Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Dalton-Brown, Sally. (1997). “Ludic Nonchalance or Ludicrous Despair? Viktor Pelevin and Russian Postmodernist Prose.” Slavonic and East European Review 75(2):216-233. Genis, Alexander. (1999). “Borders and Metamorphoses: Viktor Pelevin in the Context of Post-Soviet Literature.” In Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, eds. Mikhail Epstein, Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover. New York: Berghan.

  ELIOT BORENSTEIN

  PEOPLE’S COMMISSARIAT OF NATIONALITIES

  While the tsarist empire had no specific ministry to deal with the non-Russian peoples, upon coming to power the Bolsheviks established a People’s Commissariat of Nationalities, with Josef Stalin at its head, in its first government. Soviet policy toward the nationalities was based on both ideology and pragmatism. Both Vladimir Lenin and Stalin upheld the Marxist (and liberal) principle of the right of nationalities to self-determination, even in the face of opposition from many of their comrades. Lenin and Stalin believed that nationalism arose from non-Russians’ distrust (nedoverie) of an oppressive nationality, such as the Russians. Secure in their faith that “national differences and antagonisms between peoples are vanishing gradually from day to day” and that “the supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster,” the Bolshevik leaders were prepared to grant autonomy, cultural and language rights, and even territory to non-Russian peoples in order to stave off separatism and chauvinist nationalism. Even as national Communist leaders in Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and elsewhere took over the development of their national populations, the Commissariat of Nationalities (abbreviated as Narkomnats) managed the affairs of dozens of peoples in the Russian Soviet Socialist Federation and beyond.

  Immediately after taking power, the Bolsheviks issued a series of declarations on “the rights of the toiling and exploited peoples,” “to all Muslim toilers of Russia and the East,” and on the disposition of Turkish Armenia. Most importantly, with little real ability to effect its will in the peripheries, the Soviet government made a strategic shift in response to the growing number of autonomies and accepted by January 1918 the principle of federalism. In each national area the government promoted programs to favor the local indigenous peoples, a kind of cultural affirmative action. Not only were native languages supported, but indigenous leaders, if they were loyal to the Communist enterprise, were also supported. Within the Commissariat there were separate sub-commissariats for Jewish, Armenian, and other nationalities’ affairs-even a Polar Subcommittee for the “small peoples of the north.” The newspaper Zhizn’ nat-sional’nostei was the official house organ of the Commissariat.

  As commissar, Stalin was often absent from the affairs of his Commissariat. Yet on important

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  occasions he settled decisive issues, as in 1921 when he supported the inclusion of the Armenian region of Mountainous Karabakh in the neighboring state of Azerbaijan. Stalin favored the formation of a Transcaucasian Federation of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, against the desires of many local Bolsheviks, particularly among the Georgians. On this issue, and the even more important question of how centralized the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would be, Stalin came into conflict with Lenin, who was far more suspicious of the “Great Power chauvinism” of the Russians and favored more rights for the non-Russians. Both men, however, supported the general line known as kor-enizatsya, which sought to indigenize the areas in which non-Russian peoples lived by developing local cultures, political elites, and national languages.

  Activists from Narkomnats were involved in setting up autonomous regions for non-Russian peoples, establishing newspapers, publishing pamphlets, and fostering literacy. Many of them saw themselves as protectors of the weak, a bulwark against the potential destruction of native cultures. But at the same time the government’s policies betrayed a kind of paternalism directed toward “backward” or “primitive” peoples who were, in many cases, not considered able to run their own affairs. Officials in Moscow acknowledged at times that they knew little about the peoples in more remote reaches of their vast country. Much linguistic and ethnographic work had still to be done to evaluate just which group belonged to which nationality, and Narkomnats assisted in developing Soviet anthropology and ethnography. In a real sense government intervention and the work of intellectuals helped draw the lines of distinction that later took a reality of their own between various peoples.

  With the formation of the Soviet Union in early 1924, the Commissariat of Nationalities was dissolved, and its activities shifted to the new Soviet parliament. But by that time the broad and lasting contours of Soviet nationality policy had been worked out. Only during the 1930s, with the growing autocratic power of Stalin, the radical social transformations of his “revolution from above,” and the fear of approaching war in Europe was the policy of korenizatsya moderated in favor of a more Russophilic and nationalist policy. See also: KORENIZATSYA; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Blank, Stephen. (1994). The Sorcerer as Apprentice: Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities, 1917-1924. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Martin, Terry. (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. Slezkine, Yuri. (1994). Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. Smith, Jeremy. (1999). The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-23. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1993). The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

  PEOPLE’S CONTROL COMMITTEE

  The Soviet leadership used several organizations to ensure popular compliance with its policies, ideology, and morality. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Central Party Control Committee ensured Party discipline by verifying the thoughts and actions of Party members and candidates. Simultaneously, Rabkrin (the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate) used workers and peasants to supervise local administrators.

  Josef Stalin gradually subordinated the Central Control Commission to the Party’s Central Committee and ultimately himself. In 1923 he merged it with the Workers and Peasant’s Inspectorate. From the beginning, the Central Control Commission was given a broad and vague mandate, allowing excesses and abuse of power. Not only did it investigate cases of poor work performance, failure to meet production quotas, corruption, or even drunkenness, but it found violations as needed when Stalin’s purges began during the 1930s.

  As part of his de-Stalinization campaign following Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev announced he was going back to the party’s Leninist roots. While maintaining a tamer Party disciplinary structure, Khrushchev also recreated the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, now known as the Party-State Control Committee (PSCC). Using thousands of volunteers to supplement its small permanent staff, the PSCC was designed as more of a grassroots organization working to ensure fulfillment of the five-year plans. Instead of top-down

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  surveillance, Khrushchev saw the Committees as a way of channeling factory-level information to top planners, such as hidden stockpiles of goods or resources.

  Following Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, the committee was renamed in December 1965, becoming the People’s Control Committee. It continued to rely on volunteers-about ten million in 1980-to monitor government and economic activities. In addition, the Committee’s chair, Alexander Shelepin, was removed, as Party leaders feared he held too many powerful posts at once. He was succeeded by Pavel Kovanov, who was replaced by Gennadiy Ivanovich Voronov in 1971. Voronov was replaced in 1974 by Alexei Shkolnikov.

  Following his election as general secretary in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev began to restructure the PCC in accordance with his overall reform program. He appointed Sergei Manykin to chair the PCC
in March 1987. Among the changes ordered was to reduce the number of inspections, because they were disruptive and actually contributed to inefficiency. In 1989 the organization was reconfigured as the USSR People’s Control Committee under the newly constituted USSR Supreme Soviet. Professional staff replaced the volunteers. In June 1989, Manyakin was replaced by Gennady Kolbin, who launched an ambitious program to link inspection reports to proposed legislation in the Supreme Soviet. Kolbin also sought to ensure that punishments were actually implemented, not overturned by appeals to a party patron. See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; DE-STALINIZATION; PERESTROIKA; PURGES, THE GREAT; RABKRIN.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Adams, Jan S. (1978). “Institutional Change in the 1970s: The Case of the USSR People’s Control Committee.” Slavic Review 37(3):457-472. Adams, Jan S. (1989). “USSR People’s Control Committee and Perestroika.” Radio Liberty Report on the USSR 1(4):1-3.

  ANN E. ROBERTSON

  PEOPLE’S HOUSES

  (Narodnye doma), cultural-educational centers for the working classes that usually contained a reading room, lecture hall, tea room, and theater. The movement to construct people’s houses or people’s palaces with cultural and educational facilities for the working classes began in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and soon spread to Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Austria, and other countries.

  In Russia the first people’s houses were built by the semiofficial Guardianships of Popular Temperance, which operated under the auspices of the Finance Ministry. During the 1890s the Russian Finance Ministry began introducing a state liquor monopoly to regulate liquor sales and increase state revenues. The Ministry set up local Guardianships of Popular Temperance to monitor adherence to the liquor laws. The Guardianships were also instructed to encourage moderate drinking habits among the population by disseminating information on the dangers of excessive drinking, providing facilities for the treatment of alcoholism, and organizing “rational recreations” as an alternative to the tavern.

  By the early 1900s the Guardianships of Popular Temperance were running people’s houses in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and other cities. St. Petersburg’s imposing Emperor Nicholas II People’s House was the largest recreational facility in the Russian Empire. It contained a dining hall, tea room, lending library, reading rooms, an observatory, a clinic for the treatment of alcoholics, a museum devoted to alcoholism, a cinema, a 1,500-seat theater, and an opera house. Besides performances of drama and opera, the Nicholas II People’s House organized scientific and religious lectures, evening adult classes, gymnastic exercises, classes in choral singing and folk music, and activities for children. From 1900 to 1913 almost two million people annually attended the entertainments at the Nicholas II People’s House, which was famed for its spectacular productions of historical plays and fantasy extravaganzas. Leading actors and artists sometimes appeared on the stage of the Nicholas II People’s House, where Fyodor Shalyapin, Russia’s greatest opera singer, gave a free concert for workers in 1915.

  Zemstvos, dumas, and literacy societies also constructed people’s houses throughout Russia. The Kharkov Literacy Society built a people’s house in 1903; the Moscow duma opened a municipal people’s house with a theater in 1904. The liberal philanthropist Countess Sofia Panina opened her Ligovsky People’s House in 1903 in a poor district of St. Petersburg; there workers could attend evening courses, and Pavel Gaideburov and Nadezhda

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  PEOPLE’S PARTY OF FREE RUSSIA

  Skarskaya ran a very successful theater. By 1913 there were at least 222 people’s houses in the Russian Empire. During World War I, when prohibition against alcohol was enacted, interest in people’s houses increased, but the Petrograd and Moscow dumas’ ambitious plans for extensive networks of people’s houses were never realized due to the financial strains of the war.

  The Russian people’s houses primary aim was to promote sobriety among the lower classes by offering them “rational recreations” in the form of theater performances, lectures, reading rooms, excursions, and other sober pursuits. Although their impact on popular alcohol consumption is doubtful, the people’s houses did offer the common people modest educational opportunities and a diverse variety of affordable theatrical entertainments. After the October Revolution the people’s houses were reorganized under the Soviet regime as “palaces of culture” and workers’ clubs but continued many of the same activities as before. See also: ALCOHOLISM; ALCOHOL MONOPOLY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Swift, E. Anthony. (2002). Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thurston, Gary. (1998). The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia, 1862-1919. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

  E. ANTHONY SWIFT

  PEOPLE’S PARTY OF FREE RUSSIA

  The People’s Party of “Free Russia” (Narodnaya Par-tiya “Svobodnaya Rossiya,” or NPSR) has its origins in the democratic wing of the Communist Party, which formed in July 1991 into the Democratic Party of Communists of Russia (DPKR) as part of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Serving as its base was the group Communists for Democracy in the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) (the leader was Alexander Rutskoi, elected Russia’s vice president in June 1991), and the Democratic Movement of Communists (Vasily Lipitsky’s group). After the August 1991 putsch and the dissolution of the CPSU, the DPKR in its first congress was renamed the People’s Party of “Free Russia,” and was headed by Rutskoi and Lip-itsky. It flourished from 1991 to 1993, when it was considered a potential ruling party. Moving in March 1992 into constructive opposition to the course of the Boris Yeltsin-Yegor Gaidar administration, the NPSR reached an agreement with the Democratic Party of Russia, on the basis of which the bloc Civic Union was formed.

  In the 1993 conflict between Yeltsin and the delegates, Rutskoi sided with the latter and landed in prison after the attack on the White House. After his amnesty in May 1994, the party changed its name again, this time to the Russian Social-Democratic People’s Party (RSDNP). Its main goals were the creation of conditions for free and thorough development of the citizens of Russia; elevation of their welfare; guarantee of citizens’ rights and freedoms; and establishment of a civic society, a social-market economy, and a lawful government. Leaders had different ideas for the party’s development: Rutskoi called upon the delegates to participate in the creation of the social-patriotic movement Power, whereas Lipitsky supported the idea of transforming the RSDNP into a social-democratic party of the Western European variety. In March 1995, the split became fact in congress, after which both sides essentially ceased existing. Rutskoi’s group began working in the social-patriotic movement Power, and Lipitsky’s in the Russian Social-Democratic Union.

  In the 1995 elections, Lipitsky’s supporters participated in the bloc Social-Democrats (0.13% of the vote), and Power pushed forward its federal list, on account of which a new split occurred in the leadership of the movement, and a number of politicians left it. The new list of Power with Rut-skoi at the head received 1.8 million votes (2.6%), while in Rutskoi’s homeland, Kursk, it received more than 30 percent. In 1996, Power was unable to collect the required number of signatures for its presidential candidate Rutskoi, and it joined with the bloc of popular-patriotic forces headed by Gen-nady Zyuganov. Soon afterward, Rutskoi was elected first as cochair of the Popular-Patriotic Union of Russia, and then, with its support, governor of Kursk Oblast. He resigned as chair of Power and fell into conflict with the NPSR and Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF). In 1998, Power, under the chairmanship of Konstan-tin Zatulin, entered the movement Fatherland of Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, and on the very eve of elections it split yet again and disappeared from the political scene.

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  See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; DEMOCRATIC PARTY; RUTSKOI, ALEXANDER VLADIMIRO-VICH; ZYUGANOV, GENNADY ANDREYEVICH.r />
  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. 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

  PEOPLE’S WILL, THE

  The People’s Will was the most famous illegal revolutionary organization in late nineteenth-century Russia. This “party,” as it was termed, represented the culmination of the rapidly evolving revolutionary movement of the 1870s, the decade when radical members of the intelligentsia first made contact on a significant scale with Russian peasants and workers, the narod, or common people. The ideology of this movement was a peasant-oriented socialism known as narodnichestvo (populism). The umbrella group Land and Freedom (Zemlya i Volya), which linked most of the radical circles at the time, split in 1879 over frustration at government repression and the lack of effective peasant response to the group’s propaganda initiatives. Those radicals who were determined to incorporate the new tactic of terrorism into their activity formed a party called the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya). By terrorism they meant primarily the targeting of hated government officials for assassination. This extreme measure was variously justified as a means of exerting pressure on the government for reform, as the spark that would ignite a vast peasant uprising, and as the inevitable response to the regime’s use of violence against the revolutionaries.