Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

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  SOUL TAX

  records, regularly required information about the prerevolutionary soslovie status-an unwitting testimony to the enduring significance ascribed to soslovie in the formation of social identities. See also: ALEXANDER II; ALEXANDER III; CLASS SYSTEM; GREAT REFORMS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Freeze, Gregory L. (1986). “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History.” American Historical Review 91:11-36. Wirtschafter, Elise K. (1997). Social Identity in Imperial Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

  GREGORY L. FREEZE

  SOUL TAX

  The soul tax (podushnaya podat) was a capitation or poll tax levied on peasant communes and some urban inhabitants according to the number of males of all ages, as estimated by the periodic censuses (revizy) that began in 1718. Enacted by Peter the Great by decree on January 11, 1722, the poll tax was intended to maintain the armed forces in the peasants’ vicinity. For example, the support of an infantry soldier required payments from about thirty-six “souls.” During the Muscovite and early Petrine period there were numerous exemptions to the land and household (dvor) taxes, but by the mid-eighteenth century all peasants, whether private, state, or church, were supposed to pay around eighty kopeks. The latter two categories of enserfed peasants also paid rent (obrok) of 1.5 (later, 2) rubles, as well as some dues in kind. They could be drafted for work on roads and canals, for example.

  The rates of money taxation differed considerably depending on the class of taxpayer. Court, ecclesiastical, and state peasants, including free settlers (odnodvortsy), were supposed to pay about four times the rate for private serfs; merchants and burghers paid somewhat less-about triple the rate for private serfs. Nobles, officials, and clergy were exempt from the poll tax.

  At first the soul tax was collected by military units directly. Subsequently the serf owners had to collect the tax for their private serfs, and district administrators collected it for state or church serfs in their jurisdiction. Landowners collected the soul

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  tax even though it would have been more in their interest to raise rents instead. Since some males were either too young or too old to have income, the head of household had to pay for everyone. While the soul tax appeared to be per head, the village commune often distributed the burden on an ability-to-pay basis. The rate of tax per male soul, however, was fixed, as increases were considered politically dangerous, so higher yields came mainly from population growth. Efforts were made at each census, or revisia, to reduce the tax-exempt population. All “idling” and “free” persons were included, as well as peasants of many kinds, including bondsmen (kholopi). The revenue from tax and rents, however, failed to cover the cost of the standing army during peacetime, not to mention the great expenditures of the Northern War, which may have actually reduced the taxable population. Owing to the tax and labor burdens imposed on them, then as well as later on, many peasants fled to the borderlands and across the frontier.

  The soul tax had obvious administrative advantages over the previous household tax. Under the new system, young men could not avoid paying tax simply by postponing their departure from the ancestral home, as they could under the household tax. Nor could peasants combine nuclear families into one extended household for the purpose of avoiding tax.

  Russian historians of an earlier era considered the poll tax an increased burden on peasant households, but this seems unlikely, since the apex of war expenses and innovative kinds of taxes was reached in the years 1705 to 1715. For most serfs the monetary liability (as distinct from taxes in kind) under the poll tax appears to have been slightly lower than under the household tax. Furthermore, because the poll tax was the same regardless of the amount of land cultivated, there was an incentive to increase arable land at the expense of waste, and, in fact, the amount of cultivated land did increase during this period. That the poll tax is remembered as harsh is explained by the poor grain harvests of the time, which required peasants to buy food at high prices. After Peter’s death in 1725 the poll tax rate was lowered to seventy-four, then seventy kopeks, but during Catherine II’s reign it was raised to one ruble. The highly destructive Napoleonic Wars saw a further increase to two, then three rubles. The poll tax was eliminated between 1883 and 1886, but land taxes and redemption payments continued to the end of the empire.

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  SOVIET-FINNISH WAR

  See also: CATHERINE II; GREAT NORTHERN WAR; PEASANTRY; PETER I; TAXES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Kahan, Arcadius. (1985). The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia.. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lyashchenko, Peter I. (1949). History of the National Economy of Russia to the 1917 Revolution, tr. Leon M. Herman. New York: Macmillan.

  MARTIN C. SPECHLER

  See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT; REVOLUTION OF 1905

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Anweiler, Oskar. (1974). The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1921, tr. Ruth Hein. New York: Pantheon Books.

  DAVID PRETTY

  SOVIET-AFGHAN WAR See AFGHANISTAN, RELATIONS WITH.

  SOVIET

  Soviet (sovet) is the Russian word for “council” or “advice.”

  Its political usage began during the Revolution of 1905 when it was applied to the councils of deputies elected by workers in factories throughout Russia. Although suppressed in 1905, the soviets reappeared in nearly every possible setting immediately following the February Revolution of 1917. With the soviet in Petrograd setting the tone, they very quickly became the organs of power that the majority of the population saw as legitimate. Although the moderate socialists who initially led the soviets were reluctant to take executive power from the Provisional Government, most Russians seem to have favored rule by the soviets alone; the Bolsheviks’ call for “All Power to the Soviets” may well have been their most successful slogan. The October Revolution was timed to coincide with the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, both to forestall its taking power without Bolshevik initiative and to gain legitimacy from its approval. The new Bolshevik-led government was thus initially based on soviets, and the state structure formally remained so until Mikhail Gorbachev. For most of the Soviet era, the Supreme Soviet was theoretically the highest legislative organ, although the Communist Party held practical power. Throughout their history, soviets generally proved too large for day-to-day governance, a role filled by a permanent executive committee elected by the full soviet. Some scholars have suggested that the soviet became so popular an institution because it was an urban counterpart to the village commune assembly, a governing system with which most Russians, even in the cities, were familiar.

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  SOVIET-FINNISH WAR

  The Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940, which lasted 103 days and is commonly known as the “Winter War,” had its origins in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939. The secret protocols of that non-aggression accord divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet security zones. Finland, which had been part of the Russian Empire for more than a century prior to gaining its independence during the Russian Revolution, was included by that agreement within the Soviet sphere. Shortly after the dismemberment of Poland by Germany and the USSR, the Soviet government in October demanded from Finland most of the Karelian Isthmus north of Leningrad, a naval base at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland, and additional land west of Murmansk along the Barents Sea. The USSR offered other, less strategically important, borderland as compensation. After Finnish President Kiosti Kallio rejected the proposal, the Red Army, on November 30, invaded along the extent of their border as the Soviet Air Force bombed the Finnish capital, Helsinki.

  Finland’s most formidable defenses were a line of hundreds of concrete pillboxes, bunkers, and underground shelters, prote
cted by anti-tank obstacles and barbed wire, which stretched across the Karelian Isthmus. General (and later Field Marshal) Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, a former tsarist officer, had organized these defenses, and he commanded Finland’s armed forces during the war. During the first two months of conflict, Finland astonished the rest of the world by defeating the much larger and more heavily armed Soviet forces, especially along the Mannerheim Line. In snow-at times five to six feet deep-with temperatures plunging to -49° F,

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  SOVIET-FINNISH

  WAR

  A Finnish village burns after a February 1940 air raid by Soviet planes. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS the Finnish defenders were clad in white-padded uniforms, and some attacked on skis. The Red Army troops were entirely unprepared for winter combat. In early February, the USSR enlarged its forces to 1.2 million men (against a Finnish army of 200,000) and increased the number of tanks and aircraft to 1,500 and 3,000, respectively. In March the Red Army broke through the Mannerheim Line and advanced toward Helsinki. Finland was compelled to accept peace terms, which were signed in Moscow on March 12, 1940. The USSR acquired more territory than it had demanded before the war, including the entire northern coastline of Lake Ladoga and parts of southwestern and western Finland. Approximately 420,000 Finns fled from the 25,000 square miles of annexed territories.

  Soviet victory, however, came at a very high cost. Whereas Finland lost about 25,000 killed in the war, Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Vy-acheslav Molotov acknowledged that immediately after the war almost 49,000 Soviet troops had perished. In 1993 declassified Soviet military archives revealed that 127,000 Soviet combatants had been killed or gone missing in action. The Red Army overwhelmed Finnish defenses with massive formations. For example, to take one particular hill, the USSR attacked its thirty-two Finnish defenders with four thousand men; more than four hundred of the Soviet assault troops were killed. Material losses were similarly lopsided in the war. Altogether, the Soviet Air Force lost about one thousand aircraft; Finland around one hundred.

  The world’s attention was focused on the Soviet-Finnish War, because at that time despite British and French declarations of war against Germany in September 1939 over Germany’s invasion of Poland, there was no other fighting taking place in Europe. Finland was much admired in the democratic West for its courageous stand against a much larger foe, but to Finland’s disappointment, that admiration did not translate into significant outside assistance. By contrast, Soviet aggression was widely condemned, and the USSR was expelled from the League of Nations. More importantly, So1434

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  SOVIET-GERMAN TRADE AGREEMENT OF 1939

  viet military weakness was exposed, which served to embolden Hitler and confirm his belief that Germany could easily defeat the USSR.

  Defeated Finland became increasingly worried when in the summer of 1940 the USSR occupied Estonia, which lay just forty miles across the Baltic Sea. Finland found a champion for its defense and a means to regain the lost territories when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in Operation Bar-barossa on June 22, 1941. The USSR provided a convenient pretext for the start of the “Continuation War” (as the resumed hostilities are known in Finland), when it bombed several Finnish cities, including Helsinki, on June 25. While the Red Army retreated before the Nazi blitz to within three miles of Leningrad and twenty of Moscow, Finland invaded southward along both sides of Lake Ladoga down to the 1939 boundary. During the nearly nine hundred day siege of Leningrad, Finnish forces sealed off access to the city from the north. Close to one million Leningraders perished in the ordeal, primarily from hunger and cold in the winter of 1941-1942. Finland, which relied heavily on German imports during the war, rebuffed a Soviet attempt through neutral Sweden in December 1941 to secure a separate peace and relief for Leningrad. At the same time, the Finnish government refused German requests to attempt to cross the Svir River in force to link up with the Wehrmacht along the southeastern side of Ladoga. The lake remained Leningrad’s only surface link with the rest of the USSR during the siege.

  Finland’s position in southern Karelia became increasingly vulnerable as its ally Germany began to lose the war in the USSR in 1943. In late February 1944, a month after the Red Army smashed the German blockade south of Leningrad, the Soviet Air Force flew hundreds of sorties against Helsinki and published an ultimatum for peace, which included, among other things, internment of German troops in northern Finland and demobilization of the Finnish Army. After Finland refused the harsh terms, the Red Army launched a massive offensive north of Leningrad on June 9. In early August Mannerheim managed to shore up Finnish defenses near the 1940 border at the same time that the Finnish parliament appointed him the country’s president. However, continued German defeats and Soviet reoccupation of Estonia convinced President Mannerheim to agree to an armistice on September 19. The agreement restored the 1940 boundary, forced German troops out of Finland, leased to the USSR territory for a military base a few miles

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  from Helsinki (which was later returned), and saddled Finland with heavy reparations. Although the Soviet Union basically controlled Finnish foreign policy until the Soviet collapse in 1991, of all of Nazi Germany’s wartime European allies, only Finland avoided Soviet occupation after the war and preserved its own elected government and market economy. See also: FINLAND; FINNS AND KARELIANS; NAZI-SOVIET PACT OF 1939; WORLD WAR II

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Mannerheim, Carl. (1954). Memoirs. New York: Dutton. Trotter, William R. (1991). A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

  RICHARD H. BIDLACK

  SOVIET-GERMAN TRADE AGREEMENT OF 1939

  After declining relations throughout the 1930s and then a flurry of negotiations in the summer of 1939, Germany (represented by Karl Schnurre) and the Soviet Union (represented by Yevgeny Babarin) signed a major economic agreement in Berlin in the early morning hours of August 20. The treaty called for 200 million Reichsmark in new orders and 240 million Reichsmark in new and current exports from both sides over the next two years.

  This agreement served two purposes. First, it brought two complementary economies closer together. To support its war economy, Germany needed raw materials-oil, manganese, grains, and wood. The Soviet Union needed manufactured products-machines, tools, optical equipment, and weapons. Although the USSR had slightly more room to maneuver and a somewhat superior bargaining position, neither country had many options for receiving such materials elsewhere. Subsequent economic agreements in 1940 and 1941, therefore, focused on the same types of items.

  Second, the economic negotiations provided a venue for these otherwise hostile powers to discuss political and military issues. Hitler and Stalin signaled each other throughout 1939 by means of these economic talks. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed a mere four days after the economic agreement.

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  SOVIET MAN

  Because raw materials took less time to produce, Soviet shipments initially outpaced German exports and provided an important prop to the German war economy in late 1940 and 1941. Before the Germans could fully live up to their end of the bargain, Hitler invaded. See also: FOREIGN TRADE; GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH; NAZI-SOVIET PACT OF 1939; WORLD WAR II

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Ericson, Edward E. (1999). Feeding the German Eagle: Soviet Economic Aid to Nazi Germany, 1933-1941. West-port, CT: Praeger.

  EDWARD E. ERICSON III

  SOVIET MAN

  For many years, the term novy sovetsky chelovek in Soviet Marxism-Leninism was usually translated into English as “the new Soviet man.” A translation that would be more faithful to the meaning of the original Russian would be “the new Soviet person,” because the word chelovek is completely neutral with regard to gender.

  The hope of remaking the values of each member of society was implicit in Karl Marx’s expectations for the progression o
f society from capitalism through proletarian revolution to communism. Marx reasoned that fundamental economic and social restructuring would generate radical attitudi-nal change, but Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin insisted that the political regime had to play an active role in the transformation of people’s values, even in a socialist society. It remained for the Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, adopted at the party’s Twenty-Second Congress in 1961 in accordance with the demands of Nikita Khrushchev, to spell out the “moral code of the builder of communism,” which subsequently was elaborated at length by a wide variety of publications. The builder of communism was expected to be educated, hard working, collectivistic, patriotic, and unfailingly loyal to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. During the transition to a fully communist society, as predicted by Khrushchev, such vestiges of past culture as religion, corruption, and drunkenness would be eradicated. The thinking associated with the Party Program of 1961 represented the last burst of revolutionary optimism in the Soviet Union.

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  Over time, it became increasingly difficult to ascribe “deviations from socialist morality” to the influence of pre-1917 or pre-1936 social structures. Indeed, testimony from a variety of sources suggested that reliance on connections, exchanges of favors, and bribery (which had by no means disappeared in the Stalin years) were steadily growing in importance during the post-Stalin decades. In the mid-1970s Hedrick Smith’s book The Russians described the members of the largest nationality in the USSR as impulsive, generous, mystical, emotional, and essentially irrational, behind the facade of a monochromatic ideology imposed by an authoritarian political regime. Though the Brezhnev leadership still insisted that the socialist way of life (sotsialistichesky obraz zhizni) in the Soviet Union was morally superior to that in the West with its unbridled individualism and moral decay, the sense of optimism concerning the future was slipping away. Ideologists complained ever more about amoral behavior by citizens, and the political leaders seemed to become more tolerant of illegal economic activity and corruption. Despite those general trends, problematic as they were, some Soviet citizens did strive actively to serve their fellow human beings, including the most vulnerable members of society. See also: KRUSCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILLICH; MARXISM