Encyclopedia of Russian History

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Russia put pressure on Prussia to end an occupa-

tion of Jutland in order to prevent a Scandinavian

alliance. The Russians considered various ulti-

mately unsuccessful plans to neutralize Denmark

toward the end of the century. Relations in the sec-

ond half of the century benefited from a close re-

lationship between the two royal families. Nicholas

I in 1852 gave up the Russian claim on Gottorp

and a dynastic marriage between Christian IX’s

daughter and the future Alexander III in 1866. The

tsar and his family visited Denmark at least once

a year. Russia also supported Denmark against Ger-

many after 1864, following the loss of Schleswig-

Holstein and Lauenburg to Prussia and Austria.

Economic ties between the two countries ac-

quired a new dimension with growth in Danish in-

vestment and entrepreneurship starting in the late

nineteenth century. By 1917, Danish direct invest-

ment in Russia was comparable to the kingdom’s

annual budget. The Danes were especially active in

the agricultural and food sector. A Dane—Carl An-

dreas Koefoed—was one of the driving forces be-

hind the Stolypin reforms. Russia was Denmark’s

third or fourth most important trade partners and

accounted for one-tenth of total Danish imports.

Before World War I, Russia was the leading export

market for Danish industry.

Following unsuccessful efforts to gain com-

pensation for economic losses in connection with

the Bolshevik Revolution, Denmark recognized the

Soviet regime in 1923. However, a Bolshevik pro-

paganda representation had operated in Copenhagen

already in 1918 and 1919. Danish observance of

political neutrality made relations with the com-

munist regime relatively problem-free, in spite of

Soviet sponsorship of the Danish Communist Party

(DCP) and other revolutionary organizations. The

DCP, however, remained throughout a relatively

marginal factor in Danish internal politics. Adher-

ing to its neutrality Denmark in 1939 refused to

support the expulsion of the Soviets from the

League of Nations and refused to join a Nordic de-

fensive alliance thereafter.

The Red Army occupied the Island of Bornholm

in 1945 with a view to ensuring free access to the

Baltic. The British promise not to continue with the

occupation of Denmark led to a Russian departure

in 1946. The postwar government, committed to

neutrality, sought to acquire a role as a bridge-

builder between the East and the West. However,

following Norwegian NATO accession in 1949,

Denmark followed suit to face a virulent Soviet re-

action. The Soviets sought to foster forces opposed

to Danish NATO membership and advocated the

neutralization of Scandinavia or, at least, guaran-

tees against the stationing of nuclear weapons

there. A gradual rapprochement began under Nikita

Khrushchev, but the Brezhnev regime sought to

convince Denmark of the new geopolitical realities

created by its active armament campaign. The So-

viets were particularly enthusiastic about the emer-

gence of a grassroots peace movement in the 1980s,

which was viewed as a way of weakening Danish-

U.S. ties. The ruling Social Democrats in Denmark

became more favorable to a nuclear-free Scandi-

navia by the mid-1980s, and relations were fairly

cordial thereafter, fully normalized after the col-

lapse of the Soviet Union.

See also: GREAT NORTHERN WAR; NORWAY, RELATIONS

WITH; SWEDEN, RELATIONS WITH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kirby, David. (1990). Northern Europe in the Early Mod-

ern Period: The Baltic World, 1492–1772. London:

Longman.

Kirby, David. (1995). The Baltic World, 1772–1993: Eu-

rope’s Northern Periphery in an Age of Change. London:

Longman.

Lauring, Palle. (1995). A History of Denmark, 3rd ed.

Copenhagen: Høst.

ARMO

T. K

OTILAINE

DEPORTATIONS

The term deportation does not have an exact Rus-

sian equivalent (vyselenie is the most common, with

deportatsiya also coming into use in the twentieth

century). The term refers to the forced removal of

a defined group from a certain territory. The largest

cases of mass deportation occurred during the two

world wars and were linked in many ways to the

practices of ethnic cleansing and nationalist politics

that swept through Europe during the dark years

of the first half of the century.

But the practice can also be traced to precedents

in earlier Russian history. Some of the best-known

early attempts to use deportation as an official pol-

icy involved repressions of elites after conquest of

new regions or in the aftermath of rebellions. Af-

ter the conquest of Novgorod in the late fifteenth

century, the Prince of Muscovy expropriated the

DEPORTATIONS

383

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

lands of leading boyars and forcibly took them to

Moscow. When Russia conquered the Crimea, there

was a mass exodus of Tatars in which the role of

Russian officials remains in dispute among histo-

rians. During the conquest of the Caucasus in the

nineteenth century, the regime turned to extremely

violent methods of driving the entire population

from given regions, and encouraged mass emigra-

tions of Adygy, Nogai, and other predominantly

Muslim and Turkic groups. In the aftermath of

both the 1831 and 1861 rebellions the authorities

confiscated estates and deported thousands of Pol-

ish gentry it accused of participating to Siberia and

the Caucasus.

Another important precedent for the twentieth-

century deportations was the Russian punitive

system, which relied heavily upon the exile of in-

dividuals to Siberia and other locations and thereby

created a template for officials to apply to entire

groups in extraordinary circumstances. Likewise,

the myriad of regulations on Jewish rights of res-

idence resulted in a constant stream of forced ex-

pulsions of Jews from areas declared off-limits, in-

cluding the mass expulsion of Jews from Moscow

in 1891–1892.

Important as these precedents were, the mass

deportations of the period from 1914 to 1945 stand

in a category apart. The first major deportations of

this period occurred during World War I. In the

first months of the war, the regime interned en-

emy citizen males to prevent them from departing

the country to serve in enemy armies. By the end

of 1915, the regime had expanded these operations

to include large numbers of women, children, and

elderly, and by 1917, over a quarter million enemy

citizens had been deported to the Russian interior.

In a series of other operations, the army extended

the mass deportations to Russian subjects. The

largest of these operations resulted in the deporta-

tion of roughly 300,000 Germans and the expul-

sion of a half million Jews from areas near the

front. In addition to these groups, ten thousand

Crimean Tatars and several thousand Adzhars, Laz,

gypsies, and others were swept up in the opera-

tions.

The motives and explanations for these opera-

tions include many different variables, of which

two stand out. First were security concerns: The

deported groups were accused of disloyalty or po-

tential disloyalty if allowed to fall under enemy oc-

cupation. The second was economic nationalism.

Demands among local populations to expropriate

the lands and businesses of the foreigners, Ger-

mans, and Jews resonated with more general cam-

paigns led by Russians during the war to

nationalize and nativize the economy. As the war

dragged on, security motives tended to give way

to the nationalist ones. This was reflected in a se-

ries of administrative and legal decisions in 1915

that effectively ensured that the ownership of prop-

erties of deported groups would be permanently

transferred to Russians, to other favored national-

ities, or to the state.

DEPORTATIONS UNDER

THE BOLSHEVIKS

After 1917, the Bolshevik regime attempted to use

deportation to achieve revolutionary aims. The

practice of deporting criminals to Siberia greatly

expanded, and several campaigns resulted in at-

tempts to deport entire social population categories.

Most dramatic was the 1919–1920 “decossackiza-

tion” campaign during the civil war, and the

DEPORTATIONS

384

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Major Ethnic Deportations, 1937–1944

Number Date of Place of

Nationality Deported Deportation Resettlement

Koreans 171,781 8/21/37–10/25/37 Kazakhstan,

Uzbekistan

Finns 89,000 8/31/41–9/7/41 Kazakhstan

Germans 749,613 9/3/41–10/15/41 Kazakhstan,

Siberia

Kalmyks 93,139 12/28/43–12/29/43 Siberia,

Kazakhstan

Karachais 69,267

11/6/43

Kazakhstan,

Kyrgyzstan

Chechens 387,229 2/23/44–2/29/44 Kazakhstan,

Kyrgyzstan

Ingush 91,250 2/23/44–2/29/44 Kazakhstan,

Kyrgyzstan

Balkars 37,713 3/8/44–3/9/44 Kazakhstan,

Kyrgyzstan

Crimean

Tatars 183,155 5/18/44–5/20/44 Uzbekistan,

Molotov

Crimean

Greeks 15,040 6/27/44–6/28/44 Uzbekistan,

Mari ASSR

Meskhetian Turks,

Kurds, and

Khemshils 94,955 5/11/44–11/26/44 Uzbekistan,

Kazakhstan,

Kyrgyzstan

Total 1,982,142

SOURCE: Based on Pohl, J. Otto. (1999). Ethnic Cleansing in the

USSR, 1937–1949. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

1930–1933 deportation of kulaks (in theory, the

relatively affluent peasants in each village).

The next wave of mass deportations was closely

linked to World War II, and the international ten-

sions that preceded its outbreak. Fears of foreign

influence, hostility toward foreign capitalist states,

and insecurity about the loyalty of certain ethnic

groups that straddled the border led the Bolsheviks

to turn to mass ethnic deportations. Already in

1934, operations to clear the border regions of “un-

reliable elements” began with a deportations of

Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Germans, and Poles

from Leningrad, which was considered to be a

strategic border city. In February and March 1935,

authorities deported more than 40,000 “unreli-

ables” (mostly ethnic Germans and Poles) from

Ukrainian border regions. This was the first of a

series of mass deportations from border areas, in-

cluding about 30,000 Finns sent from the Leningrad

border regions in 1936 and 170,000 Koreans de-

ported from the Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbek-

istan. The latter was the first ethnic cleansing of

an entire nationality.

During the Great Purge of 1937–1938, depor-

tation to the Siberian camps was a major part of

the operations, which targeted former kulaks, crim-

inals, “anti-Soviet elements,” and in a separate set

of “national operations,” a series of ethnic groups,

including: Koreans, Poles, Germans, Greeks, Finns,

Latvians, Estonians, Afghans, and Iranians. In all,

according to Terry Martin (1998, p. 858), approx-

imately 800,000 individuals were arrested, de-

ported, or executed in the national operations from

1935 to 1938. The regime seems to have been mo-

tivated in this wave of peacetime mass ethnic de-

portations by an attempt to secure the border zones

in preparation for war, and by the failure of its at-

tempt to spread revolution beyond the Soviet Union

by granting wide cultural autonomy and support

to ethnic groups that were divided by the Soviet

DEPORTATIONS

385

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Russian Jews gather at the Baltic Railway Station in St. Petersburg, bound for the Pale of Settlement. © B

ETTMANN

/CORBIS

border. Recognition of the failure of this latter strat-

egy led the regime to turn in the opposite direction,

toward prophylactic strikes to remove the same

groups from border areas to prevent their own at-

traction to their co-ethnics abroad.

World War II brought mass deportations on an

even greater scale. First, the Soviet occupation of

the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) and

parts of Poland and Rumania as a result of the Nazi-

Soviet agreement of August 1939 was followed by

mass deportations of the cultural, political, and

economic elites of these states. The scale of the ar-

rests and deportations was remarkable. Pavel Po-

lian estimates that 380,000 people were deported

in these operations from early 1940 to June 1941.

After the German invasion of June 1941, Joseph

Stalin ordered the mass deportation of entire nation-

alities. Thirteen national groups in all were rounded

up by special police units and deported by train to

Central Asia in operations that lasted only a few days

each. The first operations occurred in August and

September 1941, when 89,000 Finns and 749,613

Germans were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia.

Hitler made no secret of his plans to use the German

minority in the Soviet Union as a building block for

his new racial order in the East, and his mass evac-

uation of ethnic Germans from the Baltic states to

Germany in 1939 on the eve of the Soviet invasion

of those states set the tone for Stalin’s deportations

of Germans. As in World War I, the regime deported

ethnic Germans from the western and southern parts

of the empire, but this time added the large German

population in the middle Volga region. Germans ac-

counted for nearly half of the wartime ethnic de-

portations. The Finns were deported largely from the

Leningrad region in August 1941 as the Finnish

Army was advancing toward the city.

From November 1943 to November 1944, the

Kalmyks, Karachai, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Cri-

mean Tatars, Crimean Greeks, Meskhetian Turks,

Kurds, and Khemshils were all deported en masse to

Central Asia. These deportations were accompanied

by accusations of collaboration while under Ger-

man occupation, but the long histories of resistance

among some of these groups to Russian rule doubt-

less was an important factor as well. This was par-

ticularly true in Chechnya, where an insurgency

formed during the war and conducted raids and as-

sassinations against Soviet officials.

In the final analysis, of course, there can be no

rational explanation for the mass deportation of

entire nationalities. The deportations were recog-

nized as early as the 1950s as one of Stalin’s great-

est crimes. The conditions of the deported groups

were improved and restrictions on their movement

were partially lifted between 1954 and 1956. The

easing of conditions from 1954 to 1956 led to ma-

jor unsanctioned return journeys of many of the

Caucasus nationalities. This was a factor in the

government’s decisions from 1956 to 1958 to al-

low the Karachai, Balkars, Kalmyks, Chechens, and

Ingush to return and to restore their local national

governmental autonomy. But official rehabilitation

for the Germans came only in 1964 and for the

Crimean Tatars in 1967, and in neither case were

their national autonomous governments restored,

nor were these groups given permission to return

to their homelands until the late 1980s and early

1990s. The mass deportations of the twentieth cen-

tury left a bitter legacy that contributed to the de-

termination of national movements from the

Baltics to Chechnya to acquire full independence

from Moscow.

See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES

POLICIES, TSARIST; PALE OF SETTLEMENT; WORLD WAR

I; WORLD WAR II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lohr, Eric. (2003). Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The

Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Martin, Terry. (1998). “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic

Cleansing.” The Journal of Modern History 70(4):

813–861.

Nekrich, Aleksandr M. (1978). The Punished Peoples: The

Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of

the Second World War. New York: Norton.

RIC

OHR

DERZHAVA See PEOPLE’S PARTY OF FREE RUSSIA.

DERZHAVIN, GAVRYL ROMANOVICH

(1743–1816), poet.

Gavryl Derzhavin, one of the most original Rus-

sian poets of the eighteenth century, was regarded

as the greatest national poet before Alexander

Pushkin. Following a period in the army, he worked

as a civil servant for more than twenty years. He

served first as provincial governor from 1786 to

1788 in Tambov, a city in south-central European

DERZHAVA

386

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Russia founded in 1636 as an outpost against the

Crimean Tatars. A man of the Enlightenment, he be-

came poet laureate and served as minister of justice

for Catherine II from 1802 to 1805. Derzhavin also

served briefly as Catherine’s private secretary.

Derzhavin’s most famous works, listed chrono-

logically, include The Courtier (1776), The Death of

Prince Meshchersky (1779–1783), Felitsa (1782), Ode

to God (1784), To the Potentates and Judges (1780),

and The Waterfall (1791–1794). While Derzhavin

favored the ode as genre, he differed from the poet

Lomonosov in that he did not consider it a lauda-

tory form. His style is more reminiscent of the Ro-

man lyric poet and satirist, Horace (65

.–8

.). Derzhavin first caught Catherine the Great’s

attention with his ode to her, Felitsa, named after

a character in Catherine’s own story “The Tale of

Prince of Khlor.” Here he broke several taboos,

praising the sovereign not with awe, but with easy

familiarity. She walks “on foot,” eats, reads, writes,

enjoys jokes, and treats people nicely. Derzhavin

then contrasts her to the petty self-centeredness of

the nobles surrounding her, with their feasts, fancy

dress, and endless entertainments. Derzhavin sharply

criticizes court life in The Courtier and To the Poten-

tates and Judges, lampooning the unjust bureau-

crats and parasitic aristocracy.

Derzhavin’s poetry and memoirs present a rich

and complex portrait of his time, employing a di-

verse range of topics from war and peace to love

and dining. Open to the influence of all contempo-

rary currents and at ease with various philosophi-

cal perspectives, Derzhavin is remembered as the

poet who loved truth more than he loved kings. In

his poetry he was a defender of justice and an in-

dependent spirit. Politically, however, Derzhavin

remained a staunch monarchist and general oppo-

nent of liberal ideas. Along with Admiral Alexander

Shishkov (a defender of serfdom), Derzhavin estab-

lished the Colloquy of Lovers of the Russian Word

(Beseda Lyubitelei Russokogo Slova, 1811–1816)—a

formal literary society with as many as five hun-

dred members whom Derzhavin would invite to his

large home on the banks of the Fontanka in St. Pe-

tersburg.

In Derzhavin’s poetical development, the

themes of time and immortality become increas-

ingly more prominent, until the other motifs—the

poet’s relationship with other people, his memo-

ries, and his own life experience—become varying

aspects of his central poetic obsession with the el-

ement of time. When, on the morning of July 9,

1815, relatives discovered Derzhavin’s corpse, they

spotted an unfinished poem scrawled on a black-

board. Immortalized as “the slate ode” by Osip

Mandelshtam more than a hundred years later, the

poem begins:

Time’s river carries on its current

All the affairs of men; it flings

To the abysm of oblivion

Drowned nations, kingdoms even as kings.

And if the voice of lyre and trumpet

Awhile holds aught above the spate,

That, too, eternity will swallow,

That, too, await the common fate.

The presence of Derzhavinian time imagery can

be detected in the works of later Russian poets such

as Pushkin, Tyutchev, Fet, and Mandelshtam. With

its emphasis on the ode and on emulation of liter-

ary models, Derzhavin’s poetry represents the cul-

mination and expansion of Russian Classicism,

rather than the first step toward Russian Roman-

ticism. Unlike the Romantics, Derzhavin also

demonstrated a Classicist-oriented belief in the sta-

bility of the world order, which he as an odist ex-

alted.

See also: LOMONOSOV, MIKHAIL VASILIEVICH; PUSHKIN,

ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crone, Anna Lisa. (2001). The Daring of Derzavin: the

Moral and Aesthetic Independence of the Poet in Russia.

Bloomington, IN: Slavica.

Derzhavin, Gavryl Romanovich. (2001). Poetic Works: a

Bilingual Album, tr. Alexander Levitsky and Martha

Kitchen. Providence, RI: Dept. of Slavic Studies,

Brown University.

Sandler, Stephanie. (1999). Rereading Russian Poetry. New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

OHANNA

RANVILLE

DE-STALINIZATION

De-Stalinization refers to the attempt to handle the

Stalin legacy following Stalin’s death. Its chrono-

logical boundaries are not clearly defined, but the

process began soon after Stalin died in March 1953

and was generally halted in the early years of the

Brezhnev period following Khrushchev’s ouster in

October 1964. There were four principal elements

of de-Stalinization.

DE-STALINIZATION

387

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

The first element is official pronouncements. The

two most important were Khrushchev’s speeches

to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party

of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956 and the

Twenty-Second Congress in 1961. The former speech

was delivered in closed session to the congress and

was not published in the USSR until 1990, al-

though it was published in the West in 1956 and

was read to closed party meetings across the coun-

try. The second speech was delivered in open ses-

sion and published in the Soviet press at the time

of its delivery. The first speech sought to deflate

the exaggerated image of Stalin and to place the re-

sponsibility for the terror and repressions upon him

alone. Khrushchev sought to argue that Stalin was

responsible for the application of terror to the Party

(no mention was made of the suffering of anyone

outside the party) and that he steered Soviet devel-

opment off of the healthy course upon which the

Party had set it. In the second speech, Khrushchev

further attacked the image of Stalin and sought to

associate some of his own current political oppo-

nents with Stalin’s crimes.

Second are his policies. The policies embarked

on by the Khrushchev leadership in many respects

reversed or modified those pursued by Stalin.

Among the most important of these were the for-

mal reaffirmation of the principle of collective lead-

ership; restoration of the Communist Party to the

central place in the political system; the elimina-

tion of terror as a central aspect of life, including

the rehabilitation of some of those who suffered;

the opening of some of the labor camps and the re-

turn of many of the prisoners and internees to So-

viet society; the increased priority given to light

industry, without displacing heavy industry as the

main priority; and a more flexible foreign policy.

Such changes were crucial because of the freeing

up of general life that they signified. The removal

of the overt threat of terror was particularly im-

portant here.

Third is the freeing up of intellectual life. While

this was, strictly speaking, a change in policy, its

nature and importance warrants separate mention.

The tight restrictions upon discussion, literature,

and all forms of cultural expression were relaxed.

Although censorship, especially self-censorship, re-

mained firmly in place, the boundaries of accept-

able expression expanded significantly. Particularly

important was the emergence of so-called camp lit-

erature, which discussed life in the labor camps and

brought a new perspective on the Stalinist experi-

ence. The publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) was

particularly important in this regard. So was the

rewriting of Soviet history to downplay, and at

times almost eliminate, Stalin’s role.

Fourth is symbolism: The manifestations of the

Stalin cult disappeared as soon as Stalin died. His

image and person ceased to dominate the Soviet me-

dia. And in a process that gathered speed follow-

ing Khrushchev’s 1956 speech, Stalin’s name was

removed from everything that had been named af-

ter him, all statues, busts, and portraits were re-

moved from public display (except in his birthplace,

Gori), and his writings were removed from public

availability in the libraries. In 1962 his body was

removed from the mausoleum on Red Square and

buried in a simple plot beneath the Kremlin wall.

The impetus for de-Stalinization came from

both above and below. It was widely recognized

throughout society that some change would be

necessary following Stalin’s death, but there was

widespread disagreement about how substantial

such change should be. At the top of the political

system, the issue of de-Stalinization became tan-

gled up with factional conflict among the leaders.

From 1956, Khrushchev became the major Soviet

leader pressing the cause of de-Stalinization, while

others like Kaganovich and Molotov, who had been

closer to Stalin, sought to restrict the dimensions

of this process. Similar disagreements about how

far de-Stalinization should extend were evident

within the community as a whole. Many intellec-

tuals, responding to the greater scope for free ex-

pression, played an important part in fueling

de-Stalinization. Many scholars, writers, artists,

poets, and playwrights continually sought to push

back the frontiers of what could and could not be

said. This process was very uneven; many of the

key positions in the artistic and creative worlds

were held by conservatives who sought to hold the

line against too much innovation and who were in

a position to hinder publication and exhibition.

In addition, the line coming from the top was

not consistent; Khrushchev and his supporters

were continually wavering about de-Stalinization,

sometimes pushing it forward, at other times wind-

ing it back. Everyone was uncertain about how far

and how fast the process could be undertaken, and

the political elite in particular was concerned to en-

sure that de-Stalinization did not undermine the

power and legitimacy of the system. In this sense

even Khrushchev, while recognizing that changes

had to be made, was uncertain about their speed

and extent.

DE-STALINIZATION

388

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

De-Stalinization constituted a classic case of lib-

eralization. It was designed to bring about change

without altering the basic Soviet power structure.

In this sense de-Stalinization was limited in its ef-

fect and, when a more conservative leadership came

to power under Brezhnev and Kosygin, many of

these changes were wound back. This was especially

clear in the cultural sphere, where the crackdown

on free expression was important in generating the

dissident movement. However, de-Stalinization left

its mark nonetheless. In the short term it was im-

portant for the regime’s ability to survive the cri-

sis induced by Stalin’s death, but in the longer term

it was crucial in shaping many of those who were

to come to the fore when Gorbachev sought to

bring major change to the system in the 1980s. De-

Stalinization was an important source of pere-

stroika.

See also: KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; STALIN,

JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Breslauer, George W. (1982). Khrushchev and Brezhnev as

Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics. London:

George Allen & Unwin.

Linden, Carl A. (1966). Khrushchev and the Soviet Leader-

ship 1957–1964. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.

Tatu, Michel. (1968). Power in the Kremlin: From Khrushchev

to Kosygin. New York: Viking Press.

Van Goudoever, A. P. (1986). The Limits of Destaliniza-

tion in the Soviet Union: Political Rehabilitations in the

Soviet Union since Stalin. New York: St Martin’s Press.

RAEME

ILL

DÉTENTE

By détente (a French word for “release from ten-

sion”), historians refer to the period of gradually

improved relations between the USSR and the West,

during the 1960s and early 1970s.

The first signs of détente appeared shortly af-

ter Josef Stalin’s death, with the signature of the

peace treaty granting Austrian independence in

May 1955 and the Geneva summit in July that

opened the way for dialogue between the USSR, the

United States, Britain, and France. In March 1956,

during the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU,

“peaceful co-existence” became the “baseline of So-

viet Foreign policy.” Competition with the West

was not over, but, for Nikita Khrushchev, this com-

petition had to be ideological, economic, and tech-

nological rather than military. The USSR kept

however improving its military potential (it fired

its first inter-continental ballistic missile in August

1957 and launched the first Sputnik the following

October) and, regarding the Third World, all means

of influence were still contemplated. This new ap-

proach to international relations led Khrushchev

and Nikolai Bulganin to visit Western countries

(Britain in 1956, the United States. in 1959, and

France in 1960) and to participate in the Paris sum-

mit meeting in 1960. However, détente did not go

without tensions and crises, such as the first Berlin

Crisis in 1958, the U-2 incident in May 1960, the

second Berlin Crisis in August 1961 that led to the

construction of the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Mis-

sile Crisis in October 1962.

The Cuban crisis was actually a turning point

for détente: it led Washington and Moscow to es-

tablish a hotline, so as to prevent the risk of a

nuclear war that could arise from a lack of com-

munications, and in August 1963 the USSR signed

with the United States and Great Britain the first

Nuclear Test Ban treaty. Despite Khrushchev’s dis-

missal in October 1964 and the promotion of a new

leadership with Leonid Brezhnev, Nikolai Pod-

gorny, and Alexei Kosygin, détente was not only

maintained but fostered, for the Soviets perceived

it as the best way to achieve their two major ob-

jectives: obtaining the official recognition of the

post-World War II European territorial status quo

and improving the standard of living of the popu-

lation, by devoting more resources to civil produc-

tion than to the military-industrial complex and

by importing Western advanced technologies and

products.

And indeed, from the mid-1960s to the mid-

1970s, détente became a multilateral process as well

as a bilateral one.

As a bilateral process between the USSR and

the United States, détente focused primarily on

strategic issues; it first led in July 1968 to the Nu-

clear Non-Proliferation Treaty and, in May 1972,

to the SALT I treaty limiting strategic arms; how-

ever, détente dealt also with economic matters:

During his historical trip to the Soviet Union, Pres-

ident Nixon signed several agreements on coopera-

tion and trade, including grain exports to the Soviet

State; one year later, new agreements were signed

during Brezhnev’s visit of June 1973 to the United

States. This Soviet-American détente was not lim-

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ited to domestic questions, as shown by the active

cooperation displayed by the two super-powers in

the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

But détente started involving West-European

governments as well. In 1966 the French President

Charles de Gaulle visited the USSR to promote “dé-

tente, entente, and cooperation” and give détente a

broader content, extended to cultural and human

questions. Three years later Chancellor Willy Brandt,

previously mayor of West Berlin, engaged West

Germany in the Ostpolitik, a policy of opening to

the East which led to concrete achievements: in

1970, West Germany concluded two treaties, one

with Poland and the other with the USSR, that rec-

ognized the current German frontiers, notably the

Oder-Neisse border, gave up all claims to the lost

lands, and implicitly recognized the existence of

East Germany. In 1972, the USSR, the United

States, Britain, and France signed an agreement on

Berlin. These treaties paved the way to the official

admission of the two Germanies to the United Na-

tions in 1973.

Détente was also a truly multilateral process:

In November 1972, thirty-five European countries,

the United States, and Canada opened the Confer-

ence on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE).

In August 1975, the Helsinki Final Act recognized

the post-World War II borders and adopted decla-

rations encouraging Western-Eastern trade and

cultural exchanges as well as promoting human

rights and freedom of movement.

Despite these successes, détente declined and

faded in the second half of the seventies. The active

support of the USSR to Marxist revolutionary

movements in the Third World, its repeated viola-

tions of the Helsinki Final Act, its intervention in

Afghanistan in December 1979, the euromissiles

question, and the Polish crisis in 1980 all con-

tributed to a revival of the Cold War.

See also: ARMS CONTROL; BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; COLD

WAR; CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA

SERGEYEVICH; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan,

Washington DC: Brookings Institution.

Petro, Nicolai N., and Rubinstein, Alvin Z. (1997). Rus-

sian Foreign Policy, From Empire to Nation-State. New

York: Longman.

ARIE

-P

IERRE

DEVELOPED SOCIALISM

The concept of developed (“mature,” or “real”) so-

cialism emerged in the offices of the Central Com-

mittee of the Communist Party in the late 1960s,

soon after the establishment of Leonid Brezhnev’s

regime, which reacted to the public ideology of

Nikita Khrushchev’s regime. Almost immediately,

it was accepted in all Soviet satellites in Eastern Eu-

rope as the leading doctrine. As a matter of fact,

each new Soviet regime made considerable changes

in the public ideology. With Brezhnev’s demise, the

concept of developed socialism was almost imme-

diately discarded. Already in the span of Yuri An-

dropov’s short regime skeptical attitudes toward

the previous regime emerged. The new propaganda

focused on social justice. Then, with the start of

perestroika, this concept associated with Brezhnev’s

stagnation was sent to the dustbin of history.

Khrushchev, the most eclectic Soviet leader,

who tried to combine the goal of developing mili-

tary might (his son Sergei Khrushchev aptly named

a book about his father Nikita Khrushchev and the

Creation of a Superpower, 2000) with a naive belief

in communist ideals, and also with serious liberal-

ization of society. Khrushchev wanted to reach the

standard of living associated with communism

without deflecting any resources from the defense

of the motherland, the sacred cow of all Soviet lead-

ers. It was Khrushchev who in 1961, just a few

years before the coup against him, in the new pro-

gram of the Communist Party, promised that “the

next generations of the Soviet people will live un-

der communism.”

Khrushchev tried to implement this belief

through his policy, which had some disastrous

consequences. He castigated the personal ownership

of cars and private country houses, as well as en-

couraged collective transportation and vacations.

He initiated people’s teams for keeping order as an

attempt to diminish the role of the professional po-

lice, an idea that goes back to Vladimir Lenin’s

utopian vision of socialist society in “State and

Revolution,” written before the October revolution.

Moved by the same motivation, Khrushchev pro-

moted amateur theaters with the same ridiculous

fervor. More serious consequences rose from

Khrushchev’s economic policy. He promised a rad-

ical jump forward in the production of food by the

collective farms. However, he put a limit on the

production of milk and meat from private plots.

While Khrushchev’s program in collective agricul-

ture failed, the curtailment of food production in

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

the private sector led to big lines for food products

in the state and even in the so-called free collective

market.

The leadership who ousted Khrushchev as a

demagogue and adventurist (or voluntarist as he

was cautiously and indirectly named in the press)

who endangered the system searched for more re-

alistic mass propaganda. Preoccupied with military

competition with the United States, Brezhnev and

his colleagues did not want to spread the illusion

that paradise was right around the corner. Such il-

lusions, it was thought, would generate discontent

among the people in the near future.

With a sober stance, the leadership looked for

an ideological concept that would preserve the com-

munist phraseology (“the building of the material-

technological basis of communism”), but instead of

waiting for the future, would proclaim that Soviet

life could be enjoyed right now. This was the mes-

sage of developed socialism, which commanded

great fanfare in the early 1970s. The leadership’s

appeal to the masses to be “satisfied”—a famous

term, often used by Brezhnev—with life at present

seemed all the more reasonable because they were

indeed “deeply satisfied” with the military parity

with the West in the 1970s, an achievement that

had been dreamed about by all the Russian leaders

since Peter the Great.

The authors of the concept described the cur-

rent Soviet society as having already accomplished

many of the goals of socialism in the first stage of

communism. They depicted Soviet society as based

on highly developed productive forces, as a society

that was close to eliminating class and ethnic dis-

tinctions, and as a new type of human community

and socialist personality. Soviet ideologues also

talked about the highly developed socialist democ-

racy, and the scientific character of the political

management. Most postulates of the concept had

few links to reality. The pathetic statements about

the technological revolution in the Soviet economy

looked absurd against the backdrop of the grow-

ing economic gap between the Soviet and Western

economies, particularly in the production of civil

goods. The thesis about the flourishing of socialist

democracy was ridiculous considering the system’s

harsh persecution of dissidents.

There was, however, one element of the new

thinking—that is, the mode of life, or obraz zhizni—

that held a special place in the concept of developed

socialism. The “Soviet mode of life” was closer to

reality than most other dogmas. While refusing to

claim that Soviet society can in the foreseeable fu-

ture surpass the level of material consumption and

productivity in the West (which had been promised

by Khrushchev) the sophisticated Soviet ideologues

focused on other elements of everyday life. They

used the concept of “quality of life” with its focus

on the subjective evaluation of different components

of life that had just emerged in the West in the early

1970s.

While in some ways they followed the spirit of

Western studies on the quality of life, the Soviet

ideologues avoided the comparison of the material

consumption in the USSR and the West. As the

most important features of Soviet life, they con-

centrated on the free education and health care sys-

tem (the quality of which was quite high by

international standards) as well as the high level of

science and culture, the relatively low social in-

equality, the importance of cultural activities in the

lives of ordinary people, the big network of insti-

tutions for children, the vacations in resort insti-

tutions accessible to everybody, full employment,

the absence of homeless people, and the impossi-

bility of evicting people from their apartments. The

Soviet ideologues also described, and not without

reason for the significant part of the Soviet popu-

lation, the Soviet people as patriots, international-

ists, collectivists, and optimists. They depicted life

in the West as full of various conflicts and deeply

immoral. They also ascribed to the Soviet people

mostly fictional properties, such as high labor dis-

cipline, temperance, active participation in the

management of their factories and offices, and a

motivation to work that was not driven by mate-

rial incentives, but by the general willingness to

make their country strong and prosperous.

Despite the permanent grumbling about the

lines for consumer goods and services, the major-

ity of the Soviet people accepted the propaganda

about the superiority of the Soviet style of life com-

pared to capitalist society. In a national survey,

which the author conducted in 1976, the majority

of the respondents evaluated the quality of life in

the USSR as “four” on a five-point scale; they graded

life in the USA as “three,” and in the German De-

mocratic Republic as “five.”

The concept of developed socialism, which un-

derpinned the anti-Western propaganda, was used

also as a tool against “the Great Chinese Proletar-

ian Revolution.” Both countries since the late

1960s struggled for the leadership of the interna-

tional communist movement as well as in the third

world in the 1960s and 1970s. The Soviet ideo-

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

logues denounced the Maoist utopian leftist radi-

calism of the “Great Chinese Cultural Revolution,”

opposing it to Soviet “real socialism.”

The concept of developed socialism was con-

cocted as an ideological trick by the Soviet propa-

gandists for the justification of the new regime. It

was a laughing stock for liberal intellectuals, and

the subject of political jokes from the moment of

its birth. However, ironically, it became a monu-

ment to the period that is considered by many Rus-

sians as the happiest time of their lives. In any case,

ten years after the demise of the USSR, one-half to

two-thirds of the Russians, according to various

polls, believed that life during Brezhnev’s times was

much better than in any other period of Russian

history in the twentieth century, and definitely bet-

ter than in post-Soviet Russia.

See also: BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA

SERGEYEVICH; SOCIALISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kelley, Donald. (1986). The Politics of Developed Socialism.

New York: Greenwood Press.

Shlapentokh, Vladimir. (1988). The Soviet Ideologies in the

Period of Glasnost. New York: Praeger.

LADIMIR

E. S

HLAPENTOKH

DEZHNEV, SEMEN IVANOVICH

(c. 1605–1673), Cossack; explorer of northeastern

Siberia.

Originally from the Pomor region, on the

North Dvina, Semen Dezhnev entered Siberian ser-

vice with the Cossacks in 1630. His expeditions,

particularly that of 1648–1649, were an important

part of the great push eastward that Russia made

into Siberia during the seventeenth century.

Based in Yakutsk, Dezhnev helped to explore

and survey the Alazeya and Kolyma rivers in

northeastern Siberia. In 1647 he set out to find and

map the Anadyr River, but this attempt proved

abortive. Dezhnev began again in June 1648, at the

head of ninety men. From Srednekolymsk, Dezh-

nev’s party sailed north, then, upon reaching the

Arctic Ocean, turned east, along Russia’s northern

coast.

During the next one hundred days, Dezhnev’s

party lost six of seven boats. The surviving vessel

sailed two thousand miles, rounding the Chukotsk

Peninsula, Asia’s northeastern tip. Thus Dezhnev

and his men became, albeit unwittingly, the first

Europeans to navigate what later came to be known

as the Bering Strait. Dezhnev also discovered the

Diomede Islands. Dezhnev had sailed between Asia

and North America, but not for another century,

with Bering’s Great Northern Expedition, would it

be proven conclusively that the two continents

were not physically linked.

In October 1648, Dezhnev’s boat was cast

ashore on Russia’s Pacific coast, well south of the

Anadyr. Before winter set in, the party marched

north, locating the river’s mouth. Sixteen men,

Dezhnev included, survived the winter encamp-

ment. In the spring of 1649, they traveled upriver

and founded the outpost of Anadyrsk. In 1650 and

1651, Dezhnev consolidated his control over the

river basin, aided by Mikhail Stadukhin and Se-

myon Motora, who had reached the eastern Anadyr

overland. Dezhnev was relieved in 1659 and re-

turned to Yakutsk in 1662. In 1672, shortly be-

fore his death, he returned to Moscow.

See also: ALASKA; BERING, VITUS JONASSEN; SIBERIA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bobrick, Benson. (1992). East of the Sun: The Epic Con-

quest and Tragic History of Siberia. New York: Posei-

don.

Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1993). Conquest of a Continent: Siberia

and the Russians. New York: Random House.

OHN

ANNON

DIAGILEV, SERGEI PAVLOVICH

(1872–1929), famed Russian impresario.

Sergei Pavlovich Diagilev founded and led the

Ballets Russes, a touring ballet company that at-

tained an unprecedented level of fame throughout

Europe and the Americas from 1909 until 1929.

Diagilev, his company, and his collaborators intro-

duced Russian dancers, choreographers, painters,

composers, and musicians to Western audiences

that previously had scant knowledge of them. His

Ballets Russes single-handedly established the cen-

trality of dance to the artistic culture of the early

twentieth century.

A former law student, whose own attempts at

musical composition proved a failure, Diagilev bro-

DEZHNEV, SEMEN IVANOVICH

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