by James Millar
SERHY YEKELCHYK
SHLYAPNIKOV, ALEXANDER GAVRILOVICH
(1885-1937), highly skilled metalworker, trade union leader, and revolutionary.
Alexander Shlyapnikov, an ethnic Russian from the town of Murom in central Russia, joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party in 1902 and became a Bolshevik in 1903; he was imprisoned in 1904 and 1905-1907. From 1908 to 1916 he lived in Western Europe. During World War I, Shlyapnikov organized a route through Scandinavia into Russia for smuggling illegal Marxist literature and Bolshevik correspondence.
In February 1917 Shlyapnikov led the Bolshevik Party organization in Petrograd and became a member of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. Subsequently Shlyapnikov became chairman of the All-Russian Metalworkers’ Union (1917-1921). He became commissar of labor (1917-1918) after the October 1917 Revolution. During the Russian civil war, Shlyapnikov was chairman of the Revolutionary Mlitary Council of the Caspian-Caucasian Front (1918-1919).
From 1919 to 1921 Shlyapnikov led the Workers’ Opposition and advocated the role of unionized workers in directing and organizing the economy. Shlyapnikov continued to criticize Soviet economic policy and treatment of workers throughout the 1920s. In 1933 he was purged from the Communist Party. In 1935 he was arrested on false charges, imprisoned, and sent into internal exile. In 1936 he was arrested again. In September 1937, in a closed session, the Military College of the USSR Supreme Court found Shlyapnikov guilty of terrorist activities, based on false testimony from compromised witnesses, and ordered his execution. Shlyapnikov was rehabilitated of criminal charges in 1963 and restored to membership in the Communist Party in 1988. See also: BOLSHEVISM; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY; WORKERS’ OPPOSITION
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SHOCK THERAPY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Daniels, Robert. (1988). The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Shliapnikov, Alexander. (1982). On the Eve of 1917, tr. Richard Chappell. London: Allison and Busby.
BARBARA ALLEN
SHOCK THERAPY
The term shock therapy has come to arouse a great deal of controversy. Its original use was related to the use of electrical shocks as therapy in psychiatric treatment. In economic policy, it has been used to describe powerful austerity measures designed to break spirals of very rapid inflation. More recently, it has been used as a blanket term for policies designed to reform the postsocialist economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The latter also is where the main controversies have arisen.
The divergence of opinion concerning reform policy can be attributed in large part to the disparate nature of the tasks involved. Setting out to break inflation is different from seeking to undertake a broad socioeconomic transformation from failed centrally planned economies into functioning market economies. Above all, the political implications are very different.
In a first stage, beginning after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, postsocialist governments in Central Europe embarked on economic reform programs that featured rapid liberalization and broad-based privatization. It has been held by some that those who succeeded did so because they applied shock therapy. Others, notably so people from the region, have rejected such claims, arguing that foreign advice had little to do with their achievements.
The main test of shock therapy came in the first half of 1992, when the Russian government of Yegor Gaidar sought to implement rapid and radical systemic change. The bulk of all prices were liberalized and state owned enterprises were informed that their life support systems, in the form of direct financial links to the state budget, would be terminated.
It was believed that this “shock” to the system also would bring a form of therapy in its wake. As enterprise managers realized that they could no longer count on automatic subsidies from the state budget, they would be forced into producing goods that could be sold on real markets, at prices that would cover their costs. It was expected that within a period of one-half of one year or so the transition should be completed. From there on the Russian economy would be growing at a healthy pace, and no more foreign economic support would be needed.
By the summer of 1992 it became painfully evident that the project was failing. Enterprises had responded to the government’s austerity measures not by cultivating markets, but by developing a subsequently chronic practice of non-payments. Losses of government subsidies were met by reduced payments on due taxes and wages. Failures to receive payments from customers were met by refusals to pay suppliers. Reduced government orders were met by reductions in output, but could not result in closures since there was no bankruptcy law.
It was also clear that the associated ambitions of bringing stability to government finance had met with equal disaster. Inflation was spiraling out of control, ending up at well more than 2,000 percent for the year as a whole, and persistent deficits in the state budget would come to haunt the government for several years to come.
Ten years later the evidence remains fairly bleak. Between 1991 and 1998, the Russian economy lost around 40 percent of GDP and more than 80 percent of capital investment. There was mass impoverishment of the population, serious decay of the country’s infrastructure, and a general widening of the technology gap against the industrialized world. In August 1998, a brewing financial crisis produced a massive crash, leaving investors with tens of billions of dollars in losses.
In the policy debates that surrounded the initial failures of rapid systemic change, two different sides emerged. One side, representing many market analysts, argued that the reason behind the initial failures was linked to insufficient shock. In their view, the crash of 1998 actually was a good thing, laying the groundwork for the economic upturn in 2000 and 2001.
The other side, representing mainly non-economists and a minority of uninvolved academic economists, held that the policy of shock therapy as such has been at fault, and that a set of alternative policies would have allowed much of the destruction to be avoided. Today it would seem fair to say that the latter represents the majority view.
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SHOCKWORKERS
See also: ECONOMY, CURRENT; GAIDAR, YEGOR TIMURO-VICH; PRIVATIZATION; YELTSIN, BORIS.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aslund, Anders. (1995). How Russia Became a Market Economy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Hedlund, Stefan. (1999). Russia’s “Market” Economy. London: UCL Press. Nelson, Lynn D., and Kuzes, Irina. (1995). Radical Reform in Yeltsin’s Russia. New York: M.E. Sharpe.
STEFAN HEDLUND
SHOCKWORKERS
Shockworkers (udarniki), a term originating during the Russian Civil War to designate workers performing especially arduous or urgent tasks, reemerged during the late 1920s and was applied thereafter to all workers and employees who assumed and fulfilled obligations over and above their work assignments. The rise of the Stakhanovite movement in 1935 reduced the prestige of the shockworker title, and it all but disappeared during the late 1940s and early 1950s, only to resurface again under the guise of shockworkers of Communist labor. From about ten million in 1966, the number of such workers increased to 17.9 million in 1971 and twenty-four million (or twenty-six percent of all wage and salary workers) by 1975.
The checkered history of shockwork in the USSR faithfully mirrors changing approaches by the Communist Party to the task of mobilizing workers and stimulating their commitment to raising labor productivity. If during the Civil War it was associated with voluntary Communist Saturdays (subbotniki), then during the late 1920s it arose primarily among young industrial workers who were eager to demonstrate their skills on new equipment and methods of production. From 1929 onward, shockwork invariably was linked with socialist competitions in which brigades of workers overfulfilling production quotas or meeting other obligations assumed in competition agreements were rewarded with prizes and privileged access to scarce goods and ser
vices.
But as the number of shockworkers increased to slightly more than forty percent of all industrial workers, the value of the title became debased. Moreover, the brief period of extra physical exer1386 tion (known as “storming”) associated with shock-work was ill suited to complex and interrelated production processes. Shockwork became a regular feature of Soviet industrial and agricultural life in the post-Stalin era as a result of the responsibility placed on lower-level trade union, Komsomol, and party officials to exercise leadership and record progress along bureaucratically predetermined lines. Workers seeking to extract favors from these organizations or demonstrate their suitability for promotion into their ranks went along with the game. See also: INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET; STAKHANOVITE MOVEMENT; SUBBOTNIK
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kuromiya, Hiroaki. (1988). Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932. New York: Cambridge University Press.
LEWIS H. SIEGELBAUM
SHOLOKHOV, MIKHAIL ALEXANDROVICH
(1905-1984), Russian writer and Soviet loyalist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1965.
Mikhail Sholokhov was born in the Don Cossack military region in 1905. During the civil war he joined the Bolsheviks, twice being on the verge of execution for his views. In 1922 he moved to Moscow to pursue a career as a writer. In 1924 he published his first short story and then published regularly throughout the 1920s. After 1924 he moved back to the Cossack regions to remain close to his stories.
The first volume of his most important work, the Quiet Flows the Don (Tikhii Don, 1928-1940) was published in 1928. It is a portrayal of the struggles of the Don Cossacks against the Red army in Southern Russia, and is noted for its objectivity and lack of positive Bolshevik characters. The work was an instant success. Sholokhov would publish three more volumes in the course of his lifetime. This work has been tainted by unsubstantiated claims of plagiarism.
His second major novel was the story of the triumph of collectivization in the early 1930s, entitled Virgin Soil Upturned (Podnyataya tselina, 1932-1960). This work was trumpeted as one of the masterpieces of Socialist Realism.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
SHORT COURSE
Sholokhov joined the Communist Party in 1932 and was a loyal adherent to the party line for the rest of his life, though outspoken in his criticism of the quality of Soviet writing.
He was one of the most honored authors of the Soviet period. His short stories and novels were published in massive editions. He was a member of the Supreme Soviet and Central Committee, awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, and won both the Lenin and Stalin Prizes. He was acknowledged for his writing in the West as well, receiving the Nobel Prize of literature in 1965 for Tikhii Don. See also: SOCIALIST REALISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ermolaev, Herman. (1982). Mikhail Sholokhov and His Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sholokhov, Mikhail. (1959). Virgin Soil Upturned, tr. Stephen Garry. New York: Knopf. Sholokhov, Mikhail. (1996). Quiet Flows the Don, tr. Robert Daglish. New York: Carroll amp; Graf.
KARL E. LOEWENSTEIN
SHORT COURSE
The central text of the Josef Stalin-era party catechism, The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)-Short Course was compulsory reading for Soviet citizens of all walks of life between 1938 and 1956. This textbook traced the origins of the Russian revolutionary movement to tsarist industrialization efforts after 1861. Early agrarian populists gave way during the 1880s to Marxist Social Democrats, who acted in the name of the nascent working class. By the mid-1890s, Vladimir Ilich Lenin had emerged to guide this movement through police persecution and internal division (versus the Mensheviks, “Legal Marxists,” and Economists); his leadership allowed the Bolsheviks to seize power in 1917. Subsequently, Lenin plotted a course through civil war and foreign intervention toward the construction of a socialist economy. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin navigated the USSR successfully through shock industrialization, agricultural collectivization, and the defense of the revolution’s gains against internal and external enemies. All but several sections on dialectical materialism were actually drafted by E. M. Yaroslavsky, P. N. Pospelov,
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
and V. G. Knorin before being edited for publication by Stalin and members of his entourage.
A seminal text, the Short Course epitomized a belief held by Soviet authorities after the early 1930s that history ought to play a fundamental role in party indoctrination efforts. This was signaled by a letter Stalin wrote to the journal Prole-tarskaya revolyutsia (Proletarian Revolution) in 1931 in which he denounced party historians for daring to question even minor aspects of Lenin’s leadership. Party historians floundered in the wake of this scandal, forcing Soviet authorities to clarify the party’s new expectations on “the historical front.” Existing party histories were too inaccessible and insufficiently inspiring for what was still a poorly educated society. A long-standing focus on anonymous social forces and abstract materialist analysis was to be replaced by a new emphasis on heroic individuals, pivotal events, and the connection of party history to that of Soviet society as a whole. These demands reflected the Soviet leadership’s intention to treat both party and state history as motivational propaganda.
Editorial brigades under Yaroslavsky, Knorin, P. P. Popov, Lavrenti Beria, and others struggled to address these new demands, although the situation was complicated by the Great Terror. Repeated exposure of traitors within the Soviet elite between 1936 and 1938 made it difficult to write a stable narrative about the party. A lack of progress led the party leadership to ask Yaroslavsky, Pospelov, and Knorin to combine forces on a single advanced text. Knorin’s arrest during the summer of 1937, however, forced Yaroslavsky and Pospelov to focus exclusively on the jointly authored manuscript, redrafting it under the supervision of Stalin, Andrei Zhdanov, and Vyacheslav Molotov.
Released in the fall of 1938, the Short Course was hailed as an ideological breakthrough that succeeded in situating party history within a broader Russo-Soviet historical context. Moreover, its tight focus on Lenin and Stalin ensured that the text would survive future purges (although at the cost of conflating party history with the cult of personality). Ubiquitous after the printing of more than forty-two million copies, the Short Course reigned over party educational efforts for eighteen years, authoritative until Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the personality cult in 1956. See also: STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
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SHOSTAKOVICH, DMITRI DMITRIEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brandenberger, David. (1999). “The ‘Short Course’ to Modernity: Stalinist History Textbooks, Mass Culture, and the Formation of Russian Popular National Identity, 1934-1956.” Ph.D. diss, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
DAVID BRANDENBERGER
SHOSTAKOVICH, DMITRI DMITRIEVICH
(1906-1975), highly controversial composer, at the same time outstanding musical representative of the Soviet Union and tragic figure in tension between acceptance and rejection of his music by the Soviet regime.
Dmitry Shostakovich’s acculturation and his musical training at the Petrograd, then Leningrad, conservatory took place in the new Soviet state. Overnight Shostakovich rose to fame with a rousing performance of his first symphony in 1926. He was seen as a beacon of hope in Soviet music. The young composer succeeded in fulfilling the highflying expectations in the following years. Overwhelming applause was given to the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District (1934). This coarsely realistic work based on a novel by Nikolay Leskov was celebrated as a first milestone in the development of a genuine Soviet musical theatre. In 1936, however, a devastating review based on ideological criteria was published in Pravda. Shostakovich was caught-after Josef Stalin had watched the opera with greatest displeasure-in the trap of the aggressive, intrigue-dominated cultural policy. The composer was branded in public as aesthetizing formalist and his work as extreme left abnormality. These typi
cal expressions of Soviet politico-cultural discourse meant that his music was too dissonant and complicated for Party taste. Ensuing condemnations not only by the officialdom but even by previously enthusiastic fellow composers greatly worried Shostakovich, as did the arrest and execution of his friend and patron Soviet Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky in the course of the Great Terror in 1937. Nonetheless, during the same year he managed to rehabilitate himself with his fifth symphony. In fact, the work signals a clear stylistic turn to a more moderate musical language, but to attribute this exclusively to political pressure seems misguided. Previous works indicate a break with aesthetic radicalism; moreover, Shostakovich practiced all his life through diverse styles of composi1388 tion. He even wrote operetta-like light music, which cannot be dismissed simply as reluctantly performed commissioned work. From the end of the 1930s, however, Shostakovich successfully developed forms of musical expression that realized his aesthetical ideas and at the same time met the demands of Socialist Realism for comprehensibility and popular appeal. His individuality and heterogeneity, his inclination toward the grotesque and sarcasm, and the profound seriousness and expressiveness of his works left the audience fascinated, but again and again provoked conflicts with the official state organs. In spite of vehement accusations in 1948, he soon was integrated again into the Soviet music elite, but only the Thaw following Stalin’s death made general conditions more favorable for the composer and his oeuvre. During his last two decades he could act as a respected personality of Soviet cultural life.
Shostakovich and his work have been highly disputed and exposed to ideologically charged interpretations. Shostakovich was seen as a faithful communist, an opportunistic conformist, a secret dissident, or an oppressed genius. In any case, he was a Soviet citizen, who, like many others, stood by his home country but also got in trouble with its officials. Regardless of all political factors, he was one of the outstanding composers of the Soviet Union and perhaps the last great symphonist of music history. See also: CULTURAL REVOLUTION; MUSIC; PURGES, THE GREAT; THAW, THE