Russian Research Center Studies
Once the hub of the tsarist state, later Brezhnev's "model Communist city"--home of the Kremlin, Red Square, and St. Basil's Cathedral--Moscow is for many the quintessence of everything Russian. Timothy Colton's sweeping biography of this city at the center of Soviet life reveals what such a position has meant to Moscow and ultimately to Russia itself.
Linchpin of the Soviet system and exemplar of its ideology, Moscow was nonetheless instrumental in the Soviet Union's demise. It was in this metropolis of nine million people that Boris Yeltsin, during two frustrating years as the city's party boss, began his move away from Communist orthodoxy. Colton charts the general course of events that led to this move, tracing the political and social developments that have given the city its modern character. He shows how the monolith of Soviet power broke down in the process of metropolitan governance, where the constraints of censorship and party oversight could not keep up with proliferating points of view, haphazard integration, and recurrent deviation from approved rules and goals. Everything that goes into making a city--from town planning, housing, and retail services to environmental and architectural concerns--figures in Colton's account of what makes Moscow unique. He shows us how these aspects of the city's organization, and the actions of leaders and elite groups within them, coordinated or conflicted with the overall power structure and policy imperatives of the Soviet Union. Against this background, Colton explores the growth of the anti-Communist revolution in Moscow politics, as well as fledgling attempts to establish democratic institutions and a market economy.
As it answers persistent questions about Soviet political history, this lavishly illustrated volume may also point the way to understanding Russia's future.
For six decade the Soviet system has been immune to military rebellion and takeover, which often characterizes modernizing countries. How can we explain the stability of Soviet military politics, asks Timothy Colton in his compelling interpretation of civil-military relations in the Soviet Union.
Hitherto most western scholars have posited a basic dichotomy of interests between the Soviet army and the Communist party. They view the two institutions as conflictprone, with civilian supremacy depending primarily upon the party's control of officers through its organs within the military establishment. Colton challenges this thesis and argues that the military party organs have come to possess few of the attributes of an effective controlling device, and that the commissars and their heirs have operated as allies rather than adversaries of the military commanders. In explaining the extraordinary stability in army-party relations in terms of overlapping interests rather than controlling mechanisms, Colton offers a major case study and a new model to students of comparative military politics.
The Dynamics of Soviet Politics is the result of reflective and thorough research into the centers of a system whose inner debates are not open to public discussion and review, a system which tolerates no public opposition parties, no prying congressional committees, and no investigative journalists to ferret out secrets. The expert authors offer an inside view of the workings of this closed system a view rarely found elsewhere in discussions of Soviet affairs. Their work, building as it does on the achievements of Soviet studies over the last thirty years, is firmly rooted in established knowledge and covers sufficient new ground to enable future studies of Soviet politics and social practices to move ahead unencumbered by stereotypes, sensationalism, or mystification.
Among the subjects included are: attitudes toward leadership and a general discussion of the uses of political history; the dramatic cycles of officially permitted dissent; the legitimacy of leadership within a system that has no constitutional provision for succession; the gradual adoption of Western-inspired administrative procedures and "systems management"; a study of group competition, and bureaucratic bargaining; Khrushchev's virgin-lands experiment and its subsequent retrenchment; the apolitical values of adolescents; the problems of integrating Central Asia into the Soviet system; a history of peaceful coexistence and its current importance in Soviet foreign policy priorities, and, finally, an overview of Soviet government as an extension of prerevolutionary oligarchy, with an emphasis on adaptation to political change.
The specific challenge that confronted Count Dmitry Tolstoi as Minister of Education was to raise the educational level of the Russian people without giving them the intellectual weapons with which to threaten the autocracy. The efforts of Tolstoi's ministry to resolve this dilemma resulted in comprehensive reforms which shaped the Russian school system until early in the twentieth century.
It is interesting therefore that, until now, there has been no complete analysis of all aspects of Tolstoi's ministry. Allen Sinel's study fills that gap.
Beginning with the historical, political, biographical, and administrative contexts for Tolstoi's reforms, Sinel then provides a detailed examination of Tolstoi's transformation of Russian education at all levels, particularly the secondary level, which was the cornerstone of his program.
The ministry's greatest achievement in improving the school system was increasing the number of schools and supplying trained teachers to staff them. Less successful were Tolstoi's efforts to minimize the political consciousness of the students. Tolstoi's methods were short-sighted and negative, helping to create the very elements of alienation and antagonism that might destroy the existing regime he wanted so much to protect and preserve.
Sinel's analysis of Tolstoi's program, the most durable of the tsarist period, provides a much-needed survey of the Russian educational system at a crucial time in Russian history. In addition, the study contributes to a more balanced assessment of one of tsardom's most important bureaucrats.
For centuries the exchange of letters between Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584) and Prince Kurbskii, Muscovy's first notable defector, has been considered an authentic and important source for sixteenth-century Russian history. The Ivan portrayed in these letters has dominated posterity's perception of him and his time. But the provenance of the "Correspondence" has never been properly established.
Edward L. Keenan draws on all the tools of source study and literary criticism to demonstrate that the "Correspondence" is a forgery, and in fact was composed some decades later in the seventeenth century. He concentrates on the first letter of Kurbskii, which is the earliest of the letters as well as a source for the later ones, and concludes that it was written between 1623 and 1625 by Semen Ivanovich Shakhovskoi--a conclusion that will necessitate the re-evaluation of sixteenth-century Russian history as it has previously been written by scholars throughout the world.
Keenan discusses at length the implications of his discovery and sketches directions for future study, which will include a reconstruction of our conception of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thought, of Ivan's personality--indeed of the nature of his reign--and of the evolution of Muscovite state ideology.
That Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov was always classified by his contemporaries as a "conservative" gives his life a special significance in Russian intellectual history. The myth of radical historiography has made him a victim of purposeful historical forgetfulness. In this respect he shares the fate of men like Aksakov, Danilevsky, and Katkov, indeed, of most Russian conservatives. Yet it is misleading to place him in such politically conservative company.
Strakhov was born in 1828, the same year as his great friend Leo Tolstoy and his great opponent Nikolai Chernyshevsky. His adult life spans the entire second half of the century. As a philosopher, literary critic, and journalist, he was involved in most of the major intellectual controversies of his time. He was personally close to and a major influence on the giants of the period: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Vladimir Solovev. One of the most penetrating thinkers of nineteenth-century Russia, he engaged in serious and often bitter debate with the leading intellectuals of Russian radicalism: Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, Mikhailovsky.
In this first full-length intellectual biography in any language of Strakhov, Linda Gerstein provides a guide both to the individual and to the amazingly complex picture of Russian intellectual life in the nineteenth century. Strakhov's concerns, she shows, were the major concerns of his era: positivism, nihilism, materialism, the woman question, Darwinism. In all these matters he displayed a consistent intelligence and independence, unusual in that time of intellectual faddishness, that make him a rewarding figure to study.
"The failure of the annual harvest is still an event of greater importance in the lives of the Russian people than...what happens to steel production."--from the Introduction
With over 540 million acres sown to crops the Soviet Union was one of the world's agricultural giants. Yet agriculture was the Achilles heel of the Soviet economy. Public pronouncements of Russian leaders--prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary alike--attested the crucial role of the agricultural problem, its economically and politically explosive nature, and its persistence over the years.
This is one of the most thorough studies ever made of Russian agriculture. Emphasizing the continuity of problems and policies too often dichotomized into tsarist and Soviet eras, Volin has created a monumental work--a sweeping panorama of the century between the emancipation of the serfs and the 1960s.
The author begins by recounting the development of serfdom and describing the emancipation and subsequent problem of land distribution. In the first part of the book he also explores the first agrarian revolution (1905) and the reforms that followed it, as well as the conditions during World War I that led to the Revolution of 1917.
In Part II he treats agricultural conditions during the Civil War, attempts made to restore the economy by means of the New Economic Policy, Stalin's program of forced collectivization and liquidation of the kulaks, agricultural conditions during World War II--including Nazi policies in occupied territory--and the policies of Stalin in the postwar recovery.
The longest section of the book is devoted to the Khrushchev era. It covers capital investment and expansion of sown acreage, incentives for the kolkhozniks, their income, and the supply of consumer goods, as well as mechanization and electrification programs, the state farms, rates of production, and administrative control and planning.
The final chapter summarizes the past century and comments on the outlook for the future.
