Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  It was not until early 1989 that the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan. In all, the ten-year Afghan War cost the Soviet Union more than 15,000 killed and more than 460,000 wounded or incapacitated due to illnesses contracted while serving in the country (this was an amazing 73 percent of all forces

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  AGANBEGYAN, ABEL GEZEVICH

  that served in the country). Such casualties severely damaged the country’s international reputation and internal morale. During this period of glasnost by the Gorbachev administration, it was commonplace for Soviet citizens to criticize the government’s war effort and the effect it had on returning veterans, the “Afghantsy.” Indeed, many observers compared the Soviet experience in Afghanistan with that of the United States in Vietnam.

  For the first several years after the Soviet withdrawal, the government of Najibullah, the Soviet-sponsored leader of Afghanistan who succeeded Babrak Karmal, was able to maintain power. However, by 1992, the Mujahedeen forces ousted him and set up their own provisional government. These groups no longer had a single unifying cause (the removal of Soviet forces) to keep them together, and a civil war ensued. This lasted until 1996, at which time the Taliban were able to wrest control of most of the country.

  As a result of the United States-led “coalition of the willing” attacks in 2001-2002, Russia ironically became a more active player in the region. Following the al-Qaeda attacks in the United States, Afghanistan quickly came under attack for its support of that terrorist organization and its unwillingness to hand over top al-Qaeda officials. By the beginning of 2002, supportive of the U.S. effort, Afghanistan has been more active in assisting what it sees as the defense of its southern borders.

  For more than two decades, Afghanistan has remained a security problem for the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. Therefore, Russia will undoubtedly continue to place importance on remaining politically involved in future developments in that country, although given its somber experience in the 1980s, it is doubtful that Russia will develop a military or security presence in the country any time soon.

  The Afghans are likewise mistrustful of Russian influences in the country. Even in the early twenty-first century, Afghanistan continued to feel the effects of the Soviet campaign in the country. As expected, U.S. troops toppled the Taliban regime and were in the process of establishing a more representative regime in Kabul. Russia, for its part, had seen 1.5 million Afghans killed in the ten-year war, most of whom were civilians. In addition, millions more citizens became refugees in Iran and Pakistan. Finally, hundreds of thousands of landmines remained in place to cause injuries and death on a near-daily basis. On a broader level, the economic and social disruption caused by the war, and the subsequent civil war and Taliban rule, had resulted in a country completely in ruins.

  Perhaps most telling for contemporary Russia is the fact that Afghanistan symbolizes defeat on several levels. It was a failed effort to export socialism to a neighboring state; it was a failure of the Soviet army to defeat an insurgency; it was a failure of confidence by the population in the political leadership; and it was a failure for the economy, as the war created a drain on an already-troubled economy. See also: BREZHNEV, LEONID, ILICH; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Dupree, Louis. (1980). Afghanistan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Goodson, Larry P. (2001). Afghanistan’s Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban. Seattle: The University of Washington Press. Grau, Lester, ed. (2003). The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan, 2nd edition. New York: Frank Cass Publishers. Kaplan, Robert D. (2001). Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan. New York: Vintage Books. Khan, Riaz. (1991). Untying the Afghan Knot: Negotiating Soviet Withdrawal. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rashid, Ahmed. (2000). Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Roy, Olivier. (1986). Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan. London: Cambridge University Press. Rubin, Barnett. (1995). The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah. (1982). Afghanistan of the Afghans. London: Octagon Press. Tapper, Richard. (1991). The Conflict of Tribe and State in Afghanistan. London: Croom Helm.

  ROGER KANGAS

  AGANBEGYAN, ABEL GEZEVICH

  (b. 1932), leading Soviet economist and organizer of economic research.

  Academician Abel Gezevich Aganbegyan began his professional career as a labor economist and was

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  AGITPROP

  an active member of the group of mathematical economists that emerged in the USSR in the 1960s. He was the Director of the Institute of Economics and the Organization of Industrial Production in Novosibirsk (1966-1985) and the creator and first editor of the lively journal EKO for many years the best economics journal in the USSR. In 1985 he returned to Moscow and was an important economic adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev. Aganbegyan seems to have played a major role in promoting the ill-fated acceleration (uskorenie) program of 1985-1986. Intended to speed up the national economic rate of growth, the policy mainly resulted in destabilizing the economy by sharply increasing investment in projects without any short-run returns. Aganbegyan was also involved in the preparation of the economic reform announced by Gorbachev in June 1987. This reform did not achieve its objectives but did contribute to the financial crisis and economic destabilization of 1989-1991. In 1990, Gorbachev requested that he produce a compromise economic program out of the rival Five-Hundred-Day Plan of Stanislav Shatalin and Grigory Yavlinsky on the one hand, and the government program of Leonid Abalkin and Nikolai Ryzhkov on the other. During pere-stroika Aganbegyan became rector of the Academy of the National Economy. He established a consulting firm and founded a bank, of which he served as CEO for five years, then honorary president. A property development deal he made with an Italian firm was a failure, leaving behind a half-finished building. See also: FIVE-HUNDRED-DAY PLAN; PERESTROIKA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Aganbegyan, Abel. (1989). Inside Perestroika. New York: Harper amp; Row. Aslund, Anders. (1991). Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform, 2nd ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

  MICHAEL ELLMAN

  into five subsections, the two most important being the agitation subsection, which directed propaganda campaigns and supervised local press, and the political education subsection, which developed curriculum for Party schools. The three remaining subsections were concerned with publishing Central Committee works, addressing problems with the distribution of propaganda in literature, and coordinating work among the parties of the national minorities. Agitprop, whose activities reached their fullest height during the Stalinist era, was one of the most important Central Committee sections by 1946. The role of Agitprop during the Brezhnev years and beyond included overseeing publishing, television, radio, and sports, directing agitation and propaganda work, guiding political education within the Party, and conducting cultural work with trade unions.

  Agitprop techniques, based on the political education of the immediate postrevolutionary period, were basically solidified in the 1920s. Early Agitprop in the cities included parades, spectacles, monumental sculpture, posters, kiosks, films, and agit-stations, located at major railroad stations, which had libraries of propaganda material, lecture halls, and theaters. These varied activities continued throughout the Soviet period. Agitation and propaganda were taken to the countryside during the civil war by agit-trains and agit-ships, a unique Bolshevik method for the political education of rural citizens and front-line troops. These modern conveyances functioned like moving posters with exterior decorations of heroic figures and folk art motifs accompanied by simple slogans. The trains and ships brought revolutionary leaflets, agitators, newsreels, and agitki (short propaganda films), among other items. Agit-trains were reinstituted during World War II to convey propaganda to f
orces at the front. After the civil war, and throughout the Soviet period, propaganda continued to be exported to the countryside via radio, traveling exhibitions, posters, literature, and film. Agitprop, like other Central Committee departments, had become relatively stable in its organization by 1948, and remained so until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  AGITPROP

  Agitprop, the agitation (speech) and propaganda (print, film, and visual art) section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, was established in August of 1920, under the direction of R. Katanian to coordinate the propaganda work of all Soviet institutions. Agitprop was originally divided See also: CENTRAL COMMITTEE; HIGHER PARTY SCHOOLS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Kenez, Peter. (1986). The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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  AGRARIAN PARTY OF RUSSIA

  Stites, Richard. (1995). Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900. New York: Cambridge University Press.

  K. ANDREA RUSNOCK

  AGRARIAN PARTY OF RUSSIA

  The Agrarian Party of Russia (APR) was established on February 26, 1993, on the initiative of the parliamentary fraction Agrarian Union, the Agrarian Union of Russia, the profsoyuz (trade union) of workers of the agro-industrial complex, and the All-Russian Congress of Kolkhozes. Its chair was Mikhail Lapshin, elected a couple weeks earlier as the vice-chair of the restored Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). In the 1993 elections, the APR list, headed by the leader of the Agrarian fraction Mikhail Lapshin, profsoyuz leader Alexander Davydov, and vice-premier Alexander Zaveryukha, received 4.3 million votes (8.0%, fifth place) and twenty-one mandates in the federal district; sixteen candidates won in single-mandate districts. In 1995 the Agrarians entered the elections with a similar makeup, but a significant portion of the left-wing electorate consolidated around the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and as a result, the Agrarians’ list only won 2.6 million votes (3.8%). In the single-mandate districts, the agrarians brought forth twenty candidates; this allowed them to form their own delegate group, with the addition of delegates from the CPRF dedicated to this task. In the 1999 elections, the APR leadership split over the issue of bloc formation. The majority, with chair Lapshin in the lead, joined the bloc Fatherland-All Russia (OVR); the others, including the leader of the parliamentary fraction Nikolai Kharintonov, went on the CPRF list. As a result of OVR’s low results, Lapshin’s supporters were unsuccessful in forming their group, and the communists with single-mandate candidates created the Agro-Industrial Group with Kharitonov at the head.

  In the regional elections, the APR entered in coalition with the CPRF, and had several serious victories to its credit, including the election of APR leader Lapshin as head of the small Republic of Altai, and head of the Agrarian Union Vasily Staro-dubtsev as governor in the industrial Tula Oblast (twice).

  At the time of registration in May 2002, the APR declared 42,000 members and fifty-five regional branches. While lacking potential as a self-sufficient entity, the APR was quite attractive to the Communist Party, and to the “ruling party,” by virtue of the provincial infrastructure, the popularity of the name, and the influence on the rural electorate, traditionally sympathetic toward the left.

  On the threshold of the 2003 elections, a struggle for control of the APR arose between the leftist Kharitonovtsy (Kharitonov was the head of the Agro-Industrial Union) and the pro-government Gordeyevtsy (Alexei Gordeyev was the leader of the Russian Agrarian Movement, founded in 2002), both sides trying to put an end to Lapshin’s extended leadership. See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.

  NIKOLAI PETROV

  AGRARIAN REFORMS

  The concept of agrarian reform refers to changes implemented in the agricultural economy, changes designed broadly to improve agricultural performance and notably to contribute to the process of economic growth and economic development. The concept of reform implies changes to an existing system or policies, though the interpretation of change and the precise boundaries of the agricultural sector are general and broad. Thus characterized, agrarian reform has been a continuing and important component of the Russian economic experience. Moreover, the nature of agrarian reform has been closely associated with the differing stages of Russian economic development and with the role envisioned for the agrarian economy in the process of industrialization and modernization.

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  AGRICULTURE

  Russia has been an agrarian economy since its beginnings. For this reason, changes in the agrarian economy have been central to any discussion of economic growth and economic development in Russia. Beginning in the era of serfdom and the existence of a premodern agriculture, the focus has been on the nature of agrarian reform necessary to contribute to modernization.

  The nature of agrarian reform necessarily depends heavily on the time period considered. In the Russian case, a convenient turning point is 1861, the date of the Emancipation Act, the purpose of which was to eliminate serfdom. Prior to this date, the Russian rural economy was feudal in character, with serfs bound to their landlords, communal landholding, and periodic redistribution of land plots.

  Although the Emancipation Act was judicial more than economic in character, it nevertheless introduced a long period of agrarian reform through the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. During this period, there was gradual reallocation of land, although preservation of the village (mir) as a communal form of local decision making limited the extent to which the modernization of agriculture could take place. Peasant mobility was limited, a major reason for political instability in the early 1900s and the implementation of the Stolypin reforms, a series of changes designed to break the communal system, to change land usage, and to introduce individual peasant farming.

  The agrarian reform, prior to the Bolshevik revolution, has been the subject of controversy. The traditional agrarian crisis view has supported a negative view of the Russian rural economy, while the revisionist view argues that output and structural changes during the late tsarist era were di-rectionally important for the ultimate development of a modern agricultural sector.

  It is perhaps ironic that by the 1920s and the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the rural economy would again be at the forefront of attention. Specifically, the focus would be the potential role of agriculture in Soviet economic development. After extensive discussion and experimentation during the NEP, Stalin forcibly changed the institutional arrangements on Soviet agriculture beginning in 1928. The introduction of the collective farms (the kohlkoz), the state farms (the sovkhoz) and the private subsidiary sector fundamentally changed the manner in which agriculture was organized. Markets were replaced by state control. Although these changes remained in effect through the end of the Soviet era, there were important changes made in the rural economy during the Soviet years. In effect, there was a continuing search for optimal organizational arrangements. This search led to important changes in the mechanization of agriculture (especially the introduction of the Machine Tractor Stations), the nature of land use (amalgamation of farms seeking scale advantages and the conversion of collective to state farms) and the relations between the state and the farm units in terms of deliveries, financing, and the like. Most important, in the latter years of the Soviet era, the focus became agro-industrial integration, an effort to reap the benefits of Western “agribusiness” types of arrangements for production and marketing of agricultural products.

  With the collap
se of the Soviet Union in 1991, the era of socialist agriculture and socialist agricultural policies came to an end. Much less attention was paid to the rural economy; it was not central to the Russian approach to transition, and yet agrarian reform was once again on the agenda. Throughout the 1990s, the emphasis has been the creation of a corporate (share) structure in farms and the conversion of these farms to various forms of private equity arrangements. However, given the very slow emergence of land reform, and specifically the slow development of a land market in Russia, fundamental change in the Russian rural economy continues to be at best very slow. See also: AGRICULTURE; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; FREE ECONOMIC SOCIETY; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY PEASANT ECONOMY; SERFDOM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 7th ed. New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Volin, Lazar. (1970). A Century of Russian Agriculture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  ROBERT C. STUART

  AGRICULTURE

  Agriculture is that sector of an economy concerned with the production of food and food products both for domestic use, in (industrial) production and (household) consumption, and for export to external markets. Although it is often difficult to define

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  AGRICULTURE

  Peasants sift grain in the village of Shari, 560 miles east of Moscow. © 2002 GETTY IMAGES the sectoral boundaries of agriculture with precision, agriculture is critical to the process of economic growth and economic development. Less developed economies are typically primarily agricultural in terms of output and resource usage and, appropriately, focus on institutions and policies that encourage the modernization of agriculture as a sector to support the growth of industry and services.