by James Millar
The onset of Catherine II’s reign marked the zenith of the Preobrazhensky’s role as power broker, although association with the regiment continued to retain symbolic significance. To forestall repetition of events, a new generation of military administrators increasingly recruited non-noble subjects with outstanding physical characteristics as rank-and-file guards, while Tsar Paul I subsequently diluted the guards with recruits from his Gatchina corps. Moreover, other sources of officer recruitment, including the cadet corps, soon supplanted the guards. Only in 1825, during the Decembrist revolt, when a Preobrazhensky company was the first unit to side with Tsar Nicholas I, was there more than brief allusion to a political past. Subsequently, the Preobrazhensky Regiment remained the bearer of a proud combat tradition that included distinguished service in nearly all of imperial Russia’s wars. The sons of illustrious families vied for appointment to its officer cadre, while the tsars continued to wear its distinctive dark green tunic on ceremonial occasions. See also: CATHERINE II; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; PETER I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, John T. (1989). Catherine the Great: Life and Legend. New York: Oxford University Press. Keep, John. L. H. (1985). Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462-1874. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
BRUCE W. MENNING
PREOBRAZHENSKY, YEVGENY ALEXEYEVICH
(1886-1937), Russian revolutionary, oppositionist, and Marxist theorist.
Born in Bolkhov, Orel province, Yevgeny Pre-obrazhensky began his political activism at age fifteen as a Social Democrat and later became a Bolshevik and a regional leader. Together with Nikolai Bukharin, Preobrazhensky led the Left Communist opposition to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany (1918). In 1920 he became one of three secretaries of the Bolshevik Party, together with Nikolai Krestinsky and Leonid Serebryakov, all later active in the Trotskyist Opposition. The three were removed from these posts in 1922, when Josef Stalin was made General Secretary of the Party Central Committee.
In 1923 Preobrazhensky authored the “Platform of the Forty-Six,” which attacked the growing bureaucratization and authoritarianism of the Party apparatus. Also in 1923 he published On Morality and Class Norms, in which he attacked the apparatus’s growing privileges. From this point Preobrazhensky became a close ally of Leon Trotsky and a leader of the various Trotskyist oppositions. Following the suppression of the 1927 Joint Opposition, he was expelled from the Party in 1928, but in 1929 became one of the first Trot-skyists to recant his views and return to the Party fold. He was arrested in 1935 and testified against Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev at the first Moscow show trial in 1936. He was scheduled to be a defendant in the second trial in 1937, but refused to confess and was shot in secret in that same year. He was rehabilitated during Gorbachev’s per-estroika.
Preobrazhensky was a major theorist and one of the Soviet Union’s leading economists of the 1920s. He opposed Stalin’s and Bukharin’s policy of “Socialism in One Country” and the slow pace of industrialization. In his major work, The New Economics, he put forward the theory of primary socialist accumulation, in which he argued that successful industrial development had to extract resources from the peasant economy. However, he resolutely opposed the use of force to achieve this, and by 1927 had concluded that only a revolution in the advanced countries of Western Europe could save the Soviet Union from a political and economic impasse. While he purported to welcome Stalin’s solution to this dilemma (forced collectivization and industrialization), in 1932 he published his second theoretical masterpiece, The Decline of Capitalism. This was a serious analysis in its own right of the Great Depression, but it contained a less-than-veiled attack on Stalin’s five-year plans and the policy of developing heavy industry at the expense of consumption. See also: BUKHARIN, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; TROTSKY, LEON DAVIDOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Day, Richard B. (1981). The “Crisis” and the “Crash”: Soviet Studies of the West (1917-1939). London: NLB.
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Erlich, Alexander. (1960). The Soviet Industrialization Debate. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Preobrazhensky, E. A. (1965). The New Economics. Oxford: Clarendon. Preobrazhensky, E. A. (1973). From NEP to Socialism. London: New Park. Preobrazhensky, E. A. (1980). The Crisis of Soviet Industrialization, ed. Donald A. Filtzer. London: Macmil-lan. Preobrazhensky, E. A. (1985). The Decline of Capitalism, ed. Richard B. Day. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
DONALD FILTZER
PRESIDENCY
The presidency is the most powerful formal political institution in post-communist Russia. Except for the ceremonial title given to the head of the USSR Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Union did not have a presidency until its waning years, although the adoption of one was discussed under Josef Stalin and again under Nikita Khrushchev. New proposals resurfaced in the late 1980s, prompting intense debate among Communist Party elites about the efficacy of introducing an institution that could challenge the party’s authority. Despite concerns about the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual, the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People’s Deputies approved the Soviet presidency in 1990. The first presidential election was to be held by the legislature, with subsequent popular elections. Mikhail Gorbachev became president in March 1990, receiving 71 percent of the votes in the Congress of People’s Deputies.
The union republics began electing presidents before the dissolution of the USSR. In June 1991, Boris Yeltsin was chosen as Russia’s first president in an election that pitted him against five competitors. In his first term, following the breakup of the USSR, Yeltsin faced a recalcitrant parliament that opposed many of his initiatives. The conflict between the executive and legislative branches culminated in Yeltsin’s issuing a decree that dissolved parliament on September 21, 1993. Parliament rejected the decree and declared Vice President Alexander Rutskoi to be acting president. The forces opposing Yeltsin assembled armed supporters, occupied the Russian White House, and attempted to take control of the main television network. ProYeltsin forces attacked the White House and crushed the parliamentary rebellion in early October 1993.
The constitutional crisis led to the formal strengthening of the presidency, codified in the 1993 constitution. Rather than a pure presidential system, the Russian Federation adopted a semi-presidential system in which the president is the popularly elected head of state, and the prime minister, nominated by the president, is the head of government. The president is elected to a four-year term using a majority-runoff system that requires a majority vote to win in the first round of competition. If no candidate gains a majority, a runoff is held between the top two candidates from the first round. The president wields substantial formal powers and thus has more authority than the leaders in parliamentary and many other semipresidential systems. Among other things, the president can veto laws, make decrees, initiate legislation, call for referenda, and suspend local laws that contravene the constitution. The president is limited to two consecutive terms in office.
Yeltsin was reelected president in July 1996, after defeating the candidate of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Gennady Zyuganov, in the second round of competition. Yeltsin resigned from the presidency on December 31, 1999. Vladimir Putin served briefly as acting president and then was elected in March 2000. Putin reasserted presidential authority, strengthening central control over the regions, challenging powerful business interests, and extending control over the press. See also: CONSTITUTION OF 1993; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; PUTIN, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Huskey, Eugene. (1999). Presidential Power in Russia. Ar-monk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Nichols, Thomas M. (2001). The Russian Presidency. New York: St. Martin’s.
ERIK S. HERRON
PRESIDENTIAL COUNCIL
In March 1990, when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union lost its political monopoly and Mikhail Gorbachev was elected president of the
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USSR, he created a new Presidential Council to replace the Politburo as the major policy-making body in the Soviet Union. The council’s task, according to the newly revised Soviet constitution, was to determine the USSR’s foreign and domestic policy. This was a major institutional innovation. The Presidential Council was to be independent of the Communist Party, which at this stage was viewed as incapable of reform, and was intended to challenge the power of the Defense Council (subsequently abolished) and to increase and reinforce Gorbachev’s new presidential power. Gorbachev’s choice of members to compose the Council was very controversial. The sixteen members, only five of whom were Politburo members, included Chin-giz Aitmatov, a Kyrghiz writer; Vadim Bakatin, minister of the interior; Valery Boldin, head of the Central Committee General Department; KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov; Anatoly Lukyanov, chair of the Supreme Soviet; Yuri Maslyukov, chairman of the state planning commission; Yevgeny Primakov, chairman of the Soviet of the Union; Valentin Rasputin, the nationalist writer and only non-communist; Prime Minister Nikolay Ryzhkov; Stanislav Shatalin, economist; Eduard Shevardnadze, the foreign minister; Alexander Yakovlev, a senior secretary of the Central Committee and minister without portfolio; Venyamin Yarin, leader of the United Workers Front; and Marshal Dmitry Yazov, minister of defense. Depending upon which source one consults, the council also included two of the following: Yuri Osipian, physicist; Georgy Revenkov, chair of the Council of the Union of the Supreme Soviet; and Vadim Medvedev. The council experiment did not work because the members could not act collectively and the council’s policies were rarely put into practice. As a result, making the necessary changes in the Soviet constitution, Gorbachev abolished the Presidential Council in November 1990. The council was resurrected several times during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin but had no clearly defined functions and little political clout. See also: GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; POLITBURO; PRESIDENCY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Archie. (1996). The Gorbachev Factor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gill, Graeme. (1994). The Collapse of a Single-Party System: The Disintegration of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sakwa, Richard. (1990). Gorbachev and His Reforms, 1985-1990. New York: Philip Allan.
CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS
PRESIDIUM OF SUPREME SOVIET
The Russian word soviet means “council.” The Supreme Soviet beginning in 1936 was the pre-1991 equivalent of the Parliament or Congress in democratic countries. It consisted of two chambers. The upper chamber (the Council of Nationalities) consisted of representatives (“people’s deputies”) of the hundred-plus nationalities of the USSR; the lower chamber (the Council of the Union) represented the population at large on a per-capita representative basis. Initially they were elected for four-year terms, then, beginning in 1977, for five-year terms. There were eleven convocations (following eleven elections) of the Supreme Soviet between December 12, 1937, and March 26, 1989, which met in eighty-nine sessions. The Supreme Soviet met for only a few days semiannually to vote unanimously for the government’s (in reality, the Communist Party’s) program. It elected the Presidium, which was a standing body that had more functions; as well as nominally formed the government, including the Council of Ministers of the USSR; chose the procurator general (chief prosecutor, equals attorney general) of the USSR; and appointed the Supreme Court of the USSR.
The Brezhnev Constitution of 1977 converted the Supreme Soviet into a fuller legislative and control organ elected by the Congress of the Council of Nationalities and Council of the Union. The Supreme Soviet itself appointed the Council of Ministers, the Control Commission, the chief prosecutor, and chose the Presidium from among its members.
In 1989 the old Supreme Soviet was converted into the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR, a standing body with 2,250 deputies, one-third elected from equal territories, one-third from nationality regions, and one-third from social organizations. Five such congresses met between 1989 and 1991. From its members it chose by secret ballot a new Supreme Soviet, in accord with a law of December 1, 1988, which was subordinate to it. The new Supreme Soviet had the same two chambers as before with 266 deputies in each.
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Table 1. Presidium of the Supreme Soviet Individual Dates in Office Mikhail I. Kalinin
1938-1946
Nikolai M. Shvernik
1946-1953
Klimentii E. Voroshilov
1953-1960
Leonid I. Brezhnev
1960-1964
Anastas I. Mikoian
1964-1965
Nikolai V. Podgornyi
1965-1977
Leonid I. Brezhnev
1977-1982
Iurii V. Andropov
1983-1984
Konstantin U. Chernenko
1984-1985
Andrei A. Gromyko
1985-1988
Mikhail S. Gorbachev
1988-1989
SOURCE: Courtesy of the author.
The heads of the Presidium were the nominal heads of state of the Soviet Union: Mikhail Ivano-vich Kalinin (1938-1946), Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik (1946-1953), Kliment Efremovich Voroshi-lov (1953-1960), Leonid Ilich Brezhnev (1960-1964 and 1977-1982), Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan (1964- 1965), Nikolai Viktorovich Podgorny (1965-1977), Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov (1983-1984), Kon-stantin Ustinovich Chernenko (1984-1985), Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1985-1988), and Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (1988-1989). Most of them were figureheads, for power actually lay in the Communist Party, and the state authorities were its rubber stamps. However, when Brezhnev in 1977 decided to combine the jobs of head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and of the USSR (followed in this by Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev), the heads of the Presidium were the most important figures in the Soviet Union. The Presidium also had the office of first assistant to the head, but this office was so insignificant that it was not created until 1944, and then was not appointed from 1946 to 1977.
The men who made the Presidium work were its secretaries: A. F. Gorkin (1938-1953 and 1956-1957), N. M. Pegov (1953-1956), M. P. Georgadze (1957-1982), and T. N. Menteshashvili (1982-1989).
To the extent that the Soviet service state (q.v.) functioned efficiently or not, the Presidium secretaries deserve much of the credit or blame. They embodied the meritocratic principles of the service state and the last two, as Georgians, personified the multinational nature of the Soviet empire. Occasionally the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Council of Ministers of the USSR, and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR met together, as happened on March 5, 1953, from 10 to 10:40 P.M., when they adopted resolutions on governmental organization after Stalin’s death.
The Supreme Soviets met only a few days annually, and its Presidium carried on its business in the intervals. (The two organs paralleled the Communist Party’s All-Union Congresses and the Politburo. In theory, the CPSU made policy; the government carried it out.) According to Article 119 of the 1977 Constitution, the Presidium had thirty-seven members. The chairman was nominally in charge; then there were fifteen vice-chairs, one for each republic, who were present more for decoration than for work. Then there was the secretary, the workhorse of the Presidium, and twenty others who had area responsibilities corresponding to the ministries that ran the USSR. The presidium had a long list of functions, only some of which can be mentioned here. It set the dates for the election of the Supreme Soviet and convened its sessions. It was responsible for the government observing the Constitution and that all laws were constitutional. It had the task of interpreting the laws when dispute arose. The Presidium instituted and awarded orders and medals, including military ones. It ruled on matters of citizenship. It formed the Council of Defense and appointed and dismissed the leaders of the armed forces. It was the body that could proclaim martial law, declare war and peace, and order the mobilization of the armed forces. It ratified foreign tr
eaties and dealt with diplomatic matters. Article 121 of the Constitution authorized the Presidium to create and disband governmental ministries and to appoint and fire ministers. See also: CONGRESS OF PEOPLE’S DEPUTIES; CONSTITUTION OF 1977; COUNCIL OF MINISTERS, SOVIET; SUPREME SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kudriavtsev, V. N., et al., eds. (1986). The Soviet Constitution. A Dictionary. Moscow: Progress.
RICHARD HELLIE
PRIKAZY See CHANCELLERY SYSTEM.
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PRIMAKOV, YEVGENY MAXIMOVICH
PRIMAKOV, YEVGENY MAXIMOVICH
(b. 1929), orientalist, intelligence chief, foreign minister, and prime minister under Boris Yeltsin.
Born in Kiev, Yevgeny Maximovich Primakov grew up in Tbilisi; his father disappeared in the purges. Trained as an Arabist, Primakov worked in broadcasting in the 1950s and then became a Middle East correspondent for Pravda (and perhaps a covert foreign intelligence operative). In the 1970s he assumed academic posts as deputy director of the Institute of World Economics and International Relations (IMEMO), then as director of the Institute of Oriental Studies, and in 1985 as director of IMEMO.
In 1986 Primakov became a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and a foreign policy advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev. He was chosen in June 1989 to chair the Congress of People’s Deputies, the lower house of the Supreme Soviet formed pursuant to Gorbachev’s new constitution. His party status rose accordingly: full Central Committee member in April 1989 and candidate member of the Politburo in September. He was a leading contributor to the “New Thinking” regarding international cooperation that was identified with Gorbachev.
Primakov condemned the attempted coup by hard-line communists in August 1991; Gorbachev then made him First Deputy Chairman of the KGB and head of foreign intelligence. He was one of the few Gorbachev appointees to be retained in office by Russian President Boris Yeltsin after the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991.