Search Results for: Australia

Red Square Demonstration

Chronicle of Current Events, Invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Red Square Demonstration. 1968

 

Original Source: Chronicle of Current Events (Possev-Verlag, Frankfurt, 1970), pp. 495-97.

Since the Siniavskii-Daniel trial, since 1966, not a single arbitrary or violent act by the authorities has passed without a public protest, without censure. This is a valuable tradition, the start of people’s self-liberation from the humiliation of fear, from connivance in evil … If Herzen a century ago, by speaking out in defense of Poland’s freedom and against its great power suppressors, alone saved the honor of Russia’s democrats, then the seven demonstrators on Red Square have undoubtedly saved the honor of the Soviet people. The significance of the demonstration of August 25th cannot be overestimated.’

Anatolii Iakobson, September 1968

The dramatic Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on the night of August 20th-21st, 1968, introduced a new dimension into the Soviet civil rights movement. Previously the movement had been little if at all concerned with criticizing Soviet foreign policy, so preoccupied was it with its own problems vis-a-vis the authorities. But this particular aggressive act at once aroused many of its members to outraged protest. First, the Soviet government’s action was so blatant, so crushing and so universally condemned that few liberally minded people could fall to be indignant, however passive or even approving many other Soviet citizens might be. More important still was the fascination which the democratization in Czechoslovakia had naturally held for Soviet liberals, giving them the hope that the same process might one day occur in the USSR These hopes, as some had foreseen would happen, were now dashed.

The demonstration of August 25th and other acts of protest by Soviet citizens form the core of this chapter. Further such acts feature, for various reasons, in different chapters, while Chapter 5 records the trial of the demonstrators and the circumstances surrounding it. All this material gives a vivid preview of Nataliia Gorbanevskaia’s remarkable book Midday: the Case of the Demonstration of August 25th, 1968, on Red Square, which covers the same historic events in greater detail.

No. 3 of the Chronicle came out only ten days after the invasion an reported thus:

On August 21, 1968, the forces of five member-countries of the Warsaw Pact carried out a treacherous and unprovoked attack on Czechoslovakia.

The aggressive actions of the USSR and her allies met with a sharp rebuff from world public opinion.

This issue of the Chronicle will deal with the events in our country which in one way or another are connected with the question of Czechoslovakia.

The facts show clearly that even in conditions which practically preclude the possibility of resistance, the struggle for the realization in practice of the principles of humanism and justice has not ceased …

On July 29th a letter was handed in to the Czechoslovak embassy, signed by five Soviet Communists. It approved the new course of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and condemned Soviet pressure on Czechoslovakia.

On July 30th, Valerii Pavlinchuk died. A young physicist from Obninsk, one of the most active and public-spirited people and communists of the city, a talented scientist and teacher, he was expelled from the party and dismissed from his work for circulating samizdat. Shortly before his death he sent an open letter to Alexander Dubcek, in which he directly expressed his solidarity with the new political course in Czechoslovakia, seeing it as an example of real socialist construction, free from dogmatism and excessive police control.

Even before the invasion, Czech newspapers had disappeared from the book-stalls, and with the invasion L’Humanité, L’Unita, the Morning Star, Borba, Rinascita and other publications ceased to arrive. Regular jamming of broadcasts from foreign radio stations began. The press and the ether were monopolized by our own propaganda.

On August 24th, in Moscow’s October Square, a certain citizen shouted out a slogan against the invasion of Czechoslovakia and was roughly beaten up by some strangers in plain clothes. Two of them hustled him into a car and drove off; the third remained beside a second car. Indignant onlookers began to demand that the police should detain this participant in the assault. But the police only examined his papers.

Many incidents are known of non-attendance on principle at meetings held with the aim of achieving unanimous approval for the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia. There have also been cases where people have found the courage either to refrain from voting or to vote against giving such approval. This happened at the Institute of the International Workers’ Movement, at the Institute of the Russian Language, in one of the departments of Moscow State University, at the Institute of World Economics and International Affairs, at the Institute of Philosophy and at the Institute of Radio Technology and Electronics.

Pamphlets containing protests against the occupation of Czechoslovakia have come to circulate widely in Moscow. The text of one of these documents is printed below.

LET US THINK FOR OURSELVES

The Central Committee and the majority of members of the Communist Party of China, also of the Communist Parties of Albania, Indonesia, North Korea and the so-called ‘parallel Communist Parties’ of Japan, India and Australia declare that ‘bourgeois revisionism’ and open counter-revolution are triumphant in the USSR, that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, having unmasked the cult of Stalin and his crimes and not having recognized the genius of Mao, ‘has betrayed the ideals of proletarian dictatorship’, that ‘the Soviet press slanders China’, and so on.

But supposing a few of our ardent successors of Stalin or Beria suddenly decided to call on our Chinese, Albanian and other brothers to come to their aid?

What if the tanks and parachutists of these brothers suddenly appeared during the night in the streets of our towns? And if their soldiers, in the name of rescuing and defending the ideals of communism – as they understand them – began to arrest the leaders of our party and state, to close the newspapers, shut down the radio stations, and shoot those who dared to resist, the crowd which had gathered, ones who had expressed their sympathy with us, were arrested along with us, and released only late in the evening. During the night searches were made of all those held, on the charge of ‘group activities flagrantly violating public order’. One of us, Vadim Delone, had already been conditionally sentenced under this article earlier, for his part in the demonstration of January 22nd, 1967, on Pushkin Square. After the search I was released, probably because I had two children to look after. I am continually being summoned to give evidence. I refuse to give evidence on the organization and conduct of the demonstration, since it was a peaceful demonstration which did not disturb public order. But I did give evidence about the rough and illegal actions of the people who detained us: I am ready to testify to this before world public opinion.

My comrades and I are happy that we were able to take part in this demonstration, that we were able, if only for a moment, to interrupt the torrent of barefaced lies and the cowardly silence, to show that not all the citizens of our country are in agreement with the violence which is being used in the name of the Soviet people. We hope that the people of Czechoslovakia have learned, or will learn about this. And the belief that the Czechs and the Slovaks, when thinking about the Soviet people, will think not only of the occupiers, but also of us, gives us strength and courage.

NATALIIA GORBANEVSKAIA

A team of investigators of the Moscow City Procuracy is conducting the investigation into the demonstration. They are Akimova, Gnevkovskaia, Lopushenkov, Galakhov and Soloviev. Three of them worked on the investigation into the Pushkin Square demonstration of January 22nd, 1967. General supervision of the progress of the investigation is in the hands of the Moscow Procurator’s assistant, Fedorov. The participants in the demonstration have been charged under article 190-3, which specifies a sentence of up to three years for obstructing the flow of transport and the work of state institutions. It has been learned for certain that-as part of the pre-trial investigation -material of a purely personal nature is being collected and that untrue versions of events are being concocted, which provide opportunities for false and misleading interpretations.

Meanwhile the people who committed sadistic and hooligan acts in the square, in particular the beating up of Fainberg and Litvinov, have had no measures taken against them.

Reports have come in of incidents in other towns of the country. In Leningrad and the Baltic Republics leaflets condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia have come to circulate widely.

In Tartu a student has been arrested for writing a protest on a cinema wall. The name of the student is not known.

In Leningrad on August 1st and 2nd four people were arrested: a legal adviser, Iurii Gendler; a chemist, Lev Kvachevskii; an engineer, Evgenii Shashenkov; and a jurist, Nikolai Danilov. They were searched on an absurd pretext, and literature of allegedly anti-Soviet content was confiscated.

The real reason for their arrest was an attempt to write a letter about Czechoslovakia. The majority of those arrested had previously been subjected to repression.

More detailed information about pending trials in Moscow and Leningrad will be known later.

Subsequent issues reported more detail on the Tartu student, then further immediate protests:

The Estonian student who wrote CZECHS, WE ARE YOUR BROTHERS on a cinema wall in Tartu on the night of August 21st-22nd was savagely beaten up while in detention. His kidneys were damaged and he is still in hospital. Now he has been removed from hospital by KGB men, and so far nothing is known about his fate.

LENINGRAD. On the night of August 21st-22nd, 1968, a 4 20-year-old Leningrader, Boguslavskii, wrote on the sculpture of three horses by Klodt: BREZHNEV – GET OUT OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA. He was arrested immediately on Anichkov Bridge and two weeks later was sentenced under article 70 to five years in a strict-regime labor camp. In October the Russian Supreme Court, considering his appeal, reclassified his action under article 1901 and consequently altered his sentence to three years in an ordinary-regime camp (the maximum penalty under this article).

MOSCOW. On one of the first days after the Czechoslovak invasion, Vladimir Karasev, a graduate of the Physics Faculty at Moscow University, hung a placard up in the hall of the main Moscow University building, and began collecting signatures in protest against the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia. When not long afterwards some university security men came up, he had managed to collect no more than four signatures. As Karasev refused to go with the security men of his own accord, they threw him to the ground and dragged him off by his arms and legs. One of the postmen from post office V-234, who appeared at this point, hit Karasev in the face a few times, shouting abusive political slogans at him: ‘Fascist, Bandera-ite’ and so on. At the Police headquarters they demanded that Karasev write an explanation of the motives for his action, and then sent him off to a mental hospital, where he then spent about three months. On his discharge from the hospital, Karasev fixed himself up with a job as a stoker in a factory near Moscow.

NOVOSIBIRSK. On the night of August 25th, 1968, slogans condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia appeared on several public buildings in the Akademgorodok suburb of Novosibirsk. One of them read: BARBARIANS-GET OUT OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA. Dogs were used in the search for those who had written the slogans, but no one was found. From previous experience it was known that the slogans would not wash off easily and so they were covered with newspapers.

MOSCOW Bopolov, a student of the Institute of Foreign Languages, wrote a letter to the ‘Voice of America’ condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia; he did not send the letter and lost it, but it was later found by somebody in the Institute; a meeting of his fellow students voted his expulsion from the Komsomol and recommended to the Rector that he be expelled from the Institute. Three hours later Bopolov threw himself into the Moscow river, but was saved and put into a mental hospital.

Marina Melikyan, a lecturer in the Department of Russian for Foreigners at Moscow University, voted against a resolution expressing approval of the invasion of Czechoslovakia and was dismissed ‘at her own request’.

Aronov, a member of the Institute of Organic Element Compounds, abstained at a meeting where Czechoslovakia was discussed. The Institute did not apply for an extension to his Moscow residence permit and he was dismissed from work when his permit expired.

But the colleagues of protesters were not always without a spirit of solidarity, as the next item (of 1969) – about the same institute as Aronov’s -shows:

MOSCOW. In May of this year Rokhlin, a Master of Chemical Sciences at the Institute of Organic Element Compounds, was considered along with other candidates for competitive reelection, at a meeting of the Academic Council. The Director of the Institute, Academician Nesmeianov, called upon the members of the Academic Council to vote against the re-election of Rokhlin. ‘I am a man who remembers certain sorts of things,’ said this former President of the Academy of Sciences. ‘Last year Rokhlin was one of those who spoke at a meeting in the Institute against the sending of Soviet troops to Czechoslovakia.’ In spite of expectations to the contrary, this speech did not affect the result of the voting. Rokhlin was elected Senior Research Officer, with an average ratio of votes for and against.

Thus the critical spirit did not disappear with the passage of time. Moreover, the distorted Soviet press reporting from Czechoslovakia also came in for attack.

LENINGRAD. In February 1969 V. M. Lavrov, Doctor of Geology and Head of the Coal Department at the All-Union Geological Research Institute (VSEGEI), sent an unsigned letter to the offices of the paper Pravda, addressed to the journalist Sergei Borzenko. The letter contained sharp criticism of Borzenko’s articles on the situation in Czechoslovakia, and the writer expressed the hope that ‘all honorable Leningraders would subscribe’ to his opinion. The letter was posted in a different district of the city from that of the Institute, but within three days Lavrov was faced with the charge of having written an anonymous political letter. Several closed party meetings were held in the Institute, with KGB participation. Lavrov was demoted to rank-and-file geological work, and the Coal Department was purged.

Not surprisingly, the suicide of the Czech student Ian Palach in Prague on January 16th 1969, struck a chord in the willingness for self-sacrifice of the Soviet civil rights activists, as shown in the attempt to imitate him by Il’ia Rips of Riga (see pp. 243-4) and in the next two items. The second one-an appeal by Grigorenko and Takhimovich6 was a logical follow-up to their visit to the Czechoslovak embassy on July 29th, 1968.

Moscow. On January 25th, 1969, the day of Jan Palach’s funeral, two girl students of Moscow University appeared on Maiakovskii Square with a placard on which were written two slogans: ETERNAL MEMORY TO JAN PALACH and FREEDOM FOR CZECHOSLOVAKIA. They stood in the square behind the statue of Maiakovskii for about twelve minutes. A silent crowd gradually began to gather round them. Then a group of young people, calling themselves volunteer police but without any armbands, came up to the girls. They took away the placard and tore it up, but, after a consultation, let the students go.

TO THE CITIZENS OF THE SOVIET UNION:

The series of self-immolations begun on January 16th, 1969, by the Prague student Jan Palach in protest against the interference in the internal affairs of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic continues. Yet another (for the time being, the last) human torch burst into flames in Wenceslas Square in Prague on February 21st.

This protest, taking such a terrible form, is aimed above all at US, THE SOVIET PEOPLE. It is the unasked-for and in no way justified presence Of 0 U R armies which causes such anger and despair among the Czechoslovak people. It is not for nothing that the death of Jan Palach has stirred the entire working population of Czechoslovakia.

We all carry our share of the blame for his loss, as for that of our other Czechoslovak brothers who have committed suicide. By our approval of the intervention of our armies, by our justification of it, or simply by our silence, we are helping to ensure that human torches will continue to burn in the squares of Prague and other cities.

The Czechs and Slovaks have always considered us their brothers. Can we really allow the word ‘Soviet’ to become for them a synonym for the word ‘enemy’?!

Citizens of our great country!

The greatness of a country lies not in the might of its armies brought down upon a small freedom-loving people but in its MORAL strength.

Can we really go on watching in silence as our brothers perish?!

By now it is already clear to all that the presence of our armies on the territory of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic is serving neither the defense interests of our motherland nor the interests of the countries of the socialist commonwealth.

Do we really not have the courage to admit that we have made a tragic mistake and to do everything in our power to correct it?

That is our right and our duty!

We call upon all Soviet people who do not approve of this rash and hasty act to use all legal means to achieve the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia and a renunciation of interference in that country’s internal affairs! Only in this way can the friendship between our peoples be renewed.

Long live the heroic Czechoslovak people!

Long live Soviet-Czechoslovak friendship!

February 28th, 1969 PETR GRIGORENKO, IVAN IAKHMOVICH

A year after the invasion, No. 9 produced for the occasion the following evidence, revealing that opposition and protest had far exceeded what was known to the outside world and even – so spontaneous had it been – some of the best informed people in Moscow:

Recently yet more expressions of protest against the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia have become known. There are grounds for supposing that the number of such incidents is far greater than it has been possible to discover. For instance, in October 1968 it was reported to Leningrad district party committees that there had by that time been seventeen acts of protest in Leningrad. The Chronicle has reported only one of them-the inscriptions made by the 20-year-old Boguslavskii. One more incident has become known: a car drove at high speed across Palace Square, and two packets of leaflets were thrown out of the windows. One of the packets burst, scattering leaflets in all directions; the second fell to the ground without coming open. The car managed to get away. Next day, this request was made in a Leningrad radio program of announcements: if anyone had noticed the number of a car out of which Ca parcel of valuable documents’ fell on to Palace Square, would he please inform the authorities of that number.

In the town of Roshal, in Moscow Region, the 23-year-old Valerii Lukanin displayed a poster in his window this spring protesting against the continuing presence of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia. He was dispatched to a psychiatric hospital, and, without being informed of the fact, was declared insane, with the diagnosis ‘a serious form of schizophrenia’. The fact that his case was being investigated was concealed from him: Lukanin’s actions were classified under article 70 of the Russian Criminal Code. 7 Nor was he informed that on June 23rd there had been a trial at which compulsory treatment in a special psychiatric hospital was ordered. Lukanin’s mother was threatened that if she told her son about the trial when she visited him, she would in future not be allowed visits. On July 18th Valerii Lukanin was sent to the special psychiatric hospital in Kazan.

At the beginning of July, a Doctor of Biological Sciences, Sher, was brought to trial in Rostov-on-Don. He was charged under articles 65 (espionage) and 70 of the Russian Criminal Code. In practical terms the charge related to a letter Sher had written to the Central Committee of the party, in which he protested at the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia, and at the revival of Stalinism: Sher demanded in particular that all those who had worked with Stalin-and especially A. N. Kosygin -should resign their posts. On the grounds that Sher was charged with ‘industrial espionage’, the trial was declared a closed one at the request of the Procurator. The judicial investigation failed to confirm the charges and the defense demanded a verdict of not guilty. The court reclassified Sher’s actions under article 190-1 of the Russian Criminal Code, and sentenced him to two years in an ordinary-regime camp.

In one of his articles Anatolii Kuznetsov has reported that soon after the demonstration of August 25th, 1968, he found a letter in his Tula letterbox supporting the demonstrators’ action.

One ironical comment on the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia was made by students of the Estonian Agricultural Academy at the traditional student carnival last autumn in Tartu. The students held up placards with slogans, the following of which are known: LONG LIVE THE WISE AND FLEXIBLE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE SOVIET UNION; WELCOME, TOURISTS IN YOUR TANKS; YANKEES, GET BACK BEHIND LAKE CHUDSKOE; WELCOME TO THAT UNSWERVING LENINIST, COMRADE LENTSMAN.

The Chronicle also carried these items under the heading:

THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE INVASION OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA

On August 20th, 1969, a group of Soviet citizens issued the following declaration:

On August 21st last year a tragic event took place: Czechoslovakia, a friendly country, was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops. The aim of this action was to put a stop to the process of democratization which had begun in that country. The whole world had been following the post-January developments in Czechoslovakia with hope. It seemed that the idea of socialism, which had been discredited during the Stalin period, would now be rehabilitated. The Warsaw Pact tanks destroyed this hope. On this sad anniversary we declare that we disagree, as before, with the decision to invade, which has endangered the future of socialism.

We declare our solidarity with the Czechoslovak people, who wanted to prove that socialism with a human face was possible.

These lines are prompted by the pain we feel for our homeland, which we wish to see truly great, free and happy.

And we are firmly convinced that a people which oppresses other peoples cannot be free or happy.

T. BAEVA, I. VISHNEVSKAIA, I. GABAT, N. GORBANEVSKAIA, Z. M. GRIGORENKO, M. DZHEMILEV, N. EMELKINA, V. KRASIN, S. KOVALEV, A. LEVITIN-KRASNOV, L. PETROVSKII, L. PLIUSHCH, G. PODIAPOLSKII, L. TERNOVSKII, I. IAKIR, P. IAKIR, A. IAKOBSON.

On August 21, leaflets appeared in the housing-blocks where Moscow writers live, near the ‘Airport’ underground station and at Ziuzino, and also in the Moscow University hostel on the Lenin Hills, protesting at the continued presence of allied troops in Czechoslovakia. One of the three texts of these leaflets is signed ‘Union of Communards’.

On the anniversary of the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia, the mathematician Aleksandr Volpin, well known for his regular writings in defense of human rights, sent the following proposals to the USSR Supreme Soviet:

1. To withdraw the Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia immediately.

2. To implement this withdrawal in such a way as to restore to the Czechoslovak people in the greatest possible degree their national rights, and to liquidate all the undesirable consequences of the presence of foreign troops on Czechoslovak territory.

3. In memory of the sacrifices made by the Czechoslovak people, the most famous of which is the life of Jan Palach, one of the Moscow streets or squares to be renamed after him, for example Istoricheskii Passage. The choice of a suitable street or square for renaming to be agreed with representatives of the Czechoslovak people.

4. Czechoslovakia to receive compensation for all material losses incurred due to the presence of Soviet troops on its territory.

Hardly expecting his proposals to be speedily accepted, Volpin nevertheless reminds the Supreme Soviet that ‘any measures it may take to implement these proposals would be in accordance with the principles of international law, which the Soviet Union has many times supported, and would help to restore its reputation as a country which faithfully follows these principles’.

A few months later, on Soviet Constitution Day, another incident took place in Moscow: the arrest of a girl who tried to distribute copies of a poem she had written. The girl concerned was later sentenced to indefinite detention in the prison psychiatric hospital in Kazan, the Procurator comparing her act to the attempt on the cosmonauts’ lives of January 1969. The Chronicle printed her poem.’ This was its first report:

On December 5th, 1969, Valeria Novodvorskaia was arrested in the Palace of Congresses, where she was scattering and handing out leaflets before the start of a performance of the opera October. Novodvorskaia made no attempt to escape, and continued to hand out leaflets until she was approached by KGB men. The leaflets were written in verse form, and the theme was our tanks in Czechoslovakia. There was probably also something in them about the constitution. After Novodvorskaia’s arrest, several copies of three manuscript booklets of her own poetry were removed from her flat.

Valeria Novodvorskaia is nineteen. She finished school in 1968 with a medal, and gained a place with honors in the French Department of the Foreign Languages Institute. At the time of her arrest she was in her second year there.

The Chronicle’s regular samizdat section has carried two categories of material on Czechoslovakia. That devoted to the county’s ‘experiment’ and the course of events there is-since it would interrupt the narrative here-presented in Chapter M. The second category is summarized in No. 5 under the heading:

OPEN LETTERS AND ARTICLES BY SOVIET AUTHORS ON THE QUESTION OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, at the end of July 1968, when the Soviet press was conducting a particularly violent campaign against the democratization in Czechoslovakia and when the threat of intervention seemed more real than at any time before or after, there had already appeared two documents expressing sympathy for Czechoslovakia and indignation at the propaganda campaign: a letter to all members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the whole Czechoslovak people signed by five communists, P. Grigorenko, A. Kosterin, V. Pavlinchuk, S. Pisarev and I. Iakhmovich; and an open letter by Anatolii Marchenko.

The sending of Soviet troops to Czechoslovakia under the guise of ‘fraternal help’, unanimously approved in the pages of the Soviet press,”‘ met with various forms of protest from individual Soviet citizens. Among the samizdat reactions to these tragic events may be mentioned: the letter of Ivan Yakhimovich;12 ‘September 1969’ by Valentin Komarov;13 ‘The Logic of Tanks’, an article by an anonymous author; ‘An appeal to Communists’ signed ‘Communist’; a letter by P. Grigorenko and A. Kosterin;14 and also a letter to the Party’s Central Committee 15 from A. Kosterin, resigning from the party ‘which has become the gendarme of Europe’.

All these documents, though differing in style and form, make the same points: (a) the intervention in Czechoslovakia is the result of a revival of Stalinism; (b) the real reason for it was a wish to suppress democratization, freedom and the rule of law, and to destroy a dangerous experiment in combining socialism with democracy; (c) the invasion was a moral defeat for the occupiers; (d) our people and intelligentsia are collectively responsible for what has happened, and all honest, thinking people in our country must unite.

Source: Peter Reddaway, comp., Uncensored Russia: protest and dissent in the Soviet Union (New York: American Heritage Press, 1972), pp. 95-112.

 

Invitation to the Communist International

Invitation to the First Congress of the Communist International. January 24, 1919

 

COMRADES: The undersigned parties and organizations consider it indispensable to call the first congress of the new Revolutionary International. During the war and the revolution it has become clear not only that the old socialistic and social-democratic parties have gone bankrupt, and the Second International with them, and that the elements included among the old Social-Democracy (the so-called “Center”) were incapable of active revolutionary activity, but also that already now the framework is ready for the real revolutionary international. The gigantic pace of the world revolution which gives rise to new problems, the danger that this revolution may be killed by the alliance of the capitalistic states, which organize a “League of Nations” against the revolution, the attempt of the “traitor-socialists” to gather, and after having “amnestied” each other, to assist their governments and the bourgeoisie again to betray the working class, and finally in view of revolutionary experience and for the purpose of internationalizing the whole course of the revolution, we were induced to take the initiative in placing on the order of the day the question of calling the revolutionary proletarian parties to an international congress.

Aim and Tactic

According to our opinion, the new International must be based on the recognition of the following principles, which we present as the platform and which have been worked out in accordance with the programs of the “Spartacus Association” in Germany and the Communist (Bolshevik) Party in Russia:

1. The present is the period of destruction and crushing of the capitalistic system of the whole world, and it will be a catastrophe for the whole European culture, should capitalism with all its insoluble contradictions not be done away with.

2. The aim of the proletariat must now be immediately to conquer power. To conquer power means to destroy the governmental apparatus of the bourgeoisie and to organize a new proletarian governmental apparatus.

3. The new apparatus of the Government must express the dictatorship of the working class (and in certain places even the dictatorship of the half-proletariat in the villages, that is the peasant proletariat), that is, to persist in the systematic suppression of the exploiting classes and be the means of expropriating them. No false bourgeois democracy–this treacherous form of the power of a financial oligarchy, with its mere external equality-but a proletarian democracy able to realize the freedom of the working masses, no parliamentarism, but the self-government of the masses through their elected organs; no capitalistic bureaucracy, but governing organs which have been appointed by the masses themselves, through the real participation of these masses in the governing of the country and the socialistic work of reorganization-such ought to be the type of the proletarian state. Soviet power or a corresponding organization of governments is its concrete expression.

4. The dictatorship of the proletariat must be the occasion for the immediate expropriation of capital and the elimination of the private right of owning the means of production, through making them common public property. The socialization (meaning doing away with private property and making it the property of the proletarian state, which is managed by the workers on a socialistic basis) of the large-scale industries and the central bodies organized by the same, including the banks, the confiscation of the capitalistic agricultural production, the monopolization of large-scale commerce; the socialization of the large buildings in the towns and in the country; the establishment of a workers’ government and the concentration of the economic functions in the hands of the organs of the proletarian dictatorship-these are the most essential aims of the day.

5. In order to protect the socialist revolution against external and internal enemies, and to assist the fighting proletariats of other countries, it becomes necessary to entirely disarm the bourgeoisie and its agents and to arm the proletariat.

6. The world situation demands immediate and as perfect as possible relations between the different groups of the revolutionary proletariat and a complete alliance of all the countries in which the revolution has already succeeded.

7. The most important method is the mass action of the proletariat, including armed struggle against the Government power of capitalists.

Attitude toward Socialist Parties

8. The old International has been divided in three main groups: the outright Socialist Chauvinists, who, during the whole imperialistic war, 1914-1918, supported the bourgeoisie and undertook the role of executioners of the laborers’ revolution; the “Center,” the theoretical leader of which is Kautsky, and which within itself contains mostly wavering elements, who are unable to follow any decided lines, but sometimes are clearly traitorous to the International; and finally the Left Revolutionary Wing.

9. Toward the Socialist-Chauvinists, who everywhere and especially on the most critical occasions appear with arms in their hands against the proletarian revolution, we can only advocate a struggle without quarter, and toward the “Center” such a tactic as would separate the most revolutionary elements from the rest by criticizing and exposing the leaders. It is absolutely necessary to see to it that the labor organizations at a certain stage of development are kept from being controlled by the “Center.”

10. It is necessary to organize the revolutionary elements among the workers who have not as yet joined the socialistic parties, but completely stand on the side of the proletarian dictatorship in the form which it has assumed in the Soviet system. Such are first of all the syndicalist elements of the workers.

11. Finally it is necessary to include all proletarian groups or organizations which, if they have not openly joined the Left Revolutionary movement show, however, tendencies in that direction.

12. We propose that in the Congress should participate representatives of the following parties, groups and movements (which have the right to full membership in the Third International):

(1) Spartacus League of Germany; (2) The Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Russia; (3) Communist Party in German Austria; (4) The Communist Party of Hungary; (5) The Communist Party of Poland; (6) The Communist Party of Finland; (7) The Communist Party of Estonia; (8) The Communist Party of Latvia; (9) The Communist Party of Lithuania; (10) The Communist Party of Belorussia; (11) The Communist Party of the Ukraine; (12) The revolutionary elements within the Czech Social-Democracy; (13) The Social-Democratic Party of Bulgaria; (14)The Social-Democratic Party of Romania; (15) The Left Wing of the Socialist Party of Serbia; (16)The Social-Democratic Left Party of Sweden; (17) The Social-Democratic Party of Norway; (18) The Socialist Workers’ Party of Denmark; (19) The Communist Party of the Netherlands; (20) The revolutionary elements within the Workers’ Party of Belgium; (21 and 22) Groups and organizations within the socialist and syndicalist movements of France, mainly in solidarity with Loriot; (23) Left Social-Democrats of Switzerland; (24) Socialist Party of Italy; (25) The left elements within the Socialist Party of Spain; (26) The left elements of the Socialist Party of Portugal; (27) The Socialist Party of Great Britain (especially adherents of MacLean’s groups); (28) The Socialist Labor Party (SLP) of England; (29) IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) of England; (30) IW of Great Britain; (31) The revolutionary elements of “shop steward” movements of England; (32) The revolutionary elements of the labor organizations of Ireland; (33) Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP); (34) The left elements of the Socialist Party of America (SP) (especially that group which is represented by Debs and the socialist propaganda association); (35) IWW of America; (36) IWW of Australia; (37) Workers International Industrial Union (WIIU) of America; (38) Socialistic groups in Tokyo and Yokohama (represented by Katayama); (39) Socialistic International Youth.

The Question of Organization and the Name of the Party

13. The Third International’s basis has been worked out so that in different parts of Europe groups and organizations of similarly thinking people have been formed which join the same program and practically follow the same tactics. This first of all applies to the Spartacans in Germany and the Communist parties in many other countries.

14.TheCongress must lay the foundation of a common fighting organ, which will provide permanent liaison and systematic direction for the movement, a center for the Communist International, which subordinates the interests of the movement in every separate country to the common interests of the Revolution on an international scale. The concrete forms for the organizations, the representation, etc., are to be worked out at the Congress.

15. The Congress shall be called “The First Communist International Congress” of which the different parties will form the sections. Marx and Engels even considered the name “Social-Democrats” theoretically wrong. The humiliating bankruptcy of the old “International” demands a new name. In addition, the nucleus of the great movement is already formed by many parties, which have already taken the name of Communist.

In view of the above we propose that all affiliated parties and organizations take up, on the order of the day, the subject of calling an International Communist Congress.

With fraternal greetings,

The Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Lenin, Trotsky).
The Foreign Bureau of Poland’s Communist Workers’ Party (Karski).
The Foreign Bureau of Hungary’s Communist Party (Rudnianski).
The Foreign Bureau of the German-Austrian Communist Party (Duda)
The Russian Bureau for the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party (Rosin).
The Central Committee of the Finnish Communist Party (Sirola).
The Acting Committee for the Federation of the Revolutionary Balkan Social-Democrats (Rakovskii).
The Socialist Labor Party of America (Reinstein).

Source: U.S. Department of State, Memorandum on Certain Aspects of the Bolshevik Movement in Russia (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919), pp. 22-24.

International Situation and the Comintern

Thesis on the International Situation and the Tasks of the Communist International. July 4, 1921

 

I. The Root of the Problem

1. The revolutionary movement at the close of the imperialist war and during the succeeding period has been marked by unprecedented intensity. The month of March, 1917, witnessed the overthrow of Tsarism. In May, 1917, a vehement strike movement broke out in England. In November, 1917, the Russian proletariat seized the power of Government. The month of November, 1919, marked the downfall of the German and Austro-Hungarian monarchies. In the course of the succeeding year, a number of European countries were being swept by a powerful strike movement constantly gaining in scope and intensity. In March, 1919, a Soviet Republic was inaugurated in Hungary. At the close of that year the United States was convulsed by turbulent strikes involving the steel workers, miners and railroad workers. Following the January and March battles of 1919 the revolutionary movement in Germany reached its culminating point shortly after the Kapp uprising in March, 1920. The internal situation in France became most tense in the month of May, 1920. In Italy we witnessed the constant growth of unrest among the industrial and agrarian proletariat leading, in September, 1920, to the seizure of factories, mills and estates by the workers. In December, 1920, the Czech proletariat resorted to the weapon of the proletarian mass strike. March, 1921, marked the uprising of workers in Central Germany and the coal miners’ strike in England.

Having reached its highest point in those countries which had been involved in the war, particularly in the defeated countries, the revolutionary movement spread to the neutral countries as well. In Asia and in Africa, the movement aroused and intensified the revolutionary spirit of the great masses of the colonial countries. But this powerful revolutionary wave did not succeed in sweeping away international capitalism, nor even the capitalist order of Europe itself.

2. A number of uprisings and revolutionary battles have taken place during the year that elapsed between the Second and Third Congress of the Communist International, which resulted in sectional defeats (the Red Army offensive new Warsaw in August, 1920, the movement of the Italian proletariat in September, 1920, and the uprising of the German workers in March. 1921).

Following the close of the war which has been characterized by the elemental nature of its onslaught by the considerable formlessness of its methods and aims, and the extreme panic of the ruling classes, the first period of the revolutionary movement may now be regarded as having reached its termination. The self-confidence of the bourgeoisie as a class, and the apparent stability of its government apparatus have undoubtedly become strengthened. The panic of Communism haunting the bourgeoisie, not having disappeared, has nevertheless somewhat relaxed. The leading spirits of the bourgeoisie are now even boasting of the might of their government apparatus, and have assumed the offensive against the laboring masses everywhere, on both the economic and the political fields.

3. This situation presents the following questions to the Communist International and to the entire working class:

To what extent does this transformation in the relations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat correspond to the actual balance of the contending forces? Is it true that the bourgeoisie is about to restore the social balance which had been upset by the war? Is there any ground to suppose that the period of political upheaval and of class-wars is going to be superseded by a new epoch of restoration and capitalist development? Does not this necessitate revision of program or tactics of the Communist International?

II. The War, Artificial Business Stimulation

The Crisis and the Countries of Europe.

4. The high tide of capitalism was reached in the two decades preceding the war. The intervals of prosperity were superseded by periods of depression of comparatively shorter duration and intensity. The general trend was that of an upward curve: the capitalist countries were growing rich.

Having scoured the world market through their trusts, cartels, and consortiums, the masters of world-capitalism well realized that this mad growth of capitalism will finally strike a dead wall, confining the limits of the capacity of the market created by themselves. They therefore tried to get out of the difficulty by a surgical method. In place of a lengthy period of economic depression which was to follow and result in wholesale destruction of productive resources, the bloody crisis of the world war was ushered in to serve the same Purpose.

But the war proved not only extremely destructive in its methods, but also of an unexpectedly lengthy duration. Besides the economic destruction of the “surplus” productive resources, it also weakened, shattered. and undermined the fundamental apparatus of European production. At the same time it gave a powerful impetus to the capitalist development of the United States and quickened the aggrandizement of Japan. Thus the center of gravity of world industry was shifted from Europe to America.

5. The period following upon the termination of the four years’ slaughter, the demobilization of the armies, the transition to a peaceful state of affairs, and the inevitable economic crisis coming as a result of the exhaustion and chaos caused by the war-all this was regarded by the bourgeoisie with the greatest anxiety as the approach of the most critical moment. As a matter of fact during the two years following the war, the countries involved became the arena of a mighty movement of the proletariat.

One of the chief causes which enabled the bourgeoisie to preserve its dominant position was furnished by the fact that the first months after the war, instead of bringing about the seemingly unavoidable crisis, were marked by economic prosperity. This lasted approximately for one year and a half. Nearly all the demobilized workers were absorbed in industry. As a general rule wages did not catch up with the cost of living, but they nevertheless kept rising, and that created the illusion of economic gains.

It was just this commercial and industrial revival of 1919 and 1920 which, to some extent, relieved the tension of the postwar period, that caused the bourgeoisie to assume an extremely self-confident air, and to proclaim the advent of a new era of organic capitalist development. But as a matter of fact, the industrial revival of 1919-20 was not in essence the beginning of the regeneration of capitalist industry, but a mere prolongation of the artificially stimulated state of industry and commerce, which was created by the war, and which undermined the economy of capitalism…

8. By means of a continuous derangement of the economic system, accumulation of inflated capital, depreciation of currency (speculation instead of economic restoration), the bourgeois governments in league with the banking combines and industrial trusts succeeded in putting off the beginning of the economic crisis till the moment when the political crisis consequent upon the demobilization and the first -squaring of accounts was somewhat allayed. Thus, having gained a considerable breathing space, the bourgeoisie imagined that the dreaded crisis had been removed for an indefinite time. Optimism reigned supreme. It appeared as if the needs of reconstruction had opened a new era of lasting expansion of industry, commerce and particularly speculation. But the year 1920 proved to have been a period of shattered hopes.

The crisis Financial, commercial and industrial, began in March, 1920. Japan saw the beginning of it in the month of April. In the United States, it opened by a slight fall of prices in January. Then it passed on to England, France and Italy (in April). It reached the neutral countries of Europe, then Germany and extended to all the countries involved in the capitalist sphere of influence during the second half of 1920.

9. Thus the crisis of 1920 is not a periodic stage of “normal” industrial cycle, but a profound reaction consequent upon the artificial stimulation that prevailed during the war and during the two years thereafter and was based upon ruination and exhaustion.

The upward curve of industrial development was marked by turn-, of good times followed by crises. During the last seven years, however, there was no rise in the productive forces of Europe but, on the contrary, they kept at a downward sweep. The crumbling of the very foundation of industry is only beginning and is going to proceed along the whole line. European economy is going to contract and expand during a number of years to come. The curve marking the productive forces is going to decline from the present fictitious level. The expansions are going to be only short lived and of a speculative nature to a considerable extent, while the crises arc going to be hard and lasting. The present European crisis is one of under-production. It is the form in which destitution reacts against the striving to produce trade, and resume life on the usual capitalist level…

III. The United States, Japan, Colonial Countries and Soviet Russia.

14. The development of the United States, during the war proceeded, in a certain sense, in an opposite direction to that of Europe. The part played by the United States in the war was chiefly that of a salesman. The destructive consequences of the war had no direct effect upon that country, and the damage caused to its transport, agriculture, etc., was only of an indirect nature and of a far smaller degree than that caused to England, not to speak of either France or Germany. At the same time, the United States, taking full advantage of the fact that European competition had either been removed entirely or had become extremely weak, succeeded in raising some of its most important industries (such as petroleum production, ship-building, automobile and coal industry) to such a height as it had never anticipated. Today most of the countries of Europe are dependent on America not only for their petroleum and grain, but also for their coal.

While America’s export prior to the war consisted chiefly of agricultural products and raw materials (making up more than two-thirds of the entire export), her main export at the present time is made up of manufactured articles (60 per cent of her entire export). Having been in debt prior to the war, the United States is now the world’s creditor, concentrating within her coffers about one-half of the world’s gold reserve and continually augmenting her treasury. The dominating part played by the pound sterling has now been taken over by the American dollar.

15. This extraordinary expansion of American industry was caused by a special combination of circumstances, namely the withdrawal of European competition and, above all, the demands of the European war market. But, American capitalism today has also got out of balance. Since devastated Europe as a competitor of America is not in a position to regain its pre-war role on the world market, the American market as well can preserve only an insignificant part of its former position with Europe as a customer. At the same time America today is producing goods for export purposes to a much greater extent than prior to the war. The over-expansion of American industry during the war cannot find any outlet owing to the scarcity of world markets. As a consequence, many industries have become part time or seasonal industries, affording employment to the workers only part of the year. The crisis in the United States resulting from the decline of Europe signifies the beginning of a profound and lasting economic disorganization. This is the result of the fundamental disturbance of the world’s Subdivision of labor.

16. Japan also took advantage of the war in order to extend her influence on the world market. Her development has been of a much more limited scope than that of the United States and some branches of Japanese industry have acquired the character of what might be termed “hothouse” production. Her productive forces were sufficiently strong to enable her to take hold of the market while there were no competitors. But they are utterly insufficient to retain that market in a competitive struggle with the more powerful capitalist countries. Hence the acute crisis which had its starting point particularly in Japan.

17. The Transatlantic countries and the colonies (such as South America, Canada, Australia, China, Egypt and others), which used to export raw materials in their turn, took advantage of the rupture in international relations for the development of their home industries. But the world crisis has now involved these countries as well, and their internal industrial development is going to be checked, thereby serving as an additional cause for trade handicaps to England and of the whole of Europe.

18. Thus, there is no ground whatsoever to speak of any restoration of lasting balance today either in the sphere of production, commerce or credit with reference to Europe or even with reference to the World as a whole. The economic decline of Europe is still going on and the decay of the foundation of European industry will manifest itself in the near future.

The exchange of goods on the world market is being greatly hindered by the devaluation of currency in Western European countries, reaching in some cases 99 per cent. The incessant rapid fluctuation of the rate of exchange has converted capitalist production into wild speculation.

The world market is in a state of disorganization. Europe wants American products for which, however, it can give nothing in return. While the body of Europe is suffering from anemia, that of America is affected with plethora. The gold standard has been destroyed and the world market has been deprived of its general exchange medium. The only way by which the restoration of the gold standard in Europe could be achieved would be by getting the export to exceed the import. But this is just what devastated Europe is not in a condition to do. America, on the other hand, is trying to check the influx of European goods by raising her tariff.

Thus, Europe has become a bedlam. Prohibitive measures concerning import and transit and increasing the protective tariff manifold have been passed by many a state. England has introduced prohibitive customs duties. The export as well as the entire economic life of Germany is at the mercy of the Allies and particularly by the French speculators. The former Austria-Hungary is now broken up into a number of provinces divided by custom borders. The net in which the Versailles Treaty has entangled the world is becoming more and more tightened. The elimination of Soviet Russia as a market for manufactured goods and as a supply of raw materials has contributed in a very high degree to the disturbing of the economic equilibrium of the world.

19. The reappearance of Russia on the world market is not going to produce any appreciable changes in it, Russia’s means of production have been always completely dependent upon the industrial conditions of the rest of the world and this dependence particularly with regard to the Allied countries has become intensified during the war when her home industry was almost completely mobilized for war purposes. But the blockade cut off these vital connections between Russia and the other countries. There could be no question of setting up any new branches of industry which were needed to prevent the general decay caused by the wear and tear of machinery and equipment in a country completely exhausted during three years of incessant civil war. In addition to this, hundreds and thousands of our best proletarian elements, comprising a great number of skilled workers had to be recruited for the Red Army. Under these conditions, surrounded by the iron ring of the blockade, carrying on incessant wars and suffering from the heritage of an industrial collapse no other regime could have maintained the economic life of the country and create such conditions as would permit of centralized administration. There is no denying, however, that the struggle against world imperialism was carried on at the price of the progressive diminution of the productive resources of industry in various branches. Now, since the blockade has relaxed and the relations between town and country are becoming more regular, the Soviet power for the first time, has been enabled to gradually and steadily direct the country upon the road to economic prosperity in a centralized manner.

IV. Social Contradictions Intensified.

20. The unprecedented destruction of industrial resources brought about by the way did not check the process of social differentiation. Quite the contrary, the proletarization of the intermediary classes, including the new middle-groupings of employees, officials, etc., and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the small clique of trusts combines and so on, have, for the last ten years, made enormous strides in the more backward countries. The Stinnes combine is now the most important factor of the economic life of Germany. The soaring of prices on all commodities coincident with the catastrophic depreciation of currency in all countries involved in the war meant a redistribution of the national incomes to the disadvantage of the working class, officials, employees and small owners and all other persons with a more or less fixed income.

Thus we see that though Europe has been thrown back for a number of decades as to its material resources, the intensification of the social contradictions has not only not retrograded or been suspended but has, on the contrary, assumed a particular acuteness. This cardinal fact is, of itself, sufficient to dispel any illusions of the possibility of a lasting and peaceful development under a democratic form of Government. The social differentiation proceeding along the line of economic decline predetermines the most intense convulsive and cruel nature of the class struggle.

The present crisis is only a continuation of the destructive work done by the war and the post-bellum speculative boom.

21. The prices of agricultural products have risen, bringing about an apparent prosperity in the country and increasing in reality the income and the property of the rich peasantry… At the same time large numbers of the poorer peasantry have become proletarians and paupers, the village has become a breeding place of discontent, and the class-consciousness of the country proletariat has become sharpened. On the other hand, the general impoverishment of Europe, making it incapable of purchasing sufficient American grain, has caused a heavy crisis in the farm industry across the ocean. We are approaching a crisis of peasant and farming economy, not only in Europe, but also in the United States, Canada, Argentine, Australia and South Africa.

22. Owing to the fall of the purchasing power of money, the position of the State and private employees has, as a rule, become even worse than that of the proletarians. Having lost their usual stability the middle and lower officials are becoming factors of political unrest and undermine the Government apparatus which they are called upon to serve. This “new middle estate” which has been regarded by the Reformists as the bulwark of conservatism, can he utilized as a factor in the revolution in the present transitional period.

23. Capitalist Europe has completely lost its dominating position in the world economy. But it was just this domination that had lent some relative equilibrium between its social classes. All the efforts of the European countries (England and partly France) to restore former conditions only tend to intensify their instability and disorganization.

24. While the concentration of wealth going on in Europe has its foundations in the ruinous conditions of that Continent, in the United States the concentration of property and the extreme intensification of class distinctions are proceeding on the basis of the feverish growth of capitalist accumulation. The class struggle now being waged on American soil is assuming an extremely tense revolutionary character owing to the sharp vacillations produced by the general instability of the World market. The period of an unprecedented rise of capitalism is bound to be followed by an extraordinary rise of revolutionary struggle.

25. The emigration of workers and peasants across the ocean has always served as a safety-valve to the capitalist regime in Europe. It grew during prolonged periods of depression and after unsuccessful revolutionary outbreaks. At present, however, America and Australia are putting ever-growing obstacles in the way of emigration. Thus, this safety-valve, so necessary to the capitalist regime, has ceased to exist.

26. The vigorous development of capitalism in the East, particularly in India and in China, has created new -social foundations for the revolutionary struggle. The bourgeoisie of the Eastern countries has bound up its fate even more closely with foreign capital, and has thus become a very important weapon of capitalist domination. The contest between this bourgeoisie and foreign imperialism is the contest of a weaker competitor against his stronger rival, and is by it-, very nature only half-hearted and ineffective. The development of the native proletariat paralyzes the nationalistic-revolutionary tendencies of the capitalist bourgeoisie. At the same time the great masses of the peasants of the Oriental countries look upon the Communist vanguard as their real revolutionary leader. This is particularly true of the more progressive elements of these masses.

The combination of the military nationalistic oppression of foreign imperialism, of the capitalist exploitation by foreign and native bourgeoisie, and the survivals of feudalism are creating favorable conditions in which the young proletariat of the colonial countries must develop rapidly and take the lead in the revolutionary movement of the peasant masses. The revolutionary national movement in India and in other colonies is today an essential component part of the world revolution to the same extent as the uprising of the proletariat in the capitalist countries of the old and the new world.

V. International Relations.

27. The economic conditions of the world in general, and the decline of Europe in particular, presage a long period of hard times, disturbances, crises of both a general and partial character, and so forth. The international relations inaugurated by the war and the Versailles Treaty are rendering the situation more and more hopeless. The trend of the economic forces tending to sweep away national boundaries and convert Europe and the rest of the world into one economic territory gave birth to imperialism. But, on the other hand. the struggle between the contending forces of this imperialism led to the creation of a multiplicity of new national boundaries, new custom-barriers and new armies. In regard to State administration and economy, Europe has been thrown back to the Middle Ages.

The soil which has been exhausted and laid waste is now being called upon to feed an army one and a half times as large as, that of 1914, in the hey-day of “armed peace” …

31. Both the original causes that called forth the recent great slaughter and the chief combatants that took part in it marked it as a European war, the crucial point of which was the antagonism between England and Germany. The intervention of the United States only widened the scope of the struggle, but it did not divert it from its original direction. The European conflict was being settled by world-wide means. The war, having settled the English-German and German-American quarrel in its own way, not only did not solve the problem of the relations between the United States and England but has, for the first time, put that problem prominently forward as one of the first order and the question of the American-Japanese as one of the second order. Thus, the last war was in reality only a prelude to a genuine world war which is to solve the problem of imperialist autocracy.

32. This, however, forms only one focus of international policy which has yet another focus located in the Russian Soviet Federated Republic and the Third International, brought about by the war. All the forces of the world revolution are arraying themselves against all the imperialist combinations. Whether the alliance between England and France is going to be maintained Or broken up, whether the Anglo-Japanese treaty is going to be renewed or not, whether the United States is going to join the League of Nations or not-all this is of little value as far as the interests of the proletariat or the securing of peace is concerned. The proletariat can see no guarantee for peace in the vacillating, predatory, and treacherous combinations of capitalist powers, whose policy turns to an every-increasing extent around the antagonism between England and America, fostering that antagonism and preparing for a new bloody outbreak.

The fact that some of the capitalist governments have concluded peace and commercial treaties with Soviet Russia does not mean that the bourgeoisie of the world has given up the idea of destroying the Soviet Republic. What we are witnessing now is nothing but a change, a temporary change perhaps, of the forms and methods of struggle. The uprising caused by the Japanese troops in the Far East may serve as an introduction to a new stage of armed intervention.

It is altogether obvious that the longer the revolutionary movement of the world proletariat will go on, the more inevitably will the bourgeoisie be impelled by the contradiction of the international economic and political situation to make another bloody denouement on a world-wide scale. If this should come to pass, the “restoration of capitalist equilibrium” consequent upon a new war would have to proceed under conditions of economic exhaustion and barbarity in comparison with which the present state of Europe might be regarded as the height of well-being.

33. In spite of the fact that the late war has furnished terrible evidence that wars are unprofitable-a truth lying at the bottom of bourgeois and socialist pacifism—the process of political, economic, ideological and technical preparation for a new war is going on at full speed all through the capitalist world. Humanitarian anti -revolutionary pacifism has become an auxiliary force to militarism. The social-democrats of every variety and the Amsterdam trade unionists, who are trying to make the workers of the world believe that they ought to adapt themselves to the economic and political conditions resulting from the war, are rendering the imperialist bourgeoisie most valuable services in the matter of preparing a new slaughter which threatens to completely annihilate civilization.

VI. The Working Class and the Post-Bellum Period.

34. The problem of capitalist reconstruction along the lines outlined above essentially puts forward the question as to whether the working class is willing to bear any more heavy sacrifices in order to perpetuate it, own slavery which is going to be even more heavy and more cruel than it was prior to the war. The industrial and economic reconstruction of Europe requires the setting up of new machinery to replace that destroyed during the war and the effective recreation of capital. This would be possible only if the proletariat were willing to work more under a far lower standard of living. The capitalists are insisting on this. and the treacherous leaders of the Yellow International urge the proletariat to assist in the reconstruction of capitalism in the first place, and then proceed fighting for the betterment of their own conditions. But, the European proletariat is not ready to make this sacrifice. It demands a higher standard of living, which is utterly incompatible with the present state of the capitalist system. Hence the everlasting strikes and uprisings; hence the impossibility of the economic reconstruction of Europe.

To restore the value of paper money means for a number of European countries (Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, the Balkans, etc.) first of all to throw off the burden of too heavy obligations, i.e., to declare themselves bankrupt; but this would be a strong impulse to the struggle of all classes for a new distribution of the national income. To restore the value of paper money means further reduction of state expenditures to the detriment of the masses (to forego the regulation of wages and of articles of prime necessity); to prevent the import of cheaper foreign manufactures and increase the amount of exported articles by lowering the cost of production which can be achieved, above all, by increasing the exploitation of labor.

Every real measure tending to restore capitalist equilibrium must by the very nature of the case tend to disturb class equilibrium to a still greater extent than heretofore, and lend additional impetus to the class war. Thus, the attempt at a revival of capitalism involves a contest of vital forces, of classes and parties. If one of the two contending classes, namely the proletariat, should decide to refrain from the revolutionary struggle, the bourgeoisie would undoubtedly establish some sort of a new capitalist equilibrium, an equilibrium based upon material and spiritual deterioration, leading to new wars, to the progressive impoverishment of entire countries, and to the continuous dying out of these millions of toiling masses. But the frame of mind of the world proletariat today furnishes no ground whatever for any such supposition.

35. The elements of stability, of conservatism, and of tradition have to a considerable extent lost their power over the minds of the laboring masses. It is true, that social democracy and the trade unions still exercise an influence over a considerable part of the proletariat, thanks to the apparatus of organizations that has come down to them from former times. But the nature of this influence as well as that of the proletariat itself has undergone considerable changes in no way consistent with the “step by step” methods of the pre-war period.

In the upper crust of the proletariat the labor bureaucracy, having grown out of proportion, being closely knit together, resorting to certain methods of domination that have become habitual, still preserves its usual position and is bound up by numerous ties with the institutions and organizations of the capitalist state. Then come those of the rank and file whose position is more favorable than that of the rest of the workers, who occupy or look forward to occupying some administrative post in the industry itself, and on whom the labor bureaucracy mainly relies for its support. The older generation of social-democrats and trade union men consisting in the main of skilled workers, have become attached to their organizations through decades of struggle and cannot make up their minds to sever connections with them, regardless of the treacherous nature of their activity. But, in many industries, unskilled workers, and female workers are entering the ranks in considerable numbers.

Millions of workers having gone through the experience of the war and having acquired the ability to use the rifle are now prepared to a large extent to turn the weapons against their class enemies, provided they be given the strong leadership and serious training which are essential for victory. Millions of working men and particularly women have been newly recruited for industrial pursuits during the war. These new workers brought with themselves their petty-bourgeois prejudices. But they also brought along their impatient claims for better conditions of life.

There are also millions of young working men and women who have grown up in the storm and stress of war and revolution, who are more susceptible to the Communist ideas and are anxious to act.

The ebb and flow of the gigantic army of unemployed, some of whom are unattached to any class while others possess only partial class attachments, form a striking illustration of the disintegration of capitalist production and represent a constant menace to the bourgeois order. All these proletarian elements, varying so much in origin and character, have been enlisting in the post-bellum revolutionary movement at various times and in varying degrees. This explains the vacillations, the ebbs and flows, the attacks and retreats, characterizing the revolutionary war. But the shattering of old illusions, the terrible uncertainty of existence, the arbitrary domination of the trusts and bloody methods of the militarized state-all these are rapidly welding the overwhelming majority of the proletarian masses together. The great masses are searching for a determined and definite leadership and for a closely welded and centralized Communist Party to take the lead.

36. During the war, the condition of the working class became perceptibly worse. It is true some groups of workers improved their condition, and in those cases where several members of a working man’s family were in a position to hold their place near the loom, the workers succeeded in maintaining and even in raising their standard of life. But as a general rule wages did not keep up with the rise in prices. The proletariat of Central Europe has been doomed to ever-greater privations, ever since the war began. The lowering of the standard of life was not so noticeable in the allied countries till lately. In England, the proletariat succeeded in stopping the process of lowering the standard of life by means of an energetic struggle carried on during the last period of the war. In the United States, some strata of the workers succeeded in improving their conditions, others only retained their previous standard of living, while still others had their standard of living lowered. The economic crisis has come down upon the proletariat with terrific force. The failing of wages began to exceed the fall of prices. The number of unemployed and semi-employed has reached such dimensions as have never been equaled in capitalist history.

The ups and downs in the condition of existence not only have an unfavorable effect on productivity, but also prevent the restoration of class equilibrium in its most essential domain, that of production. The instability of the conditions of life reflecting nationally and internationally the general instability of economic conditions is to-day the most revolutionary factor of social development.

VII. The Perspective and Problems Involved

37. The war did not have as its immediate consequence a proletarian revolution, and the bourgeoisie has some ground to register this fact as a great victory for itself.

Only petty bourgeois dullards can imagine that the fact that the European proletariat did not succeed in overthrowing the bourgeoisie during the war or immediately after it, is an indication that the program of the Communist International failed. The Communist International is basing its policy on the proletarian revolution, but this by no means implies either dogmatically fixing any definite date for the revolution, or any pledge to bring it about mechanically at a set time. Revolution has always been, and is today, nothing else but a struggle of living forces carried on within given historic conditions. The war has destroyed capitalist equilibrium all over the world. It has thus created conditions favoring the proletariat, which is the fundamental force of the revolution. The Communist International has been exerting all its efforts to take full advantage of these conditions.

The distinction between the Communist International and Social-Democrats of all colors does not consist in the fact that we are trying to force the revolution and set a definite date for it while they are opposed to any utopian and immature uprisings. No, the distinction lies in the fact that Social-Democrats hinder the actual development of the revolution by rendering all possible assistance in the way of restoring the equilibrium of the bourgeois state while the Communists, on the other hand, are trying to take advantage of all means and methods for the purpose of overthrowing and destroying the capitalist government and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.

But, during the two and a half years following the war, the proletarians of various countries have exhibited their self-sacrifice, energy, and readiness for the struggle to such an extent as would amply suffice to make the revolution triumphant, provided there had been a strongly centralized international Communist Party on the scene ready for action. But, during the war, and immediately thereafter, by force of historic circumstances, there was at the head of the European proletariat the organization of the Second International which has been and remains up to date, the invaluable political weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

38. By the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919, the power of the Government in Germany was practically in the hands of the working class, but the Social-Democracy, the Independents, and the unions used all their traditional influence and their whole apparatus for the purpose of returning the power into the hands of the bourgeoisie.

In Italy, the stormy revolutionary movement of the proletariat during one and a half years has been marked by powerful currents and it was only thanks to the petty bourgeois impotence of the Socialist Party, to the treacherous policy of the parliamentary factions, and to the cowardly opportunism of the trade union organizations, that the bourgeoisie got into a position to reconstruct its apparatus, to mobilize its white guards and to assume the offensive against the proletariat which has thus been temporarily discouraged by the bankruptcy of its leading organs.

The mighty strike movement in England was frustrated again and again during the last year, not so much by the government forces as by the conservative trade unions whose apparatus was most shamefully used to serve counter-revolutionary ends. Had the leaders of the trade unions remained faithful to the cause of the working class, the machinery of the trade unions could have been used for revolutionary battled despite their defects. The recent crisis of the Triple Alliance furnished the possibility of a break with the bourgeoisie, but this was frustrated by the conservatism, cowardice and treachery of the trade union leaders. Should the machinery of the English trade unions develop half the amount of energy in the interests of socialism which it had been using in the interests of capitalism, the English proletariat would conquer power and would start the reconstruction of the economic organization of the country with only an insignificant amount of sacrifice. The same refers to a greater or less extent to all other capital countries.

39. It is absolutely beyond dispute that in many countries the open revolutionary struggle of the proletariat for power has been temporarily delayed. But in the very nature of the case it was impossible to expect that the revolutionary offensive after the war not having resulted in an immediate victory, should go on developing incessantly along an upward curve. Political evolution proceeds in cycles and has its ups and downs. The enemy does not remain passive, but fights for his existence. If the offensive of the proletariat does not lead to direct victory, the bourgeoisie embraces the first opportunity for a counteroffensive. The proletariat in losing some of its positions which were too easily won usually experiences some temporary depression in its ranks. But it is an undoubted mark of our time that the curve of the capitalist evolution proceeds, through temporary rises, constantly downwards, while the curve of revolution proceeds through some vacillations constantly upwards.

Since the reconstruction of capitalism presupposes a great intensification of exploitation. the annihilation of millions of lives. the lowering of millions of other lives below the minimum of existence, the constant insecurity of the conditions of the proletariat, the working class will be forced to repeated revolts, to continuous strikes and riots. Under this pressure and in the course of these struggles the will of the masses to overthrow the capitalist order will grow in strength.

40. The fundamental task of the Communist Party in the current crisis is to conduct, extend, widen and unite the present defensive fight of the proletariat and sharpen it towards the final political struggle in accordance with the course of evolution. Should, however, the pace of development slacken and the present economic crisis be followed by a period of prosperity in a greater or lesser number of countries, this would by no means be an indication of the beginning of the “organic” epoch. So long as capitalism exists periodic vacillations are inevitable. These vacillations are going to accompany capitalism in its death agony as was the case during its youth and maturity. In case the proletariat should be forced to retreat under the onslaught of capitalism in the course of the present crisis, it will immediately resume the offensive, as soon as a more favorable combination of circumstances sets in. The offensive character of the economic struggle of the proletariat which would inevitably be carried on under the slogan of revenge for all the deceptions of the war period, and for all the plunder and abuses of the crisis, will tend to turn into an open civil war just as the present defensive stage of the struggle does.

41. Whether the revolutionary movement in the near future is going to proceed at a rapid or protracted rate, the Communist Party must, in either case, be the party of action. This Party stands at the head of the struggling masses. It must firmly and clearly formulate its slogans and must expose and sweep aside all equivocal slogans of the Social Democrats, which always tend toward compromise. Whatever the turns in the course of the struggle, the Communist Party should always strive to fortify the contested positions, to get the masses used to active maneuvering, to equip them with new methods calculated to lead to an open conflict with the enemy forces. Taking advantage of every breathing -pace offered in order to appreciate the experience of the preceding phase of the struggle, the Communist Party should strive to deepen and widen the class conflicts, to combine them nationally and internationally by unity of goal and practical activity, and in this way, at the head of the proletariat, shatter all resistance on the road to its dictatorship and the social revolution.

Source: Theses and Resolutions Adopted at the Third World Congress of the Communist International (New York: Contemporary Publishing, 1921), pp. 5-33.

Bibliography

This is a list of primary materials consulted when the site was first developed. Many of them are no longer available on the web. We will be working on updating them over the next few months.

“Fighting Pencil” Group: Red Tape from Red Square, 1998

Abamedia: Russian Archives Online, 1999

Ablin, Fred, ed.: Education in the USSR; a collection of readings from Soviet journals, New York: International Arts & Sciences Press, 1963

Abramov, Fedor: Two Winters and Three Summers, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984

Abrams, Avi: Dark Roasted Blend, 2007

Abramskii, I. P.: Vragi i druz’ia v zerkale Krokodila, 1922-1972, Moscow: Pravda, 1972

The Action Program of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1972

Ades, Dawn, Tim Benton, David Elliot, Iain Boyd Whyte, eds.: Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930-45, London: The South Bank Centre, 1995

Akhapkin, Yuri, ed.: First Decrees of Soviet Power, London: Lawrence & Wiehart, 1970

Akhmatova, Anna: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Boston: Zephyr Press, 1992

Aksenov, Vassily: In Search of Melancholy Baby, New York: Random House, 1985

American Relief Administration: Bulletin, New York: American Relief Association, 1919

The American Review on the Soviet Union, New York: The Institute, 1941

Anderson, Paul B.: People, Church and State in Modern Russia, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944

Andrew, Milton H.: Twelve Leading Constitutions, Compton, California: American University series, 1931

Annenkov, Iurii: Dnevnik moikh vstrech: tsikl tragedii, New York: Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1966

Arad, Yitzhak, Yisroel Gutman, Abraham Margaliot, eds.: Documents on the Holocaust. Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1981

Archaeological Institute of America: Archaeology, 2000

Astrov, Valentin, ed.: An Illustrated History of the Russian Revolution, New York: International Publishers, 1928

Babine, Alexis: A Russian Civil War Diary: Alexis Babine in Saratov, 1917-1922, Durham: Duke University Press, 1988

Baltermants, Dmitri: Faces of a Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, 1917-1991, Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 1996

Baranskaya, Natalya: A Week Like Any Other, Seattle: Seal Press, 1989

Batsell, Walter Russell: Soviet Rule in Russia, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929

Beatty, Bessie: The Red Heart of Russia, New York: The Century Co., 1918

Bendavid-Val, Leah, ed.: Propaganda & Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the US, Zurich and New York: Stemmle Publishers GmbH, 1999

Berman, Harold J. and Miroslav Kerner, ed.: Documents on Soviet Military Law and Administration, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955

Bezbozhnik u stanka, Moscow: M.K.R.K.P., 1923

Bishop, Donald G., ed.: Soviet Foreign Relations: Documents and Readings, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1952

Blueprint for World Conquest, as outlined by the Communist International, Washington: Human Events, 1946

Blum, Alain, Catherine Gousseff, Jacques Magaud, Alain Desrosieres, Morgane Labbe: History of Demographic Statistics, 2000

Bortoli, Georges: Moscow and Leningrad Observed, New York: Oxford University Press, 1975

Bowlt, John E., ed.: Russian Art of the Avant-garde: theory and criticism, 1902-1934, New York: Viking Press, 1976

Brezhnev, L. I.: How It Was: the war and post-war reconstruction in the Soviet Union, New York: Pergamon, 1979

Brezhneva, Luba: The World I Left Behind: pieces of a past, New York: Random House, 1995

British Broadcasting Corporation. Monitoring Service: Summary of world broadcasts. Part I, The U.S.S.R., London: British Broadcasting Corporation,, 1949

British Labour Delegation to Russia: Report, London: Offices of the Trade Union Congress and the Labour Party, 1920

Brovkin, Vladimir N.: Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994

Browder, Robert Paul and Alexander F. Kerensky, eds.: The Russian Provisional Government, 1917: Documents, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961

Bukovskii, Vladimir: To Build a Castle. My Life as a Dissenter, New York: The Viking Press, 1979

Bukovsky, Vladimir: Soviet Archives, 1999

Bunyan, James and H. H. Fisher, ed.: Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1918; Documents and Materials, Stanford: Stanford University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1934

Bureau of Labor Statistics: Principal Current Soviet Labor Legislation: a compilation of documents, Washington: U.S. Dept. of Labor, 1962

Butt, V. P., ed.: Russian Civil War: Documents from the Soviet Archives, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996

Captured Archives; the Story of the Nazi-Soviet Documents, London: Latimer House, 1948

Carmichael, Joel: An Illustrated History of Russia, New York: Reynal & Company, 1960

Carter, Huntley: The New Theatre and Cinema of Soviet Russia, London: Chapman and Dodd, 1924

Cartier-Bresson, Henri: The People of Moscow, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955

Case of the Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites: heard before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R., Moscow. March 2-13, 1938, Moscow: People’s Commissariat of Justice, 1938

Chamberlin, William Henry: The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1935

Chudakov, Gregori, A. Lavrentiev, eds.: Fotografia sovietica, Valencia: Edicions Alfons el magnanim: IVEI, 1993

Chudakov, Grigori, Olga Suslova, and Lilya Ukhtomskaya, eds.: Pioneers of Soviet photography, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1983

Chuev, Felix: Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993

Chukovskaia, Lydia: The Akhmatova Journals, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994

The Code of Labor Laws of Soviet Russia, New York: Russian Soviet Government Bureau, 1920

Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania: ELTA Information Bulletin, Washington, D.C. : Lithuanian National Endownment, 1991

Communism and the International Situation. Thesis on the international situation and the tasks of the Communist International, New York: Workers’ Library Publishers, 1929

Communist International (Petrograd), Petrograd: Executive Committee of the Communist International, 1919

Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Moscow: State Political Publishing House of the USSR, 1938

Corbesero, Susan, Helena Goscilo, and Petre Petrov: Stalinka: Digital Library of Staliniana, 2005

Corley, Felix, ed.: Religion in the Soviet Union: an Archival Reader, New York: New York University Press, 1996

Counts, George S.: The Challenge of Soviet Education, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957

Criminal Code of the R.S.F.S.R, Moscow: Official Edition, 1923

The Criminal Code of the RSFSR, London: HMSO, 1925

Crouch, Martin and Robert Porter, ed.: Understanding Soviet Politics through Literature: a book of readings, Boston: G. Allen & Unwin, 1984

Cullerne, Matthew, ed.: Soviet socialist realist painting 1930-1960s, Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1992

Cunningham, Hugo S.: Cyber-USSR, 2001

Current Soviet Policies, New York: F. A. Praeger, etc., 1953

Daily Review of the Foreign Press, Neutral Press Supplement, London: War Office, General Staff, 1918

Daniels, Robert V., ed.: A Documentary History of Communism, New York: Vintage, 1960

Daniels, Robert V., ed.: A Documentary History of Communism, Hanover: Published for the University of Vermont by University Press of New England, 1984

Daniels, Robert V., ed.: A Documentary History of Communism, Hanover: Published for the University of Vermont by University Press of New England, 1993

Davies, Joseph E.: Mission to Moscow, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1941

Davies, Sarah: Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997

Decrees of the Soviet Government, Moscow: Institute of Marxism-Leninism, 1957-2009

Degras, Jane, ed.: Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, London: Oxford University Press, 1951

Denner, Michael: From the Ends to the Beginning, 2003

Department of State Bulletin, Washington: Office of Public Communication, Bureau of Public Affairs, 1939

Deutscher, Isaac: The Great Purges, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984

Dickerman, Leah, ed.: Building the Collective: Soviet graphic design, 1917-1937, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996

Dmitriev, Stanislas: Virtual Matchbox Label Collection, 1999

Dreiser, Theodore: Dreiser Looks at Russia, New York: Horace Liveright, 1928

Dudintsev, Vladimir: Not by Bread Alone, New York: Dutton, 1957

Dunlop, John: The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983

Duranty, Walter: I Write as I Please, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935

Durgo, A. S., ed.: Russia Changes: the Events of 1991 and the Russian Constitution, Commack, N.Y.: Nova Science, 1992

Edited by a commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.): History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course, New York: International Publishers, 1939

Ehrenburg, Ilya: Memoirs 1921-1941, New York: The World Publishing Company, 1963

Ehrenburg, Ilya: The Thaw, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955

Eisen, Jonathan, ed.: Glasnost Reader, New York: New American Library, 1990

Eudin, Xenia Joukoff and Robert C. North: Soviet Russia and the East, 1920-1927; a documentary survey, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957

Eudin, Xenia Joukoff and Robert M. Slusser, eds.: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1928-1934; Documents and Materials, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967

Evtushenko, Evgenii, ed.: Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry, New York: Doubleday, 1993

Evtushenko, Evgenii: Bratsk Station and other New Poems, New York: Anchor Books, 1967

Evtushenko, Evgenii: Precocious Autobiography, New York: Dutton, 1963

Ezhegodnik Krokodila, Moscow: Pravda, 1958

Farson, N.: Way of the Transgressor, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936

Fischer, George: Soviet Opposition to Stalin, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952

Fisher, Louis, ed.: Thirteen Who Fled, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949

Fitzpatrick, Sheila: Stalin’s Peasants, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996

Four Soviet Plays, London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1944

Freidin, Gregory: A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and his Mythologies of Self-Presentation, Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1987

Gantenbein, James Watson: Documentary background of World War II, 1931-1941, New York: Columbia University Press, 1948

Getman, Nikolai: The Gulag Collection, 2001

Getty, J. Arch and Oleg Naumov, eds.: The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-39, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999

Gladkov, Fedor: Cement, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1929

Golder, Frank, ed.: Documents of Russian History, 1914-1917, New York: The Century Co., 1927

Gorinov, M. M., V. N. Parkhachev, and A. N. Ponomarev, eds.: Moskva prifrontovaia, 1941-1942: Arkhivnye dokumenty i materialy, Moscow: Izdatel stvo ob edineniia Mosgorarkhiv, 2001

Gorky, Maxim: Articles and Pamphlets, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950

Grigoriev, V. A.: Art of War. The Art of Veterans, 1998

Gsovski, Vladimir: Soviet Civil Law, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Law School, 1948

Guerman, Mikhail, ed.: Soviet Art, 1920s-1930s, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988

Hazard, J. N. and M. L. Weisberg: Cases and Readings on Soviet Law, New York: Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law, Columbia University, 1950

Hindus, Maurice: Red Bread, New York: J. Cape & H. Smith, 1931

Hunczak, Taras: The Ukraine, 1917-1921; A Study in Revolution, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977

Inber, Vera: Leningrad Diary, London: Hutchinson, 1971

Inkeles, Alex and Kent Geiger, eds.: Soviet Society: a book of readings, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961

Institute of Estonian Language, Estonian Folklore Institute: Folklore: An Electronical Journal of Folklore

International Affairs, Moscow: Znanie Pub. House 1955-, 1955

International Conciliation (Monthly), New York: American Association for International Conciliation, 1919

International Council of Friendship and Solidarity with Soviet People: Northstar Compass, 2005

International Institute of Social History: The Chairman Smiles, 2001

Iskusstvo pervoi piatiletki, Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1983

Ivanov, S. V.: The Leningrad School, 1930-1990, 1999

Jaworskyj, Michael, ed.: Soviet Political Thought; an anthology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967

Johnson, Priscilla and Leopold Labedz, eds.: Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962-1964, Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1964

Journal of Soviet Nationalities, Durham, N.C.: The Center, 1990-

Kataev, Valentin: Time, Forward!, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933

Kennan Institute-National Public Radio: Russian History Audio Archive

Kerensky, Alexander: The Catastrophe: Kerensky’s Own Story of the Russian Revolution, New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., 1927

Khan-Magomedov, S. O.: Pionery sovetskogo dizaina, Moscow: Galart, 1995

Kochina, E. I.: Blockade Diary, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1990

Konkol, Eric: Soviet Literature Resource , 2012

Kopelev, Lev: The Education of a True Believer, New York: Harper & Row, 1980

Kosmodemianskaia, L. T.: Povest o Zoe i Shure, Minsk: Narodnaia asveta, 1978

Kratkaia entsiklopediia domashnego khoziaistva, Moscow: Gos. nauch. izd-vo Bolshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1959

Kumanev, G. A.: Problemy voennoi istorii otechestva 1938-1945, Moscow: Sobranie, 2007

Kunst Aus Der Revolution: Sowjetische Kunst Wehrend der Phase der Kollektivierung und Industrialisierung, 1927-1933, Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft fur Bildende Kunst Berlin, 1977

Kuptsov, I. I.: Idushchie vperedi, Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1987

Labour in the Land of Socialism: Stakhanovites in Conference, Moscow: Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U. S. S. R., 1937

Lane, David: Soviet Society under Perestroika, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990

Lasky, M. J., ed.: The Hungarian Revolution: a White Book, New York: Praeger, 1957

League of Nations: Official Journal, Geneva: The League, 1920-

Lebedev, Artemii: Moscow Metro, 1996

Lenin, V. I. and J. Stalin: The Russian Revolution, New York: International Publishers, 1938

Lenin, V. I.: Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964

Lenin, V. I.: Collected Works, New York: International Publishers, 1934

Lenin, V. I.: Selected Works in Two Volumes, Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1952

Lenin, V. I.: The National-Liberation Movement in the East, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957

Lenin, V. I.: Toward the Seizure of Power. The Revolution of 1917, from the July Days to the October Revolution, New York: International Publishers, 1932

Letter of an Old Bolshevik, New York: The Rand School, and London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938

Liberman, E. G.: Economic Methods and the Effectiveness of Production, White Plains: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1972

Libraries of University of Texas at Austin: Perry-Casta¤eda Library Map Collection, 2001

Library of Congress: Revelations from the Russian Archives, 1996

Lih, Lars T., O. V. Naumov, and O. V. Khlevniuk, eds.: Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995

Lih, Lars T.: Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990

Lyons, Eugene: Assignment in Utopia, London: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937

Malle, Silvana: The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918-1921, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985

Malnick, Bertha, comp.: Everyday Life in Russia, London: George G. Harrap, 1938

Matrosovich, Yuri: Museum of Anti-Alcohol Posters (Internet, 1996)

Matthews, Mervyn, ed.: Soviet Government: a selection of official documents on internal policies, New York: Taplinger, 1974

Mawdsley, Ewan: The Stalin Years: The Soviet Union, 1929-1953, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998

McCannon, John: Red Arctic, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998

McKay, Ron, ed.: Letters to Gorbachev: Life in Russia Through the Postbag of Argumenty i Fakty, London: Michael Joseph, 1991

McNeal, Robert H., ed.: Lenin. Stalin. Khrushchev. Voices of Bolshevism, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1963

McNeal, Robert H., ed.: Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974

Meek, Dorothea L., ed.: Soviet Youth: Some Achievements and Problems. Excerpts from the Soviet Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957

McVay, Ken: The Nizkor Project, 1998

Medvedev, Roy A.: On Socialist Democracy, New York: Knopf, 1975

Medvedev, Roy, ed.: Samizdat Register, New York: Norton, 1977

Meisel, J. and E. S. Kozera, eds.: Materials for the Study of the Soviet System, Ann Arbor: G. Wahr Pub. Co., 1953

Memorandum on the Bolshevist or Communist Party in Russia, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920

Mezhenkov, Vladimir and Eva Skelley, eds.: Perestroika in action: a collection of press articles and interviews, Moscow: Progress, 1988

Mikhailov, Nicholas: Soviet Russia, the Land and its People, New York: Sheridan House, 1948

Mironenko, Yu. P.: On the Annulment of Criminal Responsibility of Workers and Employees, Munich: Bulletin of the Institute for the Study of the USSR, 1956

Molotov, V. M.: On the New Soviet Constitiution, Moscow: Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R, 1937

Morozov, Sergei: Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia fotografiia, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1958

Moynahan, Brian: The Russian century: a photographic history of Russia’s 100 years, New York: Random House, 1994

Naiman, Eric: Sex in Public: the incarnation of early Soviet ideology, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997

Nelson, William, ed.: Out of the Crocodile’s Mouth, Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1949

Nonconformist Art. The Soviet experience 1956-1986. The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum Rutgers, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995

OSPAAAL – International Solidarity Organization with the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America: Posters from Cuba, 2000

Ognev, Nikolai: Diary of a Communist Schoolboy, New York: Payson and Clarke, Ltd., 1928

Ogonek, Moscow: Pravda, 1923

Olga’s Gallery: Classics of Russian Painting, 2000

Osipov, D. M.: Aleksandr Gerasimov, Moscow: Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, 1981

Page, Stanley W., ed.: Russia in Revolution: Selected Readings in Russian Domestic History Since 1855, Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1965

Papernyi, Vladimir: Kul’tura Dva, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982

Paret, Peter, Beth Irwin Lewis, Paul Paret: Persuasive Images: Posters of War and Revolution from the Hoover Institution Archives, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992

Parker, Scott Zenkatsu: The Truth about Kronstadt, 2000

Patrick, George Z., ed.: Popular Poetry in Soviet Russia, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1929

Pipes, Richard, ed., with the assistance of David Brandenberger: Unknown Lenin: from the Secret Archive, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996

Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Moscow: Novosti Press Agency, 1986

Prokhorov, Gleb, ed.: Art Under Socialist Realism: Soviet Painting 1930-1950, Roseville East, Australia: Craftsman House, 1995

Reddaway, Peter, comp.: Uncensored Russia: protest and dissent in the Soviet Union; the unofficial Moscow journal, a Chronicle of current events, New York: American Heritage Press, 1972

Reprints from the Soviet Press, New York: Compass Publications, 1965

Roman Szporluk, ed.: Russia in World History; selected essays, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970

Rosenberg, William G., ed.: Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984

Royal Institute of International Affairs: Documents on International Affairs, London: Oxford University Press, 1929

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media, Making the History of 1989,2007–2015

Russian Society for Pictorial Photography: Sheremei’s Gallery, 1997

Sakharov, Andrei: Sakharov Speaks, New York: Knopf, 1974

Sakwa, Richard, ed.: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, 1917-1991, London: Routledge, 1999

Schlesinger, Rudolf, ed.: Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia; the nationalities problem and Soviet administration, London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1956

Scott, H. G., ed.: Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress, Moscow: Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R, 1935

Scott, John: Behind the Urals, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942

Selection of Documents Relative to the Labour Legislation in Force in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1931

Semashko, N. A.: Health Protection in the USSR, London: Gollancz, 1924

Semenov, M., ed.: Krokodilu–60 let: iubileinaia letopis’, Moscow: Izd-vo Pravda, 1983

Serdtsem slushaia revoliutsiiu, Leningrad: Avrora, 1977

Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, New York: Workers’ Library Publishers, 1935

Shalamov, Varlam: Kolyma Tales, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980

Shapiro, Leonard: Soviet Treaty Series, Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1950

Shkolnikova, Masha: Vladimir Vysotsky Official Site, 1995

Shostakovich, Dmitry: Testimony. The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, New York: Harper & Row, 1979

Siegelbaum, Lewis and Andrei Sokolov, eds.: Stalinism as a Way of Life: a narrative in documents, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000

Simis, Konstantin: USSR: The Corrupt Society, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982

Simon Wiesenthal Center: Museum of Tolerance Online, 1997

Sino-Russian Crisis; the actual facts brought to light, Nanking, China: The International Relations Committee, 1929

Skomorovsky, Boris and E. G. Morris: Siege of Leningrad, New York: Books, Inc., 1944

Skrjabina, Elena: Siege and Survival: The Odyssey of a Leningrader, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971

Slonimsky, Nicolas, ed.: Music since 1900. Includes Music and the classes (the ideological platform of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians), New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1971

Slonimsky, Nicolas, ed.: Music since 1900, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1937

Smotr pobedy sotsialisticheskogo sel’skogo khoziaistva, Moscow: Sel’khozgiz, 1940

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: Letter to the Soviet Leaders, New York: Harper & Row, 1974

Sontag, Raymond James and James Stuart Beddie, eds.: Nazi-Soviet relations, 1939-1941; documents from the archives of the German Foreign Office as released by the Dept. of State, New York: Didier, 1948

Sopotsinsky, Oleg, ed.: Art in the Soviet Union, Leningrad: Aurora, 1978

Sovetskii khudozhestvennyi plakat, Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1984

Soviet Humor. The Best of Krokodil, New York: Andrews and McMeel, 1989

Soviet Life, Washington: Embassy of the Soviet Union in the USA, 1965-1991

Soviet Press Translations, Seattle, Wash.: Far Eastern Institute, 1946

Soviet Russia, New York: Russian Soviet Government Bureau, 1919

Soviet War Documents: USSR Information Bulletin Special Supplement, Washington: Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1943

Stalin, I. V.: Economic Problems of Socialism, Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1952

Stalin, I. V.: On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954

Stalin, I. V.: Problems of Leninism, Moscow: Foreign Language Publishers, 1934

Stalin, I. V.: Speeches Delivered at Meetings of Voters of the Stalin Electoral District, Moscow, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950

Stalin, I. V.: Works, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952

Sukhanov, N. N.: The Russian Revolution, 1917: A Personal Record, London: Oxford University Press, 1955

Tallmo, Karl-Erik: The Art Bin, 2003

Tarakhanov, Aleksei and Sergei Kavtaradze: Architecture of the Stalin Era, New York: Rizzoli, 1992

Tarasulo, Isaac, ed.: Gorbachev and Glasnost: Viewpoints from the Soviet Press, Wilmington: SR Books, 1989

Tarasulo, Isaac, ed.: Perils of Perestroika: Viewpoints from the Soviet Press, 1989-1991, Wilmington: SR Books, 1992

Tarle, Evgenii: Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia, 1812, New York: Oxford University Press, 1942

Taylor, Richard and Ian Christie, eds.: The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988

The Fundamental Law (Constitution) of the USSR, Moscow: Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1932

The Labor Correction Code of the RSFSR, London: Sweet and Maxwell, Ltd., 1936

The Slavonic (and East European) Review, London: SSEES, 1928-

The Soviet Union and Peace; the most important of the documents issued by the government of the U.S.S.R. concerning peace and disarmament from 1917 to 1929, London: M. Lawrence, 1929

The Utopian Dream: Photography in Soviet Russia, 1918-1939, New York: The Gallery, 1992

Theses and Resolutions Adopted at the Third World Congress of the Communist International, New York: Contemporary Publishing, 1921

Trotsky, Leon: The New Course, New York: New International, 1943

Trotsky, Leon: Problems of Everyday Life, New York: Monad Press, 1973

Trotsky, Leon: The Soviet Thermidor, New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1936

Trotsky, Leon: The Trotsky Papers, 1917-1922, The Hague: Mouton, 1975

Truman Library: North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 2001

Tsaritsyn–Stalingrad–Volgograd, Volgograd: Izdatel’, 2000

Tupitsyn, Margarita: The Soviet Photograph, 1924-1937, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996

U.S. Congress, House Committee on Un-American Activities: The Communist Conspiracy, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1956

U.S. Department of State: Memorandum on Certain Aspects of the Bolshevik Movement in Russia, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919

U.S. Department of State: Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1870-

U.S. House of Representatives, 80th Congress: The Strategy and Tactics of World Communism, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1948

USSR Today, Columbus: AAASS, 1981-1991

USSR in Construction, Moscow: State Fine Arts Press, 1930-1941, 1949

USSR, Sixty Years of the Union, 1922-1982, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982

United States Congress, Committee on the Judiciary: Bolshevik Propaganda, Washington: Govt. Print. Off., 1919

United States Department of State: Problems of Communism, Washington: International Information Administration, 1952

Urban, George R., ed.: Social and Economic Rights in the Soviet bloc: a documentary review seventy years after the Bolshevik Revolution, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1988

Vigdorova, Frida: Diary of a Russian Schoolteacher, New York: Grove Press, 1960

Vlast’ sovetov za 10 let, 1917-1927, Moscow: Krasnaia gazeta, 1927

Voline: The Unknown Revolution (Kronstadt 1921. Ukraine 1918-1921), London: Freedom Press, 1955

von Geldern, James and Louise McReynolds, eds.: Entertaining Tsarist Russia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998

von Geldern, James and Richard Stites, eds.: Mass Culture in Soviet Russia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995

Vorontsova-Iur eva, Natalia: Live Journal, 2007-

Voyce, Arthur: Russian architecture, trends in nationalism and modernism, New York: Philosophical Library, 1948

Vyshinskii, A., ed.: The Law of the Soviet State, New York: Macmillan, 1938

Wade, Mark: Encyclopedia Astronautica, 2001

Walsh, Warren B., ed.: Readings in Russian History: from ancient times to the post-Stalin era, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1965

Ward, Dana: Anarchist Archives, 2000

Wat, Aleksander: My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988

Weinberg, Robert: Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998

White Book on Aggressive Activities by the Governments of the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Albania towards Yugoslavia, Beograd: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, 1951

White, Stephen: The Bolshevik Poster, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988

Wildman, Alan: The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March-April 1917), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980

Williams, Albert Rhys: Through the Russian Revolution, New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921

Wilson International Center: Cold War International History Project, 1997

Witness to history: the photographs of Yevgeny Khaldei, New York: Aperture, 1997

World Marxist Review, Moscow: Progress Books, 1977

Wozniuk, Vladimir, ed.: Understanding Soviet Foreign Policy: readings and documents, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990

Yanowitch, Murray, ed.: Contemporary Soviet Economics; a collection of readings from Soviet sources, White Plains: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1969

Zamiatin, Evgenii: A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1970

Zhdanov, Andrei: Essays on Literature, Philosophy, and Music, New York: International Publishers, 1950

Zinner, Paul E., ed.: National Communism and Popular Revolt in Eastern Europe, New York: Columbia University Press, 1956

Zirkle, Conway, ed.: Death of a Science in Russia, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949

Zoshchenko, Mikhail: Nervous People, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963

Glossary

ACSSR

Autonomous Crimean Socialist Soviet Republic.

AES

Atomic-electric station.

AKhRR

(Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia) Artistic organization that promoted the “proletarianization” of the visual arts during the Cultural Revolution. Active in Moscow and Leningrad in 1922-32.

AMO

Automobile Manufacturing Company, established in 1916 in Moscow.

ARA

The private charitable relief effort organized to help Volga region during the great famine of 1921-23.
Headed by Herbert Hoover, it operated the American Volga Relief Society (AVRS), created by a merger of theVolga Relief Society (VRS), which solicited funds from Volga German communities in America for the relief of relatives in Russia, and the Central States Volga Relief Society (CSVRS), which arose at the same time in Nebraska.

ARCEC

All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

ASSR

A territorial and administrative subdivision of some union republics, created to grant a degree of administrative autonomy to some major minority groups. Directly subordinate to its union republic. In 1989 the Soviet Union had twenty autonomous republics, sixteen of which were in the Russian Republic.

ATSSR

Autonomous Turkestan Socialist Soviet Republic.

AUCCTU

All-Union Central Council of the Trade Unions.

AVIAKhIM

Society of Friends of the Airforce and Chemicas Industry, a semi-official organization popular in 1920s and ’30s.

Academy of Agricultural Sciences

Home academy of Trofim Lysenko, the biologist who dominated scientific life after the war and whose hostility to Mendelian genetics destroyed the Soviet biological sciences.

Academy of Sciences

The Soviet Union’s most prestigious scholarly institute, which conducted basic research in the physical, natural, mathematical, and social sciences. Established in 1725 by Peter the Great, it carried out long-range research and developed new technology. Union republics also had academies of sciences. The Academy of Sciences was under the direction of the Council of Ministers. (Alternative term: Akademiia nauk.)

Agentstvo pechati novosti; NPA

News Press Agency. The news agency responsible for disseminating Soviet information abroad in the post-Khrushchev era. (The word novost’ means news or something new.)

Akademiia nauk

The Soviet Union’s most prestigious scholarly institute, which conducted basic research in the physical, natural, mathematical, and social sciences. Established in 1725 by Peter the Great, it carried out long-range research and developed new technology. Union republics also had academies of sciences. The Academy of Sciences was under the direction of the Council of Ministers. (English: Academy of Sciences.)

All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions; All-Russian Council of Trade Unions

Russian acronym: VTsSPS.

All-Union Central Council of the Trade Unions

English acronym: AUCCTU.

American Relief Administration

The private charitable relief effort organized to help Volga region during the great famine of 1921-23.
Headed by Herbert Hoover, it operated the American Volga Relief Society (AVRS), created by a merger of theVolga Relief Society (VRS), which solicited funds from Volga German communities in America for the relief of relatives in Russia, and the Central States Volga Relief Society (CSVRS), which arose at the same time in Nebraska.

Arbat

One of the principal commercial streets in central Moscow; before reconstruction in the 1970s, one of Moscow’s oldest and most charming neighborhoods.

Artek

A Pioneer summer health camp on the Black Sea coast of Crimea.

Aurora

Russian naval vessel seized in course of October Revolution; used to fire on Winter Palace.

Autocephalous Church

Independent or self-governing; an Orthodox church that was headed by its own patriarch.

Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic

A territorial and administrative subdivision of some union republics, created to grant a degree of administrative autonomy to some major minority groups. Directly subordinate to its union republic. In 1989 the Soviet Union had twenty autonomous republics, sixteen of which were in the Russian Republic.

Autonomous oblast

A territorial and administrative subdivision of a union republic or of a krai in the Russian Republic, created to grant a degree of autonomy to a national minority within that krai or union republic. In 1989 the Soviet Union had eight autonomous oblasts, five of which were in the Russian Republic.

Autonomous okrug

A territorial and administrative subdivision of a krai or oblast in the Russian Republic that granted a degree of administrative autonomy to a nationality; usually found in large, remote areas of sparse population. In 1989 the Soviet Union had ten autonomous okruga, all of which were in the Russian Republic.

acceleration

Under Gorbachev, an on-going effort to speed up the rate of growth and modernization of the economy.

agitprop

Agitation and Propaganda Department, established by the Central Committee of the party in 1920. Absorbed by the Ideological Department in 1988. The term agitprop means the use of mass media to mobilize the public to accomplish the regime’s demands.

aktiv

Local Communist Party activists, recognizable by their constant involvement in official community affairs.

all-union

National, with purview throughout the entire territory of the Soviet Union.

all-union ministries

Ministries of the Soviet central government that did not have counterpart ministries at the republic level. Other ministries were termed union-republic ministries.

anarcho-syndicalism

Radical ideological current and movement preaching all power to producers.

apparat

Soviet or party office with administrative responsibilities; often used perjoratively to refer to the Soviet bureaucracy.

apparatchik

Russian colloquial expression for a person of the party apparatus, i.e., an individual who has been engaged full time in the work of the CPSU. Often used in a derogatory sense.

arioso

In classical music, arioso is a style of solo opera singing between recitative and aria.

ariq

Irrigational ditches that ran alongside roads in Central Asia.

arshin

unit of length equal to two feet, four inches.

artel

Russian artisans’ or farm co-operative.

ataman

Cossack chief; the word was also used for the heads of criminal gangs during the first decade following the October Revolution.

aul

A fortified village often found in the Caucasus region.

autonomous republic

A territorial and administrative subdivision of some union republics, created to grant a degree of administrative autonomy to some major minority groups. Directly subordinate to its union republic. In 1989 the Soviet Union had twenty autonomous republics, sixteen of which were in the Russian Republic.

BAM

A second trans-Siberian railroad, running 100 to 500 kilometers north of the original Trans-Siberian Railway and extending 3,145 kilometers from the western terminus at Ust’-Kut to the eastern terminus at Komsomol’sk-na- Amure. Opened in 1989, the BAM was designed and built to relieve traffic on the Trans-Siberian Railway, lessen rail traffic’s vulnerability to Chinese military incursion, and facilitate transport of natural resources from huge, unexploited deposits in eastern Siberia. (English: Baikal-Amur Main Line; alternative term: Baikalo-Amurskaia Magistral’.)

BSSR

Belorussian Socialist Soviet Republic; or Bukharan Socialist Soviet Republic.

Baikal-Amur Main Line

A second trans-Siberian railroad, running 100 to 500 kilometers north of the original Trans-Siberian Railway and extending 3,145 kilometers from the western terminus at Ust’-Kut to the eastern terminus at Komsomol’sk-na- Amure. Opened in 1989, the BAM was designed and built to relieve traffic on the Trans-Siberian Railway, lessen rail traffic’s vulnerability to Chinese military incursion, and facilitate transport of natural resources from huge, unexploited deposits in eastern Siberia.

Baikalo-Amurskaia Magistral’

A second trans-Siberian railroad, running 100 to 500 kilometers north of the original Trans-Siberian Railway and extending 3,145 kilometers from the western terminus at Ust’-Kut to the eastern terminus at Komsomol’sk-na- Amure. Opened in 1989, the BAM was designed and built to relieve traffic on the Trans-Siberian Railway, lessen rail traffic’s vulnerability to Chinese military incursion, and facilitate transport of natural resources from huge, unexploited deposits in eastern Siberia.

Baikonur

Rocket launching site in Kazakhstan.

Basmachi

Central Asian “bandits” who opposed Soviet power, especially active in early 1920s.

Basmachi Rebellion

A sporadic and protracted revolt by Central Asian Muslims against Soviet rule beginning in 1918 and continuing in some parts of Central Asia until 1931.

Bezbozhnik

Godless, the title of a journal issued by the Society of the Militant Godless in the 1920s and ’30s.

Black Hundreds

The Union, called the Black Hundreds by their opponents, were right-wing, proto-fascist extremist organization that took as its mission the maintenance of the truest traditions of the Russian people. Made the first extensive use of the ‘pogrom’ as a form of organized anti-Semitic terror. (Russian: chernosotensty; alternative term: Union of the Russian People.)

Black Marias

Cars used by the NKVD to transport people who had been arrested during and after the Great Terror.

Bloknot agitatora

(Agitator’s Notebook) Pocket-sized booklet issued weekly to suggest timely slogans and brief arguments to be used in speeches and conversations among the masses. Published by the Propaganda Departments of regional and city party committees of the Communist Party, and from 1942 by Soviet Communist Party twice monthly. The publication gained readers in the late 1950s due to its section on City History Facts. In 1987 the Bloknot Agitatora was renamed Dialog and its format enlarged. The publication was shut down in 1991.

Bol’shevik

Faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party that seized power during the October Revolution. Also a journal, later renamed Kommunist.

Bolsheviki; RKP(B); Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)

A member of the radical group within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which, under Vladimir I. Lenin’s leadership, staged the Bolshevik Revolution. The term bol’shevik means a member of the majority (bol’shenstvo) and was applied to the radical members of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party after they won a majority of votes cast at a party congress in 1903. In March 1918, the Bolsheviks formed the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) and began calling themselves Communists. That party was the precursor of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

Bolsheviks

A member of the radical group within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which, under Vladimir I. Lenin’s leadership, staged the Bolshevik Revolution. The term bol’shevik means a member of the majority (bol’shenstvo) and was applied to the radical members of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party after they won a majority of votes cast at a party congress in 1903. In March 1918, the Bolsheviks formed the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) and began calling themselves Communists. That party was the precursor of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

Brezhnev Doctrine

The Soviet Union’s declared right to intervene militarily to prevent other states from eliminating the leading role of the communist party and returning to capitalism once they have achieved socialism. First expressed after Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring in 1968 and used as justification for the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. In the late 1980s, Mikhail S. Gorbachev made statements interpreted by some in the West as repudiating the Brezhnev Doctrine.

Bukhara

One of the centers of Central Asian Muslim culture, located in Uzbekistan.

Butyrki

Prison in Moscow.

baba

Derogatory term for elderly woman, usually peasant.

bagmen

Illegal traders during Russian civil war.

bai

Wealthy Central Asian landlord.

balance of payments

The international transactions of a country, including commodity and service transactions, capital transactions, and gold movements.

balance of trade

The relationship between a country’s exports and imports.

banya

Traditional Russian steam bath.

bast shoe

Soft shoes made of the bark of a tree, and worn by the poorer peasants.

batiushka

Sire: traditional Russian title of respect, whether of peasants for their master, or all Russians for their tsar.

bedniak

Poor peasant, owning some land but usually not enough to support a family.

bednota

The poorest sector of the rural community, used as a wedge against wealthier peasants (kulaks) during collectivization. Also a Soviet newspaper in 1920s devoted to interests of poor peasants.

besprizornye

Orphaned or abandoned children who were particularly numerous during the 1920s.

blat

Profitable connections, influence, pull, or illegal dealings, usually for personal gain.

blatnoi

Goods and services obtained via unofficial system of exchange; also refers to the culture and society of the criminal underworld.

bogatyr

Knight; hero of traditional Russian tales.

borshch

beet soup, a specialty of Russian and Ukrainian cuisine

byt

daily life

CARC

State council (1944-1965) that kept a watch on and sometimes supervised church affairs after the reestablishment of the Patriarchate in 1943. (English: Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults.)

CEC

All-Russian, later All-Union executive arm of the Soviet government, the effective ruling body of the Soviet governmental system. (English: Central Executive Committee; Russian acronym: TsIK; alternative terms: VTsIK; Tsentral’nyi ispolnitel’nyi komitet.)

CEMA; CMEA

(Council for Mutual Economic Assistance). A multilateral economic alliance headquartered in Moscow; it existed from 1949-91. Members in 1989 were Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Hungary, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam. Comecon was created in January 1949, ostensibly to promote economic development of member states through cooperation and specialization, but actually to enforce Soviet economic domination of Eastern Europe and to provide a counterweight to the Marshall Plan.

CER

Chinese-Eastern Railway. Built by Russia in 1897-1903; claimed by Japan after its occupation of Manchuria in 1931; sold to Japan in 1935.

CIS

Commonwealth of Independent States. (SNG: Sodruzhestvo nezavisimykh gosudarstv). Official designation of the former republics that remained loosely federated in economic and security matters of common concern, after the Soviet Union disbanded as a unified nation in 1991. Members in 1993 were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

CP; VKPb; VKPU; VKP; VSKP(b)

Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The official name of the communist party in the Soviet Union since 1952. Originally the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the party was named the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) from March 1918 to December 1925, the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) from December 1925 to October 1952, and the CPSU thereafter.

CPC

Communist Party of China.

CPSU

The official name of the communist party in the Soviet Union since 1952. Originally the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the party was named the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) from March 1918 to December 1925, the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) from December 1925 to October 1952, and the CPSU thereafter.

CSCE

Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Originating at the meeting that produced the Helsinki Accords in 1975, a grouping of all European nations (the lone exception, Albania, joined in 1991) that subsequently sponsored joint sessions and consultations on political issues vital to European security.

CSSR

Czechoslovak Soviet Socialist Republic.

Cadets

Constitutional Democratic Party (1906-17); moderate liberals.

Carpatho-Ukraine

An area historically belonging to Hungary but, attached to Czechoslovakia from 1918 to October 1938. In October 1938, Carpatho-Ukraine became autonomous, and in March 1939, it became independent as Subcarpathian Ruthenia. But Hungary occupied it nine days later and after World War II, ceded the area to the Soviet Union. Populated mostly by Ukrainians, who, prior to World War II, were sometimes referred to as Ruthenians. (Alternative term: Subcarpathian Ruthenia.)

Central Black-Earth Region

Literally, black earth. The zone of rich, black soil that extends across the southwestern Soviet Union. (Russian: chernozem.)

Central Bureau of Statistics

Central Statistics Department of the government. (Russian acronym: TsSU; alternative term: Tsentral’noe statisticheskoe upravlenie.)

Central Committee of the Communist Party

Central ruling body of the Soviet Communist Party. Membership in the Central Committee was a mark of the highest Soviet elite. The business of the Central Committee was directed by the Politburo in the periods between its congresses.  (Russian acronym: TsK; alternative term: Tsentral’nyi komitet.)

Central Control Commission

Highest body of the Communist Party (1920-34) for supervision of party members; it served as the instrument of the initial party purges in the early 1930s.

Central Executive Committee

All-Russian, later All-Union executive arm of the Soviet government, the effective ruling body of the Soviet governmental system.

Central Powers

Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey (Ottoman Empire) in World War I.

Cheka

The political police created by the Bolsheviks in 1917; supposed to be dissolved when the new regime, under Lenin, had defeated its enemies and secured its power. But the Vecheka, also known as the Cheka, continued until 1922, becoming the leading instrument of terror and oppression as well as the predecessor of other secret police organizations. Members of successor security organizations continued to be referred to as “Chekisty” in the late 1980s.

Cheliuskin Arctic expedition

Soviet ship under command of Otto Schmidt which attempted to navigate sea from Murmansk to Vladivostok in 1933 but became stuck in ice and was rescued.

Chernobyl’

A town in the Ukrainian Republic, site of the world’s most catastropic nuclear accident. On April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl’ nuclear power plant exploded and irradiated areas as far away as Sweden. Most radioactivity contaminated large sections of rich farmland in the Ukrainian, Russian, and Belorussian republics and affected millions of their inhabitants. Soviet and Western experts believe that damage to the people’s health, to the economy, and to the environment will be felt for decades. As of 1989, the accident had cost hundreds of lives and billions of rubles, caused a major slowdown in what had been an ambitious nuclear energy program, and provided an impetus to the fledgling environmental movement in the Soviet Union. Although the accident was caused by a combination of human error and faulty reactor design, the remaining three reactors at the Chernobyl’ power plant and reactors of this type remained operational elsewhere in the Soviet Union in 1989.

Chinese-Eastern Railway

Built by Russia in 1897-1903; claimed by Japan after its occupation of Manchuria in 1931; sold to Japan in 1935.

Comecon

(Council for Mutual Economic Assistance). A multilateral economic alliance headquartered in Moscow; it existed from 1949-91. Members in 1989 were Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Hungary, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam. Comecon was created in January 1949, ostensibly to promote economic development of member states through cooperation and specialization, but actually to enforce Soviet economic domination of Eastern Europe and to provide a counterweight to the Marshall Plan.

Cominform

Communist Information Bureau. An international organization of communist parties, founded and controlled by the Soviet Union in 1947 and dissolved in 1956. The Cominform published propaganda touting international communist solidarity but was primarily a tool of Soviet foreign policy.

Comintern

An international organization of communist parties founded by Lenin in 1919. Initially, it attempted to control the international socialist movement and to foment world revolution; later, it also became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. Dissolved by Stalin in 1943 as a conciliatory measure toward his Western allies.

Commonwealth of Independent States

(SNG: Sodruzhestvo nezavisimykh gosudarstv). Official designation of the former republics that remained loosely federated in economic and security matters of common concern, after the Soviet Union disbanded as a unified nation in 1991. Members in 1993 were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

Communist Party of Germany

Communist Party of Germany in the years following the First World War.

Communist Party of the Soviet Union

The official name of the communist party in the Soviet Union since 1952. Originally the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the party was named the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) from March 1918 to December 1925, the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) from December 1925 to October 1952, and the CPSU thereafter.

Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe

Originating at the meeting that produced the Helsinki Accords in 1975, a grouping of all European nations (the lone exception, Albania, joined in 1991) that subsequently sponsored joint sessions and consultations on political issues vital to European security.

Congress of People’s Deputies

The highest organ of legislative and executive authority, according to the Soviet Constitution. Existed in the early Soviet period as the Congress of Soviets and was resurrected in 1988 by constitutional amendment.

Congress of Soviets

First met in June 1917 and elected the All-Russian Central Committee of over 250 members dominated by the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet. The Second Congress of Soviets met on October 25, 1917, one day offer the start of the Bolshevik Revolution. Dominated by Bolshevik delegates the Second Congress of Soviets approved the Bolshevik coup d’¦tat and the decrees on peace and loud issued by Lenin. It also confirmed the Council of People’s Commissars, drawn exclusively from Bolshevik Ranks, as the new government and elected the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. It adjourned on October 27 and was not reconvened.

Constituent Assembly

Elected in November 1917 on the basis of universal franchise; assembled for one session in January 1918 before being dissolved by Soviet Red Army.

Control Commission

Highest body of the Communist Party (1920-34) for supervision of party members; it served as the instrument of the initial party purges in the early 1930s.

Cossack

Originally peasants, primarily Ukrainian and Russian, who fled from bondage to the lower Dnepr and Don river regions to settle in the frontier areas separating fifteenth-century Muscovy, Poland, and the lands occupied by Tatars. The cossacks, engaged in hunting, fishing, and cattle raising, established permanent settlements and later organized themselves into military formations to resist Tatar raids. Renowned as horsemen, they were absorbed into the Russian army as light cavalry or irregular troops by the late eighteenth century.

Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults

State council (1944-1965) that kept a watch on and sometimes supervised church affairs after the reestablishment of the Patriarchate in 1943.

Council of Defense

The chief decision-making organ of the Soviet national security apparatus, composed of selected members of the Politburo and headed by the general secretary of the CPSU and the chairman of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee.

Council of Labor and Defense

See entry for Soviet of Labor and Defense.

Council of Ministers

The highest executive and administrative body of the Soviet Union, according to the Constitution. In practice, its members directed most day-to-day state activities.

Council of People’s Commissars; Council of People’s Commissaries

The first central institution of the Soviet state, formed immediately after the October Revolution to coordinate the work of the various commissariats. The Sovnarkom had an overlapping and sometimes conflicting mandate with other important Soviet institutions such as the Party, the military, and various economic councils. Renamed the Council of Ministers in 1946.

Cultural Revolution

Policy of Communist Party (1928-31) to proletarianize the arts by removing bourgeois personnel and influences and promoting those of proletarian background.

Cyrillic

An alphabet based on Greek characters that was created in the ninth century to serve as a medium for translating Eastern Orthodox texts into Old Church Slavonic. Named for Cyril, the leader of the first religious mission from Byzantium to the Slavic people, Cyrillic is used in modern Russian and several other Slavic languages.

cadre

Organized group of party activists. A party member who holds a responsible position (usually administrative) in either the party or the government apparatus. In a more restricted sense, a person who has been fully indoctrinated in party ideology and methods and uses this training in his or her work.

centner

One centner =100 kilograms.

chai-khan

Tea house in Central Asia where males congregated for conversation and recreation.

chastushka

Rhymed ditty characteristic of pre-revolutionary popular culture; its salty language could be easily adapted to satiric purposes.

chernosotensty

The Union, called the Black Hundreds by their opponents, were right-wing, proto-fascist extremist organization that took as its mission the maintenance of the truest traditions of the Russian people. Made the first extensive use of the ‘pogrom’ as a form of organized anti-Semitic terror.

chernozem

Literally, black earth. The zone of rich, black soil that extends across the southwestern Soviet Union.

chervonets

Soviet gold-backed ruble introduced in July 1922.

collective farm

(Kollektivnoe khoziaistvo). An agricultural “cooperative” where peasants, under the direction of party-approved plans and leaders, are paid wages based, in part, on the success of their harvest.

collectivization

Stalin’s policy of confiscating privately owned agricultural lands and facilities and consolidating them, the farmers, and their families into large collective farms and state farms. Forced collectivization took place from 1929 to 1937.

combine

An economic entity of an industrial or service nature that consists of several specialized, technologically related enterprises.

commanding heights

The main or crucial levers of the economy (large-scale industry, banking, foreign commerce) controlled by the state during the New Economic Policy.

cosmodrome

Soviet space center.

cult of personality

A term coined by Nikita S. Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU in 1956 to describe the rule of Stalin, in which the Soviet people were compelled to deify the dictator. Leonid I. Brezhnev also established a cult of personality around himself, although to a lesser extent than Stalin. Similar cults of saints, heroes, and the just tsar formed a historical basis for the cult of personality.

DDR

German Democratic Republic. East Germany of the divided Cold-War Germanies (see FRG).

DOSAAF

Dobrovol’noe obshchestvo sodeistviia armii, aviatsii i flotu (Voluntary Society for Assistance to the Army, Air Force, and Navy). Responsible for premilitary training of Soviet youth.

DRA

Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The socialist government defended by the Soviet invasion of 1979.

Dashnak

Armenian nationalist movement (1880s – 1920s).

Defense Council

The chief decision-making organ of the Soviet national security apparatus, composed of selected members of the Politburo and headed by the general secretary of the CPSU and the chairman of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee.

Defensist

A moderate socialist (or any other leftist) who during the First World War supported the Russian war effort as a defense against aggressive German designs.

Deutsche Demokratische Republik

German Democratic Republic. East Germany of the divided Cold-War Germanies (see FRG).

Dinamo

Sports organization sponsored by Soviet police; name of soccer and hockey teams based in Moscow and other large cities.

Dneproges; Dneprostroi

Dam and hydroelectric station on the Dnepr river near Zaporozh’e built in 1927-32; one of the great construction projects of the Soviet industrial revolution.

Donbass

Donets Basin. A major coal-mining and industrial area located in the southeastern Ukrainian Republic and the adjacent Russian Republic.

Duma

Lower chamber of the Russian Parliament, established by Nicholas II after the Revolution of 1905. Absent during Soviet times, the name was revived for the post-communist Russian legislature.

dekkan

Ordinary peasant in Central Asia.

dekulakization

Euphemism for the forced displacement, exile and often execution of better-off peasants during the years of collectivization that followed 1929.

democratic centralism

A Leninist doctrine requiring discussion of issues until a decision is reached by the party. After a decision is made, discussion concerns only planning and execution. This method of decision making directed lower bodies unconditionally to implement the decisions of higher bodies.

democratization

Campaign initiated by Gorbachev to enable different interest groups to participate in political processes to a greater extent than previously allowed.

demokratizatsiia

Campaign initiated by Gorbachev to enable different interest groups to participate in political processes to a greater extent than previously allowed.

desiatin

Measure of land, 2.7 acres or 1.1 hectares.

detdom

Home for orphaned or abandoned children.

dialectical materialism

A Marxist tenet describing the process by which the class struggle between bourgeois capitalist society and the exploited workers produces the dictatorship of the proletariat and evolves into socialism and, finally, communism.

dictatorship of the proletariat

According to Marxism-Leninism, the early stage of societal organization under socialism after the overthrow of capitalism. It involves workers’ dominance in suppressing the counterrevolutionary resistance of the bourgeois “exploiting classes.”

druzhinniki

Para-police force established under Khrushchev to maintain social order in cities.

dual power

Referring to the uneasy division of real governmental power by Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies in the months leading up to the October Revolution.

dvoevlastie

Referring to the uneasy division of real governmental power by Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies in the months leading up to the October Revolution.

EBRD

A bank founded under sponsorship of the European Community in 1990, to provide loans to East European countries (Bulgaria, the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia) to establish independent, market-driven economies and democratic political institutions. Some fifty-eight countries were shareholders in 1992.

EC

A group of primarily economic communities of Western European countries, including the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom or EAEC) and the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Executive power rested with the European Commission, which implemented and defended the community treaties in the interests of the EC as a whole. Members in 1993 were Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. Name changed to European Union (EU), December 1993.

ECCI

Executive Committee of the Communist International.

EKO

(Economics and Organization of Industrial Production) Bi-monthly publication put out by the Institute of Economics and Organization of Industrial Production of the Soviet Academy of Sciences from 1965. Aimed at economists, planners, policy makers, plant managers and others involved in the administration and operation of the Soviet economy.

Eastern-Rite Catholics; Ukrainian Greek Catholic; Ukrainian Uniate Church

A branch of the Catholic Church that preserved the Eastern Rite and discipline but submitted to papal authority. Established in 1596 at the Union of Brest. In the Soviet Union, the Uriate Church is found primarily in the western Ukrainian Republic, where it has been referred to as the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Also known as the Greek Catholic Church or the Byzantine Rite Church.

Eighth Congress

Congress of the Bolshevik Party held in March 1919. Its most important resolution decreed the separation of Party and Soviet organizations.

Ekonomika i organizatsiia promyshlennogo proizvodstva

(Economics and Organization of Industrial Production) Bi-monthly publication put out by the Institute of Economics and Organization of Industrial Production of the Soviet Academy of Sciences from 1965. Aimed at economists, planners, policy makers, plant managers and others involved in the administration and operation of the Soviet economy.

European Bank for Reconstruction and Development

A bank founded under sponsorship of the European Community in 1990, to provide loans to East European countries (Bulgaria, the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia) to establish independent, market-driven economies and democratic political institutions. Some fifty-eight countries were shareholders in 1992.

European Community

A group of primarily economic communities of Western European countries, including the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom or EAEC) and the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Executive power rested with the European Commission, which implemented and defended the community treaties in the interests of the EC as a whole. Members in 1993 were Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. Name changed to European Union (EU), December 1993.

Exarch

Non-resident church leader, or ruler from outside.

Ezhovshchina

The Great Terror prosecuted under N. I. Ezhov, People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs (1936-38).

edinolichnik

Independent farmers; i.e., those peasants who did not join collective farms, most of whom were destroyed or forced into collective farms by the late-1930s.

emploi

A defined range of characters defined for a given actor, which define their acting roles or, for singers, their voice and character range.

enemy of the people

Characterization of victims of the Great Terror (1936-38).

estrada

Genre of popular musical performance, from “estrada” (stage).

executive committee

Executive committee of soviets and the party from the local to the All-Union level.

FRG

Known as West Germany before the reunification of the two Germanys (see DDR).

Federal Republic of Germany

Known as West Germany before the reunification of the two Germanys (see DDR).

Fellow Travellers

Term coined by Trotsky in his 1923 LITERATURE AND REVOLUTION for the talented writers who pursued their own creative paths, but were not hostile to the Bolsheviks. Many of the fellow travellers were in fact sympathetic to Bolshevik policies in the mid-1920s, though some would later suffer under the Stalinist literary establishment.

Finland Station

Railroad station in Petrograd where Lenin arrived in April 1917.

First Clause of the Party Statute

The wording of this clause, which defined Party membership, was one of the sharpest points of difference between Lenin and Martov in the Split of the Russian Social Democratic party into the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.

First Secretary

The title of the head of the CPSU Secretariat that was adopted after Stalin’s death in 1953; used by Khrushchev, and by Brezhnev until 1966 before the title was changed back to General Secretary.

Five-Year Plan

A comprehensive plan that sets the economic goals for a five- year period. Once the Soviet regime stipulated the plan figures, all levels of the economy, from individual enterprises to the national level, were obligated to meet those goals.

Five-hundreder

A worker producing at least 500 percent of quota. See the entry for Stakhanovite.

Fontanka

Graceful canal in the center of Petersburg, associated with painters and poets from Pushkin to Akhmatova.

Formerly TsGAOR (Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii)

Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation).Archival holdings include government institutions of the Russian Empire, Provisional Government, RSFSR, Soviet Union and the Russian Federation from the early nineteenth century until the present. Archives on non-Communist political parties and the emigre community are also held. Catalogues accessible at http://garf.narod.ru/. (Russian acronym: GARF.)

Foros

Resort area on the south coast of the Crimea that was site to the luxurious dachas of the highest members of the Soviet elite.

Fourth Congress of the Third International

Held 1922-23 in Moscow. The Third International was the Bolshevik-dominated Communist international movement, usually known as the ‘Comintern’, so called to distinguish it from the Second or ‘socialist’ International.

fabrichno-zavodskie komitety

Committee elected to exercise workers’ control in 1917; absorbed by trade unions in 1918.

fabzavkom

Committee elected to exercise workers’ control in 1917; absorbed by trade unions in 1918.

face to the countryside

Slogan of the Communist Party; adopted in 1925 to promote interests of peasants.

factory committee

Committee elected to exercise workers’ control in 1917; absorbed by trade unions in 1918.

fartsovshchik

Black-marketeer.

food detachments

Food detachments, better known as Food Requisition Detachments, were groups of armed city workers who were organized either by trade unions or by individual factories and sent to food-surplus regions to requisition grain from the peasants. The organization of these detachments was authorized by the Soviet government on August 6, 1918.

GAKhN

Gosudarstvennaia akademiia khudozhevennykh nauk (Soviet Academy of Arts), which enforced the standard of socialist realism during the years of Stalinism, and beyond. Members of the academy were given great benefits in Soviet society, and artists who were not included had difficulty exhibiting their works or making a living as an artist.

GARF

Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation).Archival holdings include government institutions of the Russian Empire, Provisional Government, RSFSR, Soviet Union and the Russian Federation from the early nineteenth century until the present. Archives on non-Communist political parties and the emigre community are also held. Catalogues accessible at http://garf.narod.ru/.

GATT

An integrated set of bilateral trade agreements among more than 100 contracting nations. Originally drawn up in 1947, GATT aimed at abolishing quotas and reducing tariffs among members. The Soviet Union eschewed joining GATT until 1987, when it applied for membership.

GDP

The total value of goods and services produced exclusively within a nation’s domestic economy, in contrast to gross national product, usually computed over one year.

GES

Electric-producing dam, such as the giant projects built on the Dnepr, Bratsk or Angara rivers.

GKChP

Coup launched on August 18, 1991 by high ranking members of the Soviet government against the possibility of signing the Union Treaty. (Alternative terms: Gosudarstvennyi komitet chrezvychainogo polozheniia; State Committee for the State of Emergency.)

GNP

The total value of goods and services produced within a country’s borders and the income received from abroad by residents, minus payments remitted abroad by nonresidents. Normally computed over one year.

GOELRO

State Commission for the Electrification of Russia.

GPU

Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie (State Political Directorate). The security police successor to the Cheka from 1922 to 1923.

GRU

Main Intelligence Directorate. A military organization, subordinate to the General Staff of the armed forces, that collected and processed strategic, technical, and tactical information of value to the armed forces. It may also have included special units for engaging in active measures, guerrilla warfare, and sabotage.

GUGB

Main Directorate for State Security. The security police, successor to the OGPU, subordinate to the NKVD. Existed from 1934 to 1941, 1941 to 1943, and 1953 to 1954.

GULAG

Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps. The penal system of the Soviet Union, consisting of a network of harsh labor camps where criminals and political prisoners were forced to serve sentences.

GUM

State Department Store located on Moscow’s Red Square across from the Kremlin; the main and best supplied department store in the Soviet Union open to the public.

Gdansk Agreement

The first of several major concessions made by the Polish communist government in late 1980 to the rising Solidarity movement. The agreement granted public expression to many groups in Polish society hitherto restricted, promised new economic concessions, removed discredited communist officials, and recognized workers’ right to establish free trade unions.

Gen-sek

The title of the head of the CPSU Secretariat, who presides over the Politburo and has been the Soviet Union’s de facto supreme leader. Stalin became general secretary of the Russian Communist Party (Bolskevik) in 1922 and employed the positions to amass personal powers. After Statin’s death in 1953, the title was changed to first secretary, which was used by Khrushalea and by Brezhnev until 1966, when the title of general secretary was reinstituted. Brezhnev’s successors–Iurii Androkov, Konstantin Chernenko, and Mikhail S. Gorbachev–were all general secretaries.

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

An integrated set of bilateral trade agreements among more than 100 contracting nations. Originally drawn up in 1947, GATT aimed at abolishing quotas and reducing tariffs among members. The Soviet Union eschewed joining GATT until 1987, when it applied for membership.

General Secretary

The title of the head of the CPSU Secretariat, who presides over the Politburo and has been the Soviet Union’s de facto supreme leader. Stalin became general secretary of the Russian Communist Party (Bolskevik) in 1922 and employed the positions to amass personal powers. After Statin’s death in 1953, the title was changed to first secretary, which was used by Khrushalea and by Brezhnev until 1966, when the title of general secretary was reinstituted. Brezhnev’s successors–Iurii Androkov, Konstantin Chernenko, and Mikhail S. Gorbachev–were all general secretaries.

Genoa Conference

International conference (1922) to revitalize international trade after WWI.

GlavPUR

The organ the CPSU used to control the armed forces of the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries. An organ of the CPSU in the Ministry of Defense, it was responsible for conducting ideological indoctrination and propaganda activities to prepare the armed forces for their role in national security.

Glavkomtrud

Committee of Universal [Compulsory] Labor, established toward the end of the civil war to help mobilize labor to win the war and reconstruct the economy after. An embodiment of the Bolshevik tendency during the Civil War on compulsory methods of labor mobilization.

Glavlit

Glavnoe upravlenie po delam literatury i izdatel’stv (Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs). Created in 1922 under the People’s Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR to administer Soviet literary life, Glavlit eventually became the necessary clearing house and censor for all print publications in the Soviet Union. Renamed Main Administration for Safeguarding State Secrets in the Press in 1946. The acronym Glavlit continued to be used in the late 1980s.

Glavnoe razvedyvatel’noe upravlenie

Main Intelligence Directorate. A military organization, subordinate to the General Staff of the armed forces, that collected and processed strategic, technical, and tactical information of value to the armed forces. It may also have included special units for engaging in active measures, guerrilla warfare, and sabotage.

Glavnoe upravlenie gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti

Main Directorate for State Security. The security police, successor to the OGPU, subordinate to the NKVD. Existed from 1934 to 1941, 1941 to 1943, and 1953 to 1954.

Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel’no- trudovykh lagerei

Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps. The penal system of the Soviet Union, consisting of a network of harsh labor camps where criminals and political prisoners were forced to serve sentences.

Glavnyi komitet po kontroliu za zrelishchami i repertuarom

Committee established in 1923 under the People’s Commissariat of Education to control theatrical, film, and other cultural productions and sanctioned their release for public viewing. Glavrepertkom functioned as the de facto theater censor with the advent of Stalinist cultural policies. The acronym, Glavrepertkom, continued in use although the organization was changed from a committee (komitet) to an administration (upravelenie) under the Ministry of Culture.

Glavrepertkom

Committee established in 1923 under the People’s Commissariat of Education to control theatrical, film, and other cultural productions and sanctioned their release for public viewing. Glavrepertkom functioned as the de facto theater censor with the advent of Stalinist cultural policies. The acronym, Glavrepertkom, continued in use although the organization was changed from a committee (komitet) to an administration (upravelenie) under the Ministry of Culture.

Gorkom

City party committee.

gorodki

An ancient Russian folk sport. Similar in concept to to horseshoes, the aim of the game is to knock out groups of wickets arranged in various patterns by throwing a bat at them. The wickets or pins, are called gorodki.

Gosbank

State Bank. The main bank in the Soviet Union, which acted as a combination central bank, commercial bank, and settlement bank. It issued and regulated currency and credit and handled payments between enterprises and organizations. It received all taxes and payments to the state and paid out budgetary appropriations.

Gosizdat

State Publishing House.

Goskino

Gosudarstvenyi komitet po kinematografii (State Committee for Cinematography). Created in 1933, Goskino consolidated and controlled all facets of the film industry, from scenario writing to production. Goskino allowed the Soviet state to exert complete control over the industry. Absorbed by the Ministry of Culture in 1953, it became an independent organization again in 1963.

Goskomizdat

State Committee for Publishing Houses, Printing Plants, and the Book Trade. Supervised the publishing and printing industry and exercised all-union control over the thematic trend and content of literature.

Goskompriroda

State Committee for the Protection of Nature. Formed in 1988, the government agency charged with responsibility for overseeing environmental protection in the Soviet Union.

Goskomstat

State Committee of the Russian Federation on Statistics.

Goskomtsen

State Committee on Prices. The government body that established, under party guidance, the official prices of virtually everything produced in the Soviet Union, including agricultural produce, natural resources, manufactured products, and consumer goods and services.

Gosplan

Gosudarstvennyi planovyi komitet (State Planning Committee). Under party guidance, it was primarily responsible for creating and monitoring five-year plans and annual plans. The name was changed from State Planning Commission in 1948, but the acronym was retained.

Gostelradio

State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting. Established in 1957 as the Committee for Radio Broadcasting and Television. Upgraded to a state committee in 1970.

Gosudarstvennyi komitet chrezvychainogo polozheniia; State Committee for the State of Emergency

Coup launched on August 18, 1991 by high ranking members of the Soviet government against the possibility of signing the Union Treaty.

Gosudarstvennyi komitet po delam izdatel’stv poligrafii i knizhoi torgovli

State Committee for Publishing Houses, Printing Plants, and the Book Trade. Supervised the publishing and printing industry and exercised all-union control over the thematic trend and content of literature.

Gosudarstvennyi komitet po okhrane prirody

State Committee for the Protection of Nature. Formed in 1988, the government agency charged with responsibility for overseeing environmental protection in the Soviet Union.

Gosudarstvennyi komitet po tsenam

State Committee on Prices. The government body that established, under party guidance, the official prices of virtually everything produced in the Soviet Union, including agricultural produce, natural resources, manufactured products, and consumer goods and services.

Gosudarstvennyi universal’nyi magazin

State Department Store located on Moscow’s Red Square across from the Kremlin; the main and best supplied department store in the Soviet Union open to the public.

Gosudarstvennyy komitet po televideniyu i radioveshchaniiu

State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting. Established in 1957 as the Committee for Radio Broadcasting and Television. Upgraded to a state committee in 1970.

Guardsmen

The name given to WWII regiments that had earned special distinction in a military campaign, for example, by taking a major city. Such regiments were supplied somewhat better than their ordinary counterparts, receiving larger rations of sugar, vodka, and dried food.

Gvardeitsy

The name given to WWII regiments that had earned special distinction in a military campaign, for example, by taking a major city. Such regiments were supplied somewhat better than their ordinary counterparts, receiving larger rations of sugar, vodka, and dried food.

glasnost’

Public discussion of issues; accessibility of information so that the public can become familiar with it and discuss it. Gorbachev’s policy of using the media to make information available on some controversial issues, in order to provoke public discussion, challenge government and party bureaucrats, and mobilize greater support for his policy of perestroika.

glavki

Main administrations; branch units of the Vesenkha, the state agency regulating the economy.

gorispolkom

City, town or municipal executive committee, the operating arm of local soviet power.

gross domestic product

The total value of goods and services produced exclusively within a nation’s domestic economy, in contrast to gross national product, usually computed over one year.

gross national product

The total value of goods and services produced within a country’s borders and the income received from abroad by residents, minus payments remitted abroad by nonresidents. Normally computed over one year.

guberniia

Administrative unit of the Tsarist empire, roughly equivalent to a province.

gubkom

Guberniia (province) committee of the Communist Party.

Helsinki Accords

Signed in 1975 by all countries of Europe except Albania (which signed in 1991), plus Canada and the United States, at the conclusion of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Helsinki Accords endorsed general principles of international behavior and measures to enhance security and addressed selected economic, environmental, and humnitarian issues. In essence, the Helsinki Accords confirmed existing, post-World War II national boundaries and obligated signatories to respect basic principles of human rights. Helsinki watch groups were formed in 1976 to monitor compliance. The term Helsinki Accords is the short form for the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and is also know as the Final Act.

Helsinki watch groups

Informal, unofficial organizations of citizens monitoring their regimes’ adherence to the human rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki Accords.

Holy Synod

Chief tsarist state administrative body with responsibility for oversight of Russian Orthodox Church; the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Russian Church stood at the head of Church administration.

hard currency

Currency that was freely convertible and traded on international currency markets. The Soviet ruble was not hard currency, and Soviet citizens from the mid-1920s were not allowed to hold hard currency, eventually creating a huge black market in dollars.

hectare

One hectare = 2.5 acres.

hydro-electric station

lectric-producing dam, such as the giant projects built on the Dnepr, Bratsk or Angara rivers.

IAEA

International Atomic Energy Agency.

IMF

International Monetary Fund. Established along with the World Bank in 1945, the IMF is a specialized agency affiliated with the United Nations and responsible for stabilizing international exchange rates and payments. Its main function is to provide loans to its members (including industrialized and developing countries) when they experience balance of payments difficulties. These loans frequently have conditions that require substantial internal economic adjustments by the recipients, most of which are developing countries.

Industrial Workers of the World; IWW

Radical labor union in North America popularly known as the Wobblies.

International Monetary Fund

Established along with the World Bank in 1945, the IMF is a specialized agency affiliated with the United Nations and responsible for stabilizing international exchange rates and payments. Its main function is to provide loans to its members (including industrialized and developing countries) when they experience balance of payments difficulties. These loans frequently have conditions that require substantial internal economic adjustments by the recipients, most of which are developing countries.

Intourist

Official Soviet state tourist organization for foreign tourists.

Iskra

(Spark). Party journal of the Russian Social Democrats, of which Lenin was member of the editorial board from December 1900 to October 1903.

Izvestiia

The second most authoritative paper (after Pravda). Published by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., and the official national publication of the Soviet government until 1991. Circulated to between 8 and 10 million people daily. Contained official government information and general news and an expanded Sunday section composed of news analysis, feature stories, poetry, and cartoons. Its extensive coverage of international relations made it the principal voice for Soviet foreign policy. Under the editorship of Nikita Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, became a lively, readable and popular daily newspaper that included photographs, bigger headlines, shorter and more interesting articles, and a generally high standard of design.

Izvestiia TsIK; Izvestiia TsK KPSS

The second most authoritative paper (after Pravda). Published by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., and the official national publication of the Soviet government until 1991. Circulated to between 8 and 10 million people daily. Contained official government information and general news and an expanded Sunday section composed of news analysis, feature stories, poetry, and cartoons. Its extensive coverage of international relations made it the principal voice for Soviet foreign policy. Under the editorship of Nikita Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, became a lively, readable and popular daily newspaper that included photographs, bigger headlines, shorter and more interesting articles, and a generally high standard of design.

iconostas

The holy partition wall dividing the altar from the congregation in an Orthodox church, bearing icons of saints in four ranks.

indigenization

Rooting in: a policy of the late 1920s and 1930s that encouraged the advancement of local or native ethnic cadres into the upper-ranks of national-republic administrations and other positions of power.

intelligentsia

Intellectuals constituting the cultural, academic, social, and political elite. Often the source of opposition to the oppressive state in tsarist and Soviet times.

internal passport

Government-issued document, presented to officials on demand, identifying citizens and their authorized residence. Used in both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union to restrict the movement of people, in conjunction with the propiska system.

ispolkom

Executive committee of soviets and the party from the local to the All-Union level.

Jadidism

Radical secularist movement among Central Asian intelligentsia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Julian calendar

A calendar, named for Gaius Julius Caesar and introduced in Rome in 46 B.C., that established the twelve-month year of 365 days. It was adopted throughout much of the Western world, including Kievan Rus’ and Muscovy. The Julian calendar’s year, however, was over eleven minutes too long compared with the solar year, i.e., thetime the earth requires to make one revolution around the sun. Because of this discrepancy, Pope Gregory XIII introduced a revised calendar in 1582 that had a shortened year and then omitted the ten excess days that had accumulated since A.D. 325, the year of the Council of Nicea, which was chosen as the base year. Although most of the Western world adopted the Gregorian calendar, Russian regimes retained the Julian calendar (termed old style or O.S.) until after the Bolshevik Revolution. On February 1, 1918 O.S., the Bolsheviks introduced the Gregorian calendar and omitted the thirteen excess days that had accumulated since A.D. 325, thus making that day February 14, 1918 (new style or N.S.). The Russian Orthodox Church and other Eastern Christian churches continue to use the Julian calendar.

June Offensive

Last major offensive of Russian Imperial army (June-July 1917).

Junkers

Military cadets of the tsarist era. Junker units were the final troops to defend the Winter Palace in October, 1917.

KAPD

Communist Workers’ Party of Germany, competitor of the VKPD in the years following the First World War.

KGB

Committee for State Security. The predominant security police organization from its establishment in 1954, it was broken up into internal and external security organs after the fall of the Soviet Union.

KOR

KOR, or KSS-KOR [Committee of Social Self-Defense – Worker Defense Committee] was the union of dissident intellectuals and workers organized in 1976, which helped inspire the strong resistance to Communist dictatorship in Poland, and constituted the core for the later Solidarity movement.

KPSS

The official name of the communist party in the Soviet Union since 1952. Originally the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the party was named the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) from March 1918 to December 1925, the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) from December 1925 to October 1952, and the CPSU thereafter.

KSS-KOR

KOR, or KSS-KOR [Committee of Social Self-Defense – Worker Defense Committee] was the union of dissident intellectuals and workers organized in 1976, which helped inspire the strong resistance to Communist dictatorship in Poland, and constituted the core of the later Solidarity movement.

Kadet

Constitutional Democratic Party (1906-17), moderate liberals.

Kalym

Bride price traditional in some Muslim cultures, particularly in Kyrgyzstan. The practice was stamped out by Soviet power, and has undergone a revival in post-Soviet times.

KamAZ

Largest truck factory in the Soviet Union which began production in 1972; located in Naberezhnye Chelnyi on the Volga.

Kamenev-Zinoviev trial

First of the major Show Trials of the Great Terror (August 1936).

Karakum Canal

An irrigation and water supply canal, which is navigable, in the Turkmen Republic. Under construction since 1954, the 1,100 kilometers completed by 1988 diverted a significant amount of the Amu Darya’s waters west through and into the Kara Desert and Ashkhabad, the republic’s capital, and beyond. The canal opened up expansive new tracts of land to agriculture, while contributing to a major environmental disaster, the drying up of the Aral Sea. The primitive construction of the canal allows almost 50 percent of the water to escape en route.

Kavbiuro

Caucasian Bureau of the Communist Party set up during the civil war to provide political leadership in Transcaucasia, much of which was not under Bolshevik control.

Kazakhstan

Literally, land of the Kazakhs. A vast region in Central Asia settled by the Golden Horde in the thirteenth century that the Russian Empire acquired during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1924 the Soviet regime began dividing Kazakhstan into its major nationality groups, the Kazakhs and the Kirgiz. Subsequently, both of these groups was given union republic status in the Soviet Union.

KhSSR

Khorezm Soviet Socialist Republic.

Khanate

Dominion or territorial jurisdiction of a Mongol khan (ruler).

Khokhol

Perjorative Russian term for Ukrainian, implying provincial slowness. The traditional Ukrainian rejoinder was to call the Russian “Moskal.”

Khorezm

The central Asian khanate based in the present city of Khiva, from which shifted the Soviet administrative center in Bukhara. Both became part of the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, with its capital in the modern city of Tashkent.

Kievan Rus’

An East Slavic state, centered on Kiev, established by Oleg ca. 880. Disintegrated by the thirteenth century.

Knigotsentr

Literally: Book Center, the central distribution point for state publishers.

Komintern; Third International, Communist International

An international organization of communist parties founded by Lenin in 1919. Initially, it attempted to control the international socialist movement and to foment world revolution; later, it also became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. Dissolved by Stalin in 1943 as a conciliatory measure toward his Western allies.

Komitet Samoobrony Spolecznej – Komitet Obrony Robotnikow

KOR, or KSS-KOR [Committee of Social Self-Defense – Worker Defense Committee] was the union of dissident intellectuals and workers organized in 1976, which helped inspire the strong resistance to Communist dictatorship in Poland, and constituted the core of the later Solidarity movement.

Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti

Committee for State Security. The predominant security police organization from its establishment in 1954, it was broken up into internal and external security organs after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Kommunist

Organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party from 1940 (previously Bol’shevik). Kommunist was often the forum in which party doctrines on important theoretical and political were enunciated.

Komsomol; Kommunisticheskii soiuz molodezhi; Vsesoiuznyi Leninskii kommunisticheskii soiuz molodezhi

All-Union Lenin Communist Youth League (YCL). An organization administered by the CPSU for youth between ages fourteen and twenty-eight. Since its establishment in 1918, the Komsonol has helped the party prepare new generations for an elite role in Soviet society. It has instilled in young people the principles of Marxism-Leninism and involved them in large-scale industrial projects, such as factory construction and the virgin land campaign. Members were expected to be politically conscious, vigilant, and loyal to the communist cause. Membership privileges included better opportunities for higher education and preferential consideration for career advancement. In 1982 the Komsomol had 41.7 million members.

Komsomol’skaia pravda

(Komsomol Truth) Morning daily newspaper published in Moscow that was the official voice of the Central Council of the Komsomol, or Communist youth league. Aimed at young people aged 14 to 28. Under the editorship of Nikita S. Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, in the 1950s, it introduced more travel articles, sports pieces, and short fiction and reduced the amount of propaganda. At its peak in the 1970s and early ’80s, its circulation was more than 15 million.

Komsomolka

Either a female member of the Komsomol, or a diminutive form for the newspaper Komsomol’skaia pravda.

Kornilov affair

Attempt by General Lavr Kornilov, Supreme Commander of the Russian Armed Forces, to crush Soviets in August 1917.

Krasnaia Presnia

Historically working-class district of Moscow, site of street battles during 1905 revolution.

Krasnaia gazeta

(Red Gazette) A daily newspaper which at different times of its existence was an organ of the central, provincial, city committees of the All-Union Communist Party and the Petrograd/Leningrad Soviet. It circulated from January 1918 to 1939, when it was merged with Leningradskaia Pravda.

Kremlin

Central citadel in many medieval Russian towns, usually located at a strategic spot along a river. Moscow’s Kremlin, situated on the Moscow River on a spot found by Prince Iurii Dolgorukii in 1147, became the fortress of the Muscovite princes and then tsars. Deprived of ruling status when Peter the Great moved the capital to St. Petersburg, it recovered its status as seat of the CPSU and the government of the Soviet Union in 1918.

Krokodil

(Crocodile). Thrice-monthly 14-18-page magazine of humor and satire, published 1922-1991. One of the most popular publications in the Soviet Union; with a circulation of approximately 6 million. Printed in color. Featured excellent artistic political cartoons and feature stories that pushed the envelope of ideologically correctness. Its humor was chiefly directed against what it termed Western imperialism and bourgeois ideology, but it also assailed “undesirable elements” in Russian society.

Kuomintang

Chinese nationalist movement led by Chiang-Kai Shek which routed Chinese Communists in 1927 and was defeated and exiled to Taiwan in 1949.

Kurile Islands

Archipelago extending southwards from Kamchatka peninsula; occupied by USSR during WW II, and the source of great contention between the Soviet Union and Russia, and later Russia and Japan.

Kuzbass

Kuznetsk Basin (Kuznetskii bassein). A major coal-mining and industrial area located in southern Siberia, east and southeast of Novosibirsk.

kerenka

Popular name of currency issued by the Provisional Government under Aleksander Kerenskii, which to succumbed to the hyper-inflation of the war-time economy.

khozraschet

A system of “self-supporting operations,” applied to such individual enterprises as factories, encompassing a wide range of activities, including samofinanserovanie, and a management process involving a large number of individuals.

khutor

Ukrainian village.

kishlaq

Central Asian or Afghan village.

kolkhoz

(Kollektivnoe khoziaistvo). An agricultural “cooperative” where peasants, under the direction of party-approved plans and leaders, are paid wages based, in part, on the success of their harvest.

kolkhoznik

Collectivized peasant-farmer.

kombedy

(Committees of the Poor). Organizations of rural poor established in 1918 to serve as base of Soviet power in countryside.

kombinat

An economic entity of an industrial or service nature that consists of several specialized, technologically related enterprises.

kommuna

(Commune) The most complete collective farm in which there was no private property; all land was worked collectively and its produce shared. Sometimes included collective eating and living.

korenizatsiia

Rooting in: a policy of the late 1920s and 1930s that encouraged the advancement of local or native ethnic cadres into the upper-ranks of national-republic administrations and other positions of power.

krai

A large territorial and administrative subdivision found only in the Russian Republic, where there are six, all of which are thinly populated. The boundaries of a krai are laid out primarily for ease of administration but may also contain lesser political subdivisions based on nationality groups–autonomous oblast, or autonomous okrug, or both. Directly subordinate to its union republic.

krasnyi ugolok

The corner of a peasant reserved for the display of icons and other religious items. Capitalizing on the two meanings of the Russian word “krasnyi” (both beautiful and red), the Soviets encouraged kolkhoz peasants to arrange their own “Red Corners” devoted to pictures and the works of Lenin.

kul’tzmichki

Ukrainian: cultural link, as in the Russian smychka.

kulak

Literally, fist. A successful, independent farmer of the period of Soviet history before collectivization. According to the Bolsheviks, any peasant who hired labor. The term eventually was applied to any peasant who opposed collectivization.

L’Humanite

Official newspaper of the French Communist Party.

L’Unita

Newspaper of the Italian Communist Party.

LEF

Acronym of Left Front, leftist artistic movement of 1920s, and also name of the movement’s journal.

Lake Chudo

Lake where Aleksandr Nevskii threw back the Teutonic Knights in 1242 in the famous Battle on the Ice, memorialized in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film, Aleksandr Nevskii.

League of Nations

Organization for international cooperation established by the victorious Allied Powers at the end of World War I. The Soviet Union joined in 1934 but was expelled in 1939.

Left Opposition

Faction of Communist party led by Trotsky against bureaucratic maneuverings of Stalin (1925-27); ended with Trotsky’s exile, and most former members eventually perished in the Great Terror.

Left SRs

Faction of Socialist-Revolutionary Party that sided with Bolsheviks in 1917, briefly participated in Soviet government, but went into opposition after March 1918.

Lend-Lease Law

A foreign aid program initiated by the United States in March 1941 that authorized the transfer of substantial quantities of war materiel, such as tanks, munitions, locomotives, and ships, to countries opposing the military aggression of the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) while the United States mobilized for war. In November 1941, the Soviet Union was added to the list of recipients and, during the course of World War II, received supplies and equipment worth billions of dollars.

Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences (LAAAS)

Home academy of Trofim Lysenko, the biologist who dominated scientific life after the war and whose hostility to Mendelian genetics destroyed the Soviet biological sciences.

Leningrad Affair

Arrest and execution of high-ranking party officials in Leningrad (1949) following death of A. Zhdanov.

Literaturnaia gazeta

(Literary Newspaper) Weekly 16-page newspaper published by the USSR s Union of Writers from 1929-1990. Contained authoritative statements and perspectives concerning literature, plays, cinema, and literary issues of popular interest, but also included political and social content. Acquired greater influence in the post-World War II period, becoming one of the most authoritative and influential publications in the country. Faithfully reflected government policy (both political and literary) but also attempted to show the human face of Soviet society. Was the national newspaper most likely to push the limits of censorship. Most interesting to its readers were reports on the international political scene, and especially on cultural life in countries outside the Soviet sphere of influence.

Little Entente

Alliance of Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia formed in 1921.

Living Church

Break-away movement within Russian Orthodox Church, sponsored by Soviet government in 1920s.

Lubianka

Building in central Moscow that served as headquarters of the political police (Cheka – OGPU – NKVD – KGB), and where its holding prison was located.

Luftwaffe

German Air Force.

labor day; laborday

Method of payment to collective farmers based on gradated occupational category and number of days worked per year.

lapti

Soft shoes made of the bark of a tree, and worn by the poorer peasants. (English: bast shoe.)

lavra

A large monastery given particular prestige within the Orthodox Church.

lishentsy

Category of former bourgeois, tsarist officials, police, and clergy deprived of civil rights (1917-36).

lubok

Cheap popular print or literature produced in 19th c.

MGB

Ministry of State Security. The paramount security police organization from 1946 to 1953; replaced by the KGB.

MOOP

Ministry for the Preservation of Public Order. Functioned between 1962 and 1968, and was in charge of the druzhinniki.

MOSSKh

Moscow Section of the Union of Soviet Artists. Formed in 1932. The Painting Section represented half of its membership. Of these, over two to one were stylistic traditionalists. This section of the Artists’ Union was one of the most active in expelling members who did not conform with the socialist realistic aesthetic.

MTS

Provided collective farms with mechanized equipment in return for portion of harvest. Motor-tractor stations were abolished in 1958 in an effort to give collective farms more autonomy and economic flexibility.

MVD

Ministry of Internal Affairs, and successor to the NKVD. Existed from 1946 to 1991; from 1968 it exercised regular police functions.

Magadan

One of the principal labor camps of the GULAG located in the far Northeast of the USSR.

Magnitka

Popular name for Magnitogorsk, steel city located east of Urals.

Main Committee for Control of Entertainment and Repertory

Committee established in 1923 under the People’s Commissariat of Education to control theatrical, film, and other cultural productions and sanctioned their release for public viewing. Glavrepertkom functioned as the de facto theater censor with the advent of Stalinist cultural policies. The acronym, Glavrepertkom, continued in use although the organization was changed from a committee (komitet) to an administration (upravelenie) under the Ministry of Culture.

Main Political Directorate of the Soviet Army and Navy

The organ the CPSU used to control the armed forces of the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries. An organ of the CPSU in the Ministry of Defense, it was responsible for conducting ideological indoctrination and propaganda activities to prepare the armed forces for their role in national security.

Marshall Plan

A plan announced in June 1947 by United States secretary of state George C. Marshall for the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. The plan involved a considerable amount of United States aid to Western Europe, but the Soviet Union refused the offer of aid and forbade the East European countries it dominated from taking part in the Marshall Plan. As a counterweight, the Soviet Union created the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA).

Marxism

The economic, political, and social theories of Karl Marx, a nineteenth-century German philosopher and socialist, especially his concept of socialism, which includes the labor theory of value, dialectical materialism, class struggle, and the dictatorship of the proletariat until a classless society can be established. Another German socialist, Friederich Engels, collaborated with Marx and was a major contributor to the development of Marxism.

Marxism-Leninism

The ideology of communism, developed by Karl Marx and refined and adapted to social and economic conditions in Russia by Lenin, that has guided the party and the Soviet Union. Marx talked of the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, as a transitional socialist phase before the achievement of communism. Lenin added the idea of a communist party as the vanguard or leading force in promoting the proletarian revolution and building communism. Stalin and subsequent leaders contributed their own interpretations of the ideology.

May Day

International workers’ holiday, celebrated in Soviet Union and many other European countries.

Melodiia

State-owned record company, with a monopoly on the production and distribution of recorded music within the USSR.

Mendelism-Morganism

In August, 1948, at a disastrous session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Lysenko’s dogma, approved by Stalin personally and named “Michurinian biology”, was proclaimed to be the greatest achievemet in Soviet biological science. “Weismanism-Mendelism-Morganism” was announced to be a “bourgeois pseudo-science” and was anathemized. Mendelism-Morganism was, of course, the foundations of the science that would soon be known in the west as genetics. Soviet biology never recovered from the attack.

Menshevik

A member of a wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party before and during the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Unlike the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks believed in the gradual achievement of socialism by parliamentary methods. The term Menshevik is derived from the word menshenstvo (minority).

Messidor

One of the months of the French revolutionary calendar, adopted in 1793 and intended to rationalize the inconsistent old system of months and seasons. Months (beginning at the autumnal equinox), included Vend¯miaire, Brumaire, Frimaire, Niv se, Pluvi se, Vent se, Germinal, Flor¯al, Prairial, Messidor, Thermidor, and Fructidor.

Metropolitan

The primate of an ecclesiastical province of the Orthodox Church, usually housed in a large city, such as Moscow, Petersburg or Kiev.

Military Revolutionary Committee

Formed in the days before the October Revolution to coordinate the seizure of power, the Revvoensovet continued to be an important director of armed might during the Civil War.

Milton

Slang for militiaman or cop.

Ministerstvo gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti

Ministry of State Security. The paramount security police organization from 1946 to 1953; replaced by the KGB.

Ministerstvo okhrany obshchestvennogo poriadka

Ministry for the Preservation of Public Order. Functioned between 1962 and 1968, and was in charge of the druzhinniki. (Russian acronym: MOOP.)

Ministerstvo vnutrennykh del

Ministry of Internal Affairs, and successor to the NKVD. Existed from 1946 to 1991; from 1968 it exercised regular police functions.

Mongol yoke

Period of Mongol domination of much of eastern Europe by the Golden Horde from the mid-thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century.

Morganism-Mendelism; Morganists; Weismannist-Morganist Movement; Mendelism

See the entry for Mendelism-Morganism.

Mosfilm

Main film studio located in Moscow.

Mosselprom

Short for Moscow Rural and Industrial Products. Soviet department store built in the 1920s to compete against the private goods that dominated the consumer market during the years of the New Economic Policy.

Mossovet

Moscow City Soviet.

makhorka

Cheap tobacco, usually smoked in hand-rolled form. Makhorka was the tobacco of choice for the lower classes and lower ranks of the military during the years of revolution and the Great Patriotic War [World War II], and an item of ready exchange and barter.

matreshka

Traditional Russian embedded doll, the “dolls within the doll.”

medres

Islamic religious school.

meshochniki

Illegal traders during Russian civil war.

mir

A peasant commune established at the village level in tsarist Russia. It controlled the redistribution of farmland and was held responsible for collecting taxes and levying recruits for military service. In Russian, mir also means ‘world’ and ‘peace.’

motor-tractor station

Provided collective farms with mechanized equipment in return for portion of harvest. Motor-tractor stations were abolished in 1958 in an effort to give collective farms more autonomy and economic flexibility.

mujahideen; mujahidin

Derived from the word jihad, the term means holy warriors and was used by and applied to the Afghan resistance or freedom fighters.

mullah

Muslim man trained in Islamic law and doctrine.

muzhik

Derogatory term for Russian peasant.

NATO

An alliance founded in 1949 by the United States, Canada, and their postwar European allies to oppose Soviet military presence in Europe. Until the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, NATO was the primary collective defense agreement of the Western powers. Its military and administrative structure remained intact after the threat of Soviet expansionism had subsided.

NDPA

The ruling party of Afghanistan during its period of Soviet tutelage.

NEP

Novaia ekonomicheskaia politika. Instituted in 1921, it let peasants sell produce on an open market and permitted small enterprises to be privately owned and operated. Cultural restrictions were also relaxed during this period. NEP declined with the forced collectivization of farms and was officially ended by Stalin in December 1929.

NKGB

Narodnyi komissariat gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti (People’s Commissariat of State Security). Security police which functioned in 1941 and again from 1943 to 1946.

NKVD

Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennykh del (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs). The commissariat that administered regular police organizations from 1917 to 1946. When the OGPU was abolished in 1934, the NKVD incorporated the security police organization until 1946.

Continue reading