Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  In the course of the 1920s, during the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP), social structures began to resolidify as industrial production and trade expanded. Those whose occupation defined them as workers, and those who could authenticate their social origins in the working class, received privileged access to housing, higher education, health and pension benefits, and perhaps most important of all, party membership. But the upheavals of the First Five-Year Plan years (1928-1932) uprooted millions once again, as whole classes (so-called NEPmen, kulaks, and remnants of the urban bourgeoisie) were “liquidated.” Cities and construction sites were overwhelmed with peasant migrants fleeing collectivization, and hundreds of thousands of others were resettled in remote regions of the country or sent to labor camps.

  The social structure that emerged from these upheavals was officially characterized as consisting of two classes: one of workers (essentially industrial wage earners and state farm workers) and collective farmers, the other a “stratum” consisting of the intelligentsia. This putative class system remained virtually unchanged throughout the remaining decades of the Soviet Union’s existence. In reality, a complex hierarchy, reminiscent of tsarist Russia’s estate (soslovie) system, developed,

  271

  CLIMATE

  involving highly differentiated access to the state’s goods and services. At the top of the Soviet pecking order stood the party elite and other recipients of the Kremlin emolument (kremlovka). Next came those who appeared on the party’s nomenklatura: high military and state officials, People’s Artists, Stalin-prize-winning scientists, academicians, writers, and other members of the cultural, scientific-technical, and managerial elites. Lower-level officials-the police, teachers, junior military officers, engineers, and state and collective farm bureaucracies-enjoyed certain privileges, as did outstanding workers (Stakhanovites in the 1930s and 1940s, innovators, and “advanced workers” from the 1950s onward). Collective farmers, who were denied the right to internal passports until the mid-1970s, occupied perhaps the lowest rung in the class hierarchy, with the obvious exception of prisoners and inmates of labor camps and colonies.

  Cutting across this system were such factors as political geography (capital cities vs. provincial towns; towns vs. villages) and the strategic significance of the enterprise or institute to which one was attached. Scientists living in such closed facilities as Dubna and Akademgorodok enjoyed a particularly high standard of living. The entire structure was mitigated by petitioning, but also by informal connections based on kinship or friendship, exchanges of favors, and other semi-legal transactions that were very much a part of quotidian reality during the Soviet Union’s “mature” stage. See also: FIVE-YEAR PLANS; INTELLIGENTSIA; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; SOSLOVIE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1999). Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press. Matthews, Mervyn. (1972). Class and Society in Soviet Russia. London: Allen Lane.

  LEWIS H. SIEGELBAUM

  CLIMATE

  There are five climates in Russia. The Polar climate hugs the Arctic coast and yields a 60-day growing season, with July and August averaging temperatures over freezing. Tundra vegetation prevails. South of the tundra, blanketing two-thirds of Russia, is the Subarctic climate with its brief cool summers and harsh cold, mostly dry, winters. With a growing season of sixty to ninety days, the dominant vegetation is taiga (northern coniferous forest), 90 percent of which is underlain by permafrost. In European Russia and Western Siberia, the Subarctic climate merges southward with the Humid Continental Warm-to-Cool Summer climate. Here the winters become less harsh, although much snowier, and the summers become longer and warmer. Growing seasons reach 90 to 120 days, and the vegetation is a temperate mixed forest that joins the broadleaf forests and grasslands to the south. Along the Lower Volga and in the North Caucasus, the climate becomes sub-humid. Here summers become equal to winters, a Semiarid Continental climate prevails, the growing season reaches 120 to 160 days, and grassland, or steppe, vegetation dominates. Particular to Russia’s “breadbasket,” a terrain with rich black loams, this climate suffers from insufficient precipitation. A tiny strip of Arid Continental climate fringes the Russian shoreline of the Caspian Sea. With hot, dry summers and rather cold, shorter winters, this climate yields a 160- to 200-day growing season. A true desert, it reflects a severe soil-moisture deficit.

  Russia’s massive landmass, northerly location, and flat-to-rolling terrain dramatically influence these climates. Because three-fourths of Russia is more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) away from a largely frozen sea, the climates are continental, not maritime. Continental climates exhibit wide ranges of temperature (the difference between the warmest and coldest monthly averages) and low average annual precipitation that peaks in summer instead of spring. Climatic harshness increases from west to east as the moderating influence of the warm North Atlantic Ocean decreases. St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland has a 45° F (25° C) difference between the July and January mean temperatures and 19 inches (48 centimeters) of annual precipitation. Yakutsk in Eastern Siberia contrasts with a 112° F (65° C) range of temperature and only 4 inches (10 centimeters) of precipitation.

  Russia’s high-latitude position enhances conti-nentality. Nine-tenths of the country is north of 50° N Latitude. Moscow is in the latitude of Edmonton, Alberta; St. Petersburg equates with Anchorage, Alaska. Russia thus resembles Canada in climate more than it does the United States. High-latitude countries like Russia and Canada suffer low-angle (less-intense) sunlight and short grow

  SEMIARID CONTINENTAL CLIMATE

  (120-160-day growing season: "breadbasket," black soil)

  SOURCE: Courtesy of the author.

  COLD WAR

  ing seasons that range from 60 days in the Arctic to 200 days along the Caspian shore.

  Low relief also augments the negative effects on Russia’s climates. Three-fourths of Russia’s terrain lies at elevations lower than 1,500 feet (450 meters) above sea level. This further diminishes the opportunities for rain and snow because there is less friction to cause orographic lifting. The country’s open western border, uninterrupted except for the low Ural Mountains, permits Atlantic winds and air masses to penetrate as far east as the Yenisey River. In winter, these air masses bring moderation and relatively heavy snow to many parts of the European lowlands and Western Siberia. Meanwhile, a semi-permanent high-pressure cell (the Asiatic Maximum) blankets Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East. This huge high-pressure ridge forces the Atlantic air to flow northward into the Arctic and southward against the southern mountains. Consequently, little snow or wind affects the Siberian interior in winter. The exceptions are found along the east coast (Kamchatka, the Kurils, and Maritime province).

  As the Eurasian continent heats faster in summer than the oceans, the pressure cells shift position: Low pressure dominates the continents and high pressure prevails over the oceans. Moist air masses flow onto the land, bringing summer thunderstorms. The heaviest rains come later in summer from west to east, often occurring in the harvest seasons in Western Siberia. In the Russian Far East, the summer monsoon yields more than 75 percent of the region’s average annual precipitation. Pacific typhoons often harry Kamchatka, the Kurils, and Sakhalin Island.

  Winter temperatures plunge from west to east. Along Moscow’s 55th parallel, average January temperatures fall from a high of 22° F (-6° C) in Kaliningrad to 14° F (-10° C) in the capital to 7° F (-14° C) in Kazan to -6° F (-20° C) in Tomsk. Along the same latitude in the Russian Far East, the temperatures reach low averages of -29° F (-35° C). Northeast Siberia experiences the lowest average winter temperatures outside of Antarctica: -50° F (-45° C), with one-time minima of -90° F (-69° C).

  In July, the averages cool with higher latitudes. Thus, the Caspian desert experiences averages of near 80° F (25° C), whereas the Arctic tundra records means of 40° F (5° C). Moscow averages 65° F (19° C) in July
. See also: GEOGRAPHY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Borisov, A. A. (1965). Climates of the USSR. Chicago: Al-dine Publishing Co. Lydolph, Paul E. (1977). Climates of the USSR: World Survey of Climatology. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Mote, Victor L. (1994). An Industrial Atlas of the Soviet Successor States. Houston, TX: Industrial Information Resources.

  VICTOR L. MOTE

  CODE OF PRECEDENCE See MESTNICHESTVO.

  COLD WAR

  The term Cold War refers to the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States that lasted from roughly 1945 to 1990. The term predates the Cold War itself, but it was first widely popularized after World War II by the journalist Walter Lippmann in his commentaries in The New York Herald Tribune.

  Two features of the Cold War distinguished it from other periods in modern history: (1) a fundamental clash of ideologies (Marxism-Leninism versus liberal democracy); and (2) a highly stratified global power structure in which the United States and the Soviet Union were regarded as “superpowers” that were preeminent over-and in a separate class from-all other countries.

  THE STALIN ERA

  During the first eight years after World War II, the Cold War on the Soviet side was identified with the personality of Josef Stalin. Many historians have singled out Stalin as the individual most responsible for the onset of the Cold War. Even before the Cold War began, Stalin launched a massive program of espionage in the West, seeking to plant spies and sympathizers in the upper levels of Western governments. Although almost all documents about this program are still sealed in the Russian archives, materials released in the 1990s reveal that in the United States alone, at least 498 individuals actively worked as spies or couriers for Soviet intelligence agencies in the 1930s and early 1940s.

  In the closing months of World War II, when the Soviet Union gained increasing dominance over Nazi Germany, Stalin relied on Soviet troops to ocCOLD WAR cupy vast swathes of territory in East-Central Europe. The establishment of Soviet military hegemony in the eastern half of Europe, and the sweeping political changes that followed, were perhaps the single most important precipitant of the Cold War.

  The extreme repression that Stalin practiced at home, and the pervasive suspicion and intolerance that he displayed toward his colleagues and aides, carried over into his policy vis-?-vis the West. Stalin’s unchallenged dictatorial authority within the Soviet Union gave him enormous leeway to formulate Soviet foreign policy as he saw fit. The huge losses inflicted by Germany on the Soviet Union after Adolf Hitler abandoned the Nazi-Soviet pact and attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941-a pact that Stalin had upheld even after he received numerous intelligence warnings that a German attack was imminent-made Stalin all the more unwilling to trust or seek a genuine compromise with Western countries after World War II. Having been humiliated once, he was determined not to let down his guard again.

  Stalin’s mistrustful outlook was evident not only in his relations with Western leaders, but also in his dealings with fellow communists. During the civil war in China after World War II, Stalin kept his distance from the Chinese communist leader, Mao Zedong. Although the Soviet Union provided crucial support for the Chinese Communists during the climactic phase of the civil war in 1949, Stalin never felt particularly close to Mao either then or afterward. In the period before the Korean War in June 1950, Stalin did his best to outflank Mao, giving the Chinese leader little choice but to go along with the decision to start the war.

  Despite Stalin’s wariness of Mao, the Chinese communists deeply admired the Soviet Union and sought to forge a close alliance with Moscow. From February 1950, when the two countries signed a mutual security treaty, until Stalin’s death in March 1953, the Soviet Union and China cooperated on a wide range of issues, including military operations during the Korean War. On the rare occasions when the two countries diverged in their views, China deferred to the Soviet Union.

  In Eastern Europe, Stalin also tended to be distrustful of indigenous communist leaders, and he gave them only the most tenuous leeway. At Stalin’s behest, the communist parties in Eastern Europe gradually solidified their hold through the determined use of what the Hungarian communist party leader M?ty?s R?kosi called “salami tactics.” By the spring of 1948, “People’s Democracies” were in place throughout the region, ready to embark on Stalinist policies of social transformation.

  Stalin’s unwillingness to tolerate dissent was especially clear in his policy vis-?-vis Yugoslavia, which had been one of the staunchest postwar allies of the Soviet Union. In June 1948, Soviet leaders publicly denounced Yugoslavia and expelled it from the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), set up in 1947 to unite European communist parties under Moscow’s leadership. The Soviet-Yugoslav rift, which had developed behind the scenes for several months and had finally reached the breaking point in March 1948, appears to have stemmed from both substantive disagreements and political maneuvering. The chief problem was that Stalin had declined to give the Yugoslav leader, Josip Broz Tito, any leeway in diverging from Soviet preferences in the Balkans and in policy toward the West. When Tito demurred, Stalin sought an abject capitulation from Yugoslavia as an example to the other East European countries of the unwavering obedience that was expected.

  In the end, however, Stalin’s approach was highly counterproductive. Neither economic pressure nor military threats were sufficient to compel Tito to back down, and efforts to provoke a high-level coup against Tito failed when the Yugoslav leader liquidated his pro-Soviet rivals within the Yugoslav Communist Party. A military operation against Yugoslavia would have been logistically difficult (traversing mountains with an army that was already overstretched in Europe), but one of Stalin’s top aides, Nikita Khrushchev, later said he was “absolutely sure that if the Soviet Union had had a common border with Yugoslavia, Stalin would have intervened militarily.” Plans for a full-scale military operation were indeed prepared, but the vigorous U.S. military response to North Korea’s incursion into South Korea in June 1950 helped dispel any lingering notion Stalin may have had of sending troops into Yugoslavia.

  The Soviet Union thus was forced to accept a breach in its East European sphere and the strategic loss of Yugoslavia vis-?-vis the Balkans and the Adriatic Sea. Most important of all, the split with Yugoslavia raised concern about the effects elsewhere in the region if “Titoism” were allowed to spread. To preclude further such challenges to Soviet control, Stalin instructed the East European states to carry out new purges and show trials to

  COLD WAR

  remove any officials who might have hoped to seek greater independence. Although the process took a particularly violent form in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Hungary, the anti-Titoist campaign exacted a heavy toll all over the Soviet bloc.

  Despite the loss of Yugoslavia, Soviet influence in East-Central Europe came under no further threat during Stalin’s last years. From 1947 through the early 1950s, the East-Central European states embarked on crash industrialization and collectivization programs, causing vast social upheaval yet also leading to rapid short-term economic growth. Stalin relied on the presence of Soviet troops, a tightly woven network of security forces, the wholesale penetration of the East European governments and armies by Soviet agents, the use of mass purges and political terror, and the unifying threat of renewed German militarism to ensure that regimes loyal to Moscow remained in power. By the early 1950s, Stalin had established a degree of control over East-Central Europe to which his successors could only aspire.

  The Soviet leader had thus achieved two remarkable feats in the first several years after World War II: He had solidified a Communist bloc in Europe, and he had established a firm Sino-Soviet alliance, which proved crucial during the Korean War. These twin accomplishments marked the high point of the Cold War for the Soviet Union.

  CHANGES AFTER STALIN

  Soon after Stalin’s death in 1953, his successors began moving away from some of the cardinal precepts of Stalin’s policies. In the spring of 1953, Soviet foreign p
olicy underwent a number of significant changes, which cumulatively might have led to a far-reaching abatement of the Cold War, including a settlement in Germany. As it turned out, no such settlement proved feasible. In the early summer of 1953, uprisings in East Germany, which were quelled by the Soviet Army and the latest twists in the post-Stalin succession struggle in Moscow, notably the arrest and denunciation of the former secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, induced Soviet leaders to slow down the pace of change both at home and abroad. Although the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to a ceasefire in the Korean War in July 1953, the prospects for radical change in Europe never panned out.

  Despite the continued standoff, Stalin’s death did permit the intensity of the Cold War to diminish. The period from mid-1953 through the fall of 1956 was a time of great fluidity in international politics. The United States and the Soviet Union achieved a settlement with regard to Indochina at the Geneva Conference in July 1954 and signed the Austrian State Treaty in May 1955, bringing an end to a decade-long military occupation of Austria. The Soviet Union also mended its relationship with Yugoslavia, an effort that culminated in Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to Yugoslavia in May 1955. U.S.-Soviet relations improved considerably during this period; this was symbolized by a meeting in Geneva between Khrushchev and President Dwight Eisenhower in July 1955 that prompted both sides to build on the “spirit of Geneva.”

  Within the Soviet Union as well, considerable leeway for reform emerged, offering hope that Soviet ideology might evolve in a more benign direction. At the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956, Khrushchev launched a “de-Stalinization” campaign by delivering a “secret speech” in which he not only denounced many of the crimes and excesses committed by Stalin, but also promised to adopt policies that would move away from Stalinism both at home and abroad.