by James Millar
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blum, Jerome. (1961). Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press. Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hellie, Richard. (1982). Slavery in Russia 1425-1725. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
RICHARD HELLIE
DYACHENKO, TATIANA BORISOVNA
(b. 1960), adviser to her father, President Boris Yeltsin.
Tatiana Dyachenko became an adviser to her father, President Boris Yeltsin, in the last few years of his rule. Trained as a mathematician and computer scientist, she worked in a design bureau of the space industry until 1994. She then worked for the bank Zarya Urala (Ural Dawn).
In the early 1990s her father’s ghostwriter Valentin Yumashev introduced her to the Mafia-connected businessman Boris Berezovsky. The latter courted her with attention and lavish presents, and handed her father three million dollars that he claimed were royalties on Yeltsin’s second volume
DYAK
of memoirs. This episode launched the rise of the businessmen oligarchs who became highly influential in Yeltsin’s administration.
In February 1996, with a popular approval rating in single digits as he began his ultimately successful run for reelection, Yeltsin appointed Dyachenko to his campaign staff. Here she worked closely with key oligarchs and the campaign director Anatoly Chubais. That summer, she facilitated her father’s ouster of his hitherto most trusted aide, Alexander Korzhakov, and then the ascent of Chubais to head the Presidential Administration.
In June 1997 Yeltsin formally appointed her one of his advisers, responsible for public relations. In 1998 she was named a director of Russia’s leading TV channel, Public Russian Television (ORT), controlled by Berezovsky.
In 1999, as Yeltsin’s power ebbed, Dyachenko’s lifestyle fell under scrutiny with the unfolding of various top-level scandals. For example, the Swiss firm Mabetex was revealed to have paid major kickbacks to Kremlin figures, with Dyachenko and other Yeltsin relatives allegedly having spent large sums by credit card free of charge.
After her father’s resignation in December 1999, Dyachenko continued to be an influential coordinator of her father’s political and business clan and an unpaid adviser to the head of Vladimir Putin’s Presidential Administration Alexander Voloshin.
Dyachenko has three children, one by each of her three husbands. See also: YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Klebnikov, Paul. (2000). Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia. New York: Har-court. Yeltsin, Boris. (2000). Midnight Diaries. New York: Public Affairs.
PETER REDDAWAY
DYAK
State secretary, professional administrator.
The dyak (state secretary) spearheaded Muscovy’s bureaucratic transformation from the late 1400s into the Petrine era. Moscow professional administrators, seventeenth-century dyaks guaranteed daily chancellery operation, served in the governing tribunals, and supervised the clerks. Dyaks authorized document compilation, verified and signed documents after clerks drafted them, and sometimes wrote up documents.
Technical expertise was the dyak’s sine qua non. Talent and experience governed promotion and retention of dyaks. Of appanage slave origin, the dyaks were docile, functionally literate, efficient paperwork organizers, and artificers of chancellery document style and formulae. Less than eight hundred dyaks served in seventeenth-century chancelleries, annually between 1646 and 1686; forty-six (or 6%) of all dyaks achieved Boyar Duma rank. The decrees of 1640 and 1658 formally converted dyaks and clerks into an administrative caste by guaranteeing that only their scions could become professional administrators. Dyaks’ sons began as clerks, but father-son dyak lineages were uncommon, as few clerks ever became dyaks.
Almost half of the chancellery dyaks (some Moscow dyaks received no administrative postings) worked in one chancellery. Dyaks worked on average 3.5 years per state chancellery, their average earnings decreasing from one hundred rubles in the 1620s to less than ninety rubles in the 1680s. They could also receive land allotments as pay. In contrast, counselor state secretaries could earn two hundred rubles in the 1620s, and their salaries nearly doubled in the 1680s.
Seventeenth-century dyaks’ social position declined, although their technical skills did not. Dyaks served also in provincial administrative offices, and numbered between 33 to 45 percent of their chancellery brethren. Few ever entered capital service. See also: BOYAR DUMA; CHANCELLERY SYSTEM; PODY-ACHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Peter B. (1978). “Early Modern Russian Bureaucracy: The Evolution of the Chancellery System from Ivan III to Peter the Great, 1478-1717.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago. Plavsic, Borovoi. (1980). “Seventeenth-Century Chanceries and Their Staffs.” In Russian Officialdom: The Bu-reaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, eds. Walter McKenzie Pint-ner and Don Karl Rowney. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
PETER B. BROWN
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DZERZHINSKY, FELIX EDMUNDOVICH
DZERZHINSKY, FELIX EDMUNDOVICH
(1877-1926), Polish revolutionary; first head of the Soviet political police. “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, the feared chief of the Bolshevik political police. © BETTMANN/CORBIS
Felix Dzerzhinsky descended from a Polish noble family of long standing, with known paternal roots in seventeenth-century historic Lithuania. His father Edmund taught physics and mathematics at the male gymnasium in Taganrog before retiring to the family estate located in present-day Belarus. His mother, Helena Janus-zewska, came from a well-connected aristocratic family. After Edmund’s death in 1882, she raised Felix in a devout Roman Catholic and Polish patriotic environment. A sheltered child, Dzerzhin-sky was earmarked by his mother for the priesthood, but his participation in a series of progressively radical student circles in Vilnius led to his expulsion from the gymnasium two months before graduation in 1896. His subsequent in volvement with the fledgling Lithuanian Social Democratic Party ended with his arrest in Kaunas in 1897, the first of six arrests in his revolutionary career.
Dzerzhinsky was exiled to and escaped from Siberia on three different occasions. Following his first escape in 1899, he resurfaced in Warsaw, where he founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) by merging remnants of previously existing social democratic organizations in Warsaw and Vilnius. Over the next dozen years, despite long periods of confinement, Dzerzhinsky constructed the apparatus of a conspiratorial organization that guided the SDKPiL through and beyond the revolutionary turmoil of 1905-1907. An ideological disciple of Rosa Luxemburg, Dzerzhinsky was a permanent fixture on the party’s executive committee and played a principal role in defining the SDKPiL’s relations with the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP). Following the SDKPiL’s formal unification with the Russian party in 1906, Dzerzhinsky represented the former on the RSDRP Central Committee and editorial board.
Dzerzhinsky’s final arrest in Warsaw in 1912 resulted in successive sentences to hard labor. He was released from the Moscow Butyrki prison by the March 1917 revolution. Dzerzhinsky was soon caught up in the Russian revolutionary whirlwind, first in Moscow, then in Petrograd, at which time he entered the Bolshevik Central Committee. Dzerzhinsky played a key role in the Military Revolutionary Committee that carried out the October 1917 coup d’?tat, and he assumed responsibility for security of the Bolshevik headquarters at the Smolny Institute. From there it was a logical step for Dzerzhinsky to head an extraordinary commission, the Cheka, to act as the shield and sword of the Bolshevik regime against its enemies and opponents. Under Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka became more than a political police force and instrument of terror. Instead, Dzerzhinsky’s obsessive personality and dynamic organizational talents drove the Cheka into almost every area of Soviet life, from disease control and social philanthrop
y to labor mobilization and management of the railroads. Following the civil war, Dzerzhin-sky aligned himself with Bukharin’s faction and, as Chairman of the Supreme Economic Council, became a vigorous proponent of the New Economic Policy. Physically weakened by years spent in varDZERZHINSKY, FELIX EDMUNDOVICH ious prisons, Dzerzhinsky collapsed and died in Boulder, CO: East European Monographs (dist. CoJuly 1926 following an impassioned public defense lumbia University Press). of the policies of the existing Politburo majority. Gerson, Leonard D. (1976). The Secret Police in Lenin’s Rus sia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. See also: NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; RED TERROR; STATE SE CURITY, ORGANS OF Leggett, George. (1981). The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Po lice. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blobaum, Robert. (1984). Feliks Dzierzynski and the SD- ROBERT E. BLOBAUM KPiL: A Study of the Origins of Polish Communism.
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This page intentionally left blank EARLY RUSSIA See KIEVAN RUS; MUSCOVY; NOVGOROD THE GREAT.
ECONOMIC GROWTH, EXTENSIVE
In the quantitative analysis of aggregate economic development, modern economists commonly distinguish extensive from intensive growth. Extensive economic growth comes from the expansion of ordinary inputs of labor, reproducible capital (i.e., machines and livestock) and natural resources. Intensive growth, by contrast, involves increased effectiveness, quality, or efficiency of these inputs- usually measured as a growth of total factor productivity.
The early development of the USSR was primarily of the extensive sort. Increased application of labor inputs came from reduced unemployment, use of women previously engaged within the household, diminished leisure (e.g., communist sabbaticals or subotniki), and forced or prison labor. Increased capital investments were a result of forced savings of the population, taxes and compulsory loans, deferred consumption, and a small and varying amount of foreign investment in the country. Natural resources were expanded by new mines and arable acreage, most notably the “virgin lands” opened up in semiarid zones of Kazakhstan during the 1950s. But shifting resources from the backward peasant sector to modern industry, as well as to borrowed technology, also accounted for some intensive growth.
During the 1950s total growth of gross domestic product (GDP) was an impressive 5.7 percent annually, adjusted for inflation, of which approximately 3.3 percent came from increased inputs and only about 2.4 percent from increased productivity. Growth rates declined to 5.1 percent during the 1960s, 3.2 percent during the 1970s, and a mere 1.9 percent during the 1980s. Less than 1 percent of these growth rates came from intensive sources. The increased share of extensive sources meant that growth could not be sustained for several reasons. Population growth was slowing in Russia. Most of the increased labor supplies came from the less educated populations of Soviet Central Asia, where industrial productivity was considerably lower than in the traditional heartland of Russia and Ukraine. These Muslim populations did not move readily to, or were not welcome in, the most productive areas of the USSR,
425
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such as the Baltic states. Some economists, including Martin Weitzman and Stanley Fischer, attributed the slowdown to the difficulty of substituting new investments for labor, as well. Depletion of oil and ore fields also played a role in reduced growth.
For systemic reasons, the Soviet command economy could not develop the new goods, higher quality, and innovative processes that increasingly characterized the economies of the developed West. Nor could it keep up with the newly industrializing economies of southeast Asia, which by the 1980s displayed higher growth rates, predominantly from intensive sources. See also: ECONOMIC GROWTH, IMPERIAL; ECONOMIC GROWTH, INTENSIVE; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (1986). Soviet Economic Structure and Performance, 3rd rev. ed. New York: Harper amp; Row. Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (1999). Comparative Economics Systems, 6th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
MARTIN C. SPECHLER
ECONOMIC GROWTH, IMPERIAL
The economic development of the Russian Empire can be traced back to the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725), who was determined to industrialize Russia by borrowing contemporary technology from Western Europe and attracting foreign specialists. While military considerations played an important role in this drive, they combined with vast natural resources and large labor pool to develop an increasingly modern industrial sector by eighteenth-century standards. The less progressive policies of Peter’s successors lead to a growing gap between Russia and its industrializing European competitors that became evident in the nineteenth century. Peter’s most significant policy was his entrenchment of serfdom in the village, which was abolished in 1861. After the Crimean War (1854-1856), especially during the tenure of the Minister of Finance Count Sergei Witte (1892-1903), recognition of the dangers of the economic gap bolstered the accelerated industrialization of the Russian Empire. Large government investments in the rail network development expanded the transportation network from 2,000 kilometers in 1861 to more than 70,000 kilometers in 1913. This development helped to open up the iron and coal resources of the Southern regions (Ukraine) and facilitated the marketing of wheat, the major export commodity of the Russian empire. A vibrant textile industry grew in Moscow, and metalworking blossomed in St. Petersburg.
Government policy favored the influx of foreign capital, primarily from England, France, and Belgium, which were attracted by Russia’s vast economic potential. The stabilized ruble exchange rate allowed Russia to join the international gold standard in 1897. The expansion of domestic heavy industries was promoted by government protectionist policies such as high tariffs, profit guarantees, tax reductions and exemptions, and government orders at high prices to insure domestic demand. The ministry of finance was the major agent in this strategy. Bureaucratic intervention into economic matters and bribery were among the numerous limitations on the development of a modern entrepreneurial class in Russia. More recent data suggest that the state was not as pervasive in Russian economic life as was originally thought. Budgetary subsidies were modest, and tariffs and indirect taxes were levied strictly for revenue purposes and played little role in the industrial policy. Russia had active commodity markets and was active in world markets. The state did not engage in economic planning, and both product and factor prices were set by markets. The creation of industrial trusts and syndicates in the early years of the twentieth century implied the existence of some monopolies in Russia.
The success of Russian industrialization before 1917 was evident, but agricultural progress was more modest (agriculture continued to account for more than half the national product). During the industrialization era, the share of agriculture fell from 58 percent in 1885 to 51 percent in 1913. Russian agriculture was characterized by feudal elements and serfdom that provided few incentives for investment, productivity improvements, or better management. Russian serfs had to work the landlords’ land (called barshchina) or make in-kind or monetary payments from their crops (obrok). Peasant land prior to 1861 was held communally and was periodically redistributed. Agricultural reforms were modest or too late to prevent what many contemporary observers feel was a deepening agrarian crisis. The Emancipation Act of 1861 provided the peasants with juridical freedom and transferred to them about half the landholdings of the landed aristocracy. However, peasants had to
ECONOMIC GROWTH, IMPERIAL
“redeem” (buy) their allotted plots of land. The size of land allotments was very small, and backward, unproductive communal agriculture remained the main organizational form in villages. While the production and marketing of grain increased substantially after the Emancipation Act of 1861, the primary objective of the Russian emancipation was not to create a modern agriculture, but to prevent revolts, preserve the aristocracy, and retain state control of agriculture.
Many observers feel that the agrarian crisis was one of the causes o
f the Revolution of 1905, which necessitated further reforms by the tsarist government. The reforms introduced in 1906 and 1910 by Peter Stolypin allowed the peasants to own land and cultivate it in consolidated plots rather than in small, frequently separated strips. The Stolypin reforms weakened communal agriculture and created the base for a class of small peasant proprietors. These reforms were considered long overdue, and they had a positive effect on the development of agriculture. In spite of persistent regional differences, peasant living standards rose, and productivity and per capita output increased. Overall, agricultural growth during the post-emancipation period was much like that of Western Europe. In spite of the late removal of serfdom, there is evidence of significant peasant mobility, and the completion of an extensive rail network greatly facilitated the marketing of grain. Regional price dispersion fell as transportation costs were lowered, and agricultural marketing and land rents were, in fact, dictated by normal market principles.
Despite scholarly controversy concerning the consequences of active government intervention in economy, the late tsarist era after 1880 is characterized by the significant acceleration of the output growth rate. Between the 1860s and 1880s the average annual rate of growth of net national product was 1.8 percent, while for the period thereafter, up to the 1909-1913 period, the rate of economic growth was 3.3 percent. At the same time, Russia experienced significant population growth, which put the Russian empire in the group of poorer West European countries in per capita terms. Russian economic growth was largely the consequence of the relatively rapid rate of growth of population (1.6% from 1885 to 1913) and labor force (1.7% from 1885 to 1913), pointing to the extensive character of the growth. Less reliable data on the tsarist capital stock suggests that roughly two-thirds of the growth of Russian output was accounted for by the growth of conventional labor and capital inputs. With respect to structural change, the decline in the shares of agriculture (from 58% in 1885 to 51% in 1913) and expansion of industry, construction, and transportation (from 23% in 1885 to 32% in 1913) suggests that the Russian economy had indeed embarked on a path of modern economic growth.