Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  During perestroika, policy makers lengthened the plan period to five years in order to eliminate the pressures of the ratchet. However, in an environment without a wholesale market, enterprise managers were dependent upon their supplier enterprises to meet their plan obligations, and fulfilling annual output plan targets remained the most important determinant of the bonus payments. In practice, lengthening the plan period did not eliminate the ratchet effect. See also: ENTERPRISE, SOVIET; HARD BUDGET CONSTRAINTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Birman, Igor. (1978). “From the Achieved Level,” Soviet Studies 31(2):153-172. Gregory, Paul R. (1990). Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

  SUSAN J. LINZ

  RAZIN REBELLION

  Of the four great rebellions that Russia experienced between 1600 and 1800, the rebellion led by the Don Cossack Stepan (Stenka) Razin has evoked the most popular feeling. It did not involve the most territory nor the widest diversity of population, but it lasted the longest, and the name of Stenka Razin has come to signify the very essence of Russian folk spirit.

  Stepan Razin’s life as a rebel began abruptly at the age of thirty-seven, in April of 1667, when he led a group of fellow Cossacks from their Don River settlements to the Volga River for the purpose of brigandage. The rebellion on the Lower Volga started as a Cossack attack on a fleet of tsarist ships sailing to Astrakhan. This success whetted the appetite of the experienced frontier warriors for further conquest. The state offered no resistance, despite the brigands’ obvious intentions. In fact, government troops at garrisons in Tsaritsyn,

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  Chernyi Yar, and in Astrakhan occasionally joined the rebels in looting and pillaging the rich commerce of the Lower Volga. In the spring of 1668, after wintering at Yaitsk, Razin ventured into the Caspian Sea, lured by the bountiful traffic of the Shah of Persia. As many as one thousand Cossacks took part in this campaign, which struck not only at the shipping on the Caspian, but also attacked commercial settlements and towns of the Caucasus along the western shore, from Derbent south to Baku. After wintering along the southern shore in Persia, Razin’s band resumed the campaign in 1669 along the eastern shore among the settlements of the Turkmen population of Central Asia. They then decided to return to the Don in the fall of 1669, with the riches and memories of their long and exhilarating adventure that provided the material for songs and legends that would be handed down for generations.

  In March of 1670, Razin announced to the Cossack assembly (krug) that he intended to return to the Volga, but instead of sailing against the Turks or the Persians to the south, this time he pledged to go “into Rus against the traitorous boyars and advisers of the Tsar.” After once again securing Tsaritsyn, Chernyi Yar, and Astrakhan by leaving comrades in charge of these fortress towns at the mouth of the Volga, Razin’s band moved quickly up the river. In June and July, the townsfolk of Saratov and Samara opened their gates to the Cossacks, and the garrisons surrendered and joined the rebel army. Razin again left Cossacks in charge to supervise the looting and pillaging, while he set out for the next fortified town, Simbirsk. (This town was called Ulianovsk for six decades in the twentieth century, commemorating it as the birthplace of Lenin.)

  Razin was forced to lay siege to Simbirsk. After four unsuccessful assaults in September 1670, and threatened by the approach of a major tsarist force, Razin retreated down the Volga in early October. In the meantime, a massive uprising, involving tens of thousands of Russians and native non-Russians (Mordvinians, Chuvash, Cheremiss, and Tatars) erupted in a forty thousand square mile expanse of land called the Middle Volga region. For two months, local rebels controlled virtually all of the territory within a rectangle bordered roughly on four corners by the major towns of Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Simbirsk, and Tambov. The type of protest, the levels of violence, the character of leadership, and the extent of popular interaction reflected the socioeconomic realities of the vast region as they appeared on the eve of Razin’s arrival. Local issues determined the pattern and ensured the stunning success of the Middle Volga rebellion in the first two months. At the same time, these regional particulars eventually determined the failure of the complex and uncoordinated insurgency in the ensuing two or three months. The uprising was finally crushed in January of 1671 by the combined efforts of five Tsarist armies coordinated by Prince Yuri Dolgorukov from a command post in the midst of the region at Arzamas. In the spring of 1671, a group of Cossacks betrayed the location of Razin’s camp on the Don to the Cossack chieftain (ataman), Kornilo Yakovlev. Yakovlev’s forces captured Stenka Razin in May and brought him in an iron cage to Moscow, where he was tried and condemned for leading the rebellion, was anathematized by the Russian Orthodox Church, and on June 6 was hanged not far from Red Square and the Kremlin just across the Moscow River.

  Thus the state succeeded eventually in destroying Stepan Razin and in imposing its will upon the townsfolk, peasantry, the military, and the rambunctious Russian and non-Russian Volga frontier population. The rebellion solved nothing in the long run, and very little in the short run. Nonetheless, the name of Stenka Razin would live forever as a reminder of this exciting time, and as an enduring promise of relief to the oppressed. The Razin Rebellion expresses a profound truth about the meaning of Russia and its history. That truth is exhilarating and romantic, but at the same time it is violent, bloody, and hopelessly tragic. See also: ALEXEI MIKHAILOVICH; COSSACKS; ENSERFMENT; PEASANT UPRISINGS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Avrich, Paul. (1972). Russian Rebels: 1600-1800. New York: Norton amp; Company. Chapygin, Alexei Pavlovich. (1946). Stepan Razin, tr. Paul Cedar. London: Hyperion Press. Field, Cecil. (1947). The Great Cossack. London: Herbert Jenkins. Longworth, Philip. (1969). The Cossacks. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Mousnier, Roland. (1970). Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia, and China. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Ure, John. (2003). The Cossacks: An Illustrated History. New York: Overlook Press.

  JAMES G. HART

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  RAZNOCHINTSY

  Raznochintsy were people of various ranks, a judicial category of population consisting of educated individuals from classes and estates in Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This included members of the clergy, merchants, petty townspeople, peasantry, minor officials, and impoverished nobility who had received an education and left their former estates.

  From the 1840s the raznochintsy had a significant influence on the development of Russian society and culture, and became the main social stratum for the formation of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1860s.

  The development of capitalism in Russia after the abolition of serfdom in 1861 demanded more educated people. After the opening of university education for the middle class, the number of educated people in the Russian empire rapidly increased. Thus increased the number of raznochintsy. Raznochintsy worshiped education and had a cult of science, believing that the main principles of life should be materialism, utilitarianism, and scien-tism. They thought that art should serve utilitarian purposes. The hero of the novel Fathers and Sons (1862), by Ivan Turgenev, Evgeny Bazarov was a typical raznochinets and nihilist. He believed only in the value of science and denied the worth of art and poetry.

  Among the raznochintsy at that time was wide spread nihilism (from the Latin nihil meaning nothing). They denied the traditional values of the society, such as marriage and private property, and derided sentimentalism. They created their own morality and style of life. They called themselves “developed individuals,” “thinking realists,” “new people” and “critically thinking individuals.” The women nihilists had short haircuts and smoked cigarettes. They often live in communes and participated in various groups and societies, where they discussed political and social problems. Raznochintsy usually chose independent liberal professions such as writers, journalists, teachers, scientists, and scholars rather than toiling in govern
ment service.

  The Russian writers and literary critics Vissar-ion Belinsky, Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nickolai Dobrolubov were raznochintsy. The “Letter to Gogol” by Belinsky became the “. . . testament and gospel” of (the Russian) radicals. Intolerance and unwillingness to accept compromise was very typical for nihilists, the generation of raznochintsy of the 1850s and 1860s. Denying traditional values of the hypocritical society, they were very intolerant of the contrary opinions and created their own system of restrictions and limitations. Some historians explain the radicalism of raznochintsy by their social origins: many of them were the sons of provincial priests and former seminarians, and they were idealists and dreamt about creation of an ideal and fair state. Due to their radicalism, raznochintsy played a central role at the crucial moment in the formation of the revolutionary intelligentsia. By the 1870s nihilism as a social phenomenon almost disappeared and gradually raznochintsy transformed into part of the Russian intelligentsia. See also: INTELLIGENTSIA; NIHILISM AND NIHILISTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Becker, Christopher. (1959). “Raznochintsy: The Development of the Word and the Concept,” American Slavic and E. European Review, 18: 63-74. Pomper, Philip. (1970). The Russian Revolutionary Intelligentsia. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, Inc. Wirtschafter, Elise K. (1994). Structures of Society: Imperial Russia’s “Peoples of Various Ranks.” DeKalb: Northern University Press.

  VICTORIA KHITERER

  REDEMPTION PAYMENTS

  One of Alexander II’s reforms was the emancipation of twenty million serfs in 1861. The Russian government paid former serf-holders for land that was then issued in allotments to the newly freed serfs. The peasants, however, were obligated to pay the government back for this land (plus interest) through what were called redemption payments. Each peasant household generally got less land (and less desirable land) in the emancipation settlement than it had tilled before emancipation, and the redemption payments were often in excess of the rental cost of the allotment.

  The traditional peasant commune (mir or ob-shchina) was given the responsibility of assuring that its members would pay their redemption debt. The communes accomplished this by limiting the

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  rights of peasants to leave the commune prior to paying off their debt, and by redistributing land between households in the commune. This method of periodic redistribution ensured that each household had the resources to make its redemption payments, but continued a pattern of a peasants holding many small strips of land rather than one contiguous field. It further required that all peasants retain the primitive three-field system of crop rotation, and discouraged individual peasants from improving their holdings.

  Peasants never accepted the redemption debt as legitimate, and many communes accumulated large arrears, which periodically were written off and then accumulated again. By 1905 the government realized that the payments were more of an irritation to the peasantry than they were worth as a source of income, and on November 3 of that year an imperial decree abolished them, partly as a vain attempt to forestall growing peasant unrest that led to the 1905 revolution. See also: ENSERFMENT; EMANCIPATION ACT; GREAT REFORMS; MIR; OBSHCHINA; PEASANTRY; SERFDOM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1990). The Great Reforms. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Robinson, Geroid T. (1967). Rural Russia under the Old Regime. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  A. DELANO DUGARM

  RED GUARDS

  Red Guards (also called Workers’ Militia) were volunteer armed bands formed by industrial workers in the cities during the Russian Revolution of 1917. They played an important role in the turmoil of 1917, in the Bolshevik seizure of power, and in securing the new Soviet government. The term Red Guard originated in Finland during the Revolution of 1905 and reemerged in 1917, especially after April, to signify the more politically militant armed workers.

  Volunteer armed workers’ bands were formed during and after the February Revolution by industrial workers at factories to protect and advance the interests of the industrial workers during the revolution, to maintain public safety, and to guard against counterrevolution. They were loosely organized (mostly self-organized), chose their own leaders, and were independent of all political parties and the new Provisional Government. They attracted the more militant members of the working class and gravitated politically toward the radical end of the spectrum (thus the tendency in later writing to associate them with the Bolsheviks, even though Socialist Revolutionaries [SRs], anarchists, and even Mensheviks participated, along with non-party elements). Indeed, they were a symbol of the most emphatic worker self-organization and self-assertion. Their organizational base was the factory, and their loyalty was to it and to the factory committees and the soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies, in Petrograd (the capital) and other cities. The government and more moderate socialists were suspicious of them but unable to suppress them.

  The Red Guard grew in size and militancy during the summer and early fall as political tensions increased, the economic situation worsened, and workers sensed that the gains they had made after February were slipping away. Industrial workers increasingly saw the Red Guards as essential to protecting their economic and political interests. By the October Revolution, Red Guard detachments totaled about 150,000 to 175,000 men across the country, about 25,000 to 30,000 of them in Petrograd. The Red Guards and the Bolsheviks found common ground in the slogan “All Power to the Soviets” and the call for radical social reforms and an end to the war. As a result, a close working relationship developed between them.

  The Red Guards played an important role in the October Revolution and the first few months of the new Bolshevik regime. In Petrograd they joined with soldiers to secure the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the proclamation of “Soviet power”-the new Bolshevik government. Red Guard bands played a similar role in the transfer of power in Moscow and provincial cities. They fought the initial armed efforts to overthrow the Bolsheviks and provided the new government with much-needed armed coercion. The Red Guards were an important part of expeditionary forces sent from Petrograd and Moscow in late 1917 and early 1918 to secure control over outlying regions. Some Red Guard detachments were incorporated into the new Red Army in 1918, others withered away, and the Soviet government formally abolished the Red Guard in April 1918. The essential features of the Red Guard and workers’ militias-self-organization, local orientation, and elected leaders-were not suited to the demands of civil war or the new Communist era.

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  See also: BOLSHEVISM; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; WORKERS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Wade, Rex A. (1984). Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  REX A. WADE

  RED SQUARE

  Red Square, like the Moscow Kremlin on which it borders, is one of the best known locales of modern world culture. Associated with military parades, aggressive rhetoric, and the Lenin mausoleum, Red Square came to symbolize Soviet power from 1918 until the demise of the Soviet Union. The term “red” in fact derives not from political sources but from a former meaning of the Russian word krasnaia: “beautiful.”

  From the earliest days of Moscow’s existence in the twelfth century, some form of trading area probably existed to the east of the fortified center (kremlin) of the settlement. By the second half of the fourteenth century, evidence suggests that there was a more clearly defined area devoted to trade and located near the main, east towers of the Kremlin, whose log walls were at that time being rebuilt in limestone by Prince Dmitry Ivanovich. This space was enlarged for defensive purposes by the decree of Ivan III after the great fire of 1493, which destroyed many ramshackle trading booths.

  The sixteenth century witnessed dramatic changes in the form and meaning of Red Square. Between 1508 and 1516, Basil III ordered that a large moat be dug alon
g the east wall of the Kremlin, which had been rebuilt of strong brick under the supervision of Italian engineers. The highest sections of the wall faced Red Square, which had no natural defensive barrier, whereas the Moscow and Neglinnaia Rivers flowed along the other two sides of the Kremlin triangle. Between 1535 and 1538, the construction of brick walls around the larger trading district of Kitai gorod (Chinatown, lying to the east of the Kremlin) gave Red Square its own defensive system, and the moat was soon drained. Within a few years of the conquest of Kazan by Ivan IV in 1552, work began on the most renowned of Moscow’s architectural monuments, the Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat, popularly called Saint Basil’s (1555-1561). With the consecration of this complex structure, Red Square gained a focal point that has remained to this day.

  The first ruler to attempt to bring order into the chaotic trading zone of Red Square was Boris Godunov, who in 1595 ordered the construction of brick trading rows on the east side of the square. These rows, designated Upper, Middle, and Lower, faced the east wall of the Kremlin and descended almost to the bank of the Moscow River. Tsar Boris also commanded the rebuilding of Lobnoe mesto, the site from which state proclamations were read. First mentioned in 1547, this wooden platform was rebuilt as a circular limestone form with a low parapet. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the area near Lobnoe mesto became notorious as a place of state executions.

  The deliverance of Moscow from the Time of Troubles (1598-1613, an interregnum that included the occupation of the city by Polish forces) in the early seventeenth century was commemorated by the construction of the Church of the Kazan Mother of God (consecrated in 1636, razed in 1936, rebuilt in 1990-1993). In the same period, Red Square was repaved with flat logs, and during the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich, its north boundary was given a more imposing form with the construction of the brick Resurrection Gate (1680; razed in 1931 and rebuilt between 1994 and 1996). By the latter part of the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great embarked on another campaign to rid the square of wooden structures. As part of this process, the trading rows were expanded and Lob-noe mesto was shifted eastward to its present position.