Encyclopedia of Russian History

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The Georgian Church was encouraged to join

the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1961, and

Ilia II has served as its president. Internal pressures

from conservatives helped to further the decision

of the Georgians to leave the WCC and other ecu-

menical bodies during the spring of 1997.

There has also been considerable persecution of

non-Orthodox religious communities, including

Baptists, Pentecostals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, in

the post-Soviet period, some of it violent. The

Orthodox responsible for this persecution are gen-

erally persons excommunicated by the Georgian

Church. Some within the church, however, have

participated either by direct violence or by an ele-

vation of rhetoric against the non-Orthodox.

See also: BYZANTIUM, INFLUENCE OF; GEORGIA AND GEOR-

GIANS; ORTHODOXY; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH;

RUSSIFICATION.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Babian, Gorun. (2001). The Relations Between the Armen-

ian and Georgian Church: According to the Armenian

Sources, 300–610. Antelias, Lebanon: Armenian

Catholicosate of Cilicia.

Mgaloblishvili, Tamila, ed. (1998). Ancient Christianity in

the Caucasus. Surrey, England: Curzon.

AUL

REGO

GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

One of the unintended and initially unforeseen con-

sequences of World War II was the division of Ger-

many. At the end of the war, Western forces

controlled and occupied Western Germany, while

Soviet forces occupied Eastern Germany and East-

ern Europe. The Allied powers, including Russia,

agreed to divide Germany and Berlin into occupa-

tion zones. The tensions resulting from the joint

administration of Germany, as well as the emer-

gence of the Cold War, led in 1949 to the formal

division of Germany into two separate states.

In 1949 occupied West Germany was trans-

formed into the Federal Republic of Germany, a

democratic state with close ties to the Western

powers. In East Germany, the German Democratic

Republic was founded. The Soviets had allowed po-

litical parties to form in their section of Germany

as early as 1945, but had used pressure and coer-

cive measures to achieve a merger between the so-

cialist and communist parties during April of 1946.

The result was the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialis-

tische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) or SED, which

came to exercise near-complete control in East Ger-

many. The GDR, like other communist govern-

ments established in Eastern Europe, had a central

committee, and power came from the party lead-

ership, which also assumed key roles in the state

bureaucracy. The government used repressive mea-

sures such as censorship and arrest, and began

to require communist ideology to be taught in

schools. Walter Ulbricht, the head of the German

Democratic Republic, had been part of the German

Communist Party from 1919, the year it was

founded, and had served as a communist deputy

in the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic. Ul-

bricht was flown from the Soviet Union to Ger-

many after the Soviet army had invaded Germany.

Ulbricht, a hard-line Stalinist, stated in 1952 that

East Germany could pursue the construction of full

socialism, further restricting workers and reducing

the availability of consumer goods. Although the

Soviet Union had been exerting considerable pres-

sure upon Ulbricht to reform and alter his repres-

sive policies, the Soviets used force to suppress the

rebellion his policies provoked in 1953.

Since the Soviet occupation of East Germany

had begun, hundreds of thousands of Germans

had fled to the West. The desire to escape Soviet-

occupied territory intensified during Ulbricht’s

tenure, a fact illustrated by the 400,000 Germans

who left East Germany in 1953. The Soviet Union

was able to lessen this massive emigration by pa-

trolling the border between the two German states

and making it impassable, but until 1961, Germans

could take public transportation from East Berlin

to West Berlin and then declare themselves to au-

thorities. In 1961, the Soviets officially sealed off

East Berlin, as well as the last breach in East Ger-

many, by building the Berlin Wall.

The erection of the Berlin Wall led to a stabi-

lization of the situation in East Berlin and the end

to the constant drain on the population. Ulbricht

introduced the New Economic System in 1963. The

New Economic System did not succeed in substan-

tially altering the centralized structure of the East

Germany economy, but it allowed for a relaxation

of the rigid economic policies and for some inde-

pendent decisions. As a result of these changes, the

East German economy became the strongest of all

of those countries within the Soviet sphere of oc-

cupation, while still far below the economies of

GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

553

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Western Europe. Ulbricht appeared to be at the

height of his power in 1968, but many of his poli-

cies were unpopular. In 1971 Soviet authorities

forced Ulbricht to step down. Ulbricht died in 1973,

and his death paved the way for improved relations

between East and West Germany. The East German

minister, Willie Stoph, negotiated and signed sev-

eral treaties with the German Federal Republic.

Stoph briefly served as the effective head of state

but was replaced by Erich Honecker in 1976. In

1989 the changes and reforms initiated by Mikhail

Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and the reluctance

of the Soviet leader to use force to suppress rebel-

lions elsewhere led to uprisings in Eastern Europe.

In East Germany the Berlin Wall symbolized not

just the repressive Soviet-style government that

had been in place since 1949 but also the single

largest cause of resentment among Germans. The

Soviet control of East Berlin and East Germany ne-

cessitated the forced separation of family and

friends who were unable to secure travel permits

or permission to emigrate from the notoriously in-

efficient and reactionary bureaucracy in the East.

The uprisings in Eastern Europe and the discontent

in Germany led the SED to replace Honecker and

to pass a new law regarding travel and emigration.

It was too little too late, however, and crowds

swarmed the crossing point arguing that restric-

tions had been relaxed. When Soviet guards, un-

sure of the situation, opened the gate and allowed

them to pass, Germans began to dismantle the

Wall, and it was not long until the communist

government in East Germany collapsed. The non-

communist leadership of the German Democratic

Republic immediately arranged to meet with au-

thorities from the German Federal Republic. The ini-

tial focus of these talks was on the financial

situation and the request for a loan to East Ger-

many, but the question of German reunification

also hung in the air. These developments led to the

“Two plus Four” talks, encompassing the two Ger-

man states and the four powers that had occupied

Germany. The Two plus Four Treaty, concluded on

September 12, 1990, dealt with all international is-

sues regarding affairs in Germany, to the satisfac-

tion of the major powers. The support of the

president of the United States, George H.W. Bush,

was instrumental in securing the approval of the

French, who had grave concerns about the renewal

of Germany. At 12:01

. on October 3, 1990,

the GDR ceased to exist, and the German Federal

Republic became the sole authority for a reunified

Germany. Reunification has greatly impacted all

Germans socially, economically, and politically as

the complicated process of reintegrating East and

West Germany has taken place within both a na-

tional and an international context.

See also: COMMUNIST BLOC; COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL;

GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Detwiler, Donald S. (1999). Germany: A Short History, 3rd

edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University

Press.

Turner, Henry Ashby, Jr. (1992). Germany from Partition

to Reunification. Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press.

ELISSA

R. J

ORDINE

GERMAN SETTLERS

German traders and missionaries began settling on

the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea during the thir-

teenth century and eventually became the exclu-

sive nobility in the region. The Germans ruled over

the native Estonian and Latvian peasants and con-

verted them first to Catholicism and then, after the

Protestant Reformation, to Lutheranism. They were

responsible for establishing merchant and artisan

guilds in urban areas and feudal manors in rural

areas. The Baltic Germans retained their privileged

status even after Sweden decisively conquered the

region during the 1620s. In 1721 the Russian Em-

pire acquired the territories of Estland and Livland

(equivalent to modern-day Estonia and northern

Latvia) from Sweden. Germans became influential

and loyal members of the Russian government and

army, with some serving as generals, administra-

tors, and diplomats. Baltic Germans fought simul-

taneously against the Bolsheviks and the Latvian

nationalists during the late 1910s but did not suc-

ceed in establishing a permanent German-ruled

state in the Baltics. The number of Germans living

in the Baltics steadily decreased. Following a pact

signed between the foreign ministers of Adolf Hitler

and Josef Stalin in August 1939, almost all of the

remaining Baltic Germans moved to German-ruled

Poland over the next two years.

Germans arrived in the Russian Empire in sev-

eral additional waves of immigration between 1763

and 1862. The areas in which these Germans ini-

tially settled included the Middle Volga Area, south-

ern Ukraine, the Crimean peninsula, Bessarabia,

Volhynia, and the Caucasus. Their religions included

Lutheranism, Catholicism, and Mennonitism.

GERMAN SETTLERS

554

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

On July 22, 1763, the Russian Tsar Catherine

the Great issued a manifesto that offered foreigners

the opportunity to settle in Russia. The newcomers

were promised land, self-governance, religious free-

dom, exemptions from taxes and military service,

and other privileges. The manifesto particularly ap-

pealed to Germans, who had suffered during the

Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), a time of rampant

famine and forced military conscription. From 1763

until 1767, approximately 25,000–27,000 Germans

resettled in the Middle Volga river valley in 104

colonies in the provinces of Saratov and Samara,

which later developed into 192 towns and villages.

Most of the Volga Germans engaged in agriculture,

harvesting such crops as rye, sunflowers, potatoes,

and sugar beets, but some worked as tanners,

sausage makers, millers, and craftspeople. Tsar

Alexander II began drafting them into the Russian

army in 1874. During the following decades, some

Volga German families moved to Siberia, while oth-

ers immigrated to the United States, Canada, and

other countries. Volga Germans were afflicted by

severe famines in 1891–1892, 1921–1922, and

1932–1933, the last one caused by Stalin’s forced

collectivization of farms. While the Volga Germans

had been granted their own autonomous republic

in 1924, it was abolished by Stalin on August 28,

1941, in the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s invasion

of the Soviet Union, and the Volga Germans were

deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia and forced into

slave labor.

Between 1783 and 1812, the Russian Empire

annexed former Ottoman and Crimean Tatar ter-

ritories on the northern Black Sea coast. In 1787

Germans began to settle in New Russia, which later

became the provinces of Kherson, Yekaterinoslav,

and Tauride. In 1813 Tsar Alexander I invited Ger-

mans to Bessarabia and offered them many privi-

leges. The first German settlement in Bessarabia

was founded in 1814, and in the following years,

until 1842, many more Germans arrived and formed

numerous other colonies. Many of the Bessarabian

and Ukrainian Germans specialized in farming and

grape growing, but others worked in trades like

weaving, blacksmithing, shoemaking, and carpen-

try. Germans also founded factories and mills.

Bessarabia became part of Romania in 1918, and

its Germans departed in 1940.

The Russian Germans were very conscious of

their identity, operating their own schools and

churches and teaching their children the German

language. Tsar Alexander III’s Russification policies

in the 1880s and 1890s made Russian the language

of all schools and abolished the Germans’ right to

self-government. During World War I, with Ger-

many an enemy of Russia, German organizations

and newspapers were shut down by the Russian

government, preaching in German was outlawed,

and Germans from Volhynia were exiled to Siberia

(1915). During the Soviet years, increasing num-

bers of young Germans became fluent in Russian

rather than in German.

Whereas from the 1950s to the1970s few So-

viet Germans were allowed to immigrate to Ger-

many, during the late 1980s and 1990s a much

larger number of Germans did so following the

gradual easing of restrictions beginning in 1987.

As of the 1989 census there were at least two mil-

lion Germans living in the Soviet Union, but the

majority of them left within a decade.

See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES

POLICIES, TSARIST

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brandes, Detlef. (1991). “A Success Story: The German

Colonists in New Russia and Bessarabia: 1787–1914.”

Acta Slavica Iaponica 9:32–46.

Giesinger, Adam. (1981). From Catherine to Khrushchev:

The Story of Russia’s Germans. Lincoln, NE: American

Historical Society of Germans from Russia.

Kern, Albert. (1998). Homeland Book of the Bessarabian

Germans. Fargo, ND: Germans from Russia Heritage

Collection, North Dakota State University Libraries.

Koch, Fred C. (1977). The Volga Germans: In Russia and

the Americas, from 1763 to the Present. University

Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Long, James W. (1988). From Privileged to Dispossessed:

The Volga Germans, 1860–1917. Lincoln: University

of Nebraska Press.

Pleve, Igor R. (2001). The German Colonies on the Volga:

The Second Half of the Eighteenth Century, tr. Richard

R. Rye. Lincoln, NE: American Historical Society of

Germans from Russia.

EVIN

LAN

ROOK

GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH

The reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725) marked

Russia’s official entry into European diplomatic af-

fairs. Around 1740 this was followed by the entry

of another power, Prussia, transformed under Fred-

erick the Great. Significant Russian-Prussian rela-

tions began during the reign of Catherine the Great

GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH

555

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

(1762–1796), a former German princess. Cather-

ine’s husband, Peter III, a great admirer of Freder-

ick II, the king of Prussia, had withdrawn from the

Seven Years’ War, a decision that left Russia with

no gains from a costly conflict that it had been

waging successfully. After the coup removing Pe-

ter from the throne, Catherine repudiated his treaty

with Prussia in order to demonstrate Russia’s

power and independence. By 1772, however, rela-

tions with Prussia had been reestablished, in part

in connection with the negotiations leading to the

partition of Poland by Russia, Prussia, and Austria.

The French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon

posed a direct threat to Prussia and Russia, and they

both participated in the coalitions formed in oppo-

sition to the French emperor. The defeat of Napoleon

led to the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The three

most conservative of the attending powers (Russia,

Austria, and Prussia) were determined to preserve

a balance of power through the Concert of Europe

and to preserve the old order by exercising the right

to intervene militarily in order to preserve legiti-

mate governments.

The next significant period in German-Russian

relations occurred just prior to and during the uni-

fication of Germany under the leadership of King

Wilhelm I of Prussia, and his iron chancellor, Otto

von Bismarck. Bismarck was able to unite Germany

in part by securing Russian nonintervention. Al-

though Russia has been criticized for enabling the

rise of Germany, there were practical considerations

for its support of Bismarck, such as the possibility

of increasing its influence in certain areas as a

consequence of the Austro-Prussian War. Further-

more, the possible consequences of German unifi-

cation under Prussia were not fully understood.

During the immediate aftermath of the unification,

Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Germany formed the

Three Emperors’ League (1872–1873), a defensive

military alliance that attempted to revive and main-

tain the old order upheld at the Congress of Vi-

enna. Difficulties and disagreements arising from

the situation in the Crimea and in the Balkans

brought about the league’s collapse. It was revived

and then allowed to lapse permanently in 1887

because of the impossibility of reconciling the dif-

ferences between Austria-Hungary and Russia. Bis-

marck maintained relations with Austria and

negotiated the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia,

which guaranteed the neutrality of the signatories

in case of war, except if Germany attacked France

or Russia attacked Austria-Hungary. Wilhelm II’s

dismissal of Bismarck and refusal to renew the

Reinsurance Treaty in 1890 led to the formation of

new alliances. Russia, no longer tied to Germany

or Austria-Hungary, and afraid of being diplomat-

ically isolated and without allies, negotiated a

treaty with France. Wilhelm II alienated the British,

who maintained friendly relations with the French,

and Germany found itself allied with only Italy and

Austria-Hungary.

During the conflict between Austria-Hungary

and Serbia that triggered World War I, Germany

was compelled to support Austria-Hungary and

Russia was similarly committed to support the Ser-

bians. The resulting war led to a major conflict be-

tween Russia and Germany on the Eastern Front.

Russia’s poor performance in the war combined

with the policies of Tsar Nicholas II led to defeat

and revolution. The Bolshevik regime that replaced

the Provisional Government ended Russia’s partic-

ipation in the war by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

in 1917 which was bitterly resented by many Rus-

sian. The Versailles Treaty, signed by a defeated

Germany, in 1919, overturned the earlier Russian-

German agreement.

The refusal of the Allied powers to recognize

the communist government and the diplomatic iso-

lation of the Soviet Union were factors in German-

Soviet relations during the interwar years. Even

after the rise of Adolf Hitler and the violent sup-

pression of the Communist Party in Germany,

Josef Stalin continued to maintain relations with

Germany. Although Hitler and Stalin gave consid-

erable aid and support to different factions during

the Spanish Civil War, no breach of their relation-

ship occurred and negotiations for a nonaggression

treaty were initiated. Stalin’s primary reason for

signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 is still

uncertain. The Nazi-Soviet Pact included a nonag-

gression clause and a secret protocol calling for the

division of Poland between the two countries.

Whether Stalin believed a genuine alliance could be

formed with Germany against the Allied powers or

was merely attempting to gain time to further in-

dustrialize and prepare for war, it is clear that he

did not expect the massive German invasion of the

Soviet Union that was launched on June 22, 1941.

The defeat of Hitler and Germany by the Allied

powers led to the occupation of Eastern Germany

and East Berlin by the Soviet Union. Although di-

vided and occupied, Germany played a role in the

Cold War; the German Democratic Republic (East

Germany) was allied with the Soviet Union, while

the German Federal Republic (West Germany) was

allied with the United States and the Western pow-

GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH

556

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

ers. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe

and the Soviet Union paved the way for the reuni-

fication of Germany in 1990. The republics of the

former Soviet Union have established economic and

diplomatic relations with unified Germany, which

has become the Russian Federation’s most impor-

tant trading and financial partner in the post-

communist era.

See also: GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC; GERMAN

SETTLERS; NAZI-SOVIET PACT OF 1939; SOVIET-GER-

MAN TRADE AGREEMENT OF 1939; THREE EMPERORS’

LEAGUE; WORLD WAR I; WORLD WAR II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jelavich, Barbara A. (1964). A Century of Russian Foreign

Policy, 1814–1914. New York.

Smyser, W. R. (1999). From Yalta to Berlin: The Cold War

Struggle over Germany. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Sodaro, Michael J. (1990). Moscow, Germany, and the West

from Khrushchev to Gorbachev. Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press.

Stent, Angela. (1999). Russia and Germany Reborn: Unifi-

cation, the Soviet Collapse, and the New Europe. Prince-

ton: Princeton University Press.

ELISSA

R. J

ORDINE

GIGANTOMANIA

Gigantomania is the creation of abnormally large

works. Gigantomania dominated different areas of

political and cultural life in the Soviet Union and

was a feature of other totalitarian societies (Nazi

Germany, Fascist Italy, communist states of East-

ern Europe, and modern China).

According to the Marxist theory, socialism must

triumph historically over capitalism. Soviet rulers

attempted to prove the superiority of the socialist

system by the creation of gigantic industrial com-

plexes, huge farms, colossal buildings, and enor-

mous statues.

Enormous new cities and industrial centers

were erected in the Soviet Union from the end of

the 1920s through the 1930s. Historian Nicolas V.

Riasanovsky wrote, “Gigantic industrial complexes,

exemplified by Magnitostroi in the Urals and

Kuznetsstroi in western Siberia, began to take

shape. Entire cities arose in the wilderness. Magni-

togorsk, for instance, acquired in a few years a pop-

ulation of a quarter of a million.”

However, the execution of the Five-Year Plans,

industrialization, and the forced collectivization of

agriculture were accompanied by a huge number

of human victims. Gulag prisoners working in ter-

rible conditions built many of the huge projects.

Gigantism and monumental classicism became

the typical features of Soviet architecture starting

in the 1930s. All other architecture styles were sup-

pressed in the Soviet Union. Historian Geoffrey

Hosking points out that in the Soviet architecture

“. . . neoclassical forms gradually became distorted,

more extended in size . . ..” As the result of this

distortion, many large buildings were erected, as

exemplified by the tasteless “wedding cake” style

skyscrapers built in Moscow after World War II.

The same standard was used in Soviet sculp-

ture and art. Huge monuments of Vladimir Lenin

and Josef Stalin were erected in every sizable city.

Many Soviet artists created paintings showing gi-

gantic images of the communist leaders with tiny

figures of the common people in the background.

Gigantomania began in Stalin’s time, but con-

tinued after his death. During the 1960s to the

1980s two huge sculptures depicting the warrior

“Motherland-Mother” were erected by sculptor

Yevgeny Vuchetich near Kiev and Volgograd. Ac-

cording to Soviet doctrine, art should show the

super-human accomplishments of the new social-

ist man, who was depicted as a huge muscular and

overpowering human being. Even women were

sculpted as enormous figures with rugged mascu-

line physiques.

These works are now generally thought to be

the vulgar creations of dilettante artists; showing

the exceedingly poor taste of the all-powerful So-

viet leaders who commanded their creation.

See also: ARCHITECTURE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bown, Matthew Cullerne, and Taylor, Brandon, eds.

(1993). Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture, and Ar-

chitecture in a One-party State, 1917–1992. Man-

chester: Manchester University Press.

Groys, Boris. (1992). The Total Art of Stalinism. Avant-

Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, tr. Charles

Rougle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hosking, Geoffrey. (2001). Russia and the Russians. Cam-

bridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univer-

sity Press.

GIGANTOMANIA

557

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

London, Kurt. (1938). The Seven Soviet Arts. New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press.

Riasanovsky, Nicolas V. (2000). A History of Russia, 6th

ed. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ryabushin, Alexander and Smolina, Nadia. (1992).

Landmarks of Soviet Architecture 1917–1991. New

York: Rizzoli.

ICTORIA

HITERER

GINZBURG, EVGENIA SEMENOVNA

(1904–1977), Stalin-era memoirist.

Evgenia Semenovna Ginzburg was one of the

most well-known and respected memoirists of Josef

Stalin’s purges and life in the Soviet Gulag. She was

born into a middle-class Jewish family in Moscow.

She became a teacher and party activist in Kazan.

She married Pavel Aksenov, a high-ranking party

official in Kazan, and the couple had two sons. The

eldest, Alyosha, would die during the Siege of Lenin-

grad; the younger, Vasily, became a noted writer

in his own right. In 1937 both Ginzburg and her

husband were arrested. Ginzburg spent the next

two years in solitary confinement before being sent

to a labor camp in Kolyma. While in the camps,

she undertook a variety of work, including nurs-

ing, and she met Anton Walter, a fellow prisoner

who worked as a doctor. He became her second

husband. In 1947 Ginzburg was released from cap-

tivity but chose to stay in the Magadan area to

wait for Walter to finish his allotted prison sen-

tence. She began teaching Russian language and lit-

erature. Ironically many of her students at the time

worked for the security services. Ginzburg was re-

arrested in 1949. In 1955 she was released again.

This time Ginzburg was allowed to return to

Moscow and was officially rehabilitated. She began

to write pieces for such Soviet periodicals as Youth

(Yunost), the Teacher’s Newspaper (Uchitelskaya

gazeta), and the News (Izvestiya). Despite her re-

habilitation, Ginzburg’s background still made her

a bit suspect in the eyes of the authorities, so she

never joined the Soviet Writers’ Union. In 1967 the

first volume of her memoirs, Journey into the Whirl-

wind, was published in Italy. The book covers the

1934–1939 period of her life. In it, she describes

how her mentality as a devoted party member

changed once she realized the extent of the Purges,

and she notes the kinds of things people had to do

to survive their imprisonment. In Ginzburg’s case,

for instance, she took great solace from her vast

knowledge of Russian poetry, and she would recite

it at length for her fellow prisoners. The second

volume of her memoirs, Within the Whirlwind, was

published abroad in 1979 and describes her re-

maining years in prison as well as her life in Ma-

gadan and her eventual return to Moscow. There is

a distinct difference in tone between the two vol-

umes, with the second book being much harsher

and honest in its criticisms. Many scholars have

speculated that Ginzburg knew by then that her

memoirs would not legally be published in the So-

viet Union during her lifetime and that she chose

not to temper her language in the hopes of publi-

cation. Both volumes of memoirs have been trans-

lated into an array of languages, and they remain

among the best, most widely read accounts of

Soviet prison life. In the Soviet Union, the books

circulated widely in samizdat form among the dis-

sident community and, finally, in 1989 they were

published officially.

See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; GULAG; PURGES, THE

GREAT

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Heldt, Barbara. (1987). Terrible Perfection. Bloomington,

IN: Indiana University Press.

Kelly, Catriona. (1994). A History of Russian Women’s

Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kolchevska, Natasha. (1998). “A Difficult Journey:

Evgeniia Ginzburg and Women’s Writing of Camp

Memoirs.” In Women and Russia: Projections and Self-

Perceptions, ed. Rosalind Marsh. New York: Berghahn

Books.

Kolchevska, Natasha. (2003). “The Art of Memory: Cul-

tural Reverence as Political Critique in Evgeniia

Ginzburg’s Writing of the Gulag.” In The Russian

Memoir: History and Literature, ed. Beth Holmgren.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

LISON

OWLEY

GKOS

GKOs, Gosudarstvennye Kratkosrochnye Obyazatel-

stva, are short-term ruble-denominated treasury

bills issued since 1993. They played a major role in

Russia’s August 1998 economic crisis.

In the 1990s Russia was unable to balance its

budget. The general government budget deficit

GINZBURG, EVGENIA SEMENOVNA

558

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

varied from 5 to as much as 25 percent of GDP with-

out any declining trend. First the deficit was covered

by money emission, which contributed to very high

and variable inflation. The Russian government

started in May 1993 to issue short-term zero-

coupon bonds known as GKOs. This was meant as

a non-inflationary method of financing the deficit.

The GKO maturity is less than a year. Sometimes

the average maturity has been as short as half a

year. There are also ruble-denominated medium-

term federal bonds known as OFZs (since 1995).

Other government debt instruments were also is-

sued, but GKOs remained the most important ones.

Russian inflation came down after 1995. The

root problem, the budget deficit, was not ad-

dressed. It was believed that deficits could be fi-

nanced by increasing debt. The government debt

market was the fastest-growing market in 1996

and 1997. Domestic ruble-denominated debt re-

mained very small until 1996 but rose to 13 per-

cent of GDP in January 1997. This is still not an

internationally high figure. But the high yields,

short maturities, and large foreign ownership

shares of GKOs made the situation explosive.

The GKO real interest rates were first highly

negative due to unexpectedly high inflation. As in-

flation subsided but GKO nominal yields remained

high—due to high inflation expectations, political

uncertainty or other reasons—real interest rates

shot up. They were 30–60 percent in 1996–1997.

Later they decreased, only to reach new highs in

early 1998, as the danger of default became evi-

dent. Interest payments rose to 27.6 percent of fed-

eral government revenue in 1995 and more than

half in early 1998. Most GKOs were consequently

issued to service earlier debt. By 1997 the GKO con-

tribution to financing the deficit was actually neg-

ative. On the other hand, they had become the main

revenue source for the larger Russian banks.

Access for foreigners to the GKO market was

quite restricted until 1996. Due to the small size of

the market relative to international capital flows

and very high real interest rates, access was only

liberalized gradually. Measures were used to keep

the non-residents’ earnings within limits. Still, by

the end of 1997 their share in GKO stock was at

least a third, perhaps more. The rest was basically

owned by the Central Bank and the state-owned

Sberbank. The risk of sudden exit of nonresident

GKO holders was real. Nonresident behavior soon

became a major source of the GKO market crisis in

the spring of 1998.

After the crisis of August 1998, the govern-

ment chose to restructure the GKOs and OFZs,

which were to a large part frozen. Afterward, Rus-

sian government debt market has remained quite

illiquid. With budget surpluses, the government

has not needed new debt. Investors remain wary.

GKO stock is less than 1 percent of GDP. However,

debt instruments would be useful for liquidity con-

trol and protection from inflation.

See also: ECONOMY, POST-SOVIET; SBERBANK

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gobbin, Niko, and Merleverde, Bruno. (2000). “The Rus-

sian Crisis: A Debt Perspective.” Post-Communist

Economies 12(2):141–163.

Malleret, Thierry, Orlova, Natalia, and Romanov,

Vladimir. (1999). “What Loaded and Triggered the

Russian Crisis?” Post-Soviet Affairs 15(2):107–129.

Willer, Dirk. (2001). “Financial Markets.” In Russia’s

Post-Communist Economy, eds. Brigitte Granville and

Peter Oppenheimer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

EKKA

UTELA

GLASNOST

Glasnost is a Russian word that proved fateful for

the Soviet communist empire in its last years of ex-

istence. Variously translated as “openness,” “trans-

parency,” or “publicity,” its root sense is public

voice or speech. Freedom of speech is a close West-

ern equivalent.

Upon his rise to power in 1985 as General Sec-

retary of the Communist Party of the Soviet

Union, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost as

one of a troika of slogans in his campaign to re-

form a faltering Soviet system. He called for glas-

nost (openness) in public discussion, perestroika

(restructuring) in the economy and political sys-

tem, and novoye mneniya (new thinking) in foreign

policy. All three slogans broke away from the ide-

ology-laden sloganeering of past Soviet leaders and

suggested movement away from dictatorship to a

more open and democratic Soviet future.

While Gorbachev made perestroika the troika’s

centerpiece, glasnost was the most potent in bring-

ing new political forces and formerly silenced voices

onto the political stage. The notion of a public voice

distinct from the ruling power and the idea of open

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public debate ran hard against the Soviet ideologi-

cal system.

Before Gorbachev, the regime recognized no

public voice beyond the voice of the nomenklatura,

the Communist Party hierarchy, speaking to its

subjects through state-controlled media. All non-

political, literary, academic, and scientific publica-

tion was subject to the strictures of the party line

and censorship.

Glasnost made its initial and unofficial appear-

ance during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, Gor-

bachev’s predecessor. A small but vocal dissident

movement (also known as the Democratic Move-

ment) broke through the regime’s facade of ideo-

logical conformity. It produced an underground

press, samizdat (lit. self-publishing), which gave

voice to a wide range of opinion and criticism at

odds with the official line. A notable moment in

samizdat came when Andrei Sakharov, the famed

Soviet nuclear physicist and advocate of civil and

democratic rights, published an unauthorized es-

say in 1968. He appealed to the top leaders to move

toward glasnost and democracy as the path toward

overcoming the country’s urgent problems. Enti-

tled Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, the

essay, written in typescript, circulated widely in-

side the USSR and was smuggled to the West.

Sakharov’s outspokenness led the Brezhnev regime

to exile him in 1980 to the closed city Gorky, far

from Moscow and Western media sources. In a

symbolic gesture of his glasnost policy, Gorbachev

freed Sakharov from exile six years later and al-

lowed him to return to Moscow.

Though Sakharov’s essay may well have influ-

enced Gorbachev, Gorbachev’s version of glasnost

was limited and aimed at a controlled change and

liberalizing reform of the Soviet system without de-

stroying its foundations. Yet, despite his effort to

keep glasnost within manageable limits, it opened

the door ever wider to an intensifying and search-

ing public debate challenging the Soviet order itself.

Newspapers, journals, once-banned books, and rev-

elations from archives appeared and found appre-

ciative audiences. Glasnost as transparency brought

to light what the regime had hidden. Revelation

upon revelation of its record of mass repressions,

abuses, lies, and corruption were publicized, deep-

ening its disrepute among the public at large. Glas-

nost also gave voice to long-suppressed national

independence movements within the empire, which

contributed to its disintegration. Defenders of the

old order warned Gorbachev that glasnost was a

“two-edged sword” that could turn against its user.

Yegor Ligachev, a fellow member of the Politburo,

aimed a barb at Gorbachev that it was not wise to

enter a room if you do not know the way out. And,

in fact, the explosion of the nuclear reactor in Cher-

nobyl, Ukraine, severely tested Gorbachev’s com-

mitment to glasnost.

Gorbachev’s glasnost policy was a major fac-

tor precipitating and informing the political strug-

gle developing in the leadership in the latter half of

the 1980’s and culminating in the coup of August

1991. The struggle began in earnest in the fall of

1987 with a split inside the ruling Politburo. Yegor

Ligachev, former ally of Gorbachev, became his ad-

versary on the right. Boris Yeltsin became his rival

in the cause of reform on the left. Second in com-

mand in the Politburo, Ligachev defended the in-

terests of the nomenklatura against Gorbachev’s

reforms. Yeltsin, who entered the Politburo under

Gorbachev’s patronage from provincial Sverdlovsk,

pressed for a faster pace of reform than Gorbachev

was then ready to promote. At a Central Com-

mittee meeting in October 1987, Yeltsin attacked

Ligachev for sabotaging his reform efforts as

Moscow party chief and accused Gorbachev of

foot-dragging on perestroika. The upshot was

Yeltsin’s ouster from the Politburo and then as

Moscow party secretary. His fall was a blessing in

disguise for Yeltsin and freed him subsequently to

rise as a popular leader untainted by association

with the ruling group.

Despite his effort to control glasnost, Gor-

bachev soon found himself driven to more radical

measures by the dynamic of the new political world

that glasnost was bringing into play. First he pro-

posed at a party plenum in January 1987 that

party leaders be elected from below instead of by

cooptation from above. He ran into a wall of re-

sistance from local and regional party secretaries

who feared losing power. He then turned to shift-

ing his own base of power from the party to a new

parliamentary body with constitutional powers be-

yond the reach of party control. In March 1989 he

realized his project. A Congress of Peoples Deputies

was instituted with two-thirds of its deputies pop-

ularly elected and a third selected from party and

other official organizations. The Congress became

a platform of open public debate televised to the

whole country. Andrei Sakharov led the democra-

tic grouping (Interregional Group) in opposition to

the party nomenklatura. Sakharov lent his great

prestige and the fire of his moral passion to the

sharp and open debate in the body (often to Gor-

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bachev’s irritation as the presider) and galvanized

public opinion against Communist Party abuses.

Though conservative party elements held a large

majority in the Congress, they found themselves

on the defensive in the face of withering criticism

from the Sakharov-led opposition. Glasnost was

winning the day, but Gorbachev’s grip on public

debate and democratic reform began to slip. The in-

troduction of popular elections was reversing the

political thrust in the heart of the Soviet system.

Power from above was increasingly challenged by

power coming from below.

Yeltsin lost no time in using the electoral

process Gorbachev brought into being. In Moscow

he won a seat in the Congress by landslide, and af-

ter Sakharov’s death in December, he assumed

Sakharov’s place as leader of the democratic fac-

tion. He also won a seat in the parliament of the

Russian Federation, the body that elected Yeltsin its

president in May 1990. At his initiative the Rus-

sian presidency was made into a national elective

office, and in June 1991 he handily won that of-

fice in a national election, becoming the first Russ-

ian leader so chosen. Yeltsin became a powerful

challenger to Gorbachev and to the Soviet system

itself. Glasnost and democratic reform were no

longer Gorbachev’s preserve. What formerly had

been a mere facade of Russian self-government now

became a second center of authority in the land.

As rivalry between Gorbachev and Yeltsin un-

folded, conservative elements inside the party were

marshaling their forces to challenge Gorbachev and

suppress glasnost and the democratic movement.

Gorbachev now walked a tightrope between right-

wing forces and the Yeltsin-led forces on the left.

Gorbachev’s effort to shore up his presidential pow-

ers and build his base in the Congress of Peoples

Deputies and its Supreme Soviet was ineffectual.

His popularity plummeted as Yeltsin’s soared.

Leaders of the party’s old guard finally struck

in August 1991. They sought to employ all the So-

viet agencies of repression against the developing

democratic and national revolution. They orga-

nized an emergency committee, seized power in its

name, declared martial law, sent an armada of

tanks into Moscow, and put Gorbachev under

house arrest in his vacation dacha in the Crimea.

Yeltsin defied the perpetrators of the coup from

atop a tank in front of the White House (the Rus-

sian parliament building), drawing a mass of sup-

porters around him. The standoff ended when the

military and special forces refused the emergency

committee’s orders to crush the opposition. The

Russian democratic and national revolution under

Boris Yeltsin’s lead dissolved the emergency com-

mittee, arresting its members and the coup partic-

ipants. The Russian Federation assumed full

authority in its territories, abolished the Soviet

Communist Party, and ushered the Soviet Union

out of existence at the end of the year. The princi-

pal nations that had been subjected to the Soviet

empire gained their independence. Gorbachev be-

came a private citizen, and his rival, Yeltsin, went

on to lead the resurrected Russian republic.

Before his death in December 1989, Sakharov,

in a private encounter with Gorbachev, forewarned

him that if he continued to seek unlimited power

without standing for election, he would one day

find himself without public support in a leadership

crisis. Gorbachev was unwilling or unable to act

on the clear implication that glasnost posed for his

leadership, namely, that democratic legitimacy

could only be secured through a process of public

debate and popular election.

Though this was not his intention, Gorbachev

paved the way for Russia’s historical return as a

nation-state and in the form of a democratic re-

public. His taking up of the cause of glasnost led

to a renaissance of Russian intellectual and politi-

cal life. Despite instability and a perilous transition

from Soviet despotism to a fledgling republic, glas-

nost continued to be the rule in the new Russia’s

first decade, in the provisions of its new constitu-

tion, the existence of free public debate, and a se-

ries of orderly and reasonably fair parliamentary

and presidential elections. Whether the spirit of

glasnost prevails or wanes in the post-Yeltsin era

was yet to be determined as the reborn Russia en-

tered the twenty-first century. One thing was clear:

glasnost would go down in the annals of Russian

history as the potent word that brought down an

empire.

See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL

SERGEYEVICH; LIGACHEV, YEGOR KUZMICH; PERE-

STROIKA; SAKHAROV, ANDREI DMITRIEVICH; SAMIZ-

DAT; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gorbachev, Mikhail S. (1995). Memoirs: Mikhail Gor-

bachev. New York: Doubleday.

Gwertzman, B., and Kaufman, Michael T., eds. (1990,

1991). The Collapse of Communism. New York: Times

Books.

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Kaiser, Robert G. (1991). Why Gorbachev Happened. New

York: Simon and Shuster.

Linden, Carl. (1997). “Gorbachev and the Fall of the

Marxian Prince in Europe and Russia.” In Russia and

China on the Eve of a New Millennium, eds. Carl Lin-

den and Jan S. Prybyla. New Brunswick, NJ: Trans-

action Publishers.

Tarasulo, Isaac J., ed. (1989). Gorbachev and Glasnost:

Viewpoints from the Soviet Press. Wilmington, DE:

Scholarly Resources Inc.

Walker, Rachael. (1993) Six Years that Shook the World:

Perestroika, the Impossible Project. Manchester, UK:

Manchester University Press.

ARL

A. L

INDEN

GLAVKI

Plural, short for glavnoye upravlenie, or chief ad-

ministration.

Glavki are subordinate administrative units or

departments of Soviet state planning and existed in

economic, military, and cultural ministries, such

as tourism. In the economy these subdivisions of

central or local industrial ministries dealt with spe-

cific industrial branches in formulating and ad-

ministering the annual and perspective plans.

These departments appeared originally as parts

of the Supreme Council of National Economy

(VSNKh or Vesenkha) controlling particular sec-

tors, such as the match, soap, oil, and timber in-

dustries (Glavspichki, Tsentromylo, Glavneft, Glovles,

and so forth). They replaced the corresponding

People’s Commissariats by early 1918. During the

civil war period, the glavki controlled distribution

of scarce materials and ordered new production of

items for war, subject to interference from the

Party’s Politburo and without a national plan,

wages, or bookkeeping. By 1921 this had become

a bureaucratic chaos (called glavkism). Neverthe-

less, these units survived reorganizations during

the New Economic Policy of the 1920s and there-

after, emerging once again in 1931. Now under the

commissariats (called ministries after 1946) and

Gosplan in the Stalinist planning period, they ac-

quired direct power over their subordinate enter-

prises until Nikita Khrushchev’s reorganization in

1957.

As a result of subdivisions, some glavki became

new ministries, whose number in the industrial and

construction branches alone reached thirty-three in

1946 and 1947, but about a year later the num-

ber was again reduced by unification. For instance,

the Ministry of Textiles sometimes reverted to a

chief administration within the Ministry of Light

Industry, or the reverse. These continual organiza-

tional changes had questionable practical effect.

Some of these glavki—such as those for finance or

labor—were responsible for functional administra-

tion, and some were specialized subdivisions, such

as the glavki for woolens in the Ministry of Tex-

tiles. Enterprises received their plans from the chief

administration, usually in Moscow, and submitted

their requirements to it. So-called funded inputs,

which were especially scarce, were allocated to en-

terprises by the glavki, which set up their own sup-

ply arrangements to make sure their firms met the

planned targets. They set up workshops to produce

spare parts on an inefficiently small scale, a prac-

tice that also led to duplication. The chiefs of these

chief administrations, usually called Deputy Min-

isters, became nonpolitical technical specialists, like

most of the ministers over them, subject only to

occasional intervention from party officials in the

Kremlin. Their incentives were linked informally to

the success of the enterprises under them, but not

necessarily their profit or productivity. Accord-

ingly, they could be relied on to support enterprises’

requests for more investments and supplies and

easier plans, even when they knew higher produc-

tivity would be possible. Sometimes they reallo-

cated profits among their subordinated enterprises

to allow all of them to meet their financial obliga-

tions. Even during the regional reorganization in-

stituted by Khrushchev, the more important

allocation decisions were made in the republican or

sectoral glavki of the all-Union Gossnab (supply

agency) in Moscow. This was necessary to prevent

“localism,” a preference for enterprises within one’s

region over the needs of enterprises elsewhere.

See also: GOSPLAN; INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bergson, Abram. (1964). The Economics of Soviet Planning.

New Haven: Yale University Press.

Carr, Edward Hallett, and Davies, R. W. (1969–[1978]).

Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929. 3 vols.

London: Macmillan.

Nove, Alec. (1961). The Soviet Economy. New York:

Praeger.

ARTIN

C. S

PECHLER

GLAVKI

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