Father Georgiy Gapon, a Russian Orthodox 
priest who headed a police-sponsored workers' association, led 
a huge, peaceful march in St. Petersburg to present a petition 
to the tsar. Nervous troops responded to the throng with gun- 
fire, killing several hundred people and initiating the Revolu- 
tion of 1905. This event, which came to be called Bloody 
Sunday, combined with the embarrassing failures in the war 
with Japan to prompt more strikes, agrarian disorders, army 
mutinies, and terrorist acts organized by opposition groups. 
Workers formed a council, or soviet, in St. Petersburg. Armed 
uprisings occurred in Moscow, the Urals, Latvia, and parts of 
Poland. Activists from the zemstva and the broad professional 
Union of Unions formed the Constitutional Democratic Party, 
whose initials lent the party its informal name, the Kadets. 

Some upper-class and propertied activists called for compro- 
mise with opposition groups to avoid further disorders. In late 
1905, Witte pressured Nicholas to issue the so-called October 
Manifesto, which gave Russia a constitution and proclaimed 
basic civil liberties for all citizens. In an effort to stop the activ- 
ity of liberal factions, the constitution included most of their 
demands, including a ministerial government responsible to 



45 



Russia: A Country Study 

the tsar, and a national Duma (see Glossary) — a parliament to 
be elected on a broad, but not wholly equitable, franchise. 
Those who accepted this arrangement formed a center-right 
political party, the Octobrists, and named Witte the first prime 
minister. Meanwhile, the Kadets held out for a ministerial gov- 
ernment and equal, universal suffrage. Because of their politi- 
cal principles and continued armed uprisings, Russia's leftist 
parties were undecided whether to participate in the Duma 
elections, which had been called for early 1906. At the same 
time, rightist factions actively opposed the reforms. Several new 
monarchist and protofascist groups also arose to subvert the 
new order. Nevertheless, the regime continued to function 
through the chaotic year of 1905, eventually restoring order in 
the cities, the countryside, and the army. In the process, terror- 
ists murdered several thousand officials, and the government 
executed an equal number of terrorists. Because the govern- 
ment had been able to restore order and to secure a loan from 
France before the first Duma met, Nicholas was in a strong 
position that enabled him to replace Witte with the much less 
independent functionary Petr Stolypin. 

The First Duma was elected in March 1906. The Kadets and 
their allies dominated it, with the mainly nonparty radical left- 
ists slightly weaker than the Octobrists and the nonparty cen- 
ter-rightists combined. The socialists had boycotted the 
election, but several socialist delegates were elected. Relations 
between the Duma and the Stolypin government were hostile 
from the beginning. A deadlock of the Kadets and the govern- 
ment over the adoption of a constitution and peasant reform 
led to the dissolution of the Duma and the scheduling of new 
elections. In spite of an upsurge of leftist terror, radical leftist 
parties participated in the election, and, together with the non- 
party left, they gained a plurality of seats, followed by a loose 
coalition of Kadets with Poles and other nationalities in the 
political center. The impasse continued, however, when the 
Second Duma met in 1907. 

The Stolypin and Kokovtsov Governments 

In 1907 Stolypin instituted a series of major reforms. In June 
1907, he dissolved the Second Duma and promulgated a new 
electoral law, which vastly reduced the electoral weight of 
lower-class and non-Russian voters and increased the weight of 
the nobility. This political coup had the desired short-term 
result of restoring order. New elections in the fall returned a 



46 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

more conservative Third Duma, which Octobrists dominated. 
Even this Duma quarreled with the government over a variety 
of issues, however, including the composition of the naval staff, 
the autonomous status of Finland, the introduction of zemstva 
in the western provinces, the reform of the peasant court sys- 
tem, and the establishment of workers' insurance organizations 
under police supervision. In these disputes, the Duma, with its 
appointed aristocratic-bureaucratic upper house, was some- 
times more conservative than the government, and at other 
times it was more constitutionally minded. The Fourth Duma, 
elected in 1912, was similar in composition to the third, but a 
progressive faction of Octobrists split from the right and joined 
the political center. 

Stolypin's boldest measure was his peasant reform program. 
It allowed, and sometimes forced, the breakup of communes as 
well as the establishment of full private property. Stolypin 
hoped that the reform program would create a class of conser- 
vative landowning farmers loyal to the tsar. Most peasants did 
not want to lose the safety of the commune or to permit outsid- 
ers to buy village land, however. By 1914 only about 10 percent 
of all peasant communes had been dissolved. Nevertheless, the 
economy recovered and grew impressively from 1907 to 1914, 
both quantitatively and through the formation of rural cooper- 
atives and banks and the generation of domestic capital. By 
1914 Russian steel production equaled that of France and Aus- 
tria-Hungary, and Russia's economic growth rate was one of the 
highest in the world. Although external debt was very high, it 
was declining as a percentage of the gross national product 
(GNP — see Glossary), and the empire's overall trade balance 
was favorable. 

In 1911 a double agent working for the Okhrana assassi- 
nated Stolypin, and Finance Minister Vladimir Kokovtsov 
replaced him. The cautious Kokovtsov was very able and a sup- 
porter of the tsar, but he could not compete with the powerful 
court factions that dominated the government. 

Historians have debated whether Russia had the potential to 
develop a constitutional government between 1905 and 1914. 
The failure to do so was partly because the tsar was not willing 
to give up autocratic rule or share power. By manipulating the 
franchise, the government obtained progressively more conser- 
vative, but less representative, Dumas. Moreover, the regime 
sometimes bypassed the conservative Dumas and ruled by 
decree. 



47 



Russia: A Country Study 

During this period, the government's policies waivered from 
reformist to repressive. Historians have speculated about 
whether Witte's and Stolypin's bold reform plans could have 
"saved" the Russian Empire. But court politics, together with 
the continuing isolation of the tsar and the bureaucracy from 
the rest of society, hampered all reforms. Suspensions of civil 
liberties and the rule of law continued in many places, and nei- 
ther workers nor the Orthodox Church had the right to orga- 
nize themselves as they chose. Discrimination against Poles, 
Jews, Ukrainians, and Old Believers was common. Domestic 
unrest was on the rise while the empire's foreign policy was 
becoming more adventurous. 

Active Balkan Policy, 1906-13 

Russia's earlier Far Eastern policy required holding Balkan 
issues in abeyance, a strategy Austria-Hungary also followed 
between 1897 and 1906. Japan's victory in 1905 had forced Rus- 
sia to make deals with the British and the Japanese. In 1907 
Russia's new foreign minister, Aleksandr Izvol'skiy, concluded 
agreements with both nations. To maintain its sphere of influ- 
ence in northern Manchuria and northern Persia, Russia 
agreed to Japanese ascendancy in southern Manchuria and 
Korea, and to British ascendancy in southern Persia, Afghani- 
stan, and Tibet. The logic of this policy demanded that Russia 
and Japan unite to prevent the United States from establishing 
a base in China by organizing a consortium to develop Chinese 
railroads. After China's republican revolution of 1911, Russia 
and Japan recognized each other's spheres of influence in 
Outer Mongolia. In an extension of this reasoning, Russia 
traded recognition of German economic interests in the Otto- 
man Empire and Persia for German recognition of various Rus- 
sian security interests in the region. Russia also protected its 
strategic and financial position by entering the informal Triple 
Entente with Britain and France, without antagonizing Ger- 
many. 

In spite of these careful measures, after the Russo-Japanese 
War Russia and Austria-Hungary resumed their Balkan rivalry, 
focusing on the Kingdom of Serbia and the provinces of Bosnia 
and Herzegovina, which Austria-Hungary had occupied since 
1878. In 1881 Russia secretly had agreed in principle to Aus- 
tria's future annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But in 
1908, Izvol'skiy foolishly consented to support formal annex- 
ation in return for Austria's support for revision of the agree- 



48 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 



ment on the neutrality of the Bosporus and Dardanelles — a 
change that would give Russia special navigational rights of pas- 
sage. Britain stymied the Russian gambit by blocking the revi- 
sion, but Austria proceeded with the annexation. Then, backed 
by German threats of war, Austria-Hungary exposed Russia's 
weakness by forcing Russia to disavow support for Serbia. 

After Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegov- 
ina, Russia became a major part of the increased tension and 
conflict in the Balkans. In 1912 Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and 
Montenegro defeated the Ottoman Empire in the First Balkan 
War, but the putative allies continued to quarrel among them- 
selves. Then in 1913, the alliance split, and the Serbs, Greeks, 
and Romanians defeated Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War. 
Austria-Hungary became the patron of Bulgaria, which now 
was Serbia's territorial rival in the region, and Germany 
remained the Ottoman Empire's protector. Russia tied itself 
more closely to Serbia than it had previously. The complex sys- 
tem of alliances and Great Power support was extremely unsta- 
ble; among the Balkan parties harboring resentments over past 
defeats, the Serbs maintained particular animosity toward the 
Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

In June 1914, a Serbian terrorist assassinated Archduke 
Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, which 
then held the Serbian government responsible. Austria-Hun- 
gary delivered an ultimatum to Serbia, believing that the terms 
were too humiliating to accept. Although Serbia submitted to 
the ultimatum, Austria-Hungary declared the response unsatis- 
factory and recalled its ambassador. Russia, fearing another 
humiliation in the Balkans, supported Serbia. Once the Ser- 
bian response was rejected, the system of alliances began to 
operate automatically, with Germany supporting Austria-Hun- 
gary and France backing Russia. When Germany invaded 
France through Belgium, the conflict escalated into a world 
war. 

Russia at War, 1914-16 

Russia's large population enabled it to field a greater num- 
ber of troops than Austria-Hungary and Germany combined, 
but its underdeveloped industrial base meant that its soldiers 
were as poorly armed as those of the Austro-Hungarian army. 
Russian forces were inferior to Germany's in every respect 
except numbers. In most engagements, the larger Russian 



49 



Russia: A Country Study 

armies defeated the Austro-Hungarians but suffered reverses 
against German forces. 

In the initial phase of the war, Russia's offensives into East 
Prussia drew enough German troops from the western front to 
allow the French, Belgians, and British to stop the German 
advance. One of Russia's two invading armies was almost totally 
destroyed, however, at the disastrous Battle of Tannenberg — 
the same site at which Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian troops 
had defeated the German Teutonic Knights in 1410. Mean- 
while, the Russians turned back an Austrian offensive and 
pushed into eastern Galicia, the northeastern region of the 
Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Russians halted a combined 
German-Austrian winter counteroffensive into Russian Poland, 
and in early 1915 they pushed more deeply into Galicia. Then 
in the spring and summer of that year, a German-Austrian 
offensive drove the Russians out of Galicia and Poland and 
destroyed several Russian army corps. In 1916 the Germans 
planned to drive France out of the war with a large-scale attack 
in the Verdun area, but a new Russian offensive against Austria- 
Hungary once again drew German troops from the west. These 
actions left both major fronts stable and both Russia and Ger- 
many despairing of victory — Russia because of exhaustion, Ger- 
many because of its opponents' superior resources. Toward the 
end of 1916, Russia came to the rescue of Romania, which had 
just entered the war, and extended the eastern front south to 
the Black Sea. 

Wartime agreements among the Allies reflected the Triple 
Entente's imperialist aims and the Russian Empire's relative 
weakness outside Eastern Europe. Russia nonetheless expected 
impressive gains from a victory: territorial acquisitions in east- 
ern Galicia from Austria, in East Prussia from Germany, and in 
Armenia from the Ottoman Empire, which joined the war on 
the German side; control of Constantinople and the Bosporus 
and Dardanelles straits; and territorial and political alteration 
of Austria-Hungary in the interests of Romania and the Slavic 
peoples of the region. Britain was to acquire the middle zone 
of Persia and share much of the Arab Middle East with France; 
Italy — not Russia's ally Serbia — was to acquire Dalmatia along 
the Adriatic coast; Japan, another ally of the entente, was to 
control more territory in China; and France was to regain 
Alsace-Lorraine, which it had lost to Germany in the Franco- 
Prussian War, and to have increased influence in western Ger- 
many. 



50 



Historical Setting: Early History to 1917 

The Fatal Weakening of Tsarism 

The onset of World War I exposed the weakness of Nicholas 
II's government. A show of national unity had accompanied 
Russia's entrance into the war, with defense of the Slavic Serbs 
the main battle cry. In the summer of 1914, the Duma and the 
zemstva expressed full support for the government's war effort. 
The initial conscription was well organized and peaceful, and 
the early phase of Russia's military buildup showed that the 
empire had learned lessons from the Russojapanese War. But 
military reversals and the government's incompetence soon 
soured much of the population. German control of the Baltic 
Sea and German-Ottoman control of the Black Sea severed 
Russia from most of its foreign supplies and potential markets. 
In addition, inept Russian preparations for war and ineffective 
economic policies hurt the country financially, logistically, and 
militarily. Inflation became a serious problem. Because of inad- 
equate materiel support for military operations, the War Indus- 
tries Committee was formed to ensure that necessary supplies 
reached the front. But army officers quarreled with civilian 
leaders, seized administrative control of front areas, and 
refused to cooperate with the committee. The central govern- 
ment distrusted the independent war support activities that 
were organized by zemstva and cities. The Duma quarreled with 
the war bureaucracy of the government, and center and center- 
left deputies eventually formed the Progressive Bloc to create a 
genuinely constitutional government. 

After Russian military reversals in 1915, Nicholas II went to 
the front to assume nominal leadership of the army, leaving 
behind his German-born wife, Alexandra, and Rasputin, a 
member of her entourage, who exercised influence on policy 
and ministerial appointments. Rasputin was a debauched faith 
healer who initially impressed Alexandra because he was able 
to stop the bleeding of the royal couple's hemophiliac son and 
heir presumptive. Although their true influence has been 
debated, Alexandra and Rasputin undoubtedly decreased the 
regime's prestige and credibility. 

While the central government was hampered by court 
intrigue, the strain of the war began to cause popular unrest. In 
1916 high food prices and fuel shortages caused strikes in some 
cities. Workers, who had won the right to representation in sec- 
tions of the War Industries Committee, used those sections as 
organs of political opposition. The countryside also was becom- 
ing restive. Soldiers were increasingly insubordinate, particu- 



51 



Russia: A Country Study 

larly the newly recruited peasants who faced the prospect of 
being used as cannon fodder in the inept conduct of the war. 

The situation continued to deteriorate. In an attempt to alle- 
viate the morass at the tsar's court, a group of nobles murdered 
Rasputin in December 1916. But the death of the mysterious 
"healer" brought little change. Increasing conflict between the 
tsar and the Duma weakened both parts of the government 
and increased the impression of incompetence. In early 1917, 
deteriorating rail transport caused acute food and fuel short- 
ages, which resulted in riots and strikes. Authorities summoned 
troops to quell the disorders in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg 
had been called since 1914, to Russianize the Germanic name). 
In 1905 troops had fired on demonstrators and saved the mon- 
archy, but in 1917 the troops turned their guns over to the 
angry crowds. Public support for the tsarist regime simply evap- 
orated in 1917, ending three centuries of Romanov rule. 

* * * 

Three excellent one-volume surveys of Russian history are 
Nicholas Riasanovsky's A History of Russia, David MacKenzie 
and Michael W. Curran's A History of Russia and the Soviet Union, 
and Robert Auty and Dmitry Obolensky's An Introduction to Rus- 
sian History. The most useful thorough study of Russia before 
the nineteenth century is Vasily Kliuchevsky's five-volume col- 
lection, The Course of Russian History. Good translations exist, 
however, only for the third volume, The Seventeenth Century, and 
part of the fourth volume, Peter the Great. For the 1800-1917 
period, two excellent comprehensive works are the second vol- 
ume of Michael T. Florinsky's Russia: A History and Interpretation 
and Hugh Seton-Watson's The Russian Empire, 1801-1917. The 
roots and nature of Russian autocracy are probed in Richard 
Pipes's controversial Russia under the Old Regime and Geroid 
Tanquary Robinson's Rural Russia under the Old Regime, and 
Franco Venturi describes the development of populist and 
socialist movements in Russia in Roots of Revolution. Barbara 
Jelavich's A Century of Russian Foreign Policy 1814-1914 studies 
the foreign relations of the last century of the autocracy. Jer- 
ome Blum treats social history in Lord and Peasant in Russia from 
the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century. Cultural history is discussed in 
James H. Billington's The Icon and the Axe and in Marc Raeffs 
Russian Intellectual History. (For further information and com- 
plete citations, see Bibliography.) 



52 



Chapter 2. Historical Setting: 191 7 to 1991 



Tsarevich Ivan pondering how he can obey his father and marry a frog. For- 
tunately for Ivan, the frog turns into Vasilisa the Wise and Clever, a maiden 
more beautiful than anyone had ever seen (design from lacquer box made in 
village ofFedoskino). 



THE HISTORY OF RUSSIA between 1922 and 1991 is essen- 
tially the history of the Soviet Union (the Union of Soviet 
Socialist Republics — USSR). This ideologically based empire 
was roughly coterminous with the Russian Empire, whose last 
monarch, Tsar Nicholas II, ruled until 1917. The Soviet Union 
was established in December 1922 by the leaders of the Russian 
Communist Party (Bolshevik). At that time, the new nation 
included the Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Transcauca- 
sian republics. 

A spontaneous popular uprising in Petrograd, in response to 
the wartime decay of Russia's physical well-being and morale, 
culminated in the toppling of the imperial government in 
March 1917. Replacing the autocracy was the Provisional Gov- 
ernment, whose leaders intended to establish democracy in 
Russia and to continue participating on the side of the Allies in 
World War I. At the same time, to ensure the rights of the work- 
ing class, workers' councils, known as Soviets, sprang up across 
the country. The radical Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir I. Lenin, 
agitated for socialist revolution in the Soviets and on the streets. 
They seized power from the Provisional Government in 
November 1917. Only after the long and bloody Civil War of 
1918-21, which included combat between government forces 
and foreign troops in several parts of Russia, was the new com- 
munist regime secure. 

From its first years, government in the Soviet Union was 
based on the one-party rule of the communists, as the Bolshe- 
viks called themselves beginning in March 1918. After unsuc- 
cessfully attempting to centralize the economy in accordance 
with Marxist dogma during the Civil War, the Soviet govern- 
ment permitted some private enterprise to coexist with nation- 
alized industry in the 1920s. Debate over the future of the 
economy provided the background for Soviet leaders to con- 
tend for power in the years after Lenin's death in 1924. By 
gradually consolidating his influence and isolating his rivals 
within the party, Joseph V. Stalin became the sole leader of the 
Soviet Union by the end of the 1920s. 

In 1928 Stalin introduced the First Five- Year Plan for build- 
ing a socialist economy. In industry the state assumed control 
over all existing enterprises and undertook an intensive pro- 
gram of industrialization; in agriculture the state appropriated 



55 



Russia: A Country Study 

the peasants' property to establish collective farms. The plan's 
implementation produced widespread misery, including the 
deaths of millions of peasants by starvation or directly at the 
hands of the government during forced collectivization. Social 
upheaval continued in the mid-1980s, when Stalin began a 
purge of the party; out of this process grew a campaign of ter- 
ror that led to the execution or imprisonment of untold mil- 
lions from all walks of life. Yet despite this turmoil, the Soviet 
Union developed a powerful industrial economy in the years 
before World War II. 

Although Stalin tried to avert war with Germany by conclud- 
ing the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in 1939, in 1941 Ger- 
many invaded the Soviet Union. The Red Army stopped the 
Nazi offensive at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943 and drove 
through Eastern Europe to Berlin before Germany surren- 
dered in 1945. Although ravaged by the war, the Soviet Union 
emerged from the conflict as an acknowledged great power. 

During the immediate postwar period, the Soviet Union first 
rebuilt and then expanded its economy, with control always 
exerted exclusively from Moscow. The Soviet Union consoli- 
dated its hold on Eastern Europe, supplied aid to the eventu- 
ally victorious communists in China, and sought to expand its 
influence elsewhere in the world. This active foreign policy 
helped bring about the Cold War, which turned the Soviet 
Union's wartime allies, Britain and the United States, into foes. 
Within the Soviet Union, repressive measures continued in 
force; Stalin apparently was about to launch a new purge when 
he died in 1953. 

In the absence of an acceptable successor, Stalin's closest 
associates opted to rule the Soviet Union jointly, although a 
struggle for power took place behind the facade of collective 
leadership. Nikita S. Khrushchev, who won the power struggle 
by the mid-1950s, denounced Stalin's use of terror and eased 
repressive controls over party and society. Khrushchev's 
reforms in agriculture and administration, however, were gen- 
erally unproductive, and foreign policy toward China and the 
United States suffered reverses. Khrushchev's colleagues in the 
leadership removed him from power in 1964. 

Following the ouster of Khrushchev, another period of rule 
by collective leadership ensued, lasting until Leonid I. Brezh- 
nev established himself in the early 1970s as the preeminent 
figure in Soviet political life. Brezhnev presided over a period 
of detente with the West while at the same time building up 



56 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



Soviet military strength; the arms buildup contributed to the 
demise of detente in the late 1970s. Another contributing fac- 
tor was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. 

After some experimentation with economic reforms in the 
mid-1960s, the Soviet leadership reverted to established means 
of economic management. Industry showed slow but steady 
gains during the 1970s, while agricultural development contin- 
ued to lag. In contrast to the revolutionary spirit that accompa- 
nied the birth of the Soviet Union, the prevailing mood of the 
Soviet leadership at the time of Brezhnev's death in 1982 was 
one of aversion to change. 

Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the 
increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's eco- 
nomic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at 
reforms to reverse that process. After the rapid succession of 
Yuriy V. Andropov and Konstantin U. Chernenko, transitional 
figures with deep roots in Brezhnevite tradition, the energetic 
Mikhail S. Gorbachev made significant changes in the econ- 
omy and the party leadership. His policy of glasnost (see Glos- 
sary) freed public access to information after decades of 
government repression. But Gorbachev failed to address the 
fundamental flaws of the Soviet system; by 1991, when a plot by 
government insiders revealed the weakness of Gorbachev's 
political position, the end of the Soviet Union was in sight. 

Revolutions and Civil War 

The chaos and hardship that resulted from Russia's entry 
into World War I in 1914 were exacerbated in the years that fol- 
lowed. Russians saw the fall of the Romanov Dynasty, which had 
ruled for more than 300 years, followed by a long struggle for 
power between the Bolsheviks and a series of disparate armies, 
known collectively as the Whites, supported by Russia's erst- 
while wartime allies. The combination of military occupation 
and economic disorder bled the country for three years until 
the Bolsheviks triumphed and began to establish a new order. 

The February Revolution 

By early 1917, the existing order in Russia was verging on 
collapse. The country's involvement in World War I had 
already cost millions of lives and severely disrupted Russia's 
already struggling economy. In an effort to reverse the worsen- 
ing military situation, Nicholas II took personal command of 



57 



Russia: A Country Study 

Russian forces at the front, leaving the conduct of government 
in Petrograd (St. Petersburg before 1914; Leningrad after 
1924; St. Petersburg after 1991) to his unpopular wife and a 
series of incompetent ministers. As a consequence of these 
conditions, the morale of the people rapidly deteriorated. 

The spark to the events that ended tsarist rule was ignited on 
the streets of Petrograd in February 1917 (according to the 
Julian calendar then still in use in Russia; according to the 
modern Gregorian calendar, which was adopted in February 
1918, these events occurred in March). Driven by shortages of 
food and fuel, crowds of hungry citizens and striking workers 
began spontaneous rioting and demonstrations. Local reserve 
troops, called in to suppress the riots, refused to fire on the 
crowds, and some soldiers joined the workers and other rioters. 
A few days later, with tsarist authority in Petrograd disintegrat- 
ing, two distinct groups emerged, each claiming to represent 
the Russian people. One was the Executive Committee, which 
the Duma (see Glossary), the lower house of the Russian parlia- 
ment, had established in defiance of the tsar's orders. The 
other body was the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' 
Deputies. 

With the consent of the Petrograd Soviet, the Executive 
Committee of the Duma organized the Provisional Govern- 
ment on March 15. The government was a cabinet of ministers 
chaired by aristocrat and social reformer Georgiy L'vov. A legis- 
lature, the Constituent Assembly, also was to be created, but 
election of the first such body was postponed until the fall of 
1917. Delegates of the new government met Nicholas that 
evening at Pskov, where rebellious railroad workers had 
stopped the imperial train as the tsar attempted to return to 
the capital. Advised by his generals that he lacked the support 
of the country, Nicholas informed the delegates that he was 
abdicating in favor of his brother, Grand Duke Michael. When 
Michael in turn refused the throne, imperial rule in Russia 
came to an end. 

The Period of Dual Power 

The collapse of the monarchy left two rival political institu- 
tions — the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet — 
to share administrative authority over the country. The Petro- 
grad Soviet, drawing its membership from socialist deputies 
elected in factories and regiments, coordinated the activities of 
other Soviets that sprang up across Russia at this time. The 



58 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



Petrograd Soviet was dominated by moderate socialists of the 
Socialist Revolutionary Party and by the Menshevik (see Glos- 
sary) faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. The 
Bolshevik (see Glossary) faction of the latter party provided the 
opposition. Although it represented the interests of Russia's 
working class, the Petrograd Soviet at first did not seek to 
undermine the Provisional Government's authority directly. 
Nevertheless, the Petrograd Soviet's first official order, which 
came to be known as Order Number One, instructed soldiers 
and sailors to obey their officers and the government only if 
their orders did not contradict the decrees of the Petrograd 
Soviet — a measure formulated to prevent continuation of Rus- 
sia's war effort by crippling the Provisional Government's con- 
trol of the military. 

The Provisional Government, in contrast to the socialist 
Petrograd Soviet, chiefly represented the propertied classes. 
Headed by ministers of a moderate or liberal bent, the new 
government pledged to convene a constituent assembly that 
would usher in a new era of bourgeois democracy modeled on 
European constitutionalism. In the meantime, the government 
granted unprecedented rights — full freedom of speech, press, 
and religion, as well as legal equality — to all citizens. The gov- 
ernment did not take up the matter of land redistribution, 
however, leaving that issue for the Constituent Assembly. Even 
more damaging, the ministers favored keeping Russia's military 
commitments to its allies, a position that became increasingly 
unpopular as the war dragged on. The government suffered its 
first crisis in the "April Days," when demonstrations against the 
government's war aims forced two ministers to resign, an event 
that led to the appointment of Aleksandr Kerenskiy — the only 
socialist among the government's ministers — as war minister. 
Quickly assuming de facto leadership of the government, 
Kerenskiy ordered the army to launch a major offensive in 
June. After early successes, that offensive turned into a 
full-scale retreat in July. 

While the Provisional Government grappled with foreign 
foes, the Bolsheviks, who were opposed to bourgeois democ- 
racy, gained new strength. Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, 
returned to Petrograd in April 1917 from his wartime resi- 
dence in Switzerland. Although he had been born into a noble 
family, from his youth Lenin espoused the cause of the com- 
mon workers. A committed revolutionary and pragmatic Marx- 
ist thinker, he astounded the Bolsheviks in Petrograd with his 



59 



Russia: A Country Study 

April Theses, in which he boldly called for the overthrow of the 
Provisional Government, the transfer of "all power to the Sovi- 
ets," and the expropriation of factories by workers and of land 
belonging to the church, the nobility, and the gentry by peas- 
ants. Lenin's dynamic presence quickly won the other Bolshe- 
vik leaders to his position, and the radicalized orientation of 
the Bolshevik faction attracted new members. 

Inspired by Lenin's slogans, crowds of workers, soldiers, and 
sailors took to the streets of Petrograd in July to wrest power 
from the Provisional Government. But the spontaneity of the 
'July Days" caught the Bolshevik leaders by surprise, and the 
Petrograd Soviet, controlled by moderate Mensheviks, refused 
to take power or to enforce Bolshevik demands. After the upris- 
ing had died down, the Provisional Government outlawed the 
Bolsheviks and jailed Leon Trotsky, leader of a leftist Menshe- 
vik faction. Lenin fled to Finland. 

In the aftermath of the 'July Days," conservatives sought to 
reassert order in society. The army's commander in chief, 
General Lavr Kornilov, who protested the influence of the Sovi- 
ets on both the army and the government, appeared as a coun- 
terrevolutionary threat to Kerenskiy, now prime minister. 
Kerenskiy dismissed Kornilov from his command, but Kornilov, 
disobeying the order, launched an extemporaneous revolt on 
September 10 (August 28). To defend the capital, Kerenskiy 
sought help from all quarters and relaxed his ban on Bolshevik 
activities. Railroad workers sympathetic to the Bolsheviks 
halted Kornilov's troop trains, and Kornilov soon surrendered, 
ending the only serious challenge to the Provisional Govern- 
ment from the right. 

The Bolshevik Revolution 

Although the Provisional Government survived the Kornilov 
revolt, popular support for the government faded rapidly as 
the national mood swung to the left in the fall of 1917. Workers 
took control of their factories through elected committees; 
peasants expropriated lands belonging to the state, church, 
nobility, and gentry; and armies melted away as peasant sol- 
diers deserted to take part in the land seizures. The Bolsheviks, 
skillfully exploiting these popular trends in their propaganda, 
achieved domination of the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets by 
September. Trotsky, freed from prison after the Kornilov revolt, 
was recruited as a Bolshevik and named chairman of the Petro- 
grad Soviet. 



60 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



Realizing that the time was ripe to seize power by force, 
Lenin returned to Petrograd in October and convinced a 
majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee, which had hoped 
to take power legally, to accept armed uprising in principle. 
Trotsky won the Petrograd garrison over to the soviet, depriv- 
ing the Provisional Government of its main military support in 
Petrograd. 

The actual insurrection — the Bolshevik Revolution — began 
on November 6, when Kerenskiy ordered the Bolshevik press 
closed. Interpreting this action as a counterrevolutionary 
move, the Bolsheviks called on their supporters to defend the 
Petrograd Soviet. By evening, the Bolsheviks had taken control 
of utilities and most government buildings in Petrograd, thus 
enabling Lenin to proclaim the downfall of the Provisional 
Government on the morning of the next day, November 7. The 
Bolsheviks captured the Provisional Government's cabinet at its 
Winter Palace headquarters that night with hardly a shot fired 
in the government's defense. Kerenskiy left Petrograd to orga- 
nize resistance, but his countercoup failed and he fled Russia. 
Bolshevik uprisings soon took place elsewhere; Moscow was 
under Bolshevik control within three weeks. The Second Con- 
gress of Soviets met in Petrograd to ratify the Bolshevik take- 
over after moderate deputies (mainly Mensheviks and right- 
wing members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party) quit the 
session. The remaining Bolsheviks and left-wing Socialist Revo- 
lutionaries declared the Soviets the governing bodies of Russia 
and named the Council of People's Commissars (Sovet narod- 
nykh kommissarov — Sovnarkom) to serve as the cabinet. Lenin 
became chairman of this council. Trotsky took the post of com- 
missar of foreign affairs; Stalin, a Georgian, became commissar 
of nationalities. Thus, by acting decisively while their oppo- 
nents vacillated, the Bolsheviks succeeded in effecting their 
coup d'etat. 

On coming to power, the Bolsheviks issued a series of revolu- 
tionary decrees ratifying peasants' seizures of land and workers' 
control of industries, abolished laws sanctioning class privi- 
leges, nationalized the banks, and set up revolutionary tribu- 
nals in place of the courts. At the same time, the 
revolutionaries now constituting the regime worked to secure 
power inside and outside the government. Deeming Western 
forms of parliamentary democracy irrelevant, Lenin argued for 
a "dictatorship of the proletariat" based on single-party Bolshe- 
vik rule, although for a time left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries 



61 



Russia: A Country Study 

also participated in the Sovnarkom. The new government cre- 
ated a secret police agency, the VChK (commonly known as the 
Cheka), to persecute enemies of the state (including bourgeois 
liberals and moderate socialists) . Having convened the Constit- 
uent Assembly, which finally had been elected in November 
with the Bolsheviks winning only a quarter of the seats, the 
Soviet government dissolved the assembly in January after a 
one-day session, ending a short-lived experiment in parliamen- 
tary democracy 

In foreign affairs, the Soviet government, seeking to disen- 
gage Russia from World War I, called on the belligerent powers 
for an armistice and peace without annexations. The Allied 
Powers rejected this appeal, but Germany and its allies agreed 
to a cease-fire. Negotiations began in December 1917. After 
dictating harsh terms that the Soviet government would not 
accept, however, Germany resumed its offensive in February 
1918, meeting scant resistance from disintegrating Russian 
armies. Lenin, after bitter debate with leading Bolsheviks who 
favored prolonging the war in hopes of precipitating class war- 
fare in Germany, persuaded a slim majority of the Bolshevik 
Central Committee that peace must be made at any cost. On 
March 3, Soviet government officials signed the Treaty of 
Brest-Li to vsk, relinquishing Poland, the Baltic lands, Finland, 
and Ukraine to German control and giving up a portion of the 
Caucasus region to Turkey. With the new border dangerously 
close to Petrograd, the government was soon transferred to 
Moscow. An enormous part of the population and resources of 
the Russian Empire was lost by this treaty, but Lenin under- 
stood that no other alternative could ensure the survival of the 
fledgling Soviet state. 

Civil War and War Communism 

Soon after buying peace with Germany, the Soviet state 
found itself under attack from other quarters. By the spring of 
1918, elements dissatisfied with the radical policies of the com- 
munists (as the Bolsheviks started calling themselves) estab- 
lished centers of resistance in southern and Siberian Russia. 
Beginning in April 1918, anticommunist forces, called the 
Whites and often led by former officers of the tsarist army, 
began to clash with the Red Army, which Trotsky, named com- 
missar of war in the Soviet government, organized to defend 
the new state. A civil war to determine the future of Russia had 
begun. 



62 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



The White armies enjoyed varying degrees of support from 
the Allied Powers. Desiring to defeat Germany in any way possi- 
ble, Britain, France, and the United States landed troops in 
Russia and provided logistical support to the Whites, whom the 
Allies trusted would resume Russia's struggle against Germany 
after overthrowing the communist regime. (In March 1918, the 
Russian Social Democratic Labor Party officially was renamed 
the Russian Communist Party [Bolshevik].) After the Allies 
defeated Germany in November 1918, they opted to continue 
their intervention in the Russian Civil War against the commu- 
nists, in the interests of averting what they feared might 
become a world socialist revolution. 

During the Civil War, the Soviet regime also had to deal with 
struggles for independence in regions that it had given up 
under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (which the regime immedi- 
ately repudiated after Germany's defeat by the Allies in Novem- 
ber 1918). By force of arms, the communists established Soviet 
republics in Belorussia (January 1919), Ukraine (March 1919), 
Azerbaijan (April 1920), Armenia (November 1920), and 
Georgia (March 1921), but they were unable to take back the 
Baltic region, where the independent states of Estonia, Latvia, 
and Lithuania had been founded shortly after the Bolshevik 
Revolution. In December 1917, the Soviet government recog- 
nized the independence of Finland as a gesture of support to 
the Finnish Reds. However, that strategy failed when Finland 
became a parliamentary republic in 1918. Poland, reborn after 
World War I, fought a successful war with Soviet Russia from 
April 1920 to March 1921 over the location of the frontier 
between the two states. 

During its struggle for survival, the Soviet state relied heavily 
on the prospect that revolution would spread to other Euro- 
pean industrialized countries. To coordinate the socialist move- 
ment under Soviet auspices, Lenin founded the Communist 
International (Comintern) in March 1919. Although no suc- 
cessful socialist revolutions occurred elsewhere immediately 
after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Comintern provided the 
communist leadership with the means for later control of for- 
eign communist parties. 

By the end of 1920, the communists had clearly triumphed 
in the Civil War. Although in 1919 Soviet Russia had shrunk to 
the size of sixteenth-century Muscovy, the Red Army had the 
advantage of defending the heartland with Moscow at its center 
(see fig. 4). The White armies, divided geographically and with- 



63 



Russia: A Country Study 




International boundary 
National capital 

Area under communist 
control 

Red Army line, 
March 1920 



denikin White army general 



*etrograd 



/yUDENICH 

'Baltic Sea r-- ^mrvm <A 

.LITH- . -f 



Kotlas I 
Tobol'sk 

COMMUNIST- Tyumen'.} 
CONTROLLED 



^ ("Minsk 

\ ^POLAND j/^fa 

^ r/ /Kiev 

f' \ DENIKIN 



Kazan 
Samara 



Chelyabinsk 
Ufa 

Orenburg 



X 



ROMANIA 



JULGARM 



WRAi^tpgpr 

(Btaci Sea 
mstantinople 



mrot. 

Sjeo} 



Source: Based on information from David MacKenzie and Michael W. Curran, A History 
of Russia and the Soviet Union, Chicago, 1987, 611. 

Figure 4. Red Army Line, March 1920 



out a clearly defined cause, went down to defeat one by one. 
Hopes of restoring the monarchy ended effectively when com- 
munists executed the imperial family in July 1918. The Allied 
governments, lacking support for intervention from their 
nations' war-weary citizenry, withdrew most of their forces by 
1920. The last foreign troops departed Siberia in 1922, leaving 
the Soviet state unchallenged from abroad. 

During the Civil War, the communist regime took increas- 
ingly repressive measures against its domestic opponents. The 
constitution of 1918 deprived members of the former "exploit- 
ing classes" — nobles, priests, and capitalists — of civil rights. 
Left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries, formerly partners of the 
Bolsheviks, became targets for persecution during what came 
to be known as the Red Terror, which followed an attempt on 
Lenin's life in August 1918 and lasted into 1920. In those des- 
perate times, both Reds and Whites murdered and executed 



64 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



without trial large numbers of suspected enemies. The party 
also took measures to ensure greater discipline among its mem- 
bers by tightening its organization and creating specialized 
administrative organs. 

In the economic life of the country, too, the communist 
regime sought to exert control through a series of drastic mea- 
sures that came to be known as war communism. To coordinate 
what remained of Russia's economic resources after years of 
war, in 1918 the government nationalized industry and subor- 
dinated it to central administrations in Moscow. Rejecting 
workers' control of factories as inefficient, the regime brought 
in expert managers to run the factories and organized and 
directed the factory workers as in a military mobilization. To 
feed the urban population, the Soviet government requisi- 
tioned quantities of grain from the peasantry. 

The results of war communism were unsatisfactory. Indus- 
trial production continued to fall. Workers received wages in 
kind because inflation had made the ruble practically worth- 
less. In the countryside, peasants rebelled against payments in 
valueless currency by curtailing or consuming their agricultural 
production. In late 1920, strikes broke out in the industrial 
centers, and peasant uprisings sprang up across the land as 
famine ravaged the countryside. To the Soviet government, 
however, the most disquieting manifestation of dissatisfaction 
with war communism was the rebellion in March 1921 of sailors 
at the naval base at Kronshtadt (near Petrograd), which had 
earlier won renown as a bastion of the Bolshevik Revolution. 
Although Trotsky and the Red Army succeeded in putting 
down the mutiny, it signaled to the party leadership that war 
communism had to end. The harsh economic policies of the 
Civil War period, however, would have a profound influence on 
the future development of the country. 

The Era of the New Economic Policy 

The period of war communism was followed in the 1920s by 
a partial retreat from Bolshevik principles. The New Economic 
Policy (Novaya ekonomicheskaya politika — NEP; see Glossary) 
permitted certain types of private economic activity, so that the 
country might recover from the ravages of the Civil War. The 
interval was cut short, however, by the death of Lenin and the 
sharply different approach to governance of his successor, 
Joseph Stalin. 



65 



Russia: A Country Study 

Lenin's Leadership 

With the Kronshtadt base rebelling against war communism, 
the Tenth Party Congress of the Russian Communist Party 
(Bolshevik) met in March 1921 to hear Lenin argue for a new 
course in Soviet policy. Lenin realized that the radical 
approach to communism (see Glossary) was unsuited to exist- 
ing conditions and jeopardized the survival of his regime. Now 
the Soviet leader proposed a tactical retreat, convincing the 
congress to adopt a temporary compromise with capitalism 
under the NEP program. Under the NEP, market forces and 
the monetary system regained their importance. The state 
scrapped its policy of grain requisitioning in favor of taxation, 
permitting peasants to dispose of their produce as they 
pleased. The NEP also denationalized service enterprises and 
much small-scale industry, leaving the "commanding heights" 
of the economy — large-scale industry, transportation, and for- 
eign trade — under state control. Under the mixed economy 
called for under the NEP, agriculture and industry staged 
recoveries, with most branches of the economy attaining pre- 
war levels of production by the late 1920s. In general, standards 
of living improved during this time, and the "NEP man" — the 
independent private trader — became a symbol of the era. 

About the time that the party sanctioned partial decentrali- 
zation of the economy, it also approved a quasi-federal struc- 
ture for the state. During the Civil War, the non-Russian Soviet 
republics on the periphery of Russia were theoretically inde- 
pendent, but in fact they were controlled by the central govern- 
ment through the party and the Red Army. Some communists 
favored a centralized Soviet state, while nationalists wanted 
autonomy for the borderlands. A compromise between the two 
positions was reached in December 1922 with the formation of 
the USSR. The constituent republics of this "Soviet Union" 
(the Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Transcaucasian 
republics — the last combining Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Geor- 
gia) exercised a degree of cultural and linguistic autonomy, 
while the communist, predominantly Russian, leadership in 
Moscow retained political authority over the entire country. 
The giant Central Asian territory was given republic status 
piecemeal, beginning with the inclusion of the Turkmen and 
Uzbek republics in 1924 and concluding with the separation of 
Kazakstan and Kyrgyzstan in 1936. By that year, the Soviet 
Union included eleven republics, all with government struc- 



66 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



tures and ruling communist parties identical to the one in the 
Russian Republic. 

The party consolidated its authority throughout the country, 
becoming a monolithic presence in state and society. Potential 
rivals outside the party including prominent members of the 
abolished Menshevik faction and the Socialist Revolutionary 
Party, were exiled. Within the party, Lenin denounced the for- 
mation of factions, particularly by radical-left party members. 
Central party organs subordinated local Soviets to their author- 
ity. Party members perceived as less committed periodically 
were purged from the rosters. The Politburo (Political 
Bureau), which became the elite policy-making agency of the 
nation, created the new post of general secretary for the super- 
vision of personnel matters and assigned Stalin to this office in 
April 1922. A minor member of the party's Central Committee 
at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin was thought to 
be a rather lackluster personality and therefore well suited to 
the routine work required of the general secretary. 

From the time of the Bolshevik Revolution and into the early 
NEP years, the actual leader of the Soviet state was Lenin. 
Although a collective of prominent communists nominally 
guided the party and the Soviet Union, Lenin commanded 
such prestige and authority that even such brilliant theoreti- 
cians as Trotsky and Nikolay Bukharin generally yielded to his 
will. But when Lenin became temporarily incapacitated after a 
stroke in May 1922, the unity of the Politburo fractured, and a 
troika (triumvirate) formed by Stalin, Lev Kamenev, and Gri- 
goriy Zinov'yev assumed leadership in opposition to Trotsky. 
Lenin recovered late in 1922 and found fault with the troika, 
and particularly with Stalin. In Lenin's view, Stalin had used 
coercion to force non-Russian republics to join the Soviet 
Union, he was uncouth, and he was accumulating too much 
power through his office of general secretary. Although Lenin 
recommended that Stalin be removed from that position, the 
Politburo decided not to take action, and Stalin still was in 
office when Lenin died in January 1924. 

As important as Lenin's activities were to the establishment 
of the Soviet Union, his legacy to the Soviet future was perhaps 
even more significant. By willingly changing his policies to suit 
new situations, Lenin had developed a pragmatic interpreta- 
tion of Marxism (later called Marxism-Leninism — see Glos- 
sary) that implied that the party should follow any course that 
would ultimately lead to communism. His party, while still per- 



67 



Russia: A Country Study 

mitting intraorganizational debate, insisted that its members 
adhere to the organization's decisions once they were adopted, 
in accordance with the principle of democratic centralism. 
Finally, because the party embodied the dictatorship of the 
proletariat, organized opposition could not be tolerated, and 
adversaries would be prosecuted. Thus, although the Soviet 
regime was not totalitarian when he died, Lenin had nonethe- 
less laid the foundation upon which such a tyranny would later 
arise. 

Stalin's Rise to Power 

After Lenin's death, two conflicting schools of thought about 
the future of the Soviet Union arose in party debates. Left-wing 
communists believed that world revolution was essential to the 
survival of socialism in the economically backward Soviet 
Union. Trotsky, one of the primary proponents of this position, 
called for Soviet support of a permanent world revolutionary 
movement. As for domestic policy, the left wing advocated the 
rapid development of the economy and the creation of a social- 
ist society. In contrast to these militant communists, the right 
wing of the party, recognizing that world revolution was 
unlikely in the immediate future, favored the gradual develop- 
ment of the Soviet Union through continuation of pragmatic 
programs like the NEP. Yet even Bukharin, one of the major 
right-wing theoreticians, believed that socialism could not tri- 
umph in the Soviet Union without assistance from more eco- 
nomically advanced socialist countries. 

Against this backdrop of contrasting perceptions of the 
Soviet future, the leading figures of the Ail-Union Communist 
Party (Bolshevik) — the new name of the Russian Communist 
Party (Bolshevik) as of December 1925 — competed for influ- 
ence. The Kamenev-Zinov'yev-Stalin troika, although it sup- 
ported the militant international program, successfully 
maneuvered against Trotsky and engineered his removal as 
commissar of war in 1925. In the meantime, Stalin gradually 
consolidated his power base and, when he had sufficient 
strength, broke with Kamenev and Zinov'yev. Belatedly recog- 
nizing Stalin's political power, Kamenev and Zinov'yev made 
amends with Trotsky in order to join against their former part- 
ner. But Stalin countered their attacks on his position with his 
well-timed formulation of the theory of "socialism in one coun- 
try." This doctrine, calling for construction of a socialist society 
in the Soviet Union regardless of the international situation, 



68 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



distanced Stalin from the left and won support from Bukharin 
and the party's right wing. With this support, Stalin ousted the 
leaders of the "Left Opposition" from their positions in 1926 
and 1927 and forced Trotsky into exile in 1928. As the NEP era 
ended, open debate within the party became increasingly lim- 
ited as Stalin gradually eliminated his opponents. 

Foreign Policy, 1921-28 

In the 1920s, as the new Soviet state temporarily retreated 
from the revolutionary path to socialism, the party also 
adopted a less ideological approach in its relations with the rest 
of the world. Lenin, ever the practical leader, having become 
convinced that socialist revolution would not break out in 
other countries in the near future, realized that his govern- 
ment required normal relations with the Western world for it 
to survive. Not only were good relations important to national 
security, but the economy also required trade with the indus- 
trial countries. Blocking Soviet attainment of these objectives 
were lingering suspicions about communism on the part of the 
Western powers and concern over foreign debts incurred by 
the tsarist government, which the Soviet government had uni- 
laterally repudiated. In April 1922, the Soviet commissar of for- 
eign affairs, Georgiy Chicherin, circumvented these difficulties 
by achieving an understanding with Germany, the other pariah 
state of Europe, in the Treaty of Rapallo. Under the treaty, Ger- 
many and Russia agreed on mutual recognition, cancellation of 
debt claims, normalization of trade relations, and secret coop- 
eration in military development. Soon after concluding the 
treaty, the Soviet Union obtained diplomatic recognition from 
other major powers, beginning with Britain in February 1924. 
Although the United States withheld recognition until 1933, 
private American firms began to extend technological assis- 
tance and to develop commercial links in the 1920s. 

Toward the non-Western world, the Soviet leadership limited 
its revolutionary activity to promoting opposition among the 
indigenous populations against "imperialist exploitation." The 
Soviet Union did pursue an active policy in China, aiding the 
Guomindang (Nationalist Party), a non-Marxist organization 
committed to reform and national sovereignty. After the tri- 
umph of the Guomindang in 1927, a debate developed among 
Soviet leaders concerning the future status of relations with 
China. Stalin wanted the Chinese Communist Party to join the 
Guomindang and infiltrate the government from within, while 



69 



Russia: A Country Study 

Trotsky proposed an armed communist uprising and forcible 
imposition of socialism. Although Stalin's plan was finally 
accepted, it came to naught when in 192V the Guomindang 
leader Chiang Kai-shek ordered the Chinese communists mas- 
sacred and Soviet advisers expelled. 

Society and Culture in the 1920s 

In many respects, the NEP period was a time of relative free- 
dom and experimentation in the social and cultural life of the 
Soviet Union. The government tolerated a variety of trends in 
these fields, provided they were not overtly hostile to the 
regime. In art and literature, numerous schools, some tradi- 
tional and others radically experimental, proliferated. Commu- 
nist writers Maksim Gor'kiy and Vladimir Mayakovskiy were 
active during this time, but other authors, many of whose works 
were later repressed, published work lacking socialist political 
content (see Literature and the Arts, ch. 4). Filmmaking, as a 
means of influencing a largely illiterate society, received 
encouragement from the state; much of legendary cinematog- 
rapher Sergey Eisenstein's best work dates from this period. 

Under Commissar Anatoliy Lunacharskiy, education entered 
a phase of experimentation based on progressive theories of 
learning. At the same time, the state expanded the primary 
and secondary school systems and introduced night schools for 
working adults. The quality of higher education suffered, how- 
ever, because admissions policies gave preference to entrants 
from the proletarian class over those with bourgeois back- 
grounds, regardless of qualifications. 

In family life, attitudes generally became more permissive. 
The state legalized abortion, and it made divorce progressively 
easier to obtain. In general, traditional attitudes toward such 
institutions as marriage were subtly undermined by the party's 
promotion of revolutionary ideals. 

Transformation and Terror 

The gradual accession of Stalin to power in the 1920s even- 
tually brought an end to the liberalization of society and the 
economy, leading instead to a period of unprecedented gov- 
ernment control, mobilization, and terrorization of society in 
Russia and the other Soviet republics. In the 1930s, agriculture 
and industry underwent brutal forced centralization, and Rus- 
sian cultural activity was highly restricted. Purges eliminated 



70 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



thousands of individuals deemed dangerous to the Soviet state 
by Stalin's operatives. 

Industrialization and Collectivization 

At the end of the 1920s, a dramatic new phase in economic 
development began when Stalin decided to carry out a pro- 
gram of intensive socialist construction. To some extent, Stalin 
pressed economic development at this point as a political 
maneuver to eliminate rivals within the party. Because 
Bukharin and some other party members would not give up 
the gradualistic NEP in favor of radical development, Stalin 
branded them "right-wing deviationists" and during 1929 and 
1930 used the party organization to remove them from influen- 
tial positions. Yet Stalin's break with the NEP also revealed that 
his doctrine of building "socialism in one country" paralleled 
the line that Trotsky had originally supported early in the 
1920s. Marxism supplied no basis for Stalin's model of a 
planned economy, although the centralized economic controls 
of the war communism years seemingly furnished a Leninist 
precedent. Between 1927 and 1929, the State Planning Com- 
mittee (Gosudarstvennyy planovyy komitet — Gosplan) worked 
out the First Five-Year Plan (see Glossary) for intensive eco- 
nomic growth; Stalin began to implement this plan — his "revo- 
lution from above" — in 1928. 

The First Five-Year Plan called for rapid industrialization of 
the economy, with particular emphasis on heavy industry. The 
economy was centralized: small-scale industry and services 
were nationalized, managers strove to fulfill Gosplan's output 
quotas, and the trade unions were converted into mechanisms 
for increasing worker productivity. But because Stalin insisted 
on unrealistic production targets, serious problems soon arose. 
With the greatest share of investment put into heavy industry, 
widespread shortages of consumer goods occurred, and infla- 
tion grew. 

To satisfy the state's need for increased food supplies, the 
First Five-Year Plan called for the organization of the peasantry 
into collective units that the authorities could easily control. 
This collectivization program entailed compounding the peas- 
ants' lands and animals into collective farms (kolkhozy; sing., 
kolkhoz — see Glossary) and state farms (sovkhozy; sing., sovkhoz — 
see Glossary) and restricting the peasants' movement from 
these farms. The effect of this restructuring was to reintroduce 
a kind of serfdom into the countryside. Although the program 



71 



Russia: A Country Study 

was designed to affect all peasants, Stalin in particular sought 
to eliminate the wealthiest peasants, known as kulaks. Gener- 
ally, kulaks were only marginally better off than other peasants, 
but the party claimed that the kulaks had ensnared the rest of 
the peasantry in capitalistic relationships. In any event, collec- 
tivization met widespread resistance not only from the kulaks 
but from poorer peasants as well, and a desperate struggle of 
the peasantry against the authorities ensued. Peasants slaugh- 
tered their cows and pigs rather than turn them over to the col- 
lective farms, with the result that livestock resources remained 
below the 1929 level for years afterward. The state in turn forc- 
ibly collectivized reluctant peasants and deported kulaks and 
active rebels to Siberia. Within the collective farms, the author- 
ities in many instances exacted such high levels of procure- 
ment that starvation was widespread. 

By 1932 Stalin realized that both the economy and society 
were under serious strain. Although industry failed to meet its 
production targets and agriculture actually lost ground in com- 
parison with 1928 yields, Stalin declared that the First Five-Year 
Plan had successfully met its goals in four years. He then pro- 
ceeded to set more realistic goals. Under the Second Five-Year 
Plan (1933-37), the state devoted attention to consumer 
goods, and the factories built under the first plan helped 
increase industrial output in general. The Third Five-Year Plan, 
begun in 1938, produced poorer results because of a sudden 
shift of emphasis to armaments production in response to the 
worsening international climate. In general, however, the 
Soviet economy had become industrialized by the end of the 
1930s. Agriculture, which had been exploited to finance the 
industrialization drive, continued to show poor returns 
throughout the decade. 

The Purges 

The complete subjugation of the party to Stalin, its leader, 
paralleled the subordination of industry and agriculture to the 
state. Stalin had assured his preeminent position by squelching 
Bukharin and the "right-wing deviationists" in 1929 and 1930. 
To secure his absolute control over the party, however, Stalin 
began to purge leaders and rank-and-file members whose loy- 
alty he doubted. 

Stalin's purges began in December 1934, when Sergey Kirov, 
a popular Leningrad party chief who advocated a moderate 
policy toward the peasants, was assassinated. Although details 



72 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



remain murky, many Western historians believe that Stalin 
instigated the murder to rid himself of a potential opponent. 
In any event, in the resultant mass purge of the local Leningrad 
party, thousands were deported to camps in Siberia. Zinov'yev 
and Kamenev, Stalin's former political partners, received 
prison sentences for their alleged role in Kirov's murder. At the 
same time, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Nar- 
odnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del — NKVD), the secret police 
agency that was heir to the Cheka of the early 1920s, stepped 
up surveillance through its agents and informers and claimed 
to uncover anti-Soviet conspiracies among prominent 
long-term party members. At three publicized show trials held 
in Moscow between 1936 and 1938, dozens of these Old Bol- 
sheviks, including Zinov'yev, Kamenev, and Bukharin, con- 
fessed to improbable crimes against the Soviet state. Their 
confessions were quickly followed by execution. (The last of 
Stalin's old enemies, Trotsky, who supposedly had master- 
minded the conspiracies against Stalin from abroad, was mur- 
dered in Mexico in 1940, presumably by the NKVD.) 
Coincident with the show trials of the original leadership of the 
party, unpublicized purges swept through the ranks of younger 
leaders in party, government, industrial management, and cul- 
tural affairs. Party purges in the non-Russian republics were 
particularly severe. The Yezhovshchina ("era of Yezhov," named 
for NKVD chief Nikolay Yezhov) ravaged the military as well, 
leading to the execution or incarceration of about half the offi- 
cer corps. The secret police also terrorized the general popu- 
lace, with untold numbers of common people punished after 
spurious accusations. By the time the purges subsided in 1938, 
millions of Soviet leaders, officials, and other citizens had been 
executed, imprisoned, or exiled. 

The reasons for the period of widespread purges, which 
became known as the Great Terror, remain unclear. Western 
historians variously hypothesize that Stalin created the terror 
out of a desire to goad the population to carry out his intensive 
modernization program, or to atomize society to preclude dis- 
sent, or simply out of brutal paranoia. Whatever the causes, the 
purges must be viewed as having weakened the Soviet state. 

In 1936, just as the Great Terror was intensifying, Stalin 
approved a new Soviet constitution to replace that of 1924. 
Hailed as "the most democratic constitution in the world," the 
1936 document stipulated free and secret elections based on 
universal suffrage and guaranteed the citizenry a range of civil 



73 



Russia: A Country Study 

and economic rights. But in practice the freedoms implied by 
these rights were denied by provisions elsewhere in the consti- 
tution that indicated that the basic structure of Soviet society 
could not be changed and that the party retained all political 
power. 

The power of the party, in turn, now was concentrated in the 
persons of Stalin and the members of his handpicked Polit- 
buro. As if to symbolize the lack of influence of the party rank 
and file, party congresses were convened less and less fre- 
quently. State power, far from "withering away" after the revolu- 
tion as Karl Marx had prescribed, instead grew. With Stalin 
consciously building what critics would later describe as a cult 
of personality, the reverence accorded him in Soviet society 
gradually eclipsed that given to Lenin. 

Mobilization of Society 

Concomitant with industrialization and collectivization, soci- 
ety also experienced wide-ranging regimentation. Collective 
enterprises replaced individualistic efforts across the board. 
Not only did the regime abolish private farms and businesses, 
but it collectivized scientific and literary endeavors as well. As 
the 1930s progressed, the revolutionary experimentation that 
had characterized many facets of cultural and social life gave 
way to conservative norms. 

Considerations of order and discipline dominated social pol- 
icy, which became an instrument of the modernization effort. 
Workers came under strict labor codes demanding punctuality 
and discipline, and labor unions served as extensions of the 
industrial ministries. At the same time, higher pay and privi- 
leges accrued to productive workers and labor brigades. To 
provide greater social stability, the state aimed to strengthen 
the family by restricting divorce and abolishing abortion. 

Literature and the arts came under direct party control dur- 
ing the 1930s, with mandatory membership in unions of writ- 
ers, musicians, and other artists entailing adherence to 
established standards. After 1934 the party dictated that cre- 
ative works had to express socialistic spirit through traditional 
forms. This officially sanctioned doctrine, called "socialist real- 
ism," applied to all fields of art. The state repressed works that 
were stylistically innovative or lacked appropriate content. 

The party also subjected science and the liberal arts to its 
scrutiny. Development of scientific theory in a number of fields 
had to be based upon the party's understanding of the Marxist 



74 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



dialectic, which derailed serious research in certain disciplines. 
The party took a more active role in directing work in the 
social sciences. In the writing of history, the orthodox Marxist 
interpretation employed in the late 1920s was modified to 
include nationalistic themes and to stress the role of great lead- 
ers to create legitimacy for Stalin's dictatorship. 

Education returned to traditional forms as the party dis- 
carded the experimental programs of Lunacharskiy after 1929. 
Admission procedures underwent modification: candidates for 
higher education now were selected on the basis of their aca- 
demic records rather than their class origins. Religion suffered 
from a state policy of increased repression, starting with the 
closure of numerous churches in 1929. Persecution of clergy 
was particularly severe during the purges of the late 1930s, 
when many of the faithful went underground (see The Russian 
Orthodox Church, ch. 4). 

Foreign Policy, 1928-39 

Soviet foreign policy underwent a series of changes during 
the first decade of Stalin's rule. Soon after assuming control of 
the party, Stalin oversaw a radicalization of Soviet foreign pol- 
icy that paralleled the severity of his remaking of domestic pol- 
icy. To heighten the urgency of his demands for moderniza- 
tion, Stalin portrayed the Western powers, particularly France, 
as warmongers eager to attack the Soviet Union. The Great 
Depression, which seemingly threatened to destroy world capi- 
talism in the early 1930s, provided ideological justification for 
the diplomatic self-isolation practiced by the Soviet Union in 
that period. To aid the triumph of communism, Stalin resolved 
to weaken the moderate social democratic parties of Europe, 
which seemed to be the communists' rivals for support among 
the working classes of the Western world. 

Conversely, the Comintern ordered the Communist Party of 
Germany to aid the anti-Soviet National Socialist German 
Workers' Party (Nazi Party) in its bid for power, in the hopes 
that a Nazi regime would exacerbate social tensions and pro- 
duce conditions that would lead to a communist revolution in 
Germany. In pursuing this policy, Stalin thus shared responsi- 
bility for Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933 and its tragic con- 
sequences for the Soviet Union and the rest of the world. 

The dynamics of Soviet foreign relations changed drastically 
after Stalin recognized the danger posed by Nazi Germany. 
From 1934 through 1937, the Soviet Union tried to restrain 



75 



Russia: A Country Study 

German militarism by building coalitions hostile to fascism. In 
the international communist movement, the Comintern 
adopted the "popular front" policy of cooperation with social- 
ists and liberals against fascism, thus reversing its line of the 
early 1930s. In 1934 the Soviet Union joined the League of 
Nations, where Maksim Litvinov, the Soviet commissar of for- 
eign affairs, advocated disarmament and collective security 
against fascist aggression. In 1935 the Soviet Union formed 
defensive military alliances with France and Czechoslovakia, 
and from 1936 to 1939 it gave assistance to antifascists in the 
Spanish Civil War. The menace of fascist militarism to the 
Soviet Union increased when Germany and Japan (which 
already posed a substantial threat to the Soviet Far East) signed 
the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936. But the West proved unwill- 
ing to counter German provocative behavior, and after France 
and Britain acceded to Hitler's demands for Czechoslovak ter- 
ritory at Munich in 1938, Stalin abandoned his efforts to forge 
a collective security agreement with the West. 

Convinced now that the West would not fight Hitler, Stalin 
decided to come to an understanding with Germany. Signaling 
a shift in foreign policy, Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin's loyal assis- 
tant, replaced Litvinov, who was Jewish, as commissar of foreign 
affairs in May 1939. Hitler, who had decided to attack Poland 
despite the guarantees of Britain and France to defend that 
country, soon responded to the changed Soviet stance. While 
Britain and France dilatorily attempted to induce the Soviet 
Union to join them in pledging to protect Poland, the Soviet 
Union and Germany engaged in intense negotiations. The 
product of the talks between the former ideological foes — the 
Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (also known as the Molotov- 
Ribbentrop Pact) of August 23, 1939 — shocked the world. The 
open provisions of the agreement pledged absolute neutrality 
in the event one of the parties should become involved in war, 
while a secret protocol partitioned Poland between the parties 
and assigned Romanian territory as well as Estonia and Latvia 
(and later Lithuania) to the Soviet sphere of influence. With 
his eastern flank thus secured, Hitler began the German inva- 
sion of Poland on September 1, 1939; Britain and France 
declared war on Germany two days later. World War II had 
begun. 

The War Years 

The security that Stalin bought with the German treaty was 



76 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



short-lived. Hitler repudiated the agreement in 1941, and Rus- 
sian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian territory subsequently 
became the scene of fierce righting and the eventual repulsion 
of a huge Nazi invasion force. Stalin was able to rally patriotic 
support for the war effort, and Soviet forces entered Berlin tri- 
umphantly in April 1945. Together with the United States, the 
Soviet Union entered the postwar era as a superpower. 

Prelude to War 

When German troops invaded Poland, the Soviet Union was 
ill prepared to fight a major war. Although military expendi- 
tures had increased dramatically during the 1930s and the 
standing army was expanded in 1939, Soviet weaponry was infe- 
rior to that of the German army. More important, eight of the 
nation's top military leaders, including Marshal Mikhail Tukha- 
chevskiy, had been executed in 1937 in the course of Stalin's 
purges; thus the armed forces' morale and effectiveness were 
diminished. The time gained through the pact with the Nazis 
was therefore critical to the recovery of Soviet defenses, partic- 
ularly because Hitler's forces had overrun much of Western 
Europe by the summer of 1940. To strengthen its western fron- 
tier, the Soviet Union quickly secured the territory located in 
its sphere of interest. Soviet forces seized eastern Poland in 
September 1939; entered Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 
October 1939; and seized the Romanian territories of Bessara- 
bia (later incorporated into the Moldavian Republic) and 
northern Bukovina (later added to the Ukrainian Republic) in 
June 1940. Only Finland resisted Stalin's program of expan- 
sion, first by refusing to cede territory and then by putting up a 
determined defense along the Mannerheim Line when the 
Red Army invaded in November 1939. The Soviet-Finnish War 
(also known as the Winter War) of 1939-40 exposed grave defi- 
ciencies in Soviet military capabilities, which Hitler undoubt- 
edly noted. 

As the European war continued and the theaters of the con- 
flict widened, Hitler began to chafe under his pact with the 
Soviet Union. The German dictator refused to grant Stalin a 
free hand in the Balkans, instead moving the German forces 
deeper into Eastern Europe and strengthening his ties with 
Finland. Hitler thus prepared for war against the Soviet Union 
under a plan that he officially approved in December 1940. At 
this point, however, Stalin still apparently believed that the 
Soviet Union could avert war by appeasing Germany. To 



77 



Russia: A Country Study 

achieve this goal, regular shipments of Soviet materials to Ger- 
many continued, and the Soviet armed forces were kept at a 
low stage of readiness. But despite Stalin's efforts to mollify Hit- 
ler, Germany declared war on the Soviet Union just as 180 Ger- 
man divisions swept across the border early on the morning of 
June 22, 1941. 

The Great Patriotic War 

The German blitzkrieg, known as Operation Barbarossa, 
nearly succeeded in breaking the Soviet Union in the months 
that followed. Caught unprepared, the Soviet forces lost whole 
armies and vast quantities of equipment to the German 
onslaught in the first weeks of the war. By November the Ger- 
man army had seized the Ukrainian Republic, besieged Lenin- 
grad, the Soviet Union's second largest city, and threatened 
Moscow itself (see fig. 5). The Great Patriotic War, as the Soviet 
Union and then Russia have called that phase of World War II, 
thus began inauspiciously for the Soviet Union. 

By the end of 1941, however, the German forces had lost 
their momentum. German movements were increasingly 
restricted by harsh winter weather, attacks from bands of parti- 
sans, and difficulties in maintaining overextended supply lines. 
At the same time, the Red Army, after recovering from the ini- 
tial blow, launched its first counterattacks against the invaders 
in December. To ensure the army's ability to fight the war, the 
Soviet authorities moved thousands of factories and their key 
personnel from the war zone to the interior of the country — 
often to Central Asia — where the plants began producing war 
materiel. Finally, the country was bolstered by the prospect of 
receiving assistance from Britain and the United States. 

After a lull in active hostilities during the winter of 1941-42, 
the German army renewed its offensive, scoring a number of 
victories in the Ukrainian Republic, Crimea, and southern Rus- 
sia in the first half of 1942. Then, in an effort to gain control of 
the lower Volga River region, the German forces attempted to 
capture the city of Stalingrad (present-day Volgograd) on the 
west bank of the river. Here, Soviet forces put up fierce resis- 
tance even after the Germans had reduced the city to rubble. 
Finally, Soviet forces led by General Georgiy Zhukov sur- 
rounded the German attackers and forced their surrender in 
February 1943. The Soviet victory at Stalingrad proved deci- 
sive; after losing this battle, the Germans lacked the strength to 
sustain their offensive operations against the Soviet Union. 



78 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



After Stalingrad, the Soviet Union held the initiative for the 
rest of the war. By the end of 1943, the Red Army had broken 
through the German siege of Leningrad and recaptured much 
of the Ukrainian Republic. By the end of 1944, the front had 
moved beyond the 1939 Soviet frontiers into Eastern Europe. 
With a decisive superiority in troops and weaponry, Soviet 
forces drove into eastern Germany, capturing Berlin in May 
1945. The war with Germany thus ended triumphantly for the 
Soviet Union. 

In gaining the victory, the Soviet government had to rely on 
the support of the people. To increase popular enthusiasm for 
the war, Stalin reshaped his domestic policies to heighten patri- 
otic spirit. Nationalistic slogans replaced much of the commu- 
nist rhetoric in official pronouncements and the mass media. 
Active persecution of religion ceased, and in 1943 Stalin 
allowed the Russian Orthodox Church to name a patriarch 
(see Glossary) after the office had stood vacant for nearly two 
decades. In the countryside, authorities permitted greater free- 
dom on the collective farms. Harsh German rule in the occu- 
pied territories also aided the Soviet cause. Nazi administrators 
of conquered Soviet territories made little attempt to exploit 
the population's dissatisfaction with Soviet political and eco- 
nomic policies. Instead, the Nazis preserved the collective farm 
system, systematically carried out genocidal policies against 
Jews, and deported others (mainly Ukrainians) to work in Ger- 
many. Given these circumstances, the great majority of the 
Soviet people chose to fight and work on their country's behalf, 
thus ensuring the regime's survival. 

The war with Germany also brought about a temporary alli- 
ance with the two greatest powers in the "imperialist camp," 
namely Britain and the United States. Despite deep-seated mis- 
trust between the Western democracies and the Soviet state, 
the demands of war made cooperation critical. The Soviet 
Union benefited from shipments of weaponry and equipment 
from the Western allies; during the course of the war, the 
United States alone furnished supplies worth more than US$11 
billion. At the same time, by engaging considerable German 
resources, the Soviet Union gave the United States and Britain 
time to prepare to invade German-occupied Western Europe. 

Relations began to sour, however, when the war turned in 
the Allies' favor. The postponement of the European invasion 
to June 1944 became a source of irritation to Stalin, whose 
country meanwhile bore the brunt of the struggle against Ger- 



79 



Russia: A Country Study 




Source: Based on information from David MacKenzie and Michael W. Curran, A History 
of Russia and the Soviet Union, Chicago, 1987, 742. 



Figure 5. Military Operations Against Germany, 1941-45 

many. Then, as Soviet armies pushed into Eastern Europe, the 
question of the postwar order increased the friction within the 
coalition. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Stalin 
clashed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minis- 
ter Winston Churchill over Stalin's plans to extend Soviet influ- 
ence to Poland after the war. At the same time, however, Stalin 
promised to join the war against Japan ninety days after Ger- 
many had been defeated. Breaking the neutrality pact that the 
Soviet Union had concluded with Japan in April 1941, the Red 
Army entered the war in East Asia several days before Japan 
surrendered in August 1945. Now, with all common enemies 



80 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



defeated, little remained to preserve the alliance between the 
Western democracies and the Soviet Union. 

The end of World War II saw the Soviet Union emerge as 
one of the world's two great military powers. Its battle-tested 
forces occupied most of Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union had 
won island holdings from Japan and further concessions from 
Finland (which had joined Germany in invading the Soviet 
Union in 1941) in addition to the territories seized as a conse- 
quence of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. But these 
achievements came at a high cost. An estimated 20 million 
Soviet soldiers and civilians perished in the war, the heaviest 
loss of life of any of the combatant countries. The war also 
inflicted severe material losses throughout the vast territory 
that had been included in the war zone. The suffering and 
losses resulting from the war made a lasting impression on the 
Soviet people and leaders that influenced their behavior in the 
postwar era. 

Reconstruction and Cold War 

The end of the common cause again exposed the underlying 
hostility between the capitalist countries and the Soviet Union. 
And the favorable position in which the Soviet Union finished 
World War II rapidly made it the prime postwar threat to world 
peace in the eyes of Western policy makers. The so-called Cold 
War that emerged from that situation featured Soviet domina- 
tion of all of Eastern Europe, the development of nuclear 
weapons by the Soviet Union, and dangerous conflicts and 
near-conflicts in several areas of the world. 

Reconstruction Years 

Although the Soviet Union was victorious in World War II, its 
economy had been devastated in the struggle. Roughly a quar- 
ter of the country's capital resources had been destroyed, and 
industrial and agricultural output in 1945 fell far short of pre- 
war levels. To help rebuild the country, the Soviet government 
obtained limited credits from Britain and Sweden but refused 
assistance proposed by the United States under the economic 
aid program known as the Marshall Plan (see Glossary). 
Instead, the Soviet Union compelled Soviet-occupied Eastern 
Europe to supply machinery and raw materials. Germany and 
former Nazi satellites (including Finland) made reparations to 
the Soviet Union. The Soviet people bore much of the cost of 



81 



Russia: A Country Study 

rebuilding because the reconstruction program emphasized 
heavy industry while neglecting agriculture and consumer 
goods. By the time of Stalin's death in 1953, steel production 
was twice its 1940 level, but the production of many consumer 
goods and foodstuffs was lower than it had been in the late 
1920s. 

During the postwar reconstruction period, Stalin tightened 
domestic controls, justifying the repression by playing up the 
threat of war with the West. Many repatriated Soviet citizens 
who had lived abroad during the war, whether as prisoners of 
war, forced laborers, or defectors, were executed or sent to 
prison camps. The limited freedoms granted in wartime to the 
church and to collective farmers were revoked. The party tight- 
ened its admission standards and purged many who had 
become party members during the war. 

In 1946 An drey Zhdanov, a close associate of Stalin, helped 
launch an ideological campaign designed to demonstrate the 
superiority of socialism over capitalism in all fields. This cam- 
paign, colloquially known as the Zhdanovshchina ("era of 
Zhdanov"), attacked writers, composers, economists, histori- 
ans, and scientists whose work allegedly manifested Western 
influence. Although Zhdanov died in 1948, the cultural purge 
continued for several years afterward, stifling Soviet intellec- 
tual development. Another campaign, related to the 
Zhdanovshchina, lauded the real or purported achievements 
of past and present Russian inventors and scientists. In this 
intellectual climate, the genetic theories of biologist Trofim 
Lysenko, which were supposedly derived from Marxist princi- 
ples but lacked a scientific foundation, were imposed upon 
Soviet science to the detriment of research and agricultural 
development. The anticosmopolitan trends of these years 
adversely affected Jewish cultural and scientific figures in par- 
ticular. In general, a pronounced sense of Russian nationalism, 
as opposed to socialist consciousness, pervaded Soviet society. 

Onset of the Cold War 

Soon after World War II, the Soviet Union and its Western 
allies parted ways as mutual suspicions of the other's intentions 
and actions flourished. Eager to consolidate influence over a 
number of countries adjacent to the Soviet Union, Stalin pur- 
sued an aggressive policy of intervention in the domestic affairs 
of these states, provoking strong Western reaction. The United 



82 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



States worked to contain Soviet expansion in this period of 
international relations that came to be known as the Cold War. 

Mindful of the numerous invasions of Russia and the Soviet 
Union from the West throughout history, Stalin sought to cre- 
ate a buffer zone of subservient East European countries, most 
of which the Red Army (known as the Soviet army after 1946) 
had occupied in the course of the war. Taking advantage of its 
military occupation of these countries, the Soviet Union 
actively assisted local communist parties in coming to power. By 
1948 seven East European countries — Albania, Bulgaria, 
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia — 
had communist governments. The Soviet Union initially main- 
tained control behind the "Iron Curtain" (a phrase coined by 
Churchill in a 1946 speech) through the use of troops, security 
police, and the Soviet diplomatic service. Inequitable trade 
agreements with the East European countries permitted the 
Soviet Union access to valued resources. 

Soviet actions in Eastern Europe generated hostility among 
the Western states toward their former ally, but they could do 
nothing to halt consolidation of Soviet authority in that region 
short of going to war. However, the United States and its allies 
had greater success in halting Soviet expansion in areas where 
Soviet influence was more tenuous. British and American dip- 
lomatic support for Iran forced the Soviet Union to withdraw 
its troops from the northeastern part of that country in 1946. 
Soviet efforts to acquire territory from Turkey and to establish 
a communist government in Greece were stymied when the 
United States extended military and economic support to 
those countries under the Truman Doctrine, a policy articu- 
lated by President Harry S. Truman in 1947. Later that year, 
the United States introduced the Marshall Plan for the eco- 
nomic recovery of other countries of Europe. The Soviet 
Union forbade the countries it dominated from taking part in 
the program, and the Marshall Plan contributed to a reduction 
of Soviet influence in the participating West European nations. 

Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union 
became especially strained over the issue of Germany. At the 
Potsdam Conference of July-August 1945, the Allied Powers 
confirmed their decision to divide Germany and the city of 
Berlin into zones of occupation (with the eastern sectors 
placed under Soviet administration) until such time as the 
Allies would permit Germany to establish a central govern- 
ment. Disagreements between the Soviet Union and the West- 



83 



Russia: A Country Study 

ern Allies soon arose over their respective occupation policies 
and the matter of reparations. In June 1948, the Soviet Union 
cut off the West's land access to the American, British, and 
French sectors of Berlin in retaliation for steps taken by the 
United States and Britain to unite Germany. Britain and the 
United States thereupon sponsored an airlift that kept the 
beleaguered sectors provisioned until the Soviet Union lifted 
the blockade in May 1949. Following the Berlin blockade, the 
Western Allies and the Soviet Union divided Germany into two 
countries, one oriented to the West, the other to the East. The 
crisis also provided the catalyst for the Western countries in 
1949 to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO — 
see Glossary) , a collective security system under which conven- 
tional armies and nuclear weapons would offset Soviet forces. 

While the Soviet Union gained a new satellite nation in the 
German Democratic Republic (East Germany), it lost its influ- 
ence in Yugoslavia. The local communists in Yugoslavia had 
come to power without Soviet assistance, and their leader, Josip 
Broz Tito, refused to subordinate the country to Stalin's con- 
trol. Tito's defiance led the Communist Information Bureau 
(Gominform — founded in 1947 to assume some of the func- 
tions of the Comintern, which had been abolished in 1943) to 
expel the Yugoslav party from the international communist 
movement in 1948. To avert the rise of other independent 
leaders, Stalin purged many of the chief communists in other 
East European states. 

In Asia the Chinese communists, headed by Mao Zedong 
and assisted by the Soviet Union, achieved victory over the 
Guomindang in 1949. Several months afterward, in 1950, 
China and the Soviet Union concluded a mutual defense treaty 
against Japan and the United States. Hard negotiations over 
concessions and aid between the two communist countries 
served as an indication that China, with its independent party 
and enormous population, would not become a Soviet satellite, 
although for a time Sino-Soviet relations appeared particularly 
close. Elsewhere in Asia, the Soviet Union pursued a vigorous 
policy of support for national liberation movements, especially 
in Malaya and Indochina, which were still colonies of Britain 
and France, respectively. Thinking that the West would not 
defend the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Stalin allowed or 
encouraged the Soviet-equipped forces of the Democratic Peo- 
ple's Republic of Korea (North Korea) to invade South Korea 
in 1950. But forces from the United States and other members 



84 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



of the United Nations came to the aid of South Korea, leading 
China to intervene militarily on behalf of North Korea, proba- 
bly at Soviet instigation. Although the Soviet Union avoided 
direct participation in the conflict, the Korean War (1950-53) 
motivated the United States to strengthen its military capability 
and to conclude a peace treaty and security pact with Japan. 
Chinese participation in the war also strengthened China's 
independent position relative to the Soviet Union. 

The Death of Stalin 

In the early 1950s, Stalin, now an old man, apparently per- 
mitted his subordinates in the Politburo (enlarged and 
renamed the Presidium in October 1952) greater powers 
within their respective spheres. Also at the Nineteenth Party 
Congress, the name of the party was changed from the All- 
Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) to the Communist Party 
of the Soviet Union (CPSU — see Glossary), Indicative of the 
Soviet leader's waning strength was top aide Georgiy Malen- 
kov's presentation of the political report to the congress in Sta- 
lin's stead. Although the general secretary took a smaller part 
in the day-to-day administration of party affairs, he maintained 
his animosity toward potential enemies. In January 1953, the 
party newspaper announced that a group of predominantly 
Jewish doctors had murdered high Soviet officials, including 
Zhdanov. Western historians speculate that the disclosure of 
this "doctors' plot" may have been a prelude to an intended 
purge directed against Malenkov, Molotov, and secret police 
chief Lavrenti Beria. When Stalin died in March 1953, under 
circumstances that remain unclear, his inner circle, which for 
years had lived in dread of their leader, secretly rejoiced. 

During his quarter-century of dictatorial control, Stalin had 
overseen impressive development in the Soviet Union. From a 
comparatively backward agricultural society, the country had 
been transformed into a powerful industrial state. But in the 
course of that transformation, many millions of people had 
been killed, and Stalin's use of repressive controls had become 
an integral function of his regime. The extent to which Stalin's 
system would be maintained or altered would be a question of 
vital concern to Soviet leaders for years after his passing. 

The Khrushchev Era 

The end of the Stalin era brought immediate liberalization 



85 



Russia: A Country Study 

in several aspects of Soviet life. Party leader Nikita S. Khru- 
shchev denounced Stalin's tyrannical reign in 1956, signaling a 
sharp break with the past. Because Khrushchev lacked the all- 
encompassing power of Stalin, his time in office was marked by 
continuous maneuvering against political enemies much more 
real than Stalin's had been. Party control of cultural activity 
became much less restrictive with the onset of the first "thaw" 
in the mid-1950s. Khrushchev attempted reforms in both 
domestic and foreign policy, with mixed results. During his ten- 
ure (1953-64), world politics became much more complex as 
the insecurities of the Cold War persisted; Khrushchev ulti- 
mately was undone by a combination of failed policy innova- 
tions in agriculture, party politics, and industry. 

Collective Leadership and the Rise of Khrushchev 

Stalin died without naming an heir, and none of his associ- 
ates had the power to make an immediate claim to supreme 
leadership. At first the deceased dictator's colleagues tried to 
rule jointly, with Malenkov holding the top position of prime 
minister. The first challenge to this arrangement occurred in 
1953, when the powerful Beria plotted a coup. However, Beria, 
who had made many enemies during his bloody term as secu- 
rity chief, was arrested and executed by order of the Presidium. 
His death reduced the inordinate power of the secret police, 
although the party's strict control over the state security organs 
ended only with the demise of the Soviet Union itself (see 
Internal Security Before 1991, ch. 10). 

After the elimination of Beria, the succession struggle 
became more subtle. Malenkov found a formidable rival in 
Khrushchev, whom the Presidium elected first secretary (Sta- 
lin's title of general secretary was abolished after his death) in 
September 1953. Of peasant background, Khrushchev had 
served as head of the Ukrainian party organization during and 
after World War II, and he was a member of the Soviet political 
elite during the late Stalin period. The rivalry between Malen- 
kov and Khrushchev manifested itself publicly in the contrast 
between Malenkov's support for increased production of con- 
sumer goods and Khrushchev's stand-pat backing for contin- 
ued development of heavy industry. After a poor showing by 
light industry and agriculture, Malenkov resigned as prime 
minister in February 1955. Because the new prime minister, 
Nikolay Bulganin, had little influence or real power, the depar- 



86 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



ture of Malenkov made Khrushchev the most important figure 
within the collective leadership. 

At the Twentieth Party Congress, held in February 1956, 
Khrushchev further advanced his position within the party by 
denouncing Stalin's crimes in a dramatic "secret speech." Khru- 
shchev revealed that Stalin had arbitrarily liquidated thousands 
of party members and military leaders, thereby contributing to 
the initial Soviet defeats in World War II, and had established 
what Khrushchev characterized as a pernicious cult of person- 
ality. With this speech, Khrushchev not only distanced himself 
from Stalin and from Stalin's close associates, Molotov, Malen- 
kov, and Lazar Kaganovich, but he also abjured the dictator's 
use of terror as an instrument of policy. As a direct result of the 
"de-Stalinization" campaign launched by Khrushchev's speech, 
the release of political prisoners, which had begun in 1953, was 
stepped up, and some of Stalin's victims were posthumously 
rehabilitated. Khrushchev intensified his campaign against Sta- 
lin at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961, winning 
approval to remove Stalin's body from the Lenin Mausoleum, 
where it had originally been interred. De-Stalinization encour- 
aged many in artistic and intellectual circles to speak out 
against the abuses of the former regime. Although Khru- 
shchev's tolerance for critical creative works varied during his 
tenure, the new cultural period — known as the "thaw" — repre- 
sented a clear break with the repression of the arts under Sta- 
lin. 

After the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev continued 
to expand his influence, although he still faced opposition. His 
rivals in the Presidium, spurred by reversals in Soviet foreign 
policy in Eastern Europe in 1956, potentially threatening eco- 
nomic reforms, and the de-Stalinization campaign, united to 
vote him out of office in June 1957. Khrushchev, however, 
demanded that the matter be put to the Central Committee of 
the CPSU, where he enjoyed strong support. The Central Com- 
mittee overturned the Presidium's decision and expelled Khru- 
shchev's opponents (Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich), 
whom Khrushchev labeled the "antiparty group." In a depar- 
ture from Stalinist procedure, Khrushchev did not order the 
imprisonment or execution of his defeated rivals but instead 
placed them in relatively minor offices. 

Khrushchev moved to consolidate his power further in the 
ensuing months. In October he removed Marshal Zhukov (who 
had helped Khrushchev squelch the "antiparty group") from 



87 



Russia: A Country Study 

the office of defense minister, presumably because he feared 
Zhukov's influence in the armed forces. Khrushchev became 
prime minister in March 1958 when Bulganin resigned, thus 
formally confirming his predominant position in the state as 
well as in the party. 

Despite his rank, Khrushchev never exercised the dictatorial 
authority of Stalin, nor did he ever completely control the 
party, even at the peak of his power. His attacks on members of 
the "antiparty group" at the Twenty-First Party Congress in 
1959 and the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961 suggest 
that his opponents retained support within the party. Khru- 
shchev's relative political insecurity probably accounted for 
some of his grandiose pronouncements, for example his 1961 
promise that the Soviet Union would attain communism by 
1980. His desire to undermine opposition and mollify critics 
explained the nature of many of his domestic reforms and the 
vacillations in his foreign policy toward the West. 

Foreign Policy under Khrushchev 

Almost immediately after Stalin died, the collective leader- 
ship began altering the conduct of Soviet foreign policy to per- 
mit better relations with the West and new approaches to the 
nonaligned countries. Malenkov introduced a change in tone 
by speaking out against nuclear war as a threat to civilization. 
Khrushchev initially contradicted this position, saying capital- 
ism alone would be destroyed in a nuclear war, but he adopted 
Malenkov's view after securing his domestic political position. 
In 1955, to ease tensions between East and West, Khrushchev 
recognized permanent neutrality for Austria. Meeting Presi- 
dent Dwight D. Eisenhower in Geneva later that year, Khru- 
shchev confirmed a Soviet commitment to "peaceful 
coexistence" with capitalism. Regarding the developing 
nations, Khrushchev tried to win the goodwill of their national 
leaders, instead of following the established Soviet policy of 
shunning the governments while supporting local communist 
parties. Soviet influence over the international alignments of 
India and Egypt, as well as of other Third World countries, 
began in the middle of the 1950s. Cuba's entry into the socialist 
camp in 1961 was a coup for the Soviet Union. 

With the gains of the new diplomacy came reversals as well. 
By conceding Yugoslavia's independent approach to commu- 
nism in 1955 as well as by his de-Stalinization campaign, Khru- 
shchev created an opening for unrest in Eastern Europe, where 



88 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



the policies of the Stalin era had been particularly onerous. In 
Poland, riots brought about a change in communist party lead- 
ership, which the Soviet Union reluctantly recognized in Octo- 
ber 1956. A popular uprising against Soviet control then broke 
out in Hungary, where the local communist leaders, headed by 
Imre Nagy, called for a multiparty political system and with- 
drawal from the Warsaw Pact (see Glossary), the defensive alli- 
ance founded by the Soviet Union and its East European 
satellites in 1955. The Soviet army crushed the revolt early in 
November 1956, causing numerous casualties. Although the 
Hungarian Revolution hurt Soviet standing in world opinion, it 
demonstrated that the Soviet Union would use force if neces- 
sary to maintain control over its satellite states in Eastern 
Europe. 

Outside the Soviet sphere of control, China grew increas- 
ingly restive under Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao 
Zedong. Chinese discontent with the new Soviet leadership 
stemmed from low levels of Soviet aid, feeble Soviet support for 
China in its disputes with Taiwan and India, and the new Soviet 
doctrine of peaceful coexistence with the West, which Mao 
viewed as a betrayal of Marxism-Leninism. Against Khru- 
shchev's wishes, China embarked on a nuclear arms program, 
declaring in 1960 that communism could defeat "imperialism" 
in a nuclear war. The dispute between militant China and the 
more moderate Soviet Union escalated into a schism in the 
world communist movement after 1960. Albania left the Soviet 
camp and became an ally of China, Romania distanced itself 
from the Soviet Union in international affairs, and communist 
parties around the world split over whether they should be ori- 
ented toward Moscow or Beijing. The monolithic bloc of world 
communism had shattered. 

Soviet relations with the West, especially the United States, 
seesawed between moments of relative relaxation and periods 
of tension and crisis. For his part, Khrushchev wanted peaceful 
coexistence with the West, not only to avoid nuclear war but 
also to permit the Soviet Union to develop its economy. Khru- 
shchev's meetings with President Eisenhower in 1955 and Pres- 
ident John F. Kennedy in 1961 and his tour of the United States 
in 1959 demonstrated the Soviet leader's desire for fundamen- 
tally smooth relations between the West and the Soviet Union 
and its allies. Yet Khrushchev also needed to demonstrate to 
Soviet conservatives and the militant Chinese that the Soviet 
Union was a firm defender of the socialist camp. Thus, in 1958 



89 



Russia: A Country Study 



Khrushchev challenged the status of Berlin; when the West 
would not yield to his demands that the western sectors be 
incorporated into East Germany, he approved the erection of 
the Berlin Wall between the eastern and western sectors of the 
city in 1961. To maintain national prestige, Khrushchev can- 
celed a summit meeting with Eisenhower in 1960 after Soviet 
air defense troops shot down a United States reconnaissance 
aircraft over Soviet territory. Finally, mistrust over military 
intentions clouded East-West relations during this time. The 
West feared the implications of Soviet innovations in space 
technology and saw in the buildup of the Soviet military an 
emerging "missile gap" in the Soviet Union's favor. 

By contrast, the Soviet Union felt threatened by a rearmed 
Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), by a United 
States alliance system that seemed to be encircling the Soviet 
Union, and by the West's superior strategic and economic 
strength. To offset the United States military advantage and 
thereby improve the Soviet negotiating position, Khrushchev 
in 1962 tried to install nuclear missiles in Cuba, but he agreed 
to withdraw them after Kennedy ordered a blockade around 
the island nation. After coming close to war during the Cuban 
missile crisis, the Soviet Union and the United States took steps 
to reduce the nuclear threat. In 1963 the two countries estab- 
lished a "hot line" between Washington and Moscow to provide 
instant communication that would reduce the likelihood of 
accidental nuclear war. In the same year, the United States, 
Britain, and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban 
Treaty, which forbade nuclear weapons testing in the atmo- 
sphere. 

Khrushchev's Reforms and Fall 

Throughout his years of leadership, Khrushchev attempted 
to carry out reform in a range of fields. The problems of Soviet 
agriculture, a major concern of Khrushchev's, had earlier 
attracted the attention of the collective leadership, which intro- 
duced important innovations in this area of the Soviet econ- 
omy. The state encouraged peasants to grow more on their 
private plots, increased payments for crops grown on collective 
farms, and invested more heavily in agriculture. In his dramatic 
Virgin Lands campaign in the mid-1950s, Khrushchev opened 
vast tracts of land to farming in the northern part of the Kazak 
Republic and neighboring areas of the Russian Republic. 
These new farmlands turned out to be susceptible to droughts, 



90 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



but in some years they produced excellent harvests. Later inno- 
vations by Khrushchev, however, proved counterproductive. 
His plans for growing corn and increasing meat and dairy pro- 
duction failed miserably, and his reorganization of collective 
farms into larger units produced confusion in the countryside. 

Khrushchev's attempts at reform in industry and administra- 
tive organization created even greater problems. In a politically 
motivated move to weaken the central state bureaucracy, in 
1957 Khrushchev did away with the industrial ministries in 
Moscow and replaced them with regional economic councils. 
Although he intended these economic councils to be more 
responsive to local needs, the decentralization of industry led 
to disruption and inefficiency. Connected with this decentrali- 
zation was Khrushchev's decision in 1962 to recast party organi- 
zations along economic, rather than administrative, lines. The 
resulting bifurcation of the party apparatus into industrial and 
agricultural sectors at the oblast (province) level and below 
contributed to the disarray and alienated many party officials 
at all levels. Symptomatic of the country's economic difficulties 
was the abandonment in 1963 of Khrushchev's special 
seven-year economic plan (1959-65) two years short of its com- 
pletion. 

By 1964 Khrushchev's prestige had been damaged in a num- 
ber of areas. Industrial growth had slowed, while agriculture 
showed no new progress. Abroad, the split with China, the Ber- 
lin crisis, and the Cuban fiasco hurt the Soviet Union's interna- 
tional stature, and Khrushchev's efforts to improve relations 
with the West antagonized many in the military. Lastly, the 1962 
party reorganization caused turmoil throughout the Soviet 
political chain of command. In October 1964, while Khru- 
shchev was vacationing in Crimea, the Presidium voted him out 
of office and refused to permit him to take his case to the Cen- 
tral Committee. Khrushchev retired as a private citizen after his 
successors denounced him for his "hare-brained schemes, 
half-baked conclusions, and hasty decisions." Yet along with his 
failed policies, Khrushchev must also be remembered for his 
public disavowal of Stalinism and the greater flexibility he 
brought to Soviet leadership after a long period of monolithic 
terror. 

The Brezhnev Era 

The regime that followed Khrushchev took a much more 
conservative approach to most problems. Stalinism did not 



91 



Russia: A Country Study 

return, but there was less latitude for individual expression. 
Foreign relations continued to roller-coaster, with the invasion 
of Afghanistan in 1979 constituting a major setback for rela- 
tions with the West. The Soviet economy continued to falter, 
reaping no apparent benefit from the end of Khrushchev's eco- 
nomic experimentation. 

Collective Leadership and the Rise of Brezhnev 

After removing Khrushchev from power, the leaders of the 
Politburo (as the Presidium was renamed in 1966 by the 
Twenty-Third Party Congress) and Secretariat again estab- 
lished a collective leadership. As was the case following Stalin's 
death, several individuals, including Aleksey Kosygin, Nikolay 
Podgornyy, and Leonid I. Brezhnev, contended for power 
behind a facade of unity. Kosygin accepted the position of 
prime minister, which he held until his retirement in 1980. 
Brezhnev, who took the post of first secretary, may have been 
viewed originally by his colleagues as an interim appointee. 

Born to a Russian worker's family in 1906, Brezhnev became 
a Khrushchev protege early in his career and through his 
patron's influence rose to membership in the Presidium. As his 
own power grew, Brezhnev built up a coterie of followers whom 
he, as first secretary, gradually maneuvered into powerful posi- 
tions. At the same time, Brezhnev slowly demoted or isolated 
possible contenders for his office. For instance, in December 
1965 he succeeded in elevating Podgornyy to the ceremonial 
position of chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, 
the highest legislative organization in the government, thus 
eliminating him as a rival. But Brezhnev's rise was very gradual; 
only in 1971, when he succeeded in appointing four close asso- 
ciates to the Politburo, did it become clear that his was the 
most influential voice in the collective leadership. After several 
more personnel changes, Brezhnev assumed the chairmanship 
of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1977, confirming his 
primacy in both party and state. 

The years after Khrushchev were notable for the stability of 
the cadres, groups of activists in responsible and influential 
positions in the party and state apparatus. By introducing the 
slogan "Trust in Cadres" in 1965, Brezhnev won the support of 
many bureaucrats wary of the constant reorganizations of the 
Khrushchev era and eager for security in established hierar- 
chies. Indicative of the stability of the period is the fact that 
nearly half of the Central Committee members in 1981 were 



92 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



holdovers from fifteen years earlier. The corollary to this stabil- 
ity was the aging of Soviet leaders; the average age of Politburo 
members rose from fifty-five in 1966 to sixty-eight in 1982. The 
Soviet leadership (or the "gerontocracy," as it was referred to in 
the West) became increasingly conservative and ossified. 

Conservative policies characterized the regime's agenda in 
the years after Khrushchev. Upon assuming power, the collec- 
tive leadership not only reversed such Khrushchev policies as 
the bifurcation of the party, it also halted de-Stalinization. 
Indeed, favorable references to the dead dictator began to 
appear. The Soviet constitution of 1977, although differing in 
certain respects from the 1936 Stalin document, retained the 
general thrust of the latter. In contrast to the relative cultural 
freedom permitted during the early Khrushchev years, Brezh- 
nev and his colleagues continued the more restrictive line of 
the later Khrushchev era. The leadership was unwilling or 
unable to employ Stalinist means to control Soviet society; 
instead, it opted to use repressive tactics against political dissi- 
dents even after the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki Accords 
of 1975, which bound signatory nations to higher standards of 
human rights observance. Dissidents persecuted during this 
time included writers and activists in outlawed religious, 
nationalist, and human rights movements. In the latter part of 
the Brezhnev era, the regime tolerated popular expressions of 
anti-Semitism. Under conditions of "developed socialism" (the 
historical stage that the Soviet Union attained in 1977, accord- 
ing to the CPSU), the precepts of Marxism-Leninism were 
taught and reinforced as a means to bolster the authority of the 
regime rather than as a tool for revolutionary action. 

Foreign Policy of a Superpower 

A major concern of Khrushchev's successors was to reestab- 
lish Soviet primacy in the community of communist states by 
undermining the influence of China. Although the new lead- 
ers originally approached China without hostility, Mao's con- 
demnation of Soviet foreign policy as "revisionist" and his 
competition for influence in the Third World soon led to a 
worsening of relations between the two countries. The 
Sino-Soviet relationship reached a low point in 1969 when 
clashes broke out along the disputed Ussuri River boundary in 
the Far East. Later, the Chinese, intimidated by Soviet military 
strength, agreed not to patrol the border area claimed by the 



93 



Russia: A Country Study 

Soviet Union; but strained relations between the two countries 
continued into the early 1980s. 

Under the collective leadership, the Soviet Union again used 
force in Eastern Europe, this time in Czechoslovakia. In 1968 
reform-minded elements of the Communist Party of Czecho- 
slovakia rapidly began to liberalize their rule, loosen censor- 
ship, and strengthen Western ties. In response, Soviet and 
other Warsaw Pact troops entered Czechoslovakia and installed 
a new regime. Out of these events arose the so-called Brezhnev 
Doctrine (see Glossary), which warned that the Soviet Union 
would act to maintain its hegemony in Eastern Europe (see 
Central Europe, ch. 8). Soviet suppression of the reform move- 
ment reduced blatant gestures of defiance on the part of 
Romania and served as a threatening example to the Polish 
Solidarity trade union movement in 1980. But it also helped 
disillusion communist parties in Western Europe to the extent 
that by 1977 most of the leading parties embraced Eurocom- 
munism, a pragmatic approach to ideology that freed them to 
pursue political programs independent of Soviet dictates. 

Soviet influence in the developing world expanded some- 
what during the 1970s. New communist or left-leaning govern- 
ments having close relations with the Soviet Union took power 
in several countries, including Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, 
and Nicaragua. In the Middle East, the Soviet Union vied for 
influence by backing the Arabs in their dispute with Israel. 
After the June 1967 War in the Middle East, the Soviet Union 
rebuilt the defeated Syrian and Egyptian armies, but it suffered 
a setback when Egypt expelled Soviet advisers from the country 
in 1972 and subsequently entered into a closer relationship 
with the United States. The Soviet Union retained ties with 
Syria and supported Palestinians' claims to an independent 
state. But Soviet prestige among moderate Muslim states suf- 
fered in the 1980s as a result of Soviet military activities in 
Afghanistan (see The Middle East, ch. 8). Attempting to shore 
up a communist government in that country, Brezhnev sent in 
Soviet armed forces in December 1979, but a large part of the 
Afghan population resisted both the occupiers and the Marxist 
Afghan regime. The resulting war in Afghanistan continued to 
be an unresolved problem for the Soviet Union at the time of 
Brezhnev's death in 1982. 

Soviet relations with the West first improved, then deterio- 
rated in the years after Khrushchev. The gradual winding down 
of United States involvement in the war in Vietnam after 1968 



94 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



opened the way for negotiations between the United States and 
the Soviet Union on the subject of nuclear arms. The Treaty on 
the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (commonly known 
as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — NPT; see Glossary) 
went into effect in 1970, and the two countries began the Stra- 
tegic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) the following year. At the 
Moscow summit meeting of May 1972, Brezhnev and President 
Richard M. Nixon signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM 
Treaty — see Glossary) and the Interim Agreement on the Limi- 
tation of Strategic Offensive Arms. Both agreements essentially 
froze the two countries' existing stockpiles of strategic defen- 
sive and offensive weapons. A period of detente, or relaxation 
of tensions, between the two superpowers emerged, with a fur- 
ther agreement concluded to establish ceilings on the number 
of offensive weapons on both sides in 1974. The crowning 
achievement of the era of detente was the signing in 1975 of 
the Helsinki Accords, which ratified the postwar status quo in 
Europe and bound the signatories to respect basic principles of 
human rights. In the years that followed, the Soviet Union was 
found to be in substantial violation of the accords' human 
rights provisions. 

But even during the period of detente, the Soviet Union 
increased weapons deployments, with the result that by the end 
of the 1970s it achieved nuclear parity with — or even superior- 
ity to — the United States. The Soviet Union also intensified its 
condemnation of the NATO alliance in an attempt to weaken 
Western unity. Although a second SALT agreement was signed 
by Brezhnev and President Jimmy Carter in Vienna in 1979, 
after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the Carter administra- 
tion withdrew the agreement from consideration by the United 
States Senate, and detente effectively came to an end. Also in 
reaction to the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, the United 
States imposed a grain embargo on the Soviet Union and boy- 
cotted the Moscow Summer Olympics in 1980. Tensions 
between the United States and the Soviet Union continued up 
to Brezhnev's death. 

The Economy under Brezhnev 

Despite Khrushchev's tinkering with economic planning, the 
economic system remained dependent on central plans drawn 
up with no reference to market mechanisms. Reformers, of 
whom the economist Yevsey Liberman was most noteworthy, 
advocated greater freedom for individual enterprises from out- 



95 



Russia: A Country Study 

side controls and sought to turn the enterprises' economic 
objectives toward making a profit. Prime Minister Kosygin 
championed Liberman's proposals and succeeded in incorpo- 
rating them into a general economic reform program 
approved in September 1965. This reform included scrapping 
Khrushchev's regional economic councils in favor of resurrect- 
ing the central industrial ministries of the Stalin era. Opposi- 
tion from party conservatives and cautious managers, however, 
soon stalled the Liberman reforms, forcing the state to aban- 
don them. 

After Kosygin' s short-lived attempt to revamp the economic 
system, planners reverted to drafting comprehensive central- 
ized plans of the type first developed under Stalin. In industry, 
plans stressed the heavy and defense-related branches, slight- 
ing the light consumer-goods branches (see The Postwar 
Growth Period, ch. 6). As a developed industrial country, the 
Soviet Union by the 1970s found it increasingly difficult to 
maintain the high rates of growth in the industrial sector that it 
had enjoyed in earlier years. Increasingly large investment and 
labor inputs were required for growth, but these inputs were 
becoming more difficult to obtain. Although the goals of the 
five-year plans of the 1970s had been scaled down from previ- 
ous plans, the targets remained largely unmet. The industrial 
shortfalls were felt most sharply in the sphere of consumer 
goods, where the public steadily demanded improved quality 
and increased quantity. Agricultural development continued to 
lag in the Brezhnev years. Despite steadily higher investments 
in agriculture, growth under Brezhnev fell below that attained 
under Khrushchev. Droughts occurring intermittently 
throughout the 1970s forced the Soviet Union to import large 
quantities of grain from Western countries, including the 
United States. In the countryside, Brezhnev continued the 
trend toward converting collective farms into state farms and 
raised the incomes of all farmworkers. Despite the wage 
increases, peasants still devoted much time and effort to their 
private plots, which provided the Soviet Union with a dispro- 
portionate share of its agricultural goods (see Agriculture, ch. 
6). 

The standard of living in the Soviet Union presented a prob- 
lem to the Brezhnev leadership after the growth of the late 
1960s stalled at a level well below that of most Western indus- 
trial (and some East European) countries. Although certain 
appliances and other goods became more accessible during 



96 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



the 1960s and 1970s, improvements in housing and food sup- 
ply were slight. Shortages of consumer goods encouraged pil- 
ferage of government property and the growth of the black 
market. Vodka, however, remained readily available, and alco- 
holism was an important factor in both the declining life 
expectancy and the rising infant mortality rate that the Soviet 
Union experienced in the later Brezhnev years (see Health 
Conditions, ch. 5). 

Culture and the Arts in the 1960s and 1970s 

Progress in developing the education system was mixed dur- 
ing the Brezhnev years. In the 1960s and 1970s, the percentage 
of working-age people with at least a secondary education 
steadily increased. Yet at the same time, access to higher educa- 
tion grew more limited. By 1980 the percentage of secondary- 
school graduates admitted to universities had dropped to only 
two-thirds of the 1960 figure. Students accepted into universi- 
ties increasingly came from professional families rather than 
worker or peasant households. This trend toward the perpetua- 
tion of the educated elite was not only a function of the supe- 
rior cultural background of elite families but also, in many 
cases, a result of their power to influence admissions proce- 
dures (see The Soviet Heritage, ch. 5). 

Progress in science also was variable under Brezhnev. In the 
most visible test of its advancement — the race with the United 
States to put a man on the moon — the Soviet Union failed, but 
through persistence the Soviet space program continued to 
make headway in other areas. In general, despite leads in such 
fields as metallurgy and thermonuclear fusion, Soviet science 
lagged behind that of the West, hampered in part by the slow 
development of computer technology. 

In literature and the arts, a greater variety of creative works 
became accessible to the public than had previously been avail- 
able. As in earlier decades, the state continued to determine 
what could be legally published or performed, punishing per- 
sistent offenders with exile or prison. Nonetheless, greater 
experimentation in art forms became permissible in the 1970s, 
with the result that more sophisticated and subtly critical work 
began to be produced. The regime loosened the strictures of 
socialist realism; thus, for instance, many protagonists of the 
novels of author Yuriy Trifonov concerned themselves with 
problems of daily life rather than with building socialism. In 
music, although the state continued to frown on such Western 



97 



Russia: A Country Study 

phenomena as jazz and rock, it began to permit Western musi- 
cal ensembles specializing in these genres to make limited 
appearances. But the native balladeer Vladimir Vysotskiy, 
widely popular in the Soviet Union, was denied official recogni- 
tion because of his iconoclastic lyrics (see Literature and the 
Arts, ch. 4). 

In the religious life of the Soviet Union, a resurgence in pop- 
ular devotion to the major faiths became apparent in the late 
1970s despite continued de facto disapproval on the part of the 
authorities. This revival may have been connected with the gen- 
erally growing interest of Soviet citizens in their respective 
national traditions (see The Russian Orthodox Church, ch. 4). 

The Death of Brezhnev 

Shortly after his cult of personality began to take root in the 
mid-1970s, Brezhnev began to experience periods of ill health. 
After Brezhnev suffered a stroke in 1975, Politburo members 
Mikhail Suslov and Andrey Kirilenko assumed some of the 
leader's functions for a time. Then, after another bout of poor 
health in 1978, Brezhnev delegated more of his responsibilities 
to Konstantin U. Chernenko, a longtime associate who soon 
began to be regarded as the heir apparent. His prospects of 
succeeding Brezhnev, however, were hurt by political problems 
plaguing the general secretary in the early 1980s. Not only 
were economic failures damaging Brezhnev's prestige, but 
scandals involving his family and political allies also were 
undermining his stature. Meanwhile, Yuriy V. Andropov, chief 
of the Committee for State Security (Komitet gosudarstvennoy 
bezopasnosti — KGB; see Glossary), apparently also began a 
campaign to discredit Brezhnev. Andropov took over Suslov's 
functions after Suslov died in 1982, and he used his position to 
promote himself as the next CPSU general secretary. Although 
he suffered another stroke in March 1982, Brezhnev refused to 
relinquish his office. He died that November. 

The Soviet Union paid a high price for the stability of the 
Brezhnev years. By avoiding necessary political and economic 
change, the Brezhnev leadership ensured the economic and 
political decline that the country experienced during the 
1980s. This deterioration of power and prestige stood in sharp 
contrast to the dynamism that had marked the Soviet Union's 
revolutionary beginnings. 



98 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



The Leadership Transition Period 

By 1982 the decrepitude of the Soviet regime was obvious to 
the outside world, but the system was not yet ready for drastic 
change. The transition period that separated the Brezhnev and 
Gorbachev regimes resembled the former much more than the 
latter, although hints of reform emerged as early as 1983. 

The Andropov Interregnum 

Two days passed between Brezhnev's death and the 
announcement of the election of Andropov as the new general 
secretary, suggesting to many outsiders that a power struggle 
had occurred in the Kremlin. Once in power, however, 
Andropov wasted no time in promoting his supporters. In June 
1983, he assumed the post of chairman of the Presidium of the 
Supreme Soviet, thus becoming the ceremonial head of state. 
Brezhnev had needed thirteen years to acquire this post. Dur- 
ing his short rule, Andropov replaced more than one-fifth of 
the Soviet ministers and regional party first secretaries and 
more than one-third of the department heads within the Cen- 
tral Committee apparatus. But Andropov's ability to reshape 
the top leadership was constrained by his poor health and the 
influence of his rival Chernenko, who had previously super- 
vised personnel matters in the Central Committee. 

Andropov's domestic policy leaned heavily toward restoring 
discipline and order to Soviet society. He eschewed radical 
political and economic reforms, promoting instead a small 
degree of candor in politics and mild economic experiments 
similar to those that had been associated with Kosygin in the 
mid-1960s. In tandem with such economic experiments, 
Andropov launched an anticorruption drive that reached high 
into the government and party ranks. Andropov also tried to 
boost labor discipline. Throughout the country, police stopped 
and questioned people in parks, public baths, and shops dur- 
ing working hours in an effort to reduce the rate of job absen- 
teeism. 

In foreign affairs, Andropov continued Brezhnev's policy of 
projecting Soviet power around the world. United States-Soviet 
relations, already poor since the late 1970s, began deteriorat- 
ing more rapidly in March 1983, when President Ronald W. 
Reagan described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire . . . the 
focus of evil in the modern world," and Soviet spokesmen 
responded by attacking Reagan's "bellicose, lunatic anticom- 



99 



Russia: A Country Study 

munism." In September 1983, the downing of a South Korean 
passenger airplane by a Soviet jet fighter resulted in the deaths 
of many United States citizens and further chilled United 
States-Soviet relations. United States-Soviet arms control talks 
on intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe were sus- 
pended by the Soviet Union in November 1983 in response to 
the beginning of United States deployments of intermediate- 
range nuclear weapons in Europe. The next month, Soviet offi- 
cials also walked out of negotiations on reducing the number 
of strategic nuclear weapons. 

Whether Andropov could have found a way out of the 
depths to which United States-Soviet relations had fallen, or 
whether he could have managed to lead the country out of its 
stagnation, will never be known. The Andropov regime was to 
last only fifteen months. The general secretary's health 
declined rapidly during the tense summer and fall of 1983, and 
he died in February 1984 after disappearing from public view 
for several months. 

Andropov's most significant legacy to the Soviet Union was 
his discovery and promotion of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Begin- 
ning in 1978, Gorbachev advanced in two years through the 
Kremlin hierarchy to full membership in the Politburo. His 
responsibilities for the appointment of personnel allowed him 
to make the contacts and distribute the favors necessary for a 
future bid to become general secretary. At this point, Western 
experts believed that Andropov was grooming Gorbachev as his 
successor. However, although Gorbachev acted as a deputy to 
the general secretary throughout Andropov's illness, Gor- 
bachev's time had not yet arrived when his patron died early in 
1984. 

The Chernenko Interregnum 

At seventy-two, Konstantin Chernenko was in poor health 
and unable to play an active role in policy making when he was 
chosen, after lengthy discussion, to succeed Andropov. But 
Chernenko's short time in office did bring some significant 
policy changes. The personnel changes and investigations into 
corruption undertaken by the Andropov regime came to an 
end. Chernenko advocated more investment in consumer 
goods and services and in agriculture. He also called for a 
reduction in the CPSU's micromanagement of the economy 
and greater attention to public opinion. However, KGB repres- 
sion of Soviet dissidents also increased. Stalin was rehabilitated 



100 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



as a diplomat and a military leader, and there was discussion of 
returning the name Stalingrad to the city whose name had 
been changed back to Volgograd during the anti-Stalinist wave 
of the 1950s. The one major personnel change that Chernenko 
made was the firing of the chief of the General Staff, Nikolay 
Ogarkov, who had advocated less spending on consumer goods 
in favor of greater expenditures on weapons research and 
development. 

Although Chernenko had called for renewed detente with 
the West, little progress was made toward closing the rift in 
East-West relations during his rule. The Soviet Union boy- 
cotted the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, retaliating 
for the United States boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in 
Moscow. In the late summer of 1984, the Soviet Union also pre- 
vented a visit to West Germany by East German leader Erich 
Honecker. Fighting in Afghanistan also intensified, but in the 
late autumn of 1984 the United States and the Soviet Union 
did agree to resume arms control talks in early 1985. 

The poor state of Chernenko's health made the question of 
succession an acute one. Chernenko gave Gorbachev high 
party positions that provided significant influence in the Polit- 
buro, and Gorbachev was able to gain the vital support of For- 
eign Minister Andrey Gromyko in the struggle for succession. 
When Chernenko died in March 1985, Gorbachev was well 
positioned to assume power. 

The Gorbachev Era 

In contrast to the uncertain handling of leadership vacancies 
in 1982 and 1984, upon the death of Chernenko the Politburo 
acted within hours to choose unanimously the healthy and rela- 
tively youthful Gorbachev as general secretary. In his speech 
before the Central Committee, Gorbachev announced that he 
would emphasize policies of labor discipline and increased pro- 
ductivity, calling for a "scientific and technological revolution" 
to revive heavy industry. 

Gorbachev's First Year 

Gorbachev quickly changed the composition of the highest 
CPSU and government bodies, eliminating Brezhnev-era 
appointees and promoting allies. Among the major changes in 
the July 1985 Central Committee plenum, Gorbachev pro- 
moted Georgian party first secretary Eduard Shevardnadze to 



101 



Russia: A Country Study 

full membership in the Politburo and nominated him as minis- 
ter of foreign affairs, while Boris N. Yeltsin made his national 
political debut as one of two members added to the CPSU Sec- 
retariat. In December Yeltsin advanced again, this time as first 
secretary of the Moscow city committee of the party. 

At the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1986, 
Gorbachev reaffirmed much of the existing CPSU doctrine and 
policies, giving little indication of future reforms. While calling 
for "radical reforms" in the economy, he merely reemphasized 
the need to increase production and to use more advanced 
technology in heavy industry. The new party program con- 
tained no surprises, and the congress made few changes in 
high-level CPSU bodies. Among the significant changes that 
did occur were the appointment to the Central Committee Sec- 
retariat of Aleksandr Yakovlev, an advocate of radical reform 
and the exposure of Stalin's crimes, and the promotion of 
Yeltsin to candidate membership in the Politburo. It was at this 
party gathering that Yeltsin first offended conservatives by 
denouncing the hidden privileges of the party elite. 

New Thinking: Foreign Policy under Gorbachev 

"New Thinking" was Gorbachev's slogan for a foreign policy 
based on shared moral and ethical principles to solve global 
problems rather than on Marxist-Leninist concepts of irrecon- 
cilable conflict between capitalism and communism. Rather 
than flaunt Soviet military power, Gorbachev chose to exercise 
political influence, ranging from the enhancement of diplo- 
matic relations and economic cooperation to personally greet- 
ing the public in spur-of-the-moment encounters at home and 
abroad. Gorbachev used the world media skillfully and made 
previously unimaginable concessions in the resolution of 
regional conflicts and arms negotiations. In addition to help- 
ing the Soviet Union gain wider acceptance among the family 
of nations, the New Thinking's conciliatory policies toward the 
West and the loosening of Soviet control over Eastern Europe 
ultimately led to the collapse of communism and the end of 
the Cold War. 

United States-Soviet relations began to improve soon after 
Gorbachev became general secretary. The first summit meeting 
between Reagan and Gorbachev took place in Geneva in 
November 1985. The following October, the two presidents dis- 
cussed strategic arms reduction in Reykjavik, without making 
significant progress. In the late summer of 1987, the Soviet 



102 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



Union yielded on the long-standing issue of intermediate- 
range nuclear arms in Europe; at the Washington summit that 
December, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate- 
Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty — see Glossary), elim- 
inating all intermediate- and shorter-range missiles from 
Europe. In April 1988, Afghanistan and Pakistan signed an 
accord, with the United States and Soviet Union as guarantors, 
calling for withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan by 
February 1989. The Soviet Union subsequently met the 
accord's deadline for withdrawal. 

Gorbachev also assiduously pursued closer relations with 
China. Improved Sino-Soviet relations had long depended on 
the resolution of several issues, including Soviet support for the 
Vietnamese military presence in Cambodia, the Soviet occupa- 
tion of Afghanistan, and the large numbers of Soviet troops 
and weapons deployed along China's northern border. Soviet 
moves to resolve these issues led the Chinese government to 
agree to a summit meeting with Gorbachev in Beijing in May 
1989, the first since the Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s. 

Soviet relations with Europe improved markedly during the 
Gorbachev period, mainly because of the INF Treaty and Soviet 
acquiescence to the collapse of communist rule in Eastern 
Europe during 1989-90. Since the Soviet-led invasion of Czech- 
oslovakia in 1968, the Soviet Union had adhered to the Brezh- 
nev Doctrine upholding the existing order in socialist states. 
Throughout the first half of Gorbachev's rule, the Soviet Union 
continued this policy, but in July 1989, in a speech to the Coun- 
cil of Europe (see Glossary), Gorbachev insisted on "the sover- 
eign right of each people to choose their own social system," a 
formulation that fell just short of repudiating the Brezhnev 
Doctrine. By then, however, the Soviet Union's control over its 
outer empire already was showing signs of disintegration. 

That June the communist regime in Poland had held rela- 
tively free parliamentary elections, and the communists had 
lost every contested seat. In Hungary the communist regime 
had steadily accelerated its reforms, rehabilitating Imre Nagy, 
the reform communist leader of the 1956 uprising, and dis- 
mantling fortifications along Hungary's border with Austria. At 
the end of the summer, East German vacationers began escap- 
ing to the West through this hole in the Iron Curtain. They also 
poured into the West German embassy in Prague. The East 
German state began to hemorrhage as thousands of its citizens 
sought a better and freer life in the West. 



103 



Russia: A Country Study 

With the East German government under increasing pres- 
sure to stem the outflow, East Germans who stayed behind 
demonstrated on the streets for reform. When the ouster of 
East German communist party leader Honecker failed to 
restore order, the authorities haphazardly opened the Berlin 
Wall in November 1989. The same night the Berlin Wall fell, 
the Bulgarian Communist Party deposed its longtime leader, 
Todor Zhivkov. Two weeks later, Czechoslovakia embarked on 
its "Velvet Revolution," quietly deposing the country's commu- 
nist leaders. At an impromptu summit meeting in Malta in 
December 1989, Gorbachev and United States president 
George H.W. Bush declared an end to the Cold War. 

Throughout 1990 and 1991, Soviet-controlled institutions in 
Eastern Europe were dismantled. At the January 1990 Council 
for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon — see Glossary) 
summit, several East European states called for disbanding that 
fundamental economic organization of the Soviet empire, and 
the summit participants agreed to recast their multilateral ties. 
At the next summit, in January 1991, Comecon dissolved itself. 
In March 1990, Gorbachev called for converting the Warsaw 
Pact to a political organization, but instead the body officially 
disbanded in July 1991. Soviet troops were withdrawn from 
Central Europe over the next four years — from Czechoslovakia 
and Hungary by mid-1991 and from Poland in 1993. By mid- 
summer 1990, Gorbachev and West German chancellor Hel- 
mut Kohl had worked out an agreement by which the Soviet 
Union acceded to a unified Germany within NATO. 

By the June 1990 Washington summit, the United States- 
Soviet relationship had improved to such an extent that Gor- 
bachev characterized it as almost a "partnership" between the 
two countries, and President Bush noted that the relationship 
had "moved a long, long way from the depths of the Cold War." 
In August 1990, the Soviet Union joined the United States in 
condemning the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and supported 
United Nations resolutions to restore Kuwait's sovereignty. In 
November 1990, the United States, the Soviet Union, and most 
of the European states signed the Conventional Forces in 
Europe Treaty (CFE Treaty — see Glossary), making reductions 
in battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, artillery, and fighter 
aircraft "from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains." 

During the Gorbachev years, improvements in United States- 
Soviet relations were not without complications. For example, 
in 1991 Soviet envoy Yevgeniy Primakov's attempted mediation 



104 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



of the Kuwait conflict threatened to undercut the allied coali- 
tion's demand that Iraq withdraw unconditionally from Kuwait. 
After the signing of the CFE Treaty, disputes arose over Soviet 
compliance with the treaty and the Soviet military's efforts to 
redesignate weapons or move them so that they would not be 
subject to the treaty's terms. United States pressure led to the 
resolution of these issues, and the CFE Treaty entered into 
force in 1992. The Soviet crackdown on Baltic independence 
movements in January 1991 also slowed the improvement of 
relations with the United States. 

By the summer of 1991, the United States-Soviet relationship 
showed renewed signs of momentum, when Bush and Gor- 
bachev met in Moscow to sign the Strategic Arms Reduction 
Treaty (START I— see Glossary). Under START, for the first 
time large numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles were 
slated for elimination. The treaty foresaw a reduction of 
approximately 35 percent in United States ballistic missile war- 
heads and about 50 percent in Soviet ballistic missile warheads 
within seven years of treaty ratification. Gorbachev recently had 
attended the Group of Seven (G-7; see Glossary) summit to 
discuss his proposals for Western aid. Gorbachev also estab- 
lished diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, South Korea, 
and, in the waning days of the Soviet Union's existence, Israel. 

Gorbachev's foreign policy won him much praise and admi- 
ration. For his efforts to reduce superpower tensions around 
the world, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1990. 
Ironically, as a result of frequent rumors of a conservative 
coup, the leader of the Soviet empire, whose previous rulers 
had kept opposition figures Lech Walesa and Audrey Sakharov 
from collecting their Nobel prizes, was unable to collect his 
own until June 1991. 

Perestroika 

Domestic policy in the Gorbachev era was conducted prima- 
rily under three programs, whose names became household 
words: perestroika (rebuilding — see Glossary), glasnost (public 
voicing — see Glossary), and demokratizatsiya (democratiza- 
tion — see Glossary) . The first of these was applied primarily to 
the economy, but it was meant to refer to society in general. 
Over the course of Soviet rule, society in the Soviet Union had 
grown more urbanized, better educated, and more complex. 
Old methods of exhortation and coercion were inappropriate, 
yet Brezhnev's government had denied change rather than 



105 



Russia: A Country Study 

mastered it. Despite Andropov's efforts to reintroduce some 
measure of discipline, the communist superpower remained 
stagnant. Once Gorbachev began to call for bolder reforms, 
the "acceleration" gave way to perestroika. 

Throughout the early years of his rule, Gorbachev spoke of 
perestroika, but only in early 1987 did the slogan become a full- 
scale campaign and yield practical results. At that time, mea- 
sures were adopted on the formation of cooperatives and joint 
ventures (see The Perestroika Program, ch. 6). At a plenum of 
the CPSU Central Committee in January 1987, Gorbachev 
explicitly applied the label to his program to devolve economic 
and political control. In economics, perestroika meant greater 
leeway in decision making for plant managers, allowance for a 
certain degree of individual initiative and the chance to make a 
profit. 

In January 1988, the new Law on State Enterprises went into 
effect, allowing enterprises to set many of their own prices and 
wages. Results were disappointing, however, because workers 
demanded steep wage increases. As the government printed 
more money, products fetched higher prices outside the offi- 
cial economy. Thus, goods usually sold in state stores at fixed 
prices quickly disappeared as speculators snatched them up or 
producers ceased making deliveries. By September 1988, many 
staple products could not be found even in Moscow. During 
1988-89 Gorbachev also issued orders to the oblast party com- 
mittees to cease interfering in the economy, and he cut the 
staffs of state committees and ministries involved in the econ- 
omy in order to prevent them from further tampering with it. 
Without the state and the party to hold it together and guide it, 
the economy went into free-fall (see Unforeseen Results of 
Reform, ch. 6). 

In the summer of 1990, Yeltsin, who had been elected chair- 
man of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic in May, 
backed a radical economic reform plan that would have spelled 
the end of many special interests within the party. Gorbachev 
in turn presented a much less extreme "Presidential Plan," 
which the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union passed. Yeltsin 
threatened that the Russian Republic would proceed with the 
initial radical plan, but shortly thereafter he suspended it. 

In January 1991, Gorbachev replaced Prime Minister 
Nikolay Ryzhkov, who had become identified with the regime's 
economic failures, with Valentin Pavlov, an opponent of radical 
reform. Pavlov immediately created a mass panic by withdraw- 



106 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



ing large-denomination banknotes from circulation and limit- 
ing the public's ability to convert them to lower-denomination 
notes. The move, designed to reduce the vast sums of money 
circulating and to punish "black marketeers" hoarding large 
banknotes, only intensified the people's mistrust of the Soviet 
government. The economy continued to spiral downward, and 
Gorbachev and Shevardnadze had to ask the West for financial 
aid in order to stave off collapse. Gorbachev's retreat marked 
the last time economic reform dominated the agenda of a 
Soviet government. 

Glasnost 

As perestroika was failing, the two policies designed to pro- 
mote it, glasnost and demokratizatsiya, were moving out of con- 
trol. To mobilize the populace in support of perestroika, 
Gorbachev and his aide Aleksandr Yakovlev introduced glas- 
nost, a policy of liberalized information flow aimed at publiciz- 
ing the corruption and inefficiency of Brezhnev's policies and 
colleagues — qualities that the Russian public long had recog- 
nized and accepted in its leadership but that had never been 
acknowledged by the Kremlin. Like perestroika, this policy had 
unintended results. Gorbachev had meant to shape the new 
information emanating from his government in a way that 
would encourage political participation in support of his eco- 
nomic and social programs. Instead, the process of calling into 
question the whole Stalinist system inevitably led to questions 
about the wisdom of Lenin, the man who had allowed Stalin to 
rise in the first place. Because Lenin was the undisputed 
founder of the Soviet Union, the process then moved even far- 
ther as open questioning signified that somehow the Soviet 
Union, supposedly immune to such doubts, had lost its raison 
d'etre. 

The official announcement of glasnost, scheduled for mid- 
1986, was overtaken by an event that lent new meaning to the 
term. In April 1986, a reactor explosion at the Chernobyl' 
Nuclear Power Station, located in northern Ukraine, covered 
Belorussia, the Baltics, parts of Russia, and Scandinavia with a 
cloud of radioactive dust (see table 3, Appendix). The efforts 
to contain the accident and its attendant publicity were han- 
dled with exceptional ineptitude, setting glasnost back by six 
months as official news sources scrambled to control the flow 
of information to the public. 



107 



Russia: A Country Study 



Despite the clumsy reaction of the Soviet government to the 
Chernobyl' episode, Gorbachev turned the accident in his 
favor by citing it as an example of the need for economic pere- 
stroika. Taking their cue from Gorbachev, throughout the 
Soviet Union the news media reported numerous examples of 
mismanagement of resources, waste, ecological damage, and 
the effects of this damage on public health. In the Soviet 
republics, these revelations had the unintended effect of accel- 
erating the formation of popular fronts pushing for autonomy 
or independence. 

The officially controlled phase of glasnost began the exami- 
nation of "blank pages" in Soviet history. Literary journals 
filled up with long-suppressed works by writers such as Anna 
Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Paster- 
nak, and Andrey Platonov. Newspapers and magazines carried 
stories of Stalin-era acts of repression, concentration camps, 
and mass graves. The works of Marxist theoretician Nikolay 
Bukharin, shot in 1938 for alleged rightist deviation, appeared. 
By revealing communist party crimes against the Soviet peo- 
ples, and the peasants in particular, glasnost further under- 
mined Soviet federalism and contributed to the breakup of the 
Soviet Union. 

Demokratizatsiya 

By 1987 Gorbachev had concluded that introducing his 
reforms required more than discrediting the old guard. He 
changed his strategy from trying to work through the CPSU as 
it existed and instead embraced a degree of political liberaliza- 
tion. In January 1987, he appealed over the heads of the party 
to the people and called for demokratizatsiya, the infusion of 
"democratic" elements into the Soviet Union's sterile, mono- 
lithic political process. For Gorbachev, demokratizatsiya meant 
the introduction of multicandidate — not multiparty — elections 
for local party and soviet offices. In this way, he hoped to reju- 
venate the party with progressive personnel who would carry 
out his institutional and policy reforms. The CPSU would 
retain sole custody of the ballot box. 

Despite Gorbachev's intentions, the elements of a multiparty 
system already were crystallizing. In contrast to previous Soviet 
rulers, Gorbachev had permitted the formation of unofficial 
organizations. In October 1987, the newspaper of the CPSU 
youth, Komsomol' skay a pravda, reported that informal groups, 
so-called neformaly, were "growing as fast as mushrooms in the 



108 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



rain." The concerns of these groups included the environment, 
sports, history, computers, philosophy, art, literature, and the 
preservation of historical landmarks. In August 1987, forty- 
seven neformaly held a conference in Moscow without interfer- 
ence from the authorities. In fact, one of the unofficial attend- 
ees was Yeltsin. In early 1988, some 30,000 neformaly existed in 
the Soviet Union. One year later, their number had more than 
doubled. These informal groups begot popular fronts, which 
in turn spawned political parties. The first of those parties was 
the Democratic Union, formed in May 1988. 

Gorbachev's Reform Dilemma 

Gorbachev increasingly found himself caught between criti- 
cism by conservatives who wanted to stop reform and liberals 
who wanted to accelerate it. When one of these groups pressed 
too hard, Gorbachev resorted to political methods from the 
Brezhnev era. For example, when Yeltsin-spoke out in 1987 
against the slow pace of reform, he was stripped of his Polit- 
buro and Moscow CPSU posts. At the party meeting where 
Yeltsin was removed from his post, Gorbachev personally sub- 
jected him to verbal abuse reminiscent of the Stalin era. 

Despite some setbacks, reform efforts continued. In June 
1988, at the CPSU's Nineteenth Party Conference, the first 
held since 1941, Gorbachev launched radical reforms meant to 
reduce party control of the government apparatus. He again 
called for multicandidate elections for regional and local legis- 
latures and party first secretaries and insisted on the separation 
of the government apparatus from party bodies at the regional 
level as well. In the face of an overwhelming majority of conser- 
vatives, Gorbachev still was able to rely on party discipline to 
force through acceptance of his reform proposals. Experts 
called the conference a successful step in promoting party- 
directed change from above. 

At an unprecedented emergency Central Committee ple- 
num called by Gorbachev in September 1988, three stalwart 
old-guard members left the Politburo or lost positions of 
power. Andrey Gromyko retired from the Politburo, Yegor 
Ligachev was relieved of the ideology portfolio within the Sec- 
retariat, and Boris Pugo replaced Politburo member Mikhail 
Solomentsev as chairman of the powerful Party Control Com- 
mittee. The Supreme Soviet then elected Gorbachev chairman 
of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. These changes meant 
that the Secretariat, until that time solely responsible for the 



109 



Russia: A Country Study 

development and implementation of party policies, had lost 
much of its power. 

Meaningful changes also occurred in governmental struc- 
tures. In December 1988, the Supreme Soviet approved forma- 
tion of a Congress of People's Deputies, which constitutional 
amendments had established as the Soviet Union's new legisla- 
tive body. The Supreme Soviet then dissolved itself. The 
amendments called for a smaller working body of 542 mem- 
bers, also called the Supreme Soviet, to be elected from the 
2,250-member Congress of People's Deputies. To ensure a com- 
munist majority in the new parliament, Gorbachev reserved 
one-third of the seats for the CPSU and other public organiza- 
tions. 

The March 1989 election of the Congress of People's Depu- 
ties marked the first time that voters of the Soviet Union ever 
chose the membership of a national legislative body. The 
results of the election stunned the ruling elite. Throughout the 
country, voters crossed off the ballot unopposed communist 
candidates, many of them prominent party officials, taking 
advantage of the nominal privilege of withholding approval of 
the listed candidates. However, the Congress of People's Depu- 
ties that emerged still contained 87 percent CPSU members. 
Genuine reformists won only some 300 seats. 

In May the initial session of the Congress of People's Depu- 
ties electrified the country. For two weeks on live television, 
deputies from around the country railed against every scandal 
and shortcoming of the Soviet system that could be identified. 
Speakers spared neither Gorbachev, the KGB, nor the military. 
Nevertheless, a conservative majority maintained control of the 
congress. Gorbachev was elected without opposition to the 
chairmanship of the new Supreme Soviet; then the Congress of 
People's Deputies elected a large majority of old-style party 
apparatchiks to fill the membership of its new legislative body. 
Outspoken party critic Yeltsin obtained a seat in the Supreme 
Soviet only when another deputy relinquished his position. 
The first Congress of People's Deputies was the last moment of 
real control for Gorbachev over the political life of the Soviet 
Union. 

In the summer of 1989, the first opposition bloc in the Con- 
gress of People's Deputies formed under the name of the Inter- 
regional Group. The members of this body included almost all 
of the liberal members of the opposition. Its cochairmen were 
Yeltsin, Andrey Sakharov, historian Yuriy Afanas'yev, economist 



110 



Boris Yeltsin appears before crowds during 1991 coup, Moscow. 

Courtesy Michael E. Samojeden 



111 



Russia: A Country Study 

Gavriil Popov, and academician Viktor Pal'm. Afanas'yev 
summed up the importance of this event, saying, "It is difficult 
for Gorbachev to get used to the thought that he is no longer 
the sole leader of perestroika. Other forces are already fulfilling 
that role." Afanas'yev had in mind not only the Interregional 
Group. He also was referring to the miners striking in Ukraine, 
Kazakstan, and Siberia, and the popular fronts in the Baltics, 
which were agitating for independence. In January 1990, a 
group of reformist CPSU members announced the formation 
of Democratic Platform, the first such CPSU faction since 
Lenin banned opposition groups in the 1920s. 

A primary issue for the opposition was the repeal of Article 6 
of the constitution, which prescribed the supremacy of the 
CPSU over all the institutions in society. Faced with opposition 
pressure for the repeal of Article 6 and needing allies against 
hard-liners in the CPSU, Gorbachev obtained the repeal of 
Article 6 by the February 1990 Central Committee plenum. 
Later that month, before the Supreme Soviet, he proposed the 
creation of a new office of president of the Soviet Union, to be 
elected by the Congress of People's Deputies rather than the 
people. Accordingly, in March 1990 Gorbachev was elected for 
the third time in eighteen months to a position equivalent to 
Soviet head of state. Former first deputy chairman of the 
Supreme Soviet Anatoliy Luk'yanov became chairman of the 
Supreme Soviet. 

By the time of the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress in July 
1990, the CPSU was regarded by liberals, intellectuals, and the 
general public as anachronistic and unable to lead the country. 
The CPSU branches in many of the fifteen Soviet republics 
began to split into large pro-sovereignty and pro-union fac- 
tions, further weakening central party control. 

In a series of humiliations, the CPSU had been separated 
from the government and stripped of its leading role in society 
and its function in overseeing the national economy. For sev- 
enty years, it had been the cohesive force that kept the union 
together; without the authority of the party in the Soviet center, 
the nationalities of the constituent republics pulled harder 
than ever to break away from the union. 

Nationality Ferment 

The issue Gorbachev understood least of all was that of the 
nationalities. Stalin, a Georgian, had been a commissar for 
nationalities, Khrushchev had built his career suppressing 



112 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



Ukrainian nationalism, and Brezhnev had risen through his 
work in Ukraine and Moldavia. Gorbachev was a Russian whose 
political background included little time outside Russia proper. 
His policies of glasnost and demokratizatsiya, which loosened 
authoritarian controls over society, facilitated and fueled the 
airing of national grievances in the republics. As the peoples of 
the Soviet Union began to assert their respective national char- 
acters, they clashed with ethnic minorities within their repub- 
lics and with Soviet authorities (see table 4, Appendix). 

As early as 1985, reports of clashes between Estonian and 
Russian students began seeping into the West. By 1987 the Bal- 
tic republics all had developed popular fronts and were calling 
for the restoration of their independence. In November 1988, 
Estonia issued a declaration of sovereignty, claiming that all 
Estonian laws superseded Soviet laws. Lithuania and Latvia fol- 
lowed with their own declarations of sovereignty in May and 
July 1989, respectively. 

The first major flare-up of ethnic violence came in Decem- 
ber 1986, when Gorbachev replaced the first secretary of the 
Communist Party of Kazakstan with an ethnic Russian. A large 
crowd gathered in the Kazakstani capital, Alma-Ata (renamed 
Almaty after independence), to protest the move. When a 
force of 10,000 Soviet troops was deployed in Alma-Ata to dis- 
perse the crowds, demonstrators rioted. 

In 1987 citizens of the autonomous oblast of Nagorno-Kara- 
bakh, a landlocked enclave of Armenians inside Azerbaijani 
territory, petitioned the Central Committee, requesting that 
the region be made part of the Armenian Republic. The Cen- 
tral Committee's rejection of this petition was followed by dem- 
onstrations in the autonomous oblast and similar displays of 
sympathy in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. A promise by Gor- 
bachev to establish a commission to study the Karabakh issue 
provoked outrage in Azerbaijan. After an anti-Armenian 
pogrom took place outside Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, large- 
scale fighting erupted between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, 
with both groups claiming to have been victimized by the 
Soviet regime in Moscow. In both republics, people rallied 
around popular fronts, which later became movements for 
independence from the Soviet Union. By the end of 1988, 
Georgia had developed its own popular front as well. In April 
1989, more than twenty Georgians were killed as Soviet troops 
brutally dispersed demonstrators in the Georgian capital, 
Tbilisi. 



113 



Russia: A Country Study 

Ethnic violence became a frequent occurrence throughout 
the Soviet Union — in Uzbekistan's Fergana Valley between 
Uzbeks and Meskhetian Turks, and in Georgia, when that 
republic's Abkhazian Autonomous Republic and South Osse- 
tian Autonomous Oblast sought status as separate Soviet repub- 
lics. Wherever Soviet forces intervened, they either failed to 
master the situation or contributed to the violence. In January 
1990, the Armenian Supreme Soviet enacted a measure giving 
its own legislation supremacy over Soviet law In the Armenian 
government's view, this meant that the Soviet demarcation of 
autonomous jurisdictions such as Nagorno-Karabakh no longer 
was binding on Armenians in that enclave. That vote caused 
rioting to break out in Azerbaijan. When the Soviet govern- 
ment imposed a state of emergency in the Azerbaijani capital 
of Baku and deployed 11,000 troops to end the anti-Armenian 
and anticommunist riots, at least eighty-three Azerbaijanis were 
killed. 

As it had in the republics along the Soviet southern perime- 
ter, national consciousness reawakened in Ukraine and 
Belorussia. In Ukraine the first popular front, the Ukrainian 
Popular Movement for Perestroika, known as Rukh, held its 
founding congress in September 1989. On March 4, 1990, 
Ukraine and Belorussia elected new legislatures. In both cases, 
opposition movements and coalitions made good showings 
despite ballot tampering and legal obstacles erected by authori- 
ties. 

In March 1990, Lithuania declared independence, and Gor- 
bachev imposed a partial economic blockade in response. That 
same year, riots also took place in Tajikistan and in the Kyrgyz 
city of Osh, leading to hundreds of deaths and the imposition 
of a state of emergency in several areas of Kyrgyzstan. The Mol- 
davian government also declared a state of emergency when 
Gagauz separatists tried to declare the independence of their 
region, prompting Gorbachev to deploy troops from the Minis- 
try of Internal Affairs in Moldavia. Violence between ethic 
Romanian Moldavians and Russians broke out in the Transnis- 
tria region of the republic a few weeks later. In October 1990, 
multiparty legislative elections in Georgia resulted in victory 
for the pro-independence bloc, and the new Supreme Soviet in 
Tbilisi began to move toward declaring independence. The 
major challenge to Gorbachev, however, came not from the 
non-Russian constituent republics but from Russia itself. 



114 



Tanks on Red Square during 1991 coup, Moscow 
Courtesy Michael E. Samojeden 



Many institutions that existed in the other constituent 
republics did not exist in Russia. Russia had no television sta- 
tions addressing specifically Russian interests. Unlike other 
republics, the Russian Republic had no academy of sciences 
(see Glossary). It also lacked a ministry of internal affairs, a 
republic-level KGB, and a Russian communist party. Between 
1918 and 1925, the GPSU had been called the Russian Commu- 
nist Party (Bolshevik), but it was known as the All-Union Com- 
munist Party (Bolshevik) from 1925 until 1952 when Stalin 
changed the name to the Communist Party of the Soviet 
Union. 

Such a policy by the communists had aimed at tying the Rus- 
sian people as closely as possible to the Soviet state. The strat- 
egy was based on the belief that, lacking internal security forces 
and the political base that would be furnished by a Russian 
communist party, the Russians would be unlikely to engage in 



115 



Russia: A Country Study 

opposition to the system. By 1990, however, Russians were 
beginning to think differently. Although the predominantly 
Russian CPSU promoted policies of Russification to facilitate 
its rule and to placate the large Russian population, in the late 
1980s average Russians increasingly saw the CPSU's efforts to 
co-opt and coerce the other nationalities as debasing the Rus- 
sian language and culture and depleting Russian natural and 
financial resources. Gorbachev viewed this growing body of 
opinion with fear, but Yeltsin, who had been learning from the 
Baltic republics' struggle, saw it as providing an opportunity. 
Yeltsin took up the cause of Russia's rights within the union, 
making alliances with both Russian nationalists and Russian lib- 
erals. 

In July 1990, Gorbachev finally acceded to the founding of 
the Russian Communist Party, which became a bastion of Rus- 
sian nationalist conservatism and opposition to Gorbachev. 
The party failed to gain control of the Russian Republic's legis- 
lative bodies, however. Instead, it faced formidable competi- 
tion in the Russian Congress of People's Deputies, which by 
that time was dominated by Yeltsin. Yeltsin's May 1990 election 
as chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet had made him the 
de facto president of the Russian Republic, just as Gorbachev's 
election as chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet 
Union had made him de facto president of the country in 
1989. 

Yeltsin's new position enabled him to pose a serious chal- 
lenge to Gorbachev. On June 11, 1990, Russia issued its declara- 
tion of sovereignty, the first republic to do so after the Baltic 
states. This move challenged Soviet jurisdiction over the very 
heart of the union. By the end of November, another nine 
republics had followed Russia's lead. The last instance of coop- 
eration between Yeltsin and Gorbachev in this period was their 
effort in the fall of 1990 to draft a common economic policy. 
However, Gorbachev's desire to protect the favored position of 
the military-industrial establishment caused the effort to 
founder and the two men's relationship to deteriorate rapidly. 

As the leader of the most populous and richest union repub- 
lic, Yeltsin became the champion of all the republics' rights 
against control from the center. However, he did not advocate 
the breakup of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin originally hoped for 
the creation of a new federation anchored by bilateral and mul- 
tilateral treaties between and among the union republics, with 
Russia as the preeminent member. When Soviet forces cracked 



116 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



down on the Baltic states in January 1991, Yeltsin went to Esto- 
nia in a show of support for the Baltics, signing agreements 
with the Baltic states that recognized their borders and promis- 
ing assistance in the event of an attack on them from the Soviet 
center. 

In June 1990, Gorbachev already had initiated talks on a new 
union treaty. The Supreme Soviet debated provisions of a draft 
union treaty throughout 1990 and into 1991. With tensions 
increasing between the center and the constituent republics, 
Gorbachev scheduled a national referendum in March 1991. 
The Baltic states, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldavia refused to 
participate. In the Russian referendum, Yeltsin included a 
question on the creation of a Russian presidential post. The 
overall referendum vote gave approval to Gorbachev's position 
on preserving the union, but the voters in Russia also approved 
Yeltsin's call for a president elected directly by the people. On 
June 12, Yeltsin, whose popularity had risen steadily as Gor- 
bachev's plummeted, was elected president of the Russian 
Republic with 57 percent of the vote. 

The August Coup and Its Aftermath 

Gorbachev hoped that he could at least hold the union 
together in a decentralized form. However, in the eyes of the 
remaining CPSU conservatives, he had gone too far because 
his new union treaty dispersed too much of the central govern- 
ment's power to the republics. On August 19, 1991, one day 
before Gorbachev and a group of republic leaders were due to 
sign the union treaty, a group calling itself the State Emergency 
Committee attempted to seize power in Moscow. The group 
announced that Gorbachev was ill and had been relieved of his 
state post as president. Soviet Union vice president Gennadiy 
Yanayev was named acting president. The committee's eight 
members included KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, Inter- 
nal Affairs Minister Pugo, Defense Minister Dmitriy Yazov, and 
Prime Minister Pavlov, all of whom had risen to their posts 
under Gorbachev. 

Large public demonstrations against the coup leaders took 
place in Moscow and Leningrad, and divided loyalties in the 
defense and security establishments prevented the armed 
forces from crushing the resistance that Yeltsin led from Rus- 
sia's parliament building. On August 21, the coup collapsed, 
and Gorbachev returned to Moscow. 



117 



Russia: A Country Study 

Once back in Moscow, Gorbachev acted as if he were oblivi- 
ous to the changes that had occurred in the preceding three 
days. As he returned to power, Gorbachev promised to purge 
conservatives from the CPSU. He resigned as general secretary 
but remained president of the Soviet Union. The coup's failure 
brought a series of collapses of all-union institutions. Yeltsin 
took control of the central broadcasting company and key eco- 
nomic ministries and agencies, and in November he banned 
the CPSU and the Russian Communist Party. 

By December 1991, all of the republics had declared inde- 
pendence, and negotiations over a new union treaty began 
anew. Both the Soviet Union and the United States had recog- 
nized the independence of the Baltic republics in September. 
For several months after his return to Moscow, Gorbachev and 
his aides made futile attempts to restore stability and legitimacy 
to the central institutions. In November seven republics agreed 
to a new union treaty that would form a confederation called 
the Union of Sovereign States. But Ukraine was unrepresented 
in that group, and Yeltsin soon withdrew to seek additional 
advantages for Russia. In the absence of the CPSU, there was 
no way to keep the Soviet Union together. From Yeltsin's per- 
spective, Russia's participation in another union would be 
senseless because inevitably Russia would assume responsibility 
for the increasingly severe economic woes of the other repub- 
lics. 

On December 8, Yeltsin and the leaders of Belarus (which 
adopted that name in August 1991) and Ukraine met at Minsk, 
the capital of Belarus, where they created the Commonwealth 
of Independent States (CIS — see Glossary) and annulled the 
1922 union treaty that had established the Soviet Union. 
Another signing ceremony was held in Alma-Ata on December 
21 to expand the CIS to include the five republics of Central 
Asia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Georgia did not join until 1993; 
the three Baltic republics never joined. On December 25, 1991, 
the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Exactly six years after Gor- 
bachev had appointed Boris Yeltsin to run the Moscow city 
committee of the party, Yeltsin now was president of the largest 
successor state to the Soviet Union. 

* * * 

A number of comprehensive texts cover the history of the 
Soviet Union through 1985. Most worthy of recommendation 



118 



Historical Setting: 1917 to 1991 



to the nonspecialist is A History of Russia and the Soviet Union by 
David MacKenzie and Michael W. Curran. A thoughtful survey 
can be found in Geoffrey A. Hosking's The First Socialist Society. 
Other general works covering the Soviet period include Robert 
V. Daniels's Russia: The Roots of Confrontation, Donald W. 
Treadgold's Twentieth Century Russia, and Adam B. Ulam's A 
History of Soviet Russia. Several excellent books cover the various 
phases of Soviet history. The recognized classic on the revolu- 
tionary and Civil War period is William H. Chamberlin's The 
Russian Revolution, 1917-1921. Recommended for the Stalin 
era is Stalin: The Man and His Era by Adam B. Ulam. For Khru- 
shchev, the reader is referred to Carl A. Linden's Khrushchev 
and the Soviet Leadership, 1957-1964. Khrushchev's two-volume 
memoir, Khrushchev Remembers, makes fascinating reading. 
Harry Gelman's The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Detente 
treats the Brezhnev period in detail. 

Significant overviews of all or part of the post-Brezhnev era 
include Donald R. Kelley's Soviet Politics from Brezhnev to Gor- 
bachev, Stephen White's Gorbachev in Power, and John B. Dun- 
lop's The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire. Important 
articles include Amy Knight's "Andropov: Myths and Realities"; 
Marc Zlotnik's "Chernenko Succeeds"; and Jerry Hough's 
"Andropov's First Year." Other useful sources are Martin Malia's 
The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991, 
David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb, and Helene Carrere 
d'Encausse's The End of the Soviet Empire. (For further informa- 
tion and complete citations, see Bibliography.) 



119 



Chapter 3. Physical Environment and Population 




A peasant named Ivan rides a humpbacked pony, which has very long ears, on 
a quest to the Palace of the Moon (design from lacquer box made in village of 
Palekh). 



CURVING AROUND THE NORTH POLE in a huge arc, Rus- 
sia (the Russian Federation) spans almost half the globe from 
east to west and about 4,000 kilometers from north to south. 
Divided into eleven time zones, Russia is by far the world's larg- 
est country. It occupies much of Eastern Europe and northern 
Asia. The country's terrain is diverse, with extensive stands of 
forest, numerous mountain ranges, and vast plains. On and 
below the surface of the land are extensive reserves of natural 
resources that provide the nation with enormous potential 
wealth. Russia ranks sixth in the world in population, trailing 
China, India, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil. The 
population is as varied as the terrain. Slavs (Russians, Ukraini- 
ans, and Belarusians) are the most numerous of the more than 
100 European and Asiatic nationalities. 

The Ural Mountains, which extend more than 2,200 kilome- 
ters from north to south, form the boundary separating the 
unequal European and Asian sectors of Russia. The continen- 
tal divide continues another 1,375 kilometers from the south- 
ern end of the Ural Mountains through the Caspian Sea and 
along the Caucasus Mountains. Asian Russia is about as large as 
China and India combined, occupying roughly three-quarters 
of the nation's territory. But it is the European western quarter 
that is home to more than 75 percent of Russia's inhabitants. 
This acutely uneven distribution of human and natural 
resources is a striking feature of Russian geography and popu- 
lation. Despite government attempts to settle people in 
sparsely populated Asian areas abundant in resources, this 
imbalance persists. Meanwhile, depletion of water and fuel 
resources in the European part outpaces exploitation of 
resource-rich Siberia, the famously forbidding land stretching 
from the Urals to the Pacific Ocean. From 1970 to 1989, the 
campaign to settle and exploit western Siberia's plentiful fuel 
and energy supplies was expensive and only partially successful. 
Since glasnost (see Glossary), revelations of extreme environ- 
mental degradation have tarnished the image of the Siberian 
development program. 

The Soviet and Russian environmental record has been gen- 
erally dismal. Seven decades of Soviet rule left irradiated land- 
scapes and marine ecosystems, a desiccated inland sea, 
befouled rivers, and toxic urban air as reminders of the conse- 



123 



Russia: A Country Study 

quences of seeking industrialization at any price. Russia and 
the other Soviet republics responded to the pressures of the 
long and costly Cold War by developing a defense-oriented, 
production-obsessed economy amid ecological devastation. 
Without a genuine environmental movement until its final 
years, the Soviet Union left in its wake an environmental catas- 
trophe that will take decades and perhaps trillions of dollars to 
repair even partially. 

During the Soviet period, natural and geopolitical phenom- 
ena shaped the characteristics of Russia's population. In that 
period, wars, epidemics, famines, and state-sanctioned mass 
killings claimed millions of victims. Before the 1950s, each 
decade brought to the population of the former Russian 
Republic some form of cataclysmic demographic event. 
Demographers have calculated that a total of 33.6 million peo- 
ple died from a brutal collectivization process and the famine 
that ensued in the 1920s and 1930s, the Great Terror of Joseph 
V. Stalin (in office 1927-53) in the 1930s, and World War II 
(see Transformation and Terror, ch. 2). Although those events 
ended more than fifty years ago, such disasters have had signifi- 
cant long-term effects. In age-groups above forty-five, women 
greatly outnumber men. 

In the 1990s, demographers and policy makers are con- 
cerned about alarming trends such as a plummeting birthrate, 
increasing mortality among able-bodied males, and declining 
life expectancy. Another demographic concern is the millions 
of Russians remaining in the other newly independent coun- 
tries of the former Soviet Union, called by policy makers the 
"near abroad." These Russians or their forebears resettled 
under a variety of conditions. Russian authorities fear that 
social and ethnic upheaval in those states could trigger the 
mass migration of Russians into the federation, which is ill 
equipped to integrate such numbers into its economy and soci- 
ety. By the early 1990s, Russia had already become the destina- 
tion of greatly increased numbers of immigrants. 

In 1995 the population of the Russian Federation was esti- 
mated at slightly less than 150 million. Whereas Russians had 
accounted for only about 50 percent of the Soviet Union's pop- 
ulation, in Russia they are a clear majority of 82 percent of the 
population in what remains a distinctively multicultural, multi- 
national state (see Ethnic Composition, ch. 4). 



124 



Physical Environment and Population 

Physical Environment 

Russia's topography includes the world's deepest lake and 
Europe's highest mountain and longest river. The topography 
and climate, however, resemble those of the northernmost por- 
tion of the North American continent. The northern forests 
and the plains bordering them to the south find their closest 
counterparts in the Yukon Territory and in the wide swath of 
land extending across most of Canada. The terrain, climate, 
and settlement patterns of Siberia are similar to those of Alaska 
and Canada. 

Global Position and Boundaries 

Located in the northern and middle latitudes of the North- 
ern Hemisphere, most of Russia is much closer to the North 
Pole than to the equator. Individual country comparisons are 
of little value in gauging Russia's enormous size (slightly less 
than twice that of the United States) and diversity. The coun- 
try's 17.1 million square kilometers include one-eighth of the 
earth's inhabited land area. Its European portion, which occu- 
pies a substantial part of continental Europe, is home to most 
of Russia's industrial and agricultural activity. It was here, 
roughly between the Dnepr River and the Ural Mountains, that 
the Russian Empire took shape after the principality of Mus- 
covy gradually expanded eastward to reach the Pacific Ocean 
in the seventeenth century (see Expansion and Westernization, 
ch. 1). 

Russia extends about 9,000 kilometers from westernmost 
Kaliningrad Oblast, the now-isolated region cut off from the 
rest of Russia by the independence of Belarus, Latvia, and 
Lithuania, to Ratmanova Island (Big Diomede Island) in the 
Bering Strait. This distance is roughly equivalent to the dis- 
tance from Edinburgh, Scotland, east to Nome, Alaska. 
Between the northern tip of the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya 
to the southern tip of the Republic of Dagestan on the Caspian 
Sea is about 3,800 kilometers of extremely varied, often inhos- 
pitable terrain. 

Extending for 57,792 kilometers, the Russian border is the 
world's longest — and, in the post-Soviet era, a source of sub- 
stantial concern for national security. Along the 20,139-kilome- 
ter land frontier, Russia has boundaries with fourteen 
countries. New neighbors are eight countries of the near 
abroad — Kazakstan in Asia, and, in Europe, Estonia, Latvia, 



125 



Russia: A Country Study 

Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Other 
neighbors include the Democratic People's Republic of Korea 
(North Korea), China, Mongolia, Poland, Norway, and Fin- 
land. And, at the far northeastern extremity, eighty-six kilome- 
ters of the Bering Strait separate Russia from a fifteenth 
neighbor — the United States (see fig. 6). 

Approximately two-thirds of the frontier is bounded by 
water. Virtually all of the lengthy northern coast is well above 
the Arctic Circle; except for the port of Murmansk, which 
receives the warm currents of the Gulf Stream, that coast is 
locked in ice much of the year. Thirteen seas and parts of three 
oceans — the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific — wash Russian shores. 

Administrative and Territorial Divisions 

With a few changes of status, most of the Soviet-era adminis- 
trative and territorial divisions of the Russian Republic were 
retained in constituting the Russian Federation. In 1996 there 
were eighty-nine administrative territorial divisions: twenty-one 
republics, six territories (kraya; sing., kray), forty-nine oblasts 
(provinces), one autonomous oblast, and ten autonomous 
regions (okruga; sing., okrug). The cities of Moscow and St. 
Petersburg have separate status at the oblast level. Population 
size and location have been the determinants for a region's 
designation among those categories. The smallest political divi- 
sion is the rayon (pi., rayony), a unit roughly equivalent to the 
county in the United States. 

The republics include a wide variety of peoples, including 
northern Europeans, Tatars, Caucasus peoples, and indigenous 
Siberians. The largest administrative territorial divisions are in 
Siberia. Located in east-central Siberia, the Republic of Sakha, 
formerly known as Yakutia, is the largest administrative division 
in the federation, twice the size of Alaska. Second in size is 
Krasnoyarsk Territory, which is southwest of Sakha in Siberia. 
Kaliningrad Oblast, which is somewhat larger than Connecti- 
cut, is the smallest oblast, and it is the only noncontiguous part 
of Russia. The two most populous administrative territorial 
divisions, Moscow Oblast and Krasnodar Territory, are in Euro- 
pean Russia. 

Topography and Drainage 

Geographers traditionally divide the vast territory of Russia 
into five natural zones: the tundra zone; the taiga, or forest, 
zone; the steppe, or plains, zone; the arid zone; and the moun- 



126 



1 V w 

, verim UNITED 



"Bering Sea 




3vskaya 

Jtka 

LA Ocean 



KURIL 
SAKHALIN ISLANDS 1 
hJSLAND 



m 

: 



s •> 

ill 

/ NORTH 
KOREA 



iivostok 






Physical Environment and Population 

tain zone. Most of Russia consists of two plains (the East Euro- 
pean Plain and the West Siberian Plain), two lowlands (the 
North Siberian and the Kolyma, in far northeastern Siberia), 
two plateaus (the Central Siberian Plateau and the Lena Pla- 
teau to its east) , and a series of mountainous areas mainly con- 
centrated in the extreme northeast or extending intermittently 
along the southern border. 

Topography 

The East European Plain encompasses most of European 
Russia. The West Siberian Plain, which is the world's largest, 
extends east from the Urals to the Yenisey River. Because the 
terrain and vegetation are relatively uniform in each of the nat- 
ural zones, Russia presents an illusion of uniformity. Neverthe- 
less, Russian territory contains all the major vegetation zones 
of the world except a tropical rain forest. 

About 10 percent of Russia is tundra, or treeless, marshy 
plain. The tundra is Russia's northernmost zone, stretching 
from the Finnish border in the west to the Bering Strait in the 
east, then running south along the Pacific coast to the north- 
ern Kamchatka Peninsula. The zone is known for its herds of 
wild reindeer, for so-called white nights (dusk at midnight, 
dawn shortly thereafter) in summer, and for days of total dark- 
ness in winter. The long, harsh winters and lack of sunshine 
allow only mosses, lichens, and dwarf willows and shrubs to 
sprout low above the barren permafrost (see Glossary). 
Although several powerful Siberian rivers traverse this zone as 
they flow northward to the Arctic Ocean, partial and intermit- 
tent thawing hamper drainage of the numerous lakes, ponds, 
and swamps of the tundra. Frost weathering is the most impor- 
tant physical process here, gradually shaping a landscape that 
was severely modified by glaciation in the last ice age. Less than 
1 percent of Russia's population lives in this zone. The fishing 
and port industries of the northwestern Kola Peninsula and the 
huge oil and gas fields of northwestern Siberia are the largest 
employers in the tundra. With a population of 180,000, the 
industrial frontier city of Noril'sk is second in population to 
Murmansk among Russia's settlements above the Arctic Circle. 

The taiga, which is the world's largest forest region, contains 
mostly coniferous spruce, fir, cedar, and larch. This is the larg- 
est natural zone of the Russian Federation, an area about the 
size of the United States. In the northeastern portion of this 
belt, long and severe winters frequently bring the world's cold- 



129 



Russia: A Country Study 

est temperatures for inhabited areas. The taiga zone extends in 
a broad band across the middle latitudes, stretching from the 
Finnish border in the west to the Verkhoyansk Range in north- 
eastern Siberia and as far south as the southern shores of Lake 
Baikal. Isolated sections of taiga also exist along mountain 
ranges such as the southern part of the Urals and in the Amur 
River valley bordering China in the Far East. About 33 percent 
of Russia's population lives in this zone, which, together with a 
band of mixed forest to its south, includes most of the Euro- 
pean part of Russia and the ancestral lands of the earliest Slavic 
settlers. 

The steppe has long been depicted as the typical Russian 
landscape. It is a broad band of treeless, grassy plains, inter- 
rupted by mountain ranges, extending from Hungary across 
Ukraine, southern Russia, and Kazakstan before ending in 
Manchuria. Most of the Soviet Union's steppe zone was located 
in the Ukrainian and Kazak republics; the much smaller Rus- 
sian steppe is located mainly between those nations, extending 
southward between the Black and Caspian seas before blend- 
ing into the increasingly desiccated territory of the Republic of 
Kalmykia. In a country of extremes, the steppe zone provides 
the most favorable conditions for human settlement and agri- 
culture because of its moderate temperatures and normally 
adequate levels of sunshine and moisture. Even here, however, 
agricultural yields are sometimes adversely affected by unpre- 
dictable levels of precipitation and occasional catastrophic 
droughts. 

Russia's mountain ranges are located principally along its 
continental divide (the Urals), along the southwestern border 
(the Caucasus), along the border with Mongolia (the eastern 
and western Sayan ranges and the western extremity of the 
Altay Range), and in eastern Siberia (a complex system of 
ranges in the northeastern corner of the country and forming 
the spine of the Kamchatka Peninsula, and lesser mountains 
extending along the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan). 
Russia has nine major mountain ranges. In general, the eastern 
half of the country is much more mountainous than the west- 
ern half, the interior of which is dominated by low plains. The 
traditional dividing line between the east and the west is the 
Yenisey Valley. In delineating the western edge of the Central 
Siberian Plateau from the West Siberian Plain, the Yenisey runs 
from near the Mongolian border northward into the Arctic 
Ocean west of the Taymyr Peninsula. 



130 



Physical Environment and Population 

The Urals are the most famous of the country's mountain 
ranges because they form the natural boundary between 
Europe and Asia and contain valuable mineral deposits. The 
range extends about 2,100 kilometers from the Arctic Ocean to 
the northern border of Kazakstan. In terms of elevation and 
vegetation, however, the Urals are far from impressive, and 
they do not serve as a formidable natural barrier. Several low 
passes provide major transportation routes through the Urals 
eastward from Europe. The highest peak, Mount Narodnaya, is 
1,894 meters, lower than the highest of the Appalachian Moun- 
tains. 

To the east of the Urals is the West Siberian Plain, which cov- 
ers more than 2.5 million square kilometers, stretching about 
1,900 kilometers from west to east and about 2,400 kilometers 
from north to south. With more than half its territory below 
500 meters in elevation, the plain contains some of the world's 
largest swamps and floodplains. Most of the plain's population 
lives in the drier section south of 55° north latitude. 

The region directly east of the West Siberian Plain is the 
Central Siberian Plateau, which extends eastward from the 
Yenisey River valley to the Lena River valley. The region is 
divided into several plateaus, with elevations ranging between 
320 and 740 meters; the highest elevation is about 1,800 
meters, in the northern Putoran Mountains. The plain is 
bounded on the south by the Baikal mountain system and on 
the north by the North Siberian Lowland, an extension of the 
West Siberian Plain extending into the Taymyr Peninsula on 
the Arctic Ocean. 

Truly alpine terrain appears in the southern mountain 
ranges. Between the Black and Caspian seas, the Caucasus 
Mountains rise to impressive heights, forming a boundary 
between Europe and Asia. One of the peaks, Mount Elbrus, is 
the highest point in Europe, at 5,642 meters. The geological 
structure of the Caucasus extends to the northwest as the 
Crimean and Carpathian mountains and southeastward into 
Central Asia as the Tian Shan and Pamirs. The Caucasus Moun- 
tains create an imposing natural barrier between Russia and its 
neighbors to the southwest, Georgia and Azerbaijan. 

In the mountain system west of Lake Baikal in south-central 
Siberia, the highest elevations are 3,300 meters in the Western 
Sayan, 3,200 meters in the Eastern Sayan, and 4,500 meters at 
Mount Belukha in the Altay Range. The Eastern Sayan reach 
nearly to the southern shore of Lake Baikal; at the lake, there is 



131 



Russia: A Country Study 

an elevation difference of more than 4,500 meters between the 
nearest mountain, 2,840 meters high, and the deepest part of 
the lake, which is 1,700 meters below sea level. The mountain 
systems east of Lake Baikal are lower, forming a complex of 
minor ranges and valleys that reaches from the lake to the 
Pacific coast. The maximum height of the Stanovoy Range, 
which runs west to east from northern Lake Baikal to the Sea of 
Okhotsk, is 2,550 meters. To the south of that range is south- 
eastern Siberia, whose mountains reach 2,800 feet. Across the 
Tatar Strait from that region is Sakhalin Island, where the high- 
est elevation is about 1,700 meters. 

Northeastern Siberia, north of the Stanovoy Range, is an 
extremely mountainous region. The long Kamchatka Penin- 
sula, which juts southward into the Sea of Okhotsk, includes 
many volcanic peaks, some of which still are active. The highest 
is the 4,750-meter Klyuchevskaya Volcano, the highest point in 
the Russian Far East. The volcanic chain continues from the 
southern tip of Kamchatka southward through the Kuril 
Islands chain and into Japan. Kamchatka also is one of Russia's 
two centers of seismic activity (the other is the Caucasus). In 
1994 a major earthquake largely destroyed the oil-processing 
city of Neftegorsk. 

Drainage 

Russia is a water-rich country. The earliest settlements in the 
country sprang up along the rivers, where most of the urban 
population continues to live. The Volga, Europe's longest river, 
is by far Russia's most important commercial waterway. Four of 
the country's thirteen largest cities are located on its banks: 
Nizhniy Novgorod, Samara, Kazan', and Volgograd. The Kama 
River, which flows west from the southern Urals to join the 
Volga in the Republic of Tatarstan, is a second key European 
water system whose banks are densely populated. 

Russia has thousands of rivers and inland bodies of water, 
providing it with one of the world's largest surface-water 
resources. However, most of Russia's rivers and streams belong 
to the Arctic drainage basin, which lies mainly in Siberia but 
also includes part of European Russia. Altogether, 84 percent 
of Russia's surface water is located east of the Urals in rivers 
flowing through sparsely populated territory and into the Arc- 
tic and Pacific oceans. In contrast, areas with the highest con- 
centrations of population, and therefore the highest demand 
for water supplies, tend to have the warmest climates and high- 



132 



Physical Environment and Population 

est rates of evaporation. As a result, densely populated areas 
such as the Don and Kuban' river basins north of the Caucasus 
have barely adequate (or in some cases inadequate) water 
resources. 

Forty of Russia's rivers longer than 1,000 kilometers are east 
of the Urals, including the three major rivers that drain Siberia 
as they flow northward to the Arctic Ocean: the Irtysh-Ob' sys- 
tem (totaling 5,380 kilometers), the Yenisey (4,000 kilometers), 
and the Lena (3,630 kilometers). The basins of those river sys- 
tems cover about 8 million square kilometers, discharging 
nearly 50,000 cubic meters of water per second into the Arctic 
Ocean. The northward flow of these rivers means that source 
areas thaw before the areas downstream, creating vast swamps 
such as the 48,000-square-kilometer Vasyugane Swamp in the 
center of the West Siberian Plain. The same is true of other 
river systems, including the Pechora and the North Dvina in 
Europe and the Kolyma and the Indigirka in Siberia. Approxi- 
mately 10 percent of Russian territory is classified as swamp- 
land. 

A number of other rivers drain Siberia from eastern moun- 
tain ranges into the Pacific Ocean. The Amur River and its 
main tributary, the Ussuri, form a long stretch of the winding 
boundary between Russia and China. The Amur system drains 
most of southeastern Siberia. Three basins drain European 
Russia. The Dnepr, which flows mainly through Belarus and 
Ukraine, has its headwaters in the hills west of Moscow. The 
1,860-kilometer Don originates in the Central Russian Upland 
south of Moscow and then flows into the Sea of Azov and the 
Black Sea at Rostov-na-Donu. The Volga is the third and by far 
the largest of the European systems, rising in the Valday Hills 
west of Moscow and meandering southeastward for 3,510 kilo- 
meters before emptying into the Caspian Sea. Altogether, the 
Volga system drains about 1.4 million square kilometers. 
Linked by several canals, European Russia's rivers long have 
been a vital transportation system; the Volga system still carries 
two-thirds of Russia's inland water traffic (see Transportation, 
ch. 6). 

Russia's inland bodies of water are chiefly a legacy of exten- 
sive glaciation. In European Russia, the largest lakes are 
Ladoga and Onega northeast of St. Petersburg, Lake Peipus on 
the Estonian border, and the Rybinsk Reservoir north of Mos- 
cow Smaller man-made reservoirs, 160 to 320 kilometers long, 
are on the Don, the Kama, and the Volga rivers. Many large res- 



133 



Russia: A Country Study 



ervoirs also have been constructed on the Siberian rivers; the 
Bratsk Reservoir northwest of Lake Baikal is one of the world's 
largest. 

The most prominent of Russia's bodies of fresh water is Lake 
Baikal, the world's deepest and most capacious freshwater lake. 
Lake Baikal alone holds 85 percent of the freshwater resources 
of the lakes in Russia and 20 percent of the world's total. It 
extends 632 kilometers in length and fifty-nine kilometers 
across at its widest point. Its maximum depth is 1,713 meters. 
Numerous smaller lakes dot the northern regions of the Euro- 
pean and Siberian plains. The largest of these are lakes Beloye, 
Topozero, Vyg, and Il'men' in the European northwest and 
Lake Chany in southwestern Siberia. 

Climate 

Russia has a largely continental climate because of its sheer 
size and compact configuration. Most of its land is more than 
400 kilometers from the sea, and the center is 3,840 kilometers 
from the sea. In addition, Russia's mountain ranges, predomi- 
nantly to the south and the east, block moderating tempera- 
tures from the Indian and Pacific oceans, but European Russia 
and northern Siberia lack such topographic protection from 
the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans. 

Because only small parts of Russia are south of 50° north lati- 
tude and more than half of the country is north of 60° north 
latitude, extensive regions experience six months of snow cover 
over subsoil that is permanently frozen to depths as far as sev- 
eral hundred meters. The average yearly temperature of nearly 
all of European Russia is below freezing, and the average for 
most of Siberia is freezing or below. Most of Russia has only two 
seasons, summer and winter, with very short intervals of moder- 
ation between them. Transportation routes, including entire 
railroad lines, are redirected in winter to traverse rock-solid 
waterways and lakes. Some areas constitute important excep- 
tions to this description, however: the moderate maritime cli- 
mate of Kaliningrad Oblast on the Baltic Sea is similar to that 
of the American Northwest; the Russian Far East, under the 
influence of the Pacific Ocean, has a monsoonal climate that 
reverses the direction of wind in summer and winter, sharply 
differentiating temperatures; and a narrow, subtropical band 
of territory provides Russia's most popular summer resort area 
on the Black Sea. 



134 



Collective farm in Kultuk, at 
southern tip of Lake Baikal 
Courtesy Donna Kostka 




In winter an intense high-pressure system causes winds to 
blow from the south and the southwest in all but the Pacific 
region of the Russian landmass; in summer a low-pressure sys- 
tem brings winds from the north and the northwest to most of 
the landmass. That meteorological combination reduces the 
wintertime temperature difference between north and south. 
Thus, average January temperatures are -8°C in St. Petersburg, 
-27°C in the West Siberian Plain, and -43°C at Yakutsk (in east- 
central Siberia, at approximately the same latitude as St. Peters- 
burg), while the winter average on the Mongolian border, 
whose latitude is some 10° farther south, is barely warmer. Sum- 
mer temperatures are more affected by latitude, however; the 
Arctic islands average 4°C, and the southernmost regions aver- 
age 20°C. Russia's potential for temperature extremes is typi- 
fied by the national record low of -94°C, recorded at 
Verkhoyansk in north-central Siberia and the record high of 
38°C, recorded at several southern stations. 

The long, cold winter has a profound impact on almost 
every aspect of life in the Russian Federation. It affects where 
and how long people live and work, what kinds of crops are 
grown, and where they are grown (no part of the country has a 
year-round growing season). The length and severity of the 
winter, together with the sharp fluctuations in the mean sum- 



135 



Russia: A Country Study 

mer and winter temperatures, impose special requirements on 
many branches of the economy. In regions of permafrost, 
buildings must be constructed on pilings, machinery must be 
made of specially tempered steel, and transportation systems 
must be engineered to perform reliably in extremely low and 
extremely high temperatures. In addition, during extended 
periods of darkness and cold, there are increased demands for 
energy, health care, and textiles. 

Because Russia has little exposure to ocean influences, most 
of the country receives low to moderate amounts of precipita- 
tion. Highest precipitation falls in the northwest, with amounts 
decreasing from northwest to southeast across European Rus- 
sia. The wettest areas are the small, lush subtropical region 
adjacent to the Caucasus and along the Pacific coast. Along the 
Baltic coast, average annual precipitation is 600 millimeters, 
and in Moscow it is 525 millimeters. An average of only twenty 
millimeters falls along the Russian-Kazak border, and as little as 
fifteen millimeters may fall along Siberia's Arctic coastline. 
Average annual days of snow cover, a critical factor for agricul- 
ture, depends on both latitude and altitude. Cover varies from 
forty to 200 days in European Russia, and from 120 to 250 days 
in Siberia. 

Environmental Problems 

With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moscow and 
the Russian Federation escaped direct responsibility for some 
of the world's worst environmental devastation because many 
of the Soviet disaster sites were now in other countries. Since 
then, however, the gravity and complexity of threats to Russia's 
own environment have become clear. During the first years of 
transition and reform, Russia's response to those conditions 
was sporadic and often ineffectual. 

Only in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a linkage identi- 
fied between the increasingly poor state of human health and 
the destruction of ecosystems in Russia. When that linkage was 
established, a new word was coined to sum up the environmen- 
tal record of the Soviet era — "ecocide." 

Environmental Conditions 

In the Soviet system, environmentally threatening incidents 
such as the bursting of an oil pipeline received little or no pub- 
lic notice, and remedial actions were slow or nonexistent. Gov- 



136 



Physical Environment and Population 

ernment officials felt that natural resources were abundant 
enough to afford waste, that the land could easily absorb any 
level of pollution, and that stringent control measures were an 
unjustifiable hindrance to economic advancement. In the 
1990s, after decades of such practices, the government catego- 
rized about 40 percent of Russia's territory (an area about 
three-quarters as large as the United States) as under high or 
moderately high ecological stress. Excluding areas of radiation 
contamination, fifty-six areas have been identified as environ- 
mentally degraded regions, ranging from full-fledged ecologi- 
cal disaster areas to moderately polluted areas. 

Major Crises 

Dangerous environmental conditions came to the attention 
of the public in the Soviet Union under the glasnost policy of 
the regime of Mikhail S. Gorbachev (in office 1985-91), which 
liberated the exchange of information in the late 1980s. The 
three situations that gripped public attention were the April 
1986 nuclear explosion at the Chernobyl 1 Nuclear Power Sta- 
tion in Ukraine, the long-term and ongoing desiccation of the 
Aral Sea between Uzbekistan and Kazakstan, and the irradia- 
tion of northern Kazakstan by the Semipalatinsk (present-day 
Semey) nuclear testing site. The overall cost of rectifying these 
three disasters is staggering, dwarfing the cost of cleanups else- 
where, such as the superfund campaign to eliminate toxic 
waste sites in the United States. By the time the Soviet Union 
dissolved in 1991, such conditions had become symbols of that 
system's disregard for the quality of the environment. 

Since 1990 Russian experts have added to the list the follow- 
ing less spectacular but equally threatening environmental cri- 
ses: the Dnepropetrovsk-Donets and Kuznets coal-mining and 
metallurgical centers, which have severely polluted air and 
water and vast areas of decimated landscape; the Urals indus- 
trial region, a strip of manufacturing cities that follows the 
southern Urals from Perm' in the north to Magnitogorsk near 
the Kazak border (an area with severe air and water pollution 
as well as radioactive contamination near the city of Kyshtym); 
the Kola Peninsula in the far northwest, where nonferrous min- 
ing and metallurgical operations, centered on the region's 
nickel reserves, have created air pollution that drifts westward 
across northern Scandinavia; the Republic of Kalmykia, where 
faulty agricultural practices have produced soil erosion, deserti- 
fication, and chemical contamination; and the Moscow area, 



137 



Russia: A Country Study 

which suffers from high levels of industrial and vehicular air 
pollution and improper disposal of low-level radioactive waste. 
The experts also named five areas of severe water pollution: the 
Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Sea of Azov north of the Black 
Sea, the Volga River, and Lake Baikal. 

Each of Russia's natural zones has suffered degradation of 
specific kinds. In the tundra, the greatest damage stems from 
extraction and transportation of mineral resources by crude 
techniques. In delicate tundra habitats, oil spills, leaks in natu- 
ral gas pipelines, and the flaring of natural gas destroy north- 
ern marshland ecosystems, which take many years to purify 
naturally. Also endangered are reindeer grazing lands, upon 
which indigenous peoples traditionally have depended for 
their livelihood. In the permafrost zones that constitute about 
40 percent of Russia's territory, lower air, water, and ground 
temperatures slow natural self-cleansing processes that mitigate 
contamination in warmer regions, magnifying the impact of 
every spill and leak. 

In the taiga, or forest, zone, the overcutting of trees poses 
the greatest threat, particularly in northern European Russia, 
the Urals, and the Angara Basin in south-central Siberia. 
Uncontrolled mining operations constitute the second major 
source of damage in the taiga. In the broad-leafed forest zone, 
irrational land use has caused soil erosion on a huge scale. 
Urbanization and air and water pollution also are problems. 

The forest-steppe and steppe regions are subjected to soil 
exhaustion, loss of humus, soil compacting, and erosion, creat- 
ing an extremely serious ecological situation. The soil fertility 
of Russia's celebrated black-earth (chernozem — see Glossary) 
region has deteriorated significantly in the postwar period. 
Overgrazing is the main problem in the pasturage regions of 
the Russian steppe and has severely affected the Republic of 
Kalmykia in southwestern Russia and the region east of Lake 
Baikal. In Russia's limited semiarid and arid territories, poorly 
designed irrigation and drainage systems have caused saliniza- 
tion, pollution, and contamination of surface and under- 
ground water, but not to the degree that these problems exist 
in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakstan. 

Air Quality 

Although reductions in industrial production caused air 
quality indexes to improve somewhat in the 1990s, Russia's air 
still rates among the most polluted in the world. According to 



138 



Physical Environment and Population 

one estimate, only 15 percent of the urban population breathes 
air that is not harmful. Experts fear that a return to full indus- 
trial production will mean even more dangerous levels of air 
pollution given Russia's current inefficient pollution control 
technology. Of the 43.8 million tons of pollutants discharged 
into the open air in 1993, about 18,000 industrial enterprises 
generated an estimated 24.8 million tons. Vehicle emissions 
added 19 million tons 

In the early 1990s, Russia's Hydrometeorological Service, 
which monitors air quality, reported that 231 out of 292 cities 
exceeded maximum permissible concentrations (MPCs) for 
particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, or carbon 
monoxide. Pollution levels in eighty-six cities exceeded MPCs 
by a factor of ten. The most polluted cities are centers of heavy 
industry (ferrous and nonferrous metallurgy, petroleum refin- 
ing, chemicals, and pulp production). Not surprisingly, the 
largest industrial cities head the list. In European Russia, these 
are Moscow and St. Petersburg; the Ural manufacturing cen- 
ters of Yekaterinburg, Nizhniy Tagil, Magnitogorsk, and Ufa; 
and Astrakhan', Samara, and Volgograd on the lower Volga. In 
Asian Russia, the heaviest air pollution is in Omsk and 
Novokuznetsk in southwestern Siberia, Irkutsk on Lake Baikal, 
the Noril'sk industrial center in northwestern Siberia, and Kha- 
barovsk in the Far East. Levels of airborne sulfur, nitrogen, and 
lead remain high. 

Most vehicles in Russia continue to burn leaded fuel. In the 
early 1990s, motor vehicles contributed about one-third of total 
hazardous emissions in urban and industrial areas. Through- 
out the Soviet period and into the 1990s, trucks were the great- 
est vehicular polluters because privately owned vehicles were 
relatively scarce. As Russia adopts the culture of the privately 
owned vehicle, however, it is likely that transportation will 
increase its share of total emissions. 

Water Quality 

Soviet leaders took little action to protect the nation's inland 
bodies of water or surrounding oceans and seas from pollution, 
and Soviet planners gave low priority to risk-free treatment and 
transport of water. As a result, 75 percent of Russia's surface 
water is now polluted, 50 percent of all water is not potable 
according to quality standards established in 1992, and an esti- 
mated 30 percent of groundwater available for use is highly 
polluted. The most serious water pollution conditions relative 



139 



Russia: A Country Study 

to demand and availability of clean water are in the industrial 
regions of Krasnodar and Stavropol' territories north of the 
Caucasus, Rostov and Novosibirsk oblasts, the Republic of 
Chechnya, and the city of Moscow. In Krasnodar and 
Stavropol', inherent water shortages exacerbate the situation. 

The quality of drinking water is a major concern. Poor water 
management standards have raised health concerns in many 
cities, and water safety also is doubtful in the countryside, 
where 59 percent of the population draws water from common 
wells affected by groundwater pollution. Unsanitary runoff 
from populated places and agricultural sites contributes heavily 
to pollution of sources that ultimately provide water for domes- 
tic use; the quality of drinking water declines noticeably during 
spring floods, when such runoff is heaviest. Rudimentary por- 
table filters are not widely available. An estimated 8 percent of 
wastewater is fully treated prior to dumping in waterways; most 
water treatment facilities are obsolete, inefficient, and gener- 
ally overwhelmed by the volume of material that now passes 
through them, but funding is not available to replace them. 

In recent years, officials have identified many of Russia's riv- 
ers as carriers of waterborne diseases, epidemics of which were 
especially frequent in 1995. In July 1995, Moscow city health 
officials reported an outbreak of cholera-causing bacteria in 
the Moscow River. Officials have warned of increasing out- 
breaks of sewage-related diseases — including cholera, salmo- 
nella, typhoid fever, dysentery, and viral hepatitis — in many 
other Russian rivers. Citizens have been instructed to boil all 
water before use. In some areas, clean water is so scarce that 
water is imported from other regions. The highest consump- 
tion of imported water is in the republics of Sakha (Yakutia) 
and Kalmykia, Kamchatka and Magadan oblasts in the Far East, 
and Stavropol' Territory. 

Among the chemicals and contaminants dumped frequently 
and indiscriminately have been compounds containing heavy 
metals, phenols, pesticides, and pathogenic bacteria. Chemical 
pollution was dramatized when fires ignited spontaneously on 
the Iset' River in Sverdlovsk (present-day Yekaterinburg) in 
1965 and on the Volga River in 1970. Russian agriculture, like 
industry subject to centralized control and quota fulfillment in 
the Soviet era, continues to cause severe water pollution by 
overuse and improper handling and storage of toxic chemical 
fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. During the Soviet era, 
dioxin, a carcinogen, was used routinely as an agricultural 



140 



Power plant discharging effluents into Amur River and into 

atmosphere, Khabarovsk 
Courtesy Donna Kostka 

insecticide, and it heavily tainted rural wells. In 1990 Soviet 
authorities declared that dioxin, which enters the body 
through drinking water, was the most serious health threat 
from pollution. 

In 1992 the Russian Federation's Committee on Fishing 
reported 994 cases in which bodies of water were "completely 
contaminated" by agricultural runoff. Runoff from fields 
results in fish kills and groundwater contamination. Among the 
largest river systems in European Russia, the Volga and Dnepr 
rivers suffer from acute eutrophication — depletion of dissolved 
oxygen by overnutrition of aquatic plant life — which distorts 
natural life cycles. Large-scale fish kills have occurred in the 
Kama, Kuban', North Dvina, Oka, and Ural rivers. 

Pollution in the Gulf of Finland, the easternmost extension 
of the Baltic Sea, includes untreated sewage from St. Peters- 



141 



Russia: A Country Study 

burg, where heavy metals and other chemical substances are 
not properly removed prior to dumping. In late 1995, St. 
Petersburg city officials signed an agreement with a French 
water purification company to process the city's drinking water; 
the Finns hope that such a move also will improve the overall 
quality of the city's effluent water. 

Water quality in Lake Ladoga, Europe's largest freshwater 
lake, came to the attention of government authorities in the 
mid-1990s. Factories on the lake, which is just east of St. Peters- 
burg, have discharged tons of heavy metals and other toxic sub- 
stances into local rivers. The shores of Lake Ladoga and Lake 
Onega to its east have been storage sites for fertilizers, livestock 
waste, and chemicals as well as for radioactive military waste. 
When local rivers emanating from the lakes reach the Gulf of 
Finland, their chemical burden changes the oxygen balance in 
the gulf. Similar situations affect the Arctic Ocean, into which 
Siberian rivers flow after passing through numerous industrial 
and power-generating centers, and the Baltic Sea, into which 
large amounts of military waste and chemical weapons were 
discarded from Poland and the Baltic republics during the 
Soviet era. 

Marine biologists report that only five species of fish remain 
in the Black Sea, which once was a highly diverse marine eco- 
system with twenty-six species. Between 1985 and 1994, the 
total fish catch in the Black Sea dropped from 675,000 to 
45,000 kilograms. According to environmentalists, the entire 
sea is in danger of "dying" because only about 10 percent of its 
near-surface volume contains enough oxygen to support life. 
Deoxygenation is caused primarily by large-scale infusions of 
hydrogen sulfide, which comes mainly from the Danube, Don, 
South Bug, and Dnepr rivers that flow into the sea from the 
north and the west. Large amounts of mercury, cadmium, 
arsenic, and oil have been identified as well. In 1992 the littoral 
states of Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey, and 
Ukraine signed an agreement to take specific measures against 
pollution of the Black Sea and the tributary rivers that flow 
through their territory. Conflicting goals and positions among 
the states involved, however, have hindered environmental 
cooperation. 

The Caspian Sea is also beset with chemical pollution and 
the loss of indigenous species, and it now faces the danger that 
1 million hectares of its coastline, including Russia's Volga 
River delta, will be flooded. According to a 1996 report, 



142 



Public beach on Amur River, downstream from polluting power plant, 

Khabarovsk 
Courtesy Donna Kostka 

800,000 hectares in Dagestan already had been inundated. By 
1993 the average water level of the sea had risen by more than 
two meters. Scientists blame the rise on the 1977 Soviet dam- 
ming of the Garabogaz Gulf on the Caspian coast of Turkmeni- 
stan. Previously, the waters of the gulf intermixed with those of 
the Caspian, acting as the main thermal regulator and volume 
stabilizer of the larger body. In 1996 the Russian government 
allocated US$38 million for Caspian Sea conservation, to be 
matched by US$34 million from local budgets. 

Water quality problems are most severe in European Russia, 
especially in the Volga Basin, where about 60 million people 
live. Of all water withdrawn from natural sources in Russia, 33 
percent comes from the Volga. About half of that water returns 
to the Volga as polluted discharge, accounting for 37 percent 
of the total volume of such material generated in Russia. The 
Volga's water does not meet the norms for drinking water and 



143 



Russia: A Country Study 

is unsuitable for fish farming or irrigation. In the late 1980s 
and early 1990s, numerous government committees were 
formed to clean up the Volga. Few of the resulting restorative 
programs have been implemented, however, and the Volga 
remains under ecological stress. 

Lake Baikal, a water resource of world importance located in 
south-central Siberia, long was the focal point of Soviet envi- 
ronmental efforts to end the pollution that the pulp and paper 
plants caused in the lake's watershed. A series of comprehen- 
sive Soviet and post-Soviet plans yielded limited success in pro- 
tecting the lake's water and shoreline, which gradually have 
succumbed to chemical stresses. In 1995 the World Bank (see 
Glossary) and the European Union (EU — see Glossary) 
granted funds for cleaning up Lake Baikal, and in 1996 the 
Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission announced United States 
plans to aid Russia in overhauling paper plants in the Baikal 
region (see The United States, ch. 8). 

Soil and Forests 

Russia devotes about 10 percent of its land to agriculture, 
but land quality is declining. Erosion carries away as much as 
1.5 billion tons of topsoil every year (see Agriculture, ch. 6). In 
the past twenty-five years, Russia's arable land area has 
decreased by an estimated 33 million hectares, with much of 
that loss attributable to poor land management. Experts fear 
that agricultural land management may deteriorate further 
under Russia's new land privatization as individual farmers try 
to squeeze short-term profit from their new property. In the 
early 1990s, an estimated 50 percent of arable land needed 
remediation and improved management for agricultural pro- 
ductivity to improve. Russia's southern regions, especially the 
Republic of Kalmykia, are losing about 6,400 hectares of agri- 
cultural land yearly to desertification. To the east, desiccation 
of the Aral Sea and expansion of the Qizilqum Desert in Kazak- 
stan have a climatic drying effect that exacerbates desertifica- 
tion in Russia to the north and west. 

In Russia an estimated 74 million hectares of agricultural 
land have been contaminated by industrial toxic agents, pesti- 
cides, and agricultural chemicals. Considerable land also is lost 
in the extraction of mineral resources. Unauthorized dumping 
of hazardous industrial, chemical, and household waste takes 
land out of production. Flooding is a problem near the Cas- 



144 



High-rise apartment buildings on eroding sandstone banks of 

Amur River, Khabarovsk 
Courtesy Fbyd Reichman 

pian Sea and in Stavropol' Territory, where the construction of 
reservoirs has removed land from use. 

In 1994 about 22 percent of the world's forests and 50 per- 
cent of its coniferous forests were in Russia, covering an area 
larger than the continental United States. Of the 764 million 
hectares of forested area, 78 percent was in Siberia and the Far 
East. At that time, vast stands of Siberian forest remained 
untouched. Such broad expanses have an important role in the 
global carbon cycle and in biodiversity. In the 1990s, the atmo- 
sphere of economic stress and political decentralization has the 
potential to accelerate drastically Russia's rate of deforestation 
and land degradation, especially in remote areas. Environmen- 
talists fear that timber sales will be used as a short-term stimu- 
lus to regional economies; already, Chinese, Mongolian, and 



145 



Russia: A Country Study 

North and South Korean companies have taken advantage of 
looser restrictions and the critical need for hard currency (see 
Glossary) to begin clear-cutting Siberian forests. Timber har- 
vesting by Russian firms decreased dramatically in the 1990s, 
from 375 million cubic meters in 1989 to 110 million cubic 
meters in 1996. 

Aleksey Yablokov, head of the nongovernmental Center for 
Russian Environmental Policy, has estimated that Siberia is los- 
ing 16 million hectares of forest annually to cutting, pollution, 
and fires — an amount six times the official government esti- 
mate and higher than the rate of loss in the Amazon rain for- 
ests. Fires, which normally improve biodiversity and long-term 
stability, cause excessive damage because of poor fire control 
measures. Large tracts of Russian forest, most notably 136,000 
hectares in the vicinity of Chernobyl 1 , have suffered radioactive 
contamination, which also increases the likelihood of forest 
fires. Because forests cannot be decontaminated, the distribu- 
tion of radioactive particles in the trees remains constant over 
many years. 

Inefficient lumbering procedures cause unnecessary loss of 
timber; as much as 40 percent of Russia's harvested trees never 
go to the mill, and unsystematic clear-cutting prevents produc- 
tive regrowth. Forest management has improved gradually in 
the post-Soviet era. In 1993 the Supreme Soviet, then the lower 
house of Russia's parliament, passed the Principles of the For- 
est, national laws that include guidelines for management and 
protection. Because implementation of these laws has been 
quite slow, many regional jurisdictions have adopted their own 
management standards. 

Acid rain from European and Siberian industrial centers 
and from power generation plants has reduced the Siberian 
forests by an estimated 730,000 hectares. Hydroelectric dams 
on Siberian rivers raise significantly the temperature of air and 
water, destabilizing the growing conditions of adjacent forests. 
Because of the enormous oxygen production and carbon diox- 
ide absorption of the Russian forests (a capacity estimated to be 
second only to that of the Amazon rain forest), removal of 
large sections of those forests would have a drastic effect on the 
quality of land in Russia and the quality of air over the entire 
world. 

Radioactive Contamination 

Beginning with glasnost in the mid-1980s and continuing 



146 



Physical Environment and Population 

with the establishment of an independent Russia in 1991, 
much disturbing information has become available about 
Soviet and Russian nuclear practices and mishaps. These dis- 
closures have included deadly accidents on land and aboard 
naval vessels, a network of secret cities designed specifically for 
nuclear weapons production and material processing, detona- 
tion of nuclear blasts for "peaceful" purposes, and the dump- 
ing of nuclear waste at sea and its injection into subterranean 
cavities. 

More than any other event, the Chernobyl 1 disaster 
prompted greater scrutiny and candor about Soviet nuclear 
programs. Although much of the contamination from Cherno- 
byl' occurred in the now-independent countries of Ukraine 
and Belarus, the present-day Russian Federation also received 
significant fallout from the accident. Approximately 50,000 
square kilometers of the then Russian Republic, particularly 
the oblasts of Bryansk, Orel, Kaluga, and Tula, were contami- 
nated with cesium-137 (see table 3, Appendix). The total popu- 
lation of the nineteen oblasts and republics receiving fallout 
from Chernobyl' was 37 million in 1993. 

The Soviet, now Russian, navy's disposal and accidental vent- 
ing of radioactive materials pose particular problems. Begin- 
ning in 1965, twenty nuclear reactors, most with their fuel rods 
still inside, were dumped from nuclear submarines and an ice- 
breaker into the Arctic Ocean north of Russia. In 1994 the 
Oslo-based Bellona Foundation estimated that radioactive 
dumping in the Kara Sea north of western Siberia and adjacent 
waters constituted two-thirds of all the radioactive materials 
that ever have entered the world's oceans. In 1996 Bellona 
identified fifty-two decommissioned Russian nuclear subma- 
rines that were scheduled for scrapping but were still afloat 
near Murmansk with nuclear fuel on board; a timetable for dis- 
mantling them has fallen far behind. 

Japan has been engaged in a long struggle to stop Russia's 
Pacific Fleet from dumping radioactive waste into the Sea of 
Japan (see Japan, ch. 8). In 1994 Russia complied with Japan's 
demand to cease dumping entirely; after a long series of nego- 
tiations, in January 1996 Russia and Japan agreed on construc- 
tion of a floating nuclear waste recycling plant and expansion 
of an existing facility to process nuclear waste generated by the 
Pacific Fleet. The United States and Japan are to fund the first 
project, and the United States and Norway the second. In the 
mid-1990s, Russia still was seeking methods of storing and dis- 



147 



Russia: A Country Study 

posing of first-generation radioactive waste in many regions, 
including the European Arctic. Under these conditions, 
experts predict that the country will be hard-pressed to comply 
with the requirements of the arms reduction agreements for 
disposal of waste from thousands of nuclear weapons sched- 
uled for destruction later in the 1990s (see Nuclear Arms 
Issues, ch. 9). On the eve of the Group of Seven (G— 7; see Glos- 
sary) nuclear safety summit meeting in Moscow in April 1996, 
Aleksey Yablokov and the Bellona Foundation complained that 
continued operation of Chernobyl'-type reactors presented an 
unacceptable risk to the Russian public. The Western leaders at 
the G-7 meeting generally muted their criticism on the issue to 
avoid embarrassing President Boris N. Yeltsin during his presi- 
dential campaign. Yablokov announced the formation of a new 
lobby of Russian nongovernmental organizations for greater 
government disclosure on the issue. 

The Response to Environmental Problems 

In the half-decade that began with the Chernobyl' disaster 
and culminated in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, substan- 
tial changes took place in the public's attitudes toward environ- 
mental crises. The public engaged in unprecedented 
discussion about the dangers the state's environmental policies 
posed to public health. According to surveys, the public's main 
concerns were local problems having immediate impact, such 
as polluted water supplies, violation of public health regula- 
tions, and air pollution. Russians were much less interested in 
more general and fundamental issues such as loss of biodiver- 
sity, deforestation, and acid rain. In 1989 a national poll placed 
environmental pollution fifth among citizens' major concerns, 
but only one-third of respondents expressed their willingness 
to sacrifice economically to improve the situation. Neverthe- 
less, a substantial green movement arose in the late 1980s. 
Fragmented by disagreement over politicization and national 
versus local agendas, parts of the movement branched into 
other areas of activism such as human rights and regional 
autonomy, and no single green party emerged. 

Public enthusiasm for environmental improvement followed 
the same curve as enthusiasm for democratic and economic 
reform; by 1992 economic hardship began to wilt the zeal for 
reform, and the vast majority of Russians remained skeptical of 
political change throughout the early 1990s. As worsening eco- 
nomic conditions heightened short-term insecurity, issues such 



148 



Physical Environment and Population 

as environmental protection paled, especially in cases where 
the shutting of a polluting plant threatened the livelihood of a 
town or city. 

Politicians and government policy generally followed the 
same pattern as citizen concern in the early and mid-1990s. In 
1988 the initial groundswell of environmental concern stimu- 
lated the Gorbachev government to form the State Committee 
for the Protection of Nature (Gosudarstvennyy komitet po 
okhrane prirody — Goskompriroda), an agency given broad 
responsibilities similar to those of the United States Environ- 
mental Protection Agency. In 1992 the Russian Federation 
used Goskompriroda as the model for a new Ministry of Envi- 
ronmental Protection and Natural Resources, which received a 
similar mandate. 

In the 1990 elections for Russia's local legislative bodies 
(soviets) and the republic-level Congress of People's Deputies, 
virtually every candidate, whether democrat or communist, 
made the environment a major campaign issue, thus promot- 
ing the electorate's awareness that severe problems exist. In 
1990 Yablokov was appointed to an influential position as envi- 
ronmental adviser to the president of Russia (a position he 
continued to hold in the Russian Federation after 1991), and 
powerful environmental commissions were formed in the local 
Soviets of Moscow and other cities. In the early 1990s, such Sovi- 
ets blocked many large, environmentally dubious projects of 
the central government, such as the activation of the Northern 
Thermoelectric Center near Moscow, and of various local juris- 
dictions tied to national monopolies, such as the State Con- 
struction Committee (Goskomstroy) and the Ministry of 
Atomic Energy (Minatom). 

By the time of the parliamentary elections of 1993, however, 
the political atmosphere had changed. Most environmental 
activists either abstained from political activity or merged their 
single-issue efforts with coalitions that might exceed the 5 per- 
cent threshold needed for a party to gain representation in the 
State Duma. Neither strategy had political impact because envi- 
ronmental views were lost in the coalitions' agendas. Among 
the major parties, only the Yabloko coalition had a separate 
department for environmental issues. Another major reform- 
minded party, Russia's Choice, which gained seventy-six seats in 
1993, advocated environmental protection through market 
reform; Russia's minister of environmental protection and nat- 
ural resources, former communist functionary Viktor Danilov- 



149 



Russia: A Country Study 

Danil'yan, was a member of Russia's Choice. However, neither 
in the campaign nor after assuming office did Danilov- 
Danil'yan press the party's nominal program of tax stimulation 
for energy conservation and pollution control. In the 1995 leg- 
islative elections, Russia's Democratic Choice (the new name of 
Russia's Choice) declined dramatically, gaining only nine seats 
in the new State Duma, although Danilov-Danil'yan remained 
head of his ministry. 

A crucial event was the 1992 appointment of Viktor Cherno- 
myrdin as prime minister to replace Yegor Gaydar, head of Rus- 
sia's Choice. Chernomyrdin, former head of the State Natural 
Gas Company (Gazprom), has made the reinvigoration of Rus- 
sian industry, and especially the fuel industries, a top priority. A 
second important event was President Yeltsin's dismissal of the 
local Soviets in his 1993 struggle to consolidate presidential 
power and curb the growth of regional autonomy. The local 
dumas that replaced the Soviets have been much more solici- 
tous of local economic ambitions. 

In the parliamentary elections of 1995, the Kedr (Cedar) 
coalition (which also had presented a slate in the 1993 elec- 
tion) was the only group among forty-three parties calling itself 
environmental; however, the party was dominated by business- 
people rather than environmental activists. Kedr candidates 
received less than 1 percent of the vote and no seats in the new 
State Duma. Some nongovernmental groups have continued to 
have political impact, and in 1995 Yablokov hailed a new wave 
of the green movement. The annual Days of Defense Against 
Environmental Hazards, which began modestly in 1993, 
became a national phenomenon the next year and included a 
speech by President Yeltsin. Public organizations played a 
major role in establishing the All-Russian Congress for the Pro- 
tection of Nature under the Ministry of Environmental Protec- 
tion and Natural Resources. The national congress is preceded 
each year by eighty-nine regional congresses, one in each of 
Russia's political subdivisions. In late 1993, the new Commis- 
sion on Ecological Security went into operation under the 
Security Council, with the assignment of assessing the most 
serious environmental problems as they endanger national 
security (see The Security Council, ch. 8). Although it was 
formed with great fanfare, the commission received little fund- 
ing in its first three years. 

In 1994 the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natu- 
ral Resources employed about 21,000 people. In addition, the 



150 




Research vessels on Lake Baikal 
Courtesy Paul Hearn 



official Russian environmental protection system included 
environmental agencies in each of the eighty-nine subnational 
jurisdictions and also several state committees responsible for 
the use of mineral, water, and forest resources. In 1993 some 65 
percent of the ministry's expenditures went for protection of 
water quality and 26 percent for protection of air quality. How- 
ever, the ministry's actions against major polluters remained 
infrequent despite the 1993 constitution's guarantee of the 
people's right to a clean environment, to receive information 
about environmental conditions, and to get compensation for 
damage to health and property that results from negative eco- 
logical conditions. In 1995 Danilov-Danil'yan reported that 
only twenty-two cases had been brought against alleged pollut- 
ers in the previous year. 

In 1993 Russia's total investment in environmental preserva- 
tion was about US$2.3 billion, less than 4 percent of the 
national budget category entitled "industrial construction," in 
which environmental expenditures are included. That figure 



151 



Russia: A Country Study 

was 20 percent less than the 1990 investment. The structure of 
environmental spending remained substantially the same as it 
was in 1980: some 58 percent went for protection of water 
resources, 24 percent for prevention of air pollution, 7 percent 
for forest management, and only 0.04 percent for nature pre- 
serves and species protection (see table 5, Appendix). In most 
subnational jurisdictions, water pollution receives the most 
investment because of uniformly serious water conditions. 

In 1993 state enterprises and organizations paid 39 percent 
of environmental costs. As state budget deficits occurred in 
subsequent years, the amounts from those sources decreased, 
but the percentage did not because the only other funding 
sources were local budgets and private environmental founda- 
tions. Budgets of subnational jurisdictions often suffered the 
same deficits as the federal government, and private organiza- 
tions contributed only 1.4 percent of total investments in 1993. 
Meanwhile, local economic conditions have combined with 
weak enforcement funding to promote corruption among 
local authorities and to encourage poaching, especially in the 
fishing industry. 

In 1991 Yeltsin signed Russia's first comprehensive environ- 
mental law, On Environmental Protection. Modeled after a 
similar Soviet law, it made many general statements about the 
environmental rights of citizens without setting any specific 
goals. The law also defined numerous environmental functions 
for every level of government as well as for citizens and nongov- 
ernmental organizations, and it specified environmental regu- 
lation of every aspect of society, from health resorts to 
electromagnetic radiation. The sheer inclusiveness of such pro- 
visions made practical enforcement impossible. The other 
major obstacle to enforcement has been the slow development 
of Russia's judiciary, which was only a rubber-stamp branch of 
government in the Soviet system and which totally lacked expe- 
rience in the area of environmental law (as well as the general 
theory of Western-style jurisprudence) (see The Criminal Jus- 
tice System, ch. 10). Before any enforcement could begin, the 
1991 law stipulated that numerous other laws had to be passed. 
The same complex situation has existed at the regional and 
local government levels. In early 1995, the State Duma passed a 
law requiring environmental impact assessments for a variety of 
construction and development projects, including large-scale 
industrial development, large-scale use of natural resources, 



152 



Physical Environment and Population 

city planning, creation of new technology and materials, and 
modification of existing commercial facilities. 

Russia is a signatory of most major international environ- 
mental treaties. Among them are the International Tropical 
Timber Agreement (1983), the Convention on International 
Trade in Endangered Species (CITES, 1973), the United 
Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982), and the 
Montreal Protocol controlling substances harmful to the ozone 
layer. 

Population 

The population in what is now the Russian Federation has 
undergone several major shocks in the twentieth century, 
including large-scale rural famines in the 1920s and 1930s and 
the loss of millions of citizens in World War II. According to 
demographic experts, the early 1990s may be the start of a 
more gradual but potentially powerful new shift. Beginning in 
1992, the population has suffered a net loss that is projected to 
continue at least through the first decade of the next century 
This phenomenon is caused by a combination of economic, 
political, and ethnographic factors. 

In the mid-1990s, Russians constituted about 82 percent of 
the population of the Russian Federation, and they dominate 
virtually all regions of the country except for the North Cauca- 
sus and parts of the middle Volga region (see Minority Peoples 
and Their Territories, ch. 4). The major ethnic minorities are 
Tatars (3.8 percent), Ukrainians (3.0 percent), Chuvash (1.2 
percent), Bashkirs (0.9 percent), Belarusians (0.8 percent), 
and Mordovians (0.7 percent). The total population of the 
twenty-one ethnic republics, all designated for one or more of 
the minority groups in the federation, was about 24 million. 
However, only in eight of the republics was the population of 
the titular group (or groups, in the case of Kabardino-Balkaria 
and Karachayevo-Cherkessia) larger than the population of 
Russians, and Russians constitute more than half the popula- 
tion in nine republics. One other ethnic jurisdiction, the 
Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Region in the West Siberian Plain, 
has a population of more than 1 million; however, two-thirds of 
the autonomous region's population are Russian settlers, and 
the Khanty and Mansi, the tribes for which the region is 
named, together constitute less than 2 percent of the popula- 
tion. 



153 



Russia: A Country Study 

Demographic Conditions 

The range of estimates for Russia's 1995 population is 
between 147.5 and 149.9 million. Roughly 78 percent of Rus- 
sia's population lives in the European part of Russia; most of 
the industrial cities with over 1 million inhabitants are located 
in the European part. In order of size, the largest Russian cities 
are Moscow (8.7 million people in 1992), St. Petersburg (4.4 
million), Novosibirsk (1.4 million), Nizhniy Novgorod (1.4 mil- 
lion), Yekaterinburg (1.4 million), Samara (1.2 million), Omsk 
(1.2 million), Chelyabinsk (1.1 million), and Kazan' (1.1 mil- 
lion). Of those cities, only Novosibirsk and Omsk are located 
east of the Urals. In 1995 Russia's population density was 8.7 
persons per square kilometer, but distribution varies from 
more than 200 persons per square kilometer in parts of Euro- 
pean Russia, to 0.03 person per square kilometer in the Evenk 
Autonomous Region of Siberia. 

According to most sources, the population of the present 
Russian Federation peaked in 1991 at 148,689,000. Even with 
significant increases in immigration in the early 1990s, the Rus- 
sian population has been shrinking since 1992; according to 
projections by the Center for Economic Analysis of the Russian 
Federation, immigration will make a very small dent in a con- 
tinued negative natural increase through the year 2005. Thus, 
for the period 1985-2005, projected total immigration is 3.3 
million, whereas the natural population will decrease by 12.9 
million. The annual rate of population change, which dropped 
from 0.7 percent in 1985 to its first negative figure of -0.3 per- 
cent in 1992, is projected to reach -0.6 percent in 1998 and to 
continue at that level through 2005. 

Several reasons are given for the decline in Russia's popula- 
tion. First, the postwar baby boom, which began echoing in a 
secondary population rise in many Western countries in the 
early 1990s, had much less demographic impact in Russia. Sec- 
ond, a long history of Soviet ecological abuse has planted still 
unquantifiable seeds of demographic decline throughout the 
population, especially in areas of concentrated industry, mili- 
tary installations, and intensive agriculture. Third, post-Soviet 
Russia has experienced a general decline in health conditions 
and health care (see Health, ch. 5). 

In addition, the prolonged economic downturn of the early 
and mid-1990s, in which an estimated 31 percent of the popu- 
lation (46.5 million people) had incomes below the poverty 
level, has increased the incidence of malnutrition, which in 



154 



Physical Environment and Population 

turn lowers resistance to common ailments. Only individuals 
who have their own gardens are assured a regular supply of 
fruits and vegetables (see table 6, Appendix) . Even under the 
Soviet system, the average Russian's diet was classified as defi- 
cient, so the population now shows the cumulative effects of 
earlier living conditions as well as current limitations. Poor eco- 
nomic prospects, together with low confidence in the state's 
family benefits programs, discourage Russians from planning 
families; the least positive "reproductive attitudes" have been 
found in the Urals and in northeastern Siberia. 

Experts have identified a number of general demographic 
trends that are likely to prevail between 1996 and 2005. Con- 
trary to the trend in Western countries of a shrinking working 
population supporting an expanding community of retired 
individuals, in Russia a declining life expectancy and a declin- 
ing birthrate will increase marginally the proportion of active 
workers in the population. The actual number of such people 
is not likely to rise appreciably, however, and some analyses 
project a decline in this figure as well. In 1992, for every 1,000 
people of working age, 771 people were outside working age; 
the Center for Economic Analysis projects that in 2005 that 
proportion will drop to 560 per 1,000. The declining birthrate 
is projected to cause the ratio of younger-than-working-age 
individuals in the population to decrease dramatically from the 
1992 figure of 421 per 1,000 in the working-age group to only 
241 per 1,000 in 2005. According to that scenario, the overall 
percentage of the population in the working-age group would 
increase from 56.5 to 64.1. 

Most of the demographic disasters that have beset Russia in 
the twentieth century have affected primarily males. In 1992 
the sex ratio was 884 males per 1,000 females; in the years 
between 1994 and 2005, the imbalance is projected to increase 
slightly to a ratio of 875 males per 1,000 females (see table 7, 
Appendix). Gender disparity has increased because of a sharp 
drop in life expectancy for Russian males, from sixty-five years 
in 1987 to fifty-seven in 1994. (Life expectancy for females 
reached a peak of 74.5 years in 1989, then dropped to 71.1 by 
1994.) Projected changes in life expectancy are negative for 
both sexes, however. Mortality figures that the Ministry of 
Labor released in mid-1995 showed that if the current condi- 
tions persist, nearly 50 percent of today's Russian youth will not 
reach the retirement ages of fifty-five for women and sixty for 
men. 



155 



Russia: A Country Study 

The process of urbanization of the Russian population, 
ongoing since the 1930s, began a gradual reversal in 1991, 
when a peak of 74 percent of the population was classified as 
urban. This marked a significant increase from the 1970 figure 
of 62 percent. In 1995 the urban share fell below 73 percent. 
Meanwhile, rural areas continued to lose significant portions 
of their population. Between 1960 and 1995, about two-thirds 
of Russia's small villages (those with fewer than 1,000 residents) 
disappeared; of the 24,000 that remained in the mid-1990s, 
more than half the population was older than sixty-five and 
only 20 percent was younger than thirty-five (see Rural Life, ch. 
5). Migration has exacerbated the negative population trend of 
lower marriage and birthrates in many rural settlements. As the 
young have left rural Russia, large rural sections of the coun- 
try's central region have been deserted. As their aged inhabit- 
ants die, thousands more Russian villages are disappearing. 
Proposals have been put forth for resettling some of the Rus- 
sian immigrants from the "near abroad" in rural areas in order 
to revive local economies, but in the mid-1990s migration 
authorities had little authority and few resources with which to 
organize such a program. 

A particular demographic concern of the Russian govern- 
ment, as well as governments of the other states of the Com- 
monwealth of Independent States (CIS — see Glossary), is the 
loss of highly skilled personnel. This problem had existed in 
the last decade of the Soviet Union; in 1989 some 2,653 
employees of the Soviet Union's Academy of Sciences left the 
country, five times more than in 1988. A 1990 sociological fore- 
cast predicted that 1.5 million specialists would leave the coun- 
try in the 1990s if conditions did not improve. 

The easing of emigration restrictions in the early 1990s 
resulted in a significant increase in Russia's "brain drain." In 
the early 1990s, China, North Korea, the Republic of Korea 
(South Korea), Iran, Iraq, and several Latin American coun- 
tries offered jobs to scientists in Russia, especially those with 
nuclear backgrounds. (Russia also loses scientific know-how 
when its scientists move into the growing financial and com- 
mercial fields; in 1994 the newspaper Moskovskiye novosti 
reported than one in three leaders of commercial structures 
was a former scientist or technical specialist.) An ongoing eco- 
nomic crisis and political uncertainty encourage individuals 
with marketable skills to leave Russia. A high percentage of 
immigrants from other CIS republics possess the same type of 



156 



Physical Environment and Population 



skills as those being lost, but in the mid-1990s Russia lacked a 
program for settling and apportioning the newcomers so that 
their presence would compensate for emigration losses. 

Fertility 

With the exception of a few ethnic groups in the North Cau- 
casus, birthrates for all nationalities in Russia have generally 
declined in the postwar period (see Ethnic Composition, ch. 
4) . Throughout the Soviet period, urbanization was rapid, and 
urban families generally had fewer children than rural ones. 
The urbanization process ended in 1992, when for the first 
time in the postwar period a smaller percentage of the Russian 
population lived in cities than the year before. By that time, 
however, substantial reasons existed for Russians to limit the 
size of their families. The population decline of the Russians 
has been especially pronounced in comparison with other eth- 
nic groups. In many of the twenty-one republics, the titular 
nationalities have registered higher birthrates and larger aver- 
age family sizes than the Russian populations. 

The birthrate of Russians already was falling dramatically in 
the 1960s, moving from 23.2 per 1,000 population at the begin- 
ning of the decade to 14.1 in 1968. By 1983 the rate had recov- 
ered to 17.3 per 1,000, stimulated by a state program that 
provided incentives for larger families, including increased 
maternity benefits. Another decline in the birthrate began in 
1987, and by 1993 the rate was only 9.4 per 1,000. According to 
the projections of the Center for Economic Analysis, after 
reaching its lowest point (8.0 per 1,000) in 1995, the birthrate 
will rise gradually to 9.7 per 1,000 in 2005. 

In the turnaround year of 1992, the number of births in Rus- 
sia dropped by 207,000 (13 percent) compared with 1991, and 
the number of deaths increased by 116,000 (7 percent). The 
fertility rate has dropped in both urban and rural areas. In the 
early 1990s, the lowest rates were in the northwest, especially 
St. Petersburg and in central European Russia. The disparity 
between birth and death rates was especially pronounced in 
the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg and in the European 
oblasts of Pskov, Tula, Tver', Belgorod, Leningrad, Novgorod, 
Yaroslavl', Moscow, Tambov, and Ivanovo. In 1992 natural pop- 
ulation growth occurred only in the republics of Kalmykia, 
Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, North 
Ossetia, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Gorno-Altay, Sakha, and Tyva, 
and in Tyumen' and Chita oblasts of western and eastern Sibe- 



157 



Russia: A Country Study 

ria, respectively. However, although fertility rates in the pre- 
dominantly Muslim republics of the North Caucasus and the 
Volga region continued to exceed those of the Slavic popula- 
tion, by 1995 the rate was declining even in Dagestan, the 
republic with the highest birthrate in Russia. 

For Russians the total fertility rate, which is the average num- 
ber of children a woman of childbearing age will have at cur- 
rent birthrates, fell from 2.0 in 1989 to 1.4 in 1993. The State 
Committee for Statistics (Goskomstat) estimates that the rate 
will decline further to 1.0 by the year 2000. Roughly half as 
many children were born in 1993 as in 1987. In 1994 the popu- 
lation of Russia fell by 920,000. 

The sharp decline in the fertility rate in the 1990s was linked 
to the social and economic troubles triggered by the rapid tran- 
sition to a market economy and resulting unemployment. Fam- 
ilies have been destabilized, and living standards for many have 
fallen from even the modest levels of the Soviet era (see The 
Family, ch. 5). Under such circumstances, decisions on mar- 
riage and childbearing often are postponed. Particularly in the 
cities, housing has been extremely hard to acquire, and the 
percentage of working wives has increased significantly in the 
post-Soviet era (see The Role of Women, ch. 5). The number of 
common-law marriages, which produce fewer children than 
traditional marriages, has increased since the 1960s, as has the 
percentage of babies born to unattached women. 

History also has affected the absolute number of births. The 
birthrate during World War II was very low, accounting for part 
of the low birthrate of females in the 1960s, which in turn low- 
ered the rate in the 1990s. Between 1989 and 1993, the number 
of women in the prime childbearing age-group decreased by 
1.3 million, or 12 percent, making a major contribution to the 
27 percent decline in births during that period. Between 1990 
and 1994, the government's official estimate of the infant mor- 
tality rate rose from 17.4 per 1,000 live births to 19.9, reflecting 
deterioration of Russia's child care and nutrition standards. 
But Russia has not used international viability standards for 
newborns, and one Western estimate placed the 1995 rate at 
26.3. Between 1992 and 1995, the official maternal mortality 
rate also rose from forty-seven to fifty-two deaths per 100,000 
births. 

Abortion 

Fertility in Russia has been adversely affected by the com- 



158 



Physical Environment and Population 



mon practice of using abortion as a primary means of birth 
control. In 1920 the Soviet Union was the first country to legal- 
ize abortion. Sixteen years later it was prohibited, except in cer- 
tain circumstances, to compensate for the millions of lives lost 
in the collectivization of agriculture and the widespread famine 
that followed in the 1930s. The practice was fully legalized once 
again in 1968, and an entire industry evolved offering abortion 
services and encouraging women to use them. Although abor- 
tions became easily available for most women, an estimated 15 
percent of the Soviet total were performed illegally in private 
facilities. Because of the persistent lack of contraceptive devices 
in both Soviet and independent Russia (and the social taboo 
on discussion of contraception and sex in general, which con- 
tinued in the 1990s), for most women abortion remains the 
only reliable method of avoiding unwanted pregnancy (see 
Health Conditions; Sexual Attitudes, ch. 5). Russia continues 
to have the highest abortion rate in the world, as did the Soviet 
Union. In the mid-1990s, the Russian average was 225 termi- 
nated pregnancies per 100 births and ninety-eight abortions 
for every 1,000 women of childbearing age per year — a yearly 
average of 3.5 million. An estimated one-quarter of maternal 
fatalities result from abortion procedures. 

Mortality 

The social and economic crises that gripped Russia in the 
early 1990s are reflected in increased mortality and declining 
life expectancy, especially among able-bodied males. Contribut- 
ing to Russia's long-term population decline is a projected mor- 
tality rate increase from 11.3 per 1,000 population in 1985 to 
15.9 per 1,000 in 2005. Russia's mortality rate reached its lowest 
level, 10.4 per 1,000 population, in 1986 (for which a state anti- 
alcohol campaign received substantial credit) ; then the figure 
rose steadily in the ensuing decade. The largest jump was from 
12.2 to 14.6 per 1,000 between 1992 and 1993; after having 
reached 15.7 per 1,000 in 1995, the rate was projected to 
remain virtually flat over the next decade. 

According to 1994 statistics, the life expectancy for Russian 
males had reached 57.3 years and for females 71.1 years. These 
are the lowest figures and the largest disparity by sex for any 
country reporting to the World Health Organization, and they 
are a sharp decline from the 1987 levels of 64.9 years for males 
and 74.6 years for females. In 1990 the Russian Republic 
ranked only seventh in this statistic among the fifteen republics 



159 



Russia: A Country Study 

of the Soviet Union. The lag in the average life expectancy of 
males was attributed to alcohol and tobacco abuse; to unsafe 
conditions at work, on the road, and in the home; and to 
declining heath care. 

Mortality rates are especially high for able-bodied males in 
rural areas. Served poorly by the health care system and lack- 
ing basic sanitary facilities and conveniences, many farming 
communities have been transformed into enclaves for the eld- 
erly, the indigent, and the sick. Moreover, indigenous national- 
ities such as the Evenks and the Nenets have suffered 
catastrophic declines in life expectancy and high rates of sick- 
ness and death that have prompted speculation that some of 
those groups may become extinct. Geographically, the lowest 
average life expectancy in Russia is in the Siberian Republic of 
Tyva, and the highest figures are in the Caucasus Republic of 
Dagestan and in the Volga region. In the first half of the 1990s, 
the imbalance between the birth and death rates was especially 
acute in major cities. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, the num- 
ber of deaths in 1992 was almost double the number of births. 

Since 1987 mortality from accidents, injuries, and poison- 
ings has risen significantly, from 101 to 228 per 100,000 popula- 
tion. Contributing to that figure are an estimated 8,000 fatal 
workplace accidents per year, largely the result of aging equip- 
ment, the proliferation of risky jobs in the unofficial "shadow 
economy," and the deterioration of work discipline. For the 
period between 1990 and 1994, the suicide rate rose by 57 per- 
cent to a total of nearly 62,000, putting Russia in third place 
among eighty-four developed countries. The stress of the tran- 
sition period is one explanation for this rising statistic. The 
homicide rate rose by more than 50 percent in the same period 
(see Crime, ch. 10). In 1994 Russia's 35,000 motor vehicle 
deaths nearly equaled the 40,000 in the United States, 
although Russia has less than 1 percent as many automobiles. 
Deteriorating roads and declining police discipline are the 
main causes of that fatality statistic. 

The chief natural cause of death is diseases of the circulatory 
system, which accounted for 769 deaths per 100,000 popula- 
tion in 1993. The next causes in order of frequency are cancer 
and respiratory diseases. Among people of working age, 41 per- 
cent of deaths are attributable to unnatural causes; the propor- 
tion of such deaths was highest in Leningrad Oblast, the 
Permyak Autonomous Region, the Republic of Tyva, and the 
Evenk Autonomous Region. The number of alcohol-related 



160 



Physical Environment and Population 

deaths also climbed in the mid-1990s; the 1994 figure was 25 
percent higher than the 1993 total. In some regions, alcohol- 
ism has assumed epidemic proportions; in the Bikin Rayon of 
Khabarovsk Territory on the Pacific coast, nearly half the 
deaths between 1991 and 1995 were alcohol related (see 
Health Conditions, ch. 5) . 

The overall aging of the population also is an important fac- 
tor in the higher mortality rate. Between 1959 and 1989, the 
percentage of retirees in the population and the percentage of 
Russians eighty or older nearly doubled, although declining 
life expectancy already was reducing the impact of that trend in 
the mid-1990s. 

Migration 

For most of the postwar period, the state tightly controlled 
migration into and emigration from the Soviet Union and 
movement within the nation. Nevertheless, in each year of the 
1980s, about 15 million citizens changed their place of resi- 
dence within the Soviet Union, and large numbers of some eth- 
nic groups, most notably Jews, Germans, and Armenians, were 
successful in emigrating. An estimated 2 million Jews left the 
Soviet Union between 1945 and 1991 (see Other Religions, ch. 
4). Overall, external migration played a relatively minor role in 
the structure of the Russian Republic's population. 

With the introduction of the policies of glasnost and pere- 
stroika (see Glossary) in the late 1980s, migration policy began 
to change. In 1985 just 2,943 persons received official permis- 
sion to emigrate. By 1990 the figure had risen to more than 
100,000. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, legisla- 
tive and administrative changes brought about new policies 
with respect to migration. First, the traditional internal pass- 
port (propiska) that conferred permission to work and live in a 
specific place was nominally abolished, enhancing freedom of 
movement within Russia. Second, the general right to emigrate 
was written into law in the 1993 constitution. 

Prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, major his- 
torical internal migration paths were from the western parts of 
Russia and the Soviet Union to the northern and eastern 
regions. In contrast to the American experience, Russia has 
had difficulty in stabilizing the population in newly settled east- 
ern and northern areas of the federation, where the climate 
and living conditions are harsh. Despite pay and benefit incen- 
tives, turnover has continued to hamper the operations of the 



161 



Russia: A Country Study 

giant territorial production complexes, especially in the key 
energy sector. 

In the Soviet period, immigration was not a problem 
because the Soviet Union was not a destination of preference 
for any class of refugee. For that reason, in the early 1990s Rus- 
sia was not equipped with agencies or laws for dealing with a 
large-scale influx of asylum seekers and returning Russians. In 
light of new demographic movements in the 1990s, however, 
respected academician Dmitriy Likhachev has warned that in 
the next decade immigration may become a national concern 
of the same magnitude as national defense. 

Issues and Procedures 

In 1993 Russia signed the United Nations Convention on 
Refugees, which reclassified it as a "country of first resort" for 
foreigners fleeing countries outside the CIS. Under the 1951 
United Nations convention, this status entails an international 
obligation to care for such individuals. At the same time, the 
decline in border security since the dissolution of the Soviet 
Union has made illegal immigration easier in many areas. In 
the early 1990s, the number of official refugees swelled when 
students from Third World nations, particularly Afghanistan, 
refused to leave Russia when their studies were completed. 
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refu- 
gees (UNHCR), about 28,000 foreign refugees were living ille- 
gally in Moscow in 1994; figures for other parts of Russia are 
not available. The UNHCR's Moscow total was divided among 
20,000 Afghans, 6,000 Iraqis, 2,000 Somalis, and smaller num- 
bers of Angolans, Ethiopians, and Zairians. A 1995 Moscow 
press report, however, estimated that 100,000 illegal immi- 
grants were living in Moscow, including 50,000 Chinese and 
15,000 Afghans. 

The first major influx of refugees into the Russian Republic 
occurred in 1988 and 1989, when Azerbaijanis and Armenians 
(mainly the latter) fled the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict 
between their respective countries, and when Meskhetian 
Turks fled Uzbekistan following a massacre in that republic in 
1989. However, only in 1992 did the Russian government estab- 
lish its first agency for dealing with such conditions, the Fed- 
eral Migration Service (FMS). That service monitors refugees 
and other migrants from both outside and within the CIS, but 
it is underfunded and understaffed. In 1994 UNHCR transit 
camps in Moscow had a capacity of 1,000, leaving a large num- 



162 



Physical Environment and Population 

ber of Moscow's refugee population to live in primitive condi- 
tions. Given the FMS's limited resources, several international 
social and charitable organizations are active in aiding refugees 
and migrants, although their work has not been well coordi- 
nated with the FMS or among themselves. An additional com- 
plication in the early 1990s was the influx of tens of thousands 
of Russian military personnel withdrawn from former Warsaw 
Pact member nations and from other CIS nations. 

In response to Russia's new status as a country of first resort, 
a series of laws on refugees and forced migrants were passed in 
1993 and 1994. The laws define various categories of migrants, 
particularly refugees and forced migrants, according to the 
conditions and motivations that prompted their movement as 
well as the responsibilities of the state to care for them. 

Local branches of the FMS conduct registration of refugees 
and forced migrants and are responsible for providing material 
support until they are classified. Individuals in both categories 
theoretically have some input in their new place of residence; 
the FMS provides a list of permissible urban destinations, or 
relatives may accept them elsewhere. Legally, the FMS is 
obliged to help find suitable employment, schools, and social 
security and to aid in compensation for lost property. FMS 
activities receive funding from the Russian state budget, other 
countries and international organizations according to bilat- 
eral agreements, and private donations. Russian citizenship is 
granted automatically to individuals who were permanent resi- 
dents of the federation before the Law on Citizenship was 
passed in February 1992; migrants from elsewhere in the CIS 
(particularly the 25 million Russians in other former Soviet 
republics) also have a guarantee of Russian citizenship upon 
arrival, provided they are not already citizens of another state. 
A 1993 refinement of FMS regulations added compulsory 
annual reregistration and stricter requirements for proof of 
forced migrant status. It also modified the temporary housing 
guarantee. 

As of mid-1996, however, little of the system for carrying out 
the laws' guarantees had been worked out. Transportation aid 
is available only in extreme cases, and financial support at the 
time of settlement is offered only to individuals and families 
below the poverty line. The FMS reported that, to comply with 
all aspects of the refugee law, each individual should receive 
about US$10,000, a sum far beyond the resources of the 
agency. 



163 



Russia: A Country Study 

Most illegal immigrants enter the country on tourist visas; 
some take advantage of leaky borders and vague visa require- 
ments. Most claim to be in transit to another country, usually in 
the West. Profitable businesses have sprung up smuggling refu- 
gees through Russia and then to the West. In 1994 Russian 
authorities announced plans for a central data bank to monitor 
all immigration and emigration and a new refugee agency, but 
no such system was in place in mid-1996. Meanwhile, the pros- 
pects of moving large numbers of immigrants to Western coun- 
tries diminished with new immigration restrictions imposed 
there; at the same time, the United Nations convention sub- 
stantially limits Russia's options by forbidding deportation of 
immigrants to "countries of persecution." The FMS has opti- 
mistically planned to deal with 400,000 refugees per year, but 
some estimates projected that as many as 2 million would immi- 
grate in 1996 alone. 

The proportion of non-Russian immigrants declined notice- 
ably after 1992. In 1995 the estimated share of Russians was 63 
percent of refugees and 75 percent of forced migrants, fol- 
lowed by overall immigration shares of 7 to 9 percent each for 
Armenians, Ossetians, and Tatars, 3 percent for Ukrainians, 
and 1 percent each for Georgians and Tajiks. Non-Slavic immi- 
grants have encountered hostile attitudes from most Russian 
authorities. For example, beginning in 1993 Moscow authori- 
ties mounted "cleansing" campaigns to rid the city of individu- 
als lacking residence permits; because immigrants from the 
Caucasus and Central Asia are easily distinguishable from Slavs, 
such campaigns have detained and deported disproportion- 
ately large numbers from those ethnic groups. International 
human rights organizations have criticized Moscow for such 
practices. 

The Soviet-era internal passport system, which required doc- 
umentary proof of an individual's place of residence for that 
person to receive housing, was simplified theoretically in Octo- 
ber 1993 to allow an individual to take residence in any area 
without proof of registration in that location. However, local 
authorities have ignored this change, especially in cities such as 
Moscow that are chief targets of migration. In continuing the 
Soviet registration system, local authorities can restrict hous- 
ing, education, and social security benefits to migrants, what- 
ever their origin. In the mid-1990s, strict, "temporary" local 
restrictions on initial admittance of migrants spread rapidly to 
most of the oblast capitals, often with conditions in clear viola- 



164 



Physical Environment and Population 

tion of the human rights provisions of the 1993 constitution, 
with the official backing of the FMS. Continued local limita- 
tions have had the effect of discouraging housing construction 
and employment, hence exacerbating the situation of nonresi- 
dents. 

Such a discrimination policy has not stemmed the tide of 
migration into Russia's cities from other CIS states or from 
within the federation. Because the Soviet system usually 
allowed migrants to eventually register, find work, and settle at 
their destination, continuation of that system also has contin- 
ued the expectations and the demographic movement that it 
promoted. As a result, the number of homeless people in Rus- 
sia's cities has increased dramatically (see Social Welfare, ch. 
5). 

Migration Patterns 

The increased numbers of Russians arriving from other CIS 
nations create both logistical and political problems. As in the 
case of non-Russian refugees, statistical estimates of intra-CIS 
migration vary widely, partly because Russia has not differenti- 
ated that category clearly from the refugee category and partly 
because actual numbers are assumed to be much higher than 
official registrations indicate. Many newly arrived Russians 
(like non-Russians) simply settle with friends or relatives with- 
out official registration. 

During Russia's problematic economic transition period, the 
movement of comparatively large numbers of migrants has cre- 
ated substantial social friction, especially over the distribution 
of scarce urban housing. Nationalist extremist political groups 
have inflamed local resentment toward refugees of all types. 
Friction is exacerbated by the state's meager efforts to support 
migrant populations. Skilled immigrants show particular 
resentment against a state that fails to provide opportunities 
and even enough resources to survive, and these people often 
have drifted into progressively more serious types of criminal 
activity. Local populations uniformly resent resources provided 
to migrants in their midst, and they attribute their own eco- 
nomic difficulties to the "strangers" among them, especially if 
those people are not of the same nationality. Particular tension 
has been evident in North Ossetia, whose 17 percent immigra- 
tion statistic is by far the highest in the Russian Federation, in 
Stavropol' and Krasnodar territories, and in Orenburg, Kaluga, 



165 



Russia: A Country Study 

Voronezh, and Saratov oblasts, all of which have numbers of 
migrants exceeding 1 percent of their populations. 

By 1992 the International Red Cross had estimated that 
about 150,000 ethnic Russians had migrated from CIS states, 
and at the end of 1993 the head of the FMS estimated that 2 
million Russians and non-Russians had arrived from the near 
abroad in the first two post-Soviet years. As many as 300,000 of 
the 375,000 Russians in Tajikistan left that country in the first 
years of the civil war that began in 1992, and in 1994 more than 
half the Russian arrivals came from Chechnya, Azerbaijan, 
Georgia, and Tajikistan. However, the structure of this group 
changes according to security and political conditions in the 
CIS states; by the end of 1994, almost 60 percent of Russian 
arrivals came from Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, 
driven not by armed conflict but by local discrimination, and 
the share of arrivals from the conflict states had declined to 
one-third. The official FMS estimate for 1995 was 963,000 peo- 
ple arriving in Russia from other CIS states, slightly lower than 
the 1994 total. The number offorced migrants rose by 300,000 
in 1995, however. The states of origin showing the largest 
increases in 1995 were Kazakstan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, 
and the Central Asian republics continued to account for more 
than half the total CIS migrants. 

Refugees and migrants from outside the federation have set- 
tled in most of the territory of Russia except for parts of the Far 
North and ethnic republics such as Sakha, Chechnya, and Ady- 
gea. The largest numbers of settlers are in the North Caucasus, 
the southern part of the chernozem agricultural zone of Euro- 
pean Russia, the Volga region, and the industrial cities of the 
adjacent Ural Mountains. Forced migrants show a decided 
preference for cities. In the north and the east, almost 100 per- 
cent of all migrants settle in urban regions, but more than half 
of migrants to south-central European Russia, the North Cau- 
casus, and the Urals settle in rural areas. Because there has 
been no state program for distributing forced migrants, they 
have chosen destinations according to accessibility from their 
starting point and the location of relatives. Russian refugees 
seldom settle in an ethnic republic or a region with a high pro- 
portion of non-Russians, such as Orenburg Oblast; for that rea- 
son, their share of total refugees in the republics is less than 10 
percent. Armenian refugees, mainly from the Nagorno-Kara- 
bakh enclave of Azerbaijan, are concentrated in the North Cau- 
casus and Saratov Oblast, as well as the large cities and 



166 



Physical Environment and Population 

Kaliningrad Oblast on the Baltic Sea. Islamic refugees, mainly 
Tatar, Bashkir, Tajik, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz, prefer the republics of 
Tatarstan and Bashkortostan and adjacent regions with large 
numbers of Tatars. National groups also have varying long- 
term intentions. Russians and Tatars tend to remain perma- 
nently in their new locations; Chechens mostly plan to return 
to their homeland once conditions improve; and Armenians 
and Germans are predominantly transit migrants en route to 
another country. 

Future Prospects 

The Russian Federation possesses a unique variety and scale 
of geographic features, even after the collapse of the larger 
Soviet Union, but it faces grave problems in managing its abun- 
dant natural resources. Although the potential remains for 
constructive exploitation of Russia's environment, the eco- 
nomic and political condition of the country does not bode 
well for an organized effort in that direction. Meanwhile, a 
large percentage of Russia's population is threatened by 
numerous grave ecological hazards left behind by Soviet 
regimes as well as by the tolerance the post-Soviet government 
has for most of those conditions. In the mid-1990s, those 
threats combine with other health problems, a low birthrate, 
and a declining life expectancy to give Russia one of the least 
positive demographic profiles in the world. 

* * * 

Two classic authorities on the geography of Russia are Paul 
E. Lydolph's Geography of the U.S.S.R. and David Hooson's The 
Soviet Union: People and Regions. A post-Soviet treatment of the 
topic is found in Russian Regions Today: Atlas of the New Federa- 
tion, published in 1994 by the International Center in Washing- 
ton, D.C. Environmental problems are discussed at length in 
D.J. Peterson's Troubled Lands: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental 
Destruction and in Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under 
Siege, edited by Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly. Informa- 
tion on the current demographic crisis is provided by Valentina 
Bodrova's "Reproductive Behaviour of Russia's Population in 
the Transition Period" and Penny Morvant's "Alarm over Fall- 
ing Life Expectancy." (For further information and complete 
citations, see Bibliography.) 



167 



The Firebird tears herself from the grasp of Tsarevich Ivan, who manages to 
retain one of her beautiful tail feathers (design from lacquer box made in vil- 
lage ofPakkh). 



THE RUSSIAN STATE HAS EMERGED from the Soviet era 
dominated by an ethnic group, the Russians, whose language 
prevails in most educational and government institutions, and 
a religion, Russian Orthodoxy, that is professed by the vast 
majority of those citizens who admit to a religious preference. 
In some respects, Russia's relative homogeneity in language 
and religion is the result of the uniformity imposed by Soviet 
rule. As they had in the centuries of tsarist rule, Russians con- 
tinued in the twentieth century to occupy a percentage of gov- 
erning positions disproportionate even to their lopsided ethnic 
majority. Enforced use of the Russian language was a chief 
means of preserving Moscow's authority in the far-flung 
regions of the Russian Republic, as it was in the other fourteen 
Soviet republics. Although it was not spared the persecution 
meted out to all faiths practiced in the Soviet Union, Russian 
Orthodoxy retained its preeminence among religiously obser- 
vant Russians throughout the seven decades of officially pre- 
scribed atheism. 

In the 1990s, Russians continue to constitute the largest eth- 
nic group in all but a handful of the Russian Federation's nom- 
inally ethnic republics, but leaders in many of the republics 
and smaller ethnic jurisdictions have pressed the central gov- 
ernment to grant measures of autonomy and other concessions 
in the name of indigenous groups. The breakaway Republic of 
Chechnya has taken the process to its furthest extreme, but in 
the mid-1990s other republics — in the North Caucasus, Siberia, 
and the Volga and Ural regions — were pushing hard to achieve 
the local autonomy to which Soviet governments had only paid 
lip service. 

Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Church, long forced to 
rubber-stamp the cultural decisions of Soviet governments, has 
moved rapidly in the 1990s toward a more balanced partner- 
ship in the governance of Russia's spiritual and secular life. 
Post-Soviet Western influences have brought new variety to the 
spectrum of religious practice, but the loyalty to Orthodoxy of 
average Russians and of the Russian government has become 
clear as the church has added millions of professed believers in 
the 1990s and the government has sought church advice on 
many critical decisions. This renewed alliance has posed a chal- 



171 



Russia: A Country Study 

lenge to the freedom of religion nominally guaranteed in the 
1993 constitution. 

The issue of language diversity has risen in parallel with 
issues of local sovereignty. The Russian language retains its tra- 
ditional dominance in official communications and in the edu- 
cation system; however, the increasing unofficial use of the 
federation's many minority languages shows that they survived 
Soviet repression with the capacity to flourish anew as the cen- 
tral government's power has diminished. 

Ethnic Composition 

Russia is a multinational state that has inherited many of the 
nationality problems that plagued the Soviet Union. The last 
official Soviet census, conducted in 1989, listed more than 100 
nationalities. Several of those groups now predominantly 
inhabit the independent nations that formerly were Soviet 
republics. However, the Russian Federation — the most direct 
successor to the Soviet Union — still is home to more than 100 
national minorities, whose members coexist uneasily with the 
numerically and politically predominant Russians (see table 8, 
Appendix) . 

Besides the Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians), 
who account for about 85 percent of Russia's population, three 
main ethnic groups and a handful of isolated smaller groups 
reside within the federation. The Altaic group includes mainly 
speakers of Turkic languages widely distributed in the middle 
Volga, the southern Ural Mountains, the North Caucasus, and 
above the Arctic Circle. The main Altaic peoples in Russia are 
the Balkars, Bashkirs, Buryats, Chuvash, Dolgans, Evenks, 
Kalmyks, Karachay, Kumyks, Nogay, and Yakuts. The Uralic 
group, consisting of Finnic peoples living in the upper Volga, 
the far northwest, and the Urals, includes the Karelians, Komi, 
Mari, Mordovians, and Udmurts. The Caucasus group is con- 
centrated along the northern slopes of the Caucasus Moun- 
tains; its main subgroups are the Adyghs, Chechens, Cherkess, 
Ingush, and Kabardins, as well as about thirty Caucasus peoples 
collectively classified as Dagestani (see Minority Peoples and 
Their Territories, this ch.). 

In the Soviet Union, the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist 
Republic (RSFSR) contained thirty-one autonomous, ethni- 
cally based administrative units. When the Russian Federation 
proclaimed its sovereignty in the wake of the Soviet Union's 
collapse in late 1991, many of those entities also declared their 



172 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

sovereignty. Of the thirty-one, sixteen were autonomous repub- 
lics, five were autonomous oblasts (provinces), and ten were 
autonomous regions (okruga; sing., okrug), which were part of 
larger subnational jurisdictions. During the Soviet era, the 
autonomy referred to in these jurisdictions' official titles was 
more fictitious than real — the executive committees that 
administered the jurisdictions had no decision-making author- 
ity. All major administrative tasks were performed by the cen- 
tral government or, in the case of some social services, by 
industrial enterprises in the area. In postcommunist Russia, 
however, many of the autonomous areas have staked claims to 
more meaningful sovereignty as the numerically superior Rus- 
sians continue to dominate the center of power in Moscow (see 
The Federation Treaty and Regional Power, ch. 7) . Even in the 
many regions where Russians are in the majority, such claims 
have been made in the name of the indigenous ethnic group 
or groups. 

According to the 1989 Soviet census, Russians constituted 
81.5 percent of the population of what is now the Russian Fed- 
eration. The next-largest groups were Tatars (3.8 percent), 
Ukrainians (3.0 percent), Chuvash (1.2 percent), Bashkirs (0.9 
percent), Belorussians (0.8 percent), and Mordovians (0.7 per- 
cent). Other groups totaling more than 0.5 percent of the pop- 
ulation each were Armenians, Avars, Chechens, Germans, Jews, 
Kazaks, Mari, and Udmurts. In 1992 an estimated 7.8 million 
people native to the other fourteen former Soviet republics 
were living in Russia. 

The Russians 

The ethnic group that came to be known as the Russians 
sprang from the East Slavs, one of the three groups into which 
the original Slavic people divided sometime before the seventh 
century A.D. The West Slavs eventually became differentiated 
as the Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks; the South Slavs divided into 
the Bulgarians, Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes. The East Slavic 
tribes settled along the Dnepr River in present-day Ukraine in 
the first centuries A.D. From that region, they then spread 
northward and eastward. In the ninth century, these tribes con- 
stituted the largest part of the population of Kievan Rus 1 , the 
medieval state ruled by a Varangian dynasty from Scandinavia 
(see The East Slavs and the Varangians, ch. 1). 

The East Slavs became more politically united in the tenth 
century when they adopted Christianity as the state religion of 



173 



Russia: A Country Study 

Kievan Rus'. Nevertheless, tribal and regional differences were 
exacerbated in subsequent centuries as the state expanded, 
bringing the East Slavs into contact with other ethnic groups 
on their borders. Thus, Baltic and Finno-Ugric tribes mixed 
with the East Slavs to the northwest and the northeast, respec- 
tively. By the time the state of Kievan Rus 1 began disintegrating 
into independent principalities in the twelfth century, the East 
Slavs had begun to evolve into three peoples with distinct lin- 
guistic and cultural characteristics: the Russians to the north 
and northeast of Kiev, the Belorussians to the northwest of 
Kiev, and the Ukrainians in the Kiev region and to its south and 
southwest. In the thirteenth century, the invasion of the Mon- 
gols brought the final collapse of Kievan Rus' as a political 
entity, accelerating differentiation and consolidation of the 
three ethnic groups (see The Golden Age of Kiev, ch. 1). 
Although the three groups remained related culturally, linguis- 
tically, and religiously, each of them also was influenced by dif- 
ferent political, economic, religious, and social developments 
that further separated them. 

Building a state of increasing vitality as the Mongol occupa- 
tion weakened in the fourteenth century, the principality of 
Muscovy became the base from which the Russian cultural and 
political systems expanded under a series of strong rulers. By 
the end of the nineteenth century, Russians had settled the 
remote stretches of Siberia to the Pacific Ocean and colonized 
Central Asia and the Caucasus, becoming in the process the 
most numerous and ubiquitous of the Slavic peoples (see Rul- 
ing the Empire, ch. 1). 

Minority Peoples and Their Territories 

With a few changes in status in the post-World War II period, 
the autonomous republics, autonomous oblasts, and autono- 
mous regions of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Repub- 
lic retained the classifications assigned to them in the 1920s or 
1930s. In all cases, the postcommunist Russian government 
officially changed the term "autonomous republic" to "repub- 
lic" in 1992. According to the 1989 Soviet census, in only fif- 
teen of the thirty-one ethnically designated republics and 
autonomous regions were the "indigenous" people the largest 
group. Of the twenty-one republics existing in Russia in the 
mid-1990s, nine fell into this category, with the smallest per- 
centages of Russians in Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, and 
North Ossetia. Each region designated by ethnic group is 



174 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

home to the majority of Russia's population of that group (see 
table 9, Appendix). 

The border-drawing process that occurred in tsarist times 
and in the first decades of Soviet rule sometimes divided rather 
than united ethnic populations. The Buryats of southern Sibe- 
ria, for example, were divided among the Buryat Autonomous 
Republic and Chita and Irkutsk oblasts, which were created to 
the east and west of the republic, respectively; that population 
division remains in the post-Soviet era. By contrast, the Chech- 
ens and Ingush were united in a single republic until 1992, and 
smaller groups such as the Khanty and the Mansi were grouped 
together in single autonomous regions. 

Of the sixteen autonomous republics that existed in Russia 
at the time of the Soviet Union's breakup, one (the Chechen- 
Ingush Autonomous Republic) split into two in 1992, with 
Chechnya subsequently declaring full independence as the 
Republic of Chechnya and with Ingushetia gaining recognition 
as a separate republic of the Russian Federation. Three Soviet- 
era autonomous oblasts (Gorno-Altay, Adygea, and Karacha- 
yevo-Cherkessia) were granted republic status under the Feder- 
ation Treaty of 1992, which established the respective powers of 
the central and republic governments. Two republics, Chech- 
nya and Tatarstan, did not sign the treaty at that time. Most 
provisions of the Federation Treaty were overtaken by provi- 
sions of the 1993 constitution or by subsequent bilateral agree- 
ments between the central government and the republics. 

After the changes of the immediate post-Soviet years, twenty- 
one nationality-based republics existed in the Russian Federa- 
tion and were recognized in the constitution of 1993 (see table 
10, Appendix). They are Adygea, Bashkortostan, Buryatia, 
Chechnya, Chuvashia, Dagestan, Gorno-Altay, Ingushetia, 
Kabardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, Kare- 
lia, Khakassia, Komi, Mari El, Mordovia, North Ossetia, Sakha 
(Yakutia), Tatarstan, Tyva (Tuva), and Udmurtia. 

Besides the republics, the constitution recognizes ten auton- 
omous regions, whose status, like that of the republics, is based 
on the presence of one or two ethnic groups. These jurisdic- 
tions typically are sparsely populated, rich in natural resources, 
and inclined to seek independence from the larger units to 
which they belong. The existence and configuration of Russia's 
other jurisdictions are determined by geographical or political 
factors rather than ethnicity. The ten autonomous regions are 
the Aga Buryat, Chukchi, Evenk, Khanty-Mansi, Koryak, 



175 



Russia: A Country Study 

Nenets, Permyak, Taymyr, Ust'-Orda Buryat, and Yamalo- 
Nenets autonomous regions. A Jewish Autonomous Oblast 
(Yevreyskaya avtonomnaya oblast', now known as Birobidzhan) 
was established in 1934. Russians are the majority of the popu- 
lation in all but the Aga Buryat Autonomous Region (whose 
population is 55 percent Buryats) and the Permyak Autono- 
mous Region (whose population is 60 percent Komi-Permyak, 
one of the three subgroups of the Komi people). More typical 
is the Evenk Autonomous Region in Siberia west of the Repub- 
lic of Sakha, where the Evenks are outnumbered by Russians 
17,000 to 3,000. In fact, the Evenks, originally a nomadic and 
clan-based group whose society was nearly destroyed by Soviet 
collectivization in the 1930s, are among the indigenous peo- 
ples of Russia whose survival experts fear is endangered. 

The North Caucasus 

The region of Russia adjoining the north slope of the Cauca- 
sus range includes eight republics — Adygea, Chechnya, 
Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia, Karacha- 
yevo-Cherkessia, and North Ossetia. The North Caucasus 
retains its historical reputation as a trouble spot, although the 
majority of the region's republics are relatively peaceful and 
undeveloped. 

The Adygh (or Adygey) Autonomous Oblast was established 
in 1922 as part of Krasnoyarsk Territory; between 1922 and 
1928, it was known as the Cherkess (Adygh) Autonomous 
Oblast. It was redesignated as the Republic of Adygea in 1992. 
A landlocked sliver of land, Adygea occupies 7,600 square kilo- 
meters just inland from the northeast coast of the Black Sea, 
reaching southward to the northern foothills of the Caucasus 
Mountains. The oblast was formed by the early Soviet govern- 
ment for the Adygh people, who are one of three branches of 
the Cherkess, or Circassian, tribes — the other two being the 
Cherkess and the Kabardins. The general group from which 
these three peoples descend has occupied the northern border 
of the Caucasus Mountains at least since the Greeks began 
exploring beyond the Black Sea in the eighth century B.C. The 
Adyghs, most of whom accepted Islam early in the nineteenth 
century, speak a Caucasian language. 

In 1995 the Adyghs constituted 22 percent of the population 
of Adygea, which was estimated at 450,400. The rest consisted 
of 68 percent Russians, 3 percent Ukrainians, and 2 percent 
Armenians. Adygea is the only Muslim republic of the Russian 



176 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

Federation where the Muslim share of the population has 
decreased in the last two decades. The official languages are 
Russian and Adygh. Rich soil is the basis for an agricultural 
economy specializing in grains, tobacco, sugar beets, vegeta- 
bles, fruits, cattle, poultry, and beekeeping. Processing of 
meats, tobacco, dairy products, and canned goods is an impor- 
tant industry. The republic's only substantial mineral resource 
under exploitation is an extensive natural gas and oil deposit. 
The capital city, Maykop, is the main industrial center, with 
metallurgical, machine-building, and timber-processing plants. 

Chechnya has been the scene of the most violent of the sepa- 
ratist movements against the Russian Federation (see Move- 
ments Toward Sovereignty, this ch.; Chechnya, ch. 9; Security 
Operations in Chechnya, ch. 10). The Chechens and Ingush 
belong to ancient Caucasian peoples, mainly Muslim, who have 
lived in the same region in the northern Caucasus Mountains 
since prehistoric times. The two groups speak similar languages 
but have different historical backgrounds. The Chechen- 
Ingush Autonomous Oblast was established in 1934 by combin- 
ing two separate oblasts that had existed since the early 1920s. 
In 1936 the oblast was redesignated an autonomous republic, 
but both ethnic groups were exiled to Central Asia in 1944 for 
alleged collaboration with the invading Germans. 

The republic was reinstated in 1957, and what was left of the 
original population was allowed to return. In the three decades 
following their return, the Chechen and Ingush populations 
recovered rapidly, accounting in 1989 for 66 percent of the 
population of their shared republic. At that time, the Chechen 
population was about 760,000, the Ingush about 170,000. This 
proportion reflects approximately the relative size of the two 
regions after they split into separate republics in 1992. (Ingush- 
etia occupies a sliver of land between Chechnya and North 
Ossetia; in 1995 its population was estimated at 254,100.) In 
1989 Russians constituted about 23 percent of the combined 
population of Chechnya and Ingushetia, their numbers having 
declined steadily for decades. 

The most important product of what now is known as the 
Republic of Chechnya (and officially called the Republic of 
Chechnya-Ichkeria within the republic) is refined petroleum. 
The capital, Groznyy, was one of the most important refining 
centers in southern Russia prior to its virtual annihilation in 
the conflict of 1995-96. Several major pipelines connect 
Groznyy refineries with the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, and 



177 



Russia: A Country Study 

Russian industrial centers to the north. The republic's other 
important industries are petrochemical and machinery manu- 
facturing and food processing. When the Chechen-Ingush 
Autonomous Republic split in June 1992, Chechnya retained 
most of the industrial base. 

Both the Chechens and the Ingush remain strongly attached 
to clan and tribal relations as the structure of their societies. 
Primary use of their respective North Caucasian languages has 
remained above 95 percent, despite the long period that the 
two groups spent in exile. Chechnya was fully converted to 
Islam by the seventeenth century, Ingushetia only in the nine- 
teenth century. But the region has a two-century history of holy 
war against Russian authority. When the indigenous popula- 
tions were exiled in 1944, Soviet authorities attempted to 
expunge Islam entirely from the region by closing all mosques. 
Although the mosques remained closed when the Chechens 
and Ingush returned, clandestine religious organizations 
spread rapidly. 

Despite the close ethnic relationship of the Ingush and 
Chechen peoples, the Ingush opted to remain within the Rus- 
sian Federation after Chechnya initially declared its sovereignty 
in 1991. In June 1992, Ingushetia declared itself a sovereign 
republic within the Russian Federation. At that time, Ingushe- 
tia claimed part of neighboring North Ossetia as well. When 
hostilities arose between the Chechens and the Ingush follow- 
ing their split, Russian troops were deployed between the two 
ethnic territories. Ingushetia opposed Russia's occupation of 
Chechnya, but it supported the regime of President Boris N. 
Yeltsin on other issues in the mid-1990s. The capital of Ingushe- 
tia is Nazran. 

The Republic of Dagestan, formerly the Dagestan (or 
Daghestan) Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Dagestan 
ASSR), occupies 50,300 square kilometers along the western 
shore of the Caspian Sea, from the border with Azerbaijan in 
the south to a point about 150 kilometers south of the Volga 
River delta in the north. Arriving along the Volga, Russians first 
settled the area in the fifteenth century, but Dagestan was not 
annexed by the Russian Empire until 1813. During 1920-22 
most of the Dagestani people joined the Chechens in a wide- 
spread revolt against Soviet power; some of the secret Islamic 
orders that led the revolt continued to practice terrorism 
through the Soviet period. Designated an autonomous repub- 
lic in 1921, Dagestan lost some of its territory in 1941 and 1957; 



178 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 



most of the original republic was restored in 1957. In the Soviet 
period, the Muslim majority suffered severe religious repres- 
sion. 

Unlike the other autonomous republics, Dagestan does not 
derive its existence from the presence of one particular group. 
Besides its Russian population (9.2 percent of the total in 
1989), Dagestan is home to an estimated thirty ethnic groups 
and eighty nationalities, who speak Caucasian, Iranian, and 
Turkic languages and account for more than 80 percent of the 
population. The ten non-Slavic groups identified by Soviet cen- 
suses within the population of about 2 million are, in order of 
size, Avars, Dargins, Kumyks, Lezgins, Laks, Tabasarans, Nogay, 
Rutuls, Tsakhurs, and Aguls. Colonies of Azerbaijanis (4.2 per- 
cent in 1989) and Chechens (3.2 percent) also exist. Knowl- 
edge of Arabic and the teachings of Islam are more widespread 
in Dagestan than in any other Russian republic. In the 1990s, 
tension has existed among the many ethnic groups, accompa- 
nied by a debate over whether the republic should be orga- 
nized on a unitary or federative basis. 

The Avars, known for their warrior heritage, live mostly in 
the isolated western part of the republic, retaining much of 
their traditional village lifestyle. Numbering nearly 600,000, 
the Avars are by far the largest ethnic group in Dagestan. The 
Lezgins (also seen as Lezghins and Lezgians) are the dominant 
group in southern Dagestan; because of the Lezgins' location, 
their society has been more affected by foreign cultural influ- 
ence than the other groups. Like the Avars, the Dargins, 
divided into several distinct groups, maintain their village com- 
munities in relative isolation. The Kumyks, the largest Turkic 
group in the republic, are descendants of the Central Asian 
Kipchak tribes; they inhabit northern Dagestan. 

The Laks, a small, homogeneous group, occupy central Dag- 
estan; their region was the original center of Islam on the 
upper Caspian coast. The Tabasarans, who live in southern 
Dagestan, are strongly influenced by the more numerous Lez- 
gins, although folk practices such as vendettas persist. The 
steppe-dwelling Nogay of Dagestan, the second Turkic group in 
the republic, are descendents of one of two Nogay hordes of 
the Middle Ages; the second and larger group settled to the 
west, in Stavropol' Territory, and speaks a different language. 
The Tsakhurs, Rutuls, and Aguls are small, isolated groups of 
mountain people who lack a written language and largely have 
preserved their traditional social structures. The capital city, 



179 



Russia: A Country Study 

Makhachkala, is located in southern Dagestan, on the Caspian 
Sea, in a region dominated by the Lezgins. 

Most of the rural population raises livestock in the republic's 
hilly terrain. Dagestan is rich in oil, natural gas, coal, and other 
minerals; swift rivers offer abundant hydroelectric-power 
potential. The polyglot nature of Dagestan has made linguistic 
unity impossible; among the major groups, only the Nogay lan- 
guage is said to be declining in usage. Besides Azerbaijani and 
Russian, six languages were recognized as official languages in 
the late Soviet period. 

Kabardino-Balkaria, the territory of the Kabardin and Balkar 
peoples, is located along the north-central border of Georgia 
and the northern slope of the Caucasus Mountains. Occupying 
about 12,500 square kilometers, the autonomous republic was 
established in 1936 after fourteen years as an autonomous 
oblast. In 1944 the Balkars, like certain other North Caucasus 
groups, were deported to Central Asia because of their alleged 
collaboration with the Nazis, and the region was renamed the 
Kabardin Autonomous Oblast. Republic status was restored in 
1957 when the Balkars were allowed to return. In 1992 both 
the Kabardins and the Balkars opted to establish separate 
republics within the Russian Federation, using an ethnic 
boundary established in 1863, but the incumbent parliament 
of the republic declared the separation unlawful. Since that 
time, the issue of the republic's configuration has awaited a ref- 
erendum. In 1994 Kabardino-Balkaria signed a bilateral treaty 
with Russia defining respective areas of jurisdiction within the 
federation. 

In the fifteenth century, Crimean Tatars and Ottoman Turks 
brought Sunni Islam of the Hanafi school to the territory that 
is now Kabardino-Balkaria, but Muslim precepts have been 
observed rather superficially since that time. A small group of 
Christian Kabardins remains. Despite Russian immigration into 
the republic, the Muslim Kabardins and Balkars now constitute 
nearly 60 percent of the republic's population, which was esti- 
mated at 800,000 in 1995. Of that number, 48 percent were 
Kabardin, 9 percent Balkar, and 32 percent Russian, according 
to the 1989 census. 

Although the tribal system of the Kabardins disappeared 
with the first contact with Russians, some aspects of the tradi- 
tional clan system persist in society, and family customs are 
carefully preserved. Unlike other ethnic groups in the region, 
the Kabardins were strongly pro-Russian in tsarist times; they 



180 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

did not participate in the numerous uprisings of Caucasus peo- 
ples between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. This 
affinity survived into the Soviet period despite the dominant 
position of the aristocracy in Kabardin society. 

The economy of Kabardino-Balkaria is based on substantial 
deposits of gold, chromium, nickel, platinum, iron ore, molyb- 
denum, tungsten, and tin. The main industries are metallurgy, 
timber and food processing, the manufacture of oil-drilling 
equipment, and hydroelectric power generation. The repub- 
lic's capital is Nalchik. 

The former Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic 
(Kalmyk ASSR) is located in the Caspian Lowland, on the 
northwestern shore of the Caspian Sea. It has an area of 75,900 
square kilometers and a population of about 350,000 (in 
1995). 

The Kalmyks, also known as the Oirots, were seminomadic 
Mongol people who migrated from Central Asia in the six- 
teenth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 
much of the Kalmyk population was dispersed or extinguished 
by Russian authorities, and the nomadic lifestyle largely disap- 
peared during this period. 

The republic was established in 1920 as an autonomous 
oblast. The Kalmyk ASSR was established in 1935, dissolved in 
1943, then reconstituted in 1958, when its indigenous people 
were allowed to return from the exile imposed in 1944 for 
alleged collaboration with the Nazis. The republic officially 
changed its name to Kalmykia in February 1992. In 1989 the 
republic's population was 45 percent Kalmyk, 38 percent Rus- 
sian, 6 percent Dagestani peoples, 3 percent Chechen, 2 per- 
cent Kazak, and 2 percent German. The Kalmyk economy is 
based on the raising of livestock, particularly sheep, and the 
population is mainly rural; the capital and largest city, Elista, 
had about 85,000 people in 1989. 

Until 1992 an autonomous oblast, the Republic of 
Karachayevo-Cherkessia occupies 14,100 square kilometers 
along the northern border of Georgia's Abkhazian Autono- 
mous Republic. A single autonomous region was formed in 
1922 for the Cherkess (Circassian) and Karachay peoples; then 
separate regions existed between 1928 and 1943. The regions 
were recombined in 1943 as an autonomous oblast. The 
Cherkess converted to Islam after contacts with Crimean Tatars 
and Turks; the Karachay are an Islamic Turkic group. The 
Cherkess are the remnants of a once-dominant Circassian 



181 



Russia: A Country Study 

group of tribes that were dispersed, mostly to the Ottoman 
Empire, by the Russian conquest of the Caucasus region in the 
early nineteenth century. The original Cherkess now inhabit 
three republics, divided among five tribal groups: the Adyghs, 
Kabardins, Balkars, Karachay, and Cherkess (who inherited the 
original generic name). 

The Balkars and the Karachay belong to the same overall 
Turkic group, although the latter live in the Republic of 
Karachayevo-Cherkessia immediately west of Kabardino- 
Balkaria on the north slope of the Caucasus Mountains. Like 
the Chechens and the Ingush, the Karachay were exiled to 
Central Asia during World War II. The Cherkess and the 
Karachay were reunited when the latter were returned from 
exile in 1957. Established in 1992, the republic is mainly rural, 
with an economy based on livestock breeding and grain cultiva- 
tion. Some mining, chemical, and wood-processing facilities 
also exist. The population, which was estimated at 422,000 in 
1990, was 42 percent Russian, 31 percent Karachay, and 10 per- 
cent Cherkess. The capital city is Cherkessk. 

North Ossetia, called Alania in the republic's 1994 constitu- 
tion, is located along the northern border of Georgia, between 
the republics of Kabardino-Balkaria and Ingushetia. The Osse- 
tians are of Iranian and Caucasian origin, and they speak an 
Iranian language. In the first centuries A.D., Ossetia was occu- 
pied by the Alani tribe, ancestors of the modern Ossetians. In 
the thirteenth century, the Tatars drove the Alani into the 
mountains; Russian settlers began arriving in the eighteenth 
century. Russia annexed Ossetia in 1861. In 1924 North Ossetia 
became an autonomous region of the Soviet Union; in 1936 it 
was declared an autonomous republic. In 1992 the campaign 
for separation waged by Georgia's South Ossetian Autonomous 
Oblast directly to the south drew significant support from com- 
patriots to the north. North Ossetia is the only Caucasus repub- 
lic of the Russian Federation to give official support to Russia's 
occupation of nearby Chechnya. 

In 1995 the republic's population was estimated at 660,000, 
of which 53 percent were Ossetian, 29 percent Russian, 5 per- 
cent Ingush, 2 percent Armenian, and 2 percent Ukrainian. 
The area of North Ossetia totals about 8,000 square kilometers. 
The outputs of industry and agriculture were of approximately 
equal value in 1993. The main industries, concentrated in the 
capital city of Vladikavkaz, are metalworking, wood processing, 
textiles, food processing, and distilling of alcoholic beverages. 



182 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

The main crops are corn, wheat, potatoes, hemp, and fruit. 
Lead, zinc, and boron are mined. 

The Northern Republics 

Karelia and Komi, the two northernmost republics of Euro- 
pean Russia, occupy a sizable portion of the latitudes north of 
Moscow. Both are rich in natural resources, exploitation of 
which has caused considerable environmental damage. 

At 172,400 square kilometers, Karelia is the fourth largest of 
the autonomous republics of the Russian Federation. The 
republic shares a border with Finland from the Kola Peninsula 
in the north to Lake Ladoga in the south. The Karelians are of 
the same ethnic stock as the Finns. The status of Karelia has 
changed several times in the twentieth century. When Karelia 
first became an autonomous republic of the Soviet Union in 
1923, it included only the territory known as Eastern Karelia, 
which had been Russian territory since 1323. When Western 
Karelia was gained from the Finns in 1940, the enlarged Karelia 
became a full republic of the Soviet Union, called the Karelo- 
Finnish Republic. After World War II, the southwestern corner 
of the republic, including its only stretch of open-water sea- 
coast on the Gulf of Finland, became part of the Russian 
Republic. In 1956 the regime of Nikita S. Khrushchev (in office 
1953-64) redesignated the artificial entity, which never came 
close to having a Karelian majority, as the Karelian ASSR. In 
1994 the republic's population of about 800,200 was 74 percent 
Russian, only 10 percent Karelian, 7 percent Belarusian, and 4 
percent Ukrainian. The dominant religion is Russian Ortho- 
doxy. 

In a region dominated by forests, lakes, and marshes, the 
Karelian economy is supported mainly by logging, mining, and 
fishing. The plentiful mineral resources include construction 
stone, zinc, lead, silver, copper, molybdenum, aluminum, 
nickel, platinum, tin, barite, and iron ore. Industries include 
timber and mineral processing, and the manufacturing of fur- 
niture, chemicals, and paper. The capital of Karelia is Petroza- 
vodsk. 

The Republic of Komi extends westward from the northern 
end of the Ural Mountains across the Pechora River basin; the 
republic's westernmost extension is about 250 kilometers east 
of Arkhangelsk and the White Sea. The region, which as a 
republic occupies 415,900 square kilometers, was annexed by 
the principality of Muscovy in the fourteenth century, princi- 



183 



Russia: A Country Study 

pally because of its rich fur-trading potential. In the eighteenth 
century, Russians began exploiting mineral and timber 
resources. The Komi people, a Finno-Ugric group, traditionally 
have herded reindeer, hunted, and fished. They nominally 
accepted Russian Orthodoxy in the fourteenth century. In 
1921 the Soviet government designated an autonomous oblast 
for the Komi, and in 1936 the oblast became an autonomous 
republic. The Komi include three ethnic subgroups: the Perm- 
yaks, who inhabit the Permyak Autonomous Region south of 
the republic; the Yazua, who live in both the Republic of Komi 
and the Permyak region; and the Zyryan, who account for the 
majority of the republic's Komi population. Altogether, in 1994 
the Komi constituted 23 percent of the 1.2 million people of 
their republic, which had a 58 percent Russian majority. Long 
isolated by the forbidding climate of their region, the Komi of 
the north have intermixed with other ethnic groups only in 
recent decades. 

Located just southwest of the oil-rich YamalTeninsula, Komi 
has become an important producer of oil and natural gas; in 
1994 a pipeline leak caused extensive damage to the tundra 
and rivers in the Pechora Basin. Vorkuta, in the far northeast- 
ern corner of the republic near the Kara Sea, is an important 
Arctic coal-mining center. The capital of Komi is Syktyvkar. 

The Volga and Ural Republics 

Forming a crescent from the middle Volga to the southern 
extent of Russia's Ural Mountains, six republics represent a 
variety of ethnic and religious groups. Included in this group 
are the republics of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, two of Rus- 
sia's richest and most independent republics. 

Bashkortostan is the name assumed in 1992 by the former 
Bashkir ASSR, which also had been called Bashkiria. The 
republic occupies an area of 143,600 square kilometers in the 
far southeastern corner of European Russia, bounded on the 
east by the Ural Mountains and within seventy kilometers of 
the Kazakstan border at its southernmost point. The region was 
settled by nomads of the steppe, the Turkic Bashkirs, during 
the thirteenth-century domination by the Golden Horde (see 
Glossary; The Mongol Invasion, ch. 1). Russians arrived in the 
mid-sixteenth century, founding the city of Ufa, now the repub- 
lic's capital. Numerous local uprisings broke out in opposition 
to the settlement of larger Russian populations in the centuries 
that followed. The Bashkirs finally give up nomadic life in the 



184 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

nineteenth century, adopting the agricultural lifestyle that 
remains their primary means of support. The traditional clan- 
based social structure has largely disappeared. The predomi- 
nant religions of the Bashkir population are Islam — observed 
by the majority — and Russian Orthodoxy. A major battle- 
ground of the Russian Civil War (1918-21), in 1919 Bashkiria 
was the first ethnic region to be designated an autonomous 
republic of Russia under the new communist regime. The 
republic declared its sovereignty within the Soviet Union in 
1990, and in 1992 it declared full independence. Two years 
later, Bashkortostan agreed to remain within the legislative 
framework of the Russian Federation, provided that mutual 
areas of competence were agreed upon. 

The republic has rich mineral resources, especially oil, natu- 
ral gas, iron ore, manganese, copper, salt, and construction 
stone. The Soviet government built a variety of heavy industries 
on that resource base, and the republic's economy is relatively 
prosperous. The traditional Bashkir occupations of livestock 
raising and beekeeping remain important economic activities. 
Bashkortostan's population was about 4 million in 1995. In 
1989 the major ethnic groups were Russians (39 percent), 
Tatars (28 percent), Bashkirs (22 percent), Chuvash (3 per- 
cent), and Mari (3 percent). 

The Republic of Chuvashia, the former Chuvash ASSR, occu- 
pies about 18,000 square kilometers along the east bank of the 
Volga River, about sixty kilometers west of the river's conflu- 
ence with the Kama River and some 700 kilometers east of Mos- 
cow. The Chuvash are a Turkic people whose territory first was 
settled and annexed by Ivan IV (the Terrible; r. 1533-84) in the 
sixteenth century (see Ivan IV, ch. 1). At that time, the Chuvash 
already were a settled agricultural people. In 1920 Chuvashia 
became an autonomous oblast, and in 1925 it was redesignated 
an autonomous republic. The republic declared its sovereignty 
within the Soviet Union in 1990. The primary economic activi- 
ties are agricultural; grain and fruit production and logging are 
emphasized. Except for phosphates and gypsum, Chuvashia 
lacks significant amounts of minerals and fuels. 

The Chuvash speak a unique Turkic language and are 
believed to have descended from the same stock as the modern 
Bulgarians, whose ancestors migrated from the area. The Chu- 
vash also are the only Turkic ethnic group in Russia to have 
converted en masse to Russian Orthodoxy. In 1995 the Chu- 
vash constituted 68 percent of the population of their republic, 



185 



Russia: A Country Study 

which totaled about 1.4 million. Other groups are Russians (27 
percent), Tatars (3 percent), and Mordovians (1 percent). The 
capital city is Cheboksary. 

The Republic of Mari El, formerly the Mari ASSR, is located 
in the middle Volga Basin on the north shore of the river, 
directly east of the city of Nizhniy Novgorod (formerly 
Gor'kiy). The Finno-Ugric Mari people, also known as Chere- 
miss, first came into contact with the Russians in the sixteenth 
century, when the major Tatar outpost of Kazan', just down- 
stream from the current republic, fell to Ivan IV. The autono- 
mous oblast of Mari was established in 1920; an autonomous 
republic was designated in 1936. The economy is based mainly 
on timber products, agriculture, and machine building; the 
region is not rich in mineral resources. In 1989 the largest eth- 
nic group was the Russians, who make up 48 percent of the 
population, with Mari constituting 45 percent and Tatars 6 per- 
cent. The predominant religion is Russian Orthodoxy, 
although some traces of animism remain in the Mari popula- 
tion. The total population in 1995 was 754,000, about 60 per- 
cent of whom dwell in cities. The republic's area is 23,300 
square kilometers. The capital city is Yoshkar Ola. 

Formerly the Mordovian (or Mordvinian) ASSR, Mordovia 
(or Mordvinia) is located at the southwestern extreme of the 
middle Volga cluster of autonomous republics that also 
includes Tatarstan, Mari El, Udmurtia, and Chuvashia. Belong- 
ing to the Finno-Ugric ethnic group, the Mordovians were tra- 
ditionally agriculturalists, known especially as beekeepers. The 
first Russians reached the area in the twelfth century, and Mus- 
covy had taken full control of Mordovia by the seventeenth cen- 
tury. After receiving the status of autonomous oblast in 1930, 
Mordovia was declared an autonomous republic in 1934. 
Although the Mordovians nominally accepted Russian Ortho- 
doxy in the seventeenth century, they retain significant rem- 
nants of their pre-Christian beliefs, as well as national costumes 
and social practices. 

In 1995 Russians constituted about 61 percent of the repub- 
lic's population of approximately 964,000. Another 33 percent 
were Mordovians, and 5 percent were Tatars. The total area of 
Mordovia is 26,200 square kilometers. The republic's economy 
is based mainly on agriculture, especially the cultivation of 
grains, tobacco, hemp, and vegetables. Industry includes some 
machine building and chemical manufacturing, as well as 



186 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

enterprises based on timber and metals. The capital of Mor- 
dovia is Saransk. 

Located in the middle Volga east of Mari El and Chuvashia 
and west of Bashkortostan, Tatarstan was established as an 
autonomous republic in 1920 for one segment of the large and 
widespread Tatar population of the Russian Republic. In the 
1980s, less than one-third of Russia's Tatars lived in the repub- 
lic designated for them. Extensive populations of Tatars, who 
are predominantly Muslim, are scattered throughout Russia as 
well as most of the other former Soviet republics. In the late 
Soviet period, numerous Tatars migrated to the Central Asian 
republics, in particular Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The popula- 
tion of Tatarstan, about 3.8 million in 1995, is second only to 
that of Bashkortostan among Russia's republics. According to 
the 1989 census, the population was 49 percent Tatar, 43 per- 
cent Russian, 4 percent Chuvash, 1 percent Ukrainian, and 1 
percent Mordovian. 

The Tatars are a Turkic people whose language belongs to 
the Kipchak group and has several regional dialects. The 
region of present-day Tatarstan was occupied by the Mongols 
when the Golden Horde swept across the middle Volga region 
in the early thirteenth century. When the Mongol Empire frag- 
mented two centuries later, one of its constituent parts, the 
Tatar Kazan' Khanate, inherited the middle Volga and held the 
region until its defeat by Ivan IV. Shortly thereafter, Russian 
colonization began. 

Tatarstan has a diversified, well-developed economy that has 
been the basis of bold claims of independence from the Rus- 
sian Federation beginning in 1992 (see Movements Toward 
Sovereignty, this ch.). The first World Congress of Tatars was 
held in the republic's capital, Kazan', in June 1992. About 1,200 
delegates attended from Tatarstan and the Tatar diaspora to 
discuss the republic's status. In 1994 a bilateral agreement with 
the Yeltsin administration satisfied some of the republic's 
claims to sovereignty. 

In 1995 the discovery of a large oil field in northern Tatar- 
stan promised to boost the sagging local economy; oil extrac- 
tion already was Tatarstan's most important industry. Other 
major industries include chemical manufacturing, machine 
building, and the manufacture of vehicles and paper products. 
The agricultural sector produces grains, potatoes, sugar beets, 
hemp, tobacco, apples, dairy products, and livestock. 



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Russia: A Country Study 

Udmurtia, formerly the Udmurt ASSR, occupies 42,100 
square kilometers north of Tatarstan on the lower reaches of 
the Kama River, northeast of the confluence of the Kama and 
the Volga. The Udmurts are a Finno-Ugric people whose terri- 
tory was occupied by the Kazan' Khanate in the fourteenth and 
fifteenth centuries, then passed to Russian control when Ivan 
IV captured Kazan' in 1552. Originally established as the Votyak 
Autonomous Oblast in 1920, the territory was renamed for the 
Udmurts in 1932, then redesignated an autonomous republic 
in 1934. In 1995 the republic's population was about 1.5 mil- 
lion, of which 59 percent was Russian, 31 percent Udmurt, 7 
percent Tatar, 1 percent Ukrainian, and 1 percent Mari. 

Located in the industrial zone of the south Ural Mountains, 
Udmurtia has a substantial and diversified industrial economy 
that emphasizes locomotives and rolling stock, metallurgy, 
machine tools, construction materials, clothing, leather, and 
food processing. The capital city, Izhevsk, is also the largest 
industrial center. The most important agricultural products are 
grains, vegetables, and livestock. 

The Republics of Siberia 

Of the five republics located east of the Urals in Asian Rus- 
sia, four — Buryatia, Gorno-Altay, Khakassia, and Tyva — extend 
along Russia's southern border with Mongolia. The fifth, Sakha 
(formerly Yakutia), is Russia's largest subnational jurisdiction 
and the possessor of a large and varied supply of valuable natu- 
ral resources. 

The Republic of Buryatia, formerly the Buryat ASSR, occu- 
pies 351,300 square kilometers along the eastern shore of Lake 
Baikal and along the north-central border of Mongolia. The 
Buryats, a nomadic herding people of Mongolian stock, first 
faced colonization by Russian settlers in the seventeenth cen- 
tury. After initially resisting this intrusion, most of the Buryats 
eventually adapted to life in farming settlements, which contin- 
ues to be the predominant mode of existence. In 1989 the 
Buryats constituted only about 24 percent of the republic's 
population; Russians made up about 70 percent. The total 
Buryat population of the Soviet Union in the 1980s was about 
390,000, with about 150,000 living in the adjacent oblasts of 
Chita and Irkutsk. In 1994 the population of the republic was 
1.1 million, of which more than one-third lived in the capital 
city, Ulan-Ude. 



188 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

Buryatia possesses rich mineral resources, notably bauxite, 
coal, gold, iron, rare earth minerals, uranium, manganese, 
molybdenum, nickel, and tungsten. Livestock raising, fur farm- 
ing, hunting, and fishing are important economic pursuits of 
the indigenous population. The main industries derive from 
coal extraction, timber harvesting, and engineering. 

Gorno-Altay was established in 1922 as the Oirot Autono- 
mous Oblast, for the Mongol people of that name. In 1948 the 
region was renamed the Gorno-Altay Autonomous Oblast. 
Redesignated a republic in 1992, the region took its present 
name — the Republic of Gorno-Altay, or simply Altay (the ver- 
nacular term omits gorno, which means mountainous in Rus- 
sian) — in that year. Occupying 92,600 square kilometers on the 
north slope of the Altay Range on the northeast border of 
Kazakstan, Gorno-Altay had a population in 1995 of 200,000, of 
whom 60 percent were Russian and 31 percent Altay. About 83 
percent of Russia's total Altay population lives in the Republic 
of Gorno-Altay. The Altay people comprise several Turkic- 
speaking tribes living in the Altay and Kuznetsk Alatau moun- 
tains. Several collective terms have been applied to the overall 
group, including "Oirot," which was used in tsarist times. The 
Altays first came into contact with Russians in the eighteenth 
century, when colonization of the region began. Some conver- 
sion to Christianity occurred in the nineteenth century, but 
substantial numbers of Altays returned to their previous Mon- 
golian Lamaism in the early twentieth century, as part of a gen- 
eral movement against Russian domination. In the post-Soviet 
era, most of the republic's population is Orthodox Christian. 

The economy of Gorno-Altay is primarily agricultural, sup- 
ported mainly by livestock raising in the hillsides and valleys 
that dominate the republic's landscape. Gold and other pre- 
cious and nonprecious minerals — especially the rare earth 
minerals tantalum and cesium — support a small mining indus- 
try, and Gorno-Altay possesses rich coniferous forests. The 
main industries, mostly based on local resources, are the manu- 
facture of clothing, footwear, and foods, and the processing of 
chemicals and minerals. The capital of the republic is Gorno- 
Altaysk. 

Khakassia, an autonomous oblast that was redesignated an 
autonomous republic in 1992, is located about 1,000 kilome- 
ters west of Lake Baikal on the upper Yenisey River. Before the 
arrival of the first Russians in the seventeenth century, Khakas- 
sia was a regional power in Siberia, based on commercial links 



189 



Russia: A Country Study 

with the khanates of Central Asia and with the Chinese Empire. 
The sparsely populated republic (total population in 1995 was 
about 600,000) occupies 61,900 square kilometers of hilly ter- 
rain at the far northwestern end of the Altay Range. The Kha- 
kass people are a formerly nomadic Turkic Siberian group 
whose modern-day sedentary existence depends on sheep and 
goat husbandry. Russians now constitute nearly 80 percent of 
the population of Khakassia, although in 1989 more than 
three-quarters of oblast residents spoke Khakass. The Khakass 
population is 11 percent of the total. The republic produces 
timber, copper, iron ore, gold, molybdenum, and tungsten. 
The capital of Khakassia is Abakan. 

Sakha, whose name was changed from Yakutia in 1994, is by 
far the largest of the republics in size. It occupies about 3.1 mil- 
lion square kilometers that stretch from Russia's Arctic shores 
in the north to within 500 kilometers of the Chinese border in 
the south, and from the longitude of the Taymyr Peninsula in 
the west to within 400 kilometers of the Pacific Ocean in the 
east. Sakha was annexed by the Russian Empire in the first half 
of the seventeenth century. Russians slowly populated the val- 
ley of the Lena River, which flows northward through the heart 
of Sakha. In the nineteenth century, most of the nomadic 
Yakuts adopted an agricultural lifestyle. 

Formed as the Yakut Autonomous Republic in 1922, Sakha 
had a population of 1.1 million in 1994, of which 50 percent 
were Russian, 33 percent Yakut, 7 percent Ukrainian, and 2 
percent Tatar. The Yakuts are a Mongoloid people who origi- 
nated through the combination of local tribes with Turkic 
tribes that migrated northward before the tenth century. 

Climatic conditions preclude agriculture in most of Sakha. 
Where agriculture is possible, the main crops are potatoes, 
oats, rye, and vegetables. The republic's economy is supported 
mainly by its extensive mineral deposits, which include gold, 
diamonds, silver, tin, coal, and natural gas. Sakha produces 
most of Russia's diamonds, and natural gas deposits are 
thought to be large. The capital of Sakha is Yakutsk. 

Tyva was called the Tuva ASSR until the new Russian consti- 
tution recognized Tyva, the regional form of the name, in 
1993. The republic occupies 170,500 square kilometers on the 
border of Mongolia, directly east of Gorno-Altay. After being 
part of the Chinese Empire for 150 years and existing as the 
independent state of Tannu Tuva between 1921 and 1944, Tyva 
voluntarily joined the Soviet Union in 1944 and became an 



190 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

autonomous oblast. It became an autonomous republic in 
1961. The Tuvinians are a Turkic people with a heritage of rule 
by tribal chiefs. The republic's predominant religion is Tibetan 
Buddhism. In 1995 the population of about 314,000 was 64 per- 
cent Tuvinian and 32 percent Russian. 

Tyva is mainly an agricultural region with only five cities and 
a predominantly rural population. The main agricultural activ- 
ity is cattle raising, and fur is an important product. Gold, 
cobalt, and asbestos are mined, and the republic has extensive 
hydroelectric resources. The capital is Kyzyl. 

Other Ethnic Groups 

Besides the ethnic groups granted official jurisdictions in 
the Russian Republic and later in the Russian Federation, sev- 
eral minority groups have played an important role at some 
stage of the country's development. Among those that exist in 
significant numbers in parts of post-Soviet Russia are Germans, 
Koreans, and Roma. 

Germans 

According to the Soviet census of 1989, a total of 842,000 
Germans lived in Russia. The remains of a large enclave that 
was settled along the Volga River beginning in the time of Peter 
the Great (r. 1682-1725), the "Volga Germans" were the ethnic 
basis of an autonomous republic before World War II. When 
Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Joseph V. Stalin 
(in office 1927-53) dissolved the republic and dispersed the 
German population into Central Asia and Siberia. Although 
some German prisoners of war remained in the Soviet Union 
after the war, many others returned to Germany in the decades 
that followed. By 1991 less than half of the German Russians 
claimed German as their first language. 

Because of the discrimination suffered by the Volga Ger- 
mans, the postwar constitution of the Federal Republic of Ger- 
many (West Germany) granted ethnic Germans in Russia the 
right to citizenship if they moved to Germany. Russia's German 
population began lobbying for reestablishment of the prewar 
Volga German Autonomous Republic in 1990. In 1991 Presi- 
dent Yeltsin began discussions with the German government 
on creation of a German autonomous republic on the lower 
Volga near Volgograd. A protocol of cooperation signed in 
1992 arranged for such a republic in exchange for significant 
financial aid from Germany. However, the proposed German 



191 



Russia: A Country Study 

enclave encountered strong local resistance from populations 
that would have been displaced by the Germans on the lower 
Volga; official discussion of the issue ended in 1993. In 1995 
about 75,000 Russian Germans settled in Germany. 

Koreans 

An increasing percentage of the approximately 321,000 
Koreans living in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, in 
particular Uzbekistan, began migrating to the Russian Federa- 
tion in 1992 when various forms of discrimination against non- 
indigenous peoples increased in those republics. Most of these 
migrants to Russia have settled in Maritime (Primorskiy) Terri- 
tory, where their commercial activities have competed with 
local merchants and stirred numerous anti-Korean incidents. 
In 1996 about 36,000 Koreans also were living on Sakhalin 
Island. 

When economic conditions deteriorated in the Democratic 
People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) in the mid-1990s, 
the North Korean government allowed thousands of carefully 
chosen guest workers to find manual jobs in Vladivostok and 
other parts of the Russian Far East. As North Korean guest 
workers have sought asylum in Russia, the question of their 
repatriation has caused Russia a difficult diplomatic problem 
in its relations with North Korea and the Republic of Korea 
(South Korea), in view of Russia's intensified efforts to expand 
commercial ties with South Korea without alienating putative 
ally North Korea. Korean arrivals in Russia from Central Asia 
and from North Korea receive support from the Association of 
Ethnic Koreans and from South Korea. Another Korean emi- 
gre organization, the United Confederation of Koreans in Rus- 
sia, lends vocal support to North Korea in its disputes with 
South Korea. Tensions between the two Korean populations 
were very strong by 1996. Russian migration officials feared a 
much larger influx of North Koreans if the North Korean gov- 
ernment collapsed. 

Roma 

The 1989 Soviet census indicated that Russia was home to 
about 153,000 Roma, commonly known as Gypsies. However, 
the actual size of the population is unknown because many 
Roma do not register their nationality; experts assume that the 
true number is much higher than the official estimate. Most of 
the Roma currently in Russia are descended from people who 



192 



Members of Korean community gather at Korean Cultural Center, 

Vladivostok. 
Courtesy Youn-Cha Shin Chey 

migrated from Europe in the eighteenth century; they now call 
themselves Russka Roma. Another group, called the Vlach 
Roma, arrived after 1850 from the Balkans. Other Roma travel 
seasonally to Moscow from Moldova and Romania and back. 
Members of this group are often seen begging on Moscow 
streets; this activity has figured largely in the negative stereo- 
type of the Roma among ethnic Russians. 

Most Roma have been unable or unwilling to gain employ- 
ment in any but a few occupations. In the Soviet era, metal- 
working was a designated Roma trade, but street commerce — 
selling whatever goods become available — remains the most 
common occupation. Roma were much involved in the black- 
market trade of the last Soviet decades. Roma musical ensem- 
bles have prospered in Soviet and post-Soviet times, but few 
individuals have access to such a profession. 

In general, post-Soviet Russian society has included the 
Roma with other easily identified non-Slavic groups, particu- 



193 



Russia: A Country Study 



larly those from the Caucasus, who are accused of exploiting or 
worsening the economic condition of the majority population. 
In the 1990s, violence has erupted between Russians and Roma 
on several occasions. The wide dispersion of the Russian Roma 
population — there are at least six distinct groups, with little 
contact among them — has limited their ability to organize. In 
the 1990s, some Russian Roma have participated in interna- 
tional movements to gain support abroad. The various groups 
have widely varying political views. The elite musical perform- 
ers and intelligentsia, for example, supported the socialism of 
the Soviet Union, but the wealthy Lovari group, which the gov- 
ernment persecuted in Soviet times, is strongly antisocialist. 

Movements Toward Sovereignty 

Beginning in 1990, many of the constituent autonomous 
republics and regions, delineated at various stages of tsarist or 
Soviet control, used the chaos and centrifugal force created by 
the breakup of the Soviet Union to move toward local sover- 
eignty. The legislatures of most republics made official declara- 
tions of sovereignty over their land and natural resources 
between August and October 1990. Although the declaration 
of full independence by the Chechen Autonomous Republic 
was the most extreme result of such moves, some observers felt 
that the political and economic stability of the Russian Federa- 
tion was threatened by the separatism of regions that were valu- 
able because of their strategic location or natural resources 
(see The Separatism Question, ch. 7). Furthermore, Russia, 
acutely conscious of having lost its "near abroad" — the four- 
teen republics that constituted the Soviet Union together with 
the RSFSR — could ill afford the second blow to national self- 
image that the loss of ethnically based jurisdictions would 
inflict. 

Occupying about three-quarters of the territory of the 
former Soviet Union, Russia is the largest country in the world. 
It never has existed as a country within its present borders, 
however. Intent upon preserving the territorial integrity of the 
Russian Federation, the government in Moscow maintains an 
uneasy relationship with the non-Russian (and particularly the 
non-Slavic) nationalities. This relationship stems from Russian 
racial, religious, and cultural stereotypes (for example, percep- 
tions of the dark-skinned Muslims in the midst of white- 
skinned, Orthodox Slavs), a historical tendency toward xeno- 
phobia among Russian commoners and parts of the Russian 



194 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

intelligentsia, and a legacy of forcible incorporation of various 
ethnic and nationality groups into the Russian Empire and the 
Soviet Union. Further complicating the relationship is the fact 
that many of Russia's abundant natural resources lie in the ter- 
ritories of various regions now proclaiming exclusive sover- 
eignty over those resources. 

Although some tensions in ethnic and nationality relations 
stem from a desire for union between peoples on both sides of 
an internal or international border arbitrarily drawn by the 
tsars or by Soviet authorities, other motivations also underlie 
the assertiveness of national minorities in the federation. In the 
more liberal post-Soviet atmosphere, people no longer must 
suppress their anger over Soviet political and economic subju- 
gation and Russification campaigns. Accordingly, non-Russian 
nationalities seek recompense for long periods of colonial-style 
exploitation of their indigenous resources for the benefit of 
the regime in Moscow. Another cause of dissatisfaction is the 
perceived failure of the Russian government to provide ade- 
quate support and protection for native schools and cultures. 
Finally, the end of the Russian government's monopolization 
and censorship of the news media acquainted minority groups 
with political trends, such as the spread of nationalism, with 
which the rest of the world has been familiar for some time. 

Other tensions result from Russian policies that non-Russian 
groups perceive as discriminatory or confiscatory. Examples 
include unfair tax practices and the refusal of the Russian gov- 
ernment to let various ethnic groups reap the income from sale 
of their indigenous products and natural resources. 

Separatist agitation in many areas of Russia already had 
begun in the Soviet Union's twilight years. A full year before 
the Soviet Union's demise, more than half the autonomous 
republics in the RSFSR had adopted declarations of sover- 
eignty. Every region of the vast RSFSR was affected by this 
trend, which was more an indication of the central govern- 
ment's waning authority — even in regions relatively close to 
Moscow — than it was an indication of intent by those declaring 
sovereignty. 

In May 1990, the Tuva ASSR witnessed civil strife between 
the Russian and Tuvinian populations. Charging that Russia 
had failed to provide them with employment opportunities or 
suitable housing and had sought to eradicate their indigenous 
culture, the Tuvinians attacked Russian neighborhoods, setting 
fire to homes and forcing about 3,000 Russians to flee. 



195 



Russia: A Country Study 



In October 1990, the Chuvash ASSR declared itself a full 
republic of the Soviet Union, a status that would have given it 
equal status with Russia, Ukraine, and the other thirteen Soviet 
republics. Although the announcement stated that Chuvashia 
would remain part of the Russian Federation, the republic 
would exercise complete control over all its natural resources 
and would make Chuvash equal with Russian as an official lan- 
guage. Also in 1990, the Mari ASSR, about 500 kilometers east 
of Moscow, proclaimed itself a full Soviet republic whose natu- 
ral resources would become the exclusive property of its peo- 
ple and whose state languages would be Mari and Russian. The 
republic adopted the new vernacular name "Mari El," meaning 
"Mari Territory," and that name won official approval from the 
government in Moscow. 

Also in 1990, the Gorno-Altay Autonomous Oblast and the 
Adygh Autonomous Oblast unilaterally upgraded themselves to 
autonomous-republic status. While declaring 'their intention to 
remain part of the RSFSR, these jurisdictions asserted the right 
to local control of their land and natural resources. Still 
another declaration of sovereignty came from the Buryat 
ASSR. The Buryats declared that their republic's laws hence- 
forth would take precedence over those of the RSFSR. 

In northwestern Russia, secessionist sentiment manifested 
itself among the ethnic minorities of the Karelian and Komi 
ASSRs. In the autumn of 1990, local Karelian authorities pro- 
tested insufficient food shipments by refusing to deliver timber 
and paper products to Russia. Many Karelians, ethnically close 
to the Finns, want their republic to become part of Finland. 

During the period leading to the collapse of the Soviet 
Union, local officials in the oil-rich Bashkir ASSR (renamed 
Bashkortostan in 1992) declared sovereignty, and the Chukchi 
Autonomous Region, which faces Alaska across the Bering 
Strait, declared itself autonomous and demanded control over 
its reindeer and fish resources. Commenting on the rash of 
separatist activity, an adviser to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev 
remarked, "It's getting to the point where sooner or later some- 
one is going to declare his apartment an independent state." 

In October 1991, the legislature of the Tatar ASSR, some 600 
kilometers east of Moscow, adopted a declaration of indepen- 
dence from Moscow, and in 1992 Tatarstan approved a consti- 
tution that described the republic as being on an equal footing 
with the Russian Federation. And, in what was to become the 



196 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

most troublesome of the ethnic autonomy movements of the 
1990s, Chechnya proclaimed its sovereignty in October 1991. 

Among these nominally separatist political units, the transi- 
tion from words to deeds has been uneven. In some cases, eth- 
nic and nationality groups appear content with the mere form 
of sovereignty; in others, efforts are under way to give sub- 
stance to the words of separatism. In republics such as Mor- 
dovia, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria, relations with 
Russia are the defining issue among opposing political groups. 
Other republics, such as pro-Russian Kalmykia and indepen- 
dence-minded Bashkortostan, are firmly under the control of a 
single leader. 

The enormous Republic of Sakha in north-central Siberia, 
rich in diamonds and other minerals, exemplifies the threat 
that secession poses to the Russian Federation. Sakha has 
declared that its local laws supersede those imposed from Mos- 
cow and that it will retain all revenues generated by the sale 
and use of its resources. The republic also has accepted sub- 
stantial direct development investment from Japan and China. 
Many members of Sakha's Russian majority have sided with the 
indigenous population in supporting self-government or full 
independence. Experts believe that such regions as Sakha, 
Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan theoretically have sufficient natu- 
ral wealth to become viable independent entities. According to 
estimates, these regions' secession from the Russian Federation 
would deprive Russia of half of its oil, most of its diamonds, and 
much of its coal, as well as a substantial portion of such indus- 
tries as automobile manufacturing. 

Against the backdrop of ethnic and nationality tensions, a 
tug-of-war developed in the early 1990s over the respective pow- 
ers of the federal and local governments in Russia (see Local 
and Regional Government, ch. 7). In March 1992, representa- 
tives of all but two of the republics (Chechnya and Tatarstan) 
and most of the smaller ethnic jurisdictions signed the Federa- 
tion Treaty, which was an attempt to forestall further separat- 
ism and define the respective jurisdictions of central and 
regional government. The treaty failed to resolve differences in 
the key areas of taxation and control of natural resources, how- 
ever. In some cases, self-proclaimed independent entities in 
Siberia and elsewhere in the Russian Federation have forged 
links with foreign countries. Commercial and cultural accords 
between Turkey and Turkic republics such as Bashkortostan 
and Chuvashia especially worry the central government. 



197 



Russia: A Country Study 

The Chechnya Dilemma 

The only autonomous jurisdictions that refused to sign the 
1992 Federation Treaty were Chechnya and Tatarstan, both of 
which are rich in oil. In the spring of 1994, President Yeltsin 
signed a special political accord with the president of Tatarstan 
granting many of the Tatar demands for greater autonomy. 
Yeltsin declined to carry out serious negotiations with Chech- 
nya, however, allowing the situation to deteriorate into full- 
scale war at the end of 1994 (see Chechnya, ch. 9). In the first 
half of 1996, Chechnya continued to pose the biggest obstacle 
to the quelling of separatism among the components of the 
Russian Federation. 

Chechnya long has had a reputation in Russia as a center of 
organized crime and corrupt business practices; the Chechen 
maftya has a particularly fierce reputation. The proportion of 
Chechens and other Caucasians in Russia's emerging market 
economy is much higher than the representation of these 
nationalities in the population as a whole. In its propaganda 
campaign to justify military action against Chechnya, the Rus- 
sian government played upon the stereotypes of the criminal 
and the dishonest businessman. It also illustrated the brutal 
practices of the Chechen rebels by broadcasting photos of the 
severed heads of victims along the roads in the breakaway 
republic. Meanwhile, Russians adopted the habit of including 
all individuals of non-Slavic appearance under the heading 
"Chechen," widening the existing strain of racism in Russia's 
society. 

The first Russian invasion of Chechnya occurred during the 
time of Peter the Great, in the early eighteenth century. After a 
long series of fierce battles and bloody massacres, Chechnya 
was incorporated into Russia in the 1870s. In 1936 Stalin cre- 
ated the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic. In 1943, 
when Nazi forces reached the gates of the Chechen capital, 
Groznyy, Chechen separatists staged a rebellion against Russian 
rule. In response, the next year Stalin deported more than 1 
million Chechens, Ingush, and other North Caucasian peoples 
to Siberia and Central Asia on the pretext that they had collab- 
orated with the Nazis. The remaining Muslim people of the 
Chechnya region were resettled among neighboring Christian 
communities. Stalin's genocidal policy virtually erased Chech- 
nya from the map, but Soviet first secretary Nikita S. Khru- 
shchev permitted the Chechen and Ingush peoples to return 
to their homeland and restored their republic in 1957. 



198 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

The series of events since the Soviet Union's collapse flowed 
naturally from the Chechens' long-standing hatred of the Rus- 
sians. In September 1991, the government of the Chechen- 
Ingush Autonomous Republic resigned under pressure from 
the proindependence Congress of the Chechen People, whose 
leader was former Soviet air force general Dzhokar Dudayev. 
The following month, Dudayev won overwhelming popular 
support to oust the interim, central government-supported 
administration and make himself president. Dudayev then 
issued a unilateral declaration of independence. In November 
1991, President Yeltsin dispatched troops to Groznyy, but they 
were withdrawn when Dudayev's forces prevented them from 
leaving the airport. 

The Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic split in two in 
June 1992. After Chechnya had announced its initial declara- 
tion of sovereignty in 1991, Ingushetia joined the Russian Fed- 
eration; Chechnya declared full independence in 1993. In 
August 1994, when an opposition faction launched an armed 
campaign to topple Dudayev's government, Moscow supplied 
the rebel forces with military equipment, and Russian aircraft 
began to bomb Groznyy. In December, five days after Dudayev 
and Minister of Defense Pavel Grachev of Russia had agreed to 
avoid the further use of force, Russian troops invaded Chech- 
nya. 

The Russian government's expectations of a quick surgical 
strike followed by Chechen capitulation were misguided. The 
protracted war in Chechnya, which generated many reports of 
violence against civilians, ignited fear and contempt toward 
Russia among many other ethnic groups in the federation. 
Experts believe that the inability of Russian forces to subdue 
the Chechen "bandits" also might encourage other ethnic 
groups to defy the central government by proclaiming and 
defending their independence. As the war was reported to the 
Russian public on television and in newspaper accounts, the 
rising protests from Russia's independent news media and vari- 
ous political and other interest groups soon came to threaten 
Russia's democratic experiment. Chechnya was one of the 
heaviest burdens Yeltsin carried during the 1996 presidential 
election campaign. 

In January 1996, the destruction of the Dagestani border vil- 
lage of Pervomayskoye by Russian forces in reaction to 
Chechen hostage taking brought strong criticism from the 
hitherto loyal Republic of Dagestan and escalated domestic dis- 



199 



Russia: A Country Study 

satisfaction. Chechnya's declaration that it was waging a jihad 
(holy war) against Russia also raised the specter that Muslim 
"volunteers" from other regions and even outside Russia would 
enter the fray. However, Russia feared that a move to end the 
war short of victory would create a cascade of secession 
attempts by other ethnic minorities and present a new target to 
extreme nationalist Russian factions. 

Some fighting occurred in Ingushetia in 1995, mostly when 
Russian commanders sent troops over the border in pursuit of 
Chechen rebels. Although all sides generally observed the dis- 
tinction between the two peoples that formerly shared the 
autonomous republic, as many as 200,000 refugees from 
Chechnya and neighboring North Ossetia strained Ingushetia's 
already weak economy. On several occasions, Ingush president 
Ruslan Aushev protested incursions by Russian soldiers, even 
threatening to sue the Russian Ministry of Defense for damages 
inflicted. 

Meanwhile, the war in Chechnya spawned a new form of sep- 
aratist activity in the Russian Federation. Resistance to the con- 
scription of men from minority ethnic groups to fight in 
Chechnya was widespread among other republics, many of 
which passed laws and decrees on the subject. For example, the 
government of Chuvashia passed a decree providing legal pro- 
tection to soldiers from the republic who refused to participate 
in the Chechnya war and imposing limits on the use of the Rus- 
sian army in ethnic or regional conflicts within Russia. Some 
regional and local legislative bodies called for a prohibition on 
the use of draftees in quelling internal uprisings; others 
demanded a total ban on the use of the armed forces in domes- 
tic conflicts. 

The Caucasus Region in the Federation 

The oil-rich region around Chechnya, between the Black 
Sea and the Caspian Sea, forms a southwestern corridor of Rus- 
sian territory bounded on the west by Ukraine and the Black 
Sea, on the south by Georgia and Azerbaijan, and on the east 
by the Caspian Sea and Kazakstan. The region north of the 
Caucasus includes seven ethnic republics and four "Russian" 
jurisdictions: the territories of Krasnodar and Stavropol' and 
the oblasts of Rostov and Astrakhan'. With the thirty ethnically 
and linguistically distinct communities of Dagestan the most 
extreme example of the region's ethnic diversity, much of the 
region surrounding Chechnya is a cauldron of nationality and 



200 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

ethnic conflicts among warlike mountain clans. On the oppo- 
site slope of the Caucasus, the former Soviet republic of Geor- 
gia likewise includes a number of ethnic groups, two of 
which — the Abkhaz and the South Ossetians — declared out- 
right independence in the early 1990s. 

Tsarist Russia conducted a centuries-long process of expan- 
sion into the Caucasus region, subduing the nationalities of the 
area gradually and often at great expense. The region has 
assumed particular importance in the contemporary era 
because of its oil, its location astride Russia's transportation 
and communications arteries leading to the Middle East, and 
the central government's fear of resurgent Islam along the 
southern border of the former Soviet Union. 

Not far from Chechnya, a self-styled Confederation of Moun- 
tain Peoples of the North Caucasus emerged in 1992 in south- 
western Russia, where the borders of the Russian Federation 
abut the Transcaucasian republics of the former Soviet Union. 
That confederation, including representatives from Russia's 
seven republics bordering the Caucasus, aspires to establish a 
chain of independent, predominantly Muslim states along the 
federation's southern periphery. It also has provided a forum 
for Chechen leaders to enlist support against Russia and for 
separatist leaders from Abkhazia and South Ossetia to enlist 
support against Georgia. Terrorist acts in Chechnya and else- 
where have been attributed to confederation members. 

Responses and Prospects 

In the mid-1990s, the relationship of Russia's central govern- 
ment to its regional jurisdictions remains tentative; the Yeltsin 
administration's failure to contain separatist movements is a 
favorite target of the president's nationalist critics. The Yeltsin 
government's policy toward separatism grew from the theory 
that compromises made with individual ethnic groups would 
satisfy the need to express national identity. Such an approach 
rests on the proposition that the diverse inhabitants of the Rus- 
sian Federation ultimately will identify closely enough with the 
federation to ensure its continuing territorial integrity, and 
that centrifugal impulses will not lead Russia to the fate suf- 
fered by the Soviet Union. 

Theoretically, the secession of one component of the Rus- 
sian Federation could encourage the movement of others in an 
irrational but uncontrollable domino effect. On the one hand, 
Russia's inability to reverse secession despite the deployment of 



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Russia: A Country Study 

a large-scale force in Chechnya is cited by experts as an induce- 
ment to other national units to break away. On the other hand, 
the fact that no minority ethnic group constitutes more than 4 
percent of the federation's population militates against break- 
away jurisdicdons attaining the critical mass and political lever- 
age needed to secede and function successfully as independent 
nations. In many respects, Russia's ethnic republics, many of 
which lie deep within the boundaries of the federation, remain 
heavily dependent on the center, especially in economic mat- 
ters. For example, under the conditions of the mid-1990s, 
Tatarstan's oil cannot be processed or transported to the out- 
side world without the utilization of facilities lying outside its 
borders, in Russia proper. Thus, the threat of secession has now 
been established as a bargaining chip in the struggle with the 
central government for political and economic advantage, but 
it is a threat of limited practical value. 

Religion 

The chief religion of Russia is Russian Orthodox Christian- 
ity, which is professed by about 75 percent of citizens who 
describe themselves as religious believers. Because the concept 
of separation of church and state never took root in Russia, the 
Russian Orthodox Church, a branch of Eastern Orthodoxy, was 
a pillar of tsarist autocracy. During the communist era, the 
church, like every other institution in the Soviet Union, was 
completely subordinate to the state, achieving a modus vivendi 
by ceding most of its autonomous identity. Under the officially 
atheist regimes of the Soviet Union, no official figures on the 
number of religious believers in the country were available to 
Western scholars. According to various Soviet and Western 
sources, however, more than one-third of the citizens of the 
Soviet Union regarded themselves as believers in the 1980s, 
when the number of adherents to Russian Orthodoxy was esti- 
mated at more than 50 million — although a high percentage of 
that number feared to express their religious beliefs openly. 

Islam, professed by about 19 percent of believers in the mid- 
1990s, is numerically the second most important religion in 
Russia. Various non-Orthodox Christian denominations and a 
dwindling but still important Jewish population complete the 
list of major religious groups in the Russian Federation. In gen- 
eral, Russians of all religions have enjoyed freedom of worship 
since the collapse of the communist regime in 1991, and large 



202 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

numbers of abandoned or converted religious buildings have 
been returned to active religious use in the 1990s. 

The Russian Orthodox Church 

The Russian Orthodox Church has a thousand-year history 
of strong political as well as spiritual influence over the inhabit- 
ants of the Russian state. After enduring the Soviet era as a 
state-controlled religious facade, the church quickly regained 
both membership and political influence in the early 1990s. 

Beliefs and Ritual 

Orthodox belief holds that the Orthodox Church is Chris- 
tianity's true, holy, and apostolic church, tracing its origin 
directly to the institution established byjesus Christ. Orthodox 
beliefs are based on the Bible and on tradition as defined by 
seven ecumenical councils held by church authorities between 
A.D. 325 and 787. Orthodox teachings include the doctrine of 
the Holy Trinity and the inseparable but distinguishable union 
of the two natures of Jesus Christ — one divine, the other 
human. Among saints, Mary has a special place as the Mother 
of God. Russian Orthodox services, noted for their pageantry, 
involve the congregation directly by using only the vernacular 
form of the liturgy. The liturgy itself includes multiple elabo- 
rate systems of symbols meant to convey the content of the 
faith to believers. Many liturgical forms remain from the earli- 
est days of Orthodoxy. Icons, sacred images often illuminated 
by candles, adorn the churches as well as the homes of most 
Orthodox faithful. The church also places a heavy emphasis on 
monasticism. Many of the numerous monasteries that dotted 
the forests and remote regions of tsarist Russia are in the pro- 
cess of restoration. The Russian Orthodox Church, like the 
other churches that make up Eastern Orthodoxy, is autono- 
mous, or self-governing. The highest church official is the 
patriarch. Matters relating to faith are decided by ecumenical 
councils in which all member churches of Eastern Orthodoxy 
participate. Followers of the church regard the councils' deci- 
sions as infallible. 

Church History 

The Russian Orthodox Church traces its origins to the time 
of Kievan Rus', the first forerunner of the modern Russian 
state. In A.D. 988 Prince Vladimir made the Byzantine variant 
of Christianity the state religion of Russia (see The Golden Age 



203 



Russia: A Country Study 

of Kiev, ch. 1). The Russian church was subordinate to the 
patriarch (see Glossary) of Constantinople (present-day Istan- 
bul), seat of the Byzantine Empire. The original seat of the 
metropolitan, as the head of the church was known, was Kiev. 
As power moved from Kiev to Moscow in the fourteenth cen- 
tury, the seat moved as well, establishing the tradition that the 
metropolitan of Moscow is the head of the church. In the Mid- 
dle Ages, the church placed strong emphasis on asceticism, 
which evolved into a widespread monastic tradition. Large 
numbers of monasteries were founded in obscure locations 
across all of the medieval state of Muscovy. Such small settle- 
ments expanded into larger population centers, making the 
monastic movement one of the bases of social and economic as 
well as spiritual life. 

After the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the Russian 
Orthodox Church evolved into a semi-independent (autoceph- 
alous) branch of Eastern Christianity. In 1589 the metropolitan 
of Moscow received the title of patriarch. Nevertheless, the Rus- 
sian church retained the Byzantine tradition of authorizing the 
head of state and the government bureaucracy to participate 
actively in the church's administrative affairs. Separation of 
church and state thus would be almost unknown in Russia. 

As Western Europe was emerging from the Middle Ages into 
the Renaissance and the Reformation, Russia remained iso- 
lated from the West, and Russian Orthodoxy was virtually 
untouched by the changes in intellectual and spiritual life 
being felt elsewhere. In the seventeenth century, the introduc- 
tion by Ukrainian clergy of Western doctrinal and liturgical 
reforms prompted a strong reaction among traditionalist 
Orthodox believers, resulting in a schism in the church. 

In the early eighteenth century, Peter the Great modern- 
ized, expanded, and consolidated Muscovy into what then 
became known as the Russian Empire. In the process of rede- 
fining his power as tsar, Peter curtailed the minimal secular 
influence of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was func- 
tioning principally as a pillar of the tsarist regime. In 1721 
Peter the Great went so far as to abolish the patriarchate and 
establish a governmental organ called the Holy Synod, staffed 
by secular officials, to administer and control the church. As a 
result, the church's moral authority declined in the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries. 

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the monastic 
tradition produced a number of church elders who gained the 



204 




205 



Russia: A Country Study 

respect of all classes in Russia as wise counselors on both secu- 
lar and spiritual matters. Similarly, by 1900 a strong revival 
movement was calling for the restoration of church autonomy 
and organizational reform. However, few practical reforms had 
been implemented when the October Revolution of 1917 
brought to power the Bolsheviks (see Glossary), who set about 
eliminating the worldly and spiritual powers of the church. 
Ironically, earlier in 1917 the moderate Provisional Govern- 
ment had provided the church a few months of restoration to 
its pre-Petrine stature by reestablishing the patriarchate and 
independent governance of the church. In the decades that 
followed, the communist leadership frequently used the 
restored patriarch as a propaganda agent, allowing him to 
meet with foreign religious representatives in an effort to cre- 
ate the impression of freedom of religion in the Soviet Union. 

Karl Marx, the political philosopher whose ideas were nomi- 
nally followed by the Bolsheviks, called religion "the opiate of 
the people." Although many of Russia's revolutionary factions 
did not take Marx literally, the Bolshevik faction, led by 
Vladimir I. Lenin, was deeply suspicious of the church as an 
institution and as a purveyor of spiritual values. Therefore, 
atheism became mandatory for members of the ruling Russian 
Communist Party (Bolshevik). To eliminate as soon as possible 
what was deemed the perverse influence of religion in society, 
the communists launched a propaganda campaign against all 
forms of religion. 

By 1918 the government had nationalized all church prop- 
erty, including buildings. In the first five years of the Soviet 
Union (1922-26), twenty-eight Russian Orthodox bishops and 
more than 1,200 priests were executed, and many others were 
persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and publication of 
most religious material was prohibited. The next quarter-cen- 
tury saw surges and declines in arrests, enforcement of laws 
against religious assembly and activities, and harassment of 
clergy. Antireligious campaigns were directed at all faiths; 
beginning in the 1920s, Buddhist and Shamanist places of wor- 
ship in Buryatia, in the Baikal region, were destroyed, and their 
lamas and priests were arrested (a practice that continued until 
the 1970s). The League of the Militant Godless, established in 
1925, directed a nationwide campaign against the Orthodox 
Church and all other organized religions. The extreme posi- 
tion of that organization eventually led even the Soviet govern- 
ment to disavow direct connection with its practices. In 1940 an 



206 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

estimated 30,000 religious communities of all denominations 
survived in all the Soviet Union, but only about 500 Russian 
Orthodox parishes were open at that time, compared with the 
estimated 54,000 that had existed before World War I. 

In 1939 the government significantly relaxed some restric- 
tions on religious practice, a change that the Orthodox Church 
met with an attitude of cooperation. When Germany invaded 
the Soviet Union in 1941, the government reluctantly solicited 
church support as it called upon every traditional patriotic 
value that might resonate with the Soviet people. According to 
witnesses, active church support of the national war effort drew 
many otherwise alienated individuals to the Soviet cause. 
Beginning in 1942, to promote this alliance, the government 
ended its prohibition of official contact between clergy and for- 
eign representatives. It also permitted the traditional celebra- 
tion of Easter and temporarily ended the stigmatization of 
religiosity as an impediment to social advancement. 

The government concessions for the sake of national 
defense reinvigorated the Russian Orthodox Church. Thou- 
sands of churches reopened during the war. But the Khru- 
shchev regime (1953-64) reversed the policy that had made 
such a revival possible, pursuing a violent six-year campaign 
against all forms of religious practice. Although the church 
retained its official sanction throughout that period, Khru- 
shchev's campaign was continued less stringently by his succes- 
sor, Leonid I. Brezhnev (in office 1964-82). By 1975 the 
number of operating Russian Orthodox churches had been 
reduced to about 7,000. Some of the most prominent members 
of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy and religious activists were 
jailed or forced to leave the church. Their place was taken by a 
docile clergy whose ranks were sometimes infiltrated by agents 
of the Committee for State Security (Komitet gosudarstvennoy 
bezopasnosti — KGB; see Glossary) . Under these circumstances, 
the church espoused and propagated Soviet foreign policy and 
furthered the Russification of non-Russian believers, such as 
Orthodox Ukrainians and Belorussians. 

Despite official repression in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev 
years, religious activity persisted. Although regular church 
attendance was common mainly among women and the eld- 
erly, special occasions such as baptisms and Easter brought 
many more Russians into the churches. An increase in church 
weddings in the 1950s and 1960s stimulated the establishment 
of secular "marriage palaces" offering the ceremonial trap- 



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Russia: A Country Study 

pings of marriage devoid of religious rites. When applications 
for seminary study increased significantly in the 1950s, the 
Communist Youth League (Komsomol) forced aspiring semi- 
narians to endure interrogations that discouraged many and 
that succeeded, by 1960, in sharply reducing the number of 
candidates. 

The general cultural liberalization that followed Stalin's 
death in 1953 brought a natural curiosity about the Russian 
past that especially caught the interest of younger generations; 
the ceremonies and art forms of the Russian Orthodox 
Church, an inseparable part of that past, attracted particular 
attention, to the dismay of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev 
regimes. Historian James Billington has pointed out that in 
that period religious belief was a form of generational rebel- 
lion by children against doctrinaire communist parents. 

Although the Russian Orthodox Church did not play the 
activist role in undermining communism that the Roman Cath- 
olic Church played in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern 
Europe, it gained appreciably from the gradual discrediting of 
Marxist-Leninist ideology in the late Soviet period. In the mid- 
1980s, only about 3,000 Orthodox churches and two monaster- 
ies were active. As the grip of communism weakened in that 
decade, however, a religious awakening occurred throughout 
the Soviet Union. Symbolic gestures by President Gorbachev 
and his government, under the rubric of glasnost (see Glos- 
sary), indicated unmistakably that Soviet policy was changing. 
In 1988 Gorbachev met with Orthodox leaders and explicitly 
discussed the role of religion in the lives of their followers. 
Shortly thereafter, official commemoration of the millennium 
of Russian Orthodoxy sent a signal throughout Russia that reli- 
gious expression again was accepted. Beginning in 1989, new 
laws specified the church's right to hold private property and to 
distribute publications. In 1990 the Soviet legislature passed a 
new law on religious freedom, proposed by Gorbachev; at the 
same time, some of the constituent republics began enacting 
their own laws on the same subject. In the fall of 1990, a new 
deputy to the parliament of the Russian Republic, the Ortho- 
dox priest Gleb Yakunin, guided the passage of an extraordi- 
narily liberal law on religious freedom. That law remained in 
force when Russia became a separate nation the following year. 
(Yakunin was defrocked in 1994, however, for criticizing the 
church hierarchy.) 



208 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

According to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, 
Patriarch Aleksiy II, between 1990 and 1995 more than 8,000 
Russian Orthodox churches were opened, doubling the num- 
ber of active parishes and adding thirty-two eparchies (dio- 
ceses). In the first half of the 1990s, the Russian government 
returned numerous religious facilities that had been confis- 
cated by its communist predecessors, providing some assistance 
in the repair and reconstruction of damaged structures. The 
most visible such project was the building of the completely 
new Christ the Savior Cathedral, erected in Moscow at an 
expense of about US$300 million to replace the showplace 
cathedral demolished in 1931 as part of the Stalinist campaign 
against religion. Financed mainly by private donations, the new 
church is considered a visible acknowledgment of the mistakes 
of the Soviet past. 

In the first half of the 1990s, the church's social services also 
expanded considerably with the creation of departments of 
charity and social services and of catechism and religious edu- 
cation within the patriarchy. Because there is a shortage of 
priests, Sunday schools have been introduced in thousands of 
parishes. An agreement between the patriarchy and the 
national ministries of defense and internal affairs provides for 
pastoral care of military service personnel of the Orthodox 
faith. The patriarch also has stressed that personnel of other 
faiths must have access to appropriate spiritual guidance. In 
November 1995, Minister of Defense Grachev announced the 
creation of a post in the armed forces for cooperation with reli- 
gious institutions. 

Among the religious organizations that have appeared in the 
1990s are more than 100 Russian Orthodox brotherhoods. 
Reviving a tradition dating back to the Middle Ages, these 
priest-led lay organizations do social and philanthropic work. 
In 1990 they formed the Alliance of Orthodox Brotherhoods, 
which organizes educational, social, and cultural programs and 
institutions such as child care facilities, hostels, hospitals, and 
agricultural communities. Although its nominal task is to foster 
religious and moral education, the alliance has taken actively 
nationalist positions on religious tolerance and political issues. 

Public opinion surveys have revealed that the church 
emerged relatively unscathed from its association with the com- 
munist regime — although dissidents such as Yakunin accused 
Aleksiy II of having been a KGB operative. According to polls, 
in the first half of the 1990s the church inspired greater trust 



209 



Russia: A Country Study 

among the Russian population than most other social and 
political institutions. Similarly, Aleksiy II, elected to head the 
church upon the death of Patriarch Pimen in 1990, was found 
to elicit greater grassroots confidence than most other public 
figures in Russia. The political leadership regularly seeks the 
approval of the church as moral authority for virtually all types 
of government policy. Boris Yeltsin's appearance at a Moscow 
Easter service in 1991 was considered a major factor in his suc- 
cess in the presidential election held two months later. Patri- 
arch Aleksiy officiated at Yeltsin's inauguration that year. 

Although the status of Russian Orthodoxy has risen consid- 
erably, experts do not predict that it will become Russia's offi- 
cial state religion. About 25 percent of Russia's believers 
profess other faiths, and experts stated that in the mid-1990s 
the church lacked the clerics, the organizational dynamism, 
and the infrastructure to assume such a position. 

Other Religions 

Article 14 of the 1993 constitution stipulates that "the Rus- 
sian Federation is a secular state. No religion may be estab- 
lished as the state religion or a compulsory religion. Religious 
associations are separated from the state and are equal before 
the law." However, such a constitutional guarantee existed even 
during the Stalinist era, when religious oppression was at its 
worst. In the 1990s, the Russian citizenry has shown that the 
traditional, deeply felt linkage between Russian Orthodoxy and 
the Russian state remains intact. That linkage has a palpable 
effect on Russian secular attitudes toward religious minorities, 
and hence on the degree to which the new constitutional guar- 
antee of religious liberty is honored. 

Even before the demise of the Soviet Union, the new open- 
ness of Russian society had attracted religious activists of many 
persuasions from all over the world. In Moscow evangelists and 
missionaries filled the airwaves and the streets. Notable among 
them were German Lutherans, a Roman Catholic missionary 
society, Swiss Protestant church groups, the Quakers, the Salva- 
tion Army, and the Sisters of Charity, a Roman Catholic order 
of nuns headed by Mother Teresa. Also present were members 
of such groups as the Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, 
and the Church of Scientology. 

The activity of such groups, which paralleled Russia's new 
enthusiasm for all things Western in the late 1980s and early 
1990s, had begun to wane by 1994. However, it stimulated a 



210 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

strong reaction among conservative political and religious 
groups. In November 1992, the influential conservative wing of 
the Russian parliament reacted to the influx of non-Russian 
religious activists by proposing the creation of a so-called 
Experts' Consultative Council of church representatives and 
government officials. That body would have had the power to 
tighten the requirements for registration of a religious group 
or missionary activity. 

After a flurry of criticism from international human rights 
and religious groups, President Yeltsin failed to sign the consul- 
tative council bill, which died in the fall of 1993. After a new 
parliament convened, additional versions of the bill appeared. 
In mid-1996 a somewhat milder bill requiring registration of 
foreign missionary groups was passed by parliament. Mean- 
while, some eighteen jurisdictions in the federation passed a 
variety of bills restricting missionary activity or requiring regis- 
tration. Non-Orthodox religious groups also found that the 
purchase of land and the rental of building space were blocked 
increasingly by local authorities. 

In the 1990s, the Russian Orthodox hierarchy's position on 
the issue of religious freedom has been muted but negative in 
many respects, as church officials have seen themselves defend- 
ing Russian cultural values from Western ideas. Patriarch Alek- 
siy lent his support to the restrictive legislation as it was being 
debated in 1993, and Western observers saw an emerging alli- 
ance between the Orthodox Church and the nationalist fac- 
tions in Russian politics. In another indication of its attitude 
toward the proliferation of "foreign" religious activity in Russia, 
the hierarchy has made little active effort to establish contacts 
with new foreign religious groups or with existing groups, and 
experts see scant hope that an ecumenical council of churches 
will be established in the near future. In October 1995, the 
Orthodox Church's governing Holy Synod refused to partici- 
pate in a congress of Orthodox hierarchs because the Ortho- 
dox patriarch of Constantinople had recognized the Orthodox 
community in Estonia and an autocephalous Orthodox 
Church in Ukraine. 

In 1995 the Yeltsin administration formed a consultative 
body called the Council for Cooperation with Religious Associ- 
ations, which included representatives from most of the major 
denominations. On the council, the Russian Orthodox and 
Roman Catholic churches and Islamic organizations have two 
members each, with one representative each for Buddhist, Jew- 



211 



Russia: A Country Study 

ish, Baptist, Pentecostal, and Seventh-Day Adventist representa- 
tives. Council decisions have only the status of 
recommendations to the government. 

Non-Orthodox Christian Religions 

The Soviet Union was home to large numbers of Christians 
who were not followers of the Russian Orthodox Church. Sev- 
eral other churches had numerous adherents, including the 
Georgian Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church 
(also called the Armenian Orthodox Church), and the Ukrai- 
nian and Belorussian autocephalous Orthodox churches, 
which, like the Russian Orthodox Church, were rooted in Byz- 
antine rather than Roman Christianity. All of these faiths like- 
wise endured persecution by the Soviet state. A large number 
of Roman Catholics and Protestants of various denominations 
also resided in the Soviet Union. But, because the majority of 
non-Orthodox Christians were concentrated in the Soviet 
republics of Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Esto- 
nia, the representation of non-Russian Orthodox groups in 
post-Soviet Russia is much less than it was in the Soviet Union. 

The first West European Protestants in Russia were German 
Mennonites who arrived in the second half of the seventeenth 
century. Throughout the twentieth century, the Baptists have 
been by far the most active and numerous Protestant group. 
During the repressive 1960s, enthusiastic Baptist groups 
attracted numerous young Russians away from the official 
Komsomol, and the fervor of the Baptists in a nominally atheist 
society earned them admiration even among communist offi- 
cials. The number of Protestants in the Soviet Union was esti- 
mated at 5 million in 1980; in 1993 an estimated 3,000 Baptist 
communities were active under the administration of the Eur- 
asian Federation of Unions of Evangelical Baptist Christians. 
Within that structure, the Union of Evangelical Baptist 
Churches includes about 1,000 communities and supports two 
missionary groups and one publication. Headquarters is in 
Moscow The Council of Churches of Evangelical Baptist Chris- 
tians was founded in 1961 as a splinter group from what was 
then the Union of Evangelical Baptist Christian Churches; it 
existed illegally in Russia until 1988 and is not registered offi- 
cially as a religious group. In the mid-1990s, the council 
included 230 communities. 

Other Protestant groups in Russia have far fewer members 
than the Baptists. The Union of Evangelical Christian 



212 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

Churches was founded in 1992 to continue the tradition of the 
Union of Evangelical Christians, which had been founded in 
Russia in 1909 and then banned under communist rule. Pente- 
costals first became active in Russia in the early twentieth cen- 
tury. In 1945 one faction reunited with the main Baptist 
church; then in 1991 the remaining group formed the Union 
of Christians of the Evangelical Faith Pentecostal, which issues 
several publications and supports missions. 

The Seventh-Day Adventists formed a Russian union in 1909, 
despite active government opposition. The church structure 
was largely destroyed during the Soviet period. Then, after 
World War II, the Ail-Union League of Seventh-Day Adventists 
was established. The union was inactive from 1960 until 1990, 
when it was included in the international General Assembly of 
Adventists. About 600 communities were active in the mid- 
1990s, with publications, one seminary, one religious school, 
and a radio broadcast center. 

The Jehovah's Witnesses appeared in Russia in 1939; their 
center in St. Petersburg and their missionary work in Russia are 
supported by the Jehovah's Witnesses Center in Brooklyn, New 
York. Lutheranism appeared in Russia in the seventeenth cen- 
tury; in the mid-1990s, only a few churches were active. A few 
groups of Methodists, Presbyterians, Mormons, and Evangeli- 
cal Reformed believers also are active in Russia. 

The size of the Roman Catholic population of Russia has var- 
ied greatly according to the territorial extent of the country. 
For example, after the partitions of Poland at the end of the 
eighteenth century, large numbers of Polish Catholics became 
subjects of the Russian Empire. Accordingly, from the eigh- 
teenth century until 1917 a papal legate, or nuncio, repre- 
sented the Vatican in St. Petersburg. A Roman Catholic 
academy operated in St. Petersburg, and a mission was estab- 
lished in Astrakhan*. After World War II, the absorption of the 
Baltic states added many Catholics to the Soviet Union's popu- 
lation, but relatively few of those individuals entered the Rus- 
sian Republic. In 1993 twenty-nine Roman Catholic dioceses 
were active in the Russian Federation, with those in the Euro- 
pean sector administered from Moscow and those in the Asian 
sector from Novosibirsk. 

The 1990 establishment of new Roman Catholic dioceses in 
Russia has caused tension with the Russian Orthodox hierar- 
chy. The two churches have an understanding that neither will 
proselytize in the "territory" of the other, so representatives of 



213 



Russia: A Country Study 



the patriarch have condemned expanding Catholic influence 
as an unwelcome Western intrusion. 

Islam 

In the 1980s, Islam was the second most widespread religion 
in the Soviet Union; in that period, the number of Soviet citi- 
zens identifying themselves as Muslims generally totaled 
between 45 and 50 million. The majority of the Muslims 
resided in the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union, 
which now are independent countries. In 1996 the Muslim 
population of Russia was estimated at 19 percent of all citizens 
professing belief in a religion. Major Islamic communities are 
concentrated among the minority nationalities residing 
between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea: the Adyghs, 
Balkars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Cherkess, Ingush, Kabardins, 
Karachay, and numerous Dagestani nationalities. In the middle 
Volga Basin are large populations of Tatars, Udmurts, and Chu- 
vash, most of whom are Muslims. Many Muslims also reside in 
Ul'yanovsk, Samara, Nizhniy Novgorod, Moscow, Perm', and 
Leningrad oblasts (see Ethnic Composition, this ch.). 

Virtually all the Muslims in Russia adhere to the Sunni 
branch of Islam. In a few areas, notably Chechnya, there is a 
tradition of Sufism, a mystical variety of Islam that stresses the 
individual's search for union with God. Sufi rituals, practiced to 
give the Chechens spiritual strength to resist foreign oppres- 
sion, became legendary among Russian troops fighting the 
Chechens during tsarist times. 

Relations between the Russian government and Muslim ele- 
ments of the population have been marked by mistrust and sus- 
picion. In 1992, for example, Sheikh Ravil Gainurtdin, the 
imam of the Moscow mosque, complained that "our country 
[Russia] still retains the ideology of the tsarist empire, which 
believed that the Orthodox faith alone should be a privileged 
religion, that is, the state religion." The Russian government, 
for its part, fears the rise of political Islam of the violent sort 
that Russians witnessed in the 1980s firsthand in Afghanistan 
and secondhand in Iran. Government fears were fueled by a 
1992 conference held in Saratov by the Tajikistan-based Islamic 
Renaissance Party. Representatives attended from several newly 
independent Central Asian republics, from Azerbaijan, and 
from several autonomous jurisdictions of Russia, including the 
secessionist-minded autonomous republics of Tatarstan and 
Bashkortostan. The meeting's pan-Islamic complexion created 



214 




Traditional wooden homes, with new mosque in background, Tyumen' 

Courtesy G. W. Meredith, Jr. 



concern in Moscow about the possible spread of radical Islam 
into Russia from the new Muslim states along the periphery of 
the former Soviet Union. For that reason, the Russian govern- 
ment has provided extensive military and political support to 
secular leaders of the five Central Asian republics, all of whom 
are publicly opposed to political Islam. By the mid-1990s, the 
putative Islamic threat was a standard justification for radical 
nationalist insistence that Russia regain control of its "near 
abroad" (see The Near Abroad, ch. 8). 

The struggle to delineate the respective powers of the fed- 
eral and local governments in Russia also has influenced Rus- 
sian relations with the Islamic community. The Russian 
Federation inherited two of the four spiritual boards, or mufti- 
ates, created during the Stalinist era to supervise the religious 
activities of Islamic groups in various parts of the Soviet Union; 
the other two are located in Tashkent and Baku. One of the 
two Russian boards has jurisdiction in European Russia and 
Siberia, and the other is responsible for the Muslim enclaves of 
the North Caucasus and Transcaspian regions. In 1992 several 
Muslim associations withdrew from the latter muftiate and 
attempted to establish their own spiritual boards. Later that 



215 



Russia: A Country Study 

year, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan withdrew recognition from 
the muftiate for European Russia and Siberia and created their 
own muftiate. 

There is much evidence of official conciliation toward Islam 
in Russia in the 1990s. The number of Muslims allowed to 
make pilgrimages to Mecca increased sharply after the virtual 
embargo of the Soviet era ended in 1990. Copies of the Quran 
(Koran) are readily available, and many mosques are being 
built in regions with large Muslim populations. In 1995 the 
newly established Union of Muslims of Russia, led by Imam 
Khatyb Mukaddas of Tatarstan, began organizing a movement 
aimed at improving interethnic understanding and ending 
Russians' lingering conception of Islam as an extremist reli- 
gion. The Union of Muslims of Russia is the direct successor to 
the pre-World War I Union of Muslims, which had its own fac- 
tion in the Russian Duma (see Glossary). The postcommunist 
union has formed a political party, the Nur All-Russia Muslim 
Public Movement, which acts in close coordination with Mus- 
lim clergy to defend the political, economic, and cultural rights 
of Muslims and other minorities. The Islamic Cultural Center 
of Russia, which includes a medrese (religious school), opened 
in Moscow in 1991. The Ash-Shafii Islamic Institute in Dagestan 
is the only such research institution in Russia. In the 1990s, the 
number of Islamic publications has increased. Among them 
are two magazines in Russian, Ekho Kavkaza and Islamskiy vest- 
nik, and the Russian-language newspaper Islamskiye novosti, 
which is published in Makhachkala, Dagestan. 

Judaism 

Judaism began to have an influence on Russian culture and 
social attitudes in the sixteenth century, shortly after the expul- 
sion of the Jews from Spain by Queen Isabella in 1492. In the 
centuries that followed, large numbers of Jews migrated to 
Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belorussia. Much of the anti- 
Semitism that developed subsequently among Russian peasants 
came from the identification of Jews with activities such as tax 
collection and the administration of the large estates on which 
the peasants worked, two of the few occupations Jews were 
allowed to pursue in tsarist Russia. Anti-Semitism followed the 
Jews from Western Europe, and already in the sixteenth cen- 
tury the culture of Muscovy contained a strong element of that 
attitude. When Poland was partitioned at the end of the eigh- 
teenth century, large numbers of Jews came into the Russian 



216 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

Empire, giving Russia the largest Jewish population (about 1.5 
million) in the world. For the next 120 years, tsarist govern- 
ments restricted Jewish settlements to what was called the Pale 
of Settlement, established by Catherine II in 1792 to include 
portions of the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the 
northern shore of the Black Sea. 

During the nineteenth century, restrictions on the Jewish 
population were alternately eased and tightened. Alexander II 
(r. 1855-81), for example, relaxed restrictions on settlement, 
education, and employment. Alexander's assassination in 1881 
brought reimposition of all previous restrictions, which then 
remained in force until 1917. During that period, Jews were 
beaten and killed and their property destroyed in government- 
sanctioned pogroms led by a group called the Black Hundreds. 
Despite repressive conditions in Russia and high levels of emi- 
gration to the United States, the Jewish population grew rap- 
idly in the nineteenth century; by the beginning of World War 
I, an estimated 5.2 million Jews lived in Russia. 

Within their areas of settlement, the Russian Jews developed 
a flourishing culture, and many of them became active in the 
revolutionary movements that sprang up in the late nineteenth 
and early twentieth centuries. But much of the long period of 
violence that began with World War I in 1914 and continued 
until the Civil War ended in 1921 took place in the regions 
inhabited by the Jews, many of whom were killed indiscrimi- 
nately by the various armies struggling for power. After World 
War I, parts of the western territory of the former Russian 
Empire became the independent nations of Lithuania, Latvia, 
and Poland, a development that left many Russian Jews outside 
the borders of what now was the Soviet Union. By 1922 Russia's 
Jewish population had been reduced by more than half. 

In the early years of the Soviet Union, Jews gained much 
more freedom to enter the mainstream of Russian society. 
Although relatively few supported the explicit program of the 
Bolsheviks, the majority expected that the new state would 
offer much greater ethnic and religious tolerance than had the 
tsarist system. In the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Jews were 
integrated into Soviet economic and cultural life, and many 
acquired prominent positions. Among them were communist 
leaders Leon Trotsky, Lazar Kaganovich, Maksim Litvinov, Lev 
Kamenev, and Grigoriy Zinov'yev; writers Isaak Babel', 
Veniamin Kaverin, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandel'shtam, and 
Ilya Ehrenburg; and cinematographer Sergey Eisenstein. Spe- 



217 



Russia: A Country Study 



cial Jewish sections were established in the All-Union Commu- 
nist Party (Bolshevik). Then, in the 1930s the purges initiated 
by Stalin targeted groups for their ethnic and social identities. 
As non-Russians stereotyped as intellectuals, the Jews were tar- 
gets in two categories. As part of Soviet ethnic policy, the Jewish 
Autonomous Oblast (Yevreyskaya avtonomnaya oblast', later 
called Birobidzhan) was established in 1934. But the oblast 
never was the center of the Soviet Union's Jewish population. 
Only about 50,000 Jews settled in this jurisdiction, which is 
located along the Amur River in the farthest reaches of the 
Soviet Far East. 

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, 
about 2.5 million Jews were killed by the Germans or by their 
Slavic collaborators. Jews who escaped to areas untouched by 
the Nazis often suffered from the resentment of local popula- 
tions who envied their education or supposed wealth. 

Between World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union, 
Russia's Jewish population declined steadily, thanks to emigra- 
tion, a low birth rate, intermarriage, and concealment of iden- 
tity. In 1989 the official total was 537,000. Of the number 
remaining at that point, only about 9,000 were living in the Jew- 
ish Autonomous Oblast, and, by 1995, only an estimated 1,500 
Jews remained in the oblast. The Jews of Russia always have 
been concentrated overwhelmingly in the larger cities, espe- 
cially Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Odessa — partly because of 
the traditional ban, continued from tsarist times, on Jews own- 
ing land. Although 83 percent of Jews claimed Russian as their 
native language in the 1979 census, the Soviet government rec- 
ognized Yiddish as the national language of the Jewish popula- 
tion in Russia and the other republics. 

In the early 1980s, the Kremlin's refusal to allow Jewish emi- 
gration was a major issue of contention in Soviet-American 
relations. In 1974 the United States Congress had passed the 
Jackson- Vanik Amendment, which offered the Soviet Union 
most-favored-nation trade status in return for permission for 
Soviet Jews to emigrate. The Soviet Union responded by relax- 
ing its restrictions, and in the years that followed there was a 
steady flow of Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union to Israel. 
But the intensification of the Cold War in the years after the 
1979 invasion of Afghanistan brought new restrictions that 
were not lifted fully until 1989, when a new surge of emigration 
began. Between 1992 and 1995, the emigration of Jews from 
Russia averaged about 65,000 per year, after reaching a peak of 



218 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

188,000 in 1990. In 1996 the Russian government began cur- 
tailing the activity of the Jewish Agency, an internationally 
funded organization that has sponsored Jewish emigration 
since the 1940s. 

The Soviet and Russian governments have always regarded 
the Jews not only as a distinct religious group but also as a 
nationality. This attitude persists in the post-Soviet era despite a 
provision in Article 26 of the 1993 constitution prohibiting the 
state from arbitrarily determining a person's nationality or forc- 
ing a person to declare a nationality. 

Although official anti-Semitism has ceased and open acts of 
anti-Semitism have been rare in Russian society since the col- 
lapse of the Soviet Union, Jews have remained mindful of their 
history in Russia and skeptical of the durability of liberalized 
conditions. Traditional anti-Semitism in the Russian Orthodox 
Church and the increasing power of ultranationalist and neo- 
fascist political forces are the principal causes of concern; Jews 
also fear that they might become scapegoats for economic diffi- 
culties. Nevertheless, in the early 1990s Judaism has shown a 
slow but sure revival, and Russia's Jews have experienced a 
growing interest in learning about their religious heritage. In 
January 1996, a major event was publication in Russia of a Rus- 
sian translation of a volume of the Talmud. The first such pub- 
lication since before the Bolshevik Revolution, the volume 
marks the start of a series of Talmudic translations intended to 
provide Russian Jews with information about their religion's 
teachings, which until 1996 had been virtually unavailable in 
Russia. 

With Jews becoming more willing to identify themselves, offi- 
cial estimates of the Jewish population increased between 1992 
and 1995, from 500,000 to around 700,000. The Jewish popula- 
tion of Moscow has been estimated in the mid-1990s at between 
200,000 and 300,000. Of that number, about 15 percent are 
Sephardic (non-European). 

The number of Jews participating in religious observances 
remains relatively small, even though organizations such as the 
Hasidic (Orthodox) Chabad Lubavitch actively encourage full 
observance of religious traditions. In Moscow the Lubavitchers, 
whose activism has met with hostility from many Russians, run 
two synagogues and several schools, including a yeshiva (acad- 
emy of Talmudic learning), kindergartens, and a seminary for 
young women. The organization also is active in charity work. 



219 



Russia: A Country Study 

In the 1990s, a number of organizations devoted to the fos- 
tering of Jewish culture and religion have been established in 
Moscow. These include a rabbinical school, a Jewish youth cen- 
ter, a union of Hebrew teachers, and a Jewish cultural and edu- 
cational society. The orthodox Jewish community also 
campaigned successfully for the return of the Shneerson 
books, a collection of manuscripts that had been stored in the 
Lenin State Library in Moscow since Soviet authorities confis- 
cated them in the 1920s. 

Religion and Foreign Policy 

In the 1990s, there have been indications that religious con- 
siderations can influence certain areas of Russian foreign pol- 
icy, as they have in the past. Relations with the newly 
independent Muslim states of Central Asia are a case in point. 
In all five republics of that region, the Russian government has 
strongly supported secular, autocratic Islamic leaders whose 
hold on power is justified in part by an ostensible threat of 
Muslim political activism. However, only in Tajikistan has a fac- 
tion with any sort of connection to Islamic groups attempted to 
take power. There, a nominally secular Islamic party has played 
a central role in a prolonged guerrilla war against the Russian- 
supported regime, with assistance from Afghan forces. 

Beginning in 1992, the conflict between Muslims and Ortho- 
dox Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina has tested the deeply 
ingrained tradition within the Orthodox Church of protecting 
coreligionists in the Middle East, the Balkans, and elsewhere 
beyond Russia's borders (see Central Europe, ch. 8). Russia's 
former minister of foreign affairs, Andrey Kozyrev, cautioned 
against making the Orthodox religion a determinant of Rus- 
sian foreign policy, lest such a policy promote a split in Russia 
itself between Orthodox and Muslim believers. Nevertheless, 
nationalist sentiment in Russia caused the Yeltsin government 
to limit its participation in international sanctions and military 
actions against Serbia. 

The Russian Language 

The Russian language has dominated cultural and official 
life throughout the history of the nation, regardless of the pres- 
ence of other ethnic groups. Linguistic groups in Russia run 
the gamut from Slavic (spoken by more than three-quarters of 
the population) to Turkic, Caucasian, Finno-Ugric, Eskimo, 



220 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

Yiddish, and Iranian. Russification campaigns during both the 
tsarist and communist eras suppressed the languages and cul- 
tures of all minority nationalities. Although the Soviet-era con- 
stitutions affirmed the equality of all languages with Russian 
for all purposes, in fact language was a powerful tool of Soviet 
nationality policy. The governments of both the Soviet Union 
and the Russian Federation have used the Russian language as 
a means of promoting unity among the country's nationalities, 
as well as to provide access to literary and scientific materials 
not available in minority languages. According to the Brezhnev 
regime, all Soviet peoples "voluntarily" adopted Russian for use 
in international communication and to promote the unity of 
the Soviet Union. 

Beginning in 1938, the Russian language was a compulsory 
subject in the primary and secondary schools of all regions. In 
schools where an indigenous language was used alongside Rus- 
sian, courses in science and mathematics were taught in Rus- 
sian. Many university courses were available only in Russian, 
and Russian was the language of public administration in all 
jurisdictions in all fifteen Soviet republics. Nevertheless, the 
minority peoples of the Russian Republic, as well as the peoples 
of the other fourteen Soviet republics, continued to consider 
their own language as primary, and the general level of Russian 
fluency was low (see The Post-Soviet Education Structure, ch. 
5). In the mid-1990s, in every area of the federation, Russian 
remains the sole language of public administration, of the 
armed forces, and of the scientific and technical communities. 
Russian schools grant diplomas in only two minority languages, 
Bashkir and Tatar, and higher education is conducted almost 
entirely in Russian. 

Although Russian is the lingua franca of the Russian Federa- 
tion, Article 26 of the 1993 constitution stipulates that "each 
person has the right to use his native language and to the free 
choice of language of communication, education, instruction, 
and creativity." Article 68 affirms the right of all peoples in the 
Russian Federation "to retain their mother tongue and to cre- 
ate conditions for its study and development." Although such 
constitutional provisions often prove meaningless, the non- 
Slavic tongues of Russia have retained their vitality, and they 
even have grown more prevalent in some regions. This trend is 
especially visible as autonomy of language becomes an impor- 
tant symbol of the struggle to preserve distinct ethnic identi- 
ties. In the 1990s, many non-Russian ethnic groups have issued 



221 



Russia: A Country Study 

laws or decrees giving their native languages equal status with 
Russian in their respective regions of the Russian Federation. 
In the mid-1990s, some 80 percent of the non-Slavic nationali- 
ties — or 12 percent of the population of the Russian Federa- 
tion — did not speak Russian as their first language. 

Literature and the Arts 

Russian civilization has produced classic works of art in all 
genres, including innovations of lasting significance in litera- 
ture, music, and ballet. The artistic process often has collided 
with political dogma, and outside influences have combined 
with "pure Russian" art forms in a sometimes uneasy harmony. 

Literature 

In the course of Russia's thousand-year history, Russian liter- 
ature has come to occupy a unique place in the culture, poli- 
tics, and linguistic evolution of the Russian people. In the 
modern era, literature has been the arena for heated discus- 
sion of virtually all aspects of Russian life, including the place 
that literature itself should occupy in that life. In the process, it 
has produced a rich and varied fund of artistic achievement. 

The Beginnings 

Literature first appeared among the East Slavs after the 
Christianization of Kievan Rus' in the tenth century (see The 
Golden Age of Kiev, ch. 1). Seminal events in that process were 
the development of the Cyrillic (see Glossary) alphabet around 
A.D. 863 and the development of Old Church Slavonic as a 
liturgical language for use by the Slavs. The availability of litur- 
gical works in the vernacular language — an advantage not 
enjoyed in Western Europe — caused Russian literature to 
develop rapidly. Through the sixteenth century, most literary 
works had religious themes or were created by religious figures. 
Among the noteworthy works of the eleventh through four- 
teenth centuries are the Primary Chronicle, a compilation of his- 
torical and legendary events, the Lay of Igor's Campaign, a 
secular epic poem about battles against the Turkic Pechenegs, 
and Zadonsh china, an epic poem about the defeat of the Mon- 
gols in 1380. Works in secular genres such as the satirical tale 
began to appear in the sixteenth century, and Byzantine liter- 
ary traditions began to fade as the Russian vernacular came 
into greater use and Western influences were felt. 



222 



Folk dance performance, 
Volgograd 
Courtesy Robert Schlickezvitz 




Written in 1670, the Life of the Archpriest Avvakum is a pio- 
neering realistic autobiography that avoids the flowery church 
style in favor of vernacular Russian. Several novellas and satires 
of the seventeenth century also used vernacular Russian freely. 
The first Russian poetic verse was written early in the seven- 
teenth century. 

Peter and Catherine 

The eighteenth century, particularly the reigns of Peter the 
Great and Catherine the Great (r. 1762-96), was a period of 
strong Western cultural influence. Russian literature was domi- 
nated briefly by European classicism before shifting to an 
equally imitative sentimentalism by 1780. Secular prose tales — 
many picaresque or satirical — grew in popularity with the mid- 
dle and lower classes, as the nobility read mainly literature 
from Western Europe. Peter's secularization of the Russian 
Orthodox Church decisively broke the influence of religious 
themes on literature. The middle period of the eighteenth cen- 
tury (1725-62) was dominated by the stylistic and genre inno- 
vations of four writers: Antiokh Kantemir, Vasiliy Trediakovskiy, 
Mikhail Lomonosov, and Aleksandr Sumarokov. Their work 



223 



Russia: A Country Study 

was a further step in bringing Western literary concepts to Rus- 
sia. 

Under Catherine, the satirical journal was adopted from 
Britain, and Gavriil Derzhavin advanced the evolution of Rus- 
sian poetry. Denis Fonvizin, Yakov Knyazhnin, Aleksandr 
Radishchev, and Nikolay Karamzin wrote controversial and 
innovative drama and prose works that brought Russian litera- 
ture closer to its nineteenth-century role as an art form liber- 
ally furnished with social and political commentary (see 
Imperial Expansion and Maturation: Catherine II, ch. 1). The 
lush, sentimental language of Karamzin's tale Poor Lisa set off a 
forty-year polemic pitting advocates of innovation against those 
of "purity" in literary language. 

The Nineteenth Century 

By 1800 Russian literature had an established tradition of 
representing real-life problems, and its eighteenth-century 
practitioners had enriched its language with new elements. On 
this basis, a brilliant century of literary endeavor followed. 

Russian literature of the nineteenth century provided a con- 
genial medium for the discussion of political and social issues 
whose direct presentation was censored. The prose writers of 
this period shared important qualities: attention to realistic, 
detailed descriptions of everyday Russian life; the lifting of the 
taboo on describing the vulgar, unsightly side of life; and a 
satirical attitude toward mediocrity and routine. All of those 
elements were articulated primarily in the novel and short 
story forms borrowed from Western Europe, but the poets of 
the nineteenth century also produced works of lasting value. 

The Age of Realism, generally considered the culmination of 
the literary synthesis of earlier generations, began around 
1850. The writers of that period owed a great debt to four men 
of the previous generation: the writers Aleksandr Pushkin, 
Mikhail Lermontov, and Nikolay Gogol 1 , and the critic Vissar- 
ion Belinskiy, each of whom contributed to new standards for 
language, subject matter, form, and narrative techniques. Push- 
kin is recognized as the greatest Russian poet, and the critic 
Belinskiy was the "patron saint" of the influential "social mes- 
sage" writers and critics who followed. Lermontov contributed 
innovations in both poetic and prose genres. Gogol 1 is 
accepted as the originator of modern realistic Russian prose, 
although much of his work contains strong elements of fantasy. 
The rich language of Gogol 1 was much different from the 



224 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

direct, sparse lexicon of Pushkin; each of the two approaches 
to the language of literary prose was adopted by significant 
writers of later generations. 

By mid-century a heated debate was under way on the appro- 
priateness of social questions in literature. The debate filled 
the pages of the "thick journals" of the time, which remained 
the most fertile site for literary discussion and innovation into 
the 1990s; traces of the debate appeared in the pages of much 
of Russia's best literature as well. The foremost advocates of 
social commentary were Nikolay Chernyshevskiy and Nikolay 
Dobrolyubov, critics who wrote for the thick journal Sovremen- 
nik (The Contemporary) in the late 1850s and early 1860s. 

The best prose writers of the Age of Realism were Ivan Tur- 
genev, Fedor Dostoyevskiy, and Lev Tolstoy. Because of the 
enduring quality of their combination of pure literature with 
eternal philosophical questions, the last two are accepted as 
Russia's premier prose artists; Dostoyevskiy's novels Crime and 
Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, like Tolstoy's novels War 
and Peace and Anna Karenina, are classics of world literature. 

Other outstanding writers of the Age of Realism were the 
playwright Aleksandr Ostrovskiy, the novelist Ivan Goncharov, 
and the prose innovator Nikolay Leskov, all of whom were 
closely involved in some way with the debate over social com- 
mentary. The most notable poets of mid-century were Afanasiy 
Fet and Fedor Tyutchev. 

An important tool for writers of social commentary under 
strict tsarist censorship was a device called Aesopic language — a 
variety of linguistic tricks, allusions, and distortions compre- 
hensible to an attuned reader but baffling to censors. The best 
practitioner of this style was Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, a 
prose satirist who, along with the poet Nikolay Nekrasov, was 
considered a leader of the literary left wing in the second half 
of the century. 

The major literary figure in the last decade of the nine- 
teenth century was Anton Chekhov, who wrote in two genres: 
the short story and drama. Chekhov was a realist who exam- 
ined the foibles of individuals rather than society as a whole. 
His plays The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, and The Three Sisters 
continue to be performed worldwide. 

In the 1890s, Russian poetry was revived and thoroughly 
reshaped by a new group, the symbolists, whose most promi- 
nent representative was Aleksandr Blok. Two more groups, the 
futurists and the acmeists, added new poetic principles at the 



225 



Russia: A Country Study 

start of the twentieth century. The leading figure of the former 
was Vladimir Mayakovskiy, and of the latter, Anna Akhmatova. 
The premier prose writers of the period were the realist writers 
Leonid Andreyev, Ivan Bunin, Maksim Gor'kiy, Vladimir Koro- 
lenko, and Aleksandr Kuprin. Gor'kiy became the literary fig- 
urehead of the Bolsheviks and of the Soviet regimes of the 
1920s and 1930s; shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, Bunin 
and Kuprin emigrated to Paris. In 1933 Bunin became the first 
Russian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

The Soviet Period and After 

The period immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution 
was one of literary experimentation and the emergence of 
numerous literary groups. Much of the fiction of the 1920s 
described the Civil War or the struggle between the old and 
new Russia. The best prose writers of the 1920s were Isaak 
Babel', Mikhail Bulgakov, Veniamin Kaverin,- Leonid Leonov, 
Yuriy Olesha, Boris Pil'nyak, Yevgeniy Zamyatin, and Mikhail 
Zoshchenko. The dominant poets were Akhmatova, Osip Man- 
del'shtam, Mayakovskiy, Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and 
Sergey Yesenin. But under Stalin, literature felt the same 
restrictions as the rest of Russia's society. After a group of "pro- 
letarian writers" had gained ascendancy in the early 1930s, the 
communist party Central Committee forced all fiction writers 
into the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934. The union then estab- 
lished the standard of "socialist realism" for Soviet literature, 
and many of the writers in Russia fell silent or emigrated (see 
Mobilization of Society, ch. 2). A few prose writers adapted by 
describing moral problems in the new Soviet state, but the 
stage was dominated by formulaic works of minimal literary 
value such as Nikolay Ostrovskiy's How the Steel Was Tempered and 
Yuriy Krymov's Tanker Derbent. A unique work of the 1930s was 
the Civil War novel The Quiet Don, which won its author, Mikhail 
Sholokhov, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965, although 
Sholokhov's authorship is disputed by some experts. The strict 
controls of the 1930s continued until the "thaw" following Sta- 
lin's death in 1953, although some innovation was allowed in 
prose works of the World War II period. 

Between 1953 and 1991, Russian literature produced a num- 
ber of first-rate artists, all still working under the pressure of 
state censorship and often distributing their work through a 
sophisticated underground system called samizdat (literally, 
self-publishing). The poet Pasternak's Civil War novel, Doctor 



226 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

Zhivago, created a sensation when published in the West in 
1957. The book won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, but 
the Soviet government forced Pasternak to decline the award. 
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose One Day in the Life oflvanDeniso- 
vich (1962) also was a watershed work, was the greatest Russian 
philosophical novelist of the era; he was exiled from the Soviet 
Union in 1974 and eventually settled in the United States. In 
the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of satirical and prose 
writers, such as Fazil' Iskander, Vladimir Voinovich, Yuriy Kaza- 
kov, and Vladimir Aksyonov, battled against state restrictions on 
artistic expression, as did the noted poets Yevgeniy Yevtush- 
enko, Andrey Voznesenskiy, and Joseph Brodsky. Aksyonov and 
Brodsky emigrated to the United States, where they remained 
productive. Brodsky won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 
1987. The most celebrated case of literary repression in the 
1960s was that of Andrey Sinyavskiy and Yuliy Daniel, iconoclas- 
tic writers of the Soviet "underground" whose 1966 sentence to 
hard labor for having written anti-Soviet propaganda brought 
international protest. 

Another generation of writers responded to the liberalized 
atmosphere of Gorbachev's glasnost in the second half of the 
1980s, openly discussing previously taboo themes: the excesses 
of the Stalin era, a wide range of previously unrecognized 
social ills such as corruption, random violence, anti-Semitism, 
and prostitution, and even the unassailably positive image of 
Vladimir I. Lenin himself. Among the best of this generation 
were Andrey Bykov, Mikhail Kurayev, Valeriy Popov, Tat'yana 
Tolstaya, and Viktor Yerofeyev — writers not necessarily as tal- 
ented as their predecessors but expressing a new kind of "alter- 
native fiction." The glasnost period also saw the publication of 
formerly prohibited works by writers such as Bulgakov, 
Solzhenitsyn, and Zamyatin. 

Beginning in 1992, Russian writers experienced complete 
creative freedom for the first time in many decades. The 
change was not entirely for the better, however. The urgent 
mission of the Russian writers, to provide the public with a kind 
of truth they could not find elsewhere in a censored society, 
had already begun to disappear in the 1980s, when glasnost 
opened Russia to a deluge of information and entertainment 
flowing from the West and elsewhere. Samizdat was tacitly 
accepted by the Gorbachev regime, then it disappeared 
entirely as private publishers appeared in the early 1990s. Writ- 
ers' traditional special place in society no longer is recognized 



227 



Russia: A Country Study 

by most Russians, who now read literature much less avidly 
than they did in Soviet times. For the first time since their 
appearance in the early 1800s, the "thick journals" are disre- 
garded by large portions of the intelligentsia, and in the mid- 
1990s several major journals went bankrupt. Under these cir- 
cumstances, many Russian writers have expressed a sense of 
deep loss and frustration. 

Music 

Until the eighteenth century, Russian music consisted 
mainly of church music and folk songs and dances. In the 
1700s, Italian, French, and German operas were introduced to 
Russia, making opera a popular art form among the aristoc- 
racy. 

In the nineteenth century, Russia began making an original 
contribution to world music nearly as significant as its contribu- 
tion in literature. In the first half of the nineteenth century, 
Mikhail Glinka (1804-57) initiated the application of purely 
Russian folk and religious music to classical compositions. His 
best operas, Ruslan and Lyudmila and A Life for the Tsar, are con- 
sidered pioneering works in the establishment of Russian 
national music, although they are based on Italian models. 

In 1859 the Russian Music Society was founded to foster the 
performance and appreciation of classical music, especially 
German, from Western Europe; the most influential figures in 
the society were the composer Anton Rubinstein and his 
brother Nikolay, who founded influential conservatories in 
Moscow and St. Petersburg. Anton Rubinstein also was one of 
the best pianists of the nineteenth century. 

In the second half of the nineteenth century, a group of 
composers that came to be known as the "Mighty Five" — Miliy 
Balakirev, Aleksandr Borodin, Cesar Cui, Modest Musorgskiy, 
and Nikolay Rimskiy-Korsakov — continued Glinka's movement 
away from imitation of European classical music. The Mighty 
Five challenged the Russian Music Society's conservatism with a 
large body of work thematically based on Russia's history and 
legends and musically based on its folk and religious music. 
Among the group's most notable works are Rimskiy-Korsakov's 
symphonic suite Scheherezade and the operas The Snow Maiden 
and Sadko, Musorgskiy's operas Boris Godunov and Khovan- 
shchina, and Borodin's opera Prince Igor'. Balakirev, a protege of 
Glinka, was the founder and guiding spirit of the group. 



228 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

Outside that group stood Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (Chay- 
kovskiy), who produced a number of enduring symphonies, 
operas, and ballets more imitative of Western music. During his 
lifetime, Tchaikovsky already was acknowledged as one of the 
world's premier composers. Among his most-performed works 
are the ballets Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker, 
and his Sixth Symphony, known as the Pathetique. At the end 
of the 1800s, the generation that followed the Mighty Five and 
Tchaikovsky included talented and innovative figures such as 
Sergey Rachmaninov, a master pianist and composer who emi- 
grated to Germany in 1906; Rimskiy-Korsakov's student Alek- 
sandr Glazunov, who emigrated in 1928; and the innovator 
Aleksandr Skryabin, who injected elements of mysticism and 
literary symbolism in his works for piano and orchestra. 

In the twentieth century, Russia continued to produce some 
of the world's foremost composers and musicians, despite the 
suppression by Soviet authorities of both music and perfor- 
mances. Restrictions on what musicians played and where they 
performed caused many artists to leave the Soviet Union either 
voluntarily or through forced exile, but the works of the emi- 
gres continued to draw large audiences whenever they were 
performed. The Gorbachev era loosened the restrictions on 
emigres returning. The pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who left the 
Soviet Union in 1925, made a triumphal return performance 
in Moscow in 1986, and emigre cellist Mstislav Rostropovich 
made his first tour of the Soviet Union in 1990 as conductor of 
the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. 

Igor' Stravinskiy, who has been called the greatest of the 
twentieth-century Russian composers, emigrated permanently 
in 1920 after having composed his three best-known works, the 
scores for the ballets The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of 
Spring. Stravinskiy enjoyed a productive career of several 
decades in exile, making return visits to Russia in his last years. 
The composers Aram Khachaturyan, Sergey Prokof yev, and 
Dmitriy Shostakovich spent their entire careers in the Soviet 
Union; all three were condemned in 1948 in the postwar Stalin- 
ist crackdown known as the Zhdanovshchina (see Reconstruc- 
tion and Cold War, ch. 2). Prokof yev, best known for his ballet 
music, had achieved enough international stature by 1948 to 
avoid official disgrace. Shostakovich, who enjoyed triumph and 
suffered censure during the Stalin era, wrote eleven sympho- 
nies and two well-known operas based on nineteenth-century 
Russian stories, The Nose by Gogol' and Lady Macbeth ofMtsensk 



229 



Russia: A Country Study 

District by Leskov. He enjoyed substantial recognition after the 
"thaw" that liberated artistic activities after 1953. Khachaturyan 
based much of his work on Armenian and Georgian folk music. 

Composers of modern music received much criticism in the 
Soviet period for digressing from realistic or traditional styles. 
Both official Soviet artistic standards and the traditional expec- 
tations of the Russian public restricted the creation and perfor- 
mance of innovative pieces. The most notable avant-garde 
symphonic composer was Alfred Schnittke, who remained in 
the Soviet Union, where his work won approval. Aleksey 
Volkonskiy was a notable member of Schnittke's generation 
who left the Soviet Union to compose in the West. The 
restraints of the 1970s and 1980s stimulated a musical under- 
ground, called magnitizdat, which recorded and distributed for- 
bidden folk, rock, and jazz works in small batches. Two notable 
figures in that movement were Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir 
Vysotskiy, who set their poetry to music and became popular 
entertainers with a satirical message. Vysotskiy, who died in 
1980, was rehabilitated in 1990; Okudzhava continued his 
career into the mid-1990s. 

Jazz performances were permitted by all Soviet regimes, and 
jazz became one of Russia's most popular music forms. In the 
1980s, the Ganelin Trio was the best-known Russian jazz 
combo, performing in Europe and the United States. Jazz 
musicians from the West began playing regularly in the Soviet 
Union in the 1980s. 

Rock music was controlled strictly by Soviet authorities, with 
only limited recording outside magnitizdat, although Russia's 
youth were fascinated with the rock groups of the West. In the 
more liberal atmosphere of the late 1980s, several notable 
Soviet rock groups emerged with official approval as more 
innovative, unsanctioned groups proliferated. The Leningrad 
Rock Club, which became a national network of performance 
clubs in 1986, was the most important outlet for sanctioned 
rock music. In the 1990s, much of Russia's rock music lost the 
innovative and satirical edge of the magnitizdat period, and 
experts noted a tendency to simply imitate Western groups. 

Ballet 

Russia has made a unique contribution to the development 
of ballet. Ballet was introduced in Russia together with other 
aristocratic dance forms as part of Peter the Great's Westerniza- 
tion program in the early 1700s. The first ballet school was 



230 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

established in 1734, and the first full ballet company was 
founded at the Imperial School of Ballet in St. Petersburg in 
the 1740s. Italian and French dancers and choreographers pre- 
dominated in that period, but by 1800 Russian ballet was assim- 
ilating native elements from folk dancing as nobles sponsored 
dance companies of serfs. European ballet critics agreed that 
the Russian dance had a positive influence on West European 
ballet. Marius Petipa, a French choreographer who spent fifty 
years staging ballets in Russia, was the dominant figure during 
that period; his greatest triumphs were the staging of Tchai- 
kovsky's ballets. Other noted European dancers, such as Marie 
Taglioni, Christian Johansson, and Enrico Cecchetti, per- 
formed in Russia throughout the nineteenth and early twenti- 
eth centuries, bringing new influences from the West. 

The most influential figure of the early twentieth century 
was the impresario Sergey Diaghilev, who founded an innova- 
tive touring ballet company in 1909 with choreographer 
Michel Fokine, dancer Vaslav Nijinksy, and designer Alexandre 
Benois. After the staging of Stravinskiy's controversial The Rite 
of Spring, World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution kept 
Diaghilev from returning to Russia. Until Diaghilev died in 
1929, his Russian dance company, the Ballet Russe, was head- 
quartered in Paris. In the same period, the emigre dancer 
Anna Pavlova toured the world with her troupe and exerted a 
huge influence on the art form. 

After Diaghilev, several new companies calling themselves 
the Ballet Russe toured the world, and new generations of Rus- 
sian dancers filled their ranks. George Balanchine, a Georgian 
emigre and protege of Diaghilev, formed the New York City 
Ballet in 1948. Meanwhile, the Soviet government sponsored 
new ballet companies throughout the union. After a period of 
innovation and experimentation in the 1920s, Russia's ballet 
reverted under Stalin to the traditional forms of Petipa, even 
changing the plots of some ballets to emphasize the positive 
themes of socialist realism. The most influential Russian 
dancer of the mid-twentieth century was Rudolf Nureyev, who 
defected to the West in 1961 and is credited with establishing 
the dominant role of the male dancer in classical ballet. A sec- 
ond notable emigre, Mikhail Baryshnikov, burnished an 
already brilliant career in the United States after defecting 
from Leningrad's Kirov Ballet in 1974. The large cities of Rus- 
sia traditionally have their own symphony orchestras and ballet 
and opera houses. Although funding for such facilities has 



231 



Russia: A Country Study 

diminished in the 1990s, attendance at performances remains 
high. The ballet companies of the Bol'shoy Theater in Moscow 
and the Kirov Theater in St. Petersburg are world renowned 
and have toured regularly since the early 1960s. 

Architecture and Painting 

Early Slavic tribes created handsome jewelry, wall hangings, 
and decorated leather items that have been recovered from 
burial mounds. The folk-art motifs made liberal use of animal 
forms and representations of natural forces. Subsequently, the 
strongest single influence on Russian art was the acceptance of 
Christianity in A.D. 988. Transmitting the idea that the beauty 
of the church's physical attributes reflects the glory of God, 
Byzantine religious art and architecture penetrated Kiev, which 
was the capital of the early Russian state until about 1100 (see 
The Golden Age of Kiev, ch. 1). The northern cities of 
Novgorod and Vladimir developed distinctive architectural 
styles, and the tradition of painting icons, religious images usu- 
ally painted on wooden panels, spread as more churches were 
built. The Mongol occupation (1240-1480) cut Muscovy's ties 
with the Byzantine Empire, fostering the development of origi- 
nal artistic styles. Among the innovations of this period was the 
iconostasis, a carved choir screen on which icons are hung. In 
the early fifteenth century, the master icon painter Andrey 
Rublev created some of Russia's most treasured religious art. 

As the Mongols were driven out and Moscow became the 
center of Russian civilization in the late fifteenth century, a new 
wave of building began in Russia's cities. Italian architects 
brought a West European influence, especially in the recon- 
struction of Moscow's Kremlin, the city's twelfth-century 
wooden fortress. St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square, however, 
combined earlier church architecture with styles from the 
Tatar east. In the 1500s and 1600s, the tsars supported icon 
painting, metalwork, and manuscript illumination; as contact 
with Western Europe increased, those forms began to reflect 
techniques of the West. Meanwhile, folk art preserved the 
forms of the earlier Slavic tribes in house decorations, clothing, 
and tools. 

Under Peter the Great, Russia experienced a much stronger 
dose of Western influence. Many of the buildings in Peter's 
new capital, St. Petersburg, were designed by the Italian archi- 
tects Domenico Trezzini and Bartolomeo Rastrelli under the 
direction of Peter and his daughter, Elizabeth. The most pro- 



232 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 

ductive Russian architects of the eighteenth century, Vasiliy 
Bazhenov, Matvey Kazakov, and Ivan Starov, created lasting 
monuments in Moscow and St. Petersburg and established a 
base for the more Russian forms that followed. 

The Academy of Fine Arts, founded by Elizabeth in 1757 to 
train Russia's artists, brought Western techniques of secular 
painting to Russia, which until that time had been dominated 
by icon painting. Catherine the Great (r. 1762-96), another 
energetic patron of the arts, began collecting European art 
objects that formed the basis of the collections for which Russia 
now is famous. Aleksey Venetsianov, the first graduate of the 
academy to fully embrace realistic subject matter such as peas- 
ant life, is acknowledged as the founder of Russia's realistic 
school of painting, which blossomed in the second half of the 
1800s. 

In the 1860s, a group of critical realists, led by Ivan Kram- 
skoy, Il'ya Repin, and Vasiliy Perov, portrayed aspects of Russian 
life with the aim of making social commentary. Repin's Barge 
Haulers on the Volga is one of the most famous products of this 
school. In the late 1800s, a new generation of painters empha- 
sized technique over subject, producing a more impressionistic 
body of work. The leaders of that school were Valentin Serov, 
Isaak Levitan, and Mikhail Vrubel'. In 1898 the theatrical 
designer Alexandre Benois and the dance impresario Sergey 
Diaghilev founded the World of Art group, which extended the 
innovation of the previous generation, played a central role in 
introducing the contemporary modern art of Western Europe 
to Russia, and acquainted West Europeans with Russia's art 
through exhibitions and publications. 

In the nineteenth century, Russia's architecture and decora- 
tive arts combined European techniques and influences with 
the forms of early Russia, producing the so-called Russian 
Revival seen in churches, public buildings, and homes of that 
period. The European-trained goldsmith, jeweler, and designer 
Karl Faberge, the most notable member of a brilliant artistic 
family, established workshops in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and 
London. His work, including jeweled enamel Easter eggs pro- 
duced for the Russian royal family, is an important example of 
the decorative art of the period. 

The Russian artists of the early twentieth century were 
exposed to a wide variety of Russian and European movements. 
Among the most innovative and influential of that generation 
were the painters Marc Chagall, Natal'ya Goncharova, Vasiliy 



233 



Russia: A Country Study 

Kandinskiy, Mikhail Larionov, and Kazimir Malevich. The con- 
structivists of the 1920s found parallels between their architec- 
tural and sculptural work and the precepts of the Bolshevik 
Revolution. By the 1930s, the government was limiting all 
forms of artistic expression to the themes of socialist realism, 
forbidding abstract forms and the exhibition of foreign art for 
more than thirty years. An "unofficial" art movement appeared 
in the 1960s under the leadership of sculptor Ernest Neizvest- 
nyy and painters Mikhail Chemyakhin, Oskar Rabin, and Yev- 
geniy Rukhin. In the 1970s and the early 1980s, informal art 
exhibits were held in parks and social clubs. Like the other arts, 
painting and sculpture benefited from the policy of glasnost of 
the late 1980s, which encouraged artistic innovation and the 
exhibition of works abroad. 

Outlook 

In the mid-1990s, the Russian Federation remains an amal- 
gam of widely varying ethnic groups and cultures. In fact, the 
differentiation among groups has increased since the demise 
of the Soviet Union. The much less repressive grasp of Russia's 
central government has encouraged both cultural and political 
autonomy, although ethnic Russians constitute about 80 per- 
cent of the population and about 75 percent of religious believ- 
ers are Russian Orthodox. Many minority groups maintain 
their ethnic traditions, continue wide use of their languages, 
and demand economic and political autonomy partially based 
on ethnic differences. 

In the 1990s, Islam, which has the second largest body of 
religious believers in Russia, has prospered among many of the 
ethnic groups. The Russian Orthodox Church also has experi- 
enced a renaissance after emerging from Soviet repression; the 
church's membership, secular influence, and infrastructure 
expanded rapidly in the 1990s. 

Russia's long and rich literary history came to a new cross- 
roads beginning in the late 1980s, as freedom of expression 
seemingly ended the traditional role of literature as the anti- 
dote to authoritarian dogma. Like literature, other elements of 
the federation's cultural and artistic life, all of them with nota- 
ble past accomplishments, remained in a transitional stage in 
the 1990s. 

* * * 



234 



Ethnic, Religious, and Cultural Setting 



The Handbook of Major Soviet Nationalities, edited by Zev Katz, 
is a somewhat dated but detailed listing of ethnic groups. 
National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and the New States of Eur- 
asia, edited by Roman Szporluk, provides a discussion of the 
unique viewpoints of all the major ethnic groups of the former 
Soviet Union, including those remaining in the Russian Feder- 
ation. In Islamic Peoples of the Soviet Union, Shirin Akiner lists and 
describes all the Islamic ethnic groups in that category; that 
book is supplemented by Muslims of the Soviet Empire: A Guide by 
Alexandre Bennigsen, Marie Broxup, and S. Enders Wimbush. 
Religion as an ongoing element of Russian culture is described 
in Russian Culture in Modern Times, edited by Robert R Hughes 
and Irina Paperno; Michael Bourdeaux discusses religion in 
post-Soviet Russia in The Politics of Religion in Russia and the New 
States of Eurasia. The evolution of Russian literature is discussed 
in the introductions and explanatory texts of anthologies such 
as Medieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, edited by Serge 
A. Zenkovsky, and The Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia, 
edited by Harold B. Segel, and in Marc Slonim's The Epic of Rus- 
sian Literature from Its Roots Through Tolstoy and Edward J. 
Brown's Russian Literature since the Revolution. (For further infor- 
mation and complete citations, see Bibliography.) 



235 



Chapter 5. The Society and Its Environment 



The girl with the golden hair sits on a stone at the water's edge (design from 
lacquer box made in village of Kholuy). 



THE DEMISE OF THE SOVIET UNION in 1991 brought a 
measure of freedom to Russia's people, but at the same time 
this change removed or severely weakened certain elements of 
the social safety net, which for many years had included a guar- 
antee of employment, basic medical care, and government sub- 
sidies for food, clothing, shelter, and transportation. For the 
average citizen, social and economic conditions worsened con- 
siderably in the early postcommunist era. Although some com- 
ponents of state support remained close to their Soviet-era 
levels, the government lacked the resources to compensate 
Russia's citizens for the stresses of the transition period. 

The end of the Soviet Union meant the disappearance of a 
reliable, if mediocre, set of social expectations.for every Rus- 
sian. Lacking such guidance, various elements of Russian soci- 
ety moved in very different directions. A small segment took 
immediate action — both legal and illegal — to make the most of 
its newfound range of opportunities for self-expression and 
economic advancement. Although few such adventurers found 
success, those who did coalesced into a new class of wealthy 
Russians independent of the government. The vast majority, 
however, met the prospect of reduced predictability in their 
lives with suspicion, confusion, or resentment. Remembering 
the security of Soviet life, many clung to symbolic or real rem- 
nants of that life, particularly in the workplace. 

As the economic controls of centralized government were 
eased, prices for basic necessities rose — sometimes precipi- 
tously — and society was buffeted by marked increases in crime, 
infectious diseases, drug addiction, homelessness, and suicide. 
Growing pollution and other environmental hazards added to 
the malaise. 

Social Structure 

In the mid-1990s, Russian society was in the midst of a 
wrenching transition from a totalitarian structure to a protode- 
mocracy of unknown character. During most of the Soviet era, 
society was atomized, so that the communist regime and its 
"transmission belts" (officially sanctioned organizations and 
institutions of every kind, from trade unions to youth groups) 
could fully monitor and control each individual. Civil society 



239 



Russia: A Country Study 

was nonexistent. The lines of control ran from the top down, 
through a rigid hierarchy constructed and staffed by the ruling 
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (GPSU — see Glossary). 

Post-Soviet Russia is slowly striving to create a civil society 
and restore the family and other basic institutions as functional 
units within the society. In the mid-1990s, habits of trust, per- 
sonal responsibility, community service, and citizen coopera- 
tion remained unformed in much of Russia's society, as the 
social attitudes of previous decades remained intact. Those 
holding such attitudes envisioned little between the extremes 
of totalitarianism and social anarchy; having moved away from 
the simplistic guidance of the former, much of society was 
strongly tempted to embrace the latter. 

Social Stratification 

Perhaps the most significant fact about Russia's social struc- 
ture is that ideology no longer determines social status. During 
the Soviet era, membership in the CPSU was the surest path to 
career advancement and wealth. Political decisions rather than 
market forces determined social status. Despite Marxist-Lenin- 
ist (see Glossary) notions of a classless society, the Soviet Union 
had a powerful ruling class, the nomenklatura, which consisted 
of party officials and key personnel in the government and 
other important sectors such as heavy industry. This class 
enjoyed privileges such as roomy apartments, country dachas, 
and access to special stores, schools, medical facilities, and rec- 
reational sites. The social status and income of members of the 
nomenklatura increased as they were promoted to higher posi- 
tions in the party. 

The social structure of the Soviet Union was characterized 
by self-perpetuation and limited mobility. Access to higher edu- 
cation, a prerequisite to political and social advancement, was 
steadily constrained in the postwar decades. The so-called 
period of stagnation that coincided with the long tenure of 
CPSU chief Leonid I. Brezhnev (in office 1964-82) had social 
as well as political connotations. Moreover, the sluggish econ- 
omy of that period reduced opportunities for social mobility, 
thus accentuating differences among social groups and further 
widening the gap between the nomenklatura and the rest of soci- 
ety. 

Members of the urban working class (proletariat), in whose 
name the party purported to rule, generally lived in cramped 
apartment complexes, spent hours each day standing in line to 



240 



The Society and Its Environment 



buy food and other necessities, and attended frequent obliga- 
tory sessions of political indoctrination. Similarly, the peas- 
antry eked out a meager existence, with little opportunity for 
relief. Agricultural workers constituted the bottom layer of 
Soviet society, receiving the least pay, the least opportunity for 
social advancement, and the least representation in the nomi- 
nally all-inclusive CPSU leadership. 

Postcommunist society also is characterized by a wide dispar- 
ity in wealth and privilege. Although there is no rigid class 
structure, social stratification based on wealth is evident and 
growing. The nomenklatura as it existed in Soviet times disap- 
peared with the demise of the CPSU, but many of its members 
used their continuing connections with industry and finance to 
enrich themselves in the emerging capitalist system. According 
to a 1995 study conducted by the Russian Academy of Sciences, 
more than 60 percent of Russia's wealthiest millionaires, and 
75 percent of the new political elite, are former members of 
the communist nomenklatura, and 38 percent of Russia's busi- 
nesspeople held economic positions in the CPSU. The wealth 
of the new capitalists, who constitute 1 to 2 percent of the pop- 
ulation, derives from the ownership of private property, which 
was prohibited under the communist regime; from former 
black-market transactions that now are pursued legally; and 
from repatriation of funds that were secretly transferred 
abroad during the Soviet era. Entrepreneurs have purchased 
former state-owned enterprises privatized by the government 
(often using connections with government authorities to gain 
favorable treatment) and have opened banks, stock exchanges, 
and other ventures typical of a market economy (see Banking 
and Finance; Privatization, ch. 6). By the mid-1990s, Russia had 
by no means established a full-fledged market economy, but 
the era of capitalism, which the Bolshevik Revolution had cut 
short, was ascendant. 

The most successful of the new capitalists practice conspicu- 
ous consumption on an extravagant scale, driving flashy West- 
ern cars, sporting expensive clothing and jewelry, and 
frequenting stylish restaurants and clubs that are far beyond 
the reach of ordinary Russians. Russian biznesmeny with cash- 
filled briefcases purchase expensive real estate in exclusive 
areas of Western Europe and the United States. Other areas of 
the world, such as the city of Limassol, Cyprus, have been trans- 
formed into virtual Russian enclaves where illicit commercial 
transactions help fuel the economy. Russian capitalists attempt- 



241 



Russia: A Country Study 

ing to achieve at a high level using legitimate means must 
nonetheless pay protection money to criminal groups, espe- 
cially in the larger cities. 

In the first half of the 1990s, the gap between the richest and 
poorest citizens of Russia grew steadily, and it became a source 
of social alienation because newly successful Russians are 
resented and often are assumed to have criminal connections. 
In 1995 the World Bank (see Glossary) ranked Russia's dichot- 
omy between the highest and lowest economic echelons on a 
par with the wide gaps between rich and poor in Argentina and 
Turkey. However, by 1996 the gap had decreased slightly. 
According to the State Committee for Statistics (Goskomstat), 
in 1995 the wealthiest 10 percent of Russians earned 13.5 times 
as much as the poorest 10 percent. In 1996 the ratio had 
shrunk to 12.8 percent, suggesting that more people were shar- 
ing in the wealth. According to reports in 1996, the flaunting 
of luxurious automobiles, clothing, and other forms of mate- 
rial wealth became less prevalent in Russia's largest cities, espe- 
cially Moscow, which is the center of the nouveau riche 
population. 

Nonreporting of incomes by the highest socioeconomic level 
likely makes the real gap wider than the official statistics indi- 
cate. The overall decline in living standards in 1995 is revealed 
by an 8 percent decrease in retail trade and by opinion surveys. 
For instance, in early 1995 some 56 percent of respondents said 
that their material situation had declined, and 17 percent said 
that it had improved. Another survey identified 68 percent of 
respondents claiming to live below the poverty line in 1995, 
compared with 56 percent the previous year. Such self-percep- 
tions of victimization promote the platforms of antireform 
political parties that promise a return to the guaranteed well- 
being of the Soviet era (see The Elections of 1995, ch. 7). 

A subclass of young businesspeople, mainly bankers and 
stockbrokers, runs the new trading and investment markets in 
Moscow and St. Petersburg, remaining aloof from the tangled, 
state-dominated manufacturing sector. This group, a very visi- 
ble part of life in the larger cities in the mid-1990s, has profited 
from the youthful flexibility that enabled it to embrace an 
entirely new set of rules for economic success, while Russia's 
older generations — with the exception of the astute nomenkla- 
tura members who became part of the nouveau riche — were 
much less able to adapt to the post-Soviet world. 



242 




Puppeteer in Sokol'niki Park, Moscow 



Courtesy A. James Firth, United States 



Department of Agriculture 



243 



Russia: A Country Study 

Conditions for the working class and the peasants are 
sharply at variance with those of the new capitalist class. Politi- 
cal repression has eased, but economic privations have 
increased. Although more goods are available, they are often 
beyond the means of the average worker. Full employment, the 
virtually guaranteed basis of survival under communism, no 
longer is the norm (see Unemployment, ch. 6). At the lower 
end of the social scale, the "working poor" toil predominantly 
in agriculture, education, culture, science, and health, most of 
which are considered middle-class fields of employment in the 
West. State employees, who suffer especially from inflation 
because of infrequent wage adjustments, often fall below the 
official poverty line. 

Young parents with little work experience and more than 
one child are especially likely to be members of the working 
poor. In 1993 some 57 percent of families classified as poor by 
the World Bank had one or more children, and 86 percent of 
families with three or more children were classified in the low- 
est income group. Most single-parent families also belonged to 
this group. In the lower- income groups, people with relatives 
generally fare better than those with none (especially single 
pensioners), as the informal subsistence networks formed dur- 
ing the Soviet era continue to provide support to a substantial 
segment of society. 

The glasnost (see Glossary) policy of the late 1980s brought a 
new youth culture that took up the nonconformist dress, drug 
use, music, and antiestablishment stance of young people in 
the West, while earnestly seeking answers to questions about 
Russia's past and its potential future. The social and economic 
stresses and disappointments of the 1990s have pushed the 
majority of young Russians completely out of the youth culture, 
while the few who have won some sort of success have moved to 
further extremes, such as hedonism and wild economic specu- 
lation. In the cities, clubs and bars, all making heavy protection 
payments to the mafiya — as Russia's growing organized crime 
groups are termed — are gathering places that feature a variety 
of narcotics (including mushrooms gathered in the woods near 
St. Petersburg), alcohol, and a form of Russian rock music that 
was full of protest in the late 1980s but has since been diluted 
to widen its market appeal. This small but highly visible class of 
youth is divided into hundreds of tusovki (sing., tusovka), mutu- 
ally exclusive social circles that provide a sense of identity but 
isolate their members from the rest of society. What the tusovki 



244 



The Society and Its Environment 



have in common are decadence, an appetite for risk, and a 
readiness to indulge in faddish forms of mass behavior. 

Wages and Work 

In the post-Soviet era, social mobility is unlimited in theory, 
but in the mid-1990s economic factors play an important role 
in restricting upward movement for most Russians. Those with- 
out an established source of wealth generally are unable to pur- 
chase land, real estate, or enterprises, or to take advantage of 
other financial opportunities to increase their income and sta- 
tus. Because individuals under such limitations also lack oppor- 
tunities to pursue higher education, they tend to remain at or 
below the socioeconomic level of their parents. In many cases, 
the younger generation has less earning power than the one 
that preceded it. 

In 1995 official government estimates placed 39 million peo- 
ple, or 26 percent of the population, below the poverty line. 
Living standards, which dropped drastically in 1992, recovered 
somewhat in 1993 and 1994 before falling again in 1995 as the 
government tightened its social support spending policy (see 
Social Welfare, this ch.; table 11, Appendix). Other factors, 
such as inflation, changes in the minimum wage and minimum 
pension, and income from nonwage sources such as business 
activity and property, also influence annual income in a given 
period. Raised in mid-1994, then not again until April 1995, 
the minimum wage has provided little protection against inter- 
mittent periods of high inflation. Official income statistics are 
skewed because many Russians underreport their incomes to 
avoid taxes and because such statistics ignore important nonin- 
come sources of well-being such as property. 

The real incomes of state-sector employees fell as much as 30 
percent in the first three quarters of 1995. Wages in the private 
sector have kept pace with inflation more consistently, unless 
an enterprise has financial difficulties such as debts owed to 
other enterprises. In both sectors, long-term failure to pay 
wages has become a chronic problem; it affected an estimated 
13 million people in mid-1995. Enterprises also have 
responded to financial difficulties by laying off employees and 
by shortening work weeks, pushing more workers below the 
poverty line. Although many of the working poor retain the 
housing, health, and free holidays associated with employment, 
enterprises are rapidly withdrawing those Soviet-era privileges. 



245 



Russia: A Country Study 

The economic condition of many Russians is ameliorated by 
earnings from additional jobs or by access to private plots of 
land. In a 1994 survey, 47 percent of respondents reported 
some form of additional material support, and 23 percent 
reported having supplementary employment. In some cases, 
unofficial employment is quite profitable. Of the "working 
unemployed," Russians who consider themselves out of work 
but nevertheless hold some sort of job, 11 percent had incomes 
at least three times higher than the average wage in 1994. The 
large number of pensioners with unofficial jobs (approxi- 
mately one in four) generally fare much better than those on 
fixed incomes, generating a disparity of status within the oldest 
segment of society. The easing of travel restrictions in post- 
Soviet Russia and the overall diversification of the private sec- 
tor increased opportunities to earn supplementary income, 
through such activities as buying goods abroad and selling 
them inside Russia and offering a variety of private services 
such as repair work, sewing, and translation. In general, these 
opportunities are most accessible to young, well-educated Rus- 
sians in large cities. But in many cases, well-educated individu- 
als must sacrifice their social status by accepting unskilled jobs 
to make ends meet. 

Some professional positions that are accorded high prestige 
carry a salary below that for certain categories of skilled labor. 
The upper echelons of the political, artistic, and scientific elites 
form the top of the occupation pyramid in terms of status and 
income. That category is followed by the professional, intellec- 
tual, and artistic intelligentsia; the most highly skilled indus- 
trial workers; white-collar workers; relatively prosperous 
farmers; and average workers. The bottom of the status and pay 
scales includes people employed as semiskilled or unskilled 
workers in light industry, agriculture, food processing, educa- 
tion, health care, retail trade, and the services sector. 

Among the low-paying jobs are some that require higher or 
specialized education and that carry some level of prestige. 
Women predominate in these job categories, which include 
engineers, veterinarians, agronomists, accountants, legal advis- 
ers, translators, schoolteachers, librarians, organizers of clubs 
and cultural events, musicians, and even doctors. A 1994 World 
Bank report identified an increasing likelihood that positions 
offering lower wages would be filled by women, in most sectors 
and occupations of the Russian economy. Many women, how- 
ever, reportedly accept jobs at lower levels of skill and remuner- 



246 



The Society and Its Environment 



ation in exchange for nonmonetary benefits, such as short 
commuting distances, minimum overtime hours, and access to 
child care or shopping facilities in the workplace (see The Role 
of Women, this ch.). 

Rural Life 

For rural society in both Soviet and post-Soviet times, agri- 
culture has been the primary source of employment. Before 
1992, however, the CPSU and its predecessors constituted the 
sole form of political organization, and all village communities 
were organized around the economic institution of the collec- 
tive farm (kolkhoz — see Glossary) or state farm (sovkhoz — see 
Glossary) and the village soviet (council) administration — 
organizations that employed the elite of rural society, nearly all 
of whose members were men. 

As in the past, the post-Soviet nonpolitical elite includes 
schoolteachers, agronomists, veterinary surgeons, and engi- 
neers. Teachers are held in high esteem, partly because of their 
role in determining who in the next generation will have 
upward social mobility. Despite this status, teachers receive low 
pay and often must maintain private garden plots to support 
themselves. Agricultural machinery specialists, including oper- 
ators and mechanics, emerged as increasingly important and 
well-paid members of rural society in the 1970s and 1980s. In 
general, however, workers who remain in the countryside have 
less possibility of upward mobility than do urban dwellers. Man- 
agers and white-collar workers in rural agricultural and other 
organizations generally are brought in from outside. 

Rural dwellers tend to spend more time in their homes than 
residents of urban areas. Rural homes generally are larger than 
those in the city and have private garden plots. The tastes of 
country people are simpler and less Western-oriented than 
those of their urban counterparts, and they have less money to 
spend on leisure pursuits. The routine of life in many rural vil- 
lages has scarcely changed over many generations; the central 
concerns continue to be the weather and the condition of 
crops and livestock. 

The end of Soviet rule cast a shadow over the villages' guar- 
antee of medical care, job training, and entertainment, and 
rural areas benefited much less from the increased pace of 
information exchange characteristic of urban centers. Rural 
young people continue to leave their families to seek a better 
life elsewhere because village life has improved little since their 



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Russia: A Country Study 

grandparents were young. In this process, the family, the foun- 
dation of peasant society, has become fragmented. Villages 
with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants are disappearing at a rapid 
rate: between 1960 and 1995, the entire population of an esti- 
mated two-thirds of such villages either died or moved away. In 
the remaining rural villages, health care and education are 
increasingly inadequate, and essential commodities such as 
propane gas have become extremely expensive. 

Many young people return to their rural homes after acquir- 
ing the type of education or technical training that is available 
only in cities and that is increasingly necessary to run mecha- 
nized farming operations and agroindustrial enterprises. They 
are joined by Russian emigres from former Soviet republics, 
especially Central Asia, for whom it is easier to start life in Rus- 
sia in a rural rather than an urban setting. However, most of 
those additions to the rural population are only stopping tem- 
porarily until they find more satisfying situations elsewhere. 
According to most experts, the long-term prospects of the tra- 
ditional Russian village became grim in the immediate post- 
Soviet period. 

Social Organizations 

In the mid-1990s, the structure of Russia's civil society was 
still in flux, but by that time the country had developed a large 
and growing network of social organizations, including trade 
unions, professional societies, veterans' groups, youth organiza- 
tions, sports clubs, women's associations, and a variety of sup- 
port groups. Whereas all types of organization during the 
Soviet era functioned as "transmission belts" for the communist 
party, in the years that followed the emergence of a large num- 
ber of diverse, autonomous nongovernmental groups was an 
important aspect of the growth of civil society. 

The Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia 
(Federatsiya nezavisimykh profsoyuzov Rossii — FNPR) is one of 
the largest trade union organizations. Created as the official 
trade union movement was reconstituted following the disinte- 
gration of the Soviet Union, the federation includes thirty-six 
unions — many of them quite small in the mid-1990s — grouped 
by type of occupation. Among the FNPR's activities is the col- 
lection of contributions to the Social Insurance Fund by Rus- 
sia's enterprises, each of which is required to earmark 4.5 
percent of its total payroll for the fund. 



248 



The Society and Its Environment 



Breaking the legal stranglehold of the Soviet-era trade union 
structure on the provision of social security benefits was a com- 
plicated but essential stage in enabling new unions to gain 
legitimacy in the eyes of workers. In the early 1990s, most work- 
ers saw the FNPR as representing the interests of management 
and the government, so they relied more heavily on unofficial, 
independent unions and a variety of worker-oriented organiza- 
tions. However, in 1995 and early 1996 the FNPR, now a part- 
ner with top businesspeople in an umbrella party called Trade 
Unions and Industrialists of Russia, played a central role in 
organizing large-scale rallies and picketing actions to protest 
chronic late wage payments by enterprises all over the Russian 
Federation. 

In the 1990s, substantial independent union activity has also 
occurred in the coal industry. There, the Independent Miners' 
Union (Nezavisimyy profsoyuz gornyakov — NPG) and the 
Independent Trade Union of Workers in the Coal-Mining 
Industry (Nezavisimyy profsoyuz rabochikh ugol'noy promy- 
shlennosti — NPRUP), a reformed version of the official Soviet- 
era trade union, share power and have organized large-scale 
strikes. 

In the 1990s, independent individuals and groups have 
begun establishing professional, research, educational, and 
cultural organizations. This activity has included a substantial 
upswing in the number of voluntary charitable and philan- 
thropic organizations. In 1995 about 5,000 nonprofit organiza- 
tions and 550 formal charities were operating in Russia. In 
Moscow more than 10,000 volunteers worked for these organi- 
zations in 1996. These numbers are low by Western standards, 
and a legal framework for the existence of charities and non- 
profit organizations still did not exist as of mid-1996. However, 
the starting point in 1992 was nearly zero in both categories. 

A significant token of citizen awareness is the proliferation 
of local and regional ecological and environmental cleanup 
groups throughout the Russian Federation (see The Response 
to Environmental Problems, ch. 3) . For example, Epitsentr, an 
umbrella organization in St. Petersburg, has spawned numer- 
ous smaller groups that focus on controlling pollution in the 
city's water supply, stopping the construction of a controversial 
dam in the Gulf of Finland, and preserving St. Petersburg's his- 
toric buildings and cultural monuments. Students at Moscow 
State University and other educational institutions have played 
an important role in directing public attention to the massive 



249 



Russia: A Country Study 

environmental degradation that plagues Russia. The Socio-Eco- 
logical Union, which was founded at Moscow State University 
in 1988, has become one of the Russian Federation's most 
influential umbrella organizations committed to environmen- 
tal protection. 

The Family 

As the Soviet Union became urbanized, families grew more 
numerous and smaller in average size. Between the censuses of 
1959 and 1989, the number of family units increased 41 per- 
cent, from 28.5 million to more than 40 million. Average family 
size in the Russian Republic declined from 3.4 persons in 1970 
to 3.1 in 1989. Already in the late 1970s, more than 80 percent 
of urban families had two children or fewer. In 1989 some 87 
percent of the population lived in families, of which about 80 
percent were based on a married couple. 

In the 1980s, the divorce rate in the Soviet Union was second 
in the world only to that of the United States, although "unoffi- 
cial divorces" and separations also were common. Crowded 
housing and lack of privacy contributed heavily to the divorce 
rate, especially for couples forced to live with the parents of 
one spouse. Drunkenness and infidelity were other major 
causes. Divorce procedures were relatively simple, although 
courts generally attempted to reconcile couples. Custody of 
children normally was awarded to the mother. In the first half 
of the 1990s, the conditions contributing to the majority of 
Russia's divorces did not change, and the divorce rate 
increased. 

In post-Soviet attitudes, the family continues to be viewed as 
the most important institution in society. In a 1994 poll funded 
by the Commission on Women's, Family, and Demographic 
Problems, less than 3 percent of respondents named "living 
alone without a family" as the best choice for a young person. 
Although the size of the average Russian family has decreased 
steadily over the past quarter-century, nearly 80 percent of 
respondents named children as the essential element of a good 
marriage. At the same time, about three-quarters of respon- 
dents said that a bad marriage should be terminated rather 
than prolonged; the poll also showed that, generally, the Rus- 
sian attitude toward divorce is more positive than it was in the 
Soviet era. 

According to the 1994 survey, the dynamics of the average 
Russian family have changed somewhat. Compared with 1989, 



250 



The Society and Its Environment 



about 3 percent fewer individuals characterized their mar- 
riages as in conflict, and 9 percent fewer called their marriages 
"egalitarian" in the distribution of authority between the part- 
ners. The average distribution of common household tasks was 
shown to be far from equal, with women performing an aver- 
age of about 75 percent of cooking, cleaning, and shopping 
chores. Between 1989 and 1994, women's expression of dissatis- 
faction with their family situation increased 13 percent, while 
that of men rose only 2 percent. Women reporting family satis- 
faction were predominantly young or elderly, with adequate-to- 
high incomes and at least a secondary education. According to 
experts, social and economic crises have caused Russians to 
rely more heavily than ever on the family as a source of per- 
sonal satisfaction. But these same crises have caused the stan- 
dard of living to fall, and they have required that more time be 
spent at work to keep it from falling further, thus making it 
harder for families to sustain their most cherished attributes. 

The Role of Women 

In the post-Soviet era, the position of women in Russian soci- 
ety remains at least as problematic as it was in previous decades. 
In both cases, a number of nominal legal protections for 
women either have failed to address the existing conditions or 
have failed to supply adequate support. In the 1990s, increas- 
ing economic pressures and shrinking government programs 
left women with little choice but to seek employment, although 
most available positions were as substandard as in the Soviet 
period, and generally jobs of any sort were more difficult to 
obtain. Such conditions contribute heavily to Russia's declining 
birthrate and the general deterioration of the family. At the 
same time, feminist groups and social organizations have 
begun advancing the cause of women's rights in what remains a 
strongly traditional society. 

The Soviet constitution of 1977 stipulated that men and 
women have equal rights, and that women have equal access to 
education and training, employment, promotions, remunera- 
tion, and participation in social, cultural, and political activity. 
The Soviet government also provided women special medical 
and workplace protection, including incentives for mothers to 
work outside the home and legal and material support of their 
maternal role. In the 1980s, that support included 112 days of 
maternity leave at full pay. When that allowance ended, a 
woman could take as much as one year of additional leave with- 



251 



Russia: A Country Study 

out pay without losing her position. Employer discrimination 
against pregnant and nursing women was prohibited, and 
mothers with small children had the right to work part-time. 
Because of such provisions, as many as 92 percent of women 
were employed at least part-time, Soviet statistics showed. 

Despite official ideology, Soviet women did not enjoy the 
same position as men in society or within the family. Average 
pay for women in all fields was below the overall national aver- 
age, and the vaunted high percentage of women in various 
fields, especially health care, medicine, education, and eco- 
nomics, did not hold true in the most prestigious and high-pay- 
ing areas such as the upper management of organizations in 
any of those fields. Women were conspicuously underrepre- 
sented in the leadership of the CPSU; in the 1980s, they consti- 
tuted less than 30 percent of party membership and less than 5 
percent of the party Central Committee, and no woman ever 
achieved full membership in the Politburo. 

Most of the nominal state benefit programs for women con- 
tinued into the post-Soviet era (see Social Welfare, this ch.). 
However, as in the Soviet era, Russian women in the 1990s pre- 
dominate in economic sectors where pay is low, and they con- 
tinue to receive less pay than men for comparable positions. In 

1995 men in health care earned an average of 50 percent more 
than women in that field, and male engineers received an aver- 
age of 40 percent more than their female colleagues. Despite 
the fact that, on average, women are better educated than 
men, women remain in the minority in senior management 
positions. In the Soviet era, women's wages averaged 70 per- 
cent of men's; by 1995 the figure was 40 percent, according to 
the Moscow-based Center for Gender Studies. According to a 

1996 report, 87 percent of employed urban Russians earning 
less than 100,000 rubles a month (for value of the ruble — see 
Glossary) were women, and the percentage of women 
decreased consistently in the higher wage categories. 

According to reports, women generally are the first to be 
fired, and they face other forms of on-the-job discrimination as 
well. Struggling companies often fire women to avoid paying 
child care benefits or granting maternity leave, as the law still 
requires. In 1995 women constituted an estimated 70 percent 
of Russia's unemployed, and as much as 90 percent in some 
areas. 

Sociological surveys show that sexual harassment and vio- 
lence against women have increased at all levels of society in 



252 



The Society and Its Environment 



the 1990s. More than 13,000 rapes were reported in 1994, 
meaning that several times that number of that often-unre- 
ported crime probably were committed. In 1993 an estimated 
14,000 women were murdered by their husbands or lovers, 
about twenty times the figure in the United States and several 
times the figure in Russia five years earlier. More than 300,000 
other types of crimes, including spousal abuse, were committed 
against women in 1994; in 1996 the State Duma (the lower 
house of the Federal Assembly, Russia's parliament) drafted a 
law against domestic violence. 

Working women continue to bear the "double burden" of a 
job and family-raising responsibilities, in which Russian hus- 
bands generally participate little. In a 1994 survey, about two- 
thirds of women said that the state should help families by pay- 
ing one spouse enough to permit the other to stay at home. 
Most women also consider their role in the family more diffi- 
cult than that of their husband. Such dissatisfaction is a factor 
in Russia's accelerating divorce rate and declining marriage 
rate. In 1993 the divorce rate was 4.5 per 1,000 population, 
compared with 4.1 ten years earlier, and the marriage rate 
declined from 10.5 per 1,000 population in 1983 to 7.5 in 1993. 
In 1992 some 17.2 percent of births were to unmarried women. 
According to 1994 government statistics, about 20 percent of 
families were run by a single parent — the mother in 94 percent 
of cases. 

Often women with families are forced to work because of 
insufficient state child allowances and unemployment benefits. 
Economic hardship has driven some women into prostitution. 
In the Soviet period, prostitution was viewed officially as a form 
of social deviancy that was dying out as the Soviet Union 
advanced toward communism. In the 1990s, organized crime 
has become heavily involved in prostitution, both in Russia and 
in the cities of Central and Western Europe, to which Russian 
women often are lured by bogus advertisements for match- 
making services or modeling agencies. According to one esti- 
mate, 10,000 women from Central Europe, including a high 
proportion of Russians, have been lured or forced into prosti- 
tution in Germany alone. 

Independent women's organizations — a form of activity that 
was suppressed in the Soviet era — have been formed in large 
numbers in the 1990s at the local, regional, and national levels. 
One such group is the Center for Gender Studies, a private 
research institute. The center analyzes demographic and social 



253 



Russia: A Country Study 

problems of women and acts as a link between Russian and 
Western feminist groups. A traveling group called Feminist 
Alternative offers women assertiveness training. Many local 
groups have emerged to engage in court actions on behalf of 
women, to set up rape and domestic violence awareness pro- 
grams (about a dozen of which were active in 1995), and to aid 
women in establishing businesses. Another prominent organi- 
zation is the Women's Union of Russia, which focuses on job- 
training programs, career counseling, and the development of 
entrepreneurial skills that will enable women to compete more 
successfully in Russia's emerging market economy. Despite the 
proliferation of such groups and programs, in the mid-1990s 
most Russians (including many women) remain contemptuous 
of their efforts, which many regard as a kind of Western subver- 
sion of traditional social values. 

The rapidly expanding private sector offers women new 
employment opportunities, but many of the Soviet stereotypes 
remain; the most frequently offered job in new businesses is 
that of secretary, and advertisements often specify physical 
attractiveness as a primary requirement. Russian law provides 
for as much as three years' imprisonment for sexual harass- 
ment, but the law rarely is enforced. Although the Fund for 
Protection from Sexual Harassment has blacklisted 300 Mos- 
cow firms where sexual harassment is known to have taken 
place, demands for sex and even rape still are common on-the- 
job occurrences. 

Women's higher profile in post-Soviet Russia also has 
extended to politics. At the national level, the most notable 
manifestation of women's newfound political success has been 
the Women of Russia party, which won 11 percent of the vote 
and twenty-five seats in the 1993 national parliamentary elec- 
tions. Subsequently, the party became active in a number of 
issues, including the opposition to the military campaign in 
Chechnya that began in 1994. In the 1995 national parliamen- 
tary elections, the Women of Russia chose to maintain its plat- 
form unchanged, emphasizing social issues such as the 
protection of children and women rather than entering into a 
coalition with other liberal parties. As a result, the party failed 
to reach the 5 percent threshold of votes required for propor- 
tional representation in the new State Duma, gaining only 
three seats in the single-seat portion of the elections (see The 
Elections of 1995, ch. 7). The party considered running a can- 



254 



The Society and Its Environment 



didate in the 1996 presidential election but remained outside 
the crowded field. 

A smaller organization, the Russian Women's Party, ran as 
part of an unsuccessful coalition with several other splinter par- 
ties in the 1995 elections. A few women, such as Ella Pamfilova 
of the Republican Party, Socialist Workers' Party chief Lyudmila 
Vartazarova, and Valeriya Novodvorskaya, leader of the Demo- 
cratic Union, have established themselves as influential politi- 
cal figures. Pamfilova has gained particular stature as an 
advocate on behalf of women and elderly people. 

The Soldiers' Mothers Movement was formed in 1989 to 
expose human rights violations in the armed forces and to help 
youths resist the draft. The movement has gained national 
prominence through its opposition to the war in Chechnya. 
Numerous protests have been organized, and representatives 
have gone to the Chechen capital, Groznyy, to demand the 
release of Russian prisoners and locate missing soldiers. The 
group, which claimed 10,000 members in 1995, also has lob- 
bied against extending the term of mandatory military service. 

Women have occupied few positions of influence in the 
executive branch of Russia's national government. One post in 
the Government (cabinet), that of minister of social protec- 
tion, has become a "traditional" women's position; in 1994 Ella 
Pamfilova was followed in that position by Lyudmila Bezlep- 
kina, who headed the ministry until the end of President Boris 
N. Yeltsin's first term in mid-1996. Tat'yana Paramanova was 
acting chairman of the Russian Central Bank for one year 
before Yeltsin replaced her in November 1995, and Tat'yana 
Regent has been head of the Federal Migration Service since 
its inception in 1992. Prior to the 1995 elections, women held 
about 10 percent of the seats in parliament: fifty-seven of 450 
seats in the State Duma and nine of 178 seats in the upper 
house of parliament, the Federation Council. The Soviet sys- 
tem of mandating legislative seats generally allocated about 
one-third of the seats in republic-level legislatures and one-half 
of the seats in local Soviets to women, but those proportions 
shrank drastically with the first multiparty elections of 1990. 

Sexual Attitudes 

In the 1990s, Russian sexual values and attitudes generally 
moved toward liberalization and autonomy, with distinct differ- 
ences according to age, sex, region, and level of education. In 
the Soviet era, the Russian attitude toward sexuality itself paral- 



255 



Russia: A Country Study 



leled that toward artistic expression of the erotic: it simply was 
concealed. Most Soviet philosophical, psychological, and bio- 
logical reference works made little or no mention of sexuality 
as a major characteristic of human beings. Soviet psychology, 
notoriously backward and misused, ignored almost completely 
the influence of sexual behavior and motivation on overall psy- 
chological makeup. 

After decades of Stalinist repression, Russian erotic art, liter- 
ature, and theater began a gradual revival in the 1970s as cen- 
sorship and ideological control weakened somewhat. Access to 
Western novels with erotic motifs, such as Henry Miller's Tropic 
of Cancer and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, also improved in this 
period. In 1992 restrictions on the publication of erotic litera- 
ture were loosened in Russia, heralding a rapid output of erotic 
and pornographic material of all sorts. A collection of chil- 
dren's erotic folklore was prepared in 1995, and erotic film fes- 
tivals and photography exhibits began to appear in the 1990s. 
The public seemingly has accepted the frequent use of nudity 
in Russian television, dance, and drama. 

Especially in film and literature, the shift has produced 
many instances of gratuitous or cruel sex and arbitrarily intro- 
duced nudity. Violence against women frequently is a central 
motif of movies, and violence and sex often are linked. Russian 
observers have expressed alarm that the release of long- 
repressed sexual expression in art will be accompanied by a 
similar deluge of sex and violence in Russian society. Indeed, 
the incidence of violence and sexual attacks against women in 
the first half of the 1990s seems to confirm these fears (see The 
Role of Women, this ch.). 

Objections to the trend toward sexual liberation are concen- 
trated in the older generations. In surveys younger and better- 
educated Russians generally voice approval, and new enter- 
prises selling cosmetics, high-fashion clothing, and health 
products play to a new public interest in attractive display of 
the human body. The individuality implicit in such market- 
ing — and especially obvious in the new Russian youth culture — 
is a drastic change from the strict standards of dress and 
grooming imposed in the Soviet era. The wearing of shorts, for 
example, only was accepted in Russia in the 1980s; in the Soviet 
era, women could not wear trousers in public without harass- 
ment or arrest; and vigilantes often forcibly cut the hair of 
youths who exceeded the standard for hair length. 



256 



The Society and Its Environment 



According to surveys taken in the early 1990s, most Russians 
feel that romantic love is a precondition to marriage and to 
sexual intimacy. But there are great differences in attitude 
toward this ideal between the older and younger generations, 
between the sexes, and between rural and urban Russians. Rus- 
sians in larger cities tend to take a more liberal outlook on pre- 
marital sex. The younger generations in Russia show a much 
more casual attitude toward commitment to a long-term rela- 
tionship than do the older generations. However, in surveys 
younger males showed a much stronger identification of sex 
with pleasure, and younger females a stronger identification of 
sex with love. Russians' attitudes toward premarital sex became 
somewhat more liberal in the 1990s; in a 1993 survey, the per- 
centage of those disapproving was substantially lower than it 
had been in previous years. 

The official policy of the Soviet Union toward homosexuality 
was one of persecution and intimidation. Until the late 1980s, 
Russian social scientists and society in general were completely 
silent on the subject. Under those conditions, homosexuals, 
known as "blues," lived in an underground culture circum- 
scribed by the brutality of gangs and the police and by employ- 
ment discrimination. 

With the advent of glasnost and the appearance of acquired 
immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in the Soviet Union, 
open scientific and journalistic discussion of homosexuality 
began in 1987. The issue became politicized in 1990 as gays 
and lesbians began attacking discrimination as a human rights 
issue. At this point, strong arguments appeared for abolishing 
Article 121 of the Criminal Code, which stipulated that sex 
between men (but not between women) was a crime. Despite 
increasingly strong opinion against Article 121, in the early 
1990s nationalists and communists joined some religious orga- 
nizations in opposing decriminalization. Meanwhile, the num- 
ber of convictions under Article 121 decreased steadily. 
Although Russia's new Criminal Code had not been ratified as 
of mid-1996, substantial modifications had been made to Arti- 
cle 121 by that time. 

Hundreds of gay rights organizations appeared in Russia in 
the 1990s, mostly in urban centers. Moscow became the center 
of Russia's gay and lesbian communities, both of which 
remained substantially less overt than their Western equiva- 
lents. Despite a gradual increase in public tolerance in the 
1990s, substantial residues of homophobia remain in Russian 



257 



Russia: A Country Study 



society. The neofascist group Pamyat', for example, remained 
violently antigay in the mid-1990s, and the communist and 
extreme nationalist media have launched strident homophobic 
attacks. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, numerous surveys 
identified homosexuals as the most hated group in Russian 
society, although the number of Russians calling for their exter- 
mination or isolation decreased noticeably between 1989 and 
the mid-1990s. 

Education 

In the Soviet period, education was highly centralized, and 
indoctrination in Marxist-Leninist theory was a major element 
of every school's curriculum. The schools' additional ideologi- 
cal function left a legacy in the post-Soviet system that has 
proved difficult for educators to overcome. In the 1990s, 
reform programs are aimed at overhauling the Soviet-era peda- 
gogical philosophy and substantially revising curricula. Inade- 
quate funding has frustrated attainment of these goals, 
however, and the teaching profession has lost talented individ- 
uals because of low pay. 

The Soviet Heritage 

The Soviet government operated virtually all the schools in 
Russia. The underlying philosophy of Soviet schools was that 
the teacher's job was to transmit standardized materials to the 
students, and the student's job was to memorize those materi- 
als, all of which were put in the context of socialist ethics. That 
set of ethics stressed the primacy of the collective over the 
interests of the individual. Therefore, for both teachers and 
students, creativity and individualism were discouraged. The 
Soviet system also maintained some traditions from tsarist 
times, such as the five-point grading scale, formal and regi- 
mented classroom environments, and standard school uni- 
forms — dark dresses with white collars for girls, white shirts 
and black pants for boys. 

As in other areas of Soviet life, the need for reform in educa- 
tion was felt in the 1980s. Reform programs in that period 
called for new curricula, textbooks, and teaching methods. 
The chief aim of those programs was to create a "new school" 
that would better equip Soviet citizens to deal with the mod- 
ern, technologically advanced nation that Soviet leaders fore- 
saw in the future. Nevertheless, in the 1980s facilities generally 



258 



The Society and Its Environment 



were inadequate, overcrowding was common, and equipment 
and materials were in short supply. The schools and universities 
failed to supply adequately skilled labor to almost every sector 
of the economy, and overgrown bureaucracy further compro- 
mised education's contribution to society. At the same time, 
young Russians became increasingly cynical about the Marxist- 
Leninist philosophy they were forced to absorb, as well as the 
stifling of self-expression and individual responsibility. In the 
last years of the Soviet Union, funding was inadequate for the 
large-scale establishment of "new schools," and requirements 
of ideological purity continued to smother the new pedagogi- 
cal creativity that was heralded in official pronouncements. 

The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the transition 
toward democracy had a profound effect on national educa- 
tion policy. In 1992 a reform philosophy was set forth in the 
Law on Education. The fundamental principle of that law was 
the removal of state control from education policy. In regions 
with non-Russian populations, that meant that educational 
institutions could base their curricula and teaching methods 
on national and historical traditions. In all regions, enactment 
of the law meant significant autonomy for local authorities to 
choose education strategies most appropriate to the time and 
place. Post-Soviet education reform also stressed teaching 
objectively, thus discarding all forms of the narrow, institu- 
tional views that had dominated the previous era and prepar- 
ing young people to deal with all aspects of the society they 
would encounter by presenting a broader interpretation of the 
world. 

Post-Soviet educational philosophy also has sought to inte- 
grate education with the production and economic processes 
into which graduates will pass in adult life. Envisioning a pro- 
gram of continuous education lasting throughout the lifetime 
of an individual, this concept has as its goal converting the edu- 
cation process from an economic burden on the state to an 
engine of economic progress. Especially important in this pro- 
gram is the reorientation of vocational training to complement 
the economic reforms of the 1990s. New systems of education 
for farmers and various types of on-the-job training for adults 
have been introduced, and new curricula in economics stress 
understanding of market economies. 

The Post-Soviet Education Structure 

Article 43 of the 1993 constitution affirms each citizen's 



259 



Russia: A Country Study 

right to education. It stipulates that "basic general education is 
compulsory" and that parents or guardians are responsible for 
ensuring that children obtain schooling. "General access to 
free preschool, basic general, and secondary vocational educa- 
tion in state or municipal educational establishments and in 
enterprises is guaranteed," according to the constitution. 
Although such access continued to exist in principle in the 
mid-1990s, various components of the system were increasingly 
inadequate. In 1993 some 35.2 million students were enrolled 
in Russian schools at all levels, including 20.5 million in gen- 
eral primary and secondary schools, 1.8 million in professional 
and technical schools, 2.1 million in special secondary schools, 
and 2.6 million in institutions of higher learning (see table 12, 
Appendix). A total of 70,200 general primary and secondary 
schools and 82,100 preschools were in operation at that time. 
Of the former category, 48,800 were in rural areas and 21,000 
in urban areas. 

In 1995 the projected budgetary expenditure for education 
was about 3.6 percent of the total state budget, a level Russian 
experts agreed could not maintain the system as it was, to say 
nothing of implementing the changes called for by post-Soviet 
legislation. The financing system made educational institutions 
fully dependent on state funds; outside sources of funding did 
not exist because no tax advantages accrued from investing in 
education. 

Infrastructure 

Because the Soviet Union had not built enough schools to 
accommodate increasing enrollment, Russia inherited a system 
of very large, overcrowded schools with a decaying infrastruc- 
ture. By the late 1980s, 21 percent of students were attending 
schools with no central heating, and 30 percent were learning 
in buildings with no running water. In 1992 Russia had nearly 
67,000 primary and secondary schools, which provided an aver- 
age per-pupil space of 2.6 square meters, one-third the official 
standard. About one-quarter of schools housed 900 or more 
students. In 1993 Russia was forced to close about 20,000 of its 
schools because of physical inadequacy, and an estimated one- 
third of the national school capacity was in need of large-scale 
repair. In 1994 one of every two students attended a school 
operating on two or three shifts. Rural schools, which make up 
about 75 percent of the national total, were in especially bad 
condition. 



260 



Children in middle school, Tyumen' 
Courtesy G. W. Meredith, Jr. 

Teachers 

The Soviet Union suffered a shortage of teachers for 
decades before the 1990s. Although society held the profession 
in high regard, teacher salaries were among the lowest of all 
professions, at least partly because women dominated the field 
at the primary and secondary levels. The emerging market 
economy of the 1990s improved the pay and career opportuni- 
ties outside teaching for many who would have remained in 
education under the more rigid Soviet system; thus, the short- 
age was exacerbated. In the 1992-93 school year, Russian 
schools had about 29,000 teacher vacancies, and in the follow- 
ing year 25 percent of all foreign-language teaching positions 
were unfilled. Although low pay has damaged morale among 
Russian teachers, they are more disillusioned by the end of the 
idealistic first post-Soviet years of innovation and freedom of 



261 



Russia: A Country Study 

speech and the continued decline of their material environ- 
ment. In the mid-1990s, rural schools experienced particular 
difficulty retaining teachers, as qualified young adults sought 
opportunities in larger communities. 

Curriculum 

The end of the communist system has led to extensive cur- 
riculum revision. A new paradigm has been developed to guide 
education, and more attention has gone to the arts, humani- 
ties, and social sciences. The 1992 Law on Education stressed 
the humanistic nature of education, common values, freedom 
of human development, and citizenship. Curriculum changes 
were laid out in another document, the Basic Curriculum of 
the General Secondary School; the overall curriculum reform 
program is to be put in place over a five-year period ending in 
1998. In the mid-1990s, many public schools have designed spe- 
cial curricula, some returning to the classical studies prevalent 
in the early 1900s. Local development of curricula and materi- 
als became legal in 1992, although financial constraints have 
limited experimentation and the Soviet era left educators with 
a strong bias toward standardized instruction and rote memori- 
zation. In contrast to the Soviet era, the quality and content of 
curricula vary greatly among public schools. A major factor 
encouraging local initiative is the disarray of federal education 
agencies, which often leave oblast, regional, and municipal 
authorities to their own devices. Nevertheless, only about one- 
third of primary and secondary schools have taken advantage 
of the opportunity to develop their own curricula; many 
administrations have been unwilling to make such large-scale 
decisions independently. 

Grade Structure 

Russian parents have the option of sending their children to 
preschool until age seven, when enrollment in elementary 
school becomes mandatory. Because the overwhelming major- 
ity of mothers still have full-time employment, many preschool 
facilities are colocated with enterprises. As businesses become 
increasingly profit oriented, however, many have ceased or 
reduced their support of such facilities. The number of child- 
care facilities for working parents declined significantly after 
1991, mainly because many such facilities lacked the funding to 
continue operation without state support. Of about 82,100 pre- 



262 



The Society and Its Environment 



schools in operation in 1993, more than one-third were housed 
in inadequate facilities. 

Although the 1992 Law on Education lowered the upper age 
of the compulsory education range from seventeen to fifteen, 
in the mid-1990s more than 60 percent of students remained in 
school for the previously required ten years. Among Russia's 
educational reforms is a regulation authorizing school officials 
to expel students fourteen years of age or older who are failing 
their courses. By the end of 1992, about 200,000 students had 
been expelled, and two to three times that number had 
dropped out. In the mid-1990s, Russia had five types of second- 
ary school: regular schools featuring a core curriculum; 
schools offering elective subjects; schools offering intensive 
study in elective subjects; schools designed to prepare students 
for entrance examinations to an institution of higher educa- 
tion (vyssheye uchebnoye zavedeniye — VUZ; pi., VUZy); and alter- 
native schools with experimental programs. 

Private Schools 

State education is free, but by 1992 several state higher-edu- 
cation institutions had begun charging tuition. At that point, 
almost half of the students above the secondary level were pay- 
ing fees of some sort. The 1992 Law on Education provides 
explicitly for private educational institutions; in the ensuing 
years, several organizations for private education have 
appeared, and a variety of private schools and colleges have 
opened. By 1992 about 300 nonstate schools were being 
attended by more than 20,000 students. 

As public schools debated what to do with their new aca- 
demic freedom, private schools and preschools became centers 
of innovation, with programs rediscovering prerevolutionary 
pedagogy and freely borrowing teaching methods from West- 
ern Europe and the United States. Serving largely Western-ori- 
ented families intent on making progress up the newly 
reconstructed social ladder, private schools emphasize learning 
English and other critical skills. Student-to-teacher ratios are 
very low, and teacher salaries average about US$170 per month 
(about three times the average for a public school teacher). 
Tuition may be as much as US$3,000 per year, but some private 
schools charge parents according to their means, surviving 
instead on donations of money and time from wealthy parents. 
Unlike public schools, all private schools must pay for rent, util- 



263 



Russia: A Country Study 

ities, and textbooks, and many have struggled to retain ade- 
quate building space. 

Educational Achievement 

The literacy rate in Russia is nearly 100 percent except in 
some areas dominated by ethnic minorities, where the rate may 
be considerably lower. According to the 1989 census, three- 
fifths of Russia's people aged fifteen and older had completed 
secondary school, and 8 percent had completed higher educa- 
tion. Wide variations in educational attainment exist between 
urban and rural areas. The 1989 census indicated that two- 
thirds of the country's urban population aged fifteen and older 
had finished secondary school, as compared with just under 
one-half of the rural population. Schools can award diplomas 
only in three languages — Russian, Tatar, and Bashkir — a 
requirement that puts many of the country's more than 100 
ethnic groups at a disadvantage. 

Higher Education 

The VUZ category includes all of Russia's postsecondary 
educational institutions; in 1995 these totaled about 500, 
including forty-two universities. The other two types of VUZ are 
the institute and the polytechnic institute. Institutes, the largest 
of the three groups, train students in a specific field such as law, 
economics, art, agriculture, medicine, or technology. The poly- 
technic institutes teach the same range of subjects but without 
specialization in a single area. Most universities teach the arts 
and pure sciences. 

The institute program consists of two phases. After complet- 
ing two years of general studies, a student receives a certificate; 
he or she then may take an entrance examination to continue 
for two more years or terminate the program and seek a job. 
Completion of the next two years results in conferral of a bac- 
calaureate degree. The next level of higher education is spe- 
cialized study based on a research program in the area of 
future professional activity. This phase lasts at least two years, at 
the end of which the individual is designated a specialist in the 
chosen field. The top level of higher education is graduate 
work, which entails a three-year program of study and research 
leading to a degree of candidate (kandidat), then finally to a 
degree of doctor of sciences (doktor nauk) . 

In the post-Soviet era, the system of higher education has 
undergone a more drastic transformation than the primary 



264 



The Society and Its Environment 



and secondary systems. Authority has moved from the center to 
agencies in local and subnational jurisdictions. About 14 per- 
cent of institutions of higher learning are located in the twenty- 
one republics of the federation (see table 13, Appendix). 
Under the new system, each VUZ can determine its own admis- 
sions policy and the content of its academic programs. These 
institutions also have their own financial resources and statutes 
of operation. 

Most of Russia's universities are located in large cities. Mos- 
cow State University, which was founded in 1755 and has about 
28,000 students and 8,000 teachers, enjoys the highest reputa- 
tion. The Russian People's Friendship University in Moscow 
has about 6,500 students and 1,500 teachers, and St. Petersburg 
State University has about 21,000 students and 2,100 teachers. 

The Soviet Union concentrated its vocational training 
resources in areas such as space and military technology. It 
lagged behind the West in technical and vocational training in 
other sectors because of the practice of ending students' prepa- 
ration in these areas at the secondary level. In Russia vocational 
schools traditionally have had a poor image; only in the early 
1990s was comprehensive vocational education introduced for 
postsecondary students. In 1993 some 400 VUZ offered special- 
ized training in specific vocational areas ranging from engi- 
neering and electricity to agricultural specialties. Some 
vocational schools have combined general and vocational cur- 
ricula, with the goal of giving specialists a broader educational 
background. Another trend is the integration of higher techni- 
cal education with on-the-job training by linking educational 
institutions with enterprises and factories. 

In the post-Soviet era, business education has expanded dra- 
matically because the demand for competent managers far out- 
strips the supply. Experts believe that Russia's business 
education programs will play an important role in transform- 
ing social attitudes toward the market economy and capitalism 
and establishing a new economic infrastructure. The primary 
goal of the new programs is to create familiarity with the princi- 
ples of the market economy while casting aside Marxist eco- 
nomic ideology. In the first two years after the Soviet Union 
dissolved, more than 1,000 business schools and training cen- 
ters were established. 

Three types of institution offer business management educa- 
tion: state and private business schools and private consulting 
firms. Many in the last category simply offer high-priced lec- 



265 



Russia: A Country Study 

tures, but some business schools have developed sophisticated 
programs. Examples are the International Business School of 
Moscow State University, the Graduate School of International 
Business of the Academy of the National Economy in Moscow, 
and the International Management Institute in St. Petersburg. 
Several schools offer full master of business administration 
(MBA) degree programs based on Western models. Business 
schools are funded by the state and by private enterprise. Com- 
petent faculty are at a premium in this field; many have been 
trained by Western firms such as IBM. 

Education and Society 

Education plays a crucial role in determining social status in 
Russia. People who leave school after eight years generally can 
find only unskilled jobs. Even those who complete secondary 
education may rise no higher than skilled labor or low-level 
white-collar work. A college or university education is necessary 
for most professional and bureaucratic positions and appears 
to be highly desirable for a position of political power. For 
example, a very high percentage of the members of Russia's 
parliament are university graduates. 

Access to higher education is roughly proportionate to the 
social and financial situation of an individual's family. Children 
whose parents have money and status usually have an advan- 
tage in gaining admission to an institution of higher education. 
The reasons lie not only with the parents' possible influence 
and connections but increasingly with the better quality of pri- 
mary and secondary education that has become available to 
such children, enhancing their ability to pass difficult univer- 
sity entrance examinations. Moreover, such families can afford 
to hire tutors for their children in preparation for the examina- 
tions and can more readily afford to pay university tuition in 
case the children do not receive stipends. 

By the mid-1990s, the new phenomenon of individual com- 
mercial success began influencing the attitude of Russian soci- 
ety toward education and its goals. At the same time, the last 
generation of Soviet-educated Russians was finding itself ill pre- 
pared to deal with a new set of conditions for social and eco- 
nomic survival. In the new order, acquisition of money is much 
more important for both self-respect and practical survival, and 
career prestige by itself is of relatively less worth than it was in 
the Soviet system, where every career label ensured a known 
level of comfort. Significantly, in post-Soviet years, the phrase 



266 



The Society and Its Environment 



delat' den'gi (to make money) has passed into common usage in 
colloquial Russian. Together with the employment insecurity 
felt in the 1990s by well-educated Russians, the new values have 
dampened the educational ambitions of many, particularly 
with regard to higher education. Although most older Russians 
resent those who achieve commercial success in the new "sys- 
tem," the generation now in school shows increasing interest in 
advancement in the private sector of the economy. At the same 
time, polls show that education ranks ninth among the most 
pressing concerns of Russians. 

Health 

Russia has an entrenched, albeit underfunded, system of 
socialized medicine. Basic medical care is available to most of 
the population free of cost, but its quality is extremely low by 
Western standards, and in the mid-1990s the efficiency of the 
system continued the decline that had begun before the col- 
lapse of the Soviet system. In the first four post-Soviet years, 
that decline was typified by significant increases in infant and 
maternal mortality and contagious diseases and by decreases in 
fertility and life expectancy. 

Health Conditions 

The decline in health is attributable in part to such environ- 
mental and social factors as air and water pollution, contamina- 
tion (largely from nuclear accidents or improper disposal of 
radioactive materials), overcrowded living conditions, inade- 
quate nutrition, alcoholism, and smoking, and in part to a lack 
of modern medical equipment and technology. In 1991 life 
expectancy in Russia was 74.3 years for females and 63.5 years 
for males. By 1994 the figure for males was 57.3 years. The 
male-to-female ratio in the population reflects the higher male 
mortality rate and the enduring impact of losing millions more 
males than females in World War II. (In all age-groups below 
thirty-five, there are more males than females.) In 1993 the 
overall ratio was 884 males per 1,000 females, and experts pre- 
dicted that the figure for males would decline to around 875 by 
the year 2005 (see Demographic Conditions, ch. 3). 

By the mid-1990s, Russia's death rate had reached its highest 
peacetime level in the twentieth century. Curable infectious 
diseases such as diphtheria and measles have reached epidemic 
levels unseen since the Bolshevik Revolution, and the rates of 



267 



Russia: A Country Study 

tuberculosis, cancer, and heart disease are the highest of any 
industrialized country. 

In 1993 the incidence of a number of infectious diseases 
increased significantly over the previous year: tuberculosis by 
1.25 times, brucellosis by 1.9 times, diphtheria by 3.9 times, 
and syphilis by 2.6 times (see table 14, Appendix). In 1995 the 
Russian health system was overwhelmed by the return of epi- 
demic diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever, even as it 
faced chronic staff and equipment shortages. In the winter of 
1995-96, Russia suffered its most severe epidemic of influenza 
in decades. An estimated 1 million people were infected in 
Moscow alone, and numerous schools and public institutions 
were closed to prevent the spread of the disease. Experts attrib- 
uted the virulence of the epidemic to the generally low level of 
resistance of much of the Russian population, the result of 
poor overall health care and stressful economic conditions. 
Other causes were the uneven availability of influenza shots 
and the population's general belief that injections enhance 
rather than decrease an individual's chances of becoming ill. 

Between 1980 and 1989, cancer and its complications 
increased from 15 percent to 18 percent among causes of 
death. In 1990 the most common types of cancer were breast 
cancer, cancer of the stomach and liver, and skin cancer. In the 
last years of the Soviet Union, about 680,000 new cases were 
diagnosed annually. The causes of cancer are varied and com- 
plex, but contributing factors in Russia are heavy smoking, 
radiation exposure, and contact with pervasive toxic emissions 
and chemicals in soil, food, and water. According to the deputy 
minister of environmental protection and natural resources, 
about 50 percent of all cancer-related illnesses can be attrib- 
uted to environmental factors. Heavy-manufacturing regions 
show especially high rates; in Noril'sk, the metallurgical center 
located above the Arctic Circle, the incidence of lung cancer 
among males is the highest in the world (see Environmental 
Conditions, ch. 3). 

Russia's birthrate has shown an increasingly steep decline in 
the 1990s, amounting to what one commentator calls "the 
quiet suicide of a nation." For example, the annual birthrate 
for the first six months of 1992 was 11.2 per 1,000 population — 
a 12 percent decline from the same period in the previous year. 
In some areas, the rate was even lower, for instance, 9.2 in St. 
Petersburg and 8.2 in the Moscow region. 



268 



Funeral procession with coffin on flatbed truck, village of Pertominsk 

Courtesy Al Levine 

Russia's Ministry of Health reported in June 1991 that the 
country had a negative rate of population change for the first 
time since records have been kept. The declining number of 
births is attributed in part to a drop in fertility, which presum- 
ably stems from a combination of physiological and environ- 
mental factors, and in part to women's reluctance to bear 
children in a time of economic uncertainty. 

Maternity, Infant Care, and Birth Control 

Some of the same factors shortening the lives of adults cause 
needless premature deaths of newborns in Russia. Poor overall 
health care and lack of medicines, especially in rural areas, 
reduce infants' survival chances. In Russia an estimated 40 to 
50 percent of infant deaths are caused by respiratory failure, 
infectious and parasitic diseases, accidents, injuries, and 



269 



Russia: A Country Study 

trauma. For developed countries, this share ranges between 4 
and 17 percent. 

Infant mortality rates vary considerably by region. Central 
and northern European Russia's rates have been more in line 
with West European rates. In the intermediate category are the 
Urals, western Siberia, and the Volga Basin. The highest rates 
are found in the North Caucasus, eastern Siberia, and the Far 
East. Several autonomous republics, including Kalmykia, 
Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Tyva, consistently record 
the highest rates in the Russian Federation. In these areas, 
social and economic underdevelopment, poor health care, and 
environmental degradation have had an impact on the health 
of mothers and newborns. 

Unwanted pregnancies are common because of the limited 
availability and substandard quality of contraceptives and a 
reluctance to discuss sexual issues openly at home or to provide 
sex education at school. No social stigma is attached to chil- 
dren born out of wedlock, and unmarried mothers receive 
maternity benefits. Medical care for expectant mothers is 
among the least adequate aspects of the country's generally 
substandard system of health care. A high percentage of preg- 
nant women suffer from anemia and poor diets — factors that 
have a negative effect on their babies' birth weight and general 
health. 

In the mid-1990s, modern forms of contraception are 
unavailable or unknown to most Russian women. The Soviet 
Union legalized abortion for medical reasons in 1955 and over- 
all in 1968. But information about Western advances in birth 
control — and all modern means of birth control — was system- 
atically kept from the public throughout the remaining Soviet 
decades. As a result of that policy, today's Russian gynecologists 
lack the training to advise women on contraception, and public 
knowledge of the subject remains incomplete or simply mis- 
taken. Even in Moscow in the mid-1990s, most contraceptives 
were paid for by voluntary funds and international charities. In 
the early 1990s, an estimated 22 percent of women of child- 
bearing age were using contraceptives; the percentage was 
much lower in rural areas. 

Abortion remains the most widely practiced form of birth 
control in Russia. In 1995 some 225 abortions were performed 
for every 100 live births, up from a rate of 196 per 100 in 1991. 
According to one study, 14 percent of the women in Russia with 
sixteen or more years of school had undergone eight to ten 



270 



The Society and Its Environment 



abortions. The conditions under which abortions are per- 
formed often are primitive. Moreover, it is estimated that 
nearly three-quarters of abortions take place after the first tri- 
mester of pregnancy, involving substantially greater maternal 
risk than those performed earlier. The number of abortions is 
much higher among Russian women than among Muslims and 
other minority groups, however. Statistically, the higher her 
social status and the extent of her Russification, the more likely 
a Muslim woman is to seek an abortion. 

Infant and child health in Russia is significantly worse than 
in other industrialized countries. According to official statistics, 
only one child in five is born healthy. The inability of more 
than half of all new mothers to breast-feed, mainly because of 
poor diet, further undermines infants' health in a country 
where diets generally are unbalanced. Another problem is that 
most women of childbearing age are employed and thus must 
place their young children in day care centers, where they 
often contract contagious diseases. Illnesses such as cholera, 
typhoid fever, diphtheria, pertussis, and poliomyelitis, which 
have been virtually eradicated in other advanced industrial 
societies, are widespread among Russia's children. Vaccines are 
scarce. Even when immunizations are available, parents often 
refuse them for their children because they fear infection from 
dirty needles. 

Alcohol, Narcotics, and Tobacco 

Russia's rate of alcohol consumption, traditionally among 
the highest in the world and rising significantly in the 1990s, is 
a major contributor to the country's health crisis, as well as to 
low job productivity. Rated as Russia's third most critical health 
problem after cardiovascular diseases and cancer, alcoholism 
has reached epidemic proportions, particularly among males. 
In the twentieth century, periodic government campaigns 
against alcohol consumption have resulted in thousands of 
deaths from the consumption of alcohol surrogates. The latest 
such campaign was undertaken from 1985 to 1988, during the 
regime of Mikhail S. Gorbachev (in office 1985-91). Although 
some authorities credited reduced alcohol consumption with a 
concurrent drop in Russia's mortality rate, by 1987 the produc- 
tion of samogon (home-brewed liquor) had become a large- 
scale industry that provided alcohol to Russians while depriv- 
ing the state of tax revenue. When restrictions were eased in 
1988, alcohol consumption exceeded the pre-1985 level. 



271 



Russia: A Country Study 

According to one study, between 1987 and 1992 annual per 
capita consumption rose from about eleven liters of pure alco- 
hol to fourteen liters in 1992; current consumption is esti- 
mated at about fifteen liters. (According to World Health 
Organization standards, consumption of eight liters per year is 
likely to cause major medical problems.) 

A 1995 Russian study found that regular drunkenness 
affected between 25 and 60 percent of blue-collar workers and 
21 percent of white-collar workers, with the highest incidence 
found in rural areas. Because alcohol remains cheap relative to 
food and other items, and because it is available in most places 
day and night, unemployed people are especially prone to 
drunkenness and alcohol poisoning. In 1994 some 53,000 peo- 
ple died of alcohol poisoning, an increase of about 36,000 
since 1991. If vodka is unavailable or unaffordable, Russians 
sometimes imbibe various combinations of dangerous sub- 
stances. The Russian media often report poisonings that result 
from consumption of homemade alcohol substitutes. Produc- 
tion of often-substandard alcohol has become a widespread 
criminal activity in the 1990s, further endangering consumers. 
Alcohol consumption among pregnant women is partly respon- 
sible for Russia's rise in infant mortality, birth defects, and 
childhood disease and abnormalities. 

Smoking, a widespread habit, especially among women and 
teenagers, compounds Russia's health crisis. Chain-smoking is 
endemic in Russia; in 1996 an estimated 55 percent of Russians 
were regular smokers, and health authorities believed that the 
figure was rising. However, rather than urge patients to quit, 
doctors often recommend the purchase of American ciga- 
rettes, which are more expensive but have less tar and nicotine 
than Russian brands. When import restrictions ended in the 
early 1990s, the American cigarette industry found a large new 
market in Russia. A modest government antismoking campaign 
paralleling Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign in the late 1980s 
had little effect. In January 1996, cigarette advertising in the 
print media was prohibited, and smoking in theaters and work- 
places generally was restricted to designated locations. 

The increasing incidence of drug abuse was belatedly 
acknowledged by the Russian government as a public health 
problem. In 1995 an estimated 2 million Russians used narcot- 
ics, more than twenty times the total recorded ten years earlier 
in the entire Soviet Union, with the number of users increasing 
50 percent every year in the mid-1990s. In the Soviet era, drugs 



272 



The Society and Its Environment 



were viewed officially as a capitalist vice, but that attitude disap- 
peared soon after the Soviet Union dissolved. Russia legalized 
drug use (but not possession or sale) in 1991. According to 
experts, laws against possession are not dissuasive. Narcotics 
use has spread to new elements of society in recent years, 
including alcoholics seeking a new means of escape. Russian 
experts rate the new class of Russian businesspeople as the 
group with the highest percentage of drug users; for them, suc- 
cess often includes the ability to purchase the most expensive 
narcotic. The drug scene, once dominated by students and 
intellectuals, now includes large numbers of housewives and 
workers. Synthetic drugs now are manufactured in small labo- 
ratories by professional chemists; some are easily fabricated by 
amateurs as well. Legally produced drugs often are stolen and 
move into the black market (see The Crime Wave of the 1990s, 
ch. 10). 

Medical treatment and educational programs now include 
hot lines in major cities and walk-in clinics that provide advice 
and treatment on an anonymous basis. Some schoolteachers 
have begun class discussions of drug-related issues and have 
distributed antidrug literature to students. Nevertheless, Rus- 
sia's drug problem remains largely intractable. Many addicts 
overdose, and some who cannot afford heroin inject them- 
selves with other substances that cause illness or death. 

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome 

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) likely was 
brought to the Soviet Union by students from countries with 
high levels of incidence of the disease. In 1987, after the first 
case of AIDS was confirmed in Russia, the Supreme Soviet of 
the Soviet Union passed the strictest anti-AIDS law in the 
world, making the knowing transmittal of the infection a crimi- 
nal offense punishable by up to eight years in jail. A 1995 law, 
which has been criticized vehemently for its human rights 
implications and the cost of its administration, stipulates that 
all visitors remaining more than three months must prove that 
they are not infected with the AIDS-causing human immunode- 
ficiency virus (HIV). 

The government has established a diagnostic and screening 
infrastructure for AIDS prevention and control at the central 
and subnational levels. This system has been criticized heavily, 
however, because it tests only populations with little chance of 
infection, and because it fails to allocate scarce funds to root 



273 



Russia: A Country Study 

causes of AIDS transmittal such as infection from hospital pro- 
cedures and reuse of hypodermic needles. The release of statis- 
tics on the incidence of AIDS and other sexually transmitted 
diseases has been extremely slow. In late 1995, the Ministry of 
Health reported that 1,023 Russians, including 278 children, 
had been registered as having HIV, and that to that point 160 
Russians, of whom seventy-three were children, had died of 
AIDS. Before 1992 several mass infections of children occurred 
in medical facilities. 

Official diagnoses of HIV increased 50 percent from 1993 to 
1994. However, according to an official of the Imena AIDS sup- 
port group, which is devoted to rehabilitation of HIV victims, 
the official statistics are understated at least tenfold because 
Russians in the groups most at risk — prostitutes, homosexuals, 
and drug users — have reason to fear that results will not 
remain confidential and so refuse AIDS testing. Although the 
1990 Law on Prevention of AIDS mandates confidentiality of 
medical records, in practice jobs often are lost and social ser- 
vices denied after a positive diagnosis. The highest incidence of 
HIV is in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Rostov-na-Donu, Volgograd, 
and the Republic of Kalmykia, the last three of which have 
medical facilities where unsanitary procedures have resulted in 
mass transmission of the virus. The majority of reported HIV- 
positive individuals are drug users. 

As in the Soviet period, the public receives little information 
about precautions against AIDS or the identity of the high-risk 
categories in society, and AIDS sufferers meet much intoler- 
ance in Russian society. Because the disease has been associ- 
ated with foreigners, government officials and the public have 
ignored the need for preventive measures among Russians. 
AIDS transmittal is increased by a chronic shortage of condoms 
(which Soviet medical officials euphemistically called "Article 
Number 2") and by the lack of disposable hypodermic syringes 
in hospitals and clinics, which results in the repeated use of 
unsterilized needles. 

The Health System 

The glasnost period of the late 1980s first revealed the decay 
of the Soviet system of socialized medicine, which nominally 
guaranteed full health protection to all citizens without charge. 
That system had been installed under Joseph V. Stalin (in 
office 1927-53) with an emphasis on preserving a healthy work 
force as a matter of national economic policy. In the 1980s, 



274 



Child undergoing an EKG at 
children's hospital, Khabarovsk 
Courtesy Barry Peril 



Hospital staff members talking 
in hospital hallway, Novgorod 
Courtesy Judy Kramer 




275 



Russia: A Country Study 

Russia had a huge network of neighborhood and work-site clin- 
ics and first-aid facilities to provide readily accessible primary 
care, together with large hospitals and polyclinics to diagnose 
and treat more complex illnesses and to perform surgery. In 
1986 the Soviet Union had 23,500 hospitals with more than 3.6 
million beds. Such facilities included about 28,000 women's 
consultation centers and pediatric clinics, together with emer- 
gency ambulance services and sanatoriums. 

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was first in the world in the 
ratio of hospital beds to population. Behind this system was a 
huge, multilevel bureaucracy directed from Moscow in consul- 
tation with organs of the CPSU. All aspects of health service 
had nationwide annual programs with complex statistical 
accounting and goals. Physicians devoted an estimated 50 per- 
cent of their time to filling out forms, and every year a large 
part of the national health care budget went to construction of 
new facilities. 

The structure of the Soviet system, which specified the 
length of treatment for every disease, often caused people suf- 
fering from relatively minor ailments such as influenza to be 
hospitalized. The result was a serious overcrowding problem in 
hospitals despite the large number of beds available. Patients 
preferred hospital treatment because hospitals were better 
equipped than clinics and because crowded living conditions 
made recuperation at home difficult. Many large enterprises 
operated clinics that provided workers health care without 
requiring them to leave the work site. Such clinics aimed at 
reducing the incidence of sick leave, which averaged 3 percent 
of the workforce per day in the 1980s. 

The most outdated and abuse-ridden aspect of Soviet health 
care was psychiatric treatment. That system never advanced 
from the methodology of the 1950s, which included Pavlovian 
conditioned-response treatment, heavy reliance on drug ther- 
apy, and little practice of individual or group counseling. 
Therefore, most citizens preferred to suffer rather than submit 
themselves to treatment. In addition, Soviet psychiatry was at 
the service of the government to declare dissenters "insane," 
commit them to psychiatric hospital-prisons, and administer 
powerful psychotropic drugs. In the mid-1980s, estimates of 
the number of political prisoners in such institutions ranged 
from 1,000 to several thousand, and in 1983 the Soviet Union 
withdrew from the World Psychiatric Association to avoid cen- 
sure for its abuses of the profession. In 1988 the special psychi- 



276 



The Society and Its Environment 



atric hospitals to which political dissidents had been 
committed were transferred from the jurisdiction of the Minis- 
try of Internal Affairs to that of the Ministry of Health. 

In 1986 the Soviet Union had about 1.2 million doctors and 
about 3.2 million paramedical and nursing personnel. Medical 
training emphasized practical work over basic research and 
pure science; only nine medical institutes were attached to uni- 
versities. In the late 1980s, the average doctor's salary was 
roughly comparable to that of the average industrial worker. In 
1996 the average Moscow specialist made about US$75 per 
month, and senior doctors made about US$150 per month. 
Paramedics and nurses needed only two years of training and 
no scientific background; however, in rural areas, which suf- 
fered a shortage of doctors, such individuals often were the 
only medical personnel available. 

Despite the nominally equitable nature of Soviet socialized 
medicine, the actual system was highly stratified according to 
location, with far inferior care and facilities available in rural 
areas, and especially according to political status. The Ministry 
of Health maintained a completely separate, vastly superior sys- 
tem of clinics, hospitals, and sanatoriums for top party and gov- 
ernment officials and other elite groups such as writers, actors, 
musicians, and artists. 

The outline of the Soviet system did not change appreciably 
in the first half of the 1990s, but quality declined in nearly 
every aspect except the facilities designated for the elite. In 
1992 Russia had 662,700 doctors, a drop of about 32,000 since 
1990, and 131 hospital beds per 10,000 population, a drop of 
97,000 beds (about 5 percent) since 1990. Among the doctors, 
78,600 were surgeons, 77,600 pediatricians, 39,600 gynecolo- 
gists, 20,300 psychiatrists, and 18,500 neurologists. 

In the early 1990s, the public health delivery system in Rus- 
sia was in crisis. Although the number of doctors and paramed- 
ics has remained sufficiently high to ensure the provision of 
adequate treatment, most such personnel are poorly trained, 
lack modern equipment, and are badly paid. In 1995 Russia 
had one doctor for every 275 citizens (compared with one for 
every 450 in the United States), but about half of medical 
school graduates cannot diagnose simple ailments or read an 
electrocardiogram when they enter practice. In 1993 about 
forty institutions offered medical training, but the quality of 
training varied considerably. Many medical schools suffer from 



277 



Russia: A Country Study 

shortages of instructors, textbooks, current medical journals, 
contacts with Western experts, and equipment. 

Low salaries have made corruption common among medical 
personnel, who often extract bribes for both materials and ser- 
vices. Thus, although health care is free in principle, the 
chances of receiving adequate treatment may depend on the 
patient's wealth. The combination of bribes and authorized 
charges puts many types of medical treatment beyond the 
reach of all but the wealthy. Elderly people are hit especially 
hard by this situation. Meanwhile, a sharp decline in state fund- 
ing has affected all aspects of medical care, from prevention to 
emergency treatment. Between 1990 and 1994, state funding 
declined from 3.4 percent of the national budget to 1.8 per- 
cent. 

Although Russia pioneered in some specialized fields of 
medicine such as laser eye surgery and heart surgery, the coun- 
try's medical establishment is generally deficient in hospital 
equipment, technology, and pharmaceuticals. For example, 
preventable infant deaths result from an absence of fetal heart 
monitors, ultrasound units, and various other equipment for 
monitoring labor and delivery; needless deaths from heart dis- 
ease occur because hospitals lack the equipment needed to 
perform bypass surgery and angioplasty. 

Facilities for the disabled, of whom about 6 million reside in 
Russia, also fall far below Western standards. Wheelchairs and 
artificial limbs are in very short supply, rehabilitation centers 
are few, and wheelchair ramps are virtually nonexistent. A 1995 
law, On the Social Protection of Disabled Persons in the Rus- 
sian Federation, provides for a wide range of benefits and ser- 
vices, including equal access to education, employment, 
transportation, and services. The law requires businesses to set 
aside at least 3 percent of their jobs for the disabled. However, 
no funding was available for any of the law's programs in 1996. 

The shortage of medicines in Russia is chronic and cata- 
strophic. Soviet-era supplies of materials and drugs have been 
depleted and are not being adequately replenished. Domestic 
production has plummeted because of the obsolescence of 
pharmaceutical factories and shortages of requisite raw materi- 
als and supplies. Many of the items produced are ineffective. 
Russia relies increasingly on imports from former Soviet-bloc 
nations in Central Europe, which formerly accepted barter 
transactions and payment in rubles but now demand hard cur- 
rency (see Glossary), a scarce item in Russia, for their products. 



278 



The Society and Its Environment 



The nonconvertibility of the ruble also has hindered Russia's 
ability to purchase medicines abroad. Even when pharmaceuti- 
cals are available in Russia, they often are priced beyond the 
reach of doctors and patients. 

Russia's hospitals and polyclinics are generally old (about 15 
percent were built before 1940), and they lack basic amenities. 
Roughly 42 percent of the country's hospitals and 30 percent 
of its clinics lack hot water, and 12 percent and 7 percent, 
respectively, have no running water at all. About 18 percent of 
hospitals and 15 percent of clinics are not connected to a sew- 
erage system, and only 12 percent in both categories have cen- 
tral heating. Even in the best hospitals, medical personnel do 
not regularly wash their hands, surgical instruments are not 
always properly sterilized, and rates of infection are abnormally 
high. 

Aside from shortfalls in Russia's health facilities and the 
quality of medical personnel, much of the country's public 
health crisis stems from poor personal hygiene and diet and 
lack of exercise. Preventive medicine and wellness programs 
are virtually nonexistent, as are programs to educate the public 
about personal sanitation, proper diet, and vitamins. The aver- 
age Russian does not consume a balanced diet. Vegetables 
often are scarce in Russia, except in rural areas where they are 
homegrown, and fruits never have constituted an important 
element of the Russian diet. Per capita meat consumption also 
has fallen in the 1990s (see table 6, Appendix). 

Russia's government is attempting to equalize the distribu- 
tion of health care by fragmenting the Soviet-era network of 
top-level medical facilities for exclusive use of the elite. In the 
spring of 1993, President Yeltsin signed a decree entitled On 
Immediate Measures to Provide Health Care for the People of 
the Russian Federation. The proclaimed goal, which already 
had been established in the 1980s, was the creation by 2000 of a 
"unified system of health care" for the entire population. How- 
ever, economic constraints are likely to stymie achievement of 
that goal in the near future. In 1995 less than 1 percent of Rus- 
sia's budget was earmarked for public health, compared with 6 
percent in Britain and more than 12 percent in the United 
States. Experts forecast that such a meager outlay will not 
address the major shortfalls in Russia's health care system, not 
to mention the air, water, and soil pollution that continue to 
contribute insidiously to worsening public health. 



279 



Russia: A Country Study 

The impersonality and inaccessibility of national health sys- 
tem facilities, with patients often standing in line at clinics for 
an entire day before receiving brief diagnoses and prescrip- 
tions for drugs they cannot afford, has encouraged many Rus- 
sians to turn to unorthodox alternatives such as faith healing, 
herbal medicine, and mysticism. By the mid-1990s, private 
medical clinics were serving a growing number of Russians able 
to afford their care. 

In the Soviet era, the state discouraged alternative medicine 
by arresting practitioners. By 1995, however, the number of 
such individuals was estimated at 300,000, and as many as 80 
percent of Russians needing medical assistance have turned to 
them, according to a Yeltsin adviser on social policy. Tradi- 
tional folk healers constitute the largest group of nontradi- 
tional practitioners. They offer personalized attention and 
affordable cures such as birch bark and cranberries to cure a 
variety of complaints. Russians with access to a plot of land 
often grow their own herbs, and books describing home cures 
have become popular. Long-practiced cures such as wrapping 
oneself in a vinegar-soaked blanket and drinking one's own 
urine have become more widespread in the 1990s. 

Housing 

Always in short supply in the Soviet era, housing continues 
to be at a premium in the 1990s. However, the old, state-con- 
trolled system has begun giving way to private enterprise and a 
rudimentary housing market. Despite severe inequalities in 
housing opportunity and daunting financial disadvantages, 
many Russians have been able to establish private homes that 
would have been beyond their reach under the Soviet system. 
Nevertheless, in 1996 housing subsidies remained a significant 
drain on the national budget as the state continued the 
attempt to protect citizens from the inequities of a nascent 
housing market. 

The Soviet Era 

In the Soviet era, all land and most buildings belonged to 
the state; in rural areas, private home ownership was permit- 
ted, but the law limited such houses to a floor space of forty 
square meters. The occupants of state-owned housing enjoyed 
the rights to lifetime occupancy and to bequeath their housing 
units to the next generation, as well as virtually complete pro- 



280 



The Society and Its Environment 



tection against eviction. Rental rates remained at the same 
extremely low, universal level — 0.132 ruble per square meter — 
from 1927 until 1992. Maintenance of existing buildings and 
construction of new housing were both financed from other 
parts of the state budget; only 3 percent of funds used for these 
purposes came from residents. State enterprises covered a sig- 
nificant share of housing expenses as part of their employees' 
benefits. The design and construction of new housing had no 
relation to aesthetics or even to cost; in cities the State Con- 
struction Committee (Gosstroy) simply erected monolithic 
high-rise buildings containing a given number of housing 
units, following the dictates of the five-year plan for that local- 
ity. In 1990 nearly 100 percent of the housing stock in Moscow 
and St. Petersburg was publicly owned, and more than one- 
quarter of Russia's total housing stock had been built before 
1917. 

As in other aspects of daily Soviet life, the elite were allotted 
the best and most spacious housing, and influential friends 
helped them avoid long waiting lists that sometimes lasted 
more than ten years for ordinary Russians. The average urban 
Russian family either occupied a very small single apartment or 
shared an apartment with one or more other families, with 
joint access to the bathroom and the kitchen. According to a 
1980 Soviet estimate, 20 percent of urban families (and 53 per- 
cent in Leningrad) shared apartments; that percentage had 
dropped slightly by the end of the Soviet era. Young, unmar- 
ried Russians often found housing only in crowded hostels 
operated by their employer; young married couples frequently 
lived with one set of parents until they could locate an apart- 
ment. Housing in rural areas was more spacious, but it usually 
had few amenities — the traditional wooden farmhouse con- 
tained two rooms divided by a raised corridor, with living space 
for people on one side and for animals on the other. In 1990 
the average floor area per person in Moscow was 17.8 square 
meters, and in Russia as a whole it was 16.4 square meters, com- 
pared with averages in Western countries of between thirty and 
forty-five square meters per person. 

Post-Soviet Conditions 

The economic reforms of the post-Soviet era brought drastic 
and problematic changes in the Russian housing system. In the 
first years of that period, state support for new construction 
dwindled dramatically, making enterprises a more important 



281 



Russia: A Country Study 

source of financing in the absence of large-scale private invest- 
ment. Privatization of existing housing increased substantially 
in the mid-1990s, and more types of dwelling became eligible 
for privatization. The rate of new construction did not keep 
pace with demand, so waiting lists continued to exist, and the 
beginning of landownership law reform encouraged construc- 
tion of fully private housing by Russians who could afford it. 
However, in mid-1996 the average Russian still spent less than 3 
percent of his or her budget on rent because a large share of 
Soviet-era state housing subsidies remained in place. 

The establishment of a full market system in housing was 
complicated by several factors. First, the notion of private own- 
ership of land and housing was diametrically opposed to the 
concepts at the base of Soviet society, so the advantages of 
privatization were not immediately understood — especially as 
low-rent state housing continued to exist alongside expensive 
private property. Second, high inflation priced most Russians 
out of the housing market, especially as the inflation-adjusted 
incomes of most social groups declined. Third, continuing 
monopolies in construction materials, finance, and urbanized 
land kept construction costs very high; the first steps toward 
privatization were taken in the building industry only in 1993. 
Finally, a relatively high percentage of existing housing stock 
remained in the public sector, which promised to remain a sig- 
nificant housing owner through the near future. 

After a relatively slow beginning in 1992, privatization of 
housing stock increased dramatically. The Soviet privatization 
law of 1989 began the process, which was continued in Russia 
by the 1991 Law on Privatization of Housing. But the newness 
of the laws, the lack of administrative procedures, and the con- 
tinuing attractiveness of low rents in state-owned housing lim- 
ited the total number of units privatized in 1991 to about 
122,000 units, or 0.3 percent of urban housing stock in the Rus- 
sian Republic. By the end of 1993, more than 40 percent of 
urban housing stock (about 8.6 million units) in Russia had 
been privatized, and the total was between 55 and 60 percent 
one year later. Often the privatization process involved renters 
buying the apartments in which they were living. An important 
step in this process was a 1992 constitutional amendment that 
allowed free distribution of housing, broadened the categories 
of housing that could be privatized, and simplified privatiza- 
tion procedures. In the mid-1990s, the growing problem of 
how to house military families formerly domiciled outside Rus- 



282 



The Society and Its Environment 



sia caused the Ministry of Defense and agencies dependent 
upon it to withhold their housing stock from privatization; in 

1993 defense budgets financed 15 percent of Russia's total 
housing investment. 

Availability of new private housing improved somewhat by 
the mid-1990s, after a sharp decline in the first post-Soviet 
years. In 1993 the output of new housing was 57 percent of the 
peak Soviet-era output reached in 1987, and in the early 1990s 
the ratio of unfinished projects to usable housing output was 
more than three to one (compared with 84 percent in 1988) 
because incentives promoted new starts rather than comple- 
tions. Between 1986 and 1992, the number of names on hous- 
ing waiting lists increased from about 8 million to some 10 
million, mainly because in that period Russians began to 
change jobs and places of residence more frequently and 
because family units became smaller. In 1993 more than 21 per- 
cent of urban households were on waiting lists for housing. 
The waiting lists began to shrink in 1993, and by the end of 

1994 about 9.1 million Russian households (including single- 
person households) were registered for housing. Inflation also 
played a major role in housing availability; in 1994 the price of 
a typical Moscow apartment of fifty-five square meters 
increased by five times over the 1993 average. A housing allow- 
ance program has been established to bridge the gap between 
rental costs and family incomes. 

Because they felt the direct pressure of longer waiting lists 
and the support costs associated with the movement of people 
into their jurisdictions, local housing authorities lobbied 
against abolition of the internal passport (propiska; see Glos- 
sary) system that had restrained internal migration in the 
Soviet period. In 1993 the system was officially abolished in all 
jurisdictions except Moscow and St. Petersburg (see Social Wel- 
fare, this ch.). 

Housing maintenance has been problematic in the post- 
Soviet era because local housing authorities, to whom full 
maintenance responsibility was shifted in 1991, have reallo- 
cated funds from maintenance to more pressing needs. Mean- 
while, individual attitudes toward routine maintenance have 
been slow to compensate for this shift. In Soviet-era collective 
living quarters such as urban high-rise apartment buildings, 
which housed as many as 1,000 people, housing managers were 
expected to uphold minimum standards of cleanliness and ser- 
vice. In the 1990s, those complexes still house people from all 



283 



Russia: A Country Study 

economic levels (a survival of Stalin-era policy), but, given the 
newly fragmented condition of Russian society and economic 
distractions facing tenants, initiatives by residents often give 
way to disregard for voluntary maintenance of common prop- 
erty. Housing officials demand bribes for routine services, and 
housing complexes have become increasingly shabby. In some 
cases, the suspicion and anonymity of the Soviet era have been 
reinforced among people of disparate backgrounds forced to 
live in a more cramped environment than in Soviet times. How- 
ever, in some apartment buildings condominium associations 
have been formed to advance the common welfare of families 
in a building or neighborhood. 

Land Reform and Private Enterprise 

Experts consider reform of landownership and condomin- 
ium laws an important step toward full privatization of housing. 
Privatization of land, both urban and agricultural, has been a 
controversial issue for Russian legislators; there is a strong body 
of opinion that land is fundamentally public property that can- 
not belong to any single person. In the late Soviet period, new 
landownership laws confused rather than simplified the legal 
status of various types of land. Consequently, housing privatiza- 
tion has been hindered because ownership of a residence may 
not include ownership of the land on which it stands — a dispar- 
ity rare in Western property law. Legislation passed in August 
1993 legalized the sale of land, allowed villages to give away 
plots of land to individuals, and removed the space limitation 
on private homes on collective farms. Although dwellings built 
on suburban garden plots technically still could be no bigger 
than a summer cottage, such land increasingly was used to 
build year-round housing, thus expanding the number of avail- 
able residences in Moscow and other cities. 

In general, Moscow was the center of land-use innovation 
because it was the center of new commercial activity and for- 
eign influence. The constitution of 1993 recognized for the 
first time the right to private ownership of land, a departure 
that experts believed would have a major impact on overall real 
estate ownership. In late 1993, a presidential decree estab- 
lished Russia's first set of provisional condominium regula- 
tions, which were considered an important clarification of 
housing ownership policy. But additional legislation, drafted by 
the Yeltsin administration to expedite landownership, was 
blocked in the State Duma in 1996. 



284 



The Society and Its Environment 



Especially in Moscow, the emergence of Western-style enter- 
prises associated with housing construction, such as finance 
companies, real estate offices, plumbing suppliers, and lumber- 
yards, heralds more growth. The rapidly rising cost of existing 
apartments has fueled a brisk property business, as speculators 
buy privatized property in the hope that prices will continue to 
rise. In the mid-1990s, private houses began to appear rapidly 
just outside the ring of Soviet-era high-rises that surrounds 
Moscow. According to a 1995 report, prices for private land 
and housing in Moscow ranged from US$900 for an unim- 
proved small plot to US$300,000 for a four-bedroom villa in a 
compound with security guards. As of mid-1996, mortgage 
loans were not yet offered by the Russian banking system, so 
buyers had to pay cash. Many Russians build their own dwell- 
ings, bribing city officials and contractors when necessary and 
collecting materials wherever possible. The demand for materi- 
als has prompted the emergence of numerous building supply 
stores and a parallel rise in the price of materials. Thus, 
although many Russians remain on waiting lists for existing 
housing, others have begun what they hope will be a Western- 
style progression from a first modest dwelling to something 
larger. The same divergence has appeared in housing as in 
other aspects of socioeconomic activity: individuals with finan- 
cial resources or unusual initiative have taken advantage of the 
new opportunities of the 1990s. Those not so fortunate remain 
dependent on state housing subsidies. 

Social Welfare 

As Russia makes the transition from a command economy to 
a partial free-market system, the provision of an effective social 
safety net for its citizens assumes increasing urgency. A 1994 
World Bank report described the current social-protection sys- 
tem as inappropriate for the market-oriented economy toward 
which Russia supposedly was striving. Among the major short- 
comings noted in the report were the continued major role 
played by enterprises as suppliers of welfare services, as they 
had been in the Soviet period; the absence of any coverage for 
large groups of people and the inadequate level of benefits in 
some regions; a growing disparity between a shrinking wage 
base and the demands placed on the system; and the failure to 
target the neediest recipients. As the economic transition of 
the 1990s forces more of Russia's citizens into poverty, the state 



285 



Russia: A Country Study 

has tried to maintain the comprehensive Soviet system with 
severely constrained resources. 

The system's inefficiency is exacerbated by its fragmentation. 
As in the Soviet period, allowances and benefits are adminis- 
tered and financed by diverse agencies, including four 
extrabudgetary funds, several ministries, and the lower levels of 
government. The Ministry of Social Protection is the primary 
federal agency handling welfare programs. However, that min- 
istry focuses almost exclusively on the needs of people who are 
retired or disabled; other vulnerable groups receive much less 
attention. The four extrabudgetary funds that provide cash 
and in-kind social welfare benefits at the federal level are the 
Social Insurance Fund, the Pension Fund, the Employment 
Fund, and the Fund for Social Support. 

Social security and welfare programs provide modest sup- 
port for the most vulnerable segments of Russia's population: 
elderly pensioners, veterans, infants and children, expectant 
mothers, families with more than one child, invalids, and peo- 
ple with disabilities. These programs are inadequate, however, 
and a growing proportion of Russia's population lives on the 
threshold of poverty. Inflation has a particularly deleterious 
effect on households that rely on social subsidies. Women tradi- 
tionally have outnumbered men in such households. 

The Fund for Social Support supplements a variety of in- 
kind social assistance programs in Russia. It is financed 
through the Ministry of Social Protection and supplements 
social welfare programs at the subnational level. The federal 
government has transferred most responsibility for social wel- 
fare, health, and education programs to subnational organs 
but has failed to ensure their access to adequate revenue. The 
total allocation of transfers from the federal budget to localities 
amounted to less than 2 percent of Russia's gross domestic 
product (GDP — see Glossary) in 1992. Thus, the quantity and 
quality of social services at the local level — including the provi- 
sion of food vouchers and cash payments to cover specific 
items such as heating bills — are far from certain as time passes. 
Under these conditions, local jurisdictions have come to rely 
increasingly on extrabudgetary sources, the instability of which 
makes long-term planning difficult. 

Pensions 

Pensions are the largest expenditure of the social safety pro- 
gram. The Pension Fund accounts for 83 percent of Russia's 



286 



The Society and Its Environment 



extrabudgetary allocations. At the end of 1994, about 36 mil- 
lion citizens, or 24 percent of the country's population, were 
receiving pensions, an increase of about 5 percent in the first 
three post-Soviet years. Two broad categories of pensions are 
paid in Russia: labor pensions, which are disbursed on the basis 
of a worker's payroll contributions, and social pensions, which 
are paid to individuals who have worked for less than the five 
years needed to qualify for a labor pension. All Russian citizens 
who have worked for twenty years are entitled to at least a mini- 
mum pension. In 1994 about 75 percent of all pensioners 
received labor pensions. The Pension Fund also finances some 
child allowances and other entitlements. 

The Pension Fund is administered by the Ministry of Social 
Protection and financed by a 29 percent payroll tax and by 
transfers from the state budget. Between 1991 and 1993, the 
real income of pensioners was cut in half as prices rose rapidly 
and pension indexation failed to keep pace. Inflation also 
severely eroded the value of the life savings of retirees, and a 
disproportionate number of pensioners were victimized by 
financial scams. A 1994 law requires quarterly indexation of 
pensions, but the law was not observed consistently in its first 
year, and in mid-1995 the average pension fell below the subsis- 
tence minimum for pensioners. Beginning in 1994, the govern- 
ment's failure to pay pensions on time led to large rallies in 
several cities. In August 1994, an estimated 10 million pension- 
ers did not receive their checks on time, and pension arrears 
mounted in the two years that followed. By mid-1996 the pay- 
ment backlog was estimated at US$3 billion. The present sys- 
tem includes an important provision that has kept many 
pensioners above the poverty line: it allows workers to draw 
pensions while continuing to work. In 1995 as many as 27 per- 
cent of Russian pensioners continued to work after retiring 
from their primary job. 

Russian and Western experts agree that the pension system 
requires comprehensive reform — although its rate of payment 
compliance by enterprises is substantially better than that of 
the State Taxation Service. The most pressing needs are an 
effective system of indexation of pensions to purchasing power, 
an insurance mechanism, individualized contributions, higher 
retirement ages, and the closing of loopholes that allow early 
retirement. In 1995 the Ministry of Social Protection began 
work on a reform that would establish a three-tier pension sys- 
tem including a basic pension, a work-related pension in pro- 



287 



Russia: A Country Study 

portion to years of service, and an optional private pension 
program. In 1995 Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin admit- 
ted that the state budget lacked the money to continue index- 
ing pensions according to living costs. In November 1995, a 
decree by President Yeltsin, On Additional Measures to 
Strengthen Payments Discipline for Settling Accounts with the 
Pension Fund, set stricter reporting standards for payments to 
the fund by organizations and citizens, in an effort to preclude 
nonpayment. In the midst of his campaign to be reelected pres- 
ident, Yeltsin then approved two laws increasing minimum pen- 
sion levels in three stages, by 5, 10, and 15 percent, between 
November 1995 and January 1996. 

Women are entitled to retire when they reach age fifty-five, 
and men when they reach age sixty. Nevertheless, financial 
hardship leads many women to remain in the labor force past 
retirement age, even while continuing to receive pensions, in 
order to prevent a drop in their families' standard of living. In 
1991 women constituted an estimated 72 percent of pension- 
ers. The disproportion between the genders stems from 
women's earlier permissible retirement age and their greater 
longevity. Aside from pensions, women receive other retire- 
ment privileges. Mothers of five or more children are entitled 
to a pension at age fifty. "Mother Heroines" — women with ten 
or more children — receive an allowance equal in sum to the 
pension, and the time they spent on child care leave counts 
toward the minimum twenty years of work required for labor 
pensions. For these reasons, many women retire before age 
fifty-five, while most men wait until they reach sixty-two. (Many 
job categories routinely allow retirement for both sexes before 
the standard ages.) 

Worker Protection and Benefits 

Legislation has established numerous protective devices at 
the enterprise level to provide a social safety net that is particu- 
larly attuned to the needs of women of childbearing age. Thus, 
family policy and employment policy are inextricably linked. In 
addition to basic allowances for all workers, special allowances 
exist for children of military personnel, children with unmar- 
ried, divorced, or widowed mothers, and children who are dis- 
abled. Women who have an employment contract are entitled 
to paid maternity leave from seventy days prior to giving birth 
until seventy days afterward. Maternity leave benefits are based 



288 



The Society and Its Environment 



on the minimum wage rather than on a woman's current wage, 
however. 

Russia also provides a maternity grant, which is a onetime 
payment totaling three times the minimum wage or 45 percent 
of the minimum wage in the case of mothers who have worked 
less than one year. In order to receive a maternity allowance 
(or sickness benefits), a woman must have an employment con- 
tract. The maternity allowance amounts to 100 percent of the 
mother's salary, regardless of her length of employment. 

Maternity allowances in Russia are followed by a monthly 
child allowance of 80 percent of the minimum wage in the case 
of children up to eighteen months old. This allowance may be 
supplemented by a child-care allowance, set at 35 percent of 
the minimum wage, to compensate for earnings lost in the 
course of caring for children in this age bracket. The latter 
allowance is paid to mothers over the age of eighteen who have 
been in the labor force at least one year. An additional com- 
pensatory child-care allowance, equivalent to 35 percent of the 
minimum wage, is available to mothers or other caretakers of 
children under the age of three. 

Russia also has an extended child allowance of 45 percent of 
the minimum wage (60 percent for children of military person- 
nel, children living with a guardian or in an orphanage, and 
children with AIDS) to assist families with the care of children 
between the ages of eighteen months and six years. Single 
mothers and those who receive no child support from the 
father of their child may obtain an additional 45 percent of the 
minimum wage up to their child's sixth birthday; this figure is 
then increased to 50 percent and remains effective until the 
child is sixteen. In May 1992, special cost-of-living compensa- 
tions were introduced to cover the increased expense of meet- 
ing children's basic needs. These compensations ranged from 
30 percent of the minimum wage in the case of children less 
than six years old to 40 percent in the case of those ages thir- 
teen to sixteen. 

Among other benefits provided by enterprises to their work- 
ers are access to special shops that sell subsidized milk for fami- 
lies with low incomes and small children and an allowance to 
children for the purchase of a school uniform when they start 
school and again at the age of thirteen. Other regulations focus 
more specifically on families with small children. These include 
protective legislation prohibiting the dismissal of pregnant 
women or women with children under the age of three, ban- 



289 



Russia: A Country Study 

ning night work and overtime for mothers of small children, 
stipulating workload concessions to pregnant women and 
mothers of young children, and providing flextime, part-time 
work, home-based employment, nursing intervals, and addi- 
tional paid and unpaid leave to mothers to care for sick chil- 
dren. Many workplaces also permit informal leave arrange- 
ments for the purpose of food shopping. 

A significant portion of Russian workers have entitlements to 
housing, child care, and paid vacations, regardless of their rank 
within an enterprise. Housing entitlements involve either out- 
right provision of a low-rent apartment (most apartment rents 
are very low) or various forms of cash or in-kind assistance. 
Moreover, occupants obtain an implicit ownership right 
extending beyond their term of employment. They may also 
have the legal title of the apartment transferred to their own 
names without paying any purchase price (see Housing, this 
ch.). 

Besides housing allowances, most large and medium-sized 
enterprises provide on-site medical facilities or they contract 
for outside health care facilities for their employees. The medi- 
cal care provided through the auspices of enterprises is free 
and often is of much higher quality than the care available in 
government-run facilities (see The Health System, this ch.). 
Finally, enterprises provide their employees with goods ranging 
from foodstuffs to consumer durables. The enterprises procure 
these items through direct purchase, barter, or from their own 
farms, and make them available at below-market prices. 

The Social Insurance Fund is the administrative mechanism 
for payments to workers of birth, maternity, and sickness allow- 
ances, and child allowances for children between the ages of 
six and sixteen. The fund is managed by the largest union 
organization in Russia, the Federation of Independent Trade 
Unions of Russia (Federatsiya nezavisimykh profsoyuzov 
Rossii — FNPR) and serves as the repository of enterprise con- 
tributions consisting of 5.4 percent of the total payroll (see 
Social Organizations, this ch.). Nominally an independent 
institution since its establishment in 1991, the Social Insurance 
Fund is in fact responsible to the FNPR. 

In 1993 an overhaul of the fund's administrative structure 
began as a result of enterprises' low levels of compliance with 
contribution requirements, charges of serious abuse by trade 
union officials, and the government's desire to promote demo- 
cratic accountability. Since 1993 the management system has 



290 



Salvation Army young people's group, Red Square, Moscow 

Courtesy Debbie Horrell 

been in flux, and the quality of administration varies consider- 
ably throughout the country. Most worker contributions to the 
fund are retained by the enterprise for distribution. About one- 
half of the money goes to sick pay and one-fifth to subsidize 
treatment at sanatoriums. Family support includes birth and 
maternal allowances intended to replace lost wages, but child 
allowances do not address poverty directly because payments 
are not in proportion to household income. 

Russia also has an overall system of family benefits. These 
can be grouped into three broad categories: those payable to 
all families with children, regardless of income or other qualify- 
ing conditions; those payable to working mothers; and those 
payable to disadvantaged families. 

The communist system, for all its economic and moral defor- 
mities, provided virtually universal employment, so that every 
able-bodied citizen had an opportunity to earn income and 
thus social security. In postcommunist Russia, the phenome- 
non of unemployment is openly acknowledged and growing 
(see Unemployment, ch. 6). At the end of 1995, some 8.2 mil- 
lion people were registered as unemployed, indicating a far 
higher actual number. Three years earlier, about 5 million were 



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Russia: A Country Study 

registered. The "new poor," in the parlance of the World Bank, 
put a considerable strain on the resources available in Russia 
for social welfare. 

Administered by the Ministry of Labor, the Employment 
Fund, which is financed by a 2 percent payroll tax from all 
enterprises, disburses compensation to jobless people. The 
level of compensation, already low in 1995, was expected to 
drop further if unemployment rose. As part of its assistance 
package to Russia, the World Bank is providing a computerized 
system that will help the country register claimants for unem- 
ployment and pay adequate benefits. 

The Ministry of Labor's subsistence minimum is based on 
the cost of nineteen staple items considered sufficient to 
ensure survival, plus an estimated minimum cost for utilities, 
transportation, and other necessities. The calculation varies 
according to age-group and region; trade unions use other for- 
mulas that usually expand the number of people identified as 
living below the poverty line. In early 1996, the State Duma 
considered a law that would make the Ministry of Labor's fig- 
ure the legal basis for establishing minimum wages, pensions, 
and other levels of social support. Barring such legislation, the 
subsistence minimum has no legal status. 

The Homeless 

The urban homeless are a category of the socially disadvan- 
taged that received no official recognition in the Soviet era. 
Because Soviet law banned beggars and vagrants, the homeless 
(meaning anyone who lost his or her place of residence for any 
reason) were imprisoned or expelled from the cities. When the 
ban ended in the early 1990s, thousands of homeless people, 
mostly men, appeared in Russia's cities; the majority had 
migrated to urban areas seeking work or were refugees from 
the armed conflicts that erupted in the Caucasus and Central 
Asia when the Soviet Union dissolved. 

In 1995 Moscow authorities estimated that city's homeless 
population at 30,000, but Western experts put the figure as 
high as 300,000. An estimated 300 homeless people died in 
Moscow in the first half of the winter of 1995-96, and on-site 
medical personnel reported widespread disease. At that point, 
Moscow had one shelter, with a capacity of twenty-four, and 
other Russian cities offered no sanitation or temporary resi- 
dence centers of any sort. In the mid-1990s, the government of 
mayor Yuriy Luzhkov followed the Soviet pattern of forcibly 



292 



The Society and Its Environment 



removing vagrants from the city, especially at times when large 
numbers of Western visitors were expected. Police routinely 
harass and beat vagrants found on the streets. The Soviet pro- 
piska system of residency permits, which granted housing and 
employment to individuals only in the place where they were 
officially registered, has been found unconstitutional several 
times by Russia's Constitutional Court. However, many local 
authorities, including those in Russia's largest European cities, 
continue to require Soviet-era documentation; in 1995 Moscow 
assessed a fee of 35 million rubles (about US$7,000) for regis- 
tration as a permanent resident of the city, and several other 
cities adopted similar measures. In the face of such restrictions, 
many homeless individuals are unable to change their status. 

Through the first half of the 1990s, no specific agency of the 
Russian government has borne responsibility for aiding the 
homeless; the Federal Migration Service, a badly underfunded 
and understaffed agency created in 1992, has not been able to 
carry out its legal responsibility to locate housing and employ- 
ment for internal and external migrants (see Migration, ch. 3). 
A number of Western humanitarian organizations, such as the 
Salvation Army and Doctors Without Borders, are the main 
source of assistance. In late 1995, the many deaths of homeless 
people prompted the Moscow government to announce plans 
to build ten new shelters and to ease the procedure for obtain- 
ing residency permits. 

Private charities in Russia have suffered from an absence of 
government support and a general lack of social acceptance. In 
1995, for example, the soup kitchen of the Christian Mercy 
Society in Moscow, which fed 400 poor people daily, had to pay 
city officials to stay open, and the organization was unable to 
obtain a designated space in which to operate. In fact, Russian 
law gives no status whatever to private charities, so such organi- 
zations must fend for themselves in helping the increasingly 
large number of urban poor. Russian society generally distrusts 
charities, partly because no such institutions existed either in 
tsarist times (royalty and the nobility provided whatever assis- 
tance went to the needy) or in the Soviet era, and partly 
because society has become fragmented by the difficult eco- 
nomic conditions of the 1990s. 

According to Western experts, a comprehensive system of 
social protection is an urgent need of the Russian government, 
both for humanitarian reasons and as a prerequisite to finan- 
cial stabilization and economic restructuring. The quality of 



293 



Russia: A Country Study 



future Russian society also will depend on reversing a steep 
downward trend in the quality of education and health care 
that has eroded the ability of Russians to improve their eco- 
nomic standing and to feel the sense of basic security that the 
Soviet system provided to some degree. Under Russia's condi- 
tions of drastic social and economic change, such forms of sup- 
port are especially missed in the mid-1990s. 

* * * 



A number of useful monographs published in the 1990s 
include discussion of various aspects of Russia's social condi- 
tions. In Redefining Russian Society and Polity, Mary Buckley dis- 
cusses major changes in housing, health care, and social 
expectations, with substantial background on the Soviet 
period. The Environmental and Health Atlas of Russia, edited by 
Murray Feshbach, provides useful details on the health crisis 
and its causes. Education and Society in the New Russia, edited by 
Anthony Jones, includes discussion of education trends as they 
apply to changes in post-Soviet society. Local Power and Post- 
Soviet Politics, edited by Theodore Friedgut and Jeffrey Hahn, 
illuminates the role of local governments in areas such as wel- 
fare and housing. The World Bank's 1995 report Russia, Hous- 
ing Reform and Privatization gives a full picture of the economic 
forces and existing traditions at work in forming a new housing 
market. Igor Ron's The Sexual Revolution in Russia is a detailed 
and well-documented analysis of sexual attitudes in the Soviet 
and post-Soviet periods. Russia's Youth and Its Cultureby Hilary 
Pilkington is a sociological study of groupings and behavior. A 
series of articles by Penny Morvant, published in the Open 
Media Research Institute's biweekly Transitionvsx 1995, are con- 
cise studies of poverty, the role of women, and the health crisis 
in Russia. (For further information and complete citations, see 
Bibliography.) 



294 



Chapter 6, The Economy 



The beautiful Vasilisa walks into the forest holding her magical doll while a 
horseman rides by (design from lacquer box made in village of Palekh). 



LIKE MANY OTHER ASPECTS OF RUSSIAN LIFE, the Rus- 
sian economy underwent a journey through uncharted waters 
in the early 1990s. First came the disintegration of the centrally 
planned economy that was a hallmark of the state-controlled 
economy and then its replacement by an economy operating 
on the basis of market forces. Some of the former communist 
states of Central Europe began their process of economic tran- 
sition two years before Russia and have provided positive mod- 
els. But Russia lacks experience with market economies and 
the institutions needed to operate them. Moreover, deeply en- 
trenched remnants of central planning present challenges in 
Russia that other countries were able to avoid. 

Russia undertakes the transition with advantages and obsta- 
cles. Although only half the size of the former Soviet economy, 
the Russian economy includes formidable assets. Russia pos- 
sesses ample supplies of many of the world's most valued natu- 
ral resources, especially those required to support a modern 
industrialized economy. It also has a well-educated labor force 
with substantial technical expertise. At the same time, Soviet- 
era management practices, a decaying infrastructure, and inef- 
ficient supply systems hinder efficient utilization of those 
resources. 

For nearly 60 years, the Russian economy and that of the rest 
of the Soviet Union operated on the basis of central plan- 
ning — state control over virtually all means of production and 
over investment, production, and consumption decisions 
throughout the economy. Economic policy was made accord- 
ing to directives from the communist party, which controlled 
all aspects of economic activity. The central planning system 
left a number of legacies with which the Russian economy must 
deal in its transition to a market economy. 

Much of the structure of the Soviet economy that operated 
until 1987 originated under the leadership of Joseph V. Stalin 
(in office 1927-53), with only incidental modifications made 
between 1953 and 1987. Five-year plans (see Glossary) and 
annual plans were the chief mechanisms the Soviet govern- 
ment used to translate economic policies into programs. 
According to those policies, the State Planning Committee 
(Gosudarstvennyy planovyy komitet— Gosplan) formulated 
countrywide output targets for stipulated planning periods. 



297 



Russia: A Country Study 

Regional planning bodies then refined these targets for eco- 
nomic units such as state industrial enterprises and state farms 
(sovkhozy; sing., sovkhoz — see Glossary) and collective farms 
(kolkhozy; sing., kolkhoz — see Glossary), each of which had its 
own specific output plan. Central planning operated on the 
assumption that if each unit met or exceeded its plan, then 
demand and supply would balance. 

The government's role was to ensure that the plans were ful- 
filled. Responsibility for production flowed from the top down. 
At the national level, some seventy government ministries and 
state committees, each responsible for a production sector or 
subsector, supervised the economic production activities of 
units within their areas of responsibility. Regional ministerial 
bodies reported to the national-level ministries and controlled 
economic units in their respective geographical areas. 

The plans incorporated output targets for raw materials and 
intermediate goods as well as final goods and services. In the- 
ory, but not in practice, the central planning system ensured a 
balance among the sectors throughout the economy. Under 
central planning, the state performed the allocation functions 
that prices perform in a market system. In the Soviet economy, 
prices were an accounting mechanism only. The government 
established prices for all goods and services based on the role 
of the product in the plan and on other noneconomic criteria. 
This pricing system produced anomalies. For example, the 
price of bread, a traditional staple of the Russian diet, was 
below the cost of the wheat used to produce it. In some cases, 
farmers fed their livestock bread rather than grain because 
bread cost less. In another example, rental fees for apartments 
were set very low to achieve social equity, yet housing was in 
extremely short supply (see Housing, ch. 5). Soviet industries 
obtained raw materials such as oil, natural gas, and coal at 
prices below world market levels, encouraging waste. 

The central planning system allowed Soviet leaders to mar- 
shal resources quickly in times of crisis, such as the Nazi inva- 
sion, and to reindustrialize the country during the postwar 
period. The rapid development of its defense and industrial 
base after the war permitted the Soviet Union to become a 
superpower. 

The record of Russian economic reform through the mid- 
1990s is mixed. The attempts and failures of reformers during 
the era of perestroika (restructuring — see Glossary) in the 
regime of Mikhail S. Gorbachev (in office 1985-91) attested to 



298 



The Economy 



the complexity of the challenge. Since 1991, under the leader- 
ship of Boris N. Yeltsin, the country has made great strides 
toward developing a market economy by implanting basic 
tenets such as market-determined prices. Critical elements 
such as privatization of state enterprises and extensive foreign 
investment went into place in the first few years of the post- 
Soviet period. But other fundamental parts of the economic 
infrastructure, such as commercial banking and authoritative, 
comprehensive commercial laws, were absent or only partly in 
place by 1996. Although by the mid-1990s a return to Soviet-era 
central planning seemed unlikely, the configuration of the 
post-transition economy remained unpredictable. 

Economists have struggled to achieve accurate measurement 
of the Russian economy, and they have questioned the accuracy 
of official Russian economic data. Although the market now 
determines most prices, the Government (Russia's cabinet) 
still fixes prices on some goods and services, such as utilities 
and energy. Furthermore, the exchange rate of the ruble (for 
value of the ruble — see Glossary) to the United States dollar 
has changed rapidly, and the Russian inflation rate has been 
high. These conditions make it difficult to convert economic 
measurements from rubles to dollars to make statistical com- 
parisons with the United States and other Western countries. 

According to official Russian data, in 1994 the national gross 
domestic product (GDP — see Glossary) was 604 trillion rubles 
(about US$207 billion according to the 1994 exchange rate), 
or about 4 percent of the United States GDP for that year. But 
this figure underestimates the size of the Russian economy. 
Adjusted by a purchasing-power parity formula to account for 
the lower cost of living in Russia, the 1994 Russian GDP was 
about US$678 billion, making the Russian economy approxi- 
mately 10 percent of the United States economy. In 1994 the 
adjusted Russian GDP was US$4,573 per capita, approximately 
19 percent of that of the United States. A second important 
measurement factor is the extremely active so-called shadow 
economy, which yields no taxes or government statistics but 
which a 1996 government report quantified as accounting for 
about 50 percent of the economy and 40 percent of its cash 
turnover. 

Historical Background 

The Soviet economic system was in place for some six 
decades, and elements of that system remained in place after 



299 



Russia: A Country Study 

the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The leaders exert- 
ing the most substantial influence on that system were its 
founder, Vladimir I. Lenin, and his successor Stalin, who estab- 
lished the prevailing patterns of collectivization and industrial- 
ization that became typical of the Soviet Union's centrally 
planned system. By 1980, however, intrinsic defects became 
obvious as the national economy languished; shortly thereafter, 
reform programs began to alter the traditional structure. One 
of the chief reformers of the late 1980s, Boris Yeltsin, oversaw 
the substantial dissolution of the central planning system in the 
early 1990s. 

The Eras of Lenin and Stalin 

The basic foundation of the Soviet economic system was 
established after the Bolsheviks (see Glossary) assumed power 
in November 1917 (see Revolutions and Civil War, ch. 2). The 
Bolsheviks sought to mold a socialist society from the ruins of 
post-World War I tsarist Russia by liberally reworking the ideas 
of political philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. 

Soon after the revolution, the Bolsheviks published decrees 
nationalizing land, most industry (all enterprises employing 
more than five workers), foreign trade, and banking. The peas- 
ants took control of the land from the aristocracy and farmed it 
in small parcels. 

Beginning in 1918, the new regime already was fighting for 
its survival in the Russian Civil War against noncommunist 
forces known as the Whites. The war forced the regime to orga- 
nize the economy and place it on a war footing under a strin- 
gent policy known as war communism. Under such conditions, 
the economy performed poorly. In 1920 agricultural output 
had attained only half of its pre-World War I level, foreign trade 
had virtually ceased, and industrial production had fallen to 
only a small fraction of its prewar levels. Beginning in 1921, 
Lenin led a tactical retreat from state control of the economy 
in an effort to reignite production. His new program, called 
the New Economic Policy (Novaya ekonomicheskaya politika — 
NEP; see Glossary), permitted some private activity, especially 
in agriculture, light industry, and services (see Lenin's Leader- 
ship, ch. 2). However, heavy industry, transportation, foreign 
trade, and banking remained under state control. 

Lenin died in 1924, and by 1927 the government had nearly 
abandoned the NEP. Stalin sought a rapid transformation from 
an agricultural, peasant-based country into a modern indus- 



300 



The Economy 



trial power and initiated the country's First Five- Year Plan 
(1928-32). Under the plan, the Soviet government began the 
nationwide collectivization of agriculture to ensure production 
and distribution of food supplies to the growing industrial sec- 
tor and to free labor for industry (see Industrialization and 
Collectivization, ch. 2) . By the end of the five-year period, how- 
ever, agricultural output had declined by 23 percent, according 
to official statistics. The chemical, textile, housing, and con- 
sumer goods and services industries were also performing 
poorly. Heavy industry exceeded the plan targets, but only at a 
great cost to the rest of the economy. 

By the Third Five-Year Plan (1938-41), the Soviet economy 
was once again on a war footing, devoting increasing amounts 
of resources to the military sector in response to the rise of 
Nazi Germany. The Nazi invasion in 1941 forced the govern- 
ment to abandon the five-year plan and concentrate all 
resources on support for the military sector. This period also 
included the large-scale evacuation of much of the country's 
industrial production capacity from European Russia to the 
Urals and Central Asia to prevent further war damage to its 
economic base. The Fourth Five-Year Plan (1946-50) was one 
of repairing and rebuilding after the war. 

Throughout the Stalin era, the government forced the pace 
of industrial growth by shifting resources from other sectors to 
heavy industry. The Soviet consumer received little priority in 
the planning process. By 1950 real household consumption 
had climbed to a level only marginally higher than that of 
1928. Although Stalin died in 1953, his emphasis on heavy 
industry and central control over all aspects of economic deci- 
sion making remained virtually intact well into the 1980s. 

The Postwar Growth Period 

Soviet economic growth rates during the postwar period 
appeared impressive. Between the early 1950s and 1975, the 
Soviet gross national product (GNP — see Glossary) increased 
an average of about 5 percent per year, outpacing the average 
growth of the United States and keeping pace with many West 
European economies — albeit after having started from a much 
lower point. 

However, these aggregate growth figures hid gross inefficien- 
cies that are typical of centrally planned systems. The Soviet 
Union was able to attain impressive growth through "extensive 
investments," that is, by infusing the economy with large inputs 



301 



Russia: A Country Study 

of labor, capital, and natural resources. But the state-set prices 
did not reflect the actual costs of inputs, leading to enormous 
misallocation and waste of resources. In addition, the heavily 
bureaucratic economic decision-making system and the strong 
emphasis on meeting targets discouraged the introduction of 
new technologies that could improve productivity. Central 
planning also skewed the distribution of investments through- 
out the economy. 

The aggregate Soviet growth figures also did not reveal 
either the generally poor quality of Soviet goods and services 
that resulted from the state monopoly over production or the 
lack of priority given the consumer sector in the planning pro- 
cess. Eventually, diminishing returns from labor, capital, and 
other inputs led to a severe slowdown in Soviet economic 
growth. Furthermore, the availability of inputs, especially capi- 
tal, labor, and technology, was decreasing. Declining birth 
rates, particularly in the European republics of the Soviet 
Union, placed constraints on the labor supply. By the mid- 
1970s and into the 1980s, average Soviet GNP growth rates had 
plummeted to about 2 percent, less than half the rates of the 
immediate postwar period. 

Although such rates might have been acceptable in a 
mature, modern industrialized economy, the Soviet Union still 
trailed far behind the United States, other Western economies, 
and Japan, and in the 1980s another challenge arose from the 
newly industrializing countries of East Asia. Furthermore, the 
standard of living of the average Russian citizen, which had 
always been below that of the United States, was declining. In 
the 1980s, with the advent of modern communications that 
even Soviet censors found impossible to restrict, Soviet citizens 
began to recognize their relative position and to question the 
rationale of their country's economic policies. This was the 
atmosphere in which the Gorbachev regime undertook serious 
economic reform in the late 1980s. 

Reform and Resistance 

During several distinct periods, Soviet leaders attempted to 
reform the economy to make the Soviet system more efficient. 
In 1957, for example, Nikita S. Khrushchev (in office 1953-64) 
tried to decentralize state control by eliminating many national 
ministries and placing responsibility for implementing plans 
under the control of newly created regional economic coun- 
cils. These reforms produced their own inefficiencies. In 1965 



302 



The Economy 



Soviet prime minister Aleksey Kosygin (in office 1964-80) 
introduced a package of reforms that reestablished central gov- 
ernment control but reformed prices and established new 
bonuses and production norms to stimulate economic produc- 
tivity. Under reforms in the 1970s, Soviet leaders attempted to 
streamline the decision-making process by combining enter- 
prises into associations, which received some localized deci- 
sion-making authority. 

Because none of these reforms challenged the fundamental 
notion of state control, the root cause of the inefficiencies 
remained. Resistance to reform was strong because central 
planning was heavily embedded in the Soviet economic struc- 
ture. Its various elements — planned output, state ownership of 
property, administrative pricing, artificially established wage 
levels, and currency inconvertibility — were interrelated. Funda- 
mental reforms required changing the whole system rather 
than one or two elements. Central planning also was heavily 
entrenched in the Soviet political structure. A huge bureau- 
cracy was in place from the national to the local level in both 
the party and the government, and officials within that system 
enjoyed the many privileges of the Soviet elite class. Such 
vested interests yielded formidable resistance to major changes 
in the Soviet economic system; the Russian system, in which 
many of the same figures have prospered, suffers from the 
same handicap. 

Upon assuming power in March 1985, Gorbachev took mea- 
sures intended to immediately resume the growth rates of ear- 
lier decades. The Twelfth Five- Year Plan (1986-90) called for 
the Soviet national income to increase an average of 4.1 per- 
cent annually and labor productivity to increase 4.6 percent 
annually — rates that the Soviet Union had not achieved since 
the early 1970s. Gorbachev sought to improve labor productiv- 
ity by implementing an anti-alcohol campaign that severely 
restricted the sale of vodka and other spirits and by establishing 
work attendance requirements to reduce chronic absenteeism. 
Gorbachev also shifted investment priorities toward the 
machine-building and metalworking sectors that could make 
the most significant contribution to retool and modernize 
existing factories, rather than building new factories. Gor- 
bachev changed Soviet investment strategy from extensive 
investing to intensive investing that focused on elements most 
critical to achieving the stated goal. 



303 



Russia: A Country Study 

During his first few years, Gorbachev also restructured the 
government bureaucracy (see Perestroika, ch. 2). He combined 
ministries responsible for high-priority economic sectors into 
bureaus or state committees in order to reduce staff and red 
tape and to streamline the administration. In addition, Gor- 
bachev established a state organization for quality control to 
improve the quality of Soviet production. 

The Perestroika Program 

The Soviet economic reforms during Gorbachev's initial 
period (1985-86) were similar to the reforms of previous 
regimes: they modified the Stalinist system without making 
truly fundamental changes. The basic principles of central 
planning remained. The measures proved to be insufficient, as 
economic growth rates continued to decline and the economy 
faced severe shortages. Gorbachev and his team of economic 
advisers then introduced more fundamental reforms, which 
became known as perestroika (restructuring). At the June 1987 
plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist 
Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU — see Glossary), Gorbachev 
presented his "basic theses," which laid the political foundation 
of economic reform for the remainder of the decade. 

In July 1987, the Supreme Soviet passed the Law on State 
Enterprises. The law stipulated that state enterprises were free 
to determine output levels based on demand from consumers 
and other enterprises. Enterprises had to fulfill state orders, 
but they could dispose of the remaining output as they saw fit. 
Enterprises bought inputs from suppliers at negotiated con- 
tract prices. Under the law, enterprises became self-financing; 
that is, they had to cover expenses (wages, taxes, supplies, and 
debt service) through revenues. No longer was the government 
to rescue unprofitable enterprises that could face bankruptcy. 
Finally, the law shifted control over the enterprise operations 
from ministries to elected workers' collectives. Gosplan's 
responsibilities were to supply general guidelines and national 
investment priorities, not to formulate detailed production 
plans. 

The Law on Cooperatives, enacted in May 1987, was perhaps 
the most radical of the economic reforms during the early part 
of the Gorbachev regime. For the first time since Lenin's NEP, 
the law permitted private ownership of businesses in the ser- 
vices, manufacturing, and foreign-trade sectors. The law ini- 
tially imposed high taxes and employment restrictions, but it 



304 



The Economy 



later revised these to avoid discouraging private-sector activity. 
Under this provision, cooperative restaurants, shops, and man- 
ufacturers became part of the Soviet scene. 

Gorbachev brought perestroika to the Soviet Union's foreign 
economic sector with measures that Soviet economists consid- 
ered bold at that time. His program virtually eliminated the 
monopoly that the Ministry of Foreign Trade had had on most 
trade operations. It permitted the ministries of the various 
industrial and agricultural branches to conduct foreign trade 
in sectors under their responsibility rather than having to oper- 
ate indirectly through the bureaucracy of trade ministry orga- 
nizations. In addition, regional and local organizations and 
individual state enterprises were permitted to conduct foreign 
trade. This change was an attempt to redress a major imperfec- 
tion in the Soviet foreign trade regime: the lack of contact 
between Soviet end users and suppliers and their foreign part- 
ners. 

The most significant of Gorbachev's reforms in the foreign 
economic sector allowed foreigners to invest in the Soviet 
Union in the form of joint ventures with Soviet ministries, state 
enterprises, and cooperatives. The original version of the 
Soviet Joint Venture Law, which went into effect in June 1987, 
limited foreign shares of a Soviet venture to 49 percent and 
required that Soviet citizens occupy the positions of chairman 
and general manager. After potential Western partners com- 
plained, the government revised the regulations to allow 
majority foreign ownership and control. Under the terms of 
the Joint Venture Law, the Soviet partner supplied labor, infra- 
structure, and a potentially large domestic market. The foreign 
partner supplied capital, technology, entrepreneurial exper- 
tise, and, in many cases, products and services of world compet- 
itive quality. 

Although they were bold in the context of Soviet history, 
Gorbachev's attempts at economic reform were not radical 
enough to restart the country's chronically sluggish economy 
in the late 1980s. The reforms made some inroads in decentral- 
ization, but Gorbachev and his team left intact most of the fun- 
damental elements of the Stalinist system — price controls, 
inconvertibility of the ruble, exclusion of private property own- 
ership, and the government monopoly over most means of pro- 
duction. 

By 1990 the government had virtually lost control over eco- 
nomic conditions. Government spending increased sharply as 



305 



Russia: A Country Study 

an increasing number of unprofitable enterprises required 
state support and consumer price subsidies continued. Tax rev- 
enues declined because revenues from the sales of vodka plum- 
meted during the anti-alcohol campaign and because republic 
and local governments withheld tax revenues from the central 
government under the growing spirit of regional autonomy. 
The elimination of central control over production decisions, 
especially in the consumer goods sector, led to the breakdown 
in traditional supplier-producer relationships without contrib- 
uting to the formation of new ones. Thus, instead of streamlin- 
ing the system, Gorbachev's decentralization caused new 
production bottlenecks. 

Unforeseen Results of Reform 

Gorbachev's new system bore the characteristics of neither 
central planning nor a market economy. Instead, the Soviet 
economy went from stagnation to deterioration. At the end of 
1991, when the union officially dissolved, the national econ- 
omy was in a virtual tailspin. In 1991 the Soviet GDP had 
declined 17 percent and was declining at an accelerating rate. 
Overt inflation was becoming a major problem. Between 1990 
and 1991, retail prices in the Soviet Union increased 140 per- 
cent. 

Under these conditions, the general quality of life for Soviet 
consumers deteriorated. Consumers traditionally faced short- 
ages of durable goods, but under Gorbachev, food, wearing 
apparel, and other basic necessities were in short supply. 
Fueled by the liberalized atmosphere of Gorbachev's glasnost 
(literally, public voicing — see Glossary) and by the general 
improvement in information access in the late 1980s, public 
dissatisfaction with economic conditions was much more overt 
than ever before in the Soviet period. The foreign-trade sector 
of the Soviet economy also showed signs of deterioration. The 
total Soviet hard-currency (see Glossary) debt increased appre- 
ciably, and the Soviet Union, which had established an impec- 
cable record for debt repayment in earlier decades, had 
accumulated sizable arrearages by 1990. 

In sum, the Soviet Union left a legacy of economic ineffi- 
ciency and deterioration to the fifteen constituent republics 
after its breakup in December 1991. Arguably, the shortcom- 
ings of the Gorbachev reforms had contributed to the eco- 
nomic decline and eventual destruction of the Soviet Union, 
leaving Russia and the other successor states to pick up the 



306 



Economist Yegor Gaydar, acting 
prime minister under Boris 
Yeltsin in 1992 and major 
advocate of economic reform 
Courtesy Michael E. Samojeden 



pieces and to try to mold modern, market-driven economies. 
At the same time, the Gorbachev programs did start Russia on 
the precarious road to full-scale economic reform. Perestroika 
broke Soviet taboos against private ownership of some types of 
business, foreign investment in the Soviet Union, foreign trade, 
and decentralized economic decision making, all of which 
made it virtually impossible for later policy makers to turn back 
the clock. 

Economic Reform in the 1990s 

Two fundamental and interdependent goals — macroeco- 
nomic stabilization and economic restructuring — mark the 
transition from central planning to a market-based economy. 
The former entails implementing fiscal and monetary policies 
that promote economic growth in an environment of stable 
prices and exchange rates. The latter requires establishing the 
commercial, legal, and institutional entities — banks, private 
property, and commercial legal codes — that permit the econ- 
omy to operate efficiently. Opening domestic markets to for- 
eign trade and investment, thus linking the economy with the 
rest of the world, is an important aid in reaching these goals. 
Under Gorbachev, the regime failed to address these funda- 



307 



Russia: A Country Study 

mental goals. At the time of the Soviet Union's demise, the 
Yeltsin government of the Russian Republic had begun to 
attack the problems of macroeconomic stabilization and eco- 
nomic restructuring. As of mid-1996, the results were mixed. 

The Yeltsin Economic Program 

In October 1991, two months before the official collapse of 
the Soviet regime and two months after the August 1991 coup 
against the Gorbachev regime, Yeltsin and his advisers, includ- 
ing reform economist Yegor Gaydar, established a program of 
radical economic reforms. The Russian parliament, the 
Supreme Soviet, also extended decree powers to the president 
for one year to implement the program. The program was 
ambitious, and the record to date indicates that the goals for 
macroeconomic stabilization and economic restructuring pro- 
grams may have been unrealistically high. Another complica- 
tion in the Yeltsin reform program is that since 1991 both 
political and economic authority have devolved significantly 
from the national to the regional level; in a series of agree- 
ments with the majority of Russia's twenty-one republics and 
several other subnational jurisdictions, Moscow has granted a 
variety of special rights and powers having important economic 
overtones. 

Macroeconomic Stabilization Measures 

The program laid out a number of macroeconomic policy 
measures to achieve stabilization. It called for sharp reductions 
in government spending, targeting outlays for public invest- 
ment projects, defense, and producer and consumer subsidies. 
The program aimed at reducing the government budget deficit 
from its 1991 level of 20 percent of GDP to 9 percent of GDP by 
the second half of 1992 and to 3 percent by 1993. The govern- 
ment imposed new taxes, and tax collection was to be 
upgraded to increase state revenues. In the monetary sphere, 
the economic program required the Russian Central Bank 
(RCB) to cut subsidized credits to enterprises and to restrict 
money supply growth. The program called for the shrinkage of 
inflation from 12 percent per month in 1991 to 3 percent per 
month in mid-1993. 

Economic Restructuring Measures 

Immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union was 
announced, the Government lifted price controls on 90 per- 



308 



The Economy 



cent of consumer goods and 80 percent of intermediate goods. 
It raised, but still controlled, prices on energy and food staples 
such as bread, sugar, vodka, and dairy products. These mea- 
sures were to establish a realistic relationship between produc- 
tion and consumption that had been lacking in the central 
planning system. 

To encourage the development of the private sector, funda- 
mental changes were made in the tax system, including intro- 
duction of a value-added tax (VAT — see Glossary) of 28 
percent on most transactions, a progressive income tax, and a 
tax on business income; revisions in the system of import tariffs 
and export taxes; new taxes on domestic energy use to encour- 
age conservation (a necessary step because energy prices were 
still controlled) ; and new taxes on oil and natural gas exports 
to narrow the gap between subsidized domestic prices and 
world prices and to prevent domestic energy shortages (see 
Taxation, this ch.). A fixed exchange rate was to be established 
for the ruble, which then would become convertible. Many 
restrictions on foreign trade and investment also were to be 
lifted to expose Russia to the discipline of world prices. 

Monetary and Fiscal Policies 

In 1992 and 1993, the Government expanded the money 
supply and credits at explosive rates that led directly to high 
inflation and to a deterioration in the exchange rate of the 
ruble. In January 1992, the Government clamped down on 
money and credit creation at the same time that it lifted price 
controls. However, beginning in February the RCB loosened 
the reins on the money supply. In the second and third quar- 
ters of 1992, the money supply had increased at especially 
sharp rates of 34 and 30 percent, respectively, and by the end of 
1992, the Russian money supply had increased by eighteen 
times. 

The sharp increase in the money supply was influenced by 
large foreign currency deposits that state-run enterprises and 
individuals had built up and by the depreciation of the ruble. 
Enterprises drew on these deposits to pay wages and other 
expenses after the Government had tightened restrictions on 
monetary emissions. Commercial banks monetized enterprise 
debts by drawing down accounts in foreign banks and drawing 
on privileged access to accounts in the RCB (see Banking and 
Finance, this ch.). 



309 



Russia: A Country Study 

Government efforts to control credit expansion also proved 
ephemeral in the early years of the transition. Domestic credit 
increased about nine times between the end of 1991 and 1992. 
The credit expansion was caused in part by the buildup of 
interenterprise arrears and the RGB's subsequent financing of 
those arrears. The Government restricted financing to state 
enterprises after it lifted controls on prices in January 1992, but 
enterprises faced cash shortages because the decontrol of 
prices cut demand for their products. Instead of curtailing pro- 
duction, most firms chose to build up inventories. To support 
continued production under these circumstances, enterprises 
relied on loans from other enterprises. By mid-1992, when the 
amount of unpaid interenterprise loans had reached 3.2 tril- 
lion rubles (about US$20 billion), the government froze inter- 
enterprise debts. Shortly thereafter, the government provided 
181 billion rubles (about US$1.1 billion) in credits to enter- 
prises that were still holding debt. 

The Government also failed to constrain its own expendi- 
tures in this period, partially under the influence of the conser- 
vative Supreme Soviet, which encouraged the Soviet-style 
financing of favored industries. By the end of 1992, the Russian 
budget deficit was 20 percent of GDP, much higher than the 5 
percent projected under the economic program and stipulated 
under the International Monetary Fund (IMF — see Glossary) 
conditions for international funding. This budget deficit was 
financed largely by expanding the money supply. These ill- 
advised monetary and fiscal policies resulted in an inflation 
rate of over 2,000 percent in 1992. 

In late 1992, deteriorating economic conditions and a sharp 
conflict with the parliament led Yeltsin to dismiss economic 
reform advocate Yegor Gaydar as prime minister. Gaydar's suc- 
cessor was Viktor Chernomyrdin, a former head of the State 
Natural Gas Company (Gazprom), who was considered less 
favorable to economic reform. 

Chernomyrdin formed a new government with Boris 
Fedorov, an economic reformer, as deputy prime minister and 
finance minister. Fedorov considered macroeconomic stabiliza- 
tion a primary goal of Russian economic policy. In January 
1993, Fedorov announced a so-called anticrisis program to con- 
trol inflation through tight monetary and fiscal policies. Under 
the program, the Government would control money and credit 
emissions by requiring the RCB to increase interest rates on 
credits by issuing government bonds, by partially financing 



310 



The Economy 



budget deficits, and by starting to close inefficient state enter- 
prises. Budget deficits were to be brought under control by lim- 
iting wage increases for state enterprises, by establishing 
quarterly budget deficit targets, and by providing a more effi- 
cient social safety net for the unemployed and pensioners. 

The printing of money and domestic credit expansion mod- 
erated somewhat in 1993. In a public confrontation with the 
parliament, Yeltsin won a referendum on his economic reform 
policies that may have given the reformers some political clout 
to curb state expenditures. In May 1993, the Ministry of 
Finance and the RCB agreed to macroeconomic measures, 
such as reducing subsidies and increasing revenues, to stabilize 
the economy. The RCB was to raise the discount lending rate to 
reflect inflation. Based on positive early results from this policy, 
the IMF extended the first payment of US$1.5 billion to Russia 
from a special Systemic Transformation Facility (STF) the fol- 
lowing July. 

Fedorov's anticrisis program and the Government's accord 
with the RCB had some effect. In the first three quarters of 
1993, the RCB held money expansion to a monthly rate of 19 
percent. It also substantially moderated the expansion of cred- 
its during that period. The 1993 annual inflation rate was 
around 1,000 percent, a sharp improvement over 1992, but still 
very high. The improvement figures were exaggerated, how- 
ever, because state expenditures had been delayed from the 
last quarter of 1993 to the first quarter of 1994. State enterprise 
arrears, for example, had built up in 1993 to about 15 trillion 
rubles (about US$13 billion, according to the mid-1993 
exchange rate). 

In June 1994, Chernomyrdin presented a set of moderate 
reforms calculated to accommodate the more conservative ele- 
ments of the Government and parliament while placating 
reformers and Western creditors. The prime minister pledged 
to move ahead with restructuring the economy and pursuing 
fiscal and monetary policies conducive to macroeconomic sta- 
bilization. But stabilization was undermined by the RCB, which 
issued credits to enterprises at subsidized rates, and by strong 
pressure from industrial and agricultural lobbies seeking addi- 
tional credits. 

By October 1994, inflation, which had been reduced by 
tighter fiscal and monetary policies early in 1994, began to soar 
once again to dangerous levels. On October 11, a day that 
became known as Black Tuesday, the value of the ruble on 



311 



Russia: A Country Study 

interbank exchange markets plunged by 27 percent. Although 
experts presented a number of theories to explain the drop, 
including the existence of a conspiracy, the loosening of credit 
and monetary controls clearly was a significant cause of declin- 
ing confidence in the Russian economy and its currency. 

In late 1994, Yeltsin reasserted his commitment to macroeco- 
nomic stabilization by firing Viktor Gerashchenko, head of the 
RCB, and nominating Tat'yana Paramonova as his replace- 
ment. Although reformers in the Russian government and the 
IMF and other Western supporters greeted the appointment 
with skepticism, Paramonova was able to implement a tight 
monetary policy that ended cheap credits and restrained inter- 
est rates (although the money supply fluctuated in 1995). Fur- 
thermore, the parliament passed restrictions on the use of 
monetary policy to finance the state debt, and the Ministry of 
Finance began to issue government bonds at market rates to 
finance the deficits. 

The Government also began to address the interenterprise 
debt that had been feeding inflation. The 1995 budget draft, 
which was proposed in September 1994, included a commit- 
ment to reducing inflation and the budget deficit to levels 
acceptable to the IMF, with the aim of qualifying for additional 
international funding. In this budget proposal, the Cherno- 
myrdin government sent a signal that it no longer would toler- 
ate soft credits and loose budget constraints, and that stabiliza- 
tion must be a top government priority. 

During most of 1995, the government maintained its com- 
mitment to tight fiscal constraints, and budget deficits 
remained within prescribed parameters. However, in 1995 pres- 
sures mounted to increase government spending to alleviate 
wage arrearages, which were becoming a chronic problem 
within state enterprises, and to improve the increasingly tat- 
tered social safety net. In fact, in 1995 and 1996 the state's fail- 
ure to pay many such obligations (as well as the wages of most 
state workers) was a major factor in keeping Russia's budget 
deficit at a moderate level (see Social Welfare, ch. 5). Condi- 
tions changed by the second half of 1995. The members of the 
State Duma (beginning in 1994, the lower house of the Federal 
Assembly, Russia's parliament) faced elections in December, 
and Yeltsin faced dim prospects in his 1996 presidential reelec- 
tion bid. Therefore, political conditions caused both Duma 
deputies and the president to make promises to increase 
spending. 



312 



The Economy 



In addition, late in 1995 Yeltsin dismissed Anatoliy Chubays, 
one of the last economic reform advocates remaining in a top 
Government position, as deputy prime minister in charge of 
economic policy. In place of Chubays, Yeltsin named Vladimir 
Kadannikov, a former automobile plant manager whose views 
were antireform. This move raised concerns in Russia and the 
West about Yeltsin's commitment to economic reform. Another 
casualty of the political atmosphere was RCB chairman Para- 
monova, whose nomination had remained a source of contro- 
versy between the State Duma and the Government. In 
November 1995, Yeltsin was forced to replace her with Sergey 
Dubinin, a Chernomyrdin protege who continued the tight- 
money policy that Paramonova had established. 

By mid-1996 many Duma deputies raised concerns about the 
Government's failure to meet its tax revenue targets. Revenue 
shortages were blamed on a number of factors, including a 
heavy tax burden that encourages noncompliance and an inef- 
ficient and corrupt tax collection system. A variety of tax collec- 
tion reforms were proposed in the parliament and the 
Government, but by 1996 Russian enterprises and regional 
authorities had established a strong pattern of noncompliance 
with national tax regulations, and the Federal Tax Police Ser- 
vice was ineffectual in apprehending violators (see Ministry of 
Internal Affairs (MVD), ch. 10). 

Inflation 

In 1992, the first year of economic reform, retail prices in 
Russia increased by 2,520 percent. A major cause of the 
increase was the decontrol of most prices in January 1992, a 
step that prompted an average price increase of 245 percent in 
that month alone. By 1993 the annual rate had declined to 840 
percent, still a very high figure. In 1994 the inflation rate had 
improved to 224 percent. 

Trends in annual inflation rates mask variations in monthly 
rates, however. In 1994, for example, the Government man- 
aged to reduce monthly rates from 21 percent in January to 4 
percent in August, but rates climbed once again, to 16.4 per- 
cent by December and 18 percent by January 1995. Instability 
in Russian monetary policy caused the variations. After tighten- 
ing the flow of money early in 1994, the Government loosened 
its restrictions in response to demands for credits by agricul- 
ture, industries in the Far North, and some favored large enter- 
prises. In 1995 the pattern was avoided more successfully by 



313 



Russia: A Country Study 

maintaining the tight monetary policy adopted early in the 
year and by passing a relatively stringent budget. Thus, the 
monthly inflation rate held virtually steady below 5 percent in 
the last quarter of the year. For the first half of 1996, the infla- 
tion rate was 16.5 percent. However, experts noted that control 
of inflation was aided substantially by the failure to pay wages 
to workers in state enterprises, a policy that kept prices low by 
depressing demand. 

Exchange Rates 

An important symptom of Russian macroeconomic instabil- 
ity has been severe fluctuations in the exchange rate of the 
ruble. From July 1992, when the ruble first could be legally 
exchanged for United States dollars, to October 1995, the rate 
of exchange between the ruble and the dollar declined from 
144 rubles per US$1 to around 5,000 per US$1. Prior to July 
1992, the ruble's rate was set artificially at a highly overvalued 
level. But rapid changes in the nominal rate (the rate that does 
not account for inflation) reflected the overall macroeconomic 
instability. The most drastic example of such fluctuation was 
the Black Tuesday (1994) 2V percent reduction in the ruble's 
value. 

In July 1995, the RCB announced its intention to maintain 
the ruble within a band of 4,300 to 4,900 per US$1 through 
October 1995, but it later extended the period to June 1996. 
The announcement reflected strengthened fiscal and mone- 
tary policies and the buildup of reserves with which the Gov- 
ernment could defend the ruble. By the end of October 1995, 
the ruble had stabilized and actually appreciated in inflation- 
adjusted terms. It remained stable during the first half of 1996. 
In May 1996, a "crawling band" exchange rate was introduced 
to allow the ruble to depreciate gradually through the end of 
1996, beginning between 5,000 and 5,600 per US$1 and end- 
ing between 5,500 and 6,100. 

Another sign of currency stabilization was the announce- 
ment that effective June 1996, the ruble would become fully 
convertible on a current-account basis. This meant that Rus- 
sian citizens and foreigners would be able to convert rubles to 
other currencies for trade transactions. 

Privatization 

The essence of economic restructuring, and a critical consid- 
eration for foreign loans and investment in Russia's economy, is 



314 



Central meat market, Moscow 
Courtesy Michael E. Samojeden 



the privatization program. In most respects, between 1992 and 
1995 Russia kept pace with or exceeded the rate established in 
the original privatization program of October 1991. As deputy 
prime minister for economic policy, the reformist Chubays was 
an effective advocate of privatization during its important early 
stages. In 1992 privatization of small enterprises began through 
employee buyouts and public auctions. By the end of 1993, 
more than 85 percent of Russian small enterprises and more 
than 82,000 Russian state enterprises, or about one-third of the 
total in existence, had been privatized. 

On October 1, 1992, vouchers, each with a nominal value of 
10,000 rubles (about US$63), were distributed to 144 million 
Russian citizens for purchase of shares in medium-sized and 
large enterprises that officials had designated and reorganized 
for this type of privatization. However, voucher holders also 
could sell the vouchers, whose cash value varied according to 
the economic and political conditions in the country, or they 
could invest them in voucher funds. 

By the end of June 1994, the voucher privatization program 
had completed its first phase. It succeeded in transferring own- 
ership of 70 percent of Russia's large and medium-sized enter- 



315 



Russia: A Country Study 

prises to private hands and in privatizing about 90 percent of 
small enterprises. By that time, 96 percent of the vouchers 
issued in 1992 had been used by their owners to buy shares in 
firms directly, invest in investment funds, or sell on the second- 
ary markets. According to the organizers of the voucher sys- 
tem, some 14,000 firms employing about two-thirds of the 
industrial labor force had moved into private hands. 

The next phase of the privatization program called for direct 
cash sales of shares in remaining state enterprises. That phase 
would complete the transfer of state enterprises and would add 
to government revenues. After that procedure met stiff opposi- 
tion in the State Duma, Yeltsin implemented it by decree in 
July 1994. But the president's commitment to privatization 
soon came into question. In response to the monetary crisis of 
October 1994, Yeltsin removed Chubays from his position as 
head of the State Committee for the Management of State 
Property, replacing him with little-known official Vladimir Pole- 
vanov. Polevanov stunned Russian and Western privatization 
advocates by suggesting renationalization of some critical 
enterprises. Yeltsin reacted by replacing Polevanov with Petr 
Mostovoy, a Chubays ally. In the ensuing eighteen months, 
Yeltsin made two more changes in the chairmanship position. 

In 1995 and 1996, political conditions continued to hamper 
the privatization program, and corruption scandals tarnished 
the program's public image. By 1995 privatization had gained a 
negative reputation with ordinary Russians, who coined the 
slang word prikhvatizatsiya, a combination of the Russian word 
for "grab" and the Russianized English word "privatize," pro- 
ducing the equivalent of "grabification." The term reflects the 
belief that the privatization process most often shifted control 
of enterprises from state agencies to groups of individuals with 
inside connections in the Government, the mafiya, or both. Dis- 
trust of the privatization process was part of an increasing pub- 
lic cynicism about the country's political and economic leaders, 
fueled by the seeming failure of Yeltsin's highly touted reform 
to improve the lot of the average Russian (see Social Stratifica- 
tion, ch. 5). 

The second phase of the privatization program went ahead 
with the sale of state-held shares for cash. Although the process 
was virtually complete by the end of the first quarter of 1996, 
the Government failed to garner expected revenues. Mean- 
while, Yeltsin's June 1996 bid for reelection brought a virtual 
halt in privatization of state enterprises during the campaign 



316 



The Economy 



period. In February 1996, the Procuracy announced a full-scale 
investigation into privatization practices, in particular a 1995 
transaction in which state banks awarded loans to state firms in 
return for "privatization" shares in those enterprises (see The 
Procuracy, ch. 10). This loans-for-shares type of transaction 
characterized the second phase of privatization; banks pro- 
vided the government badly needed cash based on the collat- 
eral of enterprise shares that banks presumably would be able 
to sell later. But most of the twenty-nine state enterprises origi- 
nally slated to participate withdrew, and the banks that received 
shares appeared to have a conflict of interest based on their 
role in setting the rules of the bidding procedure. In the most 
widely publicized deal, the Uneximbank of Moscow received a 
38 percent interest in the giant Noril'sk Nickel Joint-Stock 
Company at about half of a competing bid. Other banks and 
commercial organizations joined the traditional opponents of 
privatization in attacking the loans-for-shares program, and in 
1996 the Government admitted that the program had been 
handled badly. As a result of corruption allegations, the State 
Duma formed a committee to review the privatization pro- 
gram. And Prime Minister Chernomyrdin requested off-budget 
funds to buy back shares from the banks. 

Because the faults of the Yeltsin privatization program were 
an important plank in the 1996 presidential election platform 
of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (Kommunis- 
ticheskaya partiya Rossiyskoy Federatsii — KPRF), the strongest 
opposition party, Yeltsin's campaign strategy was to reduce 
privatization as far as possible as a campaign issue (see The 
Executive Branch, ch. 7). Part of that strategy was to shift the 
privatization process from Moscow to the regions. In February 
1996, a presidential decree simply granted shares in about 
6,000 state-controlled firms to regional governments, which 
could auction the shares and keep the profits. 

After Yeltsin's reelection in July 1996, his financial represen- 
tatives announced continuation of the privatization program, 
with a new focus on selling ten to fifteen large state enterprises, 
including the joint-stock company of the Unified Electric 
Power System of Russia (YeES Rossii), the Russian State Insur- 
ance Company (Rosgosstrakh), and the St. Petersburg Mari- 
time Port. The Communications Investment Joint-Stock 
Company (Svyazinvest), sale of which had failed in 1995, was to 
be offered to Western telecommunications companies in 1996. 



317 



Russia: A Country Study 

The new, postelection privatization stage also was to reduce 
the role of enterprise workers in shareholding. Within the first 
years of such ownership, most worker shares had been sold at 
depressed prices, devaluing all shares and cutting state profits 
from enterprise sales. Therefore, to reach the budget target of 
12.4 trillion rubles (about US$2.4 billion) of profit from priva- 
tization sales in 1996, distribution was to target recipients who 
would hold shares rather than sell them immediately. 

Despite periodic delays, the inept administration of the pro- 
gram's more recent phases, and allegations of favoritism and 
corrupt transactions in the enterprise and financial structures, 
in 1996 international experts judged Russia's privatization 
effort a qualified success. The movement of capital assets from 
state to private hands has progressed without serious reversal of 
direction — despite periodic calls for reestablishing state con- 
trol of certain assets. And the process has contributed to the 
creation of a new class of private entrepreneur. 

Economic Conditions in Mid-1996 

As of mid-1996, four and one-half years after the launching 
of Russia's post-Soviet economic reform, experts found the 
results promising but mixed. The Russian economy has passed 
through a long and wrenching depression. Official Russian 
economic statistics indicate that from 1990 to the end of 1995, 
Russian GDP declined by roughly 50 percent, far greater than 
the decline that the United States experienced during the 
Great Depression. (However, alternative estimates by Western 
analysts described a much less severe decline, taking into 
account the upward bias of Soviet-era economic data and the 
downward bias of post-Soviet data.) Such a decline, however, 
was to be expected in an economy going through the transition 
from central planning to a market structure. Much of the 
decline in production has occurred in the military-industrial 
complex and other heavy industries that benefited most from 
the skewed economic priorities of Soviet planners but have 
much less robust demand in a freer market. 

But other major sectors such as agriculture, energy, and light 
industry also suffered from the transition. To enable these sec- 
tors to function in a market system, inefficient enterprises had 
to be closed and workers laid off, with resulting short-term 
declines in output and consumption. Analysts had expected 
that Russia's GDP would begin to rise in 1996, but data for the 
first six months of the year showed a continuing decline, and 



318 



Cossack running money- 
changing operation, 
Krasnodar 
Courtesy A. James Firth, 
United States Department of 
Agriculture 



some Russian experts predicted a new phase of economic crisis 
in the second half of the year. 

The pain of the restructuring has been assuaged somewhat 
by the emergence of a new private sector. Western experts 
believe that Russian data overstate the dimensions of Russia's 
economic collapse by failing to reflect a large portion of the 
country's private-sector activity. The Russian services sector, 
especially retail sales, is playing an increasingly vital role in the 
economy, accounting for nearly half of GDP in 1995. The ser- 
vices sector's activities have not been adequately measured. 
Data on sector performance are skewed by the underreporting 
or nonreporting of output that Russia's tax laws encourage. 
According to Western analysts, by the end of 1995 more than 
half of GDP and more than 60 percent of the labor force were 
based in the private sector. 

An important but unconventional service in Russia's econ- 
omy is "shuttle trading" — the transport and sale of consumer 
goods by individual entrepreneurs, of whom 5 to 10 million 
were estimated to be active in 1996. Traders buy goods in for- 
eign countries such as China, Turkey, and the United Arab 
Emirates and in Russian cities, then sell them on the domestic 
market where demand is highest. Yevgeniy Yasin, minister of 
economics, estimated that in 1995 some US$11 billion worth of 



319 



Russia: A Country Study 

goods entered Russia in this way. Shuttle traders have been vital 
in maintaining the standard of living of Russians who cannot 
afford consumer goods on the conventional market. However, 
domestic industries such as textiles suffer from this infusion of 
competing merchandise, whose movement is unmonitored, 
untaxed, and often ?na/z)>a-controlled. 

The geographical distribution of Russia's wealth has been 
skewed at least as severely as it was in Soviet times. By the mid- 
1990s, economic power was being concentrated in Moscow at 
an even faster rate than the federal government was losing 
political power in the rest of the country. In Moscow an eco- 
nomic oligarchy, composed of politicians, banks, businesspeo- 
ple, security forces, and city agencies, controlled a huge 
percentage of Russia's financial assets under the rule of Mos- 
cow's energetic and popular mayor, Yuriy Luzhkov. Unfortu- 
nately, organized crime also has played a strong role in the 
growth of the city (see The Crime Wave of the 1990s, ch. 10). 
Opposed by a weak police force, Moscow's rate of protection 
rackets, contract murders, kickbacks, and bribes — all intimately 
connected with the economic infrastructure — has remained 
among the highest in Russia. Most businesses have not been 
able to function without paying for some form of mafiya protec- 
tion, informally called a krysha (the Russian word for roof). 

Luzhkov, who has close ties to all legitimate power centers in 
the city, has overseen the construction of sports stadiums, shop- 
ping malls, monuments to Moscow's history, and the ornate 
Christ the Savior Cathedral. In 1994 Yeltsin gave Luzhkov full 
control over all state property in Moscow. In the first half of 
1996, the city privatized state enterprises at the rate of US$1 bil- 
lion per year, a faster rate than the entire national privatization 
process in the same period. Under Luzhkov's leadership, the 
city government also acquired full or major interests in a wide 
variety of enterprises — from banking, hotels, and construction 
to bakeries and beauty salons. Such ownership has allowed 
Luzhkov's planners to manipulate resources efficiently and 
with little or no competition. Meanwhile, Moscow also became 
the center of foreign investment in Russia, often to the exclu- 
sion of other regions. For example, the McDonald's fast-food 
chain, which began operations in Moscow in 1990, enjoyed 
immediate success but expanded only in Moscow. The concen- 
tration of Russia's banking industry in Moscow gave the city a 
huge advantage in competing for foreign commercial activity. 



320 



The Economy 



In mid-1996 the national government appeared to have 
achieved some degree of macroeconomic stability. However, 
longer-term stability depends on the ability of policy makers to 
withstand the inflationary pressures of demands for state subsi- 
dies and easier credits for failing enterprises and other special 
interests. (Chubays estimated that spending promises made 
during Yeltsin's campaign amounted to US$250 per voter, 
which if actually spent would approximately double the 
national budget deficit; most of Yeltsin's pledges seemingly 
were forgotten shortly after his reelection.) 

By 1996 the structure of Russian economic output had 
shifted far enough that it more closely resembled that of a 
developed market economy than the distorted Soviet central- 
planning model. With the decline in demand for defense 
industry goods, overall production has shifted from heavy 
industry to consumer production (see The Defense Industry, 
ch. 9). However, in the mid-1990s the low quality of most 
domestically produced consumer goods continued to limit 
enterprises' profits and therefore their ability to modernize 
production operations. On the other side of the "vicious cir- 
cle," reliance on an outmoded production system guaranteed 
that product quality would remain low and uncompetitive. 

Most prices are left to the market, although local and 
regional governments control the prices of some staples. 
Energy prices remain controlled, but the Government has 
been shifting these prices upward to close the gap with world 
market prices. 

Natural Resources 

Russia is the largest country in the world; it covers a vast 
amount of topographically varied territory, including much 
that is inaccessible by conventional modes of transportation. 
The traditional centers of economic activity are almost exclu- 
sively located in the more hospitable European part of Russia, 
which once offered considerable coal and natural gas to drive 
heavy industry (see fig. 7). But the European fuel base was 
largely depleted by the 1980s, forcing Russia to rely on Siberian 
deposits much farther from the industrial heartland. 

Russia is one of the world's richest countries in raw materi- 
als, many of which are significant inputs for an industrial econ- 
omy. Russia accounts for around 20 percent of the world's 
production of oil and natural gas and possesses large reserves 
of both fuels. This abundance has made Russia virtually self-suf- 



321 



Russia: A Country Study 




322 



The Economy 



ficient in energy and a large-scale exporter of fuels. Oil and gas 
were primary hard-currency earners for the Soviet Union, and 
they remain so for the Russian Federation. Russia also is self- 
sufficient in nearly all major industrial raw materials and has at 
least some reserves of every industrially valuable nonfuel min- 
eral — even after the productive mines of Ukraine, Kazakstan, 
and Uzbekistan no longer were directly accessible. Tin, tung- 
sten, bauxite, and mercury were among the few natural materi- 
als imported in the Soviet period. Russia possesses rich reserves 
of iron ore, manganese, chromium, nickel, platinum, titanium, 
copper, tin, lead, tungsten, diamonds, phosphates, and gold, 
and the forests of Siberia contain an estimated one-fifth of the 
world's timber, mainly conifers (see fig. 8; Environmental Con- 
ditions, ch. 3). 

The iron ore deposits of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly, close 
to the Ukrainian border in the southwest, are believed to con- 
tain one-sixth of the world's total reserves. Intensive exploita- 
tion began there in the 1950s. Other large iron ore deposits are 
located in the Kola Peninsula, Karelia, south-central Siberia, 
and the Far East. The largest copper deposits are located in the 
Kola Peninsula and the Urals, and lead and zinc are found in 
North Ossetia. 

Agriculture 

Climatic and geographic factors limit Russia's agricultural 
activity to about 10 percent of the country's total land area. Of 
that amount, about 60 percent is used for crops, the remainder 
for pasture and meadow (see table 15, Appendix). In the Euro- 
pean part of Russia, the most productive land is in the Central 
Chernozem Economic Region and the Volga Economic 
Region, which occupy the grasslands between Ukraine and 
Kazakstan. More than 65 percent of the land in those regions is 
devoted to agriculture. In Siberia and the Far East, the most 
productive areas are the southernmost regions. Fodder crops 
dominate in the colder regions, and intensity of cultivation 
generally is higher in European Russia. The last expansion of 
cultivated land occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s, 
when the Virgin Lands program of Nikita Khrushchev opened 
land in southwestern Siberia (and neighboring Kazakstan) for 
cultivation. In the mid-1990s, about 15 percent of the working 
population was occupied in agriculture, with the proportion 
dropping slowly as the younger population left rural areas to 
seek economic opportunities elsewhere (see Rural Life, ch. 5). 



323 



Russia: A Country Study 




324 



The Economy 



Crops 

Grains are among Russia's most important crops, occupying 
more than 50 percent of cropland. Wheat is dominant in most 
grain-producing areas. Winter wheat is cultivated in the North 
Caucasus and spring wheat in the Don Basin, in the middle 
Volga region, and in southwestern Siberia. Although Khru- 
shchev expanded the cultivation of corn for livestock feed, that 
crop is only suitable for growth in the North Caucasus, and pro- 
duction levels have remained low compared with other grains. 
Barley, second to wheat in gross yield, is grown mainly for ani- 
mal feed and beer production in colder regions as far north as 
65° north latitude (the latitude of Arkhangelsk) and well into 
the highlands of southern Siberia. Production of oats, which 
once ranked third among Russia's grains, has declined as 
machines have replaced horses in farming operations. 

Legumes became a common crop in state farms in the 
1980s. Potatoes, a vital crop for food and for the production of 
vodka, are grown in colder regions between 50° and 60° north 
latitude. Sugar beet production has expanded in recent years; 
the beets are grown mainly in the rich black-earth districts of 
European Russia. Flax, also a plant tolerant of cold and poor 
soils, is Russia's most important raw material for textiles, and 
the country produced about half the world's flax crop in the 
1980s. Flax also yields linseed oil, which together with sunflow- 
ers (in the North Caucasus) and soybeans (in the Far East) is 
an important source of vegetable oil. Production of fruits and 
vegetables increased as private farms began to expand around 
1990. In the mid-1990s, the largest yields in that category were 
in cabbages, apples, tomatoes, and carrots. 

Increased production of fodder crops and expansion of pas- 
tureland have supported Russia's livestock industry, although 
economic conditions have caused cutbacks in animal holdings. 
Cattle are the most common form of livestock except in the 
drier areas, where sheep and goats dominate. The third-largest 
category is pigs, which are raised in areas of European Russia 
and the Pacific coast that offer grain, potatoes, or sugar beets 
as fodder. Only very small numbers of chickens are kept, and 
frozen chicken has become one of Russia's largest import 
items. 

Agricultural Policy 

Agricultural reform has proved to be a tough challenge for 



325 



Russia: A Country Study 

Russia during its transition to a market economy. The chal- 
lenge comes from the legacy of the Soviet period and from 
deeply imbedded cultural biases against individualism. Because 
of agriculture's vital economic role, large-scale agricultural 
reform is necessary for success in other sectors. In the mid- 
1990s, however, private initiative was not rewarded, and ineffi- 
cient input distribution and marketing structures failed to take 
advantage of agricultural assets. 

Soviet Policy 

Under Stalin the government socialized agriculture and cre- 
ated a massive bureaucracy to administer policy. Stalin's cam- 
paign of forced collectivization, which began in 1929, 
confiscated the land, machinery, livestock, and grain stores of 
the peasantry. By 1937 the government had organized approxi- 
mately 99 percent of the Soviet countryside into state-run col- 
lective farms. Under this grossly inefficient system, agricultural 
yields declined rather than increased. The situation persisted 
into the 1980s, when Soviet farmers averaged about 10 percent 
of the output of their counterparts in the United States. 

During Stalin's regime, the government assigned virtually all 
farmland to one of two basic agricultural production organiza- 
tions — state farms and collective farms. The state farm was con- 
ceived in 1918 as the ideal model for socialist agriculture. It was 
to be a large, modern enterprise directed and financed by the 
government. The work force of the state farm received wages 
and social benefits comparable to those enjoyed by industrial 
workers. By contrast, the collective farm was a self-financed 
producer cooperative that farmed parcels of land that the state 
granted to it rent-free and that paid its members according to 
their contribution of work. 

In their early stages, the two types of organization also func- 
tioned differently in the distribution of agricultural goods. 
State farms delivered their entire output to state procurement 
agencies in response to state production quotas. Collective 
farms also received quotas, but they were free to sell excess out- 
put in collective-farm markets where prices were determined 
by supply and demand. The distinction between the two types 
of farms gradually narrowed, and the government converted 
many collective farms to state farms, where the state had more 
control. 

Private plots also played a role in the Soviet agricultural sys- 
tem. The government allotted small plots to individual farming 



326 



The Economy 



households to produce food for their own use and for sale as 
an income supplement. Throughout the Soviet period, the 
productivity rates of private plots far exceeded their size. With 
only 3 percent of total sown area in the 1980s, they produced 
over a quarter of agricultural output. 

A number of factors made the Soviet collectivized system 
inefficient throughout its history. Because farmers were paid 
the same wages regardless of productivity, there was no incen- 
tive to work harder and more efficiently. Administrators who 
were unaware of the needs and capabilities of the individual 
farms decided input allocation and output levels, and the high 
degree of subsidization eliminated incentives to adopt more 
efficient production methods. 

The Gorbachev Reforms 

The Gorbachev agricultural reform program aimed to 
improve production incentives. Gorbachev sought to increase 
agricultural labor productivity by forming contract brigades 
consisting of ten to thirty farmworkers who managed a piece of 
land leased from a state or collective farm. The brigades were 
responsible for the yield of the land, which in turn determined 
their remuneration. After 1987 the government legalized fam- 
ily contract brigades and long-term leasing of land, removing 
the restrictions on the size of private agricultural plots and cut- 
ting into the state's holdings of arable land. 

Although Gorbachev's reforms increased output in the agri- 
cultural sector in 1986, they failed to address fundamental 
problems of the system, such as the government's continued 
control over the prices of agricultural commodities, the distri- 
bution of agricultural inputs, and production and investment 
decisions. In the contract brigade system, farmers still had no 
real vested interest in the farms on which they worked, and 
production suffered accordingly. In the 1980s, the Soviet 
Union went from being self-sufficient in food production to 
becoming a net food importer. 

Yeltsin 's Agricultural Policies 

The Yeltsin regime has attempted to address some of the 
fundamental reform issues of Russian agriculture. But agricul- 
tural reform has moved very slowly, causing output to decline 
steadily through the mid-1990s. Reform began in Russia shortly 
before the final collapse of the Soviet Union. In December 
1990, the Congress of People's Deputies of the Russian Repub- 



327 



Russia: A Country Study 

lie enacted a number of laws that were designed to restructure 
the agricultural sector and make it more commercially viable. 
The Law on Peasant Farms legalized private farms and allowed 
them to operate alongside state and collective farms, to hire 
labor, and to sell produce without state supervision. The same 
session of the congress passed the Law on Land Reform, which 
permitted land to be bequeathed as an inheritance from one 
generation to the next, but not to be bought or sold. The gov- 
ernment also established the State Committee for Agrarian 
Reform, whose responsibility was to oversee the transfer of 
available land to private farming. 

The main thrust of Yeltsin's agricultural reform has been 
toward reorganizing state and collective farms into more effi- 
cient, market-oriented units. A decree of December 1991 and 
its subsequent amendments provided several options to state 
and collective farmers for the future structure of their farms. 
The decree required that farmers choose either to reorganize 
into joint-stock companies, cooperatives, or individual private 
farms, or to maintain their existing structure. Under the first 
two arrangements, workers would hold shares in the farms and 
be responsible for managing the enterprises. An individual 
farmer could later decide to break from the larger unit and 
establish private ownership of his or her share of the land, as 
determined by an established procedure. 

This restructuring program has progressed slowly. Although 
95 percent of the state and collective farms underwent some 
form of reorganization, about one-third of them retained 
essentially their earlier structure. Most of the others, fearing 
the unstable conditions of market supply and demand that 
faced individual entrepreneurs, chose a form of collective own- 
ership, either as joint-stock companies or as cooperatives. The 
conservatism of Russia's farmers prompted them to preserve as 
much as possible of the inefficient but secure Soviet-era con- 
trolled relationships of supply and output. 

As of 1996, individual private farming had not assumed the 
significance in Russian agriculture that reformers and Western 
supporters had envisioned. Although the number of private 
farms increased considerably following the reforms of 1990, by 
the early 1990s the growth of farms had stalled, and by the mid- 
1990s the number of private farms actually may have dropped 
as some individuals opted to return to a form of cooperative 
enterprise or left farming entirely. By the end of 1995, Russia's 



328 





Waiting for grocery store to open in small town, Republic ofTyva 

Courtesy Eugene Zakusib 



280,000 private farms accounted for only 5 percent of the ara- 
ble land in Russia. 

A number of factors have contributed to the slow progress of 
agricultural reform. Until the mid-1990s, the state government 
continued to act as the chief marketing agent for the food sec- 
tor by establishing fixed orders for goods, thus guaranteeing 
farmers a market. The government also subsidized farms 
through guaranteed prices, which reduced the incentive of 
farmers to become efficient producers. 

Perhaps most important, effective land reform has not been 
accomplished in Russia. The original land reform law and sub- 
sequent decrees did not provide a clear definition of private 
property, and they did not prescribe landholders' rights and 
protections. The nebulous status of private landholders under 
the new legislation made farmers reluctant to take the risk of 



329 



Russia: A Country Study 

proprietorship. In March 1996, President Yeltsin issued a 
decree that allows farmers to buy and sell land. However, in 
April 1996 the State Duma, heavily influenced by the an tire- 
form KPRF and its ally, the Agrarian Party of Russia (represent- 
ing the still formidable vested interests of collective and state 
farms), passed a draft law that prohibits land sales by anyone 
but the state. Recent opposition to the new notion of private 
landownership is based in a strong traditional Russian view that 
land must be held as collective rather than individual property. 

However, in 1996 several factors were exerting pressure on 
the agricultural sector to become commercially viable. The fed- 
eral government has retreated from its role as a guaranteed 
purchaser and marketer, although some regional governments 
are stepping in to fill the role. And private markets are emerg- 
ing slowly. Increasingly, Russian agricultural production must 
compete with imported goods as the gap between domestic 
prices and world prices narrows. In addition, the fiscal position 
of the federal government has forced it to reduce subsidies to 
many sectors of the economy, including agriculture. Subsidies 
are among the targets of major budget cuts to comply with the 
standards of the IMF and other Western lenders and achieve 
macroeconomic stabilization. 

Agricultural Production 

Like the rest of the economy, the Russian agricultural sector 
has experienced a long, severe recession in the 1990s. Even 
before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the output of grains 
and other crops began to decline, and it decreased steadily 
through 1996 because of the unavailability of fertilizers and 
other inputs, bad weather, and major readjustments during the 
period of transition. In 1995 overall agricultural production 
declined 8 percent, including a drop of 5 percent in crop pro- 
duction and 11 percent in livestock production. That year Rus- 
sia suffered its worst grain harvest since 1963, with a yield of 
63.5 million tons. 

The most dramatic declines occurred in livestock produc- 
tion. Farmers reduced their holdings of animals as the price of 
grains and other inputs increased. As meat prices rose, the 
composition of the average consumer's diet included less meat 
and more starches and vegetables. Reduced demand in turn 
exacerbated the decline in livestock production. 



330 



The Economy 



Energy 

Energy plays a central role in the Russian economy because 
it drives all the other elements of the system — the industrial, 
agricultural, commercial, and government sectors. In addition, 
energy, particularly petroleum and natural gas, is the most 
important export and source of foreign exchange for the Rus- 
sian economy. Experts forecast that the energy sector will con- 
tinue to occupy this central position until Russian 
manufacturing reaches a level competitive with the West. 

Exploitation and Consumption 

Russia's self-sufficiency in fuels and power generation puts 
the country in a good position for future economic growth and 
development. But Russia is also one of the most energy-depen- 
dent countries. The International Energy Agency of the Organ- 
isation for Economic Co-operation and Development 
(OECD — see Glossary) estimated that in 1993 it took 4.46 tons 
of oil equivalent (TOE) to produce US$1,000 of Russia's GDP, 
compared with an average of 0.23 TOE to produce US$1,000 of 
GDP for the OECD member countries. 

Russia's excessive consumption of energy results from the 
Soviet system, which artificially priced energy far below the 
level of world market prices and thus subsidized it. Soviet 
energy-pricing policies disregarded resource utilization in the 
quest for higher output volumes and discouraged the adoption 
of conservation measures. Soviet planners also skewed 
resources toward the defense-related and heavy industries, 
which consume energy more intensively than other sectors of 
the economy. Until the 1980s, the national economy managed 
to survive under such policies because of the Soviet Union's 
rich endowment of natural resources. 

The problems that plagued the Russian energy sector in the 
last decades of the Soviet Union were exacerbated during the 
transition period. Since 1991 the output of all types of fuel and 
energy has declined, partly because of plummeting demand for 
energy during a time of general economic contraction. But the 
energy sectors also have suffered from the intrinsic structural 
defects of the central planning system: poor management of 
resources, underinvestment, and outdated technology and 
equipment. 

The structure of energy and fuel production began to 
change dramatically in the 1980s with the exploitation of large 



331 



Russia: A Country Study 



natural gas deposits. In the mid-1990s, natural gas accounted 
for more than half of Russia's energy consumption, a share that 
is expected to increase in the next decades. Oil accounts for 
another 20 percent, a proportion that is expected to remain 
approximately constant. Goal and other solid fuels, water 
power, and nuclear energy account for smaller shares that 
experts predict likely will decline after 2000. Despite the waste 
of fuel in the Russian economy, Russia manages to produce a 
surplus of energy for export. Exports, particularly of natural 
gas and oil, have accounted for 30 percent of Russian energy 
production, and this share is expected to hold steady. 

Russia's drive to become a market economy should help to 
alleviate some of the problems of the energy sector. Russian 
energy pricing policies have changed. Since January 1992, 
energy has been gradually deregulated, closing the gap 
between world market prices and domestic prices and forcing 
consumers to conserve. Russia is also adopting Western tech- 
nology and more efficient management techniques that will 
improve productivity in the sector. 

Oil 

Russia ranks third in the world in oil production, after Saudi 
Arabia and the United States. Estimates place proven and 
potential oil reserves at 8 to 11 billion tons. Russia's oil produc- 
tion peaked in 1987, then began a decline that continued 
through 1995. In the latter year, the yield was 741 million bar- 
rels, 13 million barrels less than the previous year. Output for 
the first quarter of 1996 was 182 million barrels. 

Wasteful Soviet oil exploration and extraction techniques 
depleted wells, which often fell far below their potential capac- 
ity. Soviet technology was not capable of exploring and extract- 
ing as deeply and efficiently as Western technology. These 
handicaps have been instrumental in Russia's plummeting oil 
production during the last two decades. In 1994 the number of 
oil wells drilled was only one-quarter the number drilled in 
1983. About two-thirds of Russia's oil comes from Siberia, 
mostly from huge fields in the northwest part of the region. 
The main European oil and gas fields are located in the Volga- 
Ural region, the North Caucasus, and the far north of the 
Republic of Komi (see fig. 9). 

Russian oil companies are vertically integrated units that 
control the entire production process from exploration to 
transmission. The largest company is Lukoil, which, according 



332 



19 



The Economy 



to some measurements, is the largest oil company in the world. 
The dominance of a few large companies has made all stages of 
petroleum exploitation and sale extremely inefficient. National 
and local government policies have discouraged individual 
retailers from establishing independent gasoline storage facili- 
ties and stations; therefore, retail gasoline likely will continue 
to be in very short supply (only 8,900 stations were operating in 
Russia in 1995). Until January 1995, government policy 
applied quotas to oil exports, and until July 1996 tariffs were 
applied to oil exports. Both policies, resulting from the gap 
between controlled domestic prices and world market prices, 
aimed at ensuring a sufficient supply of oil to meet domestic 
demand; both were lifted as the gap narrowed. 

The search for new oil deposits has been a primary force in 
Russia's foreign policy toward states to the south. Russia has 
staked its claim to the Caspian oil reserves that Western compa- 
nies are exploring in conjunction with Azerbaijani, Turkmeni- 
stani, and Kazakstani state companies. The presence of 
Western interests and the strong role being played by Iran and 
Turkey, Russia's traditional regional rivals, have complicated 
this policy, which aims to achieve maximum benefit from Rus- 
sia's position on the shore of the north Caspian. Also a source 
of international controversy is Russia's insistence that Caspian 
oil flow northward through Russian pipelines rather than west- 
ward via new lines built through Georgia and Turkey (see For- 
eign Investment in Oil and Gas, this ch.). 

Natural Gas 

Russia is also one of the world's largest natural gas produc- 
ers. Its proven reserves have been estimated at 49 billion cubic 
meters, or roughly 35 percent of the world's total. Natural gas 
has also been one of the most successful parts of the Russian 
economy. In the early 1980s, it replaced oil as the Soviet 
"growth fuel," offering cheaper extraction and transportation. 
Although output has dropped in the 1990s, the decline has not 
been as severe as that for other energy sources or the rest of the 
economy. Natural gas production peaked in 1991 at 727 mil- 
lion cubic meters, then dropped throughout the early 1990s. 
But 1995 production, 596 million cubic meters, was an increase 
from the previous year. After European gas fields in the Volga- 
Ural region dominated the industry through the 1970s, pro- 
duction shifted to giant fields in Siberia. The Urengoy and 
Yamburg fields in the West Siberia region are among the most 



335 




Figure 9. Energy Facilities, 1996 
334 



The Economy 



to some measurements, is the largest oil company in the world. 
The dominance of a few large companies has made all stages of 
petroleum exploitation and sale extremely inefficient. National 
and local government policies have discouraged individual 
retailers from establishing independent gasoline storage facili- 
ties and stations; therefore, retail gasoline likely will continue 
to be in very short supply (only 8,900 stations were operating in 
Russia in 1995). Until January 1995, government policy 
applied quotas to oil exports, and until July 1996 tariffs were 
applied to oil exports. Both policies, resulting from the gap 
between controlled domestic prices and world market prices, 
aimed at ensuring a sufficient supply of oil to meet domestic 
demand; both were lifted as the gap narrowed. 

The search for new oil deposits has been a primary force in 
Russia's foreign policy toward states to the south. Russia has 
staked its claim to the Caspian oil reserves that Western compa- 
nies are exploring in conjunction with Azerbaijani, Turkmeni- 
stan!, and Kazakstani state companies. The presence of 
Western interests and the strong role being played by Iran and 
Turkey, Russia's traditional regional rivals, have complicated 
this policy, which aims to achieve maximum benefit from Rus- 
sia's position on the shore of the north Caspian. Also a source 
of international controversy is Russia's insistence that Caspian 
oil flow northward through Russian pipelines rather than west- 
ward via new lines built through Georgia and Turkey (see For- 
eign Investment in Oil and Gas, this ch.). 

Natural Gas 

Russia is also one of the world's largest natural gas produc- 
ers. Its proven reserves have been estimated at 49 billion cubic 
meters, or roughly 35 percent of the world's total. Natural gas 
has also been one of the most successful parts of the Russian 
economy. In the early 1980s, it replaced oil as the Soviet 
"growth fuel," offering cheaper extraction and transportation. 
Although output has dropped in the 1990s, the decline has not 
been as severe as that for other energy sources or the rest of the 
economy. Natural gas production peaked in 1991 at 727 mil- 
lion cubic meters, then dropped throughout the early 1990s. 
But 1995 production, 596 million cubic meters, was an increase 
from the previous year. After European gas fields in the Volga- 
Ural region dominated the industry through the 1970s, pro- 
duction shifted to giant fields in Siberia. The Urengoy and 
Yamburg fields in the West Siberia region are among the most 



335 



Russia: A Country Study 

productive; the former is the largest field in the world. Soviet 
plans called for rapid development of new reserves in the 
Yamal Peninsula in the Arctic Ocean north of Urengoy, but 
environmental problems and infrastructure costs slowed devel- 
opment. Hasty construction and poor maintenance have 
caused chronic breakdowns and accidents in the long pipelines 
of Russia's natural gas delivery system (see Transportation, this 
ch.). 

The State Natural Gas Company (Gazprom) has a virtual 
monopoly over Russia's gas production and transmission. A ver- 
tically organized enterprise, the company has been reorga- 
nized into a joint-stock company, in which 40 percent of the 
shares remain under state control. Company employees hold 
another 15 percent, managers of the company hold 10 percent, 
and the remaining 35 percent were sold at public auction. Gaz- 
prom controls a network of regional production associations. 
Its management, which once was headed by Prime Minister 
Viktor Chernomyrdin, has been accused of corruption and tax 
evasion. 

Coal 

For more than 150 years, coal was the dominant fuel sup- 
porting Russia's industries, and many industrial centers were 
located near coal deposits. In the 1960s, oil and natural gas 
overtook coal when plentiful reserves of those fuels became 
available and the coal shafts of the European Soviet Union 
(located primarily in what is today Ukraine) were being 
exhausted. Russian coal reserves are estimated at 200 billion 
tons, an amount that experts say is more than ample for cur- 
rent usage trends. Siberia and the Far East produce about 
three-quarters of Russia's coal, with the European contribu- 
tions coming largely from the Vorkuta field (Pechora Basin) in 
Komi, the Urals, the eastern Donets Basin in the southwest, 
and the Moscow Basin. Largely untapped coal fields lie in the 
Siberian Tunguska and Lena basins. Productive fields in Sibe- 
ria are located along the Trans-Siberian Railroad, making their 
exploitation more economical. The largest operational sources 
in that region are the Kuznetsk, Kansk-Achinsk, and Che- 
remkhovo fields. Coal is one of the less important sources of 
energy because its labor-intensive extraction makes production 
much more costly than other fuels. Rossugol', the Russian coal 
company, controls coal production through regional associa- 
tions that are organized as joint-stock companies. Russian coal 



336 



The Economy 



production has declined markedly over the last decade, and 
the coal industry has suffered a long series of strikes. Coal min- 
ers, among the best paid industrial workers of the Soviet 
period, have organized strikes that have gained national atten- 
tion to protest the industry's long delays in paying wages. 
Experts predict that coal output will continue to dwindle as its 
relative usefulness in industry and domestic applications is 
reduced. In 1994 Russia produced 249 million tons of coal, and 
in 1995 the total rose to 255 million tons. Production for the 
first quarter of 1996 was 71 million tons. 

Nuclear Energy 

In 1996 some twenty-nine nuclear reactors were operating at 
nine sites: Balakovo on the northwest border of Kazakstan, 
Beloyarsk in the southern Urals, Bilibino in northeastern Sibe- 
ria (the only station east of the Urals), Kola in the far north- 
west, Kursk near the Ukrainian border, Novovoronezh on the 
Don River, St. Petersburg, Smolensk west of Moscow, and Tver' 
northwest of Moscow. Altogether these facilities accounted for 
10 percent of Russia's energy generating capacity in 1994. The 
plants are operated by regional joint-stock companies in which 
the Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom) controls 51 percent 
of the shares. The nuclear energy sector has undergone finan- 
cial problems because of government funding reductions. The 
industry has turned to selling goods related to nuclear 
energy — equipment and instruments, nuclear fuel, medical 
isotopes, and fertilizers. 

The industry's financial problems, along with the disaster 
that occurred at the Chernobyl' plant in Ukraine in 1986, have 
raised questions about nuclear safety. Western countries have 
provided financial assistance in some cases because of their 
concern about Russia's lax standards of handling nuclear mate- 
rials and the continued use of outmoded equipment. Russia's 
piecemeal environmental laws have led to indiscriminate 
dumping and burial of radioactive wastes, which are creating 
severe environmental problems. The theft of nuclear materials 
has become another source of danger emanating from Russia's 
nuclear energy program (see Environmental Conditions, ch. 3; 
The Crime Wave of the 1990s, ch. 10). 

Nevertheless, experts predict that nuclear energy probably 
will play an important role in the Russian economy if enough 
investment is available to expand existing capacity. In 1992 
Minatom announced plans to double nuclear energy capacity 



337 



Russia: A Country Study 

by 2010, but ensuing financial problems have caused a reduc- 
tion of that goal, and no new capacity has been added since the 
breakup of the Soviet Union. The International Atomic Energy 
Agency (IAEA) projects that construction of new capacity will 
not begin until after 2005, even if the investment climate is 
favorable. 

Conventional Power Generation 

Much of the conventional fuel produced in Russia is burned 
to produce electric power. The Unified Electric Power System 
operates Russia's electric power plants through seventy-two 
regional power distribution companies. The power system con- 
sists of 600 thermal generating systems, more than 100 hydro- 
electric plants, and Russia's nine nuclear plants. Of the total 
rated generating capacity of 205 gigawatts, only about 188 giga- 
watts were available as of 1996. In 1995 Russia's power plants 
generated a total of 846 million kilowatt-hours, compared with 
859 million kilowatt-hours in 1994. Generation for the first 
quarter of 1996 (normally the peak demand period of the 
year) was 268 million kilowatt-hours. 

In 1993 natural gas provided 42 percent of electricity pro- 
duction; hydroelectric plants, 19 percent; coal, 18 percent; 
nuclear power, 13 percent; and other sources such as solar and 
geothermal plants, 8 percent. Natural gas and coal are burned 
at thermoelectric plants, which produce only electricity, and ai 
cogeneration plants, which produce electricity and heat for 
urban centers. The largest hydroelectric plants are located on 
the Volga, Kama, Ob', Yenisey, and Angara rivers, where large 
reservoirs were built in massive Soviet energy projects. Ther- 
moelectric and hydroelectric plants — located in Siberia 
because of available fuels and water power — send power to 
European Russia through a system of high-voltage transmission 
lines. 

Consumption of electric power divides into the following 
categories: industrial, 61 percent; residential, 11 percent; the 
services sector, 11 percent; transportation, 9 percent; and agri- 
culture, 8 percent. Regional energy commissions control the 
price of electricity. 

Foreign Investment in Oil and Gas 

In the mid-1990s, many analysts consider the oil and gas 
industries to be the best targets for foreign investment in Rus- 
sia. The record of foreign investment in that period illustrates 



338 



The Economy 



both the potentials and the pitfalls of such ventures. Experts 
have concluded that the Russian oil and gas sector will require 
large amounts of foreign capital to improve output. According 
to some estimates, the oil sector will require US$30 to US$50 
billion in new investment just to maintain the mid-1990s level 
of production. To return production to its peak levels will 
require an estimated US$70 to US$130 billion in new invest- 
ments, which clearly would have to come from foreign sources. 
The Russian oil and gas sector also would benefit from infu- 
sions of Western technology and expertise. However, according 
to a 1995 report by Cambridge Energy Research Associates, key 
figures in the oil industry, most of whom were schooled in the 
isolated Soviet-era approach to commerce, have been indiffer- 
ent or hostile to Western management methods. 

By the end of 1994, the oil and gas sector accounted for 
about 38 percent of total foreign direct investment in Russia, 
but the total input was only about US$1.4 billion. Although 
Western companies are poised to commit large amounts of cap- 
ital for exploration, as of 1996 most foreign investment had 
gone to repairing and maintaining current facilities. Some ana- 
lysts have estimated that foreign investment in the oil and gas 
sector could reach US$70 billion by the year 2000. 

Among several United States oil companies active in Russia, 
Texaco heads a consortium in the largest project, the develop- 
ment of oil fields in the Timan-Pechora section of the Komi 
region north of the Arctic Circle. The project, under negotia- 
tion since 1989, has an estimated potential of US$45 billion in 
investment over the next fifty years. Conoco, a subsidiary of the 
DuPont de Nemours chemical firm, leads a consortium of 
United States and European firms and a Russian firm in the 
Polar Lights project to explore Siberian oil fields. Two United 
States companies, Marathon Oil and McDermott, along with 
the Japanese companies Mitsui and Mitsubishi and Britain's 
Royal Dutch Shell, are engaged in one of several projects to 
explore for oil off Sakhalin Island on the Pacific coast. The last 
two projects each could bring in as much as US$10 billion. 

Nevertheless, Russia's generally poor investment climate and 
other obstacles such as special taxes have discouraged addi- 
tional investment in gas and oil. As of mid-1996, a tax of about 
US$5 per barrel was imposed on oil exports, and a tax of about 
US$2.60 was levied per 1,000 cubic meters of natural gas 
exported. Foreign and domestic firms were also subject to roy- 
alty payments to the Government for the privilege of drilling 



339 



Russia: A Country Study 

for oil. Foreign investors have argued that reduced profit mar- 
gins are a substantial obstacle to the support of some projects. 
Some major oil investors have received tax exemptions, but 
delays in rebate payments have created additional deterrents. 

Banking and Finance 

Experts have agreed that establishing a viable financial sec- 
tor is a vital requirement for Russia to have a successful market 
economy. In the first five years of the post-Soviet era, the devel- 
opment of Russia's financial sector as an efficient distributor of 
money and credit to other parts of the economic structure has 
mirrored the ups and downs of the rest of the economy. In 
1996 some elements of the central planning system remained 
obstacles to further progress. 

The Soviet Financial System 

The financial system of the Soviet period was a rudimentary 
mechanism for state control of the economy. The government 
owned and managed the banking system. The State Bank (Go- 
sudarstvennyy bank — Gosbank) was the central bank and the 
only commercial bank. In its capacity as a central bank, Gos- 
bank handled all significant banking transactions, including 
the issuance and control of currency and credit, the manage- 
ment of gold reserves, and the oversight of transactions among 
enterprises. Enterprises were issued money and credits in 
accordance with the government's planned allocation of wages 
and its management strategy for other expenses. 

Wages were paid only in cash, and households used cash 
exclusively for making payments. Checkbooks, credit cards, 
and other alternative forms of payment were not available in 
the Soviet Union. Wage earners could keep savings deposits in 
the Savings Bank (Sberbank), where they earned low interest, 
and these funds were available to the government as a source 
of revenue. Two other banks also existed prior to 1987. The 
Construction Bank (Stroybank) provided investment credits to 
enterprises, and the Foreign Trade Bank (Vneshtorgbank) 
handled financial transactions pertaining to trade. 

In 1987 and 1988, the Gorbachev regime separated commer- 
cial banking operations from Gosbank and replaced the two 
specialized banks with three banks to provide credit to desig- 
nated sectors of the economy: the Agro-Industrial Bank (Agro- 
prombank), the Industry and Construction Bank (Promstroy- 



340 



The Economy 



bank), and the Social Investment Bank (Zhilsotsbank), which 
managed credits for the social welfare sector. The Soviet econ- 
omy also had state-controlled insurance firms, but other forms 
of finance such as stocks and bonds did not exist. 

The Financial Sector in the 1990s 

In the 1990s, Russia's financial sector, particularly its bank- 
ing system, has been one of the fastest changing elements of 
the economy. Although changes have moved clearly in the 
direction of market principles, in the mid-1990s much addi- 
tional reform was necessary to achieve stability. 

Reform of the Banking System 

The Russian banking system has developed from the central- 
ized system of the Soviet period into a two-tier system, includ- 
ing a central bank and commercial banks, that is the standard 
structure in market-based economies. The Russian Central 
Bank (RCB) assumed the functions of Gosbank in November 
1991, and Gosbank was eliminated when the Soviet Union dis- 
solved one month later. In its first years of existence, the RCB 
functioned under the guidelines of the 1977 Soviet constitu- 
tion and Russian laws passed in 1990, which made the bank 
essentially an arm of the Russian parliament, whose members 
manipulated bank policy to help favored enterprises. 

Russia's 1993 constitution gave the RCB more autonomy. 
However, the president has substantial influence on bank poli- 
cies through his power to appoint the bank chairman, who in 
turn wields extensive authority over bank operations and pol- 
icy. (The nomination is subject to the approval of the State 
Duma.) 

Viktor Gerashchenko, a former Gosbank chairman, was the 
first chairman of the RCB. In late 1994, he resigned under 
pressure from President Yeltsin after the so-called Black Tues- 
day plunge of the ruble's value on exchange markets (see Mon- 
etary and Fiscal Policies, this ch.). Yeltsin named Tat'yana 
Paramonova to replace Gerashchenko, but she remained act- 
ing chairman throughout her tenure because the State Duma 
refused to approve her appointment. Powerful Duma members 
opposed Paramonova's policy of restricting credits to favored 
industrial sectors. In November 1995, the Duma approved 
Yeltsin's nomination of Sergey Dubinin to replace State Para- 
monova; Dubinin remained in that position through the end 
of Yeltsin's first term as president in mid-1996. 



341 



Russia: A Country Study 



The Law on the Central Bank, enacted in April 1995, pro- 
vides the statutory authority for the RCB. Under the law, the 
RCB is responsible for controlling the country's money supply, 
monitoring transactions among banks, implementing the fed- 
eral budget and servicing Russia's foreign debt, monitoring the 
foreign-exchange rate of the ruble, implementing Russian 
exchange-rate policies, maintaining foreign currency reserves 
and gold reserves, licensing commercial banks, and regulating 
and supervising commercial banks. 

The RCB has had the greatest impact on Russia's economy 
through its role in monetary policy. The RCB controls the 
money supply by lending funds to commercial banks and by 
establishing their reserve requirements. For several years after 
its establishment, the RCB issued direct credits to enterprises 
and to the agricultural sector at subsidized rates. Such credits 
were directed via commercial banks to politically influential 
sectors: agriculture, the industrial and energy enterprises of 
the northern regions, the energy sector in general, and other 
large, state-run enterprises. 

In the early years, the RCB also financed state budget deficits 
by issuing credits to cover Government expenditures. The 
availability of such credits played a central role in the high 
inflation that the Russian economy endured between 1991 and 
1994. In 1995 new legislation and regulations reduced this type 
of credit by prohibiting the use of credit to finance state bud- 
get deficits, and recent RCB chairmen have raised discount 
rates for RCB borrowing by commercial banks. Such restric- 
tions have been heavily influenced by requirements of the IMF 
to maintain strict fiscal and monetary standards to be eligible 
for international financial assistance (see Foreign Debt, this 
ch.). 

Initially, the RCB's regulation of commercial banks also was 
lax because the banking sector grew rapidly as the centralized 
economy collapsed and because Russia had no experience in 
establishing a market-based system. In the early and mid-1990s, 
the failure of regulation led to a plethora of new commercial 
banks, most of which were of dubious quality. 

In the mid-1990s, the World Bank (see Glossary) assisted the 
Russian government in establishing a core of large banks, 
called international standard banks, that met the standards of 
the Bank for International Settlements (BIS — see Glossary). 
The new banks must conform to strict standards for the size 
and interest rates of loans; the size of a bank's capital base; the 



342 



The Economy 



volume of loan reserves that banks must maintain; and the 
scrutiny under which banking activities will be monitored. The 
International Standard Bank program anticipates that the core 
of banks that meet its requirements will grow until the entire 
banking system conforms to the BIS criteria. 

Meanwhile, plans called for the RCB to remain the founda- 
tion of the Russian banking system. Its success will depend 
greatly on its retaining as much independence as possible from 
both the executive and the legislative branches of government 
and on bank officials' ability to maintain credible monetary 
policies. 

Commercial Banks 

By the end of 1995, Russia had nearly 3,000 commercial 
banks. However, most of these banks were small and had little 
capitalization. A large portion of them are financially linked to 
companies and act exclusively as conduits of subsidized credits 
to these enterprises. The financial health of such institutions is 
highly questionable, and experts forecast that many of them 
will merge into larger, more viable institutions or go bankrupt 
as the RCB continues to tighten its requirements and as the 
role of cheap credits diminishes. 

The commercial banking system has a core of large, viable 
banks that have attained financial credibility and that experts 
expect to remain in operation under any foreseeable economic 
conditions. The former state-controlled specialized banks of 
the Soviet system form the foundation of the current commer- 
cial banking system, including the six largest commercial banks 
in Russia. In 1991 three of the banks — the Agroprombank 
(subsequently renamed Rossel'bank), the Promstroybank, and 
the Zhilsotsbank (reorganized into Mosbusinessbank) — were 
reorganized into joint-stock companies and became indepen- 
dent commercial operations, forming the foundation of the 
commercial banking system. 

The Soviet-era Savings Bank (Sberbank) was reorganized as 
the Sberbank of Russia, with the RCB holding controlling 
shares. In 1996 the Sberbank held between 60 and 70 percent 
of Russians' total household savings; that figure decreased from 
90 percent in 1991 as other commercial banks began to pro- 
vide competition. The Foreign Trade Bank (Rosvneshtorg- 
bank) also remains state-controlled, and it continues to handle 
most foreign transactions, although by the mid-1990s it 
received competition from newer, privately owned banks. The 



343 



Russia: A Country Study 

Moscow International Bank handles business between the large 
Russian banks and Western banks. Sberbank and Rossel'bank 
have systems of nationwide branches. 

The types and quality of services that the Russian banking 
system offers to the public are still rudimentary according to 
the standards of Western industrialized countries. They are 
unable to offer diverse and efficient customer services because 
the Soviet Union had no retail banking tradition and because 
Russia lacks the sophisticated infrastructure, especially high- 
speed telecommunications and trained staffs, on which mod- 
ern Western financial institutions depend. 

Most of the commercial banks offer their customers savings 
deposit accounts, and the more established banks provide for- 
eign-exchange services, investment services, and corporate ser- 
vices. Bank checks are still rarely used in Russia because check 
clearance is a long process. Some banks offer debit cards that 
allow customers to have payments for goods and services 
deducted directly from their bank balances. Some banks also 
offer credit cards to customers with impeccable credit ratings. 
The continued predominance of cash transactions has slowed 
the rate of Russia's commerce. 

Although foreign banks have played a larger role in the Rus- 
sian economy in the mid-1990s, that role has met substantial 
resistance from nationalist factions. In early 1996, the State 
Duma passed a statute prohibiting the RCB from licensing for- 
eign banks that did not have operations in Russia before 
November 1993. However, opponents of such a policy have 
pointed out that efforts to protect the fledgling domestic bank- 
ing sector from foreign competition also deny access to West- 
ern financial techniques that eventually would improve the 
competitiveness of Russian banks. 

Other Financial Institutions 

A Russian securities market has evolved with the rest of the 
economy. When the first Russian stock market was established 
in 1991, few private companies existed to offer shares, so trad- 
ing activity was quite low. The securities market got a large 
boost from the Russian government's privatization campaign. 
Shares in privatized firms were issued, and then a secondary 
market emerged for the privatization vouchers that the govern- 
ment issued to each citizen (see Privatization, this ch.). As the 
first phase of the privatization program ended and companies' 



344 



The Economy 



capital requirements rose, an efficient securities market 
became increasingly important. 

Russian laws and regulations of the stock market and other 
elements of the securities market have not kept pace with the 
growth in the industry, fostering irregularities in the market. 
Among the most infamous was the operation of the MMM 
investment company, which developed into a pyramid scheme 
guaranteeing investors very high returns on their investments. 
A number of Russian small investors, whose savings had been 
eroded severely by inflation, were attracted to the scheme and 
eventually lost large sums of money. The head of MMM, Sergey 
Mavrodi, was arrested and jailed on tax fraud, but the MMM 
case underlined the lack of Western-style commercial laws in 
the Russian legal system. The Russian securities market also 
lacks a modern communications infrastructure, so registration 
and reporting of financial transactions are very slow. 

In 1993 the Government added a new element to the securi- 
ties market by issuing treasury bonds to help finance its budget 
deficits. In addition, Russian citizens are able to buy and sell 
rubles for foreign currency at selected banks. The exchange 
rate is established through weekly auctions on the Moscow 
International Currency Exchange (MICEX). 

Insurance remains a small part of the Russian financial mar- 
ket. In 1996 approximately 200 insurance companies were 
operating in Russia, including the privatized versions of former 
Soviet state insurance companies. According to experts, Rus- 
sia's relatively new financial institutions are likely to face a long 
period of adjustment as weaker banks close or merge with 
stronger banks, and a regulatory framework must be developed 
to ensure public confidence in the banking system and enable 
banks to offer reliable support in the development of private 
enterprise — a role that has expanded rapidly in the first five 
post-Soviet years. Other aspects of the financial system, such as 
securities markets, also lack the degree of standardized regula- 
tion required for large-scale domestic participation. However, 
as the private sector's role in the national economy grows and 
as Russia develops needed regulations and infrastructure, the 
securities markets and other nonbank financial institutions are 
expected to follow the banks as important elements of the 
economy. 

Taxation 

Throughout the first half of the 1990s, international finan- 



345 



Russia: A Country Study 

cial institutions warned Russia that major adjustments were 
needed in the structure and the administration of the coun- 
try's tax-collection system. However, in 1996 few meaningful 
changes had emerged. Tax reforms until that time had empha- 
sized revenue from income, consumption, and trade, with the 
value-added tax (VAT — see Glossary), corporate profits taxes, 
and personal income taxes accounting for 60 to 70 percent of 
total revenue (see table 16, Appendix). Beginning in 1993, 
experts have pointed to changes in the bases and rates of the 
profit tax and the VAT as a major cause of declining revenues. 
Between 1993 and 1994, the ratio of taxes collected to GDP 
declined from 41 percent to 36 percent, although the percent- 
age of GDP paid in taxes already was lower in Russia than in 
any of the Western market economies. In the first quarter of 
1996, only 56 percent of planned tax revenue was realized. 

The system in place in 1996 taxed the profits of enterprises 
heavily, especially in comparison with the tax burden of per- 
sonal income. In 1993 business profit taxes were three to seven 
times higher than in Western economies, and personal income 
taxes were two to four times lower. That emphasis was not con- 
ducive to expanding investment, and many non-wage sources 
of income were not captured by personal income tax stan- 
dards. According to a 1996 estimate, Russians kept US$30 bil- 
lion to US$60 billion in foreign banks to avoid taxation. 

The VAT, which is levied on imported and domestic goods, is 
set at 21.5 percent for most purchases and 10 percent for a 
specified list of foods. Administration of that tax is complicated 
by uneven compliance and accounting rules that do not define 
clearly the amounts to be classified as value added. Taxation on 
the extraction and sale of natural resources is a major revenue 
source, but the current system yields disproportionately little 
revenue from the energy sector, especially the natural gas 
industry. Excise taxes are levied on merchandise of both 
domestic and foreign origin. The tax on imported luxury items 
ranges from 10 to 400 percent, and the rate on imports has 
been kept higher than for domestic products in order to pro- 
tect domestic industries. 

Taxes on trade are a major revenue source. In the mid- 
1990s, export taxes became a more important source of reve- 
nue as other types of trade control were eliminated. Frequent 
changes in the tariff schedule for imported goods have led to 
confusion among importers. The average tariff rate in mid- 



346 



The Economy 



1995 was 17 percent, but a reduction of maximum rates was 
announced for the medium term. 

Russia's taxation agency is the State Taxation Service (STS), 
which was established to administer the new market-based tax 
system installed in 1991 and 1992. Although in the mid-1990s 
its staff of 162,000 employees was much larger than tax agen- 
cies in Western countries, the STS has been hampered by poor 
organization, inadequate automation, and an untrained staff. 
Training and reorganization programs were announced in 
1995, and some streamlining has resulted in separating the 
roles of various levels of government, identification of tax-eligi- 
ble individuals and corporations, and application of penalties 
for tax evasion and tax arrears. 

Experts have identified the most serious defect of the tax 
administration system as the ad hoc granting of tax exemp- 
tions, which distorts the overall revenue system and under- 
mines the authority of administrators. The most problematic 
examples of this practice are exemptions granted to agricul- 
tural producers and the oil and natural gas industries. 

The Labor Force 

Literacy and education levels among the Russian population 
(148 million in 1996) are relatively high, largely because the 
Soviet system placed great emphasis on education (see The 
Soviet Heritage, ch. 5). Some 92 percent of the Russian people 
have completed at least secondary school, and 11 percent have 
completed some form of higher education (university and 
above). In 1995 about 57 percent of the Russian population 
was of working age, which the government defined as between 
the ages of sixteen and fifty-five for women and between the 
ages of sixteen and sixty for men, and 20 percent had passed 
working age. Women make up more than half the work force. 

Although size, age, and education would seem to place the 
Russian labor force in a good position to participate in devel- 
oping a modern, industrialized economy, it is not clear that the 
skills that Russian workers attained during the Soviet period 
are those required for a market economy. In 1994 the construc- 
tion, industry, and agriculture sectors employed 53.5 percent 
of the work force, and the services sector employed 37 percent, 
a distribution typical of developing economies. By contrast, 67 
percent of the United States labor force is in the services sector, 
and 22 percent is in agriculture, industry, and construction, a 
configuration typical of modern industrialized market econo- 



347 



Russia: A Country Study 

mies. The Russian pattern reflects the emphasis that Soviet eco- 
nomic planners placed on the nonservice sectors. Even among 
the highly skilled labor force, the Soviet economy (and the 
national education system as a whole) skewed training toward 
the sciences, mathematics, and engineering and gave little 
attention to education in management and entrepreneurship. 
This pattern of work training and general education has con- 
tinued in the 1990s; according to experts, its continued pres- 
ence indicates that the economy may not be able to depend on 
younger workers to expand the fund of service-sector skills 
needed for a modern market economy. In any case, as the Rus- 
sian economy progresses toward a market structure, middle- 
aged and older workers will increasingly find themselves play- 
ing a marginal role. 

The living standards of Russia's workers have been eroded by 
two factors. First, the severe depression of the country's 
extended economic transition has left a large share of the work 
force either unemployed, underemployed, or receiving 
reduced wages. Second, labor lacks an effective organization to 
protect its interests. Neither trade unions from the Soviet era 
nor new, independent organizations have provided effective, 
united representation. As of mid-1996, negative conditions had 
not yielded the large-scale unrest that many experts had pre- 
dicted in the working class. 

Unemployment 

The growth of unemployment has been the bane of many of 
the Central and East European countries in the transition from 
centrally planned to market economies. Russia's unemploy- 
ment rate has been hard to measure accurately because many 
firms unofficially furlough workers but leave them on company 
rolls. This practice is a vestige of the paternalistic Soviet era, 
when the presence of workers in an enterprise often had no 
relation to that enterprise's actual production. Many of these 
furloughed workers find gainful employment in the private sec- 
tor, where wages often go unreported. Such a system results in 
a haphazard, inefficient allocation of the labor force. 

Western and Russian analysts have relied on International 
Labour Organisation measurements, which indicate that at the 
end of 1995, Russian unemployment had reached 8.2 percent 
(see table 17, Appendix). The Russian journal Ekonomika i 
zhizn' estimated the figure at 8.6 percent, or 6.3 million people, 
for the first quarter of 1996. Although the last figure still is 



348 



The Economy 



below the unemployment rates of Poland and some other 
countries in transition, the full extent of unemployment has 
been masked by extended subsidies that delayed the shutdown 
of large Russian enterprises. In 1995 nearly half of plant direc- 
tors surveyed said that they had more workers than they 
needed. 

Unemployment varies considerably according to region. 
Moscow's unemployment rate, the lowest in Russia, was 0.6 per- 
cent in March 1996. The Republic of Ingushetia, which also has 
had the highest immigration rate because of its proximity to 
Chechnya, reported a rate of 23.5 percent in December 1995. 
In March 1996, Ivanovo, a textile center east of Moscow, had a 
rate of 13 percent, and the Republic of Udmurtia, a center of 
the struggling military-industrial complex, reported 9.4 per- 
cent (see The Defense Industry, ch. 9). At that time, women 
constituted 62 percent of Russia's officially unemployed, and 
37 percent of the total were people below the age of thirty. 

The Federal Employment Service (Federal'naya sluzhba zan- 
yatosti — FSZ), the agency in charge of issuing unemployment 
benefits and placing unemployed workers, had only 3.7 per- 
cent of the working population registered for benefits in 
March 1996; many jobless workers do not register because ben- 
efits are so small (averaging US$22 per month in 1995) and 
because, after the guaranteed employment of the Soviet era, 
joblessness entails a significant stigma for many Russians. How- 
ever, as the average term of unemployment grew from six to 
eight months between 1994 and 1995, more workers partici- 
pated in FSZ programs. In 1995 the service placed an estimated 
1.7 million workers in new jobs. That year, 9.8 million workers 
left positions and 8.7 million were hired, and the majority of 
those who left did so voluntarily — many because wages were 
not paid — rather than because of dismissal. Shortages exist in 
some types of skilled labor, and some companies actively 
recruit workers. 

Wages 

By 1995 delays in wage payment had become a chronic prob- 
lem even in profitable Russian enterprises. In many cases, 
enterprises simply passed along the burden of late payments of 
state subsidies and customer debts. At the end of 1995, the Gov- 
ernment owed a total of US$112 billion of subsidies, of which 
about 27 percent were more than three months overdue. Most 
of its debt was to the military and energy sectors. Through 1995 



349 



Russia: A Country Study 

an average of 19 percent of wages were paid late, and in Janu- 
ary 1996 a total of US$2.1 billion was overdue in agriculture, 
construction, industry, and transportation. The State Commit- 
tee for Statistics (Goskomstat) began keeping separate statistics 
for wages formally paid and those actually delivered. The pay- 
ment record of privatized enterprises was worse than that of 
state enterprises, and in many cases workers were paid in mer- 
chandise rather than in cash. In early 1996, the average rates of 
overdue payment were 62 percent in ferrous metallurgy, 86 
percent in oil extraction, and 22 percent in food processing. 

In his presidential campaign, Yeltsin promised to abolish 
state-sector wage arrears and to encourage improvement in the 
private sector. By squeezing the national budget, Yeltsin 
achieved temporary results in the state sector, but his promise 
had no effect on other enterprises. Officials proposed several 
programs to raise average wages and streamline the inefficient 
system by which wages are delivered, but no meaningful reform 
had been achieved by mid-1996. In July 1996, coal strikes in the 
Far East, southwestern Russia, southern Siberia, and the Urals 
threatened a nationwide shutdown in response to continued 
payment failures in that industry 

Manufacturing 

Beginning in 1921, Lenin's Soviet government made indus- 
trial modernization a priority. But it was under Stalin that the 
system of central planning was fully developed and the industri- 
alization of the Russian Republic reached its peak. Throughout 
the Stalin period, investment resources were directed into 
heavy manufacturing at the expense of consumer or light 
industry 

During the later Soviet period, economic reformers such as 
Nikita Khrushchev attempted to shift some resources to the 
consumer industries, but the emphasis eventually shifted back 
to heavy and military industries. This emphasis was especially 
strong while the Soviet Union was building its military base 
during the Cold War. In the 1970s, manufacturing productivity 
declined. As part of his perestroika program in the late 1980s, 
Gorbachev redirected resources to consumer goods, but the 
effort proved insufficient to forestall the decay of the manufac- 
turing sector. 

In the 1990s, Russia urgently needed a revival of the manu- 
facturing sector to provide employment and steer the restruc- 
turing of industrial priorities away from the impractical Soviet 



350 



The Economy 



emphasis on subsidized heavy industry and the military-indus- 
trial complex (MIC). Although a substantial share of Russia's 
MIC enterprises underwent full or partial conversion to civilian 
production and most manufacturers were partially or fully 
privatized, manufacturing output continued a general decline 
in the mid-1990s (see table 18, Appendix). This trend had 
slowed by 1995, when the decrease in total industrial produc- 
tion was 4 percent compared with 1994; the 1994 total had 
been 23 percent below that of 1993. 

Ferrous Metallurgy 

The Soviet Union's ferrous metallurgy industry was a show- 
piece of centralized planning of heavy industry. The fast-grow- 
ing industry, vital in supplying other heavy industries with 
semifinished inputs, led the world in output in the 1970s and 
the 1980s. Beginning in the mid-1980s, however, ferrous metal- 
lurgy did not keep pace with the demands of domestic industry 
and foreign markets for more sophisticated and stronger metal 
materials. Many older plants with outmoded technology 
remained in full production; Soviet plans called for refitting 
the industry in the 1990s, but Russia's resources have not been 
sufficient for such a massive project. 

In 1994 the ferrous and nonferrous metallurgical industries 
accounted for about 16 percent of industrial output. In 1996 
more than 80 percent of Russia's steel output came from eight 
plants, although about 100 plants were in operation. Among 
the industry's most important products are pipe, pig iron, 
smelted steel, finished rolled metal, and shaped section steel. 
The four largest steel enterprises are the Novolipetsk and 
Cherepovets metallurgical plants, located southeast and north 
of Moscow, respectively, and the Magnitogorsk and Nizhniy 
Tagil metallurgical combines, located in the Ural industrial 
region. In 1995 the Cherepovets plant was re-formed as the 
Severstal' (Northern Steel) Joint-Stock Company. In the mid- 
1990s, more than half of Russia's steel production came from 
the outmoded open-hearth furnace process; the more modern 
continuous casting method accounted for only 24 percent of 
output. 

In the first half of the 1990s, the steel industry was hit espe- 
cially hard by Russia's overall economic decline, which caused 
domestic consumption to drop sharply; by 1996 only 50 to 60 
percent of capacity was in use. Between 1991 and 1994, output 
of rolled steel dropped from 55.1 million tons to 35.8 millions 



351 



Russia: A Country Study 

tons. Foreign sales were especially important as the only source 
of hard currency for some enterprises, accounting for as much 
as 60 percent of output in some cases. In 1995 Russian exports 
increased by 30 percent, making Russia the second largest 
exporter of ferrous metals in the world. The profitability of 
such sales dropped substantially between 1994 and 1996, how- 
ever. Much of the steel industry's domestic business was pay- 
ment in kind to input suppliers and railroads. Production costs 
are raised by the prices of such domestic inputs as coal and 
iron ore and transportation, which averaged at or above world 
levels in 1996. Another major cost to the ferrous metallurgy 
sector is social support programs for workers. Those costs in 
turn raise domestic metal prices above international levels. 

Nonferrous Metallurgy 

The Noril'sk Nickel Joint-Stock Company dominates Russia's 
nonferrous metallurgy industries. It controls nearly all of the 
country's aluminum and nickel production and 60 percent of 
copper production. The largest operations in the industry are 
Noril'sk Nickel in northwestern Siberia and Bratsk Aluminum, 
Krasnoyarsk Aluminum, and Sayan Aluminum in south-central 
Siberia. More than 90 percent of Russia's aluminum comes 
from six smelters. Some smelters have been privatized and 
export their semifinished products. Inputs, especially alumina 
(of which Russia has little), became much more expensive in 
the mid-1990s, as did transportation and electricity costs. At the 
same time, export revenues fell. 

The Automotive Industry 

In 1993 Russia's automotive industry produced 956,000 pas- 
senger automobiles, a decrease from the 1991 figure of 
1,030,000 automobiles. During the Soviet period, the industry 
had gained a reputation for extremely slow production of very 
unreliable vehicles. In the mid-1990s, the plant rated most effi- 
cient, the Volga Automotive Plant (Avtovaz) at Tol'yatti, 
required about thirty times as long to assemble an automobile 
as the leading plants in Japan. All Russian vehicle plants oper- 
ated at far below capacity, with outmoded machinery and 
bloated work forces. Avtovaz, the most productive plant, oper- 
ated at about 70 percent of capacity, and the Gor'kiy Automo- 
tive Plant (GAZ) in Nizhniy Novgorod was the only other major 
plant operating above 30 percent in 1995. The two main truck 
manufacturers, the Likhachev Automotive Plant (ZIL) in Mos- 



352 



New "American car" 
dealership, Moscow 
Courtesy Michael E. Samojeden 



cow and the Kama Automotive Plant (KamAZ) in Naberezh- 
nyye Chelny, have suffered especially from reductions in orders 
by their main customers — the armed forces and collective 
farms. GAZ has successfully marketed a light truck, of which it 
sold 75,000 in 1995, mainly to small businesses. The traditional 
Soviet truck was a heavy diesel model with limited service life. 

Although demand for passenger automobiles has increased 
substantially in Russia over the last twenty-five years, output has 
not responded even in the post-Soviet period. In 1994 only 
eighty-four autos were registered per 1,000 people. In the mid- 
1990s, all automobile plants retained the Soviet style of organi- 
zation, which is incapable of self-financing or effective market- 
ing. The lack of post-Soviet government subsidies has placed 
most enterprises in danger of extinction. Some Russian enter- 
prises have proposed joint ventures with Western firms, but in 
many cases the Russian partners lack funding for such ven- 
tures. Meanwhile, foreign imports further endanger the indus- 
try: in 1994 only 65,000 automobiles were imported legally, but 
another 250,000 to 500,000 entered Russia illegally. Therefore, 
most new cars in Russian cities are foreign. (In 1996 govern- 
ment vehicles were exclusively Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Saab, or 
Volvo). Exports of Russian passenger cars declined in the early 
1990s. 



353 



Russia: A Country Study 

Machine Building 

In the Soviet period, the machine-building industry was at 
the center of the industrial modernization programs that 
required a steady supply of capital equipment to respond to 
new demands. However, the inefficient organization of indus- 
trial planning caused bottlenecks in crucial programs and gen- 
erally unreliable performance. The industry is concentrated in 
the European part of Russia, with major facilities in Moscow, St. 
Petersburg, Nizhniy Novgorod, and the Ural industrial region. 
(Russian machine building includes the automotive, construc- 
tion equipment, and aviation industries as well as the tractor, 
electrical equipment, instrument making, consumer appliance, 
and machine industries.) 

Between 1985 and 1995, production of most categories of 
machines decreased significantly, mainly because of declining 
domestic orders. For example, by 1992 production of metal- 
cutting machines had dropped by 20 percent, washing 
machines by 47 percent, turbines by 36 percent, and tractors by 
45 percent. In 1993 production of about one-third of sixty-two 
major categories of products declined by at least 50 percent. In 
1995 production for the entire machine-building complex was 
about 4 percent below the 1994 level. 

Light Industry 

The most important branch of light industry is cotton tex- 
tiles, which has production centers in Ivanovo, Kostroma, Yaro- 
slavl', and about two dozen smaller cities between the Volga 
and Oka rivers east of Moscow. The economic slump of the 
1990s had a dramatic effect on textile production and other 
light industries. In 1995 Russia's light industry suffered the 
sharpest drop in production of all economic sectors, slumping 
by an estimated 25 to 30 percent compared with the previous 
year. Prices for light-industry goods increased by an average of 
2.9 times in 1995 after having increased by 5.6 times in 1994. 

Unemployment in Russia's textile production centers has 
been among the highest in the country. In early 1996, an esti- 
mated 70 percent of workers in the industry were on furlough 
or working part-time. The chief cause is the Russian consum- 
ers' decline in personal income, hence in demand. In the mid- 
1990s, consumers purchased most of their textile products at 
flea markets, which offered both a wider variety of merchan- 
dise and cheaper prices than most stores. By the end of 1995, 



354 



The Economy 



orders for all types of light-industrial production were 48 per- 
cent of the average for the previous years. Production declined 
by 20 percent in fabrics, 21 percent in leather shoes, and 44 
percent in knitted goods, but stocks of finished products grew 
because demand decreased at a faster rate. 

The high price of cotton also has hampered the textile 
industry, which had been accustomed to paying low prices for 
its raw material when the major suppliers in Central Asia were 
part of the Soviet economic system. Although their cotton is 
not of high quality, Central Asian sellers now charge world mar- 
ket prices. (Cotton from the "far abroad," outside the former 
Soviet Union, is even more expensive, however.) In 1996 indus- 
try experts expect some improvement because of expanding 
export markets in Europe and new investment in light industry 
by Russia's banks. They also expect an increase in domestic 
shoe manufacturing in the 1990s because the high import 
duties on foreign shoes make them twice as expensive as Rus- 
sian shoes — although in 1996 some 65 percent of shoes sold in 
Russia were imported. The former member countries of the 
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon — see Glos- 
sary) were the chief source of such goods. 

Chemicals 

The centers of the chemical industry traditionally have been 
areas where critical raw materials and allied industries were 
available. Before 1960 plants were near mineral deposits, 
potato farms, coking coal, and nonferrous metallurgy plants. 
When oil and natural gas became prime raw materials for 
chemical production, plants were built near the Volga-Ural and 
North Caucasus gas and oil fields or along pipelines. In the 
1980s, major plants were built at Omsk, Tobol'sk, Urengoy, and 
Surgut in the western Siberia oil region and at Ufa and Nizh- 
nekamsk in the Volga-Ural region. In the same period, the gov- 
ernment gave strong investment and research support to 
chemical production because of its importance to the rest of 
heavy industry. 

The major divisions of the chemical industry are paints and 
varnishes, rubber and asbestos products, synthetic tar and plas- 
tic products, mined chemical products, household chemicals 
and washing compounds, mineral fertilizers, chemical fibers 
and filaments, and paper and pulp. In the 1990s, output has 
decreased in all of those areas. Among representative products, 
between 1985 and the early 1990s production of mineral fertil- 



355 



Russia: A Country Study 

izers dropped by 29 percent, agricultural pesticides by 74 per- 
cent, industrial carbon by 28 percent, sulfuric acid by 19 
percent, synthetic tars and plastics by 16 percent, paints and 
varnishes by 43 percent, household soaps by 25 percent, and 
caustic soda by 15 percent. 

Based on Russia's huge supply of timber, a substantial lum- 
ber-processing and pulp industry developed in the Soviet 
period as a subsidiary of the chemical industry In 1996 Russia's 
largest pulp and paper enterprises were at Kondopoga near the 
Finnish border, Bratsk west of Lake Baikal, Syktyvkar in the 
Republic of Komi, and Kotlas southeast of Arkhangelsk. Most 
pulp and paper companies do not own timber resources, but 
timber suppliers, who lease timberland from the state, gener- 
ally sell raw materials at below world prices, giving Russian 
manufacturers a competitive advantage. Some mergers have 
occurred between suppliers and manufacturing operations. 

In the early 1990s, production of raw timber dropped by 
about 25 percent, mainly because of equipment depletion, lack 
of credit, higher railroad transport fees, and a drop in con- 
struction of lumber roads. In 1993 production of raw timber 
was 450,000 cubic meters, 75 percent of the 1992 total; produc- 
tion of commercial cellulose was 79 percent of the previous 
year's total; and of cardboard, 73 percent (see Environmental 
Conditions, ch. 3). 

Transportation and Telecommunications 

As with the rest of the economy, the transportation and tele- 
communications infrastructures of the Russian economy con- 
tinue to bear the imprint of Soviet central planning. CPSU 
priorities shaped those systems, and they are generally inappro- 
priate to serve the needs of a market economy. Many analysts 
contend that inferior transportation and communications con- 
stitute a major impediment to Russian economic growth. 

Transportation 

The transportation system during the Soviet period was 
organized in the form of vertically integrated monopolies con- 
trolled by the central government. Thus, for example, the same 
administrative agency owned and operated the airports, air- 
lines, and enterprises that manufactured aircraft. The infra- 
structure eroded seriously in the late Soviet period and 



356 



The Economy 



requires much modernization and reform, for which Russia 
relies heavily on foreign investment and aid. 

Roads 

Roads were one of the least-used forms of transportation in 
the Soviet Union, a characteristic that has continued in the 
Russian Federation. Soviet industry placed little emphasis on 
the production of automobiles and other modes of personal 
transport, and the privately owned vehicle was a relatively rare 
phenomenon; therefore, the demand for road construction 
was small. The dominance of the railroads for cargo transport 
also constrained the demand for the construction of roads. In 
1995 Russia had 934,000 kilometers of roads, compared with 
6.3 million kilometers in the United States (see fig. 10). Of Rus- 
sia's total, 209,000 kilometers were unpaved, and 445,000 kilo- 
meters were not available for public use because they served 
specific industries or farms. 

The World Bank has estimated that in twenty years the 
demands of Russia's new economy will increase the road sys- 
tem's share of transportation to 41 percent from its 1992 level 
of 13 percent. However, in 1992 some 38 percent of Russia's 
highway system required rehabilitation or reconstruction, and 
another 25 percent required repaving. Many major bridges also 
required large-scale repair in the mid-1990s. 

Railroads 

Railroads are the dominant mode of transportation. In 1995 
Russia had some 154,000 kilometers of railroads, 26 percent of 
which were electrified, but 67,000 kilometers of that total 
served specific industries and were not available for general use 
(see fig. 11). The entire system is 1.52-meter gauge. In 1993 
railroads accounted for 1,608 billion ton-kilometers of cargo 
traffic, compared with the 26 billion ton-kilometers provided 
by trucks. The prominence of railroads is the result of several 
factors: the vast distances that need to be covered; the pen- 
chant of Soviet economic planners for locating manufacturing 
facilities in politically expedient areas rather than where raw 
materials and other inputs were available; and the conditions 
for granting state fuel subsidies, which provided no incentives 
to break up cargo transportation into shorter-haul operations 
that could be covered by road. Cargo traffic is the predominant 
use of railroads, in contrast to the emphasis on passenger traf- 
fic in West European railroad systems (see table 19; table 20, 



359 




Figure 10. Major Roads, 1996 
358 



The Economy 



requires much modernization and reform, for which Russia 
relies heavily on foreign investment and aid. 

Roads 

Roads were one of the least-used forms of transportation in 
the Soviet Union, a characteristic that has continued in the 
Russian Federation. Soviet industry placed little emphasis on 
the production of automobiles and other modes of personal 
transport, and the privately owned vehicle was a relatively rare 
phenomenon; therefore, the demand for road construction 
was small. The dominance of the railroads for cargo transport 
also constrained the demand for the construction of roads. In 
1995 Russia had 934,000 kilometers of roads, compared with 
6.3 million kilometers in the United States (see fig. 10). Of Rus- 
sia's total, 209,000 kilometers were unpaved, and 445,000 kilo- 
meters were not available for public use because they served 
specific industries or farms. 

The World Bank has estimated that in twenty years the 
demands of Russia's new economy will increase the road sys- 
tem's share of transportation to 41 percent from its 1992 level 
of 13 percent. However, in 1992 some 38 percent of Russia's 
highway system required rehabilitation or reconstruction, and 
another 25 percent required repaving. Many major bridges also 
required large-scale repair in the mid-1990s. 

Railroads 

Railroads are the dominant mode of transportation. In 1995 
Russia had some 154,000 kilometers of railroads, 26 percent of 
which were electrified, but 67,000 kilometers of that total 
served specific industries and were not available for general use 
(see fig. 11). The entire system is 1.52-meter gauge. In 1993 
railroads accounted for 1,608 billion ton-kilometers of cargo 
traffic, compared with the 26 billion ton-kilometers provided 
by trucks. The prominence of railroads is the result of several 
factors: the vast distances that need to be covered; the pen- 
chant of Soviet economic planners for locating manufacturing 
facilities in politically expedient areas rather than where raw 
materials and other inputs were available; and the conditions 
for granting state fuel subsidies, which provided no incentives 
to break up cargo transportation into shorter-haul operations 
that could be covered by road. Cargo traffic is the predominant 
use of railroads, in contrast to the emphasis on passenger traf- 
fic in West European railroad systems (s