Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  PUGO, BORIS KARLOVICH

  sisted pressure from state expansion. Disputes over the elected leadership led to government suppression of a cossack mutiny in January 1772, which left the community divided and resentful. Pu-gachev, a Don cossack fugitive, visited the area in late 1772. A typical primitive rebel, Pugachev was illiterate and his biography obscure. His imposture was not original; he was one of some seven pretenders since 1764. Shrewd, energetic, and experienced in military affairs, he was also charismatic. It is unclear whether he initiated renewed revolt or was persuaded to lead it by the cossacks.

  About sixty rebels issued a first manifesto in late September 1773, presumably dictated by Pu-gachev or cossack scribes, calling on cossacks, Kalmyks, and Tatars to serve Peter III in pursuit of glory, land, and material reward. The rebels focused on frontier freedom or autonomy, but Peter III’s name lent national stature to the burgeoning movement. Within weeks their forces exceeded two thousand besieging the fortress of Orenburg and spreading the revolt into the Ural Mountains with specific appeals to diverse social and ethnic groups. Turkic Bashkirs joined in force as the regional rebellion evolved into three chronological-territorial phases.

  The Orenburg-Yaitsk phase lasted from October 1773 until April 1774, when the rebel sieges of Orenburg, Yaitsk, and Ufa were broken, Pugachev barely escaping. Shielded by spring roadlessness, the rebels replenished ranks while fleeing northward through the Urals. This second phase culminated in the plunder of Kazan on July 23 before the horde was defeated and scattered. With rebel whereabouts unknown, panic seized Moscow, but news of peace with the Turks soon allayed fears.

  Pugachev fled southward down the Volga, exterminating the nobility and government offi-cials-the third and final phase. This rampage sparked many local outbreaks sometimes called “Pugachevshchina without Pugachev.” The main rebel force was decisively defeated south of Tsarit-syn on September 5. To save themselves, some cossacks turned Pugachev over to tsarist authorities at Yaitsk on September 26, 1774. After lengthy interrogation he was beheaded and then quartered in Moscow on January 21, 1775. To erase reminders of the revolt, Yaitsk, the river, the cossacks, and Pugachev’s birthplace were all renamed, his wife and children exiled. Late in life Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) popularized Pugachev in history and fiction. “The Captain’s Daughter” became an instant classic, famously declaiming “God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.” But agrarian anarchist dissidents found inspiration in Pugachev for grassroots rebellion. After 1917 the Soviet regime endorsed Pugachev’s fame, recasting the revolt as a peasant war against feudal society and autocratic government. See also: CATHERINE II; PEASANTRY; PETER III; PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Alexander, John T. (1969). Autocratic Politics in a National Crisis: The Imperial Russian Government and Pu-gachev’s Revolt, 1773-1775. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alexander, John T. (1973). Emperor of the Cossacks: Pu-gachev and the Frontier Jacquerie of 1773-1775. Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press. Pushkin, Alexander. (1983). “The Captain’s Daughter” and “A History of Pugachev.” In Alexander Pushkin: Complete Prose Fiction, ed. Paul Debreczeny. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Raeff, Marc. (1970). “Pugachev’s Rebellion.” In Preconditions for Revolution in Early Modern Europe, eds. Robert Forster and Jack P. Greene. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

  JOHN T. ALEXANDER

  PUGO, BORIS KARLOVICH

  (1937-1991), Party official involved in the 1991 coup attempt against Boris Yeltsin.

  Born in Latvia, Boris Karlovich Pugo was a Communist Party and state functionary whose career was shaped by Leonid Brezhnev’s “mature socialism.” This was a time of ossification in the leadership and mounting economic crisis that gave way to attempts to reform the system from within under the direction of Yuri Andropov, former head of the KGB, and then, after a brief interval, to more systemic reforms under Mikhail Gorbachev. Like many leaders of the Brezhnev era, Pugo began his career as an official in the Komsomol. His career was closely connected with Soviet power in his native Latvia, where he served as head of the local KGB and later as first secretary of the Latvian Communist Party.

  Pugo came to prominence with the advent of glasnost and perestroika. In 1988 he was appointed chairman of the powerful CPSU Control Commis1246

  PURGES, THE GREAT

  Interior Minister Boris Pugo bows his head during the press conference held by the leaders of the August 1991 coup. He committed suicide days later. © SHEPARD SHERBELL/CORBIS SABA sion in Moscow, a post he held for two years. This was a time of struggle within the Communist Party, for Gorbachev’s effort to use it as a vehicle for reform had failed and only managed to split the Party along pro- and anti-reform lines. In the Baltic republics even the local Communist parties were joining in the call for independence by the summer of 1990. In December, Gorbachev appointed Pugo minister of internal affairs.

  The appointment came at a time of crisis for perestroika. There were increasing calls for independence in the Baltic republics. Opponents of reform in Moscow, such as the “Black Colonel” Viktor Alk-snis, were calling for a crackdown against anti-Soviet elements, especially in the Baltic republics. Hardliners argued that the impending war between the United States and Iraq would distract international opinion from a Soviet crackdown. As one of his first acts as minister of internal affairs, Pugo took a leading role in the attempt to reassert Soviet power in the Baltic republics. The crackdown in Vilnius, poorly organized and indecisive, collapsed in the face of popular resistance in the republics and Gorbachev’s failure to support it publicly. In August 1991 Pugo joined in the desperate attempt by the State Committee for the State of Emergency to remove Gorbachev and prevent the approval of a new union treaty that would bring about a radical shift in power from all-union institutions to the constituent republics, especially the Russian Federation under its popularly elected president, Boris Yeltsin. The so-called putsch in which the committee attempted to seize power was poorly organized and badly prepared. Within a matter of days it collapsed. Boris Pugo committed suicide on August 22, together with his wife, Valentina. His suicide note contained a brief explanation of his actions: “I put too much trust in people. I have lived my life honestly.” See also: AUGUST 1991 PUTSCH; SOYUZ FACTION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Albats, Yevgeniia. (1994). The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia-Past, Present, and Future. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Aron, Leon. (2000). Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lieven, Anatol. (1993). The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Path to Independence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Medevev, Roy. (2002). “Yesteryear: Three Suicides.” Moscow News No. 023 (August 21).

  JACOB W. KIPP

  PURGES, THE GREAT

  The term Great Purges does not accurately designate the chaotic chain of events to which it is applied and was never used by the Soviet authorities. The regime tried to cover up the large-scale violence it had deployed between the summer of 1936 and the end of 1938. Although scholars apply the term purges to this period, many of them agree that the appellation is misleading. It implies that the Bolshevik attempts to eliminate the system’s presumed enemies were a carefully planned, faithfully executed series of punitive operations, and this was far from being the case. The terror of 1936 to 1938 emerged without clear design-it targeted ill-defined categories of people and it proceeded haphazardly. Although purges victimized around 1.5 million individuals, they did not succeed in ridding the country of the problems they were supposed to stamp out.

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  Workers in a Leningrad turbine shop listen to a report on the trial and execution of Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and fourteen others convicted of plotting against Stalin. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS

  FEAR OF OPPOSITION

  The Bolsheviks were convinced that the USSR was threatened by internal adversaries. They never hesitated to attribute dis
content among the people to instigation by irreconcilably hostile elements, and they frequently did not even trust fellow militants. In the course of the 1930s, failure was increasingly imputed to deliberate sabotage.

  There was barely a sector of life where the regime’s initiatives succeeded. Collectivized agriculture did not feed the country properly, industry did not work according to plans, the Communist Party and the state administration did not carry out important directives. Peasants on collective farms did their best to avoid work, officeholders in the countryside vacillated between compromising with rural ways and taking brutal measures, workers were hard to discipline, managers invented ways to seem to be doing their jobs, officials in all institutions eagerly covered up for incompetent colleagues and the true state of affairs. The Bolsheviks were unwilling to acknowledge that the masses were only reacting to the outcome of the regime’s policies, and top decision-makers were unable to grasp that subordinates were following their own example of not speaking out about inextricable issues, leaving problems unsolved, blaming whipping boys for their own miscalculations, and lavishing praise on achievements that were more than dubious. The elite never came close to recognizing that the monopoly of the Party-state in nearly every domain left no room for checks and balances, and that attempts to improve the situation could not bring results as long as they were entrusted to the very establishment whose practices had to be corrected. The leaders could not see that the regime’s difficulties were part-and-parcel of the system and could not be overcome without changing it completely.

  Unwilling to accept responsibility for the system’s failures, the Bolsheviks intensified the search for hidden enemies. Even top leaders were convinced that intractable problems were due to subversion. They projected the secretive character of their own dealings onto controlled aspects of the Party and state apparatus, and imagined conspiratorial intrigues behind the USSR’s accumulating troubles. For Bolsheviks, there was no question but that the remnants of the prerevolutionary elite, adherents of defunct parties, and former kulaks represented a threat. They also suspected erstwhile oppositionists of disloyalty. Many of the Trotskyites and other deviationists of the 1920s had the same revolutionary credentials as their persecutors and thus were seen as dangerous rivals for legitimate authority. Josef V. Stalin feared that they might try to claim power if the situation worsened.

  Although thousands of deviationists remained in the Communist Party until 1937, many others

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  were expelled during membership screenings in 1935 and 1936. Starting in 1935, secret directives instructed the NKVD to detect their terrorist intentions, even if they were in exile and detention. A show trial highlighted the terrorist designs of the deviationist leaders Lev B. Kamenev and Grigory E. Zinoviev in August 1936, and this date is seen as the starting point of the Great Purges.

  THE PURGES BEGIN

  The trial of Lev B. Kamenev and Grigory Y. Zi-noviev and subsequent directives from the Central Committee triggered a vigilance campaign within the Party. The campaign targeted not only the opposition, but also Party members who had criticized the Party or whose work and lifestyle brought discredit to the Bolsheviks. The failures of agriculture, construction, industry, and other branches of the economy provided a legion of opportunities to denounce workers and managers. Poor results, errors, and accidents were reclassified as intentional sabotage. There were plenty of motives to level accusations of poor discipline, since the campaign came during a severe crop failure and in the wake of a Stakhanovist drive that had disorganized production and undermined workplace safety. Leading cadres were reluctant to dig too deeply into conditions in their workplaces, and it was safer to single out alleged Trotskyites as scapegoats, for the Party already had a tendency to blame them for nearly every shortcoming.

  Sabotage is more accurately described as the regime’s daily routine. Inefficiency, abuses, and heavy-handed handling of subordinates and the population disrupted the proper functioning of the Party, the state, and the national economy. The charge of oppositionist schemes was more problematic. It was used to justify the elimination of imprisoned Party members who had been dissidents in the 1920s. It was also used to stigmatize anyone who could be blamed for the regime’s shortcomings without having to indicate any fault other than alleged sympathy, association, or even simple acquaintance with Trotskyites. Insinuations of this sort obscured Party efforts to correct official misconduct, facilitated scapegoating, and deflected blame onto the most vulnerable cadres. But there was hardly any other feasible way to dissociate the regime from its misdeeds and to suggest that the culprits were foreign or hostile to the Soviet ideal.

  The scapegoats singled out in this way were made to answer for the defects of the Soviet system. Since many officeholders were at least partly responsible for the difficult living and working conditions imposed on them, the masses were not impervious to the argument that their superiors were enemies of the people. Quite a few citizens were ready to take up this argument against unpopular bosses as a way of venting their discontent and avenging past mistreatment and humiliations.

  The leaders of the purges often emphasized that the alleged enemies were Party members in order to exploit tensions within the Party, in government agencies, and in other administrations. A show trial in January 1937 abundantly featured charges of wrecking and treason against Yuri L. Piatakov, deputy commissar of heavy industry and former member of the Central Committee, and other prominent figures in economic management and foreign affairs. Those who engineered this attack on leading Communists also tried to mobilize support in the lower ranks of the Party. The plenum of the Central Committee in February and March 1939 decided to reelect officeholders by secret ballot. It also decided to use the secret ballot at forthcoming elections for the Supreme Soviet, where, for the first time since the Revolution, all citizens were supposed to vote and have the right to be run for office. High officials at the plenum warned that subversive elements were likely to take advantage of the election campaign. They were aware of the discontent among the masses that had surfaced in public discussions about the recently adopted constitution, and especially that some people were attempting to invoke their constitutionally guaranteed rights to reclaim confiscated property and to freely practice religion.

  The Party elections were expected to eliminate disruptive practices and boost the regime’s reputation by replacing unruly and unpopular cadres. The targeted members did everything possible to ensure their reelection, because fallen communists risked jail-or worse. Networks of mutual aid were set in motion to rescue colleagues whose defeat would have endangered the position of everyone connected to them. While many targeted communists were saved, others were irreparably damaged when the police stepped in. By the summer of 1937, the winners of the intra-Party elections increasingly faced charges of having deceived the Party faithful. By that time, Party members alarmed by the increasing popular unrest had convinced the top leadership that it was necessary to launch an extensive purge. The crackdown came suddenly. No arrangements had been made to prepare concentration

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  camps for the arrival of several hundred thousands of prisoners.

  Seen as a preventive strike before the elections to the Supreme Soviet, the massive operation targeted a wide spectrum of so-called class enemies: kulaks, members of dissolved parties, ecclesiastics, sectarians, recidivist criminals. Moscow ordered the regional administrations to shoot, imprison, or deport specific quotas of enemies. Three-member boards (troikas) handed down summary sentences. This operation had hardly begun when another terror campaign was initiated. The new campaign was ostensibly aimed at ethnic Poles accused of being agents of the Polish government, but it was soon extended to other minorities, most of whom were not even mentioned in the central directives. No limits were set on the number of victims of this cleansing. Both operations were expected to end in December 1937, on the eve of the elections.


  At first glance, it was easy to identify people on the basis of their past activities or political affiliations, especially former oppositionists. Nonetheless, it was impossible to know what constituted deviation because the term applied to attitudes as well as behaviors. In the same way, there was no guarantee that only declassed people and believers were dissatisfied with the regime. Moreover, there was no guarantee that potential subversion by foreign governments could be countered by massacring their ethnic kin.

  OUTCOME

  The Great Purges resulted in chaos. About 100,000 Party members were arrested, often tortured to confess to concocted charges, and sent before the firing squad or to camps. But it soon became evident that many of them were victims of overzealous officials, some of whom were themselves later purged. The mass terror took almost a year more than projected. This was partly because zealous cadres sought to demonstrate their vigilance by requesting new quotas from Moscow for additional arrests and shootings. The names of purported accomplices were frequently obtained by cruelly mistreating the detainees. People were sometimes punished because of a foreign-sounding name or simply because anyone could be accused of being a German, Japanese, Latvian, or Greek spy. The campaign took on a life of its own. Even when it was halted in November 1938, scheduled executions continued in some regions.

  More than 680,000 people were killed in 1937 and 1938, and about 630,000 were deported to Siberia. Nevertheless, two years after the purge the number of persons listed as politically suspect by the secret police exceeded 1,200,000. But official misconduct, incompetence, and networks of solidarity did not change, despite the massive change in the leading personnel. The national economy and the administration suffered from the loss of valuable specialists, and the hunt for enemies in the army decapitated the high command and decimated the officer corps. Many of the victims were sincerely devoted to the principles of Bolshevism.