Encyclopedia of Russian History

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together with a burgeoning second economy

(Grossman, 1977), grew with increasing rapidity

through the 1970s and 1980s. These conse-

quences, together with the repeated failure of par-

tial and incremental reforms to improve the

situation and a growing gap in technology from

the levels of the developed West, inspired the rad-

ical economic, and indeed political, reforms of

Mikhail S. Gorbachev that soon afterward brought

an end to the Soviet Union and its command ad-

ministrative economy.

See also: ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; MARKET SOCIAL-

ISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ericson, R. E. (1981). “A Difficulty with the Command

Allocation Mechanism.” Journal of Economic Theory

31(1):1–26.

Ericson, R. E. (1991). “The Classical Soviet-Type Econ-

omy: Nature of the System and Implications for Re-

form.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5(4):1–18.

Grossman, G. (1963). “Notes for a Theory of the Com-

mand Economy.” Soviet Studies 15(2):101–23.

Grossman, G. (1977). “The ’Second Economy’ of the

USSR.” Problems of Communism 26(5):25–40.

Kornai, J. (1992). The Socialist System. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.

Shmelev, N., and Popov, V. (1989). The Turning Point:

Revitalizing the Soviet Economy. New York: Double-

day.

Wiles, P. J. D. (1962). The Political Economy of Commu-

nism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

ICHARD

E. E

RICSON

COMMANDING HEIGHTS OF

THE ECONOMY

As a result of peasant and military revolts in 1920

and early 1921, Vladimir I. Lenin was forced to re-

verse the extreme policies of War Communism in

favor of a temporary expedient, the mixed econ-

omy of the New Economic Plan (NEP). The Bol-

shevik Tenth Party Congress (March 1921) adopted

a tax in kind on the peasantry to replace confisca-

tions. The Congress also permitted leasing smaller

nationalized workshops back to private individu-

als, provided they hired no more than ten or twenty

workers. But the Bolsheviks retained in state hands

most large-scale industry in the fuel and metallur-

gical sectors, mines, and military plans, along with

all banking, railroads, and foreign trade. These were

to constitute the “commanding heights,” which

were supposed to control and guide the rest of the

economy under Soviet power. They were provided

subsidies from the budget to pay for wages and

supplies. Many of the industrial enterprises were

soon organized into trusts or syndicates under the

Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh)

for operational supervision, though many rehired

former managers and experts (“bourgeois special-

ists”) deemed to be loyal to the new regime. By

1922 more than 90 percent of industrial output

still came from these nationalized plants, mines,

and transportation facilities. By 1928 industrial

output had recovered the levels achieved in 1913,

but further expansion would depend on new net

investments, for which the state budget would be

the only significant source, for the “commanding

heights” did not generate sufficient profits.

See also: NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; WAR COMMUNISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nove, Alec. (1969). Economic History of the USSR. London:

Allen Lane.

ARTIN

C. S

PECHLER

COMMISSAR

Soviet government official.

“Commissar” was the title given to the bu-

reaucratic leaders of the Soviet Union, used from

1917 to 1946. The title and rank of commissar was

also given to the military-political officers serving

with the Red Army during World War II. Also

known as People’s Commissars, they were the

heads of the various people’s commissariats (of

health, justice, education, internal affairs, and so

forth), the central bureaucratic organizations that

governed the Russian Republic and the Soviet

Union. The commissars were also the members of

the Soviet of People’s Commissars (Sovet narodnykh

komissarov—Sovnarkom, or SNK), the central organ

of state power that coordinated government deci-

sions in the Soviet republics and among the com-

missariats when the USSR Supreme Soviet was not

in session. In 1946, when the commissariats were

renamed ministries, the commissars became minis-

ters, and the SNK became the Council of Ministers.

COMMISSAR

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

See also: COUNCIL OF MINISTERS, SOVIET; SUPREME SO-

VIET

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fainsod, Merle, and Hough, Jerry F. (1979). How the So-

viet Union Is Governed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-

versity Press.

HARON

A. K

OWALSKY

COMMITTEE FOR THE OPERATIONAL

MANAGEMENT OF THE NATIONAL

ECONOMY

The Committee for Operational Management of the

National Economy (COME) and a parallel body, the

Interrepublican Economic Committee (IEC), were

created in the wake of the failed coup of August

1991, in a vain bid to coordinate economic policy

across the territory of the Soviet Union. They were

trying to pick up the functions of the government

of the USSR, which had disintegrated after the

coup. COME was headed by Ivan Silaev, a former

deputy prime minister in the Soviet government

(1985–1990) who had been appointed by Boris

Yeltsin in June 1990 as prime minister of the Rus-

sian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic. Silaev strug-

gled to maintain food supplies and deal with Soviet

debt obligations, while Yeltsin’s reform team, led

by Yegor Gaidar, was preparing a radical reform

program. Silaev resigned as Russian prime minis-

ter on September 27, 1991, after being accused of

trying to empower the COME at the expense of the

Russian Federation (for example, by taking control

over energy supplies). Silaev then became acting

prime minister of the Soviet Union—a country that

had de facto ceased to exist. Together with Grigory

Yavlinsky he worked on a treaty on economic co-

operation between the republics, but encountered

hostility from the Russian Federation Supreme So-

viet and government. He tried to salvage some of

the ministries of the Soviet government, whose

forty thousand employees were still sitting in

Moscow. The COME and IEC were founded on the

assumption that some elements of the unified So-

viet economic management system would be pre-

served, but this proved erroneous. Over the course

of 1991 all republican governments had progres-

sively ceased to cooperate with federal economic

agencies, refusing to pay taxes and ignoring policy

directives, and this trend accelerated after the failed

August coup. By the end of 1991 all the republics

had declared their complete independence and the

COME and IEC were closed down. In the future,

economic ties between the newly independent states

would be conducted on a bilateral basis without

any central coordinating agency such as COME.

See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; GAIDAR, YEGOR TIMURO-

VICH; YAVLINSKY, GRIGORY ALEXEYEVICH; YELTSIN,

BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

ETER

UTLAND

COMMITTEE OF SOLDIERS’ MOTHERS

The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia

(CSMR) was organized in 1989 at a time when glas-

nost and perestroika had led to greater information

about the abuses within the Soviet military and its

conscript system and created opportunities for the

actions of nongovernmental organizations. In 1989

the mothers of 300 student-conscripts protested

against their draft and lobbied successfully to

change the conscription law to allow student de-

ferments. Their successes include the granting of

deferments and the early return of 180,000 stu-

dents from the army to finish their studies. The

Committee was also involved in seeking to end

abuses in barracks life, especially the bullying of

junior conscripts (dedovshchina), and in promot-

ing the transition from a conscript system to a vol-

unteer military. The CSMR has worked to expose

human rights violations within the military, given

legal and material assistance to the families of dead

servicemen, consulted on legislation affecting mil-

itary service, and published research on service-re-

lated deaths in the military. It operates hostels in

Moscow for AWOL soldiers.

The CSMR actively protested the First Chechen

War (1994–1996) and in March 1995 organized

the “March for Compassion” from Moscow to

Grozny. The March drew attention to the horrific

violations of human rights by both sides and

sought to draw support from Chechen mothers op-

posed to the war. Media attention to these efforts,

as well as efforts to secure the release of Russian

prisoners of war, won broad international praise

for the CSMR. In 1995 the committee received the

Sean MacBride Peace Prize from the International

Peace Bureau and was nominated in the same year

for the Nobel Peace Prize.

OPERATIONAL MANAGEMENT OF THE NATIONAL ECONOMY

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Between 1996 and 1999, the CSMR continued

to lobby the Russian parliament for legislation to

protect the rights of servicemen, reform the mili-

tary, rehabilitate veterans of regional conflicts, and

provide support to the families of dead servicemen.

It also supported the efforts of deserters to secure

amnesty through the military prosecutor’s office.

The CSMR has continued its efforts to support

the rights of soldiers and their families during the

Second Chechen War (September 1999–) but with

much more limited success and less public support.

See also: CHECHNYA AND CHECHENS; CIVIL SOCIETY, DE-

VELOPMENT OF; MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lambroschini, Sophie. “Russia: Expressions Of Civil So-

ciety Gain Ground.” Radio Free Europe/Radio Lib-

erty. http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/1999/11/

F.RU.991130131712.html (Accessed November 12,

2002).

ACOB

W. K

IPP

COMMITTEES OF THE VILLAGE POOR

Committees of the Village Poor (komitety dereven-

skoy bednoty or kombedy in Russian) were peasant

organizations created by the Bolshevik government

in 1918 to procure grain and create a revolution-

ary counterweight to the traditional peasant com-

mune.

Bolshevik ideologists viewed peasant commu-

nities as divided between a small minority of rich

kulaks and a majority of poor peasants. The ku-

laks controlled local soviets and traditional peasant

communes, hoarded grain, and hired poor peasants

to till their extensive lands. The kombedy, selected

by poor peasants, would break this power, dis-

tributing food and consumer goods to the rural

poor and assisting in expropriating grain from the

kulaks for delivery to the city. With their knowl-

edge of local conditions, they would be far more

effective at finding hidden grain than food-supply

detachments from the city.

In practice, the committees failed to fulfill the

hopes communist leaders had for them. Peasants

made no firm distinction between the village so-

viet, the village commune, and the committee of

the rural poor, and the committee was rarely more

responsive to central control than the first two had

been. Food supply officials complained that the

kombedy focused too little attention on procuring

grain and pursued local interests at the expense of

the state. Most grain gathered by the kombedy was

redistributed within the peasant community. Some

committees used their powers to rob fellow peas-

ants or to settle old scores. Bringing the revolution

to the countryside did not result in more bread for

the city.

Attempts to requisition grain by force, depre-

dations of the kombedy, and an ill-timed attempt

at conscription led to uprisings throughout central

Russia in November 1918. While Red Army de-

tachments quickly suppressed the poorly organized

peasant groups, the 6th Congress of Soviets decided

to eliminate the Committees of the Village Poor in

November 1918. It ordered new elections to local

soviets in which kulaks would not participate.

These new, more reliable soviets would replace the

committees. This process was little more than a

face-saving gesture, as the new soviets were no

more pliable than the institutions they replaced.

Communist government retreated to the cities, and

the only influence it had over rural society was ex-

ercised by armed grain-procurement and recruit-

ment detachments.

The kombed experiment failed to create a rural

government that was responsive to the center, and

failed to procure significant amounts of grain. It

did mobilize thousands of peasants to join the Com-

munist Party (including Brezhnev-era ideologue

Mikhail Suslov), but without creating a significant

Party presence in the countryside. Ambitious, en-

ergetic rural party members moved to the cities or

joined the Red Army, while most of the members

remaining in the villages were soon purged for in-

activity.

See also: AGRICULTURE; COLLECTIVE FARM; COLLECTIVIZA-

TION OF AGRICULTURE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brovkin, Vladimir, ed. (1997). The Bolsheviks in Russian

Society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Figes, Orlando. (1989). Peasant Russia, Civil War: The

Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917–1921). Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Lih, Lars. (1990). Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

A. D

ELANO

ARM

COMMITTEES OF THE VILLAGE POOR

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COMMONWEALTH OF

INDEPENDENT STATES

The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was

established on December 8, 1991, in the Belovezh

Accords, which also brought an end to the Soviet

Union. These accords were signed by leaders from

Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and on December 21,

1991, in the Almaty Delcaration and Proctocol to

these accords, eight additional states (Moldavia, Ar-

menia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkemenistan,

Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan) confirmed

their intention to join the CIS and accept the demise

of the Soviet state. Georgia joined the CIS in De-

cember 1993, bringing total membership to twelve

states (the Baltic republics of Estonia, Lithuania, and

Latvia never joined). The organization had several

goals, including coordination of members’ foreign

and security policies, development of a common

economic space, fostering human rights and inter-

ethnic concord, maintenance of the military assets

of the former USSR, creation of shared transporta-

tion and communications networks, environmen-

tal security, regulation of migration policy, and

efforts to combat organized crime. The CIS had a

variety of institutions through which it attempted

to accomplish these goals: Council of Heads of State,

Council of Heads of Government, Council of For-

eign Ministers, Council of Defense Ministers, an

inter-parliamentary assembly, Executive Commit-

tee, Anti-Terrorism Task Force, and the Interstate

Economic Committee of the Economic Union.

Although in a sense the CIS was designed to re-

place the Soviet Union, it was not and is not a sep-

arate state or country. Rather, the CIS is an

international organization designed to promote co-

operation among its members in a variety of fields.

Its headquarters are in Minsk, Belarus. Over the

years, its members have signed dozens of treaties

and agreements, and some hoped that it would ul-

timately promote the dynamic development of ties

among the newly independent post-Soviet states.

By the late 1990s, however, the CIS lost most of

its momentum and was victimized by internal rifts,

becoming, according to some observers, largely ir-

relevant and powerless.

From its beginning, the CIS had two main pur-

poses. The first was to promote what was called a

“civilized divorce” among the former Soviet states.

Many feared the breakup of the Soviet Union would

lead to political and economic chaos, if not outright

conflict over borders. The earliest agreements of the

CIS, which provided for recognition of borders, pro-

tection of ethnic minorities, maintenance of a uni-

fied military command, economic cooperation, and

periodic meetings of state leaders, arguably helped

to maintain some semblance of order in the region,

although one should note that the region did suf-

fer some serious conflicts (e.g., war between Arme-

nia and Azerbaijan and civil conflicts in Tajikistan,

Moldova, and Georgia).

The second purpose of the CIS was to promote

integration among the newly independent states.

On this score, the CIS had not succeeded. The main

reason is that while all parties had a common in-

terest in peacefully dismantling the old order, there

has been no consensus among these states as to

what (if anything) should replace the Soviet state.

Moreover, the need to develop national political and

economic systems took precedence in many states,

dampening enthusiasm for any project of reinte-

gration. CIS members have also been free to sign

or not sign agreements as they see fit, creating a

hodgepodge of treaties and obligations among CIS

states.

One of the clearest failures of the CIS has been

on the economic front. Although the member states

pledged cooperation, things began to break down

early on. By 1993, the ruble zone collapsed, with

each state issuing its own currency. In 1993 and

1994, eleven CIS states ratified a Treaty on an Eco-

nomic Union (Ukraine joined as an associate mem-

ber). A free-trade zone was proposed in 1994, but

by 2002 it still had not yet been fully established.

In 1996 four states (Russia, Belarus, Krygyzstan,

Kazakhstan) created a Customs Union, but others

refused to join. All these efforts were designed to

increase trade, but, due to a number of factors,

trade among CIS countries has lagged behind tar-

geted figures. More broadly speaking, economic co-

operation has suffered because states had adopted

economic reforms and programs with little regard

for the CIS and have put more emphasis on redi-

recting their trade to neighboring European or Asian

states.

Cooperation in military matters fared little bet-

ter. The 1992 Tashkent Treaty on Collective Secu-

rity was ratified by a mere six states. While CIS

peacekeeping troops were deployed to Tajikistan

and Abkhazia (a region of Georgia), critics viewed

these efforts as Russian attempts to maintain a

sphere of influence in these states. As a “Monroeski

Doctrine” took hold in Moscow, which asserted

special rights for Russia on post-Soviet territory,

COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

and Russia used its control over energy pipelines to

put pressure on other states, there was a backlash

by several states against Russia, which weakened

the CIS. After September 11, 2001, the CIS created

bodies to help combat terrorism, and some hoped

that this might bring new life to the organization.

See also: BELOVEZH ACCORDS; RUBLE ZONE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Heenan, Patrick, and Lamontagne, Monique, eds. (1999).

The CIS Handbook. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn.

Olcott, Martha Brill; Aslund, Anders; and Garnett, Sher-

man. (1999). Getting It Wrong: Regional Cooperation and

the Commonwealth of Independent States. Washington,

DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Sakwa, Richard, and Webber, Mark. (1999). “The Com-

monwealth of Independent States, 1991–1998: Stag-

nation and Survival.” Europe-Asia Studies 51:379–415.

AUL

J. K

UBICEK

COMMUNISM

In its broadest meaning communism describes a so-

ciety in which all its members jointly (commu-

nally) own its resources and in which the society’s

wealth and products are distributed equally to

everyone. The term has been applied to premodern

social and political constructs, such as communal

societies propounded in Plato’s Republic and in

Thomas More’s Utopia; to proposals of some rad-

icals in the French Revolution of 1787; and to ideal

communities advocated by nineteenth-century re-

formers such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen,

but none of these systems corresponded fully with

the principles of communism.

Most often, communism designates the ultimate

good society espoused by Karl Marx and Friedrich

Engels in their Communist Manifesto of 1848 and

the ideas and Soviet system in twentieth-century

Russia associated with Vladimir Lenin and the Bol-

shevik Party. The latter usage is a misnomer: Nei-

ther Lenin nor later Soviet leaders ever claimed that

communism had been established in the Soviet

Union. Nevertheless, they willingly adopted the

label, since it furthered their revolutionary and

propagandistic purposes. As a result, in general dis-

cussion and writing, the Soviet state and its post-

World War II offshoots in Eastern Europe, China,

North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Cuba

were generally called “communist.” Correspond-

ingly, leaders of the Soviet Union, of other similarly

constituted states, and of revolutionary parties

worldwide that adhered to Marxist-Leninist doc-

trine were known as “communists.”

MARX’S VIEW OF COMMUNISM

More accurately, however, communism signifies

only the very last step in the historical process and

the ultimate and highly desirable goal of human

development as outlined in Marx’s economic, so-

cial, and political philosophy. Influenced by egali-

tarian ideas current in the eighteenth-century

Enlightenment, Marx was outraged by what he

saw as the unjust nature of the economic system

spawned by the Industrial Revolution, which he

called capitalism. Marx and Engels portrayed his-

tory as determined inevitably by “scientific” laws,

which divided human social evolution into five

broad stages: “gentilism,” sometimes referred to as

“primitive communism,” with individuals living in

clans and holding property in common; “slavery”

based on slave labor; “feudalism” dependent on serf

labor; “capitalism,” in which entrepreneurs or cap-

italists exploited workers (the proletariat) and con-

trolled the government; and “socialism,” with

public ownership replacing private capital and the

emergence of a classless society providing justice,

equity and freedom for all. Since conflict and class

struggle, the mechanism for social change, would

not exist in this new order, socialism would be the

final stage of history and the highest level of hu-

man development.

Marx noted, however, that socialism would

have two phases: the lower phase, also known as

“socialism,” and a higher phase, “communism.”

The latter would be the ultimate good society ben-

efiting all mankind. In the lower, socialist phase,

the whole society would own its productive forces,

or the economy, but work would still be valued

and paid differentially and distribution of the soci-

ety’s goods and wealth would not yet be equal. To

reach the higher, communist phase, two require-

ments had to be met. First, the productive forces

of society, restricted by the capitalists in a vain at-

tempt to prop up their profits, would be liberated,

and the economy, hugely expanded by modern sci-

entific and technological inputs, would become ca-

pable of producing “a superabundance of goods.”

This enormous output would permit everyone to

have whatever they needed. Second, in counterbal-

ance, an individual’s needs would be limited and

sensible, because society would develop, through

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

education and by example, “a new-type socialist

person.” Reoriented individuals would desire only

what was truly necessary to sustain life, eschewing

ostentation and waste. They would also contribute

to the socialist society altruistically, applying their

work and varied talents to the common welfare.

With the superabundance of goods and the new so-

cialist individual, society could then be organized

on the principle: “from each according to his abil-

ity; to each according to his needs.” Thus, com-

munism would mark an end to coercion, want, and

inequality.

LENIN AND COMMUNISM

Circulating in tsarist Russia by the 1880s, Marx’s

views were adopted by Vladimir Lenin, who soon

led the Bolsheviks, a Marxist-oriented revolution-

ary party. Lenin linked his effort in Russia to the

global spread of capitalism, which he labeled “im-

perialism,” and counted on aid from successful

workers’ revolutions in Europe to help the Russian

proletariat achieve socialism. He was dismayed,

therefore, when, after the “imperialist” World War

I broke out, most European workers and their

Marxist leaders chose patriotism over revolution

and backed their own national governments in the

war.

Many Marxists in Russia also rallied to sup-

port the tsarist war effort. Determined to keep his

party in control after the Bolsheviks came to power

in November 1917 and to discredit other Russian

Marxist revolutionaries, Lenin in 1918 changed the

name of the Bolsheviks to the Russian Communist

Party, and a year later he founded an international

revolutionary organization called the Communist

International. These actions were taken to broaden

the appeal of the Bolshevik Revolution and to dis-

tinguish Lenin and his followers from other Marx-

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Young communists salute as they pass Lenin’s tomb on May Day. © H

ULTON

RCHIVE

ian socialists in Russia and throughout the world,

whom he considered insufficiently revolutionary,

if not collaborators with the hated imperialists.

Lenin added little to Marx’s sketchy ideas on

the characteristics of communism, once mention-

ing cooperatives as a possible organizational basis

for the future and another time referring to “ac-

counting and control” and “the administration of

things” as keys to establishing a truly communist

society. Stalin proclaimed in the 1930s that the So-

viet Union had achieved the lower phase, socialism,

of Marx’s fifth stage of history, and after World

War II Soviet theoreticians added that Soviet soci-

ety had entered “the transition to communism.”

But what communism would actually look like

remained vague, except for speculation about free

transportation, state-run boarding schools, and

communal eating.

THE DISCARDING OF COMMUNISM

In the 1980s, as the weaknesses of the Soviet econ-

omy and system became apparent, the appeal of

communism, so closely linked to the Soviet expe-

rience, dimmed. In 1989 and 1991, when socialist

states in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union col-

lapsed, many observers declared that communism

was dead. Although nominally communist sys-

tems still existed in North Korea, China, Vietnam,

and Cuba, even these governments made conces-

sions to nonsocialist economic activity. Moreover,

none of these regimes argued that it had achieved

communism, or even that it was nearing the ulti-

mate good society envisaged by Marx.

See also: BOLSHEVISM; ENGELS, FRIEDRICH; LENIN,

VLADIMIR ILICH; MARXISM; SOCIALISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Daniels, Robert V. (1993). The End of the Communist Rev-

olution. New York: Routledge.

Heilbroner, Robert L. (1980). Marxism, For and Against.

New York: Norton.

Hunt, Carew R. N. (1983). The Theory and Practice of Com-

munism: An Introduction, 5th rev. ed. New York: Pen-

guin Books.

Mayo, Henry B. (1966). Introduction to Marxist Theory.

New York: Oxford University Press.

Meyer, Alfred G. (1986). Leninism, 2nd ed. Boulder, CO:

Westview Press.

Sowell, Thomas. (1985). Marxism: Philosophy and Eco-

nomics. New York: Morrow.

OHN

M. T

HOMPSON

COMMUNIST ACADEMY

The Communist Academy (Akademiya kommu-

nisticheskaya) was founded on June 25, 1918, by

order of the All-Russian Central Executive Com-

mittee. Known until 1924 as the Socialist Academy,

this institution was designed to rival the nearly

200-year-old Academy of Sciences. Indeed, al-

though it was formally established “from above”

by government decree, the Communist Academy

also answered calls “from below” from the radical

wing of the Russian intelligentsia, which had lob-

bied for an alternative to the conservative Academy

of Sciences since the 1880s.

The Communist Academy served to coordinate

communist higher education and research along-

side the Institute of Red Professors and the Com-

missariat of the Enlightenment. It consisted of a

number of institutes devoted to subjects ranging

from philosophy, history, literature, and the nat-

ural sciences to economics, socialist construction,

and international relations and development. It also

boasted a number of specialized sections and com-

missions, as well as an array of societies revolving

around groups such as the Militant Materialist Di-

alecticians, Marxist Historians, Marxist Oriental-

ists, and Marxist Biologists.

Structurally reminiscent of the older Academy

of Sciences, the Communist Academy supplanted

its rival’s apolitical “bourgeois” approach to science

and scholarship with an explicitly political agenda

grounded in the tenets of Marxism–Leninism.

Moreover, there was a fairly explicit division of la-

bor between the two, with the Communist Acad-

emy attempting to monopolize the most important

areas in the social and natural sciences and ceding

only experimental, abstract work to the Academy

of Sciences (along with arcane subjects like arche-

ology and the study of antiquity). Scarcity of re-

sources and the frequent overlapping of scholarly

research, however, kept the two institutions in a

state of fierce competition for much of the 1920s.

A bastion of party power in science and higher

education, the Communist Academy was neverthe-

less symbiotically linked to the Academy of Sciences.

In essence, the Communist Academy thrived as long

as its rival was able to preserve its semi–autonomous,

apolitical status. But by 1928, the Academy of Sci-

ences—the longest-lasting of the powerful NEP-era

bourgeois institutions—found itself under attack. In

an effort to bring the Academy of Sciences under state

control, the party leadership ordered the institution

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to elect Marxist scholars as academicians. Then, dur-

ing the radical years of the cultural revolution (1928-

1932), the Academy of Sciences was terrorized by

official harassment and wave after wave of arrests

and dismissals, which ultimately forced the institu-

tion to adopt a more conformist line. This process

was completed in 1934 when the newly cowed Acad-

emy of Sciences was uprooted from its historical

habitat in Leningrad and moved to Moscow to work

alongside the Communist Academy.

Although these changes broke the resistance of

the Academy of Sciences, they undermined the very

raison d’être of the Communist Academy. After all,

once the Academy of Sciences had begun to employ

Marxist–trained scholars and produce at least nom-

inally Marxist scholarship, it became difficult to

justify the continued existence of the Communist

Academy. Within two years, the latter institution

was subsumed into the newly Sovietized Academy

of Sciences by government decree on February 8,

1936.

See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; EDUCATION; INSTITUTE

OF RED PROFESSORS; MARXISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

David–Fox, Michael. (1997). Revolution of the Mind:

Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

David–Fox, Michael. (1998). “Symbiosis to Synthesis:

The Communist Academy and the Bolshevization of

the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1918-1929.”

Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 46(2):219-243.

AVID

RANDENBERGER

COMMUNIST BLOC

Countries after the end of World War II (i.e., after

August 1945), which became linked by adherence

to the ideology and practice of communism, as de-

veloped by Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin and their

successors in the Soviet Union.

Before the collapse of the USSR, some of the

countries within it were also informally known as

the Soviet bloc. Their official name was Sodruzh-

estvo sotsialisticheskikh gosudarstv (Common-

wealth of Socialist Countries), for not even the

USSR claimed that it had reached the communist

stage after socialism. Lenin and his associates, most

notably Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev, had

vainly tried to spread communism throughout the

world after the successful October, or Bolshevik,

Revolution in Soviet Russia, despite the short-lived

communist regime of Bela Kun in Hungary

(March–August 1919). The Communist Interna-

tional, or Comintern, in Moscow (March 1919–

June 1943), which was dominated by leaders of

the Russian Communist Party, helped to train com-

munist revolutionaries from all over the world.

They became leaders of their countries in East Cen-

tral and Southeastern Europe and in Asia after

World War II. International links were then pro-

vided by the Communist Information Bureau, or

Cominform (September 1947–April 1956), the

Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (January

1949–June 1991) and the Warsaw Pact (May

1955–July 1991). At the height of its largest ex-

tent under Stalin (late 1940s, early 1950s), the

communist bloc comprised more than a billion peo-

ple or one-third of the world’s population. In Eu-

rope, there was the USSR itself, with Estonia,

Latvia, and Lithuania having been incorporated af-

ter the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (August 23,

1939); the German Democratic Republic; Poland;

Czechoslovakia; Hungary; Romania; Bulgaria; Yu-

goslavia; and Albania. In Asia, the Bloc included:

Cambodia (Kampuchea), China (People’s Republic

of China), Laos, Mongolia, South Yemen (People’s

Democratic Republic of Yemen), and Vietnam

(North Vietnam only from 1946–1975, then all

of Vietnam). In America, Cuba joined the Bloc af-

ter the Fidel Castro Revolution of January 1959.

In Africa, Angola, Benin, Congo, Ethiopia, and

Mozambique linked up in the 1960s.

Did Marxist-Leninist socialism advance mod-

ernization in the communist bloc, or would mod-

ernization have occurred anyway and without the

increase in authoritarianism and the use of terror?

Zbigniew Brzezinski criticized in The Grand Failure

“the dogmatic grand oversimplification inherent in

the communist claim to a unique grasp of all truth

and in the communist quest for a total monopoly

of power.” Arguably, total monopoly of power pre-

supposed the use of terror, which, as Merle Fainsod

put in his How Russia Is Ruled, “[was] the linchpin

of modern totalitarianism.” Stephane Courtois and

others implicitly extended Fainsod’s insight to the

entire communist bloc. When, in the interest of re-

forms and modernization, Stalin’s successor Nikita

S. Khrushchev and, even more, Mikhail S. Gor-

bachev, restricted the use of terror within the USSR

and police violence and military intervention in the

communist bloc, the bloc began disintegrating in

the 1960s and broke apart completely between

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1989 and 1991, after the semi-free elections in

Poland in June 1989 and the establishment in Sep-

tember 1989 of the first Polish government after

World War II that was not dominated by com-

munists from the Polish United Workers’ Party.

It is also arguable whether U.S. and Western

policy of containment and coexistence helped more

to break up the already reforming and moderniz-

ing USSR, the key state in the communist bloc, or

whether it was U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s pol-

icy of military containment through rearmament

that led to the political transformation and demise

of the USSR. Reagan’s political war, in turn, was

based on U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s support of

Soviet dissidents.

Finally, it remains to be seen whether Vladimir

V. Putin, who was elected president of Russia in

March 2000 and whose formative experience had

been the breakdown of communist authority in

East Germany in 1989, will succeed in attempting

to reassert Russia’s great power status, particularly

in the territory of the former USSR. Russia’s weak

economy and Western diplomacy may prevent

reestablishment of Russia’s influence over portions

of the old communist bloc.

See also: COMINTERN; WARSAW TREATY ORGANIZATION,

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brzezinski, Zbigniew K. (1967). The Soviet Bloc: Unity and

Conflict, rev. and enlarged ed. Cambridge, MA: Har-

vard University Press.

Brzezinski, Zbigniew K. (1990). The Grand Failure: The

Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Cen-

tury. New York: Macmillan.

Courtois, Stephane; Werth, Nicolas; Panne, Jean-Louis;

Paczkowski, Andrzej; Bartosek, Karel; Margolin,

Jean-Louis. (1999). The Black Book of Communism:

Crimes, Terror, Repression, tr. Jonathan Murphy and

Mark Kramer; consulting ed. Mark Kramer. Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Fainsod, Merle. (1953). How Russia Is Ruled, 1st ed. Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Garthoff, Raymond L. (1994). Détente and Confrontation:

American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, rev.

ed. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Garthoff, Raymond L. (1994). The Great Transition: Amer-

ican Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War.

Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1988). Perestroika: New Thinking for

Our Country and the World, new updated ed. New

York: Harper & Row.

Hunt, R. N. Carew. (1962). The Theory and Practice of

Communism: An Introduction, 5th rev. ed. New York:

Macmillan.

Schweizer, Peter. (2002). Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of

His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Com-

munism. New York: Doubleday.

Zacek, Jane Shapiro, and Kim, Ilpyong J., eds. (1997).

The Legacy of the Soviet Bloc. Gainesville: University

of Florida Press.

AROSLAV

ILINSKY

COMMUNIST INFORMATION BUREAU

The Communist Information Bureau was an orga-

nization, usually known as the Cominform, cre-

ated by Stalin in 1947 ostensibly for the purpose

of exchanging information among the communist

parties of Europe. Actually, the Cominform served

two purposes: 1) to solidify relationships among

the communist parties of Eastern Europe as tools

of Soviet foreign policy; 2) to act as a device for

dealing with Tito and the Communist Party of Yu-

goslavia. The organization’s full name was the In-

formation Bureau of the Communist and Workers’

Parties, sometimes known by its Russian abbrevi-

ation, Informburo.

Following World War II, one of Stalin’s pri-

mary foreign policy goals for Eastern Europe was

to establish friendly (i.e., subservient) states in East-

ern Europe as a buffer against a potentially revived

Germany. Whereas the western allies did not dis-

agree with that goal in principle, they did find the

Soviet Union’s revolutionary rhetoric and its ag-

gressive policies in Poland and the Balkans unac-

ceptable, even frightening, as they began to

establish their own vision of a liberal world sys-

tem. In 1947 the British decided to pull back from

the international commitments that had character-

ized their imperial history, and the United States

stepped into the breach. Citing the apparent divi-

sion of the world into two camps, a free one based

on “individual liberty” and an unfree one based on

“terror and oppression,” President Harry Truman

endorsed what later became called the policy of con-

tainment, that is, limiting communism to those

countries where it already existed. Shortly there-

after, the United States introduced the Marshall

Plan for the recovery of Europe.

In the summer of 1947, largely in response

to these western initiatives, Stalin had Wladyslaw

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Gomulka, head of the Polish Workers Party, invite

the representatives of Communist parties of nine

European countries (USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslova-

kia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, France,

and Italy) to the Polish resort of Szklarska Poreba

for a “private conference . . . to exchange informa-

tion on the situation in the various countries” and

perhaps to create a journal. Actually, as documents

made available in the 1990s show, Stalin intended

to create a mechanism for subordinating the activ-

ities of the other parties to Soviet aims.

The main speech at the conference, which con-

vened on September 22, was made by Andrei Zh-

danov, second only to Stalin in the Soviet hierarchy.

In an aggressive and strongly-worded talk, Zh-

danov restated the “two-camp” notion, but this

time with the democratic camp (the USSR and its

allies) consisting of those “antifascist” countries

that had “broken with imperialism and have firmly

set foot on the path of democratic development,”

and the imperialist camp (the U.S. and its allies)

consisting of countries that relied on “reactionary,

anti-democratic forces.” Zhdanov characterized

“America’s aspirations to world supremacy” as

“highly reminiscent of the reckless program . . . of

the fascist aggressors,” the Hitlerites. Stalin gave

the Yugoslav party pride of place at the conference

by permitting its representatives to be the harsh-

est critics of the other parties, particularly the

French and Italian, which recently had been

dropped from their coalition governments. He

added to Yugoslavia’s prestige by making Belgrade

the location of the editorial offices of the new Com-

inform monthly (later biweekly) publication enti-

tled For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s Democracy!

It is not clear whether Stalin was rewarding the

Yugoslavs at Sklarska Poreba or setting them up.

But in the winter and spring of 1948, a serious con-

troversy arose between the Yugoslav party and

Stalin that led to an exchange of messages. At one

point the Yugoslavs stated that “no matter how

much each of us loves the land of socialism, the

USSR, he can, in no case, love his own country less.”

This was exactly what Stalin could not abide. The

second meeting of the Cominform, which took place

in Bucharest in June 1948, therefore expelled Yu-

goslavia from the fraternal brotherhood of socialist

states (i.e., the Soviet bloc). Because the events lead-

ing up to this expulsion had been strictly secret, this

expulsion produced a great sensation in Europe and

the world. It put a shocked Yugoslavia on a path

toward an independent style of self-managed so-

cialism, while at the same time opening a vicious

campaign against alleged “Titoism” in the socialist

countries of Eastern Europe.

The Cominform, now excluding Yugoslavia,

met only one more time, in November 1949 in

Hungary. This meeting was devoted primarily to

the “anti-Titoist” campaign. Stalin’s death in 1953

and the changes in Soviet policy that ensued made

the organization increasingly obsolete. Khrushchev

decided in 1956 to restore good relations with Yu-

goslavia, and the Cominform was dissolved on

April 17 of that year.

See also: STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; YUGOSLAVIA, RE-

LATIONS WITH; ZHDANOV, ANDREI ALEXANDROVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bass, Robert Hugo, ed. (1959). The Soviet-Yugoslav Con-

troversy, 1948–1958: A Documentary Record. New

York: Prospect Books for the East European Insti-

tute.

Procacci, Giuliano, ed. (1994). The Cominform: Minutes

of the Three Conferences, 1947/1948/1949. Milan:

Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.

ALE

TOKES

COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL

Communist International was an organization of

communist parties devoted to hastening socialist

revolution. During World War I, Vladimir Ilyich

Lenin condemned the Second International, a loose

coalition of socialist parties, because most of its lead-

ers had voted for war credits and supported the

war. He dubbed them traitors to Marxism and the

proletariat, and thereafter urged creating a new in-

ternational, a Third or Communist International,

which would lead the world’s workers to socialism.

The founding Congress of the Communist In-

ternational (Comintern) in 1919 was the first step

toward realizing Lenin’s dream. That Congress did

little more than announce the birth of the Com-

intern—“a unified world Communist Party, specific

sections of which were parties active in each coun-

try”—and its basic principles. Delegates to the Sec-

ond Congress in 1920 adopted the Twenty–One

Points, which defined membership rules. Certain

points deserve note. Each party seeking Comintern

affiliation had to remove reformists from its ranks,

purge its membership periodically, and adhere to

the principles of democratic centralism. Those prin-

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