Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  Moreover, the fundamental fact that socialist realism changed with the ideological and political demands of a particular time period argues for an inherent organicity that infused the system since its inception. Our understanding and, perhaps, even appreciation of socialist realism has grown thanks not only to the post-glasnost flood of archival texts and documents, but also thanks to the broader vision that hindsight provides. See also: BULGAKOV, MIKHAIL AFANASIEVICH; GORKY, MAXIM; MOTION PICTURES; RUSSIAN ASSOCIATION OF PROLETARIAN WRITERS; SAMIZDAT; SILVER AGE; SOLOVIEV, VLADIMIR SERGEYEVICH; THAW, THE; ZHDANOV, ANDREI ALEXANDROVICH tural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931, ed. Sheila Fitz-patrick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clark, Katerina. (1985). The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dobrenko, Evgeny. (1997). The Making of the Soviet Reader. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dobrenko, Evgeny. (2001). The Making of the Soviet Writer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ermolaev, Herman. (1963). Soviet Literary Theories, 1917-1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism. University of California Publications in Modern Philology, no. 69. Berkeley: University of California Press. Golomshtock, Igor. (1990). Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People’s Republic of China, tr. Robert Chandler. London: Collins Harvill. Groys, Boris. (1992). The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, tr. Charles Rougle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gunther, Hans, ed. (1990). The Culture of the Stalin Period. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Gutkin, Irina. (1999). The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890-1934. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. James, C. Vaughan. (1973). Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lahusen, Thomas. (1997). How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lahusen, Thomas, and Dobrenko, Evgeny, eds. (1997). Socialist Realism without Shores. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Reid, Susan E. (2001). “Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: The Industry of Socialism Art Exhibition, 1935-1941.” Russian Review 60:153-184. Robin, Regine. (1992). Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, tr. Catherine Porter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tertz, Abram [Andrei Sinyavsky]. (1982). The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism, tr. Max Hayward and George Dennis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  CYNTHIA A. RUDER

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Brooks, Jeffrey. (1994). “Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All About It.” Slavic Review 53(4):973-991. Carleton, Greg. (1994). “Genre in Socialist Realism.” Slavic Review 53(4):992-1009. Clark, Katerina. (1978). “Little Heroes and Big Deeds: Literature Responds to the First Five-Year Plan.” In CulSOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES The Russian Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party arose between 1900 and 1902. Industrial growth, peasant unrest, and the rise of the Marxist Social Democratic movement spurred an array of leaders

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

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  SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES

  from the earlier populist movement, as well as new figures, to create a party that adapted the older movement’s traditions to the new realities. Socialist Revolutionary ideology, organizational base, and personnel therefore reflected, but was not identical to nineteenth-century, Russian populism. The prime mover was Victor Chernov, the educated grandson of a serf. Chernov hailed from the Volga region, the new party’s first bastion. Chernov’s neo-populist theory maintained that industrialization had created a sizable proletariat and that the peasants had become a revolutionary class. In the SR view, a coalition of the radical intelligentsia, the industrial proletariat, and the peasants would make the coming revolution, whereas Russia’s middle class would remain quiescent. Consequently, the revolution would be socialist, hence the party’s title. This complex of views gave birth to a program aimed at propagandizing and recruiting workers, peasants, and intelligentsia. In addition, the SRs utilized terrorism to destabilize, rather then overthrow, the existing regime. The actual revolution, they insisted, would result from hard organizational work and a popular uprising.

  During the early 1900s, the party laid down a network of peasant-oriented organizations and in the cities challenged the Social Democrats among the proletariat. The SR Party won over some of the Social Democrats’ following through its popular terror program and appeal to both peasants and urban workers and as a result of splits within Social Democracy. By the 1905-1907 Revolution, the latter party still had an edge among the proletariat, but the SRs operated virtually unchallenged among the peasants. The SRs’ special attention to arming workers and peasants allowed them to play a lively role in armed struggles in Moscow, Saratov, and elsewhere during 1905. However, as Chernov later admitted, none of the socialists proved capable of uniting the opposition to overthrow the regime. Beginning in 1908, the Stolypin repression damaged all socialist organizations and destroyed SR-oriented national peasant, railroad, and teachers’ unions. Debates and splits characterized party life, as the party put the terror program into abeyance. Furthermore, the revelation that party leader Evno Azev was a police spy further demoralized party cadres. Yet the party survived and plunged into the nascent labor movement. This tactic brought the SRs to virtual parity with the Social Democrats in many industrial areas and provided them with the means to become fully involved in the post-1912 revival of the revolutionary movement.

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  The outbreak of the war in 1914 gave the regime its last opportunity to suppress the radical movement. Like the Social Democrats, the SRs split over the war issue. Leftists, known variously as Left SRs or SR-Internationalists, opposed the war, whereas Right SRs supported the government’s war effort. By 1916 the government’s ability to control the revolutionary movement waned. SR organizations opposed the war and propagandized revolution, often in coordination with Social Democrats. The February 1917 Revolution reflected protracted, sustained revolutionary activity, not least by SRs, who were also the revolution’s prime early beneficiaries. After tsarism’s fall, the SRs strove to reunite the party’s left, right, and center in order to dominate the new revolution. Moderate SRs and Mensheviks, in alliance with the liberals, soon led the Provisional Government, which the SR Alexander Kerensky headed after July. Still, the dedication of the moderate socialist-liberal coalition to pursuing the war gave ammunition to the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, who began to call for soviet, socialist power. Leftist SRs gradually moved away from the moderate leadership, which by then included Chernov and other former radicals. By the fall of 1917, the SR-Mensheviks’ cooperation with the liberals discredited those parties in the eyes of many workers and soldiers, who supported the Bolsheviks and other leftists. During the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks removed the Provisional Government from power in the name of the soviets. Deprived of the reins of government, the SRs’ residual support from the peasantry held them in good stead in the November 1917 Constituent Assembly elections, a success that proved untranslatable into political power. After the Soviet government dismissed the Constituent Assembly in early January 1918, many SR delegates, including Chernov, formed a government in Samara that sought legitimacy in association with the Constitutional Assembly. This government, like other SR-oriented governments in Arkhangelsk and Siberia, failed to stand up to Red and White military forces, in part owing to the shift of peasant support to the Left SRs, now a separate party.

  By late 1918 the SR Party had once again become an underground resistance movement, in this case against the communists, a status that party leaders managed to sustain until 1922. Massive arrests and the famous SR trials of that year effectively ended the party’s existence inside Soviet Russia. Chernov and many leaders escaped and lived in the European and North American emigration but had no real influence from abroad. Although the SR approach had initially won the party a huge backENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  SOKOLOVSKY, VASILY DANILOVICH

  ing during 1917, its combined worker, peasant, and intelligentsia progra
m proved too broad to exercise power. Likewise, Chernov’s post-October 1917 “third way,” which hoped to unite democratic elements of the population between the two extremes of Bolshevism and the reactionary Whites failed, to catch hold in the chaos of civil war. See also: BOLSHEVISM; CHERNOV, VIKTOR MIKHAILOVICH; CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; LEFT SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; MENSHEVIKS; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; POPULISM; PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT; REVOLUTION OF 1905; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PARTY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Hildermeier, Manfred. (2000). The Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party before the First World War New York: St. Martin’s Press. Melancon, Michael. (1990). The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-War Movement, 1914-1917. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Perrie, Maureen. (1976). The Agrarian Policies of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party from its Origins through the Revolution of 1905-1907. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Radkey, Oliver. (1958). The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February-October 1917. New York: Columbia University Press. Rice, Christopher. (1988). Russian Workers and the Socialist Revolutionary Party through the Revolution of 1905-1907. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

  MICHAEL MELANCON

  SOKOLOVSKY, VASILY DANILOVICH

  (1897-1968), marshal of the Soviet Union (1946), military commander, and theoretician.

  Native of the Hrodna region, from a peasant family, Vasily Sokolovky entered the Red Army in February 1918 and studied in a short course for commanders. During the Civil War, he served with cavalry units. He later was transferred to central Asia and was attached to the Turkestan Military District and commanded units in Samarkand and Fergana, which were engaged in fighting against the Basmashi guerrillas. In 1921 he graduated from the military academy. Between 1922 and 1930, he served as chief of staff of a division and corps, and from 1930 to 1935 as commander of a division and chief of staff of the Volga, Ural, and Moscow Military Districts. He joined the Communist Party in 1931. Sokolovsky was fortunate not to come under suspicion during the Great Terror. In May 1940 he received the rank of lieutenant general. In February 1941 he was appointed as deputy chief of staff of the Red Army. In the beginning of the war, after Stalin ordered the arrest and execution of the leadership of the shattered West Front, Sokolovsky was appointed chief of staff of this front (July 1941-January 1942 and May 1942-February 1943). Along with these appointments, he was also the chief of staff of the Western Theater (July-October 1941 and May 1942). After the Battle of Moscow, the West Front, under Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev, failed in repeated attempts to break through the enemy lines, suffering massive losses for little gain, except for preventing the German units from being deployed elsewhere. Sokolovsky was involved in all these battles, and in February 1943, he was appointed commander of the West Front. His tenure in this position was marked by a lack of success even in sectors where the Red Army enjoyed a 10-1 superiority over the enemy. Sokolovsky was removed from command in April 1944 and replaced by Ivan Chernyakhovsky, and it was under his leadership that the West Front, now renamed the Third Be-lorussian Front, managed to roll over the enemy lines. During the great summer offensive of 1944, Sokolovsky returned to staff positions. He was attached to the First Ukrainian Front in April 1945 and took part in the Berlin Operation. Despite a rather undistinguished record during the war, Sokolovsky’s star rose in the postwar years. In 1945 he was Deputy Commander of the Soviet forces in Germany, and after Zhukov’s departure in 1946, the commander. In 1945 he also received the title of hero of the Soviet Union, a rarity for a staff officer. In 1946 Sokolovsky was elected to the Supreme Soviet. From 1946 to 1949 he was a member of the Allied Control Commission. In March 1946 he was the first deputy minister of the armed forces (from February 1950, war minister). In June 1952, he headed the General Staff and continued to hold the position after Stalin’s death until April 1960. He was also the first deputy war minister (from 1953, minister of defense). In 1952 he was elected to the Central Committee, but was demoted to candidate member in 1961. He was removed from active command in June 1960 and was attached to the Red Army inspectorate. He is buried at the Kremlin Wall. Sokolovsky’s fame rests mainly on his views on military strategy, published first in 1963, which have been studied in depth by Western strategists as the “Bible” of Soviet military doctrine.

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

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  See also: MILITARY ART; MILITARY DOCTRINE; MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; WORLD WAR II

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Sokolovskii, V. D. (1963). Soviet Military Strategy. En-glewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

  MICHAEL PARRISH

  SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT

  In the summer of 1980, Poland experienced labor unrest on an unprecedented scale. Faced with nationwide strikes, the ruling Communist Party was forced to sanction, for the first time in a Soviet-bloc country, the creation of independent trade unions, free of state control.

  The emergence of the Solidarity trade union movement was viewed with acute anxiety by the leaders of Poland’s neighboring socialist states, the USSR in particular. How, given that the living and working conditions of Soviet workers were at least as bad as those of their Polish counterparts, could the development of similar labor unrest be forestalled in the USSR? The rise of Solidarity accordingly contributed to a far-reaching debate over political and economic reform in the USSR. The debate was even more significant since it occurred at a moment when the Soviet leadership was facing a major generational shift and concomitant power struggle. The aging leadership of Leonid Brezhnev had allowed social and economic problems to accumulate to such an extent that the USSR was experiencing stagnation in economic growth. This threatened the informal social contract between leaders and rank-and-file workers.

  In the early months of the Polish crisis (late 1980 and early 1981), after deciding against an invasion, the Brezhnev leadership adopted a series of stopgap measures to ward off the danger of contagion. For example, the jamming of Western radio broadcasts was resumed, while government financial priorities were revised to put increased emphasis on consumption.

  By the time martial law was declared in Poland in December 1981 it was clear that the danger of spillover to the USSR-if it ever existed-had been averted. Apart from a few isolated strikes and scattered leafleting in the USSR’s western republics, the Polish events evoked little sympathy among Soviet workers, who were inclined to believe that the USSR was subsidising its Warsaw Pact allies anyway.

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  Faced with a continuing slowdown in the rate of economic growth, which was leading to stagnation, if not actual reduction, of popular living standards, the Soviet leadership abandoned carrots for sticks. This was exemplified by the brief leadership of Yuri Andropov (1982-1983), who launched a massive campaign to raise workplace discipline and crack down on crime, corruption, and alcoholism, with only limited results.

  The Polish events continued to reverberate when, in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet communist party. Gorbachev publicly identified himself with reformist Soviet academics who argued that the Polish crisis was attributable not simply to the mistakes of Poland’s leaders but to a general weakness afflicting all single-party, planned economies of the Soviet type. Members of the reformist camp used the Polish example to press for radical reforms of the Soviet political and economic system. The Polish experience can accordingly be said to have acted as a catalyst to Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost (openness) and per-estroika (restructuring).

  Gorbachev’s efforts to persuade Soviet workers and managers to take responsibility for the quality of their work, in return for enhanced rewards, met first with apathy, then with hostility and resistance. Gradually he adopted more radical measures, culminating in his efforts to strip the communist party of its monopoly on power. In attacking the party, however, Gorbachev was attacking the mainspring of the Soviet system. The result was the collapse of the USSR itself. See also: G
ORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; LABOR; POLAND; TRADE UNIONS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Andrew, Christopher, and Mitrokhin, Vasili. (1999). The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West London. London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press. Teague, Elizabeth. (1988). Solidarity and the Soviet Worker: The Impact of the Polish Events of 1980 on Soviet Internal Politics. London: Croom Helm.

  ELIZABETH TEAGUE

  SOLOVIEV, VLADIMIR SERGEYEVICH

  (1853-1900), philosopher, theologian, journalist, poet, literary critic.

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  SOLOVIEV, VLADIMIR SERGEYEVICH

  At the end of the nineteenth century, Vladimir Soloviev sought to counter the secular trend in Russian thought by articulating a world view grounded in Christianity. As a young man, Soloviev seemed destined to become the foremost academic philosopher of the Slavophile school, and his early works, such as The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists (1874), reflected Slavophile themes, but in time he gravitated from Slavophilism to Westernism, much like his father, the renowned historian Sergei Mikhailovich Soloviev. When Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, Soloviev called upon the new tsar to set an example of Christian forgiveness by sparing the lives of the terrorists. The ensuing scandal led to his exile from Russia’s government-controlled universities, a lifelong career as an independent writer, and eventually an association with the liberal journal Vest-nik Evropy (European Messenger). Soloviev led an unconventional life as a kind of secular monk dedicated to intense intellectual work; the result was a remarkable output of philosophy, theology, poetry, literary criticism, and social commentary.