Encyclopedia of Russian History

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INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET

The industrialization of the Soviet Union proceeded

at a rapid pace between the two World Wars, start-

ing in 1929. Within an historically short period of

twelve to fifteen years, an economically backward

agrarian country achieved rapid economic growth,

created a more modern industrial sector, and ac-

quired new technologies that changed it from an

agrarian to an industrial economy.

At the turn of the century Imperial Russia was

lagging behind its neighbors to the west in practi-

cally all aspects of economic development. Weak-

ened by World War I and the civil war that

followed, Russia was in ruins in 1918. The Com-

munist Party that seized power after the Bolshevik

revolution in 1917 initially proclaimed a world rev-

olution as its goal. The first socialist revolution oc-

curred in Russia, the weakest link among the world

capitalist states. However, later failures to propa-

gate communist rule in Germany, Hungary, and

Poland demonstrated that the export of revolution

required not an ideological dogma, but a powerful

economy and military might. Both required pow-

erful industry.

Soviet industrialization was organized accord-

ing to five-year plans. The first five-year plan was

launched by the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in

1928. It was designed to industrialize the USSR in

the shortest possible time. The plan, put into ac-

tion ruthlessly, aimed to make the USSR self-suf-

ficient and emphasized heavy industry at the

expense of consumer goods. The first plan covered

the period from 1928 to 1933 but was officially

considered completed in 1932, although its achieve-

ments were greatly exaggerated. One objective of

the plan was achieved, however: the transforma-

tion of agriculture from predominantly individual

farms into a system of large collective farms. The

communist regime thought that the resources for

industrialization could only be squeezed out of

agriculture. Moreover, they believed that collec-

tivization would improve agricultural productivity

and produce sufficient grain reserves to feed the

growing urban labor force caused by the influx of

peasants seeking industrial work. Forced collec-

tivization also enabled the party to extend its po-

litical dominance over the peasantry, eliminating

the possibility of resurrection of market relations

in agriculture. The traditional Russian village was

destroyed and replaced by collective farms (kolkhoz)

and state farms (sovkhoz), which proved to be

highly inefficient.

Although the first five-year plan called for the

collectivization of only 20 percent of peasant

households, by 1940 some 97 percent of all peas-

ant households had been collectivized, and private

ownership of property was virtually eliminated in

trade. Forced collectivization helped Stalin achieve

his goal of rapid industrialization, but the human

costs were huge. Stalin focused particular hostility

on the wealthier peasants or kulaks. Beginning in

1930 about one million kulak households (some

five million people) were deported and never heard

from again. Forced collectivization of most of the

remaining peasants resulted in a disastrous dis-

ruption of agricultural production and a cata-

strophic famine in 1932 and 1933 in Ukraine, one

of the richest agricultural regions in the world,

which exacted a toll of millions of lives. The ratio-

nale for collectivization in the Soviet Union, with

all of its negative consequences, was its historic ne-

cessity in communist terms: Russia had to engage

in rapid industrialization in order to create a mas-

sive heavy industry and subsequently powerful

modern armed forces.

The second five-year plan (1933–1937) con-

tinued and expanded the first, albeit with more

moderate industrial goals. The third plan

(1938–1942) was interrupted by World War II. The

institution of the five-year plan was reinforced in

1945, and five-year plans continued to be published

until the end of the Soviet Union.

From the very beginning of industrialization,

the Communist Party placed the main emphasis on

the development of heavy industry, or, as it was

called in the Soviet literature, “production of means

of production.” Metallurgical plants that included

the whole technological chain from iron ore refin-

ing to furnaces and metal rolling and processing

facilities were constructed or built near the main

coal and iron ore deposits in Ukraine, the Ural

Mountains, and Siberia. Similarly, production plants

for aluminum and nonferrous metals were con-

structed at a rapid pace. Electric energy supply was

ensured through the construction of dozens of hy-

droelectric and fuel-operated power stations; one of

them, a Dnieper plant, was canonized as a symbol

of Soviet industrialization. Railroads and water-

ways were modernized and built to ensure unin-

terrupted flow of resources. Automobile and

aviation industries were built from scratch. Whole

plants were purchased in the West, mostly from

the United States, and put in operation in the

Soviet Union. Stalingrad Tractor Plant and Gorki

Automotive Plant began production in the early

INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET

663

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

1930s. Many American engineers were lured by

promises of high wages to work at those plants

and contributed to a rapid technology transfer to

Russia.

New weapon systems were developed and put

into production at the expense of consumer goods.

On the eve of World War II the Red Army had more

than twenty-three thousand tanks—six times more

than Fascist Germany. Similar ratios applied for ar-

tillery, aircraft, navy vessels, and small arms. Sub-

stantial resources were materialized and frozen in

the stockpiles of weapons. Nonetheless, World War

II did not begin according to Stalin’s plans. The

USSR was unprepared for Hitler’s invasion.

During the first period of war a substantial

portion of the European territory was lost to Ger-

many. During the second half of 1941 and the be-

ginning of 1942, industrial facilities were relocated

to the east (beyond the Volga river and the Urals)

from European Russia, Central and Eastern Ukraine

(including major industrial centers of Kharkov,

Dniepropetrovsk, Krivoy Rog, Mariupol and

Nikopol, Donbass), and the industrial areas of

Moscow and Leningrad; this relocation ranks

among the most difficult organizational and hu-

man achievements of the Soviet Union during

World War II. The industrial foundation laid be-

tween 1929 and 1940 proved sufficient for victory

over Fascist Germany in World War II.

See also: INDUSTRIALIZATION; INDUSTRIALIZATION, RAPID

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian

and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure.

Boston, MA: Addison Wesley.

Nove, Alec. (1965). The Soviet Economy: An Introduction,

rev. ed. New York: Praeger.

AUL

R. G

REGORY

INORODTSY

Any non-Slavic subject of the Russian Empire, such

as Finns, Germans, or Armenians.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the

term inorodtsy carried pejorative overtones. First

used in a legislative project of 1798, the word was

given a precise legal definition by a legal statute of

1822. Here it was used to refer to groups of Rus-

sian subjects for whom the fundamental laws of

the Empire were deemed inappropriate and who

therefore required a special, protected status. While

under the protection of the state, they would be

gradually “civilized,” becoming more like the set-

tled Russian population. Initially applied to peoples

living in Siberia, the category also came to include

newly–annexed peoples of Middle Asia (Kazaks,

Kyrgyz, Turkmen), some of whom had a long tra-

dition of permanent settlement and high culture.

With the exception of the Jews, the inorodtsy

were indigenous peoples who inhabited areas of

Siberia and Central Asia. (Thus, the common trans-

lation of this term in English as “aliens” is mis-

leading; “natives” might better convey what the

term implied to Russian colonizers.) They included

the Kyrgyz; the Samoyeds of Archangel province;

the nomads of Stavropol province; the nomanic

Kalmuks of Astrakhan and Stavropol provinces;

and the Kyrgyz of the Internal Hordes of Middle

Asia (the regions of Akmolin, Semipalatinsk, Semi-

rech, and the territory beyond the Ural mountains).

The Statute on the Inorodtsy of 1822, asso-

ciated with Mikhail Speransky’s enlightened ad-

ministration of Siberia, sought to protect the

traditional hunting and grazing areas of native

peoples from encroachment by Russian settlers.

The Statute placed all inorodtsy into one of

three categories: settled, nomadic, and wandering

hunter–gatherer–fishermen. Each category received

special prerogatives and levels of protection

thought appropriate for its level of culture and its

economic pursuits. The inorodtsy were permitted

local self–administration, which included police

duties, administration of justice (based on custom-

ary law), and the collection of taxes in money or

in kind, as appropriate. Administration was placed

in the hand of the local elites, generally tribal el-

ders and chieftains.

With a few exceptions, such as some groups of

Buryats, inorodtsy were generally exempted from

military service. The military reform of 1874 be-

gan to erode this privilege. A Bashkir cavalry

squadron was created in Orenburg province in

1874, while in the 1880s a growing number of na-

tive peoples in Siberia were subject to some form

of service. Some groups were permitted to substi-

tute service with a monetary tax, while others were

recruited on an individual basis, with the assurance

that they would be assigned to specific regiments.

An attempt, announced on June 25, 1916, to end

the tradition of a general exemption from military

service of many Middle Asian peoples and to draft

INORODTSY

664

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

390,000 inorodtsy into the army for support du-

ties, triggered a vast anticolonial revolt in Middle

Asia, which was put down with great brutality.

Jews were included in the category of inorodtsy

by a statute of 1835. This categorization was en-

tirely anomalous. The general tendency of Russian

legislation towards the Jews was to promote their

sliyanie (merger) with the non-Jewish population,

yet their designation as inorodtsy placed them in a

special, unique category. All other inorodtsy re-

ceived special privileges and exemptions as a result

of this status, while for the Jews it was a vehicle

for the imposition of liabilities. The inorodtsy of

Siberia in particular were viewed as living at a lower

cultural level, as followers of animistic, pagan be-

lief systems. (Many of the inorodtsy of Middle Asia

were Muslims.) The Jews, in contrast, were ad-

herents of a “higher” religion. Most inorodtsy were

in the eastern regions of the Empire; the Jews were

resident in the Russian–Polish borderlands; indeed,

they were largely barred from settlement in those

areas where most inorodtsy were to be found. The

most distinctive privileges of the inorodtsy were

their own institutions of government, and exemp-

tion from military service; the Jews were made

liable for military service in 1827, and the au-

tonomous Jewish community, the kahal, was abol-

ished in 1844. There was an ethnic component of

inorodets status, since any inorodets who con-

verted from paganism to Christianity retained all

the rights and privileges of an inorodets; Jewish

converts to Christianity lost the legal status of

“Jew” and the disabilities that it carried. Nonethe-

less, this bizarre anomaly endured until the demise

of the Russian Empire, when the Provisional Gov-

ernment not only granted full equality to the Jews,

but also abolished all special legislation for the in-

orodtsy.

See also: JEWS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baumann, Robert, F. (1987). “Subject Nationalities in the

Military Service of Imperial Russia: The Case of the

Bashkirs.” Slavic Review 46:489-502.

Baumann, Robert F. (1986). “Universal Military Service

Reform and Russia’s Imperial Dilemma.” War and

Society 4(2):31-49

Kappeler, Andreas. (2001). The Russian Empire: A Multi–

Ethnic History. Harlow, UK: Longman.

Klier, John D. (1989). “The Concept of ‘Jewish Emanci-

pation’ in a Russian Context.” In Civil Rights in Im-

perial Russia, eds. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson.

Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Sokol, Edward Dennis. (1954). The Revolt of 1916 in Russ-

ian Central Asia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.

OHN

D. K

LIER

INPUT-OUTPUT ANALYSIS

Input-output analysis is a methodology for inves-

tigating production relations among primary fac-

tors, intersectoral flows, final demands, and

transfers. Primary and intermediate factors are the

“inputs,” and final demands and transfers are the

“outputs.” Aggregate input values equal “gross na-

tional income” and aggregate output “gross do-

mestic product.” Consequently, input-output is

best conceptualized as a map, or flowchart, of in-

tersectoral activities that underlie the standard ag-

gregate measures of national income and product.

It permits analysts to quantify precisely and assess

the matrix of intersectoral relationships, often hid-

den or overlooked in more aggregative methodolo-

gies. Sometimes this serves an informative purpose.

For example, Soviet leaders suppressed data on the

USSR’s military-industrial production level, and

the delivery of weapons to final demand, but

this information was contained in its input-

output tables, and could be ferreted out by West-

ern scholars and intelligence agencies in principle.

Input-output tables also shed light on the internal

consistency of Soviet statistics. If these data were

a patchwork, either of truths or lies, latent incon-

sistencies should be visible in the flow relationships.

Soviet economists were concerned with the lat-

ter application of the technique, and viewed

input-output analysis as a useful adjunct to “ma-

terials balance” planning. Gosplan (the state plan-

ning agency) constructed its plans from the late

1920s onward on a sector-by-sector basis, taking

inadequate account of intersectoral dependencies.

Soviet input-output tables, first introduced for

1959, provided a sophisticated check, enabling plan-

ners to discern whether adjustments were required

in specific instances to their simpler procedures.

The construction of input-output tables is a la-

borious task that could not be completed swiftly

enough to displace material balancing as the method

of choice for developing annual and five-year plans.

Nonetheless, it did serve as a valuable tool for

perspective planning. The great strength of the

methodology was its lucid theoretical foundation,

which permitted analysts to grasp the hidden as-

sumptions affecting the reliability of their forecasts.

INPUT-OUTPUT ANALYSIS

665

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Wassily Leontiev, Nobel Laureate and the father of

input–output analysis, hypothesized that produc-

tion technologies for practical purposes could be

conceived as approximately linear homogeneous

functions, with constant returns to scale, and rec-

tangular isoquants, even though he knew that this

would not always be true. The working assump-

tion implied that both “socialist” and “capitalist”

economies were strongly determined by their tech-

nological structure (supply side economics) because

factor proportions were fixed and could not be al-

tered by competitive negotiations. Nor did planners

and entrepreneurs have to fret about diminishing

returns to proportional investment, because a dou-

bling of all inputs would always result in a dou-

bling of output. Some economists contended before

the demise of communism that this strong deter-

minism proved that markets were superfluous, but

this is no longer fashionable. During the early

twenty-first century input-output in post-Soviet

Russia serves primarily as a guide to indicative per-

spective planning, that is, a tool used by policy

makers to evaluate various development scenarios.

Whereas it once was an adjunct to material balance

planning, it became a tool for managing market-

based development.

See also: GOSPLAN

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carter, Anne. (1970). Structural Change in the American

Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Leontief, Wassily. (1951). The Structure of the American

Economy 1919–1939, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press.

Miernyk, William. (1965). The Elements of Input–Output

Analysis. New York: Random House.

Rosefielde, Steven. (1975). The Transformation of the 1966

Soviet Input–Output Table from Producers to Adjusted

Factor Cost Values. Washington: G.E. TEMPO.

Treml, Vladimir; Gallik, Dimitri; Kostinsky, Barry; and

Kruger, Kurt. (1972). The Structure of the Soviet Econ-

omy: Analysis and Reconstruction of the 1966 In-

put–Output Table. New York: Praeger Publishers.

TEVEN

OSEFIELDE

INSTITUTE OF RED PROFESSORS

The Institute of Red Professors (Institut Krasnoy pro-

fessury, or IKP) was founded by government decree

on February 11, 1921, in order to train a new gen-

eration of Marxist cadres for careers in education

and elsewhere in the Party, state, and scientific es-

tablishment. Along with the Communist Academy,

the IKP was launched as an alternative to the

“bourgeois” Academy of Sciences and universities

that the Bolsheviks had inherited from the old

regime. Headed between 1918 and 1932 by Mikhail

Pokrovsky, the IKP was formally affiliated with

the Commissariat of the Enlightenment. In practice

it was also subordinate to the party’s Central

Committee—specifically, the Politburo, Orgburo,

Secretariat, and department of agitation and pro-

paganda.

At its launch the IKP was designed to be an in-

terdisciplinary body. But by 1922 it had been di-

vided into three departments—history, economics,

and philosophy—that were augmented in 1924 by

a preparatory program for less-qualified students.

Four more departments were added in 1928 that

concerned party history, law, literature, and the

natural sciences. After an abortive merger with the

Communist Academy between 1930 and 1931, the

IKP was broken up into separate institutes devoted

to history, Communist Party history, economics,

philosophy, and the natural sciences. These divi-

sions, in turn, were quickly flanked by six more

institutes after the IKP assumed responsibility for

the Communist Academy’s graduate program in

1931.

Although the IKP was initially designed to be

an elite institution of the red intelligentsia, it was

transformed in the mid-1920s by repeated reorga-

nizations, the dismissal of former Trotskyites and

Mensheviks, and ongoing efforts to proletarianize

the IKP community as a whole. Personal ambition

and the turbulence of the so-called cultural revo-

lution between 1928 and 1932 further divided the

IKP. Although wholly Marxist, the faculty and stu-

dent body split repeatedly along generational, class,

and educational lines during these years. These ten-

sions led faculty and students to seek positions else-

where, a trend encouraged by the Sovietization of

the universities and the Academy of Sciences that

was underway at this time. Indeed, the Stalinist co-

option of these educational institutions—facilitated

by a merciless purge of the old bourgeois profes-

sorate—left the IKP without a clear mandate and

ultimately led to its closure in 1938.

Over the course of its existence, the IKP was

frequented by both party officials and Marxist

scholars. Some of the most prominent among them

included Vladimir Adoratsky, Andrey Bubnov, Niko-

lai Bukharin, Abram Deborin, Sergey Dubrovsky,

INSTITUTE OF RED PROFESSORS

666

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Emilian Yaroslavsky, Bela Kun, Nikolai Lukin, Ana-

toly Lunacharsky, Vladimir Nevsky, Mikhail

Pokrovsky, Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, Karl Radek,

Leon Trotsky, Yevgeny Varga, and Vyacheslav

Volgin. IKP graduates who went on to serve in

prominent positions in party, state, and scientific

institutions included Grigory Alexandrov, Isaak

Mints, Mark Mitin, Militsa Nechkina, Anna

Pankratova, Boris Ponomarev, Pyotr Pospelov,

Nikolai Rubinshtein, Arkady Sidorov, Mikhail

Suslov, Pavel Yudin, and Nikolai Voznesensky.

See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; COMMUNIST ACADEMY;

EDUCATION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

Learning Among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929. Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press.

Fox, Michael S. (1993). “Political Culture, Purges, and

Proletarianization at the Institute of Red Professors,

1921–1929.” Russian Review 52(1):20–42.

AVID

RANDENBERGER

INSTRUCTION, LEGISLATIVE

COMMISSION OF CATHERINE II

In July of 1767 the Legislative Commission met in

Moscow and was presented with Catherine II’s In-

structions. The lengthy Instructions (twenty chap-

ters and 526 articles) were intended to guide the

work of the Commission as they came together to

discuss the grievances of their electors and the na-

ture of government and the laws in Russia. The In-

structions borrowed heavily from writers such as

Baron de Montesquieu (The Spirit of the Laws), Ce-

sare Beccaria (An Essay on Crimes and Punishments),

William Blackstone (Commentaries on the Laws of

England), and Baron Bielfeld (Political Institutions),

as well as from Catherine’s correspondence with

such enlightenment thinkers as Voltaire and

Diderot.

The Instructions themselves were neither a law

code nor a blueprint for a constitution (as some

historians have claimed), but rather a kind of guide

as to the type of government and society Cather-

ine hoped to mold in Russia. Catherine may have

been inspired by Frederick II of Prussia, who had

also promulgated his own visions as to the proper

role of the monarch and the organization of the

bureaucracy; when Catherine finished writing and

editing her Instructions, she sent a German trans-

lation to Frederick II. Certainly one goal of the In-

structions was to proclaim Russia’s place as a

modern European state rather than the Asiatic

despotism Montesquieu had named it. The Instruc-

tions deal with political, social, legal, and economic

issues, and in 1768 Catherine issued a supplement

that dealt with issues of public health, public or-

der, and urban life.

Catherine’s reasons for promulgating the In-

structions as well as her success in achieving the

stated goals have been the subject of considerable

debate. The Legislative Commission disbanded in

1768 as war broke out between Russia and Turkey,

and the Commission never succeeded in finalizing

a draft of a law code. Several partial codes were is-

sued later, and some refer back directly to Cather-

ine’s Instructions. However, a complete body of law

code was never produced in Catherine’s time. The

other perceived failure of the Instructions was the

fact that it did not deal with serfdom. Catherine’s

criticisms of serfdom were deleted from her final

draft after consultations with her advisers. Chap-

ter 11 of the Instructions does note that a ruler

should avoid reducing people to a state of slavery.

However, Catherine had originally included a pro-

posal that serfs should be allowed to accumulate

sufficient property to buy their freedom and

that servitude should be limited to six years.

Because Catherine did not abolish serfdom, re-

duce the power of the nobility, draft a constitution,

or promulgate a complete law code, Catherine’s In-

structions have often been considered a failure.

Many people have assumed that Catherine was

simply vain or a hypocrite or that she hoped to

dazzle the west with visions of Russia’s political

progress. De Madariaga disagrees, noting that the

Instructions were never intended to limit Catherine’s

power. Catherine made it clear that she saw abso-

lutism as the only government suitable for Russia,

but that even in an absolute government funda-

mental laws could and should be obeyed. In states

ruled by fundamental laws (a popular concept in

the eighteenth century), citizens could not be de-

prived of their life, liberty, or property without

judicial procedure. In her Instructions Catherine

made the case for the importance of education, for

abolishing torture, and for very limited capital pun-

ishment. Perhaps just as importantly, the Instruc-

tions disseminated a great deal of important legal

thinking from the West and created a language

in which political and social discussions could be

held.

INSTRUCTION, CATHERINE II

667

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

See also: CATHERINE II; ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, John. (1989). Catherine the Great: Life and Leg-

end. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Catherine II, Empress of Russia. (1931). Documents of

Catherine the Great: The Correspondence with Voltaire

and the Instruction of 1767, in the English text of 1768,

ed. W. F. Reddaway. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press.

De Madariaga, Isabel. (1990). Catherine the Great: A Short

History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Dukes, Paul. (1977). Catherine the Great’s Instructions to

the Legislative Commission. Newtonville, MA: Orien-

tal Research Partners.

Raeff, M. (1966). Plans for Political Reform in Imperial Rus-

sia, 1730–1905. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

ICHELLE

ESTE

INTELLIGENTSIA

The intelligentsia were a social stratum consisting

of people professionally engaged in intellectual

work and in the development and spread of culture.

The term intelligentsia was introduced into the

Russian language by the minor writer Boborykin

in the 1860s and it soon became widely used. Ac-

cording to Martin Malia, the word intelligentsia has

had two primary overlapping uses: either all peo-

ple who think independently, whom the Russian

literary critic Dmitry Pisarev called “critically

thinking realists,” or the more narrow meaning,

“the intellectuals of the opposition, whether revo-

lutionary or not.” However, the second definition,

which is often found in historical literature, is too

narrow and unjustifiably excludes important

thinkers, philosophers, writers, public figures, and

political rulers. For example, the famous Russian

philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev called Tsar Alexander

I “a Russian intelligent on the throne.” Thus one

may consider as intelligentsia well-educated and

critical-thinking people of all political spectrums of

society, not just radicals and liberals.

THE INTELLIGENTSIA IN THE

RUSSIAN EMPIRE

Historians have different opinions about the time

of the appearance of the Russian intelligentsia as a

historical phenomenon. Some of them consider

people who were opposed to the Russian political

regime since the end of the eighteenth century as

intelligentsia. According to this chronology the first

representatives of Russian intelligentsia were writ-

ers Alexander Radischev and Nikolai Novikov, who

protested against serfdom and the existing regime,

as well as the first Russian revolutionaries, the De-

cembrists. They were either separated individuals

or small groups of people without significant in-

fluence on Russian society. Their ideas foreshad-

owed important future intellectual trends. Because

of this, most historians considered them as a proto-

intelligentsia.

In the 1830s–1850s philosophical debates largely

divided Russian intellectuals into Westernizers and

Slavophiles, in line with their opinion about how

Russian society should develop. Westernizers ad-

vocated a West European way for the development

of Russia, while Slavophiles insisted on Russian his-

torical uniqueness. Both these groups of Russian

proto-intelligentsia had their distinguished repre-

sentatives. The most famous Slavophiles were the

writers Ivan and Konstantine Aksakov and the

thinkers Ivan Kiryevsky and Alexsei Khomiyakov.

The most distinguished Westernizers of this time

were Peter Chaadayev and writer and radical pub-

licist Alexander Herzen. Since there was strict cen-

sorship in Russia, Herzen established the Russian

publishing house “Free Russian Press” in London in

1852, where he published the journal Kolokol (The

Bell).

The most radical faction of Russian intellectu-

als began to adopt Western socialist ideas at this

time. Among the famous radical intelligentsia were

publicist Vissarion Belinsky, anarchist Mikhail

Alexandrovich Bakunin, and the radical Mikhail Pe-

trashevsky’s circle, which discussed the necessity

of the abolition of serfdom in Russia and reform of

the Russian monarchy in a democratic, federal re-

public.

The circle of Russian intellectuals remained very

small before the 1860s. Higher education was avail-

able only to the noble elite of society; consequently

most of the Russian proto-intelligentsia was from

the gentry.

The majority of western historians agree that

the Russian intelligentsia appeared as an actual so-

cial stratum in the 1860s. There were several rea-

sons for its appearance, among them the period of

Great Reforms in Russia under Tsar Alexander II

with the liquidation of serfdom, liberalization of

society, and awakening of public opinion. Also, the

INTELLIGENTSIA

668

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

development of capitalism in Russia and the begin-

ning of industrialization demanded more educated

people. At this time the technical intelligentsia ap-

peared in Russia, while education became more

widespread among the population.

In the 1860s there appeared a current among

Russian intelligentsia called “nihilism” (from the

Latin nihil meaning reject). Some historians believe

that nihilism was a reaction of part of Russian so-

ciety to the failure of the government in the

Crimean War. The term nihilism was popularized

by the Russian author Ivan Turgenev in his novel

Fathers and Sons in 1862, where he described the

conflict between two generations. Historian Philip

Pomper wrote: the “Nihilist denied not only tradi-

tional roles of women but also the family, private

property, religion, art—in a word, all traditional

aspects of culture and society.” According to Pom-

per the doctrinal bases of Russian nihilism were

materialism, utilitarianism, and scientism. The

most famous writers and literary critics, who more

or less shared nihilistic ideas, were Nikolai Cherny-

shevsky, Nikolai Dobrolubov, and Dmitry Pisarev.

Populism became the ideology of a large segment

of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1870s–1880s.

This was a reaction to the nihilist’s rationalistic elit-

ism on one side, and the continuation of the ideas

of the Slavophiles on the other. Populists had great

sympathy for the suffering peasant masses and,

like Slavophiles, they believed in the uniqueness of

the Russian peasant commune and saw in it the

germ of the future socialist society. They created

the movement “Going to the people.” The many

admirers of this movement lived among peasants,

attempting to educate them and spread their ideas

about a future just society. Peasants usually looked

suspiciously at these intelligent agitators from the

cities and sometimes physically attacked them.

When “Going to the people” failed, Russian

populists rejected this tactic and instead created sev-

eral secret societies to struggle against the govern-

ment. One of these groups of Russian radical

intelligentsia, Zemlya i Volya, was established in

Petersburg in 1876. In 1878 this organization split

into two parts. Extreme members founded the new

group Narodnaya Volya that chose political terror

as their primary tactic. In 1881 members of Nar-

odnaya Volya assassinated Tsar Alexander II. Mod-

erate members of Zemlya i Volya founded Chernyi

Peredel, which continued anti-government agita-

tion. The most noted member of Chernyi Peredel

was the future Marxist Georgy Plekhanov.

Marxism and other socialist movements be-

came popular in Russia in the 1890s with the de-

velopment of industry and the rise in the number

of industrial workers. The first Marxist and so-

cialist groups in Russia were composed almost en-

tirely of intellectuals. The writings of Karl Marx

and the other ideologists of socialism were too com-

plicated for comprehension by barely literate work-

ers. The Russian radical intelligentsia took on the

mission of spreading these socialist ideas among the

proletariat. Their motivation was similar to their

radical predecessors of the 1860s: the search for so-

cial justice and dreams about equality for all mem-

bers of society. But unlike in earlier times, these

political groups transformed into large political

parties with well-formed programs of political

struggle against the government. Among these po-

litical parties were the Russian Social-Democratic

Party that split in 1903 into the Bolsheviks and

Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, various

anarchist groups, etc. These political parties used a

variety of methods to struggle against the govern-

ment: from political agitation and propaganda to

terror, organization of political strikes, and at-

tempts to overthrow the government. Members of

these parties were from disparate sections of soci-

ety, but Russian radical intelligentsia led all of these

groups.

These political movements had support in their

struggle with the existing regime from the move-

ments of national minorities in the Russian empire.

The best representatives of the Ukrainian and Pol-

ish intelligentsia were persecuted by the tsarist

regime for expression of their national feelings and

calling for the independence of their nations. Thus

the celebrated Ukrainian poet and artist Taras

Shevchenko was sent by order of Tsar Nicolas I to

a ten-year term in a labor battalion in Siberia “un-

der the strictest supervision” and was forbidden to

write and sketch. Use of the Ukrainian language

was forbidden several times in the Russian empire.

Russian governments severely suppressed Polish

uprisings and sent thousands of people who par-

ticipated in them to exile in Siberia.

Jews were the most oppressed group in the

Russian empire. Their restriction to the Pale of Set-

tlement, the “percentage norm” (i.e., limitation on

numbers admitted) in Russian universities and

gymnasiums for Jewish students, and the policy

of state anti-Semitism made the life of the Jewish

intelligentsia miserable in the empire. Revolutionary

and nationalist moods were widely spread among

the Jewish intelligentsia. Thus Jews comprised a

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

percentage of revolutionaries far higher than the

proportion of Jews in the Russian population.

Conservatives in the Russian intelligentsia al-

ways opposed Russian radicals and revolutionaries.

Russian conservatives did not create their political

parties until the beginning of the twentieth cen-

tury. They usually supported the Russian monar-

chy and government, and expressed their ideas in

philosophical and literary works, and in the Russ-

ian conservative press. Among them were famous

thinkers (Konstantin Leontiev), writers (Feodor

Dostoyevsky), and publicists (Mikhail Katkov,

Vasily Shulgin). All of them warned Russian soci-

ety about the danger of the socialists’ ideas and the

impending revolution. Their ideas were shared by

a significant part of the Russian intelligentsia.

After the first Russian revolution in 1905 the

volume of essays Vekhi (Landmarks, 1909) argued

against the revolutionary inclinations of the Russ-

ian intelligentsia. Among the authors was a group

of famous Russian religious philosophers and pub-

licists (philosophers Nicolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bul-

gakov, publicist Peter Struve, and others). Some of

the authors of this book were former socialists and

Marxists who were greatly disillusioned after the

first Russian revolution. Vekhi was one of the most

famous books in Russia in the early 1900s, it was

reprinted five times during its first year.

The Liberal movement appeared comparatively

late among the Russian intelligentsia, on the eve of

the First Russian Revolution of 1905. During the

First Russian Revolution, Russian liberals created

the Constitutional Democratic Party (Cadets), with

the goal of transforming the absolute monarchy

into a constitutional monarchy. The ideas of liber-

alism were not widely spread among the Russian

population; thus the Constitutional Democratic

Party never had a large influence on political events

in the country. The Constitutional Democratic

Party was often called the party of Russian intelli-

gentsia, because they dominated the party, al-

though intelligentsia led most political parties and

movements in Russia.

The Russian intelligentsia was responsible for

what is arguably the greatest achievement of Rus-

sian culture: Russian literature. The majority of

Russian writers, artists, scholars, and scientists

lived a quiet everyday life and pursued their aes-

thetic, scholarly, and scientific tasks. The apolitical

Russian intelligentsia believed that literature and art

should have only aesthetic goals. These ideas were

shared by many celebrated writers, poets, and

artists of the Silver Age of the Russian culture (at

the beginning of the twentieth century).

A large part of the intelligentsia greeted the Feb-

ruary revolution as an attempt at the liberalization

of the country. Many of them favored the provi-

sional government. However, at the time of the Oc-

tober revolution only an insignificant minority of

the Russian intelligentsia supported the Bolsheviks.

THE INTELLIGENTSIA IN THE

SOVIET UNION

The Russian intelligentsia felt responsible for the

future of the country, and some of them had the

naïve illusion that they could persuade the Bolshe-

vik leaders to stop terror. However, such attempts

by the Russian writers Maxim Gorky and Vladimir

Korolenko, who appealed personally to the Bolshe-

vik leader Vladimir Lenin, were unsuccessful. Bol-

sheviks did not forgive the counter-revolutionary

mood of the intelligentsia and soon began repres-

sion against it. One of the first victims was the fa-

mous poet of the Silver Age of Russian culture

Nikolai Gumilev. In 1921 he was accused of con-

spiracy against the Soviet regime and was executed.

Many of the intelligentsia emigrated from Russia

after the October revolution. The elite of the Rus-

sian intelligentsia, including famous philosophers

(among them was an author of Vekhi, Nicolai

Berdiaev) and writers, were expelled from the coun-

try by the order of the Bolshevik leaders in the fall

of 1922.

The Bolsheviks attempted to spread Marxist

ideology among the entire population and to con-

trol the development of culture in the Soviet Union.

They declared war on illiteracy. Thousands of new

schools were opened in the Soviet Union, and edu-

cation became obligatory. The children of peasants

and workers received the right to enter technical

schools and universities. In contrast members of

formerly rich bourgeois families were deprived of

many rights, and the Soviet universities were very

reluctant to accept them. The educational system

in the Soviet Union was under the absolute control

of the Communist Party, and communist ideology

was the core of the educational curriculum.

The majority of the new Soviet intelligentsia

consisted of technically trained personnel who, ac-

cording to Richard Pipes, had “. . . mere nodding

acquaintance with the liberal arts, once considered

the essence of a higher education.” Thus Pipes char-

acterized these people as semi-intelligentsia or

“white collar.” However, people educated in this

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

way were most devoted to the political system.

They did not know any other ideology beside the

Communist. The Soviet government exterminated

all other sources of knowledge except the apolitical

and pro-Soviet. Many authors and books, and all

press except the Bolsheviks’, were forbidden in the

Soviet Union. All publications appeared only after

approval under strict Soviet censorship. In litera-

ture, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writ-

ers (RAPP), with its dogmatic party approach

controlled all works of Soviet writers. The com-

munications of Soviet citizens with foreigners was

severely restricted. Thus was created the Soviet in-

telligentsia, completely devoted to the communist

regime.

Soviet propaganda even influenced the minds

of some Russian emigrants. Among the Russian

emigrant intelligentsia there appeared a movement

called “left-wing Smenovekhism.” Members of

this movement criticized the authors of Vekhi for

“. . . their inability to accept the great Russian Rev-

olution.” The authors of the volume of essays

Smena Vekh (Change Landmarks) proclaimed their

pro-Soviet position.

During Josef Stalin’s regime many thousands

of intelligentsia became the innocent victims of po-

litical repression. Only a small percentage of them

dared to resist the regime. Most of the repressed in-

telligentsia were loyal to the Soviet system. Among

them were talented writers (Boris Pil’niak, Isaac Ba-

bel), poets (Osip Mandelshtam), scientists, and

scholars. Others, such as the poet Marina Tsve-

taeva, were pushed to commit suicide.

Nevertheless, the Communist government needed

the creators of weapons and ideologies, as well as

musicians and artists. Thus in the Soviet Union

there always existed an intellectual elite that made

distinguished achievements in many areas of sci-

entific and scholarly life, and in art and culture.

The other part of the Soviet intelligentsia actively

collaborated with the state in the hope of promot-

ing their careers, with the expectation of receiving

some state privileges. Thus at the same time, when

some Soviet writers, poets, artists, and musicians

created masterpieces, others created works devoted

to the Soviet political leaders. Huge portraits of

Stalin and Lenin decorated every state office and

their statues were erected in each city.

Some change in the political climate appeared

after the secret speech of Nikita Khrushchev to the

twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the

Soviet Union (1956) about the crimes of Stalin’s

regime. The time from this speech through the first

part of the 1960s was called the period of cultural

“Thaw.” At that time political executions were

stopped, and the intelligentsia felt freer to express

their ideas and feelings. During this period many

political prisoners were released, including many

intellectuals. The Thaw brought a new approach to

culture and art, which became more humane. Dur-

ing these years many masterpieces of Russian lit-

erature were published, many of them devoted to

the recent past: Stalin’s repression and World War

II. Among these works was One Day in the Life of

Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the po-

etry of Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, and

Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, for which he won

the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. However,

the treatment of Pasternak in the Soviet Union

was appalling and hastened his death. Thus Khrush-

chev’s cultural policy was contradictory: he united

some cultural liberalization with the continuation

of some repression. During the cultural Thaw the

Communist Party did not release culture from ide-

ological control, but only extended the limits on the

creativity of the intelligentsia.

The period of Leonid Brezhnev’s leadership

(1964–1982) was a time of political and cultural

stagnation. Stalin and his policies were somewhat

rehabilitated, which led to increased repression

against the intelligentsia. In 1965 two writers, An-

drey Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, were arrested for

publishing satirical works in the West. But the So-

viet intelligentsia were not completely silent as in

the past. Prominent intellectuals protested against

the arrest of Sinyavsky and Daniel. The period of

Thaw, with the humanization of the society and

the rethinking of the recent historical past, changed

the social atmosphere in the Soviet Union. Soviet

intellectuals began the dissident and “human

rights” movements. They avoided state censorship

by samizdat (self-publishing) printings that gave

freedom of self-expression to their authors. The

Soviet regime did not surrender its ideological po-

sitions and continued the persecution of noncon-

formist intellectuals. In 1974 the famous writer

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was forcibly deported from

the Soviet Union. In 1980 the hydrogen bomb

physicist and progressive thinker Andrei Sakharov

was sent to internal exile to Gorky. These people

who participated in the dissident and Human rights

movements were the forerunners of glasnost and

the transformation of the communist regime into

a democratic society.

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671

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Mikhail Gorbachev began his leadership in

1985 with an initiative for “democratization of so-

cial and economic life.” He did not want to under-

mine the communist regime, but intended to

improve it and make it more effective. However,

the liberalization of society and diminishing of the

censorship opened the press and mass media for

political discussions and public exposure of histor-

ical reality. In a short time this changed public

opinion, social values, and the attitude of the ma-

jority of the society against the communist regime.

After a long break the intelligentsia had revived

their influence on public opinion. The former dis-

sidents Andrey Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn,

and hundreds of others returned from emigration,

exile, and prisons to lead movements opposing the

communists. All these processes, combined with

the economic crisis, undermined the communist

government. The Soviet Union collapsed in De-

cember 1991 with the intelligentsia playing an im-

portant role in the destruction of the Soviet empire.

The post-Soviet years, however, have not be-

come years of the flourishing of arts and sciences

in the former Soviet states. In most of the new

countries the intelligentsia have received freedom of

expression, but have lost almost all government fi-

nancial support. The new post-Soviet states are un-

able to adequately finance scientific projects and

development of culture and art. Many intellectuals

have lost their jobs, and some emigrated from the

former Soviet states to the West in the 1990s. The

future of the intelligentsia in the post-Soviet coun-

tries depends entirely upon political and economic

developments.

See also: AKSAKOV, IVAN SERGEYEVICH; AKSAKOV, KON-

STANTIN SERGEYEVICH; BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL ALEXAN-

DROVICH; BELINSKY, VISSARION GRIGORIEVICH;

BULGAKOV, SERGEI NIKOLAYEVICH; DISSIDENT MOVE-

MENT; HERZEN, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH; JOURNAL-

ISM; PISAREV, DMITRY IVANOVICH; SOLZHENITSYN,

ALEXANDER ISAYEVICH.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acton, Edward. (1997). “Revolutionaries and Dissidents:

The Role of the Russian Intellectual in the Downfall

of Tsarism and Communism.” In Intellectuals in Pol-

itics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie, edited

by Jeremy Jennings and Anthony Kemp-Welch.

London and New York: Routledge.

Fisher, George. (1969). Russian Liberalism from Gentry to

Intelligentsia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.

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

bridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univer-

sity Press.

Kagarlitsky, Boris. (1994). The Thinking Reed: Intellectu-

als and the Soviet State, 1917 to the Present, tr. Brian

Pierce. London, New York: Verso.

Pipes, Richard, ed.(1961). The Russian Intelligentsia. New

York: Columbia University Press.

Pomper, Philip. (1970). The Russian Revolutionary Intelli-

gentsia.New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company,

Inc.

Read, Christopher. (1990). Culture and Power in Revolu-

tionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Transition

from Tsarism to Communism. Houndmills, Bas-

ingstoke, Hampshire and London: The Macmillan

Press LTD.

Slapentokh, Vladimir. Soviet Intellectuals and Political

Power: The Post-Stalin Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press.

Tompkins, Stuart Ramsay. (1957). The Russian Intelli-

gentsia: Makers of the Revolutionary State. Norman:

University of Oklahoma Press.

ICTORIA

HITERER

INTERMEDIATE RANGE NUCLEAR

FORCES TREATY

In 1987 Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and

U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed the first

major Soviet-U.S. disarmament agreement—the

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

The pact broke precedent in three ways. Previous

treaties limited weapons, but the INF Treaty stip-

ulated abolition of top-of-the-line missiles. Second,

the deal was highly asymmetrical: Moscow gave

up more than Washington. Third, the treaty’s pro-

visions were to be verified not just by “national

means” (mainly, spy satellites), but also by on-site

inspections by Soviets in the United States and

Americans in the USSR.

Demand for such a treaty arose in the 1970s

when the USSR began to deploy what the West

called SS-20 missiles. These were two-stage, inter-

mediate-range missiles, many of them mobile, hard

for the United States to track or attack. Since most

SS-20s targeted Europe (some aimed at China), they

were intimidating to America’s NATO partners.

The Reagan administration proposed a “zero

option.” If the USSR abolished all its SS-20s, the

United States would not build an equivalent. After

INTERMEDIATE RANGE NUCLEAR FORCES TREATY

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY