Encyclopedia of Russian History

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Róna-Tas, András, ed. (1982). Chuvash Studies. Budapest:

Akadémiai Kiadó; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Shnirelman, Viktor A. (1996). Who Gets the Past? Com-

petition for Ancestors Among Non-Russian Intellectuals

in Russia. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Cen-

ter Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press.

ANIEL

E. S

CHAFER

CIMMERIANS

Cimmerians are a nomadic, Iranian-speaking peo-

ples who occupied the North Pontic steppe zone

from the Don to the Danube, with their center in

the Crimea. Their culture and civilization flourished

between about 1000 and 800

. Pastoralists had

inhabited the North Pontic region since approxi-

mately 4000

., or some three thousand years

prior to the advent of the Cimmerians, but the lat-

ter were the first to be mentioned by name in the

written sources, and so they were sometimes (in-

accurately) seen by historians as the earliest no-

madic peoples of southern Russia.

It is not clear whether the term “Cimmerian”

represented an ethnic group or simply designated

any Iranian-speaking equestrian nomads inhabit-

ing the North Pontic area. There is also no con-

sensus on the origins of these peoples. However, it

is most likely that the Cimmerians evolved out of

the sedentary Srubnaia (“Timber-Grave”) archaeo-

logical culture of the second millennium

. af-

ter they took up a pastoral way of life in the steppe.

There are reasons to believe that the Cimmerians

can be connected to the Belozersk culture, which

some scholars believe is derived from the late Srub-

naia culture. By about 800

., the Cimmerians

were supplanted by the Scythians, a closely akin

Iranian-speaking nomadic group that arrived in the

area and absorbed some of the former into their

tribal confederation while expelling the rest. Some

Cimmerian tribes who were ejected from the North

Pontic steppe zone moved southeast through Trans-

caucasia into Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia,

which they raided for about twenty years.

See also: CULTURAL REVOLUTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hammarstrom, David Lewis. (1983). Circus Rings around

Russia. Hamden, CT: Archon.

Stites, Richard. (1992) Russian Popular Culture: Enter-

tainment and Society since 1900. New York: Cam-

bridge University Press.

ÓSA

AGNÚSDÓTTIR

CIVIC UNION

The Civic Union was a political movement active

in 1992 and 1993, intended to represent the inter-

ests of state-owned enterprises and their managers

and employees. It was a bloc of several parties and

extraparliamentary organizations. One of its lead-

ers was Vice President Alexander Rutskoy; another

was Arkady Volsky, president of the Russian Union

of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. Its activities

were a reaction against the economic policies of the

Yegor Gaidar government (1991–1992).

Russian governments in the Boris Yeltsin era,

in accordance with mainstream Western econom-

ics, aimed at financial stabilization, specifically of

the price level. The Civic Union was more interested

in real stabilization: namely, stabilization of out-

put levels. It primarily aimed to halt, and then re-

verse, the sharp fall in production and living

standards that took place between 1989 and 1992.

Unlike the Gaidar government, the Civic Union,

worried about the possible negative consequences

of privatization, did not consider it a high priority,

and believed that any privatization of large enter-

prises should adhere to the Soviet tradition of safe-

guarding the rights of employees.

With respect to liberalization, the Civic Union

saw advantages in the partial reintroduction of

some elements of the old economic mechanism

(state orders, the provision of goods in kind, price

controls, and wage controls). For the Gaidar team,

the Civic Union’s position on this issue exposed its

“reactionary essence” and made it “dangerous” for

the future of Russia.

In agriculture, during the winter of 1991–

1992, the Gaidar government tried to carry out a

quick decollectivization policy, ignoring the needs

and interests of this remaining large-scale sector.

The Civic Union, on the other hand, argued for con-

tinued financial support for large-scale agriculture

(the former collective and state farms).

The Civic Union played an important role in

the emergence of a democratic system in Russia by

providing a constitutional channel for criticism of

the unpopular economic policies of the Gaidar gov-

ernment. It contributed to undermining them and

forcing Gaidar himself from office in December

1992. However, it failed on the whole to provide

direction and leadership for government economic

policy. The growing political tension of 1993 and

the increased privatization of the economy led to

the disappearance of the Civic Union.

See also: ECONOMY, CURRENT; PRIVATIZATION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ellman, Michael. (1993). “Russia: The Economic Program

of the Civic Union.” RFE/RL Research Report 2(11):

34-45.

Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitrii. (2001). The

Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms. Washington, DC: United

States Institute of Peace Press.

ICHAEL

LLMAN

CIVIC UNION

264

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

CIVIL WAR OF 1425–1450

The Civil War of 1425–1450 was a major forma-

tive event in Russian history, the impact of which

was evident well into the Soviet period. It began as

a dynastic controversy, the sole major civil war in

the Moscow princely line (the Danilovichi) until

that time. This was only one of the ninety major

civil wars in Russia between 1228 and 1462.

Moscow’s other major rivals for hegemony over

the East European plain (especially Tver) were con-

stantly destroying themselves in civil wars,

whereas Moscow had a single line of unchallenged

rulers between 1300 and 1425. If it would be fair

to say that Moscow’s ultimate triumph as East

Slavic hegemon was determined already in the

1390s, then in the political sphere the civil war of

1425–1450 was almost irrelevant in the long run.

In the social sphere, however, the civil war set the

ball rolling toward serfdom and, by 1649, to a

legally stratified, near-caste society that essentially

lasted until the 1950s, when the Soviets finally is-

sued peasants internal passports, putting an end to

the serf element of collectivized agriculture. For this

reason an understanding of the civil war is both

interesting and important.

Muscovite grand prince Basil I died in 1425.

Surviving him were his ten-year-old son, who be-

came Basil II, and three brothers, Pyotr (d. 1428),

Andrei (d. 1432), and Yuri (d. 1434). The general

(but not universal) Muscovite practice had been for

succession to be vertical, from father to son—a sys-

tem of limited primogeniture, one of the strengths

of the Danilovichi. The issue was complicated by

contradictory wills. Dmitry Donskoy had willed

the realm to Basil I, then to his next son Yuri—all

before Basil II was born. Later, Basil I’s will of 1423

passed power to his son.

In 1425 Basil II was only a nominal ruler. Real

power was in the hands of the boyars, head of the

church Metropolitan Foty, and Basil’s mother,

Sofia Vitovtovna (daughter of the ruler of Lithua-

nia). This group was opposed by Basil’s uncle, Yuri

Dmitrievich, appanage prince of Zvenigorod and

Galich, who would have been the legitimate heir

under the archaic system of lateral succession.

While he lived, he was regularly raising armies in

Galich in an attempt to seize the throne in Moscow.

His brother Andrei, prince of Beloozero, conspired

with Yuri to keep their nephew off the throne.

Three years of war and plundering ended in 1428,

when Yuri gave up his pretensions to the throne.

Warfare continued, however, as Basil II and Yuri

continued to fight over the escheated Dmitrov ap-

panage of Peter, who died in 1428 without heirs.

In 1432 the Mongol Khan gave the patent (yarlyk)

to Basil, who was installed as ruler of All Rus in

Moscow, which henceforth became the capital of

Russia. The khan awarded Dmitrov to Yuri;

Dmitrov was then seized by Basil’s troops. A tem-

porary calm ensued.

In 1433 Basil II married Maria Yaroslavna, sis-

ter of the prince of Serpukhov-Brovsk. In an ap-

parent gesture of clan harmony, Basil’s cousins, the

sons of Yuri of Galich, Basil Yurievich (Kosoi, d.

1448) and Dmitry Yurievich Shemyaka (poisoned

in 1453) attended the wedding. A third son, Dmitry

Krasny (d. 1441) was absent. Basil Yurievich wore

a gem-studded golden belt, which was alleged to be

part of the grand princely regalia that had been

stolen from Dmitry Donskoy. Sofia Vitovtovna

took the belt, the keystone of subsequent Russian

history, from Basil Yurievich, who then with his

brother fled to their father Yuri’s estate in Galich.

Yuri rounded up his army, defeated Basil II, took

Moscow, and proclaimed himself grand prince.

Basil rounded up an army, and Yuri surrendered

Moscow without a fight. Then Yuri rounded up his

forces and those of his three sons and defeated Basil

II at Rostov, and Basil fled to Novgorod. Yuri took

Moscow, but died. This should have ended the civil

war, but it was continued by his sons, who had no

“legitimate” claims to the throne whatsoever. Basil

Yurievich seized the throne and was crowned. His

two brothers, Dmitry Krasny and Dmitry She-

myaka, opposed him and joined Basil II, and Basil

Yurievich fled. He and his army looted everything

along the way, as was the practice throughout the

civil war. Then civil war spread throughout nearly

all of northeastern Rus. In 1436 Basil Yurievich was

captured and blinded, hence his nickname “Kosoi”

(“squint”). Dmitry Shemyaka took over leadership

of the rebels. The Mongol-Tatars joined the fray,

plundering and burning everything in their wake.

On July 7, 1445, they captured Basil II, and a week

later they burned the Kremlin. Shemyaka wanted

Basil II turned over to him, but the Tatars freed him

for an enormous ransom, 200,000 silver rubles, in

October. The taxes raised to pay the ransom caused

further chaos and population dislocation.

This led to the third and worst period of the

civil war. Shemiaka and his allies continuously

fought Basil II and sacked every place they visited.

CIVIL WAR OF 1425–1450

265

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Basil II was seized by his enemies at the Trinity

Sergiev monastery and blinded (henceforth called

temny—“the dark”). While this was going on, She-

myaka seized Moscow and became grand prince in

1446. The treasury was looted, and the peasants,

even more oppressed than they had been, fled fur-

ther. Crops were destroyed by the marauding

armies, and starvation ensued. Grain was scarce in

Novgorod for a decade. Shemyaka, condemned as

an oathbreaker by the church, was soon driven out

of Moscow. He continued the war for several years

in the North (Ustiug, Vologda), then fled to Nov-

gorod, where he was poisoned by his cook, an agent

of Basil II.

The Venetian diplomat, merchant, and traveler

Josaphat Barbaro observed that Russia was a

desert. In an attempt to assure repayment of peas-

ant debts, a few monasteries persuaded rulers to is-

sue laws prohibiting peasant debtors from moving

at any time other than around St. George’s Day

(November 26)—after the harvest, the best time to

collect debts. This initiated the enserfment of the

Russian peasantry.

See also: BASIL I; BASIL II; BOYARS; DONSKOY, DMITRY

IVANOVICH; KREMLIN

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alef, Gustave. (1956). “A History of the Muscovite Civil

War: The Reign of Vasilii II (1425–62).” Ph.D. dis-

sertation, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.

Hellie, Richard. (1971). The Enserfment of the Russian Peas-

antry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hellie, Richard. (1971). Muscovite Society. Chicago: The

University of Chicago Syllabus Division, 1967,

1970.

ICHARD

ELLIE

CIVIL WAR OF 1917–1922

The most decisive chapter of the Russian Revolu-

tion, the civil war raged between October 1917 and

1922. The traumatic experience of civil war served

as a defining moment for the new Soviet state by

embedding itself into both the people’s and the

state’s outlook and behavior.

The origins of the Russian civil war can be

found in the discrediting of the tsarist government

that took place before World War I; in the social

divisions that shaped politics before and during the

Revolution of 1917; and in the Bolshevik leader-

ship’s belief in the importance of civil war, in the

imminence of world revolution, and in the accept-

ability of applying coercion in setting up a dicta-

torship of the proletariat. Although historians

disagree over when the civil war began, dating the

event to the October Revolution of 1917 makes

sense, because that is how contemporaries under-

stood it. Moreover, armed opposition to the new

Bolshevik government, the Council of People’s

Commissars (Sovnarkom), arose immediately after

October when officers of the Imperial Army,

Mikhail Alexeyev, Lavr Kornilov, Anton Denikin,

Alexei Kaledin, and others, formed the first coun-

terforce known as the Volunteer Army, based in

southern Russia.

During the civil war the Bolsheviks, or Reds

(renamed “communists” in 1918), waged war

against the Whites. A term used loosely to refer to

all factions that battled against the Bolsheviks, the

Whites were a more diverse group than the Bol-

shevik label of “counterrevolution” suggests. Those

who represented the country’s business and land-

owning elite did tend to express monarchist senti-

ments. In addition, Cossack military units that had

enjoyed self-government and other privileges like-

wise held conservative political views. But many

White officers opposed the autocracy and even har-

bored reformist beliefs.

Much more complicated were the Bolsheviks’

relations with Russia’s moderate socialists, the

Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs),

and with both parties’ numerous offshoots, who

wished to establish a government that would in-

clude all socialist parties. The internecine struggle

within the socialist camp persisted throughout the

civil war, and flared up after the Bolsheviks routed

the Whites in 1920. Fearing a White victory, the

moderate socialists complicated this scenario by

throwing their support behind the Reds at critical

junctures. Moreover, left-wing factions within

these parties allied themselves with the Bolsheviks.

For instance, until mid-1918 the Bolsheviks stayed

afloat in part owing to the support of the Left SRs,

who broke from their parent party following the

October Revolution of 1917 to join the Bolsheviks.

In some locales the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition

even weathered the controversy over the Brest-

Litovsk Peace with Germany, signed in March

1918, which otherwise sundered the alliance with

the Left SRs, who withdrew from the Lenin

CIVIL WAR OF 1917–1922

266

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

government in protest. The peace ceded eastern

Poland, the Baltic states, Finland, and Ukraine to

Germany, as well as Transcaucasia to Turkey, in

return for an end to hostilities. Ratifying the

treaty sparked heated debate within the Commu-

nist Party, especially among the so-called Left

Communists led by Nikolai Bukharin who backed

the idea of a revolutionary war against Germany.

Later, from September 1918 until October 1920,

renegade Left SRs formed a new party called the

Revolutionary Communists (RCs), who partici-

pated in a ruling coalition with the Bolsheviks in

many Volga provinces and the Urals. The Bolshe-

vik attitude toward the socialist groups that sup-

ported the Reds reflected the overall strength of

Soviet power at any given time. When vulnera-

ble, the Bolsheviks welcomed their socialist allies;

otherwise the Bolsheviks sought to manipulate

them through a process of co-optation amid re-

pression.

Political opposition to the Bolsheviks became

more resolved after they closed down the Con-

stituent Assembly in January 1918. Elected just

days after the October Revolution, the assembly

was slated to determine Russia’s political future.

Although Lenin did not dare cancel the elections, he

had no reservations about dispensing with the as-

sembly after the SRs and related populist parties

won a plurality of just under half of the votes cast.

Capturing roughly a quarter of the popular vote,

the Bolsheviks fared best in the cities and within

the armed forces. Recognizing the need for a mili-

tary force more formidable than the worker Red

Guards who had backed the Bolsheviks’ bid for

power in October, Lenin established the Red Army

under Leon Trotsky shortly after dispersing the

Constituent Assembly. Trotsky recruited ex-tsarist

officers to command the Reds, appointing political

commissars to all units to monitor such officers

and the ideological education of recruits. That

spring, support for the Bolsheviks within the pro-

letariat began to erode as the Mensheviks made a

comeback.

This early phase of the civil war ended with a

spate of armed conflicts in Russian towns along the

Volga in May and June 1918 between Bolshevik-

run soviets (councils) and Czechoslovak legion-

naires. Prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian

armies, the legionnaires had agreed to be trans-

ported across Siberia and from there to the West-

ern front in order to join the Allies in the fight to

defeat the Central Powers. The Czechoslovaks’ clash

with the Soviet government emboldened the SR op-

position to set up an anti-Bolshevik government,

the Committee to Save the Constituent Assembly,

Komuch, in the Volga city of Samara in June 1918.

Many delegates elected to the Constituent Assem-

bly congregated there before the city fell to the Bol-

sheviks that November. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks

expelled Mensheviks and SRs from local soviets,

while the Kadets convened in the Siberian city of

Omsk in June 1918 to establish a Provisional Siber-

ian Government (PSG). The rivalry between Samara

and Omsk resulted in the last attempt to form from

below a national force to oppose Bolshevism, a state

conference that met in Ufa in September and set

up a five-member Directory after its French revo-

lutionary namesake. But in November the military

removed the socialists and installed Admiral

Kolchak in power. Remaining official leader of the

White movement until defeat forced him to resign

in early 1920, he kept his headquarters in Siberia.

Although its role is often exaggerated, interna-

tional (“Allied”) intervention bolstered the White

cause and fuelled Bolshevik paranoia, providing

“evidence” for the party’s depictions of the Whites

as traitorous agents of imperialist foreign powers.

Dispatching troops to Russia to secure military

supplies needed in the war against Germany, the

Allies deepened their involvement as they came to

see Bolsheviks as a hostile force that promoted

world revolution, renounced the tsarist govern-

ment’s debts, and violated Russia’s commitment to

its allies by concluding a separate peace with Ger-

many. Allied intervention on behalf of the Whites

became more active with the end of World War I

in November 1918, when the British, French,

Japanese, Americans, and other powers sent troops

to Russian ports and rail junctures. Revolutionary

stirrings in Germany, the founding of the Third

Communist International in Moscow in March

1919, and the establishment of a soviet republic in

Hungary at roughly the same time heightened the

Allies’ fears of a Red menace. Yet the Allied gov-

ernments could not justify intervention in Russia

to their own war-weary people. Lacking a com-

mon purpose and resolve, and often suspicious of

one another, the Allies extended only half-hearted

support to the Whites, whom they left in the lurch

by withdrawing from Russia in 1919 and 1920—

except for the Japanese who kept troops in Siberia

for several more years.

Both Reds and Whites turned increasingly to

terror in the second half of 1918, utilizing it as a

substitute for popular support. Calls to overthrow

Soviet power, followed by the assassination of the

CIVIL WAR OF 1917–1922

267

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

German ambassador in July, which the Bolsheviks

depicted as the start of a Left SR uprising designed

to undercut the Brest-Litovsk Peace, provided the

Bolsheviks with an excuse to repress their one-time

radical populist allies and to undermine the Left

SRs’ popularity in the villages. Moreover, with

Lenin’s knowledge, Tsar Nicholas II and his family

were executed on July 16, 1918. Following an at-

tempt on Lenin’s life on August 30, the Bolsheviks

unleashed the Red Terror, a ruthless campaign

aimed at eliminating political opponents within the

civilian population. The Extraordinary Commission

to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage

(Cheka), set up in December 1917 under Felix Dz-

erzhinsky, carried out the Red Terror. Seeking to

reverse social revolution, the Whites savagely

waged their own ideological war that justified the

use of terror to avenge those wronged by the rev-

olution. Putting to death communists and their

sympathizers, and massacring Jews in Ukraine and

elsewhere, the Whites were determined to sweep

the “Germano-Bolsheviks” from power.

The Whites posed a more serious threat to the

Red republic after the Allies defeated Germany in

late 1918 and decided to back the Whites’ cause.

Soon, the Whites engaged the Reds along four

fronts: southern Russia, western Siberia, northern

Russia, and the Baltic region. Until their rout in

1920, White forces controlled much of Siberia and

southern Russia, while the Reds, who moved their

capital to Moscow in March 1918, clung desper-

ately to the Russian heartland. The Whites’ ambi-

tious three-pronged attack against Moscow in

March 1919 most likely decided the military out-

come of their war against the Reds. Despite their

initial success, the Whites went down in defeat that

November, after which their routed forces replaced

CIVIL WAR OF 1917–1922

268

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

White Russian troops advance through Siberia on horseback in 1919. © B

ETTMANN

/CORBIS

General Denikin with Petr Wrangel, the most com-

petent of all of the White officers. Coinciding with

an invasion of Russia by forces of the newly res-

urrected Polish state, the Whites opened one final

offensive in the spring of 1920. When Red forces

overcame Wrangel’s army in November, he and his

troops evacuated Russia by sea from the Crimea.

In the meantime, the Bolsheviks’ conflict with the

Poles ended in stalemate; the belligerent parties

signed an armistice in October 1920, followed by

the Treaty of Riga in 1921, which transferred parts

of Ukraine and Belorussia to Poland.

Apart from their military encounters with the

Whites, the Bolsheviks also had to contend with a

front behind their own lines because of the appeal

of rival socialist parties and because Bolshevik eco-

nomic policies alienated much of the working class

and drove the peasantry to rise up against the req-

uisitioning of grain and related measures. Known

subsequently as war communism, the series of ad

hoc policies designed to prosecute the war and to

experiment with socialist economic principles was

characterized by centralization, state ownership,

compulsion, the extraction of surpluses—especially

requisitioning of grain, forced location of labor, and

a distribution system that rhetorically privileged

the toiling classes. Despite the popularity of Bol-

shevik land reform, which placed all land in the

hands of peasants, requisitioning and other mea-

sures carried out in 1919 with shocking brutality

drove the peasantry into the opposition. The effect

of Bolshevik economic policies on the starving and

dying cities as well as the party’s violations of the

political promises of 1917 also turned workers

anti-Bolshevik by civil war’s end.

Studies tapping long-closed Russian archives

underscore the vast scale of workers’ strikes and

violent peasant rebellions known collectively as the

Green movement throughout Russia in early 1921.

The enormity of the opposition convinced the com-

munists to replace war communism with the New

Economic Policy (NEP), which swapped the hated

grain requisitioning with a tax in kind and restored

some legal private economic activity. The necessity

of this shift in policy from stick to carrot was made

clear when, in early March 1921, sailors of the

Kronstadt naval fortress rose up against the Bol-

sheviks whom they had helped bring to power.

Demanding the restoration of Soviet democracy

without communists, the sailors met with brutal

repression that the party’s top leaders sanctioned.

Although most historians view the Kronstadt up-

rising, worker disturbances, the peasant move-

ment, and the introduction of the NEP as the last

acts of the civil war, after which the party mopped

up remaining pockets of opposition in the border-

lands, the famine of 1921 can be said to mark the

real conclusion to the conflict, for it helped to keep

the Bolsheviks in power by robbing the population

of initiative. Holding the country in its grip until

late 1923, the famine took an estimated five mil-

lion lives; millions more would have perished with-

out relief provided by foreign agencies such as the

British Save the Children Fund and the American

Relief Administration.

Moreover, the Bolshevik Party took advantage

of mass starvation to end its stalemate with the

Orthodox Church. Believing that a materialistic

worldview needed to replace religion, the Bolshe-

viks had forced through a separation of church and

state in 1917 and removed schools from church

supervision. Once famine hit hard, the party lead-

ership promoted the cause of Orthodox clergy loyal

to Soviet power, so-called red priests, or renova-

tionists, who supported the party’s determination

to use church valuables to finance famine relief.

Party leaders allied with the renovationists out of

expediency: They had every intention of eventually

discarding them when they were no longer needed.

The defeat of the Whites, the end of the war

with Poland, and famine made it possible for the

Lenin government to focus on regaining breakaway

territories in Central Asia, Transcaucasia, Siberia,

and elsewhere, where issues of nationalism, eth-

nicity, religion, class, foreign intervention, and dif-

fering levels of economic development and ways of

life complicated local civil wars. Russians had com-

posed approximately 50 percent of the tsarist em-

pire’s multinational population in which more than

a hundred languages were spoken. An increasingly

contradictory and even repressive tsarist national-

ity policies had given rise to numerous grievances

among the non-Russian population, but only a mi-

nority of intellectuals in the outlying areas before

World War I had championed the emergence of in-

dependent states. The Revolution of 1917, however,

gave impetus to national movements as the provi-

sional government struggled to maintain its au-

thority in the face of potent new challenges from

some of the country’s minorities.

In January 1918 the Commissariat of Nation-

alities headed by Joseph Stalin confirmed the So-

viet government’s support of self-determination of

the country’s minorities, and characterized the new

state as a Federation of Soviet Republics. The first

CIVIL WAR OF 1917–1922

269

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Soviet constitution of July 1918 reiterated these

claims, without specifying the nature of federal-

ism. The cost of survival, however, made it neces-

sary to be pragmatic and flexible. For this reason,

Lenin soon made it clear that the interests of so-

cialism were more important than the right of self-

determination.

Indeed, by 1918 independent states had arisen

on the Soviet periphery. Fostered by intellectuals

and politicians, local nationalisms tended to develop

into political movements with popular support in

territories most affected by industrial development.

Often, however, class and ethnic conflicts became

entangled as these territories turned into major bat-

tlefields of the civil war and arenas of foreign in-

tervention.

For instance, Ukraine, where the activities of

peasant rebel Nestor Makhno obscured the inter-

twining hostilities among Reds, Whites, Germans,

and Poles, changed hands frequently. Under the

black flag of anarchism, Makhno first formed a

loose alliance with the communists, but then bat-

tled against Red and White alike until Red forces

crushed his Insurgent Army in 1920. In the Cau-

casus, Georgian Mensheviks, Armenian Dashnaks,

and Azeri Musavat established popular regimes in

1917 that attempted a short-lived experiment at

federalism in 1918 before hostilities between and

within the groups surfaced, leaving them to turn

to foreign protectors. By 1922 the Red Army had

retaken these territories, as well as the mountain

regions of the northern Caucasus, where they

fought against religious leaders and stiff guerrilla

resistance. In Central Asia the Bolsheviks faced

stubborn opposition from armed Islamic guerrillas,

basmachi, who resisted the Bolshevik takeover un-

til 1923. The Bolsheviks’ victory over these break-

away territories led to the founding of the Union

of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in December

1922. Smaller than its predecessor, the new Soviet

state had lost part of Bessarabia, Finland, Estonia,

Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as part of Ukraine,

Belorussia, and Armenia. Granting statehood

within the framework of the Russian state to those

territories it had recaptured, the Soviet government

set up a federation, a centralized, multiethnic, anti-

imperial, socialist state.

In accounting for the Bolshevik victory in the

civil war, historians have emphasized the relative

discipline, self-sacrifice, and centralized nature of

the Bolshevik Party; the party’s control over the

Russian heartland and its resources; the military

and political weaknesses of the Whites, who, con-

centrated on the periphery, relied on Allied bullets

and misunderstood the relationship between social

policy and military success; the local nature of

peasant opposition; the inability of the Bolsheviks’

opponents to overcome their differences; the tenta-

tive nature of Allied intervention; the effectiveness

of Bolshevik propaganda and terror; and, during

the initial stage of the conflict, the support of work-

ers and the neutrality of peasants. In defeating the

Whites, the Bolsheviks had survived the civil war,

but the crisis of early March 1921 suggests that

mass discontent with party policies would have

continued to fuel the conflict if the party had not

ushered in the NEP and if the famine had not bro-

ken out.

The Russian civil war caused wide-scale devas-

tation; economic ruin; loss of an estimated seven

to eight million people, of whom more than five

million were civilian casualties of fighting, repres-

sion, and disease; the emigration of an estimated

one to two million others; and approximately five

million deaths caused by the famine of 1921–1923.

Moreover, the civil war destroyed much of the

country’s infrastructure, producing a steep decline

in the standard of living as industrial production

fell to less than 30 percent of the pre-1914 level

and the amount of land under cultivation decreased

sharply. The civil war also brought about deur-

banization, created a transient problem of enor-

mous proportions, militarized civilian life, and

turned towns into breeding grounds for diseases.

Furthermore, war communism strengthened the

authoritarian streak in Russian political culture and

contributed to the consolidation of a one-party

state as the population turned its attention to hon-

ing basic survival strategies.

The price of survival was the temporary nat-

uralization of economic life, famine, and the en-

trenchment of a black market and a system of

privileges for party members. While the sheer enor-

mity of the convulsion brought about a primi-

tivization of the entire social system, it was not

simply a matter of regression, but also of new

structuring, which focused on the necessities of

physical survival. The social fabric absorbed those

everyday practices that had been mediated or mod-

ified in these extreme circumstances of political

chaos and economic collapse, as the desire to sur-

vive and to withdraw from public life created prob-

lems that proved difficult to solve and undermined

subsequent state efforts to reconfigure society. In

CIVIL WAR OF 1917–1922

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this regard the civil war represented a formative,

even defining experience for the Soviet state.

See also: BOLSHEVISM; BREST-LITOVSK PEACE; FAMINE OF

1921-1922; GREEN MOVEMENT; KOLCHAK, ALEXANDER

VASILIEVICH; LEFT SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; LENIN,

VLADIMIR ILICH; MENHSHEVIKS; OCTOBER REVOLU-

TION; RED GUARDS; RED TERROR; SOCIALIST REVOLU-

TIONARIES; SOVNARKOM; WAR COMMUNISM; WHITE

ARMY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brovkin, Vladimir N. (1994). Behind the Front Lines of the

Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in

Russia, 1918–1922. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-

versity Press.

Figes, Orlando. (1997). A People’s Tragedy: A History of the

Russian Revolution. New York: Viking.

Holquist, Peter. (2002). Making War, Forging Revolution:

Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.

Kenez, Peter. (1977). Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920:

The Defeat of the Whites. Berkeley: University of Cal-

ifornia Press.

Koenker, Diane P.; Rosenberg, William G.; and Suny,

Ronald G., eds. (1989). Party, State, and Society in the

Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mawdsely, Evan. (1987). The Russian Civil War. Boston:

Allen & Unwin.

McAuley, Mary. (1991). Bread and Justice: State and So-

ciety in Petrograd, 1917–1922. Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press.

Patenaude, Bertrand M. (2002). Big Show in Bololand: The

American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the

Famine of 1921. Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Press.

Pereira, G. O. (1996). White Siberia: The Politics of Civil

War. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Raleigh, Donald J. (2002). Experiencing Russia’s Civil War:

Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov,

1917–1922. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press.

Roslof, Edward E. (2002). Red Priests: Renovationism,

Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905–1946.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Smele, Jonathan. (1996). Civil War in Siberia: The Anti-

Bolshevik Government of Admiral Kolchak, 1918–1920.

New York: Cambridge University Press.

Swain, Geoffrey. (1996). The Origins of the Russian Civil

War. London: Longman.

ONALD

J. R

ALEIGH

CLASSICISM See NEO-CLASSICISM.

CLASS SYSTEM

When the Bolsheviks came to power in October

1917, they did so in the name of Russia’s prole-

tariat and to a lesser extent the “toiling masses” of

peasants who made up the vast majority of the

population. The Bolsheviks’ aim—to overthrow the

rule of capital (the bourgeoisie) and establish a so-

cialist society—was to be achieved via a “dictator-

ship of the proletariat.” The dictatorship was

enshrined in the first Soviet Constitution of 1918,

which disenfranchised large property owners, the

clergy, and former tsarist officials and gave urban-

based voters the advantage over peasants in elec-

tions to all-Russian soviet congresses. Ironically,

during the civil war, much of Soviet society was

declassed: the old privileged classes were expropri-

ated, industrial workers returned to the country-

side or were recruited into the Red Army, and

millions of other citizens were uprooted and lost

their social moorings.

In the course of the 1920s, during the period

of the New Economic Policy (NEP), social structures

began to resolidify as industrial production and

trade expanded. Those whose occupation defined

them as workers, and those who could authenti-

cate their social origins in the working class, received

privileged access to housing, higher education,

health and pension benefits, and perhaps most im-

portant of all, party membership. But the upheavals

of the First Five-Year Plan years (1928–1932) up-

rooted millions once again, as whole classes (so-

called NEPmen, kulaks, and remnants of the urban

bourgeoisie) were “liquidated.” Cities and con-

struction sites were overwhelmed with peasant mi-

grants fleeing collectivization, and hundreds of

thousands of others were resettled in remote re-

gions of the country or sent to labor camps.

The social structure that emerged from these

upheavals was officially characterized as consist-

ing of two classes: one of workers (essentially in-

dustrial wage earners and state farm workers) and

collective farmers, the other a “stratum” consist-

ing of the intelligentsia. This putative class system

remained virtually unchanged throughout the

remaining decades of the Soviet Union’s existence.

In reality, a complex hierarchy, reminiscent of

tsarist Russia’s estate (soslovie) system, developed,

CLASS SYSTEM

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

involving highly differentiated access to the state’s

goods and services. At the top of the Soviet peck-

ing order stood the party elite and other recipients

of the Kremlin emolument (kremlovka). Next came

those who appeared on the party’s nomenklatura:

high military and state officials, People’s Artists,

Stalin-prize-winning scientists, academicians, writ-

ers, and other members of the cultural, scientific-

technical, and managerial elites. Lower-level

officials—the police, teachers, junior military offi-

cers, engineers, and state and collective farm bu-

reaucracies—enjoyed certain privileges, as did

outstanding workers (Stakhanovites in the 1930s

and 1940s, innovators, and “advanced workers”

from the 1950s onward). Collective farmers, who

were denied the right to internal passports until the

mid-1970s, occupied perhaps the lowest rung in

the class hierarchy, with the obvious exception of

prisoners and inmates of labor camps and colonies.

Cutting across this system were such factors

as political geography (capital cities vs. provincial

towns; towns vs. villages) and the strategic signif-

icance of the enterprise or institute to which one

was attached. Scientists living in such closed facil-

ities as Dubna and Akademgorodok enjoyed a par-

ticularly high standard of living. The entire

structure was mitigated by petitioning, but also by

informal connections based on kinship or friend-

ship, exchanges of favors, and other semi-legal

transactions that were very much a part of quo-

tidian reality during the Soviet Union’s “mature”

stage.

See also: FIVE-YEAR PLANS; INTELLIGENTSIA; NEW ECO-

NOMIC POLICY; SOSLOVIE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1999). Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary

Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the

1930s. New York: Oxford University Press.

Matthews, Mervyn. (1972). Class and Society in Soviet

Russia. London: Allen Lane.

EWIS

H. S

IEGELBAUM

CLIMATE

There are five climates in Russia. The Polar climate

hugs the Arctic coast and yields a 60-day growing

season, with July and August averaging tempera-

tures over freezing. Tundra vegetation prevails.

South of the tundra, blanketing two-thirds of Rus-

sia, is the Subarctic climate with its brief cool sum-

mers and harsh cold, mostly dry, winters. With a

growing season of sixty to ninety days, the dom-

inant vegetation is taiga (northern coniferous

forest), 90 percent of which is underlain by per-

mafrost. In European Russia and Western Siberia,

the Subarctic climate merges southward with the

Humid Continental Warm-to-Cool Summer cli-

mate. Here the winters become less harsh, although

much snowier, and the summers become longer

and warmer. Growing seasons reach 90 to 120

days, and the vegetation is a temperate mixed for-

est that joins the broadleaf forests and grasslands

to the south. Along the Lower Volga and in the

North Caucasus, the climate becomes sub-humid.

Here summers become equal to winters, a Semiarid

Continental climate prevails, the growing season

reaches 120 to 160 days, and grassland, or steppe,

vegetation dominates. Particular to Russia’s “bread-

basket,” a terrain with rich black loams, this cli-

mate suffers from insufficient precipitation. A tiny

strip of Arid Continental climate fringes the Rus-

sian shoreline of the Caspian Sea. With hot, dry

summers and rather cold, shorter winters, this cli-

mate yields a 160- to 200-day growing season. A

true desert, it reflects a severe soil-moisture deficit.

Russia’s massive landmass, northerly location,

and flat-to-rolling terrain dramatically influence

these climates. Because three-fourths of Russia is

more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) away from

a largely frozen sea, the climates are continental,

not maritime. Continental climates exhibit wide

ranges of temperature (the difference between the

warmest and coldest monthly averages) and low

average annual precipitation that peaks in summer

instead of spring. Climatic harshness increases from

west to east as the moderating influence of the

warm North Atlantic Ocean decreases. St. Peters-

burg on the Gulf of Finland has a 45° F (25° C) dif-

ference between the July and January mean

temperatures and 19 inches (48 centimeters) of an-

nual precipitation. Yakutsk in Eastern Siberia con-

trasts with a 112° F (65° C) range of temperature

and only 4 inches (10 centimeters) of precipitation.

Russia’s high-latitude position enhances conti-

nentality. Nine-tenths of the country is north of

50° N Latitude. Moscow is in the latitude of Ed-

monton, Alberta; St. Petersburg equates with An-

chorage, Alaska. Russia thus resembles Canada in

climate more than it does the United States. High-

latitude countries like Russia and Canada suffer

low-angle (less-intense) sunlight and short grow-

CLIMATE

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