Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Baumann, Robert, F. (1987). “Subject Nationalities in the Military Service of Imperial Russia: The Case of the Bashkirs.” Slavic Review 46:489-502. Baumann, Robert F. (1986). “Universal Military Service Reform and Russia’s Imperial Dilemma.” War and Society 4(2):31-49 Kappeler, Andreas. (2001). The Russian Empire: A Multi- Ethnic History. Harlow, UK: Longman. Klier, John D. (1989). “The Concept of ‘Jewish Emancipation’ in a Russian Context.” In Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, eds. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sokol, Edward Dennis. (1954). The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.

  JOHN D. KLIER

  INPUT-OUTPUT ANALYSIS

  Input-output analysis is a methodology for investigating production relations among primary factors, intersectoral flows, final demands, and transfers. Primary and intermediate factors are the “inputs,” and final demands and transfers are the “outputs.” Aggregate input values equal “gross national income” and aggregate output “gross domestic product.” Consequently, input-output is best conceptualized as a map, or flowchart, of in-tersectoral activities that underlie the standard aggregate measures of national income and product. It permits analysts to quantify precisely and assess the matrix of intersectoral relationships, often hidden or overlooked in more aggregative methodologies. Sometimes this serves an informative purpose. For example, Soviet leaders suppressed data on the USSR’s military-industrial production level, and the delivery of weapons to final demand, but this information was contained in its input-output tables, and could be ferreted out by Western scholars and intelligence agencies in principle. Input-output tables also shed light on the internal consistency of Soviet statistics. If these data were a patchwork, either of truths or lies, latent inconsistencies should be visible in the flow relationships.

  Soviet economists were concerned with the latter application of the technique, and viewed input-output analysis as a useful adjunct to “materials balance” planning. Gosplan (the state planning agency) constructed its plans from the late 1920s onward on a sector-by-sector basis, taking inadequate account of intersectoral dependencies. Soviet input-output tables, first introduced for 1959, provided a sophisticated check, enabling planners to discern whether adjustments were required in specific instances to their simpler procedures.

  The construction of input-output tables is a laborious task that could not be completed swiftly enough to displace material balancing as the method of choice for developing annual and five-year plans. Nonetheless, it did serve as a valuable tool for perspective planning. The great strength of the methodology was its lucid theoretical foundation, which permitted analysts to grasp the hidden assumptions affecting the reliability of their forecasts.

  INSTITUTE OF RED PROFESSORS

  Wassily Leontiev, Nobel Laureate and the father of input-output analysis, hypothesized that production technologies for practical purposes could be conceived as approximately linear homogeneous functions, with constant returns to scale, and rectangular isoquants, even though he knew that this would not always be true. The working assumption implied that both “socialist” and “capitalist” economies were strongly determined by their technological structure (supply side economics) because factor proportions were fixed and could not be altered by competitive negotiations. Nor did planners and entrepreneurs have to fret about diminishing returns to proportional investment, because a doubling of all inputs would always result in a doubling of output. Some economists contended before the demise of communism that this strong determinism proved that markets were superfluous, but this is no longer fashionable. During the early twenty-first century input-output in post-Soviet Russia serves primarily as a guide to indicative perspective planning, that is, a tool used by policy makers to evaluate various development scenarios. Whereas it once was an adjunct to material balance planning, it became a tool for managing market-based development. See also: GOSPLAN

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Carter, Anne. (1970). Structural Change in the American Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leontief, Wassily. (1951). The Structure of the American Economy 1919-1939, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Miernyk, William. (1965). The Elements of Input-Output Analysis. New York: Random House. Rosefielde, Steven. (1975). The Transformation of the 1966 Soviet Input-Output Table from Producers to Adjusted Factor Cost Values. Washington: G.E. TEMPO. Treml, Vladimir; Gallik, Dimitri; Kostinsky, Barry; and Kruger, Kurt. (1972). The Structure of the Soviet Economy: Analysis and Reconstruction of the 1966 Input-Output Table. New York: Praeger Publishers.

  STEVEN ROSEFIELDE

  INSTITUTE OF RED PROFESSORS

  The Institute of Red Professors (Institut Krasnoy pro-fessury, or IKP) was founded by government decree on February 11, 1921, in order to train a new generation of Marxist cadres for careers in education and elsewhere in the Party, state, and scientific establishment. Along with the Communist Academy, the IKP was launched as an alternative to the “bourgeois” Academy of Sciences and universities that the Bolsheviks had inherited from the old regime. Headed between 1918 and 1932 by Mikhail Pokrovsky, the IKP was formally affiliated with the Commissariat of the Enlightenment. In practice it was also subordinate to the party’s Central Committee-specifically, the Politburo, Orgburo, Secretariat, and department of agitation and propaganda.

  At its launch the IKP was designed to be an interdisciplinary body. But by 1922 it had been divided into three departments-history, economics, and philosophy-that were augmented in 1924 by a preparatory program for less-qualified students. Four more departments were added in 1928 that concerned party history, law, literature, and the natural sciences. After an abortive merger with the Communist Academy between 1930 and 1931, the IKP was broken up into separate institutes devoted to history, Communist Party history, economics, philosophy, and the natural sciences. These divisions, in turn, were quickly flanked by six more institutes after the IKP assumed responsibility for the Communist Academy’s graduate program in 1931.

  Although the IKP was initially designed to be an elite institution of the red intelligentsia, it was transformed in the mid-1920s by repeated reorganizations, the dismissal of former Trotskyites and Mensheviks, and ongoing efforts to proletarianize the IKP community as a whole. Personal ambition and the turbulence of the so-called cultural revolution between 1928 and 1932 further divided the IKP. Although wholly Marxist, the faculty and student body split repeatedly along generational, class, and educational lines during these years. These tensions led faculty and students to seek positions elsewhere, a trend encouraged by the Sovietization of the universities and the Academy of Sciences that was underway at this time. Indeed, the Stalinist co-option of these educational institutions-facilitated by a merciless purge of the old bourgeois professorate-left the IKP without a clear mandate and ultimately led to its closure in 1938.

  Over the course of its existence, the IKP was frequented by both party officials and Marxist scholars. Some of the most prominent among them included Vladimir Adoratsky, Andrey Bubnov, Nikolai Bukharin, Abram Deborin, Sergey Dubrovsky,

  INSTRUCTION, CATHERINE II

  Emilian Yaroslavsky, Bela Kun, Nikolai Lukin, Ana-toly Lunacharsky, Vladimir Nevsky, Mikhail Pokrovsky, Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, Karl Radek, Leon Trotsky, Yevgeny Varga, and Vyacheslav Volgin. IKP graduates who went on to serve in prominent positions in party, state, and scientific institutions included Grigory Alexandrov, Isaak Mints, Mark Mitin, Militsa Nechkina, Anna Pankratova, Boris Ponomarev, Pyotr Pospelov, Nikolai Rubinshtein, Arkady Sidorov, Mikhail Suslov, Pavel Yudin, and Nikolai Voznesensky. See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; COMMUNIST ACADEMY; EDUCATION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  David-Fox, Michael. (1997). Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning Among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fox, Michael S. (1993). “Political Culture, Purges, and Proletarianization at the Institute of Red Professors, 1921-1929.” Russian Review 52(1):20-42.

  DAVID BRANDENBE
RGER

  INSTRUCTION, LEGISLATIVE COMMISSION OF CATHERINE II

  In July of 1767 the Legislative Commission met in Moscow and was presented with Catherine II’s Instructions. The lengthy Instructions (twenty chapters and 526 articles) were intended to guide the work of the Commission as they came together to discuss the grievances of their electors and the nature of government and the laws in Russia. The Instructions borrowed heavily from writers such as Baron de Montesquieu (The Spirit of the Laws), Ce-sare Beccaria (An Essay on Crimes and Punishments), William Blackstone (Commentaries on the Laws of England), and Baron Bielfeld (Political Institutions), as well as from Catherine’s correspondence with such enlightenment thinkers as Voltaire and Diderot.

  The Instructions themselves were neither a law code nor a blueprint for a constitution (as some historians have claimed), but rather a kind of guide as to the type of government and society Catherine hoped to mold in Russia. Catherine may have been inspired by Frederick II of Prussia, who had also promulgated his own visions as to the proper role of the monarch and the organization of the bureaucracy; when Catherine finished writing and editing her Instructions, she sent a German translation to Frederick II. Certainly one goal of the Instructions was to proclaim Russia’s place as a modern European state rather than the Asiatic despotism Montesquieu had named it. The Instructions deal with political, social, legal, and economic issues, and in 1768 Catherine issued a supplement that dealt with issues of public health, public order, and urban life.

  Catherine’s reasons for promulgating the Instructions as well as her success in achieving the stated goals have been the subject of considerable debate. The Legislative Commission disbanded in 1768 as war broke out between Russia and Turkey, and the Commission never succeeded in finalizing a draft of a law code. Several partial codes were issued later, and some refer back directly to Catherine’s Instructions. However, a complete body of law code was never produced in Catherine’s time. The other perceived failure of the Instructions was the fact that it did not deal with serfdom. Catherine’s criticisms of serfdom were deleted from her final draft after consultations with her advisers. Chapter 11 of the Instructions does note that a ruler should avoid reducing people to a state of slavery. However, Catherine had originally included a proposal that serfs should be allowed to accumulate sufficient property to buy their freedom and that servitude should be limited to six years.

  Because Catherine did not abolish serfdom, reduce the power of the nobility, draft a constitution, or promulgate a complete law code, Catherine’s Instructions have often been considered a failure. Many people have assumed that Catherine was simply vain or a hypocrite or that she hoped to dazzle the west with visions of Russia’s political progress. De Madariaga disagrees, noting that the Instructions were never intended to limit Catherine’s power. Catherine made it clear that she saw absolutism as the only government suitable for Russia, but that even in an absolute government fundamental laws could and should be obeyed. In states ruled by fundamental laws (a popular concept in the eighteenth century), citizens could not be deprived of their life, liberty, or property without judicial procedure. In her Instructions Catherine made the case for the importance of education, for abolishing torture, and for very limited capital punishment. Perhaps just as importantly, the Instructions disseminated a great deal of important legal thinking from the West and created a language in which political and social discussions could be held.

  INTELLIGENTSIA

  See also: CATHERINE II; ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Alexander, John. (1989). Catherine the Great: Life and Legend. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Catherine II, Empress of Russia. (1931). Documents of Catherine the Great: The Correspondence with Voltaire and the Instruction of 1767, in the English text of 1768, ed. W. F. Reddaway. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. De Madariaga, Isabel. (1990). Catherine the Great: A Short History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dukes, Paul. (1977). Catherine the Great’s Instructions to the Legislative Commission. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners. Raeff, M. (1966). Plans for Political Reform in Imperial Russia, 1730-1905. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

  MICHELLE DENBESTE

  INTELLIGENTSIA

  The intelligentsia were a social stratum consisting of people professionally engaged in intellectual work and in the development and spread of culture.

  The term intelligentsia was introduced into the Russian language by the minor writer Boborykin in the 1860s and it soon became widely used. According to Martin Malia, the word intelligentsia has had two primary overlapping uses: either all people who think independently, whom the Russian literary critic Dmitry Pisarev called “critically thinking realists,” or the more narrow meaning, “the intellectuals of the opposition, whether revolutionary or not.” However, the second definition, which is often found in historical literature, is too narrow and unjustifiably excludes important thinkers, philosophers, writers, public figures, and political rulers. For example, the famous Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev called Tsar Alexander I “a Russian intelligent on the throne.” Thus one may consider as intelligentsia well-educated and critical-thinking people of all political spectrums of society, not just radicals and liberals.

  THE INTELLIGENTSIA IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

  Historians have different opinions about the time of the appearance of the Russian intelligentsia as a historical phenomenon. Some of them consider people who were opposed to the Russian political regime since the end of the eighteenth century as intelligentsia. According to this chronology the first representatives of Russian intelligentsia were writers Alexander Radischev and Nikolai Novikov, who protested against serfdom and the existing regime, as well as the first Russian revolutionaries, the Decembrists. They were either separated individuals or small groups of people without significant influence on Russian society. Their ideas foreshadowed important future intellectual trends. Because of this, most historians considered them as a proto-intelligentsia.

  In the 1830s-1850s philosophical debates largely divided Russian intellectuals into Westernizers and Slavophiles, in line with their opinion about how Russian society should develop. Westernizers advocated a West European way for the development of Russia, while Slavophiles insisted on Russian historical uniqueness. Both these groups of Russian proto-intelligentsia had their distinguished representatives. The most famous Slavophiles were the writers Ivan and Konstantine Aksakov and the thinkers Ivan Kiryevsky and Alexsei Khomiyakov. The most distinguished Westernizers of this time were Peter Chaadayev and writer and radical publicist Alexander Herzen. Since there was strict censorship in Russia, Herzen established the Russian publishing house “Free Russian Press” in London in 1852, where he published the journal Kolokol (The Bell).

  The most radical faction of Russian intellectuals began to adopt Western socialist ideas at this time. Among the famous radical intelligentsia were publicist Vissarion Belinsky, anarchist Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, and the radical Mikhail Pe-trashevsky’s circle, which discussed the necessity of the abolition of serfdom in Russia and reform of the Russian monarchy in a democratic, federal republic.

  The circle of Russian intellectuals remained very small before the 1860s. Higher education was available only to the noble elite of society; consequently most of the Russian proto-intelligentsia was from the gentry.

  The majority of western historians agree that the Russian intelligentsia appeared as an actual social stratum in the 1860s. There were several reasons for its appearance, among them the period of Great Reforms in Russia under Tsar Alexander II with the liquidation of serfdom, liberalization of society, and awakening of public opinion. Also, the

  INTELLIGENTSIA

  development of capitalism in Russia and the beginning of industrialization demanded more educated people. At this time the technical intelligentsia appeared in Russia, while education became more widespread among the population.

  In the 1860s there appeared a current among Russian intell
igentsia called “nihilism” (from the Latin nihil meaning reject). Some historians believe that nihilism was a reaction of part of Russian society to the failure of the government in the Crimean War. The term nihilism was popularized by the Russian author Ivan Turgenev in his novel Fathers and Sons in 1862, where he described the conflict between two generations. Historian Philip Pomper wrote: the “Nihilist denied not only traditional roles of women but also the family, private property, religion, art-in a word, all traditional aspects of culture and society.” According to Pom-per the doctrinal bases of Russian nihilism were materialism, utilitarianism, and scientism. The most famous writers and literary critics, who more or less shared nihilistic ideas, were Nikolai Cherny-shevsky, Nikolai Dobrolubov, and Dmitry Pisarev.